Letters, Mar. 15, 1948

  • Challenge

    Sir:

    For the lucid account of Karl Marx's Communist Manifesto [TIME, Feb. 23], I offer my congratulations. . . . Nothing can forestall Communists' inroads in starving countries unless awakened American officials answer the Manifesto's challenge.

    RAY F. LAIR Columbus, Ohio

    Sir:

    Communist pictures always show American businessmen as fat, heedless, cigar-smoking, worker-eating ogres.

    By depicting Karl Marx on your cover as a red-eyed monster, you are stooping to those low Communist tactics.

    I. D. BONNEY Vancouver, B.C.

    Sir:

    You can't imagine how much amusement you are affording Marxists the whole world over. The apologists for capitalism are still trying to rub poor old Karl off the map. . . .

    However, to set the record straight, we beg to point out that, contrary to-what the Russophiles and phobes may say or think, Marxism never has been tried, so cannot be found wanting, as you so glibly try to cancel it out. . . .

    The world is filled with followers of false tacticians, who take the name of Marx in vain. . . .

    PETER ROBERTS World Socialist Party Los Angeles, Calif.

    Tom Clark's Quail

    Sir:

    If Attorney General Tom Clark had, as you say, been dining on "quail full of buckshot" [TIME, Feb. 23], it would have been a neat trick. . .

    Any quail of which there is to be enough left to dine on, must be shot with "birdshot."

    THOMAS H. GILLIAM JR.

    Philadelphia

    TIME overshot the mark.—ED./i>

    Irish Honey

    Sir:

    Since sentimentalists in great numbers are always among even such intelligent audiences as TIME'S readers, you have done me a great service by reviewing The Pursuit oj Robert Emmet [TIME, Feb. 23] as though it were a curl-up book suggestive of saccharin and Irish honey. For this I am truly and deeply grateful.

    But for the realists among your readers, could you add that it is also the delineation, documented to the last detail, of the origin, development and suppression of a democratic movement in Ireland which was influenced by American ideas even more than French ones? The adjectives valuable, scholarly and realistic have been used [by other critics] to describe the book, which give a different impression from that conveyed by your reviewer. After all, one doesn't endure, for eight years, in exile, the difficulties which were a constant factor of my work on the book, just to embroider in emerald floss another portrait of Emmet suitable for use on a cuddly sofa cushion. It took guts and ingenuity even to stay in Ireland. . . .

    HELEN LANDRETH Brooklyn, N.Y.

    ¶ Let Author Landreth not get her Irish up, and eat hearty, now she's home. TIME said her book was "exhaustive."—ED.

    Voice from the Archives

    Sir:

    Your note in TIME, Feb. 23, on the 3¢ stamp commemorating the 150th Anniversary of the Mississippi Territory mentioned that Mississippi was misspelled on the territory's original seal.

    You could have stated that the seal was designed in 1798 by the State Department, Washington, D.C., and sent by it to Natchez. Therefore, it was another mistake produced by the damnyankees.

    WILLIAM D. MCCAIN Director Department of Archives and History Jackson, Miss.

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