January 1981

January 1981

SPAN Ronald Reagan: 40th President of the United States

by Howard Cincotta

5 A Small Jewel for India

by Nicholas C. Chriss

Cyril Harris Talks About Acoustics An Interview by Kumud Mehta

12 The Burger Court: Continuity and Change byA.G. Noorani

16 Changing Lifestyles in the Eighties

21 Two-dimensional World of Comics

by Jacquelin Singh

27 "It's the Phantom's World-and

Mine Too"

An Interview With Lee Falk by Aruna Vasudev

29 What's New About New American Cinema?

by Girish Karnad

33 The Politics of Economic Interdependence A Dialogue Between Paul Wallace, Ranabir Roy Chowdhury, Tilak Ratnakara and Faisal S. AI-Salem

36 The Tale Behind Mary~sLittle Lamb

by Joseph Kastner

40

45 Toward a Bipartisan Foreign Policy President-elect Ronald Reagan Talh With the Press

48

K.R. Narayanan Presents Credentials

Managing Editor

Chidananda Das Gupta

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Editorial Staff

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Art Director

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Assistant Art Director

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Art Staff

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Chief of Production

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Photographs: Front cover, 5-8, 9 bottom-Avinash Pasricha. 9 top-Denis Kuhn. 1 I-Louis Checkman. 21-© King Features Syndicate, Inc., 1962.23-R.F. Outcault, 1896.24-© National News Association, '1911. 25-© International Feature Service, Inc., 1920. 23, 24. 25-all three reprinted by permission of King Features Syndicate, Inc. 26 top-© Edgar Rice Burroughs. Inc., 1933; bottom left-© John Dillie Co., 1932. 27-Aruna Vasudev. 33-R.K. Sbarma. 37Frederick Lewis, 38-Culver.

39-Clark M. Goff, courtesy town of Sudbury, Mass. 41-Manuel Gomez. 42, 43 top row- Katrina Thomas; 43 bottom left- Miriam Caravella. 44- Katrina Thomas.

48-courtesy Photo Division, PIB, Government of India. Inside back cover and back covercourtesy

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Front cover: The ne\y Tata Theatre of the National Centre for the Performing Arts in Bombay has been designed by American architect Philip Johnson.

See pages 5-11. Photograph

by Avinash Pasricha.

Back cover: Typical of a new trend in American public service advertising, this ad by an American oil company helps educate the public about the energy problem-and its solutions. See also page 49.

This month the American people are preoccupied with the transition from the presidential administration of Jimmy Carter to that of the president-elect, Ronald Reagan, who takes office on January 20. By all accounts, the transfer of power (and responsibility) is moving smoothly and efficiently. Some of the details of this process are described by President-elect Reagan himself in the press conference reported on page 45 of this issue.

The new president and his representatives have carefully refrained from involving themselves in the actions of the Carter administration during its last 10 weeks in power--though it is inevitable that Mr. Reagan should refer to his predecessor's policies in presenting his own.

The transition period in the U •S. political process is a relatively long one-two and one-half months. Like many peculiarly American institutions and arrangements, its roots lie as much in the geography and economics of the country as in its political system.

At the end of the 18th century, travel on the American continent was both lengthy and arduous. In 1789, when George Washington was sworn in as the first President of the United States, the journey from his home in Mount Vernon, Virginia, to New York City, which was then the capital--a distance of some 400 kilometers--took a full two weeks. Whenever there was a change of administration after a national election, the elected representatives took a long time simply rea,ching the nation's capital.

But by the 20th century, modern rail and air travel made a lengthy hiatus between administrations unnecessary. "Lame duck" administrations that remained in power long after they had been defeated at the polls could no longer be tolerated.

(The lame duck is a poor, helpless fowl that can neither swim nor fly.) So in 1933, a lame-duck amendment to the U•S. Constitution shortened the transition period by a full two months.

'But it was still felt desirable not to plunge the new administration directly into the thick of daily government. The president-elect needs sufficient time to choose his top officials with' careful consideration. They, in turn, need time to set their affairs in order, and to orient themselves to their new responsibilities-many of them have not been professional politicians. (The American political system provides for no opposition shadow cabinet ready at a moment's notice to move into the office for which they have groomed themselves.)

What to do in the interregnum to ensure stability and continuity in American policy? Outgoing presidents themselves seized the initiative. In 1932 Herbert Hoover, a Republican, invited Franklin D. Roosevelt, the Democratic presidentelect, to discuss international matters shortly after the election. Two decades later, Harry Truman, a Democrat, began providing intelligence briefings for his potentia 1 successors during the actual presidential campaign. Later, he urged General Dwight D. Eisenhower, the Republican victor, to send preinaugural representatives to the most important Federal agencies. Presidents John F. Kennedy, Richard M. Nixon, and Jimmy Carter have all benefited from the same invaluable cooperation.

But the important question, of course, is not how long it takes a new president to take office in the United States, but what course he will take once he has assumed it. Replying to a message of felicitation from Indian President Sanjiva Reddy, Mr. Reagan ha s made clear his intention to continue close ties between the two democracies: "I look forward to continued close and cooperative relations between our two nations as we move forward toward our shared goals of peace and prosperity throughout the world. " --M. P. I

In this article on the life and career of Ronald Reagan, . the author offers insight into the political and economic philosophy of the new President of the United ,States.

"Let us pledge to restore, in our time, the American spirit of voluntary service, of cooperation, of private and community initiative . . . to build a new consensus with all those across the land who share a community of values embodied in these words: family, work, neighborhood, peace and freedom."

These words sum up the political and economic philosophy of America's new president, Ronald Reagan. As he emphasized during the campaign. President Reagan's new policy direction for the United States will be aimed at decentralizing Federal programs, reducing the size and spending of government, strengthening national defense, insuring economic prosperity through private enterprise, and restoring individual initiative in place of dependence on government.

At the core of President Reagan's political philosophy is the belief that the best government is a limited government.

"The Federal Government has taken on functions it was never intended to perform and which it does not perform well," President Reagan says.

In economic affairs, the president takes a strongly conservative approach that stresses balanced budgets, curbs on government spending, and a reliance on a free market to encourage economic growth.

Along with reducing the size of government, President Reagan has called for substantial tax cuts for individuals and businesses.

By reducing Federal taxes, spending apd regulations, President Reagan believes the United States can reduce inflation and unemployment, and stimulate economic growth and industrial productivity.

In energy matters, the president has advocated an end to price controls and other Federal restrictions to encourage

development of coal, oil and natural gas reserves.

In foreign affairs, President Reagan stresses the need for firm alliances and a strong national defense. He believes that a genuine relaxation of tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union can evolve only from a position of military security and clear, constant policies. While critical of aspects of SALT II, the president supports "a treaty that fairly and genuinely reduces the number of strategic nuclear weapons." ~~~ Ronald Reagan was born February 6, 1911, in the small town of Tampico, Illinois, not far from Chicago. His father was a shoe salesman. His family moved through a series of Illinois towns during his early years, finally settling in the town of Dixon, where he attended high school, played football and basketball, and worked for several summers as a lifeguard.

With the aid of a scholarship, he attended nearby Eureka College. Young Reagan was elected president of the student body, was a member of the football, track and swimming teams, and developed a love of acting in the school's dramatic club. He got his first taste of politics at Eureka when he led a successful student strike that forced the school administration to reinstate some proposed curriculum cuts and to relax a ban on

dancing. He graduated in 1932 with a bachelor's degree in economics and sociology.

Reagan found ajob as a sports announcer for a Des Moines, Iowa, radio station, broadcasting college football, professional baseball and other sporting events.

For fiveyears he was one of the best-known sports announcers in the Midwest. When he was in California in 1937 to cover a baseball team, the Warner Brothers motion picture studio gave him a screen test and offered him a $200-a-week contract.

His film career began with some 20 low-budget, forgettable "B" movies that the film industry in those days churned out in great numbers.

But Reagan himself was good enough to graduate to modest stardom in firstrate "A" films. He performed in comedy parts and in such roles as a football.player who dies young in Knute Rockne-All American, and a man who loses both legs in the film King's Row. (His famous line from that movie also served as the title for his autobiography, Where's the Rest of Me?)

Poor eyesight (now corrected with contact lenses) prevented Reagan from engaging in combat during World War II. Instead, he became a lieutenant in the U.S. Army Air Corps and narrated military training films.

40TH PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES

I. As governor of California; Ronald Reagan meets with black leaders of the state to discuss problems of minorities.

2. This scene from the film King's Row show Reagan with Ann Sheridan. Reagan's movie career spanned 25 years,. he had over 50 films to his credit.

3. Ronald Reagan as a child (right, foreground) with his elder brother Neil and their parents.

4. One of his college's best swimmers, Reagan was also on thefootball team, and president of the student council.

5. Following his graduation, Reagan's first job was as a sports broadcaster for radio station WHO in Des Moines, Iowa.

Reagan met the criticism about his lack of experience directly: "I am not a politi"Of all the objectives cian. I am an ordinary citizen with a deepwe seek, first and foremost seated belief that much of what troubles us has been brought about by politicians; is the establishment and it's high time that more ordinary of lasting world peace." citizens brought the fresh air of commonsense thinking to bear on these problems.

If we ordinary citizens don't run governAfter the war, Reagan served six one- ment, government is going to run us." year terms as president of the Screen When the votes were counted, Reagan Actors Guild, whose membership num- had defeated two-term governor Edmund bered 15,000. On one occasion he led a Brown by almost a million votes. Reagan successful strike of actors to win improved easily won re-election to a second fourpension and medical benefits, and a larger year term in 1970. share of television revenues.

The Reagan administrations were conReagan found his film career fading in troversial and effective. The assessment the early fifties, and he became one of the of writer Richard Whelan is shared by first important movie stars to switch over many: "Twice elected governor of the to television. The show was a weekly nation's most populous and arguably anthology series, General Electric Theater, most complex state, he proved an innoand Reagan appeared as host and occa- vative and surprisingly able executive. sional actor.

Some of his major reforms have survived.

In addition, he toured General Electric By contrast to other large states, Caliplants throughout the United States, dis- fornia's fiscal condition is outstanding, cussing the strengths of free enterprise and a legacy of the Reagan years." the dangers of big government. In eight When he took office in 1967, for exyears, from 1954 to 1962, he talked to ample, Reagan inherited a bndget deficit 250,000 General Electric employees in 38 of almost $700 million from the preceding states, sometimes making as many as '14 . administration. When he left the goverspeeches a day. It was a national political norship in 1975, the state treasury held a campaign in miniature, and an unparal$400 million surplus. leled opportunity for Reagan to formulate Reagan made strenuous efforts to cut a conservative political philosophy and taxes and halt, or at least contain, the sharpen his speaking skills. growth of government. His record shows Reagan changed his party registration considerable success as well as some from Democrat to Republican in 1962, failure. Early in his first term, he sponsored and in 1964 he supported the Republican the largest tax increase in the state's candidate for president, Barry Goldwater. history to reduce the state deficit. He Goldwater lost in a landslide to President stabilized the number of state employees, Lyndon B. Johnson, but Reagan vaulted and returned more than $5,000 million into national prominence with a nationto taxpayers in property tax and general wide television speech during the cam- tax relief. paign. Entitled "A Time for Choosing," A main target for Reagan reform was it was basically a reworked version of the welfare. He mobilized widespread public talk he had been giving for years with support for welfare revision, and in 1971 General Electric. Reagan delivered it with hammered out a compromise with the such style, conviction and impact that he Democratic state legislature that increasimmediately became a leading conser- ed relief to those in greatest need, cracked vative spokesman in the Republican Party. down on fraud and required able:bodied recipients to perform public-service jobs The following year Reagan assembled a top-flight group of political advisers. for their benefits. The number of persons took a crash course in state politics and on welfare declined, and, observers agree, administration, and in 1966 announced the Reagan reforms kept costs under control. his candidacy for governor of California.

It was an audacious step for a man who Reagan left the governorship in 1975, previously had not held public office, and but not the political spotlight. He remainReagan endured the inevitable laughter ed the conservatives' most commanding and visible representative through a whirland jokes about being an actor-turnedpolitician. wind of activity: daily five-minute radio

spots for approximately 200 stations, a weekly syndicated column for more than 170 newspapers and an average of eight speeches a month across the country.¡ In 1975, Newsweek magazine said that Reagan "has become, at least for a season, the most kinetic single presence in American political life-scold to the powerful, a missionary to the aggrieved."

A year later, Reagan challenged the incumbent president, Gerald Ford, for the Republican presidential nomination, and lost a close, hard-fought contest. Reagan returned to California, but he remained politically active. In 1980, he defeated a crowded field of aspirants for the Republican nomination (including George Bush, the man he later selected for Vice President) and went on to win election as the 40th President of the United States.

President Reagan and his wife, the former Nancy Davis, met when he was head of the Screen Actors Guild and she was an aspiring actress. They were married in 1952. (Reagan and his first wife, actress Jane Wyman, were divorced in 1948.)

His daughter Maureen Reagan, 39, is a director of an organization that promotes American exports, and has been active in the Republican Party for 20 years. Adopted son Michael, 35, sells equipment for producing gasohol from grain and other agricultural products.

(Maureen and Michael are children of the first marriage.) Patricia, 27, is an actress and songwriter; and Ron Reagan, 22, has begun a career as a ballet dancer with the Joffrey Ballet. ~~~ The foundation of President Reagan's beliefs lies in his commitment to enduring values. He has stated these beliefs to the American people-and to the worldthis way: "Together, let us make a commitment to care for the needy; to teach our children the values and virtues handed down to us by our families; t<;>have the courage to defend those values and the willingness to sacrifice for them ....

"Of all the objectives we seek, first and foremost is the establishment of lasting world peace. We must always stand ready to pursue any reasonable avenue that holds forth the promise of lessening tensions and furthering the prospects of peace."

0 About the Author: Howard Cincotta is a SPAN correspondent

in Washington, D.C.

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Above: The main features of the 1,040-seat NCP A theater are a rotatable stage and a fan-shaped design, which brings the last rows closer to the performance.

The special acoustic design by a leading acoustician, Cyril.

Harris, has eliminated the need for sound amplification.

Above, left: A view of the entrance to the foyer. The simple Kota stone flooring is offset by the chandelier and the NataraJ. Left: Skyscrapers surrounding the NCPA campus, as seen from the auditorium. The picture at far left shows Marine Drive, also known as Queen's Necklace, with the NCP A theater in the foreground.

Built upon a plot of land that juts into the sea at Nariman Point, the sleek structure contrasts with the taller buildings around.

A nine-day-long festival of music, dance and drama marked the opening of the Tata Theatre. The programs included a shehnai recital

by Bismillah Khan, dance performances by Birju Maharaj and Yamin; Krishnamurthi, a vocal concert by M.S. Subbulakshmi, a Marathi version of Kalidasa' splay Shakuntalam (top) and a festival of country

music called "Southern Music USA." At left, above, is Cheryl White, a member of the American music group. Above: Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, escorted by NCP A's vice-president Jamshed Bhabha, is greeted by Ambassador Robert Goheen and his wife as she arrives to inaugurate the hall. At extreme left is acoustician Cyril Harris.

u.s.

by NICHOLAS C. CHRISS

small jewel ... a meeting of the minds of the East and the West." That's how American architect Philip Johnson describes his first Indian assignment: the auditorium of the National Centre for the Performing Arts (NCPA) in Bombay.

The recently inaugurated auditorium has been hailed for its successful merger of aesthetic and functional considerations, a task that Johnson has accomplished with remarkable ease considering that he was a stranger both to India and its culture.

"Indian music," as Johnson pointed out in a recent interview, "calls for a close aUdience-performer relationship with a lively give and take-something we Westerners don't understand. It calls for a special kind of theater." And that was what the National Centre for the Performing Arts wanted Johnson to create.

"This was to be an intimate theater for about 1,000 people."

And yet it was no small venture; the commissioning of Philip Johnson was proof of that.

Though relatively unknown in India, Philip Cortelyou Johnson's regarded as one of the United States' most distinguished architects-and also "American architecture's number-one enfant terrible," thanks to the outrageous statements he delights in making.

But his can be a benign influence too. To quote New York magazine: "In the eastern United States, most of the important architecture critics, most of the deans of school of architecture, and most of the promising up and coming new practitioners are indebted to Philip Johnson in one way or another." And, of course, there are the awards, topped by the prestigious gold medal of the American Institute of Architects (AlA), which was bestowed on Johnson in 1978.The medal put him in the ranks of previous winners like Frank Lloyd Wright Le Corbusier, Louis Kahn, Louis Sullivan and Eliel and E~ro Saarinen.

Philip Johnson's buildings taken as a whole body of work defy categorization. He has been modern, innovative and often reinterpretative of neoclassical themes. While his modernity can be as conventional as a cigar-box skyscraper, he can also be vividly different, creating controversy and, often, ire with unconventional designs.

A

In the 1940s he shocked fellow architects, critics and neighbors when he designed and built a glass house for himself. "I still live in it, but I wouldn't build a glass house again," he says, to illustrate his belief in the importance of moving with the times.

"There's a whole new concept abroad now, new thoughts, new designs. The younger people are leading the way these days against the old established architects who do those old-fashioned flat tops. And I've reacted to them. I guess I am sort of considered by them to be a precursor to their postmodern world."

This constant reaction to-or development of-new trends has always been typical of Johnson. His career is marked by repeated shifts. Heir to an Alcoa stock fortune, he graduated from Harvard in 1930 having studied, not architecture, but Greek and philosophy. An introduction to architecture historian Henry Russel Hitchcock and, through him, to the work of Mies and Le Corbusier in Europe led him, at the age of 34 in 1940, to return to Harvard to study architecture. For years he was the greatest Miesean of them all, standing in the shadow of the Master. During this phase he designed more than a dozen museums in the United States and outside. Eventually, though, he broke away and established his own reputation.

One of the best examples of his ever-changing compass is in Houston-the two-trapezoid towers of the Pennzoil Place that shoot up in the air just three meters apart and are anchored with a huge glass atrium.

Though the NCPA auditorium has no relation, in the physical sense, to any other building that Johnson has done, the basic concept of intimacy is not new to him. The closeness of the audience to the performer is what he has always based his own theater designs on, even for his largest theater, at the Lincoln Center in NewYork.lt was thistheaterwhich impressed NCPA's Jamshed Bhabha while he was traveling around the world in search of the perfect architect for the ambitious auditorium.

CYRIL HARRIS TALKS ABOUT ACOUSTICS' The 1,040-seat NCP A auditorium is so designed as to allow echo less sounds to reach the entire audience without the aid of an amplification system. In the following interview with Kumud Mehta, American acoustic consultant Cyril Harris explains how this feat has been accomplished.

Kumud Mehta: Does an architectural design influence the acoustics or vice versa?

Cyril Harris: Actually, you can't do an architectural design without acoustic considerations.

The shape, volume, boundaries and materials of the hall are decided by the acoustics. If you are going to have a concert hall for Western music, for symphonic music, I would insist on a rectangular shape. For an opera house I would use a different shape. In addition, the outer boundaries of the hall-what's on the wall, what

shape the ceiling has -are all determined by the acoustics. This means that, to quite an extent, the architect is restricted. There are various architectural solutions that can be made and the hard part is to find a solution which will please the Cyril Harris architect and please the acoustician.

Mehta: What solution did you find in the case of the NCPA hall?

Harris: Here the acoustical design was based on the fact that the hall was primarily for Indian traditional music. When I first visited India and attended concerts with Dr. Narayana Menon, I realized how important was the visual contact with the performer. This means that the Western shape simply can't work; it puts too many of the people far away. The shape that we now have here brings the audience much closer. And the

performer can see their expressions-which is important. Intimacy is a very difficult thing to achieve. For a I ,ODD-seat auditorium, I have the feeling that this is a very intimate theater.

You don't believe that there are that many seats there.

The acoustical design was also influenced by another fact: I realized that it was important t.o have lower reverberation time than we would have for many kinds of Western performances of equal size. We also decided to do without a proscenium because unlike the trumpet and other Western music instruments, which have a lot of power, most Indian instruments have a delicate sound, and you can't afford to throw away' any of it. With a proscenium, as much sound goes in the space behind it as in front, and all of it is lost.

So instead of the proscenium, here we have a thrust ~tage, which comes into the auditorium and is sealed away, almost like a reflecting surface. So all that sound which would otherwise be lost is now going forward to the audience without any hindrance. The shape of the stage

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"At Lincoln we designed almost a half circle to enable a greater number of people to get closer to the stage as against a movie hall kind of theater where the seats go too far back and you lose any great connection with the live performance.

"We transferred this idea to Bombay-of course with modifications. One of my aims," says Johnson, "is to fit a new design to the requirements of public interest." The challenge at Bombaywas greater because not only was the place and its requirements new, but as with any innovative project, there was a constant evolution of ideas. "As the auditorium developed, there were different pressures from local theater groups, the NCPA and others."

The NCPA auditorium is a joint venture. The Maharashtra Government gave the land and the finances came from a host of private firms, with the Tata group of companies supplying over 50 percent.

"When NCPA decided to make it a more flexible theater, we changed our plans. The stage now revolves so that different kinds of plays can be put on. But it is still an intimate theater; the delicate instruments of Indian music can be perfectly heard by anyone sitting anywhere in the hall."

"We had Cyril Harris of Columbia University, one of the leading acousticians in the world, work on the acoustics. He visited Bombay several times."

To Johnson's knowledge of architecture and Harris' acoustic genius was added Indian informed advice .."We found everyone extremely cooperative. They wanted the best available Western technology. Narayana Menon, NCPA's director and a great expert on Western as well as Indian music, was our guru.

"But, still, I'm a Westerner! All I could do was filter Menon's expertise through our knowledge of structure and distance and Cyril's acoustics. For example, we placed our ceilings low to let the audience in the back seats hear the small instruments as well as those sitting in the front seats could. OUf aim was to make it a pleasure to be in the room while listening to the music."

But while keeping the needs of music in mind-and the NCPA was planned especially for small instruments and small groups-

Johnson had to also consider other functions that the auditorium would be called upon to perform. The NCPA auditorium is now equipped to put on plays, dances and a variety of other entertainment. And while picking up the nuances of Indian music became an important part of Johnson's assignment, "we had to make the theater flexible enough to accommodate other kinds of musicone requirement that surfaced was that Western chamber orchestras might play here in addition to Indian musicians."

Flexibility was also essential for the size of the stage. "Though the revolving stage is small, you can build over the first seats an9 make it larger. In fact," continues Johnson, "you can use the whole auditorium for a stage if you want to set it up that way."

If the design of the auditorium found Johnson at his innovative best, other elements of the assignment offered exciting opportunities to the derivative architect in him. To quote New York: "(Johnson) is often derivative in the best sense of the term ... he almost always draws upon early as well as recent precedents and elaborates on them with spectacular polish."

For the main material of the building Johnson chose a local "most beautiful" stone, Malad. "It's been used for centuries. It's yellowish brownish, a very warm glowing stone, and the Indian workmen have fitted it extremely well. It's a craft they haven't lost. The stone is combined with a great deal of concrete, which, of course, is now everywhere."

"In a sense," Johnson continued, "it's a combination of the latest technology and the oldest stone techniq ues."

In talking of the colors and decorations used, Johnson was at a loss for words. "It's impossible to describe them," he declared.

Architecturally speaking, he explained, "they were determined by the acoustics, since the ceiling and walls had to vary a great deal to break up the sound. The result," he said after some thought, "is a kind of network of colors, a criss-crossing of gold bands and setbacks of other colors. It's a very lively scene in purple, green and red. The design, on the other hand, is essentially quiet-but very unique-and is a sort of background to these strong colors."

CYRIL HARRIS continued itself is designed to equalize the sound that is carried throughout the hall.

Mehta: What is the reason for the steep slope of the seats in the auditorium?

Harris: That comes from my research into ancient Greek and Roman theaters: We found that if you have a sound source close to an absorptive surface, the sound decreases much more rapidly as you go away from the source than if it is over a hard surface. But if you raise the source up high, so it doesn't have to drag over .theabsorption, it gets to the back of the hall with less hindrance. People are very absorptive; each person absorbs about six square feet of highly absorptive acoustical material. So having the sound reach the back without going over the people in front gives it much more sound throw at the back. That's the reason for the steep slope. But even then, the sound would still be less at the back than the front because it has to travel a further distance. So two things were done to equalize the sound: We used the shape of the reflector on the stage and also the ceiling surface to direct more of the sound to the back.

Mehta: What underlines the principle of the ceiling design?

Harris: Acoustically, the shape of the ceiling was determined by two considerations. First, it should direct sound to the back of the building. Second, it should scatter some of the sound throughout the hall, all over, so that it is even.

In fact, that principle is what makes some of the old Western halls built 150years ago much better than many modern ones. The baroque style resulted in sound-hitting ornaments of different shapes, which would scatter the sound evenly throughout the hall. If you had just a smooth ceiling and smooth sidewalls, you would have some places where you would hear much better than the others. But at the NCPA if you walk along any row, when a performer is singing or playing, the sound tends to be very uniform.

Mehta: We found that sounds in the auditorium -a cough, the jingle of bangles, the clicking of cameras~are heard so clearly that they disturb the audience and probably the performer. Is there any way of tackling this problem?

Harris: The answer is no. The fact is that

ordinarily you don't hear this in the usual hall because the acoustical conditions are poor. the noise level is high and you can't hear that well either. In the United States after the Kennedy Center opened, a music critic wrote: "Our audiences are going to have to be quieter than they have been in the past." I hope that audiences here will realize this. At the Metropolitan Opera House in New York they have a camera at the stage all the time. When people come in late, they won't let them in until there is a break in the program. Latecomers move over to the foyer and view the performance on the TV screen there.

Mehta: Some people doubt if the cost for perfect acoustics is justified.

Harris: That is not really a question for me to answer here. But the objection to costs is not unique to India. When the Kennedy Center was proposed, some people said, the money-about $80 million or so-could instead be given to struggling performers. Well, what has happened is that these performers-who didn't have a job, or any place to perform-now have, on some

Interestingly, though the colors sound typically Indian, Johnson "happened to find them in Japan-they are a series of colors that the Japanese use a great deal."

In sharp contrast, the seats in the auditorium are dark grey"very Western" and in the same Western tradition, the dressing rooms are "extensive."

But the main feature of the building, according to Johnson, is the "enormous l20-meter long lobby that joins two entrances at right angles to each other, and cuts across the front of the auditorium-theater. " All in all, Philip Johnson has designed the NCPA to be a delight both for the performers and the audiences. The building done, Johnson's main concern now is that Indian audiences and Indian performers enjoy his creation. Because that, when all is said and done, is the criterion of success.

Johnson's success will help the NCPA achieve its long-range aims. The Centre is a nonprofit society founded by the Tatas and other prominent industrial groups to help preserve and develop India's heritage in the performing arts. Among its sponsors other than the Tata trusts and companies are the Government of Maharashtra, the Ford Foundation and the John D. Rockefeller Fund. The NCPA is already engaged in extensive recording of music and dance-both classical and folk-performances, and a number of distinguished teachers conduct classes for artists with outstanding potential. The NCPA plans to extend its presentations to the public by constructing another concert hall seating 2,000,an art cinema, a theater for experimental work, and an art gallery. Among its advisers in this ambitious undertaking are Yehudi Menuhin, Satyajit Ray, Ravi Shankar, Zubin Mehta, M.S. Subbulakshmi, Igor Moisseyev and other internationally renowned artists and scholars. With their contribution to the making of NCPA's "small jewel," Philip Johnson and Cyril Harris have joined this eminent list.

0' About the Author: Nicholas Chriss, who writes frequently is the Houston bureau chief of the Los Angeles Times.

days, threl; concerts in the same hall. The place is busy all day long. The performers are now provided with a place to work and it has generated much more interest in the arts. I think this is particularly important here in India.

Of course, if a performer plays poorly, the hall can't make him sound better. There are halls that hide some of the imperfections in play-. ing; at NCPA you are going to hear them. If a person speaks in a very low voice, with his head down, and you can't even hear him in a living room, there is nothing a hall, even with perfect acoustic conditions. can do to enahle 1,000 people to hear him. You can't break any laws of physics. Other than that I would say the NCPA hall has achieved in every respect what I expected it to achieve.

0 Cyril Harris has served as acoustic consultant on several important American projects. He is professor of electrical engineering and of architeclure at Columbia University and chairman of Columbia's Division ofArchiteclural Technology.

Kumud Mehta is the editor of NCPA'sQuarterly Journal.

on architecture,

The new American Telephone and Telegraph Building in New York is one of Johnson's recent designs.

The controversial structure has been described as the most radical skyscraper design of the past decade.

J

THE BURGER COURT: used several of these quiet devices to erode Warren court doctrines."

A renowned Indian lawyer Examining the Burger court's decade-old closely examines the record, record, Sidney Zion, a former law correspondent of The New York Times, expressed of the U.S. Supreme Court the same view in November 1979. "The since Warren Earl Burger criminal-justice revolution forged by the took over as its Chief Justice Warren court has been virtually dismantled" through "narrow interpretations" of the from Earl Warren in 1969.

Warren court's landmark precedents rather than by outright reversals .... "Conflicts beWhen Earl Warren retired as Chief tween an individual and the government have been resolved mainly against the indiJustice of the United States Supreme Court, in late May 1969, the Warren court had es- vidual .... Conflicts between an individual tablished a solid reputation the world over and the press have been resolved mainly for its staunchly libertarian stand on a against the press."

But other commentators had disagreed. wide range of issues-freedom of the press, criminal justice, individual liberty and racial "The Burger court is more like than unlike equality. It was a stand that aroused keen, the Warren court," RobertJ. Steamer, a noted even bitter, controversy. writer on the court, opined in 1977. "We can Warren E. Burger, who became the next say in sum that the court is skewed toward Chief Justice, had publicly criticized his a conservative restraint position, and yet has predecessor's rulings on criminal law; Presi- not broken out of old Warren pathways." dent Richard Nixon nominated him as an A strikingly original approach was develavowed "strict constructionist" of the Con- oped by Elder Witt on the basis of the court's stitution who, the president hoped, would decisions during the 1977-78 term. They reverse the trends set by the Warren court. revealed, he wrote, "a court on which In the decade that has passed since, the there was no dominant philosophical majorrecord of the Burger court has been subjected ity to consistently guide the justices' actions. to minute and critical scrutiny. It is always Taken as a whole, the decisions reflected a fascinating to watch any contest between the 'centrist' court with shifting alliances among elements of continuity and change. More so the justices. " in the present case because the judgments In Witt's view the two ends of the philoof the U.S. Supreme Court are of great sophical spectrum were each held by two consequence. Of course, they lay down justices. On the liberal side were Thurgood the law in the United States itself; abroad, Marshall and William J. Brennan, survivors they are regarded as precedents of high of the Warren court. On the conservative persuasive authority. Indian law reports are side were Chief Justice Burger and William replete with references to the U.S. Supreme H. Rehnquist, both Nixon appointees. BeCourt's decisions. The controversy over the tween these two extremes stood five "swingrecord of the Burger court, as compared to ers" - two other survivors of the Warren that of the Warren court, is therefore of court, Byron R. White and Potter Stewart; much interest to the Indian observer, to whom two Nixon appointees, Harry A. Blackmunn the contest between elements of continuity and Lewis F. Powell Jr., and a justice nomiand change holds a particular fascination. nated by President Gerald Ford, John Paul The tocsin was sounded as early as 1952 Stevens. Of the five "swingers" Powell and

by Professor Paul Bender when he wrote in Stevens, in particular, played key roles in Harper's, "There is a new Court: far more many decisions. (Powell's was the decisive is going on than meets the eye." There had vote in the Bakke case, for instance.)

On July 4, 1978, The New York Times been, he said, no dramatic overruling of precedents but "there are more subtle devices published a statistical analysis of the court's for a change. In their first months as a team, votes. It revealed that the Nixon appointees, the Nixon justices, consciously or not, have who once voted together on as many as

three of every four cases, had agreed on only one in every three cases during the 1977 term.

Blackmunn and Powell often voted with the liberals.

The survivors of the Warren court were no less divided. Its former dissenters, White and Stewart, would now and then go along with the conservative~.

Payton v. New York, decided on April 15, 1980, illustrates these divisions. By a majority of 6 to 3, the court ruled that the Fourth Amendment's bar on "unreasonable searches and seizures" applies as much to arrests of persons as it does to searches of homes without a warrant. Stevens wrote the majority opinion in which Brennan. Marshall, Stewart, Blackmunn and Powell concurred.

White wrote the dissenting opinion joined by Burger and Rehnquist.

Four years before the court had upheld a warrantless "midday public arrest" but had left open the question whether the police could enter a suspect's home to arrest him without a warrant. A search without a warrant would have been admittedly wrong.

But, the majority said, 'The two intrusions share this fundamental characteristic: the breach of the entrance to an individual's home. The Fourth Amendment protects the individual's privacy in a variety of settings.

In none is the zone of privacy more clearly defined than when bounded by the unambiguous physical dimensions of an individual's home-a zone that finds its roots in clear and specific constitutional terms: 'the right of the people to be secure in their ... houses . .. shall not be violated.' " The majority brushed aside the argument that a warrant requirement would impair law enforcement saying, "Such arguments of policy must give way to a constitutional command that we consider to be unequivocal."

The minority held that "the Fourth ,Amendment is concerned with protecting people, not places" and four common law restrictions on home arrests-"felony, knock and announce, day time, and stringent

CONTINUITY

AND

CHANGE probable cause"provide sufficient protection as far as the privacy of the home is concerned.

The members of the Warren court divided, and so did the Nixon appointees. The majority ruling in Payton v.

New York would have done the Warren court proud.

The result was less satisfactory in the Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS) case decided in April 1979. Anthony Herbert, a retired army officer, had written articles accusing his superiors of covering up reports of atrocities. The CBS broadcast a report on him and his accusations produced and edited

by Barry Lando and narrated by Mike Wallace. Lando later published a related article in The Atlantic Monthly. Herbert then sued CBS. The A tfantic, Lando and Wallace for defamation.

In The New York Times' Farber case, the Supreme Court had ruled in 1964 that a "public figure" cannot sue for libel unless he proves "actual malice" on the part of the writer; that is, knowledge or falsehood of the offending statement or "reckless disregard of whether it was false or not." With this precedent Herbert sought to prove malice by seeking disclosure of a host of material including five items to which the defendants objected, claiming privilege. They included "Lando's conclusions about facts imparted by interviews; his state of mind with respect to the veracity

of persons

intervieH'ed ...

conversation between Lando and Wallace about matter to be included or excluded from the broadcast publication; and Lando's intentions as manifested by his decision to include certain material." (Italics mine.)

The trial court overruled the defendants' objections. The Court of Appeals sustained them, only to be reversed by the Supreme Court (6-3), which rejected the claim of privilege.

White delivered the opinion of the court in which Burger, Blackmunn, Powell, Rehnquist, and Stevens joined.

They held that "the suggested privilege

byA.G.NOORANI

for the editorial process would constitute a substantial interference with the ability of defamation plaintiff to establish the ingredients of malice as required by The New York Times (case). As respondents would have it, the defendant's reckless disregard of the truth, a critical element, could not be shown by direct evidence through inquiry into the thoughts, opinions and conclusions of the publisher but could be proved only by objective evidence from which the ultimate fact could be inferred."

The inquiry cannot be so restricted, they said.

Dissenting, Stewart said simply that libel concerns what is published. "What was not published has nothing to do with the case" and cannot be looked into.

Brennan struck a compromise. Predecisional communication among editors would be protected, but the editorial privilege must yield if a public figure plaintiff estabIishes to the prima facie satisfaction of the court that the libel constitutes defamatory falsehood.

Marshall alone entered a complete dissent.

Editorial decision making should not be open to intrusion. "To preserve a climate of free interchange among journalists, the confidentiality of their conversation must be guaranteed."

Marshall argued that it is always open to the plaintiff to establish malice by a variety of ways such as absence of verification, inherent implausibility, obvious reasons to doubt the veracity of information and contradictions by the defendant. According editorial processes privilege from disclosure might affect the result only in some marginal cases, but that, Marshall said in his dissent, is "an acceptable price to pay for preserving a climate conducive to considered editorial judgment. " This ruling evoked a howl of protest in the press, since it followed a series of reverses which the press had suffered in the courts, the Farber case being one of them.

In May 1978, in the Stanford Daily case, a majority of the Supreme Court (5 to 3) ruled that the normal requirements of a search warrant will suffice even in the case of the search of a newspaper office. "Properly administered, the preconditions for a warrant -probable cause, specificity with respect

to the place to be searched and the things to be seized and overall reasonableness-should afford sufficient protection against the harms that are assertedly threatened by warrants for searching newspaper offices."

The minority view expressed by Stewart and Marshall pointed out the fallacy. "A search warrant allows police officers to ransack the files of a newspaper, reading each and every document until they have found the one named in the warrant, while a subpoena would permit the newspaper itself to produce only the specific documents requested. A search, unlike a subpoena, will therefore lead to the needless exposure of confidential information completely unrelated to the purpose of the investigation.

The knowledge that police officers can make an unannounced raid on a newsroom is, thus, bound to have a deterrent effect on the availability of confidential news sources."

It is unlikely that the Warren court would have rejected these arguments as the Burger court did.

Another decision which caused disquiet in liberal circles was the ruling in July 1979 in the Gannett case upholding the exclusion of the press and the public from a pretrial hearing. The majority-Burger, Stewart, Rehnquist, Powell and Stevens-held that the Sixth Amendment guaranteed "a public trial" to the accused, not to the public or the press. Such literal reading of the Constitution was not acceptable to Marshall, Brennan, Blackmunn and White. Blackmunn wrote for his dissenting colleagues: 'The Sixth Amendment, in establishing the public's right to access to a criminal trial and a pretrial proceeding, also fixes the rights of the press in this regard. Petitioner (Gannett), as a newspaper publisher, enjoys the same right of access to the ... hearing at issue in this case as does the general public. And what petitioner sees and hears in the courtroom it may, like any other citizen, publish or report consistent with the First Amendment."

A year later, however, the Burger court rallied round to decide the aspect it had ignored in the Gannett case-the First.

Amendment. Seeing the judges close their courtrooms on the strength of the Gannett case, the court ruled in Richmond Newspapers v. Virginia on July 2, 1980, with Rehnquist

as the sole dissenter, that criminal trials must be open to the press and the public, unless there is an "overriding interest" in closing them. Burger observed that "the right to attend criminal trials is implicit in the guarantees of the First Amendment."

It is a ruling of seminal importance. The court ruled for the first time that the right of access to information is integral to the rights to freedoms of speech and of the press.

This ruling will rank as a precedent of high persuasive authority in Indian courts.

The Warren court had strongly disapproved of pretrial publicity, and had reversed convictions when 'it felt that prejudicial publicity had led to the denial of a fair trial; most notably, in the case of Dr. Sam Sheppard, who had been convicted of murdering his wife. Judges must take "stronger measures," said the court, to ensure that prejudicial publicity did not deny a defendant this right. But would the Warren court have gone so far as to exclude the public? Very unlikely.

In the case of Walston v. Reader's Digest Association, decided in 1979, the court narrowed the definition of a "public figure" who needed to prove actual malice to win a libel suit. It ruled that an individual does not become a public figure simply because he was convicted of contempt of court for failing to testify before a grand jury 16 years before the publication called him a Soviet agent. Brennan alone dissented. The ruling is, with respect, unexceptionable.

In contrast, the majority (4-3) view in the KQED case is highly debatable. It rejected the claims of the press for greater access to prisons than was afforded to the public.

Stewart's dissent referred indirectly to Burger's remarks on "Special" First Amendment rights and pointed out the fact "that the First Amendment speaks separately of freedom of speech and freedom of the press is no constitutional accident but an acknowledgment of the critical role played by the press in American society."

However, the court unanimously ruled that a newspaper cannot be punished for publishing an accurate account of confidential disciplinary proceedings against a judge. The punishment, Burger wrote, would infringe upon "those interests in public scrutiny and discussion of governmental affairs which the First Amendment was adopteq to protect." '.

The Burger court has been cold to any claims by the press for "special" rights, but it has consistently rejected the state's attempts to influence or restrict press co~erage or to suppress publication. The court has yet to accept Stewart's view that

the First Amendment "extends protection to an institution" -the press-apart from guaranteeing the citizen's right to free speech.

It is only fair to add that the traditional view expressed by Frankfurter has been that "the liberty of the press is no greater and no less than . . . the liberty of every citizen of the United States." It is time, one would think, for the Stewart view to be accepted in all democracies.

It is in the field of criminal justice that the Burger court has departed most and in some fundamental respects from the Warren court.

This must be a matter of particular regret to an Indian lawyer because of its likely impact on the growth of Indian law.

The most striking example of this was in regard to the famous Miranda case decided in 1966.Twelve years later the Supreme Court of India relied heavily on the precedent, characterizing it as "the lodestar on the subject" (see SPAN, July 1979, for an Indian appreciation of Miranda).

By a majority of 5-4 the court had ruled in the Miranda case that "when an individual is taken into custody or otherwise deprived

"The criminal-justice revolution forged by the Warren court has been virtually dismantled" by the Burger court through its "narrow interpretations." of his freedom by the authorities in any significant way and is subjected to questioning, the privilege against self-incrimination is jeopardized. Procedural safeguards must be employed to protect the privilege, and unless other fully effective means are adopted to notify the person of his right of silence and to assure that the exercise of the right will be scrupulously honored, the following measures are required." The court proceeded to specify the warnings and intimations of rights to the presence of an attorney and the like.

Miranda has suffered serious erosions in the Burger court. In Harris v. New York, decided in 1971, Burger and Blackmunn joined the Miranda dissenters- Harlan, Stewart and White-to permit an unwarned suspect's statement to be used, not as evidence, but to confront him with it in order to impeach his veracity if he chose to testify in his defense. Black, Douglas, Brennan and Marshall dissented vigorously.

The court went still further in 1975, and held that after a suspect exercises his right

to remain silent about one crime, the police may still validly question him about another.

Alarmed, both Brennan and Marshall predicted the "ultimate overruling of Miranda's enforcement of the privilege against selfincrimination. " The trend persists, however. On June 20, 1979, the U.S. Supreme Court reversed a holding by the California Supreme Court that a juvenile's request to talk to his probation officer amounted to an assertion of his rights under Miranda. But the court ruled, on the basis of the record, that the juvenile had waived his Fifth Amendment rights. Marshall, Brennan, and Stevens dissented. So did Powell. "Although I view the case as close," he said, "I am not satisfied that this particular 16-year-old boy, in this particular situation, was subjected to a fair interrogation free from inherently coercive circumstances. " Another Warren court landmark to suffer a similar fate is Mapp v. Ohio (1961). Speaking for the majority (6-3), Justice Tom Clark had ruled that "all evidence obtained by searches and seizures in violation of the Constitution is, by the same authority (Fourth Amendment), inadmissible in a state court ... " as it is in a Federal court.

In 1974 the ruling was diluted in its application to grand juries. In 1976 the court ruled that government can summon from a bank a person's checks, deposit slips and financial statements because a depositor has no "legitimate expectation of privacy." By widening the concept of "consent searches" the court has rendered them outside the protection of the Fourth Amendment's guarantee against "unreasonable searches and seizures."

The U.S. Supreme Court went so far as to rule, in 1973, that a person can consent to an otherwise unconstitutional search even though he does not know or is not told that he has the right to refuse the search. Consent, the majority ruled, cannot be taken literally to mean a "knowing choice" so long as it is given voluntarily, free of coercion. But how' can a citizen waive a precious constitutional guarantee "without ever being aware of its existence?" Brennan asked in dissent.

By the same logic the installation of a pen register to determine numbers called from a particular telephone was also held, in June 1979, not to be a "search" within the meaning of the Fourth Amendment. A conviction based on information so obtained was upheld.

The victim of a robbery had received telephone calls from the alleged robber. Police traced to him the license plates of a car the victim had seen near the crime. Without

obtaining a warrant, they placed a pen register on his telephone. It revealed that he had called the victim's number. A page in his telephone book was turned down to the name and number of the victim.

The court held that the accused had no "reasonable" or "legitimate expectation of privacy" in the numbers he had dialed because it is well-known that they are recorded by the telephone company. Yet, as Marshall was quick to point out, those "who disclose certain facts to a bank or phone company for a limited business purpose need not assume that this information will be released to other persons for other purposes. " It was a hard case, obviously. And hard cases are known to make bad law. But it was not this old saw which was at work in this case. It was the narrow majority's inarticulate major premise in matters criminal which led it to spell out distinctions and exceptions to those Warren precedents which went in favor of the accused. This is the worrisome aspect. Burger, Rehnquist, Blackmunn, Stevens and White would do it time and again; in the instant case, over Marshall, Brennan and Stewart's dissent.

But neither group of justices constituted a "bloc." In other matters they differed. Even in cases of search and seizure the majority justices who were hard on the accused would break up. In June 1979 the court held that without a warrant the police have no right to search luggage taken from a car when there is no risk to themselves or danger of loss of evidence. BJackmunn and Rehnquist alone dissented. Burger and Stevens concurred with the majority, but said its holding was too "broad. " In the same month the court unanimously set aside a conviction for selling obscene material based on a police visit to an "adult bookstore" at which the police freely inspected the material and then listed them in the search warrant. The court tartly remarked, "Our society is better able to tolerate the admittedly pornographic business of petitioner than a return to the general warrant era; violations of the law must be dealt with within the framework of constitutional guarantees." This is precisely the minority's point in the Miranda and Mapp erosIOncases.

It is not unlikely that the majority itself may erode. In November 1979, the court ruled that a warrant for the search of a tavern and the bartender for the possession of a controlled substance did not entitle the police to search a customer. Burger, Rehnquist and Blackmunn protested. The April 15,

1980, decision is also in the same vein.

The Economist's correspondent has described it as the court's "new liberal look."

It remains to be seen whether this new approach prevails in the long run, for the Burger majority's rulings in other fields concerning individual liberty have also caused disquiet. To hold, as the court did in 1979, that detention in a country jail for eight long days because of mistaken identity did not deprive the detainee of "liberty ... without due process of law" is disturbing. Stevens, Marshall and Brennan dissented.

So does a 5-3 ruling of April 1976 that a police circular distributed to 800 merchants during the Christmas season listing an in-

"The Burger court is more like than unlike the Warren court. We can say in sum that the court is skewed toward a conservative restraint position, and yet has not broken out of old Warren pathways." nocent man among "active shoplifters" does not expose the officials to liability for damages for violating the man's rights.

In a bitter dissent, Brennan said: "The court today holds that police officials, acting in their official capacities as law enforcers may on their own initiative and without trial constitutionally condemn innocent individuals as criminals and thereby brand them with one of the most stigmatizing and debilitating labels in our society."

Similar bitterness surfaced in Anthony Lewis' column in The New York Times in March 1979. Frank Snepp, a CIA official, had published Decent Interval on his experiences in Vietnam admittedly without seeking clearance and in violation of his contract. The book contained no classified material, however. The state claimed an injunction plus the profits from the book on the basis of breach of trust. The District Court granted the prayers. The Fourth Circuit upheld the injunction, but not the grant of profits to the state. The Court of Appeals ruled the state could ask for punitive damages. Snepp moved the Supreme Court, and so did the government by a cross-petition.

On February 19, 1979, the court acted summarily-without hearing argument in an unsigned opinion-and ruled that the profits of the book were impressed with a trust in favor of the government. Stevens,

Marshall and Brennan sharply dissented, both at the ruling and the procedure. They would grant punitive damages and no more, since had Snepp actually submitted the book for approval, he would have secured it because it contained no classified material.

He did not stand to gain by his conduct.

Why should the government? But the disturbing part was the refusal of a hearing.

Anthony Lewis' criticism is well merited.

The majority ruling, he wrote, "opens the way for a major increase in government secrecy." Refusal of a hearing would affect public confidence in the court as well.

On equal protection the Burger court has not gone back on the Warren legacy. Indeed, in 1976 it extended the concept of state action and the frontiers of constitutional rights for blacks beyond previous limits by interpreting Section 1981 of the U.S. Code as outlawing racial segregation in private commercially operated, nonsectarian schools.

But affirmative action just about survived in the Allan Bakke case decided in 1978.

Powell tilted the balance between Burger, Rehnquist, Stevens and Stewart on the one side and Marshall, Brennan, White and Blackmunn on the other. We have seen how White and Blackmunn have differed on other issues. There is no solid phalanx. This was revealed once again on April 16, 1980, when the court ruled (5-4) that local governments cannot plead that they or their officials had acted in good faith in defense against suits brought under the Civil Rights Actofl871.

But far more promising was the court's ruling (6-3) in Earl Fullilove v. Klutznick, at the end of the term on July 2. 1980, upholding a provision in a Federal public works statute reserving 10 percent of public works contracts for businesses owned by members of racial minorities. It was a resounding triumph for affirmative action.

The dissenters were Stevens, Rehnquist and Stewart. It bears comparison with the notes on the Bakke case. Burger opted for affirmative action. So did Powell, more unequivocally than before.

What of the future? Brennan is likely to retire soon and Marshall has been in poor health. Five of the nine justices are 70 or older. Stevens was the last to be appointed in 1975. It will be interesting to follow the course of the Burger court when new justices join its ranks, as they assuredly will before long.

0 About the Author: A.G. Noorani, a distinguished' Bombay-based lawyer, is a frequent contributor [a SPAN and other magazines.

II1I LlrlSTYLIS IITBI80s

C

What will the typical American lifestyle be like at the end of the 1980s? Forecasters believe that, as in the past decades, dramatic advances in technology will shape the next 10 years. Home computers, an entertainment explosion, an electric car, and medical innovations will transform the American pattern of life and set the stage for further progress in the years beyond.

A revolut,ion in the American lifestyle over this decade?

Not quite, but enough changes will occur to make the 1970s look a bit old-fashioned.

Some of the most exciting developments will occur inside the home, which will feature elaborate entertainment centers, computers and new types offumiture and appliances.

Cars will be smaller, sleeker and more fuel efficient-many of them powered by diesel fuel or electricity.

The rush of women into jobs will create a demand for all sorts of services to help juggle home and business duties.

Instead of paying cash when they shop, consumers increasingly will have funds transferred electronically from their banks to merchants. Families will be able to shop from their homes, with the help of two-way cable television.

More people, too, will be in a do-it-yourself mood, taking the time to tackle home repairs and other chores rather than pay for high-priced labor. Self-improvement courses, sports and other leisure-time pursuits will be in big demand, as people enjoy shorter workweeks and earlier retirements.

In medicine, computerized devices w,ill open up the world to the deaf and blind, and a new class of personality drugs will improve memory.

These are some of the shifts that will be coming in day-to-day living, For a closer look at how Americans' habits will change:

No longer an isolated haven where the family lives out its private life, the home in the United States is fast becoming a vehicle for bringing the outside world to people's fingertips.

A prime tool in this transformation will be the home com'puter, which will allow people to figure their taxes, obtain information on entertainment, pay bills and send messages to friends.

Besides the personal computer, which might be located in the kitchen or den, many family television sets in the late 1980s also will be equipped to serve as complete information centers.

With the spread of cable-television systems and communications satellites, hundreds of electronic highways will be created to bring families an almost endless variety of data and entertainment possibilities. Over the TV set, people will be able to call up local and international news, sports results, calendars of local events, restaurant menus and theater schedules. Even sections of magazines and newspapers will be delivered on home screens and with the proper equipment, families will be able to print out parts they want to save. However, experts don't believe that the screens will soon replace the printed media.

"The newspaper has shape, texture and personality difficult to duplicate at home on a screen or in a home printer," says John Morton, a media analyst for John Muir & Company, a New York brokerage firm. What will happen, he says, is that newspapers and magazines will tailor their products to appeal to specialized audiences and neighborhoods.

As for entertainment, the offerings available on television will be multiplied many times over. There will be channels that specialize in sports, children's programs, first-run movies, cultural events, religion, hobbies-almost every interest under the sun. Some cable systems, such as one now in experimental use in Columbus, Ohio, will allow viewers to make comments or ask questions about what they've seen.

Available, too, at cheaper prices and at higher quality will be video discs of movies, Broadway plays, cultural events and other offerings. The discs will give viewers a picture that is far better than anything obtainable over the air, plus stereo sound.

An executive with U.S. JVC Corporation, a New York electronics firm, envisions that many American families will have an audiovisual room with big-screen television, a home computer, videodisc and video-cassette equipment and quadraphonic sound.

Home movies, too, will rebound, with the development of film that can be used repeatedly, in the same way that people now use sound-cassette tapes.

Telephones in the United States also will be more effective links to the world than ever before. Consumers will be able to push a single button for frequently dialed numbers, have a busy number called back automatically, and summon emergency help instantly. Printed telephone directories could become passe, if phones are tied into computer terminals that can retrieve home and business numbers, as has been tried in Albany, New York.

Refrigerators, ranges; washing machines and other appliances will be much more energy-efficient and sophisticated than today's models. Pilot lights on gas furnaces and ranges will be replaced by electric-ignition systems. Even the common light bulb will be designed to use a third of the energy it now takes. One example of new developments is the convection oven, which has been used in commercial kitchens for many years but now is beginning to gain popularity in homes. It consists of a small heating element with a fan that circulates the hot air inside a portable unit plugged into ordinary house current. The oven uses less energy and cooks faster than regular ovens, and it will become as popular as microwave models.

Being introduced, too, are ranges with cooking surfaces that use magnetic induction to heat food -again at an energy savings. In such models, the heat is induced by placing a metal pan

in the electromagnetic field located below a smooth, heat-free cooking surface, usually- made of ceramic tile. When the pan is removed from the stove, a small integrated circuit in the stove's hardware automatically shuts off the current within secondseliminating heat loss and reducing the chance for bums.

Labor-saving small appliances, too, will continue to sell well, catering to the working woman's desire to make the most of her time. Richard Montmeat, an executive with General Electric, predicts that most families will be short on time-not energy.

He adds: "The family meal is a thing of the past. It's going the way of the family breakfast and the family lunch. To provide a variety of meals at various times of day, households will buy more frozen and other processed foods that can be prepared quickly, especially with the aid ofa microwave oven."

On the inside, homes built in this decade will offer less elbow room than many Americans have become accustomed to having.

To beat soaring costs that are pricing more and more families out of the market for shelter, builders say there is no choice but to offer smaller homes on more modest lots.

Increasing as well in this decade will be even higher density forms of housing: Townhouses, low-rise condominiums and many varieties of clustered housing-styles suitable for the growing number of single people and retirees looking for smaller, low-maintenance homes. One example is the fourplex or sixplexbig homes that on the outside look like one large mansion but on the inside are divided into four or six separate units.

For people who want the privacy of a detached home but the cost savings of higher density, there will be patio homes that save space by eliminating the large side yards that separate homes in conventional developments. Instead, the homes are clustered around common courtyards or private interior patios.

There will be plenty of economizing inside the home, says Guy Odom, president of U.S. Home Corporation, a Houstonbased firm that in 1978 started nearly 12,000 homes. He predicts that the formal living room will be eliminated in the average home and replaced by an all-purpose "great room" linked to the kitchen. In other rooms, folding doors will allow families to have one big room for recreation or two smaller ones when privacy is needed.

More kitchens will be designed with all appliances on one wall to allow an eating area. Among other prospects: tables and desk tops that pull out of the wall, leaner cabinets with revolving shelves and other space-saving devices, scaled-down furniture and a revival of the old Murphy bed, which folds into a closet when not in use.

Since energy conservation will be accorded a high priority, homes built in the 1980swill be sited to take full advantage of the sun. Maximum insulation, storm doors and windows and solarassisted hot-water heaters will be standard in most homes by the end of the decade. More homes will have computers that automatically monitor heat, cooling, lights and the hot-water system to eliminate energy waste. There also will be energy meters indicating to homeowners the best times to use appliances to take advantage of lower off-peak rates charged by utility companies.

Mote of the home's components will come from the factory.

In fact, a strong revival is likely by the end of the 1980sin modular homes-units that are built entirely in the factory and moved to

the site, wJ1erethey are erected on a permanent foundation.

That idea, promoted heavily by the Federal Government in the early seventies, met with a cool reception in many parts of the United States, but housing experts say that people will be more enthusiastic about the better styles-and the price savings-that will come with factory-built designs of the 1980s.

In the same vein, most experts see a surge in sales of mobile homes, still priced in a range that moderate-income people can afford. Mobile-home manufacturers are switching more to double wide or multisection models that closely resemble traditional homes when placed on a foundation.

Parked in the typical family's garage in 1989 will be a small, two-seater electric car for commuting and a diesel van for weekends and vacations.

The average new car at that time will be getting 12kilometers to a liter of gas-many models more than 20 to the liter.

Big, gas-guzzling V-8 models will virtually disappear and will be replaced by autos with V-6 and four-eylinder engines.

Turbochargers-devices that use energy from an engine's exhaust to boost power-also will be common.

Grilles and exterior trim will be eliminated, and head lights, taillights, bumpers and door handles will be recessed into the car's body to minimize drag. Front-wheel drive will provide better handling and more interior space.

More safety features will be built in-air bags, automatic seat belts, additional padding.

The use of gasohol, a blend of 90 percent regular unleaded gasoline and 10 percent alcohol, will be widespread by 1985.

Although the expense may be high, autos powered by gas turbine engines that burn kerosene might also be introduced, says G. Ga'rth Leeth, an energy specialist with General Electric's Center for Advanced Studies.

Electric cars, by the late 1980s, will take many commuters to their jobs without the need to charge batteries daily, a drawback with current models that have limited range. Estimates are that 100,000 electric vehicles will be in use by 1985, with General Motors expected to unveil its electric model that year.

For those who like to tinker, the years ahead could bring some disappointment. The technology of tomorrow's cars will be far too sophisticated for most backyard mechanics. Built-in digital computers will monitor ignition timing, the mixture of air and fuel and other vital functions.

Microcomputers also will be incorporated into door-lock systems, dashboard controls and air conditioning. For example, instead of using a key to unlock a car, a person will merely place a finger on the surface of a flat optical reader installed on the door, and the car will be unlocked instantly. Computers also will give motorists data on travel conditions and arrival times

Despite the fuel economy offuture cars, the cost of gasoline50 cents a liter by 1985-will prompt more families to rely on public transportation for longer trips. Airlines will be especially popular. The big draw: cut-rate fares brought on by government deregulation and a mushrooming of charter services.

The surge in business, however, will mean more-crowded airports, parking problems and long waits for baggage. Buses and bus terminals, on the other hand, will be spruced up to attract more higher income passengers.

The U.S. train system will continue to suffer cutbacks, except in heavily traveled routes, such as the Boston-to-Washington corridor, where revamped roadbeds and 160-kilometer-an-hour trains will provide fast, reliable service.

As for the traffic snarls in America's biggest cities, there's little hope for much relief. It will take years to improve aging bus and subway systems, and the money for new rail networks will be hard to come by. Instead, many cities will try to ease the plight of motorists with computerized traffic control, special lanes for buses and car pools and promotion of "flextime" work schedules to minimize the rush-hour crunch.

Uncertainty over the supply of energy will alter people's spare-time activities, but there still will be plenty of time for fun.

"People will stay home and spend more time watching television," says Lee Isgur, a leisure analyst with Paine Webber Mitchell Hutchins, a New York brokerage firm.

Because so many first-run movies will be available at home, movie theaters will have to provide more-sensational visual effects, such as three-dimensional pictures.

Theme parks will become more spectacular, not only for children but for adults as well. One example is a park being built

by Walt Disney World in Florida called Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow, or EPCOT (see SPAN, July 1977).

In that park, a food pavilion will show how food can be grown in hydroponic or chemical solutions and in other artificial environments. Other pavilions will offer simulated space rides and solar energy demonstrations.

To save energy, more resorts will offer a wide choice of recreation for a "one stop" vacation, predicts Richard Ragatz, an Oregon leisure consultant. Resorts will be tied in closely with charter-bus and airline services.

The desire of Americans to own a vacation home won't diminish, but high costs will put that dream in jeopardy. Instead, more people will invest in "time sharing" of condominiums, a concept that gives families the use of a resort home for a couple of weeks each year for a one-time payment.

Americans will continue to satisfy their wanderlust in motor homes, but the models available will be smaller than today's gas hogs and designed to make the best use of space.

Camping will be popular, too, although Americans will tend to seek sites that are closer to home. National parks will grow more crowded and, in some cases, people will need reservations just to get in.

Frank Shaw, executive vice-president of the Coleman Company, sees a change in the style of camping. "Back packing is going to give way to family camping," he says. "Members of the generation who took up back packing enthusiastically as young single adults in the late 1960s and in the 1970s now are including their children."

Sports of all kinds will boom. "The rise in spending for leisure is going to outstrip the inflation rate," says Richard Geisler, president of Champion Products, a company which makes athletic wear.

The typical American already spends about 7 percent of his after-tax income on recreation, and that figure does not include clothing purchased for sports.

Women will become even more active in sports. A poll taken in 1978 by Louis Harris & Associates showed that women account for 46 percent of tennis players, 61 percent of swimmers and 64 percent of cyclists.

More genteel pursuits~reading and the arts~will prosper, too, insuring busy times for bookstores, art galleries and libraries, predicts New York psychologist Ernest Dichter. He envisions permanent fairs that will offer movies and many educational exhibits under one roof.

Bargain air fares and faster planes will make foreign travel more popular. Mainland China, South and Southeast Asia, exotic areas of Africa and the Pacific~even Antarctica~will draw many more visitors.

Restaurants will continue to lure more customers because of the growing number of working women and the additional income generated by two-income families.

Leading the way will be the fast-food and moderately priced family restaurants. Jose Alberni, director of marketing services for Burger King, predicts that fast-food sales will grow by 12 to 15 percent in the early 1980s.

When people go out to spend their money, it will be with a lot more caution than in recent years.

Having lived through one decade of soaring prices and with prospects of high inflation throughout the 1980s, families will be wiser and more prudent in their buying habits.

Most experts contend that more families will steer away from wasteful purchases. "Consumers will be more conservative," says marketing professor Robert D. Buzzell of Harvard University, "because their incomes will be growing more slowly." \ Companies will be cautious, too, he adds, and will introduce fewer new products~except in the electronics field, which will spawn countless new items. Behind that reluctance to take risks: the rising cost of borrowed funds and the burdens of government regulations.

Much of the new merchandise that is introduced will be designed and packaged for the growing number of single households and small families.

In this climate, people will be in a mood to patronize discount stores and to buy do-it-yourself and home-improvement items, predicts Jeffrey Feiner, a vice-president and retail specialist at Merrill Lynch, Pierce, Fenner & Smith. He believes that people will continue to buy goods as an inflation hedge~ housing and jewelry, in particular.

More people will shop at big specialty stores that deal in products such as toys, furniture and appliances. New types of stores will spring up to sell and install¡ the sophisticated computers, energy-control devices and other electronic gadgets in tomorrow's homes.

Jack Smallwood, a Worthington, Ohio, marketing consultant, sees big demand especially for appliances and other durable goods, as more of the baby-boom generation begins to furnish houses. Sales of baby furniture and children's clothes also will spurt when that same generation triggers a boomlet in births.

Also predicted : More storefront law offices that handle wills,

divorces and other legal requests at lower fees. Opticians and other service firms will locate in shopping malls.

There will be a bigger interest in gourmet foods and foreignmade items, as people become more educated and cosmopolitan in their tastes, says Professor William Lazer, who teaches marketing at Michigan State University.

Department stores, supermarkets and other retail establishments will adopt computer technology for checkout and for inventory control. By the end of the 1980s, more merchants will sell their products by utilizing two-way cable television.

That type of remote-control sales technique will tie in to local banks, which will be moving increasingly toward electronic funds transfer. Under that concept, no cash is needed to buy goods. Instead, a merchant's account is credited automatically when a sale is made-and the same amount is deducted from the customer's account. Similarly, more workers won't get a paycheck, but rather a receipt for wages credited automatically to their accounts.

By using their home computers or television information systems, people will be able to get an instant reading on their bank balances, as well as bills for charge accounts, auto-loan payments and other obligations. If they are in the market for, say, a home-improvement loan, families will be able to do a bank -by-bank comparison, simply by calling up each institution's interest rates on their computer screen.

Automatic-teller machines, located in banks and shopping centers and activated by plastic cards, will make it possible for people to take care of their financial matters without going through a bank teller.

Bank offices themselves will be smaller, with fewer employees.

The teller machines will handle routine transactions, leaving the staff free to conduct more complicated business and to give more personal service to individuals. However, some machines will be programmed to counsel individuals on their finances, spewing forth data on retirement accounts, investment strategy and other financial-planning information.

The 1980s will see big changes in health care, as Americans live longer and place bigger demands on doctors and hospitals.

A rise in group health insurance will assure many people of more specialized attention. Supporting these doctors-many more of them women-win be a team of medical personnel: physician's assistants, nurse practitioners, social workers and technicians.

Instead of long hospital stays, those with chronic problems will go more often to temporary nursing facilities and outpatient clinics. Dying patients who need professional care will get loving and sympathetic treatment in homelike hospices. The mentally ill also will be treated frequently in the community anp at general hospitals rather than being shut away in state institutions.

However, that trend will stir controversy because of the shortage of housing for these people and the objections of neighbors.

The Federal Government also will encourage the spread of prepaid health programs in which a single fee entitles a person or

a family to an array of services. These plans, known as healthmaintenance organizations, are expected to provide 25 percent of American health care by the end <;>f the decade.

A substantial boost in the number of retired peopie will create a greater demand for nursing facilities, drugs, hearing aids, pacemakers and other products. Theodore Gordon of the Futures Group predicts the development of new personality drugs that will improve memory, attention span and visual ability.

George von Haunalter of the SRI International research group adds that there will be fewer new drugs, but that they will be much more effective. He notes that $100 worth of pills might be a substitute for $1,000 worth of hospitalization. Also expected to increase: self-help courses in first aid and cardiopulmonary resuscitation, as well as exercise programs and campaigns to end the smoking habit.

For the handicapped: Deaf people will be able to use the telephone with the help of a computer inserted in the receiver that will relay a caller's words onto a small screen. The blind will be able to purchase a computer that will write, store and communicate Braille. Handicapped people of all ages can look forward to technological breakthroughs that will allow them to lead happier, more-active lives.

Religion is expected to thrive in the 19808, although some institutional churches may face a rocky road.

Attendance at weekly services, which now amounts to 41 percent of the population, down from a peak of 49 percent in 1958, will at least hold steady in the next few years.

Pollster George Gallup notes that the number of Americans who believe that religion's influence is gaining has tripled since 1970 and that 6 out of every 10 people now describe religious beliefs as "very important" in their lives.

Some scholars predict that church participation will accelerate as institutional religion benefits from what sociologists describe as a spiritual hunger. Others predict that more people will turn to small prayer meetings, such as the charismatic groups, and to offbeat cults. Michael Novak, a Roman Catholic philosopher at the American Enterprise Institute, sees mainline churches turning away from the "soft-boiled religion and Utopian social views" of the sixties and seventies in favor of traditional messages.

There will be a greater cooperation among religious faiths, spurred on by the continuing ecumenical movement and an energetic Pope who will keep religious issues in the forefront.

Rather than seek converts from other faiths, pastors and rabbis will focus on the "unchurched" or members of their own religion who have quit practicing. .

Peter Berger, a Lutheran sociologist at Boston College, believes that Eastern religions will have more impact on American religious beliefs. That will result, he says, from improved communications with the rest of the world and a disillusionment with America's focus on materialism.

Hard pressed to maintain their buildings in a -t-ighteconomy, some churches-even different denominations-will share facilities. In Protestant churches, more women will join the clergy.

Women will press for ordination in the Roman Catholic Church, too; both women and men will have a greater role in services than ever before. In the synagogues, except for the Orthodox, women also will playa larger part.

0

Trash or literature? Comic strips have long been the target for both adulation and criticism. In this analysis, the author argues that comics appeal to young and old alike because of the earthiness and the very excesses that some highbrows deplore.

TWO-DIMENSIONAL WORLD OF

History was made on October 18,1896. when a stickfigure cartoon called "'The Yellow Kid" came strutting across the pages of the Sunday supplement, The American Humorist, sporting a bright yellow suit and promising S2 Sundays' worth of fun every year for the readers of William Randolph Hearst's New York Journal. It was the first time color was used in a newspaper.

But.. more important for American pop culture, it was the occasion for the first comic strip to join jazz and the movies as a truly American invention.

Telling a story by means of pictures in a sequence is as old as the human race and is a technique that has been used for centuries by all cultures. But "'The Yellow Kid" was something else.

Hearst had directed staff artist, Richard Felton Outcault, to draw a series of comic pictures telling a story with a main character. Whether he knew it or not. Outcault was putting it all together when he sat down to work: the 15thcentury German picture stories called

"broadsheets" that were hand-printed from wooden blocks or copper sheets; the 18th-century English caricatures with their "'talk balloons"; and the popular graphic cartoon drawings that appeared during the 19th century.

WhatOutcault came up with amounted to a completely new medium-one around which a passionate controversy has raged since the very beginning.

Intellectuals and literati attacked the comic strip as vicious and crude.

Applying bookish standards to this new phenomenon, they found it gross and illiterate. Even worse in their eyes was the fact that it first appeared in the sensational press. The tag, "yellow journal," in fact, originated with the color of the Kid's costume and is still used to label any publication that indulges in melodramatic overstatement associated with Hearst's style.

About the only point everybody is agreed upon is that comics are popular, a truth deplored by many.

What is it about comics that has gripped the masses-especially the young-from the beginning? It is esti-

mated that 90 percent of American children between the ages of 7 and 14 read them. During a recent year, over 80 million comic books were sold on U.S. newsstands. An even wider audience exists for the strips that appear in newspapers and magazines all over the world. The reason for their universal appeal amongst the young may well lie in those very features of the medium that have always generated hostility in the adult intellectual minority. Paradoxically, neither comic strip buffs nor their detractors are generally aware of these features. The former happily follow the adventures of their favorites without bothering to wonder why they enjoy them; the latter attack comics on various grounds: they glorify violence, they waste children's time, they deal in trivialities, they are escapist.

Media specialists like Marshall McLuhan see deeper seated reasons for all the antagonism. For one thing, comics demand a special kind of literacy that has little to do with the verbal variety learnt in school. Like television, which provokes similar attacks for similar

reasons, comics involve the viewer to a sage," that it doesn't matter much what point of view. The best comics contain appears in comics-only how it is a high quality of writing within the high degree. This is because (and not conveyed. narrow limits of the genre and appeal in spite of the fact that) they provide But content has exercised the imagi- to the interest level of readers and not very little data. In other words, a particular moment in time or aspect in space nations of serious students of the med- necessarily to their capability level. The of an object is ill defined. Printed as ium for some time. Particularly the lan- best are also concerned with the timeguage. While some are appalled at the honored themes found in all literature. they are on cheap paper by comparatively crude technical means, comics debasement that takes place in them.

It is generally acknowledged that do not give the reader the rich detail H. L. Mencken found the language of characters in comics are first cousins to cornic strips to be a folk heroes of the past and what goes and sense of verisimilitude that quality magazines and books do that are great enlivening force on in the strips reflects society at large. in American speech. printed on slick paper by more sophistiSocial historians have come to recated processes.

From the cartoon gard comics as valuable clues to the "Popeye" alone, he American experience of the past 80 Consequently, the viewer of the comic book is compelled to complete cited such coinages as years. They see in the innocent humor drugstore cowboy (teen- of pre-World War I "funnies" a reflecand interpret what he sees from the few hints he gets. He has constantly to age lounger), nobody tion of a less complicated age when home (dim-wit), goon fill in the gaps, flesh out the starkly Americans could laugh Sunday after drawn, craggy faces and jutting chins (subhuman) and jeep that have all be- Sunday at the slapstick shenanigans of of the characters, and connect each come part of the spoken language. The Jiggs and Maggie in "Bringing Up frame with the next while following the same cartoon is responsible for the Father" and at the ups and downs of "balloon" dialogue, which acts as a vogue of words ending in -burger. Other "The Gumps" and "Buster Brown."

After the sobering experience of soundtrack. words whose origins Mencken traced to In fact, further comparisons with the comics are heebie jeebies (the jitters), World War I, "unfunny funnies" the cinema are possible. Individual hot mamma (a Mae West prototype), . made their appearance. The American frames of a comic strip, like the movie, hotsy totsy (pretentious) and horse public wanted stories like "Little Orare made up of long or medium shots, feathers (nonsense). The soundtrack phan Annie" and "Buck Rogers" that or even an occasional close-up. They noises of comic strip fight scenes like were full of suspense and thrills. Like depict the passage of time by means zowie, bam, socko, gurp, plop, wow, the heroes every age and every culture of a montage, carefully adjusting the wham, glug, oaf, and ulk have likewise invents for itself, the superstars of content of each frame in a sequence. made the American language of every- this so-called Golden Age of comics Long and short shots are alternated to day that much more zestful. represented, in the words of social make it seem that things are happening critic, D. Keith Mano, a kind of "comEducationists have long acknowlfast. The illusion of motion is achieved edged the fact that comic strip language munal dream work." These oversimpliby showing moments of the starting appeals more to children who have fied and easy-to-recognize archetypes and stopping of an action, the flow of trouble learning to read than to any were invariably involved in a goodmovement being possible only in the other group, and that far from keeping versus-evil issue, with no doubt about film. The cartoonist can "dolly in" and them away from "real" books, comics, God's existence or confusion about "dolly back" and can create the idea in fact, often pave the way for more whose side He was on. "Superman" of steady movement by providing a substantial reading. and "Flash Gordon" are only two out sequence of shots or frames in a consisThe art work in comics began being of the dozens of brave champions who tent direction-southwest to northeast, taken seriously in the United States for a score of years took up the battle for example. from the I960s. By then European against evil and held up the ideal of "Reading" all of this adds up to a lot critics had got excited about the aesthet- right conduct before a believing audiof engrossing work - the kind a literary- ics of comics, and the original drawings ence. They are direct descendants minded person is unwilling to put up of Burne Hogarth, who did the art of Homer's Trojan War heroes and the with or even finds frustrating, but which work for "Tarzan," and Hall Foster of Old Testament Samson. keeps children from 6 to 60 busily "Prince Valiant" fame were put on As Americans felt more and more involved for hours. Ironically-as Mc- show at the Louvre, while Picasso drawn into the shattering events of Luhan points out-the response of the himself was revealed as a fan of Ameri- World War II, strip writers turned to comic strip. fan of any age is not can comics. It was time for American themes of anticrime, patriotism and characterized by excitement or agita- intellectuals to take a fresh look at the fight against oppression. A couration or arousal, no matter how lively comic strips. Today several U.S. col- geous detective like "Dick Tracy" kept the strip may become. His reaction is leges offer courses in the genre, and many a fan engrossed in the issue of instead one of concentrated passivity: a writer of the stature of John Updike the law-abiding citizen confronted by the indistractable adolescent with a feels that the great American novel of crime. comic book in front of him is a familiar the future may very well be created by However, a great deal of simple enough sight. some artist-writer who produces the faith in the rightness of things was McLuhan, then, explains both the ultimate comic. dissipated during World War II. popularity of comics amongst the Although only about 15 percent of Besides, television took center stage as young and their corresponding un- the entire output rates serious attention, the major factor in social change in the popularity with adults who have out- good comics have several points in United States. This made the pre-World grown them in terms that leave out their common: they have exciting layouts War II comic book stalwarts obsolete. content. This is in consonance with his with lots of visual impact, novel characComic strips became funny again. The theory that "the medium is the mes- terization, a strong plot and a consistent kind of one-shot amusing anecdote

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Dreams (1911), with no definite, characters or themes. Marital life was an incidental topic in comic strips, until George McManus' Bringing Up Father, begun in 1914, poked fun at henpeckery. But even as the bickerings of the Irish bricklayer-tumed-millionaire and his sociiJlly ambitious wife continued to delight and inspire comic tiffs, the genre took an adventurous turn. In 1929, Tarzan,

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that fans all over the world associate with the "Peanuts" characters came into vogue, followed by more sophisticated fare in the 1970s. Gary Trudeau's "Doonesbury" is typical. This strip, published in 347 newspapers and reaching 18 million readers, deals with contemporary subjects, and its pithy characters are easy for readers to identify with-if not to look up to.

It has been noted that times of anxiety bring comic book heroes to the fore. As the 1970s drew to a close, the collective concern over energy costs and inflation gathered momentum and set people longing for the "good old days." Riding in on this wave of nostalgia are old-timers like "Superman," "Popeye," "Buck Rogers," and "Flash Gordon" who are the subjects of recent movies and television shows.

Many an observer of the social scene is alarmed about the latest creations the comic culture has thrown up.

More likesuperfreaks than superheroes, "The Hulk," "The Beast," "Angel," and "Iceman" are gaudy creatures who look as though they just stepped off the stage of a punk rock concert.

All have had something happen to them to make them mutants. The "Six-Million Dollar People" have one real limb plus three solid state appendages.

The "Fantastic Four" have been zatzed by cosmic rays, "The Hulk" by gamma rays-and so on. They are made of elastic or brick or fire or ice. But not flesh and blood. Pseudo-scientific jargon is used to "explain" their predicaments, but whatever the cause. as Mano points out, they are individually "mute and stupid." Unlike their predecessors, these new "heroes" have no positive effect on human life. They live in a moral vacuum where God is

irrelevant and the power of science is neutral.

Mano and others see the popularity of these strange beings as a reflection of the deep uneasiness that modern man has about science, and these characters as symbols of our age that has lost its faith.

Yet, for all that, it is unlikely that the mesmerized adolescent slumped in his chair with his stack of dog-eared comic books before him sees the specter of 20th- century angst stalking the pagesany more than he recognizes art work in some of them worthy of exhibition in the Louvre. He is having a wonderful time in a world that he knows, better than we, is make-believe.

0 About the Author: Jacquelin Singh, afrequenl contributor to SPAN, is the author of Dee Kay and .the Mystery of the Laughing Natraj (1980), afull-lengthfictionfor teen-agers, and several nonficlion educational books.

"IT'S THE PHANTOM'S WORLD -AND MINE TOO"

Aruna VasiIdev: When did you create the Phantom?

Lee Falk: I started the Phantom in 1936 when I was a student in the university.

I really did it as a sort of prank to see if 1 could sell it. Much to my amazement, King Features Syndicate bought it and then I had to keep doing it! For the money, of course!

Vasudev: Did you conceive the whole story of Phantom when you started it, or did it develop slowly over the years?

Falk: It developed gradually. At first, I had a different idea, in fact, of him-as a playboy by day and the Phantom by night. I worked with that theme for a few months and then decided I didn't like it-so 1 never revealed Lee Falk (above, with his wife), to the readers that the playboy who is a creator of the Phantom and M anfriend of Diana's and the mysterious masked drake, talks to Aruna Vasudev man who visits her are the same. Of course, about his old-fashioned comicthe idea was later taken up for Superman. strip heroes and the reasons for Vasudev: Yes, Clark Kent. even in these Falk: That's right. I changed my story their popularity because suddenly I got this idea of a jungle days of electronic "superheroes." background and the many generations of the Phantom. 1 gradually introduced things: First he used to run in the jungle; then I they leave the lambs, the antelopes, the deer thought it would take him too long to get and the zebras alone and they all grow and from one point to another so I gave him a live in peace. The idea is \5f a peaceable horse. And, slowly, through the years, I kingdom where the Phantom can relax; added to the folklore of the Phantom-the I'd like to go there myself sometime. It's skull cave, the pygmies, the golden beach of the Phantom's world-and mine too.

Keela-wee, the jade hut, the Isle of Eden Vasudev: How long after the Phantom did where he keeps all his animals, where the you start Mandrake? . lions and tigers live with the antelopes; Falk: It's the other way round-l started he teaches the great cats-the lions and the Mandrake one year before. tigers-to catch fish in the lagoon so that Vasudev: But why has the Phantom become

so much more popular than Mandrake?

Falk: I suppose because Mandrake is fantasy and while the Phantom has a rather exotic background he's not fantasy; he's a real man, working in a real milieu. Of course, Mandrake too is real, but he's a hypnotist and I have a lot of science fiction in his comics.

I suppose people who like fantasy are fewer than people who like straight adventure, and the Phantom is a straight adventure hero.

He's easier to understand.

Vasudev: That's exactly what I wanted to ask you: How do kids in the United States, who live in a world so scientific, so geared toward space fantasy and all that, feel about the Phantom? This primitive jungle hero, the strong man, seems hardly the kind of thing young children would react to today.

Falk: Well, the newer types of comic strips are popular now but the Phantom is too.

There was a comic strip popularity poll 'in Florida recently in which the Phantom was right under the top. He always is. So, he has his own place, you see. The heroes in the comic world now are all super super and they are in some kind of an electronic age; the Phantom is not-that makes him unique.

I've often been asked why I don't make the Phantom also do all those things. But I don't want to. He's a superhero with many firsts-he's the first jungle man in comics, the first masked man and so on.

Vasudev: What was your inspiration when you started your coplics?

Falk: It's rather odd, but I never thought much about comic strips then. I was much more interested in theater, which I sub-

I

sequently had a long career in -still have-as a producer, director, writer. I've had five theaters of my ..â&#x20AC;˘ own and over a period of 15-20 years I've produced 300 playsShakespeare, musicals, comedies, all professional-directed a hundred and written about 12 plays. The last one I did was, in fact, a musical version of Mandrake, which we performed at the Music Festival in Tanglewood (Massachusetts). And all this has been concurrent with my comic strip work.

Vasudev: But how do you find the time to do both theater and comics?

Falk: Well, I've gradually been giving up theater-having my own theaters that ismainly because it became less and less profitable with the cost of production going up. And I stopped enjoying it.

Vasudev: You produce about four comic strip stories a year, I believe.

Falk: Yes, and there haven'i been any repeaters. Filmmaker Alain Resnais. who is a Mandrake expert, told me some years ago that I had written 800, each one of which is the equivalent of a short novel. And then there are also about 800 Phantom stoTies. Apart from that, some years ago we did about 15 Phantom novels. I personally did about five of them. and the others were adapted from my comics.

Vasudev: When you started Mandrake and Phantom, did you always write the story yourself and had someone else do the illustrations?

Falk: No, I drew originally. And I wasn't very good at it! Then I asked a commercial artist, Phil Davis, to help me with it. Now there are five artists: one works on Mandrake. and four work on Phantom.

Vasudev: But the idea of what Mandrake and Phantom should look like and their costume and everything else is yours?

Falk: Yes. It's very much like a film scenario.

Each panel has a description of the characters. the background, and I write the dialogue and narration. I used to make rough layouts for the artists in the beginning but now they don't need them.

Vasudev: Do you write one episode and then develop it or do you write the whole story?

Falk: I have the whole story in my head but I don't write it. I could tell you a story about that. I once started a Sunday page episode.

It began in the Arctic with a polar bear scratching away the ice on a huge iceberg.

Then an Eskimo comes in a kayak and shoots at the bear. He misses, but tries to find out what the bear was looking for. He brushes the snow aside and sees a man's face buried under the ice. He gets scared, fears evil spirits and rushes off in his kayak. Now I stopped there and returned to it after several months.

I had been busy with the theater, writing and producing plays. And when I came'back to it I picked up the script and said to myself: "Now what the hell was he doing thereT I really forgot! I couldn't change it because the earlier episodes were ready!

28

SPAN

JANUARY

1981

Vasudev: So what did you do? Do you remember?

Falk: It turned out to be a rather interesting science fiction story. I wrote about a race of men before the ice age who were very superior. They had aircraft and one of them, the Wizard. was an evil man .... Oh. it's a long story. But it turned out very nicely, made good pictures. You see, I have to think in terms of pictures. It's as if I was writing for a film. Except that they are still pictures and the action moves very fast. You know, long ago when Time magazine did a cover story on Resnais they asked him where he got the technique of flashing quickly from scene to scene and he said, "from a comic strip called Mandrake."

[Federico] Fellini is another one who prefers Mandrake to the Phantom. He always says he's going to make a film on him.

Vasudev: Oh, it would be ideal if Fellini were to do it.

Falk: Well, it would be more like Fellini than Mandrake!

Vasudev: How come a film hasn't been made on the Phantom or Mandrake yet?

Falk: Negotiations are on nght now with a French producer who wants to do Mandrake and one from Rome 'who is interested in filming the Phantom. And two Americans are keen to do animation films on both Mandrake and the Phantom.

Vasudev: You have been accused of making the Phantom a racist. What do you say to that?

Falk: I say, "No." A racist is a bigot and a nasty fellow. The Phantom is a friendly man. And. in fact. he's very popular with blacks in the United States. The Phantom's relationship with the jungle people is very friendly, as it is with anybody else. They accept him, he accepts them.

Vasudev: Do your stories have a message?

Falk: Not intentionally, because if you do that it gets very dull. But basically, the Phantom has more of a message than Mandrake.

Maybe that's part of the appeal of the Phantom: this man dedicated to fighting injustice.

That's a very strong word and strikes a chord in countries where there isn't any justice. One of the Phantom stories was banned by the military dictatorship in Argentina because it showed the general as a bad guy. In a Caribbean island, there's an underground movement called Phantom made up of young officers who had enrolled against the dictator.

Vasudev: In how many languages are the Phantom and Mandrake published?

Falk: I think about 40 languages and in 140 countries. In India a firm called Indrajal publishes them-or at least one of them-in eight languages. And in Port Moresby in New Guinea the Phantom is published in pidgin English by, a church! They really idolize the Phantom there. The church uses posters saying: PHANTOM SAYS YOU SHOULD BRUSH YOUR TEETH EVERY DAY and things like that.

Vasudev: It must be very satisfying to know

that people all over the world are reading what you write.

Falk: Yes. and it's amazing. Because as a writer you write for a certain audience.

Now with a circulation of a hundred million and a readership 10 times that you get all sorts of readers.

Vasudev: Isn't the Phantom a bit like Tarzan?

The white man in the jungle ....

Falk: Not really. They are bOlhjungle menbut that's all.

Vasudev: But had you read Tarzan before?

Falk: Oh sure, I love Tarzan. I grew up with it. Edgar Rice Burroughs wrote the book way back. In fact, it's the first adventure strip.

Vasudev: With echoes of Kipling in it.

Falk: That's right. Whatever I knew came from these books. They definitely served as an influence. In fact someone who interviewed me here in India said that the Phantom had a feeling of India in it. I think it does because of the influence of Kipling's stories.

Vasudev: And where did Mandrake come from?

Falk: I used to like stage magicians and I was intrigued by the great detective stories, by Sherlock Holmes. Mandrake came from all that and also from great travelers like Marco Polo and Richard Halliburton. And another thing I like is science fiction. I started reading it when there was just a small cult that read it. Then I wrote science fiction.

Vasudev: In Mandrake?

Falk: Yes and outside of Mandrake too. I've written one about four years ago for Playboy; I called it "Time is Money." It's about a mythical land where time is the exchange unit; you pay for things with the time of your life. Thing could cost a minute or two or a year. And there's a time bank in the center of the earth which monitors all transactions. When you are 21 you are given a certain allowance and you have to live with that. And if you don't have time you have to die.

Vasudev: Fascinating idea!

Falk: My hero is a man who is running out of time because he has foolishly given two months of his to a girl in a brothel. And now he is desperately running around looking for her because he has only five minutes left.

He is frantically trying to borrow time, and selling off all he has-five minutes for his shoes and so forth-but he can't. Then 'a young couple comes along and the girl feels bad for him and agrees to give him a week.

Just as he's thanking her, his account closes. a little electrode explodes and he drops dead.

A crowd gathers and an old lady asks a policeman. "What happened ?'. and he answers: "He's overdrawn.'- That's it.

Vasudev: That's a wonderful story! Why on earth don't you write more?

Falk: Yes, I suppose I should. I think I'll write a play one of these days just to see if I still can write' 0 About the Interviewer: Aruno Vasudev is a filmmaker trained in France. and author of Liberty and Licence in Indian Cinema.

What's

lew About Ie.

American Cinema!

A noted Indian playwright, film director and actor discusses how Hollywood was changed by the rise of the director as superstar and assesses the works of two of them-Peter Bogdanovitch, director of The Last Picture Show (above), and Francis Ford Coppola of Godfather fame. find the history, and the work, of the new American film directors fascinating, because many of the problems they faced are so akin to the ones we face in India.

Of course one can't talk about these new directors without briefly touching upon the older cinema. As is well known, the traditional Hollywood system collapsed toward the late 1940s.

Two things hastened its end-one was the coming of television, and the second was that the hold of Hollywood studios over distribution and exhibition was found monopolistic and they wereasked to divest themselves of interest in these sectors. By the early fifties the question was whether American cinema would at all survive the onslaught of television. Would American films become an antiquated art medium without a popular following?

The interesting thing that happened around this time, after World War II, was that the French discovered Hollywood.

France was occupied most of the time during the war and had no access to the American cinema. At the end of the war, when the Hollywood film came back and the war generation of France discovered Hollywood films, they reacted in a way very different from the way they had during the heyday of Hollywood. Earlier generations, both in Europe and the United,States,'were wont to denigrate the American and uphold the European cinema. Itwas good for the morale of the young American filmmakers to know that young Europeans were looking up to, rather than down on,

I

American cinema. Lindsay Anderson in Britain had already turned John Ford from a competent maker of Westerns into one of the great film directors. With the new French film critics came the deification of Orson Welles, Alfred Hitchcock and Howard Hawkes.

The major European influence on American film thinking was at that time Cahiers du Cinema, run by the disciples of the critic Andre Bazin and of his "auteur" theory, which saw the film director as the sole creator of a film, controlling every aspect of it. The French realized that all American films were not products of the system but were the work of individual artistsWelles, Nicholas Ray, Otto Preminger were authors not just of good individual films but of a whole body of work. The glorification of Hollywood came exactly at the time when Hollywood was collapsing. The auteur idea was picked up by critics like Andrew Sarris, and Peter Bogdanovitch, a filmmaker who had started as a critic. There was the great controversy between Peter Bogdanovitch and Pauline Kael in which Kael maintained that the whole of Citizen Kane had been actually written by Joseph Mankiewicz, the script writer, that everything you admire in Citizen Kane w~s the doing of Mankiewicz and that's why Welles never reached the same height again once he had lost Mankiewicz and Greg Toland, his photographer. Bogdanovitch countered that the film was not about Kane, but about Welles

Right: Two performers in Robert Altman's musical Nashville. Below: Geraldine Page and E.G. Marshall in Woody Allen's Interiors.

To see Woody Allen parodying Bergman parodying Bergman becomes almost comical.

himself-that's why his later films continued to repeat the personality. This sort of debate showed how deep an impact the auteur idea had made in the United States.

In this context the next batch of American filmmakers were very interesting. Take John Frankenheimer, Sidney Lumet and Arthur Penn, for example. They made their films in the early and mid-sixties, tried to break away from the Hollywood tradition, and were attracted by the new cinema as it was evolving in Europe-a new cinema that was, as it were, glorifying the Hollywood from which they were breaking away. As a result there is in the work of this group a certain kind of emotional schizophrenia about their own cultural background, a lack of maturity. Frankenheimer started with films like The Young Stranger, an adaptation of a television play, and went on to do Birdman of Alcatraz. But slowly he got so drawn back into the Hollywood system that in films like The Manchurian Candidate, Seven Days in May, and Train, he seems to have lost all intelligence; his later films are so degenerate, decadent, glossy, so lacking in any sense of what was happening around him, that it's hard to believe that he had been earlier considered a very promising talent. So the ghost of Hollywood took its revenge on those who tried to exorcise it.

Sidney Lumet. too, came from television; his first successful .film. Twelve Angry Men) was a film version of a television play ..lt is interesting to see how he too reacted to Europe. Look at his Pawnbroker-about a Jewish trader in Harlem and his reaction

to the daily violence around him, reminding him of his experience in Nazi concentration camps. Stylistically, Lumet is greatly influenced by Alain Resnais' Hiroshima Mon Amour, which had unexplained flashcuts of sometimes less than a second. Resnais used them not to explain anything but to create a mood, to establish a subconscious connection between different parts of the film; in Lumet these become a kind of laborious, elaborate system of flashbacks. It starts with quick flashes; these are slowly added up to show his past in the Nazi concentration camp. He sought to integrate European stylistic influences into t~e traditional narrative needs of American cinema. Pawnbroker is a good film, and yet this stylistic confusion shows through. Later Lumet went on to make a straight film out of a stage play in the Long Day's Journey Into Night with hardly any change.

The most successful of the three was Arthur Penn, who directed The Miracle Worker and Bonnie and Clyde. Yet here too, if one is thinking of the influence of Europe, it is interesting to note that when Warren Beatty wanted to make Bat/me and Clyde he first approached Jean Luc Godard, who had done Breathless.

How Godard would have treated it if he had decided to take the assignment is another matter, but the fact rema illS that among the films of the sixties, Bonnie and Clyde stands out as a beautiful, extremely well-made film. In films like The Graduate, the European-type exploration of editing t~chniques, and indeed of the whole medium, becomes a very slick bag of tricks the transitions from one scene to the other are sleights of hand rather than editing

innovations. As a film, The Graduate tends to be rather arcane and coy; its wit is what sells it.

These three films exemplify for me the kind of confusion that prevailed in the minds of the American filmmakers of the sixties. The new film came into its own in the seventies-with Francis Ford Coppola, William Friedkin, Peter Bogdanovitch.

Martin Scorsese. Arthur Spielberg. George Lucas and, more lately, Michael Cimino. One distinguishing feature of these directors is that they are very self-conscious filmmakers-they are very aware of the medium and its history and sociological importance. In their films you feel the presence of their academic study of film. Most, if not all of them, are keenly responsive to their social environment. In their best products they bring together the two concerns-film as a medium with a history and tradition, and social reality with its problems-very successfully, almost indivisibly, as in Bogdanovitch's The Last Picture!

Show. Film history becomes a metaphor for social history again and again in many of the films made by this generation.

An interesting fact is that many of these filmmakers were discovered by Roger Corman, who made little more than cheap thrillers, horror movies-cheap not only financially but also in taste. He needed cheap labor and hired these trained youngsters.

Coppola describes at great length how, to get a job with Corman, or to retain it, he would sleep at night on his desk in Corman's office,so as to impress the boss. None of the newcomers made any money out of Corman but many of their concerns developed out of the association. Three of them-Coppola, Bogdanovitch and Scorsese-made their first film when they were working for Corman. Coppola in fact made his first film Dementia II when they were working on a film location. Corman wanted to save money and Coppola suggested that since the unit was out there anyway, instead of making one film why not make two. Coppola shot the whole film in three and a half days, and Dementia II was released as a full-length feature film. We in India find such experiences touching because sometimes they are reminiscent of the conditions under which our own "new" Indian films are made.

Bogdanovitch and Coppola both represent, rather typically, the problems this generation of film directors faced.

What is so new about these new directors? The first problem they had to face was something I have briefly touched upon: What do you do with your inherited Hollywood film history and with the influences you have imbibed from Europe-how do you reconcile the two? H ow do you react to the fact that the film medium is no longer a local product which can be exported like Coca-Cola, as Hollywood used to do. The earlier generation of Frankenheimer and Lumet was not able to reconcile the two pressures upon them. It's not as though Hollywood of old was unaware of talent in Europe; it simply imported Renoir or Stroheim and made them work within the system.

The new generation of filmmakers in America no longer had a system to work within; they were impressed by what they saw in Europe. and had to decide what to do with it. An interesting aspect of this concern with Europe you see in Woody Allen's Interiors. It's beautifully made, but to someone who has seen Ingmar Bergman, and Bergman parodying Bergman as Bergman often tends to do, to see Woody Allen parodying Bergman parodying Bergman becomes almost comical. He was obviously trying to get Bergman out of his system; there is more Bergman, in a more creative way, in his next film. Manhattan. The influence isclear. but it is America. It never becomes a parody.

The sec0I!d problem is very relevant to what Indian filmmakers have to face all the time. Given the fact that there is so much money, such a big market, do you stand outside it or do you become a part of it-and if you become a part of it, how do

you survive in it as an artist? The European tradition is clear; a Bergman or a Federico Fellini, no matter how successful they are, remain outsiders; they never became part of a commercial setup. The tradition in Hollywood is not of film d'art but of the nickelodeon; the very word "movies" suggests that film has been a popular medium first, whatever it may be thereafter.

The third point is this: Given that t'here is no longer the kind of financial structure Hollywood had that enabled it to go on making films for nearly 30 years, how do you continue to make films by yourself that will show the way to the next generations?

It is in the context of these three questions which the new generation of filmmakers faced that I want to discuss, briefly, the work of Bogdanovitch and Coppola. Bogdanovitch began as a critic. Most of the new directors in the seventies were either critics or came from film schools-unlike the earlier generation, which came from television. Bogdanovitch had written monographs on Welles and Ford for New York's Museum of Modem Art. He brought to filmmaking a critic's awareness of film history. In his early. and best films, he combines his academic knowledge with his creative talent. The first film he made for Roger Corman was called Targets. It is about an aging horror movie star-actually played by Boris Karloff, horror movie star of the thirties-who is killed in the film by a homicidal maniac, thus transferring fantasy, as it were, into reality.

Bogdanovitch is talking about American society, the eruptions that are taking place in it; at the same time, he is talking of film history, using it to illuminate social reality.

A better example is The Last Picture Show, in which the last picture show taking place in a small town in Texas in the early fifties becomes the metaphor for social change. The photography is black and white, deliberately grainy to invoke the period. As in Orson Welles' The Magnificent Ambersons, in which the coming of the automobile signifies the end of an era, here it is signified by the coming of television. The film is full of nostalgia for the period when Bogdanovitch was himself young.

There are thus these crosscurrents of social reality and film tradition and reference to American history, both in terms of film and society. At the same time, the film is distinctively European.

Bogdanovitch's early career was in itself very European in character; he was one of the few film critics in the United States to break into filmmaking. The entire feel of The Last Picture Show is very much Renoir, particularly Renoir of Rules of the Game, where he deals with a lot of people. Each character is made interesting, and the film is essentially about the interrelationship between different people. It does have a sort offocal character, but the film looks at the entire society, about a dozen characters interacting in terms of a central episode, or rather a central way of life. In the sound track of the film absolutely no background music is used at all; there are only sound effects and pop songs of the late forties and early fifties. It gives one also a feeling of the influence of Bergman, who introduced the use of the silent sound track, sometimes even without sound effects.

The Last Picture Show seems to me a beautiful example of the creative balance Bogdanovitch struck between the European influence and American film tradition.

Coppola came from the London film school, started writing for Roger Corman, wrote the script of Patton, was later asked to write The Great Gatsby; he learnt to make his peace with big money when his break came with Godfather, financed by Paramount. The fact that Coppola was of Italian descent may have had something to do with Paramount's decision. When Godfather was announced, the United Italian-American League protested that it would put all Italians under a cloud-people would think that every Italian is a criminal. This is why the word Mafia or the

Above: Ellen Burstyn (right) and Diana Ladd in Martin Scorsese's Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore. Left: Richard Dreyfuss (left) and Bo Hopkins in George Lucas' American Graffiti, produced by Francis Ford Coppo{a~

Lucas, Coppola, Scorsese and others have set up a kind of cooperative where they swap scripts, ideas, money.

phrase Co sa Nostra is never used in the film. The Italian association was played down, and Coppola insisted on Brando for the main role. What is interesting is that having got the money, Coppola \ was then thrown out of the film almost every week because he refused to do it in the established tradition of the Hollywood gangster movies, which are cut very fast and have things happening all the time. Godfather is cut slow and built up very carefully, gradually, as if the basic concept of the gangster film was not acceptable to its director. This comes through in the film; it is a strange mix of conservatism-it glorifies the family, order, law-and violence; it shows how society is exploited. It is not really about gangsterism at all but about a family-relationships, loyalties. While it wallows in violence, the film seems to be continually speaking of the need to escape into some kind of order at any cost. Asked by the ItalianAmerican League, Coppola said that it was not about the Cosa Nos.tra or the Mafia but about a family-like the Kennedy or Rockefeller family-where the family uses its power but demands total allegiance within its own ranks.

When he was asked to do Godfather II, Coppola carried on with the same idea-it is again about a family and about powerhow it corrupts or doesn't. Godfather II is related to Godfather I in the way that Ivan the Terrible II is related to its part I. In the first part you see the energetic young man taking over';' in the second, he is getting old, irascible, lonely, and lost. .

The first 80 percent of Coppola's latest film, Apocalypse Now, contains some of the greatest filmmaking I have ever seen.

It is a recreation of the Vietnam war; cinematically it is just extraordinary. It is based on Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness in which Marlowe goes up a stream in the African jungle looking

for Kurtz, a man who is supposed to be lost in it. Here a Vietnamese patrol is sent up in a trawler to find the Kurtz of Apocalypse Now, played by Marlon Brando. The film works beautifully until Brando comes on the screen. Then it collapses. But it is a truly extraordinary exploration, and the metaphor of the jungle is used to show the war and what happens in war.

So all these filmmakers faced the problem of how to adjust their training to the terms of big money, and Coppola certainly knew what to do with it. But not everybody succeeded equally.

One casualty, for instance, was William Friedkin, who did French Connection and then The Exorcist, and was hailed as a great filmmaker. But to me both these films seem totally mindless.

They do have a mechanical kind of impressiveness; French Connection is edited with the great mechanical consistency of the television film. It's as though two and a half hours could not contain all the material, so you went on chopping away to make it all fit in-it does not seem to have any other pattern to me.

Certainly The Exorcist had an impact and frightened one with its effects; but at the end it left no feeling either of evil or of danger.

Its impact is solely due to its gimmicks. Violent images are thrown on top of each other, with a lot of zooming, to numb the audience into a kind of stupor. Friedkin has been a little too successful with too much money-a danger to which Coppola was also exposed; but he managed to survive artistically.

In terms of resolving the commercial problem and Hollywood tradition, these directors have again and again returned to the genres into which Hollywood's output has so often been classified-the Western, the horror film, the gangster film.

Spielberg's Jaws is a horror film, Sugarland Express is essentially the cha.se, Close Encounters of the Third Kind science fiction.

I think this is where, apart from the Europeans, the influence that has worked on the new American filmmakers is that of Kurosawa, who himself has been influenced by American cinema, particularly that of John Ford. Recently, when Kurosawa was making his Kagemusha-which got the top award at the Cannes Film Festival last year-and ran out of money, it was Lucas and Coppola who persuaded Twentieth Century-Fox to pay $1.5 million for world distribution rights. The two have now offered Fellini money to make a film. In other words, they are resolving the problem of perpetuating good filmmaking in the absence of the Hollywood system, not only for themselves, but for others. Coppola has started a film production company, The American Zoetrope, to finance filmmaking. Lucas' first film THX 1138 was financed by this company, and so was American Graffiti, and later Black Stallion. Scorsese, Lucas, Coppola and others have combined to set up a kind of cooperative, where they not only work together but swap scripts, swap ideas, money, percentages- the lot. This group functionihg has made it possible for them to make their own films, as well as to discover new talent and support old talents such as Kurosawa or Fellini. After Lucas' Star Wars became a big success, the direction of Star Wars II was given to Irvin Kershner-a fantastic gesture for a director who had made what is probably one of the most successful films in Ameri-. can history. This attitude of cooperation is very touching.

Besides, these filmmakers have continually used young people from the American Film Institute to help them. They seem to think that the whole business of good cinema can be kept going only by turning it into a kind of cooperative system.

So the question: What's new in American cinema? can be answered in different ways. Much of what it is goes back to old Hollywood, some of it consciously, some of it due to the demands of the market. Nevertheless there is a certain idealism and vitality about these filmmakers of the seventies which makes them a fine subject to study for us filmmakers in India.

0

TBI POLITICS or ICOIOMIC IITBBOIPBIOIICB In the contemporary world, developed and developing countries alike are linked in a chain of mutual need. At a recent seminar held at the American Studies Research Center in Hyderabad, economists and political scientists from Bangladesh, India, Kuwait, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Sudan, and the United States met to discuss common problems and attempts at their solution.

A postmortem of the discussions by four participants follows: Let us try to illustrate some of the political problems arising from dependence / interdependence that developing countries have been facing.

-PAUL

WALLACE

The economic welfare of the developing countries in the final analysis depends on the social stability of the oil-producing countries.

-RANABlR ROY CHOWDHUR Y

Instead of economic dependence or interdependence, I prefer a moderate, less emotional, more neutral word-linkage.

-FAISAL

s. AL-SALEM

I've deliberately called my country (Sri Lanka) a micronation; we think of ourselvesasdependent, rather than interdependent.

-TILAK

RATNAKARA

PAUL WALLACE (professor of political science, University of Missouri, moderator): At the Hydera bad conference we four have just come back from, there seemed to be a general consensus that all of the countries represented-from both the developing and the developed world-faced difficult political problems because of their economic interdependence -or dependence.

Let me ask each of you in turn what the major economic and political considerations are in your country-and how they clash.

RANABIR ROY CHOWDHURY (development economist for The Statesman, New Delhi) : I suppose there are three main areas of economic consideration. First is the World Bank and Internatiomil Monetary Fund nexus and its relations vis-a-vis the poor countries. Second is the question of aid from both multilateral and bilateral agencies, and how that aid is to be utilized.

Third is the general North-South trade pattern -technology transfer, capital formation, and the like. The seventies was the "rhetoric period" for the World Bank. as contrasted with the "economist's period" of the sixties.

PW: Rhetoric of what kind?

RRC: It was a rhetoric that depended more on political will than on objective economic considerations. I differ with Dr. Gary C. Hufbauer's presentation at the Hyderabad conference. Hufbauer [formerly with the U.S. Treasury Department] argued that the World Bank's approach in the seventies was an economist's approach, based on primarily economic considerations of how much aid a country could assimilate in specific fields, the size of the loans the Bank could usefully channel to each country. My own view is that president Robert McNamara of the World Bank was emphasizing a number of other considerations than the purely economic ones during the seventies.

PW: One of those "other considerations" was that aid should be rechanneled so

that it targeted the bottom 40 percent of the world's poor. Would you comment on that?

RRC: Yes. Take agricultural loans. Much depends on how the country receiving such loans is going to use them, whether it will be able to repay them-interest as well as principal-with a comfortable margin. The focus has to be on the grassroots rural structure-the institutions, the infrastructure. One has to check these out before channeling aid to a particular country. The World Bank people must have realized that it isn't . economically viable to give aid to a . country that doesn't have the necessary grassroots rural structure-but they decided to do so nevertheless because of the social and political aspects of the situation.

PW: The political scientists at the Hyderabad conference emphasized this very point-that it was the rural elites in a country, those who owned the bulk of the land, who were the major recipients of the aid, and very little was trickling down to the bottom 40 percent of the rural population.

RRC: Yes. PW: Let us now try to illustrate some of the particular problems arising from dependence/interdependence that other developing countries have been facing.

Vice-Chancellor Tilak Ratnakara of Kelania University in Sri Lanka has dwelt on what he describes as "the' problems of micronations."

T1LAK RATNAKARA: Yes, I have deliberately called my country-as well as Nepal and Bangladesh-a micronation; we think of ourselves as dependent, rather than interdependent. It's not a question of our being exploited by one particular country or another; it's simply that because we're small we cannot enter the mainstream of world trade and world aid. On our own we cannot develop.

Our experience has been that for about 30-40 years we were faced with tremendous foreign exchange shortages; we tried to be self-reliant, inward-looking-

and that policy failed. About 20-30 percent of our population became unemployed. At that time political rhetoric was superseding actuality. I remember McNamara hailing Sri Lanka as a wonderful model of growth because we had a growth rate of only about 3 percent Gross National Product, but we had an umbrella of social services. "We don't measure economic development by the rate of economic growth," he said. "Look at Sri Lanka: it has only about 4 percent or less growth, but it has high levels of literacy, the quality of life is very good, and so forth." But we had over a million persons unemployed. Eventually, we were shocked into the realization that we were a micronation and could not solve our problems alone. We were more dependent than big nations were- they could afford to be a little ~ore self-reliant.

The oil crisis loomed large in our discussions at Hyderabad. because everything has depended -and will continue to depend in the eighties-on what is going to happen in the oil sphere. Not that I am blaming the oil countriesit's a scarce resource.

PW: Vice-Chancellor Ratnakara has emphasized the fact that Sri Lanka has gone through two stages: first, a policy of trying to lessen its dependence on other countries, which didn't work; second, a recognition of Sri Lanka's dependence or interdependence, which has led to a rethinking of economic policy.

There is a third type of nation, represented at the Hyderabad seminar by Dr. Faisal S. AI-Salem, who is chairman of the department of political science at Kuwait University. Kuwait, one might imagine, is in a different, happier position than all the other countries. If any country would seem to be indepen-_ dent, it would be Kuwait, with its small population and enormous oil reserves.

But Dr. AI-Salem will enlighten us as to the kind of dependencies that exist even in Kuwait.

FAISAL AL-SALEM: First of all, I think that Kuwait is glamorized too much.

Let me deglamorize it. .Second, a question of definitions: Instead of economic dependence or interdependence, I prefer a moderate, less emotional, more neutral word -linkage.

In terms of the Gulf region, the linkage is obvious, between the Western world and the Gulf. The United States may not be so dependent on ·the Gulf area, since it imports only about 16 percent of its oil from that area. But the U.S. allies, particularly Japan, which imports about

90 percent of its oil from the Gulf. are very closely linked with us; Europe_ too .... The Gulf exports about 40 percent of the world's oil, and has 60 percent of the world's known reserves.

So in essence we're dealing with a unique area. While this area is very rich in monetary value and paper money and other such assets, in socioeconomic and political structure it is very poor. This is where we need to distinguish OPEC power from Western power. The future of humanity will be determined by technology, by creative social-economic-political systems, not by paper currency holdings, or even by oil, for that matter.

PW: At Hyderabad you emphasized the social dimension-the relations between the indigenous people of Kuwait and the ever-increasing number of foreign workers who are coming into Kuwait.

•••

The future of humanity will be determined by . technology, by creative sodal-econom ic -po litical systems, not by paper ~urrency holdings, or even 'by oil, for that matter.

FAS: There is the problem of expatriate labor and the fact that the whole Gulf region really is highly dependent on expatriate labor in very important sectorseven' in vital sectors such as security and oil. This internal problem is all the more important because the internal structure isvery weak. In such a situation, anything can happen. The present crisis between Iraq and Iran is a perfect example-most of the problem between the two countries is really an internal one. It has to do with religion, with politics, with historical animosities, with sociocultural beha vioL. .. This internal problem has had international effects; it has stopped the flow of oil from these two countries and may well have unbelievable repercussions on the oil market. So I believe that in the Gulf area, internal social-political-cultural factors are more important than external economic ones-though both, of course, are important.

PW: Obviously, the Iraq-Iran crisis illuminates the fact that we don't at this

time have any group of institutions that can deal with this kind of problem, one that affects every country in the world.

RRC: Under the present circumstances, the dependence of India on Iraqi and Iranian oil is too great for complacency.

A lot of other developing countries face the same problem. This only goes to show that OPEC-the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries-is still in a very strong position insofar as its raw material supplies are concerned. But Faisal's point is that the strength of the oil-exporting Gulf countries depends to a greater extent than is commonly realized on their social stability. So the economic welfare of the developing countries-putting aside the developed ones-in the final analysis depends on the social stability of the oil-producing countries .... The' point is that this dependence-or strong linkage, as Faisal prefers-is due to the fact that the flow of financial resources will continue to be from the Third World to OPEC in return for crude supplies to the Third World. This raises two questions. One is: The revenue that OPEC derives from these transfers-to what extent is it being used or will it be used in the future to strengthen the social aspect? How much of this money is going to go into social engineering?

PW: Within their own countries?

RRC: Yes, within their own countries.

I personally think that apart from the research being done by political scientists and sociologists, not much is being done in these countries along those lineswhich means that the long-term prospect is for instability.

Secondly, part of the revenue from oil exports should go in a reverse flow back to those other non~oil-producing Third World countries, so they can strengthen their economies. _.. Now I would like to turn to my second point, which is how to utilize this aid-not only from OPEC but from the multilateral agencies as well and from the countries' of the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). We have talked a lot about how much guidance or advice should come from the donorsthis refers to the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund as well as the OECD. Well, I feel that the Third World countries have been putting too much of the blame for their inefficient utilization of aid on the donors. We have got to set our own house in order.

But it's not simple, improving the utilization of aid. During the course of

the conference one idea kept cropping up-the rigidity of the social structure in the developing world. To take a concrete example: there's the landed aristocracy. Most of the ruling elite in the developing countries own land or have special connections with those who own land on a very big scale. Now if you say that the land should be redistributed by the government to the landless, that means that the government will have to compensate the landowners, which means a huge chunk of money. One purpose to which foreign aid from any source can be put is for the government to take that money, buy the land and redistribute it among the landless people.

PW: The core of the difficulty is that land is not only economic power, it also is political power. This is very well realized in the countryside. Faisal has a comment on this....

FAS: My respected colleague. Mr. Chowdhury (since you have add ressed me as representing the Gulf states), the problem is not that simple. To take the money and distribute it to everyone is just a dream. You talk about aid for social engineering-we spent three semesters in the university where I studied in the United States mulling over that one and were unable to define it-social engineering for whom? for what? how do you go about it? It's a very vague term~ I agree with you that not enough is being done. Our decisionmakers in the Gulf countries are complaining that the capital is not being sufficiently absorbed; there's not enough intelligentsia. marketing, productivity, consumption; it's much easier to import products, and, except for petrochemicals, most of our light industries are los}ng propositions, subsidized by the government to create an image of nationhood.

Now, as far as giving more aid to developing countries-which I'm all for: When we say to the developing countries: "Let's sit down and decide on what basis aid is to be given, for what programs, how is it going to be channeled. what are the timetables" -when it comes to the nuts and bolts, most of the developing countries refuse such aid, because they want to make the decisions. Then again, when aid is given, very little filters down for one reason or anotherI'm not accusing anyone in particular.

But I know from our own experience with the poorer Arab countries that social engineering and aid are not really that easy-there's a lot of hostility and politics involved. It's a complicated relationship.

PW: Exactly like the relationship between the developing countries and the World Bank.

FAS: Yes, the same human behavior.

PW: Much of the argument at the Hyderabad seminar concerned the important question of how the development process can make positive use of the aid program, with all its linkages. ViceChancellor Ratnakarl\ told us about some of the measures that Sri Lanka has recently taken, not to lessen dependence (since that is inevitable for a micronation), but how to make th.elinkages more amenable, more positive for the purposes of Sri Lankan planning and development.

TR: Yes. We in Sri Lanka decided that we had to diversify our dependence, so to speak, so that we would not be so completely dependent on one, two, or three products-and so that we could be

Third World countries ha ve been putting too much of the blame for their inefficient utilization of aid on the donors.

We have got to set our own house in order.

really more self-reliant. We discovered that since, like other developing countries, we had been getting soft loans, we had thought we didn't need to make our people save, or our corporations, or our nationalized ventures. We thought we could go on a spending spree and get all the capital for investment we needed from the donor countries. The present Sri Lankan Government took a look at the situation and said, "Look, this won't do. We are getting soft loans but we have to generate our own capital.

Besides, we are pumping a lot of money into the country which can only lead to inflation; we have to combat inflation and trail\ people to save and to invest."

So one prong of the attack was to raise the interest rates to very high levels-from about 6 percent to between 22 and 30 percent. The other prong was to flush out the money that people had been h(i)arding-that's a common practice in South Asia, you know-not to declare money but to hoard it. So

we issued bearer bonds. No questions asked as to where the maney comes from: You just buy the bearer bonds, and you can get a high rate of interest on it. We did it to bring more money into the kitty for internal investment, and also to get our people into the habit of saving and investing.

Another way to enlarge people's horizons, we thought, was to change their living conditions. When a large number of people are living in squalor they will feel there is no hope of their moving ahead. The thing to do was to give them better living quarters so they could plan for a better future. This is something more positive than quality of life rhetoric.

Then we had a lot of school dropouts at the sixth or seventh grade, middle graders who were unemployable except as unskilled building workers. So we had to have a construction program. That tied in with the fact that we agreed with the World Bank that we should develop our natural resources through a longrange, multiphase river dam projectthe Accelerated Mahaveli Development Program. So we identified six main projects that could be accomplished a year at a time in six stages. We could wipe out the backlog of unemployment, and begin with a clean slate. Now the design stage is over, we have three years to go, and hope to finish the dam in three years.

Our third plan was to get in new technology and investment from abroadfrom commercial, not aid, sources. So we allocated a free trade zone, an area of 300 square kilometers out of 40,000 square kilometers, for a free trade processing zone.

We could do this because under the Generalized Preference Plan, we had a tremendous quota from the United States and the European Economic Community countries. But we couldn't meet the quota because we didn't have the expertise or the raw materials or the machinery. But we do have people, talented people, whom we can train in siX or seven or eleven weeks to perform the process of manufacturing. The free trade zone gives us access to the raw material and the machinery, through private enterprise from abroad.

Of course, there are critics in my country who say, "You're selling out the country to the foreigners." That objection is natural. But personally, coming as I do from an island, if I may paraphrase John Donne, who said, "No man is an island unto himself' -no island, and no country, is an island unto itself.

0

The Tale Be For 150 years, the poem has amused and thrilled children-and parents, too-aU -

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d over the world.

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It's one of the best-known poems ever written by an American, and last year was the 150th anniversary of its publication, yet how many Americans can come up with the name of the author of "Mary's Lamb"? Not that Sarah Josepha Hale is a forgotten woman-far from it. She is well known as one of the most formidable and influential Americans of the 19th century. Editor for four decades of Godey's Lady's Book, the most widely circulated magazine of its time, she sternly guided generations of American wives and mothers in matters of taste and morals, told them what to wear and how to cook, fought successfully to get them equal educational and property rights and, along the way, promoted Thanksgiving Day into a national holiday. But Sarah Hale is hardly known at all as the author of the unforgettable-and surprisingly controversial-poem which begins, "Mary had a little lamb."

"Mary's Lamb" was published in Boston in 1830 in a small volume called Poems for Our Children. The following year, it was set to music and reprinted in the Juvenile Lyre, the first song book written for American schoolchildren. But it wasn't until the poem appeared as Lesson XLVII in the 1857 edition of William H. McGuffey's famous Reader that it became indelibly inscribed in the minds of American children-and their parents. It soon became a staple of nursery and classroom recitations, and the classic expression of childhood innocence.

Then, half a century after its first appearance, "Mary's Lamb;' became the cause of an improbable dispute, begun by an old woman in Boston who declared that it was she, her lamb and her school that the poem memorialized, and that a young acquaintance of hers, not Mrs. Hale, was the author. The flurry of controversy that rose soon faded and might have died forever had not one of the world's foremost industrialists intervened to become the woman's champion and perpetuate her claim in bronze. Today, the fuss over the irrepressible jingle still bemuses historians and agitates Sarah Hale's descendants. ~~~~ When Mrs. Hale first published her little poem, she was a 42-year-old widow trying to support five children by editing a Boston monthly named Ladies' Magazine. To her task, she brought an unfailing will and, for a woman of her time, an unusual education, provided by her devoted brother, Horatio Buell. While a student at Dartmouth College, Horatio would come home to Newport, New Hampshire, sit down with his sister and go over all his courses, from grammar and mathematics to Greek and moral philosophy. When he graduated, so, in effect, did she.

Sarah's husband, a lawyer named David Hale, had been as helpful as Horatio. Encouraging his wife to write, Hale not only suggested improvements in her poems and

essays, but also submitted them to magazines, many of which published them under the pseudonym "Cornelia."

When her husband died just two weeks before the birth of her fifth child, Sarah Hale turned to writing to make a living. Her 1827 novel Northwood, which contained prescient observations on the intractable differences between the Northern and Southern states', was highly praised

by Ralph Waldo Emerson and other critics and went into several editions. Its success brought Mrs. Hale the invitation to become editor of Ladies' Magazine.

"I had qualms," she said, "abbut entering a profession restricted almost entirely to men." Nevertheless, she tackled her task with vigor, personally writing virtually all of the first issue-poems, essays, reviews, translations of French essays, even a letter to the editor, signed S**** H***, in which she advised the magazine to eschew "Fourth of July prose." ~~~~ Busy as she was with her job and children, Mrs. Hale found time to do a favor for a Boston composer named Lowell Mason, who had asked her to write some simple poems which he could set to music. (Lowell Mason is revered by modern American educators as "the father of public-school music education" and respected by musicologists as a composer and compiler of church music.)

In the preface to Poems for Our Children" under the date of May 1,1830, Mrs. Hale addressed "all good children in the United States" and told them: "I wrote this book to please and instruct you ... a few pretty songs and poems which would teach you truths." Several of her verses, such as "Birds" ("If ever I see, on bush or tree ... "), became quite popular. But none matched "Mary's Lamb."

If the readers of this account think they know that full verse, let them recite lines 9 through 24, picking up after "To see a lamb at school." There will be a slight pause for recollection. Here they are: And so the teacher turned him out, But still he lingered near, And waited patiently about, Till Mary did appear: And then he went to her, and laid His head upon her arm, As if he said-fm not afraid, You'll keep mefrom all harm." " What makes the lamb love Mary so ?"

The eager children cry"Oh, Mary loves the lamb, you know" The Teacher did reply:"And you each gentle animal

Marys Little Lam:Q

. But who wrote "Mary's Lamb?" ~u~hors!tipof the classic is still a subject of controversy.

Iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii

In confidence may bind, And make them follow at your call If you are always kind."

It was the truths in the last two stanzas that Mrs. Hale hoped the children would remember. But it was the more frivolous first stanza, of course, which stuck in their minds.

It wasn't long before "Mary's Lamb" became something of a fad. In 1832, it was printed on silk handkerchiefs and sold in Boston bookstores. And Currier and Ives brought out a print of "Mary and Her Lamb," sitting in a flowery bower. In 1834, Mrs. Hale published it in her School Song Book.

By then, Sarah Hale had become the most successful magazine editor, male or female, in the country. Impressed by her work at Ladies' Magazine, a rival publisher named Louis A. Godey set out to get her as editor of his magazine, Lady's Book. After printing several flattering tributes to "the gifted lady editress" and even running a tiresome poem by Sarah Hale's l4-year-old son, he finally just bought Ladies' Magazine and merged it, along with its "editress," into a new publication, Godey's Lady's Book.

As the new editor, Sarah Hale instructed women in proper social behavior, wifely attitudes, family duties, fashionable clothes, personal care and "domestic science," a term she had invented to elevate the more menial aspects of women's work. The magazine was filled with the gushings

â&#x20AC;˘â&#x20AC;˘

so beloved then by many women writers, but from time to time it also ran substantial works by such authors as Edgar Allan Poe, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.

Though she attacked the early feminist movement as "the wrangling of misguided women," Sarah Hale fought unremittingly to get women an education equal to men'sfrom primary school through college. While she admonished her readers to remember that a woman's "meekness was her highest ornament," she also encouraged them to work at trying to repeal laws that deprived them of their property rights. By tactful and persistent pressure, she won many of her battles. After nagging Presidents Millard Fillmore, Franklin Pierce and James Buchanan, she finally coaxed Abraham Lincoln into declaring Thanksgiving Day a national holiday.

Mrs. Hale's instinct for what women wanted, combined with William Godey's business skills, gave their magazine a huge national circulation, which eventually climbed to 150,000, far larger than that of any other American magazine of the day.

Meanwhile, Mrs. Hale managed to find time to publish several anthologies, to write a few five-act plays, to edit some household guides, and to put together a 900-page compilation of women's biographies. She also kept at her poetry.

The Female Poets of America praised one of her poems, "Harry Guy, A Story of the Sea," as "nearly 3,000 lines of most compact versification." A much shorter work. "It Snows" (" 'It snows,' cries the schoolboy, 'Hurrah.' ") was a standard classroom declamation piece. And, of course, there still was "Mary's Lamb," beside which most of the rest of Sarah Hale's output was just a waste of iambics.

In 1858. Mrs. Hale noted that her children's poetry books were all out of print, but she added, "most have been copied into other works." In those days of ineffectual copyright laws, stories and poems were appropriated and reprinted without permission or payment. William H. McGuffey, a notable offender, printed "Mary's Lamb" in the 1844 edition of his First Eclectic Reader, and later reprinted it in the 1848 and 1853 editions. In 1857, he

promoted the poem to the Second Reader. At no time did he sign Sarah Hale's name to the poem. For the most part, McGuffey did not believe in giving authors credit. So the millions of children who read and memorized "Mary's Lamb" grew up thinking it was a Mother Goose rhyme.

As the years went by, Godey's Lady's Book made backhanded acknowledgments of its editor's most famous poem by printing some of the parodies of it sent in endlessly by readers. Finally, Godey grew tired of them. He would run just one more, he said. and this would absolutely be the last: Mary had a liule lamb.

II sufferedji-om Ihe gouI, So Mary gOI disgusTed, And sluffed il up Ihe spout.

By that time, Sarah Hale was almost 80. Her energies, and those of the magazine, were beginning to run down.

But it wasn't until her 90th year that she wrote her farewell editorial and left the post she had held for four decades.

Then, just as she was settling into a well-earned rest, she was challenged over the authorship of "Mary's Lamb."

In 1878, a 72-year-old woman named Mary Sawyer Tyler showed up at Old South Church in Boston with an unusual contribution for a rummage sale that was being held to raise money to save the edifice from demolition.

Her offering was a batch of little cards on which were pasted strands of wool that she said were raveled from stockings which had been knitted with yarn spun from the fleece cut from the lamb that had followed her to school one dayinl813.

When she was a little girl in Sterling, Massachusetts, Mrs. Tyler recounted, she had gone out to her father's barn and found a newborn lamb, all but dead from the cold. She nursed it back to life with catnip tea and the lamb became her pet, following her everywhere. One spring day. her mischievous brother Nat proposed that they take the pet to school with them. Off they went, the loyal lamb behind them. The rest, said Mrs. Tyler, happened just as the poem tells it.

Then came the really interesting part of her story.

A young man named John Roulstone, Jr., was visiting the school that day, Mrs. Tyler said, and the next day he brought her 12 lines of verse he had written about the prank. His 12 lines, she added, matched those in the poem published by Sarah Hale several years later.

Mrs. Tyler, a respectable woman who had spent most of her life helping her husband run a mental home, could not produce Roulstone's poem, which had long since been lost, nor the author, who had died while still a youth.

As for the lamb, she said it been gored by a cow and died with its head in her lap.

It was an affecting story and the newspapers picked it up.

Mrs. Hale was distressed. She dictated a rebuttal. "There would seem to be no doubt," she declared, "that good Mrs. Tyler gives a truthful account of her recollections. She is merely mistaken in regard to the verses." Undeterred by the awesome lady who bent presidents to her will, Mary Tyler went right on distributing her little bits of wool and telling her story to fascinated journalists.

From her deathbed, Sarah Hale dictated a last letter in 1879 affirming her authorship. Nobody questioned Mrs. Hale's integrity. But she did live not too far from Mary Tyler at the time she published "Mary's Lamb."

Possibly, some said, she had heard of the poem and subconsciously repeated it in her version.

Sarah Hale, many think.

More probably.

IVas the true and original said others, Mrs. author o.("Mary's Lamb."

Tyler had forgotten Roulstone's ditty until she read Mrs. Hale's poem and somehow confused the two.

Mary Tyler died in 1889,but her story didn't. That "ame year. Mrs. Hale'sson Horatio. a renowned philologist. wrote a long letter to The Boslon Transcript denying Mrs. Tyler's story. A few years later, Mary Tyler's nephew responded with an affidavit swearing he knew Aunt Mary's story to be true. Then Sarah Hale's grandson wrote an article in Century Magazine setting forth his grandmother's case.

Still later, to support it, he printed a facsimile of the original Poems for Our Children, pointedly referring to "Mary's Lamb" on the title page.

There are, however, some confusions. Sarah herself wrote that the incident in the poem was completely imaginary: "Yet never a pet of mine followed me to school."

Still, some of her children and grandchildren recalled her telling them that she did once have a pet lamb that went to school with her. Mary Tyler's version of the poem referred to the lamb as "it" all the way through. Sarah's version mostly uses "he" and "him." Yet in reprinting the poem in Godey's in 1875, Mrs. Hale used "it." Being an editor, she perhaps could not resist changing copy, even when it was her own.

(Even Mary Tyler had her challengers. Mary Hughes, a 90-year-old Welsh woman of Llangoleelen, revealed that one day her lamb followed her to school, inspiring Mrs. Hale, who happened to be in the neighborhood at the time.

Another American claimant, Mary Dale, said it was she and her lamb whom the poem was talking about. All in all, there seems to have been a whole flock of sheep following a bevy of Marys to school.)

In any case, unprejudiced authorities concluded that Sarah Hale was the true and original author. And that would have been the end to it if someone in 1925 hadn't sent Henry Ford one of those little cards that Mary Tyler had brought to the rummage sale.

At the time, Ford was just undertaking his project to preserve the artifacts of American history (see SPAN, April 1979). Mary Tyler's story entranced him and although he had larger things on his mind-his Model T flivver was in trouble and on the verge of being taken out of production

- he could not resist the chance to rescue so dear a bit of American nostalgia. After all, he himself had learned "Mary's Lamb" from McGuffey's reader. Tracking down Mary's schoolhouse, Henry Ford found it all but falling apart. He bought it and had it moved to Sudbury, Massachusetts, where he had already restored the Wayside Inn of Longfellow's "Tales." He and Mrs. Ford scouted the countryside for old desks, blackboards and bells, and put the 5- by 9-meter building into far better shape than it had ever been before. When it was opened in 1927, it was not just as a historic relic but as a working, one-room school.

To deal with the contentious problem of authorship, Ford came up with an ingenious solution. On a boulder near the schoolhouse door, he put a bronze plaque with the poem as it appeared in McGuffey's reader. On a matching boulder he inscribed a plaque with the names of "John Roulstone, author of the first 12 lines" and of "Sarah Josepha Hale, whose genius completed the poem in its present form." This, said a spokesman, was "equal honor."

But "equal" was no honor to Sarah's adherents. How could anyone doubt the word of a renowned American set against that of an obscure woman who had nothing to back up her story except an aging memory and some old woolen stockings? Lacking other evidence, Henry Ford turned to academia for help. In a long essay in Ford's Dearborn Independent, an anonymous scholar subjected the jingle to the kind of arcane analysis usually reserved for disputes over Shakespeare's sonnets. The burden of his argument was that the poem was written in two different styles, hence by two different authors. The first 12 lines, he noted, are done in simple declarative sentences, sometimes a whole sentence in a single line. "Not an artificial note" in them, he stated. But at line 13 ("And then he went to her and laid") comes a "seam and a radical change.

Nothing so sophisticated as that construction is in all that goes before," said the critique. Moreover, line 17 ("What makes the lamb love Mary so ?") "is out of tune with the unadorned and self-certifying naturalness of line 9" ("And so the teacher turned him out").

After the first 12 lines, the analyst sums up, the poem passes from "the objective to the subjective," from the "natural to the artificial" and-winding up for a knockout - "from lyric simplicity to homiletic sophistication."

The firmest rebuttal to this labored brief was made by Ruth E. Finley in her biography of Sarah Hale. The structure of the poem explains everything, she argued. The first stanza presents a problem: the abnormality of a lamb in a schoolroom. The second stanza develops the action: the lamb being evicted. The final stanza is the logical outgrowth of the problem: the moral. "The time-honored structure," declared Ruth Finley, "is flawless." ~~~~ And there the matter rests, albeit a little uneasily.

Newport, New Hampshire, proclaims itself the birthplace of the one and only author of "Mary's Lamb." Its Richards Free Library has a Sarah Hale room filled with memorabilia, and it sponsors a Sarah Buell Hale Literary Award for New England writers-Archibald MacLeish and Robert About the Author: Joseph Kastner, former senior editor at Life, is currently working on a book about American diarists.

Henry Ford restored what he thought to be the real Mmy's school.

II has become a lourisl allraclion in Sudbury, Massachusells.

Frost have been recipients.

Sudbury remains the heretics' stronghold. Guides at the schoolhouse, which is no longer used as a school, repeat the Tyler-Roulstone version to sightseers. One visitor, on reading the bronzed lines, remarked that she had always recited the second line of the poem as "Its fleas were white as snow." And some visitors from the Soviet Union delighted a guide by reciting the lines in Russiap, the way they had learned them in school.

Some of Sarah Hale's present-day descendants have visited the schoolhouse, and bristled a bit as the guide related what the family calls "the Tyler myth." A greatgrandson, Professor Richard O. Hale, and his wife went there once with their aged and quite deaf Cousin Fanny, who defended her late kinswoman in a voice so loud that it straightened out not only the shaken guide but all of Sudbury on who wrote what.

The arguments, unfortunately, sometimes descend to the personal. "If Sarah had been the heroine of such an incident," sniffed someone in the Ford camp, "the poem would have read, 'Sarah had a little lamb.'" A Hale partisan once admonished Henry Ford with the words of Theodore Roosevelt: "No man can associate with sheep and retain his self-respect."

But the deftest put-down of the great auto maker was accomplished by one of Sarah Hale's granddaughters.

In January 1927, when the schoolhouse was opened, Sarah Hale Hunter wrote a letter to The New York Times.

Her grandmother, she said, had often told her that "there may have been other lambs anxious for an education who braved the New England schoolma'm, but the one in her poem existed only in her imagination." Then the latter-day Sarah offered this simple declarative poem: Sweet Mary long has passed away, The poet, too, is dead.

The children no more laugh and play, Afar they all have fled.

At teacher's cold unfeeling words The lamb no more can quiver, But still the gentle creature serves To advertise a flivver.

SPLINTERED AMERICA: Once the United States was seen, at home and abroad, as a melting pot that fused many different cultures into one. However, the emphasis now is upon pluralism. Various ethnic groups are encouraging newcomers to keep old traditions-and languages, too.

For the rest of the 1980s and perhaps longer, the United States will be grappling with a growing movement among its many ethnic groups to reassert ancestral languages and cultures.

This pluralist drive began in the late 1960s-a time when all kinds of minorities confronted the Establishment with demands for recognition of their civil rights.

Today, as one outcome of that era, big-city schools are spending hundreds of millions of dollars on bilingual instruction for children of new immigrants. Federally required multilingual ballots for minorities in certain states generate controversy and unease over pluralism's effect on a nation already beset by divisive conflicts.

Concern over these innovations runs especially high in South Florida and the U.S. Southwest where hundreds of thousands of Hispanic immigrants have ready access to their ancestral culture across borders an hour's journey away.

That situation, some social and political scientists say, could eventually lead to a separatism akin to that of many French-speaking Canadians in Quebec Province.

"Entering a new phase." Mexican Americans are quick to underline Mexico's former sovereignty over large parts of the Southwest. "I heard one Federal official of Mexican origin say: 'We didn't migrate; the border migrated,''' says Harvard sociologist Nathan Glazer. "That line has interesting potential.

In a way it gives them a vested moral interest in recovering 'lost territory' taken by the Americans in the 1800s.

"Of course. Mexico makes no claim for that territory.

Mexican Americans are happy to be in the United States. But we are entering a new phase-from the demand of some minorities for tolerance, to their demand for public responsibility in helping them continue their language and culture."

To many Americans, such developments seem to be putting a reverse twist on the historic U.S. motto e pluribus unum-"out of many, one" -while relegating to the junk heap of mythology the melting pot that for centuries supposedly enabled incoming streams of immigrants to become part of a basically AngloSaxon culture and language.

At this time, there is an abundance of critics who point out that in the old catch-as-catch-can process of rapid Americanization, many immigrants wound up in a no man's land-lacking both full acceptance from native Americans and the comforts of their abandoned culture and beliefs.

Preferable to that situation, they say, is a pluralism that sees America as a mosaic of cooperating cultures, differing

in lifestyles and languages within the broad confines of U.S. democracy and nationhood.

Doubts about this view are as easy to find as criticism of the melting pot. Traditionalists point out that for all its faults, the melting pot created a society where immigrants from many lands can, more than anywhere else, live together peacefully and maintain their own culture among themselves-as in New York City, which, by one count, contains at least 92 ethnic groups in its population.

Moving into the mainstream. Over recent years, however, pluralism has been gaining much ground in America's fragmented society.

Reaffirmation of ancestral cultures is getting some response from second- and third-generation offspring of European immi.grants. Most are far removed from the hardships incurred by their forebears and have moved into the American mainstream, but many still feel the pain of slurs and discrimination--ranging from anti-Polish jokes to exclusion from private clubs.

In New York City, for instance, Howard Molisani, secretary-treasurer of the state AFL-CIO (American Federation of Labor and Congress ofIndustrial Organizations), tells of an ItaloAmerican colleague who moved to a middle-class community on Long Island where his son, in his first day of school, was asked by the teacher: "Do you know anyone in the Mafia ?"

Such slurs, ethnic authorities say, feed the impulse of many so-called hyphenated Americans to catch up economically and politically with other Americans, while also looking for often neglected cultural roots.

"Each divergent group feels more intensely about its own divergences than ever before," says Alexander Schindler, president of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations.

"The Negro has become the black, and looks to Africa for his cultural roots. Jews wear the signs of their Jewishness with much more self-assurance and are much less homogenized into the American society now than in the 1930s."

It is among Hispanics where the issue of rights and cultural identity is coming into sharpest focus.

Estimates of their number range as high as 17 million on mainland United States. This number includes 6 to 8 million undocumented aliens.

Economically, Cubans who came to Miami and South Florida almost two decades ago are rising the fastest. Many, middle and upper middle class in origin, have moved ahead fast in merchandising and banking-putting Spanish on a n<:;ar-equal basis with English in Miami.

More involvement in public life. Politically, however, it is the Puerto Ricans-especially in New York City-and Mexicans in Texas and the Southwest who are pushing 1110stactively for bigger voting turnouts, more representation in government and union leadership and more bilingualism in the public schools.

The latter demand IS adding more fuel to controversies that already envelop America's beleaguered public schools in big cities, among them New York City, where 80 percent of Hispanic youngsters are dropouts, while the city is spending $ 30 million a year on bilingual education.

PROMISE OR PERIL?

Donning costumes of their ancestral land, a practice followed by most ethnic groups on festive occasions, Polish-American children greet Pope John Paul II in Washington, D.C., during his 1979 visit to the United States.

"Bilingual education, in its most admired model, consists of teaching subject matter in Spanish with a section or two given each day to learning English," says sociologist Glazer. "This process, I believe, can go on as long as three years, so clearly it is not an efficient way of teaching English."

Some Spanish-speaking Americans make no secret of their hopes that pluralism will provide a cooperative bloc tied to language. "Within the next generation or two, those of Spanish descent will begin to call themselves hispanos more than Puerto Ricans or Cubans," says a Puerto Rican activist in New York.

Others, more expansively, foresee a political coalition of all major minorities-though many admit that the very nature

of pluralism discourages long-term alliances.

What bothers some onlookers meantime about pluralism's workings is their effect on today's "muddled politics."

As stated by Samuel H. Beer, Harvard political scientist: "In the New Deal period, in the 1930s, the stress was mostly on the economic interests. In the 1960s, there was a shift to ethnic interests, which cut across the economic interests. As a result, lining up a coherent national coalition becomes much more difficult than it ever has been."

A more hopeful view of pluralism's prospects for peaceful growth comes from Irving M. Levine, director of the American Jewish Committee's Institute on Pluralism and Group Identity: "America needs a pluralism that accepts cultural and lifestyle differences. With the participation of informal support systemsself-help associations, religious groups and extended family networks-it can both sustain ethnic consciousness and develop a sense of American identity among our ethnic minorities."

HISPANICS, NEW YORK CITY "Most definitely I will stay Spanish," Rita Bayron says emphatically. "I don't have to wear any badge that says I'm Puerto Rican. I feel it. It's in my soul."

The comments by the 27-year-old executive director of the East Harlem college and career-counseling program point to a common spirit felt by many of the three million Hispanics living in the New York metropolitan area.

Born and raised in East Harlem, Bayron moved five years ago to Parkchester, a Bronx neighborhood popular among black and Hispanic professionals.

Now she plans a career move to private industry that could take her further away from the Hispanic community. Yet the ties will continue. "I see myself as forever committed to my people and this community and to the philosophy of this organization," says Bayron.

Indeed, unlike earlier generations of ethnics who emulated American ways in order to make it, many Hispanics share Bayron's belief that one can achieve economic security without giving up ethnic traditions.

"We have a different psychology." Pride in Hispanic ways endures, says attorney Herman Badillo, because Hispanics have influenced America since long before the Pilgrims landed in Massachusetts in 1620. Spanish explorers arrived in Florida and the Southwest in the 1500s, and Spanish traditions still are evident in the Southwest.

"We do not consider ourselves immigrants," says Badillo, formerly a congressman and deputy mayor of New York City.

"We feel we were here first, so we have a different psychology."

Troubling many Hispanics, and contributing to their maintenance of a separate culture, is continuing discrimination. Often poor, ill-educated and speaking Spanish, many Hispanics cling to ethnic pride as their only solace in a hostile land. Even for those who achieve economic mobility, the sense of neighborhood remains strong.

POLISH AMERICANS, CHICAGO "I'm Polish and proud of if' is not just a slogan in Chicago; ifs a way of life.

Young Polish Americans are changing Americanized surnames back to the original. "Evening English classes" that helped earlier immigrants learn a new tongue have been replaced with "Saturday Polish classes" to teach the young.

Growing numbers of the metropolitan area's 800,000 citizens of Polish extraction are visiting their forebears' native land. A million-dollar theater-renovation project is under way in Chicago to house the Copernicus Cultural and Civic Center-a showplace of Polish traditions, art and music.

"Being proud of your ethnic background makes you a better American, because you have that much more to contribute to America," says Aloysius A. Mazewski, president of the PolishAmerican Alliance.

"Diversity makes American life more interesting. " Indeed, in a nation where other immigrants eagerly shed national ties to embrace American ways, Chicago's Po!ish community is conscientiously retaining national traditions. Today it is by choice; but for years it was a necessity.

Immigrants banded together in the face of the anti-Polish sentiment that took the form of anti-Polish jokes, discrimination and suspicions about Poles' close-knit ways. Polish neighborhoods provided havens and helped gain political power.

Bettering the situation. "Their desire to maintain their community flowed from two things," says Josef Barton, an American ethnic historian at Northwestern University. "One was a love of the old culture. The other was a recognition that a shared culture and maintenance of it was a first step toward collective action to better the situation of working-class Poles."

It was Polish immigrants working in the steel mills and stockyards, for example, who formed unions to better their plight in "the city with broad shoulders," in the words of poet Carl Sandburg.

The United States is home to over 100 different ethnic groups, drawn from all over the world. Most of them have their own cultural, educational and religious organizations.

They own newspapers, sponsor radio and television programs, and hold etlmicfestivals all over the country.

These photographs give a glimpse (!t'their rich and varied life.

The legacy of those years of Polish immigrants standing together still is felt in Chicago. Polish customs are actively preserved in churches and fraternal organizations, bowling leagues and bars, Polish picnics and celebrations.

Highways and parks honor Polish heroes. Two congressmen and nine members of the City Council are Polish Americans.

Even with major English-language newspapers closing down around the country, the Polish Daily Zgoda survives, a halfdozen radio stations and a UHF television station provide Polish-language programming, several bookstores offer Polishlanguage books and a couple of record stores specialize in polkas and Polish music.

Patriotic and established, some Polish Ame~icans now are seeking more elusive goals. including better' representation in government and on corporate boards in the auto and steel industries where Polish Americans make up much of the work force. Some even favor preferential treatment akin to that enjoyed by racial minorities.

But as in the past. most Polish Americans appear likely to continue making economic and political gains not a:s a group but as individuals-buoyed by the same pride in being Polish that strengthened earlier generations.

BLACKS,

HOUSTON

A separate black culture ~born of poverty rather than choice-is surviving within sight of the glistening downtown monuments to corporate wealth in Texas.

Numerous customs. including matriarchal families and the birth of illegitimate children without stigma, have emerged in Houston's slums in response to broken homes, an unchanged welfare system and economic despair.

The education system that might otherwise offer a way out for many blacks is considered second-rate by many activists. The best black teachers were moved out of the black neighborhoods and into predominantly white schools to achieve racial balance.

Disciplinary problems abound, crime is rampant and medical care often inferior. "They've developed a culture of poverty," says Roger Nett, professor of sociology at the University of Houston. "I don't know what to make of it, but it's real."

The goal of most. The separate cultural traditions of poverty, however, exist largely by default in the black community. Most blacks are striving to make it in America, willingly forgoing. the customs of the ghetto in exchange for economic security.

"Blacks want to do well," says Andrew Jefferson, a former judge and now a prominent attorney. "They want to participate in the mainstream."

Once blacks achieve economic security, many then seek to preserve distinctive black traditions and symbols of being black that may have been overlooked in the quest for economic wellbeing.

Middle-class blacks, notes Naomi W. Lede, professor of urban studies and director of the Urban Resources Center at Texas Southern University, "want their own symbols, their own bands and want black teachers. They are not interested in integration any more. " Yet in Houston. as elsewhere. differences exist within the black community onjust how much of a separate existence blacks should pursue. "There are a great deal of individualized views

~'Wetalk now of salad bowls, not melting pots, with each minority adding to the beauty of the American mosaic."

within the black community," notes Lawrence D. Spencer. executive director of the Houston Council on Human Relations.

"There are those who want a mixed community and others who want all-black schools. There are strong feelings on both sides of tha tissue. " As with other ethnic groups, vestiges of the past are preserved but balanced against the goal of fulfilling the American dream.

One prosperous Houston attorney has chosen to continue living in his black neighborhood, for example. Yet he notes that his sons dream of success in mainstream America.

"The melting-pot concept is still valid." he says. "We know the world is bigger than our neighborhoods. "

Blending African and Spanish cultures, a Puerto Ric.an youth wears a grotesque mask during the Feast of Santiago Apostolo held in New York.

CHINESE AMERICANS, SAN FRANCISCO While Chinese Americans are still clinging to distinctive ethnic traditions, many are shedding those customs that stand in the way of making it in America.

"Our roots are here and we are here for good, part of the American team," says Dr. Rolland Lowe, a medical doctor serving as chairman of the Chinese Cultural Foundation. "Our dream is to be accepted 100 percent as Americans."

Often it is only the highly visible ethnic customs that survive.

Children attend special language classes. Chinese New Year is enthusiastically celebrated. Weddings often retain feudal rites not even used in China.

Preservation of such customs helps many Chinese Americans overcome the inevitable anxieties of being a minority in a nation where national values parallel Anglo-Saxon traditions. "We feel more comfortable in each other's company," notes Henry Der, executive director of Chinese for Affirmative Action. "You can never erase the discrimination you've faced."

Chinatown: "More like a social center." At the same time, many Chinese Americans no longer are bound by old customs or limitations. Confident, economically powerful and politically astute, residents are breaking out of a neighborhood that served for 150 -years as a refuge from discrimination and rejection.

Only about half of San Francisco's 75,000 Chinese Americans now live in Chinatown. Many are buying property elsewhere, in the city's Richmond and Sunset districts. "Chinatown." says Jack Chen, author of a forthcoming study of The Chinese in America, "is becoming more like a social center than a ghetto."

The number of Chinese Americans registered to vote more than doubled in the 1970s. No Chinese American held public office a decade ago. Now, seven, including two judges. hold government positions.

Behind the transformation is an end to the real and imagined barriers to education, jobs and better housing. Today's role models for the young are just as likely to be architects, nuclear physicists and computer engineers as restaurateurs.

Adopting the values of the middle class, they are attracted by American individualism rather than the community-oriented traditions of their forefathers. They often prefer hamburgers to Chinese food and speak Chinese as a second language.

The differences underlie a generation gap that is an asset as well as a liability for the Chinese-American community.

Born and raised in the United States, the young are refusing to accept the conditions deemed acceptable by earlier generations: "Y oung Chinese Americans think they are completely equal," says historian Him Mark Lai. "When they find out they are not, they often become militant."

That pride and strength are proving contagious throughout the Chinese community. "Ours is a unique culture," says Superior Court Judge Harry Low. "We want to preserve and share it. We talk now of salad bowls, not melting pots, with each minority adding to the beauty of the American mosaic."

-K.M. Chrysler

Toward a Bipartisan

Foreign Policy In his first press conference after his victory, President Ronald Reagan renewed his resolve to "rebuilda bipartisan base for American foreign policy." He also answered questions on the Middle East, the Soviet Union and the strategic arms limitation treaty, Poland, and human rights.

Ronald Reagan: Before we begin taking questions, I know that you're interested in the transition and what its status is. We've already begun to work putting together an administration, and we will begin immediately on the job of translating campaign promises into reality.

I'm turning to William Casey to head up the transition effort as chairman of the Transition Executive Committee. Bill will also serve as chairman of the interim Foreign Policy Advisory Board.

I have asked Anne Armstrong, former ambassador to Great Britain,¡ to serve as vice-chairman of the Transition Executive Committee, and I am pleased that Senator Paul Laxalt has agreed to organize and chair a Congressional Advisory Com.mittee to work with us throughout the entire transition process.

The director of the transition team is Edward Meese. Senior advisers will be Caspar Weinberger, Martin Anderson and Richard Allen.

I'm appreciative that President Jimmy Carter has moved swiftly to make this

transition both easy and effective. He Question: As you go about forming your has named Chief of Staff Jack Watson to new government and selecting the peopll! work with Meese in effecting an orderly who are going to head the cabinet, be transition. in your cabinet and run the government, In a separate area, that of the interim how much consideration are you going to Foreign Policy Board, I am most grateful give the advice of these new conservative that three prominent Democrats have organizations, the moral majority and the agreed to work with us. They are Senator people like the Reverend Jerry Falwell?

Henry M. Jackson, Senator Richard Stone Reagan: I have told the people who supand Edward Bennett Williams. And, as ported us in this campaign that I'm going I promised during the campaign, I will to do as I did when I was governor work hard to rebuild a bipartisan base . of California, that I am going to be for American foreign policy. The board open to these people. I'm to be president will receive recommendations from a of all the people, and I am going to want to group of 120 distinguished foreign policy seek advice where I think I can get advice. and defense policy advisers before it In other words, I'm not going to separate reports to me in January. myself from th~ people who elected us Members of the board include for- and sent us there. mer President Gerald Ford, Senator John Tower, Henry Kissinger, General Question: In the foreign policy section of Alexander Haig, Governor William V. your recent speech on television, you said Clements, Caspar Weinberger, Eugene Americans do not shirk from history's duty V. Rostow, Donald Rumsfeld, George to stand by those who are persecuted And Shultz, Jeane J. Kirkpatrick, John J. you specifically said that you speakfor those McCloy, Anne Armstrong and Richard who seek the riRht to self-determination V. Allen. without interference from foreign powers. I

wonder whether you could tell us what this means, and specifically whether you think it applies to the situation in Poland now, where an independent workers' movement is growing up in a country that's on the border of the Soviet Union, and in which there are a couple of Soviet divisions stationed?

Reagan: It means that all of these problems and the policies of aggression of the Soviet Union must be a part of discussions and negotiations that go forward. I don't think you simply sit down at the table with the Soviet Union to discuss arms limitations, for example, but you discuss the whole attitude, world attitude, as to whether we're going to have a world of peace or whether we're simply going to talk about weaponry and not bring up these other subjects. In other words, I believe in linkage.

Question: Vice President-elect George Bush recently said that the hostage crisis is

President Carter's problem and that you and he did not want to butt into it. You said you've had ideas about how to secure' the releaseof the hostages. Is there any role that you now intend to play in any kind of plan to secure the release of the hostages and haveyou discussed it with President Carter?

Reagan: No, and let me make it plain.

When I said I've had ideas, I had to be honest. I think you will all agree that anyone who was seeking this position [the presidency] couldn't help but say that if this problem confronted him, he'd have some thoughts about how he could deal with it. That does not mean that at this point this is our problem.

Let me make it plain. It is our problem as Americans, but the president is still the president, and I think what George was saying is that anything in which we would be helpful, if President Carter wanted it, we will be, because, like everyone else, we want the hostages to be returned.

But at the same time we want to make it perfectly plain that we are not going to intrude, and we're going to recognize the fact that the Carter Administration is still in office, and foreign leaders must be aware that President Carter is still the president.

Question: During the campaign, you said

you'd like to begin the SALT III process immediately, negotiating with the Russians.

Do you plan to communicate with the Soviets during the transition to start this process?

Reagan: No, I don't. I don't think we

What can you tell America~s allies in Western Europe about America's foreign policy, now that you've taken over? And are there certain misconceptions you feel about yourself among the people of Western Europe?

Reagan: I think that's very possible.

Question: You have said during the. I think when the allies have to translate campaign that you would like to abolish campaign rhetoric into their own lanthe Department of Energy and the Depart- guages, there's bound to be a certain element of Education, two new departments. ment of confusion. But I want them to What are you going to do in terms of know, and we will make it plain to them appointing cabinet officials? Are you going when it is our opportunity to do so, that to appoint heads of these departments we intend to consult, we intend to confer while you think about abolishing them? with them on major decisions. We believe Reagan: Yes, these departments exist in the importance of the North Atlantic and, of course, you're going to have Treaty Organization (NATO) alliance and heads for the departments. Let me we'll do everything we can to reassure make it also plain that I am well aware them that we are not going it alone. We that in both of those new cabinet-level want to restore their confidence in us. departments, there are legitimate func- They can trust our word, that we do contions that have existed for a long time sider the alliance very impo~tant to the and were then incorporated in those de- United States. partments. So when you talk about questioning whether a cabinet-level department Question: Have you had any conversations to date with the Democratic leaders in the U.S. Congress, and how do you plan to work with them in implementing your program?

Reagan: Two Democratic senators, Henry Jackson and Richard Stone, are a part of our transition team in foreign policy.

Based on my previous experience, I recognize the need for bipartisanship in the Congress, on getting necessary legislation passed. I certainly intend to make contact with the Democratic Party leadership should exist as it is today, that does not as well as with their members, just as mean that you are throwing out the I have been meeting throughout this legitimate functions which have always campaign at every opportunity with the been performed by government and that Republican members of the House and should continue to be.

Senate. want to do anything that indicates to them that we are not a unified country and that we are in any way trying to speak with a different voice than the Carter Administration.

In light of the Reagan steamroller effect, you said a little bit earlier that you would seek a bipartisan basefor foreign policy. Would that indicate that you might consider putting a Democrat on your cabinet staff, or in the cabinet, a cabinet-level Democrat?

Reagan: That could very well be. I've made no decision on that, and this again would be getting into discussing individuals.

We haven't done that as yet. But I very definitely want the world to know, in foreign policy particularly, that there is no political division that affects our foreign policy.

Question:

There seems to be a bit of concern how U.S.joreign policy will change.

Question:

Question: Is there a specific effort to find

minorities or blacks tofill any of the cabinet posts?

Reagan: Race and sex will be considerations, of course-because I think that they should be. Besides, I'm sure that there are many well-qualified people in the various ethnic groups and races.

Question: Governor Reagan, now that you hold the presidential office at an older age than any other U.S. president in history, are you prepared to say whether you intend to be a one-term president-or have you not ruled out seek inKre-election infour years?

Reagan: No, I haven't thought beyond the term to which I have been elected.

I feel just fine.

Sir, you staked much of your campaign on your economic prescriptionfor the country. Now that you've been elected, can you tell us how quickly you expect to move on your economic program, and how quickly the American people can expect some results from it?

Reagan: I expect to move as swiftly as possible. I think this is the most important thing; I think it is what the American people told us with their votes they wanted, and so we'll move instantly on that. .

Question:

Question: Governor Reagan, you were ob-

viously elected with millions of Democratic and independent votes. Do you still feel totally wedded to the Republican Party platform, and will you specifically push for passage of an anti-abortion amendment to the Constitution?

Reagan: I ran on the platform. The people voted for me on the platform. I do believe in that platform, and I think it would be very cynical and callous of me now to suggest that I'm going to turn away from it. Evidently, those people who voted for me, of the other party or independents, must have agreed with the platform also.

feeling about the amendment during this campaign meant opposition to equal rights for women were absolutely wrong.

Question: Governor, do you intend to pursue the Camp David peace process, and would you still characterize the PLO as you did about a year ago as a terrorist organization?

Reagan: Yes. I think the Palestine Liberation Organization has proven that it is a terrorist organization. I have said repeatedly, I separate the PLO from the Palestinian refugees. No one ever elected the PLO. We don't intend to mandate or dictate a settlement. Whatever the United States can do to promote peace in the Middle East, we are going to do.

Question: Governor, given the size of your

victory, there are a number of people who are saying that it's being interpreted as a mandate for considerable change. Is there anything that you would say to those Democrats or Republicans, liberals and moderates, whofeel potentially disenfranchised by your political views-is there anything you would say to reassure them?

Reagan: Well, I don't think that anyone is politically disenfranchised by my views.

I know that, for example, through the campaign, the issue of the equal rights amendment constantly came up. And I tried to make it plain at every instance that if you will read the Republican platform, it has never spoken more strongly with regard to equal rights for women. And I feel that way myself. The only difference of opinion was whether an amendment that, in over eight years, has not been able to secure ratification. of the states, or even if it could-whether the amendment was the best and the most practical way of achieving those equal rights.

I pointed to my own record as Governor of California of what we did by statute.

Now, I am going to aggressively pursue the subject of equal rights for women.

Those who chose to believe that my

Governor, at the beginning of President Carter's term, he gave human rights a very high priority. Will you also give human rights a similarly high priority, especially in the Third and Fourth World countries?

Reagan: Yes. I think that all of us in the United States are dedicated to the belief in human rights. But I think it must be a consistent policy. I don't think that you can turn away from some country because here and there they do not totally agree with our concept of human rights, and then, at the same time, maintain relations with other countries, or try to develop them where human rights are virtually nonexistent.

The subject, as well as others, should be part of any negotiations on the foreign scene, any relationship that we have with other countries.

But I don't think that our record of turning away from countries that were basically friendly to 'us, because of some disagreement on. some facet of human rights and then finding that the result was that they have lost all human rights in that country-that isn't a practical way to go about that.

0 Question:

K.R.Narayanan Presents Credentials Recently, India's new ambassador to the United States, K.R. Narayanan, presented his diplomatic credentials to President Jimmy Carter. Excerpts from their speeches on the occasion are printed below.

Ambassador Narayanan:

justice in the world. I believe that for this basic objective we can work together through continued dialogue, better understanding and appreciation of each other's interests and perceptions.

There is a deep-seated common desire for closer relations between our two countries. Our relations are today warm and cordial and there are bright prospects of further improving them on the basis of mutual understanding, mutual respect and friendly reciprocity. We have involved ourselves in widening areas of cooperation with one another. I would refer in particular to the Indo-U.S. Joint.

Commission, which was established in 1976.All the subcommissions are doing excellent work, be it economic, commercial, science and technology, education and culture, or the most recently established subcommission on agriculture. I have had the privilege of being the cochairman of the Subcommission on Education and Culture. Cooperation in this field is a fundamental basis on which our two countries can' build a relationship that is steady and enduring.

The Government ofIndia and the people of India are keenly interested in developing friendship and cooperation with the United States of America. It shall be my endeavor to work. for this noble purpose.

India and the United States have both gone through a momentous process of free elections this last year. Behind this great drama of elections lie ideals, values and political processes which are fundamental to our two nations and which link our two peoples in a common spiritual fellowship. At the same time, our two great democracies have developed and have been functioning in the context of differing social, cultural and economic circumstances. The United States of America has been fortunate to base its democratic system on economic' .prosperity and technological know-how, while we in India have been engaged in a colossal struggle, within the framework of democracy, to develop and transform a society of over 650 million people after centuries of historic degradation and deprivation. I am glad to say that we have achieved some substantial successes in this field, though much is yet to be achieved. On the success of this experiment depends. to some extent at President Carter: least, the future of democracy as a world I am happy to welcome you as India's phenomenon, as distinct from its glorious new ambassador to the United States success in a few advanced countries of America. India stands out as a vibrant which have been its original historic illustration to all other nations that democracy and economic development are homes.

Both India and the United States are closely intertwined. We are proud that dedicated to the noble objectives of world we have been able to make some contripeace. We have throughout attached great bution to these fine achievements. importance to the role of the United Although our countries are located on States as a major force for peace in the opposite sides of the globe, we have world, and we believe that friendly rela- much in common. Topay. although our tions between India and the United two countries are at different stages States are not only beneficial to our of economic development, India and two countries but also to the general the United States share a commitment to cause of peace. It may be that our two strengthening our democratic processes, countries have not always looked at preserving the rule of law. protecting the world in the same way in every the individual liberties of our citizens respect, which is perhaps unavoidable and upholding the cause of human rights. considering our geographical and his- It is these enduring values which form torical situations. But even when we the bedrock of our relationship. have differed on methods and approaches, The pursuit of a durable peace around our basic objectives have been the same, the world in the context of freedom viz., to work for peace, freedom and is another endeavor to which India

and the United States have long been dedicated. I fully agree with your statement that a strong cooperative relationship between our two countries is a vital element in seeking this goal. It is true that India and the United States at times view world issues from differing perspectives. But let me assure you that we respect India's nonalignment and its unique contribution to world peace, and we look to India for reciprocal understanding of our position. I firmly believe that the strength of our relationship rests on our ability to discuss our sometimes differing approaches in a spirit of complete trust, candor and goodwill.

The United States fully shares India's desire to build upon our already close ties. Weare dedicated to pursuing new areas of cooperation. The U.S.-India Joint Commission and its four subcommissions are one example of how the great human resources of the American and Indian peoples can be put. to work to assist not just our two countries but also all peoples. There are many other avenues to explore in pursuit of our joint goal of establishing even closer ties between the United States and India.

I sincerely welcome you to our country and wish you all success in carrying out your mission. You will find the American people eager and receptive to enhancing relations with their sister democracy. You can be assured as well that the Government of the United States will do all it can to achieve this goal.

0

The Great Enumeration 1980 was census year for the United States. The article traces the history and methodology of this great decennial head count. Former Chief Census Commissioner of India Ashok Mitra contributes an account of the 125-year history of the Indian census.

Mr. New York Times As editor of The New York Times, A.M. Rosenthal is the most powerful journalist in the United Statesand maybe in the world. A free-wheeling description of this talented man's character and background.

Is the American Century Ending?

British historian Paul Johnson answers such questions as;¡ Are there such things as dominant societies that are worthy of owning a century or an era? Has the United States been one such dominant society? Is the American moment in history ending?

Eudora Welty: A Sense of Place . Nayantara Sahgal assesses the Southern author with specific examples from her works. Accompanied

by Welty's short story, "Why I Live at the P.O."

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To become less depenlient on foreign oil, we need more tbalfAmerican oil.

We need American energy.

The form of energy is less important than tbefact of energy .

PUBLIC SERVICE ADVERTISING

An important development in public service advertising in the United States has been the focusing of corporate promotion on the energy problem. Through intensive advertising campaigns, U.S. companies are trying to contribute to public understanding of some of the fundamental truths about energy. Continental

Oil Company (Conoco), whose advertising messages appear here and on the back cover, highlights the need to exploit energy sources such as coal,. uranium, natural gas, synthetic gas and gasoline, and solar power. This, the Conoco advertisements point out, can ultimately reduce American dependence on imported oil.