SPAN: October 1966

OFF

TO

COLLEGE

SPAN 1 Cyrus Vance Deputy Secretary Department of Defence

Where Technicians are Made

2

by V. S. Nanda

Heroic Struggle of Margaret Sanger

8

by Florence Gorfinkle

Off to College

/2

Photographs by Douglas Jones

The Big Change

16

by Frederick Lewis AI/en

Is This Man Guilty of Murder?

2 Walter Lord Author A Night to Remember 35

Photographs by Carl Iwasaki

Treasures of the National Gallery

42

Photograph by Arnold Newman

Front Cover

Back Cover

More than one and a balf million young Americans are entering institutions of higher learning in the United States this autumn to begin their most important phase of academic life. See story on page 12.

Part I of The Big Change, Frederick Lewis Allen's dramatic account of the changes which occurred in the U.S. from 1900 to 1950, begins on page 16. The second and third parts will be condensed in future issues.

3 Peter Dominick United States Senator from Colorado

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W. D. Miller, Publisher; Dean Brown, Editor; V. S. Nanda, Mg. Editor.

Editorial Staff: Carmen Kagal, Avinash Pasricha, N irmal K. Sharma.

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5 Byron White Associate Justice U.S. Supreme Court

4 Gerald Ford Minority Leader U.S. House of Representatives

EVENTS IN THE SPRING OF 1940, Potter Stewart and seventy-six other young, ambitious students posed for this remarkable group photograph, wearing fashi~nable suits with broad lapels. Though members of the Phi Delta Phi fraternity at Yale Law School, not all of them went on to practise law but an extraordinary number achieved national prominence. Stewart, who visited India recently, became Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. Several others have achieved fame as writers and lawyers, politicians and government officials.

Standing with Stewart in the back row was a man who would one day direct both the Peace Corp:; and the anti-poverty programmes, and another who would wield influence in the U.S. House of Representatives as Minority Leader. And in the second row were a future U.S. Senator and a director of the Federal Aviation Agency. Sitting on the grass next to a governor-to-be of Pennsylvania was a future Secretary of the Army. Several of the bestknown are shown here in recent pictures, with the corresponding num ber on the 1940 portrait.

7 William Scranton Governor State of Pennsylvania

8 Stanley Resor Secretary of the Army

9 Louis Hector Former Member Civil Aeronautics Board

10 Potter Stewart Associate Justice U.S. Supreme Court

11 J. Richardson Dilworth Executive Rockefeller Brothers Inc.

12 Najeeb Halaby Former Director Federal Aviation Agency

WHERE TE HNllANSARE

India's polytechnic institutions are making an important contribution to technical education and producing each year thousands of skilled "middle-level" technicians for the country's growing industries. One of the largest progressive institutions of this kind is the Central Polytechnic, Madras, which offers diploma courses in various branches of engineering and has modern facilities for practical training. It was recently the venue of a summer institutes session, which was attended by polytechnic teachers from all over southern India.

MADE

The arbour at the rear of the cafeteria. at left, is a popular student resort during the lunch hour. The polytechnic buildings cover an area of 100 acres and blend utility with good design.

D

rafting and Design was one of the courses at the Summer Institutes sessionfor polytechnic teachers in Madras City. Above.

Professor Jervis R. Manahan helps Soumini with a problem.

SOUMINISASIDHARAN, a young Indian married woman, spends most of her working hours studying or discussing road and building construction, surveying, mechanical drawing and allied subjects. Such an occupation may not conform to the traditional Indian concept of "Grih Lakshmi" or "Queen ofthe Home" -a label which implies that a married woman's interests are almost wholly domestic. But Soumini is typical of the new generation of Indian women who are steadily making their way into fields previously deemed to be reserved for men. She is a teacher in the Government Polytechnic for Women, Madras, an institution which trains women not only in such established feminine vocations as costume designing, dress making and secretarial practice, but also in radio engineering and draughtsmanship.

Soumini was one of a group of sixty polytechnic teachers from Madras, Mysore, Kerala and Andhra Pradesh States, who recently attended a six-week summer institutes course in Madras. Organized by the Government of India with the cooperation of the United States National Science Foundation and several American universities, the summer institutes programme has grown in size and popularity since it was first introduced in 1963. This year the total number of summer institutes of various categories-for teachers in secondary schools, universities and colleges, polytechnics and engineering colleges-was ninety-eight, including eight for polytechnic instructors. During the three summer sessions since 1964 about 1,200 teachers from polytechnics all over India have participated in the programme.

The role of polytechnic institutions in Indian education and their contribution, present and potential, to national development is perhaps inadequately understood and appreciated. While the top-level scientist, engineer or technician has come into the limelight and much attention has been drawn to the importance of his function in a developing economy, comparatively little is heard about the foreman, chargeman or overseer. But it is this category of middlelevel technician who is in immediate charge of a department in a factory, who rolls up his sleeves and operates a lathe or drilling machine or shows a workman how to do it. His ability and performance have a direct bearing on the efficiency and output of the factory, and may be important elements in its success or failure. As India grows industrially, it will need trained supervisors of the type turned out by polytechnics, in ever-increasing numbers.

The Central Polytechnic, Madras, which was selected as a centre for the summer institutes programme, is one of the largest institutions of its kind in the country. It opened fifty years ago as a small trade school to give part-time training to forty apprentices in mechanical engineering and plumbing. Over the years it has expanded into a full-fledged technical institution, housed in spacious, well laid-out buildings spread over an area of about a hundred acres, and equipped with workshop and training facilities for the diploma and "post diploma" courses offered in civil engineering, mechanical engineering, electrical engineering and air-conditioning, and town and country planning. The normal duration of the full-time diploma course is three years, and some 400 students are admitted every year, with a total current enrolment of 1,300.

A

student is at work in the dressmaking class, above, at the Government Polytechnic for Women, Madras. Other courses at the polytechnic are secretarial practice, radio engineering and draughtsmanship.

T

he model room of the Central Polytechnic is well-equipped. Below, left, Professor M.K. Ganesan, Principal of the Madras institute, talks to a group of first-year students as they study the various models.

PrinciPals of some of the participating polytechnics meet, below, to assess the value of the summer institutes programme. Seen addressing them is Prof. John R. Martin, field co-ordinator of the programme.

Comprehensive workshop facilities are a feature of the Madras Polytechnic. At right, students are at work in the polytechnic foundry.

The student in the foreground prepares a sand mould for a casting.

In polytechnic curriculum practical work is as important as a study of engineering theory.

Students spend many hours in workshops.

Candidates for admission to the Madras Polytechnic must have passed the high school examination. An innovation introduced in Madras State, however, is the JuniorTechnical School which is part of the polytechnic and admits students in the thirteen to seventeen-year age group with a minimum educational qualification of a pass in the eighth class.

The Junior Technical School final examination has been recognized as the equivalent of the high school or matriculation examination, so that on passing out of the Technical School the student has the choice of joining the university or the polytechnic and in the meantime has acquired the basic skillswhich equip him either for immediate entry into a trade or craft or for higher studies in engineering or technology.

Since independence, basic education-a system in which learning is correlated with the physical and social environment of school children-has been introduced in some 80,000 elementary schools in India and is being extended to others.

In this system productive activities such as spinning and weaving, gardening, carpentry and other domestic crafts form an essential part of the curriculum. Children learn to use their hands as well as their brains at an early age and build a sound foundation for further training in a craft or trade.

This combination of practical work with textbook study and other academic activity is, of course, characteristic of the polytechnic curriculum. Students in the Madras Polytechnic spend a good deal of time in the well-equipped workshops. They operate lathes, drilling machines, surface grinders and other automatic machinery, and study the working of electric motors, generators and alternators, and steam and diesel engines. They may work in the carpentry, smithy or foundry shops or familiarize themselves with a wdding

plant. A wide range of machinery is available to give them the practical experience necessary for a professional assignment. And to supplement their classroom work, there is a room where models of various building structures, railways and bridges, engines and assorted machinery are on display.

Emphasis on the importance of work in the laboratory or workshop is also a special feature of the summer institutes programme for teachers. At the last session at Madras, time was equally divided between theory and practice: the afternoon classes spent three hours each day on practical work relating to their special field of study.

The participants were divided into five groups of twenty, each group consisting of teacher-trainees specializing in one branch of engineering-civil, electronics, industrial, mechanical and drafting. In each branch a particular subject was chosen for intensive study during the session; the subject chosen under civil engineering was "Highways" and under mechanical engineering "Refrigeration and Air-conditioning." An Indian and American professor co-operated in handling each group. The Indian professor was selected from one of the engineering institutes in the region. The leader of the American team was Prof. Arley L. Tripp, of City College of San Francisco, who himself helped with a class in electronics.

It is not easy to assess in definitive terms the value of an educational programme of this kind as its success is reflected in such intangible factors as enhanced interest in the subject under study, an urge to profit from new ideas and willingness to change old methods and attitudes. Talking to the participants, however, one gathered the impression that they found the courses both interesting and stimulating. Several ofthem commented that they were going back to their institutions with fresh ideas about how an engineering problem should be presented to students or an experiment made more convincing and effective. They acq uired new insight into how a piece of equipment-for example, a transistor amplifiercould be improvised from available material. They were also impressed with the American example of handling any kind of odd job-such as mixing of concrete-as part of an engineering assignment.

Among the courses offered at the summer institute, the one in refrigeration and air-conditioning, which was first introduced in 1964, has proved to be specially popular. The success of this course has led to two notable developments.

First, the subjects have been included in the polytechnic's regular syllabus of studies for the diploma in mechanical engineering. Secondly, evening classes are being held for the benefit of diploma holders and others who wish to specialize in these subjects.

The refrigeration and air-conditioning course at Madras Polytechnic was first organized by Prof. Robert J. O'Brien, of Bluefield, West Virginia, and Mr. A. N. Joshi, head of the polytechnic's mechanical engineering department. Mr. Joshi set up the laboratory, planned the syllabus and continues to take active interest in the course. The laboratory has a large, "walk-in" refrigerator which serves both as a teaching aid and as storage for the fresh foods used in the polytechnic cafeteria.

Another popular course, introduced this year, is "Drafting and Design." This subject is often ignored and even continued

Technicians who pass out of Madras Polytechnic find many job opportunities in the growing industrial complex in and around Madras City.

looked down upon by the average engineer. The course did not arouse enthusiasm when it was announced, but as the session progressed and the instructor's methods and approach presented trainees with challenging problems, their interest mounted and lukewarmness changed to active participation.

One of the primary objectives of the summer institutes programme is to relate polytechnic education to the needs of Indian industry. It is the experience of some industries that a student who has obtained an engineering diploma from a polytechnic is not immediately employable in a supervisory or other suitable position and needs a further period of training or apprenticeship under factory working conditions. The summer institutes, with their emphasis on practical work and simulation of these conditions, seek to bridge the gap between polytechnic and industry.

Industrial development in South India has been extensive during recent years and what was once an economically retarded part of the country is now a thriving industrial and manufacturing area. In Madras City and its environs alone, there has grown up a large complex of engineering and other industries. Among these are the Simpson group of factories which manufacture diesel engines, lathes, drills and various tools; Ashok Leyland Motors, Standard Motor Products ofIndia Ltd., Enfield India Ltd., Binny's Engineering Works, Dunlop Rubber Co. (India) Ltd., Lucas Indian Service Private Ltd., and Wheel & Rim Co. of India Private Ltd., all manufacturing automobiles or automobile parts and accessories; English Electric Co. of India Ltd., manufacturing electricity distribution equipment; and Buckingham & Carnatic Co. Ltd., manufacturing textiles. In the public sector the Integral Coach Factory at Perambur, near Madras, which has been manufacturing railway coaches since 1955,is a major industrial unit. Two other important undertakings in this sector are the Teleprinters Factory and the Surgical Instruments Factory, Madras.

This industrial complex, which continues to grow, provides many avenues of employment for the 400 or more technicians who pass out of the portals of Madras Polytechnic every year. Although no employment bureau has yet been set up, enquiries are received from industrial concerns and suitable candidates recommended by the polytechnic.

For the current enthusiasm for technical education in Madras State and its efficient organization, much credit is due to the energetic Director of Technical Education, Mr. T. Muthian. At one time Chief Engineer in the State Public Works Department, he joined the newly created Department of Technical Education in 1957 and has played an active role in implementation of the State Government's progressive educational policy. During the four weeks he spent in the United States in 1965 when he attended the World Congress in Engineering in Chicago, he had the opportunity of visiting the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Boston, and other institutions. He was specially impressed with the American system of day-to-day assessment of students' per-

formance and the stress on self-study and development of initiative. He has introduced some of these ideas and methods in the engineering colleges and polytechnics in Madras State. A circular giving detailed instructions about examinations and progressive evaluation of students contains these pregnant observations: "Engineering is far from static. It is a creative profession that is essentially dynamic and constantly advancing. Education in engineering is a process that must continue throughout one's career. One of the most significant instructional goals in engineering is to motivate and help the student to learn on his own."

Translation of such principles and rules into practice is of course the responsibility of those immediately in charge of the institutions. Prof. M. K. Ganesan, Principal of Central Polytechnic, Madras, combines administrative and teaching ability with responsiveness to new ideas and innovations.

He is appreciative of the summer institutes programme and co-operated wholeheartedly in carrying it out. In his view, as in that of Mr. Muthian, technical education at the polytechnic level has great scope for expansion and is helping substantially to solve the problem of middle-class unemployment. But further steps are needed to improve the quality of polytechnic teaching and training-for instance, a massive programme for provision of suitable textbooks, which are in short supply-and enhance its usefulness to industry.

Similar views were expressed at a meeting of principals of some of the polytechnics which participated in the summer institutes programme, and which was also attended by Dr. John R. Martin, of the University of Houston and Field Co-ordinator of the programme. Representing the Government Polytechnic for Women, Madras, at this meeting was its Principal, Mrs. May George, who was formerly an executive engineer in the State Housing Board and whose successful career is a source of inspiration to the women engineering students at the polytechnic.

The cost of education, especially technical education, is high in relation to the average income of people in India, and it has to be heavily subsidized by the State. Apart from other expenditure, in Madras State a sum of about rupees twenty-five lakhs is being disbursed annually in the form of scholarships to students, and almost eighty per cent of students in polytechnics get a scholarship of one kind or another.

To quote Mr. Muthian again: "Success in engineering, or for that matter in any profession, demands sustained, purposeful, systematic hard work. The ability to submit oneself to exacting mental effort over long hours can only be acquired through proper training." Sustained, purposeful effort is certainly the keynote of training at the Madras Polytechnic and it may be expected to produce progressively satisfying results.

Students at the Polytechnic are expected to familiarize themselves with various types of machinery, as an essential part of their training.

At right, a final year student is operating a gear-cutting machine.

Heroic Struggle of Margaret The death of Margaret Sanger last monthremoves from the world scene thepioneer who conceived, and gained acceptance of, the whole concept of family planning. Her life is a saga of rare courage and sacrifice.

FIFTY YEARS have passed since that eventful day, October 16, 1916, when Margaret Sanger opened the first birth-control clinic in the United States.

The establishment of the Brownsville Clinic in a crowded section of Brooklyn, New York, became a focal point in her long and persistent crusade to help save the lives of millions of women throughout the world. If it had not been for Margaret Sanger's untiring efforts, her vision and faith, the legal right to plan a family to safeguard the health of mothers might not be possible today in many nations.

At a time when vast areas of the United States were unpopulated, Mrs. Sanger prophesied the dangers of an unlimited population -the economic and social problems that it would generate. She emphasized the dire predictions of Thomas Robert Malthus, English economist who, as early as 1798, had published his views in "An Essay on the Principle of Population."

But her main concern was an immediate one: to alleviate the plight of women who, because of economic and physical reasons, begged to know "the secret" of limiting the sizeof their families. She faced many obstacles -fear, lack of understanding and prejudicein her struggle to revise a law that banned the dissemination of birth-control information.

Her compassionate defiance of convention evenled to her arrest on October 26,1916, ten days after she opened the Brownsville Clinic.

She served thirty days in the prison workhouse because of this humanitarian act.

"I believed then, and do today," Mrs. Sanger wrote in her autobiography, My Fight for Birth Control, "that the opening of those doors to the mothers of Brownsville was an act of social significance in the lives of Amer-

ican women."

The achievements of Margaret Sanger, who was eighty-three at the time of her death last month, command the respect and appreciation of the world. This gallant lady lived to see her philosophy become part of the planning of governments, scientists and international organizations.

The force that shaped Mrs. Sanger's work was the misery she observed working as a nurse among indigent, large families. "I resolved," she said, "that women should have some knowledge of their own bodies, some knowledge of contraception .... You ask me how I could face all the persecution, the martyrdom, the opposition. I'll tell you how: I knew I was right. It was as simple as that, I knew I was right."

Although Margaret Sanger's interest in birth control-a term she coined-stemmed from her nursing career, circumstances of her childhood influenced her crusade. Born in Corning, New York, she was the sixth of eleven children of Michael and Ann Higgins.

She recalled that there were always debts and household bills, and a mother who grew more frail year by year. Mrs. Higgins, aged prematurely by childbearing and tuberculosis, died when she was forty-eight. Michael Higgins died when he was in his eighties.

"I can never look back on my childhood with joy," said Mrs. Sanger. "We often get together, my brothers and sisters and I, and laugh about things that happened then, but I never desire to live it over again. It was a hard childhood, which compelled one to face the realities of life before one's time .... " But red-headed Margaret developed from her father an independence of thinking and determination which was to colour her life.

Michael Higgins loved to preach, to argue, to thunder his opposition to all dogma. His own small library was one of the best in the town, and he demanded the privilege of books for all through free libraries. He supported the right of full individual liberty for women as well as men and defended the campaign for woman suffrage. "The one thing I've been able to give you is a free mind," he said to his children. "Use it well and give something back to your generation."

Margaret Sanger adhered to this advice; her achievements benefited not only her generation, but will benefit generations to follow.

Young Margaret's education began in the schools of Corning; later, she attended Claverack College in New York State. Her two older sisters helped with her college expenses, and she supplemented these funds by washing dishes and waiting on tables. Her natural ability to lead and organize was apparent during her college years, characteristics which were to dominate her campaign for birth control.

After a short term of teaching, Margaret was called home to nurse her dying mother.

She later began training as a nurse at the White Plains Hospital in New York, and then did graduate nursing work at the Manhattan Eye and Ear Hospital. There, the stage was set for her career and the cause that she was to found and develop.

Meanwhile, Margaret met her future husband, William Sanger, an architect, and was married on August 18, 1902. She had three children, two sons, and a daughter who died in childhood. Her sons, Stuart and Grant, are physicians today. Mr. and Mrs. Sanger were later divorced and she married J. Noah Slee, an oil company executive, in 1922.

At a time of social ferment, when the feminist cause was on the move, Margaret Sanger became restless. (She retained the name Sanger because of its identification with her campaign.) She decided to follow a nursing career, and became aware of the desperate situation of many of her women patients with large families and low incomes. "No woman," she wrote, "can call herself free until she can choose consciously whether she will or will not be a mother." In her fight to obtain this freedom, her main adversary was the restrictive Comstock law, under which information on birth control, sex and venereal disease were all labelled obscene.

When Mrs. Sanger began her crusade, her problem was a basic one-finding information on contraceptives. For months she researched libraries; she called on doctors and pharmacists, but they avoided her questions.

She refused to accept defeat.

Finally, a friend suggested asolution: travel to France where, traditionally, women had for generations passed on information about family limitation practices. In 1913, Mrs. Sanger embarked on her important mission, accompanied by her husband and children. Later, armed with her newly acquired information, she returned to the United States to strike a

Sanger firm blow against the Comstock law.

She p:lb!ished a magazine, The Woman Rebel, in which she used the phrase "birth control" for the first time. Because she could not publish contraceptive information, she wrote a message denouncing the law prohibiting it.

The magazine was banned from the mails within a month. Mrs. Sanger was warned that if she continued publication, she faced a possible five-year prison term and a $5,500 fine.

But Margaret Sanger was defiant. She continued publishing the magazine, which drew an overwhelming audience. She wrote a pamphlet, Family Limitation, and after a search, located a courageous individual who printed 100,000copies of it. (The pamphlet was later translated into thirteen languages, ten million copieswere printed, and thousands more were copied so that the information could be passed .fromhand to hand.) Mrs. Sanger was indicted but the charge against her was eventually dismissed. She had won the first battle in her campaign for birth control. And, for the first time, the subject became a topic for discussion in the press.

"It was as though I was born to this," she said later. "I could no more stop than I could change the colour of my eyes."

Meanwhile, Mrs, Sanger travelled to Europe again to obtain more information. It was The first birth-control clinic in U.S., located in Brownsville section of Brooklyn, New York, above, during these years that she saw the complete was opened by Mrs. Margaret Sanger on October 16,1916, to distribute information on family planning. picture, that the fight for birth control inTen days after opening Brownsville Clinic, Mrs. Sanger, left, and her sister, Ethel Byrne, shown in volved not only the needs of individuals, but a courtroom, were arrested for "maintaining a public nuisance" and sentenced to thirty days in jail. the health and economic status of nations.

She visited the Netherlands where the world's first birth-control clinic had been established by Dr. Aletta Jacobs in 1878. She conferred with Dr. Johannes Rutgers about birth control techniques and spent days studying statistics on birth and death rates and infant mortality.

"The facts were illuminating and the conclusions revealing," wrote Mrs. Sanger. "I glowed with fresh enthusiasm as this data proved that a controlled and directed birth rate was as beneficial as I had conceived it might be," Following her trip to the Netherlands, Mrs. Sanger opened the Brownsville Clinic in 1916.

She was determined that women in the United States would be instructed in birth-control techniques, and she was equally determined to test the law which prohibited that instruction. Unable to find a doctor who would head

"Always she made birth control not walks oflife. Following the conference, she es- advances in birth control.

Mrs. Sanger lived to see a constantly injust an instrument of science, but a tablished the American Birth Control League, outlining these goals: "To build up public creasing number of planned parenthood cenflame of hope," says her biographer.

the clinic, she operated it with the help of her sister, Ethel Byrne, also a registered nurse, and another woman, Fania Mindel.

Ten days following the opening of the clinic, Margaret Sanger and her sister were arrested for "maintaining a public nuisance" and sentenced to thirty days in jail. Mrs. Byrne gained nation-wide sympathy by going on a hunger strike in prison which led to her eventual release. Mrs. Sanger served her full thirtyday sentence rather than obey a law she considered unjust. .

"It is nohaggeration," recalled Mrs. Sanger, "to call this period in the birth-control movement the most stirring up to that time, perhaps the most stirring of all times. For it was the only period in which we had experiencedjail terms, hunger strikes .... It was the first time that there were any number of widespread demonstrations in our behalf. ... " The arrest laid the groundwork for court rulings which gave one section of the Comstock law a more favourable interpretationa physician could now give contraceptive advice to a married woman "for the prevention and cure of disease."

The court decision, issued in January 1918, was a major victory. Now Margaret Sanger wanted to deliver her message to women everywhere. Invitations to lecture came from all corners of the globe. Her travels took her to Europe, then to Japan, Korea, China, and to India in 1935. She toured eighteen cities in India and held dozens of conferences with city officials,medical societies and social workers.

"Always," writes Lawrence Lader in his book The Margaret Sanger Story, "she made birth control not just an instrument of science, but a flame of hope."

At home in the United States, Mrs. Sanger found that one phase of the battle was won, but that there were many others left to conquer. Physicians were slow to take advantage of the court decision and several groups denounced it. But the movement continued to grow and the number of Mrs. Sanger's supporters increased. "I was besieged with letters and messages," she said, "requesting me to speak at clubs, to debate in halls and to write for magazines."

In 1921, Mrs. Sanger organized the first American Birth Control Conference in New York, which was attended by leading physicians,. scierttists and supporters from many

opinion so that women should demand in- tres established throughout the United States. struction from doctors; to assemble the find- Today, the use of contraceptives is legal in all ings of scientists; to remove hampering Fed- of the fifty States of America and more than eral statutes; and to co-operate with similar thirty provide family-planning services.

The U.S. Government assists with familybodies in studying population problems, food supplies and world peace." The League, later planning activities principally through the disbanded, eventually led to the formation of Department of Health, Education and Welthe Planrted Parenthood Federation of Amer- fare (HEW). It supports local family planning ica, Incorporated. The Federation was later services through general health grants-in-aid merged with the World Population Emer- to States under a programme administered by gency Campaign and called Planned Parent- the U.S. Public Health Service; through a grant-in-aid programme for maternal and hood-World Population.

Another important milestone in the birth child health administered by the Children's control movement was the opening by Mrs. Bureau of the Welfare Administration, and Sanger ofa Bureau of Clinical Research in 1923 through the programme administered by the Bureau of Family Services of the Welfare Adin New York City, now called the Margaret Sanger Research Bureau. She started it as an ministration. The Office of Economic Opportunity also conducts community action proexperimental bureau designed to demonstrate the practicability of birth control clinics in all grammes involving birth control. In all cases, of America's cities and towns. She wanted it family services are initially requested by to become a social force and prove itself as a States or localities, and individuals avail themhealth centre. Actually, it was the first per- selves of services on a voluntary basis.

In addition, the Public Health Service supmanent birth-control clinic in the United States, fashioned after the short-lived Browns- ports medical research and research training on family planning, mainly through its Naville Clinic.

Using the New York City clinic as a tional Institutes of Health (NIH). Through model, birth -control clinics began to spring NIH, university training programmes and up throughout the United States. The second fellowships, the Public Health Service is helpclinic was established in Chicago, Illinois. By ing to increase the number of research scien1930 there were fifty-five birth-control clinics tists who are sufficiently skilled to work on in twenty-three cities in twelve States. Marg- population problems.

In the field of information concerning poparet Sanger's dream was being realized. The opening of this chain of clinics was a testa- ulation control, much has been accomplished ment to her unswerving devotion to a cause. in the United States and other countries. CenRecalling the opposition and the work in- sus-taking, compiling vital statistics, projectvolved, she said that those first years "remain ing future population trends and analysing the in my memory as ones of smiles and tears, of inter-relationship between future trends and economic and social development, are all conheartaches and anxieties."

All this is a far cry from the present time, tributing to the education of the public and when thousands of birth-control clinics have serving as a basis for developing programmes of action. There has been considerable rebeen established throughout the world.Today, because of their similar aims, governments of search on family-planning techniques to determine those which are acceptable and effective many nations are co-operating in promoting planned parenthood. Along with the United in different economic, social, cultural and religious environments.

Nations, private organizations, foundations Along with tax-supported family-planning and individuals, leaders of many countries are services in the United States, there are some devoting increased attention to the population problem. India's Prime Minister Indira 400 centres sponsored by 153 affiliated comGandhi, during her visit to the United States mittees of the Planned Parenthood-World last April, asserted that population control is Population (PPWP). Margaret Sanger was "at the core" of her people's "hopes and plans honorary chairman of PPWP, considered a leader in its field. It provides a wide range of for a better India."

Since Mrs. Sanger's struggle, there has services, including medically-approved conbeen tremendous progress in the development traceptive information, marriage education, of new contraceptive methods. Two of these, research in the field of human reproduction the oral pill and the Intra-Uterine Contra- and infertility treatment for the childless.

In PPWP's comprehensive annual report, ceptive Device (IUCD) represent significant

the organization notes that in 1965 "the pace of accomplishment notably quickened throughout the whole field of family planning." In the past year, Planned Parenthood centres increased fourteen per cent over 1964, and over the past five years, the number of people receiving services from these centres grew more than 150 per cent.

The Margaret Sanger Research Bureau, PPWP's national research centre, expanded its training programmes in the past year for physicians and nurses in the United States and other nations. Among its projects, the bureau tested the safety and effectiveness of new contraceptives and completed a clinical study of the practicability and acceptability of a new type of dispenser for oral contraceptive pills.

The existence and active programmes of these organizations are all a tribute to Margaret Sanger's pioneering efforts. In addition, she won many awards and honorary degrees for her significant achievements. In 1931, she received the American Woman's Award for "integrity, vision and valour," and in 1936 she was given the Town Hall Award of Honour for "conspicuous contribution to the enlargement and enrichment of life." The Albert and Mary Lasker Foundation honoured her for being "foremost in teaching families wise planning in birth control and being a leader in influencing nations towards balanced population."

The birth-control pioneer has been called "Humanist of the Year," "Woman of the Century," and was named in 1965 to the Women's Hall of Fame as one of the twenty outstanding women of the twentieth century.

At a testimonial dinner in 1965 which Mrs. Sanger was unfortunately unable to attend, Mrs. B. K. Nehru, wife ofIndia's Ambassador to the United States, paid tribute to the great humanitarian. She was a rebel, said Mrs. Nehru, who went to jail to win freedom for women because she believed in the unjustness of unwanted large families. "America is fortunate to have this little woman who has assured a healthy life to all mothers."

Margaret Sanger's work is done and others have now to meet the challenge in continuing the great movement that she founded.

"Her name will be held in honour in distant ages when the sounding exploits of soldiers and statesmen have faded to thin echoes," columnist Max Freedman wrote in a tribute to the great lady.

"Of her it can be said without paradox, that children yet unborn will call her blessed and keep her name sweet, for because of Margaret Sanger, they will be born with a more decent chance in life."

Present-day birth-control clinics in U.S. give family-planning information, present lectures, offer educational material on human reproduction. Above, a group of mothers attends a talk at an Iowa clinic.

The Sanger clinic was forerunner of planned family services, now supported by government and private organizations in U.S. Above, mothers and children await consultation in a 1921 birth-control centre.

Margaret Sanger visited many countries to obtain more information on family planning. In India, she lectured. conferred with doctors and met late Prime Minister Nehru. In background is Lady Rama Rau.

OFF TO COLLEGE SMILINGINTOthe sunshine for a final group picture, the high school graduates shown above are typical of the nearly one and a half million young Americans who are entering college this autumn. They begin the most important phase of their academic lives with enthusiasm tempered by caution, confidence mixed with concern. For the next four years they will need to work harder, be more alert and maintain more self-discipline than ever before. But they will also develop many new interests, learn to think for themselves and mould countless friendships that will last them a lifetime.

Each year, the crop of new freshmen enter-

ing universities across the land is better prepared than its predecessors. This year is no exception. Today's eighteen-year-olds were born during the postwar baby boom. Television, automation and the exploration of space developed as they grew. For more and more youngsters, education automatically included plans for college. And, as a result, the universities have swelled to capacity and beyond in just a few years.

Last year, there were more than 5.3 million students enrolled in some 2,000 institutions of higher learning and the number of freshmen exceeded the previous year by about twenty

per cent. This year's class of '70 is expected to outnumber last year's class by over ten per cent. According to the U.S. Office of Education, within the next decade a fifty per cent increase is anticipated-up to 1,834,000 freshmen in the class of '78.

Hand in hand with this education explosion are several distinct advantages and disadvantages. College building programmes and teacher training are accelerating in order to keep pace. A wide variety of colleges-differing in size, geographical location and curricula-awaits the student today. Universities range in enrolment from fewer than 100 students to more than 70,000, in location from Maine to Hawaii. But some schools are being inundated with five times more applications than there are openings, so that students are not always accepted by their first choice. Competition has become so great that the serious student is encouraged to start thinking as early as eighth grade about which university he would like to attend.

High schools are doing their part, too. Says one college administrator, "Incoming freshmen are stronger in mathematics and science.

They've achieved more in high school and they've had better guidance." Says another,

"They're more interested and more highly motivated." The influence of John F. Kennedy had a lot to do with this motivation for the young President awakened the youth of America to a new purpose and direction. Two extremes, the college bookworm and the social butterfly, are fast disappearing from today's campuses. The boy who yesterday tended to "bury" himself in his books today participates in extra-curricular activities and emerges a more well-rounded individual. The girl who considered college merely a place to meet a congenial husband, now buckles down to prepare herself for a job as well as marriage after graduation.

Greater responsibility rests with the college student today, and most of them welcome it.

As Harvard art major Howard Cutler puts it, "I think the great challenge of a college education is the responsibility of freedom. Whether or not the education one gets is the richest possible depends entirely on one's own initiative."

With each new academic year it becomes apparent that more students are showing that initiative, accepting that challenge and finding college the best training ground for the life ahead.

Lolly Adelman, a major in education, chose New

Ronald Desilets, a student of space engineering, York's Yeshiva University, founded in 1886, so was lured by the Georgia Institute of Technology's she could pursue her regular academic studies fine space programme. Growing up near Cape in an atmosphere of traditional Jewish culture. Kennedy strongly influenced his choice of study.

Pursuing their chosen fields of study, American students are finding college the best training ground for the life ahead.

Donald King, science major, finds non-academic pursuits at Harvard a rich experience. Despite a demanding curriculum, he joins in campus affairs and hopes to join Peace Corps before graduate school.

Howard Cutler, an art student, finds college full of variety and says: "At Harvard I am ill the midst of a very exciting atmosphere." Whell not studying, he explores historic Boston, Elizabethan music.

Linda Greer, below, student of biology at Kansas State College, ranks with the best and steadily makes the honour roll. Last summer, she took another giant step-marriage to a music student.

Tony Graham, agriculture student at Berea College, Kentucky, raised pigs, drove school bus to save money for education to fulfil his ambition to become agriculture teacher.

Phil Burk, below, drama major, is one of many students influenced by TV and by the late President Kennedy's active interest ill culture.

"We feel all the arts now have prestige," he says.

Helga Zirkel, above, enrnl/ed at Chicago Art Institute. wants to teach fine arts. "I want to be able to accomplish something, besides being a housewife," says Helga.

Marina Yon Eckardt studies voice and flute at Indiana University and spends most of time in class or practice. A lover of music, she found a new favourite in college-jazz.

AMERICA

TRANSFORMS ITSELF, 1900-1950

BY FREDERICK LEWIS. ALLEN.

In THE BIG CHANGE, one of the classic social histories of the United States, Frederick Lewis Allen sketched the dramatic changes which took place in American life during the first half of the 20th century. Editor MAGAZINE for many years, of HARPER'S Mr. Allen began his dissection of American manners and mores with ONLY YESTERDAY, an objective account of the free-wheeling 20's.

A decade later he wrote SINCE YESTERDAY, a study of the gfim '193Qs. Shortly before his death in 1954, he surveyed the half century in THE BIG CHANGE, a candid account of the dramatic forces which reshaped America.

A condensed version begins in this issue.

ON THE MORNINGof January I, 1900, there was skating for New Yorkers in Van Cortlandt Park, and presently it began to snow. But the sharp cold had not chilled the enthusiasm of the crowds who, the night before, had assembled in Lower Broadway to celebrate either the beginning of the twentieth century or the beginning of the last year of the nineteenth: there was some dIsagreement as to the proper interpretation of the event, but none as to the size and liveliness oUhe gathering.

In its leading editorial of January I, the New York Times sounded an optimistic keynote. "The year 1899 was a year of wonders, a veritable annus mirabilis, in business and production ... " it proclaimed.

Uptown, in the mahogany-panelled library of his big brownstone house at the corner of Madison Avenue and Thirty-sixth Street. John Pierpont Morgan. head of the mightiest banking house in the world and the most powerful man in all American business, sat playing solitaire as the old year drew to an end. During the next twelve months Morgan would begin negotiations with Andrew Carnegie-the twinkling little steel master whose personal income in 1900 would be over twenty-three million dollars, with no income tax to pay-for the formation of the United States Steel Corporation, the biggest corporation that the world had ever seen.

There wer~, to be sure, hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers for whom the city was hardly "a pleasant place in which to live." On the Lower East Side there were poverty, filth. wretchedness on a scale which to us today would seem incredibl~. And in many other cities and industrial towns of America the immigrant families were living under comparable conditions, or worse; for at a time when the average wage earner in the United States got hardly five hundred dollars in a year-roughly the equivalent of fifteen hundred at present prices-most of the newcomers to the country scrabbled for far less.

It was a time of complacency. Since the end of the depression of the mid-nineties the voices of protest at the disparities offortune in the United States had weakened. The once angry farmers of the Plains States were making out so well that in 1899 a traveller commented that "every barn in Kansas and Nebraska has had a new coat of paint." Not yet had the oncoming group of journalists, labelled "muckrakers," begun to publish their remorseless studies of the seamy sides of American life. American fiction, like American journalism, was going through what old Ambrose Bierce called a "weak and fluffy period."

Contrasts marked the U.S. at the turn of the century. The country's wealth was unevenly distributed; the great middle class which would dominate the 1950s had yet to appear. President McKinley, left, sat on the sidelines while business leaders J. P. Morgan, centre, and Andrew Carnegie, right, dominated the nation's economic life. But a change was coming, spearheaded by mass production of low cost automobiles and the income tax.

Morgan looked confidently forward to an era of stability and common sense, in which political leaders like Mark Hanna would see that no foolish equalitarian ideas got anywhere in government, and in which the regulation of American business would be undertaken, not by politicians, but by bankers like himself.

Out in Terre Haute, in an upstairs bedroom of a highceilinged, eight-room house, a tall, gaunt, bald-headed Hoosier looked out over the railroad tracks and dreamed a quite different dream of the future. Eugene V. Debs was a one-time locomotive fireman. He had led the Pullman strike in 1894, had served a term in prison, had consumed Marxist literature in his cell, and had become an ardent Socialist.

His exalted hopes were to take shape in the 1900 platform of the Social Democratic party, as whose candidate Debs would poll a meagre 96,000 votes.

But this was to be merely a beginning; had Debs but known it then, he was destined to have nearly a million followers by 1912. A friendly and merciful man with an insecure grasp of logic, Debs was hotly aware of the desperate plight of the immigrant workers, and he was sure he knew the one and only answer to their miseries. His platform called for public ownership of railroads, telegraphs, public utilities, and mines, and-somewhat more distantly-public ownership of the means of production and distribution generally. Nothing but this, thought Debs, would end the ind ustrial horrors and inequities of the day.

Both Morgan and Debs would have been bewildered had they been able to foresee what the next half century would bring to the nation: how a combination of varied and often warring forces would produce an America which would not only be utterly unlike the America of 1900, but also would be utterly unlike the picture in either man's mind; yet an America in which an astonishing productive capacity would be combined with the widest distribution of prosperity ever witnessed in the -.vor1d.

To understand the extent and nature of the big change that was to take place, we must first go back to 1900 and look about us-at the scene. the conditions oflife, the people.

First, the scene.

IF A NEATLYadjusted time machine could take you back to the Main Street of an American town in 1900, to look about you with your present-day eyes, your first exclamation would probably be, "But look at all those horses!"

For in that year 1900 there were registered in the whole United States only 13,824 automobiles (as compared with over forty-four million in 1950). And they were really few and far between except in the larger cities and the well-to-do resorts. For in 1900 everybody thought of automobiles as playthings of the rich-and not merely of the rich, but of the somewhat adventurous and sporting rich: people who enjoyed taking their chances with an unpredictable machine that might at any moment wreck them. There were almost no paved highways outside the cities, and of course there were no roadside garages or filling stations; every automobilist continued

The idea of sheltered ladies was difficult to maintain in a country where nearly onefourth of all women worked. must be his own desperate mechanic.

But horses were everywhere, pulling surreys, buggies, cabs, delivery wagons of every sort on Main Street, and pulling harvesters on the tractorless farms out in the countryside.

The sights and sounds and sensations of horse-and-carriage life were part of the universal American experience.

It is hard for us today to realize how very widely communities were' separated from one another when they depended for transportation wholly on the railroad and the horse and wagon-and when telephones were still scarce, and radios non-existent.

1900 was amply enveloped in material. Even for country wear, in fact even for golf or tennis, the skirt must reach within two or three inches of the ground, and a hat-usually a hard sailor hat-must almost imperatively be worn.

At any season a woman was swathed in layer upon layer of underpinnings-chemise, drawers, corset, corset cover, and one or more petticoats. The corset of those days was a formidable personal prison which did its strenuous best, with the aid of whalebones, to distort the female form into an hour-glass shape. Dresses almost invariably came in two pieces, and the discipline begun by the corset was reinforced by the bodice part of the dress, which was stiffened to complete the hour-glass effect.

As for the men, their clothes, too, were formal and severe by today's standards. Collars were high and stiff. The man of

A town which was not situated on a railroad was really remote. A farmer who lived five miles outside the county seat made something of an event of hitching up and taking the family to town for a Saturday afternoon's shopping.

(His grandchildren make the run in a casual ten minutes, and think nothing of it.) A trip to see friends ten miles away was likely to be an all-day expedition, for the horse had to be given a chance to rest and be fed. No wonder that each region, each town, each farm was far more dependent upon its own resources-its own produce, social contacts, amusements-than in later years. For in terms of travel and communication the United States was a very big country indeed.

No wonder, furthermore, that the majority of Americans were less likely than their descendants to be dogged by that frightening sense of insecurity which comes from being jostled by forces-economic, political, international-beyond one's personal ken. Their horizons were close to them. They lived among familiar people and familiar things-individuals and families and fellow townsmen much of their own sort, with ideas intelligible to them.

A man's success or failure seemed more likely than in later years to dltpend upon forces and events within his own range of vision. Less often than his sons and grandsons did he feel that his fortune, indeed his life, might hang upon some decision made in Washington or Berlin or Moscow, for reasons utterly strange to his experience. The world at which he looked over the dashboard of the family carriage might not be friendly, but at least most of it looked understandable. exclamation, if you found yourself on a Main Street sidewalk of 1900, would probably be, "But YOUR

SECOND

those skirts!"

For every grown woman in town would be wearing a dress that virtually swept the street; that would in fact actually sweep it from time to time, battering and begriming the hem, if its owner had not learned to hold it clear. From the high collar of her shirtwaist to the ground, the woman of

From the high collar of her shirtwaist to the grouncf, the woman of 1900 was amply enveloped in material.

affairs was likely to wear, even under his everyday sack suit (of three-button coat, obligatory waistcoat, and narrowish trousers), a shirt with hard detachable cuffs and perhaps a stiff bosom too. To go hatless, except in the wide open spaces, was for the well-dressed male unthinkable.

These implacable costumes, male and female, reflected the prevailing credo as to the relations between the sexes. The ideal woman was the sheltered lady, swathed not only in silk and muslin but in innocence and propriety, and the ideal man, whether a pillar of rectitude or a gay dog, virtuously protected the person and reputation of such tender creatures as were entrusted to his care. If unmarried, a girl must be accompanied by a chaperone whenever she ventured out to an evening's entertainment in the city. If she were a daughter of the rich, a maid might take the place of the chaperone; it was never quite clear, under these circumstances, who was supposed to protect the maid's virtue.

The chaperone was, to be sure chiefly an urban institution. In the smaller places, especially west of the Alleghenies, and among city people vacationing in the country, the rules were greatly relaxed.

But throughout these companionships one might almost say that an imaginary chaperone was always present. What was operating was in effect an honour system: these boys and girls knew they were expected to behave with perfect propriety towards one another, and only rarely did they fail to do so The boys preferred to think of "nice" girls of their own class in other terms, and tinder their code, a kiss ,was virtually tantamount to a proposal of marriage.

The idea of the sheltered lady was of course difficult to maintain in a country in which 20.4 per cent of the female population were engaged in working for a living. This unhappy fact of life caused the moralists of the day deep concern. If there was a steadily increasing number of women working in offices, it was understood that they were victims of unfortunate financial circumstance; their fathers, poor fellows, were unable to support them properly; and it was hoped that their inevitable contacts with rude men of business would not sully their purity.

If unhappy circumstances forced a "nicely brought up" young woman to work for a living, a career as schoolteacher, or music teacher, or trained nurse was considered acceptable for her. If she had the appropriate gift she might become a writer or artist or singer, even an opera singer. Some went on the stage; but at the grave risk of declassing themselves, for actresses were known to be mostly "fast."

There were pioneers who, with flaming intensity, took up other careers-as doctors, for instance-against every sort of opposition; but it was an unusual community in which they were not considered unfeminine cranks for doing so, and one of the most telling arguments marshalled against their decision was that a girl who set out to earn money was selfishly causing her father needless embarrassment: somebody might think that he couldn't support her. By common consent the best-and safest-thing for a girl to do was to sit at home and wait for the "right man." j

You COULD NOT travel far, on your return to the America of 1900, without noticing how much smaller the cities and towns were. For in that year the population of the continental United States was just about half what it would be fifty years later-a little less than seventy-six millions as against a little more than 150 millions in 1950. And although you would find open fields where there are now villages, and villages which have since grown into towns, it would be in the cities and their suburbs that the contrast would be most striking.

The thinness of the western population would remind you how much farther east, in those days, was the centre of gravity of American industry and American cultural institutions; even in the eastern cities you would miss many of the commonplace features of modern city life. Skyscrapers, for instance: the tallest building in the country was the Ivins Syndicate Building on Park Row in New York, which rose twenty-nine storeys, with towers which brought its utmost altitude to 382 feet. Not yet did visitors to New York remark upon the "famous skyline." And in other cities a ten- or twelve-storey building was a thing of wonder.

As for'public transportation in the cities, there was only one completed subway, a short one in Boston, though in New York ground was broken for another during 1900; and if New York and Chicago had their thundering elevated railroads (New York was just electrifying its line, which had previously run by steam), most urban Americans got about town in trolley cars, the screaming of whose wheels, as they rounded a corner, seemed to the countryman the authentic note of modern civilization.

Each city had its outlying residential areas, within walking distance of the railroad or trolley lines: long blocks of single-family or two-family houses, rising bleakly among the vacant lots and fields; comfortable lawn-surrounded houses for the more prosperous. And there were many commuters who made a cindery railroad journey to work from suburban towns. But those outlying towns were quite different from what they were to become in the automobile age. For only if one could be met at the station by a horse and carriagewhich was inconvenient unless one could afford a coachman-or was an exceptionally hardy pedestrian, wasit practicable to live more than a mile or so from the railroad or trolley.

So the suburbs were small, and backed by open country.

Nothing would have been more incredible to the commuter of 1900 than the notion that within a generation the field and woods in which he went walking on a Sunday would be studded with hundreds of suburban cottages, all easily accessible in a motorized age.

There was still lots of room to play in America-thousands of miles of shoreline, hundreds of lakes and rivers, hundreds of mountains, which you could explore to your heart's content, camping and bathing and hunting and fishing without asking anybody's permission, if you could only somehow reach them. Already there were far-sighted conservationists pointing out that for generations Americans continued

A nation of individualists in 1900 was moving into an age of interdependence-and was slow to recognize the fact. had been despoiling the land while subduing it; that forests were being hacked to pieces, farm land misused and overused, natural resources plundered right and left; and that national parks would be needed, both to conserve these resources and to give the people room to play. But to most people such warnings just didn't make sense. If lumbermen destroyed one forest, there were others to enjoy; if cottagers bought up one beach, there were others open to any bathers.

The bounties of nature seemed inexhaustible.

To the city-bred children of that time, the farmers they met in the country seemed a race apart, foreign in everything but language. And why shouldn't they have been? With no automobiles, no radio, no rural free delivery, no big mass circulation magazines; with, in many places, no access to any schooling but the most elementary; .and with rare chances, if any, to travel to a city, they were imprisoned in rural isolation. If, as we have already noted, the world they saw about them was moved by more understandable and therefore less terrifying forces than those which impinged upon their descendants, it was also unbelievably more limited.

As YOU CONTINUED your investigation of the United States of 1900 you would find yourself, again and again, struck by the lack, or the shortage, of things which today you regard as commonplace necessities.

Electrical services and devices, for instance. Most of the city houses of the really prosperous were now electrified; but the man who was building a new house was only just beginning to install electric lights without adding gas, too, lest the current fail suddenly. And the houses of the great majority were still lighted by gas (in the cities and t()wns) or oil lamps (in the country).

Of course there were no electric refrigerators-to say nothing of washing machines and deep-freeze units. Farmers -and summer cottagers-had icehouses in which big cubes of ic!;, cut during the winter at a neighbouring pond or river, or imported by ship from north to south, lay buried deep in sawdust. When you needed ice, you climbed into the icehouse, scraped the sawd ust away from a fine hunk of ice, and carried it in your ice tongs to the kitchen icebox. If you lived in the city, the ice company's wagon showed upat the door and the iceman stowed a huge cube in your icebox.

For a good many years there had been refrigerator cars on the railroads, but the great national long-distance traffic in fresh fruits and vegetables was still in its infancy; and accordingly the prevailing American diet would have shocked deeply a visitor from 1950. In most parts of the United States people were virtually witho'ut fresh fruit and green

vegetables from late autumn to late spring. During this time they consumed quantities of starches, in the form ¡of pies, doughnuts, potatoes, and hot bread, which few would venture to absorb today. The result was that innumerable Americans were in sluggish health during the months oflate winter and early spring; when their diet was short of vitamins.

By the turn of the century running water, bathtubs, and water closets were to be found in virtually all the townhouses of the prosperous, though many a fine house on a fashionable street still held only one bathroom. But not only did factory workers and farmers (except perhaps a few owners of big farms) still not dream of enjoying such luxuries, but even in the gracious houses of well-to-do people beyond the reach of city water lines and sewer lines, there was likely to be no bathroom at all. They washed with pitcher and basin in their bedrooms, each of them pouring his dirty water from the basin into a slop jar, to be emptied later in the day; and after breakfast they visited the privy behind the house.

At a luxurious hotel you might, if you paid extra, get a room with private bath, but not until 1907 did Ellsworth M. Statler build in Buffalo, New York, the first hotel which offered every guest a room and private bath.

As a visitor from the nineteen-fifties to the era of the cast-iron bathtub it might or might not occur to you that personal cleanliness was not so readily achieved then as in your own time, and that if the Saturday-night bath offered to millions of Americans their only weekly immersion in warm water, this was chiefly because bathrooms were few and far between.

Telephones, in 1900, were cl umsy things and comparatively scarce; they were to be found chiefly in business offices and in the houses of such well-to-do people as enjoyed experimenting wi'th new mechanical devices. In the whole country there were only 1,335,911 of them-as compared with over 43,000,000 at the end of 1950.

As for the instruments of mass communication which, in the years to come, were to do so much to provide Americans of all classes and conditions with similar information, ideas, and interests, these too were almost wholly lacking. There would be no radio for another twenty years; no television, except fora very limited audience, for over forty-five years.

Crude motion pictures were occasionally to be seen at vaudeville theatres, or in peep-show parlours. but the first movie which told a story, The Great Train Robbery, was still three years in the future.

There was as yet no magazine with a circulation of over a million. Already the days were ending when a group of splendid and sedate periodicals designed for polite reader~ with intellectual tastes-such as The Century, Harper's, and Scribner's-had dominated the maga1.ine field. Munsey and Curtis and McClure had begun to show that many readers could be attracted by magazines which offered less literary but more hu~an al1d popular fare, and that such magazines could as a result attract lucrative advertising. But although Cyrus Curtis had pushed the circulation of his Ladies' Home Journal to 850,000, he had only just begun his

extraordinary demonstration of the way in which popular magazines could serve as a medium for national advertising on a huge scale. H is Saturday El'ening Post had only 182,000 readers in 1900, and an advertising revenue oJ only $6,933.

Accordingly there were sharp limits to the fund of information and ideas which people of all regions and all walks of life held in common. To some extent a Maine fisherman, an Ohio farmer, and a Chicago businessman would be able to discuss politics with one another. but in the absence of syndicated newspaper columns appearing from coast to coast their information would be based mostly upon what they had read in very divergent local newspapers, and in the absence both of the radio and of newsreels it is doubtful if any of them-except perhaps the Chicago businessmanhad ever heard with his own ears the silver voice of William Jennings Bryan. There was no such common denominator of acquaintance as there would be in 1950.

And if the instruments of mass communication were lacking, so also were many social institutions which today Americans take for granted. A nation of individualists, accustomed to the idea that each person must fend for himself as an independent unit, was moving into an age of inter dependence but was still slow to recognize the fact and slow to organize the institutions which such an age required. Consider, for example, what a small Midwestern town had to offer a boy by way of recreation and educational opportunity. Tradition said that boys must find their own chances for recreation~swimming at the old swimming hole of hal-

lowed legend, playing baseball in the open fields, hunting and fishing in the neighbouring woods and streams. But already industrialism was contaminating the rivers, the open country was being built up and cultivated, the natural playgrounds were being despoiled-and few substitute diversions had been provided.

It seems to be a continuing characteristic of American life that communities perpetually fail to catch up institutionally with their own growth; at any rate, it was glaringly true that the American town of 1900 had failed to adapt itself to the necessities of the onrushing industrial age.

IN THE DEVELOPMENT of organized sports there was the same sort of lag. The frontier tradition and the old American individualism died hard. Most American boys and men were still expected to get their active amusement on a catchas-catch-can basis out in the open countryside-hunting, fishing, swimming, riding-or to get it out of contests (such as target-shooting) which grew directly out of the conditions of the open countryside. Baseball had long been the national game and millions of boys had learned to play it, but mostly on local sandlots, from which, if proficient, they might graduate to play on the town team against a neighbouring town.

As for girls, t~e traditional idea was that they were too weak, or at any rate too proper, to engage in such rough goings-on. Organized games which required special costumes and equipment were mostly considered affectations of the rich, and to the average small-town American any such

continued Boys found their own recreation. A fal'ourite was swimming at the old swimming hole of hallowed tradition.

Andrew Carnegie's income in 1900 was 20 thousand times greater than that of the average American worker. notion as that of offering "supervised play" for boys and girls would have been quite bewildering.

Already this old-time tradition was breaking down. Organized games were gro'wing rapidly in the schools and colleges: football, baseball (which was a college sport with much more prestige then than later), rowing, track, and on a minor scale soccer and lacrosse. Among the games which older people, too, could enjoy, golf and tennis were spreading fast in popularity; a considerable number of people bowled; and men and women by the hundreds of thousands bicycled for recreation. But as we look back on the sports of those days, the most striking thing is the extent to which they centred in the east-and also were still regarded as the prerogative of the well-to-do.

Even if one makes allowance for a certain degree of condescension on the part of eastern chroniclers, the evidence is overwhelming that at the turn of the century athletic sports centred in the east and that the public thought of them as surrounded by an aura of fashion. Far ahead were the days of tennis champions from municipal courts, golf champions from the public links, expert college teams playing in huge stadiums so numerously that no one selecting an All-American eleven could see more than a few of the best ones play; Californians moving into the top ranks in sport after sport; high-school basketball teams organized by the thousands from one end of the country to the other; and Americans of both sexes, to the estimated number of well over ten millions, enjoying at least an occasional evening of bowling.

Grandeur, Limited OF ALL THE contrasts between American life in 1900 and half a century or more later, perhaps the most significant is in the distance between rich and poor-in income, the way of living, and status in the community. At the turn of the century the gulf between wealth and poverty was immense.

One illustration may help to point the contrast. I have already mentioned Andrew Carnegie's income. During the per cei1t of year 1900 Carnegie owned fifty-eight-and-a-half the stock of his great steel company. That year it made a profit of forty million dollars. Carnegie's personal gain that year, whether or not he took it in dividends, was therefore well over twenty-three million dollars-with no income taxes to pay. During the five years 1896-1900 his average annual income, computed on the same basis, was about ten millions.

And these figures include no other income which he may have had from any other property.

At the time that Carnegie was enjoying this princely income, tax free, the average annual wage of all American

workers was somewhere in the neighbourhood of four or five hundred dollars; one economic calculator has arrived at a figure of $417 a year, another makes it $503. Remember that these figures are averages, not minimum incomes. â&#x20AC;˘ In short, Andrew Carnegie's annual income was at least twenty thousand times greater than that of the average American workman.

There you have the basic contrast. Andrew Carnegie was one of the very wealthiest men of his day, but many others had incomes in the millions. And their way oflife showed it.

Let us take a look at this way of life.

To begin with, they built themselves palatial houses.

During the last twenty years of the nineteenth century, when a great many American millionaires had decided that the thing for a rich man to do was to build himself a princely mansion, it had been the Vanderbilt family who had set the pace for the rest to follow. By the middle eighties there were no less than seven great Vanderbilt houses within the space of seven blocks on the west side of Fifth Avenue.

William H. Vanderbilt's and the pair of houses he built for his daughters Mrs. Shepard and Mrs. Sloane conformed outwardly, in everything but scale, to the New York brownstone tradition; but William H.'s contained a bewildering variety of statues, paintings, tapestries, and urns from all over-English, French, German, Japanese. For a pattern was forming: the American millionaire wanted to live like a prince; and since princes were foreign, and princely culture was likewise foreign, he must show his princeliness by living among foreign furnishings and foreign works of art, in as great variety and profusion as could be managed.

The William K. Vanderbilt house and the Cornelius Vanderbilt house carried the idea a step further. They abandoned the New York brownstone and New York exterior aspect.

For William K., Richard Morris Hunt designed a limestone castle that was reminiscent of the Chateau of Blois and even more so of the fifteenth-century French mansion of Jacques Coeur at Bourges; for Cornelius, George B. Post provided a brick-and-stone chateau that likewise carried people's minds ba~k to Blois. Both were splendid buildings, ornaments to Fifth Avenue, but their foreignness amused the architect Louis Sullivan, who felt that houses should harmonize with the lives of the people who lived in them.

No such misgivings as these troubled the Vanderbilts, nor did they let anything stint their zeal for grandeur. Subsequently, the family fortune went also into the building of several massive Newport houses, of which the most immense was Cornelius Vanderbilt's The Breakers, which resembled an oversized Italian villa, and the most dazzling was William K.'s Marble House, the construction, decoration, and fur-

* To translate these figures into the terms of 1950 one must make allowance for the dwindling value of the dollar. For convenience I shall assume in this book that the 1900 dollar bought three times as much as the 1950 one, which is at least close to the reality. Translate the wages of 1900 into these terms and we find that the average 1900 wage, in terms of what it would buy in 1950, was somewhere in the neighbourhood of $1,200 to $1,500-which looks considerably less appalling than $400 to $500.

nishing of which was alleged to have cost some eleven millions. But the champion of all the turn-of-the-century chateaux was George W. Vanderbilt's ducal palace at Asheville, North Carolina, which he called Biltmore.

Biltmore, too, was French, designed by Hunt after the manner of the great castles of the Loire. It was surrounded by an estate which gradually grew until it covered some 203 square miles, giving Vanderbilt ample scope to exercise his interest in scientific farming and forestry. To serve as his director of forestry, Vanderbilt hired a young man named Gifford Pinchot, who was enabled to offer what a standard work on American forestry calls "the first practical demonstration of forest management on a large scale in America."

J. Sterling Morton, U.S. Secretary of Agriculture in the middle nineties, regarded Vanderbilt's experimental work in agriculture and forestry with admiration not unmixed with envy. "He employs more men than I have in my charge," said Secretary Morton. "He is also spending more money than Congress appropriates for this Department."

No wonder a chronicler of the time reflected that "what with the six or seven great New York houses of the Vanderbilt family, and their still larger numbers of country estates, it could plausibly be argued that among them they have invested as much money in the erection of dwellings as any of the royal families of Europe, the Bourbons alone excepted."

AT SEVERAL houses in New York and Newport the hostesses prided themselves on being able to serve dinner for a hundred or more people on a few hours' notice-a feat which

The champion of all turn-oFthe century chateaux was G. W. Vanderbilt's ducal palace, Biltmore.

required, of course, a profusion of servants. But servants were not lacking: in some country houses they might number fifty or sixty in all, including the gardeners, chauffeurs, and grooms, and they were organized in a hierarchy of their own, English fashion.

If my mention of people's being able to serve dinner to a hundred guests on short notice suggests some sort of casserole operation, be assured that there was nothing casual about a fashionable dinner at the turn of the century. The internal capacity of the prosperous of those days was prodigious. Seven or eight courses were likely to be served, with a variety of wines. In my life of Pierpont Morgan I printed the menu of a dinner enjoyed by the members of the Zodiac Club, a private dining club in New York. It is a little hard today to be sure, from that menu, which dishes were served as alternate choices and which constituted separate courses for all, but it appears to have been a ten-course feast: oysters, soup, hors d'oeuvres, soft clams, saddle and rack of lamb, terrapin, canvasback ducks, a sweet, cheese, and fruit -the dinner being preceded by sherry (instead of cocktails), accompanied successively by Rhine wine, Chateau-Latour, champagne, and Clos- Vougeot, and washed down with cognac (along with the coffee).

IN THOSEDAYSthe word Society (with a capital S) carried much more definite connotations than it would today. In every community, probably, and in any generation, there is social emulation: there are certain families, or certain individuals, association with whom will seem to other people to

The Iron Law of Wages: All wages tend to fall to the level which the most unskilful or desperate man will accept. number them among the elect. You will find this emulation in its most acute form today in the fraternity systems of some colleges; in adult communities the lines are less inexorably drawn. The smaller and less fluid the community, the clearer this phenomenon is likely to be; in larger cities, and in suburban communities where there is a constantly changing population, it is usually confused and obscured.

One may find a great variety of groups, such as the old, tradition-bound leading families; the fashionable group; the newly prosperous who are not yet admitted to fashionable standing; the well-bred professional people and intellectuals who touch these other groups but do not quite belong to them; the earnest business people who are pillars of the churches and charities; the second rank of business people who live comfortably but have little traffic with these other groups; and so on through the whole vaguely defined spectrum-the pattern being sharply modified in each community by factors of national origin and of religious, professional, and business association. What was striking about the social pattern of 1900, as we look back upon it today, was that in most communities it was much clearer and simpler, the stratifications more generally recognized; and especially that they were generally taken much more seriously than they are today.

And while the socially established were striving to hold the ranks of Society intact against the inroads of the new rich, the new rich in their turn were striving even more furiously to gain recognition by irresistibly lavish but carefully correct entertaining.

The same sort of drama was going on in other cities the country over: there was the same eagerness for admission to the gatherings of the socially elect, whether these were assemblies, cptiIIions, sewing circles, the gatherings of some local association, or a leading family's annual ball. It continues today, of course, in somewhat altered forms; the difference is that today comparatively few people take the drama seriously .as involving social ranking, and that the whole phenomenon is complicated by the preferences of news photographers, gossip columnists, television audiences, and publicity-hungry restaurateurs and entertainers.

In 1900 Society was Society indeed. It was scornful of public entertainers. It was scornful of the attentions of the press; indeed, there were fathers who told their sons that "a gentleman's name appeared in the papers only three times: when he was born, when he was married, and when he died."

And it was confident that it represented what was most patrician, most brilliant, and most important in American life.

That is one of the explanations for the international

marriages between American heiresses and foreign noblemen that were so frequent in those days. The first important otie had taken place in the eighteen-seventies between Jennie Jerome of New York and Lord Randolph Churchill (it had produced one of the great men of a future day, Winston Churchill). By the nineties they were becoming epidemic. In McCall's magazine for November 1903, there was a list of fifty-seven of them to date, including the match between Miss Mary Leiter and Lord Curzon.

For this spate of international marriages there were two reasons. One of them was that to a Prince or Duke or Count it was very agreeable to get both a charming girl and a lot of money. And sometimes there was nothing conjectural about the money.

Yet there was another reason for such alliances. The American girl's parents felt that a noble wedding set upon them the authentic stamp of aristocracy. What if the country was traditionally a democracy and its Constitution decreed that "no title of nobility shall be granted by the United States"? There were, of course, wealthy and socially impeccable Americans who took these traditions seriously and regarded the collecting of ducal sons-in-law with amused contempt; but there were others who felt that in truth the people of the United States constituted a social pyramid, with Society at its apex, a peerage in all but name; and that if the families of this peerage intermarried with the lords of other lands, the alliances gave recognition of their true worth.

Just as some Americans of wealth, for all their patriotism, felt that the best art and culture were European, so they recognized that the insignia of aristocracy, too, were European-and equally worth embracing. It was good to feel sure one belonged to the American nobility.

SOMEWHAT BELOWthese Himalayan heights of affluence there were hundreds of thousands of Americans who might have been classified as rich, prosperous, or well-to~do-ranging from the families of the less glitteringly successful manufacturers, merchants, and businessmen, and the top-of-theheap professional men, down the income scale to the families of, let us say, minor business executives, shopkeepers, runof-the-milllawyers and doctors, and the better-paid professors and ministers. Naturally any group so inclusive and illdefined as this represents at any time such a great diversity of occupations, incomes, and modes of life that to generalize about it is risky.

Yet for all their variety, most of the members of this group-which we might very loosely identify as the upper middle class-did have one thing in common, as we look back at them today. Though many of them suffered intermittently from acute financial worry, their general position seems to people of similar status today to have been amply comfortable.

A further advantage these people undoubtedly had over their comparably circumstanced grandchildren. They had more room to turn round in.

Because wages in the building trades-and the costs of

building materials-were much lower than today, they could live in much larger quarters. Because servants' wages were much lower and candidates for servants' jobs were in abundance, they could staff these larger quarters amply. Furthermore they were spared many of the expenses which most of their des~endants take as a matter of course: the cost of an automobile (much greater than that of a horse and carriage); the cost of such extra gadgets as electric refrigerators, washing machines, radios, television sets, or what not; the cost of a college education for children of both sexes; and very likely the cost of an extra home for week-end or summer use.

So the man whose salary now would command a rather cramped apartment might then have occupied a house which today would seem grandly large.

Wherever you may live today, you probably know some street which at the turn of the century was the abode of the prosperous and which has not been wholly rebuilt since then.

As you walk along it, you may wonder how anybody with an income ofless than princely size could have afforded to live in one of those big houses (most of which have probably been broken up into apartments within the past generation).

You may be sure that some of these houses were occupied in 1900 by families with incomes of well under ten thousand dollars a year-the equivalent of forty thousand or less before taxes in 1950. This is a handsome income, but it won't command in the nineteen-fifties anything like so much space on the finest street of a big city. How did these families manage?

Here are some of the answers. Some of the clothes for the women of the family were bought ready-made in the stores, or were made by professional dressmakers who had their own establishments, but the chances are that most of them were run up at home by dressmakers and seamstresses.

Even when one added the cost of materials bought by the yard, clothes thus made were not expensive. This family probably owned no carriage, but got about on foot and by trolley-or, in bad weather, by hired cab.

The head of the house would probably have been outraged if his daughter had even thought of taking a job: wasn't he able to support her? But on the other hand he saved money' on her education. She would go to a private school, but in all probability not to college, though her brother would be sent to college as a matter of course, and perhaps would go to boarding school as well.

With these various savings such a family would be able to live a life of spacious and well-served comfort. And because the house was so large, they would accumulate more possessions-furniture, rugs, ornaments, pictures, books, china, silver-than their grandchildren would ever dream of burdening themselves with.

The pattern varied endlessly, of course, by communities and according to individual taste. Even in a row of almost identical houses, the scale and manner of living were anything but standardized; in order to underline the contrast with present conditions, I have been describing the living scheme of the sort of people who preferred space and service

to other comforts. Wages and prices tended to be lower in the smaller communities, and wages in particular were still lower in the south. Well-to-do families in the west were less likely to send their children to private schools than their counterparts in the east. But this was the general nature of life among the comfortably prosperous.

Elderly people who look back today upon childhoods lived under any of the circumstances which I have just been describing sometimes regard them with nostalgia. Life seems to have been much simpler in its demands then, and certain of the amenities seem to have been much more accessible.

It was easier then than now, these people feel, to maintain a sense of the identity of the family. People who live in ample houses are better able to take care of old or invalid or ineffective relatives than families with less space.

Indeed it is quite possible that part of the social security problem of our time-the widely expressed need for pensions, medical insurance, unemployment insurance, etc.arises out of the fact that many families no longer can shelter those whom they used to consider their dependantsgrandma, who used to have a third-floor room, or eccentric Cousin Tom, who was tucked away in the ell. (Part of the problem today, of course, results from what inflation has done to savings, and still more of it is a product of the revolution in social concepts which this book is attempting to outline.) Even when one makes every allowance for the many good things of today which the prosperous of 1900 (and those who approximated their way of life) had to go without, one must admit that there is a basis for the nostalgia. Space and service add up to a good deal.

Yet we must remember that the well-to-do family's ample life in their big house was made possible by the meagre wages of the maids who lived in narrow rooms at the very top of the house, four flights above the level on which they did most of their interminable work; by the meagre wages of dressmakers and seamstresses, of the carpenters and masons who had built the house, of the workers in factories and stores who produced and sold the goods they used; and that the space and service which were at the disposal of even the well-to-do family were likewise made possible by low wages. There is another side to be looked at.

Let us travel clear to the other side of the economic and social spectrum-by-passing on the way the majority of the Americans of 1900-and take a glance at life as it was lived by the under-privileged.

The Other Side of the Picture days of the factory system in England, David Ricardo enunciated the grim principle which he called the Iron Law of Wages; the principle that all wages tend to fall to the level which the most unskilful or most desperate man will accept. In pre-industrial times this law had not often operated unchecked. The prince, or the baron, or the squire, or the neighbours had tended to look after those who by reason of incompetence or illness or adversity were in want.

And in the United States of pre-industrial days, men and

IN THE EARL Y

continued

Labour unions existed in peril of law which upheld the notion that wages were a private affair between employer and employee. women who were in cruel straits-whose crops had failed, or whose trade was dwindling, or whose family store had gone broke-had at least been able to go on working, for whatever pittance they could command, or could move on elsewhere to try again. But the coming of industrialism had brought a change, in America as well as in Europe.

For when a man built a mill or factory, around which there grew up a mill village or factory town, those who came to work for him were in great degree imprisoned by their choice. They did not own the tools with which they worked, and therefore were dependent upon what employment the mill offered; and anyhow there was not enough work in such a community for all who would be looking for it if the mill shut down. And if their wages were really low they could not afford to look elsewhere for jobs. So they ceased to be free agents. They were at their employer's mercy. The code of conduct of the day did not require him to feel any responsibility for what happened to them. And the Iron Law really went into action.

Likewise in a city slum into which there flowed a steady stream of newcomers from abroad-almost penniless peo-

pie, ignorant, inexpert, often friendless, and unable to speak the language of the country-men and women were likewise imprisoned by circumstance. Theoretically there were all manner of occupations open to them; theoretically they were dependent upon no single employer. But in practice poverty, limited skills, and ignorance kept them-the great majority of them-where they were, year after year, to battle fiercely for chances to earn a living, and to accept whatever miserable wage was offered to them. Here too the Iron Law ruled.

Nowhere in the United States, in the middle years of the nineteenth century, had the Iron Law brought quite such abominations as it had produced in England, where the wages, hours of work, and sanitary conditions in the new industrial towns and the mining areas had been a stench in the nostrils of decency; but in all conscience they had been bad enough. For in the second quarter of the nineteenth century wages had fallen in the mill towns of New England until by 1850 whole families were labouring at the machines for three or four dollars a week per worker; a twelve-hour day was average, and a fourteen-hour day was not unusual; there were even children of what we would consider secondary school age who had to spend the hours from five o'clock in the morning till eight o'clock at night-with half an hour off for breakfast and half an hour for dinner-six days a week, in an ill-lighted, ill-ventilated factory, foregoing sunshine, education, and health itself to keep the family alive; all this even if the employer was raking in high profits.

It had been conditions such as these, appearing wherever

the new industrial capitalism seemed to be making its most active forward progress, that had prompted Karl Marx to see if he could not invent a different system.

During the latter half of the nineteenth century, industrialism had advanced with mighty strides in the United States. A remarkable series of inventions and technological improvements had sparked its progress. By 1900 what had formerly been a land mostly of farmers and villagers had become a land increasingly of cities and roaring industrial towns; and comforts, conveniences, and wealth had so piled up that it almost seemed as if a whole new world had been invented for people to work and play in. But the wealth still tended to flow into a few people's pockets.

During most of this incredible half century, to be sure, the general standard of living in the United States had happily shown considerable improvement. Prosperity had tended to sift down through the ranks of society and to improve the conditions of life for the great majority of Americans. Although there had been some improvement in the lot of the workers following the depression of 1897, there was no further gain in the trend of what the economists call "real wages," which is to say wages as measured against prices. What was happening to prevent the new wealth which the millionaires were so happily raking in, and from which millions of Americans in the middle eC0nomic ranks were directly or indirectly benefiting, from percolating all the way down to the lower levels of society?

One thing that was happening was that the good American land was filling up. Traditionally, when the American working-man's position had become intolerable, he could always go west-if he could raise the cash to go. The west had been the land of new hope, not only for men of adventurous ambition, but also for the discards of industrialism.

But now the frontier was closed, and though there were still chances for a man to arrive in the west with nothing and then to achieve comfort, these chances seemed to be dwindling.

And a second thing that was happening was that the United States was continualiy importing a proletariat of such size, and such limited employability for the time being, that the labour. market in the large cities and industrial towns was glutted and the wage level was held down.

Throughout most of the nineteenth century this proletariat had been coming across the Atlantic. For a time it had been mostly Irish: in the eighteen-forties and -fifties it had been the Irish who were the diggers of ditches, the builders of levees, the mill workers who laboured twelve or thirteen or fourteen hours a day for a microscopic wage.

Then, as the Irish began to better themselves, the Italians had begun to pour in. And then, increasingly, the Jews and Slavs of Eastern Europe. As each group arrived, it tended to form a proletarian level under the previous one. (Always at or near the bottom, in menial and ill-paid jobs, remained our Negro population, slaves no longer, but condemned nevertheless to a servitude of ignorance and exclusion from opportunity.)

Little. by little, most of the members of these foreign groups caught the contagion of freedom and ambition in the American air and began to lift themselves out of poverty.

But as they did so, their places on the lowest economic level were taken by still newer immigrants, lured from Europe by the glowing reports (sometimes fictitious) of relatives and fellow townsmen who had preceded them, or by the bright promises held out by industrial agents. So fast did they come that they filled up the slums of New York and Boston and Philadelphia and Chicago, and the factory towns of New England and Pennsylvania and Ohio, more rapidly than American opportunity could drain them off.

During the single year 1900, the number of immigrants who arrived was 448,572; during 1901 it was 487,918; the figure kept on rising until in 1907 it reached a peak of 1,285,349. Here was irony indeed: so brightly did the Goddess of Liberty's lamp glow, with its promise of hope to the dispossessed of many lands, that the very numbers in which they answered its invitation tended to keep the wage level down, not only for these new arrivals but for native-born Americans as well, and delayed the modification of the Iron Law. But, one may ask, what about those traditional foes of the Iron Law, the labour unions? The answer is that they were few and-except in a few favoured crafts-weak; that they existed in peril of the law, which in general upheld the notion that what an employer chose to pay a man, and what that man chose to accept, were those two men's business and nobody else's; and that they were generally viewed by the rest of the public with fear and dislike.

In 1900 the total trade union membership came to 868,500; of these, the unions in the American Federation of Labour (AF of L) claimed 548,321. In a few successfully organized trades, such as the cigar makers', their pressures had pushed wages up. The head man of the AF of L was a cigar maker himself, Samuel Gompers, a thick-set, strongjawed, wide-mouthed man with unruly hair and rimless pince-nez glasses who took a strictly limited view of the aims which the unions under his influence should pursue.

In his youth Gompers had learned German in order to read the works of Marx; but since then lie had seen American unionism so often weakened by the impracticality of revolutionary theorists, and by the hatred that their imported revolutionary theories aroused among the public at large, that he stuck rigidly to the principles of craft-as opposed to industrial unionism, opposed any attempt to put his unions into politics (as by forming a labour party), and bade them bargain only for improvements in wages, hours, and conditions of work.

But to cite the modest aims which Gompers pursued is to give an utterly misleading picture of unionism in general at the turn of the century. Most big industries were not unionized at all; and where unions did exist, or where attempts were made to organize the men, there were likely to be violent, headlong, and bloody conflicts, with ferocious battles between rebellious workers on the one hand, and their

The rich minority of 1900 believed the poor were poor because they were victims of their own laziness or stupidity. implacable employers and the employers' scabs and perhaps the militia on the other hand.

Under such circumstances it is not remarkable that labour unions had, on the whole, only a minor influence in 1900. And anyhow they could not reach down to the very bottom ranks of labour to protect the men and women on whom poverty bore down most cruelly of all.

It is time for us now to look at a few of the hard facts of a worker's life at the turn of the century.

HEREAREa few cold figures: (I) WAGES.The average annual earnings of American workers, as I have already said, were something like $400 to $500 a year. For unskilled workers they were somewhat less-under $460 in the north, under $300 in the south. A standard wage for an unskilled man was a dollar and a half a day-when he could get work. That qualification is important: one must bear in mind that according to the census of 1900,nearly six-and-a-half million workers were idle (and therefore, in most cases, quite without income) during some part of the year, that of these, nearly two million were idle four to six months out of the twelve.

(2) HOURS.The average working day was in the neighbourhood of ten hours, six days a week: total, sixty a week.

In business offices there was a growing trend towards a Saturday half holiday, but if anybody had suggested a fiveday week he would have been considered demented.

(3) CHILDLABOUR.Among boys between the ages of ten and fifteen, no less than twenty-six per cent-over a quarter-were "gainfully employed;" among girls in the same age groups, ten per cent were. Most of these children were doing farm work, but 284,000 of them were in mills, factories, etc., during years in which, in any satisfactorily arranged society, they would have been at school.

(4) ACCIDENTS. The standards of safety were curiously low from our present-day point of view. Consider this set of facts: in the single year 1901, one out of every 399 railroad employees was killed, and one out of every twenty-six was injured. Among engineers, conductors, brakemen, trainmen, etc., the figures were even worse than this: in that single year, one out of every 137 was killed.

(5) THEHUMANRESULT.Robert Hunter's book, Poverty, published in 1,904,was a conscientious attempt to define the extent and nature of the group of people in America who were "underfed, underclothed, and poorly housed." Hunter defined poverty very strictly, as a condition in which people, "though using their best efforts, are failing to obtain sufficient necessaries for maintaining physical efficiency." His

best guess, after studying all available statistics, was that there were at least ten million of them in the United States, of whom four million were public paupers-people dependent upon public or private charity-while the rest gained no such relief from their pitiable state. Hunter admitted that his figure often million might be far short of the truth; there might be fifteen million, or twenty million. He was dismayed that a nation devoted to the use of statistics had not shown real interest in getting an answer to what seemed to him a vital question. "But ought we not to know?" he asked.

AND WHATdid those cold figures mean in human terms?

To read the reports of qualified observers of poverty at its worst in the big city slums and the grim industrial towns at the beginning of the century is to hear variation after variation upon the theme of human misery, in which the same words occur monotonously again and again: wretchedness, overcrowding, filth, hunger, malnutrition, insecurity, want.

Yet, as the floods of immigration continued, and wages obeyed the Iron Law even though industry was booming, and dirty and dilapidated habitations acquired new layers of grime and sagged still further, those who made it their business to wrestle with the problem of American poverty often felt helpless to bring about any real improvement.

"The real trouble," wrote Woods, "is that people here are from birth to death at the mercy of great social forces which move almost like the march of destiny." Did not what was happening make a mockery of the very idea of a democratic society? "We are witnessing today, beyond question, the decay-perhaps not permanent, but at any rate the decayof republican institutions," said the sociologist Franklin H. Giddings to the members of the Nineteenth Century Club.

"No man in his right mind can deny it."

And when Edwin Markham wrote his poem, "The Man with the Hoe," which appeared in 1899, even people whose contact with American poverty had been slight felt a vague sense that a portent had been described; that in these verses, written by Markham after seeing Millet's famous painting .of a brutalized toiler, they were getting a picture of what industrialism was doing to the common man and might, perhaps, do to themselves some day if the social forces which they had seen in operation were not somehow reversed. Markham saw the toiler as a man with The Emptiness of ages in his face, And on his back the burden of the world.

Markham asked: Who loosened and let down this brutal jaw?

And commented: There is no shape more terrible than thisMore.)ongued with censure of the world's blind greedMore filled with signs and portents for the soulMore packed wIth danger to the universe.

And concluded: o Masters, lords and rulers in all lands, How will the fnture reckon with this man?

How answer his brute question in that hour

When whirlwinds of rebellion shake all shores?

How will it be with kingdoms and with kingsWith those who shaped him to the thing he isWhen this'dumb Terror shall rise to judge the world, After the silence of the centuries?* From the vantage point of the nineteen-fifties one can read those prophetic lines and declare that they proved not to be prophetic for the United States. But surely it was significant tha,t when the century was beginning a great many Americans were far from sure that the "dumb Terror," asking his "brute question," would not cause the "whirlwinds of rebellion" to shake, not only Europe, but also an America in which such gaudy wealth was contrasted with such inhuman misery.

Capitalism Indeed IN 1899 there died in New York a man who, though

he had never made much of a study of economics and had a curiously immature mind, may have had a more pervasive influence on the thinking of Am"rican businessmen at the turn of the century than all the professors of economics put together. This man's name was Horatio Alger, Jr;, and what he had done was to write more than a hundred books for boys-success stories called Bound to Rise, Luck and Pluck, Sink or Swim, Tom the Bootblack, and so forth-the total sales of which came to at least twenty million copies.

The standard Horatio Alger hero was a fatherless boy of fifteen or thereabouts who had to earn his own way, usually in New York City. He was beset by all manner of villains.

They tried to sell him worthless gold watches on railroad trains, or held him up as he was buggy-riding home with his emt>loyer's funds, or chloroformed him in a Philadelphia hotel room, or slugged him in a Chicago tenement. But "Reprinted by permission.

Millet's painting, "The Man with the Hoe," inspired poet Edwin Markham 10 ask: "How ~ifllhe future reckon with this man?"

always he was strong and shrewd and braye, and they were foolish and cowardly. And the end of each book found our hero well on the way towards wealth, which it was clear resulted from his diligence, hones'ty, perseverance, and thrift.

There was no denying thatthe Alger thesis had a certain magnificent validity. Look ~t John D. Rockefeller, who had begun as a $4-a-week clerk In a commission merchant's house in Cleveland, and by the beginning of the twentieth century was becoming the richest man in the world. Look at Andrew Carnegie, who had begun at thirteen as a $1.20-aweek bobbin boy in a Pittsburgh cotton mill, and had become the greatest of steel manufacturers.

Look at Edward H. Harriman, who had begun as a broker's office boy at $5 a week, and was building a railroad empire. These were only a few of the examples which proved the formula for success: begin with nothing, apply yourself, save your pennies, trade shrewdly, and you will be rewarded with wealth, power, and acclaim. To which the natural corollary was: poor people are poor because they are the victims of their own laziness, stupidity, or profligacy.

Naturally it was pleasant for successful businessmen to believe that these were, in fact, the first principles of economics. But, one might ask, hadn.'t they learned in the classroom that economics is, just a little more complex than that?

To this question there are two answers. The first is that mighty few of the tycoons of 1900 had ever studied economics. Take, for instance, seven of the most successful of all: John D. Rockefeller, Carnegie, and Harriman, whom we have just mentioned; and also J. Pierpont Morgan, William Rockefeller, James Stillman, and H.H. Rogers. Of these seven, only Morgan had had anything approaching what we today would call a college education. It is doubtful if even in the prime of life many of these men, or their incontinued

A typical communist propagandist of the 1950s sounded as if he were reacting angrily to the news of March 3, 1901. numerable rivals and imitators, had much truck with economic science, or thought of professors of economics as' anything but absurdly impractical theorists.

A man who had come up in the world liked to describe himself as a graduate of the School of Hard Knocks. Education was all right in its way, and you sent your son to college if you could, if only because it was a good place to make useful contacts with the right people; but these college professors knew nothing about business, which was a battlefield for hard-shelled fighters. And anyhow the principles laid down by Ben Franklin, and somewhat foolishly simplified for boys by Horatio Alger, were fundamentally sound.

Manifestly the lesson of the Alger books was not supposed to be that hard work brings in but a pittance and that the way to succeed is to stand in with the rich. The lesson was rather that capital comes as a reward from heaven to him who labours mightily, puts his pennies in the savings bank, and shuns, the fleshpots. Work, save, be a good boy, and presently the railroad stock will fall into your lap and all will be well.

Perhaps the Horatio Alger stories help to explain to us why it was that a generation of businessmen who sincerely believed that wealth was the fruit of virtue and poverty the fruit of indolence, and that one should not tinker with economic law, were simultaneously shaping economic and social institutions which often seemed to follow quite different-and much more dynamic-principles. Let us look at some of these institutions.

IN 1900 capitalism was capitalism indeed. Businesses were run by their owners, the people who had put up or had acquired the capital with which to finance them. There was very little of what Paul Hoffman has called the "diffusion of decision-making power." It would have seemed wildly irrational that a man should manage the destinies of a corporation while owning only a minute fraction of its stock, as so frequently happens today. Only two-thirds of the manufactured products of the country were made by corporations; the other third were made by partnerships or individual proprietors. No corporation in the country had over 60,000 stockholders.

The head of a company was likely to be a man who had started with an idea and some money to finance it-either his own money or his friends'; or else, if-the concern were older, he might be the inheritor or purchaser of most of its capital stock. If the company were a large one whose shares were listed on the Stock Exchange, he might have bought a

Andrew Carnegie

J. P. Morgan

controlling interest in the course of stock-market trading.

In any case he was likely to have a sense of personal proprietorship which few heads of businesses possess today, except in small or young concerns. And his freedom to do as he personally pleased with this working property of his was only slightly restricted either by law or by custom. The very idea of a "managerial revolution" would have been unintelligible to him. The business belonged to him, didn't it?

In many cases he felt that how he ran it was nobody else's affair. Some companies made ample reports to their minority stockholders, but others made scanty ones, and some made none at all.

If even minority stockholders had no business to know what was going on, still less did the government or the courts. The records of governmental investigations and court trials during the last years of the nineteenth century are full of instances of men saying over and over again on the witness stand, as William Rockefeller did in a railroad rate case, "I decline to answer on advice of counsel."

Most businessmen believed in competition-theoretically. But in practice there was a ceaseless search for ways in which to prevent it, so that rival companies in an industry might all jack up their prices and enlarge their profits. Again and again the heads of various steel companies, let us say, would form a "pool"-make an agreement not to sell below a certain price. But often-as one industrialist put it-such agreements lasted only as long as it took the quickest man in the group to get to a telegraph office and quote 'a lower price in order to grab business from the others. So the search went on for a way of making agreements that would stick.

In 1879 John D. Rockefeller's lawyer, Samuel C. T. Dodd, found one. He got the owners of forty different oil companies to put their stock into the hands of a group of trustees (headed by Rockefeller), who could then operate all forty companies as a unit, charging what they pleased and forcing their competitors to the wall; hence the term "trust." During the eighteen-eighties there appeared a sugar trust, a butcher trust, a rubber trust, and many others. But so ferocious was the outcry of protest from rival businessmen against the trusts-and from the gouged public toothat the legislators went to work to outlaw such practices, the most famous of their legislative prod.ucts being the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890.

Yet even this obstacle to the consolidation of competing

John D. Rockefeller

Mark Hanna

William McKinley

businesses did no more than delay the trend temporarily.

For a Supreme Court sympathetic with big business interpreted the Act very narrowly for many years.

I HAVESAIDthat in that age of unbridled capitalism, a company was run by the man who owned it, and he tended to be its personal proprietor. But unless he was overwhelmingly successful, and also astute enough to plough his profits back into the property-as Henry Ford did some years later-there was one group of men of whom he stood in awe: the hankers. They commanded the credit he might need to tide him over lean seasons; and if he had to reorganize his company or to sell bonds or stock to investors, they had the power and prestige in the financial world to provide-or deny-a market for his securities. To command capital was even more important than to own capital.

Indeed as the twentieth century began, a banker, Pierpont Morgan, was becoming by all odds the most powerful figure in the American world of business, if not the most powerful citizen of the United States. He controlled, or at least was highly influential in, the corporations that ran a number of the most important railroads of the land; not because he was a railroad man, for he was not, but because he was a master of the art of financial reorganization, and when big railroads got into financial trouble, as many of them did during the depression of the eighteen-nineties, he was the man who could best put them on their feet again-partly by reason of the wealth that his firm directly commanded, partly by reason of his great prestige and moral force in Wall Street, and partly by reason of his reputation for insisting upon proper management of any property for which he had raised money.

When Morgan reorganized a railroad company he either called the tune from then on, or else listened to the tune and intervened if he didn't like the sound of it. He was also a power among bankers; gradually he and his partners were becoming major factors in the policies of many of the leading banking houses of New York. And now, in 1901, he had become the kingpin of the great steel industry, and was looking about for more worlds to supervise. His authority was vague, but it was immense-and growing.

When in the spring of 1901 the news broke that he had formed the Steel Corporation, there was a note of dismay in the comment even of conservative citizens. President /

Hadley of Yale said in a speech that unless some way could be found to regulate such trusts, there would be "an emperor in Washington within twenty-five years." Others feared that if the trend towards consolidation continued, the public would rebel and embrace socialism. Said the Boston Herald editorially, "If a limited financial group shall come to represent the capitalistic end of industry, the perils of socialism, even if brought about by a somewhat rude, because forcible, taking of the instruments of industry, may be looked upon even by intelligent people as possibly the lesser of two evils."

What irony that the revolution which these observers feared should indeed have taken pJace-but not in the United States! It has often been noted that when the orators of Moscow berate American capitalism and turn their invective upon Wall Street, they are a couple of generations out of date; one might say, more specifically, that a typical Communist propagandist of the nineteen-fifties sounds exactly as if he were reacting angrily to the news in the morning papers of March 3, 1901.

Government on the Sidelines AND WHAT,one may ask, was the United States Government doing while these portentous events were afoot?

It is hard for us, today, to realize how small the government was in 1900, and how limited in its functions and powers.

It spent roughly half a billion dollars a year, about oneeightieth of what it was destined to spend half a century later.

The government had no Department of Commerce, no Department of Labour, no Federal Trade Commission, no Federal Reserve System. The reason was simple: business was supposed to be no affair of the government's. It had an Interstate Commerce Commission, which was supposed to regulate the railroad companies, but the powers of the Commission were small and uncertain.

One or two examples may illustrate how incidental was the role of the government in business affairs. In 1895 its gold reserve was slipping away and it desperately needed a loan of money to enable it to buy more gold with which to buttress its endangered currency. It turned, in this emergency, to the strongest private banker in the country, who was of course Pierpont Morgan; only he had the financial prestige to assure the bankers and the men of me.ans that they might safely lend to the government. Washington without Wall Street's aid was helpless.

Or take the action of President Theodore Roosevelt in ending the anthracite coal strike of 1902 by mediating between the coal operators and the United Mine Workers. For decades now we have been so accustomed to seeing management and labour going to Washington-or being dragged to Washington-to settle their major disputes that it is hard for us to realize that in 1902 the settlement of a strike by the President of the United States was without precedent.

BUT THATWASin 1902 and Theodore Roosevelt was an adventurous man. In 1900 his predecessor, the stately continued

Not many Americans in 1900 had learned to think of economic affairs as matters of concern to them as citizens.

William McKinley, sat in the White House, and McKinley was a man of discretion, who wouldn't have dreamed of trying to settle a strike. McKinley took a different view of the functions of the Federal Government. He believed, quite sincerely, that the government oughtn't to intervene in business affairs uniess criminal activities were involved (and there were mighty few activities which the laws then defined as criminal); instead, t~e government ought to serve business to the extent of its modest capacity.

Behind this frock-coated statue of civic righteousness, as he presided over governmental affairs, stood the stalwart Republican leader, Mark Hanna, a solid, forthright, outspoken, generous, very human man who genuinely admired McKinley, somewhat as a sales manager might admire a noble though impractical bishop, and took delight in showing him what practical course he should pursue. Hanna was a prosperous manufacturer, a Senator from Ohio, and chairman of the Republican National Committee. He knew well how to raise money from the rich and privileged. Temperamentally he was in full accord with the big m\lnufacturers, and at ease with the big bankers. He felt that whatever served them served the country. Within the limits of feasible statesmanship, he was their earnest and devoted servant.

What William Allen White called "the alliance between government and business for the benefit of business" was an honest love affair to Hanna. He felt that if the path were made easy for the great corporations to do as they pleased, the riches which they accumulated would filter down to the less fortunate, and that any attempt to change the rules of the game except to give the great corporations even more opportunity to prosper would .open the way to demagoguery, mob rule, and destruction. With others the alliance was not a miltter of emotional affinity or of conviction, but of purchase and sale-the prostitution of government bodies for favours and cash. Big corporations advanced their interests not only by making sizable campaign contributions-often to both parties-but also by subsidizing or bribing legislators and even judges.

By hints, suggestions, loans; so-called loans that were in fact gifts, a.nd on occasion by outright secret bribes, could a big corporation make legislators" elected officials, and even judges do its bidding. The Soviet propagandists of the nineteen-fifties are forever talking about "lackeys of Wall Street." Well, in 1900 the United States Goven'lment included many men who might aptly, if not quite idiomatically, have been described as lackeys of Wall Street. Moving into public life in those days was like moving into the neighbourhood ofa million-dollar fruit tree whose fruit could

readily be dislodged if one but made the slightest move in its direction. And this was easily done, for no one much seemed to be looking.

WHY WAS no one much looking? There was furious interest in political elections. The 1896 campaign had been the hottest, perhaps, in the whole history of the United States, and the 1900 one did not lack for warmth. There was, as I have already said, a very widespread popular fear that the trusts might ultimately take over the control of the United States. Why, then, did very few people seem to realize that since the nature and behaviour of American capitalism was a matter of transcendent importance to them, and involved great political problems, therefore the character and performance of their political representatives should come under the closest observation?

The reasons were many. In the first place, much of the opposition to the trusts which did exist took the form of advocacy of a socialism of manifestly European derivation.

It seemed foreign to the nature of Americans, who were likely to be unsympathetic towards ideologies and disinclined to think of themselves as proletarians, however miserable their lot. Besides, it was suspect as revolutionary -in the sense of advocating a total transformation of the business system, if not in the sense of involving barricades and bloodshed.

In the second place, though many earnest Americans who did not like the trend of things had become "Christian Socialists"-following a pattern of thought later inherited in part by Norman Thomas-these were an unorganized and somewhat impractical group; and the theological student or social worker who argued that all industry should be taken over by the government, which would presumably be dominated by people as benevolent as himself, became the awkward butt of japes to the effect that if you divided up all the money in the country evenly among the population, it would soon be back once more in the smart people's hands.

Yet still more important, perhaps, was the fact that there were few people outside the inner circles of'big business and corporation law who really understood how the big business combinations were set up, how they functioned, or how they exercised their political leverage; and there were still fewer who had any but the dimmest notion of how the trend of the times could be reversed without a grave danger of disrupting the industrial and political processes of the nation.

This general haziness of the public mind was due in large part to the fact that not many Americans had learned to think of economic affairs-industry, technology, trade, commerce-as matters of general concern to them as citizens. A man worked hard at his business, did his level best to make money at it, talked business with other men in the Pullman smoking compartment or in the country store; but all that was personal and immediate. and quite disconnected, in his mind, with the general condition of American life.

Nobody had told him that all Americans were interde-

pendent; that each business, each social activity, each political activity, formed a part of a general American pattern which was affected by what everybody-did; that, in the phrase of a later day, Americans were "all in the same boat." He was used, for instance, to thinking of American business as something which had little to do with American history, except insofar as the tariff affected it. Was not the American history which he had studied in high school a dreary tale of political campaigns and manoeuvres which led from the Missouri Compromise to the Dred Scott case and from the Resumption of Specie Payments to the Dingley Tariff, enlivened only by occasional wars? What did the operation of his business have to do with all that?

To be sure, he was excited by Presidential campaigns, and could argue with the best that McKinley was the creature of the trusts or that Bryan was unsound; but his political affiliation was likely to be hereditary, and the newspaper editorials and cartoons which provided him with most of his current political education were more partisan than illuminating. As for the popular magazines, it was true that Ida M. Tarbell was already at work on her painstaking history of the Standard Oil Company for McClure's, but not a word of

this chronicle had yet appeared in print, and very few of the magazine journalists of the day, except S.S. McClure and his staff, were much interested in probing deeply into the facts of business life in its relation to political life. And as for the great magazines of the old school, those highly respectable publications which ladies and gentlemen liked to display on their library tables, these had become so intent upon serving the interests of culture-a culture daintily remote from the crass concerns of everyday life-that the idea of examining closely the nature of any such vulgar necessity as business was repugnant to them.

But a change was coming. And, paradoxically, the advance agent of this change was an ignorant, demented assassin. On the 6th of September 1901, at the Pan-American exposition in Buffalo, a man named Czolgosz shot and fatally wounded President McKinley.

Not only had Mark Hanna lost a loved and revered associate, but the cloud of uncertainty that he had discerned on the horizon when Roosevelt had been nominated for the Vice Presidency now filled half the sky. "And now look," he exclaimed to his friend Kohlsaat, "that damned cowboy is TO BE CONTINUED President of the United States!"

Advance agent of the change was a demented assassin who shot and fatally wounded President McKinley in 1901.

In this instalment Mr. Allen recreated the social and economic atmosphere of America in 1900. It was the end of an era; change was coming, and in Part IT appearing in the next issue, Mr. Allen describes the momentous events of 1910 to 1945 when America underwent rapid transformation. With bold strokes he sketches both the advancements and the setbacks of the period. He recounts the era of idealism that carried Wilson into the White House, the disillusion that followed World War I, the prosperity of the 20s, the despair of the 30s. In a graphic narrative, Mr. Allen weaves the story of how most Americans lived in these tumultuous times, and the heights of production they reached when war came again in 1941. It was an exciting period of change. and challenge.

While the twentieth anniversary of the United States Fulbright Programme of world-wide cultural exchange falls this month, the programme was introduced in India at the beginning of 1950.

It has enabled more than 2,000 Indian students, teachers, research scholars and lecturers to enrol in American universities for periods of from one to four years; at the same time, it has provided facilities for about 1,000 Americans to visit India on study or lecture tours. In this letter, an American Fulbright scholar who was in India for the 1963-64 academic year narrates some of his personal experiences.

Dear Sir: two years since we flew out of Dum Dum Airport on our journey home to America.

Not an insignificant portion of these years has been spent in the formulation of plans to return to India. Why India has become such an important part of our lives-when it played so little a role before-is a question at which we used to wonder, but now take for granted. I can recall the reactions of family and friends when we announced that we had won a Fulbright Fellowship and would be sailing half way around the world to India within a month. Although no one asked, "Where's India?", a number of people opened their atlases and for the first time since grade school geography, looked at the map east of Suez.

Neither my family nor my wife's family had ever really thought about India before-certainly not in any personal way. It had no role in our lives other than a piece of geography, too far away. If I were asked to describe the most striking change in two years, it would be the casual way in which our family and friends now treat things Indian: the immediate recognition of a piece of chikan work, the appreciation for a fine Banaras saree, more significantly, the consciousness of a personal tie with a country which no longer seems so far away.

In so many ways, India is no longer exotIc and other-worldly to at least these few Americans.

For myself, there is the obvious academic interest associated with my profession. Before we travelled to India, however, I was a student of British Empire and Commonwealth history, with a particular interest in South Asia. After a year of study and living in India, I have returned a student of Indian history.

There was no immediate love-match between ourselves and India when our P&O ship docked at Ballard Pier, Bombay, on July 26, 1963. It was

IT HAS BEEN

a hot, sticky day, and intermittent showers were our introduction to the monsoon season. We toted our hand luggage and made our way slowly down the steep gangway, to India.

Before we left the United States, we had heard a great deal about "culture shock." India was different, vastly different, and we were told that there might be some delay in getting used to our new surroundings. Looking back on these initial weeks, it is possible to smile and place all the early problems in the perspective of a year of rich experience. This was not possible during that first July.

On that first day, we were rushed to our hotel, then off to meet a group of Indian Fulbrighters on their way to the United States. After lunch we piled into taxis and drove to Ravi Shankar's studio. For many of us, this was our first significant Indian experience. Suddenly the heat was forgotten as we listened to this warm and sensitive man talk with obvious enthusiasm about his country and its music. No one wanted to leave.

The research project that had brought us to India waited during these days of settling in and driving down roots that would hold us for a year.

Within a few weeks, however, the transformation had taken place. It was so easy that it seemed almost unbelievable.

A Fulbrighter's experience goes far beyond the specific project which brings him to India. The project is the link which at the beginning binds him to his new situation. Nonetheless, it inevitably turns his attention in many directions and it takes great determination to resist distraction.

One by one, new doors are opened, new experiences are encountered, filled with great personal as well as academic satisfaction.

My own work required spending much time at the National Archives in New Delhi looking through documents on the Indian freedom movement. It was also necessary to spend some time in Lucknow and Calcutta, and the necessity to travel soon became the great opportunity to travel.

India was a constant visual experience for us.

During this one year, we saw far more of India than we have seen of our own country. The problem of distance always seemed so significant at home. In India, no less grand in its proportions, distance seemed unimportant.

We never travelled alone. We were always taken by Indian friends anxious to show us their city, or by strangers,met on a train or bus,anxious to do the same. Our neighbours in Jangpura Extension in New Delhi took us to Chandigarh and then up to Kasauli and Simla. There can be few experiences more enchanting than watching the lights of Simla, floating in the sky like some special Indian galaxy, from a vantage point across the valley. The family that lived in the flat on the first floor of our house took us to Lucknow for the Christmas holiday.

The Fulbright Conference held at Ootacamund in April gave an opportunity to those of us who were living in the north to travel into the Deccan.

Our journey was an extraordinary concentration

of new experiences as we travelled via train and bus to Ajanta and Ellora, Hyderabad, Bangalore, Ooty, Cochin, Trivandrum, and around the cape to Madras and then back to Delhi.

When we left Ootacamund after the conference, we travelled by train from Coimbatore to Cochin. We shared this ride with an Indian family from Kerala. During the trip we carried on a polite conversation without really getting to know one another very well. When we arrived at Ernakulam, the end of the line for the train, our relationship changed suddenly. The head of this family took note of our confusion in first of all trying to find out where Cochin was, and then how to get there. He immediately walked up to the ticket counter, told the clerk to forget about our problems and offered us the use of his car and driver for the trip. We pointed out the trouble it would cause him, but he ignored our arguments and literally pushed us into the car while the driver piled the luggage on top. We had thought he lived in Ernakulam, but soon realized that he was travelling in the opposite direction and would have to wait with his family until the car returned from Cochin. We started to get out of the car, but he became very excited, insisting that it was his duty to be kind to foreigners in his country. We drove on to Cochin in fine style, a bit overwhelmed by this display of hospitality and wondering whether we would do the same in our own country. I believe we would-now.

We participated as much as possible in India's holidays, exhausting ourselves for example, in a rigorous colour and water fight on Holi. In the midst of daily routine, from time to time we were privileged to enter a special world, to take tea with Zakir Hussain, to speak with Jawaharlal Nehru.

These are the personal memories of one American couple that rush in ahead of the temples and forts and make the wonders of this ancient civilization immediate and continually meaningful.

India has made a permanent impact on our lives.

This year of living and working in India was no passing adventure-something to talk about when vast chests of travel slides are dragged out for yet another time. The research done in Indian libraries, archives, and newspaper offices has finally reached a stage of fruition in a completed doctoral dissertation. My teaching, I believe, reflects these personal experiences-in a more vivid appreciation of Indian history and culture.

We realize that we have secured only a foothold in our efforts to understand. We have passed. however, the first stage of uncritical judgment.

In the next few years, as we make plans to return to India, we are also making preparations to insure that we shall meet this next opportunity with better mental equipment: a firmer grasp of language, and a deeper understanding of the essentials of Indian life.

We have, I believe, made a good beginning.

.Milton Israel University of Toronto Toronto, Canada

OF MURDER? When Glenn Hammer was arrested and charged with murder, he asked for a jury trial. Relatively rare in other countries, eighty per cent of world's jury trials, 60,000 a year, take place in the U.S. For nine days, the jury heard evidence, presented by prosecution and defence, in one of America's most dramatic exercises in the due process: jury trial.

THE JUDGE:

Mitchell B. Johns

THE DEFENCE ATTORNEY: William Erickson

THE PROSECUTOR: Gilbert Alexander

Due Process of Law: The Promise of Equal Justice GLE\j]\' HAMMER knew he could be sentenced to death.

He also realized his future, if he had one, depended on persons near him in the Denver, Colorado, courtroom.

He watched impassive Gilbert Alexander, one of two Deputy District Attorneys appointed to prosecute him, conferring with his colleague, Joseph Medina. These were his antagonists. Representing the people of the State of Colorado, they were asking his execution on a charge of murder.

Beside him was William Erickson, veteran of many famous trials, and Terry Fiske, a recent law school graduate anxious to do well in a major courtroom effort. Both had been designated by the court to defend Hammer

at State expense because he lacked funds for counsel.

Arbitrating the legal arguments of these adversaries was Mitchell B. Johns, twelve years a judge. He would rule on points of law and advise the citizen jury of eight men and four women on its duties.

The jurors sat behind a low railicg across the courtroom listening to the evidence. Hammer wondered how this impartial panelamong them a teacher, a janitor, a few housewives-would interpret the violent act that now demanded their judgment. Would they accept his motive of self-defence as justification for killing a man?

There was the memory of that turbulent night. He and four other tenants were repair-

ing a truck radiator for their hotel landlady, Mrs. Frances Reeves. Suddenly her estranged husband bulled into the room, chased off the men with a rifle, threatened his wife. Hammer came back with his own pistol, commanded the intruder to stop menacing the woman, then fired four times as the man whirled to charge him.

Would the jury be influenced by the fact that he was only a drifting labourer-sometime fireman, lumberjack and fruit pickeronce convicted of burglary? He glanced at spectators, a newspaperman, a photographer (trial pictures, a rarity in American courts, are permitted in Colorado with consent of defendant and judge), but his chief concern was with the jury-and its verdict.

Seeking Justice. Left: To inform his attorney of details to prepare defence, Hammer revisited scene of slaying, recreated sequence oj events, as landlady looked on. Above: Sobbing Mrs. Reeves, the widow, substantiates in courtroom Hammer's story by describing her husband's threats and defendant's protection.

Below: During selection of jury, a potential juror swears to tell the truth. This woman was disqualified for knowing defence counsel.

Attorneys can eliminate persons who they think may be prejudiced. Defendant has choice to ask for trial by either judge 01' jury.

A Search for Truth Legal Clash. When defence counsel objected to prosecution's gruesome photograph of victim, the judge

A CROWDED COURT docket had delayed the proceedings. Judge Johns, feeling Hammer's constitutional right to speedy trial had been compromised, released him under bond.

(Granting bail, common for lesser crimes, is unusual for capital offences.) While he waited, the defendant met often with his attorneys, sometimes visiting the scene of the slaying to talk with the landlady and prepare the case.

Hammer had entered a not-guilty plea at a preliminary arraignment and, although not compelled to disclose the identity of his own witnesses, he was handed a list, as required by law, of those who would testify against him.

It was the duty of the judge to tell him of other legal safeguards: the presumption that he was innocent until proof of his guilt had been established beyond a reasonable doubt, the burden of this proof resting with the prosecution. Later, at the trial, it took three days for lawyers to select a jury before the first witness was summoned.

withdrew lawyers to his chambers-away from the members of the jury-to hear arguments on its relevancy. Prosecutor Gilbert Alexander, above, contends that photograph should be allowed as evidence but strong rebuttal by defence attorney, William Erickson, below, brings ruling by Judge Johns that picture is too prejudicial for evidence. Defendant Hammer, below left, was always included in these conferences.

Trial Drama tells story of slaying. The prosecution counsel offers his case first, and gives accused and his counsel the opportunity to prove it untrue or raise a reasonable doubt. With witness Maurice Moreland acting as "body" of victim, Attorney Joseph Medina shows jury how Reeves fell.

Decision! . ended after nine days, three of them devoted to the judge's consultations with the attorneys to decide his instructions to the jury: self-defence is excusable if Hammer acted as "a reasonable and prudent person would ... under the circumstances," out of fear, but not revenge. Choices of verdict ranged from first-degree murder (with possible death sentence) to acquittal.

While jurors discussed his case in seclusion a nervous Hammer, still free under bond, tries his best to relax. Court was reconvened when the group of twelve reached the required unanimity. Its written decision, passed across the courtroom, was unfolded and Judge Johns read: "Not Guilty."

THE TRIAL

Tense Hours. As the jury deliberates in private, above, time drags for nervous Hammer, right, wait-

ing anxiously for verdict. Finally, the ordeal was over as judge read out jury's verdict: "Not Guilty."

Graphic Evidence. Mrs. Reeves slumps before the jury as the defence attorney, William Erickson, re-enacts her husband's attempt to choke her.

Defendant's Evidence. Hammer explains, with aid of hotel plan and victim's rifle, how Reeves threatened him. Though not required to testify, he was effective witness.

Treasures of the National Gallery of Art

TWENTY-FIVE years ago, when President Franklin D. Roosevelt opened the National Gallery of Art in Washington, there were only a handful of paintings to adorn the walls of the huge 785-foot-long marble building. An enterprising journalist calculated that the density of paintings was roughly thirty to an acre. Today the museum's five and a half acres of gallery space is practically full, and the institution ranks with the great art galleries of the world.

A branch of the Smithsonian Institution, the National Gallery was constructed with funds donated by the late Andrew W. Mellon. The nucleus of the gallery's collection is made up of the art masterpieces collected by Mellon, Samuel H. Kress and Chester Dale, American philanthropists, who bequeathed their important collections to the gallery. Ever since it was founded, the galJery has adhered to its policy of "concentrating on masterpieces from the Western heritage since the Middle Ages."

Shown here are some of the treasures that have made the National Gallery a Mecca for art connoisseurs as well as for thousands of tourists each year. At centre is Verrocchio's bust of Lorenzo de' Medici, with Rembrandt's magnificent "SelfPortrait" behind it. Moving clockwise from da Settignano's bust of a little boy are Raphael's "St. George and the Dragon," John Constable's "Wivenhoe Park, Essex," "The Small Crucifixion" by Grunewald, EI Greco's "Laocoon," David's "Napoleon," Gilbert Stuart's portrait of Mrs. Richard Yates, Cezanne's "Still Life," Rogier van der Weyden's "Portrait of a Lady," "A Vase of Flowers" by Jan Davidsz de Heem, and Houdon's "Diana."

END

WILLPUERTORICObecome the 51st state of the American Union? Will it be independent? Or will it retain its present status as a Commonwealth voluntarily associated with the United States?

No one knows the answers to these questions as yet, but a twelve-member U.S.-Puerto Rican Commission reported a few weeks ago that "all three forms of political status are valid ... and confer upon the people of Puerto Rico equal dignity with equality of status and of national citizenship."

Aside from the question of its political future, the eyes of the world have long been focused on the beautiful little island, 161kilometres long and 56 kilometres wide, that sits like a jewel between the Atlantic Ocean and the Caribbean Sea. Reason for the worldwide attention is the economic and social revolution that has been under way in Puerto

tion achieved without violence, bloodshed or a reign of terror.

In 1940, the island was rated "the poorhouse of the Caribbean." Travellers praised Puerto Rico's natural charms, walked the winding, colourful streets of its capital San Juan, filled with reminders of the island's Spanish heritage. But everywhere there was grinding poverty. Puerto Rico lacked natural resources. And always there was the pressure of population-of the people who flocked to town for jobs that did not exist.

Today Puerto Rico hums with purpose and activity. In the last two decades per capita income has risen five-fold. Factories, hotels, schools and hospitals are going up in one fantastic building boom. The transformation of Puerto Rico within less than one generation from a despondent, poverty-stricken dependency to a thriving democracy has been called one of the wonders of modern history.

sar 0 PRico's t U praglBat.c revolution W:::::::::,

Rico fo' the p:

quae'ecoenMy-a revolu-

continued

Mechanical loaderfor sugar-cane, above, is silhouetted by fires set to burn off the underbrush, facilitating cutting the next day. Once Puerto Rico's main source of foreign exchange, sugar is now only a part of a diversified agriculture pattern.

Helicopters, like the one at left, have set thousands of poles to bring power to inaccessible mountain farms and villages.

The country's power authority, looking to industry's needs, has recently added a nuclear electric station to its system.

Beautiful little island of Puerto Rico, at far left, sits like a jewel between the Atlantic Ocean and the Caribbean Sea. For decades, travellers have praised its natural charms, walked the picturesque winding streets of its capital San Juan.

CONQUERED FOR SPAINby Ponce de Leon, who brought the first Spanish settlers to the island in 1508, Puerto Rico remained a Spanish colony until 1898, when it was ceded to the U.S. after the Spanish-American war.

Puerto Ricans were granted U.S. citizenship in 1917, and were given the right to elect the Puerto Rican legislative assembly. In 1947, the islanders were authorized to elect their own governor by popular vote.

In 1952, the U.S. Congress granted Puerto Ricans the right to their own constitution, elevating Puerto Rico from an unincorporated U.S. territory to the unique status of a selfgoverning free commonwealth associated with the United States.

During the depression of the 1930s, Puerto Rico was a stricken land. The island's exclusively agrarian economy-mainly dependent on sugar-was incapable of supporting its rapidly-growing population, the result of a high birth rate coupled with the marked lengthening of life achieved by a successful health programme.

Puerto Rico's economic revolution started in 1940under the programme that has now become famous as "Operation Bootstrap." And the man mainly responsible for the island's economic and political improvement is Luis Munoz Marin, Governor of Puerto Rico for

sixteen years-from 1948 to 1964.

Munoz began by putting land reform into effect. The government bought back some of the land that had been swallowed in large sugar plantations and sold plots on a longterm basis to the rural landless. Agriculture was diversified. Besides the traditional sugarcane, coffee and tobacco, crops included pineapple and soyabean. Modern processing, marketing and distributing systems were evolved to handle the crops after they were harvested.

Munoz used government capital as a catalyst for promoting private investment. By 1942, Fomento-popular name for the catalytic promotion-development agency-was going. There was free trade with the U.S. And since the island was not taxed by the Federal Government, it could offer attractive tax exemptions for U.S.-backed manufacturing and tourism ventures. Today, hundreds of plants and factories dot the island and tourism has jumped to a more than $80-mi11ioii-a~year (Rs. 60-crore) business.

The "Bootstrap" programme has brought change to every corner of Puerto Rico. A major step forward was the early construction of hydroelectric plants. Electricity has now been extended to remote rural areas. At the same time, serving pressing immediate needs, government housing programmes replaced tum-

bledown shacks with low-cost homes. Many working-class islanders now possess refrigerators, TV sets and automobiles. Vigilant sanitation, better food, more do:tors and hospitals have raised life expectancy from 46 in 1940to over 70 today.

Many reasons are erroneously advanced for Puerto Rico's success: natural resources, geography, cheap labour, or the island's association with the United States.

But natural resources are not the key to the boom. The land has no industrial raw materials such as coal, iron or minerals. Most power fuel has to be imported. Nor is geography the key. Puerto Rico lies an average 2,000 miles from its best markets. Nor cheap labour.

The average manufacturing wages are the second highest in the world. And it is not the island's association with the United States. If this were the cause of its prosperity, investment capital would have flowed into the country long before it did. Prosperity has come to the island only since the islanders themselves began to plan and develop their own economic programme. The people are the key to the boom.

But the people are also the source of Puerto Rico's most pressing economic problems-a spiralling population that is partly the result of, and the most potent threat to, prosperity. continued

Unskilled workers, at left, erect a modest but solid concrete structure for $350 to replace a tumbledown shack. This self-help programme is an excellent example of the ingenious, flexible approach of the island's "Operation Bootstrap."

Former Governor Luis Munoz Marin discusses Puerto Rico's pressing population problem with Catholic Archbishop James Davis. The island's two and a half million people make it one of the most densely-populated areas in the whole world.

Razor-sharp machete whistles through a thick stalk of sugar-cane, below. The country's crop is harvested by cane-cutters, but only because modern technology has yet to devise a successful machine to operate in the irrigation furrows.

THE~EARE2.5 million people in Puerto Rico (half of them under twenty) which makes it one of the most densely-populated areas in the world. They can move as freely to continental United States as New Yorkers can to California, and already more than 900.000 Puerto Ricans live in America.

The island's inhabitants enjoy the services of most U.S. Government agencies, but pay no Federal taxes on money they earn in their homeland. They use U.S. money ap.d the American postal system. They serve in the U.S. armed forces and their goods are in the U.S. tariff area. Commonwealth status, in fact, offers a mixed variety of privileges.

However, some problems still remain.

There is, for example, the question of identity.

Who am I? A Puerto Rican? An American?

Both? There is a growing feeling that in the headlong modernization, tremendously important intangibles-chiefly the island's rich and beautiful Spanish culture-may be lost.

A concerted national effort, called "Operation Serenity," is now being made to reassert

Hispanic values, partially by creating a favourable climate for the island's flourishing indigenous arts. Pablo Casals, the cellist of legendary fame, adopted Puerto Rico, his mother's birthplace, as his home. He conducts its symphony and lends his name to the brilliant and successful annual Casals music festival. Beyond tlus, the government encourages folklore, painting, sculpture and theatre.

The question of identity applies with eq ual force to Puerto Rico itself. At present a majority of Puerto Ricans see great advantages in the island's Commonwealth status. It gives both political independence and the substantial economic benefits of close ties with the United States. As U.S. representative to the United Nations Arthur J. Goldberg said recently, "The people of Puerto Rico have shown through their votes that they continue to approve a Commonwealth status."

In the last Puerto Rican elections held in November 1964, the popular Democratic Party, which advocates continuance of the present Commonwealth status, received 59.5

Renowned cellist Pablo Casals, here leading Puerto Rico's orchestra, is a central figure in the movement to build cultural vigour and identity. Adopting the island as his home, the world-famous musician lends his name to the brilliant annual Casals music festival.

per cent of the total vote. The statehood Republican Party, promoting establishment of the Caribbean island as the 51st state of the U.S., received 34.7 per cent of the vote. And the Independence Party received less than three per cent of the vote.

In a speech given in January 1965, Puerto Rico's present Governor Robert Sanchez VileUa once again expressed his country's desire to retain its ties with the United States. He said: "I am happy to be able to report that Puerto Rico is marching forward energetically; that our people are continuing to devote every effort to improving the island's position as a healthy and progressive community, in close association with the United.

States .... Together our future is bound in the fight against poverty. against illness, against lack of education and job opportunities."

Whatever will be Puerto Rico's futurc decision, it seems a fair guess that-as in its economic development programmes-the island's course regarding statehood or independence will be based on pragmatic considera tions.

Cutting crew is followed by a swarm of men who collect the fresh-cut stalks, above. The waste green leaves from the tops of the cane are spread over the fields as mulch for new planting which will take place in a few days.

Strong face of a peasant woman straining to grasp ideas ~f a government rural health specialist, left, seems to reflect Puerto Rico's past and future. This woman and thousands like her are the key to the country's boom.

Dramatic sight of a sugar-cane field on fire is a common one in the Caribbean is/and.

Puerto Rico's sugar crop has increased annually until the country now ranks as one of the principal sugar producers in the world.