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Peanuts are out for the typical cotton farmer as FSA co-ops are allotted all of the available pickers for this crop. Most cotton land around here is entirely unsuited for this crop anyway and likewise over a large part of the cotton belt. The shortage of wire fence is keeping down the production of hogs in the South, and this land is not all suitable to the production of hog feeds.
The shortage of machinery is holding down the production of the soybeans you suggest we might be using. . . .
But we can all produce cotton, the one perfect wartime crop that produces food, fiber and shot. Compound lard, high explosives, stock feed, clothing, plastics, isinglass for planes and thousands of other products are produced from cotton. Very few articles can be made from soybeans that cannot also be made from cotton seed. We can grow more pounds of cotton seed per acre than we can soybeans, and we can harvest the cotton seed.
No wonder the "Solid South" is sometimes unreasonable as the entire rest of the nation is unreasonable concerning the South.
R. A. PICKENS Pickens, Ark.
— The Solid South does not solidly bear out Reader Pickens' argument—as evidenced by the South's increased production in soybeans, peanuts, hogs, cattle, corn, other diversified crops. —ED.
Talent Scout
Sirs:
Congratulations on the fine example of TIME'S good journalism in the sketch of the late Conde Nast [TIME, Sept. 28].
However, you omitted what to many must stand out as his most notable accomplishment. This consisted in locating and employing editorial talent, either inexperienced or undeveloped in other publishing jobs, but under Nast's influence later to become nationally famous. There were Bruce Barton, Frank Crowninshield, Dorothy Parker, Robert Benchley, Clare Boothe Luce and Edmund Wilson, to mention only a few; while the bright young women copywriters have overflowed into Fifth Avenue's swankiest shops to such an extent as to have definitely influenced the whole school of current department-store advertising.
Somehow Mr. Nast seemed to have had the ability to develop the best of those who entered his employ to a degree not to be found in any other magazine-publishing enterprise of our generation.
H. A. WHIFFLE
Atlanta, N. Y.