SPAN: March 1979

MARCH 1979 RUPEES 2.50

AMERICAII FORDGI POLICY

by Daniel Yergin

THE : ElE HD IDRTOI II DREAMS BEIIII RESPOISIBILITIES A short story by

Delmore Schwartz

A LEITER FROM THE PUBLISHER American studies have achieved a new status in lndia with the recent dedication of a splendid building to house the American Studies Resea rch Centre in H yderabad. With a library of nearly 100,000 volumes. the Centre has facilities for scholars to do advanced research, and rooms for seminars and conferences. India now possesses a resource for the study of American life and thought unique in Asia.

Actually, American studies are part of a larger movement called area studies that had its origin in U.S. universities after World War II. At that time, Americans became aware of the need to study in depth not only Western civilization, but those of Asia and Africa as well. Area studies became popular with students, partly because they opened up exciting vistas into other :;ultures, partly because the United States had taken on a new international role, for which special skills and knowledge-in government, in business, in diplomacywere obligatory.

There are two basic requirements in area studies: first , to study theJanguage of tlie area, and second, to study the area's history, literature, political science, anthropology, religion.

Although Sanskrit had been taught and Hinduism and Buddhism studied at most of the great American universities in the 19th century, little work had been done in modern Indian languages, history or in the social sciences dealing specially with India. Indian area studies expanded tremendously in the decade after 1955; at both the graduate and -the undergraduate levels thousands of American students began studying contemporary Indian languages, and taking courses in the humanities related to India, immersing themselves in the richness oflndian civilization.

T he same period has seen a complementary growth in the formal study of the United States in Indian colleges and universities. Almost all Indian universities now include the study of some aspect of American culture, as an optional subject or part of a general course. The very nature of Indian higher education, with its wide knowledge of modern Western scholarship and its use of English, made knowledge of American life relatively accessible to Indian students. And then, of course, American culture is widely popular in India through American films. music and books. What has been missing has been a more precise, informed. deeper understanding of American Life ; for that it was necessary to introduce the study of American society into the Indian university curriculum in a formal way. There is of course no need for the special study of American English in India! But neither American history nor litemture nor political science studied in isolation can provide a true understanding of American life. Only the "area studies·· concept, with its insistence on an interdisciplinary approach , can suggest the variety and complexity of a civilization, whether Indian or American.

American studies in India are an integrated part of the university curriculum, and are intended to serve Indian, not American needs-ju st as Indian studies in United States' universities serve American needs. Academically rigorous, pursued in an atmosphere of intellectual freedom, they are not merely goodwill exercises. By leading to a deeper understanding of all aspects of another culture, its weaknesses as well as its strengths, area studies develop the mutual respect, communication and interaction between peoples that can be the only basis for a better international order.

- J.W.G.

SPAN

March 1979

VOLUME XX NUMBER 3

2

American Studies Research Centre Dedicated in Hyderabad

5 The Chair: Eleanor Holmes Norton

by Clrarlarne Hunrer-Gault

10 Turning Sound Into Light

by George A.W. Boehm

13 American Foreign Policy 16 U.S. Public Libraries Meet Many Needs 19 Profile of an Indian Public Library hy Dame/ y ergm

20 Sea and Science Meet at Woods Hole 26 Soccer's American Breakthrough

hy Bill Bruns

30 Teaching Good Health to Children

by Janet Fine

34 In Dreams Begin Responsibilities A Story by Dl.'lmore Schll'art=

38 Score One for Ingenuity

40 Cecil B. DeMille 44 On the Lighter Side

by Sanjeev Prakash

45 India, America and International Trade Anlnten"lf!ll" with Jejjrey Ganen by N.S. .lagann01han

Front cover : Soccer is head y fun-a d1scovery thousands of Americans like thi s young· ster have made over the last few years. making the game America ·s fastest growing sport.

See pages 26-29 Back cover: In late 1978 Walt Disney's popular cartoon character. M1ckey Mouse. celebrated his 50th birthday with a colorful parade in Disney World, Florida, amidst yesterday's world of fantasy (that"s Cinderella's castle in the background). Meanwhile, preparations have begun for yet another Disney creation . this one focusing on the future - Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow. See page 49 PhotOllfllphs: Front co•er-Bob Jonc> Jr ln>ide front cover-Shell) K.uu. J.J-A>uu•h Pa.,.,cha 7-1!-courte:.y Equal Employment Opponunuy CommtJs.on 11- !)Qn Charles IU-11 Len Stem, counesy Western Clectnc except 10 topcounc>) Bell Labs 16·18- Paul Conklmexa:pt 16 bonom ItO a nd l81op lcfl 19-Av11taSh Past~cha. 211opJohn Poneous, WHOl ; bouom !eli and cen1er-G Lower, MDL: bonom right Dan McCoy. 22.23 Dan r.fcCoy: G. Lower. MBL , Dan McCoy 24·25-Dan McCoy. 26-28-Bob Jo nes Jr. 30·31- Barbara lynch. 32·33-top row counesy Amencan Lung AssocLauon; bottom.- Barbar.t lynch. 34- Colltt,..11011 or Ame.ncan Lner.uure. Be1ne.cke.

Rare Books and ManuscBpt L.tbrnry, Vale Umversuy 38.39 Lynn Hohensee. courteS) Shell 011 Company 40 Mu,;cum o·f Modem Art;Film S!dls Archm's 45, o18-Av10asb Pasncha 49 and bock cover-copynghl Walt Dl>ney ProducTJons.

JACOB SLOAN, lidlitor ; J AY W. G ILDNER, Publisher.

STATD1f.NT FORM I\

The foi!Ow10g >Sa statement of ownersh•p and orh<r pontculars about SPAN mdl!llZlllC •s requored under Scctton 19 O(b) of the Pres. & Rejpstrauon of Books Act 1867 and under Rule 8 ol I he Retn<truuon of Newspaper (Cent1iAII Ruks, t956

I Place of Pu bhcatlon

.

United State,f lmi!YIWtional CommunlcatiOIJ Agem·y

14, Kasturba Gandhi Marg. 1"1<11 Dtlh, I /1)(1(/t M'mtht} H KMthra lndron

2. Periodtl.!lt)' of Its Publicauon 3. Pnoter•s Name· Nauon•I•IY Thom.fOif Prns ( lm/taJ Lmuti'd, Furtdahad. lft~ryc.~rw Address Ja)• IJ Gr/dntr 4 Pubhsher> N~m• AmrrJtOtr Nauonnluy 24, Kosrurba Gandlu Marg. Nm DPIIJ/ I 100111 Addre.; Jac-ob Sloan 5 Edttor"s Name Amerit'an Nationahly U. Kaswrba Gandhi Marg, Ntll Dtllti I JlJI/Of Address Th~ Guwrrr.m~Jif o.f the Umt~d Stales oj Amtr~tu 6. Names and addrc>SeS of mdtvtduals who own lh< ne-.spoper and ponners or shareholders holding more 1ban one pcreent of thelotnl cap,tnl.

1, Ja) W. Ctldn<r. hereby declo"' thai Ihe parl!CUI<lt> gJVen above ut true tO the best o[ my kno,.ledgc •nd behtf.

Date ; FtbruarJ IJ, 1979

(Signed) Jay W. Gildner s.grnJIII" uj Pu/oluhq

AMERICAN STUDIES CENTRE DEDICATED IN HYDERABAD

I

feel especially privileged to assist in the dedication of this impressive new building of the American Studies Research Centre.

As you know, the Centre is a jointly developed institution, unique in all of Asia. For me, it epitomizes the basic concepts¡ underlying an increasingly significant way of thinking about global education, and the growing mutual dependence

among the nations of the world.

I am honored to have the opportunity to share some thoughts with you this morning on the occasion of an important new stride taken by the Centre in its fostering of the exchange of ideas, scholarsill p and understanding among peoples.

Global education strives to instill in all students, at all levels, a perception of the world in its totality. We who are humanists, we who have applied ourselves to obtaining global perspectives on man and society, we who attempt to apply a sense of global awareness to our respective callings, understand that an institution such as this Centre achieves far more than assisting a certain number of scholars and organizations to conduct research on specific topics. The Centre, of course, does contribute to significant research in American history, literature and society.

And that is laudable. But any institution 2

SPAN MARCH 1979

crucial for all cultures today. Never before have the countries of the world been so Dedicating the new building mutually dependent; never before has it of the American Studies been so important that different cultures communicate with each other, underResearch Centre in Hyderabad stand each other, cooperate to prevent on January 15, Ambassador disaster and build a desirable future for the world. I tend to sympathize with John E. Reinhardt (above), E.B. White when he said, "I hold one Director of the U.S. share in the corporate earth and am International Communication uneasy about the management." Indeed, we aU have reason to be uneasy. It is Agency, said that an incumbent on us all to try to bring mutual understanding to bear on world manageinstitution like the ASRC ment decisions. fosters 'exchange of ideas, Our planet's increasingly fragile ecology scholarship and understanding demands the cooperative attention of a world citizenry which is dramatically among peoples.' Here is the heterogeneous both ethnically and culturally. Most overriding world probtext of his address. lems can only be solved through agreement. Each society must bring its own resources into cooperative dealings with dedicated to the study of a foreign culture other societies on shared problems and also encourages expanded awareness of priorities- energy, food, natural rethe world and meaningful identification sources, population, strategic and mon¡ with all mankind. This is what I define etary resources.

To illustrate how the United States, for as global education-the process of imparting a broad view of mankind's example, interconnects with other coundiversities to people capable of grappling tries: Approximately one quarter of a with mankind's problems. million foreign students are currently The internationalizing of education is studying in America, teaching us as much

Lefi : View of the reference section of American S!Udies Research Cemre.

Above : The Centre's densely packed steel shelves hold a collection of 100,000 volumes on American lilerature and history.

lations, can furnish insights into one's own culture and oneself, and can provide sources of creativity to both partners in the dialogue. In fact , expressly because of our increased dependence on each other, and the high risks that stem from ignorance, effective communication among peoples may well have become the central issue of our times.

I do not mean to offer communication as a panacea for the world's ills, or to suggest that study of another country automatically eradicates problems. But effective communication helps. By communicating we learn the techniques of cooperation and begin to comprehend the benefits that can derive from the process. We realize that one of the lessons gained from the study of other peoples is that profound philosophical differences do separate cultures. We learn that understanding and respecting different systems of ideas is a precondition for determining useful ways of working together toward our mutual benefit.

1he

of international communications in recent years. New technologies inject new ideas across the globe. Suddenly millions of people in hamlets as well as metropolises can view Jive coverage of phenomena as diverse as President Anwar Sadat 's visit to Jerusalem in 1977, the Olympic Games, or the landing of astronauts on the moon. This contributes to the process of global education by raising the "international literacy" level of the world's citizens.

Lee Anderson, a pioneer in global education, said that one should '' perceive of oneself, of one's community, of one's nation, and of one's civilization as both 'culture borrowers' and 'culture deposia bout their countries as they are learning tors,' who both draw from and conabout ours. In the economic sector, tribute to a 'global bank of human one in three acres of our farmland pro- culture' that has been and continues to be duces crops for export ; one-third of the fed by contributions from all peoples, in profits of American corporations derive all geographical regions, and in all periods from exports or foreign investment; one- of history." sixth of all the manufacturing jobs in the Global education concerns itself with the commonalities among mankind , as U.S. are in export industries.

In the same fashion , India has immense well as with the differences. I believe it trade with the United States and other is common wisdom that all men are countries, in excess of $5 .5 billion brothers, and all brothers are different. annually, in products as diverse as steel An American coming to India realizes this instantly. It is clear that a professor and sugar. from our country who spends a year here ut trade statistics are simply an easy will learn a great deal about India, and measurable indication of the will inform his Indian colleagues about the more far-reaching commerce of United States, and later will impart to ideas. Fortunately, more and more people Americans the knowledge and underare beginning to realize that mankind standing he has acquired. shares responsibility for the world as a Understanding other cultures and comwhole. The dawning of this realization re- municating with other peoples can help sults in no small part from the burgeoning reduce the tensions in international re-

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he philosophical foundation of American and all Western society contrasts markedly with that of Indian and Eastern society, for example.

On the one hand, our culture is characterized by a certain pragmatic orientation, and a rationalist outlook on the world.

The imprint of our puritan heritage and of humanism runs deep in our thinking. On the other hand, India's culture has always been more philosophical , deriving from a religion of natural order and predestination inspired by spirituality.

Yet certain great similarities exist as well between the world's two largest democracies. Both countries have defined themselves by their revolutions, and try to abide by the democratic ideals that spurred the establishment of their nationhoods. Indians and Americans cherish freedom and free elections, and need them to accommodate the varying needs of their pluralistic societies. We both value diversity and do not shrink from the dynamism of evolution. We strive for civil liberties and human rights. And we provide that new ideas from throughout our societies can find their way onto our national agendas. We are in fact extremely fortunate to share such ideas and practices, for all too large a portion of mankind does not enjoy the vitality of democracy and freedom. Although we are different peoples, we may profitably learn from e~ch other by learning about each other.

J would like to note here the extremely encouraging recent surge of belief in humane values and action for the betterment of the human condition-in our own country, in India, and throughout the world. We may be cheered by the atmosphere of awakening, of change and SPAN MARCH 1979

J

AMERICA:-.i STLDIES RESEARCH Ct'l RE cominued

of progress toward human liberty in And, as we all know welL Gandhi mmany countries today. I believe we ·arc fluenced our Mart1n Luther King in witnessing the turning of an historic his philosophy and c1vil rights activities. corner. Whole new segments of the world's In the United States today there arc population now grasp the opportunity to many univers1ty centers for the study of demand freedom from terror and freedom Indian civilizat1011. languages and literfrom vanous ideological straitjackets. ature and many hundreds of courses on There will be much more ind1vidual ex- Indian society, both at the undergraduate pression henceforth, much more un- and the graduate level The American fettenng of human potential. much more Institute of Ind1an Stud1es is thriYing. I communication among peoples, a much haYe heard that more people are engaged greater 111terchange of ideas. This budding in studying South Asian subjects in movement toward increased humane American colleges and universities than values and rights has gathered enough in any cquntry outside South Asia itself. momentum that its flourishing has beThe breadth of interest in 1ndian studies come the genuine historical inevitability in America coincides with the interest in of our ume. Indeed, it has replaced other American studies 111 India. The American systems of ideas fonnerly perceived as Studies Research Centre exemplifies the bemg mevitable. ·mutuality of global education that I This movement affirms our own striv- have been discussing. Founded in 1964 ings to fashion society so that we as and sustained w1th grants from the I ndian CitiZens may ljve in dignity, freedom and and American Go,emments and from equality. As a corollary goal, we w1ll try pnvate contnbutions, the Centre IS the also to infuse global perspectives into our only institution 111 India providing books educational system, for we believe Thomas and materials to support the dozens of Jefferson's assertion that we cannot be courses in American literature and history both ignorant and free. We want to ofrered by Indian universities. Scholars support more study of foreign languages come to use its collection of nearly 100,000 and cultures, for we are convinced that volumes, its microfiche facilit1es. and, as knowledge sustains the enlightened con- of today, its attractive new premises. duct of world cit1zensh1p.

Its publications. seminars and scholarship programs attract h1gh praise. Its orne of the ideas our two countries sophisticated contnbutions to the litershare have an interesting h1story. 1 ature of American studies readily become should note. Ideas. as scholars pan of the body of the best scholarship familiar with the Centre know. have been in this field. flowing back and forth between India and This is a major ach1evement, especially America for generations. The Centre's con- considering that 20 years ago, very few centration on American studies enables 1ndian universities offered courses in one kind of interchange of ideas to occur. American studies. Now the Centre is One rather obvious instance of the evolving beyond its present status. I longer-term cross-fertilization of I ndian applaud the new stndes it is taking to and Amencan thinking also comes to diversify and expand its focus to include mmd. The first truly American philo- the interdiSCiplinary approaches of the sophical movement, transcendentalism. social and political sc1ences and to make retlected the influence of I nd1an phi- its resources available to scholars throughlosophy profoundly. Raja Ram Mohan out Asia.

Roy engendered in Ralph Waldo EmerIn an article in Exchange magazine son an admiration for Oriental literature. two years ago, the Centre·s academic Henry David Thoreau embraced Indian associate Amntjit Singh observed that thmking even more closely. basing· the scholars have examined comparisons beway of life he established in Walden tween our two societies with useful rein part on the new tenets he d1scovered sults. H e cited Caste. Race and Politics in his readings. He said. "The New b} Anil Bhatt, Basheeruddin Ahmed and Testament is remarkable for 1ts pure Sidney Verba. Mr. Singh also observed morality, the best of the H indu scnpture that the style of operation of this mstifor 1ts pure intellectuality. The reader is tution and some of the ideas and models nowhere raised 1nto and sustained in a it offers about American education have bigger, purer, or rarer region of thought inspired some modifications of Indian than in the Bhagavad Gita. '' higher education. T am most pleased to Afler a lapse of many years of minimal learn that the Centre. which he percross-cultural contact between India and ceptively called an "Academic Ashram," Amenca, Mahatma Gandhi discovered has filled the dual role of making new Thoreau and came to admire his works. ideas available for public use and providThoreau'!> ideas in The Duty o.f C111l Dis- mg a haven for reflection and scholarsh1p. obedience are thought to have contnbuted The Centre IS remarkable for another to Gandh1's beliefs and political strategies. reason as well. It has fostered an

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SP,\N MARCil 1979

mtellectual, academic and scholarly relationship between our two countnes for nearly 1.5 years. It is a good example of the ability of this kjnd of relationship to weather the vagaries of our political bilateral relationship. FriendshipS have flowed back and forth as a result of academic exchanges, and the Centre has been a focus for the individual good feelings Americans and Indians have for each other. The felicitous relations our two countries now enjoy should enhance the Centre's •activities even further. The rise of Interest here in the history of IndoAmerican relations-in fact, all the scholarly endeavors which the Centre makes possible-should positively affect our interaction for many years in the future.

Ex-Senator William J. Fulbright, our countr} ·s guiding spint for mtemational academic exchange, has said that "international educ-ation can turn natiOns mto people and contribute as no other form of communication can to the humanizing of international relations. Man's capacity for decent behavior seems to vary proportionately with his perception of others as indiv1duals wnh motives and feelings, whereas his capacity for barbarism seems related to his perception of an adversary in abstract terms as the embod1ment of some evil design or ideology." Of course we are not adversaries. But we are different. And we benefit from understanding each other as people.

T

he United States is pleased to have the opportunity to continue its support of international education a::. it is conducted at Osmarua University and at the American Studies Research Centre. The U.S. International Communication Agency. which I represent. maintains the interest exhibited in the past by the Uruted States Government in furthering scholarship and trusting that a degree of mutual understanding will result from it. We believe that the importance of people who deal with ideas is great.

I am glad we can help provide some of the resources the Centre contams. 1 wish to applaud Osmania University's generous and far-s1ghted gift ofland for the Centre's facll1t1es. I see the new building as a symbol, an outward visible sign. ofman·s pursuit of new ideas and the importance of collaborative work. I believe the significance of the enterprise derives from the Ind ian people's interest in expanding its horizons, from its vitality in contributing to the interchange of ideas and from the excellence of Indian scholarship. I trust that one of the results is that our societies ha\le a firmer basis for communicating our respective thoughts and asp1 rations.

0

THE CHAIR ELEANOR HOLMES NORTON b) CHARLAY E HUNTER-GAULT

'It is incomplete victories that have nourished our will to struggle against any obstacles.' In that reaction to Bakke case's decision Eleanor Holmes Norton (right) spoke as a black civil rights leader who is also the dynamic head of an organization which she bas turned into what President Carter calls America's prime civil rights agency.

ELEANOR HOLMES NORTON ('OIIIinued

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hairwoman is sexist, chairman is too sexist, and chairperson is a title men refuse to use." With that explanation Eleanor Holmes Norton let it be known that she wanted to be known as "Chair," soon after she was appointed head of the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC). That set the decisive pace and character for an old job that needed both badly- pace and character. And it needed someone like this dynamic 40-year-old lawyer who has been involved in the fight for human rights and civil liberties from her teen days.

Now as the woman heading the Federal agency charged with insuring that no one trying to get a job in America is discriminated against because of race, creed, national origin or sex, Eleanor Holmes Norton's attitudes and actions will have- in fact are already havinga profound effect on the racial and sexual makeup of the American labor force.

It is an awesome job for many reasonsamong others, the "reverse discrimination" challenges of white males, an unsteady economy, and the EEOC itselfup to recently an agency rife with internal dissension , ineptness and inefficiency. The agency has already seen six chairmen and ten executive directors come and go since its creation in 1965. The result was a backlog of some 130,000 individual complaints of discrimination and an agency so low in morale as to be moribund .

The state of the U.S. economy made things even worse. Many members of minority groups and women had entered the labor force as a direct result of the I 964 Civil Rights Act that barred discrimination in employment and created the EEOC as its enforcement agency. But the 1972 recession dealt a blow to all workers, and an especially devastating one to those who were new to the labor force and lacked the protection of seniority.

At a time when the law was beginning to have an impact on righting past economic wrongs, the economic downturn threatened not only to bring the process to a halt, but also to reverse some of the gains. The Bakke case (SPAN, September 1978) further exacerbated the situation.

Allan Bakke argued that affirmative action remedies that called for setting aside a fixed number of places for minorities and women- some with lower qualifications than his- were tantamount to denying opportunities to whites Like himself. The result, he alleged, was "reverse discrim.ination."

Bakke sued the University of California

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SPAN MARC H 1979

at Davis, where he had been denied admission in preference to some less qualified blacks- the school had reserved 16 of the 100 seats for them. The California State Supreme Court ruled in favor of Bakke, the school appealed against the decision and the historic case came up before the U.S. Supreme Court.

The civil rights community awaited the decision with anxiety, most people arguing that a pro-Bakke ruling would signal the end of all affirmative action and set back by decades the struggle for racial parity.

Thus in June 1977 when Eleanor H olmes Norton took over the EEOC, she had to contend with a high sense of insecurity amongst the minorities. Tbe Bakke case had yet to be decided. She refused to let the case unsettle her ; she was determined to revive the agency.

In her first few days and months at the EEOC, Eleanor Holmes Norton was a veritable whirling dervish. She launched a massive internal reorganization , introduced a new system for processing new discrimination complaints and by the end of the first year had so established herself and the agency in the esteem of the White House that President Jimmy Carter declared through an executive order that the EEOC would be the lead agency in civil rights, bringing under its umbrella almost aU the civil rights functions of the Federal Government.

The thorniest of all EEOC problems was the backlog, which Eleanor H olmes Norton pledged to have under control within two to three years.

Under the old system, a person who believed himself to be the victim of discrimination and filed a complaint with the EEOC, had to wait for almost three years before its resolution. If a job loss were involved, three years could mean not only severe economic problems, but err.otional ones as well.

Previously, because all complaints were investigated, with no screening in advance to determine whether the EEOC had jurisdiction over the case under Tille VII of the Civil Rights Act, much of the Commission's time and energy was spent on cases for which there was ultimately a finding of "no cause.." In fiscal year 1975, of some 48,000 cases filed involving hiring, promotion and discharge. 40,000 were investigated; and in 37,000 there was a finding of no cause.

Under the new procedure, interviews with the complainants and other methods to screen cases helped resolve the matter

immediately. Early-on results show resolution on an average of four months.

Jn Dallas, one of three model offices set up to test the new system, in less than a year some 3,400 cases were resolved, eliminating the entire Dallas backlog for the first time in the history of the agency.

Eleanor Holmes Norton is cautious about revising her earlier pledge to eliminate the enti re backlog of the agency in less than three years. But already, she has begun to look to programs that will attack discrimination on a far broader scale.

"We had lost sight of our real mission because the backlog predominated as such an explosive issue," she said. " But now we must move on to the only reaJ way to approach discrimination- through systematic pattern and practice work. ,.

"There's not a lot of simple, turndown racism in this country any more," Eleanor Holmes Norton points out. " But in most institutions there is pattern and practice, patterns that may be unintentional, but are every bit as discriminatory: women slotted in as secretaries, blacks with high school educations slotted in below whites with high school educations.

And what we're going to say to employers is: 'If you keep putting them there, you are in violation of the law.' " As distinguished from individual cases of discrimination where the relief goes to one individual, pattern and practice cases require that companies that have been proven guilty of discrimination hire a certain percentage of mjnotities based on the available pool or their percentage in the population . First given a goal to aim for, they are then given a timetable in which to achieve it. The EEOC is there both to monitor and assist the company in reaching its goal and at the same time to protect it from "reverse discrimination" charges from those nonminorities that fear they are being discriminated against. Ever since her appointment, the Chair has bad to contend with the problem of reverse discrim.ination and other fallout from the Bakke case before and after the Supreme Court verdict.

She had to deal with them both as a government representative and herself a member of the minority race. She has handled the tricky, potentially sensitive situation with typical candor and competence. The issue was confused and caused so much anxiety to the minorities because it involved two oft-used remedies for racial discrim.ination- affirmative action and quotas. The Davis University's adherence to one remedy (quotas) seemed to

Ac a news conference in Washington, D.C., Eleanor Holmes Norton uses a chart to show rhe number of additional srajf positions she has requested for the EEOC in her drive ro revitalize rhe agency under her charge.

threaten the existence of the other. Most minorities tended to see them as part of the same solution.

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ut many in the civil rights field privately agreed that the Bakke case was the " wrong" case on which to test affirmative action, primarily because a remedy of rigid quotas (16 out of 100 slots) was set, although no record of prior discrimination existed. Quotas did not comprise all that there was to affirmative action.

But because no one wanted to be accused of contributing to a pro-Bakke climate, those voices remained silent. It was left to Eleanor Holmes Norton to speak up and to assert that a " defeat" for quotas did not mean a defeat for affirmative action.

A little more than a month before the Bakke decision, at a Civil Rights summit meeting hosted by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in Chicago, she said, ' We all know it is vitally important to win the case. And quotas have indeed been ordered in a fair number of court cases. But neither the set-aside places of the Bakke case nor the occasional quotas courts order are central to affirmative action.

" Affirmative action is far more complicated, more subtle, and ultimately more effective than an occasional quota case.

For correctly done, affirmative action brings permanent institutionalized change to the total personnel system ofa company.

It erases the white male preference that currently exists for most jobs except those at the bottom. It opens the all-important recruitment process, forcing business to recruit from black sources as well, so that the pool from which workers are chosen does not have the pronounced white male bias that still infects the best jobs in America. " It gets rid of tests which are not related to the job to be performed. It readjusts credentials so that they too are job related. ll uses goals and timetables. And it involves dozens of other techniques that free personnel system of bias and introduce blacks into jobs from which they have been historically barred.

By allowing the concept of affirmative action to be debated exclusively around Bakke set-asides and quotas, we are playing into the hands of the enemies of affirmative action. " On June' 28, 1978, the Supreme Court delivered its long-awaited opinion. While deciding that Bakke had suffered from illegal discrimination and should be admitted to the Davis school and ruling that rigid admission quotas based solely on race are forbidden , the court also held that race might legitimately be one element in judging students for admission. Thus the court approved of the principle of affirmative action. Eleanor Holmes Norton was immediately tapped by major news organizations in the country for her views.

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n her first lengthy television interview that day, on the MacNeil/Lehrer Report program, she said: ¡.' For a year now employers have been looking for weakness at the EEOC; indeed, looking to .see whether or not we expected a defeat.

"My technical reading of the decisions up until this time- and this is not the first time that the Supreme Court bas spoken to the issue of race- was that the EEOC ought all this year to be warning employers that they ought not to expect Bakke to let them off the hook. On the contrary, the Bakke case has clarified one very important issue, and in my view the issue that made for the controversy.

The Supreme Court of California, in an extreme decision, had said that race could not be taken into account. Five justices clearly say that race-conscious

remedies may be used. That decision lays to rest, in my view, the controversy which, if we bad lost that issue, would have dismantled affirmative action. As it is, I can say to employers that they ought to be doing tomorrow what they were doing yesterday and not see the Bakke decision as having undermined their obligation under the 1964 Act. " Hastily summoned to another civil rights gatheri ng, featuring some of the same critics of her prior stand, Eleanor Holmes Norton _saw her role as that of a legal expert, to clarify. But, as a black person closely identified with the historical struggle of the race. she also used the occasion to inspire and exhort. " The Bakke case ... leaves minorities with less than a complete victory," she told them, adding, ''it is incomplete victories that have nourished our will to struggle against any and all obstacles."

"The Bakke decision bas failed to meet our highest expectations or to confirm our worst fears ... . How shall we receive this decision? What will you, who are in the vanguard of the equality struggle, do with it? What will we in government who work on affirmative action every day and are sworn to pursue discriminationwhat will we do with it?"

"I can understand and appreciate the occasional notes of despair and defeat," she said, but added: "I cannot and will not accept defeat for affirmative action ....

The court has said race may be used to fashion remedies. Can we meet the challenge of creating remedies that are both strong and constitutional? I believe we have only one alternative: That is to accept the challenge. I say, let me at it!"

In her early days as the bead of the beleaguered EEOC, many found it difficult to fathom Eleanor Holmes Nortona lithe, medium tall figure, with a smi le so broad and innocent as to betray her quick, sharp tongue that one moment can be cutting, the next utterly charming and downright folksy.

The Chair is a woman of intense passion and boundless energy, according to people close to her, including her husband Edward, also a lawyer with the Federal Government.

Those unfamiliar with her style. including some of the agency's 2,500-plus employees, bristled initially at her aggressive, no-nonsense, play-it-close-to-thechest style. Talk of revolt surfaced in some of the agency's 32 district offices around the country. They complained of not being consulted in the massive reorganization she was planning, and

SPAN MARC H 1979

ELEANOR IIOLMES NORTON conlinued

'The court has said race may be used to fashion remedies.

Can we meet the challenge of creating remedies that are strong and constitutional? . ,, . . . I say, I et me at It. some expressed fear oflosing their jobs.

At one point, the American Federation of Government Employees even threw up picket lines at E EOC offices in 14 cities, incl udi ng Washington.

But a truce was reached in which displaced employees would get job offers in the EEOC office closest to their present job, and a guarantee of their current salary for two years, even if they got a job at a lower grade level. The truce proved short lived, but in the resultant tense situation, the Chair once again showed her mettle and her ability to size up a situation and ta ke firm , fair action.

As the agency geared u p to hire additional "equal employment opportunity specialists" to help process, investigate and concitiate complaints of job discrimination- a move aimed at reducing the backlog- a series of questions were devi sed by a retired veteran of the Civil Service Commission that sparked a furor.

For they included eliciting the views of applicants on such unrelated topics as defense spending, the Panama Canal Treaty, public employee strikes, welfare curbs and news-media coverage of former Secretary of the Treasury Bert Lance and former President Richard M. Nixon.

Mrs. Norton had been out of town, but upon learning of the questions, she said that they were "clumsy, in~nsitive and inappropriate," and ordered a halt to them and an investigation .

This is the kind of decisive action that has earned her the respect of people like M. Carl Holman, head of the National Urban Coalition, an organization of black activists and white business and civic leaders who function as advocates for the cities.

"Her tendency," according to Holman, "is unusual. You tell her there's a problem and right away, she wants to know ' Who's responsible?' And no matter who it is, from the lowest staff person to the President of the United States, she picks up the phone and arranges to go and see them."

Her critics, however, eomplained that she aid not seem to understand that the 8

SPAN MARCil 1979

The U.S. cour1-ordered enro/me/11 of two black swdems at the Unil•ersily of Alabama led to a dramaTic cor!fi·ontation in the campus on June II. 1963. beiiVeen Governor George Wallace ( left) and the U.S. Deputy A 11orney General. The Governor blocked the entrance of the two swdents. and withdrew only ll"hen troops of the Federalized Alabama National Guard arrived to enforce the order. The piCiure abo1•e shows him saluting their commander, Brigadier General Henry Graham.

A felt' years later, black activist Eleanor Holmes Non on aroused controversy when. as a s1aj]er of the American Ci1•il Liberties Union, she suttessfully defended Wallace in court because his cil•il rights were being denied- he had been refused permission to speak at a sports stadium.

EEOC was a national agency, and that it could not be run like the very small New York City Commission on Human Rights, of which she had been head.

But Alfred Blumrosen, a Rutgers laV( professor who had worked with her on many projects in the past, including her model for alternatives to recessionary layoffs, had a different view: "The New York City experience gave her an edge over almost everybody in the trade. She needed no on-the-job training."

He describes her style of operation as being something akin to a five-ring circus. "She'll have four or five things going at once- on the phone, writing a memo, staff members at one desk in her office. people rrom the outside on the other side of the room.·· Continuing, he said. "She's quick to give an opinion. And

it always sounds definite. Never unsure.

But if you can convince her that A, B, or C is wrong, with her analysis, she'll change just as quickly."

The Chair's commitment to activism and doing "something about the things that worry people" are rooted in positive legacies from her past. They are also shaped by the experiences of growing up in a segregated society.

S

he is from an old Washington. D.C.. family whose forbears came as escaped slaves.

Much of her inspiration came from the "sense of craftiness of my forbears and their almost Darwinian capacity to survive." She relates the story of her grandfather's father, a runaway slave, who got a job digging ditches in Washington. He was approached one day from

behind by the slave master who had pursued him North. Sneaking up, the master suddenly shouted his name, but the runaway slave did not react. So that when the slave master tried to convince the employer that this man was indeed his slave, the employer wasn't persuaded.

The man had not flinched even as he heard his name thundered at him. ''That," Eleanor Holmes Norton declared, ''is determination. And l guess that's where I get it from."

She attended Dunbar High Schoolsomething of a legend in Washington for the notable blacks it has produced, including Edward Brooke, the former, and in recent times, the only black United States Senator, and the late Charles Drew, the creator of blood plasma.

The society in which they lived was one where most of the teachers held Ph.D.s.

But no institution of higher learning would hire them because of their color.

Just as the injustice of their condition etched itself permanently in her memory, so did the lessons they taught her: Study hard, for education is the way out of racism.

"You were reminded from the time

you were a little child that you were in a segregated system and that you had to be smarter than anybody else."

She chose Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio, to do her undergraduate work because it appealed to her "inherent radicalism."

There even as she established an excellent academic record, she picketed local barbershops and restaurants closed to blacks.

She entered Yale University to pursue a master's degree in American studies.

"Out of the impulses of the civil rights movement" she also decided to pursue law there.

The harsh, violent summers of the South in the early 1960s served as her laboratory.

She was among the early wave of Northern students to go South and set up Freedom Schools to train black youth in the techniques of nonviolent resistance.

And she chose to do most of her work in the Mississippi Delta on the theory that the most virulent racism in America existed there; if you could topple Mississippi, the rest of the South would fall like dominoes.

Many of those she worked with did not live to see the fruits of their labors.

Medgar Evers was murdered in his driveway the day after he put Eleanor Holmes, law student from the North, on a bus headed for the delta.

As for Eleanor Holmes Norton, seeing racial terrorism firsthand , "Thi s whole period helped coalesce and possibly cement a lifelong direction in civil rights activity. . . . " Everything seemed to flow from that.

She was one of three attorneys who prepared the brief for the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, the group that challenged the regular- all whiteleadership of the Democratic Party in 1964.

In 1965, she joined the staff of the American Civil Liberties Union because of her interest in constitutional law.

She defended Muhammad Ali when he was stripped of his heavyweight boxing championship title because of his refusal to fight in the Vietnam war. as well as former movement colleague Julian Bond , when the Georgia legislature refused to seat him for his antiwar comments.

At the same time, she defended such an unlikely client as George Wallace, the Alabama Governor who in 1962 had stood in the doorway of the University of Alabama in an unsuccessful attempt to prevent the first two black students

from registering there. The City of New York had tried to deny Wallace permission to speak at a sports stadium.

Eleanor H olmes Norton took the casebecause, as she explained at the time... the rights denied to Wallace could easily be denied to others"- and won.

As New York City Commissioner on Human Rights, Mrs. Norton solved the city's fiscal stringency by attracting Federal and private funds through innovative programs.

The yeat before she left the Commission to join the Carter Administration, she won more than $20 million in jobs for minorities and women. She also provided companies with programs that would guide them toward correcting practices that had discriminatory effects. This included eliminating test criteria not related to jobs and monitoring companies on an ongoing basis.

The tone that the Chair has set for the nation carries over into her home life as well. Her children, Catherine, eight, and Johnnie, six, have learned how to insist upon their rights.

The other day, while Eleanor Holmes Norton was on a one-and-a-half-day tour of Texas, with a hurried stop in Dallas, Johnnie called his mother's office and spoke with her secretary, Clara Breeland. " I just wanted to remind my mother that there's a meeting at school tonight at 8," he said.

"But your mother's in Daltas and her plane doesn't get in until 7 :so:¡ Mrs. Breeland told him.

"That's great:¡ said Johnnie, "she'll have plenty of time to make it."

It's the kind of attitude that is spreading about Eleanor Holmes Norton. the 0 Chair.

Cbarlayne Hunter-Gaul! ( /eji ) , a .former reporter with The New York Times, noll' works as a TV correspondent ll'ilh the MacNeiljLehrer Report. a program produced hy 1he Public Broadcasiing Ser vice.

SPAN MARCH 1979

9

Mechanized production of glass fibers may advance lightwave communication techniques by decades. We may before long see a vastly enlarged telephone network, a speeded-up postal system, simplified banking procedures, even personalized cables-thanks to glass fibers that occupy very little space. ake some silky threads of glass fiber, thin as a human hair, strong as steel and more flexible than copper. Pump a beam of laser light through two of them to transmit a color television program. Or use a sheaf of about I00, no thicker than a child's crayon, to transmit the entire contents of 200 books in just one second. These astonishing fibers may be destined to multiply the power to transmit information by at least 1,000, and probably much more.

Research in communication by light beams instead of radio or microwaves is making fast progress in a major test-anddemonstration program begun in 1976 in Atlanta, Georgia.

The people in charge are engineers and scientists from Bell Telephone Laboratories, who developed most of the elements of the system, and engineers from Western Electric, who are determining how to manufacture it economically and with a high degree of automation. When they are through, the next step may be field trials with the Bell System's operating companies.

(Bell Labs and Western Electric are subsidiaries of the American Telephone and Telegraph Company, familiarly known as the Bell System.)

Within a few years- possibly 5 to 10-lightwave communications will begin to play a role in telecommunications. Depending on human ingenuity, demand and affluence, lightwave communications may, for example, be used in the U.S. postal system; it may also bring about new forms of home education and entertainment, which no one can yet foresee; it may even lower telephone bills.

By 1976, experimental messages had already been sent and clearly received over fiber pathways nearly 10 kilometers long.

Present manufacturing methods, though developed under ideal laboratory environments, have been designed to be adaptable to factory mass production, where highly automated machinery promises to produce more uniform and reliable parts than is possible with hand tooling. This represents a technological leap from 1970, when some scientists doubted whether they could make anything practical out of lightwave communications before theyear 2000.

It was a practical problem that gave impetus to the vigorous pursuit of lightwave communications. Under many city streets there is a maze of water pipes, sewer pipes, gas pipes, power lines, telephone cable conduits, instruments and other apparatus.

In many crowded places, work crews who break through the pavement find almost no elbow room to make repairs. By installing fiber lightguide transmission lines within the near future, the telephone system would be able to increase transmission without extra space. The added lines would be reserved at first for the main flow of telecommunications traffic: shuttling information between central telephone exchanges in large cities.

That, however, is one step short of using lightwave communications as additional transmission Lines which are needed in busy sections of large cities. They could, for instance, form a network under large streets and be joined to the copper cables that now lead from big buildings. We would only need more efficient apparatus for converting lightbeam messages into

U

Reprinted from &II T<leplw11e Magazine. Courtesy American Telephone and Telegraph Company.

11

TUR lNG SOUND INTO LIGHT continued

The primary raw material for glass fibers is silica, a common form of which is sand, one of the earth's most abundant materials. Turning sound into light is thus economically viable.

12

scientists had concluded that all messages- voice, music, computer data or anything else - were most efficiently transmitted through "pulse code modulation," which is si milar to, but more complex than, the blinker light signaling used between ships at sea. Although small solid-state lasers were being developed. they did not work reliably for more than a few hours at best.

A third major stumbling block was splicing. An experienced maintenance person requires a day or more to mend a broken copper telephone cable. But how could that person cope with a sheaf of 100 or more slender glass fibers, attaching the end of each to its corresponding fiber so that the joint would be concentric to within a thousandth of a millimeter?

Scientists attacked all three problems (and several others) simultaneously. They have found ways to purify glass so that fibers would have an acceptable light absorption rate of about 20 decibels per kilometer. (In the terminology of engineering, a loss of 10 decibels amounts to losing 90 per cent; 20 decibels to losing 99 per cent.) Now the loss has been reduced below 2 decibels- with the resull that messages in Atlanta have been clearly received nearly 10 kilometers from the transmission point without being amplified.

The current fiber-making process in many ways resembles that of fabricating transistors and microminiature circuits.

It begins with a thin-walled glass tube of fused quartz that has been carefully prepared to eliminate all bubbles, bumps and critical impurities, such as iron, which are hungry for light.

Streams of vapor passed through the heated tube deposit controlled amounts of glasslike materials on the inside surface until a few dozen of these layers have been built up. Then the tube is collapsed by further heating, drawn to the thinness of a hair, clad with a protective coating and wound on drums. The layers, which retain their relative positions within the fibers, are essential to bend stray light rays back to the center of the fiber so that the emerging light arrives in the same pulses that were introduced by the laser. The Atlanta trials began with almost 100 kilometers of fiber, weighing a total of about 2.25 kilograms. The lasers that feed light into these remarkable fibers have been described as "about the size of a grain of salt. " But the light-emitting part is an incredibly thin strip of gallium arsenide that is invisible to the naked eye. The bulk of the grain is a sandwich, most of which consists of two copper end plates that conduct away heat.

Today, "run-of-the-mill" gallium arsenide lasers last 100,000 hours, or about a dozen years, and by the end of the decade researchers expect to produce million-hour lasers routinely.

The useful lifetime of a laser is crucial, of course, for replacing one that has failed is expensive. Large numbers of lasers would be used in a commercial system, and the cost of maintenance is an important component of total system cost.

Researchers in several other countries are already developing other forms of lightwave communications for the future. The French and British are known to be conducting experiments, the Netherlands and West Germany are moving quickly ahead , and Japan may be the most advanced next to the Bell System.

An additional economic reason for turning to lightwave communications is that the primary raw material of lightguides is silica- the most common form of which is sand- one of the earth's most abundant materials.

Considering all that has been accomplished in five years, it would be surprising if many nations did not turn to lightwave communications to fill a large part of their telecommunications needs before the year 2000.

0

electrical communications.

Looking farther into the future - perhaps toward the end of this century- engineers can envision applications that would be physically impossible or much too expensive to achieve with today's cable and microwave equipment. Currently, businesses. such as branch banks and far-Hung brokerage companies, ship tons of paper each day. But it would be much simpler and cheaper to send pictures of checks and other documents back and forth between headquarters and branch offices via lightwave fibers. The only new piece of equipment that would have to be added is a facsimile machine cheaper and faster than those existing.

In time, even private homes may be linked with networks of fiber lightguides that could transmit cable television, personal letters and various visual and auditory messages. The fi rst home consoles are likely to be luxury items- like the first color television sets- but if enough people want them, they could be massproduced and the price would fall rapidly.

As versatile, high-speed receivers become common, libraries, business files and other bulky repositories of information can be stored in miniaturized form on microfilm and microfiche. Then, people wanting to look up information would be able to find it almost as simply as by dialing a phone number. John R. Pierce, an engineering professor at California Institute of Technology, who while at Bell Labs made the first serious proposals for satellite communication, believes the day is coming when many people will rely on information stored in remote places .. In his opinion there will be less "commuting to work-more communicating instead."

How rapidly lightwave communications will step into these new fields depends largely on economics- especially the cost of telecommunications equipment compared to the postal system.

The trend is all in favor of telecommunications. In 1927, for example, it cost almost $1 0 to phone San Francisco from New York (a distance of some 4,100 kilometers) ; today, if the call is dialed direct, the charge is $1.36 for three minutes. Meanwhile. first-class postage has jumped from 2 cents to 13 cents, and some economists predict that it will double or triple within the next couple of decades. If a nationwide network of fiber lightguides existed. and if most people owned home consoles equipped with facsimile producers, people could transmit personal letters almost instantaneously.

The basic principles of light and radio transmission are the same. A carrier wave broadcasts at a relatively high fixed frequency of radio or light energy, represented by a point on the tuning dial. The message is superimposed as varying vibrations on the carrier wave. The receiver ~ancels out and discards the wave, leaving only the message.

Only a few years ago, however, communications experts faced a host of technological obstacles in light transmission that seemed almost insurmountable.

For example, the best glass available in 1970 absorbed light so greedily that optical signals would have to be intercepted and amplified every few meters, an unthinkably costly process.

Then, each fiber had to have its own miniature light source About the Author : George A.W. Boehm, a free-lance writer, formerly fixed to the transmitting end of the fiber- flashing on and off worked with Fortune magazine. He now writes for Reader's Digest cuul at least 50,000 times per second. This was necessary because Harvard Business Review.

AMERICAN FOREIGN POLICY

by DAN!EL YERGlN

The forties and fifties saw a transformation

in American politics: American hegemony turned into American interdependence. Even so, the United States, perhaps more than any other country, continues to be able to choose its own possibilities for order and survival.

To ask the question: "Is there a new America?" in the context of foreign affairs is to pose another question" Is there a new world?" For the character of a nation 's foreign policy cannot be judged apart from the challenges it faces in the world. and from the shifts in the distribution of power in the international system. Thus, we are pressed to identify the elements of change and of continuity.

In so doing, three critical problems come into clear view-involving order, security, and the conceptual basis of U.S. foreign policy.

The two decades between 1940 and 1960 witnessed a transformation in international politics. The European centered state system, solidified after the Napoleonic wars, collapsed in 1939. It could not be repaired after 1945. Its place was taken by a new system characterized by a confrontation between two hostile alliance systems, one led by the United States and the other by the Soviet Union.

This was the bipolar international system.

Yet, though both were called superpowers, the disparity between the United States and the Soviet Union was considerable.

By every index, the United States was far and away the most powerful nation in the world, the preponderant nation in the international system, the " freest " in the choices it could make. It was truly a global power, the hegemonic leader of

the coalition of industrial democracies, possessing worldwide capabilities and networks of interest. On its side of the confrontation with the Soviet Unicm, the United States shaped and ma.naged almost singlehanded ly the political and economic rules, norms and procedures that constituted the ¡'order" in which interacted the Western industrial nations, as well as most of what became known as the Third World. Thus, it is fully appropriate to describe the postwar years as the "American era of international relations."

In the 1960s, however, a process of erosion began, at first visible only to those with a professional interest in such matters as the balance of payments, but by now, revealed to all. Indeed, by the end of the 1970s, the American-shaped and dominated order has been subjected to four severe challenges: the attainment of "near economic parity" by Western Europe and Japan; the rapid rise of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC); the call by the Third World for a radical transformation of the entire order; and the prospect of nuclear proliferation.

These challenges to the order are, ipso facto, challenges to America's preponderant position in that order. They represent conscious or structural constraints and checks on the exercise of

American power- that is, of America's ability to determine outcomes. They also mean a change in the foreign policy agenda. Formerly, the items at the top were composed of the relatively welldefined primary security questions. But now more confusing and obscure questions that are an admixture of politics and economics have been added. With these latter questions. absolute measures of power do not necessarily mean that a country can decide the outcome in one issue area or another.

Here-coping with the issues of orderis the first of the three critical problems for American foreign policy. It is one that arises, then , from a shift from American hegemony to American interdependence. Yet care must be taken in such an analysis, for there is a real danger of seeing a sharper change than bas been the case. America is not an "ordinary country," and shows no immediate prospect of becoming such. Even though its relative power has declined, America is still the most powerful country in the world, the dominant country in the world, and the first problem is to decide how it can and should most effectively wield that power. For, when a country is as powerful as is the United States, to not. exert its power also constitutes a form of action.

While the issues of order represent the

Reprontcd With !X'rrm:.sion from DaediJ/us magazone.\C 1978 by the American Academy or Arts and Sctences.

SPAN MARCH 1979

MERICA

FOREIGN POLI CY comimwd

Between the realpolitik of the previous era and the human rights stand of the Carter Administration, can Americans find a new intellectual basis for postwar foreign policy? It involves a process of choice and balance-between the accommodation, and the pursuit, of just change on the one hand and an international environment hospitable to American values and institutions on the other. new problem for U.S. foreign policy, no less pressing, despite its familiarity , is the enduring issue of survival and the balance of power. the problem posed by the confrontation with the Soviet Union.

The third problem derives from the preceding two. It is a conceptual problem - to find a way to think about America's role and goals in a world in which issues of order and issues of survival both claim centrality. a world in which America, although no longer preponderant, remains the dominant power.

1n 1968 Henry Kissinger wrote: " In the years ahead , the most profound challenge to American policy will be philosophical : to develop some concept of order in a world which is bipolar militarily but multipolar politically....

Wherever we turn then, the central task of American foreign policy is to analyze anew the current international environment and to develop some concepts which will enable us to contribute to the emergence of a stable order. " A decade later. th is remains t he central task. Perhaps the very fact that it always seems to be the central task is a testament to at least one aspect of American exceptional ism - that, as a nation, Americans are constantly faced with the problem of defining and then defining again the purpose and goals of U.S. foreign policy.

These are not given. Several reasons can be suggested: the nature of American ideology: the openness of foreign policy making to domestic debate; the consequent need for a domestic consensus; geography; and experience. Add to the above, two other data: First, the world is complex. change does occur with rapidity, and there is nothing simple about being powerful. Second. because the United States is so powerful, it is not constrained in the way other nations are. Its possibilities are still , even after Vietnam and changes in the world economy, to a considerable degree what it chooses them to be.

Until the 20th century, a world view in a literal sense was not very important.

American foreign policy primarily in-

~ Sl'AN MARCH 1979

vo lved continental and then regional expansion. sufficiently motivated by doctrines of manifest destiny and commercial interest. The basic issues of international politics- survival and the balance of power- were hardly posed. The international hegemon was Britain, and America's geography and dynamism guaranteed it, in Walter Lippmann's phrase, " unearned security."

At last the world caught up with the United States. World War I drew the United States into the mainstream of international politics and the struggle over what was then the key issue, the balance of power in Europe. In the course of this involvement, Woodrow Wilson articulated an ideology of liberal internationalism that has. since, been at the heart of 20th century U.S. foreign policy. " Wilsonianism" is a powerful and attractive vision of how the world might be organized, and of America's role in it. This vision has sought to project American values into world politics, the values being those of a liberal society united in a broad Lockean consensus. Wilson, like many subsequent American leaders, hoped and/or believed that the often brutal anarchy of the international system and the balance of power could be superseded by a juridical international community, committed to due process and common values. The United States would work within the old system in order to reform it. The United States saw itself as a disinterested, innocent power, whose own desires and aims were thought to express the yearnings of all people, and whose responsibilities were to become inescapable and worldwide.

As it sought to remove conflict and anarchy from international relations, Wilsonianism was truly seeking to abolish the very substance of world politicsbalance of power, spheres of influence, power politics. These are the ineluctable features of the "anarchical society'' of an international system composed of sovereign states. T wo impulses are associated with this outlook. One is an optimism about the possibilities for resolution and harmony, an "invisible hand,"

if you like, for the political affairs of the world. But there is a contrary impulse as well- a belief that the world as constructed is not merely harsh, but also evil, and that the inability to attain the first goal is not a consequence of the character of the enterprise but of moral fai ling and danger.

That latter impulse led to the retreat from the first great burst of Wilsonianism, which did not outlast the post-World War I disillusionment. In the interwar years, the United States, though still involved economically, eschewed a political role. Despite the desires of some leaders, there was a consensus not for involvement, but for withdrawal. Franklin Roosevelt's complaint in 1935- that " no European capital in the present confusion gives a continental damn about what the United States thinks or does"-was the result of the fact that America had evidently decided to stand aside.

World War II brought a profound reassertion of Wilsonianism. The conditions were more right this time- the old international system had collapsed- and the United States, by design and circumstances, found itself the linchpin of the new system. The acquisition of a hegemonic role happened even more quickly than those who had directed America's global war had expected. "We are in the thing aU over the world to an extent that few people realize," James Byrnes, the first postwar Secretary of State, told his colleagues in the cabinet in April 1946.

Wilsonianism remained the basic ideological fra mework. But it was not enough.

Two key sets of ideas gained quick expression-what might be called " commanding ideas" - that is, concepts that explain America's relation to the rest of the world, integrate contradictory information, suggest and rationalize courses of action, and, as almost a court of last resort, provide a resolution for debates and disputes.

One was anticommunism. The question about Russia was posed at the war' s end

by James Forrestal, shortly to become the first Secretary of Defense: " Are we

dealing with a nation solely as a national entity. or are we dealing with such a national entity plus a philosophy which amounts to a fervent religion?" The answer was generally thought to be the latter, and the United States did indeed embark on a crusade to contain communism. The second commanding idea was a ..doctrine of national security," a very expansive definition of security. a tendency to push the subjective boundaries of security outward to more and more areas. to encompass more and more geography and more and more problems.

Here was Wilsonianism made into realpolitik.

Of course, there were other impo rtant ideas, such as those relating to an open international economy. But these were part of the Wilsonian program and were additionally validated as they were subordinated to the two commanding ideas.

T hese ideas and formulations held powerful sway well into the 1960s, providing the real impulse for the American role in Vietnam, a war, at least until we have more of a perspective, that can probably be better understood as a conflict over ideology and theories than for treasure and gain. But in Vietnam, these ideas were stretched almost to their breaking point - for a time. it .cemed, even beyond their breaking point. Certainly the anticommunist consensus, which had been generated from these two commanding ideas, collapsed .

Anticommunism proved too undifferentiated a concept, at least as balanced against the other evident costs. lt tended to obscure the local character of the contest. National security also proved too undifferentiated a concept, for, when the idea was challenged. it could not be established. whatever else was at stake. that American national security was in question. Indeed, the enterprise damaged America's overall v.orld posJtJon. Obviously, as well , Vietnam raised basic questions about power and the utility of force.

What then was to guide American foreign policy? Here perhaps Henry Kissinger made his most lasting contributions- to set out a different conception of foreign policy, one that might well be descri bed as "European," that is, that international politics is less about ideology than about the cooperation and competition of states for power, prestige, position and wealth, and that nations pursue those as their interests. When the competition

becomes very severe, then the most basic of all values· survival is at stake. ··we are immersed in an unending process, not in a quest for a final destination," Kissinger wrote in 1968. Such a view does not accord with the traditional American vision, for it says that there are no final solutions, no resolutions, no ultimate harmony, only that endless process. The basic problem of international politics remains as expressed

by Rousseau : The state, lxing an artificial body. IS not ltmitcd in any way . . .. It can always increase: 11 always feels itself weak if there is <mot her that i ~ stronger. lls security and preservation demand that it ma kc itself more powerful than its ne1ghbor~. It can increase. nourish and excrc1sc its power on ly at their expense.... While the inequaliJy of man has natural limits. that between societies can grow without cease. until one absorbs all the others ....

The formation of the first society necessanly led to the fom1a11on of all the others. It was necessary to join 11 or unite in order to resist it. It was necessary to imitate it or be engulfed by 11. ... Becau:.e the grandeur of the state is purely rclame. 11 IS forced to compare itself with that of the others.... It is in vain that it wishes to keep 11self to ll~lf. 1t becomes small or great. weak or strong. accord1ng to whether its nctghbor expands or contracts. becomes stronger or declines.

It cannot be otherwise.

Such a vision clashed sharply with the Wilsonian ideology. It seemed immoral and inconsistent. lacking in purpose. How, critics asked, could the United States at the same time both pursue detente with the Soviet Union and yet do political battle with the Soviet Union in southern Africa? How could both enterprises be ''valid" at the same time? The unpalatable response was that detente was in our interest- not a favor we bestow. in Kissinger's words- while not to act in southern Africa was also a form of action.

The choice in southern Africa was not about the estimates of Soviet intentions. but rather a balance between the effects of a predominant Soviet role in a tense situation against the risks of sliding into a deeper form of military intervention.

Such realpolitik was too uncomfortable, too cynical, for many Americans. Much of what the Carter Administration did in its first year appeared to be for the purpose of establishing that Kissi ngerism was banished from the realm of policy.

This is a very helpful step for rebuilding a domestic consensus, but it is an inadequate basis for a foreign policy. ..Human rights'· cannot by itself provide an effective commanding idea for foreign

policy in an anarchic world.

Can Americans find a new intellectual basis for a post-postwar foreign policy?

We can look toward certain elements.

T he first is to attempt to define problems in terms of American interests. There are no absolute tests. Rather, it involves a process of choice and balancing- between accommodating to change, pursuing change that is just and desirable. and yet seeking to maintain an international environment hospitable to U.S. values and institutions. Second, it involves a continuing recognition of the role of power, and no pretense about its abolishment. It in volves a staking out of positions between those governed by ideological shibboleths of the past and deceptive romanticism about a new international order. And, third. it still involves the endless need to come to grips with the fact that we do live in a world in which communism. Marxist-Leninism. continues to be a mode for capturing control of and organizing states. ·'Being confident of our own future, " President Jimmy Carter said at Notre Dame on May 22.

1977. ·'we are now free of that inordinate fear of communism which once led us to embrace any dictator who joined us in that fear.'' But we would be deluding ourselves if we dispensed with the "ordinate fear," not so much on ideological grounds per se, but that in the name of ideology. shifts in the international balance can occur that are detrimental to American interests.

All this does not point to a conclusion, to a clear end goal for foreign policy.

It does suggest modification, but not the abandonment, of the postwar commanding ideas. It emphasizes, in addition, the range of uncertainty and risk, the constant need for choice: and it requires an endless process of analysis. of questioning. of differentiation, and of honesty with ourselves as well as toward others. All this does not call up crusades. and it may not sit well with the requirements of the American domestic polity. But such is the task before the nation that remains the dominant power in the world, a nation that as such must cope simultaneously with the critical issues of order and the fundamental issues of survival.

0 About th e Author: Daniel Yergin is a lecturer at Han•w·d Business School and in the department of go1·ernmen1 til Harvard Unit·ersill'. lfe is the author oj Shane red Peace: The Ong1n~ of the Cold War and the National Security.

SPAN \1>\RCH 1979

I5

U.S. PUBliC liBRARIES MEET MANY NEEDS A library in Erie, Pennsylvania, lends pets to children.

The animals come with food and instructions for care. Members of the public library in Newton.

Massachusetts. can borrow paintings and sculptures to decorate their homes for up to two months. One T ennessee library lends out electronic calculators, another has its own radio station. broadcasting 18 hours a day. A New Jersey public library has a garden for the blind with 26 toPch-and-smell plants, identified in Braille on metal plates. A New Mexico library tapes reminiscences of old residents to create a treasure house of oral history. Some libraries have dial-a-stor y services.

And . of course. books- 1.5 billion of them in America's 13,000 public libraries, 75,000 school libraries. and 3,000 college and university libraries.

But today's libraries are no longer simply repositories of printed matter. They are changing to meet the needs of an information-hungry society by increasingly acting as multimedia resource centers for the community. Apart from unusual loans and service to specialinterest groups. the major emphasis in the phenomenal expansion of library services is providing information that may not always be available on the bookshelf. The idea is to serve not just people interested in reading (the distinguishing trait of the library visitor once upon a time) but all people Top: A visitor ac the Library and Museum of Performing Arts at Lincoln Center in New York listens to a retord with earphones to a1•oid disturbing others. Right : At the Oral Roberts Unil·ersity librm:r in Tulsa. a srudem watches a pretelevised lecture film. Far right· A studious patron. Not al/ou·etl in libraries til/late in the last cemury, children now form one-third oj a lihrm-y's registration in Ameriu1.

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interested in just about anything.

Music. drama. dance. painting. literature, news-all are available .on records. audio-cassettes, video tape and closed-circuit television.

This plethora of services is provided free in all the public libraries. Supported by public funds, the libraries charge their patrons only indirectly- their funds come from taxes which add up to barely $5 per person per year.

Prior to 1833 when the first free library was opened. members had to pay a fee or belong to a particular club to borrow a book from a library. The first private library was set up some two centuries before the first free library when. in 1638. John Harvard willed 400 books to Harvard College. Today the Harvard University Library with 9.4 million volumes is the world's largest university library.

American steel manufacturer and philanthropist Andrew Carnegie gave a tremendous boost to the public library movement in the late 19th and early 20th centuries- he donated more than ~40 million to build I ,679 publiclibrariesin America.

In time, branch libraries opened. traveling libraries were begun. foreign language collections were ordered. Technology brought more visual and audioaids into the library.

Changes and innovations conLeji: A young borrower checks out an armload of books. Below: The imposing marble front of the New York Public Library, builr in 181 I. One of America's biggest and best. it has 10 million books il1 its 81 branches in Neu¡ York State.

tinue and imaginative librarians regularly add new programs and facilities. In a move pioneered bytheDetroit Public Library. more and more libraries act now as community information and referral centers, providing a range of information on health and welfare programs, etc. Computer technology. by making information available at the press of a few buttons. has greatly aided the libraries in their new self-imposed responsibility.

No treatise on American libraries would be complete without mentioning America's biggest library- the Library of Congress, founded in 1800 to serve members of the U.S. Congress. Though not technically a public library. it is open for reference work to anyone. 1t is of immense service to America's public libraries, which it supplies with printed catalogue cards.

As libraries grew they needed a good classification system. One was provided by what is known the world over today as the Dewey Decimal System, originated by Melvil Dewey in 1873 when he was just 21. In 1887 Dewey made another contribution to the science of library by starting the first school to provide professional training to librarians in America.

Today's librarians, according to the American Library Association, ''all have special graduate training and experience in automation, community information referral. the library in society. child development. adult education, media technology, communication theory. and expertise in various subject specialties."

PUBLIC LIBRARIES I'Ontinuecl

Today libraries are no longer mere repositories of printed matter. They are changing ... to serve not only people interested in reading, but people interested in just about anything.

Right: Remy Charlip, an author of children's books, conducts a workshop in the Cemra/ Chi/drm's Room of the Donnell Library Center, a branch of the New York Public Library in Manhattan.

Sud1 programs, usually conducted on Saturdays, attract parents and children. Below: The library on

the Arizona State University campus in Tempe has been built so as to offer ample scope for outdoor reading and studying.

Bottom: A father reads to his son in the Children's Room ofa New York library. The air of informality andfreediJm adds to the library's attraction for a youngster.

PROFilE OF AN INDIAN PUBliC liBRARY The Delhi Public Library (DPL) has come a long way from those early days in 1951 when library officials went around the city of Delhi on tongas making announcements over loudspeakers urging people to visit their novel library, which offered free reference and lending facilities. The tonga ads stopped but the library has traveled onfrom one member then to well over one lakh today: from 8,000 books to 6 lakhs; from one room in an old building to tbe entire building, 23 branches, 58 mobile service stations and service centers in three hospitals and one jail; from serving those who can read to those who can't see ....

"We issue out 10,000 volumes a day," says Jagdish Chandra Mehta, who has been with the library since 1962 and took over its directorship in 1967. Though Mehta was not with the library in its ftedgling years, he recalls how even Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru expressed his. misgivings about "letting the readers loose among racks of high-priced books." He feared that soon after the inauguration he would be called upon to write the epitaph for it.

Nehru's reservations echoed the surprise that had greeted the UNESCO proposal to open a public library in Delhi - a rare phenomenon for this part of the world. For it would not only not charge a fee or even a deposit for lending out books, it would also allow members free access to the books which were to be kept on open racks and not in locked cupboards. Anyone could become a member on a recommendation from a "responsible citizen." And to further encourage reading the library would open from 8.00 a.m. to 8.00 p.m. Altogether, it was a very unusual library for India. ¡ That, in fact, was the reason which prompted UNESCO to offer a four-year collaboration to set up a public library in a developing country. India accepted the offer and DPL was set up with UNESCO providing $60,000 and sponsoring a study tour of public libraries in Europe and America by the first director, Des Raj Kalia.

Since 1955 D PL has been under the Government of India, and has been branching out all over the city to serve those who find the library's location opposite Old Delhi Railway Station inconvenient.

But it is in rural Delhi that DPL has been concentrating its attention in recent years.

Starting with book deposit centers in panchayats and youth clubs and mobile libraries, it is now opening big libraries in central villages around Delhi's periphery.

The village libraries are and will be so located as to serve five to six villages each.

The pride of place for the library's

resourcefulness, however, goes to its work in serving the blind. ln 1963 the library set up a Braille unit but found that there were only about 60 volumes (including duplicates) of Hindi Braille books. So it started producing its own Braille books in H indi with the help of two typewriters. special sulphide paper and other equipment donated by the American Foundation for the Overseas Blind. T wo transcribers and one blind proofreader run this unit today, producing 100 books a year. D PL has even worked with the Forest Research Institute of Dehra D un to perfect a process for making sulphide paper, and has got a mill to make it for them.

A specially designed mobile van goes to schools and institutions for the blind once a week with the Braille books in English and Hindi. D PL has four other vans which visit over 50 points in the city.

DPL's largest collection of books is in English and Hindi, followed by Urdu and P unjabi. A few Sind hi and Bengali holdings have been added. You can find every kind of book- from the latest American bestseller to a de luxe high-priced book on art.

In keeping with the new concept of public libraries as community centers, DPL has study circles, film shows, TV-viewing facilities, plays, music concet1S. It even has a 2,500-strong record collection, also loaned out free.

Not many people use the library simply to get information. But there have been unusual requests from abroad. One English lady wanted to find out about an old grave. An American girl asked about an old church that seemed to have disappeared.

Mehta personally undertook a search for it.

The American girl wrote that it bad been near the library building (which was at one time known as Wavell Canteen and was the

Above: In rhe Children's Room of the Delhi Public Ubrary, young members mrair their rum ro have books issued our on their cards.

rest house of American and British soldiers during World War II). Mehta contacted old library staffers and managed to find it.

The girl came to India and paid a nostalgic visit-her grandfather had been clergyman there. An American publ ishing house asked for information on the hindi; the library obliged again, this time with Mehta interviewing his lady relatives and staffers.

More such information is provided through the notice boards in the conidor of the library building: posted on them are notifications about jobs, announcements of local events, and clippings on a variety of subjects from the latest magazines.

D PL is certainly conscious of being a library for the public. Twenty-eight years of existence have not dimmed enthusiasm.

Its original purpose- of being a pilot project to encourage more such ventureshas been served. As D. R. Kalia, currently Library Adviser to the Government of India, says, ''It has had a very stimulating influence on libraries all over the country.

The central libraries of Shillong, Gauhati.

Patiala and Chandigarh, for example. are patterned on it to the extent of having cultural shows, programs for children. etc. And as a system it has been emulated in Madras, Bangalore. Hyderabad , Mangalore- they too have one main library and branches all over the city.¡¡ The concept has got across: libraries should not just wait for people to walk in; they should go to the people. And the public library way of doing that is by making libraries free. accessible, and inviting- getting the books out of locked cupboards onto open racks.

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814 ARB SCIIRCI .11!4!

WOODS lOLl A small American town in the northeastern state of Massachusetts, Woods Hole is the site of four research institutions on oceanography. Together, their contribution to man's knowledge of the oceans-and to new discoveries covering many areas of science including medical care - is formidable. Researchers at Woods Hole map the oceans, study the marine and mineral resources of the deep, undertake voyages. This article gives glimpses of their work. ooping across the Atlantic Ocean at the equator and then flowin g up the eastern seaboard oft he United States, the Gulf Stream carries warm water to northern coasts. Contrapuntally, the Labrador current flows southward from the Arctic, carrying colder waters with it.

Where these two currents meet off the northeastern United States there is an abundance of warm- and cold-water marine life and unpolluted waters.

Where they meet is also the site of one of the world's foremost scientific centers for the study of the oceans and marine biology Woods Hole. Although this Massachusetts town is by itself quite small. it is the home of four major institutions studying the sea.

First to come to Woods Hole was the U.S. Government's Northeast Fisheries Center. set up in 1871. It was followed in 1888 by the Marine Biological Laboratory, a private research center. The Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, another private organization, was created in 1930.

And a second Federal bureau - the U.S. Geological Survey's branch office for the Atlantic and-Gulf of Mexico coastsmoved to Woods Hole in the early 1960s.

Each separately is making important contributions to the body of knowledge we have about the oceans, but it is as a unit that they comprise a truly formida-ble international research center.

Biochemist W.S. Vincent has noted that Woods Hole either "attracts people who are productive. stimulates people to be productive, or the interaction is such that productivity results."

One reason for this scientific creativity

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SPAN MARCil 197q

is that the four institutions at Woods Hole bring together an unequaled store of research tools and talent. The Marine Biological Laboratory's library is the world's most complete collection in its field. Top marine scientists, including 30 Nobel Prize winners, have worked at Woods Hole, and a weekly lecture series is frequently the occasion of the announcement of major findings.

W .O. Russell-Hunter, editor of the scientific journal, Biological Bulletin, sums up that environment by noting that frequently '"if you are in a university, neither the people nor the organisms nor the journals are available. T he point is they are here, and they are here at 10 o'clock in the evening when you want to ask a question, when the university library is closed and the animals you want are I ,000 kilometers away and the men are in Tokyo and Palermo. But it's all here.

Everyone of us has had the experience of walking into the library at 2 a .m. or had the excitement of asking the questions concerning the animals or, if Dr. So-andSo isn't working late at night, of just waiting until the morning and asking him in person. " It was the abundance of animal life in the nearby waters and estuaries, resulting from the confluence of the two currents, that attracted the Northeast Fisheries Center to Woods Hole- and not surprisingly so, since the primary concern of this government department is to keep tabs on the stocks of fish and shellfish along the northeastern Atlantic coast.

By studying the populations and growth rates of sea life. as well as the interactions

among species, environmental impact and the effects of fishing, the fisheries center can, in turn. make recommendations to national and international regulatory agencies about fishing controls.

The center's job can be critical since Woods Hole overlooks the Great Banks, highly productive fishing beds where catches have been increased sixfold in the past 15 years. Proper management of the marine stocks could make the difference between depletion of a valuable food source and continuing high yields.

Resources are also a concern of the other Federal Government office at Woods Hole, the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS).

The USGS maps and studies the nation's offshore domains and makes assessments of the existence and accessibility of offshore deposits of manganese. oil. sand and gravel.

Again, it was the abundance of marine life that brought the Marine Biological Laboratory (M BL) to Woods Hole, but with quite a different purpose in mind.

The premise of the research that MBL has undertaken for nearly a century is that some essential life processes. such as cell division and nerve impulse conduction. can be studied more easily in simpler marine animals.

These sea animals have provided the basis for much modern biological research, says Dr. Lewis Thomas, himself a prominent medical researcher, in an essay appraising MBL: 'The giant axon [nerve fiber] of the Woods Hole squid became the apparatus for the creation of today's astonishing neurobiology. Developmental and reproductive biology were recognized

SEA AND SCIENCE continued

INDO-U.S. COOPERATION IN OCEANOGRAPHY Possible areas of cooperation between India and America were identified at a five-day Indo-U.S. workshop on oceanography held recently at the National Institute of Oceanography, Goa. The projects identified by the workshop are meant to improve scientific understanding of the physical, chemical, biological and geological processes that occur in the oceans. If approved by the governments of the two countries, they may answer such questions as: What effect do ocean currents and temperatures have on monsoon rainfall? What are the factors that influence the biological productivity of the Indian Ocean?

What are the sources of materials entering the seas around India? What are the geological features of the Arabian Sea and the Bay of Bengal?

These projects constitute basic research. But in the long run, they may be of great practical value in predicting and tapping the resources of the oceans, such as fisheries, minerals and petroleum.

For example, a study of the biological productivity of the Indian Ocean can help boost the annual "catch" from India's marine resources from the present 1.5 million tons to many times that figure.

Oceanographic research can also help better understanding of monsoon phenomena .

International cooperation in oceanographic research is essential, experts say, not merely because

22

SPAN MARCH 1979

of the immense food , mineral and fuel resources of the oceans, but because they cover 70 per cent of the earth's surface and contain a nearly complete record of many events in earth's history. The Indian Ocean is considered â&#x20AC;˘Âˇa unique geophysical laboratory'' for understanding many of these events.

Top oceanographers from the two countries attended the workshop. Dr. Roger Revelle of the University of California led an 11-member American team. lt also included Dr. David Ross of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, Dr. Robert L. Fisher of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, and Mr. J. Shukla of the Goddard Space Flight Center. The 36-member Indian team was led by Dr. Devendra La!, director of the Physical Research Laboratory, Ahmedabad.

It also included D r. S.Z. Qasim, director of the National Institute of Oceanography, Goa; Dr. P.K. Das, director general of the Meteorological Department, New Delhi; Dr. V.V. Sastri of the Oil and Natural Gas Commission; and Rear Admiral F.L. Fraser, chief hydrographer of the Indian Navy.

Scientists from India, Japan, the Soviet Union and other countries are engaged in oceanographic research at American institutions. "Such international collaboration can only be of benefit to all mankind," says Dr. Roger Revelle.

and developed as sciences here, beginning with sea-urchin eggs and working up.

Marine models were essential in the early days of research on muscle structure and function, and research on muscle has become a major preoccupation at MBL. Ecology was a sober, industrious science here long ago, decades before the rest of us discovered the term. " M BL researchers found that each squid nerve trunk contained but a single giant axon. That discovery made it possible to insert electrodes into the squid's nerve cells to study how nerve impulses are conducted . These experiments have yielded much of mankind's current store of knowledge of nerve conduction, and they earned the researchers a Nobel Prize.

Some of the most important discoveries at MBL have come from research conducted on the horseshoe crab. Known scientifically as Limulus, the horseshoe crab has been a boon to researchers in visual physiology and may have valuable applications in medical care. H.K. Hartline, a scientist working at MBL, found he could record electrical activity from single nerve fibers of the horseshoe crab's eyes. These recordings contributed greatly to modern medical understanding of bow a visual message is encoded and transmitted by the human optic nerve. Limulus also proved valuable when its light-blue colored blood was discovered to contain a . reagent for the quick, easy and inexpensive detection of small quantities of bacterial contamination- making it possible to dramatically increase the purity standards for biological and medical tests.

Consequently, the horseshoe crab, which used to have a bounty on its head, is now in great demand. And MBL's neighbor, the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) has recently begun to raise Limulus for its own research purposes.

But WHOI's activities go far beyond that. Since it was initially endowed by the Rockefeller Foundation, it has been a research and teaching center for the study Left : A Soviet ship carrying American scientists enters the Woods Hole harbor. Many international scientific research voyages begin from Woods Hole. Far left: A scientist extracts blood from the horseshoe crab. The blood contains an agent that can quickly detect bacterial impurities. The crab has also been a boon for researchers in visual physiology. Center: Anocher marine animal, the sponge. Scientists' observations made while working with the sponge-that cells can recognize cells ofihe same specieshave helped research work on cancer.

SPAN MARCH 1919

2J

SEA AND SCIENCE continued

of the biology, chemistry, geology, geophysics and physical oceanography of the seas. Most of the year, WHOI keeps several ships at sea, often for four to five months at a time, with three or more research teams replacing each other on board during that period.

One recent expedition took the institution's submersible, Alvin, 2.5 kilometers below the waters off the Galapagos Islands in the eastern Pacific Ocean. There, WHOI researchers encountered water temperatures of 17 degrees Celsius when they had expected to find near-freezing temperatures.

Along the Galapagos Rift, they found active hydrothermal vents in the sea floor that helped support a dense community of sea life in total darkness. " We were fascinated by the realization that these animals form a food chain based on energy from inside the earth, rather than from sunlight," says Dr. John B. Corliss of Oregon State University, the expedition's leader.

Corliss and Dr. Robert D. Ballard of WHOI noted that "while gaining invaluable basic data for understanding earth processes, we also made history for marine biology. The unknown creatures and dense community of life we discovered living at these vents, like lush oases in a sunless desert, are a phenomenon totally new ....

"How many vents exist along the 64,000kilometer-long system of oceanic rifts?

How many of these support life? Will their existence revolutionize our knowledge of life in the abyss?"

It is just those kinds of questions and that sort of curiosity that fuels the research being done at all the Woods Hole institutions. It is not easy research. In the words of one writer on sea research: "The ocean is unpredictable, capricious, often hostile. Work is often fru strating: equipment may fail, cruise time may run out, bad weather may wipe out most of a planned investigation. But curiosity about and respect for the ocean grows with each experience. Because he wants to know more about it, the scientist goes 0 back to the sea again and again."

Right : Close-up of a section of a vast library of rock core samples collected by the U.S. Geological Survey and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. The cores show the layers of sediment along the ocean bottom, and have been taken from poilus all over the world.

They help oceanographers to map America's offshore domains, survey offshore deposits of sand, gravel and manganese, and study parts of the continental shelf off West Africa.

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SPAN MARCH 1979

tually, he says, the league will be 95 per cent American and 5 per cent top players from elsewhere in the world. This prospect appears still to be a decade away. American-born players are still less proficient in the individual skills of ball control, and they lack game experience. They are not yet good enough to beat out the NASL 's array of foreign talent for places in starting leagues.

Soccer has been played in the United States for more than I 00 years, but for the most part it was confined to such cities as New York, Chicago and Los Angeles. While native-born sports like baseball, football and basketball flourished , soccer was pushed aside as a ''foreign'' sport, relegated to new immigrants.

The 1960s changed all that, however. Buoyed by the success of World Cup games televised to the United States in 1966, professional soccer arrived with blustery fanfare the following yearwith 22 teams divided into two rival leagues, a national television contract, euphoric spending sprees all over t he soccer world for players, coaches and executives and lots of emptyheaded optimism. The whole thing, however, was a disaster.

Within two years, U.S. soccer had shriveled to one league (NASL) of only five clubs.

At this bleak moment Woosnam, a former professional player from Wales. took over as commissioner and patiently began to patch the league together again. The key element of Woosnam's salvage operation was a limited budget approach that had the owners thinking, realistically at last, in terms of minimizing losses rather than maximizing profits.

Although the pros, in general, continued to flounder until the mid•l970s. the game itself gradua lly seduced America's youth until there was finally a vital elemen t so glaringly absent in 1967 : a solid base of nationwide participation. This growth is demonstrated by the success of professiona I teams in such geographically disparate cities as Seattle, Washington ; Portland, Oregon; San Jose, California; Bloomington. Minnesota ; and Dallas. Texas.

As American soccer enthusiasts work hard to strengthen the sport at every level of competition, they try to keep in mind one axiom about developing soccer talent: patience. ''Producing top-class soccer players takes a long time.'' says British writer Paul Gardner, "and Americans are learning that it is a process that cannot be hurried .·· Improvement in the quality of coaching also will be an important factor in the growth of native American talent. * * * Soccer may never become as American as baseball and apple Gordon Bradley, the former coach of the Cosmos, lists lack of pie, but the fact remains that it is the nation's fastest growing spec- coaching as a major factor holding up the development of tator and participant sport at every level-youth, scholastic. col- American players. He believes that players are available, but that lege and professional. "Soccer has overcome the image of a they are not being trained. "All the Americans need is coaching, European sport," says North American Soccer League (NASL) for small boys on up," agrees Ivan Toplak. coach of the San Jose Commissioner Phil Woosnam. "T predict that it will be the Earthquakes and formerly a coach in Yugoslavia. " ln 5, 8, 10 number one participation sport with children within five years." years- T do not know how long, but sometime - the United Already over 850,000 players are registered in youth soccer States will be in the World Cup, and maybe will win." programs in the U.S. - compared to a mere 15,000 in 1971.

A symboJjc moment in American assimilation of the sport The solid base of youth soccer should be the key to the came moments after the NASL championship game in 1977, sport's overall success in coming years, for two important rea- in which Pete led his Cosmos to a 2-1 victory over Seattle. This sons. First, it helps insure fan support for professional soccer: was the final compet iti ve game of Pete's 22-year career, and as The kids want to see the game played well, so they talk their the final whistle sounded. several Seattle players made toward parents into taking them to professional games. Second, Pete. hoping to get his shirt as a souvenir. But Pete waved them thousands of talented young players are funneling into high away and went up to young Jim McAlister, the 20-year-old school and college soccer. American-born players are being American fullback. who had earlier been voted the league's developed who can one day star in professional soccer, and who Rookie of the Year and who had played his heart out for 90 can eventually enable America to send strong teams to Olympic minutes. Smiling broadly, Pete peeled off his shirt and presented it to McAlister. It was a marvelous gesture: Pete handing over and World Cup competitions.

The Americanization of soccer has not so far reached the the future of American soccer to the young American players. professional level, where only one or two Americans start on and saying that if they are all as good as Jim McAlister. the most NASL teams. " It's no good just bringing in chaps like me,'' sport's future in the United States is assured.

0 says one world-class player from England. "To make this thing succeed, you' ve got to have Americans that fans and future About the Author: Bilf Bruns, a free-lance writer .1peciali:::ing in sports. players can identify with.'' Woosnam agrees with this. Even- .frequently contributes art ides to Spon maga:::ine.

hen Pete (right), soccer's greatest star, came out of retirement to play in the North American Soccer League in 1975. he said his goal was to help Americans get to know- and love-his sport. Yet, he acknowledged, "1 can only show the people the game. They will decide.·· Skeptics, who certainly outnumbered tn1e believers. argued that soccer was a helpless cause in the United States, where such American-bred sports as football American style, baseball and basketball reigned supreme. True, youth soccer was beginning to bloom at the grass-roots level, but professional soccer- after eight years of existence- could still raise no more than a yawn from adult Americans who could not appreciate this comparatively amorphous and free-flowing " immigrant" game.

Then came Pete, a 34-year-old Brazilian who had led his country to three World Cup titles. This neat, compact, wrinklenosed magician, playing for the New York Cosmos (which visited India in 1977) lured sellout crowds in Boston, Washington and elsewhere on his first swing around the league.

By 1977, Pete's last season with the Cosmos, a momentum was bujlding that would change the face of the sport in the United States. One Sunday afternoon in June (which has since been tenned ''Day One" in U.S. soccer history), a game between the Cosmos and Tampa Bay drew 62,394 fans to Giants Stadium in New Jersey. ''Day Two" came in August, when the Cosmos drew 77,691 enthusiasts for a playoff game with Fort Lauderdale - the largest crowd ever to see a soccer game in North America.

Late in the game. with a Cosmos victory assured, Pele was already in the locker room getting a massage when he heard the announcement of the attendance. "That's it!" he shouted excitedly. Then he hugged Charlie Martinelli, the Cosmos' equipment manager, and wept. He knew his mission was fulfilled; he knew the people had decided. He had struggled for three years to give credibility not just to one team, or one league, but rather to a whole new sport. He had brought soccer to America.

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SPAN MAAC il 1919

t-IEAITH TO CHILDREN

by JANET FINE

American children are learning about health care earlier than ever before, and enjoying it. Games, skits, practical exercises and other do-it-yourself devices teach them good health habits in a way conventional do's and dont's cannot.

A little girl listens intently as her mother's friend complains about chest pains her husband has been having. The child breaks into the conversation. To the patronizing laughter of the women. she asks to hear all the symptoms. " Oh, mommy." she exclaims. "We studied symptoms of the heart attack in school. I think he is suffering from beginning heart attack pains. He must visit a doctor immediately .. , Several days later, the woman returns to thank the little girl. The child had saved her husband's life. The doctor had told him that he. indeed, had preliminary coronary trouble.

T his story is a favorite from one health educator, demonstrating the importance of the new and practical health education

Far left: These rhird-grade children are mastering 1he inlricacie.\¡ of 1he human body. They've drawn a life-si:e outline and are frying to fill in the skeletal system. Leji: A .fifth-grade leacher training children to presen1 a ski! on the circulatory system "smokes'' a giam cigarette. Left, above: Ho11' do the !ungs.fimction?

These fifih -graders dissect the lungs of a COli' to find the answer.

Above: A teacher shows a kindergarten child hall' 10 brush his teeth.

classes now being conducted in elementary schools around the United States.

"The approach to health education is no longer the gym approach- a film about health shown on a rainy day," commented Roger Schmidt, director of the American Lung Association's school and antismoking programs. "Educators are now integrating teaching of health with other aspects of learning."

Working with the U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare (HEW). private institutes like the American Lung Association help to train teachers and develop courses on health education throughout the United States. The HEW itself runs a school health curriculum project at the Center for Disease Control in Atlanta, Georgia. ''The goal of the project is to help the child realize that the body is each person's greatest natural resource in life." says Roy Davis, director of the Community Program Development division.

Interest in the project is rapidly growing.

At present over 2,000 schools in 29 states are teaching courses to children from the third through seventh grades. A program for children from kindergarten through third grade is also being developed. Why is the trend toward complete health education evolving at the elementary school level? According to KYB, a disease prevention program of the American Health Foundation, '¡approximately 66 per cent of all adult deaths in the United States result from heart disease, cancer or stroke. Good health is the result of a preventative lifestyle established in childhood and cominuing into old age."

Can health education be exciting to k indcrgarteners? Let's enter a classroom.

The children arc learning that "happiness is being healthy"' through a program

SPAN MARCH 1979

J)

TEACHING GOOD HEAU II

rolllllllt(•t/

Educators in the United States are now integrating the teaching of health with other aspects of learning.

Left: Two children imently examine models of their teeth. Above, left: It is parents' day in a school in Cumberland, Maryland: Two sixth-grade students take the blood pressure of a parent. Above : The grammar or spelling doesn't matter, if the child has learnt whtll smoking can do. Right: Two children lie down, fi'iends trace their body outlines on paper.

that's taught for 10 weeks. 30 minutes each day. The program encourages parents to drop into the class.

The room buzzes with activity. One girl is brushing the teeth of a model.

In a corner, some children are busy drawing in a g(!me about the body.

Others are singing songs about good health. One lesson features Octopujj' in Kumquat, the American Lung Association's film about a smoking octopus who is persuaded by young children to give up smoking.

32

SPAN MARCH 1979

Let us move down the hall. The walls of the corridor are covered with colorful posters and photographs depicting good health. In the first-grade classroom, the children are being introduced to "Super Me." At one point, children put on red felt capes. and wear a big yellow "S" on their chests. They are "Superpeople,'· learning the importance of their "super" bodies.

In the second-grade class, children are learning all about sight and sound, two of the ·'fabulous five" senses. One teacher shows them how braille is read, another demonstrates the basics of "hand talk" used by the deaf. Life-size dummies show the chi ldren how the body works.

In the sixth grade, students are enacting a drama, dressed up as parts of the heart: They are learning about the circulatory

system. A teacher is helping a child pronounce ''ar-te-ri-o-scle-ro-sis." In the fifth grade, you would see students dissecting a cow's lung as they study the respiratory system. ''We encourage reading, writing and multimedia as part of the health curriculum," says Harvey Bien , a young and dynamic supervisor of health education in the Bronx. New York City. ''Like other schools around the country, we are encouraging the active participation of students and parents."

There are some 70,000 students in Dr. Bien's district. known as District I0, all the way from kindergarten to junior high school. The health education programs include a nutritious free breakfast and lunch. traffic safety demonstrations and a "prevention of cancer pilot program." Health contests include a quiz show at which teams are quizzed on dental facts. One excited student at the show declares that that's "the best day of my life." ''Multimedia displays motivate the young students,'' says Dr. Bien, an avid photographer. "Our motto is- ·parents have made the difference.' Parents are encouraged to help their children.''

gram of the American Lung Association (ALA), develops ideas and suggestions for new school programs.

Pointing to a map with flags on it, Schmidt shows different areas in the United States that are participating in the health education program. "I want to see every state with a flag in it;' he says.

How is the ALA's program funded?

The ~ssociation receives $403,000 for a period of four years from the U.S. Government. The ALA pays for its own evaluations. State governments must supply the rest. The U.S. Government wants to make health education a private program. a community responsibi lity.

Sex education has been integrated into the program, and starts from kindergarten .

Pupils must get written permission to study sex. They use the book, Family Living, which includes chapters on sex.

Reactions from parents have been mostly favorable.

Tests are being conducted to evaluate health education programs in American schools. One study by Dr. Richard Andrews of the University of Washington in 1977 found that ¡¡schoolchildren from kindergarten to third grades showed significant gains in knowledge about good health and smoking when compared to groups of children from the same schools who did not participate in the (health education) project. The project had a positive impact upon family practices in terms ofgood health habits and smoking behavior."

The American Cancer Society works with other agencies but not with the government. They send lecturers to schools. sometimes provide nutritious snacks, stressing the importance of a good diet.

Roger Schmidt. the energetic coordinator of the antismoking education pro-

* * *

The health education program in elementary schools in India has quite a different focus, due to more pressing health problems. Ind ian heal th educators agree that the first thing that students must Jearn is nutrition and diet. D rinking water and personal hygiene are basic necessities.

In Maharashtra state. for example, there are separate health education programs for village schools and for city schools.

In rural areas, one teacher is assigned to all four grades in a small school.

At the beginning of each day, students are taught about personal cleanliness, and "the most clean student in class" gets a prize. Such programs are organized in municipal schools; private schools do not yet have them.

"We pay house visits in the villages to help parents learn about healthy living,'' says Dr. L.S. Rangnekar, assistantdirector of Maternal and Chi ld Health Services.

"Community living is taught, since most homes have joint families . Children must learn to guide their mothers in proper sanitation."

The courses in health education in Maharashtra rural school s concentrate on the fight against disease, especially gastric and intestina l sickness caused by impure well water. They stress the need for immunization and parent education to help the schoolchildren implement a t home what they learn in school about proper diet and hygiene.

The nutritious snacks provided in schools are an incentive for attendance, but shortage of funds prevents a ful llunch program. Some 400,000 c hildren in Maharashtra. from grades one to four. receive milk, sweet breads and gram.

Other health and recreation programs include regular film shows and touring medical units, with medical inspections every year. I nununization is compulsory for childreu in lower divisions.

I n its early days. the nutrition program was meant for the needy: today the emphasis is on teaching good health habits. Findings show students are more active when properly fed. They are taught to avoid eating exposed food from street vendor stands.

Bombay has a more active health education program than most other Indian cities. Many schools subscribe to the American Health Services bulletin. to read about the latest discoveries in medicine.

"India has less experience in health education than the United States," says Dr. Urmila Mehta, a medical officer for Bombay schools. "But I think this generation of I ndian schoolchildren will lead the way to health for coming generations."

0 About tbe Author: Janet Fine. a free-lcmce wrirer, s rudiedjournalism ar Columbia School ofJournalism. Site recently published a book on teaching. and at present is in India 10 study Bltaratanatyam.

SPAN MARCH 1979

Dreams Be An Extract From the Foreword

by Irving Howe Delmore Schwartz's most famous story, "In Dreams Begin Responsibilities," came out in 1937. as the leading piece of fiction in the first issue of the new Partisan Review. Those of us who read it at the time really did experience a shock of recognition. The intellectual heavyweights of the PR group had been mobilized for this opening issue, and they performed in high style. Young readers like myself who looked forward to the magazine as a spokesman for "our'' views on culture and politics - that is, the views of the anti-Stalinist left-were probably more interested in the polemics than the fiction. Still, we did read Schwartz's story, if only because the editors had put it at the top of their table of contents; and we were stunned. Many people I know have remembered the story long after forgetting everything else in the fust issue.

We were charmed by the story's invention, though this could hardly explain the intensity of our response, since you didn't have to be a New Yorker, you could as weU live jn London or Si ngapore, in order to admire Schwartz's technical bravura. Still, it was the invention-the sheer cleverness of it-that one noticed first. A movie theater becomes the site of dreams; the screen, a reflector of old events we know will soon be turning sour. The narrator watches father propose to mother at a Coney Island restaurant.

Already, during the delights of courtship, they become entangled in the vanities and deceptions that will embitter their later years.

But what can the audience do about it? The past revived must obey its own unfolding, true to the law of mistakes. The reel must run its course: it cannot be cut; it cannot be edited.

When I first read the story, at the age of 17 or 18, I felt my blood rise at the point where the narrator cries out to his parents

Delmore Schwartz, poet, short story writer, editor and literary critic. died in 1966 at age 53.

Among his books are In Dreams Begin Responsibilities. whose title story is reprinted here; The World Is a Wedding, a collection of short stories: and Vaudeville for a Princess and Other Poems.

CopyrightŠ 1937. I??R by New Direction; Publoshong Corpora lion. New Yock. :tnd Seeker and Warburt~ Ltd .. London

on the screen: " Don't do it. l t's not too late to change your minds. both of you. Nothing good wiU come of it, only remorse, hatred , scandal, and two children whose characters are monstrous .., The hopelessness, and as it seemed then, the rightness of the son's lament appealed to my deepest feelings as another son slipping into estrangement. Naturally, this struck me as the high point of the story. the cry against the mistakes of the past.

Only later, when I would now and again reread the story, did 1 come to see what r could not yet see in 1937: that its tragic force depends not so much on the impassioned protest of the young narrator as on the moment in the last paragraph when an usher hurries down the aisle of the theater and says to him: " What are you doing? Don't you know that you can't do whatever you want to do?" This voice of remonstrance, as it speaks in Kafka-like accents for inexorability, fulfills the story both on the plane of invention (the business in the movie house) and the plane of implication (how presumptuous yet inevitable that we should want to unwind the reel of our lives!). Once you see that the usher's statement has to be given a central place in the story, then you also realize that the narrator's outcry, whatever our sympathy for it, is not so much a protest against mistakes as a protest against life itself, inconceivable without mistakes.

There is still one thing more, and it comes in the last Line of the story. a phrase that would serve almost as Schwartz's literary signature: the young narrator wakes up on a bleak winter morning from his dream of a movie depicting the past of his parents, and outside, on the window sill, he sees "a lip of snow.'' It is a lovely, haunting phrase- the plenitude and renewal of nature become through metaphor a human shape, soon to melt, but still, the shape of that part of our body with which we speak and love.

Through all the wretchedness of Schwartz's later years as man and writer, he would now a11d again invoke such images of snow as an enchanting presence, the downpour, as if through God 's or na0 ture's generosity, of purity. beauty, evanescence.

Responsibilities A Story by Delmore Schwartz

• • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •

I think it is lhe year 1909. I feel as if I were in a motion picture theater. the long ann of tight crossing the darkness and spinning, my eyes fixed on the screen. This is a silent picture as if an old Biograph one, in which the actors are dressed in ridiculously old-fashioned clothes, and one flash succeeds another with sudden jumps.

The actors too seem to jump about and walk too fast. The shots themselves are full of dots and rays, as if it were raining when the picture was photographed. The light is bad.

It is Sunday afternoon, June 12th, 1909, and my father is walking down the quiet streets of Brooklyn on his way to visit my mother. His clothes are newly pressed and his tie is too tight in his high collar. He jingles the coins in his pockets, thinking of the witty things he will say. I feel as if I had by now relaxed entirely in the soft darkness of the theater; the organist peals out the obvious and approximate emotions on which the audience rocks unknowingly. 1 am anonymous, and T have forgotten myself. It is always so when one goes to the movies, it is, as they say, a drug.

My father walks from street to street of trees, lawns and houses, once in a while coming to an avenue on which a streetcar skates and gnaws. slowly progressing. The conductor, who has a handle-bar mustache, J1elps a young lady wearing a hat like a bowl with feathers on to the car.

She lifts her long skirts slightly as she mounts the steps. He leisurely makes change and rings his bell. It is obviously Sunday, for everyone is wearing Sunday clothes, and the streetcar's noises emphasize the quiet of the holiday. Is not Brooklyn the City of Churches? The shops are closed and their shades drawn , but for an occasional stationery store or drugstore with great green balls in

the window.

M y father has chosen to take this long walk because he likes to walk and think. He thinks about himself in the future and so arrives at the place he is to visit in a state of mild exaltation. He pays no attention to the houses be is passing, in which the Sunday dinner is being eaten, nor to the many trees which patrol each street, now coming to their fuJI leafage and the time when they will room the whole street in cool shadow. An occasional carriage passes, the horse's hooves falling like stones in the quiet afternoon, and once in a while an automobile, looking like an enonnous upholstered sofa. puffs and passes.

My father thinks of my mother, of how nice it will be to introduce her to his family. But he is not yet sure that he wants to marry her, and once in a while he becomes panicky about the bond already established.

He reassures himself by thinking of the big men he admires who are married: Wi!Jiam Randolph Hearst and William Howard Taft, who has just become President of the United States.

My father arrives at my mother's house. He has come too early and so is suddenly embarrassed. My aunt, my mother?s sister, answers the loud bell with her napkin in her hand. for the family is still at dinner. As my father enters, my grandfather rises from the table and shakes bands with him. My mother has run upstairs to tidy herself. My grandmother asks my father if he has had dinner, and tells him that Rose will be downstairs soon. My grandfather opens the conversation by remarking on the miJd June weather. My father sits uncomfortably near the table, holding his hat in his hand. My grandmother tells my aunt to take my father's hat.

My uncle, 12 years old, runs into the house, his hair tousled. He shouts

a greeting to my father , who has often given him a nickel, and then runs upstairs. It is evident that the respect in which my father is held in this household is tempered by a good deal of mirth. He is impressive. yet he is very awkward .

I I I I I I I I I I Finally my mother comes downstairs, all dressed up. and my father being engaged in conversation with my grandfather becomes uneasy, not knowing whether to greet my mother or continue lhe conversation. He gets up from the chair clumsily and says ·'hello'· gruffly. My grandfather watches, examining their congruence, such as it is. with a critical eye. and meanwhile rubbing his bearded cheek roughly, as he always does when he reflects. He is worried; he is afraid that my father will not make a good husband for his oldest daughter. At this point somethjng happens to the film. just as my father is saying something funny to my mother; I am awakened to myself and my unhappiness just as my interest was rising. The audience begins to clap impatiently. Then the trouble is cared for but the film has been returned to a portion just shown, and once more I see my grandfather rubbing his bearded cheek and pondering my father's character. It is difficult to get back into the picture once more and forget myself, but as my mother giggles 'at my father's words, the darkness drowns me.

M y father and mother depart from the house, my father shaking hands with my mother once more. out of some unknown uneasiness. I stir un easily also, slouched in the hard chair of the theater. Where is the older uncle, my mother's older brother'? He is studying in his bedroom upstairs. studying for his final examination at the College of the

City of New York, having been dead of rapid pneumonia for the last 21 years. My mother and father walk down the same quiet streets once more. My mother is holding my father's arm and telling him of the novel which she has been reading ; and my father utters judgments of the characters as the plot is made clear to him. This is a habit which he very much enjoys, for he feels the utmost superiority and confidence when he approves and condemns the behavior of other people. At times he feels moved to utter a brief "Ugh"whenever the story becomes what he would call sugary. This tribute is paid to his manliness. My mother feels satisfied by the interest which she has awakened; she is showing my father how intelligent she is, and how interesting.

They reach the avenue, and the streetcar leisurely arrives. They are going to Coney Island this afternoon, although my mother considers that such pleasures are inferior. She bas made up her mind to indulge only in a walk on the boardwalk and a pleasant dinner, avoiding the riotous amusements as being beneath the dignity of so dignified a couple.

My father tens my mother how much money he has made in the past week, exaggerating an amount which need not have been exaggerated.

But my father bas always felt that actualities somehow fall short. Suddenly I begin to weep. The determined old lady who sits next to me in the theater is annoyed and looks at me with an angry face, and being intimidated, I stop. I drag out my handkerchief and dry my face, licking the drop which has fallen near my lips.

Meanwhile I have missed something, for here are my mother and father alighting at the last stop, Coney Island.

in heated discussions of the subject, the whole matter ending in my father's announcement, made with a scornful bluster, that you have to die sooner or later anyway. On the boardwalk's Jlagpole, the American flag is pulsing in an intermittent wind from the sea.

My father and mother go to the rail of the boardwalk and look down on the beach where a good many bathers are · casually walking about.

A few are in the surf. A peanut whistle pierces the air with its pleasant and active whine, and my father goes to buy peanuts. My mother remains at the rail and stares at the ocean.

The ocean seems merry to her; it pointedly sparkles and again and again the pony waves are released.

She notices the children digging in the wet sand, and the bathing costumes of the girls who are her own age. My father returns with the peanuts. Overhead the sun's lightning strikes and strikes, but neither of them are at all aware of it. The boardwalk is full of people dressed in their Sunday clothes and idly strolling.

The tide does not reach as far as the boardwalk, and the strollers would feel no danger if it did. My mother and father lean on the rail of the boardwalk and absently stare at the ocean. The ocean is becoming rough; the waves come in slowly, tugging strength from far back. The moment before they somersault, the moment when they arch their backs so beautifully, showing green and white veins amid the black, that moment is intolerable. They finally crack, dashing fiercely upon the sand, actually driving, full force downward, against the sand, bouncing upward and forward, and at last petering out into a small stream which races up the beach and then is recalled. My parents gaze absentmindedly at the ocean, scarcely interested in its harshness. The sun overhead does not disturb them. But They walk toward the boardwalk, I stare at the terrible sun which breaks and my fath.er commands my mother up sight, and the fatal, merciless, to inhale the pungent air from the passionate ocean, 1 forget my parents. sea. They both breathe in deeply, I stare fascinated and finally, shocked both of them laughing as they do so. by the indifference of my father and They have in common a great interest mother, I burst out weeping once io health, although my father is more. The old. lady next to me pats strong and husky, my mother frail. me on the shoulder and says "There, Their minds are full of theories of there, all of this is only a movie, young ' what is good to eat and not good man, only a movie," but I look up to eat, and sometimes they engage once more at the terrifying sun and

•••••••••••

the terrifying ocean, and being unable to control my tears, I get up and go to the men's room, stumbling over the feet of the other people seated in my row.

I I I I I I I I I I When ( return, feeling as if I had awakened in· the morning sick for lack of sleep, several hours have apparently passed and my parents are riding on the merry-go-round.

My father is on a black horse, my mother on a white one, and they seem to be making an eternal circuit for the single purpose of snatching the nickel rings which are attached to the arm of one of the posts. A hand organ is playing; it is one with the ceaseless circling of the merry-goround.

For a moment it seems that they will never get off the merry-go-round because it will never stop. I feel like one who looks down on the avenue from the 50th story of a building. But at length they do get off; even the music of the hand organ has ceased for a moment. My father has acquired lO rings, my mother only 2, although it was my mother who really wanted them.

They walk on along the boardwalk as the afternoon descends by imperceptible "degrees into the incredible violet of dusk. Everything fades into a relaxed glow, even the ceaseless murmuring from the beach, and the revolutions of the merrygo-round. They look for a place to have dinner. My father suggests the best one on the boardwalk and my mother demurs, in accordance with her principles.

However they do go to the best place, asking for a table near the window, so that they can look out on the boardwalk and the mobile ocean.

My father feels omnipotent as he places a quarter in the waiter's hand as he asks for a table. The place is crowded and here too there is music, this time from a kind of string trio.

My father orders dinner with a fine confidence.

As the dinner is eaten, my father tells of his plans for the future, and my mother shows with expressive face how interested she is, and how impressed. My father becomes exultant. H e is lifted up by the waltz that is being played, and his own future

begins to intoxicate him. My father tells my mother that he is going to expand his business, for there is a great deal of money to be made. H e wants to settle d0\\11. After aiL he ts 29. he has lived by himself since he was 13, he is making more and more money. and he is envious of his married friends when he visits them in the cozy security of their homes, surrounded. it seems. by the calm domestic pleasures. and by delightful children, and then, as the waltz reaches the moment when all the dancers swing madly, then, then with awful daring, then he asks my mother to marry him, although awkwardly enough and puzzled. even in his excitement. at how he had arrived at the proposal. and she, to make the whole business worse, begins to cry. and my father looks nervously about, not knowmg at all what to do now. and my mother says: ·'I t's all J"ve wanted from the moment I saw you, .. sobbing, and he finds all of this very difficult, scarcely to his taste. scarcely as he had thought it would be. on his long walks over Brooklyn Bridge in the revery of a fine cigar. and it was then that I stood up in the theater and shouted: ''Don't do it.

It's not too late to change your minds. both of you. Nothing good will come of it, only remorse. hatred, scandal, and two children whose characters are monstrous." The whole audience turned to look at me, annoyed. the usher came hurrying down the aisle flashing his sea rchlight, and the old lady next to me tugged me down into my seat, saying: "Be quiet. You ·n be put out. and you paid 35 cents to come in ... And so I shut my eyes because I could not bear to see what was happening. I sat there quietly.

I I I I I I I I I I But after a\\hile I begin to take brief glimpses, and at length J watch again with thirsty interest. like a child who wants to maintatn his sulk although oflered the bribe of cand).

M y parents arc now having their picture taken in a photographer's booth along the boardwalk. The place is shadowed in the mauve light which is apparently necessary. The camera is set to the side on its tripod and looks like a M artian man. The photographer is instructing my parents in how to pose. My father has his arm over my

mother's shoulder, and both of them both go into a booth which is in a smile emphatically. The photographer way like the photographer's. since it brings my mother a bouquet of flowers is draped in black cloth and its light to hold in her hand but she holds it is shadowed. The place is too warm. at the wrong angle. Then the photog- and my father keeps saying this is rapher covers himself with the black all nonsense, pointing to the crystal cloth which drapes the camera and ball on the table. The fortuneteller, all that one sees of him is one protrud- a fat, short woman, garbed in what is ing arm and his hand which clutches supposed to be Oriental robes, comes the rubber baU which he will squeeze into the room from the back and when the picture is finally taken . But greets them. speaking with an accent. he is not satisfied with their appear- But suddenly my father feels that ance. He feels with certainty that the whole thing is intolerable; he somehow there is something wrong in tugs at my mother's arm, but my their pose. Again and again he issues mother refuses to budge. And then, from his hidden place with new in terrible anger, my father Jets go directions. Each suggestion merely of my mother's arm and strides out, makes matters worse. My father is leaving my mother stunned. She becoming impatient. They try a seated moves to go after my father. but the pose. The photographer explains that fortuneteller holds her arm tightly he has pride, he is not interested in and begs her not to do so. and I in all of this for the money, he wants my seat am shocked more than can to make beautiful pictures. M y father ever be said, for I feel as if I were says: '·Hurry up, will you? We walking a tightrope a 100 feet over haven ·t got all night." But the photog- a circus-audience and suddenly the rapher only scurries about apologeti- rope is showing signs of breaking. cally. and issues new directions. The and I get up from my seat and begin photographer charms me. 1 approve to shout once more the first words of him with all my heart, for ( know 1 can think of to communicate my just how he feels, and as he criticizes terrible fear and once more the usher each revised pose according to some comes hurrying down the aisle flashunknown idea of rightness. I become ing his searchlight, and the old lady quite hopeful. But then my father pleads with me, and the shocked says angrily: "Come on, you've had audience has turned to stare at me, enough time, we're not going to and I keep shouting: "What are they wait any longer.'" And the photog- doing? Don't they know what they rapher. sighing unhappily, goes are doing? Why doesn' t my mother back under his black covering, holds go after my father? If she does not out his hand, says: "One, two. three, do that, what will she do? Doesn't Now!"'. and the picture is taken, my father know what he is doing?"with my father's smile turned to a But the usher has seized my arm and grimace and my mother's bright and is dragging me away, and as he does false. It takes a few minutes for the so, he says: "What are you doing? picture to be developed and as my Don't you know that you can't do parents sit in the curious light they whatever you want to do? Why should become quite depressed. a young man like you. with your whole life before you. get hysterical I I I I I I I I I I like this? Why don't you think of They have passed a fortuneteller·s what you're doing? You can't act like booth. and my mother wishes to go this even if other people aren "t around! in. but my father does not. They You \viii be sorry if you do not do begtn to argue about it. M y mother what you should do. you can't carry becomes stubborn, my father once on like this, it is not right, you \viii more impatient, and then they begin find that out soon enough, everyto quarrel. and what my father would thing you do matters too much," like to do is walk off and leave my and he said that dragging me th rough mother there, but he knows that tha t the lobby of the theater into the cold would never do. M y mother refuses light. and I woke up into the bleak to budge. She is near to tears, but winter morning of my 21st birthday, she feels an uncontrollable desire to the window sill shining with its lip hear what the palm reader will say. of snow. and the morning already My father consents angrily, and they begun.

D

SCOBI OITI FOB IITGINUITY

Recently, 38 student teams from 31 universities in the United States, Canada and England gathered together on the sprawling grounds of Sandia Laboratories in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and displayed a vast array of strange contraptions they had designed. Made up of hoses, clamps, mirrors, converters, reflectors, duct~, tubes, propellers, cables, sails, meters, gauges and other odd bits and pieces of hardware, the devices demonstrated practical ways of harnessing energy from such unconventional

sources as the sun, the wind, the waves and waste materials: how to heat a house with parabolic solar collectors, how to light a seaside cottage with wave energy, how to run a film projector in a remote village on sugarcane, or how to make methane gas out of cow dung.

The occasion was the third contest sponsored by SCORE (for Student Competitions on Relevant Engineering), a nonprofit corporation whose aim is to encourage and financially assist the fledgling student in ventors. As Bob Coit, a member

of SCORE's advisory committee, says: "After aU, today's students will be tomorrow's engineers and scientists, and instead of just working on theoretical posers in classroom situations, they're getting a chance to actually tackle head-on some of the real problems plaguing us today." (Previous two SCORE competitions had students design safe, low-polluting automobiles and innovative firefighting apparatus.)

All the entries are judged for their applicability, efficiency, simplicity and cost. The grand

prize at the energy competition at the Sandia Grounds was bagged by the Illinois Institute of Technology team for its lightweight and efficient solar fiatplate collector system, which was one of more than two dozen entered in the competition. Its main virtue, said the judges, was its simplicity-it could be built and jnstalled by any homeowner. Team captain Jerry Aalam explained how the system worked : Panels coated with black velvet paint absorb the sun's heat and transfer it to water-filled copper tubes,

3

In an unusual contest, student engineers and scientists devise practical ways to tap energy from the sun, the wind and the waves.

l. Capable ofproviding space heat, cooling and electricity at home, the fiat-plate solar collector designed by the Illinois Institute ofTeclmology's team won the contest's grand prize. 2 & 6.

There were windmills by the dozen-conventional, winddriven mills, even combination solar-wind-powered devices. 3. Of all the alternative sources of energy at the comes/, this studem chose a most conventional method to cook lunch- a gas-heated stove. 4 & 5.

An unusual way ofproducing power came from the University of Houston. Here, team captain Ray Payne ( 4) shows how a 1rave-1ide mechanism powers a home: Sea water enters a holding tank, rushes down into a ~maller container ( 5), and spills over again to splash against and tum the blades of a turbine generator.

which carry the heated water to holding tanks, where it is stored •• for later use. The University . • !'......... . ., of California at Berkeley won the second prize for its solar flat-plate collectors, which used fluorescent tubing instead of plate glass covers- making them inexpensive and easy to repair.

In a way, however, mention of awards is misleading, for all . . . . . . . .. the entries are winners. "Before 1· an entry is accepted into the . . . . . . .. competition," Bob Coit notes, "the student team must prove to SCORE that its project is worthy of the organization's

financial assistance. So those teams that are accepted have already won what is probably the biggest prize of all-recognition of the value of their ideas."

Robert Schlesinger, a solar researcher at Cal Tech's Jet Propulsion Laboratories and a member of the "judging panel, also sees a value in the competition beyond the fact of coming in first, second or third. "This is sort of a seed-corn operation," be says. "It helps to show that, for the first time since the water wheel, an individual can produce his own energy."

0

.

SPAN MARCH 1979 .

by SANJEEV PRAKASH

Cecil B. DeMille's name has become permanent ly associated with the film genre of the vulgar and the spectacular that he helped to spawn. His first film, though, was a western called The Squaw Man, from a play on Broadway of the same name.

Made in 1913, it is notable for being one of the first featurelength films made in America. The year 1913 is extraordinary in the history of film for many other reasons: in India , Phalke made Raja Harishchandra. the first indigenous feature film; in America, a young vaudevillian by the name of Chaplin was persuaded to leave the stage for the slightly more lucrative film industry; in France, Georges Melies, pioneer of the dramatic film, was already nearing the eclipse of a meteoric career after making a series of films, full of brilliant invention. Two years later, D.W. Griffith was to make Birth of a Nation, thus delivering notice to the world that a new art form was in the throes of its creation.

Compared to these pioneers, the work of Cecil B. DeMille is unquestionably of lower stature- he was certainly no pioneer, except in such things as the use of megaphones on the set. But, to millions, he has become the archetypal H ollywood director; more people have seen his movies than ever heard the names

of Griffith or Lumiere; his name was "Above the Title" long before Frank Capra's. How did all this happen? Part of the reason may be that DeMille's personality happened to be the stuff of modern publicity myth; part of the reason is surely attributable to a natural nair for showmanship and a shrewd judgment of public tastes.

Cecil Blount DeMille, to give him his full name, was born in 1881 in a New York family of Dutch extraction. From the beginning, he was surrounded by the theater world-in particular, by the bustling world of early Broadway. H is father was a long-time associate of David Belasco, the most famous theatrical producer of his time. His mother ran an agency that provided young thespian talent to the professional stage. When Jesse Lasky and Sam Goldwyn were looking for someone to direct Dustin Farnum in the film of The Squaw Man, it was the mother that persuaded them to hire Cecil. He was then 31 years old, and a banker. This was not the end of his association with banks.

Some even say that he always considered making films and buying securities in the same light. It was DeMille who later convinced the Bank of America to invest money in films for the first time. So it was that the world of high finance entered film-

making, and thus started the process whereby many bankers pretended to be filmmakers. and many filmmakers turned to :>anking and related pursuits.

All this has not happened as yet. It is 1913. American filmnaking is still controlled from New York offices. Most of the 1LUdios are in New York as well, churning out two-reelers by the veek, to be projected in ramshackle balls known as '路nickeloleons路路 because entrance costs a nickel, i.e., five cents. Outdoor cenes are required for The Squaw Man. Along with a makeshift ~st and crew, DeMille leaves a cloudy New York winter for a tlace called Flagstaff, Arizona, in search of sunshine and fame. \t Flagstaff, the train stops for five minutes. DeMiJJe and his ameraman get off the train. They look around. and do not like hat they see-desert, scrub. little sign of human habitation, ,othing that appeals to DeMille's nascent film sense. When the thistle blows, they get back on the train, which finally carries ~em to Los Angeles. Then follows the famous cable to his ?OtlSors in New York: "Flagstaff no good our purpose have (Dted barn in place called Hollywood at $200 a month please ?nfiJ1!l regards DeMille."' The reply is said to have assented, ~t cautioned him against making a long commitment! It is

In the history of the cinema, few people have created such massive spectacle with such surefire box-office success as Cecil B. DeMille. He knew 'what the public wants' so well that he not only achieved personal success but laid solid foundations for an industry manufacturing dreams. known that DeMille was not the first to make films in H ollywood. The record shows that a few now-forgotten names had done this before him . But legend has it otherwise, and legend has persisted. It is tempting to think of Cecil B. D eMille setting up the capital of the American film industry singlehanded!

In a few years. there were many more barns in H ollywood, amid huge, rambling lots and the chaotic paraphernalia of equipment that is necessary to filmmaking. Hollywood was destined to become the film capital, not merely of America. but, for a time, of the world. It tempted the best- writers, directors, technicians. stars. It could afford them. The acknowledged masters of the time came to work there. Productions like Intolerance. and later Tire Ten Commandments, far surpassed, in scope, ambition. and extravagance, anything that had ever been attempted in the popular genre before. So Hollywood became the focus of a second gold rush, as Sutter路s mill had been the focus of the first, long years before Chaplin filmed his own Gold Rush. As Ernst Lubitsch put it: ''I"ve been to Paris, France, and I've been to Paris, Paramou nt. I think I prefer Paris, Paramount."'

Hollywood's big studios 11'ere miniature cities in their own SPAN MARCH 1979

4J

CEClL B. DEMILLE cominued

'Long after the award winners, great talents and celebrated artists are all forgotten . .. some people may still watch DeMille films, if only to discover the essential myths of our time.' right. each with its own galaxy of stars under contract. In many cases they were the results of mergers between small and still smaller companies. ln 1916 Lasky's Feature Play Company, whe re DeMille had directed over 20 films, combined with Famous Players under the aegis of Adolph Zukor, an early investor in the nickelodeon business. Zukor's shrewdness and ambition outmaneuvered and bought out a lot of his competition, ultimately gaining bold of Paramount Studios and assembling his considerable holdings under its banner. H e proceeded to bring over two famous directors from Europe- Joseph von Sternberg and Ernst Lubitsch - so that an unbroken chain of hits was ensured to the theate rs that he owned.

To an extent it was the witty, gentle, sex comedies of Lubitsch that began the Paramount " look," or style. Undoubtedly this " look,¡¡ which was to become the hallmark of pictures made at the studio. influenced many filmmakers, among them DeMille.

If Lubitsch introduced sex through discreet innuendo, however, DeMille did something that is more typically him, as evinced in the chain of early hits such as Male and Female, Adam's Rib, and Why Change Your W~fe? He opened to the world , as no one has, the interior of the American bathroom in all its glory.

Surely everyone has seen, in some Hollywood film or other, a beautiful woman lying languid in a huge bathtub, covered at strategic points by froth. The " bubble veil " idea dates back to DeMille, and lives on in countless subsequent films. At the time, these scenes blended ideally with the texture of high key lighting that Lubitsch delighted in. Undoubtedly, they were good for Paramount's sophisticated image. Essentially. though, they were a highly commercial D eMille idea.

Commerce was the keynote of all activities in Hollywood's early days. It was considered normal for a good director to make five or more films a year. This healthy climate enabled men like John Ford and Alfred Hitchcock to evolve and strengthen their art. H ere also, D eMille's brand of popular entertainment, linked to a banker's sense of opportunism and respect for profit, flouri shed . Film is a particularly commercial medium, and he who pays the piper generally likes to call the tune. For D eMille, this meant the realization that certain themes and treatments were virtually ensured a popular success because most people could ide ntify with, and a ppreciate them.

Most filmmakers try, at some point or the other, to discover this common ground ; few have succeeded as consistently as DeM ille. H is combinations of ham heroics, sentimental moraljty a nd barnstorming theatricalism were meant to meet precisely this aim, as Victorian theater and vaudeville had in an ea rlier generation. But in those ea rly days, the pecul iar contribution he is most re me mbered by- the genre of the cinema spectacle, with a cast of thousands- had not yet evolved.

Beside Lubitsch he had another, very unlikely influence.

D eMille came to Hollywood at the same time as a great innovator or the early cinema- D .W. Griffith. Creatively there is little ground for comparison between the two; equally clearly, D eMille had fa r better busin ess sense than Griffith, who ultimately died in near penury, alone and forgotten in a hotel in Los Angeles.

Griffith is commonly credited for evolving much of the film's 42

SPAN MARC H 1979

language a nd syntax. Quite apart from this, the mammoth sets and the armies of extras that a re conjured up by the words ¡'Cecil B. DeMille,., were first used in America by Griffith, in Birth of a Nation and intolerance. Afte r Griffith had conceived of the massive nature of these epic themes, he proceeded to execute them on the scale that they demanded. The spectacular success of Birth of a Nation was accompanied by charges of racism against Griffith ; this made him turn to the making of intolerance, meant to depict the repetition of human prejudice down the ages. The sets, the vast swee p and meticulousness with which this film was produced, were unprecedented. T o film a descending tracking sh ot, Griffith had a special elevator on wheels built in the studio, a precursor to the cine dolly. The intricate, abstract theme of the film was a failure at the box office.

Griffith's career e nte red its prolonged, tragic decline ; in a few

Abore: Gloria Swanson (center) get~ reat~l'j()r a s!tolt'er u-hile Julia Faye ( lejr) and Edna Mae Cooper ll'tllclt in Male and Female.

Left: H.B. Womer as Jesus C!trisr. Julia Faye as Virgin Mary. and Ernesr Torrance as S r. Perer 111 King of Kmgs. Lej r. below: Elli01 De.u er and Pauline Garon suring on a dinosaur sk eleton in Adam·s Rib.

years his name was virtually unknown in Hollywood. But these two films - Birth ofa Nation and Intolerance- are the foetus. the skin-and-bones of DeMille ·slater spectaculars.

In the twenties carne the establishment of citizen's committees to protest against H ollywood's "immorality," and the subsequent institution of censorship. Previously, the studios had alone made the decision on where to draw the line. This self-policing system. apart from helping D eMille·s success, also g.tve us the numerous masterpieces of the early silent cinema. To DeMille, the new restrictions meant the elimination of certain highly commercial themes from his checklisl.

The early twenties saw DeMille well established at Paramount. He bad a virtual carte blanche at the studio to make whatever he considered potentially successful. H e was given control over the production and publicity of his own fllms.

In 1917 he had already made Joan the Woman, one of the first color films, in which each frame was meticulously colored by hand. He had pioneered, so we are told, the use of the camera boom (after the Griffith elevator), the megaphone on set, and the ubiquitous director's chair. These are not intrinsically important things to list, but they are the bits and pieces from which myths are made. They are still quoted as being his inventions, when they are neither real inventions nor in most cases his own original ideas. What we can infer from this is that by this time DeMille had gone a long way toward building a popular myth around himself.

S_o, in 1923, DeMille turned to religious themes, with the making of The Ten Commandments. No one had spent more on a film, nor ever before had a film been so palpably lavish to look at.

And which committee or organization dared object to the morals of the Bible? That the camera lingers on the orgy around the golden calf while Moses is receiving the Commandments on the mountain was a small matter. The film was an immediate commercial success, but Zukor fired D eMille from Paramount for going way beyond his budget. After a few films made elsewhere, and an abortive attempt to set up a studio on his o\vn, DeMille returned, reconciled, to Paramount. He was to work

there, his output diminishing but not curtailed, till his death in 1959.

The best known films of the later years, King of Kings.

Reap the Wild Wind, The Greatest Show on Earth, and the 1956 remake of The Ten Commandments. in widescreen and color are still showing to audiences around the world. In his own work: his lavishness was certainly vindicated- the more money he spent on a film, the more it seemed to earn.

The Ten Commandmems has been followed by a long chain of spectacle movies, most of which attempt to out-DeMille DeMille. H oll~wood has been responsible for a great many of these. In executton, they use the same lavish excesses that DeMille was fon? of. For publicity, they use the same adjectives and superlattves that DeMille bludgeoned the critical faculties with.

Among his imitators, we must surely place the slicker mythological fi lms turned out by Bombay and Madras that have become an exciting popular genre ; whatever their value as art, solid entertainment is worth many a trip to the movies. But it is a DeMille recipe that they follow. If in contrast, DeMille's locales, stories and characters come off looking more authentic than the rest, this is because they are. His research into military uniforms was so authentic that the U.S. Air Force asked him to design their uniforms. In his films, one senses a delight in staging spectacle for its own sake. The religious milieus undoubtedly help in creat ing universal appeal. As for the moral sententiousness- well. you can take it or leave it.

The critics of his time loved to deride D eMille; rarely did one of his film s get an appreciative review. The early film critics belonged to a literary world, and could not reconcile themselves to the cinema as primarily a popular, low-brow medium. Their elitist criteria often missed the point completely: they have been known to disparage the work of John Ford, which, in retrospect, appear~ a bold and classical example of the filmic art. But DeMille's blatant love of publicity, and his ringmaster's sense of showmanshi p ignored the critic·s prejudice. As proof there is this virtually unbeatable record: of his 70 odd films, merely one or two failed at the box office. With a record like that, he can be forgiven for not paying much attention to critics.

Since World War II , with the emergence of a new group of critics steeped in the cinema, the judgment on DeMille has been revised. In the sixties, came a general reappraisal of the commercial film, accompanied by the reverence of the French directorcritics for such auteurs as Alfred Hitchcock and Howard Hawks, solid bastions of American commercialism. No less a critic than Andrew Sarris, in his critical history of the American cinema, then wrote about DeMille: '·He may have been the last American director who enjoyed telling a story for its own sake:· DeMille is said to have once told a collaborator, ..Don ·t tell me what the truth is. Leave it to me. I know what the public wants." He didn ·t give a damn about truth. or even art. But he did know. perhaps better than anyone else, what the majority of his middle American audience wanted to see on the screen. That much is inscribed in each of those 70 films.

I saw The Ten Commandmellls, still running after 20 years, the other day. And I thought to myself that long after the award :vtnners, great ~alents, and celebrated artists are ali forgotten, tn future centunes when filmmaking has become a forgotten art, and no_t many people_go to the movies any more, some people may sull watch DeMille films, if only to discover the essential 0 myths of o ur time.

About the Author : Sanjee1• Prakash is an economics graduare turned filmmaker. He has made several short films. some on adult education and others documeming old Indian rradirions. He also 1rrites on the cinema.

SPA/\ MARC H 19?9

43

ONIHE LIGHTER SIDE

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JAGANNATHAN : Mr. Garten, F/1 begin with a quesrion on America's trade policy. in my judgment, the U.S. Administration is well ahead of Congress in trade liberalization. Tlze Congressional aLtitude on 1his issue has been. if l may say so, negarive.

The additional powers gil'en to the Congress by the Trade Act of 1974 seem to me to make it difficult for Lite Administration to push for a freer world trade regimen.

What's your view?

GARTEN : The role of Congress bas

always been central to trade policy in the United States. As you know, the Constitution gives Congress the sole power to regulate international commerce. So, the Trade Act doesn't necessarily give Congress more Constitutional power.lt merely updates its role vis-a-vis the increasing complexities of international trade, such as the regulation of nontaritf barriers.

The problem is, Congress sees the United States as giving more than it is gettin~ in trade negotiations. 1 think that is the major source of problems.

Look at the heavy subsidizations going on in developing countries and developed countrjes. Look at some of the so-called ·'advanced" developing countries that want preferences on the one hand but

refuse to dismantle their very high trade barriers on the other. I think that if the Administration comes up with a balanced package that gives the United States as much as it is giving away, there won't be any problem in bringing Congress along. There will, of course, be a heated debate. There always is. But that's really the strength of our system.

of individual goremme111s, including the Unired States, raking steps which are blatantly protectionist. Take shoes. for example. Taiwan and Korea suffer because some safeguards rule is raised in the Congress. and the Presidem is obliged to negotiate "voluntary" quotas and to get o1•er more severe staturory quotas. Take textiles. take steel. The impacr on del•eltJping countries of Western protectionism JAGA NNATHAN: The Tokyo Round of is a major problem for these countries.

Multilateral Trade Negotiations ( MTN) Would you agree? in Geneva has been grappling with trade GARTEN: Let me take one question at problems. One difficulty wirh the Tokyo a time. You say that the MTN couldn't Round is that it couldn't have come at a have come at a worse time. 1 would say worse moment. On general principles and that it came at the best time. Had the on a long-rerm view everybody is for negotiations not been going on, the kind freer trade. But currently, politicians are of protectionism you would have seen up against the social consequences of would have dwarfed anything that you domestic unemployment, inadequate think exists right now. The MTN has growth, inflation and so on. This has led been a major stabilizmg force, for while to a kind of atavistic relapse into pro- the world has been in a very deep recession, tectionism and even mercantilism. One the show went on. Trade has increased dfsconcerling aspect of this has been that rather substantially. The rate of increase protectionist barriers againsr the exports is decreasing, but it is still up. ofdeveloping countries are rising in Europe For an idea of the trade gains that the and the United States just when rhey are developing ·cou ntries have made in recent beginning to acquire some industrial and years, just look at South Asia , Southeast manujarturing sophistication.

Asia and Northeast Asia. You will set 1 could quote any number of instances some of the highest growth rates of trade

INDIA, AMERICA AND INTERNATIONAl TRADE N.S. J AGANNATHAN INTERVIEWS JEFFRE Y GARTEN

Jeffrey Garten (left), who was till recently an adviser to the U.S. State Department on international economic issues, discusses protectionist trends in the world economy and Indo-U.S. economic relations with N.S. Jagannathan, Assistant Editor of The Statesman.

SPAN MARCH 1979

45

INDIA. AMERICA AND INTERNATIONAL TRADE continued

that the world has ever seen in these areas. Why, the figures are I7 per cent and 18 per cent in some cases.

Secondly. the question of protectionism in the United States and in Europe: Let me start by saying that l think you are absolutely right that the tmposition of new trade barriers, sometimes very subtle barriers, is one of the major international economic problems that we all face.

However, it is a trend that is not at all unique to the developed countries. Why ts it that in India you can't import consumer goods? Why is it that l only see three kinds of automobiles? So it 's a problem that we've all got. I think it may get a little worse, over the next year, but thereafter it's going to get better.

For what has happened is that the normal protectionist pressures which are always there have been exacerbated by some genuine efforts to restructure economies, and there needs to be some time bought while this goes on. I am not excusing what is going on. All 1 am saying is that it is bound up with a very large adjustment process which happens to include some of the inoustries that developing countries are particularly competitive in. But over

AMERICA AND THE TOKYO ROUND President Jimmy Carter has notified Lhe U.S. Congress of his intent to enter into a series of international trade agreements that are expected to result from the Tokyo Round of Multilateral Trade Negotiations (MTN) in Geneva. ··we have an important opportunity this year to build a new and better approach to international trade," Mr. Carter said in a formal message to Congress recently.

The proposed agreements establish new international trading rules to be enforced under the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT). They deal primarily with nontarilf trade matters-such as subsidies and countervailmg duties. safeguards, technical barriers to trade, discriminatory government procurement practices, customs valuation and licensing procedures that impede world trade.

Negotiators in Geneva are also seeking to conclude a series of taritr agreements that could reduce import duties worldwide by as much as 30 to 35 per cent. The tariff negotiating authority through 1980 is granted to th!!

President under the 1974 Trade Act and does not require implementmg legislation from Congress.

The President said in his January 4 message that he is confident the Tokyo Round agreements " will embody the U.S. objectives out-

46

SPAN MARCH 1979

The question of protectionism. The the long run. the readjustment process will benefit them. real issue is: How do we get out of it?

As for the United States, I think you It seems to me that as the world comes use the term ··protectionist., exceedingly out of recession, increased growth is loosely in the examples that you men- going to help a lot. The adjustment tioned. Safeguard action is not a pro- policies that we talked about will help tectionist action. Safeguard action is in- a loL The third leg of this is that developing scribed in international trade law. Every countries, which certainly have been country is entitled to use it when there is among the hardest hit, have also got to a sudden surge of imports that is dis- look at each other's markets. One of locating, so long as it is temporary. Jf the causes of protectionism is that there you look at the quotas on shoes. not has been a penetration of certain markets only were they made with the agreement in certain product lines. A handful of of Taiwan and Korea, but there is a very five or six developing countries that fixed time limit on it. So that's not the account for something like 75 per cent same thing as an action that shot some- of all the trade and manufactures from thing out of the market. developing countries have all gone into the developed country markets. It seems JAGANNATHAN : Almos! el'en• such to me the answer over the longer term action could be a matter of s~mantic is that efforts from developing countries dispulc- whe1her it is safeguard action have got to be spread around a little or simply protectionist. more. Some pressures would then ease.

GARTEN : But it is appropriate in this particular instance, because I happen to JAGANNATHAN: One other point on have been involved in those decisions protectionism. Sometimes administrations and I know that it is a temporary action. that are themselves enlightened and anxious ff it had really been a protectionist action, to dismantle protectionist barriers run up it wouldn't have been aimed just at against opposition from organized labor.

Trade unions think that jobs are being Taiwan and Korea.

lined by Congress in the Trade Act of 1974;' which authorized U.S. participation in the MTN. "Neither Bob [Robert S.] Strauss, my Special Trade Representative, nor I will accept anything Jess," he added.

Ambassador Strauss termed the accords "the first major effort"' by the world's trading nations to regulate nontarilf barriers. ·This is an historic effort," he noted. ··we won't be able to cure all the problems related to trade. but we can assure that it be conducted more fairly and openly, by reducing the competitive disadvantages which increasing government intervention in world markets creates."

Some 98 nations are participating in the Geneva negotiations. In addition to the United States. these include members of the European Community, Canada. Japan and other industrialized and developing countries that together account for the bulk of world trade, now estimated to exceed $1,000,000 million.

The 1974 Trade Act requires the President to give Congress 90 days advance notice of his intent to formally accept any new international agreements that might reduce the incidence or impact of nontarilf barriers to trade.

Thus, by sending this notification to Congress in early January, the President has made it possible for his negotiators to register the United States' formal acceptance of the Tokyo Round package by April 5, 1979. Promptly thereafter, draft legislation will be submitted to Congress seeking final approval of the agreements and the enactment of domestic

Ia ws to implement them.

By April of this year, U.S. officials say. the Geneva negotiators hope to hammer out final texts of the agreements. taking into account a number of special issues-including how the needs and interests of developing countries can be met. Administration officials further plan to consult with spokesmen for industry, agriculture, organized labor and other influential U .S. groups regarding the substance of the agreements.

The most important-and one of the most controversial-of the proposed new codes deals with subsidies and countervailing duties, U.S. officials say.

The United States has long sought greater international discipline over the use of export subsidies. u.s. officials contend that importing countries should have the right to impose special duties on imported goods that benefit from such subsidies.

The President's notification to Congress noted significantly that "domestic implementation of such an accord may also create an opportunity to streamline U.S. domestic procedures" relating to the imposition of countervailing duties.

U.S. officials also regard the Tokyo Round elfort to negotiate a new international code on ··safeguard" actions as critical to the overall package of agreements. The U.S. objective here. according to the President's message. is to "ensure that countries observe international trading rules when temporarily limiting imports that are injuring domestic industries."

0

lost as a result of imports. The first point I wish co nwke 1s that studies made in the United States and in Europe hal'e shown that loss of jobs consequent on imports particularly ji-om the developing countries and in items like shoes and textiles- is quite insignificant and could be more than made up by the generation of economic activity in other areas. or by mo~·ing labor o~·er to other areas where they could be retrained and redeployed.

The real difficulty, it seems to me, is that many of the industries that seek protection are decaying industries; the "infant industry" argument that once used to he invoked to make protectionism respectable is now turned upside down, and used to protect old and decaying industries. If the principle of dynamic economic de~·elop­ ment operates, shouldn't labor be moving away from these aged industries? Shouldn't items like textiles and shoes be turned over to developing countries, and the developed countries concemrate on more sophisticated areas? Because pr£•sidents and prime ministers have to depend upon labor votes, they are obliged to a(Jandon the logic of international trade of which they are themselves convinced.

GARTEN: r agree with you. In theoretical terms, the gains from trade liberalization far outweigh the liabilities or dislocations caused by imports. Everyone who has looked at the situation agrees With that.

On the other hand, governments don't make policies strictly on theory. 1 don't think it's so much a question of labor unions. Administrations see it as the tragedy of people who are out of work

and who, in the real world, are not so easily trainable. or relocated easily. Jf you look at the textile industry, for example, without doubt many parts of it ought to be phased out. Everyone agrees on that. But tell a woman who is 65 years old that she should be trained and moved to another part of the country. Tell a community which is based on one textile mill that it is uneconom1c-al there and should be shifted to another country.

JAGANNATHAN: Hm1 does the Carter Administration vieu the North-South problems- and negotiations ar forums like UNCTAD? Is there any difjerence be1ween the attitude ofthe present and past Administrations /() issues like commodity trade and debt relief?

GARTEN: On commodities, l wouldn't put it so much m terms of a difference m approach between the Carter Administration and the Ford Administration.

1 would rather discus~ it 111 terms of how U.S. policy has evolved. For I think that the situation has changed significantly from the time the issue first came up in internatiOnal forums. At first the United States was certainly very skeptical about the establishment or commodity arrangements. It remains skepticaL although now much more on technical grounds than on grounds of what would be desirable. So. what started as a relatively negative reaction across the board has now emerged into one of sympathy with the goals of developing countries, to the extent that those goals mean stabilizing commodity prices rather

than artificially ra1smg them. And 1t 's making an effort on both the Common Fund and some of tbe individual commodity discussions such as rubber to come up with satisfactory arrangements.

JAGANNATHAN: How near are the attitudes of the Group of 77 and th£' United Staws? What are rhe residual areas oj d1sagreemem on commodities?

GARTEN: It's very difficult to say what the Group of 77 believes. because at the level of generality they operate it's impossible either to agree or disagree.

1 don't know whether their position now is that commodity arrangements ought to stabilize prices and not raise them above normal levels. I think it depends on whom you talk to. But to the extent that their position is to stabilize prices on that gut issue. l think there is a prett)' close agreement in principle between the United States and the Group of 77. There are some disagreements, about which commodities to stabilize and how they are to be financed.

JAGANNA1HAN : Is t/le United Swtes agre(Jable to a Common Fund for all commodities?

GARTEN: 1 think it agrees in principle to a financial mechanism which would help finance individual buffer stocks.

The deta1ls of that are being negotiated.

JAGANNATHAN: Has the United States mm•ed away }rom the position that these things have got to be decided by indi\lidual comrnodity boards? Does it now accept

SPA!\ MARC H 1979

47

INDIA, AMERICA AND INTERNATIONAL TRADE continued

the principle of commonality?

GARTEN: My impression is that the United States accepts the principle of commonality. but this is strictly supplementary to the resources of the individual funds. The Common Fund would not be the principal source of financing; under any circumstances. It is supplementary, but the burden of financing still rests with each indiv1dual commodity agreement.

JAGANNATHAN: How does the United Stales view the Indian economy's performance and its relationship with the UniLed States in economic matters?

GARTEN: 1 think first of all that the Un1ted States sees India as a very major country in the international economy for a number of reasons. One is that it is a powerful country. What it does and doesn't do can have significant international repercussions. The way India develops will have enormous impact all over Asia. The way you manage your human resources, the number of students you have abroad. their impact-all of these are tremendous factors in the world economy.

Secondly, I think that there is more opumism about India's future than I've seen in a long while in the United States.

Not just because of the recent good harvests. and the accumulation of foreign exchange reserves, but because of a feeling thai India is in its own way developing in a more balanced way than most people would have thought a couple of years

ago. In several sectors, India is becoming a panner of the United States and of the Western world. India's interests are coming very close to Western interests in terms of transfer of technology, and very significantly, in terms of international trade. The recent liberalization of India's trade regime received tremendous support from the United States and there are hopes that this kind of thing can be emulated in other developing countries.

In sum, the United States sees India as a leader of the Third World, and not just in a political sense but also as an "upper tier" developing country. How trade relationships and investment relationships work out on an international scale with India's involvement is going to have large implications for developing countries in Asia and Latin America.

And so there is a tremendous amount of interest in the United States in developing closer cooperative ties with Indiawithout any illusions that these are always going to be smooth.

non-Communist world-we have an obligation to so many to keep our economy open and to keep it healthy. That I think is the single most important thing that we can do for India- to fashion the kind of adjustment policies that will prevent protectionist pressures such as those you were talking about earlier. We can't single out ll1dia by expanding preferences or something of that sort-I don't think that's the answer at all.

On the Indian side what would be most useful is for India to continue the trend of close consultation on a variety of economic issues even when we are going in opposite directio,ns. Secondly, in the multilateral areas, India could try to bring other developing countries to assume the same attitude of ·looking at things in a nonideological way and solving practical economic problems, whether it is technology transfer, trade liberalization, or channeling more iinance to developing countTies. India's leadership role in multilateral areas should ultunately pay divi0 dends in the bilateral area as well.

JAGANNATHAN: What in your view, should India do to make Indo- U.S. economic relations more creative and fruitful? 4 nd what should the United States be doin~ for the same purpose?

GARTEN: Let me address the U.S. side of the relationship. For the United States, bilateral economic relationships may be secondary almost in every case to its multilateral economic policy. Since we are the principal trading partner to so many countries- if not almost aU irt the

SPAN.

Jeffrey E. Garten was till recently a tkputy directo'r in the policy and pianning staff of the U.S. Slate Department and a senior adviser on internatio!Ull trade, investment, foreign assistance, and energy. He is now a business executive.

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COIJIJUIITY OF TOIJOBBO\V Walt D isney's last and greatest dream, EPCOT, is a project that will never be completed- because Disney wanted it that way. As an Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow, it will be a "community continually in a state of becoming ... always 25 years Top: Scale model of EPCOT shows the giant golden geodesic dome housing ahead of its times."

Located in the heart of the the Future World section in the 27,400-acre Walt Disney World foreground and the pavilions of various site near Orlando in Flor\da, nations for the World Showcase surrounding the lagoon in the distance.

EPCOT will be a vast showplace Above: Disney audio-animatronics will for the concepts of tomorrow and present American philosophers the nations of today. The project (from left to right) Will Rogers, Mark will consist of two major theme Twain and Benjanzin Franklin as hosts areas: Future World and World of the American Adventure section.

Right. abo1â&#x20AC;˘e: An artist's concept of the Showcase.

Future World will present the Mexican pavilion. Right: The Space systems, technologies and chal- Pa1â&#x20AC;˘ilion is depicted as a spectacular lenges of tomorrow with imagina- space vehicle where guests will experience tively planned sections on space, through special effects the thrills ofa sea, land, transportation, energy "future" journey into outer space. and health. World Showcase will focus on the culture and accom- tion of America.

EPCOT is scheduled to open plishments of different countries. on October 1, 1980-11 years to Acting as a gateway between the the day after Walt Disney World two sections will be American was inaugurated.

Adventure, a panoramic presenta-