SPAN: July 1964

JULY

1964

FIFTY NAYE PAISE

An eight-page tribute dAWAHARLAL

APOSTLE

NEHRU

OF PEACE

W. fl.

VVEATHERSBY

Publisher DEAN

BROWN

Editor V. S. Managing

L.

NANDA

Editor

BHATTACHARYA

Senior Staff Editor B. Roy

CHOUDHURY

Senior Artist

On July 4, 1776, thirteen colonies in North America declared their independence from England, and every year "The Fourth" has been celebrated as a national holiday with flags displayed across the land. The photograph of the U.S. flag on the front cover was made by Irving Penn.

NAND

K.

KATYAL

PASRICHA

A VINASH

Photo Editor AWTAR

WHEN THE EARTH

by Frank T. Halpin

TREMBLES

S. MARWAHA

Production NIRMAL

Manager

K.

SHARMA

A.

K.

Circulation

MITRA

Manager

Published UNITED INFORMATION

NEW TRENDS IN SCIENCE TEACHING

by Austen Nazareth

at

STATES SERVICE,

Bahawalpur House, Sikandra Road, New Delhi-I, by The American Embassy, New Delhi.

Printed by ISAAC

N.

ISAAC

at Vakil & Sons Private Ltd., Narandas Building, Sprott Road, 18 Ballard Estate, Bombay-1.

Pages 21 to 28 printed by offset at G. Claridge & Co., Bombay.

Left: Dikes follow the contour of the land in a California rice field, where land is graded precisely to assure good drainage. Since 1933 a great transformation has taken place on American farm, increasing farm productivity three times-a revolution that began with first 100 days of New Deal administration. See story on page twenty-nine. Photo by Joe Munroe.

Conventions in Retrospect

by J. Radhakrishnan

Design Artist

Copy Manager

During his 1961 visit to America, Prime Minister Nehru and President Kennedy strolled in the White House garden. A special tribute to India's late Prime Minister begins on page 21.

Who Runs for President?

by Robert Bendiner

THE FIRST HUNDRED DAYS

by Arthur Schlesinger) Jr.

THE PEACEFUL

by Nathan Glick

REVOLUTION

Subscription rates for SPAN: One year, Rs. 4; two years, Rs. 7. Address subscriptions, including remittance, to nearest regional distributor: NEW DELHI, Patrika Syndicate (Pvt.) Ltd., Gale Market; BOMBA Y, Lalvani Brothers, Dr. Dadabhai Naoroji Road; MADRAS, The. Swadesamitran Ltd., Victory House, Mount Road; CALCUTTA, Patrika Syndicate (Pvt.) Ltd., 12/1 Lindsay Street. Subscriptions are not accepted from outside India •• Manuscripts and photographs sent for publication must be accompanied by stamped, selfaddressed envelope for return. SPAN is not responsible for any loss in transit. SPAN encourages use of its articles in other publications except where copyrighted. For details. write to the Editor, SPAN .• In case of change of address, cut out old address from a recent SPAN envelope and forward along with new address to the Circulation Manager. Please allow six weeks for change of address to become effective. •

Fireworks over the Statue of Liberty in New York harbour mark American Independence Day celebrations on 4th of July.

SPAN

OF EVENTS HEN THE NEWSof Prime Minister Nehru's death was announced, copies of the June issue of SPANwere going into the mails; the July issue was at the press.

Although it was too late to include a tribute in the June issue, this July issue was remade to include the article which begins on page 21.

The American people thought of Mr. Nehru as a staunch and stalwart apostle of peace, and his Herculean efforts to build a democratic framework for the development of India were widely admired throughout the United States.

It is hoped that the SPAN tribute reflects that admiration.

W

JULY HAS BEEN CALLEDAmerica's noisiest month, a statement which had more relevance in earlier years than today. For many years the nation

suffered a deafening racket as the Fourth of July, the national celebration of independence, was punctuated with fireworks. Every child-and most adults-merrily, and somewhat carelessly, lighted millions of firecrackers that exploded with a bang heard around the country. But many children suffered serious burns, the loss of fingers and even blindness when the firecrackers exploded unexpectedly.

Now the sale of fireworks is restricted in most of the fifty States to regulated displays ,sponsored by communities and civic groups. Firecrackers are no longer freely available, a fact bemoaned by many children, but endorsed by their parents.

Every four years another kind of noise affects the land-and this year it begins in San Francisco in July, moves to Atlantic City in August and will be heard throughout the country in nearly every city, village and hamlet during September and October. This is the sound of oratory which will accompany political campaigns for public offices ranging from President of the United States to game warden of a small county in western Pennsylvania. Millions of words will come from the mouths of candidates as they attempt to win votes. Millions of voters will listen to¡ the speeches, discuss them, argue over them-and most likely ignore them when they step into the voting booth on November 3.

Foreigners often find American politics, and especially the conventions of the two major political parties, more confusing than informative. But Robert Bendiner's article beginning on page 4, which resumes the series, "Politics '64," may help readers discover some order in this seeming chaos.

ON ANOTHER Fourth of July America took one more big step towards independence. Construction of the Erie Canal began on July 4, 1817 and eight years later, gave the young nation a larger measure of economic independence. Linking the port of New York with Buffalo, some 400 miles to the west, it became the main route for transport of grain and various manufactured goods. The canal, during the boatmen's golden era from 1840 to 1870, contributed greatly to a colourful chapter of American

history, rich with folklore. A wellknown folk-song of that epoch, for instance, begins like this: We wereforty miles from Albany, Forget it, I never shall.

What a terrible storm we had one night On the E-RI-E canal.

THE PERIODOF THEGreat Depression stands out in the memory of the older living generation of Americans as the most trying period in American history. Seldom before was the nation plunged in such economic misery and despair. But the new administration under Franklin D. Roosevelt met the grave national crisis with almost superhuman energy and resourcefulness and put into effect its plans for recovery and reform with amazing speed and vigour. Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.'s article in this issue, "The First Hundred Days," recreates the excitement and hectic activity of those turbulent days of ROQsevelt's administration which marked the beginning of a new era of social and economic development in the United States.

With the rapid expansion of the frontiers of science and technology, revolutionary changes in the teaching of science have taken place in the United States and are being introduced in other countries. The central fact of this revolution is that it lays more emphasis on approach than on content. Austen Nazareth's article, "New Trends in Science Teaching," tells the story of how modernization of science teaching is taking place in India with the active collaboration of American universities and teachers.

HUGO LAFAYETTEBLACK, a living pillar of American jurisprudence, has completed twenty-six years as Associate Justice of U.S. Supreme Court.

The principal spokesman for the liberal wing of the Court, he has played a significant role in the development of constitutional doctrine.

A recent book, One Man's Stand for Freedom, edited by Irving Dilliard, a distinguished editorial writer for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, honours this American jurist. Except for a few explanatory notes and a biographical tribute by the editor, the text is entirely in the words of Mr. Justice Black. _

WHO RUNS FOR PRESIDENT? some 40,000 Americans brave the mid-summer heat to attend the two major party conventions-Democratic and Republican. The elections are in early November. If the Presidential nominating conventions were held in the spring, the election campaign would be insufferably long, and if they were held in the fall, it would be too short-for the nomineesifnot for_the public.

So they are held in the summer sizzle of a well-cooked city while the entire country looks 011 by television, cheering favourites and hissing opponents in the comfort of home.

Foreigners are often puzzled by the colourful trappings of American political conventions. How, they ask, can candidates for the most important office in the countryand one of the most important in the world-be properly chosen in an atmosphere of almost carnival boisterousness?

I have often tried to explain to foreign friends that all the frivolity, the bunting, badges, pennants, Red Indians in full feather, marching bands, huge blown-up photographs of candidates, and beautiful girls distributing souvenirs are not as irrational as they seem-far-fetched perhaps, but not irrational. They are all part of the psychological warfare tactics which the contenders use to generate excitement and keep the delegates' attention focused on their respective candidates. They also reflect the strong element of good humoured playfulness prevalent in American politks, which in good part lack the dogmatic and ideological edge that politics often display elsewhere.

Behind the rituals and raucousness of political conventions, the serious business of democracy goes on.

Choices are made on the basis of programme and personality, with a keen awareness that the candidate chosen will, if elected the following November, lead the country for four years, and that his policies may profoundly affect the peace of the world and the prosperity of the country.

The final choice of Presidential candidates will be VERY FOUR YEARS

E

Text continued on page 6

Panoramic view of 1960 Republican convention suggests atmosphere of gaiety and excitement that leads to nominations of party's candidates for President and Vice President. After final ballots, winners make speeches accepting their party's nominations.

made by the 1,300 to 1,400 delegates to each of the conventions. Each State is allowed a minimum of two delegates for each Senator and Representative it has in Congress.

This gives each State a total vote roughly proportionate to its population.

In approximately two-thirds of the fifty States most delegates are chosen by conventions of party workers within each congressional district or county; and these conventions, in turn, are made up of representatives selected by caucuses in the precincts, wards, and towns.

In the remaining sixteen States, delegates are elected in Presidential "primaries." This system was devised early in this century by political reformers who wanted to get the conventions farther away from party machinery and closer to the voters themselves.

As they stand today, the Presidential primaries vary somewhat from State to State, and winning in a primary does not guarantee support at the nominating convention.

Why then should candidates enter primaries? There are two main reasons. One is that it is an excellent way for a comparative unknown to get national attention. The primary has become a device for keeping a candidate in the public eye, enabling him to display his prowess in all the vote-getting arts and providing a national platform for his every utterance.

The candidate who took the most spectacular advantage of the primaries was John F. Kennedy. As a Presidential aspirant in 1960, he had two great problems: no really wide support or even reputation outside his native New England, and his party leaders' fear of the old shibboleth that a Catholic could not be elected to the Presidency. So he entered seven primaries and won everyone of them, thereby making himself familiar to millions of voters all over the country, and proving that religious prejudice was not the important element it had been thought to be.

The second reason a candidate may decide to go into the primaries is the possibility it offers him of eliminating a rival in a single key primary. If he manages to lure,

Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona with family. His avowed conservatism may prejudice his chances of success.

challenge, or cajole a major opponent into just the right battle, he can hope to put him out of the race overnight.

For, if winning a dozen primaries cannot by itself win the nomination, losing one can bring quick failure. Thus Mr. Kennedy's victory over Senator Hubert Humphrey in the West Virginia primaries of 1960 dealt a final blow to Mr. Humphrey's chances of gaining the Democratic Party nomination.

Before the convention can settle down to the exhilarating pleasure of the nominations, it has the major chore of adopting a platform that most of the delegates will accept, though few delegates will approve all of it. Because both major political¡ parties are such mixtures of sectional, occupational, and group interests joined together by the accidents of history, it is no easy matter to formulate positions on all the issues of the day, but for the past century it has come to be expected of them.

The party platform plays a special role in American political life. It is not regarded by either the public or the party as a legislative programme: it is too wide-ranging and broadly phrased to serve that purpose. Why, then, is so much effort devoted to its formulation? Primarily, because the contest shows which forces within the party are dominant. The general public pays little attention to _the document itself, but various blocs and pressure groups watch the battle closely. They don't expect the victorious party to make a fetish of the platform; they just want to know which way the wind blows.

But even the interest of the specialists, like that of the general public, is focused chiefly on the candidates. We have a government of laws, not men; but we elect men, not platforms. Because the platform language is often intended to have several possible interpretations, it would sometimes be hard to choose between the parties on the basis of their platforms. But the choice between candidates -the men whose policies, Congress willing, will prevailis usually much clearer. No matter how the platforms may equivocate, the most obtuse voter could discern the great

Richard Nixon and his family. He would be willing to accept nomination for Vice Presidency too if it were offered to him.

Henry Cabot Lodge and Mrs. Lodge. A Vice Presidential candidate in 1960, he was later appointed Ambassador to Vietnam.

differences to be expected in the policies of, let us say, a Lyndon Johnson and a Barry Goldwater.

Once the platform is completed, the organizational business disposed of, and the introductory inspirational speeches delivered, the convention settles down to its real business: finding a candidate acceptable to a majority of the delegates.

Occasionally there are ritual conventions at which there is only one real candidate in the field, such as this year's Democratic convention when an incumbent President seems certain to seek re-election. This has also happened, although rarely, in other cases. Richard Nixon, then Vice President of the United States, had no serious competitor for the Republican nomination in 1960. New York's Governor Nelson Rockefeller tested his own strength briefly before the convention and then withdrew, acknowledging that Nixon had overwhelming support in the Republican Party.

Except for these few unusual conventions where one man has predominated, it would be a serious mistake to believe that any candidate had the nomination sewed up in advance. Each contender would naturally like all the others to think that this is precisely what he has achieved, and that they might just as well sit back quietly and watch the coronation. But the others are not so easily impressed.

They know that few delegates are bound firmly or for long, and that very many of them can be unbound by a process of bargaining and persuasion. So there is at most

conventions an open, vigorous, and very real contest between two or more well-known political figures-and the final outcome has often surprised the most knowledgeable politicians and reporters.

All that the Constitution requires of a would-be President is that he or she be a native-born citizen of thirty-five who has spent fourteen years in the country.

But a politically minded visitor from London or Bombay arriving in the United States in the spring of 1964 might have been surprised, to begin with, that six months before the nominating conventions only seven individuals were thought to have much chance of becoming the next President. How did the field get winnowed down so quickly?

One answer is that these seven appeared to be the most "available." Of course that only begs the question, but it is a logical start. For to be available for the Presidency means first of all to have a recognized hankering for itwhether openly declared or only hinted in a television or radio interview. And, second, it means to have certain qualifications, aside from pure merit, for winning an election. Party members are likely to feel that they have more than one man who could do the job; their task is to choose which one of these men can also get elected.

Presidential candidates generally fall into one of three broad categories: The Front-Runner: This type normally has the best chance. His aim is to take the nomination by storm, arriving Continued on next page

at the convention with so close to a majority of delegates pledged to him that others will stampede to his corral in order to claim credit, and possibly political reward, for having put him across as the winner.

The Willing Compromise: Where there are two FrontRunners, there are certain also to be several potential compromise candidates. The Willing Compromise knows that if the Front-Runners find themselves blocked by each other from getting the necessary majority at the convention, they are likely to turn bitter and throw their strength to a third man, maybe himself, rather than yield to each other.

With this happy end in mind, the Compromise, or Third Man, conducts a quiet, non-aggressive campaign, designed to give himself a solid if moderate base of votes, plus friendly second choice commitments from those who are pledged to the Front-Runners.

The Lightning-Inviter: This variety of candidate is as eager to be a candidate as the others but, assessing the situation, he feels that he has too little chance to warrant an overt campaign for the nomination. In a modest way he lets his qualifications be known, but his only hope is that ifa deadlock occurs in the convention and if the Willing Compromises are not appealing, the lightning just might strike him.

No sooner are the candidates' staffs settled into their convention headquarters than the opening gambit is tried.

This is known as a "Stop So-and-So" movement and is always directed against the top man. Say that Candidate X is known to be in the lead. If Runners-up Y and Z can be induced to combine forces in the name of either one of them, they may be able to keep X from sweeping the convention as the invincible man. Almost invariably, however, Y and Z differ on one question: which will yield to the other for the common good?

The delicate and rarely fruitful negotiations on this point are never conducted by the principals, since they would not want it noised about that they consider such desperate measures necessary. They are done through an

New York's liberal Governor, Nelson A. Rockefeller, shown with his wife, was among first to seek party's nomination.

intermediary, who can always explain to snooping reporters that he just dropped in to borrow a match.

An alternate approach to such merger attempts among the combatants is the direct approach to the delegates, and especially to their leaders.

To do their persuading, the candidates' managers and their aides receive a steady stream of delegates at their headquarters and send out missionaries to the various State caucuses, which are going on all over town; they breakfast, lunch, and dine with influential State chairmen and overlook no chance to woo a doubtful delegate.

By the evening of the third day, as a rule, everything has been done that can be done, and the climax of the convention approaches. As the roll of the States is called, in alphabetical order, a delegation may do one of three things: It may pass; it may, through a spokesman picked beforehand for the honour by the candidate himself, make a nominating or seconding speech; or it may yield to any other State for this purpose.

Nominating speeches, which run to fifteen or twenty minutes, are highly stylized affairs, tending naturally to the sonorous and high-flown. After a series of far-fetched comparisons between his man and all the titans of history, the nominator finishes with the magic pronouncing of the candidate's name. Whereupon a planned and ceremonial uproar breaks out. The organ blasts forth the candidate's theme song, and suddenly thousands of people are on their feet, hollering, stamping, singing and rattling noise-makers and waving signs and banners.

In the past few years, there has been increasing talk of somehow scrapping the traditional demonstration, especially now that millions of people see the ponderous business on television. But ancient rites are not that easily killed off, especially when they still have their uses. It may be that the delegates are no longer impressed by the uproar, in a political way, but the demonstration serves several other purposes. It gives the campaign managers extra time for last minute trafficking on the floor. It affords an explosive

Governor William Scranton of Pennsylvania, at home with his family, has the advantage of heading a populous State.

Senator Margaret Chase Smith is veteran legislator and the first woman to seek a major party nomination for Presidency.

relief from the overdose of talk and the strain on the coccyx.

And, most important, though not acknowledged, it channels the sometimes violent emotions of the week.

When the last candidate has been thoroughly nominated, seconded, and serenaded, the "moment of truth" has come. The roll of the States is now called again, and this time their spokesmen respond in turn with the fateful vote of their delegations. This first ballot is usually cluttered with votes for "Favourite Sons" of the various States, and the chief interest is not so much in the gaps between the principals as in how close the tOjJman comes to gaining a majority. If he is very close, some State, eager to be the one to put him over the top, will ask permission to switch its vote, and the contest will be over.

If no candidate comes near attaining a first-ballot majority, the game gets really interesting. Caucusing goes on all over the hall, there is a scurrying of emissaries from camp to camp, and an even greater air of expectancy prevails than before the voting started. The second-ballot should make it easier to see how matters stand, for on this, as on all subsequent ballots, trends develop-and these are allimportant. If one candidate merely holds his own over several roll calls, he is in trouble. He has not been inheriting the second-choice votes of delegates who have drifted away from their "Favourite Sons" and from other minor candidates. Tnshort, his bandwagon is stalled, and there is nothing less attractive to potential riders than a stalled bandwagon.

When a Front-Runner concludes that his campaign is hopelessly stalled he throws his strength, if he can, to another candidate. Or his following simply dissolves and he is probably overtaken by the Number Two man. Or the convention goes into a deadlock and the delegates turn to the consideration of "Dark Horses." These are usually to be found among the Favourite Sons or those LightningInviters and Willing Compromises mentioned earlier.

In one or another of these ways, the deadlock is broken and a presidential nominee is selected. The winning candidate then comes to the convention hall and delivers an acceptance speech which, among other things, calls for party unity and tries to bind up the wounds of earlier battles. After the main job is done, party leaders draw up a list of vice-presidential possibilities and submit it to the nominee, or vice versa, and an agreement is worked out as to who among these qualified leaders would best help to heal the wounds and "balance the ticket."

The choice of a vice-presidential candidate is the last act of the convention. Delegates, alternates, guests, reporters, and candidates, still dazed by the week's events, are delighted to be on their way. Surfeited with speeches, tired of waiting in line for hotel elevators, and red-eyed for lack of sleep, they may swear that this is their last convention. But don't believe them. To have been in on a moment of history is exhilarating, and grows more so as the moment recedes. Tn a week they will have forgotten the irritations, the passing outrage, and the stretches of sound and fury. They will recall only the excitement, the flashes of courage, the human drama, the sense of renewaL in this major rite of the RepUblic, in its way as impressive a show of Americana as the Grand Canyon. As one who has often cried "enough," I hope to see many another. •

Television cameras provide eye-witness view of convention proceedings for more than 60 million homes in the United States.

CONVENTIONS BECAME AMERICAN INSTITUTION WHEN ANDREW JACKSON WAS NOMINATED IN 1832.

CONVENTIONS IN RETROSPECT HENWENDELL L. WILLKIEaccepted the Republican nomination for President in 1940, millions of Americans asked: "Who is he?" For Wendell Willkie was one of that peculiar breed found in political life known as a "dark horse."

Virtually unknown before the Republican convention opened in Philadelphia on a hot July day-and a registered Democrat only a few months before-Willkie seemed to have come from nowhere to stampede the convention.

Thousands of supporters in the galleries chanted "We want Willkie," and as it became apparent that no one of the three leading, nationally famous candidates-Senator Arthur H. Vandenberg of Michigan, Senator Robert A. Taft of Ohio, and Governor Thomas E. Dewey of New York-could win a majority of delegates' votes, the Willkie movement gained momentum. Finally, on the eighth ballot, enough delegates had climbed aboard the Willkie band wagon to give the big Hoosier from Indiana the party's nomination.

Purists contend that Willkie was not a true dark horse, and cite James A. Garfield as more representative of the breed. Garfield was campaign manager for an avowed candidate at the Republican convention of 1876 when he heard his name suddenly and unexpectedly placed in nomination. He jumped to his feet to protest that he had no intention of being a candidate. But the convention chairman promptly ruled him out of order-and the convention then proceeded to nominate "The Honourable James A. Garfield" on the 36th ballot. Later he declared: "I do not believe it ever happened before that anybody who attempted to decline the Presidency of the United States was prevented by a point of order." Unlike Dark Horse Willkie, Dark Horse Garfield won the election-and died in office at the hand of an assassin.

Willkie and Garfield seem to prove the theory that anything can happen at an American political convention -and it usually does. It has been called uniquely American and in the sense that there is nothing quite like it in the political life of most other nations, it is unique. Conventions of political parties in India and England do not have as their function the selection of the country's chief executive

W

officer such as the President of the United States; they choose a party leader who, because of that choice, later becomes Prime Minister if his party is in the majority.

But the American political convention nominates its man to seek the Presidency in the November elections.

The system is the child of necessity, and while it is not illegal, there is no Constitutional requirement for either the convention or the party system. Both were born of need in the early nineteenth century, a generation after the Founding Fathers established the new Republic.

When electors participating in the first Presidential poll met in their respective States 175 years ago to cast their ballots for the first President, they were unanimous in their belief that George Washington was the one man who could best guide the new government through its infancy. He had successfully led the Continental Armies in the Revolution and had served as President of the Constitutional Convention which had framed the Law of the Land.

By the time of the second election in 1792, however, factional divisions had developed. Distinct political rivalries were rearing their heads with the most drastic cleavage appearing over the issue of a strong central (Federal) government versus a strong States' rights position. Alexander Hamilton, Washington's Secretary of the Treasury, led the Federalists, and Thomas Jefferson, author of the Declaration ofIndependence and Secretary of State in the Washington administration, led the anti-Federalists, a group which eventually became known as the Democratic Party.

Both factions agreed, however, on a second term for Washington in 1792, believing his leadership was essential to the stability of the new Republic.

Four years later, when Washington refused to be a candidate for a third term (and established a precedent which stood until Franklin D. Roosevelt sought and won a third term in 1940),it became apparent that the voters would choose sides in selecting a Chief Executive. To meet this new situation, both the Federalists and the Jeffersonians resorted to a system of Presidential nominations through a Congressional caucus. Under this arrangement which became popularly known as "King Caucus," a joint session of party members from both houses of Congress selected four Presidents: John Adams in 1797, Thomas Jefferson in 1801, James Madison in 1809, and James Monroe in 1817.

But King Caucus died when it was discovered that the most popular-and promising-candidates might not be members of Congress, or even known to Congressional leaders. The Union was growing fast; not only had it doubled in size, but its population was steadily increasing.

The urban centres were becoming pivots of power, not only because of their wealth, but also because of their voting strength as more and more wage earners gained the franchise. The Congressional circle which nominated candidates was relatively narrow, however, and several qualified and potential men were automatically out of the running, a situation that brought bitter attacks upon King Caucus.

The attacks proved fatal and the coup de grace was delivered by Andrew Jackson after he was denied the nomination of the Congressional caucus in 1824. Jackson, hero of the Battle of New Orleans in the War of 1812, and a

'j \'

More than 10,000 persons attended the 1860 Republican convention which was held in Chicago and nominated Abraham Lincoln/or

famous and tremendously popular figure, was not known as a man of patience. His temper was legendary, and when John Quincy Adams won the approval of the Congressional caucus with only 68 of the 261 members of the Congress voting and a large number of States totally unrepresented, Jackson exploded. He felt he had been defrauded by the caucus and vowed to root out the outmoded system once and for all.

Jackson and his followers began their campaign for the 1828 election almost before Adams took the oath of office in 1825. They built a national party organization and Jackson won both the nomination and the Presidency in 1828. Jackson was not a man to rest on his laurels, however, and in 1832 he dealt the death blow to the Congressional caucus by borrowing the idea of a party nominating convention from the Nation's first Third Party, the AntiMason Party, which had held a convention in Baltimore in 1831, the first party meeting of its kind.

The idea of a party convention appealed to Jackson.

For one thing, it was more democratic than the Congressional caucus and Jackson was a man of the people. So in 1832, 245 delegates and an equal number of alternates moved into Baltimore and nominated Andrew Jackson as the Democratic Party's choice for President.

Many of the procedures adopted by the first convention are still in use every four years. This month, the temporary chairman of the Republican convention will preside until delegates elect the permanent chairman; there will be a key-note address which will attempt to set the theme of the convention; candidates will be nominated; the roll will be called State by State in alphabetical order; even the trij.dition of the leader of the State delegation announcing the vote of his delegation will be continued, just as in Jackson's day.

By 1860 the political convention was an American institution and in full flower. But even then some said the flower was beginning to give off a decaying odour and

President.

there is evidence that one of the candidates for the Republican nomination in 1860 was aware of the dickering and horse-trading which had become notorious. It was common for the candidates' managers to offer political favours in return for votes of delegates, a practice not unknown today. But Abraham Lincoln attempted to divorce himself from such shady deals. He issued a statement from his home in Springfield, Illinois, to the convention meeting in Chicago: "I authorize no bargains and will be bound by none."

The statement sent Lincoln's supporters into a frenzy.

How did he expect to win the nomination when his opponents were offering the sun and the stars for delegates' votes? Lincoln's convention manager in Chicago, David Davis, was not disturbed by the statement, however.

"Lincoln ain't here," he said, "and don't know what we have to meet." Deals were made and Lincoln won the nomination.

Lincoln did not attend the convention which gave him his party's nomination and was officially notified of his selection by a committee which called upon him in Springfield, a practice which was followed until 1932 when Franklin Roosevelt shattered another precedent.

Radio and the airplane were on the scene in 1932 and as soon as Roosevelt heard he had won the nomination, he flew to Chicago to accept the nomination in personand established the theme of his administration in his acceptance speech: "I pledge you, I pledge myself to a new deal for the American people."

The carnival atmosphere, the deals and horse-trading, the oratory and the shouting are still under attack. But it seems likely that the convention will continue for some time as a vital part of American political life. "The great strength of the American convention system, with all its turbulence," says the London Economist, "is that the long arm of the people's choice can go deep into the barrel and pull out the best men available." •

Earthquakes cause huge death tolls and devastation. International co-operation in aiding the stricken country is often inspiring, but scientists around the world are co-operating in efforts to answer the questions: what causes quakes? can they be predicted? are there safeguards?

WHEN THE EARTH TREMBLES

TSEEMED UNBELIEVABLE at the beginning. Then you knew this was a mighty earthquake and thousands were in danger. You thought first of your family.

Thus spoke a man who survived the great earthquake which convulsed Alaska last March 27, "Good Friday," a religious anniversary. He was an American but his words echoed the awe and terror known to tens of millions of persons who have felt the earth tremble beneath them in India, Japan, Chile, Morocco, Italy, Yugoslavia, Iran-in fact, in all regions of the world except Antarctica.

There is no greater force on earth than these mountain building cataclysms which sometimes send giant waves racing across an ocean to smash ports and fishing villages.

Earthquakes are killers. In the first quarter of this century 500,000 persons died in five major quakes-San Francisco, California, 1906; Messina, Italy, 1908; Avezzano, Italy, 1915; Kansu, China, 1920, and Tokyo-Yokohama, Japan, 1923. In the following twenty-five years an average

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,g ::: Alaska earthquake split apart Anchorage's main thoroughfare, ~ dropped one large section twenty feet below its normal level.

IRAN, YUGOSLAVIA AND ALASKA WERE THE SCENES OF THREE RECENT QUAKE DISASTERS. of 14,000 persons died annually in earthquakes that collapsed buildings and caused fires, landslides, floods and seismic sea waves.

The worst earthquake death toll in history was 830,000 lives in Shensi, China, in 1556. Three hundred thousand died in the quake which ripped Calcutta, India, in 1737. however, are so lethal and Very few earthquakes, destructive. There are perhaps 1,000,000 tremors a year, according to one study. In 100,000 of these, shocks are felt over a fairly wide area. Only about 100 are destructive and only ten are major ones.

Major earthquakes in densely populated areas can be both murderous and devastating.

Much depends on when the quake strikes, as in the case of Alaska.

About 100,000 persons were living in the area of Anchorage, the State's largest city. Anchorage received the brunt of the shock, which struck at 5: 36 p.m. when many persons had left office buildings and department stores and were en route home. A State petroleum geologist said that if it had hit during business or school hours, thousands might have died. As it was, fewer than 125 persons were reported dead or missing.

While few died, the damages over a 2,400-kilometrelong, area were enormous-more than $500 million. A preliminary report said the central Alaskan land mass appeared to have been thrust upward 1.8 to 3 metres.

Several towns were almost wiped out. The fishing and canning industries were almost destroyed. Thousands of homes, businesses, factories and stores were wrecked.

Railroad lines and roads were ruined.

President Johnson declared the State to be a disaster area and immediately released $5 million in emergency funds for relief work. All Federal Government agencies were authorized to provide necessary assistance to meet the emergency. The Red Cross pledged its full resources and dispatched medical and relief teams to the scene with supplies. Private organizations and business firms offered food, tools and building materials. Congress appropriated S50 million a few days later. Alaskans themselves began the bitter job of cleaning up the debris, salvaging what was left, and re-building.

Earthquakes are sometimes so disastrous that the economy of a country is nearly overwhelmed. The assistance of neighbours and friends abroad is a necessity.

The response is often a bright chapter in the history of international relations.

Governments offer help to a stricken country even before it is asked. Planes fly in emergency medical teams and shipments of medicine, food, clothing, blankets and tents. Ships at sea turn about and steam to the quake-torn

country's nearest port. The Red Cross springs into action immediately. Credits and funds are provided by governments and the people themselves through public subscriptions, churches and charitable organizations.

When northwestern Iran was shaken by a tremendous quake in 1962 (its sixth major quake in twelve years) money and material poured in from all parts of the world-from Finland to New Zealand, from India, as well as from the United States. Twenty-eight hours after Iran had formally asked for U.S. help, air force planes landed in Tehran with the first of more than 450,000 kilograms of supplies.

A 100-bed U.S. army hospital was airlifted from the Federal Republic of Germany with nurses and orderlies to care for survivors. More than 12,000 were dead, 100,000 homeless and more than 150 villages were destroyed or made uninhabitable.

The Shah of Iran, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, said one of the causes for hope and elation was "the widespread sympathy and co-operation which have been extended to the earthquake victims from all parts of the globe."

About 3,000 air miles away Rev. J. Joseph Lynch, Director of New York's Fordham University Seismic Observatory, points to erratic recording of tremor violence of Alaska earthquake.

Southern Chile was ravaged by a series of earthquakes, seismic sea waves, volcanic eruptions and avalanches in May, 1960. About 5,000 persons were reported dead or missing and 2,000,000 were homeless. A major source of aid was the United States, which granted $20 million in cash and $100 million in credit for new dwellings, schools, highways, hospitals, docks and railroads.

Three years later, Chileans in the town of Valdivia took up a modest collection for the people of Skoplje, Yugoslavia, whose city was almost destroyed and 1,000 killed in the quake of July 26, 1963. Twelve national Red Cross societies sent cash, blankets, antibiotics and blood plasma for the 3,400 injured. Mobile field hospitals came from Vienna and Athens. French disaster specialists combed the ruins for several days. They found many survivors.

Among those to offer aid were India, the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, Hungary and the United States.

Site of Earthquake on March 27

• Heavy Earthquakes 1!tte..rthquake belt

India sent supplies of tea, coffee and blankets for the stricken people. The United States authorized grants and loans totalling $50 million.

One of the most powerful earthquakes wracked India's Assam State in 1950. It was so violent that airmen reported entire mountain chains in the eastern Himalayas were changed. A geologist said Mt. Everest was pushed up 59.4 metres. Fortunately, since the area was sparsely populated, the death toll was kept down. Nonetheless untold thousands died and many thousands more were deprived of food and shelter. The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) offered help in the rebuilding and rehabilitation. Six tons of urgently needed supplies, mostly medicine, was flown to New Delhi from the United States and the United Nations International Children's Emergency Fund (UNICEF) sent 90,000 kilograms of milk powder.

A massive international rescue effort was launched when Morocco's port city of Agadir was destroyed on March 1, 1960. Of the city's 40,000 population, 12,000 died.

Many of them were trapped in the crumbled buildings.

British, French, Spanish, Italian and American planes and ships rushed medicine, clothing, food and tents to Agadir.

Hundreds of French troops and civilian rescue workers dug through the rubble for survivors.

A newspaper reported that a strong factor in reviving hope among the survivors was the "unprecedented display of international efforts to help them .... " A U.S. Navy nurse at the scene said afterwards, "It was a lesson to us for readiness, organization, courage, international co-operation, and understanding among people."

Few earthquakes have been as destructive as the one which hit the Tokyo-Yokohama area in 1923. The gigantic Continued on next page

shock rocked the entire Kanto plain, 160 kilometres of Japan's most heavily-populated area. Fires raged out of control, deadlier than the quake itself. Nearly 143,000 died and 104,000 were injured. In Tokyo 375,000 of the city's 500,000 buildings were destroyed. Eighty per cent of Yokohama lay in ruins.

The world's response was swift and generous. Vessels of the U.S. Asian fleet at Dairen, Manchuria, loaded all available supplies and sailed almost immediately for Japan.

British, French and Italian ships soon began arriving with aid. Supplies came from Belgium, Sweden, Thailand, Mexico and many other countries. In the United States, President Calvin Coolidge asked the American public to donate $5 million. Within a few days twice that amount was collected. Included was $500,000 from San Francisco where many remembered the help the Japanese people had given them when their own city was devastated in the 1906 earthquake.

International co-operation in times of natural disaster can be inspiring. This thought was stated most eloquently by the Shah of Iran when he commented on the generosity

shown to his country in 1962: "I have often wished that the fine spirit of human sympathy and unity engendered by disaster among different members of the family of man would obtain throughout all time, acting across petty animosities, self-seeking and personal grudges, so that we might all work in unison and harmony to ensure a more peaceful and prosperous world."

International co-operation has advanced in recent years from extending a helping hand in time of disaster to trying to do something before the earth starts to heave and rip. Not that scientists expect to find a way to prevent earthquakes. They don't. But, based on studies of the causes and behaviour of quakes, scientists are confident that some day they will be able to predict when an earthquake is imminent-thus saving lives and reducing property damages.

Scientists are studying two well-defined earthquake belts extending around the world. One' is the circumPacific belt, stretching from Chile up along the coast of Central America and the United States to Alaska and down again through Japan and the Philippines to New

Major Rosa Ramirez of u.s. Army 8th Evacuation Hospital feeds a Yugoslav girl made orphan by violent earthquake at Skoplje.

Nurse Mary Gilman escorts an Iranian farmer, carrying his injured child, victim of quake, to the U.S. Army field hospital.

Zealand. The second band swings westward from Indonesia, Burma, China and India, along the mountain chains of the Himalayas, the Karakoram, Hindu Kush and Caucasus ranges, and through the Mediterranean area to Portugal.

These two belts have been mapped by scientists called seismologists. They use a recording and measuring device, a seismograph, to detect where a quake is happening and how much force it has.

The basic cause of earthquakes is a mystery. It is believed the cause may be in the interaction of the earth's inner molten mass and the cooling layers above it, possibly resulting in a surface shrinkage and stretching which deforms rocks too fast for them to reshape themselves imperceptibly. Pressures and strains of incalculable force accumulate, finally erupting through the earth's surface or the ocean floor.

The earth breaks along places of weaknesses called "faults." Forces build up in rocks on both sides of a fault and move the rock masses horizontally or vertically. The vertical movements account for mountains and for trenches several miles deep in the ocean floor. Either landslides into the water or undersea quakes may produce seismic sea waves or tsunami (the Japanese name) which are popularly but erroneously called "tidal waves." The waves travel up to 950 kilometres an hour and build up to heights of more than thirty metres as they crash into a shoreline. The greatest tsunami on record occurred in 1737 when such a wave broke at a height of sixty-three metres on the shore of Kamchatka, Siberia.

A victim of 1962 Iran earthquake receives medical assiSTance at U.S. Army's field hospital, airlifted from West Germany.

The great Chile quake of 1960 set off tsunami which crossed the Pacific and smashed into Hawaii taking fifty-six lives and causing $75 million damage, hit Japan with a loss of 138 lives, crashed into the Philippines and killed nineteen, and caused damage in New Zealand and the west coast of the United States.

The location and magnitude of earthquakes are detected by studying the vibrations or waves which reverberate through the earth's crust. (The focus of a quake is anywhere from just below the surface to nearly 700 kilometres inside the earth.) More than one seismological recording station is needed to plot the location.

The magnitude or amount of energy released by a quake is described on the Richter scale reading from one to nine. The greatest ever recorded was 8.9, which hit Valparaiso, Chile, in 1906. In the same year, the San Francisco quake registered 8.25. The quake at Assam, India, in 1950 was about 8.4. For the recent Alaska quake, seismologists reported readings varying from 8.2 to 8.7.

Data from recording stations around the world must be studied before a more precise determination of a quake's strength can be made.

There are more than 400 seismological observatories around the globe. When a tremor is recorded the observatories airmail or telegraph preliminary readings to one or both of the two national centres, the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey in Washington and the Institute of Earth Sciences in Moscow. A complete analysis is later sent to the two international centres, the Bureau Central International de Seismologie in Strasbourg, France, and the InternatiQnal Seismological Summary Office in Kew, England.

The findings of these observatories and centres provide scientists with the research data which may lead to a method of predicting earthquakes. There are two types of prediction.

One is a general statistical risk prediction based on how often, and where, and how hard earthquakes strike. The second, which scientists hope to invent, would predict the time, location and force of an earthquake. Some believe they may learn to make specific predictions in twenty or thirty years while others think it may take a century or more.

Last year the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey opened a new seismological data and analysis centre to study the nature, location and frequency of earthquakes. Under a programme started in 1961 to create a world-wide standard seismograph system, the United States is installing modern equipment in 125 stations in sixty-five countries.

While prediction is in the future, safeguards to reduce the death toll and damages are in the present. Among these safeguards are construction of specially-designed buildings to absorb shocks, adequate fire-fighting equipment, auxiliary water supplies, and disaster offices to plan for emergencies and to supervise preparations by area relief agencies.

One such safeguard proved itself in the Alaska quake.

In Anchora~e 500 children were watchins a motion picture in a theatre when the quake struck. The theatre manager, Joe Marboe, said: "I knew I had a theatre constructed so well that people called Lathrop, the builder, crazy because of the extra expenditures he made for safety. It came through without a crack." •

CONTINUING

A PROGRAMME

WHICH BEGAN IN 1963,

48 AMERICAN TEACHERS OF SCIENCE ARE NOW DEMONSTRATING

In

New Trends Science Teaching

DOZEN Indian university campuses, 2,200 professors and teachers are now engaged in a great experiment. The experiment is in its second year, and growing swiftly. Its aim is a thorough remoulding of a key sector of education.

This sector comprises the sciences and technological subjects. These are the subjects the 2,200 participants teach.

Because these gatherings of professors and teachers are customarily held in the summer, when schools and colleges are closed, they are known as summer institutes.

Why were the summer institutes founded, and how have they developed?

In the past 300 years or so, science has been playing a bigger and bigger part in our lives. In the last few decades, particularly, the pace of its growth has been breath-taking.

As science got more important, this was naturally reflected in the classroom. Starting from a situation in which it was not taught at all, it began to win increasing academic recognition. What has been taking place in recent years has been described as an "explosion of scientific knowledge."

Dr. D. S. Kothari, chairman of the University Grants Commission (UGC), points out that "science, and things connected with science, have a doubling period of about ten years. (So does the number of universities in Indiaten years ago the number was about thirty; now we have some sixty-though I don't see that this can continue very long!)" This means, says Dr. Kothari, that "within the lifetime of a generation-equal to about thirty yearsscientific knowledge- is multiplied eight-fold."

O

N THREE

NEW METHODS TO INDIAN TEACHERS.

What is the result? "Most of the scientists who are going to make a significant contribution to science in the next twenty or thirty years are still at school today. Most of the science (about ninety per cent of it) that the young students of today will come across and will have to deal with in their adult life will be 'new science,' and most of the scientists who will make this new science are with them in the schools today."

The "explosion of scientific knowledge" has had a correspondingly explosive effect on the spreading ofor the attempt to spread-that knowledge via the schools.

There has been a struggle to keep pace, educationally speaking. Not surprisingly, it has been an uphill fight.

"Perhaps in a losing effort to keep up with the expanding fronts of science, the general science and biology textbooks, and also the physics and chemistry textbooks, became thicker and thicker. More and more of the findings and the applications of science were included, and less and less of the approach of science," says Dr. N. E. Bingham, science education consultant of the Columbia University Teachers College team, United States Agency for International Development (U.S.A.I.~.) Mission to India.

Obviously, a revolution in science teaching was in order. "Now a revolution has come, and we are right now in the middle of it."

The central fact of this revolution is that what is important in science education is "not so much the content of as the approach towards education," says Dr. Kothari.

Science "should not be presented as a closed book, but as something which, in answering one question, opens up many new questions to be answered."

And he adds: "We have been teaching science not as an endless quest, but as something equivalent to a closed system."

Dr. N. Eldred Bingham, U.S.A.I.D. consultant to India's Education Ministry, helps high school biology teachers in their laboratory session at a six-week summer institute in Madras.

The need for science teaching to break out of this closed system is obvious. Less obvious is how it can keep from becoming a channel for outdated knowledge. The answer is in the new educational approach that has been gaining an increasingly firmer foothold in recent years.

The new approach is that a grasp of the fundamental principles of science is needed-not of the soon-outmoded details. The scientist now realizes, says Dr. J. Arthur Campbell, chairman of the chemistry department of the Harvey Mudd College at Claremont, California, that the only way for him "to discover and double his knowledge is to forget about detailed knowledge. No one has a large enough brain'to store all this information.

"The only way for a science student to master this information is to organize it under general headings or concepts. Therefore, what will happen to the student in the laboratory is, we hope, that he will make certain discoveries.

He will be able to generalize with these discoveries in terms of concepts. He will be able to fit together his discoveries and also all other things which he will discover in the future."

This new drive to modernize science education first started some years ago in the United States. It has many aspects, but there have been two major ones. First are programmes to revise syllabi, course materials, laboratory materials, films, and so on. Second are programmes to increase the competence of science teachers.

Of the various programmes, those which are of the 'most interest to India and have had the greatest impact are the summer institutes. Private industry, colleges and universities in the U.S. had sponsored a few summer institutes, but it was not until the Government-sponsored National Science Foundation entered the scene in 1953 that the project gained momentum.

The National Science Foundation was chartered by

the U.S. Congress in 1950. Scientists had played such an important role in World War II that it was considered desirable to have a permanent government agency specifically devoted to scientific affairs. Thus the Foundation was born.

Somewhat similar to India's University Grants Commission (though limited to the broad field of science), the National Science Foundation is a fund-granting agency.

The Foundation has two principal activities. One is providing funds for scientific research. The other is providing funds for projects to improve education in the sciences (including mathematics)-to improve science teachers' understanding and competence, develop better science-education materials, and so forth.

The National Science Foundation hence has a wide range of activities. The summer institutes are not the only one, but they certainly rank high. Two were held in 1953, four in 1954 and they have kept on expanding ever since.

This year 439 science summer institutes are being held in the United States for high (secondary) school-teachers alone.

What was the origin of the summer institutes? The background of many science teachers was poor. As a result, their teaching was poorly done. A teacher who is to teach science competently must first have a thorough grasp of the subject himself. "The summer institutes were aimed to help the teachers to better understand what they were teaching," says Dr. William E. Morrell, the National Science Foundation's programme director. The stimulus of the Second World. War and the fact that science had played such an important part in it gave the institutes an important added boost.

While fitted to Indian requirements, the summer institutes in this country are following the same general Continued on next page

lines of activity that they have followed for the past several years in the United States. That is, they provide a review of basic principles in the scientific field from a modern standpoint. They discuss recent advances in the subject matter. They lay emphasis on practical laboratory work and lecture-demonstrations. And they provide an opportunity for teachers to discuss their problems with fellow-participant teachers.

In the last five or six years, work has been going on to improve the materials from which students study. New courses have been developed; in the United States, millions of dollars have been spent on such development.

In teaching these courses, says Dr. Morrell, "there is more emphasis on reasoning, and less on memorizing what the teacher or the textbook says. There is more emphasis on the principles of the subject, and less on descriptive detail. There is heavy emphasis on practical work-the laboratory aspect of the subject."

"Let me cite one example," says Dr. Campbell. "When a student comes to school on the first day of our chemistry course, he is given no books. He is given only a candle and he is asked to observe what he can about the candle and write it down. This is the first experiment on the first day.

On the second day there is another experiment. Thus he does experiments during the first two weeks of school. ...

"We place emphasis on designed laboratory experiments, which are really experiments through which students explore and discover for themselves and then go to class and discuss these discoveries, compare results, learn something about the nature of scientific experiments, and then, on the basis of these experiments, discover the major concepts of science."

While the U.S. summer institutes set-up has grown apace in the decade during which it has been regularly operating under National Science Foundation support, Dr. Morrell says of India's achievement in the field (which only started last year): "You have an admirable start in your programme. Your accomplishment is amazing."

The rate of growth is certainly impressive. In 1963the very first year of the summer institutes in Indiafour institutes for secondary school science teachers were held. This year there are sixteen. Next year there are expected to be sixty-four.

Some 700 secondary school-teachers are participating in the current sixteen summer institutes. There are four such institutes each in physics, chemistry, biology, and mathematics. In addition, twenty institutes in the same subjects are being held for university science teachers. There also are four institutes or summer schools for engineering faculties, and four summer schools for polytechnic members.

Twenty American professors are participating in the summer institutes for university science teachers; twelve American professors in the institutes or summer schools for engineering faculties, and sixteen American engineers

in the summer schools for polytechnic members.

The sixteen summer institutes for secondary schoolteachers are distributed around India on a pattern of one in each region of the country (northern, southern, eastern, western) for each of the four subjects. Each institute is being conducted by the respective Indian host university, and staff members are professors from that university. The Indian staff members directing and teaching each institute are assisted by an American professor who is familiar with the new courses, syllabi, textbooks, films, and laboratory equipment developed in the United States, and an American high school-teacher who has taught these new courses in the U.S.A. This imaginative programme, growing year by year, has a Summer Institutes Administration Unit to look after it. The unit was specially set up in the UGC office in New Delhi late last year. On it are representatives of UGC, U.S.A.J.D., and the National Council of Educational Research & Training (NCERT).

"A special feature of the entire project," said Dr. Kothari a few months back in his inaugural address to a seminar held in New Delhi as a preliminary to the summer institutes, "is that in this we have the participation of U.S.A.J.D., the Columbia University team, and the National Science Foundation, and in our country we have the participation of NCERT and UGc. In other words, it is a programme where many agencies intimately concerned with education -school education and university education and so onhave joined together; and it is only through such joint co-operation that a programme of such importance, urgency, and magnitude can be made fruitful."

Underlining the significance attached to the programme was the fact that four American scientists specially came from the United States to participate in the seminar, which was held in mid-February of this year. Besides Dr. Morrell, they included Dr. Arnold B. Grobman, Dr. Howard F. Fehr, and Dr. Alfred Roemer. Subsequently plans for the organization and co-ordination of the programme were formulated at a meeting held in April at Columbia University Teachers College in New York.

The participants in the Indian summer institutes are using the new curricular materials developed in the United States. Dr. Grobman, a biologist, is the director of the U.S. programme to develop these materials in his subject area-the Biological Science Curriculum Study programme.

Dr. Fehr is professor of mathematics education at Teachers College, Columbia University; and Dr. Roemer is professor of physics at St. Lawrence University, New York.

Thus an impressive project is shaping which, as it progresses, promises to bring about a virtual revolution in the teaching of a group of subjects thrust by current events to the very forefront of the educational scene. It is a project which, with every passing year, will grow from strength to strength. •

JAWAHARLAL NEHRU: APOSTLE OF PEACE AS IT WAS FOR GANDHI, peace was the ideal of Jawaharlal Nehru-it

was his message to the world. There could be no more fitting memorial to him than a world without war. It is my sincere belief that in his memory the statesmen of the world should dedicat~ themselves to making his ideal a reality; Our country is pledged to this and we renew our pledge today in tribute to your great departed leader.-Lyndon B. Jobnson, President of tbe United States. Message to tbe President of India, Dr. S. Radbakrisbnan, May 27, 1964.

1 ~>"~'1

The Prime Minister accompanied President Eisenhower for 1959 visit to Taj Mahal.

It is not the superficial but the inner strength of a nation which impels it to progress. It will be wrong to say that the United States is merely a dollar nation. . . . We have to think of America as a country which has progressed in technology and of those deep forces which have made it progress.-Mr. Nehru at Civic Reception for President Eisenhower, New Delhi, December 13, 1959.

The danger of war is not past, and the future may hold trials and tribulations for humanity. Yet the forces of peace are strong, and the mind of humanity is awake. I believe that peace will triumph.-Radio and Television Address in the United States, December. 18, 1956.

Mr. Nehru and Dr. S. Radhakrishnan greeted Vice President and Mrs. Johnson during 1961 visit. The Johnsons were accompanied by President Kennedy's sister, Jean Kennedy Smith (between Mr. Nehru and Mr. Johnson) and her husband Stephen Smith, le/t.

Sometimes it is said that there are great differences between the United States and India in the international field and in other fields. I believe this is greatly exaggerated. Very obviously there are sometimes differences in outlook and opinion. Indeed, I imagine in the United States, among the people here there are differences. In India I know there are great differences of opinion. Yet, we come together. Yet, we have all these people of the same ideals....

The very

nature of democracy is, whether within a country or outside, to have clashes of opinion.-Mayor's

Luncheon, New York City, December 21, 1956.

Cold wars mean nourishing the idea of war in the minds of men. If we go on nourishing the idea of war in the minds of men then obviously there is always the danger J

of its bursting out from the minds of men to other activities ....

I submit to you

that this idea of cold war is essentially fundamentally wrong. It is immoral.

J

It is opposed to all ideas of peace and co-operation ....

Means are at least as important as ends; if the means are not right the end J

.

is also likely to be not right however much we may want it to be right. And thereJ

fore here especially in this world Assembly to which all the nations of the J

world look I hope an example will be set to the fest of the world in thinking J

always about the right means' to be adopted in order to solve our problems.

-Address

to the United Nations General Assembly, December 20, 1956.

Today the world is our neighbour, and the old 'divisions of continents and countries matter less and less. Peace and freedom have become indivisible, and the world cannot continue for long partly free and partly subject. In this atomic age, peace has also become a test of human survival ....

No Indian can forget that in the days of our struggle for freedom, we received from your country a full measure of sympathy and support. Our two Republics share a common faith in democratic institutions and the democratic way of life and are dedicated to the cause of peace and freedom.-Radio and Television Address in the United States, December 18, 1956.

Whenever I have come here I have been deeply impressed not only by the magnificent achievements of this great country but, if I may say so, even more so by the goodwill and friendship which I met everywhere here. _. Reply to speech of Welcome by President Kennedy, Washington, D.C. November 6, 1961.

~

~

After 15-hour flight, U.S. Secretary of State Dean Rusk arrives with Ambassador Bowles to attend last rites for lawaharlal Nehru.

The cause of freedom lost a foremost champion.

WHILE INDIA'S MILLIONSmourned Jawaharlal Nehru, America's lately-grieving millions shared ~ THE UNITED STATESexpects to work closely with India's sorrow. "Once more," President Lyndon Mr. Nehru's successor, Prime Minister Lal 13ahadur Shastri, President Johnson announced soon after B. Johnson wrote President Sarvepalli RadhaMr. Shastri was chosen to head the Indian Government. krishnan, "the_ United States and India have Mr. Johnson also sent a message to Mr. Shastri in come together in grief over the death of a great which he said: and beloved man."

"I hasten to send my hearty congratulations on the occasion of your election as Prime Minister of India.

"He is gone now, and we shall certainly not The people and Government of the United States look see his like again," one leading American newsforward to working with you and your countrymen in paper said of Prime Minister Nehru. "The the same spirit of friendship and understanding that marked the relations between India and our country records of the past few decades," said another, during the time of your great predecessor. I send my "are dotted with great events and conferences warmest personal good wishes for your success in the in which Nehru played arole." great task you now undertake, and my assurance of Americans had their occasional disagreethe reliable friendship and co-operation of the United States. Our countries are united in their purpose of ments with Jawaharlal Nehru during his years peace, their effort for economic progress, and their of leadership of the new India, and Mr. Nehru dedication to human dignity." had his disputes with America.

But these disagreements-the frictions of a busy, changing world-never obscured Ameripeoples of the two great democracies-that ca's underlying respect for India's leader, nor Americans were confident the seventeen-yearchallenged his status among Americans as one old Indian nation would respond with the of the great spokesmen of mankind. As everysa1Jle high regard for the rule of law under where else he went, enthusiastic, friendly crowds similar circumstances. tyrned out to see and hear the Prime Minister "Dictatorship was within his grasp and at d'~ring his three official visits to the United States. times India seemed to be thrusting it upon him," . And slowly, as the young Indian nation TheNew York Times wrote after Mr. Nehru's death. too form under his leadership, Americans "He refused. The insistence upon an India came to recognize that Mr. Nehru's attitudesfree in independence was his gift, born out of whether or' not they were controversial in the love, for his country."

United States-were those of a patriotic leader "He was a revolutionary, and he was an Indiof his own country. Most Americans, for an," was another admiring American comment. example, understood when the Prime Minister It has been during the last years of Jawaharof the most populous democracy remarked: lal Nehru's lifetime that Americans have begun " ... The only thing is, I am for India ... " to know and understand modern India. It is for Jawaharlal Nehru's India-a great democracy Increasingly, as the years passed, Americans came to see in Jawaharlal Nehru a man who wedded to freedom-that Americans have develwas coping successfully with the major economic oped a wealth of friendliness. Americans see in problems confronting India while building a Jawaharlal Nehru's India a strong proponent of free, morally strong, democratic and indepen,the fundamental values and principles by which dent nation. His untiring efforts won more free men everywhere live. As President Johnson and more American hearts. In 1963, after nearly said in his message to President Radhakrishnan, two centuries of nationhood, Americans felt speaking of Prime Minister Nehru: "Perhaps more than any other world leader pride in the smooth and democratic transfer of he has given expression to man's yearning for their own government authority following the peace. This is the issue of our age. In his fearless assassination of President Kennedy. In 1964, it was a tribute to Mr. Nehru's life workpursuit of a world free from war, he has served' and to the growing understanding between the all humanity." •

"This is pre-eminently the time to speak the truth, the whole truth, frankly and boldly.

N or need we shrink from honestly facing conditions in our country today. This great Nation will endure as it has endured, will revive and will prosper.

So first of all let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself-nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyses needed effort to convert retreat into advance. In every dark hour of our national life a leadership off rankness and vigour has met with that understanding and support of the people themselves which is essential to victory. I am convinced that you will again give that support to leadership in these D. ROOSEVELT critical days."-FRANKLIN _

First Inaugural Address March 4, 1933

THE FIRST HUNDRED

DAYS

Never before in American history was so much intense and pathbreaking political activity concentrated into a brief period as during the opening months of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's administration-the famous "First Hundred Days" between March and June of 1933. Faced with an economic depression of calamitous proportions, the new leadership responded with vigour, imagination and compassion. New ideas for recovery and reform sprouted in profusion. They were not only welcomed, they were put into effect with a speed and vitality that dazzled America and, indeed, the entire world. This was a period of uninhibited debate, bold experiment, egregious mistakes, and monumental successes. The New Deal, as Roosevelt's first administration came to be known, was the beginning of a new stage in the social and economic development of the United States.

No one has caught the excitement and achievement of those days more brilliantly than Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., professor of history at Harvard University, winner of the Pulitzer Prize in history, and appointed early in 1961 as Special Assistant to President John F. Kennedy. The article on the following pages is a recreation of the period, drawn from Professor Schlesinger's three-volume study, The Age of Roosevelt.

NAUGURATION DAY, March 4, 1933, dawned gray and bleak. Heavy winter clouds hung over Washington.

A chill northwest wind brought brief gusts of rain.

The darkness of the day intensified the mood of helplessness; the fog of despair hung over the land. One out of every four American workers lacked a job. Factories that had once darkened the skies with smoke stood ghostly and silent, like extinct volcanoes. Families slept in tarpaper shacks and tin-lined caves, and thousands of vagabond children were roaming the land, wild boys of the road.

Hunger marchers, pinched and bitter, were parading cold streets in New York and Chicago. On the countryside unrest had already flared into violence.

Mobs had halted mortgage sales and ran the men from the banks and insurance companies out of town; they intimidated courts and judges, and demanded a moratorium on debts. When a sales company in Nebraska invaded a farm and seized two trucks, the farmers in the district organized a posse and took the trucks back. In West Virginia, mining families, turned out of their homes, lived in tents along the road, ate pinto beans and black coffee.

"A sense of depression had settled over the capital," reported The New York Times, "so that it could be felt."

And in the late morning of March 4, 1933, people began to gather for the noon ceremonies drawn, it would seem, by curiosity as much as by hope.

A few rays of sunshine broke for a moment through the slate clouds upon the inaugural stand as Roosevelt took the oath of office. Across the country millions clustered around radio sets. The new President stood bareheaded and unsmiling, his hands gripping the lectern. "Let me assert my firm belief," he said, "that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself-nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyses needed efforts to convert retreat into advance."

Moments later the high, clear note of cavalry bugles announced the inaugural parade. Franklin Roosevelt, in the presidential car, waved greetings to the crowd along the way-men and women now curiously awakened from apathy and daze. The horsemen wheeled into line, and the parade began. In Washington the weather remained cold and gray. Across the land the fog began to lift.

Eleanor Roosevelt called the inauguration "very, very solemn and a little terrifying," and added: "One has a feeling of going it blindly ....

We're in a tremendous stream, and none of us knows where we're going to land."

The first priority was the banking system. Before anything else could be done, it seemed imperative to clear the financial arteries of the economy. Banks were going bankrupt all across the country, depriving people of their savings and sowing the seeds of further panic.

I

Before arriving in Washington, Roosevelt had already settled on the main lines of his attack. He had rough drafts of two presidential proclamations: one calling a special session of Congress; the other declaring a bank holiday during which the banks would be closed for a period of readjustment.

The closing of the banks, proclaimed by Roosevelt the day after the inauguration, seemed to give the long economic descent the punctuation of a full stop.

In the Treasury, men worked around the clock to translate a broad plan into legislative language. The banking bill provided, among other things, for the review and reopening of the closed banks under a system of licences and "conservators."

On Thursday, March 9, at noon, a breathless five days after the inauguration, Congress convened on Capitol Hill. Almost at once it received a message from the President: "I cannot too strongly urge upon the Congress the clear necessity for immediate action." Shortly after four o'clock, the House of Representatives unanimously passed the bill. Just before seven-thirty, the Senate gave it a favourable 73 to 7 vote. An hour later, it was at the White House. The whole affair, from the first introduction to the final signature, had taken less than eight hours. Not for years had Congress acted with such speed and decision.

Roosevelt had first thought of putting through the .emergency banking legislation and sending Congress home. . But the momentum generated by the banking bill now seemed too valuable to waste. Other urgent programmes, addressed both to the immediate task of recovery and to the larger task of reconstruction, had to be launched. There was, for instance, the problem of millions of men and women who had no work and could find none. Private charity had long since become inadequate; municipal and State relief fell far below the need; and the small Federal appropriation for loans to State and local authorities had little effect.

Many people close to the subject had long since concluded that the only hope was a Federal programme.

During the short session of Congress before inauguration, a parade of experts-social workers, municipal officials, representatives of charities-came to Washington to testify for a Federal relief bill. None spoke more authoritatively than Harry L. Hopkins, head of the Temporary Relief Administration in New York when Roosevelt was Governor of the State. The bill he supported proposed a Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA) with $500,000,000 for outright grants-in-aid to States. It produced some violent reactions in Congress, but passed the Senate on March 20 by a vote of 55 to 17 and the House of Continued on page 33 This moving group is typical of sad plight of many families during the Great Depression when want and misery haunted the land.

Jobs had to be provided for all able-bodied men sznce idLeness corrodes public morale.

Representatives three weeks later by 326 to 42.

Roosevelt quickly decided on Hopkins as head of the new agency. Harry Hopkins had already come a long way in forty-two years. He had spent his boyhood in midwestern small towns, ending in Grinnell, Iowa, where his father, a wanderer with a weakness for poker and bowling, finally settled down as proprietor of a harness store. After a summer job among slum children in New York following his graduation from college, Hopkins plunged into social work, and in the next years, climbed steadily in the social welfare world.

He was a lean, loose-limbed, dishevelled man, with sharp features and dark, sardonic eyes. He talked quickly and cockily, out of the side of his mouth; his manner was brusque and almost studiously irreverent; his language, concise, pungent, and often profane. But underneath the hard-boiled pose, there lay a surprising quick sensitivity to human moods and relationships.

Action was instantaneous. Before evening on the second day after the FERA bill was signed, Hopkins had thrown together a staff, begun the collection of information, alerted forty-eight State governors to set up State organizations, and sent emergency aid to seven States.

Basically, however, Hopkins objected to direct relief in any form. Keeping able-bodied men in idleness, he believed, could not help but corrode morale. It was this degeneration he wanted to avoid in demanding a more creative response to the catastrophe. Instead of putting the unemployed on a weekly dole, why not offer them a weekly government cheque in exchange for labour performed for the public welfare? Work relief, Hopkins said, "preserves a man's morale. It saves his skill. It gives him a chance to do something socially useful."

Hopkins outlined his scheme to the President. This was the beginning of the Civil Works Administration (CWA). On November 15, 1933, Hopkins announced his objective: "The employment of four million by December 15, 1933." He missed his first target date-by December 14, there were only 2,610,451 on CWA rolls-but by the middle of January 1934 he was well over the 4,000,000 mark.

CWA tackled a tremendous variety of jobs. At its peak, it had about 400,000 projects in operation. About a third of CWA personnel worked on roads and highways.

In the three and a half months of CWA's existence, they built or improved about 800,000 kilometres of secondary roads. Next in importance came schools-40,000 built or improved, with 50,000 teachers employed in country schools or in city adult education, and large numbers of playgrounds developed. CWA gave the nation nearly 500 airports and improved 500 more. It developed parks, cleared waterways, fought insect pests; dug swimming pools and Sunny smile of Roosevelt, author of the New Deal, reflects his robust optimism which led the nation from frustration to hope.

sewers. Three thousand writers and artists found CWA employment utilizing their own skills. Above all, it supplied work to 4,000,000 Americans who would otherwise have festered in humiliation and idleness.

At best, however, work relief was an emergency effort, designed only for those who could not find employment.

It had little to offer to men and women who still had jobs but worried nonetheless about their homes, their future, and their old age. It could be only a part of the New Deal's total attack on economic and social insecurity.

During the Hundred Days, Roosevelt took one notable step to assure a larger measure of general security. Few things were more demoralizing than the threatened loss of homes through mortgage foreclosure. In 1932, over 250,000 families lost their homes; in early 1933, foreclosures were taking place at a rate of more than a thousand a day.

The mounting foreclosure rate weakened the position of savings banks and insurance companies. By mid-1933, homeowners were finding it increasingly difficult to negotiate new mortgages or even to renew old ones. The real estate market and the construction industry alike seemed to be headed towards collapse.

In April 1933, Roosevelt asked Congress for new legislation to protect small homeowners from foreclosure, with - government refinancing mortgages for distressed small owners who had lost their homes as far back as 1930 or 'could not obtain present financing through normal channels. The Home Owners' Loan Corporation, which went into action in the summer of 1933, bought mortgages from holders who could carry them no longer, financed the immediate payments for taxes and repairs, and rewrote the mortgages to provide for easy repayment over a long term and at relatively low interest rates. The ceiling for an HOLC loan to an individual homeowner was $14,000.

According to careful estimates, the owners of about one-fifth of the nation's non-farm dwellings sought HOLC loans. Of these requests, more than half were granted. In the end, one out of every five mortgaged urban homes in the country was an HOLC beneficiary.

In a short time HOLC averted the threatened collapse of the real estate market and enabled financial institutions to begin to return to the mortgage-lending business. Its example simplified and liberalized methods of real estate financing everywhere in the nation. Most important of all, by enabling thousands of Americans to save their homes, it strengthened their stake both in the existing order and in the New Deal.

HOLC, in restoring the morale of a vital section of the population, contributed to the attack on insecurity.

Still, this represented only a marginal gain. The fight for a general security programme had to be conducted on a broader front. And in this fight, the central figure was to be the Secretary of Labour, Frances Perkins.

Continued on next page

The Social Security Act of 1935 reflected the maturing social consciousness of America.

Miss Perkins was fifty years old when she came to Washington in 1933. She was born in Boston, reared in Worcester, Massachusetts, and educated at Mount Holyoke College. A lively young lady with opinions of her own, she found herself bored after college by the staid society of Worcester and abandoned it for the slums of Chicago.

Here she lived with the pioneering social worker, Jane Addams, at Hull House and was initiated into the inner circle of the powerful social work apparatus; then transferred to Philadelphia, where she studied economics; then in 1910, became executive secretary of the Consumers' League in New York. Operating in the area where social work and politics intersected, she became an enormously effective woman in New York in the next two decades.

Brisk and articulate, she had pungency of character, a dry wit, an inner gaiety, an instinct for practicality, a profound vein of religious feeling.

In 1933 she had been incongruously given that most masculine of all Federal departments, the Department of Labour, redolent of big men with cigars in their mouths; but she took over with her usual quick competence. Someone asked her if being a woman was a handicap. "Only in climbing trees," she crisply replied.

Before accepting appointment, she laid before Roosevelt an extensive agenda, including unemployment and old-age insurance, minimum wages and maximum hours; and he told her to go ahead. For Miss Perkins, this opportunity was the culmination of a lifetime's hope and labour.

Her over-riding objective, once emergency problems of hunger and want had been met, was to construct a permanent system of personal security through social insurance.

On June 8, 1934, Roosevelt sent a message to Congress, vigorously reaffirming his faith in social insurance ("among our objectives I place the security of the men, women, and children of the nation first"). At the same time, he laid down what he regarded as the principles of a sound nation-wide social insurance programme: it should be a State-Federal programme, financed by contribution rather than by an increase in general taxation. Three weeks later he appointed a cabinet Committee of Economic Security, with Frances Perkins as chairman, charged with formulating a programme to be submitted to the President before December.

From Frances Perkins' point of view, the Committee's job was to consider the whole field of economic security.

Unemployment compensation might be the most important issue; but the Committee, in addition, had to review problems of old-age assistance and insurance; health insurance; workmen's compensation; and specialized types of public assistance for certain groups then on relief rolls, especially the aged, the blind, and dependent children. When the first Social Security Act passed Congress in 1935, it reflected the maturing social consciousness of America; but it also bore the definite imprint of the ideas and persuasiveness

of the Labour Department's gifted Madam Secretary.

The first business of the Hundred Days had been the banks, work relief, and measures promoting the general security of all Americans. But another problem lay urgently on Roosevelt's mind that March: this was the problem of the farmers. Few groups in the population were more badly hit by depression. The realized net income of farm operators in 1932 was less than one-third what it had been in 1929-a dizzying collapse in three years. Farm prices had fallen more than 50 per cent-far more than the prices of things farmers bought. The seething violence in the farm belt over the winter-the grim mobs gathered to stop foreclosures on farms whose owners could no longer keep up payments-made it clear that patience was running out.

The mortgage question was causing more immediate unrest than anything else; and the administration moved with vigour to relieve the situation. At the end of March, Roosevelt reorganized the hodgepodge of Federal agricultural credit instrumentalities into a single new agency, the Farm Credit Administration. The FCA refinanced farm mortgages, inaugurated a series of "rescue" loans for second mortgages, developed techniques for persuading creditors to make reasonable settlements, set up local farm debt adjustment committees, and eventually established a system of regional banks to make mortgage, production, and marketing loans and to provide credits to co-operatives.

It loaned more than $100,000,000 in its first seven months and at the same time beat down the interest rate in all areas of farm credit, getting at least the emergency debt problem under control.

Roosevelt knew, however, that there was little chance of general recovery unless the farmer's buying power could be raised. On March 8, when Secretary of Agriculture Wallace and Assistant Secretary Tugwell urged him to hold Congress long enough to pass a new farm programme, they found a receptive listener.

Henry Agard Wallace, looking younger than his forty-five years, was beginning his first large administrative job. But he could hardly be said to be facing a new challenge; like Roosevelt entering the White House, Wallace must have felt in a sense that he was coming home when he entered the Department of Agriculture. He sat in the same room his father had occupied as Secretary under a Republican administration a decade before.

The Wallace heritage was one of devotion to the soil and to those who laboured on it. All this was bred into young Henry Wallace-the smell of damp earth in the spring, the green spears of corn breaking through the black ground, the golden blaze of an Iowa cornfield in autumn -all this, and also the monotony and hardship of the farmer's condition, and the interminable struggle against the inscrutable mercies of markets beyond his control.

"When former civilizations have fallen," Wallace

Roosevelt with members of his first cabinet-the team of New Dealers who infused new life into the nation. Seated, from left to right, G. Dern, War; C. Hull, State; President Roosevelt; W. Woodin, Treasury; H. Cummings, Justice; standing, H. Wallace, Agriculture; H. Ickes, Interior; C. Swanson, Navy; J. Farley, Postmaster General; D. Roper, Commerce; F. Perkins, Labour.

said shortly after he assumed office, "there is a strong reason for believing that they fell because they could not achieve the necessary balance between city and country."

In America, as he saw it, the city-country balance had been upset by the economic vulnerability of agriculture. Since 1929, the farmer's dollar, based on wheat, corn, hogs, and cotton, bought only half as many city products as it used to, while the city dollar bought more farm products than before.

If the balance were to be re-established, it would require the increase of prices and the reduction of output in agriculture. The domestic allotment plan which Wallace sponsored in 1933 proposed to achieve this by offering the farmer a price subsidy in return for his tacit agreement to limit output. Farm leaders, disliking production control, had formerly resisted this kind of plan. But depression eroded old prejudices. By 1932 most farmers were ready to accept the need for a direct attack on surpluses.

The allotment plan contained in the Agricultural Adjustment Act, passed by Congress in May, focused on four major surplus crops-wheat, hogs, tobacco, cotton.

Every farmer agreeing to regulate his production in accordance with the plan would receive payments; non-eo-operating farmers would gain from the general price increase, but, if benefit payments were properly calculated, the co-operator would get a larger income from reducing production than the non-eo-operator would get from increasing it.

The broad design of the Agricultural Adjustment Administration was clear: to help correct the imbalance between industry and agriculture by raising farm prices; and to raise farm prices through the curtailment of pro-

duction, the regulation of marketing, and a variety of other devices. . The first problem was cotton, where the carryover of stocks from previous years was 8,000,000 bales, almost three times as much as normal-enough, indeed, to satisfy the world market for American cotton for 1933 without the harvesting of a single new plant in the United States.

By the time the act was passed in May 1933, 40,000,000 acres had been planted in cotton, and a bumper crop was in prospect. What could be done at this late date?

There was a single hope-to take part of the planted acreage out of production. But how could this be done?

AAA, a confusion of desks, telephones, people, and conferences, was obviously in no state to undertake a campaign of mass education. Yet a reservoir of trained field personnel did exist. Under the Agricultural Extension Service of the Land Grant Colleges most rural counties already had county agents-men charged with bringing the farmers information on improved agricultural techniques. The county agents knew local problems; they had the confidence of the local people. In a whirlwind drive, the county agents now signed up hundreds of thousands of farmers for the cotton plough-up campaign.

The administration took other steps to strengthen cotton prices, through government loans to cotton farmers at a rate above the market price, holding the cotton as security. If prices rose above the loan, then the grower could redeem his cotton; if not, it remained in the possession of the government. The Commodity Credit CorporaContinued on next page

America's industrial growth had produced an organic economy requiring national control. tion was set up to operate the new programme, which the administration soon applied to corn, wheat, and other storable commodities.

At the same time Wallace emphasized that AAA's ultimate object was to produce not scarcity but balance.

AAA was thus a mechanism of control, to be used as required for curtailment or for expansion. As the economy came into balance and as demand was restored, Wallace observed, "we can take off the brakes and step on the gas."

In mid-November the President remarked that conditions were much improved in the West. By winter, the atmosphere was clearing, and AAA was coming into its own.

The fight to save the banking system and to relieve the unemployed opened the Hundred Days; the fight to save the farmers opened the New Deal proper. But throughout the sleepless days and nights of March 1933 a major gap in the recovery programme became increasingly vivid and disconcerting. For the heart of the American economy was neither finance nor agriculture but industry; and that heart was only beating faintly. Manufacturing production declined almost 50 per cent from 1929 to 1932, while private construction fell to less than one-fourth of its earlier level.

More and more the movement of things in 1933 favoured those who contended that industrial growth had produced an organic economy requiring national control, and that the formula for stability in the new society must be combination and co-operation under enlarged Federal authority.

Business itself had already gone far to provide the new co-operation with an organizational basis. The key instrumentality was the trade association. Throughout the 'twenties, the Federal Trade Commission not only stimulated the spread of these associations but encouraged them to promulgate "codes of fair competition" for their industries. About 150 such codes were adopted between 1926 and 1933. And by 1931 business leaders were calling for national economic planning through the trade associations.

In some unstable industries, like coal and the needle trades, the demand for planning came from organized labour. Here the trade association was bypassed in favour of direct resort to government. In the case of coal, the United Mine Workers early developed a plan to stabilize the industry through Federal licencing, control of production, suspension of anti-monopoly laws, a thirty-hour work week, and the guarantee of collective bargaining.

The planning philosophy, strongly favoured by several Roosevelt advisers, had further support in the Senate, notably from Robert F. Wagner of New York and Robert M. La Follette, Jr., of Wisconsin. By early April, 1933, several groups were working independently on the general problem. Two were especially important. By May 15, a bill was ready for Congress.

The bill was divided into two main parts. Title I, "Industry Recovery," proclaimed the intent of the Congress "to promote the organization of industry for the purpose

of co-operative action among trade groups." Sections providing for codes of fair competition and for exemption from the anti-monopoly laws embodied the trade association programme; a provision for the Federal licencing of business showed the influence of the national planners; and Section 7a, pledging collective bargaining between unions and industry, maximum hours, and minimum wages, fulfilled the hopes of labour. Title II, "Public Works and Construction Projects," calling for the establishment of a Public Works Administration with an appropriation of $3,300,000,000, satisfied the public works advocates like Senators Wagner and La Follette.

The House of Representatives passed the bill with few changes in just over a week. Most important was a determined attempt, pressed by William Green, president of the American Federation of Labour, to strengthen Section 7a.

He persuaded the House to make explicit the protection of workers from coercion by anti-union employers.

In the Senate, however, the bill in general and 7a in particular had a stormier time. The National Association of Manufacturers and the Chamber of Commerce, two strong industrial pressure groups, both assailed the labour provisions. The more important part of the Senate discussion, however, turned on another question-the significance of the suspension of the anti-monopoly laws. The issue quickly reduced to the question: Could industry be trusted to combine for fair standards for wages, hours, and working conditions without at the same time combining for pools and price-fixing? .

William E. Borah of Idaho led the attack on the bill from the viewpoint of an old-fashioned anti-truster, with cogent support from Senators Burton K. Wheeler of Montana and Hugo Black of Alabama; and Wagner, courteous, wearily patient, ever resourceful, defended the measure. "Do you mean to tell me," said Black, "that industry would meet and agree on minimum wages and maximum hours and never discuss, to any extent whatever, the questions of the price at which they were to sell their goods?" The big interests, added Borah, would always dominate code-making, whatever the language of the bill. But how else, except through the codes, Wagner responded, to outlaw sweatshops and to shore up t~e position of labour?

On June 13, by a vote of 46 to 39, the Senate finally adopted the bill, and it was rushed to the President. The purpose of the bill, the President said on June 16, was to put people back to work. It was to raise the purchasing power of labour by limiting hours and increasing wages.

It was to elevate labour standards by making sure that no employer would suffer competitive disadvantages as a result of paying decent wages or establishing decent -working conditions.

Hugh Johnson, who had helped to draft the law, was asked by Roosevelt to direct its execution. Johnson's

With most factories idle, one out of every four American workers lacked a job. "The fog of despair hung over the land."

abilities were considerable. Fifteen years earlier he had helped mobilize industry for war thr~ugh the War Industries Board. The 1932 election campaign had shown that he had not only copious literary style and a talent for invective, but also a vast amount of information about the workings of the American economy and a capacity to condense complex problems into simple and telling statements.

On June 20, four short days after the National Industrial Recovery Act was passed, Johnson was able t'0 announce the formation of the National Recove'ry Administration. Already NRA personnel were taking over unfurnished offices in the new Commerce building. Johnson and his number-two man, Donald Richberg, immediately confronted a basic decision on the conception of the NRA job. If the code was the NRA's chosen instrument-the means by which industry pledged itself to shorter hours, higher wages, better trade practices, and better labour relations-then the critical questions were, first, how to get each industry under the code, and, second, how to make sure that code provisions were enforced.

As the merciless summer heat beat down on Washington, code hearings began in a variety of industries. "We are going to do this whole job in a goldfish bowl," Johnson said. Baffled businessmen, mopping their foreheads in heat and perplexity, flocked down the long corridors of the Commerce building to find out the methods of procedure. Coatless and perspiring, they teetered on gilt chairs in the ballrooms of Washington hotels to wrangle over the details of industrial reorganization, business glaring at labour, labour glaring back, and both chafing under the cold eye of the NRA deputy administrator, Richberg.

It was a slow process. After six weeks, a cotton textiles code broke the jam and other codes followed.

Labour was a field of NRA controversy more significant for the long run than the discussions of price, co-operation, and monopoly. The principles of Section 7a of the National Industrial Recovery Act were not new.

During World War I, the National War Labour Board, on which Franklin Roosevelt had served, developed the doctrine that workers were entitled to choose their own bargaining representatives by majority vote. The Transportation Act of 1920 and the Railway Labour Act of 1926 (drafted in part by Richberg) gave railroad workers

the right to be represented by organizations of their own choosing; and the preamble of the 1932 Norris-LaGuardia Act proclaimed similar aspirations for all workers. What the new Recovery Act did was to give the tendencies of twenty years explicit legislative status, extending guarantees of self-organization and collective bargaining to all workers in inter-state commerce.

In so doing, it brought about a fundamental change in the practical position of trade unions. "From the standpoint of human welfare and economic freedom," United Mine Workers president John L. Lewis said of the National Industrial Recovery Act, "we are convinced that there has been no legal instrument comparable with it since President Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation." In the wake of Lewis' fiery support, and of the work and speeches of other labour leaders, a stirring of American workers began to make itself felt across the land. By November over 100,000 more miners had joined the United Mine Workers Union alone.

Ultimately, the labour provisions of NRA proved inadequate, but by lending government sanction to the organizing rights of workers, they left an indelible mark on the union movement. As 7a grew demonstrably unworkable, labour leaders pressed Roosevelt for a stronger law.

On June 29, 1934, under pressure by Senator Wagner and other liberals and against the bitter protests of business, the President established the National Labour Relations Board in response to a resolution of Congress. The NLRB was empowered to conduct elections for union representation among industrial workers. With this action, struggle for control over national labour policy entered a new phase.

Ev~n today the NLRB stands as an arbiter of employerunion disputes and as a watchdog over the rights of working people and their unions. The impact on union membership has been spectacular: from 3,000,000 in 1934 to 7,000,000 in 1937 to more than 17,100,000 today.

Part of the New Deal impulse was defensive-the determination to protect the freedom of labour and all Americans from the ravages of unemployment and despair.

But part too was a desire to build a better America-a desire vividly demonstrated in the enactment on May 18, 1933, of the Tennessee Valley Authority Act. The basin of the Tennessee River spilled over seven southern States-Tennessee, Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, North Carolina, Kentucky, and Virginia. For 1,040 kilometres the Tennessee straggled and meandered, now narrow and rushing, now wide and placid, flowing finally into the Ohio River. Together with its tributaries, it drained an area of 106,000 square kilometres. Each year over 125 centimetres of rain fell, swelling rivers into angry torrents, flooding the land and carrying away strength and fertility from the soil. The forests, so sadly thin and overcut, were further depleted by burning. Income was less than half the national average. Only two out of every hundred farms had electricity. In the fall of 1933, over half the families in the highland counties were on relief; in one county the rolls included 87 per cent of the families. There seemed no protection against flood, fire, or erosion-no alternative to further descent into squalor.

The great paralysing weight of depression lifted and the nation regained self-confidence.

Yet a frail hope had centred for a dozen years around the dam on the Tennessee River near the little town of Muscle Shoals in Alabama. Here, in a foaming turbulence of rocks and rapids, the river dropped over forty metres in a wandering descent of sixty-four kilometres. As a power site Muscle Shoals had attracted attention since the turn of the century.

Muscle Shoals, Roosevelt told Congress on April 10, 1933, represented only a "small part" of the potential usefulness of the Tennessee River. Envisioned in its entirety, such use would transcend "mere" power development: it would include flood control, soil conservation, afforestation, diversification of industry and retirement of marginal farm land. To provide unified direction, Roosevelt proposed that Congress create "a corporation clothed with the power of Government but possessed of the flexibility and initiative of a private enterprise." The new Tennessee Valley Authority would have "the broadest duty of planning" in the Valley for the general good of the nation. Senator George Norris called it "the most wonderful and far-reaching humanitarian document that has ever come from the White House."

In Congress the bill faced strong criticism. After bitter debate, however, it was finally passed, and on May 18, Roosevelt signed the Tennessee Valley Authority Act. Within a few years new energy was pouring into the Valley. In the first instance, it was the electricity produced at the new dams, brought from the great generators along gleaming copper and aluminium wires to factories and farms in the farthest corners of the Tennessee basin. It was the clearing of the rivers, the rebuilding of the forests, the replenishment of the soil, the improvement of agricultural methods, the spread of schools, the development of recreation facilities. But beyond this there was something less tangible yet even more penetrating: the release of moral and human energy as the people of the Valley saw new vistas open up for themselves and for their children. The river, the destroyer, was becoming man's servant. The beaten and sour land was stirring with new hope. It was an eloquent symbol of the time-a symbol of man's capacity through the use of political and technical intelligence to change the conditions of life and transform defeat into possibility.

During the First Hundred Days, the great paralysing weight of depression began to lift. And in these days the President spoke not only to Congress. He also addressed himself directly to the people. The day before Congress convened, he held his first presidential press conference.

Over a hundred sceptical reporters crowded into the executive office. They found, not the dour irritability to which White House correspondents were accustomed, but a gay and apparently open friendliness. "No more written questions," the President said. Instead, he proposed a free exchange between the Executive and the newsmen. As he launched into a frank discussion of the banking crisis, his

enjoyment of the give-and-take with the press was obvious.

On Sunday evening, March 12, at the conclusion of the first week, Roosevelt made even more direct contact with the nation in the first of what came to b:::called his "fireside chats" -informal radio talks to the American people. "Let us unite in banishing fear," he concluded his broadcast. "It is your problem no less than it is mine.

Together we cannot fail."

The sense of motion in a capital too long sunk in apathy and gloom was reawakening the nation. As columnist Walter Lippmann summed it up: "In one week, the nation, which had lost confidence in everything and everybody, has regained confidence in the government and in itself."

As for the President, the pattern of his day was soon set: breakfast in bed; a quick skimming of half a dozen morning newspapers; then a nine o'clock bedside conference to discuss the day's urgencies. The day widened out into a vast variety of appointments, conferences, phone calls, letters read and answered, memoranda studied, decisions made, accomplishments miraculously pulled out of chaos.

Somehow Roosevelt kept all the reins in his hand.

He seemed to thrive on crisis. Reporters took from his _press conferences¡ images of urbane mastery, with the President sitting easily behind his desk, his great head thrown back, his smile flashing or his laugh booming out in the pleasure of thrust and riposte. He saw agitated Congressmen, panicky businessmen, jealous bureaucrats; he kidded the solemn, soothed the egotistical, and inspired the downhearted.

With the New Deal came the New Dealers. The old capital did not know what to make of the invasion. Depression, by cutting off normal outlets in law practice or in universities, had made men of intellectual ability available as never before; and government had never been so eager to hire them. Washington was deluged with an endless stream of bright young men.

"If ability could be measured in a tin bucket," said one writer, "I should say that the Roosevelt administration contained more gallons of ability than any of its recent predecessors." They brought with them an alertness, an excitement, an appetite for power, an instinct for crisis and a dedication to public service which became during the 'thirties the essence of Washington. Their elan, their bravado, their sense of adventure, their cocky assurance, their inexhaustible activism were infectious. They altered the whole tempo and tone of Washington as a community.

"They have transformed it," said Collier's magazine, "from a placid, leisurely Southern town, with frozen faces Continued on page 40 In support of the National Recovery Administration, workers and businessmen held a big parade in New York at the end of 1933.

and customs, into a gay, breezy, sophisticated, and metropolitan centre."

Who were the New Dealers? They represented all classes-from the well-born, like Franklin Roosevelt, to the sons of poverty, like Harry Hopldns-but they were predominately middle class. They represented a variety of occupations; but they were mostly lawyers, college professors, economists, or social workers. They came from all parts of the land and from both city and country, though most of them had been educated in State universities or in eastern colleges, and many had their first political experience in the fight for decent city government. They were all ages, though most of them were born between 1895 and 1905. But the common bond which held them together was that they were all at home in the world of ideas. They were accustomed to analysis and dialectic; and they were prepared to use intelligence as an instrument of government. They were more than specialists. They were-or considered themselvesgeneralists, capable of bringing logic to bear on any social problem. They delighted in the play of the free mind.

What Roosevelt gave the New Dealers was an opportunity to put ideas to work. Motives, of course, were mixed.

For some it was a job, or a passing enthusiasm, or a road to personal power. But for the best of them, the satisfaction lay, as lawyer Francis Biddle once put it, "in some deep sense of giving and sharing, far below any surface pleasure of work well done, but rooted in the relief of escaping the loneliness and boredom of oneself, and the unreality of personal ambition. The satisfaction derived from sinking individual effort into the community itself, the common goal and the common end. This is no escape from self; it is the realization of.self."

They often suffered frustration and disillusion. They worked to the edge of collapse. They had moments when they hated Washington and government and Roosevelt.

Yet for most of them this was the happiest time and the deepest fulfilment they would ever know. The memories would not soon fade-the interminable meetings, the litter of cigarette stubs, the hasty sandwich at the desk or (if there was time) the lazy lunch along sun-drenched wharves by the Potomac River, the ominous rumour passed on with relish, the call from the White House, the postponed dinner, the neglected wife, the officelights burning into the night, the lilacs hanging in fragrance above Georgetown gardens while men rebuilt the nation over long drinks, the selflessness, the vanity, the mistakes, the achievement. At his worst, the New Dealer became an arrant sentimentalist or a cynical operator. At his best, he was the ablest, most intelligent, and most disinterested public servant the United States had ever had.

In the three months after Roosevelt's inauguration, Congress and the country were subjected to a presidential barrage of ideas and programmes unlike anything known to American history. On adjournment on June

15, 1933, the President and the exhausted Congress left the following record: ... guaranteed bank deposits with federal insurance ... established a national system of home and work relief for the unemployed ... put millions of jobless young men to work on conservation projects ... established relief for farmers and a program to raise farm prices . . . strengthened the domestic price structure by abandoning the gold standard ... required corporations to make full and honest disclosure of their assets when selling stocks and bonds to the public ... helped homeowners to keep their homes by providing federal help in refinancing mortgages ... launched a program of industrial self-government under federal supervision, guaranteeing workers minimum wages, maximum hours, and the right to bargain collectively through unions ... gave jobs to millions of workers building roads, schools, hospitals and other public facilities ... provided easier credit to farmers to preserve ownership of their farms and to finance the purchase of machinery, seed, and other needs ... initiated the Tennessee Valley Authority, providing for unified industrial and agricultural development of a seven-State river valley region.

This was the Hundred Days; and in this period Franklin Roosevelt sent fifteen messages to Congress, guided fifteen major laws to enactment, delivered ten speeches, held press conferences and cabinet meetings twice a week, conducted talks with foreign heads of state, sponsored an international conference, made all the major decisions in domestic and foreign policy, and never displayed fright or panic and rarely even bad temper.

In the spring and summer of 1933, clouds of inertia seemed to lift. "It's more than a New Deal," said Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes. "It's a new world. People feel free again. They can breathe naturally. It's like quitting a morgue for the open woods." "We have had our revolution," said Collier's, "and we like it." The clouds would come back, as they always had through the long travail of history. But, in this moment of clarity, the American people threw off a sick conviction of defeat and began to believe in themselves again. And, as they did, they rekindled hope elsewhere in the world. "The courage, the power and the scale of (Roosevelt's) effort," wrote an English observer, "must enlist the ardent sympathy of every country, and his success could not fail to lift the whole world forward into the sunlight of an easier and more genial age." Like Roosevelt himself, that Englishman saw the effort in the long perspective of history: "For in truth," said Sir Winston Churchill, "Roosevelt is an explorer who has embarked on a voyage as uncertain as that of Columbus, and upon a quest which might conceivably be as important as the discovery of the New World." •

THE PEACEFUL THE ECONOMIC CRISIS OF 1929-33-THE GREAT DEPRESSION AFFECTED MILLIONS AND CREATED THE IMPETUS FOR THE REFORMS OF THE NEW DEAL.iTHAT TRANSFORMED THE ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL LANDSCAPE OF THE UNITED;'STATES.

REVOLUTION

HE PUBLIC BE DAMNED, a nineteenth century American capitalist was reported to have said, and more than a few capitalists of the period acted on that philosophy. But no businessman could say or think this today and be successful. The last thirty years have seen the public's influence expand enormously through the power of government and of popular opinion. A corporation today which disregarded the general interest would very likely find itself subject to a Congressional investigation, or prosecution under antitrust or other regulatory legislation, or boycott by the consumers themselves.

This change in the philosophy and practice of business is part of a peaceful revolution which has transformed the economic, social and human landscape of America. The impetus for this revolution came from the economic crisis of 1929-1933. The Great Depression showed that while the United States had developed productive forces beyond those achieved by any other society-and political institutions that jealously safeguarded individual freedoms-it had not yet solved the problem of social security or a truly equitable distribution of the goods of life. Dogmatic voices were raised asserting that these goals could be reached only by a violent revolution which would abolish all traces of a capitalist economy, that short of such a solution conditions could only get progressively more desperate. President Franklin D. Roosevelt and the vast majority of Americans rejected this fatalistic view. Instead, preserving political liberties as well as the basic structure of a private enterprise system, the Roosevelt administration acted with vigour and imagination to give workers and farmers a greater

T

degree of economic security and a fairer portion of the country's wealth.

Since Roosevelt's death, these reforms have been extended by each succeeding administration.

Central to the social revolution launched by the New Deal is the vastly expanded role of government in economic and social affairs. Throughout their history, Americans have had a suspicion of government. Many of the immigrants who oSettled the country had fled from political or religious oppression in their original European homelands. They were, therefore, drawn to the view of Thomas Jefferson, author of the Declaration of Independence and third President of the United States, that "that government is best which governs least." Jefferson. added: "I know of no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves." The American Constitution set out deliberately to separate executive, legislative and judicial powers so that no single branch of government could acquire total and thus tyrannical power. And for the most part, during the nineteenth and the early decades of the twentieth century, the U.S. Government intervened only tangentially in economic and social matters.

But alongside the Jeffersonian tradition, there emerged gradually another view which laid emphasis on the creative and purposeful role of government. Andrew Jackson, President from 1829 to 1837, declared himself ready to use the powers of government on behalf of those whom he called "the humble members of society-the farmers, mechanics, and labourers."

Not many years later, Abraham Lincoln said that the object of government was "to do for a community of Continued

011

next page

people whatever they need to have done, but cannot do at all, or cannot so well do, for themselves." In the first two decades of the twentieth century, strong Presidents such as Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson expanded government's role in the regulation of business.

Until Franklin Roosevelt's administration, however, the intervention of government was sporadic, limited, and concerned mainly with setting up rules of proper economic behaviour. What Roosevelt did was to assert the strong responsibility of government not only to make rules, but to act positively

Wages

Hours Worked

1933

$16.73

(38.1)

1938

22.30

(35.6)

1943

43.14

(44.9)

1948

54.14

(40.1)

1953

71.69

(40.S)

1959

88.26

(40.3)

r

1961

92.34

(39.8)

t

1962

96.5,6

(40.4)

t, ~

l

for the improvement of living conditions for all the people. He stated his vision in these words: "I see a United States which can demonstrate that, under democratic methods of government, national wealth can be translated into a spreading volume of human comforts hitherto unknown, and the lowest standard of living can be raised far above the level of mere subsistence."

To a considerable extent, that vision has been achieved in the past thirty years. "Millions of families in industrial cities and towns, and on the farms," wrote social historian

Frederick Lewis Allen, "have been lifted from poverty or near-poverty to a status where they can enjoy what has been traditionally considered a middle-class way of life: decent clothes for all, an opportunity to buy a better automobile, install an electric refrigerator, provide the housewife with a decently attractive kitchen, go to the dentist, pay insurance premiums, and so on." The income of an average Continued on page 44 Industrial production has increased tenfold since the 'thirties. Higher wages, a variety of other supplementary benefits, have raised workers' dignity and status.

factory worker today has nearly twice the purchasing power of his income in 1933. And apart from higher wages, the worker has acquired a variety of supplementary benefits which make life more comfortable and pleasurable.

These include shorter hours, longer vacations and periods of paid sick leave, more holidays with pay, hospital and medical insurance, and retirement pensions (in addition to old-age pensions provided under social security laws).

The worker is also likely to be a homeowner rather than a tenant (60 per cent of all Americans own their homes) and his home generally contains such work-saving electrical appliances as refrigerator, washing machine, vacuum cleaner, fan or air conditioner.

He is the beneficiary of a broad system of government-sponsored social insurance, first put into effect in 1935. From modest beginnings, this system has expanded steadily. Today about ninetenths of all workers and their families are insured against loss of income due to old age, disability or death. Eighteen

ON THE FARM

million persons were receiving monthly social security payments as the year 1963 opened. In addition, about fourfifths of all workers are protected against loss of job income by unemployment insurance, which is financed by employers and provides weekly payments for up to half a year.

The average period of unemployment is thirteen weeks, so that the twenty-six weeks coverage answers the basic needs of the vast majority of unemployed workers. Those who remain idle beyond this maximum period receive subsistence welfare payments from their local community.

A similar transformation has taken place on the farm-to a considerable extent through government assistance.

Farm productivity has risen three-fold, and with it farm income. In 1933 only one farm in ten had electricity; today 97 per cent of all U.S. farms have electric power. Seven out of ten farm families have telephon~s. Government programmes provide credit to farmers for equipment and supplies as well as help in financing and paying mort-

Number of Farms 1930

gages. As a result about four-fifths of U.S. farms are operated by families that own them and most of the others are operated by t~nants working towards the goal of farm ownership.

A crucial instrument for this redistribution of the¡ goods of life has been the graduated income tax, rising in proportion to income. Part of the large revenues derived from those with high personal incomes is diverted to social welfare projects which benefit the lower income groups. In addition, there are high rates of taxation on corporation income and these revenues too are available for programmes of social improvement.

Since the New Deal, another major weapon of economic reform has been the Federal regulatory agencies.

"Private economic power," said Franklin Roosevelt, "is a public trust as well." It is the function of regulaContinued on page 46 Agriculture is an index of peaceful revolution brought about by the New Deal.

Farm productivity, and with it farm income, have risen three-fold since 1933.

Per cent Operated

By Owner ot' Part .Owner

Total Farm Population

56% ,

30,519;000

. :~86,171,000

Acreage

1940

6,350,000

61%

30,547,,000

i,060,852,000

1945

.5,967,000

NA

25,295,000

1,141,615,000

1950

5,648,000

72%

25,058,000

1,159;789,000

.

0\0'

1¡955¡

4,654,000

75%

22,438,OdO

1;15~, 192,000 (54)

1959

. 4,091,000

80%

21,172,000

1,120, I58,000

1961

3,811,000

80%

14,803,000*

1,115,000,000**

'1963

3,700,00.0

80%

' 14,300,000

1,1,12,000,000**

* Portion of reduction between 1959-1961 resulted from a redefinition . resident by the census bureau .. oh . Estimated

of farm

.. "

~ 44

SPAN

July 1964

tory agencies to insure that private business practices do not harm the public welfare. Today the Federal Government exercises supervisory power over banking, the sale of securities, aviation, inter-state commerce, labour-management relations, trade practices and a host of other areas of economic life. The "robber baron" of the nineteenth century has disappeared from the American scene. He has been replaced by corporate managers who are very much aware. of government supervision and equally concerned to create a public image which will keep them in the good graces of the consumer and the voter.

Compared to most societies of the past, the United States has throughout its history been a relatively classless society. Most foreign visitors in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries remarked on the highly democratic and equalitarian temper of American life. But while this was true in a relative sense, many American progressive thinkers insisted that the process of democracy had not gone far enough or deep enough. They complained about the disparities of income between the very rich and the very poor, about the humiliating discriminations against Negroes, about the limited opportunities for higher education among children of lower income families, and about the lack of general availability of serious cultural expressions.

The New Deal gave the equalitarian trend of American life an enormous push. Its primary commitment was to the ordinary citizen, the farmer or worker or small shopkeeper. It recognized his troubles and enlisted the powers of government to solve them.

Thus it gave him a 'neW sense of dignity and of participation in public life. Never before had so many people of all walks of life been involved in public action. The government "of the people, by the people and for the people," of which Lincoln once spoke, became a daily reality. In a hundred ways, government was doing things

for people and enlisting their talents and enthusiasm.

The New Deal gave official voice to the liberal and progressive tradition which has always had deep roots in American life. It brought into government people who were interested not only in production and jobs and social security, but equally in the improvement of the quality of social and cultural life. Thus the Works Progress Administration, besides building schools and roads and other useful community projects, also gave jobs and outlets for expression to thousands of writers and artists. In public buildings all over the country there are murals painted by WPA artists.

Excellent work in the field of social and cultural history was done by WPA writers. The Federal Theatre Project brought classical and contemporary drama to large masses of people, many of whom, especially in the countryside, had never before seen a stage production.

The "cultural ex'plosion" that is evident all over America today had at least part of its source in the encouragement and support given by such Federal programmes to artists in the 1930's. In the new mood that seized the country, culture was no longer the largely exclusive possession of an elite, but a legitimate and rewarding activity for all. There are an estimated 30,000,000 persons who play musical instruments, encouraged by the symphony orchestras and bands organized by high schools, colleges, and community groups in cities and towns all over the United States. Amateur painters, photographers, dancers and actors are to be found everywhere in the tens of thousands. Inexpensive paperbacks have made the classics as well as popular works readily available-in super-markets, drugstores, airport and train stations-and have been bought by hundreds of millions of copies.

Television has brought opera and serious drama into easy reach in one's own home. The whole world of

culture, traditional or popular, highbrow or lowbrow, has become the property of the masses, who are discovering the possibilities of cultural response and creativity within themselves, possibilities which for lack of opportunity had never before been tapped.

The democratization of life reaches into even more prosaic areas. Women of all classes today can wear high fashion clothes, since ready-made models are manufactured at modest prices well within the income range of an ordinary working woman or worker's wife. It is likewise almost impossible to tell the difference between a worker or his employer on the basis of their clothing-again, because of the high quality and efficiency of mass production. Workers' homes in the suburbs are often indistinguishable from those of their bosses. There is also an informality at all levels that has broken down barriers of position

and class. Increasingly workers and their supervisors or employers address one another by their first names and dispense with the traditional protocol of deference and condescension. And just as differences between income groups are breaking down, so too are the differences between ways of living in big cities and small towns. Through , movies, television and national advertising, the same variety of styles and products available in cities come to the attention of inhabitants of small towns, and mass productioJ;l makes them available to all.

Certainly a major element in the breakdown of class barriers in America has been the enormous expansion of higher education. Today some 4,000,000 students-more than 36 per cent of all young people between the ages of eighteen and twenty-oneare attending a college or university.

They come from all walks of life and find that their training opens up to them jobs at all levels of the professional and business world. Their success depends, not on their social background but on their initiative and talent.

The equalitarian character of American life today has been summed up by some sociologists in the term "vertical social mobility." As one of them has put it: "the rate of movement up and down the ladder of income and social prestige has probably been greater in America than in any historical civilization."

The social revolution that has taken place in the United States is hard to define because it has no parallel in past history. One shrewd French observer, Father R. L. Bruckberger, touched on the heart of the matter when he wrote: "The American is an experimentalist and a persistent' meliorist. It is in this sense that the American is authentically revolutionary and that his revolutions, founded as they are upon a solid basis of facts, go farther than our revolutions in Europe. They are carried out Continued on next page

Constant Dollars* 1935

$1,6.31

$2,937

1941

2,209

3,663

1950

4,444

4,444

1957

6,238

5,327

1960

6,845

5,570

1962

7,140

.5,713

*Adjusted in terms of 1950 purcl)asing power.

~:USlNESS' FIRMS

~I

slowly, but they are carried out to the end."

What has evolved in the United States during the past thirty years is a new type of economic system, neither classical capitalism nor classical socialism. It is a mixed economy which permits the peaceful co-existence of private business, government enterprise, co-operatives, powerful labour unions, and a vast number of private organizations representing a variety of special interests. The role of government as participant in and supervisor of the economy has greatly increased. But government is permitted to intervene only where experience has demonstrated a compelling need for its presence. Its powers are strictly limited by law and by the existence of a large, in fact predominant, sector of private economic activity.

The virtue of this arrangement is that it provides a considerable amount of

social security and economic planning without concentrating overwhelming power in a single central authority.

Thus the rights of the individual are protected not only by law but by the presence of independent sources of power and income outside of government. Men are less easily intimidated and more prone to voice their criticisms of government when they have jobs that cannot be taken away by the officials they are criticizing.

The hallmarks of the new economy are innovation and flexibility. The pioneering spirit that earlier pushed America's western frontier to the Pacific Ocean has been turned to the more complex frontiers of an advanced industrial civilization. Economic and social institutions have been remoulded to suit human requirements.

Traditional doctrines have been reexamined, amended, discarded, replaced. The Tennessee Valley Author-

ity's enlistment of local initiative in regional development, for example, fits into neither the dogma of laissezfaire capitalism nor the Marxist critique. Nor could the doctrines of the past foresee a "capitalist" government acting vigorously to increase the power of labour, as was done under the New Deal.

In a strictly economic sense, Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal set in motion a series of reforms which make highly unlikely-impossible, according to some economists-the kind of critical economic collapse that the country experienced between 1929 and 1933.

Built into the economy today are such "stabilizers" as minimum wages, unemployment compensation, old-age pensions, farm price supports, insurance for savings, and strict supervision of the securities market. These and other innovations have not only prevented turndowns in business activity from spiralling into depressions; they have also helped to improve living standards and promote economic growth.

But the most potent legacy left by the New Deal is its demonstration that a democratic society could combine social welfare with individual freedom. As President Kennedy said: "The New Deal is an illustration of the capacity of free men to achieve a profound peaceful revolution on behalf of economic progress and justice." In the same speech, he warned against complacency: "We in the United States still have much unfinished work-to improve our housing and cities, our economy, our education and equal opportunities for all citizens.

That fight is still going forward."

As weapons in that fight, the United States during the past thirty years has developed techniques which provide economic security for the vast majority of its people without depriving them of liberty or the sense of human dignity. Seen in the perspective of man's long history, with its tragic preponderance of both tyranny and insecurity, this is no small achievement.

LOW-PRICED INDIAN REPRINTS OF AMERICAN UNIVERSITY TEXTBOOKS NOW AVAILABLE

WHEN INDIA..~ STUDENTS return to universities this month, they will have available lowpriced reprint editions of American textbooks. In the past year~ leading Indian publishers have produced more than 100 titles; by September the number will reach 150. Reprint editions of American textbooks are being published in India under a plan developed with the assistance of the Joint Indian-American Standard Works Programme.

Textbooks are suggested by Indian university professors, the Ministry of Education, Indian and American specialists and Indian and American publishers. Suggested textbooks are reviewed and approved by the Ministry of Educa,tion. Indian publishers then secure republication rights from American copyright holders.

Reprint editions are priced low-at abo~t one-third of the U.S. price of the original edition.

The low retail price in India is made possible, by payment of part of Indian publishing cos'ts with rupee funds accumulated under PL/480 wheat agreements.

No foreign exchange is involved except royalty payments to U.S. copyright holders. Among subjects represented are: biology, chemistry, engineering, geology, mathematics, physics, sanskrit, sociology and technology.

I f

-I ..

'