Letters, Jul. 9, 1951

Monday, July 09, 1951

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    ¶No censorship, invisible or otherwise. Oliver Twist has already been shown in Bridgeport (Conn.), New Orleans, Miami Beach and Chicago. Now nationally released, it simply awaits bookings by United Artists, which does not own its own theaters. — ED.

    Pro-Peyote

    Sir:

    TIME would do better to rely on the many scientific reports available on peyote [TIME, June 18] than on the accounts of missionaries and traders. I have not met a single missionary or trader who has been to a peyote ceremony, and the "paleface" you quote obviously had not been, either.

    A peyote meeting is not a "party" or "hassle" or any other kind of orgy, but a religious ceremony during which more time is spent on long prayers and the singing of sacred songs than in the consumption of peyote . . .

    DAVID P. MCALLESTER Assistant Professor of Anthropology Wesleyan University Middletown, Conn.

    Sir:

    . . . Your article repeats a familiar pattern which has been recurring for over a half-century. Whenever the peyote cult has been accepted by another tribe, the local Indian Christian converts, wishing to please the missionaries, from whom they receive secondhand clothes and other handouts, report "sex orgies," "deaths," "insanity," etc., caused by peyote. No scientists have been able to discover these evils. I have checked dozens of such reports and found them all either pure fabrications or misrepresentations . . .

    OMER C. STEWART

    Associate Professor of Anthropology University of Colorado Boulder, Colo.

    Those Eyes Sir:

    With that mouth and those eyes, is University of Toronto's Chancellor Vincent Massey [TIME,, June 18] no relation to U.S. cinema's Canadian-born Raymond Massey?

    (MRS.) ELEANOR P. A. SOTHERN

    Story, Wyo.

    Herewith brothers Vincent, 64, and Raymond, 54.—ED.

    Forced Labor

    Sir:

    The picture published in the June 18 issue of TIME, illustrating ten tugboats now being built at Viareggio, Italy for Soviet Russia, with the accompanying few words captioned, "Help for the Enemy," is not doing justice to . . . the effort that the Italian government is making in order to keep Italy on the right side of the fence . . .

    The kind of work you have publicized is forced upon Italy by the Peace Treaty—of which the U.S. is one of the signatory parties . . .

    LUIGI SOSSI

    New York City

    Reader Sossi is right. The Italo-So-viet reparations agreement of December 1948 obliges Italy to build small motor vessels for the U.S.S.R.—ED.

    Onward Syria!

    Sir:

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