SPAN: May 1962

~~on~).

MAY 1962

Mrs. Kennedy and Prime Minister Nehru.

See page twenty-six.

ARCHlTECTURAL concepts and designs are continually adapted to the changing needs of society. The giant skyscrapers and other structures modern design which dominate the urban landscape in Arnerica today are the products of technology and have evolved over the past few decades to meet the requirements of a highly mobile, highly industrialized society.

In church architecture, however, there was for a long time a reluctance to depart from familiar fqrms and designs. It is only recently that churches and chapels have been built to express that blending of the functionalism of his era wit~ the spiritual symbolism and serenitx which the twentieth-century church-goer seeks in his places of worship. The steady growth of congregations in America has --also emphasized the growing importance or the church as a community centre.

These trends ha ve resulted in a remarkable increase in church-building activity and a broader scope for architects to test novel and more creative ideas. In 1960 alone a sum of about one billion dollars was spent on the construction of new churches in the United States. An outstanding characteristic of the new church architecture is avoidance of the overornate.

By skilful exploitation of. simple materials and such elements as light, space and texture, it seeks to achieve both aesthetic expression and a sense of exaltation and sublimity . . The seventeen-spire chapel of the United States Air Force Academy, Colorado Springs, opposite, is an outstanding example of modero, unconventional church architecture. The chapel has been built to provide separate facilities on separate levels for peopl~,.o(three faiths. The spiral effect is achieved by the use of steel frames with triangular aluminium sections. Stained glass panels between the spires give a sense of warmth and interior glow.•

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CONTENTS 4 AMERICAN FOLKLORE

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by V. S. Nanda

10 THEMES IN CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN FICTION

by Granville

12 THE PROPRIETOR OF YOKNAPATAWPHA

by Lokenath

Bhattacharya

18 GO DOWN,

I

JA

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'~r) C'.

MOSeS

by WilliamlFaul!wer,

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COUNTY 'Ii

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20 THE QU:ET -REVOLUTION Photographs

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Hicks

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by Leonard Schugar

24 INVENTOR BY ACCIDENT

by Mitche:l

Wilson

26 VISIT TO INDIA Photographs

by Avinash

C. Pasricha

I

31 BUSINESS EXECUTIVEPhotographs

by Erich Hartmann

34 LIMITATIONS ON PRIVATE ENTERPRISE

by Leon Herman

36 INDIA IN AMERICA 37 THE TOOLMAKER 40 THE B:--iAGAVAD-GITA AND A NEW ENGLAND QUAKER

by John T. Reid

44

t

11

41 AMERICAN CERAMIST-

~ l A PUNJABI FAMILY rOt ri'\ \ I

by Sohindar S. Rana ( tt l\

I~I

r.

EDITOR Edward Post

SENIOR STAFF EDITOR V. S. Nanda RESEARCH EDITOR Sohindar S. Rana

FEATURE EDITOR Lokenath Bhattacharya

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'1\m~rtcan ':fclklor~ by \J. S. )ton~a LITERATURE everywhere has its roots in folklore. Long before the written word became popular or even feasible, it was the oral collection of songs, stories, hymns, ballads and jokes, handed down from generation to generation, which entertained and inspired men and women in every country. And even now, in the heyday of the paperback and massproduced publications of all kinds, folklore continues to enliven, enrich and reinvigorate literature.

America being a young country, most of its folklore dates from the relatively recent past, rather than ancient times. It relates to the early pioneering days and enshrines the deeds of men who braved the fury of the elements, the attacks of savages and other hazards of an unknown land, to blaze a path to success and glory. Inevitably, fact has blended with fiction in the tales of these heroes, many of whom have become legendary figures.

Some indeed are entirely imaginary and take their place with the gods and demi-gods of ancient mythology, performing miraculous deeds of physical strength and valour.

A typical miracle man-the product of those early days of the great immigration into the Wild West and the beginnings of the American lumber industry-is Paul Bunyan, the Master Lumberjack. His legend doubtless grew up in the rough-hewn shanties of the backwoodsmen as they sat in the evenings around the hot stoves of winter, smoking their pipes, their roars of laughter mocking the harsh weather outside.

Of the many extraordinary exploits of Paul Bunyan, one of the most astounding is the tale of his logging near the banks of the Whistling River, so called because every morning and evening it rose to a tremendous height and let off a whistle which could be heard for several hundred miles. Paul Bunyan was annoyed when the wild river suddenly squirted thousands of gallons of water into-his whiskers. Forgetting his lumbering operations, he sat down on a hill to think out some way of taming the insolent river.

To aid his thinking he began to eat a wagon-load of popcorn and his chewing sounded like a couple of hundred coffee grinders all grinding at once. At the end of the meal, followed by a three-day walk, he had a clear-cut plan-to pull the river straight in its bed by hitching to it Babe, Paul's Mighty Blue Ox. Summoning Babe, he travelled fast, covering twenty-four townships at a stride, and by noon they were near the North Pole. Soon he was in the heart of the blizzard breeding grounds and, setting a trap near a blizzard trail, caught seven half-grown blizzards and one griZZled old nor'wester.

He managed to get a pair of half-grown ones into his sack and turned the others loose. By midnight he was back at his camp and shouted to his companions to build him "the biggest log chain that's ever been built." He went to the river, tied one of the blizzards to a tree on the bank, then crossed and tied the other directly opposite. Immediately the river began to freeze and by the morning the blizzards had made a thorough job of it, the foot of the river being frozen solid for more than seventeen miles. In the meantime the great chain being ready, Paul Bunyan had Babe harnessed and, wrapping one end of it around the foot of the river, hitched Babe to the other. Although the great beast strained at the task till he sank knee-deep into the solid rock, the river would not budge. Eventually, with a tremendous shout, Paul grabbed the chain and he and the ox together gave it a mighty pull which jerked the river loose from end to end. They then hauled it across the prairie so fast that it smoked. Although the river was by then

5om~ ']Pamous <t~aract~rs-

as tame as a lapdog and could not whistle even a bird call, Paul rounded off the process by cutting it with his big cross-cut saw into nine-mile lengths which his men rolled up like linoleum and tied with bailing wire!

As an example of a really tall tale, this Paul Bunyan story is hard to beat. It reflects, however, the spirit of the frontier days of the second half of the nineteenth century which were crowded with great physical feats and when the many hardships and dangers of life were tempered with a growing sense of humour. The pioneers-the pathfinders, mountain-men, backwoodsmen, boatmen, wagon-drivers and cowboys-idolized the strong, fearless character. They delighted in boasting of his exploits and exaggerating his strength and achievements, and this tendency to exaggeration and humour sometimes found an outlet in the invention of mythical heroes.

What Paul Bunyan was to the woodsmen, Old Stormalong was to the men of the sea. He became the embodiment of all the qualities which were prized in the seamen of the pre-steam era-great physical fitness, willingness to undertake the most hazardous tasks, calm courage in the face of impending disaster and a restlessness which makes the true sailor always return from the land to a life on the sea.

According to legend, Stormalong's height was "just four fathoms (twentyfour feet) from the deck to the bridge of his nose." He was not only a seaman but a whaler too. One interesting story tells how Stormalong fought with an octopus in mid-ocean. When his ship was anchored somewhere in the North Atlantic on a whaling expedition, the skipper gave orders for hoisting the mudhook. Although all hands came forward to help, they could not pull out the anchor which seemed to be gripped by unseen hands under the water. It was finally discovered that an octopus had wrapped itself all around the anchor, holding it with half his tentacles and hanging on to the seaweed on the bottom witli the other half. Before the skipper could give any further orders, Stormalong went overboard with his sheath knife in his teeth. Soon there began a terrific struggle below the surface, with the water all churned and splashed about. The crew were sure that Stormalong had been torn apart by the octopus. But after about a quarter of an hour, his head came too.> the surface and, before anyone could throw him a line, he had grabbed the anchor chain and came hand over hand to the

7AmQ,rlcan

301hlore-

deck. After the anchor had been hoisted, someone asked Stormalong what he had done to the octopus.

"Just tied his arms in knots. Double Carrick bends. It will take him a month of Sundays to untie them."

Another mythical character, quite as famous as Paul Bunyan, is Pecos Bill, the boasting cowboy par excellence. According to legend, Pecos Bill's mother was a sturdy pioneer woman who once killed forty-five Red Indians with a broom-handle and weaned her son on moonshine liquor when he was three years old.

As a boy of ten, he fought two grizzly bears and hugged them both to death.

As a cowboy, he developed great skill as a roper. His rope is reported to have been as long as the equator, and he could rope a herd of cattle at one throw. He took in his stride such minor feats as fighting and twisting into knots a ten-foot rattlesnake, after giving the snake the first three bites, and saddling and riding a big mountain-lion which had the temerity to attack him. But his crowning achievement was the digging of the Rio Grande River in his idle moments.

His end was as remarkable as his adventurous and excitement-packed life. Having developed a great liking for toddy and wishing to make the drink ever more pungent, he began to mix fishhooks and barbed wire in it. It was the barbed wire, which rusted his interior and gave him indigestion, that finally killed him.

He wasted away to a skeleton, weighing no more than two tons, and died.

The admiration for the man of brawn whose muscles could withstand incredible physical strains, was strong in the pre-machine era and in the days when the challenge of the machine was still new. John Henry, the great Negro steel-driver, was a real-life character-as much a symbol of super-strength, grit and endurance, as he was of the tragedy of man versus machine. Standing about six feet away from the steel, he could use a ten-pound hammer in either hand with the speed of lightning, and each stroke made an arc of nineteen and a half feet. With supreme selfconfidence he accepted a challenge to compete with a steam-drill at Big Bend Tunnel on the Chesapeake and Ohio Railroad in West Virginia in 1870. He won the contest and a prize of $100, having drilled4in thirty-five minutes two holes each seven feet deep against the steam-drill's single hole of nine feet. But the super-human effort cost him his life; he burst a blood vessel and died during the night.

This flesh-and-blood hero of the rock-tunnel gangs has over the years become a half-mythical figure. He has 6

span

May 1962

been credited with various other activities, and his strength, size and prowess have become legendary. He is the subject of one of America's best-known folk ballads.

It is seldom indeed that the image which popular imagination conjures up of heroes or desperadoes coincides with the real character. Cast in the Robin Hood tradition of the noblehearted outlaw is Jesse James. A product of the bloody border warfare of Western Missouri and Eastern Kansas, he had a harrowing experience in his younger days when, ploughing in a cornfield, he was seized and lashed with a rope by a squad of federal militia, who nearly hanged his step-father and arrested and jailed his mother and sister. He joined a band of guerillas and was outlawed at the end of the Civil War. There are many tales of his coolness in the face of danger and of his generosity and chivalry. One amusing story relates to the occasion when, the day after robbing a bank at Corydon, Iowa, Jesse was trying to shake off his pursuers and became suddenly aware of two of them riding in the distance. Instead of galloping away from the well-mounted and wellarmed horsemen, Jesse decided to use his wits. Assuming the dialect and manners of an uncouth farmer, he joined them and rode with them for several miles in feigned pursuit of the robbers!

The classic instance of Jesse James' chivalry was his timely assistance to a poor widow who was about to be evicted from her mortgaged house by the mortgage-owner. When Jesse and his companions stopped at a small farmhouse to see if they could get something to eat, they found a lone woman who after some hesitation was willing to entertain the strangers.

They noticed, however, that as she went about her duties she was weeping and sobbing. The tender-hearted Jesse, who could not stand a woman's tears, soon found out the cause of her grief. The farm was mortgaged for $1,400 which was overdue for payment and it was the last day of grace. The man who held the mortgage was coming from town that very afternoon to demand his money. To the amazement of the widow, Jesse produced a sack, counted out $1,400, which he put on the table, and asked her to take the sum as a gift to pay off the mortgage. He then got the grateful widow to give a description of the mortgage-holder and found out when he was expected and which road he would be taking. Having finished their meal, Jesse and his companions bade the widow goodbye and after riding some distance from the house, hid in the bushes

1\m~;rican301klorQ-

(Continued)

besides the rocky road along which the mortgage-owner was to come in his buggy. Presently they saw him driving towards the widow's house and, after a few minutes, driving back, looking smug and prosperous. Jesse and his pals stepped out into the road, held him up and recovered the $1,400.

Not all folklore heroes are of course outlaws or desperadoes who persistently defy the law and organized authority.

Two famous frontiersmen, on the side of the law, were Kit Carson and Wild Bill Hickok. Unlike the popular conception of him as a gigantic figure, Kit Carson, who was the hero of numerous frontier adventures, was described by one of the men who knew him as "a delicate, reticent, undersized, wiry man." On the other hand, Wild Bill, who had a varied career as stage-coach driver, Civil War sharpshooter, scout, guide and peace officer, is credited with a handsome physique, great gallantry and an uncanny skill in riding and marksmanship. In the famous incident known as the McCanless Massacre-which some people are inclined to regard as a myth-he is supposed to have fought single-handed and wiped out a gang of ten desperadoes who had been terrorilZing the border. Trapped in a house when he was guiding a detachment of Union Cavalry through Nebraska in 1861, he shot five of the gangsters and then slashed at the others with fist and knife until everyone of his enemies was vanquished. At the end 0'f this deadly encounter, Wild Bill himself had thirteen cuts and eleven buckshot in his system, some of which he carried for many years.

Another anecdote concerns Wild Bill's meeting in a Deadwood saloon with six gunfighters from Montana.

Envious of Bill's prowess and reputation, they had threatened to get rid of him. When this was reported to Bill by one of his friends, he immediately went to the saloon and walking up to the six men, said: "I understand that you cheap, would-be gun-fighters have been making remarks about me. I want you to understand that unless they are stopped, there will shortly be a number of cheap funerals in Deadwood. I have come to this town not to court notoriety but to live in peace, and do not propose to stand for your insults." He then ordered the six men to stand against the wall and deliver up their guns, which they did in a sheepish manner. And that was the last Bill heard of the Montana crowd.

While tales of bravery and derring-do account for a large part of American folklore, the comic character too has his rightful place in it. A worthy specimen is Davy Crockett who was a member of Congress for three terms between 1827 and 1835, and whose title to fame rests not on his political acumen but on the image he has left to posterity of a rustic backwoodsman and thoroughly lovable braggart.

Here is a description of himself excerpted from a speech in Congress. "I can outspeak any man on this floor and give him two hours start. ... I can outlook a panther and outstare a flash of lightning, tote a steamboat on my back and play at rough and tumble with a lion, and an occasional kick from a zebra .... I can walk like an ox, run like a fox, swim like an eel, yell like an Indian, fight like a devil, spout like an earthquake, make love like a mad bull .... " On another occasion Davy, who had a partiality for strong drinks, made this ingenious plea in the House: "Congress allows lemonade to the members and has it charged under the head of stationery-I move also that whiskey be allowed under the item of fuel."

Davy Crockett's epic boasting of his exploits remains unsurpassed for sheer audacity and ingenuity. Alluding to one of his adventures, when he and a fellow~hunter were surrounded by Red Indians, Davy s.aid that he rubbed his back against a great rock, struck his left eye a few times and with one wink sent out a bolt of hot lightning that shattered the rock and killed all the Red Indians!

Lest it be thought that American folklore ideali,zesonly the daredevil, the sharpshooter and the jester, it will be appropriate to end this brief sketch of popular characters with a reference to a pioneer hero of another kind.

Johnny Appleseed, originally named Jonathan Chapman, was probably born in Boston in 1775. He was first heard of in Ohio in 1801 when, with a horse-load of appleseeds collected from cider mills, he went about planting them in various places on the borders of Licking Creek. From then on his whole life was devoted to the work of planting appleseeds in remote places, which he combined with readings from the New Testament to groups of people in the settlements which he visited.

This small, wirYman, full of restless activity, who travelled down the river in his peculiar craft-two canoes lashed together-or walked barefooted transporting loads of appleseed to the farthest places on the Western frontier, was a rare combination of an ascetic and a pioneer.

Choosing remote, picturesque and fertile spots, hemmed in by trees, for planting his seeds, he would put an enclosure around the place and leave them to grow until the trees were large enough to be transported by the settlers. The orchards grew fast and, when he finally finished his task, his labours had literally borne fruit over some 100,000 square miles of territory.

Johnny Appleseed usually wore cast-off clothing taken in payment for apple trees, but later took to wearing a coffee sack, with holes cut in it for the head and arms, as his chief garment. His great love and respect for animals, and even lower forms oflife, made Johnny Appleseed as staunch a believer in "ahimsa" as the most devout Jain or Buddhist.

He considered it a sin to kill any living creature for food. He took care of lame and old horses which had been turned loose to die. He held that it was wickedness to cut down trees. Once after lighting a fire to warm himself, he immediately put it out because he found that it was attracting and burning mosquitoes.

In spite of his odd attire and app~aranee, Johnny Appleseed was welcomed everywhere and greatly respected by even the rudest frontiersmen. Red Indians held him in much esteem and regarded him as a " great medicine man."

This extraordinary man, who was an earnest disciple of the Swedish seer Bmanuel Swedenberg and took pride in living the life of a primitive Christian, deservedly takes his place in the galaxy of great American pioneers and legendary men .â&#x20AC;˘ span

May 1962

9

â&#x20AC;˘

Themes In Contem porary

T

HE OTHER day the 15-year-old daughter of a friend of mine engaged me in a detailed, thoughtful discussion of J. D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye, and I realized that the novel, which was published in 1951, continues to charm young readers. I have talked about it at half a dozen colleges in the past few years, and there has always been a lively interest. Salinger's book is, of course, admired by many older persons, myself among them, but for the young it has been the novel of the past decade.

There is nothing melodramatic or sensational about the novel. Holden Caulfield, who tells his own story, has been expelled from a preparatory school-his third or fourth-and he has a few mild adventures in New York City. That is all. But the book gives a picture of rebellious youth that obviously seems authentic to the young. Stylistically, moreover, it is a joy: this is the way the young speak or would like to speak.

The novel, however, is not merely entertainment; as the young people I have talked with clearly recognize, it raises a fundamental problem.

Holden is in rebellion against everything that he considers "phony," and against the phoniness which in his opinion permeates most institutions around him. On the other hand, he has a deep feeling for people, all sorts of people, even those guilty of phoniness, and wants to be nice to them.

His problem is how to reconcile high moral and intellectual standards with tolerance and love.

Salinger has returned to this problem in several long short stories that he has published in The New Yorker Magazine since the appearance of The Catcher in the Rye. Each of these stories, which deal with related characters, asks how the individual can be true to his highest vision of himself without becoming self-righteous and 10

Span

May 1962

snobbish. Salinger finds a tentative answer in religion, though not in any particular religion.

Salinger's appeal to the younger generation is all the more significant because he is, in his preoccupation with ethical and philosophical issues, typical of the more serious fiction writers of the last decade. Common to most of these is an intense concern, in their writings, with personal rather than social problems. As individuals, most of them take an active interest in politics, in such issues as desegregation and the problem of preserving peace, but it is not about these subjects that they choose to write their novels and tales. American novelists who are concerned with, say politics or industry, are almost without exception journalists, and their work is ephemeral. The gifted writers are looking elsewhere. There is no use in complaining about this, as some critics are inclined to do: a writer has to go where his demon drives him.

Moreover, for my part, I see no reason to complain. Although institutions are important, human beings are more important, and these writers are looking deep into the human heart.

Take, for example, Saul Bellow, a more prolific and more versatile novelist than Salinger and one of greater literary stature. In his best known novel, The Adventures of Augie March, Bellow raises the question of identity.

The novel, which is picaresque in form, carries its hero through many parts of America and Europe, as well as up and down the social scale.

Through all these experiences Augie is always asking who and what he is, and although he learns a great deal about what he is not, the search for identity is still going on at the end.

In subsequent work Bellow has gone on from the problem of identity to the problem of salvation-salvation, of course, in this life. His most power-

ful treatment of the theme is in the novelette Seize the Day, a moving portrayal of a man at the end of his rope. This man, Tommy Wilhelm, has been guilty of every form of selfishness and irresponsibility, and at last he has nowhere to turn. The climax comes when Wilhelm, in a kind of mystical experience that Bellow makes perfectly credible despite its outward absurdity, senses the possibility of becoming a different sort of person.

We know that he may not change, but we feel the exhilaration of his conviction that change is possible.

Again, take Wright Morris. He also is concerned with salvation, although he never states the problem quite so sharply as Bellow has in his recent work. A native of Nebraska, Morris has written most frequently of people in or from the plains states, but his gallery of characters includes suburban housewives, a writer or two, a schoolteacher, a composer of popular songs. In a long line of novels, stretching from My Uncle Dudley (1942)

to

Ceremony

in Lone

Tree

(1960), he has shown us people who are carrying their burdens as best they can. Although in some of Morris's books we do have persons who seem

American

Fiction Mr. Hicks is literary critic of The Saturday Review and the aUfhor of a nUlI/ber of books.

to have triumphed over circumstances, these heroes are only qualifiedly heroic, and in the end, the world Morris portrays is profoundly pessimistic.

Ceremony in Lone Tree is the novel in which Morris's sombre vision of life is most fully rendered. Once again, the setting is the Midwestern plains, and again Morris is concerned with the ways the past may become a burden-whether it's a man's own personal past or an imagined past such as the mythical West that haunts the lives of old Tom Scanlon and other Morris characters. To a greater or lesser extent, each person in the book could fit the description one man gives of himself: "the man who still had everything to live for, since everything worth living for had eluded him." As despairing as Bellow is hopeful, Morris still addresses himself to the same problems of identity and human fulfilment, and with the same probing seriousness.

Carson McCullers published her fi,rst novel, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, in 1940, when she was only 23. She has made herself felt as a force in the American literature of the past two decades and her major theme has been the transforming power of love-even if unrequited love, even if

love for an unworthy object. This theme of an unsuitable but nevertheless potent love, which runs through The Heart Is a Lonely /-funIeI' and The Member of the Wedding, is restated with an important variation in her novella, The Ballad of the Sad C(1fd.

Here, Mrs. McCullers seems to be saying that love by its nature is doomed to end in disappointment: "There are the lover and the beloved, but these two come from different countries. Often the beloved is only a stimulus for all the stored up love which has lain quiet within the lover for a long time hitherto. And somehow every lover knows this. He feels in his soul that love is a solitary thing."

Eventually the beloved comes to fear and hate the lover. That is the sad irony to which Mrs. McCullers has come: only love can change men and women, and love cannot last.

Herbert Gold is equally concerned with love. His views are less melancholy than Mrs. McCuIIers'. He, too, celebrated the transforming power of love in his first three novels, and in each it appears that love, though precarious, is not hopeless. What particularly interests Gold is the relationship between love and self-understanding, and in his best-known novel, The Man Who Was Not With It, we see how they work together, one strengthening the other. A later novel, Therefore Be Bold, examines young love in its relationship to the beginnings of self-awareness.

Adolescence in rural Texas, is the subject of an impressive first novel by William Humphrey.

This young Southern writer reflects the influence of William Faulkner both in his feeling for history as legend and his sense of the complexity of human relationships. But he is very much his own master in the way he explores the quest of his youthful hero for an identity independent of,

yet related to, his domineering father.

The themes that occupy these writers are themes to which great writers in many times and places have devoted themselves. Still and all it does seem remarkable that the novel of social problems, which has a long and lively tradition in the United States, should

have so little appeal to serious writers at the present time. One reason for this may be that the process of technological and thus economic and social change has become so rapid as' to invite only journalistic rather than literary treatment, and serious writers naturaIIv turn to those elements in human -experience that are relatively permanent. It is the very nature of our times that seems to account for the deeply questioning quality of the best contemporary American fiction; the peculiar tensions of the present period seem to demand that the writer look beyond the surface events and institutions of society and face fundamental human issues .â&#x20AC;˘

The Proprietor of

Will iQ.Ml , f().u

IWl1f.1'L,.

'Yoknapatawpha

County IN

Original Painting for SPAN

by Umesh Varma

a sense, all works of art are absolute, eXisting for their own sake. It is only the impressions they make on viewers, readers or listeners that are relative. The works of William Faulkner, th~oexist in an excellence independent of whatever one may say for or against them.

They are their own raison d' etre and need no other justification. And there is certainly no problem regarding this for the author himself, who, on more than one occasion, has shown his militant unconcern of critics and "literary men."

But one principal aim of all creative writing being communication, the relative world of individual feelings or opinions of readers also exists in its own right. Moreover, there are two main reasons why critical essays and writings on Faulkner have been more numerous-and that number is constantly increasing day by day-than on many other contemporary writers of distinction. First, few writers, if any, have in recent times posed for their readers as many problems ofform and content as Faulkner has done. Secondly, Faulkner, in some of his public utterances, has had very definite things to say in the defence of the importance of writers a~d writing in the modern world, things which his readers expect to have a bearing on his literature as a whole and, in particular, on his mythical world of Yoknapatawpha County, the site of his most important literary achievements.

In creating Yoknapatawpha County, William Faulkner has used the materials of a distinct culture and milieu he knows most intimately. But his stories are also highly stylized, their geography being more of the soul than of any particular region or country. Through a vast and intricate metaphor, the Faulknerian geography brings into focus some of the fundamental issues of existence in the modern world and gives a dramatic entity to the author's fury-driven search for a cosmic truth.

The enunciation of that truth found its best expression in his speech of acknowledgment of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1950, in which he declared that man must not only endure but prevail, and cautioned writers to leave no room in their workshop "for anything but the old verities and truths of the heart, the old universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomedlove and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice." He termed his work "a life's work in the agony and sweat of the human spirit."

The restoration of "the old verities and truths of the heart" implies a rediscovery of meaning. But could the lives of Yoknapatawpha bear testimony to that? What do they actually do? In Frenchman's Bend, a hamlet in the south-east part of the county, there is Flem Snopes cheating and manipulating his neighbours until he controls them all and moves on to Jefferson, the county seat, with his tribe of decadent relatives to corrupt that town.

In the same hamlet Temple Drake, a college girl, falls into the hands of a gunman named Pop eye who rapes her in a most macabre way.

There is also the story of Addie Bundren, a hill woman, whose death brings into focus the peculiar conflicts of the Bundren family. The building of her coffin and the long funeral journey by wagon to the cemetery in Jefferson, accompanied by her idle husband, her pregnant unmarried daughter and her four sons, have a comic and terrible tone. The journey proves curious and full of nightmarish adventures.

Willl~fAMt

William Faulkner's Speech of Acceptance upon the award of the Nobel Prize for Literature delivered in Stockholm on the tenth of December, nineteen hundred fifty.

I FEEL

that this award was not made to me as a man, but to my work-a life's Irork in the agony and sweat of the human spirit, not for glory lInd least of all for profit, but to create out of the marerials of the human spirit something which did not exist before. So this award is only mine in trust. It will not be difficult to find a dedication for the money part of it commensurate with the purpose and significance of its origin. But I would like to do the same with the acclaim too by using this moment as a pinnacle from which I might be listened t; by the young men and women already dedicated to the same anguish and travail, among whom is already that one wlw will some day stand here where I am standing.

Our tragedy toda" ;s a general and unil'ersal physical fear so long sustained by now tF 11 we can even bear it. There are no longer problems of the spirit. There is only the question: When will I be blown up?

Because of this, the young man or woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing I ~t:ause only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat.

He must learn them again. He must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid; and, teaching himselfthatJorget it forever, leaving no room in his workshop for anything but the old verities and truths of the heart, the old universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed-love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice. Until he does so, he labors under a curse. He writes not of love but of lust, of defeats in which nobody loses anything of value, of victories without hope and, worst of all, without pity or compassion. His griefs grieve on no universal bones, leaving no scars.

He writes not of the heart but of the glands.

Until he relearns these things, he will write as though he stood among and watched the end of man. I decline to accept the end of man.

It is easy enough to say that man is immortal simply because he will endure: that when the last ding-dong 0/ doom has changed andfaded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will sti/! be one more sound: that of his pliny inexhaustible voice, still talking. I refuse to accept this. I beliere that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. The poet's, the writer's, duty is to write about these things. It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past.

The poet's voice need not merely be the record of man, if can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail.

14

Span

May 1962

AMONG Jefferson's macabre memories can be found an old woman named Emily who, fearing that her lover might leave her, poisoned him and laid him on her bed and kept his skeleton there until she herself died.

These are some of the happenings in Yoknapatawpha County. At first glance, they seem to have little to do with that "love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice" which Faulkner championed in his Stockholm speech. But on a closer examination, when one probes deep into the world of Faulkner, this seeming contradiction between his cherished vocation of writer and his image of man disappears. Even the scenes of Yoknapatawpha, roughly sketched above, have invariably another side of the picture.

Intruder in the Dust, for instance, is the story of an old Negro who is accused of murder and about to be lynched. He is saved by the courage of a white boy, a Negro boy and an old maid who are willing to go to desperate and dangerous lengths to prove his innocence. Such instances can be multiplied. They are enough to dispel the notion that Faulkner is a misanthrope wallowing in horrors.

If his stories, or a great many of them, look like grim tales of rustic violence from one angle, they are nonetheless, from the fuller perspective, epics of human tragedy. To be one, they have had to be the other and this is the marvel of Faulkner. A contradiction must be deep-rooted in him, since his basic theme is "the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself."

The image of man in Faulkner is a very complex one, and to summarize it in any short, general statement would be doing it the gravest violence.

It can be separately quiet, grim, wild, . bizarre, kind and gentle, humorous or sublime. At times it can also be a combination of all that. To catch a glimpse of that image it is necessary first to comprehend Faulkner's "grand design," his Southern myth, which so much moulds his man's image.

Faulkn.er's imaginary town of Jefferson resembles in many ways the author's actual place of residence Oxford, which-intensely and un~ mistakably a town of the Deep South not only in its appearance but in it~

"I decline

smells, its manners and morals, the speech and proprieties of its citizenslies in the north-west part of Mississippi and has a population of about 4,000. While it is true that Yoknapatawpha County and its people are a creation of Faulkner, a small selfcontained world of his imagination, they certainly evoke a pattern that is incontestably of the American South.

They seek to revitalize for the modern world a view of man that many in the South have held since Thomas Jefferson's days-a view that sees man as best in his relation to the soil and his stewardship of the soil.

IN

FAULKNER'S Southern myth, man's tragedy, which is also his ultimate glory, lies not in defeat but in surrender. This myth has a historic context which can be summarized somewhat like this.

The American South once knew an order and a tradition based on honour and a fixed code, but there was an inherent guilt in its design, its way of life. It was exploitation of fellow human beings, the red Indians, first, then the Negroes, which put a curse on the land. The Civil War came like a flaming sword of expiation. Though the War was lost, the Southerners tried to restore the design by other methods but succeeded only partially.

These men of the old order could free their land from the carpetbaggers who followed the Northern Arrllies, but they soon discovered that they had Southern enemies too. They had to fight against a new exploiting class, the descendants of the landless whites of slavery days. This was the mindless new world of moral duplicity and mechanical efficiency to which the old and new generations alike were compelled to submit. In that fight between the old clan of Sartoris and the unscrupulous new tribe of Snopeses in Faulkner's novels, the Sartorises were defeated in advance by a traditional code which prevented them from using the same weapons as their enemies.

The Snopeses, on the other hand, had to pay the price of victory by serving the mechanized civilization of the North which, being morally impotent in itself, ended by demoralizing the entire South. Thus runs Faulkner's implicit thesis.

Faulkner uses Southern history and

to accept

the South's sense of the past as a frame, a tragic fable of the human lot.

On one hand, his feeling for the South is one of alarmed and possessive love; on the other, he has a compulsive fear lest what he loves in the South should be destroyed by the greed and indifference of invading mechanization. Faulkner feels that if the South is to win its way out again, it can do so only through a reawakening moral vision of its youth and the enduring strength of its Negroes. Not only that. The sin that has befallen the South has to be expiated through endurance. "The shame," he once wrote, "will still be there of course but the whole chronicle of man's immortality is in the suffering he has endured, his struggle towards the stars in the stepping stones of his expiation." This being part of a historic pattern, men will have to act as they do, and accept and endure.

For example, the design for Thomas Sutpen, in Absalom, Absalom t, was "not what he wanted to do but what he just had to do, had to do it whether he wanted to or not, because if he did not do it he knew that he could never live with himself for the rest of his life."

The Yoknapatawpha story is more than a parable of the American South.

It is, in fact, startli ngly close to a cosmic view of history, a view whose passionate search for meanings transcends facts and particularities. Go Down, Moses, for example, can be interpreted as a serious and moving examination of white and black relationships.

The spiritual from which this collection of Faulkner stories takes its title is significant: Go down, Moses Way down in Egypt land, Tell old Pharaoh, Let My people go.

What is latent in this plea is not merely freedom for the Negro slave.

It also implies-and Faulkner's treatment of the material justifies this implication-that the freedom thus petitioned is to be for all mankind, not for any particular group of men alone.

This universalization of the particular is generally true of all Faulkner's works. But it must also be added, that, the lonely selves of his characters, as they appear in fragmented book forms, do not state a coherent, satisfactory

the end of man."

meaning. For such meaning, these characters have to be seen against the larger context of the history of Faulkner's imaginary county. It is this larger context of a continuum which gives meaning to his pattern, and not the printed volumes in which parts of it are recorded, that is his real achievement. And the sense of this continuum is developed in a style so specific and so intricate that the necessity for the reader's identification with the author becomes one of prime importance.

The state of mind that Faulkner explores is not simple. His themes are self-contradiction and inner conflict, and often seething mixture of pride and bad conscience, of exaltation and shame. At the same time, his talent is "participative" in the sense that he is writing from within his people, portraying his kinfolk and neighbours and the region of his birth. His works, in many ways, are projections of his inner conflict with the world around him.

This great pattern of the Deep South, which he so laboriously evolves, is based on what he saw in Oxford or remembered from his childhood. It is also based in considerable measure on scraps of family tradition. His family as the vehicle of this regional heritage is an important social unit in Faulkner's fiction. And in this reconstruction of the family saga no figure is more important or had a stronger influence on Faulkner's life and work than that of his great-grandfather, Colonel William C. Falkner, a legendary figure in northern Mississippi, who was enshrined as a kind of household deity among the Faulkners.

The details of the colonel's life, many of which are laid out in his greatgrandson's books, read like episodes in a picaresque novel. Born in 1825, he had begun as a poor youngster trying to earn a living for himself and his widowed mother, but ended his career as the owner of a railroad and a member of the state legislature. A severe disciplinarian and the dashing commander of a group of cavalry raiders in the Civil War, he was twice acquitted of murder charges. His death too wa~ dramatic. A former railroad partner whom he had defeated for a seat in the legislature became his enemy and shot him on Oxford's main street. To this full life Colonel

span

May 1961

15

Falkner had also added literary talent.

Among his publications, The White Rose of Memphis, a melodramatic novel, became a great popular success of its era and sold 160,000 copies, running through thirty-five editions.

The great-grandfather is the original for Colonel John Sartoris of Sartoris, The Un vanquished and various other novels and stories by Faulkner. In the interests of fiction, the colonel's life is magnified to heroic proportions, becoming the quintessence of his time and class. He and, in a somewhat lesser degree, a few others from the family history, whose lives Faulkner has reconstructed in his work, are a part of the legend of the Old South and they play an important part in the Y oknapatawpha saga.

But what needs to be emphasized in this connection is that the whole of it, so specifically and so unmistakably pertaining to a particular locale, is elaborated, transformed and. given life by the author's emotions, "the agony and sweat" of his spirit. The Faulkner characters, by simple intensity of emotions, loom larger than life, immense in feeling and movement, and upon them sweep howling winds from the past. Even their simple, homely actions assume a cosmi<> significance. These figures, though redeemed by earthy humour and follies, exist as phantasms in a dream of history concerned with the tragic heroism of man.

FAULKNER, in his desire to uplift man's heart, does 110t seem interested in c;:hanging or improving it. He does not minimize selfishness, aggrandizement, obsessions or plain human stupidity, but tells in a memorable way the truth about man, his problems and his capacity for courage and endurance.

The antique virtues and weaknesses of honour and courage and pride and nostalgia are pictured side by side with "that vicious depthless quality of stamped tin" which symbolizes for Faulkner the mechanical, dehumanizing forces of modernism. Using what his critics have termed a "polar imagination"-which seeks to view and interpret life in extreme terms, seeing it composed essentially of pairs of warring entities-Faulkner gives dramatic expression to a deeply resonant symbol of the awful slum into

" ... man is man, enduring and immortal.

which man, through his self-betrayal, is capable of transforming the world at his disposal. Several of Faulkner characters present a memorable portrait of human courage and endurance.

But even those who do not-the rapacious, egoist category of Snopeses -they too evoke, in an indirect manner and through the very instruments of their rampant selfishness and concupiscence, "the old verities and truths of the heart." This achievement of Faulkner is due to his rarified ability to lead the reader into a dimensional exploration of his characters, to involve the reader in the webs of personality, so that he cannot divorce himself totally from sympathy with even the Snopeses and the Popeyes of Yoknapatawpha.

A few examples will illustrate the point. The Sound and the Fury, for instance, is a story about the decline of the Compson family, the parents and the four children. The father is a witty but alcoholic lawyer; the mother, preoccupied with her honour, faded glories and present indignities. One of the three sons is an idiot, another selfish and villainous, the third one proud and romantic but weak. This latter, Quentin, obsessed with incestuous desires for his sister, kills himself. Only Dilsey, the old Negro decent, sympathetic and woman, responsible, "endures," providing the moral coherence and stability against which the family's drama is played.

Faulkner has termed this story one of "lost innocence." In its movement from the subjective heart of Compson life to a cold record of its death, the novel projects a radical image of man, tragic and great. Apart from the decency of Dilsey, one of Faulkner's most memorable characters, there is also the search of Quentin-the modern protagonist, the confused and sensitive aesthete-for a sense of significance.

"Old Man," a story of a different kind, provides on the other hand an implied criticism and a soul-searching analysis of man's conception ofliberty.

It concerns a Mississippi convict who is ordered to rescue from the floodaffected areas a woman perched on a cypress snag and a man stranded on a cotton house roof. He finds the woman, far gone in pregnancy, and attempts to return with her. On the way back, many difficulties assail them and the

baby is born. Finally, he returns to the prison area and tells the guard: "Yonder's your boat, and here's the woman, but I never did find that bastard on the cotton house." As a final cut of injustice, the authorities sentence him to ten more years for "attempted escape." But the convict asks for nothing "but just permission to endure and endure to buy air, to feel sun." He does not complain against the injustice. To him freedom seems elusive and, when found, limited. He is a simple man, and because of his simplicity, he is courageous and dedicated to his responsibilities, as he feels he is compelled to be. He is truly happy and one of Faulkner's natural men.

But it is A Fable, one of Faulkner's more recent books, which best expresses the supreme insight of his "life's work spent in the agony and sweat of the human spirit." In most emphatic terms it expresses that belief in man's endurance, in his ability to prevail-by mere endurance and also by "pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice" -over evil.

Though not part of the Yoknapatawpha saga, A Fable has a deep and personal meaning for Faulkner, and he believes it to be his greatest book and the pinnacle of his career. The story is about a French corporal who, during World War I, first converts his squad to pacifism and then spreads the message of peace along a large sector of the Western front. This develops into a serious situation when, one day in 1917, an entire French regiment refuses the order to attack.

The regiment is arrested for mutiny, and the corporal is to be tried by a marshal of France.

This marshal, as the book gradually reveals, fathered the corporal now under trial and left his mother before he was born. At the trial, however, the marshal soon discovers the identity of his son and Marthe, the half-sister of the corporal, pleads for the latter's life. But she also senses that the marshal must refuse, as he does with these words: " ... if he accepts his life, keeps his life, he will have abrogated his own gesture and martyrdom.

If I give him his life tonight, I myself could render null and void what you call the hope and dream of his sacrifice. By destroying his life tomorrow morning, I will establish forever that

he didn't live in vain, let alone die in vain."

But the marshal must also play the part of a quasi-Satan.

He takes the corporal to a mountain top and urges him to escape. The corporal refuses, as the marshal knows he will have to, for "we are two articulations (the marshal says) ... pos~ulated, not so much to defend as to test two inimical conditions ... I, champion of this mundane earth ... you, champion of an esoteric realm of man's baseless hopes and infinite capacity-no: passion-for unfact."

The virtue of endurance is enunciated again in an interchange between the two men on the mountain top.

"Oh yes," the marshal says, "he (man) will survive ... I don't fear man. I do better: I respect and admire him. And pride: I am ten times prouder of that immortality which he does possess than ever he of that heavenly one of his delusion."

It is certainly not without significance that Faulkner's triumphant villains such as Jason Compson, FIem Snopes and others shine so gloriously, since, as the marshal says in A Fable: "Rapacity must not fail, else ~an must deny he breathes. Not rapacIty; its whole vast glorious history repudiates that. It does not, cannot, must not fail. ... Because it endures, not even because it is rapacity but because man is man, enduring and immortal; enduring not because he is immortal but immortal because he endures: and so with rapacity, which immortal man never fails since it is in and from rapacity that he gets, holds, his immortality." And again, a few pages later: " ... people, men and women, don't choose evil and accept it and enter it, but evil chooses the men and women by test and trial, proves and tests them and then accepts them forever until the time comes when¡ they are consumed and empty and at last fail evil because they no longer have anything that evil can want or use; then it destroys them."

This, then, is the ultimate message of William Faulkner. In his art he gives magnificent embodiment to those old verities and truths of the human condition which he hailed in his Nobel address and which inspire, through his work, an awareness of moral values of timeless and universal significance.

Will;fAAM.

ffA.UIWl'lf/t,-

Excerpt from

(Continued)

Go Down, Moses

OLD lKE McCaslin is the hero of Faulkner's novel, Go Down, Moses, and one of Faulkner's most admirable characters. It is he who gives the final judgment on the Yoknapatawpha story from its beginning. "No wonder," he thinks on his last trip into the wilderness, "the ruined woods I used to know don't cry for retribution! The people who have destroyed it will accomplish its revenge."

In the following excerpt from Go Down, Moses, old Ike, guide for an annual hunting party in the Mississippi River Delta county, states some of his views of man and his world in campfire conversation.

"I

DIDN'T say that," the old man said. "There are good men everywhere, at all times. Most men are. Some are just unlucky, because most men are a little better than their circumstances give them a chance to be.

And I've known some that even the circumstances couldn't stop."

"Well, I wouldn't say-" Legate said.

"So you've lived almost eighty years," Edmonds said, "and that's what you finally learned about the other animals you lived among. I suppose the question to ask you is, where have you been all the time you were dead?"

There was a silence; for the instant even Legate's jaw stopped chewing while he gaped at Edmonds. "Well,

by God, Roth-" the third speaker said. But it was the old man who spoke, his voice still peaceful and untroubled an.d merely grave: "Maybe so," he said. "But if being what you call alive would have learned me any different, I reckon I'm satisfied, wherever it was I've been."

"Well, I wouldn't say that Roth-" Legate said.

The third speaker was still leaning forward a little over the table, looking at Edmonds. "Meaning that it's only because folks happen to be watching him that a man behaves at all," he said. "Is that it ?"

"Yes," Edmonds said. "A man in a blue coat, with a badge on it watching him. Maybe just the badge."

18

span

May 1962

"I deny that," the old man said, "I don't-" .... The old man was speaking ... in that peaceful and still untroubled voice: "I still believe. I see proof everywhere. I grant that man made a heap of his circumstances, him and his living neighbors between them. He even inherited some of them already made, already almost ruined even. A while ago Henry Wyatt there said how there used to be more game here. There was. So much that we even killed does. I seem to remember Will Legate mentioning that too-" Someone laughed, a single guffaw, stillborn.

It ceased and they all listened, gravely, looking down at their plates. Edmonds was drinking his coffee, sullen, brooding, inattentive.

"Some folks still kill does," Wyatt said. "There won't be just one buck hanging in this bottom tomorrow night without any head to fit it."

"I didn't say all men," the old man said. "I said most men. And not just because there is a man with a badge to watch us. We probably won't even see him unless maybe he will stop here about noon tomorrow and eat dinner with us and check our licenses-" "We don't kill does because if we did kill does in a few years there wouldn't even be any bucks left to kill, Uncle Ike," Wyatt said.

"According to Roth yonder, that's one thing we won't never have to worry about," the old man said. "He said on the way here this morning that does and fawns~ [ believe he said women and children-are two things this world ain't ever lacked. But that ain't all of it," he said. "That's just the mind's reason a man has to give himself because the heart don't always have time to bother with thinking up words that fit together. God created man and He created the world for him to live in and I reokon He created the kind of world He would have wanted to live in if He had been a man-the ground to walk on, the big woods, the trees and the water, and the game to live in it. And maybe He didn't put the desire to hunt and kill game in man but I reckon He knew it was going to be there, that man was going to teach it to himself, since he wasn't quite God himself yet-"

~~

rt

.

"Qk O~ÂŁ'j

...,...

"When will he be?" Wyatt said.

"T think that every man and woman, at the instant when it don't even matter whether they marry or not, I think that whether they marry then or afterward or don't never, at that instant the two of them together were God." "Then there are some Gods in this world I wouldn't want to touch, and with a damn long stick," Edmonds said. He set his coffee cup down and looked at Wyatt.

"And that includes myself, if that's what you want to know. I'm going to bed." He was gone. There was a.general movement among the others. But it ceased and they stood again about the table, not looking at the old man, apparently held there yet by his quiet and peaceful voice as the heads of the swimming hor~es had been held above the water by his weightless hand. The three Negroessitting the eook and his helper and old Isham-were quietly in the entrance of the kitchen tent, listening too, the three faces dark and motionless and musinQ. "He put them both here: man, and the game he would follow and kill, foreknowing it. I believe He said, 'So be it.' I reckon He even foreknew the end. But He said, 'I will give him his chance. I will give him warning and foreknowledge too, along with the desire to follow and the power to slay. The woods and fields he ravages and the game he devastates will be the consequence and signature of his crime and guilt, and his punishment.'Bed time," he said. His voice and inflection did not change at all. "Breakfast at four o'clock, Tsham. We want meat on the ground by sunup time." ....

Isham had made up his bed too-the strong, battered iron cot, the stained mattress which was not quite soft enough, the worn, often-washed blankets which as the years passed were less and less warm enough.

But the tent was warm; presently, when the kitchen was cleaned up and readied for breakfast, the young Negro would come in to lie down before the heater, where he could be roused to put fresh wood into it from time to time. And then, he knew now he would not sleep tonight anyway; he no longer needed to tell himself that perhaps he would. But it was all right now. The day was ended

Y'

now and night faced him, but alarmless, empty of fret ....

Wearing only his bagging woolen underwear, his spectacles folded away in the worn case beneath the pillow where he could reach them readily and his lean body fitted easily into the old worn groove of mattress and blankets, he lay on his back, his hands crossed on his breast and his eyes closed while the others undressed and went to bed and the last of the sporadic talking died into snoring. Then he opened his eyes and lay peaceful and quiet as a child, looking up at the motionless belly of rain-murmured canvas upon which the glow of the heater was dying slowly away and would fade still further until the young Negro, lying on two planks before it, would sit up and stoke it and lie back down again.

They had a house once. That was sixty years ago, when the Big Bottom was only thirty miles from Jefferson and old Major de Spain, who had been his father's cavalry commander in '61 and '2 and '3 and '4, and his cousin (his older brother; his father too) had taken him into the woods for the first time. Old Sam Fathers was alive then, born in slavery, son of a Negro slave and a Chickasaw r ndian chief, who had taught him how to shoot, not only when to shoot but when not to; such a November dawn as tomorrow would be and the old man led him straight to the great cypress and he had known the buck would pass exactly there because there was something running in Sam Fathers' veins which ran in the veins of the buck too, and they stood there against the tremendous trunk, the old man of seventy and the boy of twelve, and there was nothing save the dawn until suddenly the buck was there, smoke-colored out of nothing, magnificent with speed: and Sam Fathers said, 'Now. Shoot quick and shoot slow': and the gun levelled rapidly without haste and crashed and he walked to the buck lying still intact and still in the shape of that magnificent speed and bled it with Sam's knife and Sam dipped his hands into the hot blood and marked his face forever while he stood trying not to tremble, humbly and with pride too though the boy of twelve had been unable to phrase it then: I slew you; my bearing must not shame

your quitting life. e

in U.S. Mental

Hospitals

I

TWAS the first note from his wife in nineteen years: "Please send me a new pair of shoes. I am going outdoors every day now and I want to look nice. Do you think the doctor would let me come home for a few days?" When she was originally confined in the mental hospital, he had visited her and brought gifts. But, since she never gave a sign of recognition, never reached to take the gifts, he had stopped going years ago and tried to forget.

This American husband was to learn that many mental patients are, in a true sense, coming back to life.

Leading U.S. psychologists flatly assert now what ten years ago was unthinkable: "More than ninety per cent of today's mentally ill will go back on the job and, in many cases, be better than before."

Doctors have learned that the sooner they are able to get the mental patient back into interaction with other persons the greater are his chances for complete recovery. They have observed, conversely, the longer he was kept locked up in the traditional asylum, sometimes restrained with straps, straitjackets, cold packs or strong sedatives, Ollt of contact with healthily functioning people, out of touch with life and its realities, and in an environment where nothing is expected of him, the less likely he is to recover.

THE QUIET PLEASURE 'N. DESTRUCTIVENESS marks chil?.'s (lrst inte:view with hospital psychiatrist. Facing the complicate~ task of treatmg a human mind. he ponders.

On what PIvot does thIS force turn from destruction to creation?'

AIDE'S COMFORT and compassion dry the tears of an elderly patient. The attitude of hospital staffs is as important in the new therapy as escape from behind locked doors and barred windows. Patients made aware of sta ff sympathy and expectations tend to live up to them.

TEST REVEALS new patient's psychological strengths and deficiencies. A team comprised of a psychologist, a psychiatrist, social worker, laboratory technician and medical consultant will separately examine the potient and together plan her treotment.

The quiet revolution began with important developments in U.S. medical research-such as the tranquillizing drugs-and an increase in numbers of trained personnel.

But the move to make the hospital part of the community started in a few progressive European institutions.

The first steps, when introduced into U.S. hospitals, shocked many Americans: to open the locked doors, allow patients to wander freely about the hospital grounds, to permit convalescents to shop in town, to visit their families for weekends or even work in town by day and return to the hospital at night.

As these steps were gingerly taken by a few hospitals others followed. By autumn [959 more than sixty per cent of the patients in New York State's eighteen state mental institutions were "open" patients. Voluntary commitments to one New York hospital, which is one hundred per cent "open," had gone up fifty-five per cent.

With the aim of treating mental illness in the community, where every other illness is now taken care of, authorities are building or seeking to build smaller, less impersonal hospitals, close to town and to families instead of hidden away at a distance. Campaigning intensively, they ask for more funds to meet the greater cost of new active treatments as compared to mere custodial care, to carryon even more research and to inaugurate community rehabilitation facilities and follow-up services. They hope some day to provide psychiatric counsel in all schools, coarts, general hospitals and clinics of physical medicine.

Span

May 1962

21

HELPFUL GESTURE by a volunteer worker evakes a grateful smile from a patient who has made herself a hat from a paper picnic plate.

THE QUIET REVOLUTION

LIGHT for his cigarette from the volunteer umpire during a base,)all game between hospital teams may mean much to this patient. The more contact a mentally ill man has with other people. the better perspective he can achieve on his own problems.

A

(Continued)

In any democracy, to realize such aims the people must understand the need. The taxpayer, too, must be convinced. But layers of fear, superstition, prejudice and misinformation about the mental patient have first to be cleared from the public mind.

The pictures presented here by SPAN were exhibited with many others in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, by the county mental health society in one effort to dispel public ignorance of the subject. The settings are in average American hospitals. But the therapy is international. And one of the most interesting as well as newest lessons of mental health is that, what is good for everybody is even better for the mental patient: people need people .â&#x20AC;˘

WANTING THE COMPANY of others is important in the pattern of recovery.

Patients hold a dance in the sunshine, which is both fun and a lively session of social therapy.

MORE PATIENTS ARE LEAVING mental hospitals in the U. S. and leaving sooner.

Hospitals send them home at first for trial weekends, gradually testing their new ability to give and take in rea I life situations.

FREE INDIVIDUAL EXPRESSION in harmony with others is achieved by a jazz group composed of mental patients.

It is a crucial accomplishment.

Inventor

CHARLES Goodyear's discovery of the vulcanization of rubber makes one of the most perplexing and exasperating tales in American history.

The man had no right to achieve success. His backgro'-'.nd was all wrong. He came up against obstacles that should rightly have defeated any man. Most of the time he didn't know what he was doing.

The only possible explanation for Goodyear's persistence was his thorough belief that, as he put it, "what is hidden and unknown and cannot be discovered by scientific research, will most likely be discovered by accident, if at all, by the man who applies himself most perseveringly to the subject, and is most observing of everything related thereto."

Goodyear's work took him into the deepest thickets of organic chemistry and he went as blithely wide-eyed as Hansel and Gretel on their way to the witch. Organic chemistry was then in its infancy.

No one knew any more about rubber or the chemistry of rubber than he did, and he knew nothing. Goodyear simply believed his way to success.

In 1735 a party of French astronomers, on an expedition to Peru, discovered a tree that yielded a peculiar sap or gum which was colourless in its native state and had the property of becoming hard and tough after exposure to the su.n or the heat of fire. The natives used the gum to make simple articles: a boot and a bottle. The French brought the substance back with them and gum elastic was introduced in Europe where it was regarded merely as a curiosity.

The gum elastic had these properties: under heat it became very soft and gummy, while at low temperatures it became as hard as rock.

The. first rubber factory was established in Vienna in 1811. About 1820 24

SPan

May /962

by Accident

the French used rubber threads mixed with cotton to make suspenders and garters. In England, Mackintosh used it as a very thin layer between two pieces of cloth to make waterproof coats that stiffened to armour in the winter rain and had to be kept in cool cellars during the summer. About the same time a ship captain brought 500 pairs of the crude Indian boots to the United States. They were worn as waterproof overshoes. They were incredibly clumsy but Americans began to buy a half million pairs a year at five dollars a pair, even though they were extremely perishable.

The sudden popularity of India rubber in the United States started a boom in the 1830's. E. M. Chaffee of Boston was seeking a substance that would be an improvement in his patent leather business. He settled on a mixture of one pound of raw gum to three quarts of turpentine, and added lampblack to give him colou.r and gloss. A calendering machine of his own design spread a thin film of the mixture on cloth.

In 1833, with several other men, he founded the Roxbury India Ru.bber Company, capitalized at $30,000 and in 1835 he patented his mixing mill and calender.

Bu.siness was phenomenal. Capitalization was increased to almost half a million dollars in two years, and Chaffee made cabin covers, wagon covers, caps, shoes, and coats. Other companies started in similar business in seven other eastern cities. The furor was called "the India-rubber fever."

Two summers reduced the coats, caps, and wagon covers down to the molten state and they gave off so offensive an odour that they had to be buried in the ground. By the end of 1836 the impending doom of the rubber industry was known very clearly to insiders; the public was still unaware that the loss to owners

already amounted to two million dollars. It was shortly before this that Charles Goodyear walked into the New York shop of the Roxbury company and made a purchase. He walked out, unaware that he was being trailed by the shadow of his futu.re.

Goodyear had bought a rubber life-preserver becau.se he felt that he could improve the valve that was used for inflation, completely u.naware that the very substance of the life-preserver was far more defective than any mechanical part. Within three weeks he invented a valve far superior to the one used in the life-preserver.

When he returned to the office of the Roxbl'.ry Ru.bber Company, the agent told him that he would have been far better off to find a way of improving rubber. Instead of running for his life, he took the advice seriously.

CHARLES GOODYEAR was born in New Haven, Connecticut, in December, 1800. When he was twenty-one, he became a partner in the successfu.l hardware firm of A. Goodyear and Sons. The firm existed u.ntil 1836, when it failed. Before this, however, Charles Goodyear decided to withdraw from the business and devote himself to a career of invention. He picked for his field the one industry that was itself approaching bankruptcy as fast as A. Goodyear and Sons.

He approached rubber as if it were leather, and he frequently spoke of "curing" rubber, thereby reducing an insuperable problem to something that sounded familiar. In all innocence, he believed that he could solve the problem within the next few months.

Goodyear began experiments with Brazilian gum elastic, making thin From American Science and Invention,

by Mitchell Wilson. Published by Simon and Schuster.

Copyright 1954 by Mitchell Wilson.

#

The Story of Charles Goodyear films at home with his wife's rolling pin. He mixed crude gum with every possible substance that came to his hand: salt, pepper, sugar, sand, castor oil, soup-on the exquisite logic that sooner or later he would have tried everything on the face of the earth and come l'.pon the one successful combination.

Ralph Steele of New Haven advanced some capital, and Goodyear opened a shop with hundreds of pairs of n'.bber shoes.

On the first hot day that came along, the shoes melted into a stinking mass.

Goodyear gave up his shop and intensified his mixing experiments.

Witch hazel, cream cheese, black inkall proved total failures, with one exception: magnesia. He mixed half a pound of magnesia with a pound of the gum and produced a compound that was whiter than the gum and as firm and flexible as leather. He made book covers, piano covers, showed them, got encouragement, laughed with joy-and, within a month, fou..nd the product to be a failure. At this point he gave up his house and moved his wife and children to the cou.ntry, while he set out alone for New York and new support.

In the city he found two friends, one of whom gave him the u.se of a room in Gold Street as a laboratory; the other, a druggist, agreed to advance him on credit whatever chemicals he might want.

Goodyear liked to decorate his samples with painted patterns, and on one occasion he used bronze paint on a rubber-coated shoe. The bronze did not please him and so he removed it with aqua fortis. One drop of the acid on the rubber discoloured the cloth of the shoe so badly that Goodyear threw it away. The appearance of the spot stuck in his mind, and a few days later he dug up the discarded shoe; where the acid had fallen, the trol'.blesome stickiness had gone.

The aqua fortis Goodyear used was nitric acid with a residual trace of sulphuric acid. Goodyear knew so little about chemistry that he thought he was dealing with pure nitric acid.

He exposed a few sheets of rubber material to the fumes of the acid mixture. The result was superior to anything he had got before, and he applied for a patent. He hired an old India rubber works on Staten Island, New York, opened a salesroom on Broadway, and prepared to manufacture on a large scale-when a financial crisis hit his backers.

Within two months he was once again reduced to absolute beggary.

At this point Goodyear actually did have a process which, for thin films

of rubber, was commercially feasible.

But the financial failure threw him into such dejection that he did not realize exactly what he had. His family had joined him in New York, and to support them he pawned everything in his possession. Most of the time he was weak from hunger. At this time, as a means of demonstration, he made himself a complete outfit of India rubber clothing and wore these wherever he went. Someone at this point, who asked how Goodyear could be recognized, was told, "If you see a man in an India rubber coat, India mbber shoes, an India rubber hat, and in his pocket an India rubber p~!fse, and in that India rubber purse not one cent, then that is Goodyear."

In September of that year, 1837, Goodyear went to Roxbmy (now a part of Boston), whcre the original rubber company was operating on a skeleton basis. Chaffee, the first promoter of the India rubber process in the country, still believed in the substance. He took in Goodyear and allowed him the use of his plant for exp~riment. U sing his "acid cme" process, Goodyear made shoes and cloth good enOl'.gh to be bOl'.ght by a population that ordinarily flinched at the very sound of the word. He was immediately flooded by offers for licences, and Goodyear made close tdo4ive thousand dollars. He was able to bring his family to Roxbury with him. Once more success was at hand.

To crown his success, he received an order from the United States Government for 150 mailbags, to be made of India rubber.

Goodyear filled the order and hung the finished bags in the shop for public demonstration.

Having worked so hard, Goodyear decided to take his family on a vacation. He returned after two weeks of hot weather to find that success, far from being at hand, was as distant as ever, for the 150 mailbags had run in the heat. The surfaces of the bags were still intact, proving that they actually had been cured, but the interior of the fabric where the acid vapour had not penetrated was as sticky as ever. The contract was cancelled; other goods began to be returned; by the end of the summer, Goodyear was once again reduced to poverty.

GOODYEAR'S brother-in-law lived near Boston, and the Goodyears moved there, living on the brother's charity. It was during this winter that Goodyear finally got the lead towards the process now known as vulcanization:

"I was surprised to find that a specimen, being carelessly brought into contact with l:'. hot stove, charred like leather. I endeavoured to call the attention of others who were present ... to this, remarkable effect ... since gl'm elastic always melted when exposed to a high degree of heat.

Nobody but myself thought the charring worthy of notice ....

However, I ... inferred that if the charring process could be stopped at the right moment, it might divest the compound of its stickiness throughout. ... Upon further trials with high, temperatmes, I was convinced that my inference was sou.nd ....

What was of Sl'.preme importance was that upon the border of the charred fabric, there was a line which had escaped charring and was perfectly cu.red."

Goodyear was able to detect that tiny line, perhaps no more than a few millimetres wide, and recognize it for what it was. For that reason he was perfectly justified in saying later:" "While I admit that these discoveries of mine were not the result of scientific chemical investigation, I am not willing to admit that they were the resu.lt of what is commonly called accident. I claim them to be the result of the closest application and observation."

Of that first test, Goodyear's daughter said later: "I casu.ally observed the little piece of gum Father was holding near the fire, and I noticed that he was unusually animated by some discovery.

He nailed the gum outside in the intense cold. Next morning he brought it in and held it up exultingly. It was perfectly flexible, as when he'd nailed it up. This was proof enough of the value of his discovery."

Goodyear was only at the beginning of a series of experiments with stoves, fires, and brick kilns to determine exactly how much heat was reql'.ired.

By all his neighbours he was considered a pleasant but helpless madman.

In the winter of 1841, though, money began to come to Goodyear.

His new product was markedly successful, and there was a flood of applications for manufacturing licences.

The vulcanization of rubber was a great impetus to the electrical industry because rubber was used for various forms of insulators. He lived to see his invention give rise to enormous factories in the United States, England, France, and Germany, employing over sixty thousand workers, producing over five hundred different kinds of articles worth more than eight million dollars a year .â&#x20AC;˘

Span

May 1962

25

Mrs. Kennedy at the Ta} Mahal, teft.

Below, she meers the engine driver <JI the train which look her to Agra.

.

Du

RING her nine-day visit to India from March 12 to March 21, Mrs. John F. Kennedy, wife of the U.S. President, visited six cities in Northern India. In addition to a good deal of sightseeing, she also attempted to acquaint herself with some aspects of India's multi-faceted life.

Mrs. Kennedy saw several places of historical and cu.ltu.ral interest including the Taj Mahal-both by daylight and moonlight-the famous Moghul monu.ments in Fatehpur Sikri and the Amber Palace of Jaipur, reminiscent of ancient Rajput glory. She attended glittering receptions and formal dinners, had an elephant ride in Jaipur and boat trips on the Ganges at Banaras and the famous Pichola Lake at Udaipur. She admired the exquisite silks and brocades produced by Banaras weavers, and found time for some shopping in that city.

America's First Lady also met a cross-section of the people ranging from children in hospitals and welfare centres to princes, ministers and top officials.

On these pages SPAN presents a souvenir album of some of the highlights of Mrs. Kennedy's visit.

III

the

garden of the Prime Ministe,' residence,

to [/ndLa An elephant ride in Amber Palace with her sister, Princess Lee Radziwill.

At All India Institute of Medical Sciences, Mrs. Kennedy receives a bouquet from a young patient, who tightly squints his eyes to concentrate on his speech of welcome.

rvt1-it to !Jndia

(Continued)

In Banaras' famous silk market, Mrs. Kennedy admires the colourful Indian brocades, while a youthjitl photographer, lower right, exercises some initiative to get his picture of the visitor.

BUSINESS EXECUTIVE AT

first glance, thelife of Jefferson M. Hamilton, Jr., which is pictured on these pages, may seem no different from that of many other Americans.

He is an executive of a chemical processing corporation in Wilmington, Delaware; a college-educated man with the degrees of B.A. and Ph.D. in chemistry from Johns Hopkins University; and a husband and father whose son, Ogden, is aged fourteen and whose daughter, Elizabeth, is ten.

The statistics and the familiar patterns of his life, nevertheless, do not tell the whole story. A man who, in his own words, "caught Curiosity in college, and can't shake it off," Hamilton has brought to his everyday activities a thirst for knowledge and a drive which have transformed these familiar activities into a more meaningful way of life for him. Facing the problems of modern living with energy, enthusiasm, and imagination, he has endeavoured to push beyond immediate horizons in order to study the world around him, thereby adding new interest and scope to his own life,

JEFFERSON HAMILTON, JR, has added to his roles of businessman, husband and father, another dimensionpursuit of "the life of the educated man" in a suburban setting.

Gardening is Olle of HamillOn's !lobbies: "Owning a home and caring for it gives me a feeling of accomplishment and satisfaction .

I've started a project to raise every tree native to Delaware on my lawn."

Hamilton forgoes loftier pursuits to help daughter Elizabeth repair undermalling of rug: "I guess my most annoying problem is finding time for all the things I have to do, want to do, and ought

10

do."

Inforlllal gathering at Hamilton's hOllle: "J used to think people had to guard against conformity. I discovered that conformity for the most part is just doing what you want to do with people \l'ho want to do the same thing."

Hamilton teaches a church class: "/(s one of those things / ought to do and enjoy as well-one o/the worthwhile activities which are the legitimate responsibilities 0/ the educated man."

Playing the piano, which he taught himself, is another 0/ Hamilton's hobbies: "I keep trying to stretch my repertoire to seven pieces."

and to the lives of others. His thoughts on the various facets of his leisure pursuits are presented in his own words to accompany the pictures on these pages.

A man of action as well as thought, Hamilton plunges enthusiastically into a variety of pursuits, apportioning leisure time for family activities, community projects, and educational interests.

"It's my family that makes the struggle worthwhile and gives me the inspiration I need. I would never trade what I have for what I've passed up.".

Limitations on Private

by Leon Herman Economist,

Library

of

Congress

President Kennedy signs into law a new minimum wage act, while Secretary of Labour Arthur Goldberg, right, assists and Congressional sponsors of the bill look 011.

EVE professional economists in other countries who are well informed about the numerous specific limitations on private property that have evolved with time in all phases of American economic life, often think of these restrictions as being of a secondary, formal order of importance, largely a matter of appearance.

They think that, essentially, everything has remained unchanged: that the power of the private owner over all that he surveys is as complete in the United States today as it was a hundred years ago.

Nothing could be less true. To hold to such an image of American economic reality is to ignore the entire rich historical record of the American nation. The history of economic development in the United States during the past 185 years is, in a very real sense, largely the history of the gradual imposition of the will of the public over the activity of the private entrepreneur and, what is more important, over the main direction and quality of economic life in the nation.

The American people, it must be remembered, have never been blind worshippers of the status quo. They have always been a restless, tinkering people, have always believed that things could be made better. Implied in the idea of improvement has always been the factor of change.

Time and again in the past, when a majority of the nation wanted to, they did not hesitate to modify the established modes of practice in their economic and political affairs.

34

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May 1962

The American people began to employ the national power to modify the established economic order during the first few decades of their history.

Very early, it became clear that this country could not develop its own industry on the basis of the status quo, under which England, with its superior practical experience, could continue indefinitely to produce and deliver to our markets industrial products below the cost of locally produced goods.

So the Government took drastic action to change the economic climate.

It altered the tariff laws radically to provide for import duties on British goods that would be high enough to allow the "infant industries" of the new nation to get established, and yet, to continue to gather strength through competition with industrial products imported from abroad.

In the interest of widening the scope of economic contacts, during the early decades, the Federal Government carried out a series of internal improvements. It provided for more and better roads, canals and waterways as a means of expanding the domestic market. Such active intervention by the state treasury, in the opinion of the majority, was warranted by the important clause in our Constitution dealing with the "general welfare."

Government action was considered most necessary in the thinly populated Western regions of the country during the first half of the nineteenth century.

One effect of these improvements was to reduce the cost of goods to the consumer.

With the coming of the railroad, the Federal Government became actively involved in the promotion of rail transport across the whole country.

In transportation, as well as in education, the Federal Government made its contribution to social progress in a rather ingenious way.

In keeping with the national mood, the idea of direct state operation was rejected. Instead, the Federal Government employed the country's vast unsettled public lands in the west to provide a subsidy for speeding up the process of railway construction.

A total of 180 million acres of public land was distributed in this way.

Grants of land, usually 10 sections of land for each mile of railroad, were given to the railway firms. The rail companies sold the land to new settlers with a dual result: it helped to attract new residents for the west, and it defrayed partially the cost of laying the many miles of tracks across the country.

The Federal Government also employed the fund of public lands to help develop facilities for higher education. A law was passed in 1862 granting uniform tracts of land to each state in proportion to its population. When the land was sold, the revenue was used to provide a permanent endowment for one or more public colleges in each state.

In order to provide a sound economic basis for settlement of the west, the Government passed the Homestead Act of 1862, followed by other legislation in later years. By these acts,

Enterprise

in the United

the nation made available, free of charge, some 200 million acres of public land to settlers who were willing to build a new life for themselves in the sparsely settled, comfortless frontier regions of the country.

These grants of land also served a dual purpose: they stimulated pioneer families to inhabit and subdue a vast continent; they provided opportunity for those citizens who desired to seek a new life in developing the frontier.

The nation, as a whole, benefited.

These energetic settlers soon began to organize a highly efficient system of family farming, thus reducing the cost of food throughout the country and thereby providing more purchasing power to be spent on industrial consumer goods.

When the farmers and small business groups of the nation began to complain, during the 1870's, against certain high-handed tactics employed by the railroads, the Federal Government again intervened. In 1887, Congress passed the Interstate Commerce Act, and set up a commission to regulate the practices and the rates of all railroads passing through more than one state. The companies were required to display their rates in public, and were forbidden to engage in pooling operations, rebates, and other self-serving practices.

As a result of this reform, the United States took a long step away from the laissez-faire type of economy described in the textbooks. The regulation of business practices by an agency of the Federal Government has now been extended to all basic areas of economic activity: electric power generation, communications, trade, advertising, the purity of food and drugs, meat inspection, and so on.

With the large-scale development of industrialization in the United States late in the nineteenth century, another occasion for national action arose when the large corporations began to form combinations, pools, and monopolies that were clearly against the interests of the public. Consumers, farmers, and small business men appealed to the Federal Government for remedial action.

To cope with the problem, and help restore the necessary competition in business activity, the Congress passed the Sherman Anti-Trust Act in 1890, and later the Clayton Act in 1914.

In the special legal powers of the Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission, the public now has two permanent agencies engaged in preventing monopoly combinations and in enforcing fair trade practices.

States

As the economy became more productive, the public in general, and organized labour in particular, began to react against primitive labour conditions, long hours and hazardous conditions of work. In response to this mood, the Government, both on the federal and the state level, adopted a series of protective labour laws. In 1868, the United States Congress enacted legislation providing for the eight-hour work-day which applied to workers employed by or on behalf of the United States Government.

State legislatures soon passed laws fixing an upper limit to the number of hours worked by women and children, and minimum wage levels; laws ordering the installation of labour safety devices in factories and mines; laws establishing a mine and factory inspection service; laws providing for a compensation system to protect workers against the hazards of inpustrial accidents.

-.

As a result of this inter-action between the Government and the public, American workers were the first to enjoy the 8-hour day as well as a high wage level, just as they later became the first to attain the 40-hour work week, along with the highest wage in the world.

The Federal Government also found it necessary to take action on behalf of the interests of the consumer, in such regulatory measures as the Meat Inspection Service, the Pure Food and Drug Law, and others. Laws were also adopted to regulate banking practices, chiefly through the Federal Reserve Board. The electric power industry came to be regulated through the Federal Power Commission.

In 1914, the Congress enacted a law, authorized by an amendment to the Constitution, which established the progressive income tax, based on the ability to pay. Under this revolutionary tax system, the Federal Government possesses significant powers to redistribute income, by taxing high incomes at high rates in order to provide a br0ad range of social services for the nation-at-large.

During the severe economic depression of the 1930's the American public once again turned to the Federal Government for leadership to find new ways for immediate relief and for a more secure economic order.

At that historic moment, the demand for initiative on the part of the Federal Government was almost universal.

As a result of this broad support for Government intervention, the country's basic economic institutions underwent significant and enduring changes.

The basic character of the American economy today derives from the changes wrought by the "New Deal" legal reforms during the period from 1933 to 1940. In that period, the Federal Government wrought major changes in the social and economic landscape of the United States.

Historic innovations included: a comprehensive system of social security; unemployment compensation; old-age pensions; Federal minimum wage laws; a system of collective bargaining in industry between labour and management; comprehensive river basin development; soil conservation; insurance of bank deposits against loss; price supports for farmers; regulation of the activities of brokers selling stocks and bonds to the public.

The experience of the mid-1930's has confirmed the American belief that it is not the proper function of the Government in society to operate the economic enterprises of the nation directly, to try to produce the immense variety of goods and services that make up the daily necessities of life.

Americans do believe, however, that it is the duty of the Government to correct weaknesses in the economic order, through open deliberations and legal action of the elected representatives of the people.

When necessary, and only to the extent necessary, they favour restrictions upon the individual in his economic behaviour in the interest of goals: a achieving two important greater equality of opportunity for all citizens, and a more productive economy for the benefit of society as a whole. In this enterprise, the role of the Government is that of a traffic policeman, directing and guiding but not trying to drive everybody's car.

The collective American experience in economic development over nearly two centuries has justified the people's confidence in the energy and the ultimate social good that is generated by the initiative and drive of the individual when he is engaged in his self-realization, when he follows his urge to improve life for himself and his family.

It is this urge which has built up the vast technical plant and diversified productive system of the United States and the other industrial societies of the West. Americans know, of course, that this creative personal drive has to be harnessed to the vehicle of social and national progress, contained within the framework of the general welfare. Their body of social and economic legislation is based on this tested principle .â&#x20AC;˘

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May 196~

35

THE TOOLMAKER FRED DUNKMAN is master of a craft vitally important to American industry: toolmaking.

Unlike some crafts, that of the toolmakers has grown in importance with the ever increasing mechanization of industry.

Toolmakers build fixtures and jigs to hold, support, or guide machine tools; dies to cut or shape things to be made; gauges to measure dimensions or tolerances. Engineers design industry's tools but toolmakers make many of them. Their skill is especially valuable when a factory starts to "tool up" to make a new product.

Dunkman is employed by a large company which manufactures farm and construction machinery, trucks, engines, and other equipment. He is one of forty-seven toolmakers at the Midwestern plant where 3,528 people ma,ke engines. When the company decided to build a V-8 engine to power its largest trucks, the toolmakers had a big hand in getting it intD production.

Since becoming a toolmaker, Dunkman has completed innumerable jobs demanding measurements in microns and seconds of angles, for the tools

he makes to hold or guide other tools must be accurate. If they didn't conform to precision standards, neither would the engines produced, resulting in poor performance and angry customers.

Dunkman earns $2.72 an hour for a forty-hour week. When the job requires it, he works overtime, receiving time-and-a-half pay, or $4.08, for every hour after forty. Wage scales are agreed on in negotiations between the company management and the AFL-CIO United Automobile Workers whose two local unions represent

'HE TOOLMAKER

(Continued)

about 3,200 of the plant's employees.

The average wage for all workers in the plant is $2.22 an hour, seven cents more than the average for the entire automotive industry.

Fred Dunkman and 150,000 other toolmakers throughout the country belie the widely held belief that mass production has doomed the craftsman. So do Dunkman's friends among the carpenters, steamfitters, sheet metal workers, electricians, pattern makers, and other apprenticeable trades. It is thanks largely to mass production that the number of skilled workers in American mills and factories is higher today than it ever was before.

Now thirty-three, Dunkman has been with the same company all his working life except for four years of military service during World War II. Like many other skilled craftsmen, he began as an apprentice after graduation from a technical secondary school.

During this period he received on-thejob training supplemented by technical lectures and the study of mathematics under an instructor at the plant-a total of 8,000 hours. Now, in his turn, he is helping to train a young apprentice.

As a master craftsman, one of Dunkman's recent assignments was to fashion a milling fixture-a drill guide to locate precisely where to drill a hole in the new V-8 engine. Experts calculated he would need 375 working hours to make the drill guide. But he completed this assignment-in the steps shown on these pages-in eightyeight hours less than the estimated figure.

Dunkman is a soft-spoken man with an air of quiet competence. Of his job he says: "You have to know a little about a lot of things. Some of it - can't be taught-you have to pick it up yourself."

Dunkman lives with his wife and son in a five-room house which also is the home of two Boston terriers and two parakeets. Both Virginia, who is thirty, and Freddie, now nine, are fond of games. So Dunkman has turned the basement into a pleasant recreation room where the family and their friends play darts, ping pong, and cards. Dunkman also has made many other improvements in the little house.

The Dunkmans bought their 8,500dollar home in 1948 under a government-financed mortgage which they are paying off at the rate of fifty dollars a month. On their automobile they make smaller monthly payments which they will complete in two years.

After buying food, paying taxes, and meeting other expenses, they save about forty dollars a month .â&#x20AC;˘ 38

span

May 1962

COMMENCING

FOLLOWING

A JOB. Dunkman (1) explains 10 an apprentice the blueprint of a guide for drilling an surface of the block and scribes on it the blueprint dimensions, and sees (4)

UP THE JOB. Dunkmall (6) makes sure Ihe welding of additional pieces 10 Ihe blod fixture. The drill "uide is mounted on the assembly lille (9). It /iIS (10) am

A TOOLMAKER'S

FAMILY

LIFE. Dunkman, an expert on mechanical power, uses manpower (1J) 10 letters on !lis portable typewriter. The Dunkmans occasionally go

I

oil-return hole in engine blocks. The first step (2) is to grind a steel block, held in place by powerful electromagnets, to specified size. Next, (3) Dunkman inks the thatthefixturegetsafinepolish before the exact spot is marked. Dunkman is also on hand (5) when the crucial guide hole is drilled.

follows the design. He checks (7) the completed fixture against the blueprint, and, always careful, asks the foreman (8) to confirm a detail with the designer of the Js in operation on the production line, guiding a drill into the block of a new engine.

mow his lawn. With his wife and son Freddie (J 2) he sometimes watches television during leisure hours. Freddie, in the quiet of his own room (13), likes to write in the evenings (14) to watch outdoor movies from their car.

armchair perspective The Bhagavad-Grta

and a New England Quaker

A

CENTURY ago, or even within my lifetime, John Greenleaf Whittier was regarded by his fellowAmericans as a beloved and talented poet, second only to Longfellow in his simple appeal to the common man.

Today, when literary tastes shrink from simplicity and the homely beauty of the commonplace, Whittier is often and flippantly dismissed as a sentimental poetaster unworthy of serious attention.

It is not my purpose to "rediscover" Whittier as one of America's major poets; I propose, however, to exhibit to Indian readers some of his unjustly forgotten merits and especially to indicate his debt to ancient Indian literature.

Whittier was born in 1807 on a farm near a small Massachusetts town. His parents were Quakers, members of a Christian sect which stresses the "Inner Light," the mystic communion of the individual soul with God, and which abhors violence and war and values serenity and tolerance. Whittier's rural boyhood and his Quaker _ faith determined the salient characteristics of his life and work-his comfortable devotion to the "common unrhymed poetry-of simple life and country ways," and his zeal for social justice.

Whittier's affection for sunlit rural scenes is evident in scores of poems, including his much-maligned "The Barefoot Boy," where he recollects his childhood, "Where Where Where Where

the whitest lilies grow, the freshest berries grow, the ground-nut trails its vine, the wood-grapes' clusters shine."

His ability to summon up the joys of old-fashioned family life on the farm are beautifully displayed in "SnowBound" (1866), a fairly long poem which older generations of Americans used to love and know by heart; it probably is his best-wrought artistic achievement. A modern critic describes it as "a faultless integration of precisely remembered detail and tender devotion."

In "Snow-Bound," the poet recollects a week in the Whittier household when "the chill embargo" of a New England snow-storm cut the family off from the world. As the wind roars outside, the children sit about the fireplace: "And ever, when a louder blast Shook beam and rafter as it passed, The merrier up its roaring draught The great throat of the chimney laughed, The hous-e-dog on his paws outspread Laid to the fire his drowsy head, The eat's dark silhouette on the wall A couchant tiger's seemed to fall."

But Whittier's energies were by no means spent only in recreating homely rural idylls. For thirty years he was a fervent "abolitionist," combating the institution of human slavery in the United States. He gave his best strength to the cause, writing much verse and journalistic prose in support of it. Inspired by the ideals of common brotherhood bequeathed to him by his Quaker parents and forefathers, he persevered and suffered persecution in his efforts to bring freedom to the Negroes. For some critics, this crusade of Whittier's is a greater claim to remembrance by posterity than his poctry.

Whittier had relatively little formal education and it would seem unlikely that this rustic American bard and reformer should become fascinated with the complexities of Indian literature. Nevertheless, in the autumn 40

Span

May 1962

of his life he became an eager reader of all the books he could lay hands on which dealt with Eastern lore.

His friend Emerson lent him a copy of the Bhagavad-Gita which deeply impressed him. He wrote to Emerson, "I will keep it until I restore it to thee personally in exchange for Geo. Fox. It (the Gita) is a wonderful bookand has greatly excited my curiosity to know more of the religious literature of the East." (Fox was the founder of the Society of Friends, or Quakers.) Whittier apparently was well acquainted with Max Miiller's set of translated volumes, The Sacred Books of the East, and read in the files of the Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, from which he derived the idea of his poem, "The Dead Feast of the Kol Folk." He had in his library volumes of Eastern poetry translated by his American friends, William R. Alger and Bayard Taylor, and was greatly influenced by the translations and paraphrases of Hindu literature made by Sir Edwin Arnold. Although he knew no Sanskrit, he read dozens of other second-hand accounts of Indian religion and poetry.

In addition to having considerable knowledge of the ancient Hindu faith, Whittier also knew and admired the nineteenth century religious movement known as Brahmo Samaj, which he somewhat cryptically called "the greatest event in the history of Christianity since the days of Paul."

The effect of his readings in Oriental literature was abundantly evident in his later poetic production. The narrative poem "Shah Akbar" has real merit and "The Over-Heart" reveals significant influence of Hindu thought. A striking example of his use of Indian material is his well-known "The Brewing of Soma." The first part of this poem is based directly on a passage of Vedic literature (doubtless found in The Sacred Books of the East) which describes the preparation and use of the potent, sacrificial drink. The latter part of Whittier's poem is a beautiful hymn which has become one of the best-loved religious songs in the Protestant Christian hymnal. One of the stanzas reads: . "Breathe through the heats of our desire Thy coolness and Thy balm; Let sense be dumb, let flesh retire; Speak through the earthquake, wind and fire, o still small voice of calm I"

If it seems paradoxical that this American minor poet, seemingly so provincial a product of the New England countryside, should have become enmeshed in Indian religious lore, we must remember two explanatory facts: first, the New England of his time, as is shown in writings of Emerson, Thoreau and others, was Indiaoriented, and the literature of India was not unfamiliar to Whittier's large circle of friends; second, Whittier was a Quaker, and as such his longing for the quiet soul and his rejection of violence were so akin to some of the basic contours of Hinduism that Whittier found in Indian literature the thoughts of congenial spirits.

Something of the quality of Whittier's gentle religious ideals can be felt in lines he wrote on the death of a dear friend: "He had somehow reached a state of absolute quietude-a region of ineffable calm, blown over by no winds of hope or fear. All personal anxieties and solicitudes were unknown. The outward world was phantasmal and unreal. ... ".

A PUNJABI FAMILY in California's

forty years ago Tuly Singh, a young Sikh farmer of Jundiala, Punjab, left his home, wife and children, in search of new opportunities overseas. After a trip to Canada and other parts of North America he arrived in the State of California in .the American west.

Among the fruit-orchard farmers of California's Central Valley, he found several of his countrymen already settled. Here Tuly Singh toiled for many years, looking forward to the day when he would be joined by his children and grandchildren. They are with him now, comfortably settled on the orchards he owns in Sutter County.

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Tuly Singh is proud of his success, but he cherishes even more the achievements of his son, Guizar Johl, an osteopathic physician and surgeon who specializes in diseases of the eye.

Guizar uses the family name of Johl while his father uses the surname Singh. Dr. Johl maintains his practice in a professional office building which he constructed and owns in Yuba City, seat of Sutter County.

As they would in India, the Singhs and the Johls live together in one house. Mrs. Singh and Mrs. Johl find their life in California a happy and busy one. Both women left India for the United States only after their

husbands had established themselves in their new home. Their daily interests are preparing Indian dishes for family meals, doing household tasks with modern equipment, and making their home a comfortable and cheerful one.

Tuly Singh arrived in California by way of Canada in 1924 and began his life as a farm worker in the Valley.

He was a foreman for more than thirty years. During this time he developed his own business interests and today he owns several large orchards where he grows peaches, plums and almonds of choice quality. He is also the owner of a seventy-five-acre tree and shrub nursery, selling his products

In the Agricultural Extension Service offices in Yuba City, Director Ben Ramsaur explains tree root diseases to the orchardist.

A PUNJABI FAMI LY

(Continuecf)

The County Agent takes soil specimens from Tuly Singh's farm, below. They are analyzed and discussed with him, opposite, by Director Ramsaur.

County Agricultural Agent George Post advises Tuly Singh on mechanization problems.

to both wholesale dealers and private individuals. Very recently he has started a self-service retail division of his tree nursery-the first of its kind in the area.

Like other farmers in the Valley, Tuly Singh utilizes the counsel and guidance made available to him by the Agricultural Extension Service.

County agriculture agents, specialists who are affiliated with the U.S. Department of Agriculture through State and local governments, visit his ranch and orchards and help him with problems of soil utilization, crop planning, farming practices and mechanization. Tuly Singh keeps upto-date on developments in agriculture and new findings from research studies through this free public service. Ben Ramsaur, Director of the Agricultural Extension Service in Yuba City, is also a personal friend of the Indian farmer. Throughout the area, Ramsaur is known for his readiness to answer questions and help individual

A PUNJABI FAMILY

(Contil/ued)

farmers with their special problems.

Tuly Singh belongs to several agricultural organizations. He is less active now than formerly, because of his age, but retains his membership in the Sutter County Farm Bureau, the Canning Peach Association, the California Canners and Growers Association, and the California Nurserymen's Association. The co-operatives of which Tuly Singh is a member help him market the products of his orchards and nurseries. In addition to aiding in marketing, the associations assist in pricing and shipping problems. They operate processing plants, maintain purchasing services and conduct independent scientific

research projects for improving the quality of production.

GuIzar joined his father in California in 1948. Although he had finished high school in India, he received his higher education in the United States. He took his premedical training at Yuba Junior College in Marysville, graduating in 1949. Continuing his studies at Sacramento State College, he majored in biology and was graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree. He then enrolled at Chico State College, Chico, California, and in 1952 obtained his Master's degree in science.

The following year, GuIzar joined the College of Osteopathy and served

Three generations of the Punjabi family, below live at Tuly Singh's home. Dr. Johl and his sons are in the middle row, Mrs. Singh und Mrs. Johl at the rear.

Fourteen-year-old Malkiat Jahl explains the game of foothall 10 a friend of his grandfalher.

A PUNJABI

FAMILY

(Continued)

his internship at the Civil Centre Hospital in Oakland, California. Later he joined the staff at the Dupont Eye Clinic in Los Angeles. In July 1961, he established his own private practice and an eye clinic in Yuba City.

Guizar's mother has been living in California since 1958: his wife and two sons joined him last year. The ladies wear their native Punjabi dress and often wo;-ship at a special shrine for women in the home of a neigl1bouring friend.

The liveliest members of the household are Dr. J ohI's sons: Piara, ai;e seventeen, and Malkiat, fourteen.

The elder son is a senior at Sutter Union High School and plans to entcr Yuba College next term. The younger boy is completing elementary sC;lOol and will soon enter high school. Both boys like their schools and participate in organized sports and school social activities. They have caught on quickly to SUC!lgames as football and baseball.

Religion is an important part of the family's life. Besides daily prayers at home, they drive to Stockton, nearly a hundred miles from Yuba City, to take part in the services at the Sikh temple there. This spiritual centre, established in 1913, has over four hundred members. Many families in .the congregation come to worship at the temple from even greater distances than the Singhs and the J ohls.

Tuly Singh has said that settling in the United States was a step that he had contemplated as a young man, after a trip to Canada and other parts of North America in 1914. Ten years later, he arrived in California to stay and make his home. Like many other Sikhs who have settled in the Central Valley, he has made his contribution to the growth and development of California agriculture.

And, he has brought to his adopted country the vital traditions of his faith and the cultural heritage of India.

"These immigrants from India are proud to be Americans but they also love India," observed an Indian journalist who recently visited Sutter County.

"They now feel that they are Americans, just as do the Irish, Italians, English, Germans and others who came here.".