$1,000,000 Car
Sirs: Your statement that a private train costing $375,000 has just been purchased for the President of Mexico (TIME, May 9) is robbed of all significance by your failure to allude to the practice of sleeping in an ordinary "lower" which is observed by the President of the United States.* Let me tell you that our President gains nothing by this practice, and certainly our country gains nothing. Is there a man or woman in the U. S. who would have less respect for our President if he traveled in the world's finest private train, costing perhaps $1,000,000? Let me answer my own question by saying that the peoples of the earth would all have more respect for our President if he lived and traveled in a style worthy of the U. S. I have traveled in almost every Latin-American country, and I know that $10 worth of increased prestige for our country can be reaped for every dollar sown in providing better living and traveling quarters for our President and for his Ambassadors in foreign lands. As matters stand, foreigners visit Washington and then go home to tell their countrymen that our President lives like what Sinclair Lewis calls a "babbitt." I have heard "babbitt" picked up and used in this connection by foreigners several times. Do we want that to continue? HERBERT MILTON MAXWELL
Philadelphia, Pa.
History, Politics
Sirs:
. . . On the walls of Johns Hopkins Economic Seminary, when my classmate Woodrow Wilson taught there about 1886-1887 were the words of the Swiss Economist Bluntschli: "History is past politics. Politics is present history." TIME fills both orders.
B. H. HARTOGENSIS
Baltimore, Md.
Stool
Sirs:
... I do not care to renew for the same reason that I do not care to eat, perched on a stool. You have succeeded admirably in dishing up a mental fare that is devoid of all the things or elements except the chemical ingredients of information.
When I take bodily nourishment, I prefer to do so with a certain amount of leisure, spicing the rite with conversation with a kindred spirit. Even a few relevant words from the waiter are not unwelcome. Feeding and dining are both operations that have to do with food. But feeding is just high pressure stoking of the alimentary tract with fuel. "Feeders" resent the time required to do the job, and are hoping that some bright chap will soon boil all food down to a capsule that can be taken on the run, with no time out.
You are apparently trying to foster a habit of "newsing," which is to reading as feeding is to dining. Your ideal subscriber is the snappy chap who rushes into a feeding place, glares because no stool is vacant, spots the man who is up to pie, takes his stance behind him, elbows rivals for the vacancy out of the road, barks his order at the waitress, pulls TIME out of his pocket, and then for 15 minutes glues his eyes to the page while his right hand automatically pokes grub into his mouth to be gulped down in hunks.
The Literary Digest is as much predigestion of the affairs of the world as I care for, and what they miss I shall try to grub out of the daily papers.
LUTHER McG. MOVER
Montclair, N. J.
Negro Subscribers
Sirs: