A LETTER FROM THE PUBLISHER
July in the United States is a time for celebration and vacations. School will have been out for a few weeks by the time the 4th of July comes around, and every village, community, town and city in the land-and wherever Americans are found throughout the world-will have their own special way to commemorate the birth of our nation. Of course, each observance will embrace variations on the themes memorialized so well in the Declaration ofIndependence, whose signing on July 4, 1776, is the reason for the holiday. There will be speeches about each person's unalienable right to "life, liberty and th~ pursuit of happiness," and about justice and freedom, which we generally take for granted. The local playground is the usual scene for the festivities. In some communities cannon are fired at sunrise, noon and sunset as is the tradition for all American military forts and naval ships at sea; in other communities bells are rung, and the national flag is displayed from almost every house. I have heard of one small town whose citizens create a "living flag" every year. Each participant wears a red, white or blue shirt and stands in a formation making the pattern of the Stars and Stripes, as seen and photographed from the church tower. While orations are under way-including the reading of the famous Declaration-families picnic on the lawn. Sometimes, there are patriotic processions, perhaps accompanied by school or military marching bands and troops. Inevitably, there are foot races for all categories of runners. A friend still has the blue ribbon he won at his hometown celebration almost 50 years ago. When I was a boy, the 4th of July was a time to set off fireworks, including all manner of firecrackers, small bombs and rockets. Now, after many tragic accidents, we have become more conscious of their danger to young children and even to grown-ups. Each community still has its big fireworks show, but there has been a nationwide campaign over the years for "A Safe and Sane Fourth," which has virtually eliminated dangerous fireworks for individual use. The grandest annual display is staged on the grounds of the Washington Monument, in Washington, D.C., on the evening of July 4th. Several hundred thousand spectators gather there each year, with many thousands more watching from vantage points at a distance. On the historical side of the holiday, this month's issue carries an interesting piece by a Briton on the consequences of America's Revolutionary War in reshaping much of the world. To add to that story, I have uncovered a snippet of history that could have changed the world in another direction: Few people may realize that political independence was not the original goal of the American colonists. Rather, it was an alternative accepted only as a last resort. There is scant evidence that more than a few' of the American patriots ever seriously considered severing ties with Great Britain until 1776. Even Thomas Jefferson, who drafted the Declaration of Independence, wrote a year earlier that "I am sincerely one of those ...who would rather be in dependence on Great Britain, properly limited, than on any other nation on Earth, or than on no nation." As late as 1773, most Americans still recognized Parliament's right to regulate trade and make laws, save in the sensitive area of taxation. The fatal underlying cause of the split was simple economics: The British government, after the conclusion of the French and (American) Indian War in 1763, was in financial distress, and sought to raise relief funds in the colonies. The Americans professed their willingness to help, but objected strenuously to taxes levied on them alone. They also resented "taxation without representation" in Parliament, a slogan that became the rallying cry leading to the Revolutionary War and America's independence. The rest, as they say, is history.
SPAN 2 In the Footsteps of George Washington
by Judy Aita
6
The Shot Heard Round the World by Henry Fairlie 7 Vivekananda's July 4th Surprise by R. Visalam 1 0 Boston's Computer Museum by Sandy Greenberg 14 A Look Back at GATT by Ann Morrison and Robin Layton 16 The American Constitution A Review by A.G. Noorani 1 8 William Wharton by Chetan Shah 22 Seeing America 28 Making Waste Work by Barbara Goldo/tas 32 What Our Ancestors Ate by Melvin Konner 34 Women's Movement II by Carol F. Steinbach 38 Focus On ... 40 The Pen and the Scalpel by Richard Selzer 42 New Hope for Tired People by Steven Findlay 44 On the Lighter Side 45 Kalakshetra to California by Sabita Radhakrishna 48 Refurbishing William Penn Front cover: Visitors stand awestruck inside the Paradise Ice Caves in Washington State's Mt. Rainier National Park, one of America's many natural attractions and a favorite with vacationers. See also pages 22-27. Back cover: In a loving tribute to William Penn, the founder of their state, Pennsylvanians collected funds to refurbish his almost century-old statue. See also inside back cover. Publisher, Leonard J. Baldyga; Editor, Warren W. McCurdy Managing Editor, Himadri Dhanda; Associate Managing Editor, Krishan Gabrani; Senior Editor, Aruna Dasgupta; Copy Editors, A. Venkata Narayana, SnigdhaGoswami; Editorial Assistants, Rocque Fernandes, Rashmi Goe!; Photo Editor, AvinashPasricha; Art Director, Nand Katyal; Associate Art Director, Kanti Roy; Artist, Hemant Bhatnagar; Production Assistant, Sanjay Pokhriyal; Circulation Manager, YP. Pandhi; Photographic Service, USIS Photographic Service Unit; Research Service, USIS Documentation Service;
American Center Library, New Delhi. Photographs: Front cover-Bob & Ira Spring. 2-5-Commission on the Bicentennial of the United States Constitution. 6--Library of Congress. 7~ourtesy R. Visalam. 1O-13-Richard Howard except page 11 top by Steve Nelson-Fay, courtesy of The Computer Museum. 22-23-top & bottom center-Warren W. M~Curdy; right-Tourism Division, State of Washington. 25 top-Karen Jettmar; center-Steven Kaufman; bottom~ourtesy San Francisco Visitors Bureau. 27 top right & bottom rightChristopher Springmann; top left-Portland Department of Development; bottom left NFL Properties Ltd. 28-© Dennis Barnes. 29 top-© Jim and Mary Whitmer; bottomAvinash Pasricha. 33-Illustration by Nand Katyal. 34-36--Susan Muniak, National Journal. 37~ourtesy Lt. Governor's office.41-© 1988Michael Spano. 42-43-A vinash Pasricha. 45-47~ourtesy Katherine Kunhiraman; 46 bottom-© M. Gokey 1976; 47 bottom-Usha Kris. 48-back cover-John McGrail. Published
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n the same site where George Washington stood, April 30 two centuries ago, for his inauguration, an actor portraying the first President of the United States took part in a dramatization of that historic ceremony at Federal Hall as Washington's 40th successor and America's 41 st President, George Bush, looked on. Bush, Congressional leaders and the City of New York led America in a colorful pageant-at times dignified and solemn and at others jubilant and boisterous-marking the 200th anniversary of Washington's inauguration. The festivities were the last of a series of bicentennial observances commemorating the nation's birth; two other important celebrations were of American independence and drafting of the U.S. Constitution in 1976 and 1987, respectively. Although Washington had offered his prayers for the new nation following his inauguration, the reenactment began with the "Service of Thanksgiving" at St. Paul's Chapel, the oldest public building in continuous use and the only remaining Colonial church. President Bush, sitting in the same pew used by Washington on his inauguration day, joined representatives of the city's oldest churches, elected officials and diplomats to reflect on America's past and offer prayers for her future. President Bush flew to New York for the ceremony in less than an hour on his presidential jet. President Washington's trip took eight days. Although he was considered a wealthy man, Washington's wealth was tied up in his landholdings and he had to borrow the money from a neighbor to make the journey from his Mt. Vernon plantation in Virginia to New York City. As part of the events surrounding the 200th anniversary, Washington'sjourney was reenacted beginning with his departure from his Virginia plantation, Mt. Vernon, on April 16 to stops at major points along the East Coast, to his arrival in New York City by a ceremonial barge accompanied by a flotilla of sailing ships. While the streets in lower Manhattan are still a narrow, winding maze as in Washington's days, the historic buildings of the 18th and 19th century are dwarfed by skyscrapers of today's financial district. Yet as one walked the streets that day, the spirit of Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, John Jay and James Madison was almost palpable, hurrying through the same streets, establishing banks, discussing the Bill of Rights and beginning the other institutions of the new republic. On April 30, 1789, thousands of people gathered at the junction of Wall and Nassau Streets In the City of New York, the nation's first capital, to witness the inauguration. From packed streets and crowded windows and rooftops of nearby buildings, the spectators watched as George Washington stepped onto the balcony of City Hall, now renamed Federal Hall for the occasion, and placed his hand on a Bible borrowed from the nearby St. John's Masonic Lodge. The Hono.rable Robert R. Livingston, chancellor of the State of New York, administered the same oath of office then, and still, required by the then new U.S. Constitution: "I do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the office of President of the United States and will, to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States." Washington repeated the words, adding his own: "So help me God." "George Washington," portrayed by actor William
O
The antique carriage used to retrace George Washington's 1789 historic 400-kilometer journey from Mt. Vernon to New York City is owned by Henry du Pont of Delaware.
Sommerfield (who has playec! the role in several TV shows), arrived at Federal Hall in a: gold-trimmed carriage drawn by two white horses. The first President was dressed in a suit of brown broadcloth spun in Connecticut to promote American industry. The 20th-century "Washington" dressed the same and also doffed his tricornered hat to the crowd. He took the oath of office on the same Bible used 200 years ago, then put on his spectacles and gave the first inaugural address. "Among the vicissitudes incident to life no event could have filled me with greater anxieties than that of which the notification was transmitted by your order and received on the 14th day of the present month," he said. "On the one hand, I was summoned by my country .. .from a retreat which 1 had chosen ... as an asylum of my declining years [and] on the other hand, the magnitude and difficulty of the trust to which the voice of my country called me ...could not but overwhelm with despondence one who ought to be conscious of his own deficiencies .... " The language used 200 years ago was so formal, so different from the speech patterns of today, that Washington's speech is now difficult to understand. Thus, the organizers of the reenactment decided to use only excerpts of the 1,425-word address. Washington ended his speech with, "Having thus imparted to you my sentiments .. .I shall take my present leave; but not without resorting once more to the benign Parent of the Human Race in humble supplication that, since He has been pleased to favor the American people with opportunities for deliberating in perfect tranquility ... and the advancement of their happiness, so His divine blessing may be equally conspicuous in the enlarged views, the temperate consultations and the wise measures on which the success of this government must depend." .Chancellor Livingston then proclaimed, "Long live the spirit of George Washington and the presidency of the United States. Huzzah, huzzah, huzzah." After his inaugural, Washington had walked through the streets accepting the accolades of the citizenry to the President's mansion close to the East River whâ‚Źre the Brooklyn Bridge now dominates the shoreline. Such was the scenario in 1789, and now, as then, the crowd cheered and throughout the city church bells rang to mark the occasion. Speaking after "Washington" drove away in his carriage, President Bush recalled the first President's "vision, his balance of power, his integrity that made the presidency possible" and the changes in the United States as it moved from "the revolution of democracy to the evolution of peace and prosperity.
April 16: George Washington departs Mt. Vernon and arrives in Alexandria about noon. After an address by the Mayor and 13toasts, he is escorted up the Potomac and ferried across to Georgetown. Spends the night at Spurrier's Tavern, about 19 kilometers southwest of Baltimore. April 17: Near Baltimore, meets a large party of "citizens on horseback" and with an artillery salute continues to Daniel Grant's Fountain Inn. Is honored with addresses from Baltimore citizens and some of his former officers. April 18: Departs Baltimore about 5:30 a.m., accompanied by a band of citizens and saluted by artillery. After II kilometers, thanks his escorts and requests that they return home. Spends the night near Havre de Grace. April 19: Arrives at Wilmington in the evening. A decorated vessel commemorates his crossing of the Dela wa re Ri ver. April 20: Leaves Wilmington after several addresses and is met at the Pennsylvania line by Philadelphians who escort him to Chester where he breakfasts. Mounts a white horse for his ride into Philadelphia. About noon, the procession crosses the Schuylkill River on Gray's Ferry Bridge, which has been decorated with laurel, evergreens, state flags, banners and, at each end, a classical arch. A child lowers a crown of laurel as Washington passes beneath. Thousands line the road to Philadelphia, where he later dines with a party of 250 at City Tavern and enjoys a fireworks display. April 21: Departs in the rain for Trenton. Crossing the Delaware at Colvin's Ferry, he again mounts a white horse. An arch of greenery 3.5 meters long and six meters high, supported by 13 columns, spans the entrance of the bridge over Assunpink Creek. Women and girls sing an ode and strew flowers in his path. After a dinner and reception at Samuel Henry's City Tavern, he (probably) spends the night in Trenton. April 22: Breakfasts at Princeton with the pres-
ident and faculty of Princeton College and the citizens of the town. At New Brunswick is met with an artillery salute, the ringing of church bells and a welcoming band procession. Troops line the main street for his review. Lodges for the night at Woodbridge. April 23: Proceeds to Elizabeth Town where a joint committee from Congress waits to escort him to New York. Around noon at Elizabeth Town Point, they board a specially prepared ceremonial barge, festooned with red curtains and manned by 13 pilots dressed in white smocks and blackfringed caps. Six barges carry other dignitaries. Ag the flotilla enters New York Harbor it is joined by other vessels. Amid gun salutes and the cheers of thousands of New Yorkers along the shore, Washington arrives at Murray's Wharf
"The Constitution was and remains a majestic document, but it was a blueprint, an outline of democratic government in need of a master builder to ensure its foundations were strong," Bush continued. George Washington "created a living, functioning government...established a precedent for 40 Presidents to follow." Musket fire, balloons, confetti and the music of the U.S. Army Band playing Stars and Stripes Forever ended the ceremony and heralded the start of a colorful, exuberant two-hour parade. Solemn Lexington minutemen marched behind jovial ancient mariners. Fife and drum corps and other units in rag-tag Revolutionary War uniforms dragged ancient cannon, and men, women a¡nd children in period costumes from all over the original 13 colonies participated. Sharp colonial regiments in scarlet uniforms accompanied Washington's carriage up Broadway along with marching units and bands from the five branches of to day's U.S. military to Washington Square Park. Washington's first inauguration has been a focal point for celebrations throughout the nation's history. Every 50 years Presidents and former Presidents have joined the City of New York in marking the occasion. But this year's celebrations were on a much grander scale. Apart from the reenactment, there were other ceremonies, exhibitions and displays in honor of the
at the foot of Wall Street at about 3 p.m. After a welcome by Governor Clinton, a military escort cuts a passage through the dense throng for Washington, who walks to Franklin House where he will reside. April 24-29: Washington receives numerous visits from well-wishers, while Congress makes arrangements for his inauguration. April 30: Day breaks to the sound of artillery and church bells. At 12:30 p.m., a military escort joined by a procession of dignitaries and citizens accompany Washington's coach to Federal Hall. Upon arrival, he proceeds to the Senate Chamber where the two Houses of Congress wait to greet him, then onto the outer balcony in front of the Senate Chamber where he is sworn in as the first President of the United States. D
country's first President and 200 years of the presidency. President Bush helped dedicate The Museum of American Constitutional History located inside Federal Hall: the legacy of the city's bicentennial commission. The museum focuses on the origins and continuing role of the Constitution at the heart of the U.S. political system. Its centerpiece is "The Constitution Works," an educational program designed to provide junior and senior high school students with an understanding of the relevance of the Constitution to their own lives. Other events that continued from dawn to dusk during the commemoration included a two-day symposium on the presidency in the 1990s, a presidential flotilla of ships, a fireworks spectacular entitled "Hail to the Chief"; and a presidential descendants' breakfast. Cultural, educational and community organizations throughout the city mounted exhibits around their collections of Washington artifacts from the first President's long association with New York, dating from his days as commanderin-chief of the Continental Army. The title of an exhibition in the the Museum of the City of New York aptly summed up the city's mood on that day of nostalgia: "Celebrating George." 0
The American War of Independence was not a coup or a rebellion but a revolution with a profound political philosophy that shook the established order and lit the fires of freedom round the world. A portrait of the drafters of the Declaration of Independence-from left, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Philip Livingston and Roger Shermansuperimposed on a draft copy of the document in Jefferson's hand with insertions by Adams and Franklin.
"Here once the embattled farmers stood And fired the shot heard round the world." -Hymn
sung at the Battle monument, Concord, July 4, 1837
The claim in Ralph Waldo Emerson's oft-quoted verse is expansive. Can it be true that the shot-figuratively, the start of America's War of Independence-was heard round the world when there were no satellites, television, radio, or telephone? It then took from five to six weeks for news to cross the Atlantic Ocean. Thus the news of the "battles" of Lexington and Concord fought on April 19, 1775, appeared on May 29 in the London press, from which the French papers, as usual, took their news of America, in turn being picked up by the press in the rest of Europe. By June 19 it appeared in a Russian newspaper. Similarly, the news of the American Declaration of Independence (of July 4, 1776) was first published in a London newspaper on August 17, 1776; a week later it appeared in papers in Hamburg, on August 30 in Sweden, and on September 2 in Denmark. The actions in Lexington and Concord had been no more than skirmishes in the villages whose names Europeans could never have heard before. Yet the news excited editors across Europe, and they knew it would arouse their readers. They saw at once the size of the event. In 1775-76 the French Revolution had not sounded its tocsin to the peoples of Europe. Most of them lived under the rule of a few absolute monarchs: Louis XVI in France; Maria Theresa (as dowager empress) and her son Joseph II in Austria and the Holy Roman Empire; Frederick the Great in Prussia; Catherine the
Great in Russia; and Christian VII in Denmark. It was the age of the "enlightened despots," who genuinely had the welfare of their subjects at heart, but though they proclaimed the right of their peoples to be well governed, they did not acknowledge their right to govern themselves. The only monarch who had (sourly) learned the ABCs of freedom was, paradoxically, the one against whom the colonists were rebelling. The English were far freer than any peoples on the Continent. But the English reaction to the news from America is more interesting if we know how the shot was heard on the other side of the English Channel. Maria Theresa and Joseph II received the news of the Declaration at about the same time it reached London, and two weeks before it found its way through the heavy censorship into the daily press in Vienna. Taking a dim view of popular uprisings, Maria Theresa expressed to George III her "hearty desire to see the restoration of obedience and tranquility in every quarter of his dominions," and Joseph told the British ambassador, "The cause in which England is engaged .. .is the cause of all sovereigns who have ajoint interest in the maintenance of due subordination .. .in all the surrounding monarchies. " The rulers feared that their subjects would see the American action not as a rebellion against a rightful monarch in his own territories (there had been plenty of rebellions against European sovereigns) but as the proclamation of a revolutionary doctrine of universal application, as the American Declaration of Independence indeed announced it to be. Thus, although the Declaration was at last allowed through the censorship in Vienna, when one newspaper the next year explained the American War of Independence as a clash between two political principles-monarchy and popular sovereignty-Maria Theresa was outraged, even though the paper had covered itself by printing an editorial saying that this view of the rebellion was mistaken. Similarly, when the news of Lexington and Concord got through the censors into the St. Petersburg press, the Americans were, in deference to Empress Catherine, firmly called "rebels." In 1780, when Catherine read the Abbe Raynal's history of Europe's dominions overseas and came to his chapter on the American Revolution, she wrote to a friend: "The American record is filled with declarations in which there is too little that is reasonable and too much that is unbecoming impertinence." In Belgium, which was then under the rule of Austria, it was clear that the subjects of the enlightened despots might take the American "impertinence" as an example. The press there followed
Vivekananda's July 4th Surprise Of the innumerable July 4th celebrations over the past 213 years in American history. one instance stands out for the manner of its observance, as also the person who conceived it. The special celebration took place in 1898 in a houseboat on Dal Lake in Srinagar, Jammu and Kashmir. It was conceived by Swami Vivekananda as a "surprise present" for two American disciples who had chosen "to love and serve India" at the call of the young Indian visionary. Persistent researches carried out in India and in America by this writer reveal that this is how the Sri nagar July 4th celebration came about: On his return to India in 1897, at the conclusion of his triumphant lecture tour of America and following his inspiring addresses at the World Parliament of Religions held in Chicago in 1893, Swami Vivekananda launched a ceaseless campaign "to elevate the downtrodden Indian masses." Mission dedicated Out of this campaign was born the Ramakrishna to "the service of the needy and the uplift of the outcasts." Realizing that this stupendous mission demanded the services of countless volunteers, Vivekananda called upon his many foreign "friends to lend a helping hand." From England came Margaret Noble, who subsequently became famous as Sister Nivedita. And from America came Mrs. Ole Bull and Miss Josephine MacLeod. Bull, daughter of a wealthy senator from Madison, Wisconsin, and wife of a renowned Norwegian violinist, came into contact with Vivekananda in 1894. Her home in Cambridge, Massachusetts, became a meeting place for the swami's admirers and ardent devotees when he was there. MacLeod happened to attend a Vivekananda lecture in New York City in January 1895. "From that moment, life had a different import," she later declared. "It was like the sun that you'll never forget once you have seen it." As part of the "training to serve in India," Swami Vivekananda took all three for a journey through India so they could know the people, the conditions of life and their needs. The party journeyed through northern India and on to the beautiful Kashmir Valley. Hereabout it was almost July 4th. Realizing its importance to his American friends, Swami Vivekananda thought out "a secret plan to surprise them" with a colorful celebration of American Independence. "With a touch of youthful zest," according to one accountVivekananda was only 35 at that time-he took the one non-American member ofthe party, Sister Nivedita, into his confidence to carry out the plan. He got the services of a Kashmiri tailor and guided him to stitch an American flag, complete with the Stars and Stripes. And on the morning of July 4th, when the two American ladies entered the common hall of the houseboat for breakfast they were thrilled to see Old Glory bedecked with Kashmir's choicest flowers and bunches of evergreens. The American Independence Day turned out to be as colorful and heartwarming as at home, back in America. "To enhance the joy of the occasion," Swami Vivekananda composed a special poem for the grand observance that he read aloud.
American affairs intently, publishing, for example, the Maryland Constitution (1777), the Massachusetts Constitution (1780), some of a collection of the constitutions of all 13 states (1783), Virginia's Code of Civil and Criminal Laws (1786) and, in 1787, the U.S. Constitution in full. This steady flow of news (including the reports of the war and of American victories) could only stir up the middle class in Belgium. They enjoyed neither national independence nor a constitution guaranteeing any basic political rights, while each day the Americans were remaking their political and civil society before the eye of the world. By 1787 a strong movement for independence and a new constitution was growing in Belgium. In the debates that were provoked in Europe we-can see how the
A I Swami Vivekananda's July 4th celebrationlor his American disciples in Srinagar in l898, /i"om lell to righI, Miss Josephine MacLeod, Mrs. Ole Bull, Ihe host and Sister Nivedita.
Titled "To the 4th of July," and very carefully preserved by Bull, the poem in part reads: Bethink thee how the world did wait, And search for thee, through time and clime, Some gave up home and love of friends, And went in quest of thee, self-banished, Through dreary oceans, through primeval forests, Each step a struggle for their life or death; Then came the day when work bore fruit, And worship, love, and sacrifice, Fulfilled, accepted, and complete. Then thou, propitious, rose to shed The Light of FREEDOM on mankind. That then was the only celebrated on a And as fate would date-July 4th-four
unique July 4th celebration, perhaps the one and houseboat in Sri nagar. have it, Swami Vivekananda died on the same 0 years later, in 1902.
About the Author: R. Visalam, a Vivekananda devotee, is aformer lecturer in English at Nagpur University.
shot was heard. We can follow them (as they were conducted in the press) through the 25 or so out-of-the-way historical monographs, memoirs and the like that are the main source of this story. Throughout the debates a constant appeal was made to the example of America. Liberty had been crushed in Poland, was struggling in Holland, said Lambert d'Outrement, a lawyer in Liege, but it had been maintained in England and triumphed in America. "What will be the lot of the Austrian Low Countries?" There could be only one answer. Belgium would try itself. Toward the end of 1789 the States-General of the Austrian Netherlands deposed Joseph II and proclaimed the United States of Belgium. The Belgian Declaration of Independence (and the
equivalent declarations of the provinces of Belgium, like the states in America) followed the American Declaration faithfully. Thus, although the French Revolution had by then erupted, the inspiration was coming from America. The working people of Europe, it was said in the Belgian debates, must inevitably look to America. They had learned that conditions for the likes of them were better there, and many were emigrating. A telling use was made of America's distance from the mother country, since Belgium, like many of the territories of the Austrian Empire, was remote from the imperial capital and government in Vienna. Moreover, when, during the War of Independence, the absolute monarchs of Europe entered into relations (and even alliances) with the Americans, they were in effect endorsing revolution. The monarchs might say that the American Revolution was intolerable, but by their actions they were telling their peoples that revolution was not a crime. The significance Europeans attached to America was underlined by the deftness and even courage with which editors across the Continent managed to circumvent the censorship. In 1775-76 Denmark was a significant power. It included Norway (and Greenland, a Norwegian possession), Schleswig and Holstein, Iceland, and three West Indian islands (which were later sold to the United States). Given the insanity of Christian VII, it was governed by a court party as an enlightened despotism, and as usual a significant part of the extensive bureaucracy was the ever watchful censorship. On August 23, 1776, a German-language newspaper published in Altona in Holstein printed an edited version of the American Declaration of Independence, which was then translated and printed at the top of the front page of a Copenhagen newspaper that had the largest circulation in Denmark. In both papers it appeared uncut as far as the sentence "The History of the present King of Great-Britain is a History of repeated Injuries and Usurpations, all having in direct Object the Establishment of absolute Tyranny over these States." The trouble was that the intermittently insane George III was one of the demented Christian's closest allies. So in the above sentence, the words "King of Great-Britain" were replaced by "the present ministry of Great Britain." But the Declaration continued with the long list of grievances against the Danish monarchy. Over in the West Indies, the only Danish newspaper, the Royal Danish American Gazette, published (significantly) in English, printed the complete Declaration as early as August 17, even placing it prominently on the front page, which was otherwise reserved for advertising. The Danes in the colonies seemed themselves to have become Americans. On October 22, 1776, A.P. Bernstorff, the Danish minister for foreign affairs, wrote to a friend: "The public here is extremely occupied with the rebels in America, not because they know the cause, but because the mania of independence in reality has infected all the spirits, and the poison has spread imperceptibly from the works of the philosophes all the way out to the village schools. " The impact did not lessen even after America achieved its independence. In 1820 a Danish civil servant, C.F. von SchmidtPhiseldeck, called the Fourth of July "this forever memorable day." And in our own time a Danish historian has said that "the Declaration of Independence had a decisive impact on the course of events leading to the attainment in 1849 of Denmark's first democratic constitution." But as we come across the editors, their newspapers and their
readers, the European response is telling us something very important about the American Revolution itself. It was carried in the colonies and overseas by the assertiveness of the American middle class. One of George Ill's more apt comments was that his sovereignty was being challenged by a lot of "grocers." Marx was really saying no more when he declared that "the American Revolution sounded the tocsin for the European bourgeoisie," and gave "the first impulse to the European Revolution." Lenin later said the War ofIndependence was "one of those great, truly liberating, truly revolutionary wars"-something that cannot be said of the revolution he wrought in Russia. Two vigorous merchant cities-Hamburg and Dubrovnikillustrate the response of a newly aggressive merchant class in Europe. Hamburg was a free port, as most of its dock area still is, and since the Reformation had been the proud refuge of Protestants, other dissidents and refugees. Ports are naturally liberal, being used to strangers, with their different cultures and ideas. When the American Declaration of Independence was published in the newspaper there, its citizens naturally sympathized with the Colonies in their claim to be a free trading nation, with which Hamburg could expand its commercial ties (as it did after the war), greatly reinforcing its prosperity. Completing the story, another cargo would eventually stream through Hamburg: a vast number of immigrants to the New World from Russia and Eastern Europe. Dubrovnik had risen to be a powerful merchant republic in the Middle Ages, and had existed since then (virtually independent) under the protection, in succession, of Venice, Hungary and Turkey-until Napoleon, with his usual disrespect for history, abolished the republic in 1806, the same year in which he occupied Hamburg. Again, far away on the Adriatic, the citizens of that strong merchant port were stimulated by the news from America, a point made in a book published by the city of Dubrovnik to celebrate the bicentennial of the Declaration. It is the response of the middle class in Europe that throws light on the attitudes in England. To the ruling class in England the Declaration of Independence did not herald the dawn of a new age, or introduce new abstract principles of freedom and equality that had a universal application. In fact, it seemed to them less of a threat than it did to the ruling monarchs on the Continent, since they enjoyed many of the freedoms the Americans were claiming. It was to them a very local document, a list (as indeed it was) of very local grievances. Neither it nor any shot, in their view, was heard round the world. Both had been aimed, after all, at them; and on the whole they took it like gentlemen. There is nothing anywhere, in fact, that suggests that the governing class in London could work itself into any great passion over the American warneither the supporters nor the opponents of the American cause. Throughout the war we could have found Horace W'alpole at home in London, writing to his friends the letters that now fill 36 volumes in the Yale edition. One of Europe's most intelligent and cultivated men, he chose to be a spectator of great events rather than an actor in them. He returned again to the American question, urbane, tart and outraged: Why are we in America? he asked. "We could even afford to lose America," he wrote as early as 1774. The Boston Tea Party was to him the symbol of English official stupidity: "Mrs. Britannia orders her senate to proclaim America a continent of cowards, and vote it should be starved unless it drink tea with her." By the end of 1777 Walpole was writing: "We have been horribly the aggressors." A week after the capitulation at York-
Qce
thenewsofthefatefnlshot
reached the courts of Europe, the monarchs were alert to the effect the American rebellion might have on the balance of power in Europe.
town, but before he had news of it, he proclaimed: "The English in America are as much my countrymen as those born in the parish of St. Martin's in the Field; and when my countrymen quarrel, I think I am free to wish better to the sufferers than to the aggressors; nor can I see how my love of my country obliges me to wish well to what I despise ....Were I young and of heroic texture, I would go to America." The English people as a whole could not have their hearts in a war against their "countrymen." But there was one exception to this generally unexcited and unideological response in England, and it is illuminated by the reaction on the Continent. The merchants of the City of London and of other expanding cities of the new middle class in England identified their own interests closely with those of the colonists. The London press, almost without exception, was the voice of this class. With the introduction of the tax on the colonists' trade in molasses and sugar in 1764, the London Chronicle at once reported from the west coast port of Bristol, which depended on the American trade, that "the principal merchants of the city intend to support with all their interest the independent free trade of the American colonies." In the numerous and remarkably free English newspapers we can trace how this argument from interest developed steadily into an ideological assertion. As the Americans, during those extraordinary ten years from 1765 to 1775, worked out the philosophical grounds on which they would claim independence, the English merchant class found itself examining and then adopting the same arguments. In resisting taxation "without representation" by the English Parliament, the Americans argued that in English custom and "natural law" there was a power above Parliament-in short, the Constitution-in revolutionary thinking, in the work of the Founding Fathers, and forever afterward in the mind of America. The idea that Parliament was sovereign was then a fairly new development, and there were many at home who objected to it, but it was the American colonists who clarified the issue by their dogged resistance. Moreover, the English middle class had its own doubts about the justice of the parliamentary system as it then existed. The Industrial Revolution was reaching its flood, and beyond London many of the rising middle-class cities such as Manchester and Sheffield were not represented at all. So the American cry of "no taxation without representation" drew a strong echo from them. When the news of the Boston Tea Party reached England, the London Packet called such resistance lawful and even honorable against "tyrannic" measures. After the confrontations at Lexington and Concord the London Evening Post said that "the prevailing toast in every company of true Englishmen is, 'Victory to the Americans, and re-establishment to the British Constitution.'" (No one was arrested or imprisoned in England for supporting the Americans.)Thus in England, as in the rest of Europe, the American cause had been translated into a universal cause-by a rising class. The American Revolution represented the spontaneously international ideology of this class, which was feeling its strength in Europe
as a whole, growing assertive in England, and already established in America, even able to organize and arm itself for war. Of all the dramatic assertions in the American Declaration of Independence, none is more "impertinent" than the assurance with which the 13 Colonies said they had decided to "assume among the Powers ofthe Earth, the separate and equal Station" to which they were entitled. Yet the presumption was not as great as it seems. As early as 1765 a correspondent in the London Magazine said: "Little doubt can be entertained that this vast country will in time become the most prosperous empire that perhaps the world has ever seen." This was widely appreciated, and Europeans were aware of the rapid increase in America's population, and of Benjamin Franklin's estimate that it would double every 25 years. Once the news of the fateful shot reached the courts of Europe, the monarchs were alert to the effect the American rebellion might have on the balance of power in Europe. George III at once dispatched a personal envoy to Catherine the Great, to request no fewer than 20,000 Russian troops for help in suppressing the American insurrection. But Catherine did not have a high opinion of George, and refused to supply any soldiers or to make the treaty that Britain wanted. She and her government were extremely well informed about American affairs, and on receiving news of the Declaration, the counselor of the Russian embassy in London wrote to the Russian foreign minister, N.r. Panin, saying that both it and the prosecution of a formal war against Britain "offer evidence of all the courage of leadership" in America. King George had no better luck in Vienna. Austria had been allied with France since 1756, but by 1775 it was exhausted by the Seven Years' War, and urgently trying to resist the rise ofPr,ussia in the east under Frederick the Great. Maria Theresa saw that Austria needed to secure its position in the west by friendship with both England and France, and by 1776wished to revive her earlier friendship with England. In 1777 she wrote to her daughter Marie Antoinette that the "War in America" troubled her, as wellit might, since it pitted France and England against each other. She therefore skillfully maintained Austria's neutrality throughout the war, and forbade both English and American recruiting in Hapsburg lands. This response of the European monarchs (Denmark also remained neutral, in spite of its alliance with England and its farflung shipping and trading interests) was the clearest recognition that America had indeed become a new nation on something like equal terms with the oldest and most imperious in the Old World, at once acting and being accepted on the stage of Europe as one of the "Powers of the Earth." The story of how the shot was heard round the world carries obvious instructions. Any notion that the American War of Independence was only a rebellion falls to the ground. Both rulers and their sUbjects saw it as a revolution of universal appeal. The dynamism of that appeal was derived from the fact that the Americans had already built a great trading nation and created not only a strong middle class in the process, but a society that as a whole was middle class in its temper and ~nergy. What is more, as a result of the preparation between 1765 and 1777-ten of the most creative years in political thinking in the history of the world-the Americans entered the War of Independence with a profound political philosophy that immediately lit fires round the world. They are not yet extinguished. D About the Author: Henry Fairlie. a British-bornjournalist, editor of The New Republic.
is a contributing
Left: On the steps at the entrance of the museum, robots gather for a "family portrait" to mark the 1987 opening of Smart Machines, a gallery devoted to robotics and artificial intelligence. Below: A beautifully detailed fox made of computer components is one of several such animal sculptures on display at the m!!seum. Facing page: Using a scale model of UNIVAC, the early commercial room-sized vacuum tube computer, a guide explains its workings to a group of schoolchildren.
Boston's Computer Museum In the United States, and in many areas of the world, nearly all aspects of life-health, education, art, communication, business, science, entertainment, industry, transportation-have been affected by the phenomenal proliferation of computers. Huge, rare, experimental, and very expensive less than a lifetime ago, models today demonstrate abilities undreamed of until recently; and they may only be large enough to house the fingernail-sized chip that powers them. Already, in Boston, Massachusetts, there is a museum devoted solely to computers and computing. Using a computer simulator, a visitor can see what it's like to pilot an airplane, and if the landing is a little rough try again. A group of teenaged boys, enamored of fast cars, can design their own dream vehicle. Youngsters can use a computer to create digital images of their own faces, and change the colors at will, while others may make a voice-synthesis computer say amusing phrases in various modulations. The 5, IIO-square-meter facility has hosted more than 150,000 visitors since opening at its present location in 1984. Now in a converted warehouse on Boston's Museum Wharf, it is filled with hundreds of artifacts, photographs, films and videotapes; a 275seat auditorium; and a store. The museum is the outgrowth of an effort to save the Whirlwind, the world's first computer with an operational core memory. It was the first such machine able to perform calculations in real time-that is, able to produce data or solve problems simultaneously as they appear. Kenneth Olsen, presi-
dent of Digital, and Robert Evert, president of the Mitre Corporation of Bedford, Massachusetts, both worked on the 288-square-meter Whirlwind computer, built in 1945 at a cost of$5 million and used by the U.S. Navy as an early aircraft flight simulator and trainer. The huge device had thousands of vacuum tubes to control computing operations and occupied an entire building at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It was due to be scrapped when the two men intervened-and The Computer Museum was born. Permanent exhibits are divided into five galleries, each highlighting a different developmental phase. The Vacuum Tube Era gallery introduces the first computer generation. It features a small section of the Whirlwind and an early 1950s console television set that visitors can activate to view a vintage "interview" by the late U.S. broadcaster Edward R. Murrow with the original machine. The tasks he asked the mammoth device to perform can today be carried out by a single tiny chip. This gallery also includes a scale model of UNIVAC (Universal Automatic Computer), the nation's first commercial computer. Gallery two, The Transistor Era, re-creates a mid-1960s Travelers Insurance Company office where an IBM 1401 exemplifies transistorized workhouse computers; keypunch machines are available so visitors can punch their names onto cards to take home as souvenirs. This gallery also spotlights Seymour Cray, recognized leader in the design of supercomputers and his contributions to computing; Digital's PDP-8, the first minicomputer; and the progress of computer programming.
The third gallery showcases The Integrated Circuit Era. Exhibits delineate how the technology of integrated circuits-single semiconductor silicon chips containing complete electronic circuits-has allowed computers to become increasingly smaller and cheaper. Visitors can fOllow the step-by-step procedure in the manufacture of a computer, from concept to assembly; examine through a high-powered microscope the astounding complexity and precision of representative chips; and learn about the evolution of personal computers by experimenting with the variety of machines displayed. Gallery four, The Computer and The Image, one of the most popular areas of the museum, is devoted to the rapidly expanding field of computer graphics and image processing. Here, using the latest processors, visitors can manipulate landscape images, change lighting and colors, and direct the computer to "draw" a panorama of downtown Boston-or perform similar feats with images of their own faces; create a painting; and tour a computer model of a house, viewing it from a variety of perspectives.
The final, and newest, permanent gallery, Smart Machines, highlights robotics and artificial intelligence, featuring both historic and modern machines which in some way aim to replicate human behavior. Among the items on display are the Mars Land Rover; DDA-I, the original direct drive robot arm; the smallest underwater rover; and sophisticated robot toys. Hands-on exhibits allow visitors to race robots through an obstacle course, manipulate a robot arm, explore the frontiers of computer music or art, or ask the computer to playa game of chess. The nonprofit Computer Museum is supported by individual and corporate members and contributors, representing nearly every state in the United States and many countries. The institution also schedules special events and activities tied to important dates in computer evolution, publishes an illustrated quarterly, and has extensive archives on the history of computing, available to advanced scholars for research work. 0
1. A young enthusiast is mesmerized by the monitor as he tries one of the many hands-on computer exhibits. 2. VAX, the supercomputer that powers exhibits throughout the museum, is itself an exhibit and the first one that visitors see upon entry into the building. 3. With the aid of a large magnifier, a visitor to the museum examines the complex circuitry on an enlarged version of a single computer chip. 4. The exhibition of animal sculptures made from computer components is a perennial favorite with the young. 5. A t the flight simulator computer a schoolboy gets an idea of what it is like lOfty an airplane. 6. Visitors check the results after directing a computer graphics plotter to "draw" a picture of the Boston skyline as seen from a window of the museum, using a photograph in the background (right) as the model. 7. A museum visitor experiments with a working simulator of the Apollo Guidance Computer similar to the one that astronauts used to navigate during lunar expeditions. 8. Books on computers cater to the growing interest in computers.
A LOOK BACK AT Growth of Protectionism. The endorsement of free trade, the backbone of GATT and of U.S. trade policy, is a relatively recent phenomenon in American history. In fact, this philosophy evolved following one of the most protectionist eras since the founding of the United States. Although the United States emerged from World War I on a relatively sound economic footing, feelings of nationalism and isolationism led a return to protectionism and high tariffs. Other countries that were economically less stable also resorted to high tariffs to protect their economies after the war. In the United States, tariff levels reached their peak with the passage of the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act in 1930. This law, with an average rate of 53 percent on dutiable imports, provoked retaliatory tariff increases by other countries and resulted in a worldwide escalation of trade restrictions. Coupled with the economic chaos of the Great Depression, these "beggar-thy-neighbor" policies contributed to a decline in world trade and a fall in the gold value of U.S. exports of almost 70 percent between 1929 and 1933. Reciprocal Trade Agreements Act. Smoot-Hawley was clearly disastrous for the United States. However, it can be credited for one thing; it caused a fundamental rethinking of America's foreign trade policy. By 1934, the U.S. Congress and the Roosevelt Administration were ready to abandon protectionism for a new approach. The alternative, conceived by Secretary of State Cordell Hull, was the Reciprocal Trade Agreements Act of 1934. Under the act, for the first time, the President was given authority to enter into reciprocal trade agreements with foreign governments to reduce tariffs without the necessity of ratification by the U.S. Senate, which normally must give its advice and consent to any treaty or agreement involving another nation. Under these reciprocal agreements, the President could raise or lower tariffs by up to 50 percent of the rates established under the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act. By delineating new authority for the President under his constitutional power to make treaties, the act created a new partnership between the U.S. Congress and the President in the area of trade policy. This partnership remains in force today.' The Reciprocal Trade Agreements Act also incorporated the most-favored-nation (MFN) principle, which has served as the cornerstone of the U.S. trading system and of GATT ever since. Under the MFN principle, the benefits of any bilateral tariff reductions negotiated by the United States are extended to all MFN countries. By making such concessions on a nondiscriminatory basis, the United States sought to obtain similar treatment for U.S. exports by other countries. It was also done, in part, to avoid the aqministrative inefficiencies of applying different tariff rates on every imported good, depending on national origin. A "Multilateral" Approach to Trade. The reciprocal trade agreements program played a major role in the economic recovery
The General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) was created in Geneva in 1947 as an attempt to avoid global depressions on a large scale and also to some extent to liberalize and regulate international trade. In 1986 the Uruguay Round of multilateral trade negotiations was launched-the eighth such round to improve and expand the GATT rules in an effort to strengthen and further liberalize the international trading system. The United States was a key proponent of this effort. In this article, the authors take a look back at the history of GATT and its importance to world economic vitality.
following the Great Depression, and the United States entered into 32 such bilateral agreements between 1934 and 1945. There were, however, flaws in this bilateral approach to trade negotiations. The biggest problem was that there was no way to prevent third countries from "freeloading"; that is, from enjoying the MFN benefits of a particular bilateral agreement without making concessions of their own. It was, in part, from this background that support evolved for a multilateral approach to trade negotiations. Another major factor behind the emergence of support for a multilateral trade organization was the evolution of thinking during World War II that recognized international economic cooperation as necessary to maintain peace. Even before the war had ended, policymakers were looking for means to achieve such cooperation in both the monetary and trade fields. From this thinking emerged proposals for the International Monetary Fund, the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (World Bank), and an International Trade Organization (ITO). Although ITO never came into being, it was the planning for that organization which led to the creation of GATT.
The Genesis of GATT. In 1945, the United States, after a series of consultations with the British, put forth a proposal for an international trade organization, entitled "Proposal for Expansion of World Trade and Employment"; it sought to address a number of factors inhibiting trade: government restrictions, private cartels, erratic commodity markets, unemployment and irregular production cycles. The proposal was based on the U.S. conviction that the international trading regime should aim toward progressive trade liberalization through the abolition of non tariff trade barriers and the progressive reduction of tariffs. These ideas were folded into a draft charter, which was amended in successive conferences from 1946 to 1948 in London, New York, Geneva and Havana. Early in the drafting process, it became evident that there would be need to outline procedures to be followed for multilateral tariff negotiations under the auspices of ITO. Therefore, the drafters proposed that a General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade be established to record the results of the tariff negotiations and to ensure that any tariff concessions reached would not be undercut by other trade measures. The general agreement was not intended to be an international trade organization, but rather a specific trade agreement within the broader institutional context of the ITO charter. By the time the final version of the draft ITO charter (the Havana Charter) was drawn up, multilateral tariff negotiations under the general agreement had already begun. In January 1948, GATT, through a "Protocol of Provisional Application," officially came into force to record the results of the tariff negotiations conducted by 23 countries in the summer of 1947 in Geneva. The contracting parties to GATT met several times during the next three years while work to draft a charter for ITO continued. Unfortunately, by 1950, chances for ITO's survival dimmed and ultimately died when, in December 1950, it became clear that the U.S. Congress would not ratify the Havana Charter. With the failure of ITO, GATT evolved into something other than its creators had originally intended. On the one hand, the more far-reaching provisions of ITO, which dealt with trade in the broader context (employment, adjustment, antitrust and commodity policies and their effects on trade), were not incorporated into GAIT. However, through a series of amendments over time, GA TT assumed most of the commercial policy provisions of the Havana Charter and became the founding document for an international trade institution. The general agreement that emerged from these deliberations, and Trom successive rounds of negotiations, serves as both a framework of rules for international trade relations and as a forum for discussions and negotiations on trade matters. The guiding principles of GATT include: • Trade without discrimination through application of the
MFN principles of the Reciprocal Trade Agreements Act. • Reliance on tariffs as opposed to other commercial measures (for example, quantitative restrictions) where protection of domestic industries is necessary. • Provision of a stable and predictable basis for trade through negotiated "bindings" of tariffs at fixed maximum levels. • Settlement of disputes through consultation, conciliation and, as a last resort, dispute settlement procedures. Contracting parties to GATT agree to abide by these basic principles. However, GATT recognizes that it may be necessary in certain circumstances to suspend some of the rules. This was particularly important at the time of the drafting of the general agreement when so many national economies had been devastated by World War II. At that time it was unrealistic to expect every country to completely open its economy to foreign competition all at once. The solution was to include provisions in GATT that allow countries temporarily and legally to depart from the rules and establish quotas for balance-of-payments or infant-industry reasons. GATT also contains a safeguards clause allowing countries to protect domestic industries injured by imports in return for compensating the affected exporting countries. Another area over which GAIT· does not impose strict discipline by design is agriculture. These and other exceptions and special provisions have been relied on in the past by countries that otherwise would not have been able to assume the responsibilities of GAIT membership. Today, GATT is the primary multilateral instrument covering international trade. From the original 23 founding members in 1948, the GATT membership has grown to 96 countries, representing more than 80 percent of world trade. Since it was created, the world has witnessed an eight-fold growth in international trade. Although GATT was not the only cause of this economic expansion, the gradual reduction of tariffs and general liberalization of trade practices made under GATT's auspices was a major factor in the economic growth of the postwar era. GA TT continues to playa vital role in international relations. Today, however, most members recognize that there are problems in the system, that some of the old rules are not working as well as they should be, that too many GATT members are taking measures inconsistent with the GATT principles, and that GAIT is not set up to address the emerging economic issues of the future. It is for these reasons that members have embarked on a new round of negotiations to strengthen the system and ensure that GA TT will continue to have the same beneficial influence over economic policies and relations between trading nations that it has had since World War II. 0 About the Authors: Ann Morrison and Robin Layton are specialists in multilateral affairs in the U.S. Department of Commerce.
The principle of affirmative action embodied in the Indian Constitution was upheld
Justice Felix Frankfurter once remarked that "Constitutional law ... is not at all a science, but applied politics, using the word in its noble sense." It is profoundly true. People are apt to regard constitutional law from a purely legalistic viewpoint and treat its evolution as the product solely of judicial decisions. But constitutional law is shaped in various ways by all institutions having a role in the political process. In the United States, the Supreme Court lays down the law, but the President and Congress make their own contributions to the evolution of constitutional law; as does the fourth estate, the press and other media. Now more than 200 years old, the Constitution of the United States commands the admiration of all who are familiar with it. Within the United States the document is regarded with such veneration that it has been characterized, not inaptly, as the "uncrowned king." But it is important to appreciate the Constitution in its totality-to view the magnificent wood apart from its many and gorgeous trees. In physiology the word "constitution" refers to the make-up of the entire body. It is no less true in politics. The word describes the full set of interlinked principles that govern polity. The process is a continuous one, a constant dialogue between the elements of continuity and change. Small wonder that in the 1980s, debate should have been revived anew in the United States on the "original intent" of the framers of the Constitution two centuries ago. In the 24 years since the original publication of the tome under review by Alfred H. Kelly and Winfred A. Harbison, it has
acquired a deserved acceptance as a standard work on American constitutional history. Indeed it is one of the best singlevolume accounts of the American constitutional experience. But in recent years many of the basic constitutional assumptions have come under close criticism, fostered by new research in history and politics. The entire subject of constitutional change received a new treatment. The new volume of The American Constitution: Its Origins and Development (Tata McGraw-Hill, New Delhi) is revised by Herman Belz from "the perspective of progressive historiography and the liberal nationalist reform tradition." He explains that Kelly and Harbison's work reflected acceptance of federal centralization and interventionist government. That era reached its climax in the New Deal period of the 1930s and the years that followed. In the 1960s and 1970s, however, reaction set in. The 1980s saw a mounting distrust of bureaucratic centralization. This prompted Belz to undertake a comprehensive revision of both narrative and interpretation of their work. The result is a substantially new book. Belz writes: "Without rejecting the valuable insights offered by the liberal nationalist perspective, I have perforce recognized the enduring legitimacy and influence of the alternative decentralist, individualist, laissez-faire tradition in American constitutionalism. Furthermore, I have tried to incorporate in this book an awareness, greater perhaps than was available in the scholarship of a generation ago, of the centrality in American thought of constitutionalism as a basic ideology and approach to political life (emphasis added), rather than, as the progressive generation of historians was wont to regard it, as an expedi-
ent method of promoting class and economic in terests." This is the most fascinating and instructive feature of the new work-the emphasis on the interaction of law and politics and the role of law in regulating the political process so that it does not ignore or transgress those basic values on which the state rests. Constitutional law ensures that "governmental power is exercised legitimately." Constitutional government is, therefore, necessarily "limited government." In plain words, the state is not a law unto itself but a creature of the supreme law of the land. In the very nature of things, a great responsibility falls on the judiciary as the guardian of legality. Alexis de Tocqueville, one of the greatest observers of the American experiment, noted in his classic Democracy in America, published a century and a half ago, "I am not aware that any nation of the globe has hitherto organized a judicial power on the principle now organized by the Americans. A stranger hears the authority of ajudge invoked in the political occurrences of every day." The United States was extremely fortunate in having as the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court in the early years of the Republic a great judge who was also a great statesman, John Marshall. He struck a powerful blow for the supremacy of the Constitution and for judicial review in Marbury v. Madison (1803). In doing so he struck a blow for the Union. The book analyzes the two centuries of the Constitution under distinct phases. From 1787 to 180 I the issue was the very survival of the Constitution. From 1801 until 1877, the central issue was "the nature of the Union." The Civil War ended the controversy. "In the third phase of constitutional development, from 1877 to
The American, Constitution Its Origins and Development by the Supreme Court by a creative interpretation of the U.S. Constitution. 1933, the social transformations wrought by industrialization and urbanization imposed severe strains on the political order. Principles of limited government and entrepreneurial liberty that in the preindustrial era had encouraged broadly democratic economic progress now contributed to disparities of wealth and power that challenged republican liberty and equality. Reformers began to demand that government not merely allocate economic resources as it had traditionally done, but also regulate the economic market with a view toward restricting the power of private corporations and redistributing social goods." The New Deal marked another phase during which there was an enormous accretion of the federal government's power. The post-World War II era has been wit¡ ness to the struggle for civil rights for all regardless of racial and other distinctions and for individual liberty vis-a-vis the powerful modern leviathan of government. The book highlights the contributions of justices such as Holmes, Brandeis, Cardozo and Warren. None of them allowed himself to forget Marshall's sage advice: "We must never forget that it is a constitution we are expounding ...intended to endure for ages to come, and consequently, to be adapted to the various crises of human affairs." Constitutional values are relevant for all times. But each age has to apply them to its needs in the light of its own perceptions and judgment. To an Indian reader, the more instructive portions of the book will be the ones that deal with the past nearly 40 years during which the United States Supreme Court opened new avenues for civil rights and civil liberties. The principle of affirmative action, embodied in the Constitution
ofIndia, was upheld by the Supreme Court by a creative interpretation of the Constitution of the United States, albeit not without protracted debate. At places the author tends to minimize the significance of an event. One particularly unfortunate error is in regard to the rights ofthe press. Herman Belz writes: "In Richmond
Newspapers,
Inc.
v. Virginia
(1980), the Court refused to allow a criminal trial to be dosed to the press, as a lower court had ordered. The rationale offered by Chief Justice Burger was not, as libertarians argued, that journalists possessed a special constitutional right of access, but that in the
absence of compelling circumstances suggesting otherwise, the public had a right to attend the kind of criminal trials that had historically been open to it." This is inaccurate. Chief Justice Warren Burger's observations do uphold a "special" right pf access for the press. "Instead of acquiring information about trials by firsthand observation or by word of mouth from those who attended, people now acquire it chiefly through the print and electronic media. In a sense, this validates the media claim of functioning as surrogates for the public. While media representatives enjoy the same right of access as the public, they often are provided special seating and priority of entry so that they may report what people in attendance have seen and heard." The book does well to remind the reader that it was in the Burger era that the term "the imperial judiciary" was coined. The Burger Court retreated somewhat on the criminal-law front, but on the main battleground--eivil liberties-it was activist enough. "After years of criticism of activist, result-oriented jurisprudence, many legal scholars were dismayed to see the Burger Court engaging in judicial law-
making of its own," says the author. The roles are now truly reversed. When Roosevelt was battling with the conservative justices in the Supreme Court and went so far as to try to pack the Court with liberals, it was the liberals who talked of "government by judiciary." But as the author impishly points out, it is now the turn of the conservatives to use this expression against "equal protection-minded liberal activist judges." To be realistic, it must be acknowledged that public opinion is, as the author records, "split over the proper judicial role." This split is in a sense as old as the American Constitution itself and this book provides a fascinating account of the course of that creative controversy. In so doing, it does not neglect for a moment the political factor. Nor, of course, do either the opponents or the advocates of judicial activism. "Some observers," says Belz, "approved the court's far-flung power and proposed new concepts of public law litigation in which judges would frankly shape public policy as an extension of the political process. In this view, law would be assimilated into politics, and the results of judicial decisions justified by the social justice they embodied. Other students of public law, however, including some who had spoken for liberal activ~sm in the 1960s, advised judicial moderation." According to the author, a line must be drawn between law and politics "if American constitutionalism in the 1980s was to continue to rest on the principles and values set forth at the beginning of the republic." 0 About the Reviewer: A.G. Noorani, a frequent
contributor to SPAN, is a Bombay-based constitutional expert, lawyer and bibliophile.
William arton Man of Many Arts
William Wharton, an expatriate American painter and writer living in France, has now taken to filmmaking. He will write the script and the screenplay and coproduce hisfirstfilm, based in a Tamil Nadufishing village, with the author of this article who will also direct it. The cast will consist of talent from the Tamil stage.
William Wharton delivered an informal lecture at the USIS Madras recently, on the adaptation of his novel Birdy (1979)for the screen. The title of his lecture, "Book to Film," also describes the direction his own career is taking. Having written five more novels, Dad (1981), A Midnight Clear (1982), Scumbler (1984), Pride (1985) and Tidings (1987), Wharton has now completed the first draft of a screenplayfor a film to be set in India. He first visited India two years ago. "I came on holiday, to see a new country and be with friends who were living here, and though I carried a camera everywhere and clicked at everything, I wasn't just another tourist. I was hoping to record scenes that perhaps I would put down on canvas. But when I'd gotten back I discovered that more than wanting to paint what I'd seen and experienced, I wanted to write about it." Though Wharton is known primarily as an author, writing, as a medium of expression, has been a relatively recent discovery for him. He graduated in painting with a psychology minor, and went on to combine both disciplines in his postgraduate studies. His doctoral thesis, "Art Elements and Their Relationship to Personality Variables," was "a questioning of the nature of vision and the assumption that we all live in the same visual world." Wharton then began as a painter and it was not until 20 years later that he started writing. Even today he thinks of himself as "a painter who . happens to write." Although painting has earned Wharton a living for most of his life it is his writing that has brought him financial success; and he admits he enjoys its luxuries. His novels, possibly because their narratives are not confined by a conventional dramatic structure, have not hit bestseller lists, but have consistently attracted the attention of Hollywood producers. Wharton wrote Birdy without any thought of publishing. The subject, inspired by the seemingly naive view that humans have much to learn about attitudes of life from animals, is one that kept coming back to him periodically
over two decades before the book was written. But the story of a strange boy obsessed with the desire to fly like a bird, and lengthy passages of esoteric bird lore were unlikely to be of any interest to the reading public. However, the book was a success and was critically well received. The film rights for Birdy were sold almost immediately after the book came out, and three other of Wharton's novels have been optioned. Recently the rights for his second novel, Dad, were bought up by Steven Speilberg's production company and filming commenced in February this year. Jack Lemmon plays the role of Dad and Olympia Dukakis is the mother. Kathy Baker is the sister in the film. Despite the fact that the film Birdy-directed by Alan Parker and starring Mathew Modine and Nicholas Cagewas favorably reviewed and took the Special Jury Award at the Cannes festival, Wharton has reservations about it. "When I signe~ over the rights of the book I thought, 'Well this is it. I don't want to have anything more to do with the film.' I refused the offer to co-write the screenplay but when the producers invited me to go on location, at their expense, I didn't refuse. I found out later that they only needed me to talk to the press." Although he had accepted his place on the sidelines from the start, watching the film get made without himself being involved in its creation was a deeply frustrating experience for Wharton. His self-control was fully tested as he remained a silent observer of a system functioning in its often mindless ways. For example, in the choice of location, authenticity was a primary concern. A small neighborhood was found in Philadelphia, and an entire film unit transported there. But then an overzealous art department stepped in to remodel the area so thoroughly as to make it indistinguishable from a studio lot, and local residents were rounded up by the streetful and sent off on holidays paid for by the film company so that professional extras could take their place. "Then halfway through the shooting of the film I discovered to my utter astonishment that the story's time frame had
been shifted from World War II and the Depression years to in-vogue Vietnam, but whoever wrote the script forgot something. There are all these helicopters in the war scenes but Birdy doesn't even notice them. He should be responding with fascination or fear, but he just doesn't react at all." The excesses and wasteful methods of the Hollywood system have not made Wharton disenchanted with cinema. "The medium is in every way capable of the complexity and profoundity of the written word. If opera, because it combines elements of various arts, deserves the title Gesamkunstwerk-the total work of art-then cinema must be a strong contender from among modern art forms." Certainly Wharton has been drawn to it because it comes closest to a synthesis of the visual and the literary. The large sums of money involved had kept him from venturing into film production until recently. Despite misgivings about the Hollywood industry he appreciates the need for a film to recoyer costs. "The same principle holds for books too. It's just that only 5,000 copies of Birdy had to be sold for the book to break even, but it took 20 million people to see the film before profits started coming in. However, with different kinds of markets opening up around the world, and the possibility of shooting an international film in India at a fraction of the cost of doing it in the West, the risk on my upcoming project is minimal." The "project" is a film set in a fishing village on the untouched Tamil Nadu coastline. Lasting impressions formed during Wharton's first visit to India crystallized into vivid images that are the basis of a screenplay he is writing. It tells the story of an American engineer who acquires a piece ofland near the sea and develops it into a high-tech utopian farm, encouraging local fishermen to accept modern technology. The film has a romance element as well; a love story between the foreigner and a low-caste girl abandoned by her husband. But the greater love is that which grows in the American for the land and 'the people. The idea of a film came about because Wharton wants to
address a rural Indian audience, and realizes that cinema is the only means to do so. "I don't know about breaking it up into close-up and long shot, but I don't foresee a problem. It's pretty much the same thing writing a novel or a film; writing about Americans, or Parisians, or Indians. I'm telling a story about people-the hopes that sustain us, the pleasures that satisfy us, the weaknesses that destroy us, and the passions that elevate us." Even so, Wharton knows that he is not writing in a vacuum. The new medium may not pose insuperable problems, but his subject matter calls for extensive research. He admits it is difficult to write about India, sitting in a houseboat in France. Wharton returned to India recently, a year after his first visit, with a file full of notes. In addition to taking photographs he came equipped with a video camera, "partly to get a feel of the place, the geography of the area that the characters will inhabit, partly in an effort to discover more about the potentialities of the moving image; and partly to give the investors out there an idea of what they'll be spending their money on." A facility on the video camera allows Wharton to record his thoughts while he is shooting. So the tape plays back like a documentary-admittedly not very well shot-with a voiceover narration full of insights and personal observations. Over some footage of fishermen mooring their catamarans, for example: "They look at me strangely when I swim in their sea. Not because I'm a foreigner but because I swim for pleasure. They swim too, but they're creatures of thesea, at one with the water. For them the sea is continuous with the land, they wear the same clothes in or out of water, and it doesn't seem to matter to them whether they're dry or wet. The sea is their livelihood; I suppose they never swim for enjoyment." The video camera also came in handy to record hours of interview material with the locals, who, surprisingly, shed their playfulness and self-consciousness almost at once. "The only time some women became coy was when I asked them about kissing, and I think that was probably the
interpreter's fault. I don't see much touching and hugging or any physical displays of affection in this country." Wharton's research has its prosaic aspects too. A plot element involves the American wanting to settle down in India and buy land here, so Wharton had to consult with the local panchayats, the immigration office, the U.S. consulate, and a legal firm to get his information. Although Wharton's story explores themes that have been dealt with before, he is determined to avoid cliches and superficiality. "The mutual antagonism initially between the locals and the foreigner that turns to understanding, the long silent gazes between the white man and the dark girl; they've been done to the ground. I have to stay clear of the obvious. If we're dealing with the caste system it's with a view to analyzing the social forces which sanction the practice rather than taking a voyeuristic look at the symptoms." As an afterthought he adds, "I haven't seen the caste system operate but I've been told about it and I think I understand enough to write about it." Wharton plans another trip to India before production begins. "I need to come back here another time to be really sure of my ground. Besides I've only traveled around the south. I'm not sure I want to visit north India yet. I know it's very different, but I don't want to dilute my experience." Like the protagonist in his script Wharton has grown to love India. "That's what it's all about-painting, writing, filmmaking; mostly it's making things visible to people. Reality is not always visible. The artist makes visible to people what he sees and feels."
Wharton left America for the Continent shortly after his first child was born. The choice between an academic career and life among the artists on the Left Bank in Paris was not a difficult one. It is a choice he does not regret though he and his family did miss America. His painter's income did not allow for frequent transatlantic trips, but of late the family have been able to return once or twice each year. Despite most of his business now' being in America, Wharton is unlikely to move back. He is happy living where he has lived for the past 20 years-on a houseboat docked about 20 kilometers west of Paris. His children who talked him into this romantic if somewhat impractical notion have all moved elsewhere now leaving him and his wife Rosemary in their floating home. It hasn't always stayed afloat though. Wharton virtually rescued the boat from a scrap heap--it was all he could afford at the time-and set to work putting it together. It sank on the family twice in those early days. But successive face1ifts over the years have made the boat a comfortable place to live and work. The lower deck comprises the work area. Wharton's desk looks out through a broad window at a serene stretch of water, along which the only traffic is the sleek skiffs from the rowing club down the river. The window also serves to light him for a video camera trained at his chair from across the desk. Until recently, Wharton had never owned a TV set because of the need to protect his children from television"a medium that conditions passivity and suppresses independent thought; a system that promotes glorification of personalities instead of the understanding of people." Whar-
ton is far from being a traditionalist: "The technology which allows images to be fed from a central bank to your home is a wonderful thing. It's the lack of choice about programs foisted on you that defeats the purpose. I suppose with the future promising phone-in-programming for individual homes TV seems to have overcome some of its drawbacks." Wharton now owns a TV set which he uses almost exclusively with his video camera and recorder. Video has rekindled the art of the storyteller-narrator and Wharton does his best to promote the practice. He has spoken all of his novels on videocassettes and prefers that people listen to, rather than read them. "The slowed-down speed is the ideal pace at which to feel their textures." Wharton also keeps a video diary, and in his spare time, compiles on video the hundreds of bedtime stories he has thought up and told his children. The mechanics of producing a novel have also changed considerably for Wharton since he painstakingly clacked out Birdy on a battered Hermes Baby. He now dictates the first drafts of his books into a video recorder, then edits and makes revisions on a word processor. On weekends, when most of Paris is heading out, Wharton and his wife travel into the city. They have a small apartment near La Place de la Bastille which doubles as his studio. "I find it easier to paint than to write. It is so physical, so totally absorbing, it doesn't require much time to think; while writing is mostly thinking." Painting and writing are not kept as separate as at first might seem. "The same themes and images that are going around in my mind find expression verbally as well as on canvas; so it might be illuminating to look at my paintings with knowledge of the writing that was happening at the time." However, even though important characters in Wharton's books are often painters, there is not as much reference to art, or the use of the critical idiom, as one would expect. Perhaps this has to do with a sentiment expressed in Scumbler: "Writing about painting is like trying to kiss with a mouth punched full of novocaine. You know you're doing something, everything's in the right place but you can't feel it." WilliamWharton is about to flout the maxim of one of his own creations. Provisionaliy titled "Last Lovers," the novel he is working on includes long descriptive passages of an artist's mental life and of the paintings he paints. An old blind woman reminisces, telling the artist of events that occurred many years earlier. He makes these events the subjects of his paintings which he then describes to her. Wharton actually did the paintings while writing the novel and will be discussing with his publisher the possibility of having the pictures printed in the book. The idea Wharton is pushing is to seal prints of these paintings in the hollowedout back cover of the hardback edition, with a note from the author indicating their existence but dissauding the reader from breaking the seal to look at the pictures, urging him rather to allow his imagination to create the pictures, based upon his reading of their multiple descriptions. The whole idea though thematically motivated, is not without a commercial aspect. It is likely that those copies with seals intact will in time become collectors' items. A most novel idea. 0 About the Author: Chetan Shah lives in Madras where he makes
documentary films and writes on cinema.
Even though William Wharton (left, during his recent visit to Tamil Nadu) has achievedfame as a writer, he thinks of himself as "a painter who happens to write." Wharton, who started out as a painter (some examples of his work are shown on this page) , says: "I find it easier to paint than to write. It is so physical, so totally absorbing, it doesn't require much time to think; while writing is mostly thinking."
SEEING "The lands are all most beautiful," wrote Christopher Columbus in 1492. In the centuries since Columbus, America has been discovered time and again by countless travelers from within and outside the country. Around this time of year-from mid-June to early September-it's vacation time in America, a time to get away from it all, to leave behind the pressures and stresses of everyday life. Although Americans go just about everywhere they can, for many of them the holiday season is a time to revel in nature at its most magnificent. It may. mean a walk in the forest, a trek in the mountains, fishing, rock climbing, canoeing, backpacking, seeing the wildlife, or just plain camping out under the stars.
Three times the size of India, the United States has been endowed with some of nature's grandest spectacles. Right: A luxuriant rain forest in the Olympic National Park in Hlashington State presents an awesome sight. Left, top: Bryce Canyon in Utah, where over the millennia nature has chiseled soul-stirring shapestemples, cathedrals, spires, pinnacles, windowed walls, miniature cities. Left: In the close vicinity of the canyon are gnarled, twisted and stunted bristlecone pines. Although lacking the grandeur one expects to find in ancient trees, they are the oldest forms of life in existence on our planet at more than 4,000 years. Far left: Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument in Arizona isfamousfor its myriad varieties of colorful cacti, some more than 15 meters tall. Here a woodpecker sits atop a giant cactus.
For the more adventurous
itis the lure of the nation's last frontier that beckons them to Alaska, which is also America's largest state. Its 7.7 million-hectare Arctic National Wildlife Refuge offers visitors some of the most exotic sights, contrasting landscapes and a dazzling variety of wildlife. Summer vacation, for others, evokes thoughts of sailing, swimming, fishing, water sports, or of outdoor concerts, art exhibitions and music festivals. That is what makes_ so many people choose places like Seattle, Washington; and Newport, Rhode Island, which offer a rich fare of both varieties. Another city that excites a universal sense of romance in Americans is San Francisco, California. Maybe the enchantment has something to do with its mild summer, gently undulating topography, its cable cars, or the mystery and magic of its bridge-swallowing fog. Thickest around midyear, the billowing clouds of vapor pour in from the ocean to blot out the fabled Golden Gate Bridge and blur the cityscape to an opalescent mirage.
Above: Seattle's skyline features the Space Needle (left), built for the 1962 World Fair; Mount Rainier is in the background. Right, top: Fog and light from the midnight sun enhance the enchantmel11 of the snow-clad Romanzoj Mountains in Alaska. Right, center: Muskoxen in Alaska, once threatened
with extinction, today number more thqn 500, thanks to the concerted efforts of the Fish and Wildlife Service, which cares for endangered wildlife. Right: A couple savors the view of the San Francisco skyline from across the bay, on the deck of a waterfront cafe in Sausalito.
u.s.
Those with a sense of the past
head for cities where history resides. It may be Lexington and Concord in Massachusetts, which have a hallowed place in American history and folklore for the shot that began the War ofIndependence; Philadelphia in Pennsylvania, where the first Continental Congress met, culminating in the Declaration of Independence (see story on pages 6-9); or it may be Richmond in Virginia, which was witness to the many trials and tribulations of the American Civil War drama in the l860s. Whether for quiet or frenzy, action or contemplation, holiday travel, which packs a lot of fun and frolic of every variety for all members of the family, is a quintessential part of the American character. Vacations provide with a feeling of rejuvenation, a sense of discovery-and fulfillment.
Above: Sixlh S/I'eel Markelplace in Richmond. wilh ils mullilevel mix of shops, restaurants and en tertainmen t-a favorite with visitors. Facing page, clockwise from top'left: Children have fun at an old drinking fountain in Portland, Oregon; these fountains have been preserved as a relic of the past. Tourists in Seallle have/un silting outside a caboose. A bicycle tourist relaxes in the quiet solitude of the Oregon coast. A sciilor enjoys a drink after a sailing compelition. Sports such as American summer football allract thousands of hdlidaymakers.
By collecting such waste products as glass bottles, aluminum cans and used paper, American towns and cities are finding they not only can put dumping grounds to better use but also have a substantial new source of revenue from recycling.
People in several American cities are now collecting old bottles and cans (left) which they can exchange for cash in programs like the one sponsored by the American National Can Company in Naperville, Illinois (above). The trash is sent in trucks to recycling facilities (far left) for cleaning, crushing and flattening into aform that manufacturers can use.
The bowl of evergreens encircling a short stretch of Route 101in the state of New Hampshire might seem an unlikely spot for a garbage crisis. The ample open land suggests that somewhere among the slight hills could be found a landfill site where trash could be unobtrusively sequestered. And Wilton, New Hampshire, might seem an unlikely town to have chosen mandatory recycling to solve its solid-waste dilemma. People living there seem to take the state motto-"live free or die"--entirely to heart. They don't like to be told what to do and resist government involvement in their lives. Until 1979 Wilton did depend on a landfill of sorts-an old stone quarry where the town had long dumped its trash. As in many rural communities, the landfill was "treated with benign neglect," says town Councillor Greg Bohosiewicz. Fires were regarded as "acts of God" that lowered the ever-growing piles of garbage, he points out. The strategy worked until the mid-1970s, when the state began pressuring Wilton to close the landfill because it sat on the banks of a river: The town faced a number of options: Open a proper landfill, export the waste, incinerate it, or recycle it. Enter Bohosiewicz, then "just an interested citizen." "The only thing I knew about trash at the time was that it magically disappeared someplace," he says. As a citizen, he wanted to keep taxes low. As an economist by training, he quickly realized that recycling was the cheapest alternative for dealing with the town's trash. Working as a "one-man committee," he sold the idea of a joint recycling center to six towns in the area. The center opened in Wilton in 1979, accepting materials ranging from aluminum foil to bottles and cans, plastic milk jugs to compost. Today about 65 percent of the area's population recycles-a high participation rate. for a drop-off program. Wilton spends about $36 per ton to dispose of its waste-$84 less than a neighboring town that does not recycle. The Wilton program is part of a growing trend toward recycling. At least 14 states have passed legislation that either promotes or requires recycling of residential garbage. More than 500 communities offer curbside collection of glass, paper, metal and other materials. Recycling appears to be entering a new era both politically and economically. The wave of programs that accompanied the environmental movement in the 1970s tended to be small, private ventures that relied on volunteer labor. Many struggle to survive because revenues prove difficult to make from limited quantities of recycled material. Today profits are generally not the bottom line, and environmental concerns are not the primary motivation. The new programs tend to be run by the public sector, which is spurred by steeply rising tipping fees-the cost of unloading garbage' at landfills or incinerators-and an overabundance of garbage that has no place to go. The private sector, which is active in processing, incineration, and collecting bottles and cans, has steered clear of municipal collection programs. "Wherever there aren't huge open spaces, waste disposal costs
are the fastest rising item on any municipal budget," says John Schall, the recycling director at the division of solid waste in Massachusetts. Many officials facing solid-waste crises see recycling as a way to dispose of garbage without raising taxes. Judy Roumpf, publisher of Resource Recycling, one of two magazines devoted to the topic, says that the public sector has begun to realize "that although recycling costs, it costs less than collection or disposal of waste." To ensure a steady supply of materials and reduce the volume of garbage, today's recycling programs try to enlist the active support of a large portion of the population. Approaches to wooing the public vary. In rural areas that lack the luxury of municipal refuse collection, residents already drive to the town dump or hire a hauler. So drop-off centers like Wilton's-where citizens bring all their refuse-require only the extra step of separating the recyclables. Center Director Patricia Moore says that most people don't seem to mind the extra work. But those who do, about 35 percent, pay to have their trash taken elsewhere. Each town pays a fee for using the center based on the size of its population, and also shares in the revenues from selling recycled materials. One of the recycling center's outstanding traits is its cleanliness. Once a typical town dump, it now looks more like a summer camp with a tidy, litter-free parking lot, wind chimes and a cluster of low, prefab barns. Wooden trays, each larger than a double bed, brim with aluminum cans, tin cans, brown glass, clear glass and green glass. Hand-painted signs specify what goes where. Bins at the front of one barn collect cardboard, newspapers and mixed paper. At the far end of the lot stand a discarded vacuum cleaner and other appliances, a shelf bearing old books and a few shoes, jugs of used motor oil, several rows of car batteries, scrap metal and a dumpster filled with organic waste for composting. People also drop off unwanted clothes, styrofoam packing pellets, and milk jugs and soft-drink containers made of PET (polyethylene terephthalate-one of the few recyclable plastics). The center recycles about half the garbage it receives-a huge proportion for most such programs. About 35 percent is burned, and the rest, including the incinerator ash, is landfilled. In contrast to the Wilton program, which collects many different materials, urban programs tend to focus on convincing citizens to separate a few recyclables. Many programs offer curbside pickup during regular garbage collection and use extensive public education. New Jersey is renowned for its recycling programs. The most densely populated state, it faced landfill and toxic-waste problems early. It also contains an ample network for recyclables: Dozens of , industries, including paper and glass mills, use secondary materials, and more than 90 private dealers process wastepaper, glass and .steel. The state has increasingly pressured its 21 counties, which handle their own trash, to curtail the amount of solid waste they generate. In 1980 the state set a goal of reducing its waste by 25 percent and created a system of grants and loans to help counties launch recycling programs. Towns with mandatory recycling each take a different approach to encouraging citizen participation. Voorhees Township on the edge of the Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, suburbs boasts a 100 percent participation rate. The tactic is simple: To have trash picked up, residents must put out the recycling pail distributed by the town, whether or not it contains bottles and cans. If the pail is
he most active advocates of aluminum recycling are its manufacturers: They use 95 percent less energy to recycle aluminum than to smelt it from bauxite ore.
missing, it will be assumed that the bottles and cans were mixed in with the trash, and it all will be left behind, labeled with a red tag. The program in suburban Haddonfield has evolved into one of Camden County's most successful. The town opened a drop-off center for recyclables in 1981, and quickly moved to twicemonthly and then weekly pickups after dumping costs more than tripled. In addition to collecting bottles, cans and newspapers, Haddonfield picks up old refrigerators, stoves and other major appliances. The town also collects leaves and wood, chopping up branches, tree trunks and other scraps for composting. Some communities tackle recycling with a combination of programs rather than one comprehensive effort. A center in the New York City borough of the Bronx pays people for their materials-an important incentive for'low-income residents. It accepts any quantity of most materials other than clothes and tires, including wood and several plastics. Recyclers realize, however, that high participation will not necessarily bring a clear uniform product that manufacturers can use. The Wilton center uses a labor-intensive approach to ensure the quality of its recyclables: Workers comb through the collection bins before pushing the materials into storage bunkers. They compress the cans and paper into tight waist-high blocks with a vintage 1921 chain-driven baler. Glass and plastic are stockpiled. The glass is first crushed by a tractor to reduce its volume, and the PET bottles and jugs are fed into a granulator that chews them into small bits. Most of these materials are used by industries in the regIon. A more complex approach is the key to the success of recycling in Camden.County, where it has been mandatory since 1985. In a few minutes machinery at the Camden Recycling Facility sorts, crushes, cleans and flattens recyclables into a form that manufacturers can use. The facility is located on the site of an old scrap dealer. Outside the main building sit several three-meter piles of color-coded cullet (broken glass) and crumpled aluminum. Trucks deliver loads of glass and metal throughout the day. Inside the building workers wear earplugs for protection against the din. Unsorted glass and metal travel up a long conveyor as a worker picks out toasters, wire hangers, pots, aerosol cans, paper bags and other materials that don't belong. At the top of the belt a magnetic separator pulls out tin-plated steel cans and sends them to a processor that cleans and flattens them. The light-weight aluminum cans are blown into another processor and crushed into tight balls. The glass continues along the conveyor past workers who separate it by color-dear, brown, green. The bottles fall through vertical crushers into rotating sieves called trommels, which sift out labels and errant remnants of food. Along with other remaining garbage-about ten to 15 percent of the original load-this refuse is landfilled. When the Camden facility first opened in 1986, only about six towns brought their recyclables there. By March 1987, when it
reached its expected level of 40 tons per day (half its capacity), the number of towns had climbed to about 40. The towns use the facility for free. As the volume produced by the plant builds, the towns will also share profits from its sales. Processing plants are a key part of the new wave of recycling. Massachusetts, New York and several other states are planning to build regional facilities. By readying secondary materials for manufacturing, such technology makes large-scale recycling possible. The central facility provides a direct link between recycling in the home and recycling at the factory, fostering participation at the one end and demand for materials at the other. One of the strengths of today's recycling enterprises is their intent to forge 10ng-term.Jinks with industry. The Wilton program originally had trouble finding markets because of its size, and sometimes had to stockpile paper and glass. Now the New Hampshire Resource Recovery Association, a private nonprofit group that assists recycling efforts, coordinates the sale of most materials. Similarly, central processing facilities often do their own marketing, removing that burden from the public sector and individual programs. If offered a steady supply of good products, industry can use recycled and processed materials in place of their virgin counterparts advantageously. Cullet can replace some or all of the sand, soda ash and limestone a mill uses to make glass. Because it melts at lower temperatures than the raw materials, cullet saves wear and tear on the melting tank, uses less energy and lowers polluting emissions from the furnaces. The most active advocates of aluminum recycling are its manufacturers: They use 95 percent less energy to recycle aluminum than to smelt it from bauxite ore. According to the Worldwatch Institute, a nonprofit research organization in Washington, on averagea recycled aluminum can is back on a supermarket shelf in six weeks. Unlike glass and aluminum, paper cannot be recycled indefinitely. But many grades of paper can be de-inked, cleaned and bleached-processes that require less energy and water than those used to create virgin pulp. The recycled material is used to make products such as gameboards, cereal boxes, covers for hardcover books, ticket stubs and tissue paper.
The future of recycling depends largely on the willingness of public officials to create new, long-term programs in the face of current pressures to build incinerators. Recycling is sometimes seen as a competitor of incineration because it can reduce the amount of waste that incineration plant operators are paid to receive. Many communities guarantee incinerator operators a minimum volume of trash. But while recycling can eliminate highquality fuel like paper and cardboard, it also removes unburnable glass and metal and reduces the amount of slag that forms from melted glass on the sides of furnaces. Slag and contaminated ash ar,esuch major problems that some incinerators have facilities on site that remove glass and metal from garbage before it is burned. Yet some recycling advocates believe that attempts to see the two alternatives as complementary undermine the importance of reducing and reusing waste. "Too often recycling is seen as part of a happy marriage with incineration, rather than a primary solution," says Thomas Webster, a research associate at the Center for the Biology of Natural Systems in New York. Webster has worked with biologist Barry Commoner on a pilot recycling program for East Hampton on Long Island designed to deal with about 70 percent of the trash-an amount comparable to incineration. Webster believes recycling could reduce trash even more if legislators set standards for packaging design, targeted plastic milk jugs and other items for deposit fees, and introduced "wasteinitiator" taxes on packaging that can't be recycled. "Reduction and recycling of waste should be first priority rather than last priority," says Webster. He considers incinerators a needlessly complex and expensive form of waste disposal and a problematic one. The plants produce emissions believed to be harmful as well as toxic ash that must be landfilled. "What we need to do is to get rid of the garbage, not just move it through one more machine," maintains Webster. "To get high levels of recycling you have to work hard. You need legislative strategies, and you need political will. But once you have the 0 systems in place, you've solved the problem." About the Author: Barbara Goldoftas, aformer editor of Dollars & Sense and a/ree-lance writer on science and technology, teaches science writing at Harvard University..
"No Love for the Lonely" A Short Story by Joan Williams
The Unknown Chaplin
The Allure of Niagara For more than 200 years the mighty Niagara Falls has captured the imagination of artists. SPAN presents some of their visionsand a brief history of the artistic endeavors inspired by this wonder of the world.
New Shine on Solar Energy Topping the 30 percent efficiency mark in solar cells is like breaking the four-minute mile in track. Having now achieved this efficiency level in experiments, American laboratories are working toward the old dream of clean, abundant, low-cost solar power.
Two British filmmakers discovered a celluloid treasure when they found several reels of Charlie Chaplin footage never seen by the public before-including an unreleased film, The Professor, and test and rehearsal scenes and edited sequences from many of his important films. This priceless material is now part of a remarkable three-part documentary, Unknown Chaplin.
When his sister-with whom he has lived all his life-dies, old Cotter May comes precariously close to getting married to escape the sudden loneliness that engulfs him. But as he sees his familar home changing under the eager ministrations of his wife-to-be, May decides that he doesn't have time left to have his whole life rearranged. He'd rather be alone, even if unloved.
What Our Ancestors Ate In America there are little round black cookies: two flat hard chocolate biscuits separated by a creamy, sugary interior. You can part the halves and lick the cream. You can take little bites to prolong the ecstasy. Or, following one of my more usual methods, you can toss them down by the handful. This behavior could not occur at a more awkward time. I happen to be collaborating with two other researchers, S. Boyd Eaton, and my wife, Marjorie Shostak, on a book about the diet and lifestyle of early humans. "We just have to let people know that there's a diet we were designed to eat, during the time we were evolving," says Eaton. "Low fat, low salt, low refined carbohydrates. " Shostak continues: "High fiber, high complex carbos, high protein. It's what our ancestors ate." "It's natural," Eaton says. "Combined with the right exercise plan, which is only natural too. People just have to realize, and then they'll start to shape right up. We have to put the information in their hands." "But," I shout, glancing at the thick tome we have produced, The Paleolithic Prescription: A Program of Diet and Exercise and a Designfor Living, in our modest
attempt to transform America's eating Copyright Š 1988 by The New York Times Company. Reprinted by permission from The New York Times Magazine.
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vegetable oil in the grass huts, waiting to be added during cooking. As for salt, people living in nature get only a little of it frol,ll plants and meat; like the wild game they hunt, they rely on rare encounters with salt licks to supplement these small amounts. There are some tasty nuts with fair amounts of fat, but nothing that really rivals an American cookie. To get this food, you must walk for hours, then port it home. It's harder to get, prepare, eat and digest than the foods Americans know and love. For the game, the men walk until they are in spear or poisoned-arrow range, after which they may have to cross the thorn-scrub wilderness chasing, say, a kudu-and, if lucky, beat him to the goal of survival. The women may carry ten to 20 kilograms of kids-and on the way back the kids will be sitting on top of a pile of fruits, nuts and vegetables. Occasionally, there is honey-the only thing remotely resembling the concentrated sweets Americans routinely eat. But there can be a high price in bee stings; ineptly harvested, honey can even be deadly. Humans are the products of millions of years of organic evolution leading up to a few thousand years of incredibly rapid cultural change. That evolution has made us, biologically, what we are. During those millions of years, we learned to obtain our food by methods, and with results,
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habits-and dusting the cookie crumbs off the page-"I've been working with you for years on this! I really do believe in it! But I'm eating worse than ever! How come it hasn't changed me?" "Calm yourself," Eaton says. "You'll do better." Why, as a matter of fact, is it so hard to eat right? Picture, if you will, the natural world that was once real for the whole human species. The !Kung San, or Bushmen, with whom Marjorie and I lived for two years, inhabited that world when we met them, as hunters and gatherers in Botswana. Their word for "sweet" is also the name of a certain berry, which they collect laboriously from thorny bushes under the blazing sun: a pit about three millimeters in diameter, a brown dry skin about the thickness of the skin of a kiwi, and in between some pulp-a millimeter or two thick. I guess it's sweet enough, but nothing to write home about. For sheer sweetness, the !Kung's wild fruits go pretty much downhill from there. They get about 20 to 25 percent of the fat in their diet from game meat. But these lean, mean animals make America's leanest cuts of supermarket meat seem succulent, dripping with grease. As for American fatloaded dairy products-ice cream, butter, cheese, milk-the !Kung, like our own remote hunting and gathering a.ncestors, have none at all. Nor are there bottles of
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similar to those of the !Kung. Eaton's analysis of 153 species of wild plant foods eaten by hunters and gatherers shows the average protein (4.13 percent) and fiber (12.6 percent) content to be much higher than in our plant foods. Thousands of years of plant breeding and modern food processing have greatly increased simple, less desirable sugars, decreased many needed carbohydrates and increased calorie content. As for meat, 43 game species relied on by various hunter and gatherer groups averaged only 4.3 percent fats, compared with 25 to 35 percent in American supermarket meat. The fat of game meat also tends to be much less saturated, meaning less harmful. OveraU, the average diet of hunters and gatherers consisted of 33 percent protein, compared with 12 percent in the modern American diet; an equal percentage of carbohydrates, and 21 percent fat (with a high ratio of polyunsaturates), compared wi-th Americans' 12 percent. Hunter-gatherer sodium consumption is estimated at 690 milligrams daily, as compared with between 2,000 and 7,000 for present-day Americans. Shortages were periodicaUy imposed on the !Kung, so they could not have become obese even if their unavoidable exercise were insufficient to prevent weight gain. Specific measures of body function confirm the conclusions suggested by diet studies. In five hunting and gathering societies, cholesterol in blood was found to be extremely low, ranging from 106 in Zairian pygmies to 139 in Australian aborigines. Most American physicians today consider a level below 200 to be healthy; the threshold has been dropping. As for blood pressure, which has at least some relationship to salt intake, six hunting and
gathering groups and 19 other preindustrial societies were below 120/80, normal for modern Americans and Western Euroc peans, and unlike Westerners, showed no increase with age. Our ancestors had to fight off a heavy assault of microbes, which tended to pick them off before old age, but the ones who survived the infectious onslaught lived free of the diseases that bring us low today. Atherosclerotic heart disease and stroke, diabetes, obesity, hypertension, lung cancer, colon cancer and several other "diseases of civilization"---even dental carieswere rare. Again, in those who did not succumb to infection, muscular and aerobic fitness were high. Maximum oxygen uptake from a breath of air, one measure of aerobic fitness, is about a third higher in young men in preindustrial societies than in American men the same age. Their strength and endurance, though not comparable to those of our best athletes, are markedly superior to our averages. Now that we know we were designed for a more vigorous and Spartan way of life, and that our health depends on getting back to it, we can resist the doughnut or croissant-and I can resist the cookies. And we can get aU the exercise we need. Right? Wrong. And the reason it's not that simple, at least for many of us, lies in that same evolutionary past. Darwin's famous struggle for existence may not have always been desperate, or always red in tooth and claw, but it certainly was an effortful way to get through the aeons. Our egregious taste for fats, sweets and salt is a product of natural selection. The adaptation, built into the taste centers of our brains, says something like: Consume as much of those things as you can. You
wiU never get enough of them to hurt you. As for calories, you'll be stocking up for a rainy day. A shortage wiU come along and deplete your paltry fat stores, so they won't even be able to slow you down. Many laboratory and clinical studies point to a built-in set of biological mechanisms. Destruction of the central part of the hypothalamus, at the base of the brain, results in continuous overeating and obesity, whether in animals or humans, so one must conclude that there is a signal that normaUy stops us automatically from what the brain tells us is overeating. There is evidence that animals can assess how fat they are, probably because fat produces chemical signals that the brain can interpret. This is why normal animals (and people) don't balloon out indefinitely; but they also don't stop at a medically ideal weight. Instead, they go for what was once, under conditions oflimited availability, the evolutionary surplus. Extensive, mounting evidence, most recently in the form of two studies in The New England Journal of Medicine, points to a strong genetic component in obesity. But in all likelihood the very obese are only one end of a genetic continuum-not a class by themselves. At the other end are lucky souls who can live in this cornucopia offats and sweets and sail along thin as the proverbial rail. Most of us have a genetic tendency, from the distant past, to load up on goodies under conditions of abundance. And here we are in an unprecedented evolutionary situation, surrounded by endless supplies of fat, sugar and salt undiluted by fiber and never exposed to the needed, corrective shortage unless we impose it on ourselves. And this adaptation, foolish as it now is, persists to do us great damage. So I'm designed to not be able to resist. But I won't knuckle under. Evolution also gave me a reasoning brain, and if I can figure out why primitive people don't get heart attacks, I ought to be able to modify my own hand-to-mouth existence. The struggle may seem comical, but it's our evolutionary legacy. Anguish and aU, it's natural. 0 About the Author: Melvin Konner, an anthropologist and nonpracticing medical doctor, teaches at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia.
Women's
Mo'Vementll "As social issues have moved into the mainstream, it's now possible to be powerful in a state legislature and still work on welfare and child care." Linda,Tarr- Whelan, president of the National Center for Policy Alternatives that launched the Women's Economic Justice Center in Washington, D.C:
The two dozen women and one man who gathered in a Washington boardroom in July 1987 were having a spirited discussion on women's rights. But there was scant mention of the Equal Rights Amendment. The group was choosing priority issues for a new organization~the Women's Economic Justice Center. It's not that they ignored such familiar women's issues as affirmative action, child care and comparable worth. But the group was deeply concerned about occupational safety and health, housing, economic development, insurance, tax policy and health care. This new women's center wiIl support grass-roots lobbying efforts to improve women's economic status. Not only do some of its priorities seem unconventional for a women's group, but so do its targets-the 50 state legislatures of the United States. "The lights for women's rights have dimmed in Washington," said Linda TarrWhelan, president of the National Center for Policy Alternatives, the Washingtonbased nonprofit group that launched the Women's Economic Justice Center. "Right now, state capitals are fertile territory for real advances for women," said Democratic state Representative Mary L. Landrieu, a veteran of the Louisiana legislature and a member of the new center's advisory committee. "The national feminist movement has a bad image," added Pat ScarceIli, vice-president of the United Food and Commercial Workers Union. "But we're seeing in the states that rank and file women wiIl fight to get child care and pensions and other benefits that will help them economicaIly." The launching of the Women's Economic Justice Center iIlustrates the quiet shifts under way in the movement to advance women's rights. From its roots in the 1960s and 1970s, the contemporary women's movement has graduaIly taken a new shape in the 1980s, one that is strategicaIly broadened. The push for women's rights is no longer so concentrated in Washington, and increasingly it is being directed at the business community as well as government. Many women's movement activists have been working hard to mute what they see as feminism's hard-edge image. They want to draw in new supportCopyright Š 1987 by National Journal, lne. All rights reserved. Reprinted by pennission from National Journal.
ers-mainstream women's groups and men-who were turned off by the old "liberation" rhetoric and confrontationstyle politics. The band of core organizations that promoted feminism in the United States in the 1960s has now been augmented by hundreds of groups, nationally and in the states, all working on bits and pieces of women's concerns. Gradually, however, new coalitions are emerging around the broad "bridging issues" of work and family. Many believe that by focusing on such concerns, they can connect the goals of the earlier wave of the women's movement more directly to the concerns of women and men at the grass roots. Far more than in earlier days of the women's movement, the focus today is on the problems of working class, poor and minority women. The Women's Economic Justice Center, for instance, will target its state activities to issues affecting women who earn less than $13,000 annually. That's about two-thirds of the nation's female work force. Over the past five years, a steady swelling of state-level activity on women's work and family issues has been visible across the United States. Many causes of concern to women's groups, traditionally relegated to legislatures' back burners, have begun the transition from social fringe to political mainstream. In some states, there is still a lot more rhetoric than action on women's issues. Budget constraints limit some legislatures' ability to undertake major initiatives. But plenty of states are acting. Among the hottest topics on state agendas are child care, welfare reform, adolescent pregnancy, child support, maternal and child health, parental leave and pay equity-also known as comparable worth. Twenty states are now implementing pay equity adjustments for state employees to remedy disparities between salaries of jobs traditionally staffed by women and those usually held by men. Another 26 states have comparable-worth reviews under way. A number of legislatures have enacted parental leave laws-another 20 or so have them under consideration-to protect the jobs of mothers or fathers who temporarily leave the work force to care for newborns or newly adopted children. In January 1987, the Supreme Court upheld a California statute requiring companies to
Pat Scarcelli, vice-president of the United Food and Commercial Workers Union that fights for child care benefits.
"The movement has taken another course. The issues have become much more personalized. It's a quiet movement now." reinstate female employees who take time off after childbirth. Some legislatures have been considering a whole agenda of work and family bills, often presented to them by new statewide women's lobby coalitions. A Connecticut legislative package known as "The Future of Connecticut Families: Balancing Home and Work" consists of 37 proposals, ranging from parental leave to teen pregnancy prevention to child nutrition. Four proposals are directed at relieving the state's lack of affordable housing, which has contributed to a growing number of homeless women and children. The popularity of work and family issues in all the American states is reflected not only in the higher volume of bills, but also in the growing number of male politicians willing to embrace them. No longer are such issues the sole province of a legislature's women's caucus. Many have become, in the new parlance, "gender neutral." "Men in the Iowa legislature suddenly discovered women's issues," said Republi-
can state Representative Sue Mullins. "I was really astounded. Our women lawmakers have been talking for years about the linkages between child care and family support and economic development," she said. "Men used to just yawn. Now they're paying attention and understanding and even introducing bills of their own." What is behind the upsurge at the grass roots? Some say the devolution of responsibility for many social programs away from Washington has left states no choice but to act. "States have to deal with what's been dropped on their doorstep," said Judith H. Weitz, director of state and local affairs for the Children's Defense Fund in Washington, D.C. She fears many states may be doing little more than "holding the line" in the face of federal cuts in social program budgets. Others believe states are merely the first level of government to feel the full effects of mounting political pressures to help families deal with the economic and social sea changes of the past two decades. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, 70 percent
of women aged 25-44 are now in the paid labor force. Half of all mothers of small children work, compared with less than one in five during the 1960s. In some states, a heightened attention to welfare problems has brought a host of other women's issues into bold relief. Increasingly, public officials are seeing poverty, child care, women's health and the clustering of women in low-paid jobs as interrelated, said Alicia C. Smith, staff director of the National Governors' Association's committee on human resources. "More and more states now realize that you can't solve one problem without dealing with the whole." State government is where women have the most political clout. The number of female state lawmakers has been rising, from 344 in 1971 to more than 1,160 in 1987. Today, one in seven state legislators is a woman. By contrast, only five percent of the U.S. Congress is female. Women state legislators have formed their own national caucus, Women's Network, which is gearing up for major action. As a first test of strength, the caucus in 1987 contested plans by the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) to cut back programs and scholarships. The legislators
"You won't find one or two anymore. Because so many so many things, it's hard to
wrote to every college athletic director in child health initiative, to be paid for by a the United States, arguing that women penny increase in the state cigarette tax. athletes would bear an unfair brunt under The legislature boosted appropriations for the proposal. In June 1987, NCAA mem- a statewide parenting education program, bers voted to scrap it. Eventually, say its mandated that state community colleges leaders, the Women's Network will de- and vocational schools have on-site child velop model state bills on a few priority care facilities by 1990 and increased the issues, then work to have them filed in state minimum wage, a measure that will every state legislative chamber. benefit many female workers. As women who were elected during the In the area of comparable worth, where Minnesota's program is considered parwave of feminism in the 1960s and 1970s gain in seniority, more of them are mov- ticularly far-reaching, the legislature has ing up to become legislative leaders. In appropriated more than $33 million since 1985, women held about 11 percent of the 1984 in raises for what were seen as undertop state legislative positions in the valued state jobs. It has also forbidden United States. school administrators to receive any salary "In the old days, we had to do a lot more increases until a pay equity plan is in effect screaming just to get attention," said state for all public school employees in their Representative Landrieu. "Now we're on districts. And now, all Minnesota firms the inside of the rail." with more than 20 workers must provide "As social issues have moved into the up to six weeks of unpaid leave to parents mainstream, it's now possible to be consid- of a newborn or newly adopted child. ered powerful in a state legislature and still Though many states are moving on the work on welfare and child care," said Tarr- work and family front, states in the best Whelan. "Before, it was public works." fiscal condition are doing the most. In 1987, through the efforts of LieutenEven in financially hurting Louisiana, ant-Governor Marlene Johnson, Minne- the legislature passed new legislation to sota lawmakers voted to increase the state's confront domestic violence and a major child care budget by 150 percent over 1986 package of child support enforcement levels. They enacted a pilot maternal and bills. Another poor state, Arkansas, found the money to extend medicaid coverage to thousands more poor pregnant women and infants. On the national stage in America, the move to the mainstream of women's issues in the states has gone largely unheralded. Core feminist groups, such as the National Organization for Women (NOW), still command the lion's share of attention. Many assert, however, that NOW's style of feminism is losing ground. NOW membership, for example, dipped from 250,000 in 1982 to 150,000 in 1986. Some interpret that as telltale evidence that the women's movement has run out of steam. Issues that mobilized ail earlier generation of women and fueled the movement in the 1960s and 1970s-opening up the workplace to women, reproductive freedoms-are said to have little relevance today to a "post-feminist" generation of younger women who take the gains for granted. Neither the old core issues nor the confrontation-style politics seem to unifying organizations hold out much appeal to millions of Americans of both sexes who struggle daily with different groups are doing the balancing act of earning a living and see it as one big story." raising children.
And even though the women's movement in the United States can claim numerous legitimate victories, especially in the courts and the hard-to-measure arena of social attitudes, critics blame it for the failure of the Equal Rights Amendment in 1982 and the poor electoral showing of 1984 vice presidential candidate Geraldine A. Ferraro. Nationally, much energy has been spent in the past seven years fending off attacks against affirmative action and abortion from the New Right and the Reagan Administration. "People are quick to ring the death knell of the women's movement, but nothing could be further from the truth," said Landrieu. "The movement has not weakened at all. It's growing and strengthening every year. But not in the traditional definition of the women's movement," she said. "The movement has taken another course," said Scarcelli, whose 1.3-millionmember union now makes child care benefits a standard feature of its bargaining with employers. "The issues have become much more personalized," she said. "It's a quiet movement now." Ethel Klein, a professor of political scienceat Columbia University and author of GenderPolitics, said it is a mistake to gauge the strength of the women's movement by looking at NOW's membership. "You see the real growth," she said, "when you see how more and more diverse actors are carving out spaces, bringing out issues and bridging across constituencies." Klein cited numerous opinion polls showing public support for women's rights as evidence of the movement's success. For example, in a 1985 survey, the Virginia Slims American Women's Opinion Poll, 73 percent of those polled answered yes to the question, "Do you support strengthening women's role in society?" In 1970, only 44 percent of the respondents answered yes. The Women's Economic Justice Center and the state coalitions it will support are indicative of another shift in the women's movement-the heightened willingness of disparate organizations to work together on key issues, to embrace groups outside the women's movement and to put aside turf differences for the good of the cause. Nationally, such coalitions in the United States help fill a leadership void in an environment where hundreds of organizations are working on different pieces of women's issues, from abortion to voter
"I used my leverage to get local business leaders and officials to talk about children and families." registration, pensions to pay equity. "You won't find one or two unifying organizations anymore," said Joanne Howes, a partner in the Washington-based political consulting firm of Bass and Howes. "Because so many diffe"rent groups are doing so many things, it's hard to see it as one big story." For the first time, Howes noted, the President's Council, comprising the leaders of 35 national women's organizations, reached agreement on a list of national legislative priorities. Three items on its agenda--ehild care, parental leave and a pay equity study of federal jobs-have been embraced by numerous other groups and are the focus of three broad-based national coalitions pressing for action in Congress. "People are getting much more sophisticated about organizing and learning to cross lines and work in coalitions," said Sally y. Orr, director of public policy for the Association of Junior Leagues, which has joined both the child care and parental leave coalitions. "You can't get anything
done unless you get a critical mass," she said. "You also don't have to love everybody you work with." The nearly 70 organizations in the Alliance for Better Childcare include some unusual bedfellows: the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, the Association of Junior Leagues, the Children's Defense Fund, the National Council of Jewish Women, the National Education Association, the Service Employees International Union and the United Church of Christ. Alliance organizers are also building a network of state child care alliances to help in the lobbying. Legislation establishing a commission to review for race and sex discrimination in the federal wage-setting system is also pending. The House has passed the measure twice before. Arrayed in support are the American Association of University Women, the American Library Association, the American Nurses Association, the League of Women Voters of the United States, the National Federation of Business and Professional Women's Clubs, the United Methodist Church, the YWCA and several labor unions. Some believe the fate of the current women's movement is linked to Congress's taking the initiative on a major women's issue. Defeat in Washington, they say, could fracture the new politics of consensus among groups and unravel years of effort by moderate women's rights activists to reshape and rebuild the movement around bridging issues. There is also a belief that the continued absence of a clear national agenda will dampen the momentum for women's issues in the American states. Some fear women and children in poorer states will lose ground, even if a few wealthy and more active states continue to move. But activists such as Tarr- Whelan believe in seeking fresh answers in state experimentation, rather than wait around for the national mood to ripen. "It remains to be seen how far the curtailment of a federal agenda for women will be matched by increased state activity," she said. "But it is clear that to win women's rights, the states are now the place for action." 0 About the Author: Carol F. Steinbach is a
contributing editor of National Journal.
FOCUS Verghese
Kurien, chairman
of the Indian National
Dairy Devel-
opment Board, has been awarded the $200,000 World Food Prize for 1989 for developing a dairy cooperative system that has significantly improved the supply of milk in India. The award, sponsored by General Foods Fund, Inc., of America,
who produce milk and those who consume it," Borlaug explained. Stressing that "without effective methods of distribution, food has no way of reaching the tables of the world's population," Borlaug said that Operation Flood has all the elements needed to improve the quality and increase the quantity of the world food
was announced at a news conference in Washington, D.C., last month by Nobel laureate Norman E. Borlaug, chairman of the World Food Prize selection committee and the man who was most
supply-"effective production, processing and distribution." Verghese Kurien, who was chosen for the award from among 173 nominees from 48 countries, has been involved in India's
responsible for developing the high-yielding wheat strains that enabled India to usher in the Green Revolution and become self-
cooperative movement for the past four decades. After finishing graduate work at Michigan State University, he returned to India and began the Kaira District Milk Producers Union in Gujarat in
sufficient in food grains. Although Kurien was not able to attend the news conference, he spoke briefly through a two-way audio hookup with New Delhi. "What is being recognized [with this award]," he said, "is the emergence of the Indian farmer as a powerful force and his of India." He capacity to bring about the true development stressed
the importance
of the "democratic
structure"
of the
1949. In 1965, Prime Minister Lal Bahadur Shastri asked Kurien to develop and head the National Dairy Development Board and replicate the program on a nationwide basis. Operation Flood has now expanded to include fruits, vegetables and oilseeds. Borlaug expressed the hope that what Kurien has accomplished in India can be "put to use in Africa in the next ten years." A.S. Clausi, chairman of the World Food Prize council
cooperative as part of its success. Operation Flood, as the dairy cooperative system developed by Kurien is called, involves nearly 170 million people and is the largest agricultural development program in the world. Ur)der its
of advisers, said, "Dr. Kurien's accomplishments exemplify all that the World Food Prize represents." The World Food Prize, established in 1986, was conceived by
produce, aegis, six million dairy owners in 50,000 cooperatives process and market milk in 500 cities and towns throughout India.
Borlaug to recognize achievement in any discipline that has improved the quality, quantity or availability of food in the world.
The program, a General Foods Fund statement noted, has helped to stabilize milk prices, reduced India's reliance on milk imports, ensured the supply of hygienic milk and provided a source of regular income to small farmers and landless laborers who
The first winner of the prize was M.S. Swaminathan, architect India's Green Revolution and former secretary in the Ministry
comprise the majority of its membership. The program's philosophy is "to combine
the power of India's
people with professional management in a vertically integrated cooperative structure that establishes a direct link between those
Research on Precision Measuring In a major new Indo-U.S. cooperative project in measurement science, scientists from the National Physical Laboratory, New Delhi, and the U.S. National Institute of Standards & Technology will carry out a series of investigations related to very accurate measurements of mass, voltage, length, time and frequency The Rs. 4.9 million collabora-
quium
on world
food
issues
accuracy of the measurements is astounding," says Pâ‚Źter Heydemann, science counselor at the US. Embassy in New Delhi. "The scientists are talking about
cleaning stainless steel mass standards and provide them with greater stability with time.
which is being funded from the US-India Fund, will support a range of metrological studies on standards of measurement. Most
countries
use
stainless
steel standards of mass. The joint work will involve calibration of the stainless steel stan-
cal measurement methods great value to scientific
dards against platinum-iridium standards of mass. The study
at the Smithsonian
Institution
in
Washington:D.C.
will standardize environmental conditions for maintaining and
tive research program aims at developing sophisticated physiof re-
Agriculture in India. Kurien will be presented the World Food Prize-an original sculpture by Saul Bass and the cash award-on October 17 at a ceremony that will be held in conjunction with a daylong collo-
search and industry and commerce of both countries. "The
clocks with an error of less than one second in 300,000 years." The three-year program,
of of
ser standards for length and frequency measurement will be a step toward setting up unified standards of length and time," says Heydemann.
"Super-accurate weighing may not be important in the local market," Heydemann ex-
Another study will involve dissemination of time arid fre-
plains, "but an error of one gram in each kilogram of oil imported into India is a very large amou nt."
lites. Experiments conducted by India under this program will determine the feasibility of the dissemination of time signals through satellites. The data ob-
It is also proposed tematically study the
to syscharac-
quency
tained
signals
through
will be compared
satel-
with
teristics of zener diodes with the aim of developing a simple
those of America to determine the accuracy of the total time
technique for the establishment of electronic voltage standards
transfer tech nique and its stability. The study will likely lead to improved time standards and
of high stability. "The proposed
study on la-
time dissemination
techniques.
Three Indian Teenagers on U.S. Academic Team Three Indian American
teen-
agers were among 20 selected in a nationwide search in the United States for the "All-U.S.A. Academic Team" sponsored by USA Today, the American National Association of Secondary School Principals and the U.S. National Education Association (NEA). The Indians
The vacuum cleaner, homes, is now available
are Divya Chander, 18 (right); Ali Mesiwala, 18; and Kannon . Shanmugham, 16. They, along with the other
award
winners,
were honored at a ceremony in Washington, D.C., in May and received their awards from John Curley, president of the Gannet Corporation
that owns
USA Today. The winners
were
selected
an indispensable device in American for farms in a new model. Bug-Vac,
invented by Edgar Show, an entomologist with Driscoll Strawberry Associates of Watsonville, California, is a giant vacuum that can phoid fever and salmonella food poisoning. Chander, who plans to study biology at Harvard University, would like to become a scientist but hopes to combine this with being an astronaut. Ali
Mesiwala
of Cupertino,
be attached to the front of tractors to suck up insects from growing plants. The insects are then killed by fans in the vacuum cleaner and blown across the field as mulch to return nutrients to the soil. Bug-Vac, which has been used mainly in strawberry fields (above), is also being adapted for use on tomatoes, celery and lettuce. (The vacuum cleaner developed lettuce is called Salad-Vac.) While the vacuum
cleaner
cauliflower, for use on
may not be able to reach
living deep inside the plants, just removing
insects
the bugs on top of the
from 900 nominees from high schools throughout the United States. Senior educators reviewed the nominations in
has designed an California, algorithm for a nerve chip that would help speed up the growth of nerves after limb
plants cuts farmers' financial losses considerably. It also reduces the need for pesticides. In fact, Bug-Vac has been developed to lessen the use of costly and often harmful chemicals in farming. According to one farmer, Bug-Vachas cut the expenditure on
March and
operations.
chemicals
selected
the
top
200 who were then pared down to 20. To ensure fairness and impartiality, the judges identified students by code numbers and not by their names. In interviews with the New York weekly, India Abroad, the three Indian students talked about their fields of research and their future plans. Chander of River Vale, New Jersey, who earlier this year won a $7,500 scholarship as a tenth-place finalist in the Westinghouse Science Talent Search contest (see SPAN April 1989), has conducted research on controlling microbial infection. She believes that her experiments could eventually prove helpful
He
will
enroll
by 72 percent-from
$2,700 per hectare to $750.
in Johns Hopkins University for undergraduate work and plans to specialize in neurosurgery. Kannon .Shanmugham, the youngest
of the Indian winners,
is graduating from Lawrence High School, Lawrence, Kansas, this year. A radio buff, he monitors 1,100 radio stations worldwide (including All India
Radio)
Monitoring
and
writes for Shan-
Times.
mug ham plans to go to Harvard where he will pursue journalism or law. At the awards ceremony Curley said that the students were selected not just for their test
in determining how bacteria move in the body and thus lead
scores but also for qualities of scholarship, creativity, leadership and initiative. Mary
to development of ways of blocking their movement and preventing diseases such as ty-
Atwood, president of NEA, said, "The future of America is sitting with us in this room."
America's First Lady Barbara Bush offers a slice of cake to a you ng visitor at a recent celebration marking the 100th birthday of the National Zoo in Washington, D.C. The zoo, which was created by an act of the U.S. Congress as a wildlife refuge for endangered North American species, now animals from around the world.
houses
some
4,000 vertebrate
The Pen and the Scalpel by RICHARD SELZER
Already a successful surgeon, the author had an irresistible urge to write at the age of 40. While surgery and writing may seem to have little in common, this is not so, he says. The surgeon sutures together tissues of the body to make whole what is sick or injured; the writer sews words into sentences to fashion a new version of human experience.
I had been a general surgeon for 15 years when, at the age of 40, the psychic energy for writing inexplicably appeared. It was an appearance that was to knock over my life. For 15 years I had studied, practiced and taught surgery at the Yale School of Medicine, all the while enjoying the usefulness and the handsomeness of the craft. For the next 16years, until my recent retirement, I would practice both surgery and writing. But where to fit in the writing when all of my days and half of my nights were fully engaged? Certainly not evenings. In the evening, one visits with one's next-of-kin; inthe evening one helps with homework; in the evening, if one is so inclined, one has a martini. Instead, I became the first adult in the state of Connecticut to go to bed in the evening. Having slept from 8:30 p.m. to 1 a.m., I rose, went to the kitchen, put on a pot of tea and wrote in longhand (a typewriter would disturb the household) until precisely 3 a.m. Then it was back upstairs and to sleep until 6 a.m., when I began the day's doctoring. Plenty of sleep, only divided by two hours, when I was alone with my pen, and all the light in the world gathered upon a sheet of paper. In this way, I wrote three collections of stories, essays and memoirs. Time was when in the professions-medicine and law-to patronize the arts was respectable; to practice them was not. For a surgeon it was even more questionable. Who wants to know, after all, what a surgeon does in his spare time? When it became known how I was spending my wild nights, my colleagues at the hospital were distressed. "Come, come," they coaxed in (more or less) the words of the poet Richard Wilbur, "Forsake those roses of the mind, and tend the true, the moral flower." But because the subject of my writings was my work as a doctor, the two seemed inseparable. The one fertilized the other. Why, I wondered, doesn't every surgeon write? A doctor walks in and out of a dozen short stories a day. It is irresistible to write them down. When, at last, the time came to make a choice between my two passions, it had already been made for me. Listen: In the operating room, the patient must be anesthetized in order that he feel no pain. The surgeon too must be "anesthetized" in order to remain at some distance from the event: When he cuts the patient, his own flesh must not bleed. It is this seeming lack of feeling that gives the surgeon the image of someone who is out of touch with his humanity, a person wanting only to cut, to perform.
I assure you that it is the image only. A measure of insulation against the laying <?penof the bodies of his fellow human beings is necessary for the well-being of both patient and doctor. In surgery, if nowhere else, dispassion is an attribute. But the surgeon-writer is not anesthetized. He remains awake; sees everything; censors nothing. It is his dual role to open and repair the body of his patient and to report back to the waiting world in the keenest language he can find. By becoming a writer, I had stripped off the protective carapace. It was time to go. A surgeon can unmake himself; a writer cannot. A Faustian bargain, you say? Perhaps, but, truth to tell, New Haven had begun to seem rather like the Beast With a Thousand Gallbladders. And where is it graven in stone that, once having been ordained, a surgeon must remain at the operating table until the scalpel slips from his lifeless fingers? Nor had I any wish to become like the old lion whose claws are long since blunt but not the desire to use them. Still, one does not walk away from the workbench of one's life with a cheery wave of the hand. In the beginning, I felt a strange sense of dislocation. As though I were standing near a river whose banks were flowing while the stream itself stood still. Only now, after two years, have I ceased to have attacks of longing for the labor that so satisfied and uplifted my spirit. Then, too, there was the risk that by withdrawing from the hospital, with its rich cargo of patients and those who tend them, I would be punished as a writer and suffer from impotence of the pen. A writer turns his back upon his native land at his own peril. Besides, to begin the life of a writer at the age of 56 is to toil under the very dart of death. As did another doctor-writer, John Keats, I too "have fears that I may cease to be before my pen has gleaned my teeming brilin." In medicine, there is a procedure called transillumination. If, in a darkened room, a doctor holds a bright light against a hollow part of the body, he will see through the outer tissues to the structures within that cavity-arteries, veins, projecting shelves of bone. In such a ruby gloom he can distinguish among a hernia, a hydrocele of the scrotum and a tumor of the testicle. Or he can light up a sinus behind the brow. Unlike surgery, which opens the body to direct examination, transillumination gives an indirect vision, calling into play the simplest perceptions of the doctor. To write about a patient is like transillumination. You hold¡the lamp oflanguage against his body and gaze through the covering layers at the truths within. At first glance, it would appear that surgery and writing have little in common, but I think that is not so. For one thing, they are both subcelestial arts; as far as I know, the angels disdain to perform either one. In each of them you hold a slender instrument that leaves a trail wherever it is applied. In one, there is the shedding of blood; in the other it is ink that is spilled upon a page. In one, the scalpel is restrained; in the other, the pen is given rein. The surgeon sutures together the tissues of the body to make whole what is sick or injured; the writer sews words into sentences to fashion a new version of human experience. A surgical operation is
rather like a short story. You make the incision, rummage around inside for a bit, then stitch up. It has a beginning, a middle and an end. If I were to choose a medical specialist to write a novel, it would be a psychiatrist. They tend to go on and on. And on. Despite the fact that I did not begin to write until the middle of my life, I think I must always have been a writer. Like my father who was a general practitioner during the Depression in Troy, New York, and who wrote a novel. It was all about a prostitute with a heart of gold (her name was Goldie!) and the doctor who first saves her life, then falls in love with her. Mother read it and told him: "Keep it away from the children." Father's office was on the ground floor of an old brownstone, and we lived upstairs. At night, after office hours, my brother Billy and I (we were ten and nine years old) would sneak downstairs to father's darkened consultation room and there, shamefaced, by the light of a candle stub, we would take down from the shelves his medical textbooks. Our favorite was The Textbook ofObstetrics and Gynecology. It was there that I first became aware of the rich language of medicine. Some of the best words began with the letter C. Carcinoma, I read, and thought it was that atia from "Ringoletto" that mother used to sing while she washed and dried the dishes. Cerebellum. I said the word aloud, letting it drip off the end of my tongue like melted chocolate. And I read choledochojejunostomy, which later I was to learn as the name of an operation. All those syllables marching off in my mind to that terminal y! If that was the way surgeons talked, I thought, I would be one of them, and live forever in a state of mellifluous rapture. I do not use these words in my writing, but I do try to use language that evokes the sounds of the body-the lub-dup, lub-dup of the garrulous heart, the gasp and wheeze of hard breathing, all the murmur and splash of anatomy and physiology. And I have tried to make use of the poetic potential in scientific language. Here, from my diary, this specimen: How gentle the countryside near Troy, with much farming Before he retired as a surgeon and came to full-time writing, the author wrote only between 1 and 3 a.m.quietly, in longhand.
everywhere. Farming gives a sense of health to the land. It is replenishing to watch at dusk as a herd of cattle flows like a giant amoeba toward the barn. First one cow advances. She pauses. Another pseudopodium is thrust ahead, pulling the others behind it until all of the cytoplasm, trailing milk, is inside the barn. All along the banks of the Hudson River, oak, elm and locust trees have grown very tall. The bark of the locust is thrown into deep folds coated with lichen and moss. So old are these trees that, without the least wind, one will drop off a quite large branch as if to shed a part of its burden. This letting-fall doesn't seem to do the tree any harm. It is more an anatomical relinquishment of a part so that the whole might remain healthy. Much as a diabetic will accept amputation of a gangrenous toe in order that he might once again walk on his foot. How clever of these locust trees to require no surgeon for their trimmage, only their own corporeal wisdom. 0
Reprinted
from
U.S. News & World Report,
October 31, 1988. published at Washington. D.C.
Blame marital woes or a career slump on exhaustion, and your spouse or boss may respond with a snort. An enlightened doctor, however, will be considerably less inclined to fault your claim. Lately, the medical community has been viewing chronic fatigue with new respect. Recent studies show that along with runny noses, fever, headaches and muscle aches, feeling tired all the time is one of the five most common ailments that prompt American adults to see a doctor. And early in 1987, researchers at the federal Centers for Disease Control (CDC) formally defined chronic-fatigue syndrome, or CFS, as a new illness. Relieved as many constantly tired people will be to hear that they are not imagining things, figuring out the cause and the cure can involve painstaking detective work. Stress or caffeine could be the culprit. Or you may be depressed and unaware of it. Even the experts who drew up the criteria of CFS can't precisely explain that new illness, which they have characterized. as a debilitating ti.redness that lasts six months or longer and is accompanied by other symptoms such as joint aches and muscle weakness (see box entitled "A Disease Defined"). "Despite our definition, the nature of this illness and its prevalence are still unclear," says Dr. Gary Holmes, who is leading the CDC's research on the syndrome. A flurry of reports in 1985 and 1986 suggested that the Epstein-Barr virus, a
variety of herpes virus that causes mononucleosis, might be responsible for prolonged, unexplained fatigue. But recent studies have shown that most people with CFS do not have high levels of the virus. Researchers now speculate that a newly discover'ed herpes virus, HBLV, may be the problem, though no solid data have yet proved the link. Several recent studies incriminate depression and anxiety as the principal causes. In fact, most researchers now doubt CFS has a single cause. "While we're far from a complete portrait of CFS, it is taken more seriously now," says Stephen Straus of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and an authority on CFS. Many chronically tired people think it's high time. "They have tried for years to label us as nut cases," says Gidget Faubion, president of the Chronic Fatigue Syndrome Society (CFSS), a support group based in Portland, Oregon. Faubion and other members of support groups tend to embrace the viral theory and deny that CFS is an emotional or mental disorder. "That just doesn't square with the symptoms or the people who get this illness," Faubion insists. Many CFS sufferers, she says, led active, productive lives before they were felled by inexplicable exhaustion. And most have other CFS symptoms, such as headaches and immune-system abnormalities, that aren't usually linked to depression or anxiety. "I just had no energy at all. I had to do my work lying down," recalls Ruby Nakamura, a 51-year-old Milwaukee, Wisconsin, resident who was
finishing up a master's degree and starting a new career as an educational-assessment specialist in 1982 when she began to feel incessantly tired. Over the next two years, Nakamura suffered repeated bouts of bronchitis, pneumonia and yeast infections, and underwent test after test. Doctors found no apparent underlying illness and diagnosed what was then known as the Epstein-Barr-virus syndrome and now would be called CFS. "They told me my immune system wasn't working well and that they didn't know why," Nakamura says. Like many others with CFS, Nakamura improved on her own over the next few years. But she still suffers occasional bouts of debilitating fatigue. No one really knows how many of the chronically tired can blame their lassitude on CFS. Groups like CFSS think there are millions of undiagnosed cases, but experts are skeptical. ''I'd be surprised if more than ten percent of those with chronic fatigue fit the criteria," says Straus. No matter what the factors that are causing you fatigue, it's no less real. It could be a symptom ofa serious underlying disorder, such as cancer, heart disease or depression, or it might be an easily treatable byproduct of too much stress. The first hurdle is determining whether your fatigue is out of the ordinary. You are probably just suffering normal wear and tear if you are lethargic and unable to concentrate one or two days a week, medical experts agree. It's also common to be weary for a period of time after an illness, or in the wake of a major event such as marriage, divorce, a death in the family or a job change. Medication is another common cause. Some of the worst offenders are antihistamines; the heart and blood-pressure drugs called beta blockers; birth-control pills; tranquilizers; narcotic painkillers and sleep aids. It's when you can't explain three or more days a week of exhaustion that you should dig for causes. You may have to look no further than your daily routine. According to Dr. Richard Podell, author of Doctor, Why Am I So Tired? and a Summit, New Jersey, physician who specializes in treating chronic fatigue, the unforgiving stresses of daily life are its most common cause. "In 50 percent of the patients I see, stress is a major part of their problem," he says. "They have too many demands in their lives and cope by
Although doctors cannot always pinpoint the problem, they finally recognize
being tired." Even those who feel they thrive on office pressure or the challenges of managing home and family can burn out, with constant fatigue a frequent earlywarning sign. Easing your workload and making the time to take a solitary run, read a book or unwind with friends should help. Too little daily challenge also can make you weary. Some people are so bored because of mountains of paper work or long hours in front of a computer screen that they nearly fall asleep on the job. A regular exercise program during working hours may get yo'ur blood moving. Since too much exercise as well as too little has been linked to fatigue and lack of energy, a moderate regimen of one to two hours a week of aerobic workouts is advisable for most people who want to boost their energy level and sleep more soundly. When stress isn't the obvious answer, most experts would suspect psychological and emotional explanations. A study published last year in the Archives of Internal Medicine by University of Connecticut researchers found that, of 100 patients with chronic fatigue, the vast majority had psy~ . chiatric disorders, primarily anxiety. Only five had medical conditions that explained their exhaustion. No explanation for fatigue was found in 31 patients, although researchers did not look for CFS. People who realize that they are depressed or overly anxious usually recognize their fatigue for what it is: A symptom or byproduct of their condition. But some 30 to SO percent of all depressed people, says Podell, feel listless and tired, not depressed. A person who is chronically tired and consciously frustrated by an inability to enjoy athletic;s, sex or family events is probably not depressed. But fatigue combined with a lack of enthusiasm for normal activities may signal depression even in someone who doesn't feel sad. A person who isn't consciously aware of feeling anxious but who seesaws from fatigue to extreme agitation, or who has sharp mood swings, may still be suffering from anxiety. Psychotherapy may be necessary to relieve the depression or anxiety and the fatigue. Food and drink of certain kinds might be turning you into a zombie, too. The chief culprit here, says Podell, is caffeine. About the Author: Steven Findlay is an associate editor with U.S. News & World Report.
For people
a
who feel tired all the time, here are
few of the most
longed
common
causes
of pro-
fatigue.
Stress. A heavy workload, tight deadlines, onerous commute and other daily burdens take a toll. Unrelieved stress can produce chronic fatigue. Caffeine addiction. Some users of heavy amounts of coffee and cola drinks "crash" after the caffeine buzz wears off. Depression. Not all depressed people feel sad. They may feel tired and listless. Reactions to medication. Many drugs cause drowsiness or fatigue as a side effect. Boredom. If you drag yourself through the day and perk up after you leave the office, boredom may be getting you ·down. Chronic-fatigue syndrome. Some people may suffer from this illness, the cause and prevalence of which are still a mystery (see adjacent box). Disease. Chronic fatigue can signal underlying illnesses including cancer, heart disease and hepatitis.
Too much can produce a caffeine addiction that sends some people seesawing between stimulation and fatigue throughout the day. Heavy alcohol consumption also causes chronic fatigue, primarily by preventing restful sleep. Most people think of sugar as a stimulant and, as a result, figure that ingesting too little of it might be a possible source offatigue. Both notions are simplistic, experts say. Carbohydrates are necessary nutrients, but sugary snacks don't give you instant energy. Nor does the temporary lack of them produce fatigue. Hypoglycemia, a condition in which blood-sugar levels are low, used to serve as an all-purpose "fad" explanation for fatigue, for example. True hypoglycemia is now known to be rare. Iron deficiency, also a popular explanation for fatigue is more common, especially in women. But it, too, is now thought to be rarely, if ever, solely responsible for prolonged fatigue, as are vitamin imbalances and food allergies. Finally, a host of physical disorders and diseases, such as cancer, heart disease, diabetes, hepatitis, emphysema and anemia, can express themselves partially as chronic fatigue. Some less frequently diagnosed conditions, such as hyperthyroidism, in which metabolism is speeded up and the body uses more
chronic-fatigue syndrome as a real illness.
Is chronic-fatigue just
a
trendy
for
at
the
toms?
Experts
Control
have decided
have drawn
up
a
syndrome
label
a
a
real illness
collection
Centers
for
Disease
that it's real enough
profile
of
a
or
of symp-
textbook
and
case:
• Persistent or recurring fatigue that bed rest doesn't help. You can't function normally because you're always tired or tire easily. • At least six of these physical symptoms occurring together or alternately for several months: Mild fever, chills, sore throat, painful lymph nodes, unexplained muscle weakness or pain, fatigue that lasts 24 hours or longer after exercise that should have been or once was tolerable, frequent or unusually severe headaches, joint pain without swelling or a marked change in sleep patterns. • One or more of these mental or emotional problems, which develop or worsen over time: Excessive irritability, forgetfulness, confusion, difficulty or depression. • The absence of another disorder that might explain the persistent fatigue or other symptoms.
energy just to get through the day, are more debatable as causes. Others include hypothyroidism, in which metabolism slows down; irritable-bowel syndrome, in which normal digestion is upset; yeast infections and premenstrual syndrome. In these conditions, fatigue may be the primary symptom. But "a lot more people get labeled with these conditions than have them," says Stephen Straus. Pinpointing the source of your fatigue may take persistence and a willingness to put up with months of trial and error. But now that more doctors are accepting chronic fatigue as real, you shouldn't have to take endless weariness lying down. 0
ON THE LIGHTER SIDE
,\oO'RE AS5UM\~G I'vE c.OR~EREDTHE Mr\RKET \t-\ STUPIDITY!
Reprinted from National
Rel'iell"
by permission of Malcolm Hancock.
"... lhe good news is lhal we now have a phone in lhe car." Reprinted Evening
with permission
Post Society.
a division
from The Saturday
of BFL and MS. Inc.
Š
1988.
"Mr. Johnson, while you were oul Mr. Pickard emplied lhe safe and ran off wilh Ms. Jillian, lhe sales force handed in lheir resignalions and lhe company was laken over by a Japanese conglomera Ie. "
"If J can'l spell ii, how can [ look it up in the dictionary?"
Kalakshetra to California
Amidst Kalakshetra's hectpeople. She recalls, "I was 18 ares of succulent foliage and then, and I fell in love with avenues of trees a mighty banIndia as soon as I set foot here." yan tree-the one whose upWhat most fascinated her was rooting in a recent storm trigthe beat, the rhythm, the gered off a massive effort to restore it-has always taken pride mudras of Indian classical dance, and she rarely missed a perforof place. For years under this imposing tree on the outskirts of mance in the city. Her nimble fingers would form mudras in Madras, Rukmini Devi Arundale, her whole body speaking the imitation of the dances she had seen and she loved practicing them. language of dance, her face glowing with the ecstasy of devotion, For hours she would keep looking into the mirror, making a dancer's facial gestures. had guided groups of young boys and girls through the intricacies and subtle nuances of dance movements. In the finest Indian guruIn 1965 Katherine came to Kalakshetra to fulfill her urge to shishya tradition, she instilled in them the love of classical dance learn Indian dance. Reminiscing, she says, "Amma asked me to and inspired them to ever greater heights in the idiom. choose between Kathakali and Bharatanatyam, and I said, 'You Although Athai or Amma, as Rukmini Devi was affectionately are asking me to choose between my mother and my father. I love both, and want to do both.' Seeing my persistence, she relented. It called, died in 1986, her spirit still pervades the Kalakshetra Institute of Fine Arts, which is both her gift to the nation and a was like a dream come true to be accepted at Kalakshetra." monument to her memory. Year after year, her pupils return to this Katherine's teacher at Kalakshetra was Kunhiraman, who hallowed ashram-to pay homage to the doyen of Indian classical became her guide, friend and philosopher. She completed her twodance, to relive their past among the verdant woods, to breathe once year dance course; she had joined the short course, thinking that again the atmosphere of dance or just to renew their contacts with by then her father would have completed his term in India and be teachers and classmates, who have stayed behind to carryon her ready to leave. But when his term was extended, she decided to do unfinished task of bringing beauty and bliss to life through dance. postgraduation work. However, she encountered what she disOne such couple, who return to Kalakshetra every year during creetly calls "technical problems" with the institute's administrathe institution's music and dance festival, are K.P. and Katherine tion. Meanwhile, the affection she felt for Kunhiraman had turned Kunhiraman, who have carried the message of Rukmini Devi's into something deeper, and she thought it would be better for both dance to the United States. The story of their identification with of them if she didn't stay on in Kalakshetra. Kalakshetra began years ago. Kunhiraman requested Shanta and V.P. Dhananjayan-prodInspired by the example of his father, Ambu Panikker, a leading ucts of Kalakshetra who had recently broken off to establish exponent and teacher of Kathakali at Kalakshetra, Kunhiraman Bharata Kalanjali-to let her join their dance school. "Katherine decided to make dance his career, and joined the institute in 1947. had a very good conception of dance," says Dhananjayan. "She For the next five years, he totally immersed himself in learning analyzed every single thing taught her. She was meticulous in Bharatanatyam, Kathakali, the history and theory of Indian taking notes and, being an artist, would sketch all the movements. dance, music and Sanskrit under the tutelage of Amma herself and It made excellent documentation." Katherine completed her two other illustrious teachers- T.K. Chandu Panicker and A. arangetram in 1969. Sarada. In 1953 Kunhiraman received a two-year government The next year she and Kunhiraman were married, and in 1971, grant for postgraduate studies at Kalakshetra. Then, like his their daughter Nandini-now one of their most promising stufather, he chose to be a dance teacher at his alma mater. dents-was born. Four years later, the Kunhiramans decided to Katherine Seibel's tryst with dance began at the young age of bid goodbye to Kalakshetra and move to the United States. It was seven when she saw the movie The River, which powerfully painful to leave-especially for Kunhiraman with his three deaffected her. But it was in Calcades of intimate association cutta, where she had come with with Kalakshetra, where he had With the legacy of Kalakshetra behind them, a background in theater and grown from a fledgling, aspirKatherine and K.P. Kunhiraman (below in a graphic arts, that she got her ing student to an accomplished, Kathakali dance drama) have set up Kalanjali in first taste of Indian classical versatile dancer. Moreover, the dance. "I came to India with institute had provided him with Berkeley, California, to teach Indian dance. my parents in 1962, when my opportunities, as a member of stepfa ther was transferred to the Kalakshetra troupe, to the Calcutta office of the Ford give performances not only in Foundation," says Katherine. India but all over the world. "I have two sets of parents, as In the United States, the both of mine divorced and reKunhiramans chose Berkeley married." in California as their home, setIn India she experienced a ting up a dance school, Kalanstrange, inexplicable force that jali, there. It is difficult in the bound her to its culture and United States to make a trail-
blazing career in dance, especially in the dance idiom of another country, unless you have the sponsorship of well-known institutions, which the Kunhiramans didn't have. Kalanjali has been built up by sheer grit, hard work and performances that were noticed by the critics, the media, the audiences and students of Indian classical dance. Private students come over to the house in the mornings and afternoons, and the couple drive out to teach at various placesincluding Fremont, Sacramento and Walnut Creek-in the evenings, returning home late at night. They also give about 30 performances a year throughout the United States. Kunhiraman has also given performances for the Festival of India in America, the American Theater Convention in Dallas, Texas, the San Francisco Ethnic Dance Festival and at a number of universities. Katherine's contribution to Kalanjali is evidence of her multifaceted talents: She sings, interprets the dances to the audiences, coordinates production, designs sets and costumes and also does the tailoring. To reduce the number of hours of elaborate work required for a Kathakali dancer's makeup, she has ingeniously devised a mask made of powdered thermocole which looks remarkably like the traditional makeup. Kalanjali has about 150 students, whose ages range from three to 40. All except ten are Indian Americans, for whom learning Indian dance is a means of keeping in touch with their culture. "Since most of our students are Indian," says Katherine, "we are actively associated with the Indian community here. In fact, we hardly have a weekend free of an invitation to attend some festival-Onam, Pongal, Dussehra, or Diwali-or a family celebration." The Indian influence, says Katherine, is evident in their home too. She herself wears a sari most of the time, except while teaching when she dons the more practical trousers. To cope with the growing number of students, in 1987 the Kunhiramans took on another teacher, K. Yeshoda, Kunhiraman's niece who has been both a student and teacher at Kalakshetra. Besides teaching, the' Kunhiramans also organize concerts by well-known Indian artists. Among those who have performed at Kalanjali are Shanta and V.P. Dhananjayan, Kelucharan Monapatra, Leela Samson, Mani Krishnaswami and Ritha Devi. The Kunhiramans' one unfulfilled wish is to get Kalanjali affiliated to the University of California at Berkeley for "an Indian studies major with dance," says Kunhiraman. "We would like to see students learn Sanskrit, anthropology, art history, Indian history, literature and philosophy at the university, and dance, its theory, and music with us at Kalanjali." Although their monetary rewards are not commensurate with their long hours of work, the Kunhiramans are satisfied with their life in the United States. Their biggest satisfaction is that they are sharing the beauty of India's ancient dances and demonstrating that, through the sharing of art and culture, people can reach out to one another and achieve mutual respect and understanding. 0
Clockwise from above left: K.P. Kunhiraman and Rukmini Devi Arundale (seated centerstage) as Shiva and Parvati in Kumara Sambhavam, a ballet presented by Kalakshetra in the late 1940s; Rukmini Devi with the Kunhiramans-their daughter Nandini is at leftat their home in America in 1980; Katherine chats with Kalakshetra students during a recent visit; and Kunhil:aman as Hanuman (right).
Refurbishing William Penn For nearly a century, an II-meter-tall, Englishman,
Pho<o,,,,h'
27-ton bronze statue of William Penn, a 17th-century
has graced the tower of City Hall in Philadelphia,
It is a place of honor Pennsylvania
by JOHN McGRAIL
richly deserved.
Pennsylvania.
William Penn (1644-1718)
in 1682 as a haven for Quakers,
a Protestant
founded
sect in England
the colony of
whose manner of
worship and refusal to take up arms made them subject to religious persecution.
Penn joined the
Quakers as a young man, to the dismay of his father, a British admiral, and he was imprisoned three times for writing and preaching
about Quakerism.
Tn 1681 King Charles II granted Penn a charter to territory land as repayment "Penn's Woods,"
of a debt owed Penn's and wrote a constitution the city of Philadelphia
for the times. (which means "brotherly
love" in Greek) as the
had developed into the largest and wealthiest city in
colony's capital. By the I770s, Philadelphia
the American colonies. It was there that the colonies declared their independence Britain in 1776. Eleven years later, it was the place where the U.S. Constitution, themes foreshadowed
or
that granted freedom of worship to Quakers and all
other religious groups, an unusual provision He also founded
between New York and Mary-
father. Penn named the colony Pennsylvania,
by Penn's Frame of Government
When Penn drew up the city plan for Philadelphia,
was composed.
he reserved a plot in the center for a civic
building. Tn 1891, the city fathers laid a cornerstone city functions that had been scattered throughout
for Pennsylvania,
from Great
which contains
for a city hall on the site to bring together Philadelphia.
enormous masonry building in the French Renaissance
It was completed
in 190 I-an
style with a 176-meter tower. The statue
MPenn was sculpted by Alexander Milne Calder, who also spent 15 years working on the hundreds of depictions
on walls, columns and cornices throughout
Penn was hoisted to the top of the tower and anchored By the 1980s, 90 years of weathering
the building. Tn 1894, William
in place.
had turned the statue from an original rich brown tone
to a mottled green and black. In 1984, the city government which had rusted badly, but it lacked funds for refurbishing
voted to begin repairs on the roof, William Penn. Nonetheless,
the
scaffolding that enclosed the roof was raised six months later to the top of Penn's three-meterwide hat in the hope that money to restore the statue might be raised from private sources. Herb Olivieri, an attorney and owner of a Philadelphia organized
the William Penn Restoration
Donations
came from 30 counties
Delaware,
Maryland
restaurant,
took up the challenge. He
Committee
and began asking for financial support.
in Pennsylvania,
from the nearby states of New Jersey,
and Virginia, and from Washington,
cents for every case of beer it sold. The committee
D.C. A local brewery donated
50
also sold T-shirts and buttons emblazoned
with the slogan "Free William Penn," referring to the scaffolding that covered him from public view. By the summer of 1987, $900,000 was raised, enough to begin refurbishing standard method for cleaning bronze is by sand-blasting Because the statue could not be enclosed, the restoration
with ground-up
the statue. The
walnuts or corn cobs.
committee opted for a procedure never
used before on bronze: cleaning with water shot from a gun at a pressure of2,100 kilograms per square centimeter,
followed by the application
of a patina and two coats of hard, durable wax.
The patina's color was copied from a model Calder made that is stored in the Philadelphia
Mu-
seum of Art. The statue must be washed annually to remove dirt and loose wax, then rewaxed to preserve the patina, which should last indefinitely. On September cast his benevolent
14, 1987, the patinated
and waxed statue was unveiled. William Penn again
gaze upon the City of Brotherly
Left, top: A workman blasts 0.ff93 years of grime from the Penn statue with a water gun. Facing page, top: Constance Bassett, who also helped restore the Statue of Liberty, developed a patinaformula that Penn's sculptor Alexander Milne Calder (1846-1923) would like to have had. Here, wearing breathing gear to protect
Love.
D
against fumes, she is seen applying patina on the statue. Right, center: Ninety years of weathering had iurned the statue from the original rich brown to a mottled gi'een and black. Right: Corrosion removed, the statue is ready for patinating. Far right: After the application of patina and wax, the statue appears as Calder had intended.