The Mahatma's American Apostle Meditations on Black and White Social Welfare in the United States
Editor Managing Editor
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Avinash Pasricha
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Nand Katyal
Associate Art Director
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Assistant Art Director
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P.N. Saigal
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Photographs: Front cover-Avinash Pasricha. Inside front covercourtesy Western Electric Engineering Research Center, Princeton, New Jersey. 4-NASA. 5-courtesy The Pace Gallery. 6-courtesy Collection Citibank, New Delhi. 7 & 8 top left-courtesy Albright Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, N.Y., gift of Seymour H. Knox. 8 bottomNational Museum of American Art. 9 top-Collection M.F. Husain; bottom-Artist's collection. 11-Nancy Sirkis, Pix Inc. 12 topLibrary of Congress. 14-17- Paul Conklin. 20- Thomas McAvoy, Life magazine, Š 1938 Time Inc. 29 bottom left-courtesy of George Eastman House, Rochester, N.Y.; right-Lartz, USIA. 32-35courtesy Indrani Rahman. 37-courtesy Western Electric. 46-Peter Connigham from Jacksina and Freedman. Published by the United States Information Service, American Center, 24 Kasturbj1 Gandhi Marg, New Delhi 110001, on behalf of the American Embassy, New Delhi. The opinions expressed in this magazine do not necessarily reflect the views or policies of the United States Government. Printed by H.K. Mehta at Thomson Press (India) Limited, Faridabad, Haryana. Use of SPAN articles in other publications is encouraged, except when copyrighted. For permiss~on, write to the'Editor. Price of magazine, one year's subscription (12 issues) 21 rupees, sing~e copy. 2 rupees 75 paise. For change of address send an old address from aTccent SPAN envelope along with new address to Circulation Manager, SPAN Magazine, 24 Kasturba 9andhi Marg. New Delhi 110001. See change of address form on page 48b.
Front cover: Gandhi, Dandi March, two sculptures by Ramkinkar Vaij-left, in plaster, 23 x 29 x 49.5 cms; right, in bronze, 23.5 x 29 x 48.5 ems. Courtesy: National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi. Back cover: Henry Fonda in Young Mr. Lincoln; Fonda's career spanned almost five decades and more than 80 films. See also page 49.
For this issue alone SPAN has abandoned its sparkling colors to explore the eloquence and dignity of black and white--and the many shades of gray. Without the distractions and undeniable charms of color printing, the magazine, as always, strives to be serious but not glum; handsome, not flashy. In this issue we present a variety of views about the United States and India and how each country has influenced the other, by distinguished Indian and American authors. Setting the tone for the issue is an essay by the outstanding Indian artist Ram Kumar, who has a special feeling for the artistic excellence that painters .have achieved in black and white. Ram Kumar has produced remarkable canvases in color; yet on occasion he has felt that only black and white could portray his emotions. Best known as a painter, he is also a writer of surpassing sensitivity. Born in Simla in 1924, Ram Kumar began experimenting with painting 20 years later, although he was expecting to pursue a business career. In 1945 he earned a master's degree in economics, then he worked briefly in a bank. But he decided to dedicate himself to painting and went to Paris in 1950, where he studied with the noted artist Fernand Leger .and with Andre Lhote. Since then he has traveled widely-in Europe, Asia, North and South America--and his works have been exhibited to acclaim literally all over the world. Among the many honors he has earned are a 1970 Rockefeller Fund scholarship for work and travel in the United States and Mexico; the coveted Padma Shri--and, significantly, an award from the Goverrunent of Uttar Pradesh for a collection of short stories in Hindi. Ram Kumar was last represented in SPAN in July 1981 by his painting "Homage to The Waste Land." We are pleased to present his evocative prose in this issue. October marks the 113th anniversary of the birth of .Mahatma Gandhi. This month's cover features Ramkinkar Vaij I s remarkable sculptures of Gandhi, which were photographed with the permission of the National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi, whose collection they grace. The story about John Haynes Holmes, Gandhi's American apostle, on page 24 had its genesis in one of the earliest issues of SPAN, January1961. The article is written by S.P.K. Gupta, a¡special correspondent of the Press Trust of India currently posted in Moscow. He first read of Holmes in a column entitled "Armchair Perspective" by John T. Reid, who in 1961 was cultural counselor of the American Fmbassy. Gupta visited the Community Church of New York, which Holmes founded, while he was researching a biography of Dr. Yellapragada Subba Row (since published). The senior minister of the church, Holmes' successor, gave Gupta copies of a number of letters from Mahatma Gandhi to Holmes. This set Gupta on a quest tthat garnered 66 letters between the Mahatma and his apostle from 1926 to 1948; he is seeking others. The letters will form an appendix to Gupta's book Apostle John, to be published by Navjivan Press. Sharp-eyed readers (and our correspondence assures us we have many) may have noticed a change in our masthead: SPAN is published once again by the United States Information Service (USIS). From 1978 to 1982 the organization was known as the International Communication Agency or USICA. Now by an act of the U. S. Congress the agency returns to the name it bore for 25 years (1953-1978). USIS will perform the same function that it always has: to supply information about the United States in order to help create a better understanding of the nation and its policies. American Centers in New Delhi, Bombay, Madras, Calcutta and around the world are once again under the banner of USIS. So is SPAN.
tim3t NEW
An issue that all nations face is how to apportion responsibility among central, regional and local government units. In the United States, the issue has been a perennial one since the nation was founded more than two centuries ago through the union of 13 previously autonomous colonies. It is being debated anew under tl)e stimulus of the Reagan Administration's proposal for a "New Federalism."
FEDERAlISM by EUGENE BRAKE and THOMAS EICHLER
From the beginning, the U:S. Government enshrined the principle of shared powers and responsibilities among federal, state and local institutions. However, over the years the balance has shifted increasingly toward the Federal Government. To reverse the trend of centralization, President Ronald Reagan has proposed programs that would turn several powers and functions-and sou'rces of revenue-back to the states and local communities. Here, two Washington USIS correspondents discuss the Reagan proposal called the New Federalism.
President Reagan's proposal urges that the central government eventually turn over to the states and cities complete responsibility for financing a number of programs in welfare, education and training, transportation, community development and other sectors, along with the freedom to run these programs as they please. The Federal Government wouid also give up certain revenue sources, which the states could take over as a means of financing the programs. At present the cost of these programs is shared among the different levels of government, and federal financial assistance generally brings with it considerable federal control. The proposal is a product of President Reagan's conviction that the role of the central government-the Federal Government in· the United States-in domestic affairs should be reduced. Many others who do not necessarily share this conviction nevertheless agree that the present system of shared responsibility has become so complex and cumbersome that reform is needed. Alice Rivlin, director of the U.S. Congressional Budget Office, comments that the problems stem from the sheer number of often-overlapping programs, the regulations attached to many of the programs, the potential conflict between national and local priorities and the difficulty of designing a single national program flexible enough to address unique local circumstances. The present "New Federalism" debate in the United States is not over constitutional issues. The Constitution reserved to the states or to the people powers not specifically granted to the Federal Government. But over the years the U.S. Supreme Court, in the light of changing circumstances, has ruled that the Federal Government has many powers not explicitly stated in the Constitution, for instance In matters affecting the economy and business. Some amendments also specifically granted the Federal Govern-
J!lent powerS it did not have originally, such as authority to enforce civil rights. As a result of this evolution the Federal Government today has legal authority to act in almost all segments of public life-while the states also retain authority to act ""in most of these areas. The result has been a complex set of relationships. The present U.S. system of federalstate-city interaction-"one of the most intricate federal structures in the world," according to one expert commentatordeveloped during this century in response to some widely held concerns over the delivery of services at the state and local levels. • Some states had much more limited resources than others for meeting their residents' needs. Federal aid to education, for example, was undertaken to help poorer communities bring the quality of their schools closer to the standards achieved in wealthier areas. • The problem of income disparity was exacerbated by urban developments after World War II: the flight by prosperous city dwellers to the suburbs, where they no longer paid taxes to city governments, and. their replacement in the central cities by low-income blacks migrating from the South-or in some cases low-income Puerto Ricans and Spanish-speaking immigrants. A large number of programs of federal aid to local governments were initiated to try to deal with the urban problems that developed as a consequence. • Programs were also initiated to deal with other "pockets of poverty," such as the Appalachian region where coal mine employment had plunged. • Some states did not appear to be as responsive as others to the needs of their citizens. There was doubt about willingness to protect civil rights, to provide equal opportunity to minority groups, or to provide special assistance to lowincome groups. • Many state and local governments did not have the administrative capacity to take responsibility for providing some types of services. In addition, many thought that there was an economy of scale in dealing with some problems requiring specialized knowledge, and that· a centralized group of experts in Washington, drawing on experience in many communities, would be better able to find solutions to problems such as urban redevelopment and youth unemployment than could thousands of small governmental bodies controlled largely by part-time elected officials without specialized training.
Government role entirely for some by Congress. State and local governments often were required to obtain prior pro'- programs. Those who call for cutting back the jeet-by-project approval from Washington for the way they intended to use the federal role point out that many of the factors that led to the present system are federal assistance offered. no longer as significant as they once were. Another factor propelling the Federal The principal development, most agree, Government into state and local activities has been an improvement in the quality was a relative decline in the ability of the and capabilities of state governments. latter jurisdictions to raise revenue. Through historical chance, state and The Congressional Advisory Commission on Intergovernmental Relations comlocal governments once depended almost exclusively on property and sales taxes ments that "the decades of the 1960s and 1970s witnessed changes in state governfor revenue, while the Federal Government unparalleled since the postment in this century has gotten most of its Reconstruction period [following the revenues from a progressive income tax. Civil War] a century ago, generally in the It was difficult for state and local governdirection advocated by reformers for 50 ments to increase property and sales tax years." rates to keep up with inflation and Among the improvements have been increasing needs, while "bracket creep" operating on the progressive income tax more representative legislatures-manassured that without changes in the legis- dated by a 1962 Supreme Court decidecline in per capita income lated rates, the federal income tax would sion-a disparities, increased minority participatake an increasing percentage of national tion in government, the disappearance of income as inflation progressed. Furthermore, many Americans felt that the one-party control of governments, the progressive income tax was more equi- development of more professional executive and legislative staffs, and a divertable than sales taxes or even property sification of state revenue sources-with taxes. For these reasons, state and local 36 of the 50 American states now having governments sought to tap federal re- corporate and personal income taxes venues to help pay for the services compared with 19 in 1960. The Reagan Administration emphademanded by their residents, and Congress considered it appropriate to give sizes these improvements in arguing for a turn back of responsibility to the state and such assistance. local authorities. The main features of . As a result of such factors, Federal yet Government transfers to states and loca- the Administration proposal-not lities grew from a little more than $7,000 completed in detail-are: million in 1960 to $88,000 million in 1980. • The states would assume total rePut in other terms, these transfers rose sponsibility for the basic welfare profrom less than 2 percent of Gross Nationgram-aid to families with dependent the Federal Governal Product (GNP) and less than 15 children-while percent of total state and local outlays to ment, in exchange, would assume finantate and local 3.4 percent of GNP and 23 percent of cial responsibility for Medicaid, the program that provides health services to the jurisdictions lack- state-local outlays in 1980. people on welfare. ed the incentive to act separately to help In 1960 there were about 130 federal achieve certain national policy objectives grant programs, focused heavily on trans• The Federal Government would resuch as developing a nationwide trans- portation and income security. In 1980 tain responsibility for the Food Stamp portation network or cutting down on there were 530 grant programs, touching program, which subsidizes food purinterstate air and water pollution. nearly every state and local activity. Also chases of the poor. National coordination was clearly neces- in 1980, about 25 percent of all federal . • Responsibility for the operation of sary to make such efforts effective. grant monies flowed directly to local dozens of programs currently run by the Moreover, if only one state set high governments, compared with almost no Federal Government would be transferstandards in such matters as air and water such flows 20 years before. red to state and local governments. quality or restoration of strip-mined land, • Funding for new state and local reIn fact, dissatisfaction with the present it could face serious loss of jobs and system already has prompted a number of sponsibilities would come from state investment to other states with slack attempts to improve it. These have in- savings on the Medicaid program plus, standards or no standards at all. eventually, the opportunity to tax recluded proposals for "revenue sharing" 'Because of these concerns, agencies and "bloc grants," under which states and venue sources to be given up by the were established in Washington to try to localities receive federal money for Federal Government. (During a transifind solutions to local problems existing spending for a broad range of purposes or tion period, states would continue to around the nation. Federal financial aid in a specified functional area but with a receive support from a federal trust was offered to states and localities, with few federal restrictions on what exactly to fund.) conditions attached as an incentive to get .do with the funds. The Reagan AdminisThe changes would be initiated grastate and city governments to make tration's New Federalism proposal would dually during an eight-year transition matching efforts to pursue social goals set go even further, eliminating the Federal period beginning in fiscal year 1984.0
The second United Nations Conference on the Exploration and Peaceful Uses of Outer Space (UNISPACE-82) ended in Vienna, Austria, August 21 with the ,adoption by consensus of recommendations on the future use of space technology. These recommendations are aimed at fostering international cooperation in outer space and in the use of space technology to further global economic development, especially for developing countries. The recommendations range from increasing technic~l cooperation among countries to a greater role for the The reusable U.S. space shuttle opens up new United Nations as a sp<;lce-information possibilities for international cooperation in space; any country can contract to launch center. They are contained in a report, communications satellites and conduct remore than 100 pages long, which will be search in space. submitted for final adoption to the 37th session of the U.N. General Assembly in • On the optimal utilization of the geoNew York soon. stationary orbit, the report says, "There The report's main recommendations is a real concern that some parts of the are: geostationary or~it are approaching • A United Nations space-information saturation in certain frequency bands." system should be established. It would (Geostationary orbit is the necessar:y consist initially of a directory of information about sources of space data, so that placement of satellites, in a band over the inquiring states can have direct access to equator, for optimum transfer of signals.) data banks and information sources with- However, technical advances are underway that "will probably permit. .. the in and outside the U.N. system. The United Nations program on space closer spacing of satellites and their satisfactory coexistence." It is "imperative" applications should playa more concrete role in helping countries to select, that studies and research to achi.eve this execute and benefit from space applica- objective be intensified to ensure the tions. This prognln;lalerts members to most effective utilization of this orbit in the interests of all countri.es. the potential uses of space technology • On remote-sensing of resources on and organizes training courses throughearth by satellites, the report recomout the world. The report recommends developing a fellowship program for in- mends that the legal subcommittee of the depth training of space technologists and U.N. Committee on the Peaceful Uses of major U.N. body in applications specialists, with the help of Outer Space-the governments and international organiza- the field of outer space-agree on princitions; the organization of regular semi- ples governing satellite remote-sensing, so as to meet the concerns of states about nars for high-level personnel concerned with space applications and space tech- close observation of their territories withnology; and the promotion of greater out their permission, and the availability cooperation in space science and technol- of data derived for remote-sensing. (The ogy between developed and developing United States gave to all UNISPACE participants an index of the major data countries . • The United Nations-in association gathered by U.S. remote-sensing satellites, notably the Landsat series.) with concerned specialized agenciesThe report also recommends that such also should organize periodically studies organizations as the U.N. Food and Agto exalTIine all the global implications (technical, social, economic, environ- riculture Organization, U.N. Educational, mental and legal) of new space develop- Scientific and Cultural Organization, U.N. Development Program, and U.N. ments, especially for developing countries.
Environment Program should further help interested countries to take steps to study their needs and assess appropriate remote-sensing systems to meet them. The report also urges that a study be undertaken to assess the need for and viability of a worldwide remote-s~nsing system. • On direct-broadcasting satellites, already experimentally used by some countries for educational hroadcasting, the ,report says: "It is now time for countries to agree as soon as possible" on principles governing the use of satellites for direct television broadcasting. • On the prevention of militarization of space, the conference report says: "The extension of an arms race into outer space is a matter of grave concern to the international community ... and should be prevented." It urges all states to adhere strictly to the 1967 outer space treaty, and strongly recommends that the competent organs of the United Nations-the General Assembly and Committee on Disarmament-"glve appropriate attention and high priority" to the issue. • Developing countries should examine ','in detail the importance of communications, especially to and from rural areas, as an integral element of development. • Satellite systems should evolve within the framework of international regulations to ensure compatibility among different satellite systems. • On space debris, the report recommends that countries agree to appropriate measures to deal with this problem, such as designating certain orbits as "d~sposable orbits," and removing from orbit all inactive satellites. • On the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, the report states that "since this is so basic an issue, we should use part of our resources for this quest, which is of relevance to aU mankind. It should therefore be considered a joint international effort, with each country contributing whatever it can." • On the environmental effects of rocket launches, the report says the United Nations-and the U.N. Environment Program in particular-should encourage the continuation and expansion of studies to look at the harmful effects of rocket launches in the outer environment of the earth. 0' About the Author: Robin Newmann is a SPAN correspondent in Washington, D. C.
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Meditations on Black and White Artists say much with colors; sometimes they make a statement by omitting colors. A leading Indian painter turns his mind to this way of reducing art to its essence. He admires Louise Nevelson, whose black wood sculpture appears above, for her search for "the in-between places, the dawns and the dusks .... "
My first serious confronta'tion with
Perhaps it is the attitude toward life, perhaps different phases in the life of an artist. perhaps his search for an appropriate pictorial language suitable for a particular theme that determine the artist's choice of colors and forms. One of the great masterpieces of the 20th century. Picasso's Guernica, could not have
walls of worn-out old houses,
visit to Varanasi where I had gone
palaces, temples; watching dead
with the idea of making sketches on the spot with Japanese black ink
bodies lying in a line waiting for their turn at Manikarnika Ghat. I almost
on white paper and later developing them in oils in mystudio in Delhi. I had to see and feel the city in
felt the disappearing boundary line between life and death. And the
terms of paintings. I was looking for
river leading upward to enter the dark labyrinths of the city. I could not remain an impartial outsider.
been painted except in black and
a new visual experience. The first
white and gray. The tragedy
experience was very intense and
portraying violence and brutal force
deep, both emotionally and
against innocent victims in this
visually, both as a human being and as an artist.
monumental work was symbolized
windows jutting out from dilapidated
black and white was during my first
Wandering along the ghats in
by the artist through certain forms
vast sea of humanity, I saw
mysterious steps emerged from the
Later on, in my studio in Delhi, I gradually came to realize that the haunting experience of Varanasi could only be expressed in black and
and colors. Picasso had made lots of studies for this painting. He
faces like masks bearing marks
white. It was an important revelation
chose to omit colors.
of suffering and pain, similar to black
and also a sort of challenge. The
d
perhaps some patches of gray and
tragic sense of life was so overpowering that it needed to be explored in one direction-achieving maximum concentration with minimum means. Varanasi has no colors, at least for me; only charred black and subdued white hold between them all the meanings and the meaninglessness of life, and death. The sacred river Ganga in Varanasi is unique in the world. The city emerging at its bank has an overwhelming physiological impact on people. All these impressions contributed in evolving a suitable style which could do some justice to the feelings and images and the subject matter. "Basically, the artist paints the struggle between himself and the subject," Harold Rosenberg once said.
Visiting two exhibitions of Louise Nevelson's work in New York in 1980 was like a pilgrimage. Her black wood panels create images through which one could peep into the depths of her world. An intense spiritual experience. About her work she says: "My total conscious search in life has been for a new seeing, a new image, a new insight. This search not only includes the object, but the in-between places. the dawns and the dusks .... Tinted black wood made things easy for me. I could see what I was looking for .... " Another instance which struck me was that of Mark Rothko. In his retrospective exhibition in New York, I was quite intrigued to see some of his last canvases which were done only in black and white. Why did an artist known all his life for his vibrant colors, rich in textures and emotive
For me a visual impression occasionally has a deep impact,
quality, toward the end of his life feel
sometimes indirectly and sometimes
the need for only twCJcolors? These
unconsciously related to my own
few paintings were very austere and mute; they evoked entirely different
work. Long after the Varanasi experience, I had an opportunity
feelings from the rest of his work.
to visit Ladakh. Although familiar with
the Himalayas from my childhood, having traveled along them extensively, I had never seen such a rugged and barren desolation of a landscape. For miles and miles, vast expanses of sandy earth without a tree or a blade of grass appeared like a no man's land. Gray mountain' ranges out of which black rocks jutted, looking like bas-reliefs; white monasteries spread out on the slopes of the hills were the solitary shelters for man to survive and have faith in God. Even the blue sky and the crystal blue water of the Indus were dominated by the high rocky peaks and rugged mountains and the eternal silence of this wasted landscape which refused to compromise with man. Later on, trying to interpret these impressions on canvas, once again I could not visualize using any colors except gray, black and white. Odilon Redan once said: "Black is the most essential color .... It conveys the very vitality of a being, his energy, his mind, something of his soul, the reflection of his sensitivity .... " The very essence of a work of art, its intrinsic value, its fundamental
structure can be reduced to the bare minimum and it could then be evaluated more profoundly in depth, eliminating all the superfluous elements and illusory effectsarriving at the naked truth. For some artists these blackand~white periods could be considered as important links in their search for what they are striving to find; for others they become a final goal or a discovery. But it is an inherent part of an artist's evolution, and perhaps the most significant.
Works done in black and white on canvas, board, paper by some Indian artists in different periods of their growth are among the most significant in the contemporary art
Concerning his black-and-white paintings of 1951, Robert
world of India. In the early Sixties Akbar Padamsee painted some
Rauschenberg said: "I became disturbed by the outside
big landscapes and figures
assumptions, the prejudices around
predominantly in grays. Gaitonde at
the colors being black and
one stage did a number of drawings
white .... People thought that the black was about 'old' and 'burned'
in black ink and a few powerful paintings in black and white. Nasreen Mohamedi in her long search for
that the white was about 'negation:
the most essential elements has
and 'nothing' -some
reached a stage where she
of nothing. Someone was wrong.
meticulously draws only black lines.
The work doesn't think .... "
About the Author: One of India's most
and 'tarred,' and they thought philosophy 0
respected painters, Ram Kumar has won coveted national and international awards. These include awards in the Lalit Kala Akademi's exhibitions in 1956 and 1958, an honors mention in the Sao Paulo Biennale in 1959 and Padma Shri in 1972. Ram Kumar, who studied art in Paris in 1950 at Andre Lhote's art school and Fernard Leger's academy, has held several one-man shows in India and abroad. He visited the United States in 1970 on a one-year fellowship awarded by the Rockefeller Fund. He has also published five collections of his short stories and two novels in Hindi.
Social Welfare in the United States
Even with some recent trimming, social welfare programs in the United States remain very comprehensive, accounting for more than a fifth of the annual gross national product and more than half of the total federal budget.
Social welfare spending by all levels of government and the private sector in the United States accounts for more than a fifth of the U.S. annual Gross National Product (GNP), estimated early in 1982 at $3,200,000,000,000. Most of this spending comes from the public sector, primarily the Federal Government which provides large social insurance programs. The Federal Government was expected to spend about $400,000 million, or more than half its budget, for social welfare during the 1982 fiscal year. State and local governments contribute another $100,000 million approximately (assuming they are still spending at the rate they were in 1978-3 percent of GNP). The private sector finances the remainder of the social welfare expenses. Today's large public investment in social welfare stems mainly from decisions made in the 1960s and 1970s to expand
the role of government-especially the Federal Governmentin meeting the needs of the poor and otherwise disadvantaged. The overall economic prosperity of this period generated the resources, and perhaps even the public sympathy, necessary to support social welfare expansion. But in recent years the sluggishness of the economy has made that support harder to come by and has prompted efforts at all levels of government to curb the growth of public social welfare budgets. The Reagan Administration believes that federal support has: (1) grown beyond the nation's ability to pay for it, thereby impeding economic progress; (2) bred dependency on government aid, instead of encouraging self-sufficiency; and (3) intruded on the rights of state and local governments to determine how best to address the various needs and wants of their citizens. The administration cut roughly $10,000million from the social welfare budget ofthe 1982 fiscal year, which ended September 30. It has been seeking a reduction of another $17,000 million during 1983. A controversial proposal has also be~n put forward to transfer, over the next decade, major elements of social welfare spending from the federal budget to the states. Social insurance, basic health-care financing, and various services for the elderly, however, would remain federal responsibilities. What ultimately
would be left at the federal level, as the administration sees it, would be an affordable safety net of income, health and social supports for the neediest. The Reagan Administration's approach hinges on the private sector's willingness to participate in financing social welfare, so that as government involvement diminishes, business and philanthropic organizations will seek to fill the gap by investing more of their time and money in dealing with the nation's social problems. While perhaps precipitated by current economic problems, the move to curtail the expansion of public welfare programs in the United States-and in particular to limit the activities of the Federal Government-has its roots in American history and culture. The basic values that guided the formation of the United States more than two centuries ago have exerted a strong influence on the development of the nation's social policy. Until the middle of the 19th century, the United States was a predominantly rural, relatively homogeneous society. Welfare aid, to the extent it existed, was provided as charity, mainly by churches. Destitution was viewed largely as the result of personal shortcomings and so once the helping hand of charity had been extended, the poor were expected to work toward overcoming their dependence on it. Urban poverty, brought about as industrialization drew large numbers of people from farms to cities even though there were not jobs for all, confronted society with new problems. Business leaders cared for their workers and sometimes helped other urban poor through philanthropy. New immigrants developed mutual aid organizations along ethnic and religious lines. And state governments began helping the needy. But basic attitudes remained largely unchanged. ' The modern history of social welfare programs in the United States begins with the Social Security Act of 1935. The Great Depression convinced the American people that almost anyone could become poor under circumstances beyond an individual's control. In this case it was economic collapse. The Social Security Act was intended to provide some protection for the most vulnerable people. Through social insurance it guaranteed eligible workers a minimal retirement income and some assistance during periods of involuntary unemployment, and it provided some benefits to the blind (disability coverage was not added until 1956). Both business and labor believed such a nationwide public system would be in their mutual self-interest. Building on existing state practices, the Social Security Act also established a program of financial support for children who had lost one or both parents (Aid to Dependent Children). For more than two decades after the enactment of the Social Security Act, government involvement in social welfare changed only minimally, mainly because of the persistence of the belief in individual selfsufficiency; the lack of confidence in the government's ability to handle more responsibility; concerns about public-sector interference in the economic marketplace; and unprecedented economic growth, which
appeared to lessen the need for social welfare programs. The period of calm ended abruptly in the 1960s. The civil rights movement, which had begun in earnest in the 1950s, riveted public attention on the unmet needs of the nation's minorities, a disproportionate number of whom were poor. At the same time, the rising affluence of a large section of the American people not only created the greater resources necessary to meet those needs, but also, perhaps, fostered the attitude among federal policymakers that the problem of poverty could be solved if the United States would make the effort. The result was a rapid series of changes in social policy designed to improve the poor's standard of living, while simultaneously helping them to break, wherever possible, dependence on government aid. With the Federal Government leading the way, old programs-such as Aid to Dependent Children-were expanded, and new programs-such as Food Stamps to help the poor obtain better nutrition, and health care for the elderly (Medicare) and impoverished (Medicaid)-were started. Employment-training programs and various social work services focused on giving the disadvantaged the skills and habits that could help them become self-sufficient. In the 1970s, the commitment to improving the lot of the poor remained firm, but federal policymakers began having doubts about the effectiveness of many social welfare programs. As the decade closed, there was widespread support for slowing their growth. Now, after almost two years of the Reagan Administration, these programs remain as the basic social commitment of the U.S. Government.
Income Support There are basically four types of income support available to people in the United States: social insurance, private pensions, public assistance and tax benefits. Together, they touch the lives of nearly all Americans. By far the most pervasive of these are the social insurances, which are intended to replace partially the earnings lost when a worker retires, becomes disabled or ill, or involuntarily loses his or her job. Largely financed by payroll taxes on employers and employees, social insurances are thought of as the "earned right" of their beneficiaries. The federal Old Age, Survivors and Disability Insurance (OASDI), otherwise known as Social Security, is the largest social welfare program in the United States. Social Security paid out in fiscal 1982 more than $156,000 million in monthly tax-free benefits to some 36 million people, including the survivors and dependents of persons covered by the program. In fiscal 1981, monthly benefits-which are automatically increased periodically to reflect costof-living changes-averaged $374 for a retired worker, $402 for a disabled worker, between $107 and$178 for a worker's dependent, and $268 for the survivor of a deceased worker. 'Financed by a payroll tax paid half by the employee and' half by the employer, . OASDI currently covers around 90 percent of the work force. As a general rule, only public-sector
workers, most of whom have their own pension systems, may be exempt from participating. The Social Security program is run solely by the Federal Government. In addition to Social Security, almost half of the private work force in the United States participates in an employee pension plan. The main problem facing Social Security is the cost of maintaining it now and in the future. As the birthrate declines and people live longer the proportion of the population in the work force and paying payroll taxes consequently declines, giving rise to doubts about whether the United States can continue to afford the system as it is currently designed. Various stop-gap measures-such as higher payroll taxes and elimination of certain ancillary benefits- have been employed to keep the program financially solvent, but more profound reforms may be needed in the future. President Reagan has appointed a bipartisan national commission to look into the problem and report back to him by December 31,1982, on what should be done to preserve Social Security. People who lose their jobs through no fault of their own may receive temporary income support from the other major nationwide social insurance, unemployment compensation, which is operated by the states with federal assistance. Most wage and salary earners are covered, with benefits financed through employer payroll taxes collected by both the states and the Federal Government. Benefits, which vary from state to state and typically replace one-third to one-half of prior wages, may be obtained for up to 26 weeks of unemployment. During times of high unemployment in a state, an additional 13 weeks of benefits is available' to workers who have demonstrated a strong attachment to the labor force. The Federal Government pays the cost of administering the program, picks up half the cost of the extended benefits program, and provides loans to states which exhaust their own funds. It is estimated that during fiscal 1982 approximately 4.2 million people received unemployment compensation each week, for a total annual cost of $25,200 million. A number of other U.S. Government programs provide minimal income assistance to particular categories of people based on their work histories or work-related disabilities. In fiscal 1982, the Federal Government paid more than $51,000 million in benefits to some 7,200 million retired or disabled federal employees and railroad workers, military veterans disabled in the line of duty, coal miners incapacitated by black lung diseases, and the dependents or survivors of these people. Through more than 6,000 pension systems, similar protection is afforded most state and local government employees, separate from SO,cialSecurity. Additionally, every state has established programs-usually financed by taxes on employers-to assist workers and their families in cases of injury or death on the job. Poor people in the United States, who receive little or no help from social insurance and private pensions, may qualify for cash support from one of the public assistance, or welfare, programs operated by federal, state and local governments. Eligibility for these programs usually depends on level of income, family composition, and total monetary worth, not on any prior tax payments or contributions. The official definition of poverty-the "poverty line" as established by the Office of Management and Budget-for a nonfarm family of four is an annual income of $8,450 or less. In fiscal 1982, public assistance payments totaled roughly $30,000 million. Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), the largest public assistance program, provides cash relief to the dependent children of poor families in which a parent has died, left home, become disabled. or, in half the states, become
unemployed. The states administer the program under federal guidelines put out by the Office of Family Assistance in the Department of Health and Human Services, and costs are funded through a combination of federal, state and local revenues, with the poorer states tending to receive more federal money. Qualifications for AFDC and benefit levels vary widely from one state to the next, reflecting economic, political and social differences among the states. Cost of living varies greatly, with climate an important determinant. In December 1980, the average payment to an individual recipient ranged from $16.57 in Puerto Rico to $162.61 in Alaska; for the nation as a whole, the average monthly payment was $99.61. The total cost of AFDC was expected to exceed $14,000 million in fiscal 1982, with the Federal Government assuming around 55 percent of the bill. Some 3.8 million families, induding over 11 million individuals, received benefits. Almost 90 percent of these families were headed by a single parent, typically a mother. Aid to Families with Dependent Children has been much criticized in recent years for providing benefits to people who do not, or should not, need them. In 1981, in response to these criticisms, the Federal Government revamped the program to limit it to the most needy families and impel employable recipients to find work. The Reagan Administration, which has proposed further tightening-up revisions, would like eventually to turn over complete responsibility and funds for the program to the states which, it believes, can best respond to the widely varying circumstances of poor families with children.
However, the administration wants to maintain the role of the Federal Government in the next largest cash assistance program, Supplemental Security Income (SSI), which provides benefits to needy persons who are aged, blind or disabled. Begun in 1974, SSI established a national minimum income for this group of people, who until then had been served by widely varying state programs partially financed by the Federal Government. The basic benefit is paid out of general federal revenues, and at present can reach $264.70 a month for an individual, and $397 for a couple, with no other income. As with Social Security, benefits are periodically adjusted to reflect cost-of-living changes. In addition to the federal grant, most states provide from their own funds supplementary payments to a large portion of the SSI population. During fiscal 1982, the Federal Government spent an estimated $7,900 million on benefits to more than four million SSI recipients; state supplements accounted for another $2,100 million. A special federal public assistance program for needy wartime veterans and their widows and children served approximately 1.9 million recipients at a cost of $3,900 million in fiscal 1982. A poor person in the United States who does not qualify for any of the public assistance programs discussed above may be eligible for general assistance, a form of aid financed and administered exclusively by states and localities. General assistance eligibility requirements and benefits differ significantly among the states and may even vary within a state. Tax benehts, the fourth and final category of income support, while not normally thought of in the United States as a form of public assistance, often aims to fulfill purposes clearly associated with the social welfare function. Some of these tax policies, such as granting an income tax credit to low-income workers with dependent children (i.e., the Earned Income Tax Credit), seek to benefit the needy directly. Others-for example, allowing individuals and corporations to deduct charitable contributions from the income on which they are taxed-are more indirect in their effect on the less fortunate. Still other tax policies, such as those permitting deductions for some medical expenses and for home mortgage interest payments, try to make the cost of needed goods and services more affordable to a larger segment of society. These assorted benefits, part of a larger category known as tax expenditures, represent thousands of millions of dollars a year in taxes the Federal Government chooses not to collect in the interest of promoting the welfare of the American people. Health Care The United States does not have a nationwide, uniform health-care system for all its citizens. Instead, medical needs are met through a variety of public and private mechanisms covering, in varying degrees, all but about 5 percent of the population. The largest public program, Medicare, provides health insurance for Social Security and railroad retirement beneficiaries who are aged or disabled, and for chronic renal disease patients who have Social Security coverage either as a worker, spouse or dependent. The program was established in 1965 at about the same time as Medicaid, the health-care program for the poor in the United States. Financed by an earmarked payroll tax (which is split evenly between the employer and the employee) and by patient premiums, Medicare reimburses health-care expenses for most hospital and physicians' services provided to beneficiaries up to specified "reasonable" limits in terms of cost, number of days in care,
and the like. The Federal Government spent $49,800 million through Medicare during fiscal 1982 serving more than 30 million people, according to preliminary figures. Medicaid, the medical service program for the needy, operates much as AFDC does. The Federal Government pays a little more than half the program's cost, varying its share from state to state depending upon per capita income, and issues general policies pertaining to eligibility, coverage and administration. Medicaid covers all AFDC and most SSI recipients. In addition, 33 states extend coverage to "medically needy" persons who do not qualify for AFDC or SSI but are unable to pay their medical expenses. Federal law requires states to pay for the following services provided to Medicaid recipients: inpatient and outpatient hospital services, laboratory and X-ray services, care in a skilled nursing facility and home health services to certain individuals, physicians' services, family planning advice, rural health clinics, and preventive health care for children. States may also receive federal funding for certain optional services such as prescription drugs, dental care, eyeglasses, and less intensive long-term institutional care. The total cost for Medicaid in fiscal 1982 exceeded $33,000 million with nearly 23 million individuals receiving benefits. The ever-rising cost of health care in the United States is nowhere more evident than in Medicare and Medicaid, with spending on them increasing recently by close to 15 percent a year. In 1981, at the urging of the Reagan Administration, Congress made major changes in the Medicaid law aimed at giving states stronger incentives and more freedom to contain costs. The premiums paid by Medicare beneficiaries were increased to bring additional revenue into the system. The administration is seeking further cost-cutting modifications in both programs. Medicare and Medicaid consume nearly all of the public health-care dollar. There are, however, other governmentfunded programs designed to support particular health-care services or activities. The Federal Government, for example, in fiscal 1982 invested ab~out$2,100 million to improve the health of low-income mothers and their children; provide a variety of services to avoid injury and prevent illness and death; help people with mental health, drug and alcohol abuse problems; finance community health clinics for the poor; stimulate the development of prepaid health-care plans (i.e., health maintenance organizations); and support state and local efforts to improve health-care systems. For similar purposes, state and local governments in fiscal 1980 spent close to $4,000 million. Unlike income support, where the public sector dominates, health care in the United States comes mainly under the aegis of the private sector. Private health-care providers supply most of the medical services people receive and determine the price of nearly all health care, inclmiing that paid for by government. Additionally, a majority of Americans are covered to a greater or lesser extent by private health-care insurance, which they pay for themselves or receive as a fully or partially subsidized fringe benefit of employment. Private sector expenditures for health care, including insurance, direct purchase of services, and philanthropy, totaled almost $111,000 million in fiscal,1978, compared with public spending of $76,000 millio'n. Other Social Welfare The Federal Government in fiscal 1982 budgeted another $40,000 million or more for a variety of social welfare programs besides those aimed at income support and health care. (Text continued on page 38)
~Could That¡ Be Me?' Stage performances at Wakefield High School in Arlington, Virginia, are amazingly true-to-life ... because they are life, a small part of the young performers' own experiences. In an unusual experiment initiated by drama teacher Judy Klevins, students act out episodes from their own lives. The scenes shown here are from Stress!, a stage revue written and performed by the students. It dramatizes, with humor and pathos, some of the pressures teenagers face in their daily lives. "I began doing original shows for a practical reason," says Judy Klevins. "There are very few published plays suitable for kids to do. But the material is in the kids; they have a lot to say." By the time rehearsals began, Klevins' class had developed 150 scenes. Had they all been included, the show would have run about 14 hours! The aim of this exercise is to provide a mix of drama and therapy-the performances are both entertainment and an unusual experience in learning and understanding for the actors and their audience. As the scenes unfold, fellow students in the audience laugh with delight and self-recognition ... and, perhaps more important, both students and parents in the audience come away with a new understanding of each other's problems.
The revue presents the students' point of view, but in working out the materials the young playwrights were able to see, probably for the first time, their parents' viewpoints too. Though the students chose the themes, Klevins didn't allow Stress! to become just a string of complaints. '''If I'd let them take the stand that 'everybody's picking on me,' they'd never have gotten to the things that are important to them, like why they're under stress in the first place," she explains. About nine weeks before the performance, Klevins began holding classroom brainstorming sessions during which, according to one student actor, "we had to take personal statements and make sure they were objective enough for other people to understand. I had to rethink some of my prejudices when I started acting them out for the class." After several such sessions, Klevins asked the students Below: Youngsters seeing Stress!, a stage revue written and performed by students of an Arlington (Virginia) school, lauf?hwith delight
and self-recognition atfamiliar situations; the revue dramatized, with humor and pathos, some of the pressures in a teenager's life. Right: An actor shows how silly teenagers look when they drive fast.
to come up with a series of "visions": the action that would take place in a particular scene, who would be in it, and where it would take place. The class then wrote each scene as¡a group to make sure that "what was true for one of us would be true for all of us." In the process of creating Stress! the students learned a great deal about themselves, their parents, and their friends. Taking on the roles of others helped to crystallize stressful situations. By portraying nagging parents, for example, the young actors learned how they themselves may often cause the worry that leads to the naggingcoming home late, giving oblique explanations. "Acting taught me a lot about people," says Noel Mudd. "When I play my mother on stage, I understand her." The understanding was two-sided. "Adults can't get into kids' heads," says Klevins, "unless they take the time to learn from their perspective. In teaching these kids, I learned from them." Producing Stress! taught the students what it takes to put a theatrical event together. Having analyzed what they felt about particular issues, they had to make those views understandable and entertaining to a mixed audience of youngsters and parents. As one student puts it, "You can't tell them; you have to show them in such a way that they can see it in themselves." Klevins insisted that the scenes should make the points
1, 2 and 4: Portraying her own mother, student performer Noel Mudd shows her as happy, loving and tense. Taking on the role.of their parents helped students understand them better-and also made them realize how children often needlessly cause the worry that leads to nagging.
with humor. "Laughter is a catharsis in the theater. To me the happiest thing about the show was looking over the audience of smiling, attentive people." The reaction of the audience was the real test for the performers. "Because these were such personal statements," says one member of the cast, "a bad review from the audience would have been a personal rejection. But since they did like it, all that hard work was worth it." "One indication that the show really got to the audience;;/was the fact that they talked about it for weeks after the performance," adds Klevins. How will it affect their perspective of the world around them? One scene dealt with the difficulty involved in accepting a foreign student into a group of friends, when his religious and cultural differences forced members of the group to give up some of the things they enjoyed, like smoking. "What we learned," says a student, "was that we often reject and tease people because we don't feel confident about the ways we're different from them." Actor Robert Slocum expresses the importance of Stress! as a personal experience: "We started out to show how everybody puts pressure on us. But we discovered how we put pressure on other people." 0 About the Author: Steven Stosny is a free-lance writer living in Washington, D. C.
The stress in Stress! was on the interplay of human relationships at various levels. Showing how quarrels develop (3) was part of an episode on teenage dating. Parent-Children scenes showed a boy being reprimanded for staying out late (5) and included some more dramatic confrontations (6).
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Cook: Haven't the benefits of everyone's efforts in space, even after 25 years, been scientific and technological rather than utilitarian?
Robinson: Not at all. You feel the impact every morning when you turn on your television set to get the weather forecast. The meteorology satellite made that possible. You are now able to warn countries of impending hurricanes, cyclones, things of that nature. In communications, there has been a tremendous impact, especially for the developing countries. Two earth stations anywhere in the world that can see the same satellite can communicate directly. The International Telecommunications Satellite consortium, a system of 105 countries, does a $2,000 million-a-year business. In many countries, it is simpler to make an overseas call than it is to make an internal call, the system works so efficiently. Then too, the use of direct-broadcast satellites, beamed to rooftop antennas of community receivers rather than to one large earth station, has tremendous potential for education. In India, a few years ago, they completed an important Satellite Instructional Television Experiment (SITE), which tied in New Delhi to almost 2,500 villages throughout India with community antennas and television sets. It may take a country decades to build schoolhouses and train teachers, but with the use of this kind of satellite it can educate its people in a fraction of the time. And not only education in basics. Sanitation. Health. If you can teach farmers certain techniques, simple ones, you can increase farm productivity. For the first time in history, we have a truly global tool, a satellite, something that lifts off and orbits the planet and looks down upon it as an entity. Not fractured one way or another. This can give you geological information, topological, hydrological. Now this opens up tremendous opportunities of all kinds. You can't discover a mineral from space. What you can get, at a great saving in time and money, is space imagery like that transmitted by the United States' remote-sensing Landsat satellites, which can then be interpreted by trained people to say that this is where you are liable to find whatever you are looking for. Conoco drilled its first well in Egypt in 1979, after four years of correlating Landsat imagery, aeromagnetic surveys and seismic probing. Landsat imagery has helped locate sites for successful oil strikes in
Israel, and Chevron used Landsat to find oil in the Sudan. For agriculture, there are ways to detect diseased crops even before you can do so from the ground. The amount of energy radiated from a healthy crop is different from that of a diseased crop, and the difference can be measured. In India in the early years, they were able to discover from satellite imagery that the coconut trees were diseased-in time to do something about it. If they had discovered it from the ground, it would have been too late. In effect, businessmen can ride piggyback on the government.
Robinson: That's right. Because you have the shuttle, for example, which can take packages into outer space at relatively low cost, and there will be more shuttles. The Europeans are putting up their own concept of a space transport-the Ariane rocket. India has launched satellites, and so have Japan and China. And more and more countries will soon have the ability to do so. So there will be many opportunities for businessmen to get whatever it is they want into outer space, provided it meets all the requirements, technical and political. The data available from the remotesensing satellites cover only the United States?
Robinson: No. At the moment, this is part of a controversy going on within the United Nations itself, within the committee, involving national sovereignty over information about natural resources. They have been working on a treaty governing the use of these satellites, and one of the sticky points is that there are countries that feel that they should be the first to get information about their country received by remote-sensing satellites, and that such information should not be made available to third parties without their prior consent. There are other countries, the United States is one of them, that feel that this kind of information should be freely available to everybody. Until this is resolved, you can get data imagery on any place in the world from the remote-sensing U.S. Landsat satellites. I gather it's possible to forecast crop yields-the U.S. wheat crop, for example-with only a 5-percent margin of error.
Robinson:
Certainly this is one of the
Stepping all This
Planet by JAMES COOK
For all its technological and media triumphs in the past 25 years, from Sputnik to Columbia, the space business seems so far to have made only minimal progress. To get some sense of just where the space business is these days, we dropped in at the green-glass skyscraper that houses the. United Nations to talk with Marvin Robinson, 58, then acting head, now appointed chief of the UNs Outer Space Affairs Division. A brisk, bearded man who looks more like the diplomat he's become than the playwright, academician, bureaucrat and businessman he used to be, Robinson took over as chief of the Outer Space Affairs Division coincident with the opening of the Second Conference on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space in Vienna, Austria, in August.
volved in this technology is going to aid tremendously in solving their own problems. It already has. They have an entire space industry. They have their own satellites with their own uses, for what they need specifically. They can afford to do that because they are a large land mass. Other areas will do it on the basis of region. Indonesia has a communications satellite, providing nationwide telephone and TV service for the first time.
possibilities, and it's one of the things that worry some countries. They're afraid that sophisticated countries like the United States will be able to manipulate the world market with this kind of information, do things on the world market that would lower the prices here or raise the prices there.
Otherwise such countries believe outer space is the common heritage of mankind? Robinson: Yes. The common heritage of mankind is a concept whereby if a country were to discover a very, very exotic mineral in outer space that had tremendous value, then under the treaty there would have to be some way whereby the profits from this could also accrue to other countries as the common heritage of mankind. Exactly what this means and how it would work out is somethmg that is still being debated by many people.
Is it the u.N.'s position that the benefits of space exploration should accrue mainly to the underdeveloped countries? Robinson: To me it seems foolish to start, almost like children, talking in advance about how we are going to split the pie. There is so much out there that it is not a matter of splitting. It will be there in abundance. If we could ever get out there and begin to tap it, this would soon be apparent. I don't think you are going to have a situation where the majority of countries are going to sit on the sidelines and just a few countries are going to do all the work, spend all the money and then be expected to share. No country can afford not getting involved in space technology. Look at India. People are amazed when we say that India, a country with the kind of problems it has, has a space program. People in India have been wise enough to understand that getting in-
Space people often sound like cargocult people to me, relying on things from the sky to solve all our earthly problems. Overpopulation. Energy. I understand' a solar power plant would involve 60 satellites, 270 gigawatts of power and a $1,000,000 million investment. Can the world afford to commit sums like that to space when we have problems like poverty, pollution and defense to worry about? Robinson: Let's assume we find that it is technically feasible to put up solar power satellites, that it's economically feasible, poses no problem in terms of pollution. You are now talking about a project so big and so important that it is not going to be done by one country, or even by two countries. There would have to be massive international cooperation, and the kind of interrelationships that would have to evolve from this would be such that tensions would lessen.
Like building the medieval cathedrals or going off to the Holy Land on a crusade. Robinson: I think it was Konrad Lorenz, the naturalist, who said at the very beginning of the space age that the internationalization of outer space IS a tremendous substitute for war, demanding so much and so great an effort on the part of the human population that, if they were ready to do it, they just wouldn't have anything left over for war. This much is clear: If the world enters the next phase in outer space-space colonies, space exploration-it would have to be done on an international basis.
But that's still 40 to 50 years away. Robinson: Not 40 to 50 years away. Not at all. If there is a political decision internationally to do it, it will be done, just as it was when President Kennedy said we will put a man on the moon in a decade. We are not far away from the decision. What seems to be science fiction can come about in a very short time. The only thing that is needed is a desire to do something and the money to do it with.
It would be very tragic, however, if the whole effort in outer space becomes concentrated in the hands of the military. Not becaus.e the military is going to be aggressive, but because in dealing with national security, much of what is done has to be confidential. Secret. And you cannot have international cooperation if you cannot exchange information. That is what the United Nations has attempted to circumvent, successfully, for a number of years. I think we are nearing the point of no return.
Why do you feel space development is on the verge of being taken over by the military? Is it just the shuttle? Robinson: As we see the budgets of the various governments, more and more money is being given to the military. And this is not just here in the United States. It's happened in the Soviet Union and elsewhere. You see, if you are using satellites for communication, and communication becomes vital to military security, then you have to secure your satellites, find a way to defend them and destroy any potential destroyer, and once you are on that, there you go. There is no end to it.
But if it isn't military it's going to be government one' way or another. There's not much in it for private business. Robinson: There certainly is. I am talking about the ordinary businessman, and particularly entrepreneurs, those with the imagination to see how things might be, not how they are. That's what is needed in space.
Isn't it beyond the reach of all but the largest corporations? Robinson: Not at all. It's coming down in price all the time. You can buy space on a communications satellite, and you may not have to take it on a regular basis. You may take it whenever you need it. . One way or another we are going to continue to explore outer space. One administration may decrease the space budget, another increase it. There may be competition between various segments of the world. But man is in outer space, he is going to continue there. If this century is remembered at all, a thousand years from now, it will be primarily because this was the century that man stepped off his own planet. 0 About the Interviewer: James Cook is an editor with Forbes magazine.
executive
,
Franklin Delano Roosevelt, whose birth centenary is being celebrated this year, was keenly aware of the inescapable duty of democratic countries to extend their own .principles of freedom to colonial peoples, especially after the allied victory over fascism, a force that would negate every human right.
the liberties of mankind?" This was Sir S. During the Presidency of Woodrow Wilson, Washington, D.C., became the Subramania Aiyar, one of the founders of seat of one of the major revolutions in the Indian National Congress, writing to modern history. For Wilson recreated the President Wilson on June 24, 1917. The Burkean tradition for future generations letter, which stimulated Roosevelt's inand laid the foundations of the "Trans- terest, reflected the first phase of India's . formation of the East." Franklin D. independence movement [see "Woodrow Roosevelt continued this liberal tradition Wilson and the Indian Independence and reinterpreted the Atlantic Charter so Movement," also by A. Ranganathan, as to include India in its dispensation. SPAN August 1975]. Here is¡ what Mahatma Gandhi, the And the Roosevelt Presidency heralded India's independence through the estab- climactic hero of new nationalism in the lishment of quasi-diplomatic relations be- final phase of India's independence tween the United States Government and movement, wrote to President Roosevelt preindependent India. In addition to on July 1, 1942: "I twice missed coming to your great bringing the United States back into the forefront of international diplomacy, the country. I have the privilege of having two Presidents made full use of their numerous friends there both known and broad powers to encourage the liberal unknown to me. Many of my countrymen forces of the Asian revolution of the have received and are still receiving higher education in America. I know too that mid-20th century. Roosevelt began his political career as several have taken shelter there. I have the Assistant Secretary of the Navy in . profited greatly by the writings of Wilson's Cabinet. During that liberal de. Thoreau and Emerson. I say this to t~1I cade he was well aware of the breezes you how much I am connected with your that were wafting across the Indian sub- country .... My personal position is clear. continent. The success of the Indian I hate all war. If therefore I could perNational Congress and the All-India suade my countrymen, they would make Muslim League in arriving at a political a most effective and decisive contribution understanding in Lucknow in 1916 drew in favor of an honorable peace. But I an encomium from Roosevelt, and he know that all of us have not a living faith declared: "India must certainly partici- in nonviolence. Under foreign rule pate in the world's advance toward demo- however we can make no effective concracy." tribution of any kind in this war. ... I "If the Indian soldiers have achieved hope finally that you will not resent this ... splendid results for the Allies while letter as an intrusion but take it as an fighting heroically in France, Gallipoli approach from a friend and well-wisher and Egypt, how much greater would be of the Allies." their power if they are inspired by the Roosevelt's reply on August 1, 1942, is sentiments which can arise only in the an invaluable part of the Indian herisouls of free men-men who are fighting tage-politically and diplomatically one not only for their own liberties, but for of the most important letters in the his-
V. S. Srinivasa Sastri These were among the earliest Indian leaders to seek U.S. help in the struggle for independence.
tory of Indo-Amencan relations: "I am sure that you will agree that the United States has consistently striven for and supported policies of fair dealing, of fair play, and of all related principles looking toward the creation of harmonious relations between n'ations. Nevertheless, now that war has come as a result of Axis dreams of woild conquest, we, together with many other nations, are making a supreme effort to defeat those who could deny forever all hope of freedom throughout the world." Even though this letter was couched in general terms,' its historical pertinence lies essentially in the fact that it saw India's independence movement in a liberal perspective that was international in its implications. Several months before this letter was sent to Gandhi, Roosevelt had urged America's wartime ambassaodor to Great Britain, John G. Winant, to persuade Winston Churchill to accept the Atlantic Charter in its entirety. The first announcement of the declaration, subsequently known as the Atlantic Charter, by President Roosevelt and Prime Minister Churchill at their meeting aboard USS Augusta off Argentia, Newfoundland, was issued, on August 14, 1941. Not unexpectedly, Churchill told the House of Commons on September 9, 1941, that the Charter declaration was related to "quite a separate problem from the progressive evolution of selfgoverning institutions in the regions and peoples who owe allegiance to the British Crown." To Roosevelt, however, the Atlantic Charter was also an appeal to the rest of the free world to participate in the defense of the frontiers of freedom. "The Atlantic Charter," he said, "applies not only to the parts of the world that border the Atlantic, but to the whole world; [it includes] disarmament of aggressors, self-determination of nations and peoples, and freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom from want and freedom from fear." Looking back, it is easy to infer that Roosevelt's reinterpretation of the Churchillian thesis was an extension of the Wilsonian ideal of self-determination, which was announced in 1918. Indian liberals were uniquely the bridge builders between the Indian National Congress and Whitehall. Their role in modern' Indian politics can be understood in the ev()lving constitutional pattern of bridge 'building rather than in
terms of the game theory, which postulates a conflict situation in which both sides calculate their respective areas of self-interest. Indian liberal leaders showed a perfect sense of timing in dispatching a cable to Churchill while he was 'staying with Roosevelt at the White House. Signatories to this historic cable-dated January 2, 1942-included Sir Tej Bahadur Sapro, Sir P.S. Sivaswamy Aiyer, Lord Sinha, the Right Honorable V.S. Srinivasa Sastri, the Right Honorable M.R. Jayakar, Sir Jagdish Prasad, Raja Maharaj Singh and Mohammed Yunus. It may be said to have triggered the Cripps Mission to India in 1942, offering self-determination after World War If The mission was dismissed by Gandhi as a "postdated cheque." During this time, President Roosevelt had set forth his reflections (wryly termed , "private views" by Churchill in The Hinge . of Fate) on the Indian problem in a letter to Churchill. This letter of March 11, , 1942, was an evaluation of the Indian polifical situation in terms of America's historical experience. It added a qualitative dimension to India's independence movement by placing it in the mainstream of modern history. Roosevelt suggested the possibility of a "temporary Dominion Government" which could be charged with the responsibility of working out the terms of reference of a wideranging ppstwar constitutional convention. The key portion stated: "I have tried to approach the problem from the point of view of history and with a hope that the injection of a new thought to be used in India might be of assistance to you. That is why I go back to the inception of the Government of the United
Winston Churchill, Franklin D, Roosevelt and Joseph Stalin at the historic Yalta conference in February 1945, Roosevelt constantly urged Churchill to agree to India's independence,
States. During the Revolution, from 1775 to 1783, the British Colonies set themselves up as thirteen states, each one under a different form of government, although each one assumed individual sovereignty .... The thirteen sovereignties, from 1783 to 1789, proved, through lack of federal power, that they would soon fly apart into separate nations. In 1787, a Constitutional Convention was held with only 20 to 25 or 30 active participants, representing all of the states. They met, not as a Parliament but as a small group of sincere patriots, with the sole object of establishing a Federal Government. The discussion was recorded, but the meetings were not held before an audience. The present Constitution of the United States resulted, and soon received the assent of twothirds of the states. "It is merely a thought of mine to suggest the setting up of what might be called a temporary government in India, headed by a small representative group, covering different castes, occupations, religions and geographies-this group to be recognized as a temporary Dominion Government ... my principal thought is that it would be charged with setting up a body to consider a more permanent government for the whole country. ... Such a move is strictly in line with the world changes of the past half-century and with the democratic processes of all who are fighting Nazism." Churchill, who was not exactly im-
Sliaring lier liusband's passion for democracy and interest in India, El:eanorRoosevelt visitedIndia in 1952 where slie was received warmly by tlie government and the people. U.S. Ambassador Chester Bowles is seen liere talking to Mrs. Roosevelt and Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru.
pressed with Roosevelt's argument, politely but firmly rejected the suggestion. He wrote: "This document is of high interest because it illustrates the difficulties of comparing situations in various centuries and scenes where almost every material fact is totally different, and the dangers of trying to' apply any superficial resemblances which may be noticed to the conduct of war.'\ The proposals made by the Attlee Government during the transfer of power were strikingly similar to the "private views" expressed in Roosevelt's letter to Churchill. From Sir Subramania Aiyar tO,Gandhi and from Gandhi to Nehru, wej'find the leading Indian figures looking hopefully across the Atlantic to America during the different phases of India's independence movement. Viewed in.this perspective, Roosevelt's mes$age to Nehru was characteristic of his historical imagination, a "fireside chat" attuned to an Indian wavelength: "Say hello to him, from me. I don't know whether 'he has even been to this country! No? Tell him I would like him to come ov¡er here. I want to talk to him. Tell Nehru I would like him to write me a letter and tell me exactly what he wants us to do for India." And Jawaharlal Nehru emphasized the Indian point of view in his April 12, 1942, letter to President Roosevelt: "I am venturing to write
The difference that arose between President Roosevelt and Sir Winston Churchill actually hinged on a moral issue. Roosevelt argued that it would be ,impossible to answer with a clear conscience the imperial claims put forward by the Axis powers without a change in the British attitude toward the Indian subcontinent. However, Churchill, who was primarily interested in regaining Anglo-American m-astery of the oceans and the air during World War II, felt that the geostrategic and psychological¡balance of forces constituting the Pax Britannica could not by altered until "The Hinge of Fate" had turned. In my opinion, Roosevelt's involvement in India's independence movement evokes memories of Lafayette's contribution to American freedom, Byron's heroism when he died a martyr to Hellenic liberty at Missolonghi, and the impact of Napoleon IlIon Italian polity. Actually Ambassador William Phillips, President,Roosevelt's personal representative at New Delhi during those crucial years (December 1942-March 1945), said he was "knocked on the head" by Churchill himself "for his labors" relating to India's independence movement. Phillips quoted Churchill as having observed that a transfer of power would engulf India in a bloodbath: "Churchill was annoyed, and annoyed with me; that was clear. He got up and walked rapidly back . and forth. 'My answer. to you is: Take India if that is what you want! Take it by all means. But I warn you that if I open the door a crack, .there will be the greatest bloodbath in all history; yes, a bloodbath. Mark my words,' he concluded, shaking a finger at me, 'I prophesied the present war, and I prophesy the bloodbath!' " Like Wilson, Roosevelt had a Burkean view of history that viewed India in a large framework of freedom, democracy and civilization. He will be remembered not merely forthe morality underlying his "Four Freedoms" in an era of momentous change, bulas a great symbol of the American spirit, elegantly expressed in President Eisenhower's aphorism: "America is great because she is good." 0
to you as I kllow that you are deeply ifiterested in the Indian situation today and its reactions on the war. The failure of Sir: Stafford Cripps' mission to bring about a settlement between the British Government and the Indian people must have distressed you, as it .has distressed us .... Our sympathies, as we have so often declared, are with the forces fighting against fascism and fer democracyand freedom. With freedom in our country those sympathies could have been translated-into. dynamic action .... To your great country ,of which you are the honored head,wesend greetings and good wishes for success. And to you, Mr. President, to whom so many all over the world look for leadership in the cause of freedom, we would add our assurances of our high regard and esteem." . President Roosevelt was shocked at the failure of the Cripps Mission; on April 12, 1942, he sent an urgent message through Harry Hopkins to Churchill, imploring him to respond to India's independence movement, saying the United States could not help being involvecf; "As I expressed to you in an earlier message (March 11, 1942), I still feel that if the comp'onent groups in India could be given now the opportunity to set up a Nationalist Government in essence similar to our own form of government under the Articles of Confederation, with the understanding that following the termination of a period of trial and error they would be enabled then to determine upon their own form of constitution and to About the Author: A. Ranganathan is a determine, as you have promised them Madras-based art critic, science writer and already,their future relationship with the commentator on international affairs. His British Empire, probably a solution could works have been published in several Indian . and foreif?n journals. be found."
JMe Mahatma's Americar.1 Apostle In 1921, when hardly anyone in America had heard of Mahatma Gandhi, a young minister in New York proclaimed him ''the greatest man in the world today." So profound was Gandhi's influence on him that John Haynes Holmes dedicated his life to spreading the Mahatma's message in the United States.
John Haynes Holmes was the young minister of the Church . of the Messiah in New York City during the halcyon days before World War 1. He was chosen by the church, which was Unitarian in its strictest and narrowest sense, because he had the right background: a proper Boston family tracing its ancestry to the. Pilgrim Fathers, and Harvard Divinity School. The old parishioners were soon disturbed. Holmes read radical books ' and met leaders of radical opinion in the city. His conservatism wore thin. His Puritan idealism presently triumphed over his Puritan dogmatism. He came to believe in and work for the realization of that Christian social and ethical ideal which envisions a humanity one in prosperity and peace. He became convinced that the existing system of international relations would prevent another armed conflict between the nations and was inspired to join pacifist groups. Then in 1914 the war broke out. The whole philosophy of Holmes' life collapsed suddenly and disastrously. He was shaken out of his belief in the certain progress of mankind to Rev. Holmes with Gandhi; he considered the fulfillment of its best hopes and dreams, shaken out of his the Mahatma a latter.day Christ .. conviction that man was destined for salvation. Holmes turned for inspiration to Jesus and the early opposed to his pacifist views. However they unanimously Christians, to Quakers and other pacifist Christian sects, to Leo affirmed his right to speak freely no matter how they or the Tolstoy and Romain Rolland. He began to campaign against congregation dissented. And 98 new members joined the . the bloody harvest in Europe and delivered sermons on church during that summer. nonresistance as a basic principle of Christianity. But the war The Conference of Unitarian Churches castigated Holmes fever rose in America, more and more Americans began to for proposing that churchmen be allowed freedom of expression clamor for entry into war on the side of the Allies. Even though as the need was for "a ministry of reconciliation." The â&#x20AC;˘ Holmes' New Wars for Old, a manifesto for a humane struggle conference agreed with former U.S. President William Howard for truth and right as the moral equivalent of war, went into 13 Taft that "the war must be carried to a successful conclusion to printings, the majority of American people, ministers and stamp out militarism in the world." Holmes lost friends and newspapers remained opposed to preaching pacifism in time of comrades, was isolated in public life and had to sacrifice influence and leadership. The¡ press attacked him as a traitor war. When on April 1, 1917, Holmes declared in a sermon he on several occasions. would not support the war in~o which President Woodrow Holmes cut himself from Unitarian associations, made his Wilson was dragging the United States, 15 members resigned church the unofficial center for conscientious Objectors, confrom his church. The trustees of the church were, all but one, tinued to speak out against the war and gave his congregation the choice of letting him go or making their institution About the Author: Sikharam Prasanna Kumara Gupta is a special an authentic nondenominational "Community Church" for all correspondent of the Press Trust of India, posted in Moscow. He is the lovers and servants of mankind. However, the newly named author of A Scientist Named Subba Rowand Apostle John, which is â&#x20AC;˘ Community Church of New York was destroyed in a fire on currently being published. He is now working on a biography of Dr. September 11,1919, and it took Holmes years to rebuild it. The end of the war brought what he considered the abomination of Homi Bhabha and a book on the Kumbh Mela.
the Versailles Treaty and the subjection of the League of and made him the subject¡ of one of his sermons. The Nations to imperialist ends and aims driving the world toward a announced title of his sermon, "Who Is the Greatest Man in second war. With tortured mind and troubled heart, Holmes the World Today?" titillated public imagination and a large sought to answer these questioQs: What could the people~o to audience gathered in New York's Lyric Theater on Sunday prevent another international conflict and what should they do morning, April 10, 1921, to hear him. if it came? The men who rode the storm of the war to power and position In this hour of dire personal tumult, Holmes received from had faded or were fading into oblivion, Holmes said, and he India a pamphlet containing some addresses and letters of would discuss three cand~dates very different from one "M.K. Gandhi." He devoured them. It was an experience another in origin and character. Romain Rolland, the Fre,nchsimilar to that John Keats described in his sonnet, "On First man, was the leading internationalist in the perplexing postwar Looking Into Chapman's Homer." period and was toiling for the great kingdom of the living God Holmes now identified Gandhi as a heroic and successful in which wars and rumors of war will be no more. But, Holmes practitioner of spiritual force as contrasted with physical or said, Rolland the idealist feU short in the realm of practical armed force. The Mahatma of India was the man he needed, a affairs, and could never be the leader of arevolution,the man dedicated to the dual task of abolishing poverty and molder of the great masses of the common people to a war. He would have been lost sooner or later but Gandhi saved world-upheaval, the builder of a new political and social state. . him, gave him peace of mind and a serenity of soul which would Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, premier of the Soviet Union, fitted into be .JVithhim alm}1st to the l<:,t,st. ,"Il1myextrelllitx I turned to thisJatt.er. c'!te~9rybut~ellshort it:tmora! idealis1J1;\Le~l1was a Gandhi and he took me in his arms and never let me go," he realIst devoid of ethical Of spiritual principle;" any1meails were confessed. justifiable to him for the great end of human redemption. Tne So profound was Gandhi's influence on him thafHolmes world needed a universal man, at once an idealist and a realist, a was convinced that the Mahatma was the greatest man ,living, prophet who saw the heavenly vision and made it come true. ,
That man was Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, "leader of the an opportunity was missed to provide Gandhi a direct read~ present great revolutionary movement againsJ British rule in ership in the United States at a time when India could have used India, known and reverenced by his countrYl)len as Mahatma." greater American sympathy and support. He was "unquestionably the greatest man living in the world Holmes closely followed events in India. When torrential today, and" one of the greatest, men who have ever lived," rains devastated much of Gandhi's native Gujarat in 1927 and Holmes said. "When I think of RoHand, I think of Tolstoy. flooded his Sabarmati Ashram in Ahmedabad, Holmes started When I think of Lenin, I think of Napoleon. But when I think a "Gandhi Relief Fund" and was able to collect over $800. of Gandhi, I think of Jesus Christ." Gandhi asked his Young India readers to look not at the The audacious declaration confused the congregation. Few amount but at' ..."the motive behind the unsolicited" and among them had any previous knowledge of Gandhi's life and unexpected American contribution." career to enable them to appreciate and share Holmes' On October 20, 1929, while Gandhi was touring India to conviction. The press paid little attention to the prophetic prepare his people. for the coming struggle for complete sermon. The sermon nevertheless marked the beginning of the independence, Holmes held a Community Church meeting American discovery of Gandhi and his work for the liberation . where leading New Yorkers expressed solidarity with the of Indian people. Mahatma's cause: "As citizens of a country which a century and Holmes encouraged Blanche Watson, a member of his a half ago achieved its liberty in dedication to the high congregation, to publish Gandhi: Voice of the New Revolution, principles of free democracy and self-determination, we greet a study of the nonviolent resistance movement in India. the people of India in their heroic struggle for Swaraj. We hail Gandhi's name began to appeaq:m the front pages of American your wise, enlightened .'.and sacrificial leadership of your newspapers. Scores of articles were published in magazines and people ... we pledge to you in firm allegiance our affection and reviews. The New York World sent Prosper Bunarelli, its support." leading correspondent, "toIndia and published dispatches on the Gandhi organized "Independence Day" celebrations Mahatma and his movement. From almost utter obscurity, throughout India on January 26, 1930, and launched on April 6 Gandhi mounted in a few. months to nationwide fame. his salt satyagraha with the March to Dandi. The march recalled On the personal plane, Gandhi provided Holmes a fuller to Holmes the triumphal march two thousand years earlier by vision of paqifism, drew together all the major threads of Jesus from Galilee to Jerusalem to face death and glory. Holmes' own life and inspired him to be an unsought apostle. When Gandhi was arrested on May 4 and incarcerated in Holmes bent every effort to explain the Mahatma to America, Yervada jail, Holmes wore the Gandhi cap to his pulpit to teU to use Gandhian teachings for reforming American society. his congregation: "This cap today, like the cross yesterday, is a The pulpit. of the Community Church of New York was spiritual symb61~the symbol of Gandhi's triumph over the Holmes' principal platform for this purpose. From there issued power of the sword, of his disciples' promise of fidelity to him, during the next quarter. of a century and more a series· of and of the victory of ·freedom which waits upon their cause." sermons devoted entirely to Gandhi and his teachings and British Prime Mjnister Ramsay MacDonald. soon realized several others which drew on them for their lessons. Unity, the there could be no" political settlement without Gandhi and Unitarian weekly of which Holmes, was eoitor,"became "the ordered his release. Acknowledging greetings, the Mahatma representative organ" of Gandhi in the United States. The wrote Holmes how grateful he was for aU his efforts to mobilize more permanent medium of books was also used by Holmes, a public opinion in the United States for India. Gandhi signed a prolific writer, to subserve the apostolic aims. truce with the viceroy and was chosen the sale Congress When Gandhi was arrested and thrown into jail in March representative at a Round Table Conference in London in 1922 on 'his suspension of the civil disobedience movement even September 1931 on Indian constitutional reforms. before it was launched, Holmes was reminded of the arraign~ To meet the Mahatma in person, Holmes made a trip to ment of Jesus Christ before Pontius Pilate. He preached a London. As he paced the pier at Folkestone on the foggy and sermon drawing the parallel and deClared: "Today, as in the coW September 12 to await the arrival· of the 4:thannel ship olden times, it is no longer a question as to whether Christ is bearing Gandhi, Holmes was shown a projection of land where here or not. It is a question only of who will recognize and Julius Caesar had landed with his Roman legions to conquer follow him!" England, and was told that not much farther away was Pevensey The sermon printed as a pamphlet and reproduced in Unity where the second conqueror, William of Normandy, had landed. scandalized many Christians in the United States a.nd India. "Here is a third conqueror," Holmes later said he was thinking. The controversy, reflected in the columns of Unity and the But he had a moment of .doubt when Gandhi; naked Ch~istian Register as well as Indian newspapers, established to the thighs, his feet covered by crude sandals, body loosely Holmes in India as the stimulator of A'merican interest in wrapped in dhoti and khaddar shawl, went splashing up the Gandhi and the Iridian freedom fight, and in America as the rain-soaked pier with a fluttery flock of"secretaries and friends foremost interpreter of Gandhian thought and action. who did not know where they were going or what was likely to Between 1926 and 1929, close!y following their publication happen. The doubt soon vanished. Holmes met Gandhi and in Young India, Holmes serialized in 135 issues of Unity found him indeed his "saint and seer." Gandhi's attendance at chapters from the autobiography of Gandhi, The Story of My the Round' Table Conference marked the beginning of the Experiments With Truth. He also arranged for the autobiogra- conquest of England: India would be free within 16 years . . phy to be published as a book in the United States. But Charles Watching him address gatherings, Holmes understood the Andrews, an English missionary, persuaded the Mahatma to let mystic secret of the Mahatma's influence over India's millions. him write an adaptation for Western readers, and Holmes "This man needed nothing of the personality and pageantry of a deferred to him. The biography by Andrews sold poorly. The king to exercise his power. For it was the spirit, not the flesh, highly successful AmeriGan publication of the autobiography in which clothed this man in more than majesty," he later said. 1948-with 17 printings as of 1980-shows in"retrospect how Americans began urging the Mahatma to visit the United
THE
COMMUNITY 01"
CHURCH
N C:W YO •• K
The Reverend John Haynes' Holmes, D.O. 12. ?~lrk 11venue, NE','; YORK CITY.
Oc~ob~.· 20. 1929.
=-=- ••.•.•• Iff~ i4r..••
~.
.l cr~nt meeting of T.lftn and l'fCDell or New York City. gathered ln the Cor=1ty Churoh thie niGht. aut~.orb. "'~ to ·con.•••y to you and throuGh you' to the .All India }lational C~,gr •• s 0>1' cordlnl &r0otinga and roveront re/;arde.
.u oithe'1. ot a oountry ~1ch a oentlll')' ar.d a halt' aco aohaft<! ita libort'o?¥' 1n dedication to the hiGh prinoipho ot tree do••ocr~cy and solf-de~.r:Unatlon. "" ,roet tho p.oplo of Indla 1n tholr heroio struGGle tor SlnLraj. TIe hail your wieo. onl1&'lton-d Md •• orlfiolal l.adorship ot :Jour p.opl •• am' pray that the milliont who look UJ' to you tor light and l •• di,,& _y hoed your .XAlted and 100/ o.•.•n lor ono's .nomio •• yord ot non-noleroe 'to·o:regard the natiooaU.tlia :'love:nont or India as •••bodled in tbe 11•• t1ona1 Congro•• as the .:;rcat.st lllOvomnt or our t1;oe. and pno.j' tor 1t. o••oco•• by the noblo prooo•• o. or counsol and W1.d•• \IIl.Ulned 1>1blood5!10d OIlJ umw.rred 1>1nolollo ••
Dear Friend, You have been most diligent in writIng to .e and to IIahadev and encouraging others to write to '" 'about the IIUch talked of vlsi t ot 1I1neto America. I do not know, however, whether it was at all neceeear" tor you to take all this trouble either tor yourselt or others. I ne.er entertained the slightest doubt about the wisdom of your judgment, and I have been absolutely cleRr in my statements to every Press man that I would not 10 to America until 1011 had decided to bring me out there. Having _de up IV'mind to trust your judgment. was I .not right in telling all and sundry that you wer'!' the ke~per of mr conscience in this matter? Of course 'it has tilrowna little more responsibility upon you, but your shoulders are broad enoUlh to bear it and I allsaved a lot of worry in arguing with i,portunate friends.and reporters. I lIetMr. Boaanji fairly often quring the re. day. that he was nere. He 15 now on his .ay to Ind1a. Yours aincerely,
TIll. day 10 ••••,,'Who.·o the d")1 of tho peopl •• t.ll"", 01thona are a 1'8rt vr tho brel4t hoat ot Tou and _n who "",rohln,: tOl',ard thnt economJ.oand poll tl~",l liberatioll .••. hiob w111 at last r""l<. froe thc soul or :DllJl tor the .XT'""a'" on or its l):Ch.st and truest lir.. You. air. are laadln, .ot _rvly Ind1a but Uo world. and thoro fore do •• pledga \0 you in til'lll alleGlance our .rractlon OIldsupport.
1'0"," :.r.
When I think of Rolland, I think of Tolstoy. When I think of Lenin, I think of Napoleon. But when I think of Gandhi, I think of Jesus Christ. -Rev.
States. But Holmes felt that the time was not ripe for Gandhi's visit to an' America ill-prepared to receive his message. He wished him to come on the future day when India was free and his lifework largely done. He could the~ teach Americans the true meaning of the Christianity they professed and lay the foundation of that new and greater civilization which would bring deliverance to mankind. He persuaded the Mahatma to decline the invitations extended by leading American citizens as well as Indian expatriatel:iodies. He would later wonder if his advice had been correct. Back in New York his immediate task was to counter prejudicial reporting from London published in American newspapers. This Holmes tried to do with a syndicated article projecting Gandhi's faith in the fitness of human nature to receive his great gospel of love. It was all in vain. A dinner he arranged to mark the Mahatma's birthday on October 2 coincided with the publication of an interview Gandhi gave advising Jews to realize the spiritual Jerusalem within themselves and to go to Palestine peacefully and in friendship with the Arabs. The well-meaning rejoinder at the dinner by Rabbi Stephen Wise of the Free Synagogue hit the headlines rather than the speeches acclaiming Gandhi's cause of Indian freedom. The lingering unpleasantness over this controversy was wiped away the next spring when Rabbi Wise joined Holmes in the award of the Community Church Medal to Gandhi for his "distinguished religious service." The medal showing a dove with an olive branch in its bill flying over the rising sun is now on permanent display at the Gandhi National Museum in Delhi along with the few worldly possessions of the Mahatma.
John Haynes Holmes
Holmes paid an even greater tribute to the Mahatma with his play If This Be Treason staged on Broadway in September 1935. He had conceived it during the voyage home from his meeting with Gandhi in London. The play made a passionate plea for pacifism. Of even deeper satisfaction to Holmes was India's independence won through nonviolent means. It showed the triumph of satyagraha fashioned by Gandhi as an instrument for a society to fight an empire. He shared with his congregation joy at this confirmation of his "instant judgment" of 1921 that Gandhi was the greatest of men. Opportunity to meet the Mahatma again and see the land he had spoken and written so much about came in October 1947 when Holmes arrived in India on a university lecture tour. He was warmly welcomed. But he found that the catastrophe of the partition holocaust had eaten deep into the Mahatma's soul. Holmes tried to reassure him, without much success, that the tragedies of those months did not mean the 'breakdown of his lifework. He told him he had singlehandedly saved the situation. His teaching remained as true, and his leadership as sound, as ever. His miracles in Calcutta and Delhi in restoring communal harmony were the crown and climax of his unparalleled career, He was never so great as in those dark hours. But Gandhi wanted the claim to be proved beyond doubt. Only the restoration of peace and good will over all the land could have provided the proof. Before beginning his lectures, Holmes had a brief and hurried meeting with the Mahatma. Gandhi's "old smile of loving kindness" was a "benediction" to him. Holmes felt Gandhi's presence everywhere he went during three months of
delivering 60 addresses before academic and public gatherings. He spoke of Gandhi achieving for Indians what Washington had for Americans, and cited Gandhi's emancipation of Harijans as an accomplishment for India comparable to what Lincoln had done for America by emancipating Negroes. He left India a man "remade, with deeper sympathy, truer understanding and a fresh, strong confidence in man and his eternal destiny." He reported to his congregation on January 25, 1948, about his visit to India. He prepared for the following Sunday a sermon to share his optimistic opinion: "Within a generation the political, economic and social life of India will be transformed, and with it the religious life as well." On the intervening Friday Mahatma Gandhi was assassinated. The world was shaken as though by some cosmic quake. Holmes in his study stood in a daze; he seemed paralyzed. Slowly he recovered consciousness, like someone coming out of the ether on an operating table. He ran to his wife in an agony of spirit. When' he heard her speak as though from a great distance, he began to cry and could not stop. All that day he wept in his heart for the Mahatma. The next day he could think only of the procession in Delhi, the funeral pyre on the Jamuna with a million gathered to watch Gandhi's body burn in blazing light and his soul liberated into eternal light. He recovered enough to pl~n and conduct a worthy memorial the next morning at the Town Hall which his church used for Sunday services. The spacious gallery was crowded to the topmost row with 1,700 persons. Most of them were in tears. Holmes expressed his conviction that like Jesus, after death Gandhi would continue to live and "assert his magic influence upon the souls and hearts of men forever." The congregation prayed with him: " ... give us strength anew, and teach us to walk steadfastly in the way of brotherhood and peace wherein the great and good have trod .... " Hushed and shaken by grief and thel.l uplifted by Holmes~ affirmation of the immortality of Gandhi's work, the congregation moved forward to garland the bust of the Mahatma. Many stayed for hours communing with his spirit. In the fall of 1948 Holmes' "grand new church" was at last ready, providing the congregation its first permanent home in 29 years. In it was a concrete symbol of his apo~tqlic relationship to the Mahatma. This was the "John Haynes Holmes Pulpit in honor of Mahatma Gandhi" donated by Yellapragada Subba Row, the great Indian biochemist who had developed vitamins, antibiotics and anticancer drugs in Pearl River near New York City. By now Holmes' health was failing and he was advised complete rest. Parkinson's disease had set in while he was in India
and was taking a high toll now. He formally handed over charge to Donald Harrington on November 27, 1949, but insisted on preaching once a month at the Community Church. During the years of retirement Holmes bore witness to the Mahatma best in My Gandhi, a personal confession of their friendship and what it revealed about the larger aspects of the life of Gandhi. He was accused of having been partial, even biased, in his judgments, extravagant in his praise, sentimental in his reading of the story of the Mahatma's life. He answered the criticism in his full autobiography I Speak for Myself His experience was like that of the disciples of Socrates to the Master. In between the two books was the 1955 Montgomery bus boycott led by the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. DramatiZIng the effectiveness of nonviolent community action for basic social change, it resulted two years later in the ending of segregation in public transportation. Holmes said, "The greatest thing that has happened since Gandhi's death is the work of Martin Luther King, who has taken the whole law and gospel of Gandhi's teaching and proved its worth anew." King had put to practice in America the principles of satyagraha brought to the attention of Americans by Holmes. The cause of civil rights had always been important to Holmes, who was among the founders of the American Civil Liberties Union and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Holmes sought in his last years to establish a Gandhi Library at Harvard, but this has remained one of his unfulfilled dreams. His collection of books, pamphlets, magazine articles, and gramophone recordings is however intact as part of Harvard's Houghton Library. Holmes sustained a broken hip in 1959 and had to discontinue his monthly sermons but he rarely missed a Sunday service in his beloved Community Church of New York. He passed away on April 3, 1964, unshaken in his conviction that the end of mankind need not be catastrophic if the spirit of the Mahatma endures. While his ashes are under a marble stone set into the floor of the main aisle of his church, the memorial plaque on the wall just behind has a bronze relief of Holmes' head with a quotation from the Book of JOb-':"HE PUT ON RIGHTEOUSNESSAND IT CLOTHED HIM-serving as a halo around it. Holmes had chosen differently. In a sermon on February 9, 1947, he had said: "If there be any virtue or any praise in my ministry, any epitaph that I would have placed above my ashes, it is this: HE DISCOVERED GANDHIIN INDIA,HE KNEWHIM,LOVED HIMANDSTROVE TOFOLLOW HIM." 0
MR: WEISS: Would you summarize the Reagan Administration's immigration policy? MR. NELSON: The administration.has proposed five initiatives to curtail illegal immigration: increased enforcement of existing immigration and fair labor standards laws; a law imposing penalties against employers who knowingly hire illegal aliens; a new experimental temporary-worker program for up to 50,000 Mexican nationals annually; legal status for qualifying illegal aliens currently residing in the United States; and international cooperation within the Western
Hemisphere to enforce immigration laws and discourage illegal migration. . Insofar as legal immigration, is concerned, the administration believes that the existing statutes generally provide a sensible and workable structure. However there are two aspects of the present system that need reform: the existing unrealistic limitations on immigration from Mexico and Canada; and the cumbersome procedures required for employers to obtain labor certification for aliens based on their needed skills. Proposed legislation will raise the numerically restricted immigration from
Mexico and Canada to 40,000 annually for each country from the current 20,000 level, with the unused 'portion of either country's allotment becoming available to citizens of the other nation. We are also proposing legislation to streamline the procedures for admitting nonfamily immigrants with needed skills. How high is the current level of immigration compared with past administrations? It was over 800,000 in 1980, which is as high as the peak period between 1900 and 1910. In those years, the same number
came every year, so eight million arrived in that decade. From 1950 through '59, 250,000 came every year, and we averaged 446,000 a year from 1970 through '79. How about the formula for letting in immigrants? Has it changed over the years? Very much so. Consider the formula 20 years ago and the one currently in place. Latin America then had a fifth of the total; that figure is now two-fifths, or 40 percent. Asia has increased from 13 percent to as much as Latin America. Africa has doubled to the Canadian level, which declined. The only other decline is from Europe, which two decades ago was 61 percent and is now 13 percent. Realistically, how can you curb illegal immigration when your agency patrols such a vast and relatively open border? We propose to legalize some illegal immigration, in effect, by expanding opportunities for aliens to wor.:klawfully in the country. This would mean more enforcement of some labor laws already in existence. In the case of Mexicans, who constituted nearly 90 percent of the one million illegals apprehended last year, we propose a two-year program to admit 50,000 nationals each year for temporary employment in jobs other than those for which there is an adequate supply of qualified, and ready-to-work, American citizens. These jobs could be in any occupation, skilled or unskilled. This would be an experimental program, with the decisions on labor supply and need for foreign workers made by state governors in the 50 states. Temporary workers would have the chance to change jobs. There are an estimated 3.5 to 6 million illegal immigrants from all over the world residing in America right now. The experimental program is part of a shift from a circumstance of massive illegal immigration to a clear and effective plan, with adequate controls. Many consider it unfair to grant access (legalization) to some ilIegals as waiting lists grow. What are your views? It is important that we find some practical way of dealing with the millions of illegal aliens who now reside in the United. States. It is both more costeffective and more humane to concentrate our law enforcement resources on stopping the flow-rather than searching
out, rounding up, and deporting millions of people who have become, in effect, members of the community. We have neither the resources, the capability, nor the motivation to uproot and deport those who have demonstrated that they are law-abiding and willing to contribute in a productive way to our society. The administration has attached substantial conditions to legalization both to ensure the sincerity of participants and to send a clear signal to others: this is a one-time procedure that will not be repeated. It is part of the overall plan to deter illegal immigration more effectively in the future and must be coupled with firm enforcement measures. What is your feeling about political asylum? Congress passed a law on this issue in 1980, and more than 53,000 applications were received by the U.S. Immigration
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The United States admits twice as many immigrants as the rest of the world combined. Special laws provide for refugees and family unification.
****************** and Naturalization Service office in 1980 and 1981. In addition, 50,000 applications came from Cubans who came over in the now-famous Mariel boatlift. Men and women from over 60.countries are requesting asylum, and we recognize both humanitarian and foreign policy interests involved with the issue. Uppermost in our mind is the need to do away with the ad hoc solutions to refugee issues, and to provide in their place a systematic and permanent prQgram of refugee resettlement and selection that is consistent with America's obligations under the United Nations conventions on the situation. The sheer number of applications places an enormous burden on the Immigration and Naturalization Service, as anyone can understand. We recognize, too, that people with valid claims face long waits. Briefly, our proposal would provide for a specially trained cadre of asylum officers to handle cases. These would be people with a background in local conditions for nations around the world, and a background in international law as well. Applicants could have their
own lawyers and even bring witnesses, and other evidence could be submitted. We feel that those in fear of persecution could be given greater protection, while those using asylum to bypass immigration procedures would be spotted. Is the situation with Haitian refugees unique? The plight of the Haitians is particularly tragic. In their homeland they face poverty and hunger. According to the State Department, Haiti is the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere with an annual per capita income of $300. The State Department had advised us that the vast majority of Haitians who leave the country do so in search of improved economic conditions. The United States understandably represents for many of these people a concrete hope for a better life. While our legal immigration progrchn is the world's most generous and provides a partial answer to this problem, it allows only a small percentage of would-be immigrants to enter the United States. The United States unfortunately cannot throw open its doors to all the poor of Haiti, any more than it can open its doors to all the poor of the world who would seek a better life. America simply cannot take all those who would choose to come here. The lengthy and cumbersome legal procedures necessary to process Haitian cases are, in many ways, similar to those procedures which currently delay the entire criminal justice system. In proposing reforms for both systems this administration will be guided by the same principle-that full and fair due process can be achieved in this country as it is in the rest of the civilized world, without endless and repetitious consideration of the same issues. Because of the burdensome procedures now in place which result in delaying tactics and manipulation, and the protracted litigation brought on their behalf, Haitians have been forced to remain in detention longer than expected. The delay in processing their cases has been, in large part, occasioned by the lawsuit filed on their behalf. At the request of their lawyers, for example, the court, for some time, restrained even the return to Haiti of those who wanted and requested to go voluntarily to be reunited with their families. What is the administration proposing for new arrivals from Cuba and Haiti? A number of ideas are being consid-
ered. We favor a special, one-time-only measure to regularize the status of the 160,000 people already here in these two groups. A "temporary resident" status would be authorized so that they could take jobs, and after five years of continuous residence, Cubans and Haitians could apply to adjust their status and file petitions for admission of their relatives still living in those countries. What is happening to the Asian boat people? We have approved 33,767 for refugee status in this fiscal year (1982). The quota established for this year for refugees from Asia is 100,000. The quota for refugees worldwide is 140,000 for fiscal 1982. Is the administration's policy a flexible one? Yes, and here's why. The Refugee Act passed in 1980 provides for the President to consult with Congress every year. This assures input. The President can designate special groups for additional consideration based on humanitarian concern, and he can also place numerical ceilings on each group. We will keep waiting lists, and each applicant, upon acceptance of his or her application for filing, will be registered based on chronological order. Reunification of family is one consideration that the U.S. Attorney General may use in selecting names from lists. We have an Office of Resettlement in the Department of Health and Human Services. The State Department maintains a Human Rights Office, and Congress monitors these policies closely. The refugee status accorded some who try to enter the United States, for example, is another aspect of what is a very flexible policy that, I feel, is being improved and changed as conditions require. Do you think the United States can continue to be open or liberal in its immigration policy? Have we reached our limit? There is certainly a need to control immigration. The United States is a nation of immigrants, and we adhere to that concept. But there is a need to be sure we are dealing with legal immigration and putting appropriate controls on illegal immigration. The administration bill and certainly the Simpson-Mazzoli bill [introduced. by Senator Alan Simpson (Republican, Wyoming) and Representative Romano Mazzoli (Democrat, Kentucky)] are both geared in that direction.
How does the American record compare with the records of other countries as regards immigration? We are a nation that encourages legal immigration. We bring in more than twice as many as the rest of the world combined. However, the United States is unable to open its doors to everyone in the world who might want to come. As mentioned, the approximately 800,000 persons who were admitted to the United States in 1980 represent the largest influx since 1914. Surely it is not necessary to emphasize the vast difference in the economy of the United States in the early part of this century as compared to today. What is your policy on future illegal aliens? What about the number of illegal and legal immigrants today? Do you see any increase in either category? The task of fairly and efficiently administering our nation's immigration laws and securing our country's borders against illegal migration has never been more difficult. We have pursued unrealistic policies in the past, and they have failed. Continued illegal arrivals numbering in the millions, the Cuban boatlift, and the burgeoning refugee program attest to the fact that we have lost control of our borders. The situation of the past is intolerable and is going to change. This administration is committed to building' an effective Immigration Service that has the legal authority to get its job done. During 1981, we apprehended more than 980,000 illegal aliens in the United States. Every year, for the past several years, the number of illegal aliens apprehended has been right around a million. We realize that we only catch a percentage of those who get in. The Census Bureau, which attempted to count the number of illegals in the United States, estimated that there were between 3.5 and 6 million. They also estimated that the illegal population was growing at a rate of 500,000 per year. The administration finds that the existing laws relating to the overall number of immigrants who can be admitted each year, and the system under which immigrants and refugees are admitted are sensible and workable and basically should not be changed. In addition, the administration has determined that the statutory mandate to detain all undocumented aliens entering the United States must be obeyed, until their eligibility for admission can be expeditiously
but adequately determined. By detaining such persons pending admission or return to their homeland, we deter future arrivals and avoid repetition of the unconscionable effects experienced disproportionately in recent years by southern Florida. The administration's policy of interdiction of certain vessels suspected of conveying undocumented aliens has also served as a deterrent to illegal entries by sea. Then the United States can regain control of its borders? We are certainly making every effort to do so. We are increasing our border enforcement through reallocations and reassignment of new personnel to areas having the highest incidence of illegal entries. Our special operations along the southern border consist of coordinated line watch, traffic check, and rural and city activities. We also recognize the need to deal effectively with the major incentive for illegal entry-jobs. I have placed a high priority on reducing their employability by concentrating investigative resources in areas where there is significant employment of illegal aliens. A key provision of the Omnibus Immigration Control Act, which has been introduced in both houses of Congress, discourages the employment of illegal aliens by penalizing those employers who knowingly hire them. Are there plans to speed the process by which visitors enter the United States? Yes. We have conducted test programs bf one-stop inspection. At a one-stop inspection site a visitor completes the Immigration, Public Health, Customs, and Agriculture inspections at one location rather than moving from station to station and point to point. The test programs have been completed and onestop inspection is in effect at five ports of entry. Plans are to expand this concept to other ports of entry in the future. What do you think constitutes a fair immigration policy? The administration's proposals are fair and realistic. We will continue to be a nation that is open to immigration, yet we are attempting to gain control of our borders so that actual immigration reflects our national policy and our laws. 0 About the Interviewer: Julian Weiss, a freelance writer in Washington, D.C., is afrequent contributor to a number of American journals.
agilli GfJevi I once asked Ragini Devi how she assumed the Indian incarnation after her birth and upbringing in America. "Didn't Brahma separate himself into many parts first and then ask them to become one?" she asked me. I first met Ragini in the house of the poet Vallathol in Cheruthuruthi in Kerala in the early Twenties, when I was myself footloose in search of my own Indian identity. During the simple Malayali meal of rice, dal and yogurt, with a few curried greens thrown in, I saw the young woman from Michigan squatting on the floor and eating with her hands, South Indian style, as if to the manner born. I marveled at her eating three green chilies and, after dinner, paan. When I saw her rehearsing Mohini Attam, I noticed that she had simplified the hair style of the tradition, and draped the sari a little more like the Sinhalese dhoti, but she recreated the movements to the tala of the musicians almost perfectly. Was she a descendant of those early Nambudri Brahmins, who had come from Kashmir or somewhere in the North? The illusion was complete because she moved her supple body in the blandishments of Mohini, wandering in the maze of gestures, slowly, with such sinuous grace that the audience felt like angels waiting for the chrysalis to unfold from her fingers. Somewhere in me, I was set free from my doubts abou't identity. If Ragini Devi, an American, could become Mohini, incarnation of Vishnu, I could at least learn the signs and symbols of the classical dances of India, even put the Nataraja into my being, conquer my disobedient adolescent world and allow myself to be startled by the ecstasy of dance. I owe the inspiration for the appreciation of Indian dance as much to seeing Ragini Devi in Cheruthuruthi, as to seeing Uday Shankar give a private performance in the rooms of Beryl de Zoete and Arthur Waley, and later to Shirin Vajifdar teaching in her studio. Later, in the autumn, I met Ragini Devi in the house of G. Venkatachalam in Bangalore. This place had become a kind of
cultural c@nt@rwh(ln~ people of different n~tion~litie~ met tt5 participate in music and dance. Venka, enthusiastic patron of
promi~ing ~lfti~t§,had creuted un informul utmo~I'here where recitals every¡ weekend
brought
together
old gurus, new
aspirants and th@int~llig~nt~i~LThey were ull trying to help Indian classical dance styles recover from the bad name that had been given to it by decadent ritualists and anglicized clerks. As Venka also hosted the lumpen, I was privileged to find myself in his study while Ragini Devi was putting up in the terrace room of his beautiful bungalow. I used to watch her morning rehearsals, with some other guests, and was fascinated by her vigorous routine. I asked her how she came to India and began to cultivate the devotional dances. What she
told me confirmed the studio gossip. Her real name was Esther Sherman and she grew up in the little town of Petoskey near Lake Michigan, in the house of modest American parents. She saw some Indian dances by an itinerant Indian troupe, was fascinated by the beauty of the gesture language and began to learn from this troupe the first movements. Later, she also tried to understand the differences between Western and Indian music, and took lessons from the musicians in this troupe in playing the tambura, the easiest of the Indian musical instruments because it requires only strumming the wires to give the base tones to the other musicians. She felt she had to prove that a Western voice could acquire the technique of Indian singing. She confessed that, in the beginning, the semi tonal singing style of India seemed to her more like noise than song. But she said she persisted and trained her voice. She began to feel that she had been an Indian in her previous incarnation. And that inspired her to become an Indian. She married a revolutionary against British rule, Ram Lal Bajpai, who had escaped from India and become a refugee in the United States. She settled with her husband in New York, where the couple was active in Indian emigre circles. Bajpai was involved in political work, while Ragini cultivated the contemporary dancers and musicians, especially the few Indians who ventured out there. She acquired enough skill both in dance and song to do a prologue before the showing of Himangsu Roy and Devika Rani's film Light of Asia, in, May 1928, in Carnegie Hall, to set the mood for 'the presentation of this unique picture of the Buddha. Her prologue was appreciated, and she was invited to Esther Sherman's mind was "set on fire by the noble myth of Shiva as Nataraja" (facing page); Ragini in Shringara Lahari (right).
dance and sing by Walter Hampden in his production of the play based on Light of Asia. Among the items she put forward were Worship of Shiva, Songs of the Inner Spirit, Tagore's Cycle of Spring, Radha Krishna Cycle, Popular Melodies. And the appreciation which carne to her showed that she was much more than an enthusiastic amateur. . At that time so little was known about Indian dance that she began to research and put down the basic techniques of the classical styles in a book entitled Nrityanjali, an Introduction to Indian Dancing. I told her that though I had tried to study Bharata's Natya Shastra in the India Office library, London, I found this book of hers most instructive for the beginner in dance appreciation. I had written a brief note about it for Indian Arts and Letters magazine. Until Beryl de Zoete wrote her own interpretation of Indian and Indonesian classical dance styles, The Other Mind, she also used to consider Ragini Devi's book as the ideal introduction. In 1930, Ragini carne to India with her husband. While he was busy in revolutionary work, she stayed in the Kerala Kala Mandalam and became the first woman to perform Kathakali on the stage. She went to Santiniketan in 1934 and danced before Rabindranath Tagore. The poet wrote about her words aglow with warmth: Those of us belonging to Northern India, who have lost the memory of the pure Indian classical dance nave experienced a thrill of delight at the exhibition of dancing given by Ragini Devi. I feel grateful at the assurance it has brought to us that the ancient art is still a living tradition in India with its varied grace and vigor and subtleties of dramatic expression.
p.e had already given solo recitals of dance and song at the Royal Opera House in Bombay, in Delhi, Ahmedabad, Lucknow, Calcutta and Madras. And ~ she won genuine admiration from people like Krishna Iyer, a courageous intellectual who had himself contributed to the rehabilitation of Bharata Natyam. She had made Cheruthuruthi her base again and was organizing a Kathakali dance drama troupe with Gopinath, a highly talented Kathakali dancer, as her partner, when I met her. I carried away vivid memories of Ragini's rehearsals and got a promise from her to perform before the India Society in London in whose cultural work I was the.n assisting Sir Francis Younghusband, ex-leader of Lord Curzon's misadventure in the march on Lhasa in Tibet, turned mystic since, and researcher in Indian lore. In spite of the tensions caused by the rising tide of fascism, perhaps because of the highly charged atmosphere, some of us sought refuge in the arts as the only sustenance against despair. When I wrote to my mentor, Ananda Coomaraswamy, gloomily about the terrors brought by the superman of Germany, he reminded me that the same country had produced Nietzsche, who had said, "Man is created to be surpassed." Nietzsche had summed up ecstasy as dance, when he said: "I do not know: what the mind of a philosopher need desire more than to be a good dancer, for dancing is his ideal, his art also, indeed his only piety, his divine worship." Coomaraswamy pointed out that Hitler's idea of the superman was a perversion by a¡ mechani~al believer in guns, tanks and bombs of the man whom Zarathustra wanted "to be touched by lightning and inoculated with frenzy." I knew that Ragini Devi had read Coomaraswamy's Dance of Shiva. And she seemed to have been set on fire by the noble myth of Shiva as Nataraja, the Lord of Dance, keeping the
balance of the world against the cunning, the fury and the evil of mankind by his eternal dance in the circle of fire. In her own instinctive manner, Ragini had realized that if she could assume the forms of the mythical Hindu gods and goddesses, she could rise above the mundane to recover the innocence of the child's romp, the freedom of the life of impulse and rhythm. Nietzsche had tried to overcome his own flat earth feelings and the torment of restlessness, to reach wholeness and coherence through new symbols in the worship dances in the temples of Isis. Ragini too seems to have abandoned the void of suburban living by aspiring to be a goddess of the old world. One of the first myths she absorbed from India was that of Shiva's spouse Shakti, who appears both as destroyer and preserver. One of Ragini's favorite presentations was Kali, as the will to power. As dance is movement, she said, she wanted to emphasize the goddess as action. It was a fascinating presentation to watch. I had talked to her about the philosophy of dance, as Coomaraswamy had interpreted it. She had reacted by marking her preferences for certain gods and goddesses to others. The fact that she spent more time learning the Kathakali dance style than any other, made me feel that she was tempestuous by nature and felt freer in the enactment of the tragic dramas of the Mahabharata and the destroyer Kali. I often wondered whether she was possessed, like most of us in the Thirties, by the portents of doom. Outwardly of a sunny temperament, she seldom talked about the corning horrors. But Kathakali was Ragini's forte; below, she is seen dancing -with the celebrated Gopinath; on the facing page, she appears as Kali, the destroyer; at bottom are the three generations-Ragini in the middle, with daughter Indrani on her right and granddaughter Sukanya on her left, at a show they gave in New York not long before Ragini's death.
she seemed, inside herself, to be transforming her premonitions of disaster into her art. As though to confirm my feelings she staged the struggle between good and evil by performing the Bhasmasura Mohini dance drama in Kathakali style, when she came to London in the late Thirties. Like many myths of the Hindus, this theme expresses dithyrambs of the subconscious world and reaches the audience by making the arena into a Greek chorus. The story unfolds the ambition of the demon Bhasmasura to subdue the god Shiva, whom he had worshipped to gain power. After having acquired from Shiva the boon that anyone he touches on the head will be destroyed, he chases Shiva to kill him. As a witness to Shiva's discomfiture, the Supreme God, Vishnu, assumes the incarnation of the temptress nymph Mohini, a dancer. Bhasmasura falls to her lure. He asks her to teach him to dance: Mohini agrees. But she finds him a clumsy stiff-bodied pupil. She persists with him. At last he learns enough to become sufficiently proficient to dance a duet with her. The demon is happy in his accomplishment and hopes to gain her love. As the duet rises toward the excitement of the crescendo, Mohini touches her head. Bhasmasura also touches his head. The boon given by Shiva, that anyone Bhasmasura touches on the head will die, is thus fulfilled. Bhasmasura falls dead. Ragini Devi danced the role of Mohini. Gopinath played Bhasmasura in the presentation of this dance drama in the Arts Theatre club. They performed the ballet, choreographed by Ragini Devi, with consummate skill. She showed the cruelty in the heart of a force of nature unschooled by the spirit, ultimately resolving the crisis of the¡ power maniac who destroys himself. Ragini seemed to me to have introduced into Bhasmasura all the primitivism of wild nature. The audience on that evening applauded as though it had become the chorus, absorbing the truth of the struggle between beauty and terror, in the world of poetry which came into the theater. The confrontation through the symbolic gesture language of Kathakali had cut out all decorative asides, posing truth against unbridled urges in a magnificent metamorphosis of moods through perceptions. To the applause which greeted the dancers, Indrani, Ragini's young daughter, added a "bravo" as she sat by me. I have always speculated on the extent to which Ragini Devi's artistic achievements inspired young Indrani. Certainly, the daughter learned the first steps from her mother. But it is likely that she also absorbed the will of her heroic mother, her
35
longing to be a goddess of dance, and was dazzled by Ragini's innocent Americans into satyrs, angels and fauns. The former depended on the Kathakali drum, and the latter on the African glittering triumphs. I recall that I myself had a change of hean. I had already drum, with the two/three beat, in their training courses. This begun to dread indetermination, which is always in those who preceded the teaching of the subtler expressions, the coy seek a new self but cannot accept the holy. I began to see the glance, the movements of the eyebrows, the angry sway of the dances of the gods and goddesses of India as inventions to head, and the opening of fingers like lotuses. resolve the agony of existence, as liberating rhythms. I began to The visual aesthetic, signifying the changing feelings of the consider creative art as a synthesis of the particular and the heroes and heroines, cannot be felt without the intensive symbolic, through which the urges for freedom assume the practice of both mimetic gestures and innovative poses if the fervor of necessity, and take us beyond the chaos of nature. expression in dance-whether of undulating grace, or naked Ragini Devi gave a repeat performance of the Bhasmasura terror, or subtle inner rhythms-is to be achieved. Dancers dance drama in the Playhouse in London to a packed house. practice hard for hours, they know that even larks don't The choreographer and dancer Kurt Joos, who was then improvise their songs. preparing his ballet The Green Table, about the beginnings of Ragini Devi has written that her average day began with war, saw both performances and told me how much he had rehearsal and ended with either rehearsal or performance, and been moved by Ragini Devi's presentation. He was charmed by that in between she read and studied dance. the simple design of the Kathakali Theatre that Ragini had At the end of the war, Ragini Devi wrote Venka that she wanted urgently "to come home." And in 1948, she arrived. adopted. The safety curtain had been removed. Two attendants merely held a colorful curtain behind which the dancers were After a pilgrimage to Vallathol's Kala Mandalam, she revisited hidden. Soon the curtain bearers walked away and the actors her old haunts. But, importantly, she began research into the became part of the audience, separated only at the end of the classical styles, with a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation, play, when the bearers brought the curtain in again, drew it "for a mature book entitled Dance Dialects of India. across the st.age, and took the players behind the screen to the She wanted to saturate herself with the ethos of Bharata's back of the stage. Natya Shastra, enlivened by the awareness of the repertory of Ragini Devi gave some lecture demonstrations on the Mirror classical dances as they had matured, especially in South India. of Gesture, the classic Sanskrit treatise on dance, under the As an outsider turned insider, she was averse to idolatry in her auspices of the School of Oriental Studies of the University of writing. She was not frightened of the gods and heroes but London and the India Society. She believed in audience participaaccepted them and their playas myths. tion and wanted to train the chorus as the Greeks had done. Apart By this time her daughter, Indrani, had grown up to be a from the different approach to illusion in the Indian theater, which beauty and had begun to learn Bharata Natyam under Guru seeks to unite the actors and audience-save for a mobile Chokalingham Pillai, Kuchipudi under Guru Satya Vedantuna curtain-she wished to explain the language of gestures, the (in the Kuchipudi village after which this relatively unknown forme symbols and myths invented by the Hindus so that the dance style takes its name), Odissi from the ~urviving gurus in devotees (in the Greek sense) were freed not from, but into, Orissa, becoming the first dancer to perform Odissi on the stage passion. in India. Ragini gave recitals of her Kathakali dances at the Musee By the ~arly Fifties Indrani had emerged as a highly talented Guimet, under the sponsorship of the Association Fran~aise des interpreter of every dance style she took up. She was inclined to Amis de l'Orient, and received warm appreciation from art flow into lasya, the feminine form of Bharata Natyam and its lovers in Paris, then the premier city of Western culture. Janine variations, more than the tandava, the male expression, which Auboyer, the keeper of the museum, wrote that the Musee her mother had preferred. Ragini watched Indrahi's rehearsals Guimet had been "infused to life by Ragini Devi's recitals. without interfering. In fact, except for brief spells, she preferred to stay away from the daughter's household, after the latter had n1939 Ragini Devi went to New York. She probably had married the architect Habib Rahman. a hunch that the gathering storm in Europe would burst at Ragini Devi's liberal attitude toward the family made for a any time, and she may have felt that the United States freer upbringing even for Indrani's children. Sukanya, Indrani's only daughter, chose her career as a dancer of her own free will. would be a safe haven. She wrote to her friend G. Venkatachalam in Bangalore Both grandmother and mother helped. Unlike those children in that she had set up an Indian Dance Center in New' York on Indian patriarchal families who nowadays want to do the very West 57th Street with an Indian Arts Research Institute. She opposite of what their parents did, Sukanya was frequently a told him she was in touch with Martha Graham. And perhaps part of her mother's troupe. It must have been a happy occasion this great American dancer's adaptation of yogic exercises in when grandmother, mother and granddaughter gave a show her school was reinforced by Ragini's own predilection for the together in New York a year before Ragin'i Devi died early this exercises, massages ,and prayer practices that she had learned in ~M. D Vallathol's Kala Mandalam. The rhythmic values that both these rein vigora tors of dance held dear seem to be the synthesis About the Author: In a writing career spanning nearly half a century, of those moods, passions and movements which had found Mulk Raj Anand has written more than a dozen novels, six collections of vital expression in the so-called "primitivist" tradition. short stories and numerous other books. These include Untouchable, If Ragini Devi found in Kathakali the reservoir of emotion, Coolie, Hindu View of Art, Private Life of an Indian Prince, and action and theme that was the sum of illusions in which Confessions of a Lover. He has recently been appointed honorary editor nature-gods exalted the audience .to become other than of art books to be published by the Publications Division of the Ministry themselves, then Martha Graham researched in the energetic of Information and Broadcasting. He is also on the ministry's media world of African dance the fluent mime that would transform advisory committee.
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Among them were programs intended to improve nutrition, make adequate housing available, defray high energy costs, rehabilitate the disabled, enhance the social functioning of families and individuals, increase employability, and help particularly disadvantaged minorities become self-supporting. State and local governments and the private sector also invest in these and related activities. The primary means of helping poor people obtain adequate nutrition in the United States is the Food Stamp program, which provides needy households with a monthly allotment of coupons that can be used tc buy food. The amount of the allotment varies with the size and income of the household. Virtually all persons with income below 130 percent of the nation's poverty threshold may qualify. The Federal Government bears the entire cost of the benefits and shares administrative expenses with the states, through which the program operates. About $12,000 million was expended to provide food stamps to roughly 22 million people during fiseal 1982. The program's rapid growth of late-virtually doubling in size since 1977spurred the Reagan Administration and Congress to enact major legislation in 1981 that lowered benefits, restricted eligibility and tightened administration. Additional cost-cutting measures are being sought. The Federal Government also offers nutrition assistance to needy schoolchildren and to low-income mothers needing help in providing an adequate diet for themselves and their children. These programs cost close to $4,000 million in fiscal 1982, and served approximately 24 million children. Some 3.4 million low-income people benefited from federally subsidized housing in fiscal 1982 at a cost of $6,700 million. Almost half of this amount was spent to help poor persons pay their rent. Most of the remaining funds went toward developing and operating public housing, helping low-income families and handicapped and aged individuals purchase homes, and providing rental and cooperative housing at reduced rents to similar categories of people. Because of the rising price of energy, the Federal Government decided in 1978 to establish a program to help the poor pay their home-heating bills. The program has been revised in each succeeding year and is now offered as a $1,875 million block grant to states. Federal law requires states to focus aid on persons with the lowest income and highest home energy costs. Many states, chiefly those with relatively colder climates, have also set up their own energy assistance programs for persons who are particularly vulnerable during the winter months. There are a significant number of social service programs currently financed by the Federal Government and run by state, local and private (principally nonprofit) agencies, although the Reagan Administration is trying to reduce federal involvement in social services. The largest single program, Title XX of the Social Security Act, provides block grants to states that they may use to support just about any social service. States spend most of the money on d~y care for children, homemaker assistance, child and adult protection, counseling, education and training, child foster care, and residential treatment. Also, states contribute a sizable amount of their own resources to the program-about $700 million in 1980, when approximately
10 million people were served. The federal cost for Title XX in fiscal 1982 was $2,400 million. In addition, the Federal Government supports social service programs specifically tailored to the needs of children, elderly people and poor communities. Expenditures on these programs reached $2,300 million in fiscal 1982, and were generally used to supplement or stimulate efforts by state and local governments and the private sector. One of the better known of these is Project Head Start, the largest child support program, which provides day care and an educational program for preschool children who would otherwise not be able to perform in the public schools at the level of their more affluent classmates. Funding for 1982 was $911.7 million, and the program served 377,300 children. More than $6,000 million is spent by the Federal Government on an assortment of employment and training programs. The bulk of this amount, about $4,500 million, comes under the authority of the Department of Labor, and goes to support the programs of the federal Comprehensive Employment and Training Act (CETA), which seeks to improve the employability of economically disadvantaged groups such as minorities and youth and counter the effects of economic downturns. Up until 1981, CETA financed a relatively large program of public service employment, in addition to its various training activities. The Reagan Administration wants to replace most of CET A with a block grant to states oriented exclusively to providing the economically disadvantaged with marketable skills. Two other employment and training programs worth mentioning are employment services and rehabilitation services. The employment services program, costing about $500 million in fiscal 1982, pays states to help job seekers find employment and to operate unemployment compensation offices. The rehabilitation services program primarily supports states in their efforts to help handicapped people become self-sufficient. This program cost over $900 miilion in fiscal 1982. Comprehensive federal programs have been established to meet the social welfare needs of American Indians and refugees. The cost of providing cash assistance, health care and social services to these two groups totaled some $1,700 million in fiscal 1982. State governments operate most of the programs that assist refugees, while the Federal Government funds many American Indian assistance programs directly. In closing this survey of social welfare in the United States, it is important to identify some other federally financed programs that, while not specifically aimed at social welfare, do directly benefit the needy. These programs include General Revenue Sharing, Community Development block grants and Urban Development grants, all of which provide federal funds directly to localities for broad purposes. If the past is any indication, some of this money, which exceeded $9,000 million in fiscal 1982, will be used to support or establish social welfare programs. 0 About the Author: David Racine i8 director of govemmenr affairs and social policy of the American Public Welfare Association in Washington, D. C.
ON THE LIGHTER SIDE
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"It's a Hamburger Surprise. You had it yesterday and the day before and you certainly didn't expect to get it tonight." Š
1982 jerry Marcus and Ladies Home Journal.
"Possibly due to a technical error, I seem to be getting someone else's comeuppance."
Sendak's World Millions of children have seen their fantasies take shape in the books of Maurice Sendak. His stories and illustrations-peopled with lovable monsters, goblins, fairies, animals and adventurous children-are often fimtasies from his own childhood: "I don't really believe that the kid I was has grown up into me." In the mid-Sixties art cntlc Brian O'Doherty called Maurice Sendak "one of the most powerful men in the United States" because he has given "shape to the fantasies of millions of children-an awful responsibility. " Over the last three decades, Sendak's 1 I books have been translated into 13 languages and been read by millions of children from Japan to Denmark. One of his books, Where the Wild Things Are (1963), has sold 2.5 million copies, while another, The Nutshell Library, has sold half a million, despite the fact that it is scarcely bigger than a cigarette pack. He has illustrated almost 80 books and received both the Caldecott Award (twice) and the Hans Christian Andersen Award fo'r his contributions to children's literature. The Brussels Opera staged an operatic version of Where the Wild Things Are a couple of years ago with sets and costumes and libretto by Sendak and score by Oliver Knussen, while Really Rosie, an animated television feature in 1975, has sidestepped into a second life in an off-Broadway musical. Sendak has designed the sets and costumes for major operatic productions of Mozart's The Magic Flute and Leos Janacek's The Cunning Little Vixen. In November 1980 Harry N. Abrams published the giant book The Art of Maurice Sendak by Selma G. Lanes to grace coffee tables around the world. Sendak has come a long way from the shy, sickly child looking out the window of a Brooklyn ghetto, yet this semireclusive man continues to create an intensely personal art despite critics who would 91ake him a public "power" figure. Sendak doesn't read to children, doesn't ask their advice, and doesn't take it when given it. "I just do books for them," he says. In the past Sendak has been both praised and criticized for shedding light on the cmotio!"!s, anxieties, and obsessions of the
child's psyche-not by children, but by adults uneasy with the child in themselves. Around the time of the publication of Outside Over There last year, Senoak said that he hoped that people would look at his new book with an aesthetic appreciation first - from the heart and the eye- "before they throw it into Dr. Freud's cabinet to be deloused and scraped clinically clean of any artistic mystery and pleasure it might give. I'm not a closet psychologist, nor should my books be seen as a quick course in child anxiety. I want people to enjoy them." An hour from New York, tucked into the Connecticut woods at the end of a dirt road, is a gray house with black shutters. Beware of Dogs, says a sign, and as the dogs begin to bark, Maurice Sendak opens the door. Bespectacled and bearded, Sendak is an agile, compact man of 54 who still deprecatingly refers to himself as a "dwarf." Though the sound of crickets has not cured his insomnia, he's found peace and security in the country. His house is exquisitely decorated with American antiques while the walls bear original Audubon prints and Blake watercolors. "I'm going to put that funny-looking fellow into a story sometime," he says, pointing to an ancient wooden whirligig of a soldier. A paradisaical Samuel Palmer landscape over the fireplace hints at this artist's influence on the pastoral drawings of Outside Over There. Sendak's sunny studio at one end of his house is filled with Mickey Mouseabilia, woodcuts of Winslow Homer, and watercolors of bats by Beatrix Potter. An etching
Left: Maurice Sendak in his New York studio, where he draws illustrations for children's books-some authored by him-to the constant accompaniment of Mozart's music.
Above: The hero of Sendak's most popular book, Where the Wild Things Are, is Max. Sent off to bed without supper for being naughty, Max
fantasizes about being king of a jungle which has wild monsters and beasts. The book ends with a tired Max sending them off to bed without
their suppers and then wishing he was back home (see illustration on page 43). He returnsto find a tray of goodies waiting for him.
of Mozart as a young genius hangs above a bookshelf filled with first editions of James, Melville and fairy tale classics. The studio is neat, uncluttered, and on the drawing table lie sketches for costumes and sets. It is here that Sendak works in silence, bright orange earplugs in place, writing the text of a story completely before turning to pen and brush. The 359-word text of Outside Over There went through 100 drafts in five years before Sendak pulled out the earplugs and began drawing to the music of Mozart. Outside Over There may be Sendak's most outwardly serious book to date and his most beautiful. It is the story of a kidnapping by goblins and the courage of young Ida who rescues her baby sister through cleverness, faith and musical talent. The book is a dramatic departure, stylistically, from previous ones. The pictures have a startling realism to them, due to the fact that Sendak made use of photographs he commissioned of two children. Unlike Where the Wild Things Are, whose monsters were lovably horrible and utterly from the imagination, the goblins of Outside Over There are eventually revealed as real babies when their mysterious robes fall from them. Babies have a full range of terrible goblinesque passions, aNd Sendak shows how quickly their moods can change. It's not that Sendak is a better writer or illustrator than others, but he has an uncanny ability to tap into what it felt like to be a baby and a child. "You see, I don't really believe that the kid I was has grown up into me. He still exists somewhere .... The pleasures I get as an adult are heightened by the fact that I experience them as a child," he once said. A Sendak illustration for poet Robert Graves' The Big Green Book which has a typ.ical Sendak theme: settling scores with one's elders. Here young Jack, who has magically become a wizard and won his uncle's and aunt's estate, smugly hears them begging him to be merciful.
In the Night Kitchen, inspired like most Sendak books by memories of his own childhood, is the story of a boy who dreams his way into the delicious world of bakers who look like comedian Oliver Hardy. It was Ernest Hemingway who said that the most important ingredient for a writer was an unhappy childhood. Sendak remembers his own childhood as dark and deep, filled with anxiety, sickness, and dissatisfaction. The third and youngest child of a Jewish immigrant family in Brooklyn, he was two and a half when he contracted a 13-week case of measles and double pneumonia, a bout that left him frail for much of his life. It gave him a fear of death and made him an outsider, a kid who couldn't play outdoor games as well as the other children, a kid who stayed indoors, who was called "sissy." His parents pampered him, overprotected him. "You? Go sledding? Why you'd catch pneumonia in a week." He watched life through windows, often from the lap of his grandmother, a playful woman who would pull the window shade up and down like a camera shutter so that the street scene became a peep show. Later, Sendak would write this child into the book Kenny's Window. Sendak's father, a dressmaker whose business was hit hard by the Depression, had a knack for storytelling-often making up his own versions of Old Testament stories. Sendak remembers one in particular about a child taking a walk with his parents. "Somehow he becomes separated from them," Sendak told Selma G. Lanes who wrote the book about him, "and snow begins to fall. The child shivers in the cold and huddles under a tree, sobbing in terror. Then an enormous, angelic figure hovers over him and says, as he draws the boy up, 'I am Abraham, your father.' His fear gone, the child looks up and also sees Sarah. When his mother and father find him, he is dead." Not all the stories Sendak heard were this dark, and his memories of his father are warm, happy. His mother was the perfect
Jewish matron: affectionate, sometimes overly protecting or abrupt, but always concerned, caring. Sendak loved and admired his older sister Natalie, but his salvation was his brother Jack. "He was unlike other kids, kind, strange and amazingly patient. We were almost too close, and even today it's hard for us to be in the same room together, we're so much alike." (Today, Jack is also a children's author.) The two boys spent hours drawing and making books together, constructing intricate wooden toys with movable parts to illustrate the fairy tales they loved. "We once built an entire 1939 World's Fair out of wax-complete with a hemisphere. It puzzled our relatives, but my parents, I think, were glad that their two crazy sons could at least do something." What Sendak described as benign neglect later turned to encouragement. "While I don't think they believed I could earn a living at children's books, they felt anything to do with books was an honorable pursuit." Sendak emigrated across the East River to the magical Manhattan of his dreams, putting the horrors of high school as far behind him as possible. "The prospect of college was an absolute nightmare. I took night classes at the Art Students' League, where I could dodge in and dodge out. But I really didn't attend." Impressed by the mechanical wooden toys he and Jack had built, F.A.O. Schwarz, America's most elegant toystore, hired Sendak to do window displays. It was here that Sendak met Ursula Nordstrom, an editor at Harper & Row, who commissioned his first job, illustrating a children's book, Marcel Ayme's The Wonderful Farm, in 1951. Nordstrom is still his editor and Harper & Row his publisher. Where the Wild Things Are is unquestionably Sendak's most popular book. The
story begins with an unruly Max dressed in a wolf suit, who terrifies the dog and goads his mother to call him "wild thing." When he responds with "I'll eat you up!" he's banished to his room without supper. But that night, Max's room turns into a forest, and he sails on a boat to where the wild things are. Here, he tames large beasts with a magic spell and cavorts among them as king until he grows homesick. Smelling food across the water, he sails back to his room to find supper waiting for him-"And it was still hot." When it was rdeased by Harper & Row in 1963 with minimal publicity, neitherSendak nor his editors expected the controversy that ensued. From adults, librarians, and critics came the questions: Would the book frighten children, would they emulate Max's tantrum, or have nightmares about beasts? One librarian wrote, "It is not a book to be left where a sensitive child may come upon it at twilight." A child psychologist wrote clinically, "Where the Wild Things Are projects, releases, and masters a universal experience for the child: the wish to eat others, the fear of eating others, or of being eaten oneself. If some children are frightened by the book, it is because they are either too young or too weak (i.e., ill or disturbed). Then the fantasy of rage that is released is too much for them." One mother told Sendak she had read the book to her daughter 10 times, and the child screamed every time. When the author asked why she had continued this practice, the woman replied, "Because it's a Caldecott Award book, she ought to like it." Sendak found this reasoning absurd. "If a child doesn't like a book, throw it away. Children don't give a damn about awards." Sendak was particularly amused by an eight-year-old who asked in a letter, "How much does it cost to get to where the wild things are? If it is not expensive, my sister and I would like to spend the summer there. " He was also moved to hear that the book was being used successfully to reach autistic children. One child, who had remained in that strange oblivion beyond reality for years, grasped the book and spoke for the first time. Sendak, in his 1964 speech for the Caldecott Award, said that "what is too often overlooked is that from their earliest years ¡children live on familiar terms with disrupting emotions, that fear and anxiety are an intrinsic part of their everyday lives, that they continually cope with frustration as best they can. And it is through fantasy that children achieve catharsis. It is the best means they have for taming wild things." In 1967 Sendak was in England taping a
BBC-TV interview when he suddenly faltered and couldn't speak. He had suffered a coronary. He was taken to a hospital where he remained for five weeks. At 39, the confrontation with his own mortality was startling, as if a child were being stricken by an adult disease by mistake, or, on purpose by God. At the same time, Sendak's mother was dying of cancer and not wishing to increase her anguish, he kept the heart attack a secret. Returning to America after several months of recuperation, he found that his beloved Sealyham Terrier, Jennie, a companion of 14 years, was also dying of cancer. "That year was a nightmare," recalls Sendak. The terrier's eventual death was on Sendak's mind the previous year, as he sadly watched Jennie aging and began the book Higglety Pigglety Pop: Or, There Must Be More to Life as a way of dealing with her inevitable death. Jennie had appeared with
." minor roles in almost all of Sendak's books from 1954 onward. "Jennie was the love of my life," says Sendak, and when the book came out a month before Jennie's death, he wept. The book is based on an American nursery rhyme written by Samuel Griswold Goodrich in 1846: "Higglety Pigglety Pop!/ The dog has eaten the mop!/ The pig's in a hurry.l The cat's in a f1urry.l Higglety Pigglety Pop!" Sendak began with this simple framework to write a tale of a dog who has everything, but leaves home to discover the world. After gaining "experience," she becomes an actress in the World Mother Goose Theater, where she remains, famous and immortal. Essentially a melancholy story leavened with humor, the book reflects Sendak's anxiety over the imminent deaths of his dog and his mother. "It's my favorite book. Outlandish, funny, but with dark shadows," he says. After Jennie'~ death, Sendak bought a golden retriever, 10, and a German Shepherd, Erda, who gave birth to Agamemnon. All the dogs have received roles in Sendak's books. Sendak was not the first children's author to immortalize a pet. Sendak quotes French novelist Jules Renard: "The beauties
of literature. I lose a cow. I write about her death, and this brings me in enough to buy another cow." The artist has the rare privilege of turning the losses of life into gains, making memory and care immortal on the page. Sendak was born in 1928, the same year Disney conceived Mickey Mouse, and that rodent's effect on him was immediate and long lasting. Sendak grew up watching Mickey Mouse films, chewing Mickey Mouse bubblegum, and brushing his teeth with Mickey Mouse toothpaste. His first drawing at the age of six was of the mouse. It is no coincidence that Sendak called the boy in In the Night Kitchen (1970) Mickey. In the Night Kitchen delivered all the psychological undercurrents of Alice in Wonderland with the fresh graphic punch of the comic strip. Sendak remembers an advertisement from his childhood for Sunshine Bakers which said: We Bake While You Sleep! "This seemed like the most sadistic thing in the world, because all I wanted to do was stay up and watch!" He also remembers the moments in the kitchen when his mother baked on Fridays-the feel of the flour-dusted dough and the scent of baking bread. And this book was dedicated to his recently deceased parents. The book begins with Mickey falling asleep, entering a dream logic which finds him falling through the dark out of his pajamas, down, down, down, into a big bowl of dough in the night kitchen-a Busby Berkeley-like skyline of New York where the buildings are made of baking soda boxes; eggbeaters, cocoa containers, and flour bins lit up by the moon and stars. Our hero falls into a batter being mixed by three look-alike bakers modeled after Oliver Hardy. But before Mickey can be accidentally popped into a "Mickey Oven," he springs up, fashions an airplane out of dough, and flies up to a giant milk bottle. He falls into the milk, immersed in pleasure, emerging to triumphantly yodel, "Cock-adoodle-doo' " In the Night Kitchen became one of the few books to deal with the urgency of children's dreams and as such was fair game for amateur Freudians. How does Sendak react to such remarks? "It's so boring because everyone is peddling their own obsessions. I've heard it so much that I've reached the point where I just ignore it." Sendak did two animated sequences for television's Sesame Street in 1970, and, loving it, worked with independent producer Sheldon Riss in 1974 to complete a halfhour animated film, Really Rosie, starring the Nutshell Kids, about children in Brooklyn who get themselves through afternoon boredom by fantasy antics and playacting. Rock-composer Carole King, who also grew
up in Brooklyn, wrote the music, and, in February of 1975, CBS televised it. For a child who grew up worshipping the flickering screen image of Mickey Mouse, this was a dream come true. Sendak still has a color photograph of the giant billboard announcing to all of bustling Broadway that Rosieand Sendak-had arrived. Earlier this year Sendak went offBroadway painting the sets for Rosie's debut as a play at the American Place Theater starring children under II. Although Sendak detested school himself, and never attended college, he taught a seminar in children's literature at Yale a few years ago and is an authority on children's literature of the past. Children are extremely vulnerable creatures who live in an environment they have little control over, Sendak reminds us. And he remains greatly curious as to how children use their imaginations to overcome boredom, fear, pain, and anxiety-to find joy. "It is a constant miracle to me that children manage to grow up." Outside Over There is an example of Sendak's persistent inquiry into the mind of his own childhood. "Coaxing memory with Mozart is kind of creepy, exciting. In a sense I draw what I already know, yet it's always unexpected; memory becomes the creative act. It's like coming back to something ancient in yourself. This book, Outside Over There, is the closest I've come to the ancient in myself." But like Sendak, I believe that his work should be seen a~ an artistic contribution to our culture, not as picture book psychology. Sendak works in a deceptively simple form-children's books-to create something that, like any truly great work of art, has powers that can never be explained away intellectually. All art was made to be read, looked at, reacted to emotionally, not criticized or academicized, despite the disturbing trend in our culture to do this ad nauseam. At the end of our interview, Sendak took his three dogs for a walk in the woods across the road. "This is where I do most of my work-walking. I turn ideas over and over in my head, occasionally writing them down so I don't forget. You always have ideas within you, dormant perhaps, but when you reach the right stage in your life, they appear in your conscious mind." "You see," he joked, "all you need is a circular walking path through the woods to become a great writer." 0 About the Author: Barnaby Conrad III is a contributing editor of Horizon magazine.
Sendak used the 19th-century illustrators' technique of luminous cross-hatching for drawing the demon in Isaac Bashevis Singer's Zlateh the Goat and Other Stories.
Who Benefits? Imagine the following scenarios: • You are president of Company A, a U.S.-based multinational corporation that has already spent tens of millions of dollars on a novel process for mining the deep seabed. Millions more will be needed before,commercial operations can begin and, even then, it will be years before the investment is recovered. But now a quasi~governmental international body says that your company will not be permitted to exploit the process commercially without first sharing its secrets with a competitor created and run by this very international body. • You are marketing manager in West Africa for B Corporation, a U.S. manufacturer of consumer products. For years you have routinely used computers to accumulate financial and marketing information and send it back to company headquarters. Suddenly you learn that the countries in which you operate will not allow computerized data to be sep.t abroad unless it is first reviewed by the host government. You protest and are told that such interference with your business is authorized in a multilateral agreement sponsored by the United Nations. • As chief executive officer of XYZ Pharmaceuticals of America, you take pride in your company's record for developing safe and beneficial drugs that have met the exacting standards of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and comparable foreign agencies, and have been marketed throughout the world. Now you are told that approval by national agencies will no longer suffice. The World Health Organization is establishing an "international FDA" whose clearance will be required for all pharmaceuticals sold in countries acceding to its authority. Unimaginable scenarios? Not if the new international regulators have their way. For in recent years, while Americans concerned about undue regulation have focused on their own government, a fast-proliferating assortment of international bgdies have been moving to regulate various aspects of commercial, scientific, cultural and political life worldwide. Although not part of the explicitly coordinated global program, the international regulatory programs that have sprung onto the world scene during the past decade have, a common source, a common body of principles and common methods Jor attaining their goals. To be sure, there is nothing new about the concept of having an international body work out standards designed to govern particular areas of coinme~ce. Such groups date back at least to the Hanseatic League of Medieval Europe. In their modern form, they range from the International Union for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works and the Hague Conventions of the late 19th century to the International Telecommunications Satellite Organization and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) of today. Such groups have been concerneCl 'Yith alleviating confusion and other difficulties arising in areas where nations rub up against each other-particularly mqritime transportation, aviation, industrial property rights, meteorology and trade. Typically, they have attempted to facilitate, Abridged by permission from Regulation. Copyright Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research.
© 1981 by The
American
rather than restrict, trade and, in so doing, to benefit all nations by benefiting none in particular. In the 1960s and particulady in the 1970s, however, a number of countries that had only recently achieved indep~ndence began to see a new use for multilateral standard-setting bodies. The end of colonialism had not brought the expected better life, at least materially, for most of the Third ,World. Indeed, with the departure of expatriate armies and administrators, conditions in many new nations went from bad to worse'. Nor was there much hope of quick improvement. U.N. and other multilateral development initiatives had failed to live up to expectations. Eastern and Western , ~ bilateral aid programs were viewed with suspicion. Multinational corporations and foreign investment in general were seen as exploitative. And few leaders in the Third World were disposed to take the risks inherent in tackling head-on the huge educational, cultural and infrastructural problems that were so central to their countries' difficulties. In this climate, the Third World turned increasingly to multilateral organizations, particularly those within the U.N. complex, and to the idea of international regulation. Through such collective action, Third World nations, ever expanding in number, hoped to attain a power far exceeding what they might achieve individually or even regionally. And because those organizations operate on the principle of one-nation, one-vote, they would provide the ideologically attractive trappings of democracy for attempts to fashion the world economy along egalitarian lines. Even more to the point, standard-setting bodies convened under the aegis of the various U.N. bodies could be counted on to produce majorities friendly to Third World aims. Besides, those bodies were amply financed through substantial contributiop.s'from Western nations and, in contrast to most Third World governments, were well supplied with the type of professional civil servant needed for tackling complex regulatory matters. The movement to use international bodies as vehicles for transforming Third World economies found one of its earliest concrete ,expressions in the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD). Established in 1964 as a permanent body for formulating general rules on tra{fe between the developed and less-developed nations, with a view to aiding the latter's development, UNCT AD soon began interesting itself in "codes of conduct" strongly favorable to non-Western nations. It also served as the midwife for the birth of fhe U.N. Charter of Economic Rights and Dut,~es of States, adopted in 1974 by a General Assembly vote of 120-6-10 (with the United States, Belgium, Denmark, West Germany, Luxembourg and the United Kingdom voting "no"). The new international regulators have cited this charter, along with its call for a New International ,Economic Order arranged through U.N.sponsored "global negotiations," to justify their schemes for recasting world economic relations. No consistent economic theory, save that of redistribution, underlies the charter. Itstreatnient of raw materials contrasts sharply with its treatment of technology: it would have the •
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BROADWAY HIT ANIMAL DONORS LADY OF THE HARBOR SATELLITE SEER
Lanky Tommy Tune (center) has become one of the most sought after and successful choreographers and directors of the u.s. musical theater. Here he is surrounded by members of the cast of Nine, a musical loosely based on the Federico Fellini film Blj2, which won Broadway's prestigious Tony award as best musical of 1981-82. Tune was named best director and the show's composer, Maury Yeston, was honored for the score. As in the film, the story concerns a movie director besieged by beautiful women.
Over the last two years, several developing countries have achieved economic growth that has been described as impressive by the World Bank. Their success is all the more dramatic, notes the Bank's latest annual report, because during the same period most industrial nations experienced stagnation. Although per capita income in all developing regions grew at an annual rate of only 0.2
percent last year, countries in East Asia and the Pacific registered an impressive 3.9 percent per capita growth rate, and countries in South Asia grew at a rate of 3.5 percent in 1981. (The Indian economy, says the Bank report, rebounded in 1981, and it~ real gross domestic product rose by 7.5 percent, and this continued in fiscal year 1982.) However, per capita growth rate of countries in Southern Europe and the Mediterranean was only 0.9 percent in 1981, and Sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America, the Caribbean, North Africa and the Middle East actually experienced negative growth.
ive years ago, Tanzania in East Africa produced little fresh milk. Today, .it has 1,200 cows providing fresh milk for thousands of Tanzanians. Victories such as this 10 the battle against world hunger are being won in more than 100 countries with the help of an Arkansas-based organization called Heifer Project International (HPI). HPI operates under this principle: Poor farmers are given livestock on the solemn promise that they will pass along the first female offspring to another needy family. Thus, there is a chain reaction. During its 36 years of operation, HPI has distributed some 50,000 animals, plus 1.5 million chickens. HPI was founded by Dan West, a farmer from Indiana. Working as a relief volunteer, he distributed powdered milk to hungry families overseas during World War II. Then he asked himself: "Why not provide lasting relief to the world's hungry in a gift that could be shared?" Returning to America, he met with farmers and church people. The result: 18 heifers were shipped to Europe-and HPI was born. Through the years, West's "sharing the gift" vision has remained the guiding philosophy' of HPI. Today, the organization also distributes dairy goats, sheep, swine, beef cattle, poultry, rabbits and honeybees. HPI gets financial support from U.S. church-affiliated groups, individuals, foundations, farmers, businesspeople, civic clubs, the Federal Government-and even schoolchildren. In 1980, it received a record $3.3 million in gifts, most less than $100 each.-Douglas Jones
These vast variations in economic performance, notes the report, are the result of differing economic policies pursued by the developing countries. "The conclusion we have reached at the World Bank," said Helen Hughes, director of the Bank's economic analysis and projections department, "is that the key factor in growth is economic policy. That is why the Bank is not just a lending institution. We engage in a dialogue with member countries about their structural adjustment policies." World Bank lending, according to the report, totaled $10,330 million in the
fiscal year ending June 30, 1982. Credits from the International Development Association (IDA)-the Bank's concessional lending affiliate-to low-income countries amounted to $2,686 million in fiscal 1982. The United States contributes about 22 percent of World Bank subscriptions and about 31 percent of IDA loans. India was the biggest beneficiary of the Bank loans. According to the annual reo port, loans approved for India totaled $1,264.8 million for fiscal 1982. India was also the largest recipient of IDA funds-$900 million, more !han a third of all IDA lending.
T
his month 96 years ago, the Statue O.f Liberty, a gift, from the people of FrancetQ the people of the United States, was dedi~~tetl by President Grover Clevela'nd on a small island facing New York Harbor.Since then, the coloss·al A5-meter copper-wrol1ght figure,of Liberty ,with .aburning torch. in one hand and a tablet symbollzingthe Declaration of Independence in the: other,'has welcom{;d millions Of immigrants to the United States from alfover the world; from 1892 tQ 1954, the nearby)lhectare Elli:s Island served as America's major immigration center, through which passed morethan one-third of the forebears of the' current American population.
of
Today ,the' Statue Liberty and tHe island need major .repairs. The statue ha§ suffered .from wear and tear as millions visit iteach year, as.,weU as from the corrosive effects of the moisture,lad{;p atmosphere of New ~ork I1arbor .Many Qfthe bu~ldirigs oil Ellis' Island have fallen into serious .di§repair since the '.•1mmigration center was closed in 1954. To restore the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Islandte their fQrmerglory, Presiden~ Ro~ald Reagan has: announced the . formation of a 21-member commission which' wilT raise as much as $100 million from private sources for the restoration program, to be completed before the statue's centennial in 1986.
the first commercial comIn just 20 years-since munications sateIF.te,Te.lstar, was launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida. in 1962'-the pace of progress in global communications has been phenomenal, and its impact on life profound. And with tHe new revolutionary changes taking.place everY.;Q~y inspact( teghnology, it se~ms safe to predictthit by the end of this century, communicat,ions satellites would have changed lifestyles in ways difficult to visujilize now. A new breed of experts is studying the impact this' revolutionafy technology is having on the quiet accumulation and transmittal of knowledge. They ask suchquestions as: How best can developing countries utilizeit for their developmental efforts? What changes will it bring in the lifestyles of the, future? How shall we prepare to cope with these changes? One such expert is Dr. Robert T. Filep, who is visiting India this month. Educator,fl.uthor, businessman and, above all, communications satellite expert, Filep, 51 is president of Communications 21 Corporation, a C.alifornia consulting firm specializing in satellite user application. During his Visit, he will give a series of lectures on space telecommunications al1Qthe new technology in New Delhi, Calcutta, Ahmedabad, Bangalore and Trivandrum from October 3!0 October 15. In particular, he will discuss how direct broadcast systems (DBS) might be used today by developing nations. DBS satellites involve the transmission of television arid radio signals and the high speed transfer of data. Besides speaking about the future applications of communications, Filep will also discuss his. surrent project-'planning telecommunications systems to meet the needs of developing countries. The communications needs of the subcontinent are not new to Filep.\He was in India for a year in 1975 as a Fulbright-Hayes lecturer, during which he studied the country's communications requirements. Before leaving India, Filep also assisted the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space' Administration in worki~·g out the details for the repositioning of the Applications Technology Satellite-6 (ATS-6) over India. The satellite was lent to India in the Seventies for transmitting health and educational programs to the country'~ rural areas.
former fetch as high and the latter as Iowa price as possible. On the one hand, sovereign states should have an unrestricted right to form primary commodity cartels and are free to regulate foreign investment and multinational corporate activity. On the other hand, soverei3n states must share the technology needed to exploit what is called the common heritage of mankind. The charter's "sovereign rights" will thus in practice be mostly enjoyed by the Third World, while the "sovereign duties" will mostly belong to the so-calleg First World. Among the areas in which the new international regulators have been most active in the eight years since the New International Economic Order was promulgated are the extraction of natural resources, the transfer of technology, multinational corporate conduct, shipping, exports and imports, news gathering and the transmission of data via computer. This new, highly politicized scheme of international regulation is replete with problems, for both developed and lessd.eveloped nations and for their citizens as well. For the United States and other developed nations, the proposals not only threaten immediate commercial, economic and political interests but also conflict with the principles of free enterprise and a free press that are the foundation of the very affluence that the Third World is seeking to share. At their boldest, the international regulators seek mandatory redistribution of wealth from the developed world. The space treaty (Agreement Governing the Activities of States on the Moon and Other Celestial Bodies) and Law of the Sea treaty would bring it about by obligating multinationals to surrender part of the mineral wealth they extract. Proposals on technology transfer and multinational conduct would do it less directly by allowing host governments to cast and recast contractual terms involving foreign businesses, and the Liner Code and Multifiber Agreement would create artificial commercial opportunities for Third World enterprises. Finally, striking at the free movement of information, many of the proposed codes urge the yielding up of data generated~ by the developed world and the closing down (or the shaping) of that produced by the Third World. Bad as much of this new international regulation might be for the developed world, it would be far more harmful to the developing world itself. By ignoring the realities of capital formation and economic incentives, it would greatly impede the accumulation and flow of capital and resources that are the true prerequisites to developing both the technology and the economic growth sought by the less-developed nations. No reasonable person would deny that the Third World, with its abundance of natural resources and its populous markets, is important to Western business. But the fact is that, by and large, the lessdeveloped countries are by no means as vital as ideologues believe them to be. To use an example noted by Raymond Waldmann, ~the U.S. Commerce Department's assistant secretary for international economic policy, more than 90 percent of all technology transfers by private enterprises occur outside the less-developed countries. It is folly to assume that the multinationals responsible for these transfers will freely divulge valuable data just to hang on to the little business and less profit that so many of these. countries represent. What they are far more likely to do is refuse to undertake new technology transfers to, and investments in, the nations involved-leaving those nations the poorer for their futile regulatory effort. Likewise, if businesses and news organizations cannot gather data freely in the Third World, the developed nations will undoubtedly suffer, since they will lose access to accurate
political, cultural and economic information from that part of the world. But the less-developed countries will lose even more. Not only will their concerns be less intelligible to the rest of the world, but they will lose what are, in many instances, the most reliable and forthright sources of information about themselves and about each other. For all the flaws of these international regulatory schemes, it is neither responsible nor practical to ignore the circumstances that have given them birth. The hard fact is that the gap between rich and poor nations continues to widen-that, by the turn of the century, as many as 850 million people may be living in abject poverty. Still, handouts are not the answer. Even if the United States and its allies were capable of sustainingp quarter of the world's populace indefinitely, wealth transfers have shown themselves to be all but useless in helping the masses of the less-developed countries break out of poverty. Nor does the answer lie in international regulation. Much of that effort is just ~s demeaning and counterproductive as traditional foreign aid. Even worse, it would sap the vitality of the very economic forces and entities that could, given the chance, show the Third World how to help itself. Insofar as there is an answer, it lies in more decentralization and more freedom rather than in tighter regulatory fetters, whether of the national or transnational variety. The sorry economic performance of the world's command-and-control societies is itself the most convincing witness for the wealthcreating power of free institutions. Compare, for example, such pairs of nations as East Germany and West Germany, Burma and Singapore, Tanzania and Kenya-and, for that matter, the Soviet Union and the United States. In each instance, the country whose politics and economics are freer has grown far faster. What an irony it IS that, in the face of this record, the international regulators have turned to the model that faileda model that can only spread the stagnation and dependence now gripping parts of the Third World. The basic issues underlying the new international regulation were aired ~at the Cancun Conference, held in Mexico in October 198J. There, the leaders of Third World nations and others urged the United States to follow the course of international wealth sharing-global negotiations under U.N. auspices looking toward the creation of the New International Economic Order. There, also, President Reagan pressed the Third World to focus instead on free market solutions-on combining cooperative international approaches with the use of positive incentives in order to promote true economic development. In many ways, then, to the extent that the proposal for Global Negotiations flourishes in the aftermath of Cancun, so will international regulation. 0 About the Author: Richard Berryman and Richard Schifter are partners in a l~1V firm based in Washington, D. C.
Answers to quiz on page 37 1 d. Laser-drilled hole in silicon wafer, magnified 2,400 times. 2 d. Glass beads, magnified 900 times. 3 a. Ball of solder, magnified 35 times. 4 b. Etched epoxy on hardboard, magnified 2,100 times. 5 c. Epoxy powder' on aluminum substrate, , magnified 500 times.
19b
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"The quiet star is gone. Was there ever an actor who moved us as much as Henry. Fonda with his abashed silences, broken by that prairie-flat voice with its tumbleweed gusts of vowels, that long dream-stalking stride, those eyes fixed on some unreachable horizon? Fonda, who died [in August] at 77, worked from the stillest center of any of our most potent actors. It was an oddly Amer..- ican stillness, the eloquent passivity of a painting by Edward Hopper or a poem by Robert Frost .... " wrote critic Jack Kroll. Fonda appeared in more than 80 films between 1934 and his Academy Award-winning performance in On Golden Pond in 1981. Usually he played characters of exceptional integrity-and he devoted part of his career at a time when he was being sought for films to the less remunerative and more demanding craft of acting on the stage, to hone his art and maintain contact with a live audience. He was chosen by some of the best film directors: Hitchcock, Wyler, Sturges and Ford-and he delivered great performances. Fonda came from Omaha, Nebraska, in the geographical heart of America, and his memorable career celebrated his respect for his roots.
I. Henry Fonda, Jane Darwell and Doris Bowdon in John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath (1940). 2. Jack Lemmon, Jamgs Cagney, Fonda and William Powell in Mister Roberts (1955). 3. Fonda as Young Mr. Lincoln (1939). 4. Fonda onstage in 1978 as a Supreme Court Justice in First Monday in October (with Tom Stechschulte).