VISTA ON CULTURES

...thus cities grow up where technology allows some people leisure to work at some job other than plain food production...

...In liberal political terms, Linton is a pessimist...

...WALTER MILLIS, author and journalist: "The evidence on which Morton Sobell was convicted was probably perjurious...

...However, he declares, America now is far more backward in social than in mechanical invention—and for an explanation he takes us back not to the Indians but to the early cultures of Southeast Asia where the idea of natural law growing out of the Babylonian study of the heavens conflicted with the idea of an all-powerful God for whom there existed absolutes of right and wrong...

...WARREN K. BILLINGS, who was framed with Tom Mooney and spent 23 years in prison: "The district attorney threatened me that if I didn't testify against Tom Mooney he would hang Mooney and me too...

...During cross examination Elitcher admitted that he had falsified a loyalty oath and feared a perjury indictment...

...After reading the new book The Judgment of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, Elmer Davis wrote the publishers: "Assuming that the record is here correctly cited (and I have no reason to suppose that it is not) I cannot believe the testimony of Elitcher and the Greenglasses, or much if any of that of Harry Gold...

...Morton Sobell was tried with Julius and Ethel Rosenberg in 1951...

...If it were legally possible, the case ought to be reviewed on its merits, while in any event the 30-year sentence was grossly disproportionate to any crime actually attested against him...

...Linton obviously feels that the League of the Iroquois had some relation to the founding of our own union...

...Linton sees culture as the product of certain intellectually superior biological mutants...

...Sobell was not properly tried and the verdict and sentence were not justified...

...Among Linton's principles is the negative one that there is no evidence at all for the growth and decay of cultures...

...Toynbee, he says, has "no cultural perspective whatever...

...HAROLD C UREY, atomic scientist and Nobel Prize winner: "Mr...

...Child training has ever been a matter of unconscious absorption, and now, when our value system is not so certain as it used to be, we are finding out how little of emotional commitment verbal instruction alone can impart...

...In the opinion of radio commentator and author Elmer Davis, the testimony of Elitcher and the prosecution witnesses against the Rosenbergs is unreliable...

...Usually these two aspects are interrelated...

...CAREY McWILLIAMS, The Nation: "Apart from the fact that Elitcher was 'on the hook' for having previously falsified an affidavit, his testimony is inherently incredible...

...In the Old World, the next step after cities seemed to be empires, but America, long before the days of the white man, seemed to turn naturally to confederacies...

...Senate will be done to tee that Sobell gets justice...

...This, Linton holds, is a possible background for communism and fascism...

...Reviewed by Priscilla Robertson MOST BOOKS that try to explain the whole sweep of primitive cultures are either simple or too complicated...

...Cultural advance is evident both in increasing control over the physical world and in more complex social organization...

...JUDGE PATRICK H. O'BRIEN, Detroit, Mich: ". . . In accordance with our inheritance as a liberty-loving nation, I urge the immediate release of Sobell...

...One side of this tradition led toward science, the other toward the notion that it is wicked to tamper with social arrangements, and in this ancient paradox we are enmeshed today...

...Contribute as generously as you can...

...WALDO FRANK, novelist and essayist: "Sobell Is a symbol of our responsibility, and of our danger, of the tragic danger to America if we permit this injustice to be done...

...JUDGE JEROME N. FRANK of the Circuit Court of Appeals in a dissenting opinion: ". . . There was error, in this respect, which requires that Sobell' be given a new trial...

...Morton Sobell is in Alcatraz for 30 Years on NO EVIDENCE...

...These are the words of Morton Sobell, scientist and father of two children, condemned to 30 years in Alcatraz for "conspiracy to commit espionage...

...But Sobell didn't have anything to testify any more than I had...

...But whether we are making a virtue of necessity or not, for the first time the physical and emotional handling of children has begun to seem an exciting and interesting—shall we say a "noble...

...Although Sobell was called an "atom spy" by the prosecution, Judge Kaufman admitted to Sobell in court: "The evidence in the case did not point to any activity on your part in connection with the atomic bomb project...

...Did Morton Sobell's Trial Meet the Standards of American Justice...

...NANCY F. WECHSLER, New York Post: "Whether Sobell should have been convicted on the meagre record against him . . . whether the tactics of the prosecution or the demeanor of the judge impaired the fairness of the proceedings, whether the defendants were convicted and sentenced on a record which might not have produced the same results in calmer times—all these are real issues which cell for honest appraisal...

...Judge Kaufman said in his charge to the jury: "If you do not believe the testimony of Max Elitcher as it pertains to Sobell, then you must acquit the defendant Sobell...

...U. S. SENATOR WILLIAM LANGER: "I pledge that everything I can do as a member of the Judiciary Committee of the U.S...

...Yet somehow the author's vision of the whole world, of Asian villages and die African bush, or Eskimo and modern America, is not too complicated either...

...No one would accuse Ralph Linton's last, posthumous book, with its nearly 700 pages of anthropological detail, of being over-simplified...

...Today that is hardly so...

...And yet another line of change, hinted at though not developed in this book, may hold hope for precisely this situation...

...Unbelievable as it may seem, there was not a shred of evidence that Sobell committed espionage...

...occupation of which no one wishes to be deprived...

...and since these occur in unvarying proportion in any population or class, it follows that the more human beings exist, the more such culture-changing individuals will be born...

...No society, says Linton, has developed conscious techniques for passing on its value systems...

...Can Elitcher be believed...

...Will you help win justice for my husband and for America...

...It is a sign of a new spirit in our country that the Senate Sub-Committee on Constitutional Rights is holding hearings on the Bill of Rights...

...Asks Helen Sobell, Morton Sobell's Wife...

...he has, indeed, provided a framework into which an interested reader can fit those detailed studies he has read here and there of cave art, or life among the Kwakiutl, or of Indo-European linguistics...

...Write to: SENATOR THOMAS C. HENNINGS, Jr., CHAIRMAN, SUBCOMMITTEE ON CONSTITUTIONAL RIGHTS, U. S. SENATE OFFICE BLDG., WASHINGTON, D. C. • Funds are urgently needed for Morton Sobell's legal appeals and to help circulate the facts throughout the country...

...No aristocracy, says Linton, has ever been willing to bring up its own children...

...The Judgment of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, definitive story of the Rosenberg-Sobell trial by John Wexley (672 pp., $6...

...An author to accomplish such a feat must organize his material by certain general principles...

...They let Morton Sobell know that if he didn't testify against the Rosenbergs, he would rot in Alcatraz...

...The Ml eight-volume trial transcript ($6...

...Join the many people asking that the Sobell case be included in the committee's investigation...

...If this is new, it ought to produce new results in culture and give hope for the democracy for which Linton does not see much future...

...I AM INNOCENT...

...There was only the word of one accuser—prosecution witness Max Elitcher...

...The vanishing of a servant class is one reason—we are all aristocrats...