February 1981

)~-

NEW YORK'S MUSEUM OF MODERN ART ALSO

PAUL JOHNSON ON IS THE AMERICAN CENTURY ENDING? ASHOK MITRA ON THE INDIAN CENSUS NAYANTARASAHGAL ON EUDORA WELTY

February 1981

SPAN 2 The Reagan Cabinet

5

The Great Enumeration: The Census in the United States and India

14 Is the American Century Ending?

Ben Wattenberg and David R. Gergen Talk With Paul Johnson

18 Mr. New York Times

21 From Sap to Syrup

24 MOMA

28

Black Studies Come of Age

by Fred M. Hechinger

33 Eudora Welty: A Sense of Place . by Nayantara Sahgal

35

Why I Live at the P.O. A Shan Story by Eudora Welty

40 On the Lighter Side

41 Reinventing the Human Body

by Maya Pines

45 Internationalism Comes of Age in the U.S .... Again

by Lloyd Free and William Watts

Managing Editor .Chidananda Das Gupta Assistant Managing Editor

Krishan Gabrani

Editori~t Staff

Aruna Dasgupta, Manu Sahi, Nirmal Sharma, Murari Saha, Rocque Fernandes

Art Director

Nand Katyal

Assistant Art Director

Gopi Gajwani

Art Staff

B. Roy Choudhury, Kanti Roy

Chief of Production

Awtar S. Marwaha

Circulation Manager

A.K. Mitra

Photographic Services

ICA Photo Lab

Photographs: Front cover-Henry Groskinsky, Life magazine, © 1979Time Inc., from the Collection of the MuseulO of Modern Art. Inside front cover-NASA. I top-LD. Beri; bottomDean Brown. 6-7-The Brooklyn Museum, lent by Mr. & Mrs. Alvin Mann; right-courtesy Department of the Census; bottom left-Culver Pictures; others-Wide World. lO-courtesy Deputy Registrar General (Social Studies), Census Commissioner for India. 13-Homi lal.

14-Dean Brown. 21-23-Richard W. Brown. 24-27-Henry Groskinsky, Life magazine, © 1979 Time Inc., from the Collection of the Museum of Modem Art except 25 bottom-from exhibition "Video from Tokyo to Fukui and Kyoto," the Museum of Modern Art; 26 left-Film Stills Archive, the Museum of Modern Art; 26 top center-Philadelphia Museum of Art, Me. & Mrs. Carroll S. Tyson Collection; 26 bottom- Family of Man- Elliot Erwitt. 28- Paul Fusco, Magnum.

30 left-Culver Pictures; right-Associated Booking Corp. 31 top center-George E. Joseph; right-R. Philhps; bottom-National Archives. 34-Avinash Pasricha. 35-Rollie McKenna.

41-43-illustrations

by Patricia Wynne. Inside back cover-top and center row-Charles Herron; bottom

row-Bob

Bjork,

all courtesy

U.S.

Department

or' Agriculture.

Back cover-Emory

Kristof, © 1972National Geographic Society.

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Front cover: Part of the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, this molded plywood chair designed by Charles Eames is probably the best known piece of furniture of this century.

See pages 24-27 for a feature marking the museum's 50th anniversary.

Back cover: An experiment

in the battle against bugsmale gypsy moths wriggle on a wire grid connected to a seismograph. See also page 49.

Welthy Honsinger Fisher, who died recently at the age of 102, wa s a characteristically (though certainly not uniquely) American phenomenon-the social work volunteer (see" Forty-seven Million Helping Hands," SPAN October 1979). She wa s famous both in India and in the United States as the founder and guiding spirit of Literacy House, Lucknow (Saksharta Niketan). Dr. Fisher credited her old friend Mahatma Gandhi with having given her the mandate, shortly before his death, to dedicate the rest of her life to the cause of adult education in India.

Gandhiji's was a charismatic personality, and there is no rea son to doubt that his voice influenced Welthy Fisher's decision. But what the Mahatma said to her he said to many persons of good will who came to visit him: "Go to the villages and help them.

India is the village." What wa s distinctive wa s the verve, the energy and the practical intelligence with which, at the age of 72, she went about the work of selfless service to the country she lived in and loved for so many years.

Under Dr. Fisher's guidance and a s a result of her gra sp of Indian society's larger needs, Literacy House evolved from a place where villagers could learn ba sic reading and writing skills to what is now a whole spectrum of projects: publishing primers for courses in hygiene and home economics, teaching family planning, and many other worthwhile and imaginative schemes. ' Literacy House has trained more than 10,000 teachers--it graduates. ~bout 700 a year nowadays. These teachers then go out into the field to run literacy centers all over the country. Estimates are that more than two million villagers have benefited from the program.

"I was born spiritually color-blind," Welthy Fisher once said, "and consider all men brothers regardless of their skin. " Armed with this conviction of the equal value of all mankind, she was able to persuade individuals and organizations in both India and the United States to support Literacy House's work of enlightenment, so important for the growth of Indian society, and indeed of a just society anywhere.

Prime Minister Indira Gandhi once said that she was sure that Welthy Fisher "would prove a very good ambassador of India and create friendship and understanding wherever she went. " She wa s certa inly a wonderful amba ssador for the United States in . India. All of us, Ind ians and Americans, can celebrate Welthy Fisher's long years of dedication and usefulness to her fellow man, and we can marvel at the strength and clarity with which she perceived a new vocation at the age of 72 and followed it to the end of her remarkable life. --M. P.

.

THE REAGAN CABINET "They share with me a commitment to improve the quality of life for all the American people ... who I know will be impressed with their ability, enthusiasm, dedication and creativity."

To his friends, General Alexander M. Haig, Jr., is "brilliant, diplomatic and an organizational wizard." To critics, he is "manipulative and inarticulate." But all agree that the new U.S. Secretary of State is ambitious, hard-working and an able administrator. And many believe that he would provide something that has been conspicuously lacking in American foreign policy in recent years: a firm grasp of power realities between East and West.

As the secretary, Haig, 56, will deal with more than 150 countries of the world, and manage a sprawling 15,000person bureaucracy. He will be the chief recommender, articulator and executor of foreign policy-the president, of course, will make the final decisions.

Combining the discipline and devotion of a career army officer with the reflexes of a veteran political operator, Haig, who lost his father when only 10, is by all accounts a self-made man. Graduating from the U.S. Military Academy in 1947, Haig served a short stint as a junior aide to General Douglas MacArthur in occupied Japan, and later saw combat in Korea.

In 1962, he got his first big break when he became staff assistant in the Pentagon.

Within two years, Haig became a special assistant to Defense Secretary Robert McNamara. Despite his success in the Pentagon, General Haig opted for combat duty in Vietnam in 1966, where he won a Distinguished Service Cross.

In 1969, Henry Kissinge: President Nixon's National Security Adviser, brought Haig to the White House to be his: assistant. Next year, Haig was promoted to deputy assistant to the president.

As one of Nixon's most trusted advisers, the general headed the advance party that planned the president's trip to China. The same year, Haig became vice-chief of staff, the U.S. Army's second-highest post.

As President Nixon's chief of staff during the Watergate crisis, Haig used all his diplomatic and administrative skills to keep the Nixon presidency from falling apart. Although this role tarnished his reputation in some quarters, Leon Jaworski, then special prosecutor, now has

completely exonerated Haig of any wrongdoing. In fact, many, in retrospect, concede that Haig helped pave the way for a smooth transition from President Nixon to President Gerald Ford.

Ford appointed him NATO commander, an ideal post for displaying his political, diplomatic and military talents.

By skillful military management, Haig forged the various NATO members into a more cohesive fighting-fit unit. In June 1979he resigned as commander of NATO, and became the president of United Technologies in Hartford, Connecticut, one of the 20 largest firms in the United States.

The first military man to serve as Secretary of State since George Marshall, the reaction to his appointment at the State Department has been generally favorable.

Says a senior analyst: "If he lives up to his billing, Haig ought to get this place jumping again."

The reaction overseas has also been generally favorable. Says a senior British diplomat: "He is in our view a highly intelligent, clear-headed and able man."

Almost in the same vein, adds a topranking foreign policy adviser in Bonn: "He is extremely well equipped for the job." About the only dissent came from a Russian official: "This won't help us improve things." Naturally so, because the new secretary favors a firm policy toward the Soviet Union. In a recent speech, Haig said :-"Clearly, the task ahead for us is the management of Soviet power .... We can't refrain from challenging illegaL blatant Soviet intervention creating terror and blackmail in the Third World."

It's been an axiom on Wall Street that American investment firms fall into two distinct categories-Merrill Lynch & Company, and everybody else.

The chairman of this most powerful investment firm, Donald Regan, has been named by President Reagan as Secretary of Treasury-a position that experts regard as the most important economic post in the U.S. Government.

As the Secretary of Treasury, Regan's primary job will be to lead the new administration's¡ push for significant tax cuts in the future. In this respect, his prescription for remedying U.S. economic woes differs little from that of the president.

In testimony before the Bouse Ways and Means Committee six months ago, Donald Regan proposed a three-part taxincentive program that included "liberalized depreciation" to allow businesses to deduct the cost of new investments from their taxable income at a rate faster than is permitted under current law; a reduction of the capital gains tax to a maximum of 21 percent; and widening of current tax brackets to compensate for inflation. The new treasury secretary believes that tax cuts will bolster economic growth without being inflationary.

Donald Regan also supports legislation that would mandate lower levels of government spending as a percentage of the nation's output. At present Federal spending represents about 22 percent of the U.S. Gross National Product (GNP).

Regan, 62, was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, December 21, 1918. After graduation from Harvard, he joined the Marine Corps, and was discha-rged after World War II as a lieutenant colonel.

Regan has spent his entire business career at Merrill Lynch, which he joined in 1946 as an executive trainee. A placid, even-tempered man, Regan is also a tough competitor who isn't inclined to walk away from a fight -the qualities which helped him to become the chairman and executive officer of Merrill Lynch in 1971.

As head of the Defense Department, President Reagan wanted to put a man who could do the impossible-cut the budget and make American defenses

second to none at the same time. The new Secretary of Defense, Caspar W. "Cap" Weinberger fits the bill admirably. During his Nixon and Ford years, Weinberger was known as "Cap the Knife" because of his talent for budget cutting, without reducing efficiency.

Dubbed by the president as "my Disraeli," Weinberger, 63, will head one of the few department~ where the budget will be expanded, and not cut. However, his admirers are sure that "Cap will still find lots of places to trim their budget.

He must dream about that kind of thing."

Weinberger is now vice-president of Bechtel Corporation, an international engineering and construction firm with headquarters in San Francisco. He joined Bechtel in 1975 after he resigned as President Ford's Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare.

Weinberger's first official contact with Reagan was in 1966 when the then governor asked him to become California's finance director. The powers that be were so impressed with his handling of state finances that he was asked to take control of the Federal Trade Commission, and later by President Nixon to head¡the Office of Management and Budget, where he wasted no time in stripping waste and dead wood.

Weinberger firmly believes that "there is nothing inevi~able about the trend of lllcreasing government expenditures."

Here, he refers to Reagan's efforts as governor to revamp California's welfare program. He says that Governor Reagan made "substantial changes ... but the money saved, a large part of it, went to improve and increase the benefits."

Born on August 18, 1917, in San Francisco, Weinberger was graduated from Harvard College and the Harvard Law School. He is married and has two children.

A bone-deep conservative who is fond of remarking, "Conservatives know by instinct what it takes liberals years to learn," the new U.S. Attorney General, William F. Smith, is however liked by liberals and conservatives alike. They call him a polished and intelligent attorney, a patient mediator of disputes and an effective administrator.

Smith, 63, is a senior partner in one of Los Angeles' two' largest law firms (Gibson, Dunn and Crutcher). He has spe-

cialized in labor negotiations, representing management. He has also been active in politics, and led the California delegation to the Republican convention in 1972.

As governor of California, Reagan appointed Smith to be a member of the Board of Regents of the University of California. He has also been a member of the U.S. Advisory Commission on International Communications, Cultural and Educational Affairs since it was established in 1977. He is president of the Los Angeles W orid Affairs Council, and a member of the advisory board of Georgetown University'S Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Born in New Hampshire, the young Smith was raised under the influences of his New England heritage and bedrock Republicanism. "We grew up with an unusual combination of extreme wealth and thrift," recalls Smith's sister, Mary Shy. "Our mother was a happy, carefree person and she rather enjoyed spending money, but she insisted that we learn the value of money. When my brother [Smith] wanted his first bicycle, she told him he had to earn the money for it.

He picked apples and blueberries and sold them by the road."

William Smith is married, and has four children.

JA\1ES G. WATT C)ecrelarv

or Inferior

James G. Watt, picked by President Reagan as his new Secretary of the Interior, has been for the last three years fighting the department that he will now head.

The 42-year-old lawyer and his 10attorney Mountain States Legal Foundation have sued the Interior Department over what he firmly believes is a pervasive intrusion by government. He says the foundation's purpose is "to fight in the courts those bureaucrats and no-growth advocates who challenge individualliber- . ties and economic freedoms."

This has naturally caused dismay among conservationists, who remark that the new secretary might seek to weaken existing regulations designed to protect the environment. But, says President Reagan, what Watt has been fighting is not environmentalists, but "environmental extremists." "I think," he added, "he's an environmentalist himself, as I think I am. I think my record proves it-and his will also."

And according to Watt himself, he is not antienvironment. His endeavor as secretary will be to bring a judicious balance between the environment and the development of resources for the benefit of all Americans.

Watt formerly served in the U.S. Department of the Interior as a deputy assistant secretary and later as director of the Bureau of Outdoor Recreation in the Nixon and Ford Administrations.

Watt was born January 31,1938. 'in the state of Wyoming. He was graduated from the University of Wyoming College of Commerce and Industry in 1960, and from the Upiversity of Wyoming College of Law in 1962. He is a member of the Wyoming bar and the bar of the U.S. Supreme Court. He is married and has two children.

experience. "I think I could bring something to Washington that would be very vital and useful, and that's an agricultural background ... and experience."

HOWARD M. BALDRIGE Secret(J/Y of COmmelHJ

Howard M. Baldrige, nominated by President Reagan to head the Commerce Department, is the chairman and chief executive officer of Scovill Incorporated of Waterbury, Connecticut. Under his leadership, the firm has diversified into various fields, and has 22 plants overseas, besides 85 in the United States. He is also a professional cowboy, and sees nothing unusual in combining two professionscowboy and business executive.

His career has been a mixture of business, public service and politics. At JOHN R~.BLOCK home in Connecticut, Baldrige, 58, was Secretar\, of Agriculture active in seeking solutions to civic problems. His friends point to his assisPresident Reagan could not have tance in helping form a nonprofit corposelected a better person than John Block ration to provide housing for low-income to head the Department of Agriculture. families in Waterbury.

In the summer of 1967, he helped resolve For, John Block himself is a farmerracial conflict after a civil disturbance and a highly successful one. in his home town. Later, he helped fund Taking over the 280-hectare family farm in 1960 after military service, Block job programs and recreational programs steadily increased it to 1,200 hectares, and for ghetto residents.

He was active in Republican politics, in the process became one of the most successful farmers in Illinois. So impressed and was a close ally of Vice President was Governor James R. Thompson with George Bush. Talking about his new job as Secretary of Commerce, he recently Block:s success story that he appointed him director of the state's agriculture de- told reporters that the United States must retain its competitive edge in productivity partment. .

Here, too, Block made his mark. In if inflation is to be brought under control.

1976, the year before he took over as direc- "We are going to need government, labor tor, Illinois .exported $2,500 million worth and management all working together if we of agricultural products. Under his stew- are going to be successful at that," he said.

Born October 4, 1922, in Omaha, ardship, last year that amount increased Nebraska, Baldrige is married and has to $2,900 million.

Talking to reporters after his appointtwo children. ment, Block said that one of his first priorities as agricultural secretary would RA YMOND J. DONOVAN be to work on lifting the Soviet grain Secretary of Labor embargo "under the right circumstances and at the right time." He also said that he is generally opposed to bilateral grain The new Secretary of Labor, Raymond agreements-that the free market system J. Donovan, was the seventh of twelve is the best way to allocate food supplies children born to a working-class family worldwide. in Bayonne, New Jersey. Starting his caBlock favors higher price supports for reer as a $48-a-week laborer, Donovan farm products, but i$ against most other now is the executive vice-president and go~ernment ihtervention in the agricul- principal stockholder of the $50-milliontural sector. a-year Schiavone Construction Company Block, 45, feels that he could do a in Secaucus-a "realization of the Amerigood job as Secretary of Agriculture, even can dream," he says with justified pride. though he has no significant Washington Donovan's associates say that he will

bring two key skills to the 23,940-employee Labor Department: a strong managerial skill and a talent for negotiating-the two most important qualities for the job that he npw holds. No wonder then that his appointment has been hailed by business as well as labor leaders. A labor union leader, who has observed Donovan over the years, says: "He is tough but fair."

One of the most reclusive of the Reagan appointees, Donovan, 50, considered becoming a priest as a young man. Instead, after graduation from Notre Dame Seminary in New Orleans in 1952, he returned to Bayonne to help support his younger brothers and sisters.

Donovan declines to say how he will tackle the problems of his office until he is confirmed. However, he feels very strongly about reducing the government's role in the economy. He says: "We no longer have the best and the cheapest. We must get back to work in both the business and labor communities and get governmentout."

Donovan is married and has three children.

RICHARD S. SCHWEIKER Serretar"

or Healtl!

<1,1<'

.,

J')L ,. ¡ice.1

In his unsuccessful bid for the Republican presidential nomination in 1976; Ronald Reagan picked Richard S. Schweiker, a senator from Pennsylvania, as his running mate. Schweiker is now President Reagan's choice for Secretary of Health and Human Services.

Schweiker is not new to the Health Department, which accounts for onethird of Federal spending, and is second only to the Defense Department in budget size. As a senator, he was a member of the Appropriations Subcommittee on Health and Human Services. He was also a member of the Senate Health Subcommittee.

Schweiker, 55, is a born-again conservative. During his 20 years in the U.S. Congress, he has supported a number of liberal causes like pension reform, campaign finance reform, rent subsidies and consumer protection. However, in the mid-seventies he lamented in a newsletter to his Pennsylvania constituents that many of the liberal programs he had supported were failing, and that he was going to start applying an~effectiveness yardstick to them in the future. He wrote: "Congress not only must cut the fat and eliminate waste, but also ask whether a program that may be good is really vital. The time (Text continued on page 47)

THE REAGAN ~ABINET

continued/rom

page 4

the Energy Department, his first concern of the Delaware River Port Authority.

The Reading Company, with 10,000 as secretary will be to push for nuclear employees, carries 40,000 passengers a power, which he believes is the "cleanest day. In 1976, the Reading and five other and the safest" mode of energy, and northwestern railroad lines were reorga- one which will solve America's energy nized into a new entity known as the problems "for the next 3,000 years."

Edwards, 53, was a dental surgeon in Consolidated Rail Corporation.

Charleston, South Carolina, before he As one of the solutions to the energy successfully ran for governor in 1974. Until problem, Lewis told reporters recently, then he served as chairman of the county the Reagan Administration's top transand congressional district Republican portation priorities will be to continue committees, and as' a state senator in funding mass transit programs.

1972.

He is married and has two children.

Although Lewis has never held elective office (he ran unsuccessfully for governor SAMUEL RILEY PIERCE of Pennsylvania in 1974), he has managed )p(/"elarv of Housing and C rhan Development to carve his niche in Republican politics.

The new Secretary of Housing and "He takes a stand and he takes a side ....

The New Secretary of Education, Terrel Urban Development is a New York attor- He doesn't wait to see which way the ney and former state judge. A senior wind is blowing," says a close associate. H. Bell, is an experienced educator and adpartner in a New York City law firm, "That's what makes him different from ministrator.

After four years of service in the U.S. Samuel R. Pierce, Jr., is the first black other politicians. He's an outstanding businessman and an excellent organizer." cho~en by President Reagan to serve on Marine Corps, Bell, who has a doctorate Since 1975 Lewis has run his own man- . in education administration, began a his cabinet.

In 1964, Pierce became the first black agemeJ:}t consultancy firm, Lewis and career in education in 1946 which has named to the board of the Prudential Associates, in Plymouth Meeting, Penn- spanned his entire adult life.

Insura~ce Company of America. Six sylvania.

After serving a year as chairman of the Lewis was born November 3, 1931, Department of Educational Administramonths later, U.S. Industries made him a director. So impressive were his credentials in Philadelphia. He received his under- tion at the Utah State University, he was named Utah Superintendent of Public in tax, labor and antitrust law that eventu- graduate degree from Pennsylvania's ally Pierce was invited to sit on the boards Haverford College in 1953, and earned Instruction, a position he held from 1963 of seven national corporations, including a master of business administration degree to 1970. The same year, President Nixon the prestigious General Electric Company. at the Harvard Graduate School of Busi- made him deputy commissioner in the U.S. Although much of Pierce's career has ness in 1955. He is married and has Office of Education. Six months later, he been in private law practice, his most re- three children. left that position to become superintendent cent public service came in 1978 when he of the Granite School District in Salt Lake JAMES B. EDWARDS City. was mediation chairman in the New York SI rt ta of f./Iergy transit negotiations.

He returned to Washington in 1974 to One of Ronald Reagan's campaign accept President Nixon's nomination as Pierce believes in balance. As a mediaCommissioner of Education. tor, he has struck agreements between promises was to dismantle the Department Currently, he is Utah's State Commiscontentious foes. As an attorney, he has of Energy. And that's precisely what James B. Edwards wants to do as the sioner for Higher Education. Bell is a tempered theory with practicality.

Pierce also has experience in govern- new Secretary of Energy. ''I'd like to go to strong supporter of equal educational ment. In 1955, he became Assistant Sec- Washington and close the Department opportunities. "Minorities, women and retary of Labor. The following year, he of Energy down and work myself out the handicapped need a break,:' he has said. "In years past, we have been was named counsel to the antitrust sub- of a job," Edwards has said. committee of the judiciary committee in This comes as no surprise to those who guilty of some horrendous acts of disthe U.S. House of Representatives. know him. As South Carolina's governor crimination." However, he has cautioned In 1970, Pierce returned to Washington from 1975 to 1978, he exhibited a keen that local school administrations should as general counsel of the U.S. Treasury interest in revamping government agen- not lose sight of the final goal of academic excellence in their drive to improve eduDepartment, a position he held until 1973. cies with an eye to making them smallerPierce, 58, is married and has one child. and more efficient. Edwards launched a cational opportunities for the United crusade against overpayments and mis- States' disadvantaged. management of South Carolina's welfare Although he opposes quotas for minoriANDREW LEWIS agency, the Department of Social Ser- ties seeking entry into colleges, law and )( < I r T"/In ?I '01/' vices, and saw to it that the agency's chief medical schools, Bell says that educators Andrew L. Lewis, Jr., the new Secretary resigned. must find a way "to pay the price for bringof Transportation, brings to his new post As governor, he also created the South ing up the lower 20 percent of the popula~ a vast experience in the trade. For the Carolina Energy Research. In~titute, fi- tion with compensatory attention, affirlast 10 years, he has served as a trustee nanced not by government funds but by mative action and unprecedented congrants from foundations and large cor- sidera tion." of the Reading Company of Pennsylvania, por,ations. which operates a freight and mass transit Bell, 58, IS married and has fOUf railroad network. He is also a member Whether or not he is able to abolish children.

has come when the taxpayers can no longer afford to fund every seemingly useful program that comes down the street."

Before his first race for the U.S. Congress, Schweiker worked for 10 years in his father's tile company, rising to the position of vice-president for sales. He served four terms in the U.S. House of Representatives before he successfully ran for the U.S. Senate in 1968.

Schweiker is married and has five children.

1

,\

1

While the American cabinet officially has 13 members, four other senior advisers to the president are also considered to be of cabinet rank, attending meetings and taking part in top-level decisionmaking.

RICHARD V. ALLEN Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs

Richard V. Allen is the new Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs-a position that was made highly visible first by Henry Kissinger and then

by Zbigniew Brzezinski. But, as Allen told a recent press conference, he would keep a "low profile," and his job would be to "coordinate and perform a liaison function. " However, many agree that because of his experience, Richard Allen will have an important role in shaping the country's foreign policy. Allen was foreign policy adviser to Richard Nixon during the 1968 presidential campaign. After Nixon was elected president, Allen was appointed and briefly served as senior staff member of the National Security Council staff run

by Henry Kissinger. Later, he served on the White House staff as deputy assistant to the president for international economic affairs and as deputy executive director of the Council on International Economic Policy.

Since 1972, Allen has been president of Potomac International Corporation, a Washington consulting firm on international diplomatic relations.

In the past years, he has been a senior staff member of both the Georgetown Center, which he helped found during the I960s, and of the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace at Stanford University in California, where he worked prior to joining the Nixon campaign in 1968.

He is married and has seven children.

JEANE KIRKPATRICK Ambassador to the United Nations

"She is recognized as a brilliant thinker as well as a persuasive teacher," wrote The Washington Star recently of Jeane Kirkpatrick-the qualities that will stand her in good stead in her new role as the

U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations.

A Democrat who broke with her party's nominee, George McGovern, in the 1972 presidential election and backed Richard Nixon, Kirkpatrick ,was a member of President Reagan's transition Foreign Policy Advisory Board. .

Born in Oklahoma in 1926, Kirkpatrick received a doctorate degree from New York's Columbia Unive~sity and did postgraduate study at the Paris Institute of Political Science.

She worked for a while at the U.S. State Department as a research analyst. While there she married another State Department officer, Evron Kirkpatrick (now president of the American Political Science Association). They have three children.

In 1963 she' returned to her career as professor at Trinity College in Washington. In 1968 she wrote Mass Behavior in Battle and Capitivity. One of her most famous books is Political Women, about which The Washington Star wrote: "Her book shows that she can speak the language of social science scholarship and express herself with literary elegance." Her other books are: The Presidential Elite and Dismantling the Parties: A Reflection on Party Reform.

Since 1977 she has been a resident scholar of the American Enterprise Institute, a Washington "think tank," and the Georgetown University Center for Strategic Studies.

A widely travelled person, she visited India in 1979.

WILLIAM J. CASEY Director. lentral

Intelligence Agency

William J. Casey, Ronald Reagan's campaign chief, was the logical choice to head the Central Intelligence Agency. His first job was in the CIA's forerunner, the World War II Office of Strategic S~rvices, where Casey was chief of intelligence for occupied Europe.

Casey, 67, brings to his job a reputation as a decisive, demanding boss with an uncanny knack for driving to the heart of a problem, and solving it. Says a colleague: "He has a slogan which tells a lot about the guy: 'The perfect plan is the enemy of the good plan.' He-'d rather get a problem solved than sit around trying to devise the perfect solution. He's a pragmatist. " A New York City attorney, Casey has . been a backroom politician since the 1940s.

In 1966, he made an unsuccessful bid for the U.S. Congress. His first big break came when President Richard M. Nixon

named him chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission.

After his successful reorganization of the Commission, President Nixon made him undersecretary for economic affairs.

Later, President Gerald Ford appointed him president of the Export-Import Bank.

Casey has also served on several presidential commissions- the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, the Commission on Organization for the Conduct of Foreign Policy, and the Presidential Task Force on International Development.

A native of New York City, Casey was born March 13, 1913. He is married and has one child.

DAVID STOCKMAN Director. Office of Jfanagement

and Budget

Th(oughout the halls of the U.S. Congress, President Ronald Reagan's choice for Director of the Office of Management and Budget is known as a champion of conservative, free-enterprise economics.

Congressman David Stockman, 34, is a strong proponent of what has been called the "supply side" economics: large tax cuts, maximum reductions in Federal spending, and drastic slashing of government regulation of business. These measures, he says, will lead to productivity gains and increase economic output without exacerbating inflation.

As director of Management and Budget, Stockman's prImary responsibility will be to prepare the comprehensive Federal budget. In this role, he plans to fulfill President Reagan's commitment to cut Federal spending by 2 percent from current levels ill the fiscal year ending September 30, 1921.

Stockman is also a strong supporter of the Kemp-Roth tax proposal, which aims to cut personal taxes by 30 percent over the next three years. "The Kemp-Roth idea shifts the focus to producer incentives and opportunity, to the miracles of marketplace efficiencies, competence and innovation, and to the fallen flag of a stable monetary standard." he has said.

Stockman, a bachelor, was born in Texas November 10, 1946. He grew up in St. Joseph, Michigan, and graduated from Michigan State University in 1968.

In 1972, Stockman was named executive director of the House Republican Conference Committee from which he resigned in 1975 to run for the Congress.

He won election to the House ofRepresentatives in 1976. He was re-elected in 1978 and again last November.

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This anecdotal history of the decennial census operations in the world's 'two largest democracies marks the completion of the 20th American and the start of the 11th Indian census. The statistics reveal population and economic growth as well as changes in attitudes and ways of life.

EVERY YEAR ENDING IN ZERO byGERALDCARSON

ericans are a counting nation, They like figures-large figures such as the Gross National Product, industrial production, consumer spending, consumption of energy, even measures of economic activity in such arcane areas as the production of brooms, brushes, and pickles, Especially the American people like to count themselves, This has been going on for a long time', serially in every year ending in zero since 1790,There is more to this than a mere quirk of national character. Statistics as an instrument for ensuring political equality are imbedded in the United States Constitution, which requires that political power be apportioned according to population, That is the primary historical and legal reason why Americans count themselves every decade with a margin of ~rror that has been thinned down to 2.5 percent.

It is the special distinction of the United States Census that it is regarded as being the first in modern times to conduct a periodic enumeration of the people and to be strictly uniform in its recurrence. But the U.S. census did not arise primarily from a sudden appreciation of its usefulness in the gathering of social statistics and economic information to guide public and private decisionmakers. It was, rather, the result of a masterly compromise, one of the great political achievements in

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American history. Because of it, delegates to the Constitutional Convention of 1787 could complete their work successfully.

The background was this: Under the weak Articles of Confederation the debts incurred by the central government for the common defense during the Revolutionary War were to be charged to the states in proportion to the value of their surveyed land, not their population, The U.S. Congress consisted of a single house, every state having one vote. Congress could apportion the tax burden but each state retained the authority to levy and collect its share. This meant, in effect, that payment was voluntary; the United States could beg but not command it.

The adoption of the U.S. Constitution changed all that, but only after a monumental battle between the big states, which wanted representation in Congress to be determined by population, the small states, which wanted to retain the one-state, one-vote principle, and the Southern states, which wanted to include slaves whom the slaveowners regarded as people when they were thinking about their state's representation in Congress but as property when they thought about taxation based upon population.

In the end the delegates worked out a most ingenious solution which made the constitution finally acceptable to all: it called for ;:l '.'ensus to be taken within three years and every subsequent iG yClrs, and Congress to consist of two branchesthe Senate, whep" all states were represented equally, and the House of Revresentatives, where the populous states would have the greatest vote. In a concession to the Southern states, they were permitted to add to the number of free persons "threefifths of all other Persons," meaning their slaves, for representation in the House.

This 1850 painting, Taking the Cen~us (above), by Francis William Edmonds, and the cartoon (above, right) from the Saturday Evening Post of August 18; 1860, reveal the interest-sometimes alarm-that census operations then evoked. Half a century later. the 13th U.S. census taken in 1910 showed a popuiation jump from 31,443,321 to 91,972,266; the World-Courier made a marker at the exact center of population: Bloomington, Indiana (far left).

An enumerator's job, now easier than it was in the days of poor transportation, has its unusual moments-going by dogsled to Alaska (left, in 1940), by boat to an isolated Pacific Coast lighthouse (right, in 1950), or catching up with a trapeze performer in Virginia (far right, in 1950).

Cr:NSUS MARSHAL-" I jist want to know how many of yez is deaf, dumb, blind, insane and idiotic--likewise how many convicts there is in the family--what all your ages are, especially the old woman and the young ladies--and how many doll"rs the old gentleman is worth!"

The census had to contend with many oddities.

Good Christians feared the counting, thinking of King David, who incurred the wrath of Heaven when he had the children of Israel counted. The 1940 U.S. census turned up a vast number of people of 65, the qualifying age for benefits under the Social Security Act .iust passed.

Women's ages heaped at29; few wanted to be 30.

The stroke of genius lay in a provision that direct taxes were to be apportioned in the same way as the House of Representatives. This tying together of representation and taxation removed any bias on the part of the states toward the census since it eliminated any temptation to cook the books.

In accordance with the constitutional requirement, the first u.s. Congress at its second session enacted a law governing the census. It was approved March I, 1790, and within a year after George Washington became president the first enumeration was made. The work was done by the United States marshals of the several judicial districts with assistants of their choice, under the supervision of the Secretary of State, Thomas Jefferson. There were no standardized questionnaires, or "schedules," as they are called in. census parlance today, and the assistants, who were paid a pittance, had to provide their own pens and pa:per. (In fact, no printed schedules were furnished until the census of 1830.) hough there were only six simple questions to be asked, the task was difficult because of poor transportation, uncertain boundaries, and a scattered population. The people were suspicious, like taxpayers from time immemorial, and consistently underreported. Some had never been counted before, and those good Christians who followed the Bible as a light to their feet feared any counting, and evaded the marshals and their aides when they could. For they remembered a most unpleasant account in the Old Testament of the sin of King David, who incurred the wrath of Heaven when he had his captains number the children of Israel, and so drew down a pestilence upon them.

The 1790 census took 18 months to complete and produced a head count of 3,929,214 Americans. The public, expecting a total above 4,000,000, was disappointed, and there was anxiety about the political effect abroad. But President Washington explained the difficulties in detail and gave assurance that "our real numbers will exceed, greatly, the official returns."

In answer to the complaints, under the 1850 census law Congress provided that raw data from the field must be sent to Washington to be centrally tabulated there. Further, instead of counting only the head of the family- the traditional methodeach family member would be included separately, making possible more sophisticated analysis and cross-tabulation. This is probably the most important change in census history.

There was nothing especially notable about the eighth decennial census, but the ninth, taken in 1870, suffered from the disruptions of the Civil War, the disorganization of the government in the South, and the ~djustment to the new status of blacks under the Fourteenth Amendment (this was the first census in American history that contained no questions about slaves). Spoilsmen controlled the work of taking the census in

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1870.The U.S. marshals looked upon the census as an opportunity to distribute the offices to deserving henchmen, each of whom was instructed to "provide himself with a secure portable inkstand, good ink, and a sufficient number of pens. All entries will be carefully dried with the blotting paper which accompanies each portfolio." The entire force of enumerators was taken from the Republican Pilfty, including some blacks who could not read or write. The able superintendent of the census, Francis Amasa Walker, had no control over the marshals or the quality of their work, and was among the most severe critics o( the census which he headed. There were newspaper attacks, too, ~rguing that the census should be confined to its narrow constitutional function; but Walker insisted: "What the country needs is more information, not less."

Yet the pressure for more data consistently exceeded the capability of the technical and administrative machinery to provide and disgorge the answers. The encyclopedic censuses of 1880 and 1890 surpassed all previous efforts, employing more than two hundred schedules which asked an almost unbelievable 13,000 questions. They included, just for a few examples, the number of old soldiers and their widows still alive, the number of pounds of butter made, and data on fire losses, fire departments, garbage disposal, cemeteries, rail traffic, prisons, idiots, occupations and unemployment. Besides this, the 1890 census attempted to include all American Indians for the first time. which required a Solomonic decision as to who was an American Indian. Biological, legal, and cultural considerations were taken into account. The Census Bureau decided that in addition to full-blooded American Indians, persons of mixed blood were American Indians if they were enrolled by a tribe or registered at an American Indian agency, or if those who knew them regarded them as American Indians. This definition undoubtedly admitted some Mexicans and whites who had dropped out of conventional American life. The information gathered included such fascinating facts as the number of American Indian polygamists, the number of American Indians killed during the year, including women and children, whether by soldiers or interested citizens, and the number of whisky sellers prosecuted.

Although the counts of 1880 and 1890 produced an acute case of statisfcal indigestion, they did profit from an exhaustive study of census operations conducted by a House Committee on the Ninth Census, headed by Ohio Congressman James A. Garfield. The marshals were replaced by civilian supervisors, pay was liberalized, accuracy improved, and confidential information was protected by law. For the first time, women appeared, 200 of them, among the army of 50,000 census takers.

As plans were made for the 12th census, there was general appreciation of the fact that the last two had tried to do too much without time for careful preparation, since the organization was always dismantled after each census and had to be put together again every 10 years. So this time the questions were greatly restricted in number, and many topics were covered by being transferred to a series of intercensal reports. The 1900 census is rated as one of the best, though one special agent who worked on manufacturing schedules in Philadelphia reported on many intractable problems in trying to decide who was a manufacturer, and in getting hard information from reluctant or naive small operators. He had to interrogate and interpret the answers of wage earners who moonlighted after supper repairing bicycles, housewives who took in sewing in September and October, and the owner of a factory who had to be cornered and asked, "How

much would you have paid your sister, if she had been someone else's sister?" About all that enumerators who recorded business figures could do around the turn of the century was reach an amicable agreement with the respondent on a set of figures that was highly speculative. But they did show reasonable internal relationships, item for item, and thus met "all the requirements of mathematical accuracy and statistical harmony," if not of absolute truth.

In 1902 Congress at last passed legislation making the Census Bureau a permanent organization. Walter Willcox wrote an entertaining explanation of how this came about: "Director William R. Merriam handled Congress very cleverly; got a stunning group of girls on his staff; nearly all of them, no doubt, wanted to remain in Washington, and in the Census Office (at least until they got married). These girls, I was told, brought so much pressure on Congress that in 1902... the office was made permanent, not for any scientific reason, but to keep the staff from being disbanded." or the first 30 years of this century, the U.S. Census Bureau proceeded with caution and limited its objectives, although there were further improvements in data processing.

A major innovation of the thirties, for instance, was the perfection of sampling, a technique based upon the theory of mathematical probability: finding a small group of individuals selected with precision, whose responses to questions provide an accurate profile for the population as a whole. By such means more information could be collected than before at reduced cost and without placing a great burden on respondents. Out of this work came a monthly report on unemployment, critically important during the New Deal, and still published as the Current Population Survey.

Self-enumeration was also tried, with poor results. Its time had not come. Immigration was still at full tide and a large population of new Americans had passed through U.S. ports who could neither read nor write English. A demographic shift of historic proportions was recorded in 1920 and should not pass without notice. In that year the urban population became greater than the rural, amounting to about 51 percent of the 106,000,000 Americans who were counted. Strangely enough, or rather by sheer accident, one of the most important events in U.S. history was not caught by the census: the Great Depression. This happened because the 1930 census was designed before the collapse, and by the next census the economy was rising to meet the demand for military hardware, and American society was changed almost beyond recognition.

Some new questions in 1940 which the public was not prepared for raised a popular storm. Respondents were annoyed to be asked, "Do you have a toilet or privy?" or how much money they made. Information on salary and wages was badly needed, in the view of the government, to check on economic activity, current purchasing power, the extent of unemployment, the number of workers receiving substandard wages, and current hours of work. But Senator Charles W. Tobey denounced the questions relating to compensation both on the floor of the Senate and on the radio (more than 80 percent of U.S. homes then had radios). The senator branded the inquiry as intolerable, un-American, unconstitutional, a violation of the Bill of Rights, and lacking legislative authority.

Meanwhile, housewives in Olean, New York, adopted resolutions, organized a broom brigade, and threatened a march

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on Washington-where local merchants had launched an AntiSnooping Club. For a while it seemed that people might refuse to cooperate with the 16th census-though just those receiving $5,000 or more were asked only to say so; if they had other income all they had to say was whether it amounted to more than $50 per year. Peace was restored when the objectors were permitted to report income information directly to Washington on a separate mail-in form. About 2 percent of those answering chose this method.

The 1940 census also had to contend with a social phenomenon known as age heaping. This was the first population count taken after the passage of the Social Security Act. It turned up an extraordinary number of people who suddenly became 65, the age of eligibility for Social Security benefits-many more than could reasonably have made it according to the demographic figures. It was also noticed that women in particular resisted entering the next decade of life. A large number were missing, for instance, from the age-30 group and peaked up, or heaped, at 29.

The use of computer technology in the late sixties sharpened public concern over possible invasion of privacy. In a court contest, United States v. Rickenbacker, the argument was put forward that detailed questioning about housing was in violation of the Fourth Amendment. The District Court decided in favor of the government, the Court of Appeals sustained the decision, and the Supreme Court declined to review. Thus it was judicially determined that the gathering of household statistics was a legitimate function of modern government.

During 'the 1960 count the Bureau of the Census made new experiments, with the householders themselves completing the schedules. Results this time were so promising that the procedure was greatly extended in the next count. The chief reliance remained, however, on the door-to-door interviewers, the footslogging infantry of census work. n March 26, 1970, President Richard Nixon issued a proclamation that the census would be taken beginning on April I, and that "Every American can be sure that there will be no improper use of the information given."

Some people were not convinced. The inner-city residents of Trenton, New Jersey, and North Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, for example, were reluctant to open their doors or mouths to any caller representing the government, revealing their strong aversion to being listed in any government records. New Haven, Connecticut, respondents balked at answering a question as to "all persons who stayed here overnight on Tuesday." A Wisconsin assemblyman urged his constituents to reject all questions other than name, address, sex, and marital status, and newspaper advertisements appearing in Madison just before Census Day urged noncompliance. There was also resistance in South Carolina. The prevailing mood there disturbed some enumerators enough to cause resignations. In fact, there was a national debate carried on in and out of Congress on individual privacy versus public need, and on the obligations which lay upon government after it came into possession of personal knowledge.

In the end, however, the legal relationship of each citizen to the Census Bureau remained the same: answering the population and housing questions was mandatory.

Widespread publicity explaining the need for the data and emphasizing the confidentiality of the responses quieted down the incipient rebellion. Five court cases went to trial, but in the end a high level of compliance was obtained throughout the

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nation. Federal law states that information furnished to the Census Bureau can be used for statistical purposes only and not in any manner that could lead to the discovery of the identity of any person or business firm. Employees of the bureau are under oath to obey the constitution and the law. They can be fined $1,000 for every violation and sent to prison for up to two years, but no cases have been proved or even prosecuted under the present statute governing the census.

There is one exception to absolute confidentiality.

An individual who wishes to prove that he was born, and when and where, can for a small fee get the evidence from the bureau. he final U.S. population count for 1970 was 203,184,772. and this great undertaking produced 2,000 separate reports -as well as some responses that revealed changing social attitudes. One woman wrote to the Secretary of Commerce to complain that a married woman was required to identify herself as "wife of the head" though there was no box for "husband of the head." In the 1980 census the question as to who is "head" was deleted. James Madison had proposed questions about occupations in 1790. but the suggestion was not acted upon at that time. But by 1970 the focus was upon the economic life of the nation, and 23,000 occupations and 19,000 different industries had been classified by the Census Bureau.

Citizens of voting age have been moving around a lot since 1970, making the apportionment for representation in Congress, as well as that of local and state legislatures, out of date. Blacks are migrating away from the Northeast, many returning to the South. Texas, Oklahoma, and Louisiana are gaining rapidly in population.

Florida and Arizona are gaining, too, -but at a slower rate. Six congressional districts now have more voters than the average district has people. The census of 1980 adjusted these matters, and not least among its functions was providing new guidelines for the distribution of billions of dollars annually to states, counties. and cities through Federal revenue-sharing programs. as well as helping local government entities to plan new schools and to locate transportation systems, housing programs, day-care centers, and job-training centers.

Already it is possible to see beyond 1980. Legislation now on the books requires a national inventory in 1985 and every mid-decade thereafter, an idea first proposed to the U.S. Congress

by President U.S. Grant in 1872. The quinary count is not intended to duplicate the historic decennial census of the "zero" years in apportioning the House of Representatives but simply to bring up to date information on changing patterns and totals to guide the distribution of funds and to respond to the needs of private data users who require updated figures more often than once in 10 years.

Even now the bureau, looking ahead, has a pretty good idea of some of the shifts and changes that will affect political power and the quality of life in the early years of America's third century; it is just as well, for no matter how complex the world becomes, the mission of the census remains as simple and as profound as it has been for almost 200 years: to find out how things are going in the United States.

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About the Author: Gerald Carson is the author of Men, Beasts and Gods: A History of Cruelty and Kindness to Animals, and The Golden Egg: The Personal Income Tax, Where [t Came From, How It Grew.

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EVERY YEAR

ENDING IN ONE

byASOKMITRA

This month 1.5 million people start counting the Indian population to update what the author, a demographic expert, calls "the most complete and continuous record for any comparable population" -the 125-year-old Indian census.

Yes, a number of foolish reports were circulated, one of them was that the country of the English had suddenly become very warm, and that Her Majesty had sent orders to His Excellency the Governor General to send to England at once two virgins from each village, that they might fan her night and day and keep her cool, and that the census was only a subterfuge on the part of the authorities to enable them to pick out the virgins, and pack them off to Calcutta to be put on board vessels ready to receive them.

From the Officiating Deputy Commissioner Barabunkee to lhe Commissioner LucknolV Division, No. 1186, dated 27th June, 1869: Williams.

J. Charles: Reporl onlhe Census oIOur/h, Vol. ll, 1869.

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The Indian census will have seen in 1981 no less than 125 years of amazingly active life. The lO-yearly series of census counts started around 1865-1872 and in the last 110 years the census commissioner of India has with unfailing zeal moved from house to house throughout this great land increasing the population from a mere 206.162 million in 1872 toa hefty 548.160 million in 1971. Between 18.72 and 1981 he will have counted no less than 4,438 million souls over eleven lO-yearly censuses. Like Ozymandias of Egypt, he might as well dare all the mighties to look upon his work and despair.

~~~~ his Comparative Dictionary of the Non-Aryan Languages of India and High Asia (1868) to Queen Victoria, W.W. Hunter drew the following general conclusions: In dedicating

mutinies. In the Northwestern provinces, however, a census was conducted in January 1865. It was also the first census to attempt a detailed age classification of the population. A similar census of the Central Provinces was taken in November 1866 followed by one of Berar in 1867. A census of the population of the Punjab territories taken in January 1855 was followed by another in January 1868, while a census ofOudh was taken in 1869. Censuses of the cities of Madras, Bombay and Calcutta had, in the meantime, been taken in 1863, 1864 and 1866 respectively.

Statistical organization moved fast at the close of this decade.

An experimental census of the lower provinces of Bengal was organized in 1869. In 1865 the Government of India and the Home Government had agreed upon the principle that a general population census would be taken in 1871. Model census schedules and questionnaires had already been patiently worked out.

The years 1867-72 were spent in taking a census by the actual counting of heads in as much of the country as was practicable.

This series, commonly known as the census of 1872, was not a synchronous project, nor did it cover all territory possessed or controlled by the British. Though based on uniform schedules, it was not centrally supervised, moderated or compiled. But, inspired by modern concepts, it marked an auspicious beginning, and contained the rudiments of all basic demographic, social and economic tables.

~~~~ The points which I have endeavoured to establish are • that India is partly peopled by races distinct from the Aryan peopleraces whom we have scarcely studied and whom we do not understand, hat while some of these. races have preserved their ethnical identity in sequestered wilds, others have merged as helots or low-castes into the lowland Hindus, • that our ignorance of the first section brings forth incessant risings and frontier wars. and that our imperfect acquaintance with the second forms a serious blot in our internal administration, .that these races are capable of being politically utilized and by proper measures may be converted from a source of weakness to a source of strength.

• that they are also capable of being scientifically investigated and of furnishing trustworthy materiallO European philology, • that indications are not wanting that these new fragmentary peoples form the debris of a widely spread primitive race: and that from the northern shores of the Indian Ocean and the Chinese Sea, traces are here exhumed of ethnical evolutions and the ebb and flow of human speech, far more ancient, and on a grander scale, than the prehistoric migration of the Indo-Germanic stock.

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Hunter's preface contains a gem: 'The English are now endeavouring to reclaim them. But in order to civilize it is necessary first to understand them."

Under Statistical Despatch NO.2 of 23 July, "received from the Home Government, in the year 1856, the Government ofIndia had entered upon a consideration of the means by which a general census of the population ofIndia might be taken in 1861." But the undertaking was postponed in 1859 in consequence of the

The census of 1881 was a great step forward toward a modern, synchronous and comprehensive operation, in which much effort was spent not only on more complete coverage but on classification of demographic, economic and social characteristics.

The census stimulated for over 80 years one of the most thoroughgoing inquiries into social structure ever to be conducted in any part of the world.

The literature on the tribes and castes of India as contained in the census publications alone, not to speak of the dozens of volumes and monographs separately published by those who were actively associated some time or other with the census, is a vast storehouse.

No less instructive and encyclopedic are the discussions on the institution of marriage and on the persistent and singularly adverse numerical proportion of females to males in India. In seeking explanations for the adverse female sex ratio successive; cenS'tS commissioners and their colleagues have ranged over land and sea in search of all kinds of likely and unlikely causes. Hence the All-India Census Reports from 1881 to 1931 and several provincial reports of these years are simply enthralling. All are as rich in speculation as 'in observation. Of equal interest are the investigations into the immense variety of marriages and unions between men and women, sometimes enlivened by vivid descriptions of the rites that attend them or their dissolution, including a rather elaborate discourse on female circumcision in the AllIndia Census Report.

The literature on language classification, though less volumin- date, and having in view the advantage accruing from the use of ous, is still quite formidable. Although numerous tre~tises and a moonlight night for such a purpose as an enumeration, the grammars on a very large number of Indian languages had . committee recommend the early part of February 1881, within appeared and been printed between 1530 and 1853, the task of two or three days of the full moon, as the date best suited for a classification of languages really started with Erskine Perry's synchronous census of British India." paper in 1853 entitled "On the Geographical Distribution of the . Right in 1878 the government rejected the idea of a comPrincipal Languages of India and the Feasibility of Introducing mission of more than one person to conduct the census. The English as a Lingua Franca." The 1881 census report saw the commission would be monolithic, with one person in supreme sudden efflorescence of informed interest in linguistics, which charge at the center, with counterparts in each province or state continued up to 1931, drooped in 1941and 1951, but revived with severally responsible to the former. In each province or state the a fine blush again in 1961. In his introduction to his II-volume hierarchy would descend through the divisional commissioner Linguistic Survey of India, published in 1927, George Grierson down the district collector to the tehsildar or circle officer of the tehsil or circle, down to the schoolteacher, or talati or revenue gives a moving account of how it all began. His tentative classification of languages, based on grammatical structures, was accountant of each village. The police would be kept out. The accepted as the basis for the Indian census classification in 1901; entire machinery of the government would be pressed into a the entire classification was reviewed and revised very thoroughly supreme effort, which from humble and slow beginnings would in the light of more modern knowledge by R.C. Nigam, linguist have to be built up into a swift crescendo of a single curfew-bound to the Office of the Registrar General of India, In 1964. night. Thereafter the first results (the bare nose count) would have to be brought out in a matter of days, while the detailed results ~~~~ Since 1881 a new census has been taken every 10 years, thus might wait, but not too long; for the entire census organization providing the most complete and continuous demographic record would have to be wound up in the third year of the decade. Thus for any comparable population. It yields more profitable com- preparations would begin on the zero year of the decade, the parability over time in many fields than is commonly imagined. count would be taken around February of year one and the How is a census in India organized? Who takes it? What census wound up with the major publications accomplished in year three of the decade. The merit of the census commissioner makes it tick?

A full story would read like a romance. All that we can do here of India would be assessed not only by how smoothly he had is to give only the bare bones. We have seen how the first census succeeded in all stages but how economically he had got through was taken in 1872. In 1877 was set up a committee of three census all of them.

No wonder, the all-India census has claimed many lives in veterans of l872-W.C. Plowden of Northwestern Provinces, H. Beverley of Bengal and W.R. Cornish of Madras-to report active harness, able, learned and extremely well-informed men to the government. They laid down several basic principles of cut off in the prime of their lives. Census enumerators, supervisors and charge officers have often fared badly. There have been census taking which have continued to this day: recurrent dark stories of unwary enumerators ambushed and • The census should be canvassed, that is, enumerators should be appointed to enumerate, and it should not be left to the killed by wild animals, chiefly tigers and hyenas (the census man citizen to file his own return. does not take too kindly to the wildlife movement), resulting in • The citizen will be vouchsafed absolute confidentiality for the loss of final enumeration schedules as well. There have been the information he renders, which neither he nor government will other hazards also. The plague interfered with the census count in be entitled to use for or against him in any public or private many areas in 1901and 1911, and the noncooperation movements in 1921 and 1931, in spite of Mahatma Gandhi's express circular proceedings.

• This safeguard imposes upon the citizen the duty to give on both occasions exhorting his countrymen fully to cooperate with the cenS11Scount. The 1941 census was marred by religious truthful information.

• There should be legislation to confer sanctity on the rivalry and the passion for numbers which led to the inflation of the count in several provinces. The 1951 count had to be content operation. without the Jammu and Kashmir census, and there were anxious • The operation will be a combination of de jure and de moments on the eve of the 1961count when fears were entertained facto procedures, where the person enumerated will be accounted whether the enumeration of mother tongues in what are now for as far as possible in his usual residence.

• The enumeration will have to be conducted by an unpaid Haryana and Punjab would suffer from disfigurement.

The supreme effort starts gathering momentum about four enumerating staff. The question of payment was considered as early as 1877 and thereafter periodically, but was rejected. The months before the final count with the finalization of recruitment decision was to press into service the existing hierarchy of officials and formal appointment of the enumerating and supervising or semiofficials and honorary workers from the village upward agency. Practical training of some 1.5 million people in enumerathrough the tehsil, the subdivision, the district, the division and tion 1&8tsbetween six and eight weeks, with a minimum of six the province, each of which levels would-take the census, so to say, classroom lectures and an equal number of training enumerations. It is about this time that the countdown starts. The census as a badge of honor and national service.

• There should be a preliminary ..census count followed by a moment eventually arrives, and is soon over. The rechecking final count, the preliminary count providing not only an advance starrs, and on its completion, the preliminary count is published. estimate of the final outcome but serving to detect remediable It has been the Indian tradition to announce the preliminary defects on the eve of the final count. . count-which does not vary by more than a fraction of one per• The census count was to be organized on the basis of the cent from the final figures which come about a year and a half information deemed necessary and desirable by -the government. later-within three weeks of the completion of the census count. in other words, the authorities would have to have fairly precise ~~~~ ideas from the beginning of the form in which information should Contrary to uninformed opinion. which seems to imagine that the early censuses were little concer'ned with economic inforbe abstracted, processed and published.

• What would be the most convenient date for census taking? mation, the 1872 census of Bombay Presidency made an alphaThe committee observed: "Without, therefore, fixing any definite betical classification of 376 occupations, the 1881 all-India

census adopted 3 classes, 18 orders, 78 suborders and 480 groups of occupations, while the 189lone adopted 478 occupations divided into G classes, XXIV orders and 77 groups. Refinements were made with every census; the 196I classification went in for classifying all persons at work by their industrial classification and their personal occupations. The Standard Industrial Classification of 1961 was divided into 9 divisions, 45 major groups and 343 minor groups, while the National Classification of Occupations reclassified the same working population into II occupational divisions, 75 occupations groups and 331 occupations families. Basically the 1971 classification continued the 196I twofold classification. ~~~~ Much has been made of the Indian census' preoccupation with castes and tribes and cognate anthropological inquiries over the decades. While indeed a very large and valuable body of anthropological literature has grown round the Indian census, it needs to be emphasized that the Indian census has always been primarily concerned with its legitimate tasks of demographic analysis and economic classification, of "mathematical manipulation" and even "statistical ingenuity," the apparent lack of which was the subject of a regret expressed by Kingsley Davis. a modern demographic scholar of India and Pakistan. To take but one example: For early work on age in India, such efforts as J .A. Baines' age distribution in his report of Bombay and Sind, 1881, L. Mcl ver's dissertation on the same theme in his report for Madras, 188I, Gabriel Stokes' native life tables for the Madras Presidency, 1881, M.M. Khan's life tables for the Nizam's dominions, 1891, V.N. Narasimmiyengar's note on age statistics and sex ratios in his report of Mysore, 1891not to speak of a host of other works in later censuses-would do honor to demographic analysis in any country. What is more, they brought to the world of mathematical manipulation much broad understanding and empirical knowledge. In the preparation of age and life tables, India has always been fortunate in securing the services of eminent actuaries, beginning with Sir George F. Hardy, and continuing with S. Raghavachari and K.S. Natarajan. This long line of actuarial investigations since 1881 has presented the world with valuable devices for the construction of age and life tables out of inadequate and often very unsatisfactory material. ~~~~ On the eve of independence, the great P.e. Mahalanobis gave the Statistical Organization of India a new purpose and a new zest It was he who inspired the sample tabulations of 1941 and got the census commissioner in 1951 to undertake a sample check of the .total count, which was repeated in 1961. It was from

him that the census commissioner received the stimulus to go in for the twin occupational and industrial classifications in 1961, 1951 marked the coming of the rural urban classification for the country, and 1961 went into greater details of migration and economic activity. The 1961 data on household enterprise; of people on the land; on tenures; and on housing and industrial establishments are truly unique.

The census commissioner and census superintendents of 1961 produced a body of literature, close on 1,200 volumes, ranging over 26 different types of inquiry, a feat completed between 1960 and 1968 which may well remain an object of envy for many. Over the decades since 1861 the Census Commission of India has turned administrators into scholars and scholars into administrators. Men and women who never thought they would write a line in their lives have left voluminous books of lasting value and excellent readability.

The new demands upon the census of India as a tool of economic planning are now supported by modern technology.

The 1961 census used mechanical sorters and tabulators for the first time, and switched over to the computer around 1966-67.

The 1971 census was in great part processed by the computer.

The new technology itself imposed a new rigor and made more detailed economic inquiries possible. The computer, oddly enough, as was the experience in the United Kingdom and the United States in the 1950s, delayed the finalization of the tables.

But it made possible more satisfactory sample surveys.

The main thrust in the 1981 count will be, apart from the staple information of all censuses,' on details of migration and the fertility of married women. In addition, information will be collected in the preliminary count on physically handicapped persons (blind, crippled or dumb only). On top of this, there will be an elaborate household schedule which will also incorporate a kind of register of citizens. Fortunately, however, the Indian census is, for good or ill, not a fraction as prying as censuses in some other countries, and is as yet no great menace to individual privacy. ~~~~ The cerisus of India is the most important primary source of basic population data for administration and for many aspects of economic and social planning. It serves as a base or bench mark for current statistics, and provides the statistical frame for most sample surveys. It provides essential facts as a basis for governmental policy and administration, e.g., national electoral distribution, certain aspects of the legal or administration status of the Indian states and union territories, like budget allocation, federal awards, incentives and disincentives in the promotion of plans and targets, identification of backward regions, classes, castes and communities for economic and social planning. The census provides detailed as well as basic information for assessing past and future trends and projecting future requirements of various kinds. These apply not only to the field of demographic, social, economic and cultural planning, but also to such diverse industrial and commercial fields as the future demands of goods and services. These include such items as: telephone connections, hearing aids, classroom blackboards, children's clothes and toys, bridal trousseaus, funerary essentials, retail outlets for essential consumer goods, and what have you. For the modern planner the census is the one comprehensive source for exercises in economic decentralization, removal of regional imbalances, disparities and inequalities, and that most essential of quests: quality of life. For, at the very center of each census is lodged the human being at the various stages of his life.

0 About the Author: Asok Mitra, former census commissioner is currently a professor of demography at Delhi University.

of india,

BEN WATTENBERG: Our questions are these: Are there, indeed, such things as dominant societies that are worthy of owning a century or an era? What is their nature, and do they rise and fall?

Second, has the United States been one of these dominant societies? How did it become one? Is it still such a society?

Third, has this been good for the United States? Has it been good for the rest of the world?

Fourth, insofar as this has been an American moment in history, is it, indeed, ending?

Fifth, and finally, if it is happening, is it reversible, and is it worth the fight?

ISTHI AlIIRICll CIITURYIIDI18' ••.

. . Our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, __ or any nation so conceived and dedicated, can long endure. JJ

Thus Abraham Lincoln in his 1863 Gettysburg Address, pondering the destiny of the United States at a crucial period. Today, 118 years later, Americans are going through a similar phase of introspection and reaffirmation of basic values. Will all that their country has stoodfor and championed, as the dominant society of the 20th century, survive the turmoils of the contemporary world?

Two Americans turn to noted British historian Paul Johnson for an answer.

PAUL JOHNSON: To address your first question, I think there ii no doubt that there are dominant societies, though not necessarily all the time. One can take instances.

In the fifth century B.C., Athens and the states allied with it were dominantmilitarily, economically, and above all, culturally, because they were supplying something which the world wanted and which nobody else could supply.

Equally, you can say that empires are dominant, in the sense that the Roman Empire was completely dominant between about 100 B.c. and 200-250 A.D. You can also say that between the 1650s or I660s and 1700, France was the dominant power in Europe, dominant not only in the military sense but also in the cultural sense, in that the prevailing ideas of society came mostly from France.

Between 1815 and about the middle of the 19th century, Britain was dominant as the collapse of French power opened up a huge vacuum which was, to some extent, filled by the Royal Navy. At the same time that Britain was exporting the patents, the skilled manpower and the capital of the industrial revolution, its navy was acting as an international policeman. So, there again was another dominant period .

And I think it is true to say that between 1945 and the early 1970s, there was a period of American dominance, characterized by the United States being the great reserve military power in the West-that is to say, the power to which, when all else failed, everybody had to turn in order to sustain themselves. The United States was also the great reserve economic power in that, through the Marshall Plan and so forth, it was able to operate a series Reprinted

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American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research.

of pump-prImmg operations which restructured and rebuilt the world economy.

During that same period, the United States had a tremendous and pervasive cultural influence. American attitudesthe notion of plenty; the notion of mass production being a common legacy; the notion that if you worked hard enough you could, in the end, get what you wanted; the general optimistic expansionism based upon industrial mass production-were the key note of the world.

The 1970s, however, brought both a contraction of American power, as a result of the harrowing experience in Vietnam, and also a contraction of the American vision, because for the first time in 30 years there was very serious worldwide recession. For the first time in a whole generation, people began to doubt, "Well, is the American dream of a world of plenty actually going to come true?'; So one has a period then of 25 to 30 years of American cultural-econornicmilitary dominance, followed by what we are living through at the moment-a period of doubt and questioning which is going on all over the world.

WAlTENBERG: At that moment when the United States was such a dominant society, was that of 2reat benefit to the man in the street, or are these things that just concern intellectuals?

JOHNSON: This is always one of the great questions: Does it benefit the ordinary man in the street to be part of the dominant power and a great empire?

That is something, I daresay, that the people in fifth century Greece asked themselves as did people in the first century A.D., Rome. Certainly, one could argue that the great British Empire was administered from a country where there was ferocious poverty, and it is not always easy to see how that imperial wealth actually benefited the ordinary people.

But I would say that in the case of the American period of dominance, it is much easier to demonstrate that the "American Century" actually benefited ordinary American citizens, because in those early postwar years, the United States, as well as Western Europe and Japan and other countries, was able to enjoy a period of unprecedented prosperity. The United States was the dynamic force helping to create it, but it also shared in it as much as anyone else.

There is a second part to the question, and that is whether people outside the United States found, on the whole, that the American influence was beneficial

for them. And I would say yes, because, after all, what did they obtain during that period? They shared in this huge prosperity. For the first time in history, the notion of plenty became a realizable ideal for ordinary people. This is a fundamental economic change. Moreover, they did enjoy security. In the Eisenhower-Kennedy years, and to some extent the Johnson and Nixon years, people in the West felt that although they lived in a dangerous world, it was a world in which there was one beneficent superpower which, if worst came to worst, would be able to talk from a language of strength and would maintain the balance of terror.

It is more arguable whether the influence of American culture was beneficent.

Personally. I believe that people best express their real values when they are voting either with their feet or with their pocketbooks, and by all those criteria, American culture is an acceptable phenomenon and a likable phenomenon for the great majority of people who have actually been given the opportunity to sample it. American culture may not please traditionalists, but the great majority of ordinary, common people happen to like it.

DAVID GERGEN: Why did the Americans become the dominant force in the postwar period?

JOHNSON: I think it was inevitable and, indeed, to some extent, it had been adumbrated since 1918. The 1914-18 war ended the concert of powers, the old traditional balance of power in Europe, and it ended the dominant age of European supremacy. After 1918, the European empires were broken up, and European security had to be administered by the "walking wounded," namely Britain and¡ France. Both Britain and France emerged from that war theoretically intact as empires, but in fact grievously weakenedweakened riot merely in material things but also in spirit, because of the colossal loss of wealth and still more colossal loss of life which both of them had undergone.

The United States then retreated back to the other side of the Atlantic, leaving Europe to be run by these "walking wounded" who were manifestly incapable of doing it; there followed the rise of Hitler and World War II. In 1945, therefore, it was incumbent upon the United States to take over the role as the general administrator of the Western world, the ultimate peacekeeper, judge and administrator of it. Happily, the United States then rose and accepted that burden and, on the whole, in my

view-and I think in the view of most people in the West, if they are honest about it-discharged it very well.

Curiously enough, that had been adumbrated half a century before, just after the turn of the year 1900, by Rudyard Kipling.

Kipling was then on friendly terms with Theodore Roosevelt and he said to Roosevelt, "You have to take on some of the burdens which Britain has been discharging." And he wrote the poem, "The White Man's Burden." Leaving aside the white and the color thing, what Kipling really meant-he wasn't making a racial point-was that Britain had tried. to spread all over the world certain basic concepts which were part of her civilization: the idea of economic and political freedom, the idea of the rule of law, the sanctity of contracts, the sanctity of international obligations and so fortheverything which Britain had tried to stand for in the 19th century. He realized that Britain was ultimately too weak to carry on this burden, and he wanted the burden to be shared, so his poem was addressed essentially to the United States.

In 1918, the United States didn't accept that obligation, but it did in 1945. That is the principal reason why we have enjoyed nearly half a century of peace.

WATTENBERG: Did that moment of American dominance spread not only because of the historical factors you've talked about, but also because of a certain messianic fervor within the American soul that said, "Listen, we are the only people who really understand how to make things go and create the kind of world we want, and we will export it." In other words, was there an ideological component as well?

JOHNSON: Yes, I think there was. Inevitably, there is also an element of hubris in the imperial role, whether it is cultural imperiaJism or economic, political and military imperialism.

The Greeks understood that -the notion that hubris is followed by nemesis.

In the American case, one can say that hubris led them into Vietnam on a huge scale, and nemesis overtook tnem when they got there.

WATTENBERG: Suppose the United States had gone into Vietnam and won that war in 12 months?

JOHNSON: Well, the hubris would have still more increased, but the nemesis would have been waiting for you somewhere.

Unfortunately, there is a worm in the American apple. The United States is a product of Greco-Roman civilization

and the English common law. It's also a geous and, to a certain extent, hardboiled product of the Bible. And the Bible does in recovering from its mistakes. implant a notion of guilt. I think the role of guilt in American history is terribly im- WATTENBERG: The word "imperial" portant, and never more so than today is normally used in a pejorative sense, but because, as if it weren't enough to have let's use it in its good sense. What is the good sense of imperialism? What does it biblical feelings of guilt within Americans, provide to the world? they had to have Freud, too.

No society in history has endorsed the JOHNSON: The essence of a beneficent vulgar Freudian notions-in many cases, empire is that it internationalizes the mistaken notions-so enthusiastically as particular cultural, economic and political virtues of the dominant nation. The America.

When Abraham Lincoln said that Romans were able to give to the whole Americans were the chosen people, he had of the Mediterranean world certainly in mind this notion of guilt, but he could very substantial benefits. They gave them not have conceived the power of guilt in a marvelous legal system, they gave them American life and in American global a wonderful system of communications, politics that was to occur in the 20th cen- and they gave them very advanced engitury after the impact of Freudianism. In neering. What they couldn't give them, most other societies, Freudianism just alas-and that is why the Roman Empire hits the upper crust, but in American didn't continue-was industrial mass production. But they gave them three very society it reaches right down to the bottom of the social pyramid. The kind of guilt great blessings, so that a thousand years complex which the United States worked after the collapse of the Roman Empire, up over Vietnam and then hopelessly so . it was still retained as a folk memory in over Watergate would not have been possi- people's minds, and even in the late ble in a society which wasn't impregnated Middle Ages, as a golden age to which with Freudian notions of guilt. That, I people looked back in respect and admithink, is at the root of America's troubles ration. at the moment. They feel guilty about That was an instance of a beneficent what they don't have to be guilty about. empire, and I would make a very powerful The United States is too worried today case on behalf of the British Empire, too. about its mistaken policies in Vietnam I think Britain did give concept not only and, on top of that, the terrifying, searing to the rule of law, but also, in a deep sense, scandal of the American presidency with equality before the law. Like the Roman Watergate. Terrible things happen all the Empire, Britain's was essentially a liberal time in the world; all nations make empire, not a totalitarian, oppressive and autocratic one. mistakes. If you accept responsibilities, The Americans went a stage further as the United States did at the end of World War II, then you're bound to make because they didn't have an ehipire at mistakes, you have to learn from your all; they had an "imperial concept"mistakes, but you mustn't allow the mis- that is, they had certain very important takes and the horror of them to dominate obligations to discharge, which weren't always welcome, but they had a duty you.

Secondly, if you accept very important and they would discharge them. There roles in the world, you're bound to have a was an empire without a formal structure certain corruption of power affecting your but with the same central benevolence institutions. Just as mistaken policies in motivating it. a certain part of the world, in this case The time is coming when we will see Vietnam, were predictable, so too, it was the notion of imperialisM and empire predictable that American institutions much more objectively. We are moving would suffer some of the scars and damage out of the emotional stage of anticolonialism and into a period when we can of having to suddenly embrace enormous responsi bilities. judge these things on their merits. And It will be a sign of the United States on their ments, I would say that such maturity as a great power when it is able liberal empires are to be welcomed. to accept its mistakes as inevitable and remediable, just as it accepts its re- GERGEN: You said that you thought sponsibilities. It seems to me that the that after 1945, the dominance of the AmerUnited States 'has been very courageous icannation was practically inevitable. over the past 30 years in accepting its Was its decline also inevitable? responsibilities. It must be equally couraJOHNSON: No. What was inevitable

Paul Johnson is a noted British writer and historian who has specialized in the dynamics of social and political forces. He is a former assistant editor of the New Statesman.

was that there should be some relative decline, because after all the United States had enabled the world to enjoy not only an entire generation of peace, but 30 years or more of unprecedented economic expansion, and in those circumstances the lead that the United States had, in an economic sense, was bound to be shortened by the growth of major economic powers.

That was, of course, precisely your intention. Any leading power ought to welcome the narrowing of the gap because if the gap is too huge, it creates hostility and hatred and envy, and this is a source of weakness.

What I think has come unexpectedly and has alarmed people is the notion that the power of the United States has declined absolutely, as well as relatively, and I think if there is substance for this notion, then we ought to deplore it.

WATTENBERG: What is the evidence that this age of dominance is ending or has diminished absolutely, in addition to relatively?

JOHNSON: That is a very difficult question to answer because there isn't all that much hard evidence. It is more psychological than anything else.

One tends, for example, to confuse two quite different things: the existence of military power and the willingness to use it. What we have seen in recent years is an intense unwillingness on the part of the American Government to use such military power as it does possess, to the point where people are beginning to doubt whether it actually exists.

That leads to the related point, which 1 think is the key, that what sustains empires and what sustains nations under-

taking imperial roles is not so much the sheer physical strength they possessthough that has to be there in the last resort-but the will and the self-confidence with which they exercise it.

The Vietnam experience meant that the self-confidence in the exercise of power, which is half the battle in exercising it successfully, was eroded.

But again, one has to be careful with distinctions, and in the case of the Vietnam experience, one must distinguish the prevailing wisdom among the political elite of the country from the basic understanding arid attitudes of the country as a whole, which are particularly important in a mass democracy like the United States.

The ruling elite in the United States drew a lot of lessons from Vietnam which I think were mistaken and has been applying them accordingly. But, as far as I can judge, American opinion as a whole has been much less volatile. It didn't overreact to Vietnam; it has been much more consistent. Insofar as polls are capable of indicating these things, they show that in point of fact, the will to exercise power on the part of the American people is still there and, if anything, is increasing.

The hesitancy springs from the ruling' elite, not from the nation en masse.

at all why everybody shouldn't enjoy, within limits, a pretty good life. For the first time, that has now been universally accepted by the world as not only an ideal but an attainable ideal. It's the old concept of "a chicken for every pot," first articulated, curiously enough, by Henry IV of France-but the first nation to hold it out for the world as a whole was the United States, and that is the very essence of American culture, as I see it.

To that extent, this has, indeed, been the "American Century."

It is also continuing. Whether they are Iranians or Tanzanians or Chinese, people think that they are in the running for plenty, too, and they're going to make sure that they get it.

WATTENBERG: The vision of plenty has survived. The question is whether there is a survival quality to the means toward that plenty?

JOHNSON: Yes, that is a big question.

In my view, so long as the United States can continue to demonstrate, by her own example, that entrepreneurial capitalism is not only the best, but in fact, the only way .in which that plenty can be secured, then I think the "American Century" can continue. .But in order for that to come about, GERGEN: In the event the United States America has got to administer its own does not reverse these trends and the elites internal economic affairs with considerdo not get the message, what would you ably more skill and self~conviction than foresee, both for the United States ~nd it has been doing in recent years, and, for the world? above all, it has to spread the word about JOHNSON: Well, happily, the United capitalism; it must engage in a certain States is a democracy, and I would foresee amount of propaganda, saying, "If you the removal of one elite and replacement want plenty-and we take it that you doby another. That's what you have elections this is the way you get it. We've shown for. you how-we are showing you how."

Once again, it comes back to a lack of GERGEN: You've spoken about the de- self-confidence, I'm afraid. The nucleus cline of American economic and military of power in the world is physical strength, influence. How would you assess American but all the superstructure is self-confidence-whether you believe in your own cultural influence today?

JOHNSON: It depends on how narrowly slogans and your own ideals. What is you define culture. If you define it rather wrong with American capitalism, insofar widely as something which embraces as there is anything wrong with it, is spiritual and general attitudes toward that it doesn't trust itself to deliver the hedonism and so on, I would say that goods. That's why it invokes the powers the American culture has, in a curious of the state.

It seems to me that all ideologies stand way, transformed the world, and I would revert to my earlier point that it is a culture or fall by the importance they attach to the individual. Individualism, the intrinsic of plenty.

The basic assumptions of the American worth of every single human being, is utopia are that the world is a good place; compatible with capitalism, but is not that God has provIded us with a super- compatible with a collectivist economy. fluity of good things; if only we set about That, I think, is the fundamental strength getting them correctly and organize of capitalism-its nonmaterialistic appeal.

The propaganda has pointed to the ourselves, there is absolutely no reason

dark, satanic mills and the idea of someone being overwhelmed by giant international corporations, and so forth. But the point about capitalism is that it can accommodate the individual, whereas collectivism can't. It is a very important point that those who defend the American way of life don't point to enough.

WATTENBERG: To return to our original question, as you look at the spirit and mood of the United States, would you say that insofar as there has been a diminishment of the "American Century"-to use that phrase-it is not necessarily terminal, that our writ has not yet run?

JOHNSON: Yes. I think the United States is now discovering that it cannot abdicate its role as world leader, no more than it could in 1945.

At the moment, the American people are going through a period of self-ques~ tioning. They're saying, "We have gone into a period of decline; the world feels this; we feel it. Now what are we going to do about it?" That, in itself, is a sign of continuing life and vitality in the United States and continuing recognition that it has a special role to play.

I've no doubt at all that the United States has not only the physical resources, but equally important, the moral resources to reassert its leadership of the world and to pursue that leadership role vigorously. I have no real doubts about the United States. I think there is a lot going for it, and the spirit is still there.

What we're seeing at the moment is a period of retrospection before a further assertion of American ground rules, in my view. Now that is an optimistic view, and I don't want to be too optimistic because I don't want to encourage Americans to think that the situation is inevitably going to be all right.

I think the United States has to make a tremendous act of will, and the sooner it makes it, the easier it's going to be. It's , going to be difficult in any event. The longer it delays, the more difficult it's going to be. And the more powerful the forces building up against it, the more difficult they will make it.

The United States has to make this terrific act of will, but I think it can make it and I think it will make it.

0 About the Interviewers: Ben J. Wattenberg and David R. Gergen are coeditor and managing editor respectively 0/ Public Opinion, a magazine published by the American Enterprise Institute/or Public Policy Research.

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by HARRISON E. SALISBURY

In the spring of 1979, Abraham Michael Rosenthal celebrated his 57th birthday. He was executive editor of The New York Times, earning a salary of $150,000 a year; possessed options to buy 20,000 to 30,000. shares of New York Times common stock, some at favorable prices, some not; owned and occupied with his wife, Ann, an eight-room penthouse apartment on Central Park West; had sired three capable sons, Jonathan, Daniel, and Andrew, now in their 20s, of whom he was extraordinarily and rightfully proud; and seemed to his friends to have achieved all that his remarkable talents and ambition could desire.

But, in fact, Abe Rosenthal was, on this occasion and as he sometimes continues to be for extended periods of time, a deeply unhappy man.

He is A.M. Rosenthal. As the editor of the Times, he is automatically the most powerful editor in the United States- maybe in the world.

By every objective criterion, Rosenthal has made it. He is probably the best paid newspaper editor in the United States and the best paid editor in the history of the Times.

No other editor, not even his great rival Ben Bradlee of The Washington Post,,' can challenge his eminence.

Like it or not, and Abe Rosenthal certainly likes this, the editor of the Times is automatically the most powerful editor in the United States, and, hence, in the world.

Rosenthal's credentials are solid.

He led the Times in its breakthrough publication of the Pentagon Papers in 1971. He encouraged and supported Se.ymour Hersh in his expose of the CIA in 1974and 1975.And three years ago, he completed a radical and¡ remarkably successful transformation of The New York Times into a four-section paper with new sections on culture, finance, the culinary arts,

home decoration, sports, and science -the envy of almost every newspaper editor and publisher in the United States.

But this reality affords no ease to Rosenthal. In fact, ease is a characteristic that is absent from the chromosomes of this rather medium-sized man (he stands one meter seventythree centimeters ; sometimes he stretches this to one meter seventyfive centimeters). Kinetic energy, adrenaline, emotional overdrive, creative talent, and ambition, ambition, ambition have pushed him to the pinnacle. Not ease.

He has long since left behind the benchmarks of his past. No one in his birthplace of Sault Ste. Marie, Canada, has reached such heights; no one in "the Amalgamated," the Bronx, New York, working-class housing development where he grew up; no one in his class at DeWitt

Clinton High or among his classmates at New York's City College.

Some distance. Some achievement.

Yet, on his 57th birthday, in 1979, his soul was filled with darkness.

As he rested his 68 kilograms on the reading stand outside his office and gazed into the Times city room that was both his joy and his despairhis city room as he had thought of it since 1963, when he gave up being a foreign correspondent and returned to New York to become metropolitan editor-heavy-pounding blood flushed his temples, and, passing his hand over his face in a characteristic gesture, he exclaimed: "Why do people hate me so?"

There was no easy answer to this question, and not even Rosenthal thought there was. "I'm too smart not to know that at least part of this must come out<of myself," he told a friend.

there was no subject the Times would not touch, illuminate, or. some said, exploit.

One thing dominated Rosenthal's mind in the 1960sas he drove himself to the top at the Times .. After years of coping as a correspondent with a disturbed Indian subcontinent; an ideologically .oppressed Poland, and an enigmatic Japan, .he could not seem to identify the sources of the turbulence in America-the attitudes of the young, of liberated women, of blacks, of minority movements. It all seemed chaos to him, confusion, petulance, self-indulgence. Petty.

The trouble started when he came Abe Rosenthal himself had been back from Tokyo in 1963at the blan- a child of radicalism, although few dishments of then managing editor signs of this were still visible. In Turner Catledge, not really wanting the 1960s, he was the very image of to come, feeling that somehow the a good Jewish boy on the mak,e, his role of city editor was demeaning hair close-cropped, the same thickto a foreign correspondent. lensed, horn-rimmed glasses he had His predecessors on the Times worn since he was nine shielding shared a common characteristic: his gray-green eyes. Gay Talese lecThey were reined in and outwardly tured Rosenthal for years on his composed in moments of great ten- clothes, saying, "You must dress sion; they did not bleed easily. ("If properly. You are the editor of The the bull didn't bleed, they wouldn't . New York Times; you must dress torment him," Rosenthal once said. like the rditor of The New York "I know I bleed easily.") If these Times." This was advice that Roseneditors suffered qualms over their thal never really was able to absorb. role, they hid them away in some His suits became better cut (but secret place.

"I never had a made suit in my life"); Not so A.M. Rosenthal. He fought his glasses became a bit larger -and and bled and shouted and cried and the rims more narrow. By the midagonized in public. He turned the seventies, he let his barber fashion city room, which had drowsed for his hair, still thick and inky black decades, into a scene of melodrama, with hardly a trace of gray, into crisis succeeding crisis. The image of an attractive square-cut, blow-dried New York that the Times had style. But his shirttails continued reflected for generations changed to work out of his belt, and his under Rosenthal's editorship: The tie was askew more often than not. paper's sedate and concerned jourStill and all, this Rosenthal was nalism-serious budgetary discus- light-years away from the Abe Rossions, encomiums of Robert Moses' enthal who was born in Sault Ste. grandiose plans, careful analyses of Marie in 1922. Or even the Abe school¡ curricula-vanished into in- Rosenthal who became a naturalized side pages or from the paper entirely. U.S. citizen in 1951.

A new world opened up-of live-in Abe's father died when Abe was male-female relationships, of homo- two months shy of his 13th birthsexual society, of "cooping" police day. He had fivesisters, all older than officers (sleeping off their hours in himself, and he grew up surrounded parked squad cars), of drugs and by adoring women. Abe was to recall biZarre sex murders, of theatrical his childhood as sheer happiness. He geniuses and medical scandals loved his sisters, and they loved him as ("Doctor Feelgood," "Doctor X") only a boy youngest in a large family -a new world in which it seemed of girls can be loved. Later he was to

say: "I like women. I like women yery much. I get along best with them. I grew up with them, my fivesisters and myself." So when, after he became metropolitan editor and managing editor of The New York Times, there was one complaint after another about male chauvinism and when cases flared up about treatment of women on the paper, Abe found them hard to accept. He thought of him&elf as secure and at home in a woman's world, could not understand why the women in the city room reacted so differently from his sisters, and felt hurt and misunderstood. When the Times in 1978 agreed to the settlement of a discrimination. complaint brought by women staff members and set up a $233,500 annuity fund for 584women employees, Rosenthal irritated his friends by insisting that the settlement represented "a great victory" for the Times.

To Abe, the quarre!s"the politics, the passions of the 1930s, were real and principled. They were based on genuine ideological differencestheory, philosophy, Marx, Hegel, Lenin-and they had led naturally into the politics of postwar; the politics that he had seen and understood abroad, that were epitomized for him by his Times assignment to Poland in 1958,a watershed assignment that had gotten him expelled from Wars~w and had won him his Pulitzer Priie. He had counted himself a staunch anticommunist since the 1939Hitler-Stalin pact, but Poland had put the spin on the ball, had confirmed him as a cold warrior¡. By the 1970s,he liked to describe himself as "anticommunist, antifascist, antiauthoritarian" or, alternately, as a "bleeding-heart conservative," strong for civil liberties but sour on taxes, sour on what he called "the liberal camp." By that time he was sometimes labeled a neoconservative, but that wa~ a c~iche. Like any talented man's, his mind was filled with sharp opinions, not a few of them contradictory. On communism, however, he was dead clear, and hi~clo~ friend William F. Buckley Jr., editor of the National Review, spoke of him in awe as a "terrific anticommunist."

But Rosenthal still idolized the

Spanish Loyalists, "the. q~iginal political na'ifs, fightingfascism." .

Bemused by these images and idealizations, Rosenthal found the 1960sa hard rock.

He had dreams when he first came back to New York from Tokyo of being a writing editor, of dividing his time between desk and typewriter, but his one experiment in writing left such deep scars that he never tried it again.

His story was a melodramatic account of the Columbia University "bust," the night of April 29, 1968,when New York police violently ejected students who had been sitting in campus buildings. The anger of the students shocked Rosenthal. They were calling the police mother-- They called president (of the university) Grayson Kirk and vice-president David Truman the same. They called Abe the same. The devastation of Kirk's office appalled Rosenthal-the way books had been thrown around. It was the books that did it, even though he.insisted it was the "angry and authoritarian" atti- . tudeofthe students, for, he added, "as a Jew~ authoritarianism scares me."

Rosenthal stayed at Columbia all . night and left having witnessed "such anger as I had never seen." When he came into the Times that morning, his feelings were turbulent. He wanted to express them in the way that was natl)ral for him, by writing a story; but there was a problem. Clifton Daniel, the managing editor, had . sRecifically told him 'that he was not to do so and ,then left town.

Rosenthal could' not contain himself. He sat down at his typewriter and wrote a bold, emotional account, one that he described years later as "not a conformist piece." He felt he had seen terrible things and must bear witness.

Rosenthal described Kirk wandering about his devastated office, students being led away in manltcles whistling "We Shall Overcome," and a policeman picking up a book from the floor, saying, "The'whole world is in these books. How could they do this to these books?" The images Rosenthal evoked were to linger long in the minds of his readers. Having written the story, Rosenthal was not

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entirely certain what to do, but finally he ordered it into the paper. It ran on page one on May 1, 1968, and the repercussions were considerable.

Rosenthal's superiors were less than pleased. Columbia students picketed the Fifth Avenue apartment of publisher Punch Sulzberger, and Rosenthal acquired an aura of rightism, particularly with young people, which was never to leave him.

The role into which he had thrust himself plagued Rosenthal; he simply could not comprehend the distance in ideology that separated his generation from that of the 1960s.

The violence of the 1968 Democratic National Convention also deeply disturbed him; he was as concerned t<riee that young reporters on the Times sympathized with the demonstrators as he was by the vicious acts of the Chicago policeprobably more so. It seemed to him that the young people in the city room were not as happy as they had been in his day. Rosenthal recalled his early days on the Times as sheer joy (which was not true at all; moments of enormous misery had punctuated his whole career).

He remembered saying to Ann when they were stationed in India: 'This is incredible! Here we are in India, living in this lovely house, traveling wherever we want, writing for The New York Times, and / get paid for it!"

Of course, there were times when he looked at life more realistically.

It had taken him 10 years to achieve his ambition of going abroad. He thought he was going to make it in 1948, when he was sent to Paris for a United Nations meeting, but Cy Sulzberger, the Times' chief foreign correspondent, did not buy the idea.

The question of his Jewishness had never vanished. It had not been important to Abe when he was growing up. In 1940,when he was 17 years old, he had suffered great pain

in walking, and his hip had been operated on at the Hospital for Joint Diseases in New York. The operation¡ was a failure. His youngest sister,.

Anne, called the Mayo Clinic, in Rochester, Minnesota, and they agreed to examine him. He got a "charity fare" railroad ticket. Mayo diagnosed his case as osteomyelitis. A surgeon operated on him for 17 or 18 hours and said he was going to be all right. One day, a pretty young nurse came into his room and asked: "Are you a Hebrew?" No one had ever asked him that question. "Yes," he said. "Well," said the little nurse, "you're the first Hebrew I've ever met." When he got about on his crutches, he found that each door had a sign identifying the patient as Catholic, Protestant, or Hebrew.

There was no need for signs at the Times. Abe was a Hebrew, and he had a very Jewish name, Abraham Rosenthal. Actually, his name was Abraham Michael Rosenthal. Abe had never had a by-line until he wrote a story about the battleship New York. It was a page-one story, and that meant it had to carry a by-line. There were several Abes on the paper, and their given names were never signed. Abe was certain

Like any talented man's, Rosenthal's mind is filled with sharp opinions, not a few of them contradictory. the Times would not stand for "Abraham Rosenthal" on page one.

As he left the city room that evening, he passed the reporters' mailboxes.

Quietly he penciled an "M" after "Rosenthal, Abraham" under his box. Next morning his story appeared under the signature A.M. Rosenthal, and that was the way it was to be.

Of course, that wasn't the end of the matter. When he was covering the United Nations in 1947and 1948, he found that his name wasn't signed to stories about Palestine. "Don't get sore," an editor once told him.

"I wanted a by-line, but they took it off." It was always "they" who did these things. "They" were worried about too much Jewish emphasis.

"They." Somewhere, somehow, "they" always seem to be opposing Rosenthal or frustrating him.

him on. But in the end, it was lost, and Rosenthal was badly shaken.

He had little or no experience of the courts as a reporter. He was shocked In the winter and early spring of by the way everyone had to defer 1979, he had been in the hospital to the judges, by the rights the courts and then at home recuperating for arrogated to themselves, by the way six weeks after a complicated opera- the lawyers had to kowtow, by the tion on his knee. His legs, it seemed, absolute power wielded by the courts. had always been vulnerable.

The courts and the law-this was When Abe came back to work, he the important thing, he thought, in carried a heavy cane and imagined which he was now engaged. that he looked quite wicked with his Now, Rosenthal was attending big black stick. He thought that per- ' more and more meetings, more and haps people saw him as the image of more seminars on the First Amendevil, stomping through the city room, ment. It was the only thing he made his brow furrowed and his stick dig- speeches about. He liked to tell about ging into the nylon carpeting. a reporter behind the Iron Curtain One day a copyreader had stopped who interviewed an official on queshim, and they started to talk .. He tions of the day. The reporter took asked the copyreader the question careful notes; he wrote a story; then that so possessed him: Why did he took his notes and flushed them people react so strongly? Some liked down the toilet. He was afraid the him, some didn't, some said awful police. would come to his house, things about him. find the notes, and arrest him. It The copyreader said he thought it was, he said, a story about himself, was because Rosenthal was an agent about his days in Poland. of change; he had changed the paper, As he leaned on the readingstand and he had changed people. The atmosphere of the city room was now outside his office, he thought not only entirely different. What he was doing of those out there who did not made people angry: And, said the understand him, who thought he was copyreader, "You have your own mean, who hated him; he thought, polarized style. You are either benign too, about the ,powerful forces and loving or wrathful and threaten- against which he was doing combat. ing." Rosenthal felt this analysis About "they." And he knew, too, was not unrealistic. that it would go on as long as he But this was no longer as im- lived. He knew that if there were to portant to Rosenthal because of an be times when his face was flushed entirely new prohlem, a problem and his eyes heavy-lidded and the that, as he saw it, had grown out of faceless image of "they" haunted his the Pentagon Papers, Watergate, and mind, there would also be joyous the Times' great exposes of the CIA. moments when he would hardly be This new problem was the defense 9f able to contain himself, when he the press against the courts. It had be- would shout "I love this paper!" come, Rosenthal was convinced, the when he would be ready to throw his greatest story of the moment; this arms around anyone within reach, struggle would determine the future even the instigators of those unfair of the press and its ability to carry out and terrible women's and blacks' disits First Amendment responsibilities. crimination suits, just so long as they He had been badly upset by a row were part of this incredible world oyer one of his reporters, Myron of his emotion, The New York Times.

Farber, who had been ordered by His pride, his love, his life.

0 the New Jersey courts to produce his notes in the case of a doctor who About the Author: Harrison Salishad been brought to trial. Farber and bury, winner of the /955 Pulitzer the Times had been cited for con- Prize for international reporting, has tempt of court, and Farber was put written several books including Within jail. James Goodale, the Times' out Fear or Favor: The New York general counsel, fought the case like Times and Its Times from which this article has been adapted. a bulldog, with Rosenthal urging

down the trunk. Tappers drill one or more holes at the bottom of each tree trunk all the way to the center, then push a metal pipe into each hole to drain the sap into a bucket or into a network of plastic tubing that increases efficiency and saves labor. Workers boil the sap to evaporate its water content, producing about four liters of maple syrup from 150 to 200 liters of tree sap. The thick amber liquid is most often used as a flavoring, or is mixed with cane and corn syrup and sold as syrup for pancakes. Tappers sometimes boil all the water out of the syrup to make pure maple sugar.

Vermont maple tapper David Greenleaf (above) heads for (he woods, bucket in hand, to gather sap. The horse-drawn sledge he is trudging alongside is used 10 haul tanks filled with sap to the sugar house .. horses supply tlie surest transportation in such hilly, wooded terrain. At left, Susan Greenleaf empties her bucket of clear maple sap into a tank, which is then hauled (far left) to the sugar house, where workers boil down the sap in evaporators. over coal fireboxes. Though thermometers are available to gauge when the sap has become syrup, the more experienced worker;s Such as Barbara Carpenter (above, left) can tell just by looking.

Once prepared, the maple syrup is put into containers to be sold.

Most museums are content to be repositories of the past. New York's Museum of Modern¡ ArtMOMA, for short-has done much more than that.

Its bold and imaginative responses to the creations of its time have helped to shape the time itself. The landmarks of its first half ceritury~pictured on these pages-show how vividly it has been involved in the unfolding of modern art and taste. Most of the big names and important movements won popular recognition in the United States through shows at MOMA. In its zeal to uplift the aesthetic environ-

ment, MOMA has invaded areas that museums had never bothered about. Inspired by the example of its first director, Alfred Barr, it has crusaded for better design of mass-produced furniture and appliances.

No object was considered too mundane. The museum was the first to treat still photography and movies as serious art. It was also the first to put its shows on the road to spread the evangelical message. Whether that message was greeted with applause or outrage, it seldom failed to challenge aesthetic perceptionsor to change the way people look at their world.

Machined Beauty In recognition of the excellence of design of some machine-made products, MOMA in 1934 filled three floors with such objects as ball bearings (right), kitchen units, a cash register, light bulbs, tubing, a toaster, and a ceiling lamp.

A Look at Africa African art was still a novelty in 1935 when MOMA staged its mammoth exhibition.

The museum's chief aim was to illustrate a form of art that had inspired such modern artists as Picasso.

The show included more than 600 objects.

Picasso's "Guernica" Pablc Picasso's enormous (345 x 765 cm) canvas denouncing war was loaned by the artist t9 MOMA in 1939. It is expected to be sent back to Spain in the near future, as Picasso requested.

The New Architecture With models and drawings by more than 50 architects, including Le Corbusier's "Villa Savoye" (above), MOMA in 1932 introduced to the United States the new international style which had emanated from Europe.

On to Video In its constant effort to keep up to date, MOMA in 1974 added the medium of video to a new program of experimental work.

This screen image is from a sequence of self-images

by Hitoshi Nomura.

The Film Library MOMA's first director, Alfred Barr, believed that great films need to be preserved for posterity. The museum's film department was the first to be established in the United States, and now has about 8,000 titles. At left are stills from three classics-from top, The Cage, Intolerance, and Nanook a/the North.

Van Gogh

A tremendously popular show in 1935, seen by more than a million people, launched the popularity of Vincent Van Gogh in the United States. After 1935, a print of his famous Sunflowers became a 'fixture in most middle-class homes.

The Family of Man In 1955, MOMA opened the most succes~ful photography show of all time, seen by nine million people in the United States and abroad.

There were works by 273 photographers, among them Elliott Erwitt's picture of his wife and baby (right).

Looking Back MOMA's first exhibit of decorative arts in 1933paired the looping vegetable forms of art nouveau~ as in this Tiffany lamp, with the stark lines of contemporary pieces. But the public hated both.

Contemporary Contretemps In 1936,a huge show (700 pieces) of Dadaist art and surrealism outraged the trustees by the inclusion of such objects as a fur-lined teacup (at left) by Meret Oppenheim.

Cisitalia "202" GT MaMA became the first museum to buy a car as a work of art when it purchased this sleek 1948 Cisitalia in 1972.The car, prized by the museum for its precocious styling, was made in Turin, Italy, by Pininfarina. The company produced only 20 models.

"Two Cheeseburgers, With Everything" The museum thought enough of this particular piece by Claes Oldenburg to purchase it in 1962, but MaMA generally ignored pop art, which was the first major art movement in the United States after abstract expressionism. Some critics blamed the museum for being too fastidious and conservative to countenance such work.

There are at least 250 programs devoted to the study of black experience in American universities today. Half of these have been operating for a decade, and of the 64 that began granting degrees in 1971, all but four are still functioning. Although the number of students majoring in black studies rarely exceeds a dozen or two on any campus, at many universities, hundreds of students, including many whites, have enrolled in specific courses.

Programs which not long ago were regarded with fear and open hostility by many traditional scholars now are accepted-or at least tolerated.

Many black students, along with the whites enrolled in these programs, discuss Afro-American studies in much the same way they talk about the academic validity and content of their other courses. Gone are the days when black-studies programs offered "soul" courses based on the political and ideological slogans of black power and "black is beautiful." Today students are more likely to be learning about healthcare problems in minority communities (at Berkeley), "Ethnicity and the Political Economy in Latin America and the Caribbean" (at Stanford), or black writers from Frederick Douglass to Ishmael Reed (at Yale). In only 10 years, black studies have, for the most part, outgrown their radical origins, and now they are well on their way to becoming as respected and rigorous as any other discipline.

It was in the late 1960s, when substantial num bers of black students entered the United States predominantly white colleges and universities for the first A group of undergraduates at Stanford University gathers on the steps of a dormitory named "Ujamaa" -a Swahili word meaning family.

Largely because it has never let radical politics gain the upper hand over academic integrity, Stanford has one of the most successful black-studies programs in the United States.

as an undergraduate in the 1930s, he was handed an official letter informing him Although the initiative for Afrothat his request to room off campus had American studies first came been approved. The problem was that from radical black students young Guinier had never asked for such in the 1960s, the study of black permission. Understandably, the affront made a lasting impression. As the head experience is now a respected of the black studies department, Guinier part of American scholarship. engaged in a running feud with the Harvard administration, charging frequently time, that the demand for black! studies that it was out to "kill" Afro-American studies, treating students as "second-class arose. It was partly a response to a genuine neglect of a major tield of scholarship, citizens" or saddling them with academic comparable to earlier days when English standards he considered "a heritage of literature departments virtually excluded white supremacy." the study of American authors.

In a survey of the early days of black "It seems to me to be true," Professor studies, Professor Wilson Record, a proHenry Rosovsky wrote when the Harvard fessor of sociology at Portland (Oregon) committee he headed in the late 1960s State University, wrote: "In the process of first proposed setting up of an Afro-Amerideveloping black studies the director can studies program, "that the social usually obligates himself to black student sciences haye treated the American Negro activists who claim that if it were not for in a rather offhand fashion. His literature them the director would not have been is not commonly studied in universities appointed or would not now be able to and his music is wekome on the dance floors continue in office. The director in turn b\lt not in the classrooms .... To put it in may be able to mobilize these articulate another way, the traditional disciplines blacks to defend his program from intrahave not provided an atmosphere in institutional attack or to take the offensive which subject matter directly related to and conquer academic territory claimed black Americans has flourished." by others." One director at a state univerThe demand for black studies was also sity in the Middle West said frankly, "If it an expression of black students' feelings were not for the Black Student Union, I wouldn't be here, and if it didn't support of neglect, oppression and isolation-a me, I would probably be fired." reaction given impetus by outrage over That most black-studies programs have the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther overcome such political problems is due King J r. On some campuses, angry delargely to the workable models provided mands by black-power groups tended to

by Stanford and Yale. The Rosovsky overshadow and scuttle the sympathetic response of concerned scholars. committee at Harvard had earlier urged the appointment of specialists in the Harvard's new black-studies department was headed in its formative years by . fields of black history, sociology, government, economics, literature and art. This Professor Ewart Guinier, a black scholar proposal was turned down by the Harvard with a militant background in the laborfaculty, which instead decided to set up an union movement, whose attitudes were independent department for black studies. undoubtedly shaped by personal experi"Yale," says Rosovsky, now dean of ence. When he first arrived in Cambridge

studies. Looking back on those early days, Gibbs says that he had known from the start that "the only way to have an entity with respect is for people to have joint appointments in regular departments" -rather than being exclusively affiliated with a fledgling discipline. In academe, where traditions are measured in hundreds of years, a lO-year-old discipline can hardly expect much veneration. In order to be intellectually strong, Gibbs emphasized, you must also be perceived to be intellectually strong.

Today, Gibbs says, "the legitimacy of the field has been minimally established so that faculty members may be able to spend less time on political justification." When you deal only with the politics of oppression of black people, he points out, "nobody but black people gives a damn.

But study the consequences of oppression for society and for the oppressor, and the main line of scholarship will begin to pay attention." The courses Gibbs teaches are anything but narrow in their concerIl'S. One is about techniques of anthropological filmmaking; another compares and analyzes the legal systems of Botswana, Egypt, China and the United oday, Yale offers a wide variety of States. black-studies courses, taught by memIn contrast to Harvard, Cornell and other universities that originally seemed bers of regular academic departments as well as by visiting professors. The to be saying to their black students, "Do courses annually attract an estimated what you want to do as long as you stay 700 to 1,000 students, both black and out of our hair," Stanford stood fast for white. The offerings range from "Blacks the integrity of scholarship. It established and the Law," taught by an associate a black-studies program that became a dean of the law school, to the history of prototype for successful programs at other jazz. The eminent painter and collagist major universities. Especially important, Romare Bearden' travels from New it appointed as the program's first permaYork to New Haven every Monday to nent director Professor St. Clair Drake, teach the history of Afro-American widely regarded as the grand old man of painting. Among the other courses are the field for his pioneering work in soci"The Transfer of Values From West ology and anthropology. Drake has since Africa to Black America," "The Civil War retired, but his daughter, Sandra, teaches and Reconstruction," "Contemporary courses at Stanford in Afro-American, African and Caribbean fiction.

Black Poetry" and "The Idea of Race."

At the time black-studies programs Charles Davis, professor of English and master of Calhoun College, who has were starting up, many black students been chairman of the program since 1972, were more concerned with activism than says that there was a slight decline in scholarship. One afternoon, as St. Clair overall enrollment after "the novelty wore Drake was finishing teaching a class in off somewhat-which is fine." This means, comparative urbanism, a student strode he says, that those students still pursuing up and asked in anger, "Why are we talking about these problems? Why aren't black studies have serious intentions.

At the same time Harvard and Yale were we out there doing something about formulating their contrasting programs, them?" The professor answered, 'There an academic committee at Stanford decid- are intelleCtual tasks and there are street ed to set up an undergraduate program tasks for the black revolution, and my in African and Afro-American studies, temperament and the university environbuilding on the widely respected African- ment are suited for the intellectual tasks."

By the early seventies, however, many studies program that was already in st'Jdents had come around to Drake's operation. Its acting director was James way of thinking. The revolutionary fervor L. Gibbs J r., a young black anthropologist on campuses cooled as the economy who later served as dean of undergraduate

Harvard's faculty of art and sciences, "adopted virtually in toto the methods we had proposed" -but which the Harvard faculty voted down.

Normall~~:' Rosovsky explained, you start by offering courses and then, gradually, you may develop a department. At Yale, that is just what happened. Kingman Brewster Jr., then the university's president, entered into open and detailed discussion with students as well as professors, both black and white, from his own campus and others, at about the satne time as the Rosovsky committee was hammering out its plans. At Yale, there was to be no separate department, but all the existing disciplines were to provide new courses and insights into the Afro-American past and present. The same academic standards were to be applied as in any other disciplirie. All faculty members would be hired, and eventually granted tenure, by existing departments. At first, Yale's Afro-American studies program provided an undergraduate major; in 1979, building on this firm, scholarly b~ginning, Yale introduced a master's degree in the field.

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AFRO-AMERICAN HISTORY i$ an important part of most black-studies programs. Yale University, for ins'lance, offers a course on "The Civil War and Reconstruction." Shown above is a soldier who fought on the Union side.

JAZZ is probably America's greatest original musical form, and it is widely receiving academic attention. Lionel Hampton (lOp) and his band are now famous all over the world,

LEADERS such as Frederick Douglass (above, righI), who fought for the abolition of slavery, are being studied at many universities.

A Yale professor is editing Douglass' papers.

NOVELISTS like James Baldwin (above) are now widely read and studied. His novels (Another Country and Go Tell It on the Mountain) and essays (The Fire Next Time) are popular in many countries.

BLACK PAINTING is the subject of the course Romare Bearden (above, right) teaches at Yale. He is himselfan established artist.

could have "a fundamental impact on their lives" -even though some black parents were still telling their children 110t to "come home with that black stuff 011your record."

L worsened. Students, black and white alike, began to regard their collegiate investment with a new seriousness. Behind their academic work lurked questions about future jobs and careers.

"The students realize we've moved into a new phase, and they want substance, not politics," Sonja H. Stone, director of Afro-American studies at the University of North Carolina, said in 1975. At Berkeley, Roderic B. Park, provost and dean of the College of Letters and Science, recalls that it was around 1974 that the administration resolved to get rid of the politicians, the hangers-on and the "Mau Mau squad." "In 1968, you.cou)d have done anything in the classroom and the students would have loved it," says Mary Helen Washington, director of the Center of Black Studies at the University of Detroit. But by the early seventies, she says, "they discovered there was real meat on the bones," and that black studies

ke their white contemporaries, black students today are concerned about their economic future and pay careful attention to the dividends their academic work may yield. Realizing that "that black stuff" will not guarantee them jobs upon graduation, the overwhelming majority of black students, like the few whites who major in Afro-American studies, no longer put all their eggs in that one academic basket. Instead, they choose a so-called double major combining the Afro-American field with another discipline, such as history, economics, philosophy, sociology or even the sciences that are likely to lead to medical school.

The double major, Gibbs says, combines "bread and butter and the issue of one's identity." There may be some, he adds, who make light of the identity question, but, he asks rhetorically, "isn't that really what undergraduate education is all about? If black students can get a better perspective on themselves, they will be better integrated people."

At Berkeley, a young woman in her senior year who plans to enter the health professions, possibly medical school, explained why she had chosen AfroAmerican studies as her comajor. "When you come to your first chemistry lecture as a freshman and you see only one or two black faces," she said, "you aren't

ready to ask many questions. And then you go to your first chern lab and you sense that all the white kids you are supposed to be working with really think you shouldn't be there." Oversensitivity?

Perhaps. Still, the less isolated experience in the Afro-American department helps her overcome loneliness and occasional pamc.

"A lot of us who teach," says Armstead L. Robinson, a professor of history who helped create the Afro-American Center at Yale before going to the University of California at Los Angeles (U.C.L.A.), "remember what it was like to be a black student in a white university. For me, this is one of the most fulfilling parts of teaching. " At Stanford, Jerusha Stewart, a lawschool-bound graduate who has also studied in England, recalls that her parents had always protected her from the knowledge of racism. When she came to Stanford as a freshman, she says, she suffered a severe shock. "I had trouble with both the black kids and the white kids," she remembers.

It was probably at that point that she-a strong-minded woman determined to make her own way-decided she needed to know more about her background.

Indeed, many black students know very little about their own heritage and even the recent past. "When I asked some of my students, 'Don't you remember the march on Washington?''' says Robinson, "they asked back, 'When was that?'

They have little knowledge of the civilrights battle and when you reprimand them, they say, .~ButI was only two years old then!'" here are still some students in blackstudies programs whose search for identity is anything but an intellectual pursuit. One undergraduate at Berkeley, sporting a green smock that bore the map of Africa, proclaimed recently that blacks

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living in the United States would never be free until all of Africa is united as a superpower. He probably is not alone in hoping that black studies will perpetuate such grand illusions; but he is by no means typical of the majority of young black people exploring a field of real scholarship-in literature, in the arts, in history and the social sciences-that still has little chance of serious consideration on American campuses except under the aegis of Afro-American studies.

Professor Robinson at U.C.L.A. acknowledges that the original initiative for black studies, not unlike many earlier reform movements in American higher education, came from radical students.

But now, he says, the programs have entered a new phase. Today the emphasis nearly everywhere is on research. "Without the research capacity," says the black dean of the graduate faculties at a state university, "the department will disappear --and should."

"I'd like [Afro-American studies] to take a less rhetorical stand and build a body of work and a community of scholars," says Stanford historian Kennell Jackson. "Sometimes we forget-and whites forget-that we are part of the West. ... The way for Afro-American studies to have an impact on the university and the country is to have an impact on every part of it." Professor Jackson is confident that "Afro-American studies are going to continue to exist and they are going to continue to generate ideas.

I wish they wouldn't say they are going to redirect white scholarship-because they won't. But they are an interesting, important intellectual creation, because you didn't have anything like them in the universities." While he admits that they are peripheral programs, he suggests that "maybe that's the only place where new thinking takes place."

Today, black-studies programs are looking at a variety of subjects in a different way. Some departments are encouraging investigations of the conditions in which poor blacks live in contemporary America.

Yale, for example, has developed courses on "Urban Ghetto Economic Development" and "Education and Low-Status Populations." One Middle Western university has a course on "Law and Black People." Berkeley offers a new course in health studies and health-delivery systems in minority communities. At U.C.L.A.'s Center for Afro-American Studies, a project in comparative Afro-American sociolinguistics has been developed because of concern over the difficulties black children often experience in public schools.

Black-studies programs are also de-

"A lot of us who teach today remember what it was like to be a black student in a white university. For me, this is one of the most fulfilling parts of teaching black studies." voting increasing attention to the African influence in Latin America and the Caribbean, often with a view to training personnel for public and governmental service in those areas as well as in Africa. "Ethnicity and the Political Economy in Latin America aQd the Caribbean," a course given at U.C.L.A., draws upon scholarship in political science, economics, sociology, history and the law.

Black-studies departments are also attempting to edit and catalogue the works of black authors and political figures. At Yale, the James Weldon Johnson Memorial Collection contains a wealth of rare books, pamphlets and manuscripts-including the novelist Richard Wright's unpublished typescripts-that scholars are just beginning to explore. Yale's Professor John W. Blassingame, the first black scholar to publish a major study of slavery, is editing the papers of Frederick Douglass, the celebrated black abolitionist, while at U.C.L.A., scholars are working on letters and documents relating to Marcus Garvey's "Back-to-Africa" movement.

Despite such important undertakings, many black scholars feel that their work still receives scant respect in academe.

At major universities, they say, entire departments, especially economics and political science, continue either to resist or ignore this new field of research. Even so basically optimistic an observer as Stanford's Professor Gibbs, when asked whether he thought black studies might some day become redundant, their subject matter incorporated into courses offered by other departments, turned his eyes heavenward and said, "Well, perhaps in a thousand years."

Others are more confident about the impact of black studies on mainstream academe. Professor Blassingame, who was acting director of Yale's program for a time, believes that the siight drop in the overall enrollment in black studies there is due in part to the inclusion of material About the Author: Fred M. Hechinger, president of the New York Times Foundation Company, is a former education editor of The New York Times and author of Growing Up in America, Worrying About College and other books.

about blacks in traditional courses. "When blacks are included in a general survey course on American history," he says, "the dema,nd isn't going to be as great for a separate course in black history; I notice Ralph Ellison shows up a lot more often now in general literature courses than he did eight years ago." sthe financial noose around higher education's neck tightens in the decade ahead, many black-studies programs-except for the secure ones built on the Yale-Stanford model-may again have to fight for survival. Underscoring the problems that remain, Wilson Record warns, "Many white scholars who initially responded negatively to black studies have not changed their views .... More than a little embittered, these men of learning shut the black studies program out of their minds, avoid any contact with it, never challenge it directly and try to isolate it as a foreign object that has lodged itself tenaciously in the academic organism. They display a certain pride in claiming that they know little about what is going on 'in that academic ghetto,' and they really do not care."

"We strongly suspect," worries Orlando Patterson, professor of sociology at Harvard University and a member of the executive committee that is trying to rescue Afro-American studies there. "that many ... programs across the country are poised on the edge. If money is tight and enrollments are declining and, politically, things are quiet, this could be the right time [for their opponents] to close them."

On some campuses, such fears may indeed be justified in an era of reduced public expenditures for education. But a survey of the entire field does not support such pessimism. The vitality of many of the programs in this new discipline makes it safe to predict that black studies have become a legitimate part of American scholarship. Whatever happens to Harvard's program (early in 1979, the university rejected a visiting committee's recommendation that the Afro-Asian studies department be abolished and replaced by a degree-granting academic committee), it is not likely to affect the best black-studies departments at other universities. Though these may have been created in the same highly politicized atmosphere that shaped Harvard's program, they are now in experienced professorial hands. Stanford's Kennell Jackson predicts, quite convincingly, that "when people stop being threatened by AfroAmerican studies and get rid of their own taboos, they'll find some interesting ideas coming out of them. " 0

I

A SENSE OF PLACE An Indian author who has taught Eudora Welty to American students assesses the Southern writer's contribution in making the American short story "a thing of power, if not necessarily of beauty."

Eudora Welty's first published story appeared in 1936. The American imagination was still reacting to its first great crisis of the century, the Depression. In Europe, Franco with the help of Nazi and Fascist dictators of Germany and Italy had just overthrown an elected Socialist government in Spain. For many American and European writers the central issues of the day called for unity and commitment to values that some of them would soon take up arms to defend.

Welty's story, "The Death of a Traveling Salesman," spoke another language. R.J. Bowman, who "for fourteen years had traveled for a shoe company through Mississippi," meets his death one night in desolate hill terrain, not at the hands of brigands, but in flight from the shelter and help he has received from strangers. This is not the paradox it seems, for Bowman is really fleeing from himself, and from this particular predicament death is the only escape. He is ill at the start of the story, r,ecovering from a fever he has caught on his perpetual wanderings. But what kills him is the revelation of his utter solitariness.

Welty unfolds this in a way peculiarly her own. Stranded when his car goes over a ravine, Bowman approaches a house on a hill and sees a woman standing in the passage. "He saw at once that she was oid ... [he] set her age at 50." Sonny, whom Bowman takes to be her son, rescues his car and allows him to spend the night. Over dinner Bowman discovers the woman is young, not old, that Sonny is her husband, and that she is pregnant.

"Bowman could not speak. He was shocked with knowing what was really in the house .... There was nothing remote or mysterious here~only something private. The only secret was the ancient communication between two people." When man and wife are asleep in their shared bed "breathing round and deep ... in the room across the passage," Bowman cannot bear it any longer.

He runs out of the house, but collapses before he reaches his car.

This is not death by violence, but it is a violent death as Bowman finally faces what he has spent his life running away from.

The world's Bowmans are not the stuff of wars or revolutions, but they are the enduring material of the short story, and this seems to be Welty's favorite kind, when outer events and inner consciousness come together in a discovery that alters life. That psychological moment is the story's raison d'etre. "Indeed, as soon as the least of us stands still, that is the moment something extraordinary is seen going on in the world," she says.

And revelation is the very opposite of the social or political crusade.

"The crusader's voice is the voice of the crowd," Welty wrote in 1965," ... The voice of most crowds sounds alike .... Nothing was ever learned in a crowd, from a crowd, or by addressing or trying to please a crowd. Writing fiction is an interior affair." She has stayed with her interior testament. Her canvas is Mississippi, the deepest South, where the established gentry of her fiction, as well as its outcasts and strays, are often hard put to it to keep their identity, or discover it, in circumstances where the old familiar ways are fast disappearing.

A short story cannot be all things to all men. Its rules are rigorous, its structure as taut and interlocking as poetry. Take away one strand, and the whole thing falls apart. Welty has come up not so much with new examples of the genre, as with a whole' new landscape, as notable for its wind and weather, its fantasy and fable, as the humans who inhabit it. The American short story is in great part what she and her fellow writers of the American South have made it ~a thing of power, if not necessarily of beauty, hugely affirming life and assaulting the senses. An assortment of characters, from the confident arbiters of society to its bruised, flawed and feeble-minded, make southern fiction, with its distinctive idiom and allusions, rather bewildering for the Iridian reader.

But "family," as in India, remains the American South's enduring landmark, preserved through its memories and ceremonies when the rough passage of time leaves little else intact.

Welty herself has left nothing so shadowy as a mere imprint upon the story form. She has taken it to the carpentry table, sawed it. shaped it, polished it, until it stands four-square before you, as solid as furniture. There are times when scroll and carving have so

embellished it that sheer workmanship threatens to overpower the story. Why should anything in "Asphodel" happen the way it does? Why should three scraggy old maids "in hanging summer cottons, carrying picnic baskets" arrive at a "golden ruin," aQd lying at the foot of its Doric columns "like a faded garland," proceed to recall turn by turn, like actresses saying their parts, the married life of Miss Sabina and Mr. Don McInnis, while between recitals they devour chicken, ham, jellies, cake and fruit, and wash it all down with blackberry cordial?

Why should Welty resort to Doric columns and a Greek chorus, and even a stark naked Bacchus whose appearance scares the old maids away, when she can write a straight and powerful sentence like this: "The gentlemen were without exception drunk, and Mr. Don McInnis, with his head turning quickly from side to side, like an animal's, opened his mouth and laughed."

Why not tell us in plain language about the ageing autocrat Miss Sabina becomes when her unfaithful husband dies, and how she considers the town her personal domain? Why all the verbal posturing, all that style made visible? Is Welty just showing off, being a writer's writer? "Asphodel," like much else she has written, is not everybody's cup of tea. But if it baffles you, it also very thoroughly jolts your conventional response.

Though she has the artist's suspicion of the crusade and wants no part of it, her detachment is almost a crusade. It becomes not only a matter of consummate technique and artistic preferenceof creating a deliberate distance between reader and characterbut of a temperamental inhibitiOn. We are meant to observe her characters, not identify with them. The author's own aloofness has taken care of that, and there we are, surveying some extraordinary goings-on, like the old maids on their picnic, while we remain well and truly insulated from their eccentricities.

I miss the raw ingredient so prevalent in Faulkner. His "Dry September" is a prime example, conveying a most accurate hell.

Faulkner, too, makes no judgment, but his narrative leaves you with the only possible judgment you yourself can make of a region where a frustrated white spinster's hysterical accusation against a black man is enough to get him lynched without further ado.

"Fiction is made to show forth human life, in some chosen part and aspect," Welty wrote in 1965. What she does not choose is also revealing. She ignores the racial theme. Her black characters remain the sort slavery produced and inequality perpetuates.

Detachment as technique and temperament reaches its furthest limits with "Powerhouse," the name of a black musician who is in Alligator, Mississippi, on a performing tour with his "Tasmanians." This gets so close to straight description, it is almost not a story. Katherine Anne Porter calls it objective reporting combined with Welty's "great perception of mental and emotional states."

I cannot find in this highly stylized story, with its characters brilliantly preserved under museum glass, any such perception, while the characters hardly have what might be called an emotional state. We get a chance to see for ourselves, when Powerhouse gets a telegram during his performance, saying his wife has thrown herself out of the window. He tells his group during the intermission: "Listen!. . Listen how it is. My wife gets missing me. Gypsy. She goes to the window. She looks out and sees you know what. Street. Sign saying Hotel. People walking. Somebody looks up. Old man. She looks down, out

the window. Well? .. Ssst! Plooey! What she do? Jump out and bust her brains all over the world."

This is repeated with vanatlOns, resembling Powerhouse's nimble variations on the piano earlier. His group responds in rhythm: '''That's it,' agrees Valentine, 'You gets a telegram.' "'Sure she misses you,' Little Brother adds. "'No, it's night time.' How softly he tells them! 'Sure. It's the night time. She say, What do I hear? Footsteps walking up the hall? That's him?

Footsteps go on off. It's not me. I'm in Alligator, Mississippi, she's crazy.

Shaking all over. Listens till her ears and all grow out like old music-box horns, but still she can't hear a thing. She says, All right! I'll jump out the window then .... Says, Ho hum, all right, and jumps out the window. Is she mad at me! Is she crazy! She don't leave nothing behind her!' "'Yahal'

"'Brains and insides everywhere, Lord, Lord.' All the watching Negroes stir in their delight."

There is cadence here, but emotion there is not. I used this story in a creative writing class to show my white, mostly Southern students, Welty at her remotest. Didn't anything strike them as odd? This description of Powerhouse, for example? "'Nigger Man'-he looks more Asiatic, monkey, Jewish, Babylonian, Peruvian, fanatic, devil. He has pale gray eyes, heavy lids, maybe horny like a lizard's, but big glowing eyes when they're open. He has African feet of the greatest size, stomping both together on each side of the pedals.

He's not coal black-beverage colored-looks like a preacher when his mouth is shut, but then it opens-vast and obscene."

To me it sounded more "specimen" than "man," an exotic still-life in a frame. It did not strike them that way, since "specimen" was exactly how they saw Powerhouse. For these young readers this was an admiring story of a spellbinding musician. Unconsciously they joined Powerhouse's audience, illustrating the Southern paradox Welty's story reveals: White society scorns the "nigger," but listens rapt to his mastery over the piano keyboard. His control over his instrument, his group and his white audience is absolute. Even his ugliness is special. In entertainment, music and sport the black breaks through the divide and becomes not human ~ for that would involve accepting him in a daily coming and going~but superior. Here today, somewhere else tomorrow, as celebrities are, so it is safe to make much of him.

In contrast, there is the anonymous crippled black who is captured by a circus owner, disguised as "Keela the Outcast Indian Maiden," and whipped to make him eat live chickens for his audience. In a chilling ending, the victim, Little Lee Roy, recollects this grotesque past simply as "de ole times when I use to be wid de circus." Could it be that torture though it was, in retrospect it became a badge of identity, the only time in his life that he mattered?

Both Powerhouse and Little Lee Roy are perceived as the creatures slavery made them. Welty records the way they are, with no accompanying flutter of sentiment or sigh of aspiration.

Nayantara Sahgal has been a seholar-in-residence at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, and a fellow of the Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University. Among her novels are From Fear Set Free, This Time of Morning, Storm in Chandigarh, The Day in Shadow and A Situation 10 New Delhi. She is also the author of History of the Freedom Movement.

She has not transformed the black experience, or the white man's burden of it as she has harrowing episodes of the South's earlier history, int; humor, s'atire and fairy tale. Maybe recent cruelties do not transform so easily. They are there, faithfully observed in her fiction, which may also mean undigested; the black lump in the white stomach which in the 1960s was finally delivered whole, alien, and often hostile, to a new phase in its development, with Its more militant spokesmen wanting no part of the fancy Southern broth. All the same, Powerhouse and Little Lee Roy are as evocative of an era as the Inquisition or the atom bomb.

More direct in the telling are her "white" stories, "Why} Live at the P.O." [reprinted here] and "Petrified Man," exuding the vigor and reali.ty of completely understood and mercilessly caricatured individuals. There is also "First Love," tenderly told, with a wealth of visual detail, where a whole tale follows a whole tale, and a near-physical stamina feeds and clothes the narrative.

A deaf 12-year-old boot-boy at an inn wakes up one night in 1807 to find Aaron Burr talking to a companion in his room. The enchantment holds as Burr and his coconspirator Harman Blennerhassett visit the room night after night, deep in conversation-conspiracy? -that Joel cannot hear, until Burr, escaping the judgment of his treason trial, rides away as mysteriously as he came. Joel is desolate, but meeting Burr has changed his life.

Who, after this, can go back to being the boot-boy at the inn?

Natchez, Mississippi, where this magical encounter takes place, gets its name from an American Indian tribe that inhabited five villages in this region in the 17th century, and was wiped out by the French in 1773. The Natchez Trace, an old buffalo trail where travelers faced bandits, American Indians, and wild animals, is the setting of Welty's novel, The Robber Bridegroom, and Natchez recurs like the chime of an old bell, summoning lost associations, through much of her fiction.

"Perhaps it is the sense of place," she wrote in 1944, "that gives us the belief that passionate things, in some essence, endure.

Whatever is significant and whatever is tragic in its story, live as long as the place does, though they are unseen, and the new life will be built upon these things -regardless of commerce and the way of rivers and roads, and other vagaries."

Her "sense of place" has given Welty a concrete setting, a historical and emotional anchor, much as Malgudi has inspired R.K. Narayan. Malgudi is fictitious, but all its evocations are real, and its reality is recognizable all over India. Narayan's "place," too, is his region, and could be no other. Yet even the same "place" speaks with different voices. Native soil can nurture selfesteem or destroy it. Richard Wright, also of Natchez, learned early what happened to "uppity" blacks in Mississippi. His un.cle was murdered, and his friend's brother castrated for not showmg the respect required of him. Escape became the obsessive theme of his fiction. He himself escaped to Chicago, and after the war, to France.

"Place" and "time" are the imagination's accumulation of what happened to us yesterday, so they contain what may well happen to us tomorrow. But for Welty, whose Mississippi stands forth in its historic setting, or in its true and present texture, tomorrow does not come. What is it that we do not know about the woman, Eudora, that holds the writer in her so austerely to a thus-far-and-no-further vision, one that relents only in her stories about children? Could it be that this particular Southern genius has yet to turn a new creative corner and achieve another dimension in storytelling?

0

WHY I liVE ATTHE ~O. A short story

by Eudora Welty

Born in Jackson, Mississippi, ill /909, Eudora Welty brings her part of the United Statesthe deep South-alive in her novels and short stories. Though regional in tone and character, J'Velty's writings have placed her in the mainstream of modern literature. Among her acclaimed works are A Curtain of Green, Losing Battles, The Optimist's Daughter (winner of the /973 Pulitzer Prize) and The Eye of the Story (essays). Many of her stories, including" Why 1 Live at the P.O.," are used as examplars offiction writing in American textbooks.

I was getting along fine with Mama, Papa-Daddy and Uncle Rondo until my sister Stella-Rondo just separated from her husband and came back home again. Mr. Whitaker! Of course 1 went with Mr. Whitaker first, when he first appeared here in China Grove, taking "Pose Yourself' photos, and Stella-Rondo broke us up. Told him I was one-sided. Bigger on one side than the other, which is a deliberate, calculated falsehood: I'm the same.

Stella-Rondo is exactly twelve months to the day younger than} am and for that reason she's spoiled.

She's always had anything in the world she wanted and then she'd throw it away.

Papa-Daddy gave her this gorgeous Adda-Pearl necklace when she was eight years old and she threw it away playing baseball when she was nine, with only two pearls.

So as soon as she got married and moved away from home the first thing she did was separate! From Mr. Whitaker!

This photographer with the popeyes she said she trusted. Came home from one of those towns up in Illinois and to our complete surprise brought this child of two.

Mama said she like to made her drop dead for a second. "Here you had this marvelous blonde child and never so much as wrote your mother a word about it," says Mama, "I'm thoroughly ashamed of you." But of course she wasn't.

Stella-Rondo just calmly takes off this hat, I wish you could see it. She says, "Why, Mama, Shirley-T.'s adopted, I can prove it."

"How?" says Mama, but all I says was, "H'm!" There I was over the hot stove, trying to stretch two chickens over five people and a completely unexpected child into the bargain, without one moment's notice.

"What do you mean-'H'm!'?" says Stella-Rondo, and Mama says, "} heard that, Sister." } said that oh, I didn't mean a thing, only that whoever Shirley-To was, she was the spit-image of Papa-Daddy if he'd cut

off his beard, which of course he'd never do in the world. Papa-Daddy's Mama's papa and sulks.

Stella-Rondo got furious! She said, "Sister, I don't need to tell you you got a lot of nerve and always did have and I'll thank you to make no future reference to my adopted child whatsoever."

"Very well," I said. "Very well, very well. Of course I noticed at once she looks like Mr. Whitaker's side too. That frown.

She looks like a cross between Mr. Whitaker and Papa-Daddy."

"Well, all I can say is she isn't."

"She looks exactly like Shirley Temple to me," says Mama, but Shirley-To just ran away from her.

So the first thing Stella-Rondo did at the table was turn Papa-Daddy against me.

"Papa-Daddy," she says. He was trying to cut up his meat. "Papa-Daddy!" I was taken completely by surprise. Papa-Daddy is about a million years old and's got this long-long beard. "Papa-Daddy, Sister says she fails to understand why you don't cut off your beard."

So Papa-Daddy lays down his knife and fork! He's real rich. Mama says he is, he says he isn't. So he says, "Have I heard correctly? You don't understand why I don't cut off my beard?"

"Why," I says, "Papa-Daddy, of course I understand, I did not say any such of a thing, the idea!"

He says, "Hussy!"

I says, "Papa-Daddy, you know I wouldn't any more want you to cut off your beard than the man in the moon. It was the farthest thing from my mind!

Stella-Rondo sat there and made that up while she was eating breast of chicken."

But he says, "So the postmistress fails to understand whyI don't cut off my beard.

Which job I got you through my influence with the government. 'Bird's nest' -is that what you call it?"

Not that it isn't the next to smallest P.O. in the entire state of Mississippi.

I says, "Oh, Papa-Daddy," I says, "I didn't say any such of a thing, I never dreamed it was a bird's nest, I have always been grateful though this is the next to smallest P.O. in the state of Mississippi, and I do not enjoy being referred to as a hussy by my own grandfather."

But Stella-Rondo says,. "Yes, you did say it too. Anybody in the world could of heard you, that had ears."

"Stop right there," says Mama, looking at me.

So I pulled my napkin straight back through the napkin ring and left the table.

As soon as I was out of the room Mama says, "Call her back, or she'll starve to death," but Papa-Dapdy says, "This is the beard I started growing on the Coast when I was fifteen years old." He would of gone1on till nightfall ifShirley-T. hadn't lost the Milky Way she ate in Cairo.

o Papa- Daddy says, "'I am going out and lie in the hammock, and you can all sit here and remember my words: I'll never cut off my beard as long as I live, even one inch, and I don't appreciate it in you at all." Passed right by me in the hall and went straight out and got in the hammock.

It would be a holiday. It wasn't five minutes before Uncle Rondo suddenly appeared in the hall in one of StellaRondo's flesh-colored kimonos, all cut on the bias, like something Mr. Whitaker probably thought was gorgeous.

"Uncle Rondo!" I says. "I didn't know who that was! Where are you going?"

"Sister," he says, "get out of my way, I'm poisoned."

"If you're poisoned stay away from Papa-Daddy," I says. "Keep out of the hammock. Papa-Daddy will certainly beat you on the head if you come within forty miles of him. He thinks I deliberately said he ought to cut off his beard after he got me the P.O., and I've told him and told him and told him, and he acts like he just don't hear me. Papa-Daddy must of gone stone deaf."

"He picked a fine day to do it then," says Uncle Rondo, and before you could say "Jack Robinson" flew out in the yard.

What he'd really done, he'd drunk another bottle of that prescription. He does it every single Fourth of July as sure

as shooting, and it's horribly expensive.

Then he falls over in the hammock and snores. So he insisted on zigzagging right on out to the hammock, looking like a half-wit.

Papa-Daddy woke up with this horrible yell and right there without moving an inch he tried to turn Uncle Rondo against me. I heard every word he said. Oh, he told Uncle Rondo I didn't learn to read till I was eight years old and he didn't see how in the world I ever got the mail put up at the P.O., much less read it all, and he said if Uncle Rondo could only fathom the lengths he had gone to to get me that job!

And he said on the other hand he thought Stella-Rondo had a brilliant mind and deserved credit for getting out of town. All the time he was just lying there swinging as pretty as you please and looping out his beard, and poor Uncle Rondo was pleading with him to slow down the hammock, it was making him as dizzy as a witch to watch it. But that's what PapaDaddy likes about a hammock. So Uncle Rondo was too dizzy to get turned against me for the time being. He's Mama's only brother and is a good case of a onetrack mind. Ask anybody. A certified pharmacist.

Just then I heard Stella-Rondo raising the upstairs window. While she was married she got this peculiar idea that it's cooler with the windows shut and locked.

So she has to raise the window before she can make a soul hear her outdoors.

So she raises the window and says, "Ohf" You would have thought she was mortally wounded.

Uncle Rondo and Papa-Daddy didn't even look up, but kept right on with what they were doing. I had to laugh.

I flew up the stairs and threw the door open! I says, "What in the wide world's the matter, Stella-Rondo? You mortally wounded?"

"No," she says, "I am not mortally wounded but I wish you would do me the favor of looking out that window there and telling me what you see."

So I shade my eyes and look out the window.

"I see the front yard," I says.

"Don't you see any human beings?" she says.

"I see Uncle Rondo trying to run PapaDaddy out of the hammock," I says.

"Nothing more. Naturally, it's so suffocating-hot in the house, with all the windows shut and locked, everybody who cares to

stay in their right mind will have to go out and get in the hammock before the Fourth of July is over."

"Don't you notiCe anything different about Uncle Rondo?" asks Stella-Rondo.

"Why, no, except he's got on some terrible-looking flesh-colored contraption I wouldn't be found dead in, is all I can see," I says.

"Never mind, you won't be found dead in it, because it happens to be part of my trousseau, and Mr. Whitaker took several dozen photographs of me in it," says Stella-Rondo. "What on earth could Uncle Rondo mean by wearing part of my trousseau out in the broad open daylight without saying so much as 'Kiss my foot,' knowing I only got home this morning after my separation and hung my negligee up on the bathroom door, just as nervous as I could be?"

"I'm sure I don't know, and what do you expect me to do about it?" 1 says.

"Jump out the window?"

"No, I expect nothing of the kind. 1 simply declare that Uncle Rondo looks like a fool in it, that's all," she says. "It makes me sick to my stomach."

"Well, he looks as good as he can," I says. "As good as anybody in reason could." 1 stood up for Uncle Rondo, please remember. And I said to StellaRondo, "I think 1 would do well not to criticize so freely if 1 were you and came home with a two-year-old child 1had never said a word about, and no explanation whatever about my separation."

"I asked you the instant 1 entered this house not to refer one more time to my adopted child, and you gave me your word of honor you would not," was all StellaRondo would say, and started pulling out everyone of her eyebrows with some cheap Kress tweezers.

So 1 merely slammed the door behind me and went down and made some greentomato pickle. Somebody had to do it. Of course Mama had turned both the niggers loose; she always said no earthly power could hold one anyway on the Fourth of July, so she wouldn't even try. It turned out that Jaypan fell in the lake and came within a very narrow limit of drowning.

So Mama trots in. Lifts up the lid and says, "H'm! Not very good for your Uncle Rondo in his precarious condition, I must say. Or poor little adopted ShirleyT. Shame on you!"

That made me tired. 1 says, "Well, Stella-Rondo had better thank her lucky

stars it was her instead of me came trotting in with that very peculiar-looking child.

Now if it had been me that trotted in from Illinois and brought a peculiar-looking child of two, 1 shudder to think of the reception I'd of got, much less controlled the diet of an entire family."

"But you must remember, Sister, that you were never married to Mr. Whitaker in the first place and didn't go up to Illinois to live," says Mama, shaking a spoon in my face. "If you had I would of been just as overjoyed to see you and your little adopted girl as 1 was to see StellaRondo, when you wound up with your separation and came on back home."

"You would not," 1 says.

"Don't contradict me, 1 would," says Mama.

ut I said she couldn't convince me though she talked till she was blue in the face. Then I said, "Besides, you know as well as I do that that child is not adopted."

"She most certainly is adopted," says Mama, stiff as a poker.

1says, "Why, Mama, Stella-Rondo had her just as sure as anything in this world, and just too stuck up to admit it."

"Why, Sister," said Mama. "Here I thought we were going to have a pleasant Fourth of July, and you start right out not believing a word your own baby sister tells you!"

"Just like Cousin Annie Flo. Went to her grave denying the facts of life," 1 remind Mama.

"I told you if you ever mentioned Annie Flo's name I'd slap your face," says Mama, and slaps my face.

"All right, you wait and see," 1says.

"1," says Mama, "I prefer to take my children's word for anything when it's

humanly possible." You ought to see Mama, she weighs two hundred pounds and has real tiny feet. .

Just then something perfectly horrible occurred to me.

"Mama," 1 says, "can that child talk?"

1simply had to whisper! "Mama, I wonder if that child can be-you know-in any way? Do you realize," 1 says, "that she hasn't spoken one single, solitary word to a human being up to this minute? This is the way she looks," 1 says, and I looked like this.

Well, Mama and 1 just stood there and stared at each other. It was horrible!

"I remember well that Joe Whitaker frequently drank like a fish," says Mama.

"I believed to my soul he drank chemicals."

And without another word she marches to the foot of the stairs and calls StellaRondo.

"Stella-Rondo? 0-0-0-01 Stella-Rondo!"

"What'?" says Stella-Rondo from upstairs. Not even the grace to get up off the bed.

"Can that child of yours talk?" asks Mama.

Stella-Rondo says, "Can she what?"

"Talk! Talk!" says Mama. "Burdyburdyburdyburdy!"

So Stella-Rondo yells back, "Who says she can't talk?"

"Sister says so," says Mama.

"You didn't have to tell me, I know whose word of honor don't meim a thing in this house," says Stella-Rondo.

And in a minute the loudest Yankee voice 1 ever heard in my life yells out, "OE'm Pop-OE the Sailor-r-r-r Ma-a-an!" and then somebody jumps up and down in the upstairs hall. In another second the house would of fallen down.

"Not pnly talks, she can tap-dance!" calls Stella-Rondo. "Which is more than some people 1won't name can do."

"Why, the little precious darling thing!"

Mama says, so surprised. "Just as smart as she can be!" Starts talking baby talk right there. Then she turns on me. "Sister, you ought to be thoroughly ashamed! Run upstairs this instant and apologize to Stella-Rondo and Shirley-T." "Apologize for what?" 1 says. "I merely wondered if the child was normal, that's all. Now that she's proved she is, why, 1 have nothing further 10 say."

But Mama just turned on her heel and flew out, furious. She ran right upstairs and hugged the baby. She believed it was adopted. Stella-Rondo hadn't done a thing

but turn her against me from upstairs while I stood there helpless over the hot stove.

So that made Mama, Papa- Daddy and the baby all on Stella-Rondo's side.

Next, Uncle Rondo.

I must say that Uncle Rondo has been marvelous to me at various times in the past and I was completely unprepared to be made to jump out of my skin, the way it turned out. Once Stella-Rondo did something perfectly horrible to h"imbroke a chain letter from Flanders Fieldand he took the radio back he had given her and gave it to me. Stella-Rondo was furious! For six months we all had to call her Stella instead of Stella-Rondo, or she wouldn't answer. I always thought Uncle Rondo had all the brains of the entire family. Another time he sent me to Mammoth Cave, with all expenses paid.

But this would be the day he was drinking that prescription, the Fourth of July So at supper Stella-Rondo speaks up and says she thinks Uncle Rondo ought to try to eat a little something. So finally Uncle Rondo said he would try a little cold biscuits and ketchup, but that was all. So she brought it to him.

"Do you think it wise to disport with ketchup in Stella- Rondo's flesh-colored kimono?" I says. Trying to be considerate!

If Stella-Rondo couldn't watch out for her trousseau, somebody had to.

"Any objections?" asks Uncle Rondo. just about to pour out all the ketchup.

"Don't mind what she says, Uncle Rondo," says Stella-Rondo.

"Sister has been devoting this solid afternoon to sneering out my bedroom window at the way you look."

"What's that?" says Uncle Rondo.

Uncle Rondo has got the most terrible temper in the world. Anything is liable to make him tear the house down if it comes at the wrong time.

So Stella-Rondo says, "Sister says, 'Uncle Rondo certainly does look like a fool in that pink kimono!'"

Do you remember who it was really said that?

Uncle Rondo spills out all the ketchup and jumps out of his chair and tears off the kimono and throws it down on the dirty floor and puts his foot on it. It had to be sent all the way to Jackson to the cleaners and re-pleated.

"So that's your opinion of your Uncle Rondo, is it?" he says. "I look like a fool, do I? Well, that's the last straw. A whole day in this house with nothing to do, and

then to 'hear you come out with a remark lik~ that behind my back!"

"I didn't say any such of a thing, Uncle Rondo," I says, "and I'm not saying who did, either. Why, I think you look all right.

Just try to take care of yourself and not talk and eat at the same time," I says. "I think you better go lie down."

"Lie down my foot," says Uncle Rondo.

I ought to of known by that he was fixing to do something perfectly horrible.

So he didn't do anything that night in the precarious state he was in-just played Ca:sino with Mama and Stella-Rondo and Shirley-To and gave Shirley-To a nickel with a head on both sides. It tickled her nearly to death, and she called him ¡'Papa." But at 6: 30 A.M. the next morning, he threw a whole five-cent package of some unsold one-inch firecrackers from the store as hard as he could into my bedroom and they everyone went off. Not one bad one in the string. Anybody else, there'd be one that wouldn't go off.

Well, I'm just terribly susceptible to noise of any kind, the doctor has always told me I was the most sensitive person he had ever seen in his whole life, and I was simply prostrated. I couldn't eat! People tell me they heard it as far as the cemetery, and old Aunt Jep Patterson, that had been holding her own so good, thought it was Judgment Day and she was going to meet her whole family. It's usually so quiet here. .

Well! I made no bones about letting the family catch on to what I was up to. I didn't try to conceal it.

The first thing they knew, I marched in where they were all playing Old Maid and pulled the electric oscillating fan out by the plug, and everything got real hot. Next I snatched the pillow I'd done the needlepoint on right off the davenport from behind Papa-Daddy.

He went "Ugh!" I beat Stella-Rondo up the stairs and finally found my charm bracelet in her bureau drawer under a picture of Nelson Eddy.

"So that's the way the land lies," says Uncle Rondo. There he was, piecing on the ham. "Well, Sister, I'll be glad to donate my army cot if you got any place to set it up, providing you'll leave right this minute and letme get some peace." Uncle Rondo was in France, "Thank you kindly for the cot and 'peace' is hardly the word I would select if I had to resort to firecrackers at 6 :30 A.M. in a young girl's bedroom," I says back to him. "And as to where I intend to go, you seem to forget my position as postmistress of China Grove, Mississippi," I says. "I've always got the P.O." Well, that made them all sit up and take notice.

I went out front and started digging up some four-o'clocks to plant around the P.O. "Ah-ah-ah!" says Mama, raising the .l, wipdow.

"Those happen to be my fouro;clocks. Everything planted in that star is mine. I've never known you to make anything grow in your life."

"Very well," I says. "But I take the fern.

Even you, Mama, can't stand there and deny that I'm the one watered that fern.

And I happen to know where I can send in a box top and get a packet of one thousand mixed seeds, no two the same kind, free."

"Oh, where?" Mama wants to know.

But I says, "Too late. You 'tend to your house, and I'll 'tend to mine. You hear things like that all the time if you know how to listen to the radio. Perfectly marvelous offers. Get anything you want free."

So I hope to tell you I marched in and nd I'll tell you it didn't take me any longer than a minute to got that radio: and they could of all bit a make up my mind what to do. There I was nail in two, especially Stella-Rondo, that with the whole entire house on Stellait used to belong to, and she well knew she Rondo's side and turned against me. If J couldn't get it back, I'd sue for it like a have anything at all I have pride. shot. And I very politely took the sewingSo I just decided I'd go straight down to machine motor I helped pay the most on the P.O. There's plenty of room there in to give Mama for Christmas back in 1929, the back, I says to myself. and a good big calendar, with the first-aid

remedies on it. The thermometer and the cuttin' ofr any beard of 'mine. I'm too Hawaiian ukulele certainly were rightfully smart for you!"

"We all are," says Stella-Rondo. mine, and I stood on the step-ladder and But I said, "If you're so smart, where's got all my watermelon-rind preserves and every fruit and vegetable I'd put up, every Mr. Whitaker?" jar. Then I began to pull the tacks out of So then Uncle Rondo says, "I'll thank the bluebird wall vases on the archway to you from now on to stop reading all the the dining room. orders I get on postcards and telling every"Who told you could have those, Miss body in China Grove what you think is Priss?" says Mama, fanning as hard as she the matter with them," but I says, "I draw my own conclusions and will concould.

"I bought 'em and I'll keep track of tinue in the future to draw them." I says, 'em," I says. "I'll tack 'em up one on each "If people want to write their inmost side the post-office window, and you can secrets on penny postcards, there's nothsee 'em when you come to ask me for your ing in the wide world you can do about it, mail, if you're so dead to see 'em."

Uncle Rondo."

"Not I! I'll never darken the door to "And if you think we'll ever write that post office again if I live to be a another postcard you're sadly mistaken," hundred," Mama says. "Ungrateful child I says Mama.

After all the money we spent on you at the Normal."

"Me either,'; says Stella-Rondo. "You can just let my mail lie there and rot, for all I care. I'll never come and relieve you of a single, solitary piece."

"I should worry," I says. "And who you think's going to sit down and write you all those big fat letters and postcards, by the way? Mr. Whitaker? Just because he was the only man ever dropped down in China Grove and you got him-unfairlyis he going to sit down and write you a lengthy correspondence after you come home giving no rhyme nor reason whatsoever for your separation and no explanation for the presence of that child? I may utting off your nose not have your brilliant mind, but I fail to see it." to spite your face then," I says. "But if So Mama says, "Sister, I've told you you're all determined to have no more to a thousand times that Stella-Rondo simply do with the U.S. mail, think of this: What got homesick, and this child is far too big will Stella-Rondo do now, if she wants to to be hers," and she says, "Now, why tell Mr. Whitaker to come after her?"

"Wah!" says Stella-Rondo. I knew don't you all just sit down and play Casino?" she'd cry. She had a conniption fit right Then Shirley-To sticks out her tongue there in the kitchen. at me in this perfectly horrible way. She "It will be interesting to see how long has no more manners than the man in she holds out," I says. "And now-I am the moon. I told her she was going to cross leaving." her eyes like that some day and they'd "Good-bye," says Uncle Rondo.

"Oh, I declare," says Mama, "to think &tick.

"It's too late to stop me now," I says. that a family of mine should quarrel on "You should have tried that yesterday. the Fourth of July, or the day after, over I'm going to the P.O. and the only way you Stella-Rondo leaving old Mr. Whitaker can possibly see me is to visit me there." and having the sweetest little adopted So Papa-Daddy says, "You'll never child! It looks like we'd all be glad!" catch me setting foot in that post office, "Wah!" says Stella-Rondo, and has a even if! should take a notion into my head fresh conniption fit.

"He left fzer-you mark..my words," I to write a letter some place." He says, "1 won't have you reachin' out of that says. "That's Mr. Whitaker. I know Mr. little old window with a pair of shears and Whitaker. After all, I knew him first. I

said from the beginning he'd up and leave her. I foretold every single thing that's happened. " "Where did he go?" asks Mama.

"Probably to the North Pole, if he knows what's good for him," I says.

But Stella-Rondo just bawled and wouldn't say another word. She flew to her room and slammed. the door.

"Now look what you've gone and done, Sister," says Mama. "You go apologize."

"I haven't got time, I'm leaving," I says.

"Well, what are you waiting around for?" asks Uncle Rondo.

So I just picked up the kitchen clock and marched off, without saying "Kiss my foot" or anything, and never did tell Stella-Rondo good-hye.

There was a nigger girl going along on a little wagon right in front.

"Nigger girl," I says, "come help me haul these things down the hill, I'm going to live in the post office."

Took her nine trips in her express wagon. Uncle Rondo came out on the porch and threw her a nickel.

And that's the last I've laid eyes on any of my family or my family laid eyes on me for five solid days and nights. StellaRondo may be telling the most horrible tales in the world about Mr. Whitaker,. but I haven't heard them. As I tell everybody, I draw my own conclusions.

But oh, I like it here. It's ideal, as I've been'saYing. You see, I've got everything cater-cornered, the way I like it. Hear the radio? All the war news. Radio, sewingmachine, book ends, ironing board and . that great big piano lamp-peace, that's what I like. Butter-bean vines planted all along the front where the strings are.

Of course, there's not much mail. My family are naturally the main people in China Grove, and if they prefer to vanish from the face of the earth, for all the mail they get or the mail they write, why, I'm not going to open my mouth. Some of the folks here in town are taking up for me and some turned against me. I know which is which. There are always people who will quit buying stamps just to get on the right side of Papa-Daddy.

But here I am, and here I'll stay. I want the world to know I'm happy.

And if Stella-Rondo should come to me this minute, on bended knees, and attempt to explain the incidents of her life with Mr. Whitaker, I'd simply put my fingers in both my ears and refuse to listen.

0

ON THE LIGHTER SIDE

"I was wrapping this birthday gift for my mother-in-law when suddenly it broke loose and attacked me."

JOHN

W\LKE5

P R F F READER "Or course, we'll have to wait for the lab tests, but according to our diagnostic computer-you're dead!

Reprinted

by permission

of Science

Digest.

© 1979 The Hearst Co£poration. All rights reserved.

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A new artificial arm has been designed to replicate natural arm movement. Using tiny electric motors controlled by muscle signals, the arm can lift weights up to 2 kilograms and withstand static loads of up to 23 kilograms.

BIIIIIITI18 TBB0110 BODY A 19th-century English Using miniaturized electronics and advances in mem- sugar approaches a danger humorist, Jerome K. Jerome, brane technology, modern bioengineering has begun to point, the sensor switches on a once opened a medical tome miniature pump which is improduce a virtual cornucopia of parts for the human planted in the dog's peritoneal and discovered, he said, that he had every ailment in the body: portable kidneys, "booster" lungs made of Teflon, cavity. The pump secretes and man-made limbs that work much like the real thing. insulin in carefully regulated book except for housemaid's knee. By the 21st century, a quantities.

Patients who suffer from emphysema or man in Jerome's shoes may be able to years with the help of KoHf's machine-the other chronic lung diseases may someday order a replacement for almost every ailing first artificial kidney. part of his body, including the knee. That Its success marked the birth of modern benefit from implantable booster lungs which is the promise of a revolution that had bioengineering, an extraordinary field apply- will do part of their breathing for them, if its beginnings 40 years ago. ing engineering prinCIples to biology and experiments now under way at Brown UniWhen Willem Kolffbegan practicing medi- medicine. Since 1943, when Kolff's artificial versity in Rhode Island prove successful. cine in the 1930s, his first patient died of kidney made its debut in Holland, kidney Prototypes of such lungs, made of spongy kidney failure. There was nothing the young dialysis has saved the lives of hundreds of Teflon, will soon be implanted in sheep.

Elsewhere various laboratories are develDutch physician could do to save the boy. thousands of people around the world.

His helplessness, and the family's grief, set The artificial kidney was followed by the oping noninvasive imaging techniques, based heart-lung machine (in which Kolff also had a on X-ray scans or ultrasound probes and him off on a quest that revolutionized medical practice. If he had only been able hand). Soon afterward, bioengineering began computers. that will allow doctors to diagto remove some of the wastes that had to produce a cornucopia of spare parts: nose a variety of ills without resorting to accumulated in his patient's blood, he rea- cardiac pacemakers, patches, valves and painful tests or exploratory surgery. Other soned, this young man might have survived bypass' units, intra-aortic balloon pumps, labs are working on ways to receive and moniartificial arteries, artificial joints and sophisti" tor information from electrodes which are and led a normal life. placed over the brains, eyes, muscles or So Kolff began a stubborn search for a cated artificial limbs. material that would contain blood, yet let Now the pioneers of hioengineering see hearts of ambulatory patients who may be impurities seep through. He hit on an un- their field on the verge of new flowering. kilometers away.

Kolff himself has attracted an energetic likely one: sausage casings made of thin The future they envision includes a whole cellophane, which was then a new material. new family of instruments to monitor body and talented group of researchers to the When these casings were submerged in salt chemistry, computer systems to provide University of Utah, which he joined in 1967. solution, they became permeable by many instant medical diagnosis and perhaps even As a result, some of the most exciting work chemicals, but not by blood. Eventually treatment, synthetic materials tailor-made in bioengineering is now taking place there.

There is, for example, the Wearable Kolff built a Rube-Goldberglike (bulky and for use inside the body, and new tools for complicated) device of cellophane tubes research into the mysteries of such diseases Artificial Kidney, or WAK -a device that wrapped around a drum which he partially as atherosclerosis, cancer and schizophrenia. could make the lives of thousands of kidney immersed in saline solution, and ran a There is promising work all over the patients more bearable, because it would patient's blood through the tubes to purify it, United States, in countless laboratories. At allow many patients to treat themselves a technique known as dialysis. Only the the University of Southern California in comfortably and more cheaply at home, weakest and most desperately ill patients Los Angeles, for example, a medical research rather than in hospitals or other institutions were entrusted to this device at first, and 14 team has developed tiny glucose sensors that At present, people who undergo dialysis patients died. But Kolff continued to modify can be implanted into the body tissues of must generally lie down and stay connected the technique and patients began to respond. diabetic dogs to watch for excessive con- to a bulky machine for five hours, three The 17th patient, a woman, lived for many centrations of sugar; whenever the level of times a week-a thoroughly demoralizing

antibodies and antigens. ''That would be invaluable," he says, "as an early-warning system to alert doctors about various infections, and as a measure of how well the organism is fighting back."

The limiting factor in nearly all the products of bioengineering has been the lack of materials that are truly compatible with living tissues. Before the superprobe is tested on human beings, for instance, many more stud ies will have to be done on animals to determine whether the materials on the surface of the superprobe will cause blood to adhere to them, blocking their accessibility to other chemicals.

The University of Utah has received a $1.4 million grant from the U.S. National Institute of General Medical Sciences to study such problems in a polymer implant center directed by Donald J. Lyman.

His projects include an artificial ureter, which is proving successful in dogs and The- most successful man-made heart so far has been a bulky air-driven pump that is attached to the body. One calf, implanted with such a he<1rt,survivedfor six months, and another may one day help many caricer patients. was thriving five months after its operation, gaining weight and exercising on a treadmill.

"At present, if a tumor compresses the and fatiguing experience. However, with the chemistry lab are being designed into a tiny, ureter, surgeons simply cut it out and let the help of a WAK, which packs in a suitcase implantable chip. This is the superprobe, urine collect in a bag at the patient's side," and weighs only 3.6 kilograms, one patient only one millimeter wide, a powerful sensor Lyman explains. "Though this is easy for was able to travel to California recently and relying on microscopic integrated circuits, the surgeon, it's traumatic for the patient."

He is also working on a macaroni-sized work at his desk even during the treatments. which could be inserted into a patient's arm The WAK was designed by Stephen to give continuous reading on the vital artificial blood vessel that can flex and Jacobsen, an associate professor of mech- chemicals in his blood-without withdraw- pulsate as if it were made of living cells. anical engineering. Besides working on kid- ing a drop. The superprobe has proved The material for it was tailor-made in ney devices, Jacobsen has been designing remarkably sensitive to concentrations of Lyman's lab so that it would not clot blood a revolutionary artificial arm that amputees hydrogen, potassium and calcium ions. It is and would be able to form a good junction will be able to move just by thinking about it. hoped that in the future it will be able to with natural blood vessels.

"In the past, people used whatever Describing the plight of thousands of per- monitor other vital chemicals in the blood, sons who have lost arms above the elbow, as well as antibodies and enzyme substrates. materials were commercially available," says Stanley Moss, an electronics engineer who Lyman. In the mid-1950s, the first vascular Jacobsen says: "In many cases they wear artificial limbs that serve little more than a has done pioneering work on the super- grafts were made of Dacron, "which had cosmetic purpose, since anything more probe, foresees a time when it will be used been designed for wash-and-wear clothes," functional is disturbingly noisy, heavy, awk- with computers to control the injection of as he puts, it. Then Teflon and nylon were ward and difficult to operate." So Jacobsen various type&of ions into patients' blood, to tried out for various implants. But none designed an artificial muscle, made of maintain a constant balance of vital chemi- of these materials were really adequate for flexible plastic fibers, that works much like cals. This would create a feedback system use in the body, mostly because they stimulated the formation of blood clots which much like the body's own. the real thing. This, he believes, can provide graceful motion. Then he studied the exact "We 'have married the technology of could break loose and do serious damage to role of 30 separate muscles that are involved miniaturized integrated circuits to new dis- the brain or heart. Lyman noticed that the in arm motion, to identify those that could coveries in membrane chemistry," Moss blood clots seemed to form wherever certain be used to control an artificial arm. He made declares. The superprobe consists of almost proteins stuck to a surface. So he decided to a map of the electrical signals from the invisible membranes that are designed to study and manipulate the atoms in a polymer muscles in the amputee's shoulder and react to specific ions and are linked to chain in order to achieve exactly the kind of remnant limb, which can be picked up by miniature transistors. Traditionally, chemists surface he wanted: one to which specific electrodes embedded in the artificial arm's analyze body fluids by taking a sample of proteins would not adhere.

This kind of research, he notes, has implisocket. Finally, Jacobsen and his colleagues fluid and separating it into various comdesigned an "anthropomorphic hook," with ponents, points out Jiri Janata, an electro- cations for the control of atherosclerosis, a forefinger and thumb, to serve as an artificial chemist who is also working on the super- disease characterized primarily by the adhand. The arm can grasp objects delicately, probe. With the ion-sensitive field-effect hesion of fatty substances in the inner lift about two kilograms actively and with- transistors, which are used in the superprobe, lining of the artery wall-and the underlying stand static loads of up to 23 kilograms. each membrane reacts to one component cause of most heart attacks and strokes. It For cosmetic reasons, the team added a selectively, making it unnecessary to do any may also lead to new ways of diagnosing lifelike plastic glove, complete with finger preliminary separation.

Eventually the most selective system in Artificial replacements for body parts run from creases and nails, that can be slipped over nature, the immune system, will be tapped head to toe, as the drawing at right illustrates. the hook to look like a real hand.

Meanwhile, in another part of the univerin this way, Janata predicts, and he looks Many of these are in the experimental stage forward to the monitoring of many kinds of in the U.s., and are being tested on lab animals. sity, many of the functions of a hospital

JAWBONE BLOOD-PRESSURE REGULATOR

c,\ncer, for normal cells will stick to certain phenes would form meaningful patterns. A surfaces and cancer cells will not. In fact, computer graphics program was developed with a basic understanding of surface struc- by Michael Mladejovsky .at Utah to map tures, almost anything becomes possible. whatever phosphenes might be produced by Lyman's lab has already developed smaller the brain electrodes. and more compactible artificial blood vesIn 1973 the researchers used this program sels, including tiny, three-millimeter tubes to map the phosphenes produced by electhat could be used 'by neurosurgeons to trodes that they temporarily implanted in the bypass obstructed blood vessels leading to brain of a blind volunteer. Once they had a the brain. But now the lab is also learning map, they selected only a few electrodes to how to control the growth of different kinds activate and asked the volunteer what he of human cells by synthesizing special sur- saw. "Why, it's a triangle, of course-and faces on which only certain types of cells will it's pointing up," he replied. He also identistick. Thus, someday doctors may be able fied letters, geometric shapes and other to grow natural tissues for implanted organs, patterns. Encouraged, in 1975 the team or regenerate the skin of burn victims. implanted 64 electrodes more permanently Lyman also hopes that his group will soon into the visual cortex of two other volunteers. reach the long-hoped-for goal of reconnect- Although in one case they produced almost ing severed nerves so they work again. He no usable phosphenes (the electrodes had plans to use polymer cuffs over the cuts to been placed too far forward in his brain), serve as bridges. The inside of the cuff would the other man-a 33-year-old who had been be designed to make neurons (nerve cells) blinded by gunshot-saw 60 separate points grow, while the outside would stimulate the of light in response to the stimulation. These growth of ganglial cells that insulate and were still not enough points to form all the support the nerve cells. "Then, if you would letters of the alphabet, however, so the get nerve signals through these cuffs, as we researchers decided to program Braille charare attempting to do in the lab, across gaps acters instead. When these were flashed into of one centimeter, you could repair different his brain, the volunteer read them five types of nerve loss and paralysis," he says. times faster than when he used his fingertips.

Meanwhile, a daring attempt to develop Furthermore, when a TV camera was conartificial sight and hearing through the nected to the system, he was able to detect electrical stimulation of nerve cells in the white lines on a dark background -much like the flashing light of a football scoreboard. brain or ear is under way at the University For a system of this sort to be effective, a of Utah and at Columbia University.

The strategy of the artificial sight pro- blind person would have to have a miniature gram is to bypass the eye itself, ignore the television camera set in his eyeglasses (or optic nerve, which normally relays impulses enclosed in a glass eye) and powered by a from the retina to the back of the brain, and battery. He would have to have a computer rely on direct stimulation of a small area translate the information from the TV in the brain-the visual cortex-through camera into stimuli that would fit his internal implanted electrodes. Over 10 years ago a phosphene map. The computer would have British physiologist, Giles Brindley, showed to be connected to a wire coming out of his that when he inserted electrodes into the skull, through an opening. the size of a small visual cortex of a blind nurse, who had coin, leading to an array of at least 256 volunteered for the experiment, and then ran electrodes for each brain hemisphere, or a a mild electric current through them, she saw total of 512 separate electrodes. And he would need assurance that the electrodes could isolated points of light, called phosphenes.

Shortly after- function over a long period of time without¡ ward William damaging his brain cells, or without themDobelle, . who selves being damaged by the corrosive was then the environment of body fluids. None of this director of the can be provided in the near future.

University of The artificial hearing program, run by Utah's neuro- Mladejovsky and also in its infancy, involves prostheses pro- electrodes inserted in the cochlea, part of gram, started a the inner ear, within the skull. Instead of series of experi- phosphenes, they produce sensations of ments to deter- sound, audenes. But it has proved to be mine whether extremely difficult for a totally deaf person such stimula- to describe such audenes-to estimate their tion could be pitch, for example-so no computer prodone with- gram has yet been developed to map them. out damage to Besides, only a minority of deaf people have the brain, and the kind of impairment that lends itself to whether the re- stimulation of the nerves in the cochlea. Š 19~O by National Review Inc. suiting phos- Others would need to have the electrodes

placed directly into their brains-a tricky problem, since unlike the visual area the auditory cortex is deep in the gray matter.

While all these diverse efforts are going on at Utah, an ambitious project which was dreamed up by Kolff 23 years ago is finally nearing fruition: an implantable artificial heart, made of polyurethane parts and powered either by compressed air or by electric batteries. Kolff put a crude model of such a heart in a dog in 1957 when he was at the Cleveland Clinic, but it soon became clear that developing an artificial heart for human beings would strain every aspect of bioengineering beyond its limits. There were problems of design, materials, power, operating procedures, and even controversies about the quality of life with such a device. A lesser man would have given up long ago. Instead, in 1970 Kolff recruited an imaginative medical student, Robert Jarvik, and let him loose on the project. Jarvik, now a seasoned researcher, believes that a battery-powered artificial heart of his own design could be developed for human use in less than five years. He also feels that this could save the lives of some 50,000 persons a year who might otherwise die from heart attacks or heart disease or during open-heart surgery.

The most successful model so far has been an air-driven heart, with all its bulky machinery remaining outside the body. One calf survived six months with such a heart recently, and another was thriving five months after its operation, gaining weight and exercising on a treadmill. However, all these animals have long, thick hoses sticking out of their chests to bring in the compressed air that drives their hear.ts. They are permanently attached to a compressedair machine-a fate that Jarvik would not want to inflict on human beings. He is betting, instead, on a new electrohydraulic pump he has developed, which should make battery-powered hearts much more practical.

Kolff, on the other hand, emphasizes that even paraplegics who are confined to wheelchairs can lead rewarding lives-and that a person with an air-driven artificial heart could have a relatively happy existence.

"When you see those calves stand up the day after the operation, eat and exercise," he'says, "and then compare them with cardiac patients in bed, too weak even to shave, you realize what an artificial heart could mean."

Incorrigibly optimistic and impatient, Kolff does not want to wait for the perfect model before starting to save lives. Improve.ments can come later, he says, and anyway most doctors are too cautious.

0 About the Author: Maya Pines is the author of Retarded Children Can Be Helped (with Cornell Capa), Science and Health (with Rene Dubas), Revolution in Learning and The Brain Changers: Scientists and the New Mind Control.

Current conventional wisdom has it that the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, coming on top of the seizure of American hostages in Iran, has brought about a sea change in the attitudes of the American people toward the world around them. Many observers point to what they see as a new stiffening of the international and defense attitudes of Americans, and a turning away from the less aggressively internationalist patterns that presumably prevailed during the immediate post-Vietnam years.

Such findings, however, are geared primarily to the crises in Iran and Afghanistan and understate or even overlook the emergence of an important trend that began as early as 1974-1975.

As long as five years ago, it is now clear, the American public started to take a new and more skeptical look at the world in which we live. Americans began to shape a revised vision of the role they saw for the United States in a far more complicated and less tractable international environment.

As we pointed out almost four years ago in Foreign Policy, "The realities of detente-a policy that increasingly falls short of its earlier promise-appear to have been thoroughly digested.

The American people express a diminished sense of progress in ... dealings with ~he Spviet Union; a substantial increase in concern over the threat of war; renewed willingness to come to the defense of. .. allies in the event they come under communist attack; and a more pessimistic view ... about the prospects for future relations with ... the Soviet Union. All this has fostered a mood in the U.S. that reverses a long-term trend-there is a new desire to put 30 end to what is seen as a weakening U.S. role in the world, and to resume the po~ition of being 'number one.' " The results of a new survey of 1,611 respondents, conducted February 1-15, 1980, by the survey research firm Civic Service Incorporated, present in dramatic fashion the crystallization of this changed mood. Iran and Afghanistan have not altered this reality, nor have they given birth to a new public stance.

What they have done is to make a harder U.S. foreign policy posture legitimate, and provide the basis for a revised national consensus. Defense-oriented internationalism has come of age.

Let us look at responses over time to a series of seven statements with which cross-sections of Americans have been asked to agree or disagree. To facilitate understanding and interpretation, responses to statements involving an isolationist or unilateralist approach are discussed first, followed by those characteristics of an internationalist or multilateralist position.

In 1980, two-thirds of the sample disagreed, a dissenting proportion higher than in 1974 and 1976, but not quite up to the level reached in the period from 1964 through 1972. The moment of greatest favor for this proposition came in 1974.

B. The United States should mind its own business internationally and let other countries get along as best they can on their own.

Agree Disagree Don't know 1964 -18% -70% 12% 1968 -27 --66 --7 1972 -35 --56 --9 1974 -41 --47 --12 1975 -36 --52 --12 1976 -41 --49 --10 1980 -30 --61 --9 Rejection of this position-even more tilted toward isolationism or unilateralism-is now higher than at any time since 1968.

C. We shouldn't think so much in international terms but concentrate more on our own national problems and building up our strength and prosperity here at home.

Agree Disagree Don't know 1964 --55% --32%, --13% 1968 -60 ---31 --9 1972 -73 --20 --7 1974 -77 --14 --9 1975 -71 ---18 --11 1976 -73 --22 --5 1980 -61 --30 --9 Despite the economic problems currently facing the United States-particularly raging inflation-it is highly significant that the proportion in 1980 agreeing with the unilateralist point of view was lower (sightly more than six out of ten), and the percentage disagreeing higher (30 percent) than at any time since 1968. As with Statement A above, 1974 turns out to be the year in which this proposition was most in favor.

Internationalist-Multilateralist

Statements

D. The United States should cooperate fully with the United Nations.

Agree Disagree Don't know 1964 --72°~ --16°~ 12 1968 -72 --21 --7 1972 -63 --28 --9 1974 -66 --20 --14 1975 -56 --30 --14 1976 -46 --41 --13 1980 -59 ---28 --13 Sentiment in favor of cooperating with the United Nations reached a low point (46 percent) five years ago. A Gallup poll published in December 1975 pointed to the reason for this, reporting that "the public's rating of the United Nations performance has declined to a 30-year low point following 0

0

Isolationist-Unilateralist

Statements

A. Since the United States is the most powerful nation in the world, we should go our own way in international matters, not worrying too much about whether othet countries agree with us or not.

Agree Disagree Don't know 1964 -19% -70% 11% 1968 -23 --72 --5 1972 -22 --~ 72 --6 1974 -32 --57 --11 1975 -23 --67 --10 1976 -29 --62 --9 1980 -26 --66 --8

passage of a resolution condemning Zionism as a 'form of racism and racial discrimination.' " The significant rebound in 1980(to 59 percent) can be attributed in part, no doubt, to broadbased support in the United Nations for resolutions condemning events in Iran and Afghanistan. Nevertheless, the proportion advocating full cooperation with the United Nations remained markedly lower than what it was from 1964 through 1974.

E In deciding on its foreign policies, the United States should take Into account the views of its major allies.

Agree Disagree Don't know 1964 --81°,~ 7°0 1200 1968 --'84 --9 --7 1972 -80 --12 --8 1974 -69 --16 --15 1975 -74 --16 ---10 . 1976 -72 --18 - 10 1980 -79 --13 --8 As can be seen, support for consultation with allies climbed seven points over the past four years (from 72 percent in 1976 to 79 percent in 1980), bringing it back almost to the levels that it obtained from 1964 through 1972.

Perhaps most dramatic of all the responses in the 1980 survey are reactions to the following two statements on use of U.S. forces abroad (not asked in 1964 or 1968 but included in surveys in 1978 and 1979): F. The United States should come to the defense of Japan with military force if it is attacked by Soviet Russia or Communist China.

Agree Disagree Don't know 1972 --43% --40% --1700 1974 -37 --42 --21 1975 -42 --39 --19 1976 -45 --37 --18 1978 -50 ---35 ---15 1979 -54 ---35 ---11 191\0 ---

57 ----

24 ----

19

Following the steady upward trend from the low point in 1974, support for coming to the defense of Japan reached a substantial majority of 54 percent in 1979 and 57 percent in 1980.

G. The United States should come to the defense of its major European allies with military force if any of them are attacked b) the Soviet Union.

Agree Disagree Don't know 1972 --52% 32~0 16'% 1974 -48 --34 --1¡8 1975 -48 --34 --18 1976 -56 --27 --17 1978 -62 --26 --12 1979 -64 --26 --10 1980 -70 ---17 --13 Even more so than in the case of Japan, 1980 brought the proportion of those supporting the defense of Western Europe to a strikingly high level-a remarkable seven out of ten-the highest number we have recorded in this entire question series.

Overview To provide an overview of the present situation in comparison to past surveys, we have again utilized a system of "International Patterns." This scheme uses reactions to the statements outlined above to place members of the respective samples on an internationalist isolationist continuum. To qualify as "completely internationalist," a respondent has to disagree with the

notions that the United States should go its own way (a), mind its own business (b), and concentrate more on national problems (c), while agreeing that the United States should cooperate with the United Nations (d), take into account the views of its allies (e), come to the defense of Japan (f) and Western Europe (g). To be classified as "completely isolationist," a respondent must give precisely the opposite answers. Categories are also provided for "predominantly internationalist" and "predominantly isolationist" and "mixed."

Denned in this way, Americans 10 the 1980 sample hned up as follows: Completely internationalist 17% Predominantly internationalist 44 26 Mixed Predominantly isolationist 11 Completely isolationist.

2 100% A substantial majority of respondents-over six out of tenthus qualified as internationalists, either completely or predominantly. In contrast, the isolationists accounted for only 13 percent, and the "mixed" category for slightly more than one quarter.

Demographic Variations It is worth special note that in this new survey there were no meaningful differences between Republicans, Democrats, and Independents; on the subjects covered at least, no strong partisan variations emerged. Those who classified themselves as "liberals," however, proved to be somewhat less internationalist (56 percent) than those who said they were "moderates" (63 percent) or "conservatives" (62 percent). Perhaps surprising to some, the age group most subject to possible draft or military services (18-29 years old) proved every bit as internationalist (61 percent) as the national average.

Trends To give the foregoing figures fuller significance, we are fortunately able to relate them to the international patterns that emerged in former surveys. There was a steady drop in the proportion of total internationalists from 1964 (65 percent), to 1968 (59 percent), to 1972 (56 percent) and finally to the low point in 1974 (41 percent). The reversal of that trend, already evident in 1976, has now lifted the percentage of total internationalists back to a clear majority (61 percent).

Conversely, while the number of total isolationists was slightly greater in 1980than during the period from 1964through 1972, it has dropped markedly below the 1974 and 1976 levels.

The number of respondents in the mixed category was lower than in any of our former surveys.

All these results point consistently to the mid-seventies as a watershed period in the recent history of American attitudes.

The principal answer may be found in the fundamentally sober assessment Americans made at that time about the world around them and especially the effects of the tragedy in Vietnam. Even before the war ended, we believe, the American people had come to the view that Vietnam was a mistake, and that either we could not, or would not, win that particular struggle. They seem to have concluded that the United States must be more careful about the range of its foreign commitments, that the nation must pay greater attention to its own sources of strength (as demonstrated by the steady growth in backing for increased defense spending), and that the security of key allies abroad must command ever greater support.

0

A Special Section on Government Regulation Three articles examine what was one of the most crucial domestic issues in the 1980 American presidential elections: How much government regulation of business should there be? Three points of view-those of business, the government, and the public-are presented.

Joyce Carol Oates' story of a somewhat strange encounter between a priest and his deadfriend's wife.

Nearly a million Indians live in the United States.

Catering to their hungerfor newsfrom home is a small ethnic press. It also discusses the activities and problems of local Indian communities.

Communications, medicine and industry will benefit most from fiber optics-the new technology of transmitting information with bursts of light through glass fibers. Though still at a developing stage, it has already moved from the lab to the market.

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I BLIAI rUTUBI rOB PISTS For centuries, man has strived to eliminate his chief competitor for food and fiber -the insect. Insect species comprise 90 percent of the entire animal world. Now, with the realization that indiscriminate use of an insecticide like DDT is ecologically unsound, scientists are turning to alternative methods of insect pest control. .

Researchers with the U.S. Department of Agriculture are meeting the challenge with a variety of biological methods, including the

use of predators, parasites and sterilization programs. In one experiment directed against the gypsy moth (l) and its voracious caterpillar (2), scientists have recorded with a seismograph (back cover) the reactions of male gypsy moths to the artificial odor of a female moth. A false scent could attract gypsy moths to traps, or so confuse them that they are unable to find a female and mate.

Experts are also studying the possibility of using the natural enemies of a pest like

the destructive pink bollworm (3). A parasitic wasp (4) deposits its eggs in a bollworm larva in a laboratory setup, after which parasites hatching from the eggs feed upon the bollworm (6). The trash bug (5) and the familiar lady bug (7) both attack and feed upon the bollworm larva. By pitting bug against bug, man can get the upper hand over insect pests, and at the same time ensure that the ecological system is not ravaged by a chemical war against them.