SPAN 2 Ambassador Barnes Meets the Press
4 India Means Business
5
Moving With the Times
10 How Virginia Governorship Was Won
12
Elections, Cash and the Law by Laurence I. Barrett
15 An American in India-1853 by A.G.
Noorani
19 On the Lighter Side
20
New Jersey: A State of Surprise by Jim Hartz
28
Women in the Courtroom by Sandy Greenberg
30
'Women Are Born To Solve Problems' by Aruna Dasgupta
32
My Brother-in-Law by S.J. Perelman
35
All the Lonely People by Mal Oettinger
38
Trade for Third World Growth by Richard C. Schroeder
40 The Pied Piper of Dance by Barbara Gelb
45 Building a 'Network of Human Relations'
46 Focus On...
u.s.
48 Perspectives on Worldwide Communications by Judy Aita
Editor Managing Editor
Mal Oettinger Chidananda Das Gupta
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Krishan Gabrani
Senior Editor
Aruna Dasgupta
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Murari Saha Rocque Fernandes
Photo Editor
Avinash Pasricha
Art Director
Nand Katyal
Associate Art Director
Kanti Roy
Assistant Art Director
Bimanesh Roy Choudhury
Chief of Production
Awtar S. Marwaha
Circulation Manager
P.N. Saigal
Photographic Service
ICA Photographic Services Unit
Photographs: Front cover-Michael S. Yamashita, Š National Geographic Society. 2-R.N. Khanna. 4-H.R. Lucius. 6-Ray Ellis; Christopher Springmann; Phil Portlock/WMATA. 7-courtesy Otis Elevator Company; Energy Research & Development Corporation. 10, 11 center right, 12-Carol Hightower; 11 top left & bottom-Ken Heinen; top right-Richmond Newspapers Inc.; center (2)-Lee Battaglia. 13-Barry Fitzgerald. 15-Drawn by T.C. Dibdin from a sketch by T. Bacbn; engraved by J. Redaway. 16 bottom-courtesy T.S. Nagarajan. 17-Drawn by W. Daniell, R.A.; engraved by J.R Kernott. 21-27-Michael S. Yamashita except 22-23 and 25 top by Bob Krist. All Š National Geographic Society. 28 left-courtesy Library of Congress; right-Michael Evans. 29-Chad Slattery; Barth Falkenburg, 30-31-R.K. Sharma (2); Avinash Pasricha. 35-courtesy Newsweek. 40-44-Anthony Barboza. 46-courtesy Maharashtra Information Centre. 47 top-courtesy The Times of India; bottom-Jim Breetveld, courtesy UNICEF. Inside back cover top- Mildred Lee Ward Collection; bottom-Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Folk Art Collection; centerCorning Museum of Glass, Corning, N.Y.; right-courtesy of Jane Bolster. Back cover-Greenfield Village and Henry Ford Museum. Published by the International Communication Agency, American Center, 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 H.K. Mehta at Thomson Press (India) Limited, Faridabad, Haryana. Use of SPAN articles in other publications is encouraged, except when copyrighted.Forpermission. write to the Editor. Price of magazine. one year's subscription (12 issues) 21 rupees. single copy. 2 rupees 75 paise. For change of address send an old address from a'recent SPAN envelope along with new address to Circulation Manager, SPAN Magazine. 24 Kasturba Gandhi Marg. New Delhi 110001. See change of address form on page 48b.
Frent cover: Architecture students refurbish the 105-year-old Chalfonte Hotel in Cape May, New Jersey. (In return they get academic credit and also free board and lodging.) Such facelifts help Cape May retain its charms as a quiet seaside resort with elegant landmarks of Victorian architecture. For more about New Jersey, see pages 20-27. Back cover: An early example of reverse glass art, now being revived. See also inside back cover.
Anticipation of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi's trip to the United States this month stimulated questions at the recent interview of U . S. Ambassador Harry G. Barnes, Jr., by representatives of PTI, UNI and the Hindi wire service, Samachar Bharati. The dis.cussion lasted 75 minutes and was wideranging in subject matter. On pages 2 and 3 we present portions relating to the forthcoming visit. The event will draw the attention of the media around the world, of course, but it is of particular significance to SPAN, which is arranging extensive photo coverage. Dramatic strides have been made in India and in the United States over the pa st century in opening formerly male preserves to women. Beginning on page 28 SPAN looks at women in the lega 1 profession. The article on Indian women in law wa s written by SPAN Senior Editor Aruna Dasgupta. As is often the fate of a journalist, Aruna had to catch the story 'on the fly: "The courts were about to close for the summer and everyone wa s busy finishing up pending cases. The last thing they wanted to do was to waste time being interviewed." She was impressed by the hectic pace of activity in the courts and the vast number of litigants: "From the looks of it, there wouldn't seem to be any rea son for any lawyer in India not to have ca ses." She noted how hard her subjects work. "It's the first time I've seen anyone--man or woman--coming to work with suitca ses full of files:"'-not briefcases, suitca ses !" She admires the way the lawyers do their jobs, too. "I saw them dealing with a wide variety of people--a villager one day and a very sophisticated businessman the next. It must take some doi~lg to relate to such totally different kinds of clients." Aruna Dasgupta claims she has not encountered the kind of discrimination in her chosen profession, journalism, that her subjects did in law. "I think being a woman is a great advantage in my profession. People are very nice to you--from colleagues to interviewees to printers; they go out of their way to help you. " Aruna wa s graduated from Lady Shri Ram College in Delhi University with a degree in political science. Though she later studied journalism, slE says she got her most valuable experience working on Dateline Delhi, a monthly tabloid established in 1968 by young journalists as a cooperative enterprise. At the time, she recalls, "there Just wasn't any good, nonpolitical magazine that would give young journalists a chance to work and train. Around that time a lot of women were coming into journalism. I wasn't interested in a career as such, but I enjoyed Dateline Delhi because I was involved in all aspe.cts of journalism--. writing, rewriting, planning the magazine, editing, doing layouts, proofreading, selling advertising space and promoting sales." She also met her husband, Probir, on the magazine. He ha s subsequently formed his own company, Media Workshop, which employs more than a dozen people and provides such editoria 1 services a s writing, design, photogra phy and production. Aruna later worked on Youth Times, the Oberoi Hotels' magazine Soma and a s Delhi representative for lli magazine, where she was an assignment editor as well as a writer. She joined SPAN in 1978. Her most unusua 1 experience with SPAN, she reports, wa s interviewing Bernard Bragg, a deaf-mute actor and director with the American National Theater of the Deaf (SPAN, June 1978). "I was worried that I would do the wrong thing and embarrass him. But he was absolutely delightful, put me at ea se at once and before I knew it I wa s scribbling questions furiously and he wa s. just a s quickly writing answers. " Aruna has been an invaluable member of the SPAN staff; as in her earlier experience, she does a bit of all the editorial work and does it exceedingly well. She is also the official custodian of SPAN S sense of humor, collecting cartoons for "On the Lighter Side" and securing publication rights. She recalled recently: "I began in journalism by interviewing a woman court official--and 13 years later I'm doing that again! Have I come such a long way?" I
--M.P.
Shared Values Are a Basis for Good Dialogue In excerpts from a recent meeting with reporters from India's press services, U.S. Ambassador Harry G. Barnes, Jr., talks about Mrs. Gandhi's trip to America. Our Prime Minister will be visiting your country next month [July]. In what ways will the Reagan-Gandhi dialogue help promote international peace and security? AMBASSADOR BARNES: I think there are several things to bear in mind as far as the Prime Minister's visit to Washington is concerned. First of all, it's a continuation of the dialogue the President and the Prime Minister began in Cancun. Certainly both we and India recognize that an important ingredient in international stability and peace is constituted by the complex of problems that were discussed in Cancun. Therefore the ability of the two of them to share their concerns and their ideas about how the world can most effectively make progress on some of these problems could be one of the most important aspects. Secondly, India occupies a key role in a number of groupings, organizations like the nonaligned movement, th~ Group of 77. Therefore India's views on a whole range of problems should be understood, and what steps might be taken to have the most positive effect will be very useful and important for us to hear. Similarly, because of the role we play in a variety of areas in a variety of ways, I expect that our thoughts on problems ranging from arms reduction to a variety of crises will be useful for the Prime Minister to learn. I would not want to predict what crisis is going to be flaring at the time. One hopes that some of the crises at this very moment will have been settled or at least reduced in intensity, but of course it is possible that several things could be going on at that time which would be significant to international peace and security. -I expect the two leaders to talk about them as well. But most fundamentally the visit provides an opportunity to hear what each is thinking QUESTION:
Minister had their first meeting.in Canabout the most urgent questions, and therefore to see how their shared con- cun, and the Cancun context is very cerns can translate into ideas for having a important. I would expect that they positive impact on world problems. would want to pick up that discussion. I think that it's important to bear in Speaking from our standpoint, we are mind that this is the Prime Minister's first committed to doing what we can in the visit to the United States in 10 years. We area of international development. The have a new President. The two of them question which both the Prime Minister made a very good beginning at Cancun. I and the President talked about in Canthink what this visit offers is a chance for cun, as I understand it, was how do we do the two countries to rediscover- each it. How do we try to meet some of the other. It's not that we have not known serious problems in energy, for example, that India is here, and that you haven't or in food? So I would expect that they known the United States is there. For will address those questions in terms of various reasons things have gotten in the how the situation looks at the end of July, way of the sort of good, frank dialogue and where they think steps can be taken and communication that ought to be in the interests of international developpossible and, indeed, is essential between ment strategy. two countries like ours. So it's a renewal, The Prime Minister's visit in that sense will be a useful occasion, in my judgment, if you like; I call it a rediscovery. It's sometimes said that we both stress for helping people in the United States too much the fact that we are democrathink more about those problems. IDA is cies, and that that does not mean any- certainly a question¡ of importance to thing. I disagree with that view. I think both countries. There have been, as you that unless you've got some shared com- know, decisions by Congress to stretch mon values which guide and affect your out our contributions to IDA Six. The interests, a relationship can't be of any Administration has already indicated that lasting value. A great advantage our two it is committed to meeting the obligations countries have is in these values. Your of the United States. Under our system, translation of how best to have democra- because we do not have a parliamentary cy in India may be somewhat different form the way India has, the President can from ours, but the basic approach is the make proposals to Congress, but Con- same. So I don't dismiss the fact, as some gress has to accept or reject the propospeople do, that our democratic values are als. Our immediate job is to get Congresimportant factors. I would say they are sional agreement to the remaining sums very important. They enable us, I think, that are due for IDA Six. to have a better chance of reducing the On the subject of nuclear nonproliferadifferences. Again because we are democracies, we don't have to be worried tion and Tarapur, what is exactly the state about differences the way countries that of play at this time and how will the are totalitarian have to worry, where they _subject figure in the upcoming visit of the have to worry about every comma, or every Prime Minister? What are the prospects word in a communique. We can disagree, for the supply of fuel, and secondly, what and not be upset about it. On the contrary about the supply of spare parts for the we are used to differences and we can talk Tarapur power plant which is a turnkey about our differences, and find ways of project in the initial stage? The agenda for the discussions in narrowing the differences. Washington is still being worked out. So I Is there any indication that during the don't know what the situation will be as visit problems relating to world economic far as specific discussions of the Tarapur order, the sixth replenishment of the IDA fuel supply are concerned. Secondly, the [International Development Association], status is essentially as it has been for the last several months. What happened was and such subjects might come up? that in 1980 when President Carter was in I would expect so. As I mentioned earlier, the President and the Prime office, he proposed and the Congress did
not disapprove- I put it that way because that's the way it happened-continuation of shipments to India. However, President Carter authorized oqly one shipment to India, and none has been made since. The Indian position is that we should continue to provide the fuel under the 1963 agreement. We say we understand that's the provision of the agreement, but we are now barred by legislation from doing that, unless India is willing to accept what is called full scope safeguards. Indians say they are not prepared to do that. So we are at an impasse. Both countries are very much aware of how complicated and difficult the question is, and we both have said we will continue our efforts to see if it is possible to resolve the question. We have not been able to do it so far, and so we are still at the same stage. There were spare parts ... There has been a request submitted by an American company, General Electric, for certain spare parts, and that is still being reviewed in Washington. You know there have been several rounds of discussions where it was more or less agreed that the agreement has to be terminated. Is there any change from that position? No, we still are trying to find a mutually acceptable way out of the problem. What the way will be, I don't know yet. You have not reached a dead end? My own feeling is you never reach a dead end until you say you've reached a dead end. I am not prepared to say that we have reached a dead end yet. How do you envisage further Indo-U.S. economic cooperation, especially in trade? I am quite hopeful that the already substantial economic links between the two countries can be extended still further. The figures we have for the last year show the level of trade at about 3 billion dollars, i.e., the total trade turnover between the two countries. But I would like to look at trade in a broad context. The Prime Minister at the time of the Indo-U.S. Joint Business Council meeting here in February sent the Council a message in which she said that there is definitely scope for investment and trade, particularly in the area of sophisticated technology. I was interested to see in one of the papers this morning news about a collaboration in the high technology area, computer peripherals. This was between some American firms that are headed by
people who came from India, and some concern, the Industrial Development Corporation, I think, in. the Punjab .. My point here is that particularly in those areas in which India is placing priority, say oil exploration, or computers, or mining, numerical control machine tools, etc., some of the technology that we have developed would be useful in meeting the needs of the priority sectors of the Indian econo~y. Just the other day it was announced that a number of collaboratiop. agreements have been approved by the Indian Government and the American share was one of the largest. It indicates two things: the usefulness of collaboration from the' Indian standpoint, and the increasing interest of American firms in possibilities for collaboration in India. For a long time American firm" have not been as interested in India as they have been in a number of other areas, for example Southeast Asia, or Western Europe, or Latin America. Gradually the message the Prime Minister was conveying in this example I gave, namely that there is scope here for American firms, has been getting through to American companies. We welcomed recently in the United States a delegation from the Indo-American Chamber of Commerce [see page 4]. Indian representatives are attending some of the major trade shows in the United States. In fact, the Minister for Science and Technology is just back from visiting such a show in the field of electronics. So, my general point is that given the emphasis in India on increasing productivity by concentrating on priority sectors where the United States has relevant experience, there are, I think, significant possibilities. American firms need to be convinced. This is what I call a seller's situation. India has got something to sell to Americans, and to the extent India is able to show that the possibilities are there, that they are mutually advantageous, American companies are increasingly in a mood to respond. Both in trade and investment you are expecting a vast improvement? . Yes, I think that there are two clear aspects. One is in investment, that is, in the area of joint ventures, where because of the high Indian capability in a variety of fields, the work done by the Indian firm can also be useful to the American firm, and where the two companies concerned might actually engage in joint ventures in third countries, because they both have something to bring to the venture.
But is there any cultural agreement between the two countries, India and the. United States? Is it being worked at, at all? It appears that you are far behind compared to the cultural invasion/aggression we are having from Eastern countries. Well, I am not exactly in favor of cultural aggression, but let me put it in another way. We've had, I would say, very good cultural relations with India that go back at least to the time when I was first in India in the early 1950s. I know under what we call the Fulbright Program, the cultural/educational exchanges, there are still Americans who come to India to do research in Indian institutions, to teach in Indian universities, just as there are Indians who go to the United States to do research and to teach there. In addition, I think it is important to bear in mind that there are four Subcommissions between the two countries. There is the Agricultural Subcommission, which is meeting right now in Washington. There is the Economic and Commercial Subcommission, which met in February. There is the Science and Technology Subcommission, which met in December, and the Educational and Cultural Subcommission. The last three all met in Delhi. The Educational and Cultural Subcommission met in February. It was under the auspices of that Commission that there was a major Indian art exhibit called the Manifestations of Shiva, which took place in the United States last year. There also was a major exhibit of Indian films both in New York and on public television in the United States last year. It is the job of this Commission to find a variety of concrete ways in which the cultural ties between the two countries can be reinforced. So, I would say that there is a very rich heritage already, plus the fact that people sometimes tend to forget how strong and how vital an Indian community there is in the United States. It is now, according to the last figures I saw, around four lakhs of people, and these are people who have a significant impact on a variety of areas of American life. In fact, I have talked to a number of them who are interested in ways in which they, as Americans of Indian origin, can be helpful to the country from which they came, helpful to India. I talked to a group of doctors who are interested in helping establish a hospital here. I talked to engineers who are interested in sharing some of their skills. So, when one looks at relationships between India and the United States, one has to look at the vast variety of nonofficial as well as official components. 0
India Means Business
In the same spirit that American pioneers had pushed into the wilderness of Ohio two centuries earlier in search of I new trading opportunities, a dozen enterprising Indian businessmen recently " traveled (by bus, not covered wagon) to Ohio, Kentucky and the Northeast to alert American businessmen, bankers and manufacturers to the untapped potential of doing business in India. "Before talking business, we had to sell India," said Avijit Mazumdar, a tractor campany executive from Calcutta who is president of the Indo-American Chamber of Commerce and was the leader of the delegation. "First we had to dispel the stereotypes-Hollywood pictures of Sabu and snake charmers, elephants, stalking tigers and starving millions. We presented the new India with her forward-looking programs of agriculture, industry and, above all, human resources. The wealth of India lies in her people." The delegation brought this message to businessmen, bankers and export traders in 10 American cities. More than half the cities had never before been visited by a foreign trade delegation. The group sought to introduce business opportunities in India primarily to representatives of companies that had not previously been involved in overseas joint ventures. Since many, if not most, of the top 500 U.S. companies listed in Fortune magazi~e are already considered multinationals, the delegation 'Yas trying to reach smaller companies in medium-sized communities- "perhaps companies in Fortune's top 1,000 to 1,500," Mazumdar said. "We whetted the appetites of many of the people we met." In an elaborate slide presentation, and a discussion and question-and-answer period, the Indian delegation pointed out the advantages India offers: a stable government, an excellent record of debt repayment, a reasonable cost of living, great scope for transfer of high technology and a common language, English.
1. From left: A vijit Mazumdar, President, Indo-American Chamber of Commerce; Orville Freeman, Indo-U.S. Joint Business Council; and Richard Lesher, President, U.S. Chamber of Commerce. 2. A delegation member answers questions from Louisville, Kentucky, businessmen. 3. The group visits Accuray Corp., an electronic process control systems plant in Columbus, Ohio.
Among the delegates was Ashok C. A number of American businessmen Pratap of Bombay, a barrister specializing who met with the delegation expressed in international law, who discus~ed legal, strong interest. One was quoted by commercial and regulatory matters, such Mazumdar as saying, "Anyone who as the taxation situation for foreign com- doesn't recognize the opportunities availpanies in India, the incentives offered by able in India today is making a big misthe government and the limitations on take." In light of the enthusiastic reoperational control. Other delegates rep- sponse of audiences in the cities the resented Indian companies that could use group visited, Mazumdar is hopeful that a American technology and were in- mission of American businessmen, interested in joint ventures. The delegation cluding some of the same people, will comprised a cross-section of Indian visit India early next year "to see for businesses-chemicals, textiles, phar- themselves." . The schedule the delegates followed maceuticals, petrochemicals, heavy equipment and machinery, tires and steel tested their dedication and stamina: 10 manufacturing. "The members of the cities in 16 days. Their only breaks came group all understood America, and some on Saturdays-for sightseeing at Niagara of them have participated in successful Falls and at the famous Civil War batjoint ventures," Avijit Mazumdar said. tlefield near Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. The visit closed in a flurry of activity in "And we found that traveling by bus gave the group tremendous cohesion. It gave Washington, D.C., where on May 24 the us plenty of time closeted together to group made the presentation at a special know one another and to review plans. meeting of the U.S. Section of th.e IndoU.S. Joint Business Council at the United So we spoke with one voice." The delegation was accompanied by States Chamber of Commerce headquarHal Lucius, commercial counselor at the ters. Speakers included Orville Freeman, U.S. Embassy in New Delhi, by Indian former U. S. Secretary of Agriculture and diplomats stationed in the United States, now chairman of the U.S. Section of the and by representatives of the U.S. De- Council, Richard L. Lesher, pres.ident, partment of Commerce and the Overseas U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and Craig Private Investment Corporation (OPle). Nalen, president of OPIC. At the U.S. "Businessmen who had had no contacts Department of Commerce, they were with India seemed pleasantly surprised at welcomed by Raymond Waldmann, Assisthe progress India has made," Lucius tant Secretary for International Economic said. "But in almost every city, some Policy. The next day, the delegates met businessman would offer an unsolicited with members of Congress and their staffs. testimonial, such as, 'My company has a After a luncheon hosted by the National joint venture with an Indian company Machine Tool Builders Association and and we're doing very well. ", OPIC, they met with Robert Hormats, The delegation made its presentation Assistant U.S. Secretary of State for Ecoin each city to some 35 businessmen nomic and Business Affairs, and a variety under the sponsorship of the local cham- of State Department officials who have leading bank. ber of commerce or responsibility for relations with South Members presented cross-flag friendship Asia and for trade policy. Members of the delegation are optimispins to community leaders and had time for one-on-one business discussion. "It tic that they have planted the seeds of was the high quality of the individual ideas that will bear fruit in the form of Indian businessmen that most impressed increased business collaborations bethe American hosts," Lucius said. tween India and the United States. 0
a
URBAN TRANSPORTATION
continued
Right: Aerial tramway in New York City is one way to relieve traffic congestion. Cable cars, which connect Roosevelt Island with Manhattan Island, cover a distance of 945 meters in three-and-a-half minutes. Far right: Monorail connects Seattle Center with the city's downtown. These "people movers" run back and forth between several stations along a single path, or along a closed path between stations. Below: Gliding at speeds up to 100 kilometers an hour, the Metro subway system in Washington, D.C., moves large numbers of people quickly and efficiently.
Left: The energy crisis and air pollunonhavespurred research in development of electric cars. Experts say that by the year 2000 some 10 million electric and hybrid vehicles will be in use in the United States.
Above: Drawing by artist John Berkey shows the Otis Elevator Company's new bubble-top station, which will link vertical! horizontal cars with moving sidewalks and other people-moving units.
Appel, "may not lie so much in any radically new and different device as in rebalancing, improving and upgrading the existing transportation systems, in the better coordination of the different ways of moving people-which, after all, is the purpose of mass transportation. In short: a systems approach, a mix of people movers." C. Kenneth Orski, formerly of the U.S. Urban Transportation Administration, comments, "We are increasingly doubtful that a single system of whatever technology is capable of effectively serving the broad range of travel patterns and service requirements that prevail in a large city. Quite the contrary. The desire for wide efficiency may lead us in just the opposite direction, away from an emphasis on single solutions and toward a system that blends a number of different transit elements closely tailored to the demands and conditions prevailing within the specified corridors and areas it serves." This integrated approach does not exclude the possibility of utilizing new technology. One futuristic system, already running in several cities around the world, is Rapid Rail Transit, commonly called subways. "Although high construction costs and operating deficits remain unsolved problems," Appel notes, "rapid rail transit systems are the unchallenged champions when it comes to moving very large numbers of people quickly." He adds: "In large cities, as rush-hour surface traffic crawls along at 15 or 20 kilometers an hour or less, rapid rail trains can glide beneath the streets at speeds up to 100 kilometers. In addition, unlike buses, cars and streetcars,..rapid rails can carry more than 20,000 passengers an hour." Another efficient mass transit system, made possible by the phenomenal growth of automated control technology, is the Horizontal Elevator-a true "people mover." The simplest kind of horizontal elevator is the Shuttle and Loop Transit (SLT), commonly known as a "monorail." These multipassen-
On a recent visit to New Delhi, William Jacobson, a former official of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, discussed urban transportation problems with Krishan Gabrani, SPAN's assistant managing editor. GABRANI: Transportation systems in most cities, even in the United States, are by and large inadequate and inefficient in moving people from one point to another in the area. As an urban planner, what do you think ails these systems? What are the possible solutions? JACOBSON: In the United States public transportation in most communities has been an afterthought rather than something that's considered up front. Systems were developed to meet specific needs of a community at a specific point in time, and not much thought was given to the future growth of the cities, which has been phenomenal. So transportation systems that can get through the traffic problems and quickly transport people back and forth simply aren't there. That is why there has been an incredible reliance on the automobile in the United States. Even with the energy crisis, that reliance continues. Part of any economic development strategy concerns this issue of how you get people to where the jobs are. In the United States, people mostly use the automobile to reach their places
ger vehicles run back and forth between several stations along a single path (shuttle), or along a closed path between stations (loop). At present, monorails are being used at airports or enclosed activity areas such as shopping centers and amusement parks in the United States. However, monorails and subways. are costly to build. Besides, rapid transit systems provide service along a relatively narrow corridor-generally no more than half a kilometer to either side of the tracks. "So," Appel notes, "the more spread out a city is, the less likely that a rapid rail line can offer really useful service by itself. This equation can be modified by putting in a feeder network of buses, for example, to give the rail line area coverage beyond its own corridor." A network of buses, running on special lanes to avoid tie-ups with auto traffic, can be an important element in an integrated multimodal system. Randall Pozdena of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco says: "Even if a special lane must be built to accommodate express buses, its cost would be far lower than rail transit." Among the American cities experimenting with new bus routes is Pittsburgh; the city built a seven-kilometer separated busway in 1977 and another 10kilometer route will open this year. Not only do commuters get to their destinations quicker, but Pittsburgh saves money by carrying more people with fewer buses in a fraction of time it took when the buses traveled on the same roads as cars. Looking ahead, city transportation experts are casting a more favorable eye on light-rail systems-street (trolley) cars or trams. In the 1920s, more than 60,000 trolley cars ran on 65,000 kilometers of track in U.S. cities. But the growing dominance of the automobile almost drove them out. The old trolley tracks were ripped up or paved over everywhere. However, they are now making a comeback. One such long-distance streetcar system opened in San Diego last year.
of work; this creates traffic jams. The urban planner's ideal solution perhaps would be that if automobiles crea,te problems, then you do away with them. But what do you do in the absence of reliable" efficient systems of transportation? What about subways? A number of American CIties have them, many are building them or thinking of building them. They are very good. For example, the Metro in Washington, D.C., is very efficient and is much utilized. Just about everyone uses it. Trains tend to be reliable; they are very attractive. They move a good number of people very efficiently. The system is also safe. But there are major cost constraints. Building an extensive network of subways in a metropolitan area is an enormously expensive business. For example, the first leg of the Metro system in Washington, D.C.-I do not remember how much mileage the first leg covers-cost about $8,000-9,000 million. The full system, when completed, will encompass some 160 kilometers and will cost many more thousand millions. Then there are other problems. In many parts of the United States, the transportation systems are multiarea, multijurisdiction. So it means months, sometimes even years, of negotiations between different jurisdictions trying to reach agreements on different aspects of the planning, construction and operation of the subways, such as who is going to pay and how much. Another important aspect is that public transportation systems in the United States are heavily subsidized, and there is an ever-increasing need for additional subsidies because
Part subway, part elevated railway, Atlanta's rapid rail transit system, the newest in the United States, is highly automated. Trains are monitored by engineers from centrally located booths, and employees keep an eye on stations through closed-circuit television. Passengers gain entry to stations by inserting an electronically coded pass, a transfer card, or 50 cents, into an automatic turnstile.
Called the "Tijuana Trolley," the line runs along railroad right of way from San Diego to the Mexican border. Much of the renewed enthusiasm for streetcars is traced to relative costs. For example, the Tijuana Trolley system, funded entirely by the state gasoline tax and a local sales tax, cost $86 million to build. which comes to $3 million a kilometer compared with the $26.8 million a kilometer for the Metro subway system in Washington, D.C. Furthermore, according to experts, streetcars require 43 percent fewer operators than buses, and overall operating expenses are also much less. At the same time, their passengercarrying capacity approaches that of rapid transit systems under optimum conditions. Planned for the distant future is a fascinating form of
the operating costs keep rising constantly. Now the question is: Who is going to pay for these-the state or the user? Do you want to stimulate ridership on these systems by holding fares to a low point or do you want to take care of the increasing costs by making the user pay for them? That's a serious question. Every time there is an increase in the fare, there are all kinds of discussions and protests. However, undoubtedly in the years to come many subway systems will be built in the United States, because, fortunately, communities are concerned about the transportation bottlenecks and many of them are taking steps to do something about them. But it takes about 20-30 years to build a subway system. Are new transportation technologies being developed? Any breakthroughs? Whether or not there are going to be any breakthroughs in transportation technology which would allow cities to provide public transportation at a much lower cost, I don't know; that's not my area. But in the past, technology has generally provided important incremental improvements. Maybe over the long term, new technologies might be developed that successfully counter some of the more widespread transportation problems. But it's going to be a long-term project. In the meantime, in the short run, we have to solve the current problem, which is to make the best of what we have got. One important short-term solution is to have more busesbigger buses, smaller buses, depending on the needs and the
transport system called Dual Mode Transit (DMT), which might prove the ultimate reconciliation of personal transportation needs with the benefits of a public transit system. Dual Mode vehicles will be operated by drivers on conventional highways, then switched onto a special guideway for automatic operation under computer control. Computers will also determine speeds to maintain safe distance between the vehicles. Dual Mode systems will run faster, use less energy since they would draw power from the guideways, and carry more passengers than the private automobile. These various modes, vehicles and systems can playa part in future integrated transportation systems, says Appel. "But it is also clear that, in themselves, they do not represent a complete alternative to the automobile," he adds. "Instead, they can complement autos and help restore balance to city transit systems." In the United States and elsewhere, "the automobile is likely to remain a dominant form of urban passenger travel for many years to come." However, to maintain its predominance, the automobile will be required to move more people more efficiently; and to bear many more impositions from the public and private sector regarding safety and environmental cleanliness, as well as fuel economy. And "as some of the ways of moving people make their impact and win increasing shares of the passenger market," Appel says, "the automobile's dominance can be reduced so it can take its place as just one part of a coordinated mass transit system." The success of tomorrow's transportation system will depend on how well integrated it is, Appel notes. "But-and this is the crucial factor-the mix of transportation forms needed for the task has to be designed to meet the specific needs of the given city or urban complex. The combination that works in Tokyo, for example, might not work as well for Los Angeles, nor would it work for any other metropolis." 0
logistics of a particular area. Shared taxis and shared personal cars are another possible short-term solution. Some incremental improvements can result from these. You have visited a number of Indian cities. Have you studied their transportation problems? I have not studied them; I have observed them. I have observed them in the three cities that I have been to which are Calcutta, Lucknow and Delhi. The problems here, while they may not be different in that public transportation systems need to be improved, are clearly different from what they are in the United States. Just the size, the number of people involvedthe whole magnitude of the problem seems stupendous. But I understand attempts are being made to tackle them. I saw the subway being built in Calcutta. I think it will greatly relieve pressure on the existing system. In Delhi, I am told, they are building a circular railway. Ultimately, any solution of the transportation problem, whether it is in India or the United States or any other country, I think, will depend a lot upon what happens to the cities, what our cities become. City planners in the United States are rethinking the whole business of what their cities are for. Though this should have been done 75 years ago, urban planners are now realizing that some things are no longer possible in the cities, that they have to decide what communities expect from their cities. We must be sure of what we want our cities to be. When these difficult decisions are made, at least in part, then we can hope the rest will fall into place. 0
l. Candidates Coleman and Robb smile as they prepare to do battle. 2. Coleman greets a voter at tobacco fair in Danville, Virginia. 3. Coleman autograph$ one of his posters for a supporter. 4. Coleman's wife, Niki, tries to persuade a voter by telephone. 5. Vice President Bush and his wife Barbara (right), after his speech supporting Coleman. 6. A volunteer distributes Coleman campaign literature.
irginia,
one of the 13 original
V states of the United States, elects a new governor every four years. In November 1981, voters decided the battle between Marshall Coleman, Republican, and Charles Robb, Democrat, for the leadership of the state. Just as the President leads the Federal Government, the governor of a state is its chief executive. This year, candidates will also be campaigning for all 435 seats in the House of Representatives and 33 Senate seats out of a total of 100. The Coleman-Robb race typified the American political campaigning style. For more than four months a flurry of public appearances every day took Coleman and Robb to communities in all parts of the state. Both candidates played on the South's strong sense of tradition: "We've got a good thing going," sang Coleman's campaign jingle to the strumming of guitars and banjos in country-western style; "For a Virginia Future Worthy
Marshall Colemanvs. HOW VIRGINIP\S
of Her Past," replied Robb's slogan. As incumbent lieutenant governor and a son-in-law of President Lyndon B. Johnson, Robb was the better known at the start of the campaign. Coleman depicted Robb as the inheritor of his father-in-Iaw's "bigspending" administration, firmly aligning himself with the beliefs of President Reagan and his team. Robb too stressed a conservative philosophy while holding on to traditionally liberal Democratic supporters. Media consultants, radio, TV, opinion pollsters and other professionals and technicians played their increasingly important roles in focusing the spotlight of the campaign on the candidates. Their families were never far behind. In campaigning, in victory or in defeat, they were always by the side of their heroes, almost as visible as the candidates themselves. On election day, Robb won by a comfortable margin. Another gubernatorial campaign was over. 0
Charles Robb
GOVERNORSHIP WAS WON
Elections, Cash and the How does a large, diverse democracy like the United States manage to transfer executive and legislative power every few years in an orderly,¡ equitable manner, while allowing individuals and groups maximum opportunities for political expression? By continuously tinkering with the mechanisms used for electing its leaders. This formulation is factual rather than flippant. Certain aspects of the American electoral process are prescribed by the original Constitution and subsequent amendments to it. For the most part, these provisions concern basic rules and principles such as the length of incumbents' terms in office, and bans on racial or sexual discrimination in voting. Many other important features of the political process, however, have grown from custom and statute. One of the most interesting developments in recent years concerns the financing of campaigns for federal offices- Congress and the Presidency. Since 1974 a type of organizatIOn that had previously exercised only marginal political influence has increased in sig-
nificance. It is called a "political action committee," and is generally referred to as a PAC. As the 1980 election season began, some 2,000 separate PACs were in operation, triple the number just six years ago. They represented a broad array of interests induding labor unions and corporations as well as professional organizations concerned with a wide range of causes. PACs are expected to contribute at least $50 million to defray the campaign costs of candidates for the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives during the 1982 campaign year. PACs flourish because they fill a need not being met by other organizations. In this respect they resemble the political parties themselves. Nowhere in the Constitution are parties mentioned or even implied. For that matter, the colorful national conventions held by the two major political parties every four years to nominate candidates for President and
Vice President have no constitutional or even statutory foundation, either. Nor do the primary elections, or the party caucuses that choose delegates to the conventions. The party system began in the early years of the republic as a means by which contending interests could organize to promote the policies and candidates of their choice. Although they are important, political parties, large and small, remain unofficial organizations. Membership is voluntary and can be changed at will. Most routine party activities at all levels must be financed by contributions from individuals or private organizations. That method of raising money was once considered a safeguard against interference by the party in power. Similarly, the Hatch Act enacted in 1939 prevents most federal employees from participating in certain party activities. (They are permitted, of course, to enroll in parties and to
With his wife by his side and his children around him, Marshall Coleman concedes defeat after months on the campaign trail.
An ebullient Charles Robb reaches out to shake hands with supporters gathered to celebrate his victory as Virginia Governor.
The democratic process cannot be fixed for all time to come. The American experience has required constant readjustment of the election mechanism, for instance, in order to prevent unfair uses of money and power.
vote.) The intent of the Hatch Act is to prevent the incumbent party from using government workers for its own partisan purposes. Whether the contest is for the Presidency, a seat in Congress or the mayoralty of a small town, Americans have always practiced a vigorous style of campaigning. A candidate is expected to travel around his or her potential constituency, whether a village or the nation, meeting as many citizens as possible. The candidate's supporters publicize his name and his opinions on issues by every means possible: mailings, newspaper advertisements, billboards, radio and television broadcasts. All of these activities are expensive. But costs rose to new heights with the coming of the television age after World War II. Though television news programs cover important campaigns in depth, candidates since the 1950s have generally sought to supplement that exposure, which costs them no money but over which they have no control, with broadcast commercials, which can cost a great deal. The reason is obvious.
News coverage, whether on the air or in print, is controlled by the journalists who produce the program or the publication. A commercial paid for by a candidate can be used in any way he or his managers choose. Another important difference involves the amount of broadcast time available. Because the airwaves are regarded as part of the public domain and therefore subject to government regulation, broadcasters are required to give equal time to all candidates for a national office whenever air time is provided free for one candidate. Even in local situations where that rule does not necessarily apply, individual television and radio stations generally¡ attempt to provide equal free time to all bona fide competitors for the same office. Paid advertisements (commercials) are not subject to this "equal .time" provision. While unlimited use of commercials gives an advantage to a candidate with more money than his opponents, limiting this type of campaigning would pose another problem: Without ample air time, a lessknown candidate might be unable to
challenge a prominent incumbent. By the early 1970s, the escalating costs of campaigning had provoked a major political debate. Politicians with large resources of their own, or wealthy backers, were inclined to oppose new restrictions. However, ¡reform-minded organizations argued that the old method of private financing-with relatively lax controls-was damaging an important political tradition. Individual candidates and the established parties were relying more and more on a few thousand wealthy contributors who could afford very large donations. The danger was obvious: Citizens who could afford to give many thousands of dollars to a particular candidate could attempt to influence the recipient's decisions after the election. Beginning in 1971, Congress approved a series of measures to limit the potential power of these donors, usually referred to as political "fat cats." The most dramatic change, put into effect for the first time in the 1976 Presidential race, provided for government financing of the general election campaign. That is, once the parties' nominees have been chosen, public funds are appropriated, up to a predetermined ceiling, to pay for all the usual campaign expenses. To qualify for this subsidy, candidates must agree tp spend no more than the regulations allow. They may not use the funds for personal purposes. Further, the campaign organizations must provide detailed records of their income and expenditures for audit by the professional staff of the Federal Election Commission, a bipartisan federal agency. After considerable debate, Congress rejected public financing for House and Senate campaigns. But Congress did adopt restrictions on contributions to Congressional candidates. These limits are relatively stringent. An individual donor, for instance, can give a maximum of $1,000 to a particular candidate during an election period. (If a candidate must go through a primary to get the nomination, that campaign is counted separately; therefore the effective limit is $2,000 in many cases.) Further, that one contributor can donate no more than $25,000 in a single year to all candidates and election committees he may wish to assist. These restrictions on campaign financ-
ing enhanced the role of the political PACs, and the Federal Election Commisaction committees. One of the oldest and sion has issued detailed regulations under most active of these is the Committee on which they must operate. The most imPolitical Education (COPE) run by the portant rules place limits on individual nation's largest labor federation, the donations to a PAC and on how much a American Federation of Labor and ConPAC may give to one candidate. Without gress of Industrial Organizations (AFLthose limitations, the financing reforms of CIO). Individual unions also have maintained their own PACs, as have the the early 1970s would be meaningless. An individual may give no more than American Medical Association, farmer $5,000 to one PAC in a year. That groups and assorted other interests. The typical PAC solicits contributions donation must be incl'1ded in the $25,000 from members of its sponsoring organiza- annual limit on political donations made tion or from the public at large. Some of by one person. While there is no limit on the money may be used to present the what a PAC can spend overall, it can give group's views on current issues in pam- one candidate for federal office no more phlets, internal newspapers or other than $5,000 per election ($10,000 if there media. COPE, for instance, favors higher is a primary as well as a general election). minimum wages and other measures it In fact, most PACs give considerably less considers beneficial to its members. than the maximum. Contributions by Theref9re it argues for those policies. citizens to PACs also run far below the Organizations of business groups, such as legal ceiling: the typical donation is $100 the National Association of Manufacturor less. ers, often take the opposite side of those Liberal and labor-oriented organizadebates. tions have complained that many of the Over several decades, COPE and a few new PACs have sprung from organizaother early PACs began making contributions representing conservative viewtions to candidates sympathetic to their points and business interests. In general views. In situations where the campaign this complaint is accurate. More indilacked a good organization, the PAC also vidual corporations and outfits similar to might send in a few experts to help the the National Conservative PAC have set candidate get started. Labor-oriented up committees recently than have liberal PACs such as COPE became particularly or left -of -center associations. adept at this. Some reform groups, such as the The changes in financing regulations nonpartisan public-interest organization opened the way for a boom in PAC Common Cause, argue that the financing activity. And a change in the law in 1974 system needs still more change. Specisuddenly made it easier for individual fically, these activists would prefer that business enterprises to set up their own Senate and House of Representative PACs. Hundreds of companies have candidates receive much of their camdone so. paign funds from government sources in a As the idea took hold, special-interest manner similar to the Presidential elecorganizations began following the lead of tion procedure. They argue that members business and labor groups. One example of Congress still are vulnerable to the is the National Conservative Political influence of contributors, because the Action Committee which, as its name .PACs have taken the place of the "fat implies, supports right-of-center candi- cats. " dates and causes. The National ConIt is true that some incumbents running servative PAC raises most of its money for reelection have received large by direct-mail solicitation, sending elabo- amounts of campaign funds from PACs. rate information packets to potential The influence of anyone committee-or contributors, explaining what it is trying that ofa few like-minded committees-is to do and requesting support for its limited, however, because of the ceiling efforts. on PAC contributions to a single camOther PACs are concerned with only paign, and because nominees receive single issues. Persons who, on moral or contributions from dozens or even scores religious grounds, oppose abortions have of PACs. Further, funds continue to organized PACs to discourage any gov- come from other sources, including the ernment subsidjzation or encouragement traditional party organizations and indiof the practice, and groups wishing to vidual citizens of relatively modest means protect women's rights to abortions have who give $10 or $20 to the campaign chest countered by forming their own PACs. of their favored candidate. In the 1978 Both sides publicize their views energetiCongressional races, about 25 percent of cally, lobby public officials and provide the funds raised for House races came funds to sympathetic candidates. from PACs; for Senate contests the Congress set up general guidelines for average was 15 percent.
Audits performed by the Federal Election Commission (FEe) represent one kind of safeguard against abuse. After the 1976 Presidential election, the FEC found minor flaws in the reporting procedures of the Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford campaign organizations. Both were required to rectify the errors. A second safeguard is provided by journalists. All funds collected and spent by PACs, and by the candidates, must be reported periodically to the FEC, which stores the data in computer banks and on microfilm. Any citizen can inspect this material at the FEC headquarters in Washington, and reporters cull these records routinely. Despite these financing reforms, few think that the present system will survive without further alteration. One oddity that appears to defy the spirit of reform concerns the use of a Congressional candidate's personal funds. The original version of the campaign financing reform law barred wealthy individuals from using excessive amounts of their own money to promote their candidacies. When this provision was tested in a law suit, however, the Supreme Court ruled that it was unconstitutional. The jurists' reasoning was an interesting commentary on the continuing tension between basic principles. On one hand, the public interest is served by fair ele.ction contests, and Congress has the right to promote such equity. On the other hand, an individual has the right to express his political views. If the citizen chooses to do so by spending his own money in his election campaign, the court ruled, that right must prevail. The law has another quirk. Despite the limits on contributions made directly to a candidate's campaign, no ceiling exists on so-called "independent expenditures." These are amounts spent to promote one nominee, or to combat his opponent, but with no coordination between the donor and the beneficiary. Citizens, for example, can spend whatever they wish to trumpet the virtues of candidates for office-provided that such activities are totally divorced from the official campaign organizations. Independent monitoring groups, the press and politicians themselves continue to review campaign financing-and other electoral mechanisms as well. One thing seems certain: The tinkering that has gone on since George Washington was elected' the first President of the United States in 1788 will go on a while longer. D About the Author: Laurence I. Barrett is a Washington correspondent o/Time magazine.
An American in India -1853 For some strange reason, Bayard Taylor has remained shrouded in virtual obscurity in India, despite his many claims to fame. He was the first American correspondent to visit India, and for two months he traveled a circuitous route from Bombay to Calcutta via Indore, Agra, Delhi, the Himalayas, Kanpur, Lucknow, Allahabad and Varanasi. His book A Visit to India, China and Japan in the Year 1853 compares favorably with similar accounts by other travelers of the period. It was published by G.P. Putnam of New York in 1855, arid by 1859 had appeared in 16 editions. Yet a recent excellent anthology of writings of travelers in India does not even mention it. Bayard Taylor was 28 years old when he came to India as a correspondent of the New York Tribune. He left New York on August 28, 1851, and returned two years and four months later
on December 20, 1853. After visiting most of the countries of Europe he sailed from Gibraltar to Egypt, ascended the Nile to the kingdoms of Central Africa, journeyed eastward to Palestine, on to "Asia Minor" and India, visited China twice and joined the American expedition to Japan led by Commodore Matthew Perry before returning home via the Cape of Good Hope. Three books recorded these travels: Journey to Central Africa, Lands of the Saracen, and the third on India, China and Japan. They were perceptive and informative accounts. Taylor had an eye for detail and sensitivity to the ambience. Of the visit to India he wrote: "I have never made a more interesting, or instructive journey, or visited a country better worthy of thorough and conscientious study." For his part, Taylor did full
justice to the subject whether in describing historic places or English attitudes toward India. Sailing from Aden, Taylor saw the first prospect of India on December 27, 1852. He had been awaiting it eagerly. "That vision of gorgeous Ind, the Empress far away in the empurpled East, throned on the best grandeur of History and canopied by sublime tradition, was about to be confirmed, or displaced for ever." He received a small foretaste of Indian life on board the steamer and had already "mastered the mysteries of curry." On landing at Bombay he found a line of cabs, buggies and palanquins with their bearers. He chose the last though "it was not a pleasant sensation to lie at full length, in a cushioned box, and impose one's whole weight (and I am by no means a feather) upon the shoulders of four men. It is a conveyance intended by Despotism, when men's necks were footstools, and men's heads playthings." He stayed at the British Hotel in the Fort area run by one Mr. Palanjee. Bombay did not impress Taylor. It was wholly of "modern growth," and more than half European in appearance. The city was divided into two parts. The Fort, enclosed within the old fortifications and surrounded by a moat, was about a mile long. Outside the moat was a broad esplanade, and to the north of it a new city had grown up. There were no American merchants in the city at the time, and no American consul. The consuls who had come earlier "found the profits of the office equal to its expenses." The last of them had appointed a local merchant, Dossabhoy Merwanjee, as his agent, but with no authority to act in a consular capacity. Merwanjee's firm was actively engaged in trade with America. The only American residents Taylor found in Bombay were some missionaries who had established a school and a church, and a Boston ice merchant. Of all the communities, the Parsis impressed Taylor most. He found them highly intelligent, enterprising and publicspirited. "It would be no exaggeration to say that more than half the wealth of Bombay is in the hands of this class. Sir Jamsetjee Jeejeebhoy, the Parsee knight, presents one of the most striking examples of commercial success to be found in the history of any country ... his fortune is estimated at three crores of rupees ($15,000,000)." During a week's stay, Taylor went to Elephanta Island, attended a New Year's Day ball given by the Governor, Lord Falkland, at his residence in Parel, saw a performance by two nautch girls (bayaderes), and was initiated into the dubious joys of chewing paan. Fortunately for Taylor's travel plans, the post road to Agra had recently been made passable for a small cart which carried the mails, and a baughy cart had begun to run up to Indore. The fare was four annas (12 cents) per mile which worked out to $47. It was a square, springless horse buggy run by the postal services. At Indore, he changed to a mail cart proper, which was similar to the baughy cart but had greater speed-about eight. to nine miles an hour. Agra was then still known as Akbarabad after the emperor who built it, "one of the greatest men who ever wielded a sceptre." There Taylor stayed with an American missionary, the Reverend M. Warren. Taylor describes in vivid detail the historical monuments he visited-the Fort, which contains the palace and the Moti Masjid and the Jama Masjid; Akbar's tomb at Sikandra, and the ruins of Fatehpur Sikri. The Taj he saw only after he had seen everything else in Agra.
The splendor of the Moghuls, he wrote, "overpowered me like a magnificent dream. We in America hear so little of these things, and even the accounts we get from English travelers are generally so confused and unsatisfactory that the reader must pardon me, if in attempting the description, I lose myself in details. I thought the Alcazar of Seville and the Alhambra of Granada had already presented me with the purest types of Saracenic architecture, but I was mistaken. I found, in India, conceptions of Art far nobler and embodiments far more successful. There is a Saracenic, as distinctly as there is a Greek and Gothic school of Art-not the inferior, but the equal of these." At the Taj, Taylor had his history all wrong: "Shah Jehan, the 'Selim' of Moore's poem, erected it as a mausoleum over his queen, Noor Jehan ..... " His raptures at the sight of the Taj are best expressed in this passage: I am aware of the difficultyof giving an intelligible picture of a building, whichhas no counterpart in Europe, or even in the East. The mosques and palaces of Constantinople, the domed tent of Omar at Jerusalem, and the structures of the Saracens and Mamelukes at Cairo, have nothing in common with it. The remains of Moorish art in Spain approach nearest to its spirit, but are only the scattered limbs, the torso, of whichthe Taj is the perfect type. It occupies that place in Saracenic art, which, during my visit to Constantinople, I mistakenly gave to the Solymanye Mosque, and which, in respect to Grecian art, is represented by the Parthenon. If there were nothing else in India, this alone would repay the journey. It was, truly, a "castle in the air ... brought down to earth and fixed for the wonder of ages."
Yet so light it seems, so airy, and when seen from a distance, so like a fabric of mist and sunbeams, with its great dome soaring up, a silvery bubble, about to burst in the sun, that, even after you have touched it, and climbed to its summit, you almost doubt its reality.
Taylor left Agra for Delhi by a new mode of transport which had come into vogue around that time-the "garreedawk." It resembled a cab with the space between the back and front seats filled up and covered with a mattress. The traveler provided himself with a quilt and pillow, stowed the luggage into the bottom and relaxed as if on a bed. There were relays of horses six miles apart. A set of nearly a dozen bearers traveled with the garree including the torchbearer and the tiffin carrier. The dawk had to be "laid" by applying to the postal authorities, giving the details of the route and a deposit of money as security. " Taylor had a very comfortable journey to Delhi, the capital of the last of the Great Moghuls. The king, however, was no more than a pensioner of the East India Company. The city itself had been a migratory capital, Taylor found: The modern city of Delhi is the latest of the name, and having been founded by Shah Jehan, is still called by the natives Shahjehanabad. There were several Delhis, one of the oldest of which is the city built by Toglukh, and called Toglukhabad, the ruins of which lie about fifteen miles to the south of the present city. Another city, now cal\ed Old Delhi, built during one of the succeeding reigns, is about two miles distant. It is surrounded by lofty walls, with circular stone bastions, and has several thousand inhabitants. But all of the country south of the Jumna, for an extent of more than ten miles in every direction, is strewed with the ruins of palaces, mosques, and tombs. Whenever the city was taken and desolated in the early wars, instead of rebuilding it, the inhabitants founded a new one in the vicinity.
Taylor.'s host, a Mr. Place of the Delhi"Gazette, took him to see the Qutab Minar, and the tombs of Safdarjung, Humayun and Nizamuddin. On their return they passed around the 80-feet-high walls of Old Delhi. Delhi was laid waste once again in the aftermath of the 1857 Mu.tiny. Taylor's description of the city just four years before the tragedy deserves to be quoted in extenso: Modern Delhi was the largest and most picturesque native city I had then seen. The houses are of brick and stucco, painted. in gay colors, and very few of them less than two stories in height. They have tiled roofs, which gives the place, when seen from a minaret, a strong resemblance to Smyrna, and other large Turkish towns. It covers an extent of about two square miles, but is very compactly built, and the population is reckoned at near 200,000 souls. Most of the European residents have their bungalows on the heights outside of the Cashmere Gate, and near the military cantonments. There is an aqueduct of hewn stone traversing the city, which supplies the inhabitants with drinking water, brought from a distance of seventy-five miles, the water of the Jumna being strongly impregnated with natron, and injurious to health. The palace, which is surrounded by a deep moat, has a massive gateway and barbican in the centre of its western front. An open space intervenes between it and the city, and exactly opposite the gateway begins the Chandnee Choke-the Broadway of Delhi, which runs directly through the centre of the city, to the Lahore Gate. It is a noble avenue, somewhat resembling a Parisian boulevard, having a small aqueduct, fringed with trees, on each side of the main highway, and separating it from the paved sidewalks. The houses are made
picturesque by their wooden galleries and balconies, and some of them are very pretty specimens of architecture. When the heat of the day has subsided, and the afternoon shadows are growing long and cool, all the natives of any standing or pretension repair to the Chandnee Choke. Then, broad as it is, it can scarcely contain the gay throngs that parade up and down its whole extent.
Vice flourished in Chandni Chowk, particularly. But, as Taylor wryly remarked, "a native court in India, with its army of pensioned idlers, is a hotbed for all forms of vice, and Delhi is only surpassed in this respect by Lucknow and Hyderabad." Delhi was celebrated for its jewelry and also for its shawls and scarfs which were inferior only to those of Kashmir and Amritsar. Rambling among the shops, Taylor came across a painter of miniatures who showed him several specimens. of his work: "The delicacy of touch and artistic truth of these native artists is extraordinary. I know of but few miniature painters in America who could equal them." But what took his breath away was a wandering Indian minstrel who began singing "Get out of the way, Old Dan Tucker!" The man enjoyed Taylor's surprise and followed up with "Oh, Susanna!" "Buffalo Gals" and "other choice Ethiopian melodies." Predictably, the palace depressed the visitor and confirmed him in his poor opinion of its owner. "He devotes his time to literature, amusements and sensuality, The Mussulmen speak highly of his literary acquirements .... " So indeed does history, of the poetry of Bahadur Shah II-popUlarly known by his pen name Zafar-whom Taylor mistook for his predecessor, Akbar II. By now a whole month, half of the time allotted for the Indian trip, had expired. Taylor left for Meerut by garree on January 26. A pleasant surprise greeted him on the way: While anxiously waiting for breakfast, I amused myself by reading a list of the books in the Library of the Ganges Canal at Roorkhee, which hung upon the wall. Who would have guessed that an humble author, in scrambling about the world, should find one of his works in the furthest corner of India, at the very foot of the Himalayas?
From there he went to Hardwar, Dehra Dun, Mussoorie and Landowr where he met an American missionary, a Mr. Woodside, whose house had a commanding view of "both sides of the Sub-Himalayas." Some of Taylor's comments might seem quaint to the modern reader. He regarded Sikhism, for instance, as "a
compromise between Islam and Hindooism, rejecting all the But he was not prepared to condemn the Raj outright, minor divinities of the latter and accepting in their stead, the either: One God of the Moslems, without the full recognition of My previous notions of English rule in India were obtained Mahomet as his Prophet." The sitar was an "Indian violin" chiefly from the articles on the subject in the progressive whose tones were "like those of an ordinary violin, but very newspapers of England, and were, I need hardly say, unfavorpure sweet and ringing. I should think the instrument capable, able. The American press is still more unsparing in its in the hands of a master, of producing the most exquisite denunciation, though very few of the writers have any definite idea of the nature of the wrongs over which they grow so musical effects." indignant. That there are wrongs and abuses which call for Lucknow, like Delhi, was also on the verge of tragedy severe reprehension, is undeniable; but I have seen enough to when Taylor arrived there. The kingdom of Oudh, whose satisfy me that, in spite of oppression, in some instances of the capital it was, was annexed by the British just a year before the most grinding Character, in spite of that spirit of selfish Mutiny. Lucknow reeked of pomp, glitter and corruption. It aggrandizement which first set on foot and is still prosecuting the was then "one of the most populous cities in Asia, and may be subjugation of India, the country has prospered under English ranked with Paris and Constantinople in Europe." Government. So, far from regretting the progress of annexation, Its monuments did not much impress the author. "I had which has been so rapid of late years (and who are we, that we some difficulty in believing that this curiosity shop was the tomb should cast a stone against this sin?), I shall consider it a of the Poet-King, Azuf ed-Dowlah; but so it was. The decorafortunate thing for India, when the title of every native sovereign tions are principally due to the taste of the present king, who is is extinguished, and the power of England stretches, in unbroken integrity, from Cashmere to Cape Comorin. Having made this silly almost to imbecility." admission, I shall briefly refer to some of the most prominent Taylor also met the redoubtable Co!. Sleeman, the evils and benefits of the system. Company's Resident. He was repelled by what he saw and heard in Lucknow. True, there was "far more life, gaiety and The main blight was the country's governance by a appearance of wealth" there than in any other Indian city. But commercial corporation, even though native rule in many parts, for all the loveliness, "what deception, what crime, what utter especially Oudh, was no less despotic and was far worse in other unutterable moral degradation fester beneath its surface!" respects. Taxation by the Company was very high but it had Outstanding among the Americans he met in India was established schools, colleges and hospitals, and suppressed the Fitz-Edward Hall, a native of Troy, New York. He was practice of Suttee (widow burning) and thuggery. The Civil professor of Sanskrit in the Sanskrit College at Benares Service was dependable. "With few exceptions, order' and (Varanasi) and generously extended hospitality to Taylor security reign throughout the whole of India, and I doubt during his visit to the holy city. whether, on the whole, there has been less moral degradation On February 16, Taylor began the last leg of his journey by and physical suffering at any time since the power of the ferry boat across the Ganges, and reached Calcutta five days Moghul Emperors began to decline." later. The week in the capital of the Raj was an anticlimax. Taylor had high hopes of the Ganges Canal. He expected it "After the glowing accounts I had heard in the Provinces of its to cover with "perpetual harvests" the plain between the opulent social life and architectural magnificence, I confess to a Ganges and the Jumna "and render famine impossible in the feeling of disappointment." north of India." Calcutta's exterior was as deceptive as Lucknow's. "It is a There remained one particular failing of the Raj which fair outside, a frontispiece of wealth and parade concealing the Taylor condemned: racial arrogance. He describes his reaction: insignificance and poverty of the interior." The style of living of There is one feature of English society in India, however, the Europeans was sumptuous, but "rather too closely modeled which I cannot notice without feeling disgusted and indignant. I after London habits. Perhaps, there is no community in Europe allude to the contemptuous manner in which the natives, even which lives in a style of equal luxury." The city had little to those of the best and most intelligent classes, are almost show by way of architecture. invariably spoken of and treated. Social equality, except in some Taylor was, of course, commissioned by the Tribune to rare instances, is utterly out of the question. The tone adopted visit India, and he does not withhold his opinion of British rule. towards the lower classes is one of lordly arrogance; towards . ; Early in his tour, in Bombay, he was appalled at the enormous rich and enlightened, one of condescension and patronage. I tax imposed on toddy, the principal produce of trees in Salsette. have heard the term "niggers" applied to the whole race by those It gave color to reports "that the resources of the country are high in office; with the lower orders of the English it is the designation in general use. And this, too, towards those of our mercilessly drained by the Company, for the purpose of own Caucasian blood, where there is no instinct of race to excuse carrying out its expensive system of annexation, and at the same their unjust prejudice. Why is it that the virtue of Exeter Hall time paying the regular early dividend to the stockholders. and Stafford House can tolerate this fact without a blush, yet However, I had determined on entering India, to clear my mind condemn, with pharisaic zeal, the social inequality of the Negro of all preconceived opinions; and to judge of the effects of and the white races in America? British rule as impartially as possible." He was impressed by the fact that Indian groups like the Journalistic reportage has made great strides in the century Bombay Association had begun to petition the authorities. It and more since Bayard Taylor left Calcutta for Hong Kong. showed "the temper of the native subjects," he noted acutely. Even so, the modern journalist might envy Bayard Taylor not During his travels he discovered the zamindari system and only for his extensive travels but more so for the acuity of his condemned it as "a check to the prosperity of India and the insights. Taylor deserves to be remembered as the first in a line civilization of its people; but when I expressed such an opinion of great American reporters who have come to India. 0 to the English residents, I was generally met by the remark (the same often used by Americans, apologetic of slavery): 'We did About the Author: A. G. Noorani, a frequent contributor to SPAN, is a not make it-we found it so.'" practicing lawyer, scholar in constitutional law and bibliophile.
Reprinted with permission from The Saturday Evening Post Company Š 1981.
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Ask any American about New Jersey and he will probably tell you it's a busy industrial state-polluted, bleak and drab. But take time to explore New Jersey. You will find it has subtle charms that defy stereotypes.
For 13 years I worked as a reporter just across the Hudson River in New York City. New Jersey was a place I had to drive through, or fly over, to get somewhere else. It was the home of places with faintly amusing names-Secaucus, Ho-Ho-Kus, Piscataway-and of noisy characters who moidered da language, and occasionally each other. For the life of me, I couldn't understand why it called itself the Garden State. Well, after weeks of traveling round New Jersey, I now feel ashamed of my previous attitude. It calls itself the Garden State, I found, because its farms, most of them small and compact, are among the most productive per acre in the United States. Though it is an industrial powerhouse, it is a remarkably beautiful state, and a place of such diversity that it is almost America in miniature. One ofthe nation's 13 original states, ,it is also one of its most progressive. On a snowy day last winter Ed Rutsch drove me north on the New Jersey Turnpike, one of the ~orld's most heavily traveled highways. Ed is a native of New Jersey, an industrial archaeologist dedicated to preserving the structures that embody the history of the industrial revolution in the state. He is a great bear of a man, 300 pounds and more, streetwise with a brass-knuckles opinion on everything. We were traveling along the section of the turnpike where 12 lanes slice through the industrial heart of the state. Asfar as
maceuticals, second in chemicals, and among the top 10 in output of electrical ,machinery, electronic equipment, rubber, plastics, clothes, and fine china .. And all this is packed into one of the smallest states, 1/34th the size of Texas. Only four states are smaller-Hawaii, Connecticut, Delaware, and Rhode Island. None is more densely populated or more urbanized. "We're more densely populated than Japan," Ed said, as we meandered through crazy-quilt streets in Elizabeth, Bayonne, and Union City. In some places 40,000 people are jammed into a square mile. You can't tell when you go from one city to the next. This crowding has given New Jerseyans a keen appreciation of open spaces. Traveling on its superb highways, you can be out of the industrial sector and, in minutes, in a serene countryside reminiscent of the rural Midwest. In the Pine Barrens there is the scent of southern swamplands. "I get up at seven in the morning and drive 20 minutes before I hit a red light," one pinelands, resident told me. To the north, 75 miles from the pines, spring thaws in the low, rounded mountains unleash a torrent of crystal streams
I could see, there were factories, rail yards, tank farms, towers of the largest refinery on the East Coast, high-tension lines spider-webbing the sky. "This is the place people love to hate," Ed remarked, "the part of New Jersey that turns so many people off. But this is where you find the real current and juice of the state. I know all the jokes about New Jersey. This place doesn't have to apologize. New Jersey produces. It hustles. It's tough." During recent decades New Jersey has emerged as a fierce economic competitor in the Northeast. It has outstripped New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Massachusetts in percentage population Dawn finds streams of commuters heading for Manhattan; but New Jersey is much more than growth and exceeds them in per capita just a thoroughfare to New York. personal income. New Jersey is one of the major producers of goods and ser- A way from the expressways lie vast stretches of vices. It is the nation's leader in phar- open space set to the rhythms of agriculture.
that hint of the Pacific Northwest. Farms? Pinelands? Mountain brooks? In New Jersey? Yes indeed, and oyster fleets, picturesque winding back roads, the Appalachian Trail, wildfowl in southern preserves, rattlesnakes in the hills, plus some of the finest beaches in the world. Incredibly, two-thirds of New Jersey is still open spaces-lush farmlands and forests. It is possible, with a straight face, to describe New Jersey as a small, largely underinhabited state. Despite these blessings, New Jerseyans feel deprived. A lecturer on government and politics at Princeton University put it in a nutshell: "The state between the Liberty Bell and the Statue of Liberty has suffered because of its location. New Jersey has been called a state without an ego-a corridor between New York City and Philadelphia." The lecturer, an old acquaintance of mine, dressed in a turtleneck sweater, slacks, and loafers, was addressing a dozen or so students sprawled around the parlor of the governor's mansion, just down Nassau Street from the main campus and only a few miles from Trenton, the state capital. A fine way to behave in the governor's parlor? Well, the moonlighting part-time professor was the governor, Brendan Byrne, and¡ he didn't mind. He explained that being squeezed between two giants deprived New Jersey of the attention it deserves, and complained, jokingly, "most people whiz right through." He might have added that more than 300,000 residents whiz right out of the state each day to work in New York and Philadelphia. "It's been an uphill battle from the beginning," the governor noted wryly. "In the Revolution they did the paperwork in Philadelphia and the fighting in New Jersey." True enough. Nearly 100 engagements (with the British in the war of American independence) were fought on New Jersey soil, including the all-day battle at Monmouth, longest of the war. Lexington, Concord, Valley Forge, and Yorktown may be more famous, but no state suffered more than New Jersey in the Revolution. General Washington spent nearly a quarter of the war, including three winters, in New Jersey. Washington's crossing of the Delaware was the opening thrust of a campaign to
recapture New Jersey after his ragtag army had been kicked all the way across the state by Lord Cornwallis. His first victory came at Trenton. His first defeat of British regulars occurred a few days later at the Battle of Princeton, fought a mile from where we sat that evening. Though I respect Governor Byrne's thesis, I suspect that today the current is reversing, and the two giant neighbors may be suffering a bit from the tug of New Jersey's dynamism. For example, a large number of major corporations, including some corporate operations of American Telephone and Telegraph, have moved their headquarters from New York to New Jersey. The open spaces of the state are attractive, the land is cheaper, and the taxes are lower. The explosive growth of Atlantic City has sent shock waves into the Pine Barrens, which fan out west from the resort. The pinelands, a still largely unsettled, ecologically fragile paradise of wildlife and exotic flora, are one of New Jersey's most valuable natural resources. Now they are becoming an inviting target for development. Speculators, including some casinos, have taken options on vast tracts of land. But the state and federal governments have moved decisively to control growth. A moratorium on construction, declared in 1979, extended all the way down to small landowners who wanted to build single-family houses. Restrictions were placed on how and to whom land could be sold. Such land-use provisions have incensed Atlantic City interests who need¡ housing for employees, contractors who want to build it, farmers who fear their land will become worthless, and individuals who resent government intrusion into their lives. "Can you believe they want to put a water meter on my well?" asked Marvin Matlack, who owns five acres in Chatsworth. The water beneath the pinelands-an aquifer big enough to supply most of the state-is a prime concern of the state and federal governments. "I'm all for preservation," Matlack contended. "I like this area the way it is, that's why I live here, but I want my children to be able to build here too." Budd Wilson, an archaeologist who lives on the eastern edge of the pinelands, deplored the way the preservation act was drawn. "It's a law to protect something natural; it's not about the people
who are here and the rights they might have. I'd rather have seen preservation through education and wat~r and sewage regulation. " A parallel preservation problem in the industrialized north is how to save the older, decaying cities. Newark, the largest city, has lost 25 percent of its popula.tion since 1950. Why? Not only are tax and crime rates among the highest, but when Newarkers grow old, they want to leave the inner city and move to nearby suburbs. "We have a nine-year wait for senior citizen housing," a county official told me. "Can you imagine telling someone who is 65 to come back when he's 74?" Millions of dollars of federal money have been poured into Newark, yet it still languishes. Mayme Jurkat, an urban
Opened in 1928, Newark International Airport is a kaleidoscope of air traffic, landing and taking off alongside Port Newark-Elizabeth. Container cargo was pioneered here 25 years ago and it still accounts for most of the bustle.
planner at the Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, worries about the problem of institutionalizing poverty in places like Newark. "The federal money has had a negative impact. The city has come to depend on it," she said. "Newark has become a ward of the Federal Government. And if you get money for negative characteristics, then you don't want those characteristics to go away." Despite this grass-roots poverty, Newark remains the banking capital of the state, a hub of manufacturing, the home of Prudential, the nation's fifth
richest corporation and largest insurance company. And Newark is at the center of transportation on the East Coast. As Malcolm Forbes, a Jerseyan and owner of the business magazine that bears his name, put it: "There's no other transportation complex like this in the world. One-third of the American marketplace is within an overnight truck ride from New Jersey. While trucks are rolling down the turnpike, planes are coming into Newark International Airport on one side, and on the other are all these containerships and trains. This is the most essential piece of turf in the East Coast megalopolis." Paterson, the nation's first planned industrial city, was the brainchild of Alexander Hamilton, first Secretary of the Treasury, who contended that the
United States would never be free of England until it had its own manufacturing capability. He urged that the power of the great falls of the Passaic River, site of present-day Paterson, be tapped and factories built. Paterson became a cotton-mill center, then the silk-manufacturing capital of the nation. It also starred as the largest locomotive producer in the country. The engine that powered Charles A. Lindbergh's Spirit of Sl. Louis was built in Paterson; so was the first Colt revolver. During World War II it produced aircraft engines. But over the years manufacturers kept moving to greener pastures, abandoning the old red-brick factories that had been standing for a century. In 1976 Paterson tried for a novel comeback. The entire region around the
falls was declared a national historic landmark. With an infusion of federal funds and by the hands of the city's skilled craftsmen, the region is coming to life again. The city is gambling that the offices, shops, restaurants, and artists' lofts going into the old buildings will attract new businesses. Canals, mining and manufacturin.g centers, as well as the early railroads, fueled New Jersey's expansion as an industrial empire. And with that came an explosion of science and technology in the state. New Jersey today ranks among the top 10 states in the number of scientists and engineers. For a century it has been a research and development center. Indeed, the team concept of R & D began in New Jersey in the "invention factories" conceived by Thomas Alva Edison. At his zenith Edison presided over a 29-acre research and manufacturing empire in West Orange. In his lifetime he amassed more than a thousand patents, a record no other inventor has matched. His goal, he once said, was "a minor invention every ten days and a big thing every six months." Only one and a half acres of the complex survive, set aside as a national historic site. Preserved there for visitors are his ornate office filled with his books, a turn-of-the-century workshop, and a sampling of his inventions. Off limits to tourists is a massive underground vault, built during World War II when it was thought Germany might bomb the East Coast. There three and a half million pages of Edison's personal papers, correspondence, and patents, as well as
patent models, are stored. "It's one of the nation's real treasures," said archivist Reed Abel, as we strolled the aisles. Abel showed me some of the 9,000 glass-plate negatives of original Edison inventions, and models of devices that Edison patented: early light bulbs, phonographs, motion-picture cameras, storage batteries. In an inner sanctum, a vault within the vault, were Edison's 3,000 laboratory notebooks. Usually the time of a discovery, or the failure of an experiment, was noted, sometimes with an expletive, and the time was often in the wee hours of the morning. One notebook bore the inscription, "Not for small brained capitalists." In 1876, three years before Edison patented the electric light bulb, another of the nation's earliest inventors, Alexander Graham Bell, had invented the telephone. Although he did not live in New Jersey, the Bell System, the sprawling giant that grew from Bell's invention, is today New Jersey's largest private employer. New Jersey is the nation's leader in the Stanley Jordan's guitar notes travel through the synthesizer he has built to dance on a screen in rhythmic images (right, above); walking near a harbor in summer, a group of sisters stop for ice cream to cool off (far right, above); Triplets Andrew, Joseph and Robert Koralja combine 42 years of service on the New Jersey state police force (below); the second American state after Nevada to permit casino gambling, New Jersey draws plungers to Atlantic City, transforming a traditional seaside resort (right, below).
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production of pharmaceuticals; it is also in the forefront of petroleum research. Though there is not a single oil well in the state, one of the world's largest petroleum research centers, Exxon Research and Engineering Company, sprawls along Route 1 at Linden. Here scientists are studying how to stretch the world's remaining crude-oil reserves, and what to do when we run out. Exxon believes gasoline can eventually be made from coal at economical prices. More fascinating than these energy researches is Exxon's probing into liquid membranes, tiny droplets of oil that behave like the walls of human cells, determining what to let pass in and out. The most promising application is in reducing the time kidney patients have to spend on hemodialysis machines. A liquid membrane, now being tested in animals, is swallowed in a milkshakelike preparation. It passes through the stomach and into the 'small intestine, where it absorbs urea and then expels it in the
stool. Eventually, liquid membranes may be used to absorb oth~r body toxins, perhaps from drug overdoses. In sewage treatment the oil membrane can be made to suck up contaminants, and someday may offer a solution to one of New Jersey's biggest problems-how to rid itself of toxic wastes. Chemical manufacturing is the state's largest industry, but safe disposal of chemical wastes and by-products was long neglected. Often they have been disposed of illegally by outfits known as "midnight dumpers." New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection Commissioner Jerry Fitzgerald English said, "So far, we've identified more than 300 abandoned dumping sites in the state. We are in the process of determining what's in them in order to clean them up." As a result of illegal dumping, New A great flurry of snow geese flies over Dennis Creek Fish and Wildlife Management Area on Delaware Bay (below).
Jersey adopted a hazardous-waste bill and was the first state to prosecute illegal dumpers. "We treat it not only as a civil infraction but also as a very serious criminal activity. The penalties can run high, as much as $25,000 in fines a day and prison sentences up to five years," Commissioner English said. Enforcing the law is another thing. Marie Newhard, who lives in Presidential Lakes on the edge of the pinelands, told me of trucks "dumping stuff in the lake behind our house in broad daylight. It's sickening. Someday that's going to be our drinking water, and we can't get anyone to stop it." According to Edwin Stier, head of the criminal justice division of the state attorney general's office, some midnight (and daylight) dumpers are controlled by organized crime. "At first we went after the individual truckers," he said. "Now the campaign is against the higher-ups, and convictions have been obtained." I asked Stier whether New Jersey's
reputation as a haven for organized crime was deserved. "Like most big states we have our share," he said. "It got a foothold during Prohibition. We had a long, unguarded coastline that made smuggling easy. We had the isolated Pine Barrens, where stills could operate. We had a large immigrant population that was an easy mark for organized crime. And until a few years ago New Jersey didn't have an adequate statewide force to prosecute large-scale crime. Local communities couldn't handle it." The sheriff of rural Hunterdon County, in New Jersey's far west, never had such problems. Sheriff Ruth S; Carpenter, the first woman elected to that office in New Jersey, doesn't even carry a gun. "I can talk people out of most things," she laughed. A famous tragedy of the 1930s that catapulted New Jersey into the headlines was the crash of the dirigible Hindenburg at Lakehurst. Driving across the scrublands of central Jersey, I was attracted by
the massive hangars of the onetime dirigible base. Nick Grand, a public affairs officer, gave me a tour. "This was the nation's major international airport," he said, "for dirigibles crossing the Atlantic in the 1920s and 1930s." Today the base is a U.S. Navy engineering and testing facility. We drove into the 244-meter-Iong main hangar, which dates from 1921. A good portion of its one million cubic meters was filled with a scaled-down deck of an aircraft carrier, complete with real jet fighters, tractors and catapults. "This is where all the Navy's flight-deck officers are trained," Nick said. "We can do everything except launch a plane out the door." Once I got over the shock of finding an aircraft carrier in an old hangar in the center of the state, one big piece of the New Jersey puzzle fell into place. Industrial archaeologist Ed Rutsch had rhapsoBobby Bowker balances 24 empty boxes before filling them with blueberries (below).
dized about the "adaptive reuse" of antiquated structures. Lakehurst suggested that this blending of the old and new with hardly a shrug, with all the confidence that comes of maturity, was a central motive of New Jersey life. Cape May proved it. "Cape May received a three-milliondollar urban-renewal grant to stay old," a local scholar of New Jersey's past and present told me. One of the nation's oldest summer resorts, renowned years ago as the watering place of PresidentsBuchanan, Pierce, Harrison, GrantCape May is today a Victorian architectural gem. More than 600 structures from the last century survive. The well-kept, turreted, filigreed buildings grace winding, shaded streets. Hundreds of thousands of vacationers go there every summer to be transported back to a simpler, less hurried time. I stayed at the Chalfonte Hotel, a three-story, hundred-room structure built in 1876 (see SPAN cover). Things haven't changed much since: no elevators, no air conditioning, no room phones, and the "facilities" down the hall. It's still a grand old place and has the most wonderful cook in the world. Helen Dickerson, 70, has been cooking three meals a day for a hotel full of guests for 45 years. "I've never used any recipes," she said, stirring up homemade mayonnaise. "I just quit when it looks good." Her specialties are prime ribs, kidney stew, southern-fried chicken, and spoon bread. She gets up before dawn every morning and does all the shopping. That's New Jersey hustle. That's tough. One evening, after the sun went down, I sat in a rocking chair on the hotel's wide veranda, watching strollers along Howard Street caught in the flickering reflections of ,the gaslights in the center of town. Hotel manager Judy Bartella came out and asked if I was bored. "We have an old television somewhere," she said. "I'll get it if you need a fix." I declined the offer, preferring instead to while the evening away, silently wondering how I could have missed so many things in New Jersey in all thos'e years I lived so close. And, too, feeling a little sorry for all those people who never get off the road and see one of our most historic, productive, and elegant states. [] About the Author: Jim Hartz is a television newscaster and journalist.
Women in the Courtroom
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Top, left: More than a certury ago, lawyer Belva Lockwood had to shepherd special legislation through Congress to become thefirst woman allowed to practice law before the U.S. Supreme Court. Top, right: Sandra Day O'Connor is sworn in as the first woman justice of the Supreme Court, the highest judicial body in the United States. Her
husband holds the family bible as Chief Justice Warren Burger administers the oath of office. Above: After the ceremony, Sandra Day O'Connor poses with President Ronald Reagan and her fellow justices. From left to right: Blackmun, Marshall, Brennan, Burger, White, Powell, Rehnquist and Stevens.
he civil law, as well as nature herself, has always recognized a wide difference in the respective spheres and destinies of man and woman .... The natural and proper timidity and delicacy which belongs to the female sex evidently unfits it for many of the occupations of civil life: ... The paramount mission and destiny of women are to fulfill the noble and benign offices of wife and mother." With those words, the Supreme Court of the United States, in the case of Bradwell v. Illinois, 1873, denied Myra Bradwell the right to practice law. Today, more than a century later, about 70,000 women practice law in the U.S.-one of them as a Supreme Court Justice. Women comprise some 13 percent of American legal practitioners. In a field long dominated by men-and despite remaining vestiges of sexual bias-women are rapidly enlarging their participation in the practice of law. In law schools, huge law firms and the nation's courts, and on the legal staffs of corporations and government agencies, women are gaining in both number and influence. President Ronald Reagan's appointment of Sandra Day O'Connor as an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court last year underscored the dramatic changes of the last 109 years. Much of the gain has been in the past decade or so. Ten years ago, fewer than 3 percent of the attorneys in the United States were women, and female law students were outnumbered 23 to 1 by males. Now, nearly 35 percent of law students are women, and if current trends continue, they will constitute half of all law students by the end of this decade. By the year 2000, women are expected to comprise nearly 40 percent of the practicing lawyers in the country. The first 99 years after Bradwell v. Illinois were difficult for women aspiring to legal pursuits. A few years after Myra Bradwell lost her suit, Belva Lockwood (who had had to petition President Ulysses S. Grant to be awarded the law diploma she had earned) petitioned to practice law before the Supreme Court. She was considered qualified, but was turned down because there was no precedent for admitting women to the bar. Undaunted, she drafted special legislation to correct the situation, argued for it before the House Judiciary Committee and lobbied it through Congress until it became law in 1879. Only then was she finally allowed to practice before the High Court. Iowa admitted the first woman to its bar in 1869. But it was the turn of the century before other states began to follow suit. Equal access to law school too was slow in coming; some law schools refused to admit women students as recently as 1971. Others actively discouraged women from applying by insisting on higher entrance requirements for them than for men. But when the military draft disrupted male enrollment, many law schools were forced to admit more women. The advent of the women's liberation movement in the 1960s, and the rise in women's career and educational aspirations, strengthened the trend. In 1972, Title IX of the Higher Education Act prohibited sex discrimination in admission policies and practices; all law schools approved by the American Bar Association, the nation's primary organization of legal professionals, thereafter were required to admit female students. Such regulations and laws would have remained largely ineffective without the determined efforts of many groups and individuals to assure complete equality of professional opportunity for women lawyers. Professional organizations such as the National Association of Women Lawyers, the National Association of Women Judges, and numerous national and state coalitions and caucuses have worked long and hard to advance the status of women in law. Today, some 20 percent of the lawyers in major Wall Street firms are women, compared with 1 percent in 1970. Fifteen
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Above: Presiding Justice of the U.S. Court of Appeal, Joan Dempsey Klein discusses a case with Deputy Clerk Roy Alveston. One of over 700 women judges in the United States, Klein is the president of the National Association of Women Judges. Right: Ann Lake, president of the National Association of Women Lawyers, questions a witness. Lake also teaches law.
percent of the lawyers in the 50 largest American law firms are female. Virtually every law school has at least one woman on its tenured faculty. Female attorneys are handling many civil and criminal cases, engaging in litigation, negotiating complex corporate transactions. Several women lawyers have been elected to the United States Congress. However, Eleanor Holmes Norton, former chairman of the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, recently told a Time magazine interviewer that women are still "the foot soldiers of the profession .... You don't find many in the upper reaches of bench or bar." Inroads are only now being made into the judiciary. In 1976 there were only five female federal judges in the United States; today there are 44-5 percent of the total. Some states have two or three women judges, others have none, California has close to 100. A snowballing impact is expected from the appointment of Justice O'Connor to the nation's highest court. As many female attorneys logically point out, the boom in women law graduates is recent, and selection criteria for judges normally require 10 to 15 years of legal practice. Similarly, elevation to prestigious partnerships in large, traditional law firms usually is based on experience and length of service in the firm. There simply has not been enough time to form a large pool of experienced female legal practitioners. But women are fast catching up and maKing up for the years they have lost. They are amply demonstrating their competence and expertise with law as they move into the mainstream of the American legal profession. In doing so they are enhancing not just their own status-but that of the entire profession as well. 0 About the Author: Sandy Greenberg is a picture story editor for SPAN in Washington, D. C.
"Wol11en Are Born To Solve Problel11s" The tribulation of making it to the top in a profession . monopolized by men has been a "trial" in itselffor Justice Leila Seth (seen with SPAN's senior editor, Aruna Dasgupta), Additional District Judge Usha Mehra (center) and advocate Chandramani Chopra (far right).
The legal profession long ago put women on a pedestal-for centuries the symbol of justice has been a woman, blindfolded, holding the scales of justice in her hands. But it took longer, much longer, to put women on the bench or before the bar of courtrooms in various parts of the world. . In India, Anna Chandy of Travancore was the torchbearer: The first woman student admitted to a law course, she began her studies in 1927, five years after the Patna High Court had refused permission to a woman to practice law, in a decision reminiscent of the American judgment of 1873 referred to on page 29. Chandy became India's first woman iawyer and the first female High Court judge (Kerala, -1(59). Today as Anna Chandy enjoys her retirement, there are some 3,000 women practicing law in India, most of them as lawyers, several as judges at local and regional levels and a handful as High Court judges. In the courts of major cities, women in elegant printed black-and-white saris (which are fast replacing the traditional plai!). blacks or plain whites) are no longer a curious sight as they rush from chamber to court to canteen, their arms filled with files or swinging briefcases, with pursuing clients trying to keep pace .... The times are achanging ... but not that fast. Leila Seth, Delhi's first female High Court judge, laughs as she recalls the itinerary of some villagers from Haryana just a couple of years ago-the zoo and the kacheri (court) where' a woman presided. "They first went to see the animals and then' they came to see me!" And then there was the "first-courtappearance" syndrome, observed by all those women who entered law in the first two or three decades after Anna Chandy's breakthrough: "The courtroom was absolutely packed with spectators wanting to see a woman in a lawyer's robes." The first case for a woman lawyer in those days was almost always a "desperate" one: someone who couldn't afford to pay for his counsel but then decided that a woman lawyer was better than no lawyer. Then there were other ways of getting a brief: In certain cases the court is bound to provide counsel for an accused who can't afford his defense. Such cases are listed and lawyers can choose from among them. "And at that stage of your career you just grab any case that you can lay your hands. on because you need the experience and the exposure." In different words, they all said that: Justice Leila Seth, Addition-
al District Judge Usha Mehra and Supreme Court advocate Chandramani Chopra, the women interviewed for this article. There are other common memories: of being one of a handful of women surrounded by men in class, of "wellmeaning" discouragement from male lawyers and consistent encouragement from the judiciary, of having to work harder than any male colleague to prove yourself .... And there are special memories: Leila Seth, who studied law in England where her husband was temporarily posted as a Batg executive, was a mother of two when she sat for the final exam-and she topped the list. She was the first woman and the first Indian tb do so in England. But that didn't guarantee smooth sailing-not for a woman in that career in those times. Sheer determination got her an opening as a junior with a leading lawyer back in Calcutta-"he tried his best to talk me out of it, saying I should think of getting married, having children .... I told him I'd already done all that!" Two years later her husband was transferred to Patna. She argued her first case here, for free: Her clients were two men accused of dacoity. She won the case and the fame it brought her led Leila Babu, as she was called by her clients, to specialize in criminal defense work for some years. Another male preserve she broke into was the field of income tax cases-as a junior standing counsel on the income tax panels of the Bihar and Orissa governments. After 10 years in Patna, she had just reached a "takeoff" stage when her husband was transferred back to Calcutta. A wife first and lawyer second, she moved with him. She got several income tax cases ("this time from the people, not the government") but little else. Frustrated, she began to feel that Delhi would offer her a better chance. Her husband, whose encouragement had started her on her career, agreed. She moved to Delhi on her own in 1972 and he followed a year later. "This time we decided my profession was, in a sense, more important. " It was the right decision. After five years of practicing in the Delhi High Court and the Supreme Court, she was appointed Senior Advocate by the Supreme Court. In 1978 she became the Delhi High Court's first woman judge, one of India's eight women judges (one each in Andhra, Bombay, Rajasthan and Delhi, and four in Calcutta). The number of women court officials is substantially higher at the lower levels. Delhi has one District Judge (Kapila
family welfare courts, drafting and pushing through The Adoption of Infants Bill, successfully resisting a proposed amendment to the Hindu Succession Act in Punjab which would have denied daughters a share in agricultural property .... Starting with a modest membership of 23, the federation today has some 1,200 women on its rolls. A former president, Chandramani Chopra has been actively involved in its deliberations since its founding. Does the professionalism of a lawyer ever clash with the zeal of a social worker? The answer comes without any hesitation: "I certainly don't have any preferences as far as my choice of clients is concerned ... it can be a man or woman. But yes, the kind of pleasure I get if I have helped a woman get her due is certainly not there if it is a male client." Women litigants, however, don't reciprocate with any similar affinity for women lawyers. Says Mrs. Chopra: "I have often felt that women litigants don't repose the same confidence in me in cases involving property which they do in cases of family disputes. Hingorani) and two Additional District and Session judges. The women themselves discriminate against women!" Women lawyers have always received the maximum enUsha Mehra handles matrimonial cases, "not by choice," she says with a smile. As a practicing lawyer, Miss Mehra handled couragement from the judiciary. Miss Mehra recalls how judges several matrimonial cases but made a name for herself as a would often guide a fledgling lawyer along, by giving helpful specialist in industrial dispute cases-probably the first woman hints and references. She also remembers the financial help that to do so in Delhi. Ironically, she got a start in this field because the court gave in indirect ways: "In the beginning you made couldn't afford to pay much and I hardly any money. Those days it was impossible for a woman to she was a woman-"They either had to do cases free or for was happy with whatever they gave m~." She remembers doing survive on that money-you her very first case for free. Her deft handling of labor dispute very little. The court would help by giving us commissions-like cases made her popular with unions as well as individual asking us to record statements. This brought in Rs. 200-300 a workers, especially with bus drivers and conductors. month which in those. days was very good money." Having experienced so much early discrimination in emThanks to the pioneering work of women like Miss Mehra, ployment opportunities, most senior women lawyers make a there are no longer any fields where women lawyers haven't made their triumphant presence felt. From crime to constitupoint of taking in women as juniors. Mrs. Chopra, who has had tional law, they've made their mark everywhere. And there is two women juniors earlier, now has a male junior-yet another note of triumph for women. But discrimination and reverse one field where being a woman has its advantages: matrimonial cases. "Women can confide many things in a woman lawyer that discrimination aside, do women make better lawyers and judges than men? they can't in a man," is the common and obvious explanation. "Both women and men have nurturing qualities and "Besides," points out Chandramani Chopra who 'has handled hundreds of matrimonial cases in her 20-year career, "there aggressive qualities," says Mrs. Seth. "You can't generalize. are several trivial things in a case of marital discord which a man Some people say that women are too emotional to make good will never understand the importance of. Women are more judges; others say they are more merciful so they make better sensitive on this issue." judges. I personally feel that it depends on the individual The courts really opened up for women lawyers when they personality, not the sex. My reputation, I am told, is that I am opened up for aggrieved women-with the passing of the very tough." Hindu Marriage Act in 1954. The act made bigamy an offense, Miss Mehra feels that women can make better lawyers and made divorce easier, gave women a chance to fight for judges than men: "Women are born to solve problems." A pause and probably a flashback to a case or two: "Of course their rights-and who could help them fight better than other women? they also create them. I have found that in most matrimonial While Mrs. Seth made a conscious decision not to take up cases, the problems are caused by women as mothers-in-law, matrimonial cases, in order to avoid being categorized as a whether the husband's or the wife's." "women's lawyer," she agrees that women in the legal And it takes a woman lawyer to get to the inner recesses of a profession can help the cause of women. woman's mind in such cases. "We've fought cases on behalf of Mrs. Chopra, who is deeply involved in the Current the husband too," both Miss Mehra and Mrs. Chopra stress. "If I had more women than men as clients, it wasn't by antidowry movement in Delhi, firmly believes that women in choice," Miss Mehra says of her earlier days as a lawyer. Those the leg~l\ profession should take advantage of the resources, knowledge and power at their disposal to help women. were the days when, if they could help it, nobody took a woman In fact, the main objective of the Indian Federation of lawyer by choice. "But with the passage of time, attitudes have Women Lawyers, formed in 1962, is "to enhance and promote changed," says Mrs. Chopra. "Today there are several men the welfare of women and children particularly by securing the who prefer a woman lawyer because they have seen that many passage of legislation for the advancement of women and the of them are more dedicated. After all, we have got used to having to work extra hard to prove ourselves." protection of women and children." As Mrs. Seth puts it: "We had to be equal plus .... " D The federation has been active in promoting the concept of
My Brother-in-Law The late dean of American humorists fondly remembers novelist Nathanael West-as a struggling writer and a softhearted innkeeper.
If, in the latter half of 1932, you stayed in New York and were a midwestern music student at Juilliard School of Music, a fledgling copywriter with a marginal salary, or a divorcee grubbing along on a small alimony, the chances are that you lived at one time or another at the Hotel Sutton on East 56th Street. The Sutton was a fairly characteristic example of the residential or soi-disant "club" hotel designed for respectable young folk pursuing a career in New York. There was nothing in the least club like about it, and it was residential only in the sense that it was an abode, a roof over one's head. Otherwise, it was an impersonal 16-story barracks with a myriad of rooms so tiny that their walls almost impinged on one another, a honeycomb full of workers and drones in the minimum cubic footage required to avert strangulation. The decor of all the rooms was identicalfireproof early-American, impervious to the whim of guests who might succumb to euphoria, despair, or drunkenness. The furniture was rock maple, the rugs rock wool. In addition to a bureau, a stiff wing chair, a lamp with a false pewter base, and an end table, each chamber contained a bed narrow enough to discourage any thoughts of venery. As a further sop to respectability, the sexes had been segregated on alternate floors; but the elevator men did not regard themselves as housemothers, and for the frisky, a rear stairway offered ready access or flight. The waitresses in the coffee shop on the ground floor wore peach-colored uniforms and served a thrifty club breakfast costing 65 cents. You had a choice of 'juice-orange or tomato-but not of the glass it came in, which was a heavy green goblet. The coffee, it goes without saying, was unspeakable. By definition, the manager of the
premises should have been a thin-lipped martinet with a cold eye who slunk around counting towels and steaming open the clientele's mail. In point of fact, he was an amiable and well-spoken young man named Nathanael West, whose major interest was books rather than innkeeping. Since I was his friend and brother-inlaw, it was only natural that my wife and I gravitated to his hostel when Sherry Flip, a revue I had written some sketches for, slid into the vortex. A relative with a surplus of rooms was a mighty welcome spar, and we clung to him gratefully. He fixed up two cubbyholes into the semblance of a suite for which, unsurprisingly, we paid skeletal rates, and he was quick to apply financial poultices when the wolf nipped at our heels. His nepotism, in away, was an outgrowth of his own situation, for he had been appointed manager by some remote uncle who owned the building. Literary tastes and executive talent rarely go hand in hand, but West, curiously enough, was good at his job. He had charm and a quick sense of humor, as well as an innate sympathy with the problems of his guests. This. did not blind him to their deficiencies, nevertheless, and he often confided accounts of eccentric, and indeed clinical, behavior that suggested Dostoyevsky and KrafftEbing. He also gave us an insight into the sordid mechanics of operating a metropolitan hotel-the furtive inspection of baggage and letters, the surveillance of guests iri arrears, the complex technique of locking out deadheads or impounding their effects, and similar indignities. I presume all of these were perpetrated on us in principle, even though we were kinsmen of the boss, but so subtly that we never caught on. Had West dreamt of becoming a Conrad Hilton, he would have devoted his spare time to studying cost accounting or new methods of adulterating the coffee. The status of Boniface, * however, increasingly irked him. He had never given up the hope of writing professionally and *Synonymolls with proprietor of a hotel, nightclub, or restaurant after Boniface the innkeeper in The Beaux' Stratagem by George Farquhar-EDITOR.
in such leisure as he could contrive was working on a second novel. It had its origin in a series of letters shown him several years earlier by a friend of ours, a lady who ran an advice-to-the-Iovelorn column in the Brooklyn Eagle. For all their naivete and comic superficialities, the letters were profoundly moving. They dealt with the most painful dilemmas, moral and physical, and West saw in them and their recipient the focus of the story he called Miss Lonelyhearts. From its inception to the final version, the book occupied him almost three years. He worked slowly and laboriously; he had none of the facility of the hack writer, the logorrhea with which so many second-rate novelists cloak their shortcomings. He openly disliked the swollen dithyrambs and Whitmanesque fervors of orgiasts like Thomas Wolfe, and the clumsy, unselective naturalism of the proletarian school typified by James Farrell repelled him equally. His chief orientation, as is apparent, was European. Among the Russians, Turgenev, Chekhov, and especially Gogol, with his mixture of fantastic humor and melancholy, appealed to him. He idolized Joyce, considering him, as most of us did, the foremost comic writer, in the language, and was strongly attracted to the French surrealists like Aragon, Soupault, and Breton, whose experiments were appearing in transition magazine. Along with his avant-gardist flair, there was a deep strain of the conventional in West's nature. He loved custom-tailored clothes-his tailor bills were astronomical-first editions, and expensive restaurants. He fancied himself a Nimrod and a fisherman, largely, I often suspected, because of the colorful gear they entailed. His taste in women, with whom he tended to be shy, was catholic enough, but he preferred tall, rangy girls who had attended certain finishing schools and universities, the type our generation called snakes. For a brief interval, he even owned a red Stutz Bearcat, until it burst into flames and foundered in a West Virginia gorge. He liked to think of himself as an all-around man. It is axiomatic that when a couple of bibliophiles meet over a remainder bin, a
"Eight Ball," the Pennsylvania farm bought by West and the Perelmans in ]932. .West's writing studio was the small white building to the left behind the house.
little magazine always results. During the spring of 1931, West, an inveterate browser, became acquainted with William Carlos Williams at a bookshop. In a short while their union_ was blessed by issue-that is to say, the first one of a quarterly called Contact. The title page bore the defiant epigraph "Contact will attempt to cut a trail through the American jungle without the use of a European compass," but the undergrowth must have proved too thick, because the editors shortly switched their policy from geography to merit. They extracted essays from Diego Rivera and Marsden Hartley, as well as contributions from E.E. Cummings, Erskine Caldwell, George Milburn, and Ben Hecht (and with due modesty, of course, from themselves). The magazine published four or five numbers and then, stricken by the anemia that dogs all such enterprises, a total lack of advertising, folded. Though West was left with bales of unsolicited manuscript, which eventually stoked the furnace, he did get to know a horde of writers during his editorial tenure, and many of them, trading on his largess, dossed down at the Sutton on their visits to New York. At teatime the lobby frequently took on the air of a boo~-and-author luncheon. Burly, pipesmoking poets with thick orange cravatsnobody has yet ascertained why poets affect neckwear that has the texture of caterpillars-stood around swapping meters with feverish lady librarians; the girl at the newsstand who sold you the sports final, unless you were quick on your feet, would try to read you a quatrain in the manner of Rimbaud. One evening, as I was descending alone in the elevator, the operator, a cretin I was certain I had never seen before, halted his car between floors and turned to me
with a businesslike gleam in his eye. I thought he was about to glom my stickpin and leave through the escape hatch, but when he spoke, it was in the rich Stanislavskian Group Theater cadence. "Excuse me, sir," he said deferentially. "The housekeeper told me you had a big hit on Broadway. I'm scripting a play too, on a biblical theme, but I got stuck in the second act, in the obligatory scene. Could you recommend a good book on construction, or would you advise me to go back to the Bible?" I advised him, and thereafter used the stairs. Not all aspiring writers at the Sutton, however, were slated for anonymity. Lillian Hellman, whom I had originally met when she was a reader for Horace Liveright [book publisher] and married to Arthur Kober, was holed up there, struggling with her first solo effort, The Children's Hour. A pallid youth on the third floor named Norman Krasna, hitherto a flack in the Warner Brothers publicity department, was endlessly retyping Hecht and MacArthur's The Front Page, hoping to learn something of dramatic structure. His toil eventuated in a clamorous comedy on public relations that left Broadway unmoved but swept him on to Hollywood and affluence. The one writer of celebrity in the establishment was something of a recluse. This was Dashiell Hammett, who, in the pages of magazines like Black Mask and in several novels, had revolutionized the whole concept of police fiction. Like most innovators, he had reaped small financial benefit from his work and was on a lee shore. He had been living, prior to his arrival in our midst, at an opulent Fifth Avenue hotel where he had run up a whopping bill. Unable to pay it, he was forced, in English parlance, to "shoot the
moon" and abscond with as many of his belongings as he could conceal. His knowledge of the mentality of house detectives provided the key. A tall, emaciated man, easily identifiable in a crowd, Hammett decided to use fat as subterfuge. He pulled on four shirts, three suits, innumerable socks, two lightweight ulsters, and an overcoat, cramming his pockets with assorted toiletries. Then he puffed out his cheeks, strode past the desk without a glimmer of suspicion, and headed for the Sutton, whose manager was acquiring kudos among literary folk as a Good Samaritan. West, a clotheshorse himself, recognized in Hammett a sartorial genius. He put him on the cuff and staked him to a typewriter and a bottle of beer a day. The upshot, the bestseller called The Thin Man, clinched Hammett's reputation. It was another pen pal of West's, in this same seedy epoch, who sweet-talked him into a venture that addled our brains for years to come. About mid-autumn of 1932, my wife and I began to detect glowing references in her brother's speech to Bucks County, Pennsylvania. He had latterly been weekending there with Josephine Herbst, the novelist, and his accounts of the flora, the architecture, and the natives verged on the rhapsodic. Due to its remoteness and the paucity of highways, the district was still altogether rural; but the submarginal land and the inroads of the Depression had brought about a wave of farm foreclosures, and property was ridiculously cheap. Inevitably, West conceived a romantic dream of ourselves as country squires. He visualized us cantering on fat cobs through leafy lanes, gloating over our waving fields of alfalfa, the great stone barns decorated with hex signs, and the lowing kine. He saw himself as a mighty shikari stalking through pheasant cover, gun dogs at his heels, clad in all the corduroy vests and bush jackets he had lusted for endlessly at Abercrombie's. Since I was stony at the moment, eroded by debt and hostile to any prospect of becoming a mortgagee , West started a campaign of suasion that was a masterpiece of sophistry. The revolution, he pointed out, was imminent; how sensible it would be for us, when the carmagnole rang across the barricades, to own a patch of ground where we could raise the necessities of life. Fish and game were so abundant in the Delaware Valley that shad, rabbits, and quail had to be restntined from leaping into the cook pot. If Roosevelt
closed the banks as predicted, we could grow our own tobacco, cobble our shoes with tough, fragrant birch bark. He painted a pastoral of the three of us in our bee-loud glade, my wife contentedly humming as she bottled raspberry jam, he and I churning out an unending stream of prose. Where the requisite paper would come from, since we were to dispense with cash, he did not specify. Doubtless he expected the forest to supply it. I turned a deaf ear to all such blandishments, but his sister, who was easier to influence, succumbed. One Monday morning, the two of them returned from a reconnaissance of the section pale with excitement. They had stumbled across the ultimate, the ne plus ultra, in farmsteads-an 87-acre jewel in the rolling uplands bordering the river. Their voices shook as they described the stone house on a hillside circumscribed by a tumbling creek, the monumental barn above larger than the cathedral at Chartres.
T
he place, it appeared, belonged to a left-wing journalist, one Mike Gold, who had tried to launch a ne'er-do-well brother in the chicken business there. The brother and the rodents had eaten the fowls, and Gold, to compound his troubles, was involved with a tigress in New York who was threatening a breach-of-promise suit. To enable him to flee to Mexico, which seemed to him an ideal solution for his woes, he was willing to accept a token payment for the farm, plus easy installments. In West's view, it was the biggest steal since the theft of the Mona Lisa from the Louvre. I grudgingly went out with them to see the place, and in a trice also fell for it. The autumn foliage was at its height, and the woods and fields blazed with color. In contrast to the bedlam of New York, the. only sound that disturbed the sylvan hush was the distant chatter of crows in the north forty [acres]. There was an air of permanence, of solidity, about the house and outbuildings that captivated and reassured. My glasses steamed over as a series. of colored lantern slides flashed hefore ..rpe-sleigh rides, I:Ialloween parties, sugaring off, sugaring on, and bringing in the Yule log. We hastened through the dwelling, exclaiming over virtues like its massive fireplaces and deep window reveals and conveniently ignoring its drawbacks. Bathrooms, engineered kitchens, and oil furnaces bloomed in our overheated imagination; magically, we became a trio of Paul Bunyans, shearing off porches, cementing cellars, and re-
locating stone partitions. Sound as the house was, we had to admit that the previous tenants had left it in parlous condition. The living-room closet was heaped with empty walnut husks, and judging from the pots and dishes on the stove, the residents had departed as precipitately as the crew of the Mary Celeste. A tour of the farm buildings disclosed that Gold's brother, following the poultry debacle, had turned his hand to cabinetmaking. The sheds were piled with dozens of modernistic plywood bookcases, striped in bronze radiator paint and hot tropical colors. The monstrous things harassed me for' years afterward; whenever I tried to chop them up for fireplace use, the fibrous, springy wood repelled the axe and perforated me with splinters. I eventually made an apocalyptic bonfire of them, nearly burning down the barn in the process. Several years later, incidentally, I learned that a celebrated colleague saw the property and its .owners, just before we did, under peculiarly harrowing circumstances. George S. Kaufman was being shown some of the real estate available in the neighborhood, Kaufman strenuously protesting the while to his wife that he detested the out-of-doors, that country living was full of pitfalls, and that nobody had ever incurred a hernia in Reuben's [New York City delicatessen]. Up at the Gold farm, as they ascended its winding lane, a lesson in firearms was in progress: Mike Gold, who could not open an umbrella without puncturing someone's lung, was initiating his brother into the mysteries of handling a shotgun. "They call this the breech," he explained, opening the mechanism. "We place the bullet, or shell, in there. Then we close it, like so, and raising it to the shoulder, aim along the barrel and squeeze here." He pressed the trigger smartly, unaware that the weapon was still trained on his brother's foot. Simultaneous with the explosion, the Kaufmans materialized as though on cue, just in time to see the hapless brother bite the dust. Gold stared at the casualty, his face contorted in horror, and then bounded up to the arrivals. "Cain and Abe!!" he bellowed, and smote his forehead. "Woe is me-I have slain my own brother!" Kaufman took off like an impala, and it was a decade before he would consent to enter even Central Park. Had West and I had any such therapeutic experience, we too might have been cured of our obsession; but the poison was circulating in our
veins, and a fortnight afterward, in a simple ceremony at the county courthouse, two blushing innocents were married to four score and seven acres. Raising my half of the $500 deposit baffled us until my 'Yife came up with a brilliant expedient. The one piano at the Sutton, she suggested, was quite inadequate for the Juilliard scholars, who required sustained practice. She and I had a baby grand in storage, an heirloom from her family, which we might be willing to sacrifice for a consideration in a worthy cultural cause. Her brother went into some pretty complex double talk with the owners of the hotel to justify his expenditure of $250, but they ultimately held still for it. After all, as West fluently pointed out, he had single-handedly transformed the joint from a flophouse into an artistic mecca. For the next couple of month~, every ounce of energy the three of us could summon-along with whatever paint, hardware, tools, and furniture West could liberate from the hotel short of downright larceny-went into making the farm habitable. The self-deceit of landowners is proverbial, but we reached new heights; we became artisans as well, installing pumps and plumbing, wiring the house, and even, in a Herculean spurt that left us crippled for weeks, implanting a septic tank. All these furbelows, being makeshift, constantly tended to remind us of our inadequacy. Water pipes we had painstakingly soldered would burst their seams in the middle of the night, with a roar like Krakatoa, and drench us in our beds. Tongues of blue fire licked at our homemade electrical conduits; half the time we reeled about with catastrophic headaches, unaware that the furnace needed escape vents to discharge its burden of coal gas. Each weekend was a turmoil of displacement. Groaning like navvies, we trundled barrows of shale to and fro, uprooted and redistributed trees, realigned fences, and changed the entire topography of the place. The vogue for Pennsylvania Dutch artifacts had not yet become general, and there were quantities of dough trays, dry sinks, horsehair sofas, Victorian wig stands, and similar rubbish available around the county to any fool who confused himself with Chippendale. We invariably did, and spent endless nights in a haze of shellac dust, scraping away at some curlicued gumwood commode to bring out the beauty of the grain. Spring was upon us with a rush of seed catalogs, and we were about to occupy our demesne and see if we could subsist
on tomatoes, when the wheel of fortune . took an unexpected spin. The Marx Brothers besought me to go west and fashion another movie for them, Horse Feathers, this time in collaboration with Kalmar and Ruby, the songwriters. Somewhat less than radiant at the thought of being sucked into the millrace a second time, I hesitated, but the long financial drought had sapped my resistance. At almost the same time, West's novel Miss Lonelyhearts was published to considerable critical acclaim. Its early promise of sales, unhappily, was blasted by¡ the publisher's bankruptcy, and though another firm soon reissued it, the delay was fatal. There was, however,' a small silver lining. The film rights were acquired for a handful of lima beans by Darryl Zanuck (who, parenthetically, transmuted it into a tepid comedy), and it was on the proceeds that West decided to chuck his job and devote himself to fulltime authorship. Our farewell to him at the farm, where he was starting to woo his muse with a few Spartan adjuncts like an inkhorn, a 14-gauge shotgun, and a blooded pointer, took place in an atmosphere of mingled resignation arid hope. It seemed a cruel irony to be cheated of the rustic joys we had labored to achieve, and yet, if we were ever to enjoy them, a spell in the Hollywood de~pfreeze was unavoidahk. As for West, his mood was jubilant; he was through forever with the hotel business, with pettifogging bookkeepers and commission merchants, with the neurotics, drunks, and grifters he had been called on to comfort and wheedle. He had two tangible licenses to hunt and to fish, and one, invisible, to starve as a free-lance writer. We toasted his fJture and ours with a gulp of 40-rod [liquor] and, bidding him Godspeed, turned our faces to the setting sun. 0 About the Author: Sidney Joseph Perelman (19041979) developed a unique style of sophisticated literary humor. In addition to screenplays, he collaborated with Ogden Nash on the libretto for the musical
One Touch of Venus and wrote such
books
as
Dawn Ginsbergh's Revenge (his first, 1929), Crazy Like a Fox, Listen to the Mockingbird and The Last Laugh, which was published posthumously and from which this article has been excerpted.
All the Lonely People I was a schoolboy, 16, in 1948 when I first read Nathanael West's Miss Lonelyhearts. My' enthusiasm was boundless. The book confirmed my adolescent cynicism, validated my carefully cultivated nihilism. I had never encountered such deft interweaving of the hilarious and the ghastly. Without reaiizing it I had become a member of a cult of Nathanael West enthusiasts: For years to cOJ!!e;ref~r~!1.('e5to his 888k:; wGilld create instant bonds of brotherhood similar to those of lodge members who flash the secret sign. I would rate libraries according to whether they stocked West's novels. Few did. Rereading West today, I am less enthralled by his work generally. Yet I find Miss Lonelyhearts a gem of its genre and a remarkably original work for its time1933. Jay Martin in Nathanael West: The Art of His Life (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1970) asserts that West was an influence on "younger novelists like James Purdy, Joseph Heller, Thomas Pynchon, John Hawkes and . Flannery O'Connor." If not a direct influence, West was clearly a precursor of those writers; they share a low assessment of mankind, an ability to manipulate language to startling effect-and unfettered imagination. West was one of the first modern American masters of black humor. As T.S. Eliot said of John Webster, he saw "the skull beneath the skin." Miss Lonelyhearts is set in the newsroom of a big-city American newspaper. Like surgeons and soldiers, hangmen and gravediggers, journalists are said to be great jokers because otherwise they could not bear the daily tragedy into which their jobs shove their noses. In Shrike the Editor, West has created one of literature's great
I
comic villains. He's the newspaperman presidents and prime ministers have warned us about; he makes Walter Burns of The Front Page and Ben Bradlee of All the President's Men seem like purring pussycats. Lewd, crude and vicious, Shrike has perpetrated the cosmic newspaper joke: He has assigned a sensitive, religious, hysterical misfit of a reporter to the advice-to~the-lovelorn column. Shrike deiights in tormenting his victim-who is known only as Miss Lonelyhearts throughout the novel-as he is parched in the desert ¡of human suffering. Delightfully, Shrike has no redeeming characteristics; he's a thoroughly Brechtian creation. In one chapter, he outlines alternatives to Miss L's despair (for which he is
Nathanael West's novels; marked by black humor and the nihilism of youth, ar partly responsible), then demolishes each escapist fantasy in turn. He concludes: "My friend, I know of course that neither the soil, nor the South Seas, nor Hedonism, nor art, nor suicide, nor drugs, can mean anything to us. We are not men who swallow camels only to strain at stools. God alone is our escape. The church is our only hope, the First Church of Christ Dentist, where He is worshiped as Preventer of Decay. The chu'rch whose symbol is the trinity new-style: Father, Son and Wirehaired Fox Terrier. ... And so, my good friend, let me dictate a letter to Christ for you: "Dear Miss' Lonelyhearts of Miss Lonelyhearts"I am twenty-six years old and in the newspaper game. Life for me is a desert empty of comfort. I cannot find pleasure in food, drink, or women-nor do the arts give me joy any longer. The Leopard of Discontent walks the streets of my city; the Lion of Discouragement crouches outside the walls of my citadel. A II is desolation and a vexation t'Jfthe spirit. I feel like hell. How can I believe, how can I have faith in this day and age? Is it true that the greatest scientists believe again in you? "T rt',tld ynur rnlwvn and like it very much. There you once wrote: 'When the salt has lost its savour, who shall savour it again?' Is the answer: 'None but the Saviour?' "Thanking you very much for a quick reply, I remain yours truly, "A Regular Subscriber"
Here's what a nice guy Shrike is: Having unmanned Miss L with the pseudonymous assignment that confronts him with the bizarre miseries of a million newspaper readers, Shrike permits Miss L to pursue Mrs. Shrike because her flirtations with the hapless reporter make her feel amorous enough to accept Shrike;s brutal advances. And what a victim Shrike has selected! A prototype of modern man we have come to know well: the carrier of disaster with holy intentions. Miss Lonelyhearts drank steadily. He was smiling an innocent, amused smile, the smile of an anarchist sitting in the movies with a bomb in his pocket. If the people around him only knew what was in his pocket. In a little while he would leave to kill the President.
We know that Miss L is a minister's son, grieving because he does not feel the call, a bleeding heart (Shrike with his' customary gentleness calls him "a leper licker"). The cries for help that pile up in his mailbox-from a girl born without a nose, a deaf-mute raped on a tenement roof, a woman abused by a drunken husbandmagnify his feelings of helplessness and inadequacy. Although the deadline was less than a quarter of an hour away, he was still working on his leader. He had gone as far as: "Life is worth while, for it is full of dreams and peace, gentleness and ecstasy, and faith that burns like a clear white flame on a grim dark altar." But he found it impossible to continue. The letters were no longer funny. He could not go on finding the same joke funny thirty times a day for months on end. And on most days he received more than thirty letters, all of them alike, stamped from the dough of suffering with a heart-shaped cookie knife.
(Hollywood, which has taken on the pain-balming features of Miss Lonelyhearts itself on occasion, tried three times to translate West's novel to the screen. In the first Verl;iuH in 1QT~. ~ccnrdin!;! to Jay Martin, "To appease newspapermen, the director engaged a reporter as technical adviser and promised both accuracy of detail and a production that would reflect the journalistic profession's high image of itself." The third version, in the late Fifties, followed the plot quite reverently; but without the book's style, the effect was lost. That film did have two casting strokes of genius that make reading the book more fun: Miss Lonelyhearts was Montgomery Clift and Shrike was Robert Ryan.) Miss L's soul-sickness corrodes all his relationships. He is engaged to a lovely and sympathetic young woman, one who practices the very compassionate virtues that Miss L espouses and fails to act upon. Yet he treats her shabbily and rebuffs her attempts to soothe his obsessions. He has come to despise the victims who cry for his help. When he encounters a homosexual vagrant in a public toilet, he bullies him. The one correspondent of his column with whom he makes contact is a gross woman longing for sex because her husband is a cripple. Miss L is seduced by her and his later attempts to comfort and advise the crippled husband lead to his semiaccidental assassination, a last wicked parody of calvary. Miss L is a keen delineation of a charac-
ter immersed in hysteria whose skein has run out. He longs for a religious experience out of William James' book, but his life is fated for a five-inch obit in the pages of The New York Post-Dispatch, the fictional rag for which he works. Shrike, his tormentor, is himself a victim-a hollow man, an artist manque who needs devious stratagems to entice his own wife. Only someone with a deep need to believe could be so blasphemous. The reader feels this may well be true of West himself. He has drawn Shrike so much more fully than any other characterand he's certainly given him all the best lines. Miss L is a bumbling Othello to Shrike's resplendent Iago. Miss L has gone from being simply and ordinarily miserable to a state of hysteria; he curses his fate and keeps on drinking. Shrike strikes out at fate. He is constantly making things happenhorrible things often, as when he organizes a party for Miss L's colleagues and makes a game of answering the column letters, saving for the end a letter from the embittered cripple who has learned about Miss Land his wife. Shrike reads the letter to the assembled guests; Miss L has left the party minutes earlier in panic, and Shrike didn't bother to warn
him
For all the cult following his work attracted, Nathanael West has not been the subject of intensive scholarly biographies. Martin's book indicates why: West was no intellectual, and his short life (he died at 37) wasn't particularly fascinating. But Martin's biography does give some clues to what may have stoked the fires that produced Miss Lonelyhearts. West was born Nathan Weinstein on October 17, 1903, in New York City. His parents had immigrated from Russia. By the time Nathan was born, his father was quite successful as a builder. Says Martin of West's parents' families: Like the German Jews who were already established in New York, they attempted at once to become Americanized. They delighted in the free, open American culture, and they moved freely in it. They refused to speak Yiddish or Russian; instead they taught German to their children and learned English themselves.
populated by failures, vultures and degenerates-distasteful
but teeming with life.
highly successful comedy writer (working for the Marx Brothers). West never made much of a go of Hollywood filmwriting. Between 1936 and his death in 1940, he worked on some two dozen films, none of which was even mildly distinguished. He was acquainted with many of the other writers lured to Hollywood during those Depression days: F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, John O'Hara, Horace McCoy, Dashiell Hammett and Dorothy Parker. (None of them ever turned out a first-rate screenplay-and few of their scripts were filmed as they had written them. Hollywood moguls of those days regarded screenwriting as strictly a craft, not an art.) West's third novel, A Cool Million or, The Dismantling of Lemuel Pitkin, was published in 1934. The book is a heavy-handed satire of the Horatio Alger legend, with a plot reminiscent of Candide (an innocent remains optimistic as he is mutilated by greedy and unprincipled malefactors). West tends to belabor such themes as "Patriotism is the last refuge of a'scoundrel" and "After shaking hands with a politician, be sure to count your fingers." The most interesting aspect of the novel was West's recognition of how volatile Americans could be when gathered into a mob, the mercilessness of self-righteousness. West may have been fortunate to have been so badly done by in Hollywood. Far from the center of movie land glamor, he observed the town's myriad losers: the janitors and steam fitters of the dream factory; star-struck waitresses who wound up walking the streets; Hollywood cowboys; washed-up vaudevillians, and the people who had simply come to California to die. Most Hollywood novels before and since presented close-ups of the stars, producers and directors who made the films, the On examining the horse, Balso found omnipotent studio czars, the frustrated that there were but three openings: the artists of the silver screen. West hardly mouth, the navel and the posterior opening of the alimentary canal. The mouth was knew this crowd-but desperation, as he beyond his reach, the navel proved a culsought work on one quickie small-budget de-sac, and so, forgetting his dignity, he film after another, brought him into contact approached the last. 0 Anus Mirabilis! with the hangers-on, has-beens and neverwould-bes of Tinseltown. These were the The entrance is a metaphor for the hero's • people who wrote letters to the real Miss character and perhaps the world. The slim Lonelyhearts, the people who clung unvolume did nothing to establish West's liter- blinkingly to the screen's fantasies. West ary reputation. Miss Lonelyhearts received respectful reviews, but sales suffered because West's publisher went bankrupt and was unable to supply the novel to bookstores. On the strength of the reviews he was invited to Hollywood, where Perelman was already a West was not a devout Jew, and he was acutely sensitive to anti-Semitic slurs. The desire to have a faith that would guide him, to achieve sainthood, is Miss L's strongest obsession-and there are indications that West himself, thoroughly assimilated, felt qualms about being cut off from his own religious heritage. West was graduated from Brown University, part of the "Ivy League," in 1924. There he met S.J. Perelman, who became his friend and later married his sister. He went to Paris as did many young Americans with literary aspirations at that time, but he was not part of the Hemingway-Gertrude Stein-Fitzgerald "moveable feast" crowd. He returned to New York in 1927 to take a job as hotel manager. At the hotel, in addition to activities described by his brother-in-law in the preceding story, West (in company with Lillian Hellman) would steam open mail addressed to the more interesting hotel guests to determine if the facts of their lives coincided with his inventions concerning them. In 1929 Perelman introduced West to a woman who wrote an advice-to-the-Iovelorn column for the Brooklyn Eagle, under the pen name Susan Chester; she showed them some of the letters she received from readers. From these came the inspiration for Miss Lonelyhearts. West's first novel, a novella really, written mostly while he was in Paris, polished during lonely hotel nights and published in 1931, was The Dream Life of Balsa Snell. It is a facetious farce leaning heavily on bathroom humor and reflecting poorly assimilated influences including James Joyce and the French Dadaists. The plot loosely describes the adventures of a poet who enters the legendary Trojan Horse:
crammed them into The Day of the Locust, easily his second-best book and in many ways a more perceptive novel about Hollywood than, say, Fitzgerald's The Last Tycoon (based on the idealistic, MGM studio head Irving Thalberg). West's characters are dreamers, all right, self-deluders all, but not an idealist in the book. Even the protagonist, Tod Hackett, a Yale art school graduate who designs studio sets, is basically a sucker-he's a good guy simply by not being an exploiter. Tod is painting an apocalyptic canvas, The Burning of Los Angeles, in his spare time. His vision turns to reality when thecrowd-as-beast becomes violent during a Hollywood premiere. After a lynching-cumriot, Tod has his picture more clearly in his mind than ever: As he stood on his good leg, clinging desperately to the iron rail, he could see all the rough charcoal strokes with which he had blocked it out on the big canvas. Across the top, parallel with the frame, he had drawn the burning city, a great bonfire of architectural styles, ranging from Egyptian to Cape Cod colonial. Through the center, winding from left to right, was a long hill street and down it, spilling into the middle foreground, came the mob carrying baseball bats and torches. For the faces of its members, he was using the innumerable sketches he had made of the people who come to California to die; the cultists of all sorts, economic as well as religious; the wave, airplane, funeral and preview watchers-ail those poor devils who can only be stirred by the promise of miracles and then only to violence ....
Perhaps the relentless pessimism of West's vision was his greatest strength. Had he been a better compromiser, he'd be far better known and would have been a more successful Hollywood screenwriter. Less than a year before he died, Nathanael West married Eileen McKenna, who was the heroine of My Sister Eileen, a collection of amusing stories by Ruth McKenna that was later made into a hit play, musical and movie. He was returning with Eileen from a weekend of hunting in Mexico on December 22,1940, when his car collided with another at a crossroad, killing him and his wife. West's body was placed in the same Hollywood mortuary where F. Scott Fitz¡ gerald, who had died less than 24 houn earlier, lay. Posterity has been kinder to Fitzgerald. C
Trade for ThirdWorld Growth U.S. Trade Representative William Brock is convincing Americans that the health of their economy depends on progress around the world, specially in developing countries, and on economic interdependence. Although the United States has long been unchallenged as the world's biggest exporter and importer, foreign trade has generally been taken for granted from the time of the American industrial revolution in the late 19th century through the period immediately following the end of World War II. The size and strength of the domestic market tended to distract the attention of American producers from opportunities in overseas markets, while the ready availability of resources, technology and capital at home made foreign sources of supply relatively less attractive. The oil crisis did much to turn around American thinking on trade matters but it was not the only factor. For many years before that, the "closed-system" attitude of many American businessmen had eroded the sharp edge of U.S. competitiveness. Trade surpluses shrank and finally disappeared. Worker layoffs began to take place in basic industries such as steel, automobiles and textiles. There was talk in some circles of the impending end of American economic supremacy in an ever-changing world. The Reagan Administration is attempting to change that image, to restructure some fundamental values and to improve the understanding Americans have of their economy. "International economic interdependence," a catchword in several previous administrations, is taking on a new and deeper meaning today, as Americans are slowly coming to realize that the health of their economy depends on economic progress around the world and especially in the developing countries. The effort to instill a stronger sense of the importance of foreign trade and investment is being led by President Reagan and his principal adviser on trade matters, the U.S. Trade Representative, William E. Brock. Brock is particularly optimistic about the long-term prospects for Third World economic growth and development and for substantial gains in two-way trade between the United States and the developing countries. "Today we take 50 percent of the manufactured product for export of all the Third World countries put together into this one country, the United States," Brock says. "That's phenomenal! It shows that we have been more willing to keep our markets open than anyone else. "If you look at that in terms of its relationship to aid, they sell twice as much product in the United States as they receive in aid from the whole world combined. If you consider aid from
all countries, including the United States, they get twice as many dollars just by selling products in the U.S. market. "If you look at investments that we make in those countries, we are investing in Third World countries almost half the dollar figure they get in sum total from all forms of aid. So, in effect, if you just talk about investments in relation to foreign aid, our private investments in Third World countries are equivalent to 45 percent of the total foreign aid that they receive from the whole world put together. "So let's talk about improving economies in the total context. Aid is a part of it; international financial institutions are a part of it. But frankly, a bigger part is trade and investment. "Third World countries' opportunity for growth is really dependent upon their ability to develop a healthier trading relationship with us and with other industrial countries. We are really going to be forthcoming with the countries of Asia, Africa, Latin America and with small nations around the world to establish that trading and investment relationship so that they can in fact provide jobs and economic growth for their own people. You're talking about more economic input than they'll ever receive in direct government-to-government aid." Brock's commitment to opening U.S. markets and to providing better access for the products of the world's developing countries is premised on the understanding that international trade is a two-way street. In the words of trade experts: "You buy where you sell." The United States' growing concern for Third World countries is not wholly altruistic, but is grounded in a healthy measure of old-fashioned self-interest. "I'd like to develop more clearly our program of increasing trade with the Third World," Brock declares. "We now sell more to Third World countries than to Europe and Japan combined. Nobody thinks much about that, but it is an unbelievable opportunity for the United States and if it is going to continue to grow, we need to be very sure that we are developing a relationship with those countries that takes into account their needs as well as ours, and reaches for a kind of understanding that we will try to be accommodating to them. We'll try to keep our markets open and in exchange we would hope that they would belong to international trade organizations such as the GATT [General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade]." "We really do know," Brock observes, "thaLunless they have access to our markets, there is no way they are going to be able to buy our products. We talk about two-way trade with Japan, for example, but it's equally two-way with any other country-even the very smallest. "We will try to provide them special access, but as they achieve maturity, become competitive and productive, they should be graduated up to full acceptance of their responsibilities as trade partners, as we have already begun to do this year. "It doesn't make sense for countries to come to us and ask for special access to markets in the United States, while their own laws ban the sale of U.S. products in their own markets. "Of course we are willing to be patient, but we are not willing to be patsies," he adds dryly. Not all countries are in the same stage of development, of course, and Brock sees the need to frame U.S. trade policy according to the varying needs of Third World nations. He endorses the principle of special and differential treatment based on the economic levels of the United States' trading partners. "Some countries," he says, "remain agrarian and illdefined in terms of economic or political structure. We know it will take a considerable period of time before they evolve that
ability to sell a great deal in this or any other market. They are basically just maintenance economies. They are simply trying to do everything they can to keep their people from starving to death. "Just a little above that, though, are countries that have begun to establish some continuity of government, some predictability of economic prospect. It is in this category that there is the greatest opportunity for using the special access that we provide to the United States through preferential GSP [Generalized System of Preferences] treatment. "They can really take advantage of it and begin to build just at the embryonic stage a domestic industry that can create jobs and therefore become markets for us. What we don't want is a situation where three or four countries take all the advantages and leave nothing to any of the smaller countries. That has too often been the case." Brock's endorsement of the importance of improving U.S. trade relations with the Third World is significant, coming as it does from the man President Reagan has chosen as his principal adviser on trade matters and the nation's spokesman and chief negotiator on trade questions. Brock is new to the post of U.S. Trade Representative (USTR), having been appointed a little more than a year ago. But he is no newcomer to the Washington, D.C., political scene. Brock, 49 years old, served four terms in the U.S. Congress (1963 -70) as a Representative from his home state of Tennessee and one term as a U.S. Senator (1971-77). He was named Chairman of the Republican National Committee in 1977. He is credited by many observers with being one of those most responsible for the strong Republican congressional showing in the 1980 elections, when the party strengthened its representation in the House of Representatives and won control of the Senate for the first time in a quarter of a century.
A
u.s. Trade Representative, Brock is not only a member of the President's cabinet; by law, he also holds the rank of Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary. The Office of the USTR is the lead agency for negotiations within GATT, and it issues policy guidance for U.S. initiatives in other international bodies such as the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD). The USTR administers the dutyfree U.S. Generalized System of Preferences and hears complaints against roreign unfair trade practices. A wide variety of additional responsibilities falls within the USTR's mandate. The office is in charge of policy-related aspects of U.S. export expansion programs, commodity trade, East-West trade and international trade matters involving energy. Also in its portfolio are international direct investment policy, bilateral trade and investment issues and import policy, including trade adjustment assistance. Brock is an ex officio member of the boards of the U.S. Export-Import Bank and the Overseas Private Investment Corporation (OPle), which insures U.S. investments in foreign countries. Probably the biggest impact the USTR has in the developing world is its power to determine what products from what countries will be granted duty-free access to the U.S market under the U.S. Generalized System of Preferences. Altogether, some 2,800 products (out of 7,000 imported by the United States) from 140 developing countries are eligible for GSP duty-free treatment. The product list is not static and is amended from year to year according to fluctuations in trade flows and changes in conditions in the developing countries
themselves. If, for example, imports of a GSP eligible item from a particular beneficiary country rise above stated limits in a single year, that item from the country in question is likely to lose GSP benefits the following year. In any given year, more than 100 items from specific countries may be dropped from the GSP list for exceeding the so-called "competitive need" limitation, and an equal number may be restored because prior-year imports fell below the competitive need limit. The USTR is constantly evaluating requests for new product categories from all beneficiary countries to be added to the GSP list. In 1981 the USTR granted duty-free privileges to 48 new items, ranging from canned sardines in tomato sauce to floor coverings, unwrought aluminum and transistors. The basic purpose of the GSP is to encourage the growth of export industries in developing countries by granting their products preferential tariff treatment that is more favorable than the treatment given to the same products from developed nations. In recent years, though, it has become apparent that a handful of Third World countries have been benefiting far more than the rest. A recent congressional study showed that more than two-thirds of all U.S. GSP imports come from just five countries of the developing world: Taiwan, Korea, Hong Kong, Brazil and Mexico .. In April 1981 the USTR moved to correct this situation by selectively removing certain products from the more advanced developing countries from the GSP list-a process referred to by Trade Representative Brock as "graduation." More than $500 million in imports lost GSP privileges through this mechanism, including such items as down-filled coats, jackets and vests from Hong Kong, Korea and Taiwan; eyeglass frames from Hong Kong; steel wire rope and stainless steel cooking and kitchenware from Korea; auto parts from Mexico and Brazil; mangoes from Mexico; and hardboard from Brazil. As a result of these actions, some of the less-developed developing countries will be able to fill the gap. One of the more important items on the USTR's agenda is the negotiation of an international agreement to cover trade in services, much as existing GATT agreements cover trade in goods. The services trade has been a virtually neglected area; it is governed, if at all, by a limited number of ad hoc understandings that individual countries have with each other. Brock and many other trade experts would like to see a well-defined code spelling out the rules covering a broad range of nonmerchandise transactions including engineering and construction, banking, accounting, shipping, insurance, movies, advertising, commercial aviation, communications, legal services, franchising and many others. "We think about trade as if it were some.thing tangible," Brock remarks, "something that you can touch or feel. In fact, 41 percent of our exports are other than product-what we might call services. We have not developed a world code of law to keep people from setting up protectionist barriers against trade in services, and that is a priority for us." So far, Brock says, a tentative understanding has been reached within the OECD on the need for preliminary studies of the problem, but an international agreement as such may be some time in the future. Whether the issue is trade in services, or duty-free entry into the U.S. market or expansion of two-way trade with the United States, the U.S. Trade Representative is at the center of the action in U.S. relations with the developing world. 0 About the Author: Richard C. Schroeder, a frequent contributor to SPAN, is a free-lance writer and editor of CECON Trade News, published by the Organization of American States.
The Pied Piper of Dance At 47, New York City Ballet's erstwhile star Jacques d'Amboise performs less frequently, but he has found an exuberant new life teaching dancing to schoolchildren, nuns and even the police. Dancing transformed his life, and that is why Jacques d'Amboise, a big American boy with an aristocratic French name and a ballet technique that is elegantly and peculiarly Russian, has become, in his mid-40s, a missionary of the dance. A symbol of virile grace for the New York City Ballet for more than 30 years, the audacious partner of many of the world's most ravishing ballerinas, d' Amboise now dreams of sweeping into rhythmic Š 1981 by The New York Times Company. Reprinted by 'permission from The New York Times Magazine.
self-expression all the youth of America -for dancing, he believes, is every child's cultural birthright. As a teacher, d'Amboise owes much to George Balanchine, the fiercely demanding and most revered of contemporary ballet masters, ~ho fusses over the New York City Ballet like an autocratic Mr. Chips. D'Amboise has picked up, perhaps unconsciously, some of the Balanchine mannerisms-the disdainful sniff, softened by the impish smile, the funny and sometimes startling candor; and the intolerance for any inattention,
slackness or ill manners. He remains the well-brought-up and physically demonstrative boy. The hugs and kisses he lavishes in greeting and farewell- and often in between - are all part of his coltish exuberance. And, like a child, transparently, he sulks when someone fails to meet his standard of politesse, of good breeding. He has the appetite and the imagery of a boy, and his mind is always full of clever dance steps and scary stories and perky song ideas and fetching tableaux. For he has stayed close to the little boy within him, and that is the most
compelling of his gifts as a teacher of children. The children to whom he brings the dance hail him by his first name, embrace him like a big brother; humor his demands and eventually learn to perform, with very nearly professional skill and pride, the routines he teaches them. In the eyes of these youngsters, mostly from working-class backgrounds, d'Amboise is a tall child with whom they have a delicious rapport. Himself a child of the New York streets, growing up midst the gangs, he shudders to think how barren his life would have been without a God-sent exposure to the ordered beauty of dance, and he now tries to pour that richness into the lives of some 1,000 schoolchildren; with the exception of one private school, the youngsters are drawn from 16 public* and parochial schools in New York, Westchester, Long Island and New Jersey. The response to d'Amboise's program, initiated six years ago, has been enthusiastic and he has been invited to extend it to other cities that have resident dance companies, such as Washington, Philadelphia, Cleveland and San Francisco. In a way, d'Amboise, now nearing 48, is realizing an adolescent dream. When he turned 40, he began losing the resiliency to perform the roles of his robust young manhood; classical ballet, like baseball, properly is the occupation of youth. Facing the need to taper off, he seized upon a second career-teaching the dance to children - thereby fulfilling his early sense of mission. As a teenager, he envisioned a career in which he would help people, perhaps as a doctor or priest. Instead, at 15, he joined the New York City Ballet, where he quickly began to glow-a sturdy ornament in what Balanchine calls his "skyful of stars." Had d' Amboise's mother not been a mettlesome woman, who combined dreamy romanticism with concrete aspiration-qualities he has inherited-he might never have become one. of Balanchine's most prized dancers, one for whom the ballet master created many major works. D' Amboise's mother, Georgette (whose surname the whole family eventually adopted), was French-Canadian farm girl, transplanted to New York, who derived her high-flown notions of culture and gallantry from a close reading ofand much fantasizing about-the history of Louis XIV, the Sun King. She brought the court of Versailles into the tenement
a
*In th~ United States a public school is a free tax-supported school controlled by the local government.
life of her children-a life she found far less congenial than did her handsome, Boston-Irish husband, Andrew Patrick Ahearn. Papa Ahearn was content to work his eight-hour-day as an itinerant telegrapher and spend Sunday afternoons listening to opera on the radio. But Mama d' Amboise would be out wheedling for her children the lessons she could not really afford; she enrolled Jacques, age eight, in Balanchine's School of American Ballet. Not that d' Amboise seeks, among the schoolchildren he now teaches, candidates for a career in ballet such as his own. He is merely trying to give them, through exposure to his beloved dance, an aesthetic adventure that will open their lives to something more gentling than football. The children d' Amboise teaches frequently are from poor neighborhoods, like the one in which he grew up, and a number of them are severely hearingimpaired. They are black and Oriental and Hispanic and working-class white, and some of them run with gangs. Having run with gangs himself as a boy-his neighborhood bordered Harlem, and rumbles with rocks and zipguns, as in West Side Story, were not infrequent-d'Amboise knows how to galvanize his pupils. He off~rs them images of caged tigers-demonstrating, he _dances the tiger's angry, controlled litheness; of monstrous, 12-foot -tall piranha fish-when you kick, he tells his pupils, aim for his ugly mouthful of swordlike teeth, before he gets you. All this with the aim of giving these children a sense of the freedom and the joy of dancing. But he does more, even, than that. He imposes a disciplined goal-a public performance at the Felt Forum of Madison Square Garden at the end of the school year, in early June, in which the children are joined by celebrated professionals. His method works even on cops, whom he teaches mainly for the sake of the children. D' Amboise includes among his pupils a covey of nuns and lay teachers, as well as a pride of New York City police officers, most of whom suffer from the same cultural deprivation as the children he instructs. Some of them turned up for their first class in the winter of 1980, dressed the way cops dress for the street; d' Amboise asked them nicely, like the proprietor of a Wild West saloon, to park their hardware.
The public performance is integral to d'Amboise's teaching. An extravaganza bringing together all of his classes, it reached deMillean proportions last year. Performing with the 1,000 children was d' Amboise himself and other principals of the City Ballet, as well as Broadway stars and recording artists-anyone from among his enormous circle of friends whom he could coax into contributing talent. Balanchine is entirely sympathetic to d' Amboise's dance program. "It's a great thing Jacques does," he says. "He is better than any psychiatrist. He takes self-consciousness away from the children." . The production was a benefit for the nonprofit National Dance Institute, formed by d'Amboise to finance his teaching project. While a number of schools can afford the program, some can pay little or no part of the $2,100 to $2,500 cost of bringing in a weekly teacher and musician for the 30 weeks of each school year. Schools in need are assisted by the institute, which raises money every way it can, and now supports five dance assistants and three musicians, in addition to a small office staff. And this year for the first time it is paying d'Amboise a modest salary. There was an earlier attempt at a teaching program that ended in a shambles. In 1978, d' Amboise accepted an appointment as both dean and professor of dance at the State University of New York at Purchase. But soon he found that he did not care for the demanding administrative duties of deanship, and he neglected them, perhaps not understanding that Purchase stressed deanship over teaching. He left after two years. D'Amboise now feels fulfilled as a teacher, having found his level, and he devotes at least 40 hours a week to the children's program. The breezy, imperious style that choked him as a teacher of college students is the very quality that sparks his work with children. In his new career, he is part entertainer. D'Amboise instructs his young pupils with a combination of cajolery, scolding, clowning and praise. He tells them stories, conjures up audiences for them to dance to, rolls imaginary cameras- but he never condescends to them. In his faded jeans and unraveling cotton sweater, he looks like a captive faun. You can almost see a pair of horns poking through the tousled, dramatically black hair. His face is diamond-shaped, with high, sharp cheekbones and a challenging jaw. His dark eyes, under thickly curving brows, hold a look of pleasea expectancy. He moves with schooled, yet casual elegance; years of pounding work
have been spent to make each gesture appear effortless, no seams showing. His voice has an exotic timbre, not quite French, but not pure New York, either. He is widely read, but he dropped out of high school when he began performing, and his vocabulary, though comprehensive, is askew with quirky mispronunciations: He jokes about how he "oggles" the pretty ballerinas backstage, and-a highly disciplined man---:he worries about signs of impending disorder or, as he puts it, of "archany." His "Yes" is often an excited, "Yah, yah, yah!" And his "No" sometimes sounds like Eliza Doolittle's before Professor Higgins improved her: "Naow," he will yowl, when he feels himself misunderstood. "My teaching doesn't have to make dancers, I don't care about that," d' Amboise says. "I try to make it an adventure for the children." And while his own distinction is as a dancer of classical ballet, he also has studied and performed jazz and modern dance, and jazz is what he mostly teaches his pupils. Although dedicated to his new career, d' Amboise mi'sses steady performing with the New York City Ballet. Atthe height of his powers, he appeared on stage eight times a week throughout the year. After age 30, injuries began to accumulate and he danced somewhat less. Classical ballet is the most mercilessly disciplined of all the performing artsmore an obsession than an occupation. By the time you are 35, your performing days are numbered. It's the chemistry of the muscles, as Balanchine likes to say. Protective and nurturing, Balanchine does not turn his back on aging dancers. Indeed, he has continued to make new dances for d'Amboise, who still has a devoted following and has come to be a sort of unofficial Mr. New York City Ballet. He is always among those who represent his company abroad and at command performances in the White House. Most recently, he danced at the inaugural festivities for Ronald Reagan. The roles d' Amboise now dances, however, do not require him to wear the skinlike tights of his. youth.Somewhat .more sedate, they are roles that take advantage of his I
vivid personality and his bone-deep grace, but do not demand the spectacular lifts and dazzling leaps in which he once gloried, scoffing at gravity's pull. . D'Amboise's decision to limit his stage appearances was a painful one, and he found himself trying, against his own good sense, to postpone the moment of giving up full-time dancing. He took his problem to his wife, Carrie, a former ballerina, now a photographer, to whom he has been married 26 years, and whom he regards as his best friend. She told him gently but honestly that his legs had ceased to look presentable in the tights that are the basic costume of classical ballet's leading male roles. D' Amboise accepted her judgment. "I was no longer the prince," he says, with a rueful smile. Balanchine puts it tactfully: "When the body is slower and older, it is also wiser. You can subStitute acting for real dancing." Acting is what d' Amboise does for his young pupils, dancing both for them and with them. Each of his classes is taught an individual routine, as well as the steps to a grand finale that all the classes will dance together at the Felt Forum. D'Amboise invents the dances as he goes along, and the children are drilled, in between his visits, by his assistants. The lyrics to some of the songs that accompany the various dances are improvised haphazardly by d'Amboise and the children; often they are nonsense rhymes, based on'the children's names, their favorite foods, catchwords-anything that will establish the beat, help fix the steps in the children's minds. Eventually, these "lyrics" are written down and polished, then set to music by Lee Norris, a professional song writer. The class is held in a public school lunchroom, its trestle tables pushed back against thewalls to open up space for the unusually large group of youngsters. D'Amboise restricts his classes to children between the ages of 8 and 13, from those selected by the principal, not on the basis of discernible talent, but on how hard-working and motivated the child appears to be. D' Amboise tries to limit the classes to 3D (10 or so always drop out). D'Amboise stresses to his pupils that they are not dancing merely for themselves. "There will be people out there at Madison Square Garden who have paid good money to see you," he reminds
As a teacher d' Amboise does not seek to turn out professional dancers but to make dance "an adventure for the children."
them often. "Pretend there's a movie camera recording every step," he sometimes says. "Everything is dark out there, and you're up here on the stage. And you have to show your excellence. You have to be fantastic, you have to be amazing! Ready! Chest up! Go!" The dance has a strong beat with rapid, spirited steps, some of them quite tricky to learn; there are kicks, spins and jumps, emphatic arm and hand gestures. D' Amboise stops them, doubling over in mock anguish. "Oh, my stomach! Arghh! Oohh! When you make a mistake, I get such a stomachache!" The children are momentarily stunned. D' Amboise abruptly straightens up and says matter-of-factly, "O.K., do it again, and don't forget my stomach. Don't make a mistake!" Lisa Younes, a lO-year-old, explains why she takes the class: "Jacques gives us confidence, and it's good exercise." Lisa is chubby, despite the exercise, but determined. With the lovely simplicity of childhood, she says, "I really want to be an international lawyer. But before I do that, I'd like to dance professionally." D' Amboise's affection for children, his compulsion to nurture them, is so intense as to be almost painful. His sense of mission may have had its genesis in a terrifying experience he lived through with his first-born son, George, who was stricken as an infant with what the doctors said was a fatal illness. "When George got cancer, I. think I went crazy," d'Amboise says. "He was two, and they said it was hopeless. I was so frightened, I couldn't even think about it. I built barriers. Poor little George was in the hospital in a crib, and Carrie and I would go to visit him. Carrie would talk to him and pat him. And I couldn't stay in the room. I couldn't bear to look at him. I thought of him as already gone. And you know what I did? I walked out, and found the children's ward. And I danced for those children. I did a funny walk, to amuse them. Because I couldn't do it for my own son. I was a coward. And I danced for the other children." Miraculously, George recovered. Now 25, he is in the Air Force. The second d'Amboise son, Christopher, who recently turned 22, has paid his father the compliment of following him into the City Ballet, where
he now performs solo roles. There are dance training helps improve balance and also twin girls of 17-Kate and Charlot- coordination among the deaf. Besides, te- both of whom are athletic and musi- d'Amboise believes that in encouraging cal. And Carrie d' Amboise, known profes- these children to dance along with their sionally as Carolyn George, teaches dance hearing peers, he is lessening their isolation and allowing them to bloom in a students in a small studio at home. D' Amboise lives the dance 24 hours a world that often callously shuts them day. He can hardly wait to begin his work out. Chris d' Amboise sometimes plays the week on Monday. Often he rises at 6 o'clock, jogs 20 blocks to an exercise piano for this class, which is something of studio, where he works out for an hour, a festive family affair. Carrie d'Amboise then returns briefly to his house, where is likely to be on hand and the twins, Kate and Charlotte, are often present, enhe gobbles a breakfast sandwich. couraged by their father to join in the By 9, d'Amboise is in his battered dancing. Volkswagen, headed for St. Patrick's By 10 a.m., seated on folding chairs or School in Jersey City. Dance bag slung over his shoulder, he limps painfully sprawled on the floor against the wall, after the 40-minute ride; not until he has are a couple of dozen parents, older limbered up with his pupils is he able to brothers, older sisters, friends, all wearwalk-and dance-normally again. He ing an air of happy anticipation. Word hates to speak of. or even to notice, his has got around that Jacques' Saturday various physical disabilities, the ballet morning class is the best show in dancer's inevitable accumulation, some- town. All the while, standing beside him, thing he simply learns to live with. "I'm O.K. as long as I keep moving," he says is Marcia Rubine, the interpreter for the hearing-impaired children, some of cheerfully. Each new class must be shown what whom can read lips; for those who have d' Amboise calls "the right attitude." An difficulty, she signs d'Amboise's instrucunease still attaches in some quarters to tions. Once they have learned the the idea of little boys taking dance routines, it is impossible to single out any lessons, and so, when he first introduces deaf children. his program into a school, d' Amboise To vary the pace, d' Amboise instructs allows only boys to take his class. the children in how to acknowledge the "If I say I'm going to teach boys and applause they will receive at the Felt girls, only the girls will sign up. If I say Forum. girls aren't allowed to take this program, "Never bow with your back, the way the boys are interested right away. Boys actors do," he says scornfully. "They go don't want to be in class with girls, but like this." He doubles over, exaggeratedthey both dance better in a mixed class." ly. "Thanks a lot, excuse me, I've got a After a full day's teaching, d'Amboise stomachache." The children giggle. "This hurries to the State Theater, which is the is the way a dancer bows," he says. "Bend home of the City Ballet, and d' Amboise's your left foot, put your right foot out second home as well. He continues to front, and just relax. Nothing moves, you take classes and to practice, although he just look down. You stretch out your performs infrequently these days, and he right arm, hand held out to the audioften is asked by Balanchine to coach ence-see how I open my hand? What members of the company in new roles. you are saying to them is, 'You are And he is one of the handful of dancers applauding me, because I danced so whom Balanchine encourages to choreo- well.' " graph new works. D' Amboise is demonstrating the tradiEvery Saturday morning d' Amboise tionally regal curtain call that the male holds a class for a select group of 40 to 50 soloists of the City Ballet practice under children culled from all Balanchine. The children, awed by his the schools he teaches bearing, try earnestly to imitate him, to during the week. think of themselves as princelings and Eight hearing-imprincesses. In large measure, d' Amboise paired youngsters, already has transformed their lives. D for whom d'Amboise has a special affinity, About the Author: Barbara Gelb is a regjoin this group. There ular contributor to The New York Times is medical evidence that Magazine.
The world as a family-that concept comes closer to a reality with the launching of International Youth Exchange Initiative, an American program aimed at promoting world understanding through the international exchange of students. The cooperative endeavor between the U.S. Government and the private sector was launched by President Ronald Reagan at a White House ceremony recently. Under this program, teenagers above the age of 15 will live in another country with a local family and will also attend secondary school there. In some cases education may extend to the first year of university study. Initially, the exchanges will take place among Canada, the Federal Republic of Germany, France, Italy, the United Kingdom, Japan and the United States. However, the program is expected to expand subsequently to other countries, including Third World nations. President Reagan has named Charles Z. Wick, the director of the U.S. International Communication Agency, as his personal representative to head the program which is part ofthe U.S. Government's plan to channel more funds into youth exchanges. Speaking at the inaugural program, Wick said he hoped that such student visitor programs would help the United States "counter the adverse winds of political hostility in the world." He added that so far "32 sitting heads of state and 392 parliamentarians in 92 countries" have participated in U.S.-backed visitor programs. In his address at the ceremony, President Reagan also announced the formation of a presidential committee on international youth exchanges, which will stimulate greater private involvement in the implementation of the Youth Exchange Initiative. . The agency will serve as a clearing house of information for organizations already involved in international student exchanges-including the American Field Service, Youth for Understanding, Sister Cities International, the Experiment in International Living and others-to help expand their programs. Following are excerpts of the President's remarks on the launching of the youth exchange program:
Building a ¡Network 01 Human Relations'
Behind the headlines of today, steadily chipping away at the obstacles to peace is another, and less sensational, dimension to foreign affairs. It is the network of human relations between our country and other nations around the globe. This network is more than government-togovernment relations, tourism or commerce. It also has been built on the experiences of young people who have lived with families and attended schools or universities in other countries. I am convinced that one of the best ways to develop more accurate perspectives on other nations and on ourselves is for more Americans to join, for a time, a family and a community in another land. And we cannot hope that other nations will appreciate our country unless more of their future leaders have had the same chance to feel the warmth of the American family, the vitality of an American community, the diversity of our educational system. There is a flickering spark in us all which, if struck at just the right age I think, can light the rest of our lives, elevating our ideals, deepening our tolerance and sharpening our appetite for knowledge about the rest of the world. Education and cultural exchanges, especially among our young, provide a perfect opportunity for this precious spark to
grow, making us more sensitive and wiser. and international citizens .... Twenty-two years ago, President Eisenhower, father of the People-to-People program, said that: "The beginning point of all cooperation between individuals, between groups, within a single society, or between nations is genuine, human understanding. " Well, never have we needed this vital ingredient to peace more than in today's world. Since World War II, the United States had developed many excellent programs for students, scholars, youth, farm, and labor groups. They depend on the cooperation of thousands of American families and hundreds of schools, universities and volunteer community organizations. Still, the total number of young people sponsored by our government is relatively small,. especially when compared to sponsored programs of the Soviet Union or even of our allies, West Germany and France. I believe that today we have a great opportunity to form new bonds through expanded exchanges among our youth, from all sections of our society. If we're to succeed, if we're to build human bridges across the seas and into the future as an investment for peace, we'll need more private support and cooperation than ever before. 0
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Marathi Film Fest UNICEF's Helping Hand A Rare Bird
The golden jubilee of Marathi films was celebrated on the silver screens of the United States with a traveling film festival in May and June. Nine films-among them three classicswere shown in Washington, D.C., Philadelphia, New York, Los Angeles, Houston, Chicago, and Detroit. Touring the cities along with the films were distinguished representatives of the Marathi cinema, including directors Ramdeo Phutane, Jabbar Patel and actor-director Amol Palekar; film stars Lalita Pawar, Raja Gosavi and Asha Kale; producers Daddy Deshmukh, Kamalakar Tome and Sharad Pilgaonkar; and music director and playback singer Sudhir Phadke. Sudhir Phadke is also the president of the Marathi Chitrapat Mahamandal and the brain behind the festival, which was held under the joint auspices of the Mahamandal and an ad hoc U.S.-based volunteer group, the Marathi Film Festival Coordination Committee. A visit to, the United States recently convinced Phadke that a showing of Marathi films could prove a hit. The enthusiastic support of the Maharashtrian community organizations throughout North America spurred him on. Back home, he found support from the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, the National Film Development Corporation, the Directorate of Film Festivals and the Bank of Maharashtra. Though the festival celebrated the golden jubilee of Marathi talkies, the community's contribution to Indian cinema goes further back than Above: Hansa Wadkatr in Sangatye Aika. Below, left: Gajanan Jagirdar as Ramshastn. Below, right: Raja Paranjape in Lakhachi Goshta.
50 years. As Phadke proudly pointed out in Washington, D.C., they can claim to be the originators of Indian cinema: Dadasaheb Phalke who made the very first Indian film (the silent Raja Harishchandra, 1913) was a Maharashtrian. Ayodhyache Raja, the first Marathi talkie was the second Indian talkie; and it outshone its predecessor, the historic Alam Ara by running for 14 weeks against Alam Ara's seven weeks at the Majestic in Bombay. For the festival, the Mahamandal initially chose 21 films out of the 686 produced between 1932 and 1981. The final choice was made in the United States. The three classics featured were Ramshastri (1944), whose heroine Lalita Pawar was present at the festival; the romantic comedy Lakhachi Goshta (1952)-two of the people responsible for its success, song writer Sudhir Phadke and comedian Raja Gosavi, were present for the showings; and the record-breaking musical hit Sangatye Aika (1959). The contemporary films represented a wide cross section of themes. The earliest was Devaki Nandan Gopala, the 1977 prizewinning devotional film on social reformer Saint Gadge Baba, directed by Daddy Deshmukh. The Bombay-style entertainers were Choravar Mor, a 1979 hit in color produced by Sharad Pilgaonkar; and Kaiwari (1981), directed by Kamalakar Torne and starring Asha Kale. The new wave in Marathi cinema was also featured and was warmly received by audiences. There were two films by Dr. Jabbar Patel-the 1979 political satire Simhasan and his 1981 color feature Umbartha, exploring a woman's role in the Indian society-and Amol Palekar's controversial study of ritual murder, Akriet (1981), winner of a special jury award at the Nantes film festival and four state government awards. "If my film can relate to foreign audiences also, I am happy," said Palekar. The Directors Guild of America, Inc., and the Screen Actors Guild in New York have requested a special screening of Akriet. The film unions have been seeking to foster ties between prominent U.S. and Indian filmmakers. Professor Charles Heimsath of the School for International Service at American University said: "I think all of us should pay more attention to Indian cinema because of the shift now toward depicting the realities of Indian life." The South Asian studies professor, who had worked with the festival committee on planning the event, observed that after a lull in the Seventies, student enrollment in U.S. universities in courses dealing with India has been picking up. "Things are really blossoming when you can have this kind of film festival going on in the United States."
he United States presented a check for $10 million to the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) during the lJ.N. agency's recent annual executive board meeting in New York. The payment is part of the United States' pledge of $41.5 million for 1982 to UNICEF, which helps some 1,300 million poor children in 111 developing countries. Marjorie Craig Benton, the U.S. representative to the UNICEF board, said that despite domestic budget constraints, the United States has increased its contribution by 15 percent over the $35.9 million given during 1981. In addition to the U.S. Government contribution, UNICEF expects to receive another $19 million this year in private contributions from individuals and organizations in the United States. Benton said that the private contributions are handled through the U.S. Committee for UNICEF, an organization which raises money by selling greeting cards and calendars. The committee also coordinates the efforts of American children who collect annual donations from their neighbors for UNICEF. UNICEF, which operates only in
I
countries that invite it, concentrates a major part of its resources in training workers about hygiene, sanitation and skills necessary to run family life centers, in undertaking nutrition programs, and in any other projects necessary to improve the quality of life of villagers. However, because of the large-scale migration of villagers into cities, UNICEF is also developing programs geared to helping the urban poor. Benton stressed that the agency always "sits down with the people [of the country] and talks about priorities, so we are not imposing our ideas on them." Another important aspect of UNICEF projects is the use of "appropriate technology,"¡ Benton said. For example, UNICEF would not use sophisticated farm machinery, such as a tractor, in a village that has neither the expertise to operate it nor the resources to keep it running. In the past few years, UNICEF has also participated in major humanitarian relief efforts around the world. UNICEF's success, says Benton, can be traced to its workers who "believe in service, they feel they want the job, want to get it done, have the knowhow and dedication .... Our people are special."
It's a Gandhi! The second Siberian crane ever born in captivity has been named Gandhi as a tribute to Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi's special efforts to save the species by establishing the Keolodea Ghana National Park in Bharatpur' as a sanctuary for migratory cranes. The happy event took place at the International Crane Foundation (ICF), Baraboo, Wisconsin. The birth of the chick Gandhi-and its two brothers (more are expected)-is part of ICF's effort to raise the dwindling population of this rare bird, whose winter homes lie mainly in Bharatpur and parts of China. As the season changes, droves of them fly to India-in alarmingly fewer numbers every succeeding yearborne by an instinct far older than civilized man. ICF was founded in. 1974 to assist in saving this endangered species; Bharatpur has seen a major part of their research activity (see SPAN, May 1981). But the hatching experiments have been conducted at ICF laboratories in Wisconsin. Earlier attempts at breeding the bird in captivity have met with many failures and just one success: Dushenka (Russian for "the loved one") born last year to Hirakawa, who is Gandhi's mother too. This year Hirakawa has laid six eggs: the first to hatch was named Gandhi; the second Poyang after Lake Poyang in China, which provides a sanctuary for 140 cranes in winter; the third, Ramsar after a city near the Caspian Sea, not far from the wetlands supporting 16 Siberian cranes that winter in Iran. Mrs. Gandhi was invited by ICF director George Archibald to visit her namesake during her American trip. The Prime Minister's previous commitments made that impossible, she said, much to her regret: "It would have been a relaxing change from the usual routine of state 0 visits if I could have made it."
u.S. Perspectives
II.
Worldwide Commulicatiols "The real issue is not whether there is going to be a New World Information Order, but rather how the inevitable change in the world's communication system is to be shaped," according to William Harley, communication consultant to the UiS. State Department. Harley made these remarks during a seminar in which he discussed the U. S. perspective on the proposed New World Information Order, a project ~¡tr H I of the United Nations EducaI lam ar ey tional, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). The seminar in New York was sponsored by the American Society . of International Law. Harley noted that there are "aspects of the proposals on which there can be common ground. These include measures pertaining to international postal rates, the search for substitutes for paper pulp, access to satellite services and a whole range of national and international training assistance." However, he said, proposals to make governments arbiters of news content-such as an international code of ethics or the licensing of journalists-are too extreme and not acceptable to the Western nations. The New World Information Order is a process rather than a set of precepts. "We need to develop communication not according to slogans or prescription," Harley pointed out, "but by cooperatively advancing communication by diverse and broad stages at all levels." Harley referred to a growing international consensus "on the need for altering the imbalance in the world's communication flow and doing something about the enormously uneven distribution of communication resources." In this connection, he said that the United States feels strongly that the long-range interest of every nation "will be better served by diversity and multiplicity than by conformity and uniformity." The imbalance should be corrected, he said, not by imposing restrictions on those who have facilities, but by building up the capacities of those who do not have them. Harley who was in India recently for meetings with media specialists and officials pointed out that many Third World countries too are in the position of being donor countries. "India has more expertise in direct satellite broadcasting than any other country in the world. It can share this kind of information and expertise' with other countries including ¡developed countries." He added: "It is my understanding that India has developed her computer technology quite extensively and that India's disposition is to share this information with other nations-a very important topic emerging now in the discussion of transfer of data flow and access to stored information which is another aspect of the New World Information Order." Addressing the seminar, Leonard Theberge, president of the Media Institute, a private organization based in Washington. D.C., said, "Clearly there are information and communication needs in developing countries that cry for assistance. The need is
not for more meaningless rhetoric but for some practical, concrete programs to help the development of the media and communication efforts in developing countries." Theberge unJerscored the need to catalog the information and communication needs in developing countries and to keep an inventory of what resources are available in these nations so as to evolve strategies for effectively meeting the needs and aspirations of the Third World. However, he said, "if the West should be more sensitive to the needs of developing countries, and I believe we should, then they should also be more sensitive to our values which underlie our society and one of them is our First Amendment right of the U.S. Constitution [freedom of speech and the press]. It is not something that we are capable of treating as a bargaining chip on the table for discussion." Third World nations must decide, Theberge said, whether their own traditions and cultures are best served by a free, independent press or through dictation from the government. "It is clear, at least to me, that less freedom tends to lead to less economic development and growth in the areas of information," he said. "More freedom tends to lead to greater diversity and pluralism and greater social and economic development." Theberge cited recent studies which showed that 35 to 50 percent of the stories in major U.S. newspapers and television evening news programs are about Third World countries. "The truth of the matter is that the United States gives a lot of coverage to developing countries," he pointed out. Theberge also gave reasons why the United States appears in so much of the news in Third World nations. He said that this is not because of domination by Western wire services, but because the United States "happens to be a rather robust, vigorous society that has a lot of things going on in it that are of interest to people around the world." UNESCO's activities concerning information for the developing countries began in 1976 at a general meeting in Nairobi, which requested a study of foreign news coverage. Two years later, a UNESCO general conference adopted a declaration on the purpose and role of mass media. Meanwhile, an international panel of communication experts, headed by Irish statesman Sean MacBride, was commissioned by UNESCO Director General Amadoumahtar M'Bow to analyze the needs and problem areas in communications. The MacBride Commission report was released in 1980, and the same year an international program for the development of communication was established within UNESCO. Western nations generally supported the report's affirmation of press freedom and condemnation of censorship, but they did not agree with some aspects of the report. In May 1981, some 60 representatives of print and broadcast organizations from 20 nations met in Talloires, France, and called on UNESCO to "abandon attempts to regulate news content and formulate rules of press conduct." The Talloires conference pledged to expand free flow of information throughout the world, and support efforts by international bodies, governments and private agencies to help develop.ing countries build up a healthy and free press of their own. 0 About the Author: Judy Aita is a SPAN United Nations.
correspondent
at the
India's Embellished Images Forgotten images of another era, lying un cared for in tiny shops or in musty archives in India, have been rediscovered as valuable examples of a rare art form that combines the style, spirit and aesthetics of classical miniature painting with photography. Almost 200 such photographs form the American exhibition "Through indian Eyes."
The American Campus, Then and Now I
The academic and social life of young America comes alive in these candid first-person accounts of living and learning on an American campus by Usha Helweg, Cornell, 1961, and Simran Singh, Stanford, 1981.
The President Meets the Press Some Americans condemn them as verbal freejor-alls, others frown at the undignified picture they present of the head of the state by standing him in the dock ... but' the presidential press conference has come of age since the start of this century, a democratic tradition that makes the President answerable to the people.
Countering Terrorism The specter of terrorism stalks almost all the civilized world today. An expert suggests ways nations can deal with its dangers, lest giving in to terrorists becomes an accepted way of life.
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On a Canvas of Glass The art of reverse glass painting is exquisite to look at and difficult to execute; it produces treasured items for collectors in ¡the United States. This once-popular art is now being revived by a devoted group of collectors and artists. Even artists like Georgia O'Keeffe and Robert Rausc~enberg have taken to it. The "pleasant, insinuating art," as a 17th-century European described it, dates back to 13th-century Italy. The first reference to it noted in the United States is as a subject of study in an art school in 1787. Reverse glass artists work by painting a picture in reverse on the back of a piece of clear glass. Unlike stained glass, which is illuminated from behind, a reverse glass painting is illuminated by light passing through the glass from the front. This makes most colors in it appear a shade or two brighter than they are. The ~rt calls for a high degree of patience and perfectionism: The slippery surface of the glass makes mixing COIOliS difficult; the reversed image makes progress hard! to evaluate; and errors cannot be painted over as on canvas-they must be scraped off with a razor blade. Reverse glass portraits and landscapes were popu-
lar home decorations for at least 75 years after the American Revolution. Patriotic themes were the most popular (see Abijah Canfield's 1800 work Liberty on the back cover) and George Washington the favorite portrait subject. Among the best known early painters was Benjamin Greenleaf, whose 1816 portrait of the Revolutionary War patriot Samuel Adams is shown above. Imaginative artists used the technique to embellish clock and mirror glasses. Few of these old fragile works remain today. Jane Bolster, a teacher of this art in Philadelphia, makes a business of restoring and replacing mirror paintings. The painting on the mirror above, right, is her copy of a broken 1810 original. Innovations of the art have created some masterpieces-like the two shown at left. The still life by an unknown 1840 artist is an example of tinsel paintingthe glass is painted with transparent paint and backed with foil to make it sparkle. Revolver at left, top, is Robert Rauschenberg's 1967 creation: It consists of three plexiglass discs silk-screened in a collage pattern and mounted on a metal axle so that they rotate. In such an artist's hands the ancient craft of reverse glass painting 0 becomes modern art.