Taft Letter

Odious. Detestable

Sirs:

I cannot condone in silence the reprinting on your letter page of a scurrilous anti-Catholic campaign verse, directly under a letter from a Catholic Sister who cancels her subscription in protest against your original printing of this doggerel. If the Presidency of the United States were being contested by a Buddhist and a Mohammedan, I should wish TIME to print no shocking, versified allusion to the sacred "Beard of the Prophet."

By so doing you would merely cause unnecessary pain to pious devotees of Islam. In the present instance, I fear that you have shocked the Catholic Sister cruelly, unless you cancelled her subscription so promptly that she did not receive the issue in which her letter and the verse appeared. If I am any judge of human nature, she at least flipped through a copy to see if her letter had been printed. You might have spared her a shock, and perhaps tears.

Compassion and consideration should always be shown to those who are still religious. Personally I like to pretend that I have lost all contact with religion, and then sometimes I wonder.

MARY BURCHARD PRYOR

Worcester, Mass.

TIME assumes that subscribers who request cancellation do not thereafter peek.

If the Presidency of the United States were being contested by a Buddhist and a Mohammedan, TIME would observe due reverence in mentioning the "Beard of the Prophet." But if hundreds of Buddhist verses ridiculing the "Beard" should appear, in such scurrilous myriads as to violently affect the campaign, then TIME would print a very few significant specimens of such doggerel.

If these typical verses were of a self-evidently odious and detestable nature, TIME would expect both Mohammedans and Buddhists to join with TIME in holding them up to general odium and detestation.

Exceedingly apropos is a despatch from Tennessee, printed last week by the Republican New York Sun, staunch supporter of Candidate Hoover. The Sun's star political correspondent, George Van Slyke wired: "The religionists have thrown off all restraints in the last month and are working openly against Smith. The State is flooded with the anti-Catholic literature. More than fifty separate pamphlets and circulars have been spread broadcast. The extent of this movement has caused much comment as to its cost and who is footing the bill. Much secrecy prevails as to the method of circulation. The literature bears the mark of Flint, Mich., and mostly is put into the rural mail boxes at the crossways, under doors and into small town letter boxes during the night. . . . "All the stuff is much the same . . . holds out the most amazing threats of devastation and disaster which will come to the nation if the Pope wins control of the Government . . .and contains the most vicious and lurid attacks on the Governor, assailing him in the vilest language."-ED.

Taft Letter

Sirs:

Permit one of your original subscribers to commend your published excerpts [TIME, Oct. 15] of letter of William Howard Taft of June, 1918, wherein he declares against the pending Eighteenth Amendment and against National Prohibition as further evidence of the historical value of your publication, but also evidence of the attitude of one whom the American people had honored with the highest office in their gift.