The Contributors' Column

As a foreign correspondent for the Chicago Daily News, John Gunther (p. 385), now in his thirty-seventh year, has seen the world reshape itself since the war. Beginning in 1922, his dispatches have ‘covered’ Paris, Moscow, Berlin, Rome, Scandinavia, Geneva, Spain, Vienna, the Near East, and the Balkans. In 1936, a year momentous in English history, Mr. Gunther was in London keeping his finger on the national pulse, and incidentally watching the success of his book, Inside Europe, which has been more widely read by the British than any American volume since Mark Twain.

Many are the important clients who consult Margaret Dana (p. 397), a merchandising counsel with headquarters in New York, who has a long list of surveys to her credit. It should be pointed out in connection with her article that representatives of the New York City Federation of Women’s Clubs recently formulated a plan urging their fellow members to request stores to mark their sales checks with the fibre content of the merchandise they purchase, the checks to be forwarded in turn to the Federal Trade Commission.

Painter and sculptor, Eric H. Kennington (p. 406) was a close friend of T. E. Lawrence and the art editor of that great book, Seven Pillars of Wisdom. He designed the bust of ‘ T. E.’ now in St. Paul’s Cathedral, London. His knowledge of the original was at. once profound and sensitive.

Albert Jay Nock (p. 416), the most quizzical and independent of Atlantic philosophers, spent his Christmas holidays contemplating the warmer portions of America. ‘Boosting on top of the equator,’ he wrote, ‘is an interesting experience — once — but once is enough. Hereafter I shall not venture south of the Caribbean. Jamaica is all very well if one has to dodge the cold weather temporarily, and no doubt Haiti also, but nothing below that. I got as far as Trinidad, have seen all that is to be seen in those regions, but as the Potash puts it, I seen enough already. My ship touched at half a dozen Venezuelan ports on the way. There’s a country for you! I saw and heard enough to convince me that . . .’ But we must not anticipate.

Twenty-three years old and weighing a hundred and thirty-live pounds, Gene Richard (p. 124) is a living part of one of the most extraordinary developments in industrial America: the assembly line of a huge automobile plant in Michigan.

Writer, lecturer, and, more recently, a Monday morning columnist in the New York Herald Tribune, George E. Sokolsky (p. 429) keeps his files in New York City but hangs his hat in every state in the Union. His constant travel, his association with labor leaders and industrialists, his talks with citizens of every persuasion, give him a perspective which is anything but local.

Beloved by those who love good food, Della T. Lutes (p. 140) is the author of The Country Kitchen, which American booksellers have recently voted ‘the most original book published in 1936.’

After a winter in California, James Norman Hall (p. 448) lias returned to Papeete, Tahiti, where, in double harness with his friend and collaborator, Charles Nordhoff, he is now engaged in writing a new novel.

William Wister Haines (p. 448), of Philadelphia antecedents, is a novelist and short-story writer who knows at first hand the stimulus and temptation of Hollywood.

A Cambridge poet, Esther Dette (p. 149) crosses the Charles for her daily bread.

From Fredonia, New York, Josephine Bates (p. 449) sends us her first sheaf of verses for the Atlantic.

His long training in a New York bank has given Clifford B. Reeves (p. 450) a level view and a keen sense of economy. In the letter accompanying his manuscript he sounds this warning: ‘Some of your readers are going to regard me as a cold, inhuman fellow, without a spark of sentiment, who runs around jotting figures on his cuff with a pencil stub and reducing everything in life to percentages. Actually I am a sentimental cuss, particularly about my home and family. In fact, I am so sentimental about them that I want to be sure never to get them into trouble. Can there be a higher degree of sentimentality? Moreover, I yield to no man in I the matter of caprice in such momentous affairs as the transplantation of lilac bushes at will, or the planting of an apple. I simply want to feel sure before I start that I shall also he there for tilt’ benefits of the harvest as well. Otherwise ’t is love’s labor lost.’

Descended through his father from the kings of Connaught, L. A. G. Strong (p. 156) is an Irish hard and story-teller whose novels and short stories have been widely acclaimed on both sides of the Atlantic.

Esther Everett Lape (p. 463), the member in charge of the American Foundation Studies in Government, has organized and directed as elaborate a survey of the medical profession as has been made since the days of the Flexner report. The complete report of this survey comprises 1500 pages in two volumes and will be obtainable early in April.

Author and dramatic critic, Walter Prichard Eaton (P. 474) divides his year between his beloved Berkshires and Ids professorial post at the Yale School of Drama. When duty summons him to Broadway, he takes with him a sense of humor and a knowledge of plays and players remarkable among theatregoers.

Mazo de la Roche (p. 477) lives in Worcestershire, England, with her two adopted children, Esmee and René. But her thoughts are never far from those legendary acres in Canada, the Jalna country. The London production of Whiteoaks, the play taken from her second novel, has passed its 325th performance and is still packing them in.

Roy Palmer Clark (p. 482) is to-day the schoolmaster on Pitcairn Island.

Hilda Hinckley (p. 485), a native Californian and a graduate of Pomona College, reversed Greeley’s famous advice by coming East. In the Massachusetts State Beformalory for Women, Miss Hinckley has developed in less than five years a course in English Composition, with results which will, we believe, be appreciated by teachers evcry where.

Well known for his short stories of the sea, Bill Adams (p. 491), at the Atlantic’s request, wrote down the experiences of his early years as an English apprentice in the clipper fleet. His autobiography, Ships and Women, will be published in book form on April 5.

Arthur Pound (p. 505) is an economist well trained to interpret an industrial age in human terms, His book, The Iron Man in Industry, is a standard reference for those who study the methods of American production.

The Atlantic is old enough to enjoy a joke at its own expense. The story of the schoolgirl who traveled with the Atlantic as her chaperon (and inside the orange covers a copy of True Confessions) has been going the rounds for twenty years. In his series of Industrial Crises the artist Rea Irvin, if memory serves, once depicted the effect of a split infinitive in the Atlantic’s office. We should like to begin a collection, Will those readers who know of stories, cartoons, sketches, or references, however derogatory, however scurrilous, he good enough to send or lend us their clippings or suggest where the reproductions may he found? For each story or drawing accepted for our collection we will pay a dollar. But not, of course, for duplicates. To the reader sending in the largest assortment we will award a five-year subscription to the Atlantic.

It was to be expected that Bernard M. Baruch’s advocacy of a ‘cash-and-carry’ system of neutrality, as outlined in the MarchAtlantic, would arouse considerable comment. Not least interesting of the varied response to his article was that of the Chairman, Committee on foreign Relations, United States Senate.

Dear Atlantic,—
I have read Mr. Baruch’s article with great interest. He has great knowledge of the subject derived from his studies and a broad experience in international matters.
The amendments which I proposed to the existing Neutrality Law , and which were to-day approved by the Foreign Relations Committee of the United States Senate, have little to do with so-called neutrality. These proposed amendments constitute legal restraints upon our own citizens in the hopes that they will avoid unnecessary controversies that may lead to war.
I agree with Mr. Baruch that our people ’want to keep out of war at almost any cost - except invasion.’ I agree with him in that we cannot close our markets to belligerents, but wo can compel the title to be transferred to the belligerents before it is transported from our shores. This I also favor and my resolution so provides.
Neutrality is divided as to the lights of belligerents and the rights of neutrals. In times of peace the respective rights have never been agreed upon to any great, extent. In times of war belligerents demand every privilege they deem necessary to their selfdefense and to victory. Neutrals in such times attempt to determine what privileges demanded by the belligerents are just or in accordance with ancient customs. Such controversies nearly always result in the loss of the lives and property of neutrals, and are not settled generally until after the wars are over. Neutrals must either accept such procedure to obtain the remedy or they must go to war to protect their rights.
I am in entire accord with Mr. Baruch’s statement with regard to the rights of neutrals on the high seas when he says, ’That vexed question remains as uncertain now as it was in 1919.’
KEY PITTMAN

Another member of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations elaborates his point of view regarding American neutrality.

Dear Atlantic, —
Neutrality ought to mean taking neither side of a controversy. Such a stand practically is impossible because doing nothing means helping the stronger of two combatants; doing something, if done impartially, also means helping the stronger; it is seen that doing something which definitely helps one side is not a neutral act.
The above generalizations can be said quite as much in regard to the cash-and-carry idea as to any other kind of neutrality, because the cash-and-carry idea gives all the advantage to the side which has the money or the command of the sea. To the extent that our neutrality acts of 1935 and 1936 had for their objective the keeping of America out of war, they, of course, had my support. They were temporary acts. I was glad to see American duties stressed rather than a firm stand for American right.
In the present proposed legislation I am opposed to the mandatory type. I am opposed to the mandatory principle simply because a mandatory law in its practical effect is weaker than a discretionary law, because action under the former must await the happening of the actual events described in the law. I am opposed to mandatory neutrality also because no one can see either the size or t he place of the next war, and there may occur many wars wherein no action is necessary to keep us out.
The author of the present proposed Resolution in the Senate wants it called the Peace Act of 1937, instead of the Neutrality Act.
With his aim I am in hearty accord, but I do not believe the present proposal is entitled to that definition. An act which fails to condemn war as such, at least to the extent to which it has been condemned in our international agreements, can hardly be called a peace act.
An act which does not recognize international obligations and does not make it possible for the turning of our domestic unilateral law into international multilateral agreement, as was hinted at in Buenos Aires, is not as broad an act as I should like to see.
ELBERT D. THOMAS
Washington, D. C.

And from a lawyer who has had much experience in the conduct of international aifairs:—

Dear Atlantic, —
I agree with Mr. Baruch as to the danger of undertaking, in advance of war, to renounce rights to trade with other neutrals and belligerents.
Broadly speaking, either our policy should be designed to help get the world away from the war system or it should accept and face the realities of the war system. Neutrality proposals which incite to economic self-sufficiency merely impress more surely the war system upon the world. They put a premium upon the purely national aspect of control of raw materials and sea power and they ensure competition for dominion.
I should prefer to see us work for international conditions where less, instead of greater, importance attached to sovereignty over raw materials. If, however, this is too idealistic, lei ns abandon the sanctimonious pretext that our policy is or should be one of ‘neutrality.’ In a world where the war system prevails, no nation as rich as our own can expect to he left permanently at peace, Under such circumstances we should keep our economic power available to help nations which are friendly to us and whose ideals are sympathetic to our own. Any other policy pledges us to become the silent partner of that belligerent in the next war which possesses the maximum sea power. If we are to have partners in a war-system world, I should prefer to see us choose them for ourselves rather than have them thrust upon us by circumstances beyond our control.
JOHN FOSTER DULLES
New York City

Many there were who entered the lists in the battle raging around Gertrude Stein’s ‘Butler Will Melt,’ which appeared in the FebruaryAtlantic. Three points of view: —

Dear Atlantic, —

(With apologies to all to whom apologies are due.)
Mrs. M. D. ADCOCKWebster Groves, Missouri

Dear Atlantic,—
I am sorry that you felt it necessary to make those facetious remarks in the Contributors’ Column of the February issue of the Atlantic concerning Gertrude Stein.
Miss Stein’s treatment of the weaknesses of the human soul in her delightful ‘Butler Will Melt’ is too majestic and too searching to call for the crude treatment which you have accorded it.
DAVID J. MALCOLMCharlemont, Massachusetts

Dear Atlantic, —
It will not be necessary for the editor to use an asterisk and tell the reader that this is my own punctuation and capitalization, because I am not sailing under false colors, or trying to make a fool of myself and the intelligentsia that read the good old Atlantic.
I came to Florida at the age of eighty-one with a plan: I want to be the oldest active newspaper man in the United States and intend to live one hundred years and work up to and including rny one hundredth birthday. One of your jewels, Mari Sandoz, could tell you a lot about me because I freighted through the sand twenty miles west of Old Jules’s homestead ten years before Jules left Europe; helped to make the trail, in fact, for a freighting outfit.
But I want to say something about ‘Butter Will Melt,’ though the mail you are going to receive will keep the editor in chief and his stall busy for a month reading what folks have to say about Gertie, who can, when she feels like it, write the head off any of the pretenders who write blank verse or tell outlandish yarns. But why does she do this childish stuff? Really, I should like to have this mystery solved, for it is keeping some of your lifelong readers awake nights wondering what has pome over the good old Atlantic, aristocrat of all the magazines in Christendom.
We believe with Gertie that butter will melt. I have had it melt, strange as it may seem, right in my mouth when I had it spread on bread that Mother used to make, and when it was served to me as a driver of oxen, but only when we came in at the end of the trail at Cheyenne. Wyoming Territory, after an absence from butter for months. Say, did it melt? I’ll tell it to the whole world.
And so far as ‘Hindoos’ are concerned, let us replace them with what we called Mexican Greasers, who ate axle grease on their bread, for when we missed the axle grease after fording the North Platte River we discovered in the separate camp of the Greaser bullwhackers the very wooden boxes that had contained the axle grease, and our wagon boss accused the Greasers of eating the grease, and they admitted it, saying they thought if was some newfangled article of diet being introduced by a Yankee in our freighting outfit.
This axle grease was called Frazier’s, and one day a lone Indian (1873) came into camp when it was my trick to do the cooking, and did I know he was not alone? No. He asked, by sign, for something to eat, so I put my old Smith & Wesson in his face, handed him a box of axle grease and forced him to eat it. On the way track from Fort Laramie the famous ‘Portuguese’ Phillips, who carried Ihe news of the Fort Kearney massacre to Port Laramie, told me that they had found a dead Indian near his stage station on Chugwater creek, and that it had gotten around that I had poisoned the Indian, one of about two hundred camped a few miles from us on that fatal day, and that they wanted my scalp lock of long (then) coal-black hair!
So I was ever after — even now — known as Pizen Bill Hooker, although I think Phillips lied, and that the reason I am to-day referred to in the historical archives of Nebraska and Wyoming as Pizen Bill is because one winter I poisoned nearly one hundred coyotes and gray wolves.
Sincerely and truly and fraternally yours,
WILLIAM FRANCIS HOOKERBartow, Florida

Here is a new bouquet for Mrs. Della T. Lutes, whoseCountry Kitchenwas selected by the American Booksellers Association as “the most original book published in 1936.'

Dear Atlantic,—
It is a far cry from Michigan to Foochow, and my belated wail of protest about dried apples will, I fear, be a ‘voice flying by to be lost in an endless sea.’ Besides, who am I to challenge the rightness of one so wholly inspired as Mrs. Lutes? Because I was brought up in the orchards of central New York, do I not know how completely right she is as to the necessity of knowing one’s apples for a few generations before one at tempts a pie?
But the memory of my mother’s dried-apple pies, eagerly anticipated and joyfully welcomed all the cold days of winter, even before the Baldwin and Spitzenhergs and Greenings were gone, spurs me to give a reason for the faith that is in me; a faith that if you use the right kind of apples you will at least approximate the delights we children enjoyed, in those lattice-crusted, warm, brown, fragrant platefuls of childhood’s ambrosia.
When an incredulous uncle asked Mother, ‘What do you put into your pies to make them taste like that?’ Mother’s laconic reply, ‘Apples,’ was not the whole truth. Well do I remember that only Fall Pippins and Twenty-ounce Pippins were thought fit to dry: all the left-overs, which Mrs. Lutes’s mother dried to save, went into Grandfather’s cider press. Two parts sour apples to one part sweet is the rule for that incomparable beverage; and let it settle an hour, while you get fresh wheal straws from the new threshing. The vinegar barrel was the final end of whatever was not drunk fresh or taken to the big copper kettle to be boiled and pul into a crock down cellar — for the winter’s pies, for dried-apple sauce, for apple butter, or to go with Greenings into mincemeat.
Let those who buy dried apples in stores, if there are such, justly decry dried apples. I brought out to China with me some dried Twenty-ounce Pippins; I saw some of them in the storeroom a half hour ago. What Li Guang, incomparable cook though he is, does with them cannot possibly be what my mother would do; for who can cook, on a charcoal tire, dried apples as they should be cooked, simmering slowly for twelve to fifteen hours, with just the right amount of sugar added toward the end of the cooking, and never a spoon allowed in the kettle? Li Guang does it better than I could: but there’s no boiled cider.
By way of introduction of myself, I am one of those children of whom my father’s lifelong friend, Thomas K. Beecher, said, ‘Bailey babies have to be brought up on apple sauce.’
KATE BAILEY HINMANFoochow, China

And P.S. Could n’t you persuade Mrs. Lutes to say something about johnnycake of meal from freshground new corn? And how green corn should be grown and cooked ? let me give my father’s rule, ‘First put the kettle on; then go pick the corn.’ K. B. H.

In the FebruaryAtlanticappeared a contribution from Earnest Elmo Calkins, whose signature has been familiar in theAtlanticfor a dozen years. His latest paper. ’Wonderful Words of Life,’ stirred up a veritable hornets’ nest of protests from equally faithful readers. A reader who knew Mr. Calkins personally would realize that he is anything but cynical in his attitude. Indeed, we hardly remember among our acquaintances a man who has a more genuine feeling for the influences of his youth. In testimony of which we recommend to one and all Mr. Calkins’s autobiography,‘Louder Please!’‘ My particular grudge against gospel hymns,’ says Mr. Calkins, ’is that I learned so many of them in spite of myself.’ Doubtless others have been similarly stirred.

Dear Atlantic, —
In the interests of fairness we hope you will recommend a letter modifying the impression that we believe Mr. Calkins’s article created, namely that gospel hymns were passing and ought to pass. The first is never according to the facts as evidenced by the steady business our client, Hope Publishing Company, are doing in hymnhooks of the Gospel Hymn type. The second is a matter of personal opinion or prejudice.;br/> In the letter received to-day from Mr. Calkins he says, ’The songs are neither good music nor good literature and their tremendous vogue (in the ’80s and ’90s) was a curious phase of our cultural history.';br/> Mr. Calkins ought reasonably to inquire of himself if there is anything curious in the lives consecrated to religions advance and social betterment that Were changed by the gospel hymns and what they stood for. Sir Wilfred Grenfell occurs to me as a type. On what I believe was his last visit to Chicago I heard him tell a small group of which I was one, who entertained him for luncheon, that it was Mr. Moody’s personality and Mr. Sankey’s singing that turned his life around when he wandered into a London revival.
And there are innumerable other names of men equally important and equally-cultured, not ashamed to confess the influence which gospel hymns have had in their lives. Mho knows but that the useful and inspiring life that Mr. Calkins himself has lived was not in some measure the result of the influence of gospel hymns in his early days?
JEWELL F. STEVENS COMPANYCHICAGO, Illinois

Dear Atlantic, —
Earnest Elmo Calkins can write entertainingly on any subject he chooses to discuss; and he has put a lot of us oldsters in his debt by discoursing so interestingly on the old gospel hymns.
He touched only casually on the morbidity of the hymns. I wonder if he has speculated, as I often have, on the psychological effect upon adolescents of such a hymn as the following, which I must have learned when I was eight or nine years old:—

And there was another one: —

It was all very naive, and the times of our naïveté God winked at! But I sometimes wonder if it was not a sly wink! I would hate a god without a sense of humor!;br/> And, again, I sometimes wonder if we have not paid too much for our sophistication?;br/> A. E. BRUCEClaremont, California

A word for the modern hill girl.

Dear Atlantic,—
‘Backwoods Sparkin’,’ in the-Contributors’ Club of the January Atlantic, certainly evokes my ire as being a gross misrepresentation of the true hillbillytype girl, whether she be Ozarkian or not. In the first place, the author does not make himself clear as to whether he is trying to deride the mountain girl for her silliness or whether he hopes to elevate her by holding her up as a last example of the old true-blue blood of American pioneer provincialism and superstition. In his first paragraph he says, ‘She has tried more love magic than was known in the old days when love philtres were standard articles of merchandise, Personally, I know for a certainty that queer superstitions do exist in the Ozarks, but they do not all exist in the mind of any otie girl. In fact very few are known to any one girl.
Nowadays, the hill girl is generally well educated, cultured, and trained in modern things, including lovemaking. And when she recites this ‘mumbo jumbo,’ which the author says would make ‘voodoo worship seem like a lecture on logic,’ she looks longingly at an Ozark moon, and an intelligent capricious twinkle arising from concealed mischief will reflect from her eyes as she inwardly relies on both her modern beauty-shop complexion and make-up and the exuberant ‘It’ which only the best of health, coupled with the finest strains of ancestral blood in America to-day, can produce. Of course, ‘ Nature in the raw is seldom mild,’ but when we men have the best of dame nature to pick from,’only the choicest leaves are used.’
CLAUDE E. JOHNSON, Editor
Ozark Magazine, Romance, Arkansas

‘For services rendered.'

Dear Atlantic, —
After reading the Contributors’ Column in the December Atlantic, I am amazed at the speed with which the science of medicine has advanced from century to century. Here is a physician’s bill for services rendered in 1680 when we had no telephones down this-away. The patient apparently was suffering (at the start) from ‘ague and fever.’ There is no record either of his recovery or of his demise.
‘August 22 — I visit, 100 lbs. tobacco; 1 purgation & 2 decoctions, 250 lbs. tobacco; I vial cordial waters, 400 lbs. tobacco; 3 sweats, 100 lbs. tobacco; 2 potions laxative, with attendance, 200 lbs. tobacco.
‘September 5 Ferrying, 30 lbs. tobacco; Second visit, 100 lbs. tobacco; 6 laxatives in 6 days. 300 lbs. tobacco; Sweating & oil & unguents, 80 lbs. tobacco; I stomack plaster, with attendance, 50 lbs. tobacco.
‘September 16 — Ferrying, 30 lbs. tobacco; Third visit, 100 lbs. tobacco; 1 cordial & spirits of salt, 200 lbs, tobacco; I diet drink, and this with attendance and syrup, 200 lbs. tobacco.
‘September 25 — Ferrying, 30 lbs. tobacco; l purgation, 100 lbs. tobacco; 1 decoction with ingredients, 200 lbs. tobacco; Cordial medicines, 100 lbs. tobacco; All time and attendance, 800 lbs. tobacco.
‘Total, 3370 lbs. tobacco.’
N. B. What a gold mine’t would be to the cigarette manufaclurers if we could return to first Principles in Medica Americana!
ALBERT A. RICHARDSOnancock, Virginia