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A LETTER FROM THE PUBLISHER Who discovered America? The answer is really all kinds of people, at many different times. The most famous among them, of course, is Christopher Columbus, and 1992 marks the SOOthanniversary of his epoch-making first voyage to the New World. On the occasion of the Columbus Quincentennial, we have put together a packet of articles under the general theme of Discovering America. Distinguished historian William H. McNeill places the Columbus discovery in context, exploring how the Old World and the New World have influenced each other. University of Florida professor Michael Gannon discusses some of the controversy surrounding the anniversary; descendants of peoples native to the Americas before Columbus see very little to celebrate since his arrival largely led to the destruction of their cultures. Poet and columnist Rakshat Puri applies some droll satire to a consideration of what might have been had Columbus reached his intended destination-India. From Columbus we leapfrog the centuries to talk about other "discoverers" of America, the immigrants who have poured into the country since the 19th century. We tell the story of Ellis Island in New York Harbor, for decades the major port of entry for new arrivals. It is now a museum, with a genealogical center where Americans can glean infolJl1ation about their ancestors. Two articles focus on a group of immigrants of particular interest to SPAN readers: Columbia University professor Leonard Gordon tracks the history of Indian immigration to the United States, and photographer Pablo Bartholomew tells us in words and pictures about the Indian American experience. In a sense, with the recent influx of Indians and other Asian immigrants, the discovery of America has come full circle. Anthropologists believe that the first human beings to reach the Western Hemisphere were Asians who walked across a land 'bridge from Siberia to Alaska perhaps as long as 40,000 ;:ears ago. I am painfully a"Yare of what the early European contact did to the descendants of these first Asians to the New World. At the same time, I am gratified to see newly arriving Asians continuing the tradition of recent history that has permitted so many different groups to overcome problems of one kind or another to mingle in relative peace and prosperity. As we look for the lessons of the past to guide us in this SOOthyear after 1492, I would like to quote a living descendant of Columbus, Cristobal Colon of Spain. He recently met representatives of 40 American Indian tribes at a Spanish Embassy reception in Washington, D.C. As they exchanged greetings, Colon expressed the hope that the Spanish and American Indian communities "can make the world a better place than that which we inherited." That is something we all can resolve to work for. Happy New Year.
SPAN A merlca
D'SCOV~R'NG
2 How Columbus Reshaped the World by William H. McNeill
To Celebrate or Not to Celebrate
by Michael Gannon
8 Into a Sea of Dew by Rakshat Puri 9 Through a Golden Gateway by Dinitia Smith 1 5 Protecting Minority Rights by A.G.Noorani 18 The Indian Experience by Leonard A. Gordon 20 Portfolio of Two Worlds
24 .The Quiet
by Pablo Bartholomew
Places
28 How to Plan for Tomorrow
by Ronald Henkoff
33
On the Lighter Side 34 Focus On... 36 Memorial to a Struggle by William Zinsser 43 Message and Medium by Shoma A. Chatter}i Walking Barefoot on Broken Bottles
by John Leonard
48 Prized Architecture Front cover: This sculpture by Ramesh Bisht depicts Christopher Columbus's landing in 1492 on an island in the New World. Bisht-a noted sculptor and teacher at the Delhi College of Art-speqially created this clay image for SPAN. Back cover: An Indian grape farmer in Fresno, California-this photograph is part of Pabl? Bartholomew's photo essay on Indian immigrants in America. See pages 20-23. Publisher, Stephen F. Dachi; Editor, Guy E. Olson Managing Editor, Krishan Gabrani; Senior Editor, Aruna Dasgupta; Copy Editors, A. Venkata Narayana, Snigdha Goswami;' Editorial Assistants, Rocque Fernandes, Rashmi Goel; Photo Editor, Avinash Pasricha; Art Director, Nand Katyal; Associate Art Director, Kanti Roy; Artist, Hemant Bhatnagar; Production Assistant, Sanjay Pokhriyal; Photographic Services: USIS Photographic Setvices Unit; Research Services: USIS Documentation Services; American Center Library, New Delhi. Pbotographs: Front cover-Jotinder J.P. Takhar. Inside front cover-eourtesy Library of Congress, Quincentenary Program. 2-5--Library of Congress, Quincentenary Program. 9 top--© Emmet Gowin; bottom-The National Park Service. 12 top left and bottomBarry Fitzgerald; right-Lewis W. Hine Collection, U.S. History, Local History and Genealogy Division, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations; © National Geographic Society. l4-Barry Fitzgerald. 21-23-@ Pablo Bartholomew. 2427-© Jake RajsjThe Image Bank. 28-Michael L. Abramson. 34 top left-Nancy Crampton. 37 and 40 bottom-Richard Howard. 43-Jotinder J.P. Takhar. 47-American Film Institute. Back cover-© Pablo Bartholomew. Pubtished by the United States Information Service, American Center, 24 Kasturba Gandhi Marg, New Delhi 110001 (phone: 3316841), on behalf of the American Embassy, New Delhi. Printed at Thomson Press (India) Limited, Faridabad, Haryana. The opinions expressed in this magazine do not necessarily reflect the views or policies of the U.S. Government. Use of SPAN articles in other publications is encouraged, except when copyrighted. For permission write to the Editor. Price of magazine, one year's subscription (12 issues) Rs. 60; single copy, Rs. 6.
A menca
DISCOV~RING
Bow Columbus Reshaped the World As everyone knows, Christopher Columbus discovered America; and as almost everyone also knows, he was not the first to do ~o. Norsemen had been there a few hundred years before him; and indirect evidence suggests that Polynesians and seafarers from Asia had visited America's other coast several centuries before the Norse reached what we call Newfoundland and New England. And still earlier-thousands of years earlier-the real discoverers of America were the people we call Indians. They pioneered human life in the New World, coming from Asia across what is now the Bering Straits at a time when the ice age made overland passage possible.
They came as hunters and gatherers, but eventually they learned how to domesticate American plants-different from the crops of the Old World-and then built a series of civilizations on the basis of their own distinctive style of agriculture. This year we will celebrate the 500th anniver" sary of Columbus's voyage, and rightly"so, for that voyage made the world a different place. But we ought not to celebrate the discovery of America in 1492-that had been done long before. What Columbus did was to change the world in which he lived and the world in which the American Indians lived by connecting the two in
a way that has lasted for half a millennium. Before Columbus's time, the globe was divided by barren ocean spaces into a large number of separate human, plant, and animal communities, each an island unto itself with only sporadic and accidental connections with anything outside. The largest of these ecological islands was what we call the Old World-Asia, Africa, and Europe, together with some offshore islands like Japan and Great Britain that were close enough to the mainland to be reached by easy voyages. Within the Old World four major and an indefinite number of offshoot civilizations had arisen, each differing from the others in ideas and institutions, but all at least loosely in touch with the surrounding variety of human and ecological systems. Interactions among so many different human societies provoked the constant flux that we call history; and because that range and scale of interaction in the Old World was greater than anywhere else, human knowledge, skills, and institutions, and the ecological systems within which human beings lived, had to be tougher there than was necessary in more isolated, less variegated human, plant, and animal communities. The Americas were the next largest of the world's islands. The inhabitants of the New World had developed their civilizations to a level that resembled what Old World civilizations had been like about 1500 B.c., a full 3,000 years before Columbus crossed the Atlantic. All the things that dwellers in the Old World island had learned in the time since Hammurabi [king of Babylon], therefore, stood to their advantage in the new contacts that Columbus inaugurated; and the American Indians were correspondingly disadvantaged. Even more important was the fact that Columbus and his men were accustomed to living in the presence of a range of Old World diseases, which were quite unknown among the American Indians. Once these diseases crossed the ocean, they started to ravage the native peoples, who lacked inherited resistance and, to begin with, did not know how to treat the afflicted. The catastrophe that came to the civilizations of Mexico and Peru after Spaniards reached the mainland was largely due to the vulnerability of the local populations to disease. The total destruction of smaller communities in the Caribbean islands, where Europeans first established themselves, was due to the same lopsidedness in the early epidemiological exchanges between the Old World and the New World. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of other islanded ecological systems existed when Columbus set sail. Australia was the third largest, but it lagged far behind the Americas in its level of development. Smaller isolated ecosystems abounded, especially in the Pacific, descending to the
scale of a single atoll. Some lacked human inhabitants entirely; a few, like Easter Island, off the coast of Chile, had once been populated by human beings and then abandoned. But in all these tiny ecological systems, with or without human beings, the native plants and animals were at a severe disadvantage when compelled to compete with imported forms of life, coming by sea from the more developed ecological system of the Old World. It took about 300 years before every last one of them was explored and exposed to contacts with the rest of the world. But European navigation was such that what Columbus started in 1492 was carried forward by others unrelentingly, until the entire globe became a single interacting whole. The unification of the globe inaugurated by Columbus, therefore, damaged and sometimes destroyed many local forms of life-human as well as nonhuman. No one planned it that way. No one intended it to happen. But the different levels of ecological and cultural development in the separate world islands of preceding ages made such an upshot inevitable once communication and contact across the ocean barriers began.
Facing page: A 1597 map of the world bears the inscription "A drawing of two hemispheres." Columbus's voyage triggered a unification of the globe as a single, interacting whole. Below: A map of the New World, 1510. When Columbus discovered the New World-the western hemisphere comprising the Americas-in 1492, its inhabitants had developed their civilizations to a level that resembled what Old World civilizations had been like around 1500 B.c., almost 3,000 years earlier.
It is important to recognize that Old World expansion, spearheaded by European seamen and settlers, was ecological as well as political. Germs, weeds, and pests, transported by accident, together with plants and animals brought in deliberately, invaded new lands and soon created sharp ecological crises for themselves and for the older life forms. Human societies likewise suffered sudden catastrophe, over and over again; and many small communities disappeared entirely. Indeed, the ecological vanguard of European expansion regularly prepared the way for, and often made possible, political conquest and settlement. The conquest of Mexico by Hernan Cortes depended on a devastating smallpox epidemic that broke out among the Aztecs, for example; and both the Pilgrim settlement in New England and Pizarro's conquest of Peru were preceded by similarly devastating epidemics, perhaps also of smallpox, that made resistance to the intruders ineffective or impossible. This side of the story is relatively well known to Americans. The triumph of Old World life forms and of human immigrants coming from Europe and Africa is the substance of our national history after all; and although we Americans like to emphasize the differences that arose between the Old World and the New, thanks to the frontier and to other unique developments on American soil, still no one really doubts that the United States derives the main lines of its cultUral heritage and institutions from the Old World. The same is true of Canada and of Caribbean and Latin American countries, although the role of African and of American Indian heritages in some of those lands is far greater than in the United States. The opposite flow of influences from the New World to the Old is less familiar to Americans, partly because it affected others more than it affected us and partly because the nations and peoples of the Old World, just like us, prefer to emphasize the things that make them different and separate from everyone else, and tend to take for granted what unites them to the rest of the world. But the anniversary of Columbus's voyages, and of the new pattern of world relationships that they inaugurated, offers Americans an occasion to recognize the influences of the Old and to think globally, for it was the global impact of those voyages that makes them worth celebrating in the first piace. Three kinds of consequences may be identified: 1) new ideas, 2) new resources, and 3) new models of political and social life, all of which flowed into the Old World from the New in the centuries after the Columbian exchange got under way. Generally speaking, it took longer for American influences to penetrate Old World societies than it took for the pressure of the Old World to disrupt pre-Columbian society and ecology in the New; but that was due to the difference in complexity and toughness of the two ecological and cultural systems when they first encountered each other. Novelties from the Americas had, so to speak, to swim against the stream before they could penetrate an already highly developed cultural and ecological system and begin to make a real difference in the lands of the
Old World. Hence it is not surprising that the major impact of America on Europe, Asia, and Africa was delayed until after the 1570s, although news of the discoveries, together with handsome windfalls of silver and gold, came back with the earliest conquistadors and titillated without transforming European outlooks. Other Old World peoples reacted more slowly, but by 1600, Asians and Africans as well as Europeans had begun to react to new things coming from America in ways that mattered for everyday life and that changed their experience of the world. Let me begin with ideas. The intensified communication and regular contact across the oceans of Earth, which started with Columbus's voyaging, meant that more and more persons became more and more aware of the actual variety of human cultures. The American Indians and their way of life were a total surprise for their Old World discoverers. Nothing, in the Bible or in classical writings prepared Europeans for what they found; and for that reason Columbus resisted to the day of his death admitting that he had not reached the "Indies," that is, islands and coastlands somewhere between India and China, whence came the precious spices that European merchants had imported through Muslim middlemen for centuries. Europeans reacted to what explorers and early settlers had to tell them about the inhabitants of the New World with a mixture of opposites. A frisson of horror at stories of cannibalism and idolatry was matched almost from the beginning by a contrary image of the noble savage, immune from the corruptions of civilization. At first, the task seemed simple: To convert the heathen and save their souls by making them Christians; thereby, the inherent nobility of American Indians would Qe perfected and their evil habits corrected. In fact, early missionaries did win thousands of converts, and the readiness of the peoples of the New World to accept baptism confirmed the faith Europeans already had in the truth of their religion. Yet after about 1650 a counter current manifested itself. The variety of religions and ways of life that clearly existed and continued to exist in Asia and Africa as well as in America suggested to some that perhaps the Christian faith and the customs familiar in Europe were not uniquely and universally true, but were only one set of ideas and practices among others,. none of which could claim to be really valid because they were not based on reason or any other genuinely universal foundation. But the light of reason, such thinkers hoped, might yet prevail, and we are accustomed to agree with them by calling their assault on Europe's established ideas and institutions "the Enlightenment." Other developments within Europe fed into the Enlightenment, of course, but knowledge about the New World, and realization of how awkwardly it fitted into the biblical record, gave powerful impetus to the propagation of Enlightenment ideas. Thus, instead of reinforcing commitment to and confidence in their cultural heritage, as the first European encounter
with American reality generally had done, by the 18th century an influential group of European thinkers began to question their inherited ideas, especially religious ideas; and they set out instead to construct a new set of enlightened beliefs and of institutions to match. Without the New World, the European Enlightenment could scarcely have occurred. It certainly would not have taken the path it actually did, particularly after the American Revolution provided an example of a people rationally and deliberately creating a government to suit themselves. So much for the double-edged impact of the New World on the Old in the realm of ideas. New resources, originating in the New World, also had double-edged effects, inasmuch as Spain, the country that profited most immediately from the flood of silver that started to come from American mines in the 1570s, soon showed signs of a debilitating impoverishment. Disruptive inflation, resulting from the massive quantities of silver that started to arrive after 1570, certainly played a part in Spain's rise and fall, though historians still argue over why inflation was bad for Spain but somehow helped to stimulate the Dutch and English economies. Silver exports from the New World went directly to China across the Pacific as well as to Spain, and tied that country into the world economy more tightly than ever before inasmuch as China's currency came to depend on supplies of American
silver. Interruptions could and did induce serious crises, as happened, for instance, in the 1640s when the collapse of the Ming dynasty was accelerated, if not caused, by the government's inability to pay its troops because the whole exchange economy of the country had been paralyzed by shortages of silver. The government of the Ottoman empire also suffered systematic enfeeblement when price inflation rendered its tax income inadequate. Similar difficulties afflicted all the other governments of Europe and the world, though some of them were able to increase their revenue to keep up with inflation. Regardless of whether governments prospered or went bankrupt, wherever coined money had become the principal medium of exchange, everyday life was affected, and often dislocated, by the sharp increase in world supplies of silver that resulted from the application of the best European mining techniques to the silver lodes of Bolivia and Mexico in the decades after 1570. Thus America impinged on millions of Asians and Europeans through their pocketbooks, even though, at the time, no one understood what was happening, or why. Africans, too, began to feel the force of America's participation in the world at about the same time. The slave trade, which carried millions of Africans from their native villages to America, started in the 1560s but took more than a century to get into high gear, peaking only in the 18th century. Needless to say, the effect on African society was profound. In addition, two important newcomers from America, maize and peanuts, spread widelypartly, no doubt, as a by-product of the slave trade-and provided African farmers with a new and far more productive source of food than had been available to them before. Without the new American food crops, and the larger population they could support, Africa could perhaps not have supplied so many slaves for American plantations, although, in truth, no one knows for sure how the interplay of new food supplies, new disease exposures, and an ever deeper penetration of the African interior by slave raiders affected population growth and decay. Cultural and social changes resulting from Africa's increasingly intimate involvement with the outside world that the slave trade brought to remote villages and millions of innocent victims were also enormous, but only imperfectly known because written records are few and not always reliable. American food crops were important in the rest of the Old World as well. Potatoes in northern Europe and maize in Mediterranean lands could produce far more calories per hectare than wheat or any other grain familiar before. In the course of the 18th century, this persuaded millions of European cultivators to begin raising the new crops, even though they required more labor for cultivation than did the older staples. Europe's modern population growth, which began in the second half of the 18th century, could not have taken place without this change. Indeed the Industrial Revolution could not have taken place in the way it did without the extra food that American crops made available to support the teeming
millions of the new industrial towns spawned by the revolution. In China, too, sweet potatoes and maize played a very important role in increasing food supplies and allowing the population to rise far above earlier ceilings. No industrial revolution ensued, but modern China took its shape, just as modern Europe and Africa did, only with massive reliance on American food crops. In India and the Middle East their importance was less, but even there such produce as tomatoes added a precious supplement to the vitamin intake. The same was also true in Europe. To realize the impact of American crops on the rest of the world one need only think about what comes to our tables. Without maize-fed cattle and hogs, we would have no meat-or far less of it; and without maize, potatoes, sweet potatoes, peanuts, tomatoes, and some kinds of beans and squasheswhere would we be? This, indeed, remains by far the most enduring and important contribution the New World made to the peoples of the Old. Finally, the Americas also provided new models for social and political life to the Old World. Frontier society presented the spectacle of polar extremes. Either social hierarchy was
strenuously reinforced by dint of slavery and indentured labor, or the social pyramid familiar in the Old World dissolved into a rude frontier form of equality and freedom. The latter of these extremes was the influential one, for it appealed to restless human beings everywhere-and still does: Witness the world popularity of cowboys and American Indians in movies and television programs. By the 18th century, a more sophisticated version of American liberty was ready for export: The ideal enshrined in the U.S. Constitution. The document had an enormous impact, especially on the French Revolution. French revolutionaries looked back to the Roman republic but looked also across the Atlantic for inspiration; and from their success and failure most of the political discourse and practice of the contemporary world descends. In a second way, too, the Americas may begin to offer a social and political model for the Old World, one that is less often noticed. For from the time Europeans set foot in the Americas, they lived in a polyethnic society, where white and red and soon also black people found themselves side by side. Interracial relations were often harsh and brutal; but in time the American
To Celebrate or
I
was t in 1982 that I first became aware that the SOOth anniversary of Columbus's 1492 Voyage of Discovery was a minefield, where the prudent celebrant stepped lightly and guardedly. To my longtime friend Ramon, in an institute attached to the foreign ministry in Madrid, Spain, I said on the telephone one day that year, "Ramon, here at Florida we're beginning to get interested in the Columbus Discovery Quincentenary." "Why do you say Columbus?" he responded. "He was an Italian mercenary. It was Spain that discovered America, not Columbus." "But, Ramon," I protested, "we can't celebrate 1492 in the United States without mentioning Columbus." "In your country," he lectured me, "Columbus Day is an Italian holiday. But the ships, the crews, the money were all Spanish. Columbus was a hired hand." "But-"
"So when Cape Canaveral space center holds its 100th anniversary, are you going to call it the [rocket pioneer] Wernher von Braun celebration?" Reprinted
with permission
Copyright
Š
1991 Woodrow
from The Wilson Quarterly, Wilson
International
Autumn
1991.
Center for Scholars.
I was grateful to Ramon for alerting me, in his way, to the sensitive character of this anniversary. Soon afterward I learned that "Discovery," too, is a term freighted wit~ ethnic and cultural contentions, as many descendants of the native peoples in the Americas argue against its Eurocentric and paternalistic coloring. "We were already here," they remind me. And they were here so long ago, 10,000 to 25,000 years the anthropologists say. I was left to wonder, which was the Old World and which was the New? As the past ten years have shown, the Spanish-Italian tension has softened, but the European-Native American disjunction has hardened, as historians, epidemiologists, moralists, romanticists, and native spokespersons have clashed over the benefits, if any, that European entrance onto the American stage brought the societies of both worlds, particularly this one. Certainly huge numbers of indigenous people [of the Americas] died as the result of the collision: Some, it is true, from the sword, but by far the majority from the Europeans' unwitting introduction of pathogens-smallpox, measles, tuberculosis, the plague-to which the native peoples had no immunities.
Recognizing the dimensions of that calamity, many Westerners acknowledge that there is little to celebrate. In Spain, where a SOOth Year World's Fair will open in Seville, many of that country's intellectuals are decrying what they call a ISth- and 16th-century genocidio. In the margins of the debate, native descendants and their advocates are publicizing a long list of grievances against the Caucasians who abused their liberties, expropriated their lands, and despoiled an environmental paradise. From July 17 to 21, 1990, some 400 American Indians, including a delegation from the United States, met in Quito, Ecuador, to plan public protests against. 500 years of European "invasion" and "oppression." Even before that, the first sign of reaction in the United States had already come when, in December 1989, representatives of the American Indian Movement, supported by a group of university students, began picketing the "First Encounters" archaeology exhibition mounted by the Florida Museum of Natural History as it traveled from Gainesville to Tampa in Florida; Atlanta, Georgia; and Dallas, Texas. (In Tampa, their presence was welcomed because it boosted paid attendance.) In 1992, a loose
ideal of liberty and equality was extended to everyone, although often grudgingly and only partially. Most European nations, by contrast, were, or pretended to be, one people, living by themselves within their own boundaries. But since World War IT, thousands of immigrants of alien racial and cultural background have arrived in Britain, France, and Germany, and the intermingling of separate European nationalities in all the principal cities has begun to erode the older geographical segregation. Conseq uently, the difficulties and rewards of living in a polyethnic society, where people of different backgrounds meet and mingle, is being felt in Western Europe more acutely today than ever before. The long-standing polyethnicity of the United States and of other American countries may therefore become a model for Europeans in the 21st century in something like the same way that the American version of liberty and equality was a model in the 18th. It is still too soon to be sure. Polyethnicity is not so new to most of Asia and Africa, where different peoples have intermingled for centuries. The combination ofpolyethnicity and equality-or the ideal of equality-is, however, as new in Asia and Africa as it is in Western Europe, for the traditional relation between different peoples, living
together, was for one to be subordinated to the other, confined to p'articular occupations, dignities, and ranks. Whether American models of how to get along across racial and cultural lines will have much effect in Asia and Africa remains to be seen. A possibility is there-nothing more. Whatever lies ahead in the next 500 years, one still can say for sure that Columbus's voyages triggered the modern world, by initiating interaction across the oceans as never before. That makes our world different from what preceded it. Columbus's voyages mark a turning point in history and in the world's ecological system that can never be undone-a turning point comparable only to the rise of civilization itself or to the inauguration of the Industrial Revolution with its wholesale use of inanimate power for human purposes. That is what we celebrate: The unification of the globe; the inauguration of worldwide interaction among human beings, among animals and plants, and among every other form of life. D About the Author: William H. McNeill is an emeritus professor of history at the University of Chicago, Illinois, and the author of many books on 1V0ridhistory, including The Rise of the West and The Great Frontier.
Not to Celebrate confederation of North American Indian groups will picket in all U.S. cities where the Columbus replica ships will dock. They seek, one of their leaders told me, "not confrontation but media attention to present-day Native American problems." African Amelicans also remind their fellow citizens that the events of 1492 and afterward gave rise to the slave trade. And Jews appropriately notice that 1492 was the year when they were forcibly expelled from their Spanish homeland. In a counter-counteraction in all this Quincentenary skirmishing, however, the U.S. ational Endowment for the Humanities decided not to fund a proposed television documentary about the early contact period because, reportedly, it was too biased against the Europeans. (Spain, by contrast, is acting large-minded: It has agreed to fund the Smithsonian Institution-Carlos Fuentes television production, "The Buried Mirror," a show that is highly critical of Spain's colonial practices.) It is this "politically correct" dynamic that, most likely, will keep 1992 from being quite the exuberant celebration that the Bicentennial of the United States was in 1976. Anglo-Saxon and Celtic Americans felt comfortable with the Bicentennial because it
reinforced their ethnic and cultural givens (Plymouth Rock, Virginia, Washington, Jefferson, the English language, Northern European immigration, etc.). Today, nervous. about what is happening to "their" country and learning that citizens of Hispanic origins are projected soon to be the largest U.S. minority, the old-line white majority may not be enthusiastic about celebrating the SOOth coming of the Hispanics-especially since they sense no continuing need for Columbus as a unifying principle or symbol. What is likely to happen in 1992? Occasional public celebrations and observances will be produced by civic, ethnic, and cultural bodies. Reproductions of Columbus's ships will arrive in various ports from Spain. Tall ships may parade in New York Harbor. Fireworks will explode here and there. People will view two television miniseries and read countless ambivalent newspaper stories. The Federal Quincentenary Jubilee Commission that was appointed to superintend the exultations is in disarray, its coffers empty of federal dollars, its principal private donor, Texaco, pulling the plug. Some states, and numerous individual cities (especially those named after Columbus, 63 at last count), have
plans for observances, large or small. Florida, which has the best reasons, geographically and temporally, to do something, has no statewide plans, two commissions having collapsed and a third stripped of its funds. But now the good news: In anticipation of the SOOth anniversary an enormous amount of intellectual activity has occurred, in the form of archival discoveries, archaeological excavations, museum and library exhibitions, conferences, and publications. Some 30 new and upcoming adult titles have been enumerated by Publishers Weekly. Over 100 exhibitions and conferences have been counted by the National Endowment for the Humanities. This remarkable efflorescence of original research and scholarship will leave a lasting legacy of understanding and good. On the twin principles that cerebration is more valuable than celebration and that correcting one paragraph in our children's schoolbooks is worth more than a half-million dollars worth of fireworks exploded over Florida's Biscayne Bay, 1992 should be the best 1492 anniversary ever. 0 About the Author: Michael Gannon is director of the Institute for Early Conlact Period Studies at the University of Florida.
A menca
D'SCOV~R'NG
Goandcatch a fallingstar, place it where the stripes are. Christopher Columbus could not have even dreamt of what was to be when he voyaged westward across the Atlantic to find India and, seeing the disconcerted inhabitants where he landed, exclaimed: "";~::~~;~ he continued happy in the certainty of his triumph for
-
nearly 14 years after that voyage, until his death, evidently dismissing the find of Vasco da Gama: There were no witches to utter ~
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prophecies and to answer questions such as Banquo's when he asked if they would look into the seeds of time and say which grain would grow and which would not; nor any prophetic voice to echo a hesitant Macbeth and declare then, as Uncle Sam might declare confidently today, "I have bought golden opinions from all sorts of people .... " The seeds of time, watered by whimsical and waggish nature, came to bud in an unexpected and curious-in fact, almost bizarre-way. Columbus's India became America; but the indigenous people of the land that he found remained Indians. Even the Incas and the Mayans continue frequently to be described as Mayan Indiansand Inca Indians! The tricks that nature can play on mere man arc something that have as ingredients ambiguity, casuistry, ambivalence, irony, and double-talk. The wise people of America, unlike the wise people of earlier climes and ancient communities, were prescient. They turned early in their development to the worship of time, about the nature of which mcn like Banquo could but express curiosity and awe before the Weird Sisters. Very soon, the wise people of America discovered that the other name of time was money; and one day somebody said with a shout of triumphant certainty, "Time is dollarsl" After that nothing could stop ncle Sam. He set about buying golden opinions from all sorts of people, until he had bought almost all of them. The arts and achicvcments of Europc and the Orient came to America; and American astronauts went up to the moon to catch more falling stars to place where the stripes are.
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GAJWANI
Nature's waggery began with the cruel joke that she played on Columbus through the ignorance of an ill-informed mapmaker. The mapmaker, his nose, mind, and eyes glued to instruments, paper, and ink, finished drawing the known contours of the "new land in the western oceans" and, misassuming that one Amerigo Vespucci had found it, gave it the name of America. But for this. America today might have been called India-possibly., West India. after Vasco da Gama's voyages of exploration. The islands off northeastern South America are still called collectively the West Indies, and the inhabitants of most of them, West Indians. Nature, by such mean tricks, and by employing an ill-informed mapmaker, narrowly denied the patriotically history-minded in India, opportunities to speculate about the ancient spread and glory of Indian culture cven further back than is currently fashionable. As if to provide a hint of its larger intention, nature seems to have willed Christopher Columbus's name for appropriateness-being Cristobal Colon in Spanish and Cristo foro Colombo in Italian: "Christopher" means Christ-bearing; and "Columbus," thecolonizer. Count Vasco da Gama of Vidiguerira had no such indication of intent from nature in his name. But his forces nevertheless contained both soldiers and missionaries-and of course carried stone pillars to set up as marks of discovery and overlordship. Apparently, after Columbus, who had read deeply the account of Marco Polo's voyage to
the east and Cardinal Pierre d'Ailly's Image of the World, made his calculations and went westward on a second voyage in 1493, discovering more islands but no continent, Vasco da Gama began to suspect that old Chris had missed the point. So he immediately set about preparing to go in the other direction. He was able to sail from Lisbon in mid-1497, touch St. Helena's Bay in modern South Africa in ovember that ycar. and reach Calicut. India, in May 1498. Imagine. Had the ignorant mapmaker not put America on his map but "India," which Columbus believed he nad found in "the western oceans," we in presentday India might well have been living in America. For, Amerigo Vespucci presumably had to be accommodated somewhere, even if speculatively: A "new land in theeastern oceans" would doubtless have been as good for him in the illinformed mapmaker's viewasa "new land in the western oceans." Vascoda Gama might then, on landing at Calicut and seeing the zamorin and his courtiers, have jubilantly exclaimed, "America, land of opportunity!" In that event, the United States of India and not America would have been the superpowerl Or, America in South Asia might have been the leader of the Third World. India's cowboys would have wandered the prairies of Texas and New Mexico. History would have been an even merrier confusion of means, identities, cultures. and conquests, with the ancient Greek writings claiming an Indus where the New World traced' Amcricus. But we are where we are! Wc can dream of what might have been. But our visions of voyages, crowding history to the last syllable of recorded time, may suggest only. in the doleful words of the poet, that Wynken. Blynken and Nod one night Sailed off in a wooden shoeSailed on a river of crystal light, Into a sea of dew. About the Author: Rakshat
Puri, I\'ho \l'rites a \\'eekly column for The Hindustan Times, I1LIS formerly the ne\\'spaper '5 London correspondel1l. He is the author 0/ three volumes o./poetry.
Island. It is not surprising then that the place has a far more powerful hold on the American imagination than the unknown site where Columbus landed in 1492.
by DINITIA
P
This article takes a look at Ellis Island past and present. The inspection station's buildings have been restored recently as a national immigration museum.
In a fundamental sense, the voyages of Christopher Columbus set in motion a tide of immigration to the New World that continues to this day.
SMITH
rances Stenlake Oakley was a six-year-old English girl in 1914 when she landed on Ellis Island in New York Harbor. She thought the huge immigration building might be the Crystal Palace [a famous exhibition building in London, site of the] 851 world's fair]. "Maybe it's a theater," Oakley told herself, "or maybe we're going to have a show. Then they looked in our heads for lice and they looked in our ears, and I thought, 'This is a funny way to get into a show.''' Benjamin A. Gebiner remembers being detained in the hospital on Ellis Island when he arrived as a 23-year-old from Russia in 1921. Immigration officers thought he might have tuberculosis. ~'Here I was, I had studied jurisprudence, but I couldn't speak English. I was dumb-nothing! But there was a little boy in the hospital, eight or ten years old. He'd been ther.e a few months. He was very lively. He became my interpreter, my angel! I'll never forget that little fellow." Guerino Salerni, who came from Italy in 1919 at 14, remembers the mess hall and "lots of jelly, lots of marmalade, lots of white bread, which I had never seen before." When the ship carrying ten-year-old Viola Lewis ScottThomas from Barbados arrived in America in 1924, the little girl glimpsed, for one tantalizing moment, the mother and father she hadn't seen in almost a decade. Then an inspector found a patch of ringworm on her knee and sent her back home. The recorded recollections ofSalerni and Oakley, the inspection card preserved by Gebiner, the photographs that ScottThomas kept to remember her parents by-all are included in the new Ellis Island Immigration Museum, which opened to the public in September 1990. The museum is the culmination of the biggest restoration project in America's history, an eightyear, $345-million endeavor that also involved refurbishing the Statue of Liberty, which reopened with a flourish in July 1986 (see SPAN, July 1986). Almost 400 meters from the statue is Ellis Island, where the main immigration building has been rescued from abandonment and complete disrepair. The new museum it houses is devoted not only to the Ellis Island experience but also to immigration throughout the United States. The 900-squaremeter space is filled with more than 2,000 artifacts, 1,500 photographs, oral histories, a library, two theaters, and ultimately-it is hoped-a genealogical center where visitors may be able to trace their immigrant families. The restored immigration building is one of the largest strictly historical museums in the country. For many Americans, Ellis Island is holy. ground, the entry
point for the ancestors of more than 100 million people, 40 percent of the country's population. From 1892 to 1924, more than 12 million people entered the United States through Ellis Island. On one day (April 17, 1907), I ],747 immigrants were processed there. In a nation of well over a hundred ethnic groups, Ellis Island is the setting of America's one great unifying epic. While other countries have their national legends, America has the myth of the Golden Door [as poet Emma Lazarus called Ellis Island] through which the "huddled masses yearning to breathe free" stepped and found freedom and prosperity at last. Paradoxically, that myth is now being rethought and rewritten. The image of the immigrant as poor, oppressed, and uprooted is giving way under the weight of new scholarship. Most people who came to the New World during the peak immigration years had at least the means to pay for the journey, and the stamina and health to withstand it. They came seeking better jobs more often than freedom. For the most part, the people who came brought the structures of their old cultures with them and used their traditions to build lives here. Perhaps most startling of all, it has recently been shown that a third of all those who have come to America during the 20th century have chosen to go home again-ten million out of 30 million people. Nowhere is this revised view more clear than in the new Ellis Island Immigration Museum. The entire restoration project was developed with the help of a team of historians who aim to update the myth of immigration. As Virginia YansMcLaughlin, a history professor at Rutgers University in New Jersey, who was an adviser on the project, puts it, the building of the new museum at Ellis Island amounts to nothing less than "the construction of a national ideology." Ellis Island is an II-hectare parcel-most of it landfill from the New York City subway system-that sits about a kilometer off the tip of Manhattan. Originally a sandspit where Native Americans dug for oysters, Ellis Island was used as an execution ground for pirates during colonial times. The first immigration station was built there in 1892. Five years later, a fire destroyed the original wooden buildings, and, in 1900, the present BeauxArts building, with its four graceful copper domes, was erected from a design by the firm of Boring & Tilton. When ships of arriving immigrants anchored in New York Harbor, first- and second-class passengers were processed onboard, and those who passed inspection went on to dock in Manhattan. Steerage passengers were taken to Ellis Island for processing (along with first- and second-
class passengers who failed inspection). "Numbered and lettered before debarking, in groups corresponding to entries on the ship's manifest, the immigrants are herded onto the Customs Wharf," wrote Irving Howe in his book World of Our Fathers. "'Quick! Run! Hurry!' shout officials in half a dozen languages." The average immigrant spent three to five hours on Ellis. In the main building, new arrivals climbed to the second-floor Registry Room-also known as the Great Hall-on a staircase that is a centerpiece of legend. The climb was called "the sixsecond physical": Doctors and nurses watched from the top and weeded out for further examination people who seemed lame or out of breath-a sign of possible heart disease or tuberculosis. Fates were sealed in the Registry Room. An inspector would raise the immigrant's eyelids-using a finger, a hairpin, or even a buttonhook-in a painful procedure to check for trachoma, a contagious eye disease. Scalps were examined for favus, a fungal infection. "They were pretty rough," remembers Frances Oakley. "What bothered me most were the eyes. They tried to grab the baby. My mother said, 'Don't you hurt this baby!'" James Arraj was eight when he arrived at Ellis from Lebanon in 1920: "You were taken before an examiner who sat on a high bench making big decisions that affected your life .... We had an Arabic interpreter. They examined us and held my brother back for his eyes. Three days of waiting and worrying. My mother was upset because we didn't know whether they would let us in or not, and there was no one here to meet us. My father knew we were coming, but he didn't know when." Immigrants with possible health problems were marked with chalk on their clothing. An E meant eye disease; an L meant lameness; an X meant mental deficiency; an 0 around the X meant extreme deficiency. In one test of mental competence, immigrants had to put together a wooden puzzle of a ship. On any given day during the peak immigration period, 5,000 people, weary and anxious, could move through the Registry Room. "Do you have any skills? Do you have a job waiting for you here? Are you an anarchist? Are you a polygamist?" the inspectors would ask. "I was jostled and dragged and shoved and shouted at," recalled M.E. Ravage in An American in the Making. "I took it philosophically. I had been through the performance many times before at the Hungarian border, at Vienna, in Germany, in Holland." Legend has it that immigrants' names were changed on Ellis Island as they went through the inspection process. But the museum's researchers found only one woman who claimed she had been renamed by immigration officers, and she could provide no documentation. When Mary-Angela Hardwick-a staffer at MetaForm, one of the creators of the new museum-culled the National Archives, she could turn up no evidence to support the legend. "We call it the story that won't go away," says Phyllis Montgomery, the director of research for MetaForm. (Two other companies-Design and Production and Rathe Productions-were part of the consortium that designed the new
museum.) One theory is that the immigrants' names were changed before they boarded the ship-by, say, German clerks at Bremen trying to make sense of the complicated names of Poles who could not read or write. Another theory is that workers from immigrant-aid societies who helped the new arrivals may have suggested that they change their names to simplify or "Americanize" them. Certainly, immigrants changed their own names after they arrived. Many schools devised family names that they thought fit better into the new culture. After inspection, immigrants descended a divided flight of stairs, dubbed the Stairs of Separation because many people parted ways there. The stairs were railed off into three sections. The right led to the railroad ticket office, where immigrants bought tickets for points within the United States other than New York City. The left led to the New York ferry, which docked on the tip of Manhattan. Immigrants wanting to live in New York City's Lower East Side or other city neighborhoods in which immigrants typically settled took the ferry. The center aisle led to the temporary detention room. During the peak years, 20 percent of the new immigrants were detained because they were sick or "politically undesirable" or liable to become public charges. Single women who weren't met by a relative or a member of an immigrationaid society were also held back, for fear they would be exploited or lured into prostitution. In fact, many women-"picture brides"--eame to America to be married. In September 1907, the SS Baltic carried at least 1,000 marriageable girls. Understandably, many weddings were performed right on the island. Immigrants who were deemed anarchists, Bolsheviks, or criminals were sent to dormitories, where they were detained until they could be. sent back. Some sick immigrants were also sent back. Others in need of health care were transferred to hospitals. It is estimated that 30 percent of children with measles who were ferried to hospitals on the mainland around the turn of the century later died from the exposure. Detainees were periodically exploited by the concessionaires. Howe describes a 1909 hunger strike led by Alexander Rudenief, the son of a Russian army doctor. The food at Ellis "is suitable for hogs," cried Rudenief, in a fiery speech in the mess hall. "We are treated like wild beasts. We sleep on a wet floor." Still, conditions on the island were not always harsh. DO NOT KISS A CHILD, warned a sign for nurses in the Children's Contagious Disease Ward. Comforting children, many of them crying because they had been separated from their parents, was obviously a considerable temptation for the staff. In a taped memoir given to the new museum, Morry Helzner, who came from Russia in 1922, remembers "the biggest impression I had when they took us to the dormitories. To see white linens, white tile, sparkling clean-almost a sterile environment!" Over time, the treatment of the arriving immigrants became more humane, and some even liked the food. Vartan Hartunian came to Ellis from Armenia in 1922. "I hadn't tasted,butter," he recalls in his taped memoir. "I didn't know what butter was. And when butter was placed on white bread and I ate it,
to me that was a tremendous delight!" Ultimately, two percent of the immigrants were sent back to their native lands-an average of 1,000 people some months. Oakley remembers seeing people "sitting on benches. Some were crying; I said to my mother, 'Why are they crying?' and she said, 'Those people can't come to America. They have to go back.'" Some of those who passed inspection went on to be reunited on the first floor with family and friends who had come before them. The area where they met came to be known as the Kissing Post. One matron described the scene in 1910: "The Italian kisses his little children but scarcely speaks to his wife, never embraces or kisses her in public. The Hungarian and Slavic people put their arms around one another and weep. The Jew of all countries kisses his wife and children as though he had all the kisses in the world, and intended to use them up quick." Contrary to popular belief, most immigrants did not immediately settle on the Lower East Side of New York City. Twothirds set out for farther points. And what did the immigrants find when they set foot on American soil? "I came to America because I heard the streets were paved with gold," goes one old saying. "When I got here, I found out three things: First, the streets weren't paved with gold; second, they weren't paved at all; and third, I was expected to pave them." Then, slowly, the Golden Door began to close. During the first half of the 19th century, the majority of immigrants had come from England, Ireland, Germany, and Scandinavia. By the 1880s large numbers were Austro-Hungarian, Italian, and Russian, and by 1907 those countries supplied the majority of new arrivals. The immigrants were helping to build America, yet restrictionists believed the country could not contain the new population. Immigrants were accused of overcrowding cities and burdening social service agencies. The Immigration Restriction League based its campaign on so-called scientific evidence that "proved" the "inferiority of immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe." In 1882, the Chinese Exclusion Act was passed. In the 1890s, a Massachusetts senator, Henry Cabot Lodge, spoke out in the U.S. Senate against ..... races with which the English-speaking peoples have never hitherto assimilated and who are most alien to the great body of people of the United States." The political disruptions unleashed by World War I strengthened the campaign against immigrants, and Ellis Island was used as a deportation center. In 1923, the president of Colgate The restored Registry Room (lefl)-described as the "emotional core" of the museum-has a new gliller. Remaining are afew of the original benches on which immigrants sat (top righl) as they waitedfor health inspectors to examine them. Top left, a visitor at the Wall of Honor on which are inscribed the names of many who entered the United States through the gates of Ellis Island.
University in New York, George B. Cutten, said, "The melting pot is destructive to our race." In 1921 and 1924, acts were passed, directed especially at people from Southern and Eastern Europe and, for the 1924 act, at Asians. These "racial" quotas were not abolished until 1965. The United States has always kept some people out. During World War II, it adamantly denied refuge to those fleeing Nazi persecution. With the closing of the door, Ellis Island was used less and less until it was shut for good in 1954. By then, most immigrants were screened abroad. Rudolph Vecoli, chairman of the History Advisory Committee of the Statue of Liberty-Ellis Island Foundation and director of the Immigration History Research Center at the University of Minnesota, is, like many historians, eager to see Americans rethink their past. "The myth of immigration has always been a parable of rebirth," he says, "a utopian kind of notion, of the immigrant coming from the corrupt Old World to a fresh New World. It is a myth that serves the national pride. But we have to face up to the reality of it-the reality of immigra tion restrictions." The changes in American attitudes toward immigration are reflected in the history of Ellis Island itself. In the 1950s and early 1960s most Americans had little interest in emphasizing their ethnic roots. For years after the immigration outpost closed in 1954, the island lay vacant while the government tried without success to sell it. With the civil rights movement and the Vietnam war, differences among Americans were thrown into stark relief; as Americans began to explore their individual and ethnic histories and trace their roots, interest in Ellis Island was rekindled. In 1975, Peter Sarnmartino, a founder of Fairleigh Dickinson University in New Jersey, formed a commission to raise money to restore the island. Later, Phil Lax, a real estate developer, took over. Ultimately, a Statue of Liberty- Ellis Island restoration project was formed under the direction of Chrysler Corporation Chairman Lee Iacocca. From the beginning, there was the problem of how to "interpret" the site. "We researched every file, every archive we could for any reference to the building," says managing architect John Belle, himself an immigrant from Wales. "All had to be right." The building's main canopy, which sheltered immigrants as they arrived, had disappeared. The National Park Service philosophy of restoration is to "freeze a building in time," and it is against policy to replicate structures that no longer exist. It was decided to bend the rules, and a new canopy was built of glass and steel in a deliberately contemporary but unobtrusive style. Inside, in the Registry Room, workers began restoring the great tiled ceiling, built by the Guastavinos, a Spanish immigrant family. Each of the 28,800 tiles was tested by tapping it with a small rubber mallet; only 17 had to be replaced. Over the years, there had been two staircases in different places, both removed, leading to the room. But since the staircase-and the six-second physical-were at the center of the immigrants'
memories, the Park Service made another exception and a new staircase was built in the second location. Theaters and escalators were added in the old light wells, where they would least disrupt the building's integrity. As many as 90 architects and engineers worked on the project at the same time. At one point, Native American leaders were brought in to bury bones found during the excavations. In spring 1990, the restoration was complete. To reach the new museum, visitors may take ferries from the shores of either New York or New Jersey, arriving just as the immigrants did. Entering the main building, they will find themselves in a restored baggage room filled with trunks, sui1tcases, and baskets that immigrants brought with them. To the designers, the Registry Room is the museum's "emotional core." For that reason, they decided to leave it empty except for original benches and an inspector's desk. "You can
Museum exhibits /Ouch on different aspects of immigration. "The Word Tree" symbolizes the immigrants' contributions to the American language.
feel the emotion in that room," says Phyllis Montgomery of MetaForm. Near the Registry Room is the reconstructed Board of Special Inquiry room, a "court of last resort" for immigrants who had been detained. The museum also contains a dormitory room, refurbished to look almost as it did in 1908, with canvas bunks stacked in triple tiers. On the third floor is a 275-square-meter gallery, "Treasures From Home," that includes almost 900 artifacts. Among the exhibits is an empty box that once contained candy given to Nathan Solomon, from Poland, by his mother when he set out for America in 1923. There are candy wrappers, a notebook with recipes from the family's candy store, and a picture of Solomon's parents and brothers and sisters. It is what Solomon had left to remind him of his family. Also there is a sampler that Mary Kudrna Garba made for the father she had never seen when she arrived in America from Czechoslovakia as a tenyear-old in 1923, and a teddy bear that Gertrude Schneider Smith, now in her seventies, had saved since \921, when she brought it with her from her home in Switzerland.
"In this museum, the quintessentially mundane is elevated to a point of great dignity, even of art," says Montgomery. "This is nothing ifit isn't a family story. One of the great legends of every family history is leaving the homeland. The wrenching, the joys and travails, resonate with the descendants." Above all, the exhibit highlights the museum's intent to commemorate the stories of ordinary Americans. "There are no famous immigrants in this museum," says Montgomery. "In a city with 100 museums with some of the greatest treasures in the world, this is a museum that should speak to all of us." The museum's designers have been careful to show Ellis Island in the context of 400 years of American immigration history. In "Peopling of America," a visitor can press a button and see the location of 122 ethnic groups on a remotecontrolled map of the United States. Another exhibit, "The Word Tree," shows the contributions of various ethnic groups to the American language. An exhibit called "Forced Migration" focuses on the slave trade. One wing of the museum, "Peak Immigration Years," is devoted to the lives of the nearly 26 million immigrants who came to the United States between 1880 and 1924: Their departures from their homelands, their voyages, their dispersal throughout the country. Today, John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York is the new Ellis Island-entry point for about one-third of all immigrants to the United States. Most have been cleared at U.S. consulates abroad. There are still some restrictions. Those without proper documents are sent home, or, if they claim asylum, taken to an Immigration and Naturalization Service compound where they remain until cleared. And the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986, designed to stop illegal immigration and give amnesty to illegal aliens who entered the United States before 1982, imposes sanctions on employers hiring persons who are in the country illegally. However, the most comprehensive revisions of legal immigration laws since the I920s, passed by the U.S. Congress in late 1990, will greatly expand the number of persons allowed to enter the United States-700,000 per year for 1992 through 1994; 675,000 thereafter. Some 500,000 immigrant visas are now issued each year. Present law gives preference to those who have family in the United States. The new provisions will more than double the number of persons allowed on the basis of . occupational skills and will nullify many restrictive policies dating from 1952. Now, as borders in Europe shift once again, as winds of change blow in Africa, as the United States faces an increase in migration following a revision of immigration regulations, the Ellis Island Immigration Museum becomes a timely symbol. "This is a museum about the courage needed to start lives," says Montgomery. "I would hope those who are part of the old immigration will come-and by reliving the anxious days of the past, understand and sympathize with similar anxieties being expressed by new immigrants today." D
A menca
D'SCOV~R'NG
PROTECTING
RIGBTS The word "minorities" nowhere occurs in the United States Constitution. When it was enacted 200 years ago, the concept did not figure in the reckoning of the Founding Fathers. It is a tribute to the United States Supreme Court and the United States Congress that the Constitution has been adapted with remarkable success to protecting minority rights. Neither, however, could have accomplished much without the backing of public opinion and the support of the media. Awareness of minority rights is a fact of American life today. On February 7 last year, while the Gulf war was raging in fierce intensity, General Colin L. Powell, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staffand the first black to hold this positionwas asked about the role of minorities in the U.S. Army when he testified before the House A rmed Services Committee. The General lauded the opportunities afforded to minorities in the military but did not stop there. He said with typical American candor, "I wish that there were other activities in our society and in our nation that were as open as the military is to upward mobility, to achievement, to allowing them in." No society in the world can afford to be complacent about its record on reconciling the diverse interests of a pluralistic society. Acknowl-
The determined efforts of American lawmakers and judges, backed by public opinion and the media, have secured justice and equality for minorities in the United States.
edgment of imperfection is proof of integrity and maturity. Tn the past three decades, the U.S. Congress has enacted several laws to protect the rights of minorities. The most recent of these is the Civil Rights Bill of 1991, which, according to the Congressional Quarterly, "seeks to broaden the reach and remedies" of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the most comprehensive piece of legislation on the subject in the century. Proposals for that landmark law were submitted to Congress by President John F. Kennedy in June 1963, a few months before his assassination. Only the ardor and political skills of his successor, President Lyndon Johnson, could have secured their enactment the next year. The provisions of this statute are of abiding relevance. Title II is the heart of the Act. It declared all persons to be entitled to "the full and equal enjoyment" of the facilities of "places of public
accommodation," such as inns, hotels, motels, restaurants, motion picture houses, theaters, concert halls, and sports arenas, "without discrimination or segregation on the grounds of race, color, religion, or national origin." These guarantees were applicable to any establishment if it "affects commerce or if discrimination is supported by state action." This last was said to be present if discrimination was carried on under color of law, was req ui red by local custom or usage enforced by state officials, or was required by the state itself. Other provisions of the law range over a wide variety of civil rights problems. Title TII authorized the attorney general to file suits to compel desegregation of public facilities. Title IV required the commissioner of education to conduct a survey of the lack of availability of equal educational facilities because of race, color, religion, or national origin and also authorized him to "render school boards technical assistance" in preparing the desegregation plans. It also authorized the attorney general on complaint to institute suits to desegregate public schools. Title V empowered the Civil Rights Commission to investigate all situations where citizens are deprived of the equal protection of the laws because of race,
color, religion, or national origin. Title VI prohibited discrimination in any program receiving federal financial assistance. Title VII created a five-man Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, banned discrimination in employment on account of race. color, religion, or national origin by employers, labor unions, and employment agencies; and gave the new commission power to enforce the law through investigations, hearings, and civil actions. Title X established the Community Relations Service to assist communities in resolving "disputes, disagreements, or difficulties" relating to discriminatory practices. One area of weakness in the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was its Title I provision on voting rights. While race, color, religion, or national origin could not lead to disenfranchisement, literacy tests and other devices had been used for years to disqualify blacks and other minorities as voter.;. Title I incorporated a few measures "to provide more effective enforcement of the right to vote in Federal elections without regard to race or color," but this accomplished little more than the acts of 1957 and J 960. According to Chief Justice Earl Warren, the ineffectiveness of these laws stemmed from the fact that they tried "to cope with the problem by facilitating case-by-case litigation against voting discrimination." Writes Bernard Schwartz in Statutory Hisrory of the United States: "Individual law suits could scarcely resolve the problem presented by a system of mass discrimination .... By 1965 only 71 cases had been filed by the Department of Justice ....A new and more drastic congressional approach was demanded." On March 15, J 965, President Johnson, in an address to a joint session of Congress, urged for new legislation to secure the right to vote for minorities. Two days later the Administration presented a bill to Congress. After relatively quick discussions in the Senate, the Judiciary Committee, and the House, the bill was approved and signed by early August. According to Schwartz, it is "in many ways, the most drastic civil rights statute enacted by Congress." The Voting Rights Act of 1965 did
away with "any test or device as a prerequisite for registration or voting." Its effect was dramatic, as evidenced by the sharp rise in the registration of black voters in just two years-for instance, from 27 percent to 53 percent in Georgia, 19 percent to 52 percent in Alabama, and seven percent to 60 percent in Mississippi. The next landmark act came three years later. The Civil Rights Act of 1968 outlawed discrimination in the sale or rental of all housing-and not just in public or public-aided housing-because ofrace, color, religion, or national origin. The 1960s thus ended with significant statutory gains for the civil rights movement. The famous American historian, Henry Steele Com mager, had published a series of his lectures in 1943 under the title Majority Rule and Minority Rights (Oxford University Press). The lectures did not deal with minority rights as we now know them. They dealt with majority rule and limited government and the perennial theme of judicial review in a democracy. But it is precisely from this outlook,
The letter of the Constitution had not changed but new life was put into the language in the light of the conditions of the times. This is the essence of judicial statesmanship.
which he so eloquently articulated, that concern for minority rights has grown. No majority-whether of opinion, religion, or other--ean have absolute power. Absoluteness belongs to certain values. Even so, at times competing values do clash. That is where the judiciary comes in. The courts had made small but significant attempts at protecting minority rights by citing older legislation-the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth amendments to the Constitution that, respectively, abolished slavery, confirmed citizenship rights on "all persons born or naturalized in the United States," and
declared that race was no bar to voting rights. Perhaps the most effective provision was the guarantee of equality in the Fourteenth Amendment: "Nor shall any state ... deny to any person within its jurisdiction the eq ual protection of the laws." As former U.S. Solicitor General Archibald Cox recalls, "The Supreme Court decisions under the equal protection clause halted hostile governmental discrimination against blacks, Hispanics, and other ethnic minorities." The cia use provided the legal basis. The Supreme Court's creativity did the rest. Cox described its impact graphically: "At the same time that the Court's sense of responsibility for individuals and minorities was growing, losers in the political process were becoming more conscious of the potentials of constitutional adjudication for achieving goals not attainable through the political process, and they were also becoming better equipped to use them. Constitutional litigation came to be conducted more and more by civil rights and civil liberties organizations, by radical political associations, and later by law offices funded to stimulate community action and provide legal services to the poor." The letter of the Constitution had not changed but new life was put into the language in the light of the conditions of the times. This is the essence of judicial statesmanship. The doctrine of "State action" propounded by the Supreme Court proved handy. Technically, it means action by State organs-executive, legislative, or judicial-as opposed to private action. The doctrine, however, hit even private action where some State aid, use of State facilities, or any State sanction was involved. The exclusionary policies of private clubs were hit by the courts though congressional legislation did not cover them. The Court's rulings over the years are a fascinating story in themselves. The Court's ruling in Brown v. Board of Education in ]954 outlawing racial segregation in schools, needs no recounting today.
With the Bakke case (Regents of the University of California v. Bakke) the Court entered, in 1978, the new and highly controversial field of "affirmative action." It disallowed (five to four) the kind of explicit, rigid racial quota established by the university but upheld (five to four) the use of race as a tool of affirmative action programs. The majority ruling left intact the bulk of affirmative action programs that gave special consideration to minority groups and women while sounding an alarm on rigid quotas. Justice Lewis F. Powell cast the decisive vote breaking a four-four deadlock among the eight other justices. The Court ruled that a university has a "substantial interest" in a diverse student body that "legitimately may be served by a properly devised admission program involving competitive considerations of race and ethnic origin." Earlier, in 1971, the Supreme Court had ruled in Griggs v. Duke Power and Co. that "discriminatory preference for any group, minority or majority, is precisely and only what Congress has proscribed. What is required by Congress is the removalof artificial, arbitrary, and unnecessary barriers to employment when the barriers operate invidiously to discriminate on the basis of racial or other impermissible classification." Obviously, this may sometimes require preference to minorities to overcome handicaps or to correct past wrongs. Thus the Bakke ruling did not come all ofa sudden. It had been in the making for some¡ time. In 1977, for example, in United Jell'ish Organizations v. Care)', the Supreme Court upheld a New York statute that "deliberately increased the nonwhite majorities in certain districts in order to enhance the opportunity for election of nonwhite representatives from those districts," even if it disadvantaged certain white Jewish communities. Three members of the Court, including Justice William H. Rehnquist, who is now the Chief Justice, explained that "no racial slur or stigma with respect to white or any other race" was involved. In 1979, after Bakke, in United Steel Workers of America v. Weher, a five to two majority held
that private employers could set up a quota system with separate lists for selecting trainees for a newly created craft program. In Fullilove v. Klutznick six members of the Court led by then Chief Justice Warren E. Burger unequivocally upheld a law that reserved ten percent of federal public works programs for minority contractors. This case, decided on July 2, 1980, is of seminal importance. Section 103(6)(2) of the Public Works Employment Act, 1977, provided that no federal grant would be made for any local public works project unless the applicant gave "satisfactory
In 1978, the Court entered the controversial field of "affirmative action." It disallowed rigid racial quotas, but upheld the use of race as a tool of affirmative action programs.
assurance" that at least ten percent of the amount of each grant "shall be expended for minority business enterprises (MBE)." The expression was defined to. mean a business of which at least 50 percent was owned by minority group members or, in the case of publicly owned business, at least 51 percent was so owned. The minority groups were also specified by the provision-American citizens who were "Negroes, Spanishspeaking, Orientals, [American] Indians, Eskimos and Aleuts." The Supreme Court upheld this law six to three. Chief Justice Burger, delivering the judgment of the Court, observed: "Congress had before it, among other data, evidence of a long history of marked disparity in the percentage of public contracts awarded to minority business en terprises. This dispari ty was considered to result not from any lack of capable and qualified minority businesses, but from the existence and maintenance of barriers to competitive access which had their roots in racial and ethnic discrimination, and which continue today, even absent
any intentional discrimination or other unlawful conduct. Although much of this history related to the experience of minority businesses in the area of federal procurement, there was direct evidence before the Congress that this pattern of disadvantage and discrimination existed with respect of State and local construction contracting as well. In relation to the MBE provision, Congress acted within its competence to determine that the problem was national in scope." The interests of minorities were regarded as a matter of national concern. But this could not be stretched to impair the legitimate rights of the majority. In Wendy Wygant v. Jackson Board of Education (1986), the Court struck down a law that extended affirmative hiring policy to layoff of nonminority teachers where minority teachers with less seniority were retained. I n United States v. Paradise (1987), a one-black-for-one-white promotion requirement, as an interim measure, to state trooper promotions in Alabama was upheld beca use of evidence of past discrimination and the discrimination entailed by the new employment was "made for remedial purposes" and was "narrowly tailored" to serve a "compelling [governmental] purpose." Finally, in Johnson v. Transportation Agency an affirmative action plan for hiring and promoting minorities and women adopted voluntarily by the agency was challenged by a male employee who had been passed over for promotion in favor of a woman employee. The Supreme Court rejected the challenge. These cases are illustrative of the U.S. Supreme Court's approach over the years. Emphases vary with the justices as in any constitutional court. What is unmistakable is the trend toward greater concern for minorities. This trend is a national one. The Court shares it with Congress, public opinion, and the media. 0 About the Author: A .G. Noorani, a frequent contributor to SPAN, is a Bombay-based lawyer and constitutional expert.
A menca
D'SCOV~R'NG
The Indian Bxperience The United States of America, an immigrant society since its founding, is changing dramatically as a result ofthe Immigration Act of 1965. The percentage of white Euro-Americans is going down, and the percentage of Asian and Hispanic Americans is rising rapidly. About 90 percent of new immigrants in the 1980s were nonwhite or Hispanic. It is likely that descendants of these ethnic groups will constitute a majority of the American population by the middle of the next century. In this new America, immigrants from India are playing a significant role. Their numbers are vastly greater than those before 1965, and their educational and income levels are catapulting many of them into the upper middle class of American society. Despite lingering vestiges of racism, Asian Indians (to use one of several terms of reference now common) are gaining opportunities and making achievements barely glimpsed by their predecessors before 1965.
Only a handful ofIndianscame to the United States in the 19th century. One of the early visitors was Swami Vivekananda who stayed in America on and offforseveral years starting in 1893. He spread religion, started the Vedanta Society, established outposts, did good works, and then went home. Throughout the relationship between India and America, birds of passage have flown from one side to the other, but real settlers from India did not arrive until the early 20th century (see table on page 20). These first settlers were mainly Sikh peasant farmers pushed out of Canada who ended up in California in the early 1900s. They struggled to survive in an increasingly anti-Asian America where white supremacists aroused fears of the "tide of turbans" that would engulf America if immigration were not stopped. The movement to exclude Asians had started much earlier and
led to the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1872 and then a policy that restricted Japanese immigration to the United States. Entry was alwa ys allowed to "studen ts, businessmen, and visi tors," but after 1917 India was considered part of the "barred zone" that covered mostof Asia. Between 1908 and 1923, 67 Indians were naturalized as American citizens. However, with the delimitation of the "barred zone" and then the U.S. Supreme Court decision in the Thind Case, which barred Indians from becoming naturalized citizens, the U.S. government moved in some cases to try to strip some naturalized Indians of their acquired citizenship. In the period between World War I and World War II, a modest number of Indians continued to come and stay as permanent residents. In addition to the hardy and resilient farmers in California, a number of other Indians in America came into the public eye. One of these was Taraknath Das who had come to gain military skills that he thought necessary to drive the British from India. He was a founder of the paper, Free Hindustan, and an ally of Har Dayal and other Indians on the West Coast who formed the Ghadar Party in 1913. Das, who became a citizen around 1913, almost lost his citizenship when he was involved in the Hindu Conspiracy Case of 1917. Although convicted along with some Indians and Germans of plotting a conspiracy, Das had American friends who successfully fought to retain his citizenship. From about 1913, he wrote frequently for the Indian press, particularly The Modern Review of Calcutta, informing his countrymen at home of events in the United States and throughout the world. At the same time he wro~e for Western audiences about developments in India. He married an American woman, and established a small foundation to help Indian students abroad. The talented writer Dhan Gopal Mukerji too came to America with a nationalist mission, but settled down to become a
Taraknath Das, who went to America in the early years of the century, was a professor at New York University. This 1956 photograph shows him (center) receiving a contribution to a foundation heformed to help Indian students abroad. (Author Leonard Gordon is the current director of the foundation, which has continued to function after Das's death in 1958.)
Dalip Singh Saund (extreme right) with his family after his 1957 election to the House of Representatives. Saund, the first-and so far only-Indian American to win a seat in the U.S. Congress, died in 1973. Congressman and Mrs. Marian Saundflank their son in the front row. Seated behind them are their daughters; standing in the last row are the Saunds' daughter-in-law and son-in-law.
The Beginning
successful writer of children's books and numerous books for American adults about India, including The Face of Silence, Visit India with Me, and Disillusioned India. Sardar Jagjit Singh, a leading organizer in the Asian Indian community during the interwar period, came to the United States in the early I920s. He ran a successful import business specializing in Indian silks and cottons. Based in New York, for some time he ignored Indian politics, but in the late 1930s he became active in the freedom struggle. He energized the India League of America and made it into the best lobbying organization for the Indian cause in the United States. He secured the support of many Americans and labored to change U.S. laws so that Indians could again become naturalized citizens. He achieved this goal in 1946 when the U.S. Congress passed a law again allowing Indians to become U.S. ci tizens and providing for a quota of 100 per year. In 1959, he returned to India, where he actively worked for social causes until his death in 1976. Despite changes in American law during World War II permitting citizenship for Chinese, then Filipinos and Indians, the 1924 immigration law still precluded any large-scale immigration from anywhere except northern and western Europe. The Indian community remained small for another generation. Within this small community, though, were some remarkable
Some months ago, Commenlary, a U.S. monthly magazine of ideas, culture, and current events, carried an article by Louis Winnick on Asian Americans titled "America's 'Model Minority.' " Winnick says that if the U.S. Congress had realized that the Immigration Act of 1965 was going to spark such massive Third World, especially Asian, immigration to the United States, the Act would "likely have been forestalled." He writes that total Asian immigration increased from 153,000 in 195160 to 428,000 in 1971-80, and to more than 2.5 million in 1981-90. American immigration policy, he says, "turned out to be a golden blunder. ..it brought to the United States millions of new workers, all with an unappeasable hunger for jobs and multitudes with eminently marketable skills, advanced education, and unbounded career ambitions. In short, they carried with them the precise qualities [that America needed and encouraged] .... The Asian immigrant experience has been a chronicle of extraordinary progress." A 1980 tabulation disclosed median family income of Asian Americans to be $23,000 compared to $19,000 for the country as a whole.
And the average for Asian Indians was $25,000. [In 1988, according to William O'Hare of American Demographic magazine, the median,household income of Asians was $31,578 compared to $28,661 for whites.] Among the conclusions that Winnick draws from the achievements of Asian Americans are: • Asian immigrants lay great emphasis on acquiring higher education. Their meritocratic qualifications, in fact, have created a dilemma for the affirmative-action programs in highet·education. As a minority, they are eligible for special preferences in admission. But because of their academic attainments, they are already an "overrepresented" minority in many universities. They are now the fastest growing minority in top law schools. There is also a heavy concentration of Asians in the scientific and technological disciplines. • They are making their presence felt in American letters. Winnick cites Ved Mehta and Bharati Mukherjee among the more prominent Asian authors. • Asian Americans have a proclivity for self-employment. Thirty-three percent of them own small businesses compared to ten percent of the entire population. Koreans have generally
individuals, including two Nobel Prize winners, Har Gobind Khorana in medicine/physiology (1968) and Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar in physics (1983). These scientists as well as wri ters like Taraknath Das and businessmen like J.J. Singh were the forerunners of the new Indian community in the United States. This community even included the first Asian Indian elected to the U.S. Congress: Dalip Singh Saund. Born in Punjab in 1899, Saund hadcometo the United Statesin 1920and become a successful farmer. Benefiting from the 1946 immigration law, he had become a citizen in 1949 and was elected to the House of Representatives from the Imperial and Riverside counties of Califor:nia in 1957. He served on the House Committee on Foreign Relations and was reelected. A massive stroke in 1962 effectively terminated his political career and he died in 1973.
Recent Arrivals The 1965 immigratiorrlaw had consequences unforeseen by its creators. The new law abolished the national origins quota system of the 19241aw, terminated the "barred zone" provisions of the 1917 law, set a 'ceiling of 170,000 immigrant visas for Eastern Hemisphere nations (including a ceiling of 29,000 for anyone nation) exclusive of parents, spouses, and children of u.s. citizens, and set up seven preference categories. This last
turned to greengroceries, Chinese to the garment industry, and Indians to retail trade and motels. Winnick quotes Thomas Muller, an authority on the new immigration, on the Indians' ubiquitous hold on the motel industry: "By 1982 Indians owned over 3,100 hotels and motels across the land, ten percent of all such establishments in the nation. [Their] previous owners were simply not willing to devote the long hours and hard work necessary to remain in business .... Motels are considered good investments by Indians because the entire family can be utilized to run these establishments." • In many cases Asians have revived decaying areas of inner cities where, attracted by lower rents, they established businesses and improved their neighborhoods. • Asian immigrants acquire U.S. citizenship faster than other groups. Of those admitted during the I 970s, 55 percent of the Koreans, 60 percent of the Chinese, and 71 percent of the Indians were naturalized by 1988. By contrast, for Mexicans, Dominicans, and Cubans, the respective proportions were 12,21, and 26 percent. • Asian Americans are quick to integrate into American society. Second- and third-generation members,
with other particularly, intermarry ethnic groups, live in mainstream neighborhoods, study Western culture-at the Juilliard School of Music, New York, Asians approximate a third of the enrollment. • One area in which Asians have not made much of an impact is politics. Very few are to be found in elective office on any level, though this may change "with further naturalization and a new acculturated generation," Winnick says. Asian Americans' achievements, Winnick notes, are largely rooted in their cultural values-"an unswerving devotion to family; the high premiums paid and sacrifices endured for educational advance; the disproportionately low rates of crime and welfare dependency; a well-developed propensity, through thrift and selfdenial, toward capital accumulationthat is, the willingness to defer present gratification for future goals; a strong bent toward self-employment." He concludes: "The massive transplant of human beings and human capital from Asia to America has enriched the nation as have few past migrations, and none as quickly or from so humble a beginning .... A blessing for them, and a blessing for America." 0
A
DISCOV~RING
Hmenca provision favored the entry of professional and skilled workers needed by the United States. Although changes were anticipated on the basis of this new law, few expected that within a generation Asian Americans would number in the millions. There has also been an extraordinary growth in the number of Hispanic Americans. A high percentage of the Asian Americans have come with the educational and often professional qualifications to man American hospitals, laboratories, university faculties, and corporations. Some historians-such as Sucheng Chan-have characterized the Asian Americans as bimodal, explaining that they populate the upper and lower strata of society. In addition to those in the professions, one finds Chinese running laundries and restaurants; Koreans working as greengrocers; Asian Indians-as well as immigrants from Pakistan and Bangladesh-working at menial restaurant jobs, driving taxis, and running small shops and motels. They all labor long, long hours to ensure that their children will have better opportunities in life. Indians have been open and pragmatic in adapting to American society. At the same time many of them have sought to retain their heritage and pass it on to their children. Although parents usually have preferred that 'their children marry other Indians, intermarriage with persons of other ethnic backgrounds has become increasingly common. Writer Bharati Mukherjee has won critical acclaim for documenting in her short stories and novels how Asian Indians in the United States have been changing themselves, how they have been forming new identities that blend past and present. Educated at Loreto House, Calcutta, and then at the UlJiversity ofIowa, Mukherjee married an American, Clark Blaise, moVed to Canada, had two sons, and began her career as a writer. Eventually she and her family moved to the United States and became American citizens. Her books include The Tiger's Daughter, Wife, Days and Nights in Calcutta (with Blaise), Darkness (short stories), The Middleman and Other Short Stories, and Jasmine. From the point of view of the United States, Asian Indians are a small, growing, thriving ethnic group whose contributions to American society and culture as a whole are already considerable. Given the drive and high educational level of the community, its future seems unbounded. 0
The following table-eompiled S. Chandrasekhar and Haridas
from U.S. census data-by demographer Muzumdar, shows the changes over time:
1820-1900:
676
1941-1950:
1901-1910:
4,713
1951-1960:
1,761 1,973
1911-1920:
2,082
1961-1970:
27,189
1921-1930:
1,886
(by) 1980:
400,000 (approx.)
1931-1940:
496
(by) 1990:
750,000 (approx.)
About the Author: Leonard A. Gordon, a professor in the Southern Asian Institute of Columbia University, New York, has been a scholar and professor of Indian history for three decades.
Portfolio of Two Worlds Text and Photographs
by PABLO
BARTHOLOMEW
The story of America's Indian immigrants has always fascinated me-as an Indian and as a photographer. In my travels across America, I have been impressed and intrigued by the way most of the immigrants have tried to balance their Indianness and their American identity. So when the Asian Cultural Council in New York awarded me a fellowship to photograph Indian emigres in the United States, I decided to focus on the Indian immigrants' two worlds. There is the inner world of roots, culture, and tradition that they bring with them. And there is the outer world that they live in-a new world in more ways than one. I wanted to examine how much of the inner world they retain, and how they adjust to the exterior world. I met many recent Indian immigrants-who 'are doing well in business or medicine or academics-as well as many early pioneers, whose success stories are seldom documented and little known. The latter came to America-usually to the West Coast-at the turn of the century. Most were farmers from Punjab; some came to work on the railroads, others to study. The journey from India to A~erica was a long and arduous one. The pioneers told me some amazing stories. Chanchal Singh Rai and his younger partner Lal Singh Rai (no relation) recall that it took them eight years to reach America. They traveled through the Fiji Islands and New Zealand and walked from the Panama Canal through Mexico to reach California, where they eventually became millionaire farmers. California offered a hospitable environment to the early immigrants; the climate and river systems were similar to their homeland. But not everything-or everyone-was as welcoming. Federal and state laws severely limited the personal and professional opportunities of Asian immigrants. They could not bring over their wives and families, or marry women from other races. In 1923 they became ineligible for citizenship and thus subject to California's Alien Land Law devised to prevent all About the Author/Photographer: Pablo Bartholomew's photographs have been published in international magazines such as Time, ewsweek, and National Geographic. (The photographs used in this feature are duplicates; the originals were lost in the mail between America and India.)
aliens from leasing and owning agricultural land. This led to a now little-known phenomenon: Many Indian men married Mexican women because such marriages were permitted by U.S. law. Since the Mexican women were eligible for citizenship, the children born of such marriages became American citizens and could lease and own agricultural land. The Indian fathers became guardians of their minor children (who were described as Mexican Hindus) and managed the land on their behalf. Their descendants, with names like Mario Singh Sekhon and Fernando Singh Sangha, are today totally integrated into the larger American culture but remain conscious of their unique ancestry. As immigration laws became more liberal, South Asians became eligible for citizenship and were permitted to bring over immediate relatives. Punjabi-Mexican marriages registered a sharp fall. Above left: Nand Kaur, who came to the United States in the 1920s with her husband, stands in the living room of her house in Yuba City, California. Her 63-year-old son- . who damaged his eyesight while fighting as an American soldier during World War lI-can be seen sitting atfar left. Kaur has seven children; her youngest, Jane. teaches at the University of California, Berkeley. Left: Chanchal Singh Rai (center) ,flanked by his nephews, holds a photograph of himself as a young man. Today a successfulfarmer in Yuba City, Rai was among the turnof-the-century immigrants who arrived in the United States after arduous journeys lasting several years and taking them through many countries. They had to face discrimination, prejudices, and tough immigration laws.
Left: At a recent India Day paradeheld on or around August 15 every year-in New York City, Indians register their concern about proposed amendments to the immigration law.
In the mid-1960s, a new breed of immigrant started arriving from India-the professional. A few investors too came with money that they invested in real estate. And then the flow continued .... Whether it is a Sikh farmer in California, the inventor of the C02 laser in New Jersey, a cab driver in Manhattan, or Elizabeth Taylor's dentist in Hollywood-they all come to America in search of a dream. Some have found it, others are still struggling. Interestingly, while some of the older immigrants were compelled to assimilate and adapt, many of the newer Indian Americans make it a point to maintain their culture and their ethnic identity. There is an earnest attempt to give their childrenmany of whom may not have visited India more than three or four times in their lives-a sense of Indianness and to inculcate Indian values in them. I found a mushrooming of ashrams, summer camps, and Sunday schools where Indian children learn about India-and often from Americans! 0
1. Muslims pray during Id at Flushing Meadows in Carona Park, Queens, New York. The globe in the background was a symbol of the 1964 worldfair. 2. Indian taxi drivers in stay in New York-who touch with each other on their two-way radios-take a break on Roosevelt Island, with the Manhattan skyline behind them.
3. A bridegroom and relatives at a Hindu wedding, which was held outside a church in Connecticut for want of an alternative site. 4. Jay and Jutika Masters, a brotherand-sister team of entertainment promoters, at their dance club in the renovated Warfield Theater in San Francisco. They collaborated on the venture with noted impresario Bill Graham, who died recently.
5. Pratapaditya
Pal, senior curator of Indian and Southeast Asian Art at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, stands amidst the museum's collections.
6. Susie Coelho-former wile of singer Sonny Bono-runs a trendy theme boutique in Los Angeles called A Star is Worn; she stocks clothes and accessories that once belonged to entertainment and sports stars. 7. In a manner reminiscent of "back home," workers at afarm owned by an Indian in Yuba City break for a typically Indian meal.
8. The Sangas ol Delano, California, pose in the resort-like surroundings of their home. Sanga, who has a Mercedes Benz car dealership, even owns a custommade Benz golf cart.
A menca
D'SCOV~R'NG
Tbe
Quiet Places
Jake Rajs's new book of photographs, America, captures the grandeur of the American landscape. As author James A. Michener notes in his foreword: "This book is a joyous celebration .... [The] exquisite photographs remind us of how precious our heritage is... [and] ought to instill in each of us a determination to leave our land in at least as good condition as when we received it...or better." Michener, author of some 40 books, including Hawaii, Centennial, Texas, and Alaska, pays tribute to Rajs's creativity and America's glory:
"[Rajs's] poetic vision reveals ... the free, open range, the untouched, wild forests, the colorful, bustling cities, the quiet, small townsthese are the places that truly represent the spirit of the United States. They exemplify the possibilities offered to the men and women who till its earth, work its factories, and run its businesses and to those immigrants who continue to enter through its open doors." Rajs, who has spent the past decade traveling extensively through America's 50 states, arrived in the United States from Poland at the
age of eight. He has studied pamtmg and sculpture, but photography is his passion and career. His assignments have taken him to many exotic locations around the world.' Rajs's photographs have appeared in National Geographic books, Life, Newsweek, and Time. His first book, Manhattan: An Island in Focus (1985), has been hailed as "absolutely the ultimate color photography book about New York." With America, Rajs has widened the angle of his lens and reached new heights. 0 Above left: Hawaiian rowers, Hawaii. Above: Sunflowers, South Charleston, Ohio. Left: Buffalo, Badlands National Park, South Dakota.
The old style five-year plan has become irrelevant. The key words in planning for an unpredictable future are focus and flexibility.
How to Plan for Tomorrow
I
executive n suites across America, countless five-year plans, updated annually and solemnly clad in three-ring binders, are gathering dust-their impossibly specific prognostications about costs, prices, and market share long forgotten. Asks John Walter, chief executive officer (CEO) of R.R. Donnelley & Sons, America's largest printer, '"Do I have the books in my closet with all the numbers in them? Yes. Do I look at them? No." That doesn't mean Walter and other CEOs have abandoned themselves to the Fates and the Furies. They have, instead, begun to forge companies that think and act strategically-not just once a year but every day. The term "strategic planning," popularized in the 1960s, no longer accurately describes what they do. The phrase gaining currency is "strategic thinking." Executives use it to describe what a company does in becoming smart,. targeted, and nimble enough to prosper in an era of constant change. William Lawrence, executive vice president for planning, technology, and government affairs at TRW, speaks for many when he says, "The key words for the 1990s are 'focus' and 'flexibility.'" Focus means figuring out, and building on, what the company does best. It means identifying the evolving needs of your customers, then developing the key skills-often called the core competencies-critical to serving them. It means setting a clear, realistic mission and then working to make sure everyone-from the chairman to the middle manager to the hourly employee-understands it. Such self-assessment led Clevelandbased TRW, once a loosely knit agglomeration of 80 businesses, to shed nearly half its units and grab early leadership in the burgeoning market for automotive air bags. It led Chicago-based Donnelley to become a high-tech global communications company that adds value not just by putting ink on paper (that is only five Frederick Waddell is senior vice president of Northern Trust Corporation, which successfully emergedji-om ajinancial crisis by changing its operations and priorities. It has become a major donor to Chicago schools.
percent of the equation) but also by transmitting, customizing, and packaging information. Flexibility means sketching rough scenarios of the future-what General Electric (GE) Chairman Jack Welch calls bands of possibilities-then being ready to pounce on opportunities as they arise. Says Welch, ''I'm no guru. I'm not here to predict the world. I'm here to be sure I've got a company that is strong enough to respond to whatever happens." GE was once the corporate citadel of quantitative forecasting. The 350-member planning staff churned out voluminous reports, meticulously detailed and exquisitely packaged. Now GE has but a score of full-time planners. Called business development specialists, they only advise line managers, who have the prime responsibility for formulating strategy. The heads of G E's 13 businesses each year develop five one-page "charts," memos that alert them to possible opportunities and obstacles in their industries over the next 24 months. When Hungary opened its doors to foreign ownership in state-run companies, GE needed just 60 days to cut a deal for 50 percent of Tungsram, the country's leading lighting company. Tungsram had been on GE's charts for years. There is no neat, patentable formula for managing in times of uncertainty. Says Michael Porter, Harvard Business School professor and acclaimed authority on strategy (see SPAN, September 1991), "The state of practice in this area is very primitive." For the typical large American corporation, diversified into a hodgepodge of enterprises and involved in manufacturing, marketing, distribution, and myriad other activities, just determining what it does for a livinghow it adds value-is no easy task. Says Benjamin Tregoe, chairman of KepnerTregoe, a Princeton, New Jersey, consulting firm, "Everyone talks about sticking to the knitting, but a lot of companies don't know what their knitting is." An outfit that lost sight of its knittingand then rediscovered it-is Northern Trust Corporation, an asset management and bank holding company in Chicago,
Illinois. Long expert at ministering to the private banking needs of affluent Illinoisans, Northern expanded into such areas as energy and real estate lending in the late 1970s and early '80s. But the bank was outgunned by bigger, richer, more seasoned competitors. A string of bad loans to Third World countries forced it to take a $179 million write-off in 1987 and post the only loss in its history. Says senior vice president Frederick Waddell, "We found out that we were only marginal players in these areas." In 1989, the 13 members of Northern's policy committee, accompanied by a senior vice president of Boston Consulting Group, ensconced themselves in a hotel in Lake Bluff, north of Chicago. During three days of suburban soul-searching, the managers assessed the company's strengths and weaknesses and hammered out a ten-page vision for the next decade. Northern decided to refocus on its COTe skills-asset management, private banking, and targeted commercial lending mainly for local midsize companies. Capitalizing on its expertise in serving wealthy customers, Northern has been expanding into Florida, Texas, Arizona, and California and has its eye on the Northeast. The bank has also exported its operational excellence to London, becoming a leader in cash management and custodial services for international pension funds. Recognizing that its key asset is people, Northern has beefed up management training programs andthinking even further ahead-has donated $1 million to a Chicago community group to help improve preschool, elementary, and secondary education. While other banks founder, Northern-one of only four U.S. financial institutions that derive more income from fees than from interest-looks to be on course for another year of record earnings. It often takes a crisis to jar companies into thinking realistically about the future. At Trinova, a Maumee, Ohio, manufacturer of engineered components and systems, the catalyst was would-be corporate raiders who wanted to break up the company and sell off pieces. Trinova-formerly known as Libbey-Ow-
In most American companies the urgent has driven out the important. -C.K. Prahalad
ens-Ford-was until recently a loose confederation of three businesses with no clear mandate. Admits CEO Darryl Allen: "We didn't really have a good understanding of what we were, let alone what we wanted to be." Figuring those things out took Allen and his senior managers six years. They decided that Trinova's glass business was too capital-intensive and too dependent on the notoriously cyclical automotive industry, so they sold it. In a world awash with forecasts, opinions, theories, seminars, consultants, and concepts, many companies have come to the conclusion that the only oracles worth listening to are their customers. Trinova asked itself what kinds of products and services its customers would likely need 15 years down the road and what kind of core competencies the company would have to develop to serve them. Its Vickers division, for example, was already a global leader in hydraulic components for airplanes. But Vickers's customers were thinking about enhancing or replacing some of their hydraolic components with electric, electromechanical, and electronic parts and systems. So Vickers resolved to master those new technologies through acquisitions, joint ventures, licensing agreements, and its own research and development (R&D). Says Allen, an accountant and Star Trek freak, "I've got to have these capabilities. We never want to lose a customer because we don't have the technology." Trinova doesn't know exactly what Boeing and McDonnell Douglas will be ordering in 2005, but it is confident that it has the skills and flexibility to meet their evolving needs. Many companies have trouble mustering such farsightedness. That is because, in most organizations, the future doesn't have a lobbying group. Managers are preoccupied with-and rewarded forthe critical present-day tasks of boosting
sales, increasing market share, and enhancing profit margins. Says C.K. Prahalad, professor of corporate strategy and international business at the University of Michigan and an adviser to Trinova and other large multinationals, "In most American companies the urgent has driven out the important." The traditional building block of American corporations, the semiautonomous strategic business unit, can actually impede a company's ability to focus on the future. Most companies, Prahalad argues, still use rigid financial formulas for deciding whether they should invest in, milk, or dump individual units-an approach that not only focuses on current market conditions but also makes it easy for competitors to guess what a company will do with a particular business. Why did American companies pull out of the color TV business? Because traditional strategic analysis said it was a "mature" industry. The remaining players, who now compete in the robust markets for VCRs and video cameras, and will likely get into such new products as high-definition TV, thought otherwise. The division into strategic business units can also interfere with a company's ability to identify its core competencies-. and key people. Says Walker Lewis, head of Strategic Planning Associates, a consulting firm in Washington, D.C., "Core skills often have nothing to do with the way the company is organized." At GE, Jack Welch is trying to create what he calls a boundaryless organization in which te~hnology, information, managers, and management practices flow freely from one division to another. When inspectors at the aircraft engine division check the integrity of metal parts, for example, they use X-ray technology developed by the medical systems unit. Focusing on the future needs of customers has prompted R.R. Donnelley to reinvent not just itself but its competition as well. CEO John Walter believes his company's prime rivals aren't other printing companies but televisions, radios, telephones, computers-any medium of communication that can lure his customers away from print.
To keep current customers and win new ones, Donnelley has invested heavily in advanced technology and has stepped up expansion overseas. Using satellites, the company can print a securities prospectus simultaneously in the United States, Europe, and Japan. When a computer manufacturer wants a new user manual, Donnelley can use digital technology to do the job on glossy paper, magnetic disk, compact disc, or all three. What's next? Perhaps customized yellow pages (each would encompass a circular geographic area with the consumer's house at the center) or college textbooks tailormade for a professor's class. Says Walter, "Probably 50 percent of our revenues by 1995 or 2000 will come from businesses that we weren't in ten years ago." As chief executives strive to get their companies to think strategically, they are rediscovering the importance of their line managers, especially their middle managers. Reshuffled, depowered, and pensioned off during the past decade, middle managers are reemerging as the missing link in the drive to turn visions into realities. Says Jeanie Duck, a vice president at Boston Consulting Group, "I am frankly amazed at the number of companies I see where people don't know what the strategies are. The CEOs have ennobled the worker. Now they're asking, 'What about the middle manager?' " Andrew Grove, the plucky PhD who is CEO ofIntel, the Santa Clara, California, semiconductor giant, has recently come to a somewhat humbling conclusion about his own role in plotting strategy. He believes that the most important strategic decisions get made in the trenches, not in the cloistered precincts of the executive suite or the VDT-lit aeries of the professional planners. Says he, "People formulate strategy with their fingertips. Day in and day out they respond to things, by virtue of the products they promote, the price concessions they make, the distribution channels they choose." Grove worries that the vision and mission statements that issue from on high often bear only scant relation to reality: "You look at corporate strategy statements, and a lot of them are such pap. You
know how they go: 'We're going to be world-class this and a leader in that, and we're going to keep all our customers smiling.'" Grove believes that such a statement can be valuable (Intel has one of its own), but only if used as a constant guide for the actions of managers and workers. The acid test of a statement's effectiveness, Grove says, is how well it "helps a manager who is earning $60,000 or $80,000 a year actually do what he does." A prime example of strategic delusion, says Grove, was Intel's stated plan in the early 1980s to be a major player in both memory chips and microprocessors. Intel pulled out of the dynamic random access memory (DRAM) business in 1985-and focused its energies almost exclusively on microprocessors-after the company suffered heavy losses at the hands of Japanese competitors. Grove, who teaches case studies about the DRAM decision at Harvard and Stanford universities, says it is now clear to him that the company had already "decided" to retreat from memory chips, perhaps as early as 1983, by dint of its marketing, pricing, and investment choices. Says he, "We were fooled by our own strategic rhetoric." Grove believes Intel's current mission, "to become the premier building block supplier to the new computer industry," is
more realistic. The company intends to keep concentrating on microprocessors, such as its hugely successful 386 chip, the brains of the IBM personal computer and many others. But Intel has also begun, on a small scale, to make personal computers that are sold by customers (including AT&T and Unisys) under their own names. Says Grove, "I have to invest in capabilities. Should there be a shift in the marketplace by our customers to increasingly buy finished or semifinished systems, I want to be able to respond to it." Grove now recognizes that keeping his generals and his troops marching in the same direction requires constant cajoling and quarreling up and down the ranks, over everything from capital allocations to marketing campaigns to geographic priorities. Says the plainspeaking CEO, "It is not a pretty sight." But without such disputation, top management might end up with all the strategic sway of Napoleon during the retreat from Moscow. Napoleon, to quote Tolstoy, "was like a child holding on to the straps inside a carriage and imagining that he is driving it." At the Micro Switch division of Honeywell, General Manager Ramon Alvarez uses his office as a bully pulpit for declaiming the virtues of strategic thinking. Alvarez, who became head of the
Freeport, Illinois, operation four years ago, says the company's prior approach to strategy was elitist and academic: "We got so enamored of the process and the final book that we forgot about execution." Now he holds open forums, publishes newsletters, and makes videotapes. Every Friday afternoon, Alvarez or one of his senior managers sets aside three-and-ahalf hours of telephone time to field questions and complaints from any of the company's 5,000 employees. Alvarez's message to his workers is unvarying: If Micro Switch wants to maintain its position as one of the world's top three switch and sensor suppliers, high product quality alone won't do it. The company must continuously improve productivity, technology, and customer service. Still, even the most focused, customeroriented, boundaryless company can be tripped up by external surprises. The managers of Southern California Edison, an electric utility serving 3.9 million customers in California, came to the mindnumbing realization five years ago that their strategic planning system was a bad joke. Every long-range plan they had painstakingly constructed over the past two decades had been rendered virtually useless by unexpected events-from OPEC price-fixing to new restrictions on
Art on the. Billboard
NORMAL PROGRAM
2-
I
Derided everywhere else, billboards enjoy exalted status in Los Angeles. The city's massive hand-painted billboards-which advertise everything from concerts to cemeteries and mayonnaise to marathons-are an indigenous folk art, their creators master craftsmen.
AGRlSPON PROGRAM
The Magic Potion Years ago James Martin mixed cow manure, seawater, and yeast to produce a colorless liquid that he said could boost agricultural yields, make oil wells more productive, and cleanse the environment. Today, 17 years after his death, scientists are trying to determine if he was right.
Remembering
the Civil War
An I I-hour documentary on the Civil War has brought alive for Americans an event that shaped their nation. The film recreates the war mainly through photographs, augmented by brilliant sound effects and readings from letters and diaries of the period.
A Please-Do-Touch
Museum
The Children's Museum of Indianapolis breaks two sacred rules of museums: It encourages touching and talking. The world's largest and fourth oldest children's museum attracts a million visitors annually to see its more than 140,000 artifacts and 4,000 programs.
Everyone talks about sticking to the knitting, but a lot of companies don't know what their knitting is. -Benjamin Tregoe
sulfur emissions to accidents at Three Mile Island and Chernobyl. Says Vikram Budhraja, manager of electrical systems planning, "These were events that no one could have foreseen, but they had a drama tic impact on our business." So Edison adopted a technique known as scenario planning. Looking ahead ten years, Edison came up with 12 possible versions of the future-incorporating an economic boom, a Middle East oil crisis, expanded environmentalism, and other developments. Each scenario carries implications for how much power Edison would need to generate, from 5,000 megawatts more to 5,000 megawatts less than the 15,000 megawatts it was producing in 1987. To cope with such radical variations in demand, Edison has built flexibility into its system. It can repower or depower oiland-gas generating plants, buy juice from other utilities, and intensify or diminish its campaign to help customers use less electricity. Edison is stepping up conser-
II?\~ ] PROGRAM [r~ VOIC' OF AM'RICA
vation in response to new state regulations that reward utilities for encouraging reduced consumption. Says Budhraja, "We couldn't have done this as well if we hadn't planned for this possibility." Royal Dutch/Shell, which has been doing scenario planning for 19 years and is widely regarded as the master of the craft, currently has two 20-year scenarios in place. The first, called "Sustainable World," predicts increased concern about global warming trends and an expanded emphasis on conservation, recycling, and emissions controls. The second scenario, ominously entitled "Mercantilist World," postulates an increase in protectionism, a slump in world growth, and a de-emphasis of environmentalism. Group Planning Coordinator Peter Hadfield believes that scenario planning has helped Shell be better prepared than its competitors for external shocks. In the early 1980s, for example, while most forecasters were predicting a steadily increasing price for crude oil, Shell, in one of its scenarios, had entertained the possibility that the price would slide to $15 a barrel. As a hedge against such an eventuality, the company began looking into cost-saving exploration technologies. When the slump hit, Shell was able to sustain a higher level of drilling activity
About the Author: Ronald Henkoff is the Chicago-based associate editor of Fortune.
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than many of its competitors. Shell realizes that its two scenarios don't encompass everything that might happen in the future, and that neither will be a perfect predictor. Says Hadfield, "They're there to condition the organization to think." While constructing alternative visions of the future can be helpful, it can also carry a price. Says Michael Porter, "If you try to be flexible and be ready for everything, you could end up raising your costs and not being good at anything." Managers ultimately have to make choices, as Grove and his colleagues learned the hard way at Intel. Says he, "I'd rather have all my eggs in one basket and spend my time worrying about whether that's the right basket, than try to put one egg in every basket. Because then you have no upside." When it comes to thinking and acting strategically, managers still have to depend, to some degree, on a few devilishly unquantifiable factors, like experience, instinct, guesswork, and luck. Has the future got you down? Don't fret about it. Focus your company, listen to your customers, empower your managers, and follow your gut. 0
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ON THE LIGHTER SIDE TH E. P R I VAT E.
CHKISTOPHER
"Before you go making any New Year's resolutions, I'd like to read you the scorecard on last year's resolutions." 1989 Tribune Media Services. Ine. All Rights Reserved.
"We've been married/or 27 years. How about time of/for good behavior?" Reprinted
by permission from The Saturday Evening Post Society. a division of BFL and MS. Inc. CC 1991.
Rushdie's Children A
ne .•.•.generation
myths.
Over the years, Satyajit Ray has received innumerable accolades from around the world-including life membership of the British Film Institute and France's Legion of Honor. Now the doyen of Indian cinema receives another rare distinction-the special Oscar for lifetime achievement from the American Motion Picture Academy of Arts and Sciences. Satyajit Ray, who has often expressed his admiration for American filmmakers-such as John Ford, Frank Capra, and Billy Wilder-described the honor as "a climax totally unexpected." As Times of India Editor Dileep Padgaonkar commented, "[The award] vindicates his lifelong fascination for Hollywood films ....Now Hollywood, in turn, has paid its finest tribute to his craftsmanship." Satyajit Ray, seen below at the opening of the India Film festival on June 24, 1981, at the Asia Society in New York, will receive the award at a ceremony in Los Angeles on March 30.
The American Water Works Association (AWWA) recently honored Ravindra M. Srivastava, a doctorate student in civil engineering at the University of Illinois in Urbana, with its prestigious LARS (Larson Aquatic Research Support) PhD Scholarship for 1991 Srivastava received the $5,000 scholarship "in recognition of [his] outstanding academic achievement and of research to improve the quality of water supply." Srivastava studied at Khalsa College in Amritsar and later received a degree in civil engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology in Madras
before he went to the United States for advanced studies. In 1988, he received his master's degree in civil (sanitary) engineering from Iowa State University in Ames.
In its December 16, 1991, international edition, Time magazine carried a three-page report by Anthony Spaeth on new Indian writers who are redefining English prose"with myths, humor and themes as vast as the subcontinent." "In his 1981 book, Midnight's Children," writes Spaeth, "novelist Salman Rushdie conjured up a generation of Indians born at midnight on Aug. 15, 1947.. "That was fiction. But Midnight's Children, an international literary success, created a real generation of its own: a crop of young Indian novelists eagerly following in
hu~and
of Indian themes
writers
r~-d;i;ne;E:-;gfish
prose-with
as vast as the subcontinent
i. --"
Rushdie's footsteps." Among the young authors Spaeth discusses are Rohinton Mistry (Such a Long Journey), Farrukh Dhondy (Bombay Duck), Amitav Ghosh (The Circle of Reason), Vikram Seth (The Golden Gate), Shashi
As part of his project as a summer intern with the New Delhi office of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), Jared Clark, who is an undergraduate student at Columbia University in New York, recently prepared a report on "Forty Years of Indo-U.S. Cooperation: U.S. Aid to the Agriculture Sector, a Survey." The report traces the evolution of USAID strategy from the early days of institution building and resource transfers to the current emphasis on the private sector and state-of-the-art technology. In its early years, USAID assisted India in setting up state agricultural universities (SAUs), patterned after U.S. land-grant universities. Under this program, more than 300 American agricultural scientists served for varying periods in India and over 1,000 Indian students and faculty members visited the United States for advanced studies in agriculture. SAUs, which now number 28, have been primarily responsible for the Green Revolution in India. In the mid-1950s, the United States donated massive quantities of foodgrains to India under U.S. Public Law 480. Most of the rupees generated by the sale of these foodgrains were used, in turn, to finance various development projects, such as fertilizer plants, in India. Between the mid-1960s and early 1970s, USAID extended financial and technical assistance in modernizing India's dairy industry. Operation Flood, which was launched in 1970, has led to remarkable increases in milk production and other dairy products. As the country became more and more self-reliant in such inputs as fertilizers, improved seeds, and high-yielding cattle, USAID switched its emphasis to increasing the efficiency of agriculture through providing technical expertise in irrigation and irrigation education; it assisted in setting up water and land management institutes. The agency also rendered assistance in various other areas such as in the fight against salination and waterlogging, in
Tharoor
(The
Great
Indian
Novel), I. Allan Sealy (The Trotter-Nama), Upamanyu Chatand terjee (English, August), Firdaus Kanga (Trying to Grow). "Not all of them ,lave magic in their prose or vision," Spaeth writes. "But they are
charmed nonetheless; they crowd the fiction catalogs of the West, sup at the best literary dinners in Hampstead and Manhattan, and collect prestigious book-prize nominations." Wooed by agents, publishers, and critics in the United States and England, these new Indian writers, says Sonny Mehta, editor in chief of Alfred A Knopf: "have rediscovered the language. I get excited by them." Quoting Rushdie, who had told an interviewer in 1982: "I think we are in a position to conquer English literature," Spaeth says, "Characteristically brash words-which become more plausible every literary season."
promoting social forestry, and in the Agriculture Research Project (particularly with the National Bureau of Plant Genetics Resources). "USAID," says Clark, "has recently phased out its agriculture department after 40 years. The reason is not that agriculture has assumed less importance in the overall scheme ...[but because] India has developed a great deal in the past 40 years." Clark concludes: "The agriculture projects of primary importance at this time focus not on the inputs and institutions that dominated earlier policy; rather, they are concerned with the private service sector and extremely state-of-the-art technology, where India has not only the potentiat, but also the need for tremendous improvement and expansion. The future of USAID endeavors in India lies in helping India's agricultural system meet the challenges that will confront it in the near future and into the next century." Scientist Ludhiana
K.S. Gill of Punjab
Agricultural
(OSU) President Harold Enarson provided
University
(PAU) in
shows two new bajra varieties to Ohio State University technical
assistance
during his 1976 visit to PAU. OSU
to PAU when it was set up in 1962.
In September last year, nine young artists from around the world participated in the sixth annual Chicago International New Art Forms Exposition in Chicago, organized by the Lakeside Center for Arts. Among them, for the first time, were two Indians-Chintala Jagdish, whose medium is papier-mache, and Latika Katt, a ceramic sculptor. The man most responsible for the Indian participation is Dial Gidwani, who owns a travel agency, Intra-World, in Chicago and is a close friend of John Wilson, founder-chairman of the Lakeside Center. At Gidwani's urging, Wilson came with him to India in 1990 to select artists for the 1991 exposition. They met more than 100 artists in Bombay, Delhi, and Jaipur, and finally selected Jagdish and Kat!. During their two-month stay at the Lakeside Center-a sprawling three-hectare studio complex on the southeastern shore of Lake Michigan-Katt produced a dozen ceramic sculptures and Jagdish created nine colorful papier-mache works for the exposition. In addition, Jagdish's works were shown at the De Graaf Fine Art Gallery, also in Chicago. "The exposition was a lifetime experience," Jagdish says. "It oltered us a unique opportunity to interact with other artChintala Jagdish (above) and Latika ists from around the Katt (below) pose with their works at world." Lakeside Center, Chicago. Encouraged by the overwhelming response to his creations at the exposition, Jagdish now plans to organize several oneman shows in the United States later this year. A Delhibased artist, Jagdish graduated in fine arts from Jawaharlal Nehru Technological University in Hyderabad and did his postgraduation in fine arts from the M.S. University in Baroda. Latika Katt, who has exhibited her works in Europe, South America, and the United States, did her graduate studies at Banaras Hindu University in Varanasi and later studied at the State School of Arts in London. She now teaches sculpture at Jamia Millia Islamia University in New Delhi. -A. Venkata Narayana
I
aya Lin, who designed the Vietnam Memorial when she was a 21-year-old senior at Yale University, is now an architect in New York, and when I happened to meet her one day I asked her about her recent work. She told me about her Civil Rights Memorial at the Southern Poverty Law Center in Montgomery, Alabama, which was dedicated in the fall of 1989. The monument, she said, is of black granite and takes as its text a paraphrase of a verse in the Book of Amos that was spoken on two historic occasions by Martin Luther King, Jr.: "We will not be satisfied until justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream." Its central idea is that water flows over those words and also over the namesincised in the stone-of 40 men, women, and children who were killed during fhe civil rights movement. Like her Vietnam Memorial, it invites visitors to touch the names and thereby bring some part of themselves to the act of honoring the dead and of not forgetting what they died for. r had never heard of the memorial. Nor had I ever stopped to think that in a land strewn with heroic statuary there had been no statue commemorating the heroism of the struggle for civil rights. Montgomery was, of course, the inevitable site-a place waiting for a monument to happen. It was not only where Rosa Parks, by refusing to give up her seat in the "whites only" section of a bus, inspired the 13-month Montgomery bus boycott that gave the movement its irreversible momentum. It was also where an old black congregation and its new young pastor-the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church and Martin Luther King, Jr.together set in motion a program of nonviolent activism that neither of them could have created alone and that grounded their cause in the oldest Christian teachings. IfI wanted to see the new memorial (and I did), I also wanted to see the old church. Granite or brick, they were cut from the same stone. "In the spring of 1988," Lin recalled, "the Southern Poverty Law Center asked me if I'd be interested in designing a civil rights memorial. T thought surely one had already been done. But there had only been very specific monuments to specific people; no memorial existed that encompassed the movement itself and caught what that whole era was about. It had been very much a people's movement-many people gave their lives for it, and that had been largely forgotten." The Center sent Lin some books and tapes about the civil rights era and about the Ku Klux Klan and other hate' groups that had reemerged in the South. "I didn't know what the Center was," she recalled, "until I started to read these stories--especially the story of Michael Donald,
a black teenager who was lynched by the Klan in 1981. I found out that the Center had brought a suit that not only convicted one man for murder but that broke the entire Klan faction, making the point that the group is responsible for the actions of the individual. So I admired what they were doing and I agreed to design the memorial, which would occupy the plaza in front of their building. I was also horrified to realize that many of these murders had taken place during my lifetime and that T didn't know about them; it hadn't been taught to me in school-the case of Samuel Younge, Jr., for instance, a student who was killed in 1966 following a dispute over a 'whites only' bathroom. And I thought, if you stop remembering you can quickly slide backward into prejudicial ways." Lin spent several months doing research and just thinking about the civil rights movement, "waiting for a form to show up." Finally the day came for her to fly to Montgomery to inspect the site, which she hadn't yet seen, and it was on the plane, reading a book called Eyes on the Prize, that she encountered the phrase about justice rolling down like waters. "The minute I hit that quote I knew that the whole piece had to be about water," she told me. "I learned that King had used the phrase not only in his famous 'T have a dream' speech at the Washington civil rights march in 1963 but at the start of the bus boycott in Montgomery eight years earlier, so it had been a rallying cry for the entire movement. Suddenly the whole form took shape, and half an hour later T was in a restaurant in ArchiteCT Maya Lin (right below) designed the Civil Rights Memorial in Montgomery, Alabama, in a way that invites people to touch and experience it. Visitors (right) move slOlr/)"around a blackgranite slab on which a chronology of the movement's J 4 landmark years ( /954-1968) has been chiseled and over Il'hich water continuousl)"fimrs. Listed are 2 J significant events and the names of 40 martyrs,ji'om an unknown student to Martin Luther King, Jr.
Memorial to a Struggle The story of the civil rights movement _in words, stone, and water.
"I was surprised and moved when people started to cry. Emmett Till's mother was touching his name beneath the water and crying, and 1 realized her tears were becoming part of the memorial." -Architect MayaLin
Montgomery with the people from the Center, sketching it on a paper napkin. I realized that I wanted to create a time line: A chronological listing of the movement's major events and its individual deaths, which together would show how people's lives influenced history and how their deaths made things better." What she didn't anticipate was the power that words joined with water would generate. "At the dedication ceremony," Lin said, "I was surprised and moved when people started to cry. Emmett Till's mother was touching his name beneath the water and crying, and I realized her tears were becoming part of the memorial. "
Morris S. Dees, cofounder and executive director of the Southern Poverty Law Center, and the person who conceived the memorial, is a rangy man of 54 with curly blond hair and amused eyes, and when I met him at the Center's new building in downtown Montgomery-its previous building was burned down by the Klan-I wasn't surprised to learn that he had been the subject of a recent made-for-television movie called Line of Fire. I recognized him as a familiar American type-the maverick idealist-from dozens of Hollywood movies made in a more guileless era. He was Jimmy Stewart cleaning up the mess on Capitol Hill in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. He was Gary Cooper in High Noon and Joel McCrea in Sullivan's Travels. Dees is from a family that has farmed in Montgomery County since before the Civil War. "My parents owned a small cotton farm," he said. "They treated blacks differently from the way most white people around here did. They weren't liberals or integrationists; they were just fair-minded folks." As a sideline in his college days, Dees formed a book publishing company so prosperous that in 1969 he sold it to the Times Mirror Company in Los Angeles, thus becoming financially independent, and when he graduated from the University of Alabama law school he began to take cases brought to him by blacks who were excluded from jobs because of their color. One case involved a man who wanted to become a state trooper but wasn't permitted to apply. Dees's suit resulted in the integration of Alabama's state trooper system"one of the first hiring ratios in public service in the United States," he says. In 1971, Dees and his partner, Joseph J. Levin, Jr., changed the sign on their law office from Levin & Dees to the Southern Poverty Law Center, incorporating themselves as a nonprofit entity. As Klan killings and violence intensified in the late 1970s, Dees began to represent the victims or their survivors. He also formed a unit of the Center called Klanwatch, which monitors white supremacist groups. In this role Dees took the case of Michael Donald, a 19-year-old black youth who, in 1981, was on his way to a store when Klansmen abducted him, beat him, cut his throat, and hung him from a tree on a residential street in Mobile, Alabama. Dees's suit led to one verdict of murder, one indictment of a Klansman who is
awaiting trial, and a $7 million jury award in 1987 that put one entire faction of the Klan out of business. "The main thrust of our work is educational," Dees told me. "It's not just lawsuits. We want to stop the problem by educating people, especially young people. After that jury award I was invited to address the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People convention in Mobile, and I said that one day people would speak the names not only of Martin Luther King and Medgar Evers, but of Emmett Till and Viola Liuzza and Jimmy Lee Jackson and many other martyrs of the movement. Afterward, a black teenage boy came up to me and said, 'We heard you talk about those people who died for freedom, and we know about Dr. King, and we know about those four little girls who were bombed in that church in Birmingham. But who was Emmett Till? And who was Medgar Evers? ' "I turned to the other boys who were with him, and I said, 'Can any of you tell me who Medgar Evers was? Or Viola Liuzza?' Not a single one of them knew. Yet these young blacks can enjoy the rights won by those people who died. And white people would know even less. As I drove home I made a vow that I would do research to find out who had died, and that we would build a monument to them. Back at the Center, everybody liked the idea, and someone said, 'If we're going to do it, let's get a first-rate architect.' And Ed Ashworth, one of our board members, said, 'Let's get Maya Lin.' So we called every Lin in the New York telephone book until the right one answered.'~ "As soon as .you talk about putting names in granite you create a lot of problems," said Sara Bullard, the Center's director of resear~h and author of its book, Free At Last: A History of the Civil Rights Movement and Those Who Died in the Struggle, which has been sent to nearly all of America's junior and senior high schools. The book is a model of clear writing, taking its power from the simple recitation of events almost too terrible to believe: Beatings, bombings, burnings, ambushings, shootings, and lynchings. "We needed some guidelines to help us choose the people who would go on the memorial," Bullard said, "and we finally decided that we would start with the 1954 Supreme Court decision, Brown v. Board of Education, which banned segregation in public schools, and end with the assassination of Martin Luther King in I968-realizing, of course, that the movement didn't have that clean a beginning or an end. In fact, as I started my research I realized there were many significant deaths that fell outside our boundaries." Her research didn't start well. "I went to Tuskegee Institute and looked through its lynching files," Bullard recalled. "We figured that a resource that big and famous would have everything we needed to know about who should be on the memorial. But those files included all blacks who had ever been executed under capital punishment laws. That would have put us in the position of deciding who was innocent or guilty, because there was almost never enough information about the
circumstances of the death or the motive of the killer: Why these people were killed and who they were killed by."
"In the end," Bullard continued, "we established three criteria for including people on the memorial. One was that they were killed because of their own nonviolent civil rights activism. Typically, these were men and women like Vernon Dahmer, a black businessman in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, who offered to pay the poll tax for anyone who couldn't afford the voting feehe was killed when his home was firebombed-or Viola Liuzzo, a white housewife and mother from Detroit who was shot by Klansmen for driving freedom marchers back to Selma, Alabama, from Montgomery. "Our second criterion was: People who were killed by agitators trying to stir up opposition to the movement or throw some obstacle in its path. These tend to be the lesser-known victims-for example, Virgil Ware, a 13-year-old Birmingham boy who was shot while riding on the handlebars of his brother's bicycle by white teenagers coming back from a segregationist rally; or Ben Chester White, a caretaker in Natchez, Mississippi, who was shot by Klansmen who wanted to divert attention from a civil rights march; or the four young girls-Addie Mae Collins, Denise McNair, Carole Robertson, and Cynthia Wesley-who were killed by the bomb that exploded in the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, which had been a center for civil rights meetings. "The third criterion was: People whose death created momentum for the movement-whose death was used by civil rights groups as a tool to show the nation the conditions that Southern blacks lived under and the injustices they suffered. The death of Emmett Till, for instance-a 14-year-old boy killed for speaking to a white woman in Mississippi-was the first death that brought wide support from outside the South. Or Jimmie Lee Jackson, who was shot by Alabama state troopers for trying to protect his mother and his grandfather from a trooper attack on voting rights marchers. His death changed the entire course of the movement. It inspired the Selma-to-Montgomery march and eventually led to the passage of the Voting Rights Act." But finding the names wasn't easy. "A big problem was that newspapers in the South didn't cover these deaths," Bullard said. "My best source turned out to be the Southern Regional Council in Atlanta, a group that does research and education on issues of poverty and civil rights. One of its categories was 'Violence and Intimidation.' The cardboard cartons containing those files had been stored in the basement, under a Korean grocery store-a place with a lot of dripping water. I spent a week in that basement and would come out at the end of the day looking like a coal miner. But 1 found names that hadn't turned up anywhere else, and one name led to another-people like Clarence Triggs, a bricklayer who was shot by the roadside for having attended meetings sponsored by the Congress of Racial
Equality, or Bruce Klunder, a white minister who tried to block the construction of a segregated school in Cleveland, Ten nessee." After much debate, 40 names were chosen. "The message that we try to convey," Bullard said, "is simply: 'This memorial represents the sacrifices of ordinary people during the civil rights movement. Here are some of those people.' " The Civil Rights Memorial was designed to serve as the entrance plaza for the Southern Poverty Law Center's new headquarters, a small building with a handsome interplay of angles and glass. The memorial has two components, both of black Canadian granite. The first part is a 2.75-meter-high wall, on the face of which are carved the words: ... until justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream -Martin Luther King, Jr. Water spills down the wall at waterfall speed. Although the passage from the Prophet Amos as paraphrased by King actually begins with "We will not be satisfied," Lin told me that she started where she did because the word "until" catches the second purpose of the monument. "Unlike the Vietnam Memorial, which covers a specific period of time that's over," she said, "I wanted the Civil Rights Memorial to deal not only with the past but with the future-with how far we still have to go in a continuing struggle." The second part of the memorial, resting on an asymmetrical pedestal nearby, is a circular tabletop, 3.5 meters in diameter. Around its perimeter, incised in the stone, somewhat in the manner of a sundial, are 53 brief entries, chronologically arranged. Twenty-ope of them report landmark events in the movement: 13 Nov. 1956 Supreme Court bans segregated seating on Montgomery buses 30 Sep. 1962 Riots erupt when James Meredith, a black student, enrolls at Ole Miss 28 Aug. 1963 250,000 Americans for civil rights
march on Washington
20 Jun. 1964 Freedom summer brings 1,000 young civil rights volunteers to Mississippi
7 May 1955 Rev. George Lee. Killed for leading voter registration drive. Belzoni, MS 21 Jun. 1964 James Chaney. Andrew Goodman.
Michael Schwerner. Civil rights workers abducted and slain by Klan. Philadelphia, MS 20 Aug. 1965 Jonathan Daniels. Seminary student killed by deputy. Hayneville, AL 27 Feb. 1967 Wharlest Jackson. Civil rights leader killed after promotion to 'white' job. Natchez, MS 4 Apr. 1968 Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Assassinated. Memphis, TN Extra space after King's entry shows that this is where the story ends on the memorial. It also therefore shows where the story begins-on May 17, 1954, the Supreme Court's Brown decision-and that's where most visitors start their visit, walking slowly around the table and touching the names beneath the water, which arises from a hole in the tabletop and flows over it evenly. The table is only 78.7 centimeters high, deliberately accessible to children. "The water is as slow as I could get it," Lin told me. "It remains very still until you touch it. Your hand causes ripples, which transform and alter the piece, just as reading the words completes the piece. The sound of the water is also very calming. Sound is important to me as an architect." Installing the Civil Rights Memorial put the contractor, Ken Upchurch, through some unusual moments. "All along we were concerned about vandalism," he recalled. "Feelings about Morris Dees run high in this city, so we put a white construction fence around the site. But not a single mark was ever put on that fence. Morris said from the beginning that the memorial was a teaching tool, and in the case of my men he was right: It has already achieved that goal. Though all of us grew up in
Top: The Selma-to-Montgomery march in 1965 was aimed at highlighting discriminatory voting practices that made it difficult for blacks to exercise their franchise. Among the martyrs honored in the Civil Rights Memorial is Viola Liuzzo, a white woman who was killed by snipers for driving the participants back to Selma. Above: Cofounder and executive director of the Southern Poverty Law Center, Morris Dees-seen here with wife Elizabeth-conceived the idea of a monument to the persons, many of them unknown, who had sacrificed their lives for the civil rights movement.
Montgomery, we learned more about the civil rights movement by doing this job than we did by growing up here. Everyone on the crew saw that their problems were minor compared to the problems of the people named on the table." Upchurch's company was founded by his grandparents in 1930. "My grandfather built our business on doing jobs that nobody else was willing to do because they were too risky. He prided himself on that, and I've always been proud that in 60 years we've never finished a job late." That record appeared to be in serious trouble as the granite fabricator in Vermont kept fussing with the tabletop. Finally word came that the piece would arrive on a Saturday morning in October, just two weeks before the dedication. Nobody knew whether it would fit or whether the water would work properly. "We got to the site early to wait for it," Upchurch told me, "and around 9 a.m. a flatbed truck drove up with this IS-ton slab of granite. The driver was a black woman and her assistant driver was a white woman. We had sent precise instructions on how the granite should be loaded onto the truck so that we would be able to take it off without damaging it-it's only 2.5 centimeters thick at the edge-and right away we saw that there was a problem: The lifting device was attached upside down. We sat around for several hours trying to figure out what to do. In the end there was nothing to do but swing it into the air with our crane and turn it over and set it down on the base. "The bolt holes had also been put in the wrong place, so we had to drill new ones and get everything braced, and by that time it was almost ten o'clock at night and the crowds that had been there all day long had gone home, including Morris Dees and the people from the Center. Only my men were left. Someone said, 'Should we turn on the water?' We thought maybe we should wait until Monday. But someone else said, 'We've been working for two years to get to this point-let's turn it on!' So we did, and the water worked perfectly. And just at that moment Morris Dees came back. He had been too fidgety to wait at home. I'll never forget the look on his face when he saw the water flowing over those names." Two weeks later almost 600 members of the families of the men, women, and children named on the memorial assembled to take part in the dedication. They came from all over the country-grandparents and parents, sons and daughters, brothers and sisters, uncles and aunts, cousins and babes in arms. Except in a few cases, none of the families had ever met, but they shared the same piece of American history. Trying to reconstruct that weekend, I talked to the van driver at the Madison Hotel, who brought many of them from the airport. "It was sad the way they talked about what had happened," Leroy Terrell told me, "and when you think about it, it was sad. There was a lot of crying. I realized that quite a few of those men and women had been very young children when their father or mother died. One white lady from Michigan said she had only been five or six years old when her mother was killed near Selma." That white lady would have been Viola Liuzza's daughter, Sally Liuzza Prado.
Later I watched videotapes of the weekend's two main events. One was a banquet on Saturday night. The other was the dedication on Sunday afternoon, November 5, 1989, when the families were joined by several thousand spectators, densely packed along the street, to hear songs, prayers, speeches by survivors like Rosa Parks, and brief recollections of the longlost children by white-haired parents. What struck me about all the speakers was the natural eloquence of their language. Mamie Till Mobley, mother of Emmett Till: "We are men and women of sorrow, and we are acq uainted with grief. But we sorrow not as those who have no hope. We know that we were chosen to be burden bearers. Emmett's death was not a personal experience for me to hug to myself and weep. It was a worldwide awakening that would change the course of history. With these hurts have come additional responsibilities. We cannot afford the luxury of self-pity." Chris McNair, father of Denise McNair, one of the four young girls who were bombed in church: "Our daughter Denise, if she had lived, would be celebrating her 38th birthday next month. When Denise was in seventh grade and everybody in Birmingham was marching and going to jail, Denise said to her mother and cousin one evening, '[ want to march!' They both admonished her, saying, 'Denise, you're too little.' Denise, being very fiery, turned to them and said, 'If I'm too little, you're not too little and you're not free. Why aren't you marching?' She never got an answer." As an outdoor monument, the Civil Rights Memorial never closes, and for two days and evenings I watched people stopping by to see jt. Adults came in tour buses, children came in school buses, and the rest came by car or on foot. "The memorial has greatly increased tourist interest in Montgomery," I was told by Katie Ufford, director of the city's visitors center. "We're getting many tourists from the North and from the West, and the black population in the South all want to see it. They also want XO visit Dr. King's church, and sometimes they tie it all in with a trip to Selma and Tuskegee." Until recently Montgomery has been a tourist site primarily for Southerners and historians, as the first capital of the Confederacy and the place where the Civil War began-the order to "reduce" Fort Sumter was sent from a telegraph office on Dexter Avenue-and as the site of the first White House of the Confederacy, a white Italianate house where Jefferson Davis, the president of the Confederate States, lived with his family, starting in 1861. Its location struck me as piquant: It is two blocks up Washington Street from the Civil Rights Memorial and just up the hill from King's Dexter Avenue Baptist Church. All three coexist in the shadow of the state Capitol, an august white-domed edifice that has on its flagpole, in descending order of pertinence, the American flag, the Alabama flag, and the Confederate flag. I recognized Dexter Avenue from newsreels of the 1960s: A broad thoroughfare that terminates at the Capitol steps. The Selma-to-Montgomery march ended
there. So did Jefferson Davis's Inaugural parade. I went into the Dexter Avenue Church, a modest red-brick structure not unlike Baptist churches in many Southern towns, and introduced myself to its presiding deacon, Addre Bryant. The church, which was completed in 1889, is now a National Historic Landmark, and Bryant told me that it gets a large number of visitors every Sunday from all over the world"they want to be part of the worship service." On weekdays, tourists enter through the basement and are shown a mural depicting memorable events in Martin Luther King's 14-year odyssey from Montgomery to Memphis. From there visitors go upstairs to the church itself, a sunny interior with pale blue walls and stained-glass windows in a pattern of bright checkerboard squares. "That's always a silent, olemn period," Deacon Bryant said. "They sit in the pews and meditate. The Civil Rights Memorial has brought far more visitors to the church. There's sort of an unwritten partnership between the two-the memorial has sanctioned what the church did during the movement. Younger people especially don't understand the hardships that American blacks endured at that time." We were joined by Zelia Evans, who, though not an elder of the church, is surely its elder stateswoman, having written its history in 1977, at the age of 75. Evans first attended the church as a high school girl, and in the second half of her 44-year teaching career she was a professor of education at Alabama State University, the local college whose black presidents, faculty, and students, along with other black professionals, gave the Dexter Avenue Church its reputation as a "silk-stocking" congregation, intellectually rigorous, and impatient with emotional religion. "It was good that Martin Luther King came to a church that was trained to accept his kind of work and that could give him the endorsement he needed," Evans said, although, she recalled, one parishioner asked, "Why did they bring that boy here?" (King was 25 at the time.) "Dr. King took the Bible and made it so that you could just see it, because of the clarity and the depth of his teaching, and then he always charged you to apply it. Teaching was his work just as much as preaching was. Of course that was also true of Jesus. I guess it was the movement of the Lord to call the congregation to call him here." Walking back up to the Civil Rights Memorial, I thought of how often the words "teaching" or "education" had been woven through my visit. Earlier I had asked Lin whether anything about the memorial-perhaps the stillness, perhaps the water-reflected her heritage as a Chinese-American woman. "If it's Eastern in any way," she said, "it's not because it's Zen, or Buddhist, but because it's a teaching device. It presents information and lets the viewer interpret it, unlike Western art, which tends to be didactic. "I remember that I designed the Vietnam Memorial for two different clients. First, it was for all the people who had been involved in the war. But it also had to work I00 years from now. It had to say that the losses were immense, the price was too high. The Civil Rights Memorial has that same historical purpose. It's an educational piece. Viewers are moved less by
the stories of the individual men and women than by what was done to them. The memorial touches the surface; then you go and find out more about the period." What I saw when I got back to the memorial, however, was something that went beyond teaching and learning. Because of the monument's circularity, tourists were having an experience that was both private and shared. Moving around the blackgranite table, pausing to read and touch the names of the dead, they were also in touch with one another-literally, or in fragments of conversation, or in silent witness. Sometimes there were so many tourists that they formed an almost complete circle. At other times, nobody was there. The memorial moved to its own found rhythms. Late in the day 1 saw a black woman with a videocamera filming three people who were standing over the table. One was a black man, evidently her husband; the other two were an older white couple. The white man walked with two canes and pulled himself laboriously around the table, reading every entry. All four had the ease of old friends, and 1asked the black woman if they were traveling together. "No, we just met," she said. "We got out of our cars at the same time." After a while she and the black man went back to their car. The day had turned cold, and only the white man and his wife were left. I asked them where they were from. He said that they were Sam and Hyla Offen, from West Bloomfield, Michigan, and that they knew about the memorial because of Viola Liuzzo, who was from the same area. Normally when they drive to Florida, he said, they take Route 75 and go by way of Atlanta, but this time they were so eager to see the memorial that they made a special detour. "I'm a Holocaust survivor," Sam Offen told me, "so naturally I empathize with this monument. I was born in Poland, and I never saw a black person until after the war. Right away I saw that they're just people, like everybody else, and Hyla and I have supported the cause ever since we came to America." "What cause?" I asked, though I knew the answer. "Liberty for all," he said. "I was deprived of liberty for five and a half years, so i know exactly what it's like to lose it." Around dusk, when everyone else had left, a young black man drove up in his car, got out and spent about 15 minutes at the memorial, reading the names and taking photographs of the. biblical words behind the falling water in the failing light. I asked if he was from Montgomery. He said he was from Atlanta, and that he was a field engineer for a telephone company. "I told my boss that if a project ever came along in the Montgomery area I hoped he would send me, because I've really wanted to see this monument," he said. "A job came up this morning and I've just finished. As a young black man this place makes me realize the sacrifices that all those people made so that 1 could have a good job today. Back in the 1960s a job like mine would have been totally impossible." 0 About the Author: William Zinsser, a writer, editor, and teacher, is the author of On Writing Well.
Message and
Symposia and seminars can often be the perfect cure for insomnia-guaranteed to put you to sleep. But that could certainly not be said of the recent critics' symposia held in Bombay and New Delhi under the cosponsorship of the Indo-U .S. Subcommission on Education and Culture and the Government of India's Press Information Bureau. American experts Neil Hickey, Joy Boyum, and John Leonard spoke to and interacted with some of India's topmost filmmakers (Basu Bhattacharya and Girish Karnad were among the moderators), film and television critics, and media officials. The Americans' presentations evoked admiration, provoked lively and often heated discussions, and revealed deep insights into "culture," in the broad sense of that much-misused word. Those insights come from lives and careers spent in studying, assessing, and writing about film and television. Neil Hickey, New York bureau chief of TV Guide (he has been with the magazine for 25 years), has also covered wars, politics, presidential elections, and world affairs. Joy Boyum, a professor of humanities and communication arts at New York University, has been a columnist and film critic for more than two decades. She has written several books (including Double Exposure: Fiction [nto Film, which has been published in India under the Indo-U.S. reprints program) and contributed to reference works and anthologies. John Leonard (excerpts from his talk begin on page 45) is a respected television and book critic whose articles and reviews have appeared in Nell' York, The Nell' Republic, The Nation, Harper's, The Atlantic, Playboy, The Village Voice, The Nell' Statesman, and other noted magazines. His published works include novels and essay collections. The American moderators for the symposia were Muriel Peters and David M. Davis. Shoma A. Chatterji, who attended the symposium in Bombay, presents here a sampling of the Americans' comments on film and television, and also their reactions to India. Her conclusion: "Their views on current trends in film and television do not vary in basic substance from what Indian critics feel. Culture is a global word today."
NEIL HICKEY: I am astonished at the vigor and robustness of Indian media criticism. In many ways, it is more freewheeling, irreverent, and rough-andtumble than our own. We are indebted to the wisdom ofTndia for telling us that "knowledge is structured in consciousness." As a subset of that insight, we might adapt Marshall McLuhan's dictum, and posit that the message is structured in the medium. JOY BOYUM: This is my first visit to India. And I am amazed and fascinated at the same time. I had no way of knowing how to structure my presentation on film criticism [at the seminar]. I did not have the faintest notion of the kind of knowledgeable audience I would get, the interaction that would come about. It was like groping in the dark, not knowing where I was headed. The width and depth of cinema knowledge I have encountered here has been just amazing. As far as Indian cinema is concerned, I love the works of Satyajit Ray. I am impressed by the extraordinary humanity that underlies his works. I shall carry with me images from the Apu trilogy forever. I feel they are the best he ever made. I can never forget that scene of Apu picking up his wife Aparna's hairpin in the morning, smiling to himself. I do not consider the Ivory-Merchant team or Mira Nair as truly Indian filmmakers because their expressions do not
quite spring forth from their home soil. Their resources too are based in an alien structure. JOHN LEONARD: My brief experience in India can be summed up like this: When you discover how complicated and intelligent other people are, as I have discovered here, it gives more texture to your experience. It makes you think more generously. I found a good deal to laugh about. In a positive sense, of course. As a writer, I need to know about what I don't know and see about how to remedy all those holes in my head. In preparation of this visit, I have done a lot of reading I wouldn't otherwise have done. Thus, this has helped me to enlarge the horizons of my knowledge and my experience.
On Modern Trends in Cinema HICKEY: Speaking offilms being telecast on the innumerable channels in my country, it all boils down to a question of economics, of sheer Darwinism: The law of the electronic jungle in a free enterprise television system. On channels that are specific to cable, the programming mostly consists of ancient black-and-white situation comedies from the 1950s and the early 1960s, because they are cheap to buy and have a certain atavistic appeal. In fact, there are a lot of old movies on the cable. Not old good movies. Just old movies. U nti! a few years ago, recent box-office hit films were an important part of the prime-time schedule of the old-line networks. No more. Those movies do not attract TV audiences any longer because most Americans see them on videos long before they are released to television. BOYUM: Film today simply isn't the central and overwhelmingly important art form it was. It has been marginalized. And the trend seems to be worldwide. Reading over the clippings about film sent to me from India, I was struck by how many of the concerns expressed were identical to those we hear expressed back home-an overall decline in film quality; overemphasis on big-budget, lavishlymounted films for mass consumption in-
stead of making funding available for serious, small-budget films; falling business; degeneration in audience taste; overabundance of sex, violence, and foul language in new movies. This global decline in cinema as an art form may partly be ascribed to the domination of the blockbuster mentality, the skewing of movies toward the very young, and the playing down of the storyline and overemphasis on technique and technology. Some people feel that this comes from the globalization of film, since a downplaying of language and complex storylines and an emphasis on simple action tends to make a film more readily exportable. LEONARD [Talking about the internationalization of culture and what is lost in translation]: Let's all sit in the dark and see what Kurosawa has done to Shakespeare; what Sam Peckinpah has done to Kurosawa, what Sergio Leone has done to John Ford; what Woody Allen has done to Ingmar Bergman and Federico Fellini; what Jean-Luc Godard has done to Bogart; what Hollywood has done to Jean-Luc Godard; and what everybody has done to Hitchcock, Eisenstein, and Leni Riefsenstahl. When they go to bed at night, they dream each other. And when we go to see those dreams, we imagine we are seeing Japan and Italy and France and Russia, when what we really see is movies about other movies in these magic lantern heads, and this is an international culture. Well, it's better than the old international culture of war, pillage, rape, and slavery. But is this the best modern man can do?
HICKEY: Cable television, with its scores of channels, has most affected not only what we see on our television screens, but, if certain research is to be believed, the very activity of our central nervous systems. The synergy between cable TV and the hand-held, wireless remote control channel selector allows viewers, from the safety and comfort of their armchairs and beds, to graze across scores of channels, to browse endlessly and mindlessly among the daisies and the thistles of this electronic pastureland, to wallow in a kind
of supersensory nymphomania. The practitioners of this pastime are said to have the shortest attention spans of any generation in human history and I am beginning to believe it. In a kind of macabre feedback effect, American television is now producing programs for people with the shortest attention spans. Of course, I don't want to leave the impression that American television is irredeemably bad as a result of having been atomized. It isn't. I think I could argue that choice, in the abstract, ipso facto, is good. But there are minefields that must be negotiated before choice and excellence can be happily wed. BOYUM: To borrow an oft-repeated metaphor, if you ask where movies have gone, the answer is "down the tubes." One of the persuasive insights of mediatheorist Marshall McLuhan was that each new medium tends to swallow up the preceding one, with books thus becoming the content of film, film in turn the content of TV. McLuhan also noted that every age seems to be dominated by a particular medium, and TV seems to be dominating ours. But it is also true that through TV and through video more and more people are seeing films. Almost no one who isn't in the profession goes to the movies anymore. What they watch, they watch on TV or on video. Movies have become fodder for TV in many other ways toothey fill up TV space with ads, TV time with guest appearances by their stars, and they provide pilots for television series. LEONARD: Television, to be sure, is many other things besides entertaining: Big Neighbor, talking furniture, cure fo~ loneliness, sedative, wishing well, first draft of history, weather report on the emotional climates of Starship Earth, command console of social control, electromagnetic nervous system for the global body politic. It is where we gather to celebrate, to mourn, and to pick up tips on revolutions in the social sciences. Chinese students watched Cory Aquino's revolution of the yellow roses on television. Eastern Europeans saw those students and workers in Tiananmen Square. Everybody in the Soviet Union saw War-
saw and Prague and Budapest emancipate themselves and the Berlin Wall come down on television. The collapse of the Moscow coup ought not to have amazed us. It certainly wouldn't have come as a surprise to Martin Luther King who had read M ohandas Karamchand Gandhi, who had read Leo Tolstoy, who had read Henry David Thoreau on nonviolent civil disobedience before there ever was a CNN. Everything eventually shows up on television and it is about time for a new international culture as moral witness to make up its mind about the local cultures based on what it sees. The diversity and texture of the international culture depends on the grain and sinew of the local culture.
On the Role of the Critic HICKEY: I am a journalist who covers TV as a beat. As a critic, I bear a responsibility to the culture that buys my magazine. This is: To tell the truth without fear or favor. As I said before, the message is structured in the medium. People who write about media, such as ourselves, need to be established in a more cosmic consciousness about media as an aspect of our societies, about where television and film images come from and why. And why not. BOYUM: A film critique can be many things. Above all, it is a way of trying to convey to others the nature ~ofone's own experience through evaluation, explanation, and description of the text. In the end, it is based on one's own experience and consists in trying to persuade others (readers) to participate in that experience: It seems to me that the role of the critic today is to keep asking questions of oneself like-why is it that audiences keep wanting to see the same story over and over again? Is it a sign of the infantilism of their sensibilities? Or is it that a mechanical medium like film has a particular affinity for repetition? The modem critic has to keep exploring the sources of significance and interest in film art. To do this intelligently and meaningfully, a critic has the responsibility to keep himself informed and aware. The best critic has always seemed to me to be the most
educated one, the one who could b~ing to bear on his work the widest possible awareness of the other arts, of the world out there in general. LEONARD: As critics, we are not only the translators, but the custodians and transmitters of the best our people can imagine. We have an obligation to disdain the stereotype and the half-truth, the cliche and equivocation, the cover-up and the careerist rupee-grubbing. Our responsibility is to the deepest chords and finest blood threads of our mother tongue; to history, and nuance, and language itself,
that agency of awareness and levitation, our sky and our sail and our net; the circles of light and the suspensions of childhood; radiance and solitude, honor and shame. We have our sonar; we must constantly be listening; and then make distinctions and connections. Critical intelligence is all that stands between us and the terrorisms ofthe single idea, the black sacrifice, and the cult of mediocrity. 0 About the Author: Shoma A. Chalterji, a Bombay-based Fee-lance journalist, won the National Awardfor the Best Film Critic of 1990.
Walking Barefoot on Broken Bottles
I
nternationalizinglocal culture used to be a lot easier. There you are, sitting around the water pipe in your village hut, beating a drum or mending a net, and these strangers arrive, by horse or canoe, with a sword and a holy book. They kill some men, rape some women, seize some slaves, burn down the temple. You've been internationalized. Soon, you'll be wearing their suits, speaking. their language, worshiping their god, and playing games like cricket. And some of them may even come to love you, or at least remnants of what's left of your culture. The modern world is much more complicated. We don't get to know one another quite so intimately. We watch each other's movies, when they can find a distributor, and collect souvenirs, when we can afford to travel. We exchange symphony orchestras, bank loans, ballet companies, arms credits, ping pong teams, and microchips. Starfish satellites send down stereotypes like acid rain. Sometime back, I saw a bumper sticker on a car in southern California. This car-probably on its way to a movie lot in Hollywood or a TV studio-was manufactured either in Germany or Japan. The driver wore a French polo shirt, a Swiss wristwatch, a South African pinky ring, Korean socks, and Italian shoes-a oneman bonfire of the vanities. He was smok-
ing a Cuban cigar. The bumper sticker said: HE WHO DIES WITH THE MOST TOYS WINS.
But [there is also] an international culture of ideas and images, a kind of Olympics of the imagination. That's the one I want to talk about. I'm lousy on analysis. What you'll get from me is flagrant impressionism. In 1947, a young American and a middle-aged Japanese climbed a tower in Toyko to look at the bombed temple and the burned-out plain of the Asakusa. The 23-year-old American, in a U.S. Army PX jacket, was critic Donald Richie. The 48-year-old Japanese, wearing a kimono and a fedora, was novelist Yasunari Kawabata. Kawabata spoke no English. And Richie spoke no Japanese. Their interpreter was home in bed with a cold. And so they talked in writers. That is, Richie said, "Andre Gide." Kawabata thought about it, then replied: "Thomas Mann." They both grinned. And they would go on grinning, trading the names of Gustav Flaubert, Edgar Allan Poe, and Stefan Zweig, and the titles of their books. When Richie brought up Marcel Proust, Kawabata was mystified; Remembrance of Things Past had not yet been translated into Japanese. When Kawabata mentioned Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette, Richie was at a loss; he had
never heard of her. But they were communicating. It's a lovely story, isn't it? Two men on a tower, after a war, waving the names of writers as if .they were signal flags or semaphores. No wonder Richie spent the rest of his life in Japan. I've been twice to Japan, my head full of novels in translation, by Kawabata, Junichiro Tanizaki, Yukio Mishima, and Kobo Abe; ofmovies, with subtitles, from Akira Kurosawa, Yasujiro Ozu, and Kenji Mizoguchi; of the television miniseries Shogun; and of kung fu and Kabuki, sushi and samurai. None of this prepared me two months ago in Kyoto for my hike to a Zen temple. We stopped for something to drink. From a machine, it was possible to purchase a soda called Desert Storm, in an aluminum can with a camouflage design. And next to the Desert Storm soda pop machine were pornographic comic books. I returned to my room, in the Japanese wing of the Miyako Hotel. Full of green tea, bird trills, and cinnamon-flavored bean paste, I fell with a sigh on my sword, down to the tatami and the futon [rolled bedding], over the globe into dreams like we must live together sliding screens. and die alone and that's I would never what stories are about: understand. How to be brave and decent in between .... Nor had I understood a decade earlier, on my first visit to Japan. All' imposter among artists and academics in the green lap of white Mount Fuji, I was asked to be profound on modern cultures in translation. I cited Kobo Abe's novel The Ruined Map. A detective looks for a missing person, loses himself instead, and "nothing would be served by being found." When the missing person's wife crosses in front of lemon-yellow curtains, her face became black, her hair white, and her lips white too, the irises of her eyes became white and the whites black, her freckles became white spots, white like dust that has gathered on the cheekbones of a stone image ... .! meant to suggest, in this photographic reversal of posi'tive into negative, something problematical about identity exchange in the translation from
An
one culture to are going to another of our have to translate each deepest meanother. Poetry ...is what's ings. The Japalost in translation ...[and nese intellectuals, also! history ...humor, who disapproved and gravity, and grace. of Abe as too We're going to have to "Western," ignoput them back in. red me to discuss the French existentialists, with whom they were suspiciously familiar. But word went out to Kobo Abe in nearby hibernation that all' American book reviewer had wrenched him from context. I was asked to dinner. He spoke no English, and I was unspeakable. Between them, Abe's wife and an English newspaperman tried to interpret what we wanted to say about Tanizaki, Kawabata, Allen Ginsberg, and Gunter Grass. I asked Abe what he was working on these days, and he was as gloomy as V.S. Naipaul. He wasn't working. He'd abandoned a novel about the world after nuclear war. He hadn't written a word since ... well, Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude had just been translated into Japanese. Since Marquez was exactly Abe's age and such a superior novelist, Abe said he'd never write again. I left the table, and then the town. . The next day on my way by "bullet" train to Kyoto for some temple hopping, I read in all' English-language Toyko daily that Marquez had won the Nobel Prize for Literature. I was crazed. I knew what Japanese writers do when they're depressed. Kawabata took gas. Mishima fell on a sword. From Kyoto, between rock gardens, I called Tokyo. I was patched through to Hakone. Mrs. Kobo Abe answered the phone. I inquired into her husband's health. She said it was dandy: "He is making great progress on his book." How can that be, I said. "You do not understand," she explained. "Garcia Marquez has joined the company of the immortals. Abe is no longer in competition with him." This is extremely un-American. It may even be un-Indian. I don't know. I've spent months in Japan. Something was left out in all the novels I'd read and movies I'd seen, and no Japanese was
We
willing to tell me what was missing; no matter how sincere I might have been, their culture would remain a secret. I've spent a week in India, and everybody I've met wants to confide to me every possible intimacy of Indian culture and politics, from military maneuvers in Assam to Sonia Gandhi. But I will continue to be sincere. It doesn't matter to me where a novel or a movie comes from .... All over the globe we must live together and die alone and that's what stories are about: How to be brave and decent in between; what happens next; the mystery of evil; the equally mysterious persistence of good; the discrepancies. If I'm partial to contemporary Eastern European writers like Joseph Conrad and Milan Kundera and Christa Wolf; to Latin Americans like Carlos Fuentes and Jose Donoso and Marquez; to South Africans like Nadine Gordimer and John Michael Coetzee; to Nigerians like Chinua Achebe and Wole Soyinka, it's because they seem to have a more interesting politics than my own to construe, landscapes in sharper relief, nightmares and heresies worth caring about and dying for. I'm also partial to troublemakers like Gunter Grass, Doris Lessing, and Salman Rushdie, who would rewrite the whole world. In my country, my favorites all happen to be female-the African-American Toni Morrison, the Asian-American Maxine Hong Kingston, the Irish-American Mary Gordon, the Polish-JewishAmerican Cynthia Ozick-as if by the abrasions of sex and race and culture, we rub up something combustible, firelight to see by. These wonderful writers show up occasionally in movies, although almost never on television. But not only have they been translated into dozens of languages; they have also read each other; they've borrowed and stolen from one another. Marquez is unimaginable without William Faulkner and Gustave the abrasions of Flaubert, or, for sex and race and culture, that matter, Franz we rub up something Kafka, whom he combustible, firelight read in a translato see by.
By
I
arrived lin India] with a hodgepodge in my head of movies and books and television serials and picture postcards of India ....
Sharmila Tagore and Soumitra Chatleljee in Satyajit Ray's Apur Sansar.
tion by Jorge Luis Borges. Rushdie is unimaginable without Marquez, not to mention Mikhail Bulgakov, William Blake, and Naipaul, feeling as usual sorry for himself. Morrison knows Marquez and Soyinka. Grass reads Tanizaki and Fuentes. Before he won the Nobel Prize, Octavio Paz was Mexico's ambassador to India, where he read the sutras and wrote The Monkey Grammarian and changed his mind about almost everything. Kingston has rewri tten all of the classic Chinese novels, from The Dream of the Red Chamber to Journey to the West, featuring the very same Monkey King who so enthralled Paz. These writers are citizens of the world. But they know each other, and we know them, only through translation. Translation: According to Bernard Malamud, who spoke for the GermanJewish refugees of World War II, "Articulate as they were, the great loss was the loss of language-that they could not say what was in them to say. You have some subtle thought and it comes out like a piece of broken bottle." Toward one another, we are walking barefoot on these broken bottles. But the remarkable thing about the international culture is that I've seen Ingmar Bergman and Marcel Ophuls in my New York living room, as well as almost every movie ever made, including some odd ones by Garcia Marquez, who ought to write another novel instead. From these representations and translations, we may well imagine that we know each other. But do I know you, and do you know me? I look like the typical American tourist. We travel a
lot, because elsewhere is exciting and the past is cute. Old Europe and black Africa and the Orient are boutiques into which we blunder with a shopping list: Greek light, German sausage, Russian soul, French sauce, Spanish bull, Zen jokes, the heart of darkness, and the Blood of the Lamb. And everywhere we go-among shoguns and gondoliers, in puddles of cathedral light, at the feet ofToltec stelae, behind the veil of maya in some Himalayan comfort station-we look the same, don't we? I arrived in Bombay with a hodgepodge in my head of movies and books and television serials and picture postcards of India-Buddha and Brahma; sadhus and the Kama Sutra; the Dravidian and th~ Gupta and the Moghul; the Taj Mahal and the Towers of Silence; E.M. Forster and Paul Scott and Rudyard Kipling; R.K. Narayan and Raja Rao and Salman Rushdie. From British television, The Jewel in the Crown. On American Playhouse, the Mahabharata. Salaam Bombay and the Apu trilogy. Jean Renoir's The River and Richard Attenborough's Gandhi. The elephant, the banyan, and the mantra. I'm entirely innocent of Hindi, Urdu, Bengali, Tamil, and Sanskrit...in spite of the fact that the most important poem in my language in this century is T.S. Eliot's Wasteland, which ends with a Sanskrit quote. And in spite of the fact that when physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer exploded the first atom bomb in the New Mexico desert, he quoted a Sanskrit verse, too: "Now I am become Death, the Shatterer of worlds .... " What could such a person be expected
to know or appreciate, of terrorism and communalism and illiteracy and the Naxalites? And yet when you look at me, aren't you, too, seeing some cliche of export culture, a hodgepodge of gangster movies and Disney cartoons and Elvis Presley and the hydrogen bomb; some caricature of cowboys, blue jeans, and jazz; Kentucky Fried Chicken and the CIA? I'll tell you who I am. I am Maxine Hong Kingston and Mary Gordon and Toni Morrison and Cynthia Ozick. They're a lot harder to translate. We are going to have to translate each other. Poetry, we're told, is what's lost in translation. History often gets lost, too, and humor, and gravity, and grace. We're going to have to put them back in. Finally, my favorite discrepancy in the entire history of the literature of translation: It comes from Ivan Sergeyevich Turgenev's novel Fathers and Sons. In Ralph Matlaw's translation from Russian into English we get this: "And now I hope, Arina Vlasyevna, that having filled your maternal.heart, you will turn your thought to satisfying our dear guests, because, as you're aware, even nightingales can't be fed on fairy tales." Whereas Neil Burroughs translates the very same passage of Fathers and Sons like this: "And now, Arina Vlasyevna, I hope your maternal heart had its fill, you will about filling dear guests, cause, as are aware, words butter parsnips."
has and see our beyou fair no
'"l''' e IAmericansl travel a lot, because elsewhere is exciting and the past is cute. Europe ... Africa ... the Orient are boutiques into which we blunder with a shopping list.. ..
So far, the new international culture has given us a lot of parsnips. Where are the nightingales? In Beloved, Toni Morrison's splendid novel about slavery in America, Denver warns her ghostly sister about their difficult mother: "Watch out for her; she can give you dreams." Well, now, let's give ourselves some dreams. 0
Prized Architecture Robert
Venturi
is the 1991 winner of the Pritzker
prestigious award in architecture. phia, Pennsylvania,
Prize, the most
Venturi was born in 1925 in Philadel-
and has an architectural
firm there. He studied at
Princeton University, New Jersey, and the American Academy in Rome. He gained notoriety in 1966 with his book, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, in which he attacked the austerity of modern design and criticized Mies van der Rohe's dictum, "Less is more," by saying, "Less is a bore." As the Pritzker jury noted, "From wove a manifesto American
this simple observation
he
that challenged prevailing thinking on the subject of
functionalist
architecture,
and the minimalism
of the Inter-
national School." Venturi collaborates says he was disappointed
with his wife, architect Denise Scott Brown, and that she had not been named along with him for
the Pritzker award. Pictured here is a sampling of their work.
1. Rendering of the Philadelphia Orchestra Hall. 2. Interior of FisherJBendheim Halls, Princeton University, New]ersey.
Photo: Matt Wargo.
3. Column detail for the Allen Memorial Art Museum, Oberlin College, Ohio.
Photo: Tom Bernard.
4. Robert Venturi in front of a rendering and a model of his designfor the Philadelphia Orchestra Hal/. Photo: Matt Wargo.
5. Western Plaza on Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington, D.C. Photo: Tom Bernard. 6. Tree House at the Philadelphia Zoo. Photo: Matt Wargo. 7. Model of the Seattle Art Museum. Photo: Matt Wargo. 8. Institute for Scientific Information, Philadelphia. Photo: Tom Bernard. 9
9. Coxe-Hayden Studio and House, Block Island, Rhode Island. Photo: Tom Bernard.