Sputtering Patriots
Sirs:
You may be interested to receive a report of the accomplishment of your periodical in the West Indies and Panama.
"Pan American rights v. North American satrapy," so debates Latin American youth, readers of TIME.
Chafing at kindly paternalism that replies "the U. S. has your interest at heart" and supplies clean streets, excellent hospitals, clinics and roads, Central and South American patriots sputter ominous objections to the "Anglo-Saxon" regime.
Panamian TIME fans read Karl Marx (El Capital), The Life of Lenin, Emerson, Wisest American, Chekhov, Dostoevski, Keyserling, James Joyce. Best sellers from the pen of local authors:
America Latino, y el Imperialismo Americano —Louis Guilaume.
La Politica Internacional en America, Pasada, Presente, Futuro—Fernandez y Medina.
Norte America y los Norte Americanos—Andrew Cipolla.
El Imperialismo del Petrolio y la Paz Mundial —Camillo Trelles.
This last a treatise on the dangers of the Standard Oil Dynasty.
Latin America awaits a statement of policy from Washington about the founding of a Pan American University. At present South & Central America send their youth to college in Europe, the U. S., or not at all. If the U. S. would only help, we would contribute gladly to a University in Panama.
Why not take into account the intelligence and mentality of these people? Why not realize they will never be satisfied to give up their own culture, traditions and heritage for the sake of material wellbeing?
To be sure we continue to re-hash the Monroe Doctrine. We appoint and send commissioners to investigate, to advise, to report. We maintain our traditional aloofness to foreign entanglements. Why not consider the state rights of citizens of the Western Hemisphere in line with our own political experience? In the meanwhile our sister republics read and reread TIME. The unofficial promise it contains, the friendly American grin it brings to mind vanishes dread bugaboos of imperialistic satraps and oil barons.
TIME international news sheet, hats off to you.
WINTHROP B. PALMER
Fairfield, Conn.
To Subscriber Palmer, hats off for a TIME-worthy report on the Latin-American frame of mind.—ED.
Baby-Eating
Sirs:
I wish you would please have a talk with your editor who writes items on China. I suggest that he might eliminate once in a while reference to the six million starving Chinese who are constantly being forced to eat their babies when they are able to catch them.
... It may be that human beings have been eaten in isolated cases but unfortunately your editor gives the idea that this is just a little pastime. . . .
HUGH MACKENZIE
Passenger Traffic Manager Dollar Steamship Lines Inc., Ltd. San Francisco, Calif.
Let the most timid of travelers not fear to visit any Chinese place on the itinerary of a major steamship line or world cruise. (Safest of all Chinese places are the International Quarter at Shanghai guarded by white police, Peiping where U. S. Marines are quartered, and the British part of Hongkong.)