FEBRUARY 1962
The heroic statue of Abraham Lincolll ill the Lincoln Memorial, Washington. See page twenty-three.
NOWHERE does the season change the landscape so much or offer more splendid horizons than in the deserts of America's southwest. The tawny wastelands in the deserts of Arizona, California and New Mexico that are stretches of baked earth under the summer sun, suddenly break into dazzling colour after the gentle raits of March and April. And, perhaps there is no desert which offers more rich and exotic landscapes than the Arizona desert. All of its floral beauty, whfthspfings~ full-blown into lavish bloom at the dictates of seasonal and limited rainfall, is refreshing. Wild flower seeds which have lain . dormant for several months germinate and spring into radiant bloom under the intense, unfiltered light of the desert sun. The hot; dry· winds of Summer will soon shrivel them, but during their short, joyous life 'they blanket the land with brilliance. The various species of ocotilIos or candlewood of Arizona stay leafless until a rain comes. Then, like magic, small tender green leaves sprout from the thorny stems and gay banner of flowers breaks forth at their tips. Distant relatives of the common moss-rose, or portulaca, so widelyknown in India, have over the centuries built heavy stems to store precious moisture, lost their leaves and grown an armour of spines to protect that moisture. Today they are called cactuses and their weird shapes and fiery blossoms add a vivid distinction to the desert landscape. . One of Arizona's loveliest springflowering shrubs is the Claret-cup Hedgehog, pictured at left. This flower blooms after rain and its blossoms almost completely cover the shaggy, untidy plant. The first .part of its name is inspired by its colour and the last part by its thorns .•
4
THE MAGIC WORLD by Lokenath Bhattacharya
OF A GREAT
12
MURALS FOR by Olga Arnold
14
THE
17
A VISIT WITH by Arthur Herzog
20
CARL SANDBURG by Marjorie Yahraes
26
AT THE INDIAN INDUSTRIES Photographs by A. C. Pasricha
30
CRYSTAL ART by Dale McKean
34
SAM HIGGINBOTTOM by Sohindar S. Rana
40
SATURN
43
ARMCHAIR PERSPECTIVE by John T. Reid
44
TEEN-AGE
48
SANTOSH by Zehra Rehmatulla
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RESEARCH Sohindar
Barry
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FEATURE EDITOR
EDITOR
Lokenath
S. Rana
PHOTO EDITOR A. C. Pasricha
Bhattacharya
United
Zorthian,
Acting Director, United States Information
States
Information
Service,
Sikandra Road, New Delhi, on behalf of The American Embassy, New Delhi.
Service.
J.
Middleton
at G Claridge & Co. Ltd. (Caxton Frere Road, Bombay. IN CASE OF CHANGE OF ADDRESS. cut"'orJt old address from a recent SPAN envelope and forward along with new address to: Mail Unit, United States Information Service, Bahawa/pur House. Sikandra Road, New Delhi-I. Allow six weeks for change of address to become effective.
EDITOR Rehmatulla
Works),
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The Magic World of a Great Museum by Lokenath Bhattacharya
To
THE little boy the dimly lit hall is a hall no more, but a wild corner of a deep, dark forest, frozen as it were in a chillv silence where the mere sound of a sudden footstep nught well be enough to startle the youngster, intently staring at the ferocious Indian lion poised for a kill. The vision could have been real, but, fortunately for the boy, that lion now is only a part of inanimate nature, an exhibit in the American Museum of Natural History at New York. And the small visitor is but one of more than a million children who each year walk through the many corridors and halls of the famed museum to discover there an imaginary world of enchantment and joy. Not that that world is an altogether imaginary fairyland, though a great deal of imagination has gone into its making. Nor is the lion a fake. It is real in every sense of the term except it has no life. In short, this world of the museum is a magic world of mingled illusion and reality. It would be wrong to suppose that to provide thrills of amazement and delight is the museum's main objective. Since the date of its founding in 1869, the primary purpose of the American Museum of Natural History has been to provide education for individual visitors according to their interests, whether that individual be a housewife, a farmer, an industrialist, a teacher, a college student or a child. The museum tries to be all things to all men, to give the individual visitor an answer to his questions and a clear idea of his own place in an increasingly complex and interrelated world. However, the enchantment of the presentation serves a very important purpose: the lifelike displays help the visitor assimilate a vast area of knowledge which, if presented otherwise, would probably seem dry and unattractive. The little boy, whose fear of the ferocious-looking lion will perhaps be completely over in a couple of minutes, can expect similar experiences when he goes on to see, for example, the skeleton of tyrannosaurus rex, the "King of the Tyrant Lizards," the largest carnivorous land creature the world has ever known; or the bas-relief restoration of the giant fossil mammal, the baluchitherium, a prehistoric rhinoceros-like animal from the Gobi Desert in Mongolia; or the great cat smilodon, the prehistoric sabre-toothed tiger from the Rancho La Brea Tar Pits near Los Angeles, which was the most highly perfected killer in the course of mammalian evolution. The museum can more than amply quench the boy's thirst for the rare, the dreadful, the exotic, the beautiful and the unusual: it is also a teacher, tdling him volumes about the past and the present, giving indications also of what the future may hold for him. The Museum of Natural History, housing some ofth~ largest and richest collections from the world of natural science ever assembled in one place, is located in
Manhattan Square, New York and occupies most of the space between Central Park West, Columbus Avenue, 77th Street and 81st Street. In its halls covering over 13 acres of floor space, the museum exhibits large displays illustrating the habits of men and animals from prehistoric times to the present. Dioramas of men and animals in their natural settings are shown in painstakingly
reconstructed form. Scenes of actual sites in their natural dimensions are recreated with a care so meticulous that their incredible reality has the impact of experience on the viewers, of having encountered the men and animals inhabiting these areas - the Cashibo warrior, the red Indians of a Hopi Pueblo, Siberian tigers, African elephants, man-eating sharks, or Arctic seabirds. Recently, the perfect likenesses of these reproductions so much baffled a lady visitor that, gazing at a group of paperand-bark pine trees, she in fact asked one of the museum guards, "When do you water them?" Miniature radio sets, which may be rented in the museum's main lobby and carried around, make the visitors' experience even more exciting. With the earphones attached to these devices, the visitor can listen to continuous lectures on the exhibits in six of the main halls and can also have the thrill of hearing appropriate sound effects such as the ~creeches of mountain lions or the trumpeting of elephants.
The Magic World
(Continued)
The nine-ton cross-section of1,341-year-old sequoia cut /rom a California mountain valley. Not the oldest or the largest of rite giant sequoias, tltis tree H'as331 feet tall and 90 feet in circumference.
The museum's animal collections range from tiny insects to the skeleton of a huge brontosaurus that weighed over thirty tons in prehistoric life, from the earliest invertebrates to the tiny eocene eohippus which evolved into the modern horse. For the study of man himself, the museum offers the visitor exhibits depicting evolutionary development which explain chronologically man's developing characteristics as a vertebrate, a mammal, a primate and a hominoid. A portrait gallery of heads fashioned from skulls of different paleontological eras and found in different lands gives a picture of man over a period of about 600,000 years. Elsewhere, the museum shows man's prehistoric cultures and the living human groupings of the world. The history of the museum is an exciting story in itself. Its present vast exhibition halls had a modest origin. Only very small quarters on two floors of the
old Arsenal Building in Central Park were its first home. But as soon as the earliest collections were shown, the exhibition attracted men, women and children in large numbers. The incorporation of the museum in 1869 was evidence of the community's interest in museums. Since then, museums in America have ceased to serve as depositories for precious collections and have come to fill their present-day roles as research laboratories and educational centres. The land for the Natural History Museum was donated by the City of New York, which also agreed to maintain the necessary buildings. But the institution's real work-the scientific programmes of research, exploration and public instruction-was to be financed by private funds, interest on endowment, membership fees and gifts. Despite the tremendous scientific and technological developments in the last few centuries, man's inventory of the natural world is still scant. Today, more than at any other period in human history, the need for an increase in man's knowledge of natural science is gaining momentum. The safeguarding of the world's natural heritage has become the concern of the natural history museums. The American Museum of Natural History contains priceless collections of thousands of forms of life that can no longer be found in nature and hundreds of artifacts representing the material remains of peoples now totally forgotten. Even a cursory glance at the general guide to this museum will give an idea of the vast area of human knowledge covered in it. The broad classifications-each of which is elaborated through several subsections-include a varied range of subjects such as public instruction, astronomy and the planetarium, geology and paleontology, invertebrates, insects and spiders, fishes, amphibians and reptiles, birds, mammals, animal behaviour, anthropology, and general ecology. The latter, ecology-which studies how living animals and plants inter-depend upon one another and their
Towering nearly twenty feet, rhe skeleton of Tyrannosaurus, in the foreground, dominates tlte hall of dinosaurs. To the right is long-horned Triceratops. They once lived ill North America.
A portrait gallery of Man through the age~ Those on the leji are /rom skulls found ill , those all rhe right from skulls found ill E/I
Although not a violinist, this elder makes violins as a hobby and displays them at the museum's annual hobby show. His son, a musician in the Radio City Music Hall Orchestra in New York, plays one of the violins made by his father.
The Magic World
(Continued)
Museum recollstructioll of a summit ill the Sierra Nevada mountains.
In this diorama, a family of grizzly bears, the largest weighing five hundred pounds, are seen as in real life in Yellowstone National Park.
After studying the millutest details of a towering evergreen, museum specialist produces exact copies.
environments-is, in a sense, the keynote of the American Museum of Natural History. Here, the scientists belonging to the museum and those from allied institutions all over the world jointly work to delve into the realm of the long ago, as well as that of the recent past and the present. Their studies reveal not merely exciting facts of what is no longer extant, but also point the direction the future mankind might take. For example, today's threatened wildlife and endangered areas can be conserved by applying lessons learned from a study of the past. Or, these studies might also suggest means capable of solving the currently crucial problem of an exploding human population which is rapidly engulfing the habitable areas of the world. The museum's four purposes-exhibition, exploration, research and education-are all aimed at improving man's understanding of the world around him and of his relationship to it. Besides the exhibition halls, the museum has a large library devoted to works on natural science, exploration and travel, and containing some 145,000 volumes. It has hundreds of classrooms, laboratories, workrooms, lecture halls and study collections. A major part of the museum's collections is not on display, but is available only to students and research workers. The museum is an integral part of the New York school curriculum. In collaboration with the city schools, it conducts a children's programme called "The World We Live In," in which museum teaching is co-ordinated
with classroom work. In addition, there is the adult education programme which organizes lecture courses for teachers in high schools and colleges, students in colleges and universities, nurses in training, members of the museum and foreign-born citizens. There is also New York's Hobby Show for Older Folk held in the museum, where thousands of elderly persons exhibit their handiwork annually. The formal programme of educational services, which began in 1880 with one class of thirty students, now reaches approximately 20,000,000 persons yearly, using all educational media-extension courses, lectures, circulating exhibits, films and slides. Scientists, from the museum as well as from elsewhere in the United States and abroad, carryon research programmes at three field stations in the states of Arizona and Florida, and in the Bahama Islands. Expeditions of exploration and discovery, sent to all parts of the world, are also a very important part of the museum's multifarious activities. Among the more important expeditions sponsored by the museum have been the Jesup North Pacific Expedition, the Fossil Collecting Expedition to western North America, the Central Arctic Expedition and the Eastman-Pomeroy African Expedition. Very recently, a husband-wife anthropological team returned from Peru, after studying for the first time the remote Amatua'ca tribe. The results of these expeditions and researches are published in the museum's technical publications. It also
scheduled to open this year, is planned to show man in his social aspect, as a member of a biological group. The first two sections deal with man's place in the evolutionary process, his prehistoric ancestors, his characteristics and their relation to those of other forms of animal life. One salient feature of the Hall is a great ceramic mural portraying in a spiral of varicoloured tile mosaic the evolution of life on earth from 2,000,000,000 years ago to the present. Man's first arrival on earth, less than a million years ago, appears at the end of the spiral as a tiny red dot. Other key features of this exhibition include a group of sculptured reconstructions of the heads of fourteen prehistoric human beings; a model of the nervous system made of hundreds of tiny brass wires; painted aluminium cutouts of the human leg which demonstrate the various stages of locomotion; and the Transparent Woman, a life-size plastic model showing the internal structure of the human female in complete detail. These are some of the beautiful collections that constitute this amazing wonderland. The American Museum of Natural History is a miniature world. It is a living world of remote history as well as of the present. And as time present and time past are both contained in time future, such a museum can never be complete. Keeping pace with life whose growth is continuous, it must have continuously new exhibitions, new researches, new expeditions and new educational programmes. Each new year brings more visitors than the preceding year. The museum is fully alive to its great responsibilities and constantly works to portray more vividly, in word and exhibit, the story of life itself.â&#x20AC;˘
Over the perfectly moulded body of an Indian lioll, a scientist wraps the animal's skin.
publishes a number of natural history periodicals written in popular style, of which the Natural History magazine is a notable example. One of the most popular units of the museum is its Hayden Planetarium, visited by hundreds of thousands each year. In the planetarium dome spectacular demonstrations are given to all age groups, particularly to children, college and school students, and teachers. Courses in astronomy, meteorology and celestial navigation are also held. The planetarium is named after Mr. Charles Hayden, who donated the Copernican model solar system and the planetarium projector. This complicated piece of precision equipment can depict, with an uncanny realism, not only the Sun and the Moon and the planets, but also comets, meteor showers, the northern lights and many other astronomical displays. The machine reproduces the starry heavens and approximately 9,000 stars including those of the sixth magnitude, and can even be so adjusted as to report accurately the arrangement of the heavens on any date from approximately 13,000 years ago to about 13,000 years in the future. Then there is the newest hall, known as the Hall of the Biology of Man, which depicts man's story through the different stages of his evolution. This permanent exhibition, a significant addition to the museum's existing attractions, was originally conceived by Dr. Harry L. Shapiro and took six years to build. Its two sections were opened to the public in March 1961. A third section, Under the eerie lights of aurora borealis, wolves race across the frozen field of a diorama.
The Magic World
(Continued)
The OpOSSU/1/, upper right opposite, {l/l American marsupial, and the gray fox, lower leji, live ill a home like this in the eastern Uilited States.
EACH of the four American Museum of Natural History dioramas pictured on these two pages depicts an actual scene in nature, accurate to the minutest detail of a tiny hair on a flower petal. Once a site is selected for reproduction, a team of museum scientists and artists spend weeks studying it and photographing it in colour. Months are spent by skilled technicians in constructing animals for the scene. Actual skins are fitted on perfect models of the animals' bodies, made of wire and wood, covered with muscles and tendons of plaster and clay. Other specialists prepare the foliage of the backgrounds, which may be actual plants sprayed with preservatives or plastic and paper replicas which can hardly be distinguished from their originals. Once the background, foliage and animals are placed in a diorama, a theatrical lighting expert blends electricallighting-sometimes using mirrors -to achieve the precise quality of light required to recreate the natural environment at a given moment of the day .â&#x20AC;˘
A World of Illusion
The Magic World
(Continued)
by Olga Arnold
COLLAPSIBLE elephants and appetizing dinosaurs are attracting the startled attention of visitors to the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. These whimsical animals are almost as popular as the standard stuffed types which have long been the pride of the museum, largest institution of its kind in the world. The new beasts, in the form of cartoon murals which parade around the walls of the cafeteria, refresh the footsore sight-seer when he sits down for a relaxing lunch or a cup of coffee after wandering through the museum's fifty-eight halls and more than twelve acres of floor space. They are the fruit of Robert C. Osborn's fertile imagination. One of the most popular cartoonists and satirists in the United States, Osborn is fond of depicting human foibles, his cartoons touching on everything from political figures to the look of new automobiles. His involvement with the American Museum of Natural History resulted from an illustrated lecture he gave at the International Design Conference at Aspen, a mountain resort in the western State of Colorado. Dr. Alfred E. Parr, Director of the Museum, was so entertained by the performance that he conceived the idea of decorating some of the museum walls with the artist's lively drawings.
The murals are photographic enlargements on mat paper of Mr. Osborn's sketches, brightened with pastel dyes. They burlesque in fanciful terms the routine of museum life, showing a tiny straggler from the inevitable group of school children being stalked by a giant spider; a small dog standing before a dinosaur skeleton, licking his chops at such a prodigious display of bone; a parade of cannibalistic fish intent on swallowing each other as well as the museum clock. They show walrus-mustached attendants trying to hold up the ceiling; and tired sight-seers soaking their aching feet (and one soaking his cane) in tubs of water, while guards inflate shrivelled elephants with tyre pumps. All these capers are a distinct departure for the once-staid Museum of Natural History. When Dr. Parr commissioned Osborn to do the murals, he explained that a flash of humour will hold the interest of an audience at the most learned lecture, and added: "Since we like to consider our exhibits three-dimensional lectures, Mr. Osborn's interpretations are a first step towards making humour an integral part of what this museum has to say to the public:'.
W
HEN the early settlers on the American soil moved to the unexplored West, they found it a vast land of rolling prairies, sandy deserts, grassy plains and towering rugged mountains. The rainfall was meagre and seasonal. Settlers soon learned that to grow crops and maintain homes, water had to be diverted from the streams. The irregular stream flow-high when snow melted, then dwindling down to nothinghad to be stored behind dams if people were to have a stable, secure water supply. Individual and co-operative efforts were directed to harnessing the rivers. By the end of the nineteenth century, the people of the West had gone about as far as they could in the development of water resources by private
means; Yet vast untapped land, water, mineral, forest, and other resources awaited use by a growing nation. To meet this need, the United States Federal Reclamation Programme was established in 1902 by the Reclamation Act passed by the Congress and signed by President Theodore Roosevelt. This historic legislation extended the aid of the government in further development and conservation of water resources, especially in the western states. As the West continued to grow, and the standard of living improved, greater development of water resources was needed. This brought new and more complex problems and required a marked change in the scope and character of reclamation work. Water from federal projects, right, sustains a vineyard where once there was only parched land.
The Federal Reclamation Programme
Simple dams and canals to divert water onto adjacent lands no longer sufficed to meet modern needs. Multipurpose reclamation projects were undertaken, which embraced irrigation, hydroelectric power, municipal water supply, flood control" protection from silt and salt water, recreation, fish and wildlife protection and other benefits. Today, some eighty-four federallyfinanced projects which irrigate eight million acres have been built. About one-half of this acreage receives a full supply of water and one-half is furnished supplemental water from federally constructed reservoirs that accumulate and store water during the period of heavy runoff so that it will be available for thirsty crops in dry hot summer seasons. These projects serve more than 128,000 individually owned and operated family-size farms on which 525,000 persons live. Municipal and industrial water is served to
more than two hundred communities and major industrial users. These urban areas and the reclamation farms have a total population of nearly ten million persons. The water storage and control systems on these projects also generate electricity for use in urban and industrial areas, control floods for protection of people and property in the valleys, provide outdoor recreation for twenty-four million p~rsons annually and protect and enhance fish and wildlife populations. Forty-one hydroelectric plants with an installed capacity of over five million kilowatts provide electrical energy needs for nearly seven-and-a-half million persons. Revenues from the sale of power and water from these projects repay the project costs to the government. Repayment arrangements extend over a period of forty to fifty years and guarantee the return of costs within
Imperial Dam ill California, at left, diverts water from the turbulent Colorado River through desilting basins alld into the All-American Canal to irrigate Imperial and Coachella Valleys, a hundred miles away. Photo courtesy TIME.
Federal
Reclamation
Aerial view of a section of the All-American Canal, which irrigates hal/-a-million acres of California farmland.
(Continued)
the life of the project and at terms convenient to the users. Receipts from these projects go into a fund out of which additional projects are built. Except for financing and construction of major works, federal government supervision is held to a minimum. Individual farmers own, develop, and operate their own farms. A¡ co-operative organization of farmers manages and operates the irrigation project after it has been constructed by the Federal Bureau of Reclamation. Thus the Bureau, in co-operation with other federal agencies, state governments and local groups, seeks the fullest possible development of the country's water resources, creating opportunities for people to build new farms, new homes and new industries and providing a firm foundation for the growth of the nation's economy .â&#x20AC;˘
A Visit
with
Eugene
Black by Arthur Herzog
Y OU might think that the pressures of administering billions of dollars would make a man edgy, morose and retiring. Not Eugene Robert Black, the 62-year-old President of the World Bank. When I called on him at the Bank's gleaming headquarters on H Street in Washington, D.C., I found a tall, spare, blue-eyed man who laughs frequently and gives the impression that he would be ready to stop at any time for a chat. There is, in fact, hardly any feeling around the World Bank that the problems of a newly developing world can or must be settled tomorrow. This is the unsung side of international assistance. The work goes on with humour and hardheadedness, and without fanfare or flag waving. In this approach to its work the Bank is taking its tone from the sage, canny, sometimes tough, possibly great man upstairs.
The World Bank (or the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development, its official designation) is a piece of international handiwork carved out of the United Nations, with which it is associated as a specialized agency, in 1944. It has a membership of 68 nations, almost the entire roster of non-communist countries. The Bank used to depend for its funds entirely on subscriptions from its member nations, but it has become more and more self-sufficient, selling its own bonds, parts of its loans, and even persuading private money to come in with it on original projects, all of which gives the Bank more money to put into development. One criticism of the Bank is that it is too conservative. I asked Black what he thought. "Guilty!" he said, in an easy and marked drawl. "We are conservative. We have two rules. We want
our loans repaid, and we want our money to do some good. That may be old-fashioned, but I think it's reasonable. We insist on finding out if putting money into something makes sense. "One of our main problems, surprisingly, is to find projects we can invest in. We actually send out teams to look for them. One thing that's widely misunderstood is that there's no shortage of money for lending purposes. But there is a limit to the amount you can lend. "Suppose you offered all the money a country wanted. Could the country use it? Could it take the money without inflation? Does it have the necessary technical skills? If it wants to develop a mine, for instance, does it have any way to get the ore out? More money by itself doesn't always help, and it may even cause a country to postpone doing the
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February 1962
17
things that it ought to do. I'm afraid there's been too much emphasis on the quantity and not enough on the quality of what you finance." In this age of international assistance, the Bank occupies a rather special place. Unlike the United Nations' technical assistance programme, the Bank's help to poorer nations is proffered in the most blatantly businesslike manner. When Bank officials talk about "creditworthiness," as they do constantly, they mean that they are less stirred by utopian dreams than by the simple question of whether a project will yield an adequate return. The Bank raises most of its funds by selling bonds throughout the world (the bulk of the funds, incidentally, are now coming not from the United States, but from Western Europe), and those bondholders expect to collect on their money. The Bank, therefore, subjects would-be borrowers to the most careful investigations before it will lay out a penny. Even when a loan has been granted it parcels out the funds a little at a time.
done. Private enterprise can't build roads, railroads or massive irrigation projects. But after you've done those basic things, that's where private enterprise ~hould come in. "I agree that the rate of development in the poorer nations is too slow, but I go back to the idea that you can't speed it up just by giving more money. We're trying to promote, ultimately, growth, tolerance and freedom, and we're going to need the best possible planning to get them.
ing his head. 'Sorry,' I had to tell him. 'You're in the same boat 1 am. That's why I need experts around me. We can't have the blind leading the blind.' " Actually, Black had solid credentials as a banker, but his international experience was limited, and there are those who are still surprised both at the boldness of his work and the evolution of the man himself. The son of a banker, Black was born and raised in Georgia. He showed early
Signing all agreement in the offices of'the World Bank in Washington are former Indian Ambassador to the United States M. C. Chagla, Mr. Black, and H. T. Parekh, general manager of the Industrial Credit and Investment Corporation of India.
A Visit with Eugene Black
In the eyes of a finance mlnJster from a newly developing country, the Bank, to use an old vaudeville saw, must seem to have a hc rt of gold and teeth to match. Yet the Bank's loans are getting results. In 1960, for instance, the Bank lent $66,000,000 to develop iron mining in Mauritania, $44,000,000 to assist the steel industry in Japan, $70,000,000 for the Indian railways, and so on around the globe-a total of $658,000,000 for 1960. Over the years, the Bank's money, $5,000,000,000 plus of it, has gone into 55 countries and has wrought such diverse miracles as opening Bangkok to big ships and building automatic telephone exchanges in Ethiopia. Not all its 265 loans have been wildly successful, but it is the Bank's pride and joy that not a single borrower has defaulted. "The key," Black said to me, "is planning-an orderly rate of development. You can't develop a country by external means alone. You must get the people enthusiastic. And you've got to get them to see their economy as a whole, and if necessary change large parts of it around. "It would be impossible for private capital to do the things that have to be 18
span
February 1962
We are glVlng them hope, and this is a case where the balance of hope is more important than the balance of power." "We must admit," a United Nations delegate once said, "that the shy maiden of international finance yields to Mr. Black's touch." The job of running the world's largest and certainly among its most novel financial institutions would seem to require qualifications of an unusual sort. I asked Black what these qualifications were. "Well," he said with a smile, "there was a man who came in here one day looking for a job, and I asked him what his qualifications were. Engineer? Economist? International banker? The man kept shak-
promise as a bond salesman after World War I, when he sold Victory bonds as a volunteer, touring the State with wounded veterans. Black sold foreign bonds in the 1920's, and his fiduciary flair led him eventually to the Chase Manhattan Bank in New York, where he became a senior vicepresident in charge of the bank's multi-million dollar securities investments; but in international development he was a novice. In 1947, the World Bank was ready to market its first bonds, and Black, as a bond salesman extraordinary, was summoned to Washington as the Bank's executive director. He was stunned to learn that the Bank's bond programme was underdeveloped to the extreme. The bonds were not legal
investments in any State, laws having been passed against international bonds after many nations defaulted on them in the 1930's. Recovering from his shock, Black toured the country to get the bonds legalized, making his first public speeches and arguing with legislators. In one state, where a politician was holding out, Black proved capable of working behind the scenes. The politician was on the floor of the state legislature, attacking the World Bank, when a wire arrived from one of the state's most powerful political figures in Washington. The legislator interrupted his speech to read it: "So much," he said, "for the arguments against the Bank. In favour of it .... " Black replaced John J. McCloy as President of the Bank in 1949, and, since then, he probably has been the most peripatetic banker in the history of the profession, hobnobbing with Prime Ministers and Presidents in some 50 countries, timing his trips to take him near Shakespeare festivals; for Black's interests have been catalogued as the four B's: the Bard, baseball, Balzac and the Bank. Under Black, the World Bank has backed and filled into a new field, what might be called economic diplomacy, and oddly enough it may be the contribution for which the Bank is remembered when every country has new roads and washing machines, and developmental loans are forgotten. In September 1960, India and Pakistan signed.an agreement to share the waters of the Indus River Basin and to develop them according to a plan drawn up by the Bank. The Indus River Basin project, consisting of dams and canals connecting six rivers, will take 10 years to complete, and will cost $1,000,000,000. It is an accomplishment which helped win Black three honorary degrees-from Princeton, Harvard and Yale Universitiesin a single week. I asked Black how the Indus Basin project had come into being, and he explained that he had read an article suggesting that the two countries share the Basin waters-six rivers that flow through both countries-instead of letting them go wasted to the sea. "It was just after partition," Black said, "and the situation was very tense. Both countries claimed the water. I'd been out there and I knew that water was a question of life and death. During the negotiations I had people come to me by the hundreds, pull my clothes and cry, 'water, water, water.''' Black wrote letters to Nehru of India and Liaquat Ali Khan, then Prime Minister of P:lkistan, offering Construction at Panchet Dam, a project in which World Bank financing participated.
to help work out a settlement that would develop the Indus River region. "I thought we could approach it on an engineering level, forgetting national differences," Black said. It took Black and a Bank vice president, Sir William Iliff, who was knighted for his share in the work, over eight years to get the two countries to agree. "A lot of doing," Black said. "Then I had to go to the United States, Britain, Canada, Australia and West Germany to raise the money. (The New Zealanders came along of their own accord.) The work has already started. It will be one of the largest projects in the history of the world." In the long run, it may be that the Bank's biggest jobs will be these projects that demand the co-operation of two or more nations, such as developing the Nile or the Jordan River. Oddly enough, it is just the fact that the Bank hasn't a flag to wave that seems to make it effective where others have failed.
"We're objective," Black said to me. "We're not an instrument in the Cold War. That's very important. We say what we think. "I go back to the power of money. Missions are always going out to countries suggesting this or that, and the reports always wind up in a pigeonhole. When the Bank makes a report, people listen. If they don't, they won't get any money from us. It comes down to punishment and reward." Black has written that a new kind of diplomat is needed in the world, the development diplomat who will roam the globe with a briefcase full of plans for helping poorer countries. He will have to be, Black said, an economist, a historian, a geographer, a philosopher, a civil engineer, an anthropologist and a social scientist rolled into one. On the way out, it occurred to me that he had neglected to add the banker. For maybe the future really lies with men like Eugene Black who understand what money can, and cannot do .â&#x20AC;˘
poet,
balladeer,
biographer
and
goat-farmer
Carl and Lillian Sandburg were married in 1908.
SPRINKLED liberally through America's history are men with a strong faith in the goodness of the human race. Such a man is Carl Sandburg, son of Swedish immigrants, poet and writer of one of the great biographies of modern times. With his mass of unruly white hair, his homely face and easy booming laugh, Sandburg has the ways of an ordinary man but he is no ordinary man. He can tell you how to raise goats (he and his wife own a goat farm)-and he can quote from his poems in a way that brings tears to a listener's eyes. He can twang a lusty folk ballad on a guitar for a friend or for the large audiences that come to listen when he takes the lecture platform-and can tell the nation's most eminent historians things they didn't know about the Abraham Lincoln period. During the eightythree years of his life he has laughed, sorrowed and lived fully-and at the same time has been an earnest and humble seeker of answers to questions about living which puzzle us all. Sandburg was born on a cornhusk mattress in the prairie town of Galesburg, Illinois. The town was settled by pioneers who had come overland in covered wagons through the wilderness to seek virgin land and a new life. In Ahrays The Young Strangers, an autobiographical account of his youth, Sandburg says: "Often in the 1890's I would get to thinking about what a young prairie town Galesburg was-nearly twenty thousand people, and they had all come in fifty years. Before that it was empty rolling prairie. And I would ask: Why did they come? Why couldn't they get along where they had started from? Was Galesburg any different from the many other towns, some bigger and some smaller? Did I know America, the United States, because of what I knew about Galesburg? In Sweden all the people in a town were Swedes, in England they were all English, and in Ireland all Irish. But here in Galesburg we had a few from everywhere and there had even been cases of Swedish Lutherans marrying Irish Catholic girls-and what was to come of it all? It didn't bother me nor keep me awake nights but I couldn't help thinking about it and asking: What is this America 1 am a part of, where I will soon be a full citizen and a voter? All of us are living under the American flag, the Stars and Stripes-what does it mean? Men have died for it-why? When they say it is a free country, they mean free for what and free for whom, and what is freedom? "I said I would listen and read and ask and maybe I would learn. By guessing and hoping and reaching
out I might get a hold on some of the answers. Those questions in those words may not have run through my mind yet they ran in my blood. Dark and tangled they were to run in my blood for many years. To some of the questions I would across the years get only half answers, mystery answers." Carl grew up in a family of nine persons, a poor family. His father worked long hours for a railroad company while his mother cooked and baked, washed and mended. Carl stopped school when he was thirteen years old to help earn money. He delivered newspapers, drove a milkwagon, was a porter in a barber shop. Later in his teens he rode freight trains to the west, working in wheatfields in Kansas, washing dishes in hotels in Wyoming and Nebraska. And through these years of poverty and restlessness he was absorbing, searching, learning about life. Impressions and answers to some of the questions he had been seeking took form in poetry which he began writing when he went back to school as a scholarship student in college. But Sandburg's poetry, while it sang' with the wonder of mankind and the universe, cut through any poetic pretence with thoughts and language of common people. It was unique at that time, and success came slowly. His first volume, Chicago Poems, was published when he was thirtyeight years old. Seven other books of poetry followed through the years, along with four children's books, two collections of folk songs, a novel, an autobiography, a biography of his brother-in-law Edward Steichen, and the famous the photographer; six-volume biography of Abraham Lincoln. Somewhere along the way, the idea had come to him to write about Abraham Lincoln, the man who was President of the United States during the Civil War. Sandburg had been brought up in Lincoln country. Across the street from one of Galesburg's schools was a house where Lincoln had stayed as a guest in 1858. Lincoln's home in Springfield, lllinois, was only about 160 kilometres away. Many of the men and women of Galesburg had seen or talked with the tall, thoughtful man who opposed slavery and held the union of states together during its most critical time. Sandburg describes how he started on the project to which he has devoted most of his life: "Once upon a time, 1 had a brainstorm. I decided I would write a book that kids could understand and enjoy. It dawned on me that someone ought to tell them about that strange man from the plains of Illinois named Abe Lincoln. So, I sat down and wrote the
hearts roam about him~and they half-believed him to be a tall horsechestnut tree or a rangy horse or a big wagon or a log barn full of newmown hay~something else or more than a man, a lawyer, a Republican candidate with principles, a prominent citizen~something spreading, elusive, and mysterious~the Strange Friend and the Friendly Stranger. Once at the time of the debates during the election campaign of 1858 a boy had called out, "There goes old Mr. Lincoln," and Lincoln hearing it, remarked to a friend, "They commenced it when I was scarcely thirty years old." Often when people called him "Old Abe" they meant he had the texture and quaint friendliness of old handmade Bibles, old calfskin law books, weather-beaten oak and walnut planks, or wagon axles always willing in storm or stars. Lincoln's reputation grew for honesty, kindly humour, and a firm opposition to slavery~an issue that was dividing the nation. After he was elected President of the United States, southern states withdrew from the union and civil war broke out between the north and south. One of the decisive battles occurred at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. When the battlefield was to be consecrated as a war memorial, Lincoln was asked to say a few words at its dedication. His Gettysburg Address is considered one of the great documents of American history:
Lincoln knew the moment drew near for him to speak. He took out his own manuscript from a coat pocket, put on his steel-bowed glasses, stirred in his chair, looked over the manuscript, and put it back in his pocket. The Baltimore Glee Club finished. Ward Hill Lamon rose and spoke the words "The President of the United States," who rose, and holding in one hand the two sheets of paper at which he occasionally glanced, delivered the address in his high-pitched and clear-carrying voice. The Cincinnati Commercial reporter wrote, "The President rises slowly, draws from his pocket a paper, and, when commotion subsides, in a sharp, unmusical treble voice, reads the brief and pithy remarks." Hay wrote in his diary, "The President, in a firm, free way, with more grace than is his wont, said his half dozen words of consecration." Charles Hale of the Boston Advertiser, also officially representing Governor Andrew of Massachusetts, had notebook and pencil in hand, took down the slowspoken words of the President: "Fourscore and seven years ago, our fathers brought forth upon this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. "Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation~
or any nation, so conceived and so dedicated~can long endure. "We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We are met to dedicate a portion of it as the final resting place of those who have given their lives that that nation might live. "It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this. "But, in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow, this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our power to add or to detract. "The world will very little note nor long remember what we say here; but it can never forget what they did here. "It is for us, the living, rather, to be dedicated, here, to the unfinished work that they have thus far so nobly carried on. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us; that from these honoured dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they here gave the last full measure of devotion; that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain; that the nation shall, under God, have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth." After the ceremonies, the presidential party returned to Washington:
The ride to Washington took until midnight. Lincoln was weary, talked little, stretched out on one of the side seats in the drawing room and had a wet towel laid across his eyes and forehead. He had stood that day, the world's foremost spokesman of popular government, saying that democracy was yet worth fighting for. What he meant by "a new birth of freedom" for the nation could have a thousand interpretations. The taller riddles of democracy stood up out of the address. It had the dream touch of vast and furious events epitomized for any foreteller to read what was to come. His cadences sang the ancient song that where there is freedom men have fought and sacrificed for it, and that freedom is worth men's dying for. For the first time since he became President he had on a dramatic occasion declaimed, howsoever it might be read, Jefferson's proposition which had been a slogan of the Revolutionary War~"All men are created equal"~leaving no other inference than that he regarded the Negro slave as a man. His outwardly smooth sentences were inside of them gnarled and tough with the enigmas of the American experiment. Hardly was the war won by the North and the union of states preserved before Lincoln died. He was killed on Good Friday, April 14, 1865, by a fanatic while attending a theatre performance:
The North was in grief. Everywhere the eye might turn hung the signs of this grief. The sermons, editorials, talk in streets, houses, saloons, railroad cars and streetcars, the black bunting and the crape~these were attempts to say something that could not be said. Men tried to talk about it and the words failed and they came back to silence. To say nothing was best. Lincoln was dead. Was there anything more to say? A great Friend of Man had suddenly vanished. Nothing could be done about it. Silence, grief and quiet resolves, these only were left for those who admired and loved and felt themselves close to a living presence that was one of them. Thousands on thousands would remember as long as they lived the exact place where they had been standing or seated or lying down when the news came to them, recalling precisely in details and particulars where they were and what they were doing when the dread news arrived. Hundreds of thousands there were who had been the foundation and groundwork of what he had done. These people~the basic Lincoln loyalist legion~had not words; they had only grief~sorrow beyond words. "A stricken people came to their altars." Whatever was sensitively and humanly aware wore crape, seen or unseen. Newsboys at their stands cried no headlines, handed the damp sheets from the press to the buyers, one boy noticed as he brushed with his dirty hand the tears from his dirty cheeks. In a home at Huntington, Long Island, a mother and son, Walt Whitman, heard the news early in the morning, sat at breakfast and ate nothing, sat at other meals during the day and ate nothing, silently passed newspaper extras to each other during the day and said little, the son deciding that as long as he lived he would on April 14 have sprigs of lilac in his room and keep it as a holy day for a man he later characterized as "the grandest figure on the crowded canvas of the drama of the nineteenth century." Many of those who mourned knew there were times when with nothing to say, he said nothing, slept not at all, and wept at those times in a way that made weeping appropriate, decent, majestic. Now Father Abraham was gone. Old Abe~there would be no more stories about him alive there in the White House in Washington. They had saved the newspapers or they had clipped from the paper such pieces as the Gettysburg speech. Now the newspapers had black borders, on the front-page columns. Now there was a memory to keep. That was left-the life he had lived~the meanings and the lights of that life. This could not be taken away.â&#x20AC;˘
The Prime Minister visited the American Pavilion and the SPAN booth
Vice-President Radhakrishnan, above left, is escorted through the pavilion by Howard Messmore, manager of the U.S. exhibit. Large crowds collected for demonstrations of the Aeromobile, a vehicle with no wheels which rides on a cushion of air. A big fork-lift in action viewed from the top of the li/t.
IN
1933, when Arthur A. Houghton, great-grandson of the founder of Corning Glass Works in Corning, New York, established the company's Steuben Division, it was his conviction that in a machine age the creative artist and skilled handcraftsman can 3till hold an honoured place. Upholding his belief, Steuben glass has since achieved world-wide recognition by virtue of its superb quality, design and craftsmanship. A scholar of the arts, Mr. Houghton declared his intention to show the possibilities of crystal as an art form. He decided design must indicate the course Steuben glass was to follow. For material, he had a sparkling, colourless, heavy lead crystal of matchless purity that the Corning parent company had just developed. span
February 1962
31
Taking advantage of the crystal's intrinsic qualities, the first Steuben designs stressed simplicity of form, reflecting the fluid lines characteristic of the molten material. This same sophisticated simplicity is seen in today's Steuben, but much of it is now adorned with "laid-on" decoration, or embellished with exquisite copper-wheel engravings.
A Steuben craftsman engraves the design of Khajuraho Temple by Indian artist, K. S. Kulkarni.
Both the shape and the decoration of a piece of Steuben originate on the drawing board, sometimes as the work of one man, sometimes the result of the co-ordinated efforts of two artists. So that the artists may benefit from the cultural advantage of a metropolis, the design department is located in New York City, more than 200 miles from the factory at Corning. "Creating in glass," according to Steuben's President Houghton, "is quite different from creating in any other way, because the artist can't itself. The work in the medium sculptor and the painter have direct contact with their media and, to some extent, can rectify their errors as they work. It would be almost impossible to be truly creative in glass, because one is working against time with hot glass. The glass artist, therefore, is totally dependent upon the craftsman's skill in executing his creation." Since 1951, when the Corning Glass Centre was opened, millions of tourists from the United States and other countries have journeyed to Corning to visit the museum, where
the history and uses of glass are presented in elaborate exhibits, and the Steuben factory, where they may watch the craftsman's skill in action. The tools of the craftsmen in the blowing room are the flowing-iron, the pontil (fashioning) rod, and a few simple implements. They work as a team, skilfully interpreting every nuance of the artist's design, creating with little but their breath and their hands the thing of beauty which the artist visualized. In contrast to the activity of the blowing room, ,the pace of work in the engraving¡ department is quiet and slow. Working at their lathes, the master engravers display an uncanny sensitivity of touch and execute each stroke of the artist's drawing with exactly the right amount of pressure. In their job, there is virtually no margin for error. It's comparable to diamond cutting. Once the cut has been made, there's no turning back. Every finished piece of Steuben crystal undergoes a rigorous inspection and must meet the highest standards of material, workmanship, and design. If found lacking in any of these respects, it is destroyed. Each perfect piece is signed with a diamond point.
Only four years after the Steuben style was developed, it won recognition as an art form by winning a Gold Medal at the Paris Exposition. Awards from both the San Francisco and ew York World's Fairs followed. In 1951, the American Institute of Architects for the first time honoured a U.S. corporation by presenting its Citation of Honour to Steuben Glass "in appreciation of the splendid workmanship of its products and especially in recognition of the co-operation developed by the corporation between artist and artisan to create in glass of extraordinary quality objects of fine art and unique beauty: objects worthy of representing to the world American ideals of creative craftsmanship." The same co-operation which unites artist and craftsman serves to blend the work of the engraving designer and the creator of the glass form. For, exploring new possibilities in the medium, Steuben sometimes reaches outside its own corps of highly competent and well-recognized designers. In 1940, for instance, the company commissioned 27 leading painters, sculptors, and designers of the United States and Europe to execute drawings for copper-wheel engraving. The work of such masters as Henri Matisse, Salvador Dali, AristideMaillol.Eric Gill, Duncan Grant, Paul Manship and Grant Wood was executed on appropriate glass forms devised by Steuben designers, working in collaboration with the artists. Later, Steuben commissioned 20 British artists for a similar co-operative venture, among them Sir Jacob Epstein, Oliver Messel, Sir Muirhead Bone, Graham Sutherland, Sir Matthew Smith, and John Piper. And, a few years ago, the company obtained drawings from contemporary artist s in sixteen Asian countries, planned especially for rendition in the medium of crystal. Though separa ted from the artists by thousands of miles, the American designers sought to capture the mood of the original drawings in creating the glass shapes for the engravings. Skilfully executed by American artisans, the pieces formed the exhibition collection known as "Asian Artists in Crystal." It was sent on tour through Asia and exhibited also in leading cities of the United States. Everywhere, the exhibition was enthusiastically received.
Since 1942, when President and Mrs. Roosevelt presented "The Bowl of the Legends" to the Shah of Iran, Steuben's presentation pieces have frequently been chosen as gifts of state. "The Bowl of the Legends" was designed by the distinguished U.S. sculptor Sidney Waugh. It is engraved with vivid figures from favourite tales in American folklore. The brilliant, flawless crystal is a perfect foil for designs appropriate to any occasion. "The Queen's Cup," designed by Bruce Moore, commemorates the first English settlement in America, at Jamestown, Virginia, in 1607. The cup was the gift of President and Mrs. Eisenhower to Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, on the occasion of their visit to the United States.
For the wedding of the Crown Prince of Japan, the Eisenhowers sent "The Rose Bowl," a covered bowl of great elegance with a formal floral design created by Don Wier. The beauty of Steuben glass is not enjoyed only by dignitaries. Ninetyfive per cent of the output-ranging from a small ash tray to a semiabstract sculpture carved from a solid block of crystal-is sold in twenty stores across the United States to the American people for their own use or for gifts to friends. And in the New York store, located in Corning's own glass skyscraper office building on Fifth Avenue, there is a special gallery where art enthusiasts may view duplicates of many of the magnificent presentation and exhibition pieces.â&#x20AC;˘
Home science students conduct a class among women of neighbouring village.
organized research for developing a dairy herd suited to Indian conditions. Over the years research has been carried on at the institute on cross breeding Red Sindhi cattle with Jersey, to obtain increased milk production. Another landmark was reached in 1942when a course in agricultural engineering was inaugurated-the only such course offered by any Indian university. Better farm tools and implements, Higginbottom believed, were at the very foundation of improved agriculture in India. In this wing of the institute improved farm implements are designed, manufactured and demonstrated. Indian rural women also received Higginbottom's attention. His knowledge of this section of the Indian peasantry was to a great extent acquired through his wife Ethel, who helped organize training of young women in home economics. This study, introduced in 1936, was recognized for the Intermediate examination of Allahabad University in the early 1940's, and has recently been raised to the degree standard. AFTER seeing the institute on a sound footing and well on its way, Higginbottom retired in 1944, at the age of seventy. For him the institute was never fully developed. Almost every year in his talk to the assembly of students and staff, Higginbottom would say, "Gentlemen, when you look out across the campus of the institute, you see what is here. When I look out across the campus I see what is not yet here." Then he would go on to outline some of the tasks he hoped the institute might tackle in the future. And about the future he was always very eager. As Dr. J. N. Warner, of the institute's Department of Dairy Technology, recalls: "Dr. Sam Higginbottom was an impatient person. He did not let any petty little procedure hinder his way." Dr. Warner remembers one
of Higginbottom's mottos: "Modesty is all right until it interferes with your usefulness." Dr. Higginbottom was equally impatient to see India prosperous. "I am anxious," he said early in the 1920's, "to see the day when India shall take her proper place as one of the great self-governing peoples of the world." He was optimistic about this country's future and his optimism was based on historical observation: "There are great isolated landmarks in Indian history where an Indian had a fair chance and where he has made use of his chance. The results are part of the precious heritage of all men everywhere .... India's future can be richer than India's past. I am always brooding over ways and means of avoiding this fearful waste of human life, of transforming it into a positive asset to enrich the world." Higginbottom returned to the United States in 1945 and lived to see India achieve independence and take her place in the community of nations. He watched with great interest and satisfaction this country's development programmes and the priarity given to agricultural development in the First Five Year Plan. He continued to raise funds for the institute and gave it his best till he died on June 11, 1958. Paying a tribute to this "Farmer Extraordinary," Dr. Shri Rajan, Vice-Chancellor, Allahabad University, said: "Dr. Higginbottom was not an individual but an institution in the social and educational life of Uttar Pradesh for nearly four decades .... He worked with real missionary zeal and through teaching and other activities he tried to imbue moral stamina, integrity and unselfish idealism in his students .... "He is no longer with us but the message he has left will continue to inspire generations yet unborn. India will enshrine his memory as a great pioneer in the development of Indian agriculture .... ".
span
February 1962
39
saturn This barge was especially built to transport the Saturn engine from Alabama to Cape Canaveral, Florida.
THE remarkable successes achieved in exploration of space during the past four years have added much to man's knowledge of his space environment. But there are no limits to human curiosity or aspiration and, ultimately, it is man's eternal urge to explore new worlds which makes the steady progress of space research the most exciting enterprise of our epoch. Seldom has human imagination been more vividly stimulated than by the prospect that man in this generation wi11likely land on the moon. The latest American success in this great adventure was the successful launching of the 162-foot high Saturn rocket from Cape Canaveral, Florida, at the end of October 1961. Propelled by an eight-engine power plant, the giant rocket attained a peak speed of 3,700 miles an hour and a height of 90 miles before it plunged into the Atlantic Ocean about 200 miles away from the launching site. Its engines built up a combined colossal thrust of 1.3 million pounds, equivalent to 30 million H.P., in the incredibly short time of 1.4 seconds. The Saturn rocket is constructed on the building block principle. The model first tested consisted of three parts or stages. The flight was a test of the first stage only, the two upper "dummy" stages being filled with 23,000 gallons of water to simulate the weight of the rocket in its operational phase.
Each of the engines in Saturn's cluster of eight isJike the one in the foreground.
WORK-HORSE OF SPACE
saturn
(Continued)
The mighty Saturn blasts off, le/r, in her first test flight. The Launch Control Centre, right, houses control panels and the space technicians, below, who fire the rockets, track their /lights and record their peljormances.
During its eight-minute flight the rocket consumed 300 tons of liquid fuel. It radioed to the control room at Cape Canaveral as many as 510 items of information regarding its own performance. In keeping with traditional American policy, there was no secrecy about the flight and over a hundred newsmen, assembled at the Cape, relayed accounts of the launching to newspapers around the world. President Kennedy and millions of Americans watched it on television. The Saturn Rocket Project of the United States National Aeronautics and Space Administration was started in 1958 at Marshall Space Flight Centre, Huntsville, Alabama, under the direction of Dr. Wernher von Braun. The Gctocer flight marked
a new era in space research as the Saturn represents a fourfold power increase over any U.S. rocket launched previously. The next phase of the project, now under development, aims at a rocket 40 feet long with a 90,000pound thrust, and the third at a 29foot long rocket with a thrust of 30,000 pounds. Nine more test flights are planned, some with "live" upper stages, before the end of 1964 when Saturn is expected to become fully operational. Dr. von Braun describes the huge Saturn rocket as "the heavy workhorse of United States space vehicles." It will ultimately be used to place many tons of payload in Earth orbits and, according to present plans, to send a three-man space-ship to the moon by 1970 .â&#x20AC;˘
Armchair
New Englanders
Perspective
and India
REVIEWING recently a batch of miscellaneous notes on Indian-American literary relationships, I have been impressed by an odd circumstance which presents a challenge to one's fancy for speculative adventure: a preponderance -of Americans who have interested themselves in the religion and philosophy of India have had their roots and sustenance in the rocky soil of New England. Historically, with very few exceptions, the Midwest, the South, the Middle Atlantic and the Far West, which are the other great cultural regions of my country, have produced men of letters wedded to other and more national matters. Let us recall a few of the eminent men whose origin and interests seem to support my thesis: Emerson and Thoreau, of course, were the epitome of Transcendentalist New England; their Indian inspiration is apparent. Lesser lights of the time and the place-Amos Bronson Alcott, James Freeman Clarke, Whittier and others were appreciative ofIndian philosophy. Both Edward Salisbury and William Dwight Whitney, America's first outstanding Sanskrit scholars, were dyed-in-the-wool New Englanders. Many others we could mention, but Edward Washburn Hopkins (1857-1932), Whitney's successor in the famous Yale University Professorship of Sanskrit and Comparative Philology, is an almost perfect example of the New England Yankee who excelled in Indic studies. Born in Massachusetts, he was a seventh-generation descendant of a notably religious family which had settled in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1634. On both his maternal and paternal sides he could point to renowned New England relatives, such as the theologians Jonathan Edwards and Samuel Hopkins. After studying at Columbia University, Berlin and Leipzig and receiving his Ph.D. degree in Sanskrit, Edward Hopkins became Professor of Sanskrit at Bryn Mawr College and later at Yale. While his contribution to erudite literary and linguistic studies was considerable, he distinguished himself especially as a student and expositor of India's religions. His book, The Religions of India (1895) was for many years the only comprehensive
\ and authoritative guide to the subject available to Americans. The companion work, Ethics of India (1924) won him critical praise, but his Origin and Evolution of Religion, published in 1923, had great popular appeal and became a "best-seller," a fact which paid unusual tribute to a scholar, and a student of recondite Indian lore at that. How can one explain that Hopkins and so many sturdy New Englanders before him were peculiarly drawn to the magnet of India? One man's guess is as good as another's, I suppose, and I will hazard a few conjectures. One factor of real significance doubtless was the early and frequent contact through trade between the ports of New England and India. There is little doubt that those literate and often very devout sea-captains brought back to their stern home-land ideas as well as cloth and spices. In the second place, New England was for several centuries a land of religion par excellence. It was largely settled by various and earnest sects arising from the Protestant Reformation and for years the New England colonies were in effect theocracies. Religion and theological controversies were as much a part of their daily lives as was the raising of maize or the sailing of fishing boats. It is not strange that they interested themselves in a culture as impregnated with religion as the Indian. Lastly, their religion was a particularly austere and ascetic -kind. The philosophy and ethics of Hinduism, therefore, must have struck a responsive chord in them, even though they looked askance at the "strange" rituals of Indian religion. The apparent paradox of Yankees from New England, Christians of a terribly serious sort, contenders against the Devil and a cruel and rigorous climate, living over ten thousand miles from the Ganges-the paradox of these men devoting their minds and hearts to studying a language and a philosophy which grew in the sun-drenched plains of ancient India-is not really a paradox: in all climes and lands the hearts of men of goodwill hunger after truth and will search for it..
TEEN-AGE baby-sitter reads to high-spirited charge.
HALF of America's teen-age girls and a quarter of the boys are babysitters, which means that they are available to care for children while the parents are away, at fees averaging seventy-five cents an hour. That seventy-five cents, multiplied by many hours, is one of the factors making this group the potent economic force it is, with billions of dollars passing through its hands yearly. About a third of the total amount American young people earn comes from sitting and other part-time jobs they hold after school, and the other two-thirds is in the form of regular allowances from their parents, who pretty generally agree that a teen-ager should have a fixed amount of money for his own expenses and be able to spend it as he sees fit.
TEEN-AGE
ECONOMICS
Size of the teen-age allowance varies widely in different homes, partly because it is sometimes meant to cover basic needs such as school lunches and bus fares, while in other families is intended only for incidentals and luxuries. One big area of similarity is that the recipients would like it to be larger, and the donors, smaller. Part-time jobs that help to close the gap are often the teen-agers' first venture into the business community, and prepare them for adult responsibilities. As a rule, both allowance and earnings increase with age.
THE VARIABLE INCOME of this I7-year-old comes from a weekly family allowance and car-washing profits.
GIRLS LEARN baby-sitting skills in a child care class.
ONE 13-YEAR-OLD augments his allowance by weaving and selling potholders.
HIS EARNINGS at baby-sitting maintain his automobile.
AS CHECK-OUT CLERK in a supermarket, this teen-ager eams ten dollars on weekends.
THIS HIGH-SCHOOL lad makes a dollar a week driving friends to school in his old model automobile.
Since the decisions are theirs to make, most teen-agers pay careful attention to where the¡ money goes, and weigh favourite luxuries against fixed needs before spending. As a rule, girls spend more on clothing and grooming; boys more on entertainment and snacks, absorbing some of these costs for girls on dates .â&#x20AC;˘
SATURDAY EVENING date costs l7-year-old boy one-fourth of his weekly income.
IN EARLY TEENS, girls pay own way to movies, boys buy popcom for both of them.
TEEN-AGE ECONOMICS
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GIRLS Bo WL one night each week, find group rates cheaper.
SANTOSH
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But Santosh thought of his drawing seriously only after his nl'ltriculation in 1945, when, on the death of his father, he had to give up studies. Forced to earn his living, he took such odd jobs as silk-weaving, sign painting, and even white-washing walls when occasion demanded. Finally he drifted into the papier-mache art which has, perhaps, contributed a great deal to his present technique. At the age of twenty-one, Santosh had already won recognition as a promising painter and began at about that time to devote all his energies to painting, experimenting and exhibiting his works in various national exhibitions. In 1954 he was sent to Baroda on a Government of India Cultural Scholarship to study under Professor N. S. Bendre. The. more important of Santosh's one-man shows have taken place since 1957, every year and every new canvas showing him gathering more and more confidence in himself and perfecting his style bit by bit and step by step. Especially during the past year Santosh has taken markedly rapid strides towards complete mastery of his medium of expression. One can readily discern the evolution of a gem-like, iridescent quality in his colours and a very pleasing density in his technique. His palette is brilliant but economical and to the point, and the texture of his surfaces excites a desire to touch and feel his canvases. His paintings-stray themes of music from another world, a world of coloured crystals and blurry motion, a gossamer of mingled a world seen by Santosh-weave fantasy and suggested fact. He is most successful and creates the most vivid impact when he expresses himself in thick, black, diffused strokes which hide myriads of scintillating sparks of under-colour in their depths. There is one thing Santosh leaves to be desired, though: a further perfection of variety of content and composition. Santosh has no profound message for the world, no inner anguish to expose on canvas, no revolution to bring about. His is a more joyful perception of shimmering lights and staccato melodies, which he offers in prolific abundance to the beholder of his work .â&#x20AC;˘