July 1995

CITIBAN(O~

SPANhlYl995 One of my earliest childhood memories is of the funeral for my uncle, my father's brother, who was killed in Europe during World War II. I was fascinated by the somber ritual of two soldiers removing the American flag that covered his coffin, methodically folding it into a compact triangle, and presenting it to my grandmother. I wanted to hold the flag but was not permitted to do so.

Not long afterward I was given the responsibility of holding something-the rings to be exchanged at the wedding of another uncle, my mother's brother. Unknown to me at the time was the fact that he had survived the sinking of his ship in the Battle of Midway, having spent many hours in the water before being rescued. I don't know the details because he never wanted to talk about his experience. Such reticence was once described by the eminent Americanjournalist Eric Sevareid: "War happens inside a man ...and that is why, in a certain sense, you and your sons from the war will be forever strangers.

"If, by the miracles of art and genius, in later years two or three among them can open their hearts and the right words come, then perhaps we shall all know a little what it was like-and we shall know then that all the present speakers and writers hardly touched the story."

We have made an attempt to touch the story this month in connection with the 50th anniversary of the end of the war. We focus on "the forgotten front," the China-BurmaIndia theater. Our coverage includes Pushpindar Singh's report on the visit here of 19American veterans who joined Indian veterans in commemorating the legendary campaign to fly supplies into China. Author Robert 1. Waller profiles Charlie Uban, one of the many civilian pilots who "bellied up against death" countless times "over the Hump." Freelance reporter Lea Terhune tells about her father's experiences as a mechanic for the Hump planes.

Khushwant Singh, a writer of a certain age,shares some of his memories of the war years. He recallsthe impact made by American troops in India, the debate over the country's participation in the war,and the sacrificesthat Indians made.

Finally, historian Stephen E. Ambrose discusses how the war affected America. The country suffered fewer casualties than the other major combatants while experiencing significant social integration and economic growth. Such change, however, was accompanied by fear and sacrifice. In the years after the war, I knew few if any families that had not lost a member in battle or at least suffered the anxiety of waiting for the return of someone in uniform.

At a reception for the American and Indian veterans, U.S. Ambassador Frank G. Wisner said, "The enduring lesson of World War II is that the test of a free society is the willingness of its citizens to place themselves in harm's way in order to preserve their liberty and ensure that future generations enjoy its blessings." The 50th anniversary gives those of us who have grown up amidst such blessings the opportunity to honor and reflect on the sacrifices of those who made it possible.

- G.E.O.

2 4 6 9

110

12 14

A Remembrance The Boy From the Burma Hump by Robert James Waller StoriesMyFatherToldMe byLea Terhune Return Flight by Pushpindar Singh For the Sake of Righteousness byKhushwantSingh The Transformation of America byStephenE. Ambrose

16

The Perils of Protectionism An Interview With Jagdish Bhagwati by Fredric Smoler

19 21 26 34

38 41

42 44

There'sMoneyinEconomics

by Sylvia Nasar Arthur Tress: The Dream Collector by Arun Bhanot Jefferson in Reel Life byHelenDudar Rescuing the Art ofSatyajit Ray by Andrew Robinson Country Cubes by Julie V. Iovine On the Lighter Side Focus On ...

UpFromSlavery byThomasSowell

Front cover. From top: Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin at Yalta; bombed out Hamburg; General Douglas MacArthur in the Philippines; Air Chief Marshal (Retd.) Arjan Singh and Bishop James K. Mathews; U.S. Hump veterans in Delhi; andlndianjawans with gallantry medals.

Publisher,Thomas A. Homan; Editor, Guy E. Olson Managing Editor, Krishan Gabrani; Associate Editors, Arun Bhanot, Prakash Chandra; Copy Editors. A. Venkata Narayana, Snigdha Goswami; Editorial Assistants. Rashmi Goel, Ashok Kumqr; Photo Editor, Avinash Pasricha; Art Director, Nand Katyal; Contributing Designers, Gopi Gajwani, Suhas Nimbalkar; Staff Designer, Hemant Bhatnagar; Production Assistan¡t, Sanjay Pokhriyal; Circulation Manager, D.P. Sharma; Photographic Services: USIS Photographic Services Unit; Research Services: USIS Documentation Services, American Center Library, New Delhi.

Photographs: Front cover top left-US. Army Air Force photograph; center left-Indian Armed Forces Film & Photo Division; center right-Wide World Photos, Inc.; bottomAvinash Pasricha (2). 2 top-US. Navy, National Archives; bottom-US. Army, DAVA. 3-Indian Armed Forces Film & Photo Division. 6--courtesy Lea Terhune. 8-Signal Corps photo. IO-II-Avinash Pasricha except 10 left by Pushpindar Singh. l2--courtesy Indian Armed Forces Film & Photo Division. 13--courtesy Lancer International.

14-15-Library of Congress. l7--courtesy Department of Economics, Columbia University. 19-courtesy Harvard News Office, Cambridge, Massachusetts. 20--courtesy MlT. 34-American Film Institute. 35-Avinash Pasricha. 36-37--courtesy India Today. 42 top-AP/PTI; bottom--courtesy Ford Foundation. 43 top right-Cliff Coles; all three courtesy Eugene Ballet Company. 47 left-Library of Congress.

Published by the United States Information Service, American Center, 24 Kasturba Gandhi Marg, New Delhi 110001 (phone: 3316841), on behalf of the American Embassy, New Delhi. Printed at Thomson Press (India) Limited, Faridabad. Haryana. The opinions expressed in this magazine do not necessarily reflect the views or policies of the U.S. Government. Use of SPAN articles in other publications is encouraged, except when copyrighted. For permission write to the Editor. Price of magazine. one year subscription (12 issues) Rs. 120(Rs. 110for students); single copy, Rs. 12.

The Japanese attack Pearl Harbor, December 7, 1941.

WORLD A

RIMEMBRAHCE This year marks the 50th anniversary of the end of the most devastating war in the history of the world. In September 1939 Germany invaded Poland, setting off a global conflict that edged the world toward Armageddon.

Hitler's blitzkrieg (lightning war) enabled his mechanized legions to conquer Denmark and Norway before overpowering Belgium, France, and the Netherlands in quick succession. In April 1941 Greece fell. With Mussolini's Italy allied with Hitler's Third Reich, Great Britain stood virtually alone in Europe. In August 1940 the Battle of Britain began. The Luftwaffe first attacked England's ports and factories in the south, then industrial towns in the midlands, and London itself. The Royal Air Force, with only 800 fighter planes to counter the 3,000-aircraft-strong Luftwaffe, resisted fiercely as Prime Minister Winston Churchill led Great Britian to its "finest hour,"vowing "we shall never surrender."

Hitler scrapped his plans for a cross-channel invasion of England and, instead, turned his armies on the Soviet Union. With wonted ease, the German juggernaut soon reached the outskirts of Moscow.

But by December 1941 the harsh Russian winter slowed the German advance, and the battered Russians began to regroup. The city of Leningrad withstood a siege of 900 days, and the Germans retreated from the oil-rich Caucasus. This German reverse and the Russian victory in the Battle of Stalin grad transformed the Allied campaign on the eastern front.

The United States was supplying the Allies with massive quantities of equipment, but strong isolationist sentiment prevented direct involvement in the fighting. Then on December 7, 1941, the Japanese, flush from their conquests of Manchuria and China, attacked the American

fleet at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, denouncing the attack as "a day that will live in infamy," persuaded the U.S. Congress to declare war against Japan on December 8, and against Germany and Italy on December II. The war in the Pacific began to turn when American air and naval forces, aided by the Australian and New Zealand navies, crippled Japan's aircraft-carrier striking force in the Battle of Midway in June 1942. On the Asian mainland, British, American, and Indian forces valiantly fought the Japanese to save India, regain Burma, and enable the resupply of China.

On the European front, Allied forces landed in Sicily in July 1943, and in September Italy surrendered. German armies, however, fought doggedly before retreating up the Italian boot. The struggle against the Axis powers in the Mediterranean culminated in the British Commonwealth victory at EI Alamein, Egypt, in October 1942. This freed the Allies to organize forces for an attack on the North European coast. Shortly after midnight on June 6, 1944, in the largest air and seaborne operation ever mounted, some 155,000 mostly British and

GIs leave their landing craft and wade ashore on Omaha Beach in Normandy, June 6, /944.

American troops, with 20,000 vehicles, crossed the English Channel and invaded France along the Normandy coast. After weeks of bitter fighting, the Allied armies arrived at the frontier of Germany in September. Elsewhere, in December 1944, U.S. forces trapped in the snow-shrouded Ardennes forest of southeast Belgium fought the Battle of the Bulge to quash the war's final major German counteroffensive. As British and U.S. armies advanced into Germany across the Rhine from the west, Soviet Red Army units dashed headlong for Berlin from the east.

In the Pacific, U.S.-led forces won battle after hard-won battle to reach the strategic Japanese island of Okinawa by April 1945. Then, on the orders of President Harry S Truman, America dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima on August 6, and a second one on Nagasaki on August 9. The devastation wrought by the two attacks forced the Japanese to surrender on September 2, 1945. President Truman later said he ordered the bombings to bring the war to a swift close and thus prevent even greater casualties in a protracted campaign of traditional warfare.

The casualty statistics are staggering: Seventy million people took part in the war; 16 million of them were killed-nearly one out of four.

Another 18 million civilians died because of the war, and the total of wounded and missing will never be known.

SPAN marks the 50th anniversary with articles on the Allied campaign to ferry supplies into China and to halt the Japanese advance into South Asia; the role of American GIs in India; the contributions of Indian forces to the war effort; and the ways in which the war changed America.

"

From above: Collage of 1941-42 headlines from the New York Times; (inset) General Sir Claude Auchinleck, Commanderin-Chief of Allied forces in India, examines a Japanese sword presented to him by Brigadiers R.A. Hu[[en (center) and K. S Thimaya (left) on behalf of the Allied 51 Brigade whosejawans retrieved the sword at Kangau, Arakan, April 1944; Indian soldiers prepare to fire a 25-pound gun at Japanese positions in the Imphal area, March 1944; in Imphal, Air Commodore SF Vincent toasts Squadron Leader Aljan Singh for being awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross, May 1944; and Private Irven Stanley bandages the leg of Hari Singh,freed when American troops attacked Admiralty Island in New Guinea, March 1944.

1111

¡rma The DoY. From the B .by ROBERTJAMES

WALLER

In his apartment in Calcutta, there was a grand piano. He wore khaki then, walked the bazaars and tapped away at the piano or played lawn tennis during his leaves from upcountry. After a week or two, he was ready when the call came for the return to Dinjan.

He carried only a small suitcase for the journey, his "laundry" as he called it, and looked forward to getting back to the jungle and the mountains, away from the sterile and crumbling world of the British raj. His flight left Calcutta, climbing northeast over the Khasi Hills toward Assam, the secluded province that curls off main India and lies snuggled up on the left shoulder of Burma, just short of the Himalayan rise.

At Dinjan, he and the other pilots slept and took their meals in a large bungalow on the fringe of a tea plantation. Well before dawn, he was awakened by the hand of a servant boy.

Now he stands drinking thick Indian tea on the veranda, looking out toward the jungle where leopards sometimes go.

An open four-wheel-drive command car arrives, and he rides through the heavy night toward an airfield five miles away. Time is important now, in this early morning of 1943. Since losing an airplane to Japanese fighters over the Ft. Hertz Valley, the pilots cross there only in darkness or bad weather when the fighters are grounded. He signs the cargo manifest, checks the weather report, and walks out to the plane.

Like delicate crystal, our liberties sometimes juggle in the hands of young men. Boys, really. qimbing to the top of the arch at the front of their lives, some of them flew into Asian darkness, across primitive spaces of the mind and the land, and came to terms with ancient fears the rest of us keep imperfectly at bay.

There was Steve Kusak. And poker-playing Roy Farrell from Texas. Saxophonist Al Mah, Einar "Micky" Mickelson, Jimmy Scoff, Casey Boyd, Hockswinder, Thorwaldson, Rosbert, Maupin, and the rest.

And there is Captain Charlie Uban. Khaki shorts, no shirt, leather boots, tan pilot's cap over wavy blond hair, gloves for tightening the throttle lock.

He waits in the darkness of northeast India for his clearance from air traffic control in nearby Chabua. There are perhaps a dozen planes out there in the night, some of them Reprinted from Old SanKS in C1 New Cafe. Copyright Š 1994 by Robert James Waller. Originally published in The D('s Moim's

Rexisler.

April 8. 1990.

Burma & Ledo

Roads

flying with only 500 feet of vertical separation.

Captain Charlie Uban. Twenty-two years old, five feet nine inches, 141 pounds. Born in a room over the bank in Thompson, Iowa, when airplanes were still a curiosity and the long Atlantic haul was only a dream to Lindbergh.

Chabua gives him his slot, and he powers his C-47 down the blacktop through the jungle night, riding like the hood ornament on a diesel truck, with 5,000 pounds of small arms ammunition behind him in the cargo bay. He concentrates on the sound of the twin Pratt & Whitney engines working hard at 2,700 RPMs, ignoring the chatter in his earphones.

The plane, with its payload plus 800 gallons of gasoline, is two tons over its recommended gross flying weight of 24,000 pounds.

Gently then, Charlie Uban eases back on the yoke, pulls the nose up, and climbs, not like an arrow, but rather in the way a great heron beats its way upward from a green backwater.

It gets dicey about here. If an engine fails, he does not yet have enough air speed for rudder control. And he's lost his runway, so there is no opportunity to chop the takeoff and get stopped. But he gains altitude, turns southeast from Dinjan, and flies toward that cordillera of the southern Himalayas called the Burma Hump.

His copilot and radio operator are both Chinese. In the next four hours, they will cross three of the great river valleys of the world: The Irrawaddy, the Salween, and the Mekong. In the place where India, Tibet, Burma, and Yunnan province of China all come together, the mountain ranges lining these rivers constitute the Hump.

This is the world of the China National Aviation Corporation (CNAC-pronounced "see-knack"). Jointly owned by China and Pan American Airways, CNAC flies as a private carrier under nominal military control of the U.S. Air Transport Command. In the flesh, CNAC is a strange collection CHINA of civilian pilots from the United States, Australia, China, Great Britain, Canada, and Denmark.

They are soldiers of fortune, some of the best hired guns in the world at pushing early and elemental cargo planes where the planes don't want to go and where most pilots won't take them. As one observer put it: "All were motivated by a thirst for either money or adventure or both, and it was impossible to gain much of the first without acquiring a con sid-

Hump erable amount of the latter."

Some were members of Claire Chennault's dashing American Volunteer Group [AVG]-the Flying Tigersmustered out of various branche fly PAO fighter planes with tigerteeth painted 0 coolers in defense of China. When the AVG was disbanded, 16 of the remaining 21 Tigers decided to throw in with CNAe. Dinjan is the penultimate stop, the last caravanserai, on the World War II lend-lease column stretching from the United States to Kunming, China. Along sea and air routes to Calcutta, and then by rail to Dinjan, moves virtually everything needed to keep China in the war, including perfume and jewelry for Madame Chiang Kai-shek.

Japan controls the China coast and large slices of the interior.

Until the spring of 1942, lend-lease supplies were shipped to Rangoon, freighted by rail up to Lashio, and moved from there by truck over the Burma Road to China.

Then Vinegar Joe Stilwell's armies, sabotaged by British disinterest in Burma and by the indecisive, factionalized, and corrupt government of Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, were driven north. With the Japanese owning Rangoon, the railhead at Lashio, and portions of the Road, China was closed to the outside by both land and water. So it fell to the pilots to ferry materiel from Dinjan to Kunming. To fly the Hump.

As he reaches higher altitudes, Charlie pulls on a shirt, chino pants, woolen coveralls, and a leather flight jacket. Going through 10,000 feet he switches over to oxygen. At 14,000 feet, he needs more power in the thin air and shifts the superchargers to high.

Above the Hump now.

In summer, the monsoons force him to fly on instruments much of the time. With winter come southern winds reaching velocities of 100-150 miles per hour, and he crabs the plane 30 degrees off course just to counter the drift. Spring and fall bring unpredictable winds, frequent and violent thunderstorms, and severe icing conditions.

He will fly over long stretches where there is no radio contact with the ground, up there on his own, blowing around in the mountains without radar. "You had good weather information on your point of origin and your destination, and that was about it," he remembers. The primary instruments in use will be Charlie Uban's skills and instincts.

The winds push unwary or confused pilots steadily north into the higher peaks where planes regularly plow into the mountainsides. And there are other problems. Ground radio signals used to locate runways in rough weather have a tendency to bounce from the mountains. Even skilled and alert pilots mistakenly follow the echoes into cliffs.

Electrical equipment deteriorates from rapid changes between the cold of high altitudes and the tropical climate of Dinjan. Parts are in short supply, navigational aids faulty or nonexistent. But maintenance wizards do what they can to keep the planes rolling.

Pilots fly themselves into fatigue, sometimes making two round trips across the Hump in one day. Still they go, their efficiency and competence shaming the regular army pilots in the Air Transport Command [ATC]. CNAC, with creative, flexible management and more experienced pilots, becomes the measure of performance for the entire ATe. General Stilwell wrote in 1943: "The Air Transport Command record to date is pretty sad. CNAC has made them look like a bunch of amateurs." Edward V Rickenbacker, chief of Eastern Airlines and America's ace fighter pilot in World War I, studies the situation, discounts all of the army's problems with airports, parts, and maintenance, and simply concludes that CNAC has better pilots.

Charlie Uban is paid $800 a month for the first 60 hours of flying. He gets about $7 per hour, in Indian rupees, for the next ten hours. For anything over 70 hours, he is on "gold," $20 per hour in American money.

A 100-hourmonthearns him roughly $9,000 in 1987 terms. The rare melding of technical competence, practiced skill, good judgment, and courage always pays top dollar, anywhere. The CNAC pilots chronicle their exploits by making up song verses using the melody to the "Wabash Cannonball": Oh the mountains they are rugged So the army boys all say.

The army gets the medals, But see-knack gets the pay ...

1111

THE BURMA HUMP

""'""d

Not everyone qm do it. They arrive as experienced flyers and are trained for the Hump by riding as copilots, committing the terrain to memory, absorbing the mercurial techniques of high mountain flying, and practicing letdowns in bad weather. There is no time for coddling. Those who can't move into a captain's seat in a few months are discharged. Charlie Uban got his command in three weeks.

One veteran pilot makes a single round trip as copilot, is terrified, and asks to be sent home by boat. Others will hang on, but are so intimidated by the Hump that they develop neuroses about it and become ill. Or, bent by their fears, they make critical mistakes where there is room for none. The Hump, rising out there in the darkness and the rain, is malevolence crowned.

Was Charlie Uban afraid? He thinks about the question for a moment, a long moment, and grins, "I'd say respectful rather than fearful."

Fear and magic sometimes danced together in northern Burma. A Chinese pilot was flying a new plane from Dinjan to Kunming. Over the middle of the Hump, the temperature gauge for one of the engines began climbing. The instructions were clear: "Feather the engine at 265 centigrade." Panic arrived at 250 degrees.

With a full load, a C-47 will fly at only 6,500 feet on one engine.

So the choices were three. Feather the engine and descend to an altitude that is not high enough to get through the mountains, let the temperature escalate and burn up the engine, or bailout in the high mountains. Three alternatives, each with the same outcome.

But the manual had been written by Western minds. Therefore, and not surprisingly, the range of options was unnecessarily constrained. As the gauge hit 265, the pilot broke the glass covering the gauge and simply t\\listed the dial backward to a reasonable level. Unable to get at the sender, he chose to throttle the messenger. There is some ancient rule at work here-if you can't repair the problem, at least you can improve your state of mind.

At Kunming, the gauge was diagnosed as faulty. The engine was just fine. Remember Kipling's famous epitaph? "Here lies a fool who tried to hustle the East." The C-47, like a lot of others, tried and failed.

If a crew goes down in the Hump region, no search party is sent.

The territory is wild and rugged, settled sparsely by aboriginal tribes or occupied by the Japanese. The snow accumulates in places to a depth of several hundred feet, and a crashed plane just disappears, absorbed by the snow.

The pilots suffer through it and gather strength from one another, talking quietly when a plane is overdue and cataloging the optimistic possibilities. After a few weeks, the missing pilot's clothing is parceled out among the others' and his personal effects are sent home.

Charles L. Sharp, Jr., operations manager for CNAC, is a realist. Roosevelt demands that China be supplied. There is not enough time for proper training. The weather is wretched, equipment humbled by the task, and the planes, which are cargo versions of the venerable DC-3s, always fly above the standard gross weight.

So lives are going to be taken. Sharp accepts that. Still, he grieves for the pilots who vanish out there in the snow or thunder into foggy mountains during letdowns in China or blow up on the approach to Dinjan, and he worries about those who keep on flying.

Small samples from his logs in CNAC's war years intone a litany to risk and a chant of regret.

Aircraft No. Captain

53 49 48 72 59 63

Fox Welch Anglin Schroeder Privensal Charville

Date

3/11/43 3/13/43 8/11/43 10/13/43 11/19/43 11/19/43

Location

Hump Hump Hump Shot Down Kunming; let-down Kunming; let-down

Crew

Lost Lost Lost Lost Lost Lost

Between April 1942, when Hump operations started, and September 1945 at the end of the war, CNAC pilots will fly the

·····. s···torles

Iy

Father Told Ie

When I was growing up I would enjoy it when my father would haul out his stack of sepia snapshots and other memorabilia and start telling stories about the war. His war was not the one usually depicted in the entertaining war movies that appeared on television. It was not the war in Europe or the Pacific, but the subtle war carried on with stealth and daring in the China-Bmma-India (CHI) theater.

My father-Gerald G. "Jerry" Terhunespent his wartime in India, mostly in Barrackpore near Calcutta where he was a technical sergeant in the U.S. Army Air Force, as it was then known. He inspected and worked on aircraft that flew "The Hump."

Dad was a journeyman aircraft mechanic when he enlisted. As a child I confess I some-

Hump more than 20,000 times. They carry 50,000 tons of cargo into China and bring 25,000 tons back out. Twenty-five crews are lost. The consensus remains among those who understand flying that, given the conditions under which CNAC operated, the pilots were one of the most skilled groups ever assembled, the losses remarkably small.

Today Charlie Uban is freighting ammunition. Sometimes he carries 55-gallon barrels. of high-octane gasoline, a cargo he prefers not to haul. Or he might be loaded with aircraft parts or medical supplies or brass fittings. Occasionally he moves Chinese bank notes printed in San Francisco and being forwarded to deal with China's sprinting inflation.

On his way back from Kunming, he will be dragging tin or wood or hog bristles, or mercury or silk or refined tungsten ore.

Now and then he has a cargo of Chinese soldiers going to India for training. They are cold and airsick for most of the trip.

As Stilwell begins his 1944 push back down into the jungles of Burma, Charlie will haul bagged rice that is booted out of the

Technical Sergeant Gerald G. "Jerry" Terhune, in Barrackpore, Bengal.

times wished he had been one of the Flying Tigers, although later I came to appreciate the role he did play. Maybe he was not a John Wayne-style flying ace-but looking after the nuts and bolts for those guys was critical to the war effort. More than once he "just had a feeling" and rechecked an aircraft that had been cleared for flight, only to find an obscure flaw that could have caused the plane to crash.

The stories he told of India and his outfit, the 48th Repair Squadron, were wonderful.

There were cobras discovered on bunks, a pet mongoose, eerie things in the jungle by the swimming hole at night, nutty officers, runaway horses on Himalayan trails. There were beggars with twisted limbs-a picture of one, a little boy about my age, made a lasting impression on me. There were burning ghats and a local madwoman who ran around naked. The blistering heat, dysentery, and dengue fever aside, Dad's memories of India and Indians were positive ones.

"The American GIs had a great relationship with the Indians," he recently told me. "The local people were very helpful and cooperative." The villagers helped build an airstrip in tne middle of the jungle. Steel mats were laid down on the jungle floor and the landing field was completed during the monsoon. "The local people may have been illiterate, but they were

cargo doors at low altitudes to construction crews following the armies. The crews are building a new land route, the Ledo Road, from India across northern Burma to China.

Conditions are seldom good enough for daydreaming. Most of the time he concentrates on his gauges and listens to the engines, " ... envisioning misadventures and figuring out what to do about them ahead of time."

But now and then in clear weather he thinks about other things. He thinks about his girl, Emma Jo, back in Iowa and calculates the days left before he gets his three-month leave in the States. And he remembers Charles Lindbergh's solo flight across the Atlantic in 1927. He was six years old at that time, but somehow understood the magnitude of Lindbergh's achievement even then. That's what brought him here.

His family moved to Waterloo, Iowa, where he grew up building model airplanes and reading magazine articles about the new world of flight. At 15, he bicycled out to the old Canfield Airport and used $2 from his Des Moines Register paper route to purchase

intelligent and easy to train," he said. Chinese worked with the Americans as well.

The hulls of warplanes were brought to Barrackpore by barges on the Hoogly River at night, then transported to the jungle field and assembled. The engineers furnished each plane inside and out. The planes were flight-tested and turned loose on reconnaissance missions.

Gliders used in Burma were prepared at Barrackpore in the same way.

I would finger Dad's collection of rupees and annas as he told his stories. One was about the Gurkha guards. "Aircraft just ready were parked under mango trees, and the Gurkhas were put there to guard them, because the local villagers threw stones to get at the mangoes."

Since they hit the planes in the process, the soldiers weretold not to let anyone near the planes.

Some of the men were having lunch one afternoon when they heard a hullabaloo; a figure went running past chased by a Gurkha soldier, kukri drawn. "We ran out to stop him from killing the guy." It always impressed me that, according to Dad, before the Gurkha put his knife away,he drew his own blood with it.

Everybody went to Calcutta, about 150kilometers away,when they had time off.The Great Eastern Hotel, the Metropole, and Firpo's were the places to go to in those days. Dad kept an old copy of The Command Post, a newspaper put out for "the boys" stationed in the CBI theater. In it are schedules for events at the "Burra Club," from usa (United Service

Organizations) shows to swimming parties, and the daily programming of the VU2ZU radio station, with such syndicated American programs as Makebelieve Ballroom, Burns and Allen, The Great Gildersleeve, Charlie McCarthy, and GI Jive.

Of all Dad's stories my favorite is the one about the man with striking eyes who came up to him on a Calcutta street one day saying he had a message for him. Dad was with some of his buddies who naturally demanded that they be givenmessages also, but the man would only speak to Dad. The man began to tell my father some things about his past. Then he described a woman whom my father had met but had not yet married. Indeed, he was not in touch with her at the time.The man went on to predict how much longer Dad would be in India, that he would be injured in a plane crash and sent back to the United States and, yes, that he would marry the woman destined to be my mother.

My father didn't know what to make of it. He began to walk away, then turned to give the man some baksheesh. The man was gone.

Everything he said turned out to be true.

0 About the Author: Lea Terhune has been based in New Delhi/or several years and has written two books on Tibetan Buddhism with the 12th Tai Situpa: Relative World, Ultimate Mind, published in 1992, and Awakening Sleeping Buddha, scheduled for publication later this year. She also reports/or the Voice of America and the San Francisco Chronicle.

WIIITlIE

BURMAHUMP",,,,,,,

his first airplane ride on a Ford Trimotor.

Bouncing' around in a single-engine Taylorcraft, Charlie Uban learned to fly at Iowa State Teachers College in 1940 as part of the federally sponsored Civilian Pilot Training [CPT] program. At Iowa State College in Ames he studied engineering and passed the secondary stage of the CPT program. He learned cross-country techniques at a school in Des Moines, taught flying for a while in Aberdeen, South Dakota, and was trained as a copilot for Northwest Airlines in Minneapolis, where he picked up his instrument skills.

When Pan Am wrangled a contract for supplying the Far East, he went to work for them and flew as a copilot in fourengine DC-4s and C-87s, hauling cargo and passengers down the Caribbean to Brazil and from there to Accra on the coast of West Africa. In Accra, the cargo was off-loaded onto smaller planes for the flight over the desert and across Asia to Calcutta.

In the summer of 1943 he was riding copilot alongside Captain Wesley Gray with a load earmarked for the Generalissimo himself. In Accra, they were ordered not to off-load, but rather to continue on across Africa and Asia to Dinjan, pick up a Hump pilot to guide them through the mountains, and take the cargo on into Chungking.

On the way, Charlie bumped into a few CNAC pilots and talked with one of them at length. Since Pan Am owned 20 percent of CNAC, he applied for a transfer, and by the fall of 1943 he was flying the Hump.

The C-47 settles down on the runway at Kunming. It's 9 A.M. Charlie will spend the day at a hostel near the airfield. He will nap, play cards, and talk with other pilots. In late afternoon, he takes off for the westward flight back to Dinjan. Tomorrow he will fly the same route once again. Often he will make one-and-a half, or even two, round trips in a single day.

Charlie Uban made 524 flights over the Hump in two years and knows of only one CNAC pilot who claims more wartime crossings. After the war, CNAC moved its operations to Shanghai.

Charlie went along, flying all over the orient-north to Muckden in China, west to Calcutta, and south to Manila.

Things got messy, though. Four planes crashed in one day in Shanghai due to weather and radio interference from commercial stations operating at illegally high power levels. The Chinese communists had begun firing on the CNAC planes, and there was dissension among the pilots over the way operations were being run.

Charlie had enough and came home to finish his mechanical engineering degree at Iowa State. He graduated in 1949 and entered the family oil business in Waterloo. In 1964, and again in 1968, he was elected to the Iowa legislature as a state representative.

The CNAC Alumni Association meetings are important to him. Friends come by. "I see Kusak and Norman there. It's an occasional refurbishing, a touching again ...all the time, throughout the decades."

The old pilots talk about airplanes and mountains. Some flew for commercial airlines after the war or opened restaurants or

A unit of Merrill's Marauders moves to the front via the Ledo Road in Assam, February 1944.

farmed. Others, they say, smuggled gold through Asia and flew contraband in South America. There is a bond of forever among them. They bellied up against death, saw it all, and delivered the goods.

Any regrets about getting out of flying? Some. But Charlie Uban has looked backward, looked forward from there, and is comfortable with his choices. Yet he has a recurring dream in the nights of his life, even now. In the dream, he is flying low toward obstacles, trees and mountains and such, and there is never enough room to pass between them. He wonders about the dreams.

And I wonder what there is in the ordinary machinations of life to rival flying the Hump at 22. Can the adrenaline ever flow that swift again? Can there ever be another sound as pure to the soul as the landing gear coming down at Kunming or a sight like that of Everest and Kanchenjunga to the northwest on a clear day as you come in to Dinjan?

J Most of us think of life as a long upward sweep to some modest glory in our middle years. But if you have battled the great whale in your early times, what can ever compare? Maybe Hannibal or Lindbergh or the foot soldier at Normandy or even Orson Welles also suffered these proportions.

On the other hand, maybe none of this is important. Maybe it is enough to have done it and to live a life on the memories of having done it-of having swept upward from a thousand blacktop runways into the jungle nights on your way to China.

Others will do it again, but not in that place, in that way. The Hump, as a presence, has disappeared. It was a concoction of the times and the available technology. In a jet airplane, at 40,000 feet, the Hump no longer exists.

It's been 42 years since Charlie Uban flew the Burma Hump.

He talks about those times, late of an April afternoon, while

Emma Jo makes supper noises in the kitchen. "I remember the time I realized I was doing an excellent job of flying this tough, tough route, and it just did wonders for my self-esteem." "If you're doing a good job, and somebody knows it and appreciates it, that's about as good as life gets."

His khaki uniform with a CNAC patch on the right shoulder drapes from the back of a chair. He wears a bush jacket from his India days and shuffies through piles of flight maps and logbooks and picture albums on the table in front of him. As he warms to the memories, his voice alternates between the past and the present tense, and he speaks softly, more to himself than anyone else, running a finger gently along his recollections.

"Fall of '43. Two of 'em crash in Suifu, up the Yangtze River from Chungking. Robertson is still up there in the overcast, sees two puffs of smoke come up through the clouds, decides that's enough of that, and heads back to Dinjan." "A hundred and twenty-one hours this month." "Here! Hydraulic pump failure, good weather, short of personnel; flying the Hump solo, no copilot, no radio operator."

"Kunming, Dinjan, Kunming, Kunming. That means I had trouble leaving Kunming and had to come back in." "Next day, blower failure and had to return." "Next day, the 14th, rice dropping." "January 6, 1945, Russ Coldron disappears over the Hump." "January 7, 1945, myoid friend Fuzzy Ball flew into Tali Mountain ...."

His voice trails off to a murmur as he reads. From his kitchen table in Iowa, Charlie Uban is reaching back four decades into the night and the wind and the deep snows of the southern Himalayas where some of his friends still lie.

I listen not so much to the words themselves, but rather to the sound of his memories. It's something like the drone of a C-47 cruising out there east of Dinjan, above the Burma Hump, in the days when it was pretty clear who was right and who was wrong. Over his shoulder I can see airplanes coming and going at the Waterloo Airport a mile away.

Just outside the window, wood ducks are circling among the trees by a pond, peering through the fog at the end of a rainy afternoon, looking for a place to land. Captain Charlie Uban watches the lead drake come in through the dusk on his final approach, sees him catch the headwind as he lets down through the haze, and nods his appreciation-from one old pilot to another.

Whether it's Dinjan or Calcutta, Kunming or Shanghai, or a small pond in Iowa, those who live on the wing understand one another. They have been taken aside by Iris, trained by scholars of the twilight. And, while the rest of us plead for guidance and struggle for the trace, old fliers have no need of that, for they know secret things and hear distant ragas that carry them al.ong the great bend of the night toward home.

0 About the Author: Robert J. Waller, aformer management and economics professor, has written two best-selling novels, The Bridges of Madison County and Slow Waltz at Cedar Bend. The former was recently made into a movie starring Meryl Streep and Clint Eastwood.

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American and Indian veterans of the Hump-with guestsaboard the C-17 Globemaster /II on their flight from New Delhi to Kalaikunda, West Bengal, May 27, 1995.

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rom 1942 to 1945, more than a quarter of a million American servicemen were in India, most in direct support of operations to ferry supplies into China. This past May, 19 veterans of that campaign came back to join their former Indian colleagues for a commemorative peacetime flight "over the Hump," thus ensuring that the China-BurmaIndia (CHI) theater, once regarded as the "forgotten front," was very much a part of 50th anniversary commemorations around the world marking the end of World War II. Among the American veterans were Major General (Retd.) John R. Alison, one of the original famed "Flying Tigers" who later set up the 1st Air Commando Force; Donald S. Lopez, a fighter ace who flew P-40N Warhawks with the 75th Fighter Squadron in southern China; Phillip B. Piazza, who was wounded 400 kilometers behind Japanese lines in northern Burma while fighting with "Merrill's Marauders," the unit under the command of Major General Frank Merrill; and Major General (Retd.)

Eugene B. Sterling, who flew Douglas C-47 transports, one of which evacuated Piazza to the base hospital at Ledo in Assam. They and the rest of their distinguished colleagues stepped off a McDonnell Douglas C-17 Globemaster III, the U. S. Air Force's new generation, high technology heavy airlift transport aircraft, at the Indian Air Force's Palam Airfield in New Delhi May 26 to a very warm welcome (literally, with 44 degrees Celsius temperatures on the tarmac). Bedecked with the traditional

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marigold garlands and auspicious red tilaks of Indian hospitality, these CBI veterans were welcomed with speeches by Air Marshal S.R. Deshpande and Lieutenant General (Retd.) Claude M. Kicklighter, and then toured the nearby Indian Air Force (IAF) Museum, which has two Hump warhorses, a legendary C-47 Dakota and a B-24 Liberator, in its collection.

Transport planes had to negotiate the formidable That evening U.S. Ambassador Frank G. cordillera on the India-Burmafrontier.

Wisner hosted a reception in their honor and praised the veterans as "a group of distin- Commemorative ceremonies, May 26-28, guished Indians and Americans who served 1995 (from right top): American veterans who together during a campaign that compares arrived in a C-17 Globemaster III pose with any in modern history for its displays of with Indian veterans before a Douglas C-47 extraordinary courage, devotion to duty, and Dakota at the Air Force Station, Palam, New complexity." Air Chief Marshal (Retd.) Arjan Delhi; Lieutenant General Thomas Rienzi Singh, former chief of the IAF whose brilliant pays homage at the memorial to the unknown command of the No. I Squadron ("Tigers") soldier at the Air Force Base in Kalaikunda; during the Imphal campaign in 1944 promptthe veterans attend mass in a makeshift church ed Lord Louis Mountbatten to award him an at the site of a wartime U.S. Army Salvage immediate Distinguished Flying Cross in the and Supply Unit in Kalaikunda; General Skip field, also spoke. He recalled the desperate Rutherford, Commander-in-Chief Air Mobility fighting in the hilly jungles of Assam and Command of the U.S. A ir Force, Burma-of how the IAF fought alongside with Lieutenant General R. N. Batra, General other Allied squadrons against the tenacious Officer Commanding-in-Chief Eastern Japanese to keep safe the air routes over the Command of the Indian Army at the Hump-and the airlifting by several U.S. Cenotaph, Calcutta; and Captain (Reid.)

C-46s of the entire Indian 5th Infantry Jane Rausch Haynes, who made dozens of Division to Imphal, Assam. flights as a nurse, shares memories The combined mission of the Allied forces with an Indian CBI veteran in Delhi. in the CBI theater was critical to the war's outcome. By April 1942, Japan had overrun much fields such as the one at Dinjan in the of Southeast Asia and held all of central Brahmaputra Valley, had to climb swiftly to surmount the 3,050-meter-high mountain wall Burma. The I, I54-kilometer Burma Road that surrounding the valley, fly eastward across a stretched from Lashio, Burma, to Kunming, China-China's lifeline to supplies from the series of 4,300-to-4,900-meter high ridges, and outside world-was cut. Air transport became then surmount the awesome Santsung Range between the Salween and Mekong rivers before vital for supplying equipment and trained troops to China from bases in Assam, and in reaching the more hospitable terrain surMay 1942 Lieutenant General Joseph Stilwell, rounding the 1,890-meter-high airfield at commander of Allied forces in Burma and Kunming. Violent turbulence, severe icing, Generalissimo Chiang Kai-Shek's chief of clouds, and torrential rains during the monstaff in the China theater, directed the first soon season were all part of a day's work. To resupply flight. The 80S-kilometer air route, these unnerving natural hazards were added the dangers of Japanese fighters. aptly named "The Hump," layover imposing The overall logistics were intensely complex. mountains and steaming jungles, and only specially skilled pilots were able to traverse it. Most supplies (weapons, ammunition, spare Aircraft taking off from virtually sea-level air- parts, fuel, bombs, and medical supplies) had

the Japanese advance and speeding the conclusion of hostilities in the Far East. The operation became a model for future strategic airlifts, and for IAF supply flights from those very same Hump airfields to Ladakh.

diary he kept during his Hump missions: "April 6, 1944: Took off from Sookerating and climbed to 22,000 feet but could not hold it so dropped back to 19,000 feet and started over. I flew up and down the first ridge looking for a hole. I hit instruments east of Fort But there was yet one more mission to fly Hertz and hesitated about continuing but flew over the Hump. On May 27, 1995, the on over Tali on instruments. The air was turAmerican and Indian veterans board the bulent, it was almost impossible with rime ice C-17 Globemaster III at Palam Airport. After found heavily. About over Salween met this a mere I, 160-meter takeoff run, the whaleC-46 head on. He pushed fInder me less than like aircraft with a payload capacity of 78 100 feet away. Quite a few turned back. Hump tons-contrasted with 2.5 tons for the C-47 closed. So rough at Kunming I overshot and Hump veteran-climbs swiftly to 10,060 went around. Took off for Sookerating but meters and heads east/southeast.

The C-17 is went into Yunnenyi and stayed overnight. to be brought halfway round the world from Hump closed." designed to carry every air-transportable item America by air-or by sea to the ports of in the U.S. Army's inventory, from missiles Fifty-one years later, the C-17 lands at Karachi, Bombay, or Calcutta, and then by rail to battle tanks; it can be refueled in air, land Kalaikunda Air Force Base, once home to or road-to the Assam terminus of the Hump B-29s and P-51s of the U.S. Army Air Force, on a mere 900-meter-long airstrip, offioad route. The airlift into China commenced cargo rapidly, or drop equipment, cargo, and and now housing MiG-27ML swing-wing in July 1942, when a handful of Douglas paratroopers. strike fighters of the Indian Air Force. The C-47s flew 85 tons of supplies and pasOne of the Americans on board, General veterans tour the base, attend a sengers into China, and it reached its peak Eugene B. Sterling, has brought along the religious service, and eat lunch. Then it is in July 1945, when a total of 71,042 back to the C-17 for a short flight to tons were carried.

Dum Dum Airport in Calcutta for an A vital early need was to build airevening reception hosted by the From the remarks of Bishop James K. Mathews, a CBI fields with hard-surface runways, U.S. Consul General. veteran, who spoke at the May 26 reception at Roosevelt hardstands, and taxiways. The British May 28 begins with a ceremony at House in New Delhi: Royal Air Force in India had one such the Cenotaph, just off the famous Years ago a young American was born in China of airfield at Chabua in upper Assam, Red Road in central Calcutta from missionary parents. His name \Vas John C. Magee, Jr., and a cluster of new airfields were where Royal Air Force Spitfires took planned at Dinjan, Mohanbari, off to intercept Japanese bombers killed \Vhile a fighter pilot in 1943. In 1947 hisfather. then Sookerating, and Jorhat.

When in 1942. Wreaths are laid. On hand an Episcopal chaplain at Yale University. gave me a Generalissimo Chiang Kai-Shek is the legendary Brigadier Genehandwritten copy ofJohn'sfamous poem, "High Flight." expressed dissatisfaction in 1943 ral (Retd.)

Robert Lee Scott, 87, It seems to me an epitome of the spirit of those who with the flow of supplies, President who was General Claire Chennault's ':f1ew the Hump" in the CB1.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt ordered (Commander of the Fourteenth Air that the number of flights be Force) commander with the famed "Oh, I have slipped the surly bonds of earth, increased.

23rd Fighter Group at Kunming in And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings; To meet the demands, the July 1942. Buglers of the Indian Sunward I've climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth Americans set up a flying school near Army's 4th Gorkha Rifles, positioned Of sun-split clouds-and done a hundred things Karachi to train military pilots, and on the ramparts of nearby Fort they recruited civilian pilots from William, bring the ceremonies You have not dreamed of-wheeled and soared American Airlines. The accident rate to an end with renderings of "Last and swung Post" and "Rouse." was high, and soon the Hump route High in the sunlit silence. Hovering there, was marked by the aluminum tombs At ten minutes after noon the I've chased the shouting wind along, and flung of pilots and crew who never made Globemaster III lifts off from Dum My eager craft through footless halls of air. it. In all, 450 planes were downed Dum with its distinguished passenUp, up the long delirious, burning blue along the Hump route, by the time gers and heads eastward for I've topped the windswept heights with easy grace the war ended.

Kunming, the final destination on its The average number of aircraft flycommemorative journey. And history Where never lark, or even eagle flew. ing the Hump each day reached 250 by is relived.

0 And, while with silent, lifting mind I've trod December 1944, and peaked at 650 by The high untrespassed sanctity of space, About the Author: Pushpindar Singh is July 1945. A grand total of 650,000 Put out my hand, and touched the face of God." the managing editor of Vayu Aerotons of cargo, men, and war materiel space Review magazine. passed over the Hump, helping to stop

1111

For the Sake of

lighteou'~ness

When war clouds began to gather over Europe, I was in the fourth and final year of my law studies in London. It was 1938. A year or two earlier I had been in Germany with an Indian students hockey team to play in a tournament in Wiesbaden. I saw the treatment meted out to Jews in Nazi Germany. In the sports stadium some benches painted yellow had the word" Juden" printed on them. I knew that Juden meant Jew. I deliberately chose to sit on one of these yellow benches. I was told by an official that Indians were regarded as Aryans and I could sit anywhere I liked. I refused to budge from my seat. When we lined up on the ground to face the opposing German team, the Germans raised their hands and cried "Heil Hitler!" We had been instructed to respond in the same manner. The other ten on our side raised their hands and replied "Heil Hitler!" I did not raise my hand to give the Hitler salute. After the match was over, I was singled out by our hosts to be given a talking to. The captain of our side, who was blissfully ignorant of what had happened to Germany, threatened to send me back to England for showing discourtesy toward the host country.

Some months later I took an Italian boat from Genoa to return home to India. The boat was crammed with German Jews on their way to Hong Kong or Shanghai or any other country in Asia where they could find asylum. They had hardly any money with them. Indian passengers raised funds for them to buy extra clothes at Port Said and Aden. On board also were many Italian soldiers in uniform bound for Abyssinia (present-day Ethiopia) which Mussolini had conquered a few years earlier and made a part of Italy's overseas empire. These soldiers disembarked at Asmara.

When Nazi Germany invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, I was back home in Delhi. Following England's declaration of war against Germany on September 3, 1939, the then Viceroy of India, Lord Linlithgow, without consulting Indian leaders, also declared war against Germany on behalf of India. Indian opinion became sharply divided. Although the entire country was one in condemning fascism as an unmitigated evil, a sizeable number of nationalists resented Britain taking Indian support for granted and demanded that Britain commit itself to giving India independence before it could expect India's cooperation in the war effort. The two sides clashed when Mahatma Gandhi launched the "Quit India" movement in August 1942.

The British retaliated by jailing all the top leaders of the Indian National Congress. There was widespread violence in many cities of Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Orissa, and Bengal. But in states like the Punjab, Sindh, North West Frontier Province, Rajasthan, and the Garhwal hills-from where the British Indian Army drew most of its soldiers-there was little or no

support for the Quit India movement. Concrete evidence of this was that when the war started, the Indian Army had 189,000 in its ranks; when it ended the number had risen to 2,644,323. There was no conscription in India.

A strong section of patriotic Indians was of the firm belief that the first priority was to defeat fascism. Thereafter we could reckon with our English rulers. If the fascists won there would be no freedom for India. We regarded war as a veritable dharmayudha-war for the sake of righteousness.

The ambivalent Indian attitude persisted throughout the time the war lasted. During those years I was in Lahore practicing law at the high court. As one European country after the other fell to the Nazi onslaught, the news was received with a certain amount of glee. People tuned into German stations and heard Lord Haw Haw, a British traitor, narrating victories of German and Italian armies with great relish. Anything that was broadcast from London or All India Radio was treated with skepticism as government propaganda. One often heard people quoting lines of an Urdu poet: "Fateh sarkar kee kabza German ka hota hai." (Our government's forces are victorious but Germans capture the territory.)

When Hitler declared war on the Soviet Union, Indians became even more confused. Indian communists who had condemned the war as between contending colonial imperialisms overnight declared it to be a "peoples war." More confusion was to follow when on December 7, 1941, a Sunday, the Japanese Air Force attacked Pearl Harbor in Hawaii and sank many American warships. It seemed that the American fleet had been crippled forever and that America's subsequent declaration of war against Japan was an idle threat. Japanese armies overran most of Eastern Asia driving colonial armies of the Dutch, French, and the English out of Hong Kong, I;Jench Indochina, the Philippines, Thailand, and Burma down to Singapore. Meanwhile Subhash Chandra Bose (or Netaji-the great leader-as he came to be known), next to Gandhi the most popular nationalist leader, had slipped out

The show must go on. American, Indian, and British troops in Ledo, Assam, orchestrate some entertainment for themselves and their comrades.

refused to join whites-only clubs and undetected from his home in Calcutta and applied for membership in Indian clubs. reached Germany. There he raised the first They were eager to be invited to Indian Indian National Army (INA) comprising homes. Many had Indian friends they had Indian emigre revolutionaries and Indian got to know in English schools and univerprisoners of war taken by the Germans. sities. Thanks to the Americans and the Bose did not get much change from Adolf new breed of Englishmen, the whiteman Hitler and decided to shift his operations no longer stood for the colonial master to the eastern theater. He traveled by a race. We were able to talk on the same German submarine to Japan and was Second Lieutenant Premindra level and felt reassured that once the Axis put in command of the INA raised by the Singh Bhagat became thefirst Indian powers were defeated there would be no to win the Victoria Cross.

Japanese from among Indian prisoners return to colonial rule. they had taken. Netaji's INA hoisted the Even the Pucca Sahibs of the Colonel Blimp stereotype Indian tri-color on the Andaman Islands. His call Dilli began to thaw toward Indians. Sometime late in 1941, Second Chalo-onward to Delhi-was heard over the radio every day.

Lieutenant Premindra Singh Bhagat, the first Indian officer to Japanese armies pushed through Burma into Assam. It win the coveted Victoria Cross for conspicuous bravery in batseemed as if all was lost. tle in Africa, visited Lahore. He was my wife's cousin. I threw a The Indian Army was ill-equipped to fight a modern war, and party in his honor and took the liberty of inviting English it had no experience in aerial warfare. My younger brother judges, including the Chief Justice, and senior British officials Gurbux Singh, who had just passed out of the Indian Military of the Punjab government to meet him. In those days they Academy at Dehradun, was assigned to an antiaircraft battery would not have deigned to accept an invitation from a junior in Madras. One night sirens wailed and the gunners were put on Indian lawyer. Without exception all of them came to shake alert. A few planes flew over but could not be identified. On hands with Bhagat who had become a national hero. For four the way they dropped flowers of many colors. The commander days he had led his team to defuse mines laid by the retreating in charge of the ack-ack guns was of the opinion they were Italian army. Three of his companions traveling on the same our own planes and ordered our gunners to hold fire. On jeep had been blown up. His own eardrum had burst. But he their way back the same planes dropped bombs on Madras, carried on regardless till the mine fields had been cleared. It was and continued on to their aircraft carrier without a shot ironic that his elder brother had joined the INA and was fightbeing fired at them. ing on the other side.

The crux of the Indian dilemma was whether to go all out to Despite wavering loyalties Indians volunteered for service in aid the Allies to defeat the fascist Axis powers and then demand large numbers. Among them were my friends Faiz Ahmed Faiz, freedom for themselves, or to insist on a declaration of freedom who became the greatest Urdu poet of modern times, and Prem first and then put their full weight behind the Allies.

Bhatia, who later became a high commissioner and editor of American presence in India brought about a dramatic The Tribune. Indian troops played an important role in pushing change in the attitude of Indians toward the white races. The the Germans and Italians out of North Africa and the Middle British had always kept their distance from Indians. They had East, and they joined Allied forces to liberate Italy from their "Europeans only" clubs. Trains had compartments Mussolini's fascists. Hundreds of Indian soldiers who gave up reserved for "Whites and Anglo-Indians only." Americans swept aside social barriers based on color and race. I had pertheir lives lie buried in cemeteries near remote Italian towns and sonal experience of this. I used to go to Gulmarg, Kashmir, to cities. Likewise it was the Indians, along with British, ski every Christmas. In the one hotel that opened for the seaAustralian, and New Zealand troops, who halted the Japanese son, there were usually 50 to 100 British officers and a few advance into Assam and then fought their own countrymenEnglishwomen but never more than two or three Indians. who had joined the INA in Burma, Malaysia, Indochina, and There was an undefined social barrier between us. We took our Singapore-and forced them to surrender. A total of 36,090 drinks at one end of the bar and sat at a table set apart from Indians lost their lives and 64,000 were wounded in different theaters of war. British Field Marshal William Joseph Slim, who the British.

Then came the American GIs. They brought their Indian was responsible for the expulsion of the Japanese from Burma and Anglo-Indian girlfriends with them to keep them warm on and Southeast Asia, remarked that the Indian Army was the "best in the world." bitterly cold nights in unheated log cabins. They were eager to befriend us Indians. They asked us to join them at the bar and It is a thousand pities that in celebrating the 50th anniversary sat with us at mealtimes. The English felt let down. Americans of the victory over the forces of evil, little notice has been taken had more money to throw around and did not bother about by the Western media of the sacrifices made by Indians.

0 what the English thought of their mixing with us. To be fair to the English, the new crop of young Britishers who had enlistAbout the Author: Khushwant Singh's latest book is Men and Women I ed for service was equally free from race prejudice. They Have Known. His autobiography is 10 be published thisfall.

1111

The Transformation of America

or millions of people, World War 11 was the greatest catastrophe in history. But most Americans were spared the physical destruction that obliterated great cities in Europe and Asia, and fewer than 300,000 American soldiers, sailors, and airmen were killed in battle out of a total of some 16 million people who served in the armed forces, a ratio far lower than that of the other belligerents.

Around the world, the most common emotion during the war was fear, while the most common sensation was hunger. In the United States, fear and hunger were nearly absent. During the six-year war (1939-45), no elections were held in Europe, Asia, Africa, or the Middle East. But in the United States during those six years there were two presidential, three congressional, and hundreds of state elections, all of them hotly contested.

The war transformed the world, and America too. It was a unique time; the half decade 1940-45 did more to shake America out of its past and to shape its future than any comparable period except the Civil War era. The biggest difference between the 1930s and the war years was that in the latter everyone had jobs and money in the bank. The next biggest difference was in the extent of travel. During the war, millions of young men and thousands of young women in the armed services went overseas, a new experience for nearly all of themindeed, most had never been out of their home state, or even their home county. Within the United States, more that 15 million civilians moved, more than half of them to new states. With 17 percent of the population OlL the move in the four-year period (1941-45) that America was a combatant, this was a mass migration that dwarfed even the westward movement of the 19th century. Most of those who moved were between 18 and 35 years of age, which means that nearly everyone in that age group moved at least once. This had a tremendously broadening effect on American politics and culture, as the internal migration helped break down regional prejudices and provincialism. Yankees and westerners who moved to the South, where most of the army bases were located, or southerners who moved to the West or North, where most of the war industries were located, learned to tolerate or understand, if not appro e of, the different mores they encountered.

The generation who fought the war reinvented America after it was won. In the armed services, or in munitions plants or other war-related industries, young Americans had learned to work together as a team. As college students on the GI Bill of Rights, they learned skills. In the late 1940s and through the 1950s, they built a new America-superhighways, suburbs, sky.scrapers, station wagons. semiconductors, a sky full of commercial airplanes.

The war dramatically changed political attitudes. In the 1930s most Americans were isolationists. Neutrality and disarmament were the dominant policies. It was thought that those policies would keep America out of the next war. They did not.

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In the 1940s it came to be recognized that the way to prevent future wars was through security and military preparedness.

The role of women, especially young women, changed just as dramatically. They entered the workforce in record numbers, something that is so well known that one need only mention "Rosie the Riveter" to make the point. Ther were millions of hasty marriages-teenagers got married because, in the moral atmosphere of the day, if they wanted to have a sexual experience before one of them went off to war, they had to stand in front of a preacher first. Most of the marriages worked. The girls became women. They traveled alone, or with their infants, to distant places on hot and stuffy or cold and overcrowded trains. They became proficient cooks and housekeepers, managed the finances, learned to fix the car, and worked t~e night shift.

For African-Americans and Japanese-Americans, it was a terrible war. The armed services, the national capital, and the former Confederate states all maintained a strict segregation that was degrading to blacks-and things were not much if any better in New York or Chicago. U.S.-born JapaneseAmeri an citizens w re shipped from the West Coast to concentration camps in the western desert or as far away as the Arkansas delta.

Despite the mistreatment of minorities, American self-satisfaction during the war ran very high. Americans congratulated one another on living in the best, the freest, the richest, and the most democratic country in the world. It was also the most productive-by far. At a time when the country achieved the greatest single feat of industrial production in history, the

Scenesjrom wartime America (clockll'ise/rom lefl): A young/amil;regislers al a Washinglon, D. C, nursefl'/or children o/servicemen; lI'omen. like these 01 a Boeing planl, enlered Ihe lI'orkforce in record nUl11hen: women and yoU/h, such as Ihose ShOll'l1here in a small Connecticliltoll'l1. predominaled on America's slreels dllring Ihe Imr yeary; sailors relurn 10 base afler a day 0/ leave; and women welders leCII'ework atlhe Todd-Erif' Drydock in Brooklyn, Nf'lI' York

making of the atomic bomb, it also manufactured countless products and weapons in incredible numbers. The raw figures for just one industry give some idea of the scope of the achievement.

In 1939 American factories produced 5,856 aircraft. In 1944 American factories produced 96,318 aircraft. many of them gigantic four-engine bombers. The total number of planes produced for the war was more than 250,000. The figures were roughly similar for trucks, jeeps, and tanks. all of which came off the assembly line in a nevprending stream.

A nother miracle was the creation of the armed forces. The army hardly existed at the beginning of 1940 (175.000 men) and was virtually without equipment. Five years later, at more than eight million strong, it was far and away the best-equipped army in the world.

The theme of the war was teamwork. "We are all in this together"' as a phrase heard almost as frequently as "Don't you know there's a war on?" In th Great Depression people felt isolated, alone, fearful. In the war people felt a sense of belonging. There was a commitment to the notion that society's needs come before individual desires. Americans were faced

with a great challenge; they met it, they overcame all obstacles, and they won . . Another feature of the war experience was deferred gratification. The theme of almost all advertising and much government propaganda was the rewards that were coming after victory was attained. All the hardships of today~rationing, no tires, no new cars. no washing machines, three families to a single apartment-would disappear once the job was done.

Tomorrow was worth saving for and delicious to dream about.

On V-J Day (August 15, 1945), Marjorie Haselton spoke for her generation in a letter to her soldier husband in the Pacific: "You and I were brought up to think cynically of patriotism by the bitter, realistic writers of the twenties and thirties. This war has taught me~I love my country, and I'm not ashamed to admil it anymore. I am proud of the men of my generation.

Brought up in false prosperity and then degrading depression. they have overcome these handicaps. None of you fellows wanted the deal life handed you~but just about everyone of you gritted your teeth and hung on. You boys proved that teamwork couldn't be beaten."

In these days of the "me" generation and instant gratification, it is no wonder that those of us over 60 years of age look back with a certain nostalgia and think of World War II as "the good war."

0 About the Author: Slephen E. Amhrose is the direclor oflhe EisenhOll'er Cenler 01 Ihe Univprsit,l' 0/ NplI Orleans. wherp he is tl1('Boyd ProfPssnr of Hislory. He is Ihe aulhor ofl/umerolls hooks including Ihe bpsl-sf'lling D-Day, June 6, 1944: The Climactic Battle of World War II.

The Perils of Protectionism Bombay-born Jagdish Bhagwati may be the world's most militant defender of free trade.

The Columbia University economist, trained at Cambridge University in the 1960s, is convinced that free trade is a poor economy's only hope.

FREDRIC SMOLER: Many people seem to think that both NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement) and GA TT (General Agreement on Tariffs' and Trade) are triumphs for free trade, while you have argued that N AFT A is much less ofa good thing. What's the distinction?

JAGDISH BHAGWATI: I see NAFTA as an achievement because President Bill Clinton fought for it despite all his initial hesitations, demonstrating that he had surmounted his fears-both political and ideologicaL That was a touchstone: He had been sitting on the fence for so long that most of us thought rigor mortis had set in, Finally he found a voice and some conviction, But while the President understood NAFTA as free trade, NAFTA is in fact a free-trade area, which is not the same thing as worldwide free trade, Because the President saw NAFTA as a free-trade move, most economists were delighted that it passed, although the continuing and widespread fear that trading with poor countries hurts America is not very cheering, I hope the success of NAFTA will be seen as an affirmation that trade between rich and poor countries is by and large beneficial to the rich countries, and that is why rich countries do it What are the disadvantages of freetrade areas (FT As)?

I remain uneasy about what FTAs mean for the United States as the major

player in the world trading system, Since World War II America has articulated the goals for the world trading system and has held that FTAs, which are a club to which other people are not admitted, are a bad idea except when there are overpowering political needs for them, America's FTA with Israel, for example, was more a political affirmation than a policy shift After 1982 we abandoned our great commitment to multilateralism by moving into regionalism, but you can't be enthusiastic about arrangements that discriminate against outsiders, You're also a heretic about GA TT, the worldwide free-trade agreement.

While most critics argue that far too many concessions were made by the United States, you believe that too many concessions were made to the United States.

My remark was a response to the US Congress's feeling that somehow we made too many conceSSIOns, Obviously, we've given up very real things to the developing countries-a chunk of our textile industry, for example-and a lot of them will benefit from the trade expansion that will follow agriculture's coming under greater market discipline, In the main, though, I believe that GATT has been a win-win situation for the United States because we set the agenda when we pushed for the Uruguay Round to be launched in 1982, We didn't succeed until 1986, but the side that sets the agenda has the advantage, Also, I believe as an economist that you gain as much from your own import liberalization as from somebody else's, Unilateral reductions of your own tariff barriers let you exploit the gains from free trade more effectively, People assume that if you make an import concession, the other party wins, and therefore you have to balance off the

concessions, I think we went demanding certain concessions.

too far

What does" too far" mean?

Our role is uniquely complicated: As the architect of free trade, America has to distinguish among internal domestic lobbying, the national interest, and the international interest But it's only the last that an architect designing a world trading system should keep in mind: What will lead to maximum gains for all?

Now sometimes the architect may be able to rig the trading system. The United States normally wouldn't do that, but Nazi Germany or the old Soviet Union had no qualms about setting unfair rules for their spheres of influence, and had they designed a world trading system, it would have been the same thing on a grander scale. The United States isn't in that game, but as a result of lobbying pressures, some of the things that went into the new GATT are not mutual-gain propositions but simply ways of getting better returns for us.

Can you give an example?

Of course. Demanding extensive intellectual-property protection in fields we dominate as powerfully as we do software and pharmaceuticals.

We wanted this protection in GATT so that we could use trade sanctions to benefit our own industry, and economists think a lot of this is protection in the bad sense of the word.

You have to remember exactly what Congress means to do when it protects intellectual property. If knowledge came like manna from heaven, then its rapid diffusion would produce the greatest good for everybody. If vaccines were free, without payment to the people who invented them, then more children would benefit immediately. But knowledge does

As an economist, I believe that you gain as much from your own import liberalization as from somebody else's.

not fall like manna from heaven. People invest in creating knowledge, and if knowledge were constantly diffusing without paying those who created it, in the long run everybody would be worse off. It's a classic trade-off problem: The higher the returns to people who create new knowledge, the less the vast majority benefits right now.

There's obviously some optimum level of protection for achieving the best mix of creation and diffusion of knowledge. As it happens, economists looking into this have found very little damage from less protection. The creation-inhibiting supply-side effect is unimportant.

Why is that?

The reason is mainly competition.

If Ciba and Pfizer, two gigantic firms, are in competition with each other, the fact that you and I might be imitating their work in the garage doesn't seem too important.

Even if we're a bit bigger, it'll take a little time for us to reverse engineer the stuff they invented, so there's a natural period over which Ciba and Pfizer will able to get a good return. In any case neither can afford to sit back and say, ''I'm going to stop plowing back profits into R&D because I'm worried about the fact that people are going to copy this without my getting any royalties from it." If Ciba sits back, Pfizer's going to go ahead and

So the supply-side argument essentially collapses.

Well, supply-side economics ultimately collapsed because the supply-side people thought that when taxes were cut there would be so much output expansion-despite lower tax rates-that there would be revenues coming out of the Secretary of the Treasury's ears. And that didn't happen. There was some evidence of a supply-side effect, but it was rather small, and that misjudgment produced an enormous deficit. Similarly, I've seen no research suggesting that the supplyside effect on intellectual-property protection is worth a hill of beans. That is the view generally held by people who work in this area.

There are a lot of new theoretical arguments against this kind of intellectualproperty protection. What are the practical downsides?

America is now using GATT for the collection of royalty payments, which is not a mutual-gain transaction.

In so doing, we have abandoned or diluted a very attractive philosophical basis for organizing GATT-the idea that trade is mutually beneficial to all contracting parties and that therefore all parties should liberalize. Now we're saying that GATT is in business to secure an unrequited transfer from the poor countries to the rich ones.

We have shifted from utilitarian logic to a rights-based argument: We invented the stuff, so it's ours, and anybody who does not agree to our terms and conditions for using it is engaging in piracy and theft.

Once you use words like "piracy" and "theft," you've effectively made your opposition very defensive. But we don't really seem to believe our own argument.

If we did, we would demand permanent patent protection rather than worry about raising it to 20 years, which is the formula we imposed.

What's the advantage of a utilitarian argument?

Economics is based on the utility principle. It attempts to secure the best life for everybody, and the pursuit of mutual gain is a better basis for reaching authentic agreements with strangers than a selfinterested rights-based argument.

But most people find it very uncomfortable even to mention the topic because rights have become so much a part of the Washington rhetoric that you immediately lose all credibility if you say, "I'ill not for intellectual-property protection."

There are two arguments that might be made for the American positions on intellectual property.

The first is that they embody a conception of fair play that seems obvious to most Americans. The second is that the United States' competitive advantage lies in the production ofintellectual property.

We're abandoning our greatest asset if we let it be freely appropriated by all comers. How would you reply to those arguments?

They're fair comments, and that is why our negotiators' demands were largely met. All I'm saying is that the level at which our demands were pitched was beyond what could be justified.

We should have been able to say, "Look, what about 20 years? Let's discuss whether that makes sense for different industries," and so on. By putting it in such stark termspiracy-we managed' to drown out the really relevant question.

If protecting intellectual property has no important incentive effects, why did it become such a prominent feature of the

Perils of Protectionism Typical world experience shows that only competition produces learning; American trade debate?

Well, we do invent know-how, and if we can collect a higher return on it, we add to the national welfare-but at the expense of the developing world. If protection did provide an incentive to innovation, then protecting American intellectual property would be to the advantage of a country like Taiwan because the more new knowledge comes out, the more Taiwan benefits. But everyone seems to agree that it's really a redistributive mechanism.

The money at stake is scarcely trivial, though. One hears eight-figure estimates of the value of pirated American software, pharmaceuticals, music, and video.

Do you have any sense of the real numbers at issue?

If they were that big, then the transfer from the poor to the rich countries would be so dramatic that it would lead to evasion in the end! I believe the numbers are much smaller. Besides, there are some gains for poor countries. I come from India, and I played a role in getting the Indians to agree to intellectual property protection on the ground that India, being a middle power that increasingly produces software and movies, is potentially a major exporter. Indian films are very popular in the Middle East, but they're pirated there as much as our American movies are in India. India is a major exporter of software because Indian mathematicians are very cheap.

Given all that, I said, "Look, forget about the principles. India is right in the middle; we're not Zaire or Gabon. Yes, India will have to pay more for pharmaceuticals, but it's going to gain a great deal in other areas." Some countries were finally convinced that they had a much bigger stake here than they had first thought. But usually in these talks, when another country proposes something, it's assumed that it's going to harm yours.

And you question this assumption?

It's simply wrong. The Europeans were

against including the service sector in international trade negotiations simply because American Express pushed for it so hard in 1982. If we wanted it so much, they reasoned, it had to be bad for them.

But when they finally examined the question, they realized that they had a whole lot of terribly good banks, they had Lloyd's and other splendid insurance companies, and London's financial sector is nothing to sneeze at. So the Europeans changed their tune altogether and teamed up with us. So did many developing countries. A lot of them realized that their proposed trade liberalization in agriculture and textiles would be more effective if they could use advanced banking services, which their own banks could not provide, having been hamstrung by long-standing protection. So service liberalization was the best way to boost their own exports.

Can the French learn this lesson? They seem the most recalcitrant about giving up protection.

The French are not as into competition and free trade as we are, so they learn more slowly from the success that other countries, particularly America, have had with these policies. But there's no question that the value of our telecommunications example has been dramatic.

Nobody asked the United States to break up AT&T, freeing up the American market in telecommunications, but we've gained enormously as a result. Others may take five years or ten years to follow our example, but they will.

Example works effectively today through globalization: World markets are very open, and the experience of competition in third markets can be a strong incentive for liberalization.

You can't protect your own market if you want to playa global role. The developing countries' telecommunications markets are worth billions of dollars. If you're as inefficient because of excessive protection as the Japanese and the

French are, it's going to hurt you there.

We're seeing it happen.

So American deregulators are going to turn out to be the real heroes of the 1980s?

We've really done dramatically well because of deregulation.

Last year's McKinsey study on recent American productivity growth may be slightly exaggerated, but it still underlines the point that deregulation makes our industries leaner and meaner than those of our regulated foreign rivals.

Protectionists claim that it's crazy for an open economy to try to compete with a protected one. Not so. I've been insisting to my friends in the service sector and telecommunications that this emphasis on reciprocity and refusal to open markets just because others have closed theirs is misguided. Example and competition will bring the rest of the world on board, or they'll be wiped out.

What about Motorola and its battle with the Japanese? The Japanese reaped the benefits of competition in third markets while retaining the benefits of protection at home. They partitioned their domestic market so that within six or seven years they had produced an exportable cellular product.

Because economics is about prevailing tendencies, you can always produce counterexamples.

I had a teacher at Cambridge, Joan Robinson, who said that in economics virtually everything is true: You can find examples of both what you want to be true and its opposite. What you have to ascertain is the stronger tendency in a system.

Japan is one of the rare cases where protection has worked at all, and it worked largely because the Japanese have always set their minds on international markets and had complementary policies like investment in R&D and a very high rate of literacy, which made the theoretical possibility of learning under protection a reality. So it's a dangerous exam-

protection generally yields goofing-off effects. pie. Nine-tenths of the world does not have those complementary policies, for political and other reasons, so that you get goofing-off effects rather than learning effects, and people just hide behind trade barriers, jack up prices, and slash investment.

If I build a model where I assume learning will happen, then of course I'll conclude that protection is efficient and protection can work. But typical world experience shows that only competition produces learning, and protection works very badly. Moreover, in the case of Motorola and Japan, yes, that was an industry where protection enabled specific Japanese firms to grow. But in electronics, as in other industries, there has also been a whole lot of intervention that has not worked out. The Japanese lost very badly with digital versus analog. In the car industry they tried to stop specific firms from expanding, and that didn't work out. There are lots of examples from across their economy.

Can we conclude from this that industrial policy does not work?

It's not that industrial policy doesn't ever work. After all, even private enterprise doesn't work perfectly and painlessly; it works by wiping out the failures. No method can give you 100 percent results.

I believe in the value of intervention in many cases. We tend to judge public policy by an impossible test: It's supposed to work every time. I think we should allow for a failure rate at least similar to that of the private sector, which means maybe 30 percent.

My objection to industrial policy-an objection that I believe many economists are beginning to share-is that it is very, very difficult to decide which industries to support, and there's no reason to assume you'll break the 30 percent barrier. True, in the postwar years Japan grew rapidly by making relatively good choices.

But the government didn't make those choices; Mitsubishi and Mitsui did. The

private sector co-opted the government into support of its vision, not the other way around.

You have more experience with industrial-policy bureaucrats than do many of their American admirers. What does it teach you?

My view, highly colored not only by the American example but particularly

by India and the many developing countries I studied in my youth, is that bureaucrats are probably the people least likely to make wise choices. Their money is not at stake. They're able to use public financing to write off their mistakes whenever they're directly involved, and they typically don't have any microknowledge at all.

I am very skeptical of these people's abilities, not because of my early education as an economist, which was in fact left-wing and interventionist, but because I've observed them at work. Indeed, if Japanese bureaucrats produced the Japanese miracle, that's a miracle in itself.

The entrepreneurs, the people of Japan, and the other folks who shaped modern Japanese institutions-many of them Americans--deserve the credit for having made wise choices.

You've been skeptical that there was any such thing as an economically relevant cultural mix peculiar to Japan. You always put" cultural" in quotation}1larks.

I don't think I've ever denied the value of culture. I say, for example, that economics teaches us that people respond to prices. What culture does is determine the price at which you respond. So it's not whether you respond to economic conditions; it's how you respond to them.

Take India, and compare two areas: East Pakistan, which became Bangladesh, and West Pakistan. They were carved out of Bengal and Punjab respectively, with massive dislocation after the massacres that followed the partition. In (Continued on page 36)

TIERE1S

MONEY IN ECONOMICS

by SYLVIA

NASAR

Once-stodgy textbook publishers in the United States are placing big bets that new-wave economists like N. Gregory Mankiw (below) will write profitable best-sellers.

N. Gregory Mankiw, a dweeby 37-yearold economics professor who named his dog Keynes, was not counting on getting rich overnight.

Most academics, even at Harvard University, don't. But a phone cal1 from a Texas publisher changed all that.

Mankiw was offered a $1.4 million advance

by Harcourt Brace in Fort Worth, Texas, to write a basic economics textbook.

That's about three times as big as any other in the U.S. col1ege textbook market and rivals those of al1 but a few celebrity authors.

So what's going on?

It is a race among once-stodgy textbook publishers to find the next blockbuster economics textbook, a book that wil1 shape the thinking of the 1.5 mil1ion col1ege students who sign up for Econ 101 each year in the United States. This introductory course is both the first and the last brush that most educated Americans have with supply and demand, marginal cost, comparative advantage, and other first principles of the dismal science.

Such a book is long overdue. For nearly half a century, students have learned the essentials of economics from Paul Samuelson, now almost 80, and a score of his disciples and imitators.

But Samuelson's Economics and its many clones reflect the mindset of a postDepression generation of scholars who thought they understood the economy well enough to tell the federal government how to manage the ups and downs of the business cycle.

Meanwhile, the world has changed.

And so has wnat most economists believe.

But for all the shifts in thinking, previous attempts to sell a mold-breaking economics textbook have wound up costing publishers money. Most col1ege students are learning from books that many in the field view as outdated.

"We're really not teaching basic economics," said Paul Krugman, an economist at Stanford University in California, who is also writing an introductory textbook. "We're not getting it across at all."

I don't care who writes a nation's lawsor crafts its advanced treaties-if I can write its economics textbooks.

That is where the wooing of Mankiw and a handful of other new-wave economics superstars comes in.

Textbook publishers in the United States are placing big bets that these people will sel1lots of books.

In the past, ambitious young economists like Mankiw left textbook writing to older or less-distinguished colleagues.

They concentrated instead on the kind of esoteric research that might win them a Nobel Prize.

But now some are jumping at the chance to mold the minds of the next generation of political leaders, executives, image makers, and other members of the American elite.

The new stars are seeking not just fame, but fortune. "Even young people at the forefront of research are taking off time to write textbooks," Mankiw said. "The top three or four textbooks, even the top ten, are profitable, wildly profitable. " Samuelson's book, in al1 its editions, has sold more than three mil1ion copies around the world, including India. Since then, the feat of combining a big name with huge sales has never been repeated.

Given the chance to hit it big, some outstanding economists-like movie actors, ballplayers, and novelists-have figured out they are worth quite a lot in the new superstar market.

In 1987, the staid world of academic publishing was jolted by the heretical concept of a bidding war. Two professors, Andrew Abel of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia and Ben Bernanke of Princeton University, New Jersey, sent what they called a prospectus to eight publishers.

The auction worked bril1iantly, from the authors' point of view. It set a new floor of $250,000, which has since escalated to $400,000 to $500,000, for the much smal1er intermediate-level textbook market.

Enter Mankiw, who kept a close eye on such goings on.

Granted tenure by Harvard at the unusually young age of 29, he won notice not only with his original research but also by publishing a promising, vividly written intermediate textbook.

Scott Stratford, then at McGrawHill, began the bidding war for Mankiw's principles text. He offered what he thought was a staggering advance-$l million.

But Mankiw didn't even blink.

"That little money-grubber started shopping the deal," said John Greenman, the economics editor at HarperCol1ins, which found the bidding too rarified.

According to several people familiar with the negotiations, Mankiw's own publisher, Worth, matched McGrawHil1's offer.

Then Harcourt Brace jumped in, offering what amounted to a $400,000 signing bonus on top of the $1 million, plus a 22 percent royalty arrangement. The deal was sealed in December 1992.

"Economists are like bassets and beagles," Samuelson said recently.

"They've got no loyalty and they're insatiable."

0 About the Author: Sylvia Nasal' writes for the New York Times on economic and trade issues.

Part IV: The Lures of Love A Fine and Frothy Day Upon a Timeless Strand A Goddess Was Blown by Humid Winds Onward to the Land 1987-90 (From the Fish Tank Sonata series)

Arthur Tress: The Dream Collector Photography is my method for defining the confusing world that rushes constantly toward me. It is my defensive attempt to reduce our daily chaos to a set of understandable images ....

J need it to survive.

Arthur Tress is one of America's most extraordinary and diversified photographers, one whose documentary reportage can be so subjective or fabricated that it subverts the genre, whose manufacture of visual eras can present seemingly incongruous dualities of beauty and violence,

Act 11: The Voyage ... Where They Came Upon Fantastic Creatures And Strange Botanical Species 1980 ( From the Teapot Opera series)

and whose creation of an individual mythology in a universe of kitsch can make sense of the meaning of life, death, and the hereafter.

"Much of today's photography," Tress speculates, " ... fails to touch upon the hidden life of the imagination and fantasy which is hungry for stimulation. The documentary photographer supplies us with facts or drowns in humanity, while

the pictorialist, avant-garde or conservative, pleases us with mere aesthetically correct compositions-but where are the photographs we can pray to, that will make us well again, or scare the hell out of us?"

Over a span of 35 years, Tress has created his own selective world to suggest an answer to his query. He delights in the thought of leading his viewers through it

for one fantastic voyage. An exhibition of his work, Fantastic Voyage: The Photographs of Arthur Tress, developed and funded by the United States Information Agency, is scheduled to be shown in Calcutta (August 6-19), New Delhi (September 1-30), and Bombay (October 5-31).

*

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Arthur Tress was born on November 24, 1940, in Brooklyn, New York. A recurrent memory of his youth is his early view of the world, filtered through his bedroom window, of a solitary acanthus tree brooding in the dark, narrow courtyard outside. His early photographic experiments were deeply influenced by Heinrich Bluecher of Bard College, New York, with whom he studied comparative world culture and philosophy. The later photography of Alfred Stieglitz also interested Tress in the early years, and he briefly experimented with photographic homages to the master in a number of composed, artistic nature studies of trees and grasses.

In 1962 Tress went to Paris to study filmmaking but soon gave it up. Over the next several years he traveled through Europe, Africa, Mexico, India, and Japan. His photography shifted toward ethnographic documentation of the different cultures he came across. In 1967 Tress moved to Sweden where he prepared educational filmstrips for the Stockholm Ethnographical Museum.

Here he began to pursue III earnest a distinct directorial style of documentation, employing candid situations altered to suit his particular and intuitive imagination.

The Stockholm pictures form an introduction to Tress's mature theatrical images.

Returning to New York City in 1968, Tress's first job was to produce a series of images on sharecroppers in South Carolina and folk artists and craftspeople in Appalachia for VISTA (Volunteers in Service to America) magazine. The same year, he published the first significant collection of his work in book form in Herbert Shellans's compilation, Folk Songs of the Blue Ridge Mountains, documenting the folk

The Appointment 1985 (From the Hospital series)

Rubber Masks, 42nd Street Subway 1958

mythology passed down among the isolated mountain folk of the Appalachian mountains in Virginia.

For his next series, Open Space in the Inner City (1970), Tress chose the dense urban atmosphere of New York City, juxtaposing remnants of old New York charm with the frequent horrors and misguided intentions of modernization.

Influenced by Carl lung's philosophy of archetypes, Tress produced his first major book, The Dream Collector (1972), based on his study of dream phenomena. After interviewing children about their most memorable dreams, he attempted to recreate the imagery for his camera, using children as his actors and whatever props might be available. Tress explored his preoccupation with dreams and the unconscious in subsequent series-Shadow (1975), Theater of the Mind (1976), and Facing Up (1977-80).

In the late 1970she began to experiment with arranged stilllifes. The Teapot Opera (1980) grew from a single still life into a "story about the process of discovering the story and the evolution of the idea in making the work of art." The antique French toy opera theater, found by Tress amidst the clutter of an old curiosity shop in Stockholm, became the proscenium for the action, augmented by other toy theater designs and props.

A transitional study, Theoretical

Models (1983), was followed by another major project, the Hospital (1984), in which Tress tried to "exorcise my own fears of sickness and death by transforming the hospital paraphernalia into a kind of wondrous children's playland." In The Fish Tank Sonata (1987-90), a talking fish becomes the fisherman's guide to the secrets of life and art, teaching him technique, history, and love.

In his newest and ongoing series, Requiem for a Paperweight, Tress dabbles with futuristic technology, image application, genetic manipulation, and virtual reality. Conceived in 1990 as the final part of a trilogy (the first two parts being Teapot Opera and Fish Tank Sonata), Requiem is "a meditation on the destiny both of an individual contemplating his own definitive departure from existence, but also of our economic and scientific culture struggling to enter the next millennium without destroying itseff."

For more than 35 years, Tress has carved out a conscious microworld within the broader context of the real world. And asthe intrinsic concepts of his pictures are increasingly generated from his imagination, their progressive miniaturization becomes magical and transcendent, an optimistic approach toward subatomic, universal enlightenment. We can only wonder with Tress: Where will the voyage take us from here?

0

Right: Foundation of Good Health

1990 (From the Requiem for a Paperweight series) Below: Man and Mannequin, New York City

1982 Bottom left: Girl Gathering Goldfish, Chateau Breteuil, France 1974 ( From the Theater of the Mind series)

JEFFERSON IN REEL LIFE In their first feature film based on a historic figure, legendary filmmakers Merchant Ivory focus on the life and loves of Thomas Jefferson during his Paris sojourn in the days preceding the French Revolution.

On this fine Monday in June 1994, the Hall of Mirrors in the Versailles Palace, a vast, overdecorated space with 20 massive chandeliers, an acre of gilt and a population of undusted statues, has become a movie set. The temporary occupant is Merchant Ivory Productions, fabled for transforming highconcept fiction into classy film entertainment. The project is Jefferson in Paris, an account of America's third President's life and loves during his official stay in France and a picture that premiered earlier this year on March 31.

Today's shoot requires the services of scores of extras, properly bewigged and richly costumed in the irrational splendor of the royal court of the ancien regime. There are 14 dressers; there are 27 hairdressers and makeup people, among them numerous women dashing about waving powder puffs; there is a conseiller en reverence, an expert hired to demonstrate the proper ways to curtsy or bow as the royal couple strolls by.

Observing the process of filming is not greatly different from watching paint dry. But in those hours, a visitor can absorb a J

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Far left: Young Polly Jefferson (Estelle Eonnet) lingers in the arms of Sally Hemings (Thandie Newton) on arrival in Paris. Above: The Versailles' Hall of Mirrors provides an opulent, authentic settingfor an elaborate procession of Swiss Guards led by the Grand Chamberlain (Alain Richard). Left: In his Paris garden, Jefferson (Nick Nolte), and Maria Cosway (Greta Scacchi) face the inevitability of parting.

Above: Jefferson watches his eldest daughter, Patsy (Gwyneth Paltrow), play the harpsichord in the music room ofhis Paris home. Left: A balloon bearing a cargo of small animals is sent aloft outside Versailles to entertain royalfamily and guests. Right: Operatic interlude. A makeup artist applies final touches to producer Merchant, who appears in a cameo role as the emissary ofTipu Sultan in Dardanus, an opera

by Sacchini performed before the French court.

few of the elements that, in 35 years of teamwork, have made Merchant Ivory a legend as well as an oddity in the trade: The scrupulous attention to period detail; the million dollars' worth of costuming that would have cost any other producer twice that sum or more; the presence of an important actor, Nick Nolte, paying for the privilege of impersonating Thomas Jefferson by collecting a good deal less than the customary inflated wages of superstardom.

By looking hard, an observer might catch sight of James Ivory, whose approach to directing is so low-key it can sometimes seem invisible. More easily noticed and heard, Ismail Merchant, occasional director, gifted money-raiser, maintains his franchise on cost control: During lulls, he can be heard exhorting anyone within hearing range, "All right-let's go, let's go!" Absent is the novelist Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, who has written the script, but who is an irregular presence during production.

As Merchant likes to point out, it is an unlikely team: A devout Muslim from India plus the son of a lumber baron of the American West plus a woman who started life as a German Jew, found refuge from the Nazis in England, and married an architect from New Delhi. In contrast to Merchant's overflowing spirits, Ivory is reserved, urbane, sharply observant, and, when circumstances require it, quietly forceful. Jhabvala is a reticent, almost shadowy figure, but her novels reveal a woman with an irreverent, ironic wit.

If, as the writer L.P. Hartley tells us, the past is a foreign country, it seems reasonable to count Merchant Ivory among the canniest of cinematic tour guides. Their most successful works have looked to other times-a few years back or many decades back.

They have wandered through old landscapes and long-completed lives with the ease of people who feel most comfortable with all our vanished yesterdays. And, we are not to forget that, in great part, they have made movies for grown-ups.

This long, exhausting shoot in Versailles is taking place mainly because, II years earlier, Ivory sat down to read Olivier Bernier's Pleasure and Privilege: Life in France, Naples, and America, 1770-1790. Bernier dwells vividly on the French aristocracy and the spendthrift culture that ended in a great national upheaval, a favorite Ivory subject. In Ivory's Oregon boyhood, he was apparently more apt to play French Revolution than cowboys and American Indians. Jefferson does not occupy many pages in Pleasure and Privilege, but the references are choice. Bernier had come upon a contemporary book by a French nobleman who was profoundly impressed by an encounter with America's first polymath statesman. He reported that here was an American who "knows music, drawing, geometry, astronomy, physics and law." A more complete list would also have included gardening and architecture.

"I don't know, something just clicked," Ivory later recounted. He closed the Bernier book, thinking to himself, This could be a good film. For a cool, low-key, cultivated man, that was the Hollywood equivalent of "Wow!" Without any reading plan in mind, Ivory began his research with Fawn Brodie's 1974 best-seller, the 594-page Thomas

Jefferson, An Intimate History. Over the next few years, he would read deeply in the subject, but Brodie, a California scholar, provided details of Jefferson's private life that was history in Technicolor. Ivory's imagination was particularly seized by her account of Jefferson's time in Paris. A widower and former governor of Virginia, Jefferson sailed the Atlantic in 1784 as part of a three-man commission that was to negotiate trade agreements with the European states; soon after, he succeeded the ailing Benjamin Franklin as minister to France. He stayed on until 1789, when the downtrodden French began to lay siege to the privileged classes. In addition to exposing Jefferson to the joys of music, art, and theater, Brodie contended, the stay abroad plunged him into two affairs of the heart. The first involved Maria Cosway, a woman of beauty, talent, and wit, and wife of a British painter of uncertain sexuality. Although Jefferson was a prodigious writer of letters-18,OOO in a lifetime-he was a prudent man, and there is no clear indication in anything he wrote that the association was physical. But Maria's first of two departures for England inspired an extraordinary letter: The famous composition called "My Head and My Heart," an outpouring of love and grief in emotional language totally unexpected from this famously controlled man.

The second woman was said to be Sally Hemings, one of several slave children sired by his father-in-law and part of his wife's dowry. Barely into her teens, Hemings accompanied Jefferson's younger daughter Polly to Paris in 1787. When the family packed up to return to America, the pretty, lightskinned young woman was pregnant with the first of seven children conceived, Brodie asserts, during a lifelong relationship with Jefferson. (Only four of these children are known to have survived.) There was gossip in Jefferson's lifetime, of course, but his response to rumors was always silence. The family explanation was that Hemings' babies were the progeny of two nephews, sons of Jefferson's sister. Brodie, however, insisted on the likelihood of the Jefferson-Hemings liaison, maintaining that the nephews were seldom around at the times Hemings became pregnant, whereas Jefferson was. She also cited an 1873 newspaper interview in which an aging Madison Hemings, one of Sally's children, claimed Jefferson as his and his siblings' father. On its publication, Brodie's book unleashed a torrent of predictable protest. Most of the academic community rejected the idea out of hand.

The first samples of what Ivory expected to be a new barrage of protests were fired in 1993. Several Jefferson authorities, hearing of the Jhabvala script, wanted it known that "there isn't one grain of truth" to the Hemings story; one called it an "assault on our history."

The Question of Slavery With his customary calm, Ivory wonders why people are more upset by the idea of Jefferson's involvement in an interracial relationship than they are by his use of slavery. After all, here was a man who, for 83 years, enjoyed a princely existence supported by unpaid human labor (see SPAN, April 1993). "It's fine that he

had 125 slaves," Ivory says with dry irony. "That he might have fathered seven children with an almost-white concubine who was his wife's half sister is too much to think about."

This movie has suffered its share of the kind of vicissitudes common to little fellows up against the giants of Hollywood.

Ivory had begun thinking about the Jefferson film while working on one of his earliest successes, Heat and Dust. In the decade that followed, it loitered in his mind as the company, with varying degrees of financial and critical successes, turned out The Bostonians, A Room With a View, Maurice, Mr. and Mrs. Bridge, Howards End, and The Remains of the Day. With the exception of Maurice, all the scripts were Jhabvala's.

After a false start, this project too was turned over to Jhabvala, who drew heavily from Jefferson's writings. The future began to brighten when Merchant Ivory landed a deal with the Hollywood firm of TriStar, but TriStar was soon in trouble, and Merchant Ivory had to buy back their script.

After that, the script traveled from studio to studio-five in all.

"The attitude was," Merchant recalls, " 'Who wants to see Thomas Jefferson?' " Merchant, Bombay-born, America-educated, is an outsize figure, ebullient, expansive, boastful, a natural performer whose stage is everywhere, and his optimism is infectious. Even before a script or financing was in hand, he says, John Bright, one of Merchant Ivory's veteran costume designers, had set up a rack labeled "Jefferson" in his London studio and would spend spare hours rummaging through flea markets for period garments.

Money has always been a problem in the company's operations. In the midst of production, crew members' checks have bounced, promised support needed to finish a film has vanished. But Merchant has always managed to find fresh sources of funds. That is merely one of his numerous talents. An exuberant chef, he has written three cookbooks and will on occasion turn out splendid meals for cast and crew. To save time and money, he has taken on small roles in Merchant Ivory films.

And in 1993, he made his debut as a director of a feature film, In Custody, shot in India.

Merchant is renowned for his dedication to cheeseparing.

Reportedly, nobody in the company travels first-class or stays in luxury lodgings-unless, of course, Merchant has struck a deal on the price. Merchant Ivory's New York office is conspicuously un-Hollywood, a cramped, cluttered, indifferently furnished four-room suite where telephones ring incessantly and three or four employees deftly tend to daily operations while, somewhere, the bosses are hunting finances or making a film.

For Jefferson in Paris, both became possibilities with the release in the spring of 1992 of Howards End, the hugely successful work based on the E.M. Forster novel. One admirer was Jeffrey Katzenberg, then chairman of the rich and powerful Walt Disney Studios. One day, working in his London office, Merchant picked up the phone to hear Katzenberg say: "You have humiliated all of us in Hollywood. We seem to have lost

the art of making these kinds of films." What was their next project?

In no time, the Jefferson script was on its way to California.

Within 48 hours, Katzenberg called to say that Disney would help finance and distribute it. Ultimately, the studio put up abou t half the estimated $ I4 million cost, and the rest was raised without much difficulty.

Although Jefferson would be the most expensive picture ever undertaken by Merchant Ivory, the company could hardly be accused of profligacy. In 1994 the average cost of shooting a merely average film, without extravagant 18th-century flourishes, was $30 million. But then, not many producers bother to forage for bargains. For example, most of the period fabrics needed for costumes were either found or created in India, where costs are well below prices in Europe, and most of the 400 costumes were assembled in factories there as well.

Everyone who works with Merchant Ivory learns to be sensitive to their economics. Richard Robbins has composed the scores for most of their films since 1979, and when he was ready to record the music for Jefferson, he went to Salt Lake City. A Utah orchestra met the requirements at lower costs than symphony groups with bigger names and in more convenient locations.

One Jefferson role had been assigned early on-Greta Scacchi as Maria Cosway. Scacchi's breakthrough film role came more than a dozen years ago when she played the restless British bride seduced by a Nawab in Heat and Dust. She became a friend of the filmmakers' and often visited them. The actress, who does a wickedly accurate imitation of Merchant's deep Bombay inflections, remembers him telling her five years ago, "You're going to be in our new film. You're going to be in Jefferson. Because I made you into a star."

Ivory, of course, is another species of filmmaker. On the set, Scacchi recalls, he says little. If he doesn't like something, he might tell her bluntly, "You really look awful when you make that face. Just don't do that." If he likes a scene, she'll know because one corner of his mouth might lift-ever so slightlyin a ghost of a semi-smile.

"A Positive Genius for Casting" Ivory rarely voices his approval. "The fact is," she says, "he trusts actors, he likes actors. I remember the day we finished shooting on Heat and Dust, he said to me, 'Well, Greta, I think you've done a very good job.' "With impeccable mimicry, her voice goes Ivory nasal and uninflected Northwest. "And I said, 'No thanks to you. You never gave me any direction. You never said anything.' He said, 'Greta, that is so rude. I did half your work casting you.' " This was less boastful than it sounds.

At least one critic has found in Ivory "a positive genius for casting."

Scacchi's reminiscences were offered over a cup of tea in the cafe of a Paris hotel after a trying Sunday with a horse. The script has a scene in which Jefferson and Co sway walk through the woods, leading horses. Months earlier, Scacchi, an unen-

The legendary team circa 1985: Director James 1vory, scriptwriter Ruth Prawar Jhabvala, and producer (and sometimes director) 1smail Merchant have been collaborating for 35 years.

thusiastic horsewoman, had been assured no riding would be involved. Then, on Friday, she learned that the scene would be shot Monday in revised form: They would be mounted. And so she had spent her day in a voluminous 18th-century skirt, perched sidesaddle on a steed.

She plays opposite Nick Nolte. Properly wigged and with a straight nose disguising his own, Nolte bears some resemblance to Jefferson. There are actors who disdain the whole notion of research, but to Nolte, every new character is a crash course in a new subject. He enlisted the assistance of Mel Weiser, a theater director and old friend who helped him accumulate Jeffersoniana, ultimately more than 200 books. From time to time, Weiser would carry a batch of material to Nolte's home in Malibu, California, and the men would devote two unbroken weeks to the subject: "From early in the morning to two or three the next morning, we would talk about Jefferson," Weiser related. They visited Jefferson's home, Monticello, and his University of Virginia. They studied Virginia speech patterns of Jefferson's time. They spent the better part of a year on the subject. "Not enough time, not nearly enough," Nolte complains as shooting winds down in Paris.

When Scacchi and Nolte met in Paris, virtually the first subject they discussed and settled was the question of whether the Cosway-Jefferson relationship had been consummated. Both were persuaded that it had been. Ivory did not agree, but he was tolerant of the conclusion. He never objected, Scacchi says, when some of their scenes together became obviously sexually charged.

Jhabvala actually gave them a love scene, a passionate exchange in which they never touch. She transformed Jefferson's dazzling "Head and Heart" letter into a parlor game, a high-spirited sequence played out with highborn company in a country picnic setting. In the end, the two are so involved in the "game" that the other players have no chance to participate.

"Nobody cares for him who cares for nobody," proclaims Cosway, the Heart.

"A wise man will only depend on himself," replies Jefferson, the Head.

Scacchi had also researched Cosway's character and had visited Lodi, the small town in northern Italy where, late in life,

Cosway established an important college for women. And Scacchi had spent two months finding her way into the strings of the harp, a Cosway specialty.

Music was a passion of Jefferson's, and it is a preoccupation, if not an obsession, of the film. Ivory went to the trouble of hiring a specialist in the music of the time, David Bohanovich, a New York musicologist and founder of a trio called the Jefferson Players. Bohanovich spent months tracking down period instruments and tutoring cast members who were suddenly required to look at home with them. As Jefferson, Nolte learned to appear expert with a violin in hand. After four months of lessons Gwyneth Paltrow, who plays Jefferson's adolescent daughter Patsy, still could not read a note of music, but she had become so accomplished on an antique harpsichord that her work did not have to be dubbed.

The movie is framed at its beginning and end by scenes in an Ohio farmhouse. There in 1873, an old Madison Hemingsplayed by James Earl Jones-tells a reporter that he was fathered by a slave woman and an American President.

Between those moments, we learn of Jefferson's time in a great city aflame with pleasure, privilege, and the gathering fury of the unfed. We see Jefferson at the opera, at an art show, at soirees in luxurious homes. We see mobs of the poor and hungry looting bread from bakeries and parading poles with decapitated heads through the streets. Jefferson falls in love with Maria and also enters into a relationship with Sally.

Jhabvala's script suggests that, in the end, he may have given up Maria as a result, in part, of the emotional blackmail of a jealous Patsy.

It must be noted that all Merchant Ivory's attention to the impeccable re-creation of a time and place has not excited unanimous critical appreciation. Among the favorable reviews for most of their movies are usually a few that d~scribe the work derisively as "tasteful."

Merchant's belligerent dismissal of this sort of criticism is that taste has classically been scorned by people who are in short supply of it. Still, both taste and attention to detail are surely the hallmarks of this long June day at Versailles-a Monday, when the place is closed to tourists and thus available)to filmmakers. Since the Hall is 79 meters long, there is even room for a small knot of observers. These include the curator of the palace, as well as a Rothschild baroness said to be an authority on Marie Antoinette. Checking out the film's queen, the baroness tells Ivory, "This one looks perfect."

He looks pleased.

It is a simple scene. The king is announced. He is Michael Lonsdale, a fine actor cast for, among other assets, his majestic bearing. The king and queen are preceded into the hall by two dozen Swiss Guards. Decked out in red-and-black uniforms, they carry big, clumsy halberds and are embellished with small, matching black mustaches. They march in a rhythmic swish of soles and clump of heels-swish, clump, swish, clump. The royal couple appear, move royally down the line of courtiers and ministers, and stop before Jefferson, who intro-

Two days later, working on one of the scenes that closes Jefferson, Ivory, his crew, Nolte, and two other actors are crammed into a small space representing a corner of the study in the Paris house where Jefferson made his quarters.

Merchant Ivory has taken over a nearly vacant building in the elegant 16th arrondissement and turned it into a miniature studio. For the sequence, Jefferson, preparing to return home, is confronted by James Hemings and his sister Sally, played by Seth Gilliam and Thandie Newton. James wants his freedom and the right to remain in France; Sally isn't sure what she wants. In her confusion, she weeps-again and again and again. Once, waiting for the next take, Nolte asks Newton with gentle and amused concern, "How many times have you cried so far?" She has lost count.

Six months later, with the editing completed and the final sound mix awaiting his attention, Ivory pauses to reminisce about one serendipitous occasion in Paris, a touching moment when past and present met.

In Paris, Jefferson had a legendary dispute with the great French naturalist Comte de Buffon, who had argued that America's inferior climate resulted in undersized examples of man and No force of character emerges from this beast.

Since Jefferson was much taller Jefferson, no shade of greatness. And his amours than most Frenchmen, that claim was are dulL ..

The worst failure is primary. After all this long at the very least debatable. To counter film's fussing and nourishing, little has really inthe Comte's notion of the size of terested us and absolutely nothing at all has American native animals, he ordered a moved us . moose hunted down and had the dead -Stanley Kauffmann, The New Republic beast shipped to him. ... Though the team [of Merchant, Ivory. and Jhabvala's script called for an Jhabvala) does its customarily sterling job in capimmense live moose to appear in the turing the opulent detail, the characters stubscene of a Jefferson-Buffon encounter, bornly refuse to come to life. but finding one proved impossible. At Nolte seems to think that playing an introIvory's suggestion, his art department spective man means impersonating a wax dummy .... searched Paris for an appropriate skeleThandie Newton gives the film's liveliest perton of the animal. It arrived-"a stuformance as Sally Hemings, the young slave some pendous skeleton mounted on a scholars believe carried on a secret affair with wheeled wooden cart." Dumbfounded, Jefferson ... .The film buys into that hotly conIvory asked where it had come from. A tested notion ... but shies away from showing Sally doing more than unbuckling Big Tom's shoe. The museum of science had lent it, he was timid approach robs the film of passion and told. He bent down and looked at the point.

-Rolling Stone French label. It said, "Gift of the United States of America to the people .. .The problem with this kind of filmmaking of France, 1787." Even in the absence has always been caution. And that's what is wrong with Jefferson in Paris. It's as if everyone was just of a donor's name, it appeared obvious a little too much in tasteful awe of itssubjecl...who that here was Jefferson's moose. If is played rather stolidly by ick Nolte. They are Jefferson in Paris needed a happy afraid to grant him his full vitality or give full draomen, it would seem to have been delivmatic life to the issues that stirred him .. ered that day into the grateful hands of There is plenty of material here for a gripping story about a man whose habits of life and belief Merchant Ivory.

0

duces Patsy. She is addressed by the queen and, lacking French, looks disconcerted. The end.

After several rehearsals, the scene is shot and reshot and shot again. Once, someone announces, "Tout fait, merei," but it isn't "all done," and cameras roll again. Another time Ivory announces, "That was pretty good," and orders another shot.

Between takes, Nolte sits down every chance he has, and since there are only two folding chairs-one bearing a crudely hand-printed label for him, the other for Ivory-his is a privileged position.

The sun, high and bright and warm, invades the room, inflicting pain on Lonsdale. Rising temperatures cause an old foot injury to swell, and by day's end, he has to discard his custom-made, Cuban-heeled period pumps. For the final takes, the royal personage, adorned in unimaginably rich embroidered velvet, wears a shabby pair of incongruously modern canvas slippers. It is after 9:00 p.m. when, for the last time this day, a pair of assistants shout "Cut!" and "Coupez!" The sequence has consumed almost seven hours. It will use up no more than two minutes of the final cut of the film.

Jefferson in Paris premiered March 31 to largely unenthusiastic reviews from movie critics. Here are some examples: ... American movies so seldom delve into our 18th-century roots that one gratefully absorbs the historical details sprinkled throughout this always handsome spectacle. Jefferson in Paris is, alas, a better history Jesson than a drama. Smart but inert, stately but rhythm less, it circles its contradictory, polymathic hero for nearly two and a half hours without ever quite bringing him to life .... AIl dressed up, this elegant movie has nowhere to go.

-David Ansen, Newsweek Nobody is immune, it seems, to the politics of race and sex, not even the drafter of the Declaration of Independence and third U.S. President, Thomas Jefferson.

This, at least, seems to be one of the lessons of Jefferson in Paris ....

Jefferson in Paris has received mixed reviews from movie critics, and it seems to be getting mixed reviews from historians as well, given that it does what most historical movies do: Mixes fact and fiction in such a way as to make one indistinguishable from the other.

The problem is that what Jefferson in Paris presents as vividly real, in the way only film has the power to, has long been viewed by most historians as a possibility at best or, very likely, pure invention.

-Richard Bernstein, International Herald Tribune Draw up a list of rules for making a poor picture about a historical figure and you'll find that Jefferson in Paris ... obeys them aIL ...

This picture runs two hours and 20 minutes, but almost from the start, it seems breathless ....

are being challenged in all sorts of ways. But essentially the movie settles for pretty pictures. The love stories are presented with gingerly discretion. Jefferson's affair with Maria is all arch, twittering banter in an antique style; nothing in it elevates their pulses (or the audience's) ....

-Richard Schickel, Time

About the Author: Helen Dudar frequently contributes to Smithsonian and other generalinterest magazines.

Shannila Togore ond SOllmitra Choll!:'r}ee a scelle/rom The World of Apu (1959).

ill

"One of the great cinematic experiences of my life was in the very early '60s, when I watched the complete Apu Trilogy in a New York theater."

Rescuing the Art of Satyajit Ray When the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences decided to present a lifetime achievement award to filmmaker Satyajit Ray in 1992, it had to look to Europe to find usable clips for its Oscar night tribute: almost nothing was available in the United State'.

But even in Europe the prints were hardly satisfactory, and some of Ray's 26 feature films. eight hort features. and five documentaries were missing.

Yet this was one of the 20th-century's greatest directors, a filmmaker admired by the photographer Henri CartierBresson. the writer V.S. Naipaul, and the musician Mstislav Rostropovich.

Directors like Akira Kurosawa, Martin Scorsese, and James Ivory say they are indebted to Ray, who died a month after the 0 car ceremony (he had been filmed receiving the statuette in a Calcutta hospital bed).

"One of the great cinematic experiences of my life," Scorsese wrote in a tribute in 1991, "was in the very early I 960s, when I watched the complete Apu Trilogy in a New York theater: Pather Punchali. Aparajito. and The World of Apu ... .I was 18 or 19 years old and had grown up in a very parochial society of Italian-Americans, and yet I was deeply

moved b what Ray showed of people so far from my own experience."

Even in Bengal, when:' riginal negative of Ray's work were k pt. the situation was dire. A few were in tatter; most of the rest had seriously deteriorated.

The harsh climate and the lack of money for duplicates had wreaked havoc on Ray's works, especially the early classics like the Apu Trilogy. It was obvious that without swift action, that legacy would be lost.

Now, rescue is at hand. Two projects, one short-term, the other long-term, will reveal Ray to a new gene ation of American moviegoers. film critics, and scholars. This year, nin~ of Ray's films will be screened in ci ties across the United States by Sony Classic. Restored

by Merchant Ivory Productions and the Academy of Motion Picture Art and Sciences, they will include the Apu Trilogy (1955-59), The Music Room (1958), The Goddess (1960), Three Daughters (1961). and Charulala (1964).

The retrospective began on April 7 in Jew York, where all nine of the restored films are being shown. each for two weeks, starting with Pather Panchali. That screening marked the anniversary of its world premiere 40

byANDREWROBI

so

years ago at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Simultaneously, work has begun on the preservation of the rest of Ray's films, using the best bits of copies borro\ved from film archives all over the world. Two Ray archive are being established for those preserved films-in California (at the Academy and at the University of California.

Santa Cruz) and in Calcutta, Ray's home city.

The spon ors include the Ford Foundation, the United Nations Development Program" the United Nations Educational.

Scientific and Cultural Organization, the Rajiv Gandhi Foundation, and the Government of India. Eventually, if enough money IS forthcoming, the archives will each contain restored copies of every Ray film.

Yet paradoxically Ray belongs in neither the Western nor the Indian filmmaking mainstream, the latter with its heroes and villains, fights and chases, songs and dances. Nor is he a "difficult" artist to comprehend. a Bengali Bergman.

Perhaps Ray is more of a Bengali Renoir, both of them having been supremely intelligent artists who drew on deep reserves of feeling and humor.

Gerard Depardieu, who produced Ray's penultimate film, said enthusiastically in a filmed interview being shown with each Ray movie: "Everybody can und rstand a Ray movie if they want to hear another music. Beautiful, strong music. Some piece of Mozart."

Ray, who composed his own film music, adored Mozart, especially Mozart's operas. From the beginning he strove in his films for Mozart's tension between simplicity and complexity.

In 1950 Ray wrote, in a letter from London to a friend in India: "The entire conventional approach (as exemplified by even the best American and British films) is wrong.

"Because the conventional approach tells you that the best way to tell a story is to leave out all except those elements which are directly related to the story, while .. .if your theme is strong and simple, then you can include a hundred little apparently irrelevant details which, instead of obscuring the theme, only help to intensify it by contrast. and in addition create the illusion of actuality better."

Among the keenest fans of Ray's artistry is the energetic Ismail Merchant, who is the dominant figure in the theatrical relaunch of Ray's films. Merchant, who was born in Bombay, shuttles between New York, London, Paris, and Bombay, wheeling and dealing in the name of Satyajit Ray while also produc-

Merchant I yory movies.

Merchant and his American partner, James Ivory, who also supports the restoration project, are discharging a deep personal debt. For it was Ray who recut Merchant Ivory's fIrst film, The Hou,ldlOlder, back in 1963, and got the team started.

"Ray stood behind the Moviola crying out 'Cut!' at the points where material was to go," Ivory recalied. "This took some getting used to-~-not so much losing sequences, but the explosive force of the command that blew them away."

And Merchant says of Ray: "He helped us again and again--with that film and with Shakespeare Wa1lah, for which he wrote the most beautiful music. and The Guru, when our star, Utpal Dutt, was jailed for sedition and Ray helped us to get him out. When we could not find a leading man for Hullabaloo Over Georgie and BOllnie's Pictures, he came up with one--Victor Banerjee, as indeed he had done earlier when he got us together with Utpal Dutr, So I always wanted to help hIm in some way."

But Merchant never had the chane to produce a Ray film. Instead he has become the AmerIcan impresario for Ray's films. some 35 years after seeing his first Ray film in New York City. Having acquired the rights for nine films in India, he negotiated with the academy to have them restored at Merchant Ivory's expense. ll1g

Then Merchant persuaded Sony Classics (who handled HOll'ards End) to give Ray a major showcase. He was also able to collect funds from American admirers of Ray, like Jacqueline Onassis.

The films themselves have proved to be less tractable than their admirers. When David Shepard, an expert on film restoration, visited India during the winter of 1992-93, he reported, "It would be hard to think of another worid-class film artist whose oeu 're hangs by such a thin thread."

Shepard was devastated on seeing the original negative of Pather Pancha1i, with its 15 to 20 tears per reel patched with tape. He has restored many Charlie Chaplin films, but, he points out, Chaplin had four original negatives while Ray's producers could afford only one, and Chaplin's lifelong cinematographer as paid to preserve the negatives.

Worse was to come. Merchant had sent six original negatives, including Pather Panchali, to London for examination.

In 1993 a fire broke out at Henderson's, the film preservation laboratory. and destroyed or damaged large portions of the already damaged Ray negatives, along with various British classics.

There was nothing to do but begin patching togeth r these six films from other, less pristine sources, like internegatives, interpositives, and prints.

Michael Friend, the film archivist of the academy responsibie for restoring Ray, and others trawled archives in India, the United States, Britain, Denmark. and elsewhere. The widow of the great documentary filmmaker Robert Flaherty lent a print of Pather Panchali that had been a gift to her from Ray in the 1950s.

For Friend, who knew nothing of Ray's films when he started work, the painstaking months of restoration have been eye-opening. "It's like opening up a treasure chest," he says. "People who really care about cinema are going to love these films. They're going to be carried away by them."

D About the Author: AndrcH' Robinson i, rhe aurhor ofSatyajit Ray: The Inner Eye. and of a study of Rabindral1arh 7agore's paintings and drm\'ings.

My view.. .is that bureaucrats are least likely to make wise choices. Their money is not at stake.

They are able to use public financing to write off their mistakes whenever they're directly involved.

Bengal it took forever and ever to put people back on their feet, and there are still refugees from that time. The Punjabis, on the other hand, never looked back. Now why was that? Well, I could say that the Bengalis were part of a feudal society where people were not used to seeking out economic opportunities. That doesn't mean that they lack economic motivation-they have plenty of it-but their cultural training didn't make them run around and create opportunities. It made them look to the state, whereas the Punjabis weren't waiting for government to design anything.

So how do I explain that difference?

Well, I can go back to what happened to Punjab under the British Empire. The British started irrigation works, recruited the Punjabis into the army to fight the Afghan wars, and then settled them at a very young age on the irrigated lands. So the Punjabis went through army discipline and became very successful farmers and a potential entrepreneurial class.

Now that's a kind of quasi-cultural explanation.

But if you ask, "Why did these guys get co-opted into the British Army when the Bengalis didn't?" I'll say, "Well, because they were martial, the British must have seen something. If you go back to Alexander's invasion, he got a pretty good fight in Punjab and turned back.

Maybe, as the contemporary accounts suggest, Punjabis have been very martial for two-and-a-half thousand years; some cultures can be pretty durable. Maybe Alexander figured India was full of these guys and it wasn't worth going on. If he had, however, he would have conquered the country in a couple of weeks. Most of us have never been martial." Score one for a cultural explanation, but it's a question of how you use the cultural arguments. If you use them to say, "Economics doesn't matter," you probably don't understand

the culture you're talking about. Cultures shape specific responses, but Punjabis and Bengalis both respond to markets.

Isn't it odd that a great enthusiasmfor a Japanese model should arise in America just as it's fading in Japan, where its defects become painfully clear?

Yes. During the 1980s we Americans began thinking of the Japanese as either Supermen or Lex Luthors, or bothomnipotent or very wicked, or both. The omnipotence argument has been punctured, and now we've got to tone down the notion that they're so different from us. Once you understand their different circumstances, a lot of their practices can be explained in economic terms. The Japanese economy is far less culturally determined than we seem to believe, and the most important cultural factor is reactive nationalism-the desire to outdo foreigners-which is both diminishing and not uniquely Japanese.

American-Japanese trade negotiations seem to generate strong American nationalistic sentiment. What is your sense of the negotiations that are going on now?

I think that the Clinton Administration believes that the Japanese market is used as a sanctuary. It thinks the Japanese exploit their internal market, grow strong there, then go out and take over the world.

If you believe that, then you have to try to break into their market. The Japanese did to some extent use their home market that way to take over the D-RAM market in Jhe 1980s. But we must remember that we've come back in a big way with higher value-added chips, underlining the fact that the sanctuary concern is exaggerated and even hysterical.

At the same time, there's no smoke without fire, and a lot of people have had unpleasant experiences trying to enter Japanese markets. Unfortunately, how-

India has a huge potential export market for its popular films, particularly in the Middle East.

ever, I think President Clinton is completely conditioned by the experience of his economic advisers. If I had spent all my time for the better part of a decade listening to Mr. Scully or the Motorola people, I wouldn't find out whether Japanese unfairness actually mattered very much.

If you don't do some independent tests, you're just recording these stories from the point of view of industry.

Has that view had too much influence on the Clinton Administration?

Well, there is little doubt that the President chose advisers who bought into this extreme view. As a result, our policy shifted rather dramatically, and we insisted that the Japanese government somehow deliver "results." Essentially, the President's men were saying to the Japanese, "Look, we think that you are excluding our imports in all kinds of unfair and inscrutable ways. We don't know exactly how you do it. But we know that you are doing it. So we are going to put your feet to the fire and ask you to deliver results in the form of more imports. It is up to you to decide how to do it."

One time I called up an eminent newspaperman who had bought into this line so much that he was known as the admin-

rical, this is a very bad way to do business.

Trying to get the Japanese to regulate their economy more when views in Japan have finally changed in favor of deregulation is perverse. My own opinion is that the problem is exaggerated anyway, but even if it is not, our methods are not the right ones.

The Japanese system is changing culturally and economically, and we ought to be encouraging that change. We have extensive experience with deregulation, and we should be providing Japan with that expertise, which it can use.

istration's unofficial spokesman. In response to my protests, he replied: "When it came to dealing with Middle East terrorist attacks on us, the smartest thing for us to do was to go to Syria, which was really behind it all, and say, 'We don't know how it's going on, but you have influence and you are encouraging it or doing nothing to stop it, so you work it out any way you can, or we'll bomb the hell out of you. ", To him, dealing with Japan on trade was analogous to dealing with Syria on terrorism! If you buy such a diagnosis, the rest follows, but I don't buy that diagnosis, nor do a lot of other economists. We'd like to see Japanese deregulation; we'd like to see a stronger Federal Trade Commission; we'd like to be able to take the Japanese to GATT, so that the process would be symmetrical. If we take the Japanese to court, then the Japanese, on certain other things, should be able to take us to court.

Now, it would be nice if we could just tell the Japanese, as judge, complainant, and jury, "You're being unfair. Stop."

That was possible when they were weak, and it may have been justifiable when their markets were closed, and it wasn't even a terrible idea when we were looking at specific and identifiable practices.

But when the Japanese are strong and they're becoming more honest and they're ready to get more impartial and symmet-

The postwar movement of Republicans away from protectionist philosophies and of Democrats toward them was a historic ~'Witch in American politics. Do you think that they are beginning to flip again, with the outspoken nationalism of [Republican presidential candidate} Pat Buchanan and now [Speaker of the u.s. House of Representatives} Newt Gingrich?

I don't know where that's coming from. I thought it was confined to a fringe, but Newt Gingrich is, after all, a historian, a well-read guy. He really bothered me because the Republicans on the whole played a very good role in NAFTA, and for them now to appear to be sabotaging GATT is very worrying. It's hard for me to see what game Gingrich is playing.

Well, clearly Buchanan made an intelligent bet, if not yet a winning one: That isolationist, xenophobic politics have afuture with the American people.

I think the fundamental notion is that the Third World consists of a lot of tinhorn dictatorships. This image is increasingly at variance with reality but, though outdated, it still plays very well.

That is one of the legacies of the NAFTA debate. Mexico was also accused of sending hordes of paupers our way and stealing all the jobs, so free trade with Mexico was regarded as a suicide pact.

NAFTA created a mind set whose residue we still have to live with. The debate left a widespread conviction that our wages are going to be depressed by trading with poor countries, that they

are going to diminish our sovereignty, and that they are not really legitimate governments.

You have argued that the fear of Third World competition driving American wages down and unemployment up is poorly supported by available data.

Yes,this is so. Nearly all research shows that these dynamics are powered not by trade with poor countries, but by technical change. The real pressure on wages is coming from massive technological change, which takes incomes away from the unskilled and redistributes them up the skill ladder. Unemployment and low wages are not inflicted on the North by the South; they are produced by the North's technical progress, which will create problems for the poor countries too.

The new technology is so productive that it will create unemployment for unskilled people around the globe.

Is there a near- or middle-term solution to the unemployment wrought by this technical revolution?

Not really. Labor Secretary Robert Reich is grasping at the only idea anyone has, which is to make people better educated, but that's more easily said than done. Improving education is not a straightforward thing like building factories abroad to lower labor costs. It's more like population control. There is no easy solution.

Ultimately that is the threat to freer trade: When you can't do anything meaningful to help people, they'll grasp at straws. Even if competition with the South is only ten percent of the problem, knocking off that ten percent is politically appealing, especially if nobody has a clue about what to do about the other 90 percent. Some of the U.S. Labor Department's concern about exporting minimum wages abroad is not coming from tradeunion pressures or moral concern; it's coming from the fear that there's nothing else one can go after even to try to affect job annihilation.

0 About the Interviewer: Fredric Smoler is an editor of Audacity magazine.

COUNTRY CUBES In ancient Greece, how a temple occupied the land was often more important than the building itself-its sacredness somehow intimately linked to the way it pointed at a distant mountain peak, or sat in a wide plain.

Centuries later, two little pavilions perched side by side on a mountain ridge in Columbia County, New York, reflect that same sort of reverence. A low-budget getaway and artist's studio, the compound was designed by Andrew Bartle and Jonathan Kirschenfeld to take advantage of the view and to frame a sheltered space for outdoor From The Ne"" Ymk York Timc~ Company.

Time.'

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About the Author: Julie V. Iovine .frequently contrihutes to the New York Times Magazine on architectural suhjects.

living. They envisioned the serene stretch of lawn dividing the two structures as a kind of private village greenthe ideal place to enjoy an outdoor lunch or set up an easel.

Still, no one would call these twin cubes casually composed.

Inspired by the neoclassical architecture of New England, they possess all the earmarks of the Greek Revival style-columns, a peaked roof, and porches-but they are eminently modern. In their taut white skins, mahogany grids, and attenuated

proportions, they show a compositional rigor that even students of Le Corbusier's best villas could admire.

To this mix of the classical and the contemporary, a dose of sheer unconventionality has been added in the guise of two screened-in "hammocks" suspended on high from the roofs' front rafters. These are the architects' updated version of the New England sleeping porch. They are a Yankee's homage to the land, and the timeless luxury of spending a night under the stars.

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1. These twin-peaked buildings in upstate New York house an artist's studio and a one-hedroom house.

2. A screened-in "hammock" provides a panoramic view olthe mountains.

3. The hammock hungJi'om the roofsJi'ont

ralters (building at right) recalls the old New England sleeping porch.

4. The interior olthe house. with its sunken living room, is crisp and simp/e.

S. Inside the studio, a glass wall with mahogany trim includes a pivoting door.

Ingersoll-Rand India, a Government recognised Export House, is by far the largest exporter of compressors in the country. In the last few years, exports have earned over Rs. 450 million in foreign exchange annually.

This includes export of sophisticated process gas compressors to the People's Republic of China, small air compressor packages to Russia, drilling rigs and allied equipment to Africa, Australia, Europe, South East Asia and the USA. But that's not all. For the last 18 years, Ingersoll-Rand India has continued to receive recognition certificates and

Best Exporter Shields from the Export Promotion Council, for outstanding export performance. In 1989-90, we also won the All India Best Exporter Shield. An achievement befitting a company which, to date, has exported over 290,000 compressors to every continent.

Manufactured at our Ahmedabad plant, Ingersoll-Rand compressors have earned an international reputation for unmatched reliability.

And over the years we're only getting better.

Now you know why our compressors have gone where they have.

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all I know is that there was enormous love, and care, and concern being given to those children."

The 84-year-old Mother founded her first Missionaries of Charity home in Calcutta, in 1949. Since then she has established more than 200 homes in 60 countries, staffed by hundreds of sisters who take a vow of poverty to serve the material and spiritual needs of the poor. They wear plain blue-bordered white saris and cover their heads.

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Funding for the home came from an anonymous American donor. The Missionaries of Charity-Mother Teresa's order-will send four nuns from India to manage the home, and Washington-based charities will assist in its operation. The Missionaries of Charity already operates three similar shelters in the area for the poor and those afflicted with AIDS. Mother Teresa urged people not to abandon children, but to bring them to the shel-

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Unity in Diversity The Ford Foundation is launching a program at 24 undergraduate colleges and universities in India this month to promote understanding of cultural and ethnic diversity among students. The schools will receive grants of Rs. 300,000 to Rs. 1.5 million each over the next three years to implement various projects and activities aimed at enhancing social harmony, David D. Arnold, the Ford Foundation's representative for India, said at a recent news conference in Delhi.

"At the end of the three years we will evaluate the program and ask the colleges how they would like to proceed," Arnold said. "A question for us will be how to extend the lessons learned among this group of 24 to other colleges and universities around India."

A committee of eight distinguished academics and public servants formulated the program, known as the Campus Diversity Initiative. One of the committee members, G. Ram Reddy, former chairman of the University Grants Commission, said the "idea of the program will be to make students understand the implications of diversity, each other's positions and viewpoints, through discussions, roundtables, seminars, and similar activities."

He noted that the initiative was inspired by a similar Ford Foundation sponsored program at colleges and universities in the United States.

The partici-

pating Indian institutions represent every region in the country. Among them are S.N.D.T. Women's University in Bombay; St. Mary's College in Tuticorin, Tamil Nadu; Sardar Patel University in Vallabh Vidyanagar, Gujarat; Farook College in Calicut, Kerala; Kalimpong College in Darjeeling, West Bengal; M.P.C. College in Baripada, Orissa; and Government Narmada Mahavidyalaya in Hoshangabad, Madhya Pradesh.

Rooted and adventurous, with plenty of moxie, the Eugene Ballet Company captures the spirit of the West!

-DANCE

MAGAZINE

A company worth coming miles to see.

-SAN

JOSE MERCURY

Now the Eugene Ballet Company is coming to India to present one of its most acclaimed works, Children of the Raven, in five cities-Madras (July 8), Bangalore (9-10), Bombay (11-14), New Delhi (15-19), and Calcutta (20-22).

Founded in 1978, the Eugene Ballet has developed into one of America's busiest and most celebrated ballet companies. Its versatile repertory and educational programs reach audiences around the world.

Under the artistic direction of Toni Pimble, born in England and trained at the Royal Academy of Dancing in london, the 20-member troupe presents more than 100 performances in the United States and overseas each year. Pimble has choreographed more than 40 productions for the company, including Two's Company, Little Tricker, Common Ground, Borderline, Alice in Wonderland, Columba Aspexit, and Beauty and the Beast. Some of these have involved collaborations with composers such as Art Maddox and Philip Bayle, and with author Ken Kesey.

Children of the Raven, described as a "total theater event" by Dance Magazine, is based on the legends of four Northwest American Indian tribes-Haida, Tsimshian (Sim-she-an), Tlingit, and Kwakiutl (Kwa-cue-til). The ballet has been produced in collaboration with Native American artists, but it does not try to copy Indian dance or music. Rather, it employs ballet and modern dance techniques to give an impression of American Indian culture. It uses masks, traditional designs, totem poles, and tribal Indian imagery

AN ALLIANCE

Above: A scene from Children of the Raven, choreographed

by

Toni Pimble (left top) and narrated by Ed Edmo (below).

to highlight the importance of storytelling to American Indians. The storyteller in the ballet is Ed Edmo, a well-known American Indian poet, playwright, and actor. Says author Vine Deloria: "A good sense of humor and brilliant understanding of the ironies of life make Ed Edmo a treat to hear."

FOR PROGRESS

Indian Commerce Minister P. Chidambaram and U.S. Commerce cals, biotechnology, auto components, tourism, and textiles." He added, "I am sure that, with the active interest of the business comSecretary Ronald H. Brown last month launched the Information munity in both countries, the Alliance will act as a major catalyst in Technology Business Group under the aegis of the U.S.-India developing trade and investments."

Commercial Alliance (USICA) in Santa Clara, California. The cereChidambaram also emphasized the historic trade relations monies included a conference on "Information TechnologiesOpportunities in India," highlighting the immense potential that exists between the two countries. "Our commercial relations have come a long way from the time you shipped ice all the way from New for telecom, electronics, and software development in India.

The USICA, set up during Brown's visit to India in January (see England to Calcutta and used our tea to line the sands of Boston harbor! ...[Today] the U.S. is our largest trading partner SPAN, February 1995), aims at "facilitating greater Commerce Minister cooperation between the private sectors of our two and the largest source of investment and technology. p. Chidambaram countries" in such priority areas as information techOur two-way trade has increased by over 50 percent since the reforms began and is now more than $8,000 nology, transportation infrastructure, food processing, and power, Chidambaram said. million. Since 1991, approvals of U.S. investment amounted to $3,000 million which is more than the During his six-day visit to the United States, total U.S. investment in India from 1947, the year Chidambaram spoke at a press conference at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. He said, "The we gained independence, till 1991, the year we began liberalizing."

Alliance is off to a good start and has worked out a full He concluded his speech with the hope that "in the agenda for the power, food processing, and transyears ahead, the web of business ties is bound to portation sectors for this year. It is also looking at addigrow dramatically and bring our two great democrational sectors where there is strong business interest, cies closer." such as hydrocarbons, health care and pharmaceuti-

Up FrOnt

Siaverv Booker T. Washington was perhaps the shrewdest of all the black leaders in American history. He played upon the self-interest of whites, rather than on any moral commitment on their part to the rights of blacks, for the advancement of his people.

"I felt a good deal as I suppose a man feels when he is on his way to the gallows," ~ooker T. Washington wrote of his state of mind when he was on his way to make the historic speech at the Atlanta Exposition of 1895 that would mark the turning point in his life-and in the life of race relations in America. Looking back on that event a hundred years later gives us not only a clearer picture of how race relations have evolved but also a radically different picture of one of the key figures in that evolution-a figure far more often caricatured than understood.

There was good reason for Washington to be apprehensive. For a black man to be invited to address the distinguished audience at the exposition was itself controversial. The South was a tinderbox of raw emotions over racial issues and more than a hundred blacks a year were being lynched. Voting rights, the right to serve in public office or on juries, and even basic personal security against violence were rights that Southern blacks once enjoyed during the U.S. Army's occupation of the South for 12years after the Civil War, but these and other rights were now eroding throughout the South after that army had long since gone home and had been disbanded.

The restoration of home rule in the South meant the restoration of white majority rule-the rule of an embittered people who had lost a devastating war and then seen their slaves freed and placed on an equal legal plane with themselves, in some cases serving as public officials ruling over them with the backing of the bayonets of the Union Army. In the angry backlash that followed, blacks were increasingly barred from public office and from the ballot box, and laws were being passed segregating the races in public transportation and other public accommodations.

The right to a fair trial became a mockery for blacks, and the shadow of the Ku Klux Klan and other white terrorist night riders fell over black communities across the South. It was in this atmosphere that Booker T. Washington rose to address the dignitaries and common folk of both races at the Atlanta Exposition.

What could Washington say to this audience of white Southerners-many of whom, he knew, had come only to see him make a fool of himself-and at the same time be true to the blacks in the audience who were full of pride that someone of their race

was for the first time being given the honor of addressing an audience including such dignitaries as the governor of Georgia?

"By one sentence," Washington said later, "I could have blasted, in a large degree, the success of the Exposition." More than that, one careless remark could have blasted any hopes of racial peace and progress.

It is hard to judge anyone's performance without knowing what cards he was dealt before deciding how well he played them. Not only on this occasion, but also throughout his career, Washington was dealt one of the toughest hands of any black leader in American history.

The central theme of his talk was given in one sentence: "There is no defence or security for any of us except in the development of the highest intelligence of alL" He disarmed his audience by waving aside issues that were already lost ca uses for his generation, such as racial integration. "In all things that are purely social we can be as separate as the fingers, yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress." But neither here nor anywhere else did he renounce equal rights under the law. "It is important and right that all privileges of the law be ours, but it is vastly more important that we be prepared for the exercises of these privileges," he said in Atlanta. By linking rights and responsibilities, Washington was able to address both the blacks and the whites in the audience on common ground. And by linking the fates of the two races, he was able to enlist the support of some whites by arguing that blacks would either help lift up the South or help to drag it down.

In the context of the times, the speech was a masterpiece. It was reprinted in newspapers across the country and praised by blacks and whites alike, Northerners and Southerners. The governor of Georgia came over to shake Washington's hand after the speech and President Grover Cleveland wrote to him about the "enthusiasm" with which he had read it. Overnight Booker T. Washington was recognized as a leader of his people-indeed, the leader of his people, the successor to Frederick Douglass, who had died just seven months earlier.

The historic differences that would later arise between Washington and the more militant WE.B. Du Bois were differ-

There is no defence or security for any of us except in the development of the highest intelligence of all.

ences of emphasis and priorities, not differences of fundamental principles. Ou Bois was, in fact, among those who sent messages of congratulation to Washington on his Atlanta Exposition speech.

As one of the founders and longtime pillars of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), Ou Bois concentrated on the restoration and advancement of political rights for blacks and focused his public attacks on the system of racial segregation and discrimination known as Jim Crow in the South. With eloquent bitterness, he indicted whites for racism. Washington took no such public stance and instead directed his efforts toward the internal self-development of blacks in things ranging from personal hygiene to saving, farm management, and the establishment of businesses. The whites he spoke of and to were those whites willing to support such activities, especially those willing to help financially.

The net result was that Washington was often praising whites of goodwill while Ou Bois was attacking whites of ill will. Washington was promoting a kind of vocational education with a heavy moral and self-disciplinary component at Tuskegee Institute, Alabama, while Ou Bois promoted academic education designed to produce militant fighters for their rights against oppressors. However, this historic dichotomy was less sharp at the time than it later became in retrospect, after a new generation of more militant black intellectuals condemned Washington as an Uncle Tom. At the time, during the early years of the 20th century, Ou Bois was, like Washington, also painfully aware not only of the external dangers from white racists but also of the internal problems of a recently freed people, among whom illiteracy was widespread and experience in the ordinary business of life was still new, uncertain, and errant. Ou Bois, during this stage of his own development, spoke of the "the Great Lack which faces our race in the modern world, lack of Energy," which he attributed to "indolence" growing out of tropical origins and which had now become a kind of "social heredity."

If white people lost all their racial prejudices overnight, Ou Bois said, this would make very little immediate difference in the

economic condition of most blacks. While "some few would be promoted, some few would get new places," nevertheless "the mass would remain as they are" until the younger generation began to "try harder" as the race "lost the omnipresent excuse for failure: Prejudice." DU Bois's assessment of the black masses at that time was not very different from that of Washington, who characterized many of them as sunk into "listless indifference, or shiftlessness, or reckless bravado."

In short, at this particular juncture in history, both DU Bois and Washington saw a great need for the self-development of black Americans. DU Bois would later champion the "talented tenth" of the race who were already prepared for higher education and a more advanced way of life, many of these being people like DU Bois, descended from the antebellum "free persons of color," whose cultural develop~ent began while most of their brothers were still in bondage on cotton plantations.

By contrast, Washington's lifelong preoccupation would be with those like himself who were "up from slavery"and who needed training in the basics of manual skills, work habits, personal hygiene, and moral character. Washington's concern was with "the promotion of progress among tne many, and not the special culture of the few."

To some extent the differences between Ou Bois and Washington came from their addressing different constituencies living in very different economic and social circumstances, and having correspondingly different priorities. The vocational education that Washington promoted would have been a step backward for Ou Bois's constituency. However, Ou Bois conceded that vocational education "has accomplishments of which it has a right to be proud," and conversely, Washington declared: "I would say to the black boy what I would say to the white boy, 'Get all the mental development that your time and pocketbook will allow of,' " though he saw most blacks of his time as needing to acquire practical work skills first.

Even in the present, Washington said, "We need professional men and women" and he looked forward to a time when there would be more successful black "lawyers, congressmen, and music teachers."

That was not the whole story, however. Washington operated in the Deep South, where he founded Tuskegee Institute in rural Alabama.

Ou Bois was a Northerner who grew up in Massachusetts and whose following was largely Northern, even when he himself taught at Atlanta University in Georgia.

Moreover, Washington had an institution to safeguard and promote, using money largely from white philanthropists who were willing to see blacks trained in mechanical skills but some of whom might have had serious reservations about providing them with academic education.

Ou Bois could be, and was, far more outspoken than Washington on civil rights issues. Indeed, Washington's public posture was one of preoccupation with teaching the basics to his fellow blacks, with little time left to concern himself with legal

rights and political issues.

This posture was central to his ability to raise money among many wealthy whites and to exert influence behind the scenes in defense of blacks with federal and state political leaders. In reality, however, when Washington's papers were opened after his death, it became clear that, privately, he was not only concerned with civil rights but also goaded other blacks into similar concerns and himself secretly financed some of their legal challenges to Jim Crow laws.

While publicly turning aside questions about political issues during the era of systematic disenfranchising of blacks, Washington privately not only supported efforts to safeguard civil rights but also wrote anonymous newspaper articles protesting the violation of those rights, as did his trusted agents. He also worked behind the scenes to get federal appointments for blacks in Washington, D.C., and postmaster appointments in Alabama, as well as to get Presidents to appoint federal judges who would give blacks a fairer hearing.

What was utterly lacking in Washington, however, was the ringing rhetoric of protest, so much beloved of intellectuals, however futile it might be in practice at the time. He practiced what militants of a later era would only preach, to advance the interests of blacks "by all means necessary."

Washington was, among other things, a master of duplicity and intrigue. But unlike some others who used such talents to line their own pockets while boasting of their concerns for the rights of fellow blacks, he was untouched by any hint of financial scandal and did not even let his fellow blacks know of many of his legal and

Booker Taliaferro Washington was born a slave on a Franklin County, Virginia, plantation. In his autobiography, Up from Slavery, he wrote: "I am not quite sure of the exact place or exact date of my birth, but I suspect I must have been born somewhere and at some time." Probably he was born in 1856.

He remembered his life as beginning "in the midst of the most miserable, desolate and discouraging surroundings." His mother was the plantation cook, and the cabin occupied by Washington, his mother, and a brother and sister was also the plantation kitchen. Of his

father Washington said: "He was simply another unfortunate victim of the institution which the Nation unhappily had engrafted upon it at that time."

After the Civil War, Washington and his family were declared free and later moved to Malden, West Virginia, where he labored in the coal mines until he heard two men talking about Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute in Virginia, where blacks could learn useful skills. There he determined to go. But first he needed a few dollars. That he earned by working as a servant to a general's wife.

There, Washington later

said, he learned lessons about the bigger world "as valuable to me as any education I have ever gotten." In 1875 he graduated from Hampton.

His passion for education and self-improvemtfnt never wavered.

When General Samuel C. Armstrong, the founder of Hampton, was asked to recommend someone to found a normal school "for the colored people in the little town of Tuskegee," he recommended Washington.

Washington soon concluded that the freed slaves of rural Alabama needed more than "mere book education," which he felt would be a waste of time until

they had learned more basic things.

With a little-but very little-help from the Alabama legislature, Washington was able to open the doors of the Tuskegee Normal and Agricultural Institute on July 4, 1881.

His brilliant speech at the 1895 Atlanta Exposition may well have been the high point of his career. The speech was well received among white Americans but criticized by many black intellectuals, who wished him to be more militant in calling for rights. Washington died in Tuskegee in 1915.

-BETTY

FRANKLIN and LISA SANDERS

The reins of black leadership passedfrom former slave, abolitionist champion, and diplomat Frederick Douglass (right) to Booker T. Washington (left ).

political efforts in their behalf, for the chances of success in these efforts depended on their being conducted behind the scenes.

Yet Washington was by no means a Sunday school paragon.

He was ruthless in the building and maintenance of his power and in the advancement of the causes he believed in. He maintained a network of people around the country who did his bidding in the press, the foundations, and in the political back rooms. His whole career was, in a sense, a juggling act on a high wire and no one was more aware than he that one misstep could bring everything crashing down.

Washington had a clear sense of his own mission and great confidence in his own abilities. He wrote in his autobiography, Up from Slavery: "As for my individual self, it seemed to me to be reasonably certain that I could succeed in political life, but I had a feeling that it would be a rather selfish kind of success-individual success at the cost of failing to do my duty in assisting in laying a foundation for the masses."

Washington neither grinned nor shumed for white folks, and he was hated by racist bigots in the South. When he had dinner in the White House with President Theodore Roosevelt, there were cries of outrage from across the South, and echoes reverberated for years afterward.

Washington and Ou Bois were much closer than their public postures would indicate, though Ou Bois may not have known how much common ground there was between them. Just as the private Washington must be taken into account along with the public image he projected, so it must be noted that Ou Bois was, during Washington's lifetime, not yet the far-left radical of his later Stalinist years.

Nevertheless, the rivalry between the two men-and between their partisans-was both real and sometimes bitter. In part this mirrored a social division within the black community between the freed plantation slaves and their descendants, on the one hand, and the more polished descendants of the "free persons of color"who had been educated for generations. A disproportion-

William Edward Burghardt Du Bois was born a free black man in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, on February 23, 1868.just three years after the end of the Civil War. He was of French. Dutch. and African descent and grew up with the middle-class values of the day. believing that "all who were willing to work could easily earn a living."

Urged by his high school principal. Frank Hosmer. Du Bois took subjects that few black boys of his day took. not even those of Du Bois's relatively privileged background-algebra, geometry, Latin, and Greek. "If Hosmer had been another sort of man, with definite ideas as to a Negro's 'place,''' Du Bois later wrote, he never would have gotten that sort of education.

Du Bois dreamed of Harvard University in Cam bridge. Massach usetts, but lacked both the money and the academic record. To better prepare himself he first graduated from Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee. then moved to Harvard, where he received an undergraduate degree in 1890,a master's in 1891,and a PhD in 1895.

Though Du Bois was born and bred in the North, he went south to teach, serving as a professor of sociology at Atlanta University in Georgia from 1897 to 1910 and from 1934 to 1944. In the South he wrote The Suppression of the African Siave- Trade (1896) and The Philadelphia Negro (1899). One of his best-known works, The Souls of Black Folk, was written in 1903.

As time passed, Du Bois became more militant. After World War I he called PanAfrican congresses in 1919,

1921. and 1923. He helped form the Niagara Movement, calling for full voting rights for blacks under the banner of "manhood suffrage." He was one of the founders of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the editor of its magazine, Crisis.

As the years passed, racial segregation and discrimination in the South endured and blacks continued to be denied the full rights of U.S. citizens.

Du Bois despaired of achieving equality for his people under the capitalist system.

He turned, as many angry intellectuals did earlier in this century, to communism, thinking it could solve the problems not only of blacks but of poor whites as well.

Communism, he wrote, "was a program for a majority, not for a relatively small minority." He did not, however, endorse the Russian version.

"American Negroes," Du Bois said, should not accept unquestioningly, "a complete dogma without question or alteration. " In 1962, still frustrated and angry at the age of 94, Du Bois gave up his U.S. citizenship and moved to Ghana, in West Africa, where he became a naturalized citizen. He died in 1963, not living to see the civil rights movement achieve many of the goals he strove in vain for.

-LISA SANDERS and BETTY FRANKLIN

Washington urged the black community to develop skills for a very down-to-earth reason: "In the long run," he observed, "the world is going to have the best, and any difference in race, religion, or previous history will not long keep the world from what it wants." ate share of the black leadership came from this small elite and continued to do so on past the middle of the 20th century.

Moreover, there were skin color differences between the two groups, of which both were acutely aware, for many of the "free persons of color" became free because they were the offspring of white slave masters and black slave women.

The social snobbishness of this lighter-complexioned elite was as real as the racism of whites-and was sometimes more deeply resented by the black masses, some of whom referred to the NAACP as the National Association for the Advancement of Certain People. In a sense, Du Bois and Washington epitomized these differences. Du Bois, with his PhD from Harvard, was aloof and of aristocratic bearing and had little to do socially with the black masses in whose name he spoke. Nor was this a purely personal foible. Washington described other contemporaries as members of the "upper ten"who "very seldom mingle with the masses."

Washington himself had much more of the common touch and mingled easily with other blacks in the cities and backwoods of the South. His talk and his writings were plain and straightforward, lacking the erudition and rhetorical flourishes of Du Bois, but full of tough-minded common sense.

While Du Bois was an intellectual, Washington was shrewd, perhaps the shrewdest of all the black leaders in American history. While Du Bois discussed racial issues on a high moral plane of abstract rights, Washington put his emphasis on developing skills within the black community for a very down-to-earth reason: "In the long run, the world is going to have the best, and any difference in race, religion, or previous history will not long keep the world from what it wants."

The self-interest of whites, rather than any moral commitment on their part to the rights of blacks, was what Washington depended on for the advancement of his people. Although caricatured by some as an Uncle Tom, this complex man was seen very differently by those who actually knew him. It was none other than Du Bois who said of Washington: "He had no faith in white people, not the slightest." Washington used their money, however, to advance the causes he believed in and used his influence to get support not only for Tuskegee Institute but even for rival black institutions like Talladega College in Alabama and Atlanta University in Georgia. He also served on the board of trustees for Howard University in Washington, D.C., and Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee, whose educational missions were very different from his own.

The rivalry between Du Bois and Washington was not based simply on different educational or political approaches, nor even on differences in the social strata from which they came. They held very different amounts of power and influence. Because Washington was the black leader to many whites with wealth and . power, he became the arbiter of the fates of other blacks seeking access to funding for their projects or influence in political circles.

Du Bois, for example, left his teaching position at Atlanta

University when his opposition to Washington made him a financialliability to the institution.

Washington's "Tuskegee machine" was a force to be reckoned with within the black community and a force to be feared and resented by those blacks who were seeking a larger role for themselves. His influence-and money-reached black newspapers across the country and his followers were active, both publicly and behind the scenes, in the North as well as the South.

No one was more keenly aware of the severe limits within which he operated, especially when he operated publicly, than Washington. He wrote to Oswald Garrison Villard, one of the founders of the NAACP: "There is work to be done which no one placed in my position can do. "He realized the time-bound nature of his mission. He said: "We are doing work that is needed to be done in this generation and in this section of our country." He also said: "I have never attempted to set any limit upon the development of our race" and said of this generation of blacks that "their children will be given advantages which the first generation did not possess." He saw his task as being to "lay the foundation" in his own time, not to provide an educational blueprint-or straitjacket-for all time.

What was accomplished by this man and by the movement he led?

Tuskegee Institute was, of course, his most tangible legacy, its early buildings built by the students themselves, using the skills taught to them. The larger legacy-the people who learned such practical lessons as how to take care of their money and their health and how to conduct themselves in public-are things difficult to gauge and impossible to quantify. Neither the internal development stressed by Washington nor the quest for civil rights that preoccupied Du Bois has ever been entirely off the agenda of black Americans, though their relative priorities have varied from one era to another and from one organization or movement within a given era.

Ultimately, there was no reason that vocational training and academic education could not both go on, as they both didindeed, as they both did at Tuskegee Institute, including in c1assesJaught by Washington. The needless dissipation of energies in internal strife between the followers of Du Bois and the followers of Washington was an extravagant luxury in an era when blacks could easily have used ten more of each.

Despite today's insatiable demands for "solutions" to racial and other social problems, it would be almost a contradiction in terms to try to "apply" Booker T. Washington directly to our times. He was, consciously and above all else, a man of his time.

He saw his role quite clearly as preparatory and his work as building a foundation, not providing models for the future. Only the character and strength of the man are a model for today.

0 About the Author: Thomas Sowell, a columnist/or Forbes magazine, has written a score o/books about economics, race, and ethnic groups, including A Conflict of Visions and The Economics and Politics of Race: An International Perspective.

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