Holt's Documents
Sirs:
YOUR IMPLICATIONS IN TIME [March 23] AS TO MY LETTERS AND DOCUMENTS ABOUT WPA BEING FRAUDULENT. ANY OF YOUR STAFF MAY SEE THESE ORIGINAL LETTERS AND DOCUMENTS AT MY OFFICE IN THE SENATE BUILDING.
RUSH D. HOLT
Washington, D. C.
When West Virginia's young Senator Holt rose to declare that he had letters proving that the WPA organization in his State was fraught with fraud, not TIME but WPAdministrator Harry Hopkins implied that Senator Holt's evidence was false.—ED.
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War Babies' Guns
Sirs:
A thousand gun salute to that brilliant Princeton brain which conceived the idea of organizing the Veterans of Future Wars, and the short-lived sister organization, the Gold Star Mothers of the Veterans of Future Wars (TIME, March 30).
It's a 20th Century "Don Quixote" packed with the dynamite of "war babies" turning the guns of ridicule on the goosestepping, gun-toting generation which splashed through the biggest bloodbath in history—and emerged crying for more!
When the Ford Peace Ship sailed to end that orgy of destruction through a Neutral Conference for Continuous Mediation, the "international anarchists" (to improvise on a phrase from G. Lowes Dickinson) presented the peace pilgrimage as the great comic interlude of their four years' spectacle. Militarism had won. The Ford Expedition will serve future generations as a study in magnificent failure.
Twenty years later militarism, triumphantly astride a prostrate world, is again threatened in its security. A handful of potential cannon fodder, organized as Future War Veterans, has laid hands on a deadly weapon which threatens to engulf the hitherto invincible strongholds of the professional murderers and their patrioteer subsidiaries.
But the Veterans of This and That, the Sons of Such and Such, and the Daughters and Mothers of So and So can't take it! They know that when they go down, theirs, unlike that of the Ship of Peace, will be ignoble defeat.
They realize that stripped by merciless satire and ridicule of their tinsel, their flag-waving, and their lip-service to the tenets of human liberty and progress, men and women everywhere will see them and their cohorts for what they are—dealers in death and destruction. . . .
EDITH WYNNER
New York City
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Princeton Punks
Sirs:
We listened with mild amusement tonight to your re-enactment of the Princeton Punks' idea of something funny.
We Vets have learned to be tolerant, to a large extent, by this time and therefore will not lose many nights' sleep over this momentous event but we believe it fitting to challenge their unfairness.
We were particularly annoyed by the Vassar Virgins' ridicule of our Gold Star Mothers.
We only wish to register our objection to what we consider half-baked ideas originated by half-baked minds. We would point out, however, that when we fought in France we offered our lives for what we then thought the welfare of the Princeton Punks and others. Said Princeton Punks' sires in many cases at that time were busy profiteering and their profits now enable their brilliant offspring to attend dear old Princeton.
Dear old Princeton!