ATOMIC AGE: Angel Food
In Washington last week, at the Army War College's sumptuous officers' club, two admirals and their wives gave a little party to commemorate the dissolution of Joint Army-Navy Task Force No. i, which staged Operation Crossroads at Bikini. An East St. Louis (111.) group of bakers sent a cake, made out of tiny angel-food puffs, in the shape of an atomic explosion. Vice Admiral W.H.P. ("Spike")
Blandy, Crossroads commander, and Mrs. Blandy were photographed gaily cutting the cake, while Rear Admiral F. J. Lowry stood happily by (see cut). The picture made the Washington Post's society page.
It also made a lot of people indignant and unhappy; it made the Rev. A. Powell Davies, Unitarian pastor of a fashionable Washington church (TIME, Oct. 7), as angry as Moses denouncing the golden calf's idolaters. Brandishing a clipping from his pulpit last Sunday, the Rev. Mr. Davies thundered:
". . . An utterly loathsome picture. If I spoke as I feel I would call it obscene.... I only hope to God it isn't reprinted in Russia—to confirm everything the Soviet Government has been telling the Russian people. How would it seem in Hiroshima or Nagasaki to know that Americans make cakes of angel-food puffs in the image of that terrible diabolical thing. . . . Try to imagine yourself for a moment a continental European, wondering, brooding, asking yourself a hundred times a day, will America lead us? ... Then imagine yourself being shown this picture. If I had the authority of a priest of the Middle Ages I would call down the wrath of God upon such an obscenity. I would damn to hell these . . . traitors to humanity who could participate in such a monstrous betrayal of everything for which the brokenhearted of the world are waiting."
These were probably the harshest words ever spoken of a dessert. But a lot of non-Americans (notably Britons) had long regarded the U.S. public's attitude toward The Bomb as callous to the point of idiocy. Although this interpretation did the U.S. an injustice, it had a certain justification. Some Americans, for instance, missed the point of Davies' tirade. Said L. K. Stephens, bakery supply salesman, who helped design and bake the cake: "We intended the cake as something to eat."
RSS
