The Secretary & the Farmers

Sir:

As a small-acreage wheat farmer, I do not agree with all the opinions expressed by Secretary of Agriculture Ezra Taft Benson (TIME, April 13) ... Secretary Benson accuses inefficient farmers, as he calls them, inefficient because they do not produce in large enough quantities to be efficient . . . How can he reconcile this with the fact that the falling or low prices for wheat are brought about by overproduction? . . .

My experience has been that the main difference between efficient and inefficient farmers was merely a matter of weather . . .

TED R. BANTA Geyser, Mont.

Sir:

City slickers who read that ten-year-old Ezra Taft Benson hand-milked 30 cows twice daily will no doubt have concluded that farming is mere child's play.

WILFRED H. ROY Lampman, Sask.

Sir:

Let us not be afraid of reasonable subsidies paid to farmers. Let us use these subsidies to keep the little farmers on the land instead of crowding them off and into the big cities where they will become "surplus."

As long as there is hunger and destitution anywhere in the world, our Government should encourage the production of surpluses of food and clothing materials, pay our farmers and stock raisers parity prices for these commodities, and then announce to the world's famine areas that we will gladly supply their needs while famine lasts if they will allow us to supervise the method of distribution, so that local gougers may not profit . . .

DR. FRANCIS E. TOWNSEND The Townsend Plan for National Insurance Cleveland

Sir:

Secretary Benson is, obviously, a person of integrity . . . Would it be permissible, however, to wonder about the integrity of the professional separatists in the matter of church and state, whose vociferous hue and cry is strangely quiet when one of the Twelve Apostles who guide the Mormon Church is included in the President's Cabinet?

(THE REV.) FRANCIS J. B. FLYNN St. Mark Church Van Dyke, Mich.

Sir:

TIME and Apostle Benson apparently accept the McKinley-Hoover philosophy of the inequality of man--that the man who uses his hands, whether with a machine or in the soil, should not be considered a participant in the bounty of America. It is conveniently forgotten that the farmer's aid from Government is an infinitesimal fraction of the great bounties bestowed upon manufacturing and business interests from Grant to Hanna and from Lodge to Hoover . . .

Perhaps Mormon Benson might do well to let the spirit of the First Saint permeate his piousness with the basic Christian tenet of the brotherhood of all men--including the man in the overalls.

H. G. JONES Oak Ridge, N.C.

Semantics at 40

Sir:

Having just reached 40, it was encouraging to see in your April 20 issue that station in life referred to as "young." Thanks.

WALTER L. GILL

Oakland, Calif.

How to Gore a Neighbor's Ox

Sir:

Re Monty's visit, and Ike's remark about the burning of Washington [TIME, April 13]: the constant harping on that old episode makes Canadians wonder if Americans (including Ike) really know WHY Washington was burned in 1814. Listen, dear cousins, it was simply because you jokers had burned OUR capital of York (now Toronto) one year earlier. Sauce for the goose should have been sauce for the gander, but apparently a lot depended on whose ox was being gored.

R. M. URQUHART

Timmins, Ont.

Rovers' Return

Sir:

In your April 13 issue, you contemptuously dismiss the rosy report of the press group recently returned from Moscow as "fatuous." I fail to see that it is any more fatuous than U.S. journalism's (particularly that of TIME'S) unrelieved picture of the Soviet as masses of grey-eyed slaves groaning under the whips of fiendish perverts . . .

JOHN B. DAHL Los Angeles

Sir:

Instead of charming itself with such hackneyed second-hand cliches as "The Rover Boys in Moscow," maybe it would have been more constructive for TIME to ask itself why a group of native American bourgeois capitalists from the grass roots wrote what they did out of Moscow. You know, hicks can't have much imagination, even without censorship, and sportsmanship in any language says to give even the devil his due . . . TIME was wrong in cleverly implying the dinner party was given for our group by the Russians . . . [It] was given for us by Moscow correspondents of the New York Times and Associated Press, who invited three Russian officials and their wives.

TIME also referred to "Potemkin-like efficiency . . . carefully conducted tours." . . . We were asked what we wanted to do. Each was also free to move around Moscow without escort, and some of us made the most of it. TIME chided Publisher John Biddle and the U.P. for being amazed at the marvels of the new Moscow University and subway. Even cosmopolitan and worldly TIME would have been amazed at these. Not being a city slicker, I couldn't help being amazed. Too bad you were not along with us ...

EUGENE A. SIMON

President

Valley Daily News Tarentum, Pa.

Bishop in the Front Line (Cont'd)

Sir:

Please accept a warm word of thanks for your [April 6] article on Bishop Dibelius. It should go a long way toward giving your Christian readers a bit of insight into the state of the church and Christianity in Germany . . . Your statement that "probably less than 10% of Germany's nominal Protestants go to church regularly" is misleading. Statistics issued by the church itself reveal that only a select few parishes enjoy an attendance that anywhere approximates 10%. In all too many instances, 2 to 3% is considered a "good" attendance, while, in Hamburg, the largest city of the Bundesrepublic, it is not even 1% . .

JAMES S. KIEFER Superintendent

Children's Evangelistic Movement Frankfurt, Germany

Mayhem at the Mansion

Sir:

I am of the firm conviction that many Americans, like myself, look upon the sedate mansion at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave., Washington, D.C. with a kind of reverence, mingled with awe and deep respect. The thought of 30,000 gibbering egg-rollers (TIME, April 13) sloshing over mashed eggs, gooey marshmallows and melted jelly beans, together with comfort stations erected in critical positions, lends an air of cheap revelry to the Executive Mansion. The only things which appeared to be lacking were the Ferris wheels, the sideshows, and the prize county livestock . . .

PVT. RICHARD J. SLOTT % Postmaster, San Francisco

The Danger Signals (Cont'd) Sir:

Your April 13 summarization "The Danger Signals" paints our educators as Caspar Milquetoasts who are afraid of their own shadows. One of the prerequisites of the teaching profession used to be moral courage; another used to be intellectual honesty . . . Marxists can have moral courage, as the victims of Stalinist purges have demonstrated. But our "pinko-to-magenta" pedagogues are completely lacking in moral courage; they appear to be neither fish (democrats: believers in government by the people) nor fowl (Marxists: believers in government by misanthropy) . . .

JOHN DOMINIC MICHAEL Washington, D.C.

Sir:

Quotations by the tear-laden gentry of our nation's colleges would have us believe that we are now in a period in which the educator lives in deadly fear of criticism and social and economic ostracism . . . Dean Ackerman's . . . fear of the loss of liberty is what bothers me. He laments the passing of freedom of expression, yet in his very lamentation he betrays the fallacy of his fears. Who has prevented him from writing those . . . lines [to the American Society of Newspaper Editors] ? Who will prohibit his denouncing the Republicans, Wall Street and organized religion? Here is an educator who would have us establish a special, privileged class of citizenry which would inherit complete immunity solely by reason of a profession in education. Is this democracy ? Or is it the very reactionary society which these "liberal" minds attack ? ... As the Red Dean of Canterbury spreads the infamous lie of American brutality, so do pinkish deans and professors in American schools spread the equally infamous lie of our loss of freedom.

DANTE J. MERCURIC Bloomfield, NJ.

Sir:

We were pleased to read your correct characterization of the American Civil Liberties Union as "liberal, non-Communistic." However, we would like your readers to know that despite the fears of such people as the young University of Pennsylvania instructor (who said, "I don't want A.C.L.U. membership on my record"), more Americans are joining the A.C.L.U. today than ever before. Our membership, now over 24,000, has doubled in the past two years. Americans of [both] liberal and conservative persuasions realize that in its nonpartisan defense of the Bill of Right,? ... the A.C.L.U. is maintaining the American way of life.

PATRICK MURPHY MALIN Executive Director American Civil Liberties Union New York City

Legendary Innkeeper

Sir:

In many parts of the world there will be regret over the passing of "Tia" Bates of Arequipa, Peru [TIME, April 20] ... The Quinta Bates, as my wife and I knew it, was a jumble of shaky, patchwork structures pieced together ... a spot with unreliable plumbing and drains . . . where water and lights went off at inconvenient times . . . The charm of the place lay in the life that went on there . . . There was always some kind of ruckus in progress, usually a battle between the fiery old mistress and the servants, accompanied by strikes, walkouts [and] petty jealousies . . . Tia, with her salty tongue, was a joy to listen to. She'd fire half the force, and hire them back next morning . . . Admittance to the Quinta was a problem because reservations meant nothing to Tia, whose memory had grown so faulty that she called every man "Sonny Boy."

Sometimes she would tell of gold-mining days in Bolivia when she was the only white woman in camp. There would be an Indian baby born, and she must stand godmother. Too often the child died and she furnished the cheap little pine coffin. One day a poor mother asked for a white satin ribbon to make a bow to rest on the coffin, but refused to say why. After that, every dead baby had to have the same. The expense mounted. Tia demanded a showdown and got it: the child, being without sin, went straight to Heaven, but as everyone knew, Tia was far from sinless, as her swearing attested. The ribbon was so that the holy angels might draw her out of the pit to join them in Heaven. "I saw I was stuck with the ribbon proposition," Tia said "You can't change an Indian woman's mind."

E. A. BRANIFF

Tulsa, Okla.

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