SPAN: June 1973 by SPAN magazine

THE MONTAGE OF AMERICAN MAGAZINES AT LEFT SYMBOLIZES THE THEME OF THIS ISSUE: THE WORLD OF MAGAZINES, ITS DIVERSITY AND EXCITEMENT, ITS COLOR AND INNOVATION, ITS CYCLE OF DEATH AND REBIRTH AS MAGAZINES DIE WHILE NEW ONES ARE BORN. SEE PAGE 5 FOR THE INTRODUCTION TO THIS SPECIAL ISSUE OF SPAN ON 'THE WORLD OF MAGAZINES.'

SPAN Front cover: Cartoonist Mario's ebullient sketch of a magazine-mad world may seem a trifle exaggerated. But who knows what will happen if periodicals proliferate at their current rate? SPAN's theme this month is the magazine world. Back cover: A modern, electronic railway yard streaks a shining pattern through the Kansas City landscape in this photo by Emory Kristof. For more pictures by photographers of the National Geographic magazine, see pages 22-27.

America's Role in the World An Interview with Ural Alexis Johnson

5 6 8 12 16

The World of Magazines Would You Believe? What American Editors Say What Indian Editors Say 'All That Matters Is the Reader Out There' by Geraldine Rhoads

'My Commitment Is to Justice to My Craft' An Interview with Khushwant Singh

Magazine Design by Allen F. Hurlburt

Globetrotters Rediscover America

Legendary Editor: Ross of 'The New Yorker' by James Thurber

Scholar of Magazine Writers: Edmund Wilson

36 37

The Economist as Magazine Columnist The Corporation and Society: Two Views Milton Friedman and Paul Samuelson

Are Illustrators Obsolete? by Alan E. Cober

'Development Reconsidered' by E.P. W. da Costa

Managing Editor: Carmen Kagal. Editorial Staff: Mohammed Reyazuddin, Avinash Pasricha, Nirmal Sharma, Krishan Gabrani, M. M. Saha. Art Director: Nand Katyal. Art Staff: Kuldip Singh Jus, B. Roy Choudhury, Kanti Roy, Gopi Gajwani. Production Manager: Awtar S. Marwaha. Photographic Services: USIS Photo Lab. Published by the United States Information Service, Bahawalpur House, Sikandra Road, New Delhi, on behalf of the American Embassy, New Delhi. Printed by Arun K. Mehta at Vakil & Sons Private Limited, Vakils House, Sprott Road, 18 Ballard Estate, Bombay-400001. Photographs: Inside front cover-Barry M. Blackman. l6-courtesy Woman's Day. 37-T. Takahara, courtesy World Health. Inside back cover -Josephus Daniels .. Use of SPAN articles in other publications is encouraged, except when copyrighted. For permission, write to the Editor. Subscription: One year, rupees five; single copy, fifty paise. No new subscriptions can be accepted at this time. For change of address, send old address from a recent SPAN envelope along with new address to the Circulation Manager, USIS, New Delhi. Allow six weeks for change of address to become effective.

AMERIC~S ROLE IN THE WORLD Ambassador Ural Alexis Johnson discusses some of the newer aspects of American foreign policy in this interview with Barrett McGurn, U.S. Information Agency staff writer. QUESTION: Mr. Ambassador, looking back overyourfour decades in diplomacy, how would you outline the fundamental changes you have observed in the role and nature of the diplomat? JOHNSON: In the pre-World War II period, the United States was not involved in trying to influence or direct events in the world. We had the Neutrality Act. We had the isolationist sentiment in this country. In general, we were withdrawn from the world, and trying to stay out of its troubles. Of course we, as diplomats, represented this policy and thus were essentially observers of what was going on, and did not seek to mold events. Two things have taken place in the postwar period. First is that, whether we willed it or not, we are involved, and we can no longer take a detached view of the rest of the world. Because what goes on in the rest of the world affects us, and affects our people very, very much. Out of this grows the fact that virtually everything we do in the United States has an influence upon some f.oreign nation, and what foreign nations do has an influence upon what happens here in the United States. So the old line between foreign and domestic policy no longer really exists. QUESTION: In going over various speeches you've given recently, Mr. Ambassador, I noticed your reference to thefact that the State Department is now involved in 600 conferences a year. That certainly indicates the greater interrelationship of world affairs. Is thereany time to think with such tremendous involvement in minuteto-minute responsibilities? Or, ought we to look at it the other way around-that this is a reflection of the fact that an active and lively diplomacy is chipping away at many worldproblems? JOHNSON: I think, as you say, we need to look at it the other way around. What this shows is interdependence in the world. These conferences which range from tuna fish and radio frequencies to NATO ministerial meetings are, of course, somewhat of a problem. But I see them not so much as a problem but as examples of the depth and breadth, you might say, of our interests in the world today.

QUESTION: The public, I think, often believes that when an international negotiation starts, it means that a/l problems will be resolved, that the other country will no longer be an adversary in areas outside the negotiations. [have the impression that very often discouragement follows negotiations because of that euphoria at the outset. You now have Phase II of the SALT talks. Do you think it is wisefor world opinion to realize that limited o~iectives are all that can ever be achieved, even though limited objectives may be, indeed, of capital importance to all countries? JOHNSON: Yes, I think that you touch upon a very fundamental point. The fact that two countries are able to find a common interest and reach an agreement on one aspect of their relations doesn't mean that automatically all their problems disappear. For example, take such good friends as Canada and the United Kingdom. We have grave differences with them over many issues. With the Soviet Union we have found certain areas of common interest: nonproliferation of nuclear weapons, and the SALT agreements that have been entered into. These are fairly narrow areas but, as you say, they are areas of great importance. However, success in these talks doesn't mean that all the problems between ourselves and the Soviet Union are going to disappear overnight. I expect the Soviet Union and the Soviet negotiators to look after their interests in a hardheaded way and I intend to look after American interests in a hardheaded way. The job that we both have is to find out whether there is any common ground upon which an agreement can be reached. I hope and expect there is, but I don't think that we should expect a resolution ofÂˇ all our problems with the Soviet Union. QUESTION: Mr. Ambassador, you used thephrase" hardheaded." Some people, thinking of the current East- West talks, think that the way to foster detente is to reduce our military strength and to weaken our alliances. Does that fit in with your concept of a proper hardheaded approach?

JOHNSON: No, most emphatically not. I feel that the advances which have been made in our relations, and in the relations of Western Europe, with the Soviet Union, have been made because of our alliances. They have been made because of NATO, and because we have been able to demonstrate that the Soviet Union does not have anything to gain by overt aggression. I think that this is true for China also. I think that the improvement of relations with Peking has not been accomplished in spite of our security arrangements with East Asia. I think that this improvement has been accomplished in large part because of them. I think we should be very slow to dismantle those elements of our policy which have led us to the degree of success which we have achieved. Granted, it is a limited degree of success. But certainly if we dismantle these elements we cannot expect further accomplishments. I don't expect the Soviet Union to throwaway its cards. And I don't think the Soviet Union expects us to throwaway our cards. QUESTION: I gather that you feel that alliances tend to remove from the adversary the temptation to indulge in threats or to use force and, with those alternatives eliminated, to encourage him to go into negotiations? JOHNSON: Precisely so. That's very well put. QUESTION: In determining the area of mutual interest-again going back to your phrase of being «hardheaded"-I assume that you mean to answer in your own mind various questions such as: What are, seen from the other side, the areas of mutual interest? What are the others' motivations? Some people, thinking of the many talks now coming up with the Russians, are asking other questions: What does the Soviet Union have in mind at this time? Is the Soviet Union trying to get international recognition of some sort of nuclear parity with the United States? Or recognition of its dominion over Eastern Europe? Is the Soviet Union trying to get a rollback of America's forces in Europe, coupled with an increase of its own influence there? Other questions that come to mind are these: How can we have a broad detente with the Communist powers when they continue to insist on their right to support what they call «wars of national liberation" inside other countries? There is also the question of the Brezhnev Doctrine. Do you mean' to explore the areas of disagreement as you attempt to narrow down the areas of real agreement? JOHNSON: Well, as far as the Soviets are.concerned, let's say that they, like all of us, have a complex of motives. I think you mentioned some factors which undoubtedly go into the complex of Soviet motives. The SALT talks in which I am involved are, of course, carefully confined to strategic arms between the two I countries. We have other forums of discussion for some of these other questions, for example, the Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe (CSCE), the Conference on Mutual and Balanced Force Reductions (MBFR), and bilateral talks. You've mentioned one of the fundamental philosophical problems that has always existed between ourselves and the Soviet Union-the Soviet insistence upon their right to support "wars of national liberation," and their insistence on the right to maintain contact with Communist parties in non-Communist countries, when these parties are dedicated to the overthrow of the very governments with whom the Soviets are maintaining diplomatic relations. This is the fundamental problem between ourselves and the Soviet Union, and it is far, from being resolved. I hope that in the CSCE talks some progress may be made in resolving this problem.

QUESTION: ,As we go forward with these important talks with the Communist world several other questions come to mind. One is: Was there ever really any «monolithic Communism?" If so, could it return? Another is: Did the Domino Theory ever have any validity? Is it wholly invalid now? Have you reached a conclusion on these questions? JOHNSON: Those are good questions. Let's deal with the first one. Yes, there was in my view a monolithic Communism with the center in Moscow. I'm talking about the days prior to World War II, and even after World War II prior to the emergence of Peking. Prior to the emergence of Peking as another Communist power center, foreign Communist parties, and the Communist ideology, were largely controlled by the Soviet Union, and served Soviet purposes. The Soviets were able to use the international Communist movement to serve their own purposes. Now, with the emergence of Peking as another center of Communist power, and with the emergence of Yugoslavia and the other countries in the Eastern .bloc, Communism no longer is monolithic. It's no longer solely the tool and the instrument of Moscow. This means that Communism represents a different problem and a different threat than it did previously, and calls for different kinds of answers. In fact you might say it complicates foreign policy and diplomacy. The old answers simply are not sufficient in this polycentric world. Now, as far as the Domino Theory is concerned, I suppose it has various meanings to various people. To me, the Domino Theory simply states that what happens in a country has an effect upon its neighbors. I think this is undeniable. What that effect is going to be, and its extent and seriousness depend upon the interplay of factors between the two countries. QUESTION: Mr. Ambassador, we are in a complicated, more challenging, more difficult polycentric world. I believe on occasion you have spoken of the «geometry" underlying the new world relationships and of triangular, quadrilateral, and pentagonal relationships. Weren't these «geometric" underpinnings always there?Or is it that in the new world of the jet plane and the communicationssatellite these geometric relations are a more difficult problem for diplomacy? JOHNSON: Well, it's not only a function of transportation and communications, it's also a function of power centers. You have had Japan emerge as a major economic power center in Asia. You have Peking. You have Western Europe and the European Community. Now, we used to think in terms of a "WashingtonMoscow axis." This figure of speech is no longer applicable. What you have now is a Washington-Moscow-European Community triangle, a Washington-Moscow-Peking triangle, and a PekingMoscow-Tokyo triangle. I say "triangle" because there are movements and forces taking place within each of the three legs of each of these triangles, and these triangles overlap each other. Thus, as you can see, things have become a lot more complicated than they were, and in many ways, for a diplomat, a lot more interesting. QUESTION: Do you feel that U.S. foreign aid is going to be a continuing necessity? JOHNSON: Well, your use of the term "aid" raises a red flag as far as I'm concerned. That term has caused much misunderstanding in this country of our relations with the developing countries. "Aid" carries with it the sense of charity. It carries with it the sense of the superior and the inferior, and the inherent inequalities of the rich man helping the poor man. To me these connotations have no place in o:ur international relations. We need to think in terms of co-operation with other countries for coinm~n ends

and common purposes, or in terms of investment, if you will. You can properly use the term "aid," I suppose, in connection with the Marshall Plan. But I think everyone would agree that it was a magnificent investment as far as the United States is concerned. You can use the term "aid" with respect to our relations with Japan in the postwar periOd. It wasn't giving alms to the poor, but it was an investment that has paid us big dividends. Now, each case has brought its own problems, but these are the problems of success. As far as the developing world is concerned, I think we have to realize that unless the developing countries feel they have a stake in the system that we're supporting, that we're not going to get support from them. I think we've got to think in terms of an investment in the developing world. Not as charity, but in the interest of the United States. And I think as far as the receiving country is concerned this is also important-that it be a selfrespecting relationship, rather than one being in the position -of an alms-taker. QUESTION: Diplomats clearly will be involved heavi~y with economics in the next decade or two. Will that be true also in relation to the Soviet Unionfor instance? Will the need of the Soviet Union for credits and new technologies and managerial expertise be a factor in our ongoing negotiations with them? JOHNSON: Oh, very much so. Of course the economic relations between ourselves and the Communist world are growing very fast. This growth is not entirely one-sided. We are interested in the energy supplies and raw material supplies available from them. This is good because, for an economic system to be healthy, it has to be two-way. The problem is going to be how you develop this two-way relationship in a way that will be satisfactory to both countries and both areas, and that it really be in our interest. QUESTION: I would like to ask a question about another area in which you've had a lot of experience, the Far East. Much of your diplomatic career has been spent there. Is the role of the Far Eastits culture, civilization, politics, diplomacy, economics-something you feel we have neglected as a nation? JOHNSON: Yes, given the amount of time I've spent out there -I naturally feel this way, but apart from that, looking at the facts of the situation, you have a Japan which is now the second economic power in the free world behind ourselves, and which is very rapidly approaching the Soviet Union in total economic power. You have the nearly 900 million people of China who have an unparalleled historical record. Nobody in the world comes even close to them as far as continuing civilization is concerned. They fell behind during the industrial revolution in the 19th century, but there is nothing inherently inferior about them, quite the contrary. Then you have the 100 million people, say, of Indonesia. Then you can go on around-the 550 million people of India and so on. My point is this, in terms of sheer mass, power, capability, influence in the world, Asia is going to be an increasingly dominant factor, and we do have deep cultural differences between us. We have difficulty in understanding each other. And if we're going to have peace in the Pacific, if we're going to have peace between ourselves and Asia, it's going to be necessary for both Asia and ourselves to do infinitely more than we have in the past to promote real mutual understanding.

QUESTION: I suppose there are some people who feel that the United States is out of Vietnam for isolationist reasons and, eventual~y, will do the same elsewhere in Asia and even in Europe. Is this (ruefor Vietnam? Is it true for Asia? And do Europe and Asia equate in any case? JOHNSON: I say to my Asian friends that it's interesting to note that the United States was involved in Asia even while it isolated itself from Europe and the rest of the world. We founded our second consulate in the world in Canton, and established an Asiatic Fleet in 1850. This was the fleet which Commodore Perry used to open Japan. We sent not only a fleet but 'also a land expeditionary force to the Philippines in 1898. In 1900 we sent an American expeditionary force to China and American forces were maintained there right down to December 7, 1941. The United States historically has been very active in the Pacific. In many ways we're more a part of the Pacific-geographically, with our states in the Pacific, and so on-than we are of Europe. From that historical perspective, I don't see the United States withdrawing from the Pacific and Asia. As far as Europe is concerned, I think it's going to be quite some time before the United States comes to the conclusion that the security of Western Europe isn't of importance to us. NATO -our whole approach to Europe-has been based on the fundamental premise that the security of Europe is not only of interest to the countries of Western Europe but is of interest to the United States. Clearly, I think we're going to remain involved there. QUESTION: The final question I'd like to ask is this: Have we already, perhaps without even noticing it, gone into an era of international interdependence? Is there a chance that we are now entering a period of world peace such as we have not had since before 1914? Conversely, is this really still nonetheless a fragile peace? What should we be doing as a nation, as an alliance and as negotiators to protect that fragile peace? JOHNSON: Well, I would refer to what I said previously, we should certainly not dismantle the structure that's enabled us to get as far as we have thus far. I agree that peace is fragile but there are strong motivations on both sides for maintaining it. We have been able to avoid major conflicts between the majorpowers, and I would hope and expect that this can be continued. Because it is quite clear that major war-nuclear war-between the great powers is no longer a profitable course of action. I think we have been moving imperceptibly toward increasing interdependence. We are enormously mixed up with each other. We are co-operating on narcotics, co-operating on international communications, co-operating on air traffic, co-operating on international crime, on the role of the multinational company and so on. Most of these are not problems that can be solved better by international co-operation-they can only be solved by international co~operation. So, we've all been forced into it. And for the good of all of us! 0 Ural Alexis Johnson was America's Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs before his appointment early this year as Ambassador-atLarge and chief negotiator in the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT) with the Soviet Union. He has held many other important posts including that of u..S. envoy to Czechoslovakia, Japan and Thailand. He is the only foreign service officer on active duty who holds the rank of career ambassador, the highest rank in the U.S. Foreign Service.

T5e

~C7t'l)Toild.of

"The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated," Mark Twain once cabled to the U.S. after hearing that certain newspapers had published his obituary. The 22,500 American magazine editors should be sending similar cables because-despite reports to the contrary-the magazine industry in the United States is alive and well. The premature obituary of American magazines was engendered by the recent deaths of such giants as Life and Look-and earlier of Collier's, Woman's Home Companion and American. The millions of devoted readers of these five magazines will continue to miss them, but the great mass of Americans are already too busy reading The New Yorker, Harper's, Playboy, Intellectual Digest, Psychology Today, Popular Science, Consumer Reports, and the thousands of other publications that comprise the staggering 22,500 magazines being published today in the United States. Each year the number of new U.S. magazines far exceeds the number that dies. Always in a state offerment, the world of American magazines is now in the throes of a massive upheaval which seems to spell the end of the mass-circulation, generalinterest picture magazine-a victim of spiraling production costs, high mailing rates, and a loss of advertisements to television. Taking over from the mass publications are a spate of small, special-audience magazines catering to limited groups. Magazine publishers are finally discovering what sociologists have always known: America is not one monolithic mass of people; it is a lot of small masses; it is a heterogeneous, pluralistic, richly diversified society of bewildering complexity, of myriad interests. As a result, the American magazine reader today is surrounded by the largest and most diverse collection of periodicals in the world. His real problem-and chief frustration-is finding the time to read all that he would like to. Because there are magazines covering everything from bird-watching to antique-collecting, orthodontics to horseracing, yoga to wine-tasting. The publications that are thriving in America today are those with a clearly defined audience. Take Cosmopolitan, which is oriented toward the unmarried working girl. Its editor, Helen Gurley Brown, says: "A magazine today must be visceral. It must hit the readers where they live and think." The game plan for publishers today is qualitative rather than quantitative. It is no longer how many read your magazine but who reads it-so much so that the new slogan of the industry seems to be: "Think small." In devoting an entire issue of SPAN (except for pages 2-4) to "The World of Magazines," we hope to reflect some of the excitement and innovation taking place in magazine journalism. This month's contents include the views of U.S. and Itldian editors on subjects ranging from finances to the future of magazines; a profile of former New Yorker editor Harold Ross, "the most meticulous, hair-splitting, detailcriticizer the world of editing has known;" divergent views on the social responsibility of business by the distinguished economists and magazine columnists Milton Friedman and Paul Samuelson; and a review by the well-known Indian editor E.P.W. da Costa of a controversial new book on economic development. The visual aspect of periodicals, an:~rea of great experimentation, is represented by articles on magazine design_ and illustration and a series of memorable color pictures by N arional Geographic photographers. To those who charge that magazines are transient things, to be glanc~d at and cast aside, there is strong refutation in the assessment of Edmund Wilson, most of whose books consist of pieces originally written fof, magazines. There are big differences between the magazine'scene in the U.S. and in India. Here, the general-interest magazine is flourishing, special-interest periodicals are still growing in number, and television is but a distant threat on the media horizon. But in both countries the reader is becoming more demanding. It is still true that his ~ attention must be caught by snappy layouts, engaging leads. But once caught, the reader demands substance in his reading. To editors starting new magazines we would give this advice: Beware of the dazzling design devoid of content, the slick layout laboring'" to save the empty article. Beware lest your readers say, to quote Edmund Wilson less in this than meets the eye." on a poet he felt ~as superficially brillia~t:'''There's

C/ y ~agazlne~

(,"

l)~\)YC

ILLUSTRATION

Nine out of every 10 American adults read magazines. This amounts to some 112 million persons aged 18 years and older, each of whom reads an average of seven different publications a month.

Thriving without any advertising.

Consumer Reports is a major U.S. magazine The voluminous Sunday editions of newspapers carry a special magazine insert for general-interest readers. Parade, distributed with 100 newspapers. is the largest in circulation.

American magazines live by public acceptance, and die when it dwindles sharply. In 1950. 33 general and farm magazines boasted of circulations of at least one million. Today, eight of these magazines have ceased publication; but the number of magazines with circulations of one million or more has risen to 53.

(circulation, two million). It gives critical appraisals of a wide variety of goodsfrom autos to washing machines.

Ten largest U.S. magazines: all monthly, except T.V. Guide which is weekly. Magazine 1. Reader's Digest 2. T. V. Guide

29,728,098 (17,827,661 in U.S.) 16,410,858

3. Woman's Day

8,191,731

4. Better Homes & Garden3

7,996,050

5. Family Circle

7,889,587

6. McCall's

7,516,960

7. National Geographic

7,260,179

8. Ladies' Home Journal 9. Playboy 10. Good Housekeeping

6,400,573 5,801,477

J BELIeJ7. . LlONa

KALISH

~.?

In 1741, AndrelV Bradford broilght out the first magazine in the American colonies, which he appropriately called

A reccnt naTionwide poll of young people aged 14 [0 25 showed thaI 74 per cent of aI/males and 92 per cent of aI/ females queried believe that magazines contribute most to their knowledge about cloThes and fashion.

American Magazine. The periodical died aff('/' three I/Ionths, but the vast outpouring 0/ Al/lerican magazines had begun.

Two-thirds of all magazines sold are mailed to homes on long-term subscriptions (usually a year in duration). The rest are bought as single copies at some 113,000 newsstands, drugstores, supermarkets and other retail outlets across America.

magazine circulation has grown twice as faST as the U.S. population.

Americans can now choose from more than 9,500 different magazines published for the general public. Twenty years ago there were 7,000. In 1972, Americans bought more than 5,500 million copies of magazines, compared with about 3,500 million in 1950.

A single set of' house plans, offered by Better Homes & Gardens magazine, broughT orders frol1l 29,000 readers, and accounted for the constmetion of'more than 6,000 homes.

For an authoritative view of what's happening in the fascinating and diverse realm of American magazines, SPAN polled the men and women in a position to know best: the editors of a number of leading publications. The names of these editors are listed with thumbnail descriptions of their magazines. Their answers to the questions at right appear in the horizontal columns below.

1 "Our

goal is to broaden the horizons and enrich the lives of Americans as active citizens in a democracy. We aim at all ages and we try to publish articles of immediate impact and lasting interest."

2 "The

Digest seeks to protect and preserve what is best in America and to point the way to improvement wherever and whenever it seems desirable."

1 "We aim to reflect industrial life

in ink and paper, word and picture- and to provide stimulating intelligence and analysis for a literate audience of business leaders. Our magazine was conceived as a medium through which the managers of the business world for the

3 "Measuring

impact is difficult and controversial, but two facts about the Digest seem above controversy: We have the largest circulation in the world. We take editorial positions on such major issues as expenditures of public funds, drug abuse, the hazards of cigarettes, industrial safety, and so it is inevitable that we influence the thinking of millions."

first time accumulate a literature of their own."

2 examine "Fortune's editorial role is to and illuminate business enterprise and the men and forces that affect it. Largely staff-written, Fortune has a reputation for painstaking research, based on a tradition of thoroughness in reporting, inter-

4 "All

our editors contribute to the editorial content by recommending articles for condensation or by producing original articles. Final selection is by a consensus of top editors."

5 "Advertising,

subscriptions and newsstand sales all contribute revenue, as do the Digest Condensed

viewing, analyzing and checking, that provides its greatest single asset: authority."

3 "Our magazine has been partici-

pant as well as reporter, helping to create the new techniques by which business can successfully cope with change."

4 No answer.

"Our intent is not to tell the 2 "We advocate a strong, effective 4 "Editorial content is determined 1 farmer by all three means plus reader a step-by-step process of agri-business industry, in a sodoing each job. Instead we present new ideas and methods of farm management and feature new developments in the field of agriculture."

ciety where food is the most reasonably priced of any country in the world. We defend the wise use of chemical pesticides and fertilizers and insist that our readers become active in policy-setting activities on the local, state and national levels."

3 1 "Ours is a magazine of literature

and public affairs, the arts and other antic pursuits. We assume that our readers share a modest sophistication in literary and political matters and a willingness to be challenged by tendentious and sometimes conflicting points of view. Criteria relied on for selection of material include literary grace,

suggestions. Final decisions, of course, are made solely by the editor."

5 No answer.

No answer.

pungency, currency, wit, economy, style, persuasiveness, fairness and mild eccentricity."

3 "No

doubt the magazine influences some of its readers but how or in what way is neither clear nor in all likelihood decipherable."

2 "The Atlantic has no particular point of view other than a com- 4 "The editor of The Atlantic has final responsibility for all mamitment to honest discussion of important public issues."

terial published in the magazine. His editors are encouraged to, and do, give freely of their advice."

1 2 3

What do you think the impact of your magazine is on your readers? To what extent does your subject matter reflect or set the style for their way of life or way of thinking?

Books, special individual books, phonograph albums and other products. Our editorial policy is independent of these sources of income."

6 "While

the Digest has indeed placed an increased emphasis on the visual over the past decade, we pin our faith on the written word as the soundest means of communicating ideas and ideals. After all,

4 5 6

How is editorial content determined?

What is your source of r(!venue?How does the economics of your magazine influence your editorial decisions?

6 "The printed

word is far more than an art form. It is an essential commodity and if anything it is the television show and the motion picture that have been relegated largely to an art form."

7 "~es,. graphics wi.ll continu.e to gam Importance In magazmes,

" 8

What do you foresee for the future of magazines?

Marshall McLuhan says that movie and television have made the printed word obsolete except as an art form. What do you think?

we are not 'instant communicators' but the Reader's Digest."

7 No answer. 8 "Television have great

and the movies do impact, there is no doubt. Some magazines have been eliminated by the competition and others will disappear in the future. This is the inevitable story of evolution. But strong magazines will al-

5 "Only to a marginal degree does 6 "By

economics affect our editorial decisions. Obviously, for instance, one has to close a magazine on time, or overtime production costs would mount prohibitively and readers would not receive their publications, which often carry perishable news, in time."

Do you see the growing trend toward instant communications affecting magazine writing, photography, layout?

and large, more educated audiences prefer magazines, books and newspapers to the daily fare of television, and the fact is that the general population of the United States is becoming more educated. All of the media complement one another and do not necessarily compete with one another. They rely on different strengths and different audience needs."

ways enjoy several advantages over TV and other media: One can read a magazine whenever and wherever one wants to; one can come back to it again and again; one has before him a record to promote reflection, re-evaluation, thinking."

7 "Our objective is to offer readers 8 "There the finest in printing and illustration. We frequently engage top-rank artists to provide a sensitive and imaginative record of the drama and adventure of business. Famous photographers have pioneered photo-reportage in Fortune."

8 "There

will be fewer successful magazines in the farm field, just as there will be fewer successful farmers. However, those periodicals that remain will enjoy financial success just as will those who remain as the key producers of food for the U.S. and its export markets."

but always will be dependent on the printed word to lend meaning."

5 "Like most commercial

magazines, The Atlantic relies on advertising and subscription revenue in roughly equal proportions. Editorialdecisions are clearly separated from the business end."

6 No answer.

7 "The visual media have, indeed, 8 "I see no reason

done a great deal to broaden our cultural base. Yes, magazines will become and are already extremely visually conscious; and graphics are likely to be more and more important in the editorial and production planning of general magazines. "

why magazines should not continue to play an important part in provoking public debate of substantive political and social issues; in serving as a vehicle for experimental forms in all of the arts; in providing readers with a periodic refuge from the numbing crush of day-to-day concerns."

is a vital need for both special-interest and general-interest magazines. Over the years, advertising revenues of magazines have increased five per cent per year, and circulation growth of leading magazines has easily outstripped population growth."

1 "We cover the news in the broad- 2 "I'm est sense of that word. We try to single out those events, happenings, discoveries and activities that should be of deepest concern to our readers. A large staff of correspondents at horne and abroad gathers information and judges its importance. "

1 "Our

target is the general reader who is interested in foreign affairs. We offer our pages to authors both well-known and unknown, and our primary aim is to print articles of different viewpoints on current subjects. We hold that we can do more to guide American public opinion through a broad hospitality to

always asked about Newsweek's point of view, and I always reply that the magazine tries to be objectiv~ in its reporting and judicious in its interpretations. And I am then told by both the right and the left that it is impossible to take this path. Perhaps so. But I do know that the editors and writers of Newsweek are neither dogmatic nor doctrinaire, and that they think that,

with enough digging and reporting and honest analysis, they can reach some semblance of the truth."

divergent ideas than we can by identifying with one school of thought." [The October 1972 issue of Foreign Affairs carried an article by Prime Minister Indira Gandhi entitled "India and the World."]

Affairs is widely quoted throughout the world in articles and editorials. If this is a measure of its influence, then it is successful in stimulating discussion and new thinking on issues of international importance."

2 No answer.

4 "Editorial

3 "It's

always difficult to evaluate the impact one's magazine has upon its readers. However, Foreign

1 "We're a publication

written primarily for the most egocentric people on earth-New Yorkers. People for whom New York is undoubtedly the center of the universe. Good writing is what reading is all about. New York and good writing is what we're all about."

2 "Articles

institutions-these are some of the categories we deal with. Also, all the other important New York eventsplus analysis and criticism."

3 "Readers

are so interested in specific consumer information about New York City that even the slightest bit of guidance brings an enor-

on travel, automobiles, fashion, business, entertainment and restaurants, banks and financial

1 "Since we are written and edited 2 "We're

3 "We

have no precise way of knowing what impact we have on our readers except to note our sales, the intensity of the letters written to us, and how often we are quoted and discussed in other media."

content is determined by the editors alone. Manuscripts of course are sometimes solicited, sometimes unsolicited."

mous response, much stronger than response to other kinds of articles."

4 "We

want to cover everything about New York. We want to attack what is bad in this city and preserve and encourage what is new and good. We want to be the weekly magazine that communicates the spirit and character of contemporary New York."

3 "The magazine leads and reflects

by young people, our magazine has an under-30 point of view. All you have to do for us is write well. We haven't any set style."

not promoting anything. We're not on anybody else's trip. We're interested in all aspects of rock-and-roll culture, whether it's dope or politics, and we like to write about it."

the growing readership of today's rock culture. Rolling Stone is where it's at. Now. In the streets, on the campuses, at the rock festivals."

1 "We

2 "We feel that man's

3 "We do not evaluate

present illustrated articles on advances in science, technology, medicine and the rational management of human affairs, and we seek articles from the men and women who are actually doing the work described. Our primary consideration is to select material that represents a genuine enlargement of human understanding."

best hope is science. This does not mean science as some describe it: detached, unemotional, massive, monolithic and unconcerned with its effects on man. It does mean science as an institution that utilizes the best in human beings to discover the nature of the universe and man."

1 "Ms. should

2 "Ms. is a populist

serve as a forum, a place to voice complaints, to do some good muckraking reporting, to explore the future, and most important, a place where we can honestly expose our own weaknesses."

magazine that starts with the belief that women are human beings first and women second or even third."

3 "The magazine should appeal to

any woman, without defining her age or social status. For women who remain in the home, it should be like having a consciousness-raising group brought to them."

the impact our magazine has on its readers. We do not believe in polling our readers for their opinion of our content."

4 "The

editorial content is determined by a consensus of editors. Fortunately for us, our editorial 'formula' is provided by the chang-

"Ms. is trying to avoid the pyra4 midal structure and schism common between production and editorial personnel. Every person on the staff takes part in editorial decisionmaking. We are going to extremes to make the magazine a totally cooperative effort. There is no editor-

4 "Our

organization is a kind of controlled anarchy, with everyone welcome to suggest and push stories. We have story conferences on severalleveis and engage in long discussions. But then the talking must stop and decisions are made."

5 "Basic sources of revenue are ad-

vertising and circulation, with the former more important. As long as Newsweek prospers, the economics

of the magazine has little weight in our editorial decisions."

6 "History-and

the history of communications-moves in devious ways, and although McLuhan is a fascinating guide to the role of movies and television in the world, he is not the definitive prophet of what will happen. There are things

that the printed page can do that television cannot; and vice versa. I don't think books and journals will vanish."

7 No answer. 8 "I am not a prophet

but I think that magazines will be around for a long time to come."

basic source of income is 7 No answer. 5 "Our from subscribers and advertisers. Our editorial decisions are not based 8 "I can only say that I think there upon economic considerations."

6 "I

should merely say that the proliferation of new special-interest magazines is a fact that would substantially modify the statement attributed to Marshall McLuhan."

5 "Consumer

journalism has not handicapped our publication economically. Our advertising picture has had a steady upward climb. My feeling has always been that although some revenue is lost permanently-a price of honest reporting -the only way toward success both

is a very strong future for the special-interest magazine. I am doubtful that the importance of the masscirculation magazine will prevail."

artistically and economically is to be rigidly honest."

6 "The

successful editors of today realize that since TV is the medium of the lowest common denominator (and has unbeatable advantages in immediacy, sound and motion), print must be for the educated and affluent elite, providing something that cannot be put on the home TV set."

editor makes most of the 6 "TV hasn't 4 "The Stone, which decisions when he's around, but there are people feeding in ideas from London, New York, Boston, and about a dozen people on the staff have a say in editorial decision-making. "

affected Rolling has always been visually conscious and never part of the underground press."

7 No answer.

7 "In

an increasingly visual age, the resources for an appealing presentation of a magazine have become virtually a corporate necessity. This means attractive layouts, which can excite a jaded and busy reader."

education, creating the opportunity for specialty magazines, which can do a more efficient job for a particular segment of the American market than can a mass-circulation, general, national magazine."

8 "The

dominant fact of today's publishing market has been a sharp rise in population, income and

8 "People

will always read and they will always have special interests. There will be movies, films, television, but nothing will replace reading."

5 No answer. ing scene of human knowledge. Our work is simply to hold the mirror up to nature as skillfully as we can." "Our basic sources of revenue are what readers pay for our magazine and what advertisers pay to place advertisements in it. The

in-chief. The editors are listed alphabetically on the masthead,"

economics of our magazine has no influence on our editorial decisions."

6 No answer. 7 "I certainly

do think that magazines should and will become more visually conscious, and that graphics in magazines will continue to become a more important art

6 No answer.

Graham, publisher 7 "Consciously and unconsciously, 5 "Katherine television has heightened our of the Washington Post, provided $20,000in seed money to pay initial expenses. The first issue, a preview, appeared as an insert in New York magazine, and was published on a cost- and profit-sharing basis as a joint product of both magazines."

awareness of graphics until they are every bit as important as editorial content in magazines,"

form. Incidentally, I do not think that pictures can be characterized as 'instant communication,' Consider for example, a magnificent map. It is as rich in content as an entire volume; indeed it would seem virtually impossible to put a map into words. The same is true of the best photographs,"

8 "TV

is beginning to eliminate the need for general-interest magazines. The future of the special magazine is very good,"

8 "Magazines

in America have an excellent future. The past 40 years have been a period of explosive growth for magazines and all other forms of printed material. One may expect that all forms of communication will continue to grow."

Faced with the vast number and endless variety of Indian magazines-over 10,000 in 15 languages-SPAN limited itself to 10 periodicals published in English. The world of Indian-language magazines, we felt, is so wide and complex that we could not do it justice in the limited space we have. In the following interviews, conducted by Mohammed Reyazuddin, Stephen Espie and A.K. Ganguly, the editors answer roughly the same questions as their American counterparts. The answers are listed below.

1 "The

ATIND EDITORS SAY

basic purpose of is is to entertain, certainly not to pontificate or try and educate. As our target audience is the Indian teenager and young adult, our main purpose is to provide reading matter of interest to youth, and those who think young-and material is selected on this basis."

of view. We reflect the current scene by making it the subject of our articles and photographic essays, more specifically in the field of youth behavior. Significantly our commentaries are made by young people themselves, both staffers and freelance correspondents."

2 "Our

countrywide readership survey, just concluded, has shown that over 80 per cent of our readers

4 "As already explained,

contribution, its quality as a piece of creative writing."

flect the current scene in two ways: 1) We publish contributions on the basis of their contemporary relevance; 2) We invite articles on issues which are exercising the minds of Indians."

magazine is completely apolitical and has no specific point

1 "Quest

is a journal of inquiry, criticism and ideas. It seeks to promote a debate, on the level of ideas, over issues of contemporary relevance to a modernizing society like India's. Our audience comprises academicians, intellectuals, writers and, of late, a growing section of youth. Apart from relevance to contemporary India, the only other criterion in the choice of material is its intellectual level or, for a literary

1 "Eve's

Weekly being outright a woman's magazine, the purpose I would say is to make women more aware of themselves, their own potential, as well as to inform them about what is going on around them. Most of our readers are youngyoung working women and college students. We choose our material with this young audience in mind, but we do not ignore the older woman, the housewife."

1 "The purpose

of Design is to introduce a sense of esthetics to a totally unesthetic age. No age in the past was as bereft of taste as ours. Rapacious society is cluttering landscapes and cities with the spillage of industrialization. Design magazine shows people how thoroughly crass we are today. Our primary audience is architects and urban planners. The secondary audience is anyone interested in the arts."

2 "We

believe that architecture must evolve in keeping with the times, the climate, the surroundings, the culture. Skyscrapers in Delhi, for instance, are not in keeping with

3 "A

2 "Quest

has no particular point of view in the narrow sense of the term. It would as cheerfully publish an article written from the Jana Sangh or the Communist viewpoint as one written from the liberal, humanist point of view. The only consideration would be a certain intellectual standard. We seek to re-

2 "Well, yes. Again this

are extremely loyal and have been with us for over two of our six years of existence. The survey has also shown that most of our readers are affluent, highly educated and, to use a term I dislike, 'Westernized.' This means they are avant-garde-in fact, they consider themselves either trend-setters, or trendy." we try to give our readers features with

3 "It

is difficult to measure with any degree of precision the impact of a magazine like Quest. Its readership constitutes a select group, whose members are used to think-

3 "Interestingly

would be tied up with our purpose. The point of view would be, so to say, to hold a mirror up to the woman. She must know what she is like, what she is capable of in this world. To do this we are constantly bringing out new facets-maybe of old subjects, but new approaches to make the woman constantly aware of life around her. Subjects like dowry, widow remarriage."

enough, one of our readership surveys showed that more men than women read Eve's Weekly. I consider that a very healthy sign because it means that we are not in the old group of just fashion and just cookery and just mother-craft and childcare. Our impact, I think, is rather forceful, judging from the numerous letters that come in from all parts of India and from all kinds of women."

any of those things. The magazine reflects the current scene in many ways. We search for new materials, new techniques, new writers."

as they once were and as they should be in a nation with such a rich architectural heritage."

3 "The impact is jarring,

abrasive. We upset a lot of people. In fact in my editorials I sometimes have to attack the people who advertise in the magazine. I realize that's no way to make friends and influence people. We try to set the style and way of life of readers. We generate many new architectural trends in India because we have pushed for them in the magazine. Design has helped make architecture and architects respectable in India again-

4 "I

determine editorial content. There are no 'editorial committees' here."

5 "Source

of revenue is from advertising, but it's not enough. I have to subsidize the magazine from the earnings I get from my books.'''

6 "McLuhan

is totally out of his mind. That kind of talk about the printed word being obsolete is just gimmickry born of the constant demand for 'slick' ideas. I haven't

I 2 3

What is the purpose of your magazine? Who comprises your audience? What are your primary considerations in choosing material? Does your magazine have a particular point of view? In what way do you reflect the current scene and comment upon it? What do you think the impact of your magazine is on your readers? To what extent does your subject matter reflect or set the style for their way of life or way of thinking?

which they can identify and which will amuse or entertain them." "Revenue comes from advertisements and sales. Economics affects editorial decisions only to the extent of curtailing our more ambitious correspondents and preventing us from commissioning expensive authors. "

"Not true in India where the 6 written word is still extremely ing for themselves. Quest only seeks to 'promote' critical thinking, not to predetermine the outcome of this process."

4 "The

editor of Quest is completely free to accept or reject the material he receives for publication. The Indian Committee for Cultural Freedom, which publishes this magazine, is true to its name and respects the freedom of the editor."

4 "Well, as I have just said, we are

not ollly fashion, cookery and the 'old groove,' as I call it; but these things are also part of a woman, and will forever be. So there is a definite place for them in the magazine-they form a part of the regular contents. Then, we have a 'Problems Corner' and we have what we call our 'leads' where we have several topics discussed, analyzed." any magazine or newspaper, 5 "In as you know, advertising counts seen a movie in nine months and I don't own a television set, but I'm absolutely well informed-through the printed word alone. If the printed word were becoming obsolete, why are book publishers doing such a booming business?"

7 "Instant

communications techniques have made magazines more conscious of dazzling layouts, but to what effect? The dazzling magazines in the U.S. have been having a hard time of it. Look and Life have folded. Allen Hurlburt of Look was one of the great art directors of all time. Beautiful magazine. Visually exciting. But no

4 5

How is editorial content determined?

What is your source of revenue? How does the economics of your magazine influence your editorial decisions? Marshall McLuhan says that movies and television have made the printed word obsolete except as an art form. What do you think?

important. TV is limited and films cannot in any way be considered a threat to newspapers and journals."

7 "Instant

communications? Well, we must progress through our own stages of development and, though instant communications may shorten the span, India has yet to know a period of specialist journals catering to every taste, age group and to both sexes. This period is just "There 5 venue: ing and a ternational Freedom. sought to sions."

are three sources of resubscriptions, advertissmall grant from the InAssociation for Cultural None of these has ever influence ed itorial deci-

6 "I think

precious little of Marshall McLuhan's observation in the context of India."

for a great deal. Although I am happy and proud to say that I have never for a moment felt dependent as an editor on advertising." "As far as television is concerned there is not much to say just now. I think the printed word will always have its own power to attract and its own potential to influence readers. I do not foresee, even in the future, television or movies entirely taking the place of the printed word."

depth. In a way it's too bad Look and Life had to go, but I don't think they're missed that much and I certainly don't miss them. In fact I say good riddance to them. Glossy picture magazines were unfair competition to a magazine like Design, which can't afford the color and glitter. If a slick picture magazine does a flashy but superficial color picture story on, say, some good new architect, how can I compete with that when all I have is a profound text on the same architect? It's like you're listening attentively to me now but how could I keep

7 8 9

Do you see the growing trend toward instant communications affecting magazine writing, photography, layout?

What do you foresee for the future of magazines in India?

What do you think has been the influence of American magazines on Indian magazines?

beginning. Magazine layout is in an experimental stage, high Iy influenced by foreign journals. Magazine writing and photography are just finding encouragement in the new journals making the scene."

8 "The

future of magazines in India looks good, as long as they enjoy freedom of development and expression. A recent survey shows that most of our readers spend

7 "Yes, in the case of popular

periodicals. However, this does not apply to Quest."

9 "The

American influence on us has been mostly in layout and style of illustration. The American magazines we come by and study are Esquire, Seventeen and, of course, Time and Newsweek. Occasionally, but very occasionally, Playboy, which we admire for its very excellent writing and illustrations-and I don't mean the nudes!" uous struggle to keep it alive without compromising its integrity or standards of production."

8 "It seems to me that popular ma- 9 "Yes, like almost everything else gazines, especially in the Indian languages, have a good time ahead. I am not so optimistic about the future of serious magazines unless they are affiliated to political parties. Quest does not belong to this category and I therefore see a contin-

7 "Eve's

Weekly has always been known for its modern typography, layouts, artwork and so on."

8 "I

think the outlook for magazines in all the Indian languages -and even in English-is still very good."

9 "Well,

that opens up a lot of questions, whether American mannerisms have influenced youth today, whether American movies have influenced Indian movies or

your attention if a pretty young girl with no clothes on came in and started walking around the room?"

8 "Serious

magazines will survive -though I dislike that word 'serious.' It connotes dullness and verbosity and I don't mean that. By 'serious' I mean magazines that offer creative insights into our times. I do feel, however, that in India eventually the same thing will happen to the jazzy picture magazines that is happening in the U.S. They'll be overtaken by radio and TV."

such as literature, cinema, the arts, philosophy, social sciences, communications media and even academic jargon, American magazines have had considerable impact on Indian magazines."

not, and each time the answer is yes, yes, yes. It depends on who is doing the aping, the copying or the plagiarizing. So I would say it depends on the editor concerned as to how much he or she can cull from American magazines to adapt whatever is good for Indian readers. American magazines, such as the Ladies' Home Journal, McCall's, Cosmopolitan, have certainly influenced us in quite a few areas."

9 "I

like Fortune magazine. It reflects a point of view and does it in depth and with painstaking effort. I like Foreign Affairs. It is influential and it gets its influence by the high quality of its editorial content-not by dazzling layouts. And of course, one of the finest American magazines was Arts and Architecture which used to be published in California but which has also gone under. It was a marvelous â&#x20AC;˘ magazine. All too often the good and meaningful things in our age do not survive."

1 "As

far as an editor knows any purpose, it is to inform, to enlighten, to entertain and also to inspire. Our youngest contributor, a few years ago, was a 13-year-old schoolgirl, and our oldest was an 84-year-old doctor. So, it is our proud boast that we provide something for everybody and everything for somebody." "No, Mirror is completely unbiased, uncommitted to a point

2 1 "The

purpose is to disseminate agricultural information. Indian Farming is intended primarily to convey information based on proven research in institutions and in experimental fields. Its appeal is mainly to the more progressive type of farmer who can read the journal, assimilate the information, and use it on his own farm."

1 "The purpose

of Film/are is primarily to give our readers the inside story of the film industry. But over and above this, there is also another purpose-to inculcate in our readers a sense of film appreciation. Our readership survey shows that our audience is comprised mostly of students between the ages of 18 and 28. In choosing our material we always try and strike a balance between, shall we say, popular elements like star

1 "The

purpose of the magazine was not decided by me. It was decided by a former editor of The Statesman who started this magazine, and by another Englishman, Martin Russell. Let me suggest that the idea was to bring East and West together, so to say, and to promote democracy. As far as I know-for we have conducted a survey-most of the readership consists of senior

of view, and unconnected with any party-political or otherwise. We try to keep abreast of current events, we like to publish articles of topical interest. And as far as our comments are concerned, we like to lead our readers along progressive lines-to remind them that what is, is usually quite different from what should be."

3 "Judging

by the rise in circulation, by what I like to call my fanmail, and by the enthusiastic letters

2 "Our

point of view is improved agriculture in all its connotations, in all its aspects. The Green Revolution has brought many changes-in genetics there has been a breakthrough, in agronomy there has been a breakthrough, and we are advancing in plant protection. So this multi-faceted information has to be spread."

features and serious aspects of filmmaking."

2 "We pride ourselves on the fact

that Film/are is a fighting paper -though you can't really call this a point of view. It is extremely critical of the products of the film industry, but at the same time it strives to help the industry make better products."

students, professional men, lawyers, doctors, journalists, politicians and others interested in public affairs. The material for Thought is chosen primarily with a view to subserving the basic purpose, that is, the promotion of democracy and understanding between East and West."

2 "We comment

upon events from the point of view of democracy

1 "There are so many things wrong 2 "We are a magazine that cares for

with Indian sport that we feel a publication like ours can do a great deal toward improving the situation and help to elevate sport to its rightful position. I am afraid we have not made any in-depth survey of our readership, but our feeling is that the bulk consists of the fairly young -students, young people. Though there are quite a few elderly people, professional people who subscribe to Sportsweek."

1 "Our

purpose is hopefully to disseminate scientific information in the country and to make people more scientifically oriented. If that is the objective then naturally the audience has to be very wide. We have no special audience though some of our surveys have shown that students, younger people, form the majority of our readers. The choosing of our material also is guided by our young readership because we want to create an atmosphere of dissent-a kind of healthy irreverence -and to persuade people to ask questions."

Indian sports-I think that's our particular point of view."

4 "Our

subject matter is chosen on our strict principle of clean journalism-that means no sex, no violence, no nudity, no gimmicks. And to my dying day, I will be proud that I managed to make Mirror popular without publishing a single nude picture." "Our revenue comes mainly from 5 sales, subscriptions. Advertising, 3 "The magazine has considerable impact-I receive a large number of letters from readers expressing their thanks. For a journal in the government sector, this is something."

4 "The

editorial content is determined primarily with a view to motivating farmers to adopt mod"Our impact 3 would think.

is considerable, I Some of our features are extremely popular. Take, for instance, the question-andanswer page that is run by the film comedian I.S. Johar, or a feature like 'Out of Focus.' "

4 "Editorial

content? Well, as I said, we always try to strike a balance between star features that would appeal to fans and features that would also interest more seriand whether it is relevant or irrelevant-that is the only criteria we have in judging a particular issue."

3 "It

is difficult to discuss our impact. But the mere fact that the readership has increased, and that in nine cases out of 10 old readers have stayed on, suggests that some impact has been there." magazines, Sports world, does not sell more than 40,000 copies."

"You might say that our editorial 3 "I do not know how you would 4 content is determined by our

gauge the impact of a magazine. For example, Sportsweek's circulation is 60,000, and I think for a specialized publication this is not bad at all, especially if you relate it with the circulation of other specialized publications in India. Even in England, one of its leading sports

concern and desire to improve Indian sports. We feel that in sports, as in other spheres, we, in our typical philosophical resignation, allow matters to drift. At Sports week, we want to shake people out of this complacency. If we can develop the right mental and psychological ap-

"We reflect the current scene in the sense that we have to be alive all the time to what is going on in the country-in our environmentand to interpret that scientifically to the people and make them look at problems in a different way."

most unlikely places-the Public Accounts Committee debates, for example."

3 "It

is very difficult to judge impact, but according to surveys we find that 75 per cent of the buyers of this magazine preserve their copies. So obviously, this means that the magazine does have an impact. I have also found that several of our features have been quoted in the

4 "In determining editorial content,

we take topical subjects, because you can connect them with what has been in the headlines. That is why we have features and articles on long-term solutions for water scar- ~ city, for example. We also take developments which have already taken place in the world, and some that are yet to come-say, new technologies which are expected not now, but maybe 30 or 40 years later."

why not journalism also. But that is not the kind of journalism that will endure."

for some unknown, mysterious reason, is not as good as it should be and as it can be. Does the economics of the magazine influence my editorial decisions? No, not in the least. Some other magazines, before they publish articles against smoking or drinking, may consult their advertising departments. I certainly do not and I will not."

the kind of movies and television programs. But I would like to proclaim that movies and TV may come today and go tomorrow, but by its very nature and because of what it provides, and because of the idealistic policy behind it, Mirror, I think, will go on forevel It will certainly survive its editor."

6 "That

is a passing phase. I don't think it will endure because in an age where everything is instant,

"Ifat all there has been an Amer9 ican influence, it has not been a

5 "It is an Indian Council

7 "To

depends on the kind of printed word and it depends on

ern practices. I become slightly emotional when I speak of this aspect, for the whole of Indian development, the basis of Indian development, is still dependent on agriculture. Since 75 per cent of our people are still agriculture-based, I am naturally anxious that the new findings in agriculture should be widely accepted." ous students of the cinema because we have the nucleus of a very serious readership. In fact, Filmfare is largely a policy-making paper in the sense that our editorials are very widely read and in some cases even acted upon, as in the case of the setting up of the Film Council. In many instances Filmfare has helped in shaping government policy."

5 "Revenue

comes mainly from advertising, but also from circu-

4 "Choice of content

7 "It

of Agricultural Research journal and has a vast body of subscribers also."

6 "No. The printed word will never

be obsolete. I feel that the printed word is very powerful because it remains-you can read it at leisure -it is not a fleeting image." lation, since we have a very high circulation and each copy is priced at one rupee. However, the economics of the magazine in no way influences editorial decisions."

of revenue is the same as for most other magazines. Part of it comes from the sale of the magazine and part from advertisements. But we are very, very strict in seeing that the economics of the magazine does not influence our editorial policy in any way."

6 "What Mr. McLuhan

says may be true for the United States, but I don't think it has anything to do with us for the time being. Movies have been in India for years, but they have not been used as an information media, at least not on any

7 "Yes, to a certain extent, instant 9 "The communications does affect magazine writing, photography and layout but not to the same extent as in some of the advanced countries."

5 "Circulation

7 "To some extent that is unavoid-

from the Indian Olympic Association that Sportsweek be made the official organ for the Association. We said, 'No, thank you,' because that would be a compromise to our freedom."

mand for reading materials. This is happening in the highly literate state of Kerala where so many journals and so many dailies are published. "

"American magazines have influenced Indian readers considersee a very great future for . magazines because as literacy ably. Reader's Digest and Time have goes up there will be a terrific de- been my favorite reading for years."

8 "I

bright if we can get over newsprint shortages and certain technical and printing difficulties. As literacy goes up and as people have more money, magazines in this country can't help but grow."

proach, a positive attitude toward excelling, there is no reason why we should not do well in international sports."

5 "The source

some extent we are trying to improve our layout so that we keep up with trends in the modern world-that everything should be presented in a very attractive manner."

for 10 years at least in this country. The question of television supplanting the printed word, of course, does not arise at the moment, and even movies have limited impact." and advertisements. But the economics of the magazine does not in any way influence our editorial decisions."

from sales, for we do have a good circulation. We have not been able to get as many advertisements as we would like. The economics of the magazine, however, does not in any way influence the magazine's editorial decisions. There was an offer

definitely have a good future in India. As long as English is retained, and I am sure it is going to be retained, English magazines also will remain and they will flourish."

6 "I don't believe the printed word 8 "Well, the future seems to be very will become obsolete. No, not

is arbitrary. We make the choice. We choose material within our over-all purpose and that is the criteria we go by. To elaborate, suppose there is a short story. To be used in Thought, it should not be contradictory to our basic purpose. There are many ways and means to subvert the concept of democracy, and fiction can be very effective."

5 "The source of revenue is mainly

8 "Magazines'

healthy one because we in this country like to imitate what is spectacular, what is bizarre and what is sensational. But as far as the more sober elements or influences are concerned, I don't think they have made themselves felt so far. Where Mirror is concerned, for instance, we usually say, for the purpose of identification only, that it is India's Reader's Digest. Whether that can be called subtle psychological influence, I don't know."

able. The style is changing, the style of writing, for instance, is more time-saving oriented."

American influence has been there. I have always been a reader of Life and I was sorry to hear that it had ceased publication. I was particularly impressed by its features which were always in depth; and the photographs, the display, the layout, were all very striking, very modern, very eye-catching. Then, I find Time magazine is very popular. People swear against it, but they still read it." people in India become more analytically inclined, magazines, especially serious magazines, will do well."

"To a certain extent, yes. The 6 "It could be relevant to America, 8 "Well, I would think that as the 9 extent of influence, however, will but it is not relevant to India. vary from magazine to magazine." Television is not a fact of life so far and movies have not displaced newspapers and magazines, and are not likely to in the near future."

6 "I don't

think this applies to us at all, especially in the field of sports. Television is restricted to only a few cities so far. No, I don't think the printed word is going to be obsolete for a long time to come." significant scale. And the threat of television is still far away."

7 "Well, actually the new changes

which have taken place are changes brought about by the new technology, and since we are in that area, we are a little more sensitive to what is happening in the communications field. In our new layout, we want the written word, the printed word, the photographic material to convey the maximum impression within the shortest space."

reading habit increases and with the growth of literacy and education, magazines will have a better future than they have had so far. And I am inclined to believe that as

7 No answer. 8 "Magazines

have a bright future. Generally speaking, with literacy and our purchasing power going up, I don't see why the future of magazines in India should not be extremely bright."

8 "The

future of magazines depends on where the country is going. If our priority is to inform and instruct the illiterate masses, a new kind of role will emerge for magazines, and they will not suffer the same fate as they have suffered in other countries."

9 "No, we have not been influenced

by American magazines, but we have been influenced by British magazines-particularly by Sportsworld. However, I am sure some of the other magazines in India have been influenced by American magazines."

9 "We are living in a world which

is an open society, and we are in communication with the whole world. And so every publication here, I think, is influenced by the major publications in the United States. It is quite evident. For instance, we look up with considerable respect to the Scientific American."

~LLTHAT MATTERS IS THE READEROUT THERE' by GERALDINE

RHOADS

ABSOLUTElY IRRESISTIBLE CROCHET Breezy Little "No-Sew"

Coau to Whip Up without Patterns

Five years ago, I wrote my last letter to a subscriber. "I am ever so sorry," it began. "We are computerizing your subscription," said paragraph two in part. "In some glorious future," said paragraph three, "this will mean better service than ever." I then moved to Woman's Day, which offers no subscriptions whatever. I miss having subscribers. My heart went out to the ones to whom the computer persistently sent six copies of an issue, or none at all, and (looking back) I grow fonder of the breed who were impelled to cancel their subscriptions when they felt we'd taken a downward path. At Woman's Day, I edit on the assumption that I'll make 84 million separate sales a year-an average of seven million a month. This is in contrast to most of the large consumer magazines, 90 per cent of whose sales are accounted for by pre-sold subscriptions. If you look at the normal sales chart of any subscription magazine, it undulates from month to month, rising and dipping gracefully throughout the year. Only when you break out its newsstand sales and graph them separately do you begin to see a pattern more like Woman's Day's. These sales may rise or drop with month-to-month gains or losses of 10-15 per cent. But for subscription magazines a 12 per cent loss is likely to run less than 100,000 unsold copies-a five-figure sadness. For me, such a percentage drop means closer to a million copies-a potential seven-figure tragedy. Some of our zigs and zags are seasonal. They profile a reader who is so hot (in August in Arizona) or so busy (on the eve of Christmas) that it is hard to catch her attention. But in the main, the ups and downs spell only one message: The reader is the most important person you'll ever know, and you must find ways to be indispensable to her-every single month. You also have to figure out a way to let her know how indispensable you are. For all magazines the contents rate first in importance, but the cover is the package and an important selling tool. Woman's Day must have somewhere between eight and 20 million encounters with potential buyers every month. fil most of these, the cover is its only means of making a sale. Therefore, it must be bright and compelling, a bull's-eye in design, and striking in color and composition. It must announce to the potential reader unmistakably that a new issue is at hand. It should also have a variety of cover lines large enough for her to read, and, since she may be old or young, fat or thin, flush or feeling poor, one, at least, should speak directly to her own condition. That's Cover Rule No.1 for every magazine, but it applies tenfold to a single-copy magazine like Woman's Day. So does asecond ~ rule, that the composition as well as the dominant color scheme

of covers should change from month to month. the product of a writer's genius. Publishers, circulation experts, In the last two years, for example, the two big single-copy advertisers, and many on the promotion side may be deceived on magazines, Woman's Day and Family Circle, ran food covers this point. But not writers, even the brilliant ones who struggle to seven times apiece. Pictures of women ran second. We also had write the winning lines. Writers know that a good story all but dolls, Easter eggs, flowers, and candles, all with backup stories writes its own blurb. Readers are not deceived, either; all too inside the magazine. (The reader of Woman's Day cries foul if a quickly they grow to know if you oversell, and they despise you flower cover entices her and she finds no flower-arranging inside. for it. A cover line without a good backup story amounts to The same holds true with a sweater girl: Our reader expects us a boomerang. to tell her how to make the sweater.) I earlier acknowledged my specialization in food and shelter In contrast, in the same period, M cCal/'s and the Ladies' Home and clothing and so forth, because these are daily concerns of my Journalfeatured women on 34 of their 48 covers. Thirteen of these reader. But the on-page result of editorial exploration, even in were public figures-among them Jacqueline Kennedy, Joan these fields of basic and universal reader interest, must be someKennedy, Twiggy, Tricia Nixon, Mia Farrow, Jacqueline Susann, thing more than coverage of the latest in food and the latest in Katharine Hepburn, and Mrs. Lyndon Johnson. homes and clothing. Such reportage lacks the come-on required Well, I have published some celebrity stories in Woman's Day, in a single-copy magazine. What is wanted-what can be winning and they were well received, and we'll publish some more. But -is the report on clothes or interiors or dishes that anticipates there has never been any clear indication that gossipy personality and meets a reader's most pressing needs. stories work any sales magic for us. So we don't reach out for a I think an editor's most important coverage is coverage of the personality every month-as almost everyone else in our business reader. First and last, the genesis of a good story lies in a reader's does-and my staff is not set up, nor my operation budgeted, for needs, and reader-appeal is built into a feature only when it is developed with the reader's hopes, fears and problems in mind. the study and exploitation of celebrities. If we had subscribers, I'd have more columns in the magazine. Somehow, every month we must reach out with an irresistible invitation to all our readers, not so much with novelty as with I forgo a substantial lineup of monthly columns because the genre indispensability. This means that feature after feature, with blurb itself tends to preclude the sharp or dramatically structured piece after blurb to invite readers' perusal, must grow out of the funda- of writing most likely to tempt new readers or welcome old ones mental purpose of the magazine-to help a woman with her daily back emphatically. problems and challenges. We're a trade magazine, basically, deWith few items automatically supplied for our issues, we are signedto supply expertise to the half of our population that spends forced to keep on looking for new subjects, new writers, and new at least part of its adult years on tasks related to home and family. approaches to fill the pages. We're ready to hear ideas from all If Woman's Day has a secondary purpose, it's close to the first: sorts of experts, in all fields, there being no commitment to only to reinforce our reader's self-respect and her respect for the life one expert or expert point of view. and work she chooses to pursue. In the seven years I've been the editor of Woman's Day, and Like any sensible trade magazine, we are not concerned with learning as I go, I think my clearest lesson is that editing a magabeing all things to all people, nor even all things to those whose zine with newsstand sales in mind is editing the old-fashioned way, jobs we cover. If a woman is bright enough to be reading Woman's with only the reader in mind. I cannot afford to forget her on a Day, she is also smart enough to follow breaking news on dinnersingle page of a single issue. time TV, to update herself on current events in the newspaper, There can be no temptation to edit for advertisers, to swerve and, for more interpretive coverage, to read other periodicals. from the path to gain publicity, prizes, prestige-or even to inOur reportorial beats take us to the people and organizations dulge myself and my personal aims. It doesn't matter how many concerned with food, shelter, clothing, health, education, and the prizes you win, or advertising pages you sell, or how politically or socially prominent you grow. All that matters is the reader out like. We're dedicated to telling a woman how to cope with lifeincludingeveryday life. In fact, one of the priceless ingredients of there, someone who has bought you with the faith that you will the magazine that makes its way with single-copy sales may be its do something for her, that you are utterly honest, and she is the tapacity for meeting daily needs. only one for whom you care, that you know her strong points and There is an immediacy in our sale of the magazine and our weak, and admire her for what she is and chooses to become. 0 reader's use of it. Something about each issue must say, "Buy me, About the Author: Geraldine Rhoads had worked with several American take me home, read me, use me." Usually, according to all the magazines before she joined Woman's Day in 1966. She was associate surveysthat have come my way, this stimulus is a cover line. One editor of the Reader's Digest, 1954-55; managing editor of Ladies' of the widespread fallacies in our business is that cover lines are Home Journal, 1962-63; and executive editor of McCall's, 1963-66.

'MY COMMITMENT IS TO

JUSTICE TO MY CRAFT'

Guided by this consideration, Khushwant Singh has made the 'Illustrated Weekly' one of the liveliest and most controversial magazines in India today. Here, he answers SPAN'S questions with his customary frankness and discusses the influence of America on Indian magazines. Q. What do you think is the role of magazines in general-and of the "Illustrated Weekly" in particular-in India's life today? A. I think magazines should educate, entertain and provoke their readers into thinking of problems, both national and international. The Weekly has the largest circulation of any magazine in India, but I don't want to exaggerate its importance. Like many other journals, it is an urban phenomenon and its circulation is restricted to people who read English, who comprise less than two per cent of the population. I do not think that magazines should preach or be used as instruments of conversion. Let me explain. There is a thing people call commitment that is usually monopolized by leftists or self-styled progressives as a commitment toward socialism or Communism. I have no such commitment. I am strictly apolitical. But I do have another kind of commitment-my commitment is to justice to my craft and to objectivity. That's why if I carry an article by a Communist praising the Communist system, I also carry an article by a Swatantra leader praising the Swatantra viewpoint. And if I carry an article on the Soviet Union, I also carry an article on America. Q. Which brings us to another subject we'd like to explore today.

Is there any appreciable American influence on Indian magazines? A. Yes, there is. In fact, I think this influence is-and has beenquite distinct, from the viewpoint not only of format but also of presentation and style. Everyone has seen the direct Indian imitations of U.S. magazines, carbon copies so to speak. But I don't need to mention them here. I also think that the language of Time and Newsweek has dominated Indian magazine journalism-you know, the slick phrase, the tight, adjective-laden sentence. Q. How have you been influenced as editor of the "Weekly"?

A. Well, when I received the offer of the editorship, I was teaching at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania-teaching a course on contemporary India. And when I decided to accept the offer, I made a very deliberate attempt to study U.S. magazines. My immediate model was Life. Q. Why "Life"? A. Because Life magazine was without any doubt the greatest journal of its kind in the English-speaking world. I was very sad to see it go. Pictorial story-telling has never reached the heights it did in Life. In fact, it had everything-an exciting mixture of superb photography, news, politics, culture, even scandal. But it always maintained a particular standard of reporting and of integrity. I also looked at other successful foreign magazines-Paris Match, Scala, Der Spiegel. But Life was unquestionably the best.

Q. Did anything concrete emerge from your study of "Life"? A. Where I think I really hit the jackpot was in the discovery that Life specialized in giving Americans information about their own country. So one of the first things I started in the Weekly was the series on the various communities, castes and sub-castes of India. We are really not a country but a continent. And we know so little about each other that it is really worthwhile to inform Indians who they live with, who they are. I think this makes people realize how much closer they are to each other than they had imagined. As you probably know, the series yielded unbelievable dividends. When I took over as editor, the Weekly's circulation was 75,000. Today it is nearly 3oo,000-which means, I'm told, a readership of more than five million. Q. Did you have other models apart from "Life"?

A. Yes, I did. In fact, I adopted what you might regard as rather a prosaic approach to my job. I sat down and analyzed the phenomenal success of the Reader's Digest. And I noticed several things. The first was the question of presentation-I noticed how often and how effectively the anecdotal approach was used. Today, when I commission people to write for the Weekly, I often tell them, "Please use the Reader's Digest style." Another thing I observed was the magazine's power of condensation. By this I mean that any subject, however abstruse, is all wrapped up in two or three easy-to-understand paragraphs. Over-simplification? On the contrary, I think this is all to the good. After all, it's a magazine's business to communicate-and

the Digest's success lies precisely in its ability to do this. I also studied the magazine's pattern of subjects. It has of course its quota of anti-leftist propaganda. But it also has regular articles in support of established institutions like the Christian church, praising and protecting nature, upholding the sanctity of marriage. Speaking of this last, it seems to me that every single issue has a message for the American male-a reassurance that he will remain sexually potent so long as he does not stray beyond the bounds of monogamy. Q. Were you able to incorporate some of these features into the "Weekly"? A. It was really a question of adapting this pattern to Indian needs. I know, for instance, that Indians are greatly interested in religion and generally in things spiritual. So I often have features on different aspects of religion, on various religious leaders, etc. Again, personally I have no patience with astrology. But we carry a regular column on what the stars foretell. And I don't feel I'm compromising my integrity in the least. Q. Any other benefits from the "Reader's Digest"? A. Factual accuracy-this is one department in which I think the Digest really scores. And I have tried to follow this in the Weekly by checking and rechecking our facts. I try to make each issue of the Weekly a sort of reference copy which people will want to keep. From Time I borrowed the idea of charts. That's why we use so many charts and graphs and tables and why our articles are loaded with statistics. And I think there's proof that we're on the right track. For instance, when the Illustrated Weekly produced its first annual on "The Peoples of India," all 35,000 copies of it were sold out on the very first day-and there are 60,000 orders unfulfilled. There is something else that I picked up from Time magazinethe practice of printing unfavorable, even abusive, letters. I get a very large mail running to over 100 letters a day, of which a good 10 per cent are very offensive to me personally. I take good care that I publish them, and not the remaining ones which are full of praise. Many of the letters comment on the pictures I print -for instance, hippies who are under-clad or not clad at all, or demonstrators who demonstrate by taking their clothes off. Now that's legitimate: If people do it, I carry it; and if people like it, they are welcome to like it; and if they don't like it, they criticize me, and I take their criticism. Q. The most frequently heard criticism of the "Weekly" since you took over as editor is that there is too much emphasis on sex. What do you think of this? A. Ah, yes. I am only too familiar with this criticism. And it is true that there is more sex in the Weekly than before. But this arises out of my desire to liberate people, to make them freer, to help them to shed their inhibitions. We have erotic sculpture all over the country, which we are proud to show to the West, but \.\.':>~~\\~1;)l\,<>h a single picture of a girl in a bikini, there is an uproar. People are constantly'harping on the sex angle, but the fact is that I've made the Weekly more controversial in many other respects-in its approach to social, economic and political subjects.

Q. You've said many nice things about U.S. magazines. Don't you have any criticism? A. I certainly do. There is, in many of them, an element of political dishonesty. Take one of the magazines I've just named. In the past every single issue had at least one anti-Chinese article in it. Suddenly, after the thaw, the whole approach has changed. Now they are extolling the virtues of acupuncture, giving examples of Chinese wit and wisdom, Mao's thoughts, and so on. There are other questionable tactics adopted by American magazines, but they're not so serious. Like Time's using unflattering pictures to damn people. But between you and me, I have been guilty of this also.

Q. You write for U.S. magazines yourself, don't you? A. Yes, I write fairly regularly for the New York Times Magazine. And I write occasionally for Harper's and for Evergreen Review. Actually, it's interesting how different the needs of American magazines are. Take the length of their articles-we just don't have the paper to print things that long. Q. Would you say that U.S. magazine publishing has reached a critical stage? A. I suppose it has-what with the closure of Life and so many of the other glossy magazines. The whole U.S. magazine scene seems to have reached a kind of crossroads. One thing that strikes me is the difference between our situation and theirs. Just fancy, the city of New York has only two large dailies, whereas Bombay has 12. And Delhi has 15, or even more! In America it's the challenge of TV-it's siphoning off the ads. Anyway I think this stage is a long way away from us in India. There are other respects in which there is no comparisontake the rates of payment, for instance. I could make a lot more money if I wrote more for the New York Times Magazine. But here at the Weekly, I'm having more fun. I'm getting more kudos. And, most important, I'm my own boss. There's no interference at all. Let me tell you what happened the other day. At a party, a young man walked up to me and started complimenting me on the improvements I'd brought to the Weekly. I'm used to this sort of thing, of course, but I casually asked him his name. I was a little surprised to discover that he was a member of the Board of Directors of the Times ofIndia group of publications. I'm so free from the bosses that I don't even know who they are! One of the reasons I'm enjoying my job is because of what might be called an editor's 'fringe benefits.' Which reminds me of something that happened a few years ago. Like many other writers and editors in Delhi, I used to get the occasional bottle of whisky at Christmas time. One year I thought I'd give this a bit of a fillip-raise the number of bottles, perhaps. So I took my latest paperback, gift-wrapped it, and sent it off to several ambassadors. All nicely timed just a few days before Christmas. Not long after, there was an invitation for drinks from Ambassador Galbraith and his wife. I waited eagerly for the day. At the party we talked of this and that, but at last it was time to leave. Just as we were about to go, Galbraith said, "Wait a moment. I have something for you." "Ah!" I gloated inwardly, "here comes that crate of whisky." Just then Galbraith entered the room. He had in his hand a gift-wrapped copy of his latest book. 0

Magazine -Design The publication designer was created by the communications revolution and he has in some ways become its victim. He came into being in America during the 1920s when editors and publishers realized that they could no longer cope with the growing demand for visual presentation. But as design became more and more of an editorial force and as the stress of change began to alter magazine economics, the designer's very importance became a threat to his security. In their formative years, American magazines turned to Europe for models and guidance. Two European-trained art directors played a significant role in giving shape and form to the modern magazine in the United States. One was Dr. M.F. Agha who came to Conde Nast magazine publishers in 1929, where he was art director of Vogue and Vanity Fair; he built an organization of young designers who, in turn, contributed to the development of the modern magazine. The other was Russian-born Alexey Brodovitch, who served for about 25 years (1934-1958) as art director of Harper's Bazaar. His laboratory course in graphic design trained and set the style for a generation of art directors and photographers. The magazine revolution took full form when the advent of the picture magazine in the '30s (Life, Look, etc.) thrust the American magazine and magazine art director to the forefront. With their large formats, staffs of photojournalists, and extended sections of handsomely printed color, these magazines brought a new visual dimension to publishing and underscored the importance of the art director. His name moved up on the masthead and he frequently became the number two man on the staff. While the American magazines of the '20s and '30s developed under the influence of the graphic design revolution in Europe, they were destined to reverse that process by the end of the 1940s. In the postwar years, the Americans had a decisive influence on the development of popular, large-circulation magazines in Great Britain and on the Continent. By the end of the 1960s European magazines developed a new vitality of their own, and now in the early '70s, American designers are again turning to the magaAbout the Author: Allen F. Hurlburt is former art director of Look magazine and president of the American Institute of GraphicArts. He has received numerous design awards in the U.S. and abroad. This article has been reprinted by courtesy of Graphis magazine. Copyright ÂŠ 1970 by Walter Herdeg. the Graphis Press.

zines of Europe for some of their ideas and inspiration. As in other areas of contemporary design, the art director's responsibility extends well beyond the mere arranging of elements on the printed page. He frequently becomes involved in editorial decisions that reach far beyond the limits of his drawing board. This newly acquired stature became a mixed blessing as troubled magazines began to change art directors in the hope that the magic of a new format or the pyrotechnics of innovative typography would somehow solve all of their problems. This dubious tribute..to the importance of the art director rarely worked. Good design can make a significant contribution to a magazine, but it cannot serve as a substitute for content nor can it camouflage editorial mediocrity. This form of magazine gamesmanship led to some interesting rounds of musical chairs at the art director's desk, with magazines sometimes changing designers two or more times in the same year. As a result, only a few of the art directors responsible for the work illustrated on these pages have been with their respective magazines for more than a handful of years. The American magazine world resembles an iceberg. The colorful consumer magazines that decorate the newsstands are the upper visual portion, but beneath these hundred or so publications are another 3,000 business and professional publications and uncounted numbers of company magazines and house organs. Many of these exist without art direction except on an occasional consulting basis,

but an impressive number are well designed and handsomely illustrated publications. At their best, these magazines serve both as training grounds for some of the best art directors and as experimental areas for new design ideas. One distinguishing trait of magazine layout in the '60s was the full, two-page picture which extended to the edges of the page and contained carefully incorporated typography within the photograph. Now, in the early '70s, there is evidence of a new formalism in magazine graphics-fewer of such "bleed" photographs; a new emphasis on the symmetrical balance of pictures, type and white space; more use of type-rules and borders surrounding pictures and type; more ornament and use of old-fashioned type faces; more carefully composed photographs and more formal, decorative illustrations. As for content, television has posed new problems for many magazines. With its effortless viewing pattern, TV has become the home center for light entertainment and escape fiction. This has forced magazines to take a more serious approach in their editorial content and to concentrate on the power of words and the enduring value of the printed image. 0

Jagged, wraparound type and duplication of running figure (below) create a feeling of movement and tension for a non-fictional account of college campus unrest in the U.S. These pages are from Esquire magazine.

lIa.,' A.l • ••••• s-t .

.....•... c-_ ••• _

,.... ~ .....•.. WJdo_~...-..~ , •••••••. 'N-'-ML

••••

~:_Ioft.••• io"",, ••I0' ••• •••••••••• Jr •••••••.••••• _...,._ ••• 1tia ••••••• '!NoolIfo"k .•••• Ia..h •• d..kl,. ~_W<lOlfrC •••••••.• ofW.••• _ ••••• ,'I' •••••.• •• noj <3IW ,,""', H •••••••••• '. ••••••• ;- •••.•.••••• Wp\_ ••• lO(ld•• anrl

~,.""'d ••••••

f:="f~.:s-:-.r;z..:ll-: ;::..'=.;.=

••• Iit.t".,,_ •••.•.•.•.••• _ .•••

"'-JOOJ'O. lh •••••_d.r •.,.,oldLldr:••IrifI"l.$tllOO •••••. .-.,.._ • ., ••.•...•••..•.••••.•""'.,"';od.I_. •••. , -...I. llo". IfUo Alif. '''!b, Ii•••. ill. dIoorm-llw ""-' T.IftU,a-do •.• I»<NM town ill S.'hliolp.••", _ •••• '••••• 1'•••• """" Q<h0lrW1.too. ,_...,

a.,,-t .......•,_ ..••.,.•.•

_ .•.••. ,_;.. .11"'", ,100'-."'- •.•• _.<1.,,"...,.,, __ ,.... _......,-. ....,..,.-"""-; ... ...,.. """"'_"""-

ioo

••

..,.

,'--_

..• •.~ •......,~~

•••••• _ ••••••••••••• <te Of"" ""-"of.-. ;".toIII!"l "'- ••••••••• '"' Illel • \oloo ••• ailt. bllott-oI_1'lhtI ••••••••.

.w.;•••.

=i~~:'u:::~H .

Layout (below left) illustrates an article on race relations in the United States and typifies editorial design of the 1960s, using symbolic photography, simple composition, emotional appeal and plenty of white space. From Look magazine.

....~.~""'"pt'IOft....t

•.Itt,"'-"'lI ........$ootq_ ..•..• "u•..•••.. ,.••... 11o •••1•• Iow.I!IQ.C_hrbto ••••• _" •••••••. "~ •• I•••••••A••• -'."\ •••".h~ •.••• _ •...,of,hrf-.,. .•••• Ihrf_""'Il"W. I" 'lor•••••• ""••.. !!oo."....ll,.o' •••• nnl_ ••hoI:.hr •••.I'" .'-..II'I· •••••II •• u.dtwtdI ••••••• ·r·_ ••• dIiI,.. II. __ I •.•••• lot.~ .

"I' ••••.

..n'hi· ••

,.....••. v.r ••.

=:..riI~~~:::~~~... ~I~.-r ""---'_I"""~."' __."u...•...•..• •.••.••• Hill.,,"'"'•••• "."' .•••••...••.•••••.••••.• ....-AAIIw'J"tWIf~~ ••• __ •.•••••..••••

___ .::ti~:.:.~'::.~.;~,,::.:u~I=::::""~ [

Eye-catching blend of bright colors, photographs and odd-shaped area of type (left) match the contemporary subject matter of the story: a report in Playboy magazine on "Alice's Restaurant," a film dealing with rebellious young people .

••• tfiMIIII'r_ •• ••• "-..., ••Mtfd.".

.,. •... , •.•.• ...t .•..•••.• '''''••..•...•

Vl.Ir ••••• ''''''-..-.:

_10

•••• WI4tr ••••

,.'*'

w __

BLACK AND WHITE

Pounded into our

heads.

Black-and-White. Barn, Barn. Usand-Them. We li.,e together, lookInR' at other. rarely slavery

each other. hating each needing each other-but tQuching. The offshoots of lie across our land. White

denied Black full social justire-and dot's not now know how to stop denyin~. Yet the ideological extremes-"Backlash" and "Black Power"-botn spring from the Negro's essentiady mild demands: lndividuz.! rights and group dignity. The answer to our "race question" depends on what we are willing to perceive of each other. The ability to bridge this chasm of color is simply the mark of a sensible man. Thi?' answer. then. hinges on an urgent. new alteration in the relation of man to man. It asks that we learn to reach out. to touch-and. touching. feel there is no difference.

Use of typography to make a visual statement characterizes this sectional title page (above) from the magazine Motion Pictures, USA. The layout also features bold, rectangular shapes that suggest film frames and a dot pattern that creales a theater marquee effect.

Two-page spread (left) showing an early era of Hollywood films underscores the nostalgic mood of the old movies with the use of heavy borders, rounded corners on photos and other embellishments. Pages from Motion Pictures, USA.

GLOBETROTTERS REDISCOVER AMERICA

Ranked among the best cameramen ever are the American photographers who roam the globe for the National Geographic Society, Washington. The world's largest non-profit scientific and educational institution, the Society publishes the monthly National Geographic magazine, which has a circulation of more than seven million in nearly 100 countries. Twenty-nine of the Society's photographers recently put their favorite pictures on display in an exhibit entitled "Photographers' Choice." Selections from the exhibit appear on these and the following pages and on the back cover. The biggest surprise of the show was that most of these men-known chiefly for the exotic foreign Above: Water doubles the photographer's magic in this picture of a Louisiana bayou. With these moss-hung cypresses shrouded in mist, cameraman James L. Stanfield seems to have captured all the mystery of the American South.

places they have visitedÂˇ-selected the natural beauty of their homeland for their entries. But they were not thinking in terms of national boundaries; nor were they motivated by an excess of patriotism. As one entrant put it, the selections were based on "their ability to evoke a response of emotion in the viewer." A good example is the photograph at right. For everyone person who admires the sinuous beauty of the Grand Canyon, there will be a dozen who will thrill to the danger of the lone climber negotiating a sheer wall. The fact that these pictures were taken in America is unimportant. For they communicate in a language more fundamental than poetry, more universal than music. Opposite: Dramatic view of the Grand Canyon was taken by Walter M. Edwards. Overleaf: Gay red sail of a rubber raft contrasts strongly with the awesome, cathedrallike architecture of the overhanging cliff. Also by Walter Edwards.

Top: As haunting as memory is James Amos's photo of scarred palisades soaring behind a screen of trees in Kauai, Hawaii. Above: Robert Madden's "Sailboat With Storm Clouds" achieves a satisfying pattern of horizontals,

with the boat providing precisely the right punctuation. Opposite page: Dick Durrance II fixed forever the image of a bright moonlit night on Lehmi Pass, Montana, where the Rocky Mountains divide North America.

LEGENDARY EDITOR

ROSS OF 'THE NEW YORKER' In 'The New Yorker,' the biographical article developed into a brand new literary form called the 'Profile'-elegant in style and exhaustive in detail. But Harold Ross made sure he was never the subject of one during his long tenure as editor (1925 to 1951). Perhaps the best 'profile' of his complex and turbulentpersonality is the book 'The Years With Ross' written by James Thurber, who served on the magazine for 25 years. Here are a few of Thurber's comments which shed light on why Ross became one of the most original and successful editors in the history of American journalism. The cover at left is by Saul Steinberg, noted artist, cartoonist and illustrator, whose works have appeared mainly in 'The New Yorker' since 1941.

Harold Ross died December 6, 1951, exactly one month after his 59th birthday. In November of the following year The New Yorker entertained the editors of Punch ~the British humor magazine) and some of its outstanding artists and writers. I missed the party, but weeks later met Rowland Emett for lunch at the Algonquin Hotel. "I'm sorry you didn't get to meet Ross," I began as we sat down. "Oh, but I did," he said. "He was all over the place. Nobody talked about anybody else." Ross is still all over the place for many of us, vitally stalking the corridors of our lives, disturbed and disturbing, fretting, stimulating, more evident in death than the living presence of ordinary men. A photograph of him, full face, almost alive with a sense of contained restlessness, hangs on a wall outside his old office. I am sure he had just said to the photographer, "I haven't got time for this." That's what he said, impatiently, to anyone-doctor, lawyer, tax man-who interrupted, even momentarily, the stream of his dedicated energy. Unless a meeting, conference, or consultation touched somehow upon the working of his magazine, he began mentally pacing. He became, I think, by far the most painstaking, meticulous, hairsplitting detail-criticizer the world

and perhaps even longer. 1 cannot vouch for the truth of his query about a drawing of two elephants gazing at one of their offspring with the caption, "It's about time to tell Junior the facts of life," but, valid or apocryphal, it has passed into legend. "Which elephant is talking?" he is supposed to have asked. On another day, he doubted that the windows of the United Nations Building were anything like those shown in a drawing, and he ordered that a photographer be sent to take pictures of the windows. My favorite of all his complaints, in a career of thousands of them, was reported to me by Peter De Vries, who for years attended the art meetings and still helps go through the "rough basket," skimming off the best of hundreds or thousands of sketches. The cover on the board showed a Model T driving along a dusty country road, and Ross turned his sharpshooting eye on it for a full two minutes. "Take this down, Miss Terry," he said. "Better dust." of editing has known. "Take this down," he would say to Miss Terry, and he would dictate a note of complaint to the creator of the drawing or cover under consideration. The memory of some of this "sharpshooting"-I don't know who applied the word, but it was perfectwill last as long as the magazine,

"His mind is uncluttered by culture," said a man at the Players Club, during one of those impromptu panel discussions of Harold Ross that often began when writers and artists got together. "That's why he :can give prose and pictures the benefit of the clearest concentration of

'Some of us writers were devoted to him, a few disliked him heartily ... but almost everybody would rather have had the benefit of his criticism than that of any other editor on earth. His opinions were voluble, stabbing and grinding.... ' any editor in the world." It wasn't as simple as that, for there was more than clear concentration behind the scowl and the searchlight glare that he turned on manuscripts, proofs, and dra wings. He had a sound sense, a unique, almost intuitive perception of what was wrong with something, incomplete or out of balance, understated or overemphasized. He reminded me of an army scout riding at the head of a troop of cavalry who suddenly raises his hand in a green and silent valley and says, "Red Indians," although to the ordinary eye there is not the faintest sign or sound of anything alarming. Some of us writers were devoted to him, a few disliked him heartily, others came out of his office after conferences as from a side show, a juggling act, or a dentist's office, but almost everybody would rather have had the benefit of his criticism than that of any other editor on earth. His opinions were voluble, stabbing, and grinding, but they succeeded somehow in refreshing your knowledge of yourself and renewing your interest in your work. Having a manuscript under Ross's scrutiny was like putting your car in the hands of a skilled mechanic, not an automotive engineer with a bachelor of science degree, but a guy who knows what makes a motor go, and sputter, and wheeze, and sometimes come to a dead stop; a man with an ear for the faintest body squeak as well as the loudest engine rattle. When you first gazed, appalled, upon an uncorrected proof of one of your stories or arti-

cles, each margin had a thicket of queries and complaints-one writer got 144 on one profile. It was as though you beheld the works of your car spread all over the garage floor, and the job of getting the thing together again and making it work seemed impossible. Then you realized that Ross was trying to make your Model T or old Stutz Bearcat into a Cadillac or Rolls-Royce. He was at work with the tools of his unflagging perfectionism, and, after an exchange of snarls, you set to work to join him in his enterprise. The blurs and imperfections his scout's eye always caught drew from his pencil such designations as unclear, repetition, cliche, ellipsis, and now and then blunter words. He knew when you had tired and were writing carelessly, and when you were "just monkeying around here," or going out on a limb, or writing fancy, or showing off. His "Who he?" became famous not only in the office but outside. Joe Liebling, The New Yorker staffer, once had "Who he?" painted on the door of his office, to the bewilderment of strangers who wondered what kind of bus iness Liebling could be in. Sometimes this query put a careful finger on someone who had not been clearly identified, and at other times it showed up the gaps in Ross's knowledge of historical, contemporary, or literary figures. (He once said that only two names were familiar to every reader in the civilized world: Houdini and Sherlock Holmes.) H.W. Ross, being neither artist

nor poet, was not equipped to br~' "grace and measure" out of ~~: chaos of man on earth,for his heart's ease or his peace of mind, but there was in him something of the powerful urge that has animated the human male from Sir Percival to Pasteur, from Marco Polo to Admiral Peary. He never knew exactly what he was after, since he didn't have much self-knowledge and was afraid of introspection, but I think he hoped it would be as shining as the Holy Grail, or as important as the Northwest Passage, or as rewarding as the pot of gold. He was afraid, though, that a Gorgon would pop up at any time to frustrate him, or a Questyng Beast, or a Gordian knot, and he realized that he damn well better have a Perseus on hand to help him, or a Palamedes, or an Alexander the Great. These romantic comparisons would, I am sure, move psychiatrists to ridicule; they would find in Sir Harold not a romantic, but a mixed-up modern man driven by the well-known compulsion to build with one hand and tear down with the other. Well, that urge was in him, too, along with fixation, defense mechanism, inferiority complex, and all the rest. Many of us who went with him on his Quest, part of or all the way, often became bored or infuriated, and wanted to quit, and there were scores who did quit and found an easier way to live and make a living. A few of us could not quit. We had put on the armor and strapped on the sword and we were stuck with them. Once, when E.B. ("Andy") White had taken all he could, or thought he had, he said he was quitting and went home. Ross paced his office all afternoon and then got White on the phone at his apartment. "You can't quit," he roared. "This isn't a magazine-it's a Movement!" Andy did not leave the Movement. 0 About the Author: James Thurber, one of America's greatest humorists, was a prolific writer of stories and satirical sketches. He also produced thousands of comic drawings. When he died in 1961, at the age of 66, he had written more than 20 books. Among them are My World-And Welcome To It, The Beast in Me and Other Animals and My Life and Hard Times.

;II I

•

I son One of the great men of letters of this century, Edmund Wilson often chose to describe himself as a journalist. And it is true that the bulk of his vast output appeared in journals-that he used magazines ((as shipyards in which to assemble his books." His self-appellation notwithstanding, Wilson was one of America's foremost literary critics. He was also a novelist, poet, playwright, essayist, historian and linguist. The article beginning alongside was published shortly before his death one year ago this month. It starts as a review of Upstate-memories of New York State composed largely of diary entries-moves on to review his earlier work, and concludes that Wilson ((will go on being read as long as men are prepared to read widely and well." This article is reproduced from the London "Times Literary Supplement" by special permission.

1895-1972 Edmund Wilson writes in the 1957 chapter of Upstate: Looking out from my window on the third floor, I saw the change made here by autumn in the land· scape and the atmosphere: they become distinctly more serious. Nature begins to warn us, reassuming her august authority; the luxury of summer is being withdrawn.

In context, this passage carries many times the weight of any ordinary nature-note: the book is already half over, a splitting head of steam has been built up and the reader is by now in no doubt that the luxury of summer is being withdrawn from the writer himself, from the historical district in which he writes, from all the artists he has ever personally known and from the America which he has for so long chronicled and which he is now ceasing even to distrust. Upstate shivers with the portent of an advancing ice-cap. Wilson's monumental curiosity and zest of mind have not grown less, but by now they are like Montaigne's, exiled within their own country and awaiting, without real hope, a better age which will know how to value them. Self· confidence remains, but confidence in one's function ebbs; one's books do not seem to

have been much use; the public weal has proved itself an illusion and private life is running out of time. Wilson's tone is self-sufficient. "The knowledge that death is not so far away," he writes in 1963: ... that my mind and emotions and vitality will soon disappear like a puff of smoke, has the effect of making earthly affairs seem unimportant and human beings more and more ignoble. It is harder to take human life seriously, including one's own efforts and achievements and passions.

That was the year in which he was writing The Cold War and the Income Tax, a profound

growl of dissatisfaction about owing the United States Government a swathe of backtaxes which it would only have wasted if he had handed it over. Dealings with the revenue men were prolonged and wearying, making a general disappointment with life understandable. In 1966 things were going better, but his view of existence didn't much lighten. To go with his Kennedy Freedom Medal he was given a $1,000 award by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a $5,000 • National Book Award, but he found himself feeling let down rather than pulled up. "They make me feel that I am now perhaps finished, stamped with some sort of approval and filed away.... "

'Only the European panoptic scholars come near matching Wilson for learning, and for He is hard on himself, and no softer on humanity as a whole. "Reading the newspapers, and even the world's literature, I find that I more and more feel a boredom with and even scorn for the human race." By the end of the book we're a long way from the mood in which Wilson first evoked Talcottville, in his "The Old Stone House" essay of 1933,later collected in The American Earthquake. In the first place, that essay recalled the hopes of the New Englanders who had grown sick of narrowness and were all for pushing on into the realm of unlimited opportunity: I can feel the relief myself of coming away from Boston to these first uplands of the Adirondacks, where, discarding the New England religion but still speaking the language of New England, the settlers found limitless space. They were a part of the new America, now forever for a century on the move.

The thrill of the great American experiment is still there in the writing, and even though this old essay was just as disenchanted as the new book is, the disenchantment worked in reverse: Talcottville was the opposite of a refuge, representing a past that needed to be escaped from, not returned to. Thirty years or so later, in Upstate, he is cricking his neck to get back to it, but it is too late. Material progress has already made its giant strides. Treasured windows on which poet friends have inscribed verses with a diamond pen are shattered in his absence. The Sunday New York Times is too heavy for him to carry. There is a spider in the bathtub of a motel. An old acquaintance, Albert Grubel, keeps him abreast of the ever-escalating car-crash statistics. His daughter Helena grows up and starts having car-crashes of her own. In 1963 he finds out that he has for all this time been livjng virtually on top of a Strategic-Air-Command nuclear air-base, and is therefore slap in the middle of a prime target area. By the end of the book there is a distinct possibility that a four-lane highway will be constructed a few inches from his front door. The detail is piled on relentlessly, and if there were nothing else working against it, then Upstate would be a dark book indeed. But several things stop it being disabling. First, there are revelations of the Wilsonian character, as when he faces the bikers and asks them why they can't ride on the highway instead of around his house, or when he

argues about iambic pentameters with Nabokov (who insists that Lear's "Never, never, never, never, never" is iambic), or when he tells Mike Nichols that Thurber is not alone in lacking self-assurance and that he, Wilson, often gets up at four o'clock in the morning to read old reviews of his books. In bits and pieces like these there is enough singularity and sheer quirkiness to keep things humming. Second, there is evidence of the Wilsonian curiosity, as when he deepens his knowledge of the county's history, or when he becomes interested in the founding and the subsequent fate of the old Oneida community. Wilson can't stop learning things, and it's worth remembering at this point that the curious information which crops up in the book is only the topmost molecule of the outermost tip of the iceberg. In the period covered by Upstate (1950-1970), Wilson was producing exhaustively prepared books like The Shock of Recognition and Patriotic Gore; breaking into new cultures with books like The Scrolls from the Dead Sea, Apologies to the Iroquois, and o Canada; turning out important investigatory pamphlets like The Cold War and the Income Tax and The Fruits of the MLA (a crucially important attack on the boondoggling academicism of the Modern Language Association); and editing A Prelude, and the second and third in his series ofliterary chronicles, The Shores of Light and The Bit Between My Teeth. (The first, Classics and Commercials, had appeared in 1950.) Only the European panoptic scholars come near matching Wilson for learning, and for sheer range of critical occupation there is no modern man to match him, not even Croce. If Upstate tends to give the impression that his wonted energy now only faintly flickers, the reader needs to remind himself sharply that the mental power in question is still of an order sufficient to illuminate the average city. Seemingly without effort, Wilson dropped A Piece of My Mind (1957) somewhere into the middle of all this hustle and bustle, and in the chapter entitled "The Author at Sixty" announced: I have lately been coming to feel that, as an American, I am more or less in the 18th century-or, at any rate, not much later than the early 19th .... I do not want any more to be bothered with the kind of contemporary conflicts that I used to go out to explore. I make no attempt to keep up with the younger American writers; and I only hope to have the time to get through some of the classics I have never read. Old fogeyism is comfortably closing in.

Taking him at his word on this last point, most critics and reviewers were relieved, which was very foolish of them. But on the first point, about feeling himself to be an 18th-century or 19th-century figure, Wilson was making a just estimate, even if he meant only that he didn't drive a car and couldn't bear to pronounce the word "movies." As Alfred Kazin argued in his review of The American Earthquake (collected in his fine book Contemporaries), the men to compare Wilson with are the literary artists driven by historical imaginations-men like Carlyle. The third thing which lightens the darkness of Upstate is the author's gradually revealed-and revealed only gradually even to himself-interest in a local young woman striving to better herself. Perhaps without really willing it, Wilson is telling a subtle story here: flashes and fragments are all we get. But by the time the book is over, we are convinced that her story is the story of the book, and that the story has gone against the mood. Kazin suggested that Wilson's secret was to gaze at America with a cold eye without being cold on America. The American Earthquake inexorably recorded the shattering effects of industrialism and the spiritual confusion of the New Deal, but it was not a hopeless book-it responded to the period's vitalities, even (while castigating it) the vitality of Henry Ford. Upstate very nearly is a hopeless book, and for a long while we suspect that Wilson has gone cold on America. But finally we see that he hasn't, quite; as the girl Mary works to establish herself in a way that her European origins would probably not have allowed, the American adventure haltingly begins all over again, at the 11th hour and in the 59th minute. Against the Stygian background of the book's accumulated imagery it is not much hope to offer, but it is not nothing, and Wilson was never in the consolation business anyway. Which leaves us-as we shelve Upstate beside A Prelude and prudently leave room for the books dealing with the 30 uncovered years between them-with the question of what business Wilson has been in.

hat does Wilson's effort amount to? Is there an atom of truth in his dispirited suggestion that his books have dated? Supposing-as seems likely-that Wilson be- ~ longs with the great, copious critical minds like Saintsbury, Sainte-Beuve, Croce, Taine;

is he doomed to survive like them only as an emblem of the qualities a mind can have, Saintsbury for gusto, Sainte-Beuve for diligence, Croce for rigor, Taine for drama? Wilson makes Van Wyck Brooks's output look normal, Eliot's look slim, Empson's, Trilling's and Leavis's look famished. Just how is all this avoirdupois to be moved forward? We need to decide whether critical work which has plainly done so much to influence its time vanishes with its time or continues. To continue, it must have done something beyond maintaining standards or correctingtaste, important as those functions are: It must have embodied, not just recommended, a permanent literary value. And we do not have to re-read much of Wilson's criticism-although it would be a year of perfect pleasure to re-read all of it-to see that it does embody a value, and embodies it ina way and to a degree that no other corpus of 20th-century work has approached. But this value, so easily sensed, is very difficult to define,since it must perforce reside in whatever is left after opposing high estimations of Wilson have canceled each other out. Lionel Trilling (in "Edmund Wilson: A Background Glance," collected in A Gathering of Fugitives) says that an interest in ideas is the very essence of Wilson's criticism. Alfred Kazin, on the other hand, says that ideas are things Wilson is not at home with. If both these men admire the same thing in Wilson,what is it? The answer is that Wilson has a mental style-a mental style which reveals itself in the way he writes. He is proof by nature against metaphysics of any kind (sometimes to the damaging extent that he cannot grasp why men should bother to hold to them), and this characteristic gives his work great clarity. He never has to strive towards perspicuity, since he is never tempted even momentarilyto abandon it. And in more than 50years of activity he has put up such a consistent show of knowing what he meansand of writing it down so that it may be readily understood-that he has invited underestimation. The most difficult escape Houdini ever made was from a wet sheet, but sincehe was in the business of doing difficultlookingthings he had to abandon this trick, because to the public it seemed easy. What Wilsonwas doing was never easy, but he had .the good manners to make it look that way. If he could only have managed to dream up an objective correlative, or a few types of

ambiguity, or if he had found it opportune to start lamenting the loss of an organic society, he would be much more fashionable now than he is. But we can search his work from end to end without finding any such conversation-piece. What we do find is a closely argued dramatic narrative in which good judgment and misjudgment both stand out plainly. The dangerous excitement of a tentatively formulated concept is absent from his work, and for most of us this is an excitement that is hard to forgo: the 20th century has given us a palate for such pepper.

utthere is another, more durable excitement which Wilson's entire body of work serves to define. There is a clue to it in Upstate, in the passage where Wilson discusses the different courses taken by Eliot and Van Wyck Brooks: They were at Harvard at the same time, Brooks of the class of 1908, Eliot of 1910, and both, as was natural then, went, after college, to England. Eliot took root there, but Brooks said that, during the months he spent in England, he found himself preoccupied with American subjects. This difference marks the watershed in the early 1900s in American literary life. Eliot stays in England, which is for him still the motherland of literature in English, and becomes a European; Brooks returns to the United States and devotes himself to American writing, at the expense of what has been written in Europe. Eliot represents the growth of an American internationalism: Brooks, as a spokesman of the 'twenties, the beginnings of the sometimes all-too-conscious American literary self-glorification.

As it happened, Wilson was to go on to cover American subjects with all Brooks's thoroughness and more; and to parallel Eliot's internationalism while yet holding to the tacit belief that the American achievement could well be crucial in the continuity of that internationalism; and to combine, these two elements with a total authority of preparation and statement. For that preparation, he had the brilliant education available in pre-war Princeton to a young man ready to grasp it. For that statement, he was obliged to evolve a style which would make his comprehensive seriousness unmistakable in every line. Out of these two things came the solid achievement of judgments based on unarguable knowledge ably supplied to meet a historical demand. From the beginning, Wilson was a necessary writer, a chosen man. And it is this feeling of watching a man proving himself equal to an incontestably important task-

explaining the world to America and explaining America to itself-which provides the constant excitement of Wilson's work. Commanding this kind of excitement his prose needed no other. Wilson grew out of the great show-off period of American style. He could not have proceeded without the trail-blasting, first performed by Mencken and Nathan, but he was fundamentally different from them in not feeling bound to over-write. Wilson's style adopted the MenckenNathan toughness but eschewed the belligerence-throwing no punches, it simply put its points and waited for intelligent men to agree. It assumed that intelligence could be a uniting factor rather than a divisive one. In the following passage (from "The Critic Who Does Not Exist," written in 1928 and later collected in The Shores of Light) this point is made explicitly: What we lack, then, in the United States, is not writers or even literary parties, but simply serious literary criticism (the school of critics I have mentioned last, i.e., Brooks, Mumford and Joseph Wood Krutch, though they set forth their own ideas, do not occupy themselves much with the art or ideas of the writers with whom they deal). Each of these groups does produce, to be sure, a certain amount of criticism to justify or explain what it is doing, but it may, I believe, be said in general that they do not communicate with one another; their opinions do not really circulate. It is astonishing to observe in America, in spite of our floods of literary journalism, to what extent the literary atmosphere is a non-conductor of criticism. What actually happens, in our literary world, is that each leader or group of leaders is allowed to intimidate his disciples, either ignoring all the other leaders or taking cognizance of their existence only by distant and contemptuous sneers. H.L. Mencken and T.S. Eliot present themselves, as I have said, from the critical point of view, as the most formidable figures on the scene; yet Mencken's discussion of his principal rival has, so far as my memory goes, been confined to an inclusion of the latter's works among the items of one of those lists of idiotic current crazes in which the Mercury [Mencken's magazine] usually includes also the recall of judges and paper-bag cookery. And Eliot, established in London, does not. of course, consider himself under the necessity of dealing with Mencken at all. ... Van Wyck Brooks, in. spite of considerable baiting, has never been induced to defend his position (though Krutch has recently taken up some challenges). And the romantics have been belabored by the spokesmen of several different camps without making any attempt to strike back. It, furthermore, seems unfortunate that some of our most important writersSherwood Anderson and Eugene O'Neill, for example-should work, as they apparently do, in almost complete intellectual isolation, receiving from the outside but little intelligent criticism and developing, in their solitary labors, little capacity for supplying it themselves.

'There is nothing in criticism to beat the thrill of hearing Wilson produce the first description

Wilson's innovation was to treat the American intelligentsia as if it were a European one, speaking a common language. "For there is one language," he wrote in the same essay, "which all French writers, no matter how divergent their aims, always possess in common: the language of criticism." That was the ideal, and by behaving as if it had already come about, he did a great deal to bring it into existence. The neutral, dignified tone of his prose was crucial here: it implied that there was no need for an overdose of personality, since writer and reader were on a level and understood one another. As Lionel Trilling has convincingly argued, Wilson's years in an editorial chair for The New Republic magazine were a big help in getting this tone right-he was in action continuously (more than two-thirds of the pieces in The Shores of Light first appeared in The New Republic) before a self-defining audience of intelligent men, all of whom were capable of appreciating that opinions should circulate.

chronicles, especially The Shores of Light, are commonly valued

he literary

above Wilson's more integrated books, and although it seems likely that the people doing the valuing have not correctly judged the importance of the latter, the evaluation nevertheless seems just at first glance. As has often been pointed out, there is nothing in criticism to beat the thrill of hearing Wilson produce the first descriptions and definitions of the strong new American literature that was coming up in the 1920s-the first essays on Fitzgerald and Hemingway will always stand as the perfect objects for any literary journalist's envy and respect. But here again we must remember to avoid trying to nourish ourselves with condiments alone. What needs to be appreciated, throughout the literary chronicles, is the steady work of reporting, judging, sorting out, encouraging, reproving, and re-estimating. The three literary chronicles are, among other things, shattering reminders that many of the men we distinguish with the name of critic have never judged a piece of writing in their lives-just elaborated on judgments already formed by other men. A certain demonstration of Wilson's integrity in this regard is his ability to assess minor and ancillary literature about which no general opinion has previously been built up: The Shock of Recognition and Patriotic Gore

are natural culminations of Wilson's early drive toward mining and assaying in territory nobody else had even staked out. Wilson is a memory; he never at any stage believed that the historic process by which writings are forgotten should go unexamined or be declared irreversible. Remembering is one of the many duties the literary chronicles perform: not so spectacular a duty as discovering, but equally important. For Wilson's self-imposed task of circulating opinions within an intelligent community (a community whose existence depends on such a process for its whole existence), all these duties needed to be scrupulously carried out, and it is the triumph of the literary chronicles that they were carried out in so adventurous a way. Unless all these things are held in mind, the true stature of the literary chronicles cannot be seen, even by those who value them above the rest of Wilson's work. In The Shores of Light it is necessary to appreciate not just "F. Scott Fitzgerald" and "Emergence of Ernest Hemingway," but also pieces like "The Literary Consequences of the Crash," "Talking United States," and "PrizeWinning Blank Verse." In Classics and Commercials we need to cherish not only the stand-out hatchet-jobs like "Who Cares Who Killed Roger Ackroyd?" and "Tales of the Marvelous and the Ridiculous" but also the assiduous labor of weighing up-never impatient, even when repelled-which went into essays like "Glenway Wescott's War Work" and "Van Wyck Brooks on the Civil War Period." And unless we can get rid of the notion that picking winners was Wilson's only true calling in life, we will have no hope at all of reaching a true estimation of The Bit Between My Teeth-a book disparaged as tired and thin by reviewers who in the full vigor of youth could not have matched the solidity of the least piece in it. "The PrePresidential T.R." and "The Holmes-Laski Correspondence" are masterly examples of what Wilson can accomplish by bringing a literary viewpoint to historical documents; and "The Vogue of the Marquis de Sade" got the whole Sade revival into focus and incisively set the limits for its expansion. The literary chronicles would have been more than enough by themselves to establish Wilson's pre-eminence: to a high degree they have that sense of the drama of creativity which Taine had been able to capture and

exploit. If people are going to read only some of Wilson instead of all of him, then the chronicles are what they should read. But it is one thing to say this, and another to accept the assumption-distressingly widespread in recent years-that Axel's Castle and The Wound and the Bow and The Triple Thinkers have in some way done the work they had to do and may be discarded, like used-up boosters. There is not much doubt about how such an idea gained currency, books of long essays being so much harder to read than books of short ones. But there is no reason for anyone who has actually read and understood a book like Axel's Castle to go along with such a slovenly notion. When, in the Yeats chapter of that book, Wilson compared the Yeats of 1931 to the Dante who was able "to sustain a grand manner through sheer intensity without rhetorical heightening," he was writing permanent criticism, criticism which can't be superseded, certainly not by pundits who are boning up their Dante from a parallel text instead of learning it the hard way from a teacher like Christian Gauss. It is barbarism of a peculiarly academic kind to suppose that truths of this order-no insights, explications, or glosses, but truthscan be appropriated to a data-bank or dismissed as obsolete. A Dantesque "epigrammatic bitterness" is precisely the quality to see in the mature Yeats, and in 1931, before the last poems were written, it was virtually prescient to be able to see it, since that quality had not yet reached its full concentration. Wilson paid heavy penalties for being plain-or rather we paid heavy penalties for not seeing the force of his plainness. In the Eliot chapter of Axel's Castle he said something about Eliot that 40 years of theses and learned articles have done their best to bury, something which we are only now capable of seeing as criticism rather than conversation, the intervening hubbub of academic industry, having revealed itself as conversation rather than criticism: We are always being dismayed, in our general reading, to discover that lines among those which we had believed to represent Eliot's residuum of original invention had been taken over or adapted from other writers .... One would be inclined a priori to assume that all this load of erudition and literature would be enough to sink any writer, and that such a production as 'The Waste Land' must be a work of second-hand inspiration. And it is true that, in reading Eliot and Pound, we are sometimes visited by uneasy recollections of Ausonius, in the fourth century.

anddefinitions of the strong new American literature that was eoming up in the 1920s ....

composing Greek-and-Latin macaronies and piecing together poetic mosaics out of verses from Virgil. Yet Eliot manages to be most effective precisely-in 'The Waste Land'-where he might be expected to be least original-he succeeds in conveying his meaning, in communicating his emotion, in spite of all his learned or mysterious allusions, and whether we understand them or not. In this respect, there is a curious contrast between Eliot and Ezra Pound.

With Pound, Wilson was like Tallulah Bankhead faced with a tricksy production of Shakespeare: he wasn't afraid to announce, "There's less in this than meets the eye." With Eliot, he was bold enough to say that things were simpler than they appeared at firstblush. Both these judgments were backed up by a deep learning which had nothing to fear from either man, by a sense of quality which knew how to rely on itself, and by a seriousness which was not concerned with putting up a front.

here is no need to go on with this part of the argument. It's more merciful simply to state that Wilson's entire critical corpus willgo on being read so long as men are prepared to read widely and well. His strategy of usingmagazines-first The New Republic, later The New Yorker-as shipyards in which to assemblebooks was triumphantly successful. He is the ideal of the metropolitan critic, who understood from the beginning that the intelligenceof the metropolis is in a certain relation to the intelligence of the academy, and went on understanding this even when the intelligence of the academy ceased to understand its relation to the intelligence of the metropolis. When Wilson called the Modern Language Association to order, he performed the most important academic act of the postwar years-he reminded the scholars that their duty was to literature. For Wilson, literature has always been an international community, with a comprehensible politics of its own. He learnt languages not just out of passionate curiosity but out of quasi-political purposes, becoming acquainted with whole literatures in the same waythat a man who carries an international passport proves himself a part of the main. As late as the mid-1950s Wilson was apologizingfor not having done enough in this line: he has always been a trifle guilty about failing to get interested in Portuguese and Spanish. But to a chastening extent he had already made himself the universa1literatus, and in the later decades of his life we find

him becoming increasingly conscious that this is his major role-if he has any significance in the realm of action, then this is it. Modesty has never been among Wilson's characteristics, but a certain diffidence does creep in, of which the quietism and resignation of Upstate are the logical culmination. The central paradox of Wilson remains unresolved: he has put himself above the battle, inhabiting an Empyrean of knowledge by now fundamentally divorced from an unworkable world. The paradox was vicious from the beginning, becoming more and more so as modern history unfolded in front of him. Wilson was a born internationalist in literature and a born isolationist in politics, and there is a constant tension between the achieved serenity of his literary judgment and the threatening complexity of his selfconsciousness as an American. A patrician individualist by nature, Wilson was automatically debarred from running with the pack. His radicalism in the 1920s and 1930s had a decisive qualitative difference from any Marxist analyses currently available: it was elitist, harking back to the informed democracy of the American past, and therefore on a richer historical base than the hastily imported European doctrines which bemused his contemporaries. Wilson's reports on Detroit are as devastating as Marx on the working day, but the intensity is the only connection. Wilson was revolted by industrialism's depredations-if the ecological lobby ever wants to put a bible together, there are sections of The American Earthquake which could go straight into Revelations-but the revulsion was just as much on behalf of what America had previously been as on behalf of what it might become. Marxism is future-directed metaphysics: Wilson's thought was bent toward the literary recovery of the estimable past.

aking no commitment to Communism, Wilson was never compelled to scramble away from it, and he maintained his dignity throughout the 1930s. By 1940 he had completed his analysis of the revolutionary tradition in Europe and published it as To the Finland Station. In the final paragraph of that book he declared it unlikely that the Marxist creeds would be able to bring about: â&#x20AC;˘.. a society in which the superior development of some is not paid for by the exploitation, that is. by the deliberate degradation of others-a society

which will be homogeneous and co-operative as our commercial society is not, and directed, to the best of their ability, by the conscious creative minds of its members.

In Europe without Baedeker and A Piece of My Mind Wilson came close to holding the Europeans collectively responsible for pulling their own houses down in ruins about their heads. It was the high point of his isolationism, further reinforced by a commitment to the American past amounting to visionary fervor. In his admiration for Lincoln we find Wilson getting very near the mysticism he spent a lifetime scrupulously avoiding. Finally he found a historical base solid-seeming enough to justify the relieved rediscovery of a Platonic Guardian class. "To simplify," he wrote in A Piece of My Mind (1957): One can.say that, on the one hand, you find in the United States the people who are constantly aware ... that, beyond their opportunities for money-making, they have a stake in the success of our system, that they share the responsibility to carryon its institutions, to find expression for its new point of view, to give it dignity, to make it work; and, on the other hand, the people who are merely concerned with making a living or a fortune, with practicing some profession or mastering some technical skill, as they would in any other country, and who lack, or do not possess to quite the same degree the sense of America's role.

That was as far as he got; the Republic he loved began to be overwhelmed by the Democracy he had never been sure about, and in the new reality of the 1960s he found himself taxed but unrepresented. In Upstate, Wilson is faced with the ruins of the American Dream, and appears to be forgetting what we are bound to remember: that the fragments can be built with and that this fact is in some measure due to him. The intellectual community which is now fighting for the Republic against its own debilitating tumors was to a considerable extent his personal creation. That Americans of good will, in the midst of wearying political confusion, can yet be so confident of their nation's creativity is again in a large part due to him. As Christian Gauss was to Wilson-master to pupil-Wilson is to nobody: nobody he can see. He now doubts the continuity he helped to define. But, beyond the range of vision now limiting itself to Cape Cod and Talcottville, there will always be young mencoming up who will find his achievement a clear light. He is one of the great men o( letters in our century. 0

AN INTERVIEW

WITH

MILTON FRIEDMAN

THE ORPORATION AND SOCIETY:

FRIEDMAN: Most of the talk has been utter nonsense. In the first place, the onlyentities who can have responsibilitiesare individuals; a business cannot haveresponsibilities. So the question is, do corporate executives) provided they staywithin the law, have responsibilities in their business activities other than to make as much money for their stockholders as possible? And my answer to that is, no, they do not. Take the corporate executive who says "I have responsibilities over and above that of making profit." If he feels that he has such responsibilities, he is going to spend money in a way that is not in the interest of the shareholders.Where does he get that money? Perhapsfrom the company's employees. Ifhe can pay his employees lower wages than otherwise, he'll have some extra money to spend. It may come from the company's customers, if he can charge them more than they would otherwise pay. Or it may come from the company's stockholders. The crucial question is: What right does the executive haveto spend his stockholders' money? To spend his employees' money? Or his customers' money? Who gave him .the right to decide how their money should be spent? If "socially respon-

It is obvious that in the years ahead, the so-called private corporation will find itself increasingly subjected to external constraints never dreamed of at the Harvard Business School. Not only will the corporation president find he cannot follow policies that will pollute the atmosphere; he will also discover that hundreds of traditional ways of making business decisions will simply no longer be available to him. Society will expand business's responsibilities and take increasing part in deciding how they are to be met. What will be the new framework within which business decision-making will have to operate? How will the new way of life affect growth in national product and distribution of ; incomes among the social classes? Confident and detailed forecasting is quite impossible in so cosmic an area as this. The economist who has studied the econometric patterns of past GNP growth can often predict with some assurance that a particular region is on the brink of a vigorous expansion or is nearing an epoch of relative stagnation. The general laws of technology are conservative and regular and fairly predictable in their unfoldings. Not so the social environment. It takes a seer and a prophet to pinpoint the changes in this sphere. Alas, even a child's re-reading of history will show the seers and prophets of the past lacked genuine sorcerer's hats. Neither Karl Marx nor Henry Adams has been at all near the mark in his prognostications. Although I shall not rush in where they were brave to tread, I think it is useful to speculate, to let hypotheses well up freely, unrestrained by inhibitory

continued on page 38

continued on page 39

QUESTION: Dr. Friedman) in recent years there has been a great deal of discussion about the social responsibilities of the business corporation. Many corporate executives have made speeches about how big business should contribute to the solution of social ills. Candidates for office have reiterated the theme. What do you feel are the responsibilities of business) if any) above and beyond maximizing profits for their shareholders?

FRIEDMAN Z

= !:i E

~",;mred

sive" business executives would stop and think, they would recognize that in effect they are acting irresponsibly. Let me give you an example that has often impressed me. During the 1930s, German businessmen used some corporate money to support Hitler and the Nazis. Was that a proper exercise of social responsibility? The people who preach this nonsense talk as if everyone is always in favor of the same things, and there is no problem about which causes the money should be spent to further. But, of course, that's not the case. How the employees might want to spend the money is one thing; how the stockholders might want to spend it is another; how the customers might want to spend it is still another. The corporate executive, as long as he is hired as an agent of the stockholder, has a clear, definite responsibility to the people who hired him-to do what they want him to do. Have you ever heard anybody suggest that the corner grocery store should sell food below cost to help the poor people who shop there? Well, that would obviously be absurd! Any corner grocery that operated that way would be out of business very soon. The same is true on the larger scale. The large enterprise can have money to exercise social responsibility only if it has a monopoly position: if it's able to hire its employees at lower wages than they are worth; if it's able to sell its product at a higher price that can otherwise be charged. If it is a U.S. monopoly, it ought to be prosecuted under the country's antitrust laws. QUESTION: Do you draw a distinction between corporate sponsorship of a program which has some direct effect on its own profit and loss statement and a similar type of corporate program which is only a contribution to goodwill?

self-interest of that corporation to spend money on improving conditions in that community. That may be the cheapest way it can improve the quality of the labor it attracts. The crucial question for a corporation is not whether some action is in the interest of the corporation, but whether it is enough in its interest to justify the money spent. I think there will be many cases when activity of this kind will pay back dollar for dollar what the corporation spends. But then the corporation isn't exercising a social responsibility. The executive is performing the job he was hired for-making as much money for his stockholders as possible. The fact of the matter is that the people who preach the doctrine of social responsibility are concealing something: The great virtue of the private enterprise system is precisely that by maximizing corporate profits, corporate executives contribute far more to the social welfare than they do by spending stockholders' money on what they as individuals regard as worthwhile activity. By innovating cheap transportation, Henry Ford probably did more to transform the character of the United States than any but a small handful of other people. Did Henry Ford build the Model T in order to exercise his social responsibility? He certainly did not. He built the Model T to make money. He made a great deal of money, but in the course of his profit-making, the community at large benefited enormously. Would the community have benefited so greatly if Henry Ford, instead of producing the best car he could and making as much money as he could, had devoted his energies to social responsibility? QUESTION: Didn't Henry Ford hire his production workers at twice the going rate?

FRIEDMAN: He did that because he FRIEDMAN: Of course. There is a big could make more money that way. In distinction. Most of the time when cor- that way, he got more efficient, more porate executives talk about exercising productive workers. He was trying to their social responsibility, all they are attract people to Detroit where he was doing is engaging in window dressing. building cars-particularly people from This is why, in fact, there is very little the South. At that time, Ford announcactual corporate social responsibility in ed the $5 daily wage, twice the going a meaningful sense. wage. But he didn't do it to discharge Take the major business in a com- social responsibility. As Adam Smith munity. It's hiring workers in that com- said, "You do not owe your daily bread munity. It's producing products in that . to the beneficence of the baker, but community. It may very well be in the to his desire to pursue his own interest."

QUESTION: The question of environmental pollution is very much on the public's mind. There are various ways to approach this question. One is the completely laissez-faire approach; another is to tax pollution; another is to give tax incentives or subsidies to companies to encourage them to stop polluting; afourth is to use police power to make pollution illegal and impose penalties. Perhaps there are other solutions. What would you view as the best way to attack the problem in a free enterprise society? FRIEDMAN: Well, there is a great deal of misunderstanding about the pollution problem in today's society. First, it is often in the private interest not to pollute. That being said, we mustn't suppose that there are no mechanisms within the free enterprise society which lead to the "right" amount of pollution. Let me stop here for a minute. An ideal of zero pollution is one of the fallacies mouthed about the problem. That is absurd. As in all these cases, you must balance returns with costs. People's breathing is one source of pollution. We breathe in oxygen and breathe out carbon dioxide. If too much carbon dioxide is breathed out, there is a lot of pollution. Now we can simply stop breathing, but most of us would consider the cost of eliminating that pollution greater than the return. We must decide upon the "right" amount of pollution, that amount at which the co<;t of reducing pollution to all the people concerned would be greater than the gain from reducing the level. In many cases, the private market provides precisely that incentive. For example, consider a town that has been cited as a horror-Gary, Indiana, where the U.S. Steel Company is the major source of pollution. Let's assume for a moment that contrary to fact, none of the pollution spreads into Chicago. Instead, it's all concentrated in Gary. Now, if U.S. Steel pollutes heavily in Gary, the Gary environment becomes unattractive. People don't want to live and work there. U.S. Steel has to pay higher wages to lure employees. You'll say to me that not all the people in Gary work for U.S. Steel. Some people run stores and gas stations. But exactly the same thing is true. If Gary is an unpleasant environment, nobody will run ' a grocery store there unless he can earn sufficiently more there than he can else-

where to compensate for enduring the pollution. Consequently, food costs will be high and that again will raise the wagesU.S. Steel will have to pay to attract a labor force. Under those circumstances, all the costs of pollution are borne by U.S. Steel, meaning a collection of its stockholders and customers. QUESTION: Doesn't your argument depend on an assumption of perfect labor mobility? FRIEDMAN: No, no. It depends on somelabor mobility, but after all, there is labor mobility. It isn't necessary, that every person be mobile. Wages are determined at the margin. For example, the fact that two per cent of the people are good shoppers makes it unnecessary for the other 98 percent to be good shoppers. Why is it that the prices are roughly the same in different stores? Doesn't that assume that every shopper is a good shopper? Not at all. It's a fact that because some peopledo compare prices and select the betterbuys, the rest of us don't have to paysuch careful attention. The same is true here. Some people in the labor forcewill move in and out. The people in Gary will not live in Gary unless it offersbetter opportunity than they can getelsewhere.Maybe other things aren't very good; maybe by your standards and my standards these people are not verywell off. But among the alternatives theyhave, that's best. QUESTION: Don't the traditions and habits of people with lower income and lower education levels combine to frustrate that easy mobility of labpr? FRIEDMAN: On the contrary. There is enormous mobility of labor at the very lowest levels-not only in the United States, but all over. How were Indians everled from India to Africa, to Malaysia, to Indonesia, except for the fact that they heard of better opportunities? How was the United States settled? Fromthe end of the Civil War to World War I, if I remember correctly, a third of the people in the United States had immigrated from abroad. The people who came here were not those who earned high wages; they were not the "jet set." They were poor, ignorant people who arrived with nothing but their hands. What encouraged them to continued on page 40

SAMUELSON ...I

= Ie

criticisms. The critical testings of experience and analysis will reject and elect among the many possibilities. Almost 30 years ago, Joseph Schumpeter, in his Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, predicted the shape of things to come after the Second World War. "Capitalism in an oxygen tent" -that, in a nutshell, was his vision of the timid new world. Such a capitalism, he thought, could linger on for quite a while. But he did not really expect the hospital invalid to perform with the vigor that the youthful capitalism had, in his view, prior to the First World War. Schumpeter was dead wrong. In the two decades since his death, the modern mixed economy has surpassed in performance classical capitalism at its finest hour. The miracle is not that Japan's economy has been growing for two decades at better than nine per cent per annum in real termsremarkable as that performance has been. The miracle is that all over the Western world, whether in cynical Austria, effete France, mercurial Italy, or complacent America, real growth rates and average living standards have strongly and steadily outperformed the most daring predictions that could have been made by any objective observer of the years between the two world wars. The developing countries have generally speaking not grown as rapidly economically as the more technologically advanced nations. The widening gap is sad to observe and ominous to contemplate. But it is insufficiently realized that the divergence is not the result of poor performance by the developing nations as compared to either their own pasts or the pasts of the affluent nations at earlier stages of development. Rather it is the mushrooming affluence of the technologically advanced nations that is placing them further out front. Actually, the 1960s saw most of the world's low-income regions grow at rates more rapid than those which generally prevailed in the years of high capitalism, when Queen Victoria reigned in Balmoral Castle and Calvin Coolidge dozed in the White House. Was, however, Schumpeter's error merely a case of premature timing? For there are unquestionable parts of

the world where material progress has been slow. Witness the miracle of almost negligible economic growth in Latin America. And not even those most sympathetic to the ideals of socialism can find much to cheer about in the lack of economic progress in societies newly freed from colonial rule. What Nkrumah or Nasser was able to accomplish under the banner of rational social planning has, in the short run, been disappointing. To the satirist, it is not a case of business in an oxygen tent as much as business in bedlam. Although I am not an expert on Latin America, I cannot reject the suggestion that the slow growth of Argentina or of Uruguay (the one-time "Switzerland of South America") or of pre-Allende Chile is related to the fact that these societies are neither fish nor fowl, nor good red herring. They place social demands on industry that industry simply cannot effectively meet. Antipathy toward the corporation and the bourgeois way of life has served to hamstring performance. There is a dictum attributed to Lenin to the effect that we will ruin the capitalist system by debauching its currency. That is not a very intelligent way to hurt an economic system and advance the day of successful revolution. By contrast, there are few better ways to ruin a modern mixed economy than to insist on 40 to 70 per cent increases in money wage rates within a brief period of time. This, to a degree, has often happened in the unhappy history of Latin America. It is thus interesting to note some new forces developing in the wealthier nations. New demands for greater social responsibility are being made of business. At the same time, the principal old demands-ever greater productivity and higher living standards for all-continue to be strongly pressed, perhaps even more so than at any time in the past. In the face of the rising tide of social concern, some business strengths may be lost. Of course, there will always be sacrifices that are well worth making if on balance the common good is advanced. I am not concerned with the fact that zoning ordinances and taxes on effluencewill continued on page 41

FRIEDMAN Z

= I

ro.,;,.~d

migrate? The fact that they had heard at distances of five or six thousand miles that there were better jobs and better conditions in the United States than where they were. So it's absurd to say that because people in Gary, Indiana, are in the low-income bracket they can't migrate elsewhere. Look at the enormous migration to America's West Coast. If you count the number of people in the low-income class who every year move back and forth, it is quite obvious that there is enormous mobility of labor. QUESTION: Some 30 years ago, Joseph Schumpeter wrote that capitalism was in an oxygen tent. Do you think that is true today?

FRIEDMA : That's a very, very hard question to answer. You have to make a sharp distinction between the world of affairs and the world of ideas. Frederick Hayek's Road to Serfdom, published in 1944, reflected the way J, and other people who felt the way I did, looked at the world at that time. If you had asked us then about the health of capitalism and free enterprise 25 years later,. I think we would have said it would be closer to its deathbed than it actually is now. The interesting thing about it is that at that time it looked as if the world at large were on the road to central planning. In point of fact, we went very little further down the road. In Britain. central planning came to a screeching halt with the failure of the control of the engagements order. There is less central planning in Britain now than in 1946. In Germany, the dramatic reversal from the Nazi central planning to free enterprise is an economic miracle. In the United States, we've had a lot of intervention, but it hasn't gone in the direction of central planning. Indeed, in that respect we are much better off now than most of us thought we would be 25 years ago. I hasten to add this does not mean that the government has gotten smaller. Governments continue to grow in size, but it has come primarily through engaging in redistributive programs, transfer programs-like social security, welfare, medicare-rather than through expanding their direct control over business enterprise. So in the world of affairs, I think capitalism is in far better

shape than Schumpeter 30 years ago or Hayek 25 years ago would have thought. In the world of ideas, however, that is not true. For a time it looked as if there were a reaction against collectivism in the direction of individualism. But more recently we've started once again to move in the direction of ideas which are predominately anti-capitalist and toward a collectivist society. We must be very careful here and distinguish between the slogans people utter, the objectives they state, and the means by which they want to achieve those objectives. People who regard themselves as radical fill the air with their desire to do their own thing, get rid of the establishment and centralized control, and so on. But when you ask them how they are going to do it, the answer is always by giving government more power. They say there are mean, nasty people running things in Washington, in business, and in universities. On the other hand, they say good people like themselves exist, and if they were running things, everything would be fine. So the objectives people aim for are all individualist, but the means by which they hope to achieve those objectives are all totalitarian and collectivist. >

QUESTION: Would you say that the movement toward collectivism has been largely among intellectuals? FRIEDMAN: Yes I would, and this is a real puzzle. In some ways you'd think it would be the other way around. Intellectuals, of all people, ought to value freedom of speech, freedom of thought. In fact they do value them in intellectual areas for themselves. But their attitude in general is that they want freedom for themselves, but control over everybody else. . The second reason you would think intellectuals would be different is that the argument for collectivism is really simple-minded. It says that if there is an evil it is because a bad man did it, and the way to correct it is to put a good man in power. On the other hand, the argument made for individualism is very subtle and sophisticated. It claims that if you let individuals pursue their own self-interests, they will be led by an invisible hand to pursue the social interest more effectively than if they are organized to pursue it directly.

QUESTION: attitudes lectuals?

Why do you think these are so popular among intel-

FRIEDMAN: Schumpeter gave one answer. He said that a free enterprise society, by its success, creates a large number of intellectuals who, by their nature, feel they don't have the power they are entitled to. They become frustrated and repressed, and thus dissatisfied with the existing system. I think there is a good deal of truth to that. But, of course, that doesn't argue that intellectuals are collectivists. It only argues that they would be against the status quo; that they would be free enterprisers in a collectivist world and collectivists in a free enterprise world. However, that's hard to observe because the potential free enterprisers in a collectivist world wouldn't be permitted to talk. The only place we'd hear the intellectuals speaking freely would be in a free enterprise society. I haven't seen any public announcement of the formation of a Russians for Capitalist Action. You don't have a capitalist party in the Soviet Union, but there is a Communist Party in the United States. If you ask why so many intellectuals are collectivists, I think the fundamental reason is very different. I think it's in their own self-interest, in a double way. First, in a collectivist society, intellectuals have more power than they do in a free enterprise system. In the 1930s, the New Deal created an enormous number of jobs that didn't exist before for intellectuals. I had one myself, so I am speaking from personal experience. Second, it is much easier to sell simpleminded, collectivist ideas than it is to sell sophisticated, free enterprise ideas. Take our topic-social responsibility. Why does this nonsense fill the air? Because it is simple-minded and easy to sell. Because listeners don't have to go through a complicated thinking process. Trying to sell people on the idea that although there are things that are wrong, if you try to make them better, you'll make them worse, is a lot harder than selling them the idea that the way to solve a problem is to elect a good man and have the government do something. Consequently, there is a. better market for collectivist intellectualism than there is for free enterprise individualism. 0

SAMUElSO ...-

= I:

,., •••

<Ii"T

•

~"?f

, ",,: ',j

'Do corporate executives ... have responsibilities ... other than to make as much money for their stockholders as possible? And my answer to that is, no, they do not.'

'Business is being challenged and society shapes business's ability to respond.'

undoubtedly prevent the corporation of the future from polluting the environment. Of course that will happen. But when it does, it will not be so much a case of losing old legitimate corporate freedoms as being required for the first time to follow good practices. Society and the Promethean business giants will be the better for such fetters. I am interested, however, in contemplating the restrictions which may be placed on the exercise of previously accepted prerogatives. For example, in the United States, management cannot always shut down an unprofitable textile plant and throw its labor force out of work so that the firm can move to a more congenial environment where net labor costs are lower. In Northern Italy, corporations are not always free to trim their labor forces as their efficiency experts would desire. Collective bargaining takes place over the numbers to be employed as well as wage rates, fringe benefits, and severance pay. There may be a problem here. It is not that my heart bleeds for the corporation, but that one realizes that consumers and the earners of real wages also have a stake in the avoidance of deadweight-loss practices. At any rate, the line between rational concern and paranoia is a fine one. I have no wish to conjure up hobgoblins to terrify the denizens of the executive suite. I shall content myself with one last example of new pressures on corporations. Ralph Nader is a social force of primary significance in the United States. The movement with which his name is associated represents much more than "mere consumerism," although that movement will itself be of increasing importance in the years to come. Naderism involves participatory democracy on the part of the workers and the public interest. You are naive if you look only at the number of proxy votes the Nader movement is able to mobilize against management. Even if foundations and universities are persuaded to cast their votes against management, it will be scores of years before opposition votes now three and five per cent become majority votes of 51 per cent.

The leverage of such movements is not to be found inside the corporate ballot box, but in the minds of men. Once the public comes to believe that what is deemed good by General Motors is no longer good for the public, they will not wait for victory in the voting of shares and proxies. They )llill strike directly by legislation.

Let me illustrate. A group at the Yale Law School recently came up with the ingenious suggestion presented in an article in the Yale Law Journal, that the antitrust division of the U.S. Justice Department prevent by legal action the large auto companies from introducing substantial annual or semi-annual model changes. This pattern of contrived obsolescence, which Alfred P. Sloane, Jr., innovated to help bring General Motors to its present size and prominence, is said by the Yale reformers to constitute unfair competition and to promote monopolistic imperfection of markets. At first glance, one might tend to dismiss such proposals as utopian and no real threat to existing corporate hegemony. But often, quite often, criticism prompts some governmental response which can lead to changeeven if only through the reaction of an industry to such attention. I can recall that years of criticism by economists like myself of the monopolistically imposed minimum brokerage rates of the New York Stock Exchange got absolutely nowhere. Yet when the Department of Justice entered the fray with an announcement that it intended to bring antitrust suits against this anomalous practice, it was only a short time until the New York Stock Exchange and the Securities and Exchange Commission drastically modified the industry's practices. We must resolve many competing demands. Business is being challenged and society shapes business's ability to respond. Can we tread a path that will avoid the excesses of private greed and narrow-minded management on the one hand and the debilitating destruction of all business prerogatives on the other? We have within our grasp a system that can meet the legitimate demands made upon it now and in the future. 0

Are illustrators obsolete? This is a question often asl{ed, in one form or another, by observers of the American magazine scene. Their point of inquiry is that with the emergence of television, film, and color photography, the function of the oldfashioned painter-illustrator has been usurped. Graphic artist Alan E. Cober is an. articulate spokesman for the new breed of illustrators who are changing the language of magazine communication. On page 44, he muses on some of the forces and ideas that have shaped his work.

SICMUND Fe'4EUD HAD It

Formerly, drawings literally 'illustrated' a story. Now, they express the artist's personal point of view and add a whole new dimension for the magazine reader.

henever I am asked the question, "Is magazine illustration obsolete?" I reply: "For my own sake, I hope not." But I seriously do not believe magazine illustration is dying out. It is just changing-and it's changing in several different ways. The new illustrators are not trying to imitate photography, films or television. Today, those media, for the most part, faithfully record the times-exactly what the older generation of illustrators did in its day. But today's graphic artist is trying to do more. We are doing something totally personal-by working with as much feeling as we can, by giving our work a personal point of view, by presenting things as we see them. It might be claimed that this was also done by such illustrators as Norman Rockwell in the Saturday Evening Post. But I don't believe that is true. Anyone of them could have been hired to illustrate the same story-their approach was largely the same, the only difference was in technique. Today, on the other hand, editors look for a specific illustrator to get across his own personal point of view about the story, about art, life, politics, and so on. What has happened is that there has been a change in the function of illustration. Formerly, the drawings literally "illustrated" a story. Now they are used as an addition to an article which expresses the artist's viewpoint-his comment that, hopefully, adds a new dimension for the reader. Moreover, illustration is very important to change the pace of a magazine from what was once simply the alternate use of photographs and text. The relationship of words, photos and drawings is crucial to the appeal of a magazine. One of the most obvious differences between past and present is that there is not one dominant style today, but many-all of which reflect the artist's personal talent. Of course, the individual artist should not work in too many different styles and try too many things, because he tends to get watered down. An artist has to have a consistent technical approach and point of view toward his material. And then, when he is commissioned to do a piece of work, it is from that point of view obviously. I hope this is true of my own work. I like to think of it as all of one piece. For example, my three-dimensional cover of Thomas Jefferson for America Illustrated (the U.S. Information Agency's magazine for Poland and the Soviet Union) was a direct outgrowth of my pen-and-ink drawings of Hemingway, President Nixon and others for an earlier issue of that magazine. All these could well have been sculptures. Making a three-dimensional doll of Jefferson was simply a way of doing my drawings in actual three-dimension; so that it was not really a great departure, but a natural evolution of my particular style and approach. My style and approach are realistic, but not in the sense that Norman Rockwell's work is realistic.Âˇ'My work reflects my own realism. I take whatever it is I'm drawing as a point of objective departure and then create a subjective response to it. It is more or less a kind of magical, fantastical kind of realism. It is"scf"personal thl!t" an artist's ideas can sometimes be an intrusion â&#x20AC;˘..a misinterpretation of the author's intent. A drawing may sometimes merely get in the reader's way and confuse him. I frequently feel I am not qualified

to comment on certain subjects. In those cases I do the best I can to reduce a complicated idea down to a simplified visual statement to a level where a layman like myself can understand it. I have found this to have been successful in the past. Somehow, my own "insanity" seems to make my illustrations work. This "insanity" contains a lot of meticulous, detailed work as well as spontaneous touches. I suppose it's a reflection of my personality. Usually I just sit down to work, not knowing what the final outcome will be. I do have a vague idea inside my head-that's where the sketch is. But if I put down an idea completely on paper, then I feel obligated to stick by the idea as it is shown, and it hampers me. Also, if I put down too much in a preliminary sketch, I destroy it because I get bored. In doing a variety of things for different magazines-even though each magazine doesn't dictate a different approach-for some reason the outcome is different. First of all, in everything I do, I am always seeking ways to entertain myself-to do the best I can, and to do something that is exciting, fun and full of surprises. When I start work on a project, the subject matter has prime importance-and the style certainly has to fit it. Though I do have an established style -in the sense that you can tell that my work is by the same manthere is no question of forcing my style on the subject matter. The important thing that makes the difference in my various assignments is my feeling toward the work in hand, the story, the magazine, the audience who will see the drawing. In many magazines the illustrations are often more important than the accompanying story. As a piece of art, they have more to offer than the article or the story. I think illustration is approaching and may go far beyond many of the so-called "fine arts." And I personally consider myself an artist. I illustrate and I show my works in museums and galleries, so I am an artist first, and all other titles are secondary. Looking to the future of magazine illustration, I don't think there will be any magazines as we know them now. However, there will be special interest magazines, which are already becoming more and more important. Television will take over the whole function of general-interest magazines and it will be in cassette form. These cassettes will be a combination of a lot of things: two-dimensional, three-dimensional, drawings, animation, layout and film-and working on them promises to be an exciting challenge. As for art galleries, they, too, will be passe. Well-produced and printed art magazines will be the galleries of the future. If you want to show your work, it will be reproduced in an art magazine and distributed to interested buyers, who can purchase the original drawing if they so desire. The opportunities and challenges of the future are so exciting that illustrators, photographers and creative people of all kinds will be much happier and more productive. There are so many great ~ things to be done. I can hardly wait to start. D About the Author: Alan E. Cober is a prolific and much-sought-after contributor to such diverse publications as Intellectual Digest, Newsweek,The' New York Times Book Review, Boy's Life and America Il1ustrated.A former teacher of design and drawing, he is typical of the new breed of graphic artists who are revolutionizing magazine illustration in America. "

Cober says his threedimensional drawings (above) could well have been sculptures, and that his making a doll of Jefferson (left) is a natural outgrowth of his earlier work.

.._.~

A LEADING INDIAN MAGAZINE EDITOR REVIEWS ONE OF THE MOST IMPORTANT NEW BOOKS ON ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT IN THE 'THIRD WORLD.'

...." ----... ----

.~ .,

1• ..., •• ,•• I•• ,•• I I•• I

..... , .... ...._ -J.U ••

•••••• ••

.... .._•••••.. ._-..... ....,---- _--_••••• .....-_.

••••

•••••• ••

J.l1·· 1

_111

••••

..-

•••

1•• 1•• I•• ~•• 1•••• iIl. I•• .,•• J.__

'III"

•••• •••• E.P. W. do Costa is editor and publisher of Monthly Public Surveys and

Monthly Commentary on Indian Economic Conditions. Both are publications of the prestigious Indian Institute of Public Opinion, of which da Costa is the founder and managing director. Edited in New Delhi and founded in 1955, Surveys is a journal primarily devoted to "pub_ lishing objective surveys, conducted by the Institute, on economic, political and social matters." One of the functions of Commentary, started in /959, is to provide "guidance to a confusing range of official statistics." Because of their highly specialized nature, the magazines' circulation is limited and their audience is composed mainly of university libraries,. research scholars and business houses. Educated at Madras University and St. John's College, Oxford, da Costa was George Webb Medley University Scholar in Economics at Oxford in 1933. He was editor of the Eastern Economist from 1948 to 1962, during which time he established his reputation as one of India's foremost economists. Here, da Costa reviews Development Reconsidered, by Edgar Owens and Robert Shaw, published by Lexington Books, D.C. Heath and Company, Massachusetts. Among other things, da Costa predicts that the book will become one of the most important documents of the decade on development economics.

There are currently few more lively debates in economic science or economic history than the one which rages on the necessary conditions for development in what is often called the "third world." It all started early in the 'fifties with theoretical patterns framed in the books of Ragnar Nurkse and Arthur Lewis. These, fairly and squarely, set the ball in the court of the economists who wrongfully seized it as their own: inevitably, it became the victim of economic rationalism. The poor nations could not, in any reasonable period, raise themselves by their own bootstraps: substantial development, therefore, could not proceed without massive foreign aid. Because incomes were low, savings were low; because savings were low, investment was low; because investment was low, productivity was low; because productivity was low, incomes were low. . In this vicious circle, the "small" man was as dependent on his richer brethren as was the developing country on the support of the richer nations. Resources and "know-how" had to be catalysts of change. But these could only come as gifts from above as there was too little basic strength within. The debate has gone on wearily for two decades, but every now and then it receives a lively shot in the arm. It has also fluctuated, like the notorious trade cycle, between bouts of pessimism and optimism. Ragnar Nurkse and Arthur Lewis, who first propounded the doctrines of the impediments of growth in developing societies, were pessimists. Then dismal theory passed al1d gleeful economic

history took over with W.W. Rostow's The Stages of Economic Growth. This was a much more cheerful presentation, since it appeared to indicate the inevitability of growth, given, of course, also the Fabian inevitability of gradualness. In India, the "take-off" stage was around the corner and the self-generating economy was shortly to be carried through on a higher rate of saving aided by the requisite support in the areas of production and exports. When this vision faded in the mid-'sixties, there came, in the three volumes of Asian Drama by Gunnar Myrdal, a massive dose of pessimi&m arguing the necessity of a revolution in the social and environmental milieu before the breakthrough could occur. The economists had scarcely returned to their dismal role when economic history again took over with the arrival of the "Green Revolution" after 1967. With good reason. For the dismal predictions had been disproved in some developing countries, which seemed to be raising themselves by their own bootstraps at quite spectacular rates of growth. Obviously something had gone wrong with dogma or doctrine or both. In any case, a new look seemed urgently required. Today we have that new look in a book titled Development Reconsidered, by Edgar Owens and Robert Shaw. The authors present this new look in a critique that is essential to an understanding of the truth and error behind the West's thinking on "third world" development over two decades. Partly because it has integrated both theory

and history, but more because it assesses at the grass roots the basic capabilities of certain pace-setting developing countries, Development Reconsidered could be called the book of the year. In fact, it may well be the most relevant book on development for a decade.

THE 'SMALL' FARMER IN TAIWAN: A NEW SYMBOL

The book, by wise selection, has been able to present prototype success stories in four or five countries, two of which are very valuable grist to India's political mill. The authors argue that the spectacular success of "small" agriculture in Taiwan and Korea, both of which have eclipsed India's performance in increasing yields per acre of foodgrains, should not be discouraging to India: very much the reverse. For India-with the vast majority of its holdings less than five acres-has the greatest small-farm potential of any country. Indeed, it is pointed out that even at present in India, "small" farms of less than five acres are more "productive" than larger farms-particularly those larger than 50 acres. But whereas the average value of agricultural output in India on small farms is Rs. 200 per acre, in Taiwan mini-farms (up to 1.25 acres) have a net farm income up to $420 per acre, or, at the current rate of exchange, over 15 times as much. This is largely because of yields per acre in foodgrains which in 1968-70were 3,510 pounds per acre in Tai. wan, against about 1,000 pounds per acre in. India. But this explains only half the differential; the other half is due to a magic response, particularly in the late 'fifties and 'sixties,to the opportunities of export markets where prices were spectacular (as in the case of mushrooms) or where margins were high (as in the case of sugar). Sugar cane productivity is as high on individual small farms as on the plantations of the state-owned Taiwan Sugar Corporation. A combination of productivity efficiency with a powerful marketing thrust, largely co-operative, helped Taiwan and Korea to improve the terms of trade with their great buyers, the United States and Japan. The stimulus of technology, largely through the abundant use of fertilizers, and commercial sales abroad transformed the whole agricultural operation in both countries. But this is a more general phenomenon, and the authors

demonstrate that such transformations can take place in countries where the "small" farmer has access-not necessarily at low cost-to modern agricultural inputs. Where accessibility is secured, investment and output per acre are higher on small farms than on large farms. More important from the point of view of social justice (or Garibi Hatao) is the employment potential of the small against the larger unit-whether in agriculture or industry. International figures are, unhappily, available only for a year as far back as 1965: but the position has not changed significantly in AGRICULTURAL WORKERS PER 100 ACRES, 1965 .

NUMBER OF WORKERS PER 100 ACRES

COUNTRY JAPAN

SOUTH KOREA

TAIWAN

EGYPT

YUGOSLAVIA

CEYLON

INDIA*

PHILIPPINES

COLOMBIA

BRAZIL

MEXICO

MOROCCO

ISRAEL

UNITED *1971

STATES

Source: Derived from tables in FAO Production Year Book. 1970.

those countries where later figures are available. The authors present figures which are dramatic for us in India. (See table at left, below.) With 39 workers per 100 acres, India has vast potential for new employment once the breakthrough in technology, with new dry farming techniques and fertilizers, takes place. If yield per acre is doubled, employment can conceivably go up by 50 per cent. In fact a 15 per cent rise in agricultural employment will be sufficient to offset India's population explosion in the 'seventies. It is in rural areas, not in the towns, therefore, that the solution is to be found. Development in India over the next decade will be predominantly in agricultural productivity. This productivity can, in most districts of the Indian Union, be targeted at a level of an average growth rate of six per cent per year with a compound rate of growth of agricultural employment of about 1.25 per cent. The working population can be kept in rural areas with corresponding expansion in small industries and health activities.

The corresponding parallels of the efficiency of small industry cited in the book are also of unusual interest. One table (which is reproduced below) shows investment cost and labor's share in factory units of various sizes in Taiwan in 1961. The capital-to-output ratio of units of less than $2,500 investment is about half of those between $250,000 to $2.5 million. And labor's share of income is therefore twice as large.

INVESTMENT COST OF INCREASING PRODUCTION AND LABOR'S SHARE OF INCOME BY FACTORY SIZE, TAIWAN, 1961 SIZE OF INDUSTRY BY AMOUNT OF INVESTMENT

INVESTMENT COST OF INCREASING OUTPUT BY $1.00

LABOR'S SHARE OF INCOME PER $1.00

$1.97

LESS THAN $2,500

74 Cents

2.52

$2.500 TO $25,000

72 Cents k

$25,000 TO $250,000

3.26

50 Cents

$250,000 TO $2.5 MILLION

3.66

39 Cents

MORE THAN

4.46

31 Cents

$2.5 MILLION Source: Hsieh and Lee. Agricultural

Development

...

in Taiwan.

SMALL FARMS, LIKE THE ONE AT RIGHT IN TAIWAN, ARE ECONOMICALLY MORE EFFICIENT AND PRODUCTIVE THAN LARGE FARMS, SAY THE AUTHORS OF 'DEVELOPMENT RECONSIDERED.' In a more recent study of the World Bank (table at right) it is shown that Korea and Taiwan in the period between 1960 and 1969 used their investment capital about twice as efficiently as did the United States. Partly because of population growth, India's per capita return was the lowest on the list. It may be noted that in terms of population growth (which strongly affects Indian per capita income) both Taiwan and Korea have endured a population explosion no smaIler than India's. Although their family planning operations have been nearly as efficient as their economic miracles in agriculture and exports, it takes many years for a family planning policy to work: in the case of Taiwan there was a population explosion in the 'fifties which made the task in the 'sixties much more difficult. A postscript should also be added to the table which for one country at least is now out-of-date, proving that "bigness" in the size of a country or its population is no insuperable obstacle. In the calendar year 1971, Brazil headed the Rate of Growth tables, both over-aIl and per capita, with figures of 13.7 and 11 per cent respectively. And this short-term revolution was not achieved entirely by "smaIl" men. One can return now to the book's contribution to basic development economic theory. Where did the economists of the 'fifties make their errors? Thefirst faIlacy was the assumption that the fastest way to increase both GNP and employment was to promote big urban factories, equipped with the latest machines, and large-farm mechanized agriculture. When figures proved that smaIl farms and smaIl industry use more labor than large farms and large industry, economists advanced their second faIlacy, namely, that smaIl firms were less efficient than large firms and the additional employment was bought at the cost of economic growth. The long-term problems created by a slowing of growth rates would offset any short-run gains in employment. The third faIlacy was the two assumptions that the poor do not save because they spend their money on consumer goods and services, and that, because their incomes are low, they have no resources left to improve their productivity. Development Reconsidered has now shown, by precise case studies, that these three fallacies arise only from choosing the wrong areas for demonstration. There are several countries where the smaIl unit is more effi-

incurred in achieving social justice. Development Reconsidered now, for the first time, demonstrates that this is an error. Social justice can be made viable by making the smaIl man "efficient" as he now is in 6.4 $1.70 many countries. Edgar Owens goes further: KOREA 2.10 6.3 TAIWAN he declares that "equity" or "sociaIly just" methods of operation are efficient. However, 1.4 2.80 BRAZIL 3.4 the market is almost always unjust and in3.10 MEXICO 3.4 3.20 MOROCCO efficient because it tends to favor the big 1.9 3.50 PHILIPPINES farmer-in spite of the fact that big farms and I.l 3.90 INDIA big factories are generally less efficient in out1.4 4.00 PERU put per unit of capital. They are always less 1.5 4.30 COLOMBIA efficient in giving employment in developing 4.90 2.5 VENEZUELA countries. 2.90 5.3 ISRAEL I A pattern of "viable" social justice has 2.90 10.0 JAPAN I thus been demonstrated. But much time wiIl UNITED STATES 3.70 3.2 be required before the proved prototypes of 4.00 4.8 FRANCE Taiwan and Korea are incorporated in the 3.1 NETHERLANDS 5.00 planning of new strategies in India. How can Source: World Bank, 1971; Organization for Economic the message of this powerful bid for a new Co-operation and Development, 1971; and U.S. Agency direction in development strategy be tapped for International Development, 1970. for application in this country? This should be the central chaIlenge emerging from this book. The authors do not pose as Indian cient, as weIl as more employment-giving, experts: but it is clear their signposts are full than the large unit. The combined effect of of meaning both for Indian agriculture and high saving rates of small people, motivated Indian industry. to their own improvement and armed with There is no need to press every argument the right technology, and accessibility to the in the book to its breaking point. The develnecessary inputs can be a spectacular rate of opment process is too complex to be nailed growth. Efficiency is not a function of size: down to any precise doctrines of economics, it is overwhelmingly a matter of motivation psychology, politics or history. But there and management. should be no doubt about the global opporWhat foIlows? Surely, if efficiency or the tunities described by the authors in their conclusion: "We are fortunate to live in that power of growth and social justice particularly in employment can be combined in the period of history when the marginal people are persuaded that poverty is no longer operation of small farms and small factories, there need be no dreaded dichotomy between inevitable and their role as non-persons no longer tolerable. Enduring governments will the instruments of accelerated growth and those favoring more equitable distribution of be those that possess the will to set into motion the evolution of a different art of living opportunities so as to favor the poor, largely and working together." the underemployed against the rich and the affluent. The major discovery, since such it One might add that the political implicais to us in India, is this demonstration that tions in the next decade, if the development process should not be rapid in the "third social justice can and should be viable. We have tended for long to associate growth with world," are inescapable. World Bank President Robert McNamara has summarized efficiency meaning viability in the commercial sense of an adequa_le return on output inthe prospect in three sentences. "The marginal men, the wretched strugglers for survival vested. On the other hand, social justice objectives have been associated with some charity, on the fringes of farm and city, may already number more than half a billion. By 1980,' and it has often been argued that these needed they will surpass a billion, by 1990 two billion. to be "compassionate." How then were they Can we imagine any human order surviving to be financed without inflation? The logital with so great a mass of misery piling up at method was to build a surplus out of the growth machine to offset the financial deficits its base?" 0 AVERAGE INVESTMENT ANNUAL COST OF INCREASE IN INCREASING PRODUCTION PER CAPITA BY $1 (1960-69) GNP (1960-69)