CAPSULE Eighty-eight nations are allied through the World Health Organization in a world-wide war against ancient enemies of mankind -eom1l'ttmicable diseases.
One oj t~ma't spectacular campaigns has been India's victory over malaria. Page sixteen.
The Presidency of the United States has come downfrom George Washington in a succession uninterrupted for nearly 175 years. A popular historian discusses the future of the Presidency of the United States. Page six.
A literary rebellion occurred in American fiction in the wake of the First World War. Trends of the modern American novel will be analyzed in a series of two articles, the first of which commences in this issue on page twenty-eight. At Glen Canyon in Arizona, a mammoth dam is being "placed" into a gorge of the Colorado River from the canyon rim. Al! materials, equipment and workmen are loweredfrom an aerial cableway. Page twenty-two. George Washington Carver, born 100 years ago to parents who were slaves, became a great humanitarian scientist, revered by his countrymen. Page thirty-six.
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At Brookhaven National Laboratory, center 0/ nuclear research, an important area 0/ experimentation is the development 0/ new plant species through controlled mutation. Rust-resistant wheat and oats varieties, improved rice seedlings, are among the results achieved. The unique carnation 011 the cover with blossoms 0/ three different colors, was" bred" in Brookhal'en's gamma field See story 011 page 44.
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Words are a span from the thoughts of a man to another man and another man and another .... The image caught by camera or brush spans from eye to eye, joining the sight of many men in a common experience ....
Our legends span the past and present, threading the countless efforts of our ancient purposes with all our new ....
Our aspirations spanjrom
the urgent here and now into the infinite possibilities of approaching generations ....
:;CC~Is:e,N This magazine is offered as a span from America to India ... from man to man, reaching across seas and centuries, reaching from old-histories and new beginnings into the horizons of tomorrow ... a span of words and images to link our common hopes, our common pleasures and delights, our common goals and values.
It is our hope that SPAN may help to bridge the distances between our lands with mutual understanding, appreciation, and respect.
O-\3j..,. George Washington
was inaugurated in 1790 as the first President of the United States. The succession of Presidents has continued uninterrupted for nearly 175 years.
The U,~.Pre~iden~ W
E need no gift of prophecy to predict a long and exciting future for the American Presidency. There are those who dream of a President in the image of Calvin Coolidge; there are those who fear that the Presidency will be sapped by" the assaults of ignorance and envy." Neither the dream nor the fear is likely to find much substance in coming events. All the massive political and social forces that brought the Presidency to its present state of power and glory will continue to work in the future. Our economy and society will grow more rather than less interdependent, and we will turn to the President, anxiously if not always confidently, for help in solving the problems that fall thickly upon us. Our government will become more rather than less involved in the affairs of" mankind, from China to Peru," and the peoples will look to its executive head for bold and imaginative leadership. Emergencies will grow nastier, Congress will become more unwieldy, and politics will take on more and more the spirit of a vast town meeting. And surely we have not seen our last great man in the White House. The people of the United States are no longer interested in presidential aspirants who promise only to be meek and mild. In the foreseeable future, as in the recent past, they will expect and get a full measure of presidential leadership. There is a Presidency in our future, and it is the Presidency of Jackson and Lincoln rather than of Monroe and Buchanan, of Roosevelt and Eisenhower rather than of Harding and Coolidge. Many Americans, not all of them Miniver Cheevys, would insist that the gravest defect in the Presidency is the high concentration of power that rests in the President's hands, the startling expansion of this power over ,the past twentyfive years, the frustrations that face Congress in the attempt to regain its share and thereby to " restore the balance of the Constitution." No one who pays even passing attention to American politics can fail to know the full particulars of the case against the strong Presidency and the proposed steps to restore the old balance. Senator Taft's challenge to Truman's initial action in Korea, Representative Caudert's attempt to limit Eisenhower's power to station troops in Europe by " rider," Senator Bricker's campaign to reduce any President's power to negotiate treaties and agreements with other nations, Judge Pine's restatement of the Whig or " errand-boy" theory of the Presidency in the District Court decision in the Steel Seizure case, Senator McCarthy's riotous assault on the first principles of the Constitution-all these are straws, or whole bales of hay, in a wind that beats relentlessly on the White House. Challenges arise in every Congress to the scope if not the existence of the President's power to adjust tariffs, issue ordinances, make appointments, and influence the passage of legislation. And in Persuading the country to adopt the Twenty-second Amendment, which forbids a third term, the opponents of the strong Presidency have struck a mighty blow for their cause.
Clinton Rossiter is Professor of Government at Cornell University and one of the leading students of the Office of the Presidency of the United States. He received his Bachelor of Arts Degree from Cornell and his M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from Princeton University. Dr. Rossiter is the author of a number of popular and authoritative books on the historical development of the U.S. Government. This essay from his work on the U.S. Presidency is presented at the time when Americans are in process of electing their 35th President in a line of succession unbroken since the inauguration of George Washington as the First President.
Their cause, I am bound to say, is ill-considered and ill-starred. It is ill-considered because any major reduction now in the powers of the President would leave us naked to our enemies, to the invisible forces of boom and bust at home and to the visible forces of unrest and aggression abroad. In a country over which industrialism has swept in great waves, in a world where active diplomacy is the minimum price of survival, it is not alone power but a vacuum of power that men must fear. It is ill-starred because the Whigs, who may win skirmishes and even an occasional battle, cannot win a war against American history. The strong Presidency is the product of events that cannot be undone and of forces that continue to roll. We have made our decisions for the New Economy and the New Internationalism, and in making them we have made this kind of Presidency a requisite for the effective conduct of our constitutional system. No government can exercise the supervision that ours does over the economy at home or honor the bargains that ours has made abroad unless it has a strong, unified, energetic executive to lead it. I do not mean to say that" strength" in the Presidency is to be equated with " goodness" and" greatness." A strong President is a bad President, a curse upon the land, unless his means are constitutional and his ends democratic-unless he acts in ways that are fair, dignified, and familiar, and pursues policies to which a " persistent and undoubted" majority of the people has given support. We honor the great Presidents of the past, not for their strength, but for the fact that they used it to build a better America. And in honoring them we recognize that their kind of Presidency is one of our chief bulwarks against decline and chaos. In point of fact, the struggle over the powers of the Presidency, fierce though it may seem, is only a secondary campaign in a political war over the future of America. Few men get heated up over the Presidency alone. Their arguments over its powers are really arguments over the American way of life and the direction in which it is moving. The strong Presidency is an instrument and symbol of today, the weak Presidency is an instrument and symbol of the twenties. Those who truly yearn to " go home again" are right in thinking that a reduction in the powers of the Presidency would be an excellent first step to the rear-although it would be only a first step. It should be clearly understood that an attack on the Presidency like the Bricker Amendment is aimed beyond the Constitution at America's position in the world. The backers of this amendment may be greatly worried about the potential dangers of" presidential autocracy," but they are even more worried about the present consequences of the New Internationalism. Conversely, many voices that are raised for an even stronger Presidency are really raised for an even bigger government with even more control of society. We should not look with equanimity on the Presidency and its huge arsenal of authority. We should be careful about giving the President additional powers, alert to abuses of those he already holds, cognizant that the present balance of the Constitution is not a cause for unlimited self-congratulation. But we can look on it with at least as much equanimity -each of us according to his own blend of blood, bile, phlegm, and melancholy-as we do upon the present state of the Union. For the strength of the Presidency is a measure of the strength of the America in which we now live. Those who accept this America and do not fear the one that is coming accept the strong Presidency soberly. Those who reject this America and are alarmed by the course we are taking reject the strong Presidency angrily. I feel a deep satisfaction, although hardly of complacency, with the American Presidency as it stands today. This feeling of satisfaction springs, I am frank to admit, from a political outlook more concerned with the world as it is than as it is said to have been by reactionaries and is promised to be by radicals. Since this outlook is now shared by a staggering majority of Americans, I feel that I am expressing something more than a personal opinion. If we accept the facts of life today, as we must, and if we shun .the false counsels' of perfection, as we do, then we are bound to conclude that we are richly blessed with a choice instrument of constitutional democracy. Judged in the light of memory and desire, the Presidency is in a state of sturdy health, and that is why we should not give way easily to despair over the defects men of too much zeal or too little courage claim to discover in it. Some of these are not defects at all; some are chronic in our system of government; some could be cured only by opening the way to others far more malign.
This does not mean that we should stand pat with the Presidency. Rather, we should confine ourselves to small readjustments and leave the usual avenues open to prescriptive change. To put the final case for the American Presidency as forcefully as possible, let me point once again to its essential qualities. It strikes a felicitous balance between power and limitations. In a world in which power is the price of freedom, the Presidency, as Professor Merriam and his colleagues wrote in 1937, "stands across the path of those who mistakenly assert that democracy must fail because it can neither decide promptly nor act vigorously." In a world in which power has been abused on a tragic scale, it presents a heartening lesson in the uses of constitutionalism. To repeat a moral, the power of the Presidency moves as a mighty host only with the grain of liberty and morality. The quest of constitutional government is for the right balance of authority and restraint, and Americans may take some pride in the balance the~ have built into the Presidency. It provides a steady focus of leadership-of administration, Congress, and people. In a constitutional system compounded of diversity and antagonism, the Presidency looms up as the countervailing force of unity and harmony. In a society ridden by centrifugal forces, it is, as Sidney Hyman has written, the" common reference point for social effort." The relentless progress of this continental republic has made the Presidency our one truly national political institution. There are those who would reserve this role to Congress, but as the least aggressive of our Presidents, Calvin Coolidge, once testified, "It is because in their hours of timidity the Congress becomes subservient to the importunities of organized minorities that the President comes more and more to stand as the champion of the rights of t~e whole country." The more Congress becomes, in Burke's phrase, " a confused and scufiling bustle of local agency," the more the President must become a clear beacon of national purpose. It is a priceless symbol of our continuity and destiny as a people. Few nations have solved so simply and yet grandly the problem of finding and maintaining an office of state that embodies their majesty and reflects their character. Only the Constitution overshadows the Presidency as an object of popular reverence, and the Constitution does not walk about smiling and shaking hands. The U.S. Presidency has been tested sternly in the crucible of time. Our obsession with youth leads us to forget too easily how long our chief instruments of government have been operating in unbroken career. The Presidency is now the most venerable executive among all the large nations of the earth, and if one looks back beyond 1787 to "times of ancient glory and renown," he will find that the formula has worked before. "The truth is," Henry Jones Ford wrote with grace and insight, "that in the presidential office, as it has been constituted since Jackson's time, American democracy has revived the .oldest political institution of the race, the elective kingship. It is all there: the precognition of the notables and the tumultuous choice of the freemen, only conformed to modcrn conditions." It is, finally, an office of freedom. The Presidency is a standing reproach to those petty doctrinaires who insist that executive power is inherently undemocratic; for, to the exact contrary, it has been more responsive to the needs and dreams of giant democracy than any other office or institution in the whole mosaic of American life. It is no less a reproach to those easy generalizers who think that Lord Acton had the very last word on the corrupting effects of power; for, again to the contrary, his doctrine finds small confirmation in the history of the Presidency. The vast power of this office has not been" poison," as Henry Adams wrote in scorn; rather, it has elevated often and corrupted never, chiefly because those who held it recognized the true source of the power and were ennobled by the knowledge. The American people, who are, after all, the best judges of the means by which their democracy is to be achieved, have made the Presidency their peculiar instrument. As they ready themselves for the pilgrimage ahead, they can take comfort and pride in the thought that it is also their peculiar treasure.
The background print is a view of a recent Presidential Inauguration.
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OR A VARIETY of reasons there is general agreement in the United States that econemic growth is an important goal of the nation's economic policy. But there is disagreement over the relative importance of growth as compared with other goals and even more disagreement over the means by which growth should be pursued. Growth is only one of several major goals of economic policy. Economic freedom, stability of employment, stability of the general price level, economic efficiency, and economic security all are important. Properly conceived and pursued, economic growth is compatible with all these other goals; but it becomes incompatible when pursued too ardently or by inappropriate means. Policies to promote growth or any other goal must reflect a compromise among competing goals. Growth entails certain costs, and attempts to achieve greatly accelerated statistical growth rates may be costly in terms of human hardship. New machines may reduce prematurely not only the values of old machines but also the value of human skills acquired through long training and experience. New industries in new locations may uproot homes and communities near old industries. Unless the costs of economic growth are equitably distributed, it is only reasonable to expect strong resistance to growth and its accompanying changes.â&#x20AC;˘ To get high rates of growth through more rapid capital accumulation means that people must save more, either voluntarily or by compulsion. In state-dominated economies people are forced to sacrifice current consumption and liberty to meet targets of
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Economic The ten essentials of a positive government program for economic growth.
capital formation imposed by the authorities. As much as Americans want economic growth, compulsions and depressed levels of consumption are costs which they would not willingly pay except in dire emergency.
short, that government should force growth on the economy. This approach also involves forcing people to save more either through taxes or through inflation, in order to divert resources into collective use.
A great variety of recipes for growth are in current vogue. Most of them are hackneyed antiques, spruced up a bit with new phrases and served under new names. In the main, these recipes represent two fundamentally different approaches: mercantilism lVld economic liberalism.
The opposite school of thought, the supporters of an open society, hold that the kinds and levels of public services should be determined on the basis of what we really want government to produce, that each governmental activity should be justified either on cost-benefit principles or on sound grounds of social responsibility, and that government can best promote growth by policies which release and give effect to the creative energies of private citizens.
In many ways the debate about economic growth today is similar to the great debate two centuries ago over how best to promote the wealth of nations. The mercantilist approach of the 17th and 18th centuries was an engineering approach. The government by detailed design and elaborate regulation of economic life attempted to impose a coordinated plan of growth on society. Sumptuary laws to prevent frippery and waste, public monopolies to channel investment wisely, detailed regulation of labor and trade-all these were part of the scheme of things. Mercantilism gave way to economic liberalism - a biological approach to growth with the government cultivating growth, not imposing it. The great success of the biological approach, especially in Great Britain and the United States, is a matter of historical record. It remains to be seen whether our basically liberal approach will give way to a rising tide of mercantilist reaction. Today one school of thought, the modern mercantilists, say that the government should create growth by massive increases in the quantity and diversity of government services and activity-in
9rowth
While the factors that determine percentage rates of growth over a span of years are not fully understood, the success of past growth efforts and accumulated economic knowledge do tell us a good deal about the conditions of economic progress and how the government can best cultivate growth. The underlying forces that promote national economic growth are basically the same as those that account for the economic progress of individuals. An individual's desire for a higher and more secure standard of living for himself and for his family is the basic stimulus. To this end he studies, plans, works, saves, and invests. He searches out new ways of doing things, and develops new techniques and processes. Hence, one of the most effective means of stimulating economic growth-and at the same time one of our fundamental objectives in seeking economic growth-is to provide expanding opportunities for every individual to realize his own potentialities to the utmost
Mr. Wallis is a Special Assistant to the President of the United States and Executive Vice Chairman of the Cabinet Committee on Price Stability for Economic Growth. He is currently on a leave of absence from the University of Chicago School of Business where he is Dean and Professor of Statistics and Economics.
and to open wider vistas for his children; to encourage initiative, independence, and integrity; to preserve and enlarge the moral worth of the individual; and to approach more closely to our ideals of personal freedom, justice and fair play, broad and equal , opportunity, the rule of law, and mutual respect and charity, Growth requires a flexible and adaptable economic system with freedom to experiment. New industries must spring up, and others must decline. New methods must be accepted and old ones discarded. Labor and capital must shift easily and cooperatively in response to economic rewards and penalties. The combination of an abundant flow of new ideas, a willingness to take risks, and the speedy adoption of successful new methods is a condition for a high rate of growth. The translation of new ideas into practical processes is speeded by a high rate of saving, through which new equipment can be financed and put into use. Saving also contributes to growth even where new methods are not involved, since it makes possible a larger stock of plant and equipment, housing, and other physical capital, which add to our potential supply of goods and services. In this way, the prudence and responsible foresight of people in providing for future needs makes an essential contribution to our growth.
All of this requires an economic environment that can be brought about and maintained only by positive and progressive governmental actions. The government has a twofold function in promoting growth. First, it must provide a legal and institutional climate conducive to private economic progress. Second, the government must provide various public services and facilities which, while valuable to the nation as a whole, do not offer sufficient rewards to induce private producers to provide them for sale, or do not offer sufficient direct benefits to induce private individuals to buy them. Ten essentials of a positive government program for growth are as follows : (1) Orderly Government. People must be free to pursue their private affairs-to work, save, invest, enter into contracts without fear of fraud, confiscation, or violence. (2) Equality of Opportunity. Only when each individual has the opportunity to develop his potential to the fullest and to utilize his skills to the utmost will we obtain maximum growth. Public policy should be aimed at eliminating discrimination in education and employment, whether it results from color, religion, sex, birthplace, or social class. Our economy must be Gpen to the ambitious and the able. (3) Price Level Stability. Marked inflation or deflation destroys economic efficiency, distorts resource allocation, and retards growth. Monetary, budget, and debt policies should be conducted in such a manner as to promote reasonable stability of the general price level. (4) Stability of Employment and Income. Occasional mild fluctuations in the level of economic activity are not yet avoidable, much as we all wish otherwise. In fact, the surest thing that can be said about our future growth rate is that it will fluctuate. But national policies must deal effectively with recessions so as to assure continuity of maximum employment opportunities and to alleviate the consequences of such involuntary unemployment as may occur. To achieve maximum sustainable growth, national policies must also prevent speculative excesses in boom periods. (5) Taxes. Tax policy must serve several masters, and economic growth should be one of them. Taxes which penalize thrift, risk-bearing, and innovation have no place in a good tax system. Punitive rates applied to too narrow a base, a great hodgepodge of exemptions and exclusions, and discriminatory levies distort resource use and impede healthy growth. Tax reform should be directed toward
improving the quantity and quality of investment, releasing incentives to personal effort, improving the cyclical flexibility of the tax system as a whole, and treating equally people in equal economic circumstances. (6) Maintaining Competition. Competition is the lifeblood of a free economy. To keep the system strong and growing the lines of, entry into industry must be kept open, and monopolistic barriers to progress must be eliminated. A positive and vigorous anti-trust program is essential to growth. Restrictive labor practices, likewise, need to be eliminated. Regulatory activities of government should be aimed at protecting the consumer and should not be allowed to stifle competition and prevent innovation in the regulated industries. (7) International Trade. International trade is a powerful ally of growth. By trade we can produce indirectly a greater quantity and variety of goods and services than by domestic production alone. The pressure of foreign competition also keeps our own industries more efficient. Continued efforts to reduce or eliminate trade barriers at home and abroad will pay large dividends in growth. (8) Governmental Blocks to Growth. Although economic growth is an avowed goal of policy, many governmental programs and activities tend to block growth. Growth involves change. When the government protects the status quo or insulates particular groups of business, labor, or consumers from the causes or effects of change, it retards growth. Many pernicious and unwarranted obstacles to growth are to be found in our agricultural policies, business subsidies, natural resource policies, regulation of industry, foreign trade policies, and grantsin-aid. If we are really serious about accelerating our growth, one of our first orders of business should be an attack; on the whole structure of inefficiencies and impediments to growth induced by governments at all levels. (9) Public Works. Growth requires social as well as private investment. The government makes a genuine contribution to economic growth when it provides complementary public facilities and services desired by the community. But here strict cost-benefit principles should apply or growth will be retarded. Because public services are generally not valued in the market place, economic criteria are difficult to apply. Realism and restraint are, therefore, of crucial importance in the use of public funds. (10) Maintenance and Development of the System. Certain kinds of governmental expenditures to promote science, technology, health, and education also promote growth. Here again strict criteria should be applied, at least insofar as economic growth is to be served. Governmental activities should not supplant private activities and should be restricted to those areas where substantial benefits from governmental action are clearly apparent.
We are in the midst of a great national debate over economic growth. But until we understand what growth is, why it is an important policy goal, and how it can be achieved within a framework of economic and political freedom, the debate will range over many false and confused issues. True growth in economic welfare involves both material and non-material benefits, widely diffused. True growth must conform to the values and aspirations of a free people. The "right" or optimum rate of growth is that rate which conforms to the voluntary choices of the people, rather than a rate obtained by coercion, compulsion, or excessive social costs. The rate of growth can be increased by improving the efficiency of the economic system and by pursuing wise public policies to create a favorable environment for growth.
Arena's first production was Goldsmith's classic comedy " She Stoops to Conquer," presented in 1950 in an abandoned movie house.
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was born at the village crossroads. The people clustered round the incantations of the holy man. In the glades of ancient Greece, the magic of the mime drew the spectators up to the rim of action. On the village green the townsfolk danced around the Maypole and Hobby Horse. On Polynesian sands, in the clearings in the bush of Africa, in the desert villages of the American Indians, the ancient stories, played with familiar and venerable masks, drew the people into a ring around them. Theater began at the heart of the village, in the midst of the people. So it has been in India, too, where the legends of the gods have been relived for centuries in the nautankes at the village crossroads. Today, the most vigorous innovation in the theater affects its physical form. Theater is returning to its original shape-round. It is coming down from the stage, from behind the proscenium. It is back in the midst of the people.
Delhi audiences have seen theater-in-the-round. Two years ago John Patrick's The Hasty Heart, directed by Mrs. Eugene Rosenfeld for Delhi's Little Theater Group, was produced with the audience seated on all 'four sides of the stage. It was shortly followed by a production of Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey into Night in the same technique. , The most persuasive and consistent advocate of theater-in-the-round is probably the Arena Stage in Washington, D.C. For ten years, the repertory company of Arena have staged their plays at floor level, surrounded on all sides by the audience. Adoption of the central stage technique by the Arena company may have been dictated in the beginning by the modest resources available. Use of an abandoned, ramshackle movie house had been obtained for their first production, Oliver Goldsmith's comedy, She Stoops to Conquer. That was in 1950. The first production was a success and Arena had begun a career which has accumulated new laurels with each season. Whatever the necessities may have been which brought Arena Stage into being in the round, the company found it possessed a milieu which created a strong psychological contact between actor and audience. In the midst of the playgoers, the play achieved an in-thesame-room intimacy not obtainable in a conventional theater. It created in the playgoer a sense of sitting in the play, of participation in the drama. Having discovered that it could produce galvanic theater without the expensive equipment and settings required for conventional stages, Arena invested its modest funds in actors' salaries, costumes, and a few fine stage properties. Although it may not have been the first contemporary theater unit to experiment with theater-in-the-round, Arena is the most successful of the theaters which have adopted the central stage as their exclusive mode of production. In a decade it has developed from a struggling little group, operating tenuously in an old motion-picture house, to a professional theatrical unit firmly accepted by the cultural community. In the intervening years since its debut, Arena has moved into the hulk of a massive old brewery on the banks of the Potomac River. Thousands of visitors from all parts of the world attend its performances each year. Drama critics acclaimed the 1959-60 season the most successful in At;ena's annals. The company presents eight plays each year; each usually running for four weeks. If a play proves unusually successful, it is held over for a fifth or sixth week. Plays presented range from modern American hits to standard classics, including new scripts as well as interpretations of old favorites. Such variety has offered Arena players-and playgoers-a wide swing through theatrical literature. The company has produced successful versions of Shakespeare's Taming of the Shrew, Twelfth Night, and Julius Casar; G. B. Shaw's Arms and the Man and Pygmalion; Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest; and others from the classic repertoire. Critics, however, have observed that the most artistically successful productions through the decade have been those of modern realism. The intense social and psychological probings of the playwrights of recent
generations, exploring the complexities of contemporary life, have found a most compatible setting in Arena's intimate style. Productions which were sell-outs during the past season include Shaw's Major Barbara, Anton Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard, Herman Wouk's The Caine Mutiny Court Martial, and Eugene O'Neill's The Iceman Cometh. Other Arena performances acclaimed in the last several years have been Christie's Witness for the Prosecution, Rattigan's The Browning Version, Arthur Miller's A Viewfrom the Bridge and The Crucible, Robinson Jeffers' The Cretan Woman, Tennessee Williams' Summer and Smoke, John Osborne's Epitaph for George Dillon, and Jean Anouilh's Thieves' Carnival. Through the excellence of its performances, Arena has attained an international reputation. Brooks Atkinson, drama critic for The New York Times and one of the most influential observers of American theater, has commented: "Its professional company supplies Washington theater-goers with a balanced diet that Broadway might well feel wistful about." Arena Stage will crown a decade of steady progress this year with construction of a permanent home scheduled for occupancy in the fall of 1961. Now operated by the Washington Drama Society, a nonprofit organization, Arena will build its new home on a waterfront site in the redeveloping southwest sector of the capital city. Construction on the new 750-seat theater was started this summer. Plans have been made to present the first play there next September. Government agencies involved in the redevelopment project agreed to allocate for the theater a plot of land which had previously been set aside for a park area. In recognition of Arena's constantly growing artistic stature, four philanthropic foundations have contributed substantially toward the building fund. Contributions have also come from Arena patrons, some in the form of loans and others as outright gifts. Response to the building fund has been so enthusiastic that the original goal of $425,000 has been surpassed. The Ford Foundation has settled a special grant on Arena, enabling it to guarantee annual contracts to a repertory nucleus of ten actors. Harry Weese, whose creation for the U.S. Embassy in Ghana attracted wide attention, is architect for the structure. An award winner of the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, Mr. Weese has also designed buildings in his home city of Chicago, Illinois, a shopping center in Mexico City, and an office building in Nassau, Bahamas. With this climax to its first ten years, Arena Stage is firmly established as the stronghold of theater-in-theround. It has successfully transported the village crossroads indoors and restored the play to the midst of the people. It has revived that physical relationship between actor and witness which first drew the people close enough to the chanting priest to share his rapture, close enough to the ritual dance to feel the rhythm of the dancers' ecstasy, close enough to the strolling players to breathe the passion and the humor of their roles. Out of this relationship the theater was created. Arena Stage has remembered its origins and the impact of that recollection is likely to be felt in the modern drama in ever-widening circles.
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ALLIED through the \vorld Health Organization, 88 countries fighting a world war against ancient enemies of mankind-diseases such as yellow fever, plague, cholera, smallpox, typhoid, and malaria-have won major victories during the past ten years.
and reduce the people to poverty and misery. It is to fight and win the battles against these common scourges, and their new and deadly mutants, that WHO is building a world-wide defense line with the cooperation of most of the nations of the world.
Communicable diseases know no borders and attack all peoples. They can decimate the population of a region
India, one of the 88 nations working together to raise health levels on an international plane, has undertaken
Children in Taipeh, Taiwan, line up for their anti-tuberculosis vaccinations.
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His life cramped into a triangle of crutches, this Tokyo lad is a casualty of polio which struck him at the age of one year. Now Salk vaccine and" living" vaccine, which can be taken orally, protect the lVorld's children from this crippler.
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large-scale programs to combat diseases. A massive offensive has been mounted against malaria, which as recently as seven years ago claimed some 800,000 lives in the course of a year and disabled many more. Indian and American specialists working together through the Malaria Eradication Program have reduced the malaria death toll since 1953 by 98.75 per cent to only 18,188. During the same period, the incidence of
A control team operating [rom the National Malaria Institute of India prepares to spray mosquito-breeding sites in the campaign to eradicate malaria.
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the disease was reduced from 75 million cases of malaria to an estimated four million in all of India. Headquarters for the campaign -in India is the National Malaria Institute from which thousands of tons of DDT powder, laboratory equipment, and large quantities of antimalarial drugs have been supplied. More than Rs. 37 crores have been invested by the Technical Cooperation Mission 'in this successful assault on anopheles and malaria.
This bewildering experience may save a man's sight. The baby is being examined by a field doctor in Morocco for trachoma, an eye infection-that does not kill but can result in blindness.
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ABOVE: The Trinidad Regional Virus Laboratory fights a continuous battle against yellow fever. A field virus laboratory in the forest area traps rodents and other wild animals, in order to detect any wild viruses circulating in their blood stream that could be transmitted to man through parasites.
UPPER LEFT: A small victim of typhoid fever is quarantined in Leyden University hospital in the Netherlands while she recovers. This widespread water-borne disease is being fought throughout the world with improved sanitation techniques and inoculations.
BELa W: The skilled hands of a WHO doctor palpate the spleen of a Cameroons youngster suspected of having malaria.
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POPULAR
s
LI Professor of Education, Teachers College, Columbia University
HORACE Mann is commonly acknowledged as the father of popular schooling in the United States. Yet his work was not as an officer of the national government in Washington, but as Secretary of the Massachusetts State Board of Education between 1837 and 1848. What seems acontradiction here is really the supreme fact of the American school system: its localism. There has never been a national school system in the United States, nor is there one today. By tradition and by constitutional arrangement, education has always been a function of individual states and their local communities. This was so long before the Federal Government came into existence in 1789, and it has remained so ever since. Horace Mann's genius was to grasp the essential meaning of this localism for educational reform. He saw that the nation as a whole would never have popular schooling until the people of individual states and localities could be persuaded to want it Under his leadership, Massachusetts taught nineteenth-century America the ways and ideals of universal education. As so often happens in history, Mann came only hesitantly to the work that brought him fame. As a member of the state legislature he had long been interested in education. Indeed, when the Board was first proposed as a device for awakening public interest in the schools, he had been one of its most enthusiastic supporters. But when the governor then invited him to resign his seat to serve as the Board's secretary, Mann was taken completely by surprise. Only after several weeks of the most terrible indecision did he finally accept, and this against the advice of friends who thought he was throwing away a promising political career. Now the 1830's were a time offerment in American education. Th0se who had founded the Republic a half-century before had warned that a nation could not long remain ignorant and free. But for all their eloquent counsel, education had made little headway. The schools available to Mann in his boyhood were not much different from those the first settlers had erected to preserve culture on Europe's newest frontier. These pioneer schools had bequeathed a worthy heritage under the gravest hardships. But it is doubtful that even one American in ten ever attended them. Mann himself had studied in brief periods of eight or nine weeks a year, and with pitifully poor teachers. Only a deliberate job of selfeducation plus some tutoring from an itinerant schoolmaster had gained him admission to Brown University, and this at the age of nineteen.
Clamor for Change During Mann's own lifetime, however, the whole educational picture had begun to change. The suffrage was expanding, and politicians were pressing for literate citizenry. Infant industries needed skilled workers, and businessmen were urging the economic value of universal schooling. In grimy, crowded factory towns, a new labor movement was campaigning for popular education to raise the working class to equality. And nationalists were viewing the school as an instrument, par excellence, for integrating the swelling tide of immigrants. By 1837, these segments of the public were clamoring for change; and it was Horace Mann's unique achievement to articulate a reform program that could weld them into an effective political coalition. By 1848, when his work with the Board was completed, not only had he won impressive victories in his own state, he had become the commanding figure of a nationwide educational renaissance.
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What was Mann's program? Essentially, it revolved around his idea of the public-or as he called it, the common-school. Mann understood well the relationship between freedom, self-government, and universal education. Like Jefferson, he believed that freedom could rest secure only as free men had the knowledge to make intelligent decisions. But for Mann the problem went deeper; it was fundamentally one of moral elevation. " Never will wisdom preside in the halls of legislation," he once wrote, " and its profound utterances be recorded on the pages of the statute book, until Common Schools... create a more far-seeing intelligence and purer morality than has ever yet existed among communities of men.'" Dreading the destructive possibilities of religious, political, and class difference, Mann sought a common value system within which diversity might flourish. His quest was for a public philosophy, asense of community which might be shared by Americans of every background and persuasion. And his instrument in this effort would be the common school.
For the Rich and the Poor Mann's school would be common, not as a school for the common people-for example, the nineteenthcentury Prussian Volksschule-but rather as a school common to all people. It would be open to all, provided by the state and the local community as part of the birthright of every child. It would be for rich and poor alike, not only free but as good as any private institution. It would be non-sectarian, receiving children of all creeds, classes, and backgrounds. In the warm associations of childhood, Mann saw the opportunity to kindle a spirit of amity and respect which the conflicts of adult life could never destroy. In social harmony, he located the primary goal of popular education. Yet even social harmony was only instrumental to social progress. Once common schools were established, no evil could resist their salutary influence. Universal education could be the "great equalizer" of human conditions, the" balance wheel of the social machinery," and the "creator of wealth undreamed of." Poverty would most assuredly disappear, and with it the rancorous discord between the" haves" and the "havenots" which had marked all of human history. Crime would diminish; sickness would abate; and life for the common man would be longer, better, and happier. Here was a total faith in the power of education to shape the destiny of the young Republic-a kind of nineteenth-century vision of ancient Athenian paideia. Little wonder that it fired the optimism ofzthe American people. And fire that optimism it really did! Not only in Massachusetts but in almost every state, citizens organized to do battle ih the cause of public education. In legislatures and at the polls, they encountered fierce resistance from landowners who opposed school taxes and from religious groups that viewed public education as a threat to orthodoxy. For twenty-five years the outcome was uncertain. Local elections were fought, won, and lost on the school issue. The tide of educational reform would flow in one state, only to ebb in another. Legislation passed one year would sometimes be repealed the next. State laws requiring public schools would be ignored by the local communities that were supposed to build them. Time and again the partisans of popular education encountered the bitter disappointments that accompany any effort at fundamental social reform. Yet by 1860 a design had begun to appear, and it bore upon it the marks of Mann's ideal. A majority of the states had established public school systems, and a good
half of the nation's children were already getting some formal education. Elementary schools were becoming widely available, and in a few states like Massachusetts, New York, Pennsylvania, and Illinois, the notion of free public education was slowly expanding to include secondary schools. There were, of course, significant differences from state to state and from region to region. New England, long a pioneer in public education, also had an established tradition of private education; and private schools continued to flourish there. The Midwest, on the other hand, sent a far greater proportion of its school children to public institutions. The southern states, with the exception of North Carolina, tended to lag behind, and did not generally establish popular schooling until after the Civil War (1861-1865). On the whole, universal education had won clear-if sometimes grudging-acceptance from the society at large; and visitors from abroad were already viewing it as a characteristic American innovation. Thus, the Polish revolutionary, Count Gurowski, could observe enthusiastically in 1857: " On the common schools, more than any other basis, depends and is fixed the future, the weal and the woe of American society, and they are the noblest and most luminous manifestations of the spirit, the will, and the temper of the genuine American communities and people. . . . Europe has polished classes; learned societies; but with less preponderating individual learning, America, the Free States-stimulated, led on by New England, by Massachusetts-they alone possess intelligent, educated masses."2
The Common School Expands Horace Mann and his contemporaries laid the foundations of universal education in the United States; and in large measure the history of popular schooling since their time has been a story of efforts to build on these foundations. Particularly as industrialization progressed, the common school expanded, outward to embrace formerly neglected classes of children and upward to hold all children for longer periods of instruction. Elementary enrollments climbed steadily after 1860, while the secondary school population actually doubled every ten years between 1880 and 1930. While only eleven per cent of children between the ages of fourteen and seventeen were in school at the turn of the century, this proportion had risen to about half in 1930 and has reached almost ninety per cent today. During the 1958-59 academic year, the combined elementary and secondary school enrollment stood at 40.7 million children, of whom roughly eighty-six per cent were in public facilities. The total cost of the enterprise-both public and private-ran to approximately eighteen billion dollars.3 Statistics, though, tell only part of the story; the rest lies in the character of the school themselves. Compulsory attendance has long been the rule in all of the states, and children are not only encouraged but compelled to remain in school for at least nine or ten years. Twelve years of schooling are commonly available. Making allowances for particular neighborhoods, education at all levels tends to reflect Horace Mann's commitment to commonalty; and most schools enroll boys and girls of many different backgrounds. Lawrence Arthur Cremin, Professor 0/ Education at Teachers College, Columbia University, New York, was born in 1925 in New York City. He attended the City College 0/ New York and then went to Columbia University for graduate work in history and education. A specialist in the history 0/ American education, Professor Cremin has been a member 0/ the faculty 0/ Columbia University since 1951. He is the author 0/" The American Common School," and co-author 0/ "A History 0/ Education in American Culture."
In the matter of control, the localism of Horace Mann's time remains strong; and much of the immediate management of public education is vested in local districts created by the states for the express purpose of running the schools. Like other forms of local government-villages, townships, and cities, for example-school districts have limited taxing powers and certain prescribed responsibilities. There are some 40,000 of them in the U~ited States, the great majority run by regularly elected boards of citizens. Working within certain broad policies set at the state level, these boards set tax rates, build buildings, determine instructional policies, employ teachers and administrators, and generally oversee the day-by-day operation of the schools. . The ultimate legal authority for education remains with the fifty state governments, limited only by certain general strictures of the Federal Constitution. Thus, each state has broad powers to establish and maintain a public school system; to regulate both public and private schools; to set certain minimum requirements for curricula, personnel, and buildings; to tax for the support of education; to create and abolish local districts, and to regulate their powers and prerogatives. While most of the public money spent for education is still raised by local districts, the proportion of state funds has now risen to about forty per cent of the total. There are significant variations, though, with some states, like Delaware, paying most public school costs, while others, like Nebraska, contribute less than ten per cent.
Role of Federal Government Federal authority over the schools has traditionally been weak. Education is nowhere mentioned in the Federal Constitution, and for a long time the Federal Government has confined itself to modest appropriations for particular educational purposes under the power of Congress to "provide for common Defense and general Welfare." Since 1867 there has also been a small federal office of education presided over by a commissioner; but the office has always operated principally as a service agency to the states. In recent years there have been demands for more vigorous national activities in education, and Congress has responded with somewhat larger appropriations. But the tradition of particular purposes remains, as in the National Defense Education Act of 1958 authorizing $887 million to assist the states with guidance services, testing programs, and instruction in mathematics, foreign languages, and the natural sciences. Even with these new funds, federal contributions to the total public expenditure for education amount to only three and a half per cent. The most dramatic exercise of federal authority in the past few years bas come from the United States Supreme Court. The Fourteenth Amendment to the Federal Constitution holds that no state may deprive a person of life, liberty, or property without due process of law, nor deny to any person the equal protection of the laws. Acting under this Amendment, the Court has struck down a number of important state statutes in the realm of education. The most far-reaching of these recent actions was the famous decision in the case of Brown vs. Topeka Board of Education in 1954, outlawing racial segregation in public schools. Enforcement of the decision has been a leading public issue since the day it was handed down; and cities like Little Rock, Arkansas, have been the scene of ugly controversies over desegregation. Yet today, five years later, several hundred thousand Negro children attend schools which have been integrated since the ruling.
Universal schooling under local control has been the essential tradition of American education. Yet this tradition has been shaken as never before by the explosive increase of population in the years since World War II. Enrollments in elementary and secondary schools have climbed more than fifty per cent since 1945, and even the most conservative estimates project continued increases of at least a million a year for the foreseeable future. No one is sure of where the money is to come from to obtain the requisite classrooms and teachers. State and local budgets are already at unprecedented highs, and thousands of children are still studying on half-time shifts in overcrowded buildings under poorly prepared instructors. Teacher salaries remain low, and there is general agreement that persons of high quality are not being attracted to the profession in sufficient numbers, nor encouraged to remain. A study by the Fund for the Advancement of Education in 1955estimated that one-half of all college graduates would be needed to fill projected teacher requiremel).ts through 1965. Yet the study noted that only about onefifth of these college graduates were actually entering teaching. In the absence of bold measures, the result would surely be a steady deterioration in the quality of schooling at all levels. The crisis has been widely publicized in the press, and has led to vigorous demands that the Federal Government assume a larger burden of general educational costs. Yet beyond the commonly voiced principle that federal appropriations ought not to endanger local control, there has been little a;greement as to just how such federal aid should be distributed.
Proponents of federal aid have themselves disagreed on how extensive such aid ought to be, and what aspects of education it ought to cover. Some bills have confined assistance to school construction programs; others have specified funds for teacher salaries as well. Some bills have limited assistance to poorer states; others pave extended it to all states. Problems such as these have blocked Congressional approval of any general-purpose education bill to date. It is difficult to predict just what the outcome of the current financial crisis will be. On the one hand, the American devotion to more and more schooling for more and more children remains clear. Secondary education is well-nigh universal; and even higher education is becoming popularized as more than half of all secondaryschool graduates go on to some sort of collegiate or technical education. On the other hand, the financial difficulties of the schools grow more acute as enrollments mount. It is probable that federal assistance of some kind will be extended sooner or later. But it is utopian to assume that this assistance will not bring some form of federal control. For as the American people, through their Congress, work out the mechanics of federal aid to education, they will be shaping the course of popular schooling in the years immediately ahead. I. Twelfth Annual Report of the Board of Education. Together with the Twelfth Annual Report of the Secretary of the Board. Boston: Dutton and Wentworth, 1849, p. 84. 2. Adam G. De Gurowski, pp. 292: 308.
America and Europe. New York:
Appleton,
1857,
3. Most of these statistics can be found in Progress of Public Education in the United States of America, 1958.59, published in English, French, Russian, and Spanish by the United States Office of Education in 1959.
G LEN
CANYON DAM, the largest construction project in the United States today, is being "placed" in a deep gorge of the Colorado River from a unique aerial cableway system. The quarter-mile-long cableway between 700-foot-high cliffs that flank Glen Canyon in Arizona provides the only means of access to the dam site. Everything needed to build the dam must be lowered / from the cableway-thousands of workmen, 50 tons of machinery, and all materials, including 35,000 tons of steel and five million cubic feet of concrete. During the next two years, the cableway will be used to lower 24 tons of concrete at four-minute intervals night and day. The cable used for this aerial system, possibly the strongest ever built for such a purpose, is four inches in diameter, has a smooth exterior surface, and is flexible It is composed of 312 separate high carbon steel wires wrapped in spirals to form multiple layers around one central wire. The sinewy steel cable has sufficient strength to support 30 automobiles or 100 tons of concrete at one time. The system utilizes more than 3,800 feet of the cable.
method TO BUILD A DAM aerial
Important parts of the system are two "tracks" across the canyon, each track suspended between a pair of rail-mounted towers atop the sandstone cliffs. The cableways operate at different heights, to permit two-way travel, and the towers move along their rails to make accurate placemellt of materials at the dam site. Other parts of the cableway system are a wire mesh elevator that transports workers in and out of the deep canyon, and a steel mesh suspension footbridge across the canyon. Upon completion in 1964 Glen Canyon Dam, second only in size in the United States to the big Hoover Dam, will be 700 feet high and will have a 256-square-mile lake behind it. The high cost of the aerial construction is warranted because of the great economic importance of this dam, which will provide 900,000 kilowatts o'f p0wer and sufficient water for irrigation and industrial development to serve 110,000 square miles of arid land in five western states.
Above: This apparatus weaves the big four-inch cable from 312 carbon steel wires wrapped spirally in multiple layers around one central wire. Forty-eight lock wires are woven around the cable core to form its outer cover. The finished cable, which is reeled out to span the canyon, is possibly the strongest ever built for the purpose of aerial construction.
Right : A large truck is lowered into a gorge of the Colorado River. It is one of many machines needed for construction of Glen Canyon Dam. The cableway, which delivers all machines, equipment, and building materials to the dam site, is capable of supporting 30 automobiles or 100 tons of concrete at a time.
Opposite : Two curving spillways, each 10,000 feet long and 40 feet in diameter, have been hewn out of the rock of Glen Canyon and lined with concrete. From inlet portals 600 feet above the dam, the spillways will release water downstream during flood periods and when the power plant is not in operation.
A familiar sight at Glen Canyon is a "box" of workmen being transported in or out of the 700-foot-deep gorge by aerial cableway, the only access to the canyon floor.
The aerial cableway system above Glen Canyon in the State of Arizona consists of two sets of tracks which mount two towers of different heights on each side of the Colorado River gorge. Construction operations at the big dam site are almost wholly vertical, since all equipment and materials used to build it is lowered from above while the structure of the dam rises from below. In the course of construction, approximately 35,000 tons of steel and five million cubic feet of concrete will be lowered by cable into the gorge. The cableway is designed to transfer 24 tons of concrete at four-minute intervals night and day.
s!'J MusIC
is so much a natural part of everyone's life in India that in drawing to portray them as musicians and to try to catch something of the spirit
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people one coul of their music.
not help wanting
At a Bengali country fair, I was fortunate to find a special group of musicians, the Bauls of Bengal. These" wind-struck" musicians with their long hair and somewhat Islamic look are similar to the wandering minstrels of Europe. They have traveled about Bengal since earliest known time-some historians think before the time of the written epics of India-singing their songs, which have been handed down from one to another, concerning the religious nature of man. In the dark of the tent each musician in turn would rise and sing and act out his urgent song of goodness and of mankind's self-realization, while the others sat in meditation and their children kept the intricate time with tiny cymbals. One of my hopes in coming as much of it as I could.
to India was to live in a small village, to experience
its daily life and draw
While painting at Santiniketan in Bengal, I met the man in charge of the rural redevelopment group for that area. He was taking his unit on a field trip to one of the neighboring villages and he said that I could join them. So with painting gear thrown in the jeep along with camping supplies, it was very pleasant to be free to bicycle along the bullock track that wound its way through sugar cane, palm trees, and the dark mango groves. A space in the central part of the village had been cleared for the farm group to set up their kitchen and meeting tent. The children, sensing from the strange drawing board and knapsack that I was on a different errand, took me off like the Pied Piper on a tour of the houses and surroundings. They pointed out every possible subject for a painting, and whenever I looked as if I might begin to work someone would run off and come back with a blanket for me to sit on. Then they would spread out my paints to their satisfaction and sit back in complete silence to watch. When I asked for a bull, they proudly brought me to the village bull which" we â&#x20AC;˘â&#x20AC;˘ painted and, then the children posed each other for portraits. They attacked each project with such gusto that it became infectious. I tried hard not to disappoint their expectations of my mysterious boxes of paints. In the evening, music by Rabindranath Tagore and Sanskrit hymns The village children and elders knew the music well and sat in widening a small lantern.
were sung at the prayer meeting. circles, their faces illuminated by
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I observed, in features and gesture, the basic dignity of human expression. At a time in painting when ~here has been less interest in people and portraiture, I am most grateful for the immediate impetus, derived from this year in India, to paint human expression and the simplicity of living, common to all our origins.
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b Miss Aurelia Brown has been studying and painting in India for the past year on a Fulbright grant. An exhibit of her paintings, including those reproduced on these pages, was presented in July in the All India Fine Arts and Crafts Gallery, New Delhi, and in Bombay. A graduate of Bennington College, Vermont, Miss Brown also studied at Columbia University and at the Art Students League of New York. In the United States, her water colors have won awards from the Emily Lowe Foundation and from the National Association of Women Artists.
EAST AND WEST, share one more common meeting ground on the campus of Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The Center for the Study of World Religions has been established there. Underlying the concept of the Center are the objectives of universal love, service to mankind, and respect for all great religions. From shrines and temples in many lands priests of different religions will come here to study together the great religious faiths of the world. The Center is housed in modest, rented quarters, but construction of the new building, which will be its permanent home: has already begun. The lack of an appropriate home, however, has not prevented the pilot project from evoking wide interest in Asia and elsewhere. Already four scholars from the East have enrolled at the Center. They live and study under one roof-each following his own religious discipline, yet learning about the religions of the others. Here T. K. Venkateswaran, a Brahmin from India, Sao Htun Hinat Win, a "Buddhist scholar from Burma, Rabindra Bijay Sraman, a Buddhist monk from Pakistan, and Nobusada Nishitakatsuji, a Shinto priest from Japan, share the same classes with priests from the West. Professor T. K. Venkateswaran has been teaching Hindu philosophy and Sanskrit literature at Presidency College, Madras University. Sao Htun Hinat Win served
A Christian teaching fellow at the Center for the Study of World Religions, Alfred Bloom, and a Buddhist monk from Pakistan, Rabindra Bijay Sraman, examine a historic Bible during a tour of the chapel of Harvard University's Divinity School.
At Peabody Public School, which they attend in Cambridge, the children ofT. K. Venkateswaran, a Brahmin, watch with their classmates an educational television program.
Alfred Bloom plays Shinto chants on his record player for his friends and fellow scholars: Sao Htun Hinat Win, Rabindra Bijay Sraman, Dave Miller, and Madame and Professor T. K. Venkateswaran.
During an eveninl{ study session at the dormitory, T. K. Venkateswaran and Alfred Bloom discuss an article in the Christian Science Monitor, while Sao Htun Hinat Win deliberates a problem in The Talmud.
priests of different faiths come together to study the world's great religions. as a Buddhist monk in Burma for several years and taught Buddhist philosophy at Rangoon University. Reverend Rabindra Bijay Sraman has lived in a Buddhist monastery in East Pakistan since his early childhood. And Nobusada Nishitakatsuji's family has a tradition of almost 1,000 years in the Tenmangu shrine in Dazaifu, Japan, of which he is the priest. Alfred Bloom, a Christian teaching fellow at the Harvard Divinity School, has been assigned to help the Asian students adjust themselves to their new environment. Recently returned to Harvard after spending two years in Asia as a Fulbright scholar, he is well suited for the job. As Bloom puts it, his experiences overseas help him "see things as would a foreign student." The Center owes Its birth to an endowment provided two years ago by a group of American citizens who had long been interested in the study of other faiths. Responsibility for the program rests entirely with Harvard University, more particularly with the Divinity School with which the new Center is closely related for courses ef study previously established. The new course provides for advanced study of world religions, with special emphasis on one particular religion. " Across the world today," Dr. Robert H. L. Slater, who is guiding the program, pointed out, "there is a growing appreciation of what may be gained if classroom and library studies of other faiths can be supplemented by the opportunity for more personal discussion. This'is necessary, not only for a better academic understanding of other religions, but also to permit each of us to communicate his personal views more effectively. It is an opportunity of this kind which the Center aims to provide."
Scholars from the Center contemplate a modernistic wood sculpture of the crucifixion in the Harvard Divinity School chapel.
"The novel remains slill, under the right persuasion, the most independent, most elastic, most prodigious of literary forms." Henry James, The Art of the Novel.
TRENDS IN THE MODERN
AMERI~AN NOVEL by NATHAN
GLICK
American novelists of the nineteenth century produced a few towering masterpieces like Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, Herman Melville's romantic epic Moby Dick, Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn, and (here the choice of a single book is more difficult) Henry James's Portrait of a Lady-works which remain eyen today unsurpassed in style, power, and seriousness. Yet it is not the nineteenth but the twentieth century which is the great age of the American novel. The years since the First World War haye seen the most concentrated outpouring of important and exciting works of fiction. This article will attempt to trace only some of the major trends and recurrent themes that can be discovered in the fictional profusion of the past 40 years. World War I may be considered the great dividing point in modern American literature. Before the war, the American novel largely avoided controversial subjects or those drawn from common life; and it placed a high value on good manners
and poetic language. Of course some realistic and naturalistic writers-William Dean Howells, Stephen Crane, Frank Norris, and, above all, Theodore Dreiserwrote, even before the war, about working people and businessmen and about behavior that did not conform to the conventional morality of the period. But they were exceptions to the general pattern. After World War I, however, there took place a widespread literary rebellion against the old restrictions of subject matter and style. The postwar period was characterized by freedom and frankness, and the novelist was emboldened to use any technique, no matter how experimental, and to discu~s any subject, no matter how shocking or controversial. f
The common hero in nineteenth century European fiction-for example, Stendahl's The Red and the Black and Dickens' Great Expectations-is the ambitious young man of modest social origins who leaves his restrictive village or town to search for richer and more exciting life in the metropolis. But it is not until the twentieth century that this hero makes his presence felt in American fiction. One reason for the delay is that during the nineteenth century Americans were moving westward away from the eastern coastline with its large cities. By the
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I
SINCLAIRILEWIS
In Dreiser's most famous book, An American Tragedy, which appeared in 1925, an ambitious young man raised in a poor and spiritually limited small-town home reaches blindly for success and wealth but only succeeds in wrecking two lives, one of them his own. In these books, Dreiser challenged the simple morality of the small town, according to which virtue always triumphed and sin was always punished. He asserted that nature did not pay attention to man's moral strictures. Nature was "a blind, stumbling force" or at least appeared that way to man's limited powers of comprehension. But if he rejected the small-town outlook, he was also critical of the big city which, like Balzac, he saw as a jungle. However, Dreiser personally was drawn to the vitality and force of the city and in his powerful naturalistic novels he quickly removed his heroes and heroines from their home towns and turned them toward the metropolis and the world of power. Sinclair Lewis and Sherwood Anderson, on the other hand, kept returning to the small towns of their youth and, in their best books, criticized the life they qbserved there with a passion that revealed their own profound involvement in that life¡. In Babbitt, Sinclair Lewis (18851951)lampooned the small-city real estate broker, George Babbitt, who accepted unthinkingly the optimistic slogans and back-slapping manner encouraged by the business community. But Babbitt is not simply a caricature; he is human enough to recognize the emptiness of his life and in the end even encourages his son's search for independence and more meaningful values. In Main Street, Lewis satirized the provincialism and cultural backwardness of a typical small city. Yet the book was a great popular success and was read by, among others, the businessmen of Main Street and their wives, many of whom, it turned out, really aspired toward greater culture and sophistication, but simply did not know how to go about attaining them. And Lewis himself, it soon became clear, could criticize so freely because he basically accepted and liked his small-town
I
4jq -1I2.-srt JOHN DOS ~SSOsJ
turn of the century, the United States was fully settled, the frontier had disappeared, and restless young Americans began to look eastward to the cities that symbolized wealth, culture, and worldly experience. Not only did this type of hero appear later in American novels, but his reaction against the small town took on a more earnest and reformist character than that of his European counterpart. Even before World War I, Theodore Dreiser (18711945) had broached the theme of revolt against smalltown standards in his first novel, Sister Carrie, whose heroine leaves her Midwest home town to find success in the New York theater. But as a counterpoint to Carrie's success, Dreiser shows how the temptations and impersonality of the big city destroy her lover, Hurstwood.
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characters. His style reflected his own small-town origins. It was colloquial, boisterous, raucous, with a marvelous gift for mimicry, yet charged with good humor even when his satire was sharpest.
I
If Sinclair Lewis was the village iconoclast, Sherwood Anderson (1876-1941) was the village mystic. The small town he described in his best-known book, Winesburg, Ohio, was very different from those satirized by Lewis. Anderson's townspeople are mainly artisans-tailors, shoemakers, harness makers, wagon builders-who are more solitary and more inhibited than Lewis' characters. Indeed, the essential loneliness of individuals, the gulf between them, is a major theme in Anderson's writing. Everyone in Winesburg has a secret he doesn't dare reveal because he fears the judgment of his neighbors. Anderson believed that conventional morality warped people internally by violating their natural impulses. Like Britain's D. H. Lawrence, he advocated a new morality based on reverence for man's primitive uncultivated instincts.. Although Anderson wrote about unhappy and frustrated people, he neither judged them nor condescended to them, and they emerge from his compassionate and pitying examination with their humanity unimpaired. It remained for a younger writer, Thomas Wolfe (1900-1938), to create the most impressive and infectious portrait in American literature of the young man from the provinces setting out to experience, observe, and master the great world beyond. Wolfe's four big novels, starting with Look Homeward, Angel and ending with You Can't Go Home Again, are, on their most obvious level, one sustained fictional autobiography. But because Wolfe was as curious and impassioned about the outside world as about himself, his books are also a rhapsodic (though sometimes moody) celebration of America-in its continental immensity, in the fabulous variety of its people and their nervous, restless, creative energy. Wolfe appealed most of all to young people because, more than any other writer of his time, he embodied their instinctive idealism and their indiscriminate hunger for experience. For Thomas Wolfe World War I was a distant event seen from the perspective of a young student at a university in the southern United States. But for a whole generation of writers only slightly older than Wolfe, that war was the crucible In which their attitudes toward life and literature,. were forged. Three of the major novelists who emerged during the postwar period-Ernest Hemingway (born in 1899), John Dos Passos (1896), and William Faulkner (1897)-saw action on European battlefields before reaching their twenty-first birthday, and their first books dealt directly with the war. In the main body of Faulkner's work, however, the war theme proved peripheral; although his return to the battlefields of World War I in his recent novel The Fable, which is cast in the form of a parable of Christ's passion, suggests that he may simply have needed more time to come to terms with that experience. But for Hemingway and Dos Passos, and for a great many of their literary contemporaries, the shocking discovery of war's violence and cruelty reverberated through much of their later writing.
Of course European novelists like Henri Barbusse, Arnold Zweig, and Erich Maria Remarque also responded to the war with bitter and eloquent indignation. But there was a difference. Europeans had lived in the presence of war, or its imminent threat, for many generations; and the almost universal European practice of peacetime conscription served as a constant reminder. The United States, however, had known no major war on its own territory since 1865. The absence of peacetime conscription was only one indication of the deeply rooted anti-militarist tradition of the United States, many of whose immigrant citizens had left Europe precisely to escape from compulsory military service. Thus, when war came, its impact was more profoundly traumatic and disillusioning for Americans than for Europeans. The reaction to the war in the American novel took two major forms: protest against the senselessness of war, on the one hand, and, on the other, a sometimes frantic, sometimes exhilarating search for pleasure in the face of shattered illusions and an uncertain future. Gertrude Stein, the American expatriate living in Paris who acted as mentor for a number of younger American writers, called them "the lost generation," because their youthful expectations of life had been betrayed and because traditional values could no longer serve them as a guide. The careers of Hemingway, Dos Passos, and F. Scott Fitzgerald, the leading exemplars of the" lost generation," showed, however, that behind their bitterness, cynicism, and drive for exotic experience, they were deeply committed to traditional moral valuesto personal honesty, to social justice, and to literature as a craft and a calling which demanded effort and sacrifice and dedication. Much of Hemingway's writing can be seen as an effort to find an attitude toward life that could give man some dignity in the face of war's cruelties and society's hypocrisies. Two of his early books-In Our Time and A Farewell to Arms-deal directly with his own experiences in World War I, but almost all of Hemingway's work concerns violence and impending death. To face violent death stoically, without complaint or visible fear, was-according to Hemingway-the only way of conquering it. He wrote about bullfighting, biggame hunting, deep-sea fishing, prize fighting, illegal smuggling, for all these activities tested a man's ability to act with" grace under pressure." In a world of slogans and self-deceptions, this seemed to him all that a man could honestly ask of himself. And Hemingway's famous style of understatement-the short declarative sentences and the clipped, reticent dialogue-was the perfect instrument for conveying this attitude. But even while his style and superficially cynical stance were being imitated by dozens of younger writers, Hemingway was searching for a more satisfying commitment, which he seemed to have found in his book about the Spanish Civil War, For Whom the Bell Tolls. The hero, an American professor of literature who undertakes a dangerous mission for the Loyalist government, comes to admire the dignity of ordinary Spanish peasants and their willingness to give up their instinctive individualism for a larger cause.
Again, Hemingway's most recent novel, The Old Man and the Sea, about an old Cuban fisherman whose craft and endurance net him an enormous fish only to have it eaten by sharks, closes on a more philosophical and affirmative note than was to be found in any of his earlier works. "Man can be destroyed," the old man thinks, "but not defeated." 'John Dos Passos's revulsion against World War I took a different form from Hemingway's. In Three Soldiers, which gives an unrelievedly bitter and disillusioned portrait of army life, Dos Passos saw the issue not as the individual against death or fate, but the individual against society. Following the natural logic of his view, Dos Passos turned in his major work, the trilogy U.S.A., to the most ambitious and wide-ranging dissection of American society ever attempted in a work of fiction. Although a substantial portion of U.S.A. is devoted to the World War, war, for Dos Passos, is no longer the central event but only one more symptom of the dehumanizing of modern life. U.S.A. is a work of impressive experimental craftsmanship and solid architecture. Dos Passos carefully interweaves four devices to catch the fluid quality of American life. The fictional narratives of a dozen characters are the core of the novel. But these are set in historical perspective by the" Newsreels," which ingeniously paste together the headlines of contemporary history, and by the ironic impressionistic "Biographies" of prominent politicians, businessmen, labor leaders, and thinkers. A final device is the" Camera Eye," which sees the same events through the eyes of the author himself, and which is done in a poetic stream-of-consciousness prose borrowed from James Joyce. The cumulative effect of the three volumes (the individual titles are The 42nd Parallel, Nineteen Nineteen, and The Big Money) is a one-sided but unforgettable picture of America done from the viewpoint of an impassioned individualist. The indignation of Hemingway and Dos Passos was one response to the war in postwar American fiction. Another was to be found in the writings of F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940),who recorded the mood ofpersonal liberation and desperate high spirits that was a direct product of the shock of war. His first novel, This Side of Paradise, became a kind of manifesto of flippant and rebellious youth in the "Jazz Age" of the 1920's-an age of easy money, sel}:uallicense, bootleg liquor, and syncopated music. But while he was fascinated by the glitter and glamor that he evoked with such easy elegance, Fitzgerald was not taken in by the superficial values of the" Jazz Age." In his most-praised novel, The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald described the poignant disillusionment of a man who had lived by the dream of wealth and glamor. Actually, Fitzgerald took both life and the craft of literature with a seriousness that was in sharp contrast to the public image of him as a playboy. His final unfinished novel, The Last Tycoon, is one of the best books written about Hollywood, and the first significant attempt in fiction to portray the complicated creative process of bringing a movie to birth. The generation of novelists who matured during and
after World War II was confronted with the fact that its own reaction to war had been anticipated-and even, to an extent, pre-formed-by such earlier writers as Hemingway, Dos Passos, and Fitzgerald. Thus, the war novels of Alfred Hayes (born 1911), John Hersey (born 1914), and John Horne Burns (19161953)-dealing with American troops in Italy-showed the unmistakable influence of Hemingway's manner, although each of these writers had a distinctive talent and accent of his own. The Naked and the Dead, by Norman Mailer (born 1923~perhaps the most famous of the World War II novels-reminded many readers of Dos Passos' condemnation in Three Soldiers of military bureaucracy and the society that created it, although Mailer's indictment is in some respects more ideological and less sentimental than that set forth by Dos Passos. James Jones's (born 1921) From Here to Eternity has the distinction of dealing with life in the peacetime regular army rather than with war, but the theme is still the individual against the machine, human dignity against blind authority. The young men who lived and fought through World War II had been prepared for war not only through literature but through the cumulative international crises of the between-war years. For the most part they reacted in a moderate, unshocked manner: they did not feel themselves to be a "lost generation." After the war there was a brief revival of interest in F. Scott Fitzgerald's life and novels, but the admiration was for his serious rather than his flippant side. The closest parallel to the " lost generation" of the 1920's is the so-called" beat generation" of the 1950's. But the hitch-hiking, job-avoiding, jazz-oriented life of these rebels against conventional morality is much more peripheral to American life than was the reckless funseeking described by Fitzgerald in the 1920's. The" beat generation" has so far produced only one well-known novelist, Jack Kerouac (born 1922). His descriptions of their nomadic, sensation-centered lives in On the Road and The Subterraneans have been praised by some critics as "spontaneous" and "exhilarating" and condemned by others as "adolescent" and "anti-intellectual." In general, the novelists who emerged after World War II were not so much interested in rebelling against society as they were in understanding society and themselves. (To be concluded)
S~,
13&00
The Public Library of Falls Church, Virginia.
A
LIBRARY for the people and by the people. That is the typical small-town library found in hundreds of U.S. counties. No paid workers are hired, members of the community themselves do all the library chores. One such library started 61 years ago in Falls Church, then a small rural hamlet in Virginia. Members brought in their old books, bought a few more, rented a room, and took turns at the counter, checking books in and out. None knew professional library techniques but all were determined to keep alive the ideal of free reading matter for all the people in the village. Soon a community improvement society persuaded the Town Council to pay the rent and to buy additional
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I
titles. It was not until 1950, however, that a trained librarian arrived to take charge and catalog and shelve the odd jumble of books. Today, the small-town library in Falls Church has its own two-story red-brick building. The site is a gift to the city. The building was financed with funds raised through a local bond issue. Book borrowers of all ages came in to scrub floors, clean and label books, carry away the worthless and duplicates. A men's club donated money to buy wood for shelves and a carpenter gave his spare time to building them. After school hours students put the books on the finished shelves, using a cataloging system in the library for the first time.
The population of Falls Church doubled within ten years but the rate of book-borrowing quadrupled, now totaling 130,000 yearly. All but two of the library's staff members work only part-time, and volunteers continue to share. the work. The library's budget, allocated each year by the Town Council, is still not large. Nor is the staff yet content with its collection of 25,000 books, bought chiefly from " fines" paid by borrowers on overdue books. Most libraries in America, like the one in Falls Church, are started by individual groups and later receive federal or state aid. Foundations and citizens make generous contributions. However, a large proportion of .the small-town public libraries have only the financial support of the townspeople. In its specially designed quarters, the library has become even more of a cultural and community center for old and young. Children come not only for the regular. story-telling hours, but also to borrow books or to read them in the section reserved for them. Even smaller children easily recognize by means of colored stickers the
Even the youngest have a corner all their own.
books appropriate for their age group. Adults come to attend a meeting or to record books for the blind; local artists, to hang their pictures; and garden club members, to arrange flowers. Pupils of secondary schools, over the age of 12, find special shelves of reference books selected to fill their academic needs, or loan collections for supplementary reading. Otherwise, all the resources of the library are at their disposal. "We now minimize any dividing line separating 'adult' from 'juvenile' in our collections," the librarian explained. "We find this is the best way to introduce younger readers into the adult world of reading." Just as it displays books needed by students, the library displays on special tables or racks those needed by adults belonging to study or discussion groups. " In a small city like ours," says the librarian, " the public library is the closest approach to adult education. It is a link both with the past and the rest of the world. We need increasingly to see how we can strengthen that link."
CWOman'g C)fem T
IME WAS, executive jobs were an exclusively masculine preserve-particularly in India. Male sophistry had ingeniously thought up the slogan, "The hand that rocks the cradle rules the world," and thus relegated women to the home. With the coming of independence and emancipation (women are guaranteed equal rights with men by the Constitution) Indian women have proved equal to men in spheres hitherto exclusive to males. Today, our women are to be found in varied walks of lifein medicine, law, teaching, home science, and in services and in business. However, Indian women have not given up their femininity while doing men's jobs. One such remarkable woman who has managed to retain her femininity to a large degree while doing a man-sized job is Rekha Menon. Housewife and mother, she is Executive Secretary of the International Cultural Centre, New Delhi. In this capacity she is currently supervising the publication of a series of cultural ••profiles" of 14 large cities in India, a project sponsored by the Cultural Centre. The profiles, part of a major survey of cultural organizations in India, deal with the history of the 14 cities and their achievements in the fields of painting, sculpture, music, dance, theater, cinema, and
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",
bO"7- S-
architecture, and the outstanding personalities in each sphere. They will serve as books of reference. Among new ventures planned for this year are the publication of a book of Tagore's writings on art and aesthetics, and an anthology of Indian classical music in the form of an album, of longplaying records, with a suitable introduction. Rekha is eminently suited to undertake works of this kind. A grandniece of Rabindranath Tagore, she has always been at home in a cultured milieu. Her first interest was broadcasting, and she was well known in Calcutta, particularly for introducing the popular Mahila Mahal during the war, and later for presenting Bichitra from London for the B.B.C. Overseas Service. Returning to India, she became Publicity Officer to the Indian Handicrafts Board, and managed the Handicrafts Emporium, both in Madras and Delhi. She also spent a month in Germany as member of a cultural delegation in 1958. She has had considerable experience in presenting troupes of dancers abroad, as she was publicity manager and commentator for the two well-known dancers, Mrinalini Sarabhai and Shanta Rao, on their tours in Europe and America in 1957. Married to the erudite musicologist and critic, Dr. Narayana Menon (Deputy Director-General of the All India Radio), she has yet another entre into the world of Indian and Western music. Yet she remains a charmingly modest wife and mother whose primary interests are her young daughter and her home. A word about the Cultural Centre. Inaugurated in 1957, the Centre seeks to promote" an understanding and appreciation of the world's art forms and movements, and thus enrich and influence the development of the arts in India." It was assisted by philanthropist Nelson Rockefeller, Governor of New York, who had already shown interest in important Indian projects, such as the pilot scheme in Agricultural Credit outside Delhi, and the Indian Cooperative Movement. Rockefeller's first acquaintance with the rich Indian culture was through an exhibition qf Indian textiles and ornamental arts, organized by the Museum of Modern Art in America of which he is Founder-President. Its phenomenal success inspired Rockefeller to establish a private, nonprofit cultural center to encourage and promote cultural contacts in the fields of Arts and Humanities, between not only America and India, but also between India and the world. Feminine angle-West
and East
It is curious how the same ideals link women everywhere. In America where women have achieved equality of opportunity with men in almost every career, they must still reconcile the demands of a work-a-day life with the responsibilities of a happy and adjusted family life. Without any hesitation they endorse the priority which Indian women give to family commitments. This was emphasized recently by a leading woman jurist, 67-year-old Judge Jennie Loitman Barron, of Boston, Massachusetts, who was named the American Mother of 1959. She has three daughters and seven grandchildren. Many honors have been conferred on her. She was chosen U.S. delegate to the U.N. Congress on the Prevention of Crime in 1955, and has twice served as Assistant State Attorney-General. Mrs. Barron is the first woman to become an Associate Justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Court and Judge of the Boston Municipal Court. Judge Barron's success has not come easily. She worked hard to put herself through law school in Boston. She sold Shakespeare's works from door to door, tutoring and teaching at night schools. After taking her law degree, she married a young attorney, Sam Barron Jr., and established a law firm with him, working ceaselessly to redress the grievances of women who at that time (1918) had no vote, could not serve as juries, and did not have equal rights with fathers in the jurisdiction of children. This pioneer woman jurist has never lost sight of her main responsibilities as wife and mother .•• The family is the essence of civilization .... All the rest of life is fringe benefits," Mrs. Barron believes. This sentiment could as well have come from Indian women.
The Job story has the basic elements of formal drama and Mr. Macleish has exploited them to create a well-integrated structure. In Job, he paints the image of modern man, many-faceted, a sum of irreconcilables. Mr. Macleish's Job is much softened in his outlines. He is, in fact, a culture hero whose heroism is determined by the quality of his sensitiveness rather than by his conscious decisions. In a way, he belongs to the same ancestry as Elizabetha in Mr. Macleish's earlier play, This Music Crept by Me on the Water. A sort of a pastoral witness, Job supplies" feeling perspective." Yet within these softened outlines is the whole range of the Job-idea: SARAH:
J. B.,
a play in verse by Archibald Macleish. Mifflin Company.
Houghton
J.B. as a play enacts the story of Job in modern conditions and raises the complex dimensions of a " tragic moment" in history, a period in which traditional values no longer comfort and sustain. Man discovers himself again groping in the dark. The image of Jobthe first tragic dramatization of the Hebrew mind and the archetype of suffering, questioning, unanswered humanity-embodies the problems of the nature of man in the universe. He weighs the variety of standard human formulas for resolving the perplexity of living. More than Prometheus or Oedipus or Electra-the Greek fables so often exploited by the modern French playwrights for purposes of extending their perspective, as well as for ironic contrasts between the past and the present-Job is a symbol of the mystery of undeserved suffering in a world of collapsing values. The Job-idea, arising out of a cultural situation in which inherited values are discredited, runs the gamut of human attitudes and moods. The final affirmation is remarkably well rendered by Mr. Macleish: J.B.:
The candles ill the churches are out, The lights have gone out in the sky /
SARAH:
The candles in the churches are out, The lights have gone out in the sky, Blow on the coal of the heart And we'l! see by and by ... we'l! see where we are. We'l! know. We'l! know.
J.B.:
(desperately) God is just / If God is Just our slaughtered, broken children Stank with sin ... were rotten with it / Sarah/ Even desperate we can't despair ... No. Don't let my hand go, Sarah. Say it after me : The LORD GIVETH ...
THE LORD GIVETH. THE LORD TAKETH
J.B.:
AWAY .â&#x20AC;˘. Takes/
SARAH: Kills! Kills / Kills / Kills! J.B.:
BLESSED
BE THE NAME
OF THE LORD.
The play is rich with insight into the modern and the bitter dilemma of choice.
predicament
The diction of the play may not be expansive. It is too tied down to the actual, the local, but it certainly is within the limits of decorum, and has a sinewed fluency and eloquence about it:
(the hard word said at last) We can never know. He answered me like the ... stillness of a star That silences us asking ... No, Sarah, no / We are-and that is all our answer, We are, and what we are can suffer ... But ... What suffers, loves ... and love Will live in suffering again, Risk its own defeat again, And yet again and yet again In doubt, in dread, in ignorance, unanswered, Over and over, with the dark before, The dark behind it ... and still live ... still love.
My Sin / Teach me my sin / My wickedness / Surely iniquity that suffers Judgment like mine cannot be secret. Mine is no childish fault, no nastiness Concealed behind a bathroom door, No sin a prurient virtue practices Licking the silence from its lips Like sugar afterwards. Mine is flagrant, Worthy of death, of many deaths, Of shame, loss, hurt-indignities Such as these. Such as these Speak of the sin I must have sinned To suffer what you see me suffer.
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Job is not a symbol of protest. The whole story is an inquiry into the nature of man, the universe, and God. Job never speaks from hatred or fear but from love. Moreover, the Job story has a significant vital tension. Of course it has no plotted physical action. It has only inner realities functioning like actions and loaded with dramatic consequences. There is an inner logic, a dialectic, a dramatic rhythm to which the various characters respond till the "terrible ambiguity of an immediate experience" is created. Job and his comforters may not move from the ash-heap, but we know they are at death-grips. For each his survival at stake.
"It's not precisely the expression Anyone would choose: I know that. Evil is never very pretfy-"
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¡ C Rvt= R. bO_~3'i)<6) by Alice Cecilia Cooper and Charles A. Palmer
America is celebrating the 100th anniversary of the birth of George Washington Carver, a great scientist who was once described as having had "the worst start and the best finish" of any man then alive.
EVERYBODY KNEW THAT PEANUTS (groundnuts) had three uses. They could be fed to the monkeys in the zoo, and munched by human beings at ball games. In the form of peanut butter they could be: made into picnic sandwiches. And around the year 1900, that was' all their value. But Dr. George Washington Carver, the great Negro agricultural scientist of the South, had to find, and find quickly, other uses for the lowly peanut. He had urged its planting on cotton-poor Southern farmers, and they had followed his advice so enthusiastically that they raised more peamits than people would buy. So, to expand the market ~yond the ball parks, circus tents, and zoos, he tore the tiny peanut into fourteen different parts, shuffled them about in his labOratory, and came out with 300 different commercial products! Dr. Carver's own explanation of his work is a heart-warming blend of humble simplicity and scientific exactness. It started with a pious acknowledgment of God's help, and ended in the realm of test tubes, Bunsen-burners, and microscopes. This comforting association between God and his servant, the scientist, was the very essence of the kindly oJd Negro's philosophy. '¢
" I take a handful of peanuts and look at them, and I say to my Creator, 'Why did You make the peanut? ' Then I try to find out why by taking the peanut apart. I separate the water, the fats, the oils, the gums, the resins, sugars, starches, pectoses, pentoses, legumen, lysin, the anima all spread out before me. Then I merely try different conditions of temperature and pressure; and the results-well, you can see for yourself."
What you see for yourself takes your breath away. Dr. Carver's peanut products range from breakfast foods to shoe polish, from ice cream to axle grease. They include starch, flour, milk, cheese, vinegar, pickles, linoleum, paints, ink, wood-stains, beauty lotions, soap, emulsions, shaving cream, paper oils, and dyes! And all that is only part of George Washington Carver's life ~ork. His life story is brimful of accomplishments-new uses for cotton, startling products from the sweet potato, paints from common Alabama clays-and they all stem from one amazing source, nothing. He always started out with nothing. He took valueless crops, even waste and refuse, as the basis of his experiments, and out of nothing he created hundreds of beneficial products. He took nothing in return, gave away all of his ideas, took out no patents, and drew no royalties. George Washington Carver was born a slave. The date was "around 1860." His mother and father were slaves on Moses Carver's widespread plantation near Diamond Grove, in the southwestern corner of Missouri. The father was sold on an auction block when the child was only a month or so old. The Ozark Plateau, parts of Kentucky and Illinois, and the whole state of Tennessee separated. the Carver plantation from the thundering battlegrounds of the Civil War. The great battles to the East and South took a different and more sinister form around Diamond Grove. Bands of self-styled "Union sympathizers" made night raids on the plantations, frightened off slaves, and in other ways sporadically carried on the fight" to free the slaves." One cold moonlit night a band of night-raiders swept down on the Carver plantation and kidnaped several of the slaves. Among them was little George's mother, who huddled her six-months-old baby in her arms as she stumbled along the rutted dirt road beside the horse of her captor. All night long and through the icy mists of morning the straggling line of slaves waS herded out of Missouri and down into Arkansas. Little George's mother died from the terrible strain, and the tiny baby was left to the rough care of his kidnapers. Agents sent out by Moses Carver came across the raiders. The infant had developed whooping-cough and the raiders expected him to die. These agents offered a race horse, worth about three hundred dollars, as ransom. The raiders, glad to trade the ailing child for something which at least wouldn't catch the whooping-cough, let the baby go back to Moses Carver's plantation.
The end of the Civil War freed the slaves, but did not free certain of the plantation owners from an inbred sense of obligation toward their helpless dependents. The Carvers, though impoverished, brought up the little orphan boy and gave him a home until he was ready to leave. In accordance with custom, he was given their family name. For some years he was sickly and frail, unable to work or play as energetically as other children his age. The spirit, however, was oot lacking. He pitched into whatever work he could do around the house or in the kitchen and yard. It was his willingness and honesty which finally earned him his full name, George Washington Carver. In the pale light of early morning, hours before he would be needed to help with the work around the house, little George used to wander alone into the woods near the plantation. He always came back in time to do his share of the daily work, but in the afternoons off he would run again. No one knew why he liked so much to play there. " When I was just a little tyke," he later explained, "I thirsted for knowledge. I literally lived in the woods. I wanted to know what was in every stone and plant, and to learn about every animal, insect, and bird. I had a secret garden where I took sick plants and soon had them blooming again." An old blue-backed Webster's Spelling Book provided the young botanist's only education during his first ten years. He always carried it with him. In the woods he tucked the book into a shelf dug from the trunk of a favorite tree. Then he would scamper off to find wild flowers, ferns and moss, bring them back to where he had hidden the speller, and impatiently thumb through the tattered pages in search of words to describe what he had found. He was not satisfied
with just a knowledge of plants and animals, however. Before he ever saw the inside of a schoolroom, he had' mastered every word in that speller ! The town of Neosho, Missouri, a few miles away, boasted a one-room school and little George, hungry for education, asked if he could go there. Moses Carver was a much poorer man after those hard years which followed the war, and to lose even a ten-year-old helper from the plantation was something of a hardship. Nevertheless, he encouraged the tiny Negro boy to go ahead. " I'm only sorry I can't give you any money to start on," he said. So off he went into the world. Neosho, small as it was, frightened the frail youngster who trudged into it with his book under one arm and his small bundle of clothes under the other. There were so many horses, wagons, and people! He crowded close to the buildings to keep from getting his bare feet stepped on. When he finally found a place to sleep, in a hayloft over a livery stable, he dropped to the soft pile of hay-thinking that never before in all his life had he been so tired. The excitement of the place had completely taken away his appetite, and it was not until he awoke cold and hungry the next morning that he realized he hadn't even tried to find anything to eat. School work was fun. The shy, eager-eyed, smiling little Negro boy found odd jobs to keep himself clothed and fed. As he did on the plantation, he still rose early to go exploring in the woods before work or school. After school he ran errands, swept out stores, shined shoes and did any other odd jobs the friendly people of Neosho would give him. Within a year he had learned all that the teacher in Neosho's log school could teach him, and he was hungry for more. The opportunity came early one morning. George was strolling along the road, on his way back to town from a new garden he had started, when a stranger in a mule-drawn wagon offered him a ride. The stranger let fall that he was on his way to Fort Scott, Kansas, about seventy-five miles distant, and George eagerly asked if he could go along. There was a high school in Fort Scott. The traveler agreed, and George, having no possessions to pack anyway, left Neosho without a backward look. He got a job as a cook, dishwasher, and housekeeper for a family in Fort Scott, and entered high school. His lifelong practice of making something out of nothing was well begun. He had started without even freedom. He had earned his own food, his own clothing, even his own name. Now he was earning his education. Seven years later he graduated from the high school at Fort Scott. There had been many things to catch up. His only actual preparation had been the Webster's Speller, the one-room school, and what he had learned in the fields and woods. As close as he could guess his age, he was about twenty. With his graduation from high school came also his graduation from bodily frailty. Suddenly he began to grow and toughen. Within a year or two he had developed into a strong, healthy six-footer. The Carvers proudly claimed a part in that rapid development. They insisted that it was the home-cooking they gave him when, the summer after he finished high school, he came back "home" to visit. While at the plantation George was also given an old spinning wheel on which his mother had spun flax years before. He treasured
This story is an excerpt from the book "Ten Modern Americans" to be published this month by S. Chand and Company, Delhi, and is printed here with permission of the publisher.
that relic and kept it with him continuously from that time. Years later an old friend remarked, " I've seen him touch that wheel; he touches it as a priest reverently touches an altar. I sometimes feel that if I could be in his room when he retires, I should hear him say goodnight to that wheeL" High school whetted the young man's appetite for education just as had the blue-backed Speller and the one-room school of Neosho. He had very little money, but that was no drawback, for he had learned from experience the great difference between simply getting something for nothing and making something from nothing. During that summer on the Carver plantation, George applied by letter for admission to a college in Iowa. His credits were approved; he filled out the examination papers and eagerly sent them back to the college. Weeks passed. The opening day of the fall semester was near at hand when word finally came that he was accepted. Nearly every penny he possessed went into a railroad ticket to the college town in Iowa. He arrived happy to be starting on his higher education. He planned to start a small laundry, to finance his way through. The college Dean looked up as the young man entered the room. A look of shock and embarrassment crossed his face. Yes, they had received George Washington Carver's entrance examination. Yes, he had passed ... but unfortunately the college did not admit Negroes. "It's
a pity we didn't make that clear."
George Washington Carver smiled sadly, but without resentment. Yes, he was sorry too. He should have mentioned his race himself. Without any reference to the fact that the trip had left him penniless and hungry, he politely bowed his way out into the open air. With a heavy heart, he slowly walked back to where he had left the small satchel which contained his few possessions. He was disappointed, but by no means beaten. If this college wouldn't admit him, he would find one that would. After a year of working at odd jobs~ooking in a hotel, cleaning carpets, and any chores that he could find-he was accepted as a student at Simpson College at Indianola, Iowa. After paying his entrance fees and setting up the equipment for his laundry venture, he had exactly ten cents in his pocket. A nickel's (five cents) worth of corn meal and another nickel's worth of meat fed him for a whole week before any business came his way. Soon, however, the courteous, pleasant-spoken young Negro attracted friends who gave him work, and he spent three productive years at Simpson College. In 1890 he enrolled at Iowa State College. None of the bitterness of his earlier experiences shadowed his personality. He became popular, not only because of his warm friendliness and sincerity, but the ever-widening variety of his interests and ability. He had a full-toned singing voice, and a gift for the piano which nearly won him over to the concert stage during his college days. Another accomplishment, art, stayed with the young scientist as a life-long hobby, and it influenced many of his later experiments. The authorities at Iowa State College were so favorably impressed with young George Washington Carver's work that, upon the award of his Bachelor of Science degree in 1894, they offered him a teaching post in the chemistry laboratory. He stayed, and while he taught, he took two years of post-graduate work to earn his degree of Master of Science. During those two years the young Negro chemist and teacher took under his wing a lad whQse interest in the woods and fields was as ardent as his own. This youth, son of another teacher, "was an inquisitive youngster," as Dr. Carver later remarked admiringly, and he is proud today to admit his debt to the kindly Negro's patient guidance. He is Henry A. Wallace, former Secretary of Agriculture and former Vice President of the United States. Meanwhile, George Washington Carver's abilities were gaining reputation. In 1897 the late great Booker T. Washington, head of
struggling Tuskegee Institute at Tuskegee, Alabama, asked the young agricultural chemist to join his staff. Tuskegee Institute was just sixteen years old when Carver went there to add a Department of Agricultural Chemistry to the fastgrowing school. When its director had been asked by a former slaveowner to head this pioneer Negro school it was simply" 40 students in a dilapidated shanty near the colored Methodist Church." Today it has 100 buildings and 2,000 acres of land at its disposal, an endowment of two million dollars, and more than 1,500 eager students. At the end of the past century, however, Booker T. Washington had little more to offer Carver than the home-spun invitation: " I'd be proud if you would come here and let down your bucket." Years later George Washington Carver sat in his cluttered study at Tuskegee and recalled that early invitation. "I did come here," he murmured softly. "I did let down my bucket. And every time I've pulled it up, it has been brimful and running over ... running over." After Professor Carver had taught for two years at Tuskegee he took leave of absence to return to Iowa State College to earn his degree of Doctor of Science. As Doctor Carver, he at last considered himself prepared to begin the great work for which he felt God had called him. The first laboratory at Tuskegee was a triumph of enterprise, ingenuity, and resourcefulness. There was no equipment, and no money with which to buy it. But Dr. Carver was right at home. He was starting this undertaking as he had started every other-with nothing. He and his students spent their class periods rummaging through the trash piles in the alleys of Tuskegee. Empty bottles, tin cans, pieces of wire, and scrap of all kinds went into the furnishing of that first laboratory. Years were to pass before Tuskegee Institute could afford new equipment, but no one was ever happier with the most elaborate fittings than was Dr. Carver with his first plank benches and perfume-bottle test tubes. Regardless of the equipment, there were grave problems to be attacked at once. Over the troubled South hung a cloud which threatened Negroes and whites alike. Cotton had always been the South's money crop, almost its only source of cash income. Cotton, and nothing but cotton, had been planted on those rolling fields since the South had been settled. No replenishing crops were ever grown to give the worn-out soil a chance to breathe, or to recover the essential minerals which cotton had taken away. The land was beginning to rebel. The diminishing cotton yield was serious enough. But then the boll-weevil attacked the fields and ruined nearly all the crop that was left. Dr. Carver concentrated on the situation almost as though he felt himself to blame for it. As in childhood, it was still his habit to rise at four o'clock in the morning and rove the woods in search of plants and flowers. Now he roved the cotton fields, and returned to his laboratory in the mornings laden with cotton plants and buckets of earth. On a twelve-acre patch of ground at the edge of town, he tested this crop and that to find a substitute for cotton. Long and careful chemical analysis, hour upon hour of backbreaking labor in the fields, night after night of study went into his work. At last, sure of his results, he was ready to speak. The planters were desperate. " What are we going to do?" they cried. "The boll-weevil is ruining us !"
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Dr. Carver had the answer. "Plant sweet potatoes," he advised them in public meetings â&#x20AC;˘ and in pamphlets distributed by the Institute. " Plant sweet potatoes, or, better still, plant peanuts!" The planters and farmers were slow to heed his advice. But in the course of his tireless crusade, Dr. Carver published the startling results of crop rotation on that twelve-acre patch which he himself was tending. That piece of land, planted in cotton, had lost five dollars per acre the year its owner abandoned it as hopeless. Then Dr. Carver and his students had taken it over. The next year the plot showed a cash profit of $75 from a crop of sweet potatoes. The
year after that a crop of peanuts produced a ~rofit of $150. After twelve years of careful crop rotation and fertilizing, Dr. Carver raised a SOD-pound bale of cotton on a single acre of that abandoned land! Bale-an-acre land is the cream of the South. Here was a man who not only suggested a remedy for the farmers' problems, but went out to the soil and proved what he preached. A few farmers began planting" goobers," as they called peanuts, or groundnuts, then more and more. The land was being reviveF1.Money began to flow back to the Southern plantations. Then an unforeseen complication appeared. Dr. Carver's crusade had succeeded too well. There were more peanuts than the market could buy ! Prices began to fall. It was not the land that was failing them now. Dr. Carver felt personally responsible for the new problem. He had told the farmers what to plant. He had caused the surplus of peanut production. It was his problem to find a way out. Now it was peanuts which Dr. Carver carried into his laboratory in the early mornings. He called upon every experience of his life to help him. He was a good cook. The peanut was good food; it contained vitamins A and B-how about salad dressing, shortening? But surely there must be uses for the peanut other than food. Also, he was an artist. Could peanut oil be used for paints and dyes ?
of goobers. From a worthless crop peanuts grew into a milliondollar-a-year industry ! The modest, slender Negro who brought about this happy revolution was wel into middle age when the nation as a whole came to know him. That was in 1923 when he was awarded the Spingarn Medal, presented annually for the most distinguished achievement by an American citizen of African descent. And through it all he remained a quiet, humble, unpretentious man whose sole happiness came from making something out of nothing. Other developments, besides those growing out of sweet potatoes and peanuts, kept bringing Dr. Carver into the public spotlight from time to time. His campaign for crops to replace cotton had not been intended to cause the South to abandon cotton altogether. Indeed, that would have defeated the very principle which Dr. Carver taught -rotation of crops. In the course of time, as he himself had proved, the renewed soil of the South was capable of producing more and better cotton than it ever had before. New uses for cotton itself, of course, came from the laboratory of the famous Doctor. Among many other things, he developed a road-building process in which cotton binds the asphalt much as steel rods reinforce concrete construction. A road surface one inch thick consumes forty bales of cotton to the mile, and since such a surface stands the expansion and contraction of hot summers and cold winters without cracking, it has become widely used.
He first produced a dozen, then fifty brand-new products from the peanut. The market for the crop began to increase. Gradually a hundred items came out of the hard-working chemist's laboratory. Then one hundred and fifty, two hundred, and finally three hundred new products opened up the peanut market!
Anything that might be considered agricultural waste has been a starting point for Dr. Carver. He developed synthetic rubber tires from cotton stalks, potash from china berry tree ashes, silk from poplar bark, and synthetic marble from wood shavings.
Next he tackled the sweet potato with the same scientific thoroughness. Soon Dr. Carver was able to serve a complete meal, including "coffee," and tapioca for dessert, from sweet potato products alone. The items which he wrung out of that one common vegetable quickly numbered over a hundred.
Aside from the laboratory, painting remained the chief diversion for the gentle-spirited and somewhat shuffle-gaited old gentleman, as the years weighted down his shoulders. Beside the stains and dyes which he derived from peanuts and sweet potatoes, he developed from Alabama clays the dry colors which went into his pictures.
The First World War saw "wheatless days" all over our country. Dr. Carver was experimenting at that time with a flour made from sweet potatoes. He made bread from this flour and tried it on the students at Tuskegee. They liked it.
Dr. Carver's whole life was bound up with Tuskegee Institute. After he passed fifty a trip beyond the boundaries of Alabama became rare indeed. There was, however, one memorable trip to Washington, D.C. It occurred in 1930 when legislation was being drafted to benefit many agricultural products. Peanuts, despite Southern agitation, were not among the items listed. The bill was nearly ready when the Ways and Means Committee of Congress granted a final public hearing. The delegation from the Southern
When the process for making the flour was perfected, Dr. Carver gave it to the government for use in the army- It was received thankfully and used with great success. The quiet, religious scientist not only gave away all of his ideas to anyone who could make use of them, he actually refused payment when it was offered. When the peanut-planters were harassed by a disease which threatened to ruin their now valuable peanut crop just as the boll-weevil had destroyed their cotton, they sent specimens to Dr. Carver. He put the problem to test and discovered a cure. Anxious to show their appreciation, the grateful planters mailed him a substantial check and wrote that he could expect an equal amount every month in the future. Dr. Carver mailed the check back with this characteristic note attached: "God didn't charge anything for his work in making the peanut. I won't charge for m'Ywork in curing it." He continued to live in the simplest style. Two small rooms in a dormitory, a mile and a half from his laboratory, were all that he ever wanted. Year in and year out he wore the same old alpaca jacket. When it wore out in a new spot, he patched it. He patched his own shoes. Every morning he still rose early to go hunting in the woods and fields, returning to his classroom with a few flowers in one hand and a bundle of sticks and weeds in the other. His only love affair came to nothing as a result of this habit. " I won't play second fiddle to a handful of weeds and flowers," said the girl, and that was the end of the romance. Dr. Carver remained a bachelor to the end of his life. Dothan, Alabama, is the capital of the Peanut Belt. In 1900 it was a sleepy, out-at-elbow town of about 3,000 population. By 1937 it was a bustling city of 20,000 prosperous people. In 1900 scarcely fifty tons of peanuts were grown in the whole world. Soon the area within fifty miles around Dothan alone was producing 75,000 tons
states appeared before the committee late one hot afternoon. Of the several speakers scheduled to be heard, Dr. Carver was the last. Each speaker was allowed exactly fifteen minutes, and there were timers present to make sure that no one exceed~d the limit. By the time Dr. Carver rose to speak, the Congressmen were thoroughly tired. Some openly dozed, chins resting on their propped palms. Others were hidden behind newspapers. The Ways and Means Committee made no secret of its boredom over the whole subject of peanuts. Not more than two or three of the men even looked up as the old Negro, wearing coat and trousers which didn't match, stood to plead for the interests of his people. A rose, picked fresh that morning, drooped from his lapel. His high-laced shoes shone with a polish he himself had made from peanut oil. In his soft, somewhat highpitched voice, Dr. Carver launched into his story about the peanut. " I said to my Creator, , Why did You make the peanut?' Then I tried to find out why-" he started from the beginning. There had been mumbling among the committee members when he began to speak. It dwindled away. Newspapers rattled as they were folded up. Heads rose from the crooks of tired Congressmen's arms. Simply and truthfully, just the way it had all happened, Dr. Carver told them the story. Exactly one minute over his allotted fifteen, he sat down. There was a short silence. All eyes were on the venerable Negro. A Congressman leaped to his feet. "Go
on, sir! Tell us more."
The call was taken up by the others. More ... more! Dr. Carver rose slowly. The deep kindly smile which touched his eyes endeared him to the worldly, cynical audience before him. He told them about all the products which he had produced from the peanut. He told them about his first laboratory. That committee which had grudgingly allotted fifteen minutes to the speakers from the South kept Dr. Carver on the floor for two
solid hours! And when the bill was passed shortly peanut was included in its list of favored products.
afterward, the
Through long years of steady useful accomplishment and utterly simple living, Dr. Carver accumulated a little over $100,000. He had made no effort to gain such an amount. In fact he once refused a yearly salary of that sum offered him by the Edison Foundation. In 1933, $70,000 of his savings were wiped away in a bank crash. When told about it, he simply smiled and said, "I guess somebody found a \<Isefor it. I wasn't using it myself." It never occurred to him that he could stop working and retire. Work was his life, and, besides, the more he did, the more he found to do. He never owned an automobile, or even a hat. His favorite mode of travel was on foot so that he could" see what was going on." His apparel was always rather thrown together, starting with an old checked cap, slouchy dark coat, and baggy, speckled pants. It was only with the greatest difficulty that his colleagues induced him to wear the academic cap and gown even when a bronze plaque in his honor was unveiled at Tuskegee in 1931. He was nearly seventy at the time. In ]939 the Roosevelt Memorial Award was granted to Dr. Carver. The following year he himself gave away every penny of his remaining savings toward the founding of the Carver Creative Research Laboratories which were being built at Tuskegee Institute. Quietly smiling, he refused money, reward, or even praise for all that he did. Out of nothing, the sickly child who was traded for a horse overcame more handicaps than most of us will ever know. Out of nothing, he created things of everlasting value to all mankind, regardless of color. And after giving away all he had, he wanted nothing in return~xcept to give thanks! George Washington Carver, the Plant Doctor, died in ]943, leaving a sizable amount of money in uncashed checks for the benefit of young Negro scientists.
tlrmQt0jr
maned, breezy American in ills sixties; the elderly Indian saint, "tall, and slender, indeed emaciated" with "a clean-cut and conspicuously intellectual face, and a deep and kindly eye," clothed only in a loin cloth.
J'a!ยงp~Qi~ MANY INDIANS and Americans are aware of the fact that Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, two of America's most germinal authors of the last century, were both profoundly influenced in their thought and expression by ancient Hindu thought. Scholars may debate the sources and extent of this influence, but the loving reader of Emerson's Essays and Thoreau's Walden will certainly not miss in them the note of Indian mysticism and the accent on the virtue of quiet meditation. What may be less known to those interested in the story of Indo-American cultural relations is the fact that a respectable number of other well-known American writers have to some degree fallen under the spell of India. Not the least of these was Herman Melville, the author of the classic American novel, Moby Dick or the White Whale. While it does not appear that Melville was a close student of Hinduism, he was certainly acquainted with aspects of Indian mythology. In Chapter 55 of his best-known work-Moby Dickhe refers to the incarnation of Vishnu in the fornl of a fish, or-as Melville insists-a whale, which sounded down to the utmost depths of the sea to rescue the sacred books. And, in a later chapter, Melville returns to the same theme: "When Brahma, or the God of Gods ... resolved to recreate the world after one of its periodical dissolutions, he gave birth to Vishnu, to preside over the work: but the Vedas, or mystical books, whose perusal would seem to have been indispensable to Vishnu before beginning the creation ... were lying at the bottom of the waters." Mark Twain, humorist, satirist, and perhaps the most typically American of our nineteenth-century authors, was most certainly not a Sanskrit scholar nor was he particularly versed in the lore of India. But in 1895, as part of a long and fruitful trip around the world, he stopped for several months in India. He visited Bombay, Agra, Delhi, Banaras, Calcutta, and Darjeeling, and recorded his impressions in a longish book called Following the Equator. For the most part, his impressions are the travelogue of a sensitive journalist; he was an interested and generally sympathetic observer, and sometimes offers us truly penetrating passages. Take, for example, his encounter with a learned holy man, one who had truly reached a "state of perfection," and to whom the conCerns of the earth were foreign. The encounter must have been strange and memorable: Twain, a burly, white-
" ... but the Vedas ... whose perusal would seem to have been indispensable to Vishnu ... were lying at the bottom of the waters."
During the visit, which was brief, they exchanged autographed copies of their books. The Hindu gave Twain his commentary on the Indian holy writings and the American tendered a copy of Huckleberry Finn. "I knew that if it didn't do him any good, it wouldn't do him any harm," Twain remarks.
F. Marian Crawford is hardly in the same class with Twain and Melville, but he was an immensely popular American novelist of the late nineteenth century. His interest in India and its history was fairly extensive. As a young student he became interested in Sanskrit and, when he was only 25 years old, he came to India. For several years he was the editor of the Allahabad Indian Herald (about 1880). Returning to America, he continued his Sanskrit studies with the well-known Harvard Orientalist, Professor Charles R. Lanman. Crawford's first novel, Mr. Isaacs, was a lively sketch of the Anglo-Indian life of his time, mingled with a bit of Oriental mysticism. It bears some resemblance to a later, better, and much more famous novel, Forster's Passage to India.
A
:lea Mr. Sham Nath, Mayor of Delhi, who visited the United States earlier this summer to attend the U.S. and Canadian Conference of Mayors, was honored by the City of Washington at a special ceremony held at the District Government building. He was presented the symbolic key to the city and became an honorary citizen of Washington. Speaking on the occasion, District Commissioner Robert McLaughlin remarked: "The basic interests of our countries and our peoples are the samepeace and freedom. I hope that more of your people will visit the United States and thereby give us the opportunity to know them better. I also hope that more Americans will visit India and learn the language, history and culture of the people of India."
Sardar Hukam Singh, M.P. Sardar Hukam Singh, Deputy Speaker of the Lok Sabha, recently undertook a month-long tour of the United States to study the U.S. system of State and Federal Government and acquaint himself with American parliamentary procedures. In~roducing him on the floor of the U.S. Senate, Senator Albert Gore called Sardar Hukam Singh "a distinguished guest ... and one who coming from a country with a long history of friendship for our people is especially welcome." The Indian Deputy Speaker also visited the House of Representatives and conferred with the leaders of both Houses. He was able to renew his acquaintance with Congressman D. S. Saund-the first 'Indian-born American to be elected to the U.S. Congress-whom he had met earlier in India in 1957. In an interview in Springfield, Illinois, Sardar Hukam Singh said: "There is no doubt that Indo-U.S. aspirations are getting closer and closer every day." He found in the U.S. increasing appreciation of India's foreign policies.
Mr. M. C. Chagla "An international authority on legal education, a distinguished author, noted citizen of India, and leader of world cultural life and legal thought." This is how Mr. M. C. Chagla, India's Ambassador to the United States, was described in the citation read by Harold C. Case, President of Boston University which conferred on the Ambassador the honorary degree of Doctor of Laws at a convocation held in June. Mr. Chagla delivered the commencement or convocation address to the graduates of the University and selected as his text "The Challenge of the New Decade." The first challenge of today, said Mr. Chagla, was that of war and violence; another was the abolition of poverty from the face of the earth. He pointed out that India practiced the Gandhian way of non-violence and firmly believed in democratic methods. India "could have regimented and dragooned her people in order to produce more and build up a powerful industrial economy, but she preferred the slower and surer and much more humane method of putting the liberty of the individual before the prosperity of the State."
Mrs. Rukmini Devi
Mrs. Rukmini Devi -well-known as author, artist, dancer, lecturer, a member of the Indian Parliament and a former member of the Indian delegation to UNESCO-is home from a lecture tour of the United States. Mrs. Rukmini Devi has done much valuable work in the revival and exposition of Indian art forms, and during her tour she presented and interpreted to Americans the classical Bharat Natyam dances of South India. Dancing in accompaniment to her lectures and demonstrations was Shrimati Sarada. Mrs. Rukmini Devi also attended the Theosophical Society's National Convention in Wheaton, I1linois. Wayne State University honored her with the honorary degree of Doctor of Humanities.
"The poetry of motion" has few abler exponents than Indrani Rehman who has won wide acclaim from U.S. critics and audiences during her recent tour in the United States. Indrani's beauty and dancing skill have received favorable notices in such diverse settings as the annual Jacob's Pillow Dance Festival in Lee, Massachusetts, the vast Chicago International Trade Fair, and the posh Barbizon-Plaza Theater in N(fw York City. The New York Times choreographic critic, John Martin, introduceg a nostalgic note in reviewing Indrani's New ~ ork debut in August: "Of more personal interest is the fact that she (Indrani) is the daughter of another Indian dancer, Ragini Devi, who was a pioneer in her field in this country some years ago. Not only did she dance in this same Barbizon-Plaza Theater and hold weekly Sunday afternoons in her own little Indian dance theater in West Fifty-Seventh Avenue, but even earlier than that. .. she also wrote a small book called Nritanjali, An Introduction to Hindu Dancing, which was the first of its 'kind to be published in this country. This was in 1928, but it still reads well and is, in its brief way, most informative." The younger dancer started her own career virtually as a child in her mother's company. "Since she spent so many of her early years in this country, she is aware of the American mind as well as of the language," the critic noted.
Indrani, who has specialized in interpretation of the intricate Bharat Natyam classical dance of South India, presented three other regional dances of IndiaKuchipidi, classical dance of Andhra inspired by the numerous fables of gods and demons; Odissi, a style deriving from the ancient temple sculptures of Orissa; and Mohini Attam, "the rare form of South India only recently saved from virtual extinction." Walter Terry, dance critic of the New York Herald Tribune, commented: "The dancing and the styles she elected to employ seemed swifter, larger in scale and more vivid of accent than those of other dancers from India. The gestures were exquisite and delicately defined but more richly energized than I have seen before and her body actions were both marvelously subtle and kinetically exciting. Here, indeed, is an impressive artist, supported by an excellent ensemble. Indrani made her official American debut earlier at Jacob's Pillow Dance Festival. Her troupe-it includes a select group of singers and instrumentalists-drew a capacity audience on the opening night and by the next day the 550-seat theater had been sold out for the full week. Introducing Indrani, Founder-Director of the Festival Ted Shawn said she was not only "a fine, technically perfect exponent of the dance form of her native land but was also considered one of the great beauties of India." During the week she appeared at Jacob's Pillow, Indrani also taught classes conducted there. Pupils were eager to attend and faculty members sat in as observers. Later in an interview, Indrani said: "The audiences here are fine and intellectually aware of what we are doing. They are attentive, receptive, and I have found fine rapport between myself and them." In July the Indian dancer scored a popular success at the Chicago International Trade Fair. The Indian Pavilion at the Fair was one of the most widely attended among the 21 national exhibits. As in previous years, visitors were attracted by the array of Indian handloom fabrics and handicrafts. An estimated 500,000 people visited the Indian Pavilion during the 16 days the Fair was open.
This cross section 0/ the synchrotron's half-mile tunnel, shown during construction, is 20 feet wide.
world's scientific
In the gamma field, plants in pots arranged in circles are exposed to atomic rays from a cobalt-60 capsule located in the center 0/ the field. 1/" loaded" the capsule would be lowered into a container in the ground while the gardener works. Mutants created by such exposure have been important itl the development 0/ new plant species which will help improve /CfOdcrops.
PROTONS, flashing around a copper hoop a half-mile in circumference, reached energies above 30,000 million electron volts when the switch was thrown on Brookhaven National Laboratory's new giant atom-smasher on July 29, 1960. The beam of protons traveled at greater than 99.9 per cent of the velocity of light, which is about 186,000 miles per second. The performance of the Brookhaven Synchrotron exceeded the expectations of the American scientists who had worked on the project for six years. It had bettered
largest instrument
Brookhaven, with a staff of 1,400 technicians, is utilized cooperatively for basic and applied research by scientists of universities, industries, and other private organizations. Here two scientists in one of the laboratories prepare a complex experiment.
The Cosmotron is the second largest atom-smasher in the United States. It develops energies of 2,300 million electron volts, equivalent to those of cosmic rays. When activated, the Cosmotron is covered with huge concrete shielding blocks.
by 2,000 million electron volts the previous record energy peak of 28,000 million electron volts attained by the Meyrin Nuclear Research Laboratory near Geneva. Because the capability of the new synchrotron-a giant steel and copper hoop 842 feet in diameter-approaches the energies inherent in naturally stable atoms, it permits a " braking" of swift-moving atomic particles. It is thus expected to yield significant new observations on the nature of matter. Brookhaven National Laboratory lies about 70 miles east of New York City. For the past 13 years it has been one of the chief centers for research into benevolent uses of atomic energy. It has been utilized cooperatively by scientists from universities, from industry and from other private institutions. With a staff of 1,400 and equipment unsurpassed for both basic and applied research, Brookhaven is operated for the u.s. Atomic Energy Commission by a private, nonprofit corporation, Associated Universities, Inc. Its chief purposes are: acquisition of new knowledge in nuclear and related sciences, assistance to AEC in the solution of its special problems, and aid in training scientists and engineers.
The mammoth steel and copper hoop, 842 feet in diameter, of the proton synchrotron at Brookhaven is the world's largest scientific instrument. It has produced energies of slightly more than 30,000 million electron volts.
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2,300 million electron volts impart energies to nuclear particles equivalent to those of cosmic rays. The Cosmotron produces nuclear" events" which shed light on the identity, nature, and inter-relationships of particles and the energy that binds them together in the atom's nucleus. Research with this instrument has greatly increased man's basic knowledge regarding the atom.
In the area of engineering, physical and chemical problems, Brookhaven is working on the development of nuclear reactors for production of electricity, of materials for building better reactors, and of improved methods for disposal of radioactive wastes. With industry, it is working on the development, design, fabrication, and operation of a new type of atomic reactor to be fueled by uranium dissolved in molten bismuth. In addition to basic research and development studies, Brookhaven has pioneered in both the good and bad effects of nuclear radiation on plants. Through research in laboratories, in the gamma field, or "atomic garden," and by supporting more than 100 projects in the nation, it has been instrumental in the development of new and improved species of plants, such as diseasefree wheat and oats, improved varieties of rice, groundnuts and other crop-plants. The gamma field is used to expose plants to radiation, and the atomic reactor is used to irradiate seeds. Many of the plant mutations resulting from this research are of world-wide importance to agriculture.
Lights glow late on a snowy night at Brookhaven's main building, which houses America's largest atomic research reactor, 30,000kilowatt giant.
The atomic reactor at Brookhaven is the largest research rea~toJ;,in the United States, a 30,000-kilowatt giant that can be used simultaneously by a number of scientists for numerous experiments. Both nuclear studies and applied research in agriculture, medicine, biology, and industry are conduct~d at the reactor. It is also utilized for the production of radioisotopes which are shipped to hospitals, industries, and agriculturists. With the commissie,ping of the proton synchrotron Brookhaven now has the two largest atom-smashers in the United States. The new installation is the world's largest scientific instrument. The other is the Cosmotron, a large doughnuthaped machine built in 1948, so named because its
In the realm of medical research, Brookhaven operates the first hospital ever built in the United States to study the effects of atomic energy in diagnosis and treatment of disease. All patients in this lIS-bed hospital are "terminal cases," suffering from incurable diseases, including cancer or brain tumor. Experiments with radioisotopes and with neutron beams from the atomic research reactor have yielded vital information in this sector of medical science and have effected the,cure, improvement or relief of many patients. A new medical research center was added to Brookhaven in 1958. It includes a 48-bed hospital and the first atomic reactor designed specifically for medical research. Its facilities accommodate research in industrial medicine, medical physics, pathology, microbiology, physiology, and biochemistry. Brookhaven's nuclear horizons are constantly widening. Its quest is new modes of atomic service to humanity.
The three platforms on one face of the Brookhaven reactor, at right, give an idea of the intricate and versatile control structure which permits many different experiments to be carried out simultaneously. On the back cover, a technician is shown testing a laboratory model 0/ the new proton synchrotron preparatory to setting up an experiment.
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