Swahili
Sirs:
Your story, "No Spik Swahili" (TIME, May 4), bears the statement, "to the best of the Government's knowledge, the U.S. has no one at all who can teach such essential linguistic tools of war as Burmese, Swahili, Malagasy." This the reporter should have qualified still further. For at least the State Department must know of the passage to and from "Swahililand" (East Africa) of scores of missionaries who have mastered the tongue of this section, a language spoken also by the seafaring people of the ports of Egypt and the Near East.
Of the Holy Ghost Fathers, for example, 26 young priests are at their mission posts in Tanganyika Territory today and eleven more, who worked in this section earlier, are in the U.S. Many of the latter could qualify as teachers of Swahili (the language is more commonly called Kiswahili), for they learned the tongue not only through years of actual practice, but also in the Mission Seminary of the Congregation of the Holy Ghost in Norwalk, Conn. Classes in Kiswahili are conducted there by Rev. Francis J. Fitzgerald, C.S.Sp. who spent twelve years (1927-39) in Bagamoya, East Africa.
In fact, one of these priests, the Rev. Joseph A. Griffin, C.S.Sp., presently shepherd of souls of a small group of colored people in Salisbury, N.C., has already offered his services to the University of North Carolina, to inaugurate a class in Kiswahili. . . .
HENRY P. LEFEBURE Assistant Executive Secretary National Council of Catholic Men Washington, D.C.
> Some 2 5 TIME readers who can speak and read Hindustani, Malagasy, Arabic, Chinese, Tibetan, Japanese, other little-known tongues, would like to offer their services to the Government. Other TIME-reading linguists who wish to volunteer their services should write to Dr. J. M. Cowan, American Council of Learned Societies, 1219 Sixteenth St. N.W., Washington, B.C.--ED.
No Amateur
Sirs:
I HAVE PAID AN INCOME TAX ON MY WORK SINCE 1924 WHICH MAKES ME GIFTED BUT NOT AN AMATEUR. MY ONLY HOBBY IS GROWING BIB LETTUCE.
MAUDE PHELPS HUTCHINS* Chicago, Ill.
Manifesto
Sirs:
. . . TIME (May 11) is to be congratulated for printing Private Eugene Crowe's letter [defending the right under a democracy of the expression of honest convictions]. It shows there is still a free and just press in America, even in time of war, and that is saying plenty. The same things Crowe says I have been trying to say in the press here; he says them a great deal better, because he uses fewer words, and a man is talking who must be listened to, a man in the armed services.
I cannot remember having read anywhere in the past years a finer manifesto of the American spirit. It hits hard and clean. It gives me a new faith in our nation and the men who are fighting, and the men who, for religious reasons, are not fighting. . . . On the American front right now a deadly war is being waged between the forces of Fascism, who would suppress our civil liberties, and the forces of democracy and tolerance. All the jingoism and the stale hatemongering of our leaders since Pearl Harbor has sickened me; seldom have I heard a vital statement, a clear, enlightened pronouncement, recognizing that the rights of minorities are the very things we fight for, and if we deny them what excuse have we to fight? Instead of admitting the strength of pacifists, our leaders hush it up. Why not be proud of it, as Crowe suggests? It is because Americans can be genuinely different, conscientiously individual, that we are a great people.
Reading a statement like Crowe's strikes me at the very roots. It makes me realize what Valley Forge must have been, and the Marne, and Lincoln's dark hours. It makes me know what the American heritage is. It makes me realize our finest youth has a vision that our big shots lack. And it makes me believe that Ayres' creed, and mine, may win through in a world where some men like Crowe exist. It makes me realize, humbly, that there is something in the heart of fighters like him to which we owe honor, before which we are puny.
Even though I am a pacifist, too, I suddenly wanted to know a man like that, to fight alongside him. No patriotic utterances had ever stirred me before, because they are so often flat and dead, tied up with a dying order; but this one did. It is a new depth and a new light.
I knew all at once that things were worth dying for, that America is worth saving, if men can feel with breadth and power like that. The time is not yet when men can channel that power in the pacifist way, but the time will surely come if men like Crowe live and speak out. In his words I catch the same fire and truth that men must have caught from Lincoln's words at Gettysburg; today we do not have leaders like that; but a man like Crowe is the kind I would follow, through hell and high water. He makes me know what country I belong to and be proud of it.
GEORGE ABBE Mount Holyoke College South Hadley, Mass.
Salvo of Praise
Sirs:
May one grateful reader pause in the day's occupation to suggest a salvo of praise for the anonymous editor and the selfless team of researchers and collaborators who are responsible for the over-all story on the U.S.S.R. and Maxim Litvinoff in the issue of May 11 ?
An extremely complex subject of the most fateful urgency in probably the greatest crisis of world history has here been presented with color, with clarity and with concentrated power. In so craftsmanlike an achievement reporting transcends writing for a weekly publication. It truly reaches the level of history.
M. Lincoln Schuster Simon & Schuster NewYork City
Sirs:
CONGRATULATIONS ON MAY 18 COVER MAGNIFICENT PORTRAIT OF COMMANDER NIMITZ.
DR. ROBERT LESLIE
Editor
Art Director Magazine New York City
> TIME blushes to its borders.--ED.
Not Lost; Misplaced
Sirs:
. . . Thinking defensively (as one must, after an experience such as I have been, and am, going through) it seems to me that the leveling process of war is peculiarly apparent in our business [Salesmen, whose careers have been seriously dislocated by the war--TIME Letters, May 11], and, being frank, I'm wondering whether or not it isn't a damned good thing that much of the competitive "Buy my whatzis ... it has more super-doopers" is going to be eliminated from our future economy. If it is to be, let us hope that it will be compensated for by an equivalent elimination of politically-and hence-inefficiently run governmental services in Washington and elsewhere.
On the latter point, I feel that we ex-movers of mass merchandise have a really legitimate gripe. Personally, while still not 40, I have created and directed the advertising which has sold billions of dollars worth of food products. Yet letters of application to OFF, OPA, WPB, etc., bring either no reply or a polite "Thank you for your offer of service during the present emergency. We will keep you in mind." Letters to the Army and Naval Reserve bring forth the same reply. Incidentally, no commission was requested, and I don't mean the 15% variety. Recruiting offices? They advise a man with a wife and two children to await a draft call.
If, as you say, there are roughly 3,000,000 potential dislocatees, trained in the art of convincing people, let us demonstrate our powers of persuasion by convincing the Government that here is a ready-made propaganda army awaiting mobilization orders. . . .
W. G. JONES
Morrisdale, Pa.
Sirs:
. . . After an undistinguished college tour . . . and with no talent except a genteel approach ... I began, in 1929, selling bonds, and then automobiles, to support two children, two cars and a two handicap at golf. At the sudden demise of the automobile business, I found that no one needed a vice president in charge of good will . . . but that there were thousands of good jobs for chaps who knew how to make something. A Navy commission or Government agency job only meant postponing the inevitable a few years . . . at which time the adjustment might be more difficult.
So reasoning, I picked a fundamental trade in one of the defense industries most likely to be doing business as usual when the show is over and the monkey dead. I am a boilermaker's helper at Sun Oil in Marcus Hook, Pa. I like it ... and I seem to have some talent for it. I've lost some fat around the waist and between the ears. And I'm a little proud of the modest bit I'm doing in our war effort.
My current ambition: to get to be a good enough boilermaker to teach the knack of rolling tubes to next year's crop of dislocated bond salesmen.
ALAN McCoNE
Lansdowne, Pa.
* Wife of President Bob Hutchins of the University of Chicago, and a gifted artist whose show in Chicago TIME reported (May 18).
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