Letters, Dec. 18, 1933

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Senator's Shooting-irons

Sirs:

Some months ago, perhaps back in September, your magazine offended me greatly by saying that my friends call me ''Colonel" (TIME, Oct. 9). That is just naturally not true. I have been called nearly everything else, but I let it be known down in Kentucky many years ago that I kept shooting irons and that if any person, male or female, Jew or Gentile, black, white, yellow, red or brown, should ever apply that epithet ''Colonel" to me, I would use the shooting-irons so they would do the most harm in the worst way.

Now you can see what a predicament you have placed me in. Shooting is not free in New York State like it is down in Kentucky, so I am afraid to come up there and "crack down on you," to borrow the language recently used by a sure enough full-grown American citizen, officer and gentleman. Neither can I send you a challenge to fight a duel, which would be the gentlemanly thing to do, because no one down in Old Kentucky can hold an office until he swears that he has neither fought a duel nor accepted a challenge to fight one, and I am not through with holding public office so far as my own free will and accord are concerned.

Considering all of these reasons led me to conclude that my best policy was to forgive you and hold no hard feelings against you. All of which I did according to my forgiving nature. But you cut loose again in that aforesaid magazine in the issue of yesterday, and what you did was worse than you have ever done before. Being sort of a lawyer, I think you have libeled me by printing that picture with my name under it (TIME, Dec. 4). You must have hired one of these newspaper boys to slip up on me when I was not looking and grab that picture. I am so humiliated by it that I may resign from the Senate. So you had better be watching out for me. I might come up to see you with my shooting-irons.

M. M. LOGAN (Kentucky) U. S. Senate Washington, D. C.

TIME would gladly restore to Kentucky the dignity of its Junior Senator; were that not a service which the Senate itself is so certain to perform.—ED.

Orator

Sirs:

TIME refers to Detroit's radio priest, Father Coughlin as '''demagog." For this appellation the Funk & Wagnalls Standard Dictionary gives as definitions: "1. One who leads the populace by pandering to their prejudices and passions; an unprincipled politician. 2. Anciently, any popular leader or orator." Which definition was in the mind of modern up-to-the-minute TIME's usually accurate reportorial staff? I think an answer is due a subscriber and reader of long standing. I make no further comment here on this point lest I appear to be trying to put the answer in your mouth, figuratively sneaking. . . .

TIERNEY A. O'ROURKE Long Island City, N. Y.

TIME lapsed into the antique use of the word. An observation now current is that Father Coughlin is the first man since William Jennings Bryan to achieve a mass-following in the U. S. by means of oratory .—ED.

Dysentery Treatment

Sirs: