SPAN: January 1975

SPAN A LEITER FROM THE PUBLISHER

2 6

Kissinger in India

by S.R. Madhu

As the Press Sees It The American Revolution as a Successful Revolution

by Irving Kristal

While Secretary Kissinger's late October VISIt to India is no longer headline news, we have seen fit to add extra pages to this issue in order to provide the thoughtful reader with something of a permanent record of that event. For what was said and done over those four days of intensive discussions will doubtlessly determine the thrust of IndoAmerican relations for some time to come. Perhaps the best indicator that those relations are on a rising curve is the invitation which the Prime Minister extended to President Ford to visit India, and Dr. Kissinger's acceptance of that invitation on behalf of the President.

The record of where the Secretary went, what he did and said and what was said to him is reviewed by SPAN's Assistant Managing Editor, S.R. Madhu, in the introduction to our special pages on the visit. "As the Press Sees It" serves up a sampling of U.S. and Indian press comment on the visit.

Excerpts from his New Delhi press conference [pages 47-48] provide significant insights into Secretary Kissinger's thinking, while the full text of his candid speech to the Indian Council .of World Affairs [pages 49-52] clearly reveals it to be a charter for the conduct of U.S. relations with India.

So much for the record. The real significance of the occasion is that both sides talked to each other, free of complexes, for the first time in a long time. To recall the words of the Joint Communique (since communiques are too seldom read): "The cordial and frank nature of the discussions during the Secretary's visit reflected the desire and interest of both countries in broadening the basis for their relationship and in strengthening the many contacts and ties between the Indian and American people."

Our front cover by distinguished artist M.F. Husain and Irving Kristol's article "The American Revolution as a Successful Revolution" both remind us that the year 1975 brings America to the eve of her Bicentennial Year. For on July 4, 1976, America will, of course, be celebrating 200 years of existence as an independent nation. .

The concept for Husain's rather startling painting evolved out of a discussion with SJ;>AN'sEditor Stephen Espie in which the artist said he would like to "Indianize" the American Revolution for our readers. Thus he has chosen to portray George Washington as counseled in battle by Arjuna. This struck a responsive chord, well-tuned to Kristol's article, a main point of which is that the American Revolutionary leaders, such as Washington, were plagued with doubts about the justice, the "rightness" of their cause-as was Arjuna on the battlefield of Kurukshetra. As seen by Husain, Arjuna and Washington had much in common. Said Husain: "They shared a common feeling against shedding the blood of their relatives, their cousins. Did not Washington say that the British were not really 'foreigners' but rather part of the same family-blood relatives?"

Thus, in the war chariot in the uniform of a general of the Continental Army, is George Washington. The figure in white is Arjuna the archer.

Little did the men of Valley Forge know that their leader was being counseled by Arjuna! Well, why not? -A.E.H. Faces of many races and nationalities (left) appear in Detroit's annual ethnic festival. See story on pages 28-29.

12 16 20

23 30 34 37

Detroit's Big Union: The United Auto Workers

by Ray Martin

.

40

42 47 49

'New Beginnings Between India and America'

by Dr. Henry A. Kissinger

53 Front cover: In this painting, the American Revolution is seen through the eyes of one ofIndia's most famous artists, M.F. Husain. For insights into Husain's imaginative interpretation, see the Letter From the Publisher (left).

Back cover: Young seal is one of 30,000 now living happily along the North American west coast. But this was not always so. Only a few decades back, elephant seals literally stood at the edge of extinction. For story, see page 53

Managing Editor: Carmen Kagat Assistant Managing Editor: S.R. Madhu. Editorial Stall': Mohammed Reyazuddin, Avinash Pasricha. Nirmal Sharma, Krishan Gabrani. M.M. Saha. Art Director: Nand Katya\. Art Stall': Gopi Gajwani, B. Roy Choudhury, Kanti Roy, Suhas Nimbalkar.

Chief of Production: Awtar S. Marwaha. Photographic Services: USIS Photo Lab. Published by the United States Information Service. 24 Kasturba Gandhi Marg, New Delhi-II0 001, on behalf of the American Embassy, New Delhi. The opinions expressed in this magazine do not necessarily reflect the views or policies of the United States Government. Printed by Arun Mehta at Vakil & Sons Private Ltd., Vakils House, Sprott Road, 18 Ballard Estate, Bombay-400 038.

Khanna. 3-Amar Photographs: Inside front cover-Bob Kunz, courtesy Friends magazine.2-R.N. Nath. 4-Pramod Kumar. 5-Ashit Mukherjee, R. N. Khanna. 7-courtesy. Sotheby Perle Bernet, N.Y. 10-courtesy State Capitol, Richmond, Virginia. 15-0.P. Sharma. 22-Charles Mendez. 23-William Albert Allard. 24-25-Chuck Ternes, courtesy Friends magazine. 25 bottom-General Motors Research Laboratories. 26-27-William Albert Allard. 28-29-Bob Kunz, courtesy Friends magazine. 30William Albert Allard. 34-Wide World (2). 35-courtesy Ford Motor Company. 43-Frank Wohl.

44-45 and 46 bot!om left-courtesy Fisher-Price Inc. 46-courtesy Edcom Systems Inc. (2).47,49R.N. Khanna. Inside back cover and back cover-Robert Evans. courtesy Exxon USA. Use of SPAN articles in other publications is encouraged, except when copyrighted. For permission, write to the Editor. Subscription: One year, 18 rupees; single copy, two rupees. For change of address, send old address from a recent SPAN envelope along with new address to A.K. Mitra, Circulation Manager, SPAN magazine, 24' Kasturba Gandhi Marg, New Delhi-II0 001.

KI~I~<t~~ We

have set a new

During the U.S. Secretary of State's visit to India a few weeks ago, SPAN's Assistant Managing Editor, S.R. Madhu, accompanied other journalists, Indian and American, covering this major event in Indo-U.S. relations. In the following account of the visit, Madhu tells where the Secretary went, what he did and said, and·what was said to him.

Strobes flashed, newsreel cameras whirred, reporters struggled for position. It was noon in New Delhi on October 28, 1974, and an international group of media representatives was recording a newsworthy moment-the meeting between visiting U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and India's Prime Minister, Mrs. Indira Gandhi. Undaunted by the blinding glare of TV lights, Mrs. Gandhi calmly answered a· volley of questions.

After a turbulent 10 minutes, Indian and American newsmen and photographers emerged from the Prime Minister's office-exultant though rather disheveled.

The excitement generated by the Kissinger-Gandhi meeting bore out G.K. Reddy's assertion in the Hindu that no visit by a foreign dignitary had "aroused as much anticipation" as that of the U.S. Secretary of State. The Kissinger visit will be remembered as a significant event in Indo-U.S. relations for two reasons: It marked a clear break from the past; it charted a new course for the future. Political observers in both India and the U.S. are talking of "a new chapter" . in Indo-American relations.

Secretary Kissinger arrived in New Delhi from Moscow on the evening of October 27 to a cordial welcome. Flags fluttered jn the .cool evening breeze.

VIPs sat expectant in a red-and-white shamiana. The sleek U.S. Air Force jet landed punctually at 6 p.m., and India's External Affairs Minister, Y.B. Chavan, greeted ~cretary Kissinger and introduced him to Agriculture and Irrigation Minister Jagjivan Ram. With the Secretary came his wife, Nancy Kissinger; American Ambassador to India Daniel P. Moynihan, who had flown to Moscow a few days earlier; Alfred L. Atherton, Jr., Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern and South Asian Affairs; Winston Lord, Director, Policy Planning Staff, State Department; Robert· Anderson, Secretary Kissinger's Special Assistant for Press Relations; L. Bruce Laingen, Acting Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern and South Asian

Affairs; and Robert B. Oakley of the National Security Council. Arriving with the Secretary's party were correspondents from the New York Times, the Washington Star, the news agencies AP and UPI, the weekly magazines Time and Newsweek, and ABC, CBS and NBC radio and television networks-to name only a few.

Ministers Chavan and Jagjivan Ram escorted Secretary Kissinger along the red carpet to a platform within the shamiana for an arrival statement. Such is Kissinger's reputation for providing "good copy" that reporters on the press bus were hoping for some apt phrase at the very start of the visit. There was one.

The two greatest democracies in the world, he said, had "rediscovered their common purpose."

Secretary Kissinger's first engagement was a dinner held that night in his honor

by Y.B. Chavan. Besides several ministers, the elite of India's administration was present. Kissinger greeted an old friend

with enthusiasm-former External Affairs Minister Sardar Swaran Singh. Photographers had a field day. From the moment the Kissingers arrived, they moved in a flood of electronic light.

Raising a toast to the Kissingers, Minister Chavan expressed confidence that the discussions with Kissinger would not only "remove past misunderstanding but also generate momentum for a better, more . mature and realistic relationship in the months and years ahead." He pointed out that in spite of occasional differences, India had maintained a dialogue with the U.S. "at all times and at all levels."

Expressing admiration for "the creative genius of the American people and their contribution to human progress," Minister Chayan said that India wished to promote co-operation with America in various fields, including trade, science and technology, education and culture. No country, h~ observed, could remain isolated

course for the future' On his October 27-30 visit to India, U.S. Secretary of Stilte Henry Kissinger conferred with Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi (far left) and laid a wreath at the Gandhi Samadhi at Rajghat (left). He also had discussions with many members of the Indian Cabinet including (below, from right tf) left) External Affairs Minister Y.B. Chavan, Agriculture and Irrigation Minister Jagjivan Ram, Industries and Civil Supplies Minister T.A. Pai, and Finance Minister C. Subramaniam.

or be totally self-sufficient.

In his reply, Secretary Kissinger said the American Ambassador in New Delhi "never lets me forget for a moment how important our relationship is; and he has worked with great dedication, sharing my own conviction, and President Ford's conviction, of the importance that we attach to close ties with India." He paid tribute also to the Indian Ambassador in Washington, T.N. Kaul.

Secretary Kissinger said that in recent years the United States, like India, had made many adjustments to new conditions.

"We are interested in building a worldwide structure of peace in which all nations feel they have a sense of participation, and a structure of peace which transcends the antagonisms of the period of the Cold War." In this structure, peace in the Indian subcontinent played a crucial role. "The United States strongly supports the Simla process. The United States feels that the development of

peace in the subcontinent, free of outside interference, on'the basis of equality and negotiation, is an essential prerequisite to peace in the world."

A varied cultural program followed the dinner. Three outstanding Indian dancers-Yamini Krishnamurthy, Uma Sharma and Jagoi Marup-entertained the Minister's guests.

The following day-October 28begati,¡fittingly, with homage to Mahatma Gandhi. The Kissingers laid a wreath at Rajghat. Devendra Kumar Gupta, secretary of the Gandhi Smarak Nidhi,showed them around the Rajghat complex and presented the visitors with books on the life and teachings of the Mahatma.

The first round of talks between India and the U.S. opened soon after. Minister Chavan led the Indian side. Other Indian representatives were Bipin Pal Das, Deputy Minister for External Affairs; P.N. Dhar, Secretary to the Prime Minister; Kewal Singh, Foreign Secretary; Ambas-

sador T.N. Kaul; and J.S. Teja, Joint Secretary, Americas Division, Ministry of External Affairs. Representing the U.S. were Secretary Kissinger; Ambassador Moynihan; Assistant Secretary Alfred L. Atherton, Jr.; Deputy Assistant Secretary L. Bruce Laingen; and Special Assistant Robert Anderson.

U.S. and Indian spokesmen told a press briefing that evening that the two sides had discussed bilateral relations, the situation in South Asia and the world scene. Did the questi()n of U.S. ,arms aid for Pakistan come up at the talks? Yes, the U.S. spokesman said. America had made it clear that it has no intention of contributing to an arms race in the subcontinent. The Iridian spokesman said: "We take such high-level assurances with all seriousness."

The Secretary's meeting with the Prime Minister took place at noon. Before their appointment, Mrs. Gandhi told newsmen that Indo-U.S. relations were good, "and we want to make them better."

Secretary Kissinger and Mrs. Gandhi talked for about an hour. Asked by reporters about the subjects covered, Mrs .. Gandhi said they did not discuss merely one topic-"It was a general review of many things."

The Prime Minister later was hostess at a lunch for the Kissingers at the Ashoka Hotel. Mrs. Kissinger had spent the morning visiting the Qutab Minar, other historical monuments nearby, and Hauz Khas, the "royal tank" constructed by Allauddin Khilji in the 12th century.

The afternoon of October 28 saw the establishment of the Indo-U.S. Joint Commission, which Minister Chavan lauded as a landmark in Indo-U.S.' relations.

The Commission, which aims at creating an institutional framework for wideranging co-operation between the two countries, is to meet at least once a year.

Minister Chavan and Secretary Kissinger head the Commission; senior officials will be members, and the assistance of experts outside government will be sought whenever necessary. Three subcommissions-on economics and commerce, science and technology, education and culture-were set up. They will hold their first meetings, in Washington and New Delhi, very soon.

In the economic and commercial field, the Commission will identify areas of co-operation in such fields as energy,

fertilizers, mineral development and flow of technology. It will conduct joint studies and recommend development programs.

It will stimulate two-way trade. It will promote investment in India and third countries consistent with the investment policies of India and the U.S. And it will strengthen co-operation among financial, industrial and commercial organizations in India and the U.S. In science and technology, the Commission will expand contacts and cooperation between American and Indian experts. It will hold bilateral seminars.

As a priority task, it will develop programs in energy, water management, ppstharvest technology, disease research and the use of space satellites for educational purposes and remote sensing.

In cultural and educational matters, the Commission will facilitate the interchange of ideas and individuals, and review American and Indian studies in the two countries. Some priority topics: quantitative methods in social science research; urban studies and planning; the relationship between resources and the environment.

The signing ceremony for the Joint Commission agreement was held in a conference room in the South Block of the Secretariat. Indian and American officials sat around a large circular table in the presence of press reporters, television crewS and photographers. Minister Chavan and Secretary Kissinger arrived separately around 4 p.m.

Speaking after the brief signing ceremony, Minister Chavan said the agreement would ac.celerate the growth of Indo-U.S. trade and would provide institutional channels for an exchange of ideas and knowledge.

"Much still remain$ to be done," Chavan added, "in promoting a better economic relationship between India and the United States." India could step up exports to the United States, and America could share its technological expertise and capital resources with India.

"In terms of global trade," Chavan said, "America is one of our biggest partners, but Indian exports form only 0.7 per cent of America's world imports, and India has at present an adverse balance of trade .... If we export more to the United States, we will be in a better position to import more from the United States."

Trade apart, Chavan said, India and the U.S. could co-operate in developing energy resources, in improving communi-

cations, in promoting agriculture. "Bridges of knowledge and understanding" could be built between India and the U.S. in science and technology. "Cultural and educational co-operation provided under the Joint Commission could add another dimension to an area where there has already been substantial co-operation between the two countries."

Secretary Kissinger said: "We are only at the beginning of a period of co-operation whose possibilities have only begun to be exploited .... India is only the 26th largest trading partner of the United States-a totally unnatural condition, which these commissions hopefully give us an opportunity to rectify."

The U.S. Secretary of State held a second round of talks with the Prime Minister soon after the Joint Commission ceremony. These talks also lasted about an hour. The two leaders thus had the time and the opportunity to exchange views on several bilateral and other matters.

Later in the day, the Kissingers called on the President, Mr. Fakhruddin Ali Ahmed, and Begum Ahmed, at Rashtrapati Bhavan.

A few hours later, at the Kamani auditorium, Secretary Kissinger made a speech [see page 49] that is perhaps destined to become a landmark in IndoAmerican relations. By any account it was one of the best-attended and bestpublicized speeches ever delivered in the capital. Although the sponsors, the Indian Council of World Affairs (ICWA), had added chairs to the packed 650-seat auditorium, nearly 100 distinguished invitees stood all through the function.

Several score sat on the verandah outside, viewing the proceedings on television.

The Chiefs of Staff of the Indian Army, Navy and Air Force were also present.

So were Ambassadors, top government officials, and university vice chancellors.

Dr. H.N. Kunzru, ICWA president, introduced the speaker.

Immediately. after the Kamani auditorium speech, Secretary Kissinger met some of India's foremost business leaders at a reception given by the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry (FICC!), the Indo-American Chamber of Commerce (IACC), and the Associated Chambers of Commerce and Industry of India (ACCI). Some 40 industrialists, including Harish Mahindra, K.K. Birla and N.S. Bhat, talked about trade with the U.S. Secretary of State.

Dr. Kissinger made the following points

at the FICCI reception: .A strong and developing India is essential for the peace of the subcontinent and the world. .The passage of the U.S. trade bill will help expand Indo-U.S. trade. The U.S. Government will foster trade with India and will assist as far as possible in India's development. .Unless controlled, inflation might well trigger a world economic collapse-. which, of course, will harm everyone, producers and consumers alike, those who set the prices as well as those who have to pay them. .Developing and industrialized countries must unite to fight inflation.

Replying to a question, Dr. Kissinger said: "A powerful India is in the interest of world peace and we have no reason to fear it. ... " Secretary Kissinger ended his busy day as host of a dinner in honor of Minister Chavan at Roosevelt House, the official residence of the American Ambassador. "We have spent a very fruitful day today," he told Minister

Chavan. "We have had very good talks.

And we have formed the Indo-American Commission which, I am confident, will perform a significant service in the fields for which it has been designed. But I believe that the real significance of this occasion is that we talked to each other, for the first time in a long while, free of complexes. We now understand that when we deal with each other, the United States does not do favors for India, but deals with India on the basis of a common interest. And we are not here to seek moral approbation from India, because we now realize that what ties us together is a. common perception of the kind of world in which both of us can be secure and both of us can prosper. These in-

throne. That night, he attended a second dinner given by Minister Chavan at which he was joined by Mrs. Kissinger, who had spent the day at the Taj Mahal and Fatehpur Sikri.

A Joint Communique on Secretary Kissinger's visit issued on October 29 announCed that the Indian President and the Prime Minister had invited President Commission. "I look forward to our Ford to visit India in 1975. Secretary working together in this and other spheres Kissinger accepted the invitation on behalf of President Ford. The commuof activity," he said.

Emphasizing the crucial nature of nique also said that there is no conflict global economic problems, Minister of interests between India and the U.S., Chavan said: that outside powers should not intervene "In today's world, economics is a in the affairs of South Asia, that. comatter of supreme importance to states- operative action by all nations 'is necesmen and not specialists alone. There is sary to halt deterioration of the world much that our two countries can do in economy, and that India will use nuclear promoting a new world economic order technology for peaceful purposes only.

Secretary Kissinger's last public engagebased on the aspirations. and interests ment in India, on the¡morning of October of all nations .... We in India are fully press conferconscious of our responsibility in the 30 was-appropriately-a solution of economic problems, many of ence at the Vigyan Bhavan attended by which are not of our own making. We representatives from scores of Indian also know that the major effort in achiev- and foreign media:. Foreign Secretary Secretary ing economic growth and self-reliance Kewal Singh, introducing has to be our own. At the same time, Kissinger, described him as "perhaps we welcome co-operation with other the most eminent personality in intercountries in the solution of urgent national diplomacy today." The Secretary fielded a variety of questions [see page 47] problems."

"It is our objective," concluded Chavan, with his customary clarity, wit and "to build a lasting structure of peace, forensic skill. stability and co-operation based on the How did Indian journalists, who have independence, sovereignty and equality read and¡ heard so much about Henry of all nations. This is also your objective. Kissinger, react to him?

We are confident that in the coming One reporter in the press bus said: months and years, we can both work "I am surprised he is so human. I had together toward these common goals." got the impression that he is some kind On October 29, Secretary Kissinger of a reasoning machine, a slave driver. called on three senior Indian MinistersBut I found him very courteous and Finance Minister C. Subramaniam, Agri- considerate to those around him. I heard culture and Irrigation Minister Jagjivan him ask Darius Jhabvala of the Boston Ram, Defence Minister Swaran Singh.

Globe, 'Did you get your cable through Subramaniam told newsmen later that last night? Did you have any problems?' he gave Secretary Kissinger an idea of He knew all the pressmen in his party the state of the Indian economy, parti- by their first names." cularly the impact of inflation and oil Another reporter had high praise for prices on India's balance of payments. Kissinger's felicity of expression. "Even He also discussed the question of Ameri- when he speaks off the cuff, he doesn't can investment in India. American capital, need to be edited." he said, could play a useful role in the At II a.m., Chavan saw Kissinger off fields of offshore oil exploration and at the airport with a warm embrace. fertilizers. Jagjivan Ram apprised SecreWhat did the visit achieve? tary Kissinger of India's food situation.

As Dr. Kissinger told the people of Swaran Singh discussed Indo-U.S. bilat- India over All-India Radio: "We have eral relations in general. erased many past problems and agreed Secretary Kissinger made his¡ first and on future opportunities. We have reonly sightseeing trip that afternoon; affirmed the friendship which has existed he visited Delhi's Red For,t, where he between the Indian and American peoples watched traditional artisans at work and the basic interests we share. We have restoring a part of the Fort's ancient set a new course for the future."

0

Far left: Dr. Kissinger and Ambassador Moynihan at the first round of talks with Indian Government officials, October 28.

Left (top): Mrs. Kissinger at Taj Mahal. Left (bottom): Chavan sees Kissinger off at the airport on October 30.

tangible qualities, I believe, will be even more important than the substantive results that have become apparent today or that will be reflected in the communique. The exchanges which I have had the pleasure of conducting with the Foreign Minister and the extended talks with the Prime Minister will be continued in the months ahead."

Secretary Kissinger said he looked forward to the Washington visit of Minister Chavan, "and we will arrange as relaxed and reflective a schedule for him as he has for me!"

In his reply at the Roosevelt House dinner, Minister Chavan expressed confidence that the two countries would make a success of the Indo-U.S. Joint

In one editorial, the Christian Science largely responsible for the change in the American view of a world divided into Monitor said: Secretary Kissinger's visit to irreconcilable ideological power blocs."

India "takes on special importance in The¡ Times of India quoted liberally view of the changing patterns of power from the speech and ended with the in South Asia ..... In New Delhi, Dr. "The long night of Indo-American bickerings appeared to have ended in a hope that "the U.S. has at last laid the Kissinger's wisely conciliatory remarks new dawn of understanding between the gave credit to Indian international attighost of the late Mr. John Foster Dulles." two countries." This is how the Indian The Secretary of State's October 30 tudes for fostering a U.S. policy of Express assessed the October 27-30 visit press conference [see excerpts on pages endeavoring to improve relatipnships with to India of the U.S. Secretary of State, 47-48] was also widely discussed in all countries. These would not be based Dr. Henry A. Kissinger.

Indian newspapers. Bombay's Free Press on dependency."

Though less poetic, other Indian press In the Washington Post, a news disJournal wrote as follows: comm~nts followed similar lines.

"Even if Dr. Kissinger was evasive on patch from New Delhi reported: "The The Times of India said: "It seems that the question of arms supplies to Pakistan United States and India set the seal on the U.S.A. and India have put behind the and on the Diego Garcia base, one should reconciliation ... by pledging to prevent misunderstandings of the past, and in- accept on its face value his assurance the spread of nuclear weapons and to augurated a new chapter of friendly and that his country would not promote an co-operate in fighting world hunger." co-operative relations."

The Washington Star-News observed arms race in the subcontinent .and also The Motherland said that "the two appreciate his clear statement that 'there editorially ~ "It could have been a sticky decades of mistrust and recrimination ... was absence of identity of views' on three days for our jet-propelled Secretary appeared to give way to mutual underDiego Garcia. Perhaps the two state- of State in New Delhi. The Indians are standing, respect for each other, and ments, couched as they are in diplomatic the touchiest people in the world .... meaningful co-operation." language, are meant to convey to India All of the subjects which Henry Kissinger These views were widely shared by the that the arms supplies to Pakistan will came to discuss-food, arms for, Pakistan, language press throughout India. A typical depend on India's own acquisition of nuclear proliferation, American-Indian example was the comment in the Tamil arms, and that Diego Garcia is part of relations-had to be rated as potentially daily Swadesamitran that "the friendship the U.S. global strategy which cannot perilous .... Kissinger, on the whole, and goodwill that marked the Kennedy and will not be changed merely because seems to have threaded his way through era are reappearing." The Gujarati daily some littoral states like India disagreed the diplomatic minefield with customary delicacy and finesse."

Bombay Samachar referred to "the bridge with it."

One of the most important U.S. press of understanding that has been built by Some newspapers commented on the the visit."

Indian communists' reaction to the visit. comments was an editorial in the New York Times, which said: This is not to say that press reaction Thus, Swatantra Bharat, the Lucknow "Secretary of State Kissinger's VISIt was unanimously favorable. In the opinion Hindi daily, remarked: "If Russia and of the Patriot, "Dr. Henry Kissinger's China, in view of their supreme national to the Indian subcontinent has begun visit to this country has been a flop." interest, can extend the hand of friend- the long-overdue process of restoring In an editorial titled "Lies One After ship toward the United States, why American priorities in South Asia to Another," Kalantar of Calcutta observed should Indian leftists object if India does their proper order ....

"What is needed now is the normalithat "U.S. imperialist policy is to fish the same in its national interest?" in troubled waters by keeping tension Such effusive Indian press tributes to zation of relations, the initiation of a intact in the subcontinent."

Kissinger the Man as "wizard" and dialogue, an effort on both sides to So much for the over-all assessments. "miracle-worker" prompted G.K. Reddy accommodate inevitable differences and Various editorials also commented on of the Hindu to put things in perspective the resumption of American food and on the more specific aspects of the visit. by reminding us that: "The main achieve- developmental aid-but The Financial Express said that "the ment of Dr. Henry Kissinger ... is the limited scale that would conform to a new most significant achievement of Dr. reassuring impression he has left behind realism on both sides and the reduced Kissinger's visit is the agreement to set up that the new Indo-American understand- American capability ....

"India's importance as a symbol of a Joint Commission" because "it will ing he has established is not a fragile ensure a continuous dialogue between one-man accomplishment, but something political freedom, maintained in the face New Delhi and Washington." that can become the cornerstone of of economic poverty, does not relieve New Delhi of the requirement for reIndian editorial writers found much future U.S. policies in the ... region." sponsible policies, particularly in nuclear to praise in Dr. Kissinger's October 28 and energy affairs, and Washington must address sponsored by the Indian Council continue to press for them. But the United of World Affairs [see pages 49-52]. .

U.S. PRESS COMMENT States, without the misty-eyed illusions Describing the speech as "brilliant," Influential American newspapers carried of the early 1960s or the moralizing of the Financial Express went on to say: "Dr. Kissinger handsomely acknowledged several editorials and wide news coverage the 1950s, needs to also move now to the fact that Pandit Nehru's 'vision' was of Dr. Kissinger's four days in New Delhi. put relations on a normal footing." 0 INDIAN PRESS COMMENT ON KISSINGER VISIT

~ ~

TheAmericanRevolut!on ~. as a Successful RevolutIon ~

The year 1975 marks the 200th anniversary of the beginning of the American Revolution-a bicentennial which SPAN commemorates with this article by one of America's most distinguished social historians. The American Revolution was successful, Kristol says, because its leaders tempered enthusiasm with skepticism, because its battles were relatively bloodless, and because it did not devour its children and leave in its wake a reign of terror.

E

veryrevolution unleashes tides of passion, and the American Revolution was no exception. But it was exceptional in the degree to which it was able to subordinate these passions to serious and nuanced thinking about fundamental problems of political philosophy. The most fascinating aspect of the American Revolution is the severe way it kept questioning itself about the meaning of what it was doing. Enthusiasm there certainly was-a revolution is impossible without enthusiasmbut this enthusiasm was tempered by doubt, introspection, anxiety, skepticism. This may strike us as a very strange state of mind in which to make a revolution; and yet it is evidently the right state of mind for making a successful revolution.

The American Founding Fathers understood that republican self-government could not exist if humanity did not possess-at

some moments and to a fair degree-the traditional "republican virtues" of self-control, self-reliance and a disinterested concern for the public good. They also understood that these virtues did not exist everywhere, at all times, and that there was no guarantee of their natural preponderance. The founders thought that selfgovernment was a chancy and demanding enterprise and that successful government in a republic was a most difficult business.

In contrast, the belief is widespread in the United States today that republican self-government is an easy affair, that it need only be instituted for it to work on its own, and that when such govern- ~ ment falters, it must be as a consequence of personal incompetence Above: Emanuel Leutze's painting "Washington Crossing the Delaware" depicts one of the most dramatic battles of the American Revolution.

'What the American Revolution was trying to do ... was no small thing. It was nothing less than the establishment, for the first time since ancient Rome, of a large republican nation.' so-called leaders are in fact its captives and ultimately its victims.

A revolution, in contrast, is a political phenomenon. It aims to revise and reorder the political arrangements of a society and is therefore the work of the political ego rather than of the political ** * * * In what sense can the American Revolution be called a success- id. A revolution is a practical exercise in political philosophy, not ful revolution? And if we agree that it was successful, why was an existential spasm of the social organism. It requires an attentive prudence, a careful calculation of means and ends, a spirit it successful?

To begin at the beginning: The American Revolution was suc- of sobriety-the kind of spirit exemplified by that calm, legalistic cessful in that those who led it were able, in later years, to look document, the Declaration of Independence. All this is but anback in tranquillity at what they had wrought and to say that it other way of saying that a successful revolution cannot be govwas good. This was a revolution that did not devour its children: erned by the spirit of the mob. It may sound paradoxical, but it The men who made the revolution were the men who went on to nevertheless seems to be the case that only a self-disciplined people create the new political order, who then held the highest elective can dare undertake so radical a political enterprise as a revolupositions in this order and who all died in bed. Not very romantic, tion. This is almost like saying that a successful revolution must perhaps; indeed positively prosaic; but it is this prosaic quality of be accomplished by a people who want it but do not desperately the American Revolution that testifies to its success. It is the need it. One may even put the case more strongly: A successful pathos and poignancy of unsuccessful revolutions that excite the revolution is best accomplished by a people who do not really poetic temperament; statesmanship that successfully accomplishes want it at all but find themselves reluctantly making it. The Amerits business is a subject more fit for prose. The American Revolu- ican Revolution was exactly such a reluctant revolution.

The present-day student of revolutions will look in vain for tion did not give rise to the pathetic and poignant myth of "the any familiar kind of revolutionary situation in the American revolution betrayed." It spawned no literature of disillusionment; it left behind no grand hopes frustrated, no grand expectations colonies prior to 1776. The American people at that moment were the most prosperous in the world and lived under the freest instiunsatisfied, no grand illusions shattered.

The American Revolution was also successful in another im- tutions to be found anywhere in the world. Their quarrel with the portant respect: It was a mild and relatively bloodless revolution. British Crown was, in its origins, merely over the scope of colonial A war was fought, to be sure, and soldiers died in that war; but self-government and hardly anyone saw any good reason why this the rules of civilized warfare, as then established, were for the quarrel should erupt into a war of independence. It was only after most part quite scrupulously observed by both sides. There were this war got under way that the American people decided that this was a good opportunity to make a revolution as well-that is, no revolutionary tribunals dispensing "revolutionary justice"; there was no reign of terror; there were no bloodthirsty proclama- to establish a republican form of government.

One does not want to make the American Revolution a more tions by the Continental Congress. Tories, loyal to England, were dispossessed of their property and many were rudely hustled off prosaic affair than it was. This was a revolution-a real oneinto exile; but so far as I have been able to determine, not a single and it was infused with a spirit of excitement and innovation.

Tory was executed for harboring counterrevolutionary opinions. After all, what the American Revolution was trying to do, once it got under way, was no small thing. It was nothing less than the hat kind of revolution is that, we ask ourselves? To establishment, for the first time since ancient Rome, of a large which many will reply that it could not have been much republican nation; and the idea of re-establishing under modern of a revolution, after all-at best a shadow of the real conditions the glory that had been Rome's could hardly fail to thing, which is always turbulent and bloody and shatter- be intoxicating. This revolution did indeed have grand-even ing of body and soul. Well, the possibility we have to consider is millenial-expectations as to the future role of this new nation in that it was successful precisely because it wasn't that kind of re- both the political imagination and the political history of the human race. But certain things have to be said about these large volution and that it is we rather than the American revolutionaries expectations if we are to see them in proper perspective. who have an erroneous conception of what a revolution is.

Political theorist Dr. Hannah Arendt, in her book On Revoluhe main thing is that the millenarian tradition in America tion, makes an important distinction between rebellion and revolong antedates the Revolution and is not intertwined lution. A rebellion is a metapolitical event, emerging out of a with the idea of revolution itself. It was the Pilgrim Fathers, radical dissatisfaction with the human condition as experienced not the Founding Fathers, who first announced that this by the mass of the people, demanding instant liberation from this was God's country, that the American people had a divine miscondition, an immediate transformation of all social and economic sion to accomplish, that this people had been "chosen" to create circumstance, a prompt achievement of an altogether "better life" in an altogether "better world." The spirit of rebellion is a some kind of model community for the rest of mankind. This spirit of desperation-a desperate rejection of whatever exists, a belief was already so firmly established by the time of the Revodesperate aspiration toward some kind of utopia. A rebellion is lution that it was part and parcel of our political orthodoxy, more a sociological event than a political action: It is governed serving to legitimate an existing "American way of life" and most by a blind momentum that sweeps everything before it, and its of the institutions associated with that way of life. or malfeasance by elected officials. Perhaps nothing reveals better than these different perspectives the intellectual distance that has been traveled from the era of the Revolution.

W

T

To this traditional millenarianism the Revolution added the hope that the establishment of republican institutions would inaugurate a new and happier political era for all mankind. This hope was frequently expressed enthusiastically, in a kind of Messianic rhetoric, but the men of the Revolution-most of them, most of the time-did not permit themselves to become bewitched by that rhetoric. They certainly saw republicanism as the wave of the future, but self-government, as they understood it, presupposed a certain way of life, and this in turn presupposed certain qualities on the part of the citizenry-qualities then designated as republican virtues-that would make self-government possible. imilarly, though one can find a great many publicists during the Revolution, who insisted that, with the severance of ties from Britain, the colonies had reverted to a Lockean "state of nature" and were now free to make a new beginning for all mankind and to create a new political order that would mark a new stage in human history-though such assertions were popular enough, it would be a mistake to take them too seriously. The fact is that Americans had encountered their state of nature generations earlier and had made their social compact at that time.

To perceive the true purposes of the American Revolution it is wise to ignore some of the more grandiloquent declamations of the moment and to look at the kinds of political activity the Revolution unleashed. This activity took the form of constitutionmaking, above all. In the months and years immediately following the Declaration of Independence all of the original 13 states drew up constitutions. These constitutions are interesting in three respects. First, they involved relatively few basic changes in existing political institutions and almost no change at all in legal, social or economic institutions. Second, most of the changes that were instituted had the evident aim of weakening the power of government, especially of the executive. Third, in no case did any of these state constitutions tamper with the traditional system of local self-government; indeed they could not, since it was this traditional system of local self-government that created and legitimized the constitutional conventions themselves.

In short, the Revolution reshaped American political institutions in such a way as to make them more responsive to popular opinion and less capable of encroaching upon the personalliberties of the citizen-liberties that long antedated the new constitutions and that in no way could be regarded as the creation or consequence of revolution. Which is to say that the purpose of this revolution was to bring the new nation's political institutions into a more perfect correspondence with an actual American way of life that no one even dreamed of challenging. This restructuring, as we should now call it, because it put the possibility of republican self-government once again on the political agenda of Western civilization, was terribly exciting to Europeans as well as Americans.

But for the Americans involved in this historic task it was also terribly frightening. It is fair to say that no other revolution in modern history made such relatively modest innovations with such an acute sense of anxiety. The Founding Fathers were well aware that if republicanism over the centuries had become such a rare form of government, there must be good reasons behind this fact. Republican government, they realized, must be an exceedingly difficult regime to m,aintain-it must have grave inherent problems. And so they were constantly scurrying to their

S

I

libraries, ransacking classical and contemporary political authors, trying to discover why republics fail, and endeavoring to construct a new political science relevant to American conditions that would give this new republic a fair chance of succeeding.

That new political science was eventually to be embodied in The Federalist Papers, the only original work of political theory ever produced by a revolution and composed by successful revolutionaries. And the fact that very few Americans have ever felt the need seriously to study The Federalist Papers, and that Europeans-or in our own day Asians and Africans-have barely heard of them, tells us how inadequately the American Revolution is understood and how distant the real American Revolution has become from the idea of revolution by which we moderns are now possessed.

This idea of revolution is what Dr. Arendt calls rebellion.

Its spirit is the spirit of undiluted, enthusiastic, free-floating Messianism: It will be satisfied with nothing less than a radical transformation of the human condition. It is an idea and a movement that is both metapolitical and subpolitical-above and below politics-because it finds the political realm itself too confining for its ambitions. Metapolitically it is essentially a religious phenomenon, seized with the perennial promise of redemption.

Subpolitically it is an expre~sion of the modern technological mentality, confident of its power to control and direct all human processes as we have learned to control and direct the processes of nature. he French Revolution was the kind of modern revolution I have been describing; the American Revolution was not.

The French Revolution promised not only a reformation of France's political institutions but far more than that.

It promised, for instance-as practically all revolutions have promised since-the abolition of poverty. The American Revolution promised no such thing, in part because poverty was not such a troublesome issue in this country, but also, one is certain, because the leaders of the revolution understood what their contemporary Adam Smith understood and what we today have some difficulty in understanding: namely, that poverty is abolished by economic growth, not by economic redistribution-there is never enough to distribute-and that rebellions, by creating instability and uncertainty, have mischievous consequences for economic growth. Similarly, the French Revolution promised a condition of "happiness" to its citizens under the new regime, whereas the American Revolution promised merely to permit the individual to engage in the "pursuit of happiness."

It should not be surprising, therefore, that in the war of ideologies that has engulfed the 20th century the United States is at a disadvantage. This disadvantage does not flow from any weakness on its part; it is not, as some say, because Americans have forgotten their revolutionary heritage and therefore have nothing to say to a discontented and turbulent world. They have, indeed, much to say, only it is not what their contemporaries want to hear-it is not even what they themselves want to hear, and in that sense it max be corr~ct to claim they have forgotten their revolutionary heritage.

America's revolutionary message-and it is a message, not of the Revolution itself, but of the American political tradition from the Mayflower to the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution-is that a self-disciplined people can create a political community in which an ordered liberty will promote both eco-

T

'The American Revolution did not give rise to the pathetic and poignant myth of "the revolution betrayed" ... it left behind no grand hopes frustrated, no grand expectations unsatisfied.' nomic prosperity and political participation. To the teeming masses of other nations the American political tradition says: To enjoy the fruits of self-government you must first cease being "masses" and become a "people," attached to a common way of life, sharing common values and existing in a condition of mutual trust and sympathy as between individuals and even social classes.

It is a distinctly odd kind of revolutionary message, by 20thcentury criteria-so odd that it seems not revolutionary at all, and yet so revolutionary that it seems utterly utopian. What the 20th century wants to hear is the grand things that a new government will do for the people who put their trust in it. What the American political tradition says is that the major function of government is to supervise the orderly arrangement of society and that a free people does not make a covenant or social contract with its government, or with the leaders of any "movement," but among themselves. the n end the American political tradition is based on a proposition and a premise. The proposition is that the best national government is, to use a phrase the Founding Fathers werefond of, "mild government." The premise is that you can only achieve mild government if you have a solid bedrock oflocal self-government, so that the responsibilities of national government are limited in scope. And a corollary of this premise is that such a bedrock of local self-government can only be achieved by a people who-through the shaping influence of religion, education and their own daily experience-are capable of governing themselves.

Does this conception of politics have any relevance to the conditions in which people today live in large areas of the worIdthe so-called underdeveloped areas, especially? Weare inclined, J think, to answer instinctively in the negative; but that answer may itself be a modern ideological prejudice. We take it for granted that if a people live in comparative poverty, they are necessarily incapable of the kind of self-discipline and sobriety that makes for effective self-government in their particular communities. Mind you, I am not talking about starving people, who are in a prepolitical condition and whose problem is to get a strong and effective government of almost any kind. I am talking about comparatively poor people. Many of America's frontier communities, at the time of the Revolution and for decades afterward, were poor by any standard; and yet this poverty was not, for the most part, inconsistent with active self-government. It is alwaysbetter not to be so poor, but poverty need not be a pathological condition, and political pathology is not an inevitable consequence of poverty-just as political pathology is not inevitably abolished by prosperity. Poor people can cope with their poverty in many different ways; they are people, not sociological creatures; in the end they will cope as their moral and political convictions tell them to cope; and these convictions, in turn, will be formed by the expectations that their community addresses to them-expectations that they freely convert into obligations.

I

* * * * *

It would not be fair to conclude, however, that the American political tradition is flawless and that it is only its heirs who are to blame for the many problems U.S. society is grappling with.

The American Revolution was a successful revolution, but there is no such thing, either in one's personal life or in a nation's history, as unambiguous success. The legacy of the American Revolution, and of the entire political tradition associated with it, is problematic in all sorts of ways.

The major problematic aspect of this tradition has to do with the relationship of the "citizen" fo the "common man." And the difficulties in defining this relationship are best illustrated by the fact that though the United States has been a representative democracy for two centuries now, it has never developed an adequate theory of representation. More precisely, it has developed two contradictory theories of representation, both of which can claim legitimacy within the American political tradition and both of which were enunciated-often by the same people-during the Revolution. The one sees the public official as a "common man" who has a mandate to reflect the opinions of the majority; the other sees the public official as a somewhat uncommon man-a more-than-common man, if you will-who because of his talents and character is able to take a larger view of the public interest than the voters who elected him or the voters who failed to defeat him. One might say that the first is a democratic view of the legislator, the second a republican view. The American political tradition has always had a kind of double vision on this whole problem, which in turn makes for a bewildering moral confusion.

Half the time politicians are regarded as, in the nature of things, probably corrupt and certainly untrustworthy; the other half of the time they are denounced for failing to be models of integrity and rectitude. But politicians are pretty much like the rest of us and tend to become the kinds of people they are expected to be.

The Founding Fathers perceived that their new nation was too large, too heterogeneous, too dynamic, too mobile for it to govern itself successfully along strict republican principles, and they had no desire at all to see it governed along strict democratic principles, since they did not have that much faith in the kinds of "common men" likely to be produced by such a nation. So they created a new form of popular government, to use one of their favorite terms, that incorporated both republican and democratic principles in a complicated and ingenious way. This system has lasted for two centuries, which means it has worked very well indeed. But in the course of that time people have progressively forgotten what kind of system it is and why it works as well as it does.

So it would seem that 200 years after the American Revolution its heirs are in a sense victims of its success. They imperfectly comprehend the political tradition out of which it issued, and the political order it helped to create. The American Revolution certainly merits celebration. But it would be reassuring if a part of that celebration were to consist, not merely of pious cliches, but of a serious and sustained effort to achieve a deeper and more widespread understanding of just what it is Americans are celebrating.

0 0/ Urban Values at New York University, is coeditor 0/ the Public Interest magazine and one 0/ the members 0/ the Wall Street Journal's board 0/ contributors. He is the author 0/ many books including On the Democratic Idea in America.

About the Author: Irving Kristol, Professor

Soldiers raise the American flag (opposite page) in "Storming a Redoubt" by Louis Eugene Lami. The painting depicts an incident during the 1781 battle 0/ Yorktown, in which General Washington defeated Lord Cornwallis in the last major military engagement 0/ the American Revolution.

11

RELIGION IN AMERICA "We are a religious people .... " The United States Supreme Court made this observation in 1952 and reaffirmed it in 1963. Without question, most Americans would agree with the judgment. More than 95 per cent of them say they believe in God. Three out of five citizens are members of a church or synagogue, and two out of five, when polled, claim to have attended worship within the previous seven days.

More specifically, the latest count of membership of American religious groups showed 129.4 million persons affiliated with 79 different denominations, many of which are further broken down into subgroups whose practices may differ only a bit, or quite a lot, from each other. The largest single denomination was the Roman Catholic Church with more than 48 million members.

The various Jewish branches aggregate about 5.7 million. The rest, for the most part, belong to Protestant churches, with the 27.3 million Baptists the largest.

Religion has been part and parcel of the American experience since colonists first started coming to the New World. And from

As the U.S. approaches its Bicentennial, the author finds that religion still plays an important part in the lives of most Americans-such as the typical family above, which offers a prayer of thanks to God every mealtime.

that beginning, various denominations have existed throughout the land. From the frosty theology of New England through the warmer, more relaxed cosmology of the Southern colonies, religion had been so early ingrained in the American consciousness that it would be surprising if this citizenry did not consider itself a religious people.

Not all observers have agreed or would agree with this picture Americans have of

themselves. These observers see the people of the United States as being very much at home in the world, preoccupied with material things, little moved by spiritual affairs. Yet visitors to America have learned that how the nation conceives of itself shows up in how it acts. Whoever lingers for a while in the United States will also see why it is that the population considers itself to be religious.

The American landscape and skyscape are dotted with the towers and steeples of temples, its inner-city streets are marked by storefront churches, its suburban avenues lead to houses of worship.

That America should pay much attention to religion arouses surprise. The nation, after all, was born two centuries ago, at a time when much of Europe had begun to see a decline of interest in churchgoing.

When explorers first reached Western Hemisphere shores almost five centuries ago, they brought with them faiths which largely replaced those of the natives, and these faiths still shape much of the map of Western reli-" gion. But the same explorers were also venturers who were interested in the promise of

this world more than in the promise of another world to come. During the colonial age, there had already been periods of decline in spiritual concern. While many colonists had come for religious freedom or to go on a spiritual "errand into the wilderness," their sons and daughters often forgot the original purpose. At the end of the 18th century perhaps only five to 10 per cent of them were church members.

While the new nation's Constitution guaranteed freedom of religion, it did not mention God. And by the early 19th century legal support of religion was withdrawn and churches were disestablished by law-meaning that they were no longer supported by the government. From that time on, they have been forced to rely on the support of members. Predictions of further decline were frequent and plausible.

What happened to reverse the trend and to set America on a different course? No one can give a firm and sure answer, for the causes are complex and it is difficult to know why people make the decisions they do about matters of the heart. But some reasons do make more sense than others.

'Most apparent was the vitality that resulted from the fact that the churches were "on their own" and forced to compete. The idea of competition is in conflict with some Christian and Jewish ideals. But it did serve to inspire tremendous activity and made it possible for leaders to offer many options to the public. Those who prefer traditional, formal worship in the atmosphere of historic chants, the aura of incense, the setting of stained glass, will find it in America. Those who prefer to worship in new tents or old stores will also find, in America, environments for their more simple expressions.

Revivalism was a second factor. Throughout the centuries religions have often stimulated periods of renewal or piety. But American revivalism took its own, new character, and was related both to the spirit of competition and to the need frontier people had for spiritual emotional outlets. At the beginning of the 19th century the downward trend in church participation was turned around as in countless communities a circuit-rider (that is, a preacher who traveled from town to town) would dismount from his horse, open a Bible, attract a crowd, and preach the word of Jesus Christ.

A third factor that is frequently cited has to do with the success immigrant groups found in rallying the faithful. Many people who left their homelands for the U.S. became more, not less, involved with churches.

For example, while there were only about 25,000 Roman Catholics in a population of four to 4.5 million at the time of the nation's birth, Catholic emigrants from Ireland and the continent began to arrive by the millions in the 1840s. Most of them had to settle in the crowded cities. Many of them had been casual Catholics in Europe, but what had been a matter of habit for them in old homelands became a matter of intention in America. They brought their pennies to build huge (if often gloomy) churches.

In the middle of the 19th century, continental Protestants also began to arrive by the millions. They spoke foreign languages in English-speaking America; often, they had to migrate to an undeveloped interior. But these pioneers also found that religion held them together. Worship ennobled their lives and churches offered them a scene for social activities.

The latter part of that century saw the arrival for the first time of millions of people from Eastern Europe. Between 1881 and 1924, about 2.3 million Jews came, the majority of them from Russia and Poland. The synagogue provided a place of meeting where scattered Jews could come together. Another Jargeand sometimes overlooked-Christian group was also part of this migration. Eastern Orthodox Christians, whose members make up almost one-sixth of the worldwide Christian church, began to come in substantial numbers around the beginning of the 20th century.

They and Western Christians had had separate histories after the great schism of 1054 A.D., and neither Roman Catholics nor Protestants knew the Orthodox well.

By 1916, with the new influx, there were approximately 100,000 Russian Orthodox and a similar number of Greek Orthodox faithful in the United States. That number has grown to more than two million at present.

Long isolated by language, by the fact that they congregated in a few cities, and by their unfamiliar liturgy and practice, the Orthodox had often complained that they were neglected when Americans spoke of their major religions as being "Protestant, Catholic and Jew," since the Orthodox were none of these.

But eastern Christians' great contributions to the modern movements of Christian reunion have made them much more visible after mid-century.

One immigrant group did not come from Europe and did not come voluntarily. Beginning in 1619, blacks from Africa were imported by the millions to serve the institution of slavery, a system that was to last until 1863 and the Civil War. The white enslavers of

that age usually did what they could to break down the remnants of tribal religion. They imposed white Christianity.

American blacks improvised their own kinds of responses within the system. Sometimes they were able to retain some of their African styles, but more often they adapted revivalist worship to their own purposes. A kind of "underground church" developed in which the characteristic songs-the spirituals -served both to describe the promise of a better life to come, perhaps in the next world, and to be a code for their own private goals -including the quest for freedom.

A fourth factor helps account for religious successes. If the competing groups did not offer people what they wanted, if the revivalists failed to inspire them, and if immigrant churches did not minister to them, they could always get together to found a new church.

For example, the established church of New England produced a liberal offshoot in Unitarianism, early in the 19th century. On the frontier, "primitive" groups, whose members thought they could overleap the centuries and find the simplicity of New Testament Christianity, formed themselves into the Disciples of Christ, or the Churches of Christ.

More colorful were the Latter Day Saints, or Mormons, followers of Joseph Smith, who claimed his own new revelation. The Latter Day Saints were a fresh American flowering, and by mid-century had made their way from New York through Ohio, Illinois, and Missouri to a "kingdom" of their own in Utah.

Almost equally exotic in the eyes of their contemporaries were the Millerites, who became Seventh Day Adventists. They were and are a millennial church, whose followers expected Jesus Christ to return to the world in the 1840s and whose descendants still expect his literal return.

Later in the 19th century, under the impetus of Mary Baker Eddy, Christian Science was founded in Boston. From that headquarters many thousands of people have gone out inspired to spread a message of healing and serenity.

The Jehovah's Witnesses, a very aggressive and fast-growing group, took shape early in the 20th century. Its members have views on religion which differ sharply from those of the majority. They reject military service, refuse to salute the national flag, and have particular views of the outcome of history.

And these are only a few samples of the variety offered among some 250 easily recog- . nizable religious groups in the United States â&#x20AC;˘. as that nation approaches its Bicentennial celebration in 1976.

'Religious freedom led not only to minimizing the clash between believers and nonbelievers, it worked to reduce conflict between faiths. The ethos of tolerance also contributed to the decline of conflict.'

While competItIOn, revivalism, success with immigrants, and freedom to fill voids by creating new churches help account for religions' successes, most Americans would say that nothing helped them more to be "a religious people" than did the congenial national climate. They have often spoken of a "separation of church and state," a distinction between civil and religious spheres.

Through a complex set of decisions in the colonies and states between 1776 and 1833, the legal support of privileged churches was removed. The First Amendment to the Constitution prohibited the U.S. Congress from making laws effecting the establishment of religion or preventing its free exercise. Without an establishment there has been little animosity against religious leadership, little anticlericalism. There has also been little public atheism.

Philosophical atheism has had little impact, but this does not mean that all Americans are, or have to be, church or synagogue members. Religious freedom brought with it the corollary offreedom from being religious.

Some of these find religious alternatives in new religions, non-European faiths (Zen Buddhism, Hinduism, and Islam are enjoying new currency), astrology and the occult. Still others respond in religious ways to the symbols of national life; some people speak of a "civil religion" whose high priests have been presidents and whose images have been the flag and national memorials.

Much of the spiritual content of America is completely outside churches, sects, or cults.

The philosopher Alfred North Whitehead once defined religion as what a person does with his solitariness. Solitary spiritual figures have made their mark, as have religious geniuses in various literary movements.

Toward the middle of the 19th century a flowering of literary art occurred apart from formal religious auspices, but with deep spiritual overtones. The New England school of Transcendentalism is a characteristic part of this expression. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Theodore Parker, to name but three prominent leaders, wanted people to "forget historical Christianity" and to come to terms with the meaning of life on a different basis. These founding fathers and Transcendentalists have been the most notable in a tradition of spiritual concern that has not been housed in organizations.

Religious freedom led not only to minimizing the clash between believers and nonbelievers, it also worked to reduce conflict between faiths. The good will of the people and the ethos of tolerance also contributed to the decline of conflict. Throughout America's history there have also been movements of co-operation. Early in the 19th century, Protestants formed a network of societies for charity, missionary activity, and education that did not follow lines of denominations or separate churches.

In the 20th century, Protestant, Roman Catholic, and Eastern Orthodox Christians have united in many "ecumenical" ventures.

Christians and Jews share in many other groups and activities.

f~ ~.,.

While Roman Catholics dominate Latin America and eastern Canada, they came late to the United States. But as a result of later immigrations, and the separation of the Protestantmajority into denominations, Roman Catholicism eventually became the largest single religion in America. Despite Protestant fears, some of which remained until John F. Kennedy's Presidency, these Catholics were always intensely loyal, largely happy with life in the United States and puzzled by questions about their loyalty.

There are, too, about five million Jews in America. They live chiefly in cities, and have also "denominationalized" (Orthodox, Conservative, Reform, Liberal, Reconstructionist, and the like). Anti-Semitism has been present, but less marked than in much of European history, and Jews play prominent roles in most aspects of American life.

The trend in recent decades has been away from the geographical concentrations of the past-Jews and Catholics in cities, Baptists and Methodists in the South, Lutherans in the upper Midwest, Mormons in Utah, Idaho, and Nevada. The trend has been toward mobile populations, with all religions intermingling in all cities and large towns.

American religion has not been merely a success story. The faults of churches are many and obvious. When members do not see their own, believers from other denominations readily point them out, and dissenters add their charges to those overlooked by all the faithful. As it has contributed to the positive side of national life, so has religion also played a role in feeding the hypocrisies and divisions which exist in America as elsewhere.

Nonetheless, though many clergymen have chosen to make an impact chiefly in the sphere of private morality, religion's spokesmen have often spoken out on national issues. Much of the American critical and prophetic tradition has derived from people who received their vision of a better life or a different order in the churches. In recent times, names like those of the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., and Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel represent the many more religious leaders who criticized racist or military postures on spiritual grounds.

In the 1970s, American religion has con- ~ tinued to be active. There have been new-style revivals. Some of these are of a fresh charac-

ter, and have taken the form of communal living, experiments with consciousness-expanding drugs, fascination with the occult.

Probably more durable are the influences of Asian and African religions-Buddhism and various sects of Hinduism are growing in many parts of America [see box alongside].

Other new movements are more traditional, such as the strong and growing "Jesus Movement" among the young.

On the other hand, most predictors or projectors ofthe future tend to foresee continuing decline in religious response, much of it not on any kind of philosophical basis. As America becomes more of a leisure culture, people leave places of worship for long week-ends, or move from their conventional religious communities to retirement centers. Those who livein urban high-rise apartments tend to pay less attention to church membership than do rural people or suburbanites. Mass higher education and mass media, though both allow for religious inquiry, have also served to undercut the seriousness with which particular traditions are taken. Many thoughtful Americans have been bored by religion, or feel it does not live up to its own standards, or simply do not find it to be true. Others reject it precisely when its spokesmen do take controversial stands.

Observers who follow these trends suggest that tomorrow a smaller percentage of the population will be members of religious institutions. But many of them also think that those who do remain will be more sure of their purpose, that quality of membership may improve as quantity declines, that standards will rise as casual members drop away.

Whatever the outcome of these trends, it is not likelythat America will forget its religious heritage. Just as many revolutionary societies in the 20th century have been influenced by Marxist or nationalist outlooks, so Americans regard themselves as having constituted their society successfully around the biblical tradition, and Jewish and Christian influences are acknowledgedand generally cherished. Americans do not know what their society would look like without these influences. In a time of rapid change, they are likely to cling to these traditions because they provide refuge, security, a sense of landmark-and because so many still do believe in and share the visions these traditions have tried to embody.

0 About the Author: Martin Marty is Professor of Religion at the University of Chicago and editor of the Christian Century magazine. He has published scores of books including The Search for a Usable Future, The Hidden Discipline and The Infidel.

ASIAN RELIGIONS IN AMERICA In the first flush of enthusiasm for Indian religious thought, Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote: "It [the Gita] was the first of the books-it was as if an empire spoke to us." And it is true that the Gita and the Upanishads helped nurture the Transcendentalism of New England in the early 1800s. Then, in 1893, an extraordinary Indian burst upon the World Parliament of Religions in Chicago, Swami Vivekananda, whose eloquent exposition of Vedanta increased American interest in religions of the Orient. Recent years have seen an unprecedented surge of American enthusiasm for Oriental religions and cults-Zen Buddhism, yoga, Transcendental Meditation, and Krishna Consciousness. No one knows exactly how many Americans are involved in these religious practices, but estimates point to about 500,000 members of organized groups.

However, if one counts students of yoga, practitioners of meditation, and believers in mysticism, the figure may well run into millions.

The most visible form of Hinduism in America today is the Krishna Consciousness movement founded in 1966 by Swami A.C. Bhaktivedanta. Today it has 30 U.S. centers, and its groups of beardless youths

with shaven heads and saffron robes-such as the one above-can be seen in many American cities.

But perhaps the most spectacularly successful sect is the Divine Light Mission of 16-year-old Guru Maharaj Ji which has, within a short space of time, gained 40,000 followers and established 54 ashrams. Then there is Maharishi Mahesh Yogi and his Maharishi International University, with its headquarters in Los Angeles. Another guru is Swami Satchidananda, who gained attention by opening the Woodstock rock festival in 1969. Older religious leaders are not ignored, and the teachings of Sri Aurobindo are being studied at 10 centers across the U.S. After Hinduism, it is Buddhism that claims the greatest number of adherents in America, with three distinct varieties being practiced-Zen, Tibetan, and Nichiren Shoshu.

Whether it is Krishna Consciousness or Zen Buddhism, each has given a new dimension to American religious life. As Professor Winston King of Vanderbilt University says: "Eastern religiosity has now become one possible option for Americans, and its study is ... a permanent part of the academic scene."

CONSUMERISM

IN AMERICA

A Magazine With Clout Faced with a bewildering array of brands and model of the myriad consumer product in merica, wha does the buyer do? Million turn to Consumers Dion, a remarkable organization that tests everything-from car to can-openers. It publishes the results in the monthly magazine, 'ConsumerReports 'which ha now become a buyers' bible in the U. . .\PHL

.\t

~~~s,Mti<',> \'

,;/'H.;...

The buyer of today is often at a serious disadvantage. He may have to make a dozen different buying choices a day; and when he chooses a major appliance or a car, he has to live with that choice, good or bad, for years.

He needs accurate, comprehensive advice.

Fortunately, in America, he can get it. He can turn for help to the monthly magazine Consumer

,OJ r-:

IN

!'~OV(QHS,f, At!

soles that were check-rated for top quality over other models costing 80 more. You learn which children's bicycle are strongest and safest, and which RANGES bikes are better avoided. You GAS and ELECTRIC learn how the latest full-sized sedans actually compare in comfort, handling, power, mileage and over-all quality. You learn which brands of frozen breaded hrimp are at lea t half shrimp Reports. and which have more bread than shrimp; which red, white and Containing in factual, illustrated form the findings of one of rose table wines were rated as the largest laboratories for conbest-tasting by a special panel of professional tasters; and how to sumer product testing in the world, Consumer Reports is the save up to $100 on a cassette tape Ratings of Waterproof Paints buyer's unfailing friend. The recorder, $40 on a portable manWhen and How ToWaterproof ual typewriter, $11 on a bathmagazine describes and comroom scale, even 2 a gallon on pares, by brand name, the overinterior latex paint. all quality of a great many items on a household shopping Ii t-from color TV sets to caulking Suppose you are looking for a wall thermometer that can compounds to fabric softeners to coffee makers. It explains what be used either indoors or outdoors. Consumer Reports lists three to look for and how to judge the competing brands in each line. It models that are "Very Good." Two of these are also termed "Best alerts readers to good products that are new or little known. And Buys," meaning they are bargains in terms of more quality per each year, as its December issue, it puts out a paperback book of dollar. Ten other models are listed as "Acceptable" and four as more than 400 pages (known as The Buying Guide Issue) that sum- "Fair." The six remaining models, however, are termed "Not marizes all the currently useful information from back issues of Acceptable," and yet everyone of them costs more than the "Best the magazine. The Guide has about 500 pages and ratings for over Buy" which sells for 69 cents. The conclusion that high price does not necessarily mean high quality is a recurring theme in Con2,000 models of various products.

If you read Consumer Reports you learn, for example, the brand sumer Reports.

Predictably, the magazine pays special attention in its coverage names and model numbers of three inexpensive color TV con-

AIR CONDITIONERS Plus a Cooling Alternative: The Attic Fan

@

~

to the costlier consumer items, with regular reports on new models of automobiles, television sets, refrigerators, freezers, washing machines, stoves and other large appliances. Each spring, it devotes almost an entire issue to a thorough evaluation of the new-model cars, both domestic and foreign, in all sizes and price ranges. For cars and big appliances, it also provides data on how well different models have stood up over the years in daily use. If you want to buy a used car, for example, the magazine tells you to expect less trouble from a 1969 Dodge Dart Six or a 1969 Ford Maverick Six than any other low-priced car in its class.

Often the magazine reports the range of prices at which a particular appliance is selling in stores around the U.S. Thus, when a retailer advertises an item for a bargain price, Consumer Reports readers know just about how much of a bargain that price represents. In addition, the magazine runs general articles containing authoritative counsel on such consumer concerns as life and medical insurance, credit, health protection, discount air fares, land sale offers, and household moving services. And in regular columns, it rates the new movies (using a panel of critics and subscribers) and the quality of new classical recordings.

In its product ratings, Consumer Reports does not claim absolute certainty. Its frontispiece frankly states: "So long as the quality of a product can vary and products can change behind their names, no test results can provide infallible guidance. What the magazine's ratings offer is comparative buying information that should greatly increase the consumer's chances of getting his money's worth."

Consumer Reports wields plenty of clout, as many a manufacturer and merchant can testify. Enough Americans follow its recommendations to occasionally spell the difference between excellent or poor sales for some brands. But no matter how much an approving word in its pages may be worth, the magazine maintains, it can only be obtained by achieving a good rating in the test results it reports. Like any human enterprise, Consumer Reports can and does err. But no one yet has successfully challenged its honesty or impartiality, though many a manufacturer, wounded by a poor rating in the magazine, has tried. Among recent suits against Consumer Reports is one by a Massachusetts company, demanding $500,000 in damages for an unenthusiastic, and allegedly biased, evaluation of its expensive stereophonic loud-speaker system. The case is still pending.

The magazine itself is run by Executive Director Rhoda Karpatkin and Editor-in-ChiefIrwin Landau.

It is published by Consumers' Union of United States, Inc., a nonprofit institution known as CU to its army of adherents.

CU policy is set by a 21-member board of directors, which includes such notable consumer crusaders as Ralph Nader [see article on page 20J, John Banzhaf, Betty Furness and Bess Myerson. The board is elected in an annual balloting by mail that is open to all Consumer Reports subscribers. A subscriber becomes

a member of CU itself by the simple act of filling in and returning the CU ballot.

CU has no commercial ties. It accepts no contribution of money, goods, or services from any manufacturer or merchant, directly or indirectly. Its magazine runs no advertising and CU forbids the reprinting of its reports for any commercial purpose.

CU regularly takes legal action against sellers who try to cash in on a favorable mention in its magazine. Recently, it won a court i'iijunction requiring the Hamm Brewing Company of Minnesota to end the use of Consumer Reports} name in its beer ads.

Nearly all of CU's budget, now close to $16 million a year, comes from the sale of Consumer Reports to its more than 2,000,000 subscribers and 150,000 newsstand buyers. A mail subscription costs $8 a year, or $18 for three years. CU's only other income derives from the sales of its line of paperback books on consumer topics (such as Licit and Illicit Drugs) a report on the drug dependency problem in modern society, and Movies for TV} a compendium of 6,900 ratings of movies dating back to 1947)and from an occasional "no-strings" government contract (such as a recent grant from the U.S. Office of Education to develop consumer-education materials).

Two million subscribers are a lot of people but they are only a portion of Consumer Reports' readership. Most subscribers are heads of households, so the whole family has access to the magazine. Friends and neighbors not only listen when subscribers talk about CU recommendations but quickly fall into the habit of borrowing back issues or consulting the latest Buying Guide. In many public libraries, the single, most-asked-for reference work is not a directory, encyclopedia or atlas, but the Guide.

In short, there are enough Americans who check Consumer Reports before buying even a jar of instant coffee to make any large-scale manufacturer respectful. And there are many more who rely on CU recommendations in choosing the consumer items that cost most and matter most-things like cars, refrigerators, TV sets and home laundry equipment, things that are expensive to repair and can precipitate a domestic crisis when they break down.

CU also helps a shopper pick from among several products the ones that will best suit his particular needs. For example, CU recently found that room air-conditioning units sold under 11 different brand names were all acceptable in performance-anyone of them would keep a room comfortably cool. Some cost more than others, so you might just buy the least expensive one, without reading further-but you might be wrong. CU goes on to say that the one with the lowest price, while quiet enough inside the room, is noisy outside. Suppose the window where you plan to install the unit is close to your neighbor's bedroom -forewarned, you might decide to spend a few dollars more for one that is quieter outside, in the interest of preserving neighborly relations. CU also tells you that two of the "Acceptable" units tend to drip from their outside edges. That might be fine if the window is over a lawn or a flower bed, but a nuisance if over a doorway.

By studying Consumer Reports} a buyer learns more than just the names of high-quality models and brands. He learns what

'Like any human enterprise, "Consumer Reports" can and does err. But no one yet has challenged its honesty, though many a manufacturer, wounded by a poor rating in the magazine, has tried.' to look for in comparing the various products so that even if he buys a model CU has never tested, he is more likely to choose well. In the words of Dr. Colston E. Warne, a former economics professor who has been CU's president since its founding: "Much of the value of CU's testing service lies not so much in its direct mention of brands, although this is important, but in the description of what to look for in the market."

How does CU learn so much about the good and bad features of so many different kinds of products? The answer to that question lies in Mount Vernon, New York, a suburb of New York City, where a group of old factory buildings houses the CU laboratories, and in Orange, Connecticut, the site of CU's testing facility for automotive vehicles. At these permanent locations (and at temporary ones elsewhere that are used for special projects), CU's staff of dozens of engineers, chemists, and technicians puts each product through its paces over and over, sometimes taking it apart, reassembling it, and punishing it to the point of destruction in order to pry out its secret strengths and weaknesses.

The first problem, of course, is to select what to test. Once a year, CD sends an extensive questionnaire to all Consumer Reports subscribers, asking them to fill it out and return it. The questionnaire, which differs each year, asks whether the subscriber has bought certain products recently, and what his experience with them has been. It also asks which feature articles and departments of the magazine he finds most useful, and which products or services he'd like to see reported on. Answering is voluntary, but some 300,000 members take the time to do it each year.

CU studies the results of the questionnaires, along with its voluminous correspondence from readers (close to 50,000 letters and telephone calls a year) and pertinent information from news stories, advertising campaigns, and outside surveys on consumer affairs. From all this data, CD prepares its testing schedule, aiming for a balance between large items of less frequent purchase, such as cars, and smaller everyday sundries such as packaged foods and household supplies. Special attention is given to consumer items that may be hazardous to users and those for which manufacturers are making ambitious claims. Weeded from the list, on the other hand, are products for which no suitable tests exist or for which testing is too costly for the information gained.

As many as 50 different products may be under test at a given time-an impressive figure, but CU staffers say they wish their funding was . large enough to do even more.

Perhaps the best way to understand the testing process is to follow one partic-

ular product, step by step. Let's take a recent CU testing project for the ordinary washing machine, a ubiquitous appliance in American households and therefore under almost constant scrutiny by CU. For this particular projeCt, CU decided to examine the lowest priced line of washing machines, in both the two-speed and onespeed models, selected from brands with national distribution.

It prepared a list of 14 two-speed models, and 11 one-speed, and had its staff of shoppers buy the machines at random in retail stores (just as the ordinary shopper does), and ship them to the Mount Vernon testing center.

When the samples arrived, they were subjected to a series of carefully controlled tests, meticulously evaluating performance, design, safety, convenience and other criteria of quality. Again and again, they were run through their washing cycles, with test loads that represented the full spectrum of typical family washes.

Specially soiled swatches of cloth were used to give a comparison of cleaning efficiencies. The machines were operated with overweight and unbalanced loads to see how they withstood careless use. The amount of water used for each cycle and the length of each presoak, wash, spin and rinse periods were noted, along with data on vibration and noise levels.

When the tests were completed, the Consumer Reports writer assigned to this project wove the results into an extensive article written for the general reader. His prose was checked and rechecked by everyone concerned to improve accuracy and clarity, and finally the article appeared in the magazine.

Its opening portion was a general discussion of the characteristics of the machines tested and a description of the tests used. Throughout, solid information was presented on how best to use the machines and what to look for in the way of quality. The article then went on to list each of the tested models and describe its specific advantages and disadvantages. All proved to be able to clean an ordinary load adequately, but, CD observed, "Since few people always wash ordinary loads, our preference is for the two-speed models over the one-speed machines." The slower speed setting on the two-speed models can wash delicate fabrics without damage, CU said, but the one-speed models badly snagged these fabrics in a good number of tests.

The listing, set forth in order of estimated over-all quality, showed that some models were slower and noisier than others; some used more water or electricity; some handled larger loads; some tangled clothes less. The top-rated models in both speed categories were of the most expensive brand. However, as CU pointed out, this same brand has had a better record than most on repairs over the years, and this extra durability could make up for the higher initial cost. The listing also showed the range of prices found for each model by CD shoppers who are located in 90 cities across the U.S., and, the article pointed out, "comparison shopping may uncover even better deals."

With such information at hand, there is no doubt that Con-

sumer Reports readers have been among the canniest shoppers for low-priced washing machines in America. And this same sort of exhaustive testing, evaluation and reporting goes into CU's reports on all the products it examines.

The campaign for improving consumer information in America goes back to the days when washing machines used hand-wringers.

In 1924, a book called Your Money's Worth laid the foundation by providing an analysis, by brand name, of the comparative quality of a wide range of consumer items. The authors were Stuart Chase, a writer on public affairs, and Fred J. Schlink, a physicist and engineer who had worked for the U.S. Bureau of Standards. Controversy over the book revealed widespread public concern over the quality of consumer products, and, in 1929, a public-spirited group headed by Chase and Schlink formed Consumers' Research, Inc., which set up a testing facility for consumer products and a magazine to publish its findings.

It was a modest start. The Great Depression of the 1930s had cut consumer spending to the bone, but rational buying was needed more than ever to help dwindling income cover bare necessities, and Consumers' Research survived. In 1933, Schlink (and coauthor Arthur Kallet) put out another book, a bestseller entitled One Hundred Million Guinea Pigs, which assailed the laxity of pure food laws and further boosted interest in the consumer protection movement. Then, in 1936, internal dissension on policy split the Consumers' Research staff. The larger group left the original organization (which still exists) and founded Consumers Union.

From its headquarters in two dingy offices in downtown Manhattan, Consumers Union published the first issue of Consumer Reports in May 1936. Though it had only 3,000 subscribers, it was right on target. It examined the relative cost and nutritional value of breakfast cereals, questioned the claims of a popular headache remedy, discussed the lead-paint hazard in toys, and warned that high-octane gasoline might not be worth the extra cost. It also identified good buys in women's stockings, toilet soaps, and toothbrushes.

Over the years, CU grew to become the giant in its field, and today it does far more than publish test results. It provides an extensive series of manuals and other instructional materials for courses in consumer education, and it produces radio and TV programs on consumer topics. It co-operates with local and state consumer organizations as well as the Consumer Federation of America, and contributes financially to grants and fellowships for research on consumer problems.

It testifies before legislative committees and government bodies on consumer issues, and it opened a new office in

Washington to step up its monitoring and litigation efforts on behalf of the consumer. Recently it spun off another organization, founded by several CU directors and called Consumer Interests Foundation, which unlike CU, is legally empowered to accept tax-deductible donations. The new group hopes to raise at least $1 million to support consumer projects.

CU has consistently fought deceptive packaging, misleading advertising, confusing pricing, and hazardous design. Unit pricing has long been one of its battlegrounds and at last that particular struggle is going in favor of the consumer. For decades the law has required that packaged food items show the net weight (or volume) of the contents on the package label. However, manufacturers produce the same product in packages of differing sizes.

For example, ajar of applesauce A contains 468 grams and sells for 20 cents. On the same shelf, a jar of applesauce B contains 297 grams and sells for 16 cents. How is the nonmathematical consumer to know which is the better buy in terms of cost? Well, thanks to the effort of Consumers Union and other consumer groups, a sign on the shelf now states that the actual cost of applesauce A per unit (in this case, 450 grams) is 19.4 cents, while the cost for the same unit of applesauce B is 23.7 cents. The shopper sees at a glance that, at least, from the standpoint of price, the larger jar is the better value.

In the past CU has turned to the courts in its fight for consumer protection. In 1970 a CU suit on toy safety precipitated government recalls of hazardous toys. In 1971 CU won a suit that clarified the taxpayer's right to see the results of government testing of consumer goods, which after all, he pays for. In 1972 CU filed suits charging the Federal Government with illegally setting oil and steel import quotas that lead to unnecessarily high prices to consumers.

CU's example has spawned similar organizations 111 other countries. In 1957, two English enthusiasts of the CU idea founded the Consumer Association of Great Britain, which publishes a magazine of consumer item ratings with a 660,000 circulation and the appropriate name of Which? Today, 56 organizations in 32 coun~,\J\. tries, many of them patterned after CU, belong to the International Organization of Consumers Unions, with headquarters at The Hague in the Netherlands.

Now in its 39th year, CU has gone far on many fronts to fulfill its role as a forceful and discerning ally of the American consumer. Recently, in response to rising public concern with preserving the environment, CU has been paying more attention to the environmental impact of the products it examines. But its essential mission remains what it has always been: to help the American consumer get the most for his money. Such a preoccupation is not as mundane as it sounds.

As Clair Wilcox, a professor of political economy at Swarthmore College, has pointed out: "To discover and tell the truth is to strengthen the democratic process in a free society.

And this, it seems to me, is the deeper significance of the work in which CU is engaged."

D About the Author: Pat Tucker is a free-lance writer whose work has appeared in such magazines as Time and u.s. News & World Report.

As the self-appointed and unsalaried guardian of the interests of more than 200 million U.S. consumers, Ralph Nader has shown that one persistent man can change big business and big government. His efforts since first coming to the public's attention in 1965 have generated publicity and public concern, and have been followed by a host of laws that regulate areas from auto safety to the purity of meat and poultry packaging. At least 34 of the 50 stll.tes and a number of U.S. cities now have consumer-protection agencies. Some 50 voluntary organizations to promote consumerism have sprung up across the United States. Nader has championed dozens of causes, prompted much of U.S. industry to reappraise its responsibilities and, against great difficulties, created a new climate of concern for the consumer .. . More than, 62,000 people contributed a total of more than one million dollars

Harsh, uncompromising, incorruptible, Ralph Nader (above) personifies the consumer movement in the U.S. He has proved that persistent and intelligent protest can accomplish a great deal for society.

in 1972 to an organization formed by Nader the previous year called Public Citizen, Inc. The organization was founded to provide a fund for paying citizenla\yyer& who support Nader's investigations. They help Nader launch new projects, monitor the federal bureaucracy and

strive for greater justice. He calls it "solving our common problems through a new form of citizen action."

Nader is perhaps best known as a strong critic of the automobile industry for not developing adequate safety features or antipollution devices. He was influential in forcing General Motors Corporation to withdraw its Corvair model from production after he condemned the car as a safety hazard in his best-selling book Unsafe at Any Speed. That book, plus Nader's later speeches, articles and Congressional appearances, also encouraged the U.S. Department of Transportation to impose stricter safety standards on automobile and tire manufacturers.

In addition to contributing to the auto safety laws and the laws aimed at ensuring wholesome meat and poultry for the con~ sumer, Nader was a major influence in the passage of natural-gas pipeline safety laws,

gave a cry of delight: "Hey, fresh orange radiation-control laws and coal-mine juice!" He pieced the torn label together health and safety laws in the United States. in an attempt to discover the identity of He was the first to accuse baby-food manufacturers of imperiling the health of in- the company that had provided him with undiluted, uncolored, fants by using monosodium glutamate, a this unsweetened, absolutely natural drink. He put the label taste enhancer that medical research shows in his pocket. "I may write to these people can, in large quantities, cause brain damand express a citizen's appreciation," age in some animals. The three largest U.S. he said . producers of baby food have since stopped . When his breakfast tray' was taken using it. His repeated warnings about the dangers of cyclamates and the insecticide away, Nader uncapped a pen and began DDT helped create U.S. Government re- to go through the New York Times and strictions on their' use. He has criticized the Wall Street Journal) marking stories the sale of unclean fish, unstable tractors and scribbling file references on them. By that can tip over and kill farmers, and the the end of the week, his pile of envelopes dangerous misuse of medical X-ray equipexpanded to include 15 or 20 newspapers ment. The Nader team's 1972 book Who with valuable information to be clipped Runs Congress? discusses procedures and when he returned to Washington. members of the legislative branch of the Nader was pursued throughout the U.S. Government. week by a news story in which he saw no When Nader, often called the "peaceful humor at all. A prominent author had dissenter," battles bureaucracies, he uses written in a magazine article that Nader mainly the weapons available to any citiought to be, and could be, the next Presizen-the law and public opinion. He has dent of the United States. "They're using shown that one man, by hard work and me!" Nader cried. He had never talked to by persistent and intelligent protest, can the author) though a member of a minor accomplish a great deal for the good of political party had asked Nader to run as society. the party's Presidential candidate. Nader Nader seems to be always on the go. refused. "I'm not interested in public ofOn one typical day, he could be seen racing fice," he said later. "The biggest job in through the lobby of New York's Hotel the U.S. is citizen action. Politics follows Pierre at 6:59 a.m. to jump into a waiting that. " taxi. He was beginning an exceptionally Nader receives 50 invitations to speak strenuous week of fund-raising speaking in a typical week, and accepts about 150 engagements which would take him back a year. "I really shrink when I walk up to and forth across the United States giving the podium," he confesses, but i!1 recent five or six speeches a day. Frequently he years he has submitted to the frenetic rises as early as 5 a.m., after only a few schedule of speechmaking in order to raise. hours sleep, and travels in a rumpled shirt, money for his activities. His speeches bring carrying only a small bag for clean shirts. in perhaps $200,000 a year and he keeps and linens. Under his arm he carries a only a small portion of this for his own large stack of business envelopes. People living expenses. The rest of the moneyhave given him brief cases, but he turns along with donations from foundations them into files and leaves them behind. His and individuals-goes to the dozen sepaoffice in Washington, D.C., is a wilderness of cardbo;ud boxes filled with documents and books. When he leaves it, he takes some of the clutter with him in the envelopes, which .he virtually never lets out of his h~nds. He carries them with him to the lectern when he speaks, places them on a table by his head when he sleeps, holds them in his lap in cars and airplanes.

Aboard the plane taking him on his speaking tour Nader accepted breakfastan omelet and sausages, sweet rolls, coffee and a small container of orange juice. He ~~ took the top off his juice, sipped it and ~-

rate organizations he has established in Washington to deal with consumer problems. A score of followers, mostly young lawyers with outstanding academic records but little experience in practicing law, work long hours for very low salariesand with a reforming zeal that rivals Nader's own. Their main asset, apart from their brains and enthusiasm, is the power to involve Nader's name. And since Nader knows that his name is his main asset, he tightly controls its use and insists that most ideas and all decisions must come from him. Therefore, when he is out of Washington raising funds, the work there slows down.

The 150 speeches he makes each year include a few free appearances and some at a reduced rate. The free speeches and the cut-rate ones are supposed to be shorter, but he is rarely .able to finish in less than an hour and 45 minutes. Nader has only one speech. He gives it without notes, his body arched over the lectern, his voice, which is rather thin, pitched at a conversational tone. Often he speaks over two' hours, and will then take perhaps 45 minutes of questions from the audience. To some of his listeners, the length is stupefying. "My goodness," whispered a baffled professor at one college, "does he always go on like this?" Nader would like to go on even longer. "Someday," he says, "I'm going to say to one of these colleges, 'Six hours without interruption, or no speech.'" Constantly reiterating his criticisms of industry and government, Nader is a never-failing spring of startling statistics. He makes no concessions to the audience. There is no rhythm structure in his speeches. He merely stands up before a packed house and imparts information.

The audience sits, absolutely silent, rarely applauding or laughing. At the end of the long speech, Nader does not use any final grandiloquent phrase, or even a change in inflection, to signal that he is finished. He merely gathers up his envelopes and slouches away from the lectern.

There is a moment of silence. Then, always, tumultuous applause, a standing ovation which can last for as much as five minutes.

Among friends, Nader is noted for his mordant wit, but even at his funniest, he is not very revealing of himself. Nader believes that levity is not becoming to a leader, and he cherishes his own aloofness.

Nader's background helps explain him.

As self-appointed guardian of 200 million American consumers, Ralph Nader is constantly subjecting consumer products to merciless scrutiny. Artist Charles Mendez sees Nader as a humanized magnifying glass (right).

He grew up in an immigrant Lebanese family in a large white house above the main street in a Connecticut village called Winsted. The home resounded with discussion, conducted in a mixture of Arabic and English. There was a mixture of themes as well-the father perpetually angry over injustice, the mother joyful over human possibility. "I felt enriched by two cultures," his mother, Rose Bouziane Nader, says. "I always thought the children should be too." The parents shared the idea that a citizen owed a debt to society, which must be freely paid. The way to pay the debt was through an honest life, lived with courage. "Never tip your hat," Ralph's father, Nadra Nader, would repeat, "and never look down on anyone."

Ralph, the youngest of the Nader children, was born on February 27, 1934.

Before him came Shafik, the only child to be given an Arabic name, and two girls, Laura and Claire. All the children except Shafik, who worked in the family business -a hometown restaurant-went through college and graduate school. "The children," Nadra says, "were made to understand that the family was a bank. They put in work, duty, trust. Then they could take out what a child must have-education."

The whole family looks like Ralph: dark and bony. Nadra at 81 is an aged version of his son-a little shorter, the hair white, but with the same mien .of focused zeal.

His wife, Nader's mother, with her fine dark eyes and nobly arched nose, is a handsome woman still. Parents and sisters speak of Ralph with the jollity, filled with echoes of his mischief and his uniqueness, that is reserved for a favorite child. "Ralph used to force his sister to laugh," says Mrs. Nader.

When Ralph was almost four, the family

sailed to their native Lebanon for a visit.

He and his mother remained there for a year with his grandparents. Even in Winsted, the Naders spoke Arabic at home.

So, when Mrs. Nader and Ralph returned to Connecticut, he had spoken nothing but Arabic for a quarter of his life. The school authorities doubted that his English was good enough for the first grade. As far as Nader remembers, he spoke English as well as any five-year-old. His mother pleaded, successfully, that he be given a chance. He had no trouble getting through the first grade.

Nobody knows exactly what Nader wants. Nader always stops short of describing his goal. He believes that the whole long process of concentrating the powers of the human race in institutions has been a mistake. Nader thinks that organizational structure of almost any kind is bound to be misused. He is against structure as the dominant force in society. He thinks that structure, no matter how it begins, is likely to be employed against the public interest. "We've got to have sources of power that will rise to the occasion," he argues. '~Somehow, unstructured power, initiatory democracy, whatever you want to call it, is less likely to be abused and more likely to be continually nourished.

"When I was abroad, and came back, of course I saw that the problems people have here are pale, compared to what malaria does, or leprosy," he says. "That's not the question. In the United States we are trying to solve problems that the rest of the world will have in the future. We've got to do what past generations never had to do. Man-made hazards are transcending our traditional physiological alert system. We can't taste the mercury in swordfish, we can't smell carbon dioxide, we can't see hydrocarbons or feel radioactivity. We've got to rely more on our minds, less on our bodies, to signal pain or anger or fear. We have to do something."

Just before a college speech one time, the librarian, a stooped, graying man, approached Nader. "I wonder if you would just autograph the college's copy of your book, Mr. Nader," he said. "No," Nader said, and turned his back. The librarian blushed; his hands, holding the book, trembled. Someone explained to him that Nader never autographs anything. He has something against it. The librarian said, "1 thought he'd make an exception for an institution."

Nader makes¡ no exceptions. "People ask me for autographs," he fumes. "I say to them, 'You should be doing something!'" He is haunted by the conviction that his audience-mostly youth and the middle class-is almost incurably frivolous. He himself has not read a novel since he was a teen-ager, never goes to a play, rarely goes to a party, sees two movies in a year.

It is his refusal to compromise, his grim insistence on his own definition of virtue, that endears Nader to his admirers. It is his harshness, more usually called incorruptibility, that gives him such extraordinary power over the imagination of his followers. His personal virtue, which is unquestionable, has been confused with his public role; he is granted a latitude of behavior enjoyed by no one else in public life. Perhaps this is because the public has confidence that he follows in the footsteps of his father, who says, "When I ~ent past the Statue of Liberty, I took it seriously."

0 About the Author: Charles McCarry, a journalist formerly associated with the International ~ Labor Organization. is the author of Citizen Nader,lrom.which this profile has been adapted.

Behind the scenes of the auto industry One out of every seven Detroiters is directly engaged in the manufacture of motor vehicles-and half of Detroit's four million people work in industries and services that support the mammoth auto industry. Autos generate scientific research in a big way, much of which is done in one of the world's greatest research laboratories, the General Motors Technical Ce~. The results of tros research are applied to the assembly lines of Detroit's gargantuan automobile plants-General Motors, Ford and Chrysler-which produce three million cars every year, 27 per cent of the total American output. In a word, it's cars that make Detroit go.

Hundreds of researchers, designers and engineers at General Motors Technical Center work on the cars of tomorrow. Above: An "auto artist" studies design technique with clay model. Left: The "soft front end" Chevrolet is one of the Center's recent experiments. Top left: The "mock-up" department works on wood models of various car parts. Top right: The ultra-modern researchfoundry. Right: A skilled technicianplaces temperature sensors in a catalytic muffler.

No more a city of all work and no play The auto industry has brought Detroit immense wealth-and also all the ills of the huge American city: pollution, congestion, flight of people to the suburbs, racial tension. But Detroiters have met these problems with the same determination that built the auto industry that spawned the problems in the first place. A civic renaissance began in 1967, when the city's leaders formed the New Detroit Committee and pledged their talents and corporate resources to reviving and beautifying Detroit. The major auto companies expanded and modernized their plants. The city built a beautiful new downtown plaza, a stroller's delight of landscaped walkways, overhanging Norway maple trees and subtle night-time lighting. Work started on a billion-dollar project to transform the city's waterfront. Cultural and entertainment attractions grewamong them the famed Detroit Symphony Orchestra, the Detroit Institute of Arts, the Fisher Theater, a fine zoo, a network of municipal playgrounds and athletic fields, swimming pools and skating r~nks, four horse-racing tracks, and the world's largest fleet of pleasure boats.

Detroit, in short, is no more a city of all work and no play.

The current revival is reflected as much in business confidence and booming building construction as in the intense civic pride that now suffuses the Motor City. The feeling is summed up in the words of a black electrician who works with Detroit's Project Rehabilitation, a slum renovation program: "When you take something that's old and rundown and convert it into a nice place to live, people hold their heads up."

Top right: A craze for color in once-gray Detroit. Huge eye-catching murals on walls lure customers to Detroit's 83-year-old Eastern Market. Top,far right: A quartet of vintage cars at the Henry Ford auto museum. Right: Detroit's new spirit permeates its middle class residential areas, where children romp and play on spacious lawns of one-family homes.

COLEMAN YOUNG Detroit'sfirst black mayor One of the moving spirits behind the Detroit renaissance is its tall, plain-speaking black mayor, Coleman Young. When he was sworn in early last year, the city set aside traditional rivalries of poor vs. rich, black vs. white, and labor vs. management for three days ofinauguraI celebration.

Young laughs easily, is easy to like and delightful to dine with. His sense of humor, his gift for mediation and his knack for dealing with conflictinginterest groups have helped him reduce racial tension in Detroit.

He commands the respect of both whites and blacks after a lifetime fighting for black rights -as a politician and as a labor . leader.

Young has the support of all of Detroifs leaders in his efforts to improve law and order, establish racial harmony, halt the exodus to the suburbs, diversify industry, and continue the beautification and cultural uplift of the Motor City. Young likes to recall that in the days of his youth flowers on the City Hall lawn ~pelJed out: HDetroit-a city where life is worth living."

His idea of rebuilding Detroit is to make the city once again "like it used to be when I was

a kid."

If America is a "melting pot" of ethnic diversity, Detroit is surely a microcosm of America. It is a city where you will find tens of thousands of Poles, Greeks, Yugoslavians, Puerto Ricans, Indians, Germans, Arabs, Irish, Danes, Ukrainians, Filipinos, Mexicans-and almost every other major world nationality. One place where the ingredients of Detroit's melting pot "melt together" exceptionally well is at the city's annual ethnic festival which takes place every summer at the riverfront civic center. The "ethnics" all dress up in the national costumes of the "old country" and mingle with each other for dancing, singing, games and eating, in a dazzling carnival of pageantry and color. In short, many Detroiters would agree that it is their city's summer festival-perhaps more than any new building or monument or park-which dramatizes the new spirit of renaissance in the Motor City.

Indian women performing a folk dance (above) capture the spirit of Detroit's summer ethnic festival. In other photos, carnival revellers-male and female -display the curios and the jewelry, the unique apparel and dance traditions 0/ their countries 0/ origin. A menu ranging from Bavarian beer to Irish mussels to Arab sheesh kababs satisfies the hunger and thirst 0/ thousands 0/ visitors.

Detrol's

Big Union:

THE UNITED

Aum

DRIERS

Earning an average of $185 a week, the 1,700,000 members of the UAW are the elite of the American labor force. They enjoy innumerable benefits including health care and generous retirement pensions gained through years of collective bargaining.

A million or so men and women work in America's automobile factories and in the vast network of independently owned smaller plants that supply the world's biggest producers of automobiles and trucks.

The auto workers are of all nationalities, religions, races. Some are university-trained; some left school early in life for one of a thousand or more reasons. Some are in their teens, holding their first jobs; others ache from years of work in other mills and mines, tired veterans of the fast-changing industrial age. There are 250,000 blacks among them, and 150,000 women.

But all except a tiny fraction of America's auto workers have a common tie: They are members of one of America's giant trade unions. Their union is the UA W: the United Automobile, Aerospace, and Agricultural Implement Workers of America, second biggest union in the U.S., exceeded in numbers only by the truck drivers' conglomerate, the Teamsters Union. The imprint of the VA W on American life, in the less than four decades of its existence, has been powerful and indelible.

VA W influence extends far beyond the work place, reaching out and touching the lives of most Americans. Conservatives curse it, liberals hail it. Political in-betweens (most Americans) tolerate and respect it as a voice that often enunciates the hopes of the average citizen for a fairer society.

Further still, labor leaders from all over the world visit the VAW's headquarters in Detroit, Michigan, study the union's

techniques, marvel at its democracy and openly admit they hope to follow its pattern of operation. The union's leadership lobbies vigorously with the U.S. Congress and the White House for goals set by the union membership.

The UAW has close to 1,700,000 members-I,400,000 of them on active dues-paying status, and the rest inactive. because of retirement or leave of absence. Besides the million or so members who produce automobiles and trucks, there are many others from ancillary industries who, over the years, have voted themselves into this sprawling industrial union.

On the average, hourly earnings of UA W members in 1973 were $4.61. Some earned more, depending on their skills, and some earned less-but the typical member, by the end of his 40hour week had something like $185 coming to him, before deductions for taxes, social security, union dues and the like. Indeed, UA W members earn enough to hold an enviable position: Their standard ofliving is probably the highest of all factory workers in the world.

Most UA W members either own or are buying their own homes; almost all own at least one automobile. A few even have their own farms, and commute from the quiet of the countryside to the rumble of the factory. In this age of jet air travel, it is not unusual for a VA W member to spend his paid vacation in India.

It wasn't always this way.

In 1935, the year the U A W was born, America was struggling out of the worldwide economic depression. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, elected first in 1932 in the depths of economic chaos, had said, "Depressions are caused by men; they can be corrected by men." Prodded by him, the U.S. Congress passed a host of new laws to stimulate economic recovery.

These revolutionary measures included the Wagner Act of 1935 (named after its sponsor, Senator Robert F. Wagner of New York), which guaranteed the right of workers to organize unions and bargain with employers, without fear of penalty for doing so.

Congress at this time also created the National Labor Relations Board, a federal agency that is empowered to hold secret-ballot elections giving exclusive representation to any union that secures majority backing from workers in a plant.

Many Roosevelt-inspired laws were challenged by industry in the courts. Delays in legal decisions built tensions as America's industrial workers sensed history in the making. The industrial workers had heretofore been largely ignored by the old labor movement, led by the American Federation of Labor (AFL), a grouping of unions of skilled workers, mostly centered on their own crafts. By and large, industrial workers were left to themselves to put their own movement together. At the depths of the Depression they began doing just that-in oil, steel, rubber, and other mass propuction industries.

The surge for identity and dignity reached the auto workers in Detroit and swept across the boundary into neighboring Canada.

In 1935, Americans and Canadians joined forces to form the UA W. They were working for employers with plants on both sides of the international border, so why should they restrict their brotherhood? The cause was all: to strike, if necessary to force management to recognize their union, to return to work only when their grievances had been resolved, and only on contract terms which they themselves had endorsed. So while American auto workers struck the mighty General Motors Corporation in a string of U.S. cities, Canadians struck in unison. The alliance still holds todilY: 120,000 Canadians are in the UA W membership total.

Advocating a policy of generosity toward developing countries, the VA W says: 'The industrialized nations ... must give economic support to the underdeveloped nations.'

By the close of 1937, the UAW and other big industrial unions had established solid footholds. It was a turbulent year of strikes and clashes with authority-the police, and, in some areas, the National Guard (part-time army troops). Public debate raged over two conflicting philosophies: Management, and possibly most of the nation, believed that the right of owners to run their businesses the way they wished could not be challenged without undermining the very structure of American society; union leaders, on the other hand, swore the system had to bend, had to include workers at the tables where the vital decisions on their livelihood were made.

Now, new legislation passed by Congress said workers should have that representation-and industrial unions came to enjoy the status of legitimate entities.

There is no final report on where the boundary is between the rights of management and those of labor, because the debate still goes on, and the issue is always in flux. Today, 20 million out of a potential of 65 million workers are union members. But firm procedures, anchored in law, now exist and decisions to join or not to join a union are made in the nation's unorganized plants and offices. Today, bloody confrontations are rare, and disputes between management and labor are settled at the conference table.

There are now some 1,200 local unions of the U A W, scattered across the United States and Canada, some with just 200 or 300 members, and others with up to 30,000 members.

The member contributes, in monthly dues to the union, the equivalent of two hours' pay. Ifhe earns, for example, $5 an hour, his dues are $10 a month. In return, he is covered by the union contract with his employer, which spells out a thousand and more facets of his working existence.

Members belong to local union chapters, chartered directly by the international (American-Canadian) union. Three layers of "union government" exist: At the bottom is the local; above it is the regional level; and, at the top, the executive board, with international responsibilities. Everyone of UA W's presidents-four so far-began as an ordinary worker pn the production line.

At the local level, members choose by secret ballot the steward or committeeman who represents them in their work area. A plant of 300 can have up to 10 such in-plant union leaders.

Forty per cent of each dues dollar is kept by the local union to run this ground-floor level of the union's structure. Office rent and some salaries must be paid and a range of activities (education, recreation, etc.) must be funded. Some 600 newspapers, for example, are produced by the local unions of the UA W. Thirty per cent of each dues dollar is forwarded to the union's headquarters in Detroit for the broader-ranging work of the union. This pays the salaries and expenses of some 600 full-time staffers. The remaining 30 per cent goes to the union's strike fund, to provide payments of up to $40 a week to members and their families during periods of strike action when they forego their regular paychecks.

If the VA W has a shortcoming, it is one common to many movements and institutions: Its newest members lack meaningful knowledge of the past and can't quite equate present-day benefits with the struggles that made them possible.

Thaddeus Denthriff, for example, would represent this breed.

He is a young Ford employee who lives in Cincinnati, Ohio. Aged 36, married and the father of two small children, Denthriff is very close to being "the average auto worker" that economists report on and journalists write about. He now has 10 years' seniority with the Ford Motor Company. If he should take the time to compare his working conditions with those of his counterparts of a generation or so ago (before the UAW organized Ford in 1941), here's what he'd find: THEN: Just before World War II, the average Ford worker earned $7.20 a day (90 cents an hour for eight hours), with the same rate of pay for extra hours. NOW: Denthriff earns $4.95 an hour, slightly more than the VA W-member average. He gets timeand-a-halfpay for hours worked beyond 40 in a week, and doubletime pay for hours worked on Sundays or holidays. His weekly income is protected against inflation by an escalator arrangement that reflects the Federal Government's cost-of-living index.

THEN: There was no health insurance program for the Ford worker of earlier times. NOW: Denthriff and his family are covered free of charge (the company pays the premiums) by a surgicalmedical insurance policy that also covers hospitalization.

THEN: The Ford worker who got sick or became involved in an accident and thereby could not go to work got no pay.

NOW: If Denthriff misses work because of illness or accident, he receives $ I20 a week for up to a year. Should his incapacity continue, another program takes effect, which guarantees him a monthly income of $435 for a period of time that matches his length of service with the company.

THEN: Forty years ago, Ford workers got no life insurance protection through the company. NOW: Denthriff has a free $11,000 insurance policy, with $5,500 in additional cash payable in case of his death by accident. The policy also pays his widow $175 a month for two years. And if she were 48 years of age or older when he died, she would get the $175 a month until she reached age 62 ..

THEN: In the pre-UA W era, Ford workers received no paid holidays and no paid vacation. NOW: Because Denthriff has 10 years' service, he qualifies each year for three and a half weeks of paid vacation.

THEN:j Before the VA W began at Ford, auto workers had no program of paid retirement. NOW: In 1949 the VA W won a "first" in the industrial union field: company-paid pensions for the auto workers. That pension plan has been improved by negotiation over the years so that an auto worker aged 56 or over now can retire, after 30 years' service, on a $500 a month pension.

But high wages and an array of fringe benefits aren't what inspired the union's founding members to unite.

VA W members were then-and are today-concerned with working conditions. They want dignity, and that means having a voice in how they work as well as in how much they are paid.

Modern technology necessitates constant changes in work pace and methods, and today this is one of the VA W's major concerns.

The union is still grappling with complaints that mass production and assembly line methods produce serious problems of boredom on the job.

Former UAW President Walter Reuther (above) set something of a record during his 1956 visit to India at the invitation of the Indian National Trade Union Congress. In two weeks he made 118 speeches, visited 22 towns and cities. His approach to Indian audiences was equally unusual. As one newsman notf!d: "It has been the tradition to praise and pity this nation as something unique .... Now along comes a foreigner to explode this myth .... " The Hindustan Times said: "He has helped renew our faith in American democracy." And a simple textile worker, listening to a Hindi translation of his speech, turned to a fellow unionist and said: "This sahib makes sense. He says what we are thinking."

When Reuther died in 1970, U.S. workers did not grieve alone; thousands of Indians shared their sorrow.

With much of America's youth questioning the status quo in everything from human behavior to politics, it's only natural that youthful workers would rebel against the auto assembly line. It happened in early 1972 at General Motors new Chevrolet Vega plant in Lordstown, Ohio, which is so highly automated that the 7,800-man work force can produce 100 finished automobiles each hour. It's the world's fastest production line.

The Lordstown workers voted to strike against the work pace and they did-capturing national headlines with the spectacle of a work force, averaging 24 years of age, taking on the' world's wealthiest corporation. The settlement came after three weeks of striking. Despite the publicity, it was no great pattern-setter. However, the accord did state that more manpower would be employed, thus ending the contretemps.

Traditionally the UA W negotiates three-year contracts with the Big Three of the auto industry (General Motors, Ford, and Chrysler). In 1967 and again in 1970, the union went on long, costly strikes before settlements were reached.

The union's belief has been that bargaining success requires this formula: The membership must understand fully all of the

issues; secondary leadership must know the union's direction so it can reassure the membership during the always-tense days that precede settlement (for a membership-approved strike is the only alternative to settlement); and the top leadership, the actual negotiators, must do their bargaining exclusively within the framework of what the membership wants. A strike call, the union's ultimate weapon, demands overwhelming rank-and-file support.

To build this unity of purpose, union leaders hold discussions at local meetings on the union's over-all program for collective bargaining; local leaders compare notes with one another at meetings on the regional level ; and in a special union-owned resort area in northern Michigan, at Black Lake, the mechanics of successful bargaining are refined even more thoroughly.

Black Lake is the fruition of a dream long held by Walter Reuther, the red-headed tool-and-die maker from Wheeling, West Virginia, who helped forge the UA W from the crucible of the Depression and served as its president from 1946 until his death with his wife May in a plane crash in 1970. Reuther wanted his union to have a place where members of all ranks, and their families, could relax, enjoy themselves, and learn the techniques of modern trade unionism all at the same time. Black Lake is precisely that-a $25 million educational and recreational complex set in 400 hectares of pine and birch forest and now named the Walter and May Reuther Family Education Center.

The UA W doesn't stop its general program during the long weeks of major negotiations that come up periodically. As important as bargaining is, the union and its members must continue to cope with the problems that crop up daily at the work place. And if Congress's legislative schedule calls for debate or hearings on matters that touch on UA W aims, then a portion of the union's leadership must be free to carry the union's ideas to Capitol Hill.

A full recitation of the UA W's legislative goals would be out of place here, but the following are a few of the more important: At home, the UA W wants a national health insurance program that guarantees complete medical and hospital care for all Americans-paid for by the Federal Government out of taxes.

The UA W advocates a policy of generosity toward developing nations. On foreign aid, the UA W says: "The industrialized nations of the world as a matter of humanity and enlightened selfinterest must give economic support to the underdeveloped nations; for the values which we cherish as free people cannot survive in a world half well-fed and half starving."

The UA W also supports stepped-up trade with the Soviet.

Union: "We approve of trade between the two countries. The relaxation of tension between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. has permitted people on both sides to observe each other more calmly and rationally."

This brief history of the UA W touches only the highlights of the aims and accomplishments of this powerful labor union. UA W president Leonard Woodcock expresses particular pride in the union's great democratic tradition."

"We are democratic," says Woodcock, "in the sense that our members govern the union and determine its purposes ... and democratic in another sense-in that the union contributes to the total of well-being amI. justice and dignity in our society. The UA W helps make all of society more democratic."

0 About the Author: Roy Martin, now a free-lance wrltl1r spec,ializing in labor affairs, worked for 15 years as an editor for the United Auto Workers and personally knew the union's long-time president Walter Reuther.

What sort of men dominate the crucial negotiations between U.S. auto companies and their workers? This article describes leaders of both sides-management's colorful, confident, cigarpuffing Lee A. Iacocca; and labor's Leonard F. Woodcock, quiet, bespectacled, and conservatively dressed.

THE BARGAINERS ANOTHE BARGAIN

The triennial confrontation between the Big Three automobile companies and the gigantic V nited Auto Workers (V A W) union over new work contracts has become almost a ritualistic exercise. Into the bargaining rooms at the Detroit offices of General Motors, Ford, and Chrysler troop teams of negotiators from the contending sides. The union men sit down on one side of the long table, the men from management on the other. The union opens with a wide-ranging set of demands (basically identical for all three companies) which it has no serious hope of getting in entirety.

Management counters with a minimal offer (also basically identical for all three companies), which it knows will have to be improved upon. And so the stage is set.

Day after day, the two sides discuss, debate, bargain, and negotiate, each calling up experts and statistics to buttress its position, and each criticizing the other in statements to the public. Gradually, however, both sides make concessions and, little by little, the outline of a realistic compromise begins to emerge. As the end of the \ current contract period draws near, the

sessions extend into the night hours and the threat of strike hangs in the air.

But finally, with or without a strike, a settlement is made, detailing in similarly written contracts numbering hundreds of pages the wage LEONARD F. WOODCOCK levels and working conditions that will prevail for VA W members in the three big auto companies during the ensuing three years. And America's largest manufacturing business -leading all others in the yearly value of its products-goes on turning out its vast fleets of automobiles,. trucks, and buses.

Who makes this arduous and complicated process-called collective bargaining-work?

The most obvious participants are the actual negotiators at the bargaining tables who carry out the daily "giveand-take" of demands and counterdemands. But these negotiators do not work in a vacuum. The auto makers' team receives its instructions from top management; the union side works under direction of its top officials, who are in turn guided by what the VA W's members say.

These leaders rarely sit at the bargaining table, but their influence is always felt.

What sort of men dominate the commanding heights, and how did they get to be what they are?

A good example on the management side is Lee A. Iacocca, president of Ford Motor Company and perhaps the most colorful of the auto company executives.

Only Henry Ford II, chairman, controlling stockholder and grandson of the founder of the enterprise, h'as more to say about the far-flung operations of the Ford Company than does Iacocca, whose climb to power is a classic demonstration of the American process of upward mobility.

Iacocca reached the apex of the Ford managerial pyramid five years ago when he

was only fortysix, making him the youngest president of a major auto company in the history of the industry.

The fast-talking, cigar-puffing Lee Iacocca, who looks like a prize fighter even to the flattened nose, has shown an astute sense of what car buyers want (seemingly before they know themselves), a flamboyant talent for garnering publicity (he's the first-and so far the only-auto man to make the covers of both Time and Newsweek magazines in the same week), and a rare capacity for making the tough decisions that increase >profit margins (under his leadership Ford has reaped the highest profits in its history). The son of anItalian immigrant, Iacocca was born and raised in Allentown, Pennsylvania. -He was exempted from military service in World War II because of a serious bout with rheumatic fever, and went on to study industrial>engineering at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. There he was spotted by a recruiting representative from Ford, who hired him upon graduation for the executive training program.

Starting as a junior salesman in the district office in Chester, Pennsylvania, the young trainee worked long hours, often staying out on the road for weeks and bringing brief-cases of material home to study. "Don't despair of the first five years," Iacocca now says, in reminiscing.

"In a big company you build gradually.

It's the good little things you do every day that count. Too many guys are always trying to do something big right away."

Seasoned by intensive experience, Iacoccaprepared his attention-getting splash.

He launched a " '56 for 56" campaign in the Philadelphia area, urging prospective customers to buy a 1956 Ford for only $56 a month. His sales slogan proved so

effective it was adopted by the entire company, and Iacocca ended up the protege of Robert McNamara, then in charge of the Ford division of the company (~nd now president of the World Bank). As McNamara moved up to the presidency of Ford, Iacocca moved up, too, taking on increasing responsibilities. Henry Ford noticed that wherever Iacocca landed, sales leaped forward, and in 1960 called him in and made him head of the Ford division and a corporate vice president.

"Lee used to keep a little list of where in the corporate organization chart he should be and by when," says his wife Mary. The list called for him to be a Ford vice president by age 35. He had missed it by only a year.

Iacocca promptly gathered together a group of the most astute marketing men in the Ford division and came up with the idea for a brand-new model for the industry: the Mustang, a sleek, fast, compact-sized car designed to beguile the young buyer who wants fun in his driving rather than family convenience. Other Ford officials (including Henry Ford II himself) unhappily remembered the costly flop made by a previous new Ford model, the unpopular Edsel, and they resisted the idea. But Iacocca won his way, and when the Mustang appeared in 1964, it was an instant triumph, racking up sales of nearly 420,000 the first year, a record for a new model. Similar successes bit deeply into the sales lead of General Motorstraditionally No. 1 in the industry, to Ford's No.2-and carried Iacocca directly to the Ford presidency.

Now in the driver's seat, Iacocca still runs in high gear. He is shaking up the big manufacturing corporation (third largest in America) with new merchandising programs, cost-control procedures, tighter

managerial tables of organization. He discovered that 'Ford was wasting some of its energies on a whole series of unprofitable sidelines, including the manufacture of laundry equipment. ("Now what the hell," he asks, "was Ford doing in laundry equipment?") Iacocca quickly abandoned these minor enterprises.

Iacocca's unswerving dedication to the only company he has ever worked for excludes virtually all outside activities. He makes time in his hectic schedule to relax with his wife and two daughters (Kathryn, 13, and Lia, eight) at the family's large modern home in the fashionable Detroit suburb of Bloomington Hills. And he takes time on Friday nights for a nickel-anddime poker game with old cronies. But otherwise, he's selling, selling, sel1ing.

Iacocca knows his job hinges on his continuing ability to keep his company healthy and turn a profit. Only so long as he can hold the buying public's confidence-a difficult task in the fiercely competitive auto market-will he and Ford keep attracting customers. But he seems to relish the challenge. "I can stay up day and night, strategizing," he boasts. And for inspiration in the relentless scramble for sales, he relies on some advice from his father, an entrepreneur who built several successful businesses, including three restaurants: "My father always said, 'Even if you wait

During a 1967 strike against Ford, Walter Reuther found his workers warming themselves at coal fires provided by the company. 'Karl Marx,' he exclaimed, 'would never believe this.' on tables, be the happiest, most efficient waiter that ever came down the pike. Whatever you do, do the damned thing well.' " Brash, confident, the super car salesman -that's Lee Iacocca, a man at the topmost level of auto industry management.

Now let's look at the opposite side of the bargaining table, for a similarly powerful representative of the industry's labor movement-Leonard F. Woodcock, president of the United Auto Workers. A person seeing them both for the first time might well identify Iacocca as the labor man and Woodcock as the man from management. Bespectacled, conservatively dressed, with an air of cool self-assurance and a quiet, precise manner of speech, Woodcock seems more the stereotype of a business executive than the head of the second largest industrial union in America.

But beneath his gentlemanly exterior lies the fervor of a labor activist who learned trade unionism at his father's knee. Born 64 years ago in Providence, Rhode Island, Woodcock is the son of a British immigrant tool- and die-maker who was one of the first and most militant members of the Mechanics Educational Society of America, a forerunner of the UAW. The Woodcocks ettled in Detroit, where Leonard attended City College, now Wayne State University.

The Depression foiled young Woodcock's plan to become an accountant and after months of job-seeking, he wound up as a machine assembler for the BorgWarner Corporation, working, he recall , "seven days a week, 12 hours a day, for 35 cents an hour." Indignant at such conditions, Woodcock was quick to join a new American Federation of Labor union at the plant, and in 1933 became a fulltime organizer for the union.

But an attack of tuberculosis suddenly intervened, sending the young unionist to the hospital and a long siege of bedrest.

He spent his recuperation reading voraciously (three books a day, mainly on politics and economics and including Marx's Capital) and taking a tour of Mexico.

Mterward he went back to Detroit, and following a brief flirtation with the Socialist Party he joined the UAW regional staff in 1940, with the assigned task of organizing the Fisher Body plant, the last nonunion shop in the General Motors ~ystem-which he accomplished in less than a year. The feat caught the eye of Walter Reuther, the fast-rising, young,

UAW leader, and Woodcock became Reuther's right-hand man, acting as his floor manager in the bitter factional fight at the 1946 UA W convention that ended in Reuther's election to the union presidency. For nearly a quarter-century thereafter, Woodcock labored in Reuther's shadow, as a key aide in successively higher union posts. At the bargaining table with GM, Woodcock emerged as a canny, forceful negotiator, who could gauge the effect of a fractional wage increase in a few seconds of mental calculation, and who was not averse to boiling over when a temper display might win a point.

When 1970 began, Woodcock's career seemed at a dead end. Reuther still was going strong and gave no indication of retiring. But in May, Reuther tragically lost his life in an airplane crash, and the union executive board chose Woodcock to finish Reuther's unexpired term. Now on his own and in full command, he led the union in a 67-day strike against General Motors later that year, which resulted in major gains for UA W members. In 1974, an impressed UA W convention gave its new chief a vote of confidence by re-electing him to a two-year term as president.

Since coming to power, Woodcock has moved aggressively to advance the interests of his 1,700,000 worker-constituents. He has called on the auto industry to share its record profits by raising the wages of employees or cutting the prices of cars. He has advocated a major study, perhaps by the Federal Government, on the impact of automation on the number of jobs in the industry. As Reuther did before him, he has given strong support to broad social causes, such as ending racial discrimination in jobs, housing, and other aspects of American life.

Woodcock's fast-paced day, like the busy tempo of Iacocca, leaves little time for a private life. When he can, Woodcock finds escape in reading (mainly magazines, nowadays), tennis-playing, swimming, going fishing, and taking walks. He lives on the 22nd floor of an apartment building in downtown Detroit-alone, for he is separated from his wife, Loula, a former secretary of a union local. But he has a close relationship with his children (daughters Leslie and Janet and son John).

Woodcock's salary as UAW president is $32,907 a year-minuscule compared to the incomes of top-level auto executives, and well below the range for many other

union leaders of similar status. The principle of adequate but not opulent salaries for UA W officials was part of the philosophy of the nonmaterialistic Reuther, and Woodcock has no plans to change it. Nor will he try to reshape his low-key personality to emulate the charismatic style of Reuther, who won 13 consecutive elections as UA W president. "I'm not going to try to fill his shoes," Woodcock says. "Walter was a unique human being."

Woodcock for labor, Iacocca for management: The two personify the adversaries that carryon the process of collective bargaining in the auto industry. Woodcock, the ex-autoworker, is listened to with respect by the Ford management, because he represents a powerful union, which can, if necessary, wage an effective strike against the company. Iacocca is listened to with respec\: by Woodcock and his union committee, because the union knows that Ford is a highly successful company with a realistic idea as to how far it can go in granting wage and other concessions to its workers. Each side recognizes that the other will press every advantage it can. Yet neither side expects or even wants total victory. The union wants the company to prosper and thereby provide jobs for union members; the company needs the union to provide a work force for its production line. The paradigm of this symbiotic relationship is the story of Walter Reuther, during a 1967 strike against Ford, finding his pickets warming themselves at coal fires provided by the company. "Karl Marx," he exclaimed, "would never believe this."

But times are changing. Management faces the possibility that auto production may have to be curbed to conserve fuel resources and protect the environment against pollution. At the same time, union leaders are being pressed by their members for contract provisos involving such new bargaining considerations as job satisfaction. Yet the collective-bargaining process has served well through the changing attitudes and desires of previous decades and though it may be modified in the future, it still remains one of the best ways of reconciling management-andlabor disputes.

D About the Author: Robert Stearns, a writereditor, has long been active in trade union activities. He is a former member of United Steel Workers and Packinghouse Workers unions.

A LETTER FROM AMERICA In this warm, personal portrait of the United States, the Washington correspondent of the 'Indian Express' (above) writes of a chance meeting with Robert Frost, of a campaign ride with John F. Kennedy, and of marching with crowds to the tune of 'We Shall Overcome.'

N

o amount of preparation-talking to friends who have been in the United States and reading about it-is really enough for the initial impact of America. Statistics about one car per family (now a car and a half per family) do not condition the mind sufficientlyfor the overwhelming sense of power and movement on a superhighway without red lights, pedestrians-or bullock carts. The difference between "English" and "American" is also striking for the first few days. One soon gives up the accent cultivated painfully in India and begins to enunciate words more slowlyand clearly. But the words themselves have different meanings. However, one soon learns to ask for directions to the "elevator" instead of the "lift," and it soon dawns on one that when the owner-operator in a small coffee shop asks, "May I help you?" he means, "What will you have?" These are minor differencesbut they have a disorienting effect all the same.

However, there are compensations. The Indian is not "colored" and even at the height of racial discrimination in the "bad old days" there Were few instances of discrimination against an Indian once -he was identified as an "Easi Indian." With the loweringof the immigration barriers, the number of Indians who have settled down in America permanently runs into six figures, most of them professionals. And their number is increasing.

I was peculiarly fortunate in my American posting. The normal wayof journalism is to assume instant expertise. A correspondent canhardly wait to arrive at the scene of his new activities to start pounding away at his typewriter. It so happened that I landed

in the United States in 1958 not on a journalistic mission under the constant pressure of deadlines but to take up an Associate ieman Fellowship at Harvard. Niemans are a peculiar breed.

They are allowed to take any course, join any seminar, and write any paper. Theoretically they are also allowed to do nothing at all. However, in the achievement-oriented atmosphere of Harvard, this is more easily said than done. After a year at Harvard, the Niemans from outside the United States are also allowed two months of travel in the country. Thus, when my office asked me to stay on in America because of a sudden awareness that what happened in the U.S. could be of interest to India, I had a whole year of study behind me, related to some of the problems I would have to describe and comment on as a journalist.

During my year at Harvard, I met many personalities who were already household names or who were to become famous later. One experience I will never forget was an unexpected encounter with Robert Frost. I had been invited to an after-dinner party at the home of Mr. Morrison, who was teaching me "Writing." Crossing the Harvard Yard after dinner, I reached what I thought was the correct street. The name, however, was not visible and the numbers on the houses were by no means clear.

On that perfect moonlit night I saw a silver-haired gentleman standing in front of a house and decided to ask him whether he knew my host's address. When I went near him, I found him lost in thought, gazing up with a quiet intensity that made me feel instinctively that I was intruding. I did not know who the old man

'Looking back on my years as a U.S.-based correspondent,' says Parasuram, 'I realize that both India and America have changed. Our friendship is now less emotional and more pragmatic.' was, but he had a kindly, yet compelling, presence. As he was the only other man around, I had to bother him, so I decided to stand beside him until he would turn toward me. I do not know how long I stood that night beside the poet. After what seemed an interminable interval, he turned to me and, without waiting for my question, pointed to the house in front of us.

It turned out to be the Morrison home all right. One by one the other guests arrived and eventually the old man whom I had met in the moonlight. Only when we were all introduced to each other did I realize who he was. We talked of many things that night. He recited some of his poems but he was also very knowledgeable about politics. He repeatedly criticized those who said that New England was on the eclipse. "Who do you think is going to be the next President of the United States?" he asked, and he answered himself, "It is going to be Jack Kennedy. With Kennedy in the White House, you won't hear any talk of the eclipse of New England." He was a firm believer in New England, the land of the Puritans. He said to me, "I don't know much about India but let me ask you one thing: How is Nehru? Is he all right?" He said that in a tone which implied, "If Nehru is all right, India is all right."

What made that evening so memorable was that at that time, no one was sure that Senator John F. Kennedy would get the Democratic nomination. It was not even known that he would be a candidate. The politically sophisticated were sure that no man of Irish Catholic extraction could ever become President of the United States. Kennedy, of course, became President, and at his Inaugural, Frost recited a poem on that snowy day in front of the Capitol. When Nehru died, among the things found on his desk was a writing pad with a few of Frost's lines.

A

nother unforgettable experience was a morning in Boston campaigning with John F. Kennedy, who was then standing for re-election to the Senate. The Kennedy camp-perhaps it was Robert Kennedy who had the idea-sent word that the Senator would have two or three empty seats in his car during the campaign and if anyone of us wanted to join, it would be all right with him. The youthful Senator received us with a warm handshake and a smile, and said that if we wanted to ask him anything, we could go ahead.

It was an informal chat and not a question-and-answer session and every few minutes we would jump out to enable the Senator to do his campaigning. Having covered many political campaigns in India, I had imagined that there would be loud-speakers all over the place and that the candidate would make many speeches on national and international issues. What he did was something quite different. This was not a speech-making tour but what Americans call a "press-the-flesh" session, that is, shaking hands with as many people as possible. This is far more arduous than our simple namaste. President Johnson used to complain that after these sessions his hand would swell and need medical attention. I do not know whether Kennedy's hands were equally delicate, but he seemed to enjoy himself hugely going into barber shops, supermarkets, delicatessens and other places and clasping the hands of his voters. Old men in Boston seemed especially

fond of him. They would pat him on the shoulder and say: "Jack, you look fine." At that time he had not yet developed the charisma which made him a universal figure, as much respected in Asia,¡ Africa and Latin America as in the United States. However, one could even then sense in the affection of the Bostonians the beginnings of the "Kennedy magic."

Another charismatic American leader was Martin Luther King, Jr., who rose to prominence after his famous "march" on Washington. His imperishable "I have a dream" speech, delivered on the spur of the moment after he threw away his prepared notes, made him one of the immortals. I am proud of the fact that I marched with the crowds that day from the Washington Monument to the Lincoln Monument to the tune of "We Shall Overcome." Later, I interviewed him in Atlanta. He readily placed his movement in the Gandhian tradition but he also pointed out the differences. Mahatma Gandhi, he noted, had to fight a foreign power. When the battle against colonialism is won, the people come into their own and the colonial power disappears from the scene. On the other hand, his fight was for equality of black citizens with white. At the end of his battle, black and white would have to live together. When King was struck down by the bullet of a bigot, I could not help comparing his life with that of Mahatma Gandhi whose camps I had covered at Mahableshwar, Panchgani, Simla and Delhi.

Martin Luther King was a true revolutionary just as Mahatma Gandhi was. Black and white alike were ennobled by his triumphs.

His was a victory not of one race over another but a triumph of the American ideal. When I first toured the United States, I could see in the South separate water fountains for blacks and whites, segregated spaces on buses and in public places like restaurants.

Even in Washington, D.C., the federal capital, some hotels advertised that they were for "Whites Only" or "Blacks Only."

That is all finished now. The Negro citizen still has a long way to go just like our own Harijans in India. However, as in India, the goal of the state and of society has been firmly laid down, and there is no going back.

As a correspondent, I naturally have to concentrate on the day's news. However, I am also acutely conscious of the fact that what is news today may be utterly outdated a few years hence.

A correspondent has always to be on guard against continuing to cover yesterday's news and yesteryear's controversies. One has to strike a fine balance between the fierce quarrels and controversiesthat are inevitably emphasized in the daily newspaper and the real challenges of today and the promise of tomorrow. The "cold war" was at its height when I arrived in the United States.

Anyone who suggested that the People's Republic of China ought to occupy China's seat in the United Nations was considered a fellow traveler, if not a card-holding Communist. The Soviet Union was supposed to be leading a worldwide conspiracy of international communism. All that is now changed.

U

ltimately,the essential convictions of a correspondent in another country remain strengthened by his experiences. Yet, if heis open-minded, he has to shed some prejudices. When one is in the United States, for example, one realizes that the old ideas of dividing the world into capitalist, socialist or communist have become irrelevant. Even if Galbraith's thesis that eventually capitalism and communism will merge into one another does not come true, the changes in American society are already noticeable. The huge multinational corporations, the corporate leviathans, are owned by no capitalist or coteries of capitalists but by thousands of shareholders. Some years ago, in response to my written queries, two of the largest corporations wrote back to say that they were not interested in any joint enterprises with foreigners-they insisted on running wholly owned subsidiaries abroad. These very firms are now operating in some countries as minority shareholders. They are now willing to invest their capital and transfer their know-how on terms which they would not have accepted in the past.

T.V. Parasuram has met many American celebrities during his long tour of duty as the correspondent of the Indian Express in America.

Left: He is greeted by Nelson Rockefeller, then Governor of New York and now U.S. Vice President. Below: With Chester Bowles, former United States Ambassador to India, at his Washington home.

Nothing demonstrates this better than the fact that the country which is seeking American capital and technology the most is the Soviet Union. Standing in a factory which produces 20 million tons of steel a year, which is about one-fifth of the total production of the United States, one cannot help asking whether it is not possible to build such factories in India where the iron ore is of even higher quality. Similarly, an Indian correspondent visiting an American farm cannot help comparing yields, whether of the dairy or of the CI:0ps,and wondering whether those who actually do the farming: not the pen-pushers .and bureaucrats, should be visiting these farms and exchanging notes.

A

common grievance against a foreign correspondent is that he tends to stick to the capital and forget that most people live outside it. The point is well taken. I have often noticed that out in the Midwest, for example, the last thing people worry about are some of the political issues that rage in Washington.

America is a land of infinite variety. During a visit to a Navajo Indian reservation a few years ago, I found that the problems are the same as those of many underdeveloped countries-bringing electricity to the village and better sanitation and water supply.

An overnight stay with a Nebraska farmer proved invaluable in understanding the problem of the "adulterated" grain sorghum which made headlines in India in 1973. My host was farming about 300 hectares singlehanded, occasionally getting some help from his son who had another farm. He grew grain and soybeans.

When one thinks of a farm, one conjures up a picture of some animals, at least a few cows and chickens. On this farm, as in many others, the farmer's family bought their milk and meat from the supermarket. Growing grain was a specialized business.

In addition to preparing the ground, sowing the crop and harvesting it, the farmer had to buy implements, tractors, combines and other equipment, negotiate bank loans, take his grain to the cooperative, and keep an eye on prices in order to determine which was the best time to sell. With so much to do, it was often difficult to avoid weed infestation of his crops.

On this particular farm, the weed happened to be not harmful to humans. It was not dhatura. But it would have made no difference if it was. I asked the farmer why he could not remove the weeds. He asked me in return, "How?" I said, "Can't you hire some boys to pluck them out because they are so clearly visible?"

His answer was simple: There was no help available in that area.

He could get some hired help only during the summer vacation.

Naturally, one does not expect a farmer to undertake the job of plucking out the weed singlehanded from 300 or 400 hectares.

If the weed situation threatens to get out of hand, he tries weedkillers. If they fail, he digs up the whole field, rotates the crop and hopes for the best. The explanation did not solve the problem for the Indian consumer. However, to me it was very valuable because I realized that these things happen because of the nature of farming operations and not because of some dark, evil conspiracy.

Looking back on my years as a U.S.-based correspondent, I realize that both India and America have changed. Our relationship is now less emotional and more pragmatic-a "mature relationship," as it is called. This is but natural. However, I would be very surprised if it were ever possible to completely drain the relationship of all emotion. Shared ideals can prove uncommonly strong when put to the test. One may not talk of the "special relationship" but it remains somewhere in the background-to be revived when the occasion warrants and the time is ripe. 0

AMERICA'S NEW BEAUTY QUEEN Women's Lib in America is getting stronger every day.

But this doesn't prevent a few women from playing such "traditional" feminine roles as beauty queen-as Miss America 1975 demonstrates with a dazzling victory smile in the photograph above. For interested males, here are some details: She is Shirley Cothran, 21, a 5 foot 8 inch brunette from Denton, Texas.

She was crowned Miss America at the annual pageant in Atlantic City, New Jersey.

She is preparing for a doctorate in guidance counseling at Texas Christian University.

. TWANGY MELODIES, HOMESPUN LYRICS It's booming all over the United States-and even in such unlikely places as London, Munich, Tokyo and Moscow where foreign enthusiasts are calling it "America's sweetest sound." It's the sound, of course, of "country music" -the twangy rural melodies and homespun lyrics of America's south and west.

A thousand radio stations in the U.S. play nothing but

"country." Ecstatic fans throng clubs, concert halls and college campuses-wherever country singers appearclapping hands and slapping knees to the beat of a "hillbilly" lament. Records and tapes of country music sell more than $400 million a year.

Why the phenomenal popularity of this unsophisticated music? Some say it's because it expresses the conservative mood of America today-a longing for tranquillity-just as rock music expressed the shrill anarchism and radical protest of the '60s. John Scott Colley, a professor of literature in Nashville, Te_nnessee (the "capital" of the new music), puts it this way: "Country music is becoming the 'soul music' of white, middle and working class people. It reminds them of quieter, more peaceful times, and it describes their everyday life as they see it."

Country music's traditional message is one of love, hope, despair, loss, death. It is always the cry of the common man. "If you listen to us long enough, one of our songs will tell your story," says the manager of Louisville, Kentucky's radio station WINN, which plays nothing but country.

In the past, country music was unimaginative, dealing with such themes as blind loyalty to husband, parents, even political leaders. Today it is freer and more varied in theme. In fact, Merle Haggard, one of the superstars of country music (he's made the cover of Time), says that country lyrics are "journalism put to music." That definition certainly applies to his own hits, of which there are many. (In the past 10 years he's sold 12 million records, worth $45 million.) Haggard's

best-known song, "Okie from Muskogee," is an aggressive assertion of the conservative ethic. (An Okie is a migrant farm worker from Oklahoma; Muskogee is a city in East Oklahoma.) The song runs: "We don't smoke marijuana in MuskogeejWe don't take our trips on LSD/We don't burn our draft cards down on Main StreetjWe like livin' right and bein' free.jWe don't make a party out of 10vin'jWe like holding hands and pitching woo./ We don't let our hair grow long and shaggy jLike the hippies out in San Francisco do./ Leather boots are still in style for manly footwear.jBeads and Roman sandals won't be seen./Football's still the roughest thing on campus/And the kids here still respect the college dean.jAnd I'm proud to be an Okie from MuskogeejA place where even squares can have a ball.

Superstars like Merle Haggard, Johnny Cash and Tanya Tucker sing regularly in Nashville, which is rapidly becoming the music center of America-not just for country but for all pop. More than 90 per cent of country music and nearly half of all music in the U.S. is recorded in Nashville.

The biggest attraction for the city's six million tourists a year is the Grand Ole Opry House, named after a 50-year-old radio program, where country singers regale packed houses six days a week.

Will the mesmerism of country music last? Fans of country have no doubt it will.

They point out that country is no fad; it's been evolving for over half a century. And to quote Merle Haggard: "Country music fans are the most loyal there is."

ERICANS RETALKING

BOUli

DETENTE IN OUTER SPACE "Once you put on a cowboy hat, everybody looks alike," said a Soviet astronaut visiting the U.S. recently. "You can't tell a Russian from an American."

The same thing happens when one dons a spacesuit. Russian and American astronauts (seephoto above) are training side by side for this year's Apollo-Soyuz Test Project.

The venture is "much more than a handsp.ake in space," says Chester Lee of America's NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration).

"Its benefits will be felt by our grandchildren years from now."

Preparing for the project, scientists and astronauts from both countries have exchanged many visits and learned a lot about each other. The Russians have tasted American hamburgers and beer. The Americans have sampled Russian caviar and vodka. At a "wild West" show in Texas, the Russians tried their hands at riding, roping, and twirling guns. They toured Disneyland and lunched in American homes. Similarly, American astronauts visited historic sites around Moscow, posed for pictures with friendly Sovietfarmers and partook

of home-cooked Russian meals.

When will the project get off the ground? The Soyuz craft carrying two Soviet astronauts will be launched from the Soviet Union on July 15, 1975.

Seven and a half hours later, three American astronauts will blast off from Cape Canaveral, Florida, in their Apollo craft.

Fifty hours later the two spacecraft will link up in space nearly 210 kilometers above the earth. For two days the crews will work together on scientific experiments, moving back and forth between craft and sharing meals.

Scientists of the two countries are now working together on spacecraft design and mission guidelines. "We're learning what they have to offer," says Lee, "and they're learning what we have to offer. We're gaining mutual respect, which is essential if we're going to work together in the future."

EW INDIA EXPORTS What does India sell to the U.S.? Jute? Tea? Cashews?

Sure, but that's old hat.

What Americans are talking about more and more are the new "nontraditional" imports from India-like engineering goods, frozen shrimps, and, yes, lamps made from water jugs! The advertisement at right was inserted by B. Altman & Co., one of New York's leading department stores, and took up a full five columns of the New York Times. Such ads are appearing more and more in American newspapers and magazines, and are evidence of the increasing demand for Indian products in the U.S. Exporters and potential exporters in India, please note!

Our lamp buyer came back from India without a single lamp (and we gave her a gold star) "This is our kind of creative thinking" we said while.we opened her shipment of tall urns and ornamented vases and round water jugs.

"Not a lamp in a crate¡ful."

,

Then we sent for Altman's own Aladdin to rub us up some magic. He huffed and he buffed tillhe brought up the gleam of the brass and the glow of the copper, He smoothed out dents and he added /irm, functional bases. After that we had everything wired to our specifications: Now we 're ready for you to come pick your favorite from our beautifully burnished collection, (55.00 to 175.00 without shades), take it home and let the genie from Con-Ed light up your living room.

And when your guests

remark about your lovely lamp, just say "That's no lamp, that's an Indian water jug",

Always 'educationoriented,' the U.S. toy business is more so today than ever before, with games designed to teach their players about such modern issues as ecology, women's lib and race problems.

The Water Pollution Commis- are developing exciting new ways sioner of a small U.S. town is to combine educat ion and enterworking overtime to keep the tainment.

Of course, the "educational" waters of a local lake free of pollution. He's facing an uphill fight. label is nothing new in the AmerWastes from steel mills, power ican toy industry. Among the plants and paper companies along roughly 140,000 varieties of toys the lake shore, as well as deter- and games produced each year, gents, sewage and pesticides, typical learning toys such as threaten to destroy the cycle of counting devices, vocabulary animal and plant life that natu- cards or play clocks that teach rally purifies the water and keeps time concepts have long been his lake "alive"-drinkable and popular. Indeed, it may be argued that even the strictly-for-fun toy swimmable.

The Commissioner considers a is in some way educational beregulation that would force local cause it provides a vicarious exmanufacturers to install antipol- perience of life. For example, the 38-year-old lution devices. But waste control "Monopoly," bestselling board game, lets playis expensive and cuts into business ers buy and sell like business profits. If the Commissioner's tycoons, and even the fashion rulings are too strict, industry might suffer and the town will dolls with their ever-changing lose vital jobs. How can he meet wardrobes help little girls develop both his responsibilities-to keep concepts of taste.

But today's play-to-Iearn toys his community's waters and its and games are combining fun and economy healthy?

Hundreds of thousands of instruction better than ever beAmericans have worried far into fore. Livelier than the old "educathe night about the Commis- tional" toys, they apparently are sioner's problems. They have also more effective teachersbeen playing a new board game thanks to improved psychological called "Dirty Water," and their insights into the learning process. fascination points to a significant The range of toys has been broadtrend in America's $2,500 million ened and new themes have been early learning a year toy-and-game industry. introduced-from Once concerned primarily with techniques for baby to public selling "fun," companies today problems for older brother and

sister. And American consumers are holding the toy industry to a higher standard than ever, demanding their money's worth.

(The average American consumer spends about $80-Rs. 640-each year on toys and games.)

"The consumer is definitely concerned about educational values," says Kirby Anderson, director of product development for Urban Systems Products Inc., the company that makes "Dirty Water." "The old stigma that if a game involved learning it couldn't be any fun seems to have pretty much disappeared."

"Dirty Water," she says, is typical. Designed to be highly competitive and challenging, it also includes important lessons about pollution control. For example, players explore the financial costs of conservation and learn about the plants and animals that make up the ecological balance in a healthy fresh-water lake.

In "Smog," another Urban Systems Products offering, each player tries to cope with air pollution as the city's Air Quality Right: Little girl is fascinated by toy based on principle of centrifugal force; airplane spins round ring but doesn't fall off.

'The old stigma that if a game involved learning it couldn't be any fun seems to have pretty much disappeared.'

Manager. Chance determines how many people and industries pollute the air and how much the local citizenry will pay to clean it up. Working within these variables, the manager wrestles with problems of population growth, zoning, and industrial development. Other entries in the environmental game field include "The Cities Game," "Litterbug," and "Ecology," a game that traces the causes of pollution from primitive times to the present.

But science and ecology aren't the only subjects in the industry's effort to turn lifemanship into gamesmanship. "Woman and Man," a creation of Communications/Research/Machines Inc., examines the sex stereotypes currently under fire from the women's liberation movement. Each player chooses to be either a "woman" and fight for status, or a "man" who battles for the status quo.

Women get points when they draw cards that state women's achievements: "You are the first woman mayor of your city" or "You get your husband to spend 50 per cent of the time with the kids so you can go to work." Men get ahead by keeping women down: "As a college counselor, you have just persuaded another girl undergraduate that she shouldn't go to medical school (she'll become too masculine)," says a sample male point card.

The game called "Blacks and Whites" allows players to experience vicariously the problems of racial discrimination as ghetto dwellers, bigots, or white suburbanites. In this game, "blacks" and "whites" struggle for property in various neighborhoods.

Whites start with I0 times as much money as blacks and can buy anywhere in the city, while blacks can buy only under certain circumstances. But the game's instructions assure blacks that times can change and it's still possible to win. "When things start to change and you grab some odd breaks, it's time to stay loose and invent wild new strategies," the instructions say. "You may

The teacher observes child's. reaction to toys, notes comments on papers beside her. The boy seems temporarily more interested in the carousel than the tugboat.

use resources better, and risk yourself with more courage, than players who start well-off but live uptight in fear of failure."

Other games exploring racial themes include "Black Experience," which is based on black history, and "Feel the Soul Game," a challenging game about racial identity. Some of these social games have become so sophisticated that they are used in schools. "Ghetto," for example, was developed for the classroom

by Western Publishing Company, Inc. and tries to give middle-class students a taste of the pressures facing the urban poor.

Parlor politicians can battle for power in games such as "Summit" or "Meet the President." In one such game, "Mr. President," players form parties, nominate candidates, and plan campaign strategies for the election of an American President and VicePresident. The intrigues of foreign

policy are the subject of "Diplomacy," in which players represent nations, form alliances, and fight hot and cold wars.

The human psyche also figures importantly in games Americans play. "Group Therapy" players fight for sanity against an onslaught of emotional problems.

"Body Talk" examines the new science of nonverbal communication. Players draw emotion cards and then win points if they can express their love, hate, shyness or anger to others using only their hands, faces or bodies but not their voices.

Still other games explore that Yankee phenomenon called "getting ahead." In "Society Today," for example, players try to realize selected life goals by avoiding the board's pitfalls and taking advantage of opportunities. The ads promise that players learn "about the forces at work in our society and the many (often subtle) ways they are affecting your life."

But while grownups and teenagers are vicariously cleaning up the environment, winning wars, or seeking success, baby is not left to wallow in idle ignorance.

From the crib through elementary school, the American child is offered a broad variety of new educational toys that teach the basic concepts he needs to know and also introduce him to the concerns of the adult world.

Toys for infants have become an important new trend in the industry. "New technology has made it possible for us to make toys for infants that are absolutely safe," says Wes Sharer, vice president of Playskool, Inc. "And parents want these toys because they now know more about the importance of encouraging learning in the very young child.

"Recent research has indicated that by the time a child is four years old, he has acquired about 50per cent of his adult learning," Sharer continued. "If we can make an infant's environment more stimulating, we can help him learn better at an early age."

Playskool and other leading toy manufacturers have developeda whole range of infant toys, including musical mirrors because "an infant is fascinated by his own image," rattles shaped like glasses with colored beads

that flow back and forth, squeezable balls specially designed to have a great many small surfaces for infant hands to grab, and picture books that hang from the side of a crib.

The ultimate in education for the newborn, however, may be the new crib produced by Edcom Systems Inc. of Princeton, New Jersey. The company's president, Frank Caplan, challenges potential buyers with the question: "How would you like to spend 12 months of your life behind bars in a 3!, X 5' cage?"

That is the situation of the average infant in a typical rectangular crib, says Caplan. He may be safe, but he's bored silly. As an alternative Caplan offers a "hexagonal learning crib" complete with interchangeable "play modules." These are basically molded plastic walls fitted with a variety of amusements from goldfish tanks to spinning blocks to "texture tracks" that allow baby to feel different textures when he traces his finger along a pattern.

Caplan, former president of Creative Playthings, says the crib allows infants to make maximum use of learning opportunities that come only once in life.

Learning toys for preschoolers reflect the increasing sophistication of modern children. Computer concepts, unknown a generation ago, are now widely used.

In the "Marble Computer" of Questor Education Products Company, a child is asked to match up a picture containing several objects and a number.

When the match is correct, the bright yellow marbles appear on a black grid in the shape of the numeral. When the match is wrong, the marbles come out randomly, illustrating what grown-up computer programmers call the "gi-go principle"garbage in, garbage out.

Educational television has also had an impact on the children's toy market, according to Questor's marketing director, Gary Burgett. His company makes several toys based on the charac-

ters in such' TV programs as "Sesame Street" and the "Electric Company." The child watches the characters on the shows sing, dance and joke their way through number and reading concepts, and then when the programs end, he can play with puzzles, puppets and other toys that involve the same characters.

Of course, there are many different schools of thought on the subject of which kind of toy teaches best. One company, Educational Games Inc., recently developed an entire line of retail toys based on the world-famous Montessori learning methods.

Marie Montessori believed that a child should involve as many senses as possible in learning.

Alphabet cards based on her principles are made with sandpaper letters so that a child can engage his sense of touch-tracing the rough-textured letters with his fingers-as well as his sight in learning to recognize the letters.

Creative Playthings Inc., one of the pioneers in the educational toy field, advocates simple, nonliteral toys that encourage a child to use his imagination. The company makes a toy car that is merely an abstract chunk of wood on wheels. This is said to offer more play possibilities than an entire toy garage full of miniature sedans and sports cars, because the child can use his Creative Playthings car in many ways-as a racing car, a truck, a tank, or a family car. Most Creative Playthings toys are modernistic in design and made of wood. Attractive toys, the company says, help the child develop standards of good taste as he learns through play.

The Creative Playthings toy generally appeals to affluent middle and upper-middle-class buyers, although the company is attempting to broaden its appeal.

At the other end of the spectrum is Fisher-Price Inc., whose brightly colored plastic toys are massmarketed in American drugstores and retail chains at moderate prices. The company has sold more than 2,000 million members

of its "play family"; these are small plastic peg-doll adults and children which can be played with in a variety of settings such as a home, school, airport, farm, and even an entire village.

The settings are realistic and literal, and that, says Fisher-Price, is exactly what children want.

"We believe that dramatic playing or role-playing is one of the most educational things a child can do," says a company spokesman. "But before a toy can be educational you have to get the child to play with it. We think children like bright colors and toys that look like the things they see in life. And we definitely have a fun-first approach."

Role-playing toys may be increasingly important in the educational toy market, according to Wes Sharer of Playskool Inc. "The young woman of the 1950s grew up in the Depression and was very concerned about the basics of education for her child," he explains. "She bought toys that promised to help her child increase his intelligence or get ahead in school because she wanted him to be able to succeed economically later in life."

"Today's young mother, however, is more concerned with the quality of life," says Sharer. "She's more socially oriented and wants her child to learn to help others."

A Playskool toy that reflects this attitude, Sharer says, is a new "Rescue Center," a three-story miniature fire house and first-aid station complete with a rooftop heliport. "This toy enables the child to play with imaginary people helping other imaginary people, and the value of concern for others is built right into his games," he explains.

Social values have also updated a host of familiar toys for older children. For example, Entex Industries Inc. now sells a model-making kit that enables boys to build a replica of the new pollution-free Wankel engine.

Science kits have long been pop-ular with school-age children, but today's young scientist deals with

such questions as "Can I Breathe the Air?" -the name of a new kit that offers simple chemicals and instructions to test air pollution. "Mr. Wizard Experiments in Ecology," another science kit, provides basic information on the chemistry of pollution. The modern child's desire to help society is also nurtured by Owens-Illinois Inc., makers of the "Mystery Garden" kit. The company promises to plant a tree in the name of every child who successfully identifies the gardening kit's "mystery seeds."

Of course the traditional children's toys, from dolls to dump trucks to trains, are still popular in America. But there is evidence that parents will increasingly demand that a new toy be more than simply an amusement.

Will all these play-and-Iearn toys make the new generation brighter and more aware? No one can sayfor sure, because the effectiveness of educational toys and gameshas never been empirically tested. But judging from their growingpopularity, the new toys havealreadysucceeded in implanting one important truth. They are teaching us all that for young and old learning can be an enjoyable and exciting experience. 0 About the Author: Elizabeth Wahl i~ SPAN's correspondent in New York.

Two views ( above and left) of the new "hexagonal learning crib" produced by Edcom Systems Inc. Different shaded panels in roof are SOld to help infants develop sensitivity to color. Balls and mobiles may be added as baby needs nt'w stimuli. Toddler at far leji seems to ponder the possibilities of an all-terrain vehicle.

KISSINGER MEETS n-tE INDIAN PRESS U.S. Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger held a press conference in New Delhi's _Vigyan Bhavan on October 30, 1974. Excerpts from the conference transcript appear on these pages.

QUESTION: How successful do you think your visit has been?

KISSINGER: India and the United States are both major countries-located, of course, in different parts of the world -and they do not necessarily have a complete identity of views on every subject. But, in terms of the purpose that we set ourselves, which was to establish a basis for a new and mature relationship, I consider the trip completely successful.

QUESTION: The two points which emerged from the Joint Communique published today are that you made no direct reference to economic aid to India in your talks with C. Subramaniam and that the question of the supply of food to India will be in accordance with the decisions of the forthcoming World Food Conference at Rome. In the course of your talks, did you give any hint about the possibility of resuming economic aid to India, and food supplies on a bilateral basis, irrespective of the decisions that might be taken at the World Food Conference at Rome?

KISSINGER: Let me deal with this question in two parts. I think one of the aspects of the relationship that is devel-

oping now between India and the United States is that we can talk to each other free of complexes. One of the cbmplexes that has affected our relationship in the past has been who was asking whom for what. And, secondly, whether the United States was doing anybody a favor by extending aid or other forms of co-operation. Let me say first of all that when the United States undertakes a certain measure with respect to India, or any other country, it does so in its own interest as well as in the interest of the other country. Unless there is a joint interest, there is no firm basis for common action. We have an interest in a stable, growing subcontinent, and therefore, when we discuss aid with India, it is not in the context of India asking us for a special favor but of defining joint objectives. The Commission that has been set up will provide an opportunity for discussing common objectives, in a realistic framework. And within that framework, I am certain that the question will undoubtedly come up of what measures can be taken by the United States to assist in the development of India in our joint interest. And in that

context, it also came up informally¡ in some of the talks that were conducted.

With respect to the food problem, there are again two aspects. One is those measures which the United States takes as a country individually, and those measures which it proposes that the world take on a multilateral basis. At the World Food Conference, I intend to put before the other nations the entire United States approach to the world food problem: Those steps that are taken on a national basis as well as those steps that are taken on a multilateral basis. Those steps which the United States is prepared to take on a national basis obviously do not have to wait for the decisions of the World Food Conference. And those steps will include, as far as the United States is concerned, a program of food assistance to India.

QUESTION: .,. What surprises me is that your country has "made up" with the two biggest communist countries of the world and also supported some of the dictatorial countries. On our side, too, we have come closer to the socialist communist countries headed by the U.S.S.R. Does this mean

that the democratic countries of the world have no realfaith in theprinciple of democracy? .. Does it also mean that the U.S., a staunch believer of democracy, does not want democracy to flourish in other parts of the world?

KISSINGER: This is a question I hear occasionally at our press conferences in America, though stated with less eloquence. The United States has two categories of concerns in the world. One has to do with the problem of peace, security and the avoidance of a holocaust. The second is influenced by the basic orientation of our values in which, of course, our preference for democratic institutions plays a very important role.

Now, under ideal circumstances, those two strands of our policy should operate side by side. However, there are many circumstances in which a choice may have to be made. For example, the question of the prevention of nuclear war cannot wait for the emergence of democratic institutions in the Soviet Union. Because when you have two countries capable of destroying human life, a number of practical problems arise. And, similarly, it was our view that it was impossible to think of a peaceful international environment without an exchange of views and regular contacts between the United States and the People's Republic of China. This does not mean approbation of the domestic structure of these governments, but it does mean that there are certain practical problems that require solutions of an overwhelming importance. In the area where we believe we have a choice, our preference for democratic institutions and democratic governments ought to be clear. But there are these two strands of our policy which, for the sake of the peace of the world, have to be kept in view.

QUESTION: The Joint Communique issued on October 29 by the U.S. and Indian Governments states that the countries of the subcontinent could live without outside interference. But unfortunately, as America's record recently suggests-the interference in Chile, the coup in Cyprus, as recorded by the Congressional committee evidence-America is interested in fomenting the overthrow of constitutionally elected governments. How does it reconcile this with the high-minded principles enunciated in the Joint Communique-not wholly or alone in the Indian context either, as we all know from Ambassador Moynihan's telegraphic cable to you.

KISSINGER: As I have had occasion to say yesterday, Ambassador Moynihan sends me many cables of great eloquence designed to explain to me the point of view of Indians, and this is a point of view that you have just now repeated.

Now, in going through the particular events which you mention, 'no useful purpose would be served by going into each of the instances except to point out that the United States did not foment the overthrow of a constitutional government in Chile. That has been made sufficiently plain by the President. Secondly, the United States had nothing whatever to do with the coup in Cyprus: This is simply repeating totally unfounded propaganda.

Thirdly, the United States is not engaged, directly or indirectly, in any attempt to influence the domestic situation in India.

It has not authorized such a program; it is not engaged in such a program; and it has repeatedly pointed out that if any of its officials should ever be caught in an unauthorized action, we would take strong measures. So, I reject the implication that the United States is engaged on a systematic basis in undermining any government, and, particularly, constitutional governments. Exactly the opposite is true.

QUESTION: You stated here, as you had previously at the United Nations, that the United States strongly favors an embargo on the export of nuclear explosive technology. What response did you receive from the Prime Minister?

KISSINGER: Well, first of all, this is not exactly a precise description of what the United States position is. The United States position is that countries in a position to export nuclear technology should do so in a manner that does not contribute to the spread of explosives and especially of weapons technology-and that this shoul,d be done on a multilateral basis by all countries that have a capability to export nuclear technology. I was, first of all, as our Communique makes clear, assured that India had no intention of developing a weapons program. And I took occasion to welcome this statement.

Secondly, we will consult with India as with other countries about the safeguards that we consider useful and that we are prepared to apply also to ourselves. So this is not intended in any discriminatory sense against anyone country. I believe that we can have useful discussions on that basis.

QUESTION: We have come to know, even from the' American official sources, that you gave a very careful listening whenever the Diego Garcia question arose in the talks. I want to know why there was not some clear expression from your side regarding this question ... ?

KISSINGER: I don't know whether it is correct to say that there was no clear expression of views. I think there was an absence of identity of views on that subject. We respect the Indian point of view. And, of course, we have our own on that matter.

QUESTION: In your speech to the Indian Council of World Affairs, you linked the question offood with the energy crisis. Are you in fact saying that the United States cannot go on indefinitely providing massive food relief if countries in the third world such as India do noi support the American position-in fact your position-on the oil crisis?

KISSINGER: First of all, we have talked in a number of forums about the problem of food and the problem of energy-not to link them as conditions to each other, but in order to emphasize that current problems have become global, that the world has become interdependent and that national solutions to any of these problems are impossible. There can be no victors in a bloc approach to these issues, because even those who control the resources, be it of food or of energy, would become the victims of an economic collapse that assumes worldwide proportions. This is the basic theme that the United States is urging. We are not making our approach in Rome, our approach on food, conditional on having our views met on energy. We are presenting them in parallel as illustrations of a general problem. Now, with respect to energy, I believe that India is perfectly capable of making up its own mind as to the impact of high energy prices without pressure tactics from the United States, because it is precisely countries like India which suffer most from an increase in both energy and in food and fertilizer prices. And, therefore, I don't believe that there is any need for me to give long lectures to Indian leaders about a matter that affects them so immediately. I have not asked for formal support from India at either the Food Conference or with respect to energy since I'm confident that India is perfectly capable of making up its own mind on that subject.

0

~NEWi BEGINNINGS BETWEEN INDIA AND" AMERICA' One of the highlights of the recent visit to India of the u.s. Secretary of State was his October 28 address at New Delhi's Kamani auditorium, sponsored by the Indian Council of World Affairs. This speech has been described as a 'charter' for the conduct of American relations with India. It may provide the guidelines to help, in Dr. Kissinger's words, 'strengthen the new beginnings between India and America.' The complete text of the speech is reprinted here.

Mr. Chairman, Ladies and Gentlemen: I am honored to be invited to address this gathering. For the basic objective of this organization-to comprehend, communicate, and help shape the state of world affairs-has been the central purpose of my own life since long before I served in government. And I have since found that the statesman, too, has no more important task.

Former President Radhakrishnan once said, "Life becomes meaningful only when we grasp the character of the age we live in, see its significance and understand the objectives it sets US and strive to realize them."

Delhi have seen profound changes in the relationship between India and the United States, in the whole region and in the world.

On my last trip to South Asia I paid my first visit to Peking. On this trip I have visited Moscow. Moving about among capitals only recently considered hostile is a new pattern for the United States.

It signifies the transition from a bipolar world locked in confrontation and seemingly destined for some final encounter to the new world of dispersed power and reduced tension.

This changed environment is more complex and therefore, for some, less assuring. Yet we see it as a world of hope.

The fundamental reality of our age is that we live in a world inextricably linked by interdependent economies and universal aspirations, by the speed of co~unications and the specter of nuclear ¡warâ&#x20AC;˘.The political lesson of our age is that the national interest can no longer be defined or attained in isolation from .the global interest. And the moral challenge of our age is to free ourselves from the narrow perception of the nation state and to shape a conception of . global community.

For the process of detente among major powers has not made the world more complex; it merely signifies that leaders have recognized its complexity. Those who ought always to have known how serious is man's predicament have.learned how little benefit confrontation brings and how absolute is the need for co-operation.

This has not been an effortless transition for the American people. Nor is it without difficulties in other nations of the world.

For it requires coming to ternis with less simple views of right and wrong, of the

possible and the ideal than have permeated political thinking for a generation.

This new American view, it is appropriate to acknowledge here, owes much to an old vision ofIndia's national leaders.

Prime Minister Nehru perceived the impermanence of the postwar world-into which India was born-of frozen hostility between the superpowers and their insistent efforts to enlist other nations on one side or the other. Under Nehru and since, India sought to deflect, to moderate and to redirect those forces. This was the origin of the concept of nonalignment.

It is not necessary to debate now whether the United States should have welcomed the concept at that time in order to agree that in the present world it is for nations such as India an altogether understandable and practical position.

The United States accepts nonalignment.

In fact, America sees a world of free, independent, sovereign states as being decidedly in its own national interest. Support of national indepenaence and of the diversitY that goes with it has become a central theme of American foreign policy.

Nowhere is this clearer than with respect to South Asia, where a fifth of mankind

which leaves lives. In testimony before the U.S. Senate the United States-one Foreign Relations Committee six weeks behind the peaks and valleys of the past.

Both India and the United States still ago, I stated this principle of American foreign policy in explicit terms: "We do consider themselves youthful nations. The not look at the subcontinent as being com- restlessness, the striving and the ideals posed of some countries that are clients of of our people attest to the reality of that China, others that are clients of the Soviet image. But a basic quality of youth-enUnion, others that should be clients of thusiasm unseasoned by experience-often the United States. We believe that we can caused us to assume or expect too much. have productive relationships with all of Weare two great nations of independent them. And we believe also, especially with judgment and perspective; often our zeal respect to India, that our relations are in and moral convictions have led us into disagreements with a passion that might a stage of dramatic improvement."

The warming of our bilateral relations- not have been present had we not been has been increasingly manifest for some conscious of similar ideals.

For a, quarter of a century our relations time. It began inevitably as the Simla process began; and it has proceeded and tended to oscillate between high expectastrengthened as that process has proceeded tion and deep 'suspicion. The low point and strengthened. For it was conflict with- occurred in 1971 when a basic disagreein the subcontinent that brought the in- ment flowed from different political judgvolvement of outsiders in the first place. ments. We faced these differences candidly; And correspondingly, the region's political that crisis is now behind us. We have surcapacity to resolve regional conflict has, mounted past strains and moved ahead to a considerable degree, diminished out- with promise. We can now build our relationship free of past distortions and side involvement. conscious of the interests and values that President Ford has asked me to affirm we share. that the United States strongly supports From the events of the past-from our the efforts of peaceful settlement on the sub- experience with the world as well as yours continent,free of imposition or pressure or -we have both developed a more balanced outside interference. We want political sta- view. Both of us independently have come bility and economic success for South Asia. to temper our zeal and to understand limThat is what we believe South Asians hope itations on our ability to bend the world for, and what the rest of the world should to our expectations. In parallel with this, hope for as well. in our relations with each other we both stress the basic compatibility of our inThe statesmanship of all of South Asia's terests. This promises to provide a durable leaders has been at the heart of this pro- basis for co-operation and friendship. cess. It has taken great courage to persevere toward¡ the goal agreed upon by Pakistan and India at the Simla Conference in 1972: "The promotion of a For our new relationship to thrive, a friendly and harmonious relationship and great deal depends. on our mutual underthe establishment of a durable peace in standing. Nations face different problems the subcontinent." and different opportunities-their perspectives and power inevitably vary. Let The size .and position of India give it a me therefore briefly sketch America's special role of leadership. in South Asian broader purposes-especially as they have and in world affairs. They confer on it at evolved in' recent years¡ in a changing inthe same time the special responsibility for ternational environment. accommodation and restraint that strength Around the world today, the new and entails. The United States recognizes both the old coexist in uneasy equilibrium. The these realities. They are wholly compatible frozen international landscape of the past with the close friendships and special bonds quarter century has begun to thaw but we that we have with all the nations of the have yet to put a durable structure of coregion. As we wish South Asia well, we operation in its place. A new era of stability wish India well. has begun in Europe and Asia, but chronic disputes in the Middle East and Thus a more mature and durable re- Indochina still endanger regional and lationship is emerging between India and global peace. The United States and the

Soviet Union have perceived a common interest in avoiding nuclear holocaust, while some potential for conflict persists and the arsenals of the two sides continue to grow. The United States and the People's Republic of China have succeeded in overcoming two decades of estrangement, but important differences in philosophy remain. And as the old blocs among old powers decline, new blocs among new nations threaten to emerge.

The United States sees its central task today as helping the world to shape a new pattern of stability, justice and .international co-operation. We have rejected the old extremes of world policeman and isolation.

But we recognize that America's principles, strength and resources impose upon us a particular responsibility.

Our goal is to move toward a world where power blocs and balances are not dominant; where justice, not stability, can be our overriding preoccupation, where countries consider co-operation in the global interest to be in their national interest. For all that has been achieved, we must realize that we have taken only the first hesitant steps on a long and arduous road.

The United States has three principal policy objectives.

First, America has sought to foster a new spirit of responsibility and restraint among all powers.

The cornerstone of our foreign policy is-as it has been for a generation-our partnership with our Atlantic allies and Japan. These bonds have served both the world's peace and its prosperity. Our cooperation provided a solid foundation for efforts to reduce tensions with our adversaries. It has enabled us to contribute to world economic growth. And the nations which provide the industrial, financial and technological sinews of the global economy now share a heavy collective responsibility to concert their efforts in a time of global economic stress.

In the last five years the United States has also sought to put its relations with the communist world on a new and steady basis.

Since the .dawn of the nuclear age, man's fears of holocaust and his hopes for peace have turned on the relationship between the United States and the Soviet Union. Never before have two nations had the physical ability to annihilate civilization. Never before has it been so important

that the two nuclear giants maintain close contact with one another to avoid conflicts which would menace other nations as much as themselves.

Progress has been achieved in our relationship with the Soviet Union which would have been unthinkable a decade ago. We take the easing of tensions for granted only at the risk of the return of " confrontation. In my discussions in Moscow I stated yet again the determination of the American Government to maintain the momentum of the process of detente, and was assured by the Soviet leaders that they shared this intention. The United States will persevere to reduce military competition with the Soviet Union in all its aspects; to ensure that our political competition is guided by principles of restraint especially in moments of crisis; andto move beyond restraint to co-operation in helping find lasting solutions to chronicconflicts.

America's relations with the People's Republicof China are also of fundamental importance.There cannot be a stable peace in Asia-or in the world-without a pattern of international relationships that includesthis powerful and talented nation.

It was essential to end a generation of mutualisolation and hostility.

Yet rapprochement with the People's Republic of China is not sought at the expenseof any other nation; on the contraryit attempts to serve a wider purpose.

The principles of the Shanghai Communique commit our two nations to respect the independence, sovereignty and integrity of all countries as we work to improveour own relationships.

~;,...

~

,

Il~

Our relations with the nonaligned counanother pillar of our foreign policy.

No accommodation among countries, howeverpowerful, can be durable if negotiated overthe heads of others or if an attempt is madeto impose it on others. Our attitude towardthe nonaligned will be based on the principlesof equality, mutual respect and sharedendeavors and on the premise that all countries have a stake in a peaceful world. Condominium, hegemony, spheres of influence are historically obsolete and morallyand politically untenable.

~ I triesare

It is a corollary of this that bloc diplomacyof any kind is anachronistic and self-defeating.We see a danger of new patternsof alignment that are as artificial, rigidand ritualistic as the old ones. The

issues the world faces are so urgent that countries for restraint on the export of they must be considered 01J. their merits, nuclear materials or nuclear technology on the basis of their implications for hu- which it is not prepared to apply to itself. manity, and for world peace-rather than , We will work vigorously with others on the on some abstract notion of ideological or practical steps which should be taken to bloc advantage. In a real sense the world limit the dangers of the atom while furtheris no longer divided between East and ing its potential for human good.

West, North and South, developed and developing, consumer and producer. We A third objective of American policy is will solve our problems together or we to build global co-operation to meet unwill not solve them at all. precedented global problems.

The traditional agenda of international Second, America seeks to limit and ultimately to reduce nuclear weapons affairs-the balance among major powers, the security of nations-no longer defines competition.

The relaxation of international tensions our perils or our possibilities. cannot survive an unrestrained arms race by the two strongest nuclear powers. And To some extent we have mastered many international stability will be seriously of the familiar challenges of diplomacy. Yet jeopardized by the proliferation of nuclear suddenly we are witnessing a new threat to weapons. This is why the United States the governability of national societies and has made it a major objective to bring to the structure of international stability. A about a more stable nuclear environment. crisis threatens the world's economicsystem.

The Strategic Arms Limitations Talks The industrialized nations see decades are among the most crucial negotiations ever conducted. The agreements already of prosperity in jeopardy; the developing signed by the United States and the Soviet countries see hopes for development and Union represent a major step toward progress shattered or postponed indefistrategic stability. They placed a perma- nitely. And even the newly wealthy oil nent limit on defensive weapons and an producers are beginning to perceive that interim limit on offensive nuclear weapons. their recent gains will be swept away in a Our task now is to control the qualitative global crisis.

The dangers are as self-evident for the as well as the quantitative advance of weapons. We seek a long-term agreement United States as they are for India and which would establish stable ceilings and other countries: rates of inflation unknown other restraints, from which we could in the past quarter century; financial inbegin the long-sought process of arms stitutions staggering under the most masreductions. Progress in this direction was sive and rapid movements of reserves in made during my recent talks in Moscow. history; and profoundly disturbing ques, At the same time, a world in which an tions 'about the ability to meet man's most ever-increasing number of nations possess fundamental needs for energy and food. nuclear weapons vastly magnifies the risks This is not a conventional political probof both regional and global conflict. And proliferation complicates-if it does not lem, which can be dealt with by conventional inhibit-international co-operation in the diplomacy or on the basis of conventional peaceful uses of the atom. Last month at premises of social and economic theory. It the United Nations I proposed a compre- affects all countries and groups. There is no gain for one at the expense of another. hensive global effort.

Piecemeal solutiQnsoffer no hope; a global The United States is of the view that enterprise is imperative. No nation can imcountries capable of exporting nuclear tech- pose its narrow interests without tearing the fabric of international co-operation. Whatnology should agree to common restraints on a multilateral basis which would further ever our ideological belief or social structhe peaceful, but inhibit the military uses of ture, we are part of a single international nuclear power. We take seriously India's system on which our national objectives affirmation that it has no intention to de- depend. Our common destiny is now not 'a velop nuclear weapons. But India of course slogan; it is an unmistakable reality. has the capability to' export nuclear techThe United States is prepared to dedinology; it therefore has an important role in this multilateral endeavor. Needless to cate itself in practical ways to this global say, the United States does not ask other effort. At the World Food Conference

We have no conOid of interest, 'no basic next week we·will offer a comprehensive program as our contribution to freeing animosity or disagreement that keeps usmankind from the eternal struggle for apart. And we face a world in crisis and sustenance. We recognize that America's transition, that compels us to work together.

We are both democracies, with aU that agricultural productivity, advanced technology, and tradition of assistance repre- implies for the kinds of decisions we are able sent a major obligation. We know that to make. The leaders of a democracy can we cannot speak of the global respon- only sustain policies which their electorate sibility of others without practicing global will support•. H there are no general rules responsibility ourselves. America pioneered as to what such policies are likely to be, in development assistance, particularly with there are specific limitations as to what they respect to food; we are determined to step cannot be. lt is clear that our relationship cannot up our past contributions. We will inbe based-in either country-on the dependcrease our production at home so there ence of one on the other. Nor can our relawill be more food available for shipment tionship survive constant criticism of one abroad. And we will help developing nations increase their own production by the other in all international forums. which is the only long-term solution to There must be a sense of common purpose in at least some endeavors. To Indian-Amerthe problem.

The magnitude of the world's food ican relations equality and mutual respect needs-and the redistribution of the are more than doctrines of international world's wealth-imply that others must law. They are political necessities. enlist in the fight against famine. The In the past year or two we have removed United States will work co-operatively with major obstacles to an improved relationship. other exporters, with food importers, and Our energies are now focused on the positive with those countries in a position to help content of our relationship. finance increased food production in the Even more importantly we find once developing countries.

But it is an objective fact that we can- again that as two great nations we share not meet man's need for food, much less certain aspirations for the world at large. ensure economic and social advance, We share a concern for co-operative without coming to grips with the energy solutions to man's fundamental needs. crisis. Higher oil prices directly affect food The present crisis confronting both prices by increasing the costs of fertilizer, developed and developing nations reveals of operating agricultural machinery, and all too clearly the world's past failure to of transporting food to deficit areas. This address global problems on a truly coin turn contributes to the more general operative basis. India and the United States economic crisis of inflation and stagnation have much to contribute. The world's best which will surely doom the ability of the minds must be mobilized and India has economically advanced countries to fulfill the third largest pool· of scientific talent their obligations to the less well endowed. while the United States has the first. We Both consumers and producers have a must apply the great economic strength parallel stake in a global economy that is of our two nations; the United States has stable and growing. The economic progress the largest industrial output in the world of 30 years has brought the goal of uni- and India the 10th largest. Our economies versal well-being closer; today's crisis are complementary; the fact that India is puts it in jeopardy. This is why the United only the 26th largest trading partner of States has emphasized global interdepend- the United States reveals what potential ence and why it seeks co-operative global is yet untapped. solutions.

The Joint Commission we have established-for scientific, cultural, and economic co-operation-provides a new THE UNITED STATES means to match our resources with our AND INDIA challenges. It is the symbol of the new era The American purposes I have de- of equality. And the United States stands ·scribed are, we believe, consistent with ready to expand the concept of the Joint India's purposes. We are nations whose Commission into other areas. values and aspirations are so similar that We share a concern for economic our disputes are often in the nature of a development. family quarrel.

It is impossible to visit South Asia

withqut being deeply affected by the plight of so many of the peoples of this region.

-Individual hopes for survival and national aspirations for development have been dealt a cruel blow by the crises in energy, food and inflation.

The American people want to be helpful, while avoiding the dependence we both reject. Earlier this year; the United States wrote off the largest amount of foreign debt ever· canceled in history.

This year the United States will launch a modest bilateral aid program. A substantial portion of our multilateral aid already comes to India. Our new food program which I will outline at the World Food Conference next week will be of particular relevance to India.

We share a concern for world peace.

Neither India nor the United States will ever be satisfied with a world of chronic conflicts, uneasy truces and offsetting blocs. We have a joint interest in a comprehensive, institutionalized peace, based not merely on a balance of forces but on a sense of justice.

In recent months our dialogue on the entire range of global concerns has assumed a new frequency and depth. Our consultation has defined areas where we agree aid narrowed those where we do not. We have found anew the basis for collaboration in many areas.

Tagore wrote with foresight: "During the evolution of the nation the moral culture of brotherhood was limited by 'geographic boundaries, because at that time those boundaries were true. Now they have become imaginary lines of tradition divested of the qualities of real obstacles.

So the time has come when man's moral nature must deal with this fact with all seriousness or perish."

The time has come for nations to act on this vision. Let there be hope rather than despair, creativity rather than disarray. The recognition and understanding of our problems are clearly emerging. We have the technical means to solve them.

And the urgency of our tasks impels us.

Half a century ago, Mahatma Gandhi wrote that we must launch "experiments with truth." In this spirit, let us resolve to strengthen the new beginnings between India and America. Let us build a relationship that can endure and serve common ends for a long time. Let us make our contribution to help mankind match its capacity to its challenges for the benefit of our two peoples and of all of mankind.· 0

spm

ORDER FORM

Send SPAN for 1 year at Rs. 18 (Rs. 12.00 for students) to

Address P.O.

o o o o

City.....

.

Cheque Bank Draft Postal Order Money Order RECEIPT ENCLOSED

My Name Address

.

spm

ORDER FORM

Send SPAN for 1 year at Rs. 18 (Rs. 12.00 for students) to

Address P.O. ...........City..

PIN

CODE

DDDDDD

Dist....

o o o o

.

..

Cheque Bank Draft Posta I Order Money Order RECEIPT ENCLOSED

My Name ..

Address ...

State .

Mail to SEi\l'MAGAZINE SUBSCRIPTION

SERVICE

timulating ictorial· uthentic ewsworthy

Sundeep 4 New Marine Lines Bombay 400 020

Please remember to enclose your remittance

SPAN offers you colorful, thoughtful, authoritative articles on what's going on in America, what's happening on the Indo-American scene.

Mail to

SPAN MAGAZINE SUBSCRIPTION Sundeep 4 New Marine Lines Bombay 400 020

Please remember to enclose your remittance

SERVICE

Left and far left: "Harems" of female seals spend their day dozing in the sun or burrowing in the sand.

During mating season. bulls keep a close watch over their cows.

Below: Seals head toward a beach after a romp in the surf Bottom: An adult seal bellows a call. Overleaf: A wide-eyed young seal.

Return of the Gentle Giants In America's battle to save nature from man, some of the biggest victories have been won in California. It's no surprise, then, to hear that the state's environmentalists have successfully saved an endangered species: the giant, gentle elephant seal. During the 19th century, hunters had slaughtered the huge sea mammals for their valuable blubber. By 1870, the once-crowded coastal rookeries were virtually bare. Then, in 1907, a large herd of elephant seals was spotted on Guadalupe Island (owned by Mexico), 300 kilometers from the California coast. In 1922, the Mexican Government placed them under protection. Finally, in 1957, the State of California passed a law prohibiting the killing of the gentle giants. This was followed by a federal law, passed by the U.S. Government in 1972, putting all marine mammals under complete protection. Seals began to multiply and move back to their old homes along the coast.

Today there are more than 30,000 elephant seals along the California coast where they frolic in sun and surf with as much freedom as California's humans.