SPAN: February 1971

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Garuda, the first of seven Boeing 737s, above, landed in New Delhi last December. With all seven craft scheduled to be in operation in April, the Indian Airlines' passenger capacity is expected to expand by 50 per cent. These new jet planes, the most modern in operation for short-haul passenger service, offer intercontinental liner comfort, speed and economy.

Apollo-14 Commander Alan B. Shepard, left, wears a newlydesigned helmet with a better visor for viewing and sun protection. A metal plate protects the astronaut's head as he leaves and enters the spacecraft. A 35mm stereo camera is attached to the chest of his moon suit to photograph lunar rock samples. Scientists believe that in the Apollo-14landing area of the Fra Mauro region lie some of the oldest rocks in the solar system.

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U.S. President Richard M. Nixon, below, announces that America's Gross National Product, the total value of all goods and services produced in the United States in a year, attained the $1,000billion mark last December. He said that coming generations will judge the American economy not only by its size, but also by its increased investment in human values.

Front cover Like a rocket poised for flight is the Washington Monument at dusk, in the capital named for the father of his nation. A trail of historic landmarks rich in the Washington heritage is described on pp. 44-48.

Back cover Perched on stilts, this model of a student hostel was designed and built at the National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad. For a story on the Institute, turn to page 20.

Photograph by Avinash Pasricha.

Editorial Staff: Carmen Kagal, Avinash Pasricha, Nirmal K. Sharma, Krishan G. Gabrani, P.R. Gupta. Art Staff: B. Roy Choudhury, Nand K. Katyal, Kanti Roy, Kuldip Singh Jus, Gopi Gajwani. Production Staff> Awtar S. Marwaha, Mammen Philip. Photographic Services: USIS Photo Lab. Published by the United States Information Service, Bahawalpur House, Sikandra Road, New Delhi, on behalf of the American Embassy, New Delhi. Printed by Arun K. Mehta at Vakil & Sons Private Limited, Vakils House, Sprott Road, 18 Ballard Estate, Bombay-I. Manuscripts and photographs sent for publication must be accompanied by s.tamped, self-addressed envelope for return. SPAN is not responsible for any loss in transit. Use of SPAN articles in other publications is encouraged except when they are copyrighted. For details, write to the Editor, SPAN. Subscription: One year, rupees five; single copy, fifty paise. Inasmuch as we are currently oversubscribed for SPAN, we regret that it will not be possible to accept any more subscriptions for the time being. For change of address, send old address from a recent SPAN envelope along with new address to A.K. Mitra, Circulation Manager. Allow six weeks for change of address to become effective.

BoUnly from Ihe land AMERICAN

AGRICULTURE

COMES OF AGE

S:c. b - 73.J "The story of American food production is particularly significant now, when the gap between developed and developing countries shows greater promise of narrowing than ever before .... Each country, to be sure, must choose its own path to plenty; the United States does not pretend to hold the final answer to any other nation's farm problems. Yet the American food story is pertinent.

For it is, after all, simply the story of how one underdeveloped country used its resources to achieve a productive role in the world community of nations."

-CLIFFORD M. HARDIN U.S. Secretary of Agriculture (1970)

This golden sea of wheat, stretching as far as the eye can reach, is characteristic of the richness of American agricultural production.

Photo: Bob and Ira Spring

PrOgreSSlhrOughlheyearS A HU DRED YEARS AGO, America was a land of farms and ranches and 70 per cent of the people earned their livelihood through agriculture. Today, fewer than three million farmers produce enough food and fibre for more than 200 million persons in the United States and other millions overseas.

America's farm abundance stems from scientific research and a refined agricultural technology. But it is also the result of enlightened government action-plus the farmer's faith in himself and in the land.

During the 19th century, the U.S. Congress passed several laws that were to become milestones in the history of American agriculture. The Homestead Act opened half a continent to the plough by making free land available to masses of people.

The Morrill Act established the "Iandgrant" colleges, and the Hatch Act provided funds to set up a vast network of agricultural experiment stations. By the end of the century, a solid basis had been laid for the development of farm technology. The modernization of agriculture was under way.

But it is during the 50 years since World War I that American agriculture has registered its really spectacular advance. Consider the rise in productivity.

A typical American farmer in the early 1920s grew enough food for himself and seven other persons. In 1945, the farm worker fed 16 persons. And by 1970, he was providing for himself and 48 others.

Once again, part of the progress flowed from legislation. Farmers had been clamouring for a country-wide system through which the knowledge born of research could be channelled to them quickly on their farms. This led to the founding in 1914 of the Co-operative Extension Service, which is operated jointly by the Federal Government and the States. The field representative of the service, known as the County Agent, is the ..human link between the research laboratory and the farmer.

It is largely through his efforts that virtually every technical innovation of value is brought to the farmer's doorstep quickly, almost automatically.

The lean depression years of the 1930s

brought a number of far-reaching economic reforms in which the Federal Government played a major role. Credit was extended to farmers at low interest rates, and the prices of certain products for which there was no ready market was supported by government subsidies. The depression years also awakened the American public to the tragic waste of the country's natural resources.

Massive projects to rehabilitate the land were started in the middle 1930s. One of these was an extensive programme of reforestation. A Soil Conservation Service was set up to demonstrate such practices as terracing hillsides, contour ploughing, re-seeding pastures and ranges, and levelling and draining land. Today, the U.S. Department of Agriculture not only gives technical help in conservation but also extends financial aid through some 3,000 locally-governed conservation districts.

As in many countries including India, irrigation has greatly extended the amount of arable land in the United States. At present, more than 16 million hectares are watered artificially. Vast reclamation projects salvage many more millions of hectares; and a Federal programme of flood control and water conservation has erected immense dams in many parts of the country.

One of the most celebrated river-basin developments in the United States is the Tennessee Valley Authority (TV A), begun in 1933. By making the river navigable for a greater distance, by controlling its raging floods and harnessing its power to produce cheap electricity, the TV A has lifted millions of people from poverty to prosperity.

Electrification of rural areas-making rapid progress in India-is important to agricultural development and to modernization in general. In America in 1933, only one farm in ten had electricity; today more than 98 per cent are electrified. It is estimated that the use of electric power in rural U.S. communities has increased eightfold since 1940, and that farmers now use electricity to perform some 500 tasks once done by, hand.

But American agriculture's great spurt

forward came after 1940 with the increase in crop yields. Grain production per hectare had remained essentially unchanged throughout the whole 75-year period from the end of the American Civil War to the outbreak of World War II. But from 1940 to 1970 yields doubled, representing an average annual increase of about 32 kilograms per hectare.

One of the leading factors responsible for the increase was the development and effective use of chemical fertilizers. Greater yields were also achieved by the planting of varieties of grain particularly suited to the soil and climate of a given region.

Other stimulants to high productivity in- ~ cluded pesticides, improved seeds and.] good irrigation. :a While all these elements were raising E â&#x20AC;˘â&#x20AC;˘ yields per hectare, machinery was being ~ used to increase output per man-hour of ~ labour. Farm machinery alone does not .~ necessarily produce greater yields; it often ~ results in smaller yields per hectare than <:; '0 cultivation with simple implements op- is: erated by human or animal power. But by using tractors and other machines the individual worker's productive potential is multiplied and a large tract can be farmed by fewer men. Machines also help farmers to do timely, rapid planting, cultivating and harvesting.

Thus the total output of grains and other crops in America has been increased by a combination of practices. Mechanization was important in a country with ample reserves of arable land and a thriving industry to absorb excess farm workers. But the phenomenal rise in yields has resulted primarily from the steady advance of the agricultural sciences.

Wisconsin farming offers a notable example of modern conservation practices.

Contour ploughing and planting-a conservation technique-is carried out in this scenic Wisconsin town, right. Fighting pests by plane is another modern farm practice; above right, cotton fields are sprayed from the air.

Farming IOday As

MODERNIZATION

IN-

the number of farms in the United States decreases-from 6.8 million in 1935 to ,less than three million today. But food supplies continue to rise, along with demand.

Farms tend to become larger and more specialized; there are even a few "factory-farms" which employ several dozen to several hundred persons.

The family-type farm, on which the farmer and his family provide most of the labour, still dominates U.S. agriculture.

The head of the household, more often than not, is both operator and owner; and nearly 83 per cent of all American farms are owned, in whole or in part, by the men who work them.

The farmer shares with urban Americans most of the conveniences of modern living.

And automobiles, together with today's hard-surface roads, have ended his isolation from his rural neighbour as well as from the city dweller.

While the farms of America vary tremendously in size, the average holding is 153 hectares. Using machines, a family can cultivate this much land with little or no hired help. However, the farmer does not lack advice or assistance when he needs them. If his land is swampy, he can have it drained with the help of an expert from his state conservation district. If his soil is eroding, the district will often provide equipment to terrace steep slopes.

The farmer's most frequent counsellor, of course, is the County Agent. But he is also assisted by makers of farm machinery and large producers of seed who employ men to help farmers keep abreast of the latest developments in agriculture.

By taking advantage of such aid, American farmers are reaping bumper harvests CREASES,

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arms have tended to become fewer -though those remaining are larger and more productive-as mechanization has advanced. _']JIisKansas farmer waits for a combine to add to the load of grain in his waiting truck.

of the leading U.S. crops-maize, wheat, grain sorghums, hay, soyabeans, cotton and tobacco. Livestock and poultry production have reached record highs, and total milk output has been rising, though the number of cows has been shrinking.

Cotton, the "king of fibres," occupies a special place in American agriculture. The United States has long been theworld'sleading producer, and now accounts for about a third of the total production. The annual figure is some 11 million tons, an output achieved through high-quality seed, chemicals, insecticides and mechanical pickers.

The U.S. cotton and wool markets have both been affected by inroads from such

man-made fibres as rayon and nylon. But since 1959, when wrinkle-resistant cotton fabrics and shrink-proof woollens became available,_they reclaimed some of the ground lost to synthetics.

This is one of the achievements of "utilization research" -the study of the physical, chemical, and nutritional properties of farm products with a view to improving them or making new products from them.

The castor bean offers another example of successful utilization research. Today, its ill-tasting oil is used not only as a medicine, but also as an important ingredient in cosmetics, paints, varnishes, fungicides and lubricants for high-speed engines.

Over the years, millions of dollars have gone into agricultural research; but it has paid for itself many times over. Since the 1950s, the individual farm worker's average productivity has shot up 5.2 per cent annually. And today the American farmer ~ finds that a single hour's work produces more than six times as much as itdid in 1920.

Science and farming A ~IACHINE that picks grapefruit by acting like a man-made hurricane, planes that plant rice from the air, safe irradiation techniques that combat insect plagues or preserve food, chemicals that kill weeds and eliminate the need for ploughingthese are but a few of the astonishing contributions made by science and technology to agriculture.

From laboratories and experiment stations scattered across the United States, each day brings news of even more surprising developments resulting from the efforts of vast numbers of agricultural chemists, biologists, engineers and technicians.

Chemistry's contribution to U.S. fann. ing is enormous. One of its most significant discoveries came in 1943, when-America'n scientists adapted as an insecticide the German discovery DDT. This compound opened up a new era of organic insecticides.

But these insecticides presented some dangers and insects developed a resistance to them. So chemists again took the offensive against nature's guerrilla warriors by developing another class of chemical weapons, and the war was waged anew.

Fumigants, another product of chemistry, can destroy pests in the soil before they have time to eat plant roots. They can also protect crops in storage. Every effort is made in the United States to make sure that these chemicals cause no harm to humans. Because of this, every pesticide must meet strict requirements for safety and effectiveness before it is registered.

An alternative to the use of insecticides is to eliminate pests by interfering with their ability to multiply. Gamma radiation or chemical sex attractants, combined with sterilizing agents, are used to render some insects sterile and thereby reduce their numbers. Chemical attracting agents are used to induce female insects to lay their eggs in an environment where the hatching young will find nothing to eat.

An advance of major importance was the discovery by scientists of a way to use the nitrogen in the air to make fertilizers rich in nitrogen, one of the principal nutrients essential t~ plant growth. This is signifieant because use of commercial fertilizers has risen more than 350 per cent since the 1940s. Today ammonia derivatives like urea and ammonium nitrate are

widely used as a source of nitrogen. And several secondary nutrients like calcium, sulphur and magnesium are sometimes added to the soil to release other nutrients unavailable to the growing plant.

While chemists have been busy developing new fertilizers and pesticides, physicists and engineers have been inventing an array of new tools and machinery to lighten the farmer's toil. Among the most sophisticated of these is a whirlwind grapefruit picker.

This has a blower mounted on a platform behind a tractor which sends out air gusts strong enough to shake the limbs of the tree and snap the grapefruit stems. Another machine functions as a mobile packing plant, rumbling over several rows of carrots at a time and leaving a neatly packaged crop in its wake.

One of the most thoroughly mechanized of all U.S. crops is rice, which is planted from the air on some large rice farms. Once the fields are flooded and ready for sowing, the plane takes off, loaded with wet seed.

The pilot descends to an altitude of only 7-1/2 metres, and releases some of the seed on a strip about 9 metres wide. As he turns at the end of each strip, two flagmen on the ground show him where the next run should be made. From time to time, the pilot returns to feed the fields with fertilizer and to spray them with insecticide. Later the fields are drained of water and harvesting is done with half a dozen combines working together.

An extremely important development of recent years is the growing use of radioisotopes in agricultural research. Radioactive tracers-so called because their course can be followed in plants and animalshave shown that the foliage of plants can take in nutrients just as do roots. Tracer studies also are clarifying the whole amazing process of photosynthesis, by which green plants use the sun's energy to make carbohydrates from carbon dioxide and water. They are furnishing clues to selective livestock breeding and are being used in studies of the pests against which chemical sprays are used, as well as the predators that feed on the pests.

The rays given off by the isotopes can cause mutations in any living thing, and while most of these changes are harmful, some are good. By working with the bene-

The Machine Age has reached out to farms across America, including the island state of Hawaii. A mechanical truckloader helps Hawaii farmhands pick pineapples.

ficial changes, breeders have been improving a number of crops. Irradiation can also help combat insect plagues.

Meanwhile, other modern techniques that far antedate the use of radioisotopes continue to yield results. Hybridization, for example, has worked wonders with many plants. The new hybrid seed varieties have been made resistant to some diseases .and have even been adapted to new soils and climates.

Some crops are also being "fitted" to mechanical cultivation. Where a natural crop resists harvesting by machines, plant breeders have been putting genetics to work to alter nature. Tomatoes, for instance, are difficult to handle by machinery because of their roundness, softness and varying ripening times. But now scientists have developed sausage-shaped tomatoes suitable for canning and have devised a special machine to gather them.

What new "miracles" lie in the future?

For one thing, American laboratories are trying to find more effective chemical regulators to start, hasten, or slow down plant growth at will. If these efforts succeed, farmers may some day be able to harvest their crops at times of seasonal shortages. Some day, too, it may be possible by means of chemicals to lessen the water needs of plants, increase their tolerance to salt, and extend harvest periods. continued

Co-operation among farmers has been a key factor in making possible the prodigious quantities of food-grains America grows.

One state alone-Kansas-produces 200 million bushels of wheat annually. Each year approximately 12 per cent of the harvest is stored in the huge grain elevators seen rising from the prairie, above. Another major factor in the phenomenal growth of u.s. agriculture has been wide-ranging scientific research, which helps produce improved varieties of crops like rice, right, and peas. Typical is the work of researcher Marilyn Funk, who carries out experiments on the crossbreeding of dry peas in a government laboratory, far right.

co-operation among farmers FORAMERICA'Spioneer farmers, survival in the wilderness meant banding together for mutual aid. And the early settlers helped one another to build houses and barns, to plant and reap crops. Farmers, therefore, were among the first Americans to organize for their common benefit.

Since their livelihood depended on selling their produce, farmers began early in the 19th century to form marketing cooperatives. Other co-ops provided financial protection against fires, floods and other calamities. Still others were set up to buy seed, equipment and supplies at lower . prices than individual farmers could get.

In recent years, co-operatives have grown in power and significance in America's agricultural sector. Today, farmers market about one-fourth of their products and obtain about one-fifth of their supplies through co-operatives. In addition, today's co-operatives are: *Working closely with research agencies to utilize most effectively plant foods, animal feeds and insecticides. *Providing artificial breeding services to cattle raisers and dairymen. *Assisting farmers in earning extra in-

come by making part of their land, including lakes and woods, available as recreation areas. *Helping develop better crops and setting standards of quality for products marketed through co-operatives.

Less direct than co-operatives in their economic impact but also important to the farmer's welfare are the national farmers' organizations. The four major bodies are the National Grange, begun in 1867, which now has a membership of 800,000; the American Farm Bureau Federation, with some 1,600,000 members; the National Farmers' Union, founded in 1902, and now comprising 250,000 farmers; and the 200,OOO-member National Farmers' Organization, which is the newest of the four associations.

These organizations have a number of interests and goals, including the negotiation of contracts between farmers and food processors and the fostering of good relations between the government and the farmer. Whatever the differences of opinion concerning the degree of government intervention in the farmer's economic life, one important type of Federal aid to agri-

culture has been generally accepted for half a century: the farm credit system.

In 1916, the U.S. Congress created 12 Federal "land banks" and local land-bank associations through which loans to farmers would be made at moderate interest charges. A system of i2 intermediate credit banks was instituted in 1923 to provide the kind of credit that would enable a farmer to buy the seed and supplies he needed or that would serve as a kind of advance payment on a crop. The Farm Credit Act of 1933 authorized the intermediate credit banks to make low-cost money available to co-operatives known as P;,oduction Credit Associations (PCAs). Such PCA loans would help farmers finance the planting and harvesting of their crops and would also help stockmen raise and market their animals.

Eventually government funds invested in the PCAs were replaced by money invested by the members of these co-operatives, and today the associations are owned by the people who use them. Here, as in other forms of farm credit, the national government exercises 110 control except to see that the associations are properly run.

World trade and aid DESPITETHEgreat volume of food and fibre produced in the United States, it imports farm products from about 150 countries.

As an importer it ranks third, with Britain first and the Federal Republic of Germany second.

As an exporter of farm products, the United States leads the world; it harvests one out of every four of its cultivated hectares for export, the output of more than 25 million hectares moving overseas each year. But exports represent only one side of the picture.

In 1954 the United States responded to the growing gulf between its own agricultural producing capacity and inade-

quate food supplies in more than 100 countries by launching a programme of food and fibre shipments abroad. The PL-480 Food for Peace Programme provided such essentials as wheat, rice, milk, fats and edible oils either free of charge or on special terms that the developing countries would be able to fulfil.

By 1970 more than 200 million metric tons of food had been shipped abroad under the Food for Peace Programme and more than 100 million people were enjoying its benefits.

The programme has the long-range goal of using America's agricultural productivity to help people in developing

countries become self-sustaining. Recently new emphasis has been given the self-help principle among recipient nations and new efforts are being made to combat malnutrition.

The struggle to keep the world's food supply abreast of its rapidly mounting population has assumed alarming dimensions today. But, as Orville L. Freeman, former U.S. Secretary of Agriculture, said: "The initiative of free men, the application of science and the adoption of new technology have made it possible for the first time in man's history to say that it lies within man's power to banish hunger from the earth." (continued)

Sharing Skills SUCCESSIN AGRICULTURE is the bedrock on . which any nation's overall economic development must rest. This fact is underscored by the practices of the United Nations: in addition to the extensive work being done by the Food and Agriculture Organization, 25 per cent of the U.N. Technical Assistance Programme and 40 per cent of the projects carried out under the U.N. Special Fund are in the domain of food and farming.

The United States, too, is sharing not only its food, but also its agricultural "know-how."

Large-scale programmes, both governmental and non-governmental, aim at showing fanners in countries that request help how to get greater returns from land and labour.

In 1950, the "Point Four" programme of American technical and economic aid brought widening opportunities for people in many parts of the world to study scientific agriculture at American institutions or to do advanced research at U.S. universities, experiment stations and private laboratories.

Through all the years since then, America has welcomed growing throngs of students, exchange teachers, and research scholars from every corner of the earth.

Each year, about 3,000 scientists, technicians, teachers, and government officials (including ministers of agriculture) journey to the United States to learn how science serves the American farmer. The visitors come from well over 100 countries.

America's agricultural colleges and universities are, of course, deeply involved.

Approximately 100 have agreements with foreign institutions or governments for technical assistance programmes focusing largely on agriculture.

In addition to the resources made avail-

Sharing its "know-how" with countries abroad, the United States welcomes specialists like the Indian agricultural official at right, seen visiting a farm in Tennessee.

Researchersfrom India's agricultural universities similarly disseminate their know-how among the country's farmers, left.

able at the land-grant colleges, the U.S .

Department of Agriculture has its own training programmes for specialists from other countries.

Study programmes in many phases of agriculture are offered by Department personnel in contact with agricultural colleges and experiment stations; with hundreds of private institutionseducational, business and industrial; with farmers and farm organizations; and with other government departments and agencies. Through this intricate network, the entire agricultural competence of America is made accessible to other countries.

Over the years hundreds of American farm specialists have lived and worked in the developing countries under programmes conducted by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and the Peace Corps. These people serve the cause of agriculture in projects ranging from helping individual [{{rmers improve their dairying or poultry-raising to largescale national programmes like land reclamation, irrigation projects and soil conservation efforts.

With the assistance of USAID, several American land-grant colleges are associated with the developing countries in the establishment and working of agricultural universities. There are nine such institutions in India, which, like their American equivalents, are founded with the purpose of teaching agriculture, promoting agricultural research and conveying the results of this research to the farmer.

The broad international exchange of knowledge in the field of agriculture holds out hope that the world might yet conquer its staggering food problem. President Nixon has urged that the United States and other nations "build on recent successes in furthering food production and family planning" to combat hunger and the threat of hunger wherever they exist. He said: "Today many developing nations stand on the threshold of a dramatic breakthrough in food production. The combination of the new 'miracle' seeds for wheat and rice, fertilizer, improved cultivation practices and constructive agricultural policies show that it is possible."

END

JOHN DOS PASSOS

atical, in some ways too unreal ever to be fully understood by the individual novelist who will not feel that he can depend on "history" to hold him up, to supply him with material, to infuse him with the vitality that only confidence in one's subject can.

Henry James said that the "novelist succeeds to the sacred office of the historian." 'The old faith that "history" exists objectively, that it has an ascertainable' order, that it is what th~ novelist most depends on and appeals to, that "history" even supplies the structure of the novel-this is what distinguishes the extraordinary invention that is Dos Passos' U.S.A .. from most novels publishe9 since 1940. And it is surely¡ because "history" as ord~r-to say nothing of "history" as something to believe in!-eomes so hard to younger writers, and readers, that Dos Passos has been a relatively neglected writer in recent years.

It is often assumed that Dos Passos was a "left~ wing" novelist in the '30s who, like other novelists of the, period, turned conservative and thus changed and lost his creative identity. U.S.A. is. certainly the peak of his career and the three novels that make it up wer~ all published in the '30s-The 42nd Parallel in 1930, 1919 in 1932, The Big Money in 1936. But the trilogy is not simply a "left-wing" !lovel, and its technical inventiveness and fr~shness of style are typical of the '20s rather than the '30s. In any event, Dos Passos has¡ always been so detached from all group thinking that it is impossible to understand his development as a novelist by identifying him with the radical novelists of the '30s. ije began earlier. He has never been a Marxist, and in all periods he h~s followed his own perky, obstinately independent course. Whatever may be said of Dos Passos' political associations and ideas in recent years, it can be maintained that while some (by no means all) of his values have changed, it is not his values but the loss by many educated people of a belief in "history'~ that has caused Dos Passos' relative isolation in recent years.

DosPassos was born in Chicago in 1896, graduated from Harvard in 1916, and served as aQ ambulance driver in France and Italy before joining the American Army. None of the other writers associated with the "lost generation"-not Ernest Hemingway or F. Scott E.E. Cummings, though they were all Fitzgerald'or Alfred Kazin produced a landmark in modern American literary criticism with his first bo.ok On Native Grounds in 1942 when he was only 27. It 'has been said of him that he is "primarily concerned with the social context of the books he reads and with the relationship 'between life and literature and between literature and art." He has published extensively, won many awards and fellowships, taught in several universities both in the United States and abroad, and currently is professor of English literature at the Stonybrook campus of the State University of New York.

Introduction by Alfred Kazin to U.S,A, by' John Dos Passos .. Copyright Š 1969 by The New American Library, Incorporated. Reprinted by arrangement with The New American Library Incorpt?rated. New York.

close friends-had the passion for history, for retracing history's creative moments, that Dos Passo~ has shown in his 'many non-fiction studies of American history as well as in U.S.A. Alone among his literary cronies, Dos Passos managed to add this idea of history as the great operative force to their enthusiasm for radical , technique, the lall;guage of Joyce, and "the religion of the world." Dos Passos shared this. cult of art, an<i U.S.A. grew out of it as much as out of his sense of American history as the greatest. drama of modern times. But neither Fitzgerald, Cummings, nor Heming- . way ever had Dos Passos' interest in the average man as a subject for fiction.

M

ostoddly for someone with his "aesthetic" conCerns, Dos Passos was sympathetic to the long tradition of American radical dissent and he has always been hostile to political dogma and orthodoxy.

The 42nd Parallel opens with the story of Mac, a typically rootless "Wobbly" (member of Industrial Workers of the World, a radical labour organization) of the golden age of American socialism before 1917; The Big Money ends on the struggles of Mary French (and John Dos Passos) to save Sacco and Vanzetti, who were condemned in a notorious 1927 murder trial. To round out his trilogy when it was finally published in a single volume, Dos Passos added, as preface and. epilogue, his sketches ofa young man, hungry and alone, walking the highways. "Vag," the American vagrant,' is Dos Passos' expression of his life-long fascination with the alienated, the outsider, the beaten, the dissepter: the lost and forgotten in American history. Mac, the American Wobbly and drifter at the beginning of U.S.A., is as much 'an expression of what has been sacrificed to American progress as' is Mary Fnmch, at th~ end; of the book.

These solitaries, along with the young man endlessly walking America, frame this enorl)ious chronicle of disillusionment with the American 'promise much as the saints in a media~valpainting fra.me)he agony on the cross. The loner in America interested Dos P?-ssos long before he became interested in the American as protester. And despite his disenchantment- since the '30s with the radical-as-ide910gist, Dos Passos is. still fascinated-as witness his books on the Jeffersonian tradition-with the true dissenter, whether he is alone in,the White House or on the highway.

It is in his long attraction to figures who somehow illustrate some power for historic perspective (no matter what solitude this may bring) that we can see Dos Passos' particular artistic imperatives. The detachment behind this is very characteristic of those American' writers from the upper class, born on the eve of our century-Hemingway, Cummings, Edmund Wilsonwhose childhoods were distinctly sheltered and protectcontinued

what people were actually saying thing peculiar to the opportunity and stress of American life, like the Wright Brothers' airplane, Edison's phono.graph, Luther Burbank's hybrids, Thorstein Veblen's social analysis, Frank Lloyd Wright's first office buildings. (All these fellow inventors are celebrated in U.S.A.) The 42nd Parallel is an art work. But we soon recognize that Dos Passos' contraption, his new kind of novel, is in fact the greatest character in the book itself. Our greatest pleasure in reading The 42nd Parallel is in being surprised, delighted, and provoked by the "scheme," by Dos Passos' shifting "strategy."

We recognize that the exciting presence in The 42nd Parallel is the book itself, which is always getting us to anticipate some happy new audacity. A mobile by Alexander Calder or a furious mural design by Jackson Pollock makes us dwell on the specific originality of the artist, the most dramatic thing about the work itself. So The 42nd Parallel becomes a book about writing The 42nd Parallel. That is the tradition of the romantic poet, and reading him we are on every side surrounded by Dos Passos himself: his "idea."

I

technical e interest of The 42nd Parallel was indeed so great for its time that Jean-Paul Sartre, whose restless search for what is "authentic" to our time makes him a prophetic critic, said in 1938: "Dos Passos has invented only one thing, an art of story-telling. But that is enough .... I regard Dos Passos as the greatest writer of our time." Thirty years later, that tribute will surprise even the most loyal admirers of U.S.A., for Dos Passos has been more involved in recent years with social and intellectual history than with the art of the no.vel. Yet he has so absorbed what he invented for U.S.A. that even his non-fiction books display the flat, clipped, peculiarly rushing style that at its worst is tabloid journalism and at its best a documentary prose with the freshness offree verse. But when we look away from his recent books and come back to The 42nd Parallel, we can see the real ingenuity that went into it.

Though the trilogy gets better and stronger as it goes along, this first volume shows what a remarkable tool Dos Passos has invented for evoking the simultaneous actualities of existence.

The 42ndParallei opens in 1900. It follows Mac, the "working-class stiff," as he constantly moves about; recites the biographies of Debs, Luther Burbank, Big Bill Haywood, William Jennings Bryan, and Minor Keith of the United Fruit Company; and ends with Charley Anderson, the garage mechanic from North Dakota, going overseas. (Charley will come back an airplane ace and inventor in The Big Money.) The other main characters are Janey Williams, who will become private secretary_to J. Ward Moorehouse, the rising man in the rising public relations industry; Eleanor Stoddard, the interior decorator who will become

Moorehouse:s prime confidante; Eleanor's friend Eveline Hutchins, who is not as frigid and superior as Eleanor. Tired of too many love affairs and too many parties, Eveline will commit suicide at the end.

The important point about J. Ward Moorehouse's racket, public relations, and Eleanor Stoddard's racket, interior decorating, is that both are new, responsive to big corporations and new money, and synthetic. J. Ward Moorehouse and Eleanor Stoddard are, in fact, artificial people, always on stage, who correspondingly suffer from a lack of reality and of human affection. But on the other side of the broad American picture, Mac, the professional agitator, has no more direction in his life; marriage to a thoroughly conventional girl in San Diego becomes intolerable to him, but as he roams his way across the country, finally ending up in Mexico just as the revolution begins, he is at the mercy of every new "comrade" and every new pick-up. The only direction in his life seems to be his symbolic presence wherever the "action" is.

With the same "representative" quality, J. Ward Moorehouse rises in the public relations "game'" in order to show its relation to big business and big government, while Eleanor Stoddard's dabbling in the "little theatre" movement represents the artiness of the newly "modern" period just before World War I. History in the most tangible sense-what happenedis obviously more important in Dos Passos' scheme than whom things happened to. The matter of the book; is always the representative happening and person, the historical moment illustrated in its catchwords, its songs, its influences, above all, in its speech. What Dos Passos wants to capture more than anything else is the echo of what people were actually saying, exactly in the style in which anyone might have said it. The artistic aim of his book, one may say, is to represent the litany, the tone, the issue of the time in the voice of tl;1etime, the banality, the cliche that finally brings home to us the voice in the crowd-the voice of mass opinion.

I

voice e that might be anyone's voice brings home to us, as only so powerful a reduction of the many to the one ever can, the vibrating resemblances that make history. In the flush of Wilson's New Freedom in 1913, Jerry Burnham, the professional cynic, says to Janey Williams: "I think there's a chance we may get back to being a democracy." Mac and his comrades are always talking about "forming the .structure of a new society within the shell of the old."

Yet more important than the sayings, which make U.S:A. a compendium of American quotations, is the way in which Dos Passos, the objective narrator, gets popular rhythms, repetitions, and stock phrases into his running description of people. Terse and external continued

U.S.A. is a book at war with itself as his narrative style is, it is cunningly, made up of all the different speech styles of the people he is writing about. This is the "poetry" behind the book that makes the "history" in it live.

1919, the, second volume of the trilogy, is sharper than The 42nd Parallel. The obscenity of the war, "Mr. Wilson's War," is Dos Passos' theme, and since this war is the most important political event of the century, he rises to his theme with a brilliance that does not conceal the fury bclIind it. But it is also dear from the greater assurance of the text that Dos Passos has mastered the special stylistic demands of his experiment, that his contraption is- running better with practice. So, apart from the book's unfDrgettably ironic vibrations as a picture of waste, hypo'crisy, debauchery, 1919 shows, as a good poem does, how much more a writer can accomplish by growing into his style. History now is not merely a happening but a bloody farce, is unspeakably wrong, is a complete abandoning of all the hopes associated with the beginning of the century.

The fictional characters and the historic figures are equally the casualties of war. Just as Dos Passos' own creations are representative Americans, so the historic figures whom he has selected for his biographies become myths in the collective imagination of American l:!istory.

One of the most brilliant things about Dos Passos' 'trilogy is the way in which the fictional and the historic characters come together on the same plane.

O

ne character in the book is both "fictional" and '~historic": The Unknown Soldier. He is fictional because no one knows who he is; yet he was an actual soldier-picked at random from so many other dead soldiers. The symbolic corpse has become for Dos Passos the representative American, and his interment in Arlington Cemetery Dos Passos blazingly records in "The Body of an American," the prose poem that ends 1919 and is the most brilliant single piece of writing in the trilogy: they took to Chalons-sur-Marne and laid it out neat in a pine coffin and took it home to God's country on a battleship and buried it in a sarcophagus in the Memorial Amphitheatre in the Arlington National Cemetery and draped the Old Glory over it and the bugler played taps Woodrow Wilson brought a bouquet of poppies.

Dos Passos' book is not so much a novel of a few lives as an epic of democracy. Like other famous American books :;tbout democracy-Emerson's Representative Men; Whitman's Leaves of Grass, Melville's Moby Dick-its subject is that dearest of all AmeriCan myths,. the average man. But unlike these great romantic texts of what the philosopher Alfred N. Whitehead called "the century of hope," U.S.A. does not raise the average

man to hero. Dos Passos' subject is indeed democracy, but his belief -especially as he goes into the final volume of his trilogy, The Big Money-is that the force of circumstances that is 20th-century life is too strong for the average man, who will probably never rise above mass culture, mass superstition, mass slogans.

J

eonly heroes of The Big Money are in the "biographies" -Thorstein Veblen, who drank the. "bitter drink" for analysing predatory American society to its roots; the Wright Brothers, because the fact remains that a couple of young bicycle mechanics from Dayton, Ohio had designed constructed and flown for the first time ever a practical airplane; and the super-individualist architect, Frank Lloyd 'Wright, whom Dos Passos thoroughly admires, though Wright never understood that architecture could serve the people and not the architect alone. The other biographies are of celebrities-Henry Ford, Rudolph Valentino, 'Isadora Duncan, William Randolph Hearst -whose lives ultimately fell victim to'the power of the crowd. The only fictional character in The Big Money who gets our respect .is Mary French, the doctor's daughter and earnest social reformer who becomes a fanatical radical. But Mary French is futilely giving her life to politics. The chips are down; the only defence against the ravages of our century is personal integrity.

The particular artistic virtue of Dos Passos' book is its clarity., its strong-mindedness, the bold l;lnd sharp relief into which it puts all moral issues, all characterizations-indeed, all human destiny. There are no shadows in-U.S.A., no approximations, no fuzzy outlines.

Everything is focused, set off from what is not itself, with that special clarity of presentation which Americans value above all else in the arts of communication.

Yet in the last sections of The Big Money, Dos Passos makes it clear that though the subject of his book all along has been democracy itself, democracy can survive only through the sqperior man, the intellectual aristocrat, the poet who may not value what the crowd does.

This is the political lesson of U.S.A. and may explain, for young people who come to the trilogy for the first time, why the book did not fertilize other books by Dos Passos equal to it. The philosophy behind U.S.A. is finally at varial}ce with its natural interest, its subject matter, its greatest strength-the people and the people's speech.

Like so many primary books in the American literary tradition, U.S.A. is a book at war with itself.

It breathes American confidence and is always so di~tinct in its effects as to seem simple. But its sense of END America is 'complex, dark, and troubled.

Faees ,"of . ~aranaSI Like photographers before him, William Gedney is fascinated with Varanasi, where he has spent the past few months. In India on a Fulbright Fellowship, he has had a one-man show at New York's Museum of Modem Art and he will shortly exhibit his work in Japan. The sensitive pictures on these pages show his feeling for the city and people of Varanasi.

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FOR PILGRIM and tourist, Varanasi is the Holy City-and all roads lead to the banks of the Ganga. But there is another Varanasi, with an existence apart from its hundreds of temples. It is a place where people live, work, get married, raise children, and die. And it is this face of the city-of ordinary people entwined in the daily routine of life-that I show in my photographs.

India is a continual pleasure to my senses. It is a joy to walk streets alive with vital humanity, camera in hand, watching, waiting for the moment that will make a photograph.

Sometimes a picture is made from the slightest of components: a small movement of a hand, a contrast of light, a fleeting expression, the mingling of f6~'lflSan.d content suddenly right-

the shutter instantly released and an image preserved.

With its great diversity, Varanasi abounds in arresting images. Everything has a fantastic visual quality-the crowded streets, the shops, the homes. There is a grace and lyricism about India, a sense of togetherness among the people. And I have discovered that everything here is conducted on a human, personal leveL Thus I have found complete understanding of the nature of my work at the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting's Photo Division, with which I am affiliated.

An American in India finds many things foreign and many things familiar. To decipher the human qualities that unite and separate us, to convey visually a people's way of life, simply, honestly, directly-these are my tasks.

END

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While training students in modern industrial design, the National Institute of Design in Ahmedabad has set itself the larger goal of creating "an alert and impatient national conscience ... concerned with the quality of the environment."

TEXT BY ANDY LEON HARNEY PHOTOGRAPHS

BY AVINASH

PASRICHA

stands a large two-storey red brick building. Huge panes of glass break the walls with a milky green expanse of colour. Inside shadows move about, but it is difficult to see what they are doing.

The sign at the gate says NID. You walk in under car ports and through open courts and up an old-fashioned wrought-iron BEFORE YOU

Andy Leon Harney, a free-lance writer. spent two years working with the Peace Corps in Nasik.

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spiral staircase and suddenly you are surrounded by machines and red brick. Red brick, the most common building material known in India, housing some of the most uncommon machinery in India. Are you in a factory? What kinds of things are made here?

These are the questions that confront you as you walk through the workshops of the National Institute of Design at Ahmedabad. Inside the very modern structure made of subtle reinforced arches of brick and concrete you can see furniture being made; a book that has been written, designed, photographed, printed and bound at the Institute; a prototype of a motor scooter body soon to be on the market; an architectural model of the Indian Institute of Management at Ahmedabad; a full textile workshop with rugs, wall hangings, intricate and simple designs; a silk screen unit with yards of material lying on a table -on and on through cavernous rooms.

The Institute was formally chartered in 1961 by the Government of India's Ministry of Industry and Commerce with assis-

=

tance from the Ford Foundation. Its basic aim is to train designers to help India's small industries maintain and improve the concept, quality and design of their products. With such an ambitious goal it was decided that a designer with experience, know-how, and the ability to see things with fresh eyes should visit India to survey the needs and problems peculiar to the country. Thus, in 1958, the well-known American designer couple, Charles and Ray Eames, visited India for three months at the request of the Government of India and under Ford Foundation sponsorship.

At the end of their tour, Eames wrote a far-reaching report which set forth the proposed direction for a design institute.

In the report he clarified the objectives of such a school-research, training and service. He also stated the objective as "a desire to create an alert and impatient national conscience-a conscience concerned with the quality and ultimate values of the environment."

To illustrate some of the many questions that might ,arise if designing an object

continued Made of papier mache and steel tubes, this model of a school desk and chair was designed by the Institute's M.L. Bhandari. Right, the scene that welcomes each visitor as he enters the Institute.

"We like to feel that we are like the Bauhaus in spirit. ..

If there is a deviation, it has to do with the time in which we are living, the place, and the problems unique to India."

from scratch, Eames discussed in detail the design of a lota, by which he meant the vessel used for carrying and storing water from the well. It is doubtful if anyone man ever considered all the questions that Eames discussed in his report. For an idea of the depth in which each problem was examined, here are a few of the factors Eames would consider as designer of the first lota:

How pleasant does it sound, when it strikes another vessel, is set down on ground or stone, empty or full-or being poured into?

What is the possible material?

What is its cost in terms of working and ultimate service?

How will it look as the sun reflects off its surface?

How does it feel to possess it, to sell it, to give it?

Obviously the centuries, the locale, the available materials and many other variables beyond the control of a designer have come into play in the design of the Indian lota. In any bazaar an infinite variety of solutions to these problems can be seen.

The National Institute of Design has

The optimum amount of liquid to be carried, poured and stored in a prescribed set of circumstances.

The size and strength and gender of the hands (if hands) that would manipulate it.

The way it is to be transported: hip, hand, basket or cart.

head,

The balance, the centre of gravity, when empty, when full, its balance when rotated for pouring.

Its sculpture as it fits the palm of the hand, the curve of the hip.

The sculpture as complement to the rhythmic motion of walking or a static pose at the well.

The relation of opening to volume in terms of storage uses-and objects other than liquid.

The size of the opening and inner contour in terms of cleaning.

The texture inside and out in terms of cleaning and feeling.

Heat transfer-can the liquid is hot?

it be grasped

if

How pleasant does it feel, eyes closed, eyes open?

been formed to research, train and serve modern India in her search for the" Iotas" of today-the scooters, water fountains, typefaces, electric mixers, exhibitions, architecture, and visual communications.

It is a staggering task, and with that in mind the decision was made to start small with a low student-faculty ratio in order to ensure quality. At present there are thirty regular students, all of whom attend tuition-free and are given a monthly stipend for living expenses. The students, all graduates from fields as varied as architecture, engineering, fine arts, commercial art and even chemistry, are given an opportunity to work with experts while becoming professionals themselves.

"When they come to us as graduates, there are many things they have to unlearn

and relearn," says Dasrath Patel, Head of Visual Communications at the Institute.

"Beca use of their varied backgrounds, each student is individually considered and the particular gaps in his education are filled.

We have here the equipment to offer students practical experience in areas which no other school in India can offer at present. It is our hope that when a student leaves here he leaves as a professional."

After one year of basic training and orientation in his chosen area of studyindustrial design, architecture, graphics, textiles, visual communications or ceramics -the young designer is included in privately commissioned or institute-initiated projects that are real and not merely classroom exercises. All the fees from commissioned projects are used to help support the Institute's expenses. By the time each student has completed his three years of study and practice, he has done at least one project entirely on his own.

"They should have service training," says H.K. Vyas, Head ofIndustrial Design, "so that they learn not only theoretical design but work with teachers who are actually doing commissioned work."

The school is planned somewhat on the basis of the famous Bauhaus School of Germany of the late '20s and early '30sa school whose impact on the world of design from print typefaces to chairs to crockery to fine art is still felt today all over the world.

"We like to feel that we are like the Bauhaus in spirit," says Vyas. "If there is a deviation, it has to do with the time in which we are living, the place and the problems which are unique to India."

A good illustration of a unique Indian problem for industrial design was a commissioned project to create an electric mixer versatile enough to meet the needs of Indian cooking. For the project, the students began by interviewing a number of housewives in the Ahmedabad area who had electric mixers and did not rely on servants to do their cooking. This second qualification was considered very important, as the market for this new mixer would be largely wives who do their own cooking.

A third requirement was that a cross-section of types of Indian cooking be considered. Students found themselves interviewing Punjabis, Gujaratis, Bengalis, Maharashtrians, Tamilians and Keralites to try to categorize the varied demands made by each type of cooking with an electric mixer. A chart was made listing every-

thing from ground coffee to wet masala to idli, every conceivable item which could be made using an electric mixer. Then the students ran tests with all the different preparations using every available foreign and Indian mixer. From this they were able to gauge the extent to which existing mixers failed to fulfil the requirements of Indian cooking. Having done so, they were able to pinpoint the equipment needed to pulverize, grind, wet and dry blend.

Once the food preparation problems had been considered, the students turned to the problems of use, storage, weight, and general design. It was found that certain strong spices often left a residue of odour or taste on the inside of the mixing jar. To solve this problem, separate jarlike glasses, which fit into the machine for mixing and then, when removed, became storage containers were designed. The question of the design of the jar itself was answered partially-it had to be easy and inexpensive to manufacture.

Next the design of the motor casing was approached in terms of ease of handling, stability, and requirements for the motor itself. Graphics students designed lettering

H.K. Vyas, head of industrial design. teaches an undergraduate class in plastics. Under a new programme started in July 1970. the Institute admits 30 undergraduate students, many of them straight from high school.

for the company trade name in a style appropriate to the casing. Finally a complete mock-up, in plastic and glass, was made on the premises and presented to the manufacturer for consideration. Each student took part in the research and several students worked on the design under the guidance of H.K. Vyas. Thus, the long and difficult process of creating one solution for a modern "Iota" was completed. The procedure is similar for all projects undertaken by the Institute.

The facilities open to NID students are almost limitless. The world of design is at their fingertips. A beautiful 1,200-volume library of art and design books from all over the world is a source of inspiration for budding young designers. Along with the books and some 80 foreign and Indian periodicals, is a unique grouping called the Prototype Collection which includes articles from all over the world recognized for their outstanding design: beds, chairs, tables, cups, saucers, electric fans, mixers and toasters.

It is not enough merely to look at pictures and read descriptions; the students have to know how heavy a cup is, how easy it is to pick up, what the glaze feels like, or what it is like to sit in a chair designed by Charles Eames or to be cooled by a table fan from Germany. In the late 1950's, the Museum of Modern Art in New York was

commissioned by the Ford Foundation to create an exhibition of well-designed objects from all over the world which were at that time also being manufactured in India.

The exhibition was presented in New Delhi in 1959 and later donated to NID for its Prototype Collection. Along with this collection of products designed by "new masters," are works done by the students themselves, among them plaster models, textiles and ceramics.

NID's concept of education is unusual.

At present less that 40 per cent of the faculty is permanently attached to the Institute. The remaining 60 per cent are consultants-temporary teachers. Professionals are invited to work on specific projects.

For example, the American architect Louis Kahn was asked to come as a consultant teacher on the project to design the Indian Institute of Management along with the staff and students at NID. By seeking out professionals, the young student designers are given the priceless opportunity to learn from some of the leaders in their field in the world today.

"The decision to run the Institute with a constantly-rotating staff of technical people who have only limited time at their disposal," says Dasrath Patel, "is based on the feeling that people who practise rarely have time to teach and people who teach rarely have time to practise."

In a number of cases students have gone back with the technical consultant to work in their offices abroad to gain greater practical experience, a rather modern apprentice system. This occasional experience abroad, plus the modern tools, methods and skills taught at NID serve to bridge an important gap. Designers are trained to use certain tools and materials which are at present not available in India or are scarce. To cite a case: several years ago, a small private company asked the Institute to design the casing and dials for an electronic meter. continued

Working in an atmosphere of beauty, tomorrow's designers are executing real projects, not merely classroom exercises.

Once this had been designed, the decision was taken that the best material for this particular casing would be fibreglass. One manufacturer who was just beginning to experiment with the material was persuaded to make the cases. Later, more and more companies began to manufacture fibreglass materials. By that time the industrial design students, through the research done on the electronic meter, were familiar with the material and knew what it could and could not do, what different manufacturing techniques could be applied for both small and large-scale production, and how it might best be used. Rather than having to catch up with rapidly-moving technology for industry, NID is trying to move its students one step ahead of any possible gap so that they are ready for the new technology when it arrives.

In less than a decade, NID has progressed from an idea to reality. Its first major project was an exhibition called "Jawaharlal Nehru, His Life and His India," which was produced entirely in India and widely acclaimed when presented in New York several years ago. Since then NID students have worked in collaboration with Louis Kahn on the design and landscaping of the Indian Institute of Management at Ahmedabad; designed and engineered the Institute's building itself; made several films on family planning and one film on handicrafts in Saurashtra; invented a new Devnagari typeface for monotype-now available on the market; designed the new Indian Oil petrol pumps; and executed "The World Is My Family" pavilion at the Gandhi Darshan exhibition in New Delhi.

There is a feeling of excitement and challenge in the air at NID because of the many different activities in which it is involved.

There is a spirit of adventure, an eagerness to fully exploit the tools and facilities at its disposal. As the designers of tomorrow complete their three years' training, India will begin to feel the influence of the Institute in the concept, quality and design of the modern "IotasÂť for modern India.

END

Examining weaves worked on small handlooms, above, students of textile design learn the properties and possibilities of various yarns. Below, a visiting instructor from Finlaj;d, Helen Perheentupa, explains how she achieves certain effects. Clay horses and a huge mirror-studded screen form a striking backdrop, right, as students relax in the Institute's courtyard. Throughout the building, there are similar reminders of India's artistic heritage, in the context of which the designs of today must be evolved. Below right, a graphic design class in progress shows students absorbed in their independent projects.

magine about 400 artists -painters, sculptors, actors, playwrights, musicians, architects-gathered together in one building! And to purposely arrange for so many to live under one roof, in view of the self-centred befiaviour of most artists, would seem about as rational as inviting 20 three-year-olds to play in your house on a rainy afternoon. But that's exactly what has been done by the U.S. Government and a private foundation. The place is Westbeth, situated between West and Bethune Streets in New York's Greenwich Village.

In 1966 in a fit of daring, the National Council on the Arts and the J.M. Kaplan Fund, combining resources, acquired a 13-storey building, and converted it into a housing project for creative people. Remodelled under the imaginative eye of architect Richard Meier, Westbeth contains 383 studioapartments, all of which were snapped up by artists -':-Ieaving a waiting list of 1,000.

The project also has a theatre, film studios, exhibition galleries, sculpture gardens, rehearsal halls, playgrounds and such commercial facilities as an art supply shop, bookstore, restaurant, pharmacy, laundry.

Westbeth's one salient feature is its moveable wardrobes which give artists maximum flexibility in arranging their space. For example, Pat Photis is a sculptor with a young daughter. She arranged the wardrobes to form a tiny bedroom for her daughter, leaving the rest of the space for an enormous studio where her works fit easily.

-----continued

I

Above left: A sculptor at work in his studio. Below this is a fish-eye view of Westbeth's interior courtyard, connected by an arcade to the exterior park, right, which serves both as an exhibit area and playground. Above right: Representative artists with the tools of their trade.

W

estbeth is a happy place-with problems.

Living here means doing the laundry while the person using the next machine shouts dialogue from a play. It means enduring hours of French horn practice; or saying good morning to an over-inspired painterwho hasn't the faintest idea it's morning.

Michael Ackerman, a playwright and head of the tenants' council, says about 75 per cent of the artists are happy with the West beth arrangement.'The others, he says,are "moderately upsetto completely in a dither." Bennet Learner, a composer, is one of the happy ones: "Your neighbours ask what you do and they don't mean how you earn your living."

"It's a fantastic mix," says PeterGott, Westbeth's director. "This place has no resemblanceto any other apartment house in existence."

END

Left: Photographer and his musician wife in their studio. Above: A viewer looks at a sculpture in the first floor gallery. A paintersculptor, above right, creates an "assemblage" in his apartment.

An important attraction for tenants is the uncluttered open feeling as evidenced by the apartment of the designer JVorking 011 a book cover, right centre. All artist discusses his work with friends, right.

TWO NEW LINCOLN

FINDS

are added to the memorabilia of the Great Emancipator, whose 162nd birth anniversary is observed in America this month

The existence of this superb photograph of Lincoln first came to light in 1969. It was taken on August 9.1863. by Alexander Gardner ill Washington. The same day he also took thepictures below.

A NEW LINCOLN PHOTOGRAPH? A new Lincoln poem in his own hand?

Yes-and neither has been published in the 105 years since his death.

In 1941, when I made my first discovery of an unknown Lincoln photograph (showing him full figure, standing at a chair), I believed it was the last unknown picture of the Great Emancipator. But in 1947, I found a magnificent broken plate negative with Lincoln's likeness, and in 1948, the beautiful ambrotype (early photograph made on glass) showing him in a white duster. And in 1952, when the late Harry Pratt, head of the Illinois State Historical Library, called to tell me that a 14-year-old student in his library had come upon a faded photograph of Lincoln while examining the Nicolay papers, I was sceptical at first. But then I looked at it-it was a print of Lincoln in his coffin that Stanton, his Secretary of War, had confiscated.

After publishing it, I was certain that no more unknown Lincoln photographs would come my way.

And now comes this one-the finest of all, his most superb likeness. Lincoln presented the photograph to his secretary, John Hay, who had it on the wall of his Reprinted with permission from the new edition of Lincoln: A Picture Story of His Life by Stefan Lorant. published by W. W. Norton & Company. Inc. Copyright Š /952. /957~ /969

by Stefan Lorant. This excerpt has also appeared in LOOK magazine.

living room for decades. From Hay, the picture went to his son Clarence, and when Clarence died early in 1969, his son, John Hay, inherited it and gave me permission to publish it in my book, Lincoln: A Picture Story of His Life.

The photograph was taken by Alexander Gardner in Washington on August 9, 1863, a little over a month after the battle of Gettysburg. Lincoln sat in six other poses, but why Gardner made only a single enlargement of this pose, we do not know.

It may be that during the enlarging process the negative broke and was destroyed.

A few lines in Lincoln's handwriting were also saved by John Hay. On July 19, 1863, Hay jotted in his diary: "The Tycoon [Hay's nickname for Lincoln] was in very good humor. Early in the morning he scribbled this doggerel & gave it to me."

With that, the manuscript disappeared.

Scholars searched for it but could not find it. It remained hidden for a hundresI and six years, until David A. Jonah, the librar-

Gen. Lee's inyasion of the North, written by himseJf"In eighteen sixty three, with pomp, and mighty swell, Me and Jeff's Confederacy, went forth to sack Phil. del.

The Yankees they got arter us, and gin us partic,Jar h-II, And we skedaddled back again, and didn't sack Phil. del.

Written Sunday morning July 19, 1863.

Attest John Hay ian of Brown University, spotted it in their John Hay Collection in a folder labelled "Miscellaneous."

The date of it-July 19, I 863-is significant. A fortnight before, between July 1 and 3, the battle of Gettysburg had been fought. General Robert E. Lee's invasion of Pennsylvania was repulsed. On the 4th, the Confederate Army¡retrea ted towards

the Potomac River. On that day, General George Gordon Meade, commander of the Union forces, told his troops that the enemy was "defeated and had withdrawn from the contest." Still, he said, the fight must continue until the Union forces "drive from our soil every vestige of the presence of the invader." When Lincoln learned of this, he cried out in despair: "Drive the invaders from our soil! My God! Is that all?"

Lincoln believed that Lee's army could be destroyed, and with that, "the rebellion will be over." But Meade procrastinated.

Heavy rain swelled the Potomac. Bridges were swept away, and Lee could not cross.

The anxious Lincoln asked an engineering officer how long he thought it would take Lee to rebuild the bridge he needed for his escape. The general replied that he himself could do it in 24 hours, "and, Mr. President, General Lee has engineers as skilful as I am."

Lincoln was in despair about Meade's failure to pursue Lee. One evening, the President's son Robert came into his room and "found him in tears with head bent upon his arms resting on the table at which he sat."

On the 13th and 14th, Lee crossed the river and took his army to safety and Virginia. Lincoln cried out: "We had them within our grasp. We bad only to stretch forth our hands and they were ours." Lincoln penned a bitter letter to his general: "You fought and beat the enemy at Gettysburg; and, of course, to say the least, his loss was as great as yours. He re~ treated; and you did not, as it seemed to me, pressingly pursue him. . . . I do not believe you appreciate the magnitude of the misfortune involved in Lee's escape.

He was within your easy grasp, and to have closed upon him would, in connection with our other late successes, have ended the war. As it is, the war will be prolonged indefinitely .... " But Meade never received the letter; Lincoln never sent it. Later, while talking about. Meade with his Secretary of War, he said: "Why should we censure a man who has done so much for his country because he did not do a little more?"

Lee crossed the Potomac on Tuesday; on Sunday, Lincoln penned the doggerel, perhaps to console himself, to cheer himself up. Then he handed it to John Hay. No one has heard it, no one knew about it-until now.

Is this the last important Lincoln manuscript that will ever come to light? Or are there others? I don't believe so. But in the light of what has happened before, who knows?

END

by Paul A. Samuelson Professor of Economics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Paul Samuelson is winner of the 1970 Central Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Science in memory of Alfred Nobel.

MODERN ECONOMIC REALITIES AND INDIVIDUALISM To AN ECONOMIST THE WORD "individualism" is tied up with laissez-faire. Or with liberalism in the nineteenth-century Manchester-School sense as distinct from the modern American connotation of a liberal as a kind of New Dealer wbo is just to the left of the moving centre but not quite over the brink into radicalism. Perhaps John Stuart Mill is the archetype of an individualist. And perhaps the apotheosis of individualism is that social order which Thomas Carlyle contemptuously dismissed as "anarchy plus the constable." In this last century the world has obviously moved away from rugged individualism. Presumably in the century before that the Western world had been moving towards a greater degree of individualism. Yet it would be a mistake to think that there was ever a golden age of unadulterated individualism.

Eden in Equilibrium Physicists have a model of a dilute gas. The air in this hypothetical balloon I hold in my hand is supposed to consist of a number of hard little atoms in continuous motion. So small is each atom as to make the distances between them very large indeed.

It is a lonely life, and the encounters between atoms are very few and far between -which is indeed fortunate since the encounters are envisaged by the physicist as involving collisions with elastic rebounds.

Something like this is pictured by the extreme individualist. Daniel Boone, who moved farther west when he could begin to hear the bark of his neighbour's dog, would regard this model of a dilute gas as very heaven. Those who cherish family life, or at the least have an interest in biological survival, will gladly extend the notion of an individual to include the family group. Nor will this daunt the physicist, who is happy to think of the air in this balloon as consisting of molecules, which in their turn consist of clusters of parentand-children atoms rather than detached bachelors.

I will tell you a secret. Economists are supposed to be dryas dust, dismal fellows.

This is quite wrong, the reverse of the truth. Scratch a hard-boiled economist of the libertarian persuasion and you find a Don Quixote underneath. No lovesick maiden ever pined for the days of mediaeval chivalry with such sentimental impracticality as some economists long for the

return to a Victorian marketplace that is completely free. Completely free? Well, almost so. There must, of course, be the constable to ensure that voluntary contracts are enforced and to protect the property rights of each molecule which is an island unto itself.

Where Carlyle envisaged _an . anarchy that was veritable chaos, a jungle red in tooth and claw, the antiquarian economist sees Newtonian order-an impersonal system of competitive checks and balances.

Life in this other Eden is neither nasty, brutish, nor short. Law, labour, and capital end up getting combined in an optimal way, so that the best menu of apples, automobiles, Picasso paintings, comic books, gin, applesauce, xylophones, and zebras is offered to the consumer. He chooses from the lot what pleases him best. As Bentham said, all pleasures are one: Push-pin is as good as poetry provided individuals deem Reprinted from The Texas Quarterly. Originally presented at a symposium, uIndividualism in Twentieth-Century America," held at the University of Texas. In revised form. papers presented at the symposium were published in book form by The University of Texas Press under the title, Innocence and ,.

Power: Individualism in Twentieth-Century America, edited by .

Gordon Mills.

it so. Applejack gives a less pure pleasure than apple juice, but not for the reason that alcohol is morally bad. Rather only for the reason that its positive pleasure tonight must be carefully adjusted for the negative pleasure of tomorrow's hangover: if the net balance yields more utils than apple juice, then bottoms up! If at some midpoint between tonight's revelry and tomorrow's hangover, you decide to walk over Niagara Falls on a tightrope, that is just your way of maximizing utility.

Should that turn out in some altitudinal way to have b~eh a mistake, well, each man' who is free and twenty-one is entitled to make his own mistakes without the nosy interference of his neighbour or of arti~ ficial government.

Special allowance might have to be made for lunatics and minors. While most Benthamites would certify women as "competents"-i.e., free-wills whose tastes should be respected-few of them would go as far as Albert Schweitzer and extend the felicific calculus to animals, insects, and plants. The formula, each to count for one and only one, was not expected to include chimpanzees or amoebae: the total utility which the Universe was to minimize apparently did not include an algebraic . contribution from the likes of them.

On the other hand Bentham would not have recognized an inferior caste of slaves whose pleasures were not to count. What would he think of a person who sold him.self into perpetual slavery, in order to give a week-end potlatch? I am not sure, but if it had been a sober arms-length transaction at the going competitive market price, I dare say Bentham would have wanted such contracts to be legally enforceable.

What Smith Hath Wrought The first human was Adam. The first economist (if one can make the distinction) was Adam Smith. The year 1776.was a vintage one: it gave us the Declaration of Independence, the work of Thomas Jefferson and a committee; and it gave us The Wealth of Nations, the work of an individual. Smith was an urbane and sceptical Scot nurtured on the same branch water as his friend David Hume. No zealot he, Smith gave two resounding cheers for individualism; but for state interference of the prc-nineteenth-century type, he could muster up only a Bronx cheer.

And make no mistake about it: Smith was right. Most of the interventions into economic life by the State were then harm-

ful both to prosperity and freedom. What Smith said needed to be said. In fact, much of what Smith said still needs to be said: good intentions by government are not enough; acts do have consequences that had better be taken into account if good is to follow. Thus, the idea of a decent real wage is an attractive one. So is the idea of a low interest rate at which the needy can borrow. None the less the attempt by law to set a minimum real wage at a level much above the going market rates, or to set a maximum interest rate for small loans at what seem like reasonable levels, inevitably does much harm to precisely the persons whom the legislation is Intended to help.

Domestic and foreign experience-today, yesterday, and tomorrow-bears out the Smithian truth. Note that this is not an argument against moderate wage and interest fiats, which may improve the perfection of competition and make businessmen and workers more efficient.

It would be a mistake to think that there was ever a golden age of unadulterated individualism.

Smith himself was what we today would call a pragmatist. He realized that monopoly elements ran through laisse~-faire: when he said that Masters never gather together even for social merriment without plotting to raise prices against the public interest he anticipated the famous Judge Gary dinners at which the big steel companies used to be taught what every oligopolist should know. Knowing the calibre of George Ill's civil service, Smith believed the government would simply do more harm than good if it tried to cope with the evil of monopoly. Pragmatically, Smith might, if he were alive today, favour the Sherman Act and.stronger antitrust legislation, or even public utility regulation generally. He might even, in our time, be a Fabian. Certainly Jeremy Bentham, with his everlasting concern for maximizing utility, would in our non-individualistic age have been a social activist-at the very least a planner of the present French type.

The Invisible Hand One hundred per cent individualists skip these pragmatic lapses into good sense and

concentrate on the purple passage in Adam Smith where he discerns an Invisible Hand that leads each selfish individual to contribute to the best public good. Smith had a point; but he could not have earned a passing mark in a Ph.D. oral examination in explaining just what that point was.

Until this century, his followers-such as Bastiat-thought that the doctrine of the Invisible Hand meant one of two things: (a) that it produced maximum feasible total satisfaction, somehow defined; or (b) that it sh~wed that anything which results from the voluntary agreements of uncoerced individuals must make them better (or best) off in some important sense.

Both of these interpretations, which are still held by many modern libertarians, are wrong. This is not the place for a technical discussion of economic principles, so I shall be very brief and cryptic in showing this. First, suppose some ethical observer -such as Jesus, Buddha, or for that matter John Dewey or Aldous Huxley-were to examine whether the total of social utility (as that ethical observer scores the deservingness of the poor and rich, saintly and sinning individuals) was actually maximized by 1860 or ] 962 laissez-faire ..

He might decide that a tax placed upon yachts whose proceeds go to cheapen the price of insulin to the needy might increase the total of utility. Could Adam Smith prove him wrong? Could Bastiat? I think not. Of course, they might say that there is no point in trying to compare different individuals' utilities because they are incommensurable and can no more be added together than can apples and oranges.

But if recourse is made to this argument then the doctrine that the Invisible Hand maximizes total utility of the universe has' already been thrown out the window. If they admit that the Invisible Hand will truly maximize total social utility provided the state intervenes so as to make the initial distribution of dollar votes ethically proper, then they have abandoned the libertarian's position that individuals are not to be coerced, even by taxation ..

In connection with the second interpretation that anything which results f.rom voluntary agreements is in some sense, ipso facto, optimal, we can reply by pointing out that when I make a purchase from a monopolistic octopus, that is a voluntary act: I can always go without alka-seltzer or aluminium or nylon or whatever product you think is produced by a monopolist.

Mere voluntarism, therefore,' is not the continued

root merit of the doctrine of the Invisible Hand: what is important about it is the system of checks and balances that comes under perfect competition, and its measure of validity is at the technocratic level of efficiency not at the'ethicallevel of freedom and individualism.* That this is so can be seen from the fact that such socialists as Oscar Lange and A.P. Lerner have advocated channelling the Invisible Hand to the task of organizing a socialistic society efficiently.

In summary: these individualistic atoms of the rare gas in my balloon are not isolated from the other atoms. Adam Smith, who is almost as well known for his discussion of the division of labour and the resulting efficiency purchased at the price of interdependence, was well aware of that.

What he would have stressed was that the contacts between the atoms were organized by the use of markets and prices.

"dry." They remind one of those nunneries which receive sustenance from the outside world only through a contrivance like a dumbwaiter which bars all human confrontation. Or they are like the anthropological custom in which certain tribes trade with their neighbours by laying out gifts at dead of night, which the others pick up and reciprocate. Presumably custom keeps the balance of trade about even, which is more than custom has been doing for the weak American balance of international payments in recent years.

Just as there is a sociology of family life and of politics, there is a sociology of individualisticcompetition.

It is not a rich one. Ask not your neighbour's name; enquire only for his numerical schedules of supply and demand. Under perfect competition, no buyer need face a seller. Haggling in a Levantine bazaar is a sign of less-than-perfect competition.

The telephone is the perfect go-between to link buyers and sellers through the medium of an auction market, such as the New York Stock Exchange or the Chicago Board of Trade for grain transactions.

Two men may talk hourly all their working lives and never meet. It is alleged that many women have developed affection for the local milkman, but few romances have blossomed over a Merrill Lynch teletype.

These economic contacts between ato, mistic individuals may seem a little chilly or, to use the language of wine-tasting,

This impersonality has its good side. If money talks, you and I do not have to fabricate conversation. That is one reason my wife buys our toothpaste at the selfservice supermarket rather than at the corner drug store-which as a matter of fact is no longer there, for reasons that are obvious. The prices have been equalized

by Massachusetts law, and she is liberated from talking about the New England weather, being able to save her energies for our dialogues about Plato and Freud.

On the other hand that Southern editor, Harry Golden of North Carolina, claims he has never bought an entire box of cigars in his life, since that would deprive him of pleasurable daily contacts. Under perfect laissez-faire, those who want to talk about the weather have only to put their money in the telephone slot and dulcet tones will present the latest betting odds. I understand you already can call for a spiritual message each day; and if the demand warrants it, you will be able to dial for a set of random digits whenever your statistical

*What perfectly competitive equilibrium, the Invisible Hand, achieves is this: if production functions satisfy appropriate returns conditions, if all externalities of production and tastes are appropriately absenf (which includes the absence of public goods and of neighbourhood effects), then competitive equilibrium is such that not everyone can be made better off by any intervention.

This is not a theorem about ideal laissez-faire for it holds just as validly after good or bad (Iumpsum) interferences have determined the initial distribution of wealth and earning powers. There are literally an infinite number of equilibrium states juSt as "efficient" as that of laissez-faire individ-

ualism. Such an efficiency state is a necessary but not sufficient (repeat, not) condition for maximization of a social-welfare function that respects individuals' tastes. It is a tribute to competitive pricing that under the severe returns and externality conditions specified, and then only, it can maximize an ethically prescribed social-welfare function provided the initial "distribution of resources" has been rectified so as to make each consumer dollar voting in the market of equal social deservingness. All this is complex and was not understood until this century at the earliest.

A. Bergson, P. Samuelson, and O. Lange can, I think fairly, be cited for the present formulation;

The Impersonality of Market Relations

\

work has soiled the old ones and calls for a fresh set.

Believe me, I do not wish to jest. Negroes in the South learned long ago that their money was welcome in local. department stores. Money can be liberating. It corrodes the cake of custom. Money does talk. Sociologists know that replacing the rule of status by the rule of contract loses something in warmth; it also gets rid of some of the bad fire of olden times.

Impersonality of market relations has another advantage, as was brought home to many "liberals" in the McCarthy era of American political life. Suppose it were efficient for the government to be the one big employer. Then if, for good or bad, a person becomes in bad odour with government, he is dropped from employment and is put on a black list. He really then has no place to go. The thought of such a dire fate must in the course of time discourage that freedom of expression of opinion which individualists most favour. Many of the people who were unjustly dropped by the federal government in that era were able to land jobs in small-scale private industry.

I say small-scale industry because large corporations are likely to be chary of hiring names that appear on anybody's black list.

What about people who were justly dropped as security risks or as members of political organizations now deemed to be criminally subversive? Many of them also found jobs in the anonymity of private industry. Many conservative persons, who think that such men should not remain in sensitive government work or in public employ at all, will still feel that they should not be hounded into starvation. Few want for this country the equivalent of Czarist Russia's Siberia, or Stalin Russia's Siberia either. It is hard to tell on the Chicago Boarq of Trade the difference between the wheat produced by Republican or Democratic farmers, by teetotallers or drunkards, Theosophists or Logical Positivists. but parts of it had been understood, and sometimes misunderstood, by such distinguished economists as V. Pareto, E. Barone, A.P. Lerner, N. Kaldor, J.R. Hicks, and T. Scitovsky. Mention should be made of the useful intuitions of the neoclassical economists L. Walras, K. Wicksell, A. Marshall, F. von Wieser, A.C. Pigou, A. Young, J.B. Clark, P. Wicksteed, F. Edgeworth, F. Taylor, F. Knight, J. Viner, and still others. For a partial review of doctrine, see P. Samuelson, Foundations of Economic Analysis (Cambridge, Mass., 1947).

An economist might wonder whether the later work of K. Arrow does not cast doubt on the concept of a social-welfare function. Valuable as

,

I must confess that this is a feature of a competitive system that I find attractive.

Moreover, there is no law preventing people from falling in love over the brokerage telephone. And the warm personal relationships that are lacking in the economic sphere can be pursued in after hours. Mediaeval guild crafts are not the only human associations that are worthwhile, and the price to retain them may be too high in terms of their. inefficiency:

Eden Collapsed I have now finished describing the ideal equilibrium of the gas, which has individual atoms in dilute form. We have seen how a perfect model of competitive equilibrium might behave if conditions for it were perfect. The modern world is not identical with that model. As mentioned before, there never was a time, even in good Queen Victoria's long reign, when such conditions prevailed.

Complete freedom is not definable once two wills exist in the same' interdependent universe.

To elucidate this, let us ask what happens when we squeeze the balloon. Or what is the same thing if we permit a Malthusian proliferation of molecules within the same space. The gas is no longer dilute, the atoms no longer lonely.** The system heats up. Now the collisions are frequent and uncÂŤlIlfortable: It is no longer a question of hearing our neighbour's dog: we toss with insomnia while his TV blares. In . revenge, our electric' shaver distorts his morning symphony. For better or worse the human race has been joined.

Whatever may have been true on Turner's frontier, the modern city is crowded. it is in its own right as a contribution to mathematical politics, Arrow's demonstration, that it is impossible to have a "constitutional function" that compromises differing tastes of individuals and at the same time satisfies certain plausible requirements, does not rob the Bergson formulation of its validity. A constitutional function is not a soCl,al-weifare function, even if it. is given the same name as one. I should mention that Harsanyi, in the last decade, has made the notable contribution that the Bergson Social Welfare Function can be written as additive in individuals' utilities provided certain plausible postulates about social choice in the presence of probabilities are

.

Individualism and anarchy will lead to friction. We now have to co-ordinate and cooperate. Where co-operation is not fully forthcoming, we must introduce upon ourselves coercion. Now that man must obey the stop lights he has lost his freedom. But has he really? Has he lost something that .he had? Was he free to race his car at the speed he wished and in the direction he wished? Of course not. He had only the negative freedom of sitting in a traffic jam.

We have, by co-operation and coercion, although the arch-individualist may not like th!< new order, created for ourselves greater freedom.

The prin~iple of unbridled freedom has been abandoned: it is now just a question of haggling about the terms. On the one hand, few will deny that it is a bad thing for one man, or a few men, to impose their wills on the vast majority of mankind, particularly when that will involves terrible cruelty and terrible inefficiency. Yet where does one draw the line? At'a fifty-one per cent majority vote? Or, should there be no actions taken that cannot command unanimous agreement-a position which such modern exponents of libertarian liberalism as Professor Milton Friedman are slowly evolving towards. Unanimous agreement? Well, virtually unanimous agreement, whatever that will come to mean.

The principle of unanimity is, of course, completely /impractical.

MyoId friend Milton Friedman is extremely persuasive, but not even he can keep his own students in unanimous agreement all the time: Aside from its practical inapplicability, the principle of unanimity is theoretically faulty.

It leads to contradictory and intransitive decisions. By itself, it argues that just as society should not move from laissez-faire to planning because there will always be at least one objector-Friedman ifnecessary-so society should never move from planning to freedom because there will always be at least one objector. Like .standaccepted. The view that R. Coase has shown that externalities-like smoke nuisances-are not a logical blow to the Invisible Hand and do not call for coercive interference with laissez-faire is not mine. I do not know that it is Coase's. But if it had not been expressed by someone, I would not be mentioning it here. Unconstrained selfinterest will in such cases lead to the insoluble bilateral monopoly problem with all its indeterminacies and non-optimalities. ¡¡Density of population produces what economists recognize as external economies and diseconomies. These "neighbourhood effects" are

ing friction, it sticks you where you are. It favours the status quo. And the status quo is certainly not to the liking of arch-individualists. When you have painted yourself into a corner, what can you do? You can redefine the situation, and I prediCted some years ago that there would come to be defined a privileged status quo, a set of natural rights involving individual freedoms, which alone requires unanimity before it can be departed from.

At this point the logical game is up.

The case for "complete freedom" has been begged not deduced. So long as full disclosure is made, it is no crime to assume your ethical case. But will your product sell? Can you persuade others to accept your axiom when it is in conflict with certain other desirable axioms?

Not By Reasoning Alone The notion is repellent that a man should be able to tyrannize over others. Shall he be permitted to indoctrinate his children into any way of life wh~tsoever? Shall he be able to tyrannize over himself? Here, or elsewhere, the prudent-man doctrine of the good trustee must be invoked, and in the last analysis his peers must judge-i.e., a committee of prudent peers. And may they be peers tolerant as well as wise!

Complete freedom is not definable once two wills exist in the same interdependent universe. We can sometimes find two situations in which choice A is more free than choice B in apparently every respect and at least as good as B in every other relevant sense. In such singular cases I will certainly throw in my lot with the exponents of individualism. But few situations are really of this simple type; and these few are hardly worth talking. about, because they will already have been disposed of so easily.

In most actual situations we come to a point at which choices between goals must be made: do you want this kind of freedom and this kind of hunger, or that kind often dramatized by smoke "and other nuisances that involve a discrepancy between private pecuniary costs and social costs. They call for intervention: zoning, fiats, planning, regulation, taxing, and so forth.

But too much diluteness of .the gas also calls for social interfering with laissez-faire individualism. Thus, the frontier has always involved sparse populations in need of "social overhead capital." In terms of technical economics jargon this has the following meaning: when scale is so small as to lead to unexhausted increasing -returns, free pricing cannot be optimal and there is a prima facie case for co-operative intervention.

("

contil/lled

of freedom and that kind of hunger? I use stati quo.

The precept "persuade-if-you-can-butthese terms in a quasi-algebraic sense, but actually what is called "freedom" is really a in-no-case-coerce" can be sold only to vector of almost infinite components rather those who do not understand what it is than a one-dimensional thing that can be they ar~ buying. This doctrine sounds a little like the "Resist-Not-Evil" precepts given a simple ordering.

Where more than one person is con- of Jesus or Gandhi. But there is absolutely cerned the problem is thornier still. My no true similarity between the two docprivacy is your loneliness, my freedom to trines, and one should not gain in palatahave privacy is your lack of freedom to bility by being confused with the other. have company. Your freedom to "discriMarketplace Coercion, minate" is the denial of my freedom to or The Hegelian "participate." There is no possibility of Freedom of Necessity unanimity to resolve such conflicts.

The notion, so nicely expounded in a Libertarians fail to realize that the price 'book I earnestly recommend to you, Mil- system is, and ought to be, a method of coercion. Nature is not so bountiful as to ton Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom (Chicago, 1962), that it is better for one give each of us all the goods he desires. We who deplores racial discrimination to try have to be coerced out of such a situation, to persuade people against it than to do by the nature of things. That is why we nothing at all-but, failing to persuade, it have policemen and courts. That is why is better to use no democratic coercion in we charge prices, which are high enough, these matters-such a notion as a general relative to limited money, to limit conprecept is arbitrary and gratuitous. Its ab- ¡sumption. The very term "rationing by the surdity is.perpaps concealed when it is put purse" illustrates the point. Economists abstractly in the following form: If free' defend such forms of rationing, but they men follow Practice X that you and some have to do so primarily in terms of its others regard as bad, it is wrong in prin- efficiency and its fairness. Where it is not ciple to coerce them out of that Practice X; efficient-as in the case of monopoly, in principle, all you ought to do is try to externality, and avoidable uncertainty-it persuade them out of their ways by "free comes under attack. Where it is deemed discussion." One counter-example suffices unfair by ethical observers, its evil is to invalidate a general'principle. An excep- weighed pragmatically against its advanttion does not prove the rule, it disproves ages, and modifications of its structure are it. As a'co'unter-example I suggest we sub- introduced. stitute for "Practice X" the "¡killing by gas of five million suitably specified humans."

Who will agree with the precept now?

Libertarians fail to Only two types would possibly agree to realize that the price it: (I) those so naive as to think that persystem is, and ought to be, suasion can keep Hitlers from' cremating a method of coercion. millions; or (2) those who think the status quo achievable by what can be persuaded is a pretty comfortable one after all, even if not perfect.

Classical economists, like Malthus, I exclude a third type who simply accept always understood. this coercion. They an axiom without regard to. its conse- recognized that fate dealt a hand of cards quences or who do not understand what to the worker's child that was a cruel one, its consequences are. The notion that any and a favourable one to the "well-born." form of coercion whatever is in itself so John Stuart Mill in a later decade realized evil a thing as to outweigh all other evils that mankind, not Fate with a capital F, is to set up freedom as a monstrous shib- was involved. Private property is a concept boleth. In the first place, absolute or even created by and enforced by public law. maximum freedom cannot even be defined Its attributes change in time and are manunambiguously except in certain special made, not Mother Nature-made. models. Hence one is being burned at the Nor is the coercion a minor one. Future stake for a cause that is only a slogan or generations are condemned to starvation name. In the second place, as I have shown, if certain supply-and-demand patterns rule coercion can be defined only in terms of in today's market. Under the freedom that an infinite variety of arbitrary alternative is called laissez-faire, some worthy men I

are exalted; and so 'are soine unworthy ones. * Some unworthy men are cast down; and so are some worthy ones. The Good Man gives the system its due, but reckons in his balance its liabilities that are overdue.

Anatole France said epigrammatically all th'at needs to be said about the coercion implicit in the libertarian economics of laissez-faire. "How majestic is the equality of the Law, which permits both rich and poor alike to sleep under the bridges at night." I believe no satisfactory answer has yet been given to this. It is certainly not enough to say, "We made our own beds and let us each lie in them. ** For, once Democracy rears its pretty head, the voter will think: "There, but for the Grace of God and the Dow-Jones averages, go I."

How Unequal Is Equal?

Is Unequal?

The game is up for abnegation of all social decision making. To "d.o nothing" is not really to do nothing but to continue to do what has been done. Since coercion is willy-nilly involved, and there is no algebraic magnitude of it that can be minimized in the interests of maximizing algebraic freedom of n men, what can abstract reasoning deduce concerning the "equitable" exercise of coercion, or, what may be the same thing, concerning the setting up of optimal arrangements for co-operation?

Very little, as experience has shown and as Reason itself confirms.

"Equals are to be treated equally."

Who could disagree with this sage precept?

But what does it mean? And how far does it carry us? No two anythings are exactly equal. In what¡respect are they to be treated as essentially equal? What differences are to be ignored? Here are two organisms, each with a nose. Should they be treated equally, and what does it mean to do so?

If the state taxes a brunette a dollar, then few will argue it should tax a redhead two.

That seems discriminatory. But what if the redhead has a million dollars of income *"1 am kept from attending college because my family is --."

To discern the coercion implicit in a competitive pricing system, note that any of the following can be substituted into the blank space: Negro, bourgeois, Jewish-or, poor. **If one' disagrees with Malthus and France and thinks that we all had equal opportunities and have made the beds we are to lie in, our judgment of laissez-faire imp'roves-as it should. But note it is because of its fine welfare results, and not because the kind of freedom embodied in it is the end-all of ethics.

or wealth and the brunette has a thousand? Many would consider it indiscriminate to treat them as equals, to tax them each the same number of dollars or the same percentage of dollars.

A true story points up the problem of defining equality as a guide to "equity." In the Second War, Professor Ragnar Frisch, a world-famous economist and a brave Norwegian patriot, was put into a concentration camp by the Nazis. Food was scarce there and rationed. Frisch, according to legend, raised the question: Is equal rations per man equitable? or, since nutritional need depends on metabolism which depends on body area and size, should not bigger men get larger allotments-their fair share, but no more? (If the result seems circular, a case of giving to him who hath, Frisch would no doubt be able to devise a measure of "inherent bigness." In any case no important vicious circle would be involved since the infinite series would be a rapidly converging one, as in the case where Gracie Allen found that the heavier a package the more stamps she had to put on it, and the heavier still it became.) This is not a trifling matter. Colin Clark has pointed out that I ,800 daily calories for a small-boned man in the Tropics is not quite so bad as it sounds.

My privacy is your loneliness, my freedom to have privacy is your lack of freedom to have compa.,ny.

"Do unto others as you would have them do unto you." Shaw has not so much improved on this Golden Rule as given its antidote. "Do not do unto your neighbour as you would have him do unto you: his tastes may be different." This is, of course, the Anatole France point about asymmetry made general. It illustrates how little guidance can be derived from Kant's Categorical Imperative: Act (or create institutions that will lead to acting) in such a way that if your action were generalized to all, the total welfare and welfare of each would be maximized. Such a precept has meaning only in a perfect symmetry situation; in real life even approximate axes of symmetry cannot be found and agreed upon.

The whole matter of proper tax policy involves issues of ethics, coercion, adminis-

tration, incidence, and incentives that cannot begin to be resolved by semantic analysis of such terms as "freedom," "coercion," or "individualism."

Mine, Thine, and Our'n Life consists of minimizing multiple evils, of maximizing multiple goals by compromise. What is inevitably involved is a "rule of reason." But this kind of rule is misnamed, for it cannot be generated by abstract reason. It depends on ethics and experience. I shall not labour the point but merely give some examples of the inability of deductive reasoning to infer what is the optimal pattern of freedom and coercion, of individualism and co-operation.

Mill, and anyone, will agree: You are to be as free as possible so long as you do not interfere with the freedom of others.

Or as Mrs. Pat Campbell, Bernard Shaw's pen pal, put it: Anyone can do whatever he likes so long as he does not scare the horses in the street. In an interdependent world the horses scare easily.

In practice, as recent Reports in Britain illustrate, the gist of these modes of reasoning leads to the view that the law should not interfere with, say, the relationships between homosexuals so long as these are carried on in private. But, as these Reports say, there are certain special issues connected with the problem of enticement of the young or simply enticement in general.

Quite similar problems exist in connection with heterosexuality but almost escape notice in our post-Victorian world.

Let me leave this whole issue by reminding you of a well-told anecdote. A gay young blade is blithely swinging his umbrella and is told off by an irate oldster.

GA Y YOUNG BLADE: What's the matter, this is a free country, isn't it?

IRATE OLDSTER: Yes, young man, but your freedom ends where my nose begins.

Actually, this is an understatement.

Just as we have the rule of a three-mile limit, so there is intrinsically involved here a six-inch rule of nasal Lebensraum. And really life is much more complicated even than this: for, just as we live by taking in each other's washing, we live by breathing in each other's breath. Abstract reasoning cannot find a line between individuals, nor draw a line.

Finale My time is almost up. I shall conclude by asserting that we live in an interdependent world. Just as God knows about every

sparrow that falls, Einstein's theory of general relativity shows that everything does depend on everything else: when that sparrow falls, it creates a wrinkle in spacetime which changes space everywhere. The doughnut which is an individual man is a collection of cells, each of which is a collection of smaller individuals. The skin that surrounds us is thin skin.

My body is remaking itself every moment: the I who is talking is the heir to the l's that were and the sire to those that will be. Radioactive isotopes show that even our teeth are tenants on a short lease; they are remaking themselves every day, and the half life of the charter-member calcium is measured in weeks not years. Only our serial number has soul-like persistence.

Before Rousseau, people made the mistake of treating children as merely adults shrunk small. The Bible and Freud go farther and tell us that an adult is merely a child grown large. Man is imperfect, and so is woman. And so is We, Incorporated, who paternalistically put restraints upon ourselves. Not even an individual's perfections are his alone; like his imperfections, they are group-made. We entered a world we never made, and leave one we did not unmake.

Carry the notion of the individual to its limit and you get a monstrosity, just as you do if you carry the notion of a group to its limit. You get not Nietzsche's superman, nor even Mill's imperfect-perfect Victorian entitled to his own mistakes.

You get Wolf-Boy. The Edward Everett Hale story of The Man Without A Country made a lasting impression on the boy that was 1. You recall that Lieutenant Philip Nolan said in a fit of temper that he wanted never to hear the name of his country again. Fate gave him his wish, and how cruel his fate was. Likewise, I have thought, should an extreme individualist be given the wish of every child-to be able to travel anywhere with the gift of being invisible, inaudible, untouchable, and for that matter, inedible.

To be condemned to dwell with mankind and never experience the interaction of others-I almost said other individualswould be misery enow. It is not human to be such a human, and he would soon beg to join some committee-any committee.

Like a Beethoven symphony, my lecture does not end abruptly but it does come to an end. Perhaps what I have been saying comes to this. Wherever the true home of man is, it certainly is not in Coventry. END

Vast wealth of scientific literature has made the 65-year-old Pusa Library a

URSERY OFTHE LASTYEAR when Prof. C.Y. Raman visited the Indian Agricultural Research Institute (IARI) at Pusa in New Delhi, the imposing clock tower of its library building caught his attention. He pulled out a ten-rupee note and offered it to Dr. M.S. Swaminathan, IARI's director, saying: "Get that clock repaired."

The clock may be behind time. Not so the Pusa Library. It is India's largest scientific library, and its agricultural collection is the best in South Asia. Although age is not usually a virtue in science, the 65-year-

old Pusa Library is today a model for India's ISO agricultural institutions. Some 10,000 scholars and scientists in these colleges, universities and research establishments have been tapping its vast wealth of scientific literature-more than 200,000 volumes, including 50,000 bulletins and about 6,000 files of periodicals from 85 countries in 36 languages. The library also contains such rare items as the complete set, dating back to 1665, of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, among the oldest and most re-

GREEN REVOLUTION spected scientific journals in the world.

The Pusa Library users include not only 1,500 research scientists and 500 postgraduate students on its campus, but also 2,000 scientists who come for consultation every year from different parts of the country. The library's Reprography Service, set up in 1965, serves another 4,000 scientists through photo-copies, microfilm strips and photostats. Every year, 100,000 pages of scientific literature from Pusa's collection are so circulated. It has often been said that the Pusa Library has helped sow the seeds of the Green Revolution in India.

In the last ten years, the library has been "rejuvenated" for its information-handling role in today's world. As a result, more than 1,200 publications are consulted every day, compared to barely 100 in the early 'sixties. Its holdings now grow every year at the rate of 8,000 books and 35,000 issues of periodicals.

But this extraordinary transformation of the Pusa Library took more than ten rupees. The Rockefeller Foundation has invested $145,000 in expansion of the library. A new wing, fully air-conditioned, was added in 1963, and new facilities like the reprography unit were introduced to cater to a wider clientele.

In 1967, an Indo-American Agricultural Library Survey and Study Team, after a two-month tour covering 26 leading libraries, re~ommended that the Pusa Library be officially designated as the Indian National Agricultural Library. This role has since being recognized, and its services are being expanded with this objective.

With the rapid growth of research, now estimated to double every ten years, the volume of new scientific information is expanding at an even faster rate. And the ever-widening net of scientific inter-disciplines makes it necessary for a research worker to expand his knowledge in many diverse fields while narrowing his area of specialization. His progress is heavily dependent on his ability to cope with the "information explosion."

"The annual output of the world's scientific literature," says Pusa's Chief Librarian S.P. Phadnis, "is today estimated at one million 'bits' which include research

articles, books, monographs, pamphlets, reports, patents and standards specifications, and theses. One-fourth of this new information is in the agro-biological areas. rt is true that no single scientist would ever be interested in all of it. But ten years ago scientists became so impatient with the slow pace of information processing that they felt it was faster to do their own research than to wait for documents to come through libraries. That's when the machine stepped in and saved the day. Today, information processing has become a fullfledged technology. A wide range of mechanical devices in many libraries abroad helps in the cataloguing, storage, retrieval and dissemination of information. Computers have shrunk time incredibly. Indexing of scientific papers and abstracts which used to take years is now accomplished in days, and keeps scientists informed.

"However, it is easy to work up enthusiasm for the clap-trap of the new information technology to the extent that it may even get the better of discretion," warns Mr. Phadnis. "If the new information to be used eventually is not carefully evaluated and selected before storage, there is real danger that we may stock 'garbage' in a costly way.

"It is also sobering to remember," he adds, "that an information system, however well organized, cannot guarantee productive research and development. On the other hand, the lack of a good information service may block efficient and effective research. " The importance of a good system is highlighted by the many examples of "rediscoveries" in the history of science. One classic case is that of the work of George Mendel. His monumental paper on heredity, published in 1866, was rediscovered 34 years later by three European botanists after they had independently obtained similar results. They, however, gave him full credit, and the principles of genetics are still known as Menders laws.

"One basic thing to keep in mind about the Pusa Library," emphasizes Mr. Phadnis, "is that it is not a public library, but a special library. A public library attracts thousands who come to borrow and read

for relaxation. A special library, like Pusa's. has a small but scholarly clientele which comes for reference to specific-and usually the latest-information.

For this purpose books are hardly adequate, because many are dated by the time they reach the shelf. They are more useful for the study of a subject, rather than for its development. Current information is usually found in research articles, reports and bulletins."

One unique feature of the Pusa Library is its comprehensive collection of references on Indian agriculture, published in Indian and foreign journals over the past 25 years. The number of such references exceeds 30,000. The library's documentation staffunder Mr. N.N. Chatterji screens about 40,000 research articles every year from 4,000 issues of periodicals. This massive search yields about 3,000 references.

In the 'seventies the Pusa Library plans to computerize some of its operations to tap its vast literature holding more effectively and provide a selective dissemination of information to its users. The ideal that Mr. Phadnis and his colleague A. Shoaib Ahsan have before them is a personalized service. In such a system, a profile of each of tens of thousands of scientists, with their areas of specialization, will be kept in the library and notices sent whenever new acquisitions in the library fit the profile. This profile will have to keep on changing, as the scientist's area of interest shifts. All this can only be attempted after the information-processing operations are mechanized.

In the final analysis, Mr. Phadnis cautions, the distinction must be made between documents, information and knowledge. All the money in the world is not going to get a computer to judge what is worth storing; man still plays a vital role.

The information technologists aim at a partnership of man's mind and machines -what is known as "intellectronics."

In the development of India's agriculture, the Pusa Library has a definite role in channelizing the flood of new information to research workers. As Parkinson notes: "It is not the business of the botanist to eradicate the weeds. Enough for him if he can tell how fast they grow."

END

To Franklin Roosevelt it was a register patents. Now it concentrates exclusively on foreign affairs-from Japanese featherbed; it had no structure.

To historian Arthur Schlesinger, textiles to the uses of outer space, with an army of specialists on everything from fish Jr., it's a bowl of jelly. to the Maldive Islands. About 85 per cent But to the harassed officials who of the work is routine: passports, conferwork there, the Department of State ences, statements, protocol. Diplomacy, is neither a featherbed nor a bowl of Dean Rusk used to say, is "an exercise jelly.alt's the world that's the jelly," in tedium to talk the inflammation out says one. aWe simply reflect it. We of a problem .... " But beneath the surface, after the chuckdo the best we can with it." les have died away, the work of the Depart-

OW FOREIGN POLICY ISMADE liTHE DEPART¡ MENT OFSTATE

The Department of State is the oldest ment is very serious. What we are dealing executive department in the U.S. Govern- with, Mr. Rusk once said, "is the gravest ment. The first Secretary of State, Thomas kind of problems .... Our business is the Jefferson, had a dual job: He conducted all future. We're trying to produce one kind of future instead of another. ... We have foreign affairs and registered all patentsand did it with a staff of five clerks, two to work with decisions that affect other messengers and one part-time French trans- people, all over the world." lator. A century ago, William Seward The ever-growing complexity of the bought Alaska with a staff of only 62 assis- planet we live on puts heavier and heavier tants. At the outbreak of World War II, burdens on the Secretary. The radio brings Secretary Cordell Hull was still drafting problems to his desk in seconds-problems his own messages. But today William Rog- that a century ago had to be settled in the ers, the 55th Secretary of State, presides field. In 1803, Ambassador James Monroe, over a staff of more than 27,000 persons months away in Paris, had to decide in a around the world. They process 3,000 mes- few minutes whether to accept Napoleon's sages a day, to and from over 270 embas- surprise offer to sell an area as big as the sies, legations and consulates. That's a original 13 colonies that extended from million words a day; five times more the Gulf of Mexico to Canada and from than at the height of World War II. And the Mississippi to the Rocky Mountains; figuring 140 copies to the average message, and then hope President Jefferson would that's two million copies a week, over 100 approve and that Congress would vote the million a year, flying around Washing- money for the so-called Louisiana Purchase. ton somewhere.

In the Department today, however, more The Department of State has mush- decisions must be made by the lowest-rankroomed so because the world it deals with ing officers. Junior officers are today handlhas mushroomed-in millions of people, in ing decisions that before the war would numbers of nations, in complexity of prob- have gone to the Secretary himself. lems. In 1937, President Roosevelt devotTypical of the many middle-ranking ed 1,800 words of his Inaugural speech to continued domestic problems and just 54 words to foreign affairs. By the 1960's, President Two key figures in the evolution of American Kennedy was telling friends that a domes- foreign policy today are Secretary of State tic failure could be harmful to the country; Rogers and President Nixon. shown at right a foreign policy failure could be fatal. as they stroll on the grounds of the Western No longer does the Department of State White House in San Clemente, California.

L

lmost every decision made by State will evoke public approval or outcrysometimes both at the same time. officials who are being given more and more authority is David Rowe, 38-yearold desk officer for Ecuador, one of the more than 100 such desks in the Department-one per nation in the world. A desk officer occupies a central place in the Department of State scheme. A bewildering variety of problems may drop on his desk every hour, from arranging civil aviation talks, to checking on an aid project, to a sudden call from the Secretary asking for information. Rowe has been at State for 10 years. He bolds an M.A. from Johns Hopkins University in political science.

He has served at posts in Latin America and Greece.

On a ~not untypical day, Rowe may leave home at 7 :45 a.m. and not return until 10:00 p.m. It's a demanding life. Many officers try to avoid the assignment, but David Rowe says he enjoys it. He says he acquires a wealth of information, and takes great satisfaction in doing the job.

Two floors above the usually frantic activity of Rowe's office, on the seventh or top floor, sit Secretary Rogers and his top aides. As President Nixon pointed out in introducing William Rogers, of the 55 Secretaries of State in U.S. history, six of them went on to become President: Thomas JefTerso!.1,James Madison, James Monroe .Iol1nQuincy Adams, Martin Van Buren and James Buchanan. Both Adams and Buchanan prepared for their secretaryship as Ambassadors to Russia.

"J he Secretary of State is the highest Cabinet member in terms of prestige. President Eisenhower at one time considered making John Foster Dulles his "premier" in overall charge of the Cabinet, though the plan was never carried out. Each Secretary has his own style. George Marshall, used to the ways of an Army general's staff, appointed his top aide Dean Acheson as his chief of staff to co-ordinate all policy, operations and administration, and to put all problems before him with written analyses and recommendations. Mr. Dulles, on the other hand, worked virtually alone.

Aides complained that he kept policy in his own vest pocket, and his free-wheeling press conferences often contained as much news for his staff as for the newsmen.

Secretary Rogers' day begins at 8:45 a.m. with a briefing on all developments that have taken place overnight. Around the Secretary is his personal staff, which keeps an eye on all incoming cables and flags those which demand his immediate action or attention, or which should be passed on to the White House or foreign embassies. Of the 3,000 cables, the Secretary personally reads eight to 10 in full, but he gets summaries of perhaps 200 others.

Protocol often takes Secretary Rogers away from his desk. It might be a luncheon and reception for the National Congress of Parents and Teachers in the ornate, 18th-century John Quincy Adams Drawing Room. Talk -flows about promoting parent education in developing nations.

Plates of hors d'oeuvres disappear from the tables. Suddenly an aide comes through the doors, goes briskly over to the Secretary, bends close and says a few words.

The Secretary smiles to the guests, excuses himself, and turns to go.

There is a crisis.

Once outside the door they quicken their pace back to the Secretary's office.

They charge through it, turn right a few steps down the blue-carpeted inner corridor and hit the metal "crash bar" unlocking the door that leads to still another corridor. A guard glances quickly up as they push a button to open a second door and stride on down a short hallway to the Operations Center. This is the heart of the Department, where all news flows in from the vital areas of the world.

In the words of McGeorge Bundy, President Johnson's special assistant for foreign affairs, a crisis is "a state of creative ten-

sion." And that, he added, "is what makes the plumbing show."

The Operations Center is the State Department's "plumbing."

The Center was set up by President Kennedy in 1961 to co-ordinate all incoming information and speed it to the decisionmakers. Special lines run from this room to the Situation Room in the basement of the White House, to the Defense Department, and to other agencies.

As the Secretary strides into the big room, he glances at the blackboard on which someone has neatly printed: "Today's Crisis." On every side are huge maps, and along one wall the ticker machines which automatically decode and punch out the latest cables. Above the machines is a battery of wall clocks showing the time in Tokyo, Honolulu, London, Berlin, Moscow, New Delhi and Saigon-the other two-thirds of the world that will be awake when the United States goes to bed.

The Secretary gets a quick briefing from the duty officer, then retires into a smaller conference room off the main operations area. He asks for a direct report from the Embassy on the spot, and within three minutes the Ambassador is on the phone.

The Secretary picks it up and begins quickly to ask questions. Meanwhile, the giant screen called the Telecon has flashed a copy of the latest incoming cable so all can read it. As soon as the Secretary dictates a reply. it is flashed on another screen side-by-side.

The Secretary swings around in his chair and picks up the white phone which is plugged directly to the White House switchboard, and which "scrambles" all conversation, "unscrambling" it at the other end to ensure security.

For the next few hours, the little group remains in this room, the nerve-centre of the building. By two a.m. the room has slowly emptied. But the Secretary and his top assistants remain. The last cable indicates that the crisis has stabilized for the moment. The Secretary yawns, stretches, and ambles past the desks into what looks like a one-room apartment with two single beds, a small refrigerator and a hot plate for heating food or coffee. It also has a shower. He kicks off his shoes and drops wearily down. to try to nap for a few hours before an aide will shake him awake again.

Some of its critics charge that State is just a "fire engine," rushing about to put out fires. "But," Department officials reply,

"fighting fires is a matter of survival. What State do? The President calls for expandshould we do, sit back and do nothing?" ing trade with East Europe. Some labour Of course, this is but a small part of the unions denounce the plan because more Department's role. Long-range planning imports may throw some of their members in State is done by the Policy Planning out of work. Other unions welcome it, sayCouncil, whose chief occupies a suite near ing mbre exports will mean more jobs for the Secretary's seventh-floor office. "Our their members. American fishermen object job," he says, "is to step back and be criti- when Peru orders them to stay 320 kilocal. We ask ourselves where we want to. be metres from shore. Other American fisherin respect to a given nrcblem in 10 years' ID"n in California demand that the Departtime-what kind of ",,,orIdwe want to see. ment try to get Soviet trawlers to stay at Then we work back to recommend policies least 320 kilometres from U.S. shores. we ought to adopt now to get there." With To keep the public informed, every noon help from private and university "think in Washington the Department's Press tanks," the Council has spawned such past Officer faces the press of the world, indudideas lS the Marshall Plan, the hot line to ingreporters from New Delhi, Paris, Tokyo, Moscow, the Alliance for Progress in Buenos Aires, Moscow, Manila, Nairobi, Latin America.

Warsaw and London. Every word is picked Shorter range guidance comes from the apart. Once, during the 1967 Arab-Israeli Bureau of Research. Five words from Sec- War, he said that America is neutral "in retary Rogers-"Let's have more on that" thought, word and deed." It brought an -is enough to send the Bureau into action. outcry from those who thought he meant Analysts reduce the main points of a prob- America didn't care about the issues, and lem down to one page, short enough for forced the President himself to correct it. the Secretary to scan between phone calls. Next day, the Press Officer ruefully quoted Longer studies, up to 200 pages, may deal the lines he said he had copied from his with such problems as the effect of the church pew: "Oh Lord, keep me from.becoming talkclosing of the Suez Canal, Mao Tse-tung's cultural revolution, etc. The Bureau Chief ative, possessed with the idea that I must says, "There's a healthy tension between express myself on every subject."

Of course, public opinion is most keenly us and the day-to-day, nose-to-the-grindstone policy bureaus. And that's how it expressed in Congress, especially in the should be. We raise questions the bureaus Senate, which has the duty under the Constitution to advise and consent on may have overlooked."

Still more input reaches the Secretary's foreign policy.

Congress seems to feel, like Clemenceau desk from the Operations Center which daily prepares two summaries of incoming and the generals, that peace is too importinformation, one in the morning, one in ant to be left in the hands of the diplomats. the evening: 15 to 20 brief items dipped To the head of the Congressional liaiinto a notebook. "We try to make the dead- son office goes the job of advising the Seclines as late as possible," says one duty retary: "How can we do this or that so that officer,"so the news is as fresh as possible. Congress will go along?" He explains, And the editors are allowed some humour.

"We don't want everyone on Capitol Hill The few words that 'headline' each item to think the way we do, but we don't want are often very funny."

51 per cent against us, either."

Although much of State's work is stampOne of State's most important jobs is ed SECRET, much more is conducted in to keep Congress informed of every step it the open, and almost every decision made takes. To do this it answers 60,000 phone will evoke public approval or outcrycalls and 30,000 letters a year from Consometimesboth at the same time. The De- gressmen. That's 1,500 letters or calls a partment reads and answers almost 20 mil- week, three times more than a decade ago. lion letters a year from Americans and It tries to answer every letter within three from people writing in over 50 languages days. Every Wednesday morning, a senior from every corner of the earth. Mexican official holds a briefing on Capitol Hill, brooms are being sold in America-comdisG,ussingeverything from an upcoming petingwith those made by blind American consular treaty with the Soviet Union to citizens, but this may be the only income minor budget problems. for entire villages of Mexicans. What can It is a truism that foreign policy is an

extension of national or sectional interest.

This is particularly true in a nation such as the United States, whose peoples are drawn from every corner of the world. San Francisco, for example, has the largest Chinese population of any city outside the Orient.

Chicago has the largest Polish population of any city outside Warsaw. This variety is reflected in Congress, whose members may be sons or grandsons of Greeks, Japanese, Poles, Africans, Yugoslavs, Mexicans, Irish or Chinese. All are keenly interested in any policy that affects the land of their forebears.

Congress has an especially powerful lever with which to influence policy: It must approve every single penny appropriated for foreign affairs. A simple Waterfor-Peace conference in Washington may cost up to three million dollars to prepare.

Should Americans be taxed for that? Can the budget stand such burdens? Should the United States help build a dam to help another country grow cotton to drive U.S. cotton off the market? Cotton states, wheat states, shoe-making states, fish-producing states-all have a vital interest in foreign policy decisions.

In spite of all the frustrations, all the crushing problems, the Department of State does seem to get things done. Crises do get defused. And many other problems never grow into crises. One of the Department's most caustic Congressional critics begrudgingly admits that, "Yes, I'd say there's too much paperwork and overlapping down there in State. But I'll say this: the calibre of men is pretty good. We're getting some vigorous foreign service officers in there."

And, talking about U.S. diplomats, President Nixon said that he was very proud to have supporting him in his search for peace and freedom "a fine group of career officers who have dedicated their life to public service.... " Mr. Nixon told the Department of State employees that back in 1910, President Taft's Secretary of State used to arrive at the office at 10 a.m., look over some cables, leave at 11:30 for a leisurely lunch, then spend the afternoon playing golf and the evening at a diplomatic party. "But since then," grinned the President, "I understand that things have changed."

As one American ambassador once sighed: "Compared to foreign affairs, everything else is simple as marbles." END

~SHINGTON

COUNTRY As great men travel, they leave history behind them.

And so it was with George Washington, whose birth anniversary is observed this month. Today, following his tracks around what is loosely called Washington country, tourists visit Williamsburg, where they see Robertson's Windmill, left. They go to Philadelphia to inspect the Liberty Bell, below. And along the way they may still see an Amish farmer in his old-fashioned carriage, right.

PROBABLY only second to Disneyland, the goal of tourists in the United States-both native and foreign-is Washington, D.C., named appropriately after the first President of the United States. And from the obelisk that is the Washington Monument, tourists travel into Virginia, down the Potomac River 24 kilometres to Mount Vernon, his home from 1754 until his death. And they go up to Philadelphia to see Independence Hall and the Liberty Bell.

But Washington's life encompassed far more territory, which has now been marked as the George Washington Heritage Trail, extending far from the shadow of his monument in the District of Columbia.

Pennsylvania, New York, Maryland, Virginia, West Virginia-Washington knew them all, first when they were colonies and then, States of the Union. It was in this region that the spirit of independence was born and nourished and where the American Revolution was mainly fought under the leadership of General Washington. As President of the United States he travelled as far north as Portsmouth, New Hampshire, and as far south as Savannah, Georgia, but the Heritage Trail is concen-

trated mainly in the centre States.

Richard Dunlop, a travel writer, relates in Discovery, his adventures following the footsteps of America's founding father.

"The region of the Heritage Trail is a vacation area without parallel. There are such diverse places as a sun-drenched strand at Virginia Beach where luxurious resort hotels rise beside the sea and a rustic fishing camp on the Allegheny River close to Warren, Pennsylvania. But following the markers of the Trail from Washington, we came to Baltimore, where the first monument in the country was erected to him.

"The number one tourist attraction in the city is Fort McHenry. Here, during the War of 1812, Francis Scott Key wrote The Star Spangled Banner by the red glare of bursting British rockets. We found the Constellation, sister ship to Old Ironsides, tied up at the waterfront to be of great interest.

"In Philadelphia we went to a concert by the Philadelphia Symphony at Robin Hood Dell and learned that it is a not-soold Philadelphia tradition for diesels on the Reading Railroad not to blow their horns when the orchestra is playing. This has been the rule since the summer night continued

From the historic places that no tourist in Washington can miss, the Trail winds over grassy slope, through shady glen. The sights include (clockwise from top left): Hikers along the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal; the Jefferson Memorial through a screen of cherry blossoms; the grounds of Mount Vernon; spring-cleaning at the Lincol~ Memorial; the south lawn of the White House in spring.

C(ÂťY@l9eJ@~ Pnoto top centre: W.E. Dulton,

u.s.

National Park Service

Photo left: Fred R. Bell, U.S. National Park Service

that Leopold Stokowski stopped the orchestra in the middle of a symphony and directed a black look towards the railroad tracks where a train whistle had boomed out in the middle of a pianissimo. Someone in the audience hurried to a phone and called the Reading. He must have been the right person, because the trains have been quiet ever since.

"We drove west of Philadelphia to the Pennsylvania Dutch country where Amish farmers still ride to market in black carriages. The Mennonite brethren are a bit more receptive to modern times, and they drive autos, but the cars are black and all the chrome has been removed, since, as any good Mennonite knows, chromebeing extravagant show-is the devil's favourite metal.

"The region contains America's first national road, U.S. 40, running west of Cumberland, Maryland, and also the Pennsylvania Turnpike, built in the 1930s on the roadbed of an unfinished 19th-century railroad, to become America's first motor expressway.

"We took the Turnpike west to Pittsburgh, a city that began as the Fort Pitt of Washington's day. The Fort Pitt Blockhouse and Fort Pitt Museum are situated where the Allegheny and the Monongahela come together, a river junction so strategic it became known as the Golden Triangle.

Skyscrapers reach into a sky swept clear of the pall of smoke that once made the steel city a synonym for pollution.

"The Washington Trail loops north through the Pennsylvania highlands to the continued

Today's tourist finds that the George Washington Heritage Trail is a blend of past and present, town and country.

Left, Pittsburgh's Golden Triangle, where the Allegheny and Monongahela rivers meet.

Below, anglers on a sun-drenched Virginia beach. Right, the flood-lit dome of the Capitol.

oil fields, where although the oil reserves are running low, some new drilling is still being done.

"We cut south on an alternate trail that leads to Chester and Wheeling, West Virginia, both of which enjoy horse racing, a favourite pastime of Washington the gentleman farmer. At new Martinsville we stopped to watch glassware being made, and picked up the main trail at Parkersburg.

"In 1770, George Washington came to this beautiful spot on the Ohio River to locate lands given to him by Virginia for his military service. Nothing remains dating to Washington's day, although a twostorey cabin in City Park was built in 1804.

"U.S. Highway 50 was originally the Old Northwestern Turnpike, a wagon road into the West, suggested by Washington in 1784. We drove all the way east to Front Royal in Virginia and then turned south along the Blue Ridge Parkway, which winds through a mountainous terrain as magnificent today as it was in George

Washington's time.

"The Washington Heritage Trail leads through a country both colourful and scenic. At Lexington, Virginia, the George C. Marshall Research Library Museum portrays the recent history of the period when the United States and its allies opposed the Axis powers. Lexington is also the home of Washington and Lee University.

"We drove on dO\yn the Blue Ridge Parkway to Sharp Top. We took a bus part way up this rugged mountain and hiked the last 500 metres. The stone for the Washington Monument in Washington, D.C., was taken from Sharp Top, and a plaque on the trail advises hikers that the stone was 'from Virginia's loftiest mountain to Virginia's noblest son.'

"Certainly George Washington would have been as fascinated as we were at the stilt-legged contraptions at Langley Air Base at Hampton, Virginia, in which our astronauts trained for the first landings on the moon. Not far away near Chincoteague,

Virginia, we came upon the Wallops Island Space Center where rockets are tested.

"We looped east into Tidewater, Virginia and paused in Williamsburg, the colonial capital that saw much of young George Washington, before driving back into Washington, D.C. Washington chose the location of the city and picked Charles Pierre L'Enfant to be the engineer to design it. The heart of the city to this day reflects Washington's idea of what an American capital should be."

There is much more to the Washington heritage, of course, than can be seen along the Trail and much more than history along the Trail that Washington obviously could not have seen. But Washington was not an antiquarian: although a man of his time, he looked to the future of his country. and its people. He, too, would have been intrigued by the blend of his time and the present, which today's tourist can find in his adventures on the George Washington Heritage Trail.

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