The unusual photo above depicts a U.S. worker in a foreign-owned textile factory reprograming the grid that will change the pattern being woven by the machine. The introduction by European firms of such computerized machines into their American plants is one of the many aspects of the benevolent 'silent invasion' of the United States by foreign business, which is described in the article beginning on page 5. In a companion piece on foreign investment abroad ('Tires for the World,' .on page 11), SPAN staff writer Krishan Gabrani interviews Mammen Mappillai, managing director of the Madras Rubber Factory. Under a technical collaboration agreement with an American firm, the Madras company has received machinery and technical lmow-how which now enables it to export its products to 30 countries. These exports earn almost a crore of rupees a year in foreign exchange-l0 times the amount that is remitted to the U.S. firm under the agreement.
SPAN
Novem~'
The Silent Invasion by Stefan H. Robock
ALEfTER FROM THE PUBLISHER
11
Every magazine can stand improvement, and I suppose SPAN is no exception. We plan to make some changes and hope that you will find them to be improvements. First of all, starting next month, we will revive the Letters to the Editor department. While we've been getting letters right along, most have been "bouquets" of appreciation-welcome, but not sufficiently substantive for the dialogue we would like to encourage. Herewith and henceforth we invite letters which applaud, decry or just plain comment on the substance of the articles we run and on the viewpoints they represent about America and about matters of common concern to Indians and Americans. We will share the more interesting of these with all our readers. You may have noticed that another SPAN feature, "As the Press Sees It," began with the last issue. It is our hope that in reprinting for you a sample of what the U.S. press reports on India and, occasionally, what the Indian press carries about America, we will satisfy that yearning which Robert Burns said we have in all of us: Oh wad some power the giftie gie us To see oursels as others see us.
Another goal we have set for the months ahead is for SPAN to focus more sharply on what may be the most important new dimension of international affairs, the economic interdependency of all nations. The range of matters embraced by this broad topic-including trade patterns, investment, aid, world monetary reform-is rapidly replacing ideological postures as the important concern of every nation's foreign policy. One aspect, foreign investment, is the subject of the lead article and cover story of this issue. (See summary on opposite page.) "What is America really like today?" is a question often asked. In this issue, we've tried to answer some aspects of this complex question by examining American society from three topical angles. First of all, there is a statistical report on how the United States is solving its major racial problem ("Black Progress and Liberal Rhetoric," page 29). Secondly, there is an analysis of why most Americans dislike cities and, for good or ill, are transforming their nation into a suburban society ("An Urban Civilization Without Cities?" page 40). Finally, there is a close-up look at how a typical American housewife handles her work at home with the aid of U.S. technology ("The Push-Button World of the American Housewife," page 36). A.E.H. Note: On recently arriving in New Delhi as Minister-Counselor at the American Embassy and Director of the U.S. Information Service's information and cultural programs in India, Albert E. Hemsing also became SPAN's new publisher.
Tires for the World: The Madras Rubber Factory An Interview with Mammen Mappillai by Krishan Gabrani
16 20
Caltech: World Center of Scientific Excellence
29
Black Progress and Liberal Rhetoric
36
by Mitchell Wilson
by Ben J. Wattenberg and Richard M. Scammon
The Push-Button World of the American Housewife by Jo Ann Hardee Collinge
40
An Urban Civilization Without Cities?
45
The Politics of Welfare
by Irving Kristol
by Eric P. W. da Costa
49 Front cover: The automobile tire, a prosaic enough object ordinarily, acquires an air of mystery in Avinash Pasricha's unusual photo. These tires are made by the Madras Rubber Factory, featured on pp. 11-15. Back cover: The frenzied pace of life in U.S. cities is disliked by most Americans, who are increasingly moving to the suburbs. This view is expounded by author Irving Kristol in the article on pp. 40-44. STEPHEN
ESP IE, Editor; ALBERT
E. HEMSING,
Publisher.
Managing Editor: Carmen Kagal. Editorial Staff: Mohammed Reyazuddin, Avinash Pasricha, Nirmal Sharma, Krishan Gabrani, M. M. Saha. Art Director: Nand Katyal. Art Staff: Kuldip Singh Jus, B. Roy Choudhury, Kanti Roy, Gopi Gajwani. Production Manager: Awtar S. Marwaha. Photographic Services: USIS Photo Lab. Published by the United States Information Service, Bahawalpur House, Sikandra Road, New Delhi, on behalf of the American Embassy, New Delhi. The opinions expressed in this magazine do not necessarily reflect the views or policies of the United States Government. Printed by Arun Mehta at Vakil & Sons Private Ltd., Vakils House, Sprott Road, 18Ballard Estate, Bombay-400001. Photographs: 29 right-UP!. 30 left-Ebony Magazine. 30 right-Bob Fletcher. 32 right-U.S. News & World Report. 37-Arthur D'Arazien. 4O--John Dominis, Life. Inside back cover-NASA. Back cover-Look Magazine collection, Library of Congress. Use of SPAN articles in other publications is encouraged, except when copyrighted. For permission, write to the Editor. Subscription: One year, ten rupees; single copy, one rupee. No new subscriptions can be accepted at this time. For change of address,. send old address ffom a recent SPAN envelope along with new address to the Circulation Manager, USIS, New Delhi. Allow six weeks for change of address to become effective.
KISSINGER ON FOREIGN POLICY Dr. Henry A. Kissinger, co-winner of the Nobel Peace Prize for 1973, was recently confirmed by the U.S. Senate as the 56th Secretary of State of the United States. The first foreign-born American to hold the 184-year-old office of u.s. Secretary of State, Dr. Kissinger moves to his new post after four and a half years as National Security Assistant to President Nixon. (For a biographical sketch of his life see "How Does This Kissinger Do It?" by Barnard Law Collier in the August 1972 SPAN). Before his confirmation, during three days of public hearings before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Dr. Kissinger answered a broad range of questions on American foreign policy. Later, in his widely acclaimed speech to the United Nations General Assembly in New York, Dr. Kissinger also discussed many aspects of American policy. In the article on these pages, , SPAN offers selected excerpts from his Senate testimony and from his U.N. speech. The result, we feel, is a useful summary of official American policy goals in areas that are of interest to India. The following are excerpts from Dr. Kissinger's testimony.
It is quite correct that during the India-Pakistan War of 1971 we opposed the methods that India used, although we favored the objectives. And indeed, one of the reasons we opposed India was because we believed they should have understood that we were working toward the same objective, which was for selfdetermination of at that time East Bengal and is now Bangladesh, and that we believed that military action was unnecessary. With respect to India, one of the perhaps long-term beneficial consequences of the difficulties that arose in 1971 is that it enabled both sides to move toward a more mature relationship. On the American side, especialIy in our intelIectual community, there was a perhaps romantic conception of India. And on the Indian side there was also an excessive attitude of misconception toward the United States. We now recognize India as one of the major forces in the developing world whose growth and stability is absolutely essential to the peace and stability of South Asia. And during the last year, and especialIy during the last six months, relations with India have developed in a very undramatic but very steady manner. Now that Bangladesh exists, our objectives and those of India, with respect to it, are quite paralIeI. We are trying to help Pakistan to find its new role, having lost half of its country, and to adjust to its new reality. We have not judged it wise to resume a permanent military supply relationship with Pakistan. We believe we should not be a principal arms supplier in that area. Our present arms policy is that we will give spare parts for equipment that we have already sold to Pakistan, but that we do not engage in new deliveries. And we have not engaged in military deliveries to India at all. If another war breaks out in that area it will not be fought with American weapons.
Profound changes have occurred in the world around us, now a generation after World War II. Our era is marked by both the anxieties of a transitional period and the opportunities of fresh creation. These chalIenges, though they appear as practical issues, cannot be solved in technical terms; they closely, reflect our view of ourselves. They require a sense of identity and purpose as much as a sense of policy. Throughout our history we have thought of what we did as growing out of deeper moral values. America was not true to itself unless it had a meaning beyond itself. In this spiritual sense, America was never isolationist. This must remain our attitude .... We have as a country to ask ourselves the question whether it should be the principal goal of American foreign policy to transform the domestic structure of societies with which we deal or whether the principal exercise of our foreign policy should be directed toward affecting the foreign policy of those societies. If we adopt as a national proposition the view that we must transform the domestic structure of all countries with which we deal, then we will find ourselves massively involved in every country in the world.
With respect to stopping the interaction between Soviet and American weapons programs, an interaction which is a reality, we are making a very serious effort in the SALT-II negotiations to tackle this problem. Now, this, in effect, means some restraint on qualitative improvements, and qualitative improvements, as you will recognize, are much more difficult to bring under control than quantitative ones. They are more difficult to inspect, more difficult to know what one's objectives should be. But we have been working extremely hard on this problem. We are engaging in many exchanges with the Soviet Union designed to go a considerable way toward [that] objective. This [most-favored-nation status] is an issue that should not be seen simply in the narrow terms of most-favored nations but in the whole context of our relationship with the Soviet Union, in which we made a series of agreements for which the quid pro quo on our side was the readiness to extend it and where now the refusal to grant most-favored-nation status after the Soviet Union had performed on its side would realIy raise very serious questions about the possibility of long-term arrangements between our two countries. The phrase "most-favored-nation" is misleading because it gives the impression that a particular concession is being made where the original intention was only to say that we would grant equal status to all nations that granted us equal status. The granting of most-favored-nation status is an important ingredient of our general policy of relaxation of tensions and, moreover, it
should be seen in exactly the terms outlined, that it only permits normal two-way trade, and it can flourish only if we can sell to the Soviet Union in return for whatever they may sell here.
choice is whether the world envisaged in the Charter will come about as the result of our vision or of a catastrophe invited by our shortsightedness. The United States has made its choice. My country seeks true peace, not simply an armistice. We strive for a world in which the rule of law governs and fundamental human rights are the birthright of all. Beyond the bilateral diplomacy, the pragmatic agreements and dramatic steps of recent years, we envisage a comprehensive, institutionalized peace-a peace which this organization is uniquely situated to foster and to anchor in the hearts of men. This will be the spirit of American foreign policy. This attitude will guide our work in this or~anization ....
I have been accused, perhaps, of excessive admiration for Prime Minister Chou En-lai and it is true that I have a very high regard for him. But with all respect for him, we will not gear our foreign policy to the prospect of his visiting the United States. We will base it on more permanent factors than a visit. With respect to Taiwan, I think they [the Mainland Chinese] know both what we can do and the limit of what is possible. And while, of course, we expect them to maintain their position and Many other countries have seized the initiative and contributed while they have to do this, I do not believe that this is a fundamental obstacle at this time to the normalization of our relation- -in substance and spirit-to the relaxation of tensions. The nations of Europe and North America are engaged in a conships [with Mainland China]. ference to further security and co-operation. The two German states have taken their place in this assembly. India, Pakistan and Bangladesh have begun to move toward a welcome reThe importance that the United States must attach to lessening conciliation .... the gap or at least to improving the conditions of the less developed countries is because the world cannot possibly be stable The United States deeply believes: if that part of the world that contains most of the population • That justice cannot be confined by national frontiers; feels itself excluded from the technological progress and the in- • That truth is universal, and not the peculiar possession of a dustrial advance of the rest of the world. If yo u have an enorsingle people or group or ideology; mous gap in a global society, which is now [more] closed really • That compassion and humanity must ennoble all our to each other in terms of communication than most nation states endeavors. In this spirit we ask the assembly to move with us from detente were in the previous century, if this gap continues to grow, revolutionary upheavals in the world that will profoundly affect to co-operation, from coexistence to community. international stability are inevitable. Now, what can be done? Our journey must begin with the world as it is and with the That has been a matter that has proved much more elusive be- issues now before us. The United States will spare no effort to cause the progress of these countries depends in part on the ease tensions further and to move toward greater stability .... assistance by the more developed countries, but it also depends on the willingness of the less-developed countries to organize We are, in fact, members of a community drawn by modern themselves domestically, to utilize their resources. We have at science, technology, and new forms of communication into a various times come up with different approaches to foreign aid proximity for which we are still politically unprepared. Technoland we have never satisfactorily solved the problem. At this point ogy daily outstrips the ability of our institutions to cope with I think the best I can say is to express the fact that the problem is its fruits. Our political imagination must catch up with our urgent and that international stability will depend upon our scientific vision. This is at the same time the greatest challenge -ability to make some contribution. and the greatest opportunity of this organization: There is, however, one problem. If the nonaligned countries The pollution of the skies, the seas and land is a global problem. start forming a bloc then they become a bloc like any other bloc The increased consumption of cereals has reduced world food and the mere fact that they define their grouping as having been reserves to dangerously low levels. formed by being nonaligned does not change the basic situation. The demand for energy is outrunning supply, and the need for I would, therefore, hope that if these countries want to profit technological innovation is urgent. from their nonalignment that they will look at each issue on its The growth of the world's economy is inhibited by restrictive merits rather than to form a unit which operates in international trading blocs and an insufficiently flexible monetary system. affairs as a unit and then becomes subject to bloc politics. The exploitation of the resources of the ocean beds which is essential for the needs of burgeoning populations requires global co-operation lest it degenerate into global contention. Challenges of this magnitude cannot be solved by a world On September 24, Secretary of State Kissinger addressed the' fragmented into self-contained nation states or rigid blocs .... United Nations General Assembly. Following are brief excerpts We can repeat old slogans or strive for new hope. We can fill from that speech: the record of our proceedings with acrimony or we can dedicate Two centuries ago, the philosopher Kant predicted that per- ourselves to dealing with man's deepest needs. The ideal of a petual peace would come eventually-either a~ a result of the world community may be decried as unrealistic .... Let us dedicreation of man's moral aspirations or as the consequence of cate ourselves to this noblest of all possible goals and achieve at physical necessity. What seemed utopian then looms as to- last what has so long eluded us: true understanding and tolmorrow's reality; soon there will be no alternative. Our only erance among mankind. 0
"I am always available," Henry Kissinger once said, "to talk to the press in a critical period. The press appreciates this, and I think this is one of the reasons I have been treated so very well." It is true that even when battles raged between the U.S. Government and the American press, Kissinger remained relatively unscathed. According to Dan Rather of the Columbia Broadcasting System, Kissinger "is the best briefer in Washington." And another newsman says: "Henry will always tell you if something is secret and that he can't talk about it. He'll never just out and out lie like other bureaucrats might." Kissinger's reputation with the press is that he talks to newsmen candidly and with wit and humor. Soon after his nomination, when reporters asked him whether he preferred to be addressed as Mr. Secretary or Dr. Secretary, he hesitated a moment before answering: "I don't stand on protocol," he said with a grin. "If you will just call me Excellency, it will be okay." Almost as a reflection of his press popularity in Washington, Kissinger's appointment as U.S. Secretary of State drew general approval from editors and commentators throughout the world. The Times of India's Washington correspondent wrote: "Mr. Kissinger brings to his job a wry intelligence not pockmarked too much with dogma. He is not an Acheson willing to draw his sword to kill the Communist dragon. Nor is he a latter-day version of John Foster Dulles with a Jesuit sense of evangelic mission. In many ways he is a realist, aware of both the strengths and weaknesses of American power, both military and economic, and willing to play it by ear .... He is not a status quoist, a point in his favor .... " Calcutta's Amrita Bazar Patrika stated: " ... The cessation of hostilities in Indochina plus America's latest detente with China and the Soviet Union will necessitate rethinking and reorientation of U.S. foreign policy, a task for which Kissinger seems eminently qualified." The Hindustan Times of New Delhi referred to Kissinger as "one of the foremost practitioners of diplomacy in modern times." The Washington correspondent of that newspaper wrote: "That Dr. Henry Kissinger should take initiative in arranging a meeting with Mr. Swaran Singh and that the meeting ... should be remarkably frank and cordial has inevitably set many here thinking that perhaps under the new Secretary of State Indo-U.S. relations would improve rapidly .... Dr. Kissinger ... is not only capable of originality in thinking but is a diplomat's diplomat who can be brimming with good fellowship even when dealing with political opponents." A columnist of the Statesman examined in some depth the implications for India. He wrote: "What is pertinent for New Delhi is that U.S. policy is likely to be more pragmatic, more firmly grounded on professionalism, and
very much less secretively global than in the past. ... More than ever before, New Delhi's relations with Peking and Islamabad will be determined by the nature of its relations with Washington, which will also determine the nature of the U.S. role in this part of the world. All this calls for some very basic rethinking in an atmosphere free from the banalities of sloganized anti-Americanism." Other foreign media reaction to the new American Secretary of State was generally positive. The Times of London termed Kissinger "a man of his time" and described him as "something of a traditional European in his search for a balance of power ... rather than a victory of ideologies." Now that Kissinger was at the helm of the U.S. State Department, Les Echos of Paris looked for "a spectacular revival of American foreign policy." Commenting on Kissinger's U.N. address, the New York correspondent of the Soviet news agency Tass quoted the Secretary of State as saying that "the United States and the Soviet Union have perceived a community of interest in avoiding nuclear holocaust and in establishing a broad web of constructive relationships." A correspondent of the Melbourne Herald said Australia's independent policy "has its best chance of bearing useful fruit the more Henry Kissinger handles the American side of the relationship." By and large, most newspapers of the world concurred with the statement of the London Daily Mail: "We greet the promotion of this remarkable man with relief and hope." Most of the American press was pleased by the new appointment. A typical opinion was expressed in a New York. Times editorial: "For more than four years, Henry A. Kissinger has carried many of the responsibilities and exercised many of the functions that usually go with being Secretary of State. It comes as no surprise that President Nixon has now decided to give the job in title as well as fact to his chief foreign affairs adviser, the architect of . most of this Administration's major initiatives abroad." Joseph C. Harsch of the Christian Science Monitor offered this appraisal of Dr. Kissinger: "A man who can convert a two-power world into a multipower world-and use that conversion to get the United States out ofIndochina without the collapse of the American-supported government in Saigon-deserves to be mentioned in the same breath with Bismarck, Metternich, Talleyrand and Castlereagh." And the Washington Post commented editorially: "By having ... a chief with the President's confidence and with great personal stature and talent, the [State] Department should be able to recoup its ... morale. The country will have better assurance that considerations of diplomacy will be fairly weighed in the knot of economic, political and strategic problems ahead." 0
'-r-
'LUX
THE
SILENT INVASION Tracing the forces and events that have led to the recent unprecedented flow of foreign investment into the United States, the author is of the opinion that this 'silent invasion may be hard on the American ego,' but it means access to foreign technology, new products and more jobs for Americans.
S
ilently but surely the United States is being invaded. While America's attention has been distracted by foreign military invasions in Indochina, the Europeans and Japanese have silently but rapidly been increasing the foreign-business presence in the United States. I am not referring to the invasion of U.S. markets by foreign imports; for both American business firms and labor unions have sounded loud alarms in demanding government protection against the growing flood of imported goods. I am referring to the accelerated but little noticed trend of
foreigners to establish or acquire business enterprises in the United States. European and Japanese direct investment in American business operations has been growing at a faster rate in the last few years than has American business investment abroad. Furthermore, this silent invasion promises to pick up even greater momentum. The rapidly expanding foreign-business presence in the United States is neither narrow nor of limited interest. Much of it does not come into popular view: for instance, the vast array of industrial chemicals, industrial
machinery, and agricultural fertilizers produced in the United States by foreign-owned companies. But at the consumer level, the range and variety of products locally manufactured by foreign firms is almost endless. An American may begin his day by washing his face with Lux soap or brushing his teeth with Pepsodent toothpaste, both products of the American subsidiary of the British-Dutch Unilever company. He may then shave with a Wilkinson blade, made in the New Jersey plant of a British company or with a Norelco electric razor, a product
~
'The growth rate of European direct investments [in the U.S.] increased to almost 13 per cent annually over the 1966-70 period from only five per cent annually during the 1959-66 period.'
of the Dutch Philips enterprise. The electricity for the razor may have been generated by a Brown Boveri turbogenerator, manufactured in the $10-million Virginia plant of this Swiss company. His clothes may be made from Trevira polyester fibers, produced in a Spartanburg, South Carolina, plant where the German company Hoechst has invested $150 million and employs 2,000 workers. The zippers may have been made in the New York factory of Yoshida Kogyo of Japan. And his shoes may have been shined with Kiwi shoe polish, made by the Pennsylvania subsidiary of the Australian Kiwi company. His breakfast food may have been purchased from one of a thousand stores of the National Tea chain, in which Weston of Canada has more than 50 per cent interest. The morning newspaper is likely to be printed on paper bought from the Bowater plant in Tennessee, the Cox newsprint plant in Georgia, or the Consolidated newsprint plant in Illinois, all subsidiaries of Canadian or British companies. The ride to the office may be in an imported car, but the tires may have been made in the U.S. plants of British Dunlop or French Michelin. The gasoline may be a domestically refined and distributed product of either BP (British Petroleum), Shell (a British-Dutch company), or American Petrofina (a Belgian company).
A
t the officethe American-produced goods of foreign companies may include Olivetti business machines (Italian), BIC pens (French), and Moore Business Forms (Canadian). If he works in the New York area, his bank account might be in the Franklin National Bank, controlled by the Italian financier Michele Sindona, or with either the Republic National Bank or the King's Lafayette Bank . & Trust Company, which have recently come under Swiss control. If the workday is strenuous, he might choose Librium tranquilizers made by the American subsidiary of Hoffmann-La Roche, another Swiss company, or have a cup' of Lipton's tea sold by a Unilever subsidiary. At home in the evening, while he watches the evening news on a Sony color TV-now being manufactured by that Japanese company in San Diego, California-he can down
a drink made with Gordon's gin or vodka, distilled by a British-owned distillery in New Jersey, mixed with Schweppes's tonic, a product of another British company. The list of specific products made in the United States by foreign-owned companies can be extended almost indefinitely. But the official statistics for Europe and the U.S. provide a quicker and more comprehensive picture of the silent invasion. As of 1970 the value of U.S. direct investments (i.e., investments that carry with them participation in management as contrasted with portfolio investments, which do not) in Europe reached almost $25 billion, whereas the value of direct investments in the United States by Europeans was slightly less than $10 billion. But as shown in the table (page 7), the growth rate of inflows of European direct investments increased to almost 13 per cent annually over the 1966-1970 period from only five per cent annually during the 1959-66 period, whereas the rate of U.S. investment in Europe dropped to 12.7 per cent from a level of 17.1 per cent over the earlier period. When examined by type of business activity, the trend of European investments in the U.S. is even more impressive. Foreign investment in the insurance and finance field has not grown rapidly; but European investments in both petroleum and manufacturing have been at much faster rates than reverse flows to Europe by American companies. The value of Canadian investment in the United States is large, totaling more than $3 billion in book value as of 1970, but recent growth trends have been less dramatic than those of the European investors in the United States. Japanese investment is still small but growing rapidly. The Japanese have been shying away from direct investment in the U.S. except to build up sales and service organizations and to develop sources of supply for forest-product raw materials. Since the international financial crisis of late 1971 and the revaluation of the yen, however, the Japanese situation has changed radically. The revaluation has made imports from Japan more expensive, and several Japanese companies are now assembling color television sets in the U.S.-Hitachi and Sony in California and Matsushita in Puerto Rico.
By building sets in the U.S., the Japanese say they can make quicker deliveries, lower their transportation costs, and possibly enter the console market. But the most important reason is to hedge against any further revaluation of the yen, which would reduce even further the competitiveness of imports. The continuing large balance-of-payments surplus of Japan and new government policies to encourage Japanese to reduce this surplus by increasing outflows of investment capital has accelerated still another trend toward buying into U.S. companies. As Business Week reported, in November 1972: The next big buyers of U.S. companies will be Japanese. U.S. businessmen appear eager to sell to the Japanese or to take in Japanese partners who have cash, rarely meddle in U.S. operations, and can contribute technological expertise, Far East distribution, and lower labor costs. A leading American investment banker is quoted as saying, "There is more potential synergy between U.S. and Japanese companies than between two U.S. companies."
W
hat explains the silent invasion? Or more appropriately, why has it been delayed? European firms are not neophytes in the field of international business. Two or three decades ago a list of the major international companies would have included such old-timers as SKF ball bearings of Sweden, Royal Dutch/Shell in petroleum, Philips, the Dutch electronic firm, Nestle of Switzerland, British-American Tobacco, and such German firms in the pharmaceutical field as Merck and Schering founded in the United States at the end of the last century as offshoots of German parent companies. World War II brought the international activities of European companies to a standstill. And in many cases, foreign companies experienced a forced retrenchment in their international involvement. German and Japanese foreign investments were expropriated as alien properties by the United States and other countries. The rush for independence in former colonies discouraged new investments by the European powers in their former areas of business interest. But even if the European and Japanese companies had wanted to expand overseas after the war,
EUROPE VS. THE UNITED STATES VALUE OF D\RECT INVESTMENTS IN MIL\.tONS OF DOLLARS
their governments would not have allowed them to do so because of balance of payments difficulties and the high priority assigned to domestic reconstruction. For American companies the post-World War II situation was just the opposite. The United States had no restrictions on capital outflows and encouraged American firms to contribute to foreign reconstruction and the development aspirations of the less developed countries through increased direct private investment. Even more significant, American firms had accumulated technological and managerial advantages during and after the war that gave them a keen competitive advantage over foreign competitors in many fields. But beginning in the mid-1960s, the tide began to turn. At least four major changes laid the foundation for a delayed European and Japanese response. First, a new world balance in the economic strength of the lead-
B'I
u.s.:
BY U.S. IN EUROPE IN U.S.: IN US. '6Y EUROPEANS
GROWTH IN VALUE.S ANNUAL RATE PER C.ENT
ing industrial nations had emerged. Secondly, by building on a venerable research capability that was disrupted by the war, the Europeans were able to close the technology gap and reassert technological leadership in a number of traditional fields. The Japanese also came to the fore as technological leaders by a highly effective program of quickly absorbing and building on top of the technology of the West. A third factor was a crash program supported by foreign governments to strengthen European and Japanese firms through mergers and through closing the gap in management skills. A fourth factor was the growing realization that the Americans were not necessarily unbeatable in the economic and business fields. Nicholas Faith, of the London Sunday Times) who has analyzed the European business invasion of America in his fascinating book The Infiltrators) concludes that of all the factors explaining the change in the bal-
ance of power between Europe and the United States ... the Vietnam War was the most important. For as the American overseas expansion was based on the havoc wrought on Europe by two world wars, so the Vietnam War has not only revealed the limitations of American political power but has brought in its wake exchange controls on foreign investment and a world-wide sense that the Americans were not necessarily unbeatable.
To emphasize the change in relative strength in international economic relations, the German and Japanese governments have begun to encourage the direct export of capital, in some cases by tax concessions, for private business investment abroad, while President Nixon, who had hoped to remove the restrictions on American investment abroad, was forced to ignore the subject and •. retain his predecessors' restrictive measures. Of course, the causes of the U.S. balance-of-
'One important motivation for foreign firms to operate in the U.S. is the opportunity to learn sophisticated advertising, marketing ... techniques,' which they can apply elsewhere in the world. payments difficulties go beyond the Vietnam War. The U.S. began to run a balance-ofpayments deficit beginning about 1950, but the problem was not regarded seriously so long as the country continued to hold most of the world's gold supply. In any event, without reviewing all the complexities of the international financial situation and the recent difficulties of the international monetary system, a principal result of these events has been the strengthening of foreign currencies relative to the U.S. dollar. This development gave a double boost to foreign investment in the U.S. The cost of goods produced at home by foreign companies rose relative to those produced abroad. At the same time, a revalued German deutsche mark, a Swiss franc, a Dutch guilder, and a Japanese yen were able to buy that much more in dollar assets. It should be no surprise, therefore, that the European countries with the three strongest currencies-the Swiss, the Dutch, and the Germans-are the countries that provided the bulk of the direct investment in the U.S. in the late '60s.
E
arly in the post-World War II reconstruction period, European governments and private companies adopted strategies to close the technology gap, in some cases through co-operative research efforts across national boundaries in such fields as space, nuclear research, and aircraft. As a portent of events to come, the Aigren Report of the European Economic Community (EEC) recommends technological co-operation among the old EEC members and Britain on 30 specific projects ranging from a supercomputer all the way to oceanography. The results are already impressive. A . technology expert, K. Pavitt, from the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) concluded, in a paper prepared in 1970 by him and presented to a conference on the Multinational Enterprise at the University of Reading in England: When such [military and space research] is excluded and when corrections are made for differences in wage levels, the European Research and Development (R and D) effort is about the same as that of the U.S.A. Indeed industry in Switzerland and the Netherlands-and perhaps
also in the U.K. and Germany-devotes a greater proportion of its resources to Rand D than does U.S. industry. And there is little evidence that European Rand D is much less efficient.
Servan-Schreiber, with his best-selling book The American Challenge, did much to persuade Europeans that they were lagging behind the Americans in business-management skills. Management skills, even more than technology, have been the driving force behind U.S. industrial expansion abroad. Europe's tardy appreciation of this fact has been largely offset by the zeal with which European legislators, educators, and a host of public and private organizations have turned to the promotion of management education in Europe. New graduate and undergraduate schools of management have been established and expanded in England and on the continent. Thousands of Europeans have been sent on government scholarships to the United States to study business administration. For example, over a third of the more than 1,000 graduate students at Columbia Business School are from foreign countries. And special management courses in Europe and Japan have flourished even more. The British Management Institute counts no less than 334 organizations offering management-training courses in Britain alone. And because Europe is "where the action is" in management training, the prestigious Harvard Business School in 1972 established a center in Switzerland for offering management-training courses. Academic and other training courses may become the major source of management strength in the future. But in the immediate past the most effective institution for the management training of Europeans and Japanese has been the U.S. foreign subsidiary. As Nicholas Faith reports, No European company now feels secure without its quota of men trained by Ford or Procter & Gamble. These men, aware of the deficiencies as well as the strengths of their former employers, would naturally assume that their new employers can and must be present in the United States.
ment training, European and Japanese governments have actively encouraged business mergers so that their national firms would not lack size for competing internationally. Some of the transnational mergers, such as Dunlop (British) and Pirelli (Italian) in the tire industry, Agfa (German) and Gaevert (Belgian) in the photographic field, have epcountered serious difficulties. But others, such as the merger of the two Swiss firms CIBA and Geigy, have yielded rapid results. Probably the most fascinating of the ingredients supporting the silent invasion was the shrugging off by European and Japanese businessmen of a long-standing inferiority complex vis-a-vis dynamic Ametican businessmen. Export success in labor-intensive products, such as shoes, apparel, and textiles, was easily explained as due to lower foreign wage rates. But foreign producers have also had dramatic success in exporting to the U.S. more sophisticated products, such as automobiles, industrial machinery, and electronics, which did much to increase foreign business confidence. Not to be underestimated are the many success stories of foreign firms who were brave enough to invade the U.S. market and managed to survive and even prosper. Such has been the over-all setting for the silent invasion. At a more specific level, individual firms were able to find in the U.S. special opportunities related to their area of operations and capabilities. With growing self-confidence many foreign enterprises have taken over U.S. businesses, motivated mainly by the availability of dollars for investment; government encouragement to invest in the United States; and opportunities for profitable returns. In some cases the establishment of new plants was based on technological advantages. In other situations foreign firms had built up a large enough demand in the American market through exports to justify the establishment of an American plant that would offer locational advantages in transportation savings and in better servicing the market. One important motivation shared by a number of foreign companies operating in the United States is the opportunity to learn sophisticated advertising, marketing, and product-development techniques, which can be
applied elsewhere in the world by other subsidiaries of the foreign enterprises. Such has been the justification in part of Unilever's operations in the United States. As Nicholas Faith reported after visiting many of his fellow Europeans doing business in the United States: .•. the Europeans have tended to keep extremely quiet about their companies' parentage to avoid any nationalist reaction, while the Americans since the war have not minded being visible; so that the impact of the Europeans tends to be overdiscounted and that of the Americans, exaggerated.
Will the trend continue, and what are the implications of the silent invasion? If . Americans were more xenophobic about foreign investment, they might become alarmed. But because foreign business firms still account for a relatively small share of the domestic economy, I expect Americans to continue relaxed about the foreigners in their
The Swiss knitting machine at left is only one example of foreign technology benefiting the U.S. The machine is computerized and produces a high quality double-knit fabric in a variety of colors and patterns (above). The basic material for this fabric is the polyester fiber on the spools on top of the computerized machines.
'So long as the silent invasion brings new products and increases competition, the U.S. consumer will have little cause to complain.' midst. In fact, the U.S. Department of Commerce has had a special branch working since the early 1960sto attract foreign direct investment to the United States. And so long as the international balance-of-payments situation remains unfavorable, the U.S. official position is certain to encourage capital inflows in the form of direct or portfolio investments. Even some of the American labor unions, while opposing foreign expansion by U.S. firms as a form of exporting jobs, have followed the governmental pattern of encouraging foreign firms to enter the United States. United Auto Workers President Leonard Woodcock visited Japan in October 1972; and one of his missions was to encourage Japanese auto producers to set up shop in the U.S. At least three state governments have set up offices in Europe for attracting new industries to their areas, and numerous state dekgations have visited foreign countries to discuss future investment in their regions. The American business community is schizophrenic. On the one hand, they are not anxious to have more competition in their large home market; on the other, they do not want to see any moves that would discourage foreign investment in tbe United States, because other countries might retaliate against overseas subsidiaries of U.S. firms. In those cases where foreign firms are willing to enter into joint ventures, or be somewhat silent partners, as in the aforementioned Japanese cases, American firms can profit through partnerships in the United States with foreign corporations by gaining access to overseas distribution channels and to foreign technological developments. Another interesting pattern now emerging is the proposal by capital-surplus Middle Eastern oil countries, Saudi Arabia in particular, to make major investments in the U.S. oil industry. As in most of the major oilproducing countries, oil royalties and taxes at new high rates are pouring into the government treasury much faster than the government can spend them. The strategy to invest in "downstream" facilities offers the hope of sharing even more in the profits reaped from their own natural resources. In the hope of improving their bargaining power and securing continued access to Middle Eastern oil,
American international oil companies are likely to accede to the expressed wishes of Saudi Arabia.
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o long as the silent invasion brings new products and increases competition in the American market, the American consumer will have little cause to complain. When acquisitions of existing companies, such as the Olivetti take-over of the old Underwood typewriter company, mean that existing sources of supply will be saved from extinction or operated more efficiently, consumers' interests are benefited. Of course, the silent invasion will not be in those fields of production where low labor costs are the prime consideration, such as shoes, textiles, some lines of apparel, and electronic components. But as students of location economics are aware, the most efficient site for many industries is near the sources of raw materials, such as industrial water in the case of chemicals and electric power in the production of aluminum. Despite the widely accepted notion that wage rates are the critical factor in the competitiveness of American industry, the silent invasion is ironic proof that for many foreign firms it is most advantageous to manufacture in the United States. In large part the European-Japanese response was inevitable. Despite past history most Americans have deluded themselves into believing that a temporary situation of American business and technological superiority represented the basic underlying truth. But technology and management skills are easily transferable; foreign producers can learn from Americans in matters of business as Americans have learned from others in the past. The silent invasion may be hard on the American ego. Yet through Vietnam Americans have learned to adjust to the new reality that they are not invincible in military affairs; now they will have to adjust to the reality that America's dynamic business capability is being successfully challenged. Fortunately, a successful silent invasion can have favorable, rather than unfavorable, results. 0 About the Author: Stefan H. Roback is Professor
0/ International Business at Columbia University.
From an obscure beginning in 1946 as a toy balloon factory with six employees and -an initial capital of Rs. 10,000, the Madras Rubber Factory utilized American technology to become one of the largest tire manufacturers in India. Today, the company earns more than 10 times as much foreign exchange through its exports than it remits to the U.S. under the collaborative agreement. (See interview overleaf.)
11'corporate growth is a key to national development, few companies have done as much for Indian development as the Madras Rubber Factory, which now has a capacity to manufacture almost one million automotive tires and two million bicycle tires a year. MRF has four plants (two in Tamil Nadu, one each in Kerala and Goa), and its fixed assets exceed Rs. 10 crOl¡es. It eniploys some 3,000 persons and its exports to 30 countries earn about rupees one crore per year. In this story, Mammen Mappillai, above, the managing director of MRF, is illterviewed by SPAN staff lI'riter Krishan Gabrani.
QUESTION: Mr. Mammen Mappillai, from making simple toy balloons to becoming one of the largest manufacturers of tires in India is a fantastic success story. I suspect there must have been many frustrations and crises along the way. Is there anyone episode or incident or crisis that you think shaped the destiny of the Madras Rubber Factory ( M RF) more than any other? ANSWER: There have been many but one that stands out vividly in my memory and which I think largely determined the fate of our company goes back to the year 1950 when MRF was still very young. The Madras Rubber Factory, as you know, was founded by my father in 1946 in the backyard of our house to manufacture toy balloons which is the simplest form of the rubber industryyou make balloons out of the milk of the rubber tree. Later on, we diversified our operations. By 1950 MRF was making a host of rubber goods-toys, dry rubber sheets, rollers, shoe heels and soles, surgical gloves, industrial gloves, rubber hoses, transmission beltings. We were a jack of all trades. Around this time, we ran into serious financial difficulties. We decided to stop production of all items and concentrate on only one, rather than dissipating our energies and resources on so many. We decided to manufacture tire retreading compound. This was the most difficult and crucial decision that MRF ever made. For what followed could have wiped out the companyand it almost did. QUESTIO : Was it a problem of competition? ANSWER: Yes. Manufacture of tire retreading compound was the monopoly of the other existing tire companies. To compete with them was no joke. We didn't have any technical know-how. I went to Germany, studied rubber technology and bought German machinery. We studied and analyzed our competitors' product and found it infinitely superior. We strove very hard to improve our quality and cut on our cost and finally marketed a product which was much cheaper but comparable in quality to that of our competitors. We were selling at about two rupees and 14 annas a pound-those days it was rupees, annas and poundswhereas our competitors' product was priced at three rupees and 12 annas. That started the bitter, long-drawn-out rate war. They brought down their price to two rupees and 12 annas-two annas less than ours. We further cut our price and this went on till the price came down to about one rupee and 12 annas.
This was the most trying period. We were selling much below our cost price and were taking a loss of about Rs. 15,000 a month. which our fledgling company could hardly bear. QUESTION: How did you turn the corner? ANSWER: What happened in the severe competition was that the retreading industry went into a boom because the price had slumped to almost one-third of the original. The demand increased greatly. Our production went up. Our overhead expenses as a result came down and we also economized on various other administrative costs. Soon we were breaking even and making profits. In this whole drama, I must mention the role that quality played in our success. We hung on to the quality and in fact improved upon it. Whereas many of our competitors cut on their quality. Thus we started capturing a bigger and bigger share of the market. By 1955 we had emerged as the biggest manufacturer of tread compound in India-with about 40 per cent of the market's share in our bag. QUESTION: When did you decide to enter-the tire industry and collaborate with America's Mansfield Tire and Rubber Company? ANSWER: That was in 1961. By then we had a sizable turnover of about rupees five to six crores a year and had more than 25 branches and distribution points all over India for selling our retreading compound. We had a factory in Madras and several others feeding the main factory. So it was more or less a natural development that we ventured into tires. And this was also what the Government of India wanted us to do and it encouraged us. Our collaboration with Mansfield also dates back to 1961.This was the result of a chance meeting my brother had with James Hoffman, president of the Mansfield Tire and Rubber Company, when he visited the United States to attend a conference there. QUESTION:
What kind of a collaboration
did you set up with
Mansfield?
ANSWER: MRF has two collaborations with Mansfield. One is the collaboration of technical know-how, for which we pay them a very nominal technical fee. In the last 10 years, MRF's average remittance to Mansfield has not exceeded more than rupees sevenand-a-half lakhs a year. But as a result of the collaboration, we imported machinery from the U.S. and secured, on a continuing basis, the benefit of Mansfield's vast research and experience in tire-making. Mansfield is one of the world's biggest tire companies, with more than 60 years' experience. Mansfield keeps us posted with up-to-date developments in tire technology, which is rapidly changing. Its technicians visit us and share their skills with us. Our men go to the U.S. to learn about the intricacies of sophisticated technology. It's a minute-to-minute sharing of knowledge. In fact, whenever Mansfield introduces a new brand in the U.S., we do the same in India. For instance, we have now introduced a tire with twin treads-double white side walls on the tire. This is unique in India as it is in America. Again, the terms of the agreement are quite favorable to India and Mansfield has been very co-operative with us. I will give you one example. Our initial contract stipulated that MRF could export tires to any country in the world except the United States
and Canada. Later on, it waived this condition and we were allowed to export even to the U.S. QUESTION: You said that MRF had two collaboration agreements with Mansfield. What is the other one? ANSWER: The second is their participation in MRF's capital.
Mansfield owns 20 per cent of the equity capital of the Madras Rubber Factory. So in this way they are partners in this venture. QUESTION: Who owns the rest of the capital? ANSWER: About 30 per cent is owned by our family and the
remaining 50 per cent is owned by the public of India. MRF is a public limited company. QUESTION: Earlier you said that Mansfield allowed MRF to export tires to the United States. Does this mean that you actually export tires to America, which is the home of tire technology? ANSWER: Sure, we do. We export to America many different
varieties-boat-trailer tires, tires for antique and classic cars which are primarily used in show racing, a big event in the United States. We also export tires for minibikes, sports wagons and mobile homes. QUESTION: Does your company make at least as much money from the United States by way of exports as it pays to that country by way of the technical fee to Mansfield? ANSWER: Oh, much more than that. We make about five to
seven times more. India has greatly benefited by this collaboration. Sometimes people tend to look at one side of the balance sheet and say that we pay too much by way of the technical fee. But if you look at the other side, you will see that India has been a great gainer. The collaboration has ensured continuous access to the latest in tire technology, which enables us to compete confidently with foreign manufacturers in the export market as well as give the best and finest product to our domestic consumers in India. QUESTION: Each year, I believe, the Government of India gives awards to companies showing promising results in their export promotion efforts. Has MRF won (lny such awards? ANSWER: We have won these on a number of occasions in the
past. Only last year we bagged two awards. MRF tires and tread rubber, which the company produces in its Kerala factory, go to more than 30 countries all over the world-in Europe, the Middle East, Hong Kong, East Africa and the United States. In 1972, our exports earned India almost rupees one crore in foreign exchange. QUESTION: To save on foreign exchange, has ,the Madras Rubber Factory tried to develop indigenous machinery and technical know-how? ANSWER: We have done pioneering work in import substitution.
Our efforts go back to the year 1963 when the Madras Rubber
Factory set up its research and development center for which the foundation stone was laid by lawaharlal Nehru who also inspired us to develop machinery locally. Since then we have endeavored to develop indigenous machinery, to utilize rubber better and to improve our end product-the tire. We have in fact not only succeeded in making some machinery at home but in many cases have made improvements on the imported equipment. We have excellent fabricators in India and there is no reason why we should not take advantage of that. Our own machinery has proved to be economical and even sturdier. Besides, we save on shipping costs and do not have to wait those invariably long periods for delivery of imported machinery. You may be surprised to know that the Madras Rubber Factory has even exported some machinery to the United States. Research and development is a continuing process at the Madras Rubber Factory and it has paid the company well. We set up our Goa factory-formally inaugurated last Septemberwith very little -foreign exchange. QUESTION: Is India in a position to export tire technology? ANSWER: India is not yet in a position to do so. Though we have
succeeded in developing machinery locally and acquiring sufficient. know-how, we are not completely self-sufficient. This is because tire technology is very highly sophisticated and is changing fast. This change is brought about not only as a result of change in the automobile, but change in the technology itself-change in the machines, changes in the rubber components. For instance, every day there are new chemicals and new synthetic rubbers being developed for tire compounding. Above all, new textiles-which account for the major strength, and cost, of a tire-are replacing old fabrics. Originally, tire fabric was cotton. Then there was a switch to rayon. Now tires are being made with nylon. QUESTION: The word nylon brings to mind one of your recent advertisements to the effect that your company has, for the first time in India, introduced a nylon car tire. What advantages does this tire have over the usual rayon-fabric tire? ANSWER: India has been manufacturing truck tires with nylon
for some time now. But recently we began the manufacture of passenger car tires with nylon as a textile fabric. The nylon-fabric tire has many advantages, especially in India which is a tropical country of great distances. We have rains and monsoons and quite often we have potholes on our major highways. Added to these are the hazards of bullock carts, and stray cattle. To avoid these, our drivers have to keep on swinging from the left to the right of the road. Now, nylon has a greater tensile strength than rayon. It can therefore carry heavier loads, can better withstand the impact of brakes. Most important, nylon is not hygroscopic-it does not absorb moisture. The nylon fabric will not deteriorate, as would the rayon if there is a nail puncture and water gets into the tire. All this adds to the life of the tire, which is important because tires are expensive items.
'Though profit is the raison d'etre of every business,' says Mammen MappiIlai, 'I feel strongly that business must be responsive to social problems and must try'to help solve them.'
QUESTION: That reminds me of another serious hazard that motorists occasionally face-the hazard of a sudden tube burst when the driver loses control of the vehicle. Have you or any other manufacturer developed a tire which, if it can not completely eliminate risk, can at least reduce the danger inherent in blow-out situations? ANSWER: Though we are aware of this danger, we haven't as yet developed a tire that will help in this contingency. However, some time ago we introduced in India the tubeless tire. This, though it is not puncture-proof, can nevertheless minimize the danger. It gives enough time to the motorist to stop the vehicle without losing control. But the tubeless tire has not been successful in India because it requires a special process for repairs and there are not many repairers equipped to do that. In foreign countries, however, new developments are taking place. For instance, Mansfield has even developed bullet-proof tires. But they are expensive and their manufacture requires a sophisticated technology. Before long they may come out with a tire that eliminates the danger resulting from a sudden tube burst. This again demonstrates the usefulness of having foreign collaboration. As yet, we in India have neither enough resources nor sufficient technology to depend solely on our own efforts. A Jvorker at the Madras Rubber Factory "builds" special antique car tires, which are exported to the United States in large quantities.
QUESTION: You mentioned before that you have a factory in Kerala and recently set up another in Goa. Can you tell us something about these? ANSWER: MRF has a total of four plants-two in Tamil Nadu, one in Kerala and one in Goa. We set up our first tire unit in Madras where commercial production began in 1963. We started with truck tires, which were then in short supply, later diversified into all sorts of tires-tires for cars, for scooters, for tractors and for many other kinds of vehicles. In the late 1960s, we set up a plant in Kerala to manufacture tread rubber-the traditional item the company was making-so that the Madras factory could concentrate more on tires. Soon thereafter we got a licence to manufacture 300,000 automotive tires in Goa, and another to manufacture two million bicycle tires for which we put up a factory close to our Madras plant. Though the production in the Goa factory has begun, we have yet to start production of our bicycle tires. We hope to begin soon. QUESTION: Was expansion accomplished by your own internal resources, or did you have to borrowfrom the market? ANSWER: We have always tried to mobilize resources from within, but in business, as you know, borrowing is normal, sometimes even necessary. We have gone out and borrowed from the market and from the financial institutions of the country. On several occasions we have also borrowed from the U.S. Agency for International Development (U.S. AID)-from its PL-480 rupee fund. Only recently, AID advanced us a loan of rupees one crore from the PL-480 fund to meet part of the cost of building our Goa factory. QUESTION: One last question, Mr. Mappillai. More and more people in India are advocating that business must be responsive to social problems. Do you agree? ANSWER: Yes, I do. Though profit is the raison d'etre of every business, I feel strongly that business must be responsive to social problems and must try to help solve them. Taking the national view, this means that business companies must strive toward growth in order to provide more and better employment opportunities. Businesses must institute programs to develop new skil1s. And if businesses have export potentialities, they must strive to develop those potentialities to gain the country foreign exchange. Fortunately, we belong to an industry which is not only employment-oriented but also plays a very vital part in the economy of the nation. It is the lifeline of the transport industry. Though we at the Madras Rubber Factory employ about 3,000 persons in our four factories, the employment potential of the tire industry is much greater. Its multiplier effect is enormous. There are a host of industries which feed the tire industry-and still more that are dependent upon it. Apart from all that, perhaps the most important role a business can play is creating socially sensitive hiring policies, and providing congenial working conditions and fair wages to its workers. 0
The stimulating intellectual atmosphere of the California Institute of Technology attracts scientists and students from all over the world. It is a refuge for the brilliant individualist, who is encouraged to roam among the various scientific disciplines.
WORLD CENTER OF SCIENTIFIC EXCELLENCE
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the Oceanographic Institute in Tokyo, the Japanese marine biologist said: "I was put onto this line of research during my postdoctoral years at Caltech." In Sydney, Australia, John Bolton, director of the 20-story-high radio telescope, said: "This isn't the first one I've done. Some years ago, I erected one in Owens Valley for Caltech." At the Pasteur Institute in Paris, its director, Nobel laureate Jacques Monod, said: "I did my serious groundwork in biology research abroad. In France, biology teaching was extremely poor, so I picked the best place there was: Caltech." Dr. Paul Sodding at DESY, Germany's electron synchrotron research facility at Hamburg, was pointed out to me as a man to watch. "He's just come back from two years' postdoctoral work at Caltech." Of all American scientific research centers, Caltech (California Institute of Technology) is the one I found most often referred to on visits to the leading research laboratories around the world. In a number of countries today, there is at least one magnificently equipped scientific research institution that is proudly referred to as the nation's "center of excellence." Caltech, though, in the words of a senior Dutch astrophysicist, "may very well have become the center of scientific excellence for the entire world." Caltech's 200-inch telescope (far left) on Mt. Palomar, California, is one of the largest in the world. The Millikan library (left) honors Robert Millikan who, along with George Hale (above left) and Arthur Noyes, moved Caltech to the front rank among schools of science.
What makes Caltech even more unique is that, where other American researchoriented schools have enrollments like the 10,000 at M.LT. (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) or the 25,000 at the University of California, Berkeley, Caltech is tiny: in anyone year it has no more than 750 undergraduates, 750 graduate students, and a faculty currently numbering about 500, of which several hundred are postdoctoral research fellows. Caltech is the epitome of the elite school and is the fulfillment of a 50-year-old dream. If there was one shaper of that dream, it was astronomer George Ellery Halea quiet, fragile man whose imagination was intrigued by the study of the sun but whose life was determined by his ability to fire the enthusiasm of wealthy men. He induced them to donate large sums of money for scientific study in a country which, until then, had lagged far behind the rest of the world in scientific performance and personnel. Around the turn of the century, Hale raised money for the Carnegie Institution's new 60-inch telescope and observatory, which was to become the greatest in the world. In choosing its location, he was impressed by the clean air on the peak of Mt. Wilson, near Pasadena, California. Hale soon found himself drawn into the intellectual life of the wealthy little community and was asked to serve on the board of a local school called, pretentiously enough, Throop University. It included a grammar school, a high school, and a business college that conferred a bachelor's degree. Hale separated the small
Caltech's pre-eminence stems from its determination to honor merit alone, to remain small, to be in the forefront of the fields it pursues and any new sciences that might result. college, Throop Polytechnic Institute, from the other schools and made it the nucleus of what he hoped would be a distinguished school of scientific research to train the "hundredth man," as defined by Theodore Roosevelt in an address to the Throop student body. "I want to see [this institution and others like it] turn out 99 of every 100 students," Roosevelt said, "men who can do the kind of matchless engineering work now being done on the Panama Canal and on our great new irrigation projects: The hundredth man I want to see with cultural scientific training."
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o help him attract and train the kind of talent that could qualify as Roosevelt's hundredth man, Hale used his persuasive powers to bring to California, for a few winter months each year, two of America's greatest scientists of the timeresearch physicist Robert Millikan of Chicago University and Arthur Amos Noyes, a physical chemist from M.LT. Both men liked the leisurely life in Pasadena and, at the end of World War I, agreed to give up their Eastern ties and devote their full energies to the school, which was changing its name to California Institute of Technology. It seemed to American science at the time that two of its finest stars were hurtling into oblivion, but the triumvirate of Noyes, Millikan, and Hale, respectively referred to by the students as "Stinker, Tinker, and Thinker," got off to a running start and soon the school was earning a wide reputation. In 1923 Millikan received the Nobel Prize in physics for work done 10 years before. And on the campus even then, were four more future Nobel laureates. Through Hale's close affiliation with the Carnegie Institution's Mt. Wilson installation, Caltech started off being preeminent in astronomy. Through Millikan, it quickly attained world recognition in physics. Through Noyes, its chemistry department became so distinguished that very shortly it produced and then was directed by Linus Pauling, the only American besides John Bardeen who has won two Nobel Prizes. In its first 10 years, Caltech expanded into two more fields that were also to color its character. A modest wind tunnel, built in 1917 and capable of producing velocities of up to 40 miles an hour, led a decade later to the founding at Caltech of the Guggenheim School of Aeronautics under
the leadership of Theodor Von Karman. Its graduates in turn went on to found other aeronautic engineering schools and development facilities all over the United States. Caltech's aeronautical researches have done more to advance world aerodynamic theory and design than those of any other single institution. About the same time this school was founded, Caltech made its first move out of the purely physical sciences into biology, under Thomas Hunt Morgan. His students and associates began to perform the vital work in genetics and biochemistry that justified the Nobel Prize he received in 1933.
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altech seems to maintain its drive because of at least three strongly marked characteristics. First, it is determined to remain small and always at the leading edge of the fields it pursues; second, faculty advancement depends on merit alone, not on available vacancies (at one point some years ago the Division of Biology was driving forward over the research terrain under the leadership of 19 full professors, no associate professors, and no instructors-an electrifying army of generals and privates); third, it is always hospitable to scientific research in which fields overlap, and this means it is in the forefront of any new sciences that might result. Also, established scientists are encouraged to extend their own horizons by experimenting in unfamiliar fields. In its determination to remain small, Caltech is continually spinning off into independent life-research projects that themselves require huge staffs and enormous budgets. It drops practical courses from its curriculum, and even entire departments, as soon as other schools are found to be doing the same work equally well. The interdisciplinary approach means that everyone is exposed to everyone else's excitement. One feels this even walking through the Spanish Mission faculty dining club-the Athenaeum-where, to quote Maarten Schmidt, the discoverer of quasars, "each group of scientists finds its own table and talks about what they were doing that very morning." Not long ago one of Caltech's stars, Richard Feynman, a Nobel laureate for his work on the self-energy of the electron, was thinking seriously of resigning to go elsewhere. On his way to lunch, a biologist stopped him and excitedly told him about a brilliant research success attained just that morning.
Then and there Feynman dropped all ideas of giving up the atmosphere of men excited with discoveries. Enthusiasm for newer disciplines and syntheses of interests has made Caltech one of the first centers of work in molecular biology, and allowed Max Delbruck, Caltech's most recent Nobel laureate, to become a professor of biology even though his entire training had been in physics. In pre-World War II Germany, he had been a disciple of two famous theoretical physicists, Wolfgang Pauli and Niels Bohr. Delbruck had been so intrigued by a chance remark of Bohr's on the Correspondence Principle that he turned from physics to biology. He told me: "Bohr said that perhaps life and death were simply two different physical aspects of the same thing. He turned out to be wrong, but I had to find that out myself." Caltech gave him his biology post in 1947. A touch of the same magic transported the space scientist Bruce Murray from classical geology into what is now called planetary physics. Caltech has calmly disengaged the solar system from astronomy and brought it within reach of the earth in the institute's Division of Geological and Planetary Sciences. In this division, says the catalogue, "the student body is purposely kept small and usually consists of no more than 60 graduate students and 15 to 20 undergraduates"-a clear warning to any applicants who are not ready to work at a high level around the clock. Caltech's original divisions-physics, astronomy, chemistry, biology, and aeronautics-have maintained their standards of excellence and continually supply these fields with research leaders. In the 1930s Caltech built its own 200inch telescope on Mt. Palomar which supplanted Mt. Wilson as the world's foremost observatory. The Caltech astronomers who use the instrument realize that they are the luckiest men in their field. Allen Sandage, Maarten Schmidt, and Jesse Greenstein spend 30 nights a year in the front focus cage of the optical telescope at Mt. Palomar, where each man has to work alone and in darkness high above the floor of the observatory. Using that instrument, •. Schmidt took the optical spectrums of a stellar object which he later showed to be a member of an entirely new category known as quasars. Sandage, widely known for his work on radio stars and pulsars, speaks with humility of the advantage
Five of the many scientists associated that access to the telescope gives him. Today, astronomers at Caltech are with Caltech who have won Nobel Prizes are, equipped with instruments that can view left to right, Carl Anderson, Physics, the sky and all space through every section 1936; Murray Gell-Mann, Physics, 1969; Max Delbruck, Physiology and Medicine, 1969; of the electromagnetic spectrum-from Richard Feynman, Physics, 1965; and George the deep X-ray to the radio range. With Beadle, Physiology and Medicine, 1958. these telescopes, completely unknown aspects of space and matter are being investigated. years, exciting either admiration or irritaWhen Albert Einstein came to the tion depending on one's temperament U.S. in the early '30s, Robert Millikan and how much physics one knew. Wives was such an eminent experimental-research thought him rude, arrogant, and noisy; physicist that Einstein paid him a special their physicist husbands recognized his visit. Using an apparatus of exquisite in- brilliance. Hans Bethe, the leader of the genuity, Millikan had proved the validity theoretical physicists, once told me: "In of Einstein's photoelectric theory. A photo- that entire group of extraordinarily talentgraph from that time shows Einstein pos- ed men out there during those years, Dick ing with Millikan and a third figure-a Feynman was the most stimulating, the much younger American who had returned most interesting." recently from study in Germany and had urrayGell-Mann, 10 years younger just joined the Caltech faculty-the late than his colleague, is the son of Robert Oppenheimer, who, later at Pasadena, was to become the founder of the German refugees. "My father," he retradition of theoretical physics, an offshoot marked to me once with wry compassion, of Millikan's approach. Oppenheimer's "was an unlucky man. Things he touched line of descent continues down to Caltech's somehow didn't come off." Gell-Mann two current stars in physics, who are Milli- loves to travel; he has a deep interest in the kan's antitheses in almost every way ex- languages of the world, a reputation for cept brilliance and daring of mind: Nobel an unpredictable temper, and a capacity laureates Richard Feynman and Murray for inventing puckish scientific terminology. Gell-Mann invented the concept of Gell-Mann, both theoreticians. Millikan, the son of a small-town Mid- "strangeness" and made the expression western Protestant minister, was most at "strange particles" a part of current conhome with politically conservative, soci- ventional physics terminology. He also ally exclusive men of wealth, who took for invented the word "quark" as the name granted that the United States' steward- for the suggested substructural units of ship belonged in the hands of the descend- elementary particles. While he insists that ants of early Anglo-American Protestant he got the word from Lewis Carroll, Gellstock. Feynman and Gell-Mann both are Mann knows very well that "quark" is informal men from urban Jewish back- German for cream cheese,and what could be grounds. Feynman was the dynamic enfant a more amusing put-on than to have the terrible at Los Alamos during the war world of science seriously discussing wheth-
M
er or not the entire universe-not merely the moon-is made ultimately of cheese? In 1936 some graduate students of the School of Aeronautics, with Von Karman's encouragement, began a series of primitive rocket experiments in the hot desolate stillness of the Arroyo Seco. The direct descendant of that early work is today's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), an independent nonprofit organization administered and operated by Caltech on contract for the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration. JPL has a staff of 4,500 engineers, technicians, and scientists-a population that is three times as large as its parent operating on a budget that is 10 times bigger. JPL is NASA's principal facility for the unmanned exploration of the solar system-perhaps man's greatest feat of intellectual daring. Along the way to the present, Caltech has also produced these other Nobel Prize winners: Carl Anderson, for his discovery of the positron; William Shockley, for the discovery of the transistor; Charles Townes, for the discovery of the laser; Donald Glaser, for inventing the bubble chamber; Edward McMillan, for his discoveries in radiochemistry. The international list of other leading research scientists who came to Caltech at some point in their lives for awhile, to enrich and be enriched, is too long to include, but it characterizes a fellowship of scientific excellence that goes back for 50 years, extends around the world, and reaches into the future with the still undiscernible effects their work will have. 0 About the Author: Mitchell Wilson, a novelist and a well-known science writer, is author of the recent nonfiction book, A Passion to Know.
American Art fi)rthe
Amellliean Ambassador The startling variety and vitality of contemporary American art are demonstrated in a collection on loan to Ambassador and Mrs. Moynihan. On the following pages, SP AN presents a sampling of the collection.
Some of the greatest figures in American art are currently represented in a display at New Delhi's Roosevelt House, official residence of U.S. Ambassador Daniel P. Moynihan. This collection of 26 works of contemporary art is on loan from the Woodward Foundation of Washington, D.C. Established by a former diplomat, Stanley Woodward, and his wife, the Foundation loans works of art to U.S. Ambassadors abroad to enable them to show this aspect of American culture to local artistic and intellectual communities. Thus Ambassador and Mrs. Moynihan plan on hosting a series of exhibitions of the collection. The Woodward Foundation is guided in its choice by Henry Geldzahler, Curator of Contemporary Arts at the Metropolitan Museum in New York. In making the present selection for Roosevelt House, the Moynihans were assisted by Mrs. Stanley Woodward and Mrs. Lucius Battle. If there is one quality above all that characterizes the Roosevelt House collection it is that of vitality-an alertness, an adventurousness, a willingness to experiment, to "do one's own thing" long before that phrase was born. Perhaps the outstanding example of this attitude is Josef Albers, who fled Hitler's Germany for America in 1933. In the two Albers paintings in Roosevelt House, the artist limits himself to a square format and to three
or four colors. In "Day and Night V" (page 22), a variation of his "Homage to the Square" series, Albers has arranged muted color and gray within disciplined limitations. Such restrictions in painting may be compared to the discipline and consequent paradoxical freedom that the sonnet form exerts on the poet. A contemporary of Albers and one of America's most distinguished painters is Mark Tobey, who has traveled to the Far East and who has been deeply moved by the Oriental philosophies and art techniques he learned there. In a letter dated October 1954, Tobey wrote: "In 1934 I made a trip to China and Japan, where I studied brushwork and acquainted myself with some of the Oriental masters .... After returning to England in 1936, I began a style called 'white writing' .... Line became dominant instead of mass. 'Writing' the painting, whether in color or neutral tones, became a necessity." To achieve a whole painting Tobey uses a swirling mass of lines which still manages to be lyrical and serene. The lithograph "Devoted" (page 22), one of his most recent, is a development from his "white writing" where line becomes form, where ground becomes floating space. A strong Oriental feeling pervades Karl Schrag's "Dark Trees at Noon" (page 27). In this case, however, the calligraphic style is not the result of special training
or a leaning toward Oriental art. It is his personal economy of means in expressing his study of nature. The landscape of New England has been inspiration for much of his work. The trees, sea and sky appear in bold, abrupt brush strokes. In dramatic contrast with Schrag is the exotic calligraphy of Cy Twombly (see "Note I," page 26). Creating his numbered series of "Notes" by etching and printing on the finest of handmade paper, Twombly expresses himself through the line of handwriting, writing to read yet not to read. The "Notes" etchings range in size from small to wall-size, appearing at times like chalk-board exercises in script handwriting. The dialogue between U.S. painters and the Orient is just one aspect of contemporary American art. Many leading U.S. painters were born in Europe, and strong art ties still exist between America and the Continent. With all this, there are some characteristics that may be described as typically American-a practical, straightforward simplicity, a concern with the directness of experience, a native realism. And there are some art movements that could have originated nowhere but in America. One of the most interesting. of these is the Pop Art of the 1960s, a style of painting and sculpture that incorporates images from the daily life of the modern era, the newspaper, television and advertising
imagery that haunts us the way landscape did in an earlier age. Robert Rauschenberg has served as a bridge between the 1950s Abstract Expressionism and the Pop Art he helped invent. Rauschenberg is represented in this collection by the lithograph "Gamble"(page25), which is made up of images from photography, veiled, related and often covered by the denser strokes of abstract inking and screening. With Rauschenberg, the most incongruous juxtapositioning of objects remains coherent by the reliance on tone rather than color. There is a profound common element in things seen two or three times removed from reality: a print after a newspaper reproduction of a press photograph. Along with Rauschenberg, Larry Rivers was one of the precursors of Pop Art though he still retains some Abstract Expressionist techniques. In the etching "Downtown Lion" (page 26), Rivers satirizes an American advertisement, treating with delicacy and wit an appealing lion against the unlikely background of New York's Wall Street. Equally imaginative but inventive in a totally different way is Helen Frankenthaler, one of the most influential painters of the postwar period. She was the first to use mammoth canvases, stained, not painted. She pushed color around on unsized (untreated) canvases with sponges and knives and brushes. As fellow painter
Looking at Sam Gilliam's "And Twirl" (acrylic on canvas, 1966), one of the larger works of art in the Roosevelt House collection, are Mrs. Daniel P. Moynihan and Mrs. Nathan Glazer {the former Sulochana Raghavan). Mrs. Glazer is the wife of Dr. Nathan Glazer, Professor of Sociology at Harvard and co-author with Ambassador Moynihan of the widely-acclaimed book Beyond the Melting Pot.
Kenneth Noland commented, "She showed us the way to think about and use color." Her power and originality are demonstrated here in "A Little Zen;' and "Orange Downpour" (pages 22-23). One of the younger ."color painters" who was influenced by Frankenthaler-as well as by Kenneth Noland and Morris Louis-is Sam Gilliam. Like them he began to work on unsized and unprimed canvas in acrylic paint. In 1966he moved away from geometrically arranged bands of color (see painting above) to washed or dissolved segments of
color on canvas. He frequently washes, daubs or smears the color on folded unstretched canvas to obtain shapes which can be either linear and fanlike or irregular. Unlike other black painters who are concerned with Negro history or social problems, Gilliam concentrates on the subject matter of 20th-century art: that is, art itself. His work indicates the continuing strength of American invention in abstraction. Another impressive abstract artist is Carol Summers whose landscapes have been called "the stuff of dreams." Deceptively
simple, his shapes seem naIve and childlike-as in "Hudson River Sunset" and "Palazzo Malatesta Rimini" (page 24)-but are in fact carefully contrived and technically sophisticated. His subjects are the sunset, the volcano, a towering mountain, or the rainbow. Bold simplification of form is executed with equally striking color simplification. Carol Summers is a master of his technique in printmaking, a modern version of the old Chinese method of "rubbing." Simplicity is also the dominant feature of Jack Youngerman's work (see "Changes Number 8," page 28). His paintings most often consist of simple, irregular shapes, reminiscent of those in torn paper collage. For each work, Youngerman restricts his palette to a few brilliant colors. This is true also of Richard
Hennessy whose "The Gardens of France" (page 26) reveals his preoccupation with bold color and geometric abstraction. Of his art, Hennessy says: "What the world finds 'merely beautiful' suffices." Other artists featured in the Roosevelt House collection but not shown here include Jasper Johns, Helen Phillips, Adolf Dehn, Betty Thomson and Alexander Calder (see SPAN of September 1973). As can be seen even from this limited a collection, there is a tremendous variety of art styles and techniques in America today. An artist's primary response may be'" to form or color or intellectual content-all of which are equally valid. Each artist is choosing a strand that suits his sensibility from the rich texture of tradition 0 that is American art.
JOSEF ALBERS "Day and Night V" (1963) Lithograph, 40 ems. x 40 ems.
HELEN FRANKENTHALER Above: "A Little Zen" (1970) Poehoir, 56 ems. x 77 ems. Opposite page: "Orange Downpour" (1970) Poehoir, 77 ems. x 56 ems.
MARK TOBEY "Devoted" (1970) Lithograph, 31 ems. x 24 ems.
Above: Color Below: Color
CAROL "Hudson woodcut, "Palazzo woodcut,
SUMMERS River Sunset" (1960) 93 ems. x 91 ems. Malatesta Rimini" 91 ems. x 93 ems.
ROBERT RAUSCHENBERG Opposite page: "Gamble" (1968 Lithograph, 95 ems. x 59 ems.
LARRY RIVERS "Downtown Lion" (1967) Etching, 30 ems. x 44 ems.
RICHARD HENNESSY "The Gardens of France I" (1967) Gouache, 50 ems. x 38 ems.
CY TWOMBLY "Note I" (1967) Etching, 65 ems. x 51 ems.
KARL SCHRAG "Dark Trees at Noon" (1961) Color aquatint, 63 ems. x 48 ems.
JACK YOUNGERMAN "Changes Number 8" Silk screen, 108 ems. x 83 ems.
BLACK PROGRESS LIBE¡ L alHETORIC A phenomenon of enormous portent for the future of American society is the entry of a majority of blacks into what is known as the 'middle class.' Surprisingly, this progress has come about at a time when the liberal community insists that the condition of American blacks is not improving at all.
A
remarkable development has taken place in America over the last dozen years: For the first time in the history of the republic, truly large and growing numbers of American blacks have been moving into the middle class, so that by now these numbers can reasonably be said to add up to a majority of black Americans-a slender majority, but a majority nevertheless. This development, which has occurred against a historical backdrop of social and economic discrimination, is nothing short of revolutionary. Despite the fact that Southern blacks are economically still significantly worse off than Northern, and older blacks than younger, and despite the fact too that the economic and social gap separating whites and blacks is still a national disgrace, "middle class" has now become an accurate term to describethe.social and economic condition of somewhatmore than half of black Americans. What does "middle class" mean in this context? Obviously any line that is drawn in
the sociological sand must have about it something of the arbitrary and the artificial, yet there are a number of statistical criterianotably in the areas of income, job patterns, and education-that serve to measure the relative standing of groups (as well, of course, as individuals) in society, and these indices have an unambiguous tale to tell about the recent economic and social movement of American blacks. Obviously, too, "middle class" as used here does not refer to a condition of affluence, to a black population made up of doctors, lawyers, and businessmen (although such blacks certainly do exist). It refers rather to the condition of that vast majority of working-class Americans who, although often hard-pressed, have safely put poverty behind them and are now looking ahead, no longer back; it refers not only to engineers and teachers, but also to plasterers, painters, bus drivers, lathe operators, secretaries, bank tellers, and automobile assemblyline workers: the kinds of people who, when
they are white, are described as "Middle Americans" or members of the silent, real, or new American majorities. It refers, in the words of the economist Thomas Sowell,who is himself black, to "black men and women who go to work five days a week, pay their bills, try to find some happiness for themselves, and raise their children to be decent people with better prospects than they had .... " To belong to this "middle class" means, first, to have enough to eat, to have adequate, if not necessarily expensive, clothes to wear, and to be able to afford housing that is safe and sanitary. But that is only the beginning. The advent of a majority of blacks into the middle-income class has triggered a dominolike movement throughout American society. Once the necessities of food, shelter, and clothing are provided for, a vast flow of secondary desires follows. A middle-income family wants not only a house that is safe •. and sanitary but one in a safe and sanitary neighborhood. Middle-income parents want
'Middle class ... does not refer to a black population made up of doctors, lawyers and businessmen. their children to go to good schools, to stay in high school and graduate and, they hope, then go on to college. The young adults who come out of high school and college want better jobs than those their parents have held, the kinds of jobs available to whites in an equivalent socio-economic position. The middle-income blacks, as we shall see, have made much headway toward satisfying all these traditional middle-class desires. Their progress has hardly been trouble-free; as is the case with all forms of sharp economic movement, it has been accompanied by considerable social turbulence, much of it occasioned by race prejudice, and it has had a tremendous impact on the political life of the nation at large. But it is real progress, a massive achievement; and to all appearances it is here to stay. This is a phenomenon of enormous portent for the future of American society. That it should have come about, as it has, at a time when many civil rights leaders and liberals alike have insisted that conditions for American blacks are not improving at all, but actually deteriorating, is not the least astonishing aspect of the entire episode. It will be a great and tragic irony if this insistence on failure should prove a hindrance to the upward progress of American blacks.
T
he first and most basic index of status in American life is money, and it is therefore to comparative income statistics that we must turn first to show the broad outlines of black upward mobility in the 1960s. According to the 1970 census figures, income for white families in America went up by 69 per cent in the 1960s, while income for black families went up by 99.6 per cent. If we round off the 99.6per cent figure it can be stated that black family income actually doubled during a single decade! The ratio of black family income to white
family income also changed dramatically in the period, climbing from 53 per cent in 1961 to 63 per cent in 1971. It might be arguedand rightly-that 63 per cent is a long way from 100 per cent and still scandalously low, but what is open to little argument is that there has been sharp progress-a catching up-during recent years which was not at all apparent during the previous decade (the ratio of black to white family incomes was the same in 1961 as it had been in 1951). And the changing percentage of black families earning about $10,000 (Rs. 75,000) is even more startling, jumping from 13 per cent in 1961 to 30 per cent in 1971 (from 1951 to 1961 the percentage had increased from 3 to 13); these figures are in 1971 constant dollars, the effects of inflation having been factored out. The median family income in the United States in 1971was $10,285 (Rs. 77,137); today, it can be estimated at $11,000 (Rs. 82,500). This figure represents the middle-of-the-middie of family income distribution. Some lower figure-say, $8,000 (Rs. 60,000) outside the South-may be said to represent the bottomof-the-middle or the beginning of middleincome status in America. In the South, where median income averages almost $2,000 (Rs. 15,000) lower, and where a disproportionate number of blacks still lives, the bottom-of-the-middle line may be drawn at $6,000 (Rs. 45,000). By these criteria, and again adjusting for recent income increases, just over half of black families in the United States are by now economically in the middle class (about 52 per cent). The march of blacks across the invisible line into the lower-middle and middle classes may be seen even more clearly by looking at the data on the regional rather than on the national level, and by breaking down the figures by age and family characteristics. Thus, there is a sharp difference between black income in the South and black income
elsewhere. Whereas in 1970 black family income in the South was 57 per cent of white family income, outside the South the corresponding figure was 74 per cent. A second variable affecting black-white income ratios is family status. As we shall note later, black families are much more likely than white families to be "femaleheaded," but when they are not-when the families are "husband-wife" families-income is much likelier to approach equality with comparable white family incomes. Among black husband-wife families all over America in 1970, income was 73 per cent of white family income. Outside the South it was 88 per cent. But perhaps the most encouraging, and most significant, cross-tabulation of the income data concerns the economic status of young blacks. These young men and women have made striking educational gains in recent years; they have made gains in "occupation" as well, i.e., in the sorts of jobs they hold; and they have made gains in. the amounts of money they earn. Black males aged 25-34, for example, earn 80 per cent of white levels of income on a national basis. When one combines all these factorsyouth, non-Southern residence, and an unbroken family-a truly striking statistic emerges. The median income of black husband-wife families, in the North and West, with the head of family under 35 years of age, rose from 78 per cent of white income in 1959 to 96 per cent in 1970. There is a word to describe that figure: parity. And if we add a fourth variable to the equation, and examine families in which both the husband and wife work, the figures come out to 85 per cent in 1959, and in 1970-104 per cent! For such families, parity has not only been achieved, it has even been surpassed: Young, married blacks, outside of the South, with husband and wife both working, earn as much as or a trifle more than comparable whites.
t refers rather to that vast majority of working-class Americans who have safely put poverty behind them.' If income statistics are the most basic index of economic mobility in the United States, employment patterns follow closely behind. For the last two decades the reality of the black-white employment situation can be summed up, bleakly, as follows: Black unemployment rates have been twice as high as white rates. But in recent years a massive shift has occurred in the identity of the black unemployed. A cross-tabulation of married men over age 20 reveals a far sharper drop in unemployment among blacks than for the population as a whole, as is shown by this comparison of two early years of the '60s with two early years of the '70s:
cularly among married males. Black teenagers are mostly in school, adults are mostly supporting families. The net result would seem to be an important social and economic plus, despite the unfortunately large and continuing disproportion in black-white unemployment rates. The over-all employment pattern, of course, is made up of more than the statistics of who is at work and who is without work. Of equal significance is what kinds of jobs people hold. Here again we see major progress by blacks in entering middle-class occupations, especially in the categories of "white-collar workers," "craftsmen," and "operatives":
UNEMPLOYMENT RATE AND BLACK-TOWHITE RATIO FOR MARRIED MEN, 20 YEARS AND OVER, WITH SPOUSE PRESENT, 1962 TO 1972
NUMBERS OF WHITE-COLLAR WORKERS, CRAFTSMEN, AND OPERATIVES, IN MILLIONS
NEGRO & OTHER RACES % 1962 1963 1971 1972
7.9 6.8 4.9 4.4
WHITE
RATIO
% 3.1 3.0 3.0 2.6
2.5 to 2.3 to 1.6 to 1.7 to
1 1 1 1
At the same time, teen-age unemployment has gone up. Among the 1.9 million black teen-agers (age 16-19), unemployment rates in 1960 were 24 per cent; by 1970, the rate had climbed to 29 per cent, and by 1971 to 32 per cent. The rate for white teen-agers fluctuated between 13 and 15 per cent in the same years. These comparative data are discouraging, but there is something to be said about them that is not generally understood. In 1971, of the 1.9 million black teen-agers, 1.25million were "not in the labor force" at all (about a million were students, most of the rest housewives). They were neither "at work" nor ,"looking for work," and thus not tabulated in unemployment statistics. On balance, then: teen-age unemployment rates are up, adult male rates are down, parti-
1960 1970 Percentage increase
46.1 57.0 24
Over the same decade the numbers of Negroes in "other" work-primarily lowpaying jobs in private households, as service workers, farm workers, and laborers-decreased from 4 million to 3.5 million. Comparing, then, the balance of occupational status for blacks in America in 1960 and 1970, we find that in 1960 blacks in "good" jobs totaled 2.9 million while blacks in "not good" jobs totaled 4 million; by 1970 the number of blacks with "good" jobs totaled 5.1 million, while those with "not good" jobs totaled 3.4 million-in short, a reversal, and then some. In 1960, 42 per cent of blacks held "good" (i.e., middle-class) jobs-less than half. By 1970 the rate had climbed to 64 per cent-almost two-thirds. Along with higher incomes and better jobs the 1960s also saw a great breakthrough in the area of education. Thus in 1960 only 36
per cent of young black males finished four years of high school, the educational level that seems to separate Americans into "middle class" and "nonmiddle class." By 1970the rate was more than half-54 per cent. Among young black women the increase was even greater-from 41 per cent in 1960 to 61 per cent in 1971. If we take a longer range view, say over the last 30 years, the great educational leap forward of young American blacks becomes even more impressive: MEDIAN SCHOOL YEARS COMPLETED NEGROES, AGED 25-29 1940 1950 1960 1970
7.0 8.6 10.8 12.2
years years years years
In 1940 the young black was typically an elementary-school dropout; a decade later he could be described only as an elementaryschool graduate. Not until 1960did the young American black typically reach even the level of high-school dropout, and not until 1970 did he typically become a high-school graduate -a bona fide member of the educational middle class. Finally, the leap into the educational middle class can be seen in college-enrollment statistics. In 1970, there were over half a million young blacks in college, slightly more than nine per cent of the total. Over a short six-year period-from 1965 to 1971-the comparative figures are as follows: PER CENT OF PERSONS, AGED 18-24, ENROLLED IN COLLEGE 1965-1971
Negro White "Gap"
Again, there is a gap and it is still large-but it has narrowed considerably.
'The image of the black in America must be changed, from an earlier one of an uneducated, unemployed By most of the standards by which Americansmeasure middle-class status, then, blacks in the last decade have made mighty stridesboth absolutely and relative to whites-and the time has come for this fact to be recognized. The image of the black in America must be changed, from an earlier one of an uneducated, unemployed, poverty-stricken slum-dweller,to that of an individlJal earning a living wage at a decent job, with children who stay in school and aspire to still-better wages and still-better jobs, living not in a slum (but still in a ghetto), in a decent if unelaborate dwelling, still economically behind his white counterpart but catching up. But to say all this, while indeed correct, is not to say that the situation is uniformly good; that all "blacks are in the middle class; that blacks as a whole have achieved parity with whites; that poverty is largely a thing of the past; or, last but not least, that there is a cause for complacency in the realm of social and economic policy. None of these conclusions, in fact, is valid. The high incidence of broken families among blacks-regarded by some observers as the key to the pathology of the black slums -has increased substantially in recent years. Today, close to a third of black families are headed by females; 20-odd years ago it was about a sixth. The white rate has changed only marginally in the same period. The phrase "black female-headed families" is too often interchangeable with a more succinct term: "poor." In 1971, more than half (54 per cent) of such families were living below what the government called the "lowincome level;" only 17 per cent of maleheaded families could be so designated. And the brutal fact is that from 1959 to 1971 the number of,male-headed families in poverty decreased by more than half, while the number of female-headed families in poverty increased by a third. By 1971, almost six in 10
poor black families were female-headed. As the numbers and relative percentages of black female-headed families soared, so too did the numbers and rates of blacks on welfare. In 1960, there were 3.1 million total welfare recipients in the United States. Of that number it is estimated that 41 per centroughly 1.3 million were black, or about seven per cent of the 18.8 million Negroes in America in 1960. Of the 10.6 million on welfare in 1971, 45 per cent were black~.8 million. Of the total black population of 23 million, 21 per cent were on the Aid to Families with Dependent Children program-from seven per cent only 11 years earlier. It would be blinding ourselves to reality to deny the seriousness of these figures. The rise in female-headed black families living in poverty, and the concomitant increase in the number of blacks on welfare, is a deplorable situation from whatever angle it is viewed. It is deplorable for the millions of black children who grow up without a father in the house. It is deplorable for the stigma it attaches to those receiving welfare, and for the scars it inflicts on their spirit. And it is deplorable because of all the other circumstances that poverty entails: bad diet, bad clothing, bad housing, inferior medical care. And the situation is also deplorable because of what it does to American politicians and U.S. politics-particularly liberal politicians and liberal politics. Middle-class voters -including many black middle-class voters -don't want to pay the bill for families they believe are "shiftless," for families they believe ought to be cared for by the (absent) man of the house. They especially resent paying when they believe that the standard of living they are providing for families on welfare has begun to approach their own, a standard they have toiled long and hard to reach. Politicians with liberal instincts feel
compassion for the poor and the needy, but they also feel the hot breath of the voters on their necks. Yet the welfare figures alone, deplorable as they are, do not tell the full story. For the increase in the percentage of blacks on welfare has occurred during a time when the rate of blacks in poverty has sharply decreased. The meaning of this apparent paradox is simply that those blacks still in poverty are more likely than they once were to be receiving aid. The percentage of blacks in poverty has gone sharply down from 48 to 29 per cent in the years from 1959 to 1971. That is an enormous change. At the same time, as we have seen, the percentage of blacks on welfare has gone sharply up-by about three times, from seven to 21 per cent: another enormous change. A black person in the poverty range, then, is far more likely to be receiving welfare now than in the early '60s, perhaps as much as five times as likely.
J
udgingprogress is of necessity a cold and comparative discipline. We believe, however, that on the basis of the statistics we have examined, it is fair to say that for American blacks generally in the 1960s a huge amount of progress was made-although there is still a substantial and necessary distance to traverse before some rough level of parity is reached. Moreover, those three in 10 blacks who remain trapped in poverty also made statistical economic progress in these years, although on balance this progress may with justice be considered nullified by the stunning rise of violence in the slum areas. Now, is all this better than what it replaced? The answer is an uncompromising "yes." In a society that prides itself on being middle class, blacks are now moving into the middle class in unprecedented numbers. In a ~ society that scorns the high-school dropout and offers work to the high-school graduate,
poverty-stricken slum-dweller, to that of an individual earning a living wage at a decent job.... ' blacks are now finishing high school and significant numbers are going on to college. But what of the future? Two scenarios seem plausible to us; a third-an unpleasant one-seems unlikely. The first scenario envisages continued progress for American blacks, not only absolutely as the rest of America progresses, but 1960sstyle, in the form of a continued march toward statistical parity with whites. At least two good sets of reasons can be adduced to confirm the likelihood of this taking place. There are, first, the structural reasons. Black income levels are lowest in the South, yet rising relatively fastest there (up 113 per cent from 1960 to 1970, versus rates of from 70 to 80 per cent in other regions). A majority of all blacks still live in the South (compared with 31 per cent of all Americans), yet outmigration has been substantial and seems to be continuing. Blacks outside the South make more money than blacks in the South. There is no basis for supposing that any of these trends will change: Blacks will continue to live disproportionately in the South where black earnings are climbing fastest, and they will continue to leave the South, thus getting an automatic boost toward income parity. Another structural consideration is the status of young blacks. As noted earlier, the sharpest relative gains in the last decade were made by black families under 35. If this pattern continues-and there is no reason to believe it will not-it will of its own weight continue to move the total black-white numbers closer to parity. Elderly blacks will leave the labor force and ultimately die, and will be replaced by the new cohorts of young blacks (who happen to be a disproportionately large group today). These new young black f~milies will enter at the present closeto-parity rates now held hy young black families as a whole. Further, it seems likely that the now-young but soon-to-be-middle-
aged blacks will continue to retain some, most, or all of their present relatively high standing as they reach their late 30s and early 4Os. This seems especially plausible if one assumes that young black families have made income progress in large measure because of their greater educational attainments and because they hold better jobs than they used to; the same jobs and the same educational backgrounds will continue to serve them in good stead as they move into middle age.
B
eyond the structural reasons for assuring continued progress are the political and psychic ones. Something did indeed happen in the 1960s: the logjam broke-politically, legally, socially, economically, even spiritually-and there is no going back. Continued progress is inevitable. In the second-less optimistic-scenario of the future, the broad structural factors just mentioned are taken into account, the broad political-cultural factors are minimized, and two other factors are introduced. First, insofar as it can be measured sketchily over a short period of time, progress in the Nixon years of 1969, 1970, and 1971 was less dramatic than in the Kennedy-Johnson years. True, the slowdown was not aimed at blacks; there was a national economic recession, and if the sinking rate of blacks in poverty stopped sinking, so, roughly, did the rate for whites. The rates of black families earning $10,000 (Rs. 75,000) a year or more in fact continued to climb, although more slowly than earlier. Black income viewed as a fraction of white income seemed to reach a plateau. Unemployment rates climbed for both blacks and whites-somewhat more so for whites. On some fronts progress continued strong-very strong-despite the recession: high-school dropout rates for black males fell markedly from 1970 to 1971 (for 18-yearolds the rate fell from 30 per cent to 23 per
cent; for 19-year-olds from 44 to 29 per cent). The record of the first three Nixon years cannot be called much better than mixed. The key question, of course, is whether these three years signal a general and continuing slowdown or merely a partial and temporary one. The answer will have to wait until the economy heats up again, but according to the second scenario the 1970s will begin to bear a structural resemblance to the economic plateau of the 1950s, rather than to the sharp ascent of the 1960s. Aside from the recent figures, as the second scenario would have it, there is further reason to be concerned about the new ixon budget for fiscal 1974. That budget has been described as the death knell of the Great Society programs of the Johnson Administration, and while the description is no doubt overly dramatic, it is clear that if the President has his way many of the Great Society programs will be cut back or cut out. If these programs were indeed what was responsible for the great progress made by blacks in the 1960s, it follows that progress will decrease as the programs are eliminated or starved. Doing away with the programs, in effect, will do away with some, if not all, of the relative gains that are likely to accrue from structural forces alone. No one really knows how much good (or bad, for that matter) was accomplished by the Great Society programs of the '60s, and debate over the question is likely to go on indefinitely. Our own view-which owes something to political considerations, something to statistical ones-is that the programs accomplished a good deal; their sharp curtailment would probably be sufficient to prevent the future of steady progress envisaged in the first scenario, yet probably not sufficient to insure the future of total stasis envisaged in the second. This view, and its political implications, •. will be spelled out in detail in a moment. The third and final scenario of the future
'By most of the standards by which Americans measure middle-class status, blacks have made mighty strides-both absolutely and relative to whites-and the time has come- for this fact to be recognized.' course of events asserts confidently that the Great Society programs were so important that their partial demise will not only eliminate the projected structural gains, but insure an absolute retrogression. Things for blacks will get relatively worse in the '70s according to this scenario. In our judgment this is an improbable prognosis. President Nixon neither wants to, nor could, undo all the progress of the '60s. No one, for instance, has proposed repealing the Voting Rights Act, which wields enormous political clout. No one has proposed repealing the Public Accommodations Law. Nor the new minimum wages. Nor Medicaid. Nor aid to higher education. In addition, while no one can accurately quantify the impact of the New Frontier and Great Society, we believe it a mistaken analysis that the programs alone were responsible for the progress of the '60s. A key antipoverty remedy in the past, and one likely to remain so in the future, is a steadily strong economy. The Great Society programs were a central ingredient of progress, but not so central that repeal of some of them now would actually reverse the tide. It has been our contention, and one which we have attempted to document, that enormous progress has been made by American blacks in the past decade, so much so that a thin majority of American blacks now belong to the middle class. But we noted early in this essay that a blanket of silence seems to envelop the liberal community on this point, so that the economic and social advances made by blacks, far from being trumpeted or even acknowledged, are simply ignored when they are not actually denied. In the face of all the evidence to the contrary, not a few liberal spokesmen and civil rights activists have claimed that blacks are in fact worse off now than they were 10 years ago. Why have the data of black advancement been kept secret by those who presumably have an interest in I:;aki:lg them known? After all, the black man-in-the-street is perfectly aware of the gains that have been made. A Potomac Associates/Gallup Poll taken in 1972, for instan,ce, revealed that whereas whites on the whole said life in America has gotten worse in recent years, blacks said
things were getting better. The answer is of course that civil rights leaders do know what has happened, and even acknowledge it in private; but they have elected as a matter of policy to mute any public acknowledgment or celebration of black accomplishments in order to maintain moral and political pressure on the administration and on public opinion. This strategy, we submit, is a mistaken one, counterproductive of its goal; the only people who have been kept under pressure by it are liberals themselves. As has been the case with many aspects of the liberal agenda in the last half-century, civil rights leaders who refuse to claim credit for the successes they have earned only lend themselves to the purposes of those who declare the bankruptcy of liberalism altogether as a political strategy.
H
ere is the dilemma in which liberals find themselves. Forty years have passed since they became the driving force of American politics, frequently occupying the White House, always influential in the U.S. Congress. In this period of time a remarkable body of legislation has been placed on the statute books, as a result of which great economic and social progress has been made in the country, from which all Americans have benefited. And this progress liberals now deny, claiming that the programs for which they fought and lobbied have not worked (but at the same time denouncing President Nixon when he says they haven't worked). In short, the liberal battle cry has become, "We have failed; let us continue!" Now let us suppose that, instead of the institutionalized gloom pervading liberal thought today, a different analysis-an accurate analysis-were substituted, and a different rhetoric adopted to conform to it. Of what would it consist? It would begin, first of all, in the recognition that in 1960 and in 1964, the nation elected Presidents who were pledged to get America moving again, to give a better deal to the poor and the black, to break a decades-old legal, political, and social logjam. Thanks to these Presidents, thanks to a liberal impulse in the Congress in the mid-1960s, thanks to the tireless efforts of liberals all over America, the legislation was passed to fulfill that pledge: manpower
pro~rams, poverty programs, and a stunning array of health, education, and legal services. Now, more than a decade later, we can look back and see-results. To be sure, we cannot say absolutely that the legislation was totally responsible for the progress made, but we can say absolutely that it was crucial. Liberalism worked. The problem is more than just political in the narrow, partisan sense. At issue finally is the possibility of achieving a rational and peaceful resolution of the enduring racial problems of this country. By refusing to acknowledge the facts of success, liberals give further currency to the old stereotypes of black poverty-slums, rat-infested dwellings, a self-perpetuating welfare culture-and thereby help to confer legitimacy on the policies of those who would shirk the hard task of social and economic integration. It simply makes no sense to demand of white middle-class Americans that they welcome into their hearts, let alone into their neighborhoods, schools, or places of work, such stereotyped examples of human misery and degradation as liberals proclaim most American blacks to be. It makes eminent sense, on the other hand, to demand of white middle-class Americans that they extend a fair and equal chance to those who have, like them, earned their way into the middle class, as well as to all those millions who stand ready to do so once given the chance. Integration, still the only realistic solution to the race problem, will proceed only as economic class gaps narrow, and are publicly acknowledged to be narrowing. Trumpeting failure, the best deal liberals are likely to get, from this or any other administration, is one that amounts to standpatism. Acknowledging those successes that have in fact been achieved, demanding the means and the money for the completion of the job, liberals might legitimately hope for action, and an extension of their political writ. 0
About the Authors: Ben J. Wattenberg and Richard M. Scammon are the co-authors of This U.S.A. and The Real Majority. Wattenberg, who was an aide to President Johnson, often writes articles/or American magazines and has been an editor and a publisher. Scammon, former director 0/ the U.S. Bureau of Census, is editor of America Votes.
THE PUSH-BUTTQN WQRlDQF THE AMERICAN HQUSEWIFE A host of electrical devices has taken the drudgery out of housekeeping for the average U.S. housewife, freeing her for cultural and social pursuits that her grandmother never dreamed of. It is early morning in a suburb of an American city on the Atlantic Coast. Music from a clock radio, set the night before to turn itself on at seven, softly invades her sleeping brain. She pulls the electric blanket up over her ears. Five minutes pass. A grating buzz comes from the clock radio. Her hand shoots out and clamps down the button that turns off the alarm. Susan Adams, a typical American housewife, has started her daysymbolically enough-by pushing a button. Throughout her day, she will push dozens of other buttons, flip scores of electricai switches, dial dozens of dials as she calls upon mechanical servants to help her fill her combined role of wife, mother, cook, housekeeper, gardener, family banker, seamstress, interior decorator, amateur repairman, nurse, hostess and informed citizen. Like most American housewives, Susan Adams has no outside help. Full-time servants are virtually unknown in the United States. It is rare that a family hires even a once-a-week cleaning woman since such a person earns between $15 to $20 (Rs. 112 to Rs. 150) a day. Costs of personal services, such as commercial laundry service and dry cleaning, are very high. Repair services-plumbing, electrical work, mechanical repair for household appliances-are very expensive. So, American families do as much for themselves as they possibly can. They use outside help, such as an electrician or plumber, only when absolutely necessary. Susan and Howard and their two children are not a statistically typical American family. Based on 1970 census figures, the average American f~mily consists of a husband aged 44, a wife aged 41, a 19-year-old ~on and a 17-year-old daughter. In the average American family both4Jarents have a high-school education and the family income is $9,870 (Rs. 74,025). Susan is 31 and Howard is 35. Their son Robert is nine and their daughter Coleen is seven. Since Howard is a college graduate with advanced training, his annual salary ($18,000, or Rs. 135,000) is almost twice' the national average for family income. Susan completed two years of university before marriage and, like 40 per cent of Ameri-
can women, worked several years following marriage. Like 64 per cent of American families, Howard and Susan are buying their own home on a long-term financing basis. Because of Howard's income and Susan's earnings, the family savings were sufficient to make a down payment on a home valued at $42,500 (Rs. 318,750), two and a half times the average value of an American home. As in most American homes, theirs comes equipped with central heating, a full kitchen including hot and cold running water, refrigerator, and cooking range with oven. And since their house was built within the last 10 years and is relatively costly, it bas a garbage disposer and an electric dishwasher. (While 99.8 per cent of Americans own a refrigerator, 95 per cent own a television set, and 91.9 per cent own a clothes washing machine, only 23.7 per cent have an electric dishwasher. Installation of garbage disposers in new homes has been a legal requirement in some urban areas for many years as a means of providing more sanitary disposal of garbage and a way of reducing municipal refuse collection costs.) But now let's get back to Susan, who's been awakened by the grating buzz of the clock radio. Flipping off the heat control switch of her electric blanket, she gets up and heads toward the kitchen. It is chilly this morning, so on her way down the hall she twists the temperature dial for the house's central heating up to 22 degrees Centigrade. In the basement, the forced-air furnace immediately begins warming the house. (In summer, the same system will cool the entire house according to the temperature selected.) In the kitchen, Susan turns on the radio and listens to the news as she fills the electric coffee pot. Next, she takes a tin of frozen orange juice from the freezer compartment of her refrigerator and opens it with her electric can opener. Howard gave her the electric can opener for Christmas. Many of the electric "gadgets" found in American households are originally received as gifts. A few basic appliances are considered reasonably essential in middle-class homes-an electric steam iron, a portable electric mixer, a vacuum cleaner, an electric toaster. The rest are usually gift items.
The suburbanization of America
AI UBBAI CIVILIZATIOI "ITBOUT CITIIS' The very idea sounds preposterous. How can there be such a thing as an urban civilization without cities? Is it not a contradiction in terms? These questions are inevitablebut not quite so unanswerable as they seem at first glance. A very good case can be made to the effect that much of what we cal1 "the urban crisis" in the United States is real1y a misnomer for a historical, popular effort to create an urban civilization without cities. Indeed, it can be argued that the basic impulse throughout our history has been in this direction, and that what the textbooks call "the urbanization of America" is not at all the same thing as "the citification of America." Before we can see this matter in clear perspective, we must rid ourselves of a couple of mischievous misconceptions. The first is that, as President Lyndon B. Johnson majestical1y proclaimed, we are today what we have never been before: "a nation of cities," with some 70 per cent of our population residing in what the Census Bureau cal1s an "urban place." What President Johnson did not mention is that the Census Bureau's definition of an "urban place" is any settlement with more than 2,500 residents. That definition may once have made some sense. Today it can only confuse us, as it apparently confused the President, by obscuring the distinction between the categories of "urban" and "city." In fact, less than 30 per cent of the American population lives in places with a population of more than 100,000, which is what we ordinarily regard as a city. This is approximately equal to our "rural" population, living in settlements of fewer than 2,500 inhabitants. Moreover, the proportion of our population that lives in big cities, those of over 1,000,000, is the same as it was in 1920. True, there has been an absolute increase
in the big-city population, reflecting the overall growth of our total population. But even so, a good part of this absolute increase has not taken place in the big cities of yesteryear -the most troubled cities of today. New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, and Boston have not experienced any remarkable population growth in recent decades. (New York, in fact, has experienced no growth: Its population today is almost what it was in 1950.) The increase in our big-city population is largely the consequence of the furious expansion of such new cities as Los Angeles and Houston. These are, as we shal1 see, very special kinds of cities in that they are by traditional standards not proper cities at all. Some critics have even cal1ed them "anti-cities," which is not far from the truth. What the urbanization of America over the past half-century really amounts to, then, is the movement from the farm toward smaller cities, most of them clustered in metropolitan areas, i.e. areas in the center of which there is a city of at least 100,000 people. The urbanization of America is thus more accurately described as the suburbanizatiol1 of America. The second mischievous misconception obscuring America's actual urban condition is the notion that Americans would really prefer to live in the cities if only they were more attractive and agreeable. Behind most of the literature on city planning there lurks the conviction that Americans have been forced out of the city by circumstances beyond their control, that suburban living is for them faute de mieux, and that such things as picturesque shopping malls, efficient rapid transportation, and a civic cultural center will draw them back. Most city planners certainly and sincerely love city living; they are authentic city types,
which is, perhaps, as it should be and must be. But most Americans do not feel this way at all. In a 1968 Gallup Poll, only 18 per cent said they preferred to live in central cities; 25 per cent chose the suburbs; 29 per cent wanted to live in small towns; and 27 per cent actually said they wished they could live on a farm. In terms of the popular ideal, one could more accurately speak of an agrarian crisis than of an urban crisis. It would be tempting to dismiss these expressed opinions as an ideological hangover, a case of "cultural lag," a futile nostalgia for an unavailable past. But that would be an error. These are no idle fantasies; they are genuine preferences-and Americans act upon them. Moreover, the evidence is overwhelming that Americans have always had a similar attitude toward cities. How else can we explain the extraordinary American decision, almost without precedent or parallel, that the capitals of our states should only rarely be the largest or most important cities? Such "peculiarities" are not mere oddities. They tell us much about the American way of life and about how it differs from the traditional European ways of organizing societies. A city may exist for three types of reasons: (1) economic-commercial; (2) political-administrative; or (3) cultural-intel1ectual. In Europe, it has always been assumed that, ideally, a city should combine all three raisons d'etre; and the outstanding European citiesa London, a Paris, a Madrid, a Budapest, a Vienna-do, in fact, combine them. Surely, too, one of the reasons Italy has so many memorable cities is that until national unification only a century ago, they were all capitals, combiriing the three urban purposes. • Such a combination gives a city a power of attraction that is close to irresistible. Euro-
peans feel a possessiveness toward, and identification with, their major cities that is unknown in America. These cities are an integral part of their national identity; frequently, they antedate the national identity, and have played a crucial role in creating the nation itself. No Frenchman can imagine France without Paris, but it is not so hard to imagine the United States without New York-millions of Americans indulge in this fantasy every day, with no great pain. Clearly, what we have here is an important difference in urban values. This difference reaches far back into American history and has deep roots in the American character. Unless we take this history and this character seriously, we are not likely to get very far in understanding why American cities are the way they are. Nor are we likely to understand why it is that Americans live most happily and contentedly in precisely those cities-Los Angeles, Houston, San Diego, Tucson, Las Vegas-that are the despair of any properly educated city planner. For such an understanding, one must begin with a plain fact: Americans have always regarded their cities-with the unique exception of 19th-century Boston, an exception that proves the rule-from an utterly utilitarian perspective. The American city, unlike the European city, has never been thought of as a nucleus of civilization. As Professor Daniel Elazer of Temple University in Philadelphia has emphasized, the American city has been regarded as, and has been treated as, a focus of economic activity-to put it bluntly, as a kind of service station. Americans have always used their cities, and more often than not in a casual and even brutal way. One service, in particular, has been of the utmost importance: the absorption and integration of rural immigrants-mainly, but not only, foreign-into American life. American cities have been very successful in performing this service and are still performing it quite well. But to evaluate this service, we must first understand what "success" means in American terms. It does not mean making urban citizens of these new immigrants. It does mean making them sufficiently urbanized -sufficiently acculturated, trained, and educated-that they can leave the city. The American city is an entrep6t, importing people and exporting citizens, usually to the suburban towns and smaller suburban cities. That is why it is so misleading to try to measure the state of the blacks, the newest immigrants to the city, by looking exclusively at the conditions of life in the inner city. Such conditions always look bad, always are bad,
because the inner city is mostly populated by people who have not yet succeeded. If we wish to know if the city is working, then we must, paradoxically, look at the rate of emigration to the suburbs. This rate is moving up sharply for the blacks today, and it will certainly continue doing so throughout the 1970s. We can then say that our cities have been functioning as they were intended to. That this intention is radically different from the intention that city planners or most writers on urban affairs would ascribe to the city is another matter. The latter long desperately for a traditional kind of urbanity, for cities with grace, with style, with charm, with elegance-cities, in short, where cultivated persons like themselves can live in comfort. These people may even be right in believing that without such cities any civilization will be deficient and limited. But all this is not really relevant. It is quite impossible for the city to be a processing depot for immigrants and at the same time strive for a traditional kind of urbanity. The wear and tear is enormous; urban life is inevitably too messy and turbulent and more than a little sordid. One cannot say that Americans like this process; but it is obvious enough that they are willing to use up their cities in order to achieve this purpose.
communities that were more or less identical in their legal and social structures. All of this is but another way of saying that the instinct of American individualism is also an instinct for voluntary community. Americans are unquestionably a nomadic people-one in five moves every year. But these nomads move from one interchangeable and nearly identical community to another, and the speed with which they sink roots in their new communities is astonishing. These roots may bemore often than not, must be-shallow; yet they are nonetheless real, and it is important to the individual that they exist. It is this instinct for voluntary community that, more than anything else, explains the American suspicion of cities, big cities especially, as good places to live in. Cities are by their very nature involuntary and haphazard aggregations of people. These people are anonymous-it is an important aspect of the city's "free" life style that they be so. The city is, and always has been, the place where people go when they wish to escape from community and its confining conventions, its precise definition of one's identity in terms of family, friends, and neighborhood. The city is the place where one mixes with strangers; where one experiences elCcitement and risk; where one is liberated from the bonds of conventional thinking and conventional morality. The city is very much like the frontier For an American 'the city in that it permits, even encourages, a kind of uninhibited individualism. But while the is the place where one mixes frontier is a disordered preliminary to comwith strangers; where one munity, the city is a standing challenge and experiences excitement and alternative to it. True, the city has its own kind of "society," risk; where one is liberated.' but society is not community. It is no accident that Robert Park, the founder of urban sociThe common explanation of this callous, ology at the University of Chicago, could utilitarian attitude toward cities is in terms write: "Urbanity is a charming quality, but of frontier individualism; it is seen as an it is not a virtue. We don't even really get to anachronistic survival of a time when each know the urbane person, and hence never American dreamed of having land, lots of know when to trust him." This is a typically land, underneath the Western skies, and when American sentiment, expressing a traditional he scorned those effete conformists who could antiurban bias. At least, we are inclined tolive their routine lives cooped up behind city day to think of it as a bias, but it is really walls. There is something in this, of course something much more than that-both more -but less than meets the eye that has seen authentic and more important. For behind too many Western films. Americans are this anti-urban impulse, tIns preference for individualistic, to be sure, but one of the ways community over society, there lies a theory, they express their individualism is by setting a political philosophy. It is a republican political philosophy, as distinct from a merely up voluntary communities and associations. Put a bunch of Americans on a desert democratic one, and that distinction is anyisland and the first thing they will do is enter thing but academic. The democratic political ethos celebrates into a new Mayflower Compact, draw up a constitution, and form a Parent Teachers As- the sovereignty of the popular will, and there • sociation. The American West was explored is nothing inherently anti-urban in it. The reby rugged individuals, but it was settled by publican ethos, in contrast, defines this sov-
ereignty in terms of individual participation in popular government. For such participation, a relatively small, self-governing community is needed, not a large, bureaucratically governed society. A big city may be democratically governed, but from Aristotle to the black militants of Harlem it has been generally agreed that no big city can be governed in a republican way. The anonymous multitude that inhabits a city cannot give birth to a republic, in which the individual citizen is personally involved in the tasks of self-government. Indeed, the people who live in large cities rarely think of themselves as "citizens" of those cities; the term seems inappropriate and is rarely used-because, one suspects, it is inappropriate. This republican tradition has shaped all of American social thought, whether it be conservative, liberal, or radical. Washington and Jefferson were at one in their distrust of big cities, as were Lincoln and Jefferson Davis, Henry George and Henry Adams, William Jennings Bryan and Calvin Coolidge, John Dewey and Herbert Hoover. Our greatest architect, Frank Lloyd Wright, despised them, as have many of our novelists, poets, and playwrights. It is the power of this tradition that makes American cities so Americanwhich is to say, so lacking in urbanity as compared with the cities of Europe. Some 15 years ago there was a movement -much favored by regional and city planners -to enlarge the dominion of the city, to incorporate the suburbs within its political boundaries to bring their financial resources within reach of the city's budget makers. This idea had strong support among members of the new upper-middle class created by post-World War II prosperity, who felt entitled to the kinds of urban amenities that European cities offered. These people-more numerous than ever before, wealthier than ever before, and frustrated as never beforealso wanted chic downtown shops, a glittering cultural center, fine restaurants and convivial cafes. Since they dominated the mass media, in which so many of them make their professional careers, they were for a time able to impose their perspective upon public opinion. "Urban renewal" was their battle cry; the "revival of downtown" their declared purpose; the "good urban life" in the European style their ultimate dream. For a while it looked as if they would have their waybut only for a while. Their dream was punctured by the bristling realities of American life; and no reality was more destructive than the republican ethos itself, which experienced
a powerful and quite unexpected revival, both in the nation at large and within the city. Today, the demand is not for greater urbanity but for participation by the individual citizen in the decisions that affect his life. Such participation is almost impossible to achieve in a big city-simply because it is so big and because there are so many decisions, the consequences of which are remote and yet intertwined. Moreover, such participation is death to the idea of an urbane citywe do not get opera houses or concert halls or subsidized theaters by a popular referendum of the neighborhood they are to be built in. These institutions have to be imposed by non local governments, as is the case in Europe. There, the imposition has been of such long standing that popular opinion accepts it as natural, can even take a kind of civic pride in it. Here, it is seen simply as an imposition from above, is resented, and in the end is defeated.
'Urbanity is a charming quality, but it is not a virtue. We don't really get to know the urbane person, and hence never know when to trust him.' The problem of American cities today is not how to consolidate their civic powers for urbane purposes but how to prevent them from falling apart under the impact of a revived republican ethos. The idea of "community control," both of neighborhoods and of governmental programs as they affect neighborhoods, has become enormously popular and is finding embodiment in more and more legislation. Community control certainly increases the number of people who are involved in the decision-making process, and makes for far greater participation in self-government; but it also creates perpetual conflict within the city and the near impossibility of any largescale planning. These political developments are taking place at a time when the economic significance of the central city is steadily declining. Manufacturing has been moving out of the central city for the past 30 years, and the trend is as strong today as it was in 1950. Politically weakened and economically enfeebled, the central city is also in the process of declining as a center for cultural activity. In this case, the movement is not toward the suburbs or smaller cities but toward the
thousands of university campuses throughout the country. The writer-in-residence, the artist-in-residence, the composer-in-residence -all are familiar figures on the college campus of the 1970s. These people used to be regarded as intrinsically urban types; they still are urban types-only they no longer live and work in an urban setting. Bohemia itself, the urban artistic milieu par excellence, now tends to be a campus and off-campus phenomenon rather than a unique inner-city phenomenon. The "natural" configuration of the American city today is revealed by such new cities as Houston and Los Angeles. Though these cities provoke apoplexy among city planners and are not without their problems, they are nevertheless successful in the most elementary and primitive sense of that term: The people who live in them are disinclined to leave, and more people are moving in than are moving out. The shape of these cities is that of a doughnut. Each has a hollow center in which are located official buildings (city hall, the courts, state and federal agencies), some corporate headquarters, and perhaps a cultural center (with a museum, concert hall, and theater). Around this hollow center are concentric rings of inner suburbs, quasi-suburbs, suburbs, and exurbs. It is in these rings that everyone lives and most people work, do their shopping, and find entertainment. "Downtown" is where you sometimes have to go; it is really just another suburb, centrally located and with high-rise buildings. Even the urban poor no longer live there in large numbers. They have their own suburbs in which to be miserable. What is happening is that our urban areas are taking up more and more space, but are becoming steadily less densely settled. According to Professor Lee Rainwater of Harvard University, the population per square mile in urbanized areas will have decreased from 6,580 in 1920 to around 3,800 in 1985. We are not, as some commentators on the city seem to be saying, all being squeezed into a constricted urban space. On the contrary, each of us is getting more space than he ever had before. But the space we are getting is a new and special kind of space. It is an urbanized space, with an urbanized life style and an urbanized mode of thought. (Needless to say, the word "urbanized" here means something rather different from what we usually mean by "urbane.") Though Americans were certainly first attracted to the suburbs because they felt they•. were getting closer to the "grass roots," and though many Americans doubtless are still of
this mind, the crucial fact is that our suburbs and exurbs are inexorably being transformed into what Melvin M. Webber calls "undifferentiated urban space." Americans have been fleeing their cities to find refuge in a more traditional style of American living-only, ironically, to find themselves captives of what has been called "the tradition of the new." This liquidation of the older, provincial American culture is probably the decisive event of 20th-century history. If anything can be described as America's coming-of-age, this is it. The two cultures whose conflict and tensions had been the fundamental experience of the American arts-the traditional "square," provincial, more or less philistine culture and the urban, sophisticated, avantgarde, elite culture-have coalesced in the past 10 years. The catalyst for this event has been the enormous expansion of higher educationor, to be more precise, of college attendance -which brought masses of young people together, exposed them to "the tradition of the new," and encouraged them to create a "youth culture" that was both urban-sophisticated and popular. The prosperity of the postwar years also permitted these young people to support this new cultural mode (movies and the record industry are now "consumed" mainly by younger audiences) and eventually to impose it on the nation as a whole. It is not, in some respects, a particularly attractive popular culture, but then, neither was the popular culture it replaced. On purely esthetic grounds, it is not easy to choose. That choice, however, .is no longer offered us; it has been made for us by the developments of the postwar years. The question that confronts us, therefore, is: How do you combine an urban life style and an urban culture with a small-city and suburbanized population? No civilization in history has ever had to address itself to this question, and we ought not to be overdepressed if we find it a hard question to answer. One's instinctive response-that such a combination is impossible-is almost certainly wrong. After all, 15 years ago one's instincts would have been to assert that it was impossible for such a question to arise. There are already a few signs of the direction in which things might drift. It seems to be the case, for instance, that the republican ethos has been suffusing the arts themselves, which until now have been dominated by a talented elite who subscribed to "high" standards. One of the most striking tendencies of the present age is the desire of large numbers of people, especially young people, to
participate in the arts instead of merely enjoying or experiencing them. There is an urge to make one's own movies rather than simply attend movies; there is, similarly, an urge to make one's own music, write and read aloud one's own poetry, write one's own plays and put on one's own production of them, and so on. That such amateur efforts are almost invariably inferior to the best professional efforts is not regarded as all that important. People, it is said, get more out of participating in artistic activities, no matter how amateurish, than out of being spectators of the most polished and expert performances. Whether this is true is open to argument. (The fact that it sounds plausible to American ears, and utterly absurd to Europeans, is not decisive one way or the other.) What is not open to argument is that this kind of thinking corresponds closely to the new urban condition of so many Americans. In a smaller city or on a college campus you will either make a virtue of amateurism or be deprived of culture altogether-and this deprivation is no longer tolerable, as it once was.
'Bohemia ... the urban artistic milieu par excellence, now tends to be a campus and offcampus phenomenon rather than a unique inner-city phenomenon.' There are other possible developments we can contemplate-though we cannot attach a specific degree of probability to them. For example, it is not unthinkable that new nuclei of cultural activity will emerge in our undifferentiated urban space. Yesterday's suburban shopping center-serving several towns at once-is being transformed into today's suburban mall: a place for shopping, to be sure, but also a place where young people informally congregate, where there is likely to be a cinema and a paperback bookstore, and where there could easily be a small concert hall, library, and theater. This is one prospect that cannot be dismissed out of hand. Another, and at the other extreme, is that our culture will be completely democratized as well as republicanized; that informal, amateur activity will come to be regarded as the only proper kind of cultural life ; and that the very idea of polished professionalism in the arts will become repugnant. But whatever turn events take, there is one eventuality that is too utopian to expect in
the 20 years or so ahead of us. This is the revival of the central city as the nucleus of American urban civilization. No doubt more civic centers and museums and attractive shopping malls will be built downtown, in a heroic effort to reverse the existing trends. But we have already had enough experience on this score to say with some certainty that though these schemes may work in a few cities, they are not likely to be universally successful, and even where they do work, they may have only a temporary success. A candid recognition of this trend will not come easily. Not only are there powerful business and political interests that still have a stake in the central city, but our mass media are populated by upper-middle-class people -incipient patricians, as it were-who have an authentic longing for the more traditional kind of city and the more traditional kinds of urban amenities. They all adore London; as well they might, since it is in truth an adorable city. But the United States has never had a London, and though it was widely assumed that at some point we would be "mature" enough to have one, history has prescribed otherwise. This makes for disappointments and frustration and for a shrill insistence that we do something big and expensive about our "urban crisis." But it is close to impossible to do anything big and expensive when each neighborhood and each activist group participates in its version of community control. The sad history of urban renewal-a term in such disfavor that it is already passing into disuse-is sufficient testimony to this point. And even if it were possible to do something big and expensive, there are good reasons for thinking it would not be very effectual. The trauma of our central cities has such deep, organic causes that the proposed therapies seem trifling. It is just possible that in the distant future our central cities will assume a more significant role in American life-even if we cannot now imagine what kinds of cities these would be or who would live there. But in the foreseeable future, we can say with fair certainty that we are moving toward an urban civilization without great cities-and that this movement is so without precedent that prophecies of doom or hopes of utopia are both premature. 0 About the Author: Irving Krista I is Professor of Urban Values at New York University and co- •. editor (with sociologist Nathan Glazer) of The ' Public Interest magazine. His book On the Democratic Idea in America was published last year.
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An eminent Indian economist, reviewing Ambassador Daniel P. Moynihan's latest book, describes it as 'a crucial case study of the clash of politics with the claims of poverty.' Originally published in the U.S. by Random House, 'The Politics of a Guaranteed Income-The Nixon Administration and the Family Assistance Plan' was released in India a few weeks ago by the Affiliated East-West Press Pvt. Ltd. An economic historian in the mid-21st century, with massive hindsight, will probably see the compelling contrast between the 19th and 20th centuries with a very different focus from our' own. He will agree, no doubt, that the 19th century was dominated by laissez faire and the rapaciousness, as well as the efficiency, of Capitalist Enterprise. He may add, for good balance, that this engendered the Socialist awakening led by Marx and Engels which was translated, in the United Kingdom all too late and all too feebly, in Fabian Socialism with its "inevitability of gradualness." His description of the 20th century could, however, be a great surprise. He could say that, notwithstanding Russia's glorious October Revolution of 1917 and the arrival of the People's Republic Of China in 1949, the dominant idiom of the century was not Socialism but Welfare. 'It is in this realm of the management of poverty, largely with the effi-
cient instruments of the non-Socialist State, that the 20th century has called in a new world to redress the balance of the old. It was precisely in this area that the 20th century has demonstrated that it has not needed Socialism for its Welfare Revolution. Nearly three-fourths of the way down the century one can say that this revolution has emerged as a consensus-first in the great democracies of Western Europe and then in the United States. The militant socialists may have helped. But the grand current was made by nonideological Humanism which, broadening from precedent to precedent, used adult suffrage, medical and health welfare, unemployment insurance, and many other bits and pieces of other social legislation to build bridges between the Privileged and the Underprivileged in half the world. It is a commonplace now to state that the face of Capitalism in the 20th century was completely changed by the Welfare
State. It is this inspired management of welfare activity, both by state and voluntary agencies, that has meant more to 20th-century men and women than all the triumphs of space age technology, breath-taking as these have been. But for welfare, the Proletariat Revolution of Marx may have come about in many Western nations. Paradoxically, where the Revolution has come about, it has not cbntributed equally to welfare. Politics and economics have both contributed to the Welfare Revolution in the West-their chosen instruments being popular pressure through political lobbying and high economic growth. But the task has never been easy. Each forward step has been fiercely contested. In some cases, progress has been blocked. Much the most dramatic instance of defeat has been the overthrow of the Nixon Administration's Family Assistance Plan (FAP), at once the largest and in some respects the most penetrating attack on primary poverty that has ever been proposed. This plan sought nothing less than a guaranteed minimum income both to the working and nonworking poor. [To those on "welfare" payments, the FAP would provide income on a sliding scale; for a family of four with no outside income, FAP would give a basic federal payment of $1,600 per year. Payments from state governments plus food stamps would add the equivalent of another $800 in most cases. The actual minimum would vary, but the floor of all family incomes would tend to rise above $3,000.] It was said in a statement of the Executive to the U.S. Congress that "if the Family Assistance and food stamp proposals were enacted, the poverty gap in the country would be reduced by 59 per cent. These two programs taken together would cut by almost 60 per cent the difference between the total income of all poor Americans and the total amount that they would have to earn in order to rise out of assistance." Thus, although total poverty would not have been abolished at one stroke (except in the case of couples over 65 years of age), it is obvious that it would have been more than halved. Additional training and work opportunities might help to eliminate the remainder once the necessary organization, much more effective than the old (1965) Office of Economic Opportunity, got to work. Here was a historic breakthrough in a country which, because of its phenomenal affluence, has rightly had a very bad conscience about those below its degrading poverty line. Yet when the opportunity came, FAP was defeated-though admittedly only at a final stage in the Senate Finance Committee after a spectacular passage in the U.S. House of Representatives. Why was it defeated? The answer tells us much about the Politics of Welfare, not only in the United States but everywhere. "Handouts"or "doles" or whatever humiliating word is used-create "emotions" as well as "postures." Postures in politics are central to understanding the movements of the power machine. In the penetrating book we are discussing here, the main activist behind the scenes at every stage, Daniel P. Moynihan, now, happily, U.S. Ambassador in India, ex'" plains the tortuous channels in which the Politics of Welfare has to run. It is a poignant story, both for the author and for America's truly poor. It is a crucial case study of the clash of
politics with, the claims of poverty. It is told in profound detail with feeling as well as with objective scholarship. It is in fact a fine piece of documentation of the manner in which a small, highly elite group in a great liberal democracy can kill a public welfare measure even when it has generated large popular enthusiasm and has run the gauntlet of procedural hurdles in the Executive Branch and in the House of Representatives. Surely Montesquieu's checks and balances mirrored in the American Constitution were not designed to make the U.S. Senate Finance Committee supreme. But so, in this case, has it come to pass, for the Senate Finance Committee was where FAP met its death. At first sight it might appear that the Senate Finance Committee was concerned with the economic burden of the measure at a time when theAmerican political consensus was moving away from more domestic taxation as well as, of course, away from foreign aid. This was certainly not the case. Indeed, the crucial House of Representatives' Ways and Means Committee had, in March 1970, overwhelmingly approved the FAP proposal with 21 votes in favor and only three ("conservative" Democrats) against. The full House concurred a month later. Some measure of the favorable tide was seen in the fact that when the nnd Congress convened, the bill now marked H. R. I, occupied "pride of place in the legislative cycle." There were, indeed, continuing differences on what the net federal burden would be and some of these provided petty grist to the politica:I mill. But there were two reasons why the total cost would not be deemed prohibitive. The first was that, in an authoritative calculation, the new burden was reckoned at only about half a per cent of the GNP of the United States in 1975 by which time the full scheme might be in operation; secondly, the rate of relief was much less than 1970 welfare levels in the big northern states and less than the average in a majority of all states. Both points need documentation for they prove, firstly, that the United States Senate was not grudging on welfare as such, and, secondly, that there was no serio~s "North-South" confrontation in respect of the transfer of resources from the developed to the underdeveloped areas in the country. Additional taxation and compulsory transfers from the rich to the poor are often resisted by pressure groups hurt by their incidence. But in this particular case, the evidence clearly suggests that such opposition was conspicuous by its absence. Much of the opposition wished relief to be more generous and more extensive in the southern states where welfare levels were lower. Indeed, if three of the "liberals" on the Committee-Eugene McCarthy, once a Presidential hopeful, Albert Gore and Clinton Anderson-had voted "for" instead of "against," the measure would have got through by nine votes to seven, instead of losing by 10 votes to six. The "author concludes, with these figures in sight, that the bill was killed by the "liberal" opposition. This cannot, of course, be considered in isolation: for three votes of the "liberals" were united to six of the "conservatives," which might, turning the tables, suggest that the reactionaries are to bear two-thirds of the blame. It is time, however, to return to the documentation referred to above in respect of the total burden of FAP and its
distribution between the North and the South, on which the book adduces massive statistical information, On the annual costs, then Secretary of Labor George Shultz (now Secretary of the Treasury), gave a breakup, both of the original and amended proposal, as follows: (BILLIONS
OF DOLLARS)
ORIGINAL PROPOSAL
AMENDED COST
COSTS OF ALREADY EXISTING WELFARE SCHEMES (STATE) COSTS OF ALREADY EXISTING WELFARE SCHEMES (FEDERAL)
EARNINGS EXCLUSION OF $20 PER WEEK FAP TRAINING AND CHILD CARE POSSIBLE COST TO THE U.S. ECONOMY DUE TO REDUCTION IN WORK
[Note: The "earnings exclusion of $20 per week" in the amended proposals was designed to introduce a bias in favor of those who work. The other figure in the amended cost-"possible cost to the U.S. economy due to reduction in work"-was added by George Shultz in order to take into account the possible reduction in the working force by people who might choose to get welfare benefits instead of working.]
This total liability of $6.6 billion was, it is true, lower than the Bureau of the Budget's projected cost on the existing welfare program by 1975which was $8 billion. But if one accepts the Shultz figure and reckons that by 1975 the U.S. net national product would be $1,320 billion, which is not impossible both with growth and inflation, the net cost of FAP would be just half a per cent of national income in that year. A figure of Rs. 5,000 crores might stagger the Indian public, but it is by American standards very moderate expenditure for a historic leap in welfare activities. Indeed, it is only a little more than half of the total budget of New York City alone. How was this "moderate" figure to be divided geographically? Estimates by John F. Kain and Robert Schafer indicated that, given the income and population distributions at the time FAP was being finally considered, about four million households (to be exact 3,997,000) would receive payments. Of these 622,000 would be in the Northeast, 898,000 in the North Central states, 472,000 in the West, and 2,005,000 or more than half in the South. The benefits the South would receive were threefold. The South would provide only $768 million of the $2,138 million going to its low income families: thus there would be a net inflow of $1,370 million from outside the region. Secondly, there would be the inevitable multiplier effect. The same writers
estimated that southern income attributable to FAP would rise by $3,420 million. Thirdly, blacks would benefit much more than poor whites. The typical "nonwhite" income would rise from $2,645 to $3,891. By contrast, the white family income, which incidentally was not reckoned higher at present, would rise from $2,619 to $3,578. Thus this massive transfer on a North-South money exchange strategy favored the nonwhites. This would, perhaps, arrest the net migration from South to North. And, undoubtedly, there would be more independence in both social and political relations displayed by blacks staying behind in the South. Richard Armstrong's article in the June 1970 Fortune en- . titled "The Looming Money Revolution Down South," is quoted with tacit approval when it records the response of a young black activist: "I know a lot of white people who will be told to go to hel!." Also, the author records "an interesting, if speculative, point" madeby Armstrong in the same article. "A guaranteed income, under a federal program with national standards, fairly administered, could go a long way to lift black fears of voting and speaking out. The day of black government may be speeded in the hundreds of small towns and dozens of counties where blacks are in the majority." It is a great pity that this North-South economic transfer and the social revolution written into it were both stopped suddenly in their tracks.
With every basic economic issue thus settled, the most peripheral, but also the most persistent, of technical objections blocked the way of the Family Assistance Plan. The merciless manner in which this technical issue-of the "work requirement" or the "work clause" (the earnings exclusion of $20 per week)-was absurdly exaggerated beyond all reason is shown in the following exchange between Senator John J. Williams and Mr. Patricelli of the U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare (t!EW), which sponsored the FAP bil!. SENA TOR WILLIAMS: . . . If they increase their earnings from $720 to $5,560 'under this bill, they have a spendable income of $6,109 or $19 less than if they sit in a rocking chair earning only $720. Is that not correct? MR. PATRICELLI: That is correct. ... SENATOR WILLIAMS: They are penalized $19 because they go out and earn $5,500. Is that correct? MR. PATRICELLI: That is correct. THE CHAIRMAN: ... What possible logic is there to it? MR. PATRICELLI: There is none, Senator. Surely Mr. Patricelli should have said we live in what Peter Drucker has called the Age of Discontinuity: The purpose of the Poor Law in Britain and FAP in America was to help the genuine poor. A man drawing $5,560 does not need welfare payment benefits at all: If from this relative abundance $19 is deducted, this is no hardship. The President, even while heavily preoccupied elsewhere, saw this clearly. He told the author: "I don't care a damn about the work requirement. This is the price of getting $1,600." But
United States Capitalism has more than its usual share of Max Weber's Protestant ethic. Senator McGovern put it succinctly when he said, "The only way to promote welfare changes is to cal1 them workfare." It was no help to revise the bil1or to change the Secretary of HEW. The temper and tempo of the operation had changed. A hospitality operation at the Western White House for some leading Senators and their wives was of no avail. "There were," says Daniel Moynihan in his Afterword, "men and women who behaved as if the proposal were still a serious one. But these were few. In the main the tendency was to exaggerate and to caricature, the more so as the Presidential election approached."What had begun witha bang ended in a whimper. To assign a single reason for this major transformation of the political environment seems to be an error. One can single out members of the "liberal opposition" or "hardline conservatives." But, looking back, one can see that there was a wave of change in the environment in the period between FAP's triumph in the House and its collapse in the Senate Finance Committee. It was this current of change, not the shadow-boxing on a massive scale on the angularities of the work clause, which was decisive. The attitude of the "seventeen Senators," a majority of whom shared the general suspicion "that the welfare system was a vast swindle in which work was penalized and dependency rewarded" merely reflected, and did not initiate, the change. This is what makes the working of the United States' highly-complex system of political decision-making the central spanner in the welfare field. There are too many opportunities for dissent to allow any quick passage, except in highly favorable circumstances; and when procrastination enters into the operation, the forces of dissent grow more rapidly than does the thrust of the Executive. The Senate has often enough in the past worn down the President. But seldom, surely, has it broken down the enthusiasm of the House as it did in this case. (There was apparently no move on the part of the House to seek a joint session with the Senatea procedure for reconciling diffen;nces between the two bodies.) Obviously the House too, was having its own second thoughts. Political systems, no less than individuals under stress, show their weaknesses in fatigue. Deep are the roots of dissent in the American political system. The greater it seems are its opportunities. In a parliamentary democracy, where the Executive commands the legislative wing, it would be unthinkable that any piece of priority legislation of this character could have occupied more than a year. There could, to be sure, be battles royal in Select Committees but it is in a Committee of the whole House that the Executive would have its way with the majority that it commands. Thus dissent, whether within or without the ruling party, has both limited power to delay and limited power to destroy. Also with three-line whips the Executive could command final voting ensuring the passage of its bill. The President of the United States, the greatest single source of power in the world, is by contrast now seen to be a prisoner of a system of government in which undisciplined Committees of the House or the Senate ("undisciplined" in the sense that party members are not compelled to accept a party line) can decree both the pace
and pattern 9f his innovating power. They can lead him on and then cast him down. The operations can, withal, as in this case, be unpredictable, responding to the winds of change in a magnificently plural society. One manifestation of this unpredictability is the way in which the American elite contrives, as in this case, to sow confusion.
The particular problem posed by the current crisis in the American elite need not detain us here. It was recently the subject of a brilliant lecture in New Delhi by Norman Podhoretz, editor of Commentary. But there is the urgent problem of closing the gap between America's two nations, which, judged by FAP's fate, both "conservatives" and "liberals" seem steadily to ignore. The violence in the cities has abated; militant black agitation has not, though its leadership is confused and more hesitant. Although only 42.7 per cent of all "FAP families" were in the South and only 38.6 per cent over the United States were "nonwhite," the attack on colored poverty in the South, as already indicated, would have been very substantial. But the elite should not be concerned only with the economics of poverty. The social stresses between the "two nations" separated by the poverty line, are as deep and probably, in an age of rising social expectations, even more dangerous. It is one of the marks of the separation of the elite from the people that the line of social separation does not engage the attention of the elite in anything like the same manner as the elimination of physical poverty. There is, in most affluent societies, an aversion to "mixing," now far greater than the hesitation in "sharing." The 20th-century welfare idiom in democracies now seeks a breakdown of social barriers. For this revolution the elite in every country is unready.
This is another way of saying that the elite, however progressive in welfare assistance, is not sufficiently fil1ed with compassion. Indeed, except for the great men of vision, the stigma of poverty is not seen except in its visible material setting-bad housing, poor health, insufficient food and poor educational access. But a great American, John Adams, long ago put his finger on the problem, for which no solution is yet in sight: "The poor man's conscience is clear; yet he is ashamed .... He feels himself out of sight of the others, groping in the dark. Mankind takes no notice of him. He rambles and wanders unheeded .... In the midst of a crowd, at church, in the market ... he is in as much obscurity as he could be in a garret or cel1ar. He is not disapproved, censured, or reproached; he is only not seen. To be whol1yoverlooked, and to know it, is intolerable." 0 About the Author: Eric P. W. da Costa, one of India's foremost economists, is the founder and managing director of the Indian Institute of Public Opinion, which conducts frequent surveys on economic, political and social issues. He is also the editor and publisher of Monthly Public Surveys and Monthly Commentary on Indian Economic Conditions, which are issued by the Institute.