June 1988

SPAN 2 Chautauqua A Resort for Culture

7 Earth's Changing Poles The Nemesis Effect?

12 The Power of Unspoken Words

by Alvill P. SalJoff

14 Speaking for the Deaf

18 A Rare Bird

21 On the Lighter Side

22 Is Bloom Right?

26 Focus On...

28 On Being Black and Middle Class

by Shelby Steele

32

Remembering a Pioneer

34

Magnificent Voyagers

by Thomas Homey

36

Sweet Exchanges

39 Private Wealth for Public Good

43 Return of the Tiger

by Geoffrey

C. Ward

Acting Publisher Editor

Douglas S. Rose Warren W. McCurdy

Managing Editor

Himadri Dhanda

Associ!ite Managing Editor

Krishan Gabrani

Senior Editor

Aruna Dasgupta

Copy Editors

A. Venkata Narayana Snigdha Majmudar

Editorial Assistants

Rocque Fernandes Rashmi Goel

Photo Editor

Avinash Pasricha

Art Director

Nand Katyal

Associate Art Director

Kanti Roy

Artist

Hemant Bhatnagar

Chief of Production

Awtar S. Marwaha

Circulation Manager

Y.P. Pandhi

Photographic Service

USIS Photographic Services Unit

Photographs: Front cover-Scott Thode, for U.S. News & World Report.

Inside front cover-James A. Sugar/Black Star. 8 left-Cecil Stoughton, National Park Service; right-Graphs by Graphic Chart and Map Company. 12-eourtesy Paramount Pictures. 13 top-Avinash Pasricha (2); bottom-Martha Swope. 14-Avinash Pasricha. IS-Suman Datta. 16 left-Tony Korody/Sygrna; right-Scott Thode, for U.S. News & World Report. 17top left-Richard Saunders; right-ehildren's Television Workshop-Sesame Street; bottom left-The National Theater of the Deaf; right-David Hays. 18-Avinash Pasricha. 2o--R.N. Khanna. 22-eourtesy University of Chicago. 26 left-Avinash Pasricha and Hemant Bhatnagar; right-Photo Division, Government of India. 27 left-Suhas Nimbalkar; right-R.K. Sharma. 31-eourtesy Shelby Steele, San Jose State University. 33left-Avinash Pasricha; right-Amiya K. Saha, USIS Calcutta. 34-35 left-eourtesy Peabody Museum, Salem, Massachusetts; center top-Naval Academy Museum; center bottom and right-National Museum of Natural History. All photos courtesy Smithsonian News Service. 36 top right- T.E. Reagan; bottom-A vinash Pasricha. 39 topcourtesy Massachusetts Department of Commerce. 41-eourtesy Meredith & Grew, Inc. 43-48-Rajesh Bedi. Inside back cover and back cover courtesy Museum of Modern Art, New York; #3-Mrs. Charles B. Stachelberg Fund; .#5-Gift of William S. Paley.

Published by the United States Information Service, American Center, 24 Kasturba Gandhi Marg, New Delhi 110001, on behalf of the American Embassy, New Delhi. The opinions expressed in this magazine do not necessarily. reflect the views or policies of the U.S. Government. Printed at Thomson Press (India) Limited, Faridabad, Haryana.

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For change of address send an old address from a recent SPAN envelope along with new address 10 Circulation Manager, SPAN magazine, 24 Kaslurba Gandhi Marg, New Delhi 110001. See change of address form on page 48b.

Correction: In the May Letter From the Publisher, we inadvertently referred to Senator Estes Kefauver as Eisenhower's rival the 1952 Republican primaries. He was not. It was conservative Senator Robert Taft of Ohio. Kefauver was a liberal Democrat from Tennessee who ran well in the early primaries but ultimately lost to Governor Adlai Stevenson of Illinois, who in turn lost to Ike by a margin of 442 to ¡89 electoral votes in the presidential election. .

in

Front cover: Marlee Matlin, a deaf actress, won the Oscar for her lead role in Children of a Lesser God last year. Her success has made the American films, TV and theater world aware of the potential of deaf artists, paving a clearer path for them. See story beginning page 12.

Back cover: Theodore Roszak's Pierced Circle, 1939 (painted wood, plexiglass and wire, 61 x 61 x 6 em), was among the American paintings on display at a recent exhibition of geometric abstract art in New York.

See also inside back cover.

Late last rronth President Ronald Reagan and General secretary Mikhail S. Gorbachev met in Moscowfor their fourth summit conference in a continuing effort to build foundations for better relations between their two nations and, more importantly, to make the world a safer place through mutual reductions in conventional and, strategic arms. Since the end of World war II, t.l1ere have been a total of 15 U.S.-Soviet summits, and these contacts between the two nations at the highest level have been extraordinarily significant in preventing open conflict between the world's two major military powers. They have also been instrumental in fostering a more durable peace throLgh programs designed to reduce suspicions and build mutual trust.

It was in the belief that such trust can best be achieved through a free exchange of views on the fundamental differences that cause nations to be armed that the Chautauqua Conferences on U.s.-Soviet Relations were initiated several years ago by private citizens in the United States.

Chautauqua, a vibrant, century-old cultural center in western NewYork State (see article on page 2), has sponsored a series of these meetings in recent years bringing together American and Soviet citizens.

During the most recent week-long session in August 1987, some 170 Soviet citizens and 50 officials--the largest Soviet delegation to visit the United States in recent times--not only experienced firsthand how Americans live and think by staying with them in their homes, but also discussed freely in a forum inclUding some 6,000 Chautauquans the strengt.~s and weaknesses of their respective systems.

Ever since the end of the war, despite the yawning ideological chasm that has divided the united States and the Soviet Union, ~nerica has made serious efforts to keep open a dialogue at both h~e official and unofficial levels with the Soviet people.

In 1956, the two countries reached an agreement to exchange magazines--America and Soviet Life--to allow their two peoples to knowhow the others live, work and think.

The 1960s saw manymore bilateral programs and exchanges put into effect.

Arrongthe key events were an exchange of graduate students and university faculty, visits of each other's artists to the two countries and the first American National Exhibit in the USSR--whichserved as the sett~ng for Vice President Richard M. Nixon's famous "kitchen debate" with Premier Nikita S. Khrushchev.

In the 1970s, the two nations also signed a number of science and technology agreements to cooperate and exchange information in a variety of fields--medical science and public health, environmental studies, agriculture, oceanic research, nuclear energy and space. A highlight of the cooperat;i.on during this period was the successful docking of an Apollo spacecraft with a Soyuz spacecraft in 1975 by their two creNS, an exercise intended to provide experience to rescue future spacecraft in distress.

In 1979, the Soviet Union's invasion of Afghanistan temporarily put a brake on these mutually beneficial programs as the U.S. leadership searched for ways to protest the intervention.

By 1985, however, the united States had reopened a dialogue that led the two countries to enter into agreements for joint projects in housing, environmental protection and an extension of the atomic energy agreement to 1988. Heralding a new chapter in the exchange of young people, a group of ten American teenagers from the YoungAstronaut Council visited the Soviet Union in 1986 under an agreement signed the year before.

In a reciprocal gesture, the YoungSoviet Cosrronauts visited the United States later in 1986.

That agreement also included an exchange of films and filmmakers, exhibitions, artists, teachers and the holding of conferences on a number of important subjects.

The U.S. am SOviet academies of sciences also agreed to eight joint workshops that year.

Writing at the time of the December1987 summit, Charles Krauthammer, a respected American comnentator, made a pithy observation on the Cold war: "It should end when there is no rrore reason to pursue it.

And that will come only \\hen the moral distance between East and West has narrowed, not before."

With the beginning of the withdrawal of Soviet troops from Afghanistan, with glasnost and perestroika becoming part of our vocabulary and with two summit conferences held in the space of six rronths, we all have reason to hope that distance will go right on diminishing.

--D.S.R.

Chautauqua is many things-opera, ballet. informal entertainment on the plaza. a walk in the late afternoon. a concert in the amphitheater or even a solitary solo on a trumpet.

A Resort for Culture

The Chautauqua Institution, which began more than a century ago as an adult education movement, has developed into an unusual blend of intellectual stimulation and summertime fun. Thousands come every year to this resort which is, in effect, a 360-hectare Victorian town offering a rich fare of music, dance, drama, literature and everything one wants for a relaxed holiday.

When folk singers Arlo Guthrie and Pete Seeger appeared last summer at the Chautauqua Institution, Dr. Karl Menninger, the 90-year-old dean of American psychiatry, was part of the audience of 6,000 people, sitting right in front. It seemed an odd encounter, at least for the folk singers whose concert audiences are usually younger, but the mix represented something important about this unusual summer site in the western corner of New York State near Jamestown and Lake Erie.

Dr. Menninger has been going to Chautauqua for decades, as have thousands of others, to enjoy the lectures and the opera, theater, music and dance performances that have made the lakeside resort attractive to intellectually minded vacationers for

more than a century. Some feel it has never changed, a place "where grandmothers bring their mothers," as one guest commented.

But it is changing-"improving" is the way Robert R. Hesse, Chautauqua's former president, pu,ts it-with younger families as well as single men and women now joining the traditionally middle-aged or elderly visitors. They are being drawn to the vastly improved Athenaeum Hotel, the grande dame of the place, as well as to the smaller hotels, inns, guest houses and upstairs rooms in private homes that have long been rented, and are regularly renovated, for the nine-week season.

And that's where Guthrie and Seeger, and Ray Charles, Melissa Manchester, Emmylou Harris and other popular entertainers come in. They now attract an audience of 2,000 to 3,000 people from New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio and Canada each Friday night, doubling the audience drawn from the 6,000 resident guests and others within the gates. As a result, the institution is finding new revenues, as well as new interest.

That seems to be the purpose, to ensure the stability of the Chautauqua Institution, which began in the late l800s as a Methodist Episcopal camp meeting for Sunday school teachers. It has developed into an unusual blend of intellectual stimulation and summertime fun, and that's how we found it, anyway, during a five-day stay last summer.

When my wife, my teenage son and I weren't swimming, eating, reading or strolling the quiet, tree-shaded-and almost entirely vehicle-free-streets of what is essentially a 360-hectare small town in Victorian garb, we were wandering in and out oflectures, rehearsals and concerts or attending one-act plays, an opera, even a movIe. Chautauqua is a cultural encampment but on a take-it-or-Ieaveit basis. This struck me one afternoon, sitting in the vast amphitheater, when I noticed a teenage boy stop his bicycle, dismount and

lean against a railing to listen to the quartets and quintets of Chautauqua musicians performing inside.

But they were not "inside," as they might have been, say, at Alice Tully Hall, where tickets are required. The big wooden amphitheater is open-sided, and as centrally situated as it can be.

And when the teenager had finished his ice-cream cone he left his bicycle, walked down a few rows, took a seat and remained for half an hour.

His casual exposure to Brahms is a phenomenon that Chautauquans know about, as W. Thomas Smith, manager of the Athenaeum Hotel and the institution's vice-president for operations, indicated later. He was asked how the older, traditional visitors were responding to the increase in numbers of young children.

"Well, it is a change," Smith said. "Until recently we had no usable highchairs; now we have three, as well as eight youth seats.

And we do have some complaints about running. But this is also a place where a child may hear a symphony for the first time, and where he or she can just get up and go and not be in danger."

Chautauqua also takes note of its younger visitors by running several day camps. One for two-and-a-half to six-year-olds operates for three morning hours. A youth club, for those up to 15 years of age-I ,000 attended last summer-is open six hours a day. There is a center for the high school and college set, with snack bar, tables and rock music.

Although the institution has allowed for such changes, to visit Chautauqua is to enter an older, more placid America, the one that a parent might remember as a child, perhaps on a visit to grandmother. The streets are short, paved or brick and lined with old wooden homes, many with three tiers of small balconies and often with a flag out front.

That tranquil flavor is .maintained, in large part, by barring vehicles from the fenced-in grounds. You can obtain a pass for your car only at the beginning and end of a stay, to unload and pick up luggage. For the rest of the time, vehicles remain in two vast lots outside the gates.

Visitors arrive at Chautauqua to find young men and women directing traffic outside a converted trolley'station that has long served as a reception center for the Chautauqua Institution. Here, guests pick up their gate passes and tickets to operas or plays, and get directions to their lodgings.

While there is abundant live entertainment, there are very few television sets. Consumption of alcoholic beverages in public places is not allowed, and liquor is not sold on the grounds, a vestige of the institution's religious origins.

Chautauqua offers varied fare in accommodation to visitors.

They can rent an apartment with cooking facilities, be paying guests in private homes or check into one of the many hotels depending on their budgets. The most famous among the hotels is the 160-bed Athenaeum, an imposing structure with high ceilings and period furniture. It overlooks the 30-kilometer-Iong Lake Chautauqua. The hotel also boasts of having been the first in the world to have electric power, largely through the efforts of an early guest, Thomas Alva Edison (1847-1931).

"This is where he sat," said Hesse, the former president, sharing a corner table with me in the hotel dining room. The table was next to a typically huge window that extends to the floor, permitting easy access from the veranda that nearly encircles the hotel.

"Edison was a shy man who would come in through the open window and leave that way," Hesse said.

Chautauqua can also mean creativity and flair, whether with clay or crafts, inside or out, for young or old; or Chautauqua may mean a good book in the shade of a sturdy tree.

Edison was one of many famous people to speak, or vacation, at the facility. Nine American Presidents have done so-starting with Ulysses S. Grant (1822-85)-as have Leo TolstOY (18281910) and a Who's Who in the fields of literature, music, dance and theater as well as science, politics, business and religion.

Many leading figures are invited to the 10:45 a.m. lectures, one of the oldest of Chautauqua traditions. The summer season, from late June to late August, is divided into subject weeks-national or international affairs, science, business, social change, for example-and major speakers are asked to participate. The extent of that participation comes as a surprise to some.

First, there are written questions gathered from the amphitheater audience, then often discussion in an informal gathering at the edge of the stage and, finally, more talk with the speaker on the way to his or her lodgings. Chautauquans take their experts seriously, and the informality of the setting makes personal contact easy.

There are also 2 p.m. lectures on religious subjects in the Hall of Philosophy, a Parthenon-like structure that, similar to the opensided amphitheater, accommodates the casual coming and going of the visitors, some in blue jeans and sandals, some in dresses or

ooks are still important at Chautauqua, as those who run the 30,OOO-volume library or the crowded bookstore can testify.

shirts, ties and jackets. A talk on sexuality in religion, the first part of a series that week, attracted an overflow crowd, when we were there.

The Hall of Philosophy is in a grove, as it was when Bishop John Heyl Vincent, who founded the Chautauqua Institution in 1874 with Lewis Miller, an industrialist, set the site aside for what became the celebrated Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle.

It began as a home reading program to enable those deprived of formal education to acquire "the college outlook."

The circle, a forerunner of correspondence courses by mail and book-of-the-month type of clubs, inspired Chautauqua societies throughout the nation and played a major role in the establishment of adult education. Four years of reading and discussion still leads to a diploma, and there is an alumni house facing the Greekpillared Hall of Philosophy on this campus-like facility.

Books are still important at Chautauqua, as those who run the 30,000-volume library or the crowded bookstore can testify. But there is also dance, sculpture, theater and music, especially music.

The sounds of rehearsal are everywhere, from the cluster of sheds where violinists and pianists practice-the popular American composer, George Gershwin (1898-1937), wrote his Concerto in F in one of them-to the acoustically magnificent amphitheater, the recital halls and ~e Athenaeum lounge.

Chautauqua has its own 74-piece symphony orchestra of professionals, many of whom also serve as faculty for the Festival Orchestra, a group of 85 college and graduate students, as well as for the Youth Orchestra of 55 high school students and for the piano and voice departments.

To say that there are 9,000 young men and women studying at Chautauqua, in schools of art, dance and theater as well as music, with students who are there the entire summer admitted only by audition, is to suggest the range of talented performers seeking audiences for their work. And that, in turn, suggests the quantity and quality of effort at the lakeside resort.

We saw one-act plays, including Thornton Wilder's intriguing The Long Christmas Dinner, performed by students working with John Houseman's acting company; the Puccini opera Manon Lescaut-part of a program that also included The Merry Widow, The Marriage of Figaro and Of Mice and Men-and works by the School of Dance under the tutelage of Jean-Pierre Bonnefous, a former principal dancer with the New York City Ballet.

We also took part in the nondenominational Sunday service in the amphitheater, which was packed. The singing was fervent and the doxology a soaring and stunning moment of participatory worship. That's the old Chautauqua. The new Chautauqua is the sight of Frisbees sailing along the lake front, or a thousand people walking with candles in Bestor Square, the center of this campuslike site, recalling the anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima.

The place is reasonably compact, but free shuttle buses crisscross the grounds. They come by every 20 minutes or so and service special events. One was waiting outside¡ a hall after an opera, a welcome sight for some of the elderly.

And there are many elderly at Chautauqua.

Gray hair is commonplace, as are the cushions carried by old-timers for protection against the wood seats in the amphitheater and other halls. At Old First Night, the institution's midsummer birthday, there is a countdown of sorts each year to determine who has been coming the longest. I met Geoff Follansbee, a bachelor, who said he was a "seventh-generation Chautauquan."

"I love this place," he said, "and built my own home last year so I can stay year-round"-one of 500 to 600 who do so.

Another is Robert Osburn, who said he kept his cross-country skis by the front door in the winter. "If it gets really bad you just throw another log on the fire and reach for another book."

In summer you can bask in the sun and reach for another book just as easily. It is also a way to ignore the institution:s heavy scheduling. For the more active, there is a range of beachfront activities, from sailing, water-skiing and windsurfing, to excursion trips on the lake by paddle wheeler. Chautauqua also has its own golf course and tennis courts.

Throughout the years, Chautauqua has adapted itself to changing social forces and continues to be responsive to major contemporary issues. It is a distinctively American institution which, in its second century, will further exert its influence as a center of learning and idealism for young and old.

0 About the Author: James Feron is the chief of The New York Times bureau in Westchester County, New York.

Hundreds of times in the past, Earth's north and south magnetic poles have changed places. Now two scientists (in the photo below), Donald Morris (left) and Richard Muller, have tied together a string of remarkable coincidences to form a plausible, revolutionary theory that not only explains mass extinctions of living species, climatic changes and giant craters but also how and why magnetic reversal takes place at all.

EARTH'S CHANGING POLES

The Nemesis Effect?

In 1884, at the age of five, a boy considered "backward" by his mother and father was mesmerized by the sight of an ordinary compass. No matter which way he turned the instrument, its needle pointed unvaryingly in the same direction, as if held by some magical force.

It was the very first time, he wrote some time later, that he had been aware that "something deeply hidden had to be behind things."

The child was Albert Einstein, and the magical, hidden force was magnetism, a force he spent his whole life trying to fathom. In 1905, Einstein listed the puzzle of Earth's magnetic field as one of the five most important unsolved mysteries in physics. How was the field generated? Why did Earth have one in the first place?

Just one year later, the mystery deepened dramatically when Bernard Brunhes, a French physicist and meteorologist, made a startling discovery: Sometime in the past, the field had flipped. What was now the north magnetic pole had actually once been a south pole.

Today geophysicists know that such geomagnetic reversals have taken place some 300 times in the past 170 million years. They start with a sudden drop of the field intensity toward zero, where it remains for an extended period. Then, after 10,000years or so, it builds back up to its original value-but in the opposite direction. Until recently there was no satisfactory explanation for the bizarre flip-flops.

Now there is an extraordinary and controversial theory that provides a mechanism to account not only for the reversals themselves, but also for the not-so-coincidental mass extinctions of life on Earth. The proposed cause of both-regular, titanic collisions between Earth and massive asteroids or comets. According to the theorists, Richard Muller and Donald Morris of the University of California, Berkeley, evidence in support of their ideas can be read in the record of the rocks.

It was in rocks that man first became aware of the phenomenon of magnetism.

Millennia ago, the ancients observed that bits of the rock we now call magnetiterich in mixed iron oxides--eould attract

iron objects. The substance eventually came to be called lodestone, which meant "leading stone" in the language of the Norsemen.

They had found it to be useful for navigation because a piece of it freely suspended would always orient itself roughly along a north-south axis. That convenient bit of knowledge was known to the Chinese, perhaps as early as 2700 B.C. By the second century B.C., the Chinese had drawn the connection between the behavior of magnetic compasses and Earth's own magnetism.

The connection was not clarified in the West until A.D. 1600, when William Gilbert of Colchester, England, personal physician to Queen Elizabeth I, published a seminal book, De Magnete. He summarized everything that was then known on the subject, and declared that compasses worked because Earth behaved like a giant bar magnet. Such a magnet produces a field with a north pole and a south pole (tod~y called a dipole field).

It did not take long for scientists to realize that the magnetism found in rocks could be related to that of Earth--eould, in fact, constitute a record of it. British physicist and chemist Robert Boyle was possibly the first, in 1691, to suggest that solid materials that had been heated to a high temperature could become magnetized by Earth's field when they cooled.

The phenomenon is called thermoremanent magnetism and is most prominent in

rocks of volcanic origin. When such rocks are molten, in the form of lava, their temperature is generally more than about 1,000 degrees Celsius. That is much higher than the Curie temperature (named after Pierre, not Marie), the point above which magnetic minerals lose their magnetic characteristics. (The Curie temperature for magnetite is about 575 degrees Celsius; for hematite, about 675.) But when lava cools 1. Peaks in the ratio of carbon to nitrogen in sedimentsof an ancient lake bed at the Karewa Plateau in the Vale of Kashmir indicate the suddenonset of unusually cold spells. High ratios mean the dwindling of nitrogen, a sign that the population of algae and protein-rich plankton shrank, arguably because of a drop in temperature. The peaks align closely with geomagnetic reversals at two million, 1.9 million and 0.7 million years ago. The bars below this and the second graph show geomagnetic changes with time. Black indicates normal polarity, white reversed. These data were gathered by R.V. Krishnamurthy and colleagues at the Physical Research Laboratory in Ahmedabad.

2. Tektites--small, variously shaped glassy objects-are now known to have been formed from the globs of molten matter sprayed from craters that were created by the impact of large extraterrestrial objects. Cores from sea-floor sediments reveal the sudden appearance of tektites, represented by the peaks in this graph, just at the boundaries of geomagnetic reversals. The orange peak marks the Australasian tektite layer, associated with Asian craters. The red peak marks the Ivory Coast tektite layer, associated with the Bosumtwicrater in Ghana. The graph is freely adapted from data compiled by Bill Glass and colleagues at the University of Delaware.

3. The rate of geomagnetic reversals, in numbers per five million years (red), shows a marked periodicity--every 30 million years. David Raup and colleagues at the University of Chicago amassed the data on 29.6reversals occurring over the past 170 million years. Superimposed on this . graph is another (orange), less definitive, showing 29 sudden sea-level drops of ten meters or more, compiledfrom data supplied by Peter Vail. Some parts of each graph roughly correspond, especiallythe low incidences of reversals and sea-level drops centered around 100.million years ago.

4. The intensity of mass extinctions-times of the disappearance of many groups of living creatures-plotted for the past 170 million years by David Raup, suggests a possible cbrrelation between the periodicity of extinctions and that of geomagnetic reversals. The reversal theory of Muller and Morris provides a mechanism that could account for all of the coincidences shown here.

and solidifies on Earth's surface, the magnetic minerals are strongly magnetized in the direction of Earth's field. They retain this magnetism, which serves as a permanent record of the orientation and intensity of Earth's field in the place and at the time they solidified. And because the age of rocks can now be well established in a variety of ways, this frozen magnetic memory provides a record of any changes in the. ancient magnetic field. So examination of this record of the rocks can elucidate much about Earth's history. By the mid-19th century, such studies of paleomagnetism had become very lively.

Enter Bernard Brunhes.

Born in Toulouse, France, into a family of savants, Brunhes had begun in 1901 to sample rocks from different places and ages and study their magnetism. Because . he knew that volcanic rocks were the most promising, he traveled to the region of France called the Auvergne-poor, sparsely populated and dotted with the scattered domes of ancient, extinct volcanoes.

In 1906, Brunhes brought back to Paris a number of samples he had taken from Auvergnat lava flows and the baked clay beneath them. When he began his analysis, he expected to find some slight variations in the magnetic field recorded from sample to sample. But he was ill prepared for what his instruments revealed. The magnetic field orientation in what is known as the Pontfarein flow and the underlying baked clay strata was almost exactly 180 degrees opposite to the present direction of Earth's magnetic field. Where there should have been a north magnetic pole, Brunhes found a south.

Brunhes recorded his stunning observations and drew the inevitable conclusion: Sometime in the past, somehow, Earth's magnetic field had reversed-the poles had changed places. As befalls many scientific discoveries that reverse previous notions, Brunhes's work proved indigestible to most of the geophysical community, being little noticed at first.

The notion of magnetic-field reversals was not systematically tested until 1926, when Motonori Matuyama of Kyoto Imperial University in Japan began to collect and analyze more than 100 rock samples from 38 locations in Manchuria and China.

He found that all the samples showed magnetism either aligned with Earth's present magnetic field or opposite to it.

Moreover, he was the first to establish the ages of such rocks and thereby establish a

timing for the reversals. He concluded that Earth's field had reversed itself in the distant past and then changed back to its present "normal" direction around 750,000 years ago, an estimate that has since been proven correct.

Nevertheless, the whole subject of reversals remained hotly controversial for decades. Perhaps, some geologists suggested, a rock could somehow a4tomatically reverse its magnetization, without any nonsensical reversing of Earth's own field. In 1955, the agenda of a U.S. National Science Foundation conference on rock magnetization posed the question, "Do we have acceptable proof that the Earth's field reverses?" It was not until the mid-1960s, after an overwhelming accumulation of evidence, that most scientists agreed that Earth had indeed undergone such reversals many times in the past.

Consensus on the fact of geomagnetic reversals did nothing, however, to dispel the mystery of how and why they occurred, especially since geophysicists were unable to explain exactly how Earth's field was generated in the first place. The only model for geomagnetism that has survived centuries of theorizing are versions of the selfexciting dynamo.

In this geodynamo, heat from the radioactive elements at the core of Earth produces convection flows in the liquid-iron outer core, which is electrically conductive.

The motions of the conductor in a magnetic field (perhaps the remnants of a field originally generated during the planet's birth) induces an electric current, which in turn generates a different magnetic field.

And the geometry of the flows, currents and fields is such that there is a feedback effect, enough to ensure a large buildup in Earth's principal magnetic field' until an equilibrium is reached.

The trouble is that tnere are many such models feasible, some with two or four dynamos operating within Earth. As one expert put it, every dynamo theorist has a model, and no model agrees with another.

Any attempt to sort these versions out mathematically is formidably difficult.

The equations governing the magnetohydrodynamic behavior of the liquid core are so complex that they are virtually unsolvable, even on the most powerful of today's (and probably the next decade's) supercomputers.

One of the virtues of the new theory, Muller says, is that it does not depend on the correctness of any particular dynamo

The most amazing corroboration of the new theory came in the work of R. V. Krishnamurthy in India. His team found sudden cold periods in Kashmir that came precisely at the times of magnetic reversals. model, "but on the details of what is down there inside Earth."

Muller is an astrophysicist and a professor of physics and astronomy at Berkeiey.

Morris, who once created a highly successful company making ceramic magnets in India, is now working on high-temperature superconductors.

The genesis of the Muller-Morris scenario can be traced indirectly to American Nobel laureate Luis Alvarez, whose student at Berkeley Muller once was. It was Luis Alvarez and his son Walter who in 1979 first launched the radical notion that the recurrent wipeouts of many life forms on Earth-mass extinctions-were caused by giant impacts with extraterrestrial objects.

Each impact, Alvarez pere et fils proposed, rocketed a massive cloud of dust and debris into the atmosphere; a cloud that obscured sunlight long enough to inhibit photosynthesis, markedly lower world temperatures and wreak climatic havoc, causing the extermination of whole families of animals, such as the dinosaurs.

Subseq uently, other scientists suggested that just such a chain of catastrophes would result from major nuclear warfare, a concept that came to be known as "nuclear winter. " An equally radical idea surfaced in 1984, when David Raup, a highly respected paleontologist who is chairman of the geophysics department at the University of Chicago, and his colleague Jack Sepko ski published data showing that the extinctions occurred with marked regularity, at intervals of roughly 26 to 30 million years over the past 250 million years. The idea was outrageous to most geophysicists and biologists alike, because there was nothing on Earth that could account for periodicity on such a long time scale. Most paleontologists had always believed that mass extinctions were random-how otherwise?

The explanation, Raup and Sepko ski wrote, was "extraterrestrial causes for the reason that purely biological or Earthbound physical cycles seem incredible."

But what would induce asteroid or cometary impacts at regular intervals?

A skeptical Luis Alvarez asked Muller to

review the evidence. "1 considered a companion star to our sun, one with a period of 26 million years, from the first day," Muller remembers.

In the scenario that has come to be called "Nemesis," the star would revisit the neighborhood of our solar system regularly, passing through the Oort Cloud, a reservoir of perhaps ten million million comets in stable, circular orbits. There its gravity would unleash a shower of comets on trajectories toward the solar system.

Over a period of a million years, perhaps dozens of these comets would strike Earth, with lethal effect. Muller is now engaged in a telescopic search program to find the Nemesis star, if it exists.

When Muller told Walter Alvarez, a geologist, about the death-star concept, Alvarez suggested that the periodic comet showers demanded by the theory should have created periodically distributed craters. When the two men analyzed data on 13 large (ten kilometers across) craters that were between five million and 250 million years old, they found a period of 28.4 million years that matched the extinction record.

"I got into the magnetic-reversal business," says Muller, "when I received a copy of Dave Raup's 1985 paper showing an increase in the rate of reversals at regular intervals-ten, 40, 70 million years ago."

Raup had analyzed 296 reversals during the past 170 million years and graphed the rate of reversals per five million years.

The startling result, with a periodicity of 30 million years, appears in the graph on page 8.

Scientists, so long fascinated by lava only as a pointer to geothermal energy, are now grateful to this natural resource as an eternal record keeper of Earth's magnetic polarity at the time of a volcano's eruption.

"That lines up very well," says Muller, "with the mass extinctions and also with our crater dating. Now that's a funny coincidence-too much so. And I just couldn't ignore it. The two other cycles, extinctions and cratering, are due to impacts. If that is true, and all three cycles coincide, then impacts must cause geomagnetic reversals. So for about a year and a half I tried to come up with some way to connect an Earth impact with a reversal."

The problem is one of scale. An impact with even a large asteroid or meteor would not seem to carry enough energy to seriously disturb Earth's motion in space.

"Consider a big object, say 15 kilometers in diameter," Muller says. "Earth has a diameter of 12,800 kilometers ... call it 15,000 to simplify the calculation. That's a ratio of 1,500 to one in diameter, or a million to one in volume. And that's not even taking into account the greater mass density of Earth. So you would expect the impact to have a very small effect. It's comparable to a moth hitting a car. That's not going to change the speed or the direction of the car. On the other hand, it can make a mess on the windshield.

"I tried to find something comparable to that mess that could result in magnetic reversals. The breakthrough came when I got together with Don Morris. He pointed out that small effects can accumulate and eventually give you a large net effect. If you make a crater, for example, you move some mass from one place on Earth's surface to another, and you could change the rotational velocity of the outer crust by a small amount, and over a long period that

change could build up. When we did the calculations, however, we found that cra~ tering just didn't move enough mass to account for any such result."

Then, says Muller, he remembered the nuclear-winter scenario--darkness followed by cold. Dust from the impact crater and sooty particles from fires would change the climate and launch a little ice age. If the Climate stayed cold long enough after an impact, a sizable quantity of water in the form of snow and ice would be transferred from warm equatorial waters to the poles.

What would happen then?

"Like whirling ice skaters pulling their arms in, Earth would spin faster," says Muller. "It was Morris's contribution to recognize that over a thousand years, the spin acceleration accumulates, and that can have an important effect on the interior. In essence, the crust and the mantle, which go around together, will get out of phase with the liquid core. I think of the inner solid core as the axle, the liquid core as the axle grease, and the crust and mantle as the rim. If the rim spins faster, then it takes the axle a while before it catches up."

In the Muller-Morris theory, this difference in rotation rates would disrupt the convection flows that are the driving force of any dynamo model.

The result would be to turn off the magnetic field. It would dwindle to a low value, so that whatever was left of the dipole would no longer reach the surface.

And it would stay that way for perhaps 10,000 years, until the dynamo effect could rebuild the field. But such a dynamo does not have a built-in preferred polarity, so there is a 50-50 chance of the field either reappearing in its original orientation or flipping.

"We believe," says Muller, "that at least half the time the field grows back in the same direction. Those are called geomagnetic excursions, and there is evidence that they have occurred, although they are much more difficult to find than reversals.

"The time sequence contained in our theory for changes in Earth's magnetic field-turning off, getting low, staying low for a long time, then building back up again either in the same direction or the opposite one-¡fits just what is seen in the evidence of the rocks. We know of no other theory that can account for this sequence."

Muller and Morris recognize that impacts may not be responsible for all magnetic reversals. The sudden climatic

change at the heart of their mechanism could have been caused by something else-violent volcanic eruptions, for example. But volcanoes would not account for a striking coincidence: the occurrence of layers of tektites just at the magnetic boundaries marking reversals.

Tektites are small, glassy objects; once used as ornaments by ancient man, they have been found scattered in four widespread swaths called "strewnfields" both on land and in the sediments at the bottom of the sea.

Most geologists now agree that tektites are the melted and resolidified splatters of solid material thrown out of the craters formed by the impact of large extraterrestrial bodies with Earth's surface, a conclusion corroborated by the coincidence of large impact craters with three of the four strewnfields. Moreover, the world's leading expert on tektites, Bill Glass of the University of Delaware, has shown over the past two decades that each of these three splatterings occurred at the time of a geomagnetic reversal.

"What we find most fascinating about the tektites," says Muller, "is that we didn't know about them when we came up with the theory. They were brought to our attention after our first report appeared. That's also when we learned about the Ries Crater."

Twenty-five kilometers wide, the Ries Crater in southern West Germany is correlated with a tektite strewnfield in Czechoslovakia. The impact that created it is dated at 14.8 million years ago. "When some of the rock melted under the impact," says Muller, "it recorded the direction of Earth's magnetic field at that time. But the first layer of sediment to be deposited in the crater proved to be of opposite polarity. So a geomagnetic reversal must have occurred between the impact and the first layering of sediment, probably within a few thousand years. The odds against this being mere coincidence are substantial."

There are other coincidences to bolster the Muller-Morris scenario. To effect the required change in Earth's rotation, the drop in sea level had to have been at least ten meters and fairly sharp--inside a few hundred years.

"When we started out, we didn't know whether ten-meter sea-level drops were common or could simply be ruled out," says Muller. "We are basically not geophysicists. But one of the first things we learned is that they are in fact quite com-

mono The data have been around for a long time, gathered by Peter Vail. They show no sudden sea-level rises, just sudden, major sea-level drops, what you would get from a sudden chilling. What is striking for our theory is that 65 million years ago, at the time of the mass extinction that killed off the dinosaurs, we have the biggest sea-level drop ever recorded." No reversal is recorded for this extinction, but Muller points out that only half of the impacts may have resulted in a reversal rather than an excursion.

When the known sea-level drops are plotted together with the rate of geomagnetic reversals over the past 160 million years, as in the graph, another striking coincidence emerges--a gap in both around 100 million years ago. There is a marked absence of reversals from about 75 million to 110 million years ago, a hiatus roughly similar to the one recorded for sealevel drops.

Room for one more coincidence?

"The most amazing thing we learned, just as we were preparing the final proof of our November 1986 journal paper, was a report by R.V. Krishnamurthy at the Ahmedabad Physical Research Laboratory in India. He and his colleagues were examining a plateau that was once a lake bed in the Vale of Kashmir, and they found very short periods when there were changes in the carbon-nitrogen ratio and the carbon-13 ratio, both indicators of cold weather. And these sudden periods of cold weather, within their measurement uncertainty, come precisely at the times of magnetic reversals." (See graph.)

How has the Muller-Morris theory fared in the contentious scientific community?

"We've had a surprisingly warm reaction," says Muller. "Some people are just skeptical about the whole business of periodicity. Others criticize us because we haven't worked out the details of a model-we do not have a computer simulation that shows how these events will actually happen. But the physics we're discussing does not really' depend on a detailed model...and we're not claiming that this mechanism accounts for every reversal, although it's possible it does.

"We are saying that the mechanism does account for a number of astonishing coincidences in the geological record. What else does?"

0 About the Author: Arthur Fisher is the science and technology editor o/Popular Science.

The Power of Unspoken Words Deaf actress Marlee Matlin's Oscar-winning performance in Children of a Lesser God has helped move America's hearing-impaired performers out of the shadows and into the limelight. Matlin is seen below with William Hurt, her co-star in the film. he scenario reads like a 1980s version of A Star Is Born. Child actress quits the stage to concentrate on high school and college. Then, a friend urges her to audition for a local drama production. A film director sees a videotape of her performance and asks for a screen test. She wins a starring role, then rave reviews. And then an Oscar.

This isn't just another fictional saga created in tinseltown. It's how Marlee Matlin was catapulted from a Chicago suburb to Hollywood stardom by her sensuous portrayal of a rebellious deaf woman in Children of a Lesser God, a movie adapted from a Broadway play. Now, even friends of her parents who have known 22-year-old Matlin since childhood ask for her autograph. JWhat makes the story so compelling is that, like the strong-willed character in the film, Matlin is deaf. She lost her hearing after a high fever at the age of 18 months. .

Matlin's fiery Oscar-winning performance not only has heightened American public awareness of the hearing impaired but also has moved American deaf performers out of the shadows and into the limelight. As artists, they still face barriers. But their numbers are growing, now more than 50, and their creative powers are being felt in film, stage, television and dance.

One actress leading the way is Phyllis Frelich, who starred in the Broadway version of Children of a Lesser God. She and actor Ed Waterstreet played the deaf parents of a girl who can hear in the television film Love Is Never Silent. That movie won an Emmy (American TV's equivalent of the Oscar). Waterstreet's wife, actress Linda Bove, also deaf, appears regularly on the children's TV show Sesame Street.

There, she has exposed millions of youngsters to sign language.

The breeding ground for most profes-

T

sional deaf performers in America is a remarkable institution, the National Theater of the Deaf (NTD), in Chester, Connecticut. NTD was formed 21 years ago by David Hays, a man with normal hearing who was entranced by the idea of using sign language and speech together on the stage. "I came into this simply because I thought it was a beautiful form of theater," says Hays, NTD's artistic director. "The media of sign language and voice deepen and reinforce each other." At first, getting financial support was difficult. But Hays persevered. Today, NTD is known around the world. Its troupe of 12 actors-two with hearing, ten without-has toured all 50 American states as well as China, India, Japan and several European countries.

In a profession in which speech is considered an essential tool, deaf performers use sign language, facial expressions and body movement to communicate with audiences.

Usually, their gestures are then put into spoken language by a hearing actor. Director Peter Sellars finds "an extra dimension in the work of deaf actors, who are aware of the miracle of getting an idea across."

But their talent went largely unrecognized until Children of a Lesser God burst

onto Broadway in 1980. It was warmly embraced by critics and audiences, and ran for two years and 896 performances. Since then, it has been performed around the world and translated into at least a dozen languages. Playwright Mark Medoff opened up opportunities for deaf actors by insisting that every production of the show be cast with the hearing impaired.

Medoff did not have the same leverage on the casting of the film. At one point, the studio considered hiring Meryl Streep or another well-known actress for the role eventually won by Matlin. But, in the end, all of the deaf characters were played by people with hearing problems. "I won a Pyrrhic victory in the casting," says Medoff, who lost battle after battle over the script.

To Medoff's dismay, his play was simplified by Hollywood to eliminate references to discrimination against the deaf. The movie also ends on an upbeat note as the deaf woman and the speech therapist who falls in love with her, portrayed by William Hurt, reconcile after a bitter breakup. In the play, the future of their relationship is left hanging. (Interestingly, the film (Text continued on page 16)

Speaking for the Deaf Using her considerable talents as a stage actress, Zarin Chaudhuri (right) has opened up an exciting new world of theater for deaf children in Calcutta.

SPAN: How did you get interested in deaf theater?

ZARIN CHAUDHURI: It's a very mixed story. When I was in Delhi in the late 1960s, I was very involved with theater and also used to do mime with Irshad Panjatan. The mime shows used to attract a lot of deaf people and that's how I got to know some of them.lhen to prepare for the role of Rosa, a deaf girl, in Asif Currimbhoy's Goa, which Joy Michael was directing for Yatrik, I met students at a school for the deaf.

A year later, in 1971, I moved to Calcutta. While I was teaching in a school there in 1973, someone who knew my theater background asked me if I would like to teach mime to deaf children.¡ Anytime, I said, anytime. I met Dhun Adenwalla, the founder of the Oral School, and started teaching her students mime.

Could you give us a little background about the Oral School?

The Oral School for Deaf Children was started by Adenwalla in Calcutta in 1964. She has a deaf daughter, Dinaz, who incidentally has done marvelously well in America at the Gallaudet College for the Deaf in Washington, D.C., from where she graduated, and later at the National Theater of the Deaf (NTD). Adenwalla has retired now and Rita Joshi is the principal. There is a governing body and a trust that manages the school.

It's a very small school housed in a second-floor flat on Short Street. What makes it special are the wonderful and imaginative people working for it. When I met Adenwalla I was struck by her conviction that theater could work with deaf people. Frankly, I was a bit daunted even though I was excited about the idea. But to my delight and amazement,¡ the rapport with the children was immediate. They are trained in what we call the oral method-they could lipread me in English. I had no difficulty with them and we got along well together. Within eight months we put on our first show-An Evening of Mime. It was fun. They were all kids, some not yet in their teens. Then we experimented a little and I mixed some hearing actors with the deaf because the hearing people who were with me in the mainstream theater said, "Why can't you teach us mime?" I told them that these deaf kids could teach them a lot. So in 1974 we put on an experimental show at the British Council, where I work as cultural activities officer.

Adenwalla said, "We have broken into the hearing world. Our deaf have been isolated. They didn't have hearing friends and by putting on this show we have opened up the hearing world for them."

Since this experiment had worked so well, in 1977 we put on Sense and Nonsense in which we used seven hearing actors and actresses and all the deaf children of the Oral School, including the smallest kids. I remember how one of them, Rana, wouldn't get off the stage after the curtain call!

Since then we have done Funny Folk, Prime Time, You Light Up My Life and we are now rehearsing for Patol Babu Film Star,

based on a Satyajit Ray short story. We put on our plays under the banner of Action Players, which comprises present and former students of the school and some hearing artists.

Let me make it clear that we do not do this as handicap theater.

And we are not didactic. We never talk about deafness. We never show up deafness. We just do things that are light or funny, beautiful or poetic, or sentimental-the same as any other theater.

But, yes, our idea is not just to make better theater. Of course, we would love to be a professional company so that we could all live off its earnings really comfortably. But when hearing actors in India can't do that, how can deaf actors? So, we have got to be realistic. These kids have other jobs. Jannan Abbas, for instance, has been an electrical wireman for ten years-he is the chief of his unit and the only deaf person in his company.

What we are trying to show through theater is that deaf people are not dumb. The word dumb is fairly odious to us because dumbness is associated with stupidity. That is very unfair. They are not stupid. In any case, no one is really totally dumb. People can be taught to lipread and to talk.

Adenwalla's wider aim in setting up the Oral School and starting theater classes has been to show that the deaf are employable. We want to integrate them into society. Their lives should not be damaged because they can't hear.

So your aim is to make the hearing world aware that deaf people are really normal people, given that one constraint.

Yes-that one constraint, that one invisible handicap. Invisible and, therefore, least understood.

What about the American National Theater of the Deaf? Did you catch their eye or did you go to them?

We went to them. Till I joined the Oral School, actually, I had not even heard of them. I had studied theater in America from 1964to 1966at the Dallas Theater Center. I was one of the first fellows of the J.D. Rockefeller III Fund. NTD was formed a year after I left the United States.

My second trip to America was in 1976. I went with my husband on a personal visit. I tried contacting NTD but they were on tour.

Then while Dinaz Adenwalla was in Gallaudet College, the Asian Cultural Council sponsored her for an NTD workshopand NTD was bowled over by her. NTD Founder and Artistic Director David Hays later told me, "She is remarkable. She is one of the best students we have ever had."

How did you meet David Hays?

In 1980 I had gone to England through the British Council and from there I went to America to meet my friends. This time I was lucky enough to meet David Hays. We discussed our work. Hays then told me that he was not in favor of mime at all. He felt that with mime, silence gets associated with deaf people and we should break that. I respect that idea, but that was the only skill I hadmime-which I passed on to my deaf students. I explained to Hays

At a workshop by the U.S. National Theater of the Deaf ( NTD) at the Oral School for Deaf Children in Calcutta, NTD's Sandi fnches relates her experiences as a deaf actress. Flanking her are (from left) Vicki Waltrip, David Hays (NTD founder and artistic director) and Mike Lamitola.

that we were essentially a mime theater and we didn't know sign language. Then I asked him, "How do we do sign language when we don't even have teachers?" And he said, "Do it your way; just try it." He also told me that he was very keen to visit India.

I came back with this idea that NTD wanted to come to India.

So I put it across to Naveen Kishore of Seagull Empire; it's a Calcutta-based cultural group. He discussed it with the U.S. Information Service (USIS) and through the combined efforts of USIS and Seagull Empire (which did all the legwork) we did get NTD to India in 1981. But before the NTD troupe came we put on our own first show in sign language. Kris Jouett, an American girl in Calcutta, who knew sign language, taught it to us. We loved signing and we understood what they say about sculpture in the air.

Later when NTD came, we saw the way they do it. They performed in Delhi, Bombay, Calcutta and Madras. And thus a great friendship developed between NTD and us. In 1985 they came back, again through us. The troupe that they brought was actually the Little Theater of the Deaf, which is part of NTD. What they did for us during that Indian trip was quite wonderful and important. You see, the obvious thing to do is a theater workshop. But I told Hays that we were having some special problems with our school: The children had grown up, they were getting out of school, becoming working adults. Some were getting married. And they were now facing monetary constraints. Their families were asking them why they were spending so much time rehearsing but not getting anything for it. Many of them suddenly announced to me that they didn't want to do any more theater. I felt like I had been slapped in the face. I was shocked.

I also told Hays how I had tried explaining to them that theater could also be a profession, but they did not understand the wider aspects of what we were doing. So Hays, instead of having a workshop, just sat there and talked about what deaf theater had done for them in America. Each one of the troupe told his or her story. It was soft sell! Listening to them were our actors, the young students, parents, benefactors. The message went home.

And then Hays threw a bait. He said, "Next year [1986], I want at least two, if not more, actors from here to join our theater company in the summer program."

Finally not two, but four of us went to Chester, Connecticut, for a month in 1986. It was an intensive session-all day, 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. I was invited as the artistic director of the company. In fact, at first I wasn't sure why I was going. But when we got there, I was glad I was with my students, because of the many differences in the way we worked here in Calcutta and the way NTD worked. As it

is, even with my presence there, the program was very hard for my students. For one thing, they did not have fluency with American sign language.

Isn't there a universal sign language?

No. And this is one of the drawbacks. American sign language is probably the most advanced in the world. It is a bona fide language in America. It is taught as a second language, like German or French. A lot of hearing people take it in response to a statement made by the deaf that if we can learn to lipread and talk you can learn to sign for us. I think that's absolutely right.

However, in India we have so many linguistic differences. There is a different sign language with every language. In our school English is the medium. Which means that even the parents of the children-who may be Bengali or Gujarati or Bihari-have to learn English if they want to communicate with their children.

Mime, on the other hand, is universal. That is why, we have succeeded with mime, and continue to use it.

How did the children from Oral School communicate with the other deaf in America?

It was slow and difficult. American sign language is idiomatic; it is not signed English. What we are doing is literally signing every word of English that we speak. We speak, we sign, we gesticulate and express with the face and that whole thing makes for total communication.

American sign language has a grammar of its own. It is very fast and some American deaf will not speak as they sign or they will only sign very fast. So whole sequences are signed without exact words being signed. It is very hard to follow. Of course, we had interpreters. But it took us almost a week to get somewhat used to it.

Our children learned much more than just sign language there.

NTD is very advanced in theater. It is a professional school of theater. All the teachers come from professional schools in New York-including the HB Studio [founded by Herbert Berghof] where I had learned acting. There was Gene Lasko from the Actors Studio. The students were being given very advanced training.

Until then, my children had not been exposed to any other theater teacher besides me. So at NTD, they didn't know how to take instructions from so many people. I literally had to have a session with them every night to explain what they were being taught in the NTD classes. Incidentally, Marlee Matlin [see cover] was with us.

She was in the advanced course-because she was a cinema actress already.

Has there been any other interaction between the Action Players and NTD after the 1986 summer program?

Oh, yes. Last year Hays sent Mike Lamitola to do a workshop for us in Calcutta. In fact, his workshop has done more for my group than our going to America. Everybody here was involved, and Lamitola is such a dynamic actor and a charismatic person.

He gave our group the cohesion that it has today.

Lamitola took our actors and actresses through a lot of elementary theater; it wasn't like the NTD workshop. There was much more rapport because it was tailored to be done in Calcutta for us.

Do you have a formal relationship with NTD? .

No, but it is an active relationship. Later this year Jannan Abbas and I will probably attend the International Theater Festival in Tokyo on NTD's invitation. NTD, in fact, wants Abbas to be a member of their troupe for this tour.

Hays hopes that NTD's continuing collaboration with us will help in taking the first step toward launching an Indian Theater of the Deaf.

0

The Power of Unspoken Words continued

from page 12

sparked a two-year offscreen romance between Matlin and Hurt, which ended soon after Matlin got the Oscar in March 1987; her success, she says, "scared" Hurt.)

Medoff was inspired to write the play after an encounter with Phyllis Frelich.

While developing another work at the University of Rhode Island in 1978, he met the deaf actress through her husband, who designed the set and lighting for the campus production. "I was amazed and mesmerized by Phyllis's openness, and I had an instinctive feeling that there was an extraordinary actor living in her," recalls Medoff. "She told me that there were virtually no roles for the deaf actors in hearing theater, and it was the challenge of creating a role for a deaf performer that motivated me."

Eight months later, Medoff had written a play. He invited Frelich and her husband Bob Steinberg to New Mexico State University, where he had taken over the theater program. There they began rehearsing Children of a Lesser God, and the rest is theatrical history. The play won Tony awards, Broadway's equivalent of the Oscars, for Medoff, Frelich and actor John Rubinstein. Medoff, who has written another play for Frelich, calls the actress "one of the half dozen or so finest working today." In Medoff's play, The Hands of Its Enemy, Frelich is a deaf playwright who tries to exorcise personal demons through her work.

Despite the changes wrought by NTD and Children of a Lesser God, and the chance for theatrical instruction at such schools as Gallaudet College for the Deaf

Above: Actor Ed Waterstreet "talks" to his agent by typing into a special telephone.

Right: Phyllis Frelich, one of America's most talented deaf actresses, rehearses a new play in her New York apartment.

in Washington, D.C., roles are still scarce for the hearing impaired. While some hear well enough to have learned to speak normally, most speak little if at all. That limits the parts open to them. Even when a script calls for a deaf character, many producers and directors are reluctant to hire hearing-impaired actors.

In a recent episode of the American television series Magnum P.I., for example, an actress who can hear was used to playa deaf person. A spokesman for the Columbia Broadcasting System, on which the show airs, says that because the character had only recently lost her hearing it was not necessarily an appropriate role for a deaf artist. But David Hays argues that casting

performers who can hear in deaf roles "is like putting a white actor in blackface to play Othello."

Directors and producers who work with the deaf say reluctance to hire them stems from the days when they were regarded as stupid or retarded. There is also concern in the entertainment industry that casting deaf performers will complicate a production because interpreters must translate spoken instructions into sign language.

"People are afraid of things that are different," explains Sesame Street producer Lisa Simon, who regards such fears as totally unfounded.

Some deaf performers in the United States have concluded that the best way to

get work is to develop their own scripts.

But it can take a long time to sell an idea.

Bove says she spent two years persuading the producers of Happy Days to cast her in an episode of the TV comedy. Her husband Ed Waterstreet is working on story concepts about a deaf baseball player who invented many of the game's hand signals and a deaf swimmer who saved more than 100people from drowning. Matlin suggests the possibility of a silent film set in the 1980s that uses both deaf and hearing actors.

Most hearing-impaired performers want casting directors to look past their deafness and judge them solely on their acting abil-

ity. "Do people see me as deaf or see me as an actress?" asks Frelich, who yearns for a role in which she c":mcommunicate without being interpreted by a hearing actor.

In spite of the frustrations, deaf performers think there are more opportunities now than ever. Yet they still have a long road to travel. Witness Matlin's experience. Normally an actress fresh from a performance like hers in Children of a Lesser God would have been immediately beseiged with proposals. But for several months after the success of the film, Matlin was still awaiting an offer. She had then said, with characteristic candor, "It is almost as if those in films are blind."

The Oscar changed all that. Matlin's second film Walker, in which she plays the fiancee of an American who briefly took control of Nicaragua in the 1850s,is ready.

Matlin has four more projects in hand and a host of new celebrity friends who are "interested in learning sign language and in buying TDDs (a teletype device for the telephone) so we can communicate." Some of them go to Matlin's interpreter, Jack Jason, to learn her language. But Matlin's biggest success has been in shaking Hollywood into an awareness and acceptance of deaf actors and actresses.

0 About the Author: Alvin P. Sanoff is a senior editor with U.S. News & World Report.

Left, above: A scene from a puppet show presented by Kids on the Block, a troupe of disabled and nondisabled puppets.

Left: The Little Theater of the Deaf-a part of the National Theater of the Deafperforms The Lion in Love during its summer storytelling program. Top: Linda Bove has been a regular performer on the popular children's TV show, Sesame Street.

Above: Chuck Baird (left) and Adrian Blue in NTD's The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter.

America's most venerable ornithologist, Dillon Ripley, 74, has had a lifetime association with India. When he was 13, he visited India with hisfamily and took a walking tour with his sister through Ladakh and western Tibet. Describing the experience, he says, "Only two members of ourfamily were given permission to go trekking. With characteristic diplomacy, I offered not to go and of course I went."

This trip to India, Ripley confides, was a turning point in his life because it helped to reinforce his desire to become a biologist. But even though he knew he loved the natural sciences, he put in a year of pre-law study at Yale University in keeping with the wishes of his parents. It was only after completing his graduation that he decided he did not wish to pursue a law career. Instead he decided to accept an offer from family friends to accompany them in a small schooner on a zoological expedition to New Guinea. "I learned my zoology in the field and I loved it," he says, and ended up collecting 1,300 specimens-lOO of them live. This was followed by an expedition to Sumatra.

While working in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), as a civilian in the U.S. Office of Special Services during World War II, Ripley continued his ornithological research and discovered, among other specimens, a new subspecies of the Ceylonese thrush. He was the first naturalist from a Western country to be allowed to enter Nepal, where he discovered the spiny babbler, a cousin of the American mockingbird.

Ripley was director of the Peabody Museum of Natural History in New Haven, Connecticut, from 1959 to 1964, after which he was appointed secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. He played a key role in changing the concept that museums are mere storehouses of antiquity; that they should playa dynamic role in becoming

centers of education. He is now secretary emeritus of the Smithsonian.

The remarkable quality about Ripley is his modesty. He is one of the most . unassuming people one has ever met, which explains his ability to strike a rapport with everyone. His sense of humor keeps spilling into his conversation, and he chuckles loudly when he says, "I am convinced that Dhillons of India and Dillons from the United States can trace their ancestry back to the Phoenicians. I have a theory about this. While we DilIons settled in Scotland, which is from where my family comes, the Dhillons settled in the Punjab. We all belong to one big international tribe and that is why I am all for internationalism in one form or another. " Ripley has written numerous books, which include 30,000

Miles of Adventure With a Naturalist, A Synopsis of the Birds ofIndia and Pakistan, Together With Those of Nepal, Sikkim, Bhutan and Ceylon, as well as The Land and Wildlife of Tropical Asia. His magnum opus is the tenvolume A Handbook of the Birds of India and Pakistan, which he wrote in collaboration with India's redoubtable ornithologist Salim Ali, who died last year. Hisfavorite book remains A Paddling of Ducks in which he recounts his observations of waterfowl, particularly the ducks in the pond at his estate at Litchfield, Connecticut.

Ripley has received several awards and honors including the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the Thomas Jefferson Award. The Indian government honored Ripley with a Padma Bhushan for his outstanding contribution to the 1985-86 Festival of India in America of which he _was cochairperson with Pupul Jayakar, adviser on heritage and culture to Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi. Ripley visited India in March to deliver the first Salim Ali Memorial Lecture.

QUESTION: Dr. Ripley, you have devoted a lifetime to the study of birds. At what age did you get interested in them?

DILLON RIPLEY: Well, I really don't remember. I must have been interested in them from a very early age. I always liked nature and being out of doors. My mother was curious abo\'t why I seemed to like birds a lot although she liked birds herself. Everybody in the family was very sympathetic to nature and the outdoors. I must have had a special feeling. I think part of it stemmed from the fact that I had a very, very good eyesight; so I trained myself early to see things. When I started to drive a car at 16, I would be driving with someone in the family and I would say, "Look at that bird." And they would say, "Hey! How on Earth did you manage to spot that bird while you were driving!" I realized that I was perhaps more observant than others. It was gradual, training myself to spot objects and looking for color.

Of course, birds, like human beings, have a very acute and well-developed color sense.

That's what birds' lives are all about; because, for catching prey, eating it, establishment of mating and nesting and so on, color is everything. This is not so with the majority of the mammals. We humans are one of the few mammals that have a well-defined color sense.

Dogs, for example, tend to be color blind.

They see in shades of gray and brown. Certain other animals have a good color sense, certain fish and some of the reptiles, but we are just lucky. It means so much to us. You only realize how important it is when you are color blind.

I have always liked color. The variety of color in moving objects, and birds began to fascinate me because they were so free and independent. I used to feel if I could only get off the ground, I would be free.

As a child, what was the special thing that birds managed to convey to you?

Light, air, motion, color. Freedom. If I could have been Icarus, I would have probably killed myself trying to fly.

I remember observing birds when I was 13, here in India, in Ladakh, and it was almost the first time that I became aware of the differences among birds. When I was ten, I used to go regularly to the zoo in New York. I remember being scared by an Indian rhinoceros there once. It suddenly became active. I was standing near the pen when it charged in my direction and I was terrified. I also used to go frequently to another zoo in New York City, in the Bronx, which was quite close to my house, and it was here that I started learning

about animals. And to this day, my wife and I have a 60-hectare estate in Litchfield, where we have geese, ducks, swans, peafowl and cranes. I've been doing that ever since I was around 17 and I still take a great deal of pleasure in my private zoo.

When you came to Indiafor the first time at the age of 13, you must have seen an amazing variety of birds?

I wasn't aware of it as a variety. I saw the birds and took them in my stride. I remember, in Ladakh, seeing partridge and snow cocks. I don't remember seeing pheasants, though I did see all kinds of partridge in Rajasthan and lots of ducks in the jheels. There were plenty of peacock, but the peafowl were the only large game bird we saw then. There were a great number of mammals. Driving from Fatehpur Sikri near Agra, we stopped the car and my brother and I ran out to see a big herd of chi karas, about 200 of them. They were frisky things and they were so tame and so near us that we started running after them, not because we wanted to catch them but because we wanted to be closer to them. There were plenty of black buck farther out, and we saw some tigers. We saw lots of snakes in the rainy season, crawling all over the garden.

How did you first happen to visit India?

It happened because of a very fortuitous circumstance. A close friend of my sister was getting married to someone from outside our town. He had been offered ajob as head of the hostel in the University of Nagpur. The bride's family requested us to put him up with us because we had a large house, and h~ came to stay with us. One night, we were all sitting around a fire, and he said, "We would love it if you could come and see us in India," and my mother asked us, "What do you think? Would you like to do that, children?" We all said we would love to. My brother and sisters, who were eight or ten years older than I, had just finished their education and I was beginning my high school. So she approached the headmaster of my school. He was quite considerate and he gave me a year's leave. We all set sail in different ways. My brother and sisters, who set sail earlier, came via Japan and China. My mother and I came a little later through Egypt on the Peninsular and Orient Line and we landed in Bombay. Later, we joined them in Calcutta.

I can still remember the shoreline as our steamer approached Bombay, and the towering Gateway of India. My uncle recommended I buy a solar topee, which I have kept ever since.

From Bombay we took a train to Calcutta.

I would like to add that it was this trip to India that helped confirm my interest in natural history. For a while I had been leaning toward archaeology, but after visiting the Prince of Wales Museum in Bombay, which since 1923 had housed the exhibits of the Bombay Natural History Society, and the Indian Museum in Calcutta, I knew I wanted to become a professional biologist.

On this trip, I remember buying a Rajput painting of the Mughal period. It took me three days of bargaining in the manner I had read about in Kipling, before I got it for about $5. I also remember visiting the Lahore Museum and being dazzled by the great gun Zamzama, which was a four-meter giant made from copper and brass.

That was the beginning of the long association you have had with India?

Yes. It started in 1927. I came back in the 1930s and in the 1940s when I served in the war, mostly in Ceylon. It was then that I made my acquaintance with Salim Ali in Bombay, and we became very good friends right away.

We made a list of all the places we could explore together that had been overlooked by the British, for one reason or another, in terms of the fauna, such as the hills of what is now called Arunachal Pradesh, Orissa, parts of the south and parts of the east coast. You know, there are some parts of the Eastern Ghats, north of Madras and south ofSeringapatnam, that have not been studied to this day. So you'll see I'll soon be back. (Chuckles.)

After you drew up the list, Dr. Ripley, when did you actually begin to visit these places?

Almost every year or every other year. As Salim and I traveled from one place to another, we found we were falling into a pattern, because, by a coincidence, we just happened to visit these particular places 25 years after someone else had been there. And that revealed the great changes that had taken place in the environment over the years.

Changes like?

For example, in the 1930s, a survey had been made of the bird species and fauna in a particular area of the Deccan. When we reached the area we found many of the species missing. We began to examine why this had happened. One of the things we found responsible for this was the policy of developing reserved forests, which the British had worked hard at. Maintaining these reserved forests of teak and sal by cleaning up the understory, the bush, made the forest look very beautiful and

Dillon Ripley (right) found a kindred soul in India's bird-watcher Salim Ali. Among other things, the two undertook joint tours into different parts of India to study its fauna, which resulted in their ten-volume book,

A Handbook of the Birds of India and Pakistan.

immaculate, but it began to show a decline in the species of birds. The British had created an artificial environment instead of a natural environment.

This is something that foresters have not realized even today, with their emphasis on eucalyptus plantations and so on.

Yes. It is terribly destructive. It's a slow death. All these monocultures that are being encouraged are very destructive in the long run. Foresters don't realize it because the period is too long. By the time the problem surfaces, they will have retired from their jobs.

Whatever they do may seem useful economically, but it is bad science.

Another aspect I would like to stress is that although there is a much greater variety of species to be found in the tropical regions, the number of each species is much smaller. So, if their environment is destroyed, the chances of a particular species becoming extinct are that much greater. In the temperate regions, the varieties are far fewer, but their numbers are much larger, helping to ensure that a species is never wiped out completely.

Can you tell us something about your association with Salim Ali? We were very good friends and we got along excellently from our first meeting. When you have lived in the jungle with someone, you have been through the thick and thin of things together, and that goes a long way in helping to cement a relationship. He was a loner since he had lost his wife at a very early age. He was very close to my wife, Mary, and we were very close to members of his family.

My present trip is a nostalgic one for me.

Mary and I paid our respects at his grave and I felt honored at being asked to deliver the first Salim Ali Memorial Lecture.

One of your-and of course Salim Ali'smost enduring contributions to the field of

ornithology is the ten-volume magnum opus on the birds of the subcontinent on which both of you collaborated. Were there any problems that you and Salim Ali faced while writing the book?

Our main problem was one of distance. I was in America, he was in India, and so it took a long time to get our points across. Luckily, he had a couple of assistants and I also had one. There was a tremendous amount of correspondence, correcting little things that couldn't be allowed to pass, and also a great deal of editorial work. We had some people from the Oxford University Press working on it full time, because it was a massive project, filling ten volumes. There were an infinite variety of species that we had to reckon with.

We had to check all the names and everything else to avoid mistakes that were constantly creeping in, especially in names. Someone had used one name, someone else had used another name, and how were we to determine which was the right name? It took an awful lot of time and effort.

The actual fieldwork didn't take too much time?

That was the shortest and the most fun part of the whole thing because when you do fieldwork you are out in the open, living in tents or little dak bungalows and you are having a great time. Sometimes when it starts raining or the local people turn hostile or the jeep breaks down, it's different-but that's rare.

Dr. Ripley, you must have been very excited when you became the first nondiplomat American to be allowed to enter Nepal. How did this happen?

I had come to India in 1946 to work with Salim Ali, and we went to the northeastern parts of the country, which until a few years ago was called NEF A. I used to keep coming back to Delhi to pick up my mail and I generally stayed with George Merrill, the representative of the United States for American

Interests. On one of my visits to Delhi, I asked Merrill, "What on Earth are you doing about my visit to Nepal?" He told me that the opening of diplomatic relations between the United States and Nepal was in the offing and that he also had arranged a lunch party where I could meet Co!' Rana, the Nepalese Ambassador. "That would be wonderful!" I replied.

"I would love to meet him and maybe sometime or the other, I could get to Nepal and continue with these studies."

In those days no foreigner was allowed to visit Nepal except the British resident and the Indian representative and occasionally a doctor such as B.C. Roy, who was a heart specialist and went there to attend to the members of the ruling family. [After independence, he became the first chief minister of West Benga!.] To cut a long story short, Co!' Rana sent a telegram to Maharaja Sir Mahan Shum Sher Bahadur Rana and I was granted permission.

I was allowed to go up to Kathmandu.

Of course, in those days we went by narrow gauge railway for part of the way, after which you took a bus to a small dak bungalow where you spent the night, and then traveled the rest of the way on foot accompanied by pack mules.

You have been associated with two major museums. What suggestions do you have for making museums a more active part of our daily lives?

Museums must become centers of national pride, for research into the past and for awakening the public consciousness. And for that they must have a variety of audiovisual programs, lectures and even organize traveling exhibits into the more remote areas.

In 1967, a register of museums in India and Pakistan showed there were 267 museums in the whole subcontinent. That is extraordinary because they can be made into the most important educational tool in India today.

With a population problem and a language problem combined, here is a perfect opportunity for the development of imaginative new techniques, using displays and objects to communicate ideas and tb teach.

Museums are the greatest available laboratories for studying the problems of how to create interest, and this problem is central to our quest for survival. What is the point of being surrounded by all the wonders of technology when our plundered planet will no longer be able to support life? Museums help make people aware of their surroundings and that is one positive step forward.

0 About the Interyjewer: Rashme based free-lance writer.

Sehgal is a Delhi-

ON THE LIGHTER SIDE

"My working title is '] ,000 Tested Recipes for Cooking the Books.'"

"Slow down at the next red light.

I wanna jump out."

© 1988 Tribune Media Services, Inc. All rights reserved.

© 1987 Universal Press Syndicate.

"I should warn you that line five is a very dirty word in Serbo-Croatian."

Reprinted

with permission a division

from The Saturday

of BFL and MS, Inc.

Evening Post Society,

©

1986.

Allan Bloom's unlikely beJt-seller, The Closing of the American Mind, laments that American universities no longer provide students with a classically based education. Benjamin Barberfinds the book a "raging assault on liberal tolerance and democratic education. "

Is Bloom Right?

by BENJAM1N BARBER

land of the free---ean make Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind is not a book, peculiar land ofparadox.-ambivalent it is a phenomenon: one of those mega-literary comets that dazzles paradoxical heroes out of freedom's severest critics. How it offers without being clearly seen, and thus mesmerizes its critics as it popular success to those who contemn its popular virtues; and speeds across America's celebrity firmament. The perplexities are how, to those who disdain its materialism, it offers riches. The staggering. How does an obscure academician known chiefly for a ther America, The Making of a Counter Culture and The Greening his translations of Plato and Rousseau become a national celeb- of America had similar receptions. Yet those books were written in the spirit of progress and reform; they saw American reality as out rity? How can a book about th~ decadence of esoteric European philosophers such as Heidegger climb to the top of the best-seller of tune with the promise of the American soul, and they called for list and sell nearly a half-million copies in hardback? Why are progress not reaction. In The Closing of the American Mind we Americans so anxious to welcome a book that claims they can't confront a different phenomenon: a most enticing, a most subtle, a read, so willing to accept a polemic that excOliates their literary most learned, a most dangerous tract. What we have here is an intelligence? Why are liberal critics and egalitarian educators . extraordinary and adept exercise in the Noble Lie aimed at beside themselves with admiration for what can only be called a persuading Americans that philosophy is superior to ordinary raging assault on liberal tolerance and democratic education?

American life and philosophers superior to ordinary American From its publication early last year, The Closing of the American citizens; and consequently this nation's higher education ought to be organized around the edification of the few who embody Mind took the United States as much by surprise as by storm.

Bloom's beatification began mildly enough with a New York philosophy rather than the many who embody America.

Times daily review calling his treatise a "remarkable" exercise in "electric-shock therapy" for complacent teachers; the Sunday Book Review picked up steam by lauding it as "an extraordinary The expression of relativism in the college meditation on the fate of liberal education in this country." curriculum, as Bloom sees it, is the removal of core Unqualified raves from many other critics followed, culminating in major spreads in weeklies such as Newsweek. requirements, whose absence encourages students By late last summer, the book had become a touchstone for to believe that no studies are more central to human every imaginable contemporary debate on education, as well as a life than others.~As a result of this ethos of totem for the neoconservative assault on American higher educaopenness (which, Bloom argues, is really a kind of tion, equal opportunity, rock music, the 1960s,the young, and sex. closing of the mind), students have abandoned In September 1987, George Will paid homage to Bloom in a Newsweek column titled "Learning From the Giants." George the idea on which the university ...was founded: the Levine ran a controversial national colloquium on Bloom at idea of a rational search for the best human life.

Rutgers University, and Reader's Digest took a full-page ad in The New York Times to reprint their editor's version of what was called Allan Bloom's decisive "answer" to the question "What's wrong with American education?" The book is now descending from its loom's book is as artful and painless a piece of su}wersion apogee, but its extraordinary trajectory suggests a phenomenon as we are likely to encounter from a critic of democracy. that has yet to be explained. . For it is written by a philosopher for whom rhetoric is "a What on Earth is going on here? It certainly is not the old literary love story, for the affection America seems to feel for gentle art of deception," a polemicist who believes political writing Bloom is anything but reciprocated. It is as if the professor and the in a democratic society is necessarily an act of concealment. If country have met on a blind date and the country, though found Americans have failed fully to understand what Bloom means, it sorely wanting by the professor, nevertheless insists on finding the may be because Bloom has not said exactly what he means-or professor irresistible. He charges Americans with flat-souled does not mean exactly what he has said. In its overt hostility to all philistinism, and they buy almost a half-million copies of his the "leading notions of modern democratic thought" such as scathing denunciation. He claims the country has deserted the "equality, freedom, peace [and] cosmopolitanism," The Closing of the American Mind would seem to qualify as one of the most university and blames democracy for the debacle, so the country profoundly antidemocratic books ever written for a popular adopts him as its favorite democratic educator.

Can the mystery be unraveled? We know well enough how this audience. That, however, is not how Bloom puts it. Ever the

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prudent educator, Bloom believes that to say exactly what you mean about liberty and equality when you live in a liberal democratic state is to court the fate of Socrates, who was tried and executed by the Athenians for thinking little of their liberty and less of their democracy. Not one of the critics raving about the nobility of Bloom's philosophical project for the reconstruction of the American soul seems to have noticed that his philosopher "loves the truth" but "he does not love to tell the truth." The leading characteristic of this ostensible paean to the virtues of open discourse is in reality a commitment to closed communication-to esoteric meaning and rhetorical ambivalence.

Commentators have treated his book as a racy companion volume to E.D. Hirsch's Cultural Literacy, with which it seems to share a yearning for a more civilized culture and an affection for the so-called Great Books. Typical of this interpretation is the Reader's Digest review: [Bloom] tells us the closing of the American mind has resulted directly from "openness"-that perverse new virtue which urges us to be nonjudgmental and prevents us from "talking with any conviction about good and evil." ...Yet Americans long for something lost-the great moral truths upon which civilization rests....Education is not merely about facts-it is about truth and the "state of our souls" ....If there is a reassertion of moral truth rather than relativistic values, this book will be remembered as a catalyst.

The Allan Bloom honored by the critics is the philosophical moralist, doing battle with the forces of philistinism, relativism and nihilism that beset a civilization living in the valley of the shadow of death-that is to say, in the shadow of the death of God. He appears in their encomiums as a liberal humanist making war on students who fail to live up to the Socratic ideal.

With the artful and worshipful interlocutors of Socrates perching as archetypes in his imagination, Bloom can hardly be other than appalled by the average American 18-year-old, who is more than a little artless and never very reverent, particularly toward teachers. Bloom rails with indignation at the young and what the corruptions of democratic education (the 1960s) have done to them. He is repelled by their tastes, their pastimes, their sexual practices, their "niceness," their music, their reading habits, their lack of "prejudices" and their "flat-souled" lack of nobility. No wonder he complains that "Harvard, Yale and Princeton are not what they used to be-the last resorts of aristocratic sentiment within the democracy." At times Bloom's unrelenting 1960sbashing sounds like the screeching of an aging parent wrapped in a Roman toga-ranting about the nobility of the ancients because he cannot comprehend his daughter's purple hair. When he tells us that an American university which pledges itself to serve democracy's needs is indistinguishable from a German university which dedicates itself to the service of Nazism, or that Woodstock is the American Nuremberg (flower children listening to Jimi Hendrix are to be regarded as clones of black-shirted fascists organizing a new era of genocide), we may wonoer what has happened to the philosopher in search of great souls.

Yet underlying Bloom's hostility to the 1960s is a more profound anger. Like the champions of the new conservatism, BloQm is hostile not only to the moral decline of the university and its students but to much of what democrats and progressives have accomplished in the last 50 years. He does not simply oppose feminism or the abolition of the double standard in the abstract, he condemns them because they destroy the old sexual arrangements whereby a man could "think he was doing a wonderful thing for a

woman, and expect to be admired for what he brought." Feminists are not merely the destroyers of the family, they are "the latest enemy of the vitality of classic texts" and, since classic texts are the touchstones of a philosophical society, of civilization itself.

Bloom is aghast at modern value-relativism-that the young in America have neither values nor even prejudices-but he is also censorious about the values they choose to embrace. Thus, to him a concern for nuclear survival is bogus posturing; a belief in tolerance is a sign of moral flabbiness; to be "nice" and "without prejudices" merely underscores shallowness. Bloom condemns not just equality and the struggle for rights, but the notion of rights itself, which for him means dedication to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of property and sex." The true villains are then neither feminists nor libertarians but the humanists-not the armed prophets of the Weather Underground but the far more dangerous unarmed prophets 'Oftherapeutic ~alvation and the brotherhood of man.

The remarkable success of your book testifies to the power of your diagnosis and our yearning to escape from our plight. Yet it is just as you have us convinced you understand us that your argument, in my view, breaks down. Your prescriptions for our cure betray a misunderstanding of our country and my generation as profound as the insights of your diagnosis .... The problem with the university today is not the poisonous influence of the masses, but the poisonous influence of the elite interest groups.... Fortunately, for them and for us, they do not rule the nation. Here the masses rule and there is safety in numbers.... The primary purpose of democracy is to allow people the freedom to propagate and support ideas and save themselves from "unpopular" wisdoms. .

-Excerpt from "An Open Letter to Allan Bloom" by his former student, John Podhoretz, National Review

loom opposes democratic values not only as a conservative ideologue but as a philosopher wedded to reason. It is not really the past 20 or even the past 50 years that disturb Bloom; it is the past 200 years. The problems go back at least to the French Revolution and to those aspects of the philosophy of Enlightenment that led to the Revolution, since, as always for Bloom, history proceeds out of ideas rather than the other way around. In fact, nothing has been quite the same since a court composed of distrustful Athenian freemen put noble Socrates to death for the crime of being a truth-speaking philosopher in an opinion-governed society. The great divide is less between modern conservatives and modem democrats than between ancients and moderns-the central theme of Bloom's mentor and teacher, the great University of Chicago philosopher Leo Strauss.

The German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche signals the final eclipse of the ancient world for Bloom. Bloom's ambivalence about Nietzsche is one of the more impenetrable puzzles of The

B

,"

Closing of the American Mind, a puzzle that makes its profoundly

antidemocratic argument difficult for critics to apprehend. Bloom is simultaneously full of praise for Nietzsche's analysis of modernity (he is "an unparalleled diagnostician of the ills of modernity") and full of indignation at what he considers to be the American trivialization of Nietzschean philosophy. This he regards as the primary cause of the closing of the American mind.

Nietzsche is at once hero and villain, astute cultural critic of bourgeois culture in the abstract, but nefarious corrupter of American youth in practice. Bloom's ambivalence about him is rooted in his distrust of democracy. Like Voltaire, who urges gentlemen to send their servants out of the room before debating whether God actually exists, Bloom worries not about Nietzsche's nihilistic announcement of the death of God, but about what philistine Americans may make of this unhappy news. The danger is not philosophical relativism, but pop relativism, not Nietzsche, but the "doctrinaire Woody Allen" whose way oflooking at things "has immediate roots in the most profound German philosophy."

If Woody Allen as a pop Nietzsche seems farfetched, Bloom himself often seems like a slightly paranoid Tocqueville who, burdened by an aristocratic background and Continental manners, finds himself inexplicably residing in the state of Illinois among barbarians he both worships and despises.

As a modern, Bloom cannot really deny that the credentials for both absolute Truth and a Supreme Being have become philosophically suspect: Nietzsche was merely the messenger for the news of their delegitimation by science and the Enlightenment.

The trouble lies neither in the messenger nor in the message, but in the hungry masses that, equipped with a democratic education, beg to receive the grim tidings. These tidings only strip them of their myths and their religious comfort. Because the masses are constitutionally unfit for philosophy, the Truth leaves them" defenseless and renders them dangerous. Faced with the news of God's death and Truth's uncertainty, mass man in America has simply put his soulless self in God's place, to the peril of learning, philosophy and civilization. The demise of Authority engenders the Revolt of the Masses, whose trivialized mass culture is at war with everything noble and good. Virtue gives way to utility, reason to passion, the good to self-interest.

But how to tell such things to mass man himself? Men possessed of the idea that each of them is God must be handled carefully. To remind them of their own mortality and to tell them of the death of God may work terrible pain upon them. To avenge their suffering the messenger might be executed! The solution Bloom can only hint at (the philosopher cannot speak honestly) is certainly not to inundate the masses with books they cannot understand and are likely to misconstrue. Rather, it is to send them-like Voltaire's servants-out of the room. Bloom notes and his admirers delight in the great irony by which "openness" (which produces relativism and then nihilism) has led to the closing of the American mind.

They might do well to note the still greater irony that reopening the American mind may for Bloom depend on the closing of the American university-since. open minds seem to function best in highly selective, closed schools. To the educable, an education; to the rest, protection from fearsome half-truths and a diet of noble lies such as may be required to insulate the university from mediocrity and democratic taste. Affirmative action puts into the classroom young men who can learn from Hobbes and Nietzsche only the lesson of the rightfulness of their appetites; feminism puts into the classroom young women who can learn from Dewey and

Freud only the lesson of their equality with, or perhaps even their sexual superiority to, men. Philosophy is not to be saved by handing out Great Books to small minds, but by locking the library doors.

Bloom is remarkably candid about the nature of "the real community of man," which "is the community of those who seek the truth, of the potential knowers." To be sure, this community "in principle" includes all men "to the extent they desire to know.

But infact this includes only afew, the true friends, as Plato was to Aristotle ... " (emphasis added). Bloom's rhetorical journey finally

begins and ends with the ancients-with Socrates. How much misery mankind might have been spared; what revolutions, what prejudices, what myths, what armed braggarts might have vanished from the historical landscape, had the Athenians loved and followed Socrates instead of executing him.

It is a virtue of The Closing of the American Mind that it will provoke nearly everyone .... Bloom, a philosopher, deliberately distances himself from all parties, so as to ask the kind of questions Socrates put to his fellow Athenians: "What do your words really mean? How do you know what you know?"... Few books in recent years come close to Bloom's grand tour of the American mind either in the ambition of their reach or the breadth of their grasp.

-So Frederick Starr, The Washington Post Book World

loom's democratic admirers overlook his belief that democracy for the many (those not like him) and education for the few (those like him) proceed from radically incompatible premises. According to Bloom, society ought ideally to be arranged to achieve the latter even if it means undermining the former. "Never did I think," he writes, "that the university was properly ministerial to the society around it. Rather I thought and think that society is ministerial to the university ...." Without the university thus understood, the theoretical life collapses "back into the primal slime" (presumably democratic society) from which it "cannot re-emerge."

The citizen of a democracy who understands what Bloom intends in the honor he pays Socrates will be wary in the face of Bloom's modern pedagogical claims. The citizen has every reason to mistrust the philosopher who mistrusts him. After all, it was the tyranny of "Truth" politicized that justified the divine' right of kings, the Inquisition, the Reign of Terror and such modern orthodoxies as totalitarianism.

Bloom may not be arguing that "the old [forms]were good or that we should go back to them," but he has two crucial quarrels to pick with America: the quarrel of the philosopher with democracy and equality; and the quarrel of the ambivalent cosmopolitan both with the European decadence he fears and the American philistinism he despises. The quarrel between philosophy and democracy is the quarrel between Socrates and Athens, and we have seen how deeply that struggle affects Bloom. The quarrel between America and Europe is more complex, and Bloom is torn between the two.

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Champion of an innocent America corrupted by the tainting cynicism of Europe's anti philosophies, Bloom sees himself as a loyal but knowing son of the Republic anxious to protect its lesssophisticated citizens from the Old World's newfangled nihilisms.

Ifit is true that God has died (and there are times when Nietzsche's bad news seems also to be Bloom's bad news), don't tell the Americans! They already have a penchant for the vulgar, the novel and the experimental, and will seize on God's withdrawal from the cosmos as a reason to try to master it themselves. In place of the tragic acceptance that characterized the ancients, the Americans will deploy ideologies of reform, growth, progress and revolution.

With their hands clasping computers and spliced genes, and their heads bursting with progressive ideologies from Marxism to welfarism, they will set out to replace their vanished Creator and improve upon His handiwork.

Nonetheless, even as Bloom cherishes America's insularity from the contagion of European cultural relativism, he cherishes Europe. As an American he may be suspicious of Europe's cynical intellectuals, but as a partisan of Europe, he is even more suspicious of America's self-righteously innocent anti-intellectuals. With innocence comes a simpleminded disdain for ideas that, as the historian Richard Hofstadter has noticed, inures us to books and debases our souls. We are finally much too practical a people for Bloom's taste: philosophy enjoins reflection, but the "hidden premise of the realm of freedom [America] is that action has primacy over thought." Bloom's aristocratic hostility to America's spirited practicality, to its optimism, about change (America as the New World), to its belief in the second chance, blinds him to certain strengths of the American polity, as well as to the relationship of ordinary human beings to books.

America's true philosophers are not bookmen or academicians or theorists. They are poets such as Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman, essayists such as Henry Adams and Ralph Waldo Emerson, lawyers such as James Madison and Hugo Black, and moral leaders such as John Brown and Martin Luther King, Jr. Bloom can argue with Dewey while Strauss argues with Nietzsche,. but America's true educators dwell elsewhere; their podia are found in the open air rather than the seminar hall.

We continue to learn more from our doers than from our talkers, from Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin, Eugene Debs and Robert Taft, Harry Hopkins and, yes, even David Stockman. Bloom yearns for heroes and condemns us for having none worthy of the name, but what democrats aspire to is, as Brecht has written, not a country that has no heroes but a country that needs no heroes. At their best, Americans have been their own heroes, their nation a creation of anonymous settlers, cattlemen, grade-school teachers, factory laborers, entrepreneurs, farmers, longshoremen, inventors and just plain folks. Bloom simply gets America wrong. If Americans lack confidence in those who claim to possess Truth, it is because they are the descendants of immigrants who fled such Truthsayers. Disguised as inquisitors, prosecutors and king's counselors, such dogmatists impressed their Truths on the illiterate "rabble" in the form of chains. Bloom (it is almost as if he misses the chains) longs for the days in which Protestants and Catholics, hating each other, demonstrated they were "taking their beliefs seriously." Is the average American to be faulted for preferring the frivolous shallows of religious tolerance to the

seriousness of the Salem witch-hunts?

The lugubrious lesson Americans may wish to draw from both Socrates and Bloom is that the philosopher's ideal of the open mind seems to flourish best in a closed society where, if philosophers do not rule, those who do rule must defer to philosophy.

We ought to remember that benevolent autocrats like Frederick the Great made comfortable homes for philosophers such as Voltaire, even as those philosophers conceived rational blueprints in which there would be no room for kings. The king can at least pretend to be philosophical, whereas the self-governing common man will disdain the superior airs of both philosophers and kings.

Tyrants may indeed be better friends to Truth than citizens who must learn how to live with uncertainty and difference. We citizens can understand why a philosopher of noble intentions may be aghast at a society moved by the suspicion that one man is as good as the next; but, still, we might be expected to meet the philosopher's subtle arguments with something more than a weak and self-nullifying cheer. For we are being asked implicitly to choose between the open mind and the open society, being asked to close the university to the many in order to secure it for the few, being asked to make reflection and its requisites the master of action and its requisites, being asked finally to turn the democratic culture that ought to be the university's finest product into the servant of universities that produce something called Truth. And how we answer such questions will not only affect what kind of education we will have, but whether we will remain a free and egalitarian society devoted to justice, or become a nation of deferential tutees who have been talked out of our freedom by a critic of all that has transpired since the ancient world gave way to the modern.

A great many Americans have come to sympathize with Bloom, anxious about the loss of fixed points, wishing for simpler, more orderly times. President Reagan's longing for a court filled with somber purists, his secretary of education's campaign against the educational reforms of the 1960s, the Moral Majority's demand that the whole nation be subjected to drug testing-these are so many cries to be delivered from the 20th century. These are the voices not of mere conservatives but of zealots, the anxious ones who see in the victories of liberty only the specter of anarchy; in equality, the victory of mediocrity; in social justice, a warrant for envy and disorder. Allan Bloom's book offers certainty to the confused and comfort to the fearful. It is a new Book of Truth for an era after God. Its only rival is democracy, which Bloom, with those he comforts, can only despise.

Nevertheless, the ideology of democracy is a sound, one might even say noble, response to the dilemmas of modernity: it permits us to live with our uncertainty, our agnosticism, our doubt, our sense of abandonment, our isolation, without murdering one another; it even promises a modicum of justice made up of equal parts of compassion and tolerance. It does not rescue us from our era, but it helps us live with its perils. The most apt response to Bloom's attempt to teach us how to be noble might be for us to teach him how to be democratic. It might even be that he would get the better of the exchange.

0 About the Author: Benjamin Barber is a professor at Rutgers University, New Burnswick, New Jersey. He is the author of Strong Democracy, Marriage Voices (a novel), Liberating Feminism, The Death ofCommunal Liberty and Superman and Common Men. His new book, The Conquest of Politics, is due to be published later this year.

FOCUS Cholesterol

Free

There is good news for egg lovers. Scientists in the United States have "developed" eggs that, unlike the regular kind, do not raise levels of cholesterol, considered a villain in heart attacks; in fact, they reduce blood pressure and triglycerides-fatty substances that also contribute to heart disease.

"Creators" of these new eggs are Suk Y. Oh, an associate professor of nutrition, and his colleagues at the University of Utah who added fish oil to chicken feed. Hens that ate this feed for eight weeks laid eggs that reduced blood pressure and blood fats in a group of 12 people.

There is one snag, however: These eggs taste and smell like fish. But, says Oh, this is a small problem which can possibly be solved by feeding hens deodorized fish oil.

The American Heart Association recommends that people eat no more than 300 milligrams of cholesterol daily because its high levels in blood are linked to increased risk of hardening of, the arteries and consequently to heart attacks and strokes. Just one regular egg averages 274 milligrams of cholesterol.

Oh's study involved 12 healthy people with normal blood levels of cholesterol and triglycerides. They were divided into two groups, each person eating four eggs daily for eight

weeks. The first batch ate fish oil-enriched eggs for the initial four weeks, which appreciably reduced their blood pressure but their blood cholesterol remained unchanged. However, when they switched over to regular eggs for the last four weeks of the study, not only their cholesterol levels increased between five and ten percent but their blood pressure also shot back to their original value and their triglyceride levels rose sig nificantly.

The results of the second group, which started first on a regimen of ordinary eggs and later switched over to the "fishy" eggs, were just the opposite. At the end of four weeks, their blood cholesterol levels showed a marked increase.

However, by the end of the eighth week, their cholesterol levels had dropped to normal, and their blood pressure and triglyceride levels also fell appreciably.

Once the preliminary findings are confirmed in a larger study, which Oh hopes will be soon, people can eat as many of these eggs as they want without fear of increasing the "risk of developing coronary heart disease." Fish oilenriched eggs, Oh says, could join low-cholesterol egg substitutes in America by next year.

However, they will be about 40 percent costlier than regular eggs because of the added price of fish oil.

In the past four years, Michael A. Werboff has visited India twice.

But what is significant about his visits here is their special mission-to paint life-size portraits of the two Indian prime ministers he admires most.

In 1984 Werboff spent two-and-a-half months in New Delhi on the invitation of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi to do a portrait of her, which he completed six months before her assassination. He was back in New Delhi last February to work on a fUll-length portrait of Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi. Werboff formally presented the painting to the Prime Minister last month. As a token of his appreciation, Rajiv Gandhi presented the world-renowned artist with an exquisite Indian shawl.

In a talk with a correspondent of The New York Times about his 19841ndia visit, Werboff said, "I stayed for two-and-a-half months.

I was treated not like a prince, but like a king." He added, "I liked her [Mrs. Gandhi] very much. She had two completely different parts in her face. Enormous black eyes, very strong and a very feminine mouth. I told her, 'It's just like having Caesar and Cleopatra in the same face.'''

Of Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, Werboff, who at 91 is as active as ever, says, "He is perhaps the most unassuming and unpretentious world leader I have met. His warmth and a glowing smile completely win you over and envelope you."

One of America's most prolific and respected artists, Werboff has devoted much of his life to the fine art of portrait painting. His style is grounded in the classical tradition, and he captures the characters of his subjects with uncanny clarity and insight.

In addition to prime ministers, Werboff has painted kings, presidents, maharajas as well as a number of poets, priests,opera singers, artists and every signatory of the U.S. Declaration of Independence.

The portraits of the signers, which he did as part of America's Bicentennial celebrations in 1976,are the only ones Werboff has not done from life. "They are the only complete set of drawings of the signers scientifically researched and classically drawn," he says.

Werboff's paintings are in the permanent collections of such museums as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the National Portrait Gallery, both in Washington, D.C., the Prado Museum in Madrid and the Tretyakoff Gallery in Moscow.

America Remembers Radhakrishnan In April, Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, held a fourday Radhakrishnan Centennial Conference to observe the birth centenary (1888-1975) of the Indian philosopherstatesman and the country's President from 1962 to 1967.

The conference, which consisted of 26 separate panel discussions and 70 papers, examined various facets of Dr. Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan's life and ideas.

"Miami University," said its President Paul G. Pearson, "is proud to celebrate the life of Professor S. Radhakrishnan and to discuss his contributions to philosophy, religion, politics and education."

It is a befitting tribute to his international stature as a philosopher that the conference was attended by more than 120 philosophers from ten countries. Also present was Rukmini Kasturi, Radhakrishnan's daughter.

In his inaugural address, John Kenneth Galbraith, Harvard professor and former U.S. Ambassador to India, referred to the mutual affection between the people of India and the people of the United States.

Indo-U.S. relations, he said, are far wider and deeper than the foreign policy statements of "bureaucrats sitting in Washington and New Delhi."

In his keynote address, India's Ambassador to the United States P.K. Kaul described Radhakrishnan as "a symbol of the greatness of Indian culture and civilization not only in his ideas, but also in his life."

S.S. Rama Rao Pappu, professor of philosophy at Miami University and the organizer and director of the conference, said the conference was organized "in the Indian tradition of discharging the debt we owe to the seers, saints and philosophers of the past."

A cutting device using water as its blade forms a star out of a 3.2-mmthick piece of metal matrix composite during a demonstration at the Lockheed Aeronautical Systems Company in Marietta, Georgia.

Called an abrasive waterjet, it uses an extremely thin, highpower stream of water mixed with garnet abrasives to cut metal or composite materials to fashion aircraft parts.

Materials are cut cleaner with no ragged edges because the device produces a narrow, smooth incision without thermal delamination or deform a-

tion problems. Dust, common to traditional nonmetallic cutting, is nonexistent and also the process is said to be four times faster than traditional cutting methods.

Recently, Ambassador John Gunther Dean gave two checksone to the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) in New Delhi and another to the University of Delhi-to support two bilateral projects in science and technology.

On April 15, Ambassador Dean presented a Rs. 1,350,520check to AIIMS Director Dr. Sneh Bhargava (above, as Dr. S.K. Kacker of AIIMS looks on) as the first installment of a Rs. 2,082,840 U.S. grant under which American scientists will team up with their AIIMS colleagues to develop personalized hearing aids based on a new auditory amplification technology developed by Professor Djordje Kostic.

Hearing impairment in an individual is often restricted to certain ranges of freque~cies and does not require loudening of notes through an entire octave to enable proper hearing. In contrast to conventional hearing aids, which amplify all the sounds coming into the ear, the new device envisioned by this project would boost only those frequency ranges in which a person's hearing is deficient.

Kostic will assist investigators of the U.S. Public Health Service and a research group led by Dr. Kacker to evolve a method of analyzing a person's hearing efficiency within an improved categorization of sounds in 27 sets of frequencies.

A significant feature of the research will be an exclusive experiment for g~uging the effectiveness of this technology for hearingimpaired children.

According to the project report, this collaborative research effort could lead to "the most significant improvement in hearingaid technology since the invention of the transistor," and help millions of hearing-impaired people not only in India and the United States but everywhere.

Under the second bilateral project, for which the U.S.Ambassador presented a check of Rs. 1,303,591on April 26, the University of Delhi's Department of Physics and Astrophysics will conduct research in high energy nuclear physics in collaboration with the world-famous Fermi Laboratory in Chicago.

A key aspect of this project, which is funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation, is the building of an E-706 spectrometer, a powerful and versatile apparatus that will help scientists learn more about the structure of the nucleus of the atom. The project is part of a larger research effort to understand the ultimate constituents of matter and their energy states.

These projects, which Ambassador Dean called "a superb example of close cooperation between some of the top scientific minds of both countries," are two of some 250 science and technology projects presently being carried out in India with active support from and cooperation of the United States.

OIBIIII

BLIGK AID

I1IDDLB CLASS Is black middle class a contradiction in terms in today's America? The author reluctantly concludes that unless they learn middle-class values, blacks will always be left behind.

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ot

long ago a friend of mine, black like myself, said to me that the term "black middle class" in America was actually a contradiction in terms. Race, he insisted, blurred class distinctions among blacks. If you were black, you were just black and that was that. When I argued, he let his eyes roll at my naIvete.

He said for us, as black professionals, it was an exercise in selfflattery, a pretension, to give meaning to such a distinction.

Worse, the very idea of class threatened the unity that was vital to the black community. After all, since when had white America taken note of anything but color when it came to blacks? He then reminded me of a Malcolm X line that was popular in the I960s.

Question: What is a black man with a PhD? Answer: A nigger.

For many years I had been on my friend's side of this argument.

Much of my conscious thinking on the old conundrum of race and class was shaped during my high-school and college years in the race-charged 1960s, when the fact of my race took on an almost religious significance. Progressively, from the mid-1960s on, more and more aspects of my life found their explanation, their justification and their motivation in race. My youthful concerns about career, romance, money, values and even styles of dress became subject to consultation with various oracular sources of racial wisdom. And these ranged from a figure as ennobling as Martin Luther King, Jr., to the underworld elegance of dress I found in jazz clubs on the South Side of Chicago. Everywhere there were signals, and in those days I considered myself so blessed with clarity and direction that I pitied my white classmates who found more embarrassment than guidance in the fact of their race. In 1968, inflated by my new power, I took a mischievous delight in calling them culturally disadvantaged.

But now, hearing my friend's comment was like hearing a priest from a church I had grown disenchanted with. I understood him, but my faith was weak. What had sustained me in the 1960s sounded monotonous and off the mark in the 1980s. For me, race had lost much of its juju, its singular capacity to conjure meaning.

And today, when I honestly look at my life and the lives of many other middle-class blacks I know, I can see that race never fully explained our situation in American society. Black though I may be, it is impossible for me to sit in my single-family house with two cars and not see the role class has played in my life. And how can my friend, similarly raised and similarly situated, not see it?

Yet despite my certainty I felt a sharp tug of guilt as I tried to explain myself over my friend's skepticism. He is a man of many comedic facial expressions and, as I spoke, his brow lifted in

extreme moral alarm as if I were uttering the unspeakable. His clear implication was that I was being elitist and possibly (dare he suggest?) antiblack---crimes for which there might well be no redemption. He pretended to fear for me. I chuckled along with him, but inwardly I did wonder at myself. Though I never doubted the validity of what I was saying, I felt guilty saying it. Why? After he left I realized that the trap I felt myself in had a tiresome familiarity and, in a sort of slow-motion epiphany, I began to see its outline. It was like the suddenly sharp vision one has at the end of a burdensome marriage when all the long-repressed ipcompatibilities come undeniably to light.

What became clear to me is that people like myself, my friend and middle-class blacks generally are caught in a very specific double bind that keeps two equally powerful elements of our identity at odds with each other. The middle-class values by which we were raised-the work ethic, the importance of education, the value of property ownership, of respectability, of "getting ahead," of stable family life, of initiative, of self-reliance, etc.-are, in themselves, raceless and even assimilationist. They urge us toward participation in the American mainstream, toward integration, toward a strong identification with the society-and toward the entire constellation of qualities that are implied in the word individualism. These values are almost rules for how to prosper in a democratic, free-enterprise society that admires and rewards individual effort. They tell us to work hard for ourselves and to seek our opportunities whenever they appear, inside or outside the confines of whatever ethnic group we may belong to.

But the particular pattern of racial identification that emerged in America in the 1960s and that still prevails today urges middleclass blacks (and all blacks) in the opposite direction. This pattern asks us to see ourselves as an embattled minority, and it urges an adversarial stance toward the mainstream, an emphasis on ethnic consciousness over individualism.

It is organized around an implied separatism.

The opposing thrust of these two parts of our identity results in the double bind of middle-class blacks. There is no forward movement on either plane that does not constitute bl;lckward movement on the other. This was the familiar trap I felt myself in while talking with my friend. As I spoke about class, his eyes reminded me that I was betraying race. Clearly, the two indispensable parts of my identity were a threat to each other.

Of course when you think about it, class and race are both similar in some ways and also naturally opposed. They are two forms of collective identity with boundaries that intersect. But whether they clash or peacefully coexist has much to do with how they are defined. Being both black and middle class becomes a double bind when class and race are defined in sharply antagonistic terms, so that one must be repressed to appease the other.

But what is the "substance" of these two identities, and how

does each establish itself in an individual's overall identity? It seems to me that when we identify with any collective we are basically identifying with images that tell us what it means to be a member of that collective. Identity is not the same thing as the fact of membership in a collective; it is, rather, a form of self-definition, facilitated by images of what we wish our membership in the collective to mean. In this sense, the images we identify with may reflect the aspirations of the collective more than they reflect reality, and their content can vary with shifts in those aspirations.

But the process of identification is usually dialectical. It is just as necessary to say what we are not as it is to say what we are-so that finally identification comes about by embracing both positive and negative images. To identify as middle class, for example, I must have both positive and negative images of what being middle class entails; then I will know what I should and should not be doing to be middle class. The same goes for racial identity.

In America's racially turbulent 1960s the polarity of images that came to define racial identification was very antagonistic to the polarity that defined middle-class identification. One might say that the positive images of one lined up with the negative images of the other, so that to identify with both required either a contortionist's flexibility or a dangerous splitting of the self. The double bind of the black middle class was in place.

The black middle class in the United States has always defined its class identity by means of positive images gleaned from middleand-upper class white society, and by means of negative images of lower-class blacks. This habit goes back to the institution of slavery itself, when "house" slaves both mimicked the whites they served and held themselves above the "field" slaves. But in the 1960s the old bourgeois impulse to dissociate from the lower classes (the "we-they" distinction) backfired when racial identity suddenly called for the celebration of this same black lower class.

One of the qualities of a double bind is that one feels it more than sees it, and I distinctly remember the tension and strange sense of dishonesty I felt in those days as I moved back and forth like a bigamist between the demands of class and race.

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hough my father was born poor, he achieved middle-class standing through much hard work and sacrifice (one of his favorite words) and by identifying fully with solid middleclass values-mainly hard work, family life, property ownership and education for his children (all four of whom have advanced degrees). In his mind these were not so much values as laws of nature. People who embodied them made up the positive images in his class polarity. The negative images came largely from the blacks he had left behind because they were "going nowhere."

No one in my family remembers how it happened, but as time went on, the negative images congealed into an imaginary character named Sam who, from the extensive service we put him to, quickly grew to mythic proportions.

In our family lore he was sometimes a trickster, sometimes a boob, but always possessed of a catalog of sly faults that gave up graphic images of everything we should not be. On sacrifice: "Sam never thinks about tomorrow.

He wants it now or he doesn't care about it." On work: "Sam doesn't favor it too much." On children: "Sam likes to have them but not to raise them." On money: "Sam drinks it up and pisses it out." On clothes: "Sam features loud clothes. He likes to see and be seen." And so on. Sam's persona amounted to a negative instruction manual in class identity.

None of us believed Sam's faults were accurate representations

of lower-class black life. He was an instrument of self-definition, not of sociological accuracy. It never occurred to us that he looked very much like the white racist stereotype of blacks, or that he might have been a manifestation of our own racial self-hatred. He simply gave us a counterpoint against which to express our aspirations. If self-hatred was a factor, it was not, for us, a matter of hating lower-class blacks but of hating what we did not want to be.

Still, hate or love aside, it is fundamentally true that my middleclass identity involved a dissociation from images of lower-class black life and a corresponding identification with values and patterns of responsibility that are common to the middle class everywhere. These values sent me a clear message: Be both an individual and a responsible citizen, understand that the quality of your life will approximately reflect the quality of effort you put into it, know that individual responsibility is the basis of freedom and that the limitations imposed by fate (whether fair or unfair) are no excuse for passivity.

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hether I live up to these values or not, I know my acceptance of them is the result of lifelong conditioning.

I know also that I share this conditioning with middleclass people of all races and that I can no more easily be free of it than I can be free of my race. Whether all this got started because the black middle class modeled itself on the white middle class is no longer relevant. For the middle-class black American, conditioned by these values, the sense of meaning they provide is as immutable as the color of his skin.

I started the 1960s in high school feeling that my classconditioning was the surest way to overcome racial barriers. My racial identity was pretty much taken for granted. After all, it was obvious to the world that I was black. Yet I ended the 1960s in graduate school a little embarrassed by my class background and with an almost desperate need to be "black." The tables had turned. I knew very clearly (though I struggled to repress it) that my aspirations and my sense of how to operate in the world came from my class background, yet "being black" required certain attitudes that made me feel secretly a little duplicitous. The inner compatibility of <:;lassand race I had known in 1960 was gone.

For black Americans, the decade of the 1960s saw racial identification undergo the same sort of transformation national identity undergoes in times of war. It became more self-conscious, more narrowly focused, more prescribed, less tolerant of opposition. It spawned an implicit party line, which tended to disallow competing forms of identity. Race-as-identity was lifted from the relative slumber it knew in the 1950s and pressed into service in a social and political war against oppression. It was redefined along sharp adversariallines and directed toward the goal of mobilizing the great mass of black Americans in this war-like effort. It was imbued with a strong moral authority, useful for denouncing those who opposed it and for celebrating those who honored it as a positive achievement rather than a mere birthright.

The form of racial identification that quickly evolved to meet this challenge presented blacks as a racial monolith, a singular people with a common experience of oppression. Differences within the race, no matter how ineradicable, had to be minimized.

Class distinctions were one of the first such differences to be sacrificed, since they not only threatened racial unity but also seemed to stand in contradiction to the principle of equality, which was the announced goal of the movement for racial progress. The discomfort I felt in 1969, the vague but relentless sense of duplicity,

was the result of a historical necessity that put my race and class at odds, that was asking me to cast aside the distinction of my class and identify with a monolithic view of my race.

If the form of this racial identity was the monolith, its substance was victimization. The civil-rights movement of the 1960s was dedicated to ending racial victimization in the United States, and the form of black identity that emerged to facilitate this goal made blackness and victimization virtually synonymous. Since it was our victimization more than any other variable that identified and unified us, moreover, it followed logically that the purest black was the poor black. It was images of him that clustered around the positive pole of the race polarity; all other blacks were, in effect, required to identify with him in order to confirm their own blackness.

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ertainly there were more dimensions to the black experience than victimization, but no other had the same capacity to fire the indignation needed for war. So, again out of historical necessity, victimization became the overriding focus of racial identity. But this only deepened the double bind for middle-class blacks like me. When it came to class we were accustomed to defining ourselves against lower-class blacks and identifying with at least the values of middle-class whites; when it came to race we were now being asked to identify with images oflower-class blacks and to see whites, middle-class or otherwise, as victimizers.

Negative lining up with positive, we were called upon to reject what we had previously embraced and to embrace what we had previously rejected.

The fact that the poor black's new status was only passively earned by the condition of his victimization, not by assertive, positive action, made little difference. Status was status apart from the means by which it was achieved, and along with it came a certain power-the power to define the terms of access to that status, to say who was black and who was not. If a lower-class black said you were not really "black"-a sell-out, an Uncle Tom-the judgment was all the more devastating because it carried the authority of his status. And this judgment soon enough came to be accepted by many whites as well.

In graduate school I was once told by a white professor, "Well, buL..you're not really black. I mean, you're not disadvantaged."

In his mind my lack of victim status disqualified me from the race itself. More recently, I was complimented by a black student for speaking reasonably correct English, "proper" English as he put it. "But I don't know if! really want to talk like that," he went on.

"Why not?" I asked. "Because then I wouldn't be black no more," he replied without a pause.

To overcome his marginal status, the middle-class black in America had to identify with a degree of victimization that was beyond his actual experience. In college (and well beyond) we used to playa game called "nap matching." It was a game of oneupmanship, in which we sat around outdoing each other with stories of racial victimization, symbolically measured by the naps of our hair. Most of us were middle class and so had few personal stories to relate, but if we could not match naps with our own biographies, we would move on to those legendary tales of victimization that came to us from the public domain.

Of course, these sessions were a ritual of group identification, a means by which we, as middle-class blacks, could be at one with our race. But why were we, who had only a moderate experience of victimiLation,so intent on assimilating or appropriating an identity that in so many ways contradicted our own? Because, I think, the sense

of innocence that is always entailed in feeling victimized filled us with a corresponding feeling of entitlement, or even license, that helped us endure our vulnerability on a largely white collegecampus.

In my junior year in college I rode to a debate tournament with three white students and our faculty coach. The experience of being the lone black in a group of whites was so familiar to me that I thought nothing of it as our trip began. But then halfway through the trip the professor casually turned to me and, in an isn't-theworld-funny sort of tone, said that he had just refused to rent an apartment in a house he owned to a "very nice" black couple because their color would "offend" the white couple who lived downstairs. His eyebrows lifted helplessly over his hawkish nos.e, suggesting that he too, like me, was a victim of America's racial farce. His look assumed a kind of comradeship: he and I were above this grimy business of race, though for expediency we had occasionally to concede the world its madness.

My vulnerability in this situation came not so much from the professor's blindness to his own racism as from his assumption that I would participate in it, that I would conspire with him against my own race so that he might remain comfortably blind.

Why did he think I would be amenable to this? I can only guess that he assumed my middle-class identity was so complete that I would see his action as nothing more than a trifling concession to the folkways of our land, that I would in fact applaud his decision not to disturb propriety. Blind to both his own racism and to meone blindness serving the other-he could not recognize that he was asking me to betray my race in the name of my class.

His blindness made me feel vulnerable because it threatened to expose my own repressed ambivalence. His comment pressured me to choose between my class identification, which had contributed to my being a college student and a member of the debating team, and my desperate desire to be "black." I could have one but not both; I was double-bound. ecausedouble binds are repressed there is always an element of terror in them: the terror of bringing to the conscious mind the buried duplicity, self-deception and pretense involved in s~rving two masters. This terror is the stuff ofvulnerability, and since vulnerability is one of the least tolerable of all human feelings, we usually transform it into an emotion that seems to restore the control of which it has robbed us; most often, that emotion is anger. And so, before the professor had even finished his little story, I had become a furnace of rage. The year was 1967, and I had been primed by endless hours of nap-matching to feel at least consciously, completely at one with the victim-focused black identity. This identity gave me the license, and the impunity, to unleash upon this professor one of those volcanic eruptions of racial indignation familiar to us from the novels of Richard Wright. Like Cross Damon in Outsider, who kills in perfectly righteous anger, I tried to annihilate the man. I punished him not according to the measure of his crime but according to the measure of my vulnerability, a measure set by the cumulative tension of years of repressed terror. Soon I saw that terror in his face, as he stared hollow-eyed at the road ahead. My white friends, knowing no conflict between their own class and race, were astonished that someone they had taken to be so much like themselves could harbor a rage that for all the world looked murderous.

Though my rage was triggered by the professor's comment, it was deepened by a complex of need, conflict and repression in myself of which I had been unaware. Out of my racial vulnerability

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I had developed the strong need of an identity with which to defend myself. The only such identity available was that of me as victim, him as victimizer. Once in the grip of this paradigm, I began to do far more damage to myself than he had done.

Seeing myself as a victim meant that I clung all the harder to my racial identity which, in turn, meant that I suppressed my class identity. This cut me off from all the resources my class values might have offered me. In those values, for instance, I might have found the means to a more dispassionate response, the response less of a victim attacked by a victimizer than of an individual offended by a foolish old man. As an individual I might have reported this professor to the college dean. Or I might have calmly tried to reveal his blindness to him, and possibly won a convert. Or I might have simply chuckled and then let my silence serve as an answer to his provocation. Would not my composure, in any form it might take, deflect into his own heart the arrow he had shot at me?

Instead, my anger, itself the expression of a long-repressed double bind, not only cut me off from the best of my own resources, it also distorted the nature of my true racial problem. The righteousness of this anger and the easy catharsis it brought buoyed the delusion of my victimization and left me as blind as the professor.

As a middle-class black I have often felt myself contriving to be "black." And I have noticed this same contrivance in others-a certain stretching away from the natural flow of one's life to align oneself with a victim-focused black identity. Our particular needs are out of sync with the form of identity available to meet those needs. Middle-class blacks in America need to identify racially; it is better to think of ourselves as black and victimized than not black at all; so we contrive to fit ourselves into an identity that denies our class and fails to address the true source of our vulnerability.

For me this once meant spending inordinate amounts of time at black faculty meetings, though these meetings had little to do with my real racial anxieties or my professional life. I was new to the university, one. of two blacks in an English department of over 70, and I felt a little isolated and vulnerable, though I did not admit it to myself. But at these meetings we discussed the problems of black faculty and students within a framework of victimization.

The real vulnerability we felt was covered over by all the adversarial drama the victim/victimized polarity inspired, and hence went unseen and unassuaged. And this, I think, explains our rather chronic ineffectiveness as a group. Since victimization was not our primary problem-the university had long ago opened its doors to us-we had to contrive to make it so, and there is not much energy in contrivance. What I got at these meetings was ultimately an object lesson in how fruitless struggle can be when it is not grounded in actual need.

At our black faculty meetings, the old equation of blackness with victimization was ever present-to be black was to be a victim; therefore not to be a victim was not to be black. As we contrived to meet the terms of this formula there was an inevitable distortion of both ourselves and the larger university. Through the prism of victimization the university seemed more impenetrable

Shelby Steele is an associate professor of English at San Jose State University in California. He has published fiction , essays and critical articles in several journals. He is currently at work on a collection of essays on race.

than it actually was, and we more limited in our powers. We fell prey to the victim's myopia, making the university an institution from which we could seek redress but which we could never fully join. And this mind-set often led us to look more for compensations for our supposed victimization than for opportunities we could pursue as individuals.

The discomfort and vulnerability felt by middle-class black Americans in the 1960s, it could be argued, was a worthwhile price to pay considering the progress achieved during that time of racial confrontation.

But what may have been tolerable then is intolerable now. Though changes in American society have made it an anachronism, the monolithic form of racial identification that came out of the 1960s is still very much with us. It may be more loosely held, and its power to punish heretics has probably diminished, but it continues to catch n:iddle-class blacks in a double bind, thus impeding not only their own advancement but even, I would contend, that of blacks as a group.

!

hevictim-focused black identity encourages the individual to feel that his advancement depends almost entirely on that of the group. Thus he loses sight not only of his own possibilities but of the inextricable connection between individual effort and individual advancement. This is a profound encumbrance today, when there is more opportunity for blacks in America than ever before, for it reimposes limitations that can have the same oppressive effect as those the society has only recently begun to remove.

It was the emphasis on mass action in the 1960s that made the victim-focused black identity a necessity. But in the 1980s and beyond, when racial advancement will come only through a multitude of individual advancements, this form of identity inadvertently adds itself to the forces that hold us back. Hard work, education, individual initiative, stable family life, property ownership-these have always been the means by which ethnic groups have moved ahead in America. Regardless of past or present victimization, these "laws" of advancement apply absolutely to black Americans also.

There is no getting around this. What we need is a form of racial identity that energizes the individual by putting him in touch with both his possibilities and his responsibilities.

It has always annoyed me to hear from the mouths of certain arbiters of blackness that middle-class blacks should "reach back" and pull up those blacks less fortunate than they-as though middle-class status were an unearned and essentially passive condition in which one needed a large measure of noblesse oblige to occupy one's time. My own image is of reaching back from a moving train to lift on board those who have no tickets. A noble enough sentiment-but might it not be wiser to show them the entire structure of principles, effort and sacrifice that puts one in a position to buy a ticket any time one likes? This, I think, .is something members of the black middle class can realistically offer to other blacks. Their example is not only a testament to possibility but also a lesson in method. But they cannot lead by example until they are released from a black identity that regards that example as suspect, that sees them as "marginally" black, indeed that holds them back by catching them in a double bind.

To move beyond the victim-focused black identity we black Americans must learn to make a difficult but crucial distinction: between actual victimization, which we must resist with every resource, and identification with the victim's status. Until we do this we will continue to wrestle more with ourselves than with the new opportunities which so many paid so dearly to win.

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Remembering a Pioneer Through his business acumen, integrity and honesty, R~mdoolal Dey laid the foundations oflndo-U.S. trade 200 years ago.

R.

ecently, two Americans, James W. Whitehead and Jack W. Warner, made a brief tour of India on the invitation of the American Institute of Indian Studies to pay homage to the memory of the 18th-century Bengali merchant, Ramdoolal Dey, who almost single-handedly laid the foundations for trade ties between India and the United States.

Whitehead is the director of the Reeves Center for Research and Exhibition of Porcelain and Painting at Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Virginia. Warner, a leading collector of American art, is chairman of the Board of Gulf States Paper Corporation in Tuscaloosa, Alabama.

"The East has always fascinated me," said Whitehead. "And as a student of art I have often marveled at ancient oriental art. At the center, we have some 2,000 exquisite pieces of Chinese ceramic art, bought by American traders whose ships plied between the United States and the Far East via India in the 18th century."

Whitehead's interest in India emanated from a painting of George Washington at the Reeves Center, donated to the center

by Warner. "I must confess here," Whitehead said, "that more than the painting-which is indeed beautiful-it was the story behind it that impressed and moved me. The painting was specially commissioned by a group oflate 18th-century Yankee traders for presentation to Ramdoolal Dey of Calcutta as their tribute for his pioneering role in establishing trade between our two nations.

And when I read Dey's life story, I was indeed touched by this unlettered man who rose to dizzying heights by sheer dint of business acumen and, more importantly, by his honesty and integri ty."

So moved was Whitehead in fact that he founded the Ramdoolal Dey Society to keep Dey's memory alive. And Whitehead's son, Paul, who has been associated with the London Symphony Orchestra and Royal Philharmonic Orchestra in the United Kingdom, and leading orchestras in the United States, has composed a piece of music titled, "The Ramdoolal Dey March."

The story of Ramdoolal Dey, whose sons were described as the

Rothschilds of Bengal by The Times of London, makes fascinating reading indeed.

During the mid-18th century, a wealthy Bengali, Madan Mohan Dutta, was engaged in extensive export-import trade, and had in his employment an ayah with a teenage son, Ramdoolal Dey. Responding to her entreaties, Dutta also employed the son as a bill collector at Rs. 5 a month.

As part of his job, writes Madan Mohan Kumar in his book Ramdoolal Dey: Pioneer of Indo-U.S. Trade, Dey often had to travel long distances on foot, sometimes as much as 50 kilometers, to collect payments from his employer's clients. Once, late in the day, he collected some money from a Briton in Barrackpore, about 35 kilometers from Calcutta. Afraid to walk all the way back home in the dark lest he be waylaid by robbers, he spent the night on the pavement, money rolled in his shirt which he used as a pillow, and began his trek to Calcutta at sunrise. Because of Dey's integrity and diligence, Dutta promoted him to the position of "ship sircar" (dock liaison officer) and doubled his salary to Rs. lOa month.

Kumar's book is replete with such instances. One day, Dutta gave Dey Rs. 14,000 to buy some goods at an auction on Old Court House Street, then Calcutt~'s commercial district. But by the time he reached the place, the auction was over. The young man turned to watching another auction nearby and overheard that a sandbar in the Hooghly River had wrecked a ship. Learning that the sunken ship and its cargo were to be auctioned, Dey rushed to the site and, without his employer's knowledge or authorization, bid all of the Rs. 14,000 and bagged the treasure.

As he was signing the documents to take possession of the ship and its cargo, a British businessman came up to him and offered Rs. 114,000 for the salvage. It was a fabulous sum. Dey accepted the offer and, with a profit of Rs. 100,000 in his pocket, returned to the office and told his employer the entire story. Dutta was so overwhelmed by his enterprise and rectitude that he made him a gift of the entire profit-Rs. 100,000-and advised him to launch a business of his own.

That is how Ramdoolal Dey came to set himself up in business in 1775 at Jhe age of 23. Within a few years, he was the owner of four ships, and was engaged in trade with a number of countries.

His commercial empire, with branch offices in Singapore, Hong Kong and Rangoon, straddled all of eastern Asia. He also gave away large sums to build temples and help the poor.

Significantly, Dey never forgot his benefactor. On payday every month for the rest of his life--even when he was at the peak of his success-he would humbly enter Dutta's office, leaving his shoes outside in obeisance, and collect his salary after signing the payroll.

"Ramdoolal Dey was intimately connected with the prosperous trade with the United States," writes Dr. John Reid, a¡ cultural attache at the American Embassy in India in the early 1960s, in his book Bridges of Understanding. According to Reid, Dey acted as agent for several large firms in Boston and New York, and "assisted many a sea captain by advancing credit and selecting the choicest cargoes for them to carry home to the new republic."

As a tribute to this pioneer ofTndo-U.S. trade, says Reid in his book, "One American shipowner named a vessel after him ....

Another and more striking way in which his American friends expressed their regard for the Calcutta merchant was a cooperative gift. Some 35 merchants in Boston, New York, Salem, Marblehead and Philadelphia contributed money to commission a life-size portrait of George Washington; some attribute the work

Left: This portrait of George Washington was presented to Ramdoolal Dey in 1801 by an admiring group of American traders. Above: Jack Warner (left), a collector of American art, and James Whitehead (right), director of Reeves Center at Washington and Lee University, were recently in India where they gave lectures tracing the history of Indo-U.S. relations with particular reference to Ramdoolal Dey.

to the noted American painter Gilbert Stuart."

The painting was presented to Dey in 180 I. However, bad times fell on Dey's descendants, and a grandson was constrained to sell the magnificent Washington portrait to a member of the wealthy Mullick family of Calcutta at the end of the 19th century.

After remaining in Calcutta, in the homes of six generations of Indians, the painting, according to Kumar, was bought by an American, Eric Kauders, for Rs. 90,000, and returned to the United States, where it resided at the Herschel and Adler Art Gallery in New York.

That is where Jack Warner first encountered the painting. "As soon as I saw the portrait, I set my sights on acquiring it," he said.

"I talked to Norman Herschel, and finally bought it from him for $250,000 in May 1980." Warner, whose collection of more than 600 paintings includes about 150 works by such famous artists as Thomas Cole, Fred Church, Asher B. Durand and Mary Cassat, immediately presented the painting to Washington and Lee University.

In 1985 the painting came back to India. When John Gunther Dean was named U.S. Ambassador to India that year, his daughter-in-law, who worked for an art gallery and had seen the portrait, told him about it. Dean resolved to bring it with him to India when he assumed his ambassadorial duties. The university agreed to the loan, and Ambassador Dean ceremonially unveiled the historic painting at Roosevelt House, his official residence in New Delhi, in January 1986 (see SPAN February 1986).

"I am glad that the painting is back, at least for a while, where it belongs," said Whitehead, for whom the portrait is a reminder of the historic links between the two nations and a symbol of present

relations. Echoing similar sentiments, Warner, who spent six months in India as a first lieutenant during World War II, said, "When I got this chance to visit India, I was thrilled. I'm 70 and thought that this is perhaps my last chance to renew my contacts with India and see the vast changes that have taken place since I was last here almost 50 years ago."

To promote Indo-U.S. relations in myriad fields is, in fact, the aim of the Ramdoolal Dey Society founded by Whitehead. Its members include American governors, a recent member of the U.S. Supreme Court, Ambassador and Mrs. Dean, Warner and a number of other¡ distinguished Americans from various walks of life. "My aim in founding the society was to pay tribute to the man by continuing the process of building closer ties between India and the United States that Ramdoolal Dey began almost 200 years ago," said Whitehead.

While in India, Whitehead gave lectures in Calcutta, Madras and New Delhi. In Calcutta, where he met a descendant of Ramdoolal Dey, he enrolled several more members to the society, including this writer. The induction ceremony comprised the "garlanding" of the new members with a colorfully designed "vestment" in red, white and blue, America's national colors.The rules are few: The society meets once every four years-the year when a new American President assumes office; it has no formal constitution, nor membership fee.

"It has been a moving experience to be in Calcutta where Ramdoolal Dey had his home," Whitehead said. "I was particularly glad to meet one of his descendants."

Before Whitehead and Warner left for the United States, they expressed the hope that, in the years to come, the society will become a major catalyst "in bringing the two nations ever closer 0 together."

Magnificent Voyagers

by THOMAS HARNEY

This year America celebrates the 150th anniversary of its first official exploring expedition which, as a scientific and technological/eat, "can be rivaled today only by the landing 0/ man on the moon. "

Lieutenant Charles Wilkes of the American Navy commanded the 1838 U.S. South Seas Exploring Expedition.

To celebrate his discovery of the Antarctic Continent, Wilkes rendered a painting of the expedition's flagship, the Vincennes (left), while there.

A

ll was in readiness at Hampton Roads, Virginia, on the afternoon of August 18, 1838.Just as the wind rose and the tide began to ebb, the signal "prepare to weigh" was run aloft from the Vincennes, the squadron flagship. Orders were shouted, boatswains' whistles sounded and crew members took their stations. The sails dropped and the six vessels of the United States Exploring Expedition were off.

Their mission: to explore and chart the little known and dangerous coasts, islands, harbors, shoals and reefs of the South Seas.

As an adventure saga, their four-year, 140,000-kilometer journey was a classic, making the fictional adventures ofIndiana Jones pale by comparison. Recently, Americans were able to relive the thrills of this expedition in a year-long exhibition, "The Magnificent Voyagers: The U.S. Exploring Expedition, 1838-1842," at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C. "As a scientific and technological achievement, the U.S. Exploring Expedition can be rivaled today only by the landing of the first man on the moon," Smithsonian historian Herman Viola, head of the exhibition comfnittee, says.

The expedition's legacy was indeed immense. Led by the dashing Lieutenant Charles Wilkes, the explorers accurately

charted for the first time large portions of the Pacific Ocean, including the Hawaiian and Fiji Islands. The expedition also officially established the Antarctic landmass as a continent. In all, the explorers produced 241 maps and charts, some in use as late as World War II. Scientifically, the journey produced unprecedented collections and 19 volumes of reports and atlases, which stand as a landmark in the emergence of the United States into international science. Of more than 4,000 zoological specimens, nearly 2,000 were new to science. Fifty thousand plant specimens, including thousands of new species, were collected. Among the geologic treasures were gems from Peru and Chile, and important fossils from Oregon and Australia. Some 3,000 anthropological artifacts, including priceless masks, weapons and everyday objects, comprise one of the most important and earliest American collections from the Pacific and the North American West Coast.

In 1857, the collections were turned over to the fledgling Smithsonian Institution.

Today, the incomparable treasures of the U.S. Exploring Expedition are the core of the National Museum of Natural History's renowned natural history and anthropology reference collections.

The expedition's roots, Viola says, reach

This sketch of a New Zealand Maori chief, with elaborately painted face and wearing a finely woven flaxen cloak, was made by an artist on the expedition during a visit to the country.

back to 1818, when an ex-captain of the U.S. Army declared that the Earth was hollow and could be entered through holes in the poles. Motions in the U.S. Congress to launch an expedition to test the new "theory" soon fizzled.

However, it was on May 14, 1836, that President Andrew Jackson authorized $300,000 for a United States South Seas Exploring Expedition. Thus was born the first "National Expedition." In the end, the trip cost $928,183, a vast sum for those days.

Planning hit a snag, however, when no one in the navy's senior ranks would accept the command. The Secretary of War offered the command to 40-year-old Lieutenant Wilkes who had relatively little sea experience but much scientific expertise in

The exploring mission charted for the first time large portions of the Pacific Ocean, including the Hawaiian Islands and Fiji Islands. This engraving shows expedition commander Wilkes and his crew being entertained by Fijians with a club dance.

surveying, chart-making and astronomy.

The volatile, self-confident Wilkes was not popular with his crew, and "broils and contentions" marred the voyage. Wilkes wasalso a strict taskmaster. Each morning, the crew lined up on deck. Peering through his eyeglass, Wilkes would shout, "That third man, his legs are dirty, sir! Look at the lubber's neckerchief! The next man's head has not been combed!"

Yet even those who admired him least testified to his towering talents and industry. "The number of hours [Wilkes] spent without sleep was extraordinary," the ship's surgeon noted. Wilkes was, Viola says, a "man with a mission."

The expedition proceeded to the Madeira and Cape Verde Islands, then sailed down the South American coast to Tierra del Fuego near Cape Horn. There, Wilkes's first effort to explore Antarctic waters was thwarted by gale-force winds and pea-soup fogs. But Wilkes saw enough indications of land to pique his curiosity for a later attempt.

His squadron was to reunite in Valparaiso, Chile, but one ship disappeared en route, the victim of the treacherous Cape waters. The squadron was further reduced when Wilkes ordered the expedition's supply ship home because it was too slow.

The glamour of the mission waned as reality set in aboard the small wooden vessels-stale food, brackish water, claustrophobic cabins. After almost a year at sea, the expedition reached the first coral islands, the Tuamotu group, where the surveying mission began. Then, in Tahiti and Samoa, the nine scientists on board,

known as the Scientifics, had their first opportunity to sample comprehensively the teeming life of the sea and the islands.

The artists who accompanied them gave the world its first look at these new lands.

Australia and New Zealand were next on the tour. The Scientifics spent two months exploring the largely unknown Australian continent. Meanwhile, Wilkes set out for Antarctica. On January 19, 1840, land was reported. A jubilant Wilkes later declared, "There is no mistake about it"-he had "discovered the Antarctic continent," the name he awarded it. The commander unbent with a "treat of champagne" for all the officers except those who had been heard to agree that "he was too damned lucky a fellow."

For two months, the explorers surveyed 2,400 kilometers of Antarctic coast-an area known to this day as Wilkesland. This was the expedition's most spectacular achievement, since most people had doubted the existence of a South Pole continent.

The expedition warmed to its task at the next stop, the Fiji Islands. Wilkes's crew surveyed the area, correcting many errors on existing charts, while the Scientifics collected one of the most important Fijian ethnographic collections ever assembled; an astonishing array of fauna and flora, including 118 new species of coral, and a number of new plants and vertebrate animals.

On the Fijis, known as the "Cannibal Islands," hostile natives had earlier killed dozens of stranded, shi pwrecked American sailors. As part of the expedition's informal command to make the Pacific safer for

American seamen, Wilkes directed the capture of Vendovi, a Fijian chief who had ordered the murder of American seamen.

He died aboard the Vincennes before the vessel reached America.

Following the traumas of Fiji, the friendlier shores of Hawaii beckoned. There, they made the first accurate studies of the active volcanoes Kilauea and Mauna Loa. The squadron's next rendezvous was the mouth of the Columbia River on the northwest American coast. 'Sadly, one of the ships foundered while attempting to enter the river. The crew survived, but the ship and its scientific collections were lost. Undaunted, the explorers put together the first accurate maps of the Oregon territory.

At last, after four years in exotic lands and with major scientific treasures in their holds, the expedition crossed the Pacific once more and returned home.

"Yet, instead of a hero's welcome," Viola says, "the explorers returned to New York on June 10, 1842, to find a new President, an unfriendly Congress, a seemingly disinterested public and even a series of courts-martial, the result of trivial charges exchanged between Wilkes and several of his junior officers.

"Although the explorers may not have been heroes in their day," Viola says, "the achievements of the expedition were heroic, and the nation was the beneficiary. Their legacy, though only recognized after many years, was America's passport to respect in the world intellectual community."

0 About the Author: Thomas Harney is a writer with the Smithsonian News Service.

ยง!!!~t Exchanges The Sugarcane Breeding Institute at Coimbatore, which recently celebrated its platinum jubilee, has played a pioneering role in making India the world's largest producer of sugarcane. Its hybrid strains are used in more than 20 countries, including the United States.

Above: In vitro experiments for storage of sugarcane germplasm and clonal propagation are currently under way at the Coimbatore institute. Above right: A suction machine is used to collect insects from sugarcane fields to study insect predation.

Right: Polyethylene lanterns protect female plants from contamination and help in controlled hybridization.

then plant kingdom, sugarcane is known as a reluctant debutant. But this fact is difficult to believe as one looks around the Sugarcane Breeding Institute of Coimbatore in Tamil Nadu. Sugarcane, in different stages of development, is all around-and inside the building there is intense work under way on developing more and improved varieties.

In fact, far from being "reluctant," the sugarcane here is more likelyto spring a pleasant surprise. "This variety doesn't flower, but it is flowering," exclaims an institute worker stopping to stare at a rare bloom on one variety.

Coimbatore's wonder varieties-more than 2,400 at last count-have not only helped India become the world's largest producer of sugarcane, but are also being used in several other countries today. The institute is universally recognized for its contributions to producing improved hybrid varieties of sugarcane.

As a tribute to this pioneering work, sugarcane scientists from all over the world, including the United States, attended the Coimbatore institute's recent platinum jubilee celebrations. Describingthe institute as "outstanding," Paul H. Moore, a plant. physiologistfrom the United States Department of Agriculture's Agricultural Research Service (ARS), said, "It has been a leader for 75 years in developing superior sugarca'ne varieties for India and the rest of the world. It is an honor to be invited to present one of the lead papers at the symposium held during thecelebrations."

According to Thomas Eugene Reagan, another American delegate,"The Coimbatore institute plays a vital role in worldwidesugarcane research. It is my assessment that much of their researchis on the leading edge of sugarcane technology."

Relaxing under the shade of a gulmohar tree in the campus, Reagan talked of the Indo-American sugarcane connection. A professorin the department of entomology at the Louisiana State University,Reagan said that Louisiana has a long memory for an olddebt it owes India. "Some decades ago when a disease ravaged thesugarcane fields of Louisiana, it was a hybrid variety from the Coimbatore institute that saved the local farmers from going out of business," he said.

In the 1920s, diseases and rot destroyed the Saccharum officinarum variety of sugarcane which had sustained the Louisiana sugar industry from the mid-1700s. After briefly trying out a varietyfrom Java, Louisiana turned to Coimbatore for help. The Indian institute released two varieties, both of them instantly popular with Louisiana sugarcane growers. "One," writes ARS researchleader Richard Breaux in the souvenir book published to commemorate the institute's platinum jubilee, "was so well adapted to the area that it was more prized by growers in that regionthan any variety that preceded it, and perhaps as much as anyvariety released since." In later years, Louisiana started using sugarcane varieties from Canal Point (CP), Florida. But, as Breauxpoints out, "Ten of the first 18 CP varieties released for commercial culture had Co 281 [a Coimbatore hybrid] as their femaleparent. Louisiana still relies heavily on the profuse tillering, earlymaturing, and disease and stress resistance of S. spontaneum, inherited through the Coimbatore varieties."

The Indo-American sugarcane connection did not end with the Louisianastory. The Coimbatore institute has had four projects in

I

About the Authors: John Ojha is a former tea planter and agriculturist in Coimbatore and Cherry, his wife, is afree-lance

writer.

collaboration with the U.S. Department of Agriculture, beginning in 1963. The basic objective of the projects has been to impart resistance from Indian S. spontaneum to hybrid sugarcane varieties from Hawaii and Puerto Rico, and utilize the genetic stock for evolving improved strains.

For the first project (1963-68), 85 multiresistant lines were developed for use in sugarcane breeding programs in both countries. Sixty-three elite Indo-American clones with various degrees of resistance were selected for research in the second Indo-U.S. project (1968-73). There was a ten-year gap before the third bilateral project got under way. Between 1983and 1987more than 1,000 sugarcane seedlings were selected for evaluation.

Work on the fourth project is currently under way. Meanwhile, clones and strains developed in the first three projects are being used extensively both in India and the United States.

These bilateral projects are just part of the research being undertaken at the Coimbatore institute, which has 75 scientists and 78 technicians. A recent international survey, conducted in the United States on the input-output ratio and cost-benefit ratio through research in agricultural crops in research institutions, put the Coimbatore Sugarcane Breeding Institute right on top for its research on improved hybrid sugarcane varieties.

Such honors and compliments are not new to the institute. Sixty years ago, Lord Irwin, the Viceroy ofIndia, remarked after a visit here, "I have not so far seen anything so wonderful as this." He ordered that all sugarcane growers in India visit "this Mecca of sugarcane." Impressed by the stupendous increase in sugarcane production because of the work done at the institute, the then Governor of Madras, Lord Wellingdon, remarked that T.S. Venkataraman, the scientist at the helm of affairs there at that time, was doing "a wonderful job."

It was Venkataraman, in fact, who turned the institute from an early failure to an international success.

Relating the story of the institute and the "sugarcane wizard" Venkataraman, J. Thuljaram Rao, retired director of the institute and an FAO (U.N. Food and Agricultural Organization) adviser, writes, "Sugarcane is a tropical plant. [But] it is a historical anomaly in India that, from times immemorial, the indigenous sugarcane varietie's were being grown in. the subtropical IndoGangetic plains with its rigors of severe summer and winter conditions which inhibit the growth of the crop. The varieties were very low in yield of cane. Thus, at the beginning of this century, India was importing almost all of its requirements of sugar, mainly from Java, draining the exchequer. Pandit Madan Mohan Malaviya agitated in the legislature that something be done to save the [Indian] sugar industry from possible extinction."

As a result of this realization, the Sugarcane Breeding Station, as it was then called, was set up at Coimbatore in 1912, with two scientists-C.A. Barber as the expert and Venkataraman as his assistant. The station was the first in the world to work on evolving improved hybrid sugarcane varieties for subtropical conditions.

The other two existing institutions (in Java and Barbados) were solely devoted to developing strains for tropical conditions.

The two scientists' first attempts at crossing tropical sugarcane with indigenous north Indian strains were dismal failures. Rao describes an hour before dawn for the two trailblazers: "While in a dejected mood, they discovered the wild species of sugarcane, S. spontaneum, on the channel bunds adjoining the institute and the idea flashed to utilize it in breeding to evolve the much-needed hardy varieties for the subtropical belt." Though now a common

practice, that was the first time the concept of utilizing a wild species for improv~ment of cultivated crops was put into effect anywhere in the world. Rao continues, "When the seedlings of the first cross with wild species were obtained, they all looked like ordinary grass. Barber ordered them to be discarded. It was left to the common sense ofVenkataraman to salvage the seedlings, and out came the first batch of hybrid sugarcane varieties."

The new strain proved a remarkable success in north India, recording a 50 percent increase in yield over the earlier varieties.

Another hybrid proved as successful. Venkataraman, who took over as the institute's head when Barber retired in 1918, now decided to try a three-species combination-another first. The varieties that resulted from this revolutionized sugarcane cultivation in the subtropical belt forever.

It is because of Venkataraman's genius that several sugarcane varieties currently being grown all over the world use the Coimbatore strains as their base because of their general adaptability in addition to their better yield and sugar content.

The impact of the institute's work on the Indian sugarcane industry was phenomenal. Within a decade of its inception, the area under sugarcane went up and the productivity increased, doubling the country's production of sugar. As more sugar factories started, not only imports lessened but India also started exporting-Cuba and the United States were the first foreign countries to receive Coimbatore varieties. In 1927 Coimbatore's famous first hybrid was sent to Florida.

For his pioneering role, Venkataraman, who served the institute for 30 years, was honored with titles, a knighthood and, after retirement, the Padma Bhushan. The leadership and momentum that he provided helped the institute take giant strides, making India the world's top sugarcane producer.

The Indian share in the total world production of sugarcane today is 23 percent. In 1986-87 the country also became the world's top producer of white sugar, a position it had earlier held in 198182. Out of the world's total centrifugal sugar production of about 100 million tons (raw value), India's contribution is about nine¡ million tons. In addition, India produces about eight million tons of noncentrifugal sugar-gur and khandsari. In no other country is sugarcane, the basic raw material, utilized for the production of noncentrifugal sugar to the extent that it is in India. The nation also has the largest area under sugarcane-25 percent of the total cultivated area.

These statistics are as much a pointer to India's position on the world sugar map as to the success and growth of the Coimbatore institute.

The institute's work is all the more commendable when one realizes the time and effort it takes to evolve a hybrid sugarcane variety. "From the date of crossing to the final selection takes about 13 to 14 years for comScientists measure photosynthesis and stomatal conductance of plants in a sugarcane field in Hawaii. Such studies help in planning for increased productivity and improved varieties.

plete evaluation," says Director K. Mohan Naidu. This lab to land journey involves selection of parents, crossing, seedling evolution, transplantation to field nurseries and then long-term evaluations (ranging from two to three years) in different climatic conditions.

After all this, in the final stage the hybrid canes are tested in collaboration with sugarcane research stations of Indian agricultural universities and state governments at 46 field centers for productivity, pest resistance and other factors. It is only after they have passed these tests that the plants are selected and released for commercial cultivation.

In addition to the main campus at Coimbatore, the institute has a regional station at Karnal in Haryana, a research center at Cannanore in Kerala and four location centers in Bihar, Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka and Tamil Nadu. The objectives of the institute, which has been under the administrative control of the Indian Council of Agricultural Research since 1969 and has an annual budget of more than Rs. 12 million (1986-87), now extend beyond evolving improved varieties of sugarcane. It conducts research on various aspects of sugarcane breeding and varietal evolution. In collaboration with the Tamil Nadu Agricultural University, the institute offers a postgraduate degree program leading to an MSc in sugar production. It also offers research facilities, guidance and training to its own staff as well as candidates deputed from government offices who may be pursuing a postgraduate degree in any university in the country.

The institute's international status is also reflected in the fact of it being one of the two world centers for the maintenance of sugarcane germplasm; the other one is at Canal Point, Florida.

The Indian collection of germplasm, duplicating the original collection in Florida, was established with American aid in 1956.

Housed at the research center in Cannanore, the collection, which now consists of more than 4,000 hybrid strains, is a valuable storehouse of genes which are systematically exploited in sugarcane breeding programs in India and other countries. The collection of germplasm is a continuing process; the U.S. Department of Agriculture regularly sends samples to Cannan ore.

The germplasm collection came in for special commendation during the'platinum jubilee celebrations. Don Heinz, head of the ARS Experiment Station in Honolulu, said that his station has been increasing its annual yield steadily by "relying on the germplasm pool available to all breeders."

The jubilee celebrations led to an interesting exchange of ideas among the assembled .experts. Paul Moore, who was so impressed by the work he saw at the institute, ~aid, "I would love to come back with sufficient time to get involved in the research activities here. Several of the scientists at the Coimbatore institute are working on projects that paral!el thos~ in my laboratory [at Honolulu] and I am sure we have something to offer each other."

At 75, the Coimbatore institute, which can be justly proud of its many achievements, retains its pioneering zeal to meet the challenges of the 21st century. As Director Naidu says in the foreword to the souvenir book, "This celebration is a time for rejoicing and recollection of the achievements made by our scientists vis-a-vis the tides of change from a small beginning to a well organized research organization of international reputation.

It is also a time to peep into the future opportunities to meet challenges and to fulfill the future sugar needs of the country," and, as the institute's history proves, of the world.

D

Private Wealth for Public Good American cities are increasingly linking approval of developers' plans for projects in booming downtown areas to agreements that builders help finance social programs such as housing and jobs for the poor.

The crunch of vanishing federal funds forurban development is forcing a growing number of American cities to look elsewhere for financing their social programs.

And one new treasure trove that they have discovered is downtown developers. More and more American cities are linking approval of developers' plans to their agreeing to help finance urban social programs.

It is the cities' attempt to share the profits of their prospering sectors with their poor.

Until a few years ago, only a few growth cities with aggressive mayors and petulant neighborhood groups pursued linkage. But today, the movement is spreading rapidly-from San Francisco, California, to Richmond, Virginia, from Boston, Massachusetts, to Shreveport, Louisiana. Dozens of cities are flexing their muscles, forcing builders to contribute to efforts to create housing, jobs, training and child care for the poor.

No mayor contends that linkage will solve deep-seated urban poverty or recapture, in money terms, anything more than a smidgen of lost federal aid. "But it sure beats just sitting on your hands and complaining," said Boston Mayor Raymond L. Flynn.

Downtown builders are the most visible early target of emerging city strategies to tap private resources for urban needs.

Mayors stress that linkage is not a throwback to the antibusiness sentiment that prevailed in some cities during the 1960s.

On the contrary, for linkage to work, the private sector must be prospering.

Nonetheless, many developers are skeptical, some openly hostile. A few have challenged linkage measures in court.

Amid cries of "public interest extortion," some developers assert that heavy-handedness by the cities threatens urban revival.

Still, there's no evidence yet that builders are passing up opportunities for profits

II

Top: The renovated wharf area on the Boston waterfront has become~ a site of offices and apartments offering front door parking for cars and boats. Above: Boston's activist Mayor Raymond L. Flynn.

because of linkage. Begrudgingly, most American developers are accepting the practice as a cost of doing business in a city.

Linkage comes in all shapes and sizes, depending on a city's economy and special needs, its political style and the creativity of the mayor and urban planning officials.

Some cities wield a heavy stick, but most couple their social requirements with various carrots. Sometimes, the concessions are demanded only of developers who benefit from tax and financing incentives or use city land; other cities apply the requirements to all developers who want to build in certain areas of the city. Generally, the more attractive the project from the developer's point of view, the more likely it is that the city will try to secure some wider social benefit.

The most publicized--and controversial-linkage policies are "exactions."

These city laws require developers to pay for social needs as a quid pro quo of building approval, usually by assessing fees for each square meter of building area, which go into city trust funds for subsi-

dized housing and other programs.

But most cities have eschewed exactions in favor of another form of linkage-"negotiated development." Typically, city officials sit down with builders before their projects are undertaken and hammer out social concessions. Sometimes, cities even reward "socially conscious" builders with expedited permit approval or more liberal height, density and other zoning specifications.

In negotiated development, virtually any city need is fair game for barter. Shreveport, for instance, commonly swaps lowinterest public financing for commitments to hire the unemployed and, in one instance, agreed to run a sewer line to a firm in exchange for its promise to hire low- and moderate-income workers for half its jobs. San Antonio, Texas, negotiated with the builders of downtown Hyatt hotel to give a percentage of the equity to a Hispanic community group. Hartford, Connecticut, has exchanged tax incentives for a share of developers' profits and, in one case, exchanged tax breaks for ownership of the land on which a project was built and eventual ownership of the buildings themselves. Los Angeles, California, even traded the rights to construct a $1,900 million commercial complex for an art museum to be built by the developers.

"The philosophy is simple," Flynn said.

"We have to be sure the growth of downtown is shared with people who have traditionally been left behind. We're still seeking growth," he added, "but with justice."

While federal spending cutbacks have ignited the linkage movement all over the United States, in many communities the spark has come from neighborhood groups. They complain bitterly that downtown growth never trickles down to poor neighborhoods festering in the shadows of shiny new downtown complexes.

"Boston has one of the strongest economies in the world, but it's like Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities," said Bruce C. Bolling, Boston City Council president. "It's the best of times-unprecedented growth, developers tripping all over themselves to develop in Boston. Yet it's also the worst of times-working-c1ass neighborhoods have literally been bypassed."

Few cities have embraced linkage as aggressively as Boston has (see box page 42). Other U.S. cities in the forefront of the movement include Hartford, Miami, San Francisco, Santa Monica and Seattle.

Philadelphia is among cities that have

negotiated "first-source contracts" with builders who benefit from public development incentives. These commit the developer to go through the city employment department when recruiting workers for all entry-level permanent jobs in the new complexes and, in some cases, commit the tenants to do the same thing. The same device has been used in Dallas, Denver, Little Rock, Miami, Pittsburgh, Portland, St. Louis, St. Paul, and Washington, D.C. In Detroit, as well as in Atlanta, Boston, Washington, D.C., and a few other cities, ordinances require all developers who accept city contracts or public financing assistance to hire a percentage of city residents, minorities and women to work on the projects.

"Every city will weave its own cloth," said Steven Coyle, director of the Boston Redevelopment Authority. "The key is for a community to recognize its unique strengths and powers that can be used as bargaining chips .... Even in the era of New Federalism, even in the climate of GrammRudman [budget cuts], cities still set therules for growth. It's important for cities to expand the development debate beyond height, mass, use of building and access to roadways."

Until the late 1970s, city dealings with builders focused almost exclusively on those physical aspects of development.

Since World War II, American developers have had to help finance sidewalks, streets, schools and parks in new subdivisions. By the late 1960s, many cities had begun negotiating with builders for design¡ considerations and amenities-open spaces, treelined plazas and arcades.

The linkages became more socially oriented during the Carter Administration under the Housing and Urban Development Department's (HUD) administration of the urban development action grant program (UDAG). The program requires public-private partnerships in the projects that it finances. "HUD made it clear to cities that how well they linked [neighborhood development with] big downtown development projects would be a factor upon which competing UDAG applications would be judged," said Richard C.D. Fleming, former HUD deputy assistant secretary for community development.

But even as cities were learning to barter with builders, exactions were making headlines. Since 1981, Santa Monica has required large developers to contribute to a housing fund, and San Francisco office

builders have been required, as a condition of building downtown, to build or restore city housing or pay $55 per square meter (for every square meter over 5,000 in their complexes) to a city housing trust fund.

They are also obligated to contribute to transit, cultural and child-care programs.

In Boston, the square-meter fees assessed on office and commercial developments go into housing and job training funds.

Recently, however, developers have blocked similar exaction measures in several American cities. Mayor Washington's 1984 plan to slap a square-meter fee on Chicago builders for a neighborhood trust fund went nowhere. A similar plan was stymied in New York City. In Seattle and Hartford, developers raised such an uproar over proposed fees for housing funds that both cities opted instead for another type of linkage, known as incentive zoning. The size of developers' projects in both of these cities-as well as in Miami-are determined by the developers' commitments to housing, child care and other social programs.

Several cities are applying linkage policies to banks and other businesses. In Boston, for instance, the developer exactions apply to hospital construction and expansion. And, in 1985, Washington, D.C., began requiring banks outside the metropolitan region that want to acquire a bank within the city to establish two branches in poor neighborhoods, provide up to $100 million in loans to city sponsored projects, create up to 200 jobs and sell food stamps.

In New York City, the Mount Sinai Medical Center won approval for a hospital modernization project, but only after agreeing to provide substantial medical and administrative help to the North General Hospital in Harlem. And Philadelphia recently negotiated a first-source hiring agreement with a local bank, the Fidelity Corporation.

Many developers are skeptical of city efforts to negotiate social concessions from them and are downright angry about exactions.

"Developers know they have to help meet social needs, if not out of altruism, out of self-protection," said Richard Gordon, a Hartford developer. "But once you cross the line from voluntary efforts to mandatory, you run into problems." Gordon believes linkage advocates in Hartford are jeopardizing corporate good will.

"They'd rather trade the $10.5 million the business community gives voluntarily tor

$2.5 million they could raise through an $II-a-square-meter exaction on new development," he said.

In 1985, Boston developer Jerome L. Rappoport challenged Boston's housing exactions in court, arguing that they were "inefficient, counterproductive and an illegal tax." A Massachusetts court held in Rappoport's favor, ruling that Boston had indeed overstepped its taxing authority. The city, if necessary, will seek state legislation to empower Boston to levy exactions.

Linkages are being challenged in other cities, too, but so far few cases have been decided. "The law is pretty new in this area," said Susan E. Haar, special counsel for the Boston Redevelopment Authority.

But to the extent linkage falls in the general category of zoning, she said, "Courts have tended to rule in favor of local governments' broad latitude to do what's best for the good of the community, so long as the cities proceed in a way that's fair and rational. " But other lawyers say several cities may be exceeding their statutory powers in adopting linkage measures. And they believe courts are going to force the linkages to pass what's known as a rational nexus test, under which the city must show a direct connection between the developers' projects and the concessions. Cities requiring contributions to a housing fund, for instance, would have to prove that new office buildings eroded the supply of hous-

ing in the city or created substantial demand for new units.

So far, most developers have not challenged city linkage programs. They've preferred to cooperate rather than "antagonize local officials and risk the uncertainties and 'bad blood' inevitably associated with litigation," said John J. Griffin, a Boston lawyer.

Nor, it appears, have linkages set off a stampede to the suburbs. Boston officials report that despite their exactions, the city set a record for new development. "There is no evidence the golden goose has even had its feathers ruffled, much less been killed, so far," said W. Dennis Keating, an expert on linkage policies who teaches at Cleveland State University. His 1985 survey of San Francisco developers revealed that most rated the city's multiple exactions as a factor but not a "very important" one in deciding whether to build in the city.

One reason is that suburbs are also resorting to exactions, occasionally for lowincome housing and other social needs, but more commonly to finance roads, sewers and fire and police protection. An increasing percentage of the thousands of millions spent each year on suburban infrastructure across America is financed by developers as a condition for receiving zoning clearances and building permits.

Linkage advocates also say that the cost to developers is not that great. Hiring quotas cost developers little or nothing because they must employ workers anyway, and the cities frequently pay for training. Contributions for housing, transit, child care and cultural activities do impose added costs, but apparently some of that is borne by others. Half the developers in Keating's survey said that they would pass on all the exaction costs to commercial' tenants and customers.

The financial benefits to the cities also may not be great. The 13 developments that so far have been subject to Boston's housing exaction are expected to generate $35 million over 12 years, "clearly a: rather meager funding source given housing costs," Council President Bolling said. At that level, the fee would finance about 300 rehabilitated homes and 60 new ones annually; city officials say Boston needs at least Night view o/The Landmark in Boston.

Originally built in 1929 this Art Deco office building was restored and reopened in 1986 and designated a city landmark by the Boston Landmarks Commission.

Boston, with its booming growth, Yankee ingenuity and strong neighborhood groups, has embraced mandatory linkage policies with a vengeance. Genteel Richmond, Virginia, on the other hand, has relied on voluntary agreements to win benefits for minorities from downtown developers.

Large developers in Boston already must contribute to the city's housing and job training funds and reserve jobs on their projects for city residents, minorities and women. Now the city has launched a $500-million plan to link development of the prosperous downtown with a major economic and social revival of the city's most distressed neighborhoodRoxbury.

Since 1984, there have been more than 800,000 square meters of new development in Boston, adding 24,000 new jobs. Expanding high technology, health and service industries have sparked a city population increase for the first time in three decades.

Yet in Roxbury, 15 minutes from downtown, the unemployment, crime, school dropout and welfare dependency rates are among the highest in the nation. In 1984,United Press International ranked Roxbury's major commercial strip, Blue Hill Avenue, as one of the ten worst streets in America.

The city and the state have committed almost $1,000 million to rekindle Roxbury's economy, including a mass transit station, a new park system and a new campus for Roxbury Community College. But private development efforts have been minimal.

Enter linkages. The city and the state hold the title to 2.24 barren hectares in Roxburyparcel 18, which was razed for an expressway that environmentalists blocked a decade ago.

In downtown Boston, the city owns the Kingston-Bedford parking lot on prime acreage between the financial and retail districts. In July 1985, Mayor Raymond L. Flynn said the city would sell the Kingston parcel for half of its $40 million value. But the "lucky" developer would have to build a major commercial and residential complex on Roxbury's parcel 18 as well. (The developer must also agree to give at least 25 percent ownership of both projects to minority partners and reserve 30 percent of the engineering, legal, architectural and other contracts for minority firms.)

"We're out to rebuild an entire neighborhood economy," said Steven Coyle, director of the Boston Redevelopment Authority.

The city's plan for parcel 18 calls for housing, retail and office development. Boston banks, law firms and big corporations could use the space for "back office" functions-

processing checks, bills and credit cardswhich employ a lot of clerical workers.

But officials concluded that neither cheap land downtown nor the supposed advantage of the Roxbury parcel-ample space close to downtown-was enough to snare a cost-conscious developer. And so, the city and state have offered $115 million in public subsidies for the two projects, ranging from creative financing to free engineering and site clearance. They've promised to expedite all needed permits and have zoned the Kingston parcel for a l60-meter skyscraper. To quell developers' fears that no major tenant would be the first to go to Roxbury, the city and state have pledged to help finance a new cultural center and to finance in full a job training program to prepare Roxbury residents for the 5,000 jobs the city hopes the developers' project will generate.

Richmond's boom can't quite match Boston's, but the transformation of this old Confederate capital is still startling-$2,OOO million in downtown development recently completed or under way-including new banks, corporate headquarters, office towers, a baseball field, hotels, condominiums, renovated antebellum tobacco warehouses and a new convention center.

"There's so much boom, you can't find a plumber to fix your toilet," said T. Justin Moore, Jr., cofounder of Richmond Renaissance, the biracial public-private corporation created in 1982 to catalyze downtown development.

The new 6th Street Marketplace, built by James W. Rouse, is the focal point for Richmond's revival-and a prime example of negotiated linkage. City officials negotiated a ten-page contract with Rouse setting forth goals for minority involvement in every aspect of the marketplace-architecture, engineering, construction, leasing and employment.

Rouse agreed that at least 15 percent of the shops would be reserved for minority entrepreneurs. City officials persuaded the business schools at two local universities to sponsor an intensive, 30-week training program for potential minority tenants, and the five banks financing the marketplace were induced to set up a $1.2 million market rate loan pool for the enterprises.

"All the minority goals were met or exceeded," said Richmond Renaissance Codirector, J. Randall Evans. "The marketplace is supporting many black merchants who've never been in business before, and these aren't businesses in the ghetto that are destined to fail."

3,400 more housing units immediately to ease housing pressures.

Weak enforcement of some linkage policies has also limited their benefits in some cities. And some developers have found ways to circumvent vaguely written linkage provisions.

Some skeptics warn that whatever the benefits of linkages, cities may be moving too fast in embracing them. A downturn in the economy wil1 slow downtown development, they say, and linkage policies could become a critical factor in developers' decisions to forgo construction.

Boston officials admit that if a single planned downtown office project were kil1ed because of exactions and not replaced by another project, the lost property tax revenues would exceed the money raised annual1y through linkage fees.

Despite the kinks, however, mayors are stil1 high on the linka,ge strategy. They say the relatively meager funds raised through linkages can be used as crucial leverage to attract the private sector to ventures that were once federal1y funded, such as low-cost housing. They say that job guarantees for minorities have given a leg up on the ladder to some who would remain jobless or would never start an enterprise.

More importantly, linkage policies force cities to search within their own borders for money to finance social programs at a time when federal money is diminishing.

Whether through exactions, negotiations or bottom-line rewards, linkage is an attempt to involve the private sector more explicitly as an urban partner.

And, says Flynn, many developers real1y do want to contribute. "Many conservative businessmen are taking a stronger interest in the social climate of our city because of linkages. They want to be part of the solution of helping the poor and disadvantaged," he said.

"Negotiated linkage makes incredible sense," said Richard H. Bradley, president of the International Downtown Association in Washington, D.C. But Bradley worries that American cities relying heavily on developers are putting too many eggs in a fragile basket. "What cities need to do now," he said, "is extend linkage beyond just the developer community to the entire business sector."

D About the Author: Carol Steinbach is {I contributing editor to National Journal andjoint author of

Expanding the Opportunity to Produce.

Return of the

TIGER To the first-time visitor, Kheri District in Uttar Pradesh seems a lovely, prosperous place. Tal1 green stands of sugarcane alternate with stil1-greener fields of wheat and bril1iant yellow blankets of mustard.

Brightly painted tractors go by with wel1-dressed Sikhs at the wheel. At harvest, the sweet smel1 of the sugar factories is overpowering and the lines of bullock carts fil1ed with cane waiting to be sold stretch along the roads for miles. The hazy blue line of the Himalaya hangs above the horizon; the mountain kingdom of Nepal lies only a few kilometers to the north.

But the apparent tranquil1ity is misleading: Some 20 people are kil1edeach year in encounters with the tigers whose home this region has always been. The Indian tiger has been brought back from the brink of extinctionofficial figures indicate that its numbers have more than doubled since the Indian government, in cooperation with the World Wildlife Fund and other international conservation organizations, set out to save it just 15 years ago-yet the future of these magnificent animals and of the forests over which they reign remains very much in doubt.

The conflict between men and animals in Kheri is more clear-cut and dramatic than that found almost anywhere else on the Indian subcontinent, but during the three months I spent traveling through some of India's and Nepal's remaining forests, in 1986, the problems this region faces seemed symptomatic of what is likely to occur wherever conservationists succeed in rescuing the tiger and even a smal1 sampling of its world.

Until 1947, most of Kheri was considered unfit for human habitation. It is part of the Himalayan terai, a thick belt of deep forest and soggy grassland ideal for tigers and their prey, but hostile to settlement because of its inaccessibility and the malarial mosquitoes that swarmed out of its swamps.

Independence changed everything. Eager for additional land on which to grow more food and relocate thousands of refugees fleeing the partition of the country, the new Indian government drained the swamps. The great forests were fel1edfor new farms and commercial profit. Hundreds of thousands oflandless

has won the Padma Shri; and is the sole Asian to receive the World Wildlife Fund's Gold Medal.

Dudhwa is his monument; having persuaded the government to declare it a sanctuary in 1968 to save one of India's last remaining herds of swamp deer, he remains its tireless guardian, squinting shirtless in the sun while thumping out angry letters to the newspapers on an ancient typewriter, or speeding through the forest in his open jeep to check out rumors of il1icit fishing or look for a lame tiger seen limping along the road.

Billy fears al1 his efforts may have been in vain, that the extraordinary animals to which An American wildlife enthusiast he has devoted most of his life may ultimately marvels at "the seriousness be doomed because of the failure to keep Man with which India, faced with so many and tiger apart.

The 1973 international effort to save the challenges, has worked at tiger was begun none too soon. Three of the wildlife preservation in recent years." eight subspecies that once hunted from Iran to Siberia had already vanished; two more seemed about to share their fate. And even in people fol1owed in the wake of the first India, where there are said to have been 40,000 tigers at the century's turn, fewer than 2,000 settlers.

The surviving tigers withdrew to a few smal1 were believed to survive in the wild, many of pockets of surviving jungle. Dudhwa Na- them in scattered groups too smal1 to maintional Park is one of these, a 500-square- tain their numbers, let alone multiply.

In setting out to save the magnificent predakilometer tract of grassy meadows and groves of lofty sal trees that would also have been tor that has become its national animal, India destroyed had it not been for one of India's had twin objectives: "To ensure the maintebest-known and most-controversial conserva- nance of a viable population of tigers" and "to tionists, Arjan Singh. Stil1vigorous at 70, and preserve for al1 time, areas of biological imknown to friends and adversaries alike as Bil1y portance as a national heritage for the benefit, because of a boyhood fondness for the adven- education and enjoyment of the people." The tures of Buffalo Bil1(see SPAN June 1986), he core areas were meant to be "breeding nuclei, has farmed in Kheri since 1946 and now lives from which surplus animals would emigrate at the southern fringe of the park on a farm to adjacent forests." Broad buffer zones, where human incursions were to be restricted, cal1ed Tiger Haven.

He is a thorny, blunt man ("Bil1y talks," would shield the breeding grounds from says a longtime friend, "the way a tiger would disturbance.

A visitor can only marvel at the seriousif it could talk"), and to him the great ness with which India, faced with so many predator's survival is everything. His stubchal1enges, has worked at wildlife preservaborn efforts to reintroduce three hand-raised tion in recent years. In 1975 there were just leopards and a tigress to the forest have sparked controversy, and there are few con- five national parks and 126 sanctuaries in servationists with whom he has not quarreled the whole country; those numbers have grown at one time or another during the past 42 steadily since, and now encompass 54 national years. But no one faults either his courage parks and 248 sanctuaries. Ful1y 12 percent or his dedication. He has written four books; of India's national forests are set aside

for wildlife, more than 100,000 square kilometers. To create these havens the local populace has often been called upon to make great sacrifices. Villagers had to be moved from their forest homes, and the grazing of livestock and gathering of wood, grass and wild honey that had gone on for centuries was abruptly ended.

"It is an enormous investment for a poor country to have made," says R.L. Singh, the director of Project Tiger, a patchwork of 15 prime tiger reserves. "Our task now is to manage it wisely."

That investment has already paid off, at least in the short term. Even Bil1y concedes that there are many more tigers now than there were 15 years ago.

Just how many more, however, is a matter of controversy. Tigers are secretive, mostly solitary creatures and precise facts about them are hard to get. The most recent official figure is 4,005 animals, the grand total of the national tiger census in 1984, which includes all national parks and state sanctuaries, plus an estimate of all the animals said to live in the forests outside their precincts.

This census is a considerable undertaking.

Hundreds of thousands of square kilometers of forest are divided into individual blocks; then, in a given week, each square is systematical1y crisscrossed by forest department employees who search for tiger pugmarks while noting al1 the wildlife they see along the way.

Some 10,000 men take part, equipped with glass plates on which they trace any prints found and record their location. Forest officers then compile the results and are supposed to be able to identify the size and distinguishing features of each individual animal.

The bureaucratic completeness of these tallies is sometimes breathtaking. One park director told me that he not only knew exactly how many tigers prowled his forest but the precise number of male and female mongooses and pythons living there, too. The census has recently come under a good deal of critical fire. Singh admits that roughly half the men taking part have had little or no training and, although one former field director went so far as to claim that each tiger's footprints are as unique as are human fingerprints, many researchers question the whole notion of identification by pugmarks.

"It's all nonsense," Bil1y says. "I've been tracking tigers almost every day now for 40 years and even I am unable to differentiate from pugmarks alone between tigers of the same size and sex, unless there's some abnormalityand even that doesn't always show up." And an Indian researcher named Ul1as Karanth

has shown that there are simply not enough prey species in the parks he studied to support anything like the numbers of tigers some of their directors claim.

Seeing a tiger has become something of a national craze among middle-class Indians, and tourists are permitted inside the parks provided they do not go on foot. For some reason, tigers don't seem threatened by people mounted on elephants or riding in vehicles.

The real problem is with the village poor living around the parks who run the real risks from tigers. According to Singh, about 600 people have been killed in the past dozen years. Between 50 and 60 people annually die from tiger attacks: 15 to 25 of them are killed in the Sundarbans, a vast, thick mangrove forest on the border between India and Bangladesh; the same number die in Kheri; and the rest are scattered across the subcontinent.

Most killings are still simply cases of mistaken identity-accidents.

Since long before the advent of firearms, tigers seem to have been innately wary of humans on foot. And even when a tiger is surprised on a kill, it follows a fairly standardized routine to scare off anyone who ventures too close. First it givesa warning roar (I have heard this sound twice, and found it awesomely persuasive both times). Then it roars even louder. Then, if the intruder somehow still fails to back off, itmay make a mock charge. Finally, as like as not, it will turn and run rather than launch an all-out attack.

Human beings walking upright and sticking to forest roads are relatively safe, then; it is when they wander off into the undergrowth and lean over, cutting grass or collecting firewood, so that they lose their distinctively human look, tha t the likelihood of tragic error seems to intensify.

One afternoon Billy invited me along on his daily walk through the dense forest behind his house. I struggled to keep up with him as he paced ahead on his thick legs, a short, carved "tiger stick"-the only weapon he carriescradled in his arm. We ducked beneath branches, picked our way through mud, stepped over fallen logs and twisted roots.

"There you are," he said, stopping suddenly and pointing straight ahead. I could just make out the bent backs of three men cutting grass. Even to me, their silhouettes looked like those of browsing deer. "That's just one reason why mixed use won't work," Billy said.

"Tigers and Man cannot share space. It really is as simple as that."

Encounters between people and tigers are usually but not always fatal. I met two survivors: a young Nepalese woman, mauled last

winter while cutting grass in Royal Chitawan Reserve, who was still ambulatory despite the two neat round holes left behind her ears when her attacker's canines pierced first her skull and then her brain; and Shiv Shankar, a grizzled, 63-year-old farmer who lives near Dudhwa. He managed to survive two attacks by the same tiger, thereby surely qualifying for the Guinness Book of World Records. Flames from an overturned kerosene lamp scared off his attacker the first time; several days later, the shouts of his horrified companions drove the animal away again. I asked him to what he attributed his extraordinary good luck. He thought for a long moment. "I have always drunk a great deal of milk," he said.

The tiger's champions like to point out that one hundred times more people die in India annually of snakebites than die from tiger attacks; that the risk of a mauling is seven times less to a villager living on the edge of a national park than is, say, a traffic accident to an American commuter.

F

ully 12 percentmore than 100,000 square kilometersof India's national forests are set aside for wildlife.

But to the family and friends of a tiger victim, statistics don't mean much.

"Why is man-eating such a problem at Dudhwa?" I asked Billy, hoping to slow his headlong pace through the jungle. .

"This was the most ecologically vulnerable area," he answered, continuing to push through the undergrowth. Dudhwa has a special problem, he explained. There is no adequate buffer zone. Cultivators have been allowed to plant sugar right up to the forest edge, and sugarcane, so tall and so thickly grown that two men cutting it a couple of meters apart cannot see each other, strikes tigresses as ideal cover in which to bear and hide their cubs. The cane field becomes their home, and when, at harvest time, the cutters move into it, the tigresses defend it fiercely.

"The sugarcane problem is unique to Dudhwa," Billy says, "but the clash will come everywhere. When this place became a park ten years ago, there were 21 villages and small settlements on the outskirts; now there are 80.

Population is out of control everywhere in India, and the problem will spread as more and more tigers grow familiar with humans

and come to see them as prey. Familiarity breeds contempt."

Anything that moves is a target of opportunity for a tiger, Billy explained as we headed back to his house. Their primary prey is deer, but when hungry enough they have been known to feed eagerly on anything from baby elephants to frogs-and instinct teaches them to sample whatever they kill. A herdsman killed trying to stop an attack on his buffalo at the park's edge may become a substitute for that buffalo. The next time, another herdsman may become the primary target.

Man-eating is not new and it was once a good deal worse. Tigers accounted for the deaths of about 500 human beings and 20,000 cattle in a single district of the Bombay Presidency in 1822. Between 1902 and 1910, an average of 851 people were killed and eaten every year in India.

The notorious Champawat tigress alone killed 436 people before Colonel Jim Corbett, the most intrepid dispatcher of Indian man-eaters, managed to hunt her down.

A man-eating tiger, Corbett wrote after a lifetime of hunting them, "is a tiger that has been compelled through stress of circumstances beyond its control to adopt a diet alien to it.. ..The stress is, in nine cases out of ten, wounds, and in the tenth case, old age."

Another circumstance helping to produce that fatal stress has traditionally been the degradation of the tiger's habitat and the disappearance of prey species on which it normally depends. In order to survive in a steadily shrinking forest, old or ailing tigers turned first to livestock and then to humans.

Nowa third, still more troubling variety of man-eater seems to be emerging, and the irony is that the brand-new "stress of circumstance" that seems to produce it is the success of the parks themselves as breeding grounds. Tigers are territorial. Although they often cover 25 kilometers in a night in search of food, the jungles through which they move so quietly are divided by them into distinct territories connected by a' variety of ways-warning roars, scratch marks on the trees, the meticulous spraying of trees and other natural boundary markers.

The barriers between animals are not impenetrable. A tigress will sometimes share her territory with her grown daughters, and a resident male allows several breeding females to occupy segments of his range. But he rarely shows similar generosity toward other males, including his own sons, and so, as tigers continue to breed within the undisturbed core areas of the parks, young animals-or weakened old ones-are driven out toward the

periphery. The forest corridors between parks that the planners of Project Tiger had hoped to maintain for just such immigrants have largely failed to materialize under the competing pressures of population and agriculture, and these hungry displaced animals are forced to cling to the forest edge. Increased confrontations seem inevitable.

They have already begun at Chitawan where, until 1980, there had been no documented cases of man-eating at all. Since then, Charles McDougal, the American tiger expert who has been conducting research there for many years, told me 13 people have been killed and eaten around that park, most of them by battered animals that had lost out in the struggle for territory.

It is not the growing numbers of tigers alone, but the ever-increasing isolation of the forests in which they are forced to fight to survive that is making things worse. This seems to be demonstrated in reverse at Ranthambhore, in Rajasthan. It is one of the most populous tiger reserves (I saw seven tigers there in just two days in 1986), yet Ranthambhore has never experienced maneating. Unauthorized intrusions have until recently been kept to a minimum by the dedicated project director, Fateh Singh Rathore, and his foresters, and the unusual openness of the Ranthambhore jungle minimizes the danger of accidents. A stalking tiger can recognize his potential prey over much longer distances here than he can almost anywhere else in India. But most importantly, its director believes, is that his young tigers, unlike those elsewhere, still have an escape route to follow when they reach maturity, a sizable patch of tattered forest just a few kilometers away across the fields; he has recently found pugmarks and other signs of tigers there, and has lobbied hard to have that area declared inviolate too.

There is one region where generalizations about Indian man-eaters have never applied-the Sundarbans. There seems to be no shortage of natural prey in this huge, forested delta, and the swampy terrain precludes permanent human habitation. Yet, since at least the 17th century, tigers have systematically preyed upon the villagers who slip up its canals and inlets in small boats to fish, cut w.ood and collect honey. In 1666, Francois Bernier, a French visitor, wrote, "Among these islands, it is in many places dangerous to land, and great care must be had that the boat, which during the night is fastened to a tree, be kept at some distance from the shore, for it constantly happens that some person or another falls prey to tigers. These ferocious

animals are very apt...to enter into the boat itself, while the people are asleep, and to carry away some victim."

There are now officially said to be some 260 tigers in the Indian Sundarbans alone, the largest concentration on Earth, and they continue to be mysteriously aggressive. In fact, one out of every three is thought to be an "opportunistic" man-eater, one that will kill and eat any vulnerable human it happens to encounter. No one is certain why. Some believe the daily tides that wash away the tigers' scent markings force the animals to be unusually combative in order to hold on to their territories. Another possible explanation is that too much saltwater might affect their livers, rendering them especially irritable; freshwater ponds have been dug here and there in hopes of restoring the equanimity.

Authorities have also urged villagers to wear clay masks on the backs of their heads to confuse tigers on shore (tigers are reluctant to attack their prey from the front) and they have erected clay mannequins throughout the forest's buffer zone, each dressed in unwashed, villagers' clothing and wired to a souped-up car battery. The hope is that any tiger that attacks one of them and receives a 230-volt shock will learn a valuable lesson and may pass that lesson along to its offspring.

Eleven dummies had been mauled by March 1986 and the annual number of Sundarbans killings (which used to run between 55 and 60) has been roughly halved. It is too early to tell whether these programs or other factors have been responsible for the change.

Despite the continuing difficulties around the periphery ofthe Sundarbans, how<;ver, the great forest's inhospitableness to Man and the large number of tigers that live undisturbed within it make it one of the most likely places for a permanent tiger population to persist.

"The tiger will survive in India," R.L. Singh says, "only so long as it behaves. The moment we try to be sentimental about any aberrant, defaulting tiger, the tiger will be doomed.

Such tigers must be eliminated immediately.

We are serving people first." He claims personally to have shot three man-eaters during his six years as field director at Dudhwa, and a total of ten animals was officially done away with. "The fault is Man's, of course," Billy says, "but the tigers are always made to pay."

Some have suggested that "troublesome" tigers be transported to a forest where they are less likely to encounter humans. But other tigers often already occupy such places. Some years ago, a young Sundarbans tiger that had wandered out of the core area and killed first livestock and then a herdswoman was tran-

J. Villagers headfor the Sundarbans in West Bengal at night with rifles andflame torches to keep tigers away. 2. Dummies, like this one being taken by boat into the Sundarbans, are increasingly being used to divert and '1001" the tiger. 3. A doctor attends to Subedar AU, a mahout at Jim Corbett Park, who sustained scalp injuries after an attack by a tiger.

4. Kanha National Park Field Director A.S. Parihar (right) with a man-eater killed by him. 5. A clay mannequin attached to a 230-volt battery is installed in the Sundarbans in the hope that the electric shock will teach the attacking tiger a lesson he will never forget. 6. Since tigers usually attack from behind,fishermen in the Sundarbans have taken to wearing clay masks on the backs of their heads to confuse the animal.

quilized, taken to a spot deep in the jungle and released. The resident male killed it before the week was out.

Compensation for livestock killed by a tiger ranges up to Rs. 2,000 for a prime animal, provided the killing took place outside a park.

The family of a human victim receives Rs. 5,000. A man convicted of killing a tiger, on the other hand, must pay a fine of Rs. 5,000 and serve six months in jail.

Despite the risk, villagers often take matters into their own hands. In 1986, in and around Dudhwa, at least 13 tigers died in mysterious circumstances. One had its head blown off by a bomb planted in its kill; a forest guard was found burning the corpse of another tiger rather than have his superiors find out that one of his charges had been slaughtered. And Billy himself came upon the skeleton of a third, surrounded by the reeking corpses of close to 150 vultures; someone had poisoned the tiger's kill, the tiger had eaten from it and died, and the poison remaining in its body, in turn, had done in the overeager scavengers that had fallen upon it.

Billy has not mellowed, but he has matured.

In the old days, battling single-handed to defend his park's borders, he pummeled with his big fists the woodcutters and graziers and poachers he captured, sometimes even hauling them behind his tractor to park headquarters. He is as vigilant as ever but now sees that the poor are not the real enemy.

"How can you blame the cultivator?" he asks. "He has less than half a hectare of land and one bullock to plow it. If a tiger takes tha t bullock, what is he to do? No wonder he wants tigers done away with.

"The local people hate the park," Billy told me as I drove off to talk to villagers in the surrounding countryside. "And they hate me.

You'll see."

I stopped beside a field, where an old man was plowing behind a haggard bullock. His name was Kanthulal and he had lived there all his life. Things had been much better before the park was established, he said; he had been able to collect his firewood without fear of arrest, could buy timber and thatch to shore up his house after the monsoon. Hunters had kept the tigers down. Now he lived in fear. The wife of a friend had been killed cutting cane; he had himself twice seen tigers padding along the road and often saw their fresh pugmarks on his way to the fields in the morning.

Billy was right. No one who lived around the park seemed to have a good word to say about it. Nor did most of the villagers who clustered in and around the other reserves I visited seem anything but resentful of the

parks' existence, and their smoldering hostil~ ity sometimes flares into open warfare.

The villagers' view is ecologically shortsighted, of course. Most know only what their fathers knew-and the forest resources upon which their fathers relied have all but vanished. According to satellite data, every year India loses more than 1.2 million hectares of forest, an area a little larger than the American state of Connecticut.

There are more than 800 million people in India, and perhaps a 1,000 million head of domestic livestock, almost all of it undernourished and forced to forage to survive. "We face ecological disaster," Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi has said of the disappearing vegetation, and with aid from abroad the central and state governments have undertaken massive reforestation projects.

Indian conservationists have always hoped that in ensuring survival for the tiger, human survival would be enhanced as well. "We are here to preserve the habitat, not the individual

ndianconservationists have always hoped that in ensuring survival for the tiger, human survival would be enhanced as well.

I

tiger," Project Tiger's R.L. Singh says.

"But how can local villagers be expected to understand that?" Billy asks. "No provision is made for supplying them with alternative fuels, for teaching them other ways to build their houses or thatch their roofs or feed their animals. We must face the fact that the park does not benefit them. Why should they want to preserve it?"

Valmik Thapar, a shaggy young naturalist and filmmaker who has been studying and writing about Ranthambhore's tigers for a decade, agrees: "Villagers must be involved in these parks, must be made to feel a part of the necessary changes, not their helpless victims.

The future of Indian wildlife ultimately rests with the villages that surround them." He and Fateh Singh Rathore have proposed that local banks provide villagers who pledge to stay out of the forest with low-interest loans for buying improved livestock, for example, and that those new animals be stall-fed on grass planted and maintained outside the reserve by the forest department itself. "The ideal," Thapar says, "is that the parks will eventually provide so many benefits to the villagers that

they demand that more degraded forests be made into parks."

Billy concurs, but such programs take time to implement. "Meanwhile," Billy argues, "the only real answer that is fair to both sides is to keep people and tigers apart." He wants a high electrified fence put up around Dudhwa to keep tigers in and people out, and a permanent ban on the growing of sugarcane within ten kilometers of it.

But thousands of people would be thrown off the land. Something else would have to be provided for them to do. Isn't this sort of undertaking too large to assume for a country with limited resources and so many pressing problems?

"Saving the tiger-and the forests it lives in-is itself a large undertaking," Billy answers. "If we are serious about it, we have no choice."

"Why do you go on?" I asked Billy. "The odds must sometimes seem hopeless."

"A quirk of personality," he says, eyes flashing with their old fire. "I could not live with myself if I gave up."

Conservation is always a question of priorities and Billy's are clear: "Tigers need unmolested forest in which to multiply. People can breed anywhere." But government inevitably has a more crowded agenda.

The question remains whether in a democracy like India-where, as Billy says, "Tigers don't vote; people do" and where many of those voters are understandably preoccupied with their own day-to-day survival-government can make ordinary citizens see in time that their own future well-being and that of the Indian forests and the superb animals that still rule some of them really are inextricably linked.

On my last evening at Dudhwa, I sat with Billy across a stream from a tiger's kill. The moon cast just enough light for us to make out the tiger's silhouette, but we could clearly hear him muttering as he tore at his kill, alarming but natural sounds that have been heard here since the beginning of time.

Then, a new and ultimately more ominous noise drifted toward us from across the cane fields at our back-the amplified drone of the wedding priest in a nearby village. A new family was beginning; still more people would soon edge toward the tiger's last retreat.

It was already hard to hear the cracking of the bones.

D About the Author: Geoffrey C. Ward is a New Yorkbased biographer and historian who writesfrequently on India and its wildlife. He is the author of Before the Trumpet: Young Franklin Roosevelt.

Treasures of Terra Long before collecting American art became fashionable, Daniel J. Terra had started buying 19th-century paintings from the nation's colonial period, for aesthetic and business considerations. His private collection, updated to include contemporary art, has now become public in Chicago's Terra Museum of American Art.

CaItech: Setting a Standard for Excellence Wit and wisdom have combined to make the California Institute of Technology, which boasts of20 Nobel laureates among its faculty and alumni, "the best little research center in America" and the "powerhouse of college pranks."

Cinema's Island in the Sun The Hawaii International Film Festival is unique in its singleminded commitment to the cinema of Asia and the Pacific region. Film critic and former SPAN managing editor Chidananda Das Gupta, who was a special invitee there last year, says the Hawaii Festival is more than a showcase of American and Asian films-it has also acted as a catalyst for the production of cross-cultural films.

A Conversation With Cram Professor Donald J. Cram, corecipient of the 1987 Nobel Prize for Chemistry, discusses his life, ideas and work¡ in an interview with Rajagopal Chattopadhyaya, a young colleague at the University of California, Los Angeles.

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Geometric Abstractions Fired by geometrical abstractions, a number of Russian and European and later American artists created works that seem as modern today as they did when some of them first appeared more than 70 years ago. Recently, the Museum of Modern Art in New York displayed some of these works in an exhibition titled "Contrasts of Form: Geometric Abstract Art 1910-1980."

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Kenneth Noland (I) studied with immigrant Russian artists lIya Bolotowsky and Josef Albers, who exposed him to European geometric abstraction. Al Held (2) and Richard Diebenkorn (3) explored geometric figures and multiple spaces, creating landscapes of the mind. Antoine Pevsner's figure (4) is a three-dimensional open-structured Constructivist sculpture of the 1920s that grew out of Cubism.

Cubist works by perceptual artists who abstracted from nature, such as Pablo Picasso (5), were forerunners of an era that believed art could transform society. And Theodore Roszak (back cover) was the first American artist to combine Constructivist principles and the Bauhaus aesthetic-a synthesis of art and architecture-in his work.

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4. Antoine Pevsner, Torso, 1924-26, construction plastic and copper, 75 x 30 em.

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