Unhappy Similarities

Sir: After I had read your perceptive story on South Africa [Aug. 26], an ugly question kept bothering me: how many white Americans from Cicero to Selma would welcome apartheid policies here? As a newcomer to this country, I am struck by too many unhappy similarities in attitude between white South Africans and Americans. I hope that with the aid of enlightened governmental legislation within the next generation, I shall never again hear statements similar to the one made by a four-year-old neighborhood child to the effect that she is glad not to be colored because "Negroes aren't people." FREDI HUeBLER Old Tappan, N.J.

Sir: Your story focuses quite rightly on the Afrikaner, for it is he who holds the key to the solution of that country's problems.

Yet, the Afrikaner frightens me. As a Jewish South African, I realize that, were it not for his preoccupation with the Bantu, he would still be openly and violently antiSemitic. He frightens me because, ostrichlike, he refuses to see that apartheid can never work. He frightens me because he cannot stand criticism, and because in his mad efforts to eliminate opposition he creates the very conditions (ripe for revolution) that he seeks to destroy.

The Afrikaner is a prisoner both of circumstances and of his rigid fascist ideology. Fear dominates him. Hatred churns in his stomach. One can only hope, like Abram Fischer, that the integrity of man will ultimately win through and justice prevail. That seems to be South Africa's only hope. It is a slender thread.

MICHAEL HALBERSTADT Waltham, Mass.

Sir: Even your slanted story failed to conceal the obvious solution to the problems that plague the U.S.: we need a President who has the courage, intelligence, capabilities and qualities for leadership of Hendrik Verwoerd.

A. BRAVELLI San Francisco

Herd & Halo

Sir: Your Wall Street cover story [Aug. 19] was comprehensive, informative, readable 1966 journalism at its best.

As financial editor of the Dallas Morning News in the 1920s and 1930s--and later--I watched Merrill Lynch grow from a few docile dogies and mavericks in the small corral and then saw them emerge as the thundering herd. They are today a great aggregation and well deserve the spread TIME gave them.

J. S. FRENCH El Campo, Texas

Sir: Your description of Merrill Lynch, Pierce, Fenner & Smith as "part of American folklore" is more apt than you probably intended. Apparently even TIME has fallen for the myth that Merrill Lynch pays salesmen salaries rather than commissions (not true--compensation is directly related to production) and that it doesn't sell mutual funds because of a possible conflict for research ideas between mutual funds and individual customers (reality: customers' balances diverted into mutual funds are no longer available to salesmen).

As a consultant to some 90 New York Stock Exchange member firms, I have a high respect for Merrill Lynch's professional capabilities, but I find its pious, holier-than-thou preaching about commissions and mutual funds somewhat less than candid. Also, I might point out that it has risen from 60th place to third place among underwriters without any compunctions about acting on behalf of trusts and corporations as a dealer of large secondary distributions, where the commissions to the salesmen are five times as large as for normal brokerage. Isn't the customer entitled to be told when buying a stock on a secondary distribution that the salesman is getting extra compensation for selling him that particular stock?

I'm all for Merrill Lynch (and TIME), but let's take off the halo.

JOHN WESTERGAARD Vice President ERA Associates, Inc. New York City

The Right To Sell

Sir: "A Modest Milestone" [Aug. 19] notes Senator Dirksen's opposition to the fair-housing bill and the concern that civil rights legislation may affect the right to sell property to whomever one chooses. Let me put this "right" in focus in the light of my experience, which convinces me that federal laws have become as necessary to protect free trade in property as to protect free suffrage in Mississippi and Alabama.

When I recently moved from a suburban Washington district, three of the largest real estate dealers found it impossible to handle the sale of my house because I asked that it be shown to every financially qualified buyer, regardless of religious or national heritage. These agencies were thus barring me not only from their large clientele, but from the considerable minority family market in the Washington area--a clear infringement of my right to sell my property to whomever I chose.

THOMAS D. SCOTT Riverside, Conn.

Sir: I daresay that most of the whites who fear "the high incidence of crime and violence in the black ghettos" would not have been alarmed had respectable, middle-class white families named Speck or Whitman moved in next door last June. This summer's headlines suggest that perhaps we crime-fearing white men had better investigate the violence in white souls before looking for it in black streets.

And then perhaps we had better integrate as quickly and fully as possible with a people who have endured 300 years of systematic dehumanization with only occasional lapses into the kind of subhuman behavior we seem to be getting almost regularly from our fellow whites. We may well find that James Baldwin is right--that integration will prove the boon of the white more than the Negro.

(THE REV.) ROBERT A. WINTER Saint Mark's Church Warren, R.I.

But Nice, Too

Sir: TIME'S statement that whites drove past Gordon Wright's house in Grosse Pointe screaming "Nigger, get out!" [Aug. 19] is true. However, by failing to mention the flood of friendly telephone calls, visits, notes and gifts (from curtains to lemonade) that the Wrights received from many of their new neighbors, and by ignoring the completely peaceful arrival of another Negro family, the Glenn Browns, you left your readers with the impression that all Grosse Pointe is not only rich, exclusive, but nasty too.

PATRICIA P. MCFADDEN Grosse Pointe, Mich.

Sir: For the sake of fairness, you should know that we, a Negro family, moved into Grosse Pointe recently and have been received by our new neighbors with many gestures of friendliness and good will. In our experience, Grosse Pointe is a fine place for any American to live.

GLENN W. BROWN Grosse Pointe, Mich.

Blinking Their Earlids

Sir: I was pleased to see the Essay on "noise pollution" [Aug. 19] because I think it becomes more important all the time that action be taken to ameliorate this assault on the environment.

In April, I introduced legislation to set up an Office of Noise Control in the Office of the Surgeon General of the U.S. My concern with this subject dates back to my service in the New York City Council, where I introduced legislation to prevent the playing of transistor radios in public without an ear plug, and to require mufflers to diminish noise from machinery in the streets.

Your story will be included in the Congressional Record, along with the other outstanding discussions on the subject which I am accumulating.

THEODORE R. KUPFERMAN Congressman 17th District, Manhattan Washington, D.C.

Sir: Perhaps it is true that continuous music makes cows give more milk

--I really have no way of knowing. But right up there with fecundity and the bomb, this ubiquitous rasping, wheezing whine (it's not music!) that floods shops, offices, restaurants and terminals is a menace to civilization.

MRS. CHARLES T. MATTHEWS El Paso

Sir: As a worker in a steel mill, I am exposed to extremely loud noises, but they do not bother me because they are expected and not distracting. The "blackest" noise I am exposed to is the blare of the omnipresent portable radio in public places. I believe there is a market among people who feel as I do for a portable jamming device that would protect the person who carries it from having to listen to radio noises.

J. G. LOUGHERY

Gary, Ind.

Sir: Mankind's only hope is for the evolutionary processes to take over and provide us with "earlids" so wondrously fabricated as to enable us at will to shut out every last vestige of noise. How wonderful it would be to blink our earlids for momentary relief from the constant blare or to close them tightly when settling down for a snooze!

VERA R. PUTTOCK Anna Maria, Fla.

Oiling the Joints

Sir: TIME is wonderful. Just when we began feeling a bit creaky in the joints and a bit paunchy under the belt, we read "The Command Generation," your cover on the pleasures and perils of middle age, and found we still had five years to go (we're both 35) before entering the perilous "middle years." And now we're positively elated to read in "The Journal's Daily Dividend" [Aug. 19] that we're among those five "young" editors who help put out the front page of the Wall Street Journal. Our morale is soaring. Gratefully,

GEORGE J. CHURCH ALFRED L. MALABRE JR. Wall Street Journal New York City

Sir: What a horrid picture you gave us of "The Command Generation" [July 29], especially the women. 1 hope I'll never be middle-aged--with melancholia, loneliness, insanity. "Shrivel up and die"? Fiddledeedee. I'm nearly 83, and I'm just starting to peak.

MARION S. ONEAL Pomeroy, Wash.

Men Instead of Machines

Sir: Most of the proposals in your Essay "The Struggle to End Hunger" [Aug. 12] are both excellent and in urgent need of implementation. Not so the statement, "The rest of the world needs to catch up with the mechanization and efficiency of U.S. farms."

To a very great extent, mechanization has been forced on Western agriculture by the shortage and high cost of human labor. One commodity that most of the needy countries have in abundance is cheap labor. Wise organization of this labor force can, in terms of economy and yield per acre, compete with and often outstrip mechanized farming. Your proposal would add to the hardships of the masses already unemployed. The enormous capital needed for large-scale mechanization would be better spent on the other things you mention--improved seeds, fertilizers, irrigation facilities. Mechanization would better be left till later.

JOE ROMAN Tirumangalam, South India

Half Wild?

Sir: Arkansas has found an almost human razorback, a Jim Johnson [Aug. 19] who not only thinks and acts but can be described as one--a lean-bodied, half-wild hog. God bless Winthrop Rockefeller.

MICKEY BLANKINSHIP Peoria, Ill.

Beyond the Text

Sir: It was no "blooper" for the authors of Land of the Free [Aug. 19] to fail to note that W.E.B. DuBois "became a Communist in later life." This text is aimed at junior high school students, whose notion of what a Communist is in any context is vague if not wholly lacking. DuBois' Communism was a tragic expression of his frustration with his country's failure to fulfill the promise and the premise of emancipation. To discuss and develop this episode is beyond a junior high school textbook; yet to bring to the attention of this age group the achievements of this brilliant scholar and man of action is an obligation of any book dealing with the Negro in America.

As for your opinion that Sojourner Truth was an "obscure Negro" who was "merely one" of many Negro abolitionists, this too misses the point. Garrison was one of many white abolitionists who gets play in every textbook--albeit not always sympathetically--and there is no reason why a leading Negro abolitionist should not be portrayed as a hero. One of the great gaps in most texts is the failure to recognize the Negroes' struggle on their own behalf long before NAACP and CORE.

IRVING J. SLOAN Educational Services Inc. Cambridge, Mass.

Shaped Charge

Sir: As a bloke who once admired the provocative undulations of a girl's well rounded contours, I am in revolt against the stark, conical rigidity of what Letter Writer Lambert [Aug. 5] calls the American bosom.

This diametric exactitude, this ever upward and outward thrust, may be a tribute to a remarkable suspension system, but its twin-turret effect has destroyed the natural softness of the feminine form. Encased in armor plate from armpit to thigh, our Western woman, compared with an African water carrier or a sari-clad Indian, moves with the grace of an army tank.

ROBERT G. SMITH Wellington, New Zealand

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