SPAN: October 1977

Page 1



SPAN A LEITER FROM THE PUBLISHER Human Rights: The Unending Quest by Warren Christopher

Groucho Marx and Elvis Presley died recently, and with them a certain zany gaiety and earthiness went out of our lives. But happily, not entirely. For Groucho has left successors to carryon the tradition of shyster impudence he shared with W.e. Fields: The boisterous irreverence of comics like Jerry Lewis is still with us. And Elvis' vivid heritage, taken up by the Beatles a dozen years ago, continues its evolution in others. The eulogy to Groucho in Newsweek magazine gives us a clue to the question of his importance-and Elvis' as well: Groucho "trampled on every known beloved ideal-good sense, honesty, romantic love and fair play. He elevated the insult into one of the seven deadly virtues." There is a place for iconoclasts like Groucho and Elvis in every society and every time. We need them to prick the pretentious, the sanctimonious and the prudish, or just to speak for the young. If anyone talent may be singled out as the secret for Groucho's hilarious success, it was his masterful use of the non sequitur. One of the most famous is the exchange in his film, A Night at the Opera. As Otis B. Driftwood, a phony impresario, Groucho is discussing the reading of a contract with his brother-sidekick, the piano-mangler Chico: CHICO: You read it. GROUCHO: All right, I'll read it to you. Can you hear? CHICO: I haven't heard anything yet. Did you say anything? GROUCHO: Well, I haven't said anything worth hearing. CHICO: Well, that's why I didn't hear anything. GROUCHO: Well, that's why I didn't say anything. The film appeared in 1935, when America, and the world, were barely emerging from the depths of an unprecedented economic depression after a period of boundless expectations of prosperity. Perhaps it is not farfetched to connect Groucho and Chico's hilarious non sequiturs with the universal bewilderment at a world that did not seem to make sense. Elvis Presley was, to paraphrase the title of one of Groucho's movies, a horse of another feather. The origins of the two were quite different. Groucho came a generation earlier, sloping, leering, smoking his inevitable big cigar, a tenement-bred city slicker, descendent of recent immigrants. Elvis was a poor farm boy from the backwoods of Tupelo, Mississippi. Yet, both men were molded in the same maverick tradition. Whereas Groucho burlesqued social forms, Elvis demolished romantic decorum. His soubriquet, Elvis the Pelvis, referred to belowthe-waist gyrations that caused a lot of tongue-clucking in Grown-Up America. Classical, pure singers of "sophisticated" love lyrics like Frank Sinatra had done it their way. Elvis did it his way for a different generation. Elvis' renditions of such lines as "You ain't nothin' but a hound dog, cryin' all th' time ... " to the accompaniment of throbbing guitar and hip wiggling looked more like exhibitions than performances to older people, but the teen-agers swooned just as their mothers had when a younger Sinatra was in his heyday. Both brought their loyal, nostalgic audiences along with them into middle age, while the generation following has found its Stevie Wonders and Fleetwood Macs. Groucho Marx and Elvis Presley were unusually gifted and effective performers. They were Americans, and we are glad to claim them. But they were more than that: They were fresh forces of irreverence in their time and ours. -J.W.G.

14

Between the Covers: The U.S. Publishing Scene hy David McCullough

19 20 30 34 38 42 45 46 49

The U.S. Stake in the North-South Dialogue An interview with C. Fred Bergsten

by John J. Harter

The Joys of the Hirshhorn Museum"

Front cover: Portrayed here are five of America's "visible scientists." Unlike the traditional researcher who pursues his life's work in the quiet of a laboratory, this new kind of scientist espouses social causes and does not shrink from publicity or controversy. Clockwise, from left: Isaac Asimov, Barry Commoner, Linus Pauling, Glenn Seaborg; center: Margaret Mead. See story on pages 5-13. Bacl~ cover: Alexander Calder's Two Discs, a painted steel plate stabile in the new Hirshhorn Sculpture Garden in Washington. The Hirshhorn has 2,000 sculptures, including 14 by Calder. See picture story on the Hirshhorn on page 49.

JACOB SLOAN, Editor; JAY W. GILDNER, Publisher. Managing Editor: Chidananda Dasgupta. Assistant Managing Editor: S.R. Madhu. Editorial Staff: Mohammed Reyazuddin, Avinash Pasricha, Nirmal Sharma, Krishan Gabrani, Murari Saha, Rocque Fernandes. Art Director: Nand Katyal. Art Staff: Gopi Gajwani,; B. Roy Choudhury, Kanti Roy. Chief of Production: Awtar S. Marwaha. Photographic Services: USIS Photo Lab. Published by the United States Information Service, 24 Kasturba Gandhi Marg, New Delhi 110001, on behalf of the American Embassy, New Delhi. The opinions expressed in this magazine do not necessarily reflect the views or policies of the United States Government. Printed by Aroon Purie at Thomson Press (India) Limited, Faridabad, Haryana.

Photographs: 3-R.N. Kbanna.7-Michael Rougier, Time-Life Picture Agency. IO-UPI. Il-David Gahr, TimeLife Picture Agency.13-Ken Heyman. 14-Avinash PaST'cha. IS-·David Attie. 21-29-LeRoy Woodson Jr.© National Geographic Society. 30- Wide World Photos. 32-- © 1977 Jill Krementz. 34-Jaswant Singh Bhoee. 35-Avinash Pasricha. 37-Madan Mahatta. 49 bottom-John Tennant, courtesy Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden. Back cover-Ollie Pfeiffer.

Use of SPAN articles in other publications is encouraged, except when copyrighted. For permission, write to tbe Editor. Price of magazine: one year's subscription (12 issues), 18 rupees; single copy, 2 rupees 50 paise. For change of address, send an old address from a recent SPAN envelope along with new address to A.K. Mitra, Circulation Manager, SPAN Magazine, 24 Kasturba Gandhi Marg, New Delhi 110001. (See change of address form on page 48.)


HU

RIGHfS:THE

The promotion of human rights has become a fundamental tenet of the foreign policy of the Carter Administration. Addressing the American Bar Association in Chicago recently, a leading U.S. official terms the cause of human freedom the world's only revolutionary cause-'the idea of human rights has a force of its own which governments can never extinguish.'

Throughout the United States there are forcibly abducted from their homes, rights that make life worth living. is a new awareness of the vitality and interrogated incessantly at the pleasure Having defined the three categories of value of our founding principles. Now, of their captors, and prodded with elec- rights that are the subject of our policy, after 200 yeats, they continue to bind trodes or held under water to the point of it is only fair for me to acknowledge that us together and to define our national drowning-when such things are happenthere are those who suggest that it is identity. We have come through a difficult ing in the world in which we live-and unwise for us to be promoting abroad period of self-doubt and self-criticism, they are-aU who truly value human rights the human rights principles that gave but once again we are less conscious of milst speak out. this nation its birth. Such critics argue that what divides us and more committed . • Second, the right to the fulfillment we cannot expect non-Western societies to the pr\nciples and values we hold in of such vital needs as food, shelter, health to find much relevance in what are somecommon. care and education. The stage of a nation's times disparagingly referred to as 18thWe believe our underlying principles economic development will obviously century Western ideas. But there is nothing parochial about and values must be reflected in American affect the fulfillment of this right. But foreign policy, if that policy is to have the we must remember that this right can be the principles we seek to promote. They support of our people and if it is to be violated by a government's action or respond to universal yearnings of maneffective.• Reflecting this conviction, the inaction-for example, when a govern- kind. They have been formally adopted promotion of human rights has become ment diverts vast proportions of its coun- by virtually all governments, both in a fundamental tenet of the foreign policy try's limited resources to corrupt officiafs .their own constitutions and through interof the Carter Administration. or to the creation of luxuries for an national commitments. What we are In our efforts to promote human rights elite while millions endure hunger and urging is that more than lip service be we must carefully define the principles privation. accorded to these principles. we seek to apply, for glittering generalities • Third, the right to enjoy civil and Those who say we should not seek to can lead to unworkable policies. We must political liberties-freedom impose our particular form of democracy of thought, also serve our principles with an abiding of religion, of assembly; of speech; of on the world have set up a straw man. It realism, since rigidity in the pursuit of the press; freedom of movement both is not a matter of form we are talking principle, especially in foreign policy, within and outside one's own country; about; it is the substance of human is likely to lead us astray. freedom to take part in government. These freedom. In defining what we mean by human liberties that we Americans enjoy so fully, Even though people are very poor, rights, we believe that we should direct and too often take for granted, are under they are still profoundly interested in our efforts to the most fundamental and assault in many places. That authoritarian being free to go where they want, to say important human rights, all of which regimes are premised on a denial of what they want, to practice the religion are internationally recognized in the these rights is well known. It is all the more of their choice, and to have a voice in Universal Declaration of Human Rights distressing, however, when regimes in determining the rules under which they which the United Nations approved in countries with democratic traditions live. Do the critics really mean to suggest 1948.Thus, we emphasize three categories violate these precious rights; for example, that those struggling to break the bonds of human rights: when they shut down newspapers and of mass misery are content permanently • First, the right to be free from govern- imprison journalists who have done to trade in their freedoms for material mental violation of the integrity of the nothing more than print ideas which advancement? My own view is that those person. Such violations include torture; who make such suggestions have failed are out of step with official policy. cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or It is our goal to promote greater to recognize the deepest aspirations of punishment; arbitrary arrest or imprison- observance by governments of all three human beings. ment; denial of fair public trial; and groups of the fundamental human rights I see no necessary inconsistency between invasion of the home. When human beings I have described. It is, after all, these economic development on the one hand


UNENDING QUEST

~. Warren Christopher

and political and civil rights on the other. And I think people will eventually reject leaders who unnecessarily impose such a choice. In the short run, some people may have tempered their desire for freedom, but in the long run I believe that desire is irrepressible. We have no illusions that the process of encouraging greater respect for human rights around the world will yield early or easy successes. We realize that there are compelling reasons why we must season our idealism with realism. There is no blinking the fact that our ability to change human rights practices in other societies is limited, even where we use all the mechanisms and approaches at our disposal. We must not proceed as if we had unlimited power. Just as our power is limited, so is our wisdom. We must avoid certitude and its unattractive partner, self-righteousness. We recognize the variety of human experience. Differing histories and circumstances will necessarily mean that there will be a great diversity in political systems and economic conditions throughout the world. In addition, we must recognize that our actions may provoke retaliation

against our short-term interests or even sometimes against the victims of repression we seek to assist. We will much prefer to find positive and creative ways to encourage governments to respect human rights rather than to penalize poor performance. But where such positive measures are not possible, the risks of imposing sanctions must be faced and carefully assessed. . It is also realistic to recognize that unless our domestic actions reflect a firm commitment to human rights, the message we are sending to others will ring hollow. We have already taken important steps to improve our own human rights record. We have removed all restrictions on the right of our citizens to travel abroad. With our support, the U.S. Congress has just passed legislation relaxing our visa requirements so that foreigners wishing to visit our country will not be excluded because of political affiliation except in the rarest instances. In addition, we are seeking expansion of our refugee and asylum policies, the most current example being the plans to admit an additional 15,000 Indochinese refugees. The efforts we are making to prevent a recurrence of abuses by the intelligence community and to overhaul our outmoded and unfair welfare system are also important contributions to the cause of human rights. When we find it necessary to address ourselves to the human rights conditions in other countries, our first approach is to express our views in private to the government involved. There is a/variety of ways in which this can be done. We can therefore choose between a rather wide range of signals. It can be done, for example, by a State Department desk officer talking to a minister in a foreign embassy. It can be done by having the Secretary of State call in a foreign ambassador. It can be done by our ambassador in a foreign country going in to see the foreign minister. Or it can be done by a letter from our President to the leader of a foreign government. The point is that diplomacy is a rich resource that can only be fully mined by a calibrated, sequential approach.

by WARREN CHRISTOPHER u.s. Deputy Secretary of State

We have made scores of diplomatic approaches with respect to human rights, and by and large we are achieving good results: governments all over the world, even where they disagree with us, are beginning to understand our policy better and to gauge accurately the depth of our commitment. Diplomatic approaches enable other governments to respond privately to our concerns. This is appropriate, since our objective is improvement of human rights conditions, not embarrassment of others or publication of our successes. Other governments must be aware, of course, that when private discussions fail to convey our message, public comment may at times be necessary. And we shall never apologize for expressing our commitment to our principles. Our bilateral economic assistance programs also must reflect our commitment to human rights. For our part, we are committed to providing substantial and increasing economic assistance to the Third World. There are a number of different ways in which one government gives economic assistance to foreign nations, and. we believe we should bring human rights considerations to. bear with respect to each of them. This process is greatly complicated by the fact that most of our bilateral economic aid now goes to meet the human needs of the poorest segments of the population. To limit such aid because of human rights violations may p~nalize people who are not responsible for the human¡ rights violations and cannot prevent them. On the other hand, we are responsible for our actions and must keep trying to assure that our economic assistance programs do not run counter to our efforts in behalf of human rights. Of course, we are eager to use our economic assistance affirmatively to promote the cause of human rights. For example, we helped arrange an international loan to Portugal to aid that country in its difficult transformation into a democratic society. As for military assistance, our military assistance programs are reviewed in light


directing much of their resources toward rural development and agricultural projects that help the largest number of people. • With respect to political and civil rights, one can perceive a resurgence of democracy. Recent developments in India and Spain, as well as Portugal, are proving that democracy can stage a comeback. In some of the military regimes in Latin America, there are hesitant but hopeful signs of "retorno" -a return to elected civilian government. In addition, some East European countries have permitted the reunification of divided families and otherwise eased their emigration rules. I think all of these positive developments are clear and convincing evidence of the power of an idea. When all is said Wake encouragement, butdo and done, the idea of human rights has a not take credit, for favorable signs which life and force of its own which governwe observe around the world on the human ments can nurture or oppose but never rights front, signs which indicate that extinguish. I can see this so vividly as the issue of human rights has touched I review cables from all over the world. a responsive l::hord in a growing number The human rights initiative echoes in official circles; even more, it has a of countries. • With respect to violations of integrity resonance in the homes and hearts of of the person, some governments, we people around the world. If we have moved human rights to the hope with a real intent to halt repression, front page, it is not because of us, but have begun to release large numbers of because of the power of the idea we are political prisoners as well as to curtail espousing. I see now more clearly than the indiscriminate arrests of alleged subversives. And some governments have ever before why it has been said that the punished those responsible for torture cause of human freedom is the world's only great revolutionary cause. As Walter and ordered that such practices cease. • With respect to economic rights, Lippmann once put it: The deepest issue of our time is many governments are showing a renewed whether the civilized people can maindetermination to promote the economic tain and develop a free society or rights of their citizens. They are turning whether they are to fall back into the away from grandiose schemes and showancient order of things, when the whole case improvements to apply their energies of men's existence, their consciences, to economic projects that provide the their science, their arts, their labor, and broadest benefits. The governments of their integrity as individuals were at several African countries, recognizing the the disposal of the state. vast disparities between rich and poor, Let me conclude by saying that, as in are beginning long-range and difficult development programs to provide a better any new undertaking, our human rights standard of life for their people. In policy will not be free from mistakes and, These aresomeofthetoolsat our addition, in some Latin American coun- miscalculations. But with the understanddisposal. I want to stress that in deciding tries land reform is again being pursued ing and support of our citizens-as well whether and how to use them in particular as a way to give people a stake in their as of our leading private organizationscases, we will not be distracted by token own country and provide them an oppor- and with practical and persistent effort, I believe that over time this new policy improvements that other governments tunity for economic advancement. Iwould may make. Rather, our attention will be also note that in Portugal the new demo- will achieve historic results. The time is fixed on the long-term trend. cratic government is moving ahead in propitious. The challenge is enormous. I also want to underscore that as we use the areas of housing and health care, But our principles are sound and vital these approaches and mechanisms, it social security and welfare benefits, and and, when applied with realism, they can and will provide a harvest of freedom will always be our desire to expand our new schools. Further, the international 0 cooperation with other governments and financial institutions are gradually re- for us and for people everywhere.

of the human rights practices of the recipient governments. In some cases we may decide to limit or withdraw security assistance. In other cases, where the human rights performance of the recipient is unsatisfactory, we may decide to continue to provide aid because of overriding U.S. national security interests-but not without expressing our. concern. We are also taking important initiatives in multilateral bodies. For example, we are using our voice and vote in the World Bank and other international financial institutions to promote the cause of human rights. We do this by opposing or seeking reconsideration of loans to governments that are flagrant human rights violators, again with special consideration being given to loans that would clearly help meet the needs of the poor. At the United Nations, we are working closely with other governments to give new strength and validity to that organization's efforts on behalf of .human rights. It is especially important that the U.N. take the difficult but crucial step of making its investigations of human rights violations evenhanded and comprehensive. We are therefore enthusiastically supporting an initiative of Costa Rica to establish a U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights. And we have urged the General Assembly to establish a special -panel to give. new impetus to the campaign against torture. In the Organization of American States, we supported a successful initiative by Venezuela to increase the resources and effectiveness of the Inter-American Human Rights Commission. We believe that the commission can play a critical role in investigating allegations of human rights violations in this h~misphere and in suggesting improvements.

peoples. For we know that in the long run we will fail unless we make the promotion of human rights an international movement. Is our policy working? It is certainly too early to say. In a sense, it will probably always be too early to say. The quest to secure human rights is never ending, like the search for peace. We may hope and pray for the day when the world will seem more civilized, when governments will uniformly treat their citizens with decency and humanity, but we will not be discouraged by the shortcomings we see. Indeed, the failures we observe will only cause us to redouble our efforts.


tHEYISIBLE SCIENTISTS by RAE GOODELL

The popular image of the scientist is that of a recluse pursuing his life's work in the quiet of a laboratory. But there is another breed of scientist in the United States which vigorously espouses social causes , and seeks to influence policy makers and the public. Here are profiles of four of these 'visible scientists' - Paul Ehrlich, Linus Pauling, B.F. Skinner, Margaret Mead.


Studying theproblem of communication between scientists and society, Anita Rae Simpson Goodell, as a graduate student at Stanford University, discovered a new breed of American sCientist, totally different from the popular concept of reclusive researcher. The "visible" scientists, who leave their laboratories to espouse causes and influence people and policy, became the subject of her doctoral dissertation, from which this article is excerpted. Dr. Goodell is now doing research in communication on a postdoctoral fellowship at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology ..

pale, thin professor in a white laboratory coat steps to the microphone, blinks uncomfortably at the bright television lights, unfolds a prepared statement from his pocket, and reads it verbatim in a quavering voice. He is then subjected to polite questions from reporters, which he answers in muddy, technical terms. Mercifully, the session is short and the scientist is allowed to slip peacefully back to his beloved laboratory, where, among the gleaming rows of test tubes and the pungent smell of formaldehyde, he can continue to pursue his life's work, his magnificent obsession. Such has been the popular image of the scientist and how he might handle a rare and reluctantly granted press conference. The scientist, as thus pictured, is not a "people" person and certainly not a "press" person. He is probably not even interested in politics, with its hustle-bustle and lack of exactness. He leaves political questions and social amenities to those with more time and inclination. He feels, instead, a moral obligation and passion to add his small increment to scientific knowledge. He lives in isolated splendor, consumed by his work, and dies in obscurity, understood only by his colleagues. This scientist has one other striking characteristic: he is almost diametrically opposed to the kind actually seen in the news media today-the scientists who are "visible" to the general public. What distinguishes them is not that they are any better or less known than their predecessors, but that they are known for different reasons. Typically, in the past, the American public has known an occasional discoverer such as Albert Einstein or Jonas Salk. In 19thcentury America, many of the commonly known "scientists" were inventors such as Thomas Edison and Alexander Graham Bell. And an exceptional lecturer and popularizer would also achieve a name. Science watchers also knew the leaders of the scientific community, who served as spokesmen for their fellows. Today's scientists, however, become visible not for discoveries, popularizing, or for leading the scientific community, but for activities in the world of politics and controversy. Aggressively taking advantage of the new communications media, they seek to influence people and policy on science-related subjects such as overpopulation, drugs, health, genetic engineering, pollution, genetics and intelligence quotient (IQ), food additives and energy shortage. Circumventing the traditional channels for influencing science policy, they take their message directly to the public; to succeed, they must be knowledgeable, articulate, dramatic, persistent and sophisticated about mass media operations. Those who do succeed become

A

known not for their science but for their public involvement. Who are these visible scientists? Based on a 1972 questionnaire survey of college students, the 15 most widely known American scientists were (in descending order of "visibility"): B.F. Skinner, Margaret Mead, Jonas Salk, Wernher von Braun, Linus Pauling, Paul Ehrlich, Isaac Asimov, Albert Sabin, William Shockley, Noam Chomsky, Barry Commoner, James D. Watson, Edward Teller, Rene Dubos, Glenn Seaborg. Let's look quickly at several of them by way of illustration: • Ehrlich: He is out to persuade the public to halt the population explosion, by combining persistence, a large following and Madison Avenue advertising techniques. • Mead: For over 45 years she has been the people's anthropologist. Moving from sex customs to the generation gap to environment, she has translated anthropology into relevant and practical terms for parents, students and policy makers. • Skinner: He antagonizes psychologists and laymen alike, for he contends that man's behavior is determined by his environment. But his theories are as influential as they are objectionable, both among scientists and laymen. • Pauling: He is one of America's most brilliant and productive scientists. But laymen know him for a book on vitamin C, and if they're a little older, for his agitation for disarmament and peace. That a change should be taking shape in the visibility of scientists is not surprising. Like politicians, actors or football players, scientists gain visibility largely through the communications media, and the media have underg0!1erevolutionary change in the past few decades. Concurrently, the uneasy relationship between science and society has been changing, as technological ills have increasingly plagued society. These changes in turn have put pressure on science to update its antiquated concepts of how much to tell society, when and how. In short, dramatic changes in science and in communication are forcing changes in science communication, and, in the process, in the kind of scientist who communicates. Today's visible scientists are those who are adjusting to the modernization of science communication, to the changes in communication technology and the changes in the scientific community. In the survival struggle of our rapidly evolving communications media, they are the scientists who are adapting. They are exploring new vehicles for influence, new channels for communication between science and society. Fashioning new rules of scientific decorum, they are, consciously or unconsciously, experimenting with ways to provide the kind of information the public now demands. The scientific community is as uncomfortable about the changes in science communication as the general public is about some of the other effects of technology. Like any modernization, the updating of science communication is slow, painful, often resisted. The new scientists are seen by their colleagues almost as a pollution in the scientific community-sometimes irritating, sometimes hazardous. The new scientists are breaking old rules of protocol in the


scientific profession, questioning the old ethics, defying the old standards of conduct. They have also caused consternation among science watchers and policy makers. These scientists will mislead the public, the argument runs, because they. are speaking outside their area of expertise; but, because they are scientists, the public will listen. As a result, the visible scientists are an unusual group, emerging from strong cross-pressures-pressures from the scientific community to concentrate on their scientific research, pressures from the public to provide information on critical issues, pressures from the press to conform to standards of newsworthiness. And, unlike politicians or movie stars, for instance, their very success may have a detrimental effect on their research careers. They deserve a closer look. The future of society depends in part on how the scientific community adapts to current pressures. And the visible scientists have a crucial role in this process and its outcome. Science and technology have changed society, which has responded with new demands on science; now the way science answers these demands will influence its ability to make further changes in society. The future influence of science-whether it produces pollution problems or environmental solutions, war technology or peace plans-depends, in part, on what happens now to the communication of science.

CRUSADING

FOR

THE SCIENTISTS Visible scit:;ntists of today, Dr. Rae Goodell says, share five important characteristics: Each "has a 'hot topic,' each is controversial, articulate, has a colorful image and has established a credible reputation." Dr. Goodell notes that the media, in searching for scientists to fill their own special needs, "are of course shaping the kinds of scientists who will reach public attention." But, she says, other forces also have been working to create these visible scientists. "In the 1940s, most scientists stuck to their laboratories and avoided the taint of politics," she writes. However, the advent of nuclear energy and the increasing availability of Federal funds for scientific projects caused some scientists to leave the laboratory in the 1950s and become involved in governmental decision making. In the late 1960s, she says, this establishment of influential, behindthe-scenes scientific advisers, or "insiders," crumbled as science and society attempted to find a new working relationship. To the fore then came a type of socially and politically involved scientist-the guerrilla or "outsider" - "who sought direct contact with the public, holding an implicit belief in the workings of the democratic process and the ability of the citizen to exert influence on policy." These are the visible scientists who predominate today.

POPULATION

CONTROL

PAUL EHRLICH The battle tofeed all of humanity is over. In the I970s, the worldwillundergofamines hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now.... We can no longer afford merely to treat the symptoms of the cancer of population growth; the cancer itself must be cut out. Population control is the only answer. With such predictions, pleas and pro~ posals, between 1968 and 1970, Paul Ehrlich, a Stanford University biologist, captured the imaginations of middle-class Americans. His book, The Population Bomb (1968), sold over two million copies. He became known as the angry young man of the environment movement, a leader in the international crusade for population control. In 1970, at the climax of his visibility, he received over two dozen requests a day for personal appearances, although he charged $2,000 for a lecture and was booked a year in advance. Ramparts, Playboy and McCall's maga-


zines were after him to submit articles, scholar 'who withers in front of lights, and he was featured in Life, Look and The Ehrlich is at ease before audiences, with Washington Post. Television crews crowd- reporters, on television and in. print. ed his office. Johnny Carson featured him Whether speaking to one reporter or one on the "Tonight" television show for an million television viewers, he combines unprecedented 60 minutes; the broadcast an uncanny way with words with a flair elicited a record 5,000 letters to the for the dramatic, a dash of well-placed National Broadcasting Company, and exaggeration and a modicum of sex appeal. Ehrlich was invited back within six weeks. He is young, 45, tall and dark. Much of Paul Ehrlich is a visible scientist of the his charisma comes from a writing and 1970s. A full professor at Stanford, his speaking style that is natural, quick, credentials as a researcher in entomology caustic, iconoclastic, hyperbolic, vivid and and population biology make him un- anecdotal. questionably a "scientist." He has pub- Examples: lished several textbooks and over 100 technical papers. But he is also a best- Q: Then, you really think this population selling author, a popular lecturer, a tele- growth is that serious? vision personality and a consummate A: I wouldn't say serious; I would say salesman for his scientific ideas. Not a fatal. What's done is done. We must look

to the survivors, if any. ~aying that the population explosion is a problem of developing countries is like telling a fellow passenger, "your end of the boat is sinking." Ehrlich "shoots from the hip," as an assistant put it, and qualifies, if need be, later. He feels that, with so much at stake, he must express his opinion, even at the risk of being wrong. "You do your best, express your opinions, and take your lumps." In the process, he generates controversy. His extremes elicit equal and opposite extremes. He pulls no punches, and in exchange his critics are equally harsh with him. Ehrlich arnved at his position as a crusader for population control by choice

The "visible scientists" are active in a variety of causes. They campaign (see illustrations clockwise) for population control (Paul Ehrlich), peace and vitamin C (Linus Pauling), recognition of the essential oneness of human beings (Margaret Mead), and the control of human behavior (B.F. Skinner).


and chance. Having developed an interest in ecology as an undergraduate at the University of Pennsylvania, he emphasized population studies in his graduate work at the University of Kansas and in later research. He began¡ including discussion of his population concerns in courses he taught at Stanford University. Students mentioned him to parents, and he was soon invited to speak at alumni gatherings. From alumni, it was an easy step to other groups, including, finally, the prestigious Commonwealth Club in San Francisco, where his speech was covered by radio and television. In the meantime, he had attracted the attention of David Brower, then executive director of California's largest conservation organization, the Sierra Club, who, together with Ian Ballantine of Ballantine Books, suggested that Ehrlich write a book. "We naively thought such a book might influence the 1968 Presidential election" by pressuring candidates to take a stand on the population i'ssue, Ehrlich recalls. Ballantine Books promised to get the book out in a matter of months, just in time for the election, so Ehrlich hastily produced The Population Bomb. Ehrlich still receives about one request a day for a personal appearance. He was tempted to quit public life altogether after the 1972 election, but has compromised on a steady, lower level of activity. Since he hates "ricocheting around the country," he consolidates speeches into two or three tours a year, reserving days for research and teaching, nights and weekends for writing and other

public activities. The whole process of accumulating visibility took only three years for phrlich. In 1966, four years before his 1970 peak of activity, he was an unknown, although popular, lepidopterologist at Stanford University, a young-man-on-the-way-up in biology circles. Although he had begun at Stanford as assistant professor only six years previously, he had just been promoted to full professor. He had been publishing technical papers since he was 16 years old, and was considered in the forefront of the new field of population biology. He had accrued appropriate honors, seemed devoted to his work, and often took field trips for rest and relaxation from the pressures of his job. His hobby was flying; he was a licensed pilot who averaged 100 hours a year. He was a popular teacher, partly because he interjected discussions of the "human side" of the population studies into his lectures; he had published two general articles on the subject in little-known magazines. What happened? Why the sudden public visibility? The answer lies partly with the media. In an age of live television, lectures "broadcast" by telephone and mass paperbacks, Ehrlich is a natural. He is at home on television, in give-and-take with reporters, in question-and-answer sessions, fashioning magazine articles. While Ehrlich's career began in face-toface contacts with audiences, when opportunities arose to use the mass media, he took advantage of them. "Any loudmouth, instead of talking to 200 students at a

FOR

PEACE AND

VITAMIN

time, can talk to 200,000 over radio and TV; obviously he is going to take the opportunity," he asserts. His message moved across paperbacks, newspaper interviews, television and magazines. In part, Ehrlich took advantage of an ability to write and speak, well and quickly. While he calls writing "the hardest, most miserable work I know," he put together The Population Bomb from lecture and article notes in just three weeks. And words seem to come as easily to him on the podium as in print. Debates, speeches, magazine articles, interviews, technical papers and college and high school textbooks are all part of a conscious effort by Ehrlich to get the message about population across to as wide an audience as possible. The Population Bomb was revised in 1971, and a second paperback, How To Be a Survivor (1971), was published. It was coauthored by a law student assistant and contained the same themes as The Population Bomb. But it differed in offering more specific proposals for solving problems and in being directed to a young audience. Books for school use have included a ninevolume high school biology text; a college text, Population, Resources, Environment, of which Ehrlich's wife Anne is coauthor (1970, 1972); and a collection of essays, Global Ecology (1971). A new book by Ehrlich and his wife, The End of Affluence, directed to a general audience, was published late in 1974. In an era when it was difficult for most people to get access to media, Ehrlich had no trouble: they came to him. 0

C

LINUS PAULING On a cold January evening in 1973 at Stanford University, over 200 people, the overflow from a packed auditorium, stood outside the lecture hall in a chilling rain to hear Dr. Linus Pauling's slow, quavering voice piped over a loud-speaker. No one seemed to notice the irony of standing in the rain in order to hear Pauling's advice on how to prevent colds. There is no doubting Pauling's charisma or ability. "Pauling is arguably the.greatest scientist alive today," according to British science writer Graham Chedd, in a summary of Pauling's achievements. His contribution to the understanding of chemical bonds won him the Nobel

Prize in chemistry in 1954. Some say his discovery of the cause of sickle cell anemia, part of his development of the concept of molecular disease, deserves another Nobel Prize. He has also made major contributions in the area of antibody structure and function, protein structure, the relationship of abnormal enzymes to mental disease, and the theory of anesthesia. Pauling is not immodest when he states that about "half a dozen fields of science were in some part, perhaps considerable part, based upon my original work." He is, by the estimates of friends and enemies alike, a genius. And he had the satisfaction of receiving the Nobel

Peace Prize in 1962 for his political activities opposing war, particularly his work promoting a nuclear weapons test ban. But Pauling's political activities have won him as much animosity as admiration. Because of his stature in science, his public actions have received considerable attention. Both what he is saying and the fact that he, a scientist, is saying it, have received heavy criticism. The attacks, sometimes depress him and his wife and children, he says, and more profoundly, they have affected his professional career. To a certain extent, Pauling's troubles have been the obvious ones anyone faces when he ventures to publicize unpopular


views. Pauling opposed nuclear weapons testing, urged peace and rapprochement with the Soviets during the early 1950s. Later, he advised the public to take large doses of vitamin C to prevent and alleviate colds at a time when megavitamins were anathema to the medical community. For his efforts he received the usual treatment afforded minority voices by the majority-ridicule, contempt, epithets, pressure to conform. There was another, more serious, peril in being too public, or too political: Pauling's scientific career was affected. Ultimately, pressure from university administration officials prompted Pauling to leave the California Institute of Technology, in Pasadena, where he had taken his Ph.D. and taught for 36 years. His final decision to leave came in 1963, he says, because of "the ungracious reception of the Peace Prize by the institute." Nevertheless, at a White House ceremony on September 18, 1975, President Gerald R. Ford presented Dr. Pauling with the prestigious National Medal of Science, the U.S. Government's highest science award, for his achievements over the years. Pauling moved to the University of California at San Diego in 1967; in the interim, he served as a Research Professor of the Physical and Biological Sciences in the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions in Santa Barbara, California.

But San Diego was no more hospitable than the California Institute of Technology. Pauling was already past retirement age (he was 66), which meant his appointment was renewed on a year-to-year basis. So in 1969 he decided to accept a job at Stanford. That university, while it has a reputation for courting Nobel Prize winners, was not so hospitable to Pauling as might have been expected. He was never given adequate office and laboratory space, and now does his research in an office building off-campus. Two characteristics in Pauling seem to lead him into his political and professional hassles. The first is his sense of dedication to the cause of peace, a dedication which prompts him to spend costly hours in activities not related to his scientific work. Students say he tells them that when he received the 1954Nobel Prize in chemistry, he resolved to spend half his time henceforth on peace-related activities. The second factor which has exacted a price from Pauling is what might be called an idealistic stubbornness. It is partially responsible for his becoming repeatedly embroiled in time-consuming controversies. For example, he decided to publish his controversial book, Vitamin C and the Common Cold (1970), because he was irritated with members of the medical profession whose minds, he felt, were closed to the published findings of investi-

gators on the benefits of vitamin C. Vitamin C and the Common Cold drew a prompt reaction, especially from the nutrition specialists in the medical profession. Nutritionists were quick to point out that Pauling was not a medical researcher, and was therefore speaking outside his area of expertise. They also noted that he had not done any experimental research on the subject himself. There was not enough evidence to evaluate the role of vitamin C, they added, and there were some experiments showing that vitamin C had no effect. There were also differences in how Pauling and his critics interpreted particular key studies. The critics suggested that large amounts of vitamin C would be toxic, have side effects, or pass unmetabolized into the urine. Undaunted, Pauling has steadfastly defended his views. At times he descends to personalities in his impatience with his critics; but in general he stresses the need for more data, to confine the debate, and then, to interpret the experiments. The vitamin C controversy follows a pattern that has often existed in Pauling's work: On the basis of existing information he proposes a new theory. The scientific establishment is at first skeptical, perhaps incredulous. Over time, however, experiments suggested by his idea and conducted by him or others support his concept and it's accepted. This was the sequence in his work on protein structure, on antibodies and on molecular disease and sickle cell anemia, as he described it in a review of his work for the magazine Daedalus in 1970. More recently, his concept of orthomolecular psychiatry (that imbalances in specific substances such as ascorbic acid may be related to mental illness) has antagonized the medical profession. Typically, as in the vitamin C case, Pauling does not do the experiments himself. His primary achievements have been in the development of theory. "I have an open mind, I think," Pauling says. "Most of my contributions have involved the recognition of some misinterpretation of the existing information about the world and the development of some insight into the most profitable direction in which to try to proceed." Ironically, the controversiality of even Pauling's political views could also be considered partly a result of the fact that they are pace setting. Only time and further experimentation will determine whether, in the case of vitamin C, Pauling continues to be a leader. 0


ENGINEERING

A BETTER

HUMAN

B.F. SKINNER The scientist who best reflects the curious mixture of frustration and satisfaction which accompanies popular success is B.F. Skinner. That Harvard University professor Burrhus Frederic Skinner is successful is undebatable: He is considered by psychologists and press alike one of the most important figures in psychology. According to The New York Times Magazine, "in a survey of department chairmen at American universities ... Skinner was chosen overwhelmingly as the most influential figure in modern psychology." He is also the academic psychologist best known to the general public. But in the process of becoming one of the most visible psychologists, he has had bad moments. In particular, Skinner has been roughly handled by the press. In its inevitable image making, the press has cast Skinner in the role of the mechanical man, unfeeling, routinized, complacent, cocky, as cold and methodical as his theories. To many laymen, Skinner's theories are indeed cold and dehumanizing. The underlying message is that human behavior is determined by a combination of one's genes and one's environment, not (as people prefer to think) by one's free will, one's emotions, one's attitudes, one's impulses. To Skinner, however, this state of affairs is a hopeful one, because humanity is continually changing its environment and, by developing the appropriate "behavioral technology," the human environment can be altered in ways to improve his behavior. Skinner arrived at his conclusions by approaching the study of mankind, over 40 years ago, from a new direction. Taking off from the behavioristic theories developed by psychologist John B. Watson, Skinner studied the external behavior of the organism, rather than trying to scrutinize the inner workings of the mind. He applied scientific measurement to his observations. "Skinner did what no one else had done before," says Richard Herrnstein, former ly a student of Skinner's and now a colleague at Harvard. "He

made the study of behavior objective. Watson changed psychology from the study of the mind to the study of behavior, but Skinner changed it to a science of behavior. " Skinner's first book, The Behavior of Organisms (1938), became a classic in the field of behaviorism. It reported a large number of experiments, many of them carried out in the "Skinner box," in which Skinner found that animals learned by a process of operant conditioning-not simple stimulus-response conditioning, but a more complex schedule of reinforcements from the environment. Using Skinner's techniques, animals have been taught to perform highly complex, and colorful, tasks; pigeons, for example, play table tennis, walk in figure eights, play the piano. In later texts Skinner applied his experiences and ideas from animal experiments to human behavior. He discussed his ideas in general terms in Science and Human Behavior (1953), and focused specifically on man's language in Verbal Behavior (1957). In his best known book, Walden Two (1948), a fictionalized description of his conception of

utopia, Skinner made specific proposals for shaping human behavior. These were spelled out and elaborated in his recent nonfiction book, Beyond Freedom and Dignity (1971). In it, Skinner contends that, with population explosion, famine, pollution and other evils threatening man's existence, we can no longer afford the luxury of thinking of ourselves as free, dignified individuals; we must use the scientific tools at hand to alter man's political and social environment in ways that will improve his behavior. Critics have been quick to point out the chilling consequences of Skinner's theories. If man's behavior is to be controlled not by the individual, but by the scientists who have the technology to manipulate the individual's environment, the system is authoritarian, to say the least, and "fascist," in the minds of some opponents. Among psychologists, Skinner is either a hero or archvillain, with "not much in between," according to one colleague. Skinner's approach to behavior is anathema, for instance, to Freudian psychologists, because he ignores the internal


mechanisms of the mind. Psychologists also divide on whether he is, and should be, going beyond the Fmits of his specialty in applying his ideas to politics and the social good. Many are scornful of his leaps of inference from rats and pigeons to people, what philosopher Arthur Koestler calls the "ratomorphic fallacy," attributing to human beings only the mental processes he has found in lower animals. Journalists confronting Skinner's theories have tended to belittle him as a person. Profiles of Skinner evoke images of a man as well programed as his laboratory and with little compassion. Journalists also concentrate on the cold-hearted aspect of Skinner's experiments. One biographical profile, which appeared in The New York Times Magazine in 1968, depicts Skinner, as he puts it, as a "conceited ass." The article, entitled "Skinner Agrees He Is the Most Important Influence in Psychology," emphasizes his confident attitude toward critics and com-

ments wryly, "No one has ever accused Skinner of excessive humility." The New York Times Magazine m;ticle, Skinner feels, "seriously misrepresented me as I think I am." Skinner maintains that the author had to stretch the truth to make his point. All told, Skinner is, understandably, "not too happy" with the way he has been treated in the press, an attitude that sets him apart .from most visible scientists. The journalistic image of Skinner comes partly from a professional image which is equally unflattering. Journalists who consult Skinner's colleagues find almost unanimous agreement that he is abrasive, difficult, impatient - "it would be almost impossible not to have something of a one-sided view," a sympathetic colleague admits. Skinner, who is 73, now devotes full time to writing-no teaching duties or research. Of research, he says, "I always loved it but it always conflicted." Now that he feels he will no longer be making

SEEING ALL MANKIND

important scientific discoveries, he is concentrating on "what I think I can do best at my age. I think I am in a position to pull some strings together and ... deal with criticism and the obstacles to progress in the field." He stopped his laboratory work about 12 years ago, although, as he says, "the work is still there" and is continued by others. Even without several future books that he plans, Skinner feels well satisfied. "I ... plan my life and ... I think that explains what success I have had. I do not believe that I have an especially high intelligence quotient. I think that I have been very stubborn about some ideas and have managed my time well." Incredibly, he finds he is able to say: "When I was just coming to Harvard [as a graduate student] in 1928, if I could have prescribed exactly what I wanted to do, and if I had known the present situation, I think I would have been satisfied with exactly what I am now. That is rather remarkable." 0

AS ONE

MARGARET MEAD It is probably no coincidence that Margaret Mead is the contemporary scientist who has the most sophistication about the workings of the press and also the scientist who has had the most staying power. After over 45 years in the public eye, Mead has become probably the best known scientist alive today, a people's anthropologist. "If a non anthropological. audience is asked to name a prominent anthropologist," writes a colleague who studied Mead for his master's thesis, "the first name suggested will almost without fail be that of Dr. Margaret Mead. In my experience this will be the case on every level, from high school students to academicians in other fields." Mead has been visible in varying degrees since 1928, when her first book, Coming of Age in Samoa, became a bestseller, taking everyone, including Mead, by surprise. "I had no idea it would be popular," she recalls, "and I didn't know it was a success for six months after it was published, because I was in the field again [in New Guinea]."

For the public and the press, Mead in "jargon-free, almost lyrical prose." The success of Coming of Age in Samoa had a remarkable and successful combination of ingredients: she was readable,' seemed to determine her future direction, relevant, colorful, controversial. Journal- a direction that was to bring her increasing ists were quick to appreciate these visibility. She wrote her second book, characteristics, which grew stronger over Growing Up in New Guinea, in 1930, and the years, as she continued to lecture, began writing articles for general interest write and speak out in the press on a magazines, which she still does today. variety of issues, changing topics with Her position at the American Museum of the changing times. A science writer in Natural History in New York has given 1973 summed up Mead's powerful appeal her an additional forum for popularizing to journalists: "If I went to a scientific anthropology. She has been with the convention, and I spotted Margaret Mead, museum for some 50 years, starting as I'd go up and start interviewing her. assistant curator of ethnology in 1926, Margaret Mead is positive feedback, a becoming associate curator in 1942, curahousehold name, she's good copy ... she's tor in 1964 and curator .emeritus in 1969. Her work at the museum culminated in a sure thing. " One of the most important character- the opening of her exhibit, "Hall of istics that have made Mead popular with Peoples of the Pacific," in May 1971. Mead's ihterest in popular writing journalists and laymen has been that she write's and speaks "in English," as she reaches back into .. her childhood. She puts it-no jargon. A Time magazine .began writing poetry when she .was nine, writer described one of her lectures as started a novel in grammar school, wrote "packed with provocative opinion, and short plays for school, and helped start necessary forays into social science jargon a school, magazine. When she started were leavened with literate wit." Coming college at DePauw University in Indiana, of Age in Samoa, he added, was written she "intended to be a writer," and when


she transferred to Barnard College in New York City a year later, she continued to major in English. As late as 1932 she published a poem in New Republic magazine, but she found the most satisfying channel for her writing interests in her books on anthropology. Mead has also exploited an uncanny ability to give lectures that are extemporaneous and captivating. "I taught myself to speak," she explains, "under my father's watchful eye as he sat in the audience (I was making extemporaneous speeches while I was in high school)." Her technique is to speak from memory, without text or even lecture notes, on topics which she has studied in advance. "I don't speak about things I've written about," she says; "I speak to find out how to write them." She never gives the same lecture twice, although speeches may be based on the same themes, constructed from the same building blocks. The effect is a spontaneity to which Mead's audiences quickly respond. She has "a gift," one graduate student was quoted as saying, "of being able to capture the thing that everybody knows but rarely says. She can say it in a few words. She hits at the very human truth which is familiar, but which has never been said." In lectures and interviews, Mead has an irresistible quotability for journalists. Articles about. her are peppered with quotations of off-the-cuff remarks, sometimes featured in specially marked-off sections or separate pages of "meaty Meadisms." On American family life, she has been quoted as saying, for example: Motherhood is like being a crack tennis player or ballet dancer-it lasts just so long, then it's over.... We've focused on wifehood and reproductivity with no clue about what to do with mother after the children haveleft home. For the first time in human history, there are no elders anywhere who know what the young people know. Fathers are spending too much time taking care of babies. No other civilization ever let responsible and important men spend their time in this way.... Men today have lost something by turning toward the home instead of going out of it. Mead's writing and speaking style has also been effective because what she says is relevant: it matters to contemporary Americans. She talks about people, sex, family life, the generation gap, environment. Exotic Polynesian

tribes become human, and useful for what they tell us about life. "Margaret Mead has been a catalyst," Time says, "in making anthropology relevaI).t to contemporary man." Mead's willingness to defy critics and grapple with contemporary and controversial issues has made a strong impression on journalists. Writes David Dempsey in The New York Times Magazine: "Unlike most of her colleagues, who bury themselves in the tribal customs of primitive man, Mead is visible, a willing plunger into modern social controversy who projects herself as a global prophetess on almost every subject that concerns the human condition. To a society troubled by its own shifting folkways, and hungry for guidance in coping with them, she is a poor man's anthropologist." Since 1940 Mead has divided her time, as she analyzes it, among teaching duties (graduate and postgraduate students), writing scientific articles and reviews, doing field work, participating in scientific conferences and symposia, working in scientific societies, and writing for the general public. Mead has been able to stay relevant and current by adding to her repertoire a broad range of subjects on which she studies and comments. ~'Her subjects," writes Dempsey, "include hunger, air pollution, sex, mental hygiene, population control, women's careers, nutrition, violence, black power, drugs, primitive art, the family, military service, tribal customs, city planning, alcoholism, architecture,

civil liberties and child development." Uncannily, she often begins talking about an issue, such as population control or urbanization, just before it "breaks" as a popular topic in the press. She attributes her foresight to a kind of world view. Over the years, a kaleidoscope of contentious comments, battles with critics, and colorful eccentricities have fallen together to form an image of Margaret Mead. Her life and style are rich in imagemaking material of the kind journalists delight in. She is good copy not because she is contrived but because she is always herself, the same person in her living room, in a press conference, or speaking in a crowded auditorium. A colleague recalled seeing a film that dramatized Mead's ability to be natural and at ease wherever she was. The film was made in 1967 by National Educational Television during a return trip to the Admiralty Islands, where Mead had originally done field work in 1929. The colleague described the scenes and the effect: "You see Margaret coming up in an outrigger canoe, in her flowered dress, with a big broad hat-because with all the time she spent in the tropics, she really can't be in the sun much because she gets very bad sunburns. She comes up to this wharf and there are these black people there to greet her with some flowers. She and an old black woman fall into each other's arms and she's just as much herself there. It's really a remarkable testimony for someone who really feels it's one world." D


THE U.S. PUBLISHING SCENE The United States has nearly 6,000 book publishers, who issue about 30,000 new titles a year. If it were a single company, the book industry would rank among the country's 50 largest corporations. One can learn a good¡ deal about what is happening in the American publishing business simply by walking through a few bookstores in midtown Manhattan. In one of the largest stores, in the midst of the most fashionable section of Fifth Avenue, the browser is first greeted with lavish displays of cookbooks, show business books, sports biographies, architectural picture books and "how-to-do-it" books: how to raise plants or build houses or breed dogs. Farther back in the store are departments that sell jewelry, prints, phonograph records and 'chess sets. There is a large children's book department and a still larger nonfiction department. The poetry section takes up a few shelves, and the fiction-except for a few classicsis limited to what is currently on the lists of bestselling books compiled each week. Downstairs is a huge paperback department that offersjust about every title imaginable. Watching the shoppers, one will notice that many of themand just about all the younger ones-cross the main floor almost without looking at what's offered and head for the paperbacks in the basement. The store is owned by a large company, which itself is a subdivision of a much larger one; and the books it stocks, one suspects, are selected by a well-programed computer. Just around the corner, on a side street taken up mostly with diamond merchants' stores, there is a far different kind of bookstore. The place seems to be in total confusion. It is poorly lighted and the shelves and counters are jammed with classics, serious fiction and nonfiction, obscure film publications and odd little books that would never find their way into the first store. The poetry section sprawls halfway through the store. The walls are covered with authors' photographs, many of them

autographed: James Joyce, Edith Sitwell, e.e. cummings, Allen Ginsberg, Tennessee Williams. The aisles are usually crowded with people actually reading books. The store was founded in 1920 by a dedicated book lover, who still lives upstairs with her cats. Each store-the highly efficient professional one and the more haphazard personal oneserves a purpose and has loyal customers who would probably never think of patronizing the other store. Also in the neighborhood are a Canadian-owned bookshop that specializes in paperbacks, a giant business- and scientific-publications store, an opulent shop and gallery maintained as a showcase for an Italian publisher, four bookstores owned by American publishers (these serve as training grounds for the publishing companies as well as on-the-spot gauges of the public's bookbuying habits) and a shop that handles only French and Spanish language editions. The American publishing scene, judging from what is being sold in this few-block area, is obviously a varied one. The book publishing industry registered $3,700 million in sales in 1975, an increase of 5.7 per cent over the year before. At the time of this writing, no figures are yet available for 1976. If publishers were to merge into a single company, it would rank in the top 50 on a list of the 500 largest industrial corporations in the co~mtry. In fact, there are nearly 6,000 book publishers in the United States, of whom about 125 could be considered major. Except for a few in Boston, Chicago, or on the West Coast, most of these are located in New York City. According to the trade publication Publishers. Weekly, American publishers issue about 30,000 new titles annually,



While the readership of newspapers and magazines has decreased in the United States with the mass appeal of television, more people are reading more books than ever before. of which perhaps 2,000 or so are fiction and perhaps 1,000 during World War II. But it also includes the names of some of are poetry or drama. Interest in nonfiction is clearly overwhelm- the most respected American novelists currently at work: ing. But what kind of nonfiction? It's a broad category. Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. (Slapstick or Lonesome No Moret) and The book that topped The New York Times national best- Gore Vidal (1876). seller list in 1976 was The Final Days by Bob Woodward and It may be instructive to follow the history of one American Carl Bernstein, a description of the last year of the Watergatepublishing company to see how the modern publishing industry related activities in the Nixon White House, by the Washington evolved. Random House, which just celebrated its 51st Post reporters who broke the story. An additional three of the anniversary, is a good example. top IO books on the list also dealt with the 1974 Watergate In 1925, the enterprising American publisher Horace affair and the resignation of President Richard Nixon. Overall, Liveright needed money to finance a divorce, so he sold his according to the Publishers Weekly year in review for 1976, highly profitable sideline, The Modern Library, to two young "a nonfiction bestseller usually deals with an issue, problem, men, Bennett Cerf and Donald Klopfer. The Modern Library interesting personality, or past and current history that strikes was a series of small, hardbound editions of classics: Shakespeare, Dickens, Anatole France, Edgar Allan Poe, usually a responsive chord among book buyers." Roots, black author Alex Haley's search for his African authors whose books were no longer covered by a copyright, origins, whic~ took 12 years of research and writing and which so no royalties had to be paid. The two partners shared one was shown on nationwide television in an eight-part serial office, which also served as the storeroom for their stock of in early 1977, took second place among nonfiction bestsellers. books. As Donald Klopfer now remembers it, the most difficult When television began to pick up a mass following in the .part of the operation was sharing the space with the books: 1950s, many book publishers at first panicked. They feared that "In the middle of August, when it would get as hot as hell, people were going to stop reading books in favor of watching you wouldn't believe how a room full of books bound in imitation events flicker on the television tube. They were wrong. Reader- leather smelled." ship of newspapers and magazines has decreased, but people The partners called their new enterprise Random House, are reading more books than ever. With the closing over the because in addition to The Modern Library, they planned to last IO years of some of the country's popular magazines, such publish their own books "at random." They began by importing as Life and Look, and a sharp decrease in the number of daily elegantly designed volumes from the Nonesuch Press in England. newspapers, book publishing has taken over many of the func- With the economic crash in 1929, the bottom fell out of the tions that used to be associated with periodicals, such as investiga- market for expensive imported editions, and Random House tive reporting or "muckraking journalism." set out to find some living, producing writers. Among the first A number of the Watergate books fall in that genre. So they signed up were playwright Eugene O'Neill and poetdo the recent rash of books on the role of the CIA (the Central dramatist Robinson Jeffers, both of whom had already won Intelligence Agency) and the FBI (the Federal Bureau ofInvestireputations, and a young, unknown American writer of Armenian gation). There have been a number of investigative books on descent named William Saroyan. In the 1930s, they added to environmental problems: on the possible dangers of spills their list such authors as William Faulkner, Isak Dinesen and by huge oil tankers or malfunctions of nuclear power plants or Edgar Snow. "We were still a small outfit," Klopfer says, "so pollution caused by the internal combustion engine. we had to go far afield to get the kind of authors the more estabAn obvious advantage of these topical books is that the lished houses wouldn't touch." writer is not forced to work under a tight deadline, as a journalist After the war, the company added a dictionary to its list would, and therefore has time to be more thorough in his investi- and became one of the first trade houses to establish a children's gations. A book publisher, so the argument goes, can afford to book department. (Today, many publishing companies-this put up more money than a newspaper for in-depth investigation may not be true of Random House-report that their children's because he can expect long-term sales rather than a one- or divisions are the most financially successful part of their operatwo-day news feature. An obvious disadvantage is that what tions.) The company's postwar authors included Irwin Shaw, could have been said in a short space is sometimes padded out John O'Hara and Truman Capote. In the 1960s, the company to book length. The mass paperback companies' ability to expanded into textbooks and purchased two small publishing companies known for the high quality of their publications, produce so-called "instant books" represents another journalistic aspect of book publishing. Instant books are paperback editions Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., and Pantheon. When Random bought printed, bound and distributed almost overnight. Knopf, the news that the combined worth of both companies Finding trends in current American fiction is more chancy was $14 million made the front page of The New York Times. than trend spotting elsewhere. The most successful novel of Klopfer thinks that story opened the eyes of the huge corporations 1976,at least in terms of ,sales, was Leon Uris' Trinity, a historical to the fact that there was money to be made in books. They soon began to move into publishing. The Radio novel about the troubles in Ireland from the famine of the l840s Corporation of America bought Random House. Its rival, to the Easter Rising of 1916. Yet, among the top IO there were few, if any, surprises. the Columbia Broadcasting System, bought another publishing Most of the novels were written by well-known authors and house. Fiat, of Italy, bought an American paperback publisher. Several Hollywood film companies bought out publishers, and most were pleasant escapist literature. The list is heavy with espionage-detective-World War II so did lIT (International Telephone and Telegraph), a huge novels, such as Jack Higgins' Storm Warning, a story of a group multinational corporation. No matter how large or small the publishing company, of nuns who are taken back to Germany by ship from Brazil


the editorial process is similar. It begins with the writer who has a book he wants to publish. Sometimes the author represents himself and submits his book directly to the publisher. More often, he employs a literary agent to represent him. Depending on the individual company, the book must be accepted by an editor or a committee of editors. In some cases, the committee also includes the members of the publisher's sales and advertising staff. In at least one large company, even the art director has a say in what is finally accepted. Although the instant book is no longer a rarity among the larger publishers, it still takes at least six months-and more often a year-for most hardback books to be edited, set in type, bound and shipped to bookstores throughout the country. A few publishers print books in the central and western states of America, but most printers are located in the east, as they have been since the earliest days of U.S. publishing. This means that shipping dates and advertising schedules have to be carefully planned so that books are in the stores before the official publication day. After a book appears, critics' reviews will have much to do with the eventual success or failure of the author's latest work. Particularly a review appearing in the prestigious New York Times or New York Review of Books will be quoted, discussed and, in many instances, considered the definitive word by the reading public in the decision whether a volume is worth buying-or even borrowing. Once a book has been accepted by a publisher, the search for subsidiary markets begins. Can parts of the book be sold as articles to magazines? Are the movies interested in filming it? Two highly competitive subsidiary markets are paperback reprints and book clubs. In recent years, the paperback market has become so important that in some cases the paperback companies actually own the books, and the hardback companies bid for the rights to publish them under their own more permanent format. This is a reversal of the traditional publishing

~

\

"Why don't you worry about the dedication after you write the book?" Š 1977.

By permission

of Saturday

Review

and Gerald Emerson.

arrangement. The first American book club, the Book-of-theMonth Club, was founded 50 years ago. Its model was a German mail order operation. Soon other clubs came into existence. The principle Qf all of them is similar. Members can order books offered by the club at prices usually a bit lower than the original publishers' prices. Today, clubs rival stores as the leading book outlet in the United States. Robert Bernstein, the current chairman of the board of Random House, said recently that "Diversity still exists in publishing. Anyone can print anything. Because of fierce competition among publishers, it's harder for the little guys. Authors have become stars, like sports stars, and that's expensive. Only large corporations can afford it." Remember those young customers in the Fifth Avenue bookstore ignoring the hardback books as they made their way to the paperbacks in the basement? Given a choice between a paperback or hardback book at the same price-or even a lower price, as was sometimes the case with Modern Library books-they choose paper. Ian Ballantine, who in his 36 years in publishing has been a founder or cofounder of four paperback companies, recently explained this oddity, "To young people a book is more interesting because it has escaped being published in hardback. They just can't imagine buying a hardback. In fact, they are suspicious of them." He believes that the most important change in publishing in the last 10 years has been the abandonment of the standard pocket-sized paperback format. "We've been liberated," he says. "Now a paperback can be anything a person of imagination can make it. I frankly don't see why anything is published in hardback." Donald Klopfer sees the paperback boom in the light of what it is doing to the publishers' backlists, books published in the past but kept in print. "In the old days we had beautiful backlists. Sixty per cent of our business was selling our old books, and each year we would sell 700 or a thousand copies of each title in the warehouse. Now we put them into paper and sell 6,000 or 7,000 copies of each title. The balance is changing, but what's happening is that more people are reading the books." All this talk of corporate gigantism-Big Guys versus Little Guys, to use Robert Bernstein's phrase-should not cover up the fact that there are a number of small publishers in the United States who are doing well on modest budgets. ' Some, larger ones, publish full trade lists, ge~eral fiction, nonfiction and poetry. Many specialize in regional books, books dealing only with New England or the Far West. There's a Vermont publisher whose list is almost totally devoted to books about Japan. Some publish only poetry, or specialize in fine printing and binding. In recent years, there has been a marked increase of small houses that publish only books on photography. Seven years ago, a young Nigerian named Joseph Okpaku, who had come to the United States in 1962to study civil engineering, founded The Third Press. At first, the press published only books dealing with Africa or Black America. The early titles included Verdict! by Okpaku himself, If They Come in the Morning by Angela Davis, Season of Anomy by Wole Soyinka and Love Poems by Sonia Sanchez. Okpaku had little financial backing and used the profits from the first book to cover the costs of the second, and the profits of the second to underwrite the third. In the last three years, he has broadened the base of the subject matter he publishes, and his latest catalogue lists such items as a little known English novel published first in 1881, a study of French politics by a leading French socialist, a biography of ex-U.S. President Gerald Ford by his former press secretary and a manual of African hairstyles.


The first American bestseller is usually said to have been 'The Day of Doom.' It was published hi Massachusetts in 1662 and sold out its first printing of 1,800 copies in one year. >

The books themselves tended to be short, informative Of course, The Third Press and these other small publishers are professional operations. One of the curiosities of the 1970s paperbacks, and they were more often than not written by has been the arrival on the scene of unabashed amateur pub- groups rather than individual authors: how we founded a lishers, people publishing for the sheer fun of it. A popular community, how we designed a house without an architect, paperback a few years ago was The Publish-It-Yourself Hand- how we made clothes for less money, how we found the meanbook, a practical guide. The handbook also contains uplifting ing of life. In their way, they were a continuation of the selfstories about authors-such as Walt Whitman and Virginia improvement and inspirational books that have been a mainstay Woolf-who published their own books with success. Perhaps of the U.S. publishing industry for decades. Still, it was pretty much a regional phenomenon until 1969 it's needless to mention it, but the author published the Handwhen people across the United States began to hear of somebook himself. thing called The Whole Earth Catalog. This was founded by The amateur press boom-for want of a better terma young Stanford University graduate named Stewart Brand, began in California in the middle 1960s. Some critics have who has said that' the inspiration for it came one day when he traced its roots to the political pamphleteering that was popular in northern California. Others see it as another example of a was thinking of his friends "who were starting their own civilizabasic distrust of the Establishment: If Establishment way of tion hither and yon in the sticks." Another influence was the L.L. Bean Catalog, a catalogue of hunting and outdoor equiplife was suspect, so certainly was Establishment publishing. ment and clothes that has been published for years by a sporting goods store in the northeastern state of Maine. He came, he says, to the conclusion that "so many of the problems came 1976 BESTSELLERS-FICTION down to a matter of access. Where to buy a windmill. Where 1. Trinity by Leon Uris. Doubleday. to get good information on bee keeping." The answer~he thought, 2. Sleeping Murder by Agatha Christie. Dodd, Mead. was in a catalogue of goods continuously updated, "that owed 3. Dolores by Jacqueline Susann. Morrow. nothing to the suppliers and everything to the users." 4. Storm Warning by Jack Higgins. Holt, Rinehart and The Catalog that evolved told how to find information on Winston. everything from at-home childbirth to how to buy a second5. The Deep by Peter Benchley. Doubleday. hand school bus, all served up with an idiosyncratic mixture of 6. 1876 by Gore Vidal. Random House. basic wood lore and Westernized Eastern mysticism. The book 7. Slapstick or Lonesome No More! by Kurt Vonnegut. Delasold so well on the West Coast that large publishers fought for corte/Seymour Lawrence. the national distribution rights, and the Catalog-in its various 8. The Lonely Lady by Harold Robbins. Simon and Schuster. revisions and rebirths-has been a steady national success. 9. Touch Not the Cat by Mary Stewart. Morrow. Most nonprofessional publishing in America has been 10. A Stranger in the Mirror by Sidney Sheldon. Morrow. limited to nonfiction, but novelists and short story writers have been banding together to bring out their work. One of the best 1976 BESTSELLERS-NONFICTION examples of this is'The Fiction Collective, an expanding group of 1. The Final Days by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein. about 30 writers from various parts of the country who publish Simon and Schuster. Superlative reporting on the last about eight books a year in both hardbound and paperback. days of the Nixon Admini~tration. Taking as their model a Swedish publishing collective, the 2. Roots by Alex Haley. Doubleday. History of a black family writers-all of whom have been published before by traditional from its Mrican origin to present-day America. publishers-take turns editing, producing and promoting each 3. Your Erroneous Zones by Dr. Wayne W. Dyer. Funk and other's books. To avoid back-scratching-or backbiting-no Wagnalls. Self-help pep talk. one is allowed to edit someone he has been edited by. The 4. Passages: The Predictable Crises of Adult Life by Gail Collective's aim is to publish noncommercial fiction and keep Sheehy. E.P. Dutton. Helpful study of mid-life crises. it in print. One mark of success, a Collective member has said, 5. Born Again by Charles W. Colson. Chosen Books/Fleming is that a group of scholars noted for their conservatism is now H. Revell. Honest spiritual biography by a former aide of considering organizing an academic collective, in order to bring ex-President Richard Nixon. out scholarly works overlooked by trade or academic presses. 6. The Grass Is Always Greener Over the Septic Tank by The first American bestseller is usually said to have been Erma Bombeck. McGraw-Hill. Humorous side of a dour Calvinist theological tract dressed up in verse. The Day suburban life. of Doom by the Reverend Mitchell Wigglesworth was published 7. Angels: God's Secret Agents by Billy Graham. Doubleday. in Massachusetts in 1662 and sold out its first printing of 1,800 How "God's secret agents" combat evil on earth. copies in a year. 8. Blind Ambition: The White House Years by John Dean. Since then, the American publishing industry has grown Simon and Schuster. Informative, lively Watergate from a print shop that turned out home-grown sermons and memoirs by a key participant. imported classics to a multiheaded business that includes both 9. The Rite Report: A Nationwide Study of Female Sexuality vast electronic corporations and young people working out of by Shere Hite. Macmillan. Women's attitudes to sex. an old garage in California. Anyone can publish anything10. The Right and the Power: The Prosecution of Watergate by and does. 0' Leon Jaworski. Reader's Digest Press/Gulf Publishirig. The former Watergate prosecutor's account. About the Author: David McCullough is a senior editor at America's prestigious one-million-member Book-of-the-Month Club.


ON THE LIGHTER SIDE

"If you don't mind, Fd like to get a second opinion." © 1977. Reprinted by permission of

Ladies Home Journal

"No kidding? Do you really think Fm asjiamboyant as Pat Moynihan?" Drawing by Donald Reilly. © 1976 the New Yorker Magazine, Inc.

and Orlando Busino.

"Fd like you to meet ourfriend the protein." Drawing by Koren. © 1976 the New Yorker Magazine, Inc.

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OTHER

USE OTHER

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Harlem is courage and Harlem is love. Harlem is beauty and Harlem is squalor. Harlem is heaven and Harlem is hell. Harlem is the human condition. I first came to Harlem more than 30 years ago from Trinidad by way of London. I had been engaged in the study of law at the Middle Temple of the Inns of Court and was on my way back to the West Indies. The ship's itinerary obliged me to disembark in New York City. And so I came to Harlem. From that moment, no matter where I have wandered, I have never in my heart been far away. I ani often asked: "Why do you live in Harlem?" My answer is invariably the same. I am in love with Harlem. It is a replica in miniature of the human condition. To live in Harlem is sometimes to hear the siren song of success, often to be denied by heaven and disdained by hell, yet always to hope anew each morning, whatever yesterday's despair. The prosaic facts about Harlem are straightforward enough. Here are located some of New York's most elegant brownstones; middle-class blacks, having once abandoned them, are now returning to the old dwellings and refurbishing them. There are impressive high-rise apartment buildings,. But there also are vast areas of deteriorated tenements. At least 50 per cent of the community's housing units are substandard. Unemployment in Harlem ranges between 25 and 30 per cent, and more than a fourth of all families are on welfare. Nearly half of all young people cannot find work; many of them are unemployable because they lack market-

able skills or are addicted to drugs. Between 1950 and 1970, greater Harlem lost one in four of its inhabitants, a decline from 772,000 to 564,000. Still, if it were a separate municipality, it would rank as America's 21st largest. The crime rate is high, and violence commonplace. On Friday and Saturday nights, Harlem Hospital can resemble a casualty station behind the front lines. It is also true that drug addicts buy their fixes under the very noses of the police. The numbers game flourishes more or less openly, as does prostitution. Yet Harlem remains a key fortress for black peoplein the United States. When I arrived, at the start of the forties, Harlem seemed to me like a painting by Monet, opaque on the surface but translucent in the depths of its luminous perspectives. Here, in the gray twilight of a winter day, I gleaned muted intimations of Turner's Venice. When spring came, the quarter I lived in was transformed into a corner of Paris: Montmartre in blackface with all the raffish stridency of a canvas by Toulouse-Lautrec. There was a small middle class in Harlem, relatively successful, with mass poverty treading everywhere on its heels. Yet this widespread poverty was suffused with a massive resiliency of spirit. Humor irradiated the scene. Few things would contribute so vitally to the restoration of Harlem as the return of whites in their former capacities as patrons of

bars, restaurants and nightclubs. When, in the aftermath of World War II, the whites stopped coming to Harlem, jazz was obliged to go downtown. Black musicians abandoned Harlem for 52nd Street. Harlem has never been the same since. It still is, in part, Catfish Row (the low-life slum area of Charleston, South Carolina, from which DuBose Heyward derived his classic play Porgy). Catfish Row is comrnon to Charleston, New Orleans, London, Acapulco -and Harlem. Catfish Row exists wherever people live out the raw stuff of life in seesawing transports of triumph and tragedy. So Harlem is a perennial masquerade. There is frenzied woe beneath the frenetic gaiety. The woe is real, but so is the gaiety. And sometimes when the wind blows assertively from the southwest, ruffling the ornamental trees along 110th Street at the northern boundary of Central Park, it brings with it a nostalgic scent. I sniff again the salt tang of the sea I have journeyed across to Harlem. For me, there has always been alchemy in these sights, scents and sounds of Harlem. I remark the texture of its essential life, with its "Life for me ain't been no crystal stair," says a black mother to her son in a poem by Langston Hughes (see page 29). But she counsels: Don't you turn back. Keep going. Keep climbing. Here, a woman'sface in the crowd demonstrating against the closure of a hospital evokes the strong-willed determination of Harlem.



tic gallantry. Somewhere in Harlem is an anbattlefield element of the dead, the wounded, the dying and the survivors. I note the tique black gentleman who on a bitterly cold sentinel trees along the sculptured avenues morning was more solicitous of my' wife's and their side streets. I witness the glad- comfort than 1. That, however-that humor, ness and grief, bluster and burlesque, delecta- that zest-is the spirit of Harlem, where hution and despair. I observe how squalor and mor and sorrow are contrapuntal effects in a degradation exist side by side with elegance great human fugue by some cosmic Bach. My spirits are a sunburst some mornings. and exaltation. And I here testify to the transmutation of I juggle possibilities, throwing them into the air, catching and then tossing again this all these diverse elements into hope. For many men and women eminent in pub- choice and that alternative. If the soaring flight of the morning fulfills lic life who reside in Harlem, their dedication to the community is a living vocation, re- its early promise, I might breakfast at Adele's ligious in its intensity, all-encompassing in its Kitchen and lunch at La Famille Restaurant. devotion. A brilliant cluster of personalities Between breakfast and lunch I might work comes to mind: U.S. Representative Charles on a research project at the Schomburg ColRangel; Percy Sutton, Borough President of lection, that treasure trove of black American Manhattan; Eleanor Holmes Norton, Com- literature in a branch of the New York Public missioner of Human Rights for New York Library at 135th Street and Lenox Avenue. City; Basil Paterson, vice-chairman of the After lunch I might return to the Schomburg Democratic National Committee; New York for another two or three hours. Then I might State Senator Carl McCall. go a few yards farther up toward Seventh They reside in Harlem; so do many others Avenue (now Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., no less outstanding. University professors, Boulevard) to the Harlem Young Men's Christian Association for some exercise. clergymen, lawyers, business executives-all Later I might dine at Jock's or the Red reside in the community. Harlem is no mere dumping ground for social derelicts or an ex- Rooster, then stroll up Seventh Avenue to clusive preserve of the lawless. Some of the Small's Paradise, looking in at Joe Wells', or most notable citizens of the United States the Club Baron before ending the evening at a theater or concert hall. I might go to a ballet were born and raised here. They are all, I believe, of a mind with rehearsal by the Dance Theater of Harlem, Borough President Percy Sutton: "If I were or attend a performance at the New Heritage offered a million dollars, I wouldn't leave Repertory Theater or the National Black Harlem." And with former Sgt. Frederick Theater, or a concert or play at the Harlem Watts, who once headed the police homicide School of the Arts, founded and directed squad in a precinct in central Harlem and is by the world-famous singer Dorothy Maynor. also an attorney-at-law. No one knows the I might also go to the Apollo Theater, the streets of Harlem better than he: the danger, epicenter of Harlem's folk life. the menace, the ubiquitous horror. At the The prospect of the Apollo allures me. I ,same time, no one knows better than he the find seductive the thought of Aretha Franklin, obverse side of that coin: the humor, the wry soul sister, on the stage in a nimbus of light, realism, the irrepressible love of life. "I don't imploring her listeners in song: "Call me!" feel right," he says, "away from Harlem." She will address herself directly to me-and to Despite the formidable difficulties Harlem hundreds of others. But to me, anyway. And faces, it is a triumphant, not a defeated com- we shall all respond in unison to this bewitchmunity. It celebrates the invincibility of the ing, impassioned Circe: "I sure will, baby. human spirit. In Harlem the source of that Yes. I sure will." invincibility is humor, and often it is elementAnd if James Brown was on the billal. I cite this instance with a certain chagrin: James Brown, soul brother-he would adOn an extremely cold winter morning, my jure us, also in song: "Say it loud, 'I'm black wife is on her way to an appointment with and proud!'" her dentist. Snow lies several inches deep, On the Apollo's ghost-haunted stage, and blasts of freezing air send flurries upward dreams spun out of waking fantasy come true. into the unprotected faces of passers-by. An Even when they don't, the dreaming and the Living room with no waDs, the street serves ancient black man, an authentic old Harlem fantasy will have bestowed, for a moment at as a social center during all but the coldest cat, is sheltering in an inhospitable doorway. least, a transforming illusion to keep some weather. Summer's heat drives residentsfrom their apartments to the friendliness of curbHe sees my wife approaching, and as she goes nightmare reality at bay. side checker games and conversation (above). by, he calls out to her: "Baby, ef Ah wuz Y9' In Harlem, dreams possess vast social utildaddy, yo'd sho' be.in bed dis mawnin'." ity whether or not they come true. Wqatever That man has given me a lesson in domes- else one may do here, it is necessary to dream.


Surrounded by comforts rare in her commu-

nity, silver-haired Mrs. Lenon Holder Hoyte gives a dinner party in a brownstone building overflowing with antiques (left). An avid doll collector, she recently opened Aunt Len's Doll and Toy Museum. She hopes to make it and her home a legacy to Harlem so "children can understand how some of us lived."

Dogged determination and hard work have enabled many a Harlemite to achievefame and high office. Above: Retired Battalion Chief Wesley Williams, 80, became the first black officer in 1927 of the city's fire department. Abode of jazz, chitterlings and champagne,

the Red Rooster restaurant-bar (left, center) remains the landmark it was in the 1930s and 1940s, when it attracted such celebrities as Joe Louis, Duke Ellington and poLiticoAdam Clayton Powell, Jr. Here, owner Gwendolyn Douglas visits withjazz guitarist Tiny Grimes. Harvest of a discerning eye, thousands of photographs by James Van Der Zee preserve more than half a century of Harlem history. Left: Here, the photographer (left in photo), now 90, delights in his first meeting with Gordon Parks, a well-known film director, magazine photographer, composer and writer.


The numbers game, which is to Harlem what you a drink at the neighborhood bar in memroulette is to Monte Carlo, is based on dreams. . ory of the night when you stood there host. To "hit the number" is to rocket to the moon to all comers. and walk there, spending your winnings if Fame is a capricious redeemer of poverty. you "hit it big," like a billionaire gone crazy. The winged .chariot it sends for the chosen So that when in the shortness of time you re- may be chauffeured¡ by a gambling man, vert to your impoverished state, the people on an impresario at the Afro-American Singing your block will still remember that sudden Theater, or the coach of a topflight football or wealth did not make you a skinflint. And basketball team. It whisks the elect away some one person or another will always stand swift as a meteor to the fruition of dreams.


When he, or she, comes home again, home to Harlem-home to the childhood block-it is to be surrounded by admiring bevies of old friends. Others stand on stoops or lean from windows, calling out greetings in celebration of the present and in remembrance of times past. But there was no welcome in the haunted eyesof the girl who sat in the police car drawn up alongside the curb. She was in the front

seat, a police officer at the wheel beside her. He called out to me. "Here, come in." He threw open a door to the backseat. I had earlier requested this interview, and now the police officer told me: "Ask her anything you wish. Except her real name. That is the only ground rule." Namelessness, I reflected, is a state not alien to blacks. "Please tell me about yourself," I said.

Community action saves an institution: HarlemiteJ 5,000 strong demonstrate against the closing of the desperately needed Sydenham Hospital, which employs about 900 people and treats 100,000 patients a year. The march-and behind-the-scenes politicking-forced the authorities to change their decision.


For some reason obscure to me, she threw her head back and laughed soundlessly. "I ran away from home for the first time when I was 12.... " . "Why?" "All my friends were able to stay out until 10-11 o'clock at night, but my father wanted me to come in at six. He was a very hard man." "Do you mean stern?" "Yes. Stern ..But he loved me." "How long were you away from home?" "About two weeks." "What did your parents do when you returned home?" "My father beat me-with a broomstick. He broke my arm." She indicated the affected arm by a slight movement of it. "Did you stay home?" "No. I ran away again as soon as my arm was healed." The girl's eyes were aglow with the transport and torment of remembering. What warrant had I for rummaging through her past? I said to her, "You have always been seeking love, haven't you?" She was all at once a creature unspoiled. The smile ¡of a winsome, willful child irradiated her beautiful African face. "Yes," she answered. "You mustn't," I told her. "Let love seek you. No one who seeks love ever finds it." She nodded, acceptingly. And as though released by my little homily, the closed door of some inner compartment of her life flew open, and she said: "I've been a dope addict, a burglar, a stickup woman-to support my habit-but I've never been a prostitute." Pride elevated her voice. "How old are you now?" I asked. "Twenty-six, going on twenty-seven. And I have four children." "How would it be," the police officer inquired with dispassion, "if you were to find yourself up against it-maybe your children were hungry-would you get a gun and ... ?" She smiled, shaking her head. No. "And how about the heroin?" he persisted. "Done with that too?" "Yes," she answered. And summoning a remnant of a band of angels to do battle with a legion of devils, she said, "I've enrolled at college. My children are with my parents." Entering college is one way out of the ghetto. But there are, in the main, two triumphal paths to transfiguring success for the blacks of Harlem or any other black ghetto. They are relatively short and thus offer to those

suitably endowed more or less speedy transit to popular acclaim. One is by way of athletic prowess; the other, talented entertainment. Out of the first emerges a Willie Mays or Wilt Chamberlain, a "Doctor" Julius Erving or Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. Out of the second comes a Harry Belafonte or Sidney Poitier, a Diahann Carroll or Diana Sands, a Lena Horne or Sammy Davis, Jr., a Nina Simone. Sports and entertainment are legendary accreditations that entitle the bearer to leave the slums. The ghetto now is behind him. The ability to excel at some form of sport is the first ray oflight for many black youths. It is impossible to overemphasize the power of the example furnished by baseball players like Willie Mays or the late Jackie Robinson, or prizefighters like Joe Louis or Sugar Ray Robinson, Muhammad Ali or Joe Frazier. You too, my man, can do it. Increasingly nowadays, the great athletes return to help, encourage, prod and stimulate others by their own dramatic example' to go and do likewise. The artists of entertainment influence the black youth of Harlem as strongly as the athletes. I go to lunch with Miss Nina Simone. The late Duke Ellington, the peerless master of jazz, reportedly described her as the greatest singer he had ever worked with. It is easy to accept this description of Nina Simone. Her voice expresses in universal terms the whole emotional content of human Miss Simone, "the difference between what experience. Someone has observed of her: you choose to play and what you don't?" She puts down her champagne cup and "If a lioness could sing, she would sing like that." Besides which, Miss Simone is a superb goes to the piano. As she plays, she sings one of Billie Holiday's celebrated laments, performer on the piano. Nina Simone receives me in the house "Fine and Mellow": where Duke Ellington lived, and where she My man, he don't love me, has been residing. She wears a tailored black Treats me, Oh! so mean ... suit. Her hair is dark, crispate and close He's the lowest man that rve ever seen. cropped. She is somewhat above medium height, slender, and lissome. You notice her Fascinated, I listen, absorbed, intent. beautifully sculptured hands at once. Miss Simone pours champagne into finely "When I am at my peak," she says, "my music embossed silver cups. "Those are Duke's comes out of me in rhapsodies-like Brahms, champagne glasses," she says. Her dark, in- or in romanticism, like Chopin. Sometimes tense eyes query my purpose in coming to see my right hand will do a melody, my left hand will do a melody, there may be three melodies her before she formulates the question: all going at the same time, and all antiphonal "Well, what do you want me to tell you?" to each other." "What does jazz mean to Harlem-to A silken carpet of sound unrolls. A low black people?" I ask. She considers her reply with care. "Jazz lets murmurous voice nestles at first against the black people know, every time they hear it, carpet, then gathering volume rises from it, that they have their hands on the pulse of finally subsiding. "Those outward-spreading life. Jazz always has a pulse-a rhythmic circles" - Miss Simone's hanqs, marvelously pulse-like a heartbeat. It is the beginning plastic, essay concentric motions- "of sound. You saw ... ?" But I am still in the thrall of of life." "Will you demonstrate for me," I say to her performance.


Then her voice is suddenly overcast with a pall of somber testament to the agony of artistic creation: "I believe in minute attention to detail for the sake of perfection." I hear the ring of truth, the chime of authenticity. And to speak of authenticity is to disclose the innermost secret of the formless welter,the elusive mystique, of the life ofHarlem. The unforgivable sin in Harlem is to be a phony. You may be anything you please, provided only that you're "for real." Authenticity guarantees you acceptance in Harlem as nothing else does. The bizarre, the grotesque, alien, exotic, squalid, monstrous, beautiful, sublime-each has its place in Harlem. "Real" is a standard applied out of the searing, age-old experience of being black in a hostile culture, an instinctual response, a gut reaction, that assays in a lightning flashthe true and the false. Never during the passage of his twoscore years and more has Charles Kenyatta, who once was Malcolm X's bodyguard, hidden his reality behind anything. Few people on the Harlem scene are more r~adily identifiable. Whether orating on a street corner

against the racially inspired ills of society "The Lord loves you. Give your heart to Him," or distributing Christmas gifts to dope ad- preaches Evangelist Leemon Lawyer (above). The dicts, whether symbolically brandishing a services at the storefront church, orchestrated with machete while surrounded by his similarly tambourines, washboards, drums and organ, may last all day. Harlem's churches have played a major armed followers, or being interviewed about role in the community's stability and development. his social concerns and objectives, Charles Kenyatta seeks no refuge in dissimulation. His face beneath its canopy of abundant black "Why don't they leave our children alone?" hair is open, ingenuous even, and sensitive. Life in Harlem is always a revelation, and This is, in the romantic sense, the face of a never more than in death. Not long ago I poet, on which uncongenial action has etched attended a funeral service. The deceased, a disillusionment. woman, bore, derivatively from the slave "The clock is being turned back," he la- system and its by-products, one of the great ments. "As a people, we have not learned to names of the South. seize the time." He speaks of the overlordship The church was Baptist, the pews were of vice in the community. "Harlem," he says, filled with mourners, and she lay at rest in a "has been a haven for all the vice and cor- burnished blue-metal coffin that stood on ruption that are destroying this city." Yet he . wooden trestles in the transept. She was perremains optimistic about Harlem. Honest haps 60 years of age, the mother of several and competent law enforcement and vigorous children. At the time of her death she was an leadership would "turn the problem around," aide at a community school in Harlem. he thinks. A year or two before, she had obtained a When Kenyatta speaks of the seduction of high school diploma and had been admitted the community's children into using nar- to one of the city colleges. There she began a cotics, his eyes kindle into a blaze of fury and course of study leading to a degree of bachdisgust. He excoriates the "overseers of vice." elor of arts. Her goal was a doctorate. The suffering on his ascetic face deepens. At the end of the short and simple service


Outsiders may call it a ghetto, yet to half a million residents Harlem is home, the best known black habitat in the Western world. Above: In the heart of New York City, children play on a Harlem street, where vehicular traffic is banned for a Memorial Day party. Like a cell dividing, the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., and Mahatma Gandhi emerge from a common center-the dream of freedom -in a graffiti-obscured street mural (right).


the husband of the deceased together with their children proceeded to the coffin to take their final leave. One son, a splendidly handsome young man, whom she had striven with all her valiant soul to rescue from the demons of drug addiction, could not be persuaded to leave her coffin, nor would he permit it to be sealed. He stood there, gazing down at his mother, utterly abandoned to his grief. I salute this departed lady because the spirit that she incarnated in her lifetime is the unconquerable spirit of Harlem: always, at best, indigent-yet, no matter how bad things are, resilient. In the midst of besetting poverty and the holocaust of her children's, her husband's and her own hopes, she fought, smiledand danced. Hers was a paradigm of the common life of Harlem, of the hope, indestructible as elemental matter, that springs insuppressibly in the black breast. If there is a single cohering organization in Harlem, it is the church. Though splinteredinto numerous denominations, sects, and factions, it cements the life of the community as the Church of Rome imposed coherence on the communal life of Europe during the Middle Ages. It is to the church, above all, that the community looks for solutions to problems, private as well as public. Not seldom, indeed, does the Harlem church find itself called upon to supply social, economic and political initiatives that would ordinarily emerge from secular sources. It is a midwinter day in Harlem. I trace a labyrinthine path through the snow along l23rd Street, and come to a minister's house. I am invited to enter by Dr. David Licorish, who was associate minister of the Abyssinian Baptist Church when the late Congressman Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., was the pastor. Dr. Licorish seats me opposite himself at his desk. He is of medium height and powerful physique. An open, bespectacled brown face is framed in a squarish cast. The practiced pulpit voice rises and falls as he speaks. I ask: "What did you think of Adam Clayton Powell?" "Good and bad. Adam was genuinely interested in causes. But he was miserably selfish. He could not share anything and would not tolerate competitors. But we needed Powell. At that time." He leans back in his chair. A grudging smile, bitter as wormwood, dissolves the squarish lines of his face. "Raymond Jones -you remember him? Smart politician-

Well, son, I'll tell you: Life for me ain't been no crystal stair. It's had tacks in it, And splinters, And boards torn up, And places with no carpet on the floorBare. But all the time I'se been a-climbin' on, And reachin' landin's, And turnin' corners, And sometimes goin' in the dark Where there ain't been no light. So boy, don't you turn back. Don't you set down on the steps 'Cause you finds it's kinder hard. Don't you fall nowFor I'se still goin', honey, I'se still climbin', And life for me ain't been no crystal stair. -LANGSTON

HUGHES

warned me about Powell. Told me, 'Don't let him use you-too much.' I was Powell's deputy at the church. Whenever he was tied up with his work in the Congress, or something else, he would say, 'Lick, take over for me.' For 28 years, 'Lick, take over for me.' And now ... in the end .... " His hands,which have been restlessly arranging and rearranging papers on his desk, are still at last. He observes a moment of silence as though for the dead. At last he declares in the manner of a clergyman pronouncing an elegy: "Adam Powell died of a broken heart. The people betrayed him. Harlem today is leaderless." "I sometimes think," says Dr. Licorish, "that Adam is somewhere around-for his work is not finished. Adam was able to lift people up through his People's Committee. But now we don't know where we're going. We need leaders of experience. Ideas just don't accomplish themselves. "Our number-one problem is economics. And next, political awareness and organization. That's what Adam Powell tried to do for Harlem. To make people politically aware and to build a strong economic organization. But most of these politicians only give the people fantasy and euphoria. "If the roots are rotten, how can the tree

be, healthy? We are back to the same old trick of getting some money out of the white man's pocket." His voice resonated into a thunder of contempt. "Are we always going to be parasites?" Another distinguished clergyman thinks the problem is bigger than Harlem. Dr. M. Moran Weston is the pastor of St. Philip's Episcopal Church in Harlem, which has one of the largest congregations of its denomination in New York City. "Harlem," he says, "is going through far-reaching changes: a veritable microcosm of urban change, this community. What is wrong with Harlem is also wrong with New York City, and wrong with the whole country and, if you like, the world." "Harlem," he asserts, "cannot be isolated as though its problems were somehow unique and unparalleled by any similar phenomena in the rest of the national and world society. Harlem is only an extreme instance, in a more visible context, of what is wrong with the larger society." Dr. Weston will tell you-and so will other thoughtful people-where the solution to Harlem's agonies lies. It must stem from education and leadership. And there are in Harlem dedicated people who care, who have the ability to change things for the better. This is a constantly recurring theme in Harlem, the confidence that the community possesses the resources of leadership to regenerate itself. The extraordinary abilities of these leaders-a Congressman, a borough president, a state senator, an assemblyman, a city commissioner of human rights, distinguished judges, and many more-these are the surest guarantee of Harlem's survival and future resplendence. They-and the people of Harlem themselves, with their insatiable appetite for life, their perennial resiliency, their unconquerable humor. Harlem is courage and Harlem is love. Harlem is blood and Harlem is fire. Harlem is beauty and Harlem is squalor. 'Harlem is dreaming and Harlem is dust. Harlem is heaven and Harlem is hell. Harlem is the human condition. To love the United States with all the troubled freight of its failures of idealism, to love humanity with all the tragic burden of its imperfections, to love life in all the complexity of its myriad menace and illimitable promise is, for better, for worse, to love Harlem. D About the Author: Frank Hercules is a well-known black writer and has published a .number of books. which include Where the Hummingbird Flies.


>

THE POET D .· ··THE PUGILIST


Marianne Moore, a distinguished American poet and a great, sports fan, spent an afternoon with Muhammad Ali, the boxer, jointly writing a poem. Modestly, Miss Moore allowed Ali to take the lead, for, as she put it later, 'he fights and he writes ... he is a smilin~ pugilist.' I had very little idea what was going to come of it- the meeting' arranged between Marianne Moore, the poet, and Muhammad Ali, who was the new champion then, just about to defend his crown against Ernie Terrell in Houston. It seemed quite an odd combination. She had expressed her hope of meeting him, as .she and I were working on a project together-going to various events, mostly sports contests, and seeing how our artistic views of each compared-mine predictable and pedestrian, hers quirky and unexpected and illuminating: one saw something of the poetic process while sitting with her. We had been to a World Series game together, a football game, a zoo ("I am foolish about gorillas"), and a prizefight-the Floyd Patterson-George Chuvalo fight at Madison Square Garden. It was after that fight that Miss Moore asked to meet Ali. Until she met Ali, Marianne Moore's favorite boxer was Floyd Patterson. She had thet him at an autographing party to which she had been taken by a neighbor. The hostess was "Miss Negro Bookclub," a titular choice Miss Moore found arresting; Sugar Ray Robinson was the chairman of the event. "His competence and unsensational modesty were very pleasing," she wrote me about the occasion. "I met Floyd Patterson and Buster Watson also, his assistant trainer. Floyd was very courteous, and I was very rude, interrupting Buster when he was talking to two other men. I resolved never to be so rude again. I bought books for some boys ... and another for myself in which Floyd wrote my name and 'all the best.' " She read the book with care- Victory Over Myself. She remembered phrases from it: "I never thought of boxing as a profession; it was a grind ... but a way out for me and my family." Another was "Boxing is supposed to be a dirty business but it has made me clean and enabled me to do some good for others." I think that she was also moved by the description of Patterson's childhood: He was so intimidated and shy.that he used to hide from the outside world in a cubbyhole he had discovered in the foundations of the New York Central tracks. I arranged for a row of seats for his

fight against Chuvalo. It was not at all clear that Marianne Moore was going to enjoy the evening. She had not been to a prizefight before, and people hitting each other was an activity she could not condone. A few days before the fight she wrote me: "Marred physiognomy and an occasional death don't seem an ideal life objective. I do not like demolishing anything-even a paper bag. Salvaging and saving all but dominate my life." I asked her in the cab on the way to the fight if violence had ever intruded. It seemed an odd question to ask such a fragile person. "In Brooklyn I intercepted a small boy who laid down his schoolbooks to slug a classmate," she replied. "When I said, 'If you don't stop, I'll beat you up,' he said, 'He cursed my mother.' I said, 'Then it's justified, but layoff him.'" She closed her eyes, as if in thought, and then she said, "One time I was driving in a taxi going through the Bowery; I looked out and saw a man with a knife creeping up on another. The car was going quite fast, about as fast as we're going now, and I can't tell you what the end was." She made a small snorting sound .... Miss Moore was wearing her famous tricorne hat with its ship's prow effect; when she turned to speak it gave a sort of thrust to what she was saying, much like talking to a miner in the beam of the light from his helmet. Her tricorne fit nicely in the cab. She had others which would have required some jimmying About the Author: George Plimpton is one of America's most talented and versatile writers, famous for his numerous books-The Rabbit's Umbrella, Out of My League, Paper Lion and The Bogey Man-and his interviews with noted literary figures in the Paris Review. But he is much more than a writer. He hasfought in a bullfight staged by Earnest Hemingway .. played a tennis match against Pancho Gonzales.. boxed with the light heavyweight champion, Archie Moore .. conducted the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra .. made his film debut in Lawrence of Arabia, and worked as a trapeze artiste, lion tamer and circus clown. He, however, doesn't play to win, but rather to experience at firsthand what it feels like actually to be a participant. In fact, most of his books, which are generally on sports, are a result of this firsthand experience.

around to fit-a great cartwheel of a stiffened felt hat that one had to get under if walking along beside her, skulking along Groucho Marx-like to hear what she was saying in her soft, erratic voice. She told me that she had picked the tricorne for the fight "because my other hats keep anyone behind me from seeing." We picked up some friends to join us at the fight. Just as we were nearing the Garden, Miss Moore heard something from one of them about Chuvalo that shook her support of Patterson, namely, that Chuvalo was so incredibly poor at the start of his ring career that on one occasion he and his wife drove across Canada in a car so decrepit that the accelerator pedal had come off, and a part of the accelerator arm; Mrs. Chuvalo had to crouch under the dashboard and at a signal from her husband depress or raise what was left of the accelerator: "Bring her up a touch; we're coming into a town." Miss Moore was moved by this nearly to the point of shifting her allegiance. She asked to be told the story again. It was obviously on her mind during the fight. We had good seats in the mezzanine, far enough away so that the physical side of the fight was not too pronounced .. Still, at a solid blow, small gasps erupted from her. Once I heard her call out, "George!" Another time, "Floyd!" She had a small pad and pencil with her, though I never saw her write anything down. She seemed relieved when the fight was over. "Well, that's that," she said brightly, as if something especially wrenching had been completed, like a frightening circus act. She wrote me subsequently when she had had time to consider things: "I did not enjoy the Patterson-Chuvalo fight at¡ all until Floyd began to win and in the end suffered no major damage." But she could not rid herself of the Chuvalo accelerator story. "A moralist at heart, my notions of psychic adaptiveness and creativeness of muscular as well as mental endurance were enlarged by Mrs. Chuvalo's scars of battle with life when she held a finger in a fixed position to replace what should have been an automatic device in the car." She wrote


'Marred physiognomy and occasional death don't seem an ideal life objective,' said poet Marianne Moore. 'I do not like demolishing anything-even a paper bag.' Yet she wanted to meet the Champ. that she had also been taken by the referee's performance: "The assiduous precision of the referee in seizing the angle most advantageous from which to see every trifle impressed me most -and his impeccable appearance-nothing sticking out or dangling. Swift and compact, the embodiment of vigilance." She had also noticed Muhammad Ali at the fight-he had been sitting on the far side of the ring and had jumped up into it to talk with Patterson at the conclusion. When 1 next saw her, 1 asked if she would like to meet him. She nodded: "I do not see any reason why 1 should not meet someone who assures everyone 'I am the greatest' and who is a poet nonetheless." Some weeks later 1 was able to arrange our tea through Hal Conrad, the fight publicist. For a reason that 1 have forgotten, we had it at Toots Shor's establishment in mid-Manhattan. The place was almost empty when Miss Moore and 1 arrived, about four in the afternoon. The late Toots Shor himself was there, but knowing that Ali was expected, he did not sit with us. He did not approve of Ali then, or perhaps ever, and he sat at the opposite end of the room studiously ignoring us. From our banquette, Miss Moore looked over and was impressed by him. She had heard that he had started in the restaurant business as a bouncer. 1 think she expected, or perhaps hoped that he would "bounce" someone. "His haunt is quite peaceful," she said to me. "It makes the offices of bouncer seem hearsay; no killer GeorgePlimpton, the author of this article, chats with Marianne Moore about Muhammad Ali.

"After we defeat ... " and left Miss Moore instinct has made itself evident." "No, no," 1 said. "I think he has , to write in "Ernie Terrell" in her spidery to get her "warmed up." other people to do that for him these script-just days. Besides, there's no one in here for He wrote most of the second line "He him to bounce except the waiters and will catch nothing ... " expecting Miss Moore to fill in the obvious rhyme, and you and me." he was quite surprised when she did not. "Fancy," she said. Presently Muhammad Ali arrived with 1 could see her lips move as she fussed Hal Conrad. He slid in behind the table with possibilities. Finally, he leaned over and whispered to her, "'But hell,' Mrs. and arranged himself next to Miss Moore. He gazed at her hat, which was the same Moore." tricorne she had worn to the fight. Almost "Oh, yes," she said. She wrote down immediately, as if she had yet to arrive, "but hell." Then she wrestled with it he turned to Hal and me and asked who some more, clucking gently, murmuring she was and what he was expected to do. about the rhythm of the line, and then Had a photographer arrived? she crossed it out and substituted, "He Miss Moore listened attentively to what will get nothing, nothing but hell." Ali took over and produced his next Conrad and 1 had to say about her-a great sports fan, one of the most distingu- line in jig time: "Terrell was big and ugly and tall." He pushed the menu over ished poets in the country ... "Mrs. Moore," said Ali, turning and to her. His soup arrived. He leaned low looking at her, "a grandmother going to over it, spooning it in, glancing over to the fights?" She made a confused gesture see how she was coming along. While and then had a sip of her tea. we waited, he told Conrad and me that He ordered a bowl of beef soup and he was going to try to get the poem out a phone. He announced that if she were over the Associated Press wire that afterthe greatest poetess in the country then noon. Miss Moore's eyes widened-the the two of them should produce some- irony of all those years struggling with thing together-"I am a poet, too," Broom and the other literary magazines, he said -a joint-effort sonnet, with each of and now to be with a fighter who promised them doing alternate lines. Miss Moore instant publication over a ticker. It did not nodded vaguely. Ali was very much the help the flow of inspiration. She was more decisive of the pair, picking not doubtless intimidated by Ali's presence, only the form but also the topic: "Mrs. especially at his obvious concern that having Moore and 1 are going to write a sonnet she-a distinguished poet-was about my upcoming fight in Houston such a hard time holding up her side: with Ernie Terrell. Mrs. Moore and in his mind speed of delivery was very 1 will show the world with this great much a qualification of a profeSSIonal poem who is who and what is what and poet. He finished his soup and ordered who is going to win." A pen was produced. another. The phone arrived and was Ali was given a menu on which to write. plugged in behind the banquette. He began dialing a series of numbers, hotels He started off with half the first linemost of them, but the people he requested never seemed to respond. Finally, seeing that she had not got anywhere at all, he took the poem from her and completed it. It was not done in a patronizing way at all, but more out of consideration, presumably that every poet, however distinguished, is bound to have a bad day and should be helped through it. "Now let's see," he said as he began to write. He had moved close to her, so that she appeared to be looking down the long length of his arm to watch the poem emerge. "Yes," she said, "why not?" as he produced a last couplet. The whole composition, once he had taken over, took about a minute. With the spelling corrected, it read as follows:


After we defeat Ernie Terrell, He will get nothing, nothing but hell. Terrell was big and ugly and tall, But when he fights me he is sure to fall. If he criticize this poem by me and Miss Moore, To prove he is not the champ she will stop him infour. He is claiming to be the real heavyweight champ, But when the fight starts he will look like a tramp. He has been talking too much about me and making me sore. After I am through with him he will not be able to challenge Mrs. Moore.

The stratagem of involving her in the poem, particularly as a pugilist herself, was clever: Miss Moore nodded in delight. She made a tiny fist. "Yes, he has been mak~ng me sore," she said. A photographer arrived at the tablesomething of a surprise. He was from one of the wire services. I suspect that Muhammad Ali, knowing that he was meeting someone of distinction, if not quite sure whom, had arranged for the event to be recorded. Miss Moore did not seem to mind. She allowed Aliwho continued to dominate the afternoon - to dictate the poses. His idea was to have the photograph show the two of them at work on the poem. "We've got to show you thinking, Mrs. Moore," he said. "How you show you're thinking hard is to point your finger into the middle of your head." He illustrated, jabbing his forefinger at his forehead, closing his eyes to indicate concentration. She complied, pursing her lips in feigned concern. The photographer clicked away. Miss Moore then expressed a wish to see the Ali shuffle-a foot maneuver which Ali occasionally did in mid-fight¡ that made him look like a man trying to stay upright on a carpet being pulled out from under him. Ali said he would be delighted to show her the shuffle. He thought it would be best to do it out in the street, where he had room to do her a really good shuffle. When we walked outdoors, a crowd immediately formed-I think word had gone around the neighborhood-so we went back through the revolving door, and he did the shuffle right there in the foyer. M'iss Moore was delighted. She asked him to do it again, and when he went out and did the shufflefor the people in the street, she watched him through the revolving door. "Well," she said when he had left. "He had every excuse for avoiding a performance. But he festooned out in as enticing a bitof shuffling as you would ever wish to see." "He 'festooned'?" I asked.

"He certainly did. He was exactly what I had hoped to meet." Subsequently, I wrote Miss Moore to ask her what she had thought of her afternoon at Toots Shor's. What was her opinion of Ali as a poet? She wrote: "Well, we were slightly under constraint. And the rhyme for' Terrell (hell) being of one syllable is hardly novel. ... Cassius has an ear, and a liking for balance ... comic, poetic drama, it is poetry ... saved by a hair from being the flattest, peanuttiest, unwariest of boastings. " She was especially pleased that the poem (which she thought might be titled "Much Ado About Cassius") showed a strong sense of structure, which indeed involved herself: "He begins by mentioning a special guest and concludes with

mention of the same." She then went on to produce a whiz-bang of words about Ali: The Greatest, though a mere youth, has snuffed out more dragons than Smokey the Bear hath. Mightymuscled and fit, he is confident; he is sagacious, ever so, he trains. A king's daughter is bestowed on him as a fiancee. He is literary, in the tradition of Sir Philip Sidney, defensor of poesie. His verse is enhanced by alliteration. He is summoned by an official: "Come forth, Cassius." He is not even deterred by the small folks' dragons. He has a fondness for antithesis; he win not only give fighting lessons, but falling lessons. Admittedly the classiest and the brassiest. When asked, "How do you feel about being called by the British 'Gaseous Clay'?" his reply is one of the prettiest in literature. "I do not resent it." Note this: beat grime revolts him. He is neat. His brow is high. If beaten, he is still not "beat." He fights and he writes. Is there something I have missed? He is a smiling pugilist. 0

POETRY by MARIANNE

MOORE

I, too, dislike it: there are things that are important beyond all this fiddle. Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one discovers in it after all, a place for the genuine. Hands that can grasp, eyes that can dilate, hair that can rise if it must, these things are important not because a high-sounding interpretation can be put upon them but because they are useful. When they become so derivative as to become unintelligible, the same thing may be said for all of us, that we do not admire what we cannot understand: the bat holding on upside down or in quest of something to eat, elephants pushing, a wild wolf under a tree, the immovable critic that feels a flea, ball fan, the statisticiannor is it valid to discriminate against

horse taking a roll, a tireless twitching his skin like a horse the base-

'business documents and

school-books'; all these phenomena are important. One must make a distinction however: when dragged into prominence by half poets, the result is not poetry, nor till the poets among us can be 'literalists of the imagination' -above insolence and triviality and can present for inspection, 'imaginary gardens with real toads in them,' shall we have it. In the meantime, if you demand on the one hand, the raw material of poetry in all its rawness and that which is on the other hand genuine, you are interested in poetry. Reprinted from Collected Poems by Marianne Moore. Copyright Š 1951. Permission granted by Lawrence E. Brinn, executor of Estate of Marianne Moore.


Left: A precision-cutting machine at the L&T McNeil plant in Madras cuts steel to an accuracy of one hundred thousandths of an inch. Right: A completed Bag-O-Matic tire press made by L&T McNeil is hoisted from the workshopfloor.

When people talk about American investment in India, they usually talk about big international corporations. But not all U.S. investment in this country is the work of corporate giants. Many small U.S. companies have invested in India. SPAN reports on a joint venture between a large, well-known Indian firmLarsen & Toubro Limited-and a comparatively small American company-the McNeil Akron Company of Akron, Ohio, a division of McNeil Corporation. The joint venture is called L&T McNeil Ltd., and its product is the Bag-o-Matic tire-curing press-a machine used by rubber companies to make automotive tires.

On

Mount Poonamallee High Road in the suburbs of Madras, the clean modern gray and beige factory of L&T McNeil Ltd. sits in the middle of a green lawn, landscaped with mango trees, coconut palms, ashoka trees, dwarf cedars, magenta bougainvillea and red and white roses. In the middle of the lobby is a big Dunlop truck tire with a sign that says: "First tyre cured on first 650.55 M13 Bag-O-Matic Press, L&T McNeil Ltd., Madras, 23-12-1974."

"We don't make tires," says L&T McNeil's general manager S. Sagar Jain. "We make the presses that make the tires." We tour the factory, one of the cleanest, most colorful factories anywhere. All around us are machines making screeching and scraping noises, working on metal and moving in all directions-cutting, slicing, dicing, boring, pounding, grinding, shaving, blasting, polishing. Much of the floor is painted with bright yellow and black zebra stripes, and creamcolored walls rise to a high ceiling. Over us a huge crane with a bright yellow operator's cabin moves back and forth; hanging from it, like a pendant, is a huge menacing hook. We go to the fabrication shop. Here, rough steel plates are cut by a machine in which an optical "eye" follows a diagram. The eye gives instructions to the acetylene burning cutter that cuts the steel into shape-piercing through the steel like butter. In the machine shop, boring machines cut holes in steel discs. A technician is measuring and marking sizes of the holes to be drilled. One becomes aware of many other sounds-metal parts dropping onto the concrete floor, the screech of steel against steel, not a constant din but more like



L&T McNeil caters to about 70 per cent of the Indian market for tire-manufacturing equipment. If and when it starts exporting to America, the wheel will have gone full circle. an orchestra playing discordant avant-garde electronic music. ESPIE: Could you tell us a little about Larsen & Toubro? We tour the inspection department. "This is the heart of JAIN: Larsen & Toubro make everything-chemical vessels, quality control," says Jain. There is an Ultrasonic Flaw Detector.'oairy equipment, nuclear reactors, you name it. It's an Indian "If any casting has a flaw not visible to the naked eye," says company that was establj\;hed in 1938 by two Danish engineers, Jain, "this machine detects it." We pass a device that looks like H. Holck-Larsen and S.K. Toubro, In 1975-76, the Larsen & a magic wand with a clock on top of it. "That's a bore gauge." Toubro group's sales exceeded Rs. 100 crores, making it the We pass a closed room that houses a machine that is blasting 19th largest public limited company in India's private sector. an almost finished casting by hurling millions of tiny steel pellets against it. "The final cleaning," Jain says. "It's called ESPIE: Could you explain what a Bag-O-Matic press isshot blasting." We then go to the assembly shop. "This and how it makes tires? is where we get it all together," he says. We see a sign saying: JAIN: Bag-O-Matic is McNeil's trade mark for a tire curing STACK SAFELY ... DON'T LET THE JOB GET ON TOP OF YOU. press. This is a machine used by tire companies to manufacture We finally go to Jain's office for an interview. the final' tire or to shape the "green tire" -a process called "shaping" -and also to vulcanize the rubber, a process ESPIE: When does the story of L&T McNeil begin-in 1974, called "curing." The green tire is made up oflayers of rubberized when you made the first Bag-O.:Matic? fabric, which give the tire strength and flexibility, plus the JAIN: It started when the Shearstrip Press-the forerunner "beads" which is steel wire surrounded by rubber, plus the of 'the present Bag-O-Matic tire-curing press-was invented "tread," which is a thick piece of extruded rubber. The function in 1938 by Leslie Soderquist of McNeil Akron. But the of the bead is to give the tire a definite diameter and to enable L&T McNeil story really began more recently-in 1969, when it to fit the tire rim properly. The tread forms the wearing part of the idea for this collaboration between an Indian and an final tire and remains in contact with the road. When the green American company was born. tire is ready, its shape is more like a drum than like a tire. Now In the sixties, the Indian rubber tire industry was growing. comes the stage for shaping and curing. The green tire is placed The Indian Planning Commission estimated that the annual in a Bag-O-Matic where a thin-walled rubber bag-called demand would reach 10 million tires by 1979. Therefore, the "bladder" -automatically gets inserted inside the green tire. Indian Government decided to create-on a crash basisAs the press starts closing, the bladder starts ballooning out additional tire manufacturing capacity to meet this anticipated under steam pressure forcing the green tire against the tire mold. The rubber in the green tire is vulcanized under heat and pressure demand. The pneumatic rubber tire is a product that requires to give the final tire. There are other tire-curing machines in the world, but Bagsophisticated machinery. Imports of this machinery had been straining India's foreign exchange position. So the obvious O-Matics are generally considered the best. This is not just answer, the Government decided, was to manufacture tire- my biased opinion. It's the opinion of some of the world's biggest rubber companies that use Bag-O-Matics-such as making machinery right here in India. So Larsen & Toubro decided to form a joint venture with the makers of the best Goodyear and Firestone. tire-curing presses in the world-McNeil Akron. In 1974 we sold our first Bag-O-Matic to Dunlop India, and 10 more ESPIE: How much royalty do you pay McNeil Akron? that year. In 1975 the number rose to 25. Now we average JAIN: The royalty that we pay to McNeil Akron is roughly 35 to 40 Bag-O-Matics yearly. the same as with similar joint ventures-2 per cent of our sales, on the average. In 1975, we paid Rs. 2 lakhs royalty. In 1976, ESPIE: But how, actually, did McNeil and Larsen & Toubro it was Rs. 10 lakhs. All this, of course, is subject to tax. meet? JAIN: It's an interesting story. In 1969, Mr. Everhard of Mc- ESPIE: What do you get from McNeil Akron in return? Neil Akron came to India on an exploratory trip to see. the JAIN: Several things. Training of our personnel, product country's industrial growth and potential. At that time he knowledge, management techniques: Several of our people go didn't know Larsen & Toubro. We didn't know him-or his to their plant in the United States for technical and managecompany. Anyway, he looked around India and found no ment training. It's an ongoing process. We continue to get knowsuitable collaborator. He was all set to return to the United how from them. If there are any improvements or increased States. But on the day of his return, an acquaintance told sophistication in the American Bag-O-Matic, McNeil Akron lets us know about it. Everhard-during a lunch at the Taj Mahal Hotel in Bombaythat he ought to meet the Larsen & Toubro people. In fact, he expressed amazement that he hadn't considered the L&T ESPIE: Is there any magic ingredient that made this joint people as collaborators. A visit was quickly arranged. Thus it venture click? came about that Everhard, instead of going to the Santa Cruz JAIN: The magic ingredient in our case wasfaith. Trust between airport, motored to Powai, 25 miles north of Bombay, where two partners. Holck-Larsen reposes his faith in L&T McNeil. the L&T workshops are located. He was impressed, eventually He lets us make our own decisions. As for our collaborators, we feel that if we're fair to them, they will be fair to us. We the collaboration was signed; this factory is the result.


Two rows of McNeil Bag-O-Matic tire presses at the Goodyear tire factory in Ballabhgarh, Haryana. These Bag-O-Milties were imported from the United States ..now the same machines are being made in India.

can get more out of them if we sh,?w them we are fair with them. And this has proven to be the case. L&T is managed by professionals. It's not run like a family business. That's one of the secrets of our success. ESPIE: What about

training of personnel? Any problems on that score? JAIN: When we think of training, we automatically think of Walter Moore of McNeil Akron, who spent two and a half years with us here. Moore had 32 years of experience in the business. He knew tire-making machinery like the back of his hand. He also knew how to train people to get the best out of them and the machinery they handle. He picked young men fresh out of technical schools because he wanted to work with people who weren't set in their ways. ESPIE: When did you yourself get into the act? JAIN: I was with another company-one that had been supply-

ing L&T with a lot of equipment. So that's how I knew them and they knew me. When I joined L&T they sent me to Akron, Ohio, for four months of intensive training at the McNeil Akron plant.

How is 'L&T McNeil doing? What does the future look like? JAIN: It's too early to tell, really. The first year we declared a dividend was 1976. But in the short time that we've been in operation we have become suppliers to most tire companies in India. There is competition but the McNeil name and the wellknown quality of Bag-O- Matics assures us of a regular stream of orders for our machines. And added to the McNeil name is Larsen & Toubro's vast marketing and distribution networkwhich we can and do use. However, the tire industry not only in India but at present all over the world is passing through a period of glut which has affected our order backlog adversely. ESPIE:

ESPIE: Do you think L&T McNeil can someday start exporting

tire presses to America? JAIN: We would like to think it's possible, and we would like

to export to the United States. But not yet. Presently, we'll concentrate on the Indian market and the markets around India. If the Indian economy upswings in the right direction, the Indian tire market may become huge. When we talk of tires, we don't mean just automobile, truck or tractor tires. We also mean tires for bicycles, scooters and for heavy earth-moving vehicles. We cater to about 70 per cent of the market for tire-curing presses. When the day comes that we can export to the United States, the wheel will have really gone full circle! 0


ENERGY

Once the most widely used energy resource, coal seems poised for a dramatic comeback. The author describes the massive research now under way in the United States and India to develop technologies to convert coal into cleaner, more acceptable forms of energy-gas and oil. In his bold policy talks on energy in April 1977, President Jimmy Carter not only proposed a new departure for the United States, but also set a course forthe whole world. His words were laced with common sense. He said it is imperative to reduce demand through conservation, to conserve the fuels that are the scarcest and make the most of those that are more plentiful like coal, and to develop new unconventional sources of energy. These goals are of special relevance to Americans, the world's largest consumers of energy, but the ideas are no less significant to the rest of the world, particularly India. All over the planet today there is an energy crisis in some form. Among the plans set out by President Carter is the one to increase American coal production by more than two-thirds, to over one billion tons a year, by 1985. Thi~is part of the strategy of changing over from scarce fuels to more abundant ones like coal wherever possible. He said: "We need to find better ways to mine it safely and burn it cleanly, and to use it to produce other clean energy sources." Coal now provides only 18 per cent of America's energy needs, but it makes up 90 per cent of its energy reserves. Obviously, in a time of peril and swift change, such an imbalance needs to be corrected. But why all this flurry? How has the crisis descended upon us? Essentially it was a case of neglect and smugness. The world never bothered to plan for the

future. Energy consumption has been increasing at a much faster rate than the population. In the decade of the 1950s, people used twice as much oil as in the 1940s. During the 1950s, its use doubled again. And in each of those decades, to quote President Carter, "more oil was consumed than in all of mankind's previous history." This cannot continue unchecked without inviting a global catastrophe. Nor is there enough time left for dallying or hair-splitting or debating the finer points of every radical proposal for a change in attitudes and practices. At the current rate of exploitation, the world will probably run out of oil within a generation. Can coal come to the rescue of energystarved man? After the era of wood, coal was the most widely used resource, until the discovery of .large supplies of oil and natural gas (which are more convenient to use) pushed it into the background. But all indications now are that coal is set to stage a dramatic comeback. This however calls for at least three prerequisites. Coal is dirty and polluting; it is hard to mine and transport (not being a fluid); and, though relatively plentiful, it burns less cleanly and is best consumed by electric power companies. The preconditions to be met before more coal is pressed into service are three: • The environmental problems related to strip mining (that is, collecting coal from the surface rather than from deep underground), especially the despoliation

of land, must be satisfactorily solved. • A cheap and efficient method must be found to remove sulfur with its noxious oxides from coal-methods like stack gas scrubbing or fluidized bed combustion. • And far more effort in the shape of funds and intensified research must be put into plans for gasification and liquefaction of coal. The basic point here is that if coal is to be the exclusive or even main way to produce electricity, the energy crisis will not go away.

* * *

"Buried sunshine" -that is what coal is. It is so called because it was formed when semi-aquatic vegetation was deposited underground some 200 or 300 million years ago and converted into hard, organic rock by the action of bacteria, the earth's heat and pressure. The world's resources of coal are enormous. At workable depths, there are an estimated 10 trillion tons of it. Known U.S. reserves are nearly four trillion tons, enough to last 700 years at the current rate of production. But only about one half trillion tons can be mined economically by current technology. India's total reserves are 83 billion tons, counting only seams more than 1.2 meters thick and at a depth of 600 meters or less. The United States today uses about 600 million tons of coal a year. The consumption in India is about 100million tons. The actual use of coal, however, is not large enough. The sources of energy in the United States in the last decade were: oil 44 per cent; natural gas 31 per cent;,


coal 21 per cent; and all others (nuclear, hydroelectric, etc.) 4 per cent. Clearly, coal technology has been at a standstill, thanks to the cheapness and convenience of the other two main fossil fuels. Here is the needed corrective: A vastly increased use of coal calls for better ways to burn it and more efficient techniques to convert it into gas or liquid. This must be done without fouling the environment, however, so that coal does not become a mixed blessing. Coal is a hydrocarbon, with half the hydrogen of oil. So the basis of conversion of coal is adding hydrogen to it. Where do we get the hydrogen from? From water, in the form of steam. But it takes energy to heat the water and to separate the hydrogen from the steam. This energy is obtained from the coal itself and forms the major proportion of the cost of conversion. Several techniques for turning solid coal into gas or liquid fuels are being tried. None of them has yet been found to be economical or strikingly efficient. Some methods show greater promise than others, and it may be that a combination of three or four processes will eventually do the trick. One indispensable condition in all such conversion technologies is that the coal refinery must be located at or very near the coal mine itself. This considerably improves the economics of conversion, as well as the scope for the deployment of antipollution measures. In under eight years, according to a confident forecast made by James Schlesinger, President Carter's chief energy adviser, converted coal will save about four million barrels of oil a day. That is a sizable amount. Part of the increased U.S. budgetary allotment in fiscal year 1978 for research and development projects will go for developing coal conversion technologies.

* * *

One of the techniques now under study is gasification. This synthetic fuel process, of which there are many types, is considered to be nearest to commercial application before 1980. Some American experts predict that in three years economic production will be achieved. The conversion of coal into gas for combustion in gas engines is not new. In recent years pulverized coal, rather than the rocky stuff, has been used. Modern methods use hydrogasification. Essentially all procedures entail reacting coal

with either air or with a mixture of oxygen and steam. If air is used, we get "power gas" (carbon monoxide, hydrogen and nitrogen), with low heating value, about one-sixth of natural gas, good enough for power generation. If coal is reacted with oxygen and steam, we get "synthesis gas," a mixture of carbon monoxide and hydrogen, which can be used to make gasoline or as a fuel with a heating value about one-third that of natural gas. Coal is at present gasified in India, Turkey, South Africa, Scotland, Morocco, Yugoslavia and Korea. Several advanced techniques are being tried in the United States and a few pilot plants are already in operation. A recent study showed 176 sites in continental United States that have sufficient uncommitted coal reserves and water to supply synthetic gas plants with a capacity of 7 million cubic meters a day. This is the size most frequently proposed. The sites have a total of 42 billion tons of recoverable coal. The gas produced will have high heating value and be practically free of low-heat carbon monoxide and polluting sulfur compounds. The new coal technology has a parade of processes of varying efficiencies. Lurgi gasifiers, long used in Europe, produce low-heat power gas. Here coal is dropped from the top of the gasifying vessel and works its way down by gravity; air and steam are injected from the bottom to sustain the combustion. Usable gas is drawn off at the top and is cleaned. The Koppers- Totzek process can take any kind of coal (high or low in sulfur or ash). It uses steam and oxygen and gasification proceeds at normal pressure. What has been called the most elegant process is the Carbon Dioxide Acceptor one, in which a catalyst (calcined dolomite) is circulated through a fluidized bed of lignite char. The catalyst reacts with carbon dioxide in the initial gasification. The disadvantage here is that only lignite or sub-bituminous coal can be used. Hygas, Synthane, Bi-Gas and Cogas are other processes now in the pilot plant stage, but recently an advanced method known as the fluidized bed boiler has been . evolved. The first such pilot plant in the United States, with an output of 30 megawatts, is now ready for operation at About the Author: M. V. Mathew, an assistant editor of The Times of India, specializes in science subjects. He is a frequent contributor to SPAN.

Riversville, West Virginia. In the boiler, particles of limestone and coal are suspended by a stream of air passing upward through a bed of ash and limestone heated to about 870 degrees Celsius. Crushed coal injected into the combustion zone burns rapidly and limestone is added continuously. Calcium in the limestone reacts with sulfur dioxide released by the burning coal; the product, calcium sulfate, an inert substance, is discharged along with the ash. Polluting sulfide gases are also eliminated and the combustion gas going up the stack is relatively clean. This technique was discussed last June at the third meeting of the Indo-U.S. Subcommission on Science and Technology, which met in a two-day session in Washington. It is likely that the technique will be adopted on a large scale in India. Also¡ exchanged at the meeting were expert views and information on methods to clean up hot gas in coal-burning processes, for which a pilot plant has already been set up in Tiruchirappalli in South India. In the United States, the Energy Research and Development Administration (ERDA) has begun a five-year project for the design, construction and operation of small-scale and medium-scale demonstration plants to convert coal into clean fuel gas. Many types of gasifiers and processes will be tried and evaluated in order to advance the technology of conversion from the pilot plant stage to the commercial level. This will form the basis of subsequent scale-up to commercialsized facilities in the 1980s. Gasification helps to keep the air clean. Most coals contain uncomfortably large proportions of sulfur and ash. But, of course, direct burning yields the maximum heat energy. The heat produced in gasification is at best only three-fourths of the heat contained in the mined coal. Even so, from an environmental point of view, conversion is the sanest way out. We cannot afford to foul our habitat. Not everyone is happy about coal conversion. Many critics say such plants are not easy to operate and will require a doubling of coal production; that conversion does not really make economic sense, and that in any case it is very costly. Large capital expenditures and long gestation periods (three to eight years) are required. But they forget that the alternative will be far more painful.


The world's resources of coal are enormous; there are an estimated 10 trillion tons of it. India and the United States alone have reserves of 83 billion and 4 trillion tons respectively. Research and reflection almost always yield good ideas. Here is one that works but was laughed at when first suggested .. Why go deep underground at great risk, cut chunks of coal and transport them to the surface? Why not convert the solid fuel into pipable g'!s right underground, in the coal seams themselves? This is called "in situ (on the spot) gasification." American experts feel this process may come into use before aboveground gasification processes do-by about 1985. The reason for the optimism is that in situ gas is cheap and capital costs are low. The basic technique is this: Two bore holes are drilled 20 to 30 meters apart, reaching down to the coal beds. Air is blown down one hole and helps to burn coal in a naturally formed gasifier to produce lean, low-he at-content coal gas that leaves by the second bore hole. Either chemical explosives or high-voltage electric discharges cut a path between,the two vertical holes. According to ERDA, the United States has 1.2 trillion tons of unminable coal reserves which will¡ serve this type of gasification. "Unminable" means coal that is too deep underground (1,800 meters or more) or coal that is poor in quality. ERDA has already carried out two major tests in Hanna, Wyoming. The first, conducted from March 1973 to March 1974, produced an average of 57,000 cubic meters of gas a day for six months. (This is enough to generate one million watts of electricity per day, which can serv.ea town ¡of 1,000 people.) These results were considered extremely encouraging. A second experiment at Hanna incorporated the knowledge gained from the first and raised the gas heating value and coal utilization efficiency. More tests are planned, and a pilot plant ma:y be commissioned in 1978. The concept is so promising that Federal planners propose to spend on research $13 million in fiscal year 1978 (compared with the $6.7 million allotted in fiscal year 1977). It is even believed that one day 5 to 10 per cent of all of the United States energy needs will be met by in situ gas. But the process has some limitations.

The gas has only 10 to 20 per cent of the energy value of natural gas. It is dirty and heavily diluted with nitrogen, but can be used for power stations. Largescale in situ operations may cause disastrous land subsidence. But ERDA scientists now feel that environmental disturbance can be minimized. The underground process is being designed to prevent or reduce subsidence and prevent disruption of underground water supplies. Also, pollution control devices will form part of the equipment at the surface gas-processing plants; sulfur oxides and particulate matter will be eliminated. In any case, most of the pollutants in coal will remain underground. In situ gasification has been shown to be far less polluting than burning coal above ground. ERDA has also begun a new program to recover and use methane gas trapped in coal seams. Methane is the major constituent of natural gas and burns cleanly. One-third of the 22 trillion cubic meters of trapped methane can be recovered, according to one estimate. The first step is to encourage mine companies to capture methane themselves; the next is to develop better tools and techniques for drilling into seams or for stimulating the gas flow.

synthetic gasoline and other motor fuels as well as pipeline gas. According to the U.S. requirements, the scale of conversion will be 30,000 tons of coal a day per plant (yielding 100,000 barrels of oil). A promising process for research is hydrocarbonization. Coal is reacted with hydrogen under high pressure and at fairly high temperatures, in the presence of a catalyst. Bringing hydrogen to the coal is the basis of most techniques. These include extraction, in which coal is dissolved (solvent refined coal system and hydrogen donor process), and the Fischer-Tropsch synthesis, first developed in Germany, where coal is burned with oxygen and steam, generating carbon monoxide and' hydrogen. The gas is purified and then passed over a catalyst, yielding liquid hydrocarbon products. ERDA has already signed contracts for building an experimental coal liquefaction plant at Catlettsburg, Kentucky. It is designed to treat 600 tons of highsulfur coal per day, which is converted to a low-sulfur fuel oil by a catalytic hydrogenation technique known as the H -coal process. This will be the largest American plant to be built for coal conversion. It is expected to go into operation in autumn 1978. Direct scaling up to com* * * Coal is the largest potential source of mercial size (10,000 toos of coal per day) substitute liquid fuels, but there are econo- is possible without any intermediate step. One of the significant developments in mic constraints-at least at the momenton their being fully exploited in that this tricky field is the ambitious proposal manner. Liquefaction is the most difficult made by 10 of India's top energy experts conversion technique, and the extant to set up a one-million-ton coal liqueprocesses are not very efficient. Still, as faction plant at the Raniganj coal belt research progresses and the technology in West Bengal, at an estimated cost of is refined, coal in liquid form may supple- Rs. 701 crores. There are vast reserves of high-ash bituminous coal in the area ment the oil resources. that can be beneficially converted into Since no major change in the technology adopted by the electricity industry will be synthetic oil, which is simpler to refine required, liquefaction appeals to the than natural crude oil, as well as several industry considerably. But it is a capital- by-products. The basic technology for the process has been acquired from a pilot intensive technique. Liquefaction has not yet been com- plant at the Central Fuel Research Instimercially tried in the United States, but. tute in Dhanbad, Bihar. The production of liquid fuels from coal during World War II there was large-scale conversion in Germany which, regardless is fully justified by India's techno-econoof the cost, produced 12,000 barrels of mic status, according to the experts' comoil per day. The Sasol synthetic fuel mittee, which was headed by Dr. K.R. plant in South Africa, which has been Chakravarty, a coal technologist. Its report, compiled after 30 months' study, operating for more than 20 years, produces


is now being considereq by the Government of India. Of the four techniques considered by the Indian experts, the dust gasification process (Koppers- Totzek, developed in Germany) was chosen. The Coal Controller, P.K. Ghosh, a member of the committee, who visited the Sasol plant in South Africa, noted many similarities between it and the Raniganj project. There are large deposits, sufficient water, industries to utilize the output of the many basic chemicals and intermediates and good market outlets (both domestic and export). Predictably there is an articulate lobby which opposes the proposal because of its high cost relative to crude oil. But, as the committee stresses, it is not the return on investment that should be the first consideration, but the strategic value of acquiring a new technology. The production of synthetic oil locally as well as a speeded-up program of oil exploration can bring nearer the day of self-sufficiency in fuel and energy needs. This alone should justify the proposal, but as a bonus there is the possibility of India emerging as a consultant in coal liquefaction technology. The largest single consumer of energy in India is the domestic sector, which wastefully uses huge quantities of firewood and dung (the equivalent to 160 million tons of coal annually). Soft coke can reduce this waste. Coal India Limited has plans to raise the production of soft coke by 40 per cent. A recommendation has gone to the Indian Energy Ministry to set up 12 low-temperature carbonization plants, each of which will convert 1,500 tons of coal daily into coke and gas, with tar as a by-product. This will enormously help domestic fuel consumers, especially in villages. The two possible processes for such conversion were developed at the . Regional Research Laboratory in Hyderabad and the Central Fuel Research Institute. The entire argument can be boiled down to this: Any major change in the practices of using energy anywhere requires vision and vigor. President Carter supplied the vision when he told an energy symposium in Charleston, West Virginia, last April: "The one inevitable major shift in the years ahead is away from petroleum and natural gas toward coal." 0 Right: The world's first large-scale coal. gasification plant was completed in the U.S. in 1971.


THE WIND-CHill FACTOR A short story by M.F .K. Fisher She also accustomed herself to listen·· There was some doubt in the woman's mind about whether it would be wise to through the static on the kitchen radio to try to make notes on her experience at once mysteriously progressing reports about ice or let the long blizzard go through a fifth conditions on New York and Boston streets, noisy night. Perhaps putting onto paper about the amount of garbage that lay on what had happened to her could make their sidewalks. She herself had no such things worse, invite another such experience, problems, for the car in her friend's garage and she was not sure how well she would would not start, and she made so little handle it or, more truthfully, if she could ru~bish that it was all right to put it neatly survive. in an unheated corridor until the wind Her name was Mrs. Thayer, and she stopped. Another problem in the cities was living alone in 'a friend's cottage, ideally was animals, the radio reported. Mrs. Thayer installed for a solitary good few months on was, for the first time in her many lives, wild dunes toward the tip of Long Island, without a four-legged friend, a fact that New York. The house faced the ocean, may have added to the severity of her and except for the earth's rounding she experience on the fourth night. The wind, which during the first two could have looked east to Portugal and south to Cuba. In the rooms heated by days had shifted capriciously this way and electricity, things were cozy and fine until that, settled into a northwest blow, fiercely an uncommonly sustained blizzard moved insistent. It bent the grasses almost flat onto that part of the planet, and onto that· on the dunes, and when occasional dry tiny spit of sand, like a bull covering and snow piled up in corners it soon soiled the possessing the cow, the warm shelter. sculptured drifts with yellowish sand from On the fourth night of the storm, Mrs. the implacable surf. Waves changed from Thayer was used to adjusting the thermostats long piling rollers to mighty beasts wearing in each of the five heated rooms, turning spume four times their height. Mrs. Thayer found after the third night the one in the bathroom up when she could that as she slipped into good sleep it would no longer put off a shower and the one seem for a few minutes as if she were being in her bedroom down once the electric IOcked, moved, gently tipped by what was pad had warmed her guts. The house had happening outside the tight little shelter. a kind of private weather station on one She knew that she did not actually feel wall, and the barometer and thermometer worked among all the other gadgets that this, but she accepted it as a part of being did not: meters for wind velocity and wind so intimately close to the majesty she lay direction, a tide clock, something called a beside. The air grew steadily colder, and Mrs. durotherm hygrometer. The ship's bells that Thayer closed off rooms she did not need were part of it sounded later and later, and limited herself to the kitchen, the bedand finally went silent. Now and then a room, the toilet. Everything stayed' cozy delicate needle spun meaninglessly in one of the brass puddings with their crystal crusts for her, with no apprehensions: If the electricity went off, she would wait for as the blizzard yowled above and around. Mrs. Thayer found that she looked at people who knew she was there to get to them fairly often, as if to keep track of her somehow, before the place grew too what might really be happening, and noticed cold. Almost nonchalantly she tried not blandly when the barometer dropped in a to think about such things, even when the telephone failed. It would ring cleafly, but few hours from 30.15 to 29.60-whatever when she answered there would be only that might mean.

a wild squawk on the line. She suspected that her own voice might be heard, and would say in a high, firm way, "This is Mrs. Thayer. Everything is all right. I am all right. Thank you." It was childish to feel rather pleased and excited about the game, but she did. The night of the fourth day, she ate a nice supper at the table in the warm kitchen, adjusted thermostats, and tidied herself, with parts of at least six books to read first. In bed, she turned on the electric warmer and succumbed late but easily to sleep, at one o'clock in the morning. She felt well-fed, warm, and serene. A little after four, an extraordinary thing happened to her. From deep and comfortable dreamings she was wrenched into the conscious world, as cruelly as if she had been grabbed by the long hairs of her head. Her heart had changed its slow, quiet beat and bumped in her rib cage like a rabbit's. Her breath was caught in a kind of net in her throat, not going in and down fast enough. She touched her body and it was hot, but her palms felt clammy and stuck to her. Within a few seconds she knew that she was in a state-perhaps dangerous-of pure panic. It had nothing to do with physical fear, as far as she could tell. She was not afraid of being alone, or of being on the dUlles in a storm. She was not afraid of bodily attack, rape, all that. She was simply in panic, or what Frenchmen home from the Sahara used to callie cafard affole. This is amazing, she said. This is indescribable. It is here. I shall survive it or else run out howling across the dunes and die soon in the waves and the wind. Such a choice seemed very close and sweet, for her feeling was almost intolerably wishful of escape from the noise. The noise was above and against and around her, and she felt it was invading her spirit. This is dangerous indeed, she said, and I must try not to run outside. That is a suicide


wish, and weak; I must try to breathe more¡ slowly, and perhaps swallow something to get back my more familiar rhythms. She was speaking slowly to her whole self, with silent but precise enunciation. She waited for some minutes to see if she could manage the breathing in bed, but her heart and lungs were almost out of control when she got unsteadily to her feet, tied her night robe around her, and went into the little toilet. There it took a minute to get her hand to turn on the light, for she was racked with a kind of chill that made her lower back and thighs ache as if she were in labor, and her jaws click together like bare bones. She remembered that in her friend's mirror cabinet was a bottle of aspirin, and with real difficulty, almost as if she were spastic, she managed to shake two into her hand, fill a mug with water, and swallow the pills. If you cannot swallow, she said flatly, you are afraid of your enemy. She felt sick, and won this tiny battle of holding down the medicine at great moral cost, for by now in the astounding onslaught she was as determined as an apparently insensate animal not to submit to the roaring all around her. She dared not look at herself for a time but walked in a staggering way about the bedroom and kitchen, recalling methods she had studied, and even practiced, for self-preservation. There was one, taught to her during a period of deep stress, in which one takes three slow sips of almost any liquid, then waits a set period-from 5 to 15 minutes-and takes three more, and so on. She devoted her whole strength to this project. She carefully heated some milk, and when she could not open the bottle of angostura, which might have taken the curse off the potion's insipidity, she poured in two big spoonfuls of sugar. It was a revolting brew, but she drank about half a mugful of it over the next period of carefully repulsed frenzy. The wind had become different. Its steady

pressure of sound had changed to a spasmodic violence. Snow was stinging against the northern and western storm windows, and Mrs. Thayer already knew that the doors on those sides of the cottage were frozen shut. It did not matter. A door to the outside place where people changed bathing suits in the summer began to bang hard, in irregular patterns. It is unhinged, she said with a sly grin. That did not matter, either. Nothing mattered except to keep herself inside her own skin, and with real sweat she did. She pulled every trick out of the bagful she had collected during her long life with neurotics. She brushed her hair firmly, and all the while her heart kept kicking against her ribs and she felt so sick that she could scarcely lift her arm. She tried to say some nursery rhymes and the 23rd Psalm, but with no other result than an impatient titter. She sipped the dreadful sweet milk. She prayed to those two pills she had swallowed. If I permit myself to think in my present terms, I am done for. It is a question of moral energy, she said in rounded words and clearly punctuated sentences, in a silent voice that rang in her head like Teacher's, like Father Joseph's, like Dr. Rab's. Subconsciously I am admitting that the storm is great and I am small, and for a time or possibly forever I have lost the balance that human beings must maintain between their own inner force and that of Nature. I was unaware of what the wind and ocean could do, she thought. Now I am being told off. But do I have to lose everything? She went on like this as she walked feebly about the rooms. Heavy curtains moved in the fierce air, and she added long woollen socks and a leather coat to her coverings, then as part of her dogged rescue work she focused on a mirror enough to arrange her hair nicely and put on firm eyebrows and a mouth that looked poutish instead of hard, as she had intended. This is simply

going on too long, she said like a woman on the delivery table,¡ and added more lipstick. For a time, as the aspirin and the warm milk seemed to slow down her limitless dread (Dread of what? Not that the roof would fly off, that she was alone, that she might die ... ), she made herself talk reasonably to what was puling and trembling and flickering in her spirit. She was a doctoror, rather, an unwitting bystander caught in some kind of disaster, forced to be cool and wise with one of the victims, perhaps a child bleeding toward death or an old man pinned under a truck wheel. She talked quietly to this helpless, shocked soul fluttering in its poor body. She was strong and calm. All the while, she knew cynically that she was nonexistent except in the need thrust upon her, and that the victim would either die or recover and forget her dramatic saintliness before the ambulance had come. "Listen to your breathing," she said coolly. "You are not badly hurt. Soon you will feel all right. Sip this. It will make the pain go away. Lift your head now, and breathe slowly. You are not really in trouble." And so on. Whenever the other part of Mrs. Thayer, the threatened part, let her mind slip back to the horror of an imminent breaking with all reason-and then, so then, out the door it would be final-the kindly stranger seemed to sense it in the eyeballs and the pulse as she bent over the body and spoke more firmly: "Now hold the cup. You can. I know you can. You will be all right." This became monotonous, and in fact it was embarrassing to have the two things floating inside her as she tried deliberately to go with the sounds of the gale instead of letting her consciousness accept them and undermine her. At last she said rudely to the creature who had been trying to give, her some help, "Go away. I will be all right." And the kindly stranger part of her shrugged


In another two hours everything was all right inwardly with her, except that she was languid, as if she had lain two weeks . in a fever. The panic that had seized her bones and spirit faded fast, once routed. She was left wan and bemused. Never had she been afraid - that is, of tangibles like cold and sand and wind. She was not afraid, as far as she knew, of dying either fast or slowly. It was, she decided precisely, a question of sound. If the storm had not lasted so long, with its noise so much into her, into her brain and muscles .... If this had been a kind of mating, it was without joy. Gradually, she was breathing with deep but not worried rhythm as she lay under a cover on her bed. The wind still thrust at her, but she sensed that the giant was in that state of merciful lull that rewards old scoundrels in their final throes-he was not choking and hitting out at her. She got up carefully and did several small things, like polishing her fingernails, and then she poached an egg in some beef broth and ate it. She felt as hollow as an old shell, and surprisingly trembly. She slept and withdrew, knowing there was nothing Her father had talked often about a for two hours, out like a drunk. more to do, knowing she would not have couple of years he'd spent as a reporter in The whole peculiar experience was still been dismissed if Mrs. Thayer depended on North Dakota. He said that farm women in her mind when she wakened. Why had her any further. went stark mad there because in their it happened? Was it a question of decibels, The next step was to try to read. But lonely cabins, when they looked out the of atmospheric pressure? Had her ears she found it hard to concentrate on the print, window, the snow would always be blowing simply been too long assaulted by the and when she did it was on sentences picked horizontally. Always. It sent them mad. pullulations of the violently moving air hit or miss from this page or that. There For them, it was not the wind. The sideways about her? Where was she, then? All ofthis was one from an anonymous book called snow did it. puzzled her, and she found herself hoping Streetwalker: " ... to admit fear and weakMrs. Thayer knew. The sound of the like a child that the air would be calmer, ness to any living soul ... would be to reveal wind, for her, had been going sideways and soon. my unfitness for the life I have chosen, and, . exactly on a line with the far horizon of the She permitted herself the weakness of since no other is now possible for me, to Atlantic for days, nights-too long. It was one gentle tap on the barometer and felt reach the limits of despair-and God knows in her bowels, and suddenly they were no real dismay when its thin, fluttering loosened, and later, again to her surprise, what would happen then." indicator went down a little more. If there I am being played with, Mrs. Thayer she threw up. She told herself dizzily that the was any message in it, perhaps it said that said angrily, and with care put the book rhythm of the wind had bound her around, since Mrs. Thayer had lived through the back in its shelf place and then was reading and that now she was defying it, but it past hours she would never know them in a controlled way while her heart thugged kept on howling. again. It is probable, she said, that if I The pills worked, helped by the warm along and she felt wambly all over. "This is must, I shall bow, succumb, admit greater the day for each of us to assess our own drink. The human parts of her body helped. strength. strength, in. utter silence to plumb the The mind did not fail her, and she knew There was no point in thinking much all the time-or, at least, brought herself by depth of our own spirit." What in God's about this in her weak, lackadaisical state, name was she looking at? She saw coldly degrees to believe so-that she would riever so she wrote a few notes to herself, not the title Second noughts, by old man have run out like a beast, to die quickly caring if they might bring on more wind Fran90is Mauriac, and all her admiration of on the dunes. Once, she stopped roaming or not, and went to bed. And during the a lot of things in him turned into fuming and lay down, feeling purged and calmer, late afternoon, while she dozed with a deep, jelly, and she tossed the book on the floor but the -minute she was flat on the bed she soft detachment, the sound abated and and started to walk about the little house heard the wind pressing against the wall then died, and she was lost in the sweet beyond her head, and it was as if she were again. dream life of a delivered woman. 0 Mrs. Thayer's secret balance, the stuff locked in a cell and in the next one a giant like the fluid of the inner ear, was centered lay in his last agony, breathing with a About the Author: M.F.K. Fisher is a short story now a little below her diaphragm, and she terrible rage and roar. She got up and writer, novelist and literary critic. Her writings walked with special care, in order to keep brushed at her hair again, and then walked have often appeared in such prestigious American the whole place from crushing like an egg with a decreasing stagger about the little publications as the New Yorker. Her published works include Among Friends and The Art of Eating. as the giant thrashed.


AWARD FOR ZUBIN MEHTA Some 1,500 members of the Indian community in southern California cheered Zubin Mehta, conductor of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, as he received the Sangeet Natak Akademi Fellowship Award from Kewal Singh, Indian Ambassador to the United States. The presentation was made at a sparkling celebration of the 30th anniversary of India's independence. Kewal Singh said: "The post-independence era in India has seen a great many events of renaissance. The spirit of India through the span of one generation has reasserted itself in every field of human distinction. Art, music and drama have found eminent places of pride, reinvigorating the natural identity in India, as have science and technology, industry and commerce. "This phenomenon has led to the flowering and maturity

of many talents, who have achieved honor by sheer merit in every walk of life all around the world. Dr. Zubin Mehta is a monumental symbol of this revival phenomenon. At the young age of 41, this handsome and brilliant Indian has become celebrated in the classical music world." Ambassador Singh felicitated the Indian community of Los Angeles for its deep attachment to Indian culture and for its contribution to the composite culture of America. He urged the Indians in the United States, in the words of India's Prime Minister Morarji Desai, "to sweeten the culture in which you live." Zubin Mehta said in response: "How proud you must be, as I am, that the Indian community ... is contributing so much to the positive side of this continent's life." 0


THE U.S. STAKE IN THE NORTH-SOUTH DIAlOGUE AN INTERVIEW WITH C. FRED BERGSTEN (RIGHT). U.S. ASSISTANT SECRETARY OF THE TREASURY FOR INTERNATIONAL AFFAIRS BY JOHN J. HARTER. SPAN WASHINGTON CORRESPONDENT.

HARTER: Mr. Secretary how much progress has there been over the last two years in North-South economic relations? BERGSTEN: I think the progress has been tremendous. A little over two years ago, North-South relations were marked by very sharp confrontation. I think the main reason was that the industrialized countries had failed to respond constructively to the legitimate economic needs and aspirations of the poor countries. Over the last two years, all that has changed very dramatically. The United States is in the process of increasing its foreign assistance levels very sharply. We are now negotiating on a wide front to improve the framework of international commodity trade. We have implemented the generalized system of trade preferences, which improves the access by developing countries to our market for manufactured goods. Probably most important of all, we have engaged the developing countries as equals in a wide-ranging set of international negotiations in many forums, in an effort to find ways to advance their needs and our interests simultaneously and constructively. I think this new era will continue for some timeindeed, I think it is already in the process of becoming routinized, so that it will no longer be a special occasion for the North and South to have a dialogue. In other words, the dialogue itself is becoming an integral part of the world's international economic arrangements.

factured exports go to developing countries. Our imports of critical ra"o/materials come heavily from the developing countries, and we rely on imports for 13 out of 15 key industrial raw materials. Our foreign investment in developing countries amounts to many thousands of millions of dollars, and earnings on those investments are an important source of strength to the U.S. balance of payments and the value of the dollar. So we have a basic interest in economic progress and stability in the developing countries. I think all this reflects increasing interdependence. In my view, the developing world is the most dynamic part of the world economy. Growth rates in the developing countries, taken as a group, have been very impressive over the last 10 to 15 years, although the oil crisis and the world recession have retarded these rates in the last three or four years-as they have in the industrial world as well. I think as we look ahead 10 to 20 years, the developing world is going to have the most impressive rates of economic growth that will be found anywhere. And therefore I expect our economic inter-relationships with these countries will increase very sharply.

HARTER: Could you say what relative priority official development assistance has in U.S. economic relations with developing countries? BERGSTEN: One has to divide the developing world into at least two categories. One is those countries that have HARTER: Are the developed countries already moved to relatively high per in general, and the United States' in capita incomes and have demonstrated particular, really trying to help the develop- the capability of sustained economic ing countries accelerate their rate of growth. These countries have diversified economic development? their exports, which are increasingly BERGSTEN: No question about it. The penetrating world markets. They need Carter Administration believes very improved access to the markets of the strongly that the economic interests of the industrial countries for their manufactured United States are linked very, very closely exports; they need access to private to economic progress in the developing capital markets around the world; and • world. Almost one-half of U.S. manu- they continue to need loans from the

World Bank and the regional development banks on market-related terms. But they don't really need concessional foreign assistance. Another group-about 40 of the poorest developing countries, constituting what one might call the "Fourth World"does need heavy doses of concessional assistance through both bilateral and multilateral channels. Most of these countries are in sub-Sahara Mrica and South Asia. Some of them have very large populations, and they all have low per capita incomes. Their per capita economic growth has been stagnant in recent years. They do not yet have the ability to tap private capital markets or sell their manufactured goods widely in the markets of the industrial world. Concessional aid will certainly playa continuing major role in our relations with this group. of countries and, as Secretary of State Cyrus Vance indicated at the Conference on International Economic Cooperation, ,the United States plans substantial increases in its foreign aid to help meet the needs of these countries over the next few years. Does this kind of breakdown in the categories of developing countries imply any basic new directions in the U.s. foreign aid program? BERGSTEN: Yes, it does. To some extent, the United States has been moving in these directions over the last three or four years. The central target is to meet t.he basic human needs of the world's poorest people. This contrasts with the traditional aid emphasis on building dams, hydroelectric projects and big steel millsthings that might generate income that will trickle down over time to the poorest people, but do not directly build up the capabilities of individuals that are essential both for human happiness and long-term economic progress. HARTER:

What, specifically, is the United States doing to focus official de-

HAR'f.ER:


velopment assistance on the needs of the BERGSTEN: Yes, the Development Compoorest people? mittee faces a very full agenda in -its BERGSTEN: We're working in both the various efforts to promote development. bilateral and multilateral areas to achieve I think some of the issues that have been that purpose. Since the U.S. Congress under consideration in the recently conbegan to mandate the so-called "new cluded Conference on International directions" for U.S. aid in 1973, the Economic Cooperation (CIEC) may now bilateral programs have shifted very signi- be added to this agenda. ficantly to support increased agricultural production, improved nutritional levels, HARTER: Do you think this committee's educational projects-not college educa- work on improving the developing countion so much as basic education for a wide tries' access to capital markets will prove group of the citizenry--and health pro- us'ejul? BERGSTEN: The Development Comgrams, particularly through paramedical mittee has already done a lot of work techniques. in that area, with two major results. One In the multilateral area we supported has been educational: It has conveyed to the creation of the International Fund for Agricultural Development-to provide lending institutions in industrialized counspecifically for increased food and nutri- tries the fairly wide possibilities that exist for private capital markets to extend tional production in developing countries. Similarly, looking toward longer range loans to developing countries. I think its work here has indeed contributed to the problems, we have pushed the established international financial institutions, such massive expansion of private loans to the as the World Bank and the regional poor countries, which has been one of the development banks, to put increased most remarkable phenomena of the world emphasis on projects that will meet the economy in recent years. I think the committee is also responsible basic human needs of the poorer people . for the removal of many impediments to in these countries. Roughly a quarter to a third of the financing provided by the borrowings by the developing countries. international financial institutions now The United States has not really had such goes into projects seeking to deal with impediments, but the European countries and Japan have retained a number of precisely this kind of problem. artificial barriers to borrowing by developing countries. The work of the DevelopHARTER: Is the Joint Development Committee of the World Bank and the Inter- ment Committee has prompted a serious national Monetary Fund doing useful work? effort to get rid of them.

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What advantages will accrue to developing countries from the reduction of trade barriers in the Tokyo Round negotiations? BERGSTEN: I think the developing countries would greatly benefit from the general stimulus to world trade that one might expect as a consequence of a general liberalization of trade barriers. The export growth of manufactured goods from these countries over the last 10 to 15 years has been quite impressive, and at least 25 or 30 of them have clearly shown an ability to penetrate world markets with these goods. If they should achieve improved access to markets through reductions in trade barriers on a nondiscriminatory basis, I would expect this export growth to continue or accelerate. In fact, the developing countries might well be the principal beneficiaries of the Tokyo Round. HARTER:

HARTER: Do you believe "special and differential treatment" should be accorded the developing countries in some general areas of these negotiations? BERGSTEN: There are several areas where special and differential treatment for the exports of developing countries could be useful, but frankly I believe that overall the developing countries will gain far less advantage from this approach than they will from getting the maximum possible degree of generalized liberalization of trade barriers.

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Several officials of the Carter Administration have emphasized in public statements the .role that private foreign investment canplay in stimulating economic development in the developing countries. Do you think that developing countries are taking a more receptive view toward private foreign investment than they used to? BERGSTEN: Definitely so, for two reasons. For one thing, they have increased needs for external resources because of the world recession, higher oil prices, and the general pinch on their access to outside capital, technology, and other imported resources. Second, and probably more important, they have increased confidence in their own ability to cope with the problems posed by multinational corporations doing business in their territory. A few years ago, there was a widespread image in these countries of exploitation by the multinational firms, which then seemed able to dictate terms of production and sale. That image no longer fits the reality, if it ever did. Today, it is very clear that even the poorest of the developing countries are an even match for the most powerful multinational firms in terms of the bargaining that determines just what the firms will do. All the developing countries have had a lot of experience here, and they know how to extract a deal that will HARTER:

promote their own economic and' social objectives. When they have problems, plenty of outside experts, consultants and advisers are available to help these countries to negotiate. In fact, I think the world has seen a fundamental shift in the bargaining power relationship between the companies and developing country governments-and equally important, we've seen a major shift in the perception of that balance. The developing countries now have a remarkable degree of self-confidence in their ability to deal effectively with incoming foreign investment. There has been considerable discussion recently about the need to expand resources production in developing countries. Can you explain what this problem is, and what's being done to solve it? BERGSTEN: Productive investment in raw materials in the developing countries has declined very sharply in the last few years. In fact, about 80 per cent of all investment in industrial raw materials is now taking place in the industrialized countries, even though very large potential resources exist in many developing countries. The principal inhibition of the large corporations against investing more in the development of these resources in developing countries is a concern that such investments might be expropriated once they become productive, or perhaps HARTER:

squeezed to the point that returns on the investments will not be sufficient to warrant the risk. So we have been searching for some mechanism that would minimize such risks to the investor. The amounts of capital that would be required are far too large for governments to provide. I think it might be useful to multilateralize the process of investment, so that in some cases American, Japanese, German, French and British resources could be merged in international consortia. This would reduce any possible hint that a firm will do the bidding of its own country. Carrying that even further, the World Bank, the International Finance Corporation and the regional development banks-which by definition represent the world community-would multilateralize the whole process, to the extent they become involved. In any event, I would foresee a series of efforts to bring resources from different countries into new means of investment that may be quite different from the old equity approach, and I think this will reduce a lot of the underlying friction and instability that has surrounded private foreign ~nvestment in the past and has deterred increases in the output of raw materials. The outlook for both increased utilization of resources and for increased earnings of developing countries would improve. 0

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THE JOYS OF THE HIRSHHORN MUSEUM One of America's most outstanding repositories of modern art, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., contains a total of 6,000 works-4,000 paintings and 2,000 sculptureswhich trace the development of art from the 19th century to the present. The museum is the gift of an American multimillionaire, Joseph H. Hirshhorn, who amassed the world's largest private collection. In 1966,he gave it all- valued at about $100 million"to the people of the United States as a small repayment for what this nation has done for me and others like me who arrived here as immigrants." In 1974 the museum opened to the public. The Hirshhorn contains paintings that would delight any connoisseur of modern art. On view are the works of some of the greatest artists of the past 200 years. But the glory of the Hirshhorn is its sculpture garden, dominated by works of such internationally famous artists as Rodin, Moore and Calder. Each week, thousands flock to the museum to sample its joys. The museum's magnificent exhibits recall Joseph Hirshhorn's definition of art as "something that hits me in the heart and in the brain, something that excites me and will outlive me."

Top: Larry Rivers listens to an admirer infront of his 1963 canvas, Billboard for the First New York Film Festival. Above: A large but intimate gallery at the Hirshhorn. Back cover: Two Discs (1965), a colossal stabile by Alexander Calder, with the U.S. Cppitol in the background.



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