SPAN: February 1979

A LEITER FROM THE PUBLISHER The recent establishment of formal diplomatic relations brtween the United States and the People's Republic of China (PRC) is the culmination of a process of evolution in the two nations' relations that has spanned nearly 30 years, and is grounded in an even older historical relationship.

America's relations with China began in the mid-19th century, when the magnificent China Clippers began sailing between American and Chinese ports, exchanging Chinese tea for U.S. manufactured goods. The second half oft he century saw large numbers of Chinese immigrating to the United States; they played a significant role in building the first U.S. transcontinental railroad.

During World War II. relief aid from U.S. Government and private sources flowed into China, in response to the country's needs and the sympathetic American public opinion.

But when in 1949 the Communist forces of Mao T se-tung declared the People's Republic, the United States withheld recognition, preferring to maintain formal ties with the Nationalist Government of Chiang Kai-shek in Ta iwan. The low-point of Sino-U.S. relations was reached during the Korean War when American troops (fighting under the flag of the United Nations) clashed with PRC troops in 1952.

A long period of chilly relations began to thaw in April 1971 with what was to become famous as "ping pong" diplomacy: a U.S. table tennis team was invited to the PRC. Later that year, the United States supported Peking's admission to the United Nations. while opposing Taiwan's expulsion from the organization.

In February 1972, President Richard M. Nixon visited China at the invitation of Premier Chou En-lai. The visit resulted in the Shanghai communique, in which the United States recognized that there was only one China, of which Taiwan was a part: both states urged continued progress toward normalization of relations between them. A year later, they opened liaison offices in each other's capitals. Since then, unofficial relations in the areas of culture, trade, and tourism have steadily expanded.

So, the change in U.S. policy of three decades is inevitable.

As President Jimmy Cart'"er noted in his announcement of December 20, 1978, it is essentially the recognition of a simple fact: that the People's Republic of China, whose citizens comprise one-fourth of the world's population, is the single government of China. What the ultimate implications of this recognition are it is of course impossible to predict. But there is no reason to doubt that it can be of great, long-term benefit not only to the United States and China, but to all the peoples of the world, relieving as it does a source of international tension.

Recognition of the international facts of life is reflected in another aspect of U.S. foreign policy, the support of human rights. In an interview reprinted in this issue of SPAN, Patricia Derian, Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights. is asked how the United States could reconcile longstanding American concern about human rights problems in China with the new Sino-U.S. relationship. Candidly, Derian explains the complications involved in trying to further human rights consideratidns while developing friendly relations with a society like China's. She goes on to answer specific and searching questions about other U.S. attempts to improve human rights elsewhere in the world-i11 the Soviet Union, southern Africa, Iran, South Korea, and even in the United States itself. Her point: Human rights begin at home-in the last analysis, every nation must protect the rights or its own citizens.

-Perry L. Peterson A cling Publisher

SPAN

February 1979

VOLU M E XX NUMBE R 2

2 United States Recognizes China 5 Celebrating the Uncelebrated

by Steve u twson

10 Growing Up With Science Fiction 13 Is CapitaJism Humane-?

16 Behind the Mask of Comedy 2 0 Georgia O'Keeffe 24 Houston-City of Confident Growth 30 The Bad Days of Charles Goodyear 3 2 From Amritsar to Akron 3 3 New Products U.S.A. 3 7 On the Lighter Side 3 8 Information for the Asking

hy

Carl Sagan

/1_r Milton Friedman hy Jacquelin Singh

br Amei Wallacll

by John F. Coppola

by Richard F. Snow

by Da11icl B. Mosk(JI.-it:

4 0 The Jeaning of America 4 4 Jeans Come to India 4 5 Protecting Press Freedom in the U.S. 4 6 Human Rights: What Has the American

by Carin c. Quinn

by Anurag Mmhur

Push Achieved?

An lnteniew With Patricio Derian

4 9 Women Athletes-

Off and Running

Front cmer : T wo youngster~ peep out of a pair of Levi's jeans in this old ad vertisement of levi Strauss & Co. Levi Strauss started in the 1870~ by making Jeruls to meet the need for a sturdy worker's garment. They quickly became popular with people of al l classes and occupations all over the world. See stories on pages 40-44.

Back coter: A redhead to watch ou t for is Karen Logan. American basketball player.

She is one of the many women who are maki11g it to lhe top in American sports. Women's sports are attracting many players and big audiences. Sec page 49.

JACOB SLOAN, Editor; JAY W. G ILDNER, Publisher.

Managing Editor : Chidananda Das Gupta. Assistant Managing Editor: S. R . Madhu.

Editorial S taff: Krishan Gabrani, Aruna Dasgupta, Nional Sharma, Mura ri Saha, Rocq ue Fernandes. Art Director : Nand Katyal. Art Staff: Gopi Gajwani, B. Roy Choudhury. Kan ti Roy. Chief of P roduction: Awtar S. Marwaha. Photo Editor: Avinash Pasricha. Photographic Services: IC A Photo Lab. Published by the Internationa l Communication Agency. Amencan Center, 24 Ka,lu rba Gandh i Marg. New Dcl11i 11000 1, on behalf of the American Embassy. New Delhi. T he opinions expressed in thts magazine do not necessarily reflect the v1ews or policies of the United States Government. Printed

by II. K. Meh ta at Thomson Press (India) Limited, Faridabad, Haryana. l'hot~rapbs: Front tover- courtesy Levi Strauss & Co. 5, 7. ~-Thom~s S. England. 6- Lee Baltcrman, 10-~ I978 Giurtfr-•nco Gorgooi, Contact :!Q-Chnstopber Spnngmann. 21-23 Malcolm Varon, courtesy Georgta O'Ke<:ffc.

24-2$ SJe>e Andtrson ; Jamc> A. Sugar (2). 32-counesy Gb<ld}"'ar News Bureau 40-41- Mary Elkn Mark. except top leli courtesy Tire Ne•• York TtmtS. 42 left-eourtc>Y Lel'i Strauss&. Co.; right - Charles M . Rafshooo.

42-43 (split)-C'hnstorher Spnngmann. 43,44 -Avmash Pasrtcha. 49 top- John Hamilton. Glo be Photos : bonomCalflernsttin; rij!ht ·JorryCo<)k.Sp~~rt;l/luHrttwd©TJmelnc. Back cover Neilletfet, Sport.< 11/rwroted ©'Time I nc

U~e

oJ SPAN artJCies in other publicalions l$ en(.;ouraged, cxccpl wben copynghted~ For permission., wri1e to the Eduor. Price ofmagarlnc· ()no year'• subscrtptlon ( 12 issues), I ~ 111pee,;; smgle copy. 2 rupees 50 p aise. For change of .t(!drcss.send an old address from a recent SPAN envelope along wrth ~ew address to A.K . Mitra. Circulation Ma nager, SPAN M•gazlnc, 24 Kasturba G(U'•dht Marg, New Dclht I 10001 (~cchangcof addrcss form on pagc48.)

A NEW CHAPTER OPENS IN HISTORY

UNITED STATES RECOGtf~ZES CHINA 'The change l am announcing .. . will be of great long-term benefit to the people of both the United States and China-and, I believe, to all the peoples of the world,' said President Carter in his December 15 announcement. ''An auspicious development for Asia," said tbe Asian Wall StreeT Journal. "Carter stuns the world," announced Time. A "historic settlement:· said the Hindu of Madras. "A betrayal," American Republican leaders charged. They were commenting on President Jimmy Carter's December 15 announcement that as of January I, 1979, the United States would recognize the People's Republic of China as the sole government of China, and terminate diplomatic relations with Taiwan.

The first step toward formal U.S.China relations was taken more than six years ago, when President Richard M. Nixon visited China. He described his week-long trip as ''the week that changed the world ." The negotiations with China were continued by President Gerald Ford (who visited the People's Republic in 1975). On behalf of the Carter Administration, Secretary of State Cyrus Vance, National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski. and the head of the American mission in China. Leonard Woodcock. held several discussions with Chinese leaders. "The results bear witness to the <;teady, determined bipartisan effort of our country to build a world in which peace will be the goal and the responsibility or all nations." said President Carter.

In his announcement. which some newspapers considered the most momentous one in his two-year-old Presidency. President Carter described China as "a nation of gifted people who comprise one-fourth of the total population of the earth,·· and referred to China's .. important role in world affairs. a role that can only grow more important in the years ahead." He said the American decision was not being taken "for transient. tactical or expedient reasons··; the United States was recognizing "a simple reality." "T he change I am announcing tonight will be of great long-term benefit to the people of both the United States and China - and, l believe. to all the peoples oft he world .. , While the U.S. recognition or China and the termination of diplomatic links with T aiwan - took effect from the New Year, the two countries are to exchange Ambassadors and establish embassies on

March I, 1979. China's Vice Premier Teng Hsiao-ping is visiting the United States in late January to "give our governments the opporlunity to consult with each other on global issues.·· The U.S. President said that he had paid special attention to ensuring that the normalization of relations between the United States and the People's Republic would not "jeopardize the wellbeing of the people of Taiwan.,. He said the American people would maintain their commercial, cullural. trade and other links with Taiwan. and noted that other countries were maintaining such a relationsh ip successfully.

A joint communique issued simultaneously in Peking and Washington on December 15 reaffirmed the principles of the Shanghai communique of 1972 (signed by President Nixon and Premier Chou En-lai): emphasized that "neither should seek hegemony- the dominance of one nation over others- in the AsiaPacific region or in any other region of the world"; and that "each is opposed to efforts by any other country or group or such countries to establish such hegemony."

T he announcement of the Sino-U.S. decision in Peking was accompanied by some never-before media events: Chairman Hua Kuo-feng held a press conference for Chinese and foreign newsmen; Chmcse television interviewed Leonard Woodcock; the People's Daily brought out the first special edition published by the Chinese press since 1949 (one million copies were printed and diStributed free); the magazine China Under Construe/ion came out the same day with an AmericanIzed format, rather resembling Newsweek.

T he U.S.-China initiative was described by Dr. Brzezinski on a television program as "a very major change in\ world affairs, a strategic shift of historic proportions." Asked about the possibility that China might seize Taiwan by force, Dr. Brzezinski said. ''We are dealing with a China that is accommodating, that has an interest in close collaboration with us, thai has not contradicted our interest in a peaceful solution, and that itself has

indicated that it wishes to be patient.'' ln a television interview with veteran newsman Walter Cronkite of CBS News.

President Carter made the following points: • T he People's Republic or China does not have the capability to launch a 120mile attack across the ocean against Taiwan, which is heavily fortified and heavily armed. However, the United States expects that the differences between China and Taiwan will be settled peacefully.

"T o violate that understanding with us would be to wipe out all the benefits to them and to Asia of peace and their new relationship with us.''

• America's new relationship with China will not come in the way of a successful SALT (Strategic Arms Limitation Talks) agreement, and will not endanger America's relationship with the Soviet Union. A personal message sent to President Carter by Soviet President Leonid Brezhnev was ''very positive in tone." (The Soviet news agency Tass said later that President Brczhnev had expressed concern in his message about a passage m the joint Chinese-U.S. com munique opposing ·'hegemony,'' a term often used in Sino-Soviet polemics.)

REACTIONS TO SINO-U.S. INITIATIVE Comments on the Sino-U.S. move ranged from enthusiastic acclaim to strong disapproval. European countries, A ustralia. Japan, and China's Asian neighbors welcomed the move. T here was the expected critical comment in the Soviet and East European press, and anti-U.S. demonstrations erupted in T aiwan. Within the United States, D emocrats welcomed it while Republican leaders assailed the President's move. Most American newspapers regarded the move as inevitable, while a few expressed reserva.tions about some aspects of the accord .

Among the Democrats. Senator Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts said that normalization of U.S.-Ch ina ties was fully compatible with "assuring the peace and prosperity of the people of Taiwan.··

Left: President Carter announces the breakthrough in Sino-U.S. relations. Above: National Security Adviser Zbigniell' Brze::.inski, who held talks with Chinese leaders : Senator Edward Kennedy. ll'lzo welcomed the President's announcemenr, am/ Senaror Barry Goldwater. ll'ho opposed it. Righr: Americans at 1he Grea1 Wall of China. fnser: Chinese Vice Premier Teng Hsiao-ping. who is visiting the UniledStates a/ the end ofJanuary 10 discuss Sino-U.S. ties.

Senator Frank Church of Idaho. who is expected to head the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in the next Congress, said the President's decision ..finally brings American policy into line with Asian realities."

U.S. Senate Minority Leader, Howard Baker of Tennessee. called the decision ''a mistake" and urged President Carter to delay the notice terminating the 23year-old U.S.-Taiwan security treaty. He said the U.S. Congress should discuss such an important policy matter in advance. Senator Robert Dole of Kansas deplored the absence of"vital assurances" from Peking that it would refrain from attacking Taiwan. Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona, the 1964 Republican opponent of Lyndon Johnson for the Presidency, branded President Carter's decision as "one of the most cowardly acts by any President in the history of the

country.... The action stabs in the back the nation of Taiwan. one of the most faithful, trustworthy and valuable friends our country has ever had." He said that if the President circumvented the U.S. Congress in abrogating the treaty. he would challenge him in a court of law.

American press comment focused mainly on the motives of China and on the implications of the United States· severing links with Taiwan.

The New York Times said: '·Both Peking and Washington deserve great credit for the swift recognition that the time had come to seal their bargain.

Each showed extraordinary sensitivity for the difficulties of the other's Taiwan connection . . .. Americans should consider themselves lucky that their long and costly isolation of China can finally be ended in a manner that is honorable and at a time when the commercial and security needs of both nations propel them toward a new era of collaboration."

In another editorial on the su~ject, The New York Times said: "Although China used to jeer that America was a paper tiger, it has more recently goaded the United States to show real teeth, to offset , Soviet influence in Asia. To embarrass the United States would only weaken the value of the new relationship with America. It would alsc slam the door on the American technology needed for the

·four modemizations· of industry. agriculture, science and defense which have come to outweigh Taiwan as Chinese priorities: · The Christian Science Monitor said it was inconceivable that the United States would not one day establish full diplomatic relations with the world' s most populous nation. However, the paper wondered whether "the United States did not give away more to China than it obtained." rt said that China was too weak militarily to reunify Taiwan by force; the Chinese were likely to deal with Taiwan the same way they dealt with Hong Kong. "But what happens when the pragmatic Mr. Teng is no longer on the scene? Or if China were suddenly to reverse course a few years hence?"

The Wall Street Journal made a similar point. "The putative architect of China's turn to the West is Vice Premier Teng Hsiao-ping . .. . Teng may well be, as American officials believe, the dominant leader in Peking despite his inferior rank.

But Chinese politics are anything but stable and are, above all , mysterious to the West. ... It would not be hard to imagine yet another purge of the man on whom the United States rests its hopes. And the new leadership may see very little validity in the informal assurances Teng offered an American President."

Analyzing China's motives for the de-

NJTED STATES REC'OGNI/I'S CHINA '""tuutc•d

ctston to establish formal relations wtth the United State~. the Washington Post said that the matn mouvc was fear of the Sonet Union. "Feeltng the masst\C and still-growing So" tet deployment to tts north. seemg MosCO\\ strengthcnmg 11 s hand in Vtetnam and Afghanistan. finding no acceptable \\a)' to improve tts own relations with the Kremlin. the Chinese leaders evtdentl\. sa~ a cnucal need to tighten ttcs wllh.the Untied States and ns allies. The wtdenmg of it~ six-year-old opening to Washington wa~ preceded by an outreach to East Europe. Iran and, most notably, Japan "The other big reason bt!hind Pekmg's move apparently was to consummate n rolling decision on modernmllton. China's debate on how to develop a huge. poor country will probably never end. The way of the late Chairman Mao Tse-tung was highly tdeologtcal. Tt Involved selfreliance. home-supplied (and therefore limttcd) capital and technology. agncultural self-sufficiency. ttght internal discipline. 'moral' mcent1ve<; (low pay). social leveling.

'The way of Chairman Hua and. even more. of Deputy Pnme Mmister Teng Hsiao-pmg. who 1:. regarded as the real power in Pekmg and the archttect of the American connection. IS quite different.

It is highly pragmatic and mvolves a new emphasis on foretgn capital, techno Ioro. goods and market!>. a greater interest in industrial growth. a loosening of discipline, higher pay. the merit standard, and acceptance of some class gradations.

Not by accident i:-. Pierre Cardin headed for Peking.

"Obviously, China's leaders count on faster progress. Their own past experience demonstrates. however, that economic policy is a contmumg arena of political contention. They have taken the very 'capitalist road· for which they have long lambasted Mosco\\."

European and Asian media reaction: West European reactton to the development was htghly favorable. Asian newspapers generally welcomed tt. Certain common themes ran through A!->1an press comment: • NormaltzattOn was mevttable.

• The American decision signified "a return to Asia."

• Although tt was a shock for Ta1wan, the positive results outwetghed the negative ones, for the United States and for the world in general.

• T he decision was an example of President Carter's strong leadership.

The London Oh.1·en•er descnbcd the present drive to modernize Chma as "an historical process of enormous human significance." It said that "a serious effort by Mr. Brezhnev to settle the border dispute with China would be hts best answer to President Carter's ne~ mtttative."

Le Mamie of Pans sa1d "The blow is

a hard one for Moscow .. Whether or not there is a Chtnese danger. the So\iet Union must step up the SALT talks ... French tele\iston descnbcd the Smo- U.S. move as "the begmnmu {)fa ne\\ era.·· But a Stockholm ~cwsp;pt:r cautioned: "Nothmg could be worse than that the Lnited States replace an old neglect of China wtth a ne\\ neglect of the So\'iet U mon ...

Radio Moscow cited an arttclc tn Red S1ar, the Sovtet Defense Mintstry paper. headlined "A NATO for Asia."

It said the United States was establishing "a triple alliance with Pck1ng and Tokyo on a single anti-Soviet and anti-socialist platform." The article said that all three countries "dream of the elimination of the revolutionary gains of peoples, a redefinition of borders and the establtshment of their domination in Asia.''

Some Asian papers sympatht1cd with TaJW·an·s "bitter fate." some bcl1e\cd that the Sino-U.S. move would not help stabilitv m Asia. A wntcr 111 limes Jounzai. Mantia. asked: "When 1s it our tum to be junked b) the Amcncans'?"

Nation of Bangkok said that normalization of Sino-U.S. ties would 1mprove the balance of power between the Untted States, the Soviet Ln1on, Japan and China. The Yomiuri of Japan sa1d: "We believe that closer ties among the United States. China and Japan will strengthen the Soviet feelmg of isolation, but we must refrain from furthering this feeling."

The Hong Kong Times believed that America ·'has already walked into Communist China's dangerous trap." Newspapers in Taiwan publici;:ed anti-U.S. demonstrations in the territory and called for greater solidanty among citizens of Taiwan.

The Pakistan Time.\ said that the SinoU.S. move had ended the "absurdity of 29 years" and believed that 11 would reduce the possibility of armed conflict among the great powers. The paper stressed Pakistan's important role in origmally establishing contact between Amenca and Chma.

The Indian Express descnbed the SinoU.S. initiative as "the fomlalmau~ruratton of a ne\\ balance of power in Asta . . ..

After its recently-concluded alliance with Japan. China appears to U.S. policymakers a dependable partner in the attempt to contain Soviet 1nfluence 111 Asia.·'

*

*

•

What will be the effect of Improved Sino-U.S. relations on trade between the two countries? Sino-U.S. trade htt an all-time high of $933 million in 1974, but fell to about $336 million in 1976.

China's current drive toward modernization. and the establishment of formal relations between the United Stutes and China. open up many possibilities. For instance. Americans could help the Chinese launch commumcattons satellttcs.

develop the1r offshore oil fields. extract iron ore, build ammoma plants. set up hotel chams.

China has invited several Amencan companies to dtscuss offshore otl development. The East China Sea area 1s descnbed b) one American executive as "one of the largest unexplored areas left m the world today ...

The most likely consequence of tmprmcd ties between the two countne:. is that the peoples of Amenca and China will sec more of each other and learn about each other. Cultural, educational and scientific exchanges between the two countries will expand. ln 1978, more than 10,000 Americans including some 100 Congressmen visited China.

Chinese have been vis1ting the United States too. Recently. the People's Daily ran a series of seven articles on life in the United States. after a team of Chinese newsmen toured the United States. Sample quotes from these articles: ··For man) Americans. China IS an exot1c country. whereas for many Chtnesc. the United States is a strange countr) ...

"The Americans are famous for thetr concern for efficienC). When they are v.. orkmg. they are diligent and tense.

When they work. they work. When they play, they play."

"Workers would often raise thetr heads and say hello to us, and then bury their heads in their work again. There is no idle person and no idle conversation."

"The crowded skyscrapers gave one a feeling of distorted development. Tall buildmgs block the sunlight, and it is as if the pedestrians are in a dark valley.

Men looked relatively tiny. as if they are being crushed by these monsters of capitalism."

"In a country like America. the teleVISion industry's development is accompanted b) many adverse effects, which become society's problems. No matter ~hat program. after watching a few mmutes of it. it is then interrupted b) ad\ertisements. which tS disgusting. But thts 1s the source of revenue for television ...

"Two points we learned from the MissisSippi River are that we must improve our waterways so depth can be maintained at the level required for traffic, and also that we must develop modern, highefficiency tugboats and barge fleets to replace outdated flotillas and single-cargo vessels.'' ··we should learn the good points of advanced capitalist countries and at the same time screen out all the corrupt things. We should learn their science, but at the same time should reject their philosophy. We should learn from their experiences. Since we have the superior social svstem, we should be able to avoid the evils of capitalism ...

"We place our hope in the American people. and the American people also place thetr hope in us." -S.R. MADH U

CELEBRA Tl NG t·o11tmm•d

I

t kicks ofi' with a kinetic tableau - IS men and women miming professional tasks to the amplified accompaniment of typing, hammering, ringing. buzzing, and assorted cacophonies. Huge set pieces zoom in and out: steel girders. entire brick walls. mock automobiles. scrims swarming with slides. And across the stage rolls a long trolley bearing a huge emblem in bright orange letters: WORKING .

Working, the bestselling book by the renowned author-columnist-interviewer Studs Terkel, has been transformed into a stage musical by Stephen Schwartz, the composer of Godspe/1 and PJj>pin.

After a sold-out run in Chicago in 1977, Schwartz launched the show on Broadway in May 1978. Its opening there marked the culmination of a remarkable project in the American theater.

Rooted in the verbatim confessions of actual Chicago workers, the musical was composed by a committee whose members included the folk-rock superstar James Taylor and then developed improvisationally. Faced with the herculean job of converting an indisputable piece of literature into an equally valid theater piece, Schwartz, cast, and crew have come up with an intensely American show that not only reinterprets Terkcl's book in stage terms but extols its theme : Working celebrates the uncelebrated .

"To tell the absolute tacky truth about the whole story." laughs Schwartz, recalling how the experiment began , "what happened was this: we belong to the Book-of-the-Month Club. and I got an announcement of the book in the mail.

And I said to myself: 'This is something I ought to get hold of!'·· That was in 1974, when Working: Pevple Talk ohout What They Do All Dar and Holl' Tiler Feel aho111 What They Do was published. It was the third "oral history" by Studs Terke l. who had made a tremendous impression on critics and readers across the United States with his Di1•ision S1ree1: America (1966), a compendi um of interviews with people on both sides of the racial, Vietnam, and generation gaps, and then with Hard Times: An Oral History of the Great Depression in America ( 1970). Terkers mastery of the tape-recorded interview. his genius for inducing his subjects to tell their deepest feelings candidly, as if to a dear friend, reaches its peak rn R._..pruued \lollh pcrmt,.,IOn lrom Hort:on ((: 1')7l\ b\ Amcnc-.m Hcruagc Pubhshtnj! Lo lnl'

6

SPAN FEBRUARY 1979

CELEBRATING continued

Working. Here 134 interviewees drawn from every level of white-collar, bluecollar, and no-collar work in the United States speak out, each in the special patois of his profession and class, about the drama, drudgery, dreams, and frustrations of holding down a job. l Hear America Talking might be another title for Terkel's collections. Like his literary progenitors- Walt Whitman.

Carl Sandburg, Nelson Algren - Terkel is atttmed to tl1e populist strain in the American spirit. His sensitivity to the native pulse and exaltation of the commonplace made Working a literary success.

On the surface, however, it seemed unlikely material for the theater. The book focuses on talk, not action ; and there is a bewildering variety of charactersunlinked by story line, interaction, or traditional climax.

Yet, again and again in Working, Terkel's subjects mention "acting" on the job, adopting a mask. putting on a little show for the coworker or the boss, playing around within the limits of their occupations : the operator joking with a too-serious caller, the waitress addressing her customer as " Milady." This role playing makes the interviews surprisingly suited to the stage.

Schwartz was not alone in gauging the dramatic potential. "There were a lot of big guns interested in getting the rights." he remembers, "and there I was with my personal checkbook in hand, saying ' Don't you want to let me ¡ have this for two years?' ., His enthusiasm and ideas won Terkel over. Permission was granted, and the staggering task of adaptation began.

F.:

irst, with the help of his associate director, Nina Faso, Schwartz had o whittle down the mass of interviews to a stageworthy 40 or so. Then came the arduous process of arranging this material into a fluid running order. Terkel's own subheadings in the book provided some guidance: "Cleaning Up" comprises garbage men, domestics, and sanitationtruck drivers; "Communications" covers receptionists and switchboard operators; "Cradle to the Grave" goes from baby nurses through teachers to gravediggers.

Schwartz also worked out some connecting devices: gigantic projections of food ads tie supermarket checkers and migrant workers together, for instance.

Throughout the spring of 1977 Schwartz and 10 actors- fellow alumni, mostly from Godspe/1 or Pippin , who were willing to start work without pay- experimented

8

with the material. Then Schwartz and Faso prepared a rough scenario, casting each performer in three or four parts.

Music was the next hurdle, and here Schwartz made a definite break with the long-standing tradition of American musicals. Normally a show is known for its oneman score- a Cole Porter show, a Stephen Sondheim show. But, sensing that no single songwriter could handle the enormous range of material, Schwartz chose to use six very different composers, including himself; off-Broadway songwriter Craig Carnelia; Mary Rodgers, Richard's daughter ; pianist-rock writer Michele Brourman ; black composer Micki Grant (of Don't Bother Me, !Can't Cope fame) ; and James Taylor, who'd never before written music for the stage. Eighteen songs emerged , and 15 were integrated into the show.

The first test of songs, script, actors, and choreography came during January 1978, when the show was produced for a limited run as a "work in progress" at the Goodman Theater in Chicago.

The city where Terkel grew up, developed his daily radio interview programs (on the air now for almost three decades), spoke with many of the subjects in Working, and became a local hero seemed a natural and sympathetic home for the

'I have to be a waitress. How else can I learn about people? Everyone wants to eat, and I serve them. If they've had a bad day, I nurse them, cajole them. Maybe with coffee I give them a little philosophy.'

effort. Here the musical could be staged, shaped, and refined free from the edgy and hysterical atmosphere that usually surrounds a pre-Broadway tryout.

A

performance of Working is in progress before a packed house at the Goodman. Following the opening tableau, the cast launches into a series of vignettes illuminating the lives and days of individual workers. The American office is evoked with a coffee cart, a file cabinet, a desk or two, a carpet, and the full spectrum of personnel : a sassy secretary, a Turns-gulping boss, an idle editor looking for something to do. A gigantic model of a suburban house slides onstage, and a kid gleefully sings that it's "neat to be a newsboy" because he can bounce his papers off neatly manicured bushes. " Aisle I" and " Aisle 2' ' neon lights create a mini-supermarket where three cashiers tap-dance to the rhythm their fingers create when totting up grocery bills.

Smoke, flashing red strobes, and megaphones approximate a burning building, while a fireman rhapsodizes about why his work matters to him. Wheeled platforms and hand-held flashlights simulate trucks barreling down a highway at night and the sensation of driving a mighty machine.

The response to the Chicago run is mixed. The 683-seat Goodman Theater is sold out for all44 performances; critics enthuse about the show's "promise'' but acknowledge that¡' Working needs work ."

While the scenery is vivid and unfailingly picturesque, some of the choreography is questionable, and a few of the songs peddle shopworn visions. A big question remains: Billing Working as a musical may lead audiences to expect a conventional story line. But the show is innovative, fragmented, different. How avant-garde can it dare to be?

Still, Working's undeniable strengths may see it through to success. First, there is the dialogue, some of which was lifted intact from the book, then edited. One of the delightful shocks of Terkel's interviews is that although he deliberately avoided the more verbal professionals (writers, journalists, politicians), his subjects are naturally articulate. Dolores Dante (the fictional pseudonym for waitress Yolanda Leif) expresses herself in no uncertain terms : l have to be a waitress. How else can I team about people ? Holt' else does the

M'orld come to me? I can't go to every one.

So they have to come to me. Every one wants

to eat, everyone has hunger. And I serve them. If they've lzad a bad day, I nurse them, cajole them. Maybe with coffee I give them a lillie philosophy. They have cocktails, I give them political science. ...

People imagine a waitress couldn'l possibly think or have any kind of aspiration other than to serve food.

Such colloquial eloquence, communicating both the rough and the sweet of dayto-day working, is very much at home on the stage.

I

n addition, Schwartz has made some wise directorial decisions. Some of the most compelling vignettes consist of nothing but a single actor alone with his monologue on a bare stage. When Steven Boockvor as the professional hockey player recalls how he skated alone once on a frozen street, then moves into the Night Skate number, whirling and leaping on an empty, blue-lit stage to Brourman's hard-driving music, it's clear both actor and director grasped the sense of the memory- a man using his skill to playand the ways it couJd be relayed thrillingly.

Later, actor Matt Landers is discovered standing mutely and ingloriously by a gaudy tie rack- a concise image of a budding salesman's career- and, all alone, he confesses his dreams: 1 would like a colonial house, possibly one that leans loward a Mediterranean style. ... I want her [my quote-dream girlunquote] to have a lot of personality, because when rm fijiy, and we're goi11g up the ladder, there's going to have to be a lot more than looks . ... I hope my wife can play pool.

In the show's most powerful soliloquy an extraordinary young performer named David Patrick Kelly strides forward shirtless, coveralled, alternately tense and cheery- and gives us the brief career of Charlie Blossom, ex-newspaper copy boy.

After a breathless harangue on what he'd like to do to his superiors- hit the editor with a baseball bat, kidnap Marshall Field, rob the unemployment clerkCharlie suddenly relaxes and grins: "But that's bitterness! I don't like being bitter.

I'm a pacifist." Ifs hard to know whether to laugh or cry.

Punctuating these unvarnished monologues are equally exciting scenes staged for all-out theatrical effect. In a nwnber titled Millwork, Obie-winner Anne DeSalvo matter-of-factly recounts the dreary details of ber job as a processor in a felt

mill, then mimes the tasks with two others as another girl sings and still another dances joyously, onJy to melt into the grim assembly line at song's end. The color, movement, and lightness of the song and dance accentuate the numbing banality of the job. The sequence moves us because it's been reseen as theater. At moments like these, when Working is most conscious of its status as a musical, it achieves what Terkel brands "the fusion of life and an."

This is a propitious time for Working to arrive on the American scene. The idea that Ordinary Is Extraordinary and Small Is Beautiful is an obsession of our era. People want desperately to believe that the self can be salvaged from "power for the few," from "industrial dehumanization," ''big government," and "facelessness." A waitress feeds people-therefore, she matters. A fireman saves lives-and feels important. A cashier relishes her prowess at the cash register and transcends a boring function.

"Jobs are not big enough for people," reverberates a line in the script. "People have to experience smaJl triwnphs !"insists Terkel. "Grass roots-save this bouse, fight taxation or pollution-an actual something they can put their hand on.

There's a lot of that going on, a fight for a kind of autonomy. .. . International amity, it's funny-1 think it only begins on the block." Or on the job-or even on the stage where Working is playing.

Terkel notes that after seeing the show, people have come up to him and vowed, 'Til never again talk to a waitress the same way!'' This hits close to home for director Schwartz, too: "All my life I'd been wearing blinkers ... looking at people as functions . ... Becoming aware of the people involved was a very profound experience for me." Audiences looking at themselves onstage react the same way. ''With Working, we set out to do something where the product itself was the goal, whether or not it was successful."

That's. Stephen Schwartz's admirable claim. Working is not so much a play as an event. an experiment, an attempt to communicate the essence of a piece of literature in U1eatrical and musicalthat is. doubly new- terms. At the end of act one the company belts out Micki Grant's lyrics:

Schoolteacher Bobo Lewis sings '¡Nobody Tells Me How." She also plays a cashier in the musical.

If they had just let me go Where I was rarin' to go When I was rarin' to go back then God only knows What I could've been ...

By contrast, Craig Camelia's Something to Point To ends act two and contains the show's final message:

See rhat building; The windows are washedThe sire was surveyedThe memos are typedThe concrete was laidThe records are keptThe office is runThe coffee is soldThe digging was doneTile building was builtFor all eyes to seeBy me! me! me .1 me! me!

Dreams are important, but not feeling anonymous is the key. What Studs Terkel's book graphically suggests-and what Stephen Schwartz's adaptation is aiming to say in a new way- is how soul-killing the act of work in a technological society will be unless people fill it out with personal satisfaction. "Jobs are not big enough for people" is a disquieting statement, but in its affirmation and willingness to confront bleakness, Working onstage may offer a fascinating alternative in art.

D About the Author: Steve lAwson frequently writes on the !heater for such publications as American Scholar and Horizon.

GROWING UP WITH SCIENCI 'Science fiction has led me to science,' notes the famous astronomer, who writes about the impact of sci-fi on his life and on our society.

8

y the time I was 10 I had decided-in almost total ignorance of the difficulty of the problem- that the universe was full up. There were too many places for this to be the only inhabited planet. And, from the variety of life on earth (trees looked pretty different from most of my friends) , I figured life elsewhere would seem very strange. I tried hard to imagine what that life would be like, but despite my best efforts I always produced a kind of terrestrial chimaera, a blend of existing plants or animals.

About this time a friend introduced me to the Mars novels of Edgar Rice Burroughs. I had not thought much about Mars before, but here, presented before me in the adventures of John Carter, was another inhabited world. breathtakingly fleshed out: ancient sea bottoms, great canal pumping stations and a variety of beings, some of them exotic. There were, for example, the eight-legged beasts of burden, the thoats.

These novels were exh ilarating to read. At first. But slowly, doubts began to gnaw. The plot surprise in the first John Carter novel which I read hinged on his forgetting that the year is longer on Mars than on Earth. But it seemed to me that if you go to another planet, one of the first things you check out is the length of the day and the year. Then there were incidental remarks which at first seemed stunning but on sober reflection proved disappointing. For example, Burroughs casually comments that on Mars there are two more primary colors than on Earth.

Many long minutes did I spend with my eyes closed. fiercely contemplating a new primary color. But it would always be something familiar, like a murky brown or plum. How could there be another primary color on Mars, much less two? What IVOS a primary color? Was it something to do with physics or something to do with physiology? I decided that Burroughs might not have known what he was talking about, but he certainly made his readers think. And in those many chapters where there was not much to think about, there were satisfyingly malignant enemies and rousing swordsmanship- more than enough to maintain the interest of a city-bound 10-year-old in a long Brooklyn summer.

The foUowing summer, by sheerest accident, I stumbled upon a magazine called Astounding Science Fiction in a neighborhood candy store. A glance at the cover and a quick riffle through the interior showed me it was what I had been looking fo r.

With some effort I managed to scrape together the purchase price, opened the magazine at random. sat down on a bench not six meters from the store and read my first modern science-fiction short story, ¡' Pete Can Fix It " by Raymond F. Jones, a gentle account of time travel into a postnuclear-war holocaust. I had known about the atom bomb- I remember an excited friend explaining to me that it was made of atoms-but this was the 10

SPAN FEBRUARY 1979

Reprinted with permission from Tllr Nt.- York Times Maga!ille.

In his lab, Professor Sagan holds a Mars globe showing crarers named for sci-fi writers-"a debr ro science ficrion that scienrisrs 11011' in part have repaid.'' On rhe table is a reconstruction of Mars as envisioned by Edgar Rice Burroughs in his novels 011 tlze Red Planet.

first I had seen about the social implications of nuclear weapons.

It got you thinking.

I found I was hooked. Each month I eagerly awaited the arrival of Astounding. I read Jules Verne and H.G. Wells, read, cover to cover, the first two science-fiction anthologies that l was able to find, devised scorecards, like those I was fond of making for baseball, on the quality of the stories I read. Many ranked high in asking interesting questions but low in answering them.

There is still a part of me that is 10 years old. But by and large I'm older. My critical facu lties, and perhaps even my literary tastes, have improved. In rereading L. Ron Hubbard's The Š 1977 (Claiborne). 1978 (Sagan) by the New York Times COmpllny.

FICTION

byCARLSAGAN

End Is Not Yet, which I had first read, breathless, at age 14, I was so amazed at how it had declined in the intervening years that I seriously considered the possibility that there were two novels of that title, by the same author, but of vastly differing quality. I can no longer manage credulous acceptance as well as I used to. The plot of Larry Niven's Neutron Star hinges on the astonishing tidal forces exerted by a strong gravitational field.

But we are asked to believe that hundreds or thousands of years from now, at a time of casual interstellar space flight, such tidal forces have been forgotten. We are asked to believe that the first probe of a neutron star is a manned rather than an unmanned spacecraft. We are asked too much. In a novel of ideas the ideas have to work.

In Douglas Trumbull's technically proficient science-fiction film Silent Running, the trees are dying in vast, spaceborne, closed ecological systems on the way to Saturn. After weeks of painstaking study and agonizing searches through botany texts, the solution is found: Plants, it turns out, need sunlight. Trumbull's characters are able to build interplanetary cities but have forgotten the invers.e-square law. 1 was willing to overlook the portrayal of the rings of Saturn as pastel-colored gases. but not this.

I have the same trouble with Star Trek , which I know has a wide following and which some thoughtful friends tell me I should view allegorically and not literally. But when astronauts from earth set down on some far distant planet and find human beings there in the midst of a conflict between two nuclear superpowers- which call themselves the Yangs and Corns, or their phonetic equivalents- the suspension of disbelief crumbles.

In a global terrestrial society centuries in the future, the ship's officers are embarrassingly Anglo-American. ln fact, only 2 of 12 or 14 interstellar vessels are given non-English names, Kongo and Potemkin. And the idea of a successful cross between a Vulcan and an earthling simply ignores what we know of molecular biology and Darwinian evolution. (As I have remarked elsewhere, such a cross is about as likely as the successful mating of a man and a petunia.) I have similar problems with films in which spiders 10 meters tall are menacing the cities of earth: Since insects and arachnids breathe by diffusion, such marauders would asphyxiate before they could savage their first metropolis.

I believe that the same thirst for wonder is inside me that was there when I was 10. But T have since learned a little bit about how the world is really put together. I find that science fiction has led me to science. I find science more subtle, more intricate and more awesome than much of science fiction. It also has the additional virtue of being true. Think of some of the scientific findings of the last few decades: that there are particles which pass effortlessly through the solid earth so that we detect as many of them coming up through our feet as down from the sky; that the continents are moving on a vast conveyer belt with the Himalayas produced by a collision of India with Asia; that Mars is covered with ancient dry river valleys; that chimpanzees can learn languages of many hundreds of words, understand abstract concepts, and construct new grammatical usages; that all life on earth runs off one particular molecule that contains all the

hereditary information and is able to make identical copies of itself; that in the constellation Cygnus there is a double star, one of whose components has such a high gravity that light cannot escape from it (it may be blazing with visible radiation on the inside but it is invisible from the outside). In the face of all this (and there is much more, equally fascinating), many of the standard ideas of science fiction seem to me pale by comparison.

I see the relative absence of these findings in science fiction , and the distortions of scientific thinking often encountered in science fiction as terrible wasted opportunities. Real science is as amenable to exciting and engrossing fiction as fake science, and I think it is important to exploit every opportunity to convey scientific ideas in a civilization based upon science but somehow unable to communicate what science is about.

However, the best of science fiction remains very good indeed.

There are stories that are so tautly constructed, so rich in the accommodating details of an unfamiliar society, that they sweep me along before I have even a chance to be critical. Such works include Robert Heinlein's The Door Into Summer; Alfred Bester's The Stars My Destination and his The Demolished Man: Jack Finney's Time and Again; Frank Herbert's Dune, and Walter M. Miller's A Canticle for Leibowitz. You can ruminate over the ideas in these books. Heinlein's asides on the feasibility and social utility of housel19ld robots have worn exceedingly well over the intervening years. The insights into terrestrial ecology that are provided by hypothetical extraterrestrial ecologies, as in Dune, perform, I think, an important social service. He Who Shrank, by Henry Hasse, presents an entrancing cosmological speculation which is being seriously revived today, the idea of an infinite regress of universes- in which each of our elementary particles is a universe, one level down from the previous one, and in which we are an elementary particle in the next universe up. A rare few science-fiction novels combine a standard science-fiction theme with a deep human sensitivity.

I am thinking, for example, of Algis Budrys's Rogue Moon, Ray Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles and many of the works of Theodore Sturgeon- including To Here and the Easel, a stunning portrait of personality dissociation as perceived from the inside. Isaac Asimov's story " Breeds There a Man¡¡ provided a poignant insight into the emotional stress and sense of isolation of many of the best theoretical scientists. Arthur Clarke's The Nine Billion Names of God introduced many Western readers to an intriguing speculation in Oriental religions.

One of the great benefits of science fiction is that it can convey bits and pieces, hints and phrases, of knowledge unknown or inaccessible to the reader. Heinlein's And He Built a Crooked House was, for many readers, the first introduction to four-dimensional geometry that held any promise of comprehensibility. One science-fiction work offers as a ditty the mathematics of Einstein's last attempt at a unified field theory; another presents an important equation in population genetics.

L. Sprague de Camp's Lest Darkness Fall is an excellent introduction to Rome at the time of the Gothic invasion, and Asimov¡s "Foundation" series, although this is not explained in the books, offers a useful summary of some of the dynamics of

SPAN FEBRUARY 1979

SCIENCE FlCfiON cominuet!

knowledge of the planets has changed, the environments in the corresponding science-fiction stories have also changed. It is satisfyingly rare to find a science-fiction story written today that posits algae farms on the surface of Venus. (Jncidentally, the U.F.O.-contact mythologizers are slower to change, and we can still find accounts of flying saucers from a Venus which is far-flung imperial Rome. Time-travel stories for example, populated by beautiful human beings in long. white robes inthe three remarkable efforts by Heinlein, "All You Zombies," habiting a kind of Cytherean Garden of Eden. The 900-degree"'By His Bootstraps.. and "The Door Into Summer¡¡ force the Fahrenheit temperatures of Venus give us one way of checking reader into contemplations of the nature of causality and the such stories.) Likewise, the idea of a "space warp" is a hoary arrow of time. These are all works you ponder over as the water science-fiction stand-by, but it did not arise in science fiction. It is running out of the bathtub or as you walk through the woods arose from Einstein's General Theory ofRelativity. in an early winter snowfall.

The motivational connection between science-fiction depicScience-fiction ideas are widely dispersed, and found today tions of Mars and the actual exploration of that planet is so close in somewhat different guises. For one, we have science-fiction that, subsequent to the Mariner 9 mission of 1971-72, we were writers like Asimov and Clarke providing, in nonfictional form, able to name a few Martian impact craters after deceased sciencecogent and sometimes brilliant summaries of many aspects of fiction personalities. Thus there are on Mars craters named after science and society. Some contemporary scientists are introduced H .G. Wells, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Stanley Weinbaum and to a vaster public by science fiction. For example, in the thought- John W. Campbell Jr. - a debt to science fiction that scientists ful novel The Listeners by James Gunn, we find those directing a have now in part repaid. major radio search for extraterrestrial intelligence 50 years The great interest of youngsters in science fiction is reflected in from now comparing their progress with the ideas of my colleague a demand for science-fiction courses in high schools and colleges.

Frank Drake: "Drake! What did he know?" A great deal, it My experience is that such courses can be fine educational experiturns out. We also find straight science fiction transmogrified ences or disasters. depending on how they are taught. Properly into a vast proliferation of writings, belief systems and organi- planned science-fiction courses, in which real science or real zations. One science-fiction writer, L. Ron Hubbard, has politics is an integral component, would seem to have a long and useful life in school curriculums. founded a successful cult called Scientology.

The greatest human significance of science fiction may be Classic science-fiction ideas are now institutionalized in pseudoscientific Unidentified Flying Object (U.F.O.}- and ancient- as thought experiments, as attempts to minimize future shock, astronaut belief systems - although Stanley Weinbaum (in as contemplations of alternative destinies. This is part of the The Valley of Dreams) did it better as well as earlier than Erich reason that science fiction has so wide an appeal among young Von Daniken (author of Chario1s of !he Gods?). In Wine of people: It is they who will live in the future. No society on earth the Dreamers by John D . MacDonald (a science-fiction writer today is well adapted to the earth of 100 or 200 years from now now transformed into one of the most interesting contemporary (if we are wise enough or lucky enough to survive that long). authors of detective fiction), we find the sentence "And there are We desperately need an exploration of alternative futures, both traces. in Earth mythology, . .. of great ships and chariots that experimental and conceptual. The stories of Eric Frank Russell crossed the sky." R. De Witt Miller in his story ''W ithin the were very much to this point. We were able to see conceivable Pyramid" manages to anticipate both Von D aniken and Im- alternative economic systems, or the great efficiency of a unified manuel Velikovsky, and to provide a more coherent hypothesis passive resistance to an occupying power. In modern science on the supposed extraterrestrial origin of pyramids than can be fiction can also be found useful suggestions for making a refound in all the writings on ancient astronauts and pyramidology. volution in an oppressive computerized society, as in Heinlein's T he interweaving of science and science fiction sometimes The Moon /sa Harsh Mistress. produces curious results. It is not always clear whether life Such ideas, when encountered young, can influence adult imitates art or vice versa. For example, in Kurt Vonnegut Jr.'s behavior. Many scientists deeply involved in the exploration superb epistemological novel The Sirens of Titan, a not-al- of the solar system (myself among them) were first turned in that together-inclement environment is postulated on Satmn 's largest direction by science fiction. And the fact that some of that moon. When in the last few years some planetary scientists, science fiction was not of the highest quality is irrelevant. Tenmyself among them, presented evidence that Titan has a dense year-aids do not read the scientific literature. atmosphere and perhaps higher temperatures than expected, In all the history of the world there bas never before been a period in which so many significant changes have occurred in so many people commented to me on the prescience of Kurt Vonneat Cornell University short a span of time. Accommodation to change, the thoughtful gut. But Vonnegut was a physics major of alternative futures, is the key to the survival of civilizapursuit and naturally knowledgeable about the latest findings in astrontion and perhaps of humanity. Ours is also the time or the first omy. In 1944, an atmosphere of methane was discovered on Titan, the first satellite in the solar system known to have an generation that has grown up with science fiction. l !,.now many atmosphere. In this, as in many similar cases, art imitates life. young people who wou ld, of course, be interested, but in no way (Many of the best science-fiction writers have science or engi- astounded, were we to receive a message tomorrow from an neering backgrounds; for example, Poul Anderson, Isaac extraterrestrial civilization. They have already accommodated Asimov, Arthur Clarke and Robert Heinlein.) to that ruture. T th1nk it is not an exaggeration to say that. if In fact, our understanding of the other planets has often we survive. science fiction will have made a vital contribution changed faster than their representations in science fiction. to the continuation and benign evolution of our civili;ation. 0 A clement twilight zone on a synchronously rotating Mercury. a swamp-and-jungle Venus-, and a canal-infested Mars, while About the Author: Carl Saxan is a prqfessor ofasmmomy wul spare sciences all classic science-fiction devices, are all, in fact, based upon at Cornell Unil'ersizr. He 1.r the author of mtmerous books, including The earlier misapprehensions by planetary scientists. But as our Dragon of Eden,for which lte recently won the Pulit:er Pri:e.

The greatest significance of science fiction may be as attempts to minimize future shocks, as contemplations of alternative destinies.

12

by MILTON J"R IEDMAN

Capitalism per se is not humane or inhumane; socialism is not humane or inhumane. But capitalism tends to give much freer rein to the more humane values of human beings.

I

want to talk about an issue that is very much related to the whole problem of human freedom. It has to do with the question of whether capitalism is humane and what that means.

The arguments in the debate which has been going on for so long between the proponents of capitalism and of socialism have changed. The argument used to be strictly about the form of economic organization: Should we have government control of production and distribution, or should we have private market control? The a rgument of the proponents of government control used to be that centralized control was more efficient.

Nobody makes that argument any more. H ardly a person in the world will claim today that nationalized industry, or socialism as a method of economic organi7.ation, is an efficient way to organize things. The example of Great Britain, the example of Russia, the examples of some

of the other states around the world that have adopted these measures, plus the domestic-grown examples of the post office and its fellows have put an end to that kind of talk.

The interesting thing is that. nonetheless, there is widespread opposition to capitalism as a system of organi7.ation. T here is widespread support for some vague system labeled socialism.! believe that there is a simple explanation for this phenomenon. That explanation is an emphasis on moral values coupled with ignorance a nd misunderstanding about the relationship between moral values and economic systems.

The problem with this approach is that moral values are individual: they arc not collective. Moral values have to do with what each of us sepamtely believes and holds to be true- what our own individual values are.

Capitalism, socialism, central planning arc means

lS CAPiTALISM HUMANE? continued

In a market society people make voluntary deals. It's hard to do good because you've got to persuade people, and nothing in the world is harder. But in that kind of society it's also hard to do harm, the kind of harm that concentrated power can inflict on human beings. not ends. In and of themselves, they are neither moral nor immoral, humane nor inhumane. We have to ask what are their results. We have to look at what are the consequences of adopting one or another system of orgaruzation.

From that point of view, the crucial thing is to look beneath the surface. Don't look at what the proponents of one system or another say are their intentions, but look at what the actual results are.

Socialism, which means government ownership and operation of means of production. has appealed to highminded. fine people, to people of idealistic views. because of the supposed objectives of socialism, especially because of the supposed objectives of equality and social justice.

These are fine objectives, and it is a tribute to people of good will that those objectives should appeal to them.

B

ut you have to ask tbe question: Does the system - no matter what its proponents say-produce those results? Once you look at the results, it is crystal clear tliat they do not. Where are social injustices greatest? Social injustices are clearly greatest where you have central control. The degree of social injustice, torture, and incarceration in a place like Russia is of a different order of magnitude than it is in those Western countries in which most of us have grown up and in which we have been accustomed to regarding freedom as our natural heritage.

Again, look at the question of equality. Where is there the greatest degree of inequality? In the socialist states of the world. I remember about 15 years ago my wife and I were in Russia for a couple of weeks. We were in Moscow with our tourist guide, and I happened to see some of the fancy Russian limousines, the Zivs, that were sort of a take-off of the 1938 American Packard. I asked our tourist guide out of amusement how much those sell for. " Oh," she said, ''those aren't for sale. Those are only for the members of the Politburo."

In a country like the Soviet Union there is an enormous inequality in the immediate literal sense that a small select group has all of the services and amenities of life, and large masses have a very low standard of Jiving. Indeed, more directly, the wage rate of foremen is much higher relative to the wage rate of ordinary workers in the Soviet Union than it is in the United States.

Capitalism, on the other hand, is a system of organization that relies on private property and voluntary exchange.

It has repelled people, it has driven them away from supporting it, because they have thought it emphasized selfCopynghL© 1978 by Mihoo Friedman. Th is arucfe is a condensation of one of a series of lectures t)y Millon Fr•ed1nau , wuu1er of the 1976 Nobel Prize for economic science. The lectures are organized b)' Robert Chitester. president of Public Broadcasting of Nonhwest Pennsylvania, Inc:., to fonn the basis for a Public Broadcasung System television series in the United Stales in the Fall of 1979. The lectures are bemg vid<Otapcd and published by Harcoun Brace Jomnov.cb. Inc. This condensation onginally appeared 10 Th.- StJhioan magazmc. 11 is used WJth the perm1.ssion of Dr Friedman, Mr. Ch1tester. Harcourl Brace Jovanov1ch.loc. • and Th~Sohioon.

14

SPAN FEBRUARY 1979

interest in a narrow way. They were repelled by the idea of people pursuing their own interests rather than some broader interests.

Yet it is clear that the results go the other way around.

Only those countries in which capitalism has prevailed· over long periods have experienced botJ1 freedom and prosperity. Of course, there is not perfect freedom-we all have our defects. Yet, in those mostly Western countries that have had capitalism there has been far more freedom, far more social justice, and less inequality than in the centrally controlled countries.

The question that you have to ask is, has socialism failed because its good qualities were perverted by evil men who were in charge? Was it simply because Stalin took over from Lenin that communism went the way it did ? Has capitalism suc-eeeded despite the immoral values that pervade it? I believe that the answers to both questions are in the negative. The results have occurred because each system has been true to the values it encourages, supports, and develops in the people who live under that system.

In discussing moral values here. we are concerned with those that have to do with the relations between people.

In judging relations between people, I do not believe that the fundamental value is to do good to others whether they want you to or not. The fundamental value is not to do good to others as you see their good. Neither is it to force them to do good .

1 believe that the fundamental value in relations among people is to respect the dignity and the individuality of fellow men, to treat them not as objects to be manipulated for our purposes or in accordance with our values but as persons with their own rights and their own values- as persons to be persuaded not coerced, not forced, not bulldozed, not brainwashed. That seems to me to be the fundamental value in social relations.

T

he essential notion of a capitalist society (which I'll come back to) is voluntary cooperation, voluntary exchange. The essential notion of a socialist society is force. If the government is the master, if society is to be run from the center, people ultimately have to be ordered what to do.

Whenever we depart from voluntary cooperation and try to do good by using force, the bad moral value of force triumphs over good intentions.

In the past few decades there has been a great decline in the moral climate. We see it in the rising crime statistics, in the lack of respect for prope11y, in the kind of rioting that broke out in N ew York after the 1976 blackout, in the problems of maintaining discipline in elementary schools.

Why?Why have we had such a decline in moral climate?

I submit to you that a major factor has been a change in the philosophy which has been dominant, a change from

belief in individual responsibility to belief in social responsibility. If you adopt the view that a man is not responsible for his own behavior, that somehow or other society is responsible, why should he seek to make his behavior good?

Don't misunderstand me. On a scientific level it's true that what we are is affected a great deal by the society in which we live and grow up. Of course all of us are different from what we would have been if we had grown up in a different society. So I'm not denying in the slightest the effect on al1 of us of the social institutions within which we operate, both on our values and on our opportunities.

I am only saying that a set of social institutions that stresses individual responsibility, that treats the individual - given the kind of person he is, the kind of society in which he operates- as responsible for and to himself, will lead to a higher and more desirable moral climate than a set of institutions that stresses the lack of responsibility of the individual for what happens to him and relieves him of blame or credit for what he does to his fellow men.

I go back to the essence of capitalism and its relevance to the question of humanity. The essence of a capitalist system in its pure form is that it is a system of cooperation without compulsion, of voluntary exchange, of free enterprise.

I hasten to add that no actual system conforms fully to that notion. ln the actual world we are always dealing with approximations, with more or less. In the actual world we always have impediments to voluntary exchange. ut the essential character of a capitalist system is that it relies on voluntary exchange, on your agreeing with me that you will sell something to me if I will pay you a certain amount for it. The essential notion is that both parties to the exchange must benefit. That was the great vision of Adam Smith in his Wealth of Nations: that individuals each separately pursuing his own self-interest could promote the social interest through exchange between people on the basis of mutual benefit.

This notion extends far beyond economic matters narrowly conceived. That's really the main point I want to get across, and I want to give you two very different kinds of examples¡.

Consider the development of the English language.

There was never any central government that dictated the English language and set up some rules for it. There was no planning board that determined what words should be nouns and what words adjectives. Language grew through the free market, through voluntary cooperation. I used a word, you._ used a word; if it was mutually advantageous to us to keep on using that word, we would keep on using it. Language grows, it develops, it expands, it contracts through the free market.

How did scientific knowledge and understanding arise?

How do we get the development of science? [s there somehow or other a government agency that decides what are the most important problems to be studied, that prevents cooperation? Unfortunately, such agencies are developing, but in the history of science that isn't the way science developed. Science developed out of free-market exchange.

B

Capitalism is often reproached as being materialistic.

It is often reproached as erecting money as a chief motive.

Money is not a very noble motive, but it's cleaner than most. Look at the facts.

In any society, whatever may be its form of organization, the people who are not interested in material values are a small minority. There are no societies in the world today that are more materialistic than the collectivist societies. The Russian society, the Chinese society, the Yugoslav society- these are societies that put all their stress on materialism, on achieving economic goals and five-year plans, that destroy the nonmaterialistic achievements of mankind. Why? Because they are in a position to suppress minorities.

In order for a society to be at once humane and to give opportunity for great human achievements it is necessary that the small mino1ity of people who do not have materialistic objectives have the greatest degree of freedom. And the only society that anybody has ever invented. that anybody has ever discovered, which comes close to doing that is a capitalist society.

W

hen you hear people objecting to the market or to capitalism and you examine their objections, you will find that most of those objections are objections to freedom itself. What most people are objecting to is that the market gives people what the people want instead of what the person talking thinks the people ought to want. That is true whether you are talking of the objections of a John Kenneth Galbraith to the market, whether you are talking of the objections of a Ralph Nader to the market, whether you are talking of the objections of a Marx or an Engels or a Lenin to the market.

In a market society, in a society in which people are free to do their own thing, in which people make voluntary deals, it's hard to do good. You've got to persuade people, and there's nothing in this world that is harder. But the important thing is that in that kind of society it's also hard to do harm.

It's true that if you had concentrated power in the hands of an angel, he might be able to do a lot of good, as he viewed it, but one man's good is another man's bad. The great virtue of a market capitalist society is that, by preventing a concentration of power, it prevents people from doing the kind of harm which concentrated power can do.

So I conclude that capitalism per se is not humane or inhumane; socialism is not humane or inhumane. But capitalism tends to give much freer rein to the more humane values of human beings. It tends to d~velop a climate which is more favorable on the one hand to the development of a higher moral climate of responsibility, and on the other to greater achievements in every realm of human activity.

0 About the Author: Milton Friedman, winner of the 1976 Nobel Prize for economics, has been described by Professor Paul Samuelson as the "economist's economist.'' He has authored a number of books, including Price Theory (with his wife), Monetary vs. Fiscal Policy, An Economist's Protest, Social Security, and There Is No Such Thing as a Free Lunch.

SPAN Ff'.BRUARY 1979

l6

by JACQUELIN SINGH

Looking for the hidden springs of humor in American literature, Constance Rourke discovers some comical archetypesthe shrewd Yaokee, the ingenuous backwoodsman, the black minstrel whose lightheartedness is laced with tragedy. She links some hallowed names of American literature to these folk traditions. Humor, she finds, is a mask behind which the American hides his real emotion, 'lest the smile turn into a grimace of pain.'

SPAN FEBRUARY 19?9

F

ew subjects provoke more earnest rancor than humor does. The volumes of serious probing into the comic side of our natures- from Freud to Max Eastman, from Meredith to Karl Marx- once led Robert Benchley to declare that "there seems to be no lengths to which humorless people will not go to analyze humor. " Yet someone has to do it, if only to help interpret ourselves to ourselves. And no one has accomplished precisely this with more insight and originality than Constance Rourke did almost 50 years ago. While her name is hardly a household word, her book American Humor : A Study of the American Character has become a classic amongst scholars of humor and folklore, a touchstone against which they assay their ideas. Even when her views are challenged they have to be taken into account.

However, to the outsider- one involved in the simple enjoyment of comedy and not in its serious pursuit- American Humor would come through as a surprisingly unfunny book. Here is not the familiar anthology of quaint tales about frontier supermen and legendary cowboys prefaced by some editorial remarks, but a volwne bristling with such literary giants as Herman Melville, Edgar Allan Poe and Nathaniel Hawthorne, names that evoke hardly a chuckle, let alone a laugh.

Clearly Constance Rourke has other intentions than to entertain. First, she ferrets out at their source the major folk themes of early America. Then she goes on to demonstrate how these themes surface in the work of the nation's great 19th century writers. And finally, she delineates the American character as she sees it emerge from this folk-literary model.

The conviction that propelled Rourke's search for American folk beginnings had been articulated 150 years earlier by Johann Gottfried von Herder, a German philosopher. He asserted that a nation's literature cannot thrive unless it is nourished by a rich traditional store that it consciously or unconsciously draws on.

"Such preludes have existed for all literature," Rourke says, "in songs and primitive ballads, and a folk theater and rude chronicles .... From them litera-

ture gains immensely ; without them it can hardly be said to exist at all." While convinced that an intrinsically American literature did indeed exist, she needed to find out those sources that would prove it.

Thus she struck out on a trail nobody had taken before, one that involved a literary and cultural analysis of the United States that was neither folkloristic nor historical, but a unique combination of the two.

By the time Rourke sat down to write American Humor she had behind her a lifetime of scholarship pursued in libraries in the United States and abroad and in what she called "living research": talking with old-timers in small towns, listening to their autobiographies, looking at their art, listening to their music.

What she found was a humor that effervesced on the surface of almost every tale and song, leading her to remark that "There is scarcely an aspect of the American character to which humor is not related, few which in some sense it has not governed."

More important, she discovered a trio of true American originals, comic conceptions that appeared in numerous guises in the ubiquitous almanacs and joke books of the early 19th century and in the variety shows that were staged up and down the advancing frontier. They were the Yankee peddler, the boisterous backwoodsman and the Negro of the minstrel show.

The shrewd Yankee pops up everywhere, making deals and tricking country bumpkins or turning the tables on wouldbe con men. Sometimes his name is Brother Jonathan, as in a story current in London even before 1800 that Rourke recounts. Jonathan (an American sailor this time) is coaxed into a tavern by some sharpers. When they cannot get him to play cards, they drink three bottles of wine and depart. " Ah," says the landlord, wagging his head in mock sympathy, " 1 see you are not acquainted with our London blades. You must pay the reckoning." Jonathan looks uncomfortable, slowly draws out a handful of silver, looks at it, and orders another bottle.

When the landlord goes to fetch it, Jonathan runs to the mantelpiece, chalks the sum, scrawls, " I leave you a Yankee

handle for your London blades," and runs out the door.

Sometimes the Yankee is Sam Slick. ln a story retold by Rourke he declares, " We Yankees don 't do things like you Britishers. We are born in a hurry, educated at full speed, our spirit is at high pressure, and our life resembles a shooting star, till death surprises us like an electric shock." Elsewhere he is Jack Downing, befriending President Andrew Jacksonthe old Gineral, as he calls him- and giving this southern man of the people some New England advice (and in the process, satirizing the political goings-on in Washington).

A foil to the Yankee is the sim ple backwoodsman braving it out on the wild frontier. He is known as Mike Fink, the pugnacious river boatman, or Brother Joe, who claimed, "I can see a bee a mile away, easy. " He is best known as Davy Crockett who, like Mike Fink, was a historical personage blown up into a legend even in his own lifetime.

A tale published in 1854 describes how Crockett saved the world from being frozen over. He set out on a morning ¡â&#x20AC;˘ ... so antediluvian and premature cold that upper and lower teeth an' tongue war collapsed together as tight as a friz oyster." Seeing the world thus immobilized, he took off his back the carcass of a 200-pound bear that he'd been carrying, and beat it against the ice till the hot oil inside the skin began to "walk out of him at all sides." Then Crockett held the carcass over the earth's "axes" and squeezed it till it thawed the poles loose, poured about a ton of oiJ over the sun's face and gave the earth's cogwheel a kick backward.

In about 15 seconds the earth gave a grunt and began moving. "The sun walked up beautiful ," the tale ends, " salutin' me with such a wind o' gratitude that it made me sneeze. I lit my pipe by the blaze o' his top-knot, shouldered my bear, an' walked home, introducin' the people to fresh daylight with a piece of sunrise in my pocket."

These Yankee and backwoodsman stories all burst with raucous triumph and self-confidence, grotesque fantasy and rowdy ritual. The third member of the trio was to add his own dimension.

I

EHIND THE MASK OF COM EDY conlinued

The Negro of the minstrel show came aJong as a popular creation last of all, different from his brothers in being a theatrical figure and not a literary one.

Actually, ·minstrel players were white men in blackface performing songs and dances borrowed from plantation Negroes. As an entertainment form the minstrel show had an incredibly long life- from the 1830s to the 1920s. And it spread far

afield. There is at least one account or Hindi minstrels performing in blackface in 19th century l ndia!

Jim Crow Rice with his limping dance and plaintive song popularized the form.

Ole Dan Tucke r and Zip Coon were familiar characters in popular minstrel songs, the fonner metamorphosing into a white man as time went on. T heir names turned up in zany songs that spun with a good deal of nonsense, like 0 , ole Zip Coon Ire is a larned sk oler, Sings possum up a gum tree an· coony in a holler, Possum up a gum free, coony 011 a stump, Den 01•er dubble /rubble, Zip Coon will j ump.

From the beginning the minstrel show with its depiction of the Negro as a comic figure was vigorously denounced by Abolitionists and others who saw in it only further insult to an already injured race.

T hey sought to cancel out the minstrel image by showing the Negro to be a humorless singer of spirituals rather than a happy-go-lucky, banjo-playing dancer.

Somewhere between the two stereotypes the ' ' real" Negro got lost.

H owever, Rourke, facing the minstrel show as a fact of folklore life, recognizes in it still further features of the American profile : a gift for satire that lightly rides a substratum of the tragic and a plain delight in nonsense. The Negro, then, joined the Yankee a nd the backwoodsman to form a generic type.

All three employed the same comic method : the monologue. All three delivered their lines behind the mask of an assumed identity or persona. "This mask," Rourke says, "so simply and blankJy worn, had closed down without a crack or seam to show a glimpse of the human creature underneath." The impersonation was made complete by the Aamboyant costumes these folk entertainers appeared in, either on stage or in book and magazine illust rations: the Yankee in a kind of Uncle Sam suit; the back woodsman in

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SPAN FEBRUARY 1979

coonskin cap and fringed leather jacket borrowed from the American Indian and - the ultimate masquerade- the white minstrel in blackface.

Moreover. their style was poetic. Yet the profusion of poetic imagery. bubbling over in rhapsodic hyperbole or satirical nonsense, was-ironically- delivered in an unemotional tone. l t was as if nothing could remain sacred to the ..cultured" Englishman or European who was being turned into a native American in the fiery crucible of the frontier experience. English actors touring the min ing camps of California bad to play Hamlet for laughs; the ambivalent, sentimental attitude toward the native Indian came in for lampooning; danger was the biggest joke of aiL What does Rourke make of all this? l n ber foreword she gives us a clue when she says: This book has no quarrel with the American character ; one might as well dispwe with som e es10blislred feature in the natural landscape ... nor can it be called a defense .. .. This study has grown from an enjoyment of American vagaries, and from the belief that these have wol•en together a tradition which is various, subtle, sinewy, scant at times but not poor.

I n the second half of the book we're invited to share the folklorist's view of the literature that took root in this rocky soil.

R ourke reminds us that everything about the new land and the rapid settling of it was at cross-purposes with the great gathering of inherited lore that had gone into the literature-making process of older cultures. In the absence of a comfortable tradition to find a niche in, Ame rican writers erupted onto the scene, each an entity unto himself, coming from nowhere and claiming no followers. Even in their best work she find s a tentative air of improvisation, a series of brilliant beginnings. At the same time, these writers were unable or unwilling to absorb the traditions of the older world as part of the natural American heritage. She goes on to show how these literary greats preferred instead to make use of whatever was at hand. For instance, the folk strategy or dealing with fear was to blow up dangers to ridiculous size and heroes to exaggerated heights. T his strategy takes the form in literature of a preoccupation with fanta sy, in parts of Moby Dick , for example, and with the superna tural in Hawthorne·s .. romances .., Poe's stories of terror and

malicious chicanery, told as they are by a blank-faced narrator who is seldom reliable. provide further evidence of the same strategy. Even Emerson and Thoreau. who wear lightly the mask of the first person " I,'' deal in abstractions when they seem most not to. Rourke sees this shunning of the here-and-now as a sign of prolonged cultural "childhood."

Besides having an air of improvisation and a disinclination to confront life on its time scale, American literature of the 19th century is shown to suffer from the same lack of emotion as its folk counterpart.

Whitman, for all his passionate rhetoric, achieves, she says, only a kind of extreme tenderness that does not quite amount to love. R ourke argues that this failure to depict pure emotion is another sign of the immaturity of 19th century literature.

I n her pursuit of a tradition, this folklorist made some interesting detours.

One is her discovery of Lincoln as a conscious a rtist. ' 'Poetry," she says, "belongs to Lincoln's stories: em earthy poetry; he used I he fable. the allegory, the tale grounded in mewphor.

The artist was often a/ work there ....

Lincoln has rarely been described as a literaryfigure. Irony lurks in this relinquishment.''

Another find is her revelation of naturalist James Audubon as a frontier fanta sist, with his rustic garb and penchant for putting it over on gullible city people by his accounts of imaginary fish a nd birds.

H owever, R ourke's journey into literary criticism is not all smooth going. H ere, her

footing is on less solid ground, and the closer she gets to her own time, the fasterand the less sure- her pace. Finally, one is struck by the narrowness of vision that blinds her to the full worth of 19th century American literature taken as a whole. It is as if, having found the folk traditions she was looking for to be "scant but not poor," she estimated the work that was nurtured in their midst to be likewise undernourished.

Perhaps it is this that leads some of Rourke's detractors to claim she oversiJllplifies the relationships between fine art and folk traditions. Taking her line of vision to its extreme, they say, could lead to distortion. Poe becomes a mere teller of tall tales; M oby Dick, a good yarn, with its comic Biblical names and nautical puns; and Walt Whitman, a bardic backwoods boaster sounding his "barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world."

E

lsewhere Rourke seems to have gone wrong in her estimation of America's greatest humorist as an artless, albeit effective, raconteur. Surely, behind Mark Twain's cool comic mask labored a hardworking Samuel Clemens, who knew very well what he was up to.

To carp at Rourke's shortcomings, however, is to lose sight of her most noteworthy achievement: the "portrait of the American" that she draws. This is composed of contradictory elements that make for a lively countenance. Yankee shrewdness is offset by backwoods ingenuousness; delight in exaggeration, by the

cool delivery of the outrageous; a note Newman gives a resounding reply: " It's 1he proud consciousness of honest of triumph, by the satirical shadow of defeat. The mask, the monologue recited toil, ofhaving produced something yourself with tongue-in-cheek, the distortion, the that somebody is willing 10 pay for- since fear of showing real emotion lest the that's the definite measure. Since you smile turn into a grimace of pain- all these speak of my washtubs- which were lovelyfeatures go into a uniquely American isn't if just !hey and 1heir loveliness that make up my good conscience?" profile.

"Oh, no , '' Valentin replies. "Fve seen More significantly, Rourke recognizes them as parts of the major strategy men go beyond washtubs, who have made Americans have devised to establish a mountains of soap- strong-smelLing yellow sense of identity. For the builders of a new soap, in grea1 bars; and they've leji me nation, comedy became a means of seeing perfectly cold."

"Then it's just the regular lreat of being their way through wars and wilderness and of taking the edge off the unrelenting an American citizen. Thai sets a man right criticism by European " high" culture that up."

Newman, playing the squatter to bombarded them from across the Vallentin's city slicker, has the last word, Atlantic.

Nowhere does she deliver this shock and Rourke's sure ear catches in the of recognition with greater impact American's tone the jocose with an admixthan in her assessment of Henry James. To ture of serious conviction. It is the comic begin with, she installs him squarely in the belligerent tone of the backwoodsman mainstream of American literature, after getting the better of his "cultured" critic. such critics as Van Wyck Brooks had It is unlikely that James himself would consigned him to the shore for his obses- have recognized the rough cartoon sketch sion with " the international theme." of American folklore's comic trio beneath Rourke demonstrates that, far from neg- his fleshed-out portrait of the American. lecting indigenous materials, James is right But Newman is the Yankee peddler, in there, drawing on that basic folk successfully making money, as much as he concern: what the people back homeis the backwoodsman boasting away his sneaking sense of inadequacy. By novel's either on the East Coast or in Europethink of their country cousin on the end Newman, after touching the low point of despair, reaches a kind of release frontier.

When the city slicker in the traditional from all that has cruelly wronged him in Arkansas Traveler stories, for example, his encounter with the Europeans. It is the gets lost in the backwoods, he asks the "low-keyed humor of defeat," as Rourke way from a squatter. An exchange invari- puts it. With this we are reminded of the ably ensues in which the rustic pretends to shadow of tragedy that flits across the be even more stupid than he is expected frozen smile of the minstrel going through to be, all the while undercutting his his satirical tums. The portrait is complete.

Constance Rourke ends her book by sophisticated opponent by a play of witty double meaning. T he traveler finally ex- defining the relationship between artist plodes. " You aren't very smart, are you?" and critic. She says: The difficult task of discovering and he says. ''Nope," the squatter admits, diffusing the materials of the American "but then I ain't lost."

To show how this crude comic material tradition-many of them still buriedundergoes artistic transformation in the belongs for the most pari to criticism; the hands ofHenry James, Rourke reminds us artist will steep himseif¡ in the gathered of that wonderful scene in The American light. where Newman is confronted by the She could not have known that the light French nobleman Valentin. she gathered then would still be more than "You've got something it worries me to enough - half a century later- to illumine have missed," said Valentin. "It's not America's bright, bold comic mask and the o money, it's not even brains, though evident- sources that give it its features. ly yours have been excellen1 for your purpose. But you who, as 1 understand if, About the Author: Jacquelin Singh is a ji-eehave made and sold articles of vulgar ltmce writer, hased in New Delhi. Her articles household use-you strike me- in a .fashion have often appeared in The Illustrated Weekly, ofyour own, as a man who stands about at Eve's Weekly a_nd Femina . She has also writ/en and edited a number of children's books. his ease."

SPAN FEBRUARY 1979

Georgia O'Keeffe ARTISTRY IN ----'IHE DESERT

by AMEI WALLACH

Living in a house full of rocks, tree trunks and animal bones in the desert heights of New Mexico, Georgia O'Keeffe, 91, continues to paint the rugged landscape around her in the vivid but tightly constructed, highly condensed style that has become the hallmark of this unusual artist's work.

In the pueblos of New Mexico the American Jodians string bright bunches of red chilies and hang them, like Christmas tree lights, along the adobe walls. Just about the only ornaments Georgia O' Keeffe hangs on the adobe walls of her house, an hour's drive northwest of Santa Fe, are bones: horse skulls, cow pelvises, the shinbones of one animal or another.

"I have boxes of bones," she said one warm, clear day recently, as she sat on the patio of her house out in the high desert. 路There was somebody here who had a book the other day, and they told me what all these bones were. One was a bear.''

O'Keeffe has always understood the drama of spareness and simplicity. In her paintings she reduces landscapes and experiences to their bare-bones essentials. She contemplates the startling way the sunlight changes on the surrounding mesas, or how a cross standing in the desert breaks up the vast landscape, o r how a river looks from an airplane, or how what really matters about a jack-in-the-pulpit is the jack alone. She reduces each scene and what she feels about it to a meandering line, or a juxtaposition of pure color, or an unexpected shape.

Georgia O'Keeffe, who turned 91 on November 15, 1978, is still engaged with the world she has always exammed so closely.

She paints in as exploratory and condensed a way as ever, and the autobiography of her artistic life, entitled Georgia O'Keejje, quickly sold out when Viking published it. Now she is at work on a new book about her abstractions, which are not nearly so well known as her sinuous close-ups of flowers or her early paintings of New York.

She showed her visitor on that recent day a new painting on the easel in her long, spare 10

SPAN FEBRUARY 1979

studio. ("You must get in a lot of studios,'' she said, her midwestern accent gjving a fullness to the words. " Bet you never saw one as good as this.") The painting, which at first appeared to be an abstraction, did not please her. The principal colors, which have been showing up frequently in O' Keetfe's recent paintings, were an expressive gray and the deep blue of a clea r New Mexico sky.

T he gray filled the center of the canvas, describing a shape with a Aat top and sloping sides, and the color, as it descended, shaded into lighter grays and then into white. ''1 don't like it," said O'Keeffe firmly. ''I'm going to throw it away. I'll carry the white down and make my gray tone different.

I'll try.. that canvas, and then it 'II be easier to do another.,.

The work on the easel may well be a closeup of one of her favorite subjects: the abruptly amputated peak of the Pedernal mountain, opposite her house. But the border between abstraction and representation has always been rather blurred for O'Keeffe.

Simplifying an experience to its purest form is, after all, abstraction, and she has never found it necessary to pledge allegiance to either camp.

Georgia O'Keeffe has been working on a series called "From a Day With Juan," which came out of a visit to Washington, D .C., on Columbus Day, 1976, with her young friend and assistant, Juan H amilton. They had stopped at the National Gallery to see its collection of 500 or so photographic portraits of O' Keeffe by her late husband, Alfred Stieglitz, which she has put there on loan . Then they went to the Freer Gallery to see the Chinese paintings and jade carvings she loves. Her recent gray and blue paintings present the midsection of an obelisk-the

Washington M onument? the Mall itself?- in subtly varied space. There is about them a feeling of enclosure leading to great openness. " If I get something in my head," she said with one of her chuckles, "it's easy to get a drawing done. And then all I have to do is put some paint on it.''

O'Keetfe has also been re-exploring water color, one of her favorite media. She remembered how one day she and Juan were visiting some old friends of hers in New Jersey: "Near the house there was an oldfashioned barn, and on top these people had fixed a room for the son, because he had an idea he wanted to be a painter. He didn't live there anymore, but ever ything was there, from the tea kettle to a painting gam1ent, the best paper, the best paint, the best easel. Juan said , 'Why not come and paint?' And it was so easy, it was amusing."

So she began making water colors: "You know, with a big brush and a big sheet of paper, and Juan began making water colors, too." O'Kecffe's chuckles start way back in her throat, and she signals that one is about to come by lifting her eyebrows. 路路we had a wonderful time there. It was so convenient, it was ridiculous."

From where O'Kee(fe sits in her desert patio, with her back to shelves of bones along the rear wall, the view to Pcdcrnal Peak is unbroken. It is a scene she has painted as a frieze underlining the vast blue sky seen through a pelvis bone, or as a blue sentinel behind undulating red hills. She has painted the mountain blue against a swirl of red, or dark green in a turquoise night.

"That is my private mountain," she said. 路'It belongs to me. God told me if I painted it enough I could have it."

She has lived in New Mexico full time for

Abndged wtth penniSSIOn rrom lfon:on. (Q hy American Heritage Publishtng Co .. Inc

From a Day With Juan, No.

n. 1977, oil, 48"

X

36" SPAN FEBRUARY 1979

GEORGIA O'KEEFFE continued

almost 30 years but has made many trips around the country and the world. She is only selectively aware of contemporary artists.

"You see, I've been out of the art world," she explains, "and when I had my show in the seventies [a traveling retrospective that opened at the Whitney Museum in New York in 1970], I thought young people would be throwing onions and rotten apples at me.

But they were more enthusiastic than the older people. " But she knows and likes the work of Ellsworth Kelly and has even said she has looked at one of his flat shapes of pure colors and actually thought that she had done the painting. She saw the Salute to Mark Rothko at the Yale Art Gallery in 1971 and remembers it as "a real experience."

For the catalogue of a New York Metropolitan Museum exhibition of 50 of the Stieglitz portraits of her in May 1978, O'Keetfe wrote her remembrances of sitting for him. He made the first photo of her in 1917, about a year after they met, and went on to chronicle her extraordinarily expressive face, hands, feet and body. Stieglitz was working with glass plates, and O 'Keetfe remembers that each shot would take three or four uncomfortable minutes of sitting still"and theh I'd get yelled at."

When they met in 1916, both Stieglitz and O'Keetfe had a firm sense of who they were.

Stieglitz was revolutionizing photography, making it an art on a par with other arts.

O'Keelle, born in 1887 in Sun Prairie, Wisconsin, had at an early age discovered a rare gift in herself.

She had, and retains to this day, the ability to say No. Throughout school, which she hated, she had a predilection for taking long, forbidden walks in the woods and for refusing to read her French lessons aloud Alfred to herself three times.

The year before she met Stieglitz she had decided that the painting she had learned at the Art Institute in Chicago and at the Art Students League in New York was someone else's art and that she had to please herself, to paint what was in her head. So in 1915, as she wrote in her recent book, " I decided to start anew- to strip away what I had been taught-to accept as true my own thinking."

Her own thinking was sometimes as spare as two eloquent lines. At first she used only charcoal, occasionally allowing herself to introduce a deep, rich blue. Her color was clear and assertive. The artists around Stieglitz, however, believed in modulated color. "All

22

SPAN FEBRUARY 1979

Pink and Green Spring (above). 1977, water color, 20f' x 30f'.

Ram's H ead With HoUyhock ( right). 1935, oil on canvas.

From a Day at Esther's (below) . 1977, ll'ater color, 20f' x 30f'.

those men were furious," she remembered, back in the bright glare of her patio, "because my color was wrong. I thought one color was as good as another."

From South Carolina, where she was teaching in 1915, O' Keetfe sent drawings to a friend in New York, who showed them to Stieglitz. Soon O'Keetfe, in New York herself on a visit, heard that ¡she had a show at 291, and no one had asked her permission.

She hurried downtown and stormed into the gallery to make Stieglitz take it down, but he was away on jury duty. When they finally met the next day, he won the argument- the

drawings stayed up- and set a pattern for the rest of their lives together.

In 1924, when he was 60 and she was 37, O' Keetfe married Alfred Stieglitz. There were always people about. " Stieglitz was a personstyle person," said O'Keeffe. "I'm sort of a private-style person. I don't need them."

For years she went with him in the summer to Lake George, where there were even more people, more frenzy, and- in her opinion far too much green everywhere. Finally, in 1929, she headed for the red cliffs of New Mexico, returning nearly every summer after that until she settled there in 1949, three years

after Stieglitz's death.

In the 1930s O'Keeffe lived in a place called the Ghost Ranch, and later bought a bouse nearby. Soon after that she began to covet the then dilapidated Abiquiu house, largely for its vegetable garden and patio. After she had bought it, fixed it up, and moved in, in 1949, she often painted that patio, with its long wall containing an oddly placed door.

Now her sister Claudia lives there. The place, like her desert house, is plastered with signs saying BEWARE OF THE DOG. in honor of her fierce chows.

Since her paintings always have brought

good prices- in 1927 Stieglitz sold one O'Keeffe painting for $6,000; in 1973 her Poppies brought $120,000 at auction- there is money with which to indulge her enthusiasm for travel. Once she went around the world in three and a half months. On her trips she had noticed that much of the world is sand, and the rivers make tiny lines in it, and she has painted that. Once she flew over a pattern of clouds, and she painted that, too.

What it is that always draws her back to the desert a visitor discovered after cliwbing the handmade wooden ladder to the flat roof of her house there. Rising unevenly on

all three sides were the serrated edges of red, ocher, pink, and purple cliffs, molded by shadow and piercing the O' Keeffe-blue sky.

Then, just as the sun moved from behind a cloud, O'Keeffe said quietly, " Now look at it." And with the light full on them, the cliffs had clarified and reshaped themselves.

"It's never the same," said O'Keeffe.

"That's why I can live here. It changes all the time."

0 About the Author: Amei Wallach is a writer 011 cultural affairs for Newsday, the Long Island, New York, daily. He also writes for Horizon.

SPAN FEBRUARY 1979

23

CITY OF CONFIDENT GROWTH

It is the hub of the oil and gas industry, a showcase of architecture, home of exciting art museums and operas, focal point for America's achievements in space science. It is a boomtown of high incomes and opportunities, and a thousand new residents move in every week.

Far left: The bold face of contemporary Houston.

1f1e glass-and-chromium Post Oak Central Building, with soft rounded corners, was designed by famed architect Philip Johnson.

Center: Staircase ofthe 800-seat Alley Theater. The

theater was cited for distinction by the American Institute of Architects in 1972. Above: Y¡:ar-round skating rink of the Galleria, an enormous three-story complex that includes a shopping center, hotels, offices, a jogging track.

2

HOUSTON continued

by JOHN F. COPPOLA

T

26

he fifth largest city in the United States, its third busiest port and the energy capital of the world, Houston is a thriving metropolis in the southern state of Texas with a population of 1.5 million (and another two million in its suburbs).

Houston was a sleepy town of 45,000 people when oil was discovered at the nearby Spindletop field in 1901. Within two years, the town boasted 30 oil companies, 7 banks and 25 newspapers. And oil bas continued to shape Houston's future ever since. ''The oil industry has made Houston a very dynamic place to be," says Wilton E. Scott, president of Tenneco, one of the many corporations based in that city. "It really made Houston rev up and go. The city caiLe through the last recession with a continuing line of growth and expansion, and I think this is primarily due to the fact that it's so prominent in the hydrocarbon field. " Tenneco, a gas pipeline company that has diversified into agriculture, land development, chemical production and manufacturing, is just one segment of the energy business in Houston.

Twenty-four of the 25 largest U.S. oil companies have management offices there, as do 400 smaller oil companies. Together they produce 40 per cent of all petroleum equipment manufactured in the United States and 60 per cent of every basic petrochemical.

This phenomenal industrial development probably would not have been possible without the completion of the Houston Ship Channel in 1915. The channel links the city with the Gulf of Mexico 80 kilometers away and gives Houston an outlet to the sea. As one ship channel official put it, Houston is a town that built a port that built a city. The channel, which ends eight kilometers from downtown Houston, is lined by the largest complex of petrochemical producers in the world.

Although they may not always be as dramatic as the Spaghetti Bowl, signs of Houston's role as energy capital are everywhere.

Two of them dominate the city's skyHne. â&#x20AC;˘One Shell Plaza is the city's tallest building as well as home for the Shell Oil Company. Shell moved its ¡corporate headquarters from New York City to Houston in 1969-1970. Company president John F. Bookout says that the move put Shell closer to the mainstream of the U.S. oil industry, but he also notes that living conditions in Houston for the company's employees- good climate, adequate housing, easy commuting and lower living costs-were major factors behind the move. â&#x20AC;˘ Pennzoil Place does not rival Shell Plaza in height, but nonetheless it is a most dramatic building. Two trapezoidal towers, sheathed in dark glass, are cut off on top at sharp angles and united at ground level by an eight-story-high enclosed plaza.

The man who built both Shell Plaza and Pennzoil Place is real-estate developer Gerald D. Hines, who has given shape to much of the face of contemporary Houston. Among his best known projects is the Galleria, a multi-use center that incorporates a shopping center, hotel, offices- even an ice skating rink and jogging track.

Hines insists that he is only responding to what the city wants. " A developer really only satisfies demand or maybe anticipates it and is there a little ahead," he says, "but you can't be too far ahead or too far behind. So, the only thing a developer can do is lead in a way that yields a better product, something more interesting in architecture, or by bringing together different types of people."

Houston, alone among major U.S. cities, does not have zoning laws that would restrict specified areas for residential, commercial or industrial use. This allows buildings to go up

HOUSTON continued

where they are needed, not where an arbitrary zone has been set up. In Houston , this has resulted in a mixture of commercial and residential buildings that form a succession of subcities within the larger one.

"Houston is a very growth-oriented city, and there is little opposition to that proposition,'' says the city's mayor, Fred H ofheinz. " We owe a great deal of our prosperity to our oil and petrochemical industries, but at the same time our people have been smart enough not to put all our eggs in one basket. We go out of our way to encourage new business, to attract it to Houston and to keep it here. " H ouston's economy is booming: It leads all other American cities in growth of employment opportunities and personal income. And that kind of growth is necessary. Houston is also the fastest gr owing city in the United States, with a thousand new residents moving there every week.

Among the newcomers are two middle-aged businessmen who were seated next to each other on a recent plane flight into H ouston. They struck up a conversation and discovered that one had moved to Houston six weeks before from Cleveland, Ohio, to take a marketing job with a company that manufactures rad iation detection meters, while the second was in the process of moving there from Charlotte, North Carolina, to begin an engineering job with a storage tank manufacturer.

Congresswoman Barbara Jordan, who represents a Houston district in the U.S. Congress, explains Houston's magnetism this way: Texas, she says, is "the last frontier, and Houston is part of that. Houston is one of the last major cities in the country where you can come with your briefcase and sign under your arm, hang the sign out, say what you can do, do it and be successful at it. I still think the opportunity for growth here is greater than in any city I know about. I think it holds true for everybody."

If H ouston still retains the frontier spirit of opportunity, it also clings to some trappings of the old frontier. The biggest social event of the year is the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo which attra cts 700,000 visitors. A parade leads off the two-week event, which is held in the city's Astrodome, a huge, roofed stadium seating 66,000 people that is home to the city's professional sports teams.

The city, of course, has its cultural and scientific attractions, too. It has several art museums and the Jesse H . Jones Center, which houses the Houston Symphony, Grand Opera and Ballet.

Nearby is the Alley Theater, one of the nation's leading repertory houses.

The Texas Medical Center provides topflight medical care to Houstonians and is a lso one of the foremost hospitals and research centers of the world; internationally renowned Dr. Michael De Bakey has helped make it a leading center for heart surgery. Just outside the city is the Lyndon B. Johnson M anned Space Flight Center, the control point for the U.S. space program.

All of these add up to what Robert H. Brewer, the mayor's executive assistant, calls "a very cosmopolitan city, a very international one- and it will become even more cosmopolitan and more internationally oriented, definitely in economics, and I see it playing more of a role in politics internationally."

Pictures 011 thl' facing page dramatize lloustoii'S many-faceted growth.

Top leji: A study session is on at the Lyndon B. Johnson Man11ed Space.(fi!!,ht Ce11ter, where America's astrollauts are trained. Top right : The jaz: scene. Center, left: A housing complex there's greenery amitlw the concrete. Center, right : The Hou.mm Ship Channel/inks the city with the Gulf of Mexico 80 kilom eters t11ray and gil¡es Hous1on an outlet to the sea. HousTon is now America's third busiest seaport.

Lc(l : Shopping"! There's a lot 10 choose{rom , and a hat for every taste.

T here is widespread confidence that the city can deal with whatever problems confront it. And Brewer maintains that Houston bas had "a very excellent track record through the years of identifying problems and not letting them get out of hand ."

Buttressing that position, Congresswoman Jordan, who is black, recalls that Houston achieved peaceful racial integration of its public accommodations and schools, without the violence that characterized such efforts in some parts of the United States, through private talks between business and minority leaders.

R

epresentative Jordan enhanced her national reputation in 1976 when she delivered her highly acclaimed keynote address at the Democratic Party's national convention which nominated Jimmy Carter for President of the United States.

The one problem that virtually every Houstonian agrees is most pressing is public transportation. Houston has always been an a utomobile city, in large measure because of its size. You can drive 80 kilometers and still be within the ci ty limits. But horrendous traffic jams and increasing air pollution make a change essential. Brewer concedes that "We cannot go on enjoying the kind of growth and development that we have and remain such an automobile-oriented community."

H ouston's sprawling size- it covers over I ,300 square kilometers- and low population density argue against a fixedroute mass transit system, such as a subway. City plans therefore call for an accommodation of the automobile through such methods as reserving freeway Ia nes for buses, taxis and car pools; providing commuter parking lots on the edges of the city with bus service into downtown ; express bus routes and a doubling o f the number of city buses.

"There is a level of pride in this community that you won't find in any other big city in the country-and it's contagious:' Brewer says. " People don't have to be here but six months or a year, and they're caught up in it. ln fact, some of the people most vocal and active in community affairs have corne from other cities where they know they have major problems. They'd like to feel they've come to a c ity that's free of such problems.

And what's more, they want to help keep Houston free of them.

This attitude is so strong that we have a collective feeling we can solve any problem. And I think we can."

Sometimes it seems as if the city' s optimism dates from the time it was founded. Back in 1836 two real-estate speculators, J.K. and A.C. Allen, bought up the land where H ouston now stands. They felt confident enough to advertise that "When the rich lands of the country shall be settled, trade will flow to it, making it, beyond all doubt, the great interior commercial emporium of Texas."

The words were prophetic, but they didn't loo k far enough ahead. Houston is a great commercial and industrial center not only for Texas, but also for the United States and the world.

And the city is already building for the 21st century, when Houston may be the largest metropolis in the world , according to some predictions.

Texas Eastern Transmission Corporation is constructing Houston Center on a 30-hectare site that covers 32 blocks of downtown Houston. H ouston Center carries a $2,000 million price tag and a 20-year timetable. When finished , it will include stores, hotels, entertainment facilities, offices, apartments for 12,000 persons-and it will double the size of downtown Houston .

B. D . Goodrich , Texas Eastern's president, calls Houston Center "a prototype of what the city of tomorrow should be, not a projection into the future of the city of today."

They're building a model for the 2 1st century in H ouston only they plan to finish it during the 1980s.

0 SPAN FI:BRUAR Y 1979

The Bad Bars of Charles Goodrear b:y RICHARD F S "0\\

Rubber shoes that melted, mailbags that fell apart . ... Charles Goodyear lived down his past mistakes when he discovered the process that was to make rubber usable and valuable. But for five years no one believed the man who had wrongly cried 'eureka' too often .... "lf you meet a man who has on an India-rubber cap. stock, coat, vest, and shoes, with an India-rubber money purse without a cenf ofmoney in it . that is he.·· Thus did one of his neighbors describe Charles Goodyear. a seeming lunatic who was trudging around the Eastern seaboard in 1837 trying to drum up interest in rubber products. He had been promoting the general usefulness of rubber for three years with scant success; the industry had already c.lied. and everybody knew it.

A century earlier. French explorers had found Peruvian lndtans making boots from the tough, clear sap of a native tree.

The party brought some of this substance home with them. and for a few years "gum elastic" stirred mild interest in Europe. The great British chemist Joseph Priestley claimed that it was good for rubbing out mistakes in manuscripts, thereby giving it the name by which it would forever be known. By 1820 rubber was being manufactured on a small scale, but it was too unstable to be of any real use-it became sticky in the heat, and rock-hard when cold.

Nevertheless, New England Yankees, with their love of anything tricky and new, began buying rubber boots, and in the 1830s firms sprang up throughout the Northeast. producing coats, caps, and wagon covers. But in the summer. these items melted into gummy masses so foulsmelling that they had to be buried. The "India-rubber fever·· burned itself out, and by the middle of the decade stockholders had lost $2 million, while most of the factories stood vacant.

Into this highly unpromising situation walked Charles Goodyear, filled with the ingenuous belief that he could make something workable out of rubber. Goodyear had had little enough to encourage him at any point in his life. Born in 1800. the son of a New Haven, Connecticut, hardware manufacturer, he entered the family business and soon helped run his father into bankruptcy. By 1830 he was in debtors· prison. Four years later, while visiting New York, he wandered into the SPA!\ FEBRU"-R) 1979

Roxbury India Rubber Company office and examined a rubber life preserver.

Goodyear thought the inflating valve crude, bought the preserver, and reappeared a few days later with an improved valve. The manager of the store told him that he would have done better to improve the rubber.

Goodyear had no background in chemistry and knew nothing whatever about rubber, yet he returned home convinced that ·'an object so desirable and so important. and so necessary to man's comfort, as the making of gum-elastic ... was most certainly placed within his reach."

He began his experiments in prison, where he had again been sent for debts.

But raw rubber was dirt cheap now and Goodyear could get all he needed. He tried mixing with it every substance he could think of- ink, castor oil, soup, cream cheese, witch hazel. Something had to work, and if he tested everything in the world. sooner or later he would find it. Out of prison again, and persuaded that he had made progress, he opened a shop stocked with rubber shoes.

Swnmercame along, and the shoes melted.

He mixed the gum with magnesia and quicklime, and got white rubber smooth and supple as leather. Rejoicing, he announced his discovery to the press, was well praised. and then found that any acid, however weak-a drop oflemonade, say destroyed the product.

In 1839 he won a government contract for mailbags. The mailbags fell apart as soon as he delivered them.

That same year, however, while experimenting with rubber and sulphur in his kitchen at Woburn, Massachusetts, he spilled some of the mixture onto the top of the stove. To his astonishment, it did not melt, but charred instead. "I ... inferred," he wrote, "that if the charring ... could be stopped at the right moment, it might divest the compound of its stickiness throughout." Goodyear had discovered the process of vulcanization, which made possible the commercial use of rubber.

Nobody believed him. People shied

away from the relentless monomaniac; he had cried "eureka"too often. Forfivemorc years he plodded around New England, trying to wring a few dollars out of old associates, carrying with him the maddening knowledge that he had found the secret and was w1able to exploit it. After one such errand, he said. "I walked home ... ten miles. to learn on the threshold that my youngest boy. two years of age. who was in perfect health when I left home. was then dying.'· Once, with his library long since dispersed, he sold his children's schoolbooks for five dollars.

At last, in 1844, he secured a patent.

News of his process began to spread, but his desperate situation forced him to sell manufacturing licenses tor far less than their true value. Almost immediately. he became embroiled in patent-infringement suits. In 1852, Daniel Webster, the aging secretary of state, agreed to defend Goodyear's patent. Though Webster put less than an hour's preparation into the trial, he won the case; the vulcanization process was Goodyear's and Goodyear's alone. Webster got $15,000 for his day's work- more money than Goodyear had earned in half a century.

Goodyear lived to see his invention create a major industry- though the company that bore his name was founded years after his death. But he never seemed to make any money himself. When Napoleon lii awarded him the Medal of Honor in Paris in 1855 the emperor found Goodyear in a debtors' prison.

When he died in 1860. Goodyear was some $200,000 in debt.

In later years, however, his penury had ceased to bother him. "[I] am not disposed to repine and say that [I have] planted and others have gathered the fruits," he wrote once. 'The advantages of a career ... should not be estimated exclusively by the standard of dollars and cents, as it is too often done. Man has just cause for regret when he sows and nobody reaps. "0 About the Author: Richard F. Snoll' is a tnhuting editor to American Heritage.

Repronled w11h pcnm:;soon lrom M"""""' Hmtilft', Apnl M•• IY7x 0 IY7ti 1:>' -\mcro,.,.n Hcrnag< Publo;lun~ Co .• Inc .

COII-

From Amritsar to Akron Two decades in America- and 33 patents from the U.S. Government for products and processes he has discovered. This is the impressive record of Dr. Joginder Lal of Amritsar.

A manager in the Research Division of the Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company in Akron, Ohio, Dr. Lal, 55, has created a number of new or improved rubber products for the company.

His discoveries have also led to developments in the seemingly unrelated field of medicine that may some day be regarded as major medical breakthroughs. Dr. Lal specializes in exploratory polymers- the study of the syntheses and properties of rubber, plastic and coating materials.

Typical of the wide-ranging effect of his work is Hcxsyn, a synthetic rubber discovery that medical researchers say holds great promise for victims of severe arthritis and cardiac diseases.

Developed by Dr. Lal and his team in 1967, Hexsyn has remarkable characteristics of flexibility and resistance to deterioration. These characteristics make it feasible for Hexsyn to be employed as the internal pumping diaphragm of man-made heart mechanisms that may some day replace damaged human hearts. Thi s high-flex material was used to make a special pumping diaphragm for an artificial heart that kept a bull calf alive for more than 145 days at the Cleveland Clinic in 1976.

Now researchers say that Hexsyn's durability and flex life may also be able to improve artificial finger joints: it may be the looked-for flexible material that will not wear out when used in a titanium finger joint. The joint being developed by a laboratory that is using Hexsyn in its experiments could restore almost full use to fingers severely crippled by arthritis or accident.

A sample of the material has been in the flex test machine since 1974, and has undergone nearly 300 million bending flexes without failing, more than four times the number of finger movements in an average lifetime.

Hexsyn could also be used for other orthopedic prosthetic devices such as artificial knee joints, shoulders, wrists, elbows and hips.

This is just one of the many instances where Dr. Lal has provided his expertise and company materials without charge to research programs in hospitals, colleges and medical research organizations.

Joginder La! discovered the fascination of chemistry over four decades ago, back home in Amritsar.

A bright student, he won scholarships and honors in school and college. The most coveted was the scholarship he received in 1946 which entitled him to advanced education in the United States. He attended the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn (now the Polytechnic Institute of New York) to pursue a masters degree in chemistry and a doctorate in polymer chemistry. " It was a wonderful time in my life," he recalls. "Everyone was helpful and friendly and very curious a bout me since J arrived here soon after India's independence. Many people would ask me about Gandhiji."

He met and married Ardyce Lundenburg, a music student, and took up a job as a chem1st in the Polaroid Corporation at Cambndge. Massachusetts, after completing requirements for 32

SPAN rrBR UARY 1979

Dr. Joginder Lal's research on rubber has led to major medical developments. Above, Dr. Lal displays a joint made from his discovery H exsyn, a high-flex synthetic rubber which holds promise for victims of severe arthritis a nd cardiac diseases. his doctorate. Under the terms of the scholarship contract, he had to return to India and work there after completing his studies. So. fol lowing his graduation from the Polytechnic in 1951, Dr. Lal returned to India.

Since there were no government jobs in his area of expettise, Dr. Lal took up a teaching assignment in his alma mater, Hindu College, Amritsar. After a year, when no government jobs in his classification opened up La! was released from his contract and returned to the United States to rejoin his wife.

There he moved to Philadelphia, where during the next four years Lal brought his training to the profession of dentistry, becoming the head of polymer-organic research for a manufacturer of dental materials. In 1956 he made a significant change that moved his career into a new challenging area. He went to the American midwest, Akron , Ohio, where he joined Goodyear as a research scientist.

He has been researching in Akron ever since probing, questioning, experimenting- and coming up with scientific 0 innovations time and again.

NEW PRODUCTS

U.S.A.

Vertical Gardens The first practical vertical garden 1vhich is comm ercia//y mass-produced in the United States, the 122-centimeter w/1 "Verrigro Patio Tower" provides up to·u m eters of growing rows in only 3.721 square centimeters ojf/oor space. The unit has 4 faces with 44 distinct planting rows, a central imernal "feeding resel'l'oir .. (jl1r oncea-week plam care) , and an c1eration and drainage cylinder ll'hich brings air to I he plaw roofs and prevems overwatering. ·• Vertigro" is made of insect- and rotresistant "hean redwood" and is mounted on casters for easy mobility. Price: $20$50. Mam~f'auurer : W.A. Felknor. Dalen Products, Inc .. Dept. CN. 201 Sherlake Drive. Knoxvi//e.

Tennessee 37922.

3

NEW PRODUCfS cominued

Nonsquealing Bicyle Brakes Unlike most brake shoes, the "Sure Stop" ( right)-as the new braking system is called- is especially comoured ro fit bicycle rims. This provides superior braking ability, exceeding ordinary safety standards, and also eliminates annoying squealing when brakes are applied. The special~v formulated brake lining is par/icularly long-lasling. "Sure Stop" brake shoes weigh only 56 grams per pair and are easily installed hy the owner in a few minwes. Price: S3.95. Manufacturer: Sandy Libby, Libby-McKay Emerprises, Dept. CN. 8711 Vistarama A 1â&#x20AC;˘enue. Ewm!lt. Washington 98204.

New Putter for Golfers

Computerized Irrigation Machine

Golfers have good news in the "in-One Putter" (above), which has been re-engineered to improve strokes and impro-re a golfer's technique. The square putter head and specially designed shaft provide rhe golfp/ayer a comfortable posture with a view cent.ered directly above the ball. Correct stroke alignmenl is adzieved a/mos1 awomatically. The putter head itself lies squarely and comfortably 011 the green, and is made from a carefully chosen materialproviding con1fortable "feel" during strokes and betler control of the ball. Price: $30 and above.

Manufacturer: Brian Reeve, American (,olf Equipment, Dept. CN, 1363 East Taylor Street, San Jose, California 95133.

"Curv-A-Linear" (right) is a new machine that gives complete irrigation to large, rectangular fields. The unit mol¡es parallel to an irrigation ditch ,from whidz it takes the required amount of water. After irrigating the farm, it automatically rotates to the field on the other side of the ditch, irrigating the new area on the return trip. A salient feawre is the solid-state microprocessor, which keeps the irrigator in perfect alignment along its whole length, despite any irregularities in the terrain.

The machine is.fu/~Jl selj:contained, and sells in rwo capacities7,600 and 11.400 liters per minllte.

Price: $120,000. Manufacturer : W.G. Mulder, Gifford-Hill and Company, Inc., Dept. CN, P.O. Box 2706, Spokane, Washington 99220.

34

SPAN f'EilRUARY 1979

MechanicaJ Hoist With New Brake System Powered by an ordinary electric drill motor, air motor, or by hand, the " JOA T Mechanical Hoist" ( leji) provides a safe and simple way to lift as much as a ton to a height of 2.40 meters In just 20 seconds. Perhaps the most important new feature of the hoist is a powerful brake assembly which adjusts the load weight, locking the load in position whenever power is not being applied. Due to this feawre. the hoist can raise or lower loads to predetermined heights with extreme accuracy ( a few millimeters), unlike other hoists where loads often slip down further than desired. Price: $250. Manufacturer: Laird A. Varzaly, Joat Corporation, Dept. CN, 1180-A Aster Avenue, Sunnyvale, California 94086.

Preplater Machine for Railroad Cross Ties This unique mad1ine is engineered to align pla1es on railroad ties to the precise gauge required as the tie and pl.ate move under the gauge guide.

A hydraulically col/trolled chain moves ties through the unit, as hydraulic hammers ( replacing older air hammers) push spikes into place. Only one man is needed to operate the machine, and production rates fo r crews may be doubled. Diesel motors are standard, and electric motors are optional for stationary applications.

Price range: $68,000- $72,000. Manu/acrurer: Joe Glenn, Railroad Resources, Inc., Dept.

CN, P.O. Box 10100, Phoenix, Arizona 85014.

NEW PRODUCTS continued

Electronic Chess Game ''CompuChess F' gives chess enthusiasts a challenging opponent who is always ready for a game. This microprocessorbased unit h<Js six intelligence levels: four for playing progressively better games, two for solving chess problems (mate in two moves, for example). The simple keyboard easily programs the machine for specific random strategy (that is, it will not always play the same moves in the same situation), although moves are always chosen jor good tactical reasons. It allows for castling, "en-passant" capture of pawns, pawn promotion, handicap play. Price: $170. Mam((acturer: R .W. Wilkens, Staid, Inc., Dept. CN, 699 4th Street N. W., Largo, Florida 33540.

Battery-powered Chain Saw "'Minibrute" (le.fi) is a 4.55-kg chain saw, which is powered by any 12-volt auto battery or a portable battery pack.

11 is safe from shock hazards, works without messy gasoline or oil, and thus offers no danger offire. Price: $120.

Manufacturer: Wayman M. Mueller, Hinds International, Inc., Dept. CN, P.O. Box 4327, Portland, Oregon 97208.

36

SPAN FE.BRUARY 1979

·oN THE

LIGHTER SIDE

"Sorry Fm late. I cut myself shaving this morning." © 1978. Reprinlcd with permission of the Salurday Evenmg Post Company and Roben Hageman.

" It's very strange ... every moming,just as soon as I say 'Cock-a-doodle-doo,' the sw1 comes up!"

Reprinled with permission of the Sarurday Evening Post Company.© 1978.

" It's me! Daddy!"

Repnnted wo'!' permossoon o( the Saturday Evening Post Company. C 1978.

Repnnted WJih permiSSlon of the Saturday Evening POSI Company. @ 1978.

INFORMATION FOR THE ASKING

by DANIEL B. MOSKOWITZ

A Massachusetts housewife who was an early opponent of U.S. military involvement in Vietnam 15 years ago wants to !<now what kind of dossier the Federal Bureau of Investigation has compiled on her activities.

A Chicago television news reporter specializing in consumer news wants to know what material the U.S. Federal T rade Commission has collected about companies that promise, for a fee, to find backers to develop inventions.

A California company that lost out on a bid to supply a computer to the U.S. Department of the interior wants to sec the cost details of the winning bid submitted by a rival firm.

In all of these examples, persons who seek information in U.S. Government files have a simple way to get it: They ask. To support their requests, they can cite two important laws: the Freedom of Information Act and the Privacy Act. Since 1966, the U.S. Government has operated under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), which asserts the general principle that any data in the files of any Federal agency must be turned over to anyone who wants it, no questions asked, unless it falls within certain relatively narrow exemptions.

The law supersedes older statutes that limited disclosures to ''persons properly and directly concerned." Officials now face civil penalties if they exercise arbitrary power in denying access to material that clearly, unde.r the law. should be made public. So even at the agencies that most frequently cite the law's exemptions, according to a study by the Library of Congress, at least 84 of every 100 requests are filled.

In 1974, the U.S. Congress passed a companion statute called the Privacy Act, which is designed to inform individuals about personal information that the government has collected about them. Information released under the Freedom of Information Act is available to aU: data disclosed under the Privacy Act is revealed only to the individual involved. ¡'The Freedom of Information Act is based upon the presumption that the government and the information of government belong to the people,'¡ the Committee on Government Operations of the House of Representatives explains in a new booklet that spells out how citizens can use the statute.

In 1976, according to reports from Federal agencies. individuals and organizations submitted approximately 150.000 requests for data under the FOIA. The Defense Department gets far more requests than any ot/Jer department, perhaps 20 per cent of the total,

38

SPAN FEBRUARY 1979

American citizens now enjoy easy access to U.S. Government files. Under the Freedom of Information Act, any Federal file must be turned over to anyone who wants it. In 1976, there were 150,000 requests for data under the Act-from lawyers, pressmen, businessmen, even foreign governments. The rationale behind the Act: The government -and the information in its files-belongs to the people. and it grants 88 per cent of them. (Most pertain to military records or government contracts.) Some persons who have been denied information have taken the matter to court; more than 500 such cases are pending around the United States.

But, the court cases- and even the 150,000 formal FOIA requests totaled up annuallyare only a minor part of the act's impact.

Once the concept of openness took hold, agencies started routinely to announce decisions that they once kept secret, and to distribute data that previously had been unavailable to the general public.

One example: the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) had long kept a confidential list of building contractors who had performed so poorly that they were barred from further work funded by the agency. After someone made a request under the FOIA for this list, HUD made it generally available to anyone who

walked into one of the department's 74 offices around the country and asked for it.

The law drew relatively liule interest in its early years, but FOIA requests jumped after Congress revised the law in 1974. These revisions allow persons to ask for material in more general terms than previously. and require agencies to respond within 10 days to FOIA requests. with a month more to reconsider after a turndown. ''However, the most significant reason for increased use ofthe Freedom oflnfonnation Act probably stems from President Ford's decision to veto the amendments at the behest of the Federal bureaucracy,,. says Larry P. Ellsworth, a lawyer who handles suits under the act for the Public Citizen Litigation Group. "The publicity that accompanied the successful veto override informed a significant segment of the public of the act's existence." Public Citizen, a public interest group supported by individual donations, helps make persons aware of the law with a do-it-yourself brochure that is mailed to more than 150 persons a week.

Requests from business make up a large part of the Freedom of Information Act load. Often the companies are looking for new customers. For example, a merchant selling coins by mail asked the Treasury Department for the names of all the collectors who had requested information on new numismatic issues.

It is not unusual that what one company wants to find out, another wants to keep secret. The law says that an agency can refuse ""\ )

to reveal "trade secrets and comlllercial and financial information" that is "privileged or confidential," but, again, the courts tend to interpret the exemption narrowly. A Federal agency generally informs a company ahead of time that it plans to release information about that company that might be considered confidential. T he firm may then decide to seek a court injunction prohibiting the release of such information, but the burden of proof rests on the company and such injunctions have proved difficult to win.

One of the hottest legal issues in the United States now is whether an agency, if it wishes, can release information that the Freedom of Information Act authorizes it to withhold. Some courts have said no, but others have said that the whole idea of the law is to make more informatiOn available, so the law cannot be read as barring any disclosure that an agency wishes to make.

There is no requirement under the Freedom of Information Act that those asking for data be U.S. citizens, and recently agencies have reported an increase in requests from foreign corporations. Some foreign governments also are beginning to use the statute to gain information on trade or monetary policy not easily available through normal diplomatic channels.

Of course lawyers for nonbusiness groups -even antibusiness groups- invoke the statute, too. Ellsworth, who often aids such organizations with the Freedom of Information Act problems, lists a number of examples: ·'One women's rights organization discovered through the Freedom oflnformation Act that the National Institutes of Health were preparing a research project on the comparative effectiveness of full and partial mastectomies-without telling the women who would undergo surgery to which group they would be assigned. Armed with this information , the organization was able to force a change in the project design so that patients would be informed of the options and could choose between full and partial surgery.

'The FOIA proved useful in the long battle to ban Red Dye No. Two from the market. [Red Dye No. Two is a chemical additive in food. suspected ofcausing cancer.]

A vast amount of other health and safety information has been obtained under the act; about, for example, radioactive contamination in New Mexico's water supply. risks involved in use of silicone in cosmetic surgery, various safety defects in automobiles, results of a comprehensive Armysponsored study on the effects of marijuana use, cancer-causing propensities of chloro-

form (which is widely used in cough syrups). and the heightened incidence of cancer among workers in nuclear plants."

The press has been another prime user of the Freedom of Information Act. In fact, when a new group of owners recently took over The Nation, one of the oldest liberal weeklies in the United States, they said their number one goal was to use the Freedom of Information Act and related statutes ·•to make possible a new kind of investigative reporting.'' The National Press Club in Washington and similar organizations around the country have held seminars to teach reporters who have never used the law how it can be a tool tn investigations.

Other journalistic coups, which probably would not have been possible without the Freedom oflnformation Act, included revelations that a government bank examiner had accepted more than $50.000 worth of air travel, hotel and meal expenses from banks he investigated; and that the Energy Research and Development Administration was siding with privately owned utilities in local debates over building nuclear power plants.

In December 1977, virtually every newspaper in the United States ran from-page headlines based on the Federal Bureau of Investiga Lion·s (FBI) files on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. To comply with the Freedom of Information Act, the Bureau had opened up 40,000 pages of reports- enough to fill nine file drawers.

The files documented the FBI's efforts to track down many indications- none of which was ever validated- that the man charged with the killing, Lee Harvey Oswald. was not the sole culprit. Interested persons could read the documents in F BI headquarters, or for a copying fee of I 0 cents a page, they could have their own copies.

Apart from the Freedom of Information Act requests of business, public interest groups and the press, thousands of individuals have been relying on the act for highly personal quests. One widow, for instance, used the law to get an official report on an accident in which her husband had died. Others have invoked the law to find the present whereabouts of missing relatives.

But perhaps the most common individual request under the law is to see one's own files at the FBI. In the past, the FBI maintained dossiers on a wide range of persons, including news reporters. political activists, civil-rights workers and politicians. Although such surveillance is no longer common , the old files are kept, and those concerned seek to see what is in them.

Answering each request is a time-consum-

ing task. Each file must be scanned first by government investigators who excise anything that might pertain to a current investigation- one of the exceptions allowed by the Freedom of I nformation Act . T he Justice Department. home of the FBI, estimates that it spent 60,000 man-hours in 1976 working on requests for such documents.

Few of those inquiring find anything very surprising or revealing in their fi les. Marcus Raskin, a director of the I nstitute for Policy Studies, discovered that at times the F BI had sifted through the institute's trash . Senator Robert Morgan, who used to be Attorney General of North Carolina, found long reports of the annual meetings of the association of state attorneys general in his fiJe. T he Privacy Act Jim its what can be contained in government files. The new H ouse of Representatives guidebook advises: " In most instances, you would be on solid ground in challenging any information in your file describing )OUr religious and political beliefs, activities and associations.'· The law also allows the subjects to amend the records. ·T he Privacy Act requires agencies to keep all personal records on individuals accurate, complete, up-to-date and relevant." the House guidebook states. 'Therefore, if after seeing your record, you wish to correct, delete or add information to it. you should write to the agency official who released the information to you, giving the reasons for the desired changes as well as any documentary evidence you might have to justify the changes."

Although the Privacy Act does not apply to law-enforcement agencies, the FBI has. in fact, adopted some of its concepts voluntarily. T hose who wish to add to their files, offer explanations of events recorded there, or to correct errors of fact. usually are allowed to. And recently. some citizens have been successful at getting their FB1 records completely expunged.

Problems remain in interpreting and implementing the Freedom of Information Act: delays in releasing information beyond those sanctioned by the law, for example. and unnecessary deletions from material that is released.

Nevertheless. the Freedom oflnformation Act, along with the Privacy Act and related statutes, have opened the operations of government to public scrutiny. These laws have institutionalized the public's right to know how the government conducts the public's business.

0 About the Author : Daniel Moskowit:, a correspondent ~rith the Washingron bureau of McGraw-Hill News Senice, speciali:es in legal affairs.

SPAN FEBRUARY 1979

39

G

OF AMERICA

by CARIN C. QUINN

When Levi Strauss sold a pair of rugged pants made of canvas to a miner for six dollars in gold dust in the 1850s, he never imagined that he was starting a trend that would, a century later, take the fashion world by storm.

T

his is the story of a had exaggerated their tales of sturdy American symbol an easy life in the land of the that has now spread main chance. They were landthroughout most of the world. owners, they had told him ; T he symbol is not the dollar. instead, he found them pushing It is not even Coca-Cola. It needles, thread, pots, pans, ribis a simple pair of pants called bons, yam, scissors, and buttons blue jeans, and what the pants to housewives. For two years symbolize is what Alexis de he was a lowly peddler, hauling Tocqueville called "a manly and some 180 pounds of sundries legitimate passion for equality." door to door to eke out a Blue jeans are favored equally by marginal living. When a married bureaucrats and cowboys; bank- sister in San Francisco offered ers and deadbeats; fashion de- to pay his way West in 1850, signers and beer drinkers. They he jumped at the opportunity, draw no distinctions and recog- taking with him bolts of canvas nize no classes ; they are merely he hoped to sell for tenting.

American. Yet they are sought It was the wrong kind of after almost everywhere in the canvas for that purpose, but world- including Russia, where while talking with a miner down authorities recently broke up a from the mother lode, he learned teen-aged gang that was selling that pants-sturdy pants that them on the black market for would stand up to the rigors of $200 a pair. They have been the diggings- were almost imaround for a long time, and it possible to find. Opportunity seems likely that they will out- beckoned. On the spot, Strauss live even the necktie. measured the man's girth and This ubiquitous American inseam with a piece of string and, symbol was the invention of a for six. dollars in gold dust, Bavarian-born Jew, Levi Strauss. had the canvas tailored into a He was born in Bad Ocheim, pair of stiff but rugged pants.

Germany, in 1829, and during The miner was delighted with the European political turmoil the result, word got around of 1848 decided to take his about "those pants of Levi's," chances in New York, to which and Strauss was in business. his two brothers already had The company has been in busiemigrated. Upon arrival, Levi ness ever since.

When Strauss ran out of soon found that his two brothers

40

SPA!'. FEBRUARY 1979

canvas, he wrote his two brothers to send more. He received instead a tough, brown cotton cloth made in Nimes, Francecalled serge de Nlmes and swiftly shortened to "denim" (the word "jeans" derives from Genes, the French word for Genoa, where a similar cloth was produced).

Almost from the first, Strauss had his cloth dyed the distinctive indigo that gave blue jeans their name, but it was not until t he 1870s that he added the copper rivets which have long since become a company trademark.

The rivets were the idea of a Virginia City, Nevada, tailor, Jacob W. Davis, who added them to pacify a mean-tempered miner called Alkali Ike. Alkali, the story goes, complained that the pockets of his jeans always tore when he stuffed them with ore samples and demanded that Davis do something about it.

As a kind of joke, Davis took the pants to a blacksmith and had the pockets riveted ; once again, the idea worked so well that word got around; in 1873 Strauss appropriated and patented the gimmick-and hired Davis as a regional manager.

By this time, Strauss had taken both his brothers and two brothers-in-law into the company and was ready for his third

~~~¡;---~J~e:ans hal'e internationalized fashion. They are seen on the streets of Tokyo (ahove le.fi) and in ice cream parlors in America (above).

They also continue to serve their original purpose-a practical garment, one sturdy enough to stand up to the rigors ofjobs like carpemry and bricklaying ( lejt) .

San Francisco store. Over the ensuing years the company prospered locally, and by the time of his death in 1902, Strauss had become a man of prominence in California. For three decades thereafter the business remained profitable though smaJJ, with sales largely confined to the working people of the West cowboys, lumberjacks, railroad workers, and the like. Levi 's jeans were first introduced to the East, apparently during the dude-ranch craze of the 1930s, when vacationing Easterners returned and spread the word about the wonderful pants with .rivets. Another boost came in World War II , when jeans were declared an essential commodity and were sold only to people engaged in defense work.

From a company with IS salespeople, two plants, and almost no business east of the Mississippi in 1946, the organization grew in 30 years to include a sales force of more than

22,000, with 50 plants and offices in 35 countries. Each year, more than 250,000,000 items of Levi 's clothing are sold- including more than 83,000,000 pairs of riveted blue jeans. They have become, through marketing, word of mouth, and demonstrable reliability, the common pants of America. They can be purchased prewashed, prefaded. and preshrunk for the suitably proletarian look. They adapt themselves to any sort of idiosyncratic use; women slit them at the inseams and convert them into long skirts, men chop them orr above the knees and tum them into something to be worn while challenging the surf.

The pants have become a tradition, and along the way have acquired a history of their own- so much so that the company has opened a museum in San Francisco. There was, for example, the tum-of-the-century trainman who replaced a faulty coupling with a pair of jeans; the Wyoming man who used his jeans as a towrope to haul his car out of a ditch; the Californian who found several pairs in an abandoned mine, wore them, then discovered they were 63 years old and still as good as new and turned them over to the Smithsonian as a tribute to

their toughness. And then there is the par ticularly terrifying story of the careless construction worker who dangled 52 stories above the street until rescued, his sole support the Levi's belt loop through which his rope was hooked.

Today "those pants of Levi's" have gone across the seas although the company has learned that marketing abroad is an arcane art. The conservativedress jeans favored in northern France do not move on the Cote d'Azur; Sta-Prest sells well in Switzerland but dies in Scandinavia, button fronts are popular m France, zippers in Britain.

Though Levi Strauss & Co. has since become Levi Strauss International, with all that the corporate name implies, it still retains a suitably fond regard for its beginnings. Through what it calls its "Western Image Program," employing Western magazine advertisements, local radio and television. and the promotion of rodeos, the company still pursues the working people of the West who first inspired Levi Strauss to make pants to fit the world.

0 About tbe Author : Carin C. Quinn is a fi'ee-lance ll'riter, wlw.w! articles often appear in American Heritage.

SI'AN rEBRUARY 1979

41

42

$'AN FDilUI\IlY 1919

JEANS

COlVIE

TO

INDIA

by ANURAG MATHUR

44

"They're comparing us with the best of the world and then buying from us."

That pardonably proud claim by a young man who has been in the vanguard of the jean upsurge in India has more than a pair of denim-clad legs to support it: jeans really have arrived in India. While a pair from Levi's or Wranglers is still an enviable, jealously guarded, smugly flaunted possession, India-made jeans have finally settled down to a comfortable existence on thousands of young bodiesnot just in India but abroad too.

Among the wholesale manufacturers, Wings and Van Sobers were among the earliest to launch the large-scale production of jeans in India. That was in the midsixties; the jeans they produced were not the modern, high-style jeans but simple "cowboy jeans." Today Van Sobers has closed down but Wings is moving with the times-they make fashion jeans now, vying with the spurt of enthusiastic young jeans manufacturers who have almost flooded the market in the last two or three years, and are in the export market.

The story of jeans in India is, perhaps, best illustrated by the career of a young Indian couple, Lolita and Zake Gamatjeans and the Gamats have traveled together on the unpredictable fashion and business path.

Surveying the Indian sartorial scene in 1973, they discovered that though many tailors and shops sold a few jeans, there were no shops that specialized in them.

They looked at each other, hesitated, shrugged and taking their entire worldly wealth, took the plunge and started Jean Junction. Their grand plans were dampened, recalls Zake Gamat, by the fact that their worldly wealth consisted of Rs. 4,000.

Initially Jean Junction was located in the back room of an obscure shop near Connaught Place. Despite this terminal location, the odd customer stumbled in and bought something now and again.

Zake would thereupon grab the money

and speed on his motorcycle to Chandni Chowk where he entered into bitter battles with cloth merchants till a deal was struck and he could race back to the tailor, who would sew a couple more pairs ready to be sold the next day.

There was no possibility of making a few extra jeans from cloth given to them on credit because the thought ofextending credit to the acutely and obviously impoverished Gamats was unthinkable for the cloth merchants.

Now, however, says Zake with a luxurious sigh, he has a credit in lakhs with one merchant alone and 17 outlets for the jeans produced by the 50 tailors who work for him. His business continues to expand.

And in case he has to go down to the cloth merchants at Chandni Chowk- not that he has to any more since they now come to him- he's turned in his motorcycle are now gaining popularity. Lately, denim for a Toyota. caps have made an appearance and now Zake also designs the jeans he sells. the well-dressed collegiate can swagger " It's very easy to get quick popularity forth in his denim sandals, appropriately by doing an imitation of popular Western faded blue jeans, denim cap and denim brands,'' he says, " but we fought that jacket stretched tightly due to the untemptation and produced our own stuff, yielding fabric, in an ostentatiously masand now people are coming and asking culine fashion across the shoulders. us what we've made."

However, as all well-bred persons know, The cost of Indian jeans is lower than it would be an act of inexpressible horror that of jeans anywhere else. Hand-stitched for anyone to wear a denim shirt with Indian jeans are sold for Rs. 70 to Rs. 150, this outfit. Denim shirts are also popular, while i-n the United States hand-tailored but they are simply never worn with denim jeans can go as high as $200. Though jeans and jacket. It is written. the material used for making Indian jeans While denim is synonymous with jeans, is often less sturdy than its counterpart it is not the only material of which jeans in the West, exports to the communist are made. Suede, gaberdine, synthetic bloc countries are going up. suede and corduroys can safely be used Since the Gamats launched Jean Juncunder the generic name jeans. tion in 1973, beginning what they thought Like all fashions jeans too have their would be a lonely odyssey, no fewer detractors.

Parents of teen-agers hate than six other exclusively jean shops have jeans for their tenacity. Many are joined the jean convoy in their block of the battles fought in Indian homes to the Connaught Place shopping complex separate, even temporarily, a pair of alone. jeans from its owner and put it in its The reasons for the popularity of rightful place- the dhobi's bundle. Furjeans¡ in India are many and obvious. ther, say the complainants, jeans are They are comfortable, sturdy, relatively unpardonable in making men and women inexpensive, good-looking, age well and look exactly alike. This allegation is best of all, don't need to be washed too indignantly denied by those who have often and are singularly comfortable to obviously observed the differences with wear, even in the heat oflndia. keen devotion. ''Jeans," they ma intain, The readiness with which India has " accentuate the differences if anything." accepted jeans and the flair with which And so the debate spreads and rages. denim products are being manufactured Along with the popularity of jeans.

D may be unique. Besides jackets, there are tops and skirts for women, as well as About the Author: Anurag Mathur is a j i¡ee-lance handbags and purses. Even sandals of writer, living in New Delhi. He has studied creadenim, whose open sturdiness makes tive writing at the graduate school of the Univerthem ideal for the hot Indian climate, sity o.(Tulsa , Oklahoma.

PRafECTING

PRESS FREEDOM IN THE U.S. The U.S. Supreme Court has held that the American Constitution gives newspapermen no special rights in the matter of protection from police searches. President Carter has now proposed new legislation on the subject. If it becomes law, police will not be allowed to search the notes, tapes, photographs or other 'work products' of reporters, scholars and mass communicators.

The Carter AdministratiOn has proposed legislation to protect reporters and other writers from surprise searches

by Federal, state and local law enforcement authorities.

The proposal. outhned in December 1978 by Attorney General Griffin Bell and Assistant Attorney General Philip Heymann, would, in effect, reverse a Supreme Court decis1on of May 1978 that upheld a 1971 unannounced search by local authorities of files at the Stanford Daily, a student newspaper at Stanford University in California.

In that decision, the Court held that innocent third parties, in general. are not entitled to advance notice of a police search and that the 6rst amendment of the U.S. Constitution gives no additional special rights to news organizations. The amendment reads. 10 part: "Congress shall make no law ... abridging the freedom of speech or of the press .... " President Jimmy Carter said the Stanford Daily case had raised the "threat of encroachment on freedom of the press'' and he said his proposed legislation if passed by Congress would be "a major step forward in protecting the integrity" of press freedom. Under the Administration's proposal, law enforcement officers would not be allowed to search the notes, tapes, photographs and other ¡¡work products" of reporters,.scholars and others who disseminate information to the public.

The only exceptions to the rule would anse where a search was deemed necessary to prevent serious injury to an individual, or where the person possessing protected material was believed to have committed a criminal offense for which the material would be evidence.

The proposal also would require a subpoena rather than a search warrant when authorities are seeking other

Congress in 1978. The Congressman said he was "surprised and very satisfied" by the breadth of the Administration proposal.

Senator Edward M. Kennedj (Democrat, Massachusetts), who took over in January as Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, called the proposal a "good step forward'' and said he looked forward to working with the Administration to shape the proposal into a specific bill.

Senator Birch Bayh (Democrat, Indiana). who sponsored one of the broadest third-party bills introduced in Congress, said that he still believed the subpoena protection should extend beyond the press, but that he welcomed material-evidence such as an extortion the Administration proposal. note-again w1th few exceptions.

Following is the text of the President's Unlike surprise searches conducted with statement on the proposed legislation: a warrant, a subpoena provides advance "Of all the basic rights that contribute notice of the request for specific docu- to huma.n development, one of the most ments and an opportunity to contest the important is the First Amendment freerequest in court. A person complying dom of the press. A free press independent with a subpoena produces only the of government control, and expressing matenal specified in the document. A a variety of viewpoints, is crucial to both search warrant allows the police to appear democracy and individual liberty. with no advance warning and to search "Since last M ay, my Administration desks and files on their own. has been trying to explore the proper Interested parties from several news Constitutional way for us and the Conorganizations, the American Civil Lib- gress together to correct the threat of erties Union, and several members of encroachment on freedom of the press Congress, issued statements praising the that was raised in the Stanford Daily Administration proposal. case.

Jack C. Landau, Director of the Re''As a result of this work, I will soon porters Committee for Freedom of the propose legislation that would restrict Press, said that the proposal was the "most police intrusion into news media offices, encouraging action" the Administration and would give members of the press had taken in the First Amendment area. notice and an opportunity to challenge Favorable comment also came from requests for the products ofthe1r reporting Representative Robert F. Drinan (Demo- work. crat, Massachusetts), who authored one " I think this is a major step forward in of 13 bills restricting the usc of search protecting the integrity of the freedom warrants that had been introduced in of the press."

0 SPAN I EBRUARY 1979

45

Rcpnmed from ( S N,.,. ,, & IJoriJ Râ&#x20AC;˘port. Oecâ&#x20AC;˘mbc1 4, 1'17K. pubiJ,htd at Washmgtun, 1),('

HUMAN RIGHTS

What Has the American Push Achieved il AN INTERVIEW WITH PATRIOA DERIAN QUESTION: Is the Carter Administration abandoning ib human rights policy?

Are political and economic realities-for example, in Iran, Nicaragua and Argentina-forcing the Administration to switch to a less vigorous and public approach to human rights?

DERlAN : No. The human rights policy conttnues to be pursued with the force of the original comm1tment of th1s Admmistration. The question presumes that public criticism is usually the best tactic for implementing the human rights policy. In fact, the diplomacy of human rights involves a mix of private and public activitieS, w1th most of our work gomg through private channels.

In practical terms, what has the President's human rights campaign achieved over the past two years?

Our policy has restored the sense of the kind of people we are-with our democratic traditions and ideals of freedom. Every place that I go people say: "That's what we thought ; that's what we expected. We've been waiting for this. Thank goodness."

Nobody wants us to send in an army to defend human rights. But in places where people are 10 dissent on the human rights issues, what they want is to hear some kind of echo, some kind of response.

In terms of other governments with which we have diplomatic relations, there probably isn't one that doesn't now have to factor into that relationship with the Un1ted States our concern with human nghts.

Those are probably the two central achievements. Another achievement is our success in convmcing other governments that our human rights policy is senous and not just a propaganda device as some assumed at first.

But I want to emphasize that we are

46

SPAN I l!llRUARY 197~

very careful not to claim credit for these changes. No matter how much discussion passes between governments. the decision to make a change on a human rights policy. 111 a statute or in practice. is that of the government involved.

A lot of people who were in jail in January 1977 who had no idea if or when they might ever be released are out.

Also. we hear more and more leaders incorporating human rights language into statements they make. Once you start talkjng about it, expectations arc elevated, and people assume that more will come.

It has its own momentum.

lain universally accepted human rights that are recognized throughout the world.

Do you find the United States being accused of a " holier than thou" attitude or hypocrisy in view of our own blemishesfor example, U.N . Ambassador Andrew Young's charge that we have political prisoners?

When we talk about human rights, we always make it clear in our opening statement that we don't think we've come from Eden. that we haven't got the revealed truth. and that we're not coming to show the light to benighted, ignorant people. We often list some of our probHow can you apply American standards lems and what we're striving to do to overto countries that have an entirely different come them. We're not like a tribe of concept of human rights? avenging angels going out to get the I assumed in the beginning that there world shaped up. That would be so would be many different definitions of arrogant that I'm sure people wouldn't human rights, and that a large portion even want to talk to us on those terms. We of my time would be spent explaining talk about trying to find ways to solve these what it IS we're talkmg about. And while problems that are common to us all. the question almost always comes up in Every now and then in a newspaper. the United States, J haven't been anywhere somebody will take a little crack at our yet outside this country where people human rights record, but when we are didn't understand what we're talking involved in serious discussion, that is about. The Universal Declaration of simply not a problem.

Human R1ghts- recognized b) the U.N. General Assembly- 1s well known to Do we lay ourselves open to the charge of pursuing a double standard by penalizing people, and they subscribe to it.

When I got ready to go to La lin America a country that is of no great importance to the first time, several people advised me the U.S. while overlooking human rights that it would not be possible to discuss violations in other countries- such as South human rights questions. That turned out Korea- where we have security interests? not to be the case.

Human rights is one of the basic When I went to Asia, some people elements of foreign policy. But it's not the carefully explained that the idea of human only element. National security is also an rights was an alien concept and that element, and its importance has not Asians never thought in terms of indi- diminished.

In the case of South Korea, the national vidual rights. Well, I found leaders who understood' and were sensitive to human security interests of the United States rights concerns. I found people who had require that South Korea be able to defend participated in the writing of the U.N. itself. And it is obvious that our security human rights declaration. There are cer- interests there are critical and that certain

a forthright question and answer session, Patricia Derian, U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights, discusses the U.S. position on many thorny international issues in the context of President Jimmy Carter's ~uman rights policy. Candidly she analyses the implications [)f that policy for America's relations with such countries ~s Iran, the Soviet Union, Hungary and Nicaragua.

[n

tinds of military aid are required. That ioesn't mean that we ignore human r ights :oncerns in South Korea because we have JUs overriding security interest.

As I said earlier. there's no grid that Ne just slap on every country and say, 'It all has to conform like this." We try to be sensitive to varying factors in each ~ottnt ry.

fuming to Russia: In your view, should the strategic arms limitation talks (SAL1) ~e suspended as a protest against Soviet ~uman rights violations ?

I don't think that that kind of linkage is necessary or appropriate. After all, peace is a vital human rights consideration.

A.nd we are talking about two mighty military nations with weapons that have ~normous destructive capacity. So it is

extremely important that the SALT talks continue and that we reach an agreement that enhances our national security.

Given this overriding importance of a SALT treaty, hasn't the human rights policy jeopardized the prospect of an agreement? Haven' t the Soviets been put off by what they see as an American plot to overthrow their regime'?

J don't agree with that . The Soviet problem- their worries and fears- is with respect to their own people. They also have, as we do, a paramount interest in avoiding mutual annihilation. l t is this common self-interest which requires both sides to continue to limit the chances of a nuclear co nfrontation.

How far should the United States go to back

up its criticism of Soviet prosecution of dissidents with more than just woTds? The actions taken by the President during the Shcharansky and Ginzburg trials made plain our concern. A recent H arris poll shows that a decisive majority of the American people- 67 per cent , I believe- approve President Carter's speaking out the way he has to condemn the Soviet Union's treatment of dissidents. ft was a very o pen kind of opportunity to look at what might be at stake. But there was no big line drawn in the dust.

T he Soviets were given an o pportunity to respond without being backed into the comer or challenged in any way.

Some people wonder why the United States last summer canceled visits to the Soviet Union while sending more high-level mis-

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'47

HUMAf\1; RIGHTS continued

sions to Communist China. \there the human rights record may be even worse. How do you explain that?

You can't just x out one big chunk of the world and say we're not going to deal with them.

The fact IS that there have been human rights problems m China. We probably don't know the full scope of all the aspects of human rights conditions in that country. though we get little tnckles and bits of information. But we have behrun discussions with the Chinese on these questions.

Ms. Derian, how do you deal with criticism that the Administration seems to be more concerned about human rights violations in the \\'bite-dominated countries in Africa than they are in the black-dominated countries?

The fact of 1t IS that we are pursumg a global policy, and we have the same concern in every part of the world. With the initiatives that we have taken in southern Africa -in Rhodes1a. Namibia and South Africa- 1 can't think that anybody would complain that we are not paying attention to African problems at the same time. We are looking at black Africa in the same way.

There's a grol\ing impression that Congres.~ is taking the bit and running away with tlte human rights issue. Is the impetus be-

'When we talk about human rights, we're not like a tribe of avenging angels going out to get the world shaped up .... We talk about ways to solve problems that are common to us all.' hind this policy coming more from the Congress tltan from the Carter Administration?

The impetus for the policy has come from the Congress and the American people, as well as from thts Admmistrauon. The spec1al responsibility of Congress in our system 1s to enact laws. and the Congress has set out to create a statutory framework for human rights in our international relatiOns. In general, it looks as though they've just about completed that. They have touched almost everything.

We have opposed a good many of the specific country restnctions proposed 10 Congress. Th1s IS because there is a problem when there is written into Ia\'. a fixed relatJOnshtp with a country. You see, governments arc not fixed.

India is a perfect example. On the day before an election. you had a country with very serious human rights problems. The

next day you had an election. and you had an entirely different govermnent with an entirely different point of view. If our relationship with India had been fixed by law, we might have had to delay a year before we could respond positively to the new situation.

What is your answer to tbe complaint of State Department diplomats that you are making a shambles of foreign policy by injecting the human rights question into almost every issue?

I didn't think my office, by itself, had that kmd of power. When we started out, there were two of us handling human nghts. My job is to evaluate proposed actions and make recommendations \\ithm regular State Department channels and procedures. The decis1ons are made by the President and the Secretary of State. It says a lot for the human rights policy to think that, in two years or so, we have got to the point where you find an old bureaucrat squirming around and feeling his shoe getting tighter.

We do what the law directs us to do. It should have been done before we got there. smcc there was enough lav.· on the books. We do \\hat the Pres1dent wants to do. And we do have a voice. We try to be extremely polite about it. We don't want to VIOlate the human rights of any of our coworkers.

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14 Kas1urba Ganc:lht Marg New Delhi 1• 0001

WOMEN ATHlETESOFF AND RUNNING As he sprints for fun, fame and fortune, the American male athlete these days has cause to look over his shoulder: the female of the species is hot on his heels.

True, she is still trailing, but she is rapidly closing the gap. In fact , their accomplishments are so remarkable that the question now is not whether women should participate in sports but whether they .ought to compete directly against men.

Reasons for this spurt are many. The women's liberation movement has given them new confidence in their own worth and the courage to do what they like.

Besides, Title IX of the U.S. Education Amendments Act of 1972 mandates equal opportunity for both sexes in all educational programs receiving Federal funds.

By covering top-ranking women in sports, television is inspiring others to emulate them. Medical research, too, bas contributed to this dramatic interest. Investigations have shown women's potential for strength and endurance¡ to be more similar to men's than had previously been assumed.

Top: Mary Decker at 18 is one ofthe 11W1d'sfastest lwlf-milers. " Mary pulls forward like she's got an extra gear," says her coach. Above: Robyn Smith , a top U.S. Jockey, hadn't even seen a horse race before 1968. With seliconfidence and tenacity, however, she taught herself to ride in two years, and wem on to compile an outsta11di11g winning percemage. Left: Laura Baugh's golf swing may be Jess than classic, but it works. The youngest person ever to will the U.S. Amateur Wome11's tournament (at age 16 in 1971 ) , she is now a professional gv(fer.

Back cover: Karen Logan is probably the best woman professional basketball player in the U.S.