SPAN: September 1978

Page 1

NEW SCIENCE

OFBIRTH

ALSO IN THIS ISSUE:

JACOB BRONOWSKI'S ~HE ASCENT OF MAN IMMIGRANTS TODAY SAN 4ACOBY



SPAN

A LITTER FROM THE PUBLISHER The first Monday in September is Labor Day in the United States. Every year, the President issues a proclamation declaring this day to be a holiday in honor of the working men and women of America, who are the mainstay of the economy. Labor unions hold parades and mass rallies; there are family pIcnics and reunions; sports events and social parties are popular. Stores advertise Labor Day sales to mark the end of the summer season, the beginning of autumn. Labor Day means back to work for vacationers. We mark Labor Day this year with an article on workers' participation in Amencan business. The author, Max Ways, pO,intsout that there is a worldwide movement to give labor a larger role in the management of their work. In European countries, the approach is to have workers serve on management boards, and be involved in policy decisions. But in the United States, worker participation in management is at a more fundamental level, that of shop and office. The worker participation movement, he believes, is an inevitable result of advanced economic development. The Industrial Revolution of the 18th and 19th centuries led to increased productivity and efficiency through specialization of production. But it also created the disturbing universal phenomenon of the mechanized worker, suffering from boredom and frustration. ' But the 20th century technological revolution, Mr. Ways argues, has had quite different consequences. It has been one of tremendous growth, change, complexity, and sophistication. The problem now is how to make sure that workers do not become mere unthinking cogs in a machine, but act as informed, alert, creative individuals. The American solution has been to distribute authority and responsibility widely through all levels of the work force. He cites many instances of American businesses that have upgraded jobs and workers, involved them in the operations-and increased productivity for the firm, job satisfaction for the workers. There is good historical precedent for this self-enlightened humane approach to both work and the worker. The historian Daniel Boorstin, writing on the novel U.S. rationalization of produ<;tion in the mid-19th century, ascribes its success to the high quality of the available work force-the large number of educated and adaptable workers .. Such workers are a tradition in the United States-they are now proving themselves capable of managing the complicated machinery and processes of the technological revolution. Boorstin also points out that much of the new work force for American industry consisted of women-and that the industrial revolution would have been impossible if educated women had not been available. Similarly, the human resources expert, Eli Ginzberg, who has visited many developing countries, including India, has said that he judges the probability of successful development by two criteria: What is the role of women in the economy? And what is the role of minority groups? These very questions have been a matter of enormous concern ill the United States since the end of World War II. A problem with which the American government and people have been struggling has been how to upgrade the skills of minority group members who have been at an educational disadvantage for many years-principally blacks. One "affirmative action" was to attempt to set aside special quotas for minority group applicants to universities. But American public opinion has been divided as to the wisdom of such special treatment-implying as it does a kind of "reverse discrimination" against those who do not belong to the minority groups concerned. Against this background, we believe that the recent deciSIOnby the U.S. Supreme Court in the Bakke case, described on pages 2-3, will be of considerable interest to many of our readers. _ Perry L. Peterson Acting Publisher

Septemba

Helping Minorities: How Far Can Government Go?

4 5 10 14

Worker Participation-The

American Way

by Max Ways

l8 20 26 29 34 36

New Science of Birth by Jean Seligmann, Mariana Gosnell and Dan Shapiro

39 40 45

Defending Against Terrorism by Robert H. Kupperman and Harvey A. Smith

49 Front cover: This newborn's lusty yell dramatizes the revolution in the science of childbirth in the United States. New drugs, instruments and techniques have made childbirth safer than ever before. See story on pages 36-38. Back cover: A sleek high-speed Amtrak train shoots off from Washington. Set up by the U.S. Government in 1971, Amtrak has helped revive the rail industry. See page 49... JACOB SLOAN, Editor; JAY W. GiLDNER, Publisher. Managing Editor: Chidananda Dasgupta. Assistant Managing Editor: S.R. Madhu. Editorial Staft': Krishan Gabrani, Aruna Dasgupta, Nirmal Sharma, Murari Saha, Rocque Fernandes. Art Director: Nand Katyal. Art Staft': Gopi Gajwani, B. Roy Choudhury, Kanti Roy. Chief of Production: Awtar S. Marwaha. Photo Editor: Avinash Pasricha. Photographic Services: ICA Photo Lab. Published by the International Communication Agency, American Center, 24 Kasturba Gandhi Marg, New Delhi 110001, on behalf of the American Embassy, New Dell;ri.The opinions expressed in this magazine do not necessarily reflect the views or policies of the United States Government. Printed by Aroon Purie at Thomson Press (India) Limited, Faridabad, Haryana. Photographs: Front cover-Mike Mitchell. Inside front cover-Leo Touchet and David Moore, courtesy Exxon USA. 21 left-courtesy U.S. National Park Service; right-Joe Monroe. 24-25 top-Corcoran Art Gallery. Washington; bottom (2)-National Gallery of Art, Washington. 26-27 (clockwise from top)-Chuck Feil (3); James R. Holland, Black Star; Martin Alder Levick, Black ¡Star. 28-James R. Holland. 31- Frank Siteman, Stock Boston. 32-33Ellis Herwig, Stock Boston; Charles Gatewood; Richard Kalvar, Magnum. 34-K.N. Raghavendra Rao. 37-Mike Mitchell. 49 & back cover- Robert R:ithe except 491"'nter right by ~obert Freedman.

I

Use of SPAN articles in other publications is encouraged, except when copyrighted. For permission, write to the Editor. Price of magazine: one year's subscription (12 issues), 18 rupees; single copy. 2 rupees 50 paise. Fonhange of address~ send an old address from a recent SPAN envelope along with new address to A.K. Mitra. Circulation Manager. SPAN Magazihe, 24 Kasturba Gandhi Marg, New Delhi 11000 L (See change of address form on page 48.)


AMERIC,A:S BAKKE CASE

HElPING MINORITIES: HOW FAR CAN GOVERNMENT GOil Alan Bakke is white. He is also tall, blond, blue-eyed, and 38 years old. He has a nice home, two lovely children, a master's degree in engineering, a prestigious job as aerospace engineer with NASA (U.S. National Aeronautics and 'Space Administration). Till recently, Bakke seemed well on his way to a career of comfort and anonymity as a scientist. He has however become the central figure in the biggest civil rights controversy in the United States in a quarter century. Bakke decided late in life that he would rather be a doctor-the effects of space fligpt on the human body fascinated him. Five years ago, in 1973, he applied for admission to several medical schools including the University of California at Davis. He failed to get a seat, tried again the following year, and again failed. The Davis school had reserved 16 of its 100 seats for minorities in consonance

with nationwide programs to improve the status of those who have been discriminated against in the past. One effect of this quota was that a few successful black applicants were less qualified than some unsuccessful white applicants. Bakke, who failed to get a seat, had greater merit than some who did. Bakke sued the University of California, charging that the school's special program for minorities violated the equal rights guaranteed to him under the American Constitution's 14th Amendment. The California State Supreme Court ruled in favor of Bakke. The Davis school appealed, and the case came up before the U.S. Supreme Court. At issue before America's highest law court was a seemingly simple but actually complicated question: Is it fair for colleges to give blacks (and other minorities) preferential treatment to remedy past discrimination against them? Or should

such institutions be color-blind? At stake was the entire principle of "affirmative action" -the principle under which, over the past decade, American schools, colleges, business firms and government have provided special opportunities to minorities to catch up and compete with more privileged groups. On June 28, the Supreme Court delivered its judgment on the most publicized civil rights case since the 1954 ruling that outlawed school desegregation. The nine judges produced six separate opinions nmning to 154 pages, and offered what some critics described as "a Solomonic compromise." By a 5-to-4 verdict, the Court ruled that rigid admission quotas based solely on race are forbidden, that Bakke had suffered illegal discrimination and should be admitted by Davis school. However, by another 5-to-4 verdict, the Court held that race might legitimately be one element in judging students for admis-


sion to universItIes. Thus America's highest court implicitly approved of the principle of affirmative action. On the surface, the Supreme Court decision was a victory for Bakke, and a symbolic triumph for all those who believe they have been harmed by special preferential programs for blacks and other minorities. But it was also, experts say, a substantial victory for civil rights forces. What were the arguments of the judges? Justice Lewis Powell, who cast a pivotal vote in both verdicts, said that the language of Title VI of the 1964 U.S. Civil Rights Act-which prohibits racial dis'crimination in any program receiving Federal funds-is "majestic in its sweep." "No person in the United States shall, on grounds of race, color, or national origin, be excluded from participation in any program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance." The Davis school's program, Powell said, violated this provision: Bakke had been excluded from the Davis medical school because of his race. Justice Powell also held that many ethnic groups can claim varying degrees of past discrimination: Davis was unable to explain why it had singled out certain groups, such as Negroes, Mexican Americans and Asians, for special favor. He said that Davis could correct its unconstitutional program by following policies established at Harvard University, which attempts to recruit a diverse student body without fixing rigid racial quotas. Race is a factor-so is geographical location or athletic or artistic ability. "In such an admissions program," Powell said, "race or ethnic background may be deemed a 'plus' in a particular applicant's file, yet it does not insulate the individual from comparison with all other candidates for the available seats." Justice Harry A. Blackmun underscored the "central meaning" of the Court's verdicts: "Government may take race into account when it acts not to demean or insult any racial group but to remedy disadvantages cast on minorities by past racial prejudice." In an opinion that was totally unequivocal, Justice Thurgood Marshall, the only black member of the Supreme Court, said the Court should have upheld the quota system to compensate for the support the law had given to racial discrimination in the past. "During most of the past 200 years," he argued, "the Constitution, as interpreted by this court, did not prohibit the most ingenious and pervasive forms of discrimination against the Negro." When a government agency tries to make up for the "legacy of discrimination," Justice Marshall wrote, "I cannot believe that this same Constitution stands as a barrier." Re ••ctions to the Supreme Court decision on the Bakke case reflected joy,

relief, dismay, bewilderment. Perhaps the meaning of the judgment was best summed up by The New York Times in a telling metaphor: "Minorities may be helped through the doors of opportunity but not through a separate door that is racially reserved for them alone." Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz described the decision as "an act of judicial statesmanship." The president of the American Council on Education, Jack Peltason, said: "The main thing is that the Court left open the option to colleges and universities to contInue the progress we've been making toward a more diverse student body." Time maga-

'Government may take race into account when it acts not to demean or msult any racial group but to remedy disadvantages cast on minorities by past racial prejudice.' -Justice Harry A. Blackmun zine commented·, "Bakke was .not a sweeping decision resounding with memorable phrases. If no hosannas were being sung in the streets, there were widespread signs of relief." Some experts found fault with the Supreme Court for not coming to grips with various aspects of the "affirmative action" program. "It was a landmark occasion but the Court failed to produce a landmark decision," said Yale law professor Bruce Ackerman. Blacks and civil rights activists were divided in their opinion. The Rev. Jesse Jackson, Chicagobased civil rights leader, described the ruling as "a devastating blow to our civil rights struggle, though not a fatal one." On the other hand, William Raspberry, popular black columnist of The Washington Post, said the Court's ambiguity was most welcome. Vernon Jordan, director of the Urban League, said the most important aspect of the Bakke case was that a majority of the Court had backed the use of race as a permissible factor in affirmative action programs. Joseph Rauh, vice-president of the Americans for Democratic Action (ADA), said: "The Supreme Court's decision that race is a proper factor in admissions decisions is the legal concrete on which further affirmative action progress can be made." How does the Supreme Court decision on the Bakke case affect the future of blacks in the United States? The immediate impact is seen only in the area of education: admission quotas for blacks or other minorities are no longer permissible. But the decision does not disturb other affirmative action-such as

employment programs of government or business corporations that favor blacks. There are more than 100 government programs that give special grants to minority-owned businesses. Attorney General Griffin Bell said not one of them was overturned by the Bakke decision. Some experts even believe that the Supreme Court verdict permits admission quotas very selectively-by those institutions that have a previous history of racial discrimination. President Jimmy Carter said the Bakke decision "leaves adequate option not only in the university system but in all levels of American life for affirmative action." Joseph Califano, Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare, said that the Supreme Court decision had "explicitly blessed affirmative action." He said his department would "move forcefully" to implement the Court's decision and would· continue plans that met the Court's standards. How does the Bakke decision accord with American public opinion? Sociologists Seymour M. Lipset and William Schneider, who have reviewed U.S. racial attitudes s.ince 1935, arrived at some revealing conclusions. They wrote in Public Opinion magazine (March-April 1978): "Over the past 40 years there has been a vast improvement in American attitudes toward blacks, women, and other Ininorities. More Americans than ever before are aware that these groups have suffered discrimination, and minority claims to full equality ate accepted much more widely than in earlier eras. Most people say that further progress toward complete equality should be made." But, Lipset and Schneider added, "Americans make a critical distinction in their minds between compensatory action and preferential treatment. Compensatory action involves measures to help disadvantaged groups catch up to the standards of competition set by the larger society. Preferential treatment involves suspending those standards .... Relatively few object to compensation for past deprivations in the form of special training programs, financial aid, community development funds and the like." The Supreme Court verdict seems to reflect this same sentiment. Newsweek expressed its dilemma very well: "As so often happens when a case reaches the Supreme Court, the conflict is between two rights, not a right and a wrong. To one group of Justices, the need to redress racial grievances was overwhelming. To the other, the dangers of sanctifying a new form of discrimination was the central matter. ... In an ideal world, there would be no conflict of principles to resolve .... The best hope is that the Bakke case marks a step toward a society where such cases would not have to be brought." -S.R. MADHU


DISARMAMENT: A NORTH-SOUTH DIALOGUE "A remarkable achievement" is how American Ambassador Averell Harriman has described the recent five-week U.N. Special Session on Disarmament in New York. It was the biggest international conclave on the subject-145 governments and 260 private organizations reviewed efforts to end the $400 billion global arms race. As the session concluded, they came closer to the "common understanding" urged upon them by U.N. Secretary General Kurt Waldheim. The session was an outcome of the desire of many U.N. members to speed up the pace of disarmament talks. The United States welcomed the session in the hope it would lead to a more fruitful north-south dialogue on disarmament. "In a 10,000-word document, the session called on the United States and the Soviet Union to negotiate an early end to nuclear arms; urged the setting up of nuclear-weapon-free zones; and revamped the international machinery that deals with disarmament problems. The session also agreed on the following measures: • A group of experts selected by the U. N. Secretary General will meet in Geneva in October to study the relationship between disarmament and development. • The U.N. Center for Disarmament will be strengthened to increase public awareness of disarmament problems. • An advisory board to the Secretary General will be created to consider a program for disarmament studies. • Another disarmament conference will be convened on a date to be decided by the General Assembly. By common consent, the most important step taken at the conference was the revamping of international disarmament machinery. At present, this machinery is composed of three organizationsthe 31-nation Geneva Disarmament Conference, which has been functioning since 1959; the "first committee" of the U.N. General Assembly (one of seven committees that execute the work of the Assembly); and the U.N. Disarmament Commission. What the special session has done has been to expand membership of the Geneva Disarmament Conference from 31 to 40; the joint Russian-American chairmanship of the conference has been replaced by a rotating-chairman system. The "first committee" of the General Assembly will henceforth concentrate exclusively on disarmament; and the U.N.

"Do we really have to fight each other over a simple accident 1"

Disarmament Commission, created in 1952 but largely inactive, has been reanimated. It is hoped that the streamlining of disarmament machinery will help untangle some of the complexities of the disarmament talks now going on at various levels. (The United States and the Soviet Union alone are engaged in negotiations on half a dozen fronts.) A declaration of principles adopted at the session said: "All the peoples of the world have a vital interest in the success of disarmament negotiations. Consequently, all states have the duty to contribute to efforts in the field of disarmament .... They have the right to participate on an equal footing in tllose multilateral disarmament negotiations which have a direct bearing on their national security." The declaration listed the following priority areas in the progress toward disarmament-nuclear weapons; other weapons of mass destruction including chemical and conventional weapons; and reduction of armed forces. It said : "Nuclear weapons pose the greatest danger to mankind and to the survival of civilization. The ultimate goal is the complete elimination of nuclear weapons." The declaration also called for conventions to ban nuclear tests and to ban the development, production and stockpiling of chemical and radiological weapons. On nuclear nonproliferation, the declaration said that measures toward this goal shoUld not jeopardize the rights of states to develop programs for the peaceful uses of nuclear energy. "International cooperation in the field should be under agreed and appropriate international safeguards applied through the International

Atomic Energy Agency." Ambassador Carols Rozas of Argentina described the 10,OOO-worddocument as "the end of one stage and the beginning , of a still more promising stage in the field of disarmament." American representatives at the conference stressed the need for realistic assessments of progress on arms control. "The media must recognize," said Lawrence Weiler, an adviser to the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, "that this is not a one-shot operation, but it is the beginning of a process." He noted that this was the first major disarmament conference since World War II. "It took us 30 years to get here, and to expect one session to turn it around would be unrealistic." Two highlights of the special session were speeches by U.S. Vice President Walter Mondale and Indian Prime Minister Morarji Desai (in all there were addresses by more than 120 presidents, prime ministers and foreign ministers). Mr. Mondale outlined an eight-point program of action to "turn the world's resources from ever-growing stockpiles of destruction to ever-growing opportunities for life." These included: • Financial incentives to nations that cooperate in nuclear nonproliferation; • A pledge of support to regional agreements banning nuclear weapons; • A call for a U.N. peacekeeping reserve force to r.espond quickly to emergency situations worldwide. Vice President Mondale said that the United States had developed an agenda on disarmament "more extensive than any nation has ever attempted." Concrete action had been taken in 10 different areas, ranging from nuclear weapon accords to limits on conventional and unconventional weapons. He noted that the United States would soon conclude an agreement with the Soviet Union on reducing the combined total of strategic nuclear weapons-delivery vehicles; another agreement would be signed with the Soviet Union and the United Kingdom on a comprehensive nuclear test ban. Mr. Mondale said: "Arms control must not be on the agenda only of this session or this year alone. It must be the moral agenda of our time." Prime Minister Desai said that peace should be sought for the sake of peace and not out of fear. It is time, he said, "to replace bombs and bullets by bread and books." . 0


AMERICAN IMMIGRANTS TODAY

Thousands of people go to the United States every year to begin a new life in this land of opportunity. Immigration is not without problems-for America and the immigrants. Yet, while regulating the flow, America has kept its doors open in acknowledgment of the principle of human rights. No country in modern history has been shaped by so many different groups of immigrants as has the United States. First came the early English, Dutch and Spanish colonists, then the Irish fleeing famine and the Germans escaping political turmoil, who swelled the population of the new land in the mid19th century, the Chinese, who arrived to help build the railroads and, finally, the massive migration that brought nearly 25 million Eastern and Southern Europeans to the United States between 1880 and 1924. Today, many Americans and others around the world tend to regard immigration as a colorful, distant historical phenomenon that ended around World War I and not as a significant, continuing force in American life. Not so. In fact, more immigrants are entering the United States now than at any point since the vast migration from Europe at the turn of the century. Approximately 400,000 legal immigrants arrive each year with the total for the 1970s expected to fall between four and five million. Their hopes and aspirationsto build a .better life in a new land for themselves and their offspring-differ little from their forerunners throughout American history. But in two major respects, the immigrants who have been arriving in the United States in roughly the last decade have their own characteristics. They tend to be better educated and better off economically on arrival than immigrants of earlier periods. And they are coming from new areas. Whereas the early immigration waves came largely from Europe (with the exception of the Chinese, and the blacks brought to America before slavery was abolished in the mid-19th century), the new immigrants are coming as well from Asia outside mainland China,

the Caribbean, Mexico and Central America. And, as did their predecessors, they are absorbing and adding new ethnic and linguistic patterns to America's cultural heritage. For instance, the United States now boasts the fifth largest Spanish-speaking population in the world. The changing immigration patterns of the past decade are largely attributable to a law signed in 1965 by President Lyndon B. Johnson at the foot of the Statue of Liberty on an island in New York Bay. The legislation marked the first comprehensive change in American immigration policy since a system of "national origins quotas" was put into effect in 1924. The 1924 law, which developed out of the American isolationist movement following World War I, was designed to keep out as many people as possible and, in particular, to cut off the flow of Eastern and Southern Europeans who poured into the United States at the turn of the century. Anti-Chinese restrictions had already been in force for many years. The "national origins quotas" were based on a complicated formula that favored Northern Europeans from countries that had already reached an advanced state of economic development and were therefore unlikely to send large numbers of emigrants abroad. Most American historians now regard the 1924 law as an unsavory chapter in the nation's social history, because many who favored the law were influenced by crackpot, pseudo-scientific theories about the genetic superiority of northern races. President Johnson, as well as the members of the U.S. Congress who sponsored the 1965 law, regarded the new immigration policy as an important rectification of an old injustice. Since its inception, immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe has risen by more than 70 per cent, while immigration from Asian nations, just over 20,000 in 1965, has jumped sixfold to more than 120,000a year. There has also been a substantial increase in the flow of legal immigrants from Mexico and the Caribbean. The number of immigrants from Portugal jumped from just over 2,000 in 1965to more than 11,000 in 1974. The 1965 law set an annual limitation of 120,000 immigrants from North and South America (the Western Hemisphere) and 170,000 from the rest of the world (the Eastern Hemisphere). A limit of 20,000 persons per country per year was set for the Eastern Hemisphere, while Western Hemisphere immigration was on a first-come, first-served basis, with no country limits. The


Eastern Hemisphere was also made subject to a preference system which emphasized reunification of families and the admission to the United States of highly qualified professionals. Thus, the total number of immigrants becomes much larger because relatives of American citizens-husbands, wives, parents and children-may be admitted to the United States without numerical limitations. Finally, on January 1, 1977, the most recent changes in U.S. immigration policy took effect. On that date, the Western Hemisphere, as well as the Eastern, was included in the preference system, and an annual limit of 20,000 immigrants from each country was set. There is both a humanitarian and an economic rationale for the family preference system. The old American immigration laws caused separation in many families, especially after 1924. Chinese immigrants, including Chinese-American citizens, were prohibited from bringing their wives into the United States from 1924 until 1965. (Exceptions were made for small groups of war brides and refugees from mainland China after 1949.) As a result, elderly men were heavily over-represented in Chinese-American communities on the east and west U.S. coasts. The arrival of new immigrants since 1965 has turned San Francisco's and New York's Chinatowns into communities with a normal distribution of men, women and children, and of young and middle-aged families. The economic rationale for the family preference system is a simple one: immigrants with relatives already in America will find it easier to survive in the American job market because their families will help them find work. The old ethnic neighborhoods where immigrants generally settle provide them with a cushion against the culture shock of life in a new land. New immigrants find shopkeepers who speak their own language and sell the foods that are most popular in their native lands. An Italian can find homemade pasta in many neighborhood stores in Brooklyn; in Newark and New Bedford, a Portuguese can find dried and fresh fish that form the basis for many traditional dishes; in Los Angeles, a Mexican can buy fresh tortillas in local shops; an Indian in New York can buy spices and chutneys in local stores. The ethnic neighborhoods also include many social clubs that enable people from the same town or region to exchange gossip as well as important information about jobs and housing. Most immigrants find their first jobs through the network of friends and relatives in the neighborhoods where they live. The law does favor immigrants with specialized skills in occupations that do not attract enough Americans; such jobs are certified by the U.S. Department of Labor. In 1974, more than 2,300 occupational preference visas were issued to foreign nurses, dieticians and therapists and more than 2,400 to doctors. However, the total number of such visas-14,183-is extremely small in comparison to the total of immigrants. The vast majority of immigrants to the United States are blue-collar workersboth male and female- housewives and children. Because American law places such strong emphasis on uniting families, it is more difficult to obtain American visas in parts of the world that have not already sent large numbers of immigrants to the United States. This explains in part why the number of immigrants from Africa-only about 6,000-is relatively small. (The emigration policies of other nations in regard to their own citizens also play an important role.) A large majority of immigrants come from poor countries or from the poorer regions of About the Author: Susan Jacoby has recently published a book on the new American immigrants. She is also the author of Moscow Conversations, which is based on her two-year assignment in the Soviet Union, and numerous articles which often appear in such American publications as The New York Times Magazine and Saturday Review.


ITALIAN (above): In 1968, Frank Banca, a struggling tfnant farmer in Italy, set off for America with his older sons, in search of a better life. In four years the rest of the family followed. America didn't mean just more money. For 19year-old Domenica Banca, it meant an education she could never have imagined getting earlier as afarmer's daughter. She is the first of the family to graduate from high school. SWEDISH (above left) : Sunny California was a heaven after" the dark and bleak winters" of Sweden for Bo and Irene Tegelvik. It was also a different experience, better living: So in 1964 they decided to make it home. Now they own a house here. FILIPINO (left): Benjamin Domingo's 1972 decision to emigrate to America to seek a better life for his family proved right when in just three years he bought a house in San Francisco. The Domingos' fluency in English was a major advantage. JAMAICAN (far left): When Ken Morrison left his home in the Caribbean island of Jamaica in 1954, it was on a student visa to join his brother in a California college. He stayed on to marry a fellow student and to make California his home.


economically developed countries. Political refugees make up a significant minority of new (and old) immigrants. American law and tradition define a refugee as anyone who might suffer persecution because of race, religion or political persuasion. Many refugees come to the United States not because they are afraid of being killed or imprisoned (although some are) but because they are strongly opposed to the political and social stances of governments in their native lands. After they arrive in the United States, political refugees and ordinary immigrants have many of the same needs: a job, a way to learn English, a means of establishing their identity in a strange society. The new immigrants are not naive enough to believe the streets are paved with gold. Many must begin low on the economic ladder, gradually rising as they learn a new language and carve out a new life. Most of them eventually find at least a part of what they seek in the United States. There is no "typical" immigrant family-any more than there is a "typical" native American family-but immigrants do share many common experiences, the confusion, heartache, hard times and, eventually, triumphs of new settlers anywhere. Despite the difficulties of adjustment, a majority of immigrants are firmly committed to remaining in the United Statesespecially if they have American-born or American-educated children-but some still cherish a dream of buying a house and some land "back home." The apparent contradiction between the dream of going home and the links being forged to the new land is nothing new in the . history of American immigration. Because so many of the old immigrants remained in the United States and permanently changed the character of the nation, the sizable number who eventually returned to their native lands is overlooked. Of Italian immigrants at the turn of the century, more than 80 per cent were men who sent money home to support their families and made many trips back and forth across the ocean. (East European and Russian Jews were the only immigrants at the turn of the century who invariably arrived as family units. Because they were fleeing anti-Semitic persecution, they knew there was no way back.) One important difference between the new immigrants and the old immigrants is that more of the newcomers arrive as families. When men or women immigrate by themselves, they usually intend to send for their families as soon as it is economically possible. Another important difference between the new and the old immigration is that the improved educational opportunities in the United States during the past 50 years have speeded up the process of contact between immigrants and the larger American society. At the turn of the century, only a small minority of all American students graduated from high school and an even smaller number from college. Today, graduation from high school is the norm, and half of all high school graduates go on to college. Immigrant children went to work with their hands when they dropped out of school. (Of all immigrant groups, only the Jews "made it" into professional fields in the first and second generation through education. The rest made their way in American society through labor-usually hard manual labor.) Today, the colleges and universities of large cities are filled with the children of immigrants who have arrived during the past 10 years. The exposure of these students and their families to American culture is swift and often unsettling; a process that used to take three or four generations is being condensed into one. "You can go from being a farmer to being a teacher, a professional person, in one generation," says a

maid from Ecuador who is studying to be a medical technician. "I know this doesn't always happen. It doesn't happen to all of my friends. But it is possible." Changing American attitudes toward racial and ethnic identity have also affected the new immigrants. The growing pride of blacks, Spanish-speaking Americans and other ethnic groups has led to a revision of the old "melting pot" ideal, which led many early immigrants to turn their backs on their ethnic heritage in their striving to become part of American society. To Americans as well as new immigrants today, being an American no longer means forsaking older cultural and linguistic heritages. Chinese-Americans and Spanish-speaking Americans have taken successful lawsuits to court which brought about the establishment of bilingual classes in public schools. Bilingual programs were unheard of in American public schools 50 years ago. Although an integral part of the American heritage, immigration continues to raise many issues of public policy within the United States. Illegal immigration is a source of controversy because many economists believe the "illegals" depress the wages of both native Americans and legal immigrantsespecially in the southwestern United States, where large numbers of undetected Mexicans cross the border. Increased efforts are being made to discourage employers from hiring illegal aliens. However, it is difficult to control the movement of illegal immigrants. In their extremely open society, Americans are not required to carry any kind of identity cards or papers to obtain work or enter school. Proposals to require identity cards have met with strong opposition and it remains relatively easy for an illegal simply to disappear into U.S. life, with little chance of being traced. There is also opposition to liberal U.S. immigration policies from U.S. advocates of "zero population growth" for the nation. For instance, Carl Pope, a lobbyist for Zero Population Growth, Inc., has stated flatly that "immigration is a sentimental symbol whose day is long past." Other opponents of immigration maintain that the new immigrants place an added strain on the economic, educational and cultural resources of the cities where they settle in large numbers. And for developing nations, the departure of professionals and skilled workers raises the question of a "brain drain." Overall limitations on immigration prevent an excessively large number of applicants from anyone country from obtaining visas for the United States. But there is little the United States can do to stop its natural magnetism as a land of opportunity. And the brain drain issue may not be solved until other countries cap offer sufficient incentives for highly trained workers to remain at home. None of these problems, however, is likely to push America into closing her open door. Current U.S. immigration policiesdespite their inconsistencies and inequities-embody the belief that immigrants provide the nation a much-needed infusion of vitality, ambition and talent that have always proven invaluable to the United States and are, in most respects, a fundamental expression of the best impulses in American life. 0 MEXICAN: Daniel Ruiz (shown holding his son) came to Americafrom Mexico eight years ago at the age of 19, well educated but "not knowing a word of English." He sat up nights studying, and the management of the hotel where he worked as a busboy was impressed enough to promote him to better jobs. Now ajunior executive at afashionable hotel in Los Angeles, Daniel has repeated a family success story: His father first came to America under a temporary labor program for itinerant farmers and later returned as an immigrant andfound a job as a baker.



\voUIR PIRTICIPITIOI mIA.IRICIIWAY The American economy is growing both in size and complexity, creating more and more skilled jobs. One result is that workers at many levels are taking active part in solving problems, cutting costs and improving products or services.

Since today's business moves across national boundaries, any important development on one continent is bound to attract attention-and sometimes emulation-on others. Americans are hearing a lot these days about the "worker participation" movement that has been gaining ground abroad. Such legal requirements as placing employee representatives on corporate boards are bound to be echoed by similar proposals in the United States. The worker-participation movement in Western Europe is based on the premise that economic power is tending to be increasingly concentrated in the hands of employers. Therefore, runs the argument, laws mandating participation are needed to restore the dignity of labor and give employees a voice in shaping the companies for which they work. The way the participation movement is perceived and discussed by Americans could have a significant effect on future U.S. policy-and on Americans' present picture of their own society. In the U.S. media, the European movement is almost always reported as if the commentators were unaware of the immense changes that have occurred-and are still occurring -in the nature of work in the United States. It is said, for instance, that the United States lags in worker participation. Such a statement is true only if worker participation is narrowly defined as the kind that rises out of confrontation and class struggle and is decided by political strictures imposed on companies. This view ignores another kind of

participation-much broader, deeper and sounder-that has increased throughout the 20th century in all advanced countries. The United States is in the vanguard of the kind of participation that occurs naturally and organically through the evolution of the economic system. This movement owes nothing to political intervention and little to labor union pressure. The change advances by tiny steps made by managers and workers who are trying to cut costs, improve product or service and increase profits. The sum of these steps, added up over decades, has brought about a transformation in the nature of work that may be even more significant in terms of real human progress than the mass prosperity which is the widely recognized 20th-century achievement of the U.S. economy.

* * *

In the United States and abroad, people often fail to appreciate the upgrading of jobs-or even to admit that it has happened. They see the modern work scene through the dark glasses of a myth that became prevalent nearly 100 years ago and has never been modified to take account of new realities. According to the myth, the peoples of the advanced industrial nations sold their souls or, at least, their dignity as independent farmers and artisans in exchange for a plethora of material goods. The price in this Faustian contract is said to be the degradation and

dehumanization of work III a highly technological economy. Like most myths, this one contains some truth. In the half-century ending around 1925, the competitive pursuit of industrial efficiency led many managers to divide work into specialized operations that were often routinized, repetitive, boring. It was not utterly paranoid to say that workers were being degraded into robots by the working out of the "inner logic" of industrial capitalism. But the Faustian myth never told the whole truth about U.S. work trends. In the present generation, the number of jobs grew faster than the population, and more jobs were elevated than were downgraded. The system of industrial capitalism turned out to have an "inner logic" that would stretch the human potential of tens of millions of workers, thrusting upon them more and more mental and moral responsibility.

* * *

From Adam's time, necessity had driven people to meet their bodily needs by exerting their bodily faculties; in hunting, plowing, harvesting, digging, hammering, muscles earned what muscles required. As late as 1900, although the level of material consumption had been rising for decades, four-fifths of American workers still toiled in the sweat of their brows. Since 1900 the transformation of work has moved very rapidly, compared with


the pace of historical social changes of like magnitude. By the 1960s, fewer than half of American workers remained in the blue-collar category, and a large and growing proportion of them (for example, toolmakers) were paid much more for what went on above the collar than for what went on below it. Within the white-collar majority, recent years have brought a tremendous upgrading of jobs; the computer alone eliminated billions of hours of clerical drudgery while it was opening the doors to new and better jobs. Especially impressive is the change from 1950 to the present. The chart on p~ge 12 summarizes the occupational shifts in this generation. Two of the U.S. Census Bureau's categories tell the story: as a proportion of the whole work force, nonfarm laborers have declined since 1950 from 6.7 per cent to 4.9 per cent; professional, technical and kindred rose from 8.7 per cent to 15.2. These figures, striking though they are, don't convey the essence of the change. Inside each Census classification something has happened of far greater importance than the rise or decline in the . number of workers. A policeman, one might suppose, is a policeman is a policeman. Not so. Today's policeman, who is still counted in the growing classification of service workers, has to struggle with complexities that his predecessors never knew. He is enmeshed in a sophisticated communications network that requires him to stretch his verbal skills. Policecommunity relations programs call for tact and brotherhood. New legal safeguards protecting the rights of suspects require policemen to develop some of the skills of lawyers. Almost everywhere one looks there are examples of companies increasing the scope and authority of employees. Men and women in their 20s are now given substantial lending authority by, banks. Many assembly-line workers no longer have to endure the strictest, most routine discipline of the past. About half of the 1.4million people in the insurance business are classified as clerical workers; but that category includes claim examiners, claim adjusters and many others whose jobs require personal skill and judgment.

* * *

In short, a better job, as the word is used here, is defined by criteria that are far above the level of mere mechanical efficiency. To say that more people have better jobs means they are paid for using their knowledge, reason, judgment, communicative skill or sensitivity to' other people's needs and problems. A better job extends the employee's higher facul-

ties. Learning and personal growth are urgently invited. Holders of better jobs are responsible for the way the work is done. Therefore the employee is more of a participant in shaping the course of the organization, and, ultimately, of the whole economy. The last point is the most significant. The 20th-century transformation of work has fundamentally altered the structure of society by distributing "power" or "authority" to a much larger proportion of people. The small elite groups that in former centuries made the economic decisions and policies must now share their authority with ever-widening circles. Why and how this happens can be better understood by looking at some practical examples selected from the U.S. business scene.

* * *

The characteristics of the modern economy that drive it toward distributing authority and creating better jobs were clearly summarized by Ralph J. Cordiner in a 1956 speech at the Columbia University School of Business. Cordiner was not theorizing about the whole economy; he was telling why and how General Electric Company (G.E.), of which he was then president, had come to change its management structure. Before World War II, he said, G.E. had a highly centralized management. The war and postwar years brought a tremendous acceleration in the company's growth. Technology and markets began to change more rapidly. The whole business scene had become more complex. Cordiner's conclusion: "Unless we could put the responsibility and authority for decisionmaking closer in each case to the scene of the problem, where complete understanding and prompt action are possible, the company would not be able to compete with the hundreds of nimble competitors who were able to find a quick solution." Cordiner's analysis of why G.E. had to distribute authority can be boiled down to three words: growth, change and complexity. All three have intensified in the years since 1956. Moreover, their effects are now felt throughout the work force, not merely within the management group. Accordingly, G.E.'s huge manufacturing complex at Schenectady, New York, seems a good place to look for some of the job changes that have been taking place without fanfare across a wide range of skills and salary levels. One day in 1886 Thomas Alva Edison was riding a train, his eyes peeled for a building to house his expanding operations. He saw two standing in a field and got off at the next stop-Schenectady.

The smaller of the two structures that had caught his eye is now known as Building 10, its red-brick exterior almost unchanged in 92 years. What goes on inside Building 10 today is the creation of very special equipment for G.E.'s own use and for its customers'. Most of the people who now work in Building 10 have excellent jobs: engineers, designers, machinists. One piece of equipment built there is intended for the U.S. Government's Argonne National Laboratory at Idaho Falls, Idaho. Argonne operates an extremely low-power nuclear reactor to confirm theoretical calculations on the safety and efficiencyof reactor cores. The tests require many changes in the "mix" of nuclear fuel. To make each change the reactor is deactivated. After it "cools" (that is, becomes less radioactive), a team of five men in protective clothing goes up to the reactor face and removes selected drawers containing the fuel. Despite the very low radiation, the amount of time workers can spend handling the fuel drawers is limited by Federal standards. The time spent waiting for the radioactivity to diminish can be eliminated by the use of a machine to load and unload the fuel drawers. This would permit more reactor "runs" per day to be made in this expensive facility while minimizing workers' radiation exposure. G.E. designed and built a robot to remove and replace selected drawers without any human being going closer than 7.5 meters to the reactor's enclosure. If the robot's automatic controls fail to find and remove a drawer, a highly skilled operator can find it by means of television cameras trained on the reactor face. The robot, which cost $170,000 to design and $560,000 to build, represents an effort to find a way of performing a necessary operation that is "better," in both economic and human terms. The operator and maintenance man attending to the robot's sophisticated mechanism will have interesting jobs. the team of engineers, designers and machinists in Building 10 have had two years of challenging and innovative work building the robot.

* * *

Building 273 at Schenectady presents one of the most awesome vistas in the world of work; indeed, 273 has been called "the Grand Canyon of American industry." Under one roof are 9 hectares of turbines and other heavy electrical equipment in various stages of creation. There are many robots in Building 273but no human ones. Says Jules Mirabal. a corporate engineering executive whose consulting purview includes all of G.E.'s far-flung manufacturing operations: "The


Over the years many American companies have carried out programs explicitly designed to upgrade and enrich jobs.

people in this division have great esprit de corps, almost an arrogance, about the quality of their work." In a pit a middle-aged machinist is setting up a stop valve, two tons of precaution shaped like a monstrous fireplug. Overhead is a computer readout. The computer isn't telling the machinist what to do. It is bringing him information relevant to his responsibility. If in a power failure that valve didn't close automatically in one-tenth of a second, a turbine-generator system costing millions might be damaged. It's hard to imagine occasions where a manager would want to tell this machinist how to do his job. He is one of millions in U.S. industry whose 'personal competence and responsibility effectively limit the hierarchical "power" that might be exerted upon him. Many parts of the Bell Telephone System have carried out over the years programs explicitly designed to upgrade

As is shown by this census-eye picture, better jobs are in general increasing more rapidly than others. The 167 per cent rise in the number of workers classified as professional, technical and kindred is especially noteworthy. This group plus managers and administrators now make up nearly 26 per cent of all workers. Equally significant are the increases in

and enrich jobs. More to the present point are instances of job improvement that occur in the pursuit of such normal business goals as better service, lower costs and higher profits. Lee Oberst, a vice-president of New York Telephone Company, is a professional manager who insists he is "not a theorist." When in 1969 he was brought back to New York from elsewhere in the system, Oberst found corporate problems of the utmost gravity. Subscribers were enraged at the deterioration of service, caused partly by a failure to install new equipment at a pace matching traffic volume. The demoralization of large groups of employees had swollen along with the discontent of the customers. There were then 15,000 operators whose main job was to help phone users who couldn't dial their way through a faulty system. Often the operators had no better luck than the callers. Typical result: an angry dialogue between a frustrated customer

pay (not charted here). In constant dollars, median pay of all full-time workers increased by about 60 per cent from 1950to 1975. In a labor force that is only one-quarter unionized, these figures suggest that employers would hardly be handing out that much more money unless they were getting better work from their employees.

Total labor force Professional. technical & kindred

sales_ Craftsmen. _ foremen. etc Operatives & • kindred Nonfarm laborers _

II Private household workers


and a frustrated operator. Not surprisingly, 600 operators a month quit or were fired, an annual turnover rate of nearly 50 per cent. Since recruitment and training of each new operator cost the company about $850, this turnover rate was a grievous drain. Partly by installing better equipment, . partly by improved maintenance of existing equipment, partly by more rational procedures, the company stopped the rot. Now 10,000 operators handle a higher volume of traffic than 15,000 had failed to handle adequately. Apparently, the jobs are less frustrating. The turnover rate in this group has descended from almost 50 per cent a year to about 4 per cent. "The worst thing a manager can do," says Oberst, "is to assign an employee a task without making sure that the conditions exist under which the task can be performed." Oberst circulates around the company, removing roadblocks that get in the way of employees. A repairman's productivity rate may be low because garagemen failed to put gas in his car or because a faulty diagnosis of the trouble sent the repairman out with the wrong tools. The company now has a sophisticated system of electronic diagnosis that saves the repairman frustrating hours in checking out causes of malfunction.

* * * General Motors Corporation has some 700,000 jobs; every decade their variety increases. Stephen H. Fuller, vice-president for personnel administration and development, believes that since 1970, at least, a new spirit has pervaded the way managers think about' workers. "Instead of looking at employees as a bunch of people coming through the gates, managers began to look for ways to give employees more responsibility." Some examples of the change were provided by Alfred S. Warren, Jr., director of personnel development, who has much experience as a production manager. "You have two men putting on a bumper," says Warren. "It used to be that if they changed sides, the foreman would consider that a violation of his prerogative. Now in many locations they can change sides, or go talk to the nuts-and-bolts man, or the pneumatic toolmaker, or go to the end of the assembly line and look at the finished product." Such changes are practical responses to daily experience in the life of the company. In one plant, glass breakage rose to 46 per cent of the glass handled. In vain, managers tried all the traditional methods to make the employees more careful. Nothing worked. Frustrated supervisors quit in disgust. Finally, the problem was turned over to. the employees themselves. They-

began to identify causes of breakage. For instance, a window might break because the car's body was improperly aligned. The window installers would talk to the body workers about the problem. As a result of this improved communication among workers, glass breakage in the plant has almost ceased. "We rely less on the managers to solve specific job-related problems," says Warren. "Now the employees participate in problem solving in cases where they have the best information. And they communicate more among themselves about the work."

* * * The early industrial division of labor assigned the task of thinking to one part of a company, its management, while most employees worked in the way they were told. Management jealously guarded its prerogative of controlling the design of the work: who does what, when and how. Texas Instruments (T.L) doesn't function that way. Its principle: "Employees at all levels participate actively in the planning and control, as well as the performance, of the job." Seventy-three per cent of T.L's manufacturing employees and 49 per cent of other employees form teams of four to ten members each. Each team tries to produce a method improvement. In a warehouse, for example, a team worked out a new way of handling, inspecting and recording incoming material. The flow time from receiving dock to warehouse was reduced from three weeks to three days, the value of material tied up in the flow at a given time was cut from $960,000 to $430,000, the jobs of several workers were eliminated and the warehouse group's productivity improved by 25 per cent. How come workers take the initiative in eliminatingjobs? L.M. (Mike) Rice, Jr., vice-president for corporate relations, has an answer that goes to the heart of T.L's management style. The determination to grow pervades all levels of the company, reinforced by profit sharing and employees' stock -option plans. The fear of jo b loss has been diminished by the company's rapid growth over many years, and employee confidence that other-probably better-jobs await displaced workers.

* * * The Sun Oil Company, run for decades by the Pew family, had a highly centralized management structure. The company grew and changed, and its business became more complex. It reacted by transforming its way of looking at employees. As the changeover began, the chief executive officer of what is now called the Sun Company, H. Robert Sharbaugh, explained the.new management style in a

speech: "The key to achieving really productive growth in the future lies in more fully and more effectively developing and utilizing the creativity and capabilities of people. We have in the past built, or been party to building, jobs in the form of 'little boxes.' The lines of those little boxes signal to the people inside that the scope of their work and responsibility is/rather rigidly limited, and that involvement beyond those limits is neither encouraged nor welcomed-nor rewarded. And in doing this, we have effectively blocked off real involvement in work, and the gains that flow from such involvement. A basic part of our task is to erase the lines around those little boxes and to develop a new way of thinking about people at work." Sharbaugh doesn't agree with those who say that the newer management style came into being because young people down the line are better educated. The real line of causation runs like this: "We educate, reward and give more responsibility to more people so we can meet the challenges of the future." The 20th-century evolution of work in the United States can be summed up this way. Specialization raised efficiency and productivity. But specialization also brought horrendous problems on how to maintain the coordination of any organization in the face of growth, change and complexity. In case after case solutions to these problems turned out to require a wider distribution of authority and a greater dependence on responsible decisions made at all levels of the work force. Effective participation cannot mean that everybody has a say in every decision. Competence has become the real basis of authority and, consequently, has become the test of what kinds of power can be assigned to what functions. If that machinist in Schenectady's Building 273 changed places with a corporate vice-president, both would lose authority-and dignitybecause neither could do the job as well as it is done now. Anybody who wants to increase worker participation should study the way it has grown in the United States -and try to find further advances along the same line. If education means leading the personality into wider and higher spheres of responsible thought and action, then the U.S. workplace has evolved into the most effective educational matrix ever constructed. 0 About the Author: Max Ways has been the chief of the Time-Life London bureau and a member of the board of editors of Fortune. He is also the author of Beyond Survival.


SMALL TOWN U.S.A. TEXT BY HOWARD CINCOTTA PHOTOGRAPHS BY ANESTlS DlAKOPOULOS

In Granville, Ohio, yesterday lingers on pleasantly. Even as modernity makes its presence felt, this small town retains the sense of community of a 19th-century village. One day in 1805, while tracking cattle through the Ohio wilderness, a Welsh-born frontiersman named Theophilus Rees heard voices singing in the wilderness. For a few startling moments he thought he might be hearing a heavenly choiruntil he came upon the newly arrived settlers of Granville, Ohio, celebrating their first Sabbath near what was to be their home. Granville residents still relish the story of Theophilus Rees, and the town still enjoys the close-knit, community spirit that held those first settlers together. The town's intimate social ties are attractive to people brought up in cities and suburbs that may have become too large and volatile to foster a sense of community identity. In Granville, the connections between people are reinforced at every turn. Housewives gather at markets to shop and socialize ("Going to the market can take me an hour-anda-half because of all the friends I meet and talk with," says Carol Apacki, a resident since 1968); older men relax on park benches to read newspapers or doze in the sun; small children surge through the streets to and from school like flocks of noisy birds; teen-agers gather in knots outside the drugstore. The daily routines are punctuated by events that, whatever the occasion, are really community celebrations. Today, Granville looks more like a 19th-century New England village than a 20th-century Ohio town-which is no accident: those original settlers were farmers from Granville, Massachusetts, and neighboring Granby, Connecticut. Those New Englanders had found that they were rapidly depleting the thin glacial soil of lower Massachusetts and had heard tales of the wondrous Ohio territory to the west. A group of leading citizens formed a land company and bought 10,500 hectares of Ohio wilderness that was to become Granville and its environs. The settlers carefully planned the layout of their new town well before they left Massachusetts-the town fathers stipulated a 40-hectare division of lots for each family to farm and build upon, and set aside 40 hectares for a church, plus sites for schools, mills, a stone quarry and cemetery. Their most important decision was to build a wide street that would run the length of the village and be known as the Broadway, which remains one of the distinctive joys of Granville. Its wide, tree-lined sidewalks and graceful 19th-century buildings make it as much a plaza for people as a thoroughfare for automobiles. Downtown Granville-meaning Broadway-remains the commercial center as well as the geographical and social center of the town. Many of its shops have been


owned and run by the same families for decades, and are more than just businesses. By serving generations of Granville citizens, they have become community institutions. An example is Fuller's Market, one of three grocery stores on Broadway. Tom Fuller, the present owner, took over the store eight years ago on the death of his father, who had run the market for 30 years. Now Tom Fuller's son Scott, 13, has started helping with the business, working three afternoons a week and part of the day on Saturday. Does Tom plan to have Scott follow him in the business? "I'm not going to push it one way or the other," Tom says. "The opportunity is here ifhe wants it. It would make me happy ifhe did, but it may not be the life for him." A few years ago, Fuller was worrying about simply staying in business. A large supermarket opened at the foot of Main Street, which bisects Broadway, and, with its size and sales volume, could undersell Fuller's. "The usual pattern is for a supermarket to put several of the independents out of business, leaving maybe one," Fuller says. That didn't happen in Granville. A combination of town loyalty and a Broadway location has kept all the markets prosperous. Tom Fuller's annual gross sales now total about $400,000. "I remember when my father said that $600 a week was good. Now $600 a day would be a bad day, and I'd want to know the reason why." The scene in Fuller's Market sheds light on the customers' loyalty. Housewives chat over fresh vegetables. At the cheese counter, Fuller discusses selections with a woman planning a cocktail party. Fuller's is more than a grocery store; it is a gathering place where shopping is as much a community ritual as a semiweekly chore. The churches of Granville are another visible legacy of the town's past. The Granville Congregational Church, organized before the settlers left Massachusetts, was strict and conservative, and it dominated the social life of the town until the mid-19th century, when other Protestant denominations took root. The influence of religion continues. At Broadway and Main Streets, churches stand on three of the four corners. "When the church bells ring on Sunday morning," says one Granville resident, "no one sleeps on." In Granville's early years, education flourished along with religion. By the l830s, the town had one academy for men and two for women. In 1831, the Ohio Baptist Convention established a Literary and Theological Seminary in Granville. After several years on the outskirts, the school moved to a hill overlooking the town. One of the school's chief benefactors was William S. Denison who donated $10,000 to it in 1853. In gratitude, the trustees named the college for him. Denison University, no longer formally affiliated with the Baptist Church, is today a small liberal arts college whose 2,100 students and 150 faculty members are a sizable but not overwhelming part of the town. The university offers a range of activities, from athletics to theater, symphony concerts and art exhibits at its gallery. Top: The vital commercial and social center of Granville is Broadway, a wide street that runs the length of the village and is lined by broad sidewalks and 19th-century buildings. Leji (above and below): Every event in the town is a community celebration, be it a sports meet or a potluck church supper. Center: Started 30 years ago, Fuller's Market is among the many shops in Granville that are like community institutions. Tom Fuller took it over from his father eight years ago and today his son Scott helps him. Far left: Children romp happily through a green avenue, one among the many in Granville.


In an age of sprawling supermarkets and fierce competition~ Granville's old shops have survived due to typical small-town loyalty. The town, in turn, is an asset for the university: it offers a life-style that attracts students and faculty. And the natural town-gown tension between Granville and the university adds spice to Granville's serene life. 'The values of an academic community are Qot always those of a small town," says former Denison president Joel Smith. He mentions a new university art-andmusic building located downtown on Broadway. "It was a deliberate attempt to add a contemporary aspect to the architecture'of the college," Smith says. Some of the more traditionminded citizens felt that the building's contemporary design intruded on the carefully restored, 19th-century look of the town. Denison attracts local students to the campus through its Community Scholar Program. Residents of the area over the age of 30 can study free at Denison in courses ranging from Inorganic Chemistry to 19th-century Russian Literature in Translation. About 20 to 30 such persons attend classes at anyone time. One of them is Evelyn McSweeney, 76, who was born in Ireland and lived there until five years ago when she came to live with her son in Granville. She first took a course called World Political Geography and; enjoyed it so much that she signed up for another on the Geography of Europe. Geography professor Richard Mahard feels that his students have benefited from having Mrs. McSweeney in class. "I find many young people who have never spent much time around grandparents or other older people," he says. "Here they have discovered an older person in class, heard her speak and become aware of some of her attitudes and viewpoints." Evelyn McSweeney also makes daily visits to Granville's center for senior citizens, Sinnett House, named for one of the town's eminent citizens. The house, built in 1840, was dilapidated and empty until Helen Dunfield decided to convert it into a center for older persons. "My dream was to have a house that would be warm and inviting, not a cold institution," she says. Sinnett House is a true community institution; local citizens donated all of its furnishings and appliances. The house is alive with activities: exercise classes and prayer meetings, luncheons and birthday parties, music and discussion-groups. The Apacki family, Kenneth, Carol and their three daughters are typical of the newer, younger citizens of the town. Ken Anacki, who is 35, was born in Peoria, Illinois. He earned a degree in mechanical engineering from the University of Illinois, served with the U.S. Army and worked for the Chrysler Corporation in Detroit, Michigan. In 1969, he joined the Owens-Corning Fiberglas Company as an engineering analyst and moved to Granville. Carol, also 35, grew up in Illinois, attended the University of Illinois (where she met Ken), served with the Peace Corps in Thailand and taught high school in Illinois. A sample of Carol's routine contradicts the stereotype of small-town life as leisurely and slow-paced. She has worked with the League of Women Voters, formed a citizens' panel concerned with town growth, sponsored a student from Malaysia at Denison and served part time as a volunteer tutor in a public school. Carol is also active in the Presbyterian Church and participates in a baby-sitting cooperative in which mothers take turns caring for each other's children. "It sounds as though I'm constantly running around and doing a lot of things, but it's really no more than many other people are doing," she says. Granville has given the Apackis a place in which to put down

Above: Typical of Granville's loyal citizens is Kenneth Apacki (left), a successful engineering analyst who, along with other residents, mowed grass and graded roads to help give the town a new park. Right: Denison University, the town's "idyllic" liberal arts college. Far right: Granville's churches are an impressive legacy of the past. Below: In the old tradition, shops like this soda fountain are meeting places too.


roots. They, in turn, have contributed their sense of community and commitment to Granville. "Here a single citizen can make a difference," says Ken. One difference Ken has made is a new park. As cochairman of the Granville Community Park Planning Committee, he joined some friends in making a study of the town's recreation needs, then persuaded the town council that a new park could be created on land that the community already owned. Ken and other volunteers mowed grass and graded roads. OwensCorning donated 50 truckloads of gravel. Wildwood Park opened in the autumn of 1975-16 hectares of grass and forest with picnic tables, outdoor barbecue fireplaces and a nature trail that winds alongside a stream. Granville is growing as more people discover its attractions. Town residents see the inevitability of change and growth, but want to insure that both are orderly and controlled. The town encourages clean, nonmanufacturing industrial development. The best example is Granville's largest employer, the Owens-Corning Fiberglas Technical Center. This research center employs more than 700 persons, of whom some 120 live in Granville. It occupies 160 hectares of rolling green hills dotted with renovated, whitewashed buildings that once were part of a large farm. Recently, the Dow Chemical Company built a Research and Technical Center employing 200 persons in the Granville area. "Dow came looking for land," says Granville town manager Robert Harmon. "A realtor showed them Granville and the town just sold itself. It's going to mean new growth and new people for the region." The question of growth is closely tied to the question of whether the inner Granville village, population 2,000, should annex the surrounding township, population 6,000. Many township residents oppose unification because they would have to pay higher taxes, primarily for roads and sewers. A number of village residents support unification as the best way of controlling growth. "The overriding concern is protecting the Granville community and retaining its quality of life," says Granville town manager Harmon. Granville's older citizens, many of whom trace their ancestry back to town founders, are uneasy about these changes. No one has a greater sense of Granville's history than Minnie Hite Moody, 76. She traces her lineage back to Theophilus Rees, the man who mistook the singing Granville settlers for heavenly voices in the wilderness. Mrs. Moody was born in Granville but left when she married at age 17. She returned 43 years later, having, in the interim, published five novels and hundreds of stories, articles, book reviews and newspaper columns. Minnie Hite Moody opposes unification of the village and the township. "I don't want new industry and people coming in here," she says, "because I don't want to see the character of the town change." She finds the contemporary town and its residents less attractive, almost less real, than the men and women who trekked west to found a new town in the Ohio wilderness. Mrs. Moody and the other citizens of Granville will have to continue balancing the demands of growth and change with the need to preserve the town's sense of history and community. They have some significant assets: a healthy economic base, a vital downtown and Denison University. More important, the people of Granville possess a spirit and energy, a sense of history and purpose, that leave little doubt that the town's rich pattern of individual and community life will endure in the 0 decades ahead. About the Author: Howard Cincotta, who specializes on the American urban scene, is a SPAN correspondent in Washington, D.C.

17


KEEPING GOVERNMENT UNDERCON Two hundred years ago, Britain's 13 American colonies reached the limit of their p~tience with a distant government which, the colonists felt, had turned a deaf ear to their pleas for justice. The colonists considered themselves Englishmen, with the full rights of citizens of the m'other country, rights to which England's King George III and his ministers paid too little heed. From London, they passed laws and levied taxes, dismissed colonial legislatures and dissolved colonial courts-all without consulting those affected. What rankled even more was the fact that the English king was inaccessible. Petitions and pleas for justice never reached him, or if they did, fell on deaf ears. The colonists' reaction not only triggered the American Revolution, but also set the standards by which Americans have judged their own government ever since. Essentially it should be responsive. When it becomes unwieldy or remote, when political leaders become corrupt or disdainful of public opinion, then it is time for the body politic to stir itself. Americans like to keep their government on a short leash. The people are edgy when government becomes too powerful or too secretive, or when politicians fail to respond promptly to the signals sent out by the electorate. The reality does not always match the ideal. But, essentially, the American people feel that the government belongs to them, and not the other way around. That is a lesson that is learned and relearned by successive generations of politicians.

T

he growth of the U.S. Government has been inexorable since the founding of the republic. As the United States has expanded and matured, there has been an inevitable need for a larger and larger Federal establishment. Under President George Washington, there were only five Cabinet posts; the foreign affairs of the nation, under Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson, were managed by five clerks, a part-time translator of French and two mes-

sengers. The entire U.S. presence overseas stands at 14.6 million; one of every 15 consisted of legations in Paris and London, Americans now works for government at an agency at The Hague, six consulates and some level. Total government expenditures four vice consulates. exceed $523,000 million annually, or 37 For nearly 150years, the growth of govern- per cent of the gross national product. ment in the United States barely kept pace Such figures illustrate why many Ameriwith the nation's expanding economic, mili- cans are becoming increasingly resistant to tary and political power. Minimum govern- further unchecked growth of government. ment involvement in national life, particuThe groundswell of reaction across the larly the economy, was still the rule. How- nation is sending a clear message to ever, in the - 1930s, under Democratic Washington: the people do not necessarily President Franklin D. Roosevelt, the govern- want bigger government. They do want ment's size and its role in domestic affairs better government. took a quantum leap as a host of new Federal social programs were created to help A second major concern of Americans lift the country out of the throes of the Great is secrecy in government. Beginning with Depression. Roosevelt's "New Deal" activism reached the Watergate affair, the American people its' culmination in President Lyndon B. have been treated almost, nonstop to an Johnson's "Great Society" concept of mas- unsettling series of revelations of what their sive Federal education, welfare and work government has been doing behind closed programs aimed at the eradication of poverty doors. The question of government secrecy is a and racial prejudice. During the Johnson particularly difficult one for U.S. society, era in the 1960s, the Federal Government grew at an explosive rate. Johnson pushed and the issues involved are not always clear through such landmark legislation as Medi- to observers overseas. By history and tradicare, the 1965 Voting Rights Act, and the tion, the United States has an open society. Elementary and Secondary Education Act, Government by secrecy is as disliked as and he created a vast bureaucracy to imple- government by fiat. Some years ago, American television comment the new programs. When Republican Dwight Eisenhower left the Presidency in mentator Harry Reasoner said that Ameri1961, there were 45 Federal domestic social cans feel "an immense sense of ownership programs. When Johnson left office in 1969, and familiarity ... for their Congressmen." Reasoner's observation holds equally for there were 435. That kind of runaway growth in govern- other branches of government. The common ment spending has been criticized not only view is: "The government belongs to us; we are the government." Secrecy in governby Republican conservatives, traditionally in favor of cutting back the power of govern- ment diminishes the proprietary rights of ment, but also by many Democrats, who are the people. And yet, it must be admitted, the world normally in favor of government action is becoming enormously more complicated. where necessary to solve social problems. Still, if the United States has erred in permit- There are some areas of government where ting such growth, it has erred on the side of . good arguments can be made that decisions compassion, for the aim of these social must be made in secret and kept in secret for programs was to improve the welfare of the the sake of the national interest. Some examples: the strategy of nuclear missile people, primarily those below the "poverty level." defense or the deployment of armed forces The proliferation of programs has created in time of emergency. There are other areas a staggering bureaucracy at all levels of where the case for secrecy is harder to make. government- Federal, state and local. The Critics of America's role in South Vietnam, combined governmental work force now for example, are convinced that, with full


disclosure and public debate, the United States might not have entered the war there. .There are also areas where secrecy clearly runs counter to the public interest. Occasionally, secrecy may be invoked to cover up a bureaucratic blunder. It may also be used to conceal cronyism, favoritism and outright corruption in the letting of government contracts. In these instances, secrecy is indefensible.

To throw more light on such possible abuses, the U.S. Congress passed the Freedom of Information Act in 1966 and amended it in 1975. The act gives the media and the public access to many heretofore closed government files. Exceptions include certain classified materials; internal personnel records; medical records of individuals; and any information that might jeopardize the right of a person to a fair trial. The act works, but it takes hard work by a vigilant public and press to make it work. There are often long delays from the time a request for a file is made to the time of delivery. And not all requests are honored by the government. In 1975, the prestigious Wall Street Journal asked for 15 separate government files and received only six. The line between necessary secrecy and abuse is admittedly a delicate one, but Americans continue to search for the right balance. One reason is that public disclosure -or the fear of it-is a powerful incentive for honesty in government. As the late American writer Henry L. Mencken once noted: "Conscience is the inner voice that warns us somebody may be looking." In the wake of the Watergate scandals, a series of tough new conflict-of-interest laws have been passed at the Federal and state levels requiring public officials to list their assets and to disclose the source of their income from outside the government. "Politicians," remarks one observer, "are being watched more carefully, from town hall to the White House. For the first time, politicians have to show and tell. Show where their money comes from, tell whom it goes to. And why."

In 1974, a new Federal election law came What it all comes down to, this new into effect. It provided for public funding climate of insistence on morality and of Presidential campaigns, ceilings on poli- openness in government, is the perennial tical contributions and limits on campaign American demand for a government that is spending. In a recent test case, the Supreme honest and that listens and acts when the Court ruled that most of the new law is people speak. When the government goes constitutional. It held, however, that the wandering off on its own, the people yank government may limit campaign spending it back, like a dog on a leash. More than two decades ago, during the only if a candidate accepts public funds. The court decision was, in the words of Eisenhower Administration, the late Walter John Gardner, chairman of the citizens' Lippmann, one of America's most astute lobby Common Cause, a victory "for all political writers, said: "The re-establishment those who have worked so hard to clean up of effective control over the enormously expanded government is the first and the politics in this country." Even without this law, the old practice fundamental task of the new Administration. of trying to buy votes and influence, both in That loss of control, the conditions where Washington and in state capitals, while departments, bureaus, officials and missions far from ended, is becoming much more are out of control and out of hand - this is the difficult. In recent years, Federal prosecutors crucial trouble." This "crucial trouble" is not peculiar to and grand juries have indicted scores of any administration or time. It is a recurring public officials-not counting policementheme in American politics. for corruption in office. By any measure, Americans have unThe state of Wisconsin has long had stiff laws whereby legislators are required to paralleled access to their government. Each list every personal receipt and expenditure day, hundreds of Americans from all over for the public record. Wisconsin's U.S. the country visit Capitol Hill in Washington. Senator Gaylord Nelson tells of running into They are admitted freely to watch the Controuble when he was a state legislator because gress in session, even committee sessions he reportedly allowed a lobbyist to buy laying bare the activities, say, of the CIA. him a roast beef sandwich. Nelson had They stop to see their elected representatives, actually reimbursed the lobbyist-and had who make sure they are well received. When a canceled check for $1 to prove it-but, he they don't come in person they write, muses, "There's no place in the world where copiously, to express their views about you'd argue over a roast beef sandwich, stands their representatives should take on various issues. Congressmen receive more except in Wisconsin." Congress has passed no new laws to than 30 million letters a year from their govern its own conduct, but the post- constituents. Millions more are sent to the Watergate ultra-clean mentality has had White House and Executive Branch agencies. Under these conditions, it is impossible its effect there too. Congressmen and Senators are now much more careful about for public officials, from the President on the sources of their funds and are more down to the city councilman, not to hear reluctant to accept favors, however innocent, the voice of the people. They just need to be from special interest groups. Common Cause reminded, every now and again, who is 0 chairman John Gardner is convinced that really in charge of the government. the new climate of openness is the reason. "The greatest weapon," says Gardner, About the Author: Richard Schroeder, a Washington "is disclosure, and everybody knows it. writer specializing in international affairs, has made It sounds so simple, but you just don't a close study of the growing U.S. Government know how powerful it is until you try it. and the citizen reaction to it. He is the author of The power of the light of day to alter human two books on the U.S. Government, and is afrequent contributor to SPAN behavior is an impressive thing to watch."


THE ASCENT

OF MAN

In a celebrated BBC television series shown both in the United States and India, mathematicianpoet-humanist Jacob Bronowski discussed man's progress from prehistoric times to the present day. More than two million people watched the series; millions more read 'The Ascent of Man,' a book based on it. SP AN offers readers excerpts from this remarkable book. Man is a singular creature. He has a set of gifts which make him unique among the animals: so that, unlike them, he is not a figure in the landscape-he is a shaper of the landscape. In body and in mind he is the explorer of nature, the ubiquitous animal, who did not find but has made his home in every continent. Man is distinguished from other animals by his imaginative gifts. He makes plans, inventions, new discoveries, by putting different talents together; and his discoveries become more subtle and penetrating, as he learns to combine his talents in more complex and intimate ways. So the great discoveries of different ages and different cultures, in technique, in science, in the arts, express in their progression a richer and more intricate conjunction of human faculties, an ascending trellis of his gifts. Of course, it is tempting-very tempting to a scientist-to hope that the most original achievements of the mind are also the most recent. And we do indeed have cause to be proud of some modern work. Think of the unraveling of the code of heredity in the DNA spiral; or the work going forward on the special faculties of the human brain. Think of the philosophic insight that saw into the Theory of Relativity or the minute behavior of matter on the atomic scale. Yet to admire only our own successes, as if they had no past (and were sure of the future), would make a caricature of knowledge. For human achievement, and science in particular, is not a museum of finished constructions. It is a progress, in which the first experiments of the alchemists also have a formative place, and the sophisticated arithmetic that the Mayan astronomers of Central America invented for themselves independently of the

Old World. The stonework of Machu Picchu in the Andes and the geometry of the Alhambra in Moorish Spain seem to us, five centuries later, exquisite works of decorative art. But if we stop our appreciation there, we miss the originality of the two cultures that made them. Within their time, they are constructions as arresting and important for their peoples as the architecture of DNA for us. In every age there is a turning point, a new way of seeing and asserting the coherence of the world. It is frozen in the statues of Easter Island that put a stop to time-and in the medieval clocks in Europe that once also seemed to say the last word about the heavens for ever. Each culture tries to fix its visionary moment, when it was transformed by a new conception either of nature or of man. But in retrospect, what commands our attention as much are the continuities-the thoughts that run or recur from one civilization to another. There is nothing in modern chemistry more unexpected than putting together alloys with new properties; that was discovered after the time of the birth of Christ in South America, and long before that in Asia. Splitting and fusing the atom both derive, conceptually, from a discovery made in prehistory: that stone and all matter has a structure along which it can be split and put together in new arrangements. And man made biological inventions almost as early: agriculture-the domestication of wild wheat, for example-and the improbable idea of taming and then riding the horse. Man ascends by discovering the fullness of his own gifts (his talents or faculties) and what he creates on the way are monuments to the stages in his understanding of nature and of self-what the poet W.B. Yeats called "monuments of un aging intellect."

For at least a million years man, in some recognizable form, lived as a forager and a hunter. We have almost no monuments of that immense period of prehistory, so much longer than any history that we record. Only at the end of that time, on the edge of the European ice-sheet, we find in caves like Altamira (and elsewhere in Spain and southern France) the record of what dominated the mind of man the hunter. There we see what made his world and preoccupied him. The cave paintings, which are about twenty thousand years old, fix for ever the universal base of his culture then, the hunter's knowledge of the animal that he lived by and stalked. Man is a puny, slow, awkward, unarmed animal-he had to invent a pebble, a flint, a knife, a spear. But why to these scientific inventions, which were essential to his survival, did he from an early time add those arts that now astonish us: decora-

tions with animal shapes? Why, above all, did he come to caves like this, live in them, and then make paintings of animals not where he lived but in places that were dark, secret, remote, hidden, inaccessible? The obvious thing to say is that in these places the animal was magical. No doubt that is right; but magic is only a word, not an answer. In itself, magic is a word which explains nothing. It says that man believed he had power, but what power? We still want to know wl1at the power was that the hunters believed they got from the paintings. Here I can only give you my personal view. I think that the power that we see expressed here for the first time is the power of anticipation: the forward-looking imagination. In these paintings the hunter was made familiar with dangers which he knew he had to face but to which he had not yet come. When the hunter was brought here into the secret dark and the light was suddenly flashed on the pictures, he saw the bison as he would have to face him, he saw the running deer, he saw the turning

Excerpted by permission from The Ascent of Man by jacob BrODowski published by Little, Brown and Company.Š by J. BrODowski. All rights reserved.


In cave paintings such as these, man expressed for the first time the power of imagination, of anticipation. They were a peephole into the future. For modern man, they are valuable glimpses into the past.

The largest single step in the ascent of man was the change from nomadism to agriculture. Man put his hand on plant and animal, and in learning to live with them, changed the world to suit his needs.

boar. And he felt alone with them as he would in the hunt. The moment of fear was made present to him; his spear-arm flexed with an experience which he would have and which he needed not to be afraid of. The painter had frozen the moment of fear, and the hunter entered it through the painting as if through an air-lock. For us, the cave paintings re-create the hunter's way oflife as a glimpse of history; we look through them into the past. But for the hunter, I suggest, they were a peephole into the future; he looked ahead. In either direction, the cave paintings act as a kind of telescope tube of the imagination: they direct the mind from what is seen to what can be inferred or conjectured. Indeed, this is so in the very action of painting; for all its superb observation, the flat picture only means something to the eye because the mind fills it out with roundness and movement, a reality by inference, which is not actually seen but is imagined. Art and science are both uniquely human actions, outside the range of anything that an animal can do. And here we see that they derive from the same human faculty: the ability to visualize the future, to foresee what may happen and plan to anticipate it, and

to represent it to ourselves in images that wt: project and move about inside our head, or in a square of light on the dark wall of a cave or a television screen. We also look here through the telescope of the imagination; the imagination is a telescope in time, we are looking back at the experience of the past. The men who made these paintings, the men who were present, looked through that telescope forward. They looked along the ascent of man because what we call cultural evolution is essentially a constant growing and widening of the human imagination. The men who made the weapons and the men who made the paintings were doing the same thing-anticipating a future as only man can do, inferring what is to come from what is here. There are many gifts that are unique in man; but at the center of them all, the root from which all knowledge grows, lies the ability to draw conclusions from what we see to what we do not see, to move our minds through space and time, and to recognize ourselves in the past on the steps to the present. All over these caves the print of the hand says: 'This is my mark. This is man."

The largest single step in the ascent of man is the change from nomad to village agriculture. What made that possible? An act of will by men, surely; but with that, a strange and secret act of nature. A happy conjunction of natural and human events created agriculture. In the Old World that happened about ten thousand years ago. The turning point to the spread of agriculture in the Old World was almost certainly the occurrence of two forms of wheat with a large, full head of seeds. Before 8000 B.c. wheat was not the luxuriant plant it is today; it was merely one of many wild grasses that spread throughout the Middle East. By some genetic accident, the wild wheat crossed with a natural goat grass and formed a .fertile hybrid. That accident must have happened many times in the springing vegetation that came up after the last Ice Age. In terms of the genetic machinery that directs growth, it combined the fourteen chromosomes of wild wheat with the fourteen chromosomes of goat grass, and produced Emmer with twenty-eight chromosomes. That is what makes Emmer so much plumper. The hybrid was able to spread naturally, because its seeds are attached to the husk in such a way that they scatter in the wind. For such a hybrid to be fertile is rare but not unique among

plants. But now the story of the rich plant life that followed the Ice Ages becomes more surprising. There was a second genetic accident,which may have come about because Emmer was already cultivated. Emmer crossed with another natural goat grass and produced a still larger hybrid with forty-two chromosomes, which is bread wheat. That was improbable enough in itself, and we know now that bread wheat would not have been fertile but for a specific genetic mutation on one chromosome. Yet there is something even stranger. Now we have a beautiful ear of wheat, but one which will never spread in the wind because the ear is too tight to break up. And if I do break it up, why, then the chaff flies off and every grain falls exactly where it grew. Let me remind you, that is quite different from the wild wheats or from the first, primitive hybrid, Emmer. In those primitive forms the ear is much more open, and if the ear breaks up then you get quite a different effect-you get grains which will fly in the wind. The bread wheats have lost that ability. Suddenly, man and the plant have come together. Man has a wheat that he lives by, but the wheat also thinks that man was made for him because only so can it be propagated. For the bread wheats can only multiply with help; man must harvest the ears and scatter their seeds; and the life of each, man and the plant, depends on the other.


DC The genius of men like Newton and Einstein lies in that they ask transparent, innocent questions which turn out to have catastrophic answers. The poet William Cowper called Newton a "childlike sage" for that quality, and the description perfectly fits the air of surprise at the world that Einstein carried in his face. Whether he talked about riding a beam of light or falling through space, Einstein was always full of beautiful, simple illustrations of such principles, and I shall take a leaf out of his book. I go to the bottom of the clock tower and get into the tram he used to take every day on his way to work as a clerk in the Swiss Patent Office. The thought that Einstein had had in his teens was this: "What would the world look like if! rode on a beam oflight?" Suppose this tram were moving away from that clock on the very beam with which we see what the clock says. Then, of course, the clock would be frozen. I, the tram, this box riding on the beam of light would be fixed in time. Time would have a stop. Let me spell that out. Suppose the clock behind me says "noon" when I leave. I now travel 186,000 miles away from it at the speed of light; that ought to take me one second. But the time on the clock, as I see it, still says "noon," because it takes the beam oflight from the clock exactly as long as it has taken me. So far as the clock as I see it, so far as the universe inside the tram is concerned, in keeping up with the speed of light I have cut myself off from the passage of time. That is an extraordinary paradox. I will not go into its implications, or others that Einstein was concerned with. I will just concentrate on this point: that if I rode on a beam of light, time would suddenly come to an end for me. And that must mean that, as I approach the speed o'flight (which is what I am going to simulate in this tram), I am alone in my box of time-and space. Such paradoxes make two things clear. An obvious one: there is no universal time. But a more subtle one: that experience runs very differently for the traveler and the stay-at-home-and so for each of us on his own path. My experiences within the tram are consistent: I discover the same laws, the same relations between time, distance, speed, mass and force, that every other observer discovers. But the actual values that I get for time, distance, and so on, are not the same that the man on the pavement gets. That is the core of the Principle of Relativity. But the obvious question is "Well, what holds his box and mine together?" The passage of light: light is the carrier of information that binds us. And that is why the crucial experimental fact is the one that puzzled people since 1881: that when we exchange signals, then we discover that information passes between us always at the same pace. We always get the same value for the speed of light. And then naturally time and space and mass must be different for each of us, because they have to give the same laws for me here in the tram and for the man outside, consistently-yet the same value for the speed of light. Light and the other radiations are signals that spread out from an event like ripples through the universe, and there is no way in which news of the event can move outward faster than they do. The light or the radio wave or the X-ray is the ultimate carrier of news or messages, and forms a basic network of information which links the material universe together. Even if the message that we want to send is simply the time, we cannot get it from one place to another faster than the light or the radio wave that carries it. There is no universal time for the world, no signal from Greenwich by which we can set our watches without getting the speed oflight inextricably tied up in it. In this dichotomy, something has to give. For the path of a ray of light (like the path of a bullet) does not look the same to a casual bystander as to the man who fired it on the move. The

o [

RtEE~r:tJttlEljI Q

DOl

0

JDD

path looks longer to the bystander; and therefore the time that the light takes on its path must seem longer to him, if he is to get the same value for its speed. Is that real? Yes. We know enough now about cosmic and atomic processes to see that at high speeds that is true. We will take the tram up toward the speed oflight to see what the appearances look like. The relativity effect is that things change shape. (There are also changes in color, but they are not due to relativity.) The tops of the buildings seem to bend inward and forward. The buildings also seem crowded together. I am traveling horizontally, so horizontal distances seem shorter; but the heights remain the same. Cars and people are distorted in the same way: thin and tall. And what is true for me looking out is true for the man outside looking in. The Alice-in-Wonderland world of relativity is symmetrical. The observer sees the tram crushed together: thin and tall.


Einstein's is a man's eye view, in which what you see and what I see is relative to each of us, that is, to our place and speed. And this relativity cannot be removed. We cannot know what the world is like in itself, we can only compare what it looks like to each of us, by the practical procedure of exchanging messages. I in my tram and you in your chair can share no divine and instant view of events-we can only communicate our own views to one another. And communication is not instant; we cannot remove from it the basic time lag of all signals, which is set by the speed oflight. Einstein was the creator of a philosophical more than a mathematical system. He had a genius for finding philosophical ideas that gave a new view of practical experience. He did not look at nature like a god but like a pathfinder, that is, a man inside the chaos of her phenomena who believed that there is a common pattern visible in them all if we look with fresh eyes.

Sketches above demonstrate the Alice-in- Wonderland effects of relativity. Top: Observer sees the stationary tram (extreme left) without distortion; the other trams moving at high speed have changed shape-they seem tall and thin. (They have also changed color, but this is not a relativity effect.) Above: The observer in a stationary tram (left) sees houses undistorted. In the moving tram (right), he sees them tall and thin.


BENJAMIN FRANKLIN AND THE NEW AGE Benjamin Franklin had such marvelous luck. When he went to present his credentials to the French Court in 1778, it turned out at the last moment that the wig and formal clothes were too small for him. So he boldly went in his own hair, and was instantly hailed as the child of nature from the backwoods. All his actions have the stamp ofa man who knows his mind, and knows the words to speak it. To those who doubted the use of new inventions (the occasion was the first hydrogen balloon ascent in Paris in 1783) Franklin replied, "What is the use of a new-born baby?" His character is condensed in the answer, optimistic, down to earth, pithy, and memorable enough to be used again by Michael Faraday, a greater scientist, in the next century. Franklin was alive to how things were said. He made the first pair of bifocal spectacles for himself by sawing his lenses in half, because he could not follow French at court unless he could watch the speaker's expression. Men like Franklin had a passion for rational knowledge. Looking at the mountain of neat achievements scattered through his life, the pamphlets, the cartoons, the printer's stamps, we are struck by the spread and richness of his inventive mind. The scientific entertainment of the day was electricity. Franklin loved fun (he was a rather improper man), yet he took electricity seriously; he recognized it as a force in nature. He proposed that lightning is electric, and in 1752 he proved it-how would a man like Franklin prove it?-by hanging a key from a kite in a thunderstorm. Being Franklin, his luck held; the experiment did not kill him, only those who copied it. Of course, he turned his experiment into a practical invention, the lightning conductor; and made it illuminate the theory of electricity too by arguing that all electricity is of one kind and not, as was then thought, two different fluids. There is a footnote to the invention of the lightning conductor to remind us again that social history hides in unexpected places. Franklin reasoned, rightly, that the lightning conductor would work best with a sharp end. This was disputed by some scientists, who argued for a rounded end, and the Royal Society in England had to arbitrate. However, the argument was settled at a more primitive and elevated level: King George III, in a rage against the American revolution, fitted rounded ends to the lightning conductors on royal buildings. Political interference with science is usually tragic; it is happy to have a comic instance that rivals the war in Gulliver's Travels between "the two great empires of Lilliput and Blefuscu" that opened their breakfast egg at the sharp or the rounded end. Franklin and his friends lived science; it was constantly in their thoughts and just as constantly in their hands. The understanding of nature to them was an intensely practical pleasure. These were men in society: Franklin was a political man, whether he printed paper money or his endless racy pamphlets. And his politics were as downright as his experiments. He changed the florid opening of the Declaration of Independence to read with simple confidence, "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal." When war between England and the American revolutionaries broke out, he wrote openly to an English politician who had been his friend, in words charged with fire: You have begun to burn our towns. Look upon your hands! They are stained with the blood of your relations. Top right: Statesman-scientist Benjamin Franklin had a passion for rational knowledge. When some people expressed doubts about the value of new inventions, Franklin quipped: "What is the use of a new-born baby?"


PHYSICS AND MODERN ART: TAKING THE WORLD APART

MAN'S PERSONAL COMMITMENT

The notion that there is an underlying structure, a world within the world of the ,atom, captured the imagination of artists at once. Art from the year 1900 on is different from the art before it, as can be seen in any original painter of the time: Umberto Boccioni, for instance, in The Forces of a Street, or his Dynamism of a Cyclist. Modern art begins at the same time as modern physics because it begins in the same ideas. Since the time of Newton's Opticks, painters had been entranced by the colored surface of things. The twentieth century changed that. Like the X-ray pictures of Rontgen, it looked for the bone beneath the skin, and for the deeper, solid structure that builds up from the inside the total form of an object or a body. A painter like Juan Gris is engaged in the' analysis of structure, whether he is looking at natural forms in Still Life or at the human form in Pierrot. The cubist painters, for example, are obviously inspired by the families of crystals. They see in them the shape of a village on a hillside, as Georges Braque did in his Houses at L'Estaque, or a group of women as Picasso painted them in Les Demoiselles d'Avignon. In Pablo Picasso's famous beginning to cubist painting -a single face, the Portrait of Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler-the interest has shifted from the skin and the features to the underlying geometry. The head has been taken apart into mathematical shapes and then put together as a reconstruction, a re-creation, from the inside out. There are two clear differences between a work of art and a scientific paper. One is that in the work of art the painter is visibly taking the world to pieces and putting it together on the same canvas. And the other is that you can watch him thinking while he is doing it. (For example, Georges Seurat putting one colored dot beside another of a different color to get the total effect.)

Knowledge is not a loose-leaf notebook of facts. Above all, it is a responsibility for the integrity of what we are, primarily of what we are as ethical creatures. You cannot possibly maintain that informed integrity if you let other people run the world for you while you yourself continue to live out of a ragbag of morals that come from past beliefs. That is really crucial today. You can see it is pointless to advise people to learn differential equations, or to do a course in electronics or in computer programing. And yet, fifty years from now, if an understanding of man's origins, his evolution, his history, his progress is not the commonplace of the schoolbooks, we shall not exist. The commonplace of the schoolbooks of tomorrow is the adventure of today, and that is what we are engaged in. And I am infinitely saddened to find myself suddenly surrounded in the West by a sense of terrible loss of nerve, a retreat from knowledge into-into what? Into Zen Buddhism; into falsely profound questions about, are we not really just animals at bottom; into extrasensory perception and mystery. They do not lie along the line of what we are now able to know if we devote ourselves to it: an understanding of man himself. We are nature's unique experiment to make the rational intelligence prove itself sounder than the reflex. Knowledge is our destiny. Self-knowledge, at last bringing together the experience of the arts and the explanations of science, waits ahead of us. It sounds very pessimistic to talk about Western civilization with a sense of retreat. I have been so optimistic about the ascent of man; am I going to give up at this moment? Of course not. The ascent of man will go on. But do not assume that it will go on carried by Western civilization as we know it. We are being weighed in the balance at this moment. If we give up, the next step will be taken-but not by us. We have not been given any guarantee that Assyria and Egypt and Rome were not given. We are waiting to be somebody's past too, and not necessarily that of our future. We are a scientific civilization: that means, a civilization in which knowledge and its integrity are crucial. Science is only a Latin word for knowledge. If we do not take the next step in the ascent of man, it will be taken by people elsewhere, in Africa, in China. Should I feel that to be sad? No, not in itself. Humanity has a right to change its color. And yet, wedded as I am to the civilization that nurtured me, I should feel it to be infinitely sad. I, whom England made, whom it taught its language and its tolerance and excitement in intellectual pursuits, I should feel it a grave sense ofloss (as you would) if a hundred years from now Shakespeare and Newton are historical fossils in the ascent of man, in the way that Homer and Euclid are. We are all afraid-for our confidence, for the future, for the world. That is the nature of the human imagination. Yet every man, every civilization, has gone forward because of its engagement with what it has set itself to do. The personal commitment of a man to his skill, the intellectual commitment and the emotional commitment working together as one, has made the Ascent of Man. 0

Modern art began at the same time as modern physics; both developed from the same ideas, Below, left: Painting by French artist Georges Seurat, Seascape at Port-en-Bessin, Normandy. Below: A detailfrom the same painting. By arranging the paints in a mosaic of tiny blobs of color, Seurat was able to enhance the luminosity of the images he was painting.

Jacob BrODowski, who died in 1974, has been described as a "latter-day Renaissance man." Mathematician, poet, inventor, playwright, humanist, he was a Fellow of the Salk Institute of Biological Studies at La Jolla, California, when he died. Among his published works are

The Poet's Defence, The Face of Violence, Science and Human Values, The Identity of Man, and The Ascent of Man, from which this article has been excerpted,


An orange summer sun had just disappeared behind the horizon when the maestro took his place on the stage of the brightly lit, open-fronted orchestra shell, bowed to his audience and turned to face the musicians. Suddenly but gently, the opening strains of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony wafted out across the seated audience and beyond, to the hundreds of persons reclining on a grassy knoll. The evening breeze brought relief from the day's heat and humidity. Such a scene could be duplicated at scores of U.S. music festivals, which have become as much a part of the American summer scene as baseball and backyard barbecues. For over four decades now, Americans have been flocking to such festivals, outgrowths of the great musical gatherings that began in European cities a century ago. The most striking aspect of American music festivals is their diversity. Almost every kind of music can be found, ranging from renderings of the world's most famous composers by full symphony orchestras to learned-by-ear, foot-stomping folk tunes performed by mountain fiddle and banjo players. One thing U.S. summer festivals do have in common, however, is an air of informality. Most often, the performances are outdoors, and in many cases audiences may eat and

drink while the music is being played-the likely fare being a picnic meal washed down with soft drinks or wine. One need not dress up; a spectator's "seat" is apt to be a blanket spread across the grass. And a performance may be followed by a chat with the musicians. Although some U.S. music festivals begin as early as March and others are held as late as October, most occur during the prime vacation months of July and August. They take place at a variety of locations across the country, though southern California and the New England states, particularly, have a high concentration of festival events. Many of the U.S. festivals have become known worldwide. The Berkshire Festival by the Boston Symphony Orchestra at Tanglewood, Massachusetts, is highly esteemed for the quality of its performances and attracts some of America's best known musicians. The Marlboro Music Festival on the campus of Marlboro College in Vermont is famous for the high caliber of musical training offered to students throughout an entire summer. The Santa Fe Opera Company in the southwestern state of New Mexico is a highly acclaimed group that operates only during the summer. Probably the most famous single jazz event in the

Groups of young people enjoy their picnic meals in New York City's Central Park before the bands and singers come in to begin the music.

Below: In summer, the Boston Symphony Orchestra moves out of doors and performs popular classics in the city'sfamed Esplanade beside the Charles River.


During the Virginia country music festival (above and left) fans camp out for the three-day round-,the-clock concert. Capturing the mood of the event, star singer Emily Lou Harris sends a young listener, unmindful of the pouring rain, into raptures.


world is the Newport Jazz Festival. Named for a small Rhode Island seacoast town, it is now held in New York City. While more than 50 symphony orchestras take part in music festivals throughout the United States, it is impossible to determine the total number of festivals because of their great variety. If one includes all kinds of musical gatherings-fiddlÂŤ contests, conventions of folksong performers, southern-style "jamborees," jazz outingsthe number reaches well into the hundreds. What is known for certain is that the number of festivals has been increasing steadily for years and that, at summer's end, both music makers and music lovers already are looking forward to the festivals that will follow the long, cold months of the winter 0 ~come.

At classical music concerts, like the Tanglewood Music Festival (above), the setting is often as grand as the music and aficionados revel in both. At left afan relaxes in the splendor of the Festival's picturesque 92-hectare site in the Berkshire Mountains at Lenox, Massachusetts.


Both the placid conformity of the fifties and the angry rebellion of the sixties are gone. Though searching for a separate identity, American youth today has accepted many of the traditional responsibilities. The mosaic of American youth is one of such diversity that an onlooker could easily assume-wrongly-that it has no discernible pattern at all. In a society as heterogeneous as that of the United States, with its varied races, its geographic and ethnic diversity and its still significant income differences between various groups in the population, it is not surprising that no young American really could be typical of his or her whole generation. But if an observer of American youth were to step back a little to view the mosaic as a whole, he could see, quite definitely, certain themes and moods which characterize the majority of young people and affect many of the others. During the 1950s, for example, American youths were noted for their seriousness, their conformity and their embracement of the traditional American way of life. Starting in the early 1960s, the character of the youthful segment of the population changed dramatically. At that time, there was a good deal of experimentation with a wide diversity of lifestyles. Criticism of established society led to political activism and to an atmosphere of rebelliousness on many college campuses. By June 1970, "campus unrest" had become a major problem in the United States. Later in the 1970s,however, a rapid turnabout in the character of the youthful population occurred. What are young people like at the present time? What are their attitudes and values, their goals and expectations? One of the most striking characteristics of American youths in the late 1970s is their interest in careers. Career planning is starting in secondary school where many students are looking for more career-oriented programs at school and more discipline. During the 1960s, secondary school students were given increasing freedom and control over their education, such as selection of courses and requirements for graduation. Today, a number of young people seem to feel that this emancipation went too far, that it spawned a disruptive number of disorderly or "turned off" students, and that it is not conducive to learning. Therefore they are seeking a stricter educational environment. Future employment is very much on their minds. Nearly half the students about to graduate from secondary school in the United States are planning to go to college, a higher proportion than a few years ago. And whereas, historically, college attendance has been much higher for males than for females, those planning to go to college are now mostly female. These students are looking to the colleges to prepare them directly for a career,

instead of only providing them with a well-rounded education. On university campuses, students have become less interested in courses that provide general knowledge, such as philosophy and history, and much more interested in courses that are applicable to work roles. The number of business majors has risen especially fast. Increasing also has been the interest in professional schools, such as medical and law schools, as well as graduate school programs in business and psychology. These aspirations tell a great deal about young people's attitudes toward the business world and their own careers. During the 1960s, many young people were quite critical of business and had negative feelings toward working in the business world. Now positions in major companies are prized by many. Once on the job, university graduates and young people in general are demanding much more in terms of personal satisfaction than did previous generations. Good pay and security were the major goals of past generations, and they were happy to achieve just that. Those attributes are still important to the current generation, but they are also seeking self-fulfillment in their careers, a chance to participate in important decisions and contribute to society. Students see these possibilities in professional and executive careers which consequently have a high appeal. As secondary school and university students try to prepare themselves for careers and to gain access to desirable jobs in professional and graduate schools, they are working harder and competing for grades more intensely. Utilization of college libraries is up sharply, and the students using them are studying more seriously and taking fewer "breaks." The group around the soft drink machines, so frequent a few years ago, has been replaced by groups around the card catalogues and in the reference section. Simultaneously, however, grades that would once have guaranteed success are often surpassed by such large numbers of students that the marks actually have become less significant as indicators of ability. The intensity of all this competition has produced a new pressure-laden atmosphere on university campuses. At one time college attendance was looked upon as a special experience in life; a time of little responsibility during which the student could have fun with few concerns for the future. Students are still interested in having a good time, but the future is no longer something far away, something that they believe they can wait until graduation to attend to. They know they must work hard and that, even then, a certain number of


In the wake of years of experimentation, and often alienation, most of the rebellious youth of the 1960s have come back to the mainstream of U.S. society. But their earlier focus on self persists. them will not be admitted into the professional school of their choice, or get the first job they hope for. Still, most young people in universities remain quite optimistic and sure that in the long run they will wind up with challenging work. Not all segments of the youthful population share this optimism and hope, of course. Half of America's youth do not go to college and the young people in major cities who do not finish their secondary school educations, and some that do, often find it very hard to find and retain jobs. Unemployment among teen-agers has been rising fast. A 1975 survey revealed that about one teen-ager in five who wanted to work could not find a job. Even for those aged 20 through 24, one in eight was unemployed. For young people in the largest minority groups, blacks and Hispanic-Americans, this problem is even more severe. These difficulties easily lead to frustration and a sense of hopelessness, and thence to crime and drug use. The incidence of crime among the young has been growing in a number of urban centers. Many American cities are trying to combat those problems by providing jobs and job training for urban youth. Perhaps because education and careers within established society are very much on their minds, young people generally have retulil1ed to more traditional societal behavior. The era of experimentation with unorthodox lifestyles and of widespre,ad social criticism by the young that was so prevalent in the 1960s is clearly over, but from it has developed a new youth-group orientation toward self and society that has its roots in the earlier rebellion. The protection of individuality was a prime concern of the youth of the past decade, summarized by a common phrase of the times, "do your own thing." After their years of experimentation and, often, alienation, most of the youth of the 1960s now have come back to the mainstream of U.S. society but with their earlier focus on self still strong. That focus can be seen in many ways-for example, the growing interest in "introspection movements" such as transcendental meditation and bio-feedback (an experimental science of controlling the physical by mental processes). Other evidence is the wide popularity of self-help books and articles and the desire for careers and hobbies that provide the opportunity for self-expression. There is rising attention to personal health among the young, which is leading them to more exercise, to more care about nutrition and to more concern about preserving a clean and healthy environment. A number of young people today are deeply perturbed about pollution and about the waste of scarce resources around the world. Many youths do volunteer work for various organizations dealing with these issues. One of the consequences of this marked individualism of young Americans is an attempt by growing numbers of them to define a new relationship with society. The present youthful generation is, generally, very realistic. Most seem to realize that in order to develop and grow and have the lifestyles they want, they need to commit themselves to a money-producing job. These young people seem less willing than most past generations to compromise themselves, to take a job just for the income. Nor do they want to "drop out" of society to escape its pressures. They are striving for careers that will provide a chance to contribute to society while leaving themselves-to as large an extent as possible-free of the constraints of society, free to develop as better individuals with better lifestyles. As a result of these almost conflicting desires, many young

people have developed a mood of "first things first." They put primary emphasis on preparing for a good "affluent" career. But the career is not the final goal, it merely allows a free lifestyle and the opportunity for individual development. There are varying views about this trend. Some observers feel that this growing individualism is producing increased egocentrism and selfishness among the young. Others see only positive results. Actually, there is evidence of both consequences. On the negative side, there are signs of less responsibility, of a permissive attitude that condones a "rip off" of other individuals or institutions. A small but noticeable number of young people are avoiding repayment of student loans given them to help pay school expenses by declaring themselves bankrupt. Theft in college bookstores is up. And crime among nonschool youth is causing concern. Vandalism, alcoholism and venereal disease show signs of rising. To some extent these are the results of increased pressures on the young, at work and in school. But they seem to result, as well, from a focus on self that leads to less concern for others and fewer restraints on antisocial behavior. On the positive side, growing individualism has instilled in many young people an increasing regard for human dignity and has produced a tolerance for a wide diversity of lifestyles. As they have sought better ways to live, many young Americans have come to recognize quite strongly the right of others to choose their own ways of life. This type of experience has tended to reduce prejudice and discrimination. Indeed, relations among the different races represented within the current generation of youth are better than for any generation in American history. This emphasis on individualism also has had a major impact on views ofthe young about the institution of the family and it already has affected the type offamily relationships they form. The role of women in American families is undergoing perhaps the most radical change, which will continue with greater rapidity in the families formed by the present generation of American youth. Traditionally, there was a good deal of social pressure put on women in the United States to marry fairly early in life, have children soon after marriage and stay home with the children at least until the children were grown. Young people are rejecting this lifestyle in ever-increasing numbers. They feel women should be free to develop careers, remain childless or even single. The fact that growing numbers of mothers are going to work leads directly to less supervision of the young. The fact that university enrollments are so high means that many in their late teens or early 20s spend most of their time living away from home. Until the mid-1960s, many universities had in loco parentis authority, which meant that they had quasiparental responsibility for supervising their students. But during the campus activism of the 1960s, most higher education institutions were forced by student rebellion to give up those rights. The result is much more freedom for students. Until recently, most young men and women not going to college lived in their parents' home until they married. But, increasingly, young people rent their own apartments right after they complete their education, often moving to other areas of the country to do so. A notable phenomenon among the American youth of the seventies has been the trend to introspection and to soul-searching movements.



Instead of trying to change society through angry protests, today's young people in the United States are working for causes they feel deeply for: defending consumer interests, reducing poverty, protecting the environment. It is also significant that young people feel very free about discussing sex. In fact, they are very open about discussing all aspects of their lives with friends and family. One of the consequences of youth's increasing knowledge of sex (through discussion) and their sexual experience is that they feel a great deal of control over this aspect of their lives. Many of them know a good deal about birth control and feel capable of planning the size of families. In the future, the combination of smaller families -with, consequently, fewer young people-and increased longevity will push up the average age of the American population. Many observers believe the United States has been youthoriented. As the age structure of the population changes, this orientation might change and could affect government policy, fashions, entertainment, outlook and many other aspects of life. During the 1960s a highly vocal minority of young Americans not only was critical of the government and its leaders, but also took a very active role in trying to implement political changes. These young people were part of the first generation to grow up with television and were very conscious of the media. Thus, they organized political demonstrations and other highly visible incidents that were covered as news events on TV. A number of national organizations of politically active youth emerged during this period, seeking to become a major political influence. To a considerable degree, American involvement in Vietnam was responsible for the youth activism of the late 1960s. When that involvement was ended, the entire political character of the youthful generation changed. The activists, always a minority, practically disappeared. Most of the political organizations set up by young people were discontinued. The campuses rocked by dissent became quiet. Does this mean that young people are no longer interested in politics or political issues? The answer, quite clearly, is "no." The spirit of rebelliousness is gone. Most government policies are accepted. The voting age has been lowered and young Americans' feelings of frustration about not being able to affect the "system" have been replaced by the knowledge that they can have an influence. But instead of trying to change policy through highly vocal and visible protest, many are trying to work for various causes within the basic structure of political action. Among the causes that young people care deeply about are protection of consumer interests, ending poverty, enhancing human dignity and protecting the environment. Organizations working for these ends get thousands of volunteers from the youthful population. Consumer activists, such as Ralph Nader, are widely admired on campus. One of the reasons many students are attracted to law schools is because they believe legal training can most effectively aid them in contributing to society. Young people today are somewhat critical of the traditional "style" of politics. They are opposed to political bosses who manipulate large blocs of voters, to Congressional committee meetings and hearings that are not open to the public, to lobbyists from large organizations who try secretly to influence Congressmen. Partly because of the young, the U.S. political system is


Left and above: After the campus unrest of the early seventies students are eagerly returning to classrooms and libraries. Careerconsciousness starts early, as is obviousfrom the trend toward joboriented courses. The proportion of working students has gone up sharply in the last decade. Below: Many young activists are working for political parties. Candidates acknowledge the importance of enlisting their support in the youth-oriented society of America today.

changing and politics is becoming more open to public scrutiny. Political candidates are disclosing a good deal of information about their backgrounds and finances, new laws about political contributions have been put into effect and the power of political bosses has been greatly diminished. American youth is also demanding more from the business sector of society than previously. According to the young, it is no longer enough for businesses to sell properly made goods at reasonable prices. They believe businesses should be concerned with the environment, work to solve social problems, take affirmative steps to hire and promote people from minority groups, and refrain from making overly large profits. Many companies are responding to these demands and now have officers whose sole responsibility is to oversee corporate social responsibility or to encourage minority hiring. During the 1960s, some young people believed that if a policy of the United States was "wrong," then something was wrong with the entire society. This way of thinking is no longer p;evalent. Most young people today feel that the country has many problems it must work on, but they don't condemn their country as a whole. One of the notable characteristics of the youthful segment of the American population is its ability to influence the rest of society. Youth is a true "forerunner" group, introducing ideas and behaviors which become diffused through other age groups. There are a number of reasons for this influence. One is simply the size of the youthful population. In 1976 there were 45,041,000 people aged 14 through 24 in the U.S. population, representing 20.9 per cent of the total population. Another reason is the educational attainment of the young. Presently, about half of those aged 18and 19 and almost a quarter of those aged 20 through 24 are enrolled in school. The young are the most highly educated segment of society and this gives them an ability to articulate that makes them very effective spokesmen for what they believe in. A third factor is the degree to which the young are integrated into society. They are very frank in their discussions with parents. A good deal of research has shown that the first adults to pick up the new ideas of youth are parents with children in college. Also, growing proportions of college students are working. In 1950,32 per cent of males aged 14 through 24 who were enrolled in school were also in the labor force. By 1975 it rose to 45 per cent. For enrolled females the proportions in the labor force went from 20 per cent to 44 per cent. As young people talk to and work with adults they are able to influence the behavior of adults. A final factor is the current youth-orientation of society. Even though this orientation will probably change, it remains a potent force at the present time. What will the United States be like when this generation of youth matures and reaches positions of responsibility? Undoubtedly there will be more women working and holding positions of power, essentially because there will probably be a, low birthrate and thus fewer mothers confined to the home to care for young children. The focus on self will continue to bring concern in society for the needs of individuals, interest in health and protection of the environment. It seems most unlikely that these young people will shatter society as it now exists to rebuild it in a totally new image. They will, of course, cause changes but, in general, American youth today seems to accept most traditional American values and beliefs and aims to preserve them for the next generation at least. 0 About the Author: Mathew Greenwald is a sociologist out studies on American youth.

who has carried


RISING STAR IN INDIAN TENNIS

by SUBROTO SIRKAR

Ramesh Krishnan is a quiet, pleasant-faced young man who likes swimming, listening to his varied tapes of music, reading and rereading books of great tennis players, and-so his Davis Cup teammates say-eating a lot of rice at meals. He is probably the most talked-about teen-age sportsman in India today: sports lovers all over the land are wondering how he will fare in the tough, highly competitive world of pro tennis. For young Krishnan, who turned 17 this June, is not merely India's national champion, he has also earned a mild kind of international fame by winning one of the keenest junior competitions, the United States Tennis Association's (USTA) national Boys' 16 singles. When the boy from Madras won this prestigious title in Kalamazoo, Michigan, in August last year, he added his name to an impressive list of past

winners that included Wimbledon titlist Jimmy Connors, Cliff Richey (who in 1970 was the first Grand Prix season champion), and U.S. Davis Cup players Dick Stockton and Erik van Dillen. Not just that: the young Indian became the first non-American to win the Under16 singles. And guess who was the first foreigner to win the U.S. Boys' 18 title? None other than a carrot-haired Australian left-hander named Rodney George Laver, back in 1956. Laver, of course, went on to become the finest player of his era, and is an acknowledged all-time great. It may be hazardous to suggest, on the basis of his Kalamazoo victory, that Ramesh Krishnan might attain similar status. Nevertheless, his feat demands attention-for its potential. The question is: How far can he go? In the Tamilian tradition, the name ofIndia's young champion

should be K. Ramesh. However, tutor and educated Ramesh well following a recent trend, in the game's basics, as he had Krishnan senior has made his taught Ramanathan Krishnan. own name the family title. When Ramesh was four he used Yet whether he is Ramesh K. to play on the clay court at home or Krishnan R., jr, the Madras with a racket that had its handle collegian is destined-for some sawn short, but after some time years, at least-to play his tennis . he lost interest and began serious in the shadow of his illustrious tennis only at 10, in 1971. He father. Ramanathan Krishnan, a first came on the national scene contemporary of Rod Laver and in 1973-74 when, at the national now 41, is considered the finest championships in Pune, he won tennis player produced by India. the Boys' 14 singles (in tennis He was in the unofficial world lingo, Boys' 16 or Under-16 top 10 ran kings four times and means 16 or below in the year of renowned for his delicate touch the competition). At the time artistry, especially in his mastery Ramesh, never tall for his age, of th~ dropshot. As one of the was on the plump side, smiled world's foremost amateurs, a lot and blinked even more: Ramanathan Krishnan excelled Off the court he hardly looked on all surfaces. a tennis player, but on it his Ramesh's first coach, how- talent was evident. In 1975 Ramesh made his ever, was not his father but his grandfather. T. Ramanathan first trip abroad, with the official had been Madras State cham- junior squad under national pion in the thirties and nation- coach Akht~r Ali. That gave him ally ranked No.3 in 1939. Such a taste of European conditions, playing ability apart, he is a good and after a second tour the next


year, in the 1976-77 season, he made his Grand Prix debut in the Indian Open at Bangalore, won the all-India hard-court title at Hyderabad, and at Indore became the country's national junior champion. Last year was an important time for young Ramesh. In March he did his school-leaving examination; by the end of May he was in Europe again, playing the French junior event in Paris. At his first Junior Wimbledon (which his father had won in 1954)in late June, he made a fair impression, reaching the last 16 and being a set ahead before losing to Charlie Fancutt, an Australian older, much taller and faster than him. (This year he reached the third round.) The following week he was playing in America, at the invitation of the chairman of the U.S. Junior Davis Cup committee. Ramanathan Krishnan, who had joined him at Wimbledon, went with him. In his first tournament on the alien surface of American clay, at Burlingame (California), Ramesh reached the fourth round, swamping Chris Evert's brother John-a promising junior his own age-on the way. A few days later, in St. Louis, he won the title, and apart from that and the Kalamazoo crown, Ramesh took two other Under16 titles on the U.S. Junior circuit: at Springfield, Ohio, and River Forest, Illinois. With the tennis boom at its peak in the United States, some 600 boys from all over the country try to enter the meet on the Kalamazoo College courts, where the U.S. Boys' 18 and 16 nationals have been played for the last 35 years, and after due elimination in the qualifying rounds 128 play the tournament proper. Observers from Kalamazoo had been impressed by Ramesh's showing in earlier tournaments and he was invited to play the Under-16 singles, being seeded No.5. In the fourth round he beat the No. 11 seed, Howard Sands, and then in the quarters brought off an upset, stunning top-seeded Scott Davis of Santa Monica 6-4, 6-0. In the semifinal he swept past the 10th seeded Nixon, two and one, and in the final beat Ben

Testerman, seeded sixth, 7-6, 6-2. Ramesh's supremacy was complete: this was the first of his major accomplishments. After Kalamazoo, in the Pepsi event at Forest Hills, Ramesh lost first round to South Africa's Rory Chappell, 18. If Kalamazoo was a high spot in Ramesh's U.S. trip, so was his spell with Harry Hopman. The hard taskmaster behind Australia's great champions of the fifties and sixties, Laver included, Hopman had once offered to train Ramanathan Krishnan but the latter was unwilling to undergo the rigors of Hopman's schedule. "Hop" migrated to the United States in 1970and ran a tennis academy on Long Island before moving south to Florida in 1975. When Ramesh and his father went to "Harry Hopman's International Tennis at Bardmoor" in Largo, a large ranch where the atmosphere is "play tennis, think tennis, breathe tennis," Hopman (72 this August) observed to Ramanathan Krishnan that Ramesh had to move faster; attack more at the net; learn to get back to a good lob to smash it-and with more power than he displayed-instead of allowing many lobs to land; begin putting more "bite" into all shots he believed should be hit with power and especially into attacking shots to hurry opponents; and develop a regular habit of exercises which would add speed to his movements and keep his weight down. Back home Ramesh strictly followed the physical training schedule Hopman had charted out for him, and in the domestic season 1977-78 he was perhaps the fittest among Indian players. A few days after his second Grand Prix appearance in Bombay, Ramesh was in the Indian team for the Davis Cup tie versus the Republic of Korea at Coimbatore. He played only a dead singles rubber, but with his performance almost a model of calm consistency and unerring strokeplay, he won an impressive victory. The same evening Ramesh flew to Calcutta for the Nationals-and his first "feel" of grass courts in over five months! Premjit Lall, Ramesh's Davis Cup captain,

might have beaten him but after coming through that encounter and washing out Madras rival Jai Royappa III the semifinals, Ramesh took the title, defeating the U.S.-based Jasjit Singh in a close three-setter that might have gone either way. So within a week, Ramesh had two major achievements: The circumstances and demands were different each time, but he emerged with a definite degree of credit from both. Like his father, Ramesh was national champion and Davis Cupper at 16. But while Ramanathan Krishnan had played lead singles and beaten all the best in the Nationals, Ramesh's title triumph was in the absence of top players Vijay and Anand Amritraj, and Sashi Menon. Of greater significance, however, was his success in the Selangor Open at Kuala Lumpur in end February, when he beat Pakistan's Nadir Ali Khan in the final. A few days later, Ramesh played the eightman Straits Times Classic in Singapore: First he beat British Davis Cup player John Feaver, and then ranked Frenchman Jacques Thamin before losing by the odd set in three to another English international, David Lloyd. It was a very good run. Back in India, Ramesh lost to unpretentious K. Raghuram in Pune, and withdrew from a meet in Bombay. His calf muscles had been strained by play on the hard cement courts on the Southeast Asia trip. That put a question mark against Ramesh's ability to stand the severity of the pro circuit. After doing his preuniversity papers from Vivekananda College in Madras in end March, Ramesh-accompanied by his father-went to play the satellite circuit in Italy, and his long overseas trip this year will end with another spell at Harry Hopman's in Florida. It was the great Hopman who once said, tennis is 25 per cent strokes, and the rest is a war of nerves. Where does Ramesh stand in this regard? He undoubtedly has talent, and the keenness to work on his weaknesses. His first serve not being strong, he-realizes he must be consistent with it, placing it in

deep. The service return is one of his strengths, but his forehand could do with some improvement. Ramanathan Krishnan believes his son has both the dedication and the right temperament necessary for success. But there are other knowledgeable observers who feel, when it comes to the crunch, Ramesh may not have the mental toughness to push himself to the utmost, and-as his Pune showing suggested-may tend to falter when too much is expected of him. In his day, Ramanathan Krishnan chose to stay amateur rather than join the pro ranks. Ramesh has little choice in the matter but could find adjusting to the circuit lifestyle difficult. Some think Ramanathan Krishnan is pushing his son too hard, and Ramesh is yet unable to take that much pressure. That, of course, is one point of view. Let us take another, Harry Hopman's. "I think Ramesh will become a greater player than his father," is what Hopman has to say. "I believe that because I see in him at his current early age many of the assets of his father, one or two points where he is already stronger than his father in his prime, and most importantly, he will be able to call upon his father's vast experience to hasten his way toward being one of the best in the world. "Ramesh has his father's beautiful timing, his strong body also built for stamina, his patience, his go-about-the-business~of-playing attitude, which many call concentration, and his father's ability to accept defeat in a 'where did I go wrong or was he just too good' frame of mind." One thing is definite: Ramesh may not grow any taller than his present 5' 7" -but he will surely attain greater heights in his tennis career. And the extent of this depends more on his ability to adapt and adjust to different circumstances than on anything else. 0 About the Author: Subroto Sirkar writes regularly on tennis and other sportsfor The Hindusthan Standard, Sportsweek and other publications.


NEW SCIENCE OF BIRTH

Revolutions in scientific techniques and philosophy are comparable to certain kinds of social upheavals: they tend to happen piecemeal over a period of time, and often are not perceived until they have already occurred. This is what has happened to the science of childbirth in the United States. In the relatively short span of 20 years, a number of dramatic advances have revolutionized the process of birth. There are new drugs, new clinical apparatus, new diagnostic techniques, new psychological insights and new obstetrical methods-all of which have contributed to making childbirth safer for both the mother and the child than it has ever been in the past. Today, fetal monitors prevent cases of brain damage caused when the baby's oxygen is cut off during labor and birth. Intensive-care units for the newborn will halve the rate of U.S. infant mortality (16 deaths per 3,000 live births). Rh disease, which less than a decade ago killed 10,000 American infants every year, is now virtually a thing of the past, thanks to a new vaccine. Prenatal analysis of amniotic fluid in older pregnant women and other high-risk mothers can detect chromosomal abnormalities well before birth, persuading many doctors that the acceptable age for pregnancy may stretch into the 40s. High-frequency sound waves are being used as a diagnostic tool during pregnancy. After the baby arrives, pediatric" surgeons employ minuscule instruments to correct structural defects on hearts only 50 millimeters wide and to rearrange scrambled intestines. Some obstetricians now use a drug to induce the baby's delivery when it will be most convenient for the doctor and the parents; another drug is available to arrest labor that begins too early. Perhaps the most dramatic advance has been made in the treatment of premature babies. Less than two decades ago, hope was slim for most of the 233,000 babies born prematurely each year in the United States. Many simply died in the delivery room. Now thousands are being saved-and many others who might have been permanently incapacitated or retarded are growing up

by JEAN SELIGMANN, MARIANA GOSNELL and DAN SHAPIRO

Dramatic advances in medical science during the past 20 years have made childbirth safer for both the mother and the child. to be normal, healthy children. Among the methods commonly used to save premature babies born with breathing difficulties is a technique known as CPAPcontinuous positive airway pressure. By inserting a tube in the baby's windpipe or placing a pressurized hood around his head, doctors can direct a continuous supply of low-pressure air to the sacs of the immature lungs, preventing them from collapsing. Many preemies also suffer from jaundice, a condition in which the liver fails to detoxify the waste product bilirubin. Exposing the naked infant to a bright fluorescent light, over a period of hours, breaks the bilirubin down into harmless substances. Newborn intensive-care units also use skin sensors that continuously monitor oxygen and other blood gases, and infusion pumps that deliver intravenous fluids to the baby's bloodstream at a preset rate through a tiny tube inserted in the umbilical artery. The new techniques now available to detect and treat childbirth problems are, of course, not required for most pregnancies. In fact, most of the procedures are used only in special circumstances. For example, the new technology has provided at least a partial solution to the major obstetrical problem of older women: their vastly increased risk of bearing children with Down's syndrome (mongolism) or other chromosomal disorders. Now there is a safe, reliable test that can detect the presence of Down's syndrome (and about 60 other chromosomal and metabolic disorders) during the second

trimester of pregnancy, in time for an abortion if the parents choose. The procedure, called amniocentesis, consists of inserting a long hollow needle through the mother's abdomen into her uterus and withdrawing a sample of the amniotic fluid that surrounds the fetus. By examining the chromosomes of fetal cells contained in the fluid, researchers can discover whether the baby is suffering from any of a number of disorders. The fluid and its cells also yield vital information about the fetus' age, lung maturity, oxygen supply and sex. Another new and valuable apparatus that can be used to investigate the progress of a developing fetus is called ultrasound. A quartz crystal is placed on the woman's abdomen and high-frequency sound waves (two million cycles per second) are beamed toward the fetus. When the waves reach the fetus, they bounce back and are transformed on an oscilloscope screen into a highly detailed picture of the baby, the placenta and other features of the womb. During the eighth month of pregnancy, the fetus can be checked with an endoscope. This is a tubular, light-bearing device that is inserted into the vagina and placed against the cervix to afford a good view of the amniotic fluid. If the fluid appears to be greenishyellow rather than amber, the fetus has excreted a substance called meconium. This is a warning sign that the baby is suffering from lack of oxygen and must be delivered as soon as possible. Today, many major hospitals in the United States regularly use electronic fetal monitors to keep a careful, moment-to-moment survey over the progress of a mother's labor. To measure the baby's heartbeat, the physician threads a thin wire with an electrode on the end through the entrance to the uterus and attaches it to the baby's scalp. A slender plastic tube is also placed in the uterus to measure the mother's contractions. Both instruments are connected to a portable, boxlike machine that records the data from mother and child on a moving graph. In one recent case, after the mother had been in labor for several uneventful hours, the monitor's yellow light started to blink-



trouble! The fetal heartbeat had become irregular and was dropping off rapidly. After the administration of oxygen and other measures failed to produce an improvement, the obstetrician performed an emergency Caesarean section to save the infant. The child arrived with his umbilical cord wrapped around and between his legs, which had caused his oxygen supply to be cut off during labor contractions. But because the monitor had reported his distress and the doctors had reacted at once, the child was born alert and healthy, with no sign of brain damage. Less than a decade ago, thousands of babies in the United States died every year from fetal Rh disease, and many thousands more were born deaf, retarded or palsied because of the condition. The problem occurs when an Rh-negative woman, whose blood does not contain the Rh factor, becomes pregnant with an Rh-positive baby. Her body reacts by producing antibodies that attack and destroy the red blood cells of her developing child. Such antibodies usually form after the delivery of a first Rh-positive baby when fetal cells mix with maternal blood; the first baby is rarely affected by them. Subsequent babies who develop the disease can now often be saved by an intrauterine transfusion. But happily, the need for such operations has become rare, thanks to a vaccine developed in 1968, which prevents the destructive antibodies from forming in the first place. To be effective, however, the vaccine must be administered within 72 hours of the mother's first birth, abortion or miscarriage. Once she has already developed the antibodies, the vaccine will not help, and all her pregnancies must be carefully watched. There is also a new drug called diazoxide for stopping labor when it begins too early. Karlis Adamsons, chairman of obstetrics at the Brown University School of Medicine in Providence, Rhode Island, likes to cite the case of a woman whose active labor began seven weeks early. She was given diazoxide and the birth was delayed for two weeks. "When the baby was born," says Adamsons, "it had remarkable lung maturity. Two weeks made a critical difference between what might have been permanent neurological damage and normal survival." One important result of the new technology is that women can now have babies at a much later age than was once thought to be advisable; in fact, some obstetricians say that older women make the best patients and mothers. But most doctors still believe that it is preferable for a woman to start

mothers and fathers can prepare themselves for the birth. Classes in childbirth education are multiplying at an astonishing rate: five years ago, only 10per cent of the nation's 7,000 hospitals offered such courses. Today it is rare to find a hospital of any size that doesn't have one. Most of these classes teach a highly popular technique of disciplined breathing exercises to help a woman relax and thus reduce the pain of intense labor contractions. Developed by the famous French obstetrician Fernand Lamaze, the exercise aims at avoiding medication as much as possible during labor and delivery, but women are told not to feel like failures if they can't stand the pain and want the help of drugs. A more rigorous fqrm of natural childbirth training that emphasizes the avoidance One important result of the of any medication at all is the Bradley method, developed in the 1950s by Denver new technology is that obstetrician Robert Bradley. Bradley, who women can now have babies at brought the husband into the delivery room a much later age than once even before Lamaze, emphasizes the pleasurable, even sexual, sensations of childbirth, thought advisable. and teaches women to concentrate on them rather than to divert their energies into pregnancy characterized by fluid retention, breathing exercises. Pediatricians, who observe babies more high blood pressure and protein in the urine. Second, physicians felt that the smaller babies closely during their first hours and days than produced by smaller maternal weight gains obstetricians do, are convinced that the were desirable, because they were easier to infants of mothers who are medicated during labor and delivery often behave differently deliver. Nowadays, explains Howard Jacobson, from babies born without drugs. Virtually all medication reaches the fetus through the former chairman of the. U.S. National placenta, and a dosage high enough to reAcademy of Sciences' (NAS) Committee on Maternal Nutrition, doctors know that lieve pain in a 54-kilogram woman will in the development of toxemia is not directly most cases affect a 3-kilogram baby. The related to weight gain. More important, it drugged newborn may be unable to start has been thoroughly documented that small breathing without aid or may have difficulty babies are not preferable. This is because coughing up the mucus in its lungs. Because of most of the life-threatening problems of these risks, the American Academy of Pedinewborns, such as oxygen deprivation, birth atrics committee on drugs plans to recominjuries and respiratory distress syndrome, mend officially that the least possible medicaaffect babies who weigh less than 3 kilograms. tion during childbirth is probably best. Most doctors subscribe heartily to this According to the U.S. National FoundationMarch of Dimes, low birth weight is an advice. They emphasize that for the majority underlying cause in half the estimated 53,000 of women, childbirth is fundamentally a a fearsome infant deaths that occur annually within healthy, natural process-not the first year of life. The death rate for these one-and that in many cases the doctor's tiny babies, says the Foundation, is 17 only real function is that of "baby catcher." times the rate for babies who start life at a But when complications do arise, U.S. doctors in most large hospitals now have at higher weight. One interesting phenomenon that is pacing their disposal a remarkable arsenal of tools, the general advance in childbirth technol- drugs and techniques to fight them withogy (and which was in good measure made a wealth of resources that had only begun to possible by it) is a considerable increase in be hinted at 20 years ago. 0 the number of women who want to have their babies under circumstances that are as About the Authors: Jean Seligmann and Mariana natural as possible. The result is a burgeon- Gosnell are associate editors and Dan Shapiro is ing interest in special classes at which both a senior editorial assistant of Newsweek magazine.

her family before the age of 35. At the lower end of the childbearing age range, statistics show that women under 20 are especially likely to experience miscarriages, premature deliveries and stillbirths. There are some surprises in store for the pregnant woman today: now the first thing she may hear from her doctor is that he expects her to put on quite a bit of weight -even as much as 15 kilograms. Until quite recently, many doctors insisted upon a severely restricted gain of 5 to 7 kilograms, a practice based on two theories that have turned out to be wrong. First, it was once thought that a small gain would help prevent toxemia, a potentially fatal complication of


[i]

J-tC

;J~ ~

ON THE LIGHTER SIDE

"If I get into trouble before dinner, what will I have to go to bed without?" Š

"As afirm believer in reincarnation, Fm leaving everything to me."

1978. Reprinted

by permission of Ladies Home Journal and Chon Day.



THE ART OF

ROMARE BEARDEN One of the important contemporary artists in the United States, Romare Bearden has made a dramatic impact with his kaleidoscopic images which present Black America in all its colorful manifestations. This was it-Black America! Not just a change of complexion but a different world. I was in l25th street in uptown New York City. A veritable technicolor bazaargaudy bars, band music wafting out of dancing clubs, storefront churches, Cadillacs, sidewalks teeming with leisurely strollers, small knots of people with berets and green and pink shirts chatting at street corners, loud laughter falling full in the ear along with colorful swear words. Wellbuilt girls with long legs stood around in canary and scarlet dresses. Clutching their mothers' hands, ebony-black children with bumblebee eyelashes greedily soaked up the myriad visual impressions around them. An old couple, groceries in hand, stopped by to have a chat with a round-the-bend tobacco vendor. In the dim evening light, the black faces with their strong bone structure, sharply defined contours and massive planes looked almost like masks. Rubens was perhaps one of the first painters to bring out the nobility of a black face. Augustus John, in our times, was another who painted beautiful West Indian female heads. How was it that I had hardly seen these highly paintable faces in contemporary American art? Little did I know that, on the first floor of one of the buildings on the very street where I was standing, a painter called Romare (pronounced romeery) Bearden had been quietly capturing them in a series of brilliant paintings,

Did I say paintings? No, they weren't exactly that. Collages, montages, projections: yes. The faces he portrayed so resembled African masks that the two were easily interchangeable. During the high noon of cubism (1912-13) it was Picasso and Braque who pasted pieces of newspaper, wallpaper with simulated grains of wood, floral designs or oilcloth and other odds and ends to give the objects painted on the canvas their texture, weight and solidity. Juan Gris emulated them a year or two later. The technique came to be known as collages

or papier colles. Although Picasso had done an enormous collage, The Toilet (8' x II'). out of the pages of an atlas, it was left to Matisse, during his last years, to take this medium to its heights. He simply cut pieces of brightly painted paper and pasted them on a canvas, as though they were an extension of his paintings. He preferred to call them papier decoupe. This was pure collage because, unlike the cubists, he did not use brush and paint at all. Romare Bearden combined all these techniques with one of his own by successfully fusing "photo montages" and "projections." He even used bits of colorful cloth, adding a further dimension. The first thing that compels our attention in Bearden's work in the sixties are the faces. These are "composed" of parts cut out of magazine reproductions-a nose from one, an eye or eyes from another, a mouth from a third, combined with elements taken from reproductions of paintings or African sculptures, especially Benin heads. Bits of paper in flat colors are then thrown in either to emphasize a certain part, or create variety in the picture plane, or for the sake of color .contrast. The whole operation is so complex .that it gives the impression of an intricate jigsaw puzzle. The demeaned, shadowy faces of black men and women become profoundly human. Alive in their anguish, they seem to move out of the picture surface and stare through and beyond us, accusing,


mocking. Where do these images come from? They rise from the storehouse of Bearden's memory of black life in the rural South and the industrial North. They are the sum total of the experiences of his people-a tribute not only to the Afro-American but to the whole of America. Romare Bearden was born in 1914, in Charlotte, North Carolina, from where his family came to live in Harlem- "the soul of Black America." During the summer vacations he would visit his relatives in the South or his grandmother in Pittsburgh. It was here that, at the instance of a playmate, he became interested' in drawing. But he soon forgot about it. His middle-class parents wanted him to become a doctor, in preparation for which he majored in mathematics from New York University. At this time he also became a regular contributor of cartoons to the Afro-American, a weekly newspaper. During the Depression, the U.S. Works Progress Administration art program offered an excellent chance to blacks and other minority communities to pursue art as a vocation. Bearden joined the Arts Students League in New York City, where he studied with the well-known German expatriate artist George Grosz. This meeting of minds was of great significance because Grosz's

satirical drawings and watercolors of Nazi society made Bearden realize for the first time the enormous artistic possibility of the American Negro as a subject for his painting-the sharecropper plowing the cotton field in the South, the steel worker of the urban North, folk musicians plucking guitars and banjos, Saturday night parties, the ceremony of baptism, Sunday gettogethers, backyard gossip amongst neighbors, parents cradling babies, and scores of other aspects of the -everyday life of black people. These quotidian scenes were sometimes alternated with scenes of black ritualsthe residual memory of the Afro-American. Bearden says, "In many instances, I have painted a way of black life that will soon disappear. The mule pulling the plow will soon be gone, and with him the sharecropper will vanish. I paint, however, as passionately and dispassionately as Breughel painted the life of the Flemish people of his day." Today it is fashionable to say that subject matter in art is unimportant. But it may be that the subject is the beginning and end of a painting. The artist has to decide, at one point or the other, that he will paint "this" and "not everything else." His selection is justified only when all who look at his work see and feel what he saw and felt in the subject of his choice. He either identifies himself

completely with those to whom he belongs or finds his subjects within himself as a painter. Van Gogh, Gauguin, Rouault and Leger belong to the first category; Cezanne, Seurat, Braque and Matisse to the latter. Bearden undoubtedly belongs to the first. In their intense concern with people, Bearden's paintings of "the forties had a spiritual affinity with those of the Mexican painters Rivera and Orozco. He also felt a kinship with Breughel for the same reasons. While the two Mexican painters made social injustice their theme-and to that extent theirs was a kind of protest art-Bearden had a strong urge to present a dramatic, kaleidoscopic view of black life. This led to his very striking collages of the sixties. The feeling that they give you is of watching a montage projection on a movie screen. In 1942, Romare Bearden was sent to Europe with the American Army. During this time he became aware of the invaluable contribution made by the School of Paris to modern art. He returned to Paris, on a GJ. Bill, in 1950. It was a period of seeing, learning and absorbing. He saw at firsthand the works of the modern mastersPicasso, Braque, Leger-and learned from them the lessons of cubism. He was especially attracted to Matisse and Rouault, although for different reasons; to Matisse for the


Above:

Odysseus Leaves Circe (from series based on Homer.'s

Odyssey) 1977 Collage Left:

Mother and Child 1969 Collage

8fx 4Âą" Center:

Three Folk Musicians 1967 Collage and mixed mediums 50t"x 60" Far left:

Fli"ghtsand Fantasy 1970 Collage and mixed mediums 8}" x 11i"


lyrical use of color on a flat surface, and to Rouault for the way he portrayed human suffering. Bearden made in-depth studies of the carefully structured and highly controlled paintings of the Dutch masters like Vermeer, De Hooch and Johan Steen, the shallow space of Byzantine mosaics, the spatial harmonies of Japanese portraits and Chinese landscape painting. He also read a great deal. It took Bearden some time to sort out and assimilate so much from such diverse sources. No wonder then that he was not able to paint anything worthwhile for a few years. For a time he flirted with abstract expressionism, much in vogue in New York in the fifties. This was also the time when he wrote songs on the side, some of which became hits. It is amazing how an artist suddenly decides to stop being a performer and resolves to make a personal statement. It is his moment of truth. It is also the moment when he no longer wants to be ignored. For Bearden the moment arrived with the series of photo montages offaces I mentioned earlier. The conventional sense of perspective was turned upside down. The picture surface was treated as multidimensional planes. Scant attention was paid to scale. The relative sizes of objects were given the go-by. The cube was stretched into a rectangle; even space itself was stretched out. Bearden used distortion with a purpose. In doing so he gave the faces and figures their maximum expressiveness and communicative power. This resulted in a kind of magic spell which made it almost impossible to turn one's eyes away from them. One marveled at the imaginative range of the man who created them. Bearden's works can be divided into two categories-landscapes and interior spaces. The thick mysterious woods, the exotic birds, the serpent, the moon, the fish, the limpid pool of water with a mother-earthlike figure providing the focus are full of nostalgia for the black man's motherland. They border on fantasy. They are products of the racial memories of the Afro-American. No wonder then that they also form the backdrop to the ritualistic scenes of some of Bearden's canvases. Although some critics count them among his more mature works, I find them a trifle sentimental and romantic. We see the full flowering of his genius in the interior scenes which he did in the late sixties. The structural strength of geometrical composition, the lyrical orchestration of colors, the harmony and contrast of various shapes, the formal power of

'I do not need to go looking for "happenings," the absurd, or the surreal, because 1 have seen these things out of my studio window on 125th street.' the figures, and the very subtle use of textures-all these have combined to make some of the most original works in presentday American art. In these compositions, the most noticeable pictorial elements are the rectangles of the ubiquitous doors and windows. In some, their role is purely representational; in others, they form sharply defined areas of color or space, a frame for a head or a figure. They are reminiscent of the kind of mathematical order which Mondrian imposed on his unique compositions. They are also suggestive of the world outside. They are used as panels in a theater set which change the scene with every subtle shift. Blue Interior, Morning,' Gray Interior,' Interior With Profiles,' Domestic Classic,' Susannah and Interior 1969 are some of the best collages ever done. Musical motifs have attracted many contemporary artists because of their interesting shapes and the sharp contrast between the vertical human figure and the horizontal or diagonal instruments. For Bearden they had an added attraction: He played the guitar himself in some jazz groups and had many musician friends. Andy Razab, Samy Stewart, John Hammond, and the redoubtable Duke Ellington himself visited his family regularly. "One of the things I did was to listen to a lot of music," saysBearden. "I would take a sheet of paper and just make lines while I listened to recordsa kind of shorthand to pick up the rhythm and the intervals." He would often listen to Earl Hines' records. Hines made the pauses between notes into something important; the silences were as eloquent as the sounds. In Bearden's works too, these intervals create extraordinary passages of subtle colors interspersed with areas of strong contrast which seem to beat time. It was, therefore, all the more natural for him to include musical motifs in his pictorial repertoire. His Three Folk Musicians is one of the finest and most complex canvases ever done on the theme. The,gaiety and ebullience of jazz reverberates in his outstanding composition, Hommage a Pinturicch'io. An interesting aspect of the figures who people Bearden's canvases is their contem-

poraneity, in that they never slip away out of history into timelessness-a common fault in many artists. The interiors they live in, the clothes they wear, are indicative of Bearden's contact with today's world. Curiously enough, some critics have dubbed him a surrealist, probably because of the dreamlike quality of his landscapes or paintings like Work Train, in which we see a young couple in bed, and the husband jumping up at the sight of the train through the wooden door. Bearden's retort to these critics was: "But these things were all around me all the time. I do not need to go looking for 'happenings,' the absurd, or the surreal, because I have seen these things out of my studio window on l25th street .... The things I saw every day-the people, the music, the dancing. . .. My models were as great as Lautrec's .... Once I invited an exotic dancer to spend a night in my studio. I did not know that her luggage contained an eight-foot python (her working costume). In the middle of the night it got loose and entwined itself around my easel. . .. I think the artist has to be something like a whale, swimming with his mouth wide open, absorbing everything until he has what he really needs; when he finds that, he can start to make limitations. And then he really begins to grow." On another occasion Bearden has said, "Painting, art, is about something." "Something" for him means his people, their frustrations, hopes and aspirations. But he is too knowledgeable, sophisticated and cosmopolitan an artist to remain satisfied with merely a faithful portrayal of the life of the Afro-American. His foremost concern has always been with plastic values rather than with social themes. He is not at all concerned with the propagation of a cause; he is deeply aware that a work of art stands or falls on its own merits. Like his close friend and admirer, the well-known black writer Ralph Ellison, Romare Bearden tries to make art out of the totality of his experience. He fuBy understands the interlocking nature of different creative cultures that spanned four continents-Asia, Africa, Europe and America. This unity of vision marks him out as one of the finest artists in the humanist tradition. A man genuinely in love with his own people is, in reality, in love with humanity as a whole. D About the Author: Paritosh Sen is a leading Indian artist who has held one-man shows in New Delhi, Bombay, Calcutta, London, Paris and Brussels. He has also participated in the Commonwealth Arts Festival. London, and the Silo Paulo Biennale.


How can the world combat terrorism? Two scientists suggest an array of weapons-an international paramilitary force; better intelligence systems; perfection of devices such as chemical weapon detectors; tighter airport security; and a well-drilled counterterrorist administrative machinery in eac~ country that can click into action at any instant. There are about 50 world terrorist groups, varying in size from a handful to several hundred. Combined membership is about 3,000, but only some 200 of them belong to the four or five groups that are considered to be transnational in scope. They train together and know each other well. The groups appear to be adequately financed and many of their members are highly-educated offspring of upper-income families-some are trained in the physical and biological sciences. To complicate matters further, the groups have many sympathizers, in some cases well-established people who harbor them and aid them in other ways. There are deeply rooted causes for terrorism, especially in groups that are politically driven and habitually subjected to repressive conditions. Obviously, greater concern for human rights and the settlement of international disputes by

diplomacy and international law are crucial if the world is to rid itself of this scourge. Our focus is on national and international means to combat terrorism, especially for acts of greater domestic and international significance than those so far experienced. Specifically, we consider three lines of defense available to all governments-intelligence collection, physical security, and the ability to manage crises efficiently. If a nation could know "where, when, and how," a terrorist assault might be thwarted; however, there are gaps to be bridged between an intelligence coup and operational victory. We need to know if the captors are likely to murder the hostages, what behavioral patterns delimit rescue attempts. In other words, damage limitation may depend upon intelligence data, but the needed precision of these data depends on their applications. Intelli-

gence is the first line of defense. Limitation of damage through physical means is the second necessary technique. Fences, guards, sensors, closed-eircuit television, secure communications, and incapacitating agents are all part of a growing counterterrorism technology. Finally, even the best intelligence and physical security will sometimes fail, and governments will be forced to manage crises produced by terrorism. To minimize the. trauma resulting from such acts, governments must behave efficiently. Organizational arrangements, management information and commumcations systems, sources of expert help, specialized military assets, emergency medical, food and power generation supplies, and clear delineation of legal and administration authorities must be developed. The assessment of the terrorism threat relies on intelligence techniques-observ-


ing known or suspected terrorists and, when feasible, penetrating their organizations. Unfortunately, the task of keeping up with terrorists in this fashion is overwhelming, for it is virtually impossible to tell when a formerly obscure and inactive group will spring into prominence. (The incident of March 1977 in which Hanafi Muslims terrorized Washington with three separate sieges illustrates this point.) On the other hand, terrorism advertised in advance may never take place, at least in part because of counterefforts prompted by that advertisement. In the absence of specific intelligence about terrorist plans, the task of preventing terrorism falls upon such measures as fences, guards, alarms, and the screening of passengers and luggage at airports. There can be no guarantee that terrorists will not circumvent such measures, but their use can discourage all but the most talented and determined. To be effective even to this extent, however, these barriers must be ubiquitous. If they are not, terrorists will simply shift their operations to unprotected targets. Potential air hijackers, for instance, will board planes at airports where security is known to be lax. (The Entebbe terrorists boarded the Air France plane at Athens, then a known weak point in the airport security system.) Because they must be applied universally to all the potential targets to be effective, these preventive measures must be relatively inexpensive when the number of targets to be protected is large. This would tend to rule out a high level of technological sophistication in measures to prevent terrorism, except in isolated instances where a few extremely vulnerable targets exist. A technology directed against a broad spectrum of possible terrorist activities may be economically feasible in situations where few opportunities of relatively great vulnerability exist, but even in such a case the necessary broadness of the measures militates against use of high technology countermeasures to specific threats. A device that could detect remotely a wide variety of poisons, explosives, and drugs with moderate reliability might be useful in screening airline passengers if its cost were reasonable. The most effective security measure is to deny terrorists means to strike, but our basic political, social and economic values make this an unattainable goal. Much can be done in a technical way, however, to limit opportunities without engaging in restrictive or repressive actions which would alter the very nature of our government. (Indeed, the terrorists' objectives may include goading the government into such unpopular acts.) Tightened controls over access to com-

mercial explosives through regulation of purchases and improved procedures to bar thefts would be of some use, but the wide availability of constituents (such as fertilizers) suitable for clandestine manufacture of high explosives makes it impossible to deny high explosives to determined terrorists. A capability to detect such explosives would help provide some protection to selected targets that are either particularly vulnerable or particularly valuable. Various technical means, ranging from trained bombsniffing dogs to the most sophisticated types of physical-chemical instruments, have been suggested for the purposes of explosive detection. Chemical "taggtng" of commercial explosives or detonators to make them more easily detectable has also been suggested. Research and development along these lines should be encouraged but, as noted previously, the expense of such systems (as well as their probable inconvenience) would probably limit their use to protection of a few prospective targets unless a rash of airport bombings occurs. The case of small arms is parallel to that of high explosives. Despite all that may be done to limit access, determined terrorists can almost certainly obtain them while only a small number of potential victims can be protected by detecting devices. While technical measures can serve to frustrate the marginal terrorist and protect key targets, they will not eliminate the problem. The situation with heavier armaments is rather different, for a few sources of supply exist and the level of technology required virtually precludes clandestine manufacture. On the other hand, protection against them is virtually impossible. The key to thwarting terrorist use of these weapons thus lies in denying them access. The chances for such a policy are fairly good; although sophisticated ground-toair and antitank weapons are widely dispersed in the hands of various national troop units (and have found their way into clandestine arms traffic), this traffic is quite vulnerable to interdiction. Increased customs vigilance and devices for tracking and locating stolen weapons appear to be the most promising measures. Intelligence, inspection, and tagging are necessary but inadequate means to disrupt the clandestine arms traffic in advanced weaponry. Weapons like the Soviet SA-7 surface-to-air missile, the Soviet RPG-7 and U.S. LAW antitank weapons are already in the hands of terrorists, as witness London's Heathrow airport scare of just a few years ago, the use of an RPG-7 at Paris' Orly, and the discovery and capture of Palestinian terrorists preparing to use two SA-7s to destroy an El AI aircraft at Leonardo da Vinci airport in Rome. International

agreements are needed to limit distribution as well as to set physical security and trackability standards for them. In addition to international agreements, we must examine their true mifitary need. Consider the controlling of a terrorist act in progress and containing and restoring the damage. There are two types of terrorist actions, the hostage action and the surprise attack. The hostage-type action allows time for the government to "bargain" and devise tactics intended to improve the outcome. In the surprise attack, little can be done to control the situation, damage limitations and restoration are the primary concerns, but in the hostage-type actions, a threat is made and bargaining is attempted, providing the government with an opportunity to take initiatives toward controlling the outcome. The hostage-barricade situation is a fruitful area for the application of technology The problems inclUde getting information from behind the barrier, penetrating the barrier physically, and incapacitating the terrorists while limiting damage to the hostage. All of these are technical problems subject to solution by physical and behavioral science techniques. The key to dealing with the more exotic forms of hostage situation, threat of chemical, biological, or nuclear-radiological attack, is the prompt availability of a wide variety of experts in the relevant field. The capabilities of computers can be exploited to expedite access to appropriate experts. If no demonstration attack has occurred, the first task of technology is to assess the credibility of the threat. Most large nations possess enormous inherent capability to limit and repair terrorists' damage. The problem is mobilizing it in the face of terrorist attack and, moreover, doing so in a manner consistent with the legal, ethical, and political constraints of the particular society. The willingness to execute a threat, the assessment of the terrorists' technical competence and resources, and the costs and benefits attributable to both government and terrorists are inextricably interwoven. Government's flexibility is limited by the demands themselves, the tough-mindedness of an established policy to deal with terrorists, the personal strength of a chief executive, and the forethought that has gone into organizational planning to meet such crises. Authorities will usually limit their thinking to tactics, thus saving lives. The strategic concern-deterrence of future assaults-will take on more importance only after the immediate tragedy has passed. No simple prescriptions exist, but there are some basic principles: • Governments cannot afford to collapse in the face of a serious assault by


granting political or policy concessions. • To pursue a deterrence policy to the extent of refusing to concede even minimal demands may portend political disaster and thus further terrorist aims. • Announced no-concessions policies are especially dangerous, for their initial failures reveal their ultimate emptiness. • Pure no-concessions or tactical strategies are not viable in the long run. "Buying time" works to the advantage of both sides, for although it lessens the chance of the threat being carried out and increases the risks of capture or annihilation of the 'terrorists, it also increases their prospects fOf obtaining at least some of their demands imd may heighten the propaganda effect of their actions. However, if the viability of a government is at stake, the terrorist act may exceed the capacity of traditional police organizations to respond, and require the use of national resources. A small group at the highest level of government should be given both the responsibility of monitoring crises and the authority to coordinate government actions when necessary. Then there are the media. Newspapers, magazines, radio, and television are star actors in a terrorism play. The media can emerge as forces for good, limiting the societal repercussions of an attack, or the media can incite terror. Media coverage cannot ~e eliminated, nor would that be desirable in free societies. If the media were not to cover terrorist events, terrorists might commit even more acts-or escalate the level of violence-in order to attract

SPAN is available at leading news stands at Rs 2.50 per copy An annual subscription at Rs. 18 for 12 Issues saves 40 per cent and conventently brings SPAN to ',(ourhome or office.

keeping forces must also be determined. public attention. No discussion of the management of Because terrorists have become increasingly transnational, the credibility of their transnational terrorist incidents would be threats may depend on information that complete without exploring a military cannot be obtained domestIcally. Some solution. It is clear that if negotiations degree of international intelligence shar- fail, nations must be prepared to use ing would work to the mutual benefit of military force. Yet few countries have a governments whose interests are not other- paramilitary force that could deal with wise identical. Mutual security from ter- a fast breaklOg crisis. We think that an international pararorists may, after all, override other to all-should differences. Cooperation of this sort military force-available should be solicited from allies and ar- be formed. The risks of tactical failure rangements made to facilitate access in should be spread equitably among many a crisis. On tl:e other hand, the inter- nations. If acts of transnational terrorism necine problems inherent in rival nations are to be faced, they must be viewed as international peacekeeping problems, not promoting terrorism at one another's expense need to be explored and the long- merely domestic law enforcement chalrun consequences, in terms of the insta- lenges. Individual nations should not be . expected to bear the military and politibility of all governments, advertised. Terrorists seem to have less difficulty cal burdens alone. Finally, if international terrorism is a with cooperative arrangements than do nations. They organize well, train jointly, new mode of warfare, the arms control help each other financially and techno- and disarmament community should move logically, and possibly work together on to meet the challenge. The creation of a strategic goals as well as the tactics of a U.N. agency to verify and control disgiven operation. While there have been armament agreements has been proposed. some notable successes in obtaining inter- Such an organization might assume renational antiterrorist agreements '(such sponsibilities for the terrorism area as well. as the 1971 Organization of American Subnational groups having no fixed States Convention on Terrorism), the address and brandishlOg atom bombs are veneer of this complex topic has barely as much an arms control and disarmabeen scratched. In addition to the usual ment problem as the proliferation of 0 extradition and no-safe-havens agree- nuclear weapons among nations. ments, sanctions against nations that harbor terrorists and mutual indemni- About the Authors: Dr. Robert H. Kupperman is fication means must be explored, arms chief scientist of the U.S. Arms Control and control and physical security arrange- Disarmament Agency. Dr. Harvey A. Smith is ments must· be negotiated, and means to chairman of the department of mathematics at create and utilize international peace- Arizona State University in the United States.


BOil SU•• IT ACCOBD01 TIBBOBIS. At their July 16-17 meeting in Bonn, the leaders of seven industrial nations took an important step to curb air piracy : they agreed to halt flights to and from countries that harbor, aid or abet hijackers. Hailing the hijack agreement; President Jimmy Carter said that it was in itself "worth the entire preparation and conduct of the summit." He said the leaders of the United States, West Germany, Great Britain, Italy, France, Canada and Japan are determined to implement the accord "individually and collectively." The Providence Journal Bulletin of Rhode Island said: "For the Bonn hijacking accord to become effective, it ought to be strengthened. The seven summiting governments should recruit support for their pact from other nations, and should explore stiffer sanctions than the threatened suspension of air service, which a radically oriented regime is likely to dismiss as trivial." The Washington Star said: "Despite shortcomings, it's the first time a group of nations has reached agreement to get tough together on airplane hijacking. And part of the statement, declaring that the signatory governments will 'intensify their common undertaking to fight international terrorism,' seems to mean that they expect future agreements on combating other types of terrorism besides airplane hijacking." The United States policy on terrorism, as spelled out by the U.S. State Department, is as follows: • The United States condemns all terrorist actions as criminal and intolerable, whatever their motivation. • It takes all lawful measures to prevent such acts and to bring to justice those who commit them. It makes no concessions to terrorist blackmail because to do so would merely invite further demands. It looks to the host government, when Americans are abducted overseas, to exercise its responsibility under international law to protect all persons within its territories. This

Theftrst line of defense against terrorists. A guard at Washintgon D.C.'s National Airport screens a passenger with a metal weapon-detector.

responsibility includes arranging for the safe release of hostages. • It maintains close and continuous contact with the host government during an incident, supporting it with all practicable intelligence and technical services, but offers no advice on how to respond to specific terrorist demands. • It understands the extreme difficulty of the decisions governments are often called upon to make; for example, how as a practical operational matter, to reconcile the objectives of saving the lives of the hostages and making sure that the terrorists can gain no benefits from their lawless actions. • It believes that international cooperation to combat terrorism remains essential, since all governments, regardless of structure or philosophy, are vulnerable, and the United States intends to pursue all avenues to strengthen such cooperation. 0

CHANGE OF ADDRESS FORM To SPAN Magazine Subscription Service Post Box 213 New Delhi 110001

SPAN

When notifying SPAN about a change in your address. please attach the address label from a recent SPAN envelope in addition to filling out the form below. Since four to six weeks are needed to process a change of address. please let us know about any change promptly.

NEW ADDRESS Name Address Citv

LETTERS)

Dist.

_ S.tate

I enclose payment of Rs. 18 in favor of SPAN Magazine by

o

BLOCK

_

P.O. Pin Code

(USE

_

_

"Ale

Bank Draft 0 Postal Order 0 Money Order (receipt enclosed).

Payee"

po

_

City

_

Pin Code 000000

MAIL TO:

Circulation Manager. SPAN Magazine 24 Kasturba Gandhi Marg New Delhi 110001


The Comeback of Railroads in America Right: In time-honored fashion, an Amtrak guard checks his pocket watch against departure time. A salient feature of American railroads is their punctuality. Right, above: Passenger cars of AutoTrain, one of the nation's most successful privately owned railways, stand ready for departure. Auto-Train also haulsfreight. Above: An attendant checks the position of loaded autos. Top: Newly arrived passengers in Washington take the walk to the station lobby. Back cover: Amtrak's high-speed Metroliner whisks away from Washington's station.

Trains in America, which have progressively lost ground to the auto and aircraft, are back on the track. An important factor in this comeback has been the creation by the U.S. Government of two agencies-Amtrak in 1971 and Conrail in 1976-aimed at breathing new life into the nation's railroads. The energy crisis has also helped: the steep rise in the gasoline price sent many autos off the road and made air travel almost prohibitive. However, it is the change in the people's attitude that is most responsible for the rehabilitation of the railways. Americans have begun discovering anew the delights of leisurely train journeys-you can enjoy the scenery, read a book, 0 strike a friendship or just laze.



Issuu converts static files into: digital portfolios, online yearbooks, online catalogs, digital photo albums and more. Sign up and create your flipbook.