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SPANDe'mb~/992 The world followed the 1992 presidential elections in the United States with keen interest. Audiences of cable television and other media watched Bill Clinton and Ross Perot challenge incumbent George Bush from platforms advocating "change." And, indeed, Americans did opt for change on November 3 by electing Mr. Clinton their 42nd President. The energetic 46-year-old Governor of Arkansas will bring a generational change to the White House; Clinton is the first person from the postwar generation to be elected President. And as he pointed out after his victory, the Clinton Administration will also be the first to take office in the post-Cold War setting. As a candidate, Bill Clinton spoke of the need to get the American economy growing again through tax incentives and job training. These are themes that find resonance in many other countries, including India. Attainment of these economic goals is inextricably interwoven with economic developments abroad-a fact that highlights the growing globalization of economic life. This reality was evident in press reactions around the world to Clinton's election (see page 4). The international trade issues so visible in the news in recent weeks also underline the point. The President-elect has emphasized that although his ina ugura tion on J an uary 20 will bring a change of administration, it will not alter the basic foreign interests of the United States. Clinton has pledged continuity in American foreign policy, suggesting that any changes are likely to be minimal. Regarding Indo-U.S. relations, one can fully expect the present positive trends to continue, with the agenda of issues under discussion remaining by and large unchanged. Elected in a year that saw rioting in several cities after an all-white jury failed to convict four white Los Angeles policemen accused of using excessive force in the Rodney Kingcase last year, Bill Clinton comes to the White Houseat a time of new national self-questioning about the state of race relations. In a special section, SPAN offers a variety of perspectives on achievements and remaining problems in this area. As Norris D. Garnett observes in the lead piece, minority residents of inner-city neighborhoods still suffer from a combination of limited opportunities and thwarted motivation, but Americans and others often forget the remarkable strides made by the country's diverse minority groups. Whether through individual contacts among persons of different races, the stridency of a Malcolm X, or the staunch legal defense of civil rights by figures such as former U.S. Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, millions of black Americans and other minorities in the United States have "overcome"-have won recognition of their human dignity and successfully entered theeconomic and social mainstream. As we note in our election coverage, these strides include the election of increasing numbers of blacks, Hispanics, and members of other minorities to the U.S. Congress. The fact that more needs to be done should not, argues Nobel laureate Saul Bellow in an article beginning on page 34, lead us to simplistic dreaming about a world in which there are no perceptible distinctions of race or sex. Without the strengths of individuals in all their creative diversity, America would be deprived of the very vitality needed to solve the issues facing it in the twilight of the 20th century.
-S.F.D.
2
Change in the White Hoyse
5 6
Race Relations in America The Problem and the Promise
8
In the City of Angels
9 12
A Justice for Justice
15
Grady's Gift
21
Contemporary American Indian Art
26
Closing the Innovation Gap
32
Screening ~alcolm ~
by Norris D. Carnell
by Cary A. Hengstler
Songs of My People by Howell Raines
by BrianDwnaine
Spike Lee in Conversation With Henry Louis Cates, Jr.
34
To Dre.am-or
37
Perceiving India
39 42
200 Years of Good Consul
44 45
to Think?
by Saul Bellow
by Rakhahari Challerji by Brian Goce Aggeler
Focus On ... On the Lighter Side The Man Who Knew;Jgfinity be sworn in as the 42nd President of the United Slales on DelnO(:ral to win the presidency in 12 years. See pages 2-4.
Managing Editor, Krishan Gabralili; A. Venkata Narayana, Snigdha Goel; Photo Editor, Avinash Pasri Kanti Roy; Artist, H l Bhalna Manager, D.P. Sh Services: US1S D
Change in the T
he
1992 U.S. elections carried a clear and reverberating message from American voters: They wanted change, particularly in the White House. Bill Clinton, the 46-year-old Governor on popular disof Arkansas, capitalized content with the leadership of President George Bush and a stagnant economy to capture the presidency for the Democratic Party for the first time in 12 years. In attempting to enact the changes outlined in his vigorous electoral campaign, President-elect Clinton must reckon with the fact that his landslide victory in terms of electoral votes (370 to 168) was achieved with only a 43 percent share of the total popular vote. (This was roughly the same percentage as registered by the unsuccessful Michael Dukakis candidacy in 1988, although in 1992 five million more Americans went to the polls.) George Bush got 38 percent, and maverick independent Ross Perot won 19 percent. In fact, one of Clinton's electoral triumphs was to stave off a major erosion of his support to Perot. Although Clinton won a p/ura/it~and hence all of the electoral votesin 33 of 51 states and territories, he won a majority of the votes in only four. There was modest turnover in the membership of the U.S. Congress (see box), but hardly an influx of Clinton supporters, or, for that matter, of Democrats in general. The Democrats, who had 57 seats out of 100 in the last Senate, have 56 now, with a December 4 runoff for one seat. In the 435-member House of Representatives, the Democratic majority actually decreased from 268 to 258. Hence, the American voters were cautious regarding the degree of mandate they gave the Presidentelect--it was apparent they wanted change, but not too much.
Transition Planning Nevertheless, Clinton immediately called on Americans from all races, all walks of life, and all political parties to join him in the task of getting the United States "moving" again. The goal in Clinton's words was a "new patriotism" aimed at creating an economically more mighty America. Between election day, November 3, 1992, and the official inauguration of Clinton as the
42nd President of the United States of America on January 20, 1993, occurs a curious American phenomenon known as the transition. On December 14 the members of the Electoral College will meet to formally carry out the will of the voters by casting their votes in their respective states, according to the dictates of the plurality in each state. During this period the incoming admin¡¡ istration will select heads of all government agencies, and the President-elect will elaborate his policy objectives and legislative priorities. It is also a period in which the heat of the campaign cools, the outgoing and incoming administrations effect an orderly transfer of authority, and America comes back together. President George Bush immediately pledged wholehearted cooperation with Presidentelect Clinton, and on November 19 the two met for a foreign policy briefing that Clinton described as "terrific." During the campaign, Clinton eschewed any politics of racial divisiveness: "There is no 'them'; there is only 'us,''' he told the Democratic convention that nominated him for President. Clinton named as the chairman of his transition team a prominent black civil rights advoc'ate, the Washington, D.C., lawyer Vernon Jordan, who for a decade served as executive director of the National Urban League. Selected as day-to-day manager of transition operations was Warren Christopher, a distinguished diplomat and Los Angeles lawyer. Christopher chaired the citizens' committee that condemned the Los Angeles police department for the 1991 beating of black motorist Rodney King and proposed reforms of the department that were approved by the Los Angeles electorate in the November balloting. Jordan and Christopher were prominent advisers of Clinton in the highly professional process whereby he selected Tennessee Senator Al Gore as his running mate. Gore was a definite campaign asset, and it remains to be seen how Clinton will deploy the considerable skills of the Vice President-elect. Some speculate that he will be targeted at special priority projects; others feel he will concentrate on relations with the Congress. The transition team has already expanded
to encompass experts in a wide range of policy areas; included in their number is a young Indian American, Atul Gawande, a specialist on health-care issues. Interestingly, the Indian Embassy in Washington, D.C., was reportedly one of the first foreign missions to establish direct contact with the transition planners in Little Rock, Arkansas.
President-elect Clinton is expected to hit the ground running with a spate of legislation on a variety of fronts including investment tax credits to stimulate job-producing enterprises, spending on pending public works projects, improvements in job training, reforms in medical insurance, creation of a program in which college students will donate national service in return for tuition support, and devising a multi-year defense budget that "keeps the defense of [the] country the strongest in the world and deals with the necessity to downscale." He has called for a summit meeting in Little Rock of economic leaders and experts to share ideas on getting the economy moving, including the proposal to create a new Economic Security Council. There is, however, no guarantee that a consensus will emerge in the new Congress supporting such policies. To be sure, Democratic Congressional leaders are delighted at having a fellow party member in the White House. Speaker of the House of Representatives Thomas Foley promised to organize the chamber "earlier than any time in recent memory" in order to take up Clinton's priority legislation just as soon as the new. President is inaugurated "or even slightly before." But there will doubtless be some differences of opinion even among Democrats when it comes to hammering out the legislative details of Clinton's proposals. The Democratic Congress will surely revive and adopt for Clinton's signature a number of legislative measures vetoed by President Bush. These include a law permitting federal workers to take unpaid leave for family emergencies; campaign finance reform; and the imposition of tougher restrictions on lobbyists and on government employees who seek work in private-sector businesses they had previously overseen.
For his part, Senate Minority Leader Robert Dole of Kansas has pointedly reminded the President-elect that 57 percent of Americans voted for someone else-that, as he put it, the election provided "no mandate, no coattails, and no majority." Dole has "appointed" himself the chaperone for Clinton's "honeymoon." Uncertainty surrounds Clinton's commitment to reducing the staggering U.S. national debt. Having promised the moon economically, he must now face the tides. Late in the campaign, Clinton told an Albuquerque, New Mexico, audience: ''I'm here to tell you that we didn't get into this mess overnight, and we won't get out of it overnight." Clinton the candidate was perceptibly hedging his bets in an effort to ease
potential pressures on Clinton the President. Given the global economic slowdown, it will not be easy to impart great momentum to the U.S. economy. In order to be perceived as delivering on its promises, the new administration will likely increase government spending moderately on a range of economic and social programs and move only gradually toward debt reduction.
Foreign Policy Clinton focused little on foreign policy issues during the campaign, arguing that domestic policy was crucial: "If you don't rebuild the economic strength of this country at home, we won't be a superpower." Hoping to avoid any sign of weakness akin to that
New Faces in the Congress American voters in November did more than pass the keys of the White House over to a new First Family. They also sent many new faces to the U.S. Congress. Perhaps the Carol Moseley Braun most salient result was the election of large numbers of women. Five women were elected to the upper house, the Senate, bringing the total to six women out of 100 senators (one woman incumbent and hence was in the midst ofhersix-yearterm did not have to face the voters this year). In addition to reelecting incumbent Barbara Mikulski from Maryland, the Americans elected to the Senate Carol Moseley Braun of Illinois (the first black woman senator ever elected), Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer from populous California, and Patty Murray from the state of Washington. A total of 47 women were elected or reelected to the House of Representatives, compared to 28 in the previous House. Black candidates scored impressive gains in
the balloting. In addition to Senator Braun's triumph, 13 new black legislators were elected to the House of Representatives. Added to 26 black representatives reBen Nighthorse Campbell elected, this brings the Congressional Black Ca ucus to 40 members. The group held a meeting of the first-ever Black Congressional Leadership Institute in Atlanta to coordinate their efforts in the new Congress. Significantly, as compared to earlier black legislators, the newcomers bring far greater experience in state-level politics and governance and represent a wider geographic slice of the country. Members of other minorities also won election to the Congress. The most nota ble of these were Colorado's Ben Nighthorse Campbella Cheyenne Indian rancher who is the first American Indian to be elected to the Senateand New York Congresswoman Nydia Velazquez, the first woman of Puerto Rican origin in the Congress, who defeated her Republican opponent with nearly 80 percent of the vote.
apparently perceived by Nikita Khrushchev in the young President John F. Kennedy some 32 years ago, Clinton explicitly warned any would-be aggressor that the transition of administrations provides no opening for hostile action against the United States. The President-elect has pledged to pursue the same goals as the outgoing administration in a number of policy areas. Clinton wants to keep "the Middle East peace process on track"; in this context, howto the ever, he has voiced his opposition creation of an independent Palestinian state. Clinton pledges "continued efforts to reduce nuclear weapons with Russia and with other nuclear powers" and to work hard to stop "proliferation of weapons of mass destruction-nuclear, biological, and chemica!." The President-elect's strong words on human rights abuses in China may signal new activism on behalf of human rights in other parts of the world as wel!. In a recent 1l1lernalional Herald Tribune article, Thomas L. Friedman of the New York Times Service perceptively notes that the preoccupation of the Bush Administration with the election campaign in recent months has, in effect. left largely untended "a series of problems abroad that could force [Clinton] to devote much more time than he had planned to foreign policy." Among the issues are: Backpedaling by the Russians on destruction of SS-18 missile silos and other multiplewarhead missiles under terms of the START II follow-on agreement; the prospect that Turkey might cease allowing the United States to use Turkish bases to enforce a no-flight zone over northern Iraq and to provide relief to the Kurds; stalling of the Arab-Israeli peace talks in the absence of high-level U.S. pressure for new concessions; the possibility of a trade war with Europe; Khmer Rouge resistance to the election plan for Cambodia devised by the United Nations; a new surge of Haitian refugees; and the possible revival of civil war in Angola. World reaction to the election of Clinton has generally been favorable (see next page). While there will be new faces in the White House, most observers abroad do not seem to anticipate 0 major shifts in U.S. priorities and actions.
From the World's Press The international press reacted positively to Bill Clinton's victory and generally approached his incumbency with an open mind. The willingness of Americans to gamble on change under a youthful leader from the postwar generation drew praise, although many stressed the enormous challenges the new President will face. Greater U.S. assertiveness in trade matters was predicfed. Below are some sample commentaries: GUARDIAN, Britain-America has done itself a power of good. It has yearned for change and secured it. But this is not morning again in America, any more than it is a revived New Frontier. The possibilities of profound renewal are great; but the penalties for failure are equally clear, and written on the prairie winds that blew George Bush so haplessly into oblivion. LA STAMPA, Italy-If he wants to succeed, Clinton will have to limit his ambitions, identify few objectives and achieve them quickly ....Otherwise, he risks being crushed between the expectations he has raised and the impossibility of meeting them without imposing painful sacrifices. The pessimism of this scenario is tempered by Clinton's qualities: creativity, an ability to be in touch with the people, and, most of all, tenacity. DIE PRESSE, Austria-Bill Clinton is a risk. But the Americans have always liked risks, and this time, too, they have demonstrated their courage to take risks. BANGKOK POST, Thailand-Arkansas Governor Clinton will bring youth and a new outlook to the White House ....He will have to begin formulating foreign policy soon. The Democratic Party has called for a change in U.S..policy on China, and this could be his first major test. KOMPAS,lndonesia-Observers are beginning to predict prospects for US.-Indonesia relations under the Democrats. Some have already said relations will be more difficult in such matters as human rights, which Clinton mentions often.
AGE, Australia-The Clinton camp has taken to referring to its man as more a fair trader than a free trader, which is political shorthand for saying that he is likely to take an even tougher line than did Mr. Bush in countering the protectionist tendencies of the Europeans and Japanese. This would be bad news for smaller trading nations like Ausfralia, who are inevitably caught in the crossfire when the giants fight. TIMES OF INDIA, India-The landslide victory ...Clinton ...notched up in the American presidential election is much more than the triumph of one candidate over another. It symbolizes the arrival of the new generation, unenamored of the shibboleths and reflexes that shaped the course of the "American century" after the Second World War. EL MOUDJAHID, Algeria-The changes will probably only be minimal or insignificant in regard to the Middle East and the Palestinian question ....[Clinton's] term will clarify whether or not the life of a Palestinian will at last have some
meaning for the Americans. SOWETAN, South Africa-The champagne bottles and the streamers celeb.rating the victory of the man who will be president of the United States for the next four years are out. The followers of the loser are not happy, but they accept that the American people have made their choice. They will be loyal to the president. That is democracy at work. UHURU, Tanzania-There is hope that starting January 20 of next year, when Mr. Clinton officially assumes the power of the presidency, the White House will have a leader who shows that he understands Africa well. History has shown that Democratic presidents have understood Africa better than right-wing Republican presidents. FOLHA DE SAO PAULO, Brazil-The question that is now worrying the United States and the whole world is the future of the country under Clinton. He defended greater state intervention in the economy, he promised to increase taxes for the wealthy and to fight poverty.
Strongly supported by the trade unions, he will defend employment for Americans-and this predicts difficulties for the integratinn with Canada and Mexico and greater trade protectionism, the latter especially worrisome for Brazil. CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR, United States-The most notable feature of this election was the revitalization of the American electorate. People got interested and involved, after early assessments that many might shun the political process in disgust. Instead, over 100 million went to the polls, the highest turnout since the early 1960s THE WALL STREET JOURNAL, United States-It's true that Bill Clinton ran for the presidency and won as a New Democrat. And his ads explicitly stated that he and AI Gore "don't think the way the old Democratic Party did." This doesn't mean the "old Democratic Party" has somehow melted away. This is no fairy tale, folks. This is a struggle for national power ....Governor, welcome to the Beltway and bring a helmet. 0
THE AMERICAN CENTER in New Delhi held its own "breakfast show" on Election Day-visitors could see live TV coverage of the results coming in, "vote"for one of the three presidential candidates in a popularity poll, and pose with lifesize cutouts 0.[ Clinton (above), Bush, and Perot.
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n April 29, 1992, an all-white jury in Simi Valley, California, failed to convict four white Los Angeles city policemen charged with the beating of a black motorist, Rodney King. On March 3, 1991, King had led them on a highspeed chase and then refused to cooperate with them when finally stopped. The jury's decision exonerating the officers shocked a nation that had seen on television an onlooker's video tape showing the accused policemen repeatedly clubbing the black man on the ground. The outrage at the verdict spilled over into several days of rioting and looting in Los Angeles and several other major American cities, resulting in a number of deaths and considerable property damage. These events sparked an intense national debate about the state of race relations in America. How, many people asked, could a country that had fought a civil war to abolish slavery in the 1860s and had battled entrenched prejudices to enact
landmark civil rights laws in the 1960s still be beset by so much racial intolerance? Rodney King himself emotionally asked in a television interview on the third day of the Los Angeles rioting, "Can we all get along?" There is no easy answer to that question. Minorities in America have registered enormous social, political, and economic gains in recent decades, and racial distinctions have blurred. Yet, deep problems still plague relations among the races, particularly between an "underclass" of largely black and Latino origin and the economic mainstream. In the hope that out of examination comes understanding, and out of understanding comes wisdom, SPAN looks at the state of American race relations from several perspectives and through several eyes. We offer neither solutions nor a comprehensive picture. The issue is far too complex for that. In the following race-relations package we focus on unresolved problems and signs of progress; the "black angels" that a white reporter encountered during the Rodney King riots in the "City of Angels"; the views ·of "Mr. Civil Rights," retired u.S. Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall; photo images of the lives of black Americans; a future novelist's priceless lessons in interracial understanding from his family's maid Grady Hutchinson in segregated Birmingham; Spike Lee and his controversial film epic, just released, on the life of black nationalist leader Malcolm X; and, finally, Saul Bellow's laser-sharp surgery on contemporary U.S. social commentators.
The Problem and the Promise by NORRIS D. GARNETT
The recent civil disturbances in Los Angeles led many persons in America and elsewhere to shake their heads in dismay and ask: "Will America ever be able to resolve its race problem?" Not only do I reject the term "race problem" (because of its insidious implication that Afro-Americans are a "problem"), but I also believe that the history of race relations in the United States is one of significant and continuing progress. It is difficult for outsiders to comprehend the gains registered in relations among the races in America, because images of the brutal white resistance that marked the civil rights struggle in the 1960s remain indelibly etched in the world's memory. Whenever there is a civil incident in America with racial/ethnic overtones, many non-Americans see it at once as evidence of the deterioriation of race relations.
Misperceptions and Stereotypes I was working in the U.S. Embassy in New Delhi at the time of the 1965 riots in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles. Many well-meaning Indian friends asked me then how I, a black American, could defend such a racist country. They were somewhat surprised when I pointed out that my home was in a completely integrated middle-class neighborhood of Los Angeles, that I had gone to an integrated school, and that I had had Asian, white, and Latino friends most of my life. I assured them that contrary to media reports, not all blacks in Los Angeles lived in Watts, and while that district was predominantly black, many Latinos also lived there. Issues of race and ethnicity are so emotional-witness what has been happening in the former Yugoslavia-that it is difficult for persons not directly involved to get an unbiased picture of the actual situation. Our own prejudices are reflected in how we perceive news. Moreover, the media, not always without bias, tend to sensationalize and distort racial issues in their accounts. This is true all over the world: While I was in India, there was localized communal rioting that I learned about only through accounts in the Indian press. These incidents were so sensationalized in the American media that my family (fearful that I was in great physical danger) called me from Los Angeles to ask if I was safe. The same sort of "overreporting" occurred in the coverage of the recent "racial" riots in Los Angeles. Both national and international media characterized the disturbances as "black rage against whites and Koreans in black South Central Los Angeles as a result of the verdict in the Rodney King case." The rioting was many things to many people, but it was not simply a case of "black/white confrontation," as is evident from statistics such as these-some 52 percent of those arrested right after the turmoil were Latinos. Blacks comprised 37 percent; whites ten percent; and Asians one percent. The largest single group of arrestees were young Latino males in the ages 18to 24.
Nor were the disturbances a clear case of "black rage and violence directed at Korean shopkeepers," as widely reported in the media. The worst damage to Korean property did not occur in the predominantly black (55 percent black and 35 percent Latino) South Central Los Angeles. Only nine percent of the Korean stores are located there. Most damage to Korean stores, including the looting, took place north of South Central in the area known as Koreatown, which is inhabited mostly by poor non-English-speaking Latino immigrants. It is important to note that many of the rioters were not even bona fide Americans-many of those from Mexico are illegally in the United States, while those from El Salvador and Nicaragua have only temporary legal status. This is not to say that there was no black vandalism directed specifically at Korean-owned stores. There has been ill feeling between blacks and Koreans since a Korean woman store owner received a suspended sentence last year in the fatal shooting of a black teenage girl, Latasha Harlins. But by and large, Korean stores were looted not because they were owned by Koreans, but just because their stores happened to be located in the area of rioting and looting.
Economics Rather Than Race The civil disturbances in Los Angeles stemmed primarily from frustration over poverty of blacks and Latinos in and around areas like South Central. A number offacts and figures about Los Angeles highlight the situation: The median household net worth for whites is $31 ,904; for blacks and Latinos it is about $1,353. Some 83 percent of blacks and 73 percent of Latinos live in poverty; for whites the figure is only 33 percent. During the recession of the past two years, unemployment has tripled in the city's black and immigrant communities. The acquittal of Los Angeles police officers in the brutal 1991 beating of black motorist Rodney King-a jury verdict condemned throughout the country by the vast majority of Americans whatever their race, who had viewed a video tape of the incident on national television-was only the spark that lit the. riots. It was the frustration of poverty that really kindled the disturbance. No American can be happy about the riots. But I believe that the shock and dismay they evoked will have a salutary impact on race relations. Because of the substantial gains made by blacks and other minorities since the.civil rights movement of the 1960s, America had become complacent about the problems faced by its racial minorities. Indeed, many white Americans seemed to believe that "race" was no longer an obstacle to getting ahead in the United States, and indeed they had turned against "affirmative action" and other instruments of social policy designed to promote progress for minorities. Yet, every African American-or a member of any other racial
minority-knows that many stubborn barriers to full equality still persist. . This mixed reality was highlighted in the exhaustive report "A Common Destiny: Blacks and American Society," issued in 1989 by the National Research Council. This in-depth study, which took dozens of America's best scholars four years to complete, came to the following largely positive, but mixed, conclusion: "The great majority of black Americans contribute to the political, economic, and social health of the nation. The typical black adult-like the typical white adult-is a full-time employee or homemaker who pays taxes, votes in public elections, and sends children to school. Blacks make important contributions to all forms of American life, from sciences and health care, to politics and education, to arts and entertainment.. .. "However, this role is not available to a sizable minority of black ...Americans. The evidence for this assessment is clear. High-school dropout rates among young black adults have risen, and attaining high standards of academic competence seems unavailable to millions of poor black youths attending school systems that are not able to teach them .... Many of these men are incarcerated or have dropped out of society into the escape offered by alcohol and drug addiction .... "Barring unforeseen events or changes in present conditions-that is, [given] no changes in educational policies and opportunities, no increased income and employment opportunities, and no major national programs to deal with the problems of economic dependency-our findings imply several negative developments for blacks in the near future ... that in turn do not bode well for American society." On the positive side of the ledger, the black consumer market has grown from $30,000 million in 1960 to more than $125,000 million in 1980. The number of black elected officials has almost doubled in the past 12years, from 3,503 to 6,681, and the number of black women in office has tripled during this period. Forty members of the 103rd Congress are black, more than at any previous time in American history, and in the elections held last month the first black woman, Carol Moseley Braun, was elected to the U.S. Senate from Illinois. The high-school graduation rate for blacks has doubled in the past decade or so, and !here have also been substantial gains for other racial minorities. In 1970, only 4.5 percent of black families earned $50,000 or more a year; by 1986, that percentage had doubled, to nine percent. Fully 44 percent of black families owned their own home in 1984 (the figure for whites was 67 percent).
Tasks Ahead One could cite other data supporting the belief that the United States basically has resolved its "race problem." But statistics can be misleading. Racial and ethnic barriers remain ugly facts of American life, particularly in matters of employment and housing. While it is true that much has been accomplished in these areas, much more remains to be done.
For instance, a so-called glass ceiling acts as an invisible barrier to the promotion of women and members of minorities to top-level positions. Tn an August 12, 1992, press conference, U.S. Secretary of Labor Lynn Martin said, "We continue to find a general absence of minorities and women at the highest levels in the corporate work force .... " As probably the first multiracial class riot in American history, the latest disturbance in Los Angeles is a wake-up call. It is a poignant reminder not only that we have still to resolve the nagging question of race in American society, but that the question has become increasingly complex. The recent, sometimes violent conflicts among Korean, black, and Hispanic (Latino) groups in Los Angeles demonstrate that the old terms "black" and "white" no longer define America's so-called race problem.
The "Browning" of America Within the next 20 years, according to some studies, racial and ethnic groups in the United States will outnumber white Americans for the first time. Indeed, already one American in four defines himself/herself as Hispanic or nonwhite. It is only a matter of time before the "a verage" American will trace his or her descent to Africa, Asia, the Hispanic and Arab worlds,.or the Pacific Islands instead of to white Europe. This "browning" of America is already upon us, and no place better demonstrates this than greater Los Angeles. White students are already a minority in that metropolitan area. Hispanics account for about 31 percent; Asians and Pacific Islanders, about 11 percent; and blacks, nine percent. The youth gang culture in the area is marked by black gangs, Latino gangs, Cambodian gangs, Korean gangs, Vietnamese gangs, and racially mixed gangs. To be sure, the perception of the United States as a "white" society was never precise, even though the country drew its basic ideals from Europe and representatives of white European nationalities long constituted a majority of the population .. The first European settlers found "colored" natives already occupying the land. And Africans, some of whom arrived with the first Spanish explorers, were in the Americas before the arrival of the Pilgrim ship, the Mayflower, in 1620. But today, America is a true microcosm of the whole worlda nation of nations. There are Hmong communities in St. Paul, Minnesota; Arab communities in Detroit, Michigan; Cuban and Haitian communities in Miami, Florida; and New York City boasts oflarge African, Chinese, r ndian, Italian, Pakistani, West Indian, and other ethnic communities. Even as nonwhites come to outnumber whites in America, the whole concept of race is becoming irrelevant. It is increasingly difficult for American citizens to define themselves in racial terms. Like most black Americans, I have, in addition to African forbearers, American Indian and European ancestry (Seminole Indian great grandmother and Cuban Spanish maternal grandfather). Hispanics can be of any. race, and many AsianAmericans are of mixed parentage. The number of American
Indians almost doubled between the last two censuses, not because there was a sudden spurt in their birth rate, but because an increased number of Americans of mixed American Indian ancestry now list their "race" as American Indian, rather than "white" or "black." Although the United States has not definitively eliminated racism, its efforts are far from failed. Today, racial segregation in the United States is permanently dead in legal terms. The government is committed unto equal opportu~ conditionally nity under the law for all of its citizens. The increase in the number of African Americans-and members of other minoritieswho are elected officials continues to grow. Black American economic power also continues to increase, albeit slowly. The United States, says conservative columnist George F. Will, "is a polyglot nation of immigrants, a nation whose unity is based not on ethnicity, but on an idea. a proposition." And that "proposition" is. I submit, consecrated in the Declaration of Independence: "We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal. that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness .... " From a historical perspective, the divisions of America along lines of race and class are not nearly as pronounced as they once were. Everywhere they are being replaced by a new awareness of the multiracial, multicultural, and yet unified America that will inevitably come. 0
Norris D. Garnett, a free-lance wriler based in WasliinglOn, D.C., is a former Foreign Service officer. He served in India from 1965 10 1968.
u.s.
O
n April 29, 1992,just two hours after the Rodney King verdict, Los Angeles (LA) free-lance journalist JeffKramer set out to do a man-in-thestreet reaction story for The Boston Globe; his focus was South Central LA, the heart of the city's black community. Thirty-year-old Kramer walked into the assignment "fortified by the blind certainty that journalists are immune to tragedy because they cover it." He got a story-and he almost got killed. A group of black rioters beat him up and shot him, stopping their frenzy of violence only when he "played dead." His acting may well have turned into a tragic reality if it wasn't for another group of blacks-who hid him, dressed his wounds, and saved his life. In a recent issue of People magazine, Kramer described the chilling experience that turned heart-warming. The rioters attacked his car, punched him, slammed his face into the steering wheel, shot him in left him for dead. the leg-and When Kramer was sure that they had walked away, hc started the car, made a quick U-turn, and sped away from the scene. His
Los Angelesjournalisl Jeff Kramer revisits Marie Edwards and her son, Keenan Guidroz, who risked their lives to save his life afler black rioters attacked and shol him. attackers, reactivated by the sound of his car, turned and fired another shot, hitting him in the back. Kramer drove on until he reached a street where some children were playing. Cynthia Brown, 24, who heard him asking the children to call their parents, ran into her house and told her mother, Marie Edwards, about him. While Edwards tried to get help on the phone, her son Keenan Guidroz rushed out to Kramer's car. Edwards spoke to a paramedic, who told her what to do until medical help arrived; she came into the car with a blanket and some longjohns to use as compresses. For the 40 minutes that mother and son attended to Kramer, they were putting their life at risk-helping a white man in a black neighborhood rocked by rioting. Each time a car with possible troublemakers cruised by, Edwards would cover Kramer's head with a blanket. With no sight of the ambulance or a
police car and time possibly running out for Kramer, Lemicher Wallace, a neighbor of Edwards, moved her car out next to Kramer's so that he could be shifted into it. They drove down rioting streets until they spotted a paramedic van-which took Kramer to a hospital. After being released from the hospital-and with one bullet still embedded just a millimeter from his chest wall-Kramer went to thank his saviors. Edwards told race you him, "Wedidn'tcarewhat were. You were in trouble, and we rushed out to help." Kramer writes, "As much as getting shot may have rocked my faith in humanity, my rescuers. restored it." Kramer still has the occasional nightmares. But even when those stop, the memories of that fateful day will stay with him. Memories of the horror, of the black samaritans who saved him, and of the thought that came to him when he felt he was going to die: "It seemed such a pointless and surreal way for my life to end-at the hands of people I essentially agreed with, at least in terms of the [Rodney] King verdic!." 0
A Justice for Justice Thurgood
Marshall's
commitment
to
escort
to the justice's
chambers,
my mind
securing justice, equality, and freedom for
conjures
all Americans
became U.S. Solicitor General (1965-67)
To the casual observer, on the surface, the area of civil rights in the United States in the
and the first black justice on the U.S.
first half of this century
Supreme Court (1967-91). He came into
But beneath that tranquil exterior, fires of resentment raged. And it was Marshall who
prominence
began long before he
for his forceful argument
of
Association
for the Advance-
downtrodden. With each new victory, a new layer was added until now, at the close of his unparalleled career, the landscape has been
ment of Colored People (1936-61). That was when he argued the historic Brown v. Board of Education case and declared to
transformed into a mountain. Then the escort arrives, and I walk into the chambers of America's first black justice .... He is in much better shape than I had envisioned. And as the interview progresses, it is evident that while age may have
the justices of the U.S. Supreme Court (whose ranks he was to join 14 years later): "Separate
but equal is a legal fiction. There
never was and never will be any separate equality. Our Constitution
cannot be used
slowed him physically, his intellect has not been diminished. He talks about his years battling for civil rights, starting with his college days spent arguing with fellow students Cab Calloway, Langston Hughes, and "several others" at
to sustain ideologies and practices which we as a people abhor." Whether as a lawyer or as a judge, Marshall has always held the American Constitution
as an important
rectification of injustice-he
source of has used the
Lincoln University in Oxford, Pennsylvania. "Lincoln was a school of all Negroes with one or two exceptions," he recalls. "And an all-white faculty. We argued over general principles. We discussed it [discrimination]: Why did we have to take it? Why shouldn't we do something about it?
law to attack existing laws that he felt went against the principles of the Constitution. His 24 years on America's
highest court
were marked by landmark judgments
that
changed the face of the civil rights movement-and
of America.
In this down-to-earth
"The leader of that group at Lincoln was a guy named U.S. Tate. He said we ought to do something about it. We desegregated the the-
interview, Marshall,
now retired, reflects on the changes he has seen-and
wrought-and
has fought-and
the battles he
ater in the little town of Oxford. I guess that's what started the whole thing in my life."
won.
Thurgood Marshall as Solicitor General of the United Slates.
O
utside the columns of the U.S. Supreme Court Building in Washington, D.C., throngs of people wait patiently to be ushered into the great courtroom
was largely placid.
channeled the eruptions that culminated in a lava flow of new laws affecting America's
civil rights cases as the counsel for the National
up images of a volcano.
to listen to the arguments
of the day. I squeeze ahead to the security guards. When I tell them I have appointment for an interview with Justice Thurgood Marshall, I met with looks of doubt, reflecting, perhaps, his reputation avoiding interviews. Nevertheless, after the search and screening of metal detectors, I am directed to the marshal's office. As I await
an am for the the
Lincoln was a turning point in his life. Until then, he had been taught to go along with segregation and "learn to take it." Asked ifit were true that his father ordered him to fight if he were ever called "nigger," Marshall quickly replies, "Yes. Get in business right then and there! And I have to this very day." After a brief pause, his demeanor softens. "One or two times I did take a little-in court." The idea of a Supreme Court justice ever having had to take racial slurs in a court of law startles me. Then I recall that racial bias prevented him from attending the law school at the University of Maryland, sending him instead to Howard Law School, where he came under the influence of Charles Houston in 1930. "Charlie
Houston,
the vice dean of my law school, insisted that
we be social engineers rather than lawyers," he reflects. "And I had early decided that's what I wanted to do. I did a lot of it while I was still in law school." In 1935 Marshall took on the University of Maryland and succeeded, for the first time in American history, in getting a court to order a school to admit a black student. After becoming chief counsel to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) Legal Defense Fund, Marshall faced one of his more intriguing challenges in 1951, when news reports claimed that black soldiers serving under General Douglas MacArthur in Korea had been court-martialed on false or exaggerated charges .. "When [President] Truman
sent you to the Far East. .." I ¡begin.
"Truman didn't send me," Marshall quickly corrects. "What happened was a newspaper reporter, a Negro from the Afro-American newspaper in Baltimore, reported when he came back from his trip 30, or 40-all over there that he saw this large group of Negroes-20, handcuffed, and he tried to find out what this was all about. "And he couldn't find out. He thought something ought to be done about it. And he reported that to the board of the NAACP. They said somebody ought go over there and find out. They decided I should go. I almost didn't go because MacArthur blocked it every way he could. The only way Truman fits in was that I had to get to Truman to get over there, to get permission to go. And he gave the orders, so that's why I got over there." But what did Marshall find when he got there? "I talked with all of the people, everyone of them there. I spent about a month in Tokyo. Every day, five days a week, I went to the stockade and talked to one Negro after another. And a couple of Mexicans, too. I got all the leads I needed. Then I went to Korea and talked to the men themselves who were in [the accused black soldiers'] companies. "Then one day we found the records which MacArthur was hiding. I think he was going to deep-six them, myself. But you can't prove that.
The troops were all returned
to active duty?
"No, they were not all returned. Most of them were returned, but all of their sentences were cut. The leader of the group, I think his name was Lieutenant Gilbert, [got] a cut in his sentence. He was sentenced to life and that was reduced to about five years." By the time Marshall led the team that won the monumental Brown v. Board of Education case, 1952-54,* he already had established himself as one of the nation's premier litigators. Because of the civil rights mountain
Marshall
formed throughout
his legal career, including 29 victories in 32 arguments before the Supreme Court, it is all too easy to forget that he also established an enviable record on the bench. Of the 150 opinions he authored after his appointment to the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals by President John F. Kennedy, not one was overturned. President Lyndon Johnson named Marshall Solicitor General in 1965 and appointed him to the Supreme Court in 1967 after a bitter confirmation opposed by four Southern senators on the Judiciary Committee. Shortly before he died, Johnson told Marshall that he believed that his appointment, and not the Vietnam War, was what ultimately cost him the presidency. I ask if he shared Johnson's assessment of the appointment. But Marshall merely shrugs and says, "How do I know?"
O
nce on the Court, he regularly found himself dissenting as the Warren Court gave way to the Burger and Rehnquist Courts. But always there was the passionate, stubborn focus on the rights of the individual in those dissents-in particular, his belief that the death penalty was unconstitutional.
Marshall was the only member on the Court to have defended a man accused of murder. To what extent did those experiences shape his views? "Well, I don't know whether that...well, it did," he starts slowly. "It did because I lost the death case in private practice. The reason why I took the case was that it was a classmate of mine in high school.
who testified under oath that on that particular date, he was in their hospital. Both of them said that they weren't testifying from
And 1 lost it; and when the time of execution came up, I felt so bad about it-that maybe 1 was responsible-that I decided 1 was going to go and see the execution. "A white reporter from the daily Morning Sun newspaper in Baltimore was a good friend of mine. And when I told him, he said, 'Now wait a minute. You do whatever you want to do, but 1 have to go to them. 1 am required to.' And he gave the number [of executions] he . had been to, something like a dozen or more. He told me, 'I have been to blank number of executions, and I have puked at everyone of them.
records that they had, they saw him' and they knew it! And he was sentenced to life. "We had one other record where the court martial was in three
Now if you feel you want to go, go ahead.' "And 1 chickened out. 1 didn't go. 1 still am against penalty]. I don't see what's gained by it."
stages. I read the thing. Then I got Colonel Martin, who was with me, and one of us read it and the other timed it with a stopwatch. The entire thing was either 18 or 28 minutes. That was another life sentence. But I
1 note that in a recent ABA Journal article, several black politicians alleged that a higher percentage of plack officials were targeted for investigation and surveillance by the government than their white
got them all overruled,
counterparts. I ask him whether he ever felt that he was the target of a probe by any administration. "Well, I know my phone's been tapped regularly," he says matter-offactly. "1 don't know but that it's tapped now. And I don't care. Because all they're going to hear is my wife's gossiping and me cursing."
They were just unbelievable. [The proceedings] were what was known in the military as 'drum head' court martials, which means they were held late at night out of anybody's knowing. And automatic guilt. "One of them, I remember, was [of] a man who was convicted of bad conduct in the presence of the enemy, which meant that he was deserting. And in looking through the record, there was a captain, no, a major, who was a medical man, and a first l'ieutenant nurse
everyone."
*By ruling that separate facilities in education are inherently unequal, the case opened the door for the disestablishment of legal segregation throughout the South.
[the death
Marshall wants it made clear, however, that any doubts about his political opponents do not extend to his treatment within the Supreme Court family. "Here in the building there has never been a problem. Never. There has never been any racial feelings. Some of my best friends and some of my wife's best friends have been the people here in this Court. We've got an awfully close-knit group." For most of his career, Marshall has advocated federal intervention to protect the rights of minorities and to spur affirmative action. Yet in City of Richmond v. Croson, he seemed to have switched tactics in his
get six affidavits deteriorated. "
and everything
else. Someplace
along the line, it
Marshall continues his reminiscences: "When I first started practicing, I said one day, 'Mr. McQuinn, I've got a problem. These white lawyers, they run into me in the hall, and they call me by my first name. Why can't they call me Mister like everybody "'No problem,' he said. "'What do you mean?' I said. "'Make
else?'
it your order of business that whenever a white man calls
dissent, arguing that because local leaders had developed a far more effective plan for affirmative action, the Court ought to defer to local expertise. Isn't that a reversal of his position?
you by your first name, go straight to the phone book, find his first name and the next time you see him, call him by his first name,' he said. "And it worked."
"Well, no," he says. "I believe a state or a city can give its citizens more due process and equal protection than our Constitution provides. I don't think it should limit what they do. In that case, this Court held that the Constitution prevented it. I can't believe that. I don't believe the Constitution prevents you from giving me something if you
Marshall then recalls the days when he was not permitted to be ..a member of a bar association. "They wouldn't admit Negroes. They had a very good library in Baltimore at the bar association. But it was housed in the courthouse. And we raised the point, and the court ruled that they had to let us in [to the library] whether we were members of the bar or not because it was in the courthouse. So we got it for free.
want to do it. I think that Court's [decision] is going to have to be wiped out someplace down the line. [The Constitution means] the state can give more but is not allowed to give less." While America has come a long way, there are, however, fears of a perceived retrenchment in civil and individual rights. Where does Marshall see the nation on that score? "I did a lot of study of foreign law when I was drawing the constitutions for some of the African countries. And comparatively, I think our Constitution is the best of all, with a few exceptions, like in Kenya, where I drew the whole schedule of rights. "Whereas we have one phrase-due process of law-the section I wrote on due process was three or four pages. I spelled it out. You can't take anybody's land there unless you have a hearing and give them an adequate price for the land. And if they don't like it, they can litigate it in the high court. You don't have to start at the lower level. That's due process, I think." That line of thought prompts Marshall original intent and how the Constitution
to reflect on the concept of should be applied in our
They had to pay, and we didn't pay."
. M
arshall says he drew more satisfaction from his days as a practicing lawyer than from sitting on the bench. That makes me wonder why he declined offers to go to big firms
and make more money. "I thought I had a commitment. And once I got involved in it, I figured I had to stay with it. "I'll tell you, a member of our board of directors at the NAACP, Charlie Studin, was a very wealthy lawyer-he had gobs of money. We were walking from the board meeting one day, late in the afternoon, and I remember him saying, 'You know, Thurgood, you know I know how much you make. And I guess you can imagine how much I make, but it suddenly dawns on me that I make so much more than you, but you have so much more fun.' "And I can remember my answer to him: 'Let's trade.' But I mean, I enjoyed my work. And when you won, it was a helluva feeling."
times. "I just think it is a living document. And more and more, I think that's true .... " As an elder statesman of the legal profession, Marshall has probably seen it all. I note that the profession has been undergoing a lot of criticism in the past year. "Always," he interjects.
What advice does he give to young black attorneys today? "None. I don't," he crisply replies. "I didn't give advice to either one of my boys. I had a deal with them: I would answer any question, but I wouldn't volunteer advice. And it ends up that one of them gave up a job paying $\00,000 and some with the biggest law firm here to go to work for Ted Kennedy, and I said, 'With all that money I spent on
What does he think about the [Bush] Administration's view that the legal system and lawyers have hurt America's economy and competitiveness? Has he seen any evidence of that' over the years? "Not at all. All lawyers have been picked on, that's all I know," he
your education, why did you take that?' You know what he said? 'I know somebody else who didn't give a damn about money, too.'
remarks .."Lawyers are the whipping boys. Everybody whips them." Within the profession, there has been much concern about a decline in professionalism, particularly among the younger lawyers. Here Marshall sadly agrees. "It's steadily going down. I fortunately
started in [East] Baltimore with a lawyer, a colored man, who graduated from Yale Law School in 1888. And he was q terrific guy. He taught me the difference-that when he first started practicing, it was an insult to ask a lawyer for his signature. It was an insult to ask him to swear. And now you have to
"And my other son is a state trooper, a state policeman, and he had the same kind of education, he graduated from Georgetown. And you know what he said? 'I want to work for the people.' So that's their way, not based on money. And I mentioned it to Lewis Powell on our Court, and Lewis said, 'Yeah, I understand you. But Ijust remembered that a friend of mine who was the president of the biggest bank in Richmond was a former state trooper.' So I said, 'Whew! I have something to look forward to.' " 0 About the Author: Gary A. Hengstler
ABA Journal,
is the editor and publisher of the published by the American Bar Association.
Songs of My People "Songs of My People," a photo exhibition currently touring the United States, is a revealing self-portrait of black America. It features more than 150 photographs of the African American community by 50 of America's most talented black photographers and photojournalists. Organized by the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and circulated by the Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service, the exhibition is part of a major project directed by New African Visions, a nonprofit organization committed to providing a balanced view of the black community through the visual arts. New African Visions asked some of America's best-known (including four Pulitzer Prize recipients) and less-known black photographers and photojournalists to capture the black
community in all its diversity in rural and urban America. The images they brought back "were not a symphony that we-New African Visions-had created and which the photographers had followed note for note, but rather a jazz composition-improvisational throughout," said D. Michael Cheers, photojournalist, writer, maker of documentary films, and cofounder of New African Visions. From the cotton fields of Mississippi to the financial houses of Wall Street, the exhibition documents the homeless and the hopeful, the unrecognized and the celebrated. As the sampling reproduced here demonstrates, the exhibit spans the diverse African American heritage in music, art, spirituality, fashion, politics, sports, entertainment, and community and family life. 0
1. Ron Ceasar. Muslim girl at a Washington, D.C., masjid. 2. Sharon Farmer. Beatrice Ferguson, 97, knows how to make every moment count.
3. Jules Allen. Dancer-acrobat Bernice Collins is with the Ringling Brothers Circus. 4. Keith Williams. Black cowboys at Longview, Texas.
5. E.A. Kennedy, III. Eric Spurlock,
6. Bruce Talamon. Father and
10, rides on a gravity simulator at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration space camp in Huntsville, Alabama.
daughter in San Francisco, California. 7. Keith Hadley. Girl with flag
in Miami, Florida.
Grady's Gift Growing up white in a city in which segregation found its most violent, cruel, regimented expression, the. author got "the gift of a free and unhateful heart" from Grady, his fa~ily's young black maid.
G
rady showe'd up one day at our house at 1409 Fifth Avenue West in Birmingham, Alabama, and by and by she changed the way I saw the world, I was seven when she came to iron and clean and cook for $18 a week, and she stayed for seven years. During that time everyone in our family came to accept what my father called "those great long talks" that occupied Grady and me through many a sleepy Alabama afternoon. What happeneq between us can be expressed in many ways, but its essence was captured by Graham Greene when he wrote that in every childhood there is a moment when a door opens and lets the future in, So this is a story abcutone person who opened a door and another who walked through it. It is difficult to describe-or even to keep alive in our memories-worlds that cease to exist. Usually we think of vanished worlds as having to do with far-off places or with ways oflife, like that of the western frontier, that are remote from us in time. But I grew up in a place that disappeared, and it was here in this country and not so long ago. I speak of Birmingham, where once there flourished the most complete form of racial segregation to exist on the American continent in this century. Gradystein Williams Hutchinson (or Grady, as she was called in my family and hers) and I are two people who grew up in the 1950s in that vanished world, two
people who lived mundane, inconsequential lives while Martin Luther King, Jr., and Police Commissioner T. Eugene (Bull) Connor prepared for their epic struggle. For years, Grady and I lived in my memory as child and adult. But now I realize that we were both children-one white and very young, one black and adolescent; one privileged, one poor. The connection between these two children and their city was this: Grady saw to it that although I was to live in Birmingham for the first 28 years of my life, Birmingham would not live in me, Only by keeping in mind the place that Birmingham was can you understand the life we had, the people we became, and the reunion that occurred one day not too long ago at my sister's big house in the verdant Birmingham suburb of Mountain Brook, Grady, now a 57-year-old hospital cook in Atlanta, had driven out with me in the car I had rented, As we pulled up, my parents, a retired couple living in Florida, arrived in their gray Cadillac, My father, a large, vigorous man of 84, parked his car and, without a word, walked straight to Grady and took her in his arms. "I never thought I'd ever see y'all again," Grady said a little while later. "J just think this is the true will of God. It's His divine wish that we saw each other." This was the first time in 34 years that we had all been together. As the years slipped by, it had become more and more important to me to find Grady, because I am a strong believer in thanking our teachers and mentors while they are still alive to hear our thanks. She had been "our maid," but she taught me the most valuable lesson a writer can learn; which is to try to see-honestly and down to its very center-the world in which we live. Grady was long gone before I realized what a brave and generous person she was, or how much lowed her.
by HOWELL RAINES
Then in the spring of 1991 my sister ran into a relative of Grady's and got her telephone number. I went to see Grady in Atlanta, and several months later we gathered in Birmingham to remember our shared past and to learn anew how love abides and how it can bloom not only in the fertile places, but in the stony ones as well.
I
know that outsiders tend to think segregation existed in a uniform way throughout the Solid South. But it didn't. Segregation was rigid in some places, relaxed in others; leavened with humanity in some places, enforced with unremitting brutality in others. And segregation found its most violent and regimented expression in Birminghamsegregation maintained through the nighttime maraudings of white thugs, segregation sanctioned by absentee landlords from the United States Steel Corporation, segregation enforced by a pervasively corrupt police department. Martin Luther King once said Birmingham was to the rest of the South what Johannesburg was to the rest of Africa. He believed that if segregation could be broken there, in a city that harbored an American version of apartheid, it could be broken everywhere. That is why the great civil rights demonstrations of 1963 took place in Birmingham. And that is why, just as King envisioned, once its jugular was cut in Kelly Ingram Park in Birmingham in 1963, the dragon of legalized segregation collapsed and died everywhere-died, it seems in retrospect, almost on the instant. It was the end of "Bad Birmingham," where the indigenous racism of rural Alabama had taken a new and more virulent form when transplanted into a raw industrial setting. In the heyday of Birmingham, one vast belt of steel mills stretched for 16 kilometers, from the satellite town of Bessemer to the coal-mining suburb of Pratt .city.
1950, four weeks after her 16th birthday. Black and white men-men like Grady's. Her grades were high, eveh though she father and mine~ame from all over the had held back on some tests in an effort to South to do the work of these mills or to dig the coal and iron ore to feed them. By blend in with her older classmates. She the time Grady Williams was born in planned to go to the nursing school at Dillard University, a black institution in 1933, the huge light of their labor washed New Orleans, but first she needed a fullthe evening sky with an undying red glow. The division of tasks within these plants time job to earn money for tuition. That was when my mother hired her. There was ran along simple lines-white men made the steel; black men washed the coal. a state-financed nursing school in BirHenry Williams was a tiny man from mingham"about 16 kilometers from her Oklahoma-part African, part Cherohouse, but it was the wrong one. kee, only 160 centimeters, but handsome. etween the Depression and World He worked at the No.2 Coal Washer at Pratt Mines, and he understood his world War fl, my father and two of his imperfectly. When the white foreman brothers came into Birmingham died, Henry thought he would move up. from the Alabama hills. They were But the dead man's nephew was brought strong, sober country boys who knew in, and in the natural order of things, how to swing a hammer. By the time Henry was required to teach his new boss Harry Truman was elected President in all there was to know about washing coal. 1948, they had got a little bit rich selling "Oh, come on, Henry," his wife, Elizalumber and'building shelves for the A&P supermarket. beth, said when he complained about being passed over for a novice. But he They drove Packards and Oldsmobiles. would not be consoled. They bought cottages at the beach and One Saturday, Henry Williams sent , hired housemaids for their wives and reGrady on an errand. "Go up the hill," he solved that their children would go to said, "and tell Mr. Humphrey Davis I college. Among them, they had eight chilsaid send me three bullets for my .38 dren, and I was the last to be born, and my pistol because I got to kill a dog." world was sunny. In his bedroom later that same afterIndeed, it seemed to be a matter of noon, he shot himself. Grady found the 'family pride that this tribe of hardbody. She was seven years old. handed hill people had become prosOver the years, Elizabeth Williams held perous enough to spoil its babies. I was the family together. She worked as a doted upon, particularly, it occurs to me practical nurse and would have become a now~ by women-my mother; my sister, registered nurse except for the fact that by Mary Jo, who was 12 years older and the early 1940s, the hospitals in Bir- carried me around like a mascot; my leathery old grandmother, a widow who mingham, which ha~ run segregated nursing programs, closed those for blacks. didn't like many people but liked me Grady attended Parker High, an aLl- because I was named for her husband. black school where the children of teachThere was also my Aunt Ada, a redhaired spinster who made me rice puders and postal workers made fun of girls ding and hand-whipped biscuits and like Grady, who at 14 was already working part-time in white homes. One day a milkshakes with cracked ice, and when my parents were out of town, I slept on a boy started ragging Grady for being an "Aunt Jemima." One of the poorer boys pallet in her room. Then there were the black women, first approached him after class and said: Daisy, then Ella. And finally Grady. "Hey, everybody's not lucky enough to I wish you could ha ve seen her in 1950. have a father working. If I ever hear you Most of the women in my family ran from say that again to her, I'm going to break slender to bony. Grady was buxom. She your neck." wore a blue uniform and walked around Grady finished high school in early
B
Grady Hutchinson and writer Howell Raines (holding hands in the front row) with other members of the author's family at a'l'eunion 34 years after Grady left the Raines household.
our house on stout brown calves. Her skin was smooth. She had a gap between her front teeth, and so did 1. One of the ¡first things I remember Grady telling me was that as soon as she had enough money she was going to get a diamond set in her gap and it would drive the men wild. There is no trickier subject for a writer from the South than that of affection between a black person and white one in the unequal world of segregation. For the dishonesty upon which such a society is founded makes every emotion suspect, makes it impossible to know whether what flowed between two people was honest feeling or pity or pragmatism. Indeed, for the black person, the feigning of an expected emotion could be the very coinage of survival. So I can only tell you how it seemed to me at the time. I was seven and Grady was 16 and I adored her and I believed she was crazy about me. She became the weather in which my childhood was lived. I was 14 when she went away. It would be many years before I realized that somehow, whether by accident or by plan, in a way so subtle, so gentle, so loving that it was like the budding and falling of the leaves on the pecan trees in the yard of that happy house in that cruel city in that violent time, Grady had given me the most precious gift that could be received by a pampered white boy growing up in
that time and place. It was the gift of a free and unhateful heart.
G
rady, it soon became clear, was a talker, and I was already known in my family as an incessant asker of questions. My brother, Jerry, who is ten years older than I, says one of his clearest memories is of my following Grady around the house, pursuing her with a constant buzz of chatter. That is funny, because what I remember is Grady talking and me listeningGrady talking as she did her chores, marking me with her vi~ion of the way things were. All of my life, I have carried this mental image of the two of us: I am nine or ten by this time. We are in the room where Grady did her ironing. Strong light is streaming through the window. High summer lies heavily across all of Birmingham like a blanket. We are alone, Grady and I, in the midst of what the Alabama novelist Babs Deal called "the acres of afternoon," those legendary hours of buzzing heat and torpidity that either bind you to the South ormake you crazy to leave it. I am slouched on a chair, with nothing left to do now that baseball practice is over. Grady is moving a huge dreadnought of an iron, a General Electric with stainless steel base and fat black handle, back and forth across my father's white
shirts. From time to time, she shakes water on the fabric from a bottle with a sprinkler cap. Then she speaks of a hidden world about which no one has ever told me, a world as dangerous and foreign, to a white child in a segregated society, as Africa itself-the world of "nigger town." "You don't know what it's like to be poor and black," Grady says. She speaks of' the curbside justice administered with rubber hoses by Bull Connor's policemen, of the deputy sheriff famous in the black community for shooting a floor sweeper who had moved too slowly, of "Dog Day," the one time a year when blacks are allowed to attend the state fair. She speaks offhandedly of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). "Are you a member?" I ask. "At my school," she says, "we take our dimes and nickels and join the NAACP every year just like you join the Red Cross in your school." It seems silly now to describe the impact of this revelation, but that is because I cannot fully re-create the intellectual isolation of those days in Alabama. Remember that this was a time when television news, with its searing pictures of racial conflict, was not yet a force in our society. The editorial pages of the Birmingham papers were dominated by
the goofy massive-resistance cant of columnists like James J. Kilpatrick. Local politicians liked to describe the NAACP as an organization of satanic purpose and potency that had been rejected by "our colored people," and would shortly be outlawed in Alabama as an agency of communism. But Grady said black students were joining in droves, people my age and hers. It was one of the most powerfully subversive pieces of information I had ever encountet:ed, leaving me with an unwavering conviction about Bull Connor, George Wallace, and the other segregationist blowhards who would dominate the politics of my home state fot: a generation. From that day, I knew they were wrong when they said that "our Negroes" were happy with their lot and had no desire to change "our Southern way of life." And when a local minister named Fred L. Shuttlesworth joined with Martin Luther King in 1957 to start the civil rights movement in Birmingham, I knew in some deeply intuitive way that they would succeed, because I believed that the rage that was in Grady was a living reality in the entire black community, and I knew that this rage was so powerful that it would have its way. I learned, too, from watching Grady fail at something that meant a great deal to her. In January 1951, with the savings from her work in our home, she enrolled at Dillard. She made good grades. She loved the school and the city of New Orleans. But the money lasted only one semester, and when summer rolled around Grady was cleaning our house again. That would be the last of her dream of becoming a registered nurse. A few years later, Grady married Marvin Hutchinson, a dashing fellow, more worldly than she, who took her to all-black nightclubs to hear singers like Bobby (Blue) Bland. In 1957 she moved to New York City to work as a maid and passed from my life. But I never forgot how she had yearned for education. Did this mean that between the ages of
seven and 14, I acquired a sophisticated understanding of the insanity of a system of government that sent this impoverished girl to Louisiana rather than letting her attend the tax-supported nursing school that was a 15-cent bus ride from her home? I can't say that I did. But I do know that in 1963, I recognized instantly that George Wallace was lying when he said that his Stand in the School House Door at the University of Alabama was intended to preserve the constitutional principle of states' rights. What he really wanted to preserve was the right of the state of Alabama to promiscuously damage lives like Grady's.
I
ist April 23, 1991. I approach the locked security gate of a rough-looking apartment courtyard in Atlanta. There behind it, waiting in the shadows, is a tiny woman with a halo of gray hair and that distinctive gap in the front teeth. Still no diamond. Grady opens the gate and says, "I've got to hug you." Grady's apartment is modest. The most striking feature is the stacks of books on each side of her easy chair. The conversation that was interrupted so long ago is resumed without a beat. Within minutes we are both laughing wildly over an incident we remembered in exactly the same way. Grady had known that I was insecure about my appearance as I approached adolescence, and she always looked for chances to reassure me, preferably in the most exuberant way possible. One day when I appeared in a starched shirt and with my hair slicked back for a birthday party, Grady shouted, "You look positively raping." "Grady," my mother called from the next room, "do you know what you're saying?" "I told her yeah. I was trying to say 'ravishing.' I used to read all those True Confession magazines." Reading, it turned out, had become a passion of Grady's life, even though she never got any more formal education. For the first time in years, I recall that it was Grady who introduced me to Ernest
Hemingway. In the fall of 1952, when I had the mumps and The Old Man and the Sea was being published in Life, Grady sat by my bed and read me the entire book. We both giggled at the sentence: "Once he stood up and urinated over the side of the skiff .... " Partly for money and partly to escape a troubled marriage, Grady explains, she had left Birmingham to work in New York as a maid for $125 a month. Her husband had followed. "So we got an apartment, and the man I worked for got him a job," Grady recalls. "And we got together and we stayed for 31 years, which is too long to stay dead." Dead, T asked? What did th'at mean? For Grady it meant a loveless marriage and a series of grinding jobs as a maid or cook. And yet she relished the life of New York, developing a reputation in her neighborhood as an ace gambler and numbers player. Through an employer who worked in show business, she also became a regular and knowledgeable attender of Broadway theater. There were three children: Eric Lance, 37, works for the New York subway system; Marva, 33, is a graduate of Wilberforce University and works in the finance department at Coler Memorial Hospital in New York; Reed, 29, works for a bank in Atlanta, where Grady is a dietetic cook at Shepherd Spinal Center. It has not been a bad life and is certainly richer in experiences and perhaps in opportunities for her children than Grady would have had in Birmingham. At one point Grady speaks of being chided by one of her New York-raised sons for "taking it" back in the old days in Birmingham. "He said, 'I just can't believe y'all let that go on,'" she says. "I said: 'What do you mean y'am What could you have done about it?' What were you going to do? If you stuck out, you got in trouble. I always got in trouble. I was headstrong. I couldn't stand the conditions, and I hated it. I wanted more than I could have. "I always wanted to be more than I was," she adds. "I thought if I was given
the chance I could be more than I was ever allowed to be." I felt a pang of sympathy for Grady that she should be accused of tolerating what she had opposed with every fiber of her being. But how can a young man who grew up in New York know that the benign city he saw on visits to his grandmother each summer was not the Birmingham that had shaped his mother's life? Among black people in the SOl!th, Grady is part of a generation who saw their best chances burned away by the last fiery breaths of segregation. It is difficult for young people of either race today to understand the openness and simplicity of the injustice that was done to this dwindling generation. When you stripped away the constitutional folderol from Wallace's message, it was this: He was telling Grady's mother, a working parent who paid property, sales, and income taxes in Alabama for more than 40 years, that her child could not attend the institutions supported by those taxes. Even to those of us who lived there, it seems surreal that such a systematic denial of opportunity could have existed for so long. I have encountered the same disbelief in the grown-up children of white sharecroppers when they looked at pictures of the plantations on which they and their families had lived in economic bondage. For people with such experiences, some things are beyond explanation or jest, something I learn when I jokingly ask Grady ifshe'd like her ashes brought back. to Pratt City when she dies. "No," she answers quite firmly, ''I'd like them thrown in the East River in New York. I never liked Alabama. Isn't that terrible for you to say that? You know how I hate it."
W
ord that I had found Grady shot through my family. When the reunion luncheon was planned for my sister's house, my first impulse was to stage-manage the event. I had learned in conversations with
Grady that she remembered my mother as someone who had nagged her about the housework. None of the rest of us recollected theirs as a tense relationship, but then again, none of us had been in Grady's shoes. In the end I decided to let it flow, and as it turned out, no one enjoyed the reunion more than Grady and my mother. "You're so tiny," Grady exclaimed at one point. "I thought you were a great big woman. How'd you make so much noise?" My mother was disarmed. In the midst ofa round of stories about the bold things Grady had said and done, I heard her turn to a visitor and explain quietly, in an admiring voice, "You see, now, that Grady is a strong person." Grady is also a very funny person, a born raconteur with a reputation in her own family for being outrageous. It is possible, therefore, to make her sound like some 1950s version ofWhoopi Goldberg and her life with my family like a sitcom spiced with her "sassy" asides about race and sex. But what I sensed at our gathering, among my brother, sister, and parents, was something much deeper than fondness or nostalgia. It was a shared pride that in the Birmingham of the 1950s this astonishing person had inhabited our home and had been allowed to be fully herself. "She spoke out more than any person I knew of, no matter what their age," my sister observed. "She was the first person I'd ever heard do that, you see, and here I was 18 years old, and you ,were just a little fellow. This was the first person I'd ever heard say, 'Boy, it's terrible being black in Birmingham.''' As Grady and my family got reacquainted, it became clear that my memory of her as "mine" was the narrow and selfish memory of a child. I had been blind to the bonds Grady also had with my brother and sister. Grady remembered my brother, in particular, as her confidant and protector. And although they never spoke of it at the time, she looked to him as her guardian against the neighborhood workmen of both races who were
always eager to offer young black girls "a ride home from work." "Even if Jerry was going in the opposite direction," Grady recalled, "he would always say: 'I'm going that way. I'll drop Grady off.' " In my brother's view, Grady's outspokenness, whether about her chores or the shortcomings of Birmingham, was made possible through a kind of adolescent cabal. "The reason it worked was Grady was just another teenager in the house," he said. "There were already two teenagers in the house, and she was just a teenager, too." But it is also hard to imagine Grady falling into another family led by parents like mine. They were both from the Alabama hills, descended from Lincoln Republicans who did not buy into the Confederate mythology. There were no plantation paintings or portraits of Robert E. Lee on our walls. The mentality of the hill country is that of the underdog. They were instinctive humanitarians. As Grady tells it, my father was well known among her relatives as "an open man" when it came to the treatment of his employees. I once saw him take the side of a black employee who had fought back against the bullying of a white worker on a loading dock-not a common occurrence in Birmingham in the 1950s. The most powerful rule of etiquette in my parents' home, I realize now, was that the word "nigger" was not to be used. There was no grand explanation attached to this, as I recall. We were simply people who did not say "nigger." The prohibition of this one word may seem a small point, but I think it had a large meaning. Hill people, by nature, are talkers, and some, like my father, are great storytellers. They themselves have often been called hillbillies, which is to say that they understand the power of language and that the power to name is the power to maim. Everyone in my family seems to have kn~wn that my great long afternoon talks with Grady were about race. Their only concern was not whether I should be hearing such talk, but whether I was old
enough for the brutality of the facts. "I would tell Howell about all the things that happened in the black neighborhoods, what police did to black people," Grady recalled to us. "I would come and tell him, and he would cry, and Mrs. Raines would say: 'Don't tell him that anymore. Don't tell him that. He's too young. Don't make him sad.' He would get sad about it." Grady told me in private that she recalled something else about those afternoons, something precise and specific. I had wept, she said, on learning about the murder of Emmett Till, a young black boy lynched in Mississippi in 1955. To me, this was the heart of the onion. For while some of the benefits of psychotherapy may be dubious, it does give us one shining truth. We are shaped by those moments when the sadness of life first wounds us. Yet often we are too young t9 remember that wounding experience, that decisive point after which all is changed for better or worse. Every white Southerner must choose between two psychic roads-the road of racism or the road of brotherhood. Friends, families, even lovers have parted at that forking, sometimes forever, for it presents a choice that is clouded by confused emotions, inner conflicts, and powerful social forces. It is no simple matter to know all the factors that shape this individual decision. As a college student in Alabama, I shared the choking shame that many young people there felt about Wallace's antics and about the deaths of the four black children in the bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in September 1963. A year later, as a cub reporter, I listened to the sermons and soaring hymns of the voting rights crusade. All this had its effect. But the fact is that by the time the civil rights revolution rolled across the South, my heart had already chosen its road. I have always known that my talks with Grady helped me make that decision in an intellectual sense. But I had long felt there must have been some deeper force at work, some emotional nexus linked for
me, it seemed now on hearing Grady's . poor black student who could race words, to the conjuring power of one through high school two years ahead name-Emmett Till-and to disconnect- of schedule. Grady's baby sister, Liz Spraggins, was ed images that had lingered for decades in spotted in a Pratt City high-school choir the eye of my memory. Now I can almost recall the moment or in 1964 and offered a music scholarship imagine I can: Grady and I together, in that started her on a successful career in the ironing room. We are islanded again, Atlanta as a gospel and jazz singer. Grady's cousin Earl Hilliard, who is ten the two of us, in the acres of afternoon. years younger than she, wound up at We are looking at Life magazine or Look, at pictures of a boy barely older than Howard University Law School. Today myself, the remote and homely site of his he is a member of the Alabama legislature. When Grady and I had lunch with death, several white men in a courtroom, the Hilliards, the family was debating the immemorial Mississippi scenes. Thus did Grady, who had already given whether Earl Jr. should join his sister, me so much, come back into my life with Lisa, at Emory or choose law-school one last gift. She brought me a lost reel acceptances at Stanford, Texas, or Alafrom the movie of my childhood, and on bama universities. If Grady had been a few years younger, its dusty frames, I saw something few people are lucky enough to witness. It was she would have gone down the road taken a glimpse of the revelatory experience by her sister and cousin. If she had been described by Graham Greene, the soul- white, the public-education system of shaking time after which all that is Alabama would have bailed her out deconfusing detail falls away and all spite her poverty. Even in 1950, fatherless that is thematic shines forth with white kids who zipped through high burning clarity. school were not allowed to fall through Our reunion turned out to be a day of the cracks in Alabama. But Grady had discovery, rich emotion, and great hu- bad timing and black skin, a deadly mor. Near the end of a long lunch, my combination. sister and my brother's wife began pourAt some point during our reunion ing coffee. In classic Southern overkill, lunch, it occurred to everyone in the room there were multiple desserts. Grady spoke that of all the people who knew Grady fondly of my late Aunt Ada's artistry with Williams as a girl, there was one group coconut cakes. Then she spoke of leaving that could have sent her to college. That Birmingham with "my dreams of chasing was my family. The next morning, my the rainbow." sister told me of a regretful conversation "I used to say when 1was young, 'One that took place later that same day. day I'm going to have a big house, and "Mother said at dinner last night, 'If I'm going to have the white people bring we had just known, if we had just known, me my coffee,''' Grady said, leaning back we could have done something,''' Mary in her chair. "I ain't got the big house yet, Jo said. "Well, how could we have but I got the coffee. I chased the rainbow not known?" and I caught it." Yes, precisely, how could we not have known-and how can we not know of the f course, Grady did not catch the carnage of lives and minds and souls that rainbow, and she never will. is going on among young black people in Among the victims of segrega- this country today? tion, Grady was like a soldier shot on the In Washington, where I live, there is a last day of the war. Only a few years after facile answer to such questions. Fashionshe relinquished her dream of education, able philosophers in the think tanks that local colleges were opened to blacks, and influence this Administration's policies educators from around the country came will tell you that guilt, historical fairness, to Birmingham looking for the sort of and compassion are outdated concepts,
O
that if the playing field is level today, we are free to forget that it was tilted for generations. Some of these philosophers will even tell you that Grady could have made it if she had really wanted to. But I know where Grady came from, and I know the deck was stacked against her, and I know who stacked it. George Wallace is old, sick, and pitiful now, and he'd like to be forgiven for what he, Bull Connor, and the other segregationists did back then, and perhaps he should be. Those who know him say that above all else he regrets using the racial issue for political gain. I often think of Governor Wallace when I hear about the dangers of "reverse discrimination" and "racial quotas" from President Bush or his counsel, C. Boyden Gray, the chief arc1).itect of the Administration's civil rights policies. Unlike some of the old Southern demagogues, these are not ignorant men. Indeed, they are the polite, well-educated sons of privilege. But when they argue that this country needs no remedies for past injustices, I believe I hear the grownup voices of pampered white boys who never saw a wound. And I think of Grady and the unrepayable gift she gave with such wit, such generosity, to such a boy, so many years ago. Grady told me that she was moved when she went to a library and saw my book, an oral history of the civil rights movement entitled My Soul Is Rested. It is widely used on American college campuses as basic reading about the South, and of everything I have done in journal- . ism, I am proudest of that book. I was surprised that Grady had not instantly understood when the book came out in 1977 that she was its inspiration. That is my fault. I waited much too long to find her and tell her. It is her book really. She wrote it on my heart in the 0 acres of afternoon. About the Author: Howell Raines, the Washington editor of The New York Times, is the author of My Soul Is Rested: Movement Days in the
Deep South Remembered.
Beyond Tradition American Indian artists are carving a niche for themselves in the contemporary art world by creating works that reflect evolving, revitalized forms of traditional cultures.
Dancer and Drummer Pins/Pendants, Denise Wallace (Aleut), 1987. The figures are made of silver with lapis inlays, and have masks that open to reveal removable scrimshaw (carved whale ivory) pendants.
F
or years the art of American Indians was viewed as seemingly reflecting only disappearing cultures of the past. This was rooted in a commonly held assumption that centuries of interaction with, and influence by, whites have transformed American Indians to the point where the only art they produce is curio art directed at non-American Indian buyers. Not any more. Today there is widespread recognition of the richness of contemporary native American art. The last two or three decades have witnessed the emergence of a substantial body of gifted American Indian artists who are melding their cultural heritage with experiences in today's world to produce works of great vibrancy and vitality. According to Blackfoot-Cherokee historian and anthropologist Jamake Highwater, it has been only since the 1970s that young American Indians have begun to see personal motivation, higher education, and non-American Indian experience as possible ways of enhancing rather than weakening their cultural heritages. This realization helped give play to highly individual and personal artistic visions. Many of these artists choose to address their "Indianness" in their works. This question of the essential spirit of "Indianness" takes on even more relevance for American Indians living and working in a predominantly white society, states Rennard Strickland in American Indian Art Magazine. As individuals making personal statements, contemporary American Indian artists use 1. View of Shipaulov, Dan Namingha (Hopi), 1979, acrylic on canvas, 203 x 305 em. Namingha gives highly personal, rather than tribal, expression to his art. 2. Love and Kisses, R. Lee White (of mixed American Indian and European heritage), 1986, paper tipi/graphite and watercolor, 51 x 91 em. White uses modern pictographic style to convey the Plains Indians' artistic legacy. 3. Nevada Dawn, Jack Malolle (Western Shoshone), 1987, oil pastel on paper, 107 x 152 em. The painting reflects the artist's feelings about American Indian interconnectedness with earth and sky and his concern with military installations in Nevada. 4. Tall Visitor at (Navaho), 1981, ranks among the American Indian
Tocito, Grey Cohoe oil and acrylic. Cohoe most prominent artists.
5. Pollen in the Wind, Cliff Fragua (Jemez),
marble,
61 x 61 x 20 em. Says Fragua, "I communicate with stone ... to experience the [spirit] that is hidden in the stone. "
6. Sandpainting, Rosabelle Ben ( Navaho), 1987, 40 x 40 em. Traditionally used by Navaho Indians in healing rites and religious ceremonies, sandpaintings are now being made for sale. In these paintings, such as this one, artists either add or leave out something so as not to offend the spirits.
7. Blue Deer Prancing, Acee Blue Eagle (Creek/Pawnee), circa 1950. watercolor. The painted deer has become a symbol in a long-standing controversy about American Indian painting and its definition. While some contend that the deer symbolizes the colonial white-dictated "Bambi School" of Native American art, others say it signifies continuity and change. creativity and diversity of American Indians.
(or don't use) specific traditional subjects, symbols-an arrow, deer, buffalo-or styles as their vision dictates. "To be a modern American Indian does not mean that traditions must be cast aside," asserts Ralph T. Coe, curator of "Lost and Found Traditions: Native American Art 1965-1985," a major exhibition that was recently shown in the United States. "Rather, the past is frequently incorporated into the present with great breadth of vision, and with greater freedom than is granted by narrow definitions of tradition." If, as Coe states, "Art is an index to the American Indian will to survive culturally, even ifit does not tell the whole story or apply to all tribes at anyone time," then the richness and diversity of works being produced today is more than ample evidence of what he calls "the innate ability of American Indian traditions to withstand erosion and the extraordinary ability of American Indian artistry to adjust to circumstances in remolding itself." As Mohawk painter Rick Hill says, "There is more out there than even we had thought." 0
Pictorial Weaving, Isabel John (Navaho), 1984, handspun wool, natural and commercial dyes, 155 x 252 em. John has won many awards for her creations. Free Form Pots, Jaquire Stevens (Winnebago), 1987, hand-coiled clay, 15 to 25 em. Using traditional methods of shaping clay, Stevens creates sophisticated contemporary free-form pots.
CLOSINGTHE
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on Zarowitz had an idea. Struggling to hook up a car seat for his two-year-old daughter one day in the early 1980s, he realized that a fold-down version of such a seat could be built right into the car and offered as an option. When he became a manager at Chrysler in 1985, he was well situated to push the idea-and did he ever push it. "I brought the idea up over and over again, and every time they said, 'Why would we want to do this?'" he recalls. Scores of memos followed, and top management at last agreed to discuss the idea in 1987. "It was in the discussion phase for the next two years," says Zarowitz. The first built-in child seats appeared late last year, six years after Zarowitz proposed them, as a $200 option in 1992 Chrysler minivans. The company says it is selling them as fast as it can make them-after missing the opportunity for years. U.S. industry isn't innovating nearly as well as it should be at a time when innovation has become more important than ever. Listen to James Clark, 47, who left a professorship at Stanford University in California ten years ago to start Silicon Graphics,
now a $600-million-a-year computer maker and one of the fastest-growing and most innovative companies in the world: "We're losing our creative edge. American industry is on the decline because U.S. managers are too concerned about protecting short-term earnings to innovate." While the United States still generates more patents than any other nation, other countries are catching up fast. A new study by the Haddon Heights, New Jersey, consulting firm CHI Research found that since 1983 Japan has gained and the United States has lost share in total patents in 38 of 48 product categories, particularly in office computers, electronics, transportation equipment, and shipbuilding. While U.S. spending on research and development (R&D) has been dragging along at about two percent of gross national product (GNP), the Japanese have dramatically increased their spending, which recently reached three percent. The United States spent $100,000 million in 1989, vs. Japan's $58,000 million, for R&D outside the defense sector.
1. TORO, a maker of lawn equipment, fosters innovation by paying inventor Bob Comer for breakthrough ideas such as this water-injecting golf green aerator. 2. JAMES CLARK and other engineers at Silicon Graphics thrive on being constantly challenged to make high-powered computers that run software for a multitude of purposes, including creation of spectacular special effects for megahit Terminator 2. 3. RON ZAROWITZ sold automaker Chrysler on his idea of built-in seats for childrenafter six years of dogged effort. The company says they are selling the seats like hotcakes. 4. RUBBERMAID borrowed a molding technique from the company's picnic-cooler plant to create a line of lightweight, durable, and inexpensive office furniture.
by BRIAN
Patent and R&D statistics are a good indicator of where the United States stands in the world, but nothing says more about America's shaky will to create than its obsession with line extensions ..U.S. managers everywhere seem to be taking baby steps, launching safe variations of existing products rather than going for truly new products and entering new markets. Line extensions can make a lot of money, but Honey Nut Cheerios and Diet Cherry Coke are probably not the path to world economic leadership. Says C.K. Prahalad, a University of Michigan professor and author of an upcoming book on
DUMAINE
methods for innovation: "The global and competitive battles of the 1990s will be won by companies that can get out of traditional and shrinking product markets by building and dominating fundamentally new markets." Further, as new technology spreads ever faster, even advanced products (such as personal computers) quickly become like commodities bought solely on price. So coming up with the genuinely new becomes all the more important. How can America close the gap between the lead it ought to have in innovation and the shaky edge it now holds? Part of the problem is that innovation is risky, and taking risks is expensive in America. While interest rates look low at the moment, the truth is they have been remarkably high in recent years after adjusting for inflation, and still are. High real rates force managers to avoid gambles that might be worthwhile if the stakes were lower and to bypass projects that don't promise a fast payback-projects that other nations, with lower real rates, will tackle.
On the Biotech Frontier One field in which American companies are at their innovative best and far ahead of foreign competition is biotechnology-more specifically in genetically engineered health-care drugs. Even Japan, which has announced its intention to become a world leader in biotechnology, "is hopelessly behind," says Gene Bylinsky in an August 12, 1991, Fortune article. "Japanese lack the ingredients that created this industry: Explosive advances in biology, top scientists willing to help start pioneering newcompanies, and venturecapitalistsready to back them." Among the companies in the forefront of the biotechnology revolution is Amgen 1nc. in Thousand Oaks, California. Using the techniques of recombinant DNA and molecular biology, the ll-year~old company has already developed such substances as Neupogen and Epogen, which have been hailed as wonder drugs. Neupogen isa geneticallyengineered version of a human hormone that induces the body to produce neutrophils, a class of white blood cells, in cancer patients undergoing chemotherapy; chemotherapy destroys these cells. Administration of Neupogen as an adjunct to chemotherapy significantly reduces the chance of infection (neutropenia-low white blood cell count), and allows for more effective use of often toxic chemicals by ameliorating their crippling side effects.."Neupogen, by reducing the risk of chemotherapy-induced neutropenia, represents a significant improvement in cancer treatment," says Dr. N. Kirby Alton, Amgen vice president of therapeutic product development. Epogen, on the other hand, stimulates and regulates the production
of red blood cells, eliminating the need for blood transfusion for people undergoing dialysis. Epogen has enabled people once largely confined to bed to return to productive work and active recreation like skiing and swimming. The basis for lifesaving biotech drugs is the body itself. Unlike the conventional chemical approach, which still dominates drug development by pharmaceutical firms, the biotech approach begins with substances the body itself makes, either to heal directly or to act as signals that mobilize the response to fight an intruder. Biotech companies analyze the structure of these compounds, which are mostly large protein molecules. Then they use genetic engineering to copy them. As these proteins originate in the body and thus are not rejected as foreign substances, they are generally safer than chemical pills. A dozen biotech drugs are already on the market, and some 100others either are in clinical trials, have completed testing, or are awaiting approval by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. Experts believe that the revolution in biotech drugs has just begun. In a few years, they hope, these drugs will be available for the treatment of heart attacks, -K.G. AIDS, herpes, hepatitis B, arthritis, and diabetes. Clockwise from below left: nursing supervisor prepares and one-and-a-ha/f-year-old a clinical trial to determine
Vials of Neupogen; a medical oncology a syringe with Neupogen; Mathew Wilmarth, participant in the effectiveness of Neupogen.
Perhaps worse, a capital gains tax higher than in virtually any The Japanese are showing how to create cultures that foster other developed country slashes the rewards of successful innovation. Says James Swallow, a consultant at AT. Kearney innovation. An adventurous startup that doubled in value over who recently finished a study of 14 top U.S. and Japanese the past decade would provide its investors with a return, after companies: "The Japanese were more consistent across the board inflation and the capital gains tax, of just over one percent in their innovation practices. They plan like demons, execute annually. Under those rules, why bother? brilliantly, and yet are constantly asking how they can do better." Peter F. Drncker, professor of social science and manageFine, you say, but unfortunately I can't change interest rates or the capital gains tax. What can I do? You can begin by ment at the Claremont Graduate School, noted after a recent dismissing the common American view that innovation is some trip that the Japanese are reorganizing their R&D so that a kind of mysterious, divinely inspired miracle that just happens single team of engineers, scientists, marketers, and manufac(or doesn't). turers works simultaneously at three levels of innovation. At The best companies see innovation as a function that needs the lowest level they seek incremental improvements of an managing-and then they manage it by basing new products on existing product. At the second, they try for a significant jump, customers' needs, encouraging employees to use the expertise of such as Sony's move from the micro tape recorder to the the whole company, giving workers incentives for successful Walkman. The third is true innovation. As Drucker writes: innovation, and refusing to "The idea is to produce three punish those whose gambles new products to replace each don't payoff. One key lesson: present product, with the Good ideas don't go very far same investment of time and unless they are nurtured and money-with one of the three developed. Smart managers then becoming the new market he best companies see leader and producing the inunderstand that meeting these novator's profit." challenges is more important innovation as a function that than increasing R&D spending But structure alone won't do needs managing-which they or building Taj Mahal-size the job. Companies need to accomplish by basing new products on teach their people better ways technical centers. Says Robert customer needs, giving workers to come up with new ideas. Johnston, a partner of Ideaincentives for successful innovation, Successful innovators like Scope, a Cambridge, Massaand refusing to punish those Sony, Rubbermaid, and Silicon chusetts, consulting firm speGraphics believe you have to cializing in innovation: "Most whose gambles don't payoff. start with a clear vision of American managers think where you want to be ten, 20, there's some black magic and or 30 years from now. Sony Chairman Akio Morita argues then a new product appears, but in today's market you need a that while American companies struggle to create a vision way to innovate on demand." for the next quarter, Japanese companies have a vision It is easy to share the belief that there is something not strictly for the next decade. rational about innovation, for inventing a drop-dead new An essential part of a creative culture is teaching people to lead offering is a tricky business. According to Thomas Kuczmarski, the consumer, not follow him. The result is products like Sony's a Chicago consultant specializing in innovation, only one of diminutive Data Discman, developed after a Sony product team every 20 or 25 ideas ever becomes a successful product-and of reasoned that executives and others would like to carry huge every ten or 15 new products, only one becomes a hit. amounts of data with them while traveling. The process is what But that doesn't mean you can't inject a little science into the Robert Hall, senior vice president ofGVO, a Palo Alto, Califorprocess. Kuczmarski and other top consultants say corporania, industrial design firm, calls "needs analysis." As Hall says, tions need a dual approach. First they must create cultures "To invent products out of thin air, you don't ask people what where new ideas can thrive, and then they must set up systems they want-after all, who would have told you ten years ago that that will winnow those ideas through development and into they needed a CD player? You ask them what problems they the market with lightning speed. A study of corporate innovahave when they get up in the morning." tion practices by the Arthur D. Little consulting firm shows that U.S. executives' greatest concern about innovation is For years, Johnson Controls of Milwaukee, which makes not a lack of brilliant scientists and engineers-America climate control systems for office buildings, competed on price against rivals like Honeywell. Engineer Hugh Hudson set up a still has the best-but a dearth of managers who know how formal needs-analysis program in 1987; he and a team of eight to drive the creative process.
engineers and marketers spent two years traveling Europe, suddenly realized he could use its plastic blow-molding technique to make a durable, lightweight, and inexpensive line of Asia, and the United States to learn more about their customers' future requirements. office furniture. The result was the WorkManager System, At the end of their sojourn, Hudson found to his surprise that which the company says accounts for 60 percent of its furniture his customers were more concerned about the total cost of division sales. Says Charles Hassel, a member of the product installing and maintaining a Johnson system than with its initial development team: "If top management hadn't encouraged us price. When an old system broke, it was hard and expensive to to look at processes and technologies elsewhere in the company, fix. You had to shut down the heat or air-conditioning in the none of this would have ever happened." whole building and then disconnect a lot of wires, facing a danger Toro, a Bloomington, Minnesota, maker of mowers and of electrocution. To change that, Hudson and his team designed other lawn equipment, fosters individual innovation by letting an entirely new system called Metasys. Now to fix a problem, a it be known that risk takers won't be penalized for new ideas building owner need only pull out a gray plastic module and slip that fail. A team of young engineers thought they could save in a new one-no screwdrivers or tools necessary. time and money by using an experimental molding technique to make the metal hoods on Toro's sit-down lawn mowers. After Though Metasys costs more to make than the old system, it adding the process to the assembly line, the engineers found it costs less to install and is easier to maintain. Introduced in January 1990, it brought in didn't work well at high production levels-and Toro lost a $500 million of revenues in its year of mower sales. When first year. What about its effect Chief Executive Officer Kenon the industry? A Dean Witter drick Melrose summoned¡ the report downgraded competitor engineers to his office, they Honeywell's stock based in part thought it was pink-slip city. on the market share gains by he top innovative But when they walked in they Johnson's new system. companies know that saw ribbons and balloons on But judging the customer the walls and a cake to celezeitgeist can be enormously the greatest idea brate the risk they took. Nor difficult; you must always be on in the world won't earn a dime was the engineers' gamble a the lookout for countertrends, if it isn't taken beyond total loss; the company complications, and shifts. is the concept stage properly. Campbell Soup found this out using the molding process on with its Sou per-Combo froother products, where it works better. zen food line. The company thought it had a great ideaAnother way Toro fosters take its famous soup, add a sandwich, and make both innovation: The company keeps an independent inventor on microwaveable for busy moms and dads. The company conretainer. Bob Comer has worked under contract for 23 years ducted enormous amounts of testing, talking with retailers and and likes the fact that his independence keeps him out of office politics. Says he: "It's a real stimulant." In 1983 the company consumers, letting them taste different samples. The tests showed that people loved the idea, so Campbell launched asked him to improve its aerator for golf greens. An aerator is a Souper-Combo in 1989. machine that uses metal pipes to punch holes in the ground, In January 1991 the company killed the product. What loosening the soil and helping the grass to grow. The problem is happened? Campbell missed an important, emerging trend. that aerators make a mess, leaving small plugs of dirt all over Consumers wanted healthier foods. As Campbell was rolling the greens. Golf courses typically must close for up to a week out Souper-Combo, competitors launched a number oflow-fat, and lose lots of revenue while they clean up all the little dirt low-salt, frozen microwaveable foods that pushed Soupercylinders. Combo off the shelves. Says Elizabeth Senior, Souper-Combo's In an impressive leap of imagination, Comer figured that if project director: "We learned we have to apply more personal he used jets of water to poke holes in the green there would judgment, insight, and thought to what we see around us. We be nothing to clean up. How did he think of that? "You never have to keep our antennae up." know why or how the flash comes. It just does." After a few Rubbermaid teaches its people to let ideas flow out of its soyears of tinkering, he came up with the Black Widow, a called core competencies, the things it does best. Bud Hellman, prototype the size of a small truck with wires and hoses extending from it like the legs of a spider. Launched in 1990, who used to run a Rubbermaid subsidiary, was touring one of the company's picnic-cooler plants in the late 1980s when he Toro's HydroJect is outselling the competition two to one. If
he wasn't independent, Comer might have long ago succumbed to office naysaying. Says he: "Mostly what I do is never used. But that doesn't bother me. My job lets me work in a never-never land." The top innovative companies know that the greatest idea in the world won't earn a dime if it isn't taken beyond the concept stage properly-and many U.S. companies don't seem to know what to do with good ideas. As Johnson Controls' Hugh Hudson puts it, "Most companies fail in execution. It's what separates the Japanese from us. You can have the best technology in the world, but if you don't execute well, forget it." To spur new ideas, Bell Atlantic started what it calls its Champion program. Any employee with a good idea gets to leave his job for a while at full pay and benefits and receive training in such skills as writing a business plan and organizing a development schedule; he also gets money to invest in the idea. He becomes the idea's champion, with a strong incentive to develop it successfully: He can invest ten percent of his salary in the project and give up his bonus in return for five percent of the revenues (subject to certain caps) if the product gets to market. Champion has generated two patents with 11 more pending since the company started the program in 1989. It has produced a successful new device for trouble-shooting telephone switching problems and a phone that's small enough to fit in your ear. One of the most common development problems is that by the time a product gets to market, it looks little or nothing like the original idea that so excited everyone. At every step people try to change the idea, adding their own improvements and sometimes unintentionally making the product worse. To avoid such meddling, the Japanese spend more time than Americans do in planning. Once everyone decides what the product is-its features, color, shape, price-the company sticks to those specs. A.T. Kearney's study showed that because Japanese companies spend more time planning new products than Americans do, they experience far fewer interruptions during development and fewer problems after launch. Chrysler, the company that resisted Ron Zarowitz's idea for so long, has learned some lessons about development. Glenn Gardner heads the giant LH project, which is developing a whole new line of cars scheduled for delivery this year, and endorses the Japanese approach of settling on specifications as late as possible and then sticking to them. That way people can spend more time planning, discussing, and debating the product's characteristics-and afterward, everyone knows that a change would seriously delay the project. Gardner says that since he adopted this method, top management has yet to intercede with a major change, the first time that has happened in his 30-plus years in the auto industry. With global competition red hot, rushing new products to
market is more important than ever. Silicon Graphics uses a rigorously scheduled process that has enabled it to develop and launch most of its breakthrough products in less than 18 months. The company closes each project down the second it is finished and goes on to the next. That way Silicon Graphics' high-strung engineers, who like to be constantly challenged, don't have to linger after the launch to fiddle with this feature or that. It keeps their interest high. Says Tom Jermoluk, Silicon Graphics' executive vice president and head of product development: "Forget the incremental stuff. Go 95 percent of the way and launch. If you wait until you get 100 percent of what you want, you'll surely get beat to market by the competition." Even with that kind of compromise, the company gets impressive results. Silicon Graphics makes high-powered computers that run software designed for a multitude of purposes. Plastic surgeons, for instance, can redesign a person's face on a screen to see what he would look like after an operation. Moviemaker George Lucas's Industrial Light & Magic used a company system to create the spectacular special effects for Arnold Schwarzenegger's megahit, Terminator 2. One of the company's computers that cost $75,000 in 1989 was succeeded 18 months later by a new system, just as fast, for under $10,000. Amgen supercharges development by getting people to focus on how their product affects the world. This Thousand Oaks, California, biopharmaceutical firm makes Neupogen, a genetically engineered drug that helps prevent infections in cancer patients and was among Fortune's Products of the Year in 1991 (see page 28). Amgen employees passing company bulletin boards constantly see letters from parents of smiling kids who used the drug during clinical trials and now are out of the hospital and back in school. While most pharmaceutical companies need two or three apmonths after the U.S. Food and Drug Administration's proval to launch a new drug, Amgen got its lifesaver into patients' hands in a mere 48 hours. This meant spending $150,000 to hire a jet to airlift Neupogen from the company's bottling plant to its distribution center. Says Mike Narachi, the leader of the Neupogen product development team: "We lost some money on the jet, but we got a lot of mileage out of our morale." Despite the lessons of the best innovators, most managers continue to think innovating is just a matter of turning the spigot labeled R&D. That's not enough. As the University of Michigan's Prahalad says: "More money on R&D is money down a rat hole if you don't change the process." And the sooner you start managing the process better, the sooner you'll find that innovation more than pays for itself. 0
Screening SPIKE LEE in Conversation With HENRY LOUIS GATES, JR.
The film Malcolm X didn't have to be made to be controversial. The project has been embroiled in controversy since it was launched in 1968. At that time, a screenplay by James Baldwin and Arnold Perl was commissioned by Marvin Worth, a producer who had acquired rights to Alex Haley's as-told-to Autobiography of Malcolm X. Over the years, the focus of the controversy has changed. Initially it involved Hollywood's readiness to deal with Malcolm X. Later it concerned which phase of his ideological development to emphasize. Then it focused on whether a white director could capture Malcolm's complexity. When Spike Lee actually began filming Malcolm X for Warner Bros. last year, everybody, it seemed, had an opinion about what was in store. Within the black community, ideologues and intellectuals of every stripecultural nationalists and integrationists, buppies and revolutionaries, Five Percenters and Baptist ministers alike-wondered aloud about Lee's right to portray the complex life of Malcolm X for the big screen. In addition to battling such critics as poet Amiri Baraka, and amid reports of a conflict over Lee's insistence on a three-hour running time for the film, the director became engaged in a budget dispute with Warner. He also ran into financial difficulties. When Lee exceeded the film's $28 million budget, the Completion Bond Co., which insures investors against films going over budget, seized financial control and refused to approve further expenditures. In mid-May, Lee announced
that prominent African Americans-among them Bill Cosby, Michael Jordan, and Oprah Winfrey-had responded to his appeal to donate money to save the film. But much of the hue and cry has been over who "owns" the image of Malcolm X, an image that evolved considerably. Here was a man who went from pimp, hustler, and thief to defiant prisoner, black nationalist, and leading minister and propagandist for Elijah Muhammad's Nation of Islam. Then-after a visit to Meccain the year before his assassination in 1965 at the age of 39, Malcolm X became a profound humanist. So forceful and incisive in life, Malcolm has, paradoxically, become a cultural and political Rorschach blot for the generations who honor his memory. The result has been considerable discussion and soulsearching about the black artist's "burden of representation," as Baldwin put it, as well as about the film itself. One afternoon recently, at Lee's 40 Acres and a Mule Studio in Brooklyn, New York, the filmmaker talked with Henry Louis Gates, Jr., about the making of Malcolm X and various other subjects-among them, fact and fiction in films, his vision of Malcolm, and his thoughts about black youth. Here are excerpts from their conversation. HENRY LOUIS GATES, JR.: The Malcolm X project has been in development hell for two decades. James Baldwin and Arnold Perl, David Bradley, Calder Willingham, Charles Fuller, and David Mamet were attached to the project as writers at various points. What's the real reason this movie was never made-until now? SPIKE LEE: I just think the stu-
dios were scared of the film. And the rising popularity of Malcolm, coupled with the box-office appeal of Denzel Washington and myself, is what made it economically feasible for them to invest in the project. Gates: David Bradley says the writers weren't fired because the scripts were wrong; they were fired because the story was wrong. Lee: I would agree with that. Malcolm X was basically disputing the American dream. And if there's one thing Hollywood is about, it is selling the American dream. So Malcolm X is at odds with the images that Hollywood has always been about. Gates: On the other hand, he is the American dream-the selfmade man. His story is very much like Benjamin Franklin's autobiography or Booker T. Washington's. Lee: Yes, but the story Hollywood chooses to tell is always
The much hyped Malcolm X happens to be a spiritually enriching testament to the human capacity for change-and surely Spike Lee's most universally appealing film ... The civil rights leader, as eloquently portrayed by Denzel Washington, emerges as an immensely likable human being-a onetime black separatist who overcame his own prejudices .... Lee, who directs the way other people order Chinese food, brings all manner of styles and moods to the film's four chaptersMalcolm's troubled youth, his conversion to Islam, his ministry, and his pilgrimage to Mecca. Rita Kempley WASHINGTON POST
...it's impossible to come away from Malcolm X with one simple, singular impression: There are as many movies and styles within it as
John Doe's, Horatio Alger's. It's never been about people of color. Gates: Is Spike Lee's Malcolm the Malcolm before or after he went to Mecca? Lee: We show them all. That's why this film is an epic. That's why it's three hours. We want to show the total evolution of what made him. We want to show the three or four different people he was along the line. People tend to have one view of Malcolm, but he had many different views over his life; he turned completely around several times in this life. We leave it up to the audience to pick and choose which one they agree with, but v"e want to show all the Malcolms. Gates: Do you have a favorite? Lee: I like them all--even when he was a hustler. I can see what steered him that way, having seen the state commit your mother, the family broken up, your father killed. I try to keep him together
there were aspects of Malcolm's constantly evolving character .... This is the story of the self-creation of a fiercely eloquent spokesman for a new black consciousness, whose message of pride and self-determination ... attained mythical dimensions after his assassination in 1965 .... Malcolm X is intended, among other things, as a pedagogical film-the first Hollywood his.tory of black pride .... What fuses the film's disparate parts is [Denzel] Washington's riveting, impeccably controlled performance .... Lee and company have performed a powerful service: They have brought Malcolm X very much to life again, both as man and myth. David Ansen NEWSWEEK
Spike Lee's flair for trendiness always has exceeded his dramatic grasp.
Malcolm X More than 25 years after his death black leader Malcolm X (left) is hitting the headlines again. A film on him directed by Spike Lee (below) has sparked raging controversies. as one person, and all these things, you might say, are spokes in the wheel that made him. I know for sure Warner Brothers is trying to stress the Malcolm after Mecca, when he stopped calling white folk blue-eyed mutant devils. Gates: Does this post-Mecca Malcolm, this more embracing figure, appeal to you, given your own sensibilities? Lee: Yes. I think Malcolm came to a point where he saw that we're all brothers. Gates: Why is the life of MalLee's Malcolm, colm, Spike needed right now? Lee: It's needed for the same reason that Malcolm was needed
This chronic but fascinating disparity reaches epic scale in the biographical saga/testimonial/polemic/fashion statement Malcolm X. ...[The film] makes a fitfully compelling effort to portray a troubled yet charismatic modern black protagonist. Ulti¡ mately, it settles for an all-purpose symbol of racial pride, opaque but serviceable as role model or fashion accessory....A movie approximation might have worked better if some lean and hungry newcomer embodies Malcolm. Despite his skill and devotion ...Mr. Washington now radiates too much glamour to suggest anything but a starstruck glorification of Malcolm X. That may sufficefor pop cult appeasement. It fails to take full and decisive advantage of the dramatic challenge posed by Malcolm X in extremis. Gary Arnold THE WASHI
GTON TIMES
Spike Lee has attempted the impossible and almost brought it off .... Malcolm X...[is]an ambitious, tough, seriously considered biographical film that, with honor, eludes easy characterization ....In Denzel Washington, it also has a fine actor who does for Malcolm Xwhat Ben Kingsley did for Gandhi. Vincent Canby THE NEW YORK TIMES
Malcolm X isa "bio-pic" in the old Hollywood tradition. telling the story of a hero's life in straightforward, conventional terms. It's done with impressive skill and style.... But it's hardly the explosive experience that the movie's advance publicityor Lee's gadfly remarks on its social importance-have led moviegoers to anticipate. In the end, Malcolm X is more respectable than revolutionary, more inspirational than
when he was alive, and even more so today. One of the things that Malcolm stressed was education. Well, we're just not doing it. It's such a sad situation now, where male black kids will fail so they can be "down" with everyone else, and if you get "As" and speak correct English, you're regarded as being "white." Peer pressure has turned around our whole value system. Gates: I saw the results of a survey conducted in black Washington schools in which students listed things they consider "acting white." One thing on the list was going to the Smithsonian InI couldn't believe it; stitution. when I was a kid, going to the Smithsonian was like going to Disneyland, or better. Then you r\:alize that a certain amount of romantic black neonationalism is tied into this attitude we've been discussing. Is your movie going to counteract that?
inspired ...it doesn't have ...the cinematic fire that would have made it as invigorating as it is illuminating .. On the screen almost every minute, Mr. Washington is never less than riveting to watch and hear.. ..Lee reinforces the rhythms of his performance with rhythmic editing patterns and enhances the moods of the story with an expressive color scheme that grows ever more dark and monochromatic. David Sterritt THE CHRISTIAN
SCIENCE MONITOR
Spike Lee's Malcolm Xis an event movie that livesup to theevent. ..pick it, pro it, con it, but recommend it; this film is here to stay. Lee has toned down his usual funky-spunky style....Ifthis isn't the bottom line of all screen biography, nothing is. Mike Clark USA TODAY
Lee: You see Malcolm educate himself. You see him going through the dictionary, copying every single word and definition, A to Z. You see him striving to better himself, to educate himself, to talk correctly, to stop swearing and stop other people from swearing. Gates: Why do you think there has been such a resurgence of interest in Malcolm X, especially among black youth? You see "Malcolmania" in rap music, posters, baseball caps, a flood of new books and, of course, your movie. Lee: Chuck D., with Public Enemy, and K.R.S.-One, with Boogie Down Productions, have to be credited with really giving black youth Malcolm through their lyrics. It began there, and it just started to build. Even more, though, the issues he talked about haven't gone away. Conditions have even gotten worse. That's why he's more popular now than ever. Gates: What about the need for heroes? I think one reason Malcolm is so visible on the streets is the lack of heroes. Does your Malcolm emerge as a hero? Lee: Very heroic. I think Ossie Davis put it best in his eulogy. He said Malcolm is our shining black pnnce. Gates: Why are we seeing "Malcolmania" and not "Martinmania"? Why isn't Martin Luther King, Jr., comparably appealing? Lee: Well, Martin was more mainstream. The whole nonviolent, turn-the-other-cheek businessjust isn't getting anywhere in black America. 0
About the Interviewer: Henr)' Louis Gates, Jr., is W.E.B. Du Bois professor of the humanities af Harvard University and editor of Transition magazine.
ToDrealllor to Think? Asked for an opinion on some, perplexing question of the day, I sometimes say that I am for all the good things and against all the bad ones. Not everybody is amused by such a dinner table joke. Many are apt to feel that I consider myself too good for this world, which is, of course, a world of public questions. Was President Kennedy right to tell us, "Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do¡ for your country"? In the ordinary way oflife, what can one do for one's country? One can be preoccupied with it. That is, one can hold enlightened opinions. Most people conclude that there isn't much, practically speaking, they can do. A few become activists and fly around the country demonstrating or remonstrating. They are able to do this in a free and prosperous America. I speculate sometimes about the economics of militancy. There must be a considerable number of people with small private incomes whose life work is to march in protest, to picket, to be vocal partisans. At this moment the Roe v. Wade issue* has attracted demonstrators to Washington, D.C., and to Buffalo. Atomic energy, environmentalism, women's rights, homosexual rights, AIDS, capital punishment, various racial issuessuch are the daily grist of newspapers and networks. The public is endlessly polled; the politicians and their advisers are guided in their strategies by poll statistics. And this, let's face it, is "the action." This is where masses of Americans find substance, importance, find definition through a combination of passion and ineffectuality. The level of public discussion is unsatisfactory. As we become aware of this, our hearts sink. The absence of articulate political leadership in the country makes us feel that we are floundering. What are we, today, in a position to do about the crises chronicled daily in The New York Times-about the new Russia, and the new Germany, about Peru and China and drugs in the South Bronx and racial strife in Los Angeles, and the rising volume of crimes and diseases, the disgrace of the socalled educational system-about ignorance, fanaticism, faction, about the clownishness of candidates for the presidency? Is it possible to take arms against so wide a sea of troubles? Wherever it is feasible, arms, of course, should be taken. But we must also consider what it requires to face the trouble-sea 'In Roe v. Wade. 1973, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that a state could not interfere with a pregnant woman's decision to have an abortion during the first trimester of her pregnancy.
in its planetary vastness-what an amount of daily reading it demands of us, to say nothing of historical knowledge. It was brave of Karl Marx to say that the time had come for thinkers to be doers. But to consider what his intellectual disciples did in the 20th century will send us back to our seats. It is, after all, no small thing to correct our opinions frequently, and when you come right down to it, the passivity imposed upon us forces us to acknowledge how necessary it is to think hard, to reject what is mentally dishonorable. We feel heavy when we recognize the limits of our effectiveness in the public sphere, when we acknowledge the weight of the burden laid upon us and the complexities we have to take into account-when we become aware of the impoverished state of public discussion. Reading and hearing what most editorialists and' TV commentators tell us about the Los Angeles crisis, for instance, forces us to recognize that few opinion makers are able to think at all. To leave matters in their hands is an acute danger. The Good are attracted by Men's perceptions, And think not for themselves.
William Blake, who wrote this about 200 years ago, did not really believe in the goodness of the non thinking good. He meant that the non thinking good were inclined to surrender their mental freedom to the cunning-the sharpers and con artists-who would eventually show "their private ends." It is apparent to experienced observers that well-meaning people emphatically prefer the "good" things. Their desire is to be identified with thc "best." The more prosperous and the "better educated" they are, the greater the effort to identify themselves with the most widely accepted and respected opinions. So they are naturally for justice, for caring, compassion, for the abused and oppressed, against racism, sexism, homophobia, against discrimination, against imperialism, colonialism, exploitation, against smoking, against harassment-for all the good things, against all the bad ones. Seeing people virtually covered with credentials, buttons, badges, I am
Nobel laureate Saul Bellow (left) ruminates disparagingly over the mindless and soulless solutions that today's "experts" offer for every crisis-what he calls "the rejection of thinking in favor of wishful egalitarian dreaming"; the attempted invention, or programming, of an altogether new human type who "will be all the good things."
reminded of the layers of medals and campaign ribbons worn by Soviet generals in official photographs. People who have the best of everything also desire the best opinions. Top of the line. The right sort of right-thinking, moreover, makes social intercourse smoother. The wrong sort exposes you to accusations of insensitivity, misogyny and, perhaps worst of all, racism. As the allure of agreement-or conformism-grows, the perils of independence deepen. To differ is dangerous. And yet, as we all must know, to run from the dangers of dissent is cowardly. So much for the first part of Blake's proposition: "The good are attracted by Men's perceptions." Now for part two: "And think not for themselves." To illustrate what this may mean one need go no further than the daily papers. As I write, the Chicago Tribune reprints a piece on Michael Jackson, the pop music prodigy, by Charles Burress, a staff writer for the San Francisco Chronicle. Michael Jackson's video "Black and White" attracted a worldwide audience of 500 million youngsters. Jackson, Burress says, has achieved "monumental prominence in the cultural landscape. " To what is this prominence due? Jackson frolics over the boundaries of race and sex, Burress writes. "We've told our children that race shouldn't matter, that boys and girls are equal and that many sexual roles are arbitrary. Could youngsters be enthralled at seeing these ideas made flesh? "The refrain in the 'Black and White' video is 'It doesn't matter if you're black or white.' Most riveting is a computerenhanced segment where a person changes ethnicity and sex in rapid succession. Jackson seems to be saying we are first of all human, and secondarily male or female, one race or another. He urges us toward human unity and away from prejudice." And finally, "In a world threatened by racial tensions and overpopulation, the survival instinct could summon a new human, one who has no single race and who, by being most asexually androgynous, is less subject to the procreative urge." Readers may feel that I have gone far out of my way to find such a bizarre example. But no. Those of us who read widely in the popular press and watch the flakier channels of cable TV know that views like Burress's are not at all uncommon. The language he uses identifies him as a college graduate-possibly, though not necessarily, a California product. Besides, his preoccupation is with what appears to have become a: national project, namely, the fashioning of a new outlook, a new mind. The mind of this "new human" is synthetic, homogeneous,
improved. It transcends the limits of heredity, nature, and tradition, goes beyond all limits and all obstacles. "How do we object to [Jackson's] changing his appearance when we tolerate many body alterations, from shaving and bodybuilding to facelifts and sex-change opera~ions?" Burress asks. Now, a term widely understood to signify not thinking for oneself is ideology. Ideology for Marx was a classcinduced deformation, a corruption of reality by capitalism. Ideology, to make it short, is a system of false thinking and nontruth that can lead to obedience and conformity. In putting Burress in high company, my sole purpose is to throw light on the attempted invention of an altogether new human type. This new and "more desirable" American will be all the good things, . a creature of no single race, an androgyne, free from the disturbing influence of Eros. The idea is to clobber everything that used to be accepted as given, fixed, irremediable. Can it be that we are tired of whatever it is that we in fact are-black, white, brown, yellow, male, female, large, small, Greek, German, English, Jew, Yankee, southerner, westerner, etc.-that what we now want is to rise above all tiresome differences? Perhaps gene-fixing will realize this utopia instantly. But the rejection of thinking in favor of wishful egalitarian dreaming takes many other forms. There is simply too much to think about. It is hopeless-too many kinds of special preparation are required. In electronics, in economics, in social analysis, in history, in psychology, in international politics most of us are, given the oceanic proliferating complexity of things, paralyzed by the very suggestion that we assume responsibility for so much. This is what makes packaged opinion so attractive. This is where the representatives of knowledge come in-the pundits, the anchormen, the specialist guests of talk shows. What used to be called an exchange of views has become "dialogue," and "dialogue" has been invested with a certain sanctity. Actually it bears no resemblance to any form of communication. It is a hard thing to describe. Two or more chests covered with merit badges are competitively exposed to public view. We sit, we look, we listen, we are attracted by the perceptions of hosts and guests. When I was young the great pundits were personalities like H.G. Wells or George Bernard Shaw or Havelock Ellis or Romain Rolland. We respectfully read what they had to say about communism, fascism, peace, eugenics, sex. I recall these¡ celebrities unsentimentally. Wells, Shaw, and Romain Rolland brought punditry into disrepute. The last of the world-class mental giants was Jean-Paul Sartre, one of whose contributions to world peace was to exhort the oppressed of the Third World to slaughter whites indiscriminately. It is hard to regret the passing of this occasionally vivid spirit. On this side of the Atlantic our present anchormen are the successors of the Arthur Brisbanes, Heywood Brouns, and Walter Lippmanns of the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s. Clearly, figures like Peter Jennings, Ted Koppel, Dan Rather, and Sam Donaldson, with their easy and immediate access to the leaders of the nation, have infinitely more power than those old word-
"Can it be that we are tired of whatever it is that we in fact are-black, white, brown, yellow, male, female, large, small, Greek, German, Yankee-that what we now want is to rise above all tiresome differences? ..Will the real human being become persona non grata?"
men, their predecessors. Rather odd-looking, today's tribunes (not magistrates chosen by the people), with their massive hairdos, are the nearest thing observable to the wigs of Versailles or the Court of St. James's. These crowns of hair contribute charm and dignity but perhaps also oppress the brain with their weight. They make us aware, furthermore, of the study and calculation behind the naturalness of these artists of information. They speak so confidently and so much on such a variety of topics-do they really know enough to be so fluent? America is, of course, the land of the present; its orientation is toward the future. That Americans should care so little about the past is fetching, even endearing, but why should we take the judgments of these splendid-looking men and women on public matters seriously? That they have had "backgrounders" or briefings we may take for granted. One is reluctant to conclude that their omniscience is a total put-on. But this, too, may be beside the point. The principal aim of these opinion makers is to immerse us again and again in a marinade of "correctness" or respectability. What is it necessary that we Americans should know? When is ignorance irrelevant? Perhaps Americans grasp intuitively that what really matters to humankind is here-all around us in the capitalist U.S.A. Lincoln Steffens, playing the pundit in Russia after the Revolution, said, "I have been over into the future, and it works." Some secret wisdom! As a horseplayer he would have lost his shirt. Sigmund Freud, visiting the United States before World War I, said America was a great experiment that wasn't going to work. Later he called ita misgeburta miscarriage. This was the judgment of German high culture on us. Perhaps the death camps of World War II would have changed his mind. That America is an experiment is self-evident. Consistent with this-in a small way-Charles Burress on Michael Jackson is advocating experimentation. "Suppose Jackson were seen," he writes, "not as a freak, but as a brave pioneer devoting his own body to exploring new frontiers of human identity." The underlying hypothesis seems to be that we human beings, considered as material, are totally plastic and that the material of which we are made will take any (improving) shape we choose to give it. A less kindly word for it is "programming." The postulate is that it is necessary to reject what we are by nature, that the given, the original, the creature of flesh and blood is defective, shameful, in need of alteration, correction, conversion, that this entity, as-is, can contribute nothing, and
that it would be better to remake us totally. In my youth the civilized world was taken aback by the Stalin model of Soviet Man as pictured in newspapers, textbooks, and in art and literature. Stalinist falsification, we called this. Now we, too, seem to have come up with a synthetic man, a revised, improved American. What this implies is that the human being has no core-more accurately, that his personal core, if there should be one, would be undesirable, wicked, perverse, a lump of prejudices-no damn good at all. . We are beginning to feel the effects of this project. Perhaps the personal core, or what we are by nature, is becoming aware that what lies behind this drive to revise us is tyranny, that consciousness raising and sensitivity training are meant to force us to be born again without color, without race, sexually neutered, politically purified and with minds shaped and programmed to reject "the bad" and affirm "the good." Will the real human being become persona non grata? No wonder so many of us are in a blue funk. A self-improving Jot, Americans have a weakness for this kind of thing: The idealist holding aloft a banner with a strange device. Huck Finn had no use for the nice bright clean New England boy advancing under the motto Excelsior. When Aunt Sally threatened to "sivilize" him he decided to "light out for the territory ahead." There was a time when it was normal for American children to feel that "self-improvement" propaganda would lead us not up the mountain but into the sloughs. In the matter of opinion, Americans are vulnerable to ideologues, "originators," trendsetters, heralds of the new. Lacking the sustaining traditions of older cultures, we cast about for prescriptions, we seek-in our uncertainty-the next necessary and "correct" step. I can't at the moment remember who it was who said (it sounds like Elbert Hubbard), "Invent a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door." Revised and updated, this would go, "Invent a new cliche and you will attract a tremendous following." Perhaps the worst thing of all is the language used by these "originators," these heralds of the new. Can anything palpably, substantially, recognizably human be described in words like theirs? It was perhaps in reaction to the degradation of this newspeak-the very latest-that I instinctively turned to William Blake: The And Till And
Good are attracted by Men's perceptions. think not for themselves; Experience teaches them to catch to cage [he Fairies & Elves.
And And And And
then the Knave begins 10 snarl [he Hypocrite 10 howl; all his good Friends shew their private ends, the Eagle is known from the Owl.
About the Author: Saul Bellow won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1976 for Humboldt's Gift. His other acclaimed novels include Seize the Day, The Dean's December, Henderson the Rain King, Herzog, Mr. Sammler's Planet, and More Die of Heartbreak.
Perceiving
I DIA
"Few Americans knew much about India in pre-World War II years," admits Professor Richard Park, one of the earliest and most eminent India specialists in the United States. And the little that was known was deeply colored by Katherine Mayo's negative, if not explicitly hostile, Mother India and the writings of Rudyard Kipling (consider his dictum: East of Suez, the best is like the worst). In view of this, the volume of knowledge about India that American scholars have produced since India's independence in 1947 is remarkable. Here, U.S. political scientists have played a distinguished role in creating a better understanding of India in America. During the early years, a major focus of attraction for American political scientists was India's fledgling democratic experiment. Could it ensure economic development and social change so urgent for India? Could the leadership play the role demanded of it to make democracy a success? Could democratic institutions take strong root in India? Could the political parties acquire the features required for a stable party system? Questions such as these triggered a great deal of research in the very first decade after India's independence. The outcome was the publication of a number of excellent books: Richard Park and Irene Tinker's Leadership and Political Institutions in India (1959), Myron Weiner's Party Politics in India (1957), and Gene Overstreet and Marshall Windmiller's Communism in India (1959). The programs in Indian/Asian studies launched by U.S. universities in the 1950s expanded in the next two decades, but their growth slowed down somewhat in the 1980s, largely due to a shift of scholarly interest to countries such as China. If in the beginning the emphasis was mainly on institutions, during the following three decades India specialists directed their attention to nearly every aspect of the country's political life: From national politics and parties to regional,
state, and local politics and development; from the intertwining of tradition and modernity to oppositional and coalitional politics; from party factionalism to caste and communal mobilization; from elections and voting behavior to political culture and public policy and even the nature and process of state formation in India. In a word, with time, the research agenda continued to expand. To give some idea, however incomplete, of this expanding stream of research output let us select, if somewhat eclectically, a few titles. Myron Weiner, one of the most productive researchers on India, has been at it for the past four decades. One of his very early writings also happens to be one of the most impressive-"The Struggle Against Power: Notes on Indian Political Behavior," a paper published in World Politics (April 1956). Writing in the heyday of modernization theory when it was common faith that the emerging states of Asia and Africa must develop a set of new political structures and a new political culture on Western lines to replace the old, Weiner in this paper reflected the prevailing view but also pointed out the wisdom of anticipating what has been called "modernization revisionism" of the 1960s. He began with the idea of investigating attitudes that those pre-independence still persisted in India and were "obstacles to the growth of stable democratic institutions"-attitudes like the
by AAKHAHARICHAITml
unwillingness to make political compromises, the absence of a basic consensus on the nature of the state, the upholding of the renunciation of power as an ideal together with the existence of a scramble for power. His investigations made him realize that traditional attitudes would not disappear altogether. Yet, he was optimistic about democracy in India, for he found that in large part such traditions were being "modified" even if they were not being "supplanted." In another of his major early works on India (Party Politics in India), Weiner inquired into the process of party development and the nature of the party system. It is to Weiner's credit that he could identify so early certain features of India's party system that have persisted over time. For instance, the tendency toward "personalistic leadership" within parties; or the fact that ideological questions dividing the parties were standing in the way of attending to more urgent policy issues on which compromise was possible. As already mentioned, in Third World studies the simple view of modernization as basically Westernization started to be revised during the 1960s. The classic statement of this "modernization revisionism" with regard to India came from two Chicago political scientists, Lloyd I. Rudolph and Susanne H. Rudolph in their eminent work, The Modernity@fTrddition (1967). Rigorously attacking the simple view of a contradictory relationship between modernity and tradition, they pointed out that this relationship revealed intricate variations, suggesting that the two strains "infiltrate and transform each other." They found that even the traditional caste affiliation through horizontal and differential mobilization by caste associations and political parties respectively had opened ways for India's peasant society to participate and get involved in the political "'" process. It thus contributed both to political democ-
set by Jawaharlal .Nehru of economic racy and the growth of equality. A pioneering work in the early 1970s growth and radical social change within a was Language, Religion and Politics in framework of accommodative politics. North India (1972) by Paul Brass. In it Brass challenged the "modernization tnhe 1980s, American scholarship on teleology" derived from the West that held India was marked by the continuation political modernization to mean an inof the trend set in the 1970s of moving evitable overlap between a culturally away from the modernization perspective homogeneous nation and a politically inte- toward a ,search for new concepts. Lloyd grated state. Brass found in India a great I. Rudolph and Susanne H. Rudolph's diversity of language, religion, and people massive work In Pursuit of Lakshmi living under the umbrella of the same (1987) is a fine testimony to that. In this political system leading neither to cultural very comprehensive study of the political amalgamation nor to political secession. economy of the Indian state, the authors He felt that in countries like India "the focused "more on internal determinants problem is not to bring about an identity and dynamics than on external ones," for between state and nation, but to learn to they found that the international environrecognize the existence and to cope with ment "is far less salient for explaining the development of regional-national Indian economic and political developsentiments while simultaneously promot- ment than is the case for other Third ing and developing patriotic ties among World countries." In examining state and diverse nationalities to a common political politics in India and their interactions and territorial unit." In Brass's view, with developments in the economy, the conceptual constructs like political mod- Rudolphs built their argument, around ernization were too straitjacketed to ac- the concepts of "demand polity" and count for the complexities of India's "command polity," the former marking languages, regions, religions, and ethnic the sovereignty of the citizen-consumer groups. But it was only through a correct and the latter the sovereignty of the stateperception of these complexities that India actor. While over the years the Indian state has swung between being predomicould be understood. India's awesome social, religious, and nantly a command polity and predomiethnic diversity had made scholars of the nantly a demand polity, the authors did earlier decade apprehensive, regarding not not find much of a relationship between only India's democratic future, but also its such variations on the one hand and political future. This view was represented economic performance on the other. Francine Frankel's introductory essay by Selig Harrison in India-The Most Dangerous Decades (1960), which foresaw in the two-volume book edited by her the country's future either in a total state jointly with M.S.A. Rao (Dominance and or in total disunity. But the truth is that State Power in Modern India, 1989) is a most political systems veer between these very brief presentation of yet another new approach to reexamining some of the old extremes most of the time. A decade after Harrison wrote, Brass problems. Recognizing the inadequacy of and other American scholars were calling both the modernization approach and the for new conceptual tools to understand class conflict/dependency approach, she India's democratic experiment as well argues here that traditional stability and as the country's economic development. later tension and conflicts in India can Among these was Francine Frankel, who both be understood in terms of a complex addressed the economic crisis of the 1970s. interactive relationship in Indian society In her India's Political Economy (1978), between a structure of dominance legitishe drew the attention of her readers to the mized by sacral authority but locally dangers of abandoning-under pressure' rooted and a political power based on from the United States and the World secular interests and aspiring to be subBank as well as from powerful business continental. The idea needs further elaboand land-owning groups-the dual goals ration, but it contains the suggestion for
I
simultaneously dissecting political, economic, and religiocultural as well as local and national dimensions of power through one single approach to the study of India. This survey would be incomplete without mention of the Rudolphs's contribution toward an analysis and understanding of the state-formation process in India ("The Subcontinental Empire and the Regional Kingdom in Indian State Formation," in Region and Nation in India, 1985, edited by Paul Wallace). The authors, through a comparison of the state-making processes in Europe and in India, have tried to decipher the distinctiveness of the Indian experiment. They find that the state in India "included rather than eliminated layered and segmented social and political power and created a socially constrained and negotiated political order"-not as a concession to regional kingdoms and local chiefs, nor as a consequence of limited technical means of control, but as a "principle of state formation and maintenance." It is in this that historically the Indian state-making process has differed from the European pattern. This article is only a minor attempt at excavating the deep deposits that the Indiawallahs in the United States have unearthed during the past 40 years. It is true that on many occasions their perspectives, research priorities, and observations have differed sharply from those of their Indian counterparts. That is only to be expected. Yet it has been a notable effort to grapple with the basic dichotomies in Indian politics and society. One final word. Webster associates the word "paradox" with "unbelievable," "absurd," "self-contradictory." Isn't i~ instructive that after 40 years of research on India, the Rudolphs begin their last book with the words: '~India is a political and economic paradox," and Myron Weiner titles his 1989 collection of essays on Indian politics as The Indian Paradox? 0 About the Author: Rakhahari Chatterji is a professor in political science at Calcutta University. This article is a brief version of his presentation at a seminar on "American Perceptions of India" organized in Calcutta by the U.S. Educational Foundation in India.
200 Years
of Good Consul It is 200 years since the United States posted Benjamin Joy to Calcutta as its first "consular" officer in India. The fact that the British refused to accredit him as a consul is just one of the many stories that pepper the early history of American consuls in India. onsular officers of the United States have played an essential role in facilitating relations between India and America for 200 years----ever since the U.S. consular service was established by an act of Congress in 1792. The role of U.S. consuls has, of course, changed considerably since the early days, when they existed primarily to assist stranded sailors and support American maritime commerce and when consuls engaged in diverse outside interests-even including, in one case, serving as mayor of Madras. Today, consular offices in Bombay, Calcutta, Madras, and New Delhi handle a wide range offunctions. Among their many duties are: • Issuance of immigrant visas to Indians planning to resettle in the United States or join relatives already living there. visas to Indian tourists, • Issuance of nonimmigrant businessmen, students, and professionals. • Promotion of commercial ties between Indian and U.S. businesses, organization of trade shows and exhibits, and provision of reference services to businesspeople. • Performance of a variety of communications, documentary, legal, and personal services to American citizens traveling or residing in India.
C
Beginnings From its earliest days, the United States has taken an interest in India. In 1777, a year after the Declaration ofIndependence, a member of the American Continental Congress stated: "It is reported that the East Indians have risen upon their oppressors [Great Bdtain], and taken Madras. This is all goop ~ s." America's early consular relations with Illdia wete, h wever, the result less of such righteous sentiments tran ofthe'e 1knsive
l"' /: I·J,
I,.
maritime trade between America and colonial India. Americans first made contact with India in 1786, when the Chesapeake sailed up the "Hoogli" River into the port of Calcutta. By the following year, four Massachusetts ships were trading in Bombay, Surat, and Calcutta. Trade grew rapidly: As an official of the East India Company in Calcutta observed in 1818, the power and resources of the United States had been "hitherto nurtured in the Indian seas." Upon gaining independence in 1776, the fledgling American republic established a variety of consular-type relations with foreign countries and territories. However, it was not until 1790 that President George Washington urged the U.S. Congress to institutionalize an official consular service: "The patronage of our commerce, of our merchants and seamen, has called for the appointment of consuls in foreign countries. It seems expedient, to regulate by law, the exercise of that jurisdiction, and those functions which are permitted them, either by express convention, or by a friendly indulgence, in the places of their residence."
Benjamin Joy-Consul
or Commercial Agent?
On April 14, 1792, Congress created the consular service. In the same year, President Washington appointed Benjamin Joya businessman from Newburyport and Boston with years of successful experience in the India trade-to be consul at Calcutta "and other port~ and places .on the coast ofIndia and Asia." Diplomatic accreditation was generally slower and more problematic in those. days than today. Two years after his appointment as consul, Joy was informed thatA"the GovernorGeneral, having no instructions from England, does not think himself at liberty to admit you in the public character of a
consul entitled to privileges; but you may reside here as a commercial agent, subject to the civil and criminal jurisdiction of this country." Joy's reception was probably not made warmer by the fact that the Governor-General in Calcutta at the time of his appointment had been none other than Lord Charles Cornwallis, commander of the British forces that had been forced to surrender to the Americans at the end of their War ofIndependence a dozen years earlier. However, throughout the 18th and much of the 19th century, English authorities in Indiaanxious to prevent "direct intercourse of Indians with other countries"-as a matter of course refused to permit any foreign country to open consulates in India. As far as East India Company officials were concerned, then, Joy was an ordinary businessman. But with France and Britain vying for naval superiority around the globe, U.S. Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson instructed Joy: "As a general war appears to be gathering in Europe, I have to desire your utmost vigilance in protecting our vessels in the rights of neutrality and in preventing the usurpation of our flag by the vessels of other nations." Joy soon had cause to act on Jefferson's instructions. In 1794 two ships of U.S. registry, America and Enterprise, and their crews were captured by the comrnander of the Bengal squadron and charged with carrying enemy goods. Joy interceded on their behalf, and East India Company officials accepted Joy in his "capacity of agent for the United States of America." The case went to the Supreme Court of Judicature, which found the vessels not guilty. Both vessels were released and awarded damages for their unjustified detention. Joy left Calcutta because of ill health in 1795 and transmitted his resignation from Boston the next year. He was succeeded by W.J. Miller, a successful businessman in Calcutta. Joy protested the choice vigorously on the grounds that Miller was not an American but a Scot who had not yet been naturalized! When asked to acknowledge Miller's commission as consul, the Governor-General of Calcutta responded with "the same answer, as we gave to a similar application from Mr. Joy." Jefferson, now President, next appointed Jacob Lewis of Massachusetts as consul in Calcutta in 180 I, but there is no record that Lewis ever reached his post. For some 40 years, there was no U.S. consul in Calcutta. So forgotten were Joy and Miller that when James P. Higginson received his commission at Calcutta in 1843, he mistakenly observed: "There has never been an American consul here before."
William Abbott, Consul and Mayor of Madras Benjamin Joy believed it important also to have consular agents at Madras and Bombay "where many American ships go." On November 24, 1794, he informed the U.S. Department of State that he had appointed a consular agent at Madras, one William Abbott, whom he described as "Secretary to the Nabob of Arcot." Abbott had also spent several years as an agent to a building contractor, then as an agent to the proprietors of the weekly newspaper, Madras Courier.
Abbott's duties as consul did not seem to have distracted him from his varied commercial ventures. In 1798, he was Deputy Master Attendant, one of whose responsibilities was to supply water to ships calling at Madras port. Subsequently, he set up a company called Abbott & Maitland in Madras. He was a creditor to his old employer, the Nawab of Arcot, who had borrowed huge sums of money from various people. (Ultimately, the East India Company undertook to clear the Nawab's debts.) Abbott was active in local politics as well, being appointed one of nine aldermen of "Madraspatnam" between 1793 and 1798. His career ran into a temporary hitch when, on December 8, 1797, he and his family were asked to leave India for allegedly having shown disrespect to the government. He tendered an apology, and the order was withdrawn. The following year Abbott became the mayor of Madras! As for Bombay, the United States appointed Philemon S. Parker consul in 1838. Parker arrived at his post in August 1839, but, predictably, the governor would not recognize him as a consul, and only gave him permission to act as a commercial agent. Parker wrote to the Department of State in Washington that his consular status was being denied because Bombay was a military center and the British feared "a precedent that might lead to similar applications from other nations." There were no other consuls in Bombay at the time. British difficulties with its China trade led to a slump in American trade with India. In 1840, when it had declined to the point that only five or six American ships came to Bombay each year, Parker wrote to the State Department that "without any business whatever to detain me," he was leaving his post. Parker's successor, E.A. Webster, remained only a brief time, departing in 1842 under charges of dishonest conduct, and for ten years the United States was without a consul in Bombay. Only in 1852 did the British government recognize Edward Ely as the first U.S. consul in Bombay. But Ely, unhappy with his low pay, departed a few weeks after his arrival, leaving an Indian, Dassabhoy Merwanjee, in charge as vice consul. In 1854, the pay was improved, and Ely went back to work.
Consuls on Commission Extensive outside business interests, such as Consul William Abbott's in Madras, were the rule rather than the exception in the early years of the American republic. American consuls of the 18th and 19th centuries were not paid regular salaries but rather received commissions out of the fees they charged for the services they performed. It is ironic that the first U.S. Secretary of State, Thomas Jefferson-a man who, when negotiating for a consular convention with France, had remarked on "the absolute inutility of Consuls"-presided over the rapid expansion of the American consular service throughout the world. However; the early U.S. administrations did not attempt to make the consular service into a professional body with salaries, post rotation, or promotions. They instead followed the European
practice of enlisting the services of expatriate businessmen, preferably Americans but about half the time not. Jefferson was strongly against salaries for consuls, writing to the U.S. consul in Santo Domingo: "These appointments are given to gentlemen who are satisfied to perform their duties in consideration of the respect and accidental advantages they may derive from them." Working on commission was not a problem for consuls like Joy or Abbott, who had thriving businesses on the side. But when trade between India and the United States declined, some consuls had a difficult time making ends meet. E.A. Webster's appointed successor as consul in Bombay had no money to pay for passage to Bombay, received none from the U.S. government, and so refused to take up his position. Another consuldesignate to Bombay simply never showed up in India. Still another, claiming it was impossible to live on the $200 in fees he collected each year as a commercial agent, in 1850 went to work for the East India Company at $5,800 per year. A study made by Secretary of State Martin Van Buren in 1830 concluded that "the compensation was so low as to make it impossible for officers to maintain the social standing and influence which their positions demanded." In 1856, the U.S. Congress passed a bill that, for the first time, provided salaries to consular officials. But some consuls still had to live on the fees they collected. In 1897, Samuel Comfort, the consul at Bombay, addressed the following plaintive statement to Assistant Secretary of State John Sherman: "Many American tourists come here and the consul is called upon to carryon an extensive correspondence with American houses in reference to Indian business, as well as with individuals on many subjects, all of which take up much valuable time ... the consul receives only fees which, within the time of my knowledge of the office-nearly four years pasthave never amounted to an aggregate of $500 in any year. If all Indian goods that go from Bombay to the United States were shipped there direct, the fees would be much larger than they are. But, as a matter of fact, much merchandise intended for America is shipped from Bombay to England and the continent of Europe, and thence reshipped to destination, which has the effect of very much reducing the amount of fees collected at this office." Two years later, the consul in Bombay finally began receiving an annual salary. It was only in 1924 that a career American Foreign Service was established, with officers trained for and subject to assignment anywhere in the world. Thenceforth, consular duties were entrusted to full-time professional foreign service officers.
Consular Roles Yesterday and Today The early American consuls in India were the eyes and ears of their country in a land most Americans had never seen. As such, they contributed to the popular American view of India. Charles Huffnagle, who was consul and the consul-general in Calcutta from 1847 to 1857, imported the first Brahman cattle to America in the days before the expression "sacred cow"
entered the English idiom, while Henry Ballantine, consul in Bombay from 1890 to 1893, promoted American fairs as a sideline and brought into the United States the first Indian jugglers, swamis, and princes, complete with jewels and carpets. Through their contacts with local people, the consuls also raised Indian awareness of the United States to such an extent that when the American Civil War broke out in 1861, "Hindustanis" were said to sympathize strongly with the Union cause. Indeed, the Parsis and Hindus of Bombay contributed half the money needed to finance a hospital to treat wounded Civil War soldiers of the Union. At the same time, consuls tracked developments in India of commercial significance to American traders. In 1841, E.A. Webster reported that the East India Company was trying to introduce American cotton seeds and machinery into India and was attempting to recruit Americans for this purpose. Most of the official consular duties listed in the 1792 act of Congress related to the represen ta tion and protection of American shipping interests and American seamen. Indeed, Jefferson had even given consuls permission to wear the naval uniform. A further indication of this emphasis is the fact that the United States did not open a consulate in landlocked Delhi until 1942, even though the capital of India had been moved there decades earlier. The 1792 act authorized consuls to provide for the care of Americans in India who experienced shipwreck, disease, or imprisonment, at a rate not to exceed 12 cents a day. U.S. consuls are still required to look after the interests of American citizens in foreign countries. Today, of course, a consular officer is authorized to spend somewhat more than 12 cents a day on behalf of an American traveler encountering an emergency! When consular officials assist Americans facing legal charges in India or in other countries, they are still guided by the advice of Jefferson: "It will be best not to fatigue the government in which you reside, or those in authority under it, with applications in unimportant cases. Husband their good dispositions for occasions of some moment, and let all representations to them be couched in the most temperate and friendly terms, never indulging in any case whatever, a single expression which may irritate." In modern times, it is visas that command the most attention from U.S. consular officials in India, as in numerous other . countries. In fiscal year 1990, for example, the U.S. Embassy and consulates in India issued more than 23,000 immigrant and 128,000 nonimmigrant visas. Long queues outside the consulates reflect the increasing interest of Indian students, businesspeople, and tourists in visiting the United States. Although the visa function per se did not exist when the U.S. consular service was founded, it is a logical extension of the consuls' evolving role in 200 years of facilitating the evergrowing links between the United States and India. 0 About the Author: Brian Croce Aggeler is a consular officer with the U.S. Information Service in Madras.
FOCUS¡ , INDIA'S NEW AMBASSADOR
K~
Siddhartha Shankar Ray, India's new ambassador to the United States, presented his credentials to President George Bush at a White House ceremony on November 19. Following are excerpts from the texts of their statements on the occasion. Ambassador Ray: It is a privilege for me to assume my functions at a time when major opportunities are opening up for developing Indo-U.S. relations. Economic reforms in India have an important bearing on our bilateral relations The United States has been India's largest trading partner for some time now, but today it has become the single largest investor in our country. We appreciate the support of the United States both bilaterally and within multilateral organizations for the restructuring of the Indian economy that is under way. We value the growing exchanges between our defense establishments [which] reflect a shared interest in conducting a new dialogue on the issues and opportunities thrown up by the end of the Cold War. Symbolic of the new convergence in thinking and perceptions of our two countries was the first ever joint naval exercise by the Indian and U.S. navies off the Indian coast in May 1992. Another important item on the calendar is the Pacific Area Management Seminar scheduled to be held in New Delhi in January 1993, which will be jointly hosted by the Indian and US. armies. We share the United States' nuclear proliferation concerns and are willing to engage in a bilateral dialogue with you on how the goal of nonproliferation can be advanced while taking into account our legitimate security interests. Our two democracies have one vital thing in common: Respect for freedom and the inalienable rig hts of the individual to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Despite numerous difficulties India has not wavered from its democratic commitment. Unfortunately, terrorism has raised its ugly head in some of our borderstates. The Indian State is obliged to combat it, in full recognition of the fact that laws have to be obeyed and human rights of all protected. As part of our commitment to human rights we have decided to set up a National Human Rights Commission. A growing link in our relations is the sizable community of Americans of Indian origin who are maintaining vibrant cultural,
The Indo-U.S. Subcommission for Education and Culture met November 3 in New Delhi to give finishing touches to a series of projects under the rubric of "Information 2000 +." For the next several years, the Subcommission's activities will
scientific, and economic links with India as they contribute to and become part of the American success story. We think Today, not of Yesterday, but of Tomorrow and the program for Tomorrow, indeed its very vision, must include as one of its integral parts the United States of America and India working together in the closest possible understanding, friendship, and amity. President Bush: Iam sure you will soon feel at home here. You will find, if you have not already done so, that we Americans cherish and practice many of the same fundamental vall,Jesheld dear by the people of India. Both our countries were founded on the strong belief that power resides in the people and that government is the servant of the people. The end of the Cold War gives us a special opportunity [for] the promotion of peace and security in the world. For our part, we are working hard with Russia, our former adversary, to build a new relationship based on trust and conciliation rather than confrontation. Your government has also taken steps to reduce regional tensions. We applaud your progress so far, but urge you to redouble your efforts to fully realize peace and security in South Asia. In particular, I encourage you to look seriously at ways to affiliate yourself with the various nonproliferation agreements that have won near universal acceptance. New opportunities for expanded cooperation between our two countries are evident in the economic field where Prime Minister Rao has taken bold new steps to reform the Indian economy. Iam sure that, as economic liberalization measures take root, American firms will look increasingly at India ...as an excellent place to inves1and trade. For over 200 years, and especially since your independence in 1947, the American and Indian people have built a vast web of private and public contacts that promote mutual understanding and strengthen our friendship. Scientific, technical, cultural, and educational exchanges have been extensive, and we must ensure that they continue and flourish. There are well over a million persons of Indian origin ...living and working permanently in the United States. Their presence here underlines the increasingly close ties between our two peoples.
focus on this multiprogram initiative aimed at exploring the rapidly developing information and communication technologies and assessing their impact on the lives of Indians and Americans at the dawn of the 21st century. TechnQlogy plays a part in almost every aspect of daily life, whether it is the office worker entering data on a computer,
the farmer benefiting from satellite technology through radio weather reports, or a child using a computer in a classroom. "Information 2000 +" will offer a breadth of knowledge that can be used as the basis for making informed choices and judicious use of the resources available. To strike a balance between the dazzle of technology and its realistic application, "Informa-
U.S.Ambassador Thomas R. Pickering inaugurated a new IndoU.S.state-of-the-art optics plant last month in Bhiwadi (Alwar District), Rajasthan. The Rs. 290 million plant is a joint business venture between Bausch & Lomb Incorporated of the United States, a Fortune 500 company and a world leader in optics, and Montari Industries, which is part of the Bhai Mohan Singh Group of companies that include the well-known pharmaceutical firm of Ranbaxy. The Bhiwadi facility, India's first integrated optics plant, will manufacture soft contact lenses, cleaning solution, deproteinizing tablets, metallic frames for prescription glasses, and Bausch & Lomb's famous Ray-Ban sunglasses. The plant has an annual licensed capacity to manufacture 480,000 soft lenses and 500,000 metallic frames for prescription glasses and sunglasses. "This is the first Bausch & Lomb plant that will produce four things under one roof," said Daniel E. Gill, chairman and chief executive officer of Bausch & Lomb, who flew in from the United States for the inauouration. "We envisage this plant not only catering to the Indian market but also exporting to the Far East." Bausch & Lomb's decision to set up a plant in India, Ambassador Pickering said, is proof of "the company's abiding confidence in the future progress, potential, growth, and stability of India. Th5l United States government feels the same way." He also observed that "transfers of technology by U.S. companies and joint business ventures can make a very special contribution to India's economic and industrial development-providing capital, technology, and management skill resources as a package, custom-tailored to the requirements of a given project." Seen above are, from left, Human Resource Development Minister Arjun Singh, Bausch & Lomb India Managing Director Bhai Manjit Singh, Daniel E.Gill, Ambassador Pickering (behind Gill), Rajasthan Chief Minister Bhairon Singh Shekhawat, and Narendra Singh of Bausch & Lomb India.
tion 2000 +" will blend programs that set the imagination reeling at the possibilities promised by futuristic technology with those that offer cost-effective, immediate, future-oriented solutions to present-day problems. Designed and developed by leading authorities in the fields of information and communication from both countries, the programs will apply information
technology to traditional areas of Indo-U.S. cooperation-arts, science, education, and media. "Information 2000 +" will be inaugurated in New Delhi next March with an interdisciplinary symposium titled, "The Future of the Mind; The Mind of the Future." The symposium will be attended by philosophers, communications specialists, neural scientists, and authors.
Ajay Kothari (above), an aerospace engineer at Astrox Corporation in Rockville, Maryland, is the co-writer and plays the male lead in Akanksha, an 80-minute movie that was recently premiered at the University of Maryland's adulteducation theater in College Park. The film focuses on an Indian couple living in America. The wife, observing the freedom women enjoy in America, wants to follow in their footsteps to realize her ambition and dreams. But she finds herself pitted against her husband, who believes that the wife's place is the home. "These problems are allpervasive," says Kothari, who holds a doctorate in aerospace engineering. Immigrants from any number of Asian and Middle Eastern countries face similar cultural adjustment problems when they arrive in the United States. Though it is difficult to offer a universal solution, Akanksha, a Neeraj Bindal film, suggests that immigrants should "combine old thinking and new modern thinking to come up with your own," says Kothari. In the film the husband finally recognizes and accepts his wife's aspirations arid her desire to realize her potential within an Indian-American family.
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The Man Who I{new Infinity A Review by IAN STEWART
Robert Kanigel's biography of Srinivasa Ramanujan Iyengar "is a sensitive and intimate portrait of Ramanujan, the human being, who lived for mathematics." Godfrey Harold Hardy was a pure mathematician and the archetypal Cambridge don: Fellow of Trinity College; unmarried; his life a mixture of research, cricket, and college society; his features so finely chiseled that c.P. Snow described his face as "beautiful." He was eccentric in a disarmingly English way: He abhorred telephones and waged a quiet but very personal vendetta against God. Srinivasa Ramanujan Iyengar was born into a poor Brahmin family, contracted smallpox at the age of two, flunked out of college twice, went through an arranged marriage with a 'girl of ten, and was described by Ramachandra Rao as "a short, uncouth figure, stout, unshaved, not overclean." He was a Brahmin and worshiped the goddess Namagiri of Namakkal. It is hard to imagine two people more unlike each other. Yet their lives became so strongly entwined that it is difficult to mention one without, in the same breath, referring to the other. The Man Who Knew Infinity: A Life of the Genius Ramanujan by Robert Kanigel (published by Scribner's last year) is really a biography of them both, although Ramanujan takes pride of place. Perspicacious, informed, imaginative, the work is to my mind the best mathematical biography I have ever read. In January of 1913, when Europe was becoming enmeshed in what would become World War I, Hardy received a large manila envelope, postmarked Madras. Inside was a sheaf of papers, and a covering letter: Dear Sir, I beg to introduce myself to you as a clerk in the Accounts Department of the Port Trust Office at Madras on a salary
of only ÂŁ20 per annum, I am now about 23 years of age. I have had no U niversity education .... After leaving school I have been employing the spare time at my disposal to work at Mathematics .... I am striking out a new path for myself.
rems published .... Being inexperienced I would very highly value any advice you give me, Requesting to be excused for the trouble I give you.
Prominent mathematicians-and Hardy was one of England's greatest-receive packages like this all the time. Mostly they come from cranks who imagine they have squared the circle or trisected the angle, problems that mathematicians know to be insoluble. Hardy could easily have thrown the package away; but a page of strange formulas caught his eye. He recognized a few, but others were quite unusual.
Hardy quickly convinced himself that this was no crank, but a self-taught mathematician of the highest order. He decided that Ramanujan should be brought to England. Thus began their paradoxical friendship. The centenary of Ramanujan's birth took place five years ago. An hour-long television program was made about him, and innumerable articles appeared in newspapers and magazines. The Shobana Jeyasingh Indian Dance Company created and performed a new dance, Correspondences, to celebrate his life and works. His name should be a household word-but it is not,
The letter continued: I would request enclosed papers. convinced that value I would
you to Being there like to
go through the poor, if you are is anything of have my theo-
I remain, Dear Sir, Yours truly, S. Ramanujan.
because he was a great mathematician, not a great artist, musician, or writer. Perhaps this biography will change that. Ramanujan's life and his mathematics were inseparable; it is impossible to understand one while ignoring the other. The Man Who Knew Infinity is not just a brilliant biography of Ramanujan, the genius born in a hovel. Nor is it a "life and works," part one Life, part two Works. It is a sensitive and intimate portrait of Ramanujan, the human being, who lived for mathematics. Robert Kanigel puts the mathematics where it belongs, into the daily activity of Ramanujan's life. He shows us what it is like to be a mathematician, to be driven by the secret beauty of this most mysterious of endeavors. You do not need to have any sympathy at all with mathematics to read The Man Who Knew Infinity with pleasure; but by the time you have finished it, some of Ramanujan's love of his subject will probably have rubbed off on you, and you will have begun to appreciate the hypnotic fa-scination that it exerts upon those who make it their life's work. Kanigel gives a vivid account of Ram anujan's childhood in the India of the British Raj. His father was a clerk in a shop that sold silk saris to prosperous farmers when they married off their daughters; his mother, a strong-willed and obsessive woman who would do whatever was necessary to ensure that he learned what to do, and what not to do, to become a good Brahmin boy. Ramanujan grew up in Kumbakonam in the province of Tamil Nadu. His mother, Komalatammal, sang devotional songs at a temple near their home on Sarangapani Sannidhi Street, a strawroofed house with a frontage of no more than six meters. The five or ten rupees a month that she earned made an enormous difference, for her husband earned only 20. Three brothers and sisters died before Ramanujan was eight. His grandfather suffered from leprosy. Every morning Ramanujan took a ritual bath in the Cauvery River. ("He heard it all his life," Kanigel writes, "the slow, measured thwap ... thwap ... thwap ... of wet
clothes being pounded clean on rocks jutting up from the waters of the Cauvery River.") Even a poor Brahmin took enormous pride in cleanliness-and in education. Brahmins were making an uneasy transition from sacred to secular, from guru to professional. At the age of ten Ramanujan passed his primary examinations-English, Tamil, arithmetic, and geography-with the top score in the district. By the age of 12 he was asking mathematical questions whose answers were clearly beyond the ability of his teachers. In 1904 Ramanujan won the school prize for mathematics, his teacher remarking that a score of 100 percent understated his achievements. At some time in 1903 he came across a copy of George Shoo bridge Carr's A Synopsis of Elementary Results in Pure and Applied Mathematics. It is a very odd book: A list of some 5,000 equations, ranging over the whole of mathematics. There were no detailed explanations, but there was a sense of flow about the bookeach formula was a logical extension of those before. It was a map of the mathematical territory that showed only the hilltops, but it located those accurately in relation to each other. It may sound a thoroughly boring piece of hackwork, but it changed Ramanujan's life. With boundless inventiveness and enthusiasm, he moved quickly through the countryside between the hilltops, and then began to discover new hilltops of his own. Unfortunately, he neglected everything else to do it. When he should have been listening to lectures on Roman history, he would sit scribbling formulas. He lost his college scholarship, ran out of money, and ran away from home-heading for the college founded by Pachaiyappa Mudaliar, and a second attempt. Everybody was struck by Ramanujan's gift for mathematics. Unfortunately he had to study other subjects, such as physiology. ("Procure a rabbit which has been recently killed but not skinned"-not very appealing for a vegetarian.) By 1907 he had failed his exams, twice, and had to leave. Ramanujan was alone with his ma thema tics. He began to compile a notebook mod-
eled on Carr's Synopsis. recording his results but not the thoughts that led to them. His sources were out of date, his approach old-fashioned; but his genius would not so much transcend those difficulties as cut through them as if they never existed. As Kanigel puts it: "He was like a species that has branched off from the main evolutionary line, and, like an Australian echidna or Galapagos tortoise, had come to occupy a biological niche all his own." By now Ramanujan was back at homefat, unemployed, pottering around with his notebooks. No mother would be impressed, especially not Komalatammal. She found him a wife and married him off. Although Janaki would not join him until after she reached puberty, still three years away, it marked a major change for Ramanujan. He was now a grihasta, a family man with responsibilities. He went looking for a job. In Decem ber 1910 he was in trod uced to Ramachandra Rao, the district collector of Nellore, a man with the right connections to do something for an impoverished genius. It took four visits before Rao was convinced. He paid Ramanujan Rs. 25 a month from his own pocket, and looked for a suitable scholarship. For the first time in many years, Ramanujan was happy. He published a paper in the Indian Journal of Mathematics. He got a job as a Class III, Grade IV clerk in the accounts section of Madras Port Trust. One of the attractions was that he could take away used wrapping paper, on which to write yet more formulas. c.L.T. Griffith, an engineering professor at Madras Engineering College, rec- . ognized Ramanujan's ability and wrote about him to his former professor Micaiah Hill at University College in London. Hill was guardedly positive but did not wish to take Ramanujan on as a student. Ramanujan wrote to H.F. Baker, a fellow of the Royal Society and previous president of the London Mathematical Society. No success. He tried E.W. Hobson, Sadleirian Professor at Cambridge. Another failure. Discouraged, but resolved to make one final attempt, he wrote to Hardy.
Hardy was not easily convinced. He and his colleague John Edensor Littlewood pored over Ramanujan's list of formulas. Some were very familiar, others "scarcely possible to believe," as Hardy later wrote. They tried to prove some of the simpler-looking results, and soon decided that Ramanujan was keeping a great deal up his sleeve. Just one of Ramanujan's formulas would subsequently keep three mathematicians busy for a decade. In an uncharacteristic burst of romanticism, Hardy declared that the results "must be true, because if they were not true, no one would have the imagination to invent them." Hardy tried to get Ramanujan to Cambridge. Brahminic scruples-Ramanujan's, hiS friends', his family's-intervened. Ramanujan had no wish to become an "outcaste," as Mahatma Gandhi had become a quarter of a century earlier when he went to England for an education. Instead, Hardy persuaded the University of Madras to bend the rules and give Ramanujan a scholarship, and the two mathematicians corresponded regularly. Hardy insisted that Ramanujan should provide proofs of his remarkable results, Ramanujan offered excuses and revealed little of his methods. When Eric Neville, another Trinity fellow, visited Madras to lecture, Hardy instructed him to persuade Ramanujan to come to England. This time Ramanujan said yes. What had changed his mind? Amazingly, it was Komalatammal. She announced that in a dream she had seen her son surrounded by Europeans, and the goddess Namagiri had commanded her not to stand between him and his life's purpose. One of the most memorable sections of the Indian dance production of Correspondences occurs just before Ramanujan leaves Madras for England. In vivid mime, he is seen going to a tailor to be fitted out in an English suit. Nothing could better dramatize the changes about to occur in his life. On March 17, 1913, with a second-class ticket on the steamer Nevasa, Ramanujan sailed for England. There were two main tasks confronting Hardy, now that Ramanujan was in Cam-
bridge. He had to tease out Ramanujan's methods, so that others could benefit from his insights; and he had to fill gaps in Ramanujan's education, since there were major omissions in Carr's Synopsis. Together they began to go over Ramanujan's notebooks and turn them into "real" mathematics that could be published. Between 1914 and 1920, either with Hardy or on his own, Ramanujan wrote some three dozen research papers. Several are classics. Hardy now understood why Ramanujan had been unwilling to provide proofs. He didn't have any, not in the rigorous sense that would satisfy a professional mathematician. What he had was a mixture of intuition and calculation, enough to satisfy him that he was right. Tamil culture places great value on patterns and numbers-perhaps this influenced him as a child. Ramanujan claimed that the goddess Namagiri told him formulas in dreams. Despite this, Hardy's view was that "all mathematicians think, at bottom, in the same kind of way, and Ramanujan was no exception." His strange patterns of thought were caused by his unusual upbringing. But Hardy added: "He combined a power of generalization, a feeling for form, and a capacity for rapid modification of his hypotheses, that were often really startling." Ramanujan was strong on algebraic calculations and the manipulation of symbols, and had a genius for formulas. He liked intriguing special results, and would often conceal any general methods that might lie behind them. This was a style employed by many of the giants of mathematics during the 18th and 19th centuries. But by the early 20th century, the emphasis was on general methods, sweeping theories, broad structure rather than individual detail. Ramanujan was out of date. Hardy had to deal with this as best he could, without destroying the quintessential quality ofRamanujan's mind. He had to exploit his friend's talents in the most effective way, but he could not try to change their nature. So remarkable were those talents, however, that even being old-fashioned scarcely blunted them. Indeed, it ca'n now be argued that Rama-
nujan was not behind the times, but ahead of them. The fashion in mathematics goes in cycles, swinging from the concrete to the abstract and back again over a period of 60 to 100 years. Changes in mathematical style, brought about in part by the digital nature of modern electronics, have placed renewed emphasis on mathematics of the kind that Ramanujan loved. Every year, his work grows in stature. Bruce Berndt, at the University of Illinois, Urbana, recently edited the first part of a three-volume work, Ramanujan's Notebooks, aiming to supply proofs of all of his formulas. He writes: With a more conventional education, Ramanujan might not have depended on the original formal methods of which he was proud and rather protective .... lf he had thought like a well-trained mathematician, he would not have recorded many of the formulas which he thought he had proved but which, in fact, he had not proved. Mathematics would be poorer today if history had followed such a course.
One theorem can suggest the flavor of Ramanujan's mathematics. It should really be expressed as a formula-a curious formula, rather offbeat, even mysterious-for that is how Ramanujan conceived it.* But it can be explained in words. It is about partitions-ways to express a given number as a sum of smaller ones. Take a multiple of five, i.e., a number that is the product of five and another number, and add four to it. Then the number of different partitions of this number is always a multiple of five. For example the number 9 (I x 5 + 4) has precisely 30 partitions, and 30 is indeed divis- . ible by 5. In Ramanujan's formula, the divisibility by 5 leaps to the eye: All else is hidden in the depths. Before Ramanujan made his discovery, the arithmetical properties of partitions were a total mystery. It's not that nobody could prove anything about them: It's that nobody *The formula is: p(4) + p(9)x + p(14)xl + = S{(l-xS)(l-xIO)(l-x {(1-x)(1-x )(l-x l
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realized there was anything to prove. Ramanujan did not find it easy to adapt to Cambridge life. When an Indian student visited him in 1913, he asked Ramanujan whether he was warm at night. He replied that he always slept with his overcoat on, wrapped in a shawl. Wondering whether his friend had enough blankets, the student took a look. There they were, neatly piled beneath the bed. Nobody had shown Ramanujan what to do with them. As a Brahmin and a vegetarian, Ramanujan did not frequent the college dining hall. He cooked for himself. In wartime England, the ingredients he needed were not easily obtained. He was often miserable. On Sundays he would have Indian friends over for rasam, a thin peppery soup; but when his guests once refused third helpings, Ramanujan was so offended that he left in the middle of dinner, took a taxi to Oxford, and did not show up for four days. It is still a mystery precisely what disease laid Ramanujan low in the spring of 1917. The earliest diagnosis was a gastric ulcer, then cancer was suspected, then blood poisoning. At the sanatorium in Mendip Hills he was treated for tuberculosis, and that remains the most likely suspect. The treatment required plenty of "fresh air" and Ramanujan froze. They tried to feed him scrambled eggs on toast. Back home in India, trouble was brewing between Janaki and Komalatammal. Ramanujan's mother wouldn't let his wife write to him, or read his letters. Ramanujan knew only what his mother told him. When a letter from Janaki finally did get through, his reply held no warmth or feeling. His morale had hit rock bottom. There were a few bright spots. In a second sanatorium, at Matlock, he learned from Hardy that he had been elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS), the first Indian to be so honored. Subsequently he was made a Fellow of Trinity. In A Mathematician's Miscellany Littlewood says: "I am the only person who knows the facts, and they should be put on record, if only as illustrating the fantastic state of the College just after the 1914-1918 war." He describes how
Ramanujan's election was opposed by several Fellows at Trinity. One "went about openly saying that he wasn't going to have a black man as a Fellow." The fact that Ramanujan already had an FRS was seen by the opposition as a dirty triGk. By now Ramanujan was out of Matlock and had gone to a small hospital "overlooking a perfectly proportioned little square in the heart of London, on which George Bernard Shaw had lived in the l890s and Virginia Woolf for four years until 1911." He moved again to Putney. Visiting him one day, Hardy happened to remark that the taxi he had just taken was number 1729. "Rather a dull number," Hardy ventured. "No, Hardy," Ramanujan protested. "It is a very interesting number. It is the smallest number expressed as the sum of two cubes in two different ways." His morale improved, and suddenly he was doing mathematics again-more deep properties of his beloved partitions. Ramanujan seemed much improved, and he had gained seven kilograms in weight. In April 1919 he returned to India. The long voyage may have been a mistake, for by the time he arrived in Madras his health had once more deteriorated. Janaki was not there to greet him: Komalatammal had not informed her he was comingindeed, had no idea where she was. But Janaki read of it in the newspaper, learned that Ramanujan wanted her, and that was enough: Mother-in-law notwithstanding, she came to meet him in Madras. For three months they stayed at a small bungalow on Luz Church Road, finally beginning to get to know each other. Janaki had been 13 when she came to live with him: Now she was 18. Ramanujan wished to go to the river for a ritual cleansing. "Janaki wanted to go with him. Ramanujan said yes. Komalatammal said no. And Ramanujan insisted, yes." Finally he was master in his own house. In January of 1920 he wrote to Hardy, about a new discovery-his "mock theta functions." The classical theta functions were invented for such purposes as calculating the perimeter of an ellipse.
They are a rich source of intricate formulas. Ramanujan, purely for reasons of formal beauty, had invented his own variation on the classical theme. It was a mathematical gold mine, and he was stimulated to produce some of the best mathematics he had ever done. All that year he worked on them, producing something like 650 new formulas. George Andrews of Pennsylvania State University in Philadelphia tackled them half a century later. Among one group of five superficially similar results-"the first one took me IS minutes to prove, the second an hour. The fourth one followed from the second. The third and fifth took me three months." There was nothing wrong with Ramanujan's mind, only with his body. "He was only' skin and bones," Janaki recalled. Although in great pain, he still was consumed by mathematics, calculating on a slate, copying results on to paper. "It was always math .... Four days before he died he was scribbling." He died in April 1920. He was cremated near Chetput. Ramanujan has been called a magician, a sorcerer, a gift from heaven, an enigma. "It is uncanny," Kanigel remarks, "how often otherwise dogged rationalists have, over the years, turned to the language of the shaman and the priest to convey something of Ramanujan's gifts." Richard Askey, at the University of Wisconsin, is quoted as saying, "We have no idea how he did the marvelous things he did, what led him to do them, or anything else." Mathematics is a jungle, the Jungle of the Infinite. Most of us see only broad paths driven through it by pioneers, trampled flat by generations of fellow students. A few go out and hack new paths of their own. But Ramanujan was a creature of the jungle, who could move through it at will without leaving any traces of his passing. Only a creature of the jungle can understand another. He was, indeed, the man who knew infinity. D About the Reviewer: Ian Stewart is the author of The Problems of Mathematics, Does God Play Dice? and Game, Set & Math. He writes a bimonthly column, "Mathematical Recreations," for Scientific American.
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