SPAN: January 1964

Front, Independence Hall, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, is the birthplace of the American political system.

Photo by Tom Hollyman.

Back, the new U.S. President, Lyndon B. Johnson, visited India in May 1961 when he was Vice President. He was greeted by President Dr. S. Radhakrishnan.

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THE NEW PRESIDENT OF I~"":~ THE UNITED STATES

by Aruna Mukerji

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L.,..e THE UNWRITTEN RULES OF AMERICAN POLITICS

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Civil Rights leaders marched in an effort to influence legislation last August when some 200,000 persons rallied in Washington.

It was a dramatic example of the American political system at work. See "The Unwritten Rules of American Politics," page 17.

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THE NEW PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES

MANNER of man is Lyndon Baines Johnson who became the 36th President of the United States in tragic circumstances? Like Harry S. Truman, who on the sudden death of President Franklin D. Roosevelt was called to be the U.S. Chief Executive, Mr. Johnson, who was Vice President under President Kennedy from 1961until the latter's assassination on November 22, 1963,found himself in what is perhaps the world's most important job. It is a post of terrifying responsibility, for the decisions of the U.S. President can influence the fate of the world.

Never before has a person taken the oath of office in such a strange setting as did Mr. Johnson. He was sworn in to the office of the U.S. President aboard a plane immediately before it took off for Washington with Mr. Kennedy's body in a bronze casket. Both Mrs. Johnson and Mrs. Kennedy watched while the Federal Judge, Sarah T. Hughes, administered the oath of office in the President's Boeing 707. Then the plane began its grim flight to Washington.

Behind lay the tragedy which had shocked the whole world.

The man who now is at the helm of power in world affairs made a pertinent HAT

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Mrs. Aruna Mukerji, Assistant Editor of The Indian Express specializing in foreign affairs. covered Mrs. Kennedy's 1962 visit to India. Mrs. Mukerji studied at the London School of Economics and has been a journalist for more than twelve years.

observation during his visit to India in May, 1961, which throws a great deal of light on his character. While visiting an Agra village, the six-feet-three-inches-tall Texan told the villagers: "I have been poor myself. I have shined shoes and drawn water from the well for horses and cows. I know what it is to be poor and I also know how we can battle against poverty and build a better tomorrow for all."

It is obvious that a man who has such a background will have sympathy for the problems of the poor in countries like India as well as those of the underprivileged such as the American Negroes.

Equally revealing were the talks that he had with Prime Minister Nehru in New Delhi. Much attention was paid to the problem of rural electrification-a matter of crucial interest to all underdeveloped nations. Mr. Johnson was one of the pioneers of rural electrification in the United States, having at President Roosevelt's request participated in the establishment of the larger rural electrification projects there.

Because of the heavy demands of foreign exchange that are involved, the development of power-generating capacity has been an important part of U.S. aid to this country. At that time Mr. Johnson had expressed the hope that during the Third Plan India would be successful in carrying electricity to the rural areas.

Like Kennedy he is a passionate believer in rights for the Negroes. Even the printed word conveys ~omething of that conviction for during a speech at

Gettysburg (where Lincoln made his" immortal speech), Mr. Johnson said: "Until justice is blind to color, until¡ education is unaware of race, until opportunity is unconcerned with the color of men's skins, emancipation will be a proclamation but not a fact. To the extent that the proclamation of emancipation is not fulfilled in fact, to that extent we shall have fallen short of assuring freedom to the free.... " It is a pointer to the shape of things to come that last March Mr. Johnson disclosed that he considered his role in the enactment of civil rights legislation the most significant matter in which he had participated. Mr. Johnson was the Senate majority leader when the 1957 ~nd 1960civil rights bills were enacted by the U.S. Congress. For thirty-seven days and nights he stayed in the Senate, sleeping in his office until the legislation was passed. Further, Mr. Johnson was chairman of President Kennedy's Committee on Equal Opportunities. The object of this committee was to ensure that Negroes obtained jobs which had so far been denied to them. Civil rights is an integral part of his credo-something for which he has fought for several years. It has moulded and shaped his career.

It has been an amazing rise to fame for the man who began life as a shoe-shine boy and worked at a host of odd jobs in his teens. His early years were one of struggle for at the age of nine when boys have a good time, it was Lyndon Johnson's lot to be shining shoes in a lone barber's shop in his home town in Texas.

This wasjust the beginning of the years of struggle, for after he completed high school at the age of fifteen he did many an odd job from road-builder to elevator operator and car washer.

Then he hitch-hiked to San Marcos in Texas where he enrolled at the SouthWest State Teachers College. He did not consider it beneath his dignity to take a job as a janitor. One of the most amazing facts of American life is how labour is esteemed and no work is considered beneath one's dignity.

At the age of twenty-two Lyndon Johnson received his Bachelor of Science degree. Then for two years he taught public speaking to school studentsnever realizing how useful it would be to him in the years ahead. Destiny was now taking him by the hand and shaping his future career. He became secretary to a Congressman and for the first time he came in touch with the hard realities of American politics.

During the three years that he worked with the Congressman he obtained invaluable experience which played a key role in shaping his political future.

Ambition is the hallmark of all men who rise to eminence and it was the case with Mr. Johnson. While working during the daytime as secretary, his evenings were devoted to attending classes at Georgetown University Law School.

The year 1935 turned out to be an important year in the life of Mr. Johnson, for in that year President Roosevelt appointed him to be the Director for the State of Texas of the National Youth

Administration. This was his entry into public life. Two years later, in 1937, Mr. Johnson became a member of the House of Representatives and as a Congressman represented his home State of Texas for eleven long years.

Then in 1948 he was elected to the Senate where he was to make his mark.

In 1954 he was re-elected and became the Senate majority leader, a difficult post for it meant that he had to reconcile the differing viewpoints of his colleagues.

This task he carried out with great success.

When he was elected to the Senate for the-first time in 1948, he had supported President Truman's Point Four programme of technical assistance to other nations. Earlier in 1947 as a member of the House of Representatives he had backed the Marshall Plan. Thus helping other nations is something he believes in.

In 1943 he had married Claudia AHa Taylor who has shared her husband's love of politics. About politics she has said: "It has been a far more wonderful life than I ever could have imagined. It is like having a front seat for human nature."

She is known as Lady Bird-a name she got when a nursemaid casually remarked that "she's pretty as a lady bird."

She was then only two years of age.

It is strange how she met her husband.

Once when she was making a trip to Washington in 1934, a friend asked her to look up a secretary to a Congressman.

She went to Washington but never troubled to look up the secretary. Two months later the young man visited Texas and

inevitably they met. Soon afterwards they were married. They have two daughters, Lynda Bird and Lucy Baines.

A red-letter day in the life of Mr. Johnson was November 8, 1960, when he was elected to serve as Vice President under Mr. Kennedy and in that role it was his duty to preside over the Senate. Now began the time when he had to undertake high diplomatic assignments such as the August, 1961 trip to Berlin when he gave the people of that country the assurance that the U.S. would guarantee their freedom.

Another of his most important trips was that through many South-East Asian countries in mid-1961, for it gave him an idea of the mind and heart of Asia.

He was also able to gauge the effectiveness or otherwise of U.S. policy in Asia.

During this trip when he visited Delhi, he said, "There is much work to be done in the world and this is a very important part of the world. We cannot live in a world society where one or two nations are affluent and all others are impoverished." The politician was turning into a statesman.

It is not generally blown that Mr. Johnson was among the first to propose that the exploration of outer space should become a matter for consideration by the United Nations. With his wealth of experience, Mr. Johnson is well-fitted to fulfil the arduous demands of the U.S. Presidency. He steps into the sunlight of fame for henceforth all his actions and his words will be recorded and watched by millions all over the world. •

Four years ago ... they faced each other in a battle for their party's nomination. After two Presidential primaries, one was defeated. The other en1erged as the man to beat for the Democratic party's nomination. He was the man who had mastered

THE ART OF THE PRIMARY AND MAY of 1960 two U.S. Senators faced each other in political combat. Both sought their party's nomination for the Presidency, but before entering the convention the following July, they had to demonstrate their ability to win against the most likely Republican candidate, Richard M. Nixon, in the November general elections.

The contenders: Senator John F. Kennedy of Massachusetts and Senator Hubert Humphrey of Minnesota. Their battlegrounds: the Presidential primary elections in the states of Wisconsin and West Virginia..

There were other potential candidates for the Democratic nomination-Adlai E. Stevenson, the party's defeated candidate in 1952 and 1956; Senator Lyndon B. Johnson of Texas; Senator Stuart Symington of Missouri. But in the Spring of 1960 the frontrunners were Humphrey and Kennedy. Their battles in the Wisconsin and West Virginia primaries all but assured the nomination for one and crushed the presidential aspirations of the other.

The following dramatic account of those primaries is condensed from chapter four of the Pulitzer-prize winning book The Making of the President 1960 by Theodore H. White. Mr. White, a veteran reporter, travelled extensively with the candidates during the primaries as well as during the final campaign.

IN APRIL

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PRESIDENTIAL PRIMARY, the first direct appeal to the people in the shaping of their destiny, is always fought low, low down. And the art of the primary, for the candidate, is to appear as intimate and close as the local Congressman, yet maintain a separation of dignity that makes him seem like a President also. It is an extremely difficult art, usually performed in short snatches of stump talking of five or ten minutes each, of talk at union halls, at tea parties, at picnics, at student meetings, at minority halls. One set speech, one handful of phrases, must cover all occasions. In a primary a candidate must not waste the great utterances of state that should be used later in the grander electoral campaign if he is successful; he cannot really cut the heart out of his rival, for he may have to support his rival if he is defeated-or seek his support if he wins.

Senator Humphrey solved his problem partly by a too-folksy folksiness, partly by a series of talks on substance, detail and issue, a series that proved that he knew more about Negro problems in Negro wards, dairy problems in dairy country, union problems in union country, than did even the local Congressman. He stuck to issues, always a mistake in a primary campaign. And it was as a man running for Congress, not for the Presidency, that he was accepted.

Senator Kennedy solved his problem on two levels. The first was his own personal appearance, his incessant storm-driven campaigning, in which, over and over again, he presented himself as young Lochinvar running against the big bosses (which was true), as a man summoning all of his listeners to consider the nature of the Presidency: that the Presidency is the key office in American life, that the President alone can shape, create, revive and protect the nation, and that therefore they, who in Wisconsin were privileged enough to have first voice in this selection, should take it as seriously as did he.

Both candidates threw all their energy into Wisconsin; each spent roughly the same sum-approximately $150,000. But money could not measure their efforts. As Humphrey phrased it, he was like a "corner grocer running against a chain store."

Humphrey had billboards, advertisements, a bus, radio and TV time, literature-all the technical needs of a campaigner.

But his Minnesota team were men engaged in their daily jobs across the border; they could give him only week-end help and little else; and his national headquarters, the seat of organization, consisted of six men in four rooms in a Washington hotel.

Kennedy had been preparing for this first campaign for months. He had organization and the beginning of his national press cult. Where Humphrey could staff but two offices in Wisconsin with first-caliber personnel, Kennedy could staff eight of the ten Congressional Districts of the state with superior personnel. Nor was the Kennedy staffing done by money. It was the long-established connection of Kennedy's friendships and social background that provided him with the talent. Humphrey had relied on his credit over the years with the Wisconsin State Democratic Organization, the help he had given them in organization, the voice he had been for them in Congress. Humphrey relied too on his good name with the great unions to provide manpower, funds and help. The Kennedys relied chiefly on themselves. Beyond that, the Kennedys entered with their own organization, their own techniques, their own staff to call their own meetings, to hold their own receptions, to set their own targets.

It is activity that creates news, and activity in Wisconsin lay chiefly with Kennedy-in the flight of his personal plane, the "Mother Ship;" with the candidate's glamorous family;

The real test came

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West Virginia)¡ the zssue there was religion.

with his revolving circus of eastern performers and organizers.

The press, charmed by Kennedy, entranced by the purr of his political machinery, slowly fastened on the candidate from Massachusetts as the winner. Gradually, as primary day approached, the estimates rose-Kennedy would take six of the ten districts in the state; Kennedy would take eight of the ten; Kennedy would take nine of the ten. The political wise men of the Wisconsin Governor's officein Madison were of the opinion that Kennedy might even take all ten of the ten districts and wrap up the nomination right there.

By Tuesday, April 5th, as Wisconsin prepared to vote, it was (or so the prognosticators felt) a walkaway.

The fact that it was not a walkaway, as shown by the actual result of the voting, was to shape all the rest of Kennedy's strike for the Presidency, from then until November.

Candidate Kennedy received the returns in privacy with several members of his family, in the third-floor corner suite of the Pfister Hotel in Milwaukee, in the pattern that was later to become familiar-Brother Bobby and public opinion analyst Lou Harris receiving the direct results in a separate communications center, linked to him by direct line. Within two hours after the polls had closed the profile of voting had become apparent.

The returns had shown their character by eight o'clock; by ten, the entire message was clear to him.

He had been reading the newspapers, slowly sipping a bowl of chicken-noodle soup, now and again watching the television set or accepting a call from his brother Bobby at the communications center. In that attitude of intellectual alertness that he was to maintain constantly through the full year, in narrow victory or sweep alike, he showed his emotion only once.

"What does it mean?" asked one of his sisters.

"It means," he said quietly yet bitterly, "that we have to do it all over again. We have to go through everyone and win everyone of them-West Virginia and Maryland and Indiana and Oregon, all the way to the Convention."

He had read the meaning of the results instantly and clearly.

His margin of 56 per cent of the popular vote was not decisive.

The break of the popular vote would convince none of the bosses who controlled the delegates of the East tbat he was a winner.

He had lost all four predominantly Protestant districts and had carried the unclassified one (the Seventh) only by a hair. His popular margin had come entirely from four heavily Catholic areas. All that he had said, the entire imagery of the Presidency as the key office, the deciding force in war and peace, would be obscured by these totals. They would be read, he knew, wherever men read politics, as a Catholic-Protestant split. He had tried to dodge this issue as skillfully as he knew; so had Humphrey; but now he would have to face it head on-and in West Virginia, where Protestants measured out at 95 per cent and Catholics at 5 per cent. Taut of face, unsmiling, sensing himself wounded, he prepared to leave for the TV studios to thank the people of Wisconsin for the victory he knew was not a victory.

If Kennedy received his six-district-to-four margin as a setback, Humphrey received the short end of 4 to 6 almost as a victory.

Humphrey had expected defeat, had accepted the prognosis of the experts as certain tidings of devastation. Yet here he now was, having run a tight race, finding in the figures hope, cheer and comfort. Nixon on that day had run a poor third in the Republican primary-the total Democratic vote being more than 2 to I greater than the Republican. To Humphrey it seemed that Kennedy had won only because Republican Catholic voters had crossed party lines to vote for Catholic Kennedy. Exultantly Humphrey sat in his hotel room at the

Kaiser-Knickerbocker with wife and friends. As if presiding over a celebration, he scooped up onion dip on his potato chips and waved guests to his victory board.

He emerged from this inner scene of homespun gaiety to greet the TV cameras and the press briefly. Exuberant, he told them, "You can quote me as being encouraged and exhilarated and sorry it's all over." He quipped for a few minutes, then said he was going directly back to Washington the next day and on to West Virginia.

I

TIS quite clear now, in retrospect, that John F. Kennedy owes his nomination as much to Hubert Humphrey's decision that night in Milwaukee as to any other man's decision except his own.

For that night, on the field of battle, having carried, despite all prediction, four out of ten districts against the "chain store" Kennedys, it seemed to Humphrey that he had won a moral victory.

But the reading of politics by hard men across the nation could only be otherwise. If Humphrey could not carry Wisconsin, a neighbor state so similar in culture and sociology to his own, then he could carry nothing in the Midwest. Thus, in hard politics, he could not deliver his base; therefore, he had been eliminated.

If, realizing this, Humphrey had withdrawn at that moment, Kennedy would have faced zero opposition in the West Virginia primary; thus, any Kennedy victory there would have proved nothing and been meaningless in terms of bargaining power vis-a-vis the big Eastern bosses.

Realistically, again, Humphrey could get nothing for himself out of a West Virginia victory; Wisconsin had eliminated him as an active contender for the nomination. If he won in West Virginia, he could at most only create that Convention deadlock for which other hopeful candidates-Johnson, Symington, Stevenson-so yearned.

It was Humphrey's decision alone-and it was made impulsively, instinctively, in the flush of primary night at the Kaiser-Knickerbocker Hotel in Milwaukee, before morning and a few days' reflection could give him another perspective.

Had Humphrey really wanted to hurt John F. Kennedy, withdrawal from West Virginia that night would have done it.

But the combat wrath had been aroused in Humphrey.

The odd cleavage of the Wisconsin voting had convinced him that Republican Catholic crossovers into the Democratic primary had been chiefly responsible for his apparent defeat. He wanted to run in a primary limited to Democrats. He had accepted and raised large sums of money from friends across the country, and he owed them a real fight for their money.

So he would enter; he refused to withdraw.

The Kennedy leadership, observing Humphrey, also misread the instant situation. In retrospect, they would come to recognize that Humphrey's battle in West Virginia, a solidly Protestant state, would certify their victory as an authentic expression of national appeal. But at the moment they were furious. They had fought a clean and elevated campaign in Wisconsin. Now Humphrey refused to accept the decision. He was preparing to frustrate them in West Virginia-not, it seemed to them, out of any hope in his own eventual triumph at the Convention, but only to deny it vengefully to John F. Kennedy in the name of shadowy third persons who disdained the ardor of field combat in the primaries.

Whatever Humphrey's personal reading of his chances in West Virginia, the Kennedy reading was that Humphrey faced them chieflyas a spoiler. In the Kennedys too the combat venom

rose. They had played by Wisconsin rules in Wisconsin; they would play by West Virginia rules in West Virginia. And they meant to win.

VIRGINIAhad long attracted the interest of John F. Kennedy-perhaps longer than any of the other states in the union outside his own. Two years before, while running for re-election as Senator from Massachusetts, he had retained Louis Harris to make the very first probe of public opinion outside his home state-in West Virginia, in June of 1958.

(The result of the poll then was 52 for Kennedy, 38 for Nixon, balance undecided.)

By April of 1960, however, after the Wisconsin primary, it was uncertain whether it was Humphrey who was caught in the trap or Kennedy himself. For between February and April the political atmosphere of the country had begun to heat.

The Wisconsin primary had attracted the attention of the national press and the national television networks; and the nation had become aware that a religious issue was beginning to develop in its national politics for the first time since 1928; men and women from West Virginia to Alaska were slowly learning the identity and religion of the major candidates; and the tide in West Virginia had turned against the Boston candidate.

Sampling in Charleston, capital city of West Virginia, three weeks before the primary voting day of May 10th, pollster Harris discovered that the citizens of Kanawha County-which includes Charleston-had shifted vehemently in sentiment. They were now, he reported, 60 for Humphrey, 40 for Kennedy. When Kennedy headquarters inquired of their West Virginia advisers what had happened between his 70-to-30 margin of December and the short end of the present 40-to-60 split, they were told, curtly, "But no one in West Virginia knew you were a Catholic in December. Now they know."

Only two moments of discouragement seemed seriously to shake Kennedy's confidence in victory in the long year of 1960.

The greater was the late-August abysm, following the Convention, when the candidate was trapped in Congress' special session. But the first was the period after Wisconsin, as the Kennedy men approached West Virginia. They had been overconfident in Wisconsin; they had been misled by the press; the vote had broken on strictly religious lines. Now they faced trial in West Virginia with every survey showing against them, fighting a man who could not win at the Convention but who, if he won here, would throw the nominating decision into the "back room" where a small group of men would hand-pick the Democratic candidate.

Now, on the day after the Wisconsin primary, with the middle-European accents of Wisconsin still ringing in their ears, the Kennedy campaign managers, with no rest or vacation, arrived in West Virginia to pull the organization together for emergency action. This was crash work; defeat in West Virginia would all but end John F. Kennedy's chance of nomination.

A first meeting in the morning for the northern chairmen took place at the Stonewall Jackson Hotel in Clarksburg. A second meeting for the southern chairmen took place that afternoon at the Kanawha Hotel, 100miles away, in Charleston.

Jobs to be done: § Organization of volunteers for door-to-door distribution of the Kennedy literature. § Rural mailings. § Telephone campaign. § Receptions to be organized. § Finally, all county chairmen were told which members of the Kemiedy family (plus Franklin D. Roosevelt, Jr.) would be available to tour in what areas on which day. § Above all: work.

The issue, it was clear, over and beyond anything organization genius could do, was religion: the differing ways men worshiped Christ in this enclave of Western civilization.

All other issues were secondary. The Kennedy tacticians had already refined several minor lines of attack on Humphrey.

They had begun and continued to stress the war record of

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A mixed audience-of men and women, young and old-listen in rapt attention to Kennedy speech during primary campaign.

((I think we have now buried the religious zssue once and for all."

John F. Kennedy, for in West Virginia, a state of heroes and volunteers, the stark courage of the Boston candidate in the Straits of the Solomons in the Fall of 1942found a martial echo in every hill. ("To listen to their stuff," said an irate Humphrey man, "you'd think Jack won the war all by himself.")

Yet the religious issue remained, and as the days grew closer to the voting the Kennedy staff divided on how it must be handled. His native West Virginian advisers said that West Virginia was afraid of Catholics; the fear must be erased, the matter must be tackled frontally. Lou Harris, with his poll reports in hand, concurred. But most of the Kennedy Washington staff disagreed-raise no religious issue in public, they said, religion is too explosive.

It was up to the candidate alone to decide. And, starting on April 25th, his decision became clear. He would attack-he would meet the religious issue head on.

Whether out of conviction or out of tactics, no sounder Kennedy decision could have been made. Two Democratic candidates were appealing to the commonalty of the Democratic Party; once the issue could be made one of tolerance or intolerance, Hubert Humphrey was hung. No one could prove to his own conscience that by voting for Humphrey he was displaying tolerance. Yet any man, indecisive in mind on the Presidency, could prove that he was at least tolerant by voting for Jack Kennedy.

The shape of the problem made it impossible for Humphrey, himself the most tolerant of men, to run in favor of tolerance.

Only Kennedy could campaign on this point and still win in good taste and without unfairness. If his religion was what they held against him, Kennedy would discuss it.

Up and down the roads roved Kennedy names, brothers and sisters all available for speeches and appearances; to the family names was added the lustrous name of Franklin D. Roosevelt, Jr. Above all, over and over again there was the handsome, open-faced candidate on the TV screen, showing himself, proving that a Catholic wears no horns. The documentary film on TV opened with a cut of a PT boat spraying a white wake through the black night, and Kennedy was a war hero; the film next showed the quiet young man holding a book in his hand in his own library receiving the Pulitzer Prize, and he was a scholar; then the young man held his golden-curled daughter of two, reading to her as she sat on his lap, and he was the young father; and always, gravely, open-eyed, with a sincerity that could not be feigned, he would explain his own devotion to the freedom of America's faiths and the separation of church and state.

With a rush, one could feel sentiment change.

Kanawha County, the most populous county of West Virginia, seat of Charleston, the capital, had checked out in the first poll after Wisconsin as being 64 for Humphrey, 36 for Kennedy. Two weeks before the election, the Humphrey margin had dropped to 55 to 45; the day after the Humphrey-Kennedy TV debate it had fallen to 52 to 48; on Saturday before election, the Harris sampling showed 45 to 42 for Humphrey, the rest undecided; and after the final TV week-end on religion, it had switched to a narrow Kennedy lead. (On primary day itself, Kanawha County was to go 52 to 48 for Kennedy.)

The orchestration of this campaign infuriated Humphrey.

Once the issue had been pitched as tolerance versus intolerance, there was only one way for a West Virginian to demonstrate tolerance-and that was by voting for Kennedy.

Here, indeed, one could mourn for Humphrey. Tired from his exertions in Wisconsin, tired from his efforts in the meaningless District of Columbia primary, tired from his travels (flying by commercial airliners and carrying his own bags through the

air-gates), half of Humphrey's time was spent in raising money to continue, the other half barn-storming in his lonesome bus (OVER THEHUMPWITHHUMPHREY read the bus's sign). Humphrey was being clubbed into defeat in a gladiatorial contest far from home, without funds, in a contest where victory could bring him little, and defeat would erase any influence he might have in the campaign of 1960.

ESTVIRGINIA voted on May 10th, a wet, drizzly day. By eight o'clock the polls were closed. With 100 names on some of the local ballots, all of them more important as jobs to West Virginians than the Presidency, the count was very slow.

Shortly before nine o'clock, however, came the first flash: Old Field Precinct, Hardy County, Eastern Panhandle, a precinct acknowledging only twenty-five Catholic registered voters, had counted: For Kennedy, 96; for Humphrey, 36.

By ten o'clock the sweep was no longer spotty but statewide.

The Kennedy tide was moving, powerfully, irresistibly, all across the Protestant state, writing its message for every politician in the nation to see.

There remained then only the ceremonies of burial for the Humphrey candidacy and of triumph for Kennedy.

It is no easy thing to dismantle a Presidential candidacy, and though Hubert Humphrey had decided to yield by ten in the evening, two and a half long hours went by as, from his room in the Ruffner Hotel, he telephoned his supporters and contributors all across the land that the end had come.

It was the end of a campaign, the end of a long year of planning and hope. The first of the seven had been scratched from the list of candidates for the Presidency of the United States by the people of the hills. In the morning, when Hubert Humphrey woke, the Presidential image had evaporated. Outside the Ruffner Hotel his parked bus had overnight been given a ticket for illegal parking.

Kennedy, depressed and gloomy on primary day, feeling that here in West Virginia, despite his last-minute surge, he could not hope to win, had chosen that night to hide from the public, the press, and the West Virginians who were voting.

If he were to be beaten, he would receive the defeat in private, not under the scrutiny of the world. He had flown to Washington on the morning of primary day, addressed a women's group at lunch, retreated to his home and invited two friends for dinner with himself and his wife.

Perfectly self-possessed while every political mechanic, operator, and prognosticator worried about his reaction and his whereabouts, Kennedy calmly invited his two friends to sneak out with him to see a movie-the returns would be late in coming in, and they might as well relax. They did not return from the movie until 11:30-to find a message on the banister from their maid to please call Charleston, West Virginia, at once. A grin split Kennedy's face as he talked to his brother Bobby at the Kanawha Hotel, and then, as he put the telephone down, he burst out with a very un-Senatorial war whoop.

By three in the morning he had been into Charleston, thanked West Virginians over TV, met Hubert Humphrey and shaken hands ("It was very nice of you to come over, Hubert"), held a press conference ("I think," he said, "we have now buried the religious issue once and for all") and was leaving again. In the lobby of the Kanawha Hotel the throng glued itself about him, and with difficulty he pushed his way to the door into the rain.

"What are you going to do now, Jack?" asked a newspaperman of the candidate.

"I have to study up on the problems of Maryland tonight," said Kennedy. "I'm campaigning there tomorrow-Friday is primary day there." •

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POLITICS '64'

Continued /

.INSIDE .• 1..•••

THE WHITE HQUSE

, No absolute· monarch ha . sucH obligattorls , or., responsibilities 'as the man who sits at this desk.

The Presidency is actually four jobs) each one exacting and demanding.

who have been President of the United States have not enjoyed the job. "A splendid misery," said Thomas Jefferson, the third President. And Woodrow Wilson, who held the office during the period of World War I, said: "There are blessed intervals when I forget by one means or another that I am President of the United States."

The Presidency has been described as the most difficult job in the world, and without parallel in the social history of mankind. While kings, emperors and dictators have all had their burdens of sovereignty, none has been fettered, on the one hand, by the moral and constitutional restraints of an American President nor weighted, on the other, by his global obligations.

"No one man can really fill the Presidency," said former President Harry S. Truman. "(It) is an executivejob that is almost fantastic.

No absolute monarch has ever had such decisions to make or the responsibilities that the President of the United States has."

The Presidency is actually four jobs. First, the President is Chief Executive and the American Constitution instructs that "He shall take care that the laws be faithfully executed." As

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Chief Executive, he is also the principal architect of American foreign relations. He, alone, is qualified to deal with foreign governments. This intercourse is a world-wide web of political, military and commercial relationships which, in the years of war and "cold war," has attained a level of importance to the nation's security almost equal to that of domestic affairs.

As Cabell Phillips has written in The New York Times Magazine: "In the delicate manipulation of a vast international power, the President of the United States, more than any other individual, has the potentiality for preserving the peace or plunging the world into a war of annihilation. No matter how many aides a Chief Executive may have to help him with his job, he alone bears the responsibility for its success or failure."

In addition to being the nation's Chief Executive, the President is also Commander in Chief of the armed forces.

In the years since the end of World War II, the two jobs have frequently overlapped as military, diplomatic and domestic affairs have become interwoven into a vast panorama of objectives, decisions, alternatives and responsibilities that often touch

As Chief Executive, the President sponsors legislation. Here Congressional leaders observe as Harry Truman signs foreign aid law.

As Chief of State, the President explains nation's policies. Here President Eisenhower expresses his views in press conference.

the lives of much of the world's population.

As Chief of State, the third of a President's jobs, he must formulate and articulate what he conceives to be the dominant interests of the nation, giving form and direction to his programme through speeches, press conferences and other avenues of public communication.

And finally, the President is the leader of his political party, attempting to direct its actions along the lines of his programme.

Using the prestige and inherent powers of his office, he can provide leadership for the members of the party, in Congress and out, to achieve a practical application of his programme.

The centre of Presidential activity is the White House in Washington where the President has his officein the Oval Room of the West Wing. Here, and in adjacent offices, President Lyndon B. Johnson carries out his duties as the nation's 36th Chief Executive, fulfilling the oath of office" ... to faithfully execute the office of the President of the United States, and ... to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States."

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President meets prominent citizens at public meetings. Here F. D. Roosevelt talks with George W. Carver, famous Negro scientist.

As architect of foreign policy, the President¡ consults with world leaders. Here two great statesmen walk in White House garden.

The White House zs the nerve-centre of Presidential activity.

President's day never ends. After final meeting of afternoon, newspapers, potent organs of public opinion, claim his time.

THE UNWRITTEN RULES OF AMERICAN POLITICS OME OF MY foreign friends have never been able to understand the difference between America's two major political parties, because neither of them demands sweeping changes in our economic and social system, as do the left-wing parties in most other countries. Yet neither of them attempts a rigid defence of the status quo, much less a return to an earlier state of society, as do the traditional conservative and right-wing movements of Europe.

Stranger still, to my friends abroad, is the fact that neither the Democrats nor the Republicans have a fixed body of doctrine, to which all party members must subscribe. Nor is there any way in which either party can expel a member who opposes its current programme or defies its leadership. Consequently our political organization often looks chaotic to the foreign eye, and our election campaigns seem confusing.

Indeed, there always are some Americans who share this view. They are members of the smaller parties of both left and right-the Socialists, Communists, Social Labourites, Conservatives, America Firsters and many others-who argue for a more logical arrangement. They would like to see all the conservatives on one side of the fence and all the radicals and progressives on the other. Occasionally some of these minor parties have attracted a considerable following.

There is, however, another possible explanation for the stubborn durability of our seemingly illogical system: that it is more vigorous, more deeply rooted and far better suited to our own history and our peculiar needs than any other system would be; that it involves a more complex and subtle conception than the crude blacks and whites of strictly ideological parties. There is considerable evidence, in fact, that our system-in spite of certain weaknesses-has on the whole worked out rather successfully. After all, it is now the oldest political system in the world; even the British parliamentary system has undergone fundamental remodelling more recently than ours. Moreover, it has

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Mr. John Fischer is Editor in Chief of Harper's, the venerable American monthly journal of current affairs. And as author of -his magazine's regular feature, "The Editor's Easy Chair," Mr. Fischer is a respected writer on the American political scene.

carried the United States through a series of peaceful economic and social upheavals which, in many other countries, were accomplished by bloody revolutions. Only once in all our history has the two-party system broken down. Then, for a brief time, the American people were sharply divided over a clear-cut ideological issue-slavery. The result was the Civil War. The very subtlety of the United States political tradition may be responsible for the misunderstanding of it abroad. Every practising American politician grasps its principles by instinct; if he does not, he soon retires to some less demanding profession.

Moreover, the overwhelming majority of citizens have a sound working knowledge of the system, which they apply every day of their lives-though many might have a hard time getting that knowledge into words. Because they grasp the underlying theory, they see at once the reasons for certain patterns of political behaviour, which to a foreigner might seem arbitrary, hypocritical or irrational.

Another reason for this misunderstanding is that surprisingly little has been written about the rules of American politics during our generation. The most useful discussion of the basic tradition can still be found in the works of John C. Calhoun, a southern statesman who wrote more than a century ago. Calhoun summed up his political thought in what he called the Doctrine of the Concurrent Majority. He saw the United States as a nation of tremendous and frightening diversity-a collection of many different climates, races, cultures, religions, and economic patterns. He saw the constant tension among all these special interests and he realized that the central problem of American politics was to find some way of holding these conflicting groups together.

It could not be done by force; no one group was strong enough to impose its will on all the others. The goal could be achieved only by compromise-and no real compromise could be possible if any threat of coercion lurked behind the door.

Therefore, Calhoun reasoned, every vital decision in American life would have to be adopted by a "concurrent majority"-by which he meant, in effect, a unanimous agreement of all interested parties. It is the very essence of the idea of "concurrent majority" that it cannot be made legal and official. It can operate

Every vital decision zs adopted by a "concurrent majority." effectively only as an informal, higWy elastic, and generally accepted understanding-and it requires that all of the contending interest groups recognize and abide by certain rules of the game. Under these rules-which are the fundamental bond of unity in American political life-every group tacitly binds itself to tolerate the interests and opinions of every other group, whether or not it approves of them. It must not try to impose by force its views on others (though it can try to persuade them), nor should it press its own special interests to the point where they seriously endanger the interests of other groups or of the nation as a whole.

Furthermore, each group must exercise its implied veto with responsibility and discretion, making every conceivable effort to compromise. It must rely on its veto only as a last resort, and in times of great emergency it must forsake its veto right altogether. It dare not be intransigent or doctrinaire, lest it be considered irresponsible by the voters, losing their support in the next election. Nor is the frequent use of the veto effective, for if any group wields this weapon recklessly, the others will eventually retaliate in anger and maul those very interests it is trying so desperately to protect.

If the farm bloc wants to have enacted a measure increasing federal support of agricultural prices, for instance, it can succeed only by enlisting the help of other powerful groups. Consequently, it must always be careful not to antagonize any potential ally by a reckless use of the veto; and it must be willing to pay for such help by throwing its support from time to time behind legislation sought by the labour bloc, the National Association of Manufacturers, or the school-teachers' lobby.

This is the somewhat elusive sense, it seems to me, in which Calhoun's theory has been adopted by the American people.

It is responsible for the unique character of the major political parties. The fact that neither has a rigid ideology does not mean that they lack principles. Nor does their willingness to compromise-with each other and with their own internal factions -imply a lack of strongly held convictions.

Even so, these accommodations are possible only because of three circumstances: (I) However sharply they may disagree on specificmeasures, the contestants share an unspoken, underlying agreement about the fundamentals of American life. Neither wishes to destroy the existing social and economic system; both will normally want to change it-in one direction or another-but by processes of orderly evolution with public consent, not by revolution.

(2) Those people who are disappointed over any particular compromise know that they always have another chance. They can carry their case to the voters, demand a re-opening of the issue, and perhaps get the decision reversed at the next election.

(3) Every politician realizes that if he is too intransigent -if he threatens violence or paralysis of the processes of government, rather than agree to a reasonable compromise-he is sure to lose the support of the overwhelming mass of American voters.

At this point the sceptical European is likely to ask: If the American parties are in tacit agreement on fundamentals, if they are not based on ideologies, if they are ultimately willing to compromise, is there any real difference between them?

Yes, indeed there is-many far-reaching differences, some rooted in history, some growing out of economic, social, religious and philosophical conflicts.

Within the scope of a brief article it is impossible even to outline the historic roots of the parties. But it should be noted that the memories of the Civil War remain sharp in many sections of the country; consequently most Southerners still feel

The U.S. Senate, one of the two Houses of Congress, in session, with the then Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson presiding.

Taken as limited nuclear test ban treaty was ratified, this is first picture the Senate has ever permitted to be taken during a session. Crowded visitors' galleries indicate intense public interest in proceedings. Ninety-nine Senators are present, the lone absentee being ill. Democratic Senators sit to left of centre aisle (not fully visible), Republicans to its right.

The President zs not a mere executor of the will of Congress. a kind of family kinship for the Democratic party, which was identified with the Confederate cause, while a good many New Englanders and Midwesterners feel equally close to the Republican party, which supported Abraham Lincoln and the Union. In recent years these traditional feelings apparently have been weakening-the South, for example, no longer votes solidly Democratic, and the Republicans cannot always be sure of holding such traditional strongholds as the States of Maine and Vermont-but they are by no means negligible.

The contemporary differences between the parties can best be understood by thinking of each of them as a loose coalition.

The Republican party can be described (with some oversimplification) as an alliance of businessmen, midwestern and northeastern farmers, and many residents of the smaller towns. The Democratic party, on the other hand, normally has the support of most labour unions, a substantial majority of Negroes and other minority ethnic groups. Though it draws the votes of certain southern and western farm organizations, its core of strength rests on the big cities.

The major policies of each party have grown, naturally enough, out of the interests of the groups which make up its coalition. The Democrats therefore tend to be more concerned with economic growth and full employment; the Republicans with fiscal stability and the dangers of inflation. Democrats, moreover, are more ready to use federal authority and money to effect far-reaching changes in the society-ranging from the Tennessee Valley Authority's development of cheap public power to educational reforms; Republicans argue that the Federal Government should play a more restrained and neutral role, serving as a referee between economic and social forces rather than as an active participant; when government intervention is needed, they prefer to see State and local governments take on added functions rather than depend on central initiative.

Historically the Democrats have advocated lower tariffs and expansion of international trade, while Republicans have favoured protective tariffs (in recent years, however, this distinction has grown less sharp).

In general, the Democrats are regarded as more liberal (in the American sense of that term) and the Republicans as more conservative. But again vital exceptions must be noted.

Republican Congressmen from the big cities of the North often are thoroughgoing liberals, while Democrats from southern rural constituencies usually have conservative views. In all cases, they reflect the sentiments and interests of their own constituents more sharply than they do the formal programme of their national party organization-because in a federation each representative is, in a sense, an ambassador from his area to the central government, and he is expected first of all to look out for its interests.

The way in which this system works in practice can be observed most easily in Congress, where the basic units of organization are not the parties, but the so-called blocs, loosely organized groupings of Senators or Congressmen who share common views on a particular issue. There are dozens of themthe farm bloc, the friends of labour, the business group, the isolationists, the public power bloc. They all cut across party lines and are pretty blurred at the edges, so that every member of Congress belongs at different times to several different blocs.

He may vote, say, with the farm bloc and against his party leadership on extending federal agricultural research facilities, with the labour bloc on broadening minimum-wage coverage, and with the public power bloc on a new river development in the West.

The voters play an important role in influencing the stand each legislator takes on an issue. Every Congressman and

Senator, of course, keeps in close touch with his constituency; and debate over any important measure will bring to his office hundreds and thousands of letters and telegrams.

It is an unwritten but firm rule of Congress that no important bloc shall be voted down-under normal circumstances-on any matter touching its own vital interests. Each of them, in other words, has a limited right of veto on legislation in which it is primarily concerned. Thus the farm bloc normally needs no outside aid to stop the passage of a bill contrary to the farmers' interests. On the other hand, no bloc wants to exercise this informal veto power except when it is absolutely forced tofor it is a negative power, and one always subject to retaliation by other groups whose support will be indispensable to put through new legislation which the bloc favours.

In order to enact a programme in which it is interested, a bloc will have to enlist the help of other powerful groups.

The classic alliance of this sort was formed in the early days of the New Deal, when most of the Roosevelt legislation was put onto the statute books by a temporary coalition of the farm bloc and urban labour, occasionally reinforced by such allies as the public power group and spokesmen for the northern Negroes. Mr. Roosevelt's political genius rested largely on his ability to put together a programme on which all of these diverse interests could"agree.

Calhoun's principles of the concurrent majority and of sectional compromise operate just as powerfully, though sometimes less obviously, in every other American political institution.

In our cabinet, for example, the members are charged by law with the representation of specific interests-labour, agriculture, commerce-and the same holds true for other agencies.

The weaknessesof the American political system are obvious -much more obvious, in fact, than its virtues. These weaknesses have been sharply criticized for the past hundred years, by a procession of able analysts, both Americans and observers from abroad.

Most of the criticism has been aimed at two major flaws.

First, it is apparent that the doctrine of the concurrent majority operates as a brake rather than an engine, since the government must usually get the acquiescence of virtually everybody concerned. In times of real crisis, the unity of Congress, administration, and the people permits rapid and decisive action, but critics contend that at other times a dangerously long period of debate and compromise is necessary before any administration can carry out the drastic measures needed. On the other hand, this makes it extremely difficult for an administration to take an adventurous course in either foreign or domestic matters, for its actions would be immediately vetoed by the people through their representatives in Congress.

This same characteristic of our system gives undue weight to the small but well-organized group-especially when it is fighting against something. Hence a few power companies were able to block for years the sensible use of the Muscle Shoals dam which eventually became the nucleus of a major power development and conservation project (the Tennessee Valley Authority). In alliance with the railroads, rail unions, and eastern port interests-the same private power group also held up for some time development of the St. Lawrence Waterway. In the long run, however, no one group can prevent the eventual carrying out of an important project which is clearly in the national interest.

An even more serious flaw in our scheme of politics is the difficulty in finding a political group to speak for the country as a whole. Calhoun would have argued that the national interest is merely the sum of all the various special interests, and therefore needs no spokesman of its own-but in this case he clearly

Trade unionists, who form a powerful bloc, campaign, above, for their favourite candidates.

Women playa considerable role too as seen from picture, left, of a nominating convention. was wrong. We do need a sponsor for matters which are not merely sectional or group concerns, but of national importance.

Over the generations we have developed a series of practices and institutions which partly remedy these weaknesses, although we are still far from a complete cure. One such development has been the gradual strengthening of the Presidency. As the only man elected by all the people-not just those of one State or district-the President inevitably has had to take over many of the policy making and leadership functions which the Founding Fathers originally assigned to the legislators. This meant, of course, that he could no longer behave merely as an obedient executor of the will of Congress, but was forced into increasingly frequent conflicts with it.

Today we have come to recognize that this conflict is one of the most important obligations of the Presidency. No really strong executive tries to avoid it-he accepts it as an essential part of his job, for it is his duty to enlist the support of many minorities for measures rooted in the national interest, reaching beyond their own immediate concern-and, if necessary, to stand up against the self-centred minorities for the interest of the whole.

Because we have been so preoccupied with trying to patch up the flaws in our system, we have often overlooked its unique elements of strength. The chief of these is its ability to minimize conflict-not by suppressing the conflicting forces, but by absorbing and utilizing them. The result is a society which is both free and reasonably stable-a government which is strong and effective but can still adapt itself to social change.

The way in which the American political organism tames down the extremists of both the left and right is always fascinating to watch. Either party normally is willing to embrace any group or movement which can deliver votes-but in return it requires these groups to adjust their programmes to fit the traditions and beliefs of the majority of the people. The fanatics, the implacable radicals at either extreme cannot hope to get far until they abandon their fanaticism and learn the habits of conciliation.

The same process which gentles down the extremists also prods along the political laggards. As long as it is in a state of health, each American party has a conservative and a liberal

wing. Sometimes one is dominant, sometimes the other-but even when the conservative element is most powerful, it must reckon with the left-wingers in its own family, who exert a steady tug to the left.

The American tendency to either isolate and render ineffectual, or else pull towards a middle position, the extremists of both the left and right, has enabled Americans to bring about substantial economic and social changes while avoiding major violent clashes. This capacity to meet new needs and problems while avoiding political warfare is no small achievement for any political system. It means that, instead of fighting at the barricades, opposing groups seek to enlist popular support for their positions and make their voices felt in the decisions of government through their elected representatives. Conflicts are thus resolved at the ballot box and in the halls of Congress-not in the streets.

Suppression of any opposition group-and of all open political discussion-seems the inevitable outcome in countries where parties traditionally have been drawn up along ideological battle lines. Every political campaign then becomes a religious crusade; each party is fanatically convinced that it and it alone has truth by the tail; each party is certain that its opponents not only are wrong, but wicked. No heresy can be tolerated.

Therefore, it becomes a duty not only to defeat the enemy at the polls, but to wipe him out. Any suggestion of conciliation and sensible compromise must be rejected as treason and betrayal of the true faith. The party must be disciplined like an army, and if it cannot win by other means it must be ready to take up arms in deadly fact.

Because this sort of ideological politics is so foreign to the native American tradition, it seems to me unlikely that any new party founded on an ideological basis can take root. The uncompromising ideologist, of whatever faith, finds himself peculiarly out of place in American politics, simply because he cannot recognize the rule of the concurrent majority, nor can he accept the rules of mutual toleration which are necessary to make it work. Because of his rigid ideology, he cannot even understand that basic principle of American politics which was perhaps best expressed by Judge Learned Hand: "The spirit of liberty is the spirit which is not too sure that it is right." •

NTHE WAR on disease, important advances are being made through the use of the electron microscope.

This instrument, which magnifies objects one thousand times more than an optical microscope and makes photographs of what it "sees," is being used extensively in the United States to study living matter. Some of the results of this research include photographs of protein molecules, the essential ingredients of all living things; photographs of disease-causing viruses and bacteria; knowledge of the manner in which these foreign organisms attack the body to cause illness. Use of the electron microscope has been extended to research on cancer and to examination of vaccines developed to combat virus-caused diseases. •

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Another weapon to fight disease ...

ELECTRON MICROSCOPE The virus that causes poliomyelitis. shown left. was an important electron-microscope discovery. Knowledge of the structure of this organism enabled United States medical experts to perfect polio vaccine.

The picture below is of a soil microbe, a potential antibiotic producer. found in an earth sample from Africa.

The electron-microscope produces a beam of electrons which penetrate the object being examined. producing an image on a fluorescent screen. Pictures are made by photographing the fluorescent image.

The Wisdom

of Benjamin Franklin AN

APPRECIATION On the occasion of the 258th anniversary of his birth, JANUARY 17,

1706, (January 6 Old Style)

Being a career as printer, diplomat also loved the most

true account of his Illustrious an inventor, Philosopher, author, publisher, scientist, statesman, and public spirited citizen who Liberlj', and who was one of, respected ~ mericans of his time.

Compleat on these pages

By SAMUEL ELIOT MORISON, Historian and reprinted from THE SATURDAY EVENING POST which was founded in 1727

By B. FRANKLIN of Philadelphia This account was copyrighted in 1962 by the Curtis Publishing Company of Philadelphia, and is reprinted on the following pages with permission of the publisher.

Benjamin Franklin set the pattern of the Arnerican success story.

GREAT MEN in American history have had little or no sense of humour, and George Washington was one of them; but Benjamin Franklin, the most versatile genius in American history, not only had a sense of humour but was one of the few people who could get a laugh out of George. The story he liked best was Ben's reply to the stuffy Englishman in 1775 who protested that it was foul ball for the Yankee minutemen to fire at British redcoats from behind stone walls. "Why," said Ben, "didn't those walls have two sides?"

George relished this so well that when he visited Lexington, fourteen years later, he told it to his guides, astonishing them with roars of laughter. And like most of Franklin's jokes, this had a moral to it-don't be mad at your enemy if he is smarter than you, but try to be smarter yourself.

Franklin's humour, as revealed in his Poor Richard's Almanack, is always kindly, often earthy to the point of coarseness, but never bitter. He makes fun of pretence and stuffiness, but never sneers at poverty or ignorance. He is whimsical, as in his "Drinker's Dictionary," where he gives more than 100 terms for drunkenness-some of which, like "fuddled," "stew'd" and "half seas over," have endured; but most, like "cherry merry," "as dizzy as a goose" and "loose in the hilts," have gone down the drain. He was a master of political satire, as in that fake edict of a German king proposing to tax England because the Anglo-Saxons originally came from Germany, and he excelled in the typically American humour of exaggeration. For instance, he warns passengers sailing down Delaware Bay in August not to be alarmed at hearing "a confus'd rattling noise, like a shower of hail on a cake of ice." It is the season of fevers and agues in the "lower counties"-the present State of Delaware-and the noise is the chattering of the inhabitants' teeth!

Born in Boston in 1706, missing the Puritan century by only six years, Ben Franklin was much older than other leaders of the American Revolution. Every other leader of the Revolution belonged to a generation later than his; Washington was twenty-six years younger; Jefferson, thirty-seven years younger; Hamilton might have been Ben's grandson and was, in fact, only five years older than his grandson William Temple Franklin.

Benjamin Franklin was old enough to have called on the Rev. Cotton Mather, who when approaching a low-hanging beam in his parsonage, between the living room and the library, gave young Ben a piece of advice he always remembered and acted upon: "You are young and have the world before you; stoop as you go through it, and you will miss many hard bumps."

Expediency; or, accept the second best if you cannot get the best, might have been Franklin's motto. He was always advising it in his almanacs, as, "Write with the learned, pronounce with the vulgar," and "Keep your eyes wide open before marriage, half shut afterwards."

Ben Franklin set the pattern of the American success story.

Withdrawn from Boston Latin School within a year because, as tenth son and fifteenth child in a tallow-chandler's family, his father could not afford the small tuition fee, he became, by his own efforts, one of the most learned men of his age. He would have enjoyed enduring fame as a scientist and philosopher had he never dabbled in politics. "Doctor Franklin" he was called, because of honorary degrees from Harvard, Yale, St. Andrews and Oxford; he could put "F.R.S." after his name as a fellow of the Royal Society of London and was elected corresponding member of most of the learned societies of Europe.

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At home he was the only American leader except Washington who commanded respect and confidence throughout the Thirteen Colonies, four of which, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania and Georgia, appointed him their agent, or official lobbyist, in England. And his popularity went deep; he had the confidence of all classes. Robert Morris, Philip Livingston and Cadwallader Colden were proud to have him to dinner; yet the frontiersmen of North Carolina proposed that he "represent the unhappy state of this Province to His Majesty."

BEN

WAS an American to the core, but equally at home in England, where he spent almost twenty years prior to 1776; and in France, where he had popular renown and great influence.

A pioneer in experimental physics, especially in the new branch of electricity, he was in touch with everything else that went on in the scientific world; yet he could also make practical inventions such as the lightning rod and the Franklin stove.

This metal fireplace, which Franklin invented in 1740, included an air box over which the hot combustion gases passed on their way to the chimney. Outside air was drawn in through a duct, circulated through the air box around baffles and passed out into the room.

When he crossed the Atlantic he studied winds and currents to such good purpose that he could instruct Yankee skippers how to work the Gulf Stream to best advantage. A conservative until the very eve of the Revolution and an advocate of compromise with Britain, Franklin became in 1775 one of the strongest exponents of American independence; and, although seventy years old when An1erican independence was declared, he was one of the more radical revolutionary leaders.

Franklin never made much money, but was generous with what he had, and a public benefactor. He refused to have his inventions patented; everyone could profit from them. One of his legacies, operated under sagacious principles that he laid down, still provides the Franklin Medals for top scholars in the Boston schools; another still contributes income to the Franklin Institute of Philadelphia. His many private charities were unobtrusive; most touching were his efforts to preserve the selfrespect of his sister, Jane Mecom, by setting her up in business with the old family recipe for crown soap. And he was a most accomplished man. He could fix anything around the house and tell others how to fix things in his annual almanac. He could play the violin, guitar and harp, and he invented a new musical instrument which he called the armonica, on the principle of the musical glasses. Mozart and Beethoven composed music for the armonica, and Queen Marie Antoinette, among others, learned to play it.

A great man by any standard, Franklin was a universal genius, great in a variety of ways-as printer, philanthropist, statesman, man of science; as naturalist and humanist, and writer whose Autobiography and Poor Richard's Almanack had an international vogue. Nor was Franklin content to write literature; he organized it, as he did everything else. He organized the Philadelphia Library, the first important semi-public library in the Colonies; the College of Philadelphia, which became the University of Pennsylvania, and a "Junto" or discussion club, which eventually became the American Philosophical Society, now the senior learned society in the United States.

Franklin's secret, the thing that "made him tick" and pulled every aspect of his mind together, was his love of people. Not

"There are three faithful friends) an old wife) an old dog and ready money.Âť

Printing was Franklin's first love. He stayed/aith/ul to it to the last, describing himself even in his last will and testament as "Benjamin Franklin, printer." people in the abstract, like Karl Marx, Henry George and other dreary prophets of progress, but people in particular, and of all kinds. He liked intellectuals, businessmen, workingmen, children and Negroes; not only Americans but also Englishmen, Frenchmen and Europeans of a dozen other nations. Not that he had any illusions about people. He knew them at their worst as well as their best, but he accepted them. Note this remarkable prophecy written in 1780: "The rapid progress true science now makes, occasions my regretting sometimes that I was born so soon. It is impossible to imagine the height to which may be carried, in a thousand years, the power of man over matter. We may perhaps learn to deprive large masses of their gravity, and give them absolute levity....

Agriculture may diminish its labor and double its produce; all diseasesmay by sure means be prevented or cured ... o that moral science were in as fair a way of improvement, that men would cease to be wolves to one another and that human beings would at length learn what they now improperly call humanity!"

He talked with English and French statesmen as an equal; yet he was as homely and comfortable as an old shoe. If you had been a young man in 1776 calling on the great ones of the day, you would have been overawed by George Washington, and Sam Adams you would have found rather grim; Alexander Hamilton would have made you feel very small and stupid, Patrick Henry would have made you a speech, and John Adams

would have talked your head off. But old Ben would have made you at home. He would have asked after your parents, and probably would have known them, or at least about them; he would then have asked you about yourself, drawn you out and sent you away with some good advice, a warm handclasp and a smile you would have remembered all your life. The same would be true if the visitor were a young girl, especially a pretty girl. "eaty" Ray, a lively lass of twenty-three who happened to meet Franklin at his brother's house in Boston when he was forty-eight, became his friend for life. For more than thirty years they maintained an intimate correspondence, charming on both sides though rather illiterate on hers; and Ben's last letter, written shortly before his death, ended: "Among the felicities of my life I reckon your friendship, which I shall remember with pleasure as long as that life lasts."

It was because he loved people so much, that he hated war profoundly. After peace had been concluded in 1783, largely owing to his efforts, he wrote: "At length we are in peace, God be praised, and long, very long, may it continue. All wars are follies, very expensive, and very mischievous ones. When will mankind be convinced of this, and agree to settle their differences by arbitration?" Yet Franklin hated cruelty and injustice even more than he hated war. Outrages on humanity, such as those perpetrated by the Pennsylvania frontiersmen on the Moravian Indians, evoked savage indignation from his usually serene and tolerant mind. His last public paper, in 1790, was written in favour of the abolition of Negro slavery; and for it he was bitterly attacked in the United States Senate. No doctrinaire pacifist, he supported the three principal wars of his time. He used the wisdom of the serpent to get around the pacifism of Pennsylvania Quakers and persuade them to co-operate in the French and Red Indian War. Hopeless of abolishing war in his day, Franklin made every effort, through treaties and international agreements, to render war less horrible by safeguarding the rights of neutrals and of non-combatants; by obtaining agreements that farmers, fishermen and other civilians would not be molested by armies and fleets. He hoped to confine war to professional forces and to make it less frequent by recourse to arbitration.

Franklin's life passed through many phases-the poor boy of a large family, the Boston journeyman printer, the young man making his way in Philadelphia. Following one of his favourite quotations from the Bible, "It is better to marry than to burn," Ben married his landlady's daughter Deborah. "Debby," almost illiterate, already married to a sailor who had simply disappeared, shared few of Franklin's interests and prevented his being accepted by the polite society of his adopted city.

"How the scum rises!" remarked a Philadelphia matron when Franklin's grandson moved uptown. But that sort of thing didn't bother Ben. He was no status seeker; he accepted every social contact that came his way, and in all his vast correspondence that has been preserved there is not one complaint of being slighted or snubbed. No man ever born had less class consciousness. He never attempted to conceal his working-class origin; in his last will and testament he described himself as "Benjamin Franklin, printer." He was not ashamed of his poor relations, who were both numerous and importunate.

Many people, when he rose to fame, became his enemies and did their best to pull him down; but he never retaliated, and in his thousands of letters I have found no unkind word about anyone.

Everything he did has become part of the fabric of American history and of western civilization.

Poor Richard's Almanack. from 1733 on, is full of epigrams and mottoes that we still use in common speech, often forgetting whence they came, such as: Time is money.

Snug as a bug in a rug.

Keep one's nose to the grindstone.

Necessity never made a good bargain.

Experience keeps a dear school, but fools will learn in no other.

And these, now forgotten, deserve a revival: Fish and visitors smell in three days.

There are no fools so troublesome as those that have wit.

There are three faithful friends, an old wife, an old dog, and ready money.

None but the well-bred man knows how to confess a fault, or acknowledge himself in error.

Ten or twelve years after the almanac started, Franklin began his electrical and scientific work. In 1748 he retired from active printing and bookselling, which gave him leisure for writing and science. His Experiments and Observations on Electricity, printed at London in 1751, was translated into French, Italian and German. The book earned its author several honorary degrees, and the Copley medal of the Royal Society of London, and made him a leading figure in the world of science. These experiments, of which the famous one with kite and key was the best known but not the most important, were a notable contribution to knowledge. Franklin was responsible for the concept of positive and negative electricity; he made the first electric battery and armature; he explained how the Leyden jar, the first electrical condenser, worked. He would have liked to devote his entire life to science, but was too public-spirited to confine himself to that. He served as deputy postmaster-general for the English Colonies for twenty-one years, and very efficiently. He entered Pennsylvania politics early, and became a member of the Assembly. He organized logistic support for British armies in the interior during the Old French and Red Indian War, and he represented Pennsylvania at the Albany Congress of 1754. Three years later the Assembly sent him to England to try to persuade the Penn family to allow their millions of acres of wild land to pay a small tax to the province.

In England Franklin remained for seventeen years, most of the time as agent for the assemblies of several colonies. He made a host of friends among scientists, men of letters, economists and politicians; he promoted the scheme for a new Vandalia colony on the Ohio; he met Doctor Johnson as member of a charitable society, The Associates of Doctor Bray, which set up schools for Negro children in colonial towns. He frequently contributed to the London newspapers articles, letters and squibs supporting the rights of the colonists, the most humorous called "Rules by which a Great Empire may be Reduced to a Small One," which he dedicated to one of the leading British ministers.

At the same time he wrote to his American friends begging them to moderate their demands, to respect law and order, since time was working for them.

This policy got him in wrong with the colonial radicals.

In hisforties. Franklin took to electrical studies and was soon a leading figure in the world of science.

He spoke different languages to his English and his American friends, precisely because he was trying to moderate the extreme demands of each side and to find a formula by which American liberty could be preserved within the British Empire. That, of course, exposed him to the charge of hypocrisy. His position as colonial agent became very shaky in 1773. Sam Adams attacked him, partly because of his moderation, but mostly because he regarded Franklin as a wicked old man. Debby refused to cross the ocean, and so never came to London with Ben, who was reported to be leading the life of young Boswell; and in his writings he took an earthy, practical view of sex that outraged Puritanical sentiment. Curiously enough, it was Franklin's realistic attitude towards sex that inspired the vicious attack on his reputation, in Studies in Classic American Literature (1923), by D. H. Lawrence, who, though far from a Puritan in sexual matters, seems to have expected everyone else to be one.

Franklin worked hard to prevent a breach with the mother country, but when it became clear that Parliament would not repeal the Coercive Acts, he realized that his mission had failed.

In March, 1775, he sailed from England for the last time as a subject of King George. The very day after his arrival in Philadelphia he was chosen by the Pennsylvania Assembly a delegate to the Continental Congress.

In Congress or out, Franklin was no great or original political thinker. In politics he was an opportunist, or pragmatist, to give opportunism its modern philosophical term. His one test of a constitution, or of a political arrangement, was "Will it work?" The British Empire before 1763 worked very well, so he wished to continue it, or restore it as it had been, rather than break off. Similar was his attitude towards religion. As a young man he had been a typical eighteenth-century deist, but he abandoned deism because "this doctrine might be true, but was not very useful." He observed that public morality was essential to good government and that organized Christianity was the best promoter of public morality; so he supported churches and even occasionally attended them.

Franklin placed a high value on conciliation and compromise in politics. He did not like the result of the Federal Convention of 1787, of which he was the oldest and most experienced member, because he disliked checks and balances, and wanted no United States Senate. Yet such was his common' sense and his respect for the opinions of others, that he accepted and supported the Federal Constitution instead of standing out against it as did George Mason, Elbridge Gerry and other members whose vanity had been wounded because their pet ideas had not been adopted. The famous speech he delivered near the end of the convention expresses his attitude perfectly: "I confess that there are several parts of this Constitution which I do not at present approve, but I am not sure I shall never approve them; for having lived long, I have experienced many instances of being obliged, by better information or fuller consideration, to change opinions ... which I once thought right, but found to be otherwise....

"Thus I consent, sir, to this Constitution because I expect no better, and because I am not sure that it is not the best. The opinions I have had of its errors I sacrifice to the public good; I have never whispered a syllable of them abroad; within these walls they were born, and here they shall die. If everyone of us in returning to our constituents were to report the objections he has had to it, and endeavor to gain partisans in support of them, we might prevent its being generally received.... " Franklin may therefore be considered one of the founding fathers of American democracy, since no democratic government can last long without conciliation and compromise. And the mere knowledge that he was in favour of the Constitution did more to win acceptance from the common people of America than all the learned, close-reasoned articles in The Federalist. admirable as they are.

In diplomacy, too, Franklin was a genius. The sending of him to France to represent the Continental Congress was a master stroke; for in France he already had a great reputation as a man of science, and as "Bonhomme Richard." The French

Franklin

proved

that

Government, of course, favoured him because he represented American resistance to their hereditary enemy; and all who were dreaming of liberty for France revered him as a signer of the Declaration of Independence. His book on electrical experiments, which had been translated, paraphrased and published more than once, gave him high prestige among scientists and philosophers. An edition of Oeuvres de M. Franclin had appeared in 1773; and an enterprising Paris bookseller had translated his The Way to Wealth and a selection of his proverbs and witty sayings in the almanacs as La Science de Bonhomme Richard.

This turned out to be even more important than his work on electricity in enhancing Franklin's reputation.

The simple yet witty moral teachings in these maxims made a tremendous appeal. Edition followed edition off the French press; it was even referred to as the "Bible of the Eighteenth Century," and a royal official advised the use of it in connection with the catechism. Bonhomme Richard proved that a scientist could be religious and creative, not merely a destructive critic of religion and a puller-down of ancient institutions, as most of the French men of science had been. The maxims were acceptable to the Church, and made Franklin a favourite figure among the people at large. The ancient warfare between science and religion seemed to be ended. It was Franklin, more than any other person, who convinced the average Catholic bourgeois that natural science was not to be feared as impious and antiChristian, but a good thing which would react in a beneficial way on human life.

Hitherto, little effort had been made to define the limits between science and religion. It was generally supposed to be immoral to assert a scientific cause for phenomena such as earthquakes, shooting stars, thunder and lightning. Thus Franklin's proof of electricity's causing lightning became very significant. It had an impact comparable to that in our time of Einstein's theory of relativity. It took out of the field of religion something earlier classified as a mere act of God and included it in natural science. Yet nobody could deny that Franklin was a religious man, that he believed in God.

F

RANKLIN BEHAVED in France with great sagacity. He did not mix with the people or drive through the streets waving his hat and soliciting cheers; he lived aloof in the Hotel Valentinois at Passy, and appeared seldom in public. The rumour that he was a Quaker seemed to be confirmed because he allowed himself to be presented to the king without a wig or elaborate court dress. That was just an accident-the wig did not come in time -but it was all to the good because Quakers were the only Christian sect favoured by the philosophers.

One of the warmest tributes to Franklin's influence and standing in France came from the pen of John Paul Jones, whose naval efforts he consistently supported, despite countless difficulties. Jones wrote to Robert Morris, "I know the great and good in this kingdom better, perhaps, than any other American who has appeared in Europe since the treaty of alliance, and if my testimony could add anything to Franklin's reputation I would witness the universal veneration and esteem with which his name inspires all ranks, not only at Versailles and all over this kingdom, but also in Spain and Holland. And I can add from the testimony of the first characters of other nations that with them envy is dumb when the name of Franklin is but mentioned."

John Adams, Franklin's colleague at Paris, has left an amusing account of the doctor's working day as a diplomat.

Franklin the diplomat was held in universal veneration not only in France, but also in other countries on the continent.

. could be religious and creatzve.

Hard-working, conscientious John tried to get the doctor to do business, or at least to sign papers, before breakfast, but seldom with success. He breakfasted late; and as soon as it was over, carriages began arriving at the Hotel Valentinois with all sorts of people, "some philosophers, academicians and economists," some literary men; "but by far the greater part were women and children, come to have the pleasure of telling stories among their acquaintances about his simplicity, his bald head and scattering straight hair." These visitors occupied all his time until the hour to dress for dinner, between one and two o'clock.

He was invited to dine out almost every day and seldom declined.

After dinner he sometimes attended the play, sometimes a session of the academy or a lodge meeting, but more often to visit one of his lady friends and take tea.

"Some of these ladies," says Adams, "I knew, as Madame Helvetius, Madame Brillon, Madame Chaumont, Madame Le Ray and others whom I never knew and never enquired for.

After tea the evening was spent in hearing the ladies sing and play upon their pianofortes and other instruments of musick, and in various games as cards, chess, backgammon." Franklin, however, never played anything but chess or checkers. "In these agreeable and important occupations and amusements," says Adams, "the afternoon and evening was spent, and he came home at all hours from nine to twelve o'clock at night. This course of life contributed to his pleasure and I believe to his health and longevity."

For all that John Adams said, Franklin managed to write a surprising number of letters, by dictating them to his secretaries at breakfast or between social engagements. And he did the main work of the American mission. through personal contacts. Far more effective than formal notes were a whispered conversation at the play, a hint to a cabinet minister's mistress, a confidential chat at the Masonic Lodge.

Franklin was also keenly interested in aeronautics. He was a friend of the Montgolfier brothers, who made the first balloon ascensions. "We think of nothing here at present but of flying," he wrote from Paris in 1783. "The balloons engross all attention." John Jeffries, who made the first balloon crossing of the English Channel, brought Franklin from London the world's first airmail letter.

Thus Benjamin Franklin was a universal genius, more so than any other man of his day, American or European: one from whose writings the student of almost any subject from orchids to oceanography, or from politics to population growth, can learn something.

One of his last letters, of March 9, 1790, was written in answer to President Ezra Stiles of Yale. "You desire to know something of my religion," he says. "It is the first time I have been questioned upon it. But I cannot take your curiosity amiss, and shall endeavor in a few words to gratify it." He affirms his belief in God as the Creator of the Universe, and in immortality. He expresses some doubt of the divinity of Jesus; but with characteristic humour adds that he will not dogmatize on the subject, "having never studied it, and think it needless to busy myself with it now, when I expect soon an opportunity to know the truth with less trouble."

He had less than six weeks to wait.

As "Poor Richard" he had remarked in one of his almanacs: If you would not be forgotten As soon as you are dead and rotten, Either write things worth reading Or do things worth the writing.

Benjamin Franklin did both. Everything he wrote is worth reading, and everything he did has become part of the fabric of American history and of western civilization.

poor Richard, 17 j ,.

AN

Almanack A random sampling of epigrams from

Poor Richard's Almanac, written by Benjamin Franklin.

I

7 3 3,

Being the Firft after LEAP YEAR. AntI mIlhs pn,l./ht. Crttt1iJ1J By the Auount or the Eaflem Cruh By the Latin Olun:h, when 0 «:lIt......

By tbe Cmnpolatian 01 W.1f'.

By tho R"",an~ By t'hQ jrwtb Rabble&.

Wherein

Yeats 7~41 6912 .174' .168' 5-494

it t'ontdiffd

The Lunations. Ec1ipfes, Judgment of ,he Weather, Spring Tid." Planets Motion. 8( rnulual Afpef.ls, Sun e"<l Moon', RUing and Setti"$. Length ol'D.yo, Time or fJigh Water.

F'III, Cootie, Uld obfcrvable Days.

Fitted to the Latitude of Forty Degrees, ~d •• Meridian of FjvcHours WeI\ from '1"'''''''. but may without fenl1ble ENOr" rervealllhe adjace nl PIau>, oven fTom 1'IftIlfilinJ/IuJ- to Swill.

Yrol,"na-

By

RICH.AR.D SAUNDERS, Philom.

PHILADELPHIA.

Printed and fold by B. FR 4JlKL IJ{, at the New. . l'r1nting. Office tie •••.the Me,ktt

THERE WAS NEVER A GOOD KNIFE MADE OF BAD STEEL.

WHEN THE WELL'S DRY, WE KNOW THE WORTH OF WATER.

To God we owe fear and love; to our neighbours justice and character; to our selves prudence and sobriety.

Lend money to an enemy, and thou 'It gain him; to a friend, and thou 'It lose him.

TO BE HUMBLE TO SUPERIORS IS DUTY, TO EQUALS COURTESY, TO INFERIORS NOBLENESS.

God helps them that help themselves.

It is better to take many injuries, than to give one.

CREDITORS HAVE BETTER MEMORIES THAN DEBTORS.

If you would reap Praise you must sow the Seeds, gentle Words and' useful Deeds.

EARLY TO BED AND EARLY TO RISE, MAKES A MAN HEAL THY, WEALTHY, AND WISE.

Dost thou love Life?

Then do not squander Time; for that's the Stuff Life is made of.

A good Wife & Health, is a Man's best Wealth.

He that lieth down with dogs, shall rise up with fleas.

WOULD.YOU LIVE WITH EASE, DO WHAT YOU OUGHT, AND NOT WHAT YOU PLEASE.

A learned blockhead is a greater blockhead than an ignorant one.

The University of California provides quality education in all branches of science and humanities.

Davis

•••

4,110

~ ~::;cE::~:L FIGURU INOICA.TE f.NRQLl""'f.NT

BIG SCHOOL ITH A BIG JOB

Free education) academic excellence and creative scholarship are its three keystones.

ASSEDUCATION can be consistent with the maintenance of high academic standards and need not mean any lowering of the quality of teaching. This is well borne out by the example of the University of California in the United Stales.

With almost 60,000 students on seven campuses and 31,000 more enrolled in extension courses, the University of California is the biggest institution of higher education in the United States. Paradoxically, it is also one of the best, for rapid growth of the University, which was founded ninety-five years ago, has not compromised its commitment to academic excellence. It is the capstone of the state's ambitious educational system, a complex of schools designed to provide tuition-free education from kindergarten through graduate school for all state residents who qualify intellectually. By

M

state law, the University accepts only the top eighth of the secondary school graduates. To this elite, it offers the opportunity to study under many professors who rank with the best anywhere. To the faculty it gives freedom to combine research with teaching. The result is an atmosphere of intellectual excitement and a record of creative scholarship of which Californians are justly proud. Several members of the faculty have distinguished themselves in recent years, especially in research in physical sciences, and some have won the much-coveted Nobel prizes.

The University's high reputation and the wide range of courses offered attract students from many foreign countries. The enrolment for the current academic session includes 183 students from India. Engineering is the major field of interest of these Indian students, but some are also studying statistics, economics and chemistry.

Distinguished professors have helped raise the intellectual standard of the University of California to its present high level.

Nobel prize winner Dr. Owen Chamberlain teaches physics at Berkeley.

SPAN OF EVENTS Even as the first news of the death of President Kennedy by an assassin's bullet flashed across America and a stunned world, his successor, Lyndon B. Johnson, assumed the powers and responsibilities automatically transferred to him under the Constitution by the tragic event. Mr. Johnson took the oath of office in Dallas, Texas, in the same airplane which carried Mr. Kennedy's body to Washington for interment at Arlington National Cemetery.

The new President's assumption of office was thus marked by continuity and a smooth passing of authority. His actions and speeches during the next few days reassured Americans-and peoples everywhere-about his resolve and ability to carry through his predecessor's programmes with determination and vigour. At the same time, as he guides the task of translating the basic concepts and purposes of national policy into action, he may be expected to apply to this formidable task his vast accumulated experience as a public leader and statesman and the great influence of his personality.

The greatest leader of our time has been struck down by the foulest deed of our time. Today John Fitzgerald Kennedy lives on in the immortal words and works he left behind. He lives on in the mind and memories of mankind.

He lives on in the hearts of his countrymen. No words are sad enough to express our sense of loss. No words are strong enough to express our determination to continue the forward thrust of America that he began .... The ideas and ideals which he so nobly represented must and will be translated into effective action. ... This nation will keep its commitments from South Vietnam to West Berlin. We will be unceasing in the search for peace; resourceful in our pursuit of areas of agreement with those with whom we differ; and generous and loyal to those who join with us in common cause .... We will carryon the fight against poverty and misery, ignorance and disease

-in other lands and in our own.

We will serve all of the nation, not one section or one sector, or one group, but all Americans. These are the United States-a united people with unity of purpose ....

I urge you again, as I did in 1957 and again in 1960, to enact a Civil Rights law so that we can move forward to eliminate from this nation every trace of discrimination and oppression based upon race or color. There could be no greater source of strength to this nation both at home and abroad.

Address to U.S. Congress on November 27, 1963

I am against bigotry and discrimination because I think they are wrong. I am for human understanding, for equal justice, for equality of opportunity because I think they are right.

Address to the American Jewish Congress, Baltimore, April 3, 1962

President Lyndon Johnson bows before the Kennedy casket after offering floral tribute.

One of the first official acts of President Johnson was a conference with former President Eisenhower at the White House.

Freedom is not just a negative thing. It cannot be preserved merely by guns and armor and fighting armies. Freedom must also offer to the people a promise of a brighter dawn-the opportunity for a better and richer life.

Speech at his Texas ranch,

color, until education is unaware of race, until opportunity is unconcerned with the color of men's skins, emancipation will be a proclamation but not a fact.

Address at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, May 1963

1959

A great leader is dead. A great nation must move on. Yesterday is not ours to recover, but tomorrow is ours to win or to lose.

I am resolved that we shall win the tomorrows before us. So I ask you to join me in that resolve, determined that from this midnight of tragedy we shall move toward a new American greatness. ... Let us today renew our dedication to the ideals that are American. Let us pray for divine wisdom in banishing from our land any injustice or intolerance or oppression to any of our fellow Americans whatever their opinion, whatever the color of their skins ---;:-forGod made all of us, not some of us, in his image.

Thanksgiving Day Message, November 28, 1963

We talked of his hopes and aspirations and our desire to help .... The common enemies of mankind on which a major attack must be mounted are ignorance, poverty and disease.

On his discussions with Prime Minister Nehru after his visit to India in the Spring of 1961

New first family: President Johnson with wife, Lady Bird, seated, and daughters Lucy Baines, centre, and Lynda Bird.

In this hour, it is not our respective races which are at stake-it is our nation. Let those who care for their country come forward, north and south, white and Negro, to lead the way through this moment of challenge and decision .... Until justice is blind to

After first address to joint session of Congress, President Johnson turns to shake hands with Speaker of the House of Representatives John McCormack, next in line of succession to the United States Presidency.

MEMBERS N ONLY four weeks,ten Indian visitors who arrived as strangers in two New England towns, became "members of the family" to their American hosts.

The visitors were among a contingent of 119 Indians who spent two months in the United States recently sponsored by the Experiment for International Living, a non-profit international exchange organization formed in 1932. The organization aims to promote mutual understanding between countries, believing that "people learn to live together by living together."

Living with families in the neighbouring towns of Hanover, New Hampshire and Norwich, Vermont, the group of ten were engaged in a constant round of activities, visiting American homes, government buildings, farms, industries, and historic sites.

Included in their programme was a visit to the Vermont Legislature, where State Representative Anthony Farrell acted as their guide. (Mr. Farrell's family participated in the Experiment for International Living project.) Amy D'Souza, leader of the Indian group, said she "was impressed by the conduct of legislative discussions and the ability of the legislators. I felt that there were many similarities between your debates and ours in India."

The legislativesession was a noteworthy experience particularly for the Indian visitors in the legal profession-Vatsala Amin, Bombay lawyer; Kusumben Shah, municipal councillor and Ahmedabad lawyer, and V. S. Pathak, law student of Rajkot.

Also on the Indian guests' schedule was a visit to the U.S. Army Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory and Dartmouth College in Hanover. At the 194-year-old college, they attended the June commencement exercises and heard a Negro leader deliver the commencement address on the urgency of solving the civil rights question.

Following the address, Miss D'Souza said, "Just as you have your racial problems here, so we have ours-the caste system. To a certain extent the untouchables have been emancipated, but there has been a long struggle against discrimination. The Communists have exploited this situation."

I

OF A FAMILY While the American families were planning special activities for their guests, the Indian visitors were preparing a dinner and special entertainment in honour of their hosts. The Indians shopped in the Hanover Co-operative for many of the ingredients.

The Indians prepared dinner for some 100 host families and friends in the community. Pullao, raita, shrikhand, mixed curried vegetables and tea were served outdoors at the Farrell farm. After dinner, everyone went to the new Kellogg Medical Auditorium in Hanover for an evening of songs and dances.

The auditorium was nearly filled to its capacity as regional dances of the Punjab and Gujarat were performed by Miss Amin and Miss Shah. Mr. Pathak sang Indian songs and the Bhangra dance was demonstrated by Mrs. Kammo Bhatnagar, a Bombay housewife; Yetendra Gupta, a furniture merchant from New Delhi; Miss Amin, and Arun Mastaffy, a Calcutta tourist agent.

The evening was a tremendous success.

In fact, during intermission several parents left the hall and returned with children they had left at home. They

didn't want them to miss the wonderful performance.

How did members of the Indian group characterize their visits with the New England families?

Mr. Mastaffy said that although seventy per cent of the tourists he met on his job in Calcutta were Americans, he never felt that he really knew them until he lived with his New England family. "I seriously wonder if this could have happened in any other country in the world," he said, "to be welcomed so cordially and to feel so 'at home.' " On the day of the Indian visitors' departure, Dr. Tiwari said the group felt a deep sense of sadness. "We became very attached to the people here. Everyone got to know us by name and would greet us in the streets, the stores-everywhere we went. Besides making friendships, we learned that many of the impressions we had formed about Americans from motion pictures and other sources were not true. As people, we are very much alike. And as far as the success of the Experiment programme is concerned, I think that it can be proved by the sadness we feel at this moment of departure." â&#x20AC;˘

Mrs. Kammo Bhatnagar.

Miss Vatsala M. Amin and Mr. Pathak. above, prepare food for party in the Farrell kitchen.

Left, a view of the party showing the guests and their families.

The narrator of adventures who developed into an explorer of the mind.

HERMAN MELVILLE

N illS illuminating essay on Herman Melville, Professor Leon Howard remarks: "There is a mystery about the man as well as about his works which teases and excites the imagination."

Mystery is a term which can be applied indeed with particular appropriateness to Melville. It is not the commonplace mystery of the detective story but the more profound riddle of the mental development of a writer who was ahead of his times and whose greatness has won recognition only in this century. It is the strange phenomenon of widely diversified aptitudes and talents in a man who experienced the adventure and hazards of a sailor's life early in his youth and combined spells of creative writing with many years of prosaic professional routine-as a bank clerk, storekeeper, school-teacher and, finally, a customs inspector. It is the unusual, inextricable blend of biographical fact, fiction and philosophy in a literary output which was spread unevenly over a long span of time and attained its excellence in a masterpiece written at the age of thirty-one and some forty years before the writer's death.

The circumstances of Melville's childhood and early youth produced an unusual interplay of experiences and influences which profoundly affected the shaping of his mind and his writings.

Born in New York in 1819 in a prosperous, genteel, middle-class family, the first ten years of his life were spent in

I

comparative comfort and felicity. But then an unexpected and serious failure in business reduced his father, Allan Melville, to bankruptcy. He never recovered from the disaster and died, a physical and mental wreck, when Herman was in his twelfth year. There followed a long period of depression and instability in which the fortunes of the family, consisting of the widow and eight children, were often at a low ebb. Obliged to cut short his education and to earn a living, young Melville, then eighteen, took up a schoolmaster's job in a remote rural district. The job did not last long and the following winter found him studying surveying and engineering in the hopes of getting employment in the state canal system. When these hopes too did not materialize, Melville decided to go out to sea and signed up in the summer of 1839 as a "boy" on the St. Lawrence, a merchant vessel bound for Liverpool.

The decision was fateful in many ways.

His seaman's assignment was the first of several which Melville was to undertake over the next five years or longer as one of the crew of a trading vessel, frigate or whaler. At a highly impressionable period of his life this was a uniquely intense and complex experience to which few writers have been subjected. Against the feelings of freedom and elation aroused by the limitless expanse and grandeur of the sea and the prospect of seeing the world, there were the harsh realities of

the strenuous physical labour and rigorous routine of the ship. Also, for a sensitive, well-bred, refined lad like Melville, the change from the sheltered domesticity of his genteel household to the society of rough and ribald seamen, was not without a violent emotional and mental impact. While life on a whaling ship introduced him to a career of big, hazardous adventure, the harsh, unbearable conditions under which the seamen laboured, made him deeply conscious of the social inequities of his time.

Although Melville was only twenty-five when he abandoned his sea voyaging, the diverse influences to which he had been exposed gave him a precocious mqturity of character, soon to be reflected in his writings. By the same token this early, intense activity led to a premature exhaustion of his physical and mental energy and, with one or two notable exceptions, the bulk of his literary output belongs to the earlier part of his career.

In 1847 Melville married Elizabeth Shaw, daughter of Judge Shaw, Chief Justice of Massachusetts, who had been an intimate friend of his father and took a parental interest in Melville and his work. In spite of a certain incompatibility of temperament, Elizabeth was deeply attached to her somewhat enigmatic husband and proved to be a devoted companion. Financial worries continued to dog Melville. For some twenty years from 1866 he held the humble post of a

district customs inspector. When he died in 1891, at the age of seventy-two, he had ceased- to be a public writer for so long that most people had even forgotten his existence.

Reference has been made to the element of mystery in Melville's work. There is abundant evidence of this in his first book Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life. which also reveals his powers as a storyteller with a flair for picturesque, humorous detail and a tendency to occasional philosophic comment on life's ironies and the seamy side of modern civilization.

Typee is mainly a tale of adventure based on Melville's personal experiences and embellished by his vivid imagination.

At the age of twenty-one he had enrolled as a sailor on the whaler Acushnet but, frustrated with the intolerable conditions of his service, he deserted the ship after the voyage had lasted some eighteen months. Accompanied by another sailor, Tobias Greene----<:alled Toby in the bookhe sought refuge in one of the Marquesas Islands, and their desperate bid for freedom led them unwittingly to a tribe of notorious cannibals. The companion escaped after a few days but Melville had to spend four weeks with the Typees.

His account of these four weeks-extended in the book to four months-has the ingredients of a long chapter out of Arabian Nights.

RUNNING THROUGHthe fantastic adventure tale are two contrasted threads which constantly intertwine and give the story its queer complex of comedy and grotesqueness. On the one hand, we have the primitive, simple, hospitable Typee warriors, and their charming semi-nude women, anxious to make life as pleasant as possible for the strange white man.

Their intense curiosity, extending even to application of the "olfactory organ" to his skin, and their well-meant but crude attempts to minister to his comforts, are productive of many humorous situations.

On the other hand, the strange rituals of the natives and above all their cannibalism, carefully guarded from their guest but ever lurking in the background, provide a recurring element of fearful suspense and mystery. The feeling of mystery and eeriness is heightened by the nearcaptive state in which the visitor is kept in spite of all the hospitality he receives, and by his grotesque discovery that three innocent-looking packages suspended from a pole in his dwelling place contain human heads. The suspense culminates in the Typees' final, desperate but unsuccessful bid to prevent his escape.

Into this quite thrilling tale of high adventure, which the author admits is "sadly discursive," Melville has introduced some caustic comment on European "civilizers" and the¡ activities

of European missionaries. Describing the occupation of one of the Marquesas Islands by the French, he writes: "Four heavy, double-banked 'frigates and three corvettes to frighten a parcel of naked heathen into subjection! Sixty-eightpounders to demolish huts of cocoa-nut boughs, and Congreve rockets to set on fire a few canoe sheds!" Later, he bitterly attacks the methods and practices of Christian missions and in particular those of the Sandwich Island Missions, asserting that the natives had been "civilized into draught horses and evangelized into beasts of burden." Let the savages be civilized, he says, but civilize them with benefits, and not with evils; and let heathenism be destroyed, but not by destroying the heathen.

These comments aroused a good deal of resentment and Melville was accused of being a "traducer of missions." The controversial passages were omitted in the second American edition of the book and he had to find another publisher for his later novels. His publisher in England, where Typee was published under the title of Narrative of a Four Months Residence among the Natives of a Valley of the Marquesas Islands. was more concerned, however, about the authenticity of Melville's weird experiences. Luckily for him, his erstwhile companion, Richard Tobias Greene, appeared and confirmed the narrative up to the point of his (Toby's) escape from the Typees.

In spite of the critics and the sceptics, Typee was a success and launched Melville on his career as a writer. His next book Omoo. based on his experiences in Tahiti, largely repeated the pattern of the earlier novel and also, incidentally, his reflections on missionary failures.

This mixture of real adventure and vivid imagination, served with the skill of a good story-teller, was relished by Melville's readers and if he had stuck to it, he would probably have had an unbroken run of success. But in the meantime his mental horizons had extended. Stimulated by his reading of the Elizabethans, the English and Continental Romanticists and a whole range of philosophical writers, he was no longer content to describe cannibals and their pastimes but became preoccupied with the intellectual and social conflicts of his age. In Mardi his powers of narration combined with his new philosophic and speculative approach to explore man's eternal quest for order and happiness. Using the techniques of allegory and debate, he discussed not only the universal problem of individual happiness but also many of the social and political events then convulsing Europe and the world-the revolution in France, the Chartist movement in England, slavery in the United States. The book is significant as an index to the development of Melville's genius but it fails to satisfy artistically as there is little

fusion between its narrative and philosophical or critical content and the entire design is chaotic.

Mardi was assailed by critics both in the United States and in England and proved a financial failure, but Melville consoled himself with the thought that "there are goodly harvests which ripen late, especially when the grain is remarkably strong." To recoup his losses he reverted to the autobiographical romance which had already paid him dividends and produced in quick succession his next two works Redburn and White Jacket.

In these books he again built his story by raising an imaginative superstructure of fiction on a stratum of actual experience but, much more than in the earlier romances, he was actuated by a profound sense of social purpose. His portrayal in Redburn of the intolerable conditions on board an immigrant ship or in White Jacket of the iron discipline and ruthlessness of naval life was obviously born of deep conviction. The occasional comedy of character or situation in the stories does not detract from the seriousness of Melville's purpose in drawing attention to these glaring examples of social injustice.

THE EVOLUTION of Melville from a narrator of tales of adventure into an explorer of the mind was complete in his next book, Moby Dick. universally acknowledged to be his masterpiece. About this time he had cultivated the acquaintance of Hawthorne, whose philosophy of the "blackness" of truth and misgivings about Transcendental idealism had a profound influence on Melville's ideas and doubtless also on the shape and substance of the new book. He had been storing his experiences as a whaler for a separate story but Moby Dick as it finally emerged was no ordinary tale of perilous adventure on the high seas. In it Melville rose to the heights of a great writer of tragedy in the Shakespearean tradition, probing the age-old baflling problems of evil, of fate and of that complex of human weakness and nobility which is characteristic of the tragic hero.

At the very beginning of Moby Dick. there are unmistakable allusions to the impending tragedy and its inevitability.

On the sea, where the great drama of human frailty and man's futile struggle against fate is to be staged, the narrator, Ishmael, sees "the image of the ungraspable phantom of life." A little later he refers to the whale as "a portentous and mysterious monster." This business of whaling, he says, may mean "a speechlessly quick chaotic bundling of a man into Eternity." But the grim prospect does not deter him because he thinks his body is "but the lees of his better being . it is not him."

Writer of imaginative) pictorial prose; sensitive recorder of social and cultural conflicts.

With deft, sure strokes Melville builds up the character of his hero, Captain Ahab, even before he appears on the scene. And when that mysterious "grand, ungodly, godlike man"-who lost his leg in a previous encounter with Moby Dick, the whale-addresses the assembled crew, the effect is of a powerful, single-minded, hypnotic personality which casts a spell on the listeners and binds them in a demoniac bond of vengeance against the white whale. Ahab's words and gestures and the peculiar rituals he enforcesmaking the harpooneers drink from the sockets of the harpoons and, later, tempering barbs with blood taken from their bodies-help create an ominous, uncanny atmosphere thick with foreboding. The impression on the reader's mind is not unlike that of the boiling of the witches' cauldron and their chanting of unholy spells in Macbeth. In Ahab himself several critics have seen the likeness of Learthe same mad, noble rage, the defiance of elemental forces, the tragic flaw of mistaken judgment. Identifying the white whale with eternal evil and malice, he determines to "chase him round perdition's flames." Nothing can prevent this lonely, tormented, obsessed figure from pursuing his grand, monomaniac object foredoomed to failure and tragedy. On the track of the whale at last and hunting it for the third successive day, he is hurled from his boat by the speeding monster which also smites and sinks the ship. As the shark-infested sea swallows Ahab and all his companions except one, we realize that the mad adventure could only have ended thus and it hardly needs the narrator's comment to tell us that the whole act was immutably decreed.

IT

IS not only masterly portrayal of character and skilful build-up of the tragic climax which make Moby Dick a great work of fiction. Speaking through his narrator Ishmael, Melville says: "To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme." And what can be more mighty than the Leviathan, the ancient and eternal whale, which he has surrounded with such a unique, almost overwhelming array of fact, fiction and legend!

Several chapters in the book are devoted to portraying in great detail the size, features and habits of the whale. An amazing amount of research must also lie behind Melville's frequent allusions to descriptions of the Leviathan in ancient works of art, adventure, fiction or mythology. Incidentally, he has not over-

looked Hindu art and mythology. He mentions Matsya Avatar or Vishnu's incarnation as a great fish, which could only be a whale, and his feat as "whaleman" in rescuing the sacred Vedas from the bottom of the sea. He also refers to what is believed to be the most ancient extant portrait of the whale in the Elephanta Caves near Bombay.

Interwoven into the fabric of the story are also vivid descriptions of whaling techniques and significant incidents and reflections on the life of the whalers. The men who run such stupendous risks in their calling may be rough and uncouth but they have an inherent nobility, "that abounding dignity which has no robed investiture." Even the cannibal Queequeg who saves a white sailor from drowning because "it's a mutual joint-stock world" has this aura of nobility. The great democratic God, in whom Melville believes so passionately, can make even the humblest sublime. Moby Dick is thus not only a drama of the torment in a man's soul and his futile struggle against fate, but also a saga of human dignity and equality.

T

HE STUDY of odd facets of human behaviour under the stress of a strong mental conflict or when exposed to a particularly evil or malignant influence, continued to fascinate Melville. In his first short story Bartleby he portrays a character which, in marked contrast to Ahab's fiery, ebullient activity, is a monument of inaction and passivity. But Bartleby, the lawyer's clerk is none-the-Iess a hero whose passive exterior conceals an indomitable will and an under-current of defiance. This spirit of defiance finds unique expression in his exasperating reiteration of the words "I prefer not to," in response to every request or suggestion from his employer or anyone else for compliance with routine duties or normal standards of behaviour. In fact he is a thoroughgoing non-conformist whose protest against life's frustrations assumes this odd form of passive resistance and eventually leads to his removal and death in prison as a vagrant. What those tragic frustrations were which made Bartleby look "like the last column of some ruined temple" is largely left to the reader's imagination but Melville gives us a highly suggestive and poignant clue. Before he came to the lawyer, the unfortunate scrivener was a junior clerk in a Dead Letter Office, ceaselessly sorting out for the flames letters which cannot be delivered or returned-many of them messages

which reach their destination too late to redeem a pledge of love, to avert a calamity or to relieve hunger or despair.

In Billy Budd, Foretopman, written a quarter of a century later and published in 1924many years after Melville's death, he again probed the complexities of human behaviour and man's relationship with society. Billy Budd, the handsome, popular, simple-minded sailor on a naval vessel, arouses the elemental evil in Claggart, the Master-at-Arms, not because of anything he has done or omitted to do but merely because his innocence and the moral phenomenon he presents are too much for the petty officer to brook. Claggart falsely accuses Billy before the Captain of disloyalty and inciting a mutiny on the ship. The sailor is flabbergasted and tongue-tied and then reacts violently by aiming a blow with his bare arm which kills his accuser. Captain de Vere and the other officers who try Billy at a courtmartial are convinced of his innocence, yet the Captain, upright and noble, deems it his duty to sentence Billy to death.

The sailor dies cheerfully, invoking God's blessings on the Captain with his last breath and when the Captain meets his end later after a naval engagement, his last words are "Billy Budd, Billy Budd."

The unusual intermingling of good and evil in the story, the malignancy which breaks forth like an incipient abscess because of disdain and envy of innocence, the quiet heroism which can face death without a qualm and even bless the judge who has decreed it, the struggle between the judge's own conscience and what he deems his duty to society and his country -all these make Billy Budd a superb study in human motivation and action.

During the two decades or more which preceded the writing of Billy Budd, Melville was comparatively inactive as a professional writer, although his interest in writing never ceased. His main occupation in this period was that of a customs inspector and he relieved the tedium of official routine by literary exercise and in particular the writing of poetry. As a poet, however, he failed to make his mark and his most ambitious work, Clare!, a lengthy narrative poem, is not ranked high by critics. It is as a writer of prose, -highly imaginative, suggestive, pictorial, often reminiscent of Carlyle in its abruptness of thought and forceful imagery-as a traveller and seeker in the realm of the mind and as a highly sensitive recorder of the social and cultural conflicts of his age, that Melville is preeminent and takes his place in the galaxy of great American authors. â&#x20AC;˘

OBY DICK Excerpts from

HERMAN MELVILLE's masterpiece

The central figure ofMoby Dick is Ahab, captain of a whaling ship. In a previous encounter with Moby Dick, the White Whale, he lost a leg, and the misfortune has turned him into an embittered, lonely, tragic figure, obsessed with the passion to wreak vengeance on the whale. For several days after the ship has left the harbour, the crew see very little of him but then suddenly he appears on the deck and orders the whole company to assemble there.

These excerpts from Chapter XXXVI-The Quarter Deckgive a clear insight into Ahab's character and prepare the reader for the ensuing tragedy.

wore on;-Ahab now shut up within his cabin; anon, pacing the deck, with the same intense bigotry of purpose in his aspect. .

It drew near the close of day. Suddenly he came to a halt by the bulwarks, and inserting his bone leg into the auger-hole there, and with one hand grasping a shroud, he ordered Starbuck to send everybody aft.

"Sir!" said the mate, astonished at an order seldom or never given on ship-board except in some extraordinary case.

"Send everybody aft," repeated Ahab. "Mast-heads, there! come down!"

When the entire ship's company were assembled, and with curious and not whoUy unapprehensive faces, were eyeing him, for he looked not unlike the weather horizon when a storm is coming up, Ahab, after rapidly glancing over the bulwarks, and then darting his eyes among the crew, started from his standpoint; and as though not a soul were nigh him resumed his heavy turns upon the deck. With bent head and half-slouched hat he continued to pace, unmindful of the wondering whispering among the men; till Stubb cautiously whispered to Flask, that Ahab must have summoned them there for the purpose of witnessing a pedestrian feat. But this did not last long. Vehemently pausing, he cried:"What do ye do when ye see a whale, men?"

"Sing out for him!" was the impulsive rejoinder from a score of clubbed voices.

"Good!" cried Ahab, with a wild approval in his tones; observing the hearty animation into which his unexpected question had so magneticaUy thrown them.

"And what do ye next, men?"

"Lower away, and after him!"

"And what tune is it ye pull to, men?"

"A dead whale or a stove boat!"

More and more strangely and fiercely glad and approving, grew the countenance of the old man at every shout; while the mariners began to gaze curiously at each other, as if marveUing how it was that they themselves became so excited at such seemingly purposeless questions.

But, they were aU eagerness again, as Ahab, now halfrevolving in his pivot-hole, with one hand reaching high up a shroud, and tightly, almost convulsively grasping it, addressed them thus:"All ye mast-headers have before now heard me give orders about a white whale. Look ye! d'ye see this Spanish ounce of gold ?"-holding up a broad bright coin to the sun-"it is a sixteen dollar piece, men. D'ye see it? Mr. Starbuck, hand me yon top-maul." ...

Receivingthe top-maul from Starbuck, he advanced towards

T

HE HOURS

Whosoever of ye raises me that same white whale, he shall have this gold ounce, my boys .... "

the main-mast with the hammer uplifted in one hand, exhibiting the gold with the other, and with a high raised voice exclaiming: "Whosoever ofye raises me a white-headed whale with a wrinkled brow and a crooked jaw; whosoever of ye raises me that whiteheaded whale, with three holes punctured in his starboard fluke -look ye, whosoever of ye raises me that same white whale, he shall have this gold ounce, my boys!"

"Huzza! huzza!" cried the seamen, as with swinging tarpaulins they hailed the act of nailing the gold to the mast.

"It's a white whale, I say," resumed Ahab, as he threw down the top-maul; "a white whale. Skin your eyes for him, men; look sharp for white water; if ye see but a bubble, sing out." ...

"Captain Ahab," said Tashtego, "that white whale must be the same that some call Moby Dick."

"Moby Dick?" shouted Ahab. "Do ye know the white whale then, Tash?"

"Does he fan-tail a little curious, sir, before he goes down?" said the Gay-Header deliberately.

"And has he a curious spout, too," said Daggoo, "very bushy, even for a parmacetty, and mighty quick, Captain Ahab?"

"And he have one, two, tree-oh! good many iron in him hide, too, Captain," cried Queequeg disjointedly, "all twisketee be-twisk, like him-him-" faltering hard for a word, and screwing his hand round and round as though uncorking a bottle-"like him-him-" "Corkscrew!" cried Ahab, "aye, Queequeg, the harpoons lie all twisted and wrenched in him; aye, Daggoo, his spout is a big one, like a whole shock of wheat, and white as a pile of our Nantucket wool after the great annual sheep-shearing; aye, Tashtego, and he fan-tails like a split jib in a squall. Death and devils! men, it is Moby Dick ye have seen-Moby DickMoby Dick!"

"Captain Ahab," said Starbuck, who, with Stubb and Flask, h!ld thus far been eyeing his superior with increasing surprise, but at last seemed struck with a thought which somewhat explained all the wonder. "Captain Ahab, I have heard of Moby Dick-but it was not Moby Dick that took off thy leg?"

"Who told thee that 7" cried Ahab; then pausing, "Aye, Starbuck; aye, my hearties all round; it was Moby Dick that dismasted me; Moby Dick that brought me to this dead stump I stand on now. Aye, aye," he shouted with a terrific, loud, animal sob, like that of a heart-stricken moose; "Aye, aye! it was that accursed white whale that razeed me; made a poor pegging lubber of me for ever and a day!" Then"tossing both arms, with measureless imprecations he shouted out: "Aye, aye! and I'll chase him round Good Hope, and round the Horn, and round the Norway Maelstrom, and round perdition's flames before I give him up ...â&#x20AC;˘

Moby Dick, the object of Ahab's monomaniacal quest, has at last been sighted and for three days he chases the whale with all the pent-up fury of his mad resolve. But we know that the crazy adventure is foredoomed to failure. Ahab is hurled from his boat into the shark-infested sea. The whale smites and sinks the ship, and the swirling waters swallow everyone except a lone survivor who lives to narrate the tale.

The closing chapter of the book, The Chase-Third Day, is a fitting finale to this story of a "grand, ungodly, godlike man" who is as much of a tragic hero as Shakespeare's Lear.

third day dawned fair and fresh, and Tonce more theof thesolitary night-man at the fore-mast-head HE MORNING

was relieved by crowds of the daylight look-outs, who dotted every mast and almost every spar.

"D'ye see him?" cried Ahab; but the whale was not yet in sight.

"In his infallible wake, though; but follow that wake, that's all. Helm there; steady, as thou goest, and hast been going. What a lovely day again! were it a new-made world, and made for a summer-house to the angels, and this morning the first of its throwing open to them, a fairer day could not dawn upon that world. Here's food for thought, had Ahab time to think; but Ahab never thinks; he only feels, feels, feels; that's tingling enough for mortal man! to think's audacity. God only has that right and privilege. Thinking is, or ought to be, a coolness and a calmness; and our poor hearts throb, and our poor brains beat too much for that. And yet, I've sometimes thought my brain was very calm-frozen calm, this old skull cracks so, like a glass in which the contents turned to ice, and shiver it. And still this hair is growing now; this moment growing, and heat must breed it; but no, it's like that sort of common grass that will grow anywhere, between the earthy clefts of Greenland ice or in Vesuvius lava. How the wild winds blow it; they whip it about me as the torn shreds of split sails lash the tossed ship they cling to. A vile wind that has no doubt blown ere this through prison corridors and cells, and wards of hospitals, and ventilated them, and now comes blowing hither as innocent as fleeces. Out upon it!-it's tainted. Were I the wind, I'd blow no more on such a wicked, miserable world. I'd crawl somewhere to a cave, and slink there. And yet, 'tis a noble and heroic thing, the wind! who ever conquered it? In every fight it has the last and bitterest blow. Run tilting at it, and you but run through it. Ha! a coward wind that strikes stark naked men, but will not stand to receive a single blow.... To it! Aloft there! What d'ye see?"

"Nothing, Sir." "Nothing! and noon at hand! The doubloon goes a-begging!

See the sun! Aye, aye, it must be so. I've oversailed him. How,

"For the third time my soul's ship starts upon this voyage.))

got the start? Aye, he's chasing me now; not I, him-that's bad; I might have known it, too. Fool! the lines-the harpoons he's towing. Aye, aye, I have run him by last night. About! about!

Come down, all of ye, but the regular look outs! Man the braces!"

Steering as she had done, the wind had been somewhat on the Pequod's quarter, so that now being pointed in the reverse direction, the braced ship sailed hard upon the breeze as she rechurned the cream in her own white wake.

"Against the wind he now steers for the open jaw," murmured Starbuck to himself, as he coiled the new hauled mainbrace upon the rail. "God keep us, but already my bones feel damp within me, and from the inside wet my flesh. I misdoubt me that I disobey my God in obeying him!"

"Stand by to sway me up!" cried Ahab, advancing to the hempen basket. "We should meet him soon."

"Aye, aye, Sir," and straightway Starbuck did Ahab's bidding, and once more Ahab swung on high.

A whole hour now passed; gold-beaten out to ages. Time itself now held long breaths with keen suspense. But at last, some three points off the weather bow, Ahab descried the spout again, and instantly from the three mast-heads three shrieks went up as if the tongues of fire had voiced it.

"Forehead to forehead I meet thee, this third time, Moby Dick! On deck there !-brace sharper up; crowd her into the wind's eye. He's too far off to lower yet, Mr. Starbuck. The sails shake! Stand over that helmsman with a top-maul! So, so; he travels fast, and I must down. But let me have one more good round look aloft here at the sea; there's time for that. An old, old sight, and yet somehow so young; aye, and not changed a wink since I first saw it, a boy, from the sand-hills of Nantucket!

The same!-the same!-the same to Noah as to me. There's a soft shower to leeward. Such lovely leewardings! They must lead somewhere-to something else than common land, more palmy than the palms. Leeward! the White Whale goes that way! look to windward, then; the better if the bitterer quarter. But good bye, good bye, old mast-head! What's this ?-green? aye, tiny mosses in these warped cracks. No such green weather stains on Ahab's head! There's the difference now between man's old age and matter's. But aye, old mast, we both grow old together; sound in our hulls, though, are we not, my ship? Aye, minus a leg, that's all. By heaven this dead wood has the better of my live flesh every way. I can't compare with it; and I've known some ships made of dead trees outlast the lives of men made of the most vital stuff of vital fathers. What's that he said? he should still go before me, my pilot; and yet to be seen again?

But where? Will I have eyes at the bottom of the sea, supposing I descend those endless stairs? and all night I've been sailing from him, wherever he did sink to. Aye, aye, like many more

thou told'st direful truth as touching thyself, 0 Parsee; but, Ahab, there thy shot fell short. Good by, mast-head-keep a good eye upon the whale, the while I'm gone. We'll talk to-morrow, nay, to-night, when the White Whale lies down there, tied by head and tail."

He gave the word; and still gazing round him, was steadily lowered through the cloven blue air to the deck.

In due time the boats were lowered; but as standing in his shallop's stern, Ahab just hovered upon the point of the descent, he waved to the mate,-who held one of the tackle-ropes on deck-and bade him pause.

"Starbuck !"

"Sir ?"

"For the third time my soul's ship starts upon this voyage, Starbuck."

"Aye, Sir, thou wilt have it so."

"Some ships sail from their ports, and ever afterwards are missing, Starbuck!"

"Truth, Sir: saddest truth."

"Some men die at ebb tide; some at low water; some at the full of the flood;-and I feel now like a billow that's all one crested comb, Starbuck. I am old;-shake hands with me, man."

Their hands met; their eyes fastened; Starbuck's tears the glue.

"Oh, my captain, my captain!-noble heart-go not-go not I-see, it's a brave man that weeps; how great the agony of the persuasion then!"

"Lower away!"--cried Ahab, tossing the mate's arm from him. "Stand by the crew!"

In an instant the boat was pulling round close under the stern.

"The sharks! the sharks!" cried a voice from the low cabinwindow there; "0 master, my master, come back!"

But Ahab heard nothing; for his own voice was high-lifted then; and the boat leaped on.

Yet the voice spake true; for scarce had he pushed from the ship, when numbers of sharks, seemingly rising from out the dark waters beneath the hull, maliciously snapped at the blades of the oars, every time they dipped in the water; and in this way accompanied the boat with their bites. It is a thing not uncommonly happening to the whale-boats in those swarming seas; the sharks at times apparently following them in the same prescient way that vultures hover over the banners of marching regiments in the east....

"Heart of wrought steel!" murmured Starbuck gazing over the side, and following with his eyes the receding boat-"canst thou yet ring boldly to that sight?-lowering thy keel among ravening sharks, and followed by them, open-mouthed to the

"Future things swim before me, as in empty outlines and skeletons.')

As Queequeg watched, the vast form of the whale shot lengthwise, but obliquely from the sea.

chase; and this the critical third day?-For when three days flow together in one continuous intense pursuit; be sure the first is the morning, the second the noon, and the third the evening and the end of that thing-be that end what it may.

Oh! my God! what is this that shoots through me, and leaves me so deadly calm, yet expectant,-fixed at the top of a shudder!

Future things swim before me, as in empty outlines and skeletons; all the past is somehow grown dim....

Ho! again I-drive off that hawk! see! he pecks-he tears the vane"-pointing to the red flag flying at the main-truck-"Ha! he soars away with it!Where's the old man now? see'st thou that sight, oh Ahab!shudder, shudder!"

The boats had not gone very far, when by a signal from the mast-heads-a downward pointed arm, Ahab knew that the whale had sounded; but intending to be near him at the next rising, he held on his way a little sideways from the vessel; the becharmed crew maintaining the profoundest silence, as the head-beat waves hammered and hammered against the opposing bow.

"Drive, drive in your nails, oh ye waves! to their uttermost heads drive them in! ye but strike a thing without a lid; arid no coffin and no hearse can be mine:-and hemp only can kill me! Ha! ha!"

Suddenly the waters around them slowly swelled in broad circles; then quickly upheaved, as if sideways sliding from a submerged berg of ice, swiftly rising to the surface. A low rumbling sound was heard; a subterraneous hum; and then all held their breaths; as bedraggled with trailing ropes, and harpoons, and lances, a vast form shot lengthwise, but obliquely from the sea. Shrouded in a thin drooping veil of mist, it hovered for a moment in the rainbowed air; and then fell swamping back into the deep. Crushed. thirty feet upwards, the waters flashed for an instant like heaps of fountains, then brokenly sank in a shower of flakes, leaving the circling surface creamed like new milk round the marble trunk of the whale.

"Give way!" cried Ahab to the oarsmen, and the boats darted forward to the attack; but maddened by yesterday's fresh irons that corroded in him, Moby Dick seemed combinedly possessed by all the angels that fell from heaven. The wide tiers of welded tendons overspreading his broad white forehead, beneath the transparent skin, looked knitted together; as head on, he came churning his tail among the boats; and once more flailed them apart; spilling out the irons and lances from the two mates' boats, and dashing in one side of the upper part of their bows, but leaving Ahab's almost without a scar.

While Daggoo and Queequeg were stopping the strained planks; and as the whale swimming out from them, turned, and showed one entire flank as he shot by them again; at that moment a quick cry went up. Lashed round and round to the fish's back; pinioned in the turns upon turns in which, during the past night,

the whale had reeled the involutions of the lines around him, the half torn body of the Parsee was seen; his sable raiment frayed to shreds; his distended eyes turned full upon old Ahab.

The harpoon dropped from his hand.

"Befooled, befooled!"-drawing in a long lean breath"Aye, Parsee! 1 see thee again.-Aye, and thou goest before; and this, this then is the hearse that thou didst promise. But 1 hold thee to the last letter of thy word. Where is the second hearse? Away, mates, to the ship! those boats are useless now; repair them if ye can in time, and return to me; if not, Ahab is enough to die-Down, men! the first thing that but offers to jump from this boat 1 stand in, that thing 1 harpoon. Ye are not other men, but my arms and my legs; and so obey me.

-Where's the whale? gone down again?"

But he looked too nigh the boat; for as if bent upon escaping with the corpse he bore, and as if the particular place of the last encounter had been but a stage in his leeward voyage, Moby Dick was now again steadily swimming forward; and had almost passed the ship,-which thus far had been sailing in the contrary direction to him, though for the present her headway had been stopped. He seemed swimming with his utmost velocity, and now only intent upon pursuing his own straight path in the sea.

"Oh! Ahab," cried Starbuck, "not too late is it, even now, the third day, to desist. See! Moby Dick seeks thee not. It is thou, thou, that madly seekest him!" ...

Whether fagged by the three days' running chase, and the resistance to his swimming in the knotted hamper he bore; or whether it was some latent deceitfulness and malice in him: whichever was true, the White Whale's way now began to abate, as it seemed, from the boat so rapidly nearing him once more; though indeed the whale's last start had not been so long a one as before. And still as Ahab glided over the waves the unpitying sharks accompanied him; and so pertinaciously stuck to the boat; and so continually bit at the plying oars, that the blades became jagged and crunched, and left small splinters in the sea, at almost every dip.

"Heed them not! those teeth but give new rowlocks to your oars.¡ Pull on! 'tis the better rest, the shark's jaw than the yielding;water."

"But ;at every bite, Sif, the thin blades grow smaller and smaller!"

'TheYi.will last long enough! pull on !-But who can tell" .,..--'he muttered-"whether these sharks swim to feast on the whale or on Ahab?~But pull on! Aye, all alive, now-we near him. The h~lm! take the helm; let me pass,"-and so saying, two of the oarsmen helped him forward to the bows of the still flying boat.

At length as the craft was cast to one side, and ran ranging along with the White Whale's flank, he seemedstrangely oblivious

of its advance-as the whale sometimes will-and Ahab was fairly within the smoky mountain mist, which, thrown off from the whale's spout, curled round his great, Monadnock hump; he was even thus close to him; when, with body arched back, and both arms lengthwise high-lifted to the poise, he darted his fierce iron, and his far fiercer curse into the hated whale. As both steel and curse sank to the socket, as if sucked into a morass, Moby Dick sideways writhed; spasmodically rolled his nigh flank against the bow, and, without staving a hole in it, so suddenly canted the boat over, that had it not been for the elevated part of the gunwale to which he then clung, Ahab would once more have been tossed into the sea. As it was, three of the oarsmen-who foreknew not the precise instant of the dart, and were therefore unprepared for its effects-these were flung out; but so fell, that, in an instant two of them clutched the gunwale again, and rising to its level on a combing wave, hurled themselvesbodily inboard again; the third man helplessly dropping astern, but still afloat and swimming.

Almost simultaneously, with a mighty volition of un¡ graduated, instantaneous swiftness, the White Whale darted through the weltering sea. But when Ahab cried out to the steersman to take new turns with the line, and hold it so; and commanded the crew to turn round on their seats, and tow the boat up to the mark; the moment the treacherous line felt that double strain and tug, it snapped in the empty air!

"What breaks in me? Some sinew cracks!-'tis whole again; oars! oars! Burst in upon him!"

Hearing the tremendous rush of the sea-crashing boat, the whale wheeled round to present his blank forehead at bay; but in that evolution, catching sight of the nearing black hull of the ship; seemingly seeing in it the source of all his persecutions; bethinking it-it may be-a larger and nobler foe; of a sudden, he bore down upon its advancing prow, smiting his jaws amid fiery showers of foam.

Ahab staggered; his hand smote his forehead. "I grow blind; hands! stretch out before me that 1 may yet grope my way.

Is't night?"

"The whale! The ship!" cried the cringing oarsmen.

"Oars! oars! Slope downwards to thy depths, 0 sea, that ere it be for ever too late, Ahab may slide this last, last time upon his mark! 1 see: the ship! the ship! Dash on, my men!

Will ye not save my ship?"

But as the oarsmen violently forced their boat through the sledge-hammering seas, the before whale-smitten bow-ends of two ¡planksbuist through, and in an instant almost, the temporarily disabled boat lay nearly level with the waves; its halfwading, ;splalsJilingcrew,trying hard to stop the gap and bale out the pouring water.

Meahtime, for that one beholding instant, Tashtego's masthead hammer remained suspended in his hand; and the red flag,

Lashed round and round to the whale was seen the halftorn body of the Parsee.

half-wrapping him as with a plaid, then streamed itself straight out from him, as his own forward-flowing heart; while Starbuck and Stubb, standing upon the bowsprit beneath, caught sight of the down-coming monster just as soon as he.

"The whale, the whale! Up helm, up helm! Oh, all ye sweet powers of air, now hug me close! Let not Starbuck die, if die he must, in a woman's fainting fit. Up helm, I say-ye fools, the jaw! the jaw! Is this the end of all my bursting prayers? all my life-long fidelities? Oh, Ahab, Ahab, 10, thy work....

"Stand not by me, but stand under me, whoever you are that will now help Stubb; for Stubb, too, sticks here. I grin at thee, thou grinning whale! Who ever helped Stubb, or kept Stubb awake, but Stubb's own unwinking eye? And now poor Stubb goes to bed upon a mattress that is all too .soft; would it were stuffed with brushwood! I grin ~t thee, thou grinning whale! ...

Why fly ye not, 0 Ahab! For me, off shoes and jacket to it; let Stubb die in his drawers! A most mouldy and over salted death, though;-cherries! cherries! cherries! Oh, Flask, for one red cherry ere we die!"

"Cherries? I only wish that we were where they grow. Oh, Stubb, I hope my poor mother's drawn my part-pay ere this; if not, few coppers will nowcome to her, for the voyage is up."

From the ship's bows, nearly all the seamen now hung inactive; hammers, bits of plank, lances, and harpoons, mechanically retained in their hands, just as they had darted from their various employments; all their enchanted eyes intent upon the whale, which from side to side strangely vibrating his predestinating head, sent a broad band of overspreading semicircular foam before him as he rushed. Retribution, swift vengeance, eternal malice were in his whole aspect, and spite of all that mortal man could do, the solid white buttress of his forehead smote the ship's starboard bow, till men and timbers reeled.

Some fell flat upon their faces. Like dislodged trucks, the heads of the harpooneers aloft shook on their bull-like necks. Through the breach, they heard the waters pour, as mountain torrents down a flume.

"The ship! The hearse!-the second hearse!" cried Ahab from the boat; "its wood could only be American!"

Diving beneath the settling ship, the whale ran quivering along its keel; but turning under water, swiftly shot to the surface again, far off the other bow, but within a few yards of Ahab's boat, where, for a time, he lay quiescent.

"I turn my body from the sun. What ho, Tashtego! let me hear thy hammer. Oh! ye three unsurrendered spires of mine; thou uncracked keel; and only god-bullied hull; thou firm deck, and haughty helm, and Pole-pointed prow,-death-glorious ship! must ye then perish, and without me? Am I cut off from the last fond pride of meanest shipwrecked captains? Oh, lonely death on lonely life!-Oh, now I feel my topmost greatness lies in my topmost grief. Ho, ho! from all your furthest bounds, pour ye

now in, ye bold billows of my whole foregone life, and top this one piled comber of my death! Towards thee I roll, thou alldestroying but unconquering whale; to the last I grapple with thee; from hell's heart I stab at thee; for hate's sake I spit my last breath at thee. Sink all coffins and all hearses to one common pool! and since neither can be mine, let me then tow to pieces, while still chasing thee, though tied to thee, thou dammed whale!

Thus, I give up the spear!"

The harpoon was darted; the stricken whale flew forward; with igniting velocity the line ran through the groove;-ran foul.

Ahab stooped to clear it; he did clear it; but the flying turn caught him round the neck, and voicelesslyas Turkish mutes bowstring their victim, he was shot out of the boat, ere the crew knew he was gone. Next instant, the heavy eye-splice in the rope's final end flew out of the stark-empty tub, knocked down an oarsman, and smiting the sea, disappeared in its depths.

For an instant, the tranced boat's crew stood still; then turned. "The ship? Great God, where is the ship?" Soon they through dim, bewildering mediums saw her sidelong fading phantom, as in the gaseous Fata Morgana; only the uppermost masts out of water; while fixed by infatuation, or fidelity, or fate, to their once lofty perches, the pagan harpooneers still maintained their sinking look-outs on the sea. And now, concentric circles seized the lone boat itself, and all its crew, and each floating oar, and every lance-pole, and spinning, animate and inanimate, all round and round in one vortex, carried the smallest chip of the Pequod out of sight.

But as the last whelmings intermixingly poured themselves over the sunken head of the Red Indian at the main-mast, leaving a few inches of the erect spar yet visible, together with long streaming yards of the flag, which calmly undulated, with ironical coincidings, over the destroying billows they almost touched;at that instant, a red arm and a hammer hovered backwardly uplifted in the open air, in the act of nailing the flag faster and yet faster to the subsiding spar. A sky-hawk that tauntingly had followed the main-truck downwards from its natural home among the stars, pecking at the flag, and incommoding Tashtego there; this bird now chanced to intercept its broad fluttering wing between the hammer and the wood; and simultaneously feeling that etherial thrill, the submerged savage beneath, in his death-gasp, kept his hammer frozen there; and so the bird of heaven, with archangelic shrieks, and his imperial beak thrust upwards, and his whole captive form folded in the flag of Ahab, went down with his ship, which, like Satan, would not sink to hell till she had dragged a living part of heaven along with her, and helmeted herself with it.

Now small fowls flew screaming over the yet yawning gulf; a sullen white surf beat against its steep sides; then all collapsed, and the great shroud of the sea rolled on as it rolled five thousand years ago. â&#x20AC;˘