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The American primitives in your May 10 issue take me back 60 years to my friendship with Jack Mann, an artist who, I felt, was a genius. On exhibition in a village store was Jack's painting of a game bird, a hunting-trophy still life with every barred feather in place, as realistic and photographic as anything modern processes have shown since. Yet Jack could whip up a portrait in an hour or two for anyone who cared to pose in his paint shop amid pails of whitewash and hand-mixed house paints. At one period he traveled over the hills of southern Vermont and New Hampshire selling spectacles to the farmers' wives, but always ready to do a portrait in short order. In a small weekly paper his advertisement read:
JACK MANN, PAINTER
PORTRAITS ON REQUEST. FENCES WHITEWASHED.
IF YOU WANT YOUR HOUSE PAINTED,
BRING IT TO THE SHOP.
CHANNING BARNES Henderson, N.Y.
Sir:
Here is a primitive, dated 1898, picked up at a Canadian farm in the province of Quebec, and painted by an anonymous itinerant, who paid for his food and lodging with this painting [see cut]. It hangs in my waiting room and attracts considerable interest.
F. RONCHESE, M.D.
Providence, R.I.
Empires, Past & Present
Sir:
Your splendid May 17 study of Imperialism emboldens me to ask your kind assistance in a similar study of the spread of Communism: a TIME map of the world which would show, with dates, the blood-red tentacles spreading from a Soviet center and leeching the life of one country after another, first in the West and then in the East . . .
(THE REV.) JOHN J. G. ALEXANDER, S.J. Pomfret Center, Conn.
McCarthy Faces Life
Sir: The one—and only—accomplishment of the Army-McCarthy hearings has been the introduction of Joseph Nye Welch to American televiewers. His wonderful performance is the best entertainment I've had in years. Thank you . . . for his background sketch [TIME, May 17].
MARY ALICE RICE
Buffalo, N.Y.
Sir:
Current on our campus is the historical revelation that not since Samson and the Philistines has an army been defeated by the jawbone of an ass . . .
R. L. ABRAMSON
University of Pennsylvania Philadelphia
Sir:
How refreshing, after several centuries of stuffy British ethics and antique notions about the fitness of things, for the civilized world to be led now by a nation which gleefully washes its soiled linen in public and makes belligerent noises at everyone in sight, while wondering what the hell to do next ... I am . . . bemused by the gay ambivalence of the U.S. citizenry, which gets sore if Eisenhower is criticized but cheers when told that his administration "stinks." It's just this sort of subtle, penetrant reasoning that gives us all such confidence in the future.
CABAL AMADOR Cali, Colombia
Sir:
. . . That particular story in the May 24 issue on the Adams testimony was a masterpiece of wit on a masterpiece of silliness. As far as I'm concerned, the Government should stop squandering money on the hearings, and turn them over to some soap manufacturer who could call the show "McCarthy Faces Life."
AUSTIN PENDLETON
Warren, Ohio
Sir: