SPAN: January 1966

SPAN

OF EVENTS many paths to world understanding, which need not depend solely on agreements between nations or on the success of international conferences. On a less conspicuous level, there are hundreds of private voluntary organizations which work in obtrusively towards the same goal. One of these is the People-toPeople Programme in the United States which recently sponsored a photographic . contest among college students for the best pictures showing international friendship and co-operation at American universities.

More than 100 students submitted entries, three of which are reproduced here. Subjects ranged from organized receptions to moments of shared interest between students of different nationalities. Whatever the subject, all pictures aptly illustrated President Woodrow Wilson's well-known aphorism: "Comprehension must be the soil in which grow all the fruits of friendship."

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HERE ARE

First prize was won by picture, below, of u.s. students at University of Washington entertaining members of Japanese Mandolin Society.

Unusual feature of 1965 parade was NCC cadets in uniforms of Tippu Sultan's day .

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EVERYONE LOVES A PARADE The universal appeal of parades is underlined each January when India and the United States hold mammoth marches-the Republic Day parade in New Delhi and the Tournament of Roses parade in Pasadena, California. Though not identical in scope or spirit, the two parades are enjoyed by hundreds of thousands in each country and both testify to man's innate love of pomp and pageantry.

Right, huge outdoor stadium where Rose Bowl football game is played.

President Eisenhower, below, was Grand Marshal of Tournament parade.

More than 10,000 people from all parts of the country now participate in the Republic Day parade.

HERE IS something about a parade that reduces all men to the level of six-yearolds. In the excitement that is generated, weary and cynical adults capture once again the carefree days of childhood and its boundless capacity for wonder and delight. And this is true in all parts of the world-everyone, everywhere loves a parade.

Looked at dispassionately, a parade arouses sentiments out of all proportion to the actual event. After all, it is just a long processionwith all the trimmings. But perhaps it answers some deep, universal desire in man for pomp and pageantry. Perhaps the sight of people marching shoulder to shoulder is a fleeting reminder of the essential brotherhood of man.

In January each year, mammoth parades are held both in India and the United States.

The Republic Day parade in New Delhi is a glorious river of colour that flows from the Central Secretariat to the Red Fort. In the United States, a glittering floral parade is held each New Year's Day in Pasadena, California, as a prelude to the Rose Bowl football game. This unique blend of sport and spectacle is celebrated in Pasadena as the "Tournament of Roses."

The Indian and American observances are similar in some respects, different in others.

Republic Day is of nation-wide importance, commemorating as it does India's adoption of her Constitution in 1950. On the other hand, Pasadena's Tournament of Roses has only incidental patriotic significance. The most important common feature of the two parades is that they are enjoyed by hundreds of thousands of people in each country.

For days before the big event, there is a constant stream of people towards New Delhi and Pasadena. Visitors from outside the cities adjust business trips and social visits to coincide with the parade; and within the cities, homes are deluged with guests from all parts of the country. In Pasadena, by midnight on New Year's Eve, cars and station wagons are already unloading families equipped with cots and sleeping bags to spend the night along the parade's line of march. In New Delhi also, cartloads of rural folk from surrounding villages camp on the lawns along Rajpath all night, braving the bitter January cold for a ringside view of the parade. In both India and the U.S., the parades keep thousands in other parts of the country glued to radio and TV sets.

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When the great day dawns, excitement ripples along the entire route of the parade -roughly eight kilometres in both cases.

The Tournament of Roses march is watched by a million and a half persons; spectators at the Republic Day parade number more than two million. And pervading these vast seas of humanity is a spirit of infectious gaiety.

Though the Tournament parade is sixty years older than Republic Day-one started in 1890, the other in 195Q-both have grown from relatively small, restricted celebrations to mammoth spectacles. When the Pasadenans first began their annual observance, it was a kind of small village affair; they decorated their horses and carriages with roses, drove them through the town's unpaved streets, and ended the day with games, chariot races, and displays of horsemanship.

The first Indian Republic Day march was also comparatively small, with 3,000 men from the armed services and the police parading in the National Stadium. In contrast, more than 10,000 people now participate in the parade which winds its way through the streets of Delhi to the historic battlements of the Red Fort.

Both parades have several common features: prancing horses, bands playing martial music, and a succession of decorated floats.

In the Pasadena parade, the floats may not use any artificial decorations, only flowers and other flora in ingenious designs. Recent years have seen Antony and Cleopatra's barge rowed by sturdy men whose oars dripped blossoms instead of water; a wagon from the days of the pioneering West; a twelve-metrelong dragon; Greek temples and animals and fairy tale scenes; even the famous Chicago fire of 1871, with huge puffs of smoke made of flowers.

One of the all-time Pasadena masterpieces was "Swan Lake" -an interpretation of the Tchaikovsky ballet-which used 300,000 flowers and had a live ballerina pirouetting around a nine-metre-Iong swan of white chrysanthemums. Behind the swan, on a fanciful throne of orchids, rode the Rose Queen, chosen as usual from the students at Pasadena City College.

The Indian Republic Day floats have also on occasion been decorated with flowers, though there is no injunction that ornamentation be thus limited. In last year's parade, for example, the Jammu and Kashmir float

represented the Blossom Fair that is held each year at Badamwari. below the Hari Parbat in Srinagar. And the Ministry of Works and Housing entered a flower tableau depicting Lord Krishna and Arjuna in a chariot on the battlefield of Kurukshetra.

Most States of the Indian Union and some Indian Territories and Ministries each have a float representing them in the Republic Day parade. The subjects they depict vary widely: from giant hydroelectric schemes and public development works, to major industries or handicrafts, right down to simple village scenes or the representation of a local festival.

Last year's Goa float consisted largely of one huge fish, symbolizing the importance of fishing in the Territory's economy.

A significant difference between the New Delhi and Pasadena processions is the military aspect of the Republic Day parade.

Immediately after the President's carriage, flanked by his picturesque mounted bodyguards, come the horse cavalry and the colourful Ganga Jaisalmer Risala (Camel Corps), a nostalgic reminder of the days before mechanization. Following this is a mechanized column of tanks, tank transporters, various types of mortars and guns and an array of other modern defensive weapons. Next come detachments from the Army, Navy and Air Force, distinguished one from the other by the variety and splendour of their uniforms.

The civilian contingents represent such diverse groups as Girl Guides and Boy Scouts, defence installation employees, school-children, and units of the Delhi Fire Brigade.

One of the most thrilling moments of the parade is the Fly Past, when planes of the Indian Air Force streak over the saluting base where the President, Prime Minister and other dignitaries are assembled to view the march.

An unusual feature of last year's parade was a pageant of Indian battle dress, in which 250 NCC cadets modelled army uniforms dating from the 3rd century B.C.-the Maurya-Sunga, Gupta, Rajput and Mughal periods, Maratha warriors and Tippu Sultan's Tiger Grenadiers, and South Indian soldiers of the East India Company.

In recent years, a folk dance festival and the colourful Beating the Retreat ceremony have become integral parts of Republic Day celebrations in the capital. The latter features the participation of 6VO massed bands of the Army, Navy and Air Force in a ceremony CONTINUED

The parade's splendour and solemnity make it an unforgettable experience.

Along majestic vista of Rajpath, parade marches on in an impressive line of splendour and pageantry.

Novelty of theme is rivalled by ingenuity of execution in parade's decorated floats.

In the wonder and delight generated by parades, man may rediscover the simple joys of living.

that had its origins in mediaeval times, when an evening call was sounded to summon soldiers to the camp or fort at night.

The Republic Day parade is organized by the Ministry of Defence which handles the elaborate arrangements with military precision and orderliness. The Tournament of Roses, on the other hand, is completely managed by community volunteers, each of whom pays from $5 to $10 a year to become a member of the Tournament Association. As service and experience are the Association's only criteria, it often happens that bank presidents and city officials are supervised by mechanics and shopkeepers.

The parade, actually, is just one part of the Association's work; equally important

is the big football game. (American football is akin to the English game of rugby and is different from the football that is played in India.) As soon as the parade is ended, there is a bumper-to-bumper line of cars heading for the Arroyo Secco, a wide canyon where, surrounded by 10,000 rose bushes, lies the concrete stadium called the Rose Bowl.

The Rose Bowl was the first of the wellknown "Bowl" football games, in which regional college championship teams meet in a test of high-calibre playing. Today there is a Rice Bowl, an Orange Bowl, a Sugar Bowl, even an Alligator Bowl-but nbne have the pre-game festivities of the Rose Bowl.

Some 100,000 spectators watch the Rose Bowl match in the gigantic stadium, which is

a happy medley of college pennants fluttering in the wind, the exchange of gay banter, and the noise of hot dog and coffee stands where hungry sports fans refresh themselves. In the history of the tournament, there have been many upsets and surprise victories, but everything is taken in the spirit of good sportsmanship appropriate to such an occasion. As the evening shadows lengthen, 50,000 cars begin to crowd the roads out of the Arroyo Secco--and another great Rose Bowl game is over.

In a world facing the threat of nuclear war and beset with the relentless pressures of modem life, perhaps it is right that men should seek relief from these pressures in football garnes, parades and folk dance festivals and thus discover anew the simple joys of living. END

The entry into Latin America of a widely-known U.S. retail firm has helped start a "Consumers

Revolution"-a

whole range of

better quality goods available to more people at lower prices.

THE CUSTOMER IS KING N MEXICOCITY,Caracas, Rio de Janeiro, and other Latin American . cities one is struck by the surprising number of people who are well-dressed and live in comfortable homes, in a part of the world generally regarded as "underdeveloped" and in "a revolutionary ferment." That Latin America still has a long way to go in economic development there is no doubt, and the revolutionary ferment is also very real, but what has escaped attention is the progressive improvement in the lives of millions of Latin Americans thanks to what might be called the Consumers Revolution.

The Consumers Revolution in Latin America, which started after World War II and is still gathering momentum, has not attracted headlines because it is not bloody. But it is nonetheless significant.

What it amounts to is this: Never in the history of the vast continent stretching from the Rio Grande to Tierra del Fuego have more consumer goods been available to more people-and in greater variety, better quality and more cheaply-than today. To put it another way, for the first time great numbers of Latins are able to obtain and enjoy the fruits of modern industry and technology, from refrigerators to nylon dresses, from babies' travel diapers to plastic dishware, because of a sweeping revolution that is taking place in Latin America's consumer goods market.

Who or what started the Consumers Revolution in Latin America?

Actually, no single force or country. Following World War II there was a pent-up demand in the area for products of all kinds, and only the right catalyst was needed to get the revolution started. That catalyst appeared, logically enough, in the form of the great retail firm that had done so much to nurture a similar revolution in its own country: Sears, Roebuck & Co. of Chicago, Illinois. It was Sears' entry into Latin America which sparked the Consumers Revolution there.

Sears did not of course go into Latin America with the intention of launching a consumers or any other kind of revolution. It went there, simply, like all business enterprises, because it saw an opportunity to do good business and make a good profit. But in doing both it found that its progressive merchandising policies, long taken for granted in the United States, collided with and had the effect of uprooting the outmoded ways of buying and selling in Latin Americathey were, in short, revolutionary by Latin standards.

In the United States, the poorest customer who enters a retail store is treated like a king. The universal retailer's motto is: "The customer is always right." But in Latin America all too many stores followed a pattern which fortunately is disappearing under the onslaught of the Consumers Revolution. In such a store, a poor customer found himself in a forbidding atmosphere. Merchandise would be kept in locked cases and shown only reluctantly. Prices were rarely as stated in the price lists. Quality was not guaranteed. Sales people were often disdainful. The customer was made to feel at the store's mercy, as indeed he often was. If the goods he bought were unsatisfactory that was his loss. In Sears' stores all that was changed. One might say that the basic accomplishment of the Consumers Revolution Sears started was to convert the Latin American consumer from pariah to king.

Like most revolutions, this one has its own philosophy. As stated by Sears' Vice President for International Operations, John F.

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Gallagher, who is responsible for Latin America, it is this: "We consider that we have five major responsibilities: to our customers, to our employees, to the companies which provide us with merchandise or services, to the community and country in which we are doing business, and to our shareholders."

Note that responsibility to the consumer comes first. Quite logically, then, Sears began by introducing such consumer-oriented slogans as, "Satisfaction Guaranteed or Your Money Back" and "We Service What We Sell." Unheard-of in Latin America, such assurances tempted the shopper away from stores too narrow-minded to care about satisfying him, and led him to Sears.

But Sears went beyond that. Continues Gallagher: "In addition, we believe that we have a responsibility to our customers to serve them courteously, in well-lighted, comfortable stores where they have the opporturlity to inspect the merchandise before they buy, and where they have the option to purchase for cash or on credit."

The simple matter of openly displaying goods, so that they could be touched and examined by the prospective purchaser, was one of the most radical innovations Sears brought to Latin America. People could feel what they were buying. They could see that they were not being hoodwinked. Competitors were convinced that the display of merchandise on open shelves and counters would tempt people to steal, and that Sears would have to give up the idea; but pilfering was negligible, no greater than in Sears' U.S. stores, and the open-display policy remains in force-indeed, it is emulated now by many competitors.

Another startling innovation was fixed prices. In the old days, the practice in many Latin American stores was to bargain with the salesman until he conceded a "discount" of, say, five per cent or CONTINUED This store in Mexico City is typical of the beautiful buildings that house Sears, Roebuck stores in nine Latin American countries.

Sears has broadened the economic base of Latin American countries by stimulating local production.

ten per cent, which really was no discount since the goods were marked up to allow for bargaining. That is still the way much business is done.

But the price Sears marked on the item was final-no bargaining; if the customer thought it too high, he could walk away and the salesman would not tug at his sleeve and offer him a "discount." In time, the customer realized that the one-price policy for everybody spelled reliability and dependability, and benefited him in the end.

At the same time, Sears marked on the item, besides the exact price, the exact size, quality and kind of material of which it was made.

Ifa dress was marked, "Pure nylon," it was made of pure nylon and not part-nylon and part-something else; if the ticket said, "Size 14," it was size 14 and not 13t. Such rigorously standardized merchandising had been rare in Latin America before Sears. It meant that the customer could be absolutely certain of what he was buying.

Sears' revolutionary selling ideas caught on from the day the company opened its first full-line store in Latin America-February 27, 1947, in Mexico City-and its entrance into a new district, city or country has always been attended by throngs of eager purchasers, people attracted by the knowledge that at Sears the consumer is king. At the Mexico inauguration police could not hold back the crowds. Similar scenes have been repeated in Brazil, Venezuela, Colombia, Peru and other Latin countries where Sears has opened up new stores.

But instant consumer acceptance did not spell instant success, by any means. Before the end of its first year in Mexico, Sears ran into serious trouble when the Mexican Government, to halt a drain on its foreign exchange, drastically curtailed importations of consumer goods. That threatened to reduce Sears' inventory-made up almost entirely of American imports-to virtually nothing. What would happen to its promising new Mexican enterprise? The Consumers Revolution, hardly begun, seemed stopped in its tracks. Chicago was asked for guidance and promptly shot back the order: "Develop local sources."

"What local sources?" bewildered Sears-Mexico officials asked themselves. Industries that mass-produced consumer goods were almost non-existent in Mexico. Traditionally, goods were made in limited quantities by small-scale manufacturing units often confined to a single family working at home. Desperate, Sears approached these "cottage industries" and promised to take their full output if they expanded production to meet Sears' requirements; in many cases, it offered also to finance their expansion and lend them technical assistance supplied by the Chicago home office. The small Mexican producers went along, and, bit by bit, they learned how to manufacture in quantity and according to Sears' specifications. Today, eighteen years later, Sears-Mexico purchases ninety-nine per cent of its merchandise-representing 50,000 different items-from more than 3,000 Mexican suppliers it has put into business. And Mexico possesses a modern, and still growing, consumer goods industry.

The problems of finding and developing local sources of supply, wherever Sears went in Latin America, were many and discouraging.

In Peru, for example, where Sears opened its first store in 1955 after the most meticulous survey of economic and political conditions, the company tried to find a Peruvian firm to make innerspring mattresses for it, to avoid importing them. The company discovered that those made locally were stuffed with straw. Instead of giving up, Sears kept its buyers scouring Lima, the capital, for someone who could and would make what it wanted, and they had luck; they found a man named Salvador Salinas who used to manufacture mattresses for Sears in Havana. The company promptly set Salinas up in business, and within six months he was supplying Sears-Peru with all the mattresses it needed.

Sears has not only encouraged local production offormer imported items. It has also introduced products wholly new to Latin America and popularized others that were little known.

For years Brazilian youngsters used to dress in starched white

suits in summer and neat blue serge in winter, making for discomfort during both seasons. Labourers would go to work wearing discarded dress trousers, which were both impractical and incongruous. After studying the situation, Sears decided it would be a good idea to introduce blue jeans, so popular in the United States. But when it gave a supplier a large initial order for jeans, he asked in puzzlement, "Didn't you make a mistake about the quantities? Brazilians will never accept blue jeans." That was fifteen years ago. Today, blue jeans are a hit everywhere in Brazil.

In Venezuela, you walk into Sears' attractive main store in downtown Caracas, the capital, and you see a great variety of items it has made popular in that country: Formica kitchen equipment, mahogany phonograph cabinets, innerspring mattresses, stoves, refrigerators.

Nor does Sears encourage local production only of goods that are essentially American or European. Wherever it can, it stimulates the manufacture of purely indigenous products. In Colombia, for example, it joined the Peace Corps and the United States Agency for International Development to revive among the Red Indian tribes of the country the making of such native products as the practical ruana-a woollen cape with a hole in the middle for the head, worn as a covering by men and women alike-and a wide variety of ceramic, wood, and glass handicrafts. The revival programme has the support of the Colombian Government and has turned out to be both a new source of employment for the Red Indians as well as a growing new export for the country.

After developing a source of supply for itself, Sears does not monopolize it. On the contrary, the company deliberately encourages the source to sell its products to others, including competitors. Thus Salinas, the Peruvian mattress maker, was actively encouraged by Sears to expand elsewhere, and today has so many other buyers that the company accounts for only half his output. Like virtually all of Sears' policies, this one is motivated by practical considerations. It enables Sears to change or drop a given line if necessary without hurting the producer, and it enables the latter to keep all his workers employed, to maintain a steady level of production, and to reduce unit costs-all of which, in the end, reduces or eliminates Sears' financial responsibility for him and gives the company a lower-priced product.

The result of the Sears policy of developing local sources of supply is that, in the nine Latin countries where it operates, there is now a flourishing consumer goods industry. In some cases, a whole city has profited. The statement of a Brazilian newspaper editor, Roberto M. Santini, that "the presence of Sears has played an extremely important role in the development of the city of Santos"Brazil's famous coffee port-holds for other Latin cities.

To the Latin American as worker, the Consumers Revolution has given employment, new skills, good wages and, in many cases, security; Take the example of Sears-Peru. Its two stores, both in Lima, employ 750 persons, of whom only seven are non-Peruvians. In addition, the company's more than 500 Peruvian suppliers (all of whom it has developed since entering the country in 1955) employ another 20,000 nationals. Add to those figures again the number of workers: impossible to calculate, who are employed in other industriessuch as those producing raw materials-which supply Sears' suppliers, and it is clear that we are talking of a chain-reaction that involves innumerable workers not directly connected with Sears.

In its sixty-seven Latin American stores Sears employs a grand total of 10,072 persons, all but sixty-four of whom are Latins. Using the Peruvian yardstick, it would not be unreasonable to calculate that Sears, directly and indirectly, is responsible for the employment of hundreds of thousands of Latin Americans. We are speaking, that is, of the employment stimulated by Sears alone. If we were to take into consideration the myriad retail establishments and suppliers which have come into being, or have expanded, thanks to the Sears-initiated Consumers Revolution, we would have to conclude that probably millions of Latin workers today have employment they did not have before.

The Latin American worker has also acquired many new skills.

Sears trained from scratch persons who had never before had the slightest experience in retailing, teaching them everything from how to wrap a package correctly to such complex jobs as how to keep an inventory of tens of thousands of different items. In many cases, the company transported literally planeloads of promising Latin employees to the United States to learn first-hand, from experts, everything about the fine art of modern retailing. Sears' competitors in Latin America, to keep pace with the American company, have given their employees similarly thorough training, adding immeasurably to the pool of skills in their respective countries.

Following a policy of "promotion from within," Sears deliberately seeks out and trains promising Latin employees for the highest positions. As a consequence of that policy, in operation since Sears first set foot in Latin America, its operations there are almost entirely in the hands of Latin Americans, not Americans. Sears-Brazil is a good example of that: of its 2,165 employees, only eight are Americans; and of its eleven store and warehouse managers-the highest category below the rank of company president-nine were born in Brazil.

The other two, though Americans, are married to Brazilians and have children born in the country.

What recently happened to Manuel Negron, in Venezuela, is an individual case of Sears' "promotion-from-within" policy in action.

A native Venezuelan, Negron rose up from the ranks to become manager of one of the smaller stores, at Maracay, a little city east of Caracas. When the manager of the third largest store in the country, at Barquisimeto, was tapped to supervise Sears' entrance into Spain last year, Negron was moved into his job. He now has the responsibility for running a store that does three times the business of his old one, and for overseeing 130 employees.

.It isn't just a matter of glory, of pride, for Negron and other ambitious Latin Americans to find themselves in positions of great responsibility and prestige. Increased income is a welcome result, too.

Negron has an income of somewhere between $16,000 and $17,000 annually-and is in Venezuela's top bracket. He has, besides, an equity worth about $22,000 in Sears-Venezuela's profit-sharing fund, company-sponsored life insurance, sick benefit (which guarantees him up to twenty-four weeks' pay if he is too ill to work) and accident insurance, and hospitalization.

Local employees on the lower levels receive commensurately good incomes and are eligible for all the fringe benefits mentioned in Negron's case, plus the equivalent of two months' paid vacation.

The same financial rewards, allowing for some local variation, are enjoyed by all Sears' Latin employees.

One of the most revolutionary ideas Sears has brought to Latin America is that of profit-sharing, which it pioneered in the United States as far back as 1916. All but a small minority of its Latin employees belong to profit-sharing funds set up by Sears in each country, in which they invest a fraction of their salaries and receive, in return, a proportionate amount of stock in the company. As profits increase, so does the value of the stock, making the employee an ever bigger partner in the company with his own vested interest in its progress.

Already, the employees who belong to the company's oldest profitsharing fund in Latin America, that of Sears-Mexico, own twenty per cent of the company's sixteen stores and eight other properties in the country, with a total equity amounting to sixty-two million pesos ($5 million). The youngest fund is that of Sears-Peru, which is only two years old; but already, ninety-eight per cent of its employees belong to it and own 2.5 per cent of the company. Sears' employees in Cuba owned 18.8 per cent of the Cuban company's seven stores CONTINUED SPAN

January 1966 11

before Castro confiscated them, in effect expropriating the employees themselves. Sears' Latin employees, in short, are not simple wageearners but a species of small capitalist. They may withdraw their money from the profit-sharing fund at any time if they wish to set themselves up in business, retire, build a home, or do anything else they choose with their profits.

Sears' Latin stores are so organized that their corporate structure "will permit maximum retention of profits for the purpose of reinvesting approximately fifty per cent of them in the country in which they are made." Sears, in other words, does not remit the bulk of its profits to the United States.

Quite the contrary has often happened: a Sears enterprise in Latin America may remit nothing home for years, reinvesting its profits in the country where it is operating until the company has reached a certain stage of development. Thus in Colombia, from the opening of the first store in Baranquilla in 1953 to the establishment of nine subsequent stores in eight other cities over a period of a decade, the company ploughed all of its profits into expansion. In addition, it financed suppliers, and at one point had S I million staked on them.

In another case, Venezuela, the cost of financing the remodelling of Sears' biggest store there, approximately 3 million, and of opening two new stores last year, came out of Sears-Venezuela's earnings. And it is the proud claim of Sears-Brazil's President, William O. Kelleher, that that company "has remitted an average of less than two per cent of its original investment per year."

Does this mean that Sears is an altruistic business enterprise not interested in reaping a profit? Of course not. When asked how the company's Latin American profits compared with those it earns in the United States, one high Sears' executive candidly answered, "Both before and after taxes, very much better." In 1963, Sears did more than 100 million worth of business in Latin America and earned $8 million on an investment of more than $34 million-a rather good return.

What it proves is that a company can be profitable while contributing to the progress of a country and its people, thus making the Consumers Revolution a mutually satisfactory relationship all around.

Sears' identification with the Latin American community goes beyond the purely economic sphere. It is company policy, states Vice President Gallagher, to encourage its executives "to assume positions of responsibility in local civic and business organizations," Brazilian-made washing machines are among the thousands of new items which Sears, Roebuck has helped bring into local production.

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and to involve the company as such in charitable and other community endeavours of benefit to the nation concerned. That policy is faithfully carried out wherever Sears is established in Latin America, and in country after country one finds its leaders-Americans and Latin Americans alike-active in a wide variety of community undertakings.

Sears-Brazil is typical. "A fixed percentage of its sales was established as the range within which donations would be made," explains President Kelleher. Out of that percentage, the Brazilian company makes a total of 250 donations annually to all sorts of worthy causes ranging from the Museum of Modern Art in Rio de Janeiro to the Association for Crippled Children in Sao Paulo. It also maintains sixteen scholarships to Brazilian universities besides contributing to the libraries of several, and supports a variety of sports and recreational activities.

As for the personal involvement of the executives themselves, it should suffice to cite the example of Warren S. Remensnyder, the Group Manager in Rio de Janeiro. In 1963, Remensnyder was awarded the Order of the Cruzeiro do Sui for his civic contributions by the then President Joao Goulart, who conferred Brazil's highest honour upon the American despite his own anti-capitalist and antiforeign bias. Before that, Remensnyder had been made an honorary citizen of Rio. He is married to a Brazilian and has a son born in Brazil, thus rounding out his integration into the country's life.

Sears-Central America is unique in riding two revolutionary horses simultaneously: the new Central American Common Market, which is fast destroying trade barriers in the area, as well as the Consumers Revolution. The company is helping promote free trade by purchasing goods from suppliers in one country, say Guatemala, and selling them in others, perhaps Costa Rica or El Salvador, without tariff. It is also encouraging the building up of regional industry, another goal of the five Central American countries; thus it now buys ninety-five per cent of its furniture from regional suppliers whereas a few years ago it was importing exactly that quantity from outside.

It would be misleading to portray Sears as the saviour of the great masses in Latin America. That is far from the case. For one thing, a majority of Latins are impoverished peasants who live largely outside the money economy and hence have nothing to spend at Sears' or anybody else's stores. Most urban workers have purchasing power which is still too low to enable many of them to take advantage of the Consumers Revolution.

That leaves the middle and upper classes and the top layer of the urban working classes, to whom Sears has been directing its main appeal and who are, consequently, the beneficiaries-so far-of the Consumers Revolution. But the middle classes in Latin America are by no means an affluent group, and in catering to them Sears has brought the Consumers Revolution to a class that was fundamentally underprivileged in terms of consumer advantages. The same thing applied, of course, to the better-off urban worker, and even, surprisingly, to those who could afford the most expensive imported merchandise but could not always obtain it.

The problem remains: how to bring the revolution to the resf of the population? The answer depends, first, upon the Latin American leadership and its ability to make the peasant masses part of the money economy through such programmes as the Alliance for Progress and the Central American Common Market. Once that is done, Sears can be relied upon to help bring them the consumers goods they need just as it did to the farmers of the United States two generations ago.

Meanwhile, as much as a quarter of Latin America's 225 million inhabitants, more than fifty million people, who formerly lacked most of the ordinary consumer products available to the average North American, now have them or can get them, thanks to the Consumers Revolution Sears began. And that number is increasing from year to year, thanks not only to Sears but to the countless Latin American retail establishments who guarantee that the revolution continues its dynamic growth. END

The boundless realm of a child's imagination. is peopled with a host of fanciful and mythical creatures.

Here are some outstanding examples of the artist's attempt to bring these images to life.

THE BEST OF CURRENT STORYBOOK ART REATURES FANCIFUL and familiar cavort across the pages of children's books published in America. Shown here is a .selection of the best and brightest work, picked for The New York Times by a panel of c~itics who reviewed an entire year's output of juvenile literature. Although the illustrations differ widely in subject matter and technique, each reveals the artist's true delight in his work and his unique talent for understanding and creating forms that will appeal to a child. Dragons and lobsters, frall;tic little men and wise old owls-all have been rendered with care and integrity, proclaiming the artist's belief that children, too, respond to sophistication and good taste in art. Not surprisingly, these illustrated books are also popular with parents and catch the eye of many as they scan crowded bookshelves in search of a special gift. The stories themselves are packed with suspense and discovery, relating adventure which leaves the small readers breathless at the end of every page. In some cases the artist has harmonized his talent with that of the writer's. In other instances, the artist has also authored the book, telling his tale in words and in the colourful language of art.

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One result of better-illustrated books for children is that today's youngsters respond to good taste and sophistication in art.

Once upon a time there was a blacksmith who loved wrought iron more thari anything else in the world.

In creating

fOflT!S

that will appeal

to a child, the artist uses a wide variety of themes and techniques.

-..~~"~~~ -I

THE AMERICAN VICE PRESIDENCY AND HUBERT HUMPHREY

Within two decades the office of the U.S. Vice President has grown from a position of obscurity to international importance. The writer traces the history of the office and has a close, intimate look at its present incumbent.

W

HEN HUBERTHUMPHREYwas sworn in as the 38th Vice President of the United States, he assumed a position in the American Government which has grown from obscurity to international importance within the short space of twenty years.

During this time the deaths of Presidents Roosevelt and Kennedy and the serious illnesses of President Eisenhower transformed the Vice Presidency from a high-sounding office with little responsibility, to one demanding strong and able men with enough experience in all aspects of government to step in and assume leadership at a moment's notice. At the same time, the responsibilities of the Presidency have grown enormously and, in the process, recent Vice Presidents have been given much more to do than to preside over the U.S. Senate and to stand by as constitutionally designated successors to the President in the event of a tragedy.

No Chief Executive has been more conscious of the crucial position of the Vice President than Lyndon Johnson who, as Vice President under the late John F. Kennedy, played an active role in domestic and foreign affairs before being propelled so suddenly into the Presidency. Under these circumstances, it is not surprising that Johnson's hand-picked choice for Vice President was Hubert Humphrey, a Senate leader with considerable experience in foreign affairs and a master craftsman in tlie intricate art of government. Although Vice President Humphrey can never become an "assistant president"-the Constitution holds the President strictly responsible for all top level decisions-he is frequently expected to act as the President's eyes and ears, and to serve as his personal representative on a great variety of occasions.

To the vast majority of Humphrey's predecessors, such influential participation in major decisions and activities would have been unthinkable. Many of them remained heirs apparent-and nothing more-throughout their entire terms of office. The Constitution gives the second officer of the executive branch little power and few responsibilities. It assigns to him only the duties of presiding over the Senate, casting the deciding vote if there is a tie, and opening the certificates containing the electoral votes from each State in a Presi- . dential election. The duty of presiding over the Senate does not take much time as it is the custom for the Vice President to turn the gavel over to the Senators themselves at routine sessions.

Actually, the founding fathers did not visualize the Vice Presidency as a nonentity. Originally, he was the second best man-that is, the candidate for President who ended up with the second largest number

of votes. Thus he was put forward in the election campaign as a man of prime presidential calibre, and the first few Vice Presidents were exactly that. John Adams was Vice President to the first President, George Washington, and Thomas Jefferson was "stand-by" for Adams when Adams succeeded Washington.

Adams left his mark. He cast tie-breaking votes in the Senate twenty-nine times in eight years-a record never since equalled; he was frequently consulted by Washington, and he met regularly with Washington's cabinet. As President, Adams often brought Jefferson into consultation, until strong personal differences developed between them.

The concept of the Vice Presidency underwent a drastic change in 1804, when the Constitution was amended to provide that votes should be cast in separate categories for the offices of President and Vice President. The change was made in order to prevent a recurrence of what happened in the Presidential election of 1800 in which each of the two leading candidates received the same number of electoral votes. Under the Constitution the House of Representatives was responsible for determining which man would be President and which would be Vice President, but it required thirty-eight ballots before one candidate (Jefferson) won a majority.

The 1804 amendment caused an immediate decline in the prestige of the Vice Presidency. During most of the nineteenth century, vice presidential candidates were selected for their ability to attract votes to the party "ticket" they shared with the Presidential nominee; if the ticket was elected, the President was inclined to let the Vice President fend for himself. The Vice Presidency held so little challenge for one distinguished occupant, John C. Calhoun, that he resigned from it in 1832 to take a seat in the Senate.

Despite the low esteem of the office, the new method of electing a Vice President proved to be well suited to the system of competing political parties that emerged in the first half of the nineteenth century.

Under the old method, a President who died in office could be succeeded by someone of entirely different political convictions, causing an abrupt reversal of government policies. It has now become customary for voters to select a Vice President from the same political party, whose views are close to those of the elected President. In most States, the voter pulls a single lever to record his vote for both candidates of the same party. Thus if a President dies or is incapacitated in office, his successor will be a person likely to continue the same broad policies.

The first Vice President to succeed to the Presidency through death was John Tyler, on April 4, 1841. His chief, William Henry Harrison, had lived for only one month after his inauguration. Tyler thus became the first of seven Presidents who inherited the office.

The Vice Presidency took on some glitter when the colourful, aggressive soldier-author-reformer-outdoorsman, Theodore Roosevelt, was inaugurated with President McKinley in 1901. Ironically, McKinley had been encouraged to choose Roosevelt by political rivals of Roosevelt in New York who hoped that diverting him to the vice presidential limbo would kill off his political future. But McKinley was assassinated in his first year in office, and Roosevelt was abruptly on the road to fame rather than oblivion.

Even so, the Vice Presidency after the turn of the century continued to be regarded as a dead end. President Woodrow Wilson said, "the CONTINUED SPAN

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President Franklin D. Roosevelt entrusted his Vice Presidents with many special mISSIons.

chief embarrassment in describing it is that in saying how little there is to say about it one has evidently said all there is to say." Some Presidents did invite their understudies to attend cabinet meetings, but some of the understudies felt like outsiders there. The plain fact was that most Presidents up until recent decades did not trust their Vice Presidents as intimately as they did their aides and advisers, and the Vice Presidents sensed this.

Beginning in 1933-two years after Throttlebottom made his debut on the New York stage-Vice Presidents were given the chance to restore the office to its long-lost importance. During his twelve years as President (1933-45), Franklin D. Roosevelt not only began to bring his Vice Presidents into White House conferences but assigned them to a variety of special missions.

Roosevelt capitalized on the Vice President's special relationship to Congress as presiding officerof the Senate. He directed Vice President John N. Garner, to open liaison channels between Congressional leaders and the White House, and to try and persuade recalcitrant Congressmen to support bills Roosevelt wanted enacted. As the former well-liked Speaker of the House of Representatives, Garner commanded great respect there. Since Garner's time it has been the rule rather than the exception to select an experienced member of Congress to run for Vice President.

Henry A. Wallace, Roosevelt's next Vice President, was the first to become an administrator. Wallace was chairman of two emergency boards set up during World War II. He also was the first Vice President to be sent abroad by the President on goodwill trips.

Harry S. Truman, Roosevelt's third Vice President, sat in on cabinet meetings during his brief three months in the job before Roosevelt died in April 1945.

Truman took steps to make his Vice President, Alben Barkley, the best-informed Presidential stand-by-up to then-in American history. At Truman's request, Congress in 1949gave the Vice President a new top-level duty-serving as a member of the National Security Council, the group which advises the President on domestic, foreign and military policies relating to the national security.

Barkley, a well-loved former majority leader of the Senate, achievedeven wider fame in his new role through speeches and public appearances. It was' during Barkley's term, in 1951, that Congress for the first time granted the Vice President the same protection

by Secret Service agents that it gives the President. Barkley, who loved a joke, recalled a wry observation by Garner: "Nobody would be crazy enough to shoot the Vice President."

The steadily expanding world of the Vice President was a reflection of the awesome responsibilities piling in on the American President towards the end of World War II. President Eisenhower suffered three illnesses and thus had an additional reason for bringing his Vice President, Richard Nixon, into the highest councils as a working official.At a news conference in 1955, Eisenhower said: "I personally believe the Vice President should never be a nonentity. I believe he should be used ... and I think ours has been."

Nixon not only met regularly with the cabinet and the National Security Council, he also presided over both in the absence of the President. (Under Truman, the Secretary of State had presided in the absence of the President.) Nixon saw himself as a "troubleshooter" who interpreted the mood of Congress to his chief, and his chief's views to Congress. Nixon also made dramatic goodwill tours to the Soviet Union, the Middle East, the Far East and Latin America.

As soon as he was elected, President Kennedy made it clearperhaps with prescience-that he wanted Vice President Johnson to keep in close touch with major day-to-day discussions and decisions.

Kennedy added still another responsibility to the vice presidential category-the chairmanship of the President's council on space and aeronautics. Like Nixon, Johnson also headed the President's special committee to persuade businessmen to hire persons without regard to their race, colour or religion.

When Kennedy was killed, Johnson was left without a Vice President of his own until the next national election. If he too had met with tragedy, Johnson would have been succeeded by the Speaker of the House of Representatives (who could have been succeeded, had he died in Presidential office, by the President Pro Tempore of the Senate, a post which normally goes to the senior Senator in the majority party).

Now that the office of Vice President has once again been filled by national election, President Johnson has made it clear that he wants the new Vice President, Hubert Humphrey, to take a much more active part in the inner workings of Government than anyone has done before. Even before Humphrey was sworn into his new post last January, his chief asked him to "co-ordinate and guide" the Government's civil rights programmes in the new Administration and to "take a leading role in the war on poverty." The President directed Humphrey to make certain that the Government's programme became a "well co-ordinated, concentrated attack on poverty throughout the country."

Not only does Humphrey participate in all cabinet and National Security Council meetings, but he also sits in on all conferences on the makeup of the multi-billion dollar Federal budget. The Vice President, in addition, from time to time directs a number of Government programmes not connected with the regular Government departments. Still a third responsibility for Johnson's understudy is the assumption of much of the ceremonial burden which has always rested on the shoulders of the President alone.

Besides all this, the President is counting on his new Vice President to be an articulate spokesman for his programme on Capitol Hill and to get things done there. It is in this area of Congressional relations that Vice President Humphrey is unusually well-qualified, both by general background and by specific legislative experience. His life from its early years, and his spectacular political career, seem to have prepared him with remarkable thoroughness for great political responsibilities.

Hubert Horatio Humphrey, Jr., was born on May 27, 1911, in Wallace, South Dakota, in an apartment over his father's drug store.

As he grew up he helped wait on his father's customers and eventually earned a pharmacist's degree. He recalls that his father's library was "filled with books that told the truth about human equality."

And he credits his' father's influence for his dedication to the cause of civil rights. "My father was intolerant of intolerance," he says.

"He explained to me as a boy the evils of bigotry. We were brought up to have respect for different religions and different races, even though we lived in a very parochial community, a little rural town."

When the depression hit South Dakota hard in the 1930's,druggist Humphrey sent word to his customers with unpaid bills that the debts were all cancelled and to forget about them. Some ten years later, when these customers, began to have money in their pockets, they came to Humphrey's store and insisted on paying the old debts which he had cancelled. The incident deepened the younger Humphrey's faith in the goodness of ordinary people.

From his father, the Vice President also inherited a consuming interest in Government, from the top levels down to the local communities. The senior Humphrey served briefly as town mayor and State legislator. He read such philosophers as Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Paine, and liked to quote them. Today his son believes he first acquired a passion for political ideas and philosophy, and a growing ambition for political leadership, from this early exposure CONTINUED SPAN

January 1966 19

Anxious to solve every problem, Humphrey has been dubbed "vice president of many causes."

to political thought and writings.

After earning a bachelor of arts degree, with high honours, at the University of Minnesota, Hwnphrey won a master's degree in political science from Louisiana State University and subsequently taught political science at the University of Minnesota and at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota. During this time, Humphrey acquired his first experience working with the Federal Government. He became an official of the depression-born Works Progress Administration and then assistant regional director of the War Manpower Commission during World War II. In 1943 Humphrey ran for political office for the first time and placed second among ten candidates for the post of mayor of Minneapolis. He learned that to win an important political contest in Minnesota he would need the votes of more than members of the Democratic Party. A strong third political force in the State was the Farmer-Labour Party. Two years later Hwnphrey demonstrated his mastery of the political arts by hammering together an alliance between the Democrats and the Farmer-Labourites, and in 1945 he was elected mayor of Minneapolis on a reform ticket. Humphrey succeeded in ridding the city of professional gambling operations and putting through reforms such as a city ordinance making it illegal to discriminate in employment for racial reasons. In 1948 Humphrey ran for a United States Senate seat and won by the substantial margin of 243,000 votes.

In January 1949, he took his seat as the first Democrat ever elected to the Senate from Minnesota.

Now began the refinement process which has made Humphrey the skilled and valuable "lieutenant" President Johnson needs today.

He entered the Senate with the reputation of being a member of the aggressively liberal, or progressive, wing of the Democratic Party.

He was already nationally famous in this role. At the 1948 national Democratic convention he delivered a fiery speech demanding that his party take a stronger stand on civil rights. The convention adopted Humphrey's proposal but it was obnoxious to many southern delegates, particularly from Mississippi and Alabama, who walked out of the convention to set up their own States' Rights Party.

Since the United States Senate consists of 100 rugged individualists representing fifty different States and many shades of ideological opinion, Humphrey soon discovered that it was an exercise in futility to try to advance his own proposals without making some accommodation to the wide range of views held by his fellow Senators.

Politics in a democracy, he came to realize, is "the art of the possible," involving a consensus of all elected representatives of the people and not the imposition of one faction's views.

Humphrey has explained his attitude towards political compromise this way: "If I believe in something, I will fight for it with all I have. But I do not demand all or nothing ....

The hardest job of a politician today is to have the courage to be moderate. It is easy to take an extreme position." This ability to reconcile sharply contrasting viewpoints into effective legislation that can muster popular support helped make Humphrey a natural Senate leader. It is also an ability Johnson needs at his right hand in attempting to be, as he puts it, "President of all the people."

Humphrey is also invaluable to the President as a source of stimulating ideas on a great range of subjects. Nothing delights him more than a boldly original programme. For example, the idea of the Peace Corps made its debut in Congress when Humphrey sponsored a bill in the Senate to set up the programme under which young

Americans contributed useful services to newly developing nations.

In the crucial area of foreign affairs, Humphrey has first-hand knowledge as well as a wide background of study to draw on in working with Johnson. In the Senate, he was an influential member of the Foreign Relations Committee, making his most important contributions in the sensitive field of disarmament, which he regards as one of the most important needs of mankind today. As far back as 1958, Humphrey formally suggested that the United States negotiate with the U.S.S.R. on separate points of the U.S. disarmament proposals in order to clarify the areas of difference and to explore ways of reaching agreement. Also in 1958 Humphrey made a series of Senate speeches proposing a nuclear test-ban agreement, and in 1959 he persuaded the Senate ¡to approve a resolution favouring the concept, which became a reality in 1963.

In 1960 Hwnphrey introduced a bill to create a National Peace Agency. In slightly revised form, a bill passed the following year which established the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency.

Humphrey showed his continuing interest by gO:dg to Geneva, Switzerland, to sit in on the disarmament negotiations.

In domestic affairs, too, Humphrey is in a position to give President Johnson informed counsel. Even before he reached his present post, he was dubbed by colleagues and journalists the "vice president of many causes" because he was interested in almost every area of American life and anxious to solve every problem. "I have no patience," he has said, "with politicians who raise issues and don't try to offer solutions." Over the years Humphrey's solutions in domestic affairs have been concentrated mainly in the fields of civil rights, farm legislation, health improvement, labour union issues, drug safety and welfare programmes.

As Vice President, Hwnphrey has a personal interest in keeping an eye on the implementation of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, since he was one of the handful of legislators most responsible for its passage.

It is generally regarded as his finest legislative achievement. Humphrey did not actually write this comprehensive measure to guarantee Americans of all colours equal treatment in employment and in access to public facilities such as restaurants and hotels. But it was his adroit mixture of patience, conciliation, cajolery and tactical subtlety that steered the bill, during an exhausting three-month ordeal, through the traditional opposition in the Senate. Afterwards, several southern Senators who had fought the civil rights measure to the bitter end shook Hwnphrey's' hand and thanked him for his fairness towards them. During the entire legislative battle, Humphrey had never questioned their sincerity or integrity; he had kept the discussion centred strictly on the issues involved. He became popular in the Senate as a man who stood forcefully for what he thought was right, but never indulged in personal attacks.

Such popularity stands Humphrey in good stead as he urges support for the Johnson programme in the halls of Congress. His personality is also a factor when he represents the President in public speeches. At fifty-four, Humphrey still exudes a youthful bounce and breeziness. He is full of joy of living, and he is usually in motion, walking fast and talking even faster. His words and ideas rush out in torrents, a seemingly unstoppable flow of facts, figures, argument and good-hwnoured wit. Although he has been criticized for the length of his speeches on and off the floor of Congr.ess, he has the abilityrare in present-day American politics-of being able to inspire an audience with an old-fashioned evangelistic flair.

Hubert Hwnphrey has come to the Vice Presidency ~ata time when that office is reaching its fullest maturity and offers great opportunities for a crusading man of good will. President Johnson perhaps best summed up the feelings of many million American voters when he said at the Democratic Party's convention in 1964: "This is simply the best man in America for the job .... I will feel strengthened knowing that he is at my side at all times." END

HUBERT HUMPHREY:

CONCEPT OF THE GREAT SOCIETY In a television interview with a panel of journalists-including Mr. H. R. Vohra of the Times of India-Mr. Hubert Humphrey, Vice President of the United States, discussed, among other subjects, the concept of the Great Society and the relationship between the U.S. Government and the private business sector. Mr. Humphrey's remarks on these subjects are reproduced below.

PHRASE Great Society is more than just a political catch phrase. We feel that it implies a picture of the kind of society or commitment to the sort of society that we would like to have for ourselves and our posterity.

The Great Society ought not to be confused with just material wealth or with things.

It's really much more concerned about the quality of our lives and the quality of our people than it is about the quantity of the goods and services that are made available to our people.

Now, I don't think these are mutually exclusive, because the quality of life surely can be enhanced by prosperity and by the comforts and luxuries of life, but a Great Society surely would imply for us the creation of a social order in which there was true equality of opportunity for every citizen, in which each and every person would be encouraged and, indeed, asked to contribute to his utmost to the building of a better social order.

The Great Society would also imply that each and every person has a greatness inherent within him, and it is our belief that the individual possesses human dignity. This is a spiritual concept, but it also can be translated into political and economic reality.

The promise of American life is the promise of individual betterment, and the Great Society encompasses this individual betterment through education, through the arts, through cultural activities, through appreciation of beauty, both man-made and natural beauty, through a love of country and the resources of the country. And I would add that as the President sees the Great Society, as he has explained it, it involves the attainment of a consensus or a broad area of agreement amongst our people, a unity that is based Upon mutual respect and understanding, a dialogue that's constructive and helpful in terms of building common areas of agreement.

T

HE

Today I think there is general agreement in our country on a number of very important developments or possible developments.

When I speak to you of this broad consensus that we are trying to develop, this sense of unity, this doesn't mean that there is no difference of opinion. This doesn't mean that people are all alike. It means that you come to an agreement upon common goals and objectives and your approaches to the fulfilment of those goals and objectives may be varied and different.

All Americans now believe, or at least the vast majority, that we should have equal voting rights without restrictions. Now, this is quite an achievement, and this relates itself to individual betterment and to human dignity that young Americans should have a good education, that the quality of education should be improved as well as its base, I mean the extent of it.

There is general agreement in the country on this and that there ought to be a sense of beauty, beautification of our cities and of our countryside and personal sense of beautification in terms of the appreciation of the arts and the conservation of our resources, the building of our cities so they are livable and not just places in which you work.

Now, when it comes to our elderly citizens, many of them being workers-people that do not have an opportunity to accumulate large amounts of savings over a lifetime-we feel we should have a programme of social insurance, that is of laying aside in a trust fund a certain amount of capital to take care of the health and hospital needs at a later day in life. We think that's sensible, whatever you wish to call it; the tag is unimportant.

What we seek to do, to be frank about it, is in the dawn of life of the youngster or the young man and woman, to give them every bit of encouragement and assistance that we can in terms of good community life; by helping to make possible that their parents have a decent home, then helping them primarily to get education and health services CONTINUED

The Great Society is concerned with the quality of people and the quality of their lives.

In an age of interdependence the community is the whole world.

which they obtain through their local public health service and private medical care. Then enabling them in that period from the day of a college training or a technical training up to the point of where we call it the threescore and five, when retirement age comes, to be able to provide basically for their own wants and their own needs, and to also contribute rather generously to the common good of the community. And then when you arrive at that point of the twilight of life, it is our view that decency and compassion and a sense of justice call for special consideration for the needs of those people.

I think this sort of explains some of the building blocks of the Great Society, but to summarize it, it is a sense of personal values in which there is a commitment to sharing of one's talent, to be a citizen as well as an individual, to accept responsibility as well as the privilege of citizenship, to understand that with the role of leadership comes duty and burdens of responsibility.

I think all of this tells us a bit about the nature of the Great Society as we would hope to see it unfold.

The United States will do what it can to help developing nations help themselves.

If it were only a selfish thing I couldn't call it a Great Society, because greatness implies a sense of responsibility and leadership and also a sense of community, and the community of today is no longer the community of the Twin Cities, of Minneapolis and St. Paul, Minnesota, or America, or India or England or South Africa, or wherever it may be. The community is the world, and our basic commitment, if we are to be worthy of being called citizens of a Great Society, our basic commitment and our fundamental commitment must be to a society in which justice is the constant challenge and the goal in which the advancement and the increasing of the areas of freedom is a discipline and a requirement and in which the human life, the individual and his well-being are paramount.

This means a society in which we seek peace, a peace with justice, not a peace of the aggressor or of appeasement but a peace that has a sense of justice and of security and of freedom to it. I believe that that is what we are trying to do. We may approach it at times with errors of judgment but this is our commitment.

I believe the passage in this country of civil rights legislation, such as the Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, has tremendous international implications. These Acts reveal a commitment on the part of the

American people in law and in mind of equality of opportunity. We have closed in this country, and we are closing, the citizenship gap, the gap which relates to the promise of the emancipation proclamation and its fulfilment. It took us a hundred years to do it, and we have been very slow; yet we have made steady progress in the past decade, in fact, we have made phenomenal progress.

I believe of all the things we have done nationally that have had international implications, the most significant is the improvement of the pattern of citizenship rights and equal opportunity, civil rights, in the United States. I think this is a message to the world that we believe that regardless of race, colour or creed, people shall be judged as people. They shall be judged on merit and not the false standards of colour or stature or size or ethnic origin or geography.

For example, the Congress recently changed immigration legislation to eliminate the national origins' quota system. We are going to have an immigration policy in this country that relates to the value of people, not people in the north or in the south, not northern Europeans or southern Europeans, not Africans or Asians, but people, and I believe it will be recognized in the world as a much more equitable and humane policy.

So speaking of our p8licy relating to Africa, it is one of doing what we can within the limits of our knowledge. We lack some knowledge in our areas of human relations with people that we know so little about, but we shall do what we can within our areas of knowledge and resources to help these individual countries to help themselves, to help them without appearing to be the big brother, so to speak, and to help them without being domineering or patronizing.

I find that our friends in Africa, Asia and other countries are very self-conscious of their own rights. They are jealous of their own rights, their own dignity, and rightly they should be, and we are that way too, and we were even more so when we were a new country.

We are going to try to remember the lessons of our history, remembering that we too occasionally stumbled and faltered. Even at this day and age, we do not have always an orderly society, a society in which there is total justice. We have poor in the midst of the rich. We have poverty in the midst of vast areas of plenty. We do have some discrimination in a country that proclaims only one citizenship, and because we know this---even though we are trying to do something about it which I think is the saving grace of my country-we are sympathetic, I think the people are and I believe the Government is, sympathetic with the aspirations of people in Asian and African countries.

Now, we occasionally make a mistake in our judgment. We occasionally follow a policy temporarily that may not lend itself to fulfilment of an objective, but we have the courage to change. I think that's the best part of America, that America still has a conscience.

It does not feel self-righteous. It knows it makes mistakes and it seeks to remedy those mistakes. It seeks to change its course when somebody points out that the course is wrong, and if I may say so. I think that is a sign of strength, not weakness ....

We do believe strongly in the United Nations. We believe in international organization. We are committed to the development and the strengthening of these international organizations, and I hope that as time goes on we will even be more firm in our commitment and less reliant upon our own unilateral or even bilateral actions.

I believe very strongly, speaking for myself and I trust for my Government, in the development of peacekeeping machinery and peacekeeping forces in the international body known as the United Nations. I would hate to see any large power, the United States or anyone else, assuming the role of world policeman. It would be a role that would only bring the hate and the scorn of others and bring great difficulty and trouble to the policeman himself. So knowing that, we want international peacekeeping machinery.

GOVERNMENT AND THE PRIVATE SECTOR There have been those who over the years have tried to preach the doctrine that there was a natural animosity or enmity between business and the private sector, I mean Government and the private business sector.

We repudiate that kind of thinking.

The attitude of the current Administration, of which I am proud to be a part, insofar as the private sector is concerned, is this: We believe that Government should act as a partner with the private sector, not just business, but with labour and voluntary groups and educational establishments. We do not look upon Government as the dominating or domineering force. We look upon it as a co-operating, and at times as a co-ordinating, mechanism. We really believe that the economic dynamics of our society is in the private economy and that Government can aid and supplement and policies of Government can be very helpful; for example, this Government has passed tax reforms at the time when we had deficits in our Federal treasury. We completely reversed our economic thinking of, let's say fifty years ago or twenty-five years ago, and we proceeded to sharply reduce corporate taxes and personal income taxes, giving also investment tax credits-to do what? To release the capital and to place it into the hands of the individual in the belief that the individual and the management of industry knew better what to do with excess capital or free capital than any Government planning group .or any individual set of Government officials.

Now, this tells, I think, a great deal about the role of Government. The Government set a policy, but it relied for the implementation of that policy primarily upon the private sector of the economy, upon the business and

management and finance and labour sector of the economy. We think that the empirical evidence shows that this works. As a matter of fact, we have unprecedented prosperity today.

So to summarize it, we reject the idea that there must be Government as a natural enemy to the private sector. We accept the idea that Government and the private sector can work hand in hand, that through consultation, through dialogue, through mutual respect and understanding prior to the establishment of a policy, and then after the establishment of a policy, that we can release tremendous energies in this economy for public good and private good ....

Actually, the Federal Government in the United States has been limiting its involvement in ownership in the economy. Insofar as public power, for example, is concerned, or proprietary interests, rather than to expand that, we have been curtailing it with the exception, may I say, of the development of our great river systems. However, we do feel there are certain parts of the economy that require public investment; for example, our highway system, our airport system, our ports, and we also feel that the Government can make a tremendous contribution in this partnership that I am speaking of in the field of education and particularly in research and development.

Today about eighty-five per cent of the research dollar that's expended in the entire economy of America is the Government dollar. In other words, the Government is doing a large part-over half, about threefourths-of the research work.

We feel that the Government has an obligation to provide a state of opportunity for every citizen, to help to remove impediments and barriers, for example, the impediment to voting. We say, the Government must remove that impediment, and then the impediment of illiteracy, because to have the right to vote and to be illiterate or to have no social motivation to vote doesn't really make you a free citizen.

So we are deeply committed to the expansion of educational opportunity. The Government may very well remove impediments in terms of the enforcement of certain policies to prevent monopoly, thereby encouraging competition.

So there is a role for both (public and private sectors), and they don't need to get in the way of one another. We mustn't downgrade the public, we need that public sectorwater systems at community levels, sanitary systems, the schools, the hospitals-all of this is what you might call the infra-structure, the network around which you build a viable private economy.

We feel, if you have a viable ~conomy, that is an active economy, and you permit young people to have a good education, encourage them to have one, they will develop their talents and their abilities and their skills so they can take care of their own needs, and we feel this is the way it ought to be. END

Education is the keynote of all plans and programmes aimed at betterment of the human condition. The U.S. Government will announce shortly a long-range plan of world-wide educational endeavour which President Johnson has described as:

A NEW AND NOBLE ADVENTURE sEDUCATION A prerequisite to all other progress and should it be accorded top priority? This question has been discussed by many national leaders, planners and educators. It acquires a special significance in developing countries where limited resources must be allocated to different activities expected to yield the quickest and highest returns in terms of national welfare.

While views on the relative importance of investment in education and economic or industrial projects may vary, there is general agreement that ignorance and illiteracy are formidable barriers to progress. No nation which aspires to a position of affluence, greatness or even dignity, can neglect education: to do so would be to stifle the source of all ideas, plans and actions aimed at betterment of the human condition.

The history of the United States-where illiteracy has been virtually eliminated and a diversified system of education meets the needs of an industrialized society-demonstrates that education is the chief means by which a nation can develop its economy and its social and political institutions. It is also the surest means of extending individual freedom and bringing about equality of opportunity.

If today the American Negro is fully conscious of the rights guaranteed to him by the U.S. Constitution and demands his rightful share of the benefits and opportunities open to all American citizens, this is largely the result of education and the rising expectations it has brought in its wake.

Referring to the American experience and its lessons in a speech

I

he made at an educational conference, the late President Kennedy remarked: "There is no better way of helping the new nations of Latin America, Africa and Asia in their present pursuit of freedom and better living conditions than by assisting them to develop their human resources through education." He then outlined his plans for a unified programme to stimulate creative efforts in international education and cultural exchange.

President Johnson has adopted and enlarged most of the progressive programmes of the Kennedy Administration, giving them the stamp of his own individuality and implementing them with all the vigour of a dynamic personality. On the occasion of the recent bicentennial celebrations of the birth of James Smithson, founder of the famed Smithsonian Institution in Washington, he made a powerful plea for translating into reality James Smithson's call for "the increase and diffusion of knowledge among men"-everywhere in the world, irrespective of race, colour or creed.

Pointing out that more than 700 minion adults, or nearly forty per cent of the world's population, still dwell in the darkness of ignorance and cannot read or write, the President expressed the fear that "unless the world can find a way to extend the light, the force of that darkness may engulf us all." He declared that the American Government and nation were prepared to join in finding the way, and announced the setting up of a task force, headed by Secretary of State Dean Rusk, which would recommend "a broad and long-range plan of world-wide educational endeavour."

facilities. The opportunities available for research, in addition to teaching, are a special attraction for the members of the faculty.

The Kanpur Institute is now five years old and recently held its first convocation at which degrees were conferred on sixty-six students.

Dr. S. Radhakrishnan, President of India, who delivered the convocation address, referred to the Institute as a symbol of "this age of interdependence" and acknowledged "the debt it owes to American intellectual co-operation." He praised the Institute for its all-round emphasis on science, technology and humanities, all of which embody the pursuit of truth.

Since advanced studies and research of the type being carried on at Kanpur must have their basis in a sound foundation, planners and educators have given much thought recently to the methods of teaching science at the high school and college level. It has been recognized that a new approach to instruction in science is needed.

This new approach, according to Dr. D. S. Kothari, Chairman of the University Grants Commission, regards the teaching of science "as an endless quest, not as something equivalent to a closed system."

It lays emphasis not on cramming of formulae and details but on a grasp of fundamental principles and organizing of information by the student under broad headings or concepts. Above all it lays stress on practical or laboratory work and encourages the spirit of discovery.

These new ideas are being translated into practice in the programme of Summer Science Institutes for teachers, modelled on similar special courses of study which have been held in the United States for many years. The Indian programme-in which the U.S. Government, the U.S. National Science Foundation and four American universities have been collaborating with the Government of India's Ministry of Education, University Grants Commission, the National Council of Educational Research and Training, and Association of Principals of Technical Institutions-eommenced in 1963 and has expanded considerably since then.

Last summer ninety-seven summer institutes were organized at fifty-seven host institutions throughout India and were attended by some 5,000 Indian school-teachers and professors besides about 200 American consultants from many educational institutions in the United States. The importance attached to science teaching at the school level is underlined by the fact that as many as half the total number of summer institutes were for secondary school-teachers of physics, chemistry, biology and mathematics. Apart from the benefit of lectures J:>yexperts, the teachers attending these courses get an insight into the latest teaching techniques and the effectiveness of such educational aids as colour slides, films and specially prepared experiment kits.

While improvement of educational facilities for engineering and general science is important for India's developing economy, vitally urgent in the context of the existing food shortages in the country is the need for expansion and improvement of agricultural education. In the remarkable success of American agriculture, U.S. land-grant colleges with their unique system which combines classroom instruction with research, experimentation and extension services, have played a significant role and provide suitable models for Indian agricultural universities and colleges.

The U.P. Agricultural University at Pant Nagar, opened in 1960, was the first institution of its kind in India to be patterned after U.S. land-grant colleges, and has been followed by the establishment of similar agricultural universities in Punjab, Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Orissa, Andhra Pradesh and Mysore. Substantial U.S. assistance has been given to these institutions in meeting their capital expenses on construction and purchase of scientific equipment and,

President Radhakrishnan addresses the convocation of the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur, at which degrees were conferred on the first group of 66 students graduating from the Institute.

more importantly, by providing the services of American professors from five U.S. land-grant colleges and sending Indian members of the faculty to the United States for advanced training.

In addition to this major effort in the agricultural education field, U.S. assistance in developing existing facilities has been extended to a large number of agricultural and veterinary colleges throughout India.

Although education in India is primarily the responsibility of State Governments, the Central Government is concerned with policy and co-ordination of State activities and is naturally anxious to ensure the soundness of the entire educational structure. From time to time it has set up committees of experts to make recommendations for the improvement of the British-inherited system and devise ways and means of guiding educational effort in the States along the desired lines.

An important step in the direction of central guidance and co-ordination was taken when the National Institute of Education was established in 1961 to develop an integrated programme of development in the areas of school administration, guidance, curriculum, textbooks, basic education, social education, research and audio-visual education.

With the stress on qualitative improvement, the Institute is expected to produce highly trained professional personnel who can take up positions of leadership in teachers' training colleges, research and other educational institutions or in a supervisory or administrative capacity in the education departments of the Central and State Governments.

The U.S. has been closely associated with this project since its inception. Eight American professors from Columbia University are on the Institute's faculty while ten to fifteen Indian members of the faculty are sent to the U.S. every year for training in the University's Teachers College.

Books are the indispensable tools of education, and the anxiety of the National Institute of Education and other Indian educational authorities to ensure an adequate supply of reasonably priced textbooks is understandable. In particular the expansion of scientific and technological studies would be handicapped without easy availability of authoritative books on different branches of science and engineering.

To assist educators and students, a textbook scheme known as the Joint Indian-American Standard Works Programme has been in operation since 1961. Under this scheme selected American textbooks approved by the Ministry of Education, after evaluation by Indian educators and specialists, are reprinted in this country by Indian publishers and sold here at about a quarter of their price in the United States. The low price is made possible by the U.S. Government subsidizing part of the reprinting costs from its rupee funds in India.

More than 250 books-unabridged editions of the original American works in some thirty areas of knowledge-have so far been reprinted

The Fulbright programme

IS

the biggest educational exchange project now m operation m India.

and published in India under the programme.

The close Indian-American association which has developed recently in the educational field has not unnaturally stimulated reciprocal interest in the literature, history and culture of the two countries. For many years a number of American universities have included Indic studies in their curricula and, with the support of the Carnegie Corporation, the Rockefeller Foundation and the Ford Foundation, it has been possible to expand the scope and range of these studies. Besides Sanskrit, they now include modern Indian languages and courses on Indian literature, philosophy, history, art, archaeology and other subjects.

To support existing Indian studies in the United States, encourage their further development and promote research and scholarship, fifteen American universities collaborated in the creation of the American Institute of Indian Studies at Poona, which was formally inaugurated in February 1964. The Institute gets financial aid in rupees from the U.S. Government and in dollars from the Ford Foundation. Its activities so far have mainly centred on supporting, through fellowship and travel grants, American scholars who wish to undertake advanced study and research projects in India. It is also, however, interested in assisting joint Indian and American ventures, a notable example of which is a current project for the compilation of an encyclopaedia of Indian philosophies. This comprehensive work will take several years to complete and will be divided into fourteen sections, most of which will be edited by Indian scholars and the others by American scholars.

As a counterpart of this activity and as evidence of the developing Indian interest in America and American subjects, mention may also be made of the American Studies Research Centre in Hyderabad, Andhra Pradesh. The Centre was established in April 1964. and is located on the campus of the Osmania University. Sponsored by the U.S. Educational Foundation in India, with the assistance of financial grants by the U.S. Government and book gifts from the Asia Foundation, it is expected to meet the needs for basic works and research material of the increasing number of Indian scholars and institutions interested in American studies.

Twenty-eight Indian universities now offer courses in American history and literature. About 7,000 Indian students are at present enrolled in American universities, and thousands have returned to India after completing their studies in the United States. The Centre's specialized research library, now in the course of being built up. and the projected programmes of lectures and seminars should be of assistance to this growing body of Indian teachers, scholars and researchers.

The biggest single educational exchange programme currently in operation in India is the Fulbright programme, which came into effect at the beginning of 1950. Administered by the United States Educational Foundation in India, the programme lays emphasis on the arts and humanities, social sciences and pure sciences. During the sixteen years of its operation it has enabled over 2,000 Indiansvisiting lecturers, research scholars, teachers and students-to enrol in American universities for periods extending from one to four years.

Simultaneously it has provided facilities for nearly 1,000 Americans in the same categories to visit India on study or lecture tours. While these figures are not large in relation to India's vast needs, the programme has undoubtedly had considerable impact on Indian education, particularly at the higher levels.

U.S. programmes of educational assistance to India are typical of similar activities being carried on in many parts of the world.

They all have the common objective of helping and strengthening

the local effort and contributing towards national progress and international understanding. But the programmes are adapted to the individual needs of the countries concerned and vary in nature and emphasis. .

For example in Latin America, where rapid social change is taking place, the U.S. programme of educational and cultural exchange has been particularly responsive to modernizing trends and supported the common hemispheric goals of the Alliance for Progress. Among other activities, the programme has fostered the teaching of English since the language barrier is a formidable obstacle to mutual understanding. It has also promoted Latin American women's interest in education, child welfare and community development.

The social and educational problems of the many new countries which have emerged into political independence in Africa in recent years are formidable and are aggravated by critical shortages of capital and trained personnel. The United States, which is linked to Africa by historical and racial bonds-one-tenth of the present population of the U.S. being at least partly of African origin-is profoundly interested in contributing to the solution of these problems.

U.S, assistance in education has taken various forms to meet the Africans' pluralistic needs. Special stress has been laid on the importance of teacher training programmes in elementary and secondary education and school administration. U.S.-sponsored tours of African teachers have enabled them to observe and study the American educational system and adapt classroom techniques to their own requirements. At the same time, groups of American teachers have been teaching in African schools.

At the higher level of college and university education, apart from lecture tours by visiting American educators and specialists, some U.S. universities have entered into contracts designed to strengthen the faculties of African institutions of higher learning. Professors from the University of California and Northwestern University have been serving in the University of Khartoum in Sudan, and an exchange programme enabled the University of Chicago to assign members of its faculty to Makerere University in Uganda. Some 4,000 African students are enrolled in American colleges and universities at present and many of them are being helped financially by scholarships or U.S. Government grants administered by universities or the PhelpsStokes Fund, a fifty-year old American organization concerned with the advancement of education in Africa.

Lastly, a word about South Viet-Nam. Even as the guns boom and Viet-Cong guerillas continue their terroristic activity, the caravan of peace is on the march. With U.S. assistance, education in South Viet-Nam has made remarkable strides during the past decade. Compared with 330,000 pupils in 1,189 elementary schools in the year 1954-55, there are now about 1,215,000 students in 4,625 schools.

Of the fourteen million textbooks required for these students in 1965 and 1966, the United States undertook to provide over twelve millions; the balance is being supplied by Australia and the Republic of China.

Twenty-one technical training schools and 140 secondary schools are also in operation, and two major universities have been established in Saigon and Hue. Education is basic to man's hopes for progres~ through peace and the present effort must be greatly intensified to make the fruits of knowledge available to all men everywhere. President Johnson's projected programme of international education, which he has described as "a new and noble adventure," is expected to enhance the United States' contribution to the global effort and encourage the world-wide pursuit and diffusion of knowledge in all its diversity and richness. END

IMPRESSIONS OF

A necessary preliminary to enrolment is "the hysterical period of registration." Each student has to fill 28

SPAN

January

1966

ill

a number of prescribed (orms.

A teacher conducts a "quiz section," where books and problems raised in lectures are discussed.

expenence of the American "multiversity." In spite of its deficiencies, he thinks UCLA has much intellectual vigour.

THE U.S. "MULTIVERSITY"

B

THE lush greenery of Sunset Boulevard, where a few film stars and many businessmen live, and the spacious homes and shops of a residential paradise called Westwood Village, the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) campus lies concealed behind thick foliage. When I first arrived on the campus to take up my job I thought the foliage was camouflage. As soon as the sprinklers were turned on, I changed my mind. In a flash the campus was transformed into a Californian Versailles.

This was only the first of many shocks I experienced during my year in Los Angeles.

My adrenal in worked overtime as I absorbed the differences between British and American higher education, trying to discover what the British could learn-if anything-from the "multiversity," as Clark Kerr, the University's presirient, has dubbed his creation. At the time, I concluded there was much we could usefully apply in Britain. I still believe so.

In Britain the University of California is identified as Berkeley, the branch of the University located near San Francisco. UCLA has no public image and I was frequently asked why the Los Angeles campus has remained free of the tempests that have shaken Berkeley. Of the many reasons for this, one must surely be the difference in intellectual climate. Berkeley is-next to Harvard-the toughest American college to get into and to stay in. The IQ level of the students is high, their intellectual aspirations fierce, their involvement in the political issues of our time intense. The earnestness of the campus is ETWEEN

Mr. Gilbert's article is condensedfrom Harper's Magazine and reprinted with permission.Š 1965

by Harper & Row, Publishers, Incorporated.

The original article is taken from City of the Angels,published by Seeker & Warburg, London.

fortified by the large proportion of graduates who are taking second and third academic degrees there.

At UCLA, on the other hand, the official catalogue contains the following words: "The campus is ideally located for varied recreation and entertainment. The beaches and mountain resorts are within easy distance. Hollywood is close by and the community is served by a number of fine restaurants."

Some might see this as an indictment of the campus. I, however, found such pleasureloving honesty thoroughly attractive after the morbid, gray academicism of Oxford. At the same time, this characteristic underlined the difference between UCLA and Berkeley, where the tradition of political activity and free speech is long and honourable. The dispute over loyalty oaths, the fights against the House Committee on Un-American Activities, against compulsory training for the military reserve corps, and against racial discrimination have involved many Berkeley students and teachers in a long series of conflicts. At UCLA the students have never been so deeply involved in such issues. One of the reasons is that only a minority of them live in the university area while most Berkeley students live close to the campus. As a consequence the Berkeley students have a much greater sense of cohesion and community.

Similar differences between residential and non-residential campuses can be detected in British universities. One issue for which both British and Californian students have agitated is racial equality. In Britain students until recently have concentrated on the apartheid qolicies of South Africa. Now, as in the United States, the British student is painfully discovering that race problems begin at home.

I found my move from tradition-bound Oxford liberating. The Los Angeles campus, which has had a full undergraduate pro-

BY

gramme only since 1924, has had little time to develop burdensome traditions. It has grown and sprawled apace with the city. It is hard to say whether the university has flourished because of or despite Los Angeles. The city which everybody loves to hate engenders an animal hedonism which some would claim is directly at odds with academic pursuits. But the combination of this holiday camp atmosphere with a determined effort to remain what UCLA's Chancellor Franklin Murphy has called "a vital necessity for a society which wishes to survive free and strong" is stimulating and oddly conducive to bouts of hard work.

The focal point of the UCLA campus is a cluster of buildings that surrounds the old library. There, Gothic, Baroque, and Romanes que styles nudge each other. At noon after morning classes and lectures the students swarm towards the library steps, the most popular meeting place on the campus. The library boasts a set of melodious bells which perform at noon every day of the term. The first time I heard them they were playing a selection from Oklahoma! At the foot of the steps were herds of colourful nymphets, looking like film extras milling around a stage Californian campus. Brought up on a balanced diet of Hollywood spectaculars I waited for these exotic creatures to throw themselves into a softshoe routine and chant to the chimes behind them. Unfortunately they merely dipped into brown paper bags containing sandwiches and fruit. The contrast between these creatures and the drab, blackstockinged undergraduettes of Oxford was powerful. Even when the coeds wore casual clothes they looked so elegant that I sometimes found it hard to realize that UCLA was primarily a place of learning.

My first sight of UCLA in action was the , hysterical period of registration for the fall CONTINUED SPAN

January 1966 29

Well-known sitar virtuoso Ravi Shankar pe/jormed and lectured at UCLA for six months. At far right, a UCLA student talks to college girls in Bombay.

UCLA provides an extraordinary variety of courses and is not merely a "conveyor belt" for scientists and technologists. semester. Before any student enrols he has to pass the most rigorous medical examination he is ever likely to face-unless he hopes to be an astronaut. Then undergraduates and graduates have to sign on for the courses which they hope to take. Some are compulsory; most are left to the discretion of the student. But the mere expression of a wish to take a course in, say, Twentieth-century American Literature, in no way ensures acceptance. Each course can take only a fixed number of students.

My first task was to accept applications for the course I was going to help to teachIntroduction to the History of Western Civilization. I was told to reject the entreaties of anyone-bejeaned Lolitas or barefoot beatswho tried to get in after the quotas had been filled. Rejected students walked away dazed, mumbling, "This means I won't be able to graduate next semester." Others poured out to me incantations about units, credits, and grades-the liturgy of American higher education.

Worse scenes were occurring at this time on the Berkeley campus. Students queued for over twenty-four hours for certain supremely popular courses. Outside the Physics Department ambulances had to be called to remove the victims of a riot during the registration for Dr. Edward Teller's introductory course. Such zeal I found overwhelming-a delightful contrast to the cultivated apathy of British students.

My own position at UCLA was very attractive. While nominally I was studying for a second degree, I was not dedicated to the pursuit of the elusive Ph.D. and teaching and scholastic loads were light enough to provide some leisure.

UCLA provides an extraordinary variety of courses in sixty different faculties, yet it has resisted the temptation to become merely a convenient conveyor belt for the technologists and scientists who are in such urgent demand in Southern California. No better school of African studies exists in America and the lively Theatre Arts department produces writers and actors who spurn the clutches of nearby Hollywood. The School¡ of Music calls on the services of the many distinguished

composers and musicians who have taken up residence in California. The science faculties are sprinkled with Nobel Prize winners. The department of English contains a handful of the most brilliant teachers and lecturers I have come across anywhere.

In my own department, History, undergraduate standards were frequently very high.

At the graduate level, more and much better work was done than at most postgraduate centres in Britain. Lectures were informal and delivered with a sense of humour completely absent at Oxford. This was all the more surprising in view of the obstacles in the way of every teacher. The worst of them are summed up in the phrase, "Publish or perish."

A teacher can be a brilliant lecturer but if he does not churn out articles for The American Historical Review or the occasional book on Civil War Caves, then he is liable to be dismissed summarily. No teacher is given permanent tenure until he has completed the requirements for a Ph.D. This must be followed by a breaking-in period as an instructor at a less well known campus. Then comes an application to a leading university like California. A period of probation, a niche to be carved out, a reputation to be secured, writings to be published, involvement in departmental politics-the inventory of duties is long and onerous. If the teacher survives these obstacles to success he can then indulge in his real function-teaching.

In a course like Introduction to Western Civilization the professor delivers an hour's lecture twice a week. The six hundred students in the course are then divided into groups of thirty which meet for two hours every week with the teaching assistants and discuss assigned books and any problems arising out of the lectures. My job was to conduct two of these sessions-known, inaccurately, as quiz sections.

When I opened the door of my classroom for the first time, instead of thirty docile students waiting to discuss "Western Civ.," there were fifty, all demanding fawn-coloured, punched IBM cards. These were the physical means of ensuring enrolment and when collected together marked the academic progress of every student. In my eagerness to

please, I had put on that morning what can only be described as an imitation gamekeeper outfit. The combination of my accent and my appearance was sufficiently grotesque to allow me to impose some sort of equity from above.

The twenty students I had to reject filed out of the room.

At exam time I learned the sad truth that Americans are at no stage in¡ their career taught how to write. I mean this not only in the literary sense but also physically. The student who can type beautifully on his own electric typewriter almost disintegrates when asked to put pen to paper for an hour or two in an examination. The lack of style, the misspelling, and the idiotic punctuation drove me to despair from which I was only rescued by the occasional discovery of first-rate answers and the odd remarks that were unintentionally funny.

"Identification" with the past is a major business for the American college student.

One girl told me she was getting desperate in her reading of the Greek philosophers: "I can't identify with Plato." Some phrases distinguished potential graduate students.

There was clearly a bright future for anyone who talked about the "cross-fertilization" of cultures or the "charismatic authority" wielded by leaders or who casually introduced the word "symbiosis." For these students ancient peoples were either adjusted or maladjusted to their environment; their economies were always about to take off or to suffer recession.

The textbooks were chiefly a series of paperbacks with titles like The Age of Adventure and The Age of Anxiety. These were read in that curious way Americans have of reading books. On every page about twelve lines are neatly underlined in ink. When this has been done throughout the book, it is considered read.

In his first lecture on Western Civilization, Dr. William Hitchcock, the skilful and superbly fluent professor who conducted the course, gave out battle orders. Eating lunch during the lectures was forbidden; smoking was not. The seven teaching assistants sat at the back of the auditorium-able to see the reactions of their six hundred charges. After

each lecture the professor would be surrounded by eager faces asking him to clear up assorted mysteries. "What is the difference between culture and civilization?" "What is theExistentialistcrisis of modern man T' "Why were the Romans different from the Greeks ?"

The students' ignorance of European history was encyclopaedic-almost as great as Europeans' ignorance of American history.

Discussions that began in the lecture room usually ended in one of the restaurants in the Students' Union. This multi-million-dollar building looked like a cross between the Beverly Hilton Hotel and Macy's department store. Patios, split-levels-they were all there with vast auditoriums, smart restaurants, and self-service cafeterias. In game rooms, night and day, sweat-shirted teen-agel's bowled or played pool, poker, or table tennis. The lower floors were occupied by an excellent bookstore, and departments to provide every necessity from rust-co loured suits to class rings. In the Union cafeteria every Friday afternoon, there were twist sessions. In one corner of the large room, couples would be gyrating through this apocalyptic dance to music provided by the jukebox, while, at the opposite end, other couples, sharing a pizza and pie a-la-mode, read out portions of The Communist Manifesto to each other in preparation for a test on the following day.

From a very tender age UCLA students are encouraged to think in terms of research. In addition to regular exams, undergraduates are expected to write "papers" each term. These are beautifully typed out and bound in folders with gilt clasps. The contents hardly deserved such lavish treatment. Of the sixty I received, most dealt with safe topics-the Renaissance, Plato, or Napoleon. A few were shamelessly copied out of textbooks. A handful were original and exciting. Many students based their style on that of Time, Inc .... "Elizabeth (Call me the Virgin) Regina tapped her quill on the side of the oaken table and decided that much-married Mary Stuart must go.

The problem? How and when." All the papers were heavily footnoted and a vast bibliography was provided to prove academic respectability. Yet despite the pretentiousness, this writing is a useful exercise. Low standards

are the result of unfamiliarity, and if the students had to write papers more frequently and take fewer exams, the results would be greatly improved.

Certainly the single most serious educational deficiency at UCLA is the obsession with grades-an obsession that destroys originality, discourages unorthodoxy, and makes students approach their work with a gigantic fear of failure. When a British student fails an exam he feels he has let himself down; when an American fails he feels he has let himself, his family, his fraternity, and his country down.

The Federal and State authorities do not improve matters by treating education as a national emergency. The nervous slogan, "Catch up with theRussians," is a symptom of this attitude. The missile gap has been replaced by the graduate gap. Both are equally mythical.

The exam system which goes with this grading tends to assume that there is a right and wrong answer to most questions. The best answer, accordingly, will be that incorporating the highest number of predetermined "points" in the essay. Too often, bright students have to think of themselves as educated in spite of, and not because of, this system.

With its twenty thousand students, UCLA can offer a wide diversity of subjects and teachers. It can afford to buy the best equipment and provide all the necessary facilities.

But its large size involves much administration, and the power of these administrators has serious dangers. Committees expand and the interests of the students become subordinated to bureaucracy. The main justification, for example, of the whole system of grading is that it makes life easier for the administrators. Again, the administration has assumed the responsibility of controlling policy about student government, discipline, and recreation. Like all bureaucrats they look with disfavour on the unorthodox and the eccentric. The conflict at Berkeley was basically about the overpowerful role of the administration which had interposed itself successfully between the students and the faculties. The inaccessibility of the administrators and their remoteness from the students fortified the arguments of the student leaders who attacked the concept of the university

as a factory and corporation. The multi¡ versity whose end-product is the manufactured graduate is in danger of taking gradepoint averages more seriously than freedom of expression. The student strike which shocked so many people outside Berkeley was surely the appropriate action for those students and teachers who rejected the university as a factory. Withdrawal of labour is the last resort for factory workers with a grievance.

One result of the events in the critical fall semester at Berkeley is a determination by many students and faculty members that the administration shall administer and do no more. As one professor said, "We on the faculty have allowed the administration, over the years, to take the university away from us.

It isn't easy but we're going to have to try to take it back."

Although the administration at UCLA is complex and large, it is still less cumbersome than at Berkeley. The administrators are more accessible to student leaders and less protected by anonymous committees. Here lies one explanation why UCLA has never experienced the type of crisis which almost brought Berkeley to a standstill.

In Britain the absence of gigantic campuses, the small percentage of high school graduates who go to university, the different shape of courses and examinations, and the vestigial connections between universities and the government have all ensured that British university administrators are subordinated to faculty members.

Although most students grow to tolerate the heavy hand of the administration, some are so depressed that they give up. The dropout rate from UCLA is no higher than anywhere else, but in some departments this can be as high as twenty-five per cent. Many of these have failed their course work. But others are the brightest students who can stand no more of the system and, in their own phrase, bug out.

None of the political groups at UCLA are strong, and the professional student politician is much rarer than at Berkeley. However, the nuclear facts of life are thrust before the students as if to remind them that doomsday is always around the corner. Dotted all over CoNTINUED SPAN

January 1966 31

Student Legislative Council, governing body of students, meets weekly on the campus.

Requirements for admission to the university are rigorous. the six hundred acres of the campus are notices giving directions to the nearest evacuation areas and blast shelters. Sirens wail every month at a set time to check on their working condition. In every office and lecture room a clinical little notice explains how many minutes' alert one is likely to receive in the event of an enemy attack. The campus authorities take their "disaster preparedness plan" very seriously. The civil-defence chief of the campus claimed that if "the Bomb fell on Royce Hall [a central campus building] no one at UCLA would be saved; if it fell downtown all of us here could be saved."

Every campus building has an area where in theory the effects of a nuclear explosion can best be tolerated. In order to check on the university's "preparedness," the civil-defence teams hold "take-cover" drills from time to time. The purpose of these is to move about 22,000 people to shelter areas in three or four minutes. During the one full "take-cover" drill I witnessed, few of the students moved, while two hundred of them ignored the sirens to picket the Administration Building in protest instead. No action was taken against them and the Dean of Students admitted generously that "no one can be forced to protect himself. .. but this drill is being put on for their benefit."

In British universities there is no preparedness for nuclear disaster and the best advice that civil-defence workers can offer householders is to suggest that they whitewash their windows and put out fires caused by a nuclear explosion with a stirrup pump.

Yet civil defence is a very peripheral concern for the Los Angeles student. It is as nothing compared with what he really worries about.

Will our Bruins beat the University of Southern California? Will I get my paper on the Sociology of Rumours finished in time? Will I get at least a B in the mid-term exam? Will the bookstore have my b~oks in yet? Will I be able to get a part-time job next semester to help pay my way?

If he is a graduate student, he is worrying about deeper problems. Does my seminar paper have enough footnotes? What can I possibly choose as my Ph.D. subject which

hasn't already been investigated? When are they going to build houses for married students? Can I afford to keep us both on this teaching assistant's salary much longer? When are they going to take the Muzak out of the Students' Bookstore? Where the hell am I going to park?

When I first arrived and digested some of my earliest shocks I wondered if UCLA could be a serious academic community. I soon discovered that the answer to this question was Yes. Certainly I was disappointed at the apathy of UCLA students towards political issues and the painful contrast with the seething activity at Berkeley. Often I was bewildered by the search for Instant Education and its recipe for success: mix forty different courses in a receptive skull, add a dash of anything from Eugenics to Existentialism, brew intermittently for four years, skim off surplus nonconformism, and the result is an unpolluted B.A. degree.

But at the end of my time in California I was convinced that, for all its defects, the system of higher education there had more advantages than the British system. University education in California has different goals from its counterpart in Britain, where the expansion of universities is always met with stiff resistance from the "more means worse" school of thought.

The California system, on the other hand, is appropriately superior to that of every other State in the Union-appropriate, that is, for the Number One State. There are a quarter of a million full-time students in California.

Fifty per cent of all California's high school students go on to college-twenty per cent above the average elsewhere in the country. The State supports not only the nine campuses of the University of California but also sixteen other State colleges and seventy two-year or junior colleges which offer both the curriculum of the first two years at university and vocational curricula for those students who do not want to go any further academically. As the population and wealth of California have increased, so has the State expenditure on education. But requirements for admission to the State's university are rigorous; only

the top twelve per cent of high school grad¡ uates are admitted. The remainder who want to have a university education either go to the other State and junior colleges or to private colleges.

The elaborate structure of higher education in California is based on a report that became law in 1960. This was the Master Plan for Higher Education. The most interesting result of the plan is that it attempts to cope with the problem of quantity as well as quality in higher education. British critics of American universities always smile as you tick off the facts and figures of the American system. "Ah, yes," they drawl, "the Americans have solved the problem of quantity-but only at the cost of quality." This dichotomy set up between quantity and quality assumes that a society can either educate a minority very well or a lot of people much less well but that it cannot do both. California is attempting to do both, and surely no modern society has any choice but to aim to achieve the same ends, if by different means.

Yet expansion for expansion's sake is of no value if these ends are sacrificed to the means. This is the nub of the University of California's problems. Educating a thousand students is difficult enough; educating twenty thousand on a single campus is a Herculean task. In these conditions the provision of higher education is seriously impeded if power and authority inside the university slide into the wrong hands, away from what has been called "the community of scholars," President Kerr himself has admitted that "the multiversity is a confusing place for the student. He has problems of establishing his identity .... The walking wounded are many."

In Britain higher education is on the verge of important expansion along lines laid down by the Robbins Report on universities. The University of California will serve as an excellent model to British educationaJists who want to see simultaneously the impressive advantages and the distressing deficiencies of a giant-size university. In this way they might learn to incorporate the former and steer clear of the latter when planning new universities in Britain. END

GLEN CANYON: A treasure-trove of nature

G

architect, moderator, and life-giver is the Colorado River. For centuries it slipped along serenely, riffled only in a few places where boulder-filled narrows confined it, for nearly 300 kilometres at the Arizona-Utah border. Now its sparkling waters have been dammed in order to make the desert bloom. But the canyon's magic and majesty endure in Eliot Porter's striking studies.

LEN CANYON'S

BETTER VALUE FOR THE CONSUMER Concerned as he naturally is with getting his money's worth, the consumer-in America as well as in India-seldom realizes that there are unseen forces safeguarding his interests. Among these are the U.S. National Bureau of Standards (NBS) and the Indian Standards Institution (ISI). Differing in the scope and range of their activities, both organizations perform many common functions to ensure better value to the consumer through standardization and quality control. The first of the following two acticles describes the many-sided activity of NBS, while the second details the work of ISI.

The National Bureau of Standards ROM THETIMEa hypothetical person we shall call George Jones gets up in the morning until he goes to bed again at night, he works and lives under the benevolent protection of an important but unobtrusive Government agency in Washington, the National Bureau of Standards.

Electricity for the bedside lamp he turns on to help find his slippers is metered by the NBS calculations of the volt and ampere.

His watch and the clock in the automobile plant he is drowsily hurrying to reach at the appointed hour are synchronized by an NBS radio signal. The flour in his bread and the cream in his coffee have been weighed and measured by NBS gauges. The tyres of his automobile or of the bus he rides to work

F

have been proved as to durability by a large, revolving turntable at the NBS laboratories.

Should George Jones stop on his way home for a glass of beer-as some men do-he is sure to get full measure for his money because his glass will conform to the standard of volume set up by the NBS. And when he and his wife attend a concert in the evening, their ears are protected from strident discords, at least any due to the instruments themselves, which have been tuned to the musical pitch signal-A above middle C-that the NBS sends out daily by radio all over the world. And the light bulb he switches off when he goes to bed at night has been made to Government specifications prescribed and checked by Bureau scientists.

All these and many other benefits the Bureau extends to George Jones and millions of consumers throughout the nation. For, although, in the great majority of cases, the Bureau has no power to enforce its standards, these standards, nevertheless, have a pervasive effect upon U.S. manufactures. For one thing, innumerable private concerns sell to the Government vast quantities of their wares which are required to meet the Bureau's specifications. These goods are, of course, also sold to the public.

Manufacturers have long since learned that goods labelled or advertised as meeting "Government specifications" are preferred by customers over those which can make no such claim. Then, in addition, just the firm establishment of a standard of comparison by a responsible Government agency has given manufacturers, as well as buyers, a mark to shoot at.

George Jones himself may not realize that the concrete basement of his home has been mixed according to Government standards.

Many different departments of the Government buy millions of tons of cement every year for dams, bridges, roads, river and harbour works, and public buildings, all manufactured to meet NBS requirements.

CONTINUED SPAN January

1966 37

Affecting every aspect of U.S. production, NBS standards have ensured better consumer goods, safer manufacturing processes.

Contractors on non-Government projects, from huge office buildings to modest private homes, have adopted these standard.< as their own. Compliance with them is assured by inspectors for the insurance and investment companies that loan the money for their construction. The same is true of lumber and many other materials that go into the building of all kinds of structures. Government standards tend to become the standards of private industry, a yardstick for George Jones, or the building inspectors who check his home for him while it is under construction.

The Government is not interested officially, of course, in seeing that George gets a standard mug of beer. But a Government agency, the Treasury Department, is actively interested in collecting a tax on every barrel of bear brewed, as well as every gallon of liquor distilled. For that reason, NBS inspectors periodically calibrate the vats and measuring devices used in their manufacture. When the beer gets to the tavern where it is sold, it is measured in glasses which are checked

by State and local authorities with measures regularly compared for their accuracy with those of the Bureau in Washington. And so George Jones gets his full measure of beer.

At the turn of the last century, when the industrial growth that has marked the past fifty years was just beginning, American manufacturers had to take their calibrating instruments abroad to England or Germany to check their accuracy. In 1901, the U.S. Congress created the National Bureau of Standards as an agency of the Department of Commerce in response to the wishes of scientists, engineers, educators, and industrialists to facilitate the nation's research in physics, mathematics, chemistry, and engineering.

Situated on a hill overlooking the capital from the northwest, the NBS has a quiet, almost sleepy atmosphere to the passerby.

One of the most beautiful azalea displays in the city flanks both sides of the entrance from stately Connecticut Avenue. The ivy-covered buildings of the original establishment are arranged in a quadrangle that looks more like the campus of a small college than the heart of a great scientific research institution.

But when you enter, don't touch anything.

There are 10,000,000 volts pulsing through that burnished copper switch. Better not get your toe caught in that press. It can exert 700,000 kilograms pressure per square centimetre, enough to smash a steel girder or reinforced concrete beam. Open that door on the hottest July day, and you'll need overcoat, earmuffs, and mittens. The temperature is forty-five degrees below zero Centigrade inside-to test building materials for housing in Alaska.

The Bureau's responsibilities begin with

its function as custodian for the prototype metre and prototype kilogram which conform exactly to the international standards kept in Paris. The graduations on the prototype metre, so fine they can hardly be seen with the naked eye, have already proved too coarse for the demands of a precision age. For scientific use in commercial as well as Government laboratories, it is being replaced as a standard of length by a light wave. An isotope of mercury, Mercury 198, sealed in a lamp, produces a greenish light on a wavelength of 1,831,249.21 to the metre, from which an accuracy of 1/100,000,000 can be obtained.

For practical purposes like punching a time clock or meeting a friend who may be late anyhow, the second evolved by astronomical calculation based on the earth's rotation is accurate enough. Quartz crystals regulate its accuracy to a deviation of one second in 100,000,000. To meet the ever increasing demand of modern science, the Bureau has experimented with two kinds of atomic clocks, one based on the oscillations of the cesium atom, the other on those of the nitrogen atom of the ammonia molecule, which is expected to cut down that error to one second in 300 years.

Beginning with these basic measurements of length, mass, and time, the Bureau keeps a protective eye over George Jones' everyday economic welfare. The public-utility companies that sell electricity, gas or water must check their meters periodically with those at the NBS to be sure all their customers are receiving full value.

When George drives into a filling station to buy gasoline for his car, he knows not only that he will get full measure, but also that the quality will be suitable for his highcompression motor. Engines in the cars of today have a higher compression ratio than those of only a few years ago, and give more power and faster acceleration for the same weight. But they also require fuel containing a larger proportion of certain hydrocarbons to operate at their highest efficiency.

The colour in George's shirt, his wife's dress and the curtains decorating their home are also a matter of concern to the NBS. In conjunction with textile manufacturers in private industry, the Bureau has worked out standards for colour-fastness. When a material is guaranteed to be "sunfast," that means it will not fade perceptibly when exposed to the sun for at least a certain length of time. Before each batch of material leaves a textile mill, a sample is exposed to artificial sunlight, an ultra-violet "fading lamp," for a specific time to test its colour-fastness.

The Bureau co-operates with many other branches of private industry in the interest of the public. A few years ago, for example,

the luggage industry asked the Bureau's aid in determining the best materials for various types of baggage containers. The tensile strength and scuff-resisting qualities of a wide range of woods, fibres, and plastics were subjected to stringent, practical tests. In one of them, the handle of a suitcase was lifted by a machine 25,000 times to determine its staying qualities. Eventually, luggage was developed of a quality that would defy the most malevolent baggage-handler who ever wormed his way into a transportation company's employ.

For many years, the American Dental Association, composed of all the practising dentists in the country, has maintained close co-operative relations with the Bureau. Working as research fellows, members of the profession participate in tests of materials used for filling carious teeth and making dentures for missing ones. No dentist would think of using any material in treating George Jones' teeth that had not first been tested at the Bureau's dental laboratory, and certified as meeting the Association's stringent standards.

This stamp of approval serves as assurance that dentures won't shrink or expand after they are fitted, and makes it possible for exposed fillings to match¡ the colour of the natural teeth.

While the era of completely painless dentistry may never come, since the very thought of the dentist's chair is painful to some, joint efforts of the NBS and the Association have produced a high-speed, hydraulic dental drill that goes far in that direction. The new drill resembles the conventional dentist's handpiece in size and appearance, but is driven by a tiny stream of water with a turbine at 40,000 revolutions per minute, many times faster than the ordinary mechanically powered instrument.

At that speed, the vibrations, which many consider more distressing than the drilling itself, are almost imperceptible to the human senses, just as sounds above a certain pitch are inaudible to the human ear. The old mechanical drill is still considered preferable for work on the dentine and soft tissues of teeth, but the high-speed hydraulic drill has proved speedier and more effective in drilling the enamel that forms the tooth's outer coating and is the hardest substance in the human body.

The concern the Bureau displays for the welfare of George Jones and the public in general is not its major responsibility. The NBS is the Government's official representative at many international scientific conferences. In 1956, it was actively engaged in several projects carried out in conjunction with other nations in the observance of the International Geophysical Year. It conducts basic research in physics, chemistry, electronics, optics, metallurgy, and many other fields in which it serves as adviser to other Government departments.

In this advisory capacity, Bureau engineers frequently develop new ideas which prove broadly applicable entirely outside the field of

Government. One idea which is expected to be important to George Jones and his whole family was only recently revealed. It concerns shoe leather.

A few years ago, the Department of the Navy asked the Bureau if something could be done to improve the wearing qualities of the shoes it was issuing to its personnel. The shoes the Navy was buying were of the best quality available, but someone thought they should be better.

Bureau scientists started from the beginning, doing basic research on the structure and behaviour of the leather fibres. It was first discovered that impregnation with natural rubber increased the wear and water resistance of leather without impairing its flexibility.

Later the process was improved by using polyisobutylane as an impregnant, which increased wear about eighty per cent above untreated leather and reduced water absorption by about half. A considerable saving in tanning costs was effected, and the wearing quality of belly and shoulder leather was improved to about equal that of high-grade sole leather. Experience with a pilot plant at the Bureau showed that the treated leather could be finished to resemble the conventional type, even to a simulated grain.

In the course of its research work, the Bureau has pioneered in many fields that have indirectly benefited consumers in numerous ways. Its radio direction finder, radio beacon and blind-landing system have promoted the development of aviation. The printed circuits devised at the NBS, in which electrical wires are supplanted by conductive "ink," are proving invaluable in many small electronic instruments and such common appliances as television and radio-even in hearing aids.

In fact, the radio in general use today was contrived by two scientists at the Bureau.

Back in the early 1920's, when radio was still in its infancy, sets were designed for direct current, and required both dry and wet batteries for their operation. In 1921, these two Bureau radio specialists developed a radio that would operate entirely on alternating current, the type found in most homes.

The new alternating-current radios could thus be operated by simply plugging them into a wall outlet. The radio manufacturing and broadcasting industries, among America's largest, were the direct result. Later, Bureau scientists developed the spark-plug shield that, by eliminating interference caused by the ignition system, has made radios standard equipment on American cars today.

Among a multitude of projects the Bureau has undertaken is one for the Treasury Department, to improve the lasting quality of the special grade of paper used for money. Like everything else, currency wears out and has to be replaced by crisp new bills. A tougher grade of paper would last longer and save expense to the Government.

Now if Bureau scientists could at the same time devise some way to make money last longer for George Jones-wouldn't that be something? END

During its brief existence, ISI has established nearly 3,200 standards in fields ranging from food to chemical engineering. Its work has benefited both the Indian consumer and manufacturer.

The Indian Standards Institution

A

LMosT EVERY DAY, we buy goods to meet our varied needs. But however varied the needs, the purpose behind each of our purchases remains unchangedto get the best for the money we spend. In our choice many influences work and interact.

The influence could be that of a friend's casual remark, or a salesman's honied tongue, or the arresting design of a wrapper. But none of these of course is a guarantee of the intrinsic value of the article, its price or quality.

This is where standards come into the picture. When specifications are laid down for materials to be used in a product, they take care of a major element in the quality of goods. By eliminating waste and limiting the different shapes and sizes of a product to the minimum, standards reduce manufacturing costs. When used as a basis of

contracts, they minimize chances of dispute.

The absence of standards might mean chaos, confusion, at times even danger. A weak girder might bring down a huge building; a defective electric wire could cause death.

In India the proposal for starting a standards institution was advanced as early as 1940, but it did not materialize at the time due to the Second World War. Soon after the war, however, preliminaries for implementing the proposal were completed, and the Government of India established the Indian Standards Institution (IS!) in 1947-the same year that the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) was founded. ISI became one of the Organization's founder-members.

It was set up with the. active support of industrial, scientific and technical organizations in the country.

The Indian Standards Institution is the pioneer in the field of standardization in this country. Its main objectives are: promoting standardization, quality control and simplification in industry and commerce; co-ordinating efforts of producers and consumers for the improvement of materials, products, processes and methods, and registering standardization marks.

In its relatively brief existence, ISI already has an impressive list of accomplishments and achievements to its credit. It has so far CONTINUED SPAN

January 1966 39

ISI recommendations for the steel industry have vastly improved efficiency and effected savings of several

established nearly 3,200 standards for different categories of goods, ranging from food and agricultural products to chemical engineering and steel.

Standards for another 2,000 items are under preparation. In addition, there is a large number on the waiting list, to which new items are continuously added to afford increasing protection to the community.

To make both the consumer and the manufacturer quality-conscious, ISI has introduced the Certification Marks Scheme, under which a product is checked and re-checked at various stages starting from the selection of raw material and ending with the finished product.

If the Institution is satisfied after inspection and tests that the quality of a particular product meets its standards, it will permit the manufacturer to use its mark (the initials ISl appear on the goods in a neat rectangle) which symbolizes its guarantee of quality control.

How is the task of the discriminating buyer made easier? Take, for instance, the electrical appliances used for domestic purposes. ISI says that an electric iron with its mark on it is a guarantee to the consumer of reliable operation, safety against electric shock and overheating of the appliance. Similarly, an electric immersion water heater or a hotplate with the ISI mark ensures safety, durability and reliability in service.

In the case of fountain pen inks, ISI specifications insist that the ink shall flow from the fountain pen easily, and that it shall not be sticky after drying. Also, it shall not produce any incrustation of dried dye on the fountain pen nib when the pen remains unused for a couple of days.

ISI tests are extended even to such items as papad. They insist that the papad should be free from infestation and fungal growth; free from colouring matter and other harmful ingredients. The standards also prescribe that it "shall be pliable as sold in the raw form and shall not crumble. When roasted or fried, it shall show up bubbles and break easily."

A specification which should satisfy the most fastidious papad addict!

Behind the mark of quality and craftsmanship which reassures the consumer are the laboratory tests conducted by ISI's welltrained and competent technical staff. At present they test nearly ninety per cent of the products referred to it for the use of its certification mark; the remaining are sent to specialized laboratories.

ISI's tests are rigorous and precise, backed by many years of experience and research.

Some of them might look simple but this simplicity is deceptive. For instance, this is a test for an umbrella: "After opening and closing the umbrella

crores

of rupees.

ISI Director Dr. Lal C. Verman, who won the

1964 Leo B. Moore Gold Medal, coveted international GIllard in field of standardization. fifty times, the ribs shall not show any deformity and the cloth shall not show any sign of opening of seams, bulging or shakiness."

At times the tests are revised, as was done recently to determine the purity of vegetable oils and fats. This revision was necessitated because of the rapid progress made by the fatty oils industry in the country, leading to the development of new techniques of analysis and quality control. The revision also prescribed tests for detecting the presence of other oils or adulterants, such as sesame oil and cotton-seed oil.

The beneficiaries of these standards and tests are not the consumers alone. The manufacturers find that as the raw material is standardized, their processing becomes more streamlined and efficient; consequently, their products attain uniform quality and this often results in higher sales.

One of the Institution's most important examples of savings due to standardization and rationalization-and one that is vital to the country's economic development-is in the use of steel.

Besides commending the Institution for reducing over 1,500 varieties of steel to about 150, experts say that when all the standards in steel evolved by ISI are fully implemented, there' could be a saving of approximately 1,790,000 tonnes in the consumption of steel for fabricated structures in the Fourth Plan period (1965-66 to 1970-71). The corresponding figure for the Fifth Plan is estimated as 2,970,000 tonnes. At the present price level,

the savings would amount to at least Rs. 125.3 crores in the Fourth Plan and Rs. 207.9 crores in the Fifth Plan periods.

To extend these benefits to the country and the people, ISI functions through numerous technical committees. An autonomous body, its overall control rests with the General Council, with the Union Minister for Industry as its ex-officio president. The membership of the council includes representatives from various fields.

The man behind ISI is its director, Dr. Lal C. Verman, an expert of international fame and the second recipient of the highest honour in the field of standardization-the Leo B. Moore Gold Medal. The medal, awarded by the international Standards Engineers Society, U.S.A., was first won by U.S. Defence Secretary Robert S. McNamara.

The citation accompanying the award, given to Dr. Verman in 1964, takes note of "his high achievements, extraordinary contributions and distinguished services in the field of standardization and its advancement through creative application and service to his own nation and to the international community."

Dr. Verman has been active for many years in various phases of international standards work. He was vice president of the International Organization for Standardization for six years (1949-54), has been chairman of its Planning Committee since it was established in 1953, and a member of several international committees.

His interest in international standardization is reflected and shared by ISI. Though a national organization, its interests, like its director, are truly international. Believing that international standards build foundations for world order, ISI has played host to two international conferences and has spread the message of standardization in the region covered by the U.N. Economic Commission for Asia and the Far East. It has also extended assistance to many nations for organizing seminars on standardization and provided technical know-how to other developing countries.

The Institution has been making sustained efforts to secure widespread application in India of the recommendations of the International Organization for Standardization. As a result, about sixty per cent of some 350 ISO recommendations have been introduced or are in the process of introduction by ISI, and more are being considered for adoption.

As ISI's activities and interests are constantly expanding and multiplying, so are its responsibilities. The demand for its facilities and operations is constantly increasing. The main limitation, however, says Dr. Verman, "is the paucity of getting the right kind of men on the Institution's staff-men with imagination, thorough grounding and confidence."

But Dr. Verman is gratified with the response received so far from his colleagues, associates and friends. He has received full co-operation from the government and the technical fraternities. He still feels, however, that "the good could be better." Such an outlook is basic to the standards movement. END

IMAGES OF A TENNESSEE BOYHOOD AMESAGEE'Schildhood may have been no richer in experience than most, but the boy who lived it became a gifted writer, a man who remembered his youth with enormous perception.

During his creative years Agee won acclaim for a book of poems, a short novel entitled The Morning Watch, a handful of stories, movie criticism, a brief spate of writing for films, and Let Us Now Praise Famous Men-a poetic documentary about poor southern farmers. All these were small marvels of gemlike toughness, beauty and promise.

Two years after Agee died in 1955, at the age of forty-five, his only full-length novel appeared. It recreates his childhood in Knoxville, Tennessee, and an event which transformed his life. Rufus Foilet, hero of A Death in the Family, is Agee himself.

Through him, Agee touches the sharp and tender nerve of youth.

J

Rufus lives in love's sturdiness. His father and mother give him strength, nudge him towards wonder and let him go the way of his own sweet energies. Around him Knoxville moves slowly about its business, as if time were somewhere else.

But time menaces Knoxville and Rufus. The benign ghosts which play in his bedroom drapes, in the erratic butterfly he follows, and in ail solid substances of his life, can, at any moment, become agents of dread. Leaves' shadows flutter on his wail one night in a dance of uncanny horror. As always, his father consoles him, but soon thereafter, in a catastrophe that turns the solidity of Rufus's life into questions, his father is killed.

These-the warm rough joys of youth and the rigours of pain-are the mysteries of living for Rufus, as they were in that other Knoxville of fifty years ago for James Agee.

CoNTINUED SPAN

January 1966 41

Memories of a Summer Night

M

episodes in the novel concern the magic of commonplace things as they strike Rufus's mind during solitary moments. "Waking in darkness," Agee wrote of the boy, "he saw the window. Curtains, a tall cloven wave, towered almost to the floor. Transparent, manifold, scalloped along their inward edges like the valves of a sea creature, they moved delectably on the air of the open window.

Where they were touched by the carbon light of the street lamp, they were as white as sugar. The extravagant foliage which had been wrought into them by machinery showed even more sharply white where the light touched, and elsewhere was black in the limp cloth ....

Where the light touched the leaves ANY SUCCESSFUL

they seemed to burn, a bitter green .... He heard the summer night. All the air vibrated like a fading bell.

Couplings clashed and conjoined; a switch engine breathed heavily. An auto engine bore beyond the edge of audibility the furious expletives of its incompetence. Hooves broached, along the hollow street, the lackadaisical rhythms of the weariest of clog dancers, and endless circles, narrow iron tyres grinded continuously after. Along the sidewalks, with incisive heels and leathery shuffle, young men and women advanced, retreated. A rocking chair betrayed reiterant strain, as of a defective lung; like a single note from a stupendous Jew's-harp, the chain of a porch swing twanged."

A Gateway to Unknown Worlds

IN

Agee recreates a trip he took to the Smoky Mountains with his parents and some friends. Deeply impressed with the smells, sights and sounds of this first great adventure, he lingered on them as he wrote of Rufus, coming with wide open eyes to the railroad station. "Next morning before daylight they all got up and went to the L&N Depot. ... A man came for them in an auto because there was no streetcar to the L&N. They had so much to carry that even he was given a box to carry.

They sat in the big room and it was full of people.

His mother told his Uncle Ted she liked it better than the Southern Depot because there were so many country folks and his father said he did too.

It smelled like chewing tobacco, and like a barn.

Some of the ladies wore sunbonnets and lots of the men wore old straw hats, not the flat kind. One lady was nursing her baby. They had a long time to wait for their train; his father said, 'Count on Mary and you won't never miss a train, but you may get the one the day before you aimed to,' and his mother said, 'Jay,' ... so he heard the man call several trains in his fine, echoing voice, and finally he started calling out a string of stations and his father got up saying, 'That's us,' and they got everything together ... the train pulled out and it was already broad daylight."

THE BOOK

Photographs

by ERNST HAAS Courtesy of LIFE

The grimy old railway station at Knoxville, with its cheap furniture and echoes of furious clashing of iron wheels, was an awesome spot to young Agee-a door to the great, unknown world. Cameraman Ernst Haas has captured the brute motion of the wheels, above, and the brooding lustre of the waiting"room, below, as Agee must have seen them. To the sensitive boy's overwrought fancy, these were haunted surroundings.

A Fateful Crash on the Way Home

HE

he was on the way home, about nine coming in towards town, and he heard an auto coming up from behind, terrifically fast, and coming nearer and nearer, and he thought, there's somebody that's sure got to get some place in a bad hurry. . . . All of a sudden, he said, he heard a perfectly terrifying noise, just a second or two, and then dead silence. He knew it must be whoever was in that auto and that they must be in bad trouble, so he turned around and drove back, about a quarter of a mile, he thinks, just the other side of Bell's Bridge. He told me he almost missed it altogether because there was nothing on the road and even though he'd kind of been expecting that and driving pretty slowly, looking off both sides of the road, he almost missed it because just next the bridge on that side, the side of the road is quite a steep bank. ...

Something caught in his lights and it was one of the wheels of the automobile .... It was still turning ....

The auto was upside down and Jay was just lying there on the ground beside it His clothes were hardly even rumpled ....

The man said somehow he was sure he was dead the minute he saw him.

He doesn't know how. Just some special kind of stillness." END SAID

0' clock,

It was dawn. Jay Follet used a ferryboat on his way home from his parents' place. "The flat craft rode against the water like a hand on a breast. The water mumbled a little. The violent sky shone gray."

Climax of Agee's story is the death of Jay Follet, Rufus's father. Coming home late from a trip which was unnecessary he speeds furiously in his car. Suddenly a cotter pin loosens. and the trip ends in tragic disaster.

LI

THE GRAPHICS

OF EVERYDAY

LIFE Good graphic design has raised advertising and selling to the level of art.

T

HE GRAPHIC arts range from the paintings of old masters to traffic signs at the street corner. They are among man's most potent means of communication with his fellow beings. The average citizen, however, is concerned mainly with the graphics of everyday life: magazines, books, advertisements, posters, record jackets and packages.

Never before in the United States has the art of the commonplace been livelier or less commonplace. As the U.S. economy has prospered, Americans have insisted that the accoutrements of life be not only useful, but handsome-indeed, be art. And as the graphic image has demonstrated its power as a selling factor, publishers, manufacturers and advertisers have turned with a new urgency to the graphic designer.

The graphic designer today must co-ordinate

and unify in his person an extraordinary variety of skills and functions. A creator himself, he must be highly receptive to advanced ideas in photography, type, illustration and layout. The modern designer has a vast array of tools at his command: papers of varying textural qualities, inks in a profusion of new colours, high-speed printing presses to reproduce his work with brilliant fidelity.

The examples of commercial art on this and the following pages are from the exhibit "Graphic Arts: U.S.A.," which is currently touring several Indian cities. Selected by the U.S. National Society of Art Directors, these items are typical products of the best talent in the field. They testify to the designer's creativity, to the exciting work that is being done and the big changes that are taking place in the graphic arts today.

The power of the graphic image as a marketing force has led to a new emphasis on good design.

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New techniques in printing, better inks and papers, fresh concepts in design and typography have all vastly enriched the vocabulary of commercial art.

THE

HERITAGE AND

THE

PROMISE

TilE $OUI1tD OF ItARlaEIl