Letters, Jul. 29, 1957

Bad Seed or Bad Earth?

Sir:

"The Bad Seed" [July 8] is a sad story of a brutal father and of boys who had "the urge to kill." What's next for the boys? Years in jail, probably. Meantime, the Army will draft many other boys who have only a horror of killing; why not make boys like Ray Edwards and Marty Daniels professional soldiers? In the Army, they would have the respect of society instead of its condemnation.

M. G. LEONARD Fowler, Ohio

Sir:

TIME chose to use an old wives' slant in reporting this story: the bad father who once committed murder passes an inherent urge to kill on to his son. Bunk! How outdated! What juicy food for the hungry minds who love to believe such nonsense.

ELAINE R. POPE Boston

Sir:

Your story on Ray Edwards should not have been "The Bad Seed"; the title of another novel should have been borrowed and revised—"The Bad Earth"—in which the best of our seeds are wasted by the amateur gardeners we call society.

J. A. CHISCON Lafayette, Ind.

Too Little & Too Much

Sir:

The traffic safety conditions described in your June 24 article will undoubtedly be extremely advantageous to American motorists. However, the paramount highway problem is the frightening condition of too little brain power guiding too much horsepower.

JOHN M. LOUGHLIN

Sacramento, Calif.

Sir:

Do not Americans feel that your stupendous road-building program should include the erection of a monument to Henry Ford, who started the mass production of automobiles that revolutionized the American way of life, making the superhighways a necessity ?

RODOLFO JANUSZOWSKI Buenos Aires

Next Year's Beauties

Sir:

I read in your July 8 issue what is in store for us in the 1958 automobile. The powers that be in Detroit are really planning some beauties for next year. American cars are already too big, too powerful, too expensive to buy and operate. Why make them more so?

R. D. HARLAN II Pittsburgh

Sir:

I can hardly wait for those new models. I haven't really stopped laughing at the current ones yet.

GERALD R. BUNCE

Los Angeles

Sir:

Every year I look to the new crop of U.S. automobiles, hoping to find a sane, practical design reminiscent of the air-cooled Franklin

Airman series, circa 1927, or the Wills Sainte Claire Gray Goose, last seen in 1928. Your advance notices of what 1958 has in store doom me to continuing disappointment.

LEO TOCH Flushing, N.Y.

¶ For a look at what Reader Toch longs for, see cuts.—ED.

Cash & Credit

Sir:

Inflation is but a phase of the money troubles depicted in your July 8 article on "The Treasury Mess." The root of the whole trouble lies in the misuse of money. Money is becoming so unstable that not only the people of the U.S. but most of the people of the free world are losing their faith in it. When faith in our money is gone, chaos results, and woe betide us all.

HAROLD HUNTER Westview, B.C.

Sir: