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A LEITER FROM THE PUBLISHER I

The American Republic was only a few years old when Congressman Fisher Ames of Massachusetts made what turned out to be a prophetic statement about democracy.

He said a monarchy is like a great ship: "You ride with the wind and tide in safety and elation, but by and by you strike a reef and go down. Democracy is like a raft: You never sink, but damn it, your feet are always in the water."

We are reminded of this quotation because what we are celebrating in this Bicentennial Issue of SPAN is the revolution of people who wanted freedom from the "safety" of a powerful monarchy to experiment with the uncertainties of a democratic government. There are many articles in this issue about that revolution, its Declaration of Independence, its impact on the world, and how America is celebrating its 200th anniversary. We hope you will read them all.

We especially hope you will read the last article (page 61) .

by John D. Rockefeller 3rd, entitled "The Revolution Continues." Americans have accomplished a great deal in two centaries, and many of the articles on these pages discuss these achievements. But there is one characteristic of Americans that many foreigners have noted (with either praise or disapproval): They are never satisfied. They have great expectations. (Historian Daniel Boorstin has phrased it: "Never have a people expected so much more than the world could offer.")

Rockefeller's thesis, stated very simply, is that the United States has not fully realized the noble ideals set forth in the Declaration of Independence. But he adds that as Americans celebrate the Bicentennial of the first revolution, the country is witnessing the emergence of a second revolution.

The aim of "the second revolution-the humanistic revolution," he says, "is one of fulfillment, designed to bring finally to fruition in modern times not only the letter, but the full spirit, the intent of these great documents [the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution]." The new American revolution must create, says Rockefeller, "a politics of humanism." This new politics will address itself to those aspects of American life that are still not living up to the ideals enunciated in the Declaration of Independence. American democracy is indeed imperfect, Rockefeller reminds us (no dry feet on that watery raft). Yet, he believes the American people can move their society forward toward-and he uses a phrase that echoes Aurobindo-"a higher level of human existence."

Will the "continuing revolution" succeed? Any American who knows his country's history cannot doubt that it will.

Why? Rockefeller gives the answer in the last words of his article-which, incidentally, are also the last words of this issue: America's "second revolution" will succeed because "all the elements are there-in our founding ideals, in the initiative of our people, in the vitality of our society, in the problems we face, in the vision of what we could become."

We would like to add one final thought. Americans are trying to be careful in this Bicentennial Year to avoid a narrow parochial patriotism. The ideals of the American Revolution and the Declaration of Independence-that all men are created equal and have an inalienable right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness-are not ideals for Americans alone.

They are for all mankind. We would like to call your attention to the last paragraph of the Norman Cousins article on page 3 of this issue: "There is need today. . . for unifying and universalizing ideas. But it is the world, and not just a nation, that is now the arena which needs to be shaped and protected.

We can do no greater honor to the Founding Fathers than to see the validity of their words on a world stage." -J.W.G.

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July 1976

N tfM B E R 7

A Bicentennial Message From President Ford ,I'

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The Real Meaning of the Bicentennial

by Norman Cousins 1

\4-Pan Am's Bicentennial

by Mohammed Reyazuddin

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24 /A PictorialI..JHistory of 11the Revolution 30 The Declaration of Independence 7) -I "36 Mr. Jefferson and thei Living Generation )

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The Revolution Heard Round the World

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The Century of the American Dream

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Looking Forward

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by Eric F. Goldman

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Front cover: To commemorate America's Bicentennial, the Posts and Telegraphs Department of the Government of India issued this special Rs. 2.80 airmail stamp on May 29, 1976. The stamp depicts Archibald M. Willard's famous painting, "The Spirit of '76," which honored the soldiers of the American Revolution.

Back cover: This painting by SPAN Art Director Nand Katyal, based on a cover of A vafit Garde, is a modern version of "The Spirit of '76." It honors the "American revolutionaries" of today-fighters for women's rights, racial equality, an end to war, and other goals mentioned in "The Revolution Continues" (page 61).

Managing Editor: Carmen Kagal. Assistant Managing Editor: S.R. Madhu. Editorial Staff: Mohammed Reyazuddin, Avinash Pasricha, Nirmal Sharma, Krishan Gabrani, MU.-dri Saha, Rocque Fernandes. Art Director: Nand Katyal. Art Staff: Gopi Gajwani. B. Roy Choudhury, Kanti Roy, Suhas Nimbalkar.

Chief of Production: Awtar S. Marwaha. Photographic Services: USIS Photo Lab. Published by the United States Information Service, 24 Kasturba Gandhi Marg, New Delhi 110001, on behalf of the American Embassy, New Delhi. The opinions expressed in this magazine do not necessarily reflect the views or policies of the United States Government. Printed by Arun Mehta at Vakil & Sons Ltd., Vakils House, Sprott Road, 18 Ballard Estate, Bombay 400 038.

Photographs: 2-David Hume Kennerly. 4-Avinash Pasricha. 5-Bates Littlehales, copyright © National Geographic Society (NGS). 6-7-Keith McManus except extreme right by USIS. 8 top, center F. and bottom right-George F. Mobley, © NGS; rest-B. Anthony Stewart, © NGS. 9-George Mobley, © NGS. J2-Bates Littlehales, © NGS. 18 top right-<:ourtesy Colonial Williamsburg; bottom-George F. Mobley, © NGS. 19-Paintings

by Louis S. Glanzman, © NGS. 25 left-The Metropolitan Museum of Art, gift of Collis P. Huntington, 1896; right-<:ourtesy National Gallery of Art, gift of Edgar William and Bernice Chrysler Garbisch. 26---<:opyright © National Geographic Society. 27-<:ourtesy Library of Congress; courtesy the Continental Insurance Companies; courtesy U.S. Army Center of Military History. 28-29-<:ourtesy Valley Forge Historical Socicty; courtesy Mrs. Bertram K. Little; courtesy the Continental Insurance Companies. 32-<:ourtesy the Continental Insurance Companies. 33 top--courtesy U.S. Army Center of Military History; bottom-Yale University Library. 38-<:ourtesy University of Virginia. 39-<:ourtesy United Air Lines. 4O-<:0urtesy Virginia State News & World Report. 51-Bernard Gotfryd, Newsweek. 53-B. Anthony Travel Service. 5~U.S. Stewart, © NGS. 55-U.S. News & World Report. 56-60--NASA. 65-Avinash Pasricha.

Use of SPAN articles in other publications is· encouraged, except when copyrighted.

For permission, write to the Editor. Price of magazine: one year's subscription (12 issues), 18 rupees; single copy, 2 rupees 50 paise. For change of address, send an old address from a recent SPAN envelope along with new address to A.K.Mitra, Circulation Manager, SPAN magazine, 24 Kasturba Gandhi Marg, New Delhi 110001. (See change of address form on page 64.)

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A BICENTENNIAL MESSAGE FROM PRESIDENT FORD

My Fellow Citizens of the World: The year 1976 is a proud time for all Americans, for it marks the Bicentennial of our nation's founding. I am pleased to share with you my reflections about our country, its heritage and its future.

It took great courage 200 years ago for the men and women of 13 colonies to throw off the bonds that tied them to their motherland. Yet, their yearning for freedom was stronger than their fears of the future.

And what a future it has proved to be. Were they to look upon it today, the signers of the United States Declaration of Independence'would scarcely recognize the mighty nation that has been fashioned in just two centuries.

But they would not have been surpfised. In their wisdom, they laid the foundation for every citizen's right to "life, liberty and the pur suit of happiness." The guarantee of such fundamental rights has lured millions of talented and hard-working immigrants from all over the world to help build America into the nation we know today.

American society at the age of 200 is neither perfect nor complacent.

The future of America is brighter even than its past. The destiny of America demands the best of each succeeding generation; it does so of us today.

Our history has been marked by pain and anguish, but always there has been progress. America is, and will continue to be, the same stronghold for men and women of independent spirit, energy and individualism it was in 1776. Our initial national legacy survives today in numberless aspects of our society, but particularly in our free press, our durable system of representative government and our respect for the rights of the individual.

That is the message of the Bicentennial and of the American people whose story is the living substance of this magazine. On their beha(f, I send you greetings ..

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THE REAL MEANING OF THE

BICENTENNIAL

The distinguished editor of the 'Saturday Review' stresses the point, often overlooked, that the American Revolution 'was primarily not a political but a philosophical event.'

The man most intimately connected .with the document being memorialized on July Fourth is Thomas Jefferson. How might Jefferson, primary author of the Declaration of Independence, react to the various activities that come under the heading of Independence Day celebrations? lt is likely that Jefferson's first reaction would be one of astonishment. He would find it difficult to believe that so many Americans should be so confused about the event being celebrated. He would observe that most of the oratory mistakenly extols the independence of a new nation.

He would find it necessary to remind people that the Declaration of Independence did not give birth to the United States. That event came more than a decade later. The Declaration represented the new freedom not of a nation but of people-people who belonged to 13 sovereign governments, each with its own flag, its own foreign policy, its own currency, its own institutions. Moreover, most of the men then at the head of these governments had no intention of merging into a single government.

Equally astonishing to Jefferson would be the failure of many Americans to comprehend the extent to which the American Revolution was primarily not a political but a philosophical event. The ideas in the Declaration of Independence were directed not just to separation from a geographically distant monarchy but to revolutionary concepts of human life, of man's place in the world, of his role as controller rather than as a subject of governments.

Few things would be more surprising to Jefferson than the absence in the United States of any general awareness of the meaning of natural law. Just in the act of being born, man has rights that the state has to regard as inviolate. The principal

reason for the state's existence, in fact, is to guarantee these natural rights, which are concerned with the dignities of life.

The right to mount effective protest against governm~nt is central to all other rights.

The concept of natural rights was not born in America; it has had a long and arduous history. It owes a great deal to the physiocrats in France and to the Jesuits who had returned from China many years earlier.

There was something about government, Jefferson believed, that almost automatically pulled it away from its duty to protect the natural rights of its citizens and moved it toward a preoccupation with power and the problems of self-perpetuation. Left to itself, government gravitated to empty patriotism and tyranny. That was why he believed that "the tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. lt is its natural manure." He felt that even the best men, once in go'(ernmel)t, were affected by the gravitational pull. They became caught up in the swirl of officialdom; they became impatient and annoyed over criticisms, just or unjust. They found it difficult to resist reaching for greater power.

Jefferson probably would have something to say about patriotism in contemporary American society. He would note that many of the current appeals to patriotism invoke the names of the American Founding Fathers. And so l:le would point out that these men were not limited in their philosophies or their allegiances. They were first of all universalists, concerned with the human condition and the prospects for its infinite development and advancement.¡ They saw America as a natural habitat for the pursuit of these prospects.

Declarations of world citizenship by men such as Benjamin Franklin and Thomas

Paine were not regarded as inconsistent with citizenship in their own states but as the finest expression of it. lt was not easy, even for men of these dimensions, to join the people of the 13 states under a single, cohesive government.

Some citizens of New York denounced as subversive the efforts to create a common sovereignty with the citizens of New Jersey and the other states. The citizens ofConnecticut and Massachusetts found it difficult to imagine that the cultural and historical differences between the two states could be accommodated in a single design. "How is it possible," a Virginia legislator demanded, "to assert allegiance to two flags? I will have no flag over the flag of Virginia." Some citizens of Rhode Island regarded the proposed adoption of a single monetary standard as mongrelization of their currency.

James Madison and Alexander Hamilton, among others, recognized the need for enlarging allegiances in order to prevent a disastrous breakdown in the relationships among the states. The task they set for themselves-a union of the whole-was considered to be little short of impossible.

But they were students of history who had confidence in the power of the right words to move enough people to do those things that were in the human interest. And they continued to use those words until a new momentum of sanity and necessity was created.

There is need today, as there was at that time, for unifying and universalizing ideas. But it is the world, and not just a nation, that is now the arena which needs to be shaped and protected. We can do no greater honor to the Founding Fathers than to see the validity of their words on a world stage. Patriotism, to be truly American, begins with the human allegiance. 0

PAN AM CELEBRATES BICENTENNIAL WITH RECORD-BREAKING EW YORK-NEW DELHI FL GHT New York to New Delhi in 13 hours? It's not only possible, but it's been done. At 5 p.m. on May 2, a new Boeing 747 SP of Pan American World Airways landed in New Delhi. It had flown the 8,100 miles from New York nonstop in a record-breaking 13 hours, 31 minutes.

None of the 130 passengers on the plane was dizzy, though a few looked dazzled: A beauty queen was aboard-Summer Bartholomew, the present "Miss U.S.A." Garlands of marigold and tilaks of vermilion greeted her and other passengers.

The new aircraft, called the "Liberty Bell Express" in honor of America's Bicentennial, was a 747 SP (meaning "special performance")-a jazzed up version of the standard 747 Jumbo Jet. The amazing new plane set several records: This was the longest nonstop flight by a commercial aircraft and the first nonstop flight from the United States to

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India. (The normal travel time from New York to New Delhi on the three-to-four-stop service is about 25 hours.) The Liberty Bell Express shattered another record by the time it landed in New York on May 3. It had flown around the world in 39 hours, 25 minutes and 53 seconds air time-with a total elapsed time of 46 hours, 18 minutes and 40 seconds.

Never before has a commercial aircraft made the round-the-world trip so fast. Liberty Bell traveled 22,864 miles with stops only at New Delhi and Tokyo. At present, Pan Am's round-the-world flight is completed in 70 hours and 51 minutes with nine stops.

Unfortunately, delays at Tokyo airport prevented the Liberty Bell Express from being the fastest round-the-world flight of all time.

That record is held by two U.S. B-52 bombers which circled the globe in 45 hours and 19 minutes in 1957.

The fli~t of Liberty Bell demonstrated the /(,.-OG 5 -0 z..£.

Summer Bartholomew. the reigning "Miss U.S.A." beauty queen, alightsfrom Pan Am's "Liberty Bell Express" at New Delhi airport on May 2 after a nonstopflight from New York.

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speed and versatility of the long-range Boeing 747 SP, which is less expensive to buy and more economical to run than the AngloFrench Concorde. A truncated version of the standard 747 Jumbo, the Boeing 747 SP is 47 feet shorter. Since it has the same wing-span as the Jumbo, it can carry 48,730 gallons of fuel-about the same as the larger sister ship.

Advanced design and improvements on the Pratt & Whitney engines give the 747 SP a 25 per cent longer range than the Jumbo.

The flight of Liberty Bell was a special onetime event. However, Pan Am's manager in India, Bobby Husain, said: "We hope to have the 747 SP in New Delhi again. In the meantime Pan Am's new schedule, which went into operation May 21, has eliminated Karachi, Beirut and Istanbul on our round-the-world flight out of Delhi. This makes the New De1hiNew York flying time approximately four hours shorter."

Husain said' that although Pan Am does not have any special discount fare from India to America for the Bicentennial (nor does any other airline), Pan Am continues to offer its special tourist round-trip excursion fare ($865 or Rs. 6,298), which is lower than the one-way standard fare from New Delhi to New York ($977 or Rs. 7,113). And if you go to the U.S. during the Bicentennial Year, Pan Am offers its passengers several discount tours within America. There is, for example, the "Manhattan Weekender"-three days in New York City. There is the "Golden West Tour" -six days in Los Angeles, Las Vegas and San Francisco. Perhaps the most interesting package tour is Pan Am's "1976 Flying Camper."

In this tour visitors have the freedom to set up their own itinerary, do more and see more.

They travel by rented "camper," a huge vehicle best described as a "home on wheels."

It comes complete with bunks, hot and cold running water, stove, refrigerator and everything else needed to cook meals. (You don't have to waste any money on hotel lodging and restaurants.) If you can get as many as six persons to share the cost, it can be rented for as little as $73.50 per person per week. Tourists can rent Pan Am Flying Campers in several cities including New York, San Francisco and Washington. [For details of all these tours and other bargains, write to the nearest Pan American office in India.] Of course, unlike the flight of the Liberty Bell Express, no speed records are likely to be broken on Pan Am's campers!

The flight of the Liberty Bell opens a new era. As Indo-American tourism expands, a regular nonstop service between the two countries is very much needed, and the fast new 747 SP hopes to fill that need. But the recent Pan Am achievement involved more than mere tourism. As Chester Bowles, former U.S. Ambassador to India, said in a goodwill message carried on the May 2 Liberty Bell: "We hope that this historic record flight will help symbolize the renewed friendship between our two countries."

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cAMERICANS CELEBRATE THEIR 200TH BIRTHDAY The Bicentennial festivities in the United States will reach a climax on July 4, 1976. The celebrations include everything from mammoth nationwide projects to small community pageants that recreate the crafts of colonial America. The Bicentennial is a look at the past, but it is also a look toward the future. As one journalist wrote: 'We see this not as the end of 200 years of U.S. history, but as the beginning of a new century.'

Parades and pyrotechnics John Adams, America's second President, would have been pleased to note how thoroughly his instructions have been followed as to how Independence Day should be celebrated.

He once said: "It should be solemnized with pomp and parade, with shows, games, sports, guns, bells, bonfires and illuminations."

This year, as in years past, flags will flutter and bugles sound, as feet march to the beat of drums. Parades will pass, crowds will cheer and pretty girls will wave. And at night, the sky over thousands of cities will light up with the traditional Fourth of July fireworks. (New York plans the biggest man-made display ofpyrotechnics ever seen.)

America's 200th birthday celebrations are coordinated by the American Revolution Bicentennial Administration (ARBA), headed by former Secretary of the Navy John Warner.

There are three different kinds of ARBA projects: "Heritage 76" celebrations, which are studies and creations of the past; "Festival USA," whiCh is the birthday party aspect depicted on these pages; and "Horizons 76," or programs about the future.

As Warner says: "The Bicentennial is going to be exactly where it belongs-in every major city, minor city, community, county and tribe."

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VJ P ,.5 iP Z/ < -ff'~I The largest "stage set' of co onial'tlmes has always been Williamsburg, the old capital of Virginia,. its restoration has made it the most detailed replica of the Revolutionary era.

Top: Shrouded in smoke, Williamsburg's militia stages a mock defense of the town.

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Center left: A customer visits the apothecary in Williamsburg. Center right: At nearby Raleigh Tavern, planters relax with pipes and ale after a m.eeting of the Virginia Assembly. Above left: A cabinetmaker checks his lathe, while an assistant looks on.

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Above: Today's Bostonians re-enact an incident that led to the Revolution-the "Boston Tea Party," in which angry citizens, many of them dressed as American Indians, dumped crates of tea in the ocean. Center and right: Determined participants in the tea party pageant.

recreate the life and times of the American Revolution.

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Dancing and drama and a revival of crafts Going beyond pageants and parades, the Bicentennial has spawned a host of cultural and artistic projects in communities across the country. Right: American Indian dancers perform at a Native American Folklife Festival in St. Louis, Missouri. Right, center: Members of the Houston Ballet enact Allen's Landing, first in a trilogy of dances with a Texas historical setting.

Far right: Costumed artisans demonstrate crafts such as barrel making at Plimouth Plantation, a reproduction of a colonial village near Plymouth, Massachusetts. Below: A member of the U.S. National Park Service recreates a Revolutionary-period brass cannon. Below right: A young girl is crowned Miss Independence in a Pennsylvania town.

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Opposite page, center row: An enthusiastic celebrant (left) puts the finishing touches to Fourth of July decorations. Actress Elizabeth Ashley (right) parades on a boardwalk in Thornton Wilder's comedy, The Skin of OUf Teeth, one of a series of plays in the year-long American Bicentennial Theater. Opposite page, bottom: Scene from the historical drama, The Lost Colony, in which the British exchange gifts with the Indians.

AMERICANS CELEBRATE continued

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the past Pioneer Village, a restoration of the Puritan colony of Salem.

Massachusetts, reminds tourists of the hardships that New England settlers took for granted.

In a pageant of Puritan life ill I7thcentury Salem, the couple at right make soap from tallow and wood ash.

Such self-reliallt activities, highlighted in many Bicentennial dramas, give Americans an opportunity to reflect on the values that have guided them for two centuries.

The First 200 Years: Appraisal In an overview that spans two centuries, the author analyzes various aspects of the United States-political, economic, social-and awards grades in each field. On foreign policy, he marks the report card 'too early to tell.' Culture scores well, but he reserves the highest marks for the American Constitution-for its amazing flexibility and longevity.

As he traveled through the United States about a century ago, British historian James Bryce, an astute observer of the new American commonwealth, was intrigued by the number of times he was asked, "What do you think of our institutions?" It was a question seldom if ever put to travelers in his native Britain or in other older, more selfconfident nations. But the huge new republic was an experiment in almost any terms, political and social, and those who were taking part in it had a strong, sometimes almost pugnacious desire to win the approbation of others, especially the citizens or subjects of more established societies.

In schoolboy terms, one might say, they wanted their report card marked "A." From Lord Bryce, who spent enough years among Americans to see their faults as well as accomplishments, they received what might be called a "B+" for their hopefulness, for their good intentions, for the evils they had overcome, for their ideals. "That America marks the highest level, not only of material well-being, but of intelligence and happiness, which the race has yet attained," he wrote, "will be the judgment of those who look not at the favored few for whose benefit the world seems hitherto to have framed its institutions, but at the whole body of the people."

Now, after another century of almost unimaginable change all over the world, with old empires swept away and new if not always more benevolent powers taking their places, the United States is celebrating its Bicentennial as a free and independent nation, one still governed by the Constitution written in 1787. Although we in the United States still think of it as a new nation, that venerable document is now the oldest functioning constitution in the world.

Not the least of its achievements is that it transformed a very plural group of independent former colonies, a mere 13, into a singular nation of 50 states, all on a basis of

equality with each other, old and new, large and small.

One can look in vain among the empires and leagues of the past for a like example, or for one that after a bitter sectional conflict such as the U.S. Civil War could come together again in harmony. Wars of regions, races and religions still oppress other nations, but can no longer be even imagined among the United States. Is it not wonderful, Americans still ask visitors, how well the system works?

Presidents and Congresses calmly come and go, serving their proper terms; courts are obeyed; civil rights are preserved and extended. If there are blemishes, even of the magnitude of the recent Watergate scandals, free speech and free elections remedy them. We are still looking for that "A" on our r,eport card perhaps more than ever amid the excitement of the Bicentennial Year.

In every quarter of America, in each town and city, it is a time of evaluation and celebration. If a kind of unfocused anarchy has typified these Bicentennial Year ceremonials, and, in some quarters, a kind of half-hearted attitude toward any celebration at all, it has been only a reflection of the rather anxious mood that has oppressed many of the American people for the last several years. In the midst of national preoccupation with Vietnam, inflation and social upheaval, neither the Federal Government, the states nor the cities could agree on any great single exposition or series of events such as the great Philadelphia Centennial-Year fair of 1876. The nearest thing to a national "show" was launched as a private effort, the Freedom Train, a string of 10 long railroad cars now gradually touring the 48 contiguous U.S. states with a collection of documents, art and artifacts representative of 200 years of U.S. history. As they 'visit the Freedom Train, an estimated 10 million people will see and hear a kind of impressionistic summary of America's achievements in everything from

'A nation that receives into its bosom all kinds and conditions of men ... necessarily contains also all their conflicting ideas and controversies.' politics and war to medicine, art and technology.

Begin here, the train's show seems to say, with Revolutionary-era firebrand Tom Paine and his inflammatory pamphlet, Common Sense, a rattle of musketry, the Declaration of Independence, a few shaky years of loose confederation, then the great Constitution under which George Washington is elected first President. Here in America, for the first time in history, free men are to rule themselves for their own common good rather than for the benefit of kings, nobility, established churches and military castes. All citizens are to be equal under the law, with their rights to "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness." Observe, however, that the men who made the Revolution and set up the federal republic, the Founding Fathers-Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Alexander Hamilton and the rest-were realists and not demagogues. They did not promise "happiness" but merely the opportunity to seek it untrammeled by the harsh hand of caste or government. They believed that government which governs least governs best.

Nothing in the affairs of man begins, however, de novo, even in a new land. The men who wrote these organic documents were mainly Englishmen who loved English law and English liberties; if there had been a less obstinate English king and a more far-seeing government in Lqndon in 1775-76, America today might be another Australia or Canada still linked, albeit lightly, to Britain, and the history of the world very different. The Founding Fathers were students of history, readers of the Bible and Gibbon and Montesquieu, intellectual heirs of the Enlightenment and the Age of Reason, steeped in Roman history and fully aware of the vices which overcame the virtues of the ancient Roman republic. If the Rome of Regulus and Cincinnatus was one of their models, they cherished also the spirit of England's Magna Carta and, since many of them were descendants of the Pilgrims, the Mayflower Compact, that document under which the first Puritan immigrants, still bobbing in the sea before they set foot in Plymouth in present-day Massachusetts, sought to govern their new Zion.

The Founding Fathers, who had modest expectations, issued almost no flaming manifestoes like later revolutionists; even the Declaration of Independence, the closest thing to such a document, is more of a legal brief devoted principally, in order to justify separating from the Crown, to listing the offences of King George III against the rights of Englishmen. Yet, as U.S. historian Irving Kristol has eloquently explained, the American Revolution was so successful that its intellectual basis has been obscured, even for Americans [see January 1975 SPAN]. There was no counterrevolution, no challenge to blow the dust off the thoughtful writings of the founders in The Federalist Papers; all of them save Hamilton, who was killed in a private duel, died peacefully. While nearly all the revolutions since that time have had to call up some kind of "terror," "dictator-

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ship of the proletariat" or other harsh measures in the name of liberty, such did not happen in the United States even in wartime. That the American system of government, balancing a strong executive against a strong legislature and an independent judiciary, worked so well did not go unnoticed by other peoples in the years that followed, and many another new nation in the world attempted in large or small degree to copy it.

Yet, the society for which America's Constitution was written would be scarcely recognizable today. It numbered about three million people, 9 out of 10 of them engaged in some kind of agriculture (quite the reverse of today). They were primarily British. The largest single minority group was the Negro slaves of the South, thought to have been about one-fifth of the whole population, on whose weary backs most of the southern economy rested. They were the great exception to the ringing phrases about liberty in the Declaration of Independence. The native American Indians, never numerous, had largely vanished from the East, although they held so far undisturbed sway in the unsettled lands west of the Mississippi River, territory nominally controlled by France or Spain. The Industrial Revolution, stirring in England, had not reached America, still a rural, individualistic country, a free enough place but not an egalitarian one by today's standards. Towns and villages in the North and plantations in the South ran themselves without giving much thought to faraway government at state capitals or Washington. The more considerable farmers were like squires, apt like the bigger merchants or lawyers to be the judges and representatives in state and federal legislatures. Government itself was small and the President's personal staff, 600 or so today, numbered three in Washington's day. Nor was there very much for a staff to do in a day when the army and navy were minuscule, foreign relations oflittle importance and the very idea of social regulation of almost any sort inconceivable.

To say that this same set of instruments of government, slowly extended but never overthrown or even radically altered, now manages a giant, multi-ethnic, complex industrial state, the richest, the most productive in the world, is to state facts too obvious to elaborate or dispute. The arguments arise over the whys and hows-whether Americans owe their wealth and success primarily to the land and the bounty of nature across a vast continent or more to their own energies and the opportunity offered to them by freedom from governmental restraint; and whether capitalism, little regulated until the 20th century, has indeed produced a good life for the American people. These are harder questions, full of exceptions and gradations and qualifications, and comparisons are difficult, even with other new thinly populated lands settled by European states in the modern- era. Let us look at the American experience as far as possible, therefore, without these comparisons and rather in terms of the nation's own aspirations. And we

might begin with who the Americans are.

Although the United States started out as a predominantly English country, it is worth remembeting that the English themselves are the product of many mixings of people-Celts, Romans, Germans, Norsemen, Norman French-and were perhaps the right people to set up another melting pot. The beacon of liberty they raised in the New World sent out its warm beckoning light to a Europe then oppressed by absolutism, poverty and lack of opportunity. And so to America in the 19th and early 20th centuries came Irishmen fleeing famine, industrious Germans escaping reaction after the failed Revolutions of 1848, Italian peasants seeking work, Slavs and Jews putting despotism and pogroms behind them, Scandinavians seeking fertile farmlands in the West, Welsh miners, Greeks, Dutchmen and a leavening of smaller numbers of peoples from around the world. It was not an easy experience, either the long trip in a cramped ship or the shock of a new country and a strange language-except of course for the Englishspeaking Irish and the thousands of Englishmen and Scotchmen who continued to come as well. It was hardest of all for those of other races, the Chinese who came in droves to build the western railroads and met with deep hostility in white California, or for the blacks, who alone of all these peoples came against their will, chained in the stinking hulls of slave ships.

The fact that Negro slavery was legal under the nation's vaunted free institutions for the first 90-odd of its 200 years remains the greatest stain on U.S. history; nor did victory of the antislavery northern forces in the Civil War in 1865, or the ensuing amendments to the Constitution totally erase it. To this day, despite their legal equality, America's blacks are not fully integrated into U.S. society, if only because neither the wish nor the fiat of Congress or of the courts, nor the efforts of blacks themselves can wipe out overnight the inheritance of centuries.

Many immigrants met with hostility-or exploitation at low wages-by those immigrants who had come earlier.

Some of this was social, based on class differences; the occasional upper class or aristocratic arrival encountered few difficulties. Many native Americans, listening to the babel of foreign languages where immigrants crowded into the cities, were put off-as, indeed, people often are all

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over the world-by foreign ways and sounds and smells.

Nativists of British descent feared for the future of their Anglo-Saxon way of life and religion and government, and sought, successfully for a time in the earlier years of this century, to restrict some forms of immigration; Orientals were, for a time, totally excluded. Yet, all this the republic survived and eliminated, and to this day renewed thousands keep pouring into America, "voting with their feet" for greater opportunity or against-restrictive or even dictatorial homelands. It is some measure of the improvement of the lot of the blacks in America, despite the past, that a considerable voluntary influx of that race, many from nations of French or Spanish colonial heritage, has taken place in the last few years.

What is the result, after 200 years, of this unprecedented mixing of peoples? The melting pot, as it used to be called, has not produced a pan-European, completely homogenized, but a kind of new breed: the American. He has, if you will, two sides to him. In general manners and outlook, at his job, in his political beliefs, he becomes, after a generation or two, part of an English-speaking, English-descended, albeit greatly altered culture. In his private life, he may still cling to some aspects of the culture from which he sprang, as he may to its religion.

No doubt that pedagogical colossus, the American educational system, has played an enormous role in the Americanization process, carrying every half-way willing child through 12 years of general standard schooling. In recent years, the proliferation of free state and city universities has pushed the commitment forward until a baccalaureate is becoming as common as a secondary school diploma in other countries. Whether, to be sure, educational quality suffers when it is adjusted to the capabilities of the mass is a matter of heated argument; certainly, many great private institutions of learning maintain their standards, however. And most important, despite occasional forays by politicians, education in America has remained remarkably free of state interference.

If the schools have been a homogenizing force, the great engine behind American society, the producer of wealth, the creator of a unified culture, has been commerce and business. The late President Calvin Coolidge expressed a kind of truth in his oft-quoted remark that "the business of America is business." Never in any society in history have all kinds and conditions of men been so free and unshackled in pursuing their own interests. Americans are no more inventive or skilled than any other people, but opportunity brought out their energies and rewarded their enterprise.

The market was, eventually, a continent wide, disturbed by no customs barrier; just to unite it all brought into being ships, canals, railroads, roads and airways.

The Industrial Revolution was imported to America by men like those who went abroad to see George Stephenson's first railway and brought back the concept from Britain, and by those like the young millwright Samuel Slater, who, because it was illegal to let the secrets of machinery out of England, memorized the elaborate workings of new milling machines, emigrated secretly and set up his own factory in Providence, Rhode Island. In mills and mines, forests, farms and oilfields, America was the first

'Americans are no more inventive or skilled than any other people, but opportunity brought out their energies and rewarded their enterprise.' great mechanizer, often the teacher of those from whom we received our first lessons. Even America's bitterest critics acknowledge the primacy of U.S. technology. Giant industry and finance brought with them, to be sure, abuses, among them monopolies and labor troubles; one could not have the one without the other, but one could also not have the high standard of living which comes with mass production, the relatively low prices and high wages.

In economic matters, good and evil walk side by side.

The task of government, when some forms of regulation had to come, was to ameliorate the evils while not at the same time destroying the productive machine and discouraging the initiative which created it. It has been about this central issue that American domestic politics has swirled for most of the 20th century. It tilted a little to the left, toward more government regulations, in the late 19th century, the era of financial giants such as John D. Rockefeller and J.P. Morgan, with even President Theodore Roosevelt launching somewhat quixotic attacks on "malefactors of great wealth." In the frantic, speculative 1920s, under Presidents Harding, Coolidge and Hoover, the political tilt was to the right, ending in an economic crash and a turn to the left again under President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Yet, while the pendulum never ceases to swing, it seems to most observers to describe an ever shorter arc; for America, despite the noisy oratory before each Presidential election, is very largely governed by a political consensus.

Most of labor is not far left, as in most other countries; indeed, it embraces capitalism of the American variety as comfortably as do businessmen and the other classes in the country, for ownership-not only of stocks and bonds, but of real property and cars and appliances and the rest of the cornucopia embraced in the United States standard of living-is very widely dispersed. But while the pendulum, moves very little, there has been a steady movement toward ever greater regulation, toward a kind of combination of socialism and capitalism. A society of small, isolated, almost self-sufficient farmers, like that of 1776, is a very different thing from the complex urban-suburban America of 1976 in which all but a handful of hermits are necessarily dependent on other and often faraway sources of food, clothing, heat, light and almost all the necessities and luxuries of life. To the argument of communism and socialism, that these matters are much too complicated to be run by anyone except the state, Americans seem to reply that they find it more rewarding to manage for themselves as individuals, setting up as little regulation as possible.

What lies behind this point of view is the long libertarian tradition, stretching¡ back to the Constitution and before. It distrusts the state. It suffers generals and admirals in peacetime, and follows them in war, but immediately pushes them back in place when wars end; there has never been in America an attempt at military rule, nor any discernible desire to usurp it among its great soldiers, an agreeable

distinction shared with England and most of her former dominions. Americans in a general way speak disparagingly of "politicians," yet they do not have that deep cynicism about government, that feeling that all is corrupt, which pervades many people in other lands. If their newspapers are full of crime stories and agitated coverage when the misdeeds of politicians are uncovered, it is for the very reason that they are capable of moral indignation. Complaining audibly, they pay their taxes as a matter of civic duty-not without exceptions, to be sure-but on a generally honest basis.

The passage of 200 years, most of it in some isolation from the rest of the world but the last 60 in new proximity with its problems, has left Americans a people, to employ a European political term, of "the center." Yet, whirling around the center there are always a number of small revolutions in progress; they are the political, moral, social and artistic stirrings of a restless people. Some are replete with placards and even bombs but represent only what is called the "lunatic fringe," but many movements leave a legacy behind, whether Abolitionists fighting slavery, or so-called "muckrakers" of the early 1900s exposing the worst abuses of the meat packers, the railroad barons and the oil kings; or today's conservationists, struggling to

"You know, the idea of taxation WITH representation doesn't appeal to me very much, either."

preserve the land and air and water. The nation has been through a liberalizing revolution of sexual mores without, apparently, great harm. There are other movements in progress as well-the continuing struggle of blacks, for example, that of women for more even-handed treatment, and Ralph Nader and his consumer movement.

It is very hard to pass judgment on a whole society of well over 200 million people except in the most subjective and doubtless imprecise generalities. Foreign observers often deplore the lack of calm and moderation, just as they have from time to time deplored the insolent size of u.s. automobiles, the thickness of make-up, the brassiness of Hollywood. Americans' overcharged rhetoric disturbs the cynic in them. A "war on poverty" strikes them as absurd as a "war to end wars," and we must not forget the French statesman who, on hearing of Woodrow Wilson's ringing "Fourteen Points," recalled that God had only 10.

It would be idle also to pretend that either in foreign or domestic affairs America has dealt with others as well as the orators like to proclaim. The League of Nations was effectively scuttled by the United States' refusal to join that creation of its own President, Woodrow Wilson, while in the United Nations, America seems to have become the bete noire of many members. In the face of other countries' attempts to steal whole nations abroad, the United States has stood first on one foot and then the other, often rescuing nations from invasion or subversion only to watch them turn into authoritarian regimes from which it is difficult to disentangle. Such easy criticism, which is now very popular, does not, however, take into account what might have happened had the United States not stood firm when necessary-coming, for instance, to England's side in two world wars. George Washington's parting advice to his countrymen, to stay out of the battles of foreign lands, still rings faintly in our ears, yet isolationism, once a powerful force in America, has been forced to yield to the realities of a heavily armed and shrinking world. Given the hard realities of such a world, it might be wise to mark the nation's report card in foreign policy "good intentions," or simply "too early to tell."

How about the use of American economic power? In the caricatures of its enemies, one can still find ancient pictures of breadlines, which vanished with the end of the Great Depression, or caricatures of Morgan and Rockefeller, still wearing silk hats and clutching bags of gold, gleefully oppressing the workers. This is a far cry from the America of 1976. Today, the nation's well-established labor unions block a return to the exploitive sins of old laissezfaire capitalism. In the give and take between opposing forces, the classic struggles between labor and management are settled with more bombast than damage; and when they deadlock, government inches a little further into the field of regulation. Such economic struggle is part of the very fabric of U.S. freedom. It is self-adjusting. If oil becomes too expensive, coal miners spring into action; if they scar the landscape too badly in strip-mining, conservationists marshal their forces. A balance is achieved.

American culture, which is what the outside world sees of the United States, reflects the same freedom, showing the good and the bad with equal gusto. Authoritarian states

sometimes mock America's Coca-Cola, movie image; to Hitler's Germany it was "degenerate," and very likely some of it was. A government that does not closely control its arts, its literature and its culture in general does not have to claim perfection for a carefully sanitized product. In America, if jazz offends us, we listen to classical music; we read what we wish, as we draw and paint and design our buildings. For all its variety, or more likely because of its variety and richness, American culture has an undeniable worldwide appeal. Let us give it a high score on our card.

The highest mark, however, must be reserved for the Constitution itself, for its adaptability no less than for its longevity. If 200 years is but a blink in the eye of eternity, and a relatively short page in history, America has nevertheless lived it day by day. This is another way of saying that Americans have taken things one at a time-each political event, each crisis, each invention, each change-and found in that well-balanced instrument a phrase such as "the general welfare" or a duty of the Congress ("to regulate commerce among the several states") or of the President ("he shall take care that the laws be faithfully executed") into which the problem fitted. If the Constitution has not anticipated something such as Negro rights or votes for women, it is slowly amended. It has made possible the widest possible extension of civil rights, even when Congress quailed and it fell to the Supreme Court to enforce them.

It is perhaps well to remember that a nation that receives into its bosom all kinds and conditions of men, indeed all the peoples of the earth, necessarily contains also all their conflicting ideas and, to some extent, all their controversies.

The United States, in a phrase, is thus a microcosm of the world at large. Conflict in Europe or the Far East, struggles in Ulster or the Middle East, the battles of Left and Right, all find an American echo. It is easy to deplore such strife, but it is also possible to look upon it with a kind of pride. If such a mix of peoples can live at peace, more or less, in America, can they not do so in the world at large? All history is struggle, and in the long tempest there have been relatively few brief moments of calm, safety and happiness whep. some portion of humanity could catch its breath. For all its imperfections, such a time of rest and progress has been provided to the new American republic by the labors of its Founding Fathers.

The U.S. Constitution, to be sure, is not a sovereign remedy that can convert every courthouse politician into a Pericles, and it sometimes taxes us sorely, but it only recently provided the means whereby not only a Vice President but a President, both under heavy clouds in their personal character and behavior, could be forced to resign and be replaced in a peaceful and legal way. I like to think that Lord Bryce, who remarked at length on how well we got on as a nation with often very ordinary men as our chief magistrates, would accept these events as further support for his good opinion of the United States.

D About the Author: Oliver Jensen is a veteran Americanjournalist and historian. He is a cofounder and editor-in-chie/ 0/ American Heritage magazine. Among his books are America and Russia, Revolt of American Women, Picturesque America and The

American Heritage History of Railroads.

FIREBRANDS OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION 5 (1-' !13-3 {i

ADAMS

PAINE \HENRY

In the 1770S, three men stood out for their exceptional idealism and devotion to the principles of liberty-Samuel Adams, Thomas Paine and Patrick Henry. It was in large measure due to their efforts that the colonists in the New World began seeing themselves as Americans and began fighting for independence from a distant and tyrannical king.

Opposite page, top: "Our chains are forged," thunders Patrick Henry in his famous "Give me liberty or give me death" speech to Virginia delegates in March 1775. The fiery and eloquent orator from the Virginia backwoods helped convince less emotional Virginians such as Washington and Jefferson (in background, third and fourthfrom left) to defy the might of the British Empire.

Far right: Samuel Adams was one of the leaders of the Boston demonstrations against the British Parliament's Stamp Act of 1765. The demonstrators demanded the resignation of Andrew Oliver, Britain's stamp agent for the colony. In this painting, angry citizens require him to affirm his resignation. Oliver stands against the Liberty Tree.

Adams appears fourth from left.

Right center: The success of the American Revolution owes as much to Thomas Paine as to any other Revolutionary leader.

Gifted with a powerful pen, Paine wrote a series of brilliant, inflammatory essays and pamphlets, which stirred his countrymen to fight for their liberty. Right: The study at Paine's house in New Rochelle, New York, shows his writing kit along with his most famous tract, Common Sense.

son reached London in July 1774, he was hurried by Lord Dartmouth into the presence of the King "without being allowed time to change his clothes after the voyage." A conversation of two hours took place, Hutchinson says in his diary, "the King showing his utmost interest to find out the truth as to America." Hutchinson Three days before, the moon had been named Adams as the chief "opposer of full. Now, though it was waning, there was government. ... " "King: What gives him his importance? still light enough to see in the clear night.

"Hutchinson: A great pretended zeal It was April, and frogs piped. Two men in cloaks, roused suddenly from sleep, for liberty and the most inflexible natural temper." watched figures hurry by.

The other observer that night at LexOne was Samuel Adams, the greatest propagandist America ever produced. The ington in April 1775 was John Hanother was John Hancock, owner of ware- cock. He was, in a sense, the political inhouses and the largest merchant fleet in vention of Samuel Adams. He had not New England. They were en route to been sure at first where he would come the Continental Congress in Philadelphia. down in the quarrel, but Adams appealed Orders were to bring them in, dead or alive. to his self-importance and put him in The banging at the door started while prominent posts at public meetings. He they slept at the parsonage off the village was to become governor of Massachusetts, green. Somebody was shouting: It was immensely popular, but not without critics.

Paul Revere from Boston, riding Deacon Tories naturally did not like him; his Larkin's horse ... two British officers had "brains were shallow and his pockets jumped at him from behind a tree, he said, deep," one declared. Even colleagues had but he had broken away; all the roads were doubts. "Hancock," James Madison wrote covered to Lexington and Concord. They Thomas Jefferson, "is weak, ambitious, a were coming. courtier of popularity, given to low inThe clock struck one, then two. At four trigue, and lately reunited by a factious -still no British. The little force of 130 friendship with Samuel Adams."

Samuel Adams at any rate had character men and two small cannon relaxes. Adams and Hancock cut across the fields to Buck- enough for two. He was a born revolutionman's Tavern two miles from town even as ary and a supreme propagandist. Mostly he more Minutemen hurry past them. didn't have time to earn a living. In the They went on to Billerica where they near theocracy of Massachusetts, Adams dined on "cold salt pork and potatoes from was a strict Puritan who seemed to fit into a tray." But as they left Lexington they the role of public figure and leader of town heard behind them, according to tradition, meetings. Once he told the wondering John a single shot-followed by a volley.

Adams, his second cousin and friend, that So it had begun! Nobody knows to this "he never looked forward in his life, never day who fired the first shot. It started with: planned, laid a scheme, or formed a design A cry of defiance and not of fear, for laying up anything for himself or others A voice in the darkness, a knock at the after him." door, Providence would take care. And so it And a word that shall echofor evermore! seemed to; an unknown benefactor built The colonial quarrel began in 1764. At him a new barn; another repaired his that time Samuel Adams was 42 and a fail- house; others fitted him out for his journey ure. He was in debt, living in a rundown to Philadelphia with a new suit, new wig, house, his wife cheerful but hardpressed, new shoes, new silk hose.

Only somebody with utter faith in the his family often dependent on neighbors' virtue and importance of his cause could gifts. What a change in a year or two! The have received such beneficence and retained family was still neglected, but he had behis self-respect. come the leader of the radical party in Boston, the ascendant figure in every town meeting. Boston had 18,000 people and quartered 11 regiments of British soldiers.

Even the King heard about Samuel Adams. When Governor Thomas Hutchin-

SAMUEL ADAMS

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Reprinted by permission of the Christian Scitllce Monitor. the Christian Science Publishing Society.

All rights reserved.

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His hair was prematurely gray. He was not a very good orator. But he could manage people and, almost from the first, he had decided that independence was the only course.

"I doubt whether there is a greater incendiary in the King's dominion or a man of greater malignity of heart," wrote the colonial governor.

Adams not merely preached but organized; his committees of correspondence formed a revolutionary machine.

His austerity was notable; at Philadelphia cousin John Adams dined well and drank Madeira, but Samuel Adams took bread and milk. Enemies reluctantly admitted his dt?dication. Joseph Galloway, an expatriate Tory, wrote in 1780 in London, "He eats little, drinks little, sleeps little, thinks much, and is most decisive and indefatigable in the pursuit of his objects."

Such a man, like Cassius, was dangerous.

Samuel Adams knew that the mass of people often prefer symbols to logic: An elm in Boston Common became a Liberty Tree where they danced; the anniversary of the so-called Boston Massacre (where a mob stoned the soldiers, and John Adams courageously defended the Redcoats in court afterward) was regularly observed; people were hung in effigy; there were "liberty caps," and strong-arm methods. Yet, when at Philadelphia Benjamin Franklin first met the man who had written him fiery letters, he was pleased to discover that he was not the extremist he feared. (But Franklin wished he had not spurned the rich food, or watered his wine.)

One thing Samuel Adams had-selfcontrol. It helped explain his extraordinary ascendance. For example, in 1775 he arranged the fifth (and final) ceremony for the Boston Massacre in Old South Church, and sat in the pulpit as moderator. He was startled to see British soldiers thronging into the rear. Would there be a riot? Dr. Joseph Warren, the orator, was late and he could feel tension mount. He was sitting on a powder keg.

Samuel Adams quietly asked the glowering townspeople to vacate the front seats into which-in order that they could hear better-he invited the soldiers. There were so many that they overflowed the pews and sat on the pulpit stairs. By a deft gesture he had established his mastery.

Governor Hutchinson quotes Colonel James as saying that one of the soldiers in the rear would throw an egg if the King were attacked-"a signal to draw swords, and they would have massacred Hancock, Adams and hundreds more."

Warren judiciously avoided insult to the King. And Adams noted afterward that he had invited the soldiers to the front seats "that they might have no pretense to behave ill, for it is a good maxim in Politics as well as War [sic] to put and keep the enemy in the wrong."

So now it was Lexington and things had come to blows at last, as Adams had always felt they would.

Musketry sounded behind them. They could not wait to know the outcome.

Philadelphia lay ahead.

But Samuel Adams, the Great Incendiary, may have smiled grimly in the belief that, once more, he had put the enemy in the wrong.

What made the farmers fight in 1775?

Judge Mellen Chamberlain in 1842, when he was 21, interviewed Captain Preston, a 91-year-old veteran of the Concord fight: "Did you take up arms against intolerable oppressions?" he asked.

"Oppressions?" replied the old man. "I didn't feel them."

"What, were you not oppressed by the Stamp Act?" "I never saw one of those stamps. I certainly never paid a penny for one of them."

"Well, what then about the tea tax?"

"I never drank a drop of the stuff; the boys threw it all overboard."

"Then I suppose you had been reading Harrington or Sidney or Locke about the eternal principles of liberty?"

"Never heard of 'em. We read only the Bible, the catechism, Watts' Psalms and hymns, and the almanac."

"Well, then, what was the matter? And what did you mean in going to the fight?"

"Young man, what we meant in going for those Redcoats was this: We always had governed ourselves, and we always meant to. They didn't mean we should.>' D About the Author: Richard Strout is a correspondent for the Christian Science Monitor.

THOMAS PAINE Few people were emotionally more ready for the American Revolution than Thomas Paine when he came to the colonies in the mid-1770s. Divorced from one wife and the widower of another, he left England as a social failure. At 37, he had done nothing more than tie knots in the loose ends of life: his jobs making corsets, collecting taxes for the crown and running a tobacco shop earned for him little money and even less prestige. Apparently, he needed neither, because on landing in Philadelphia in November 1774 he had one talent that was much in needthe gift of the bold opinion. At the time, the rebels in the colonies assuredly had their opinions about the King's mischief, but boldness was lacking. A valuable book; Voices of the American Revolution, issued by the People's Bicentcnnial Commission, notes that "the revolutionary mentality that had been forming since the days of the Stamp Act was still ovcrlaid by thousands of treasured memories of Great Britain and her monarchs. This was the real power the King was counting on to keep his American subjects in line. The institution of the monarchy had become so deified and entrenched after hundreds of years in power that most Americans simply could not imagine how life would procecd without its guiding force."

Paine could imagine. He 'needed only a few months of rooting among the malcontents to sense that public opinion needed less to be formed than to be directed. His pamphlet Common Sense appeared in January 1776, an explosive blast of literary energy that shifted the feelings of its readers so that they were motivated to act from the rightness of their own cause rather than the wrongness of the King's.

You are not mere rebels, Common Sense told them, you are leaders. "The cause of America is in great measure the cause of all mankind," Paine wrote in the introduction. The pamphlet was America's first bestseller, though Paine refused all money it earned. One biographer said that the sale of Common Sense totaled lOper cent of the population, a figure that would be the equivalent of a modern-day sale of 22 million.

The ingenuity of Common Sense was not that it expressed Paine's thoughts with much clarity but that the readers saw their own sentiments, long hushed, suddenly given loud voice. He spoke of King George in a brazen way, expressing rage only heard before in whispers in the colonies' ale houses: "In England a King hath little more to do than to make war and give away places; which, in plain terms, is to empoverish the nation and set it together by the ears. A pretty business indeed for a man to be allowed ÂŁ800,000 a year for, and worshipped into the bargain! Of more worth is one honest man to society, and in the sight of God, than all the crowned ruffians that ever lived."

Paine said in Common Sense that he was not "inflaming or exaggerating matters" but was trying to "awaken us from fatal and.unmanly slumbers, that we may pursue determinately some fixed object." He had the social crusader's classic faith in citizens: Once they learn the facts, they will act on them. He raised questions and supplied answers. "Some perhaps will say that after we have made it up with Britain, she will protect us. Can they be so unwise as to mean that she will keep a navy in our harbors for that purpose? Common sense will tell us that the power which hath endeavored to subdue us, is of all others the most improper to defend us." Rather than attacking religion-save that for later, taking on the King was pleasure enough for now-Paine showed a taste for ecumenism: "There should be a diversity of religious opinions among us. It affords a larger field for our Christian kindness."

Next to the Declaration of Independence, Common Sense may be America's best-known but least-read historical document. History has made Paine a one-book author, even though his pen was only beginning to move when the Revolution heated up. Embraced by George Washington-Paine's early praise of the general came close to flattery-he felt obligated to sustain the troops now that he had roused them. For sevenyears, he produced essays that became The Crisis Papers. The first lines of the first essay rank high among the stirring openers in American literature: "These are the times that try men's souls. The summer soldier and the sun-

shine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of his country; but he that stands it now deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph.

What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly; it is dearness only that gives everything its value."

In 1783, with "the greatest and completest revolution the world ever knew, gloriously and happily accomplished," Paine received $3,000 from a grateful Congress and a piece of land from the State of New York. He turned to bridge building but, in the pattern of his days making corsets, this venture failed. He wrote that after the success of the Revolution "it did not appear to me that any object could arise great enough to engage me a second time. I began to feel myself happy in being quiet." But the itch for social reform was not still for long. He went to England to attack the British Constitution. But the English preferred to be subjects rather than citizens, so his thoughts were more argued than heeded.

He was in France for that revolution, spending a year in prison for his views.

Paine has had several biographies. The most exhaustive and most objectively critical is Paine by David Freeman Hawke.

As a human being, Hawke writes, "Paine had never been able to cope with the minor harassments of life. Wherever he had wandered someone ... had cared for and protected him." At the end of his life-in New Rochelle, New York, in 1809, the year of Abraham Lincoln's birth-he was sunk in loneliness, an invalid, and sending off pathetic letters to Congress and President Thomas Jefferson seeking expense money for a trip made 28 years earlier.

The story has a grimmer ending. In 1819, a friend came with a shovel to dig up Paine's bones. He hauled them to England for a monument to be built over them, but the bones were lost, without trace. 0

PATRICK HENRY

Young John Randolph gets to the Richmond, Virginia, Court House early and secures a seat even better than he hoped, so close to the bench that he can almost overhear the judges. One of them, it must be Chief Justice John Jay, points to a figure below: "The greatest of orators," he murmurs. Judge Iredell, his companion, glances down, and then back in disbelief.

He shrugs expressively. There below is what looks like a feeble old man, wrapped in mufflers and resting his head against the bar: Patrick Henry.

The year is 1791. British General Charles Cornwallis surrendered 10 years ago. The man below has been six times governor of Virginia, the firebrand who helped ignite the colonies and yet who, when Revolution succeeded, so much opposed yielding Virginia sovereignty to a new national government that he refused to go to Philadelphia as a delegate to the Constitutional Convention and then battled tooth and nail against ratification by his own state. His criticism of the new instrument did as much as that of any man to get the first 10 amendments added, what they, by this time, are calling a Bill of Rights.

Now he is chief counsel for debtors in a case that will test this same Constitution and perhaps decide 'peace or war. For English merchants llave sued to get their prerevolutionary debts paid. A treaty says they will be paid, and London swears it will not yield frontier posts at Niagara, New York, and Detr9it till this happens.

But how much? And can the new American Government enforce its treaty? American debtors have hired Patrick Henry to defend them against the British creditors.

Young Randolph bends forward. The About the Author: Colman McCarthy is a col- court unexpectedly asks Patrick Henry to umnist and editorial writer for the Washington outline the matter. He pulls himself up Post. He also writes for Newsweek magazine with the help of his young assistant, John and is the author of Inner Companions and Marshall (later a chief justice). He tells Disturbers of the Peace. the court deprecatingly that he is hardly able to bear the weight of these great issues a,gainst his able adversaries. (Shrewd, 20year-old Randolph, who recounts the matter, guesses that he is seeking sympathy and attention.) Randolph says that his

Reprinted by permission of the Christian Science Monitor. <l' 1915 the Christian Science Publishing Society.

All rights reserved.

"pace quickens," like "a first-rate, fourmile race horse, sometimes displaying his whole power and then taking up again."

Randolph watches: "He got up to full speed and took a rapid view of what England had done when she had been successful in arms, and what would have been our fate had we been unsuccessful."

A pause, then-"The color began to come and go in the face of the Chief Justice. Iredell sat with his mouth and eyes stretched open in perfect wonder. Finally Patrick Henry arrived at his utmost height and grandeur. He raised his hands in one of his grand and solemn pauses."

Sensation in the court; Patrick Henry still had power to surprise. "Gracious God!" exclaimed Justice Iredell, according to the account, "he is an orator indeed!"

Later Iredell himself wrote, "I shall as long as I live remember the arguments I heard in this case ... fully equal to anything I have ever witnessed, and some of them have been adorned with a splendor of eloquence surpassing what I ever felt before."

There is little verbatim record of what Patrick Henry actually said. He suffered, too, from having a worshipful biographer, William Wirt, fantasize his speeches in 1817. The authenticity of some of his most famous lines is questioned. Are they Patrick Henry or William Wirt? Yet on the other hand some phrases burned themselves into men's memories. Whatever labor he put into preparation of his speeches, they always seemed extemporaneous, bursting out at the moment with all those skills which a great orator shares with a great actor.

"Call it oratory or what you please," Thomas Jefferson wrote later of the man who had begun as his hero and ended as his lifelong enemy, "but I never heard anything like it. He had more command over the passions than any man I ever knew. It was his profound knowledge of human nature and the manner of speaking more than the matter of his orations."

Patrick Henry in effect won the British debts case by his appeal to emotions. It was not the first time.

The scene moves backward to an earlier year-1763. It is Hanover Court House, Virginia, where young Patrick Henry is just

starting his legal career. The judges know him. His father, a small planter, is one of the few men in the area with a university education, from Aberdeen, Scotland, and he has taught his son enough Latin at home to read Roman classics. The young man has tried storekeeping and failed. He married at 18 and then, hopelessly in debt at 22, read enough law to get a license from a lenient board.

He is friendly and good-humored with a "passion for music, dancing and pleasantry." He is deferential in court but with an effective skeptical smile to turn on hostile witnesses. He has been winning case after case.

So now he stands before the judges to handle a matter that will shake the colony.

The established clergy of Virginia have gone all the way to London to argue that their pay, which is pegged to-.tobacco like everything else in the one-shot economy, is unfair. London agrees. So Parson Maury is here in court today to have the jury decide his extra compensation from 1758 to the present (1763). Patrick Henry represents local authorities trying to keep the award low. It all seems simple.

Maury's lawyer challenges three jurors as not being "gentlemen"; the tall young lawyer, Patrick Henry, argues that plain farmers can make an honest jury. He is about six feet, lithe and trim, long-nosed, not handsome but engaging, and just finding his power. Change is in the air. Settlers in Virginia wistfully thought they could transplant Merrie England-the Squire, the Parson, the loyal Yeomanry-to the raw frontier. But the climate was wrong.

Now Patrick Henry boldly attacks not the details of the payment but the interference of distant Parliament itself; when the Crown disallows the "salutary" colonial statute, he cries, far from being father of his country, the King becomes a tyrant and forfeits obedience!

Rival counsel jumps up. Why, this is treason. The audience stirs. But the justices remain calm and almost sympathetic. The visiting churchmen stamp out. The jury retires and returns quickly. They grant one penny in damages. That makes Patrick Henry locally famous.

So now it is 18 months later, May 29, 1765. The little colonial capital of Williamsburg is drowsy in sunlight and bird song, with lowing cattle and drawling hens.

It is a two-storied, steep-gabled Queen Anne structure of brick, at the foot of Duke of Gloucester Street. The House of Burges-

ses sits in its small but impressive chamber, from which all but 39 of the 116 have gone home, avoiding a dull windup of the session.

(Only 10 miles away at Yorktown, in October 1781, Lord Cornwallis will surrender-the end of the cycle that is to begin today.)

A member steps up, the newest member of the House, the youth who caused all that stir in the celebrated parsons' cause case.

He has ridden into town on his lean horse, 80 miles. Tidewater grandees in silks and satins look him over amusedly in his simple country clothes. They can deal with this type. It is true, they don't like the new parliamentary taxes either and have formally protested them, but they know where to draw the line as loyal subjects.

Patrick Henry offers seven resolutions against the British stamp tax. Uproar. (At the door, a red-haired recent student of William and Mary College, now studying law in town, looks avidly in and records "a most bloody debate." It is Thomas Jefferson, 22.)

"Caesar had his Brutus," Patrick Henry says. "Charles the First his Cromwell, and George the Third ... " "Treason!" somebody shouts.

A long pause. When quiet is restored, the young man adds quietly, "and George the Third may profit by their example. If this be treason, make the most of it!"

That anyway is the way the scene is reported, though nobody knows for sure.

The Burgesses adopt only four of the seven resolutions, the least militant ones. Joseph Royle, Tory publisher of the Virginia Gazette, won't print a word about the disgraceful scene. Censorship again defeats itself; the Newport (Rhode Island) Mercury, of all papers, gets hold of the seven resolutions, assumes they have passed, publishes them as though they had passed, and eventually all the colonies read the fiery "Virginia Resolves." Sam Adams is jubilant; if Virginia, biggest, richest, most loyal of the colonies leads the way, why should not all follow?

Patrick Henry makes other speeches, too, of course; he tells the first Continental Congress at Philadelphia, "I am not a Virginian-I am an American"; he winds up an address at Richmond, "Give me liberty,

or give me death!" Always there is the restrained start, the gathering speed, the final torrent of words and magnificent climax.

He has a trick that Abe Lincoln will also use: He is tall and a little stooped, and when he comes to an oratorical flourish he slowly straightens to full height and seems to acquire a new dimension.

There's another novel device, too, according to historian George Wilson (Patrick Henry and His World). Patrick Henry is grateful, with his receding hairline, for the bar's custom of wearing "a tie wig [tied behind] with a bag of it [a silk pouch to hold the hair in back]." Sometimes when he becomes animated he twirls the wig several times in rapid succession, arresting and amusing the audience.

They call him "the trumpet of the revolution," "son of thunder," and far away Lord Byron eulogizes this "Demosthenes of the forests." But he is unpredictable.

After they become enemies, Jefferson calls him "the great apostate"; his legal knowledge "is not worth a copper," and he is "avaricious" and "rotten-hearted."

Patrick Henry's retort is more politically effective perhaps: He asks why the master of Monticello has gone in for French cooking; does he disdain honest fatback and turnip greens, and has he "abjured his native vittles?"

He is always unpredictable. This fiery revolutionary, when the war is over, urges an "act of oblivion and restoration" (clemency) for former Tories. He is as complete a master of the politics of Virginia from 1765 to 1770 as Samuel Adams is in Massachusetts. But with political passions of Federalists and Jeffersonian Republicans running so fiercely that the former institute the hateful Alien and Sedition Acts, Patrick Henry runs for office the last time, as a Federalist, having been wooed by George Washington.

He had two wives, 17 children. The cradle at home never stopped rocking.

Visitors sometimes found him on the floor with infants romping over him and no generational line between children and grandchildren.

He fought the Constitution, and helped bring the Bill of Rights. Jefferson softened somewhat over this enigmatic figure, this loner in public life.

"He gave the first impulse to the ball of revolution," Jefferson wrote. "It is not easy to see what we would have done without Patrick Henry."

D

The war for the independence of the American colonies raged for more than six years. A few of the most dramatic personalities and events of that struggle are " recalled on these pages in words and paintings. The centerfold carries an authentic reproduction of the Declaration of Independence of July 4, 1776.

Three words could sum up the Indian Revolution, said editor Frank Moraes once: tears, tragedy, triumph. The same is true of the American Revolution more than a century and a half earlier.

Similar causes animated freedom fighters in America and India.

Economic exploitation in various forms was one of them. More important, perhaps, was simply the urge to be free. Thomas Jefferson said: "Can anyone reason be assigned why 160,000 electors in the island of Great Britain should give law to four millions in the states of America?" Mahatma Gandhi put it even more succinctly: "There is no substitute for self-government."

Both movements began with a boycott of British goods and a drive against unjust laws. The Boston Tea Party and the Dandi Salt March both showed how the humblest substance-tea in one case, salt in another-could ignite the spark of patriotism. By a quirk of fate, America won freedom from the British about the time India lost hers.

"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants," Jefferson had said. Much blood flowed during the American Revolution, which began in 1775 and ended in 1781. The severity of the struggle was inevitable, given the enormous odds both sides faced. The "colonials" fighting for freedom had to get 13 far-flung states to work for a common cause-and improvise an army and a government almost out of nothing. The British had to ferry troops and supplies across a vast ocean, then subdue hundreds of isolated settlements-some as far as 300 miles inland from the coast, at a time when an army could march only a few miles a day.

The opening skirmishes of the Revolution took place on April 19, 1775, at Lexington and Concord. The British troops dispatched to Concord to destroy caches of rebel arms were confronted at Lexington by a small group of American militiamen. Firing broke out, and the militia dispersed, leaving behind eight of their dead. The British pushed on to Concord, where they clashed again with militia, who fired what Emerson immortalized in verse as "the shot heard round the world." Retreating to Boston, the red-coated British troops were badly mauled by farmer-soldiers who fired at them from behind hillocks, stone walls and buildings.

Lexington and Concord sent shock waves vibrating through all the colonies. Americans realized that war was at hand. Events now moved briskly. Delegates from the colonies met in Philadelphia and called on Canada to join them in opposing British rule; Washington was appointed commander-in-chief of the American forces; British troops assaulted the "rebels" at the Battle of Bunker Hill, won the battle but sustained severe losses; King George III declared the colonies to be in a state of rebellion; American troops under General Richard

Montgomery invaded Canada and captured Montreal, but the same army's expedition to Quebec ended in disaster and the death of Montgomery.

All this happened in 1775.In January 1776Thomas Paine published his eloquent pamphlet Common Sense, which converted thousands of undecided people to the cause of independence. Another historic document, the Declaration of Independence, was adopted by the Continental Congress on July 4. When read to American troops in New York, they surged to the equestrian statue of King George III and pulled it from its pedestal to melt it for bullets.

But the Americans suffered some shattering reverses after the Declaration. Washington's forces were defeated by those of General William Howe at the Battle of Long Island (August 27) and in other clashes in and around New York City. Two brilliant surprise victories

by Washington at Trenton (December 26)and Princeton (January 3, 1777) revived American hopes.

The real turning point of the war, however, was the American victory at the Battle of Saratoga in October 1777. As part of a British grand design to cut the colonies in half, General John Burgoyne m~ved south from Canada into New York State in July 1777. General Howe and his army were supposed to move up the Hudson River and join Burgoyne's forces somewhere around Albany to complete the conquest of New York State. The strategy badly misfired because Howe moved south to capture Philadelphia instead of north to join Burgoyne. The latter's forces were soundly beaten by the colonial army of General Horatio Gates in two battles on September 19 and October 7. Finally, on October 17, Burgoyne surrendered his entire force of 6,000 to Gates at Saratoga.

This victory was probably the most decisive one of the Revolution, because it brought France into the fray-on America's side. The war now entered a new phase, with French naval power playing a prominent role. In April 1778, the British evacuated Philadelphia in haste, fearing the appearance of a French fleet. From then onward Washington undertook only minor land operations; he was waiting for the right time to launch a major army-navy joint onslaught.

The right time was to come only after. three years. During that period, however, General Charles Cornwallis scored many victories for the British in the southern colonies, and American morale sank once again. Finally, the Americans forced Cornwallis into Virginia, and a joint American-French army-navy action defeated Cornwallis at Yorktown on October 19, 1781. The British Army surrendered. For all military purposes, the war was over, although Britain did not 0 acknowledge America's independence until 1783.

George Washington. Whenever one thinks of the American Revolution, one invariably thinks of Washington. The two are virtually synonymous. Commander-in-chief of the Colonial Army, "father of his country," Washington succeeded against formidable odds in moulding a disciplined and efficient army out of ragged bands of militia, guerrilla fighters and fiercely individualistic farmers -eventually leading them to victory. In the midst of all this, he had continually to resolve quarrels among his top officers and to use his political skill to ensure that the Continental Congress would supply the army with funds. Receiving no salary himself, he gave financial aid to the destitute families of his soldiers. Says historian Samuel Eliot Morison: "Washington was more than a general; he was the embodiment of all that was noblest and best among the American people."

The painting of Washington in uniform is by Charles Wilson Peale. The "primitive" painting above, titled "General Washington on a White Charger," is by an unknown artist.

'I wish we could sell them another hill at the same price,' said an American genera

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Battle of Bunker Hill. The painting above, by Richard Schlecht, recreates the first major battle of the Revolution. It was fought on June 17, 1775. In this bird's-eye view of the conflict, Boston is seen in the background, beyond the Charles River. Charlestown (right) is inflames, set ablaze by the British. Fighting is in progress on two fronts-on the hill, where the colonials have built a "redoubt" or dirt fort (the raised structure right of center), and

along a fence (in foreground; running from the beach at left to the road). Red-coated British troops led by General William Howe attack the fence but are pushed back. Meanwhile, warships in the river bombard the hill and British troops led by Brigadier Robert Pigot attack it from the ground. Defending the redoubt is an untrained ' group of men and boys who have been instructed: "Don't fire until you see the whites of their eyes." Pigot's men advanced up

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the hill twice; when they were within.afew .I l, yards of the redoubt, they were swept down by tongues of flame. They charged a third time -at last with success. The Americans ran out of ammunition and retreated. But for the British it was a Pyrrhic victory: They had engaged 2,500 troops and sustained 1.000 casualties. American figures: 1,500 and 400.

Said one colonial general: "I wish we could sell them another hill at the same price."

Boston Tea Party. Nathaniel Currier's painting (top) shows the famous event of the night of December 16,1773, in which a band of colonials dressed as native Indians boarded British merchant ships in Boston harbor and dumped some 300 chests of tea into the water. This act, which has since become known as the Boston Tea Party, was a protest against British mercantilism.

Battle of Charleston. In the dramatic painting at right by H. Charles McBarron, a colonial soldier, oblivious to . tV P enemy fire, retrieves the flag of South !./ Carolina and secures it to a staff 5 /0 7; 70)nthe ramparts of a fort in Charleston harbor. The fort was successfully ~'.. 7 . defended by the colonials against a lO-hour bombardment by a British fleet.

The battle took place on June 28, 1776.

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Prescott at the Redoubt. In F.C. Yohn'spainting(above), Colonel William Prescott stands defiantly atop the redoubt at the Battle of Bunker Hill, calming his men as they are about to face the first British assault.

Valley Forge. This 19th century painting (above) captures the stark, bleak coldness of the winter of 1777-78, which Washington's army spent at the village of Valley Forge near Philadelphia. Washington went into winter quarters here after abandoning the colonial capital of Philadelphia to the British.

It was indeed, as Thomas Paine wrote, a time that "tried men's souls." The American troops were short offood, shelter, clothing andfootwear; they were stricken with typhus. But the army was held together by loyalty to Washington, and when spring came in 1778, they were once again ready to fight.

Washington Attacks Trenton. The picture at right by "primitivist" J.O.J. Frost depicts a daring exploit by Washington on Christmas Eve 1776, when his troops rowed silently across the Delaware River through a night snowstorm. At dawn they captured the British garrison at Trenton.

Victory at Saratoga. In Howard Smith's painting (far right), dejected British prisoners march past as General John Burgoyne hands over his sword to General Horatio Gates at Saratoga, New York, on October 17, 1777, This American victory was one of the decisive battles of history.

It effected France's entry into the war in support of the colonies.

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Mter six years of struggle on land and sea, the British surrendered to the American~

Confrontation at Sea. "1 have not yet begun to fight!" trumpets Gaptain Paul Jones (above) from the splintered deck of the colonial flagship Bonhomme Richard, in reply to the commander of the British frigate Serapis, who asked Jones to surrender. This painting by F.G. Yohn captures the fury of one of the

most famous sea battles in historY,fought on September 23, 1779. Since the Serapis was larger and better armed, Jones adopted a bold strategy: He steered the Richard alongside the Serapis.

The two vessels were so close that their rigging became entangled. Their gun muzzles touched one another, and the two crews engaged in

hand-to-hand fighting. Eventually, after several hours of struggle, the Serapis surrendered. This was only one of several spectacular naval victories won by Jones, who became the scourge of British commerce. After the war he served the new nation for afew years as its agent in Europe and was accorded high honors by several governm('nts.

at Yorktown, and marched away to the tune 'The World Turned Upside Down.'

Battle of Guilford Court House. The painting at top right by H. Charles McBarron shows the soldiers of General Nathanael Greene, commander of American forces in the south, engaging the British troops of General Charles Cornwallis at Guilford Court House, North Carolina, on March 15, 1781.

Greene (on horseback) is calling for a bayonet charge. Cavalrymen in the background race forward in support of the colonial flank.

The End of the War. John Trumbull's classic painting (above) depicts the final historic moment of the American Revolution-the surrender of Cornwallis. The British general was defeated at the Battle of Yorktown by a joint French-American army led by Washington and supported by a Frenchfieet. 1n this ceremony, victorious American troops (right) and their French allies (left) are drawn up to accept the British surrender. Since Cornwallis

was too ill to be present, his deputy, General Charles O'Hara (red-coated officer in center), handed over Cornwallis's sword to General Benjamin Lincoln ( on horseback), deputed by Washington (at right, rear) to accept it. The French commander, General Rochambeau, is seated on a horse at the far end of the French column. As O'Hara led out the British columns, the Redcoat band played "The World Turned Upside Down."

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THE DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE The First Continental Congress on June 10, 1776, appointed a committee comprised of Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Roger Sherman and Robert R. Livingston to draft a Declaration of Independence. The Declaration, primarily the work of Thomas Jefferson (above), was adopted by the Continental Congress in Philadelphia on July 4,1776. That date has ever since been the chief American political holidayIndependence Day. Upon its adoption, the Declaration was signed by John Hancock, president of the Continental Congress, and by Charles Thomson, its secretary. A copy of the Declaration, engrossed on parchment, was signed by 56 members of Congress on and after August 2, 1776. The original parchment document with signatures of its signers (reproduced at right) is now on public view in a hermetical(y sealed, helium-filled glass case in the National Archives Building in Washington, D.C. For easier readability, the text of the Declaration is reprinted below.

When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are ac-

customed. But when a long train of abuses from the depository of their public Records, and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into Object evinces a design to reduce them under compliance with his measures.

He has dissolved Representative Houses absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to repeatedly, for opposing with manly firmness provide new Guards for their future security. his invasions on the rights of the people.

He has refused for a long time, after such Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity dissolutions, to cause others to be elected; which constrains them to alter their former whereby the Legislative powers, incapable of Systems of Government. The history of the Annihilation, have returned to the People at present King of Great Britain is a history of large for their exercise; the State remaining in repeated injuries and usurpations, all having the mean time exposed to all the dangers of inin direct object the establishment of an abso- vasion from without, and convulsions within. lute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, He has endeavoured to prevent the populalet Facts be submitted to a candid world. tion of these States; for that purpose obstructHe has refused his Assent to Laws, the ing the Laws of Naturalization of Foreigners; most wholesome and necessary for the public refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither, and raising the conditions good.

He has forbidden his Governors to pass of new Appropriations of Lands.

He has obstructed the Administration of Laws of immediate and pressing importance, unless suspended in their operation till his . Justice, by refusing his Assent to Laws for Assent should be obtained; and when so establishing Judiciary powers. suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone, for the tenure of their offices, and the to them.

He has refused to pass other Laws for the amount and payment of their salaries.

He has erected a multitude of New Offices, accommodation of large districts of people, unless those people would relinquish the right and sent hither swarms of Officers to harrass of Representation in the Legislature, a right our people, and eat out their substanee.

He has kept among us, in times of peace, inestimable to them and formidable to tyrants Standing Armies without the Consent of our only.

He has called together legislative bodies at legislatures.

He has affected to render the Military indeplaces unusual, uncomfortable, and distant

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pendent of and superior to the Civil power.

He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his Assent to their Acts of pretended Legislation: For quartering large bodies of armed troops among us: For protecting them, by a mock Trial, from punishment for any Murders which they should commit on the Inhabitants of these States: For cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world: For imposing Taxes on us without our Consent: For depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury: For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences: For abolishing the free System of English Laws in a neighbouring Province, establishing therein an Arbitrary government, and enlarging its Boundaries so as to render it at once an example and fit instrument for introducing the same absolute rule into these Colonies: For taking away our Charters, abolishing our most valuable Laws, and altering fundamentally the Forms of our Governments: For suspending our own Legislatures, and declaring themselves invested with power to legislate for us in all cases whatsoever.

He has abdicated Government here, by declaring us out of his Protection and waging War against us.

He has plundered our seas, ravaged our Coasts, burnt our towns, and destroyed the

lives of our people.

He is at this time transporting large Armies of foreign mercenaries to compleat th~ works of death, desolation and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of Cruelty & perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and tot~i1ly unworthy the Head of a civilized nation.

He has constrained our fellow Citizens taken Captive on the high Seas to bear Arms against their Country, to become the executioners of their friends and Brethren, or to fall themselves by their Hands.

He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.

In every stage of these Oppressions We have Petitioned for Redress in the most humble terms: Our repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. A Prince, whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.

Nor have We been wanting in attentions to our British brethren. We have warned them from time to time of attempts by their legislature to extend an unwarrantable jurisdiction over us. We have reminded them of the circumstances of our emigration and settlement

here. We have appealed to their native justice and magnanimity, and we have conjured them by the ties of our common kindred to disavow these usurpatio~j ..which, would inevitably interrupt our connections and correspondence.

They too have been deaf to the voice of justice and of consanguinity. We must, therefore, acquiesce in the necessity, which denounces our Separation, and hold them, as we hold the rest of mankind, Enemies in War, in Peace Friends.

WE, THEREFORE, the Representatives of the UNITEDSTATES OFAMERICA,in General Congress, Assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the Name, and by Authority of the good People of these Colonies, solemnly publish and declare, That these United Colonies are, and of Right ought to be FREEAND INDEPENDENT STATES;that they are Absolved from all Allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain, is and ought to be, totally dissolved; and that as Free and Independent States, they have full Power to levy War, conclude Peace, contract Alliances, establish Commerce, and to do all other Acts and Things which Independent States may of right do. And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.

D

MR.JEFFERSON AND THE LIVING GENERATION Everyone knows what manner of man was he, the versatile genius who wrote the Declaration of Independence. Yet few realize the relevance of Jefferson to our life and times. We may well look back to him for guidance, says the author, because he 'wanted to be associated with things that involved changeless values.'

For nearly a century and a half Thomas Jefferson has been peacefully sleeping on the hillside below the lovely house he designed and erected. To awaken him and usher him into our crowded and noisy world would be unkind, but it is a pity that we cannot get word to him, somehow, that his name has been given to a distinguished lectureship that was recently inaugurated by the U.S. National Endowment for the Humanities. He wore his honors lightly, as a gentleman and scholar should, but none of these ever gratified him as much as those he received from men oflearning. In America his pre-eminence as a patron of learning in all its branches remains beyond challenge to this day. At the height of his political success a bitter political foe referred to him as the "moonshine philosopher of Monticello," but from the pages of history he stands forth as the nearest American approximation of the universal man. To say this is certainly not to claim that he approached perfection; his reach exceeded his grasp, and he made mistakes-some very bad ones. Nor is it to reduce him to PORTRAIT OF THOMAS JEFFERSON

BY BIREN DE. ESPECIALLY COMMISSIONED FOR SPAN.

an abstraction. In fact, it is impossible to dissociate his achievements and failures from his complex and endlessly fascinating personality. I cannot hope to do justice to that here, and I can make little more than passing reference to his extraordinarily diverse interests and activities. Nothing that bore on human enlightenment, happiness, or well-being was alien to him; and, as a French visitor to Monticello observed, he placed his mind, as he s~~his house, on an elevation from which he might contemplate the universe.

On leaving the Presidency at the age of 66 he said wistfully, "Nature intended me for the tranquil pursuits of science by rendering them my supreme delight." (By "science" he meant knowledge-all knowledge; what we call science he would have called natural philosophy or natural history.) For 40 years there had been a contest for his time and attention between public duties and personal interests, but if he harbored the thought that contemplation of the universe unfitted one for affairs of state, he is not known to have said so. Nor did he perceive any conflict whatsoever within the realm oflearning. Replying to the letter informing him of his election as a member

of the National Institute of France, he said, "I accept it as an evidence of the brotherly spirit of science [learning] which unites into one family all its votaries of whatever grade, and however widely dispersed through the different quarters of the globe."

To him the contention of Lord Snow that the intelligentsia of the Western world are polarized in two antagonistic cultures would have been unthinkable.

Obviously, no one can hope to match his diversity in our age of intense specialization, but he offers a timely reminder of the unity of human knowledge. He may suggest that we have overvalued the expert, who can be an exceedingly narrow man and whose wisdom outside his own field is dubious, to say the least. In our fiercely competitive society it may be much more difficult to glimpse the universal than it was in his day, but surely somebody should try to see it. No one of us can be as well rounded as he was, but in a society that is characterized by excess in so many forms we would be well advised to seek a better balance. According to some interpreters, this highly cultivated man who became a patron saint of democracy was a mass of contradictions. He has often been called a

'To him the freedom of the spirit was the most precious freedom, and this implacable foe of prejudice pinned his hopes for human betterment on liberated intelligence.' hypocrite. Contradictions there were, as indeed there are in all of us, but I am most impressed with his equilibrium-or, to use a musical rather than a physical term, with his polyphony. He was not only a man of reason but also a man of boundless enthusiasm for things he believed to be of prime importance. One of these, unquestionably, was knowledge. Long ago in the hills of Albemarle or in the village of Williamsburg he learned what all true scholars and dedicated scientists must know, and even the humblest student and rankest amateur can find out: namely, that the pursuit of know 1edge is one of the most fascinating activities in which human beings can engage.

And, during the years following his retirement from the Presidency, he found that its satisfactions were enduring.

He pursued knowledge because he liked to, but, living in the bright springtime of the modern mind, he believed that the world would, or at least could, be saved by knowledge. This faith was not dimmed during the reaction that followed the revolutionary era in America and Europe. In the last decade of his life, in almost the last letter he ever wrote to his friend DuPont de Nemours, he said: "Enlig, t~n--trffople E:.D '-\r ) p

t~ (1

Graduation day at the University of Virginia, established by Thomas Jefferson in 1825.

Writer, educator, lawyer, historian, farmer, architect and philosopher, Jefferson asked that only three accomplishments be inscribed on his tombstone: "Author of the Declaration of Independence, of the Statute of Virginia for Religious Freedom, and Father of the University of Virginia."

generally, and tyranny and oppressions of body and mind will vanish like evil spirits at the dawn of day." His actual hopes were not quite so high as this exhortation would suggest; he did not really believe that human society would or could attain perfection. But he did believe it capable of almost unlimited improvement. How disappointed he would be to learn that despite the vast increase in knowledge and its dissemination since his day, tyranny and oppression are still worldwide. Quite clearly, knowledge is not enough. It must be accompanied by the will to use it, and the wisdom to use it humanely. But surely the world cannot be saved by ignorance. There are dimensions of the human mind that Jefferson did not perceive when, following Lord Bacon, he divided its faculties into memory, imagination, and reason, and gave to reason a primacy that is questionable in the light of human experience. But if we cannot depend on intelligence to solve our problems, what in heaven's name can we depend on? Jefferson did not place his faith in a static accumulation of information, but in the mind itself. That it must be kept free was axiomatic. The quotation in the memorial to him in Washington fully deserves the emphasis that is accorded it: "I have sworn upon the altar of God eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man." To 4im the freedom of the spirit was the most precious freedom, and this implacable foe of prejudice and superstition in any form pinned his hopes for human betterment on liberated intelligence.

But, turning from the general to the particular, we may ask: What has all this to do with the problems that most distress us here and now? Mr. Jefferson has been dead nearly a century and a half. Why look back to him for guidance? Why look to history at all? Such questions have been asked most insistently by the young, who are normally impatient and more disposed than their elders to think in terms of speed.

Some of our problems unquestionably clamor for quick solution, and, in an era of instantaneous news and supersonic speed, impatience is to be expected, From our point of view the age of Jefferson was unbelievably slow-moving, and one would

not expect a congenital optimist, who was notably patient as a reformer, to be to the taste of our young activists. But they should be pleased with one of the most¡ characteristic of his utterances: "The earth," he said, "belongs always to the living generation." To be sure, this should be regarded as a statement of fact, not as a value judgment. The father dies and the son takes over, but whether this is for better or for worse depends upon the son. As he may dissipate his inheritance so may a prodigal generation squander a priceless heritage. Jefferson first wrote these words in a revolutionary period, when shackles were being cast off in France as they had been in America, and at that precise moment he was particularly concerned that the living should not be overburdened with inherited debt. It will be recalled that during his Presidency he sought to prevent just that. We are concerned here, however, with more than financial matters, and certainly we cannot deny that the sins of the fathers have always been visited upon the children through successive generations. We are still reaping a bitter harvest from the seed the slave traders began to sow more than three centuries ago, and posterity will have to make the best of the ravaged earth that we shall leave it. There is a continuity in human affairs that is inescapable. There is something else that is inescapable: the responsibility that goes with ownership. As Mr. Jefferson reminds us, the present has to solve its problems in the light of its own circumstances: It cannot expect the past to solve them.

This is certainly not to suggest that there is no value in studying the problems of the past and the efforts of mortal men to meet them. By sharing the experience of the past we can immensely enrich our own experience and broaden our perspective. History abounds in suggestive parallels that can contribute greatly to the understanding of situations that are similar but not identical.

Knowledge of the American and French revolutions undoubtedly enables one to understand better the Russian and Chinese revolutions, but it is just as important to note the differences as the similarities. We can unquestionably profit from a considerI

N\C~ - -Lr~L) Visitors to the Jefferson Memorial in Washington are dwarfed by the towering, six-meter-high statue. Jefferson's writings appear on wall panels, and around the dome are his words: "1 have sworn upon the altar of God eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man."

a,tion of the efforts of Jefferson-or of Washington or Lincoln for that matterto meet the particular problems of his time.

To live with great men through great events is a great experience and a highly educational one.

H is a noteworthy fact, however, that Jefferson did not expect to be remembered for the offices that he held, not even the Presidency, or for the ways in which he handled particular problems. He recognized that with the passage of the years the constitutional framework could and should change and that anybody's policies could become outmoded. As his instructions for

his famous tombstone show, he wanted his name to be associated with things that were not subject to limitations of time but that involved changeless values. And to this day he is best remembered, not as the holder of the highest office in the land, but as the herald of what he himself called self-evident truths for which he made no claim of originality whatsoever. These were not for his own age only; he proclaimed them to each and every subsequent generation. His voice can still be heard in the Declaration of Independence and his Bill for Establishing Religious Freedom; and his faith in enlightenment took enduring form in the

columns and arcades of the university he fathered.

Although he founded a university, he is not famed chiefly as a creator of institutions. In fact, his present-mindedness tended to make him relatively indifferent and at times even hostile to them. (I am referring primarily to public institutions, not to private ones like the family. He was one of the most devoted family men who ever lived.) Believing as he did that the earth belongs to the living, not the dead, and being concerned as he always was to maintain a maximum of freedom, he was opposed to an established church, fearful of a

'To this day he is best remembered, not as the holder of the highest office in the land, but as the herald of what he himself called self-evident truths. These were not for his own age only; he proclaimed them to each and every subsequent generation.'

71...- - 5 -'1- )0 i cpermanent military establishment, and undisposed to develop a bureaucracy of any sort. He did not favor change for light and transient reasons, and this' optimist was generally a gradualist. Early in his first Presidential term he quoted with approval the remark of Solon that "no mQre good must be attempted than the nation can bear." To the fiery revolutionaries of our own time he probably seems a tame and timid creature. But no contemporary of his perceived more clearly the inevitability of change and the necessity that institutions keep pace with it. "Nothing is immutable," he said, "but the inherent and inalienable rights of man."

He was in his sixties, by which time one is generally beginning to dislike any sort of change, when he referred to the absurdity of requiring a man to continue to wear the coat that fitted him when he was a boy. In our day, when we have outgrown so much of our institutional clothing, the metaphor has particular appropriateness. It is not that all our garments are too small; both in government and business some appear, in fact, to be much too large for either efficiency or responsibility. (One thinks of the disease known as elephantiasis.) But there can be no possible doubt that many of these garments are ill-fitting. All human institutions-political, economic, educational, religious, and the rest-tend after a time to proceed on their own momentum and to be valued for their own sakes. We tend to become forgetful of the purposes of their creation. Any dynamic society faces the perennial task of revitalizing its institutions and adjusting them to changed circumstances. In our own case the problem is enormously complicated by the fact that circumstances have changed so greatly (often for the worse) and with such unexampled speed. Mr. Jefferson lived in what was called the age of revolution until our age pre-empted the term. I have lived through far greater change than he did.

In scope and dimension the Russian and Chinese revolutions far exceeded the American and the French. I myself am only dimly aware of the managerial revolution and I am a bewildered bystander in the atomic age, but I am certainly competent to com-

Monticello, the 35-room mansion that Jefferson designed/or himsel/near Charlottesville, Virginia, is one 0/ the most beautiful historic homes in America. It is a showcase 0/ Jefferson's talents as an inventor. Mechanical contrivances include dumb-waiters, hidden staircases, lever-operated double-door openers, swivel chairs and an interior weather vane.

ment on the revolution in transportation and communication, since I vividly remember the horse-and-buggy days. Therefore, I am personally aware that the automobile alone has effected a revolution in the American way of life. Indeed, I am constrained to say that it is the Frankenstein monster of our era; our creature has become our master and threatens to destroy us.

This is a far cry from the age of Jefferson, who never even saw a train, who in fact never saw anything faster than a horse!

He cannot be expected to tell us how to escape from perils of which he never heard and the like of which he did not even imagine. But he can remind us of the purpose of institutions and thus help us to assess the values of our own. One of the self-evident truths mentioned in the Declaration of Independence is that government was not instituted for its own sake but for the sake of human beings; man was not made for the state but the state for man. So, by inescapable logic, are businesses, schools, and everything else, even churches. The purpose of them all is to advance and maintain hu-

man rights, human interests, and human values, and their success or failure must be judged by these standards. Under our historic philosophy, therefore, a major task of any and every generation is to humanize its institutions.

How to do this is, of course, an enormously difficult problem, requiring all the intelligence and good will that can be mustered, but surely the first question that should be asked about anything and everything is: What value does it have for people? And, as it seems to me, the humanist is one who recognizes the primacy of human values and seeks to promote them.

This leads me to say that the perennial task of humanistic scholars, of whom I regard myself as one in spirit if not in attainment, is to keep the humanities human. Learning can become very barren when pursued for its own sake remote from life; and scholarship, like everything else, must be tested at last by its human value. Pedantry is an ever-present danger, and so is intellectual snobbery. By humanization, however, I do not mean popularization as it is commonly

understood. We do not have to cater to the whims and fancies of the moment in order to demonstrate our humanity, and our usefulness cannot be measured by the standards of the market place. We can continue to be respectful of the English language.

We certainly do not need to resort to vulgarity, which is in abundant supply already.

Victorian squeamishness is out of date among scholars as it is in other quarters', but those who are aware of the beauty and grace as well as the elemental power of great literature, can serve our loud and anarchistic age by upholding standards of good taste and good manners.

If I have devoted disproportionate attention to the field of learning, when there are such massive problems elsewhere, I have done so in part because I strongly believe in self-criticism. Workers in all fields may be invited to apply the test of human value to what they do, or make, or sell.

They need not and should not disregard economic values, but they should do more than tell us how much money they themselves make. It will be recalled that Mr. Jefferson was chiefly responsible for our adoption of the decimal system of coinage, which has so greatly facilitated our monetary transactions through the generations.

But he himself seems never to have used the dollar mark. In his account books to the end of his days he used a capital D. This practice may suggest that in financial matters he tended to be old-fashioned.

Alexander Hamilton undoubtedly thought him that. The property he esteemed most was real property-land and what was on and in it. He charged his colleague, the first secretary of the treasury, with seeking to flood the country with paper. It is a fair guess, I think, that he would regard our world of stocks and bonds as more remote from reality than the one he lived in. And I do not doubt that this man who never used the dollar mark would be surprised by the tendency in our society to put it on everything. (Innumerable illustrations could be adduced. One that should come to the mind of any sports fan is the customary practice of summing up the winnings of golf and tennis players, whose achievements and rank, one would assume, can be ascertained from the adding machine. A more significant one is afforded by the attempt, recently reported in the papers, to determine the monetary value of a human lifeand the expense to which society is warranted in going in order to save it.) A word might be coined for this reduction

of achievements and things and people to monetary terms. This might be "monetize" or "dollarize." The process of "monetization" or "dollarization" has gone so far that we may be disposed to take it for granted. We may need a visitor from another generation, like Mr. Jefferson, to remind us that there are other measuring rods, other criteria.

I am too impressed with his realism to believe that, if he could observe our society, he would denigrate legitimate economic interests and basic economic values.

But perhaps a fresh eye from the past could perceive more clearly than we can the major problem of which we are beginning to be aware. It is that of reconciling the economic system with values that transcend the economic and may be said to be those o'pife itself. The problem has been brought very forcibly to our attention of late in connection with the environment and the limits, actual or alleged, of material progress. In fact the problem ramifies in all directions, and we are confronted with a whole series of dilemmas.

Very recent history affords a striking example. The U.S. Government, desiring to stimulate a lagging economy, has made it easier for people to buy automobiles by removing the excise tax on them, but certainly it can be argued that we have too many cars already. My sympathies are with those who must decide which horn of a dilemma society is to be impaled on; in very many cases they will have to choose, not between good and bad, but between the greater and the lesser evil. No specific formula can be provided in advance, but I think that Mr. Jefferson as a reader of the classics and a disciple of the Renaissance could suggest a general principle that is timeless: "Man is the measure of all things." Man-not money.

Yet, as we must recognize, man himself is the main polluter, the insatiable consumer, the great destroyer, his own chief enemy, a dreadful creature in many ways.

But there is really no such thing as man; man is an abstraction. The reality is people, individual human beings: male and female, young and old, rich and poor, villains and heroes, saints and sinners. (However else they may be 'described, they are amazingly durable and quite indomitable.)

It has been said that the most important thing about Thomas JetI:erson was his attitude toward people. It is indeeq a noteworthy fact, a wonderful fact, that he retained his faith in them after all he had

gone through. It should be pointed out, however, that although gullible at times, he was no sloppy sentimentalist with respect to people. He viewed them as individuals and fully recognized that there were fools and rogues among them. He did not suffer fools gladly and he admitted to John Adams that the rogues had a way of getting on top. In the Declaration of Independence he said that all men are born equal, but, quite clearly, he did not believe that they were or could be equal in all respects. Undoubtedly he regarded them as equal in rights, as equal before the law. (I cannot enter into the nowobvious contradictions imposed by slavery.) Although full equality before the law may never have been attained in the United States or in any other country, even among free men, the principle is undeniable and immortal. Equality of status, while approximated in particular instances in American history (on the frontier, for example), has never existed in our society as a whole, and, in fact, cannot be expected to do so under conditions of freedom, since these permit men to lag as well as to strive, to fall as well as to rise. (No condonation of the ever-widening gap between the very rich and the very poor is intended. To any humane mind that is inexcusable.) Jefferson was especially concerned to remove artificial restrictions of every sort. In this way he sought to promote equality of opportunity, as he did more positively in his educational proposals. More than most of his contemporaries, he emphasized the importance of environmental factors, and he displayed no interest whatever in genealogy, but he recognized that differences in native endowment are a fact of life, and this man of the hills never thought that society could or should be reduced to the monotony of a level plain.

Nowhere is this better shown than in his dialogue with John Adams, when these two old men exchanged views on aristocracy in their justly renowned correspondence. Adams introduced the subject in letters full of quotations from Greek and Latin that he commended to the consideration of his learned friend. The Sage of Monticello replied: "I agree with you that there is a natural aristocracy among men.

The grounds of this are virtue and talents. . . . There is also an artificial aristocracy founded on wealth and birth, without either virtue or talents .... " These two veterans were agreed that this artificial

aristocracy was a "mischievous ingredient one would not suppose that, even then, in government," while differing about the such a highbrow would have been hailed means to prevent its ascendancy. Jefferson beyond any of his major contemporaries continued to believe that a free citizenry as the people's friend. Since he made would generally choose wise and good hardly any speeches, and no Presidential men to represent and govern them. His tours, he was only a symbolic figure to countrymen have never forgotten that he most people. But his humanity, besides retained his faith in political democracy, being reflected in policies, was abundantly but many of them have been unaware of manifest in his personal relations. Friendly the faith in ability and character with warmth was natural and habitual to him, which he supplemented it. At the age of according to John Adams, and, charac70 he wrote John Adams: "The natural teristically, he showed respect for the aristocracy I consider as the most precious opinions and personalities of others, high gift of nature for the instruction, the trusts, and low alike. He treated his department and government of society." heads as peers and he was noted for makHis desire to safeguard, develop, and ing his dinner guests feel at home. At the utilize this "precious gift of nature" is end of his Presidency his French chef said clearly manifest in his educational pro- that he had never enjoyed working for posals. His belief, so advanced in his day, anyone so much. This may have been that educational opportunity should be partly due to the fact that as a gourmet universal has subsequently gained all but Jefferson could appreciate his chef's dishes, universal acceptance among his country- but there can be no doubt of the affecmen. In fact, they have made a religion of tionate relationship between them. Nor it. Coupled with it, however, was an idea can there be any doubt of the affection that was long overlooked, namely, that between Jefferson and his Irish coachman, progression from one stage of free educa- with whom he exchanged many letters tion to the next should be based on the after his retirement. He received innuselective principle. Details need not con- merable communications from persons seeking cern us, but we should note that the test all over the country-students was to be, not status or wealth, but merit. advice about books, observers of natural As we know, this test has been widely phenomena who hastened to report these applied in recent years in connection with to him, inventors of potentially useful or scholarships and other grants, and as a obviously absurd devices. All were aware result, fresh reservoirs of talent have been of his interest in any sort of contribution tapped. (This would delight Mr. Jefferson.) to knowledge or improvement. There was One wonders, however, if this wise policy a good deal of old-fashioned formality in is not now threatened by a tide of in- the hundreds of replies that he penned discriminate egalitarianism. Society can- with his own hand to these people, who not be expected to provide unlimited edu- were surely not his equals; in our casual cation for everybody regardless of ability, age these letters seem a little stilted. But and it cannot afford to be indifferent to they were in no sense patronizing; they excellence. were notably devoid of arrogance. Respect There are those in America today who for the personaliti~s of other people may would describe Jefferson as an elitist, not be obtainable by legal or governmental whatever that may mean. Although he was means, but surely it is the essence of good a foe to special privilege and vested in- manners, of democracy, and of equality. terests, he certainly was not disposed to Thus, through the generations, Mr. Jefreduce human society to the dull level of ferson has been speaking not only in the mediocrity. In his day they do not seem language of high intelligence but also in to have talked about elitists, and at the that of universal humanity.

0 height of his career he was designated by his supporters as the "man of the people."

His enemies used other terms, but during About the Author: Dumas Malone, biographerin-residence at the University of Virginia, is an most of his Presidency his popularity was eminent American historian and one of the immense. This may seem surprising, since world's leading authorities on Thomas Jefferson. he disliked crowds, built his house on a He is the author of Jefferson and His Times, a mountain, and, in our terminology, was six-volume work of which four have been pubindubitably an intellectual. These things lished. His other books are Thomas lefferson were less disadvantageous in politics at as Political Leader, The Story of the Declarthat time than they afterward became, but ation of Independence and Saints in Action.

The

Revolution Heard Round the World The first battle in America's war for independence began with, in Emerson's words, 'the shot heard round the world.' And the ideals of liberty for which that war was fought have echoed across the globe for more than two centuries.

Writing to John Adams some 45 years after the event, Jefferson observed that "the flames kindled on the 4th of July, 1776, have spread over too much of the globe to be extinguished by the feeble engines of despotism; on the contrary, they will consume those engines and all who work them."

Jefferson's remarks, inspired by counterrevolutionary forces in Europe, revealed a balanced judgment that, outside his own country, the doctrines expounded in the Declaration ofIndependence he had authored had not yet prevailed. Still, he refused to be discouraged. "I shall not die without a hope that light and liberty are on steady advance," he remarked.

Two centuries after Jefferson's assertion of revolutionary principles was adopted by the Continental Congress, there are enormous spaces on the globe wherein the Declaration is accepted more as rhetoric than as reality. But if the Declaration failed to ignite an instant worldwide conflagration, it was not for want of trying. The American public was informed without delay. On the night of July 4, John Dunlap, the Philadelphia printer, issued the Declaration as a broadside, signed by John Hancock as president of the Continental Congress and attested to by Charles Thomson, as secretary.

Although not until July 19 did Congress order it engrossed on parchment and signed "by every member" (several months passed before all 56 signers complied), Congress publicly proclaimed the Declaration at Philadelphia's Old State House on July 8. Almost at once handwritten copies were sent by Jefferson to a few friends in Virginia. The printed broadside was distributed through every state. Within the week the document began to appear in numerous colonial newspapers. Washington had it read to his troops encamped in and around New York, and saw to it that his subordinates had it duly proclaimed to the men under their commands. And one stat<!legislature after another endorsed the Declaration.

Congress was equally concerned about mobilizing world opinion. On July 8 the Secret Committee of Congress, which conducted foreign affairs, dispatched a copy of the Declaration to Silas Deane, the American agent in France, following up with a letter dated August 7 in which he was instructed to make the document known to France "and the other powers of Europe."

Although formal connection with the British court had been severed, it was assumed that copies of the broadside would reach English friends of America through ship captains sailing for

England. As early as August 5, the inhabitants of St. Kitts, West Indies, were reported to be toasting "WASIDNGTON, LEE and INDEPENDENCY to America." On August 14, Governor William Tryon of New York, in enforced exile on the ship Dutchess of Gordon off Staten Island, dispatched a copy of the Declaration to Lord George Germain, the colonial Minister, writing that every vestige of royalty had been demolished by the rebels in New York. About the same date, the royal governor of Nova Scotia received the Declaration, but permitted the printer merely to publish the closing paragraphs in which Congress formally declares independence.

The Declaration appeared in the London Chronicle and the Daily Advertiser of London on August 17. The Gentleman's Magazine (England's popular news monthly) published it in its August issue, with a tactful comment by a writer cloaking his identity under the pseudonym "Sylvanus Urban." "Whether those grievances were real or imaginary, we will not presume to decide," he remarked, adding, "The ball is now struck, and time only can shew where it will rest."

Tht1 August issue of Scots Magazine dissected the reasoning and the grounds of indictment set forth in the Declaration, and found that they reflected "no honor" upon either the "erudition" or the "honesty" of its authors. Ridiculing the doctrine of equality as contrary to everyday experience and dismissing the claims to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness as "talking nonsense," the magazine implied that there was something hypocritical about effusions for liberty emanating from a people who maintained the troublesome institution of slavery.

It was impossible to elicit a direct comment from George III, that "Royal Brute of Briton," for whom the Declaration of Independence reserved its most eloquent and ringing indictment, charging him with being "a tyrant" and "unfit to be the ruler of a free people." The King maintained a scrupulous silence until October 31. On that day he opened the House of Lords with a speech-drawn up, of course, by his Prime Minister, Lord North.

Feeling no special affection for his "ungrateful children," as he continually called them, he must have relished some of the comments that were put in his mouth. Denouncing their leaders as "daring and desperate," he conceded that they had "now openly renounced all Allegiance to the Crown, and all political Connection with this Country," presuming to set up "their rebellious Confederacies for Independent States."

The Declaration of Independence 'is no longer the exclusive literary property of America, but belongs to the world.

It is a continuing¡ commitment which rests heavily on the conscience of all mankind.'

British Whig statesman Charles James Fox said the Americans were "no worse rebels" than the English in 1688.

An address approving the sentiments of the King's remarks revealed that the peers were sharply divided, supporters of the Ministry denouncing the "insolence of the rebels" and Whig opposition factions forming a united front in condemning the address. Both the Marquis of Rockingham and the Duke of Grafton expressed support for the stand of the former colonists.

The Duke of Richmond conceded that it would be much better to have the Americans "as friends than enemies," and expressed the view that England would find it necessary to acknowledge them "as so many independent States." Yet the Ministry remained in complete control of the House of Lords.

Though similarly successful in the Commons, the Ministry did not manage to avoid even more turbulent scenes. Charles James Fox observed that the "Americans had done no more than the English had done against James II," while the irrepressible John Wilkes, only recently Lord Mayor of London, hailed the "spirit and courage" of which the Declaration of Independence provided proof, and predicted that "posterity" would do it justice.

"I hope, and believe, you never will conquer the free spirit of the descendants of Englishmen, exerted in an honest cause. They honor and value the blessings of liberty."

The debates in Parliament had revealed how sharply divided England was over the Declaration of Independence. Not so long-, suffering Ireland which was ever cordial to the cause of America.

The Declaration of Independence was speedily noted in that country, appearing in August in both the Hibernian Journal and the Freeman's Journal. In pointing to the American example, the Irish patriot Henry Grattan voiced the views of Protestants and Catholics alike.

"When America manifests to the world her independence and power," Grattan asked rhetorically, "do you imagine you will persuade Ireland to be satisfied with an English Parliament making laws for her?" To keep from having to fight a civil war on a second front, the British Parliament made substantial trade concessions to Ireland and at war's end granted the Irish Parliament a coordinate status under the Crown. As Grattan put it, "the American war was the Irish harvest."

It was not until November 17 that Silas Deane, America's agent in Paris, received from Congress the copy of the Declaration of Independence dispatched under date of July 8, but apparently held for the covering letter of August 7. Both arrived simultaneously after a fast 35-days' passage from Salem. Of course, everyone in Paris was already talking about it.

The French Ministry acted promptly. The Comte de Vergennes, Louis XVI's Foreign Minister, and one already disposed to providing America with secret aids pending the right opportunity to join the war against England, brought the matter before the

J

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, the great German poet, was ecstatic about "the spirit 01'76."

King and Council on August 31. As Vergennes saw it, the Declaration of Independence greatly diminished the prospects of reconciliation between erstwhile colonies and mother country. He pointed out the advantages France might derive from the altered state of affairs.

When copies of the Declaration came to Deane, he promptly turned one copy over to Vergennes, informing him that France was the first foreign power to be notified and renewing his request for recognition. The wily Frenchman was not easily moved to alter his cautious posture toward a quasi-ally. There was nothing to be gained by an open avowal of independence on France's part, he rejoined. French ports were open to American ships and commerce "and greater indulgencies allowed than to any other nation." Should France have to go to war with England at some point, it would be far better that the conflict originate from some other ground. This would place America under a less immediate obligation to France. In addition, Vergennes reminded Deane, France was required to consult her allies on a question of going to war.

Unlike the Spanish Government, which maintained an icy silence on the subject of American independence and did not permit the publication in Spain or her colonies of the Declaration, the French Government, for reasons of its own, sponsored a propaganda journal known as the Ajfaires de l' Angleterre et de I'Amerique. Starting publication in 1776, that journal printed such subversive documents as the Declaration, along with the state constitutions, which French ideologues invariably hailed as path-breaking events.

Despite censorship in many coun~ries, it was impossible to keep news of the Declaration of Independence from spreading, even though the text was at times denied publication. The Venetian Ambassador to England sent a copy to the Foreign Office, enclosed in a communique. The enclosure disappeared and the public never saw the full text in print. Instead, the Venetian periodical Storia dell' Anno translated some passages of the document, but added a caution that the preamble contained "some false and baseless maxims, which are abhorred by wise governments and which would subvert all nations, should they not immediately and universally be recognized as erroneous and fatal to public tranquillity."

Contrariwise, Philip Mazzei, a Florentine aficionado of all things American, received from his friend Jefferson a draft of the Declaration, had copies made and sent the texts of both the Declaration and the Pennsylvania constitution to Grand Duke Leopold of Tuscany. That reform-minded ruler saw to it that the Declaration was published in complete translation.

Although Goethe, Schiller and other literati sounded ecstatic

I

.~ \h ~

,

John Wilkes, much cartooned British radical, hailed the Declaration of Independence.

~~I

~

Thomas G. Masaryk, the Czech freedom fighter, adopted the Declaration's phraseology and spirit.

about the Spirit of '76, the heads of the German states, from Frederick the Great of Prussia to Maria Theresa of Austria, showed no enthusiasm for the arguments advanced by the American subversives.

Nor was Catherine II of Russia, who could be quoted as both favoring and opposing American independence, depending upon her hearer, less scrupulous in avoiding any act which could be construed as recognizing the United States. Nonetheless, the Comte de Vergennes made a point of sending a copy of the Declaration to Russia's Foreign Minister in 1780. Although strict censorship prevailed in Russia, a Moscow publisher, Nikolai 1.

Novikov, provided much news coverage of the American Revolution in his newspaper.

Novikov managed to pursue his pro-American line without interference from the authorities. A.N. Radishchev, in his stirring Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow, hailed the American Revolution, state constitutions and leadership, and was exiled to Siberia.

If the Declaration of Independence helped popularize notions of the right of revolution as a last resort, of popular sovereignty, of liberty and equality, it was the French Revolutionary era which made it seem mandatory to issue a declaration of high principles to justify the overthrow of established authority.

When, in August 1789, the French National Assembly adopted the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen, they were in form paying tribute to Jefferson's Great Declaration while drawing substance from the Virginia Declaration of Rights.

Nearby, in the Austrian Low Countries, the Belgian people started their own revolution in 1789, with each province separately declaring its independence. Flanders appropriated words from the American Declaration.

When Greece was swept by revolt against the Turks in 1821, the Greek assembly at Messina addressed an appeal to the American people, pointing out that it was the Americans who had first proclaimed "those rights to which all are by nature equally entitled." After formulating their own Declaration of Independence and provisional constitution, the Greeks adopted the Constitution of Troezen with its assertion that government rests on the consent of the people and on the principles of equality before the law, freedom of speech, along with safeguards against arbitrary taxation and imprisonment without due process.

By the time of the Greek revolution, Latin America was in the throes of a struggle to achieve independence. Young Richard Cleveland of Massachusetts and William Shaler of Connecticut, undertaking an extensive voyage along the coast of Latin America, anchored at Valparaiso, where they learned from some Chileans who took them into their confidence that they "resented

their state of vassalage" and dared express the hope that "emancipation was not far distant." The New Englanders carried among their wares a Spanish translation of the Declaration.

Every state in Latin America issued its own declaration of independence upon revolting against Spain or Portugal. Perhaps the closest parallel in language to Jefferson's Declaration is that of Argentina, while, curiously, in Brazil, the declaration was proclaimed by a single man, the Prince Dom Pedro, who, professing to voice the will of the majority, made his deClaration verbally.

In a more recent era-lest we forget-Thomas G. Masaryk, heading a Czech government-in-exile, issued, only a month before the Armistice ending World War I, the Czechoslovak Declaration of Independence, so alike in phraseology and spirit to the document drawn up 142 years earlier in Philadelphia. While Masaryk signed the "Declaration of Common Aims of the Independent Mid-European Nations," a bell, a replica of the Liberty Bell of '76, rang out, and the Declaration was then read to a crowd.

From the Declaration of Independence issued by a group of 33 Korean patriots on March 1, 1919, down to neutralist Burma, whose declaration was proclaimed on January 4, 1948, Asian nations regardless of ideological commitment have paid obeisance to the Great Declaration. Even the "MacArthur Constitution" of 1947,' drawn up for Japan on the initiative of the occupation forces, has a preamble affirming the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

I "All men are created equal." These were Jefferson's words in ¡1776. They were also Ho Chi Minh's in 1945, appearing in the opening sentences of the Declaration of Independence of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam. Ho's use of them was overt and intentional. American members of the ass mission who made parachute drops to Ho in the summer of 1945 recall his efforts to obtain either a copy of the Declaration or an approximation of its essential passages.

Were Jefferson alive today, it might be a source of gratification to him that his Great Declaration is no longer the exclusive literary property of America, but belongs to the world. It is a continuing commitment which rests heavily on the conscience of illman~~ 0 About the Author: Richm'd B. Morris ranks among America's foremost historians. He has published a large number of books, some of which are: American Revolution-A Short History; The Peacemakers-The Great Powers and American Independence (which won for him Columbia University's Bancroft Award) â&#x20AC;˘. The Making of a Nation; and The Emerging Nations and the American Revolution (see November 1975 SPAN and page 50 of this issue).

THE CENTURY OF THE AMERICAN DREAM The American Revolution had an impact on freedom fighters all over the world, and the ideals of the new republic were beacons of light that drew millions of oppressed people to America throughout the 1800s.It was an era when the United States seemed to be, in Lincoln's words, 'the last best hope of earth.'

It was, indeed, the century of the American dream.

Some decades or centuries o( human history, even in long perspective, stubbornly resist any real generalizations. Others take on a theme, a tone, an authentic meaning of their own. Such is the case with the approximately 100 years from the early 1800sto World War 1. Whatever the necessary qualifications on the term, these years were the Century of the American Dream.

The major center of global activity was Europe and the United States. The issue was sharp and clamorous: whether Europe would finally shake off the Middle Ages.

On the one side were the formidable forces of the past-the ancient European monarchies with their rule of dissident nationalities and of empires overseas and their allies, the large landowners, the established churches, and most of those who had high income and station. On the other side was the mounting agitation of European "liberalism" -not the latter-day New Dealish liberalism calling for government intervention in economic and social affairs but a 19th-century middle- and upper-middleclass variety. It concentrated on replacing monarchy with representative government, loosing nationalities from imperial or colonial domination, and ending economic controls and social lines that impeded the middle class's sense of being free and its opportunities for profits. More or less attached to the liberals was a whole congeries of dissidents from below the middle class who had still more expansive ideas of who should rule and profit. It was an era of crust smashing, and for those raising hammers to the status quo, the model, the per-

sistent catalytic, "the eternal damned nuisance," as Winston Churchill remarked in one of his amused brandy-and-cigar moments, was the United States.

To a considerable extent, America played its special role simply by existing. In view of the limited communications of the time, it is remarkable how much Europeans of many classes knew about the land 3,000 miles away. America was news. To the liberal it seemed the very model of the liberal republic. Had it not wrested its nationhood from an old-style monarchy and done so to the cathedral prose of Thomas Jefferson? Had it not plunged ahead, oblivious of aristocracy, banning any established church, opening a continent to free political institutions and to uncontrolled, unabashed striving to get ahead? Had it not thrown up that peculiarly evocative figure, Abraham Lincoln-in many parts of Europe as well known as any national political figure-who had come out of the nobody classes to the White House and to the declaration that America and America's way constituted "the last best hope of earth?"

Conservatives had predicted that the free institutions of the United States would lead to anarchy, and they expected the Civil War to end the silly doings overseas.

After Abraham Lincoln's Union survived, the imagery of America gained that much more in potency, particularly because it seemed to represent a triumph over a plantation class resembling the old feudal aristocracy of Europe and because it was accompanied by a ringing blow for freedom, the emancipation of the slaves.

During most of the Century of the American Dream, the United States bother-

ed little with foreign policy, but some of its moves and gestures had the appropriate tone. The most significant came as early as 1823. The thrusts of the Holy Alliance-a loose phrase for the continental monarchies-against Latin American nationalist movements and the Russian threat to move down from its Alaskan territory into the disputed Oregon area brought a torrent of American emotion. "The Holy Alliance and the Devil," ran the popular toast.

"May the friends of liberty check their career." The brilliant and endlessly maneuvering Prime Minister of Britain, George Canning, had much to do with the ensuing action. But out of it came the passages in President James Monroe's Message to Congress, promptly known as the Monroe Doctrine, which bluntly declared that the Holy Alliance represented a "political system ... essentially different ... from that of America." It must stay out of the Western Hemisphere, or the United States would view the actions as hostile to itself.

After another few decades Europe erupted in the liberal revolutions of the 1840s, which sought to give independence to submerged nationalities and to replace monarchy with representative government.

A burgeoning "Young America" movement demanded aiding the revolutionaries with, to quote a vehement speech of Senator LP. Walker of Wisconsin, "both moral and physical power." The U.S. Government spoke through a gesture that, minor and almost comical as it was, reverberated

through Europe. Out from Secretary of State William L. Marcy went a "request" to American diplomats to appear at European chancelleries not in the traditional plumage but "in the simple dress of an American citizen," meaning black evening clothes. George Bancroft was writing a 10volume history of the United States that was one long vote for Jacksonian democracy. Now U.S. ambassador to Britain, he was accosted by an English diplomat, who asked why Americans wanted to look "like so many undertakers." Bancroft's reply was chill: "We could not be more appropriately dressed; we represent the Burial ' of Monarchy."

The United States came closest to actual intervention when the Hapsburg AustroHungarian empire was shaken by the Hungarian independence movement led by Louis Kossuth, he of the romantic handsomeness that made people think of Lord Byron, the rousing eloquence-in Hungarian or an engagingly archaic English learned from Shakespeare-and the gentle, enigmatic blue eyes that kept suggesting the poet and prophet of the onrushing future.

While the Hungarian revolution was still running its course, President Zachary Taylor instructed an American emissary to hold out a promise of prompt recognition of a rebel government. When Hapsburg imperial troops, aided by Russian Czarist forces, crushed the movement, the exiled Kossuth arrived in the United States to a bedlam of welcome.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow watched the New York City reception and murmured that the public had gone "clean daft"; one salvo of cheering went on for 15 minutes. During eight months, in American cities from Albany to New Orleans, Kossuth campaigned for American money and American intervention. Immense crowds cheered wildly; one Cincinnati banker subscribed $10,000, and women rushed to the podium with rings and necklaces for the cause ofliberty. The climax came at an address before the U.S. Congress, the first by a foreigner since Lafayette, and at a White House dinner for Kossuth, where he spoke, one guest enthused, "like some divine voice for man's eternal right to freedom." Also moved, Secretary of State Daniel Webster rose to reply: "Hungarian independence ... Hungarian control of Hungarian destinies!" Webster was 70 years old and about to die; no U.S. intervention came, and the American dollars and necklaces did no good. But the extraordinary figure left behind him Kossuth beards, Kossuth cigars, Kossuth hats, Kossuth County, Iowa -and a decided impression that America had a fervid eye on the monarchies.

Time after time, more or less directly, the U.S. Government made itself heard against Old World medievalisms, most notably in 1903 when a Russian pogrom savaged the Jewish ghetto of Kishinev. Privately, President Theodore Roosevelt and his Secretary of State, John Hay, could be more than sniffish on the subject of southern and eastern Europeans, especially Jews.

But the men had another side, which Hay had expressed in a poem that was bad enough to be sincere: Wherever man oppresses man Beneath Thy liberal sun, o Lord, be there, Thine arm made bare, Thy righteous will be done!

Roosevelt and Hay took steps that amounted to a strong protest to the Russian Government against the pogroms.

Like Kossuth's pleas, the objection was futile and the brutality rampaged on. But this, too, reverberated.

Some day a historian with the needed touch of a poet will catch the full nuances of the great migrations that have done so much to shape man's 5,000 years of recorded history. Surely, he will give emphasis to the massive flow of people concentrated in the Century of the American Dream, when some 55 million men, women, and children

left Europe, 35 million of them coming to the United States.

The bluntest effect of this migration to America was in the realm of simple economics. Unless the birth rate is of Asian proportions, a continent cannot lose multimillions in a century-most from the farm or urban working classes or the lower bourgeoisie-without drastically lowering the supply of people to do the dirty work and putting those who remain in a better bargaining position. In some parts of Europe, an outburst of immigrant fever could strip a farm area or a factory town of as many as half of its workers. There were other plain facts. Immigrants to the United States showed a persistent tendency to send money back-to parents, a brother, a cousin. The total figures are not too well recorded, but the case of Greece is suggestive. In the early 1900sas much as $5 million a year was coming from America, in the observation of one member of the Greek Parliament, "transforming" the position of many a villager.

Increasingly, the sons of Europe interfered directly in the affairs of their fathers and grandfathers. For the most part they stressed the nationalism in liberalism, but the strong overtones of upsetting every vestige of the old ways were there. The

For revolutionaries around the world, America was 'the model, the persistent catalytic.' It was, in the words of Winston Churchill, 'the eternal damned nuisance.' most obvious instance came at the end of the 19th century, when Irish-Americans poured money and sent more than a few men into the Irish war for freedom from England. It is not surprising that at the height of the Irish rebellion the dominant figure was Eamon de Valera, born in New York City, the son ofIrish and Spanish immigrants (Irish enemies said that his father was a Portuguese-American Jew), and counting among his prime efforts for the cause an American tour that raised the

then astronomical sum of $6 million. No European nationalist movement was without important financial and emotional aid from overseas-not even in tiny Lithuania, where a good deal of the nationalist revival was attributable to the enthusiasm and dollars of the 100,000 or so LithuanianAmericans.

The strongest influence had nothing to do with dollars. Day after day the sailing vessels and then the steamships carried huge sacks of mail from immigrants to their families and friends in Europe. Some of the¡ letters expressed bitter regrets over the move; many emphasized bleak loneliness, harsh conditions, and grueling work.

But the overwhelming tone was a songoften a crude one and just as often peculiarly moving-to life in what was frequently called the "land of Canaan." In the later period photographs often tumbled from the envelopes. Osiek, Poland, gathered in awe at the sight of Adam Falkowski, who only a few years before had tended geese in the village pond and now, a coal miner in Shenandoah, Pennsylvania, was in his Sunday best: a frock coat dropping below the knees, a thick chain across his white vest, and starched cuffs peeping out of his sleeves.

The letters sent to Scandinavia have been the most intensively studied. "America letters," the mail was called in Denmark, Norway, and Sweden (seldom did the immigrants speak of "the United States" ; the connotations clustered around the word America). New York might be written "Nefyork"; Illinois, "Elinoys" ; Iowa, "Adiova"; but the glad tidings kept breaking through: "I worked for two days and with only that I was able to buy another cow.... Out here we own two hundred acres. Two hundred acres .... The hired man eats at the master's table. Pastors and bankers carry. market baskets .... My cap is not worn out from lifting it in the presence of gentlemen .... There is no title sickness here. I say, 'Hello, Peter,' not 'Good morning, Mr. Jeweler Anderson.' ... I do not lay awake fearing military conscription .... I vote as I please and vote against people all the time without being downed .... When I hate something I just move without asking any official or clergy. ... Freedom, freedom, that is the way here. It lifts the lowly and brings down the great." Nothing human was omitted from the apostrophes to freedom. Amalie Javenskjold had a special word for the women: "A dowry is not needed. Your face and your willingness to work will get you a husband." Besides, this is "the kind of country

where when husband beats you, you feel cottage and up and down workers' flats, you can hit back." often printed on the front pages of local It is often overlooked that immigration papers, discussed, and rediscussed and rewas a two-way street. Of the 35 million rediscussed. The more the letters were talkwho came, perhaps as many as a third re- ed about, the more they stoked a demand turned to the old country to visit or to re- that those who stayed home should have main. Once again some of the visitors and their America, too. returnees brought denunciations of the In the early 19th century, conservatives United States. Most were walking "Amer- had shown little interest. In fact, so far as ica letters"-including an overwhelming immigration was concerned, they were inpercentage of those who went back perma- clined to consider the exodus good ridnently and were using money that they had dance. In the early 19th century, Britain, been able to earn and save in the United States to live in a way far better than they had known in the old days. The stories One 19th-century were the same throughout Europe. Hans Mattson, of SkoglOsa, Sweden, seeking a European lady was shocked career in the army, decided that his chances by American servants were slim because he was not of the nobiliwho 'act toward ty and headed overseas. Eighteen years later he visited Skogl6sa and, having be- their mistress as an equal. come a colonel in the U.S. Army, was a An equal! What kind subject of such celebrity that servant girls of country is that drew lots to determine who would bring his coffee. The Slavic immigrant Edward A. anyway, that America?'

Steiner wrote of the woman he knew who had made her way to Chicago, scrounged and saved to resettle back in Hungary and Denmark, Sweden, and Switzerland all had marry, and was ready "with glowing eyes" organizations encouraging and in some into tell anyone of the days "when she lived stances financing migration; reputedly, the on South Halsted Street, ate thin bread Russian Government issued railroad tickwith thick jam on it, and the land was flow- ets to Jews at reduced rates-good only on ing with sausages, lager beer, and chewing westbound trains. But as the effects became gum." plainer, the attitude shifted sharply. In The immigration, combined with the some localities conservatives set up a tangle general symbolism of the United States and of impediments to migration; they sponof its foreign stance, was having powerful sored publications that made the American and pervasive effects. They went far be- Dream sound like a nightmare. And in an yond the economic. In a celebrated speech ironical way they paid their own tribute to of 1866 Lord Acton, the British liberal the effectiveness of the attitudes from overleader, found the phrase: America was be- seas. Through all they did and said ran an coming "the distant magnet." Apart from irritation, a queasiness, a fear-the fear "the millions who have crossed the ocean, that the American influence would destroy who shall reckon the millions whose hearts their whole sense of superiority in a way and hopes are in the United States, to that was not simply political or economic. whom the rising sun is in the West ... ?"

Near the end of the 19th century, an upThroughout Europe and to some extent in per class Viennese woman visited a friend's Latin America, liberal politicians and jourhome, where she watched a servant girl nalists used America as the example by who had lived in the United States. The which they could demand changes at home. woman left the place livid: "These servant Some of them added an especially pointed girls come back with gold teeth in their argument: If Europe were to check the mouths, and with long dresses that sweep "great hemorrhage" of migration, its coun- the streets .... They do not kiss our hands tries would have to reform whether they when they meet us ... and they act toward wanted to or not. Quite unintentionally, their mistress as an equal. An equal! What the America letters were proving one of kind of country is that anyway, that the great propaganda machines of modern America? What kind of world will it be?" times. They were passed from cottage to World War I roared in and out, beginning the modern process of ripping up maps, loosing new social forces and ideologies, opening the way for a massive skepticism of liberalism. Clearly the Century of the American Dream was beginning to wane.

What record did it leave? Certainly, all is not glowing. Any majo,r penetration by the American Dream was basically limited to Europe. It inflamed nationalisms, hardly the path to a more civilized globe. It largely ignored black, brown, and yellow peoples; in fact, during much of the period when Americans were telling the world to liberalize, they were banning most Asians from migrating to the United States. The American Dream, like all such concepts, had its hypocrisies; and particularly in the early 20th century, it could be an arrogant and dangerous mask for political, economic, and cultural imperialisms. All of this contributed to making the post-World War T years a period of snarling animosities and wars and to the upbuilding of communism, which promised the same material gain more directly for more people.

Yet there is an obverse to the coin, a momentous one. At the heart of the American Dream was a crimson-shot idea: Without regard to money or status a human being has the right to walk head high in the tonic air of self-respect and to seek for himself and his children an ever better tomorrow. For three generations that idea hung shimmering and summoning over the most important part of the 19th- and early 20thcentury world, helping to start endless rivulets of change toward democracy that often broadened and deepened.

And who can reckon, to use Lord Acton's words, what the idea has done outside the area of its strongest impact and after its years of greatest influence? Thinking about the question as I wrote this article, I questioned a friend who is an Asia expert. Does the American Dream have any real role in, say, contemporary China, for so long insulted by U.S. immigration laws and then subjected to thoroughgoing communist teachings?

He smiled. "There is a Chinese folk saying that the best of all possible worlds is Chinese cooking, a Japanese wife, and a home in America. What's more, on a recent visit I heard the saying twice within 10 days."

D About the Author: Eric F. Goldman, professor

of history at Princeton University, wasformerly a special consultant to President Johnson. His published works include Rendezvous With Destiny, which won him Columbia University's Bancroft Prize in History â&#x20AC;˘.Crucial Decade and After-America, 1945-60;and The Tragedy of

Lyndon Johnson.

In their Bicentennial Year, Americans are seriously reviewing their past, the heritage of their history; they're also looking at the future. In the interviews on these pages, six prominent Americans in different fields discuss the big question: Where is their country going?

"I AM HOPEFUL THAT NATIONAL

PRIDE WILL RETURN"

Richard B. Morris Gouverneur Morris Professor of History, Columbia University; also president-elect of the American Historical Association, and editor of a forthcoming work on the revolutionary, John Jay.

Q. Mr. Morris, what ideals of the American Revolution will carry over to the nation's third century?

A. May I say first that historians, who are presumably specialists about the past, seem to have extraordinary difficulty in agreeing about it. Consequently, it behooves them to approach the future with caution and humility.

To my mind, the fundamental notion today universally accept-

ed, even though many countries merely pay lip service to it, is the notion of the people as the source of power. This notion, I feel, will continue to be governing over the next 100 years.

Lincoln put it so much better when, at a time of crisis, he expressed the hope that a "government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth." In concrete ways the American Government has, over 200 years, proved an effectual working model. It has a built-in mechanism for the peaceful transition of power; it allows for an organized opposition party; it has a device known as federalism to protect state and local rule, and take into account geographical and social differences; it has builtin safeguards to protect civil liberties.

I think all these once-innovating and even revolutionary principles will carryover into the nation's third century.

Finally, the American Government has traditions of equal rights, of asylum for liberty, and compassion. I can't see America ever abandoning these guiding precepts. In fact, everyone of them has been implemented over the past generation by legislation, court decisions and by America's great humanitarian programs abroad.

Q. Will Americans ever regain the sense of national pride that was so strong in Revolutionary times?

A. I am indeed hopeful that national pride in an enlightened and humane sense will return, not in the sense of jingoism or notions of ethnocentric superiority.

In Revolutionary times, that

pride sprang from the conviction that a new nation was leading the world in experimenting with a new system of government that would bring about a better world.

It was a part of that sense of mission that Americans have never lost, but it was mission not contaminated by notions of "manifest destiny," imperialism or assuming self-appointed tasks as the world's policeman. _ Much of the world still looks to the United States for leadership in so many areas. To take a few: in the peaceful use of the atom; in directing resources and controlling the environment in ways that are beneficial to the whole earth, not to America alone. Surely, to be an American does not mean that we should turn our back on our world obligations.

Benjamin Franklin once expressed the hope that the knowledge of the rights of man would prevail worldwide some day, and that a time would come when a philosopher might set his foot anywhere on its surface and say, "This is my country." Franklin personified pride in nation in the best sense-a love for America and a conviction that it would be a world standard-bearer of humane progress.

Q. Can you hazard a guess as to how historians of the future will view 'today's Americans?

A. That is what it will have to be-just an educated guess, and no more than that. I think historians will find America has been slow to come to grips with the new perils that confront her: the shrinkage of energy resources; the dangers posed by the Middle East oil cartel and other commodity cartels; the perils to the environment of much of modern technology, and the high risk we are running by allowing federal, state and local governments to pursue unsound fiscal policies.

Historians will be puzzled why America cannot recognize the multitude of crises that are besetting her today, whereas it is easy to recognize the kind of crisis posed by Pearl Harbor. Why Americans seem to be hiding their heads' in the sands and thinking that business as usual will get them out of their difficulties will puzzle historians. They also will wonder why the government has not been able to mobilize support for the concentrated effort and sacrifice that is needed to attain self-sufficiencyin energy resources comparable with the operations which spurred the Manhattan Project [atomic-bomb development] and the moon shot.

Historians may well find that public officials, to whom citizens look for leadership in these matters, still seem to put politics ahead of national needs. In short, historians may find that American officials, stunned by a recent military misadventure of enormous magnitude and confronted with the twin problems of inflation and recession, are unusually timid in the programs they've set forth, and keep postponing necessarily

hard decisions when they should be galvanizing public opinion to support long-range measures in the national interest.

Q. As presently constituted, is the Bicentennial going to help the American people understand themselves and their heritage better?

A. That's indeed doubtful.

Most of the American people really won't understand it. I think it will bring home certain events to them, but as to the real meaning and significance of it, it's going to be mostly pageantry and sightseeing-like the restaging of the battles of Lexington, Concord and Ticonderoga. We have failed on the educational side to bring home the problems that existed in that period and the ability of the people of the United States to surmount those problems and create a viable state that lasted for 200 years.

The American people today are in a sort of identity crisis.

Who are we? Do we have a mission any more? What are we going to do with ourselves?

With the Bicentennial, there should be an opportunity to go back to what we were. We've lost all idea of what Americans are and what America stands for. We are losing sight of the main goals by staging a series of side shows.

The sense of national purpose is not coming out loud and clear.

Q. Do you think the United States will be able to continue as a democracy for the next 100 years?

A. I would hope we can produce the kind of leadership that would enable us to deal with the tremendously difficult problems that we now have and which undoubtedly will continue to burgeon over the next 100 years. So far, we have managed to function with reasonable effectiveness as a democratic society, and I don't find any tradition in our country which supports any other kind of society.

Let us hope we can remain an affirmative example to the rest of the world in maintaining human freedom in the face of increasingly pressing technological and demographic problems and continued competition from other political systems.

Q. Will children gain or lose by this process?

"WOMEN'S LIVES lose.A. First I don't see how they could of all, they would be WILL CHANGE wanted, not just thought of as " something "everybody does."

IN EVERY. WAY .. right now, in addition to beCv~ lU 1/1..) Z 3 -/u,}â&#x20AC;˘ And ing tracked along masculine or

An editor of Ms. magazine and author of many works on politics and sociology, especially in fields of women's rights and minorities. She is chairperson of Women's Action Alliance, a self-help women's group.

Q. Ms. Steinem, will women reach true equality with men in the United States in the next 100 years?

A. It's difficult to- know. The last time we changed from gynecocracy to patriarchy-that is, from women-superior systems that existed in prehistory to patriarchal male-superior ones-it apparently took about 3,000 years. But with increased communication, change can happen much more quickly now. I would say, though, it will take at least 100 years for the sexual caste system to be eliminated; for human beings to be judged as individuals, not by group of birth. It involves very deep anthropological change.

Q. How fected?

will families

be af-

A. Already, there is a variety of alternatives available, and that's the real point of the change. It's not that we want to replace the old imperative of the patriarchal nuclear family-father, mother and children-with a new imperative, because any single system would be wrong for many people.

There must be a variety of options -so that it becomes an honorable solution to remain single, to live with a group of people, to live with another person, to have children or not to have children, and so on.

feminine or racial lines, kids rarely have any community of their own until they get to school.

In the future, there will be more communal situations in which children will be around a variety of adults, as well as other nonrelated "family" members who are children of various ages.

After all, a three-year-old learns more easily from a five-year-old than from a 30-year-old.

At present there's no real understanding that kids also need their own peers in addition to adults in their lives, before they get to school and in their living situations. We badly need more communal situations and less isolation and ghettoization of people according to age or class or sex.

We create lonely individualsand artificial groups.

Q. How will the lives of women change?

A. In every way. Autonomythe ability to control our own bodies and work identities and futures-is a revolution for women. We're only just beginning to understand what it might be like.

Many may go on for more education. Even now, women are going back to school after they've had kids. The campus is no longer an "age ghetto" of people from 17 to 22-and that makes it more possible for men to go back, too.

Education may become a lifelong process for all of us, not just one intense time of preparation.

Responsibility for children won't be exclusively the woman's any more, but shared equally by men-and shared by the community, too. That means that work patterns will change for both women and men, and women can enter all fields just as men can.

It used to be said that women couldn't succeed in work because they didn't have wives. In the future, men won't have "wives" either-not in the traditional, subservient sense.

Q. What will be the effect on men of these changes?

A. Hopefully, men will also have the whole human range of characteristics, emotions and possibilities opened up for them, too.

Now, men are cut off from less of

these possibilities than women are -it's as if 25 per cent of human qualities were generally regarded as "feminine," while 75 per cent were marked off as "masculine."

The male prison is much bigger and more luxurious-but it's a prison nonetheless.

Q. Will there be a woman President in the next 100 years?

A. I don't know. That may happen, but only after all the other male "outs" are elected-a Jewish President, a black President, a Spanish-speaking President.

If we can judge from history, sex-based prejudice is the most intimate and deep-rooted; the last to go. Even now in corporate board rooms, minority men are usually invited to join the board before women of any race. White men affirm their masculinity by having a minority man on the board-providing, of course, that there are only one or two and can't outvote them. But to have a woman enjoying the same position, especially at upper levels, just devalues the work. Why should a man be honored byajob that "even a woman" can do?

If there is a woman President, it obviously won't change everything magically overnight. Still, it would be a major change, because at least we would have before us the image of a female person being honored in authority. At a minin'mm, it would set the dreams of our children free. Girls could then dream of becoming President. And boys could see that human talent comes in all forms.

Women in decisionmaking positions may also be important in creating a more peaceful society-at least until both sex roles are more humanized, and men feel less need to prove their masculinity with confrontation, toughness and even mass violence.

In fact, the false cultural division into "masculine" and "feminine" may itself be a root cause of violence. The one common characteristic of the few peaceful societies in the world is just that.

The sex roles are not polarized.

Boys are not made to feel they have to be aggressive or violent, and girls are not made to feel they have to be passive and do the supportive or cheap-labor functions only. It's fundamentally crazy that we are made to feel we have to "earn" our gender anyway.

Feminism brings something else to the political scene that's very important: a sense that change must start at the bottom, organically. It may be attached to theory, of course, but radical or revolutionary theories are meaningless unless they have some effect on an individual's daily life.

Women realize this especially because the many supposedly revolutionary schemes have left us out entirely. Our lives remain unchanged.

As an actress friend of mine once explained, she had been married to one Marxist and one conservative-and neither one took the garbage out. That's a populist way of putting it, but it's the truth. A revolution that doesn't change heads as well as institutions, that doesn't start from the bottom up, just can't be feminist and therefore humanist.

Revolutionary feminism can hook up our daily lives and our philosophy in a very healthy way.

"MANY AMERICANS WILL LIVE INTO THE HUNDREDS" ~ ~"- <-lo

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Dr. Charles A. Berry Formerly chief of medical programs of NASA's Manned Spacecraft Center, he was widely known as "the astronaut's doctor." He now is head of the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston.

Q. Dr. Berry, will Americans be healthier and live longer in the future?

A. There's no question about

it. Health is a much broader term than medical care. It doesn't only mean the absence of disease, it means a lot of other things which require social action, too.

For instance, health would mean that the individual is not going to be exposed to so many hazards from the environment which are going to cause him trouble, whether it's lead in pipes or air pollutants. It also means that he's going to have adequate nutrition and adequate housing.

In all those areas, Americans definitely will be healthier.

Q. Will life spans be much longer 100 yearsfrom now?

A. It's very difficult to say, but I think many Americans will live well into the hundreds. We already have increased the average life span of individuals born very recently. But we have not increased the life span very much of people who are now 40 or 50 years old.

Q. What medical breakthroughs do you foresee?

A. For one thing, there has been a tremendous amount of federal money funneled into cancer research. I can't believe that we can put as much effort as we are putting into the cancer problem and not find an answer to that problem. Study and great strides in immunology, with the possibility of immunizing people against cancer, may provide a tremendous part of the answer.

There are great advances occurring in this area today. If we look at the next 100years or so, I,think we will have conquered cancer by that time. That doesn't say that there still won't be occasional cases of cancer, but not so many as now.

The same thing is true in heart disease. We don't really understand the mechanism of atherosclerosis-a common form of hardening of the arteries-which is the big, big problem in heart disease today, along with the associated problem of hypertension. But we understand a great deal more about it. We've identified the risk factors, and can do something about prevention. I think we will have more and more activity going toward preventing heart disease.

It is possible to conquer both

cancer and heart disease certainly within the next 100years.

Other advances also are going to occur. There has been a lot of experimentation with so-called "living banks," where we have living tissues that are preserved for transplant. These tissues range from kidneys to corneas for the eye. There has been some work done in this area with hearts. The use of living tissue replacements will be fairly commonplace in the future. Also, there will be artificial organs developed in this time period. I firmly feel that there will be an artificial .pancreas developed.

There will he all sorts of artificial assists. We have a lot of assisting deviCes now with hearts.

Technology will advance to the point where we'll be able to have a lot of things which can be implanted as artificial organs.

We tend to think of aging today as being automatically associated with heart disease and high blood pressure and all that sort of thing. That's not necessarily so at all. Those things can be controlled. We're going to learn a great deal more about the aging process as we continue to whittle away at the things that tend to help "age" us.

Q. How will space research lie applied to our daily lives?

A. Already we are benefiting from space research with such devices as multispectral sensors.

With them you can look carefully at large swaths of the earth, thereby'making it possible to use our resources better . We use these sensors to recognize water sources, for example. They also allow us to recognize petroleum sources. They give us a better over-all view of what's happening with pollution and help us to solve such problems. Sensors also can be used to spot such things as breeding places for disease-carrying mosquitoes. These reservoirs of disease can be cleaned up and the sources of disease eliminated.

In the future, there will be even more enormous benefits. Technology will make it possible to do more and more things at home or

near our homes, instead of traveling long distances.

A lot of things, for example, will be accomplished over television hookups. A lot of business will be done that way. We may even get to the point where you can do shopping that way. Certainly it's feasible, perfectly feasible.

Q. But what is the connection with medicine?

A. That has direct application to medicine, because we have a lot of remote areas in our own country where there are very few physicians. Therefore, medicine practiced by a doctor in one place consulting with patients in front of TV cameras may become a reality. That is coming as a direct result of some of the things I did in trying to look at man 386,000 kilometers away on the surface of the moon. I had to evaluate, diagnose and treat him at that distance.

The judgment factor of the physician and the patient contact is still here, of course, and will remain so. With the use of this technology as we come into this next 100 years, the physician is going to get some time to utilize all sorts of tools-such as computers, TV and the transmission of electrocardiograms. The physician will have all kinds of data in a very rapid fashion for his analysis. Thus, he will be able to make a much more intelligent, educated and scientific decision as to diagnosis much more rapidly.

We're not at that point today, because a lot of physicians don't believe that technology is the answer, and a lot of patients certainly don't. We've all experienced getting tied up with the computer in the billing process, with the result that you spend months trying to clear up its mistakes.

People envision that same sort of thing in medicine, and they don't want to get their health tied up in a system like that. But those things are going to be worked out. J n the next 100 years, these machines will make the lives of Americans much better, still retaining the all-important human contact-a real renaissance in medicine.

Right: The Liberty Bell, one of the most revered symbols of America's fight for independence, serves as a constant reminder of the nation's ideals.

The United States has deep-rooted traditions of liberty and equal rights, as historian Richard B. Morris points out in his interview on these pages.

He says: HI can't see America ever abandoning these guiding precepts."

"I'M VERY OPTIMISTIC ABOUT THE FUTURE OF BUSINESS"

David Packard Chairman of the board of the HewlettPackard Company. He served as Deputy Secretary of Defense from 1969 to 1971, and heads the financial operations of U.S. President Gerald Ford's re-election campaign.

Q. Mr. Packard, will American business continue to have the vitality it has had for the past 200 years?

A. I'm very optimistic about the future of business. We have been through a period over the last few years that has been traumatic, but in terms of the fundamental research-and-technology base that is being built for business, and the progress that's being made in the management area, I think the future is very bright. Business is now becoming more responsive to the problems of society. This is as it should be.

Business will continue to make contributions in the material area, but also will make increasingly important contributions to large social problems.

Q. What kinds of new businesses and new jobs are ahead?

A. It's very difficult to predict.

We don't see a new automobile industry. We don't see a new radio and television industry. We do foresee, however, some very interesting developments in the field of electronic data processing -the ability to do things with hand-held devices that 15 years

ago took a very large installation or were not possible at all.

There are tremendous problems in dealing with the future of energy, health and the environmeflt, and I see great opportunities for business and industry through the judicious application of science and technology. The future, in my view, isjust as bright as it has ever been.

safety, and related matters. In some of these areas, the country has gone too far in imposing government regulations.

Nevertheless, there is a need to improve the environment and to improve working conditions in many areas. The real problem is whether an effective balance can be found between the freedom of management to manage its affairs Q. How long will the workweek and the ability of government to become? encourage the achievement of A. Here again, we are seeing . larger social goals. improvements in productivity.

Q. Will democracy continue in The application of technology Am~ricafor another 100 years? will generate further improveA. I'm convinced that demoments in productivity. That cracy will continue in America. I means that we will be able to pro- don't think the problems we're vide our food, energy and envi- facing today are as serious as ronmental requirements with few- some of the problems this country er hours of work. faced over the past 200 years. I see One troubling development is no reason to be concerned about we seem to be hiring more people the vitality of democracy today. in government, and there are It wiIl change and be adaptable to more rules and regulations. If this meet changing situations. But I trend continues, there may not be think we've demonstrated here, a shorter week, but simply n~ore particularly in the last two or people doing those kinds of three years, that our democracy things. has a great resilience and a great There is, however, a very high strength. I'm confident it wiIl surprobability we will have a work- vive all chaIlenges. week of about four days. We're already doing some experimenting along these lines within our company. We have flexible work "A WIDE RANGE hours now, and there's a great OF INDIVIDUAL interest in providing better opporCHOICES tunities for personal satisfaction of people who have to work.

WILL CONTINUE" It's very important in the summertime, for example, to allow more time for people to enjoy the out-of-doors. The combination of time for work with time for personal aspirations is something that's going to have to receive more attention in the future. We can make progress without reducing productivity. In fact, I think we'll see an increase in productivity.

Q. Do you foresee any basic changes in the relations between free enterprise and government?

A. There is already a rapidly growing trend for more regulation of business and industry by government. This has been initiated and encouraged by people interested in environmental problems, occupational health and

Andrew F. Brimmer Ford Foundation Visiting Professor at Harvard University's Graduate School of Business Administration. He was a member of the Federal Reserve's Board of Governors, 1966 to 1974.

Q. Mr. Brimmer, will the freeenterprise system continue in its present form in America for another 100 years?

A. No. I say that because the free-enterprise system 100 years ago--and even 50 years ago-did not have the form it has today.

Consequently, as I look ahead, I would expect to see continuous modification of the free-enterprise system. The basic underpinnings of the free-enterprise system will remain pretty much the same. We have in the U.S. a market economy. It isin the marketplace where the basic decisions are made as to what is to be produced, and how and for' whom production is to occur. That wiIl continue.

A wide range of individual choices also will continue. Purchases in the market place wiII influence production and distribution decisions in private enterprise, although there will be some modification in the range of choices.

Q. How much control will the government exercise over private enterprise?

A. Even now, there's a debate over the extent to which we need some kind of national planning in this country.

One of the key people in that debate is Wassily Leontief, the Nobel Prize winner in economics.

He's been one of the leaders in this effort to bring about some degree of what he calIs informal or democratic planning. Robert Roosa of Brown Brothers Harriman has joined in that effort, and so has Leonard Woodcock of the United Automobile Workers, among others. Their argument is that the economy is so complex that decisions about investment and consumption are made in a way which would not provide much guidance for the long run.

My own view is that we won't end up with a codified national plan presented by the President and adopted by the Congress, which would be a framework for coordination of national economic policies along with private economic policies. The American system is much more amenable to amendments on an ad hoc basis along the way. As needs arise, machinery will be devised to cope with those needs, and we will end up with much more precise forecasting of risks and benefits

involved in very large-scale projects.

Let me give an example: Already, there has been a greut deal of attention given to long-term investment requirements in the energy,field-such as huge power plants. Investors would be reluctant to undertake too much risk on those projects unless they had some reasonable assurance that the properties they are supporting with their resources would not be undercut drastically and left to float as debris on a sea of bankruptcies.

It looks more and more as if there will have to be some kind of assurances for investors if these huge, essential projects are to be built. Possibly, there will have to be guarantees against losses, which some people say might require federal ownership or participation in some way.

It is this need to pool the risks which I believe will lead to a somewhat more centralized, coordinated effort involving private enterprise and the Federal Government.

But those are the exceptions.

They would not be the rule. The vast range of investment, production and consumption decisions will continue to be made in the market place.

Q. Will minorities reach economic and social equality with the majority of Americans in the next century?

A. Yes-economically, at least.

When you look at what has happened in the -last 100 years, or even in the last 50 years, there is a basis for optimism.

This is what it will take to improve the lot of blacks, American Indians, people of Oriental and Spanish descent, and the other "left out" groups: an enormous investment in skills. That can be financed only by outside helpmainly, the Federal Government.

Clearly, these minorities themselves cannot, through their own savings, finance an investment in skills of the magnitude required.

Also, there has to be a reawakening in the U.S.-among whites as well as among blacks and other minority groups-of interest in equality.

If these things happen, I see no reason why economic equality should not be achieved. So I'm optimistic.

Q. Will the U.S. get anything in return?

"AMERICA' CANNOT SURVIVE ALONE ANY LONGER"

A. What we'll get will be a guarantee of our own survival.

What I'm really suggesting is that America cannot survive alone any longer. There is no way that a materially comfortable American people can go into the 21st century and survive unless the rest of the world is going along with it.

Q. What sort of government will we have by the end of this century?

Benjamin R. Barber Professor of political science at Rutgers University; author of two booksLiberating Feminism and The Death oj Communal Liberty.

Q. Mr. Barber, what will be our fortune as a nation as we move toward our third century?

A. One thing is certain: We are going to be called upon increasingly to cut back on our standard ofliving so as to offset population growth in other parts ofthe world.

We're simply going to have to help feed and clothe the poorer nations, because they won't be able to do it on their own, and they have resources that we need.

Let me give an example: America consumes $2,000 million in pet food every year. Is this a fair distribution of resources in a world where many milllons of people are getting below-minimal caloric intake day to day?

The United States population is six per cent of the world population. Yet, we consume something like 30 to 40 per cent of its resources, depending on whether you're talking about food or material.

It's a question whether America can preserve its freedom and traditional values without helping less-developed countries. From now on, the pressures on us from the "have nots" will be enormous.

The old notion of "lifeboat America" going 'its way while the rest of the world sinks is not really viable now. Rather, we have to talk about "lifeship Earth," on which I think probably the overwhelming reality in the next 25 years will be the reality of interdependence.

A. I think, given how strong and resilient the American Constitution is, it will still be recognizable. Indeed, some people may feel it will be too recognizabletoo unchanged.

There are, on the other hand, certain tendencies which are not very promising for American democracy. One is the trend toward increasing centralization of control in America at every level.

This is, in part, unavoidable, because it arises out of the nature of our technology, communications and the nature of a decision process which more and more requires instant reaction.

Another alarming trend is the persistence of racism. In a nogrowth economy, such as we may now be facing, there is bound to be substantial unemployment. Because minorities lose their jobs first, they suffer the most. If the present economic situation persists, they could lose the economic gains they have made over the past 30 years.

In global terms, too, it is the nonwhites who are suffering most from the faltering economy-only in this case the racial issue is starvation itself, for it is the 70 per cent of the world's population that is nonwhite that is suffering most from rising prices, monopoly control of energy resources and the world fiscal crisis.

At the same time, here in America, I sense increased disregard for the interests and rights of individuals. Particularly as these international ecological, economic and fiscal problems develop, governments are going to be more and more strapped for solutions, and less and less willing to make . sacrifices in, the interests of individuals and groups. The battle for

civil liberties at the level of the individual and the press is going to become critical in the coming years, Q. Despite the frustrations and problems ahead, will America be a happier and healthier society in its third century?

A. It depends on how America adapts.

The stress on Americans is going to increase. This has already been a century of crisis, and I think that crisis, anxiety and "permanent revolution" around the world are going to continue to put very, very heavy stress on Americans. It's going to confront their private well-being and happiness with unsettling public dilemmas.

The real happiness of Americans is going to depend not so much on continued material growth but rather on the capacity to meet growing ecological crises and international problems.

The American people are still resilient, resourceful problem solvers. Furthermore, Americans are far more willing to make sacrifices than political leaders understand.

President Ford said during the energy crisis that people would have to make sacrifices. I believe many Americans were willing, in effect, to give away a fortune to meet the national emergency. But President Ford only asked for a nickel. r think that led to a great psychological letdown. Americans are prepared at present to give a great deal more than they have yet been asked to do.

But, obviously, there are limits as to how much Americans can

do individually or as a nation.

Many commentators have talked about the 20th century as "the American century," and in some ways I suppose it has been the American century. It seems clear to me, however, that the next century cannot be and will not be an American century. Indeed, it will not be a century that belongs to any nation. It will be a globJ.l century, which for the first time truly belongs to all nations and all the people in them.

I believe that America's willingness and capacity to help make the next century truly a global century will be the key to our own happiness and the measure of our historical success as a nation and as a people.

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AMERICA IN THE UNIVERSE

C.REATINGNEW WORlDS

by ISAAC ASIMOV

A L - Y;/ 75 If 3

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The American 'frontier spirit'-liberty, individualisfn, adventure-found magnificent fulfillment in the Apollo program that landed men on the·moon. But more exciting achievements lie ahead. U.S. scientists believe that it may be possible for millions of people to live in 'colonies' between the earth and the moon. This concept is more than a dream; its feasibility is discussed in .this article, with color illustrations from the N ationa] Aeronautics and Space Administration.

7..J 1'?1' { J G ./t;A 1- 7S - 1-1 c-·z 7 J (7y.'!-f _ /.- '0 Illustrations at left and /long and 6.4 kilometers in The teacup-shaped 7 "islde a space colony. above show outside and diameter-are shown as you containers that form rings The area could be inside views of the "space would see them from your around each cylinder are fashioned to resemble colonies" envisioned by approaching spaceship, agricultural stations. Each the California coast, the American scientist Gerard some 30 kilometers away. cylinder is capped by a plains of the Punjab, 0' Neill. Looking at Each colony in this power station. Large the Rhineland of Germany, the picture at left, you picture could accommodate movable rectangular or any landscape. must imagine yourself in the a population of 200,000 to mirrors on the sides of Earthlike gravity could 21st century-a space several million. The the cylinders direct be produced by centrifugal colony resident returning cylindrical portion is the sunlight into the interiors, force resulting from "home" after a holiday living area; the interior thus regulating seasons and the cylinder's rotation on earth. The twin cylinders would be a replica controlling the day-night around its long -each 32 kilometers of an earth landscape. cycle. Above: The view axis every 114 seconds.

Reprinted by permission of the Saturday

Review. © Saturday Review/World, Inc.

.

J W1.L C$' I C( 1 ~AN J

JULY 1976

57

The population bomb ticks on steadily ....

We are 4,000 million now, in 1976. Barring catastrophes, we shall be 7,000 million in 2002. We must reduce the birthrate and lower the population, but that will take time. What do we do meanwhile?

One answer is that we do as we have done before. We must take up the trek again and move on to. new lands. Since there are no new lands on earth worth the taking, we must move to new worlds and colonize the heavens.

No, not the moon. Profes::;or Gerard O'Neill of the physics department of Princeton University suggests two other places to begin with-places as far from earth as the moon is, but not the . moon. Imagine the moon at zenith, exactly overhead. Trace a line due eastward from the moon down to the horizon. Twothirds of the way along that line, one-third of the ,Wayup from the horizon, is one of those places. Trace another line westward from the moon down to the horizon. Two-thirds of the way along that line, one-third of the way up from the horizon, is another of those places. Put"an object in either place, and it will form an equilateral triangle with the moon and earth.

What is so special about those places? Back in 1772 the astronomer Joseph Louis Lagrange showed that in those places any object remained stationary with respect to the moon. As the moon moved about the earth, any object in either of those places would also move about the earth in such a way as to keep perfect step with the moon. The competing gravities of earth and moon would keep it where it was.

Professor Gerard O'Neill wants to take advantage of that gravitational lock and suggests the building of space colonies there, colonies that would become permanent parts of the earthmoon system. He envisions long cylinders designed to hold human beings plus a complex life-support system, facilities for growing food, maintaining atmospheres, recycling wastes, and so on.

O'Neill's vision sees hollow cylinders with human beings living on the inner surface, a surface that is designed and contoured into a familiar world with all the accoutrements and accompaniments of-earth. The cylInder would be composed of long, alternating strips of opaque and transparent material-aluminum and tough plastic. Sunshine, reflected by long mirrors, would enter and illuminate the cylinder and turn what would otherwise be a cave into a daylit world. The entry of light could be controlled by mirrors to allow for alternating day and night.

The inner surface of the opaque portions of the cylinder would be spread with soil, which could be used for agriculture and, eventually, animal husbandry. All the artificial works of manhis buildings and machines-would be there, too.

What makes this concept plausible and lifts the vision out of the realm of science fiction is the careful manner in which O'Neill has analyzed the masses of material necessary, the details of design, the thicknesses and strengths of materials required, the manner oflifting and assembly, and the cost of it all. The conclusion is that the establishment of such space colonies is possible and even practical in terms of present-day technology.

It would be expensive, of course, and getting the process started would require an input equivalent to what the U.S. spent on the Apollo program. But O'Neill demonstrates clearly that the expense would decline rapidly after that. As the colonies increase in number, they could be expected to grow larger and more elaborate, too. O'Neill conceives the first space colonies to be only as large as is required to be workable-two spinning cylinders, each 1,000 meters long and 100 meters wide, supporting a total of 10,000 people.

It is from the sun that the colonies would obtain their energy -a copious, endless, easily handled, nonpolluting form of energy.

It would be used to smelt the ores, power the factories, grow the

'J

food, recycle the wastes.

O'Neill envisions larger cylinder-pairs, too, and has calculated the requirements for some as large as 32 kilometers long and 6 kilometers wide. Each cylinder of a pair like that would be as wide as Manhattan and half again as long, would have a total inner surface 10 times as great as that of Manhattan, and could support up to 20 million people if it were exploited to the full, though 5 to 10 million might be a more comfortable population.

With so great a width, the cylinder would have a sufficient depth of air within to allow a blue sky and to support clouds.

The end caps of the cylinders could be modeled into mountainous territory-full-sized mountains, not just bas-reliefs.

But where are we to get all the material for the construction of these space colonies? Our groaning planet, sagging under its weight of humanity, with its supply of key resources sputtering and giving out, couldn't possibly afford to give up the colossal quantities of supplies needed for it all.

But earth is lucky, for virtually none of the material need come from our planet. As it happens, we are supplied with a moon, an empty and dead world that is one-eightieth the size of the earth.

It is close enough for us to reach-we have already reached it over and over-and it is free to be used as a quarry.

Lunar material will yield the aluminum, glass, concrete, and other substances needed for constructing the colony. Lunar soil will be spread over the interior surface, and on it agriculture will be practiced. Not only is all that material present on the moon in virtually unlimited quantities, but lifting it off the moon against that body's weak gravity would require only one-twentieth the effort necessary for lifting it off earth.

The first space colony would be by far the most expensive, even if it were small, for we would have to supply not only the

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What would be the lifestyle of people living in space colonies? This painting by Don Davis, which shows people (foreground) picnicking by a hillside stream, gives us an idea.

They live in a colony having an ecology, biosphere and environment similar to those of earth. The colony would be powered by solar energy â&#x20AC;˘.raw materials would come from lunar rocks.

The size of the colony is indicated by the bridge, which has as long a span as the 8.25-mile San Francisco Bay Bridge.

The small distances on the space colonies would make it unadvanced equipment, the machinery, the various life forms, the necessary to use high-energy systems for transportation.

Bicycles basic food supply and energy, but even some two per cent of the would be ideal for the ground, and with the lowering gravity, raw materials. After that, there would be leapfrogging. Each gliders would be perfect for air transport-and amusement. space colony would help to build up the next, while the facilities As the space colonies increased in number, the room available for mining, smelting, shipping, and constructing would be ever for human beings would increase, too, and at an exponential improving. In the end, new colonies might be formed with no rate. Within a century there could be room for 1,000 million peomore trouble than it now takes to put up a new row of houses ple on the space colonies, and by 2150, perhaps, there would be in the suburbs. more people in space than on earth.

O'Neill thinks that if all were to go optimally, the first space The colonies could act as a safety valve that would give colony could be floating in space by the late eighties and that humanity a somewhat longer time to accomplish the population several hundred more elaborate colonies would be there by the turnabout without absolute disaster. mid-21st century. These would be comfortable worlds, not, like It may be that finally, when a stable population is attained earth, taken as found, but carefully designed to meet human needs.

The temperature and weather would be controlled; energy would (or at very worst, one that is growing only as fast as can be handled by additional colonies), the earth itself will be only be free and nonpolluting; weeds, vermin, and pathogenic bacteria thinly populated. It will then, perhaps, be devoted to carefully would be left back on earth. preserved wilderness and park areas. It may serve as a monument Danger? Difficulties? Yes, some. to man's origin and to the prehuman ecology, and it would be The possibility of a meteor strike exists, but that is not very supported largely by tourism. strong. A meteorite large enough to cause serious damage to a colony is so rare that the time between strikes could be counted Almost as important as the basic fact that room would be in the millions of years per colony. found for humanity is the additional fact that it would be found Energetic solar radiation is dangerous but would not be a in thousands of different, isolated, and culturally independent problem in a cylinder protected by aluminum, plastic, and soil. places. Each colony would have its own way of life, and some Cosmic rays are much more serious. They are ever present and might be quite a distance ofr the norm. Among the offbeat ever dangerous and very penetrating. There is some question as _ colonies, we could imagine puritanical ones and hedonistic ones, to whether O'Neill's original design offers sufficient protection. libertarian ones and authoritarian ones, Orthodox Jewish 'ones and hard-shell Baptist ones.

About the Author: Isaac Asimov, associate. professor of biochemistry at You could choose where you wanted to go; and if you were Boston University, is one of America's most prolific-and popularborn on one, you might choose to try another-or at least visit science and science fiction writers. He has published 143 books, and one. Human culture would explode in variety, with each colony hundreds of his articles have appeared in magazines all over the world. having its own styles in clothing, music, art, literature. The

CREATING NEW WORLDS

continued

Artist's conception of the approach of night in a space colony, as seen from the slopes of the mountain at one end of the cylinder. The colony is in orbit around the earth (top center), which has almost shut off the sun from sight.

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options for creativity in general and for scientific advance in particular would be unbounded.

These are difficult times. The Apollo program, by its very success, seems to have taken the shine off space ventures; the world's economy teeters; there is widespread disillusionment with glowing dreams.

But perhaps mankind will answer to the lure of immediate and high-visibility profit. With that in mind, perhaps, O'Neill is carefully working out the details of an ancillary idea-the practical economics of establishing a structure designed to be a "Satellite Solar Power Station" (SSPS), one that will absorb sunlight and convert it into microwave energy that can be beamed to earth for use as direct electrical current.

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IEarth could, in thi way, be supplied with copious, nearly pollution-free energy. The amount of land that would have to be devoted to microwave reception would be, by O'Neill's calculations, as little as five per cent of that required for direct solarenergy reception, because the inefficient part of the operation would be kept out in space.

It is the energy crisis, then, that may be offering us the opportunity.' It is solar energy by way of space that may serve as the bribe. And, if the opportunity is seized and the bribe is accepted, space colonies could follow almost inevitably. With that might come the salvation of humanity and its entry into a new and larger scene with over-all changes as momentous as those that followed the discovery of fire.

0

THE

REVOLUTION CONTINUES 'Can we successfully move our society toward a higher level of human existence? All the elements are there-in our founding ideals, in the initiative of our society, in the problems we face, in the vision of what we could become.'

It is purely a coincidence that we are witnessing the emergence of the second American Revolution during an era in which the United States is celebrating the Bicentennial of the first American Revolution. Yet, it is an interesting coincidence and a fitting way to celebrate that Bicentennial, for the driving force of today's movement is to fulfill the ideals and promises that were artiCulated 200 years ago.

The Declaration of Independence is a radical document. I have heard of secondary schoolteachers and college professors who changed the wording of the Declaration slightly to remove the obvious clues to its 18th-century origins, and then passed it out to their students and asked them to identify it. The number who thought it was the Communist Manifesto was surprising.

The Declaration was, after all, a revolutionary manifesto. It held that "all men are created equal," that they are endowed "with certain unalienable rights," including "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness." Its basic message is that when men are oppressed they have the right to take action against that which afflicts them.

A few years after the Declaration was signed, it was followed by the Constitution, which, if less radical, nevertheless anchored the principles of the Revolution. It elaborated the inalienable rights of men and established a governmental system to se-

' cure those rights. Here, the basic message is that within the reasonable limits of such a system for the common good every person shall have maximum freedom.

The Second American Revolution-the humanistic revolution-is one of fulfillment, designed to bring finally to fruition in modern times not only the letter, but the full spirit, the intent, of these great documents. To grasp this, it seems to me, is essential to understanding what is going on today.

There is one very specific indication of the linkage between the America of 200 years ago and that of the present, an indication which has received little attention in the media and among the public generally. I refer to the 1971 White House Conference on Youth that took place in Estes Park, Colorado. The organizers of the conference took care in selecting the 1,000 youth delegates so as to achieve a representative sample. All minorify groups, all sections of the country and various educational levels were represented. The result, most observers felt, was a genuine cross section of American youth.

I stress this representativeness because of the surprising document the conference produced. What interested me most was the preamble to the conference report. The very first sentence said: "We are in the midst of a political, social and cultural revolution." Citing the coming 200th an-

'The Second American Revolution will not depend upon any single event, but upon the gradual spread of the new values and increasing willingness to face up to our social problems.' niversary of American Independence and the "high ideals upon which this country was ostensibly founded," it went on to say that these ideals "have never been a reality for all people from the beginning to the present day." The goals of the revolution were clearly stated: It is time now finally to affirm and implement the rights articulated in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. Each individual must be given the full rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

The preamble called for additional rights, and listed shortcomings and grievances in strong language. Then it concluded: Out of the rage of love for the unimplemented principles we here assert, we challenge the government and power structures to respond swiftly, actively and constructively to our proposals. We are motivated not by hatred, but by disappointment over and love for the unfulfilled potential of this Nation.

The preamble is a powerful statement.

Many, I am sure, would find some of the rhetoric harsh and overstated, but this overdramatization is only another clue that we Americans are indeed in the midst of a revolution. We have only to recall the anguished' outcries of our patriots of 200 years ago.

These young people are patriotic in the deepest sense of that term. It is no accident that they chose the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution as the philosophical bases for their report. Clearly, they believe in their country and its historic ideals. They are concerned with the substance of patriotism, not the symbols.

Criticisms of "the system" are frequently heard today, but it is obvious that the young people at Estes Park were not denouncing the framework of our democratic political system that was erected 200 years ago. Quite the opposite. What is at issue is how our political system functions; how well or how poorly all the many elements and institutions of our society that have grown up in the past 200 years function.

Democracy is the most fragile and difficult political system ever devised. Its fragility lies precisely in the fact that it is the system best suited to the human condition itself, since it allows maximum free-

dom for all the whims and emotions, the all know well that the U.S. economic wants and the needs, of the individual system is not an unmixed blessing, that it person. Democracy is difficult because men is exploitive at times of both resources and people, that too few people share in and women are difficult.

Can such a fragile political system sur- ownership, that along with big government vive the revolutionary pressures that now it has produced huge impersonal instituexist? That is a crucial question, and for tions, which can be dehumanizing to the the present, one can answer it affirmatively mind and spirit. We know that our system is the prime initiator of a set of attitudes only on faith. An equally important that call for steadily increasing consumpquestion is whether our system can surtion, for more and more, and bigger and vive a failure to deal with the real issues bigger. and problems that confront us' today.

Consider, too, our native ingenuity and I am not an unremitting social critic. inventiveness, which, harnessed by govI find a great deal to praise and to celebrate ernment and the economy, have produced about my country and its heritage. Yet, modern technology.

We have come permy purpose now is not to seek out that ilously close to allowing technology to be which can be praised or to work out some our master rather than our servant. We balance sheet of good and bad, but to have used it unstintingly in the service understand the driving force behind the of the "military-industrial complex," as revolution of today. And that requires an President Dwight D. Eisenhower referred examination of what is wrong and what to it, and far too little for social needs. I can be made better.

Much of what is wrong has roots in do not see the current revolution as beour history, and this is where I believe the ing against technology, but rather as being young people at the Estes Park conference for putting technology in its proper perwere quite correct in pointing to the rec- spective. ord, to the gap between. promise and There is a long agenda in the area of reality, to the shortcomings we have lived social justice. Americans all know that if with so long. It is no doubt comforting to your skin has some shade of color or if think, as many Americans do, that certain you are of some clearly identifiable ethnic stains on our history are over and finished origin, the rules tend to be tougher. It is with, but the more deep-seated ones have harder to get a good job, to get a useful a way of persisting or of reappearing in education, to live in a decent home and modern form. One has only to think of neighborhood, to get adequate medical the legacy of slavery' and of our treatment care, to join a club, to get honest credit, of the American Indians, or of our tendency to get insurance, to receive full justice in to engage in foreign adventures much less courts of law. glorious than those wars that were necesMuch of the substance of the revolution sary for creating and preserving our has become obvious in the massive social freedom. problems that afflict U.S. society and, Many of our shortcomings are not the indeed, the world today. They are almost result of anyone's deliberate and evil all of long standing, but they seem to have design, but the unwitting product of some burst upon us simultaneously. Only in other motive or drive which in itself is recent years have pollution and the effects praiseworthy. Consider, for example, the of population growth become widely pioneering spirit born out of the westward recognized. It has been two generations drive to expand to the full limits of this since President Franklin D. Roosevelt continent. It produced a breed of rugged spoke of one-third of a nation ill-fed, illindividuals, but also a pattern of life in clad and ill-housed. Now it is perhaps onewhich competition predominates over com- fifth of a nation, and poverty once again passion, .violence is an ugly undercurrent is a burning issue. In the 1950s, we disand exploitation and destruction of na- covered civil rights; in the '60s, the urban ture's bounty are seen as natural. problem; in the '70s, the environment.

Consider, also, our economic system, One could add to the familiar list of which is one of the marvels of the modern problems at great length-drug abuse, world and in no small way makes possible crime, transportation systems in disarray, the revolution of which I speak. Yet, we ugliness in our cities (and not just in the

slums), weaknesses in our systems of education and medical care and so on. They may have been long in the making, but the crucial difference now is that we are aware of them all at once, aware to the point that our nerve ends are rubbed raw.

We have a crisis of awareness, and this in turn has produced a crisis of faith' in terms of the future of our society.

Finally, there is the crucial dimension without which the revolution would have to be called something else-the dimension of values. Underlying everything I have said about the revolution so far is the profound shift taking place in the values by which we Americans order our lives and our society. The humanistic values stated at the founding of our society and the materialistic ones that have predominated throughout our history have often been in conflict. The outcome of the revolution will depend on how that conflict is resolved.

If I am correct in the view that the N"'ple want to see our society move forward in humanistic directions, then clearly w¢ will need to create a "politics of humanism." Our political processes must give expression, coherence and leadership to the humanistic revolution, and must become the testing ground for the change that will be needed if it is to succeed. A politics of humanism will depend on maximum involvement of the people, on the ability.pf our political institutions to reflect their wishes as to change, and on the

emergence of political leaders who see the vision of a truly humanistic society and dedicate themselves to its attainment.

I believe that a politics of humanism is indeed emerging in our society today. I alp encouraged by the growing involvement in politics, particularly by the moderates, and the increasing evidence that our political system can change.

When I speak of growing involvement, I am of course viewing the political spectrum broadly, which I think is proper.

Politics is much more than institutions, processes, candidates and voting. It covers any activity by the people in which they attempt to influence public policy and the public interest, whether locally, nationally or internationally. Much of the ferment on the part of blacks, young people, women, consumers-is political in nature. Certainly a peace march, an "Earth Day," an investigation of a regulatory agency by "Nader's Raiders," a "Women's Lib" demonstration, are all political acts. They are not only designed to influence our political processes and institutions, but are supplying some of the humanistic content of the Second American Revolution.

Direct political action has also been growing, in such forms as voter-registration drives, working in campaigns, lobbying, testifying before legislative bodies, running for office. It is no longer an oddity to find young people, women and blacks running for public office. There is a whole new wave of young black politicians seek-

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ing and gaining office at the state and local .levels. Young people have become a new source of effective campaign workers.

Political activism is definitely spreading to the large center of American politicsthe moderates whom I spoke of earlier as the long-range hope for a successful outcome to the humanistic revolution. This can be seen in the broad coalition groups lobbying for change, in reform efforts within our two major political parties and in renewed interest in local candidates and issues. City hall, the county seat and the state house are not the same any more as this decentralizing trend in American politics begins to have its effects.

Political ferment has been a marked characteristic of our society in recent years -and is likely to be even more so in the 1970s. With few exceptions, this ferment is indicative of health and vitality. For this is the way that ideas are tested, issues are raised to visibility, new values are infused -and, ultimately, that change occurs and decisions are made in the public interest.

One of the most hopeful signs is that the new involvement in politics appears to have staying power, which has not always been true of "reform" efforts in the past.

The typical pattern in American politics at the state and city level used to be a long toleration of machine rule, and then a burst of energy by reformers to throw the rascals out. But the energy rarely was sustained, and soon the rascals would be back in. Many feared that the growing

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The youth of America threw down this challenge: 'It is time now finally to affirm and implement the rights articulated in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.' interest in politics by the young would also be transitory, that if their candidates did not win, the young people would conclude that the "system" was hopeless and quit. As long as there are candidates who truly represent their views, it seems clear that young people are ready and willing to be involved.

Staying power is crucial, because political institutions and processes are certainly not easy to change. In The Greening of America, Charles Reich wrote that the revolution he saw emerging would "change the political structure only as its final act."

In some respects, he may be right, but the fact of the matter is that eletnents of the political structure have changed, and more will change. Moreover, as I have just indicated, the humanistic revolution is inherently political in the broadest sense.

Important and relevant political change can be seen as far back as 1954 in the U.S. Supreme Court's outlawing racial segregation in schools, and even more directly in its historic "one-man, one-vote" decisions in the early 1960s. The reapportionment and redistricting that followed have changed the map of American politics, literally and figuratively. One commentator credits these decisions with "making it possible

for the majority to translate interests and desires into politically effective solutions for pollution, suburbap sprawl, alienation, desegregation and poverty."

The most difficult area of changeamending the Constitution-has occurred in the case of giving the 18-year-olds the right to vote and seems assured in the case of the Equal Rights Amendment outlawing discriminatory practices against minority groups, including women.

In speaking about change here, I find this a good juncture for reaffirming that I am not advocating change merely for its own sake, merely to do something differently. I am interested only in purposeful change, change that serves the end objective of a better and more fulfilling life for all.

To make a process of purposeful change effective, it is essential that political leaders emerge in America who understand and espouse a politics of humanism.

I believe this is already happening and will definitely increase in the years ahead. It is almost an inevitable result of political ferment and it is indispensable to forming and realizing the agenda for change that the humanistic revolution is all about.

What will be the characteristics of ithis

new leadership?

First will be a genuine concern for the problems confronting the nation and a commitment to getting down to the tough job of working out solutions. Increasingly, candidates who do not have a convincing program for encouraging and facilitating change simply will not be elected or reelected.

Second will be a sensitivity to the political ferment that characterizes our time, a recognition that, more than a "new politics," there is a new involvement in politics, and that it must be responded to, understood, encouraged.

Third will be a tolerance for diversity, a recognition of the inherent strength in differences, and yet a skill in reconciling divergent viewpoints into a concerted whole.

Finally will be a patience that col!1es from an abiding confidence in our political institutions and the nation they serve, a deep sense of personal commitment to the purposes for which the United States was founded.

I have attempted to explore areas of needed change, to help i~entify the issues that form the agenda for the humanistic revolution. These are the issues that require

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a politics of humanism, and leaders who and more, their participation will be crucial back. Any of these courses will not only embody the qualities on which such a in the attainment of a giving society, a sacrifice that positive vision of the future, learning society, a planning society. politics must be based. but endanger what we now hold is good The Second American Revolution re- and right in our system. Only once before These leaders are going to have to respond to the people in bringing popula- quires both people who care and respon- in our history did we face the ultimate test. tion and natural resources and the environ- sive political leaders. Their interaction will Now, as then, the issue is, in Lincoln's ment into an effective balance on "Space- be a long-term process that will have its words, whether "government of the peoship Earth." They will have to help bring moments of progress and its setbacks. It ple, by the people, for the people, shall not about a "humanistic capitalism," to distri- will not depend upon any single event, not perish from the earth." If it does, there bute wealth more equitably, to provide even a Presidential election, but upon the will be no talk of humanism. meaningful work opportunities, to channel gradual spread of the new values and And so we confront the ultimate test growth more in human than in material increasing willingness to face up to our once again-whether we can crystallize a directions. Their leadership will be essen- social problems. sense of purpose and summon the will to tial in redirecting the role of the Federal The agenda for constructive change is do what must be done. I believe all the Government, in finding effective ways to formidable. We confront it at a time when elements are there-in our founding ideals, "privatize" and decentralize, while re- the world is filled with international ten- in the initiative of our people, in the taining the central power of rule setting for sion, made terribly dangerous by nuclear vitality of our society, in the problems we the society. It will be largely up to the weaponry. It is a world with a fundamen- face, in the vision of what we could bepolitical leaders of tomorrow to undertake tal and growing imbalance between the come.

0 measures to restore the private nonprofit "have" and "have-not" nations. sector to its full capability. It will be these Can we the American people success- About the Author: John D. Rockefeller 3rd has leaders who must have the imagination fully move our society forward in more made public service his career. He is the founder and sense of mission to support creation humanistic directions, toward a higher of the Population Council, trustee of the Rockeof new instruments for understanding al- level of human existence? I believe we have feller Brothers Fund, and former chairman of ternatives, establishing priorities and set- no other real choice. We cannot stand still, the u.s. Commission on Population Growth and ting goals for the future. In all these ways muddle through, try to turn the clock the American Future.