SPAN: August 1974

Artist's conception of outstanding tourist attractions in the U.S. is from an exhibit set up by United Air Lines at Expo '74 in Spokane, Washington State (see page 49 ).Like other American airlines, United offers complete package tours to Expo' 74 and the Pacific Northwest.

This map and the feature on the Spokane Fair- part of SPAN'5 "Touring America" series - might interest Indian visitors to the U.S.

TOURING AMERICA

SPAN A LEfTER FROM THE PUBLISHER Our cover this month reflects the current scientific and public interest in the nature of man-his aggressiveinstincts, his attachment to territory, his relationship with his offspring, his potential for violence. And in the search for answers to human behavior, clues are also being sought in the animal world-the world of chimpanzees and geese, of pigeons and rats. In fact, never before in history has man been the subject of such intense study and interest as he is today.

In view of this interest, the focus of this issue is on the question: "Can Human Behavior Be Controlled?"

We start with an introduction to the "behavioral psychology" of B.F. Skinner [page 5], who holds that human action has always been determined by man's environment. There is no such thing as "bad behavior," he says, because people are simply the result of their environment. Therefore he believes that it is essential that the human environment be scientifically controlled. The next article [pages 6-10] shows how some researchers are applying Skinner's theories in a practical way in homes and schools and factories.

Following this is a provocative rejection of Skinnerism by Willard Gaylin [pages 11-15],who asserts that human behavior cannot be predicted as the behaviorists assert.

As a change of pace from the intellectual exercise of contending psychological theories, there is a piece on "Yoga in America" [pages 16-17]. Writer Elizabeth Wohl tells how Americans of all ages, shapes, sizes and walks of life are doing yoga-and loving it. The more general stories in this issue include an article on Lee Strasberg's famous Actors Studio [pages 36-40]; a look at film festivals [pages 41-44], with a sidebar written especially for SPAN by director Satyajit Ray; and a pieceon the U.S. telephone system [pages 28-33], which transmits 540 million calls a day.

Speaking of communication, one of the most exciting developments in this field was the recent launching of NASA's ATS-6, the "teacher" satellite. The article on pages 45-47 describes the social, economic and educational potential of ATS-6 for those Indian villages which the Indian Government will reach via this satellite with its especially-designed educational television programs. The undertaking is scheduled to start in June 1975.

Some of our readers will perhaps find the most interesting piece of reading to be "Pollock Was No ,Accident" [pages 20-27], a review of the work of this tempestuous giant of contemporary art. Author William Rubin attacks the many myths that have gathered around Pollock and supports the thesis that he was one of the truly great painters of the century.

-A.E.H.

2 4 5 6 11 16 18 20 Furiously Proliferating 28 The American Telephone 34 No Fate Worse Than a Hang-up 36 The Actors Studio Here Wet, Staring at 41 Sitting a Wrinkled Screen, and Loving It 42 Film Festivals 45

by Edward L. Robinson

by Greta Walker

by Jack Matcha

by John Stirn

by Satyajit Ray

48 Touring America: 49 The Spokane Fair and Washington State Front cover:A vinash Pasricha's photograph of a rebellious child illustrates this issue's main theme which is explored in three articles-"Can Human Behavior Be Controlled?" (page 5); "Shapers at Work" (pages 6-10); "Skinner Redux" (pages 11-15).

Back cover: Washington State has been said by some to have a greater variety or" contrasting spectacular scenery than any other American state, including rugged glaciated mountains and dense rain forest. An added tourist attraction in 1974 is Expo '74, the world's fair in Spokane, Washington State's second biggest city.

Managing Editor: Carmen Kagal. Assistant Managing Editor: S.R. Madhu. Editorial Staff: Mohammed Reyazuddin, Avinash Pasricha, Nirmal Sharma. Krishan Gabrani, M.M. Saha. Art Director: Nand Katyal. ArtStalf: Gopi Gaiwani, B. Roy Choudhury, Kanti Roy, Suhas Nimbalkar Chief of Prodnction: Awtar S. Marwaha. Photographic Services: US IS Photo Lab. Published by th~ United States Information Service, 24 Kasturba Gandhi Marg, New DeIhi-1 10001, on behalf of the American Embassy, New Delhi. The opinions expressed in this magazine do not necessariI reflect the views or policies of the United States Government. Printed by Arun Mehta ,;; Vakil & Sons Private Ltd., Vakils House, Sprott Road, 18 Ballard Estate, Bombay-400038.

Photographs: Front cover-Avinash Pasricha. 2-R.N. Khanna. 16-17-Frank Wohl. 20 top-The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. 21 top-San Francisco Museum of Art, Albert M. Bender Bequest Fund. 20-21 bottom-Collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, George. A. Hearn Fund, 1957. 24-25-Ben Heller, New York. 29-Bell Telephone Laboratories.

Use of SPAN articles in other publications is encouraged. except when copyrighted. For permission. write to the Editor. Subscription: One year, 18 rupees; single copy, two rupees. For change of address, send old address from a recent SPAN envelope along with new address to A.K. Mitra, Circulation Manager, SPAN magazine, 24 Kasturba Gandhi Marg, New Delhi-I 10001.

u.s. ENERGY TEAM VISITS INDIA

LEADER DISCUSSES NEW POWER SOURCES A few weeks ago, a four-man interdisciplinary energy team from the United States visited New Delhi to exchange ideas with Indian scientists, economists and planners on the various options . for developing new energy sources.

The team was led by Dr. Jerome Weingart (right), 34-year-old physicist from the prestigious California Institute of Technology.

Other team members were Dr. George Rapp, Jr., of the Department of Geology and Geophysics, University of Minnesota; Luther P. Gerlach, Professor of Anthropology at the University of Minnesota; and Robert S. Loomis, Professor of Agronomy at the University of California. In the following interview with Mrs. Preminda Sen for the Voice of America, Dr. Weingart discusses the exciting possibilities of harnessing man's age-old friends-the sun and wind, earth and water.

SEN: Today everyone seems to be giving thought to alternative sources of energy. I wonder if you could tell us about some of the significant new sources that are being developed in the U.S.?

WEIN~ART: To begin with, we should, I think, consider our fossil fuels-the coal, oil, gas and tar sands-as a kind of capital investment. They are our energy in the bank, so to speak. If we continue to withdraw that energy from the bank without investing it in something that will bring us more energy, then we will have painted ourselves into a corner that we can't get out of. So we are now beginning to recognize the need to transform some of that capital into machinery that will allow us to live off our income. Now, what is our income? Sunlight is an income-form of energy, as is geothermal energy-the heat from the earth's core-and thorium, which we find in granite and which can be converted by the breeder-reactor into electricity.

There is also the lithium and deuterium from the oceans which can be converted through fusion power into electricity for billions of years. These are our income or capital resources.

In terms of technologies being developed in the U.S., one area of great interest is that of controlled thermonuclear fusion.

At many national laboratories and universities, scientists are

hopeful that the attempt to duplicate the thermonuclear process that powers the sun will be successful-perhaps by the end of this decade. Within 10 years after that, the first large prototype fusion reactors will be built; early in the next century we can begin commercial deployment; and perhaps halfway into that century, these reactors could provide a tremendous source of energy for the world .

Now, just to give you an idea of how enormous that energy is: imagine sea water pumped through a two-inch-diameter pipe at about 40 pounds pressure per square inch. That's not tremendous pressure; it's less than out of a fire hydrant, for example.

Now, if you could convert the deuterium in that sea water into electricity through the fusion process, then that two-inch tube alone would provide the entire energy needs of the United States today. That is one-third of the world's energy use-so you can imagine how enormous the resource is.

The second major source of energy is geothermal energy.

In many parts of Southeast Asia-unfortunately not so much in India, but in places like Indonesia-there is grellt geothermal potential for converting the earth's heat, through steam turbine generators, into electricity.

In the case of solar energy, there are many types of machinerysome invented a hundred years ago-that allow us to convert sunlight into energy for heating water, and homes, running refrigeration systems or converting sunlight into mechanical energy which can then be used to generate electricity.

SEN: All of this seems to be a fairly expensive process, harnessing these various types of energy. How practical would it be for the developing countries?

WEINGART: Well, to approach your question indirectly, I think that the most important invention is the one that hasn't been made yet, but I'm convinced it will be. Let me explain.

Right now most spacecraft are powered directly by a device called a solar cell. It is a very thin wafer cut from a single crystal of silicon and treated chemically. It has the interesting property that, when you put it into the sun, it turns sunlight into electricity at efficiencies of up to 20 per cent-with no moving parts.

And these silicon devices will last tens of thousands of years.

But they are expensive-in fact, it is the only other form of silicon, other than diamonds, that is worth its weight in diamonds.

I believe there is no question that with adequate funding,

the best of our solid-state engineers and chemists could invent a device similar to the solar cell which could be manufactured like we make photographic film at high speed and at low cost.

Then we could convert sunlight directly into electricity in a way that would be competitive with alternative energy sources.

SEN: Have you come across any instances while you've been in India where people are trying to invent things along these lines?

WEINGART: I have just got a letter from a man in Bombay who has invented a very simple device for producing heat at temperatures high enough to run small engines. It consists of a parabolic-shaped plywood panel covered with a thin inetal which acts as a reflector and focuses the solar energy on a black pipe; the heat is clearly adequate to run a small engine.

We need ways to encourage more people to think like this. I think that one of the great failings in the world is that we have not learned how to tap the tremendous inventive resources of the people.

SEN: Of course, that would have boundless potential.

WEINGART: That's right. By the way, I believe that whoever invents this device will get a Nobel Prize. I also believe that that same person may well get the Nobel Peace Prize-say, 20 or 30 years later. This is mainly because of the problems with nuclear power. We in the U.S. are not yet convinced that we have adequately solved the problem of the safety of nuclear reactors.

There is great concern that we have not adequately safeguarded SEN: It seems to me that, no matter how inventive or imaginative these reactors and the whole fuel cycle from the possible diver- you may be, you do need some sort of assistance to push things sion to terrorist activities. In a world of great instability this, forward. Do you feel that there is scope for Indo-American colit seems to me, is a potentially great problem. We have not yet laboration in this field? . found a way to manage the radioactive by-products of these WEINGART: I think that there is a great opportunity for colreactors for long periods of time-20,000 to 30,000 years. laboration. You know, we will be spending $600 million on solar The particular solar option, however, can be deployed in and wind technology alone in the U.S. over the next five years.. any size you want-from a little unit on a house to large solar The money will be spent at universities, national laboratories farms. You have no moving parts and no air pollution and no and private industries, and there are going to be lots of new water pollution. The stuff keeps cranking out forever, you know, inventions, many of which will have significance in other parts as long as you keep the top clean. of the world. I believe Dr. Kissinger's statement that the U.S. wants to share these technologies with the rest of the world, SEN: Well, this sounds very optimistic for a country like India and I also share his view that it is pretty much a two-way streetwhere we have so much sunshine. After meeting Indian scientists, that there are inventive ideas in other countries that will be Dr. Weingart, what do you think are the prospects for developing useful for us. One of the most productive kinds of collaborative solar energy in this country? ventures initially would be for organizations like the National WEINGART: It is quite clear that there is a great resource of Physical Laboratory to exchange ideas with laboratories and brilliant people in India, so the brain power is here to develop industries in the United States that are engaged in developing the new technologies. About laboratory resources I don't know, small solar engines and solar turbines and low-cost solar but I hope that through international agreements adequate collectors. Eventually, many of these devices could be manuresources can be made available to provide your scientists with factured in India. what they really need.

As for the form which this collaboration might take, there You see, I think that the direct conversion of sunlight into are many possibilities. One is that the National Science Foundaelectricity would hold great promise, for example, in your vil- tion, which is the lead U.S. agency for solar energy developlages. Initially, you could have a small unit; it would operate ment, is establishing bilateral arrangements with countries all lights, it might operate a pump, and it might operate a tele- over the world. Part of my job on this trip is to identify potential vision set. Once you have electricity and motive power, perhaps areas of collaboration between the United States and India you can start building small cottage industries. Then people in the area of solar and wind technology development, protocan produce their own engines and pumps and so forth. It seems type introduction in villages and so forth.

My hope is that we won't let the scientists alone run the show. to me that there are all kinds of exciting possibilities.

I feel that I can say this, as a card-carrying sCientist, that we SEN: Yes, but how close are we to practical application of this have too narrow a view of human society, that we have too little understanding of the relationship between technology sort of technology to our villages?

WEINGART: We are closer than we think. We need a great and the structure of societies. Therefore, the introduction of . effort, and funds, to take hardware that has already been devel- new technologies into the villages is going to require the very active participation of social scientists. We need anthropologists oped-solar-driven engines and solar generators, for exampleand refine them, and conduct experiments in various Indian whose professional job it is to understand human systems, villages. We know that things will go wrong at first. An engine social structures, human ecology. In the past many attempts that works beautifully in a laboratory may fail in a village be- to introduce technology have failed because the people didn't cause of something that hadn't been thought of in the labor- understand the cultural environment in which they worked. atory. It always happens. Take the gobar gas plants. If we can I think that a great opportunity for co-operative ventures would find less expensive ways to build them, and use solar collectors be for Indian and American engineers and scientists and social to add heat to them, it will increase the production of methane, scientists to work together with people in various villages and for example. So we need to take a systematic view of the energy to explore with real hardware the most effective ways of deploy0 ing these systems to meet their needs, the people's needs. needs in a village.

Dear Sir: The current global flurry about resource depletion [March-April 1974 SPAN] is typical of the way man has always floundered through history. Like Kumbhakarna, in the Indian legend, man wakes up to reality too late. And when he does, his response to it is in the nature of an obbligato!

Unlike Kumbhakarna, man is more Protean than Promethean. This makes his tragedy so much more poignant than it need be. His unflagging optimism, his sense of omnipotence, his faith that he can somehow wriggle out of any messadmirable qualities all-may yet be his undoing.

Zero population growth and zero economic growth-to descend for a moment into the maze of modern jargon-are both conceivable. No less conceivable is a stable ecosystem where use and replenishment of resources are neatly balanced.

A world without war is already almost a reality. All in all, having quietly jettisoned progress, we are very close to our new dream of the Equilibrium Society!

Fine. But is that the end of the road?

Or are we again walking up a blind alley?

I have a suspicion that we are. For when all the explosions with which we are plagued-population, pollution, poverty -shall have been defused, there still will remain one that is not so easy to defuse.

This is the Knowledge Explosion-man's most intractable problem, but one which has yet to receive the attention it deserves.

My mind goes back to the time when I first read the biblical parable about the Tree of Knowledge. That was in the mid'30s. I was a greenhorn then, very proud of my growing pile of schoolbooks, and I remember laughing it away as a rather crude Semitic fancy. Now in the mid '70s, less cocksure of my kn<;>wledgeand chastened by the traumas of our century, I reread that parable in blear-eyed amazement. And I stand in awe before the profundity of its insight.

Knowledge, I now know, liberates only up to a point. Beyond that point-and we reached it long ago-knowledge is destructive.

Knowledge is cannibalistic. It feeds on itself, and with each feeding it grows apace.

Knowledge, of course, is power. But power not only corrupts. Power destroys.

Knowledge is also, alas, sacred. Its un-

fettered pursuit is the most enduring of the emergence of some debilitating shortour sacred cows. How shall we ever kill ages have led to¡ frightful visions of an this cow? And who will dare even make apocalypse. While man's profligacy with his resources has undoubtedly aggravated the suggestion?

There is the story of Yajnavalkya in this problem, the sharp rise in the world's the Upanishad. One of his wives began to population, coupled with man's demand question him too closely on transcen- for a better and more plentiful life, would dental matters. "Gargi, my dear," said the have in any case made this situation inwise sage, "be careful or your head will evitable. Though energy sources like oil are strictly finite and nonrenewable, their fall off your shoulders."

I am not particularly religious and I am depletion need not be considered catasnot trying to sell some obscurantist trophic for man as alternatives like solar nostrum. But the more I ponder over our power, fusion power and the use of present crisis-and it is not simply a hydrogen could meet his requirements.

Similarly, the food shortage is likely to crisis of depleting resources-the more I am convinced that we must begin to curb be overcome some day, perhaps for all our insatiable appetite for knowledge or time, through the large-scale production we are done for. of synthetic foods, and the millions of Aided and abetted by the electronics acres of land currently taken up by agrimarvel, so to spe1;lk,the Knowledge In- culture may be put to alternative uses. dustry is fast threatening to rob man of Of far greater concern to man should his last shred of dignity, freedom and be the depletion of resources like some autonomy. This is hardly a prospect one metals for which there may be no substitutes. The lack of such resources could can view with calmness.

Man already knows an enormous lot affect man's standard of living and could more than he needs to know. Much of in the extreme case contribute to the this excess knowledge is useless lumber, decline of the human race on earth. weighing him down and destroying his Man's activities cannot avoid outgrowhappiness¡ and sanity. By renouncing it ing the earth's meager resources and, if a we will lose nothing. Rather we will catastrophe is to be avoide~, we will have regain some of our lost wisdom and stop . to find alternative sources, possibly be~ making fools of ourselves. yond the earth.

How then shall this renunciation of The process of man's evolution, like excessive knowledge be brought about? many other such processes, is irreversible.

I don't know. Perhaps the formulation, The present situation was, in many reunder United Nations auspices, of a spects, inevitable and any possible differUniversal Declaration on Limits to Knowl- ences in approach, had we the chance to edge may be a good beginning. do it all over again, would have been only This much, however, I do know. Man of degree. In that respect, our performance must give up playing God. Despite his to date has not been all that poor. fantastic achievements in technology, he H.P. MAMA is but a creature with feet of clay. Like all Technical Editor Air & Space Age things else he is subject to the ravages of Bombay time. He may conquer space (in a manner of speaking) but he cannot conquer time.

When the hour of his departure comes, Dear Sir: In his article on heart diseases he must go. Playing God only hastens [March-April 1974 SPAN], c.P. Gilmore has not stressed the role daily physical that hour. It does not put it off. exercise plays iri reducing the risk of a T.K. MAHADEVAN heart attack. Many physiologists have Editor. Gandhi Marg said that brisk exercises which will raise (Journal of the Gandhi Peace Foundation) New Delhi the pulse rate to 110 or above for a few minutes .are necessary to tone up the heart Dear Sir: It was with considerable interest as a muscle. It also improves the digestive that I read the article "The World Re- and respiratory systems which in turn help sources Shortage" [March-April 1974 purify the blood.

SpAN] and reflected on its portents for RI. RAMRAKHIANI New Delhi the future. The current energy crisis and

CANHUMAN BEHAVIOR BE CONTROLLED? YES, say many American psychologists.

In fact, they go further to argue that in scientifically controlling behavior we can create a model man and a utopian society. This is the thesis of 70-year-old Burrhus Frederic Skinner and his "behaviorists" who seem destined to dominate psychology in the second half of the 20th century just as Sigmund Freud and his disciples held sway over the first half of the century. As controversial as Freud was in his day, Skinner is admired and attacked for similar reasons-admired because his techniques work, attacked because his theories and philosophy seem immoral.

The basic themes of B.F. Skinner's "behavioral psychology" are outlined in his last book Beyond Freedom and Dignity, published in 1971. The world and human society, says Skinner, can no longer afford freedom. Hence, it must be replaced with benevolent control-over man, his conduct and his culture. Unlike most controllers in history, however, the behaviorists do not want to control by punishing "bad behavior;" instead, they believe in rewarding "good behavior."

Man has never been "free," has I never had "free will," says Skinner, and the sooner we get over that illusion the better. Human behavior

has always been determined by man's environment-for better or for worse_ All too often, for worse. Let us, then, control the human environment scientifically. To Skinner, people who behave badly are simply the result of defective social environments: in homes, schools, factories, elsewhere.

Behaviorism's success in the laboratories has been impressive. Rats press the right levers to get food; pigeons play ping pong and walk figure eights. Even more impressiveand pertinent to man-are behaviorism's successes with human beings, many of which are described

in Kenneth Goodall's article, "Shapers at Work," which begins overleaf.

What, then, is the source of all the controversy? Skinner's opposition has included such critics as theologian Reinhold Neibuhr, psychoanalyst Rollo May, novelist Arthur Koestler, and Willard Gaylin, president of the Institute of Society, Ethics and the Life Sciences. On page 11, Gaylin summarizes most of the doubts about Skinner's theories: Who is to do the "controlling?" Who is to say what behavior is good or bad? Are the profits gained by manipulating man balanced by the losses in other areas?

Skinner's answer is that man is controlled anyway. "We're all controlled all the time," he says.

"Parents control children and employers control employees-and they do it badly. We've got the means of controlling the human race right now, but we need to use them better." As for who will decide what is good or bad, Skinner says there are very few people today who would defend human behavior that breeds wars, pollution, and exploitation of the poor. Mankind can no longer afford such "freedoms."

Skinner sums it up: "As man qua man, we readily say good riddance."

Moving away from pigeons and rats in the laboratory, today's behaviorists are working with people in classrooms, prisons, churches, hospitals, and mental homes-and meeting with amazingly successful results.

ERSATWORK The mother of a child who attends a bigcity school rarely gets a phone call from the principal. When she does, she can expect the worst: Very likely, her child is being suspended or expelled for tardiness or truancy or rowdiness.

A call from Ronald E. Brown, principal of Bryant elementary school in Kansas City, Kansas, almost always is a pleasant surprise. "I'm glad to see that Larry made it to school on time again today," Brown might say. Or "Larry hasn't skipped a class all week and he's doing much better on his tests."

When I visited Bryant school on a recent cross-country tour of large-scale projects in Skinnerian human behavior control, Brown's associates told me that he always had preferred to pat parents and children on the back-it just came more naturally to him than chewing them out or punishing them in other ways. Now, with guidance from R. Vance Hall, a pioneer developer of behavior-shaping technology for schools, Brown was patting people systematically throughout Bryant schoolteachers as well as students and parents.

Brown is a young and enthusiastic administrator whose smile and openness convey a playful feeling of joy in his work.

He doesn't fit the fantasy of a faceless and threatening behavior controller conjured up by the anti behaviorists' persistent question, "But who will do the controlling?"

Nor did Vance Hall when I talked with him in his storefront officein Kansas City's black ghetto. Nonetheless, both Brown and Hall are in the vanguard of a rapidly expanding movement that aims to make Skinnerians of us all.

I started studying the movement after

editing B.F. Skinner's book, Beyond Freedom and Dignity, for the magazine Psychology Today, which reprinted the major part of the book. In one way the editing job was a distasteful assignment because of my long-standing aversion toward behaviorism. But it also was rewarding because I quickly realized that I was working with a rare masterpiece in the literature of psychology. Above all, it was frustrating, for Skinner stayed on a philosophical plane with his argument for the development of a technology of human behavior; only occasionally did he allude to the ways this technology might work.

"A technology of operant behavior is already well advanced and it may prove to be commensurate with our problems," he wrote. It isn't ready yet to solve all of them, but it "continues to develop and is in fact much more advanced than its critics usually realize." Behavioral technologists

still cannot design "a successful culture as a whole"-Skinner's summum bonum"but we can design better practices, piecemeal."

These and other tantalizing allusions to the human applications of behavioral technology needed probing, I felt. If Skinnerism with its reinforcements and its contingencies really were advancing at such a rapid rate, I didn't want to be taken by surprise along with the general run of Skinner's critics.

I passed the next several months reading, observing, and listening to the behaviorists who are systematically applying Skinner's psychology in all kinds of places with all kinds of people to change all kinds of behaviors. The experience helped me to flesh out Skinner's allusions and put faces on his followers, a new breed that I think of as the post-Skinnerians. Both facts and faces argued against the fantasies of Skinner's critics.

Today's band of human behavior controllers, I found, still marches to the sound of many pigeons pecking. It is a distant sound, however. Behavioral experimentation began a slow move out of the traditional campus psychology laboratory some 20 years ago, and few of the post-Skinnerians spend much time there any more.

In fact, they can be found almost anywhere but there-in classrooms, kitchens, mental hospitals, rehabilitation wards, prisons, nursing homes, day-care centers, factories, movie theaters, national parks, community mental-health centers, stores, recreation centers, and right next door. Nevertheless, the basic principles that guide them in their work with human beings are the ones B.F. Skinner and a few associates formulated

by observing pigeons and rats in Skinner boxes.

The most basic of these principles is that behavior is affected by its consequences. If a tasty bit of food falls into a Skinner box after a pigeon pecks a button or a rat presses a bar, the pigeon or the rat is likelyto peck or press again. In Skinner's psychology,the food is a natural orprimary reinforcer, the act of eating it is an unconditioned response> the pecking or pressing is a learned or conditioned response, the environmental conditions that determine the response are contingencies, and the whole process is operant conditioning.

In 1949, more than a decade after Skinner published his first book, The Behavior of Organisms, a graduate student at Indiana University (where Skinner headed the psychology department before he moved on to Harvard) showed that the human organism is just as apt as the avian when it comes to operant learning. Paul R. Fuller taught an institutionalized "vegetative idiot" to earn food by raising his right arm to a vertical position. Fuller used a shaping technique, first reinforcing random upward movements of the arm and then reinforcing movements that brought the arm closer and closer to the vertical position.

After only a few experimental sessions the youth, who according to his doctors hadn't learned anything in his 18 years of life, was raising his arm and swallowing his reinforcer (a warm sugar-milk solution) as fast as he could.

Fuller's report on this experiment ended prophetically: "While of normal human parentage, this organism was, behaviorally speaking, considerably lower in the scale than the majority of infrahuman organisms used in conditioning experiments .... Perhaps by beginning at the bottom of the human scale the transfer from rat on man can be effected."

Two of Skinner's graduate students at Harvard, Ogden R. Lindsley and Nathan H. Azrin, helped effect the transfer. Lindsley, working closely with Skinner at Boston's Metropolitan State Hospital in the mid-'50s, set up experiments with psychotic patients that closely resembled earlier animal experiments. He found that he could control human operant responses (in this case, pulling a lever to obtain reinforcements of candy or cigarettes) by varying the reinforcement schedule. (Continuous reinforcement speeds up the learning of a task. But once the task is learned, human beings, like animals, will work

harder and longer when the prize comes at an intermittent schedule than when it comes with every pull of the lever.)

Though Lindsley was working with a group of psychotics, his primary interest at the time was in gathering data on operant conditioning of human beings, not in modifying their sometimes bizarre behavior. It was Azrin who took a giant step into behavior modification in the early '60s after he became director of behavioral research at Anna State Hospital in Southern Illinois.

To help him he brought in a Wunderkind: Teodoro Ayllon, who had a brand-new Ph.D. from the University of Houston.

Ayllon first did some ingenious experiments with individual psychotic patients.

To treat a woman who had a nine-year history of towel hoarding, he had nurses deliver towels to her room by the dozens until, satiated by what she had once found reinforcing and exhausted by her customary folding-and-stacking routine, the woman carried 625 towels out of her room, never to hoard again. Ayllon then undertook the behavioral management of an entire ward of 40-odd severely disturbed patients.

Over the next few years, Ayllon and Azrin moved the experimental analysis of human behavior forward on two fronts.

They demonstrated the efficacy of a tokeneconomy system of reinforcement, and they devised an operant model that enabled clinical psychologists to work with large groups of persons who suffered from various behavioral disturbances as well as with single cases or small groups.

The token economy, like most techniques used by the human behavior controllers, had its origins in animal experiments. Chimpanzees started it all in the late '30s by showing that they could learn to 1) place a poker chip in a slot to obtain grapes, 2) press a bar to obtain a chip, and 3) save up a specified number of chips to exchange for grapes after a specified time interval. The chimpanzees also learned an unrelated task-weightlifting-to obtain only chips, which meant that the chips had become secondary reinforcers. In other words, a chimpanzee would work for a chip that wasn't worth a grape. It was a delightful development for the Skinnerians, since chips have distinct advantages over grapes: They are less perishable, less satiating (for the chimpanzees) and less limited in their appeal once the chimpanzees learn they can use them to buy bananas as well as grapes.

More than 20 years later, when Ayllon set up the token system with patients at Anna State Hospital and Arthur W. Staats and Montrose M. Wolf experimented at Arizona State University with a similar system for children, they used these advantages to good effect. Just as chimpanzees tire of grapes, children tire of candy. But, as Staats and Wolf found, even children with little love for reading will do a lot of it if their reward is a bunch of tokens that they can trade in later for cookies, pieces of cake, toys-or candy. That such a system amounted to bribing a child for doing something he ought to get into the habit of doing was once a common charge. It usually came from authoritarian tY1?eswho were blind to their own double standard.

Behavior-therapist Israel Goldiamond once made this comeback: "If they stopped paying me for coming to work, this nice ingrained habit I have might quickly vanish." The charge is heard less often these days.

Ayllon and Azrin's application of the token system is commonly regarded as one of the most significant achievements to date in human behavior control. Like Ayllon, other researchers had used experimental techniques to modify specific behaviors of individual psychotics like the woman who hoarded towels. "But," as Ayllon and Azrin recall, "none of us had yet attempted to design a total environment that would deal with all of the behavioral problems in a mental hospitaL" This engineering feat showed that longhospitalized and idle psychotics, when they were properly reinforced, could learn how to care for themselves, do housekeeping chores, and even hold down jobs around the hospital. The trick was to learn which reinforcers worked with which personsone patient might spend tokens to sit in a favorite chair, another to attend religious services-and to find an efficient way to deliver the rewards. Hospital staff members had to look at each patient's individual behaviors and overcome the stereotyped images that went with "schizophrenic," "mental defective," and other labels the patients had acquired. Staff members also had to keep records of how each patient spent the day and had to hand out reinforcements systematically.

The token system proved to be so effective that Ayllon and Azrin predicted that it "will probably find great applicability in many different disciplines concerned with human behavior." They were right. Their

example inspired many similar programs in the United States and abroad-with retarded children, slow learners and juvenile delinquents as well as with adult psychotics in mental hospitals.

Ayllon's name has become almost synonymous with the token system, especially since the publication in 1968 of Ayllon and Azrin's The Token Economy. His reputation led me to suspect, before I met him, that his current work with children in the Atlanta schools probably involved the wholesale use of token systems. I was surprised to learn from one of Ayllon's graduate students, William Skuban, that in working with a highly disq.lptive seventhgrade class they had set up a token system only as a last resort after more traditional methods had failed to end the chaos. When I asked why, he replied, "Why use tokens if something else will work?"

That seemed heretical until I realized that Ayllon was less interested in promoting "his" method than in spreading the benefits of any successful behavioral technique. At one point in our conversation about his work and its shift in focus from psychotics in mental hospitals to ordinary children in ordinary classrooms, Ayllon referred to Walden Two, Skinner's fictionalized account of a community that was run on behavioral principles. "Walden Two is visionary," he told me. "It's going to come."

Ayllon's shift in focus is no accident. In the last few years behavior controllers increasingly have moved away from the laboratory like settings of mental hospitals, correctional institutions and special classrooms and have set up programs-sometimes large-scale ones-in public schools, halfway houses, private homes and community mental-health centers. In Kansas, they have helped vitalize a large urban ghetto housing project; in Maryland, they even talk confidently of a plan to convert the governmental, educational and lawenforcement systems of a huge suburban county to the use of behavior modification.

"Behavior modification," however, is a catchall term that is fast losing whatever meaning it once had. In popular usage, it generally refers to psychotherapeutic methods that sprang from experimentation and theory in the two main branches of scientific behaviorism: Pavlovian classical conditioning and Skinnerian operant conditioning. But Leonard Krasner, a leading behaviorist, uses "behavior modification" to cover what he calls evocative psycho-

therapies, including psychoanalysis, as well as the behavioral therapies. Albert Bandura, another major behaviorist, contends that "all forms of psychotherapy, regardless of their self-conferred honorific titles and noble aims, effect behavioral changes through either deliberate or unwitting manipulation of controlling variables." To me, it seems simpler to discard "behavior modification" and to think instead in terms of two major movements that attempt to deal with human problems from a behaviorist orientation: behavior therapy and applied behavior analysis.

'If a person exhibits "deviant" behavior, the failure is in the social and physical environment that determines his behavior.... ' Behavior therapy, a mid-century outgrowth of classical-conditioning experimentation and the learning theories of psychologist Clark Hull, retains many of the trappings of older psychotherapies: a predominantly one-to-one, therapist-client relationship; scheduled sessions in the therapist's office or clinic; fees paid by clients. Its techniques-systematic desensitization, assertive training, covert sensitization and other, mainly aversive, conditioning methods-differ considerably from those used in psychoanalysis, but both therapies have the same limitations: Their practice usually requires extensive training; they can reach only a small fraction of the people who are in need or.them, and they are designed to alleviate problems, not to prevent problems.

Applied behavior analysis is a direct descendant of Skinnerian operant-conditioning experimentation. It has retained many of the scientific trappings (such as close observation and precise recording of behaviors) and most of the jargon of the rat-and-pigeon days. It also has added some trappings of its own, such as interval recording and new observation procedures and research designs. Though many of its practitioners are therapists, and many have done work in one-to-one and small-group situations, its milieu more closely resembles an educational setting than a doctor's office. Unlike psychoanalysts, who use a battery of techniques but seldom refer to them as a technology, applied behavior

analysts spend a great deal of time developing, packaging, disseminating and talking about behavioral technology. They have not given up experimentation, but their laboratory is the real world; they still treat individual problems, but they attempt to do it on an increasingly massive scale; and their technology, usable to a large extent by just about anybody, permits them to emphasize prevention rather than cure.

In short, they are becoming behavioral engineers.

Freed from built-in restraints of most psychotherapies, applied behavior analysis is an aggressive and radical reform movement that already has stepped into a vacuum of failures left by traditional methods of teaching and healing. And, like the potential victor in an evolutionary struggle, it has several built-in advantages that make it a likely alternative in the present search for social programs that refuse to set limits on an individual's possibilities for growth.

Though Skinner's philosophy, with its unabashed insistence on the need for planned control of human behavior, is the bane of humanists, the implicit assumptions of the post-Skinnerians have a strangely humanist ring.

For many applied-behavior analysts, as for humanist heroes like Thomas Szasz and R.D. Laing, mental illness is a myth. Labeling persons as schizophrenic or retarded is useless and often harmful. The illness, or medical model, which perpetuates the myth and the labels, is'no longer valid. Neither are the tools-I.Q. tests, attitude scales, questionnaires-that facilitate the pigeonholing process.

If a person exhibits "deviant" behavior, the failure is in the social and physical environment that determines his behavior, not in the individual; changing the environment will change the behavior. If "treatment" is necessary, the best place to do it is in the home or school, not in some artificial or perhaps permanent place of confinement. And the best persons to provide the treatment are parents, teachers, friends-not medicine men. Therapy, even with large groups, must concentrate on the individual or it will not be effective; and its concern is with the here and now, not with some past trauma or some statistical prediction about future performance. But therapy itself should take a back seat to prevention, which is far better and less expensive. Above all, the process of changing human lives must be evaluated continually; and it must be accountable to its consum-

ers, the persons who are affected by it and the persons who pay for it.

This is my own summary, distilled from talks with several applied behavior analysts and a great deal of reading between the lines of their scientific reports. The analysts themselves spend little time denouncing traditional clinical and teaching methods.

But if my overview is accurate, the new breed of Skinnerians has a lot in common with many of the younger radical and humanist professionals who are challenging the traditionalists in psychiatry, psychology, education, counseling, social work, rehabilitation and correction. This conclusion, which practically forced itself upon me after I noted point after point of similarity, was the most personally surprising outcome of my trip beyond Beyond Freedom and Dignity. I suspect thatifit weren't for their own curtains of mutually exclusive jargons and mutually reinforcing labels, the humanists and the behaviorists might be surprised at how near they are to being bedfellows.

The applied behavior analysts meanwhile keep themselves busy writing prescriptions for change and producing results that astonish almost all who behold. The program at Bryant school, for instance, is just one of the numerous ongoing projects that make Kansas probably the world center of applied behavior analysis. The state leaped into behaviorism in a big way in 1965, when Ogden Lindsley moved from Harvard to the University of Kansas to co-ordinate research at the Medical Center's Child Rehabilitation Unit in Kansas City. That same year, a top-notch group of young researchers who had done work in child development with Sidney W. Bijou and Florence Harris at the University of Washington-Vance Hall, Montrose Wolf, Donald M. Baer and Todd R. Risleymoved en masse to the main campus at Lawrence, Kansas, and tapped a generous supply of funds flowing from the Federal Government through the University's Bureau of Child Research.

In Kansas, the group immediately started testing their ideas at Juniper Gardens, a black housing project in the poorest section of Kansas City. Baer, a 1957 Chicago ¡Ph.D. who had taught at Washington for eight years, was the m'entor and theorist.

Hall, who had been an elementary-school teacher and principal for 13 years before completing his Ph.D. at Washington, focused his efforts on the public-school setting. Wolf, whose research at the Univer-

sity of Houston, Arizona State (Ph.D., 1963) and Washington had ranged so widely that it practically paralleled the field's development, concentrated on home-style settings. Risley, the youngest, arrived in Kansas even before he received his Ph.D. (Washington, 1966); he took charge of the Juniper Gardens community center, running the recreation, preschool and day-care programs and organizing the tenants.

The nine-year association has proved to be mutually fruitful. For the area's residents, it has resulted in better schooling for the children; new, well-run preschool classes; a new day-care center; a clean, well-managed recreation center that, unlike such centers in other areas, is much more used than abused; a reading-tutoring program; several paraprofessional jobs; and a new tenants' association that is using behavioral techniques to solve neighborhood problems, including one problem the police had ignored: speeding motorists.

If behavioral technology has any possibility of fulfilling Skinner's high ambition, its use should extend from cradle to grave.

One of the most impressive fruits from Juniper Gardens is Achievement Place, a large and rambling old farmhouse in Lawrence that is a home away from home for adolescent boys who have got into trouble with their parents, their schools, or the law. The idea was Wolf's, and he spent more than three years perfecting it. It employs an elaborate token-economy system and the learning techniques first tested at Juniper Gardens. Up to eight "uncontrollable" boys live in the home with two "teaching parents," Elery and Elaine Phillips, who trained for their jobs in graduate study with Wolf. The Phillipses and the boys themselves make videotapes of what happens at the home as they work to change various behaviors. One tape caught what might be called a Skinnerian doubletake-a new arrival's almost instantaneous behavior reversal, from adamant refusal to sit still and do his homework to rapt absorption in the task after Elaine Phillips explained the token system and put him on it. The Phillipses also have published extensive data showing increased co-operation, lessened hostility, greater tidiness

and punctuality, and better school work among the boys, who seemed anything but uncontrollable when they took me on a guided tour of the home and gave me a concise explanation of how their token system works.

Wolf has established a special graduate program at the University of Kansas to train teaching parents, and he has outlined his teaching-family model carefully in a handbook so that other communities can set up their own homes for delinquent children. A.S. Neill's Summerhill is "a great and inspiring book about working with kids," Wolf told me, "but it provides no technology. That is why attempts to replicate it have not been successful. We do have a usable technology."

Hall, too, has developed and packaged a teaching model, based on pilot studies at Juniper Gardens. Hall had noticed that some teachers who were involved in early classroom experiments "soon reverted to less effective practices once the experimenters withdrew." His responsive-teaching model makes it possible for teachers to learn the essentials of applied behavior analysis in a weeklong workshop, usually for college credit, and to devise their own experiments without esoteric equipment or outside expertise. Hall told me that there is a "terrific demand" for the workshops.

If behavioral technology has any possibility of fulfilling Skinner's high ambition to redesign the whole culture, its use should extend practically from the cradle to the grave. And it does, as I learned when I took a look at Todd Risley's "living-environments" programs in Kansas. They included crawlers and toddlers at day-care centers, beginning learners in preschool classes, juveniles at the Juniper Gardens recreation center, adults in the tenants' association, and old persons in a private nursing home for the retarded in Lawrence.

Thousands of parents have learned to use applied behavior analysis, since all of the teaching models recognize the large part that parents can play in their children's learning process. Some parents get a fairly detailed course in the principles of operant conditioning. But it really is not necessary, according to several recent studies.

Parents and thousands of their neighbors in Huntsville, Alabama, are learning behavioral techniques in one of the largest and most exciting of the programs.

The Huntsville-Madison County Mental Health Center, which serves nearly 200,000 persons, uses the techniques in all aspects

of its operation-screening, diagnosis, treatment, consultation, prevention and staffing. It switched from a traditional approach in January 1971, and six months later the National Institute of Mental Health, after much debate over this wholesale jump into a nonmedical model, gave the center a three-year, $150,000 grant to study its effectiveness.

According to William H. Goodson, Jr., .a psychiatrist who directs the center,¡ the new system "injects into the therapeutic relationship a healthy 'positive' approach, in which the patient's strengths are valued and considered much more than the weaknesses." Research psychologist A. Jack Turner, who devised the system and oversees it, told me that "our commitment is to empiricism, not to behavior modification, which I believe is a fad." The system uses tokens, modeling, desensitization or any other behavioral technique whose effectiveness can be shown empirically.

The center's services are wide-ranging.

They include therapy with inpatients and outpatients, day treatment, community consultation and education, emergency calls, care of patients before and after confinement in state mental hospitals, a satellite operation in Huntsville's Model Cities area, an alcoholism program, research and evaluation, and training. In its first year, it provided care for 1,019 patients and consultation and education for 32,419 other persons.

An ambitious plan to manage the behavior of a whole community is also under way in Prince George's County, Maryland. Prince George's, one of the largest suburban areas in the country, has a "mixture of all kinds of people" that makes it "a model of America," according to Harold Cohen, a one-time artist who is now executive director of the Institute for Behavioral Research (IBR), a private organization in Maryland.

Somehow Cohen has managed to combine the ideas of the two men who have influenced him most-B.F. Skinner and Buckminster Fuller, both of whom are associated with his Institute for Behavioral Research-into a pragmatic whole. "Fred and Bucky are quite alike," he told me in his Silver Spring office. "But they go to opposite ends of the pendulum."

From Fuller he borrowed an ability to think audaciously about doing things as they have never been done before, and from Skinner the techniques to make new environments work. The pragmatism is his

own. "I'm against any kind of aversive control," he said, "I'm not a moralist, it just doesn't work." He believes in structure because "discipline is the way to freedom." And what is freedom? "Knowing the limitations of the system."

Cohen's project is a kaleidoscope that includes two programs- Teen-agers' Rights and Responsibilities (T ARR), a packaged course to teach "social problem-solving" skills, including the ins and outs of the legal process, to eighth-graders; and Behavioral Programs in Learning Activities for Youth (BPLA Y), which includes afterschool social-problem discussions and practical sessions in such activities as auto maintenance, sewing and filmmaking. The project also has set up a teen-age coffeehouse, the Renaissance.

Maryland and Alabama are only a few of hundreds in operation or in planning stages across. the U.S. Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo, the State University of New York at Stony Brook, and the . Universities of Oregon, Washington and Hawaii are major centers of activity, and new ones spring up each year.

Although they are impressive, these programs are the products of a science and a technology that are still in their infancy.

Skinner, in Beyond Freedom and Dignity, compared human-behavior analysis to physics, suggesting that it is just slightly beyond the time of Newton. Though the number of applied behavior analysts swells as they turn out more and more Ph.D.s, they remain a close-knit, almost incestuous band whose harmony seems to be a defense against the Skinner-scared Philistines.

They have waded together into the complexities of human behavior, and they Although impressive, the know that going deeper will require more achievements of the behavior sophisticated equipment. Montrose Wolf analysts are the products told me, "We have research techniques that look like the best around, but we only of a science and technology have pieces of technology." His statement that are still in their infancy. seemed less a lament than a reminder of work to be done.

Applied behavior analysis, which came What Cohen really hopes to do is into existence only a decade ago when the to convert the country's establishmentoperant conditioners stepped out into the schools, police, courts-to behavior-conreal world, is entering a new era. "We are trol methods that are reinforcing rather now ready for phase two," according to than aversive. Like Turner, he uses a shapGerald R. Patterson of the University of ing treatment to gain acceptance for the Oregon, a leader of the movement. "While idea, especially from county officials. "I continuing to use operational language, first approached the school superintendent observation data, and a functional anawhen it,looked as if some ugly incidents lysis, phase two will also become more anmight result in the police coming into the alogous to social engineering," he said. schools," he said. "And I told him, 'You'll As behavioral engineers, the post-Skinbe blamed, but the total environment is nerians will need to concern themselves responsible.'''

He is using a similar apmuch more than they have with the penproach with police and judges, and it seems ultimate item in Baer, Wolf and Risley's to be working. definition of applied behavior analysis: "in Locked in a safe at IBR are copies of the making sufficient change for value." They. confidential records of teen-agers who are will need to translate their methods into arrested in the county, which the police viable programs that the public will find turned over to him. These records provide worth the cost. If they do not provide this baseline and experimental data, with which kind of reinforcement, no amount of shaphe hopes to show over the next few years ing will keep the public from spending its the favorable effects of TARR, BPLAY tokens elsewhere.

0 and other projects he has in mind. Someday, if things work out as he expects, policemen will go around handing out toAbout the Author: Kenneth Goodall, an editor ken rewards for correct behaviors instead and writer who often contributes articles to of making arrests. He told me he hadn't American magazines, is well qualified to write yet let them in on his idea to change their on Skinnerian principles. He has done extentitle from law-enforcement officer to resive research on the subject, interviewed many inforcement officer. behaviorists and toured the U.S. to observe The large-scale programs in Kansas, projects in Skinnerian human behavior control.

SKINNERREDUX The seductive attempt to engineer a better man evitably these experiments are to be undertaken in It is a peculiarity of behavior control rethe prisons, those unfailing institutions of failure, search, compared to almost all other biological experimentation, that success is more where each new indignity is traditionally presented as an act of grace. likely to bring dejection than joy. Devices At present, the government's investment in that save or extend life aggrandize both Skinnerism is limited, and not directed where most the discoverer and general man, with effective-the early years. That conditioning in early the suggestion that such control of life can modify future behavior is undeniable. That death, while still not the immortality of it will be so used in the future seems inescapable. gods, is a cut above the helplessness of How it should be used is another question. The the general animal host. Behavior manimore specific and limited the behavior to be modpulation, on the other hand, reasserts our ified, the safer. But even relatively modest proposals kinship with the pigeon and the rat. The more technological the control devices, the more require caution. The complexities of human develmechanical the method, the scarier it all seems. opment and human behavior are such that optimism may be arrogance, and arrogance may be fatal. The The most blatant behavior modification procedures-and technologically the most sophisticatedcure to one problem usually comes packaged with involve direct physical or chemical intervention into the cause of another. As we increase our readiness to central nervous system functions. We have drugs manipulate, to control and maneuver man, we must that are more than "ups" or "downs," more spebalance where we can the profits gained thereby cialized, more exact, pinpointing the emotions to be against the corresponding losses in other areas. inhibited or enhanced. The structure of the brain is Given the quiet acceptance that has been accorded becoming more understandable, allowing for either Skinner's ideas in some quarters, and the programs specific destructive psychosurgery or stimulating dethat are resulting from them, it seems worthwhile vices to modify behavior. Electrodes with receivers to take an unhurried stroll around Walden Two to Examining and transmitters the size of quarters can be inserted Skinner's theories remark on the garden path down which we are into the brain to pattern in or out "desirable" or being led. "undesirable" behavior. This year's angst has cen- and methods, The swap that Dr. Skinner asks us to make is the author asks: tered on psychosurgery, and while people may not freedom for security. Dr. Skinner attempts to ease know the difference between a cingulectomy and a In controlling the pain by his reflections that this swap is not only thalomotomy, they know enough to be frightened necessary, but a free ride. We gain a great deal and human behavior, by both. If this were not enough, we also seem to we give up nothing, for freedom is only an illusion. who is to say who be on the verge of being able to alter the genetic He starts his argument with disconcerting asshould do the components of man. Amniocentesis (a procedure sumptions that seem generally to have been swalfor¡intrauterine diagnosis of the nature of the fetus) lowed whole. He says: "Were it not for the unwarcontrolling -and combined with free access to abortion already perranted generalization that all control is wrong, we who is to decide mits some selectivity in breeding, and the capacity should deal with the social environment as simply what kind of for direct modification of genes may soon be availaas we deal with the nonsocial." I know of no such behavior ble, if we Wish, as a significant modifier of future generalization. Freedom and control are not a moral man and his behavior [see "Shall We Copy Human polarity in anyone's philosophy. The entire social is 'desirable'?

Beings?" July '73 SPAN]. structure is built on the right and need of society to Compared with all of this, operant conditioning, last year's control, indeed, coerce, certain behavior from the individual. dernier cri, appears positively antique. Now that copies of Beyond Organized religion, organized morality, codified ethics, style and Freedom and Dignity have been safely removed from thousands fashion, public education, civil law, constitutional law, criminal of coffee tables and tucked away on bookshelves unread, avuncuprocedures, all operate in one way or another within a whole lar old Doc Skinner has slipped out of public consciousness. Torange of explicit and implicit control mechanisms. Unrestricted day it passes almost unnoticed that there is a growing institutional personal liberty (I presume that is what Dr. Skinner means by interest in his theories for controlling man through manipulation freedom in this quotation) has rarely been offered as an ideal for of the environment. While conditioning is a less dramatic form social living by any intelligent thinker. From Plato to tne last of behavior modification than, for example, psychosurgery, it decisions of the U.S. Supreme Court one sees the deliberation of should concern us no less, especially when the Federal Governthe private right versus the public interest. Think of the current ment is preparing programs designed along Skinnerian lines. Inecology movement with the insistence on ever greater controls.

'Perhaps what Dr. Skinner really is saying is not that we are entitled to condition man since he is not free at any rate, but that we must condition man because he is free, and that freedom includes the freedom to be aggressive, the freedom to be immoral, the freedom to be destructive.'

Is there anyone left who in the name of freedom glorifies man's right to pollute his environment? If anything, I suspect the balance today is in the opposite direction. The dearly held aspirations are more likely to be peace, order, harmony, efficiency, and security,¡ instead of such unfashionable and romantically tainted concepts as dignity, humanity, and freedom.

In the psychology market, particularly, freedom has few buyers.

The two major influences here, behaviorism and psychoanalysis, may be antagonistic in every other way, but they have traditionally joined in blissfully embracing determinism. In both theories the cause-and-effect model of physics has been applied to the behavior of man. Never mind that the psychoanalyst and behavior psychologist see each other as putting the cart before the horse. It really matters very little. They are both concerned with the same cart and the same horse and neither has had any doubt that the problem is a cart-horse one, or a horse-cart one, depending on the orientation. Both see behavior as a complex end point, a mathematical resultant of a number of forces and counterforces, or experiences and conditioning, accumulated over the years, and patterning the individual in such a way as to produce one logical and inevitable result. The concept of psychic determinism allows no place for free choice or free action. Ironically, while rejecting free will in theory, in practice the psychoanalyst demands it. This somewhat illogical dualism has been the only way the analyst could function as both therapist and theorist. The compromise reached was that, while freedom of behavior may not exist for man, the illusion of freedom was essential to effect change.

This may be an effective device in individual therapy but it is not a useful concept for a society that aspires to justice. One need only consider the relationship of psychoanalysis and law to see the sterility of psychic determinism. It is an impotent tool because in theory it will not differentiate between grotesquely different qualities of behavior. When a judge in a court of law is forced to distinguish between a free and a compelled act, he is not helped by being told by either a psychoanalyst or a behaviorist that all acts are compelled. Civilized society seems to require that there be a distinction between a man who violates the law with a gun pointed at him and one who commits the same violation for greed.

Even if we accept in principle the concept of psychic determinism, human behavior is not, and never will be, analyzable into all of its components, and therefore cannot be usefully considered to operate on the model of causality supplied by physical scientists.

Despite Dr. Skinner's reassurance that "new.evidences of the predictability of human behavior" are being discovered, most of man's actions, particularly in areas of volition and cognition, will involve so many variables as to make predictability almost impossible. Let me offer an example: A man is five pounds overweight and he has just decided that he will stop all snacks for the next month. It is the first night of this resolve. He is seated at a dinner meeting, listening to a rather dull lecture on freedom and determinism. The waiter places in front of him a bowl of peanuts, a particular weakness of our would-be dieter. Within 10 seconds, the subject has an impulse to take a peanut. The question is simply to predict whether he will take the peanut or not at the time of that first impulse. Obviously, no one of the scientific mind would accept this test case and make a prediction. There are too many

variables which are unknown to determine this particular piece of behavior. It is no different from being given a complex problem in physics with incomplete data. We simply could not know.

Now let us examine the next step. You are given the data that he does not follow his impulse. He does not take the peanut.

Without analyzing the variables, you know that an entire lifetime of complex inputs toward taking the peanut have been placed on one side of the scale and an entire lifetime of training and conditioning to resist the peanut are added to the other side of the scale. We are asked to believe that, given that particular individual, that particular lifetime, and those particular conditions, at that particular moment of time, the refusal of the peanut was predetermined, in precisely the same way as if balancing weights were added to one side or the other. You are then told that three seconds later he has a second impulse. You now have the great advantage of knowing that an entire lifetime of inputs and variables, whether knowable or not, have culminated in the first decision to resist the impulse. Are you now prepared to predict the response to the second impulse?

You are not. Even though you start with the resultant of the immense number of seconds before the first decision and all you have to balance against that is three insignificant seconds of time.

And if I were to give you the pattern of 50 impulses leading both to acceptance and rejection, you would be no better off predicting the 51st even if the interval were reduced to one-tenth of a second.

For the number of variables that could be introduced in that fraction of time are as incalculable as those in that mass of time preceding the first decision. The same is not true of weights and measures, and that is what makes prediction of human behavior different from prediction of the behavior of inanimate things or of simple animal forms. Whether that is truly a "free" choice or not, it is an incalculable choice, and as such can pass for freedom.

Of course, we all know we can condition a man to reject peanuts. But my example has nothing to do with peanuts. It is concerned with impulse and control, passion and reason, appetite and knowledge, pleasure and safety, rationalization and rationality, hunger and wants, instinct and learning, motives and countermotives, thought and action-and the complexity of the human mind, which in denying predictability, defies programing.

This is not' to' say that it is impossible to modify human behavior. I would not be a practicing psychiatrist if I believed it were impossible. Nor am I saying that it is not possible and even desirable to modify environment so as to encourage certain traits and discourage others, but it is impossible to guarantee any given results in precisely those more complex areas which are ultimately the crucial aspects of human behavior to control. What is possi ble to control may not warrant the excessive price that might have to be paid for it.

It

should be understood, of course, that there are many ways of changing behavior besides modifying environment. Dr. Skinner tells us that "a person's behavior is determined by a genetic endowment traceable to the evolutionary history of the species and by the environmental circumstances to which as an individual he has been exposed." This is precisely the view expounded by Freud some 50 years ago in A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis. It is the kind of statement that we are all inclined to accept,

'Skinner has said: "The problem is to design a world which will be liked not by people as they now are but by those who live in it." How in this world is he planning to do that? The examples he uses are not even what people in his world like, only what people of his generation like .... ' as a generality. What else is there but nature and nurture? It is in the specific implications of the statement that the difficulty lies, because Dr. Skinner means "determined" not in the sense of "influenced by," but in a fixed sense. In addition, he tends to see environmental circumstances as accretions of a very specific kind \ of individualized experience. Given his specific meanings, he creates a model which seems to lead logically to only one conclusion. If something is caused by A and B, and if A is fixed, one must change B. Broad models often dictate narrow solutions.

This one indicates that only environmental manipulation works.

Let me offer another model, however. All human behavior, normal and neurotic, all action and emotion, all feeling and conduct, are mediated by physical-chemical reactions. This is another cliche which is obviously true. That does not, however, imply that the only way we can change behavior is through physicalchemical means, nor that the desired way to change behavior is through physical-chemical means. It certainly says nothing about which behavior is best changed by this means or which is unlikely ever to be changed this way. Even were we <;:apableof finally solving chemical riddles of perception and action it is doubtful whether we would "understand" everything better in those,terms or in that language. If we were capable of dissecting and analyzing a symphony in terms of frequencies, wave lengths, overtones, vibrations and all, we might add to our knowledge of music and composition, but it is doubtful that we would "understand" the symphony better than by listening to it. Nor would we find it easier to create an original great symphony.

Man's experie'nce is not quite so specific as the sum of small learnings. There are mechanisms whereby environment can influence behavior wholesale, without having specifically been experienced. I am referring here to such concepts as identification, whereby the life experiences of another individual can be absorbed totally into our acting systems without having gone through our own personal experience. We may behave like our father, not because we experienced what our father did, but because we identify with him and in that identification we begin to act as we know he would, independent of reward and punishment, pleasure or pain. Whole modes of behavior will be instituted by that strange mechanism, halfway to love, that we call identification.

Again, this is not to say that the modification of specific environmental factors cannot modify certain behaviors, but it is hardly the only, or necessarily the best, way.

Whatever the methods of learning-or programing-the lessons of the past will have a somber relevance. All that is predictable is minor in comparison with what is not predictable. The history of scientific and institutional approaches to controlling behavior gives us little comfort about the future'-of scientific behavior control. In many ways we have been better served by happenstance than social design. One need only look at the state of our designed institutions today-our prisons, our mental institutions, and our schools-to question the wisdom of social science in social engineering.

Any engineered society or engineered individual must be based on some pattern of correctness or normalcy, and the attempts to define this have been conspicuous failures in psychology. Dr. Skinner suggests his criteria for a good society. It must: (1) provide for

order and security; (2) produce necessary goods; (3) maintain a healthy environment; (4) provide for education. All of these vague and general platitudes can exist in a monstrous as well as a benevolent society-depending on who defines "healthy" or "necessary," for example. But then he adds two more. He tells us that a good society must "provide for the pursuit and achievement of happiness." What a blessed relief; what a leavening that offers. But what kind of word is "happiness," issuing from Dr. Skinner's scientific lips? What kind of behavior is it? How does he measure it? How can he recognize the contingencies for it? Lastly, he also reassures us that he wants a culture that will "encourage its members to examine its practices and to experiment with new ones." How does one encourage experimentation with determined behavior? What will be the limits of "experimentation" to be encouraged? Will we experiment with violence? Will we experiment with disobedience? How can a predetermined man experiment with deviations from the code, especially if the purpose of the conditioning is to assure subscribing to the code?

Dr. Skinner does give us some specific ideas of what problem areas demand our attention. He is disturbed that "students no longer respond in traditional ways to educational environments; they drop out of school, possibly for long periods of time, they take only courses which they enjoy or which seem to have relevance to their problems." So we will program in proper respect for learning. He is distressed that "many young people work as little as possible," and that is because "something is wrong with the contingencies which induce men to work industriously and carefully." We are also told, "that a serious problem arises when young people refuse to serve in the armed forces and desert or defect to other countries," and the solution here should seem embarrassing even¡to Dr. Skinner, although he doggedly insists that "what must be changed are the contingencies which induce young people to behave in given ways toward their governments."

Dr. Skinner is designing the world that he would like now, but he himself has said: "The problem is to design a world which will be liked not by people as they now are but by those who live in it." How in this world is he planning to do that? The examples he uses are not even what people in his world like, only what people of his generation like, and that is a world that is being passed by. We live in a technological age, in which things move fast. and generational life is shortened. The average college student often doesn't recognize an identity with a high-school sibling.

Technology speeds up change to a frightening degree. Yet we are asked to do conditioning, starting with the neonate, in order to guarantee the adult behavior in some unknown culture 20 to 30 years later that will not be inhabited by the designer. This time gap also discredits Dr. Skinner's reassurance that the democratic process will be maintained because "the principle of making the controller a member of the group he controls should apply to the designer of the culture." Since most of the control will be done on neonates, are we to have six-month-old designers?

It would be supremely difficult to find the guidelines that might indicate the most adaptive and rewarding values for a future whose conditions can only be partially anticipated. Dr. Skinner feels that it should be possible to "turn to the sources of the things people call good." But it is difficult to understand precisely where he would find his definitions for the good behavior. He has previ-

ously specifically rejected "almost every theory" in "political science, law, religion, economics, anthropology, sociology, psychotherapy, philosophy, ethics, history, education, child care, linguistics, architecture, city planning, and family life" as a "tremendous weight of traditional 'knowledge' which must be corrected or displaced." He refers to "the ultimate sources as being found in the evolution of the species and the evolution of the culture." But how is he to find ultimate, final, conclusive answers from the culture that is not only in process but, according to him, evolving on false premises?

Perhaps what Dr. Skinner really is saying is not that we are entitled to condition man since he is not free at any rate, but that we must condition man because he is free, and that freedom includes the freedom to be aggressive, the freedom to be immoral, the freedom to be destructive. I suppose if we come to the conclusion that the very survival of the species necessitates the abandonment of our concepts offreedom or, indeed, the abandonment offreedom itself, behavior conditioning would be necessary.

The question is, are we at that point? At this stage of the world's development it is fashionable to think so and it is understandable.

Given the horrors of the atomic age, it is not surprising that the most popular generalization about man in the last 20 years has been as hunter, killer, and aggressor. .

But biologically we can make a better case for man as the loving animal. No species is helpless and dependent for so large a portion of its life-span as man. Incapable of either fight or flight, the two conventional mechanisms of survival, the defenseless and passive infant survives only in dependency. His very existence depends on the strength and support of the loving adult who will sacrifice himself, if need be, for the survival of the young. It is inconceivable that any species so designed could have survived if this were left to the chance institutions of education and culture.

One must assume that built genetically into the organism is a protective response to the helpless member of the species.

Our whole biological view of man can be built starting with the enforced social structures that the prolonged dependency state dictates. Tn Totem and Taboo, one of the most criticized and, superficially, one of the most ingenuous of Freud's works, a hypothesis not unlike this is offered. True it is couched in the most naIve genetic concepts, but it can be seen as a prophetic work transcending even the ignorance of genetics that Freud shared with his times. Stripped of the specifics which make it seem silly, Freud is saying that we cannot explain the survival of the group by the institutions of our society that facilitate social living, but rather the institutions are a product of a genetically fixed demand for them. He is saying, in essence, that it cannot be an accident of culture that we have survived; we are of necessity social animals with a genetic inheritance that must include certain taboos directed against crimes of violence within the group. The capacity for love, caring, empathy, compassion are part of our natural endowment.

Theodosius Dobzhansky and others have pointed out that although culture is man's product, it also becomes his producer.

Whenever we alter our view of man and build it into our institutions, our altered view, independent of whether it is true or not, will become a determinant in the nature of the evolving man. Dr. Skinner denies this when he concludes his book with the amazing statement: "No theory changes what it is a theory about; man remains what he has always been." This seems an incredible view from a psychologist. The attitude it expresses has usually been described as one of the crucial distinctions between psychological and physical definitions. It is true that if we define a solid as a gas it nonetheless retains its solidity; the atomic weight of an

element is what it is despite our ignorant assumptions. But man is a product of his environment-which is what I had thought Dr. Skinner was saying-and he therefore becomes that which the environment makes him. Was Dr. Skinner not decrying such ideas as freedom which, by shaping- the way that culture treats man, determines the nature of the man produced by that culture?

In great part, that has seemed to me to be Dr. Skinner's thesis, and if he chooses to contradict himself at the end, it is only the final mystification.

The principle that our view of man will create a man in that image seems a reasonable assumption. Psychological and sociological theories do become self-fulfilling prophecies, and this must be a consideration in any attempts to engineer a new man. In attempting to improve man's condition we must not destroy that which is uniquely human. I do not agree with Dr. Skinner that man's strength is science and technology. They are only his products. I think the badger in The Once and Future King defined the uniqueness of the human condition best, and we would do well to keep that view in mind when confronted with Skinnerian plans for the future.

When God had manufactured all of the eggs out of which the fishes and the serpents and the birds and the mammals ... would eventually emerge, He called the embryos before him, and saw that they were good.

The embryos stood in front of God, with theirfetal hands clasped politely over their stomachs and their heavy heads hanging down respectfully, and God addressed them. He said: "Now, you embryos, here you are, all looking exactly the same, and We are going to give you the choice of what you want to be. When you grow up you will get bigger anyway, but we are pleased to grant you another gift as well. You may alter any parts of yourselves into anything which you think would be useful to you in later life. Now then ... , step up and chooseyour tools, but remember that what you choose you will grow into, and will have to stick to."

At the very end of the sixth day they had got through all the little embryos except one. This embryo was man.

"Please God," said the embryo, "I think that you made me into a shape which I now have for reasons best known to Yourselves, and that it would be rude to change. If I am to have my choice I will stay as I am. I will not alter any of the parts which you gave me, for other and doubtless inferior tools, and I will stay a defenseless embryo all my life, doing my best to make myself a few futile implements out of the wood, iron, and the other materials which \ you have seen fit to put before me."

"Well done," exclaimed the Creator in delighted tones. "Hear all you embryos, come here with your beaks and whatnots to look upon Our first Man. He is the only one who has guessed Our riddle, out of all of you, and We have great pleasure in conferring upon him the Order of Dominion over the Fowls of the Air, and the Beasts of the Earth and the Fishes of the Sea. Now let the rest of you get along and love and multiplyJor it is time to knock off for the weekend. Asfor you, Man, you will be a naked tool all your life, though a user of tools. You will look like an embryo until they bury you, but all the others will be embryos before your might. Eternally undeveloped, you will always remain potential in Our Image, able to see some of Our sorrows and to feel some of Our joys. We are partly sorry for you, Man, but partly hopeful."

0 About the Author: Willard Gaylin is president of the Institute of Society, Ethics, and the L({e Sciences in Hastings, New York, and associate professor of psychiatry at Columbia University. He has written many books including In the Service of Their Country: War Resisters in Prison.

tretching, twisting and ending their bodies in a wide ariety of physical postures, housands of Americans are ning to yoga-not only as xercise but also as relig~on, sychology and philosophy.

A few weeks ago, on a balmy morning in New York's Central Park, more than 100 New Yorkers were seated in varying approximations of the lotus posture. Oblivious to the stares of passers-by, they listened with a heavy breathing intensity to the instructions of a young woman. "Yoga must be approached gradually," she said. "Many things are happening to you on a physical and emotional level, so go slowly. Never strain."

The assurance that things were happening apparently delighted the New Yorkers who were in the park for a series of free yoga lessons offered by the city's Parks, Recreation and Cultural Affairs Administration.

Relentlessly, they stretched, twisted and bent bodies that were young, old, fat, thin, flabby, firm, limber and stiff in assorted combinations.

And along the way, quite a few managed an air of proper yogic serenity.

As she guided her class through the intricacies of the shoulder stand, the plow, the lion, the fish and the locust, the instructor managed to combine the roles of gym teacher and philosopher. "The cobra is not a push up!" she told an athletic-looking young man.

"Arch that back but don't use your arms."

Then calmly switching gears she advised the class to "let go." "In letting go of a posture, you must not anticipate what you will do next," she continued in her well-modulated tones. "In life, too, we must let go of one situation or attitude and not anticipate the next. Try to be in the present always."

The yoga classes in Central Park are but one indication of the surging American interest in yoga-which is part of an even larger and growing American interest (especially among the young) in Indian culture, philosophy, religion, art and music. Richard Hittleman, a Californian who has taught yoga via books, records and television, estimates the number of American students in the hundreds-of thousands. And the popularity of the lung-filling, mind-clearing discipline shows no signs of decline. Along with teen-agers, housewives, bankers, lawyers, cabbies, shopkeepers and other ordinary folk, the ranks of yoga devotees include such luminaries as actresses Mia Farrow and Gloria Swanson, poet Allen Ginsberg and supercelebrity Jacqueline Onassis.

Yoga classes seem to be springi ng up everywhere. Summer camps that normally resound

with the thwack of baseball bat and the splash of young bodies in the swimming pool now have their quieter moments as the children attempt deep breathing, the rishi's pose or the bow. Yoga is taught in high schools and colleges, in communes and church groups, in summer resorts, men's gyms, and prisons.

No one can say for sure why Americans have suddenly become so yoga-conscious. The country first became widely aware of yoga in the 1890s through the lectures and writings of Swami Vivekananda. Four decades later, Jiddu Krishnamurti again evoked an upsurge of interest in his cross-country lecture series and left behind a dedicated following. But, until recently, yoga was considered exoticsuitable only for artists and intellectuals.

Many factors have combined to build the , yoga trend-the growing concern with physical fitness, the widespread desire for simpler values, the search for peace amidst the frenetic pace of a modern industrial society. But basically, the pragmatic, endlessly experimenting American has tried yoga and found that it works. It makes him healthier, calmer, more kindly disposed toward his fellow man.

One of the' largest of the American yoga

movements is led by Swami Satchidananda, founder and director of the Integral Yoga Institute (IYI), which has more than a dozen centers across the United States. The Swami, a disciple of Swami Sivananda who founded the Divine Life Society, keeps in touch with his devoted and usually young adherents by plane, telephone and filmed lectures.

The variety of yoga organizations in America has developed to suit different tastes and temperaments. Many of them hold retreats in rural setting, with ascetic living quarters, work, meditation, vegetarian cuisine, and rules of silence. But all American yoga students have much in common with each other and with their counterparts in India. The longing for self-control and inner peace, the willingness to accept discipline, and the spirit of discipleship are not different.

In 1893, in a lecture to the World's Parliament of Religions in Chicago, Swami Vivekananda noted that East and West have much to share and predicted that a broad-ranging exchange of ideas would take place. The growing American interest in yoga is only one of the many ways in which his prophecy appears to be coming true.

0

SEEING AMERICA

BY BUS "Not since Marilyn Monroe stopped the bus has there been such a turn toward the coach," said Saturday Review/ World magazine recently. Thousands of Americans who had not boarded a long-distance bus in years are doing so now-thanks to the energy crisis-and are discovering that bus travel is no longer a cramped, bumpy ordeal but a thing of joy. It is simpler, cheaper and healthier than auto or plane travel. More and more families agree that seeing America by bus is really seeing America instead of just flying over it.

You can travel from New York to Los Angeles on the de luxe Silver Eagle coach (run by Continental Trailways), which has foam-cushioned reclining seats; footrests; rest rooms with washbasins, mirrors and electrical outlets; wide picture windows; and blankets and pillows for passenger rest.

There is also the super de luxe Golden Eagle, which has all the things you find on the Silver Eagle plus two lounges for card games or letter writing and a galley with a red-and-gold uniformed hostess to run it.

She offers coffee, tea or snacks at the wave of a hand. The trip from New York to Los Angeles takes three days and the round trip costs $149. The Golden Eagle service including the snacks costs an extra $13-not a bad bargain because you can eat continuously, if the spirit so moves you.

The Go)den Eagle is not a rare species. Many such buses run all over America. There are hundreds of special escorted tours to appeal to every imaginable type of traveler. The two giants of the bus industry, Continental Trailways and Greyhound, offer the largest number of services; bus companies within a state or region have special tours. Local travel agencies are replete with schedules, guides and reams of data about bus possibilities.

The options are endless. You can go on a "Cherry Blossom" mini-tour of Washington, D.C., for $16, or take a 31-day vacation to Alaska for $1,000.

A 23-day "Mexican Holiday" from New York City to Mexico City and back costs as little as $800 (an average of $34 a day) and it includes virtually everything: transportation, accommodation, most meals and tips. For $206, or $25 per day,

there's the eight-day round-trip tour from New York or Washington, D.C., to Charleston, South Carolina.

Undoubtedly the best buys of all are Greyhound's" Ameripass" ticket and Continental Trailways' "Eagle pass" ticket. They're the same price-$149-and they both offer almost unlimited travel throughout the United States for 30 days. For an extra $50, you can spend an additional 30 days.

Summer is by far'the favorite season for bus travel. But in certain cities such as Philadelphia the winter week-end ski trips to the mountains of New York are very popular. For $57, you can revel in a three-day package tour that includes hotel accommodation, transportation, four meals, ski rentals, live entertainment for two nights and a free ski lesson. Some 700 skiers, or 20 busloads a week-end, take advantage of this special package.

Bus travel is happily egalitarian-there is no first or economy class-and undoubtedly gregariE>us. When they are not eating, passengers sing together, sleep, read, gaze out of the window, chat cozily and doze again.

Finally, if you're looking for

bus travel fit for a king, you can charter one of the Executive Specials of Continental Trailways. Each has a bar, refrigerator, ice-cube maker, wall-to-wall carpeting, built-in closet, semicircular lounge, rattan draw-draperies and telephone. And all it costs is $1.50 per person per mile.

ALISTAIR COOKE'S AMERICA Alistair Cooke)s America) a history of the United States written by a perceptive observer of the American scene, was for many weeks among the top 10 nonfiction bestsellers in the U.S. For more than 35 years Cooke has been writing on America for a succession of British papers-the Times of London, the Daily Herald and the Guardian. Born in Britain, Cooke first visited the U.S. in 1932, and became an American citizen in 1941. While serving as Washington correspondent of the Guardian) he did a muchpraised J 3-part TV series for the BBC and Time-Life Films.

Alistair Cooke)s America) which begins before Columbus and ends with a peer into the future, is developed from material gathered for his TV series and is a tribute in words and pictures to the country Cooke has come to love. The author combines the reporter's eye for detail with a historian's insights. In the book's epilogue titled "The More Abundant Life," after Roosevelt's famous words, Cooke examines "where this nation has arrived." He sees the U.S. as an "early warning system" for the rest of the world. He says: "Every other country scorns American materialism while striving in

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every big and little way to match it. Envy obviously has something to do with it. ... " He concludes: "It is a bitterly and sometimes rousingly compli~ated place, this land thrashing over such incessant contradictions as control and permissiveness, the radical young and the conservative middle, the limitlessness of civil rights and the limitations of Presidential power. The Swedish sociologist Gunnar Myrdal helped make sense of the constant commotion with his remark to the effect that while the American tradition is a conservative one, what it has struggled to conserve are often very radical principles indeed."

WHAT PLANS FOR THE BIG BIRTHDAY? Last month's Fourth of July celebrations reminded Americans that it is just two years until the big Bicentennial, when the nation will commemorate its 200th birthday. As talk about the Bicentennial increased, newspapers, magazines, and private and public institutions reported more plans developing.

Disney Enterprises, which has entertained Americans for years, is planning a cinematic extravaganza called "Sea to Shining Sea." It might begin with a depiction of the Polynesians in Hawaii in their long canoes, shift to Hollywood and the American entertainment industry, then on to such scenes as St. Louis in the days of the paddle-wheel steamers, Chicago at the turn of the century, and finally the battlefields of Lexington and Concord, Massachusetts-birthplaces of theAmerican Revolution.

Another big feature of the

200th birthday is the "American Freedom Train," which will have 25 cars drawn by an old steam locomotive. The train will visit 48 of the 50 states, taking to people such historic treasures as the Declaration of Independence and the Liberty .Bell.

One of the most talked about projects is the proposed World Theater Festival, which will bring together some of the finest actors and theatrical companies from more than 20 nations to stage some of the world's greatest plays.

Scholars have their own ideas about the country's 200th birthday-celebrate it by talking about it. The American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research is organizing a "Distinguished Lecture Series" in which America's foremost intellectuals will speak all over the U.S. Says the Institute's president: "This nation's Bicentennial should be an occasion for our finest scholars to take stock of our past accomplishments and to chart a course for future achievements."

Among the speakers will be such well-known names as U.S. Ambassador to India Daniel P. Moynihan, sociologist Irving Kristol and former Secretary of State Dean Rusk.

As the number of Bicentennial plans swelled, editors of the Christian Century magazine talked to many Americans from different walks of life to find out what they thought was the best way to celebrate the occasion.

The result was a burst of lively and diverse responses.

"The best birthday present we could possibly give ourselves," said industrialist J. Irwin Miller, "is to undertake to restate what America of 1976 ought to be and to be about,

and to state it with a daring and foresight comparable to that of our ancestors. The achievement that we so much admire in our Founding Fathers was their ability to make a new statement about how people should live together and govern themselves."

From psychologist B. F. Skinner came a simple and direct proposal: "Find out what has happened to the concept of freedom."

In almost similar vein, historian John Hope Franklin said: "Deal with the question of what the patriots were really seeking in 1776."

Folk singer Pete Seeger would proclaim "both the successes and the failures of attempts to continue the struggle to improve American democracy."

Catholic lay theologian Michael Novak's suggestion was "to trace your family's experience in America down through however many generations-a great way to learn about class, ethnicity, religion, power, regionalism, etc., in America; and to inquire of those different from you the saga of their family's experience in America. There are so many different Americas."

Nathan A. Scott of the University of Chicago said: "I would suggest programs of street theater, presenting tableaux of significant contributions to the nation's history made by the particular racial and ethnic groups residing in the given neighborhood.

These events could be arranged by local theater companies or by personnel in the field of drama in local colleges."

For Ross Snyder of Chicago Theological Seminary, the approach of the Bicentennial seemed to deserve serious

reflection: "How about having every congregation work up a celebration, culminating in religious vision that opens up new living space in our common life and also enables us to be rooted and grounded--and arranging with some other church to present each one's celebration for the other?

Would we see evidences of an ecology of spirit? Of where we are relative to the frontier experience, the wilderness paradigm? Of a justice culture?

A world ecumene?"

Said George McGovern, U.S. Senator from South Dakota: "1 would like to see 'peopleoriented' events rather than elaborate staged productions."

Charles H. Percy, U.S. Senator from Illinois, thought "it would be fun to take up some of the crafts ¡that were implemented during the colonial times-quilting, candle making, weaving and pottery making."

Scholar James Luther Adams said that America should celebrate what de Tocqueville saw as a unique feature of the country's life: "the indispensable role of the voluntary sector in the development of a free, self-critical and open society."

Harvard Professor Harvey Cox had his own vision of the Bicentennial. "I would suggest that we spend the next 100 years celebrating the world and the neighborhood. For over 200 years now, people have been asked to invest loyalty and commitment in the nation-state, which is a misleading level of belonging. " However varied their conceptions, one thing is clear: Most Americans are intimately involved and united in a new, emergent "Spirit of '76," which will help make the Bicentennial an affair to remember.

D

POLLOCK

.S 10 lCCIDII!

The recent sale of Jackson Pollock's 'Blue Poles' to Australia's National Gallery for $2 million marked the highest price ever paid for an American painting. Debunking many myths in the article on page 22, the author says that Pollock's work was rooted in impressionism, it was not entirely a new phenomenon; that his canvases were lyrical, not violent; that his 'action painting' was art, not accident.

20

Top: "Ocean Greyness" (1953). Oil and enamel on canvas. 4' 9r x 7' 6".

Top right: "Guardians of the Secret" (1943). Oil on canvas. 4' !" x 6' .J:i".

Right: "Autumn Rhythm" (Number 30, 1950). Oil and enamel on canvas. 8' lOt" x 17' 8".

W

hen I began teaching around 1950, we jokingly called introductory art history' "Pyramids to Picasso." A decade later this had become "Pyramids to Pollock." To be sure, Picasso was hardly the most "advanced" -or best-artist in the world in 1950; nor was Pollock, by the time of his death in 1956.

But in their turns, they were the last painters whose work seemed to have embodied whole epochs. The abstract expressionist movement, of which Pollock was a part, boasted many superb painters. Yet "Pyramids to Rothko" or "Pyramids to de Kooning" would not have rung true-and not just because the al1iteration was missing.

This epochal dimension was not just a question of quality, for that alone would not have sufficed to endow Pollock with the reputation he enjoys today. While I personally consider him the best painter to have reached maturity since World War II, a case could be made in this regard for other painters within the ranks of the abstract expressionists alone. Indeed, there are even today a few influential critics who hold Willem de Kooning a superior painter to Pollock-an opinion in fact shared by a majority in the artists' community during the '40s and '50s when abstract expressionism was in its heyday.

The "mythic capability" of Pollock's work depended more on its particular character and methodology than on¡ its quality. And, of course, it depended upon the public personality of the man himself, the self-image he imposed. All these came together to make Jackson Pollock the symbol both of the coming of age of American avant-garde painting, and of the adventurousness of postWorld War II art in general. Without Pollock's mythic status, such "gestures" as the recent purchase of one of his pictures for $2 million, by the National Gallery of Australia at Canberra, would have been unthinkable.

As a symbolic figure, Pollock represents for the painting of recent decades what Picasso does for the painting of the first half of t~e century-and his reputation, like Picasso's, has profited accordingly. While no one today denies the Promethean range and daring of Picasso-the importance of his innovations in all aspects of the plastic arts-most artists and critics are quietly of the opinion that Matisse was a greater painter. Yet "Pyramids to Matisse" would not have sounded altogether satisfactory either. Matisse was a painter's painter, but he was "merely" a great painter-which is not in itself enough to engender a cultural myth.

As in the case of Picasso, it is necessary to separate Pollock's paintings from his myth if we want to form an adequate idea of the

work itself, especial1y the classic "drip" 01'as I prefer to call them-"poured" paintings, on which his reputation largely rests. Not that the myth cannot be traced in certain respects to truths about the man and his work, but these are invariably distorted by the myth in the interests of the way in which society needs and wants to think about them.

Take, for example, the popular image of Pollock as a kind of Frontiersman or Cowboy-the "American" artist par excellence.

Critics have described Pollock as "the man out of the West," twirling "lariats of color" in the Wide Open Spaces of immense canvases. This myth, which Pollock was not above encouraging by wearing cowboy boots while at home in Long Island and threatening occasionally, when heavily loaded, to "bust up" a saloon, was particularly popular among European critics. For the French especially, the American national genius is often taken .to be that of a kind of Noble Savage inhabiting a "real America" which begins somewhere west of the Mississippi. ' There is some basis in fact for the Frontiersman myth. Pollock was born in Cody, Wyoming (home of Buffalo Bill), and though his family left Wyoming in the year of his birth, he did spend much of his childhood on farms in California and Arizona, and he traveled through the West on several occasions later. From the ages of 12 to 18, however, he lived in or near Los Angeles and his whole adult life was spent in New York City and in Springs, Long Island. His family was dominatedby--a culturally oriented mother, and like his older brothers, Pollock became an artist, finding his true home in New York rather than on the range. "Living is keener, more demanding, more intense and expansive in New York than in the West," Pollock wrote. "The stimulating influences are more . numerous and rewarding."

T

he cowboy myth has tended to reinforce a variety of misconceptions about Pollock's paintings, among them that violence is a central characteristic of his art, and that he is a painter of very large canvases.

But Pollock's labyrinthine poured pictures have nothing to do with cowboys, lariats or shootouts. Rather they express the energy, flux and molecularity of life in New York.

And, to the extent that they simultaneously evoke landscape associations (as in "Autumn Rhythm" and "Lavender Mist," for example), they recall the light and ambiance of Long Island rather than that of the West.

Moreover, Pollock was far from the paradigm of the specifically American artist. I think it fair to say that his painting was more directly dependent on, and related to, the European modernist tradition-such movements as impressionism, cubism and sur-

'The violence that the public thought it saw in the pictures derived from the radical challenge with which these works defied accepted notions of what constituted a painting.' realism-than that of some other abstract expressionists, Clyfford Still, for example. And it is certainly not "American" in the conscious sense that characterizes regionalist and "American Scene" painting of the '30s-or pop art. "The idea of an isolated American painting," Pollock wrote in 1944, "seems absurd to me, just as the idea of creating a purely American mathematics or physics would seem absurd."

The violence and awkwardness that many critics professed to see in Pollock's mature art-"deeds of incredible violence done with paint"-went beyond the Westerner myth to establish an image of Pollock as a kind of primitive, both as man and painter. For some foreign critics this seemed his key national characteristic. In Pollock's poured paintings, wrote one, "the violence that feeds on everything typically American ... becomes obsessive and unchained."

Yet when we look at the paintings without preconceptions or prejudices, we see a sophisticated, highly complex art that is far from corresponding to this popular image.

In Pollock's earlier work, that of 1940-46, there is, to be sure, a certain amount of expressionist angst and violence that, in part, reflected his inability at the time to forge a vehicle capable of fully realizing his possibilities. But in the poured pictures of 1947-50, with which he is most identified, this gives

way to a supremely lyrical art, choreographically supple and rhythmic. These "classic" Pollocks often exhibit an almost rococo delicacy, and whatever violence they contain they situate in a broad spectrum of emotions informed far more by passion, joy, ecstasy, delight, gravity, tenderness, suffering, grace, fragility and, at moments, even charm.

Why, then, we may ask, have so many people formed a contrary impression of these works? There are, I think, a number of explanations. First, there is the fact that people do not generally look at pictures with care.

(For example, the public considers the faces and postures of Degas's ballet dancers to be "beautiful" when, in fact, they are 'ugly, strained and awkward-as Degas intended them to be.) In Pollock's case, however, it was even more a confusion of the man with his works. When Pollock was in the grips of the alcoholism that dogged him most of his adult life, he was capable of a certain violence -largely antisocial, "shocking" behaviorwhich made good copy and became part of his myth. But he didn't paint when inebriated.

(To be sure, he and his friend, the sculptor Tony Smith, indulged in a drunken paintspilling orgy on the very canvas which was to become "Blue Poles," 1952, but Pollock reworked the entire surface of the canvas when he turned it into a picture.) In any case, he was strictly "on the wagon" during the late '40s when he executed his great classic paintings.

The frequent allusion to violence in Pollock's art-a national magazine dubbed him "Jack the Dripper"-must finally be understood as a function of the paintings' historical context; it was the way people expressed the shock produced in them by Pollock's new and unexpected methods and images. The violence that the public thought it saw in the pictures derived from the radical challenge with which these works defied accepted notions of what constituted a painting. Pollock was doing violence to the public's expectations. In this sense, the situation was similar to that which obtained during the emergence of impressionism. One must remind oneself when looking at the engaging, luminous pictures of Monet and Renoir, that serious writers of the time characterized their images as "pots of paint flung in the face of the public," and cartoonists represented the artists as madmen.

The association of Pollock's work to the vastness of the American landscape has tended to reinforce the misconception that he was essentially a painter of very large canvases. Pollock did pioneer a new kind of big picture, but monumental paintings remained exceptional for him-though they were frequent in the work of such of his contemporaries as Rothko and Still. A generation later, big pictures had become commonplace in

The big picture pioneered by Pollock thus constituted a new category-a hybrid that retained the intimacy and character of the easel painting while attaining the size of a mural. Since such works were entirely abstract and free of perspective illusions, they differed fundamentally from both "Guernica" and the work of the '30s muralists. Because recessional space was eliminated, Pollock's webs onumental paintings are hardly a nov- and Rothko's rectangles seem to come forelty. The Old Masters made numerous ward somewhat from the wall, thus enhancing large transportable panel pictures and altar the illusion of their size. The nearest precedent pieces, as well as murals conceived for parti- for them in the modern tradition is the wallcular architectural settings. In regard to 20th- size late Monets, with which the Pollocks century art, Picasso's "Guernica" comes im- share an allover texture and shimmering mediately to mind, as do the murals of the light. But while Pollock knew classical imMexicans and "American Scene" painters of pressionism and was certainly at least inthe '30s. But these modern examples were like directly influenced by it, he could not have the large pictures of the Old Masters insofar seen these large late Monets-except perhaps as they were public images in every sense. in photographs. And, of course, the Monets are representational paintings while the PolThey were planned to fit public architectural settings, handled so as to be seen from a locks are entirely abstract.

The wall-size pictures of Pollock and comdistance, and their subject matter was directed toward the collectivity. Whether they dealt pany inspired and sanctioned the even larger with politics, history, religion or with com- (and far more frequent) big pictures by the munity life, their themes were of an embracing abstract painters of the next wave-Kenneth order-and their scale and handling were Noland and Frank Stella, for example-who matured in the late '50s. These younger artists, consonant with this.

From its beginnings in impressionism, how- however, changed the big picture's nature. ever, the modernist tradition has eschewed Although their work remained totally abstract, it implied a public "address." Their such values, focusing-as would Pollock-on the artist's private experience. By the 1870s larger works were too big for apartments the best artists ceased to be inspired by collec- and literally required public spaces. The tive, institutional subjects, and considered the broad, flat color areas and impersonal techworks that continued to be made in that vein nique of such paintings combined to produce by more traditional artists to be inflated, bold, heraldic images that sustained at great rhetorical and, above all, insincere. Beginning distances but discouraged intimate viewing. with the impressionists, and with few excep- This more public manner may in part have tions until World War II, modernist pictures reflected a certain rapprochement between artist and society that had occurred between were easel paintings of modest size.

Pollock's large pictures, then, were more Pollock's generation and the next. Certainly exceptions to the modernist tradition than to the generation of painters now in their 40s the history of art as a whole. But what was matured in a relatively more encouraging least to really unexpected about them-and those environment, more favorable-at which Mark Rothko, Clyfford Still and Bar- success. The abstract expressionists had nett Newman also began to make around reached artistic maturity amid general scorn 1950--was that despite thei~ large size, they and rejection. They received little support retained an intimate scale, character and from collectors, critics or museum curators. handling, a private "address" consistent with Until a few years after Pollock's death in 1956 works of easel size. They were felt as "person- there was a pervasive inferiority complex in to-person" expressions, and were intended the American art establishment. It was widely for homes rather than public buildings, assumed that all great modern art had to come churches or the like. In apartments, such from Europe-an assumption which had long pictures alter the entire ambience, and the since outlived its basis in fact. The 1960s saw viewer is forced into close contact with them a reversal of this situation (to the point where where their subtle nuancing is manifest. This Americans even began to compete with the explains what Rothko meant when he said French in cultural chauvinism). The new he "painted large to be intimate." In muse- attitude toward the public implicit in the ums, whose neutral environment involves a abstract painting ofthe Noland-Stella generacompromise of sorts, some of this intimacy is tion became explicit in the work of the pop lost. But in public buildings, the immense artists who followed hard upon them. Here spaces and random audience render the pri- the flat surfaces and impersonal techniques vate communion that such painters as Pollock were put in the service of an imagery that and Rothko wanted absolutely impossible.

Text continued on page 26 American painting. Apart from an early mural, commissioned for her apartment by his patron, Peggy Guggenheim, Pollock's truly wall-size pictures can be counted on the fingers of one hand. Their seeming ubiquitousness is explained by the fact that they were much exhibited and are extremely well placed. (All are now in important museums.)

M

"Blue Poles" (Number 11, 1952), Enamel and aluminum paint with glass on canvas.

6' 1r x 16', Collection, National Gallery of Austra11~After lengthy working and reworking of this picture, Jackson Pollock resolved the problem of its equilibrium with a series of long picketlike accents (the "blue poles" of the title), a motif he had been experimenting with since the 1930s.

Pollock says: 'I have no fears of making changes, destroying images, etc., because the painting has a life of its own.'

specifically celebrated the American scene.

As time has made Pollock's pictures more familiar, it has somewhat tarnished, though not discredited, another aspect of his mythwhat one critic called his "absolute newness."

According to this "meteor" theory, Pollock came to his role in modern painting from out of the blue-certainly from outside the modernist tradition-"demolishing," as Art News put it, "a 2,000-year-old corpus of world style." Pollock was seen as singlehandedly turning the history of art around; modern painting from Manet through surrealism was retroactively annexed to the art of the past. Described as "in revolt against everything ... in the tradition of the Western world," Pollock's enterprise was interpreted as "a departure from tabula rasa."

That many of Pollock's admirers fell victim to such antihistorical hyperbole is in part to be explained as a reaction to exaggerated attacks on his work, which were by no means limited to the popular press.

(An influential English historian of cubism, for example, not untypically dismissed Pollock's classic style as a "meaningless tangle of cordage and smears ... merely silly.")

But no more than Cezanne was without roots in impressionism, or cubism without roots in Cezanne, is Pollock unrelated to the anterior tradition of modern painting. Indeed, as Pollock himself said of the advanced painting of his day, "it didn't drop out of the blue; it's part of a long tradition." By dissociating Pollock from the past, admirers unable to see beyond the surface novelty of his painting inadvertently reinforced the view commonly voiced by his detractors in the '50s, that what Pollock created-however interesting-was "not painting." But while many significant avant-garde styles have seemed, at the moment of their appearance, to have been born whole, they are sooner or later revealed as having a coherent role in the unfolding of the modernist tradition. Indeed, one aspect of Pollock's greatness lay precisely in his not being a meteoric outsider, but in his ability to build simultaneously on such diverse and seemingly irreconcilable sources as impressionism, cubism and surrealism-even in his most radical work. As in the case of Cezanne, Matisse and other great modern innovators, an argument can be made for Pollock as a conservative painter in the best sense of that adjective. Certainly his painting preserved, in a new and vital form, aspects of earlier modernist styles which in themselves had ceased to be viable.

The reader may be surprised to hear impressionism, cubism and surrealism mentioned as sources of Pollock's poured pictures.

Because these antecedents were so perfectly

fused, so totally assimilated in his pictorial language by the time of his maturity, they are not easily distinguished in the pictures.

Some sophistication in modern painting and much careful looking is required to discern their influence. (This is not the case with Pollock's earlier semifigurative, "totemic" painting of 1942-46, where the debts to Picasso in particular, and to a lesser extent the Mexicans, Mira, Masson and others are easily identified.)

I

mpressionismwas the point of departure in modernist painting for what, in Pollock's time, came to be known as "allover" composition; it gave him a precedent for atomizing the surface of his pictures into a multiplicity of approximately even-textured accents that emanate a flickering, scintillating light.

The infrastructure however, if not the surface configuration, of Pollock's compositions was more immediately indebted to late analytic cubism and its extrapolations-Mondrian's "plus and minus" pictures, for example, which Pollock himself signaled as germinal for the allover conception. That Pollock's drawing was largely curvilinear makes this kinship difficult to perceive. It is easier to understand in the allover compositions of some of his contemporaries, such as Bradley Walker Tomlin, with their manifest dependence on the cubist grid. But cubism was more than a matter of straight lines, and Pollock's forward-coming, shallow and yet indeterminate space, the characteristic articulation of his webs and the latter's way of relating to the frame all derive from that seminal movement.

The influence of surrealism had been considerable on Pollock's early work. What remained of it in his poured style was essentially the methodology known as "automatism"-an exceedingly rapid, improvisational kind of drawing, which was felt to be particularly in touch with unconscious impulses and instincts. The surrealists often began their pictures by letting the pencil or brush wander mediumistically. From these marks they gradually invoked some form of recognizable image, and proceeded consciously to endow the picture with an artistic order. Indeed, in his early paintings, such as "Guardians of the Secret," Pollock arrived at an iconography of totemistic and symbolic figures in a not unrelated manner. But in his poured pictures, his rapid improvisation went far beyond anything surrealist automatism: had proposed, all the while remaining entirely abstract. In spite of their total nonfiguration, however, these poured Pollocks were ~mbued with a poetic and visionary cast that markedly distinguished them from the more "rational" abstraction of the European pioneers. It is as if the symbolic figures of his early work had gone underground, beneath the new ab-

'The idea of an isolated American painting seems absurd to me, just as the idea of creating a purely American mathematics would seem absurd.'-Pollock stract fabric, from whence they continued to inform the paintings' spirit.

Pollock's pouring method appeared to the public-and many critics as well-to produce an image that was essentially accidental, hence inherently inartistic. But Pollock had extraordinary control over his new battery of techniques: pouring, dripping, spattering, imprinting the canvas with his hand or with a paint-drenched stick or slat, and even squirting from basting syringes. He himself said, "I can control the flow of paint. There is no accident." Nevertheless, even a cursory glance at a poured Pollock shows that on a purely operational level this was not entirely true.

There are numerous small spots and puddlings which were manifestly not fully determined as they happened. But these were accidental only then; by the final state of the work they had been transmuted into esthetic decisions. Let us see how this happened.

Pollock adopted the pouring technique so that he could spontaneously draw extended, unbroken lines in paint) something that cannot be done with a brush. While pouring his design entirely in accordance with his will, he had to confront the fact that his technique entailed a margin of accident-unexpected marks or puddlings. Three possibilities were then open to him. If the accident were un-

fortunate, it could simply be covered over (too many such corrections produced "a mess," as Pollock called canvases with which he had "lost contact"). Yet the accident just might contain the germ of a possibility that had not previously occurred to him, in which case he could build on it improvisationally. ("I have no fears of making changes, destroying the image, etc., because the painting has a life of its own.") The structure of the picture would then change, as the accident was organically assimilated into the pictorial fabric. Finally, Pollock might just let the accidental mark stand, because he felt it was good for the picture-which is as much an esthetic decision as painting it out. Thus, to whatever extent the markings on a Pollock are not results of the initial impulses of his will-and most of them are-they finally represent not accidents but responses to them.

One might fairly ask, nevertheless, whether the quality of such works can equal that of the Old Masters, whose pictures were laid out in advance and free of such "process" accident. Yet there is no reason, esthetic or philosophical, why Pollock's incorporation of controlled accident should necessarily disadvantage his art vis-a-vis older styles. Indeed, great works from many periods can even absorb a modicum of truly random accident -the ravages of time, for example-without losing their greatness. The notion that a single line or spot on some great masterpiece cannot be changed without spoiling it is an art-historical piety.

In fact, Pollock's confrontation, absorption and, finally, transcendence of accident is precisely the guarantor of his special relevance, given the immense role played by unpredictable events-unexpected convergences and collisions-in the denouements of modern lives. A successful modern life, like a successful Pollock painting, is made coherent by decisions which maximize the favorable possibilities and minimize the unfavorable effects of myriad chance events. The carefully planned and predictably executed works of the Renaissance masters reflected the more stratified, more formally ordered character of 15th-century life. Pollock's improvised order, which absorbs the maximum of randomness and accident consistent with meaningful structure, is as true a "picture" of our life-especially as lived in a great metropolis-as Florentine Renaissance pictures were of life then. In both cases, however, the paintings reflect an ideal order rather than the actual conditions that prevailed, for life itself cannot have the completeness, equilibrium and finality of art.

If we go beyond the intrinsic quality of Pollock's pictures to the question of his influence on later art we find another myth that needs exploding. Contrary to an impression

widely held even during his lifetime, Pollock's poured paintings had little direct effect on his contemporaries-except, broadly speaking, to encourage radical solutions. As de Kooning generously said, "Pollock broke the ice." But it was de Kooning's influence which was dominant when Pollock was alive.

Pollock's influence was at its height in the decade following his death, and was felt primarily by painters such as Morris Louis, Kenneth Noland, Frank Stella, Jules Olitski and Larry POOI1S,whose work had little outward resemblance to Pollock's. These artists searched below the surface appearance of the poured pictures and abstracted from them certain basic ideas, such as alloverness, synoptic or "holistic" unity, symmetry and frontality, while bypassing Pollock's technique or "look."

E

ven, however, if we add the influence of Pollock's work to its great quality and daring, and combine these with the colorfulness of the man himself, we fall short of a sufficient explanation for the immense proportions his myth has taken on. And at this point, it would be idle to overlook the role of the wellpublicized, record prices his paintings have consistently obtained since his death in 1956 at age 44. Take the recent purchase of "Blue Poles" for the staggering price of $2 million by the National Gallery of Australia. It may well be that no picture in the history of art has acquired monetary value so quickly. That "Blue Poles" was one of Pollock's few wallsize pictures and, moreover, the last remaining in private hands, does not entirely explain an event that must finally also be attributed to the operation of the myth. Indeed, its fame and great importance notwithstanding, "Blue Poles" is not, in the estimation of some critics, ,myself included, one of Pollock's very finest works. It was among a limited group of late poured pictures which Pollock had some difficulty bringing off, and which were made during a period when he was once again suffering from great depression and alcoholism. Despite its brilliant and tragic drama, "Blue Poles" bears witness to pictorial problems and frustrations that called forth a very particular-if entirely personal-solution, the so-called "poles" themselves. These were not part of Pollock's original conception, but were superimposed at a later stage of the picture on a web of poured drawing that evidently did not "work" autonomously, did not possess in and of itself that almost magical equilibrium and coherence which Pollock could formerly conjure up.

The problem the Pollock myth presents is not that his best work has been over-estimated but that his whole oeuvre tends to be accepted uncritically. Pollock was a great and noble painter, the author of a number of unique

masterpieces. Like Mondrian, but in the opposite direction, he showed how far one could go and still make a painting-in the most rich, complete, profound and traditional sense. But he was not a Picasso or Matisse.

Pollock's career was too short, and the number of his great pictures too few, for such stature. Moreover, to overlook his many problematic and failed pictures is to miss the riskiness of his confrontation of life and art, and thus the heroism of his effort. Even toward the end, when he was having extraordinary difficulties realizing his pictures, he never fell back on formulas-never painted "Pollocks," so to say-but threw the dice, in the Mallarmean sense, in every work. He could have fooled most of his admirers, perhaps even himself, by grinding out pat pictures that had the "look" of successful Pollocks. Indeed, such forgeries of oneself account for a substantial amount of modern art.

But it was the sign of Pollock's authenticity that he never succumbed to this-and therefore left but a handful of uncertain pictures from his last three years.

The popular inflation of the myth, however, turns on more than just the news value of high prices. Some of it, I think, has also to do with the man-and therefore has spiritual implications. Admittedly, most of the people who were excited to hear about the sale of "Blue Pole"s" had never actually seen it-or perhaps any other Pollock, for that matter. And, in the first instance, many probably thrilled to the news the way they do when they read that some penny stock has become worth a fortune. But there are other things operating here. I cannot help thinking that a number of these people have had at least faint intimations of sO~l1ething more important-namely, that man has once more cheated mortality. The great emphasis our society places on art-even measured by the crass scale of what it pays for it-would seem to support Andre Malraux's contention that it has replaced religion as our last line of defense against death. The news about "Blue Poles" seemed to confirm that the world had elected one more man into its pantheon of geniuses, conferring on him in all likelihood an immortality next to which that of, say, the President of the United States, amounts to little. After all, how many people who know of Rembrandt-or even Renoir and Toulouse-Lautrec-know the names of the leading princes, politicians, and generals of their times? It seems to me not improbable that many generations hence, millions around the world will know the name of Jackson Pollock who.will have never heard of Richard Nixon or Leonid Brezhnev.

0 William Rubin is Director of Painting and Sculpture, Museum of Modern Art.

About the Author:

The American public will stand for bad mail service, uncollected garbage, and speed limits on driving. But let the telephone service flag for a moment, or break down temporarily, and there is a passionate uproar. Americans want their telephones to work swiftly, efficiently-perfectly.

THE FURIOUSLY PROLIFERATING AMERICAN TELEPHONE It's hard to escape the telephone in America. It is everywhere-in nine out of 10 homes and apartments, in virtually every office, in public pay booths, even in automobiles, trains and boats. In all, in the United States, there are some 127 million individual telephones in homes and offices,two out of every five on earth.

The American telephone user-just about everybody old enough to talk -expects his telephone to work swiftly and efficiently every time he picks it up. And to no one's great surprise, it does.

A man in a small town in Maine can press a few buttons on his telephone and within seconds reach a friend in California, 5,280 kilometers away. With almost equal ease he can call another friend in New Delhi. A vast global telecommunications system has been developed to the point where Americans can now reach 98 per cent of the 304 million telephones in the entire world. At the same time, costs of long-distance calling have gone steadily down; they are less than half of what they were a generation ago.

All of this has taken place in less than a century fulfilling a dream that surely began in prehistoric times. For the driving urge to communicate over distance with one's fellow man is a primeval instinct. Early people used horns, drums, smoke signals, beacon fires. Some 2,500 years ago, Cyrus the Great even constructed a system of relay towers across the Persian Empire and posted on each tower a man with a strong voice and a megaphone. But despite such efforts the human voice was never to carry very faruntil the wondrous invention of the telephone.

Ultimately, it was the harnessing of electricity, coupled with inventive imagination, that made it possible for men thousands of miles apart to converse. The major breakthrough came with the telegraph, developed in 1835 by Samuel F.B. Morse, a Massachusetts artist and inventor. Telegraphic messages, tapped out in Morse code, provided the first instantaneous long-distance communications.

In Europe inventors and scientists took note and in turn predicted an even greater revolutionary development-the possibility of transmitting speech itself. But their experiments failed to convert the prediction to reality, and it remained for an obscure teacher of the deaf, Alexander Graham Bell, to create the world's

first telephone. Professor Bell, a Scotsman who came to America by way of Canada, was also inspired by Morse's earlier work. As Bell put it: "If I could make a current of electricity vary in intensity precisely as the air varies in intensity during the production of sound, I should be able to transmit speech telegraphically." In 1876 Bell did just that. Utilizing crude equipment that caused a diaphragm to vibrate like the human voice, Bell managed to convey his own voice over a 12-meter iron wire into the next room where his assistant received the world's first telephone message: "Mr. Watson, come here; I want you!"

Curiously enough, this remarkable invention which, in effect, was to shrink the earth, did not at once capture the public imagination. Undismayed, Bell in 1878 made a startling prediction: "It is conceivable that cables of telephone wires could be laid underground, or suspended overhead, communicating by branch wires with private dwellings, country homes, shops, manufactories, etc., uniting them through the main cable with a central office where wires could be connected as desired, establishing direct communication between any two places in the city. Such a plan as this, though impracticable at the present moment, will, I firmly believe, be the outcome of the introduction of the telephone to the public. Not only so, but, I believe, in the future, wire will unite the head offices of the telephone company in different cities, and a man in one part of the country may communicate by word of mouth with another in a distant place. I am aware that such ideas may appear to you utopian .... " , Utopian indeed! Even Bell could not have foreseen that a businessman in New York can today pick up a phone and speak instantly with another businessman in Tokyo, their conversation being relayed by an undersea cable or by a man-made satellite positioned high over the Pacific Ocean. Nor is it likely that Bell could have visualized the sheer magnitude of the telecommunications system of his home country, where the cables he envisioned now crisscross the earth like an immense spider web.

The United States has one telephone for every 1.7 persons.

The American telephone system is one of the largest enterprises in the world-a 1,200,000-kilometer network of interstate circuits

'To get to know each other on a worldwide scale is the... most urgent need today,' observed Arnold Toynbee. The telephone is doing just that: it is creating a newer, more intimate world community. plus radiowave facilities, manned by more than one million employees deployed behind $60,000 million worth of complex equipment. On an average day, this system carries 540 million individual messages, of which 25 million are long-distance calls. And the system is growing fast-the experts predict 200 million American telephones by the mid-1980s.

The vast bulk of this communications network falls under the Bell System, a private-sector enterprise named; of course, in honor of the inventor. The parent company of the Bell System is the American Telephone and Telegraph Company (AT&T) which serves 82 per cent of America's telephones and is interlinked with 1,800 smaller companies which service more remote areas.

The United States is one of the very few countries in which the telephone system is privately owned.

AT&T is owned by some three million stockholders. Its operations are divided among 24 regional companies, and it also controls the Western Electric Company, which manufactures and supplies telephone equipment, and the famed Bell Laboratories, where scientists develop advanced equipment for tomorrow.

Today's telephone, with its 500 parts, is a far cry from the original version. That was a simple device using permanent magnets to generate the talking current. Telephones were hooked up in pairs, connected by a single wire, with no switchboard in between.

The caller summoned the person at the other end of the line by pushing down a knob on his phone which caused a thumping noise at the other end. Obviously this was a system of limited utility; so, many lines were tied together and all were connected through a central switchboard. The caller asked an operator for the desired number. The operator completed the connection.

Americans past middle age can still remember this procedureand the many wrong numbers and general confusion that resulted.

Today 99 per cent of all American telephones operate through automated switching devices without an operator's help.

Early phone calls could be transmitted only a few miles before their signal faded. It was the invention of a boosting device, the vacuum tube, by Lee De Forest in 1906 that finally made longdistance communication possible. A series of tubes intensified the voice signal, extending the range as far as wire could be strung.

In 1915, the first transcof~tinental line was opened between New York and San Francisco.

By then the telephone had become fashionable and the volume of traffic threatened to swamp the system. The limiting factors were the lines themselves-the early lines carried 50 conversations at a time. But gradually, high-capacity cables were developed; today one of these can carry 90,000 conversations simultaneously. As a result, long-distance calls go through instantly.

This is but one more in a long line of scientific achievements by the Bell Laboratories that have revolutionized communications throughout the entire world. In the process, Bell scientists have won two Nobel prizes: one for electron/diffraction and another for the development of the miraculous transistor. Transistors have made possible the miniaturization of innumerable instruments, from television sets to space satellites. They constitute an essential part of modern computers. And they have completely transformed the telephone system itself. The new transistorized system makes it possible, among other things, for the telephone user to call up to four persons in turn and hook them all into a single conversation. The equipment will automatically transfer calls from one number (if there is no answer) to an-

other number. And it has provided a process of moving data to and from computers by telephone. Transistors have also replaced the old vacuum-tube boosters, making possible amplification systems of almost unlimited strength. It was transistorized equipment that enabled men to converse with astronauts on the moon.

Along with these fundamental innovations has come rapid modernization of the telephone instrument itself. Telephones now appear in a bewildering variety of styles, colors and specialized features. The conventional circular-dial telephone is still much in use, but it is giving way to the "Touch-Tone" system of dialing.

Ten, or 12, buttons replace the circular dial, so the user can tap out a number as fast as his fingers can fly-in one-third the time it takes to dial. Each number produces its own distinctive tone, and these tones activate the switching system.

Telephones are also available in eight colors, including white, pink, and turquoise. They come in numerous shapes and sizes, some delicately molded to appeal to the artistic eye. Housewives can elect to have panel phones set flush into the wall to save space.

Some subscribers are using tape-recorder attachments to handle phone calls that come in when they are not at home or too busy to answer [see pages 34-35]. For example, an incoming call is answered by a tape-recorded message, saying (in Mr. Smith's own voice), "Mr. Smith is attending a basketball game tonight but he will return your call later. Please state your phone number and message at the sound of the tone." The caller states his message and when Mr. Smith comes back he plays the recording which gives him all the messages that came in while he was out.

The rates charged for these various services vary from place to place. In most suburban areas around Washington, D.C., for example, there is a standard charge of $11 (Rs. 85) for the initial installation of service. Monthly charges for the main phone vary from $6.45 to $11.80 (Rs. 50 to Rs. 90), according to the size of the local calling area. For each additional phone the monthly fee is $1.25 (Rs. 10). In the city of Washington itself, charges are only $6 (Rs. 46) a month for the main phone. These rates permit an unlimited number of calls. But if the user prefers, he can limit himself to 60 calls and cut his monthly rate down to $4.70 (Rs. 36).

Long-distance calls are extra, of course, but also relatively inexpensive. The day is divided into three periods. Regular workday hours (8 a.m. to 5 p.m.) are the most expensive times to call, since they comprise the period of peak demand. Rates are less costly during the 5 p.m. to 11 p.m. segment of the day, and cheapest of all from 11 p.m. to 8 a.m. A self-dialed call from Washington, D.C., to San Francisco, California, a distance of 4,800 kilometers, costs $1.45 (Rs. 11) for the first three minutes during workday hours. During evening hours this same call costs 85 cents (Rs. 7).

Lower rates also prevail on week-ends.

These rates are controlled by government agencies and are constantly under scrutiny. Under the law, the telephone system in America is regarded as a public utility, which means its rates are determined by the Federal Communications Commission and the various state utility boards. Like other privately owned utilities, notably gas and electric companies, telephone companies are permitted to charge rates that will provide them with just enough revenue to finance future expansion and provide a reasonable return to shareholders. The telephone companies are now earning a profit margin of about eight per cent.

An especially comprehensive service offered government and industry today is the Touch-Tone system for handling data com-

munications. The push-button panel of the telephone is used as a numerical typewriter to provide complex data for computers, to update computer information and to retrieve stored information. For instance, by toned signals tapped out on a telephone, a manufacturer can transmit detailed shipping information to its company warehouses all over the country. Transformed into a simple numerical code, the information appears on a receiving typewriter. Similarly, retail stores can telephone a distributor's distant computer center and tap out instantaneous orders for shipments, again through the use of coded numbers. The demand for the interconnection of computers by telephone lines is booming and computers may soon be busier telephone users than people.

Another futuristic device-the "Picturephone" system-is already in operation in five cities and may soon be available all over the country. This system, combining the wonders of telephone and television, permits two parties to see as well as hear each other.

The service utilizes existing telephone facilities, augmented by picture-display units. The caller presses a special button on a regular "Touch-Tone" telephone, and this initiates a video call.

The desired number is then dialed, producing a distinctive tone ring at the other end. H'av¡tng been alerted, the person called presses his own video button, the Picturephone connection is completed, and each person sees the other on his screen.

Using only conventional equipment, many business concerns have tied themselves into a new Wide Area Telecommunications System, known as W A TS. Businesses can lease, by the day or month, a special WA TS line which blankets a particular area-it may be one state or a combination of states. For a flat fee the leaseholder can make or receive an unlimited number of calls within the leased area. This system is often used to encourage potential customers to telephone, without cost, a distant central office for information. For example, a skier in Atlanta, Georgia, can telephone free to the WATS number of a winter sports mecca, say, Stowe, Vermont, and he will receive a tape-recorded message on up-to-the-minute skiing and weather conditions.

The fact is, the telephone is just about all over the place in contemporary American life. Swift communications are essential in keeping commercial activities moving, and in carrying out the work of government agencies. For the average citizen, the telephone is a means of fulfilling a thousand urgent needs-such as calling doctors, fire-fighting and rescue services, repairmen or making travel reservations. And of course the telephone is the most convenient way to talk with friends or obtain information.

Dispensing advice by telephone, incidentally, is one of the big developments of recent years. Newspaper and TV advertisements advise concerned citizens to call a particular number to be put in touch with persons offering advice on all sorts of delicate matters, such as drug addiction, abortion and tendencies toward suicide.

When Americans are not busy telephoning each other, they are placing more and more calls to other countries. The Bell System now handles over 40 million overseas calls each year, an average of one to every three telephones in the country.

For a long time-since 1927-it has been possible to place calls to distant spots around the world by means of radiotelephone equipment, but these signals were often weak, often faded out altogether and could not begin to meet the demand. Underseas telephone cables seemed to be the answer, but the technical problems of laying the unwieldy cables proved awesome. Frequently they twisted and broke or were sheared by fishing trawlers near the shore. It was not until 1956 that the first transatlantic cable was successfully laid between Newfoundland and Scotland in a joint British-American undertaking.

Then, in 1963, the Bell System launched the first ship designed exclusively for laying cable. The 156-meter cable ship Long Lines,

as she is called, has for a decade now been busily laying a new type of cable that is easier to handle than the old cable, even though it carries more circuits (845, compared to the old cable's 51). Soon the Long Lines will be laying new transistorized cable which can carry 4,000 conversations simultaneously. That will make a total of six cables now stretching across the floor of the Atlantic and another network of cable stretching out beneath the Pacific.

But despite all this, it has been clear for some time that underseas cables could never keep up with the demand for communications abroad. International telephone calls are increasing by 20 per cent a year. To meet this need, the United States in 1962 created the Communications Satellite Corporation (COMSAT), a special company that is pursuing a totally revolutionary concept in bringing the world closer together. Since 1965 COMSAT has been hurling commercial communications satellites into orbit at the 35,680-kilometer altitude in which their motion is synchronized with the rotation of the earth. The first such satellite, Early Bird, was placed in position over the Atlantic Ocean, where it began at once to relay telephone and television signals between the United States and Europe. Early Bird weighed only 38 kilograms and could handle 240 telephone messages at one time but had to relinquish telephone service when television programs were being relayed. Three series of advanced satellites have been developed since, and now they swing in celestial orbit high above the Atlantic, Pacific and Indian Oceans, providing communications servic~s to anyone anywhere who pays the fee for their use. This complex of satellites now makes it possible to relay signals to nearly every place on earth. [The late,St type of satellite, launched last April from Cape Kennedy, Flbria3., by the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration, is a business venture by a private corporation-Western Union. Named Westar, the drumshaped J .8-meter diameter, 572-kilogram satellite will carry 7,200 telephone conversations or 12 color television channels. Western Union launched an identical satellite, Westar II, in June.]

The entire international communications system is co-ordinated by the International Telecommunications Union (the !TU), first set up in 1932 and now a vital agency of the United Nations.

This organization has been working steadily to establish uniform operating procedures and rates. An important step toward minimizing language problems has been taken through the adoption of a common numerical code for direct dialing from one nation to another. In due time every country will have its own Country Code as well as area codes similar to those in the United States.

This system-International Direct Distance Dialing-already operates between the United States and countries in Europe, the Pacific, the Middle East and Africa. IDDD is available to some customers in nearly every major city in the United States [see "Americans Are Talking About," June 1974 SPAN).

When the service becomes available to everyone, international callers will simply dial a prefix, a country code, an area code and the local number ..

We have come a very long way indeed in this business of communications. Something even beyond Professor Bell's prediction of a communications utopia has already been realized. The noted British historian Arnold Toynbee has said: "To get to know each other on a worldwide scale is the human race's most urgent need today." With remarkable speed, the telephone is helping man -create a newer, more intimate world community.

0 About the Author: Edward L. Robinson, a journalist with many years' experience, was formerly in India as a USIS In/ormation Officer.

Overleaf: In this illustration, John Heinly traces the various stages in the development 0/ the telephone since its invention 100 years ago.

1938'

Joe Big Businessman is snugly happy with his new office telephone, boasting one "hold" button and five others for hooking in with other lines.

Without the faithful telephone, American business would be paralyzed.

The ultimate telephone for the busy-or lazyexecutive. Independent microphone and speaker units free the user's hands to take notes or, in this case, lean back in idle comfort.

1959 Still catering to the tastes of the ladies, the phone companies offered this streamlined "Princess" model-in many colors and equipped with a dial that lights up.

1892 The telephone was getting fancy. Ladies rejoiced in being able to call their neighbors and exchange gossip: "Mabel, you won't believe what I just heard from Betty McGruder! ... "

THE HISTORY OF THE TELEPHONE Here's an early wall-model phone with the first built-in generator. Its increased power, to the ladies' delight, enlarged the gossiping circle.

1919

The "picturephone set:' Not exactly a standard household appliance, but available for use between major cities. What next??

That sturdy and faithful servant of man, the redoubtable telephone, has been around for almost a century now. In the early days it exasperated as well as fascinated its users. More often than not, one got the wrong number-and when the lines were properly connected, voices came through like faint sounds from the bottom of a well. But no more. Stubborn men of genius have so refined this remarkable instrument that one can now call any place on earth-and sounds carry with dulcet fidelity.

NO FATE WORSETHAN A HANG-UP

~(

Ever had a powwow with a telephone answering machine? Well, in America you can. In this gay, lighthearted account, the author captures the pleasure, pain-and peril-of owning such an instrument.

Mignon Fedderman of New York City spent a recent morning on the phone. She called the air-conditioning service and paint store and left her name and number. She called to confirm plane reservations and was told that a clerk would be with her presently; after five minutes and no clerk, she decided to try again later. Both her analyst and dentist were out, so she left messages asking for appointments. Next she dialed a movie house and, in addition to performance times, she was treated to quotes from two good reviews and a plot summary. Her friend Hilda was out, so she left word to call her tomorrow.

When it was time to go downtown, she called the weather number and heard that sunny skies were predicted.

Before leaving the apartment, Mignon pushed the "auto answer" button on her telephone answering set. Her sexy, breathless recorded voice (evoking the image of Mignon running to meet her lover) said she was out, but (breath, breath) she'd be back soon.

When the doorman gave her a cheery "Good afternoon," Mignon realized that his was the first human voice she had heard all day. She had spent the entire morning talking to machines.

Like Mignon, Americans are all talking more to telephone answering machines. The trend has become so strong in the past three years that there are currently an estimated six million users throughout the United States.

Small businesses are beginning to rely heavily on their Record-O-Fones, Dictaphones, Anserphones, Code-A-Phones, Record-A-Calls, Sanyos or Phone Mates. Doctors, lawyers, analysts, free-lance writers, photographers and musicians have also joined the bandwagon.

Why the stampede toward the mechanized voice? Economics, of course. Most machine owners are refugees from live answering services which charge from $30 to $40 monthly for 24-hour service, plus a telephone-company mileage fee based on the distance between customer and service. With those prices, even a $700 machine pays itself off within two years.

Automatic-answering converts point out that, unlike answering services, the answering set will consistently pick up the phone on the first or second ring, will not garble or lose messages, and is never rude or overly personal. Even nonbusiness types, especially single people, feel that it's important not to miss a call. "When my machine is being repaired and there are no messages to look forward to," reports photographer Barbara Pfeffer, "I come home with such an empty feeling."

The machine, which sells from $139 to $900, is a tape recorder equipped with two reels. The first-a short one for the owner's messages-is activated by the ring of the phone. The second and longer reel, for incoming messages, is activated when the first tape comes to an end (usually indicated by a beep).

The hanging up of the caller's phone signals the machine to ready itself to start the cycle again. Later, on returning home, the owner presses a button to activate the incoming reel and obtain a playback of the day's messages.

Comments futurist-writer Alvin Toffier, "All of a sudden a new technology arrives on the scene. Then there's the big push to get it out fast. That means there is very little time for the society to make the subtle kind of adaptation necessary to it before it has committed itself to the use of the technology.

Maybe the consequences are trivial. But who knows and who asks? Nobody."

Certainly not the owners. They just try to cope. Their problem is how to fill the 30 to 50 seconds that most machines allot for the owner's message. The choice is either to speak slowly (and ponderously) or to be inventive enough to keep the caller from hanging up out of impatience or boredom.

Hang-ups are the anathema of the answer-¡ ing-machine user. "I rushed home one day," relates singer Basia Hammerstein, "only to find 300 seconds of silence." Another owner says, "I'd never hang up on someone else's machine, and I don't think any other owner would hang up on mine."

"Don't lose heart. Your beep will come," goes one recording, while another plays Barbara Streisand singing "As Time Goes By." Writer Sam Julty tries to keep things fresh by changing his outgoing message once a month.

For March, the caller was treated to a swell of Muzak, then Julty's solicitous voice: "That recorded music tells you I'm not in. My voice is recorded too. Why don't you leave me your name and phone number, the time called, and I'll call you back and [a pregnant pause] we'll talk. No, no, no, no, no ... [imploringly] don't hang up. Don't, don't, don't, don't hang up. No, no. [Relaxed and warm.] Enjoy the music. Start at the beep. Leave me the information. Enjoy it. Enjoy it." The music crescendos to the beep.

Ivan Morris, a Columbia University professor of Japanese history, changes his outgoing message weekly. "Hello. Ivan Morris here," came his crisp British voice in one recent effort. "I'm unable to answer the phone just now, so this electronic device is answering for me. Please don't panic as most people do.

It's perfectly safe."

Steven Golden, director of special projects at Lincoln Center, and his wife, June, a teacher, used to have different guest announcers each week. "In the beginning," remembers June, "Steven did the recording as if he were talking from the coffin. People would call up and complain about Steven's message and forget why they called, so we started having friends do our recordings. One day my brother called to tell me about the death of a very close member of the family-and he got our rock-singer guest announcer of the week and his zingy guitar. We decided to go back to Steven's straight boring voice."

The ultimate status symbol is to have a celebrity guest announcer. Television writer Jane Wagner has her friend comedienne Lili Tomlin do her recordings. Callers are greeted by the familiar voice saying, "Hello. This is Ernestine." (People who don't have celebrity friends sometimes imitate them.)

Cartoonist-writer Jules Feiffer has been told by friends that he must change his outgoing message every week or they won't call him anymore. To the machine owner, no calls are a fate worse than a hang-up, and Feiffer has tried to oblige.

"This is not quite Jules Feiffer," begins one message. "This is, in fact, a machine which sounds incredibly like him except that it doesn't tall(!back. If you find that a disadvanage and feel like having me talk back, wait or the thunderclap and you will then have o seconds to record your name and message.

'11get back to you within a reasonable time ifit is at all humanly possible. In the event of no thunderclap, commence at the beep."

Playwright Herb Gardner once called and acknowledged Feiffer's effort by leaving an cademyAward-winning speech thanking the roducer, the writer and all other contributors o the production. "One day my agent called nd got my machine," recalls Feiffer. "I called im back and got his machine. When his ma-

chine was finished talking, I played my machine into his mac)'line."

"Unfortunately," comments Feiffer, "I've so intimidated most of my friends by being clever that they hang up because they don't have a funny response. So now I say, 'If you find all this too horrifying, hang up, think of a good message and call back again.' " Many owners use music of their own making. Professional harpist Henry Fanelli plays a harp cadenza from Swan Lake as a background for his spoken message (he has to make two separate tapes since he can't play and talk at the same time). He tells people to leave their message at the end of the cadenza.

"The average person," observes the harpist, "will say, 'Loved the cadenza. Call me.'

Sometimes I'll get, 'What's a cadenza?' One person said, 'I thought a cadenza was a piece of furniture.' Another friend a,lwaysplays his guitar back instead of saying anything."

Composer David Amram fills his 50 seconds of outgoing tape with a straight message and ends with rhythmic sounds made by beating on the inside of his cheek, hitting himself on the head, clicking his tongue and playing a little flute. Each day he makes some small change in the rhythms and says a musicologist could trace his musical evolution by listening to his machine.

A happy thought for the day is often tacked on to fill space. "Human beings are the only animals to make love frivolously, so don't forget to make love frivolously today," advised free-lance writer Liz Smith.

Since the machine advertises that an apartment is empty, owners ofte~ use part of the message to warn off potential burglars. One New York University professor, while on a week's vacation, invented a large police-trained Alsatian dog which he said was guarding the premises in his absence.

The businessman is not concerned with expressing himself. All he wants is a name and phone number. William Tulin, a Manhattan television repairman, relies exclusively on his machine for appointments. "Often," he says, "people don't realize they have a time limit and I'll get a message like the following: 'Last night while watching the Johnny Carson Show my sister came in and changed the channel to the Late Show.

I didn't like the show and switched back to the Carson show and the set started to act funny.' ...

By then they're cut off

and I don't have a number."

Despite the slim chances of pitfalls of the telephone answering machines, their owners are committed. They will even put up with occasional inconveniences and expense: Photographer Barbara Pfeffer's inexpensive machine has had continuous breakdowns, necessitating long trips to the one repairman who can fix it; and composer Charles Gross spent $50 in phone calls trying unsuccessfully to retrieve messages from New York, when he and his beeper were in California.

The alternative, the answering service, is not only considered expensive and inefficient but intrusive as well. Barbara Pfeffer remembers an operator saying, "Oh Barbara, he called today and he sounds much nicer than the others." Henry Fanelli recalls being told, "No messages today. I guess you're not very popular." "With a machine," he says, "nobody has to know your shame."

There are still those who like the personal touch, such as Alvin Toffier. "I refuse to have one of those machines. Nobody likes to be in a situation where they're communicating and not getting feedback. Another thing I don't like is that it's going to hurt the answeringservice business."

Some of the answering-service owners, who admit that in the last three years their business hasn't been growing like it used to, still feel they can coexist with the machine. "This thing hasn't really begun yet," persists Toffier.

"It's going to sweep through the society. My hunch is that in the long run, most services will go out of business, or they will remain for very special purposes."

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About the Author: Greta Walker, a free-lance writ-

er, won't get an answering machine because she'd be too depressed if she didn't get any messages.

G

The Actors

Studio

After four decades of teaching people how to act, Lee Strasberg of the world-famous Actors Studio finally succumbed to an offer to make his screen debut-he will play the role of mobster Hyman Roth in 'The Godfather, Part II.' Long known as inventor of The Method which stresses muscle control, 'emotional memory,' and other acting aids described in this article, Strasberg and his Actors Studio are among the most powerful influences in the history of American theater.

Speaking of his experience in his first acting part, Strasberg (above) says: "It's easier to do than to tell." He adds that he might even continue to act, 'that is, "if I get another offer I can't refuse." Among the great acting talents that Strasberg has trained are (opposite page, clockwise from top left): Marilyn Monroe, Paul Newman, Jane Fonda, Anne Bancroft, Marlon Brando.

For tension and excitement, few theaters in the world can rival two drab classrooms on opposite sides of the vast North American continent. Using only a bare stage or at most a few sticks of used furniture, with none of the glamorous lighting that makes theaters glow only a few blocks away, a select group of eager young actors work tirelessly to turn themselves into star-quality performers.

The piece they are working on may be a play of Chekhov or Tennessee Williams or a brand new work by a young playwright who has never had a professional production. The director may be one of New York's superstars, taking an interval between a major motion picture or a top-rated Broadway play to perfect his own craft. No matter. Everyone connected with the play gives it an emotional and physical commitment that seems incredible to outsiders, for everyone here works without salary or even public acclaim.

The two classrooms, one hard by the warehouses of New York's Hudson River, the other a few blocks from Hollywood's glamorous Sunset Boulevard, are the workshops of the Actors Studio. Since it was founded in 1947, this world-famous training ground for actors, writers and directors has produced a greater array of major talent in the American theater than any other single institution in the United States.

Each of the two workshops is filled almost daily with performers, writers and directors from all parts of America and foreign countries. Supervising all this activity is a scholarly looking man is his 70s whose white hair and spectacles make him look like the headmaster of a boys' school or the concertmaster of a symphony orchestra. The appearance is deceptive. When a workshop is in progress, Lee Strasberg often explodes into frenetic activity the moment actors finish their scenes.

By cajolery, by stinging criticism, by wheedling and often by the most patient analysis of every moment the actor is on stage, Strasberg seeks to destroy the performer's shyness, his inability to give his best or to enter fully into the role he portrays. Above all, he demands that the actor develop his artistic sensibility for truth, the same truth on stage that Constantin Stanislavsky sought tirelessly in his work with the Moscow Art Theater.

Strasberg has often explained how the first American visit of the Russian director's world-famed troupe revolutionized his en-

'Method exercises in which actors have simulated washing machines, milkshakes and stones have seemed bizarre, because the layman has not understood the idea of sense and emotional memory.' tire thinking about acting. Until he saw StaI!'islavsky's painstaking work with actors, he had thought of the theater as merely a place for entertainment.

Stanislavsky's serious attitude toward the actor's responsibilities, his insistence on high standards that went far beyond mere imitation and cliche, galvanized the young American's ideas aoout his craft.

In 1924, a year after the Moscow Art Theater came to New York, Strasberg learned that Richard Boleslavsky and Maria Ouspenskaya, both members of Stanislavsky's troupe, had opened a new school caIled the American Laboratory Theater. The young American actor promptly auditioned for the school and was accepted. Here, he encountered the Russian theatrical master's ideas head on, and since then he has become Stanislavsky's foremost disciple in America and, many say, in the entire world.

Strasberg carried his education even further, however, with visits to "many of the leading Soviet theaters during the '30s. By watching the work of such groups as the Moscow Art Theater and Meyerhold's ensemble, and through long discussions with Soviet theatrical personages, Strasberg developed the deeply rooted awareness of the Stanislavsky theatrical experience central to his own work over the past several decades.

For example, the Actors Studio leader urges actors to practice relaxation while on stage. The actor must learn to deal with physical tension, always a great danger to his performance, by learning to control each muscle. Indeed, says Strasberg, the actor must even learn to control each muscle separately. In the studio's workshop, relaxation exercises are done over and over again until the actor can ignore the tension coming from his own insecurity and from the presence of the audience.

Perhaps the most important single concept that Strasberg borrowed from Stanislavsky, however, is that of "affective memory."

Affective memory is not mere memory, Strasberg has explained: "It is memory that involves the actor personally, so that deeply rooted emotional experiences begin to respond. His instrument awakens and he becomes capable of the kind of living on the stage which is essentially re-living. The original emotional experience can be happy or frightening or fearsome. It can be concerned with jealousy or hate or love."

In the Actors Studio, Strasberg has developed this emotional memory, or emotional recall, as one of the most popular exercises of The Method, as his teaching process is known in the United States. In this exercise, the actor enriches his performance and acting talent-which Strasberg usually refers to as his "instrument"-by reconstructing a highly charged emotional experience from his past life. By doing this, Strasberg reasons, the actor is able to recreate in himself the feelings associated with it. The mechanics vary: the performer may either think back to the event in silence, attempt to put it together verbally, or evoke it in a parallel situation. Strasberg has cautioned those starting to use this technique to go back at least seven years. He feels that the further back the memory goes, the better it functions for the actor.

It is often difficult for the layman to understand how the various training exercises work. The assumption behind all actingtraining is that a value exists that the actor may grasp and project

to an audience. But this transfer can be very complex. It is not necessarily a direct transfer. The chief value may come from the training such exercises give the actor's imagination. And the value may come across best in combination with other exercises.

Strasberg, therefore, has advised actors first to master exercises in concentration before attempting work in the area of emotional memory. These exercises help the actor to sense-to be aware of -objects.

Emotion, according to Strasberg's thinking, is brought about only through concentration on the objects with which it is connected. Method exercises in which ,actors have simulated washing machines, milkshakes, trees and stones have often seemed bizarre, because the layman has not properly understood, or had explained to him, the idea of sense and emotional memory.

While acknowledging his debt to Stanislavsky, Strasberg has taken a somewhat different direction with the development of his Method. He first started by training the actors in the Group Theater (1931-1941), one of America's most famous theatrical ensembles. An idealistic company of actors and directors dedicated to perfecting their art and to producing theatrical literature and socially significant plays, they used Stanislavsky principles. Strasberg, as their teacher, employed the system effectively to both train actors and to achieve concrete results in the interpretation of various plays.

The actors using Stanislavsky's ideas could see that they were giving better performances. They could see that the system helped them to attain a greater truth on the stage. They found that the affective memory work did help them to stir up the desired mood and, in turn, to do the scene that called for this mood.

But as the Group actors progressed in their repertory work together, they delved even deeper into ways of improving their craft. Much use was made of improvisations that compelled an actor to face each of a play's situations spontaneously, freshly.

Strasberg worked tirelessly with the actors to explore any methods that would help them to produce true emotion on the stage. He looked constantly for things that worked to produce this rare ingredient in plays, as opposed to the shaIlow acting so common in which actors gave cliche, imitative performances. He refused to accept a performance which relied on "indication" to convey the intent of the play. (An actor "indicates" when he plays a role in a stereotyped manner without true emotion. Strasberg felt that such acting was a cheap substitute for the real thing, even though audiences often accepted it.)

As Strasberg continued to work with the Group Theater actors in New York and to try new things, Stanislavsky's system slowly changed into The Method. Strasberg's basically American experience in acting and his interest in Freud's ideas made The Method more eclectic than Stanislavsky's approach. It was more insistent on psychological principles, and more emphasis was laid on subjective truth.

The enthusiasm generated in the Group Theater in turn sparked the foundation of the Actors Studio. In 1947, Cheryl Crawford, a veteran play producer, Elia Kazan (who had already become a director of note), and Robert Lewis, another respected New York director, recaIled their experience with the Group Theater.

They felt that in the absence of a national art or repertory theater, professional actors needed a place where they could work together between jobs or during long runs. Such a workshop, they agreed, would permit performers to develop as actors and allow them to experiment with new forms in creative theater work.

Chartered as a nonprofit, educational institution, the Actors Studio began its life in a rented studio on the 14th floor of a building on Broadway. Lee Strasberg quickly joined. In 1955 the Studio moved into its permanent New York home, a converted IOO-year-old church building.

Soon after the New York workshop of the Actors Studio was set up, it became obvious that another workshop was needed on the West Coast. Actors who went out there to film motion pictures and television shows missed the New York classes. When television became almost completely centered in one city, Los Angeles, the demand for a second workshop became even greater~ In 1965 the West Coast group began functioning in Hollywood, California, in a small building not far from one of the movie studios; it soon relocated in the spacious former townhouse of the late film pioneer and cowboy actor, William S. Hart. The building, which is flanked by a large lawn and has an adjoining theater, allows actors to carryon several rehearsals simultaneously.

Both workshops are in use almost constantly and 'have long waiting lists of applicants. Actors are chosen through a regular system of auditions which are held throughout the theatrical season. The audition usually consists of a short scene with a partner. If the applicants are accepted, they are admitted as observers. After a number of auditions and scenes done in the workshop they may be admitted by Lee Strasberg as members of the Actors Studio, a high honor in the acting profession and one that lasts for life.

The most exciting times in the two workshops are the actors' sessions when Lee Strasberg himself presides. These are held during the morning in New York, because the actors often work in theaters at night. Tn Los Angeles, they are held in the evenings, to meet the needs of actors who work during the day in motion pictures and television. After the actors play their scenes, Strasberg (or one of the many prestigious directors who take his place when he is absent) questions them. He wants to know what acting problem they were trying to solve. The assembled actors in the audience then offer their comments with thoroughgoing frankness.

When the actors are finished, the presiding director makes his own comments. The performer under scrutiny may be warned that he is "indicating" too much rather than living within the role. He may be urged to relax more within the scene, to allow himself a greater opportunity to realize the author's intent. Or he may be questioned thoroughly to see if he or she has done the proper preparation for the role. What method did he use to relax thoroughly before going on? What physical tasks did he create for himself on stage to give his performance greater richness?

How did he use affective memory? If the play required him to get in touch with his anger, what experience from the past did he summon for this purpose?

Sometimes the remarks can be quite caustic. Tn one scene, an actor who did Chekhov's famous monologue "On the Harmfulness of Tobacco" was told bluntly that he had not made his wife as real to the audience as his daughters. Obviously the actor had not thought deeply enough about her, his critic said. The atmosphere at these actors' sessions is often very tense, and occasionText continued on page 40

LEE STRASBERG IN ACTION LEE: I don't understand what you were doing up there (in Waiting .for Godot, by Samuel Beckett). Explain.

ACTOR: It's very simple. I was waiting. My character is waiting for something, but he doesn't know for what or whom. He's just waiting. That's it!

LEE: That's not it! The man is tired, hungry, disgusted, frightened maybe. I didn't see anything like that. You could have been waiting for a streetcar. Where's the reality? The character isACTOR: Look, I don't have to do your interpretation of the play.

I have my own ideas about the role. I think he'sLEE: I'm not interested in hearing your ideas! Prove your ideas on the stage!

ACTOR: Look, I don't think you have the right to force your ideas on me. Suppose I don't agree with you?

LEE: I didn't ask you to agree. I asked you to listen. You came here to learn. That's wliat we're all here for.

LEE: (to an actor in Elaine May's play Not Enough Rope) What are you supposed to be doing? I noticed that as soon as you came into the room, you picked up some drumsticks and beat several things around the place. Like some wild impulse hit you.

ACTOR: Well, I'm trying to show that I'm relaxed in my own home. I can do anything I want. I don't care about anybody hearing me.

LEE: Then why didn't you beat on the wall or the floor or the table?

Why didn't you really let yourself go? You're home. You can do anything. Why didn't you do a little dance? Don't be afraid of seeming grotesque. The play functions better with grotesquerie.

* * * * *

LEE: (to an actress in the same play portraying a suicidal character) I saw you look out the window. So what? I never met anyone who planned suicide just because they looked out the window. It's ridiculous! No one kills herselffor that reason.

ACTRESS: I'm very depressed. In the play I'm very low.

LEE: I saw no evidence of it. You lay on the bed, you pantomimed to some music. I saw no reality in the character's actions. I think you looked bored, that's all. Nothing you did showed anything else.

ACTRESS: (hurt) Well, I was trying to keep things simple. I think you're closest to art when you're being simple on stage.

LEE: An elephant is simple when he's being an elephant. But if he tries to imitate a mouse, he's not being simple! (laughter) ACTRESS: Well, I just didn't want to be too theatrical, that's all.

LEE: What's wrong with being theatrical? Look, I know what you're trying to say. Simplicity's fine. But everything needs preparation, no matter how simple it looks. A triple somersault on the high wire looks simple. But it takes very careful preparation. First you try a single somersault on the ground, then a double, then a triple. Then you do it on the high wire. It's not as simple ,as it looks. This girl in the play is a kook. The way you acted, the way you asked your neighbor for a rope to hang yourself; I didn't believe it. You were too normal. I don't understand this play ....

I must have seen it a hundred times but I still don't understand it. But one thing I know: The play works a lot better if the girl is played kooky ... I don't think you should have chosen this play. It's completely wrong for you. It's incredible that you chose this play. You just can't do it.

'Almost everywhere in America where actors, writers and directors work together, one is sure to find a professional who has been helped along the way by the work of the Actors Studio.'

ally tempers flare. The actor may make a furious defense of what he did and engage in a loud, acrimonious debate with the presiding officer. At times, indeed, there seems to be greater drama taking place between "audience" and actor than within the play itself.

Although the main goal of the Actors Studio is to help actors, some of the richest and most exciting work of the institution takes place in the Playwrights and Directors Unit. Because of the rare opportunity to work with top-flight actors on original material, a great number of new writers, some of whom subsequently became important talents in the theater, have worked in the Playwrights Unit since it was started in 1952 by noted dramatist Clifford Odets.

The actor-members of the Studio work tirelessly on these new plays. In New York they often spend an entire week preparing a new play for production before the Studio audience. In Los Angeles, a play may be worked on for weeks or months while the actors take time out to complete film or television assignments. As in the actors' sessions, the playwrights do a critique on each new play. They may find fault with its structure, with the dialogue, with the characters-or even with the theme itself.

In 1960, Lee Strasberg set up a Directors Unit, so that the many directors who had worked for a long time on actors' problems and craft could consider specific directorial problems. As in the other units, the director's work is evaluated by his peers, who tell him why he succeeded or failed in creating a scene properly. They may take issue with his pacing, his clocking of actors' moves, his choices for lighting or music-or with his entire concept of the play.

Any observer or member of the Actors Studio-only actors are made members-can participate in the work of the three units. This makes it possible for an actor to study the work of a new writer or to act in it or even to do a play he has written himself. A writer may want to try his hand at acting or directing, and a director may wish to write, act in and direct the same play. In this rich community of theatrical crafts he can hone any or all of his talents.

Despite the lack of a proper theater of its own, in 1962 the Actors Studio produced several plays, including Chekhov's Three Sisters with Lee Strasberg directing. Other plays were Eugene O'Neill's Strange Interlude, James Baldwin's Blues for Mr. Charlie, a play about the black experience in America; and Marathon '33, a play about the dance craze that seized America in the '30s.

But all these had to be done in a rented Broadway theater.

Therefore, perhaps the most eagerly awaited event in the history of the organization was the acquisition of its own theater in Los Angeles. The building, formerly a post office, was converted into a 200-seat theater and leased by film star Merle Oberon to some private producers. In 1971, she offered it to the Actors Studio for five years at a rent of one dollar a year.

The inaugural season of the Los Angeles theater featured a host of new plays written by playwrights associated with the Actors Studio. The first of these, Hootsoodie, opened in April 1972 to good critical notices, after members and observers of the Studio had donated many hours of their time to get their new

playhouse into shape. Some helped to build sets, others worked on lights and costumes, or helped with publicity. All realized that the theater will be an excellent showcase for their talents.

The first play in the new theater was a brisk comedy about theprivate life and athletic problems of a major league baseball player. Other plays were Felton Perry's Or, concerning the lives of white and black veterans in a large hospital; Dandelion Wine, a play about a country boyhood by the internationally famed science-fiction writer, Ray Bradbury; and Savanna of the Rhinos,

by Jack Guss, a screen and television writer who was born in the Soviet Uni~~ and came to America as an infant. His play deals with the conflict between a middle-aged man and a young girl who suddenly forces -herself into his life. At almost the same time, the New York workshop threw its performances open to the public. For a nominal sum the public can now....attend these carefully rehearsed new works.

Announcement of the twin public production programs has already led to a flurry of excitement in theatrical circles. In Los Angeles, it has been hailed as a powerful move for the growth of live theater and bravura acting in a city too long identified mainly with filmmaking. "We are in for some riveting theater," Los Angeles Times critic Dan Sullivan wrote after attending the opening of the first Studio play at the new theater. He went on to speak of the "vital and immediate acting ... so true that you feel like someone who stayed overnight on Sudie's [the leading character] sofa and can't bring himself to go home .... " Most observers agree the Actors Studio has amassed in its 27 years a proud record. It has nurtured such great acting talents as Anne Bancroft, Jane Fonda, Marilyn Monroe, Burgess Meredith, E.G. Marshall, Walter Matthau, Paul Newman, Eva Marie Saint, Marlon Brando-all major stars of stage and screen.

Among the well-known playwrights who have tested their work at the Actors Studio are Edward Albee, Robert Anderson, Jack Gelber, William Inge, Horton Foote,' Murray Schisgal, William Gibson and many more who have written nationally famous plays. There is an equally impressive list of directors, among them Elia Kazan, Joshua Logan, Martin Ritt and Frank Perry, who have not only directed some of the most important plays in the American theater but major films as well.

With a roster like that, it is easily understandable why Thornton Wilder, one of America's best playwrights, has said: "It is my deep-rooted conviction that the Actors Studio is the most important thing and the finest influence in our theater. Its repudiation of all recourse to stereotype and mere effect has enhanced the actors' art in our time. Part of its greatness is its power to capture the gifted young."

Almost everywhere in America where actors, writers and directors work together, one is sure to find a professional who has been helped along the way by the Actors Studio.

0 About the Author: Jack Matcha, who holds a master of science degree in journalism from Columbia University, is a well-known journalist, playwright (The Kingmakers) and author of many books including Prowler in the Night, Gambler's Girl and A Rogue's Guide to Europe.

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If the sky over San Francisco could shake hands it probably would have one of those shock buzzers hidden in its palm.

It's that laugh-a-minute kind of sky. Sunshine, then all of a sudden for no apparent reason, splash. That's the way it was during the San Francisco International Film Festival. When the taxi brought us around the corner and up the hill there was the Palace of Fine Arts glowing like a ripe orange in a movielab sunset. But when we got out and paused to pay the driver the sky had its laugh. Rain soaked our backs.

We dashed to the building wondering why everybody was bunched outside in the rain as though the doors were locked.

The doors were locked. They were locked because inside a movie was still showing.

It was all behind schedule. It was a film festival.

And when we finally got inside, the coffeewas all gone even though there were stilltwo more pictures to be screened. And, as usual, two people appeared here and there with tickets for the same seat and an usher who only took the job so he could

Analyzing the phenomenon of u.s. film festivals, the author also dissects the movie audience that will brave rain, hail and storm to attend them. see the movies didn't appear terribly Interested in the situation.

Compromise through negotiation of the caliber that would have rattled a Kissinger got everybody seated in the unupholstered folding chairs. There we sat, waiting, murmuring, looking up at a screen so temporary there was a wrinkle down the center. We all sat and stared at the wrinkle and waited, mildewing, voiding our dinner reservations, loving it.

Love, it has been written, is not rational.

Neither are film festivals, Especially those in the United States.

It is difficult to explain why they happen.

The movie business in the United States is unsubsidized and therefore independent and therefore consists of some very competitive people who think the only worthwhile prize is success in the open market place. They have a tendency to look upon the play prizes that come out of festivals as a pain in the sprocket.

It's all a little like someone in landlocked Iowa building an ocean yacht in his basement. The act is seemingly pointless. Film .festivals and basement yacht building in Iowa are acts of love. Nothing more.

But just as some yacht building is practical so are some film festivals. There are literally dozens of festivals in the United States but most of them are "nontheatrical." This is a term that describes a movie not made to be shown as entertainment in the neighborhood theater. They are usually intended as instructional de-

vices or as a promotional medium. They deal with practically any subject-home safety, tire recapping and earth movingare usually in 16 or eight millimeter and run less than a half hour. Without the nontheatrical festival most of these films would not be able to reach their specialized audience. It's a highly organized system dominated by the Council on International Nontheatrical Events (CINE), whose judges select the American-made nontheatrical films to be entered in the important international festivals. But when people hear about the U.S. Industrial Film Festival, or the American Television and Radio Commercials Festival, or even the Movies on a Shoestring International Amateur Film Festival, or any of the other nontheatrical events, they don't think they're hearing about a real film festival.

They want to hear about Cannes.

The International Film Festival at Cannes was set up in 1946 and now has such a reputation that to say a film won at Cannes is to say enough. But although Cannes as a festival impresses the imagination of most American film audiences, most are unable to say what film has won what at Cannes. Not like they can say who won the Oscar last year.

The Academy Awards were established by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in 1927. It is, technically, the oldest theatrical film festival in the world.

The more than 2,000 Academy members become judges each year and vote Oscars to best picture, best director and so on, just as the panels at Cannes vote the Grand Prix to their choices. But most people shake their heads and say no, the Academy Award is not a film festival.

A festival is like Cannes. It's not the prize, it's the event. It's when movies are shown on scheduled days, in a central location, in marathon, one after another.

And the movies shown should not be in widespread release. The technique is of European invention, like a trade fair.

Which is what Cannes really is. The place is an enormous merchandizing mart where producers sell their products and make deals. American movie men groan. But they take part.

"The companies would prefer not to enter the festivals," a producers' spokesman says. "But it becomes necessary to maintain good relations with the countries that give the festivals. In some countries that have quota systems (a limit on the number of nonnative films that can be

imported) there is a certain advantage. A company can get an extra film under the quota by entering it in a festival."

The American moviemaker's attitude toward American film festivals is even greater disinterest. "We generally don't bother unless it's a movie with special problems."

There is a reason. The American market is open. Any filmmaker who can find a distributor (and that's the problem) can show his picture in the United States.

It's not an easy system. In fact it can be outright vicious at times. It's a make it or go under situation. No one is there to subsidize, to prop up, to give one one chance. But the American filmmaker is accustomed to it and usually prefers his career in the hands of a mass audience than wait for a nod from a handful of judges who at times have been accused of being just a bit claquish.

As a result film festivals have flourished in countries where a festival is an advantage in the financing and marketing of a movie. They have not flourished, until recently, in the United States.

There have been several attempts. Many were simply efforts by Chambers of Commerce to gain publicity. These withered since they were heavily dependent on the co-operation of American film producers.

The ¡survivors have been the results of love, an act of passion by one individual or small group. They seek neither publicity for the host city nor business for movie industries. They exist simply for the love of movies.

Claude Jarmon's San Francisco International Film Festival takes place each October. It's the oldest, founded in 1957.

The New York Film Festival was founded in 1963 and is sponsored by the Film Society of Lincoln Center. It is held each September. Michael Kutza organized the Chicago International Film Festival in 1964/ and its program is in November.

J. Hunter Todd started the Atlanta International Film Festival in 1968. It runs each June. There are also festivals in Los Angeles and Rochester, New York, but in terms of influence there are just the first four.

They have several characteristics in common. They are usually without a permanent home. Jarmon and the city of San Francisco fight about the Fine Arts Palace each year. The New York Festival bounces all over the city. Chicago screens in difText continued on page 44

My first film, Pather Panchali found its way to the Cannes Film Festival through the efforts of some sympathetic friends.

I had no means of going, so I stayed back and held my breath. As I learnt later, the official screening of the film took place around midnight. The jury had already, on the same day, sat through four long features and decided to skip the Indian entry. Among the handful who attended were some critics, apparently with insatiable appetites, who sat through the film and liked it enough to insist on a second screening for the jurors. This was arranged, and the film went on to win a special prize as the "best human document."

The next year, my second film, Aparajito went to the Venice festival and won the Golden Lion. This time I was present and experienced the rising tension that marks the occasion for a competing director.

Between Venice in 1957 and now, I have participated in more than a dozen film festivals, either as a juror, or with a film in competition. The two experiences have nothing in common. As a juror one submits to the onslaught of films-8 to 10 hours of screening a day on an averageas well as to the endless round of parties.

Some festivals have more of these than others. At any rate, there is little time left for the jury for anything except these two obligatory occupations. At parties the jurors talk of everything except films, lest the conversation should veer inadvertently toward "what one has seen so far." All festivals insist on secrecy, with the jurors told unequivocally to wear masks of inscrutability. This is because the awards are meant to come as a surprise to the public. They never do. For instance, in Venice one evening, two days before the prizes were announced, I was sitting in a pavement cafe when a stout, middleJ

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In this article written especially for SP AN, India's most distinguished filmmaker relates his own experience of film festivals. Satyajit Ray has been associated with many festivals both as director and as juror.

instant communion between filmmakers, aged man, presumably a journalist, sidled up to me, bent down to whisper so that even before they know each other's dramatically into my ears: "I can hear the names, they may be engrossed in a discuslion's roar!"-and melted away into the sion of the latest Arriflex, or the vagaries of some new zoom lens, or the hazards gathering darkness.

Although all European festivals preview of shooting on location with a small crew.

Unless he should happen to be his own the films that are entered and are free to drop anything they don't like, the urge to producer, a filmmaker need not embroil select the best is cancelled out by the himself with the sordid business of trying equally pressing urge to make the festival to sell his own product. In fact he has only as widely representative as possible. This one obligation, which is to be present at usually leads to the inclusion of what are his own screening. This is where the quesdescribed as maiden efforts from emergent tion of the audience comes up.

Each of the four or five major film countries. The jurors, let it be known, are less concerned with effort than with festivals in Europe is marked by its own unique brand of audience. In Moscow, achievement..

Having served on the jury a number they are polite to the point where they will of times, I find that I look forward less not only sit through almost anything withto the films than to the notion of being out a murmur, but applaud heartily at the part of a group of people all connected end. In Berlin, while the rest of the auwith the cinema in various ways, converg- dience observes decorum, a small group ing from all parts of the world and en- at the back will keep hurling invectives gaging in a common pursuit. Differences at whatever unfolds on the screen. In may emerge and heated arguments ensue Venice, if a film is not liked, the audience at the time of deliberation, but seldom at will pulverize the filmmaker with their the expense of the camaraderie that has boos and catcalls. These go on throughout the screening, reaching a bloodcurdling developed through shared responsibility.

With a film in competition one is less pitch the moment the spotlight is turned on trammeled. Those who, like me, do not the director at the end. Since he is already suffer from nerves too much, can use their bowed in abject misery, there is no questime most profitably. It is true that most tion of the director taking a bow.

The new kind of film festivals which festivals have lost, or have been forced to shed, some of their glamor. The opening has come into existence in Britain and star parade is a thing of the past. But there U.S.A. in the last 10 or 15 years has been is no doubt that with the introduction of well described by John Stirn [in the preparallel festivals with their stress on off- ceding article]. Being nonexclusive and beat, meaningful cinema, along with the coming at the end of the year, these fesinevitable tributes and revivals of classics, , tivals are in a position to show the prize the choice of films is wider than ever winners from the European fetes. In addition there is a handpicked selection usually before.

Apart from the films, there is the de- reflecting the taste of the festival director, lightful occupation of talking shop with plus the usual retrospectives and tributes. fellow filmmakers. No matter how widely London and New York give no prizes, separated they may be geographically, while Chicago and San Francisco do. The some mysterious force seems to effect an audience here consists mostly of film

buffs, and the films are noticed by the critics. Prizes or no prizes, good reviews may lead to enquiries from distributors.

I had the good fortune to attend the Chicago film festival last year. John Stirn gives the impression that I won the Hugo.

I must hasten to correct him. I didn't win the Hugo, but I won a Hugo-one of six or seven which Chicago gives away every year. A Hugo, let me explain, is a handsome statuette said to be inspired by the figure of Death in Ingmar Bergman's Seventh Seal.

Two cinemas in Chicago at opposite ends of the vast sprawling city had been chosen for the festival screenings. Both showed the competitive entries as well as a series of eight of my films. One of the cinemas was within the campus of the university. I had to go there every day to introduce my films to the students and to answer questions at the end. Altogether a most refreshing change from the routine of the European festivals.

If we are to have international film festivals in India, I firmly believe that they should be planned on the lines of Chicago or San Francisco. Prizes are necessary as a bait to the lesser film producing countries; and as a sop to' our own public, a sprinkling of stars among the invited delegates wouldn't be a bad idea. Finally, and most importantly, the festival should be nonexclusive. In other words, we should have the option to ask for specific filmsthe highlights from the preceding festivals, as well as the best of recent American and British cinema which are no longer accessible to us commercially-rather than leave the choice to the producers. It is hard to believe that the major foreign producers would earmark their more prestigious productions for India, when as a potential market India has so little to offer.

D

Film festivals in the U.s. 'seek neither publicity for the host city nor business for movie industries. They exist simply for the love of movies.' ferent places. And they all lose money.

New York is typical. Richard Roud, its director, called the 11th Annual Festival last September "the most successful ever."

Eighteen films were shown. Gross box office receipts were $98,975.

The festival was budgeted at $216,250.

The difference is made up by contributions, fees from sponsors and foundations and corporations and from the New York State Council on the Arts, a quasi-governmental operation. Arts councils throughout the United States use tax revenues to support various artistic ventures. But the money comes carte blanche.

They all lose money because they all attempt more than an exhibition of movies.

There are receptions, seminars, publications, famous directors as guests, publicity and advertising. Naturally a film festival bureaucracy develops to organize and operate. And that's expensive.

And they lose money even though they all sell more than 90 per cent of their available seats. The high attendance is in common with the European festivals.

There is one other point in common. A true story: Two friends meet on a Washington, D.C., street corner. Both are ~lm fans, meaning they see an average of one movie a week which is more movie seeing than most Americans do. They both know about the U.S. film festivals and they both know the work of Satyajit Ray. His name came up in' conversation because The Adversary was showing down at the Circle Theater.

"By the way," one said, "I read somewhere Ray has won the Hugo award."

"What the hell is that?" the other asked.

So much for the prize of the Chicago International Film Festival.

Just as most Americans cannot say who won the Grand Prix at Cannes most cannot even name the prizes offered by the American festivals. San Francisco awards "The Golden Gate" and Atlanta "The Golden Phoenix." New York doesn't bother. It offers no prize. And it doesn't even call itself International. It's simply the New York Film Festival.

It's Film. The prizes are not the reason they exist in the United States, and being international is an overstatement. Film itself became internationalized two decades ago.

But in terms of origin of film shown at the American festivals, they are all more international than they are American.

During last year's Chicago festival 30 films were shown. Only three of them could be identified as purely American.

Bob Polumbo, festival co-ordinator, explained that the Chicago festival was interested in discovery. Most American movies, he said, were "too commercial."

Asked if the intent of most feature-film makers wasn't to be commercial, if the whole idea of a mass medium like film wasn't to attract a mass audience, Polumbo said what he meant by commercial were films made solely to attract a large audience. The Chicago festival, he said, seeks to exhibit films that were not made simply to attract an audience, but to deserve an audience.

That has existed as the only reason for the film festival in America, to give good but unknown films an audience.

There is a tension, however. It exists between the discovery function and the simple need to sell tickets, to keep the deficit as low as possible. Critics have recently accused the festivals of subordinating their discovery function to the role of fancy showcase for movies about to open in commercial theaters.

Roud, of the New York Film Festival, says the critics are probably "just a little bit right." The problem is not making the

festival so esoteric people won't come.

It's a delicate balance.

Most festivals include a retrospective built around a big-name director-like Chicago did with Satyajit Ray last autumnand offer a couple of big movies already assured of commercial success. Truffaut's Day for Night appeared at three festivals last year. The big name and the big film hopefully will draw the audience, fill the seats with people who are willing to discover.

The discovery intent of the festival offers only minimal advantage to the filmmaker. That is, if the reason he chose to exhibit in the festival was to seek entry in the American market place. The distri- . butor in the United States is a hard-core businessman. Art to most of them is what they call their friend Arthur. A movie is worth their effort, they think, if they see a chance to make a profit. And a profit comes from a picture they know the public wants to see. The classic problem is, of course, how does the public know it wants to see a picture by an unknown director if it has never been allowed to see the director's work because the man is unknown and therefore not able to find a distributor.

The festivals offer a minimal exposure.

In New York it's greater because the major film critics lurk there. Time and Newsweek critics will review the content of the New York Film Festival. Rarely do they cover the others.

As commercial ventures, then, the festivals in the United States cannot be compared to the buy and sell of Cannes, Berlin, San Sebastian, Brazil, Sydney, Locarno and Cartagena.

New York, San Francisco, Atlanta and Chicago exist only because in the United States there has developed an audience that considers the motion picture the most important form of expression. The reason for the festivals is to discover how one man someplace is saying something that has meaning to all men everywhere.

If the festivals in the United States vanished it wouldn't have the least impact on the film business in the country.

But they would leave behind a growing number of sad people who would rather be standing in the rain.

0 About the Author: John Stirn spent several years as a reporter for Florida newspapers and the Miami bureau of United Press International before joining the U.S. Information Service, Washington, as a staff writer in 1967.

u.s. LAUNCHES

UNIQUE ~TEACHER'SATELLITE Hovering 35,000 kilometers above the earth, a versatile American satellite will beam educational television programs to 5,000 Indian villages starting June 1975. This, Asia's first mass experiment in educational television, holds fascinating possibilities for the future.

Agronomists showing Madhya Pradesh farmers new methods to multiply crop yields. Doctors explaining basic health care to remote Bihar villagers" Soil conservation specialists discussing co-operative desert reclamation schemes in Rajasthan; family planning experts demonstrating birth control methods to rural women in Karnataka.

Such efforts to transform the socioeconomic-educational scene in remote and far-flung Indian villages, untouched by communications media, will gain a new impetus with a unique Indo-U.S. experiment in satellite communication now under way.

Described as the "most complex, versatile and powerful communications satellite ever developed," the Applications Technol-

ogy Satellite ATS-6 lifted off its launch pad at Cape Canaveral, Florida, on May 30. It is the sixth in a series of space vehicles designed to apply space technology to everyday problems.

As P.V. Krishnamurthy, Deputy Director General of India's AIR- TV who witnessed the launch, said: "Time is of the essence. India cannot a.fford to wait. We can't think of slow processes like bullock carts .... The satellite route is the only way to go ifIndia is to develop quickly."

A synchronous communications satellite, ATS-6 exemplifies the principle outlined by British science writer Arthur Clarke way back in 1945: "If a satellite can be plunged into orbit 22,300 miles above the earth, it would travel at the same speed as the

earth. It would thus appear to be stationary and would be in the line of sight of sending and receiving stations in about 40 per cent of the globe."

Built by Fairchild Industries for the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration, ATS-6. stands 8.1 meters tall, weighs.

1,400 kilograms and has an umbrellalike reflector antenna nine meters in diameter. Its transmitter is powerful enough to beam directly to simple ground receivers instead of going through an elaborate and expensive ground relay station. Thus ATS-6 makes possible the world's first direct television broadcast system.

Says Dr. Wernher von Braun, Vice President of Fairchild Industries, "ATS-6 could turn out to be the most important advance since movable type as a means of reaching people separated by vast geographical, economic and cultural barriers."

Now hovering 35,000 kilometers above the Galapagos Islands off South America's Pacific Coast, ATS-6 will for a year serve far-flung isolated communities in the U.S., providing education and televised medical care. It will then be shifted longitudinally to a new stationary orbit above Lake Victoria in Kenya. From this vantage point, it will serve India for a year (beginning June 1975), setting into motion a Indo-U.S. project known as SIT~ (Satellite Instructional Television Experiment).

India and the U.S. signed an agreement on SITE in September 1969. The project set up under this agreement tests the efficacy of satellite television to modernize Indian agriculture, spread literacy, improve health care and hygiene, promote family planning, and better the quality of life in rural areas. It is a gigantic case study in the planning, designing, organization and creation of a viable system of educational broadcasting by satellite. The results of the experiment will be of great value for India's own satellite program. It will also be watched with tremendous interest by developing countries all over the world.

How does SITE work? Its managers in India will deploy direct-reception community television sets in 2,400 villages from six states-Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Madhya Pradesh, Bihar, Orissa and Rajasthan. These community television sets will receive programs directly from the satellite with the help of a small electronic converter and an inexpensive antenna. The programs-televised features on agriculture, education, health and family planning-will be beamed to the satellite from earth stations in Ahmedabad and Delhi. These stations will also be capable of receiving programs from the satellite, which will be rebroadcast by conventional television transmitters to 2,500 other villages.

Through SITE, India will use the world's first direct television broadcast system for Asia's first mass television education experiment.

Indian participants in this trail-blazing project are the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO), which provides the hardware-including the development, installation and maintenance of community receivers-and All India Radio, which will provide the software or the programs to feed the experiment. ISRO will help AIR with research in preparing the programs.

Selection of 2,400 villages for the television sets is a difficult task. The villages should be within easy reach of maintenance centers to facilitate repairs to the community television sets whenever necessary. ISRO teams of anthropologists and social scientists will visit some 4,000 villages and undertake detailed surveys and interviews before selecting 2,400. Similar teams will visit selected villages during and after the experiment to assess

.the impact of the project on these communities.

All India Radio will prepare programs for the experiment at studios in Delhi, Hyderabad, Cuttack, Ahmedabad and Bombay.

When ATS-6 begins to cover India, there will be four hours of programs every day in two sessions. A morning session will instruct children on the three R's and carry other educational programs. An evening session will offer advice to farmers on modern methods of planting, fertilizing and irrigating crops and on other agricultural subjects such as poultry farming and pesticides, credit facilities and market trends. There will also be counsel on hygiene and family planning.

To get across its message in the best possible way, AIR may experiment with different forms of presentation-documentary films, plays, puppet shows, folk tales and folk songs. Villagers in the different states will hear the programs in their own language even when the visual elements are the same.

Radio, motion pictures and loudspeaker lectures have long been used for educational purposes, but these media are often impractical for remote areas. Now, via satellite television, widely separated and inaccessible villages can be exposed to educational advantages never before possible.

According to Krishnamurthy, credibility is an important factor in creating the programs to be shown on television. AIR plans to film a farmer's own plot of ground to show how better agricultural methods will improve crop yields. "This kind of filming will give the people a sense of belief and belonging."

Krishnamurthy is very enthusiastic about the effect of television education on the Indian child. Hardly 40 per cent of the children reach the fifth grade and there are many dropouts, he notes. "Education via satellite will help the teacher and make education more interesting for children. It will have a tremendous effect on our school systems."

Yash Pal, Director of the Space Applications Center, ISRO, emphasizes that technical knowledge in agriculture is more urgently needed than formal classical knowledge.

"Millions of people learn better by seeing. You don't need big words. The farmer is very conservative because he has done certain things for hundreds of years. He is not going to do things differently until he sees that these things are beneficial ... because his whole life depends on the way he farms.

"Fifty per cent of our Gross National Product is from agriculture. If we help agriculture, we help the whole economy."

Says Professor E.V. Chitnis, Program Manager of SITE, "Most people in the villages are completely unexposed to the mass media. We need a medium that doesn't depend on reading or writing. . .. By 1981, we should have at least one TV set in each village."

In the United States, ATS-6 will be used for color teleVIsion and two-way voice transmission in a variety of experiments. For example, the satellite will transmit seminars for teachers in remote areas to train them in new educational techniques. The teachers can see instructors, pictures and charts. They can ask questions as if they are in a classroom or lecture hall.

ATS-6 will also connect 10 Veterans' Administration hospitals, whose doctors can discuss among themselves and also consult with doctors in other hospitals. ATS-6 will allow public health workers in the remote villages of Alaska to show patients to ,doctors hundreds of miles away and receive instructions on how to treat them.

Other experimental tasks of ATS-6 include communication with ships, aircraft and other satellites; navigation and tracking experiments; and studies in radio broadcasting. The radiometer in the ATS-6 will make possible accurate forecasts of the mon-

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The American press saw the accord as the accord for silencing the guns on the Golan Heights would not have been possi- "good news" and a hopeful portent for the ble but for his [Dr. Kissinger's] marathon future. shuttle diplomacy. Painstakingly and paThe Washington Post wrote: "The SyThe disengagement agreement reached a tiently he narrowed down the differences rian-Israeli disengagement agreement is few weeks ago between Israel and Syria was between the two adversaries which at one exceptionally good news representing a vital second step (Egyptian-Israeli disengagehailed by newspapers throughout the world time appeared unbridgeable."

In the Middle East itself, Beirut's Al ment was the first) on the Mideast's road as a major step toward a durable peace in West Asia. And the role played by U.S. Nahar said: "The whole Mideast breathes from war to peace. The agreement puts Secretary of State Henry Kissinger in nego- a sigh of relief, saying congratulations, a space and United Nations personnel bettiating the agreement was described as a thousand congratulations! At last there is ween the two armies, and it puts the two personal triumph, "a classic example of agreement. ... 'At last' means not only the governments into a stance of compromise end of a month of incredible travels by the and agreement for the first time." diplomatic technique."

The Los Angeles Times: "The larger imU.S. Secretary of State, but also the beginportance of the accord is that it was in fact In India, as elsewhere, the press greeted ning of an end of 26 years of struggle. the accord with approval. Thus, New "The agreement with Egypt had indicat- agreed to. It is not an end in itself, but a Delhi's Hindustan Times commented: "The ed that the trend toward peace was possible, vital beginning, an example of what can be agreement marks a beginning toward re- but the agreement with Syria finally draws done, a demonstration that there exists a storing confidence and trust. If the agree- the dividing line between pessimism and mutual interest in journeying further along ment holds, it should make possible further optimism in favor of those saying that a a hitherto unexplored road that could lead movement along the road to a just and comprehensive settlement is no longer to a durable peace."

The Chicago Tribune: "Though it is only honorable peace. Some of the most difficult impossible. " Tel Aviv's Haaretz said that the greatest a preliminary step leading to negotiations questions remain .... Yet what has been importance of the agreement is political, for a permanent peace to be held at achieved is of high significance."

Observing that "disengagement is not "in the fact that Syria has signed an agree- Geneva, it is nonetheless cause for relief peace," the Indian Express went on to say, ment with Israel for the first time." and rejoicing."

The Baltimore Sun: "Much has been "but it does mean that for the first time in Newspapers in Britain hailed the Golan many years there will be no fighting on any Heights accord while stressing that much learned by the parties involved: that true security for Israel cannot rest alone on of the three Arab-Israeli fronts. War-ravagdifficult work lay ahead.

The Times of London held it "vital that military strength; that Arab states, their ed West Asia can therefore breathe a little more freely. The cessation of fighting will matters should not be left as they are. The honor restored, must accept Israel's right make it possible for the negotiators to ad- dynamic of peace which Mr. Kissinger has to exist as a sovereign nation; that the legitimate aspirations of the Palestinian dress themselves to the more challenging set in motion must be kept up."

"The immediate gain," said London's peoples can be ignored or exploited only at task of evolving a permanent settlement."

The Hindu of Madras expressed much Guardian, "is a valuable opportunity for the peril of governments that do so; and the same viewpoint: "Implementation of Arabs and Israelis to survey each other that the United States and the Soviet the Golan accord in letter and spirit will from a better perspective. But contempla- Union, in the interest of their complex detente, cannot allow themselves to come open the road to Geneva where the peace tion alone will not bring a settlement."

The Financial Times of London stated: to flashpoint again in the Middle East." talks have been stalled for many months.

The Washington Star-News: "It should Bringing about troop withdrawals has not "The essential task is to maintain the politencourage a continuing policy of restraint been an easy task but what remains to be ical momentum. President Sadat has stakon the part of Israel's other neighbors in done to bring about an over-all settlement ed his reputation so heavily on a settlement is going to be far more arduous and will that it is doubtful if he could survive for Jordan and Lebanon and even perhaps call for a lot of give-and-take on the part of long without perceptible progress being more serious efforts by all the governments made. The Americans are now also heavily concerned to curb the activities of Palesall the parties concerned."

The Statesman noted that achievement committed to it, while the Israelis have at tinian terrorist organizations."

The New York Times: "What has been of the accord "is impressive enough to have least gone further than ever before."

In Europe, Hamburg's Die Welt felt that achieved-it cannot be said too often-is deserved President Nixon's claim that the prospects of peace are better now 'than despite its "frailty," the agreement was not yet peace. But to indicate problems yet they have been at any time in the past nonetheless "reason enough to feel relieved to be solved is in no way to minimize the -in Europe as well a~in the Middle East." importance of the first step now success25 years.' " Le Monde of Paris said: "Thanks to his fully completed. As one of Israel's leading Among the many Indian newspapers that paid tribute to the U.S. Secretary of fantastic tenacity, Mr. Kissinger will have political commentators said: 'Something State was New Delhi's Motherland, which managed to overcome the wall of suspicion, has now started that cannot be stopped; a noted that "Dr. Kissinger has succeeded in rancor and even hatred that has separated process has begun~ and all sides will either reconciling the irreconcilable." The Times Israelis and Syrians for a quarter of a have to get aboard or lose their influence over the future.' " D of India stated: "As welcome as it is timely, century."

THE GOLAN HEIGHTS AGREEMENT

One of the highlights of Expo '74 is a song-anddance presentation "Up With People" (below). Left: :Fora change of pace from the Fair, tourists can shoot the rapids of the Spokane River. Far left: The U.S. Postal Service's salute to the Fair. Designed by artist Peter Max, the stamp shows a "cosmic jumper." Back cover: Washington State's spectacular Cascade Mountains and rain forest.

TOURING¡ AMERICA

TheSpokane Fair and Washington State

The State of Washington in the Pacific Northwest has always been a mecca for tourists, but this year it offers an added attraction: the Spokane World's Fair, "Expo '74," which opened its six-month run on May 4. The $70-million exposition is the first world's fair dedicated to the environment. The locale of Expo '74 could hardly be more appropriate-a pair of islands in the Spokane River where an array of greensward, tumbling water and stately trees suggest that man and nature can live together in harmony.

Similarly, few states of the U.S. are more appropriate for an environmental fair than Washington, which many experts say contains a greater variety of scenery than any other state-sandy ocean beaches, a sheltered inland sea dotted with jewel-like islands, vast expanses of arid deserts, fertile valleys dotted with fruit orchards, dense, mossy rain forests and snow-clad mountains that rise to 14,000 feet (see back cover).