Bread, Stones & Toynbee

Sir: For that marvelous review [Oct. 18] of Arnold J. Toynbee's A Study of History: thank you! (THE REV.) ALBERT E. JENKINS St. Matthias Episcopal Church Whittier, Calif.

Sir: Your reviewer should be told to go paddle his own "audacious canoe." Who is he to call a great man a "crypto-Herod" and to reject so didactically coexistence, a solution to the world problem that is being advocated not only by Sir Winston Churchill but also many other prominent, intelligent people? He must have very little faith in democracy and Christianity to believe that coexistence would result in the Herodian swallowing up by Communism of all other ways of life . . ." (Sgt.) JOHN V. MUNROE JR. Fort Richardson, Alaska

Sir: ". . . The idol Leviathan might still be triumphantly defied and defeated by souls contending for the liberty of Conscience and risking martyrdom for the glory of God . . ." This is Toynbee at his lyrical best. On the sentimental and the sanctimonious, the learned professor's hymnic prose may exercise a great emotional appeal, but to the agnostic majority it remains nothing but pretty phrases . . . The Study is probably the most fascinating book of the last half-century, and will be the more fascinating to future ages because it so clearly reflects the fear, the timidity, the uncertainty, the wishful theorizing and barren intellectualism of our time of troubles. K. J. KRUSE Oslo, Norway

Sir: . . . Toynbee wants a Christian revival, yet he thinks that to be a Christian--to believe that Christianity is the only true religion--is a sin. We must hope that in his analysis of the past, Toynbee is more consistent than in that of the present. GEORGE A. FLORIS London

Sir: Re your inspiring review: Has Toynbee been misquoted in your statement of his be lief that "Communism . . offers 'a stone for bread' "? In his Reith Lectures, delivered in 1952 and published as The World and the West, Toynbee asserted that in offering the non-Western world a piece of our culture (our technology divorced from our religion), it is we who offer them "a stone instead of bread," while the Russians, in offering them Communism--a creed which is an indictment of the Christian society's failure to live up to its economic and social principles, but a creed, nevertheless--offer them "bread of a sort . . . that contains . . . some grain of nutriment for the spiritual life without which Man cannot live . . ." MARTHA MOON ROSCHER Crawfordsville, Ind.

P: Historian Toynbee, not TIME, juggled his metaphors between volumes. --ED.

Sir: . . . The only hope of the Western world, Toynbee says, is a militant, dynamic Christianity. Then he lends his support to a watered-down version of Christianity which makes it almost indistinguishable from Buddhism. How can one get enthusiastic over a vague religious eclecticism that amounts to little more than belief in God? It seems to me that our civilization was built by intolerant, aggressive men like St. Francis Xavier, whose faith was narrow, intense, and utterly singleminded. We forget that Christ established a Church to perpetuate His teachings, and that He said: "He who is not with Me is against Me . . ." DONALD MOORE Bellwood, Ill.

Sir: May I just express grateful thanks? I thought the review was a brilliant piece of work and it was very good of TIME to publish it. I am now going to read Study of History, not because I want to, but because I feel I must. DONALD H. McCULLOUGH London

Cherished Heritage

Sir: The obituary in your Milestones column [Oct 25] about my father, although not intentionally so, I am sure, is cruelly misleading. Your phrase, "born into grinding poverty in the Mississippi backwoods," connotes a "Tobacco Road" environment. Like most formerly affluent Southern families, following the Civil War, his was impoverished financially, but his were the riches of the influence of a Spartan but cultured mother and a cherished heritage from his father, a Confederate cavalry officer. Your statement that he "roared around town yelling 'Hiya, boy' " is simply not true. He was not uncouth, as suggested, but very much a gentlemanly man. E. H. CRUMP JR. Memphis

New Directions (Contd.)

Sir: In your article on David Riesman [TIME, Sept. 27] you opened up the subject of how rapidly America is changing. I feel you should be apprised of still another significant change in the U.S. scene. On leaving a Manhattan restaurant today with two friends, we were approached by a tweed-bearing, clean-shirted, clipped-mustached man of about 60. Said he, in an Ivy League accent: "I don't know my name. I can't think what my name might be."

Said I: "What is your name? Come, come. Everybody knows his name."

Said he: "That's just what I can't remember since it happened to me."

Said I, genuinely concerned: "What happened to you?"

Said he: "I got rolled by a beautiful call girl. Can you gentlemen spare me a quarter so I can get back to Wall Street where I have friends who will recognize me?"

I am old enough to remember when a beggar merely held out his cap and asked for an unspecified sum for an unspecified purpose. I can remember: "Sir, will you give me a nickel for a cup of coffee?" and the great democratic and inflationary shift to "Brother, can you spare a dime?" I have even been held up at pistol point and asked for $1.60 --no more, no less --an experience which Max Weber would somehow have been able to work into his great work Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. But I never expected to live long enough to be panhandled in quite the way I was today.

What would St. Francis have said to the beggar who was rolled by the Assisian equivalent of a beautiful call girl and wanted to get to the Assisian equivalent of Wall Street? Mutatis mutandis, what would Robert Owen have said? Or Lenin? Or Kingsley Martin? Or Franklin Roosevelt? Or Emily Post? Or Freud? As for my friends and me, words failed us. Neither our education nor our experience nor our principles had prepared us for this encounter. Ours is, indeed, a rich and wonderful country--glamorous beyond belief. A bum can no longer suffer mere misfortune; he must be "rolled by a beautiful call girl." And he is not friendless. Far from it; he has only to appear in Wall Street to have his credit and identity restored. I returned to my office filled with awe. What dreams we Americans can dream ! Who has bums like our bums? MAX J. K. CLARK New York City

Panditry

Sir: May I suggest what I think is a more pithy description of Nehru's foreign policy than your [Oct 18] phrase, "antiWestern 'neutrality' "? Why not "Nehrutrality"? RALPH VIERNO Closter, N.J.

Racial Flare-Up (Contd.)

Sir: The articles [Oct. 11 et seq.] On the anti-segregation disturbances . . .certainly must be edifying to non-American readers the world over, especially here in the Middle East, where the inhabitants' skin color is usually a shade or two darker than those lofty-browed Anglo-Saxon types in the photographs accompanying your [Oct. 11] article . . . What a profound impression this must make--these Americans, always broadcasting about freedom and equality and the "American way of life" and what a great little country we are . . . As an American living abroad, I find myself wondering about my countrymen, especially that superior breed of bigots south of the Mason-Dixon line. R. N. WHITE Rafha, Saudi Arabia

Sir: As an American in India, whose great-grandfather was a Louisiana slave-owner, I have proclaimed the Negro issue in the U.S. a dying problem. I am indignant that a mob of Baltimore bigots should make me eat my words and, worse still, drag America's name . . . into the mud before my Indian associates . . . We abroad are the ones who have to answer to the world for such conduct. What possible answer can we give? (THE REV.) B. H. MILLER Poona, India

P: One answer is the seventh grade, Edison Elementary School at Hobbs, N. Mex. (see cut), where desegregation--after a brief flare-up--now works. --ED.

Man of the Year

Sir: For bringing Europe together again by his diplomatic skill, let me please nominate Sir Anthony Eden as Man of the Year. LUBIN J. VALIS Zurich, Switzerland

Sir: . . . If the London pact jells, it will be Dulles . . . ARTHUR H. HASCHE Watertown, S.D.

Sir: Whether you think he's the biggest menace since Dennis . . . you can't avoid naming Joe McCarthy . . . CHARLYN D. BURTON Dedham,Mass.

Sir: . . . Grudgingly submitted is the name of Chou En-lai . . . W. FARRISEE JR. Albany, N.Y.

Sir: . . . General Christian de Castries. JEAN LEBRUN Grand Mere, Que.

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