Sintonville, June 28, 19—
In your reply please refer to
JW: CL File 61W

DEAR JERRY:

disappointment to me that you did not seem to catch the spirit of the mattress industry. As our advertising man says, the human race spends one-third of its

Yes, New York is a big place, and it hardly compares with Sintonville. The lions on the Library steps are larger than our statue of Senator Ipswich, and there are other points of dissimilarity. Sintonville, however, is the third largest mattress production centre of the United States, and I think New York is the fourth, so you need not be ashamed to tell people that you are from Sintonville. Everybody knows the "Sleep-easy" and "Comfy" brands of rest specialties, and no doubt you will be proud to refer to the fact that your father is the creator of them. Tell your friends to write for Booklet A.

You probably will be interested, however, in higher things, since you have set out upon a career of ideal communism. I tried to get you interested in overhead when you were here, which is the highest thing around the plant, and it was a keen

I do not think you can say the same of art and literature.

However, I never did believe in trying to argue with a horse that he ought to drink water. Your mother spent a modest fortune on your sister's musical education, and Eleanor hates Tschaikowsky worse than Bichloride. It's all because they forced the child to take music lessons when her natural inclination was to be out jumping rope or teasing cats.

Your mother and I agreed that she should rear Eleanor and I should raise you.

Mama thinks I have made a pretty mournful mess of it, because of your socalled radical tendencies, but we will show them, won't we?

There is comfort to me in the fact that you think. It is far better to think wrongİy than not at all. The man who uses his mental processes invariably outgrows the earlier crudities which he mistook for gems of thought. It's like a boy reading

five-cent novels. My father castigated me because I clove to "Old Cap Collier" and "Diamond Dick," instead of "Oliver Twist" and "Paradise Lost." Little did he know that I was laying the foundation of a broader appetite, so to speak, in literature, and that, had I not started out with five-cent thrillers, I never would have cultivated a taste in reading which later made it possible for me to enjoy Pluto and Aristotle. Viewing the matter from this distance, I do not blame my father. A book agent sold him a set of Milton illustrated with unhappy artists' models in Purgatory and even lower in the social scale, together with a set of Dickens's Works. My mother tore all the pictures out of Paradise Lost, which made it a dull and properly named book, even to Papa. But he wanted his children to be better educated than he was, hence his insistence in guiding my taste.

they are waiting for you here. It seems rather odd that you do not care to accept further help from me.

I respect your determination to make a living for yourself and to pay me back all that I have expended on your education. I am sure that you are quite able to take care of yourself and that you will forge ahead in any endeavor which you select. ever, I remember that your mother and I paid fifteen dollars for a cantaloupe and a cup of coffee one morning

I am glad you have had greater educational advantages than your father, though I did manage to struggle through Allerton Tech. I cannot understand, of course, how an academic course at Harvard and a law course at Yale could result in so disrespectful an attitude toward dollars and cents as you display.

Speaking of money, though, if you ever have need of a few capitalistic dollars,

How

at the Ritzbilt when we were in New York, and the waiter said, "No thanks," when I offered him a seventy-five cent tip. If I were you, I would keep away from such places. They are quite likely to guess that you are from Sintonville.

Let me hear from you, boy, and don't feel too harsh toward

FATHER.

Dict. but not

read.

(P. S.-Miss Larrimore makes mistakes every now and then, but

would say that I am rather shocked to hear that I wrote anything that hurt your feelings.

You should not condemn the entire mattress industry simply because I asked you once if you would not like to learn how to run a factory.

If we are "oppressing" anybody in our plant, I have never been told of it before. The men and women who work for us seem to be satisfied with conditions. The girls' rest room has all the latest magazines and a fine beveled mirror in it, and the men have organized a baseball team and seem to think a lot of the gymnasium that we have put in, with the aid of the Y. M. C. A.

As for child labor-my dear boy, I do not see how you possibly could get such an impression, knowing me as you do, and as familiar as you are with our methods of running the business. We obey the Child Labor Law to the very letter. I often wonder where I would be to-day if there hadn't been any child labor in your family, Jerry. My mother used to cry because she had to wake me up at three o'clock of a bitter morning, and I had to trudge a mile and a half through the snow to my job at the foundry. That was after my father died, and things were pretty lean with us. My mother managed to keep me in school, but I worked four hours every morning before other boys woke up.

This is too much about myself, son, but you will forgive me if I cannot understand how a lad who had everything that money could buy, as you had, could grow up to manhood with the peculiar ideas that you have.

I am glad that you found a job so quickly in New York. I never have seen a copy of "Unchained," but it must be an interesting sort of a magazine, judging from the name. Tell them to write our advertising manager and give him details of rates and circulation. I know you are not in the advertising department, but my experience with newspapers has been that they feel quite friendly toward those who say it with advertising. They printed my picture as a leading citizen of Sintonville in one of the annual special editions here recently for fifty dollars. My advertising man said that was just

"mug-stuff" and a hold-up. But if they want a little mug-stuff on "Unchained," just let me know about it. If it will help you in your new job, I will put on a flannel shirt and start chewing tobacco instead of smoking cigars.

I don't think parents should ever stand in the way of their children. Your mother has just illustrated the futility of that sort of thing by forbidding Eleanor to have her own car. Yesterday Eleanor skidded out to the factory with a uselesslooking admirer and a shiny little coupé which she said was hers. I asked her where she got it-I mean the car-and she said she bought it on the installment plan, and intended to pay fifty dollars a month out of her allowance until she had satisfied the "pay-as-you-ruin-it" automobile dealer, and wouldn't I be a sweet old darling and increase her allowance fifty dollars a month?

I think I have smoothed things over between your mother and Eleanor by suggesting that Mama give a dinner dance at the Country Club on some pretext or other.

Good luck to you, boy, and don't let the problems of the universe make a dys

peptic of you. Fondly your

Dict. but not read.

FATHER.

Sintonville, July 26, 19—.
In your reply please refer to:
JW: CL File 61W

My DEAR JERRY:

It seems you have got a job on a magazine that is very much like you. A magazine that refuses advertising is certainly as unique as a son who refuses money from his father. I am sorry they will not accept the announcement of the Paramount Mattress Corporation, for I am sure that a great many readers of “Unchained" are losing sleep, and space in the magazine would be good consumer advertising, as my publicity man says.

I get this impression after reading the copy you sent me. The editor has discovered more wrongs in this miserable little world than are dreamed of in my philosophy, or Horatio's. He makes twelve worries grow where one itched before. He really does not know what ele

It sounds like an interesting experiment that you are working out. Every man.

If we could reform human nature, we wouldn't have any problems. But human nature is going to seek its own level, and all our isms and astics can only serve to dam it up in spots until such time as our artificial barriers crumble and the restless oceans of it claim their own again.

gives his labor co-operatively without salary, and shares in the profits of the sale of "Unchained," if any, to the believers in your principles. Is that right?

If you could do something, now, to take the anxiety out of business, I know where you could get a lot of converts to your cause. It's all right, though, boy. Somebody always has been looking for the thing you are looking for. They used to call it the Philosopher's Stone.

Yes, I suppose you are right about our sinful extravagance. But if a man's only son, who has most of the brains and education in the family, won't take his father's money and use it judiciously, how can you blame Mama and Eleanor for wasting it?

I admire you for your aspirations and your ideals. The only trouble is, Jerry, that general principles are often good enough until they stand the acid test of

Speaking of human nature, your mother is sitting for her portrait. Same chap who painted the portrait of the Princess Catti. Mama thinks it's cheap at five thousand dollars, and I suppose it is. She might have picked the man who paints the King of England! Won't you let me know if you need any

thing?

Faithfully,

DAD.

I apologize for anything I said about "Unchained," if you think I was making fun of it. On the contrary, it's getting to be pretty serious to me. The latest issue, with your signed article in it, seems to have been read extensively in Sintonville. I happened to see two or three of the men in the plant with copies in their pockets-no one could ever mistake that black and red cover-and The Journal had a very merry time over it. Printed your picture and mine and a

SON OF WEALTHY "OPEN SHOP" MANU

FACTURER JOINS FORCES OF
SOCIAL REVOLUTION

I'll get Miss Larrimore to find you a clipping and send it to you.

It has been rather bothersome. The Sintonville Manufacturers' Association sent a committee to me and asked me if I didn't think it looked rather bad. I told them my son was free, white, and twentyone, and it wasn't any of my business or theirs, either-what he did. That seemed to displease them, and I guess I will hear more from them.

Mama thinks its perfectly horrid, and Eleanor, not knowing the difference between the proletariat and a corsage bouquet, doesn't care. Go on, boy, and shoot at us. Chau

gressmen are always prating about the sin of class conflict and its danger to our civilization. There has been class conflict ever since Cain chopped down the original farmer-labor candidate, Abel, and if some sort of scrapping doesn't continue as long as the world wags, we ought to have a Senate committee to go out and start a fight when needed.

The trouble with the capitalistic class has always been that it didn't have enough things to fret about, prior to the establishment of the firm of Marx & Engel. No cause, or religion, or nation or class ever attained lasting success unless it was compelled to fight for it. We have Nero and his ilk to thank for the almost universal spread of Christianity. And the enthusiastic Reds, by shooting a few thousand taxpayers in Russia, have helped us Bourgeois fellows just as spec