SE Ore re en rrr ee es emery emi Oe EO OT Seite ee ee Sari tae ears pe Pree ee ee EE ar ene in - OS POS WON atresia tel let ah mate > ee ia rahe a= tie. melons a Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2012 with funding from internet archive http://archive.org/details/nation205julnewy For Reference Not to be taken from this room PRO DOVE $I 9S; Every person who maliciously cuts, defaces, breaks or injures any book, map, chart, picture, engraving, statue, coin, model, apparatus, or other work of lit- erature, art, mechanics or ob- ject of curiosity, deposited in any public library, gallery, museum or collection is guilty of a misdemeanor. Penal Code of California, 1915, Section 623. | America’s Leading Liberal Weekly Since 1865 INDEX TO VOLUME 205 JULY to DECEMBER, 1967 The following letters are used to indicate the type of article: Art Correspondence rama Editorial Article Music Moving Pictures Poetry Signed Article Television A Cc D E M MP P S a Book reviews and reviewers are indexed sep- arately in the Book Review Section. Zwol july, §3 34- 63 July 17 66- 95 July 31 98-127 Aug. 14 130-159 Aug. 28 162-191 Sep. 4 354-383 Oct. 16 386-415 Oct. 23 418-447 Oct. 30 450-479 Nov. 6 482-511 Nov. 13 514-543 Nov. 20 194-223 Sep. 11 546-575 Nov. 27 226-255 Sep. 18 578-607 Dec. 4 258-287 Sep. 25 610-639 Dec. 11 290-319 Oct. 2 642-671 Dec. 18 322-351 Oct. 9 674-703 Dec. 25 A PAGE ABM system. See Armament—Missiles Abortion; P. Kerby article on of June 12 praised and corrected. R. Roemer; C ........ 20 Academic freedom. See Education Acheson, Dean; opposed to negotiating Viet- AAAI SEUCLEMMET Gccesecsscrecrtisiicrvecessssacicssanssnssonterosstee 643 Adair, Doug César Chavez’s biggest battle; trials of United farm workers organizing commit- PERMITS OIE W.ESES OS" <.c:.cocessanccseveccusteccesss 627 Adams, Peter Agreement with R. J. Walton on Voice of Bimereaien(G. cccciseuccs 194; see also 135 Addonizio, Mayor Hugh. See Newark, N.J. Aden; date of independence advanced by Britain Adler, Renata; misstated position on black caucus at New politics convention, Chicago, in New Yorker article. A. I. Waskow; c 450; see also Adler reply, C, 514, with Waskow rejoinder Advertising; exaggeration discounted by pub- lic; analogy with administration’s credibility eae ICA EATER CS corer as sps-avessvenesceesevensacs Food industry’s pressure against truth- in-packaging bill. A. O. Mowbray; §S .... 621 Mass media’s emphasis on as indirect cause of social discontent and violence. J. SER Ghert Dyers osc nea des caren tsencteedegctieessveasace 638 Aerojet-General corp.; ‘Peacekeeper’ anti- Fane OR CAT“ CAN CMe aay ssc Janne suacceaueen eeteateabae 517 Aeschylus: Oresteia trilogy (Tyrone Guthrie theatre productions) reviewed by J. Novick; Affair of the heart, an. Reviewed by H. Meta sat ana VUE er cn. casozscapcuviven suveusuanttsdeacevsetuceanced 381 Africa; Christians’ contributions to save Delta ministry, Mississippi ...........::cccceccsseseeeeees 177-178 Agar, Herbert Praise for C. Lasch article ............ 340; see also 198 Agriculture. César Chavez’s biggest battle; trials of United’ farm workers organizing committee in southwest. D. Adair; S ...... Harvest of scandal in rightist lobbying of American farm bureau federation. R. G Sherrill; S 6 Soviet improvements ............0.::0:ec 424, 425 Aiken, Senator George D.; on_administra- tion’s insistence on victory in Vietnam 236, 237 PAGE Revival of Eisenhower phrase “military- industrial complex”; Albee, Edward. Play Everything in the garden reviewed by H. Clurman; 669 Aldabra; zoologically important atoll threat- ened by British airbase; E ...............ccccccccceeee 516 Allen, Thomas H.; interviews with Pittsburgh Negroes concerning TV reveal failure to inform. J. Horn; Alm, Lt. Col. Ross C. Objections to J. A. Heise article Why the (air force) cadets cheat, May 15; C ........ 2, with Heise reply Alsop, Joseph; columnist ot: school desegrega- BTN eric co tena eet yas arteer ens so «drei ty eniresekreoeee 552-553 Amant militaire, 1’ (San Francisco mime troupe production). Reviewed by R. F. Berge: Die. 189; and by R. Hatch; a American cancer society; idle millions in Cali- fornia division’s assets. S. Pelletiere; S .... 401 American committee for cultural freedom; affil- iate of Congress for cultural freedom; see latter American farm bureau federation; harvest of scandal in right-wing activities. R. G. Shepril ly TS aeseeerrre cts ccctrscsusesivccesvetsasevevrene 496 American federation of labor — Conference of industrial organizations. See Labor — Union American Friends service committee; not aid- ing U.S. deserters in Europe. C. Bell; C Meatcs 546; see also 490 American meat institute; lobbying against ef- fective inspection. N. Kotz; S American medical association. See Medicine American sociological association; members’ open letter to Johnson on Vietnam war; E.... 549 American telephone and telegraph company. AT&T: part I. Who will bell the colossus?; HCC shinertiaws Ne wan Parks 1G. .:..2-.0c0n 391 AT&T: part II. The sovereign state of Bell. N. L. Parks; S 4 Amery, Carl H. Hochhuth’s anti-Churchill play The sol- diers fell flat in Berlin; S 700 Letter from Berlin; death of Free university student in anti-Shah demonstration; S Letter from Munich; Social democratic group’s discussion of leftist goals for Germany; S Unilateral reduction of U.S. troops in West Germany and in West German forces; Animula. W. S. Merwin; F ..........:::::ceeeeees 694 Anouilh, Jean. Play Antigone (Stratford, Con, production) reviewed by J. Novick; oa Play The cavern (Cincinnati production) reviewed by J. Novick; D Antigone (Stratford, Conn., production). Re- viewed! Dy) Je INOVICKs) UD) aiecesce:--o-es- Gaulle, President Charles de. See France Gavin, General James M.; reservations on WES) Vietnammpolicy, anes ee eee 5 Geis, Gilbert Grime! and {politicssiisme-ctscenerceesoereet ec 2 ff. 382 386 211 -562 296 276 222 (Vol. 205) Index (July-December, 1967) PAGE Gellhorn, Martha Thin ice in the desert. Arab coffee break on A DAIECIG) ACV Ri ee ant oe De 395 General electric corp.; take-over of French computer firm, Machines Bull .........0.0000.... 243 Germany Collective madness under Hitler .................. 48 Division discussed by Rev. M. Niemoeller at Pacem in terris conference .......... 75, 76-77 Germany and the East: the outmoded wall; increasing trade with eastern Europe. C. MeWilliams; Reduction in U.S. and West German forces without quid pro quo by Soviet Union and East Germany. C. Amery; E See also Berlin Germany, West iPespasision Of US. firms) ...3ccec.e0e:cc0scessse0ee 242 ff. Letter from Munich; Social democratic group’s discussion of leftist goals. C. Amery; S 1939 Nazi murderers of Danzig postr can Puz; a exonerated by courts. G. C Soviet enemy No. 2 ........ Ghelderode, Michael de. Pl viewed by H. Clurman; D Glassboro, N. J.; Johnson-Kosygin meeting... 35 Gogol, N. V. Play The government inspector (Stratford, Ontario, production) reviewed by J. Novick; D ......... Rear eeteen nc teeeener tice 221 Gonzales, Rep. Henry; on ineffective, symbol- lasaine IOth (Congress ..........scssssssosscssesovseseas 143 Gonzales, Rodolfo (‘‘Corky’’); leader of Mex- ican-American political association .... 624, 625 Good, Paul Kentucky’s coal beds of sedition; §S ............ 166 Gore, Senator Albert; for negotiation on NUISee RCIATTLMM eer ogee votatieuteessexctssscssscasvepoduocentsscuss 450 Gott, Richard Report from Bolivia: Guevara, Debray and REMUS WAN SMe ne ec nare re atc csasnoascotenncoaccavececur Gould, Gordon, Jr. See Luten, D. B. Government affairs institute; R. M. Scammon, “expert” approving South Vietnamese elec- tion, member of administration-subsidized group Government inspector, the (Stratford, On- tario, production). Reviewed by J. Novick; Gowen, Yakubu; Nigerian leader prosecuting war against Ibo secessionists .................. 335-336 Grauman, Lawrence, Jr. After Washington peace mobillization: the BGAISH OLs GISSENES SS) cesdesciccsccacsesesscsocceseccvsusene 617 Great Britain Aldabra atoll airbase would threaten bio- logical treasure house; E ............cceseeseee 16 Chinese demonstrations against .......... 326, 327 Diplomatic comeback in U.N. on Middle East and Cyprus. A. Tuckerman; E ...... 612 Dollar invasion by U.S. firms ............0.... 242 ff Bisy pian WlESACY. <.icsccseaisecesrsnovece 3 Excuses for neo-colonialism Intellectuals’ neutralism countered by En- BRINE Merten caer ecactssucaseststeissencesaccessvocesvessnad 200 Letter from London: the Catholic crisis; tension between hierarchy and reformers. SRS ale ca ara sis SS em wey Soatese ev cce vac cousedessssccess 51 Labour party as maidservant cleaning up after Conservatives; devaluation crisis and relationship with U.S.; E ............ 578 eee theatre reviewed by H. Clurman; a 1-A in London; resister/deserter under- ground used by young Americans. H. MeO Me aero nisesctiies tn Meee 487 Safety of London compared with New Moric. S. benenbaums |G 0s. cisc.sscocssetsecetivesees 542 Sonic-boom tests. K. M. Ruppenthal; E...... 229 Wise seacoast location of nuclear power MYLARELG 0 Set cecctte eccccc te edtracsaescvecncseceeaedeascacectnenecens 339 Greece Courageous publisher H. Vlachos arrested; dentistry difficult because citizens may not open mouths. H. Cimring, D.D.S.; CR ao erreren ctr atiateawaticoeusti iieacedes 418 King’s visit to U.S. to plead for resumption of arms shipments to military dictator- ship; probable success of mission; E.... 195 Open letter to junta member S. Pattakos on A. Papandreou and other political pris- re S. Rousseas and R. Clements; a U.S. should not aid military junta; E ........ 452 Green, Lloyd; painters’ union insurgent mur- LE ess co gti cracae sae snts sasvaseviaca¥eg eticeeteituseaecdeences 81| ff. Green berets; J. and M. Wayne’s hawkish film SEN aye ca cetac este pee cc versace sacs SnideNisocoecdasvesvotesiss 614 Greene, Felix; film Inside North Vietnam re- viewed by R. Hatch; MP ........csccccsssscsocsssccvsees 701 Greer, Herb The resister/deserter underground abroad: Part WRONG IAW SS Oi ciate cass sesesacascohtses stoctteises 487 Gross, Rep. H. R.; call for retaliation against nations aiding North Vietnam ............0...... 194 PAGE Group, the; Paris-based organization aiding U.S. deserters and draft evaders ................ 490 Group research, inc.; opposition to right-wing groups; attacked by M. O. Hatfield and Sere “DA MMPOrtomer i ccsnceseckesscicncsasseaeeees 42-43 Guevara, Che; career as guerrilla; “the best Way stondie= aye Velesiass: S) -.:sc1..teieee Death of Castro aide in Bolivian jungle did not extinguish revolution in Latin Amer- Cash Mnbrnn csr oicecstincaisncesviossvasisevatscsccotttenies 390 Report from Bolivia: Guevara, Debray and the CIA. R. Gott; S Guimarra, Joseph; California grape grower, holdout against C. Chavez’s organizing Campaign er tree venice cacshsetrieieninse 627-628 Guthrie, Tyrone; productions of Oresteia tril- ogy reviewed by J. Novick; D ................ 252 H Hair. Reviewed by H. Clurman; D. ................ 540 Halfway up the tree. Reviewed by H. Clur- man; 5 Hall, Burton The painters’ union: ventilating the house of labor; S Hamburg state opera; performances at Metro- politan reviewed by B. Boretz; M ................. 15 Happiness. Reviewed by H. Clurman; D ....... 573 Harding college; “‘Americanization” program supported by American farm bureau feder- ALLO ses ete see ecm craven severest en 497 Harlem. See New York City Harris, David; new left student-body presi- dent at Stanford resigned for lack of broad backing Harris, Joe; Mississippi Negro civil-rights Neat AG Tyee eno ee cae veces oaun te vacuscsacscesvvuestrtaaeadaav® 179-180 Hart, Senator Philip A. ; The discount on “‘gorgeous’’; exaggeration in advertising and in administration’s DOLMICY Statements \S> .....cessacoossesseanattassinccs 400 Food industry’s pressure against truth-in- packaging bill. A. QO. Mowbray; S Requested Justice department to rule on legality of L. B. Hershey proposal to Craft war protesters ........cs.ccsscscscescssscees 642 Harvard university; student demonstration against Dow chemical recruiter Leavitt. By G. Ross; S Hatch, Robert Reviews of motion pictures IBonmiepand Cl ydeweracscescsccressesseaisivsssnconeccores Chappaqua Closely watched trains Daistesies ee Elvira Madigan ............ Clurman, 382 Owain wore SHOR Wats. .acssccessesssccsenetossccee rents Inside North Vietnam ...............:::0000 ees L’amant militaire (San Francisco mime troupe production) 637 Portrait of Jason .... a IHC UEP TOLIES Mace tes tence ck aseceassenssvctsvseevepeoeeece Hatcher, Richard. See Gary, Indiana : Hatfield, Senator Mark O.; as Oregon enig- Mitte peas GrepO LLL mS ness ace aascacunn toseacde sees 8 Hellman, Lillian. Revival of play The little foxes reviewed by H. Clurman; 539 Hello, there! PHeohapirosh Po iiveccc..cceccecreoseorenne 222 Heise, J. Arthur May 15 article on Air Force academy, Why the cadets cheat, criticized by Lt. Col Re CrAim si oe... 2, with Heise reply : Hernon, Joseph M.; censure by Catholic U. colleagues as academic-freedom issue. M. Urofsky; S . Hershey, General Lewis B.; national reaction against selective service head’s proposal to induct war protesters; E. ............cssccccssereeee 642 Herzberg, Donald;; background of approving “expert” on Vietnam election; E 226 Hester, Hugh B. Agreement with M. Windmiller on U.S.- Soviet nonproliferation negotiations; C.... 386; see also C, 148 Heyn, Herman N F é Baltimore Vietnam summer group’s hearing on Vietnam; C 318; see also E, 5 and C, 130 Hicks, Louise Day. See Boston, Mass. Hill, Herbert : : Sewing machines and union machines; ILGWU and Amalgamated opposition to federal training programs; S Hilton, Ronald i 2 The Yanqui universities: Latin-American universities being Americanized, and vice versa; Si fa. Pusect Pe ec eee et ne nia custees Hippies; anatomy of a hangup: last word on the hippies. H. Toch; Outlook different from slum dwellers’... 364-365 Presence in Washington peace march exag- RETALECE DVM PLCS eairave-cccsveciueectensecasptnancnarachas 455 PAGE Hirsch, John; director at Stratford, Ontario, Shakespeare festival Hirsch, Phil Data banks of U.S. census bureau: the punchcard snoopers; § ........ 369, see also : C, 610, with Hirsch reply : Historical days. J. Wright; P ........................ 374 History; conquest of in reinterpretations of ee ES s long dream in Asia. W. LaFeber; missnantasiesrrasncersnasreactesit ree 456 Wap ypetee Dae Ro lliris as] h-a Speen nD 1 Hitch, Charles Johnston; new U. of California Ee head as prominent RAND alumnus but blank as educator. H. Draper; Ss... 682 Hochhuth, Rolf; anti-Churchill play The sol- diers fell flat in Berlin. C Amery; § ........ 700 Hoffman, Paul; on development projects in ae ee Colntries eset ee 79 Hong Kong; hinese-riots' ee 326, 327 Hook, , Sidney; attacks on Communism in 1950’s; association with Congress for cul- tural etreedomuss: em 199, 200, 202 ff. Hoover institution; conferees’ thoughts on ; eve SpalreraD of porick tevolution; E.... 418 e, ur; report on “‘Happies” ............ Horn, John. See Television sia ag oe a Medicine ousing; ghetto redevelopment b: rivate ee R. A. Cloward and F. FE. Bivens Noise nuisance .. Soviet advances Hewes won the war. Reviewed by R. Hatch; Las gerel EE I Oy en vireo arenes Huge and kisses. Reviewed by H. Humphrey, Vice President Hubert H.; ner- ie vous cheerleader for Vietnam war; E On Vietnam war critics as pessimists, R. Moody, ) 5 Cia pane ty nee ie rp ren ed 642 Speech on Mexican Americans’ problems at UPD ash ya ene els kame ir oneen 625-626 Hungary; Projected economic reforms and Increasing trade with West .................... 139 ff. Huntington, Sau Pp y xceptions to J. A. Heise article of Ma on Air Force academy cheating; C ses 20 Huong, Tran Van; poor showing in South Vietnam presidential election I Ibos; massacre by other Nigerian tribes brought on civil war. S. Meisler; S ..... 334 Identification; of citizens with national great- messmeke eburke-s SG) en 46; see also C, Illinois; refusal to reappoint peace advocate ynd as history professor at Chicago ane college. C. Lasch and A. F. Young; In circles. Reviewed by H. Clurman; D .... cu 2 India; alleged Chinese aggression 462 Neutralism of as target of 1951 Bombay _meeting of Congress for cultural freedom 202 Indians, U.S.; paternalism toward still ex- hibited by Congress and Interior depart- ment. D. McNickle; Eo... 677 Industry. See Business = 8 0" Bee 3 concomitant of war expenditures in Inside Nowy Win Bice 390 Hatch eMiP) 3 sor Sa cons ei is ee 701 Insurance; American farm bureau federation’s INLET ES Es Wane renee reece, meen en ee at a 498 ff. 3; “kept”? representatives in cold war, as in Congress for cultural freedom and Encounter. C. Tasch: i Sine 198; see also 309 and 340 : International law. See Law International voluntary services; fifty work- ers in Vietnam call for end to wares. 322 Iphigenia in Aulis (M. Cocoyannis produc- tion). Reviewed by H. Clurman; D ............ 636 Iran; Shah’s visit to U.S. for cash and planes; gas-pipeline and steel-mill deal with Soviet Union; E Shah’s rioting Tsrael Arms sales as issue in secret-loan trans- actions through Export-import bank; E.... 164 Black caucus pronouncement on at New politics convention, Chicagom ees 274, 275 Defeat of Egypt brought bruises and sus- Fee Ey Bullough; 1S eee igures time is on its side, so stal U.N. on Middle East crisis .............. . was Retaliation against Egypt for sinking destroyer; reluctance to negotiate. Tuckerman; visit (July-December, 1967) Index (Vol. 205) PAGE Soviet resolution of condemnation in U.N. failed s. Heirs coi aiies th nest eeeaens min eneaett 34 Today in Tel Aviv; mood after June war. S Wolpert aS oss tvccsaccsstescceccseececeearnteresees 7 U.S.-Soviet wall of words in U.N. on con- ditions for negotiations with Arab states. A. Weill-Tuckerman; E .............:cceeeseees 2 v Japan; background of U.S. relations with .... 458 Jarry, Albert. Prague production of play King Ubu reviewed by H. Clurman; D. .............. 60 Jefferson, Thomas; rules for conduct at U. of Wilirwinitay oceccteecs.ccrasiters . 651 Jews; Soviet attitudes on ................ eens 427 John Birch society. See Birch society, John Johnson, President Lyndon B. Appointment of political hacks as directors of Office of emergency planning; E ........ 388 Blurs history in Asia policy .............::c:0000 456 California Democratic council’s delegate slate opposed to re-election; E .................. 356 Commission on law enforcement’s report; basis for backing safe streets and crime control legislation. G. Geis; S .............. 115 Communications task force ............:ccscceceeees 702 Convened cabinet committee meeting at El Paso on Mexican-American minority’s PLODIEMS. Whose srsacsssturcusacesasccvesseseveseeenst 624, 626 Escalation of Vietnam war .............:c-:ccsse 234 Glassboro, N. J., meeting with Premier ROSY PUR oo sceccescaeecsesccceecceuccasenseheweoduevacesontas 35 Great power vis-a-vis Congress; signs of revolt on Tonkin Gulf resolution of 1964; Growing impatience with dissenters Growing unpopularity; E bie [ies on! Vietnam goals. ii c.ceccce-ceconcscerecsesecacere New TV style fails to hide “capital mal- aise’’; Next move in Vietnam?; Eo... No plans to end Vietnam war; no lack of plans by, others’) ei) sccaccertaenetesee ese Open letter to on Vietman by American sociological association members; E Opposition to $3-billion job program; coun- tered by demands of urban coalition; E.... Politicking to weaken welfare and truth-in- lending legislation. R. G. Sherrill; § ...... Pressure on Mayor J. V. Lindsay, vice chairman on commission of civil disorders; Prisoner of Vietnam war; growing list of defectors from stand; E Re-election in 1968 through war with China. IRE SES (Crossoms (Oi yi cetccrccsiectneen Refusal to acknowledge national causes of city riots; appointment of commission on ClVil GISOKderss hho o-cssccvivestuctoser tenses Renomination challenged by IM cWarthy iy, scnseccosccseroetcen cnet Peete Safety cited by Los Angeles police chief in breakup of peace demonstration ........ 36; see also E, 435 Ys San Antonio line on Vietnam negotiations and reason for U.S. presence .......... 386, Shabby treatment of Secretary McNamara; Bie sey ee eae ay nacre taenenc as ee oe ee Should be opposed by R. F. Kennedy for 1968 nomination; E , Should heed prod from Senate-majority ap- proval of Mansfield resolution on bring- ing Vietnam issue to U.N.; E .............. Soft-sell campaign on Vietnam; E .......... sce Statement on Middle East; to meet with Prentier, Kosygins Wo iiri-.cccececcsseseceessercsnsees Vietnam policy in trouble, as evidenced by Rep. Mills’s defiance on tax surcharge; Be ese rocceussrccn ev ceeon nas censeeccctarsevees Violation of 1964 pledge ...........:eccesseeseeecereeee Voice of America as voice of President. REV ALLOIs Scere 135; see also C, 194 and 258, with Walton reply _ Would benefit politically by corporations’ redevelopment of ghettos «2.0.0... Josselson, Michael; organizer of Congress for cultural freedom and CIA agent ........ 198, 208, 210; see also 309 and C, 563 ; Joyce, James; play Stephen D., based on writ- ings, reviewed by H. Clurman; D Juarez. See Mexico K Kaplan, Allan VA vem Wa tick) pen tctrccrrcirtcesconrerercracercntease -u i ra e e 44 Oakland, Calif.; police brutality against draft Protesters and reporters; E 3; see also C, 546 : O’Brien, Conor Cruise; won libel suit against Haecunter ees 210; see also O’Brien letter, October: dead steer. B. Noll ieee 190 Ohnesorg, Benno; Free university of Berlin student jailed by police in anti-Shah demon- pp Sttation=y Car Amery: mS nana 80 Ojukwu, Odumegwu; Ibo secessionist leader in' Nigerian ui oh e eene e 334 ff. Olive pits (San Francisco mime troupe pro- duction). Reviewed by R. F. Sayre;\'D) .5...... 189 Oo Neill, Eugene. Play More stately mansions reviewed by H. Clurman; D ...eecccscss..... 538 Ongania, President Carlos. See Argentina Oregon; salmon threatened by nuclear power plants) PACUNetboy:; Sian arena 337 Senator M. O. Hatfield as enigma. R. G. Sherrill Seo ra cae ea 38 Oresteia (Tyrone Guthrie theatre productions). as By 7 Toes sisdeginauetteoeeennts 252 Tganization for Latin American solidarit (OLAS); anti-U.S. initial conference a aVvana eee 132; see also L. Eder, The faces of Fidelismo; S ........... 173 Organization of American states crackdownuonl Caubale neler nem 324 Ortego, Philip Darraugh = = Mexican-American minority on the border: cabinet committee meeting in El Paso convened by Johnson; § ....................... 624 P Pacem in terris II; Geneva conference of ae study Gr democratic institutions. ML) Borgeses Sie ane : 5 148 and 386° eee, Packaging. See Food Painters’ union. See Labor — Union Pantagleize. Reviewed by H. Clurman; D .... 669 Papandreou, Andreas; imprisoned Greek econ- omist; open letter to junta member S. Patta- ie on. S. W. Rousseas and R. Clements; Paris. See France Eat onan L. : part I. Who will bell th = sus?; FCC’s inertia; § ...... . wheseicn Soles 391 ee part II. The sovereign state of Bell; eats ees escuncatudssconssesexaeroutense;etertrrenert eens 430 Reviews of plays Mysteries and smaller pieces (Living theatre, Paris) een eae era te 540 Pattakos, Stylianos. See Rousseas, S. W., and Clements Patton, James G.; National farmers union president’s charges against American farm bureaty federations ene nna 499 Peace and pacifism After Washington mobilization: the goals of dissent. L. Grauman, Jr.; S Backed by California Democratic council Convention!) UE int aennn en Bnnalne 356 Work. ices: Se en ee ele ie 548 (Vol. 205) Index (July-December, 1967) PAGE International voluntary services workers in Vietnam, led by director D. Luce, call PAGE Magic night at the refermatory. D. Wag- (0) (3 ol Seda crce err eer ar ar PAGE Proxmire, Senator William; queries on de- fense-contract accounting saat nnavsacotoas aie 686, 688 OPETIG) COT WATS -Es cs, .nccncescissesacivcessecseneceves 322 Marianne Moore. By R. Roseliep .... ~ i Z ° rr Issue at New politics conference ............ 273 ff. Message to Michael. Pp. Blackburn accu 30 eae ea mua ee a ee 574 Labor meets for peace; Chicago conference New York Times weather map. A. Kaplan 22 Publius Vergilius Maro. By W. Stafford: P. 573 oo by eae labo Go Oo sr B. ee nan ee 190 Puerto Ricans; clothing operatives’ training assembly for peace. B. J. Widick; S.... ublius Vergilius Maro. W. Stafford... j - 561; see also C, 674 Rigoletto, Be oVietor Bt ees Meee 573 ee ae programs opposed by unions. a Los Angeles parade stampeded by police; also correction, 418 East Harlem: “Do not cross, flatfoot!”: eee: 30; see also) 105 ee Sonnet by Pablo Neruda, a, with translation rioting by militants. B. Kremen: S : 107 M. L. King vindicated in linking civil by RBS Belittwme ee chases cs eee 697 Puerto Rico; Commonwealth, state or nation?; rights with movement ...............ccessssseseeees 144 Sound from the earth, a. W. Stafford .. 634 issue in July 23 plebiscite G. T. Nunn: Negro draftee R. Lockman’s refusal to go Spungel9G7 secon Carrnthyc....0 ae 214 Sie asestees sates nies aes n; “a POM VRC LTANT SH) 0.) ce secsercscenneeoncnesses Pern 357 Stones, the. W. Berry ................. 312" wPurneliiKarlt tie) ee. aor kay acme Peace corps returnees organize against Viet- Those summer guests. J. Garrigue .. Pm The Negro in Vietnam; soldiers in U.S Patienea ts ce OUOCKS 1S vo sesecsceerencescassesss pans lh) Three poems against violent dea Ps forcessiS2s. AL eo ee Mar eg Police brutality against Oakland, Calif., LOCI Se er Slee i nee 94 Vietnam elections: marching out the horses anti-draft demonstrators and newsmen; Tonight. A. Kaplan . 286 by military) Sion 267 force praised by Governor Reagan; E Visit, the. K. Swenson. ............... . 598 Puzzles, crossword. F. W. Lewis. See back Pa 453; see also C, 546 Woman in a window. P. Zweig .................. 506 pages P i Polls as voice for voiceless opponents of Police MMe MIAIM MAT Es feisty rttats cers ca ssnes scsusses svaeucas 421 Actions against campus peace protesters Reouremiommoecnatore rk. Bh Morton's! New, 9 9 aacssdurssececssusercnsuunecsvostentoveccnensusvcscsazosssccoute 646, 658 Q advocacy of; E ........ 354; see also C, 642 Brutality in Oakland, Calif., against anti- Resister/deserter underground aids dis- draft demonstrators and reporters; E ...... Quang, Thich Tri; South Vietnamese Bud- sident young Americans in Britain and 453; see also C, 546 dhist leader interviewed. J. Mirsky; S . 678 Europe. 1-A in London. H. Greer; S.... Conduct in riot-torn cities .......... 101 ff., 360 ff. Quintero, José. Adaptation of O’Neill play 487. Conscientious AWOLs. T. Land; iMippiesmipatine moteee eee 582-583 More stately mansions reviewed by SSmecros 488; see also C, 546 Hooked on_law enforcement in spirit of Clurman; pA Sore! ait, hea Pe eee Sa San Francisco cease-fire referendum ............ fascism. E. Z. Friedenberg; § ...... 360; Self-immolation against war in U.S.; E ...... see also E, 515 Senate’s wavering doves; E. .........csccsessseees New anti-riot weapons available, such as R Sentiment among AFL-CIO membership; “Peacekeeper” car-tank; E. ........ccccccccceeeee 517 Te eee eer ee eon oo Ps pavstesene 325 Not so commonly perjured as stated in I. Radnoti, Miklos Signs of hope for 1968, despite New politics Younger article of May 8. T. J. Mackell; Hivevlatespoe#is sib aesa ntsc tee eer eee conference; E. ............ 261; see also 273 Ce eit oe ee foie Mssvastiaie a eee 52 Raftery, father and son; successive p U.S. citizens must decide on Vietnam, in Unnecessary violence against Los Angeles of scandal-ridden painters’ union. .............. 81 ff. view of administration’s adamancy.... 236 ff. anti-war demonstrators; E ........ 36; 101; Raleigh, N. C.; interracial camping for school- The war on U.S. campuses. Special issue, » 435 — ciiildren| banned; WE inne.) ee eee 133 Dec. 18 Pollock, Francis Ramirez, Salvador; Mexican-American leader 625 Washington demonstration had positive as- Peace corps returnees: the new world they RAND); association with of C. J. Hitch, new pects not reported in press. R. Seiden- Ge ON eerneeattnacstesseetctess sssccecerecciters een 15 U. of California president 2.0.0.0... 682 ff. eM) ato eet sect szcncoscacceststcsccecsterseates 578 Polls; on Vietnam drawal. See Vietnam Randolph, A. Philip; testimony on need for Wide opposition to Vietnam war shown in Show growing anti-war strength ..........0...... 451 master plan for city ghettos ................ 113, 114 Dearborn and Cleveland polls; E........ 69; Voice for voiceless opponents of Vietnam Rarback, Martin; painters’ union official in- see also E, 131 SW Ally me cereremeretenrertenstccrs coscecnsstranesremterteoe 421 dicted! for sbraibery, tire ineeersueeer tee 81 Peace corps; new world seen by returnees. F. Pollution, Spill-over: the costs of growth. E. Rasnick, Ben; painters’ union official convicted PESTO cS US eine ceo carsicsosCecencvsntvcnssccvoscessspsess coetne 15 Ais Hara itera rete tcey ss vadcasvssussacseasdgvactesseontes 558 Ofsemurder poe re ee ea “Peacekeeper”; armored anti-riot car-tank; TVA: the halo slips; policies may encour- Ratliff, Thomas; eastern Kentucky prosecutor- MTree es ces daucaesceddesuscdacstcebescotecpeacevcovatcses 517 age water pollution. J. Egerton; § .......... 11 politician’s raid on “subyersives” opposed to Pearson, Drew; column on homosexuals on Pontecorvo, Gillo. Film The Battle of Al- strip-mine JODERALIONS eres soreness 166, 168-169 Reagan staff suppressed by most papers .... 676 giers reviewed by H. Clurman; MP. ............ 348 Rats; friends in House, in voting down ex- Pelletiere, Steve Portrait of Jason. Reviewed by R. Hatch; termination bill for cities. S. H. Klitzmaa; American cancer society’s idle millions; VP eee eee ea FO oc eee 445 ee a ORE ER Mee ee NS SE Ona 194 pressure on California division; S .......... 401 Poverty : 2 Reagan, Governor Ronald Penn, Arthur. Film Bonnie and Clyde re- As cause of Negro riots; inadequate fed- Backlash against California poor; presiden- viewed by R. Hatch; MP. .............ceeeeseeeeees 444 Exell Outlays sei ieacccstecsrescsrscreeeceresssecs 98; 101 ff. tial aspirations. P. Kerby;)S ....4.......0..... 262 Penniman, Howard; background of approving California’s middle-class backlash against Homosexuals on staff charged by D. Pear- “expert” on Vietnam election; E ................ 226 poor, led by Governor Reagan. By P SOM Eieere score ee 676 Percy, Senator Charles H.; demagogic reso- Rex byte Simeraeeeeetenscvcecescubecvcnacecnee ee .- 262 Praise for Oakland, Calif., police who lution for increased Asian military support Ghetto redevelopment: corporate imperi- roughed up anti-draft demonstrators and in Vietnam; E ........ 387; see also C, 578 alism for the poor through private indus- TEPOLtersi Hisar 453 Perjury; and police. See Police try. R. A. Cloward and F. F. Pliven; Symbol of politics of entertainment. A. Ber- Petlin, Irving. Reviewed by M. Kozloff; A.... 509 Ss : 565 Choe ee Deer scntnctaess cette eee 422 Pew, Thomas W., Jr. Goals of poor negated by hipp 364-365 See also California ‘ Yankee station: inviting retaliation by North Kentucky’s coal beds of sedition. P. Good; Reaney. James. Play Colours in the dark a Vietnam against carriers in Tonkin gulf; Serer ence nee «20 or Sacsecosscesantuoontemne tees 66 (Stratford, Ontario, production) reviewed ‘ Bre eeceecaeasasacsacsecankncecenccvovessecessivosecsseus 141 Mexican unemployed squatting near border DYAIE, Novick ge inee ea teee en 220) Pfeffer, Leo COW TIS rere re Cerra aae ras casdk chasenntecsoee ees Records, phonograph. For reviews, see Boretz, Proposed New York constitution, permitting Ominous cuts in federal programs threat- B. : , state aid to parochial school, strongly ONE rtceeestesreceseses ence cevuchcteevescevicssesssssctusnccessenets Refugees; plight and attitudes of Arabs in backed by Catholic church; E. ............... 889 Poor as targets of restrictive amendments catipsye Mes Gellnors ion tee ee Philadelphia; Mayor H. J. Tate, Democratic to social security bills EV... eee 64 Problem for Israel following June war ...... RIS MMEL C= CLECLEC otis, «, sctcesascreseceesacsosesessndecsecieesstee 514 Poor nations getting poorer; likened to Vietnam civilians, as from razed village of Phillips, Joseph D. Marx’s 19th-century working classes. H. B Ben suc ey .p Mirsky so) eee 397 The dollar invades Europe; S ...........:seseee 242 Wiheeler TS ikea esse ivssecan.csssvtsiviceeree eases 358 Reich, Bob; leading spirit in free university Phonograph records. For reviews, see Boretz, Reallocation of national resources as weapon ateDartmouth ens. ccnercee ene 294 : against raises problems ........ 49 ff. See Reiner, Carl. Play Something different re- Picasso, Pablo. Sculpture show at Museum of also C, 290 wiewed iby, 1. \Clurman sD)... .c. tect: modern art reviewed by M. Kozloff; A .... 441 Role in Newark riots; EE ........cceccssseccsssseseee 68 Religion; in U.S. Pacific expansion ........ Pickstock, Frank; on betrayal by U.S. left.... 486 Unemployment in U.S. reduced by _war Our Lord in Vietnam. W. Eastlake; § ...... 491 Pike, Rep. Otis G.; exposé of defense profi- expenditures and military service; E .... Pression hip piestaetn ees ee oe 584-585 COT NINN nsec. ts pothocsuacsheswvetvavinscsostasaavaveedeses 686, 689 Power; proposed private nuclear plants as Republican party Pinter, Harold. Play The birthday party re- threat to fish of Pacific northwest. A. Net- Backlash against California poor; Reagan saewed, by El. Clirman;, Di vic..0-.sccssccsccsecceaevee 412 OY SSS reece ea cceeetee terse aat aes scosaveuseccstesscecsenens 337 as presidential possibility. P. Kerby; S Pliven, Frances Fox. See Cloward, R. See also NAWAPA 262; see also 422 Poems Prague. See Czechoslovakia ree Feud of non-candidates N. A. Rockefeller penta. We Ss MCT Wi0l <.ccnscsccssasesseseoscveseres 694 Press, U.S.; failed to report positive aspects and J. V. Lindsay. By G. Pressman; S.... 591 faveryMaria. By VAY Kaplan) 3 o2os:.ccscc.s-0000-s-- 437 of _ Washington 1a ene oy Hatfield: the Oregon enigma. R. G. Sherrill; Ballad of the man (who cut off both his feet Seidenberg, M.D.; C ..... 578; see also de SU eee is with his own hands). W. Biermann. ........ 533 Oyerrcrarine of hippie phenomenon. H. 582 1967 electoral victories; E Cs SWS enecenene arco ta denee csi cccecccucscccccmtenenwavnenee E ; , Baad on the poet Francois Villon. By W. 5) allored news,"aéia suppression “of B, 1967 white paper on Asian folicy occ. 459 Biues to be sung’ in a dark woice B. ee eae AR ONER eis se acest canst casdetascverssdscvacvovaceasate Ns 4 PO ae Rad en ae ye ae cag at ESoGi eek eee : se : n country’s also Ly, Brigitte. By W. Biermann epee eee ese i. Peace candidate needed; Eo vocceescssesssssssssssseoen 260 Distance, the. L. Bruce . Drinkers, the. N. Price . Driving through Minn Hanoi bombings. R. Bly role as unsinkable aircraft carrier for ; 644; see also 305 03 Ee ceceesevenes Pressman, Gabe The N. Rockefeller - J. V. Lindsay feud; i pone as usual in statement on city riots; Significance of Senator Morton’s switch to peace position; E ............ 354; see also oe morning. W. Biermann; P 533 ao anes Rrcreerercec coe Regsnceddcestereanttanesieeretccescs Sad citar a won” is . i The drinkers; P! ......:.-...... cseoneecensaneeneessoeoanen 408 Signs of wisdom on Vietnam issue in 1968; Five late poems. M. Radnoti . “440 Promise, the. London production reviewed by BO eae, ntaaras sates cutoecestetcasoeensaearasooshtored ioeeens 675 Foreign policy, R. Bly .......... p25 Pete Cletrrmiar si) ieetcetsrercessescces-nctctvcrvareersuessnenats 29 Research and development; uneasy alliance Hello there! H. Shapiro ... ws» 222 New York production reviewed by H. Clur- of universities and Pentagon. G. Kolko; ilistorical/ days.) J. Wright <.t.ccscscsccserescsseveeceo 374 SNA Mas Leet artis eerecaccscscessdevesstbeonessevditons 605 WS irestedcncsunsecsavcnveysevenantorceacvuiacoteerteae 328 and 645 (July-December, 1967) Index (Vol. 205) PAGE Resnick, Rep. Joseph; exposure of American farm bureau federation’s operations. R. G. Sherrill; Reuss, Rep. Henry; unhappy about poor rec- OL Of GOth Congress) Mrcsicesniiecssccsechessaccrsr erste 143 Reuther, Eric; Peace corps returnee organ- ized group against Vietnam war .............. 16-17 Reuther, Victor; speech at National labor leadership assembly for peace opposed AFL- CIO’s meddling in Latin America and DLO-Wats stander eer seerseemernaecence 562-563 Reuther, Walter P.; on Congress’s denial of long- rane commitments to help cities .... 113-114 Rhodes, Alan Vietnam war is racist, despite editorial re- jecting ‘‘yellow peril’; C .......... 148; see also E, 37 Ribicoff, Senator Abraham; chairman of sub- committee investigating crisis in city shee Bie yeh Cc Praise for J. A. Heise for May 15 article on Air Force academy cheating; C “Right to work.’”? See Labor — Union 2 ff. Rigoletto. By F. Victor; P ........ 346. See also correction, 418 Riots Beginnings of wisdom on causes in cities; Ribicoff subcommittee inquiry in Senate. W. Klein; S Causation of ‘crime and _ insurrection” among Negroes in Newark; E Genesis in insistence on law enforcement.... 360 Legislation against in House; E 36 Measures against as storm warnings of (WESHfascismis ter cinicttsces ctectenee eeesrectees ete 516 President’s commission on civil disorders expected to issue frank mores Lindsay therapy in New York; E ..........---..0 131 Racial civil-war costs in U. ‘By S. Black- SCOT G oa Coe coe ei cee e ccenateaneraersesenn ten saseteeenrscn se Rebuilding response to in Detroit and other cities; new heed to people of ghettos. J. WAtimentes (1S) Bustin decease ductesswsvscsvaveseavsntee 55 Symbol-slapping legislation against proposed in Congress. R. G. Sherrill; S ..........- 142 Symptom of Negro revolution in U.S. 98 and 547 Violence, the, in U.S. cities. New York: “Nothing Worth Saving.” P. G troit: Motown blues. B. J. Widick; Los Angeles: Western justice. P. Kerby; Newark: lethal indifference. L. M. Moroze; East Harlem, New York: “Do not cross, flatfoot!” B. Kiremiens us iecrcekceiese icc 101-107, 126 ee Rep. L. Mendel; for U.S. aid to Greek , si ce Ne oN ee cio beae ashy, ERE Ro ws 452 Reckefellee, Governor Nelson A.; feud with Mayor J. V. Lindsay. By G. Pressman; eat i Ries De Sse otitis csilens Socbasecantusvebtas atevarecdaases Set up commission on post-Vietnam erp DE Ye a er Renan SPEER or eer 675-676 Rodin, Auguste; notes for an essay on sculp- ADT eBOK Et CAN cosceniccceccecseeetebentesae cenedaese 661 Roemer, Ruth Praise for and correction of P. Kerby’s June 12 article on abortion; C ............0. Rollins, A. B., Jr. The voice as history: twenty years of oral LO] CCESHAIEIINU cS sls tea ieee secencen seen eetere teetee eae crnee 18 Romney, Governor George S.; admission of “brainwashing” on Vietnam may not hurt chances for Republican presidential as- pba NCO OSD 1D) cposcenseccoccncoseeenusceccchorcopanCcenog at 259 Rooks, Conrad. Film Chappaqua reviewed by Ree atelis MUP aise. cotenncvssevacncnezaveperesesseeaneese 573 Roosevelt, Theodore; deepened U.S. commit- MeTICMIU LA Sia x ees scce acne eenreneocee iawn 457-458 Roseliep, Raymond GLAM CHICK Et i catrucdicevenacusueetebadedesavastetensscwuss 24 Marianne Moores) bye tvssnrarrestrtesnteerer ee cree 55 Rosenberg, Julius and Ethel; spy case of 1950’s in cultural cold war ...............0+ 200, 205 Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead. Re- viewed) by: H. Clurmani? DD) iieecscs erences 476 Rossi, Gordino O. Editora Abril not connected with Time-Life, despite statement in E. Blum article of Maye 2 ORC Oe cevcaicrtesescttenrten cress tenescsce 226 Rossman, Michael; student-power advocate.... 659 Rousseas, Stephen W., and Robert Clements Letter to a tyrant, S. Pattakos of Greek junta, on A. Papandreou and other polit- ical prisoners; Rumania; increased trade with West ........ 139 ff. Rumsfeld, Rep. Donald; didn’t challenge tell- er vote falsified by Rep. G. P. Miller; E.... 37 Ruppenthal, Karl M. Articles of May 22, May 29, and June 19 on supersonic transport plane praised. F. Wialdropy iC wereactsssetcnsseessterenepeseercerces 20 Omissions in U.S. and British sonic-boom tests sibs ce. se ese acasetcneceherese enters sesccpnerenserss 229 Rusk, Secretary of State Dean; blurs history Ata \Wiietiratin POLICY, cccrecesccee-cocacececeeonsccacennsxesenos 456 PAGE Cited Chinese menace as reason for U.S. in Vietnam; E . : Indecorous New York demonstration against; E 1951 misreading of China ............cccceeeeeeeeeee 458 Opposition to negotiating Vietnam settle- Merit eee ee ereeavsedt saconodevsucesctcestnscuoseye 643-644 Rusk-Khoman agreement; bases in /Dhatland eter. ceeo ces eremexe eceemerens ~ 308 Russell, Carlos; leader of black caucus at New politics Convention Me .c..e eens 274-275 Russell, James E.; educator on problem of “undeveloped people” in U.S. schools ........ 554 Rustin, Bayard; testimony on incendiary mood of Los ‘Angeles INGER FOES) Visnc.ss-scsserteaeernne 112-113 Rutledge, Philip J.; Detroit anti-poverty di- rector of new technique for Negroes and other “‘let-out”’ minorities in U.S. cities 557 Ryan, Rep. William Fitts 1965 hearings on Vietnam; C ........ 130; see also E, 5, and C, 318 Ss Sacco, Nicola, and Bartolomeo Vanzetti; mem- oir forty years after execution. A. Felicani; Seapets bccash nab sencuussubeesectoneenes 108 Salisbury, Harrison E. Praise for C. Lasch article .......... 341; see also 198 Salmon; of Pacific northwest threatened by nuclear power plants. A. INetboy suena 337 San Francisco; hippies in .............. 582, 583, 586 Preparation for Dow day at state college. Je Lee SHOVES erecectenccss-.-see-oetseseocsoxenteteees 648 To vote on U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam wisdetes 421; see also 515 Vicissitudes of state experimental college... 296 San Francisco Chronicle; publicized cancer so- Ciety7s idle’ millions pi.c..000--- “tg PER a a ee . . 2 lOrPnewACONSHENEONE.1.:0c..accist>>EE—E—EE_——_{{x_{x{;_—~AeE—_—_—_—____—_—_— Williams, William Appleton The cold-war revisionists, such as A. M. Schlesinger Girarnic sec ee ae Willis, Paul S.; grocery spokesman’s pressure on news media to provide favorable pub- icity Wilson, Dow; painters’ union insurgent mur- PAGE 621-622 dered ac Aciciieet in Cen ee LL 81 ff. Wilson, Prime minister Harold. See Great Britain Windmiller, Marshall Scholars and soldiers . . . a crisis of values Ae eee department affiliations; Fe Ta ee es 651 San Francisco state college professor headed planning group on war-induced demon- Strationsen., \caseewet eerste: 648-649, 650 Wirin, A. L.; near-lynching in 1934 by Los Angeles Wegionnairestone tie. c ee 104 Wirtz, Labor secretary W. Willard; defensive toward Johnson administration against doubts expressed by press .........ccccecescesesee 580 Wiseman, Frederick. Film Titicut follies re- viewed! by Ri Hatch’; MP ou caciccecsscectect 446 Wolpert, Stanley Today in Tel Aviv; Israel’s mood after Vunenwari ore ee 7 Woman in a window. P. Zweig; P -.......0........ 506 Wood, Michael; on National student associ- atlompand iC TA: Pe. Mee eee cete reeds eee 211 Woods, George D.; World bank president on worsening financial plight of poor nations; EG ete 549; see also E, 610 World bank; data on worsening plight of poor mations ’s) saree ech cee .. 549 R. S. McNamara to be president; E 610 World war III; global fear of Vietnam war AS SPAT! earn vei cae eee cs ice 235-236 Wright, Jay Historicallidayssivba act eee 374 Writers and writing; courageous Czechs not in revolt; In Soviet Union . Wy oming ; relative economic decline s Pp sage of “right to work’ legislation; E ........ x Ximines, Vincente T.; commissioner on Inter- agency committee on Mexican American af- fairs 62 Yankee station; vulnerable crusing site of U.S. aircraft carriers in Gulf of Tonkin. TWePew; JriS Yglesias, Helen Reviews of motion pictures Rikesasbeautifulichild ei2.-ccscccceeesseeoee Yglesias, José Che Guevara: “the best way to die’; S . Whose truth?; documentary films and panel discussions ‘at Lincoln center; MP Yorty, Mayor Sam; incitement to violence against Los Angeles peace paraders ............ Opposition hurt E, G. Brown in 1966 ........ Young, Alfred E. See Lasch, C. Young, Edgar P Clarification of editorial of June 19 on U Thant’s abrupt withdrawal of U.N. forces from U.A.R.; C Young, John Starvation in Mississippi described by CORE official; plea for funds; C 482 and Young, Senator Stephen M.; courageous stand against anti-missile program .............. On U.S. coddling of Greek military dictatorship Young Torless. Reviewed by H. Clurman; MP Younger, Irving May 8 article The perjury routine disputed on perjury by police. T. J. Mackell; C .... Vagalavia; U.S. tourists in and trade with 4 ff. 141 349 463 410 105 263 34 642 164 196 381 52 141 Zilliacus, Konni; tribute to late leftist British M.P.; E 165 sp Sy eerie seeaoh ont oes ce seosch acemacncadackavesouseescaness Zinn, Howard; support for Vietnam position in San Francisco refendum ...csccccsssssssesssseeeees Withdraw-from-Vietnam viewpoint support- ed by Cleveland newspaper readers; E kets 69; see also E, Zweig, Paul Three poems against violent death; P Wontar) im a WitldOw.snl) csccsssscesevccsctvncvectosvess (July-December, 1967) Index (Vol. 205) BOOK REVIEWS Books are indexed under author and title and in some cases under subject. The following explanatory letters are used in the index: B Book review R Reviewer Cc Correspondence PAGE A ART SSmE yar lem a VlO ns ks urcser cs coer ste cnetecccnnncceses te 407 Abuse of power (by U.S. in Vietnam and elsewhere). T. Draper; B............. 213; see also A. Asher letter, 482 Acquaintances. By A. J. Toynbee; B Adcock, Cynthia L.; R ... Africa; seven books on re Africa: history of a continent. B. Da ‘ Photographs by W. Forman; B. ..................... African glory: ae story of vanished Negro civilizations. J. C. deGraft-Johnson; B ......... 90 Aleichem, Sholem; writings read in Central Parle eens rei neecttece cee cotewoateey ee cncne neste ce 124 Alliluyeva, Svetlana Twenty letters to a friend; B ............. oe 469 American literature. World elsewhere, a: the place of style in American literature. R. POiriet Becca ais ecte eee raat eee taeeane 58 Americanization of the unconscious, the. J. Seeley 3) FES esticccvs sccv cares sozerecers oer nea sessilis te-caeenes 377 Anthology of modern Yiddish poetry, an. Selected and translated by R. Whitman; Be ae ec Oe See a en oe 436 Antonio Gramsci aod the origins of Italian Communism. J. M. Cammett; B ................... 249 Aptheker, Herbert Article A note on the history in W. Styron’s The confessions of Nat Turner ................ 375 Architecture. Lost New York. N. Silver; B.... 694 ATE lista ote DOOKSR OMe essere cee susetectrseneresoecaes 696 See also Oldenburg, C. and Kaprow, A. Ast ubookssiil967 ulistic cutee: coerce erence eerie 696 Arts, the corporation and the. R. Eells; B .... 468 Asher, Aaron Draper and Steel books not mere elaboration of magazine articles; letter ........ 482; see also 213 Asia. Beyond Vietnam: the United States and Asians ©} (Reischatiers (BiG. seacseeceeeees 564 Assemblage, environments, happenings. A. IRCA PLOW 5) BS speraees esac cesosesesoserccsscesuessuteteeessectees 27 Bad man, a. So Elkins: Bie. Basic movements. AS) Gregor; Bee Battles in the monsoon: campaigning n the Central Highlands, Vietnam, summer 1966. AQ Miarshallies io eee mec cee eee ee 85 Bedient, Calvin; R ............... 59, 534 Belenky, Robert; IRD So seen cusses sdencceseeten suseceetnesasvae 188 Bendiner, Elmer; Ree 57, 283. See also Gillmor letter, 130, with Bendiner reply Benedikt, Michael (ed.) Postwar German theatre. Edited and trans- lated by M. Benedikt and G. E. Well- Rathi y erecta eee cecccnctesaserce aaa etna: 185 IBS Tek Mpc beryl crete ener eee antes eneetncee 376 Berger, John A fortunate man (Dr. John Sassall). Photo- KLADHS) Dyson Te Een tcevecereaneerss 181 Bernard, Sidney Article Sholem Aleichem in the park; Jewish writers and poets read in Central Park.... 124 Best short stories by Negro writers: an an- theless. from 1899 to the present. Edited by Hughes's: Bi iiss sic dierssates sesdacdecssaerscsoesen 599 Beyond Vietnam: the United States and Asia. Bal OtwReischatiers) Bip eee 564 Bidault, Georges Resistance: the political autobiography of Georges Bidaultsy beeen reemes 537 Bio-bibliography of Langston Hughes, a, 1920- T9G7eD aCe ickinsonie Bs erceeecesetecrs cerascence 599 Blackburnve Sarat aeerecrect ere ora menses 347 Blasts and benedictions: articles and stories. SO. Casey Dee eee 315 Boll, Heinrich rishi ournialisis Bee cecsscereeeccscecatectesecescceasse sss cestve 314 Book marks; brief reviews ....... 25, siz: 347 Books; by Nation contributors .................. 26, 665 More big 1967 books; list of art books ........ 696 1967 non-definitive list. Article by H. Wiggles talsiiertincctsse ees ates roan the sausavesie Sulccer 663 Boston. Village school downtown: politics and educstion — a Boston report. P. Schrag; 5 eee aces enaneenacrtaetnareries cpeean one sareanaaencssers ance 4 Bowles, Paul The time of friendship; B .............:scsesseeseeee 183 Bridge. Story of an accusation (of cheating in 1965 tournament). T. Reese; B ...........eseeeee 251 Bridges and bars. R. Schneider; B Bright, John; R Brown, Robert M. The electronic invasion; B ...........ccceeeeeseees Browne, Malcolm W.; statement oa Asian Communism in June 5 review of R ae: man’s To move a nation challenged. E ues Vourg letter ee rec: cicecticxessanvacccccssseticneeece Burke, Fred G. (ed.). See Diamond, S. Buah, F. K. See Davidson, B. Cc Cammett, John M. Antonio Gramsci and the origins of Italian Communism; Capouya, Emile Footnote to S. Cronin’s June 5 article Mac- Diarmid: Highland Red; letter .............. Carpenter years, the. A. A. Cohen; B ae Carruth, Hayden; R Carter, Gwendolyn; R . Chametzky, Juless\ FRY 20... .cccscceceee-c--- , Charles, Gerda AL logical! gird; Bo ceria e.ccccceccecensneceestseestenesness Children of crisis: a study of courage and fear (in Southern civil-rights struggle). R. Coles; B China. Fanshen: a documentary of revolution in a Chinese village. W. Hinton; B Clecak, Peter; R Clemens, Samuel L. Mr. Twain: a biography. J. Cleveland, Roy L. A. Werth questioned on sanguinary quota- tion by Arab Palestinians’ leader; letter ieee 578, with Werth reply; see also 312 Cohen, Arthur A. Carpentertyearsenthe mb terres. ceeneeeretereees Cohen, E. M. $250,000; B Cohn, Norman Warrant for genocide: the myth of the Jewish world-conspiracy and the Protocols of the Elders of ene B Cole, Ernest, and T. Flaherty House of bondage South Africa); 9Bio Coles, Robert Children of crisis: a study of courage and fear (in Southern civil-rights struggle) ; De Sa. x. 3. Ge ee Kaplanisi beer Communism. Opposition to as touchstone of U.S. foreign policy. See Draper, T., and Steel, Compton, Neil; Rr Sass uavvoattaisess.ctsecaeaarecets Confessions of Nat Turner, the. W. Styron; Boe 373 and 375. See also J. Meyer, Spokesmen for the blacks, 597; and H. N. Meyer letter, 542 Conot, Robert Rivers of blood, years of darkness (on Los Angeles riots of 1965); Conservative tradition in ‘America, the. A. Guttmann; B ........ 535; see also Guttmann letter, 674, with reviewer L. Kampf’s reply, 702 Contest over Japan. By H. Feis; B ................. Corporation and the arts, the. R. Eells; B .... Corti Davide ametircccrcercreesccrocncexenaneess 251, Cortazar, Julio End of the game and other stories; B ........ 248; see also O. T. Myers letter, 386, and reviewer D. Stern’s reply, 418 Craveri, Marcello The life of Jesus; B Crisis in Rhodesia. N. M. Shamuyarira; B.... Cronin, aoe eee ccde eee ee Footnote June 5 article MacDiarmid: Flighland, Red. E. Capouya; letter .......... Croydens Margarets iter .:--<.)-ccnmerscecrenretaarens S Cuba. Inconsolable memories. E. Desnoes; B.... Czechoslovakia. Article Letter from Prague, on Czech fiction, by J. Skvorecky ................ D Davidson, Basil Africa: history of a continent. Photographs by W. Forman; A history of West Africa to the nineteenth century (with F. K. Buah); B Death at an early age: the destruction of the hearts and minds of Negro children in the Boston public schools (discussion). J. FROZOLS: Biv reccceccetiess iatecsaateceasae caret Death kitilS: Sontag 9B... Kosygin- Johnson meeting will deal only in generali- ies, each side wanting to show that its policy of co- istence has not been shattered by the Middle East crisis r even the Vietnamese War. | As for the General Assembly, after an outpouring of vances, it will have to content itself, most probably, humanitarian assistance to the refugees and such ocedural devices as sending a UN representative to the a or strengthening the observers’ corps of General Odd Bull. A call to Israel for a conditional withdrawal from recently conquered territory might be issued by the Assembly, but vague assurances given to Israel in com- Densation might hardly make it worth while for the Israeli ernment. In this case, the pressure would continue on and on, in the Assembly, in the Security Council, for srael to withdraw. A long and hot summer is ahead. ~ Political progress on the Palestine question (much less a settlement of it) cannot be expected in the foreseeable re. If the war has eased some immediate problems NATION / July 3, 1967 IN THIS ISSUE EDITORIALS 2 ARTICLES 7 Today in Tel Aviv 8 The Negro in Vietnam 11 TVA: The Halo Slips 15 Peace Corps Returnees: The New World They See July 3, 1967 -2 Stanley Wolpert Karl H. Purnell John Egerton Francis Pollock 18 Sewing Machines & Union Machines BOOKS & THE ARTS 21 The Holocaust: Myths and Facts 22 New York Times Weather (poem) 23 The Wondering Jew 24 Adding Up the Double 24 Field Cricket (poem) 26 Nation Book Marks 27 Art 29 Theatre in Europe II 30 Message to Michael (poem) 31 Crossword Puzzle Publisher JAMES J. STORROW JR Editor CAREY McWILLIAMS Executive Editor ROBERT HATCH Copy Hditor MARION HESS Theatre HAROLD CLURMAN Art MAX KOZLOFF Music BENJAMIN BORETZ Science CARL DREHER Advertising Manager MARY “SIMON Herbert Hill Louis Harap Map Allan Kaplan Leonard Kriegel Jay Martin Raymond Roseliep Max Kozloff Harold Clurman Paul Blackburn Frank W. Lewis Associate Publisher GIFFORD PHILLIPS Associate Editor PHIL KERBY Literary Editor HELEN YGLESIAS Poetry Editor MICHAEL GOLDMAN Washington ROBERT G. SHERRILL Paris ALEXANDER WERTH London RAYMOND WILLIAMS Bonn Cc. AMERY Canberra Cc. P. FITZGERALD The Nation is published weekly (except biweekly in July and August) by the Nation Magazine Company and copyright 1967 in the U.S.A. by the Nation Associates, Inc., 333 Sixth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10014. Tel: CH 2-8400. West Coast office: 1256 Westwood Boulevard, Los Angeles, Calif. 90024. Tel.: GR 4-2533. Second class postage paid at New York, N. Y. and at additional mailing office. Subscription Price: One year, $10; two years, $18. Foreign and Canadian postage: $1 extra per year. Change of Address: It is essential that subscribers ordering a change of address give four weeks’ notice and provide their old as well as their new address. Please give Zip Code numbers for both addresses. Information to Libraries: The Nation is indexed in Readers Guide to Periodical Literature, Book Review Digest, Book Review Index and the Public Affairs Information Service. Vol. 205 NATI ON No. 1 Combined with FRONTI ER ~ for Israel, it did not solve the basic ones and undoubtedly created new ones as well. A marriage of convenience is not in the offing. Perhaps Israel could shorten the period of uneasy waiting by showing generosity and understand- ing on the refugee problem. It could practice enlightened self-interest by announcing its willingness to return to the original UN partition plan, which provided for an Arab state of Palestine between Israel and Jordan and a special status for Jerusalem and its: holy places. ANNE WEILL-TUCKERMAN The Chinese H-Bomb The event of the week that began on June 18 was not the opening of the debate in the UN on the Middle East crisis. That was important, but predictable: an astute commentator could have written the speeches before they were delivered. Nor was what was said of long-term sig- nificance—that will come later. The big event, not only of the week but of the year, was China’s explosion of a hydrogen bomb. Historically, China has come full circle. Until some- where around the 15th century, it was a leading nation in terms of the then current science and technology. There- after it was eclipsed by small European countries like England and Holland, followed by the United States, which still holds the lead. The possession of the hydrogen weapon does not give China equality with the West but it does give it a place among the elite of nations by the one commonly accepted measure—destructive power in its most concentrated form. The speed of the achievement is remarkable. China detonated its first atomic or fission bomb on October 16, 1964. In less than three years, it has gone from A to H. France, which is no mean scientific and industrial power, set off its first A-bomb test in 1960 and has yet to detonate an H-bomb. One of America’s leading scientists, himself closely identified with the U.S. nuclear development, re- gards the Chinese achievement as “an intelligent, unin- terrupted flow of effort and energy.” The usual fatuous effort will be made to explain the, Chinese success on the basis of earlier U.S. work in the field. A few of the Chinese scientist-engineers have worked at American universities, but what they learned there was in open literature and available to every student and in- structor. Moreover, the experience of every member of the nuclear club shows that success depends not on a few scientists and engineers of genius but on inspired leader- ship coupled with a broadly based engineering commu- nity and the ability to translate scientific insight into in- dustrial reality. The explosion of the Chinese fusion bomb marks the emergence of Asia into the modern world of science and technology—by its own efforts. The first American hydrogen explosion was that of an experimental model which was too large and heavy to be transported. A bomb was developed later. Rep. Craig 4 ee a es Ae tested an actual weapon, which could be reene quantity and presumably improved in yield relative weight. From a military and diplomatic standpoint, this is important. China and the United States confront each other in Vietnam. If the United States should invade North Vietnam, or that country should be on the verge of collapse, China would probably counter with land forces of its own. The United States would then have the ‘option of nuclear retaliation, both tactically on the battle. field and against the Chinese nuclear plants. But if China has available even short-range means of delivery of its nuclear devices, it might not be as vulnerable to U.S. nuclear attack as some of our strategists have assumed. By the end of 1968, perhaps sooner, China may pos-) | sess some fifty medium-range (up to 1,000 miles) missiles)} with nuclear payloads for use against Russian targets. Chinese hydrogen bombs pose something of a threat even to the U.S. mainland. The one used in the most recent } test was said to have a yield of about 3 megatons. Any-)} thing in the megaton range poses a threat of unknown) } magnitude in destruction of life and property. Some U.S. | experts believe it might be feasible to explode such de- vices at distances of the order of 100 miles off the U.S.)) West Coast, and to rely on sea waves and fallout for} destructive effects against cities. If deterrence deters, the? Chinese possess, or soon will possess, means of deterrence: which must be taken into account by their opponents. In a nuclear sense, China is no longer a sitting duck. The Chinese have once more solemnly declared tha it at no time and in no circumstances will China be — hep first to use nuclear weapons. Our hawks will credit suck declarations as little as they assume similar assurances by us would weigh in a future nuclear confrontation, bu 1 the fact remains that the Chinese have said it repeatedly; and we have not said it even once. That the Chinese at titude is defensive seems plausible enough. It is hard t¢ see how an aggressive nuclear policy would be in their interest. In February, 1965, Dr. Allen S. Whiting, ther director of the Office of Research and Analysis for the x Far East in the Department of State, said in an address: at the University of Michigan that the Chinese “do not want to expand their territory, they want to expand thei influence. And this ultimate goal, of expanding their politi- cal power, acts as a restraint on their use of yn y might.” Our own militarists will no doubt use the anes thermonuclear capability as an argument for a U.S. anti missile-missile system, cost what it may. But to political analysts the event may be more reassuring than disquiet- ing. Whiting is probably on sound ground in his evaluatior "| of Chinese objectives. If so, their hydrogen bomb is no j a threat to world peace. The threat lies rather in out | r much greater nuclear arsenal, and in our determination} ! to maintain a military position on the Chinese borde ' ‘ THE NATION / July 3, 196 t § I than a year ago, the United States succeeded in g on the UN Security Council agenda a draft reso- n on Vietnam. It envisioned “immediate discussions out preconditions” to arrange a conference for the pplication of the Geneva accords of 1954 and 1962. The first order of business of the conference was to be a sation of hostilities under effective supervision—pre- mably that of the UN. 4 _ That was all. The resolution is still on the agenda, but 1 the United States has never pressed for a debate or a vote. T “he resolution is a sleeper amid the forgotten peace feelers and the unforgotten escalations of the Vietnamese gedy. Ambassador Goldberg could call it up for dis- ‘cussion at any time, and the call for discussion would not be subject to veto. A man who remembers this particular “stillborn ini- tiative” is Sen. Mike Mansfield. He is one of the handful of Senators whose acquaintance with the Vietnamese a roblem is based on intense concern and first-hand in- ‘Yestigation. He has toured the theatre of war five times “and made his share of mistakes. At one time he sub- scribed to the domino theory, and he was a persistent admirer of President Ngo Dinh Diem. He has not at- tacked the Johnson Administration’s Vietnamese policy ‘as Senators Gruening and Morse, for instance, have done, t for the past four years he has voiced misgivings at ch escalation and made no secret of his view that the ombing of the North has been a military failure. Now urges on the Administration a revival of the initiative the Security Council which was not pursued at the time of its introduction. ), The perils of bringing it back to life are obvious but hardly calculated to frighten the President, his phlegmatic Ro additional troop strength of nearly 140,000, to raise the t rtal under his command above 600,000. Premier Ky, in gy ween electioneering trips in his campaign for the Presi- dency, has graciously seconded General Westmoreland’s ‘re quest. Thus, when Secretary McNamara arrives in Viet- nam ‘to see how the war is going, he will not need to do much figuring; and he can be sure, on the basis of past e erence, that the new plateau will not be the last. . Senator Mansfield’s proposal, if acted upon, might end what otherwise seems endless. Richard Dudman of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch suggests that Hanoi, Peking and si National Liberation Front could be invited to such a conference, as Peking was invited to the Korean War del ate in 1950. Another precedent involves the Jewish E NATION / July 3, 1967 Agency for Palestine, which took part in the 1948 debate on the Middle East. The NLF has certainly earned the right to representation at a regional conference, not only by its status as a de facto belligerent but because no set- tlement is conceivable without it. Premier Ky would ob- ject, but as one American officer in Vietnam is quoted as saying: “We’ve been trying the get-along-at-all-costs system for a long time. You would think that it would occur to someone to try something else for a while.” Sena- tor Mansfield’s seems the best formula at the moment. In any case, having succeeded in placing the resolu- tion on the agenda of the Security Council, do we dare let the impression prevail that we are afraid to call it up for discussion? Advice to Congressmen One way or another, every Congressman will have to consider the issue of Vietnam in the 1968 election. The hawks, the Birchites, the automatic conformists, and the superpatriots will want to be told why the war is not be- ing pushed more aggressively. On the other hand, any number of peace organizations will be seeking interviews with their Congressmen on this same issue. It is the ir- repressible issue, and by 1968 all the platitudes will have been worn threadbare. Why, then, wait for the angry delegations to appear for the discussions that may leave the problem more con- fused than before? The wise Congressman will anticipate what is to come and organize his own meeting. It will provide clarification and serve to define his own position —at least he will not be in danger of defeat through mis- understanding. There is firm precedent for such a proce- dure. In July, 1965, Rep. Robert Kastenmeier, out of a deep conviction that the dialogue on Vietnam should be kept open, announced that he was going to hold a public hearing on the question in his Wisconsin district. He did, he is still a member of the House, and few are more useful in its deliberations. The format for a meeting on Vietnam is simple. The essential thing is that all representative views shall be heard. In his successful experiment, Mr. Kastenmeier laid down a few ground rules: hear the experts first, then the spokesmen for organizations, then individuals. This sequence prepares the audience for a creative listening role and saves time. Without being denied an opportunity to be heard, individuals may conclude that their views have already been adequately aired. If not, they will be given their chance, but to insure a degree of seriousness in connection with the presentations, Mr. Kastenmeier re- quired each speaker to fill out and file in advance a form of identification. The hearings continued for two days in Madison and received general approbation. The New York Times and Columbia Broadcasting System were among those that sent reporters. Subsequently, Mr. Kastenmeier published, at his own expense, a book, Vietnam Hearings: Voices 5 From the Grass Roots, that sold through several editions and was later reissued by Doubleday. There are variants of the idea, like the meeting held at the Hotel Roosevelt in New York City by the New York State Americans for Democratic Action on June 10. Three Representatives from the area, all eminently worth attention, spoke at the hearing: Benjamin S. Rosenthal (Queens), William F. Ryan (Manhattan), and Lester L. Wolff (Nassau), together with seven distinguished panel- ists. There was only one weakness in this admirable at- tempt to carry forward a genuine dialogue between the people and their Representatives on foreign policy: it was completely ignored by the press. However constituted, such meetings can serve only to enlighten the voters and make next year’s election more meaningful. And if there were more such hearings, the press might pay closer at- tention to them. Instant Politics Half of the Big Ten student bodies—generally among the most conservative—this year elected New Left candi- dates as student body presidents. But there has been no evidence that the political pulse is beating faster on these campuses; on the contrary, student interest in civil rights, peace and related issues is less intense, by ali reports, than it was last year. Political ‘activism,’ now as yes- terday, attracts only a minority of students—15 per cent at Stanford and the University of California as shown by one recent study. The new mood reflects not a quick- ening interest in politics as politics but an impatience with things-as-they-are, a generalized resentment against being treated, as it is often expressed, as “IBM cards” in im- personal knowledge factories. Surveys have shown that this feeling is nearly twice as prevalent among students at the large state universi- ties as it is in smaller colleges, public or private. Even at Oklahoma State, where Stetsons and boots are more com- mon than beards, the students are on a rampage against remote, unresponsive administrative practices. Frustrated in their attempts to get the regular campus parties and political types to “do something”—that is, to change over- night educational theories and administrative practices that have long prevailed in the Big Ten universities— students at Northwestern, Michigan, Michigan State, Wis- consin, Indiana University and Iowa State, have voted in New Left candidates as student body presidents. The same thing happened at Stanford last year when David Harris, a bearded New Leftist who modestly estimated his real adherents at 200, was swept into office in a surge of pro- test (see “The Rebel President,” The Nation, May 16, 1966). But protests of this sort, which stem from frustration, too often result in further frustration. David Harris, for example, resigned at Stanford because he felt, and quite correctly, that he did not represent student body opinion without hearings, and appeared to have clear sailing ahead, .279 districts in twenty-two states are in noncompliance One of the Be Ten New Leftist student tok presi ie resigned for the same reason. The trouble traces back to — the traditional American impatience with long-term po- 7 litical planning. It is not this generation’s fault that it 4 shares the national folk belief in politics as a form of reflex action—an endless rotation of “ins” and “outs”— but it is not too early for students, and the rest of us, to realize that, now more than ever, “instant politics” is a 7) mirage. Today’s political problems demand a degree of ~ planning, preparation and organization, a degree of effort and commitment and patience, that we have not brought — to politics for a long time—which is another way of say- ing that, on and off the campus, events are bringing us back to such political fundamentals as power and purpose. ~ The Emergence of Conyers In politics there is no substitute for the right man in — | the right place. Rep. John Conyers, Jr., of Michigan ful- — fills both requirements perfectly in the one-man, one-vote ~ situation. Some time back, the House was in the process — } of slipping through a bill, H.R. 2508, which would have ~ undermined the Supreme Court’s decision by allowing — Congressional districts to deviate as much as 35 per cent — from the proper ratio. In 1972, the variation would have been scaled down to 10 per cent, but in 1968 and 1970, one-man, one-vote would have lost almost all meaning. The bill would also have permitted considerable gerry- ~ mandering of districts. ; This bit of sabotage was reported out of committee when Representative Conyers, who is a Negro, objected — and said he wanted to file a minority report. He was given twelve hours to do so. Under a rule to allow no amendments, he lost, 289 to 63, in the House. Since with the Supreme Court’s decision, the matter is of no- small importance. H.R. 2508 would have permitted a por- tion of a Negro district to be combined with a white sub- — urb, with the effect of cutting down Negro voting power. — That was one of Conyers’ objections. 3 Overridden in the House, he took his fight to the © Senate, where his stand aroused the interest of Sen. Ed-— ward Kennedy, who called on his brother Robert for help, with the result that a better bill was passed in the Senate. The matter now goes to a conference session, — with the Senate conferees coupling Edward Kennedy ~ with the old standbys, Eastland, Ervin, McClellan, — Hruska and Dirksen. The House conferees are on a higher level—Celler of New York, Herbert Tenzer of New York, William M. McCulloch of Ohio, Clark Mac-— Gregor of Minnesota—and Conyers. Later Celler added Byron Rogers of Colorado and Charles Mathias of Mary- land. Under these auspices, the piceoe for a halfway decent bill are not bad. i THE NATION / July 3, 1967 on Powell, only five. Conyers would like to see ning like forty Negroes in the House after the 1968 ection. Whether or not that far more salutary ratio can chieved depends to a large extent on the outcome of impending conference. Reform Democrats in the muse should give Conyers active assistance. Had it not en for him, H.R. 2508 might have had easy sailing. La ngston Hughes - Langston Hughes loved literature. He loved it not fearfully, not with awe. His respect for it was never stiff STANLEY WOLPERT Mr. Wolpert, professor of history at the University of Cali- fornia, is the author of Nine Hours to Rama (Random House) Tel Aviv I Israel has won the war, but there is little jubilation in 7 1 Aviv today as all eyes focus intently upon the more ‘difficult battle for peace that lies ahead. Israeli’s pride ‘in the dramatic force, the amazing swiftness with which ‘it destroyed the Arab ring of steel, bursting the bubble of Nasser’s threat of “obliteration,” is muted by two Robering considerations. The more immediate curb on celebration here is the price in human life paid for this national breathing spell. In so small a nation, so inti- mately integrated, few families could feel themselves remote from the front, or escape the tragedy of battle. In longer range, the Israelis perfectly understand that the other side of the victory coin they have stamped out in Sinai is the bitter humiliation of Nasser. Whatever may be said here concerning Nasser’s military skill, no one underestimates his pride. Born itself from the ashes of Hitler’s holocaust, Israel is not unconscious of the re- Vivifying potential of humiliation and defeat. Naturally, every Israeli hopes that Nasser and his allies are ca- pable of learning a lesson from the disaster that struck them in June, but some fear that the utter humiliation may only fan fresh flames of Arab hatred. Israel has not been lulled by victory into a mood of deceptive self- c confidence. p The crucial problem confronting Israel at present S how to secure national integrity without future fight- ee. It hopes to retain strategic outposts captured in Jordan and Syria, as well as the Old City of Jerusalem, but fears that its startling display of military strength in itself undermine world support for the claim that ch positions are essential to its continued existence. one speaks of attempting to remain permanently in Sinai or in the vast bulk of land taken from Jordan. Any such occupation would overextend Israel’s army THE NATION / July 3, 1967 nor cold. His respect for it was gaily deferential. He considered literature not his private inch, but great acre- age. The plantings of others he not only welcomed but busily enriched. He had an affectionate interest in the young. He was intent, he was careful. The young manuscript-bearing applicant never felt himself an intruder, never went away with Oak turned ashes in the hand. Mightily did he use the street. He found its multiple heart, its tastes, smells, alarms, formulas, flowers, garbage and convulsions. He brought them all to his table-top. He crushed them to a writing-paste. The pen that was himself went in.... GWENDOLYN BROOKS ODAY IN TEL AVIV and place an impossible burden upon its economy. Israelis have no desire to repeat the errors of Western Europe’s 19th-century imperial expansionism. Even if they had the resources, they express no wish to main- tain martial rule over the more than 1 million Arabs liv- ing in the borderland regions their armies have over- run. What they do want is unequivocal recognition by each of their neighboring states, full and open ac- ceptance of their national status in consonance with its reality. They insist, moreover, that international force assure them that no life line as vital to Israel’s sur- vival as the Strait of Tiran be arbitrarily closed to them again. Modest as these demands may seem after the spec- tacular victory, the Israelis recognize that neither goal will be easy to win. They fear that in the world debate oil interests and Afro-Asian votes will seek to deprive them of the advantage they have won in bat- tle. Their anxiety today stems from recognition that in Abu (London): Ben Roth “The UN Is Weak and Ineffectual” the world’s council chambers they remain virtually alone. Israelis are convinced that, until peace treaties are signed, Egypt and Syria will continue to divert their impoverished populations from the complex problems of internal development by raising the cry of “liberation for Palestine.” Diplomatic recognition would relieve the claustrophobic feeling of isolation and apprehension, and Israel is ready now to establish contacts at every level of diplomatic, economic and cultural activity with all of its Arab neighbors. People with whom I have spoken are convinced that once such relations are launched the walls of hatred, mistrust and fear will begin slowly to crumble, and through them will pass roads of coopera- tion and mutual respect, if not friendship. These recent weeks have taught Israel many things, not only about itself but about its place in the eyes of the world. U Thant’s capitulation of May 19 to Nasser’s demand just one day earlier that UN troops be with- drawn from the borders cannot be understood by Israelis in any terms other than betrayal. The hypothesis that U Thant surrendered in order subsequently to strengthen his bargaining position in Cairo is even less acceptable to the Israelis than it had been to Ameri- cans. Given the personality and professed goals of Egypt’s ruler, Israelis ask how any rational mind could have failed to realize that Nasser would be emboldened to increasingly aggressive action. Despite the green light from U Thant, however, few Israelis can believe that Nasser would have been capable of so supreme a level of self-deception as to think that he could beat Israel if he had not counted on firm support from Russia. Pan- Arab unity was forged with Russian support and, though it desperately appealed to the United States, Britain and France, Israel found itself alone. The transformation of Near Eastern power has given Israelis the confidence to think in terms that were hitherto impossible. Some speak, for example, of creat- ing a “Palestine Nation” out of the borderland regions of Gaza and those conquered from Jordan. Until now, discussed here as a nationalist jae of Paleceatadt , people. It may still be impossible to gain support from 7) any of the governments involved for the creation of a ~ state of Palestine next to the state of Israel, yet this may ultimately prove to be the only way in which the ~} “refugees” used for the past nineteen years by Egypt, — Jordan and Syria as saboteurs against Israel, can be — } persuaded to settle down to peaceful pursuits. With a homeland of their own, Palestine Arabs could regain © their pride, and though Israel could not be expected ||) to return any of the land it claims, it might be willing — to pay compensation, or at least to help its neighbor | in the early years. Whether Eshkol, Nasser, Hussein, or leaders of the Palestine Liberation Organization it- |} self would seriously consider such a scheme remains to be seen. The significance of its unofficial articulation 1 here is the evidence it shows of Israel’s intellectual flexi- | | bility and creative endeavor now to force a truly per- } manent peaceful settlement. ae Whatever solution is reached among the nations of — this troubled region, Israel knows that at least its im- mediate workability must depend upon the joint efforts — of the great powers. Russia’s break of diplomatic rela-_ tions is recognized here as a sop to Nasser, and Israelis §! hope that the pragmatism of Russia’s long-range inter- national policy will prevail over present-day Arab partisanship. Naturally, Israel looks to the United States for strong diplomatic support. The general disappointment felt here at our failure to take a firm stand on the crisis caused by the closing of the Strait of Tiran is tempered by Israel’s — faith in our often reiterated commitment to its national survival. The great wave of popular sympathy for Israel's ~ plight that rolled across America has also been a source | . of hope, and helped counterbalance Washington’s official — position of cool neutrality. Yet Israel will not soon forget that when the chips were down and the wheel of Near — Eastern destiny began its perilous spin toward war, the United States of America left it to stand alone. THE NEGRO IN VIETNAM KARL H. PURNELL Mr. Purnell is a former member of the Pennsylvania legisla- ture and publisher of The Union County Journal of Lewis- burg, Pa. Saigon This year, 15,000 Negro Gls, after a twelve-month tour of duty in Vietnam, will return to the ghettos of New York and Chicago, the backwoods of Tennessee and the small towns of Alabama. As members of the armed forces, many of these soldiers are being given their first taste of integration into a white man’s world. Ad- mittedly, it is not total integration. Nevertheless, it is usu- ally better than what many American Negroes have ex- perienced before, and the soldiers serving in Vietnam are finding this partial equality agreeable. 8 Consequently, the prospect of returning to a society j where no commanding officer will enforce the rules of fair treatment is stirring a fierce if well-concealed re-— sentment among Vietnam’s Negro soldiers. The ex-_ traordinary irony of fighting for the freedom of an Asian — country they had never heard of, while being denied — freedom at home, is certain to add new and explosive © fuel to the current revolution of American Negroes who— are rejecting the principles of nonviolence. i After two months of talking with Negro troops in- Vietnam, I am convinced that a new breed of impatient young men is going home, ready to provide shock troops” for the civil rights movement. Moderates such as Martin Luther King and Whitney Young will find them hard to — control; they are much more likely to hear the appeal THE NATION / July 3, 1967 f would be hard to conceive of any experience Which could cause as major a shift in the atti- Mtudes of young American Negroes as has been ac- complished by sending almost a third of them to Viet- 'mam. For the past decade, the disciples of segregation € promised that only by “getting them educated” Id the freedoms promised by the United States -onstitution ever be made available to the colored race. Vietnam is providing this education in a more decisive and dramatic fashion than a hundred integrated ‘Ole Miss” universities could ever do. In the jungles and rice fields, thousands of young men are learning what it ans to fight and die for the name of freedom. It is {| lesson which will not be easily forgotten. Several national magazines, countless news- papers, and at least one major television network have ) presented an image of the returning Negro as well satis- he ed with military integration and only mildly disturbed the prejudice he must face at home. The armed ervices are described as models of integration where every man is equal. Negro soldiers are quoted on their disen- chantment with civil rights leaders who oppose the war. To understand how this misleading picture is con- | Veyed, one must appreciate how news is gathered in Vietnam, as well as the pressures which exist on a Negro soldier. Most reporters working for the big news or- zani Zations are a harried lot. Constant requests for stories tross their desks, and in the same week they may have 0 cover a Marine patrol on the North Vietnamese order and interview Jayne Mansfield on her reactions © a visit with the troops. _ With a few exceptions, such as The Washington Post's [E NATION / July 3, 1967 Negro writer, Jesse Lewis, reporters assigned to a story on Negro reaction have lined up as many “quickie inter- views” as possible in two or three days. One national magazine sent a reporter to a military air terminal where dozens of GIs were waiting for a hop. There he could interview ten or fifteen Negroes in an afternoon, date lining the story from the soldier’s base somewhere in Vietnam. Naturally, no Negro or white soldier reveals his thoughts on such a sensitive question to a reporter on the run. The answers have been as routine as the questions: REPORTER: How do you feel about equality in the Army? ANSWER: We’re all soldiers here. Color is a forgotten issue. REPORTER: What about Martin Luther King? ANSWER: He’s lost his cool, man. What does he know about Vietnam? In the case of television, the answers are even more predictable. Imagine a young Negro captain in line for a promotion being asked whether he thinks the high ratio of Negroes killed in the war is a result of discrimination: “No sir, they volunteer because they realize the im- portance of fighting communism.” It comes out like a message from a computer. One afternoon, I returned to Saigon from Danang on a plane with a Negro officer. During the trip. I asked him how he felt about Negroes fighting for freedom in Viet- nam when they didn’t have it at home. His answers were testy and carefully phrased. “This Martin Luther King is just too high up. Trouble with that fellow is that he can’t go back to his own church. That’s why he got involved in this Vietnam business.” I pressed him on the question of freedom at home. “Listen my friend, when the American people are ready RENFRO to give us more freedom, they'll do it. No use causing © a fuss and making them angry,” he said. That night, I entered the conversation in my notes un- der the heading of “Uncle Tom.” But several weeks later I met the same officer again, under different circum- stances. I had invited him to sit at my table in a crowded, fashionable Saigon restaurant. When the subject of Negroes fighting in Vietnam came up, after several hours of conversation, it was an entirely different story from the “Uncle Tom” version I had heard earlier. “You white reporters can’t just pop a question like that and get an honest answer. We’ve been warned about making statements to the press. We're not about to lose a promotion so you can get a story.” The officer then went on to describe the burning re- sentment felt by Negro soldiers who are treated as equals in the foxholes of Vietnam, but shunted aside during off- duty hours. He described in bitter detail the countless conversations he had held with Negro GIs who were angry at the prospect of going back to a segregated world after putting their lives on the line in Vietnam. “It’s a personal subject and not many Negroes are going on television with that side of the story.” The failure to portray the nature of integration in the armed forces has, in fact, led to widespread misunder- standing. While patrolling with a company of Marines near the North Vietnamese border recently, I talked to a white corporal who was deeply depressed by the recent death of a Negro soldier with whom he had marched and fought for three months. “We were really tight. He was the best friend I had,” the Marine said. Such close friend- ships between white and colored soldiers are frequent under combat conditions, but in the big base camps or off duty, the old prejudices return. One Negro Air Force lieutenant described how a latrine wall at the Tan San Nhut air base outside Saigon was scrawled with ugly slo- gans such as “Kill niggers not VC” twenty-four hours after it had been painted. This officer was also angry at the prejudice which was never openly expressed, but which he found invariably’ present among his white col- leagues. “They can’t say anything, but you always know the feeling is there.” Negroes comprise only 3.6 per cent of the officer corps in the Army and even less in the other services. Although General Westmoreland has attempted to eradicate any evidence of prejudice within his entourage by placing nineteen Negro officers on his command staff, the fact is that career opportunities for a Negro in the service are limited. “There are plenty of ways to keep you back,” said one captain of the 173rd Airborne which he claimed was composed almost 50 per cent of Negro troops. “For one thing, getting a combat command is almost impos- sible. They get you working on pacification or some desk job where the promotions don’t come so quickly.” This view is supported by the fact that only two of the 380 combat battalion commands in the war are held by Ne- groes, despite the fact that Negroes account for 22.4 per cent of combat deaths. Perhaps the most telling evidence of how segregation works is the row of bars and night clubs along dusty, 10 _ popular clubs in the Kanh Hoi section, where the music fon central Soon: This “Kanh Hoi” area is. ton exclusively by Negro troops who go there rather than to the cleaner downtown Tu Do Street where the clients are white. ; Husky, Green Beret Sergeant William Barksdale, 26, of Baltimore, Md., explained why he preferred going to Kanh Hoi. “When I get in from the field, I just want to be at ease. If I go to Tu Do, the white guys start staring | and the girls stay clear of me, so I just stay away from | the place.” fl In fact, what particularly enraged one Kanh Hoi habitué was the fact that the brown-skinned Vietnamese — girls on Tu Do referred to themselves as white and dis- — | played contempt for colored GIs—an attitude they had | quickly picked up from their white clients. As one Negro | private who had spent six months in a line outfit said: | “Its okay when you're fighting VC, but when you have © to go your own way for a beer or to find a girl, you realize that Chuck [slang for white soldiers] isn’t your buddy after all.” Despite the lack of meaningful integration in the — armed forces, most Negroes agree that they get better © treatment in the military service than at home. Conse- quently, 45.7 per cent of Negroes re-enlist for another’ tour, in contrast to only 17 per cent of white troops. This f preference for a military world, often under combat con- ditions, to the ordeals of a segregated life in the United States is a measure of the paltry advances made thus far by the civil rights movement. 4 However, it is among those who determine to go home that the harshest resentment is expressed. This bitter undercurrent can be heard almost nightly at the and food recall the hang-outs many Negroes patronize at home. Here, after a few beers in the company of fel- — low Negroes, the Gls discuss the issue which is mors important to them than the Vietnamese War. Dis- senters like Stokely Carmichael or Cassius Clay, who take such a verbal beating before the television cameras, are seen as heroes for their courage in fighting the white establishment. j A Negro sergeant who frequents several of these off-duty clubs said the conversation he picks up would be thought by most Americans to be the views of militant extremists, rather than those of the average, passive Negro GI portrayed through the news media. “They may be mad at Clay and Carmichael for opposing the war, but 4 on the big issue they realize these fellows are on ‘their side.” 5 The big issue, of course, is how the returning Negro ise veteran can find equality where it does not yet exist. “I’m just waiting for the first guy that tries to kick me out of his restaurant,” said one tall Negro private who ea was due to end his service in two months. Having been taught that it is possible to fight and even die for the cause of freedom, these veterans are bq coming home determined to receive fair and equal, treatment. The tragedy is that an unconcerned and un-. Mit informed publie will be taken by surprise if they resort to the violence they learned in Vietnam. THE NATION / July 3, 1967) ite y igh. [(OHN EGERTON Egerton is a staff writer for Southern Education Reports. Nashville thirty-three years the Tennessee Valley Authority pursued its objectives — electric power, navigation and flood control—with an efficiency and success which have made it an international symbol of American social plan- ning at its best. Now it has turned its attention to eco- nomic development, water and air pollution and recrea- tion, and already there are indications that the new look is less attractive and more disturbing than the old. _ One example of resistance to what Business Week calls TVA’s “second spring” can be found in the Land Between the Lakes National Recreation Area, a 200,000-acre project being developed on a wooded isthmus between ty © man-made lakes in western Kentucky and Tennes- see . For almost four years, TVA has been locked in a bitter dispute with landowners in the area, a dispute which h as raised legal and constitutional questions that could ! ‘4 esent the agency with the most prickly problems it has ever handled. "The Land Between the Lakes is set apart from the surrounding countryside by Kentucky Lake (on the Ten- ssee River), Barkley Lake (on the Cumberland River), d a canal which connects the two at the north. The area is remote and sparsely populated, and about half of it is already owned by federal agencies, including the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, which has a 65,000-acre refuge there. TVA intends to buy up the land, all 200,000 eres, for what it calls “a national demonstration to show how all available resources of a large area can be devel- ) oped to serve a wide range of public recreation and con- Servation education programs.” But some of the landowners have refused to sell. They took their case first to the Federal District Court at Paducah, Ky., and being defeated there, appealed it to he Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals in Cincinnati. They asking whether TVA has legal jurisdiction outside the Tennessee Valley (half the Land Between the Lakes project lies in the Cumberland River watershed), and ther it has authority to exercise the power of eminent | domain anywhere solely for the purpose of recreation. The Land Between the Lakes project is only one of PVA’s current headaches. The agency’s recent projects ed procedures have aroused a variety of protests: _ {Conservationists in Tennessee and North Carolina nave accused TVA of building dams solely for the pur- }oses of industrial development and recreation. They con- end that in doing so, TVA is spreading pollution, elim- n pene the area’s few remaining wild rivers and trout reams, and joining commercial interests in teal estate er ntures for big profits. TVA’s practice of making payments in lieu of taxes 0 counties whose tax base is diminishing by inundation nds has been attacked by many of the counties as aadequate and deceptive. {TVA developments on the Beech and Elk Rivers in fennessee involve agency purchase of land surrounding HE NATION / July 3, 1967 THE HALO SLIPS the reservoirs. This land is then sold to a local develop- ment authority, and TVA uses the profit to repay a share of the public’s cost of the project. Grady Clay, writing in the Louisville Courier-Journal last year, said the money TVA receives as profit “would have gone directly to pri- vate owners of waterfront land under the system nor- mally followed.” The fact that those private owners now must surrender their land for eventual benefit of specu- lators has caused no little consternation. J, {TVA now produces three-fourths of its electric power with coal. It is the nation’s biggest coal consumer, and most of the coal it has bought in the past decade has been strip mined. The Peabody Coal Company and lesser giants of the industry have literally turned the earth up- side down in the counties surrounding TVA’s Paradise, Ky., power plant. Spoil heaps rise as high as 200 feet into the air, streams are polluted and vegetation is smoth- ered, but TVA’s objective—cheap coal—is achieved. Not until Kentucky strengthened its strip-mine laws and filed suit against the Peabody Company did TVA begin to show concern for conservation measures, and reports persist that neither TVA nor the coal companies are prac- ticing the reforms they have pledged. The irony in these examples is clear. Created in large part on the basic principle of relieving human misery, TVA has, with disturbing frequency, seemed to be adding to the problems of the people in its area of operation. As it has grown in power and influence, and as its projects in navigation, electric power and flood cons trol have neared completion in the Tennessee Valley, the agency has begun to appear callous at home and covetous of fertile new fields to plow outside the valley. It would be hard to quarrel with TVA’s past successes in power generation, flood control and navigation— though plenty of people, including Barry Goldwater and the country’s private power interests, have tried. Since May 18, 1933, when President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the TVA Act and gave Sen. George Norris of Nebraska a final victory in his twelve-year fight with Congressional opponents of the measure, TVA has piled one impressive accomplishment on top of another. It now has thirty-two dams on the Tennessee River and its tribu- taries; it has turned the river’s mainstream into an un- broken stairway of navigation lakes, and freight traffic along the 650-mile route from Knoxville to Paducah now totals more than 2 billion ton-miles a year—sixty- six times as much as in 1933. Flood damage avoided through TVA controls is esti- mated at close to half a billion dollars. Electricity gen- erated by the agency’s power plants exceeds 75 billion kilowatt-hours a year, and almost 2 million customers in seven states now purchase that electricity for less than le a kilowatt-hour—only one-fifth as much as it cost thirty- three years ago and still less than half the national average. Yet in spite of all this, TVA remains a controversial agency, and its handling of the Land Between the Lakes project underlines at least some of the reasons for its present notoriety. TVA seems to be winning its long fight it with the residents there, but the battle could drag on for another year or more and end up in an embarrassing loss for the agency before the courts. If that happens, the only real winners in the costly and unnecessary dispute will be some not so innocent bystanders, including land- development speculators from outside the region and con- servative critics of TVA who for more than thirty years have sought a weapon with which to fell the agency. The first official proposal for development of the land between Kentucky and Barkley Lakes was made in 1962 by the National Park Service, and that proposal specified that not all the privately heid land in the area would be needed. Then, in June of 1963, President John F. Ken- nedy signed an Executive order instructing TVA to de- velop a national recreation center in the Land Between the Lakes as a pilot project to show how an area with limited resources “can be converted into a recreation asset that will stimulate the economic growth of a region.” The Executive order made Congressional approval of the project unnecessary, and Rep. Frank A. Stubblefield of western Kentucky, who with others in and out of Con- gress had urged the action on the President, explained that TVA was empowered by law to proceed immediately, whereas special legislation requiring a year or more would be necessary in order for the Park Service to take the job. It is now a matter of debate—as witness the land- owners’ suit in federal court—whether TVA is in fact empowered to develop the Land Between the Lakes. This, plus the owners’ suspicions that TVA’s concealed but consuming interest in the project is for economic develop- ment, has made the going rough, and TVA’s strategy in the face of opposition has been highly questionable. The Presidential order instructed TVA to establish and define guidelines for “acquisition, development and opera- tion of other outdoor recreation areas.” So far, it has come closer to illustrating how not to proceed in such develop- ment. Some items: 4 Aubrey J. Wagner, chairman of the TVA board, said following issuance of the Executive order that the project would take five years to develop and would cost $33 mil- lion. Now, four years later, the agency refuses to say how long it will take, and the latest estimates on the cost ex- ceed $55 million. 4 After saying at the outset that TVA “will explain the plans to the people in the affected area soon,” the agency later announced that “every acre” of the land would be acquired (with the unexplained exception of an 8,600-acre tract in the southeast corner, near Dover, Tenn.), and some landowners still have not been notified of TVA’s intentions or of its authority to proceed. § TVA has billed the project as a demonstration of new concepts in recreation, though it duplicates principles long employed in other areas of the country by the Na- tional Park Service. { Neither the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers nor the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has yet surrendered its holdings in the Land Between the Lakes to TVA, and sub rosa disputes among the three agencies have been rumored. The Corps of Engineers, that paragon of Con- gressional pork-barreling, is predictably resentful of in- trusions into what it considers its territory (i.e., the Cumberland River Valley), and the Fish and Wildlife 12 surrende wildlife refuge. Faaheonere, the National Park a has often voiced concern about the indiscriminate use ‘of 4 park land by hordes of campers—and campers are what — TVA wants most in the area. i TVA did not announce its intention to take all the 7 land until Congress had appropriated $4 million to get the project started. The fiscal courts of Trigg and Lyon — Counties, in which the Kentucky portion of the area lies, | publicly opposed further !and acquisition by TVA ex- — cept from willing sellers, and Congressman Stubblefield also protested the land-buying plan. Amid charges of coercion, harassment and trespass, TVA began to feel a backlash. The landowners organ- ized and began picketing agency headquarters in the area, and the pro-TVA Nashville Tennessean said in an edi- | torial that “poor diplomacy, fuzzy policies, and lack of | liaison with elected officials—a cardinal principle with © TVA in early days—appear to be major factors provok- ~ ing angry resistance.” q| Kentucky’s respected Republican Senator, John Sher- man Cooper, in a letter to President Johnson, gave TVA even more cause for concern: The boundaries for the Between-the-Lakes recrea- tional area, as recently announced by TVA, have caused considerable consternation among people and com- munities in the area, and to us. On reviewing our dis- cussions and understandings of the proposals made during the past two years, we think that great harm may be done to the project if TVA does not reconsider its apparent plans to acquire all the land... . In Ken- tucky, the towns of Golden Pond and Twin Lakes, as well as the homes and businesses of some 3,000 people in the area involved, may be needlessly uprooted, mean- ing that many of these residents would be moved for the third, fourth, or fifth time due to Federal programs. . We agree generally with [TVA’s] objectives, but we cannot agree that they merit the neglect of the rights of a large number of area citizens. .. . Several residents of the area appeared before Congres- sional appropriations committees in the spring of 1964 | to testify against TVA procedures. Mrs. Corinne White- head of Lyon County told a Senate subcommittee that residents of the area “have been informed . . . that in- dustrial plant sites have been mapped and pinpointed by — TVA in the north section of Lyon County. We are con- vinced that TVA proposes to take our land and homes under the guise of recreation and ultimately sell it for in- dustrial use.” TVA Chairman Wagner called the charge “just a plain lie” that “irritates me very much.” Mrs. Whitehead and the other residents who testified said they were not opposed to the recreation area project, but re- quested that it be developed in the 100,000 acres already in federal hands “by the National Park Service, which is a recognized authority in this field.” Mrs. Whitehead underlined the eroding reputation of TVA in her area with these words: “TVA has heretofore been recognized by valley residents as a reasonable and idealistic agency with a heart in dealing with people. To- day that image is considerably tarnished in light of this | era of pure TVA empire-building.” Her comment stood in stark contrast to the testimony of TVA Director Frank } Smith, who said in answer to a question that his agency THE NATION / July 3, 19677} a. Aenest of the people in the area.” rs Despite the protests, TVA got its second appropria- —$5.5 million—for the project, and since then it has ed three more allocations. The population of the area, uch stood at about 3,000 five years ago, has now been duced to about 1,200, and of those who remain about [ty families, holding less than 10,000 acres among them, unalterably opposed to surrender of their property VA. As the months pass, these landowners are seeing sympathy and support they once received from news- CUMBER; awp RIVER Haron Murray z A > KENITUCKY me ae Pie N NES OEE Paris (3) , NATION / July 3, 1967 PARIS LANDING STATE PARK vs 12 papers, local governments and business organizations all but evaporate. TVA has mounted an intensive public re- lations campaign to sell the economic merits of the recrea- tion area to surrounding communities, and the sound of money has had a mesmerizing effect. The holdout property owners are now condemned as speculators. Still, suspicion of TVA’s motives persists. Soon after Congress voted the 1964 appropriation, it was learned that the Kerr-McGee Oil Company of Oklahoma, former empire of the late Sen. Robert Kerr, had acquired all assets of the T. J. Moss Tie Company of St. Louis in July of 1963, one month after TVA had been assigned PrincETON ® CONSERVATION EDUCATION CENTER FORT DONELSON NAT: MIL PARK RO SCOTT FITZHUGH BRIDGE Land Between the Lakes (Distance from Kuttawa to Dover Is 42 Miles) ee the Land Between the Lakes project. This created a stir because the Moss Company owned some 30,000 acres in the three counties encompassing the project. State records indicate that more than a dozen exploratory drillings for oil and other minerals have been made in the Land Between the Lakes regicn in the past thirty years, and this has prompted speculation that the Kerr- McGee land purchase was a prelude to more mineral ex- ploration. No recent drillings have been made, but the appointment last year of Donald McBride, a long-time administrative assistant to Senator Kerr, to a nine-year term. on the TVA board of directors, drew more than passing interest from skeptical residents of the area. Such developments only solidify the landowners’ con- viction that something more than a playground is in store for the Land Between the Lakes. TVA officials repeatedly deny that they have any intention of engaging in the kind of real estate and industrial development activities which they are trying in the Beech and Elk River projects in Tennessee. Since 1933, however, TVA has disposed of more than 200,000 acres of land it had acquired along the shore lines of its lakes, and in virtually every instance the sale of such land has turned a handsome profit. In its promotion of the Land Between the Lakes project, TVA has pictured a virgin wilderness, unclut- tered by commercial enterprises of any kind. It has been described as a haven for hunters, fishermen, hiking and camping enthusiasts, swimmers and boaters and horse- back riders. About 70 million people live within a 500- mile radius of the area, and TVA predicted in 1963 that within three years the park would be recording 4 million to 5 million visitor-days annually—a visitor-day being defined as twelve recreation hours spent in the area. The prediction was wildly inaccurate. Less than half a million visitor-days were recorded in 1966. Still, TVA has already begun to hedge on its policy of keeping com- mercial enterprises out of the area. If the park’s capacity of 20,000 campers is ever reached, says Sherrill Milli- ken, resident manager and coordinator of the project, the people will have to have access to supplies. Who would get that business? “We don’t know,” says Milliken. “We haven’t faced up to that part yet. This summer we may have to get into it.” Milliken is also uncertain about TVA’s future role in the project, or when fhe “demonstration of new concepts in recreation” will end. “It’s an open-ended thing,” he says. “Maybe ten years, maybe twelve, maybe fifteen, but sometime it'll be done.” Who will take it over then? “I don’t think there’s an answer to that now.” January 1, 1968, has been announced as the target date for TVA to possess all the land. The residents who remain, meanwhile, are waiting and hoping for a miracle to save their property. They are saying that no amount of money will compensate them for what they have, and TVA’s reply, in effect, is that every man has his price. Asked why he thought some people are re- sisting TVA’s land buying, Director Frank Smith re- plied: “People just think they can get more money than what we offer them, that’s what it boils down to. They want to get more than what’s been offered to them. We think most of them, when it becomes so obvious that “14 re they’re isolated, they'll eentialle” wat that abe wae to move out, when there’s nobody left around.” TVA has refused to compromise in its determination — to control all the land. It has apparently not considered | buying only from the willing sellers or even permitting present landowners to have the right of domicile for their )} lifetime. Even more important, it has made no, effort to promote any kind of cooperative zoning in which county, state and federal governments could work together to assure compatible development of public and private || lands—a principle the National Park Service employs ef- | fectively in the Nez Percé country of the Northwest. Now the agency’s intransigence has been met head-on © by that of the holdout residents. TVA has failed to con-— vince them that the necessity of a recreation area is in || any sense comparable to the urgent needs for electric power, navigation and flood control. The issue is: does |} TVA have the right, morally or legally, to condemn the | land and use it for recreation purposes? | Mr. Smith says “there’s no question about the legality,” || and cites Section 22 of the TVA Act, which makes_ reference to “studies, experiments and demonstrations” |}? by the agency. But this section makes no mention of |, recreation and does not grant powers of eminent domain to the agency. | Mr. Milliken says the Presidential order and the subse- Ty quent appropriations from Congress are authority enough. “Our legal division sees no problem, and that’s the best answer I can give you. TVA has no intention of going |} anywhere else on this type of thing. You know it’s been said that if you can do this you can go to Idaho o some place else and do the same thing. TVA has no in- tention of going anywhere else, and it has no intention of being in this type of thing forever.” But no one knows, or says, how far TVA can go. Some of the holdout residents are convinced that TVA } will never go to court to condemn the land, though) }hy Smith says it is “almost inevitable there'll be a certain amount of condemnation.” The residents contend that condemnation procedures would require the agency to specify what use will be made of the land—thus jeopardizing any future sale or lease for purposes other | than recreation. Furthermore, they say, TVA is unsure of its legal authority to condemn. for To answer the question of legal authority Granville hy Clark, a Russellville, Ky., attorney, has gone into federal}| court on behalf of some of the residents. In William Dv Travis v. Pennyrile Rural Electric Cooperative (REA) and TVA, Clark is asking the court to settle a rca between Travis and the REA concerning electric service But in his brief, Clark alleges a conspiracy between REA \s and TVA, and he asks these questions: (J). Does Pennyrile REA have a right to refuse to provide electric service to a customer in their ornaail because of a threatened condemnation [by TVA]? (2). Does TVA have a right to condemn the land of the plaintiff? Mr. Clark says the answer to both questions is “no.” In the course of his argument he contends that the TVA venture is not a demonstration project, within the defini- tion of Section 22 of the TVA Act, but rather an end in itself. He points out that the deeds the agency is issuing — => wa hs aul? ile ] UI) his y Ih THE NATION / July 3, 19677) y Not having Bscltie statatoly authority to get into the , wildlife and recreation business, TVA says it is ng to have a demonstration project. What are they going to demonstrate, other than that they are once again entering a field utterly foreign to the concepts Senator Norris had when he first conceived TVA?.. . What is TVA going to demonstrate in the LBL region ‘that has not already been demonstrated . . . in the hun- dred of national and state parks and recreational, wild- ‘life and forestry areas that stretch across the land? Just _what is it TVA is trying to prove by taking the LBL area? If whatever it is cannot be done on its own _ Merits, it ought not to be allowed by a fictitious demon- _ Stration. _ To further substantiate his case, Clark quotes the sec- Ps EACE_ CORPS _RETURNEES FRANCIS POLLOCK Mr. Pollock, a former Peace Corps Volunteer, teaches at | Cuyahoga Community College in Cleveland. Peace Corps Volunteers have been spilling back into the untry for four years now, but as yet their group forays linto politics have been sporadic at best—and more than la little unwelcome to many of the volunteers. Indeed, one af the major concerns of a 1965 conference of returned psmen—titled “Citizen in a Time of Change’—was a tie Da rcel of several proposals for a national association: a ‘Veterans of Foreign Nonwars,” as one critic sneered. these proposals, the overwhelming majority of the 1.000 ex-PCVs in attendance responded with an em- dhatic thumbs down. “They have consistently resisted all empts to be organized into a national organization or dehi nd any well-defined national movement, philosophy, ‘set of objectives,” one Peace Corps staff member ote recently. Nevertheless, the tide may be changing. though the prospects for the immediate formation of American Legion of Former Peace Corps Volunteers ire remote, there are strong indications that ex-PCVs are starting to give second thoughts to group action. More | va 800 of them, about 7 per cent of those who have come back, declared recently in a well- publicized letter oO President Johnson, that American policy in Vietnam S “seriously undermining” hopes for a “peaceful and | bor ntiful world.” And in New York, more than 100 per- 0 ons, at least two-thirds of them ex-Peace Corpsmen, phave launched the Committee of Returned Volunteers CRV) to challenge a foreign policy they say “frustrates ather than supports the aspirations of the people” of he Third World. Their concern over Vietnamese policy rompted a letter to the President in early February of s year. It carried more than 400 signatures. In Atlanta, Chicago, Los Angeles, Boston and other HE NATION / July 3, 1967 a ; mT ee = —_ = THE NEW WORLD tion of the TVA Act which governs its powers of eminent domain, and poirits out that it confines its powers to the acquisition of real estate “for the construction of dams, reservoirs, transmission lines, power houses, and other structures, and navigation projects at any point along the Tennessee River, or any of its tributaries.” Frank Smith concedes that “the TVA Act needs to be broadened to provide wider authority for us to do more in the areas of economic development, pollution control and recreation.” What started as a locally approved development pro- posed by the National Park Service has degenerated into a fight to the death between a small group of property owners and the Tennessee Valley Authority. It remains for the courts to declare the ultimate winner, but already it is clear that TVA is paying a heavy price in popularity just for being in the game. THEY SEE cities, former volunteers are contemplating group action as a response to what they feel is a worsening world situa- tion. “Young Americans of unquestioned loyalty but with alert and questioning minds are continuing to express doubts about United States policy in Vietnam,” the Akron (Ohio) Beacon Journal noted in a recent editorial about one of the letters. Vietnam is certainly the catalyst, but it is not Vietnam alone. The mounting racial tensions in southern Africa, the agonizing deterioration of the Alliance for Progress, the growing U. S. military presence in Thailand—these and other occurrences are provoking serious thought among ex-PCVs. The conditions for massive group action are good, and indications are that some elements of the government Establishment are uneasy. There are more than 12,000 ex-PCVs in the coun- try now; within three years there will be 50,000. While every indication is given that they are highly conscious politically, they have unquestionably been slow to con- sider collective action. It is understandable: the small number of returnees at first; total involvement in graduate school (which most enter upon their return); the strains of readjustment and, to a large degree, the independence that characterizes so many of them. “I didn’t join the Peace Corps to have forty-five or twenty-two or any number of people express my views,” declared one te- turnee at the 1965 conference. “If I want to express them,” he added, “I’d just as soon express them myself.” In place of group political action, the ex-PCVs have given mild assent to proposals for the formation of local organizations with blander concerns. Appropriate exam- ples are the approximately eighty Peace Corps service councils scattered across the country. They started almost spontaneously to provide books and nonessential sup- plics for PCVs in the field, and to help fill requests for 15 speakers that were inundating Peace Corps headquarters in Washington. At first they were organized and run by parents and friends of PCVs, but more and more the ex- volunteers have taken over. They have no official affilia- tion with PC/Washington, only its approval. But these booster clubs do not provide the political outlets that many ex-PCVs are now seeking. Small, local- ized political action groups started appearing as early as 1964. as soon as enough ex-PCVs could get together. For the most part they were short-lived, lacking good organization or sustained interest. Yet they were the seed groups. Their leaders were heartened by Vice President Humphrey’s speech at the 1965 conference: “I call upon you to be men and women of action,” he told the ex- PCVs, “. . . to think, to think creatively, to think daringly and to share those thoughts—to share them with the com- munity because it is only in so doing that we enrich this America.” To some, this type of statement was a call to action, and despite the rejection of proposals for a national asso- ciation, new groups were formed. Typical of them, and perhaps best organized, is the CRV, whose temporary chairman is Aubrey Brown (PC/Nigeria). Membership is by no means restricted to ex-PCVs; about a third of its 120 members have worked abroad with mission groups or other voluntary organizations, and in some cases, other agencies of the U. S. Government. Their presence, according to Brown, brings a broader perspective to the group and minimizes the possibility that outsiders would link it to the Peace Corps. CRV wants far broader U. S. engagement in multi- lateral assistance programs, preferably through the United Nations; seeks more responsiveness on the part of the U. S. Government to popular social, economic and po- litical movements in the developing nations; and opposes unilateral U. S. military intervention anywhere. It is or- ganized into highly active subcommittees studying the problems of Africa, Latin America, Southeast Asia, with special attention to Vietnam. The committee’s most publicized act to date, its February letter to the President, went unanswered by Mr. Johnson but drew a brief though cordial response from a staff member of the National Security Council. Spokes- men for the CRV feel the letter gave them useful experi- ence for planning future action. “What we did wrong there,” contends Robert McGuire (PC/Pakistan), a graduate student at Columbia, “was in failing to accompany the letter with a well-thought-out position paper.” He indicates that white papers will back up most of CRV’s major statements in the future. The Africa subcommittee has prepared one on Rhodesia, ex- pressing support of the President’s decision to maintain sanctions against that nation. A thoughtful paper on Vietnam has recently been drawn up and distributed. The war in Vietnam is the primary concern of an- other New York-based organization, the Former Peace Corpsmen’s Committee for Peace. Although numbering less than ten active members, it set out last year to solicit signatures of other returnees for a strong letter to the President, calling for recognition of the National Libera- tion Front and immediate cessation of the bombing. Ac- . 16 ‘ tage the letter. To buttress his point, he refers to an article cording to its chairman, Burton Segall (PC/Tanganyika), it failed to get enough signatures to carry out the project. He and other members involved themselves instead in the efforts of a third group, which bears a press agent’s” nightmare for a name—the Ad Hoc Committee for Re- turned Peace Corps Volunteers Letter on Vietnam. This group. in some ways the most controversial of the three, originally intended to collect as many signatures as pos- sible for its moderate letter to the President and then to - disband. But events following dispatch of the letter may prompt the organizers of the Ad Hoc Committee to con- tinue their activities even more vigorously. a The letter went to the President on March 6, signed =| with 800 names. So far there has been no response from 7 the White House, a fact from which the organizers take 4} umbrage. One reason why there has been no response may be the feeling in Washington that the letter was not solely the work of the 800 ex-PCVs who signed it. “The © letter was not spontaneous,” Peace Corps Director Jack Hood Vaughan said in a recent telephone interview. “T_ know it was done by outsiders,” he added, and indicated that it was the “result of an intensive campaign by, people ~ outside the Peace Corps.” The chief “outsider” associated with the letter is Allard Lowenstein, a New York lawyer who also participated in the drafting of letters from 100 student body presidents }} last year, and after that, the letter from fifty Rhodes ¥) scholars. Organizers of the Ad Hoc Committee and Low- enstein himself insist that his participation was minimal, consisting of advice on how to circulate the letter among possible signers and how to achieve maximum publicity. Once the sentiments to be expressed were decided on, they say, he did lend some assistance in the phrasing. Lowenstein says the student leaders’ letter followed a speech last summer at the National Student Association ~ convention ¢he is a past NSA president, having served 4) in 1951, before the time the CIA is said to have become 9) involved). He says he made his speech with the intention | of creating a dialogue between the Administration and the student leaders. “I gave a suggestion of a tactic that would provide for further discussion, not merely a pro- test,” he says. “Anybody who thinks I can put words 7 into the mouths of student leaders, fifty Rhodes scholars and 800 Peace Corps Volunteers is being absolutely ab surd.” Eric Reuther (PC/Venezuela), Washington organizer of the Ad Hoc Committee, adds angrily: “If they are foolish enough to discredit our letter on these grounds, it will only force a more bitter response.” He contends} | that some Peace Corps sources, particularly that agency's) | public information office, deliberately attempted to sabo in the Baltimore Sun of March 7, quoting a Peace Corps spokesman as saying that the Ad Hoc Committee had approached 5,000 ex-PCVs, but that 4,200 “had refused to sign the letter. . That figure “amounts to nothing less than a complete fabrication and a deliberate attempt to misrepresent situation,’ Reuther later wrote to the paper. (He puts) the figure of ex-corpsmen solicited at 2,000.) The state-) ment, he continued, “was based upon a single telephone) conversation reputed to have taken place between a re THE NATION / July 3, 1967 atiires. The Peace Corps oe made no at- empt to verify the validity of his statement by checking members of our committee.” ; The spokesman—Thomas Page, director of Public In- formation for the Peace Corps—confirms that he gave the “4,200 out of 5,000” figure to the paper, but explains that he did not say they refused to sign the letter, merely that they were approached. More static for the committee’s efforts came in an editorial in the Sun on March 8: A new young pressure group may be developing among Peace Corps alumni, a sort of liberal Ameri- can Legion. This is not going to go over well with many members of Congress. . . . Since its inception the Peace Corps has done a splendid job of convincing Americans and most foreigners that it is non-political and non-ideological. That reputation has sustained it in some ticklish situations. If former members give people a reason—or an excuse—for believing otherwise, the Peace Corps will have lost a valuable asset. This did not go over well with members of the new movement. Says Reuther: What they are saying is that once someone has been a PCV, he is an apolitical being. But if we give our youth a mandate to become involved in the shaping of overseas institutions, and if we do not expect this same involvement by such people here, then we can only admit that our support for the Peace Corps’ work over- seas has been based on chauvinistic arrogance and nar- row self-interest. The returned Volunteer is going to make some noise—that is his duty. Members of the New York-based CRV appear to share Reuther’s sentiments. “When you commit yourself to change,” contends McGuire, “you are going to cause trouble. . We are not outside the political consensus 939 now, but if we do go outside, so what? Just what position does the government take on the political activities of returned PCVs? Ostensibly it welcomes their participation, provided it is made clear that they are not speaking for the Peace Corps. “The contribution of former volunteers to society in the United States and in the Third World will constitute a major impact of the Peace Corps,” Robert Calvert, Jr., then director of the Peace Corps’ Career Information Service, wrote last year. The architects of the Peace Corps knew that this unique overseas experience would have profound effects on the volunteer, that he would be more than likely to return home with renewed convictions. “We encourage them to stand up and be counted responsibly,” PC Director Vaughan said shortly after the release of the Ad Hoc Committee’s letter. “I have won- dered for some time now just what forms the political activities of ex-PCVs would take,” he said recently, add- ing that there is “no possibility” that Congressmen would bring pressure on the Peace Corps for the actions of any returnee group. _ Members of the Ad Hoc Committee and CRV report that Vaughan has generally been encouraging in private conversations with members of both groups, while ex- pressing some concern about the letters. The apparent “THE NATION / July 3, 1967 regard for Vaughan does not extend to the PC’s Public Information Office. “Their dishonesty in releasing the figure of 4,200 refusals to the Baltimore Sun was com- pletely invented,” says Lowenstein. Burton Segall of the third group, the Former Peace Corpsmen’s Committee for Peace, has reason to believe that PC/Washington will move decisively if necessary. His group’s name was originally the Peace Corps Com- mittee for Peace. Shortly after it started asking other ex-PCVs for signatures on the letter it was drafting, a note arrived from the Peace Corps’ General Counsel, stating that the use of the name “Peace Corps” was ille- gal, punishable by fine and imprisonment. “In all instances where the use of the name ‘Peace Corps’ by another organization is brought to our atten- tion,” the letter said in part, “we feel compelled to request - that organization to alter its name.” With some chafing, Segall’s group changed the name, but in its response in- quired why the unaffiliated Peace Corps service councils had not also been prevented from using the name. - Incidents such as this and the Ad Hoc Committee’s treatment by the Baltimore Sun prompt Aubrey Brown ot CRV to express fears about future actions by the Peace Corps or other agencies. “We'll have to be prepared to see them make some efforts to insulate themselves if we become more effective,” he noted recently at a lunch- eon meeting at the African-American Institute in New York City. He and other members of his group are troubled that three of politics’ strangest bedfellows—the Peace Corps, the far Left and, as indicated by recent dis- closures, the CI[A—all have reason to be concerned with the new groups of ex-PCVs. He concedes that there are few safeguards. The prospects for future development of groups such as the CRV, the Ad Hoc Committee and other or- ganizations of overseas volunteers look encouraging, if not bright. If a national association is possible it would more likely than not be patterned along the lines of the present Committee of Returned Volunteers: study groups in a number of cities, loosely joined in a national federa- tion. Brown, who says he would “prefer to pass out leaf- lets rather than to picket,” sees these groups doing ine depth studies of foreign policy problems, and drawing upon their experience and sensitivity as Dr. Immanuel Wallerstein, sociologist and African scholar at Columbia University, suggests, to serve as interpreters of the Third World to Americans. A writer for the Saturday Review asked in 1964: Will the volunteer “readjust,” give up and adapt? Or will he take up the challenges in our own backyard similar to those he faced overseas? The answer to this question may provide the most important story yet to be written about the Peace Corps and its volunteers. Speaking at the 1965 conference on behalf of those who sought a national association—and perhaps some- what prophetically for those one ‘in twelve ex-PCVs who have signed one of the letters on Vietnam—a volunteer said: “All we want to do is to make people aware, and then they are the pressure group for whatever they believe after they know the facts. All we’re trying to do is to ex- pose these people to a new world which we see.” 17 Sewing Machines & Union Mach HERBERT HILL Mr. Hill is national labor secretary of the NAACP and co- editor (with Arthur M. Ross) of Employment, Race and Poverty (Harcourt, Brace & World). When a group of teen-age girls, mainly Negro and Puerto Rican high school “dropouts” in New York City, bitterly defended their sewing machines and their right to learn a craft, the drama at the Lower West Side Community Center, a unit of the Neighborhood Youth Corps, was reported in many newspapers. However, the real story —the refusal of the International Ladies’ Garment Work- ers’ Union and the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America, both AFL-CIO affiliates, to permit the federal training of apparel workers—was little noted. The New York Times failed to mention that the events occurred as the result of ILGWU and ACWA opposition to federal training in the clothing trades. The incident, treated as “human interest” by the press, is far more revealing of re- strictive labor union practices than its newspaper treat- ment suggests. The New York Times of June 7 reported that “Fifteen girls in a Lower West Side branch of the Neighborhood Youth Corps armed themselves with cherry cream pics and soft drinks yesterday to retain the sewing machines they love.” The Times quoted 17-year-old Sandra Brown as saying: “They’re not going to take these machines. If they do, they’re going to have to take us along.” It also referred vaguely to “a Youth Corps technicality.” As the sewing machines were being removed from other Neighborhood Youth Corps Job Training Centers in the Morrisania section of ihe Bronx and in west Jamaica, Queens, as well as in other ghetto locations, Mrs. Rosali Maxwell, a sewing machine instructor, stated that the high school dropouts will “probably go back to doing nothing again.” The apparel training program was finally saved only by private donations which made possible the delivery of new machines and bolts of fabric to the community training centers after the federal funds were withdrawn. On June 13, the New York Post quoted Jerry Kolker, project director, who said that “Neither the government nor the union will cooperate with us. But now we have enough machines and money to keep going, even if they come to collect them again. . . .” Kolker added: “We have asked them [the unions] for their help in developing training programs and working out a solution to this prob- Jem, but the ILGWU won't answer.” The insistence of the unions that there be no government-sponsored job training for workers in the apparel industry, and their ability to prevent new train- ing opportunities under the anti-poverty program, has a special implication for Negro workers. Negro applicants for jobs in garment manufacturing shops are often asked if they have had previous experience. Because they have been denied the opportunity to obtain such experience they are cither refused work or employed only in low- 18 Noe eee aed ¥ Mh pi hd paying unskilled. jobs. Despite their rigid opposition to federally sponsored training opportunities, officials of the ILGWU have admitted that the industry lacks experienced workers. Gus Tyler, assistant president of the union, has written: “There is a shortage of skilled sewing machine operators. Nobody knows this better than the ILGWU. Some employers have either closed shop in New York or threatened to fold up for lack of skilled operators.” Although admitting that this is the case, the ILGWU has more than once refused to permit federally sponsored training. In Newark, N. J., in 1965, the United Community Corporation, the anti-poverty Community Action Program agency for Newark, had a similar ex- perience. The federal Office of Economic Opportunity refused to provide funds for an apparel trades job train- ing program for 545 workers (200 of whom were wel- fare recipients). When the Newark group requested funds for the program already begun, they were told by officials of the U.S. Department of Labor that the basis for the rejection was the refusal of the two unions to approve the job training program. Shortly thereafter, the Newark training program was destroyed by federal officials act- ing upon the insistence of the ILGWU.* Action by the unions to prevent federally sponsored training in the garment industry dates back to August 22, 1963, when the U.S. Department of Labor, which ad- ministers the Manpower Development and Training Act, received a 14-page statement of the “position of the In- ternational Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union and the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America on the ques- tion of subsidized training programs in the apparel in- dustry of the United States.” In this policy statement (ini- tiated by the ILGWU) signed by Lazare Teper, research director of the ILGWU and Milton Fried, research direc- tor of the ACWA the unions stated that: “on the basis of our many years experience in the apparel industry we are convinced that such training of apparel workers is not only a waste of federal funds but sets in motion forces detrimental to the health and stability of our industry.” They also argued that “the hiring of inexperienced workers by the industry is central to its functioning.” And they stated that “training and the possession of a specific apparel skill is not an essential requirement for employ- ment in the apparel industry and... the training of in- experienced workers by the employer is a normal phase of the apparel business.” The report concludes: These considerations apply to government financed training programs under the Area Redevelopment Act as well as the Manpower Development and Training Act. We, therefore, respectfully urge that the Depart- ment of Labor as a matter of policy not sponsor or approve any training program for apparel workers under the Manpower Development Act. Both the ILGWU and the ACWA have used their con- siderable political power in Newark and elsewhere to pre- *For a discussion of the status of nonwhite workers in the gar- ment industry see Congressional Record (House), January 31, 1963. THE NATION / July 3, 1967 i w rn i b% nes ea vy 7 , f 4 Kind of training programs that are operating with public funds in many other industries. _ The statement of the apparel labor unions is contra- _ dicted by manpower data on the industry. According to _ the Occupational Training Needs Survey, Research Series _ No. 18, September, 1964, prepared and compiled by the _ state of New Jersey, Department of Labor and Industry, _ Division of Employment Security: By 1965 there will be a shortage in three of the six ~ semiskilled occupations surveyed. These occupations are: machine presser in the garment, laundry and clean- ing and dyeing industries. By 1968 (in addition to those occupations expected to be in short supply in 1965) there will be shortage of sewing machine operators and handpressers, in the garment, laundry, cleaning and dyeing industries. These data are significant because they relate directly to the proposal for funds submitted to the Office of Eco- nomic Opportunity by the Newark Community Action were having difficulty finding people with skills. In terms of fully prepared people there is a shortage.” He also noted that the growing shortage called for preparations to take care of the expanding needs in industry and asked for support of federal job training programs. ILGWU president, David Dubinsky, according to Women’s Wear Daily of March 2, 1966, in response to the Secretary’s statement, “scored the Administration’s assistance pro-* grams for on the job training as they applied to the coat and suit industry.” In the Harvard University 1959 study, “Made in New York: Case Studies in Metropolitan Manufacturing,” it is noted that Negroes and Latin Americans . . . were largely to be found in the less skilled lower paid crafts and in shops making the lower price lines and in this industry their advancement to higher skills was not proceeding very rapidly. In the higher skilled coat and suit industry the new ethnic groups have hardly made an appearance. Council. Furthermore, the city of Newark had been de- _clared a depressed area with very high unemployment among Negroes. Such job training programs, which are intended to enable the long-term unemployed to liberate themselves from the relief rolls by obtaining jobs as a re- sult of newly acquired skills, is the essence of any real “war against poverty.” The development of many large garment manufactur- ing companies with modern production methods that re- quire new skills has been evident for some time. But even though nonwhites constitute a potentially large source of skilled labor recruitment for this industry, they have been effectively denied such opportunities, mainly as a result of restrictive union practices. Secretary of Labor W. Willard Wirtz stated on March 1, 1966, at a meeting of the National Board of the Coat and Suit Industry: “Industry reports show that companies _ THE NATION / July 3, 1967 In short, Negro and Puerto Rican women, who are on the lower rungs of the city’s economic ladder, have become important in the New York garment industry, but they work mainly in the more standardized branches, and with few exceptions, unlike the Jewish and Italian men of earlier days, they do not become highly skilled tailor system workers on dresses or “cloaks.” As a re- sult, a shortage of skilled sewing machine operators is developing. In the past, the liberal and progressive ILGWU and ACWA were important vehicles for improving the economic status and social condition of immigrant work- ers. Tragically enough, these same unions now use their extensive powers to prevent the further entry of Negro and Puerto Rican workers into the labor market, or to lock these groups permanently in unrewarding menial and unskilled jobs. 19 LETTERS (continued from page 2) Elsewhere the Colonel implies that as a former Academy library executive officer, I am hardly qualified to criticize the Academy’s educational program. Such attacks on the character, qualifications or motives of anyone who dares suggest the Academy may not be infallible, I learned during three years there, are a standard device. Anticipating this line of attack, I did not present my personal opinion but reported the situation on the basis of interviews with more than a dozen past and present faculty members plus other documentary material, none of which the Colonel proved wrong in his letter... . Nowhere does the Colonel produce evidence which proves wrong or even disputes any of the questionable practices at the Academy which I reported; following an- other classic Air Force Academy tactic in dealing with | critics, he talks about everything but why cheating occurs —tepeatedly—at the Academy. If my report is as dis- torted and illogical as he claims, I suggest Colonel Alm cite the “real” reasons—supported by documentary evi- dence—for the scandals. J. Arthur Heise Los Angeles, Calif. Dear Sirs: I congratulate author J. A. Heise on his candid, yet sympathetic and understanding, analysis of the recent cheating scandals at the United States Air Force Academy. From my perspective as a former Air Force Captain and associate professor at the Academy (1958-60 and 1962-65), Mr. Heise—or rather the officer he quoted on page 626 —got to the heart of the matter when he stressed the costs of creating a truly intellectual environment for the edu- cation of our future officers. .. . The time has come to translate “pious platitudes about honor and leadership” (to use the words of Admiral Rick- over) into academically sound practices. Congress and the academic community—both of whom have major but un- exercised responsibilities for the education of future of- ficers, had better act quickly. If they continue to abdicate this responsibility, the views of one member of the White committee, before whom I testified in 1965, will con- tinue to be the Academy’s operating policy. I was told: “We must think of the survival of the institution.” We must indeed, but the institution at stake is our country, -not the Air Force or the Academy! John C. Ries, associate professor, University of California Cambridge, Mass. Dear Sirs: Mr. Heise poses an important question in the title of his article but he seems less interested in answer- ing it than in maligning the Air Force Academy and its dean. One would think that the Academy’s problems would arise from causes peculiar to it as a military educational institution. But such apparently is not the case. Look at Mr. Heise’s catalogue of deficiencies: “Standardization of prescribed courses,” “a lack of real student-faculty involve- ment,” the “policy of grading on a curve,” faculty meet- ings which “are rarely needed and rarely called,” “highly centralized administration,’ the passion for the Ph.D., “emphasis on questionable symbols of academic success.” . . - In seventeen years of teaching at Columbia and Harvard, I have heard all of these charges again and again and again. They may be the roots of the cheating problem, but if they are Mr. Heise doesn’t show why this is the case. . While Mr. Heise’s comments on the Academy are largely irrelevant, his attacks on the Academy’s dean, Brig. Gen. Robert F. McDermott, are blatantly wrong. For almost 150 years the system of education at the military academies was frozen into the pattern which Sylvanus Thayer set at West Point. Under General McDermott’s leadership, the Air Force Academy broke with this pattern and instituted, as Heise himself has to recognize, a diversified course pro- gram, majors, an enrichment program, graduate work, and advance standing. These innovations are now being copied 20 I~ ay 5 4 eh 4 by the other service aac ‘By any standard, General McDermott is one of the leading innovators: i men in higher education today. .. . Samuel P. Huntington, professor of government, Harvard University, member, advisory council, USAF Academy . air policy Washington, D.C. Dear Sirs: You have done a public service in publishing Karl M. Ruppenthal’s survey of prospects for the Super- sonic Transport as generator of political, social and eco- nomic questions its promoters decline to acknowledge [May 22, May 29, June 19]. Any resident of the Potomac River valley in the vicinity of Washington can testify that the Federal Aviation Agency accepts no responsibility for the consequences of its fixed policy to promote the interests of air carriers. In May, 1963, the FAA issued a policy declaration that it would not allow jet carriers into Washington National Airport, just 3 miles from the White House. For reasons it has never made public, FAA reversed this and the jets came into National in April, 1966. Noise, pollution and mathematically increased hazard of crashes in the center of the densely populated region embraced by the Capital Beltway are now fixed qualities of life in this city. People in all sections of Washington along the river report falling property values, kerosene droppings, near misses (and verified instances of cowlings and other parts off planes—so far, fortunately, landing in the river instead of in the streets), not to mention the endless howling and whine of engines, night and day. We do not need to wait for the SST to discover social irresponsibility in the FAA concept of how air carriers should operate in a human society. Frank C. Waldrop death by abortion Los Angeles, Calif. Dear Sirs: Phil Kerby’s article, “Abortion: Laws and At- titudes” [The Nation, June 12], deserves special recognition . for its comprehensive and incisive analysis. One error (which many writers on this topic have per- petuated) does not mar it. For the record, the total number of maternal deaths in the United States in 1964 was 1,096, of which 247, or 19 per cent, are recorded in official sta- tistics as caused by abortion. To this number should be added an unknown number of maternal deaths which are the result of criminal abortion but which, because of the stigma, have been attributed to other causes. Passage of the Beilenson Therapeutic Abortion Act in California will, we hope, decrease this needless toll. Ruth Roemer Associate Researcher in Public Health Law University of California happiness in Asia London Dear Sirs: After reading with interest, appreciation and general approval Malcolm W. Browne’s masterly destructive review of Roger Hilsman’s book, To Move A Nation [The Nation, June 5], I find myself staggered when he writes toward the end of it the words: “Granting that Asian com- munism is a brutal force that hardly does much to make life happier for the average peasant. .. .” This statement is so blatantly in contradiction with what I personally ob- served, during a fairly comprehensive tour around the Democratic Republic of Vietnam in November, 1958, and with what has been observed, before and since then, by numerous Western visitors more competent than I, that I am at a loss to understand on what evidence it is based. . . . Edgar P. Young Commander, Royal Navy (Ret.) THE NATION / July 3, 1967 at ipeL WARRANT FOR GENOCIDE: The myth of the Jewish world-conspiracy and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. By Norman Cohn. Harper & Row. 303 —pp. $6.95. TREBLINKA. By Jean-Francois Steiner. _ Preface by Simone de Beauvoir. Trans- - lated from the French by Helen Weaver. e Simon & Schuster. 415 pp. $5.95. : THEY FOUGHT BACK: The Story of _ the Jewish Resistance in Nazi Europe. Edited and translated by Yuri Suhl. The _ Crown Publishing Co. 327 pp. $5.95. rf _ THE MURDERERS AMONG US: The _ Simon Wiesenthal Memoirs. Edited, with an introductory profile by Joseph Wechs- Bere. McGraw-Hill Book Co. 340 pp. — - $6.95. _ Louis HARAP Mr. Harap is a member of the editorial board of the monthly, Jewish Currents. a i, 1 _ The four books under review fall into a _ logical progression. Norman Cohn traces _ the strange vicissitudes of that anti- _ Semitic ideology in the past few centuries _which supplied the rationale (if one can call it that) for genocide. Steiner and _ Suhl describe the genocide itself and, in _ different ways, the Jewish resistance to _ it. And Wiesenthal illuminates aspects of _ tivities in bringing Nazi criminals to jus- tice. a In meticulous detail Cohn sets forth _ the bizarre history of the Protocols of the ° _ Elders of Zion, together with its ante- _ cedents and practical consequences. He _ shows how this history is continuous with _ the medieval myth of the Jew as anti- _ Christian devil and ritual murderer. It Was only after the French Revolution, _ however, that the myth received its po- litical cast as a Judaeo-Masonic con- _ spiracy to dominate European govern- _ ments. Cohn makes clear how the myth grew in close coordination with reac- _ tionary opposition to revolutionary de- -velopments. The 1848 revolution in Ger- _ many gave fresh impetus to this drive; - Russian reactionaries and pogromists took over from the Germans in the last third 3 of the century until, in 1905, Sergei _ Nilus published the full-blown forgery, the Protocols, which was used to insti- _ gate pogroms. The execution of the Czar- ist royal family in 1918 added a new THE NATION / July 3, 1967 _ denazification through his personal ac-. The Holocaust: Myths and Facts feature, the Bolshevik Revolution as a Jewish plot. Reactionary Russian émigrés fanned out into Europe and the United States spreading the infection of the Protocols. They reached Henry Ford who took up the cause, and in 1920 had the Protocols serialized in his Dearborn Independent, circulation 300,000. Later in the year he reprinted the material in a book which was distributed in the United States in half a million copies, and was translated into sixteen languages, including the Ger- man. The Protocols emerged strongly in the United States once again in 1938, when Father Coughlin published them in his Social Justice, with a circulation of 1 million. Russian émigrés brought the Protocols directly into Germany in 1920. In 1922, they played a great part in provoking the assassination of Walther Rathenau as an “Elder of Zion.” The Nazis grafted their vélkisch-racist ideology on the Pro- tocols, which Hitler fervently embraced as the ideological basis for the “final so- lution.” The myth, Cohn shows, served as a “warrant” for genocide. In his Treblinka, Jean-Francois Steiner attempts an account of the exe- cution of this warrant in one ghetto, Vilna, and one extermination camp, Treblinka, where about 800,000 Jews were killed. Steiner was 2 years old when his Polish-Jewish father died in a camp, and he was reared by his French-Catholic mother in France. Written like a thriller, this book was an immediate success in France and aroused considerable contro- versy. The first few chapters convey the Nazi techniques for liquidating the Vilna ghetto and the rise of underground re- sistance. Most of the book describes the establishment of the extermination camp at Treblinka, the formation of revolt plans, several frustrated attempts at re- volt, the final desperate rising (which set free some 600 inmates, of whom about forty survived the manhunt that fol- lowed), and the final Nazi erasure of all traces of the camp. Steiner had spent half a year studying the records and interviewing survivors. The book cannot be said to be docu- mentary, the American publishers’ blurb notwithstanding, but is rather a semi- fictional adaptation of history designed to set forth Steiner’s theses of Jewish be- havior during the holocaust. In an inter- view with Le Nouveau Candide, Steiner explains that he wrote it because of the shame he felt at the passivity of the slaughtered 6 million—a reflection, per- haps, of the Raul Hilberg-Hannah Arendt thesis that Jews offered no sig- nificant resistance to their extermination. But the Treblinka revolt, it appears, of- fered him theses that appeased his shame. ) { But Steiner’s theses are a mass of con- tradictions. Jewish behavior under the — Nazis, he holds, was governed by the to him peculiarly Jewish, mystically tena- cious belief in life as such. (Incidentally, — Simone de Beauvoir’s laudatory introduc- — tion makes one wonder if she fully un- derstood the book she praises. In direct contradiction to Steiner, she asserts that in the camps “all peoples behaved iden- — tically.” Further, she writes that Steiner rejects the notion of “the mystery of the i, Jewish soul,” while his book advances — precisely some such view.) Together with this mystical belief in life, Steiner be- lieves that the Jews wished to survive to — bear witness to Nazi bestiality. At the same time, many who survived, Steiner — holds, did so by serving as “accomplices” of extermination. The Treblinka rebels, . Steiner repeatedly asserts, were just such “accomplices” because they attended the undressing and haircutting of the Jews, and also disposed of the corpses. No less troublesome is the synthetic history of some parts of the book, such as Steiner’s designation of the Vilna ghetto as “the pilot ghetto,” a proving ground for developing techniques to pre- pare Jews psychologically for extermina- — tion. The fact is that the Vilna ghetto was set up in July, 1941, a year after the Warsaw and other ghettos had been in operation. He wrongly places in Treb- linka a melodramatic episode that was actually part of the rising at the Sobibor extermination camp. At an early stage in the Sobibor revolt, chief Nazi camp of- ficials were lured into “appointments” | with camp tailors and shoemakers, and killed with hatchets. Steiner has the Treb- linka revolt leaders plan just this tactic, refers to it several times in reviewing the plans, and then forgets all about it in his detailed account of the uprising. Survivors who have devoted them- selves to assembling and verifying the history of the holocaust have attacked Steiner’s book. Rochel Auerbach, Treb- 21 linka survivor, associate of the War- saw Ghetto historian, Emmanuel Ringel- blum, and presently head of the Depart- ment of Testimony at the Yad Vashem archives in Tel Aviv, denounced it in the Paris Yiddish paper, Undzer Vort. Apart from her rejection of Steiner’s wish “to transfer a great part of the respon- sibility for German mass murder onto Jewish victims themselves,” she accused Steiner of having broken his agreement to allow her to read the manuscript be- fore publication, and of having used real names of victims and survivors now liy- ing in Israel, attributing fictional con- versations and actions to them. Yad Vashem demanded that these names be changed in further editions. Fearing the possibility of legal action, publishers agreed to the change. Rochel Auerbach was invited to Paris to discuss further corrections with the author. But he stubbornly refused, she writes, to “purge the book of the desecrations with which he soiled the materials taken from Jewish sources.” She then felt compelled publicly to reject the “false thanks” given f 5 \ ; her in the book (retained in the Amer- ican edition). She has asked the prospec- tive Italian producers to remove the “slanders” in the book from the forth- coming film. Two others whom Steiner “thanks” for their aid, Leon Czertok and Olga Imbert, both of the Center of Jewish Documentation in Paris, have also rejected his thanks (retained in the American edition). David Rosset, non- Jewish camp survivor and theorist of camp psychology, has described the book as “full of racist formulas.” One instance: the leader of the revolt “lacked that typically Jewish quality of looking for the hardest way, always wanting to do better, never being satisfied with the possible,” etc. Léon Poliakov points out other instances in his sharply con- demnatory article reprinted in Atlas for September, 1966. Others in Israel and Paris have condemned the book and even asked for recall of the “Prix de Résistance” award for 1966. What is particularly disconcerting is the com- mercial attitude revealed in Steiner’s re- mark, reported by Rochel Auerbach, NEW YORK TIMES WEATHER MAP Weather Map, amidst this tiny print, you stand out like a comfortable air of nudity. Amazing! in a stranger's bedroom It's my air of nudity as my eyes alight on a most pleasing spot. LOW, you're recorded right here, yet during this same hour, 2000 miles away, your vast spirit is HIGH among the Smokies. You show us in the 20th century of violence what a soul might be. Oh obviously, concentrically, lovely, your circles around a center of emptiness have been watched by typists on vacation, the mystically disposed, or me —all the pebble-droppers at the still lakes! Look, look! the bending, that contortion suddenly in those outmost circles, like an angel flailing to be free. , L have been reading joyously the dear poets, and here you’re mirroring their spirits Struggling to punch out of their lines and words to pin my shoulders to the floor. Weather Map, Oh you who are inscrutable, I know you better than anyboay. What I would do if I possessed the signs that seem to be music notes leaping and flying off the clef lines? I, as you, would dub them simply —like “cloudy” or “clear.” ALLAN KAPLAN ven eae Lene that he was not troubled by the un- — favorable attitude to the book in Israel — because Israel is a “small market.” It is not surprising that Treblinka has sold widely in France and promises to be a success in this country. It is the kind of thriller that makes one miss his subway stop, as it did this reviewer. But whether it will increase understanding of the holocaust is another matter. Fortunately, another book has recently appeared which should serve as a strong antidote—Yuri Suhl’s invalu- able collection of historical, scrupulous- ly documented accounts of Jewish re- sistance in all parts of occupied Europe which Suhl wrote because, as he says: “The world knows little or nothing about the other side of the holocaust picture: Jewish resistance. . . . It is not generally known that in every labor and concentration camp there existed a Jew- ish underground organization that kept up the prisoners’ morale, reduced their physical sufferings, committed acts of sabotage, organized escapes, collected arms, planned revolts, and, in many instances, carried them out.” Nor is much generally known about the numer- ous daring Jewish partisan and re- sistance groups. Even though Suhl’s book makes no claim to be exhaustive—the book could easily have been ten times its present size—it should permanently put to rest the legend of total Jewish passivity. Suhl’s book includes, for example, the diary of Abraham Lissner, revealing the existence of an effective and heroic Jewish Partisan Unit in Paris which, both alone and in coordination with other groups, carried out an enormous number of acts of sabotage from 1942 to 1944, when they were executed by the Nazis. Perhaps the least-known chapter of Jewish resistance is the heroic career of the Herbert Baum Jew- ish group in Berlin from 1937 to 1942, and Suhi includes the late Prof. Ber Mark’s account of this group, taken from Gestapo files. The most important act of the group was the partial burn- ing of Goebbels’ anti-Soviet exhibit at the Lustgarten in May, 1942, after which the group was betrayed and exe- cuted by the Nazis. Narratives of resistance in the largest ghettos and camps (Sobibor, Byalistok, Warsaw, Treblinka, Minsk, Vilna), and in smaller places one never heard of (Marcinkonis, Lachwa, Tuczyn, Koldyczewo, Horodenka); impressive achievements of Jewish partisans in Poland and farther east; stories of out- standing individual heroism by men, women and children in resistance move- ments and solitary acts; summaries of THE NATION / July 3, 1967 r can e BP eeisium, Italy, Bhigaria: all in. ‘Subl’s book bear striking wit- ss to Jewish activist heroism in the e of the Nazi terror. Simon Wiesenthal’s memoirs of search, seizure and exposure of Nazi War criminals, in Joseph Wechsberg’s Superbly edited volume, carries the anti- Nazi effort into the postwar period. Having miraculously escaped death “many times, Wiesenthal decided at the _war’s end to devote himself to bringing Nazis to justice. He is motivated neither _ by vindictiveness nor revenge but by I _ deep concern for the future. Wiesenthal’s attitude is epitomized in a remark he 4 heard from an American major: “The enemy of yesterday will become the - enemy of tomorrow if we let him alone.” _ As a one-man research institute, Wiesen- hal has an amazing record. He has brought to justice about 900 of the «22, 500 Nazis in his files, including his ~ essential aid in tracking down Adolf Eichmann. Wechsberg’s “profile” of - Wiesenthal reveals an _ incorruptible, _ selfless, deeply humane man, as indeed _ the memoirs themselves confirm. Light is thrown on important aspects of postwar history by these memoirs. The clandestine Nazi escape junta, ODESSA (Organization der SS-Ange- _hGrigen), which is funded with about _ $1 billion in buried treasure and invest- ments in neutral and nonbelligerent _ countries, is exposed. Wiesenthal docu- ments the well-known fact that Ger- man officialdom is permeated with high , Nazis and the less-known fact that Nazis _ are protected from prosecution and con- viction in court. Shocking miscarriages of justice in war-crimes trials are re- lated. And Wiesenthal shows how the _ British occupiers evinced more concern in stemming the illegal immigration to Palestine than in apprehending war _ criminals, and how American, British and French denazification efforts gave way to cooperation with ex-Nazis in pursuit of cold-war anti-communism. The astonishing extent of Austrian par- ticipation in the holocaust emerges: Wiesenthal told Wechsberg that although — Austria’s population was 8 per cent of that of the Reich, “about one-third of _all people working for the S.S. extermina- tion machinery were Austrians. Almost half of the 6 million Jewish victims of _ the Hitler regime were killed by Austri- ans.” At a time when neo-Nazism in Ger- ‘Many shows signs of revival (and Weisenthal believes the new reaction to be not only German but part of an in- _ ternational movement), the memoirs of this dedicated humanist sound a strong note of warning. ‘THE NATION / July 3, 1967 The Wondering Jew THE CARPENTER YEARS. By Arthur A. Cohen. New American Library. 151 pp. $4.50. FATHERS. By Herbert Gold. Perri, House. 308 pp. $5.95. THE DISSENT OF DOMINICK SHA- PIRO. By Bernard Kops. Coward- McCann. 208 pp. $4.50. LEONARD KRIEGEL Mr. Kriegel teaches English at the City College of New York, and is currently working on a novel and on a_ study of politics and literature in contemporary America. Any novelist must avoid being smothered by a personal identity crisis, especially in a work which is itself about a crisis in identity. But it is too easy to claim that all men face identity crises today, and that the novelist who is conscious of himself as a Jew is not singular. For while all men are alienated by defini- tion, the Jew is faced with an alienation that is peculiar to him alone, one that exists within the context of his imme- diate experience. In our time, his conflict has been strik- ingly nonreligious—at least until quite recently. Of the novels under discussion here, only Arthur Cohen’s The Carpenter Years tries to come to terms with the problem of how one can be a Jew in a gentile world which wears its smug security like a flower in its buttonhole. Although I do not think that Mr. Cohen has been particularly successful, he has been daring in his choice of a theme. His purpose is not ecumenical. He does not propose to reconcile American Jew and American Christian but rather to explore the very brittle heritage each can claim as his own. The Carpenter Years is apparently an effort at creating a contemporary parable about religion in the United States. Un- fortunately, Cohen’s protagonist exists only on the edges of the reader’s per- ceptions, insofar as those perceptions can be felt. Edgar Morrison, born Morris Edelman (from the noble Morris to the son of that Morris, conceived in his own spiritual inadequacy), is Cohen’s battle- ground for the conflict of Jew and gentile. Having renounced religion, fam- ily, heritage and name, Morrison has emerged as the director of a small-town YMCA in Pennsylvania, a model hus- band and father, a Christian, and an unfortunately static symbol. The novel begins when he learns of the imminent arrival of his son by his first marriage, to take a job in town. But the confronta- tion between father and son, a confronta- tion toward which the entire novel moves, is remarkably inadequate. The reader is left with the impression that Edgar Mor- rison has settled for far less than he might have expected. To trade the rich history of the Jew for the directorship of a small- town YMCA is a very poor bargain in- deed. And to go from Thomas Mann’s Naptha to Cohen’s Edgar Morrison is simply too long a journey for this reader. It leaves one in a kind of spiritual torpor. Arthur Cohen is a Jew by choice, as any reader of his nonfiction knows. failure in this novel is Cohen’s inability to make his religious consciousness de- cisive for the reader. Herbert Gold’s Fathers, an auto- biographical memoir,” does not wrestle with the spiritual rootlessness of the contemporary Jew in a gentile world. If anything, it celebrates that rootlessness. It is stasis that both Gold and the father he has so vividly brought to life in this novel seem to fear most. What Gold achieves is the — vital re-creation of a world that had ended long before the Second World War, al- though we did not know it then: the Jewish immigrant seeking fortune and dynasty in America. In his previous novels, Gold’s language, always rich and sensuous, stood in the way of what he was trying to do. He was that peculiar creature, a “natural” novelist who had not written the novel one felt he was capable of writing. It is probably this that accounts- for the smugness with which Gold has been dismissed by a number of critics and fellow novelists, most of whom should have known bet- ter. Gold was generally accused of not being tough enough, of not being con- temporary, of lacking what Hemingway called cojones (a much traveled novelistic commodity), of being too sentimental. Some of this was true. Perhaps it still is. But Gold at his best, and he is at his best in Fathers, is a warm, lyrical, zestful writer. (An indication of how tough we Americans are can be found in the fact that these adjectives seem strangely hackneyed, threatening the critic’s own toughness. It is a difficult land; even book reviewers bare their teeth in front of the mirror when they wake up each morning.) The movement from the author's father Sam Gold to Herb Gold him- self, from the father as father to the son as father, is something that de- mands no summation. Gold treads dangerously sentimental territory and the proof of his artistry is that only 23 } \ The “novel in the form of a anne, ie ae ai ee ape Ssh SnD in fleeting instances does the novel suc- cumb to sentiment. Perhaps our chief problem in reading Fathers is that we ourselves are too self-consciously filled with Angst to understand a Sam Gold, or even to accept him at face value. He is too elementary in his needs and desires, too responsive to the pork bar- tel of American life, too raucous, too tender, too loving, too intent on impos- ing a vision of his own destiny on his America. “But in this life you have to take chances and defend yourself like you can” is as meaningful a morality as any he could have learned in Russia and brought with him to the United States. Sam Gold is a wanderer. And the Jew as wanderer is a cliché only because, like so many clichés, it has a substantial basis in history. Gold has taken the myth of the Jew as wanderer and molded it to his own purposes. While some of us search for superman, he has been content to write a novel which is decidedly uncontemporary and remarkably good. According to the jacket copy, Bernard Kops’s The Dissent of Domin- ick Shapiro “presents a vivid picture of Jewish family life and offers a salu- tary . . . comment on rebellion among the young.” In short, Kops is touch- ing all bases. His difficulty is that he is not quite sure of whether his real subject is Jewish life in London or adolescent rebellion. He cannot alto- gether get away from a sometimes staged “Yiddishkeit in Golders Green” atmosphere. But despite this occasional artificiality, this is a fine novel, one that readers will inevitably compare to Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye. In his rebelliousness, his distrust of the adult world, even in his outraged sense of having been conned by those who can- not understand him, Dominick must be compared to Holden Caulfield. He is, however, far more a product of this generation. Dominick is a winner at the novel’s end, while Holden speaks to us from the sanctuary of his famous asylum. With a single notable exception—a magnificent comic explosion of a Jew- ish wedding in London which in itself is worth the price of the book—the scenes which directly concern themselves with the Jewishness of the characters fall victim to the author’s desire to make of the Jew a contemporary comic out- law. But when he is dealing with Domi- nick among his.kind, those restless dis- affiliates who seem to represent England itself at this moment in history, Kops is in superb control, and his novel is gen- uinely moving and thick with humor. When we watch Dominick’s dissent in 24 ‘ . . . . action, when we view him with a pack of beatniks, follow his first sexual ex- perience, cheer for him as he hoists an anarchist flag on Big Ben to emerge an- English celebrity, he is appealingly pica- resque, certainly an adequate anti-hero for this anti-heroic age. These three novels indicate that there is still a great deal of vitality in the Jew- ish confrontation with Anglo-Saxon so- ciety, sufficient to feed many more writ- ers. But with this observation one sus-— pects also that the Jew as rebel in fiction — has outlived both his time and useful- ness. One mythicizes at the price of possible falsity. And if the writer’s back- ground is frequently taken for his mean- ing, the sad truth is that he is too fre- quently willing to have it that way. It is, after all, much easier. It is also much more dangerous to the powers that the creative imagination must exert. Adding Up the Double MR. CLEMENS AND MR. TWAIN: A Biography. By Justin Kaplan. Simon & Schuster. 424 pp. $7.95. JAY MARTIN Mr. Martin, an associate professor of Eng- lish and American Studies at Yale Uni- versity, is the author of Harvests of Change: Ametican Literature 1865-1914 (Prentice- Hall) and Conrad Aiken: A Life of His Art (Princeton University Press). He is presently at work on a biography of Na- thanael West. Mr: Clemens and Mr. Twain, published almost a year ago, has been accorded high commendation and wide recogni- tion, culminating recently in the award- ing of both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize to Justin Kaplan for his biography. Many reviewers of the book, however, have tended merely to nod pleasantly in Mr. Kaplan’s direc- tion, and then go on to write out their own versions of Mark Twain’s “double- ness,” his “dark side” or his literary “place,” using as their evidence the vast array of material which Kaplan himself has gathered. Such a preoccupation with the sub- ject of the book rather than with the book itself seems to be a convention of reviewing at the present time. Perhaps in this case it suggests that the readers were encouraged to go on to Twain himself or to recall, absorbing some of Kaplan’s enthusiasm, their own pleas- ures in reading Twain. But a book which a former editor of the Mark Twain papers has declared “is sure to remain for a long time the standard book” about Twain, one so subsequently dis- tinguished, should be scrutinized on its own terms. If it will provide for this generation their portrait of Twain (as another historian has contended), what kind and how complete a portrait will that be? Its particular accomplishments, every- where apparent, are easy to enumerate. Eminent among these, of course, is the obvious command of document and de- tail which Kaplan shows. He has clear- ly gone through, minutely, a mountain of material far larger than that which Albert Bigelow Paine consulted; and al- though he has reduced his biography to less than half the length of Paine’s, he is essentially more complete than Paine: certainly his book is more accurately balanced. And he is never, as Paine was constantly, swept away by the flood of materials at his disposal. Moreover, in his presentation of de- tail he is witty, with a sharp feeling for light irony; he is accurate and precise (“To be in New York in 1867 was to be at the scrambling center of American life’); and he is inventive in style—as in his description of a Clemens family scene as if it were a sculptured “Rogers group.” His book is not designed as a psychoanalytic biography, and while it is true {as one reviewer complained) FIELD CRICKET He’s having a field day in my room and I don’t mind having him make all these jumps and thrusts. He accommodates, adjusts himself better than a boy in a candy factory. Pocket companion, darkheaded shadow of my boyhood. He’s practicing his pure form among the fat corn of my books, getting more mileage than goatfooted cummings or Williams and Stevens. He sounds on his forewings the within and without of things, ’ birthwater sharp over this shape, husk, peel, shell: this terrible temple. And I keep shedding mv body forever saying goodbye to the departing boy. RAYMOND ROSELIEP THE NATION / July 3, 1967 Rect to “explain” Twain's it or multiple personalities, he makes a virtue of this lack and shows admi- able tact and restraint in his analysis of Twain’s psyche. In particular he has some shrewd comments on Twain’s am- _ bivalence toward money, brilliantly call- "ing the books which come from this ob- session a “pornography of the dollar.” For his Garin theme, the split in the man indicated in the title, he has more, and more accurately presented, _ evidence than has ever been brought to- gether, although critics since Twain's time have felt and discussed the divi- sions in him. Earlier, simple, discus- sions —like that of the Van Wyck _ Brooks-Bernard DeVoto debate — Kap- lan simply passes by, in his more in- formed view, whereas many other critics ended here, stalled on their terms of debate. Kaplan’s perception, his under- | standing of Twain’s wit, his own clear style—in short, his absolute command ) ~—C of: narrative—all commend his book. /) _—‘« Although Kaplan is so careful to be accurate about Twain, he is apt to fall into the clichés of thirty years ago (vintage Brooks-DeVoto) concerning others, particularly in his view of Bret Harte and William Dean Howells, who both play important parts. Harte, who was born in Albany, N. Y., in 1839, and did not go to California until 1854, is portrayed consistently by Kaplan as _a Westerner, and he remarks on Harte’s (in contrast to Twain’s) confidence in Eastern society: he agrees, furthermore, _ with Twain’s (and Brooks’s) biased view of Harte’s literary career, although Harte produced some of his best work in his late parodies. Howells, who had first written a biography of Lincoln in Columbus, O., then had been American ‘consul in Venice, returned to a job on _Godkin’s Nation in New York, and ater lived in New York for thirty years, he speaks of as having “a sure, un- _Wavering vocation in Boston,” and as- ‘sociates him with ithe Concord and Cambridge writers in the genteel tradi- tion, though Howells had dared Twain ‘to tell the “black truth” about him- ‘self in autobiography, and published far more black truth about American soci- ety than Twain. In the case of the comic Writers and rivals of Twain in the period —P. V. Nasby and Josh Billings, for instance—Kaplan takes the view of them as buffoons (which he defends Twain against); he does not make clear that, like “Mark Twain,” these are all as- sumed names, that the comic name was also the satirist’s double, concealing name, and that, like Clemens, David Ross Locke (Nasby) was an accurate [HE NATION / July 3, 1967 has no pore tnt peat of Michael Goldman, Poetry Edi- tor, will be on leave until Septem- ber 15. During that time no poetry will be considered for publication; we shall welcome submissions again in the early fall. and vehement satirist of the corruption of his age. As here, so in the cases of such writers as Josiah Gilbert Holland, Samuel Bowles and Thomas Wentworth Higginson, he diminishes critics of Twain in order to raise Twain in the reader’s estimation. It is curious that this group, which Kaplan _ generally scorns, should have played so important a role for so sharp an intelligence as Emily Dickinson: these three, precisely, were her intellectual “tutors.” Kaplan does not mention Emily Dick- inson, and refers to Henry James only briefly; Henry Adams appears nowhere, or do John DeForest, Rebecca Hard- ing Davis, Stephen Crane, Sidney Lanier. Edward Eggleston, Edgar Watson Howe, Edward Bellamy or Edith Wharton. Only as people, not really as important contemporary writers, do Joel Chandler Harris, Walt Whitman, Sarah Orne Jewett and even Howells come into this book. For a work about a writer, there is strangely absent a sense that Twain was part of a community of writers— that others were, like him, concerned with the figure of the double (had not Melville treated this to exhaustion in The Confidence Man? Was not Adams’ Education subtitled “A Study in Twen- tieth-Century Miultiplicity’?), with the lost primitive past (Thoreau’s and Eggleston’s theme before Twain’s), with utopian thought, with the genre of the travel book or of a novel dealing with the American continent (DeForest, not to mention Cooper, preceded Twain in both genres), with the theme of Ameri- can Innocents in Europe (shared _ bril- liantly by James), and so on. What did Twain read? Whom did he admire? What was his intellectual life? His sense of the art of the novel (the subject of a brilliant essay by Twain on Howells, here unmentioned)? There is a genuine piece of literary history relegated to a footnote, while the history of social, technical and political institutions fills many paragraphs, ahd identical quota- tions or information concerning Twain’s view of H. H. Rogers, H. W. Beecher’s opinion of his sister, Howells’ comment on Twain’s frequent dinners, and the size of the Twain estate in 1963 are repeated needlessly. Reacting, perhaps, against the focus of other books on the literary Twain, Kaplan deals chiefly with the Clemens-making Twain; but to the extent that he sacrifices Twain for Clemens he is both false to the balance implied in his title and to our reasons for caring at all about Mr. Clemens. Nor does he really consider the im- portance of the connections or shifts be- tween one book and another of Twain’s; or that Twain’s art has a development of its own which runs parallel to, but is not entirely a reflection of, the artist’s life. Preoccupied with the life of the man, Kaplan misses the life of the art. It is not surprising, but it is dismay- ing, that he devotes many more pages to Twain’s schemes for the Paige Type- setter than to Huckleberry Finn. Both the accomplishments and defects of the book are aspects, I think, of the form in which Kaplan has chosen to tell his tale. Twain’s “central drama,” he tells us immediately, “was his dis- covery of the usable past.” Kaplan, too, has discovered that the past, Twain’s past, is usable, and part of the great drama of this book consists in his ef- forts to make it available to us. Not only apt parallels but direct allusions to the present—to Hal Holbrook, Earl K. Long and Billie Sol Estes, for instance—ap- pear in the book as hints of this. To make the past freely available, within the general chronology imposed by the exigencies of biography, he has aes Pre-Publication Notict®™™ COMING: A Serious Call to an American (R)Evolution THE POLITICAL ACTIVIST’S GUIDE TO ’68 ELECTION ISSUES by N. Emorey With appendix abstract of Yale University Symposium on ‘‘The Shape of the Future’’ “Professor-of-humanities N. Emorey has here contributed to humanity. The most effective statement yet to emerge from the New Left, it is certain to be one of the talked-about books of the ‘68 campaign. Long live the (r)evolution and the F.E.A.- S.LB.L.E. program! Along these lines must lie the salvation of America and the hope of the world.” —Jerome Fllison ae $1.95 ($2 postpaid) Cloth $2.95 ($3 postpaid) =e ees ORDER FORM -----4. | suLLDoG BOOKS, Box 1078 I | New Haven, Conn. 06504 | Check enclosed for copies of Emorey’s : i Serious Call. i | Name | | Address ———————_—_————————————. | City State Zip i *First-from-the-press: copies ordered before Aug. 15 will be numbered First Editions. Bookstores: Trade discounts observed; consignment. 25 | developed a kind of meditative history in which, speculating about a life which is all known to him, there is no suspense, no real unfolding. He moves freely back and forth: anticipating events from present causes, tracing out the history of Twain’s lifelong responses all at once, demonstrating how Twain’s attitudes and satiric material were accumulating. Like Henry Adams, in his History of the Administrations of Jefferson and Madi- son, he wisely, but without distortion, watches his hero kicking and gesticulat- ing on the flood of time, which will at last immerse him. And like Henry James, in biographies of Hawthorne and William Wetmore Story, he enters the life of that frail being with enormous sympathy and tenderness. He sees Twain sharply, but with great understanding, as he moves back and forth along the lines of force in his subject’s career. Such free shifting has its dangers, and for all his skill Kaplan does not entirely avoid them. The chief danger is that he will confuse one time with another, Describing Henry Ward Beech- er’s preaching style in 1867, he says that the minister “described himself as a ‘cordial Christian Darwinist’”’—a_ re- mark which Beecher could hardly have made for almost twenty years. Again, when Kaplan describes Twain’s meet- ing with Lewis Carroll (another writer interested in the “double”) in May, 1873, “the shyest full-grown man, except Uncle Remus, I ever met,” he quotes Twain as saying, although Twain did not meet Joel Chandler Harris (Remus: an- other “double” figure) until 1882. Kaplan thus slides easily from time to time (and, in a book where the index is imperfect and documentation is very sketchy, he does not give accurate documentation for either of these quotations), occasion- ally falling into the trap of a method whose generally brilliant success is to that extent affected. But these are minor skepticisms in the light of the book’s successes. Twain’s eccentricities are his own and not his author’s. Kaplan’s style is his own and not the result of stringing together his subject’s cynical or witty remarks, a decided danger to which biographers of humorists often surrender. Kaplan is himself witty and wise, involved in re- sponsiveness but detached in judgment. If his book does not give the full measure of justice to Twain’s work, and should be supplemented by those of Walter Blair, Henry Nash Smith and James Cox, still, it provides a rich un- derstanding of Twain’s life that none of these can give. Taking them all together, with Kaplan’s book undoubtedly serving as the base, they give us fully and elaborately Mr. Clemens and Mr. Twain. Nation Book Marks THE NAKED IMAGE: Observations on the Modern Theatre. By Harold Clurman. The Macmillan Co. 312. pp. $6.50. The most recent collection of reviews and essays on the theatre by the drama critic of The Nation. PLOT AGAINST THE PATIENT. By Fred J. Cook. Prentice-Hall. 373 pp. $595, An account of the American medical establishment’s lax standards, red tape, inadequate maintenance and_ staffing, insufficient funds and overcharges, by a master of the exposé technique, whose articles frequently appear in The Na- 7i0On, THE GLOSSY RATS. By David Cort. Grosset & Dunlap. 241 pp. $5. A strongly opinionated man _ has _ his lively and literate say on a wide variety of topics. Many of the book’s essays 26 appeared in the pages of The Nation. THE UNFINISHED REVOLUTION: Russia 1917-67. By Jsaac Deutscher. Oxford University Press. 115 pp. $3.75, An assessment of half a century of Soviet history questioning whether the Russian Revolution has fulfilled its hopes, and what its significance is for our age and generation. Of special in- terest is the material dealing with the divergent and clashing interests of Rus- sia and China. STALIN: A_ Political Biography. By Isaac Deutscher. Oxford University Press. 661 pp. $12.50. Paper $2.95. A new edition of what is considered the definitive life of Stalin, first pub- lished in 1949. Fresh material includes an introduction to the 1961 printing, plus a new preface, and an extensive closing chapter dealing with Stalin’s last years. Mr. Deutscher is a frequent contributor to The Nation. AND CHAI Carl Oglesby and Richard Shaull. Macmillan Co. 248 pp. $5.95, Not a collaboration, but a confronta- tion of two men of differing back- grounds and points of view about Amer- ican society and foreign policy in an era of revolutionary change. Part One, by Carl Oglesby, is “Vietnam Crucible,” and Part Two, by Richard Shaull, is entitled “Revolution: Heritage and Contemporary Option.” Mr. Oglesby’s report on the International War Crimes Tribunal appeared in The Nation re- cently. THE ACCIDENTAL PRESIDENT. By Robert G. Sherrill. Grossman Publishers. 282 pp eo. In part a personal portrait of the man Sherrill refers to as a “fascinatingly rousing bastard,” this work also cuts neatly through the myth of LBJ as master legislator and _ liberal New Dealer. The factual material on John- son’s early career in Texas is particu- larly interesting. Mr. Sherrill is The Nation’s Washington correspondent. ANATOMY OF THE STATE DE- PARTMENT. By Smith Simpson. Houghton Mifflin Co. 285 pp. $5.95. A lucid history of a “hodge-podge pseudo organization.” A section of this work appeared in The Nation. F, SCOTT FITZGERALD; The Last Laocoon. By Robert Sklar. Oxford Uni-. versity Press. 376 pp. $8.50. A study of the work of Fitzgerald from his early collegiate fiction through The Last Tycoon, and a fascinating. account of the literary world of the twenties and thirties as seen through Fitzgerald’s life and work. Mr. Sklar has written a number of essays for The Nation. THE GOODBYE LAND. By Jose Yglesias. Pantheon Books. 218 pp. $4.95, An American’s search to recover the ~ story of his father’s life and death in Spain, by a frequent contributor to | The Nation. i VIETNAM: THE LOGIC OF WITH- § @ DRAWAL. By Howard Zinn. Beacon Press. 131 pp. $4.95, { The best statement of the case for. American withdrawal that has yet ap- | peared. A section of this work appeared — in The Nation. : THE NATION / July 3, 1967 one wanted to hazard a generalization, might be split into two broadly opposing ‘camps: the tendency to conserve the “purity” of its various media, and the impulse to mix their properties, and blur their boundaries. As a statement, | this is wobbly enough, but it is tem- | porarily useful. For it focuses attention on a long-standing controversy: the de- ‘sire to fend off “life” in an effort to create a self-contained aesthetic entity, _ felationally compressing metaphors of _ Outside energies—which is resisted by the _ equally strong will to diffuse, tweak and bluff response by a more activist, un- structured notion of art, incorporating _ Teal objects, and often seeking ironically to change the status of the non-art sur- - roundings. In this metaphysical argu- Ment, the issue of abstraction versus ‘Tepresentation is secondary, or irrelevant. _ Though both sensibilities (whose com- _ mon origin is Cubism) are elitist, they conflict in a struggle between reduc- _ tion and extension, optimism and _ pes- _ simism, faith in rationality, and formal Manipulation opposed to skepticism about the effectiveness of form itself. A protagonist of the first camp will _ view a work of the second as “theatri- cal”; his own efforts, in turn, will be considered “cosmetic.” Yet while they Tadically differ as to the negotiability of conventions and moral accent (e.g., the permissible limits of what can be done), both these antitheses are irreplace- able constituents of the avant-garde, lending it its characteristic tautness and _ Vitality. Because contemporary criticism has fot yet satisfactorily formalist’ position, the appearance of _two books by practitioners of mixed edia, both extraordinary minds, is wel- come. The formulations in Claes Olden- _ burg’s Store Days and Allan Kaprow’s _ Assemblage, Environments, Happen- ings are, above all, vivid. They seem to me, in addition, far-reaching and pro- found. Being artists, these men tend to be partisan and self-interested; but it redeems their texts that they are also exceptionally self-critical. __ Despite the undiscipline of his notes, Oldenburg is perhaps the more literary of the two; he is certainly the more poetic. “I am for the art of conversation between the sidewalk and a blind man’s : “metal stick. . . .” “I am for an art that is political-erotical-mystical, that does something other than sit on its ass in a museum.” In comparison, one finds in Kaprow: “. . . A cough from the alley. You giggle, talk to someone non- E NATION / July 3, 1967 transcended a. STORE DAYS: Documents from The Store (1961) and Ray Gun Theater (1962). Selected by Claes Oldenburg and Emmett Williams. Something Else Press. 152 pp. $10. ASSEMBLAGE, ENVIRON- MENTS, HAPPENINGS. Text and design by Allan Kaprow. - Harry N. Abrams. 341 pp. $25. chalantly while eating strawberry jam sandwiches. . . Electric fans start wafting breezes of ‘New Car’ smell past your nose as leaves bury heaps of a whining, burping, foul, pinky mess.” These utterances have their correlation in William Burroughs’ reader-bugging language, his ecstatic loathing, that has its own analogies in Miller and Mailer, and that finds expression also in Ed- ward Kienholz’s gruesome environments. It is important to locate this disgust filled with enjoyment, this aesthetic diarrhea, not only because it is an authentic re- action to the American scene but be- cause, in blending fundamentally opposed effects, it can attempt to comprehend a long unrealized synesthesia in the arts. Not that Oldenburg’s Store, a Second Street establishment, rented at Christ- mas, 1961, and filled with plaster edi- bles and products of his own viscous imagining, was greatly synesthetic. The present book comprises a kind of desul- tory sales pitch to his own consciousness, on the implications of this project. Ini- tially, one finds Oldenburg forcing him- self to “think” outside bourgeois values: Perhaps this can’t be done, but why should I even want to create “art”— that’s the notion I can’t get rid of. As- suming that I wanted to create some- thing, what would that something be? Just a thing, an object. Art would not enter into it. I make a charged object (“living”). An “artistic”? appearance or content is derived from the object’s reference, not from the object itself or me. These things are displayed in gal- leries, but that is not the place for them. A store would be better... . Museum in b(ourgeois) concept equals store in mine. After all, the last thing a bourgeois public would consider an artist to be is a storekeeper. It is interesting that Kaprow, too, rejects the gallery or museum, even any cubicle, for a display for works of art —but on the ground that these places too rigidly condition the spatial exten- sions he envisages. Whereas Oldenburg can say: “My life is a history of rooms in which I am self-locked in. My life is also a history of frantic ‘escapes’ which come to nothing, back to a room....I have had something like affairs with rooms.” Forhim, meanings saturate every- thing, and what is to be done, as a re- sult, is to invert them, turn them inside out (“Store—Eros”). For Kaprow, the artist must accept whatever the nature of his improbable materials, his new subject matter, functionally making sure that they have not been cliché-ridden by previous usage. These differences of ap- proach—the one instinctively social and Dada, the other, faithful in its logic, even to anarchy—yet seem mutually in- formed by an unacknowledged presenti- ment) of nothingness, as if experience were so ungraspable that a deluge of sensations must be substituted for it. Whether emotional or pragmatic, whether zealous for an audience or indifferent to one, the experience of these two men is that the greater their intimacy with the literal stuff of actuality, the deeper are they infected by a sense of unreality. Since habitual behavior and fixed catego- ries choke that sense of life being lived in which they want almost to immolate themselves, they mount an attack, in an — ever maddened, often self-defeating whirl, against the real enemy: the capacity of the human mind to make distinctions. The Store was already a The Nation SUBSCRIBERS’ BOOK SERVICE Offers the following at a discount: Price () AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF BERTRAND RUSSELL, 1872-1914 (Little, Brown & “fs Gg BCDB) eee osteoeneinarerenereret tennant te Som $6.35 O HELL’S ANGELS: A Strange and Terrible Saga by Hunter Thompson (Random House, $4.95) neesnsensennnesresseeannseie $3.95 O THE ACCIDENTAL PRESIDENT by Robert G. 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When order- ing, please give title, author and pubs lisher, if possible. 7-3-67 eee 27 fusion of sculpture, objects and paint- ing; a parallel step was to push off into theatre, The great paradox of those sections in Store Days which have to do with Oldenburg’s happenings, is that a radi- cally sophisticated and problematic con- cept of theatre was generated by an out- standing naiveté. “Theater,” he says, “is the most powerful art form there is be- cause it is most involving . . . but it is forever becoming lost in trivialities . . Tealism .. . distance . . . commercial pressures. . . . I no longer see the distinc- tion between theater and visual arts very clearly . . . distinctions I suppose are a civilized disease.” And indeed, there is something savage and childlike about him, such that he is able to conceive of a theatre of objects, in which even people are regarded as things. But this becomes a form of imitation, con- taminated by an overwhelming animism: “my desire to imitate extends to the event or activity of making the thing I imi- tate. In one instance that is to be for a moment a sign-painter, in another, for a moment, a baker of cakes, in another the cutter of suits. . . . In some cases especially, but really in all, it is neces- sary to be for a moment nature her- self, if this is possible.” But, of course, it is not, for which reason his theatre, in fact all his work, melds extreme arti- fice and extreme spontaneity. The mid- dle range of experience is dropped out, or rather, it emerges only as the nominal heading for a_ series of elaborate charades. To pretend not to know the difference between making and repre- senting, this pretension, once enacted, brings crashing down the whole dramatic structure of plot, character and sequence, as it is known in Western theatre. According to the prime exegete of Happenings, Michael Kirby, such an attitude has extraordinary repercussions | WANT TO NUCLEAR WAR. 28 A HUMAN BRIDGE TO RUSSIA WITH CITIZEN EXCHANGE CORPS This Summer Send me FREE reprints of N. Y. Times editorials telling how CITIZEN EXCHANGE CORPS (CEC), a non-political, non-profit organization acts to implement Presidents Elsenhower, Kennedy and Johnson’s policy of ‘Building Bridges’ to Russia, Tell me how I can participate this summer in a 3 week CEC program of people-to-people contact and seminars that is open to Americans of all ages and occupations. . . HOW THIS PROGRAM CAN BE A MAJOR STEP TOWARD PREVENTING 3 WEEK EXCHANGE VISITS LEAVE NEW YORK CITY July 14 — Aug. 5 — Aug. 26 or Meet CEC in Moscow et SS Se SS NS ES SS SS ee ee ee ee ee ee ee ee es ee seeeserees eeereesees POMC OU OER ER BOTT SEO ETOS TOSSES EET EEE ESHER BREE EHTS SSE TESEEOEEES SEAUG ONccls css batbesss ossccrasbasacnvcrtines CAD cased sreeeeeees eveereeeee on the traditional concept of acting and performance. “Acting,” writes Kirby, “might be defined as the creation of character and/or place: details of ‘who’ and ‘where’ the performer is are neces- sary to the performance. The actor functions within subjective or objective person-place matrices.” Oldenburg’s per- sonages, on the other hand, are non- matrixed (like musicians). They are what they are, even when “performing”; their situations are real situations—literalist. Obviously, this literalism does much to destroy the conventional notion of “role”; it also works forcefully to collapse the contextual meaning of events, making them infinitely more ambiguous than in the normal theatre. As often happens in hybrids, how- ever, one finds the introduction of in- gredients antithetic to the various media involved, with a consequent threat to resolution. Something of the kind goes far to explain the general failure of the “Nine Evenings of Art and Technology” last year at a New York armory. If the spectator is oriented toward the visual arts, he tends to “look” and to wander in his looking, structuring his experience as he goes along. If he is primarily theatre-based, he will be more inclined to “watch,” and to be concen- trated and obedient in his watching. The events I mention vacillated between instilling the condition of the one, only to trip it up by demands implied by the tradition of the other. This is not an accusation premised on an idea of media purity but, rather, awareness of the fact that the temporal and attention claims of two arts, when flushed out- ward, can awkwardly back into each other. If this means, perhaps, that the new contexts have not had sufficient time to jell coherently, it follows, also, and absurdly, that the piece must flee HELP BUILD AND Mail to: CITIZEN EXCHANGE CORPS. 550 Fifth Ave. (Dept. N-7) New York City 10036 es 4 FIRS NL Ny, any thought of contexts, at least in sense that they may bind it in. Such, at any rate, is a major theme — of Allan Kaprow’s book. -Its short text commences only on page 146, behind a — great clump of photographs of happen- ings, and after it has been explained that the photos refer to their models, “but strangely, as would a movie taken _ of a dream, stopped at unexpected in- tervals.” The text itself has been subject to constant revisions, since first under- taken in 1959 (in explanation of his own activities), stopping only now, rather grandly, and in a form so permanent as to be untypical of the author. For this genealogist of changing spaces and for- mats, who briefly sketches their history in visual art, a book must have been a sorry compromise, whose advantage consisted only in its didacticism. The lat- ter appears in his explorations of what can be deduced, or made meaningfully hypothetical, from the pictorial direc- tions involved in “relinquishing the goal of picture making entirely by accepting the possibilities that lay in using a broken surface and a non-geometric field.” That is why Kaprow can imagine the duration of an “event” as being theoretically with- out limit—occurring over years or life- times (and discontinuously within them), and it is the cause, too, of his suggestion that an artistic action can be performed intercontinentally, infra-privately or, for that matter, in thought alone. Because of this immense and astonishing idea that the dimension of a “work of art” can be so elastic or omnipresent (viz., Early Bird television satellite), Kaprow parts ways with the Dada manifestations that other- wise would have been his normal point of departure. Neither politically moti- vated nor philosophically alienated, as they were, he conjures scenarios (by what means we shall see in a moment), quite in advance of seeing in them any intelligible program of content. That he is able to read this development out of — the history of modern art does not pre- — vent him from being, perhaps unwitting- ly, hostile to its overall tenets. This eminently logical, articulate and ~ practical man does not hesitate to call — into question principles which have long ~ safeguarded the informational and com- ~ municative basis of art. Thus, the no- ~ tion that a work of art is created by — one man (or is overseered by him), that — he is in willful control of what he does, — his craftsmanly execution commensurate __ with his intention, that his work is meant © to be embodied in permanent form, are ~ conditions which Kaprow considers dis- — pensable. He was willing to sacrifice all these as it “became necessary as means . were sought to adequately embody those — subtle and spontaneous feelings and re- — THE NATION / July 3, 1967 ’ (Italics mine.) It might be that change has always been a ominent theme of art, but here there is no inhibition against thinking of it as actual. Suggesting a ‘“form-principle _ for an art which is never finished”— “something to be renewed in different forms like fine cooking or the seasonal _ changes, which we do not put into cur pockets, but- need, nevertheless’— _ Kaprow’s perspective is far superior to di _ the merely topical references of a throw- away technological culture. Nature, the _ weather, above all, other people, may alter or reapportion the artist’s materi- als as he himself has been willing to see fit, or to take in as a bonus surprise. “Using an extreme logic,” he says, “this could imply that anything may be art and anyone may be an artist, but in _ plain fact it only extends the right of sensitive perception and creative activity _ to those who wish to respond appropri- _ ately, and artists usually proffer this invitation with discretion.” But if chance, in many cases, is too un- cooperative or indeterminate an action, _ Kaprow, going further, says: “Chance by- _ passes failure by building non-control _ into the work as a desideratum.” Aban- _ doning order on a manipulatively con- scious level, the idea has been to sub- _ Stitute for it a completely arbitrary and _ external kind of order. With all the dice throwing and number gambling that Kaprow argues for, following John Cage, under whom he once studied, I am out of sympathy. What can be stated most positively in its defense, that it brings with it something previously unknown at its every turn, is outweighed by its _ extreme deficiencies in effectiveness, and _ something more, I think—its — _ Sophical facetiousness. How can one pre- M _ tend to shed responsibility for an occur- iw ey’ me "HAROLD CLURMAN London-Paris EGne of the unmistakable successes of ; the London season is The Promise by _ Alexei Arbuzov, a prominent Soviet _ dramatist. The play was first presented _ in Oxford. Having been cordially greet- _ ed by the press, it was brought to the _ small Fortune Theatre in the capital where it has been playing to packed _ houses since its opening last winter. __ The success is something of a phe- -momenon, for Arbuzov has written a Biche, sentimental play of young folk THE NATION / July 3, 1967 as st vere the iwing expression philo-> tence, by programing it on a system to which one is completely indifferent? (Further, if one chance system is favored because it tends to produce more inter- esting results, then it is not so chancy.) Even more, if one alternative, theoretical- ly speaking, is just as good as another, then what you are doing ceases to have any evaluational density, any moral charge, and undermines the point (the claim that it is “our need for discovery or risk”) of doing it in the first place. In addition, the deliberately nonorganic quality in the relationship between cause of action and the nature of material, creates far more difficulties of compre- hension than it elicits scenes of wonder. I may be willing to undergo the trials of an extremely antagonistic, disrespect- ful artistic vision if it is made evident to me that there are eventually substances or sensations upon which I can work; but in this aesthetic, substance can just as easily evaporate as it may randomly and evanescently fall into some satisfying pattern. At such a moment, I am not prepared to be fulfilled merely by the “spirit” of accident. The literalness of the objects or events does not com- pensate for the intangibility of the art. But then, literalness is inimical to the allusiveness and metaphor by which synesthesia has always been constrained to operate in the past. To overstep them is only to court the documenary or the trivial. Still and all, it is hard to be ungrate- ful to Kaprow’s rigor, or to be unadmir- ing even, or especially when, he himself is aware of the distance he has traveled toward impasse and impossibility. With- out the sense of this impasse, and the pressures he and many others put upon them, our options would be far fewer. and the dialogue in our aesthetic life considerably less rich. THEATRE IN EUROPE II in the midst of the siege of Leningrad, of friendship born from shared hard- ship, of true love, of self-abnegation, of the stirring of conscience to renewed and ever finer effort. There is something dubious about every one of the play’s moves; nothing is wholly convincing. Yet it is a popular and critical hit. While it is true that geniality is al- ways a favored ingredient in show busi- ness, there are two aspects (besides a pleasing cast) that explain the play’s ap- peal to its London audience. It is both serious and affirmative. The more high- ly regarded of the new plays London y has been seeing for the past ten years have been bitter, and made even more acrid by their humorous garb. They have jeered at existence. In typical Soviet fashion, The Promise is bracing. One senses a kind of benevolent collu- sion between playwright and public. The English audience, sufficiently de- pressed by both fact and fiction, wants bolstering. The play provides a “lift.” Then too the play gives evidence of self-criticism; it is critical of the trend of Soviet life. That strikes the English as a sign of progress in the Socialist state with which the English people, more than we, hanker for an entente. Through its thin garment of humble heroics, comradely good nature and ~ manly resolve, the play suggests that the mood of idealistic struggle of the war days has since given way to a rather slothful acceptance of petty bourgeois mediocrity. In The Promise Arbuzov mildly urges the Soviet folk to recover the hardy aspiration of the period in which their nation’s very existence was threatened. This may to an extent ap- ply to England itself. The acting is nice and very English. Pretty, robust and charming, Judi Dench (the Juliet of Zefferelli’s Romeo and FOR WRITERS! — a ra Borich your style through ~ Philosop Herbert Spencer’s and Hdgar Pee as See Allan Poe’s classic principles ‘pyHerbe that have influenced many of the world’s great authors. q The Pao ts A help for writers eager to Ir) taal get published. Send $1.00 to U Pla Pd or PAGEANT PRESS iE 101 5th Ave. N.Y. 3 Dept. N The Best Way To Get NATION SKS eee ee ee ee SS ee THE NATION 7-3-87 j 233 Sixth Ave., New York 10014 () One Year, $10 (1 Two Years, $18 C1 6 Months, $6 O Bill Me (0 Payment Enclosed (Foreign and Canadian Postage $1 a year extra) NADIE cssscncisocrocssnternemseurnnsermuecomeersreitms tren oats ADDRESS. cccccvesewsenemseninteiosirninan ceca) COLT. scccrtvtssbsisnsoosctritetsipnver cert reeernsomsesan eorners SEDAN Ely error totter onstres ZIP NO. sersssrorns caer 29 MESSAGE TO MICHAEL I wish to say that a mouth lies other where than where it is North — West — South of me somewhere It is invisible and unattainable I talk with it always . PAUL BLACKBURN Juliet at the Old Vic) is particularly good in the third act in which the be- draggled waif of the first act has be- come a dignified doctor and wife. In the earlier scenes Miss Dench forces her youthfully eager impetus too much. Still I could not help noticing that the more heartily Russian the male actors try to be the more British “boy scout” and slightly camp they seem to become. I make this perhaps ungracious com- ment because it is reported that while Miss Dench will not be present when the play comes to Broadway, the two men are to be. Since the question of English actors on our stage has recently become a matter of some controversy, I feel obliged to assert that if ever English actors were mot needed for the proper presentation of a play among us, The Promise is a case in point. Paris has its three subsidized (national) theatres: the venerable Comé- die Francaise, the more adventurous Théatre de France (Jean Louis Bar- Tault’s company) and the Théatre Na- tional Populaire now under the guidance of an excellent actor, Georges Wilson. In these theatres (and during the spring months), with the festival visits of for- eign troupes which are collectively ad- vertised as the Théatre des Nations, worthy productions of interesting plays may be enjoyed. At the Comédie Francaise, to cite one instance, a new production of Moliére’s Dom Juan has aroused considerable in- terest: applause from the progressive forces, condemnation from the tradi- tionalists. Both factions seem to me misguided but the play itself merits consideration. It is much less frequently given than any of Moliére’s other plays because it isn’t, and is hardly intended to be, particularly funny. It verges on anger. While Moliére is passionately on the side of the angels, the play in its time, and to some degree even today, affronts both the respectable (conservative) members of society and the cynics. For Dom Ju- 30 an’s lack of hypocrisy, his witty defense of profligacy and his even bolder defi- ance of moral and religious strictures are stated with such splendid candor that he engages our sympathy. It is perhaps significant that Moliére makes Sgnarelle—an intimidated. valet, almost a “slave’—the spokesman for virtue. When he asks his master what he believes in, Dom Juan replies: “I be- lieve that two and two make four and four and four are eight,” to which the bondsman retorts, “Your religion, I see, is arithmetic.” The rejoinder has a pe- culiarly contemporary ring. The Moliére revival has been staged by a director associated with the more forward looking wing of the Parisian profession. But the French theatrical avant-garde is hardly the counterpart of that in Eastern Europe. In this respect, Dom Juan is an example of the slow pace and feeble accomplishment of the stage in Paris today. The settings for Dom Juan, prettified “Noguchi” without that artist’s originali- ty, are bronzed abstract shapes. A warm amber light plays on them, adding a glamour that negates the severity I as- sume their menacing contours are in- tended to convey. The costumes worn by the principal characters resemble blue patent leather space suits. One wonders how they are related to the text—except as they differ from the routine dress we are accustomed: to see at the Comédie Francaise. Is it possible that the director wishes to imply that space men are the aristocrats of our time? The staging too attempts to strike a “modern” note by having several scenes played in semi-obscurity with the actors placed at a considerable distance up- stage, their backs turned to the audience. Though proficient, the acting reveals nothing new, relying as it does on well- articulated and energetic speech in the best conservatory manner. Apart from the vogue of Pinter, Osborne and Albee, the will to bring a draft of fresh air onto the now languish- ing French stage is observed in the care- fully designed nonrealistic settings em- ployed in such productions as those of Arrabal’s The Architect and the Em- peror and Pirandello’s To Find Oneself. Arrabal, a Spaniard by the Seine, is thought to be sounding a chord of his own: ritualistic, improvisatory, lyrically vehement, anarchic, grotesquely and vio- lently comic. But I found little in The Architect and the Emperor, a symbolic two-character play, which does not de- rive from every one of the theatrical fauves or “wild men” from Jarry to Genet. The high point of Arrabal’s play ns re ae 1M re o> is ~ ; : a ¢ * ; , eit Che . 2 ‘is a scene in which the Acchitect, ie + Common Man Jost on a mythical planet) chops the Emperor (ruler of Civiliza- tion) to bits—and eats him. For all its gestures of total freedom and ferocious — playfulness, I see’in the play merely an- other specimen of the up-to-the-minute trite. The setting in straw is a good-looking but dramatically irrelevant object, while the acting is strenuous with a fire that sheds neither heat nor light. For all that, the play is one of the season’s hits. Pirandello’s To Find Oneself is a largely discursive rehash of the dra- matist’s everlasting theme that we have no stable identity—the illustration in this ‘case is effected in the person of a star actress—and that to find oneself one must create a superself through art. The play merits attention not so much because of its author’s eminence as be- cause it is the most meticulously mounted production in Paris. The costumes are stylishly handsome, the sets have a kind of metallic and silky Cecil Beaton chic, -and the performance as a whole is rather special. The acting, with only one ranting ex- ception, avoids “emotion” and is de- liberately reduced to a flat declarative ~statement the director mistakenly takes for either Stanislavsky simplicity or Brecht calm. As a contrast to most Parisian acting, the result is something of an innovation, though it so happens that Pirandello requires Italian flame and flare rather than dispassionate sobriety. Yet with an expert company in which Delphine Seyrig (the lady of Last Year in Marienbad), beautifully gowned, speaks in a white voice of muted resonance through a mask of suppressed fervor suggesting mystery, the evening makes an uncommon though ultimately boring impression. Another and far more modest play which has been gratefully welcomed is Romain Weingarten’s Summer at the Théatre de Poche, seating about 150 persons. It is a wispy little thing in which the characters are two cats (I’m not using slang) and two children, a brother and sister. It is whimsy, tender and touching to a degree. It evokes the poetry of young people’s loneliness, awakening desire, growth and the secret germination of nature. Like many such things, the play is prolonged beyond the point of pleasure: brevity is the soul of whimsy. Neither London with its numerous actors of genuine ability nor Paris with its remainders of former brilliance re- veals the kind of theatre excitement one finds in Prague and Berlin. Events in these cities will be discussed in the next two “installments” of this account. THE NATION / July 3, 1967 ol tS Sap, - Rog: et a At Aa he 13 14 19 22 24 25 26 zi) ACROSS: What business firms establish might be above the article or under the picture. (5, 2, 6) Literary Greek-American painter. (5) Are some papers that give a negative rendering a little touchy? (9) One might find this lady in far removed environment—pleasantly out of this world. (9) Yet it might make the spirit strong! (5) Vessels had to get it clean, but that’s the price of socialized medicine! (4, 2, 6) Not a little ways out of the area, if so- called. (4, 8) Grown out of shape, like some of the numbers we get. (5) Backing up motion? (9) Not in dire trouble? That’s a matter of interpretation! (9) Start, or bring it back to service. (5) What might be worth two points with some competitions for light duty? (6, 7) DOWN: Stress the example being “Come live with me and be my love!” (6) Certainly not late breakfasting asso- ciated with one that might bring us the world news. (5, 4) Proving even the best coal’s likely to pre- sent difficultiés. (9) Were those who couldn’t learn the dance pattern? (5) THE NATION / July 3, 1967 6 One is advised to look for them in the theater, made occasionally by actors. (5) 7 Indicates the documents are entirely all right, and the beginnings capital! (8) 8 Change one’s working hours? (5) 9 Well, it’s between physician and self, as an admonition! (7) 15 German district, or where the Old Man of the Mountain may be seen. (9) 16 Deviating. (9) 17 Wells, when productive, those in bed. (7) 18 Does it make the rest difficult to come by? (8) 20 One or two, for example, commonly con- clude. (6) 21 Urged to be might be. (5) 23 One who points the way is held up and wired for sound. (5) 24 Invertebrates shouldn’t be, but there’s an outside chance that they are. (5) might refer to like unpopular speakers SOLUTION TO PUZZLE NO. 1207 ACROSS: 1 Drinkwater; 6 and 24 Chickens; 10 Impugns; 11 Amnesia; 12 Enos; 13 Bene- fiting; 16 Suspend; 17 Hussars; 20 Send- off; 22 Attainment; 23 Mama; 25 Eternal; 26 Premier; 27 Sole; 28 Protesters. DOWN: 1 Drive-in theaters; 2 Implode; 3 Kegs; 4 Answers; 5 Erasers; 7 Hussite; 8 Charge d’affaires; 9 and 15 On pins and needles; 14 Alsatians; 18 Sitwell; 19 Sampler; 20 Sunspot; 21 Opaline. $9.95 each SAVE YOUR COPIES OF The NATION * Each file holds a i | Attractive and full year’s copies. practical for your home or office 3 for $8.25 ORDER NOW — send * Jesse Jones Vol- ume Files for every publication. * Covered in durable leather like Kivar, |check or money order. title embossed in 16 Kt gold. MAGAZINE FILE CO, 520 FIFTH AVENUE NEW YORK 36,N. Y. Satisfaction guaranteed PYRE E DESCRIPTIVE FOLDER UPON REQUEST PUBLICATIONS THE IDLER. $1 brings four Lively, offbeat, liberal monthly. different sample back issues. idler, 413B 6th St., N. E., Washington, D.C. 20002, “SELECTED POEMS” of George Flynn (Villiers of London $2.00) is “the most exeit- ing American poetry since Ezra Pound.”— James ‘Turner. Available in U.S. from the author at 544—82 St., Brooklyn 9, N.Y. 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THE COVERED WAGON, AL- gonquin 5-1788 (N.Y.C.) PERSONALS SALASACAN WALL-HANGINGS—Tapestries, hand-woven by the Salasacan Indians of the Andes. Moderately priced (C.D. Project). Write: ANDEAN, Box 2948, Quito, Ecuador, NON-PROFIT CAMP (interracial, interreli- gious) desperately needs donation of pianos, Tax deductible. Will pick up. Box 600, ¢/e The Nation, HELP! Girl, 21, with literary background needs stimulating work. Writer, researcher, girl friday, ete. Will relocate anywhere. Box 602, ¢/o The Nation. Advertising Rates CLASSIFIED F4e a line (6 words) Three-line minimum CLASSIFIED DISPLAY (minimum) $7.42 per inch The NATION 333 Sixth Ave., New York, N.Y. 10014 242-8400 sx Composition by R.C.R. Publication Printers Corp., N.Y.C. 31 ORIG ee Set i ‘ Forewarned Is Forearmed Tomorrow’s top news story need not always catch you unprepared. Time and again, The Nation has called attention to coming events well before they happened. Two examples: On November 19, 1960, we carried a story about the impending Bay of Pigs disaster, which actually occurred six months later. On March 27 of this year, we warned of the coming coup in Greece, four weeks before it hit the headlines. What Nation subscribers are reading this week is giving them a “sneak preview” of some of the front page news of next month, or next year. Why not join this group of alert and forewarned citizens? subseribe to The paperback edition of THE NEW STUDENT LEFT, an anthology edited by Mitchell Cohen and Dennis Hale with a foreword by Carey McWilliams, has much new material by Carl Oglesby, Paul Booth and others. “This is a very worthwhile book ...a@ primary source, a document in the history of a political movement, at once tough and naive, whose impact continues to be felt.” NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW FREE with each NEW subscription The NATION Herewith my order and payment for a NEW 333 6th Avenue subscription to The Nation. Please send my FREE New York, N.Y. 10014 copy of THE NEW STUDENT LEFT. (0 1 Year, $10 (2 Years, $18 [1 6 Mos., $6 (Foreign and Canadian Postage: $1 per year extra) Fill out the subscription coupon at left, and start receiving The Nation, this country’s oldest weekly journal of opinion. TOYNBEE & SNOW catvin BEDIENT ATION JULY 17, 1967.3 cems 406 | ROBERT G. SHERRILL : HATFIELD ... The Oregon Enigma a en Responsibilities of National Greatness Kenneth Burke Riess ae Letter from London Wie Catholic Crisis RAYMOND WILLIAMS oe Ti 65 te Cos aides ee eee ae TS aaa aaa ames a as = ae aes Sects, cpt msn a oe ec TE SOO GIRS IE eae a Le es Santee Sees se > 2 ee te Sete Fat GRESS — SSS = = . eR MIDDLE AMERICA Philip Roth’s Good Girl / SHAUN O0’CONNELL The Classroom Struggle / IVOR KRAFT Majority Cult in Levittown / ELMER BENDINER eee ae ee verry. pt 1TH8Nd JWYONI TNE Pl=-S1d H¥89-12-S Auyvuelt tie ah 91love vo anvONIquna LETTERS implication denied New York City Dear Sirs: Your May 29 issue has an article entitled “The Time-Life Caper: Brazil’s Yankee Network” by Ernest Blum, which contains the following statement: “Late last year, apparently as a result of the Time-Life revela- tions, the corporate links between Vision, Inc., of New York, and Visao were ostensibly severed.” This sentence implies that some unlawful or improper connection exists between Vision, Incorporated and Visao. This implication is false. Although Vision, Incorporated, pursuant to con- tract, acts as exclusive sales representative of advertising space in Visao in countries other than Brazil. . . . Vision, Incorporated has no direct or indirect interest in Revista Visao Ltda., a wholly Brazilian company which owns Visao, maintains no contacts with the editorial staff of Visao and does not interfere with or attempt to exercise any direct or indirect control or influence over the edi- torial policies or content of Visao or its orientation or management or over the policies, administration, orienta- tion or management of Revista Visao Ltda. In short, no relationship, other than our position as exclusive sales Tepresentative for advertising space in countries other than Brazil—a position wholly proper under Brazilian law and practice—exists between Vision and Revista Visao Ltda. and/or Visao.... William E. Barlow, President Vision, Incorporated non-play Washington, D.C. Dear Sirs: The New Yorker refuses to list the play Mac Bird! in its so-called “Conscientious Calendar of Goings On About Town.” This play has received both kudos and brickbats from very important critics. Mac Bird! is a very successful production in the largest theatre off-Broadway. There are also productions in London and San Francisco, with plans to mount it in Boston, Chicago, Washington, Los Angeles and perhaps other places. . . . When censor- ship occurs in the pages of a previously enlightened publi- cation, McCarthyism is closer at hand than we think... . Robert Bialek why U Thant withdrew London Dear Sirs: Your editorial statement (The Nation, June 19) that “the abrupt withdrawal of the UN forces gave Nasser the opportunity to precipitate the crisis’ would appear to be based on the picturesque simile coined by the British Foreign Secretary, Mr. Brown, in the House of Commons on May 31, and repeated by the Foreign Minister of Israel, Mr. Eban, to the Assembly on June 20: “It could not be right, when a fire is known to be imminent, to remove the fire brigade.” It may be useful, therefore, to take note of what was said by Secretary General U Thant on the latter occasion—after your state- ment was published—in condign refutation thereof and rebuke of its co-authors, if only to correct a false im- pression. U Thant told the Assembly that “unlike the UAR, which had agreed to UN troops forming a buffer on its side of the line, Israel had extended no such cooperation, despite the intent of the General Assembly resolution ten years ago. “Before receiving and replying to the UAR request for withdrawal of the UN force, he had raised with the Israeli UN delegate the possibility of stationing elements of the UN force on the Israeli side of the line, and was told that the idea was “completely unacceptable.” (Continued on page 52) 34 . tive to the creation of a Jewish state in the’ Middle East, — EDITORIALS Recalcitrant World The overwhelming influence of the two superpowers over the fate of small nations has been much deplored, not without reason. But from time to time a small nation seizes the opportunity to expose for all to see the limita- tions on the power of the great. Or, as in the recent in- conclusive voting in the UN General Assembly on the | Middle East problem, the small nations, though disagree- ~ ing among themselves, frustrate the superpowers so pain- — fully that one can almost forgive the latter for their mis- — guided policies. The prime example of a small nation humiliating a 7 large one is, of course, Vietnam vis-a-vis the United © States. True, the cost to the small country is appalling. © One has only to consider the ratio of North Vietnamese © and Vietcong dead to American and South Vietnamese 7} government losses, yet Americans are being shipped back 4 to the States in coffins at an annual rate of something ~ like 15,000, and the war drags on. Not all the power — | of the greatest military machine in all history is enough — to bring the Vietnamese to their knees. With each week of the excruciating spectacle the prestige of the United — States sinks a bit further, and the disgust of men of good — will mounts in proportion. Or take the efforts of the Soviet Union to equip the —} Arab world for its assault on Israel. The Soviet policy is — } not on the same level of iniquity as that of the United || States in Southeast Asia. The Soviets were at first recep- — and their alliance with the Arabs has the excuse of propin- quity. But the end result has been abject failure. The So- 5 viets could arm the Arabs but could not give them unity among themselves nor the ability to use modern arms to good effect. The Arabs served their patron quite as badly as the South Vietnamese generals have served the United ~ States. The Soviet effort to turn defeat into victory in the UN, — or at least to mitigate the debacle, is likewise a failure. © 1 Kosygin’s appeal to the Assembly merely emphasized the — Soviet discomfiture; if he had left the speechmaking to ~ Gromyko, the rebuff would have been less embarrassing, — Certainly the USSR is a superpower: its performance in i World War II, and its nuclear arsenal, can leave no doubt. _ But its diplomacy does not match its military prowess. | The last really brilliant Soviet diplomat was the first J foreign minister, Chicherin, who had served the Czar and 9 stayed on for the Bolsheviks. : Even the rightist press, however, cannot turn the So- viet defeat in the Assembly into an American victory. } Rallying its Latin American cohorts and anyone else it 9 could pull in, the United States did slightly better than — the Soviets, who never received more than 45 votes on { any paragraph of its own proposal. The Yugoslav draft, THE NATION / July 17, 1967 © h was the only real hope the Soviet bloc had, collected otes, with 46 against and 20 abstentions. The more sible Latin American draft, which linked Israel’s with- rawal to the end of the state of belligerency to which ‘the Arabs cling, was rejected, 57 to 43 with 20 absten- ‘tions. This was the motion the United States supported with every diplomatic resource and no doubt implied promises of reward and punishment—and it garnered 4 ' more votes than the Yugoslav proposal. Where do these events—in the Middle East, in Viet- 'mam, and at the UN—leave the superpowers? What ' emerges is that when the two great antagonists pursue t heir antagonism by all means short of nuclear war, they both lose. In one confrontation the Soviets may come out ahead, in another the United States, but in the end both cover themselves with shame. The great aggressors of the past could at least carve out world empires for themselves, but all the superpowers can achieve is chronic stalemate, with periodic threats of nuclear warfare which | may some day turn into the real thing. | This frustrating and dangerous immobility of the superpowers paralyzes the UN, but it would be a foolish exaggeration to say that the world organization has be- come useless. It did provide a means of ending the fight- ing at least some days sooner than would otherwise have _been possible. The UN role was much like that of the | referee in a prize fight where one man is decisively de- | feated and should be spared further punishment. Had it not been for the UN, the Israeli armies would probably | be in Amman, Damascus and Cairo. Second, the UN has provided a forum for debate in which the issues were | clarified for everyone who cared to listen. The fatal | weakness of the Arab case was that the leaders in Damas- us and Cairo had vowed to drive Israel into the sea, and ‘still will not give up their stand of perpetual belligerency. Some of Abba Eban’s arguments were as specious as those of any other foreign minister, but the essential reasonableness of the Israeli position emerged from the debates. Before there was a United Nations (and the earlier League of Nations), humanity had no such instru- ment of elucidation. The UN is the creation of nations try ing desperately, and with no assurance of success, to avert nuclear extermination by discussion and diplomacy. : _-It will never be more than that as long as the world is | divided into three camps—the American, the Soviet, and th (ose who occupy a precarious position in between. The UN can play a larger role, and the world can breathe More easily, only when the superpowers decide to co- operate, for the most part, instead of remaining frozen in antagonism. This was shown in the Glassboro meet- | ings. Little enough was accomplished, as far as the world | was told, in the Johnson-Kosygin confrontations, but the mere fact that they came together to talk inspired hope —not least among the American people. It was a slight indication of what could be accomplished if the super- ov ers would cease their posturing and engage in a tructive dialogue. THE NATION / July 17, 1967 a CC JUN IN THIS ISSUE a July 17, 1967 EDITORIALS 34 ARTICLES 38 Hatfield: The Oregon Enigma Robert G. Sherrill 44 Puerto Rico: Commonwealth, State or Nation? Guy T. Nunn 46 Responsibilities of National Greatness 51 Letter from London: The Catholic Crisis Kenneth Burke Raymond Williams BOOKS & THE ARTS 53 The Death of the Heart 54 The Classroom Struggle 55 Marianne Moore (poem) 57 Cult of the Majority 58 Mind-Expanding Verbs 59 The Gaze Behind the Lens 60 Theatre in Europe III 62 The Distance (poem) 63 Crossword Puzzle Shaun O’Connell Ivor Kraft Raymond Roseliep Elmer Bendiner Alan Trachtenberg Calvin Bedient Harold Clurman Lennart Bruce Frank W. Lewis Publisher Associate Publisher JAMES J. STORROW JR. GIFFORD PHILLIPS Editor CAREY McWILLIAMS Executive Editor ROBERT HATCH Copy Editor MARION HESS Theatre HAROLD CLURMAN Art MAX KOZLOFF Music BENJAMIN BORETZ Science CARL DREHER Advertising Manager MARY SIMON Associate Editor PHIL KERBY Literary Editor HELEN YGLESIAS Poetry Editor MICHAEL GOLDMAN Washington ROBERT G. SHERRILL Paris ALEXANDER WERTH London RAYMOND WILLIAMS Bonn c. AMERY Canberra c. P. FITZGERALD The Nation is published weekly (except biweekly in July and August) by the Nation Magazine Company and copyright 1967 in we U.S.A. by the Nation Associates, Inc., 333 Sixth Avenue, New York, N. ¥. 10014. Tel. CH 2-8400. West Coast office: 1256 Westwood Boulevard, Los Angeles, Calif. 90024. Tel.: GR 4-2533. Second class postage paid at New York, N.Y. and at additional mailing oifice. Subscription Price: One year, $10; two years, $18. Foreign and Canadian postage: $1 extra per year. : Change of Address: It is essential that subscribers ordering 9 change of address give four weeks’ notice and provide their old as well as their new address. Please give Zip Code numbers for both addresses. Information to Libraries: The Nation is indexed in Readers Guide to Periodical Literature, Book Review Digest, Book Review Index and the Public Affsirs Information Service. NATION ‘i? Combined with FRONTIER Was This Violence Necessary? Los Angeles The scene on June 23 was pure Hollywood, and the action occurred appropriately on the old Twentieth Cen- tury Fox movie lot, whose vast acreage is now the setting for Century City, the biggest planned complex of luxury office buildings, shopping centers and apartment houses in America. The backdrop was the crescent-shaped, block-long Century Plaza Hotel, where deep inside, the President of the United States dined with 1,000 guests at a $500-a-plate political fund-raising dinner. On the parkway facing the crowd of spectators were a tangle of TV cameras and clots of news reporters. Uni- formed, white-helmeted police, 1,300 of them, were every- where—on foot and roaring about on motorcycles and in siren-screaming squad cars. Early in the day, they had cordoned off a four-block area surrounding the hotel. Plain-clothes police mingled with the crowd, relaying in- formation to various police “command posts.” The parade of demonstrators against the war in Viet- nam, which had assembled in a park playground a few blocks away, started to empty slowly into the Century Plaza area about 7:30 P.M. Instead of moving past the hotel, the leading contingent stopped, and thousands of marchers, following behind, gradually filled half the six- lane avenue for two and a half blocks. The police parade permit, and a quickie court injunction issued only hours earlier, had required the parade not to pause at the hotel, but it was highly doubtful that most of the marchers were aware of this stipulation. Parade monitors urged people to keep moving, but their instructions could not be widely heard in the hubbub. At this point, the atmosphere was reminiscent of a Hollywood premiére, except for a small forest of picket signs, a few comparing President Johnson to Hitler. More typical were those reading, ‘“War is unhealthy for children and other living things.” Families with young children, some pushed in prams, were sprinkled through the crowd, predominantly middle class and white. As the jolly black-tie banquet got under way, a police captain outside stepped up to a loud-speaker system and ordered the crowd to disperse. Parade monitors tried, as they had before, to move the demonstrators along, but there was no perceptible movement. Afterward, many paraders insisted they had heard no warning. Thirty minutes passed, and then it was lights, camera, action, as though the scene had been thoroughly re- hearsed. A solid phalanx of police suddenly advanced into the mass of people, swinging night sticks as they reached the front lines, and turning a large part of the crowd back upon itself in panic. What had been an or- derly gathering turned into a stampede of frightened thou- sands. Motorcycle police drove a wedge into the center of the crowd, and officers on foot swarmed in to widen the gap and cut the demonstration in two. An officer of the American Civil Liberties Union who was on the march 36 trol in next year’s Presidential election. a 0 a said: “For the police, it was a safari. They were bottling people up and beating them. A dispersal could have been made without trouble.” His report could have been biased —he had been struck on the head by a police club. Was the police action necessary? One of the demon- | stration leaders put part of the blame on the “relative inexperience” of the organizers. “Our parade permit was totally inadequate, but we didn’t realize that,” he said. “We knew that some of the demonstrators planned to sit down, but we thought the parade would move around them, and they would be subject to arrest. We were not |} prepared for an attack by the police.” In the planning stage of the protest, wacky talk was heard of turning mice into the banquet room or setting off stink bombs in the} hotel. It was evident that some of the people involved, 7) especially the college youngsters, had no understanding |} of the tension that surrounds a visit of the President dur- ing a protest demonstration. They acted as though they | shad never heard of November 22, 1963, and Dallas. But) prior to the rush of the police against the crowd, there was no reported act of overt hostility directed against the or any move to approach the hotel. ¢ Chief of Police Tom Reddin said he ordered the dispersal solely for the “safety of the President of the United States during an extremely dangerous situation.” C.B.S. News suggested another reason by reporting rumors that the President had made it clear he did not want an unfriendly crowd near the hotel. It was hinted that they Secret Service passed the word on to the police. If this is true, it may pose an interesting problem of crowd con- Chief Reddin, as he deserted his “command post” and] } came into the street to congratulate his forces, said, “I think the message is out. Our city is not going to give in to lawbreakers.” As to the identity of the lawbreakers, Ds the American Civil Liberties Union offered a different) view: “What is clear beyond a shadow of a doubt is that the brutal conduct of the police in their method of dis-)} persing the alleged ‘illegal assembly’ was unwarranted, | unlawful, and a complete violation of the basic liberties) guaranteed by the Constitution.” . Hot Summers and Short Tempers The long hot summer, now at its zenith, has had only one accepted meaning in the American lexicon of politics. It is the time when disaffected Negroes take to the streets to burn and loot. It is the time when the police, and the National Guard when necessary, stand between the pil- lars of society and the ghetto rabble, which shows no gratitude for the goodies showered on it by Welfare and the Great Society. Further, according to the “right thinkers” of the middle class, law and order would not be thus flouted were it not for “outside agitators” who incite the no-good Negro poor to riot. (The most energeti¢ of these rabble rousers is, of course, Stokely Carmichael THE NATION / July 17, 1967 a ; m SUMMER SCHEDULE | During July and August, The Nation will appear on alternate weeks: forthcoming issues will be dated July 31, August 14 and August 28. H | : a. C | v ho, thanks to air travel, may pop up anywhere at any ti me to disturb the peace.) _ Sentiment in Congress to deal with this menace has been mounting to such a pitch that nearly 100 anti-riot bills have backed up in the House Judiciary Committee, | where Chairman Emanuel Celler stuck his hand in the dike to keep them from getting to the floor. However, i, after foretastes of the summer heat in Atlanta, Tampa, | Cincinnati, Buffalo, Boston and other cities, Mr. Celler a had to yield to the clamor. William C. Colmer of Missis- sippi, Chairman of the House Rules Committee, will bring @ out a bill if Celler doesn’t—and without a Celler amend- “ment to protect Negroes and other minority groups. ; The prospect is, then, for a bill that will make it a | federal crime to cross state lines with intent to “incite, | organize, promote or encourage” a riot. The penalties | ‘would be fines up to $10,000, or prison terms of up to | five years, or both. Tf all goes according to plan, the House will repeat its | performance in passing the flag-burning bill by a vote | of 385 to 16. For many Congressmen the twin occasions ® for parliamentary passion are Negro agitators and flag } burners, and in addressing their constituents they frequent- ly link the two as manifestations of a single Communist ; plot. When the flag-desecration bill was up for considera- | tion, Rep. Walter S. Baring (D., Nev.) called the flag | burners “dirty, long-haired, Communist-led beatniks.” Respect for Old Glory was upheld by another Southern Democrat, James A. Haley of Florida, who proposed | taking the miscreants 200 miles out in the ocean and |) sinking them with the anchor around their necks. “Let’s deal with these buzzards!” cried L. Mendel Rivers of South Carolina. It is safe to predict that they will be equally impassioned in dealing with anyone who urges the Negro to consider his grievances, and that they will be joined by the guardians of law and order from the North. | Of course there is always protection for the dissatisfied | and dissenting from the staunch exponent of freedom of i expression in the White House. But they had better not rely too much on support from that quarter, for there are signs that the long hot summer is fraying the Presi- dential nerves as well. Samuel Sharkey, Jr., of the Birming- ham News Washington staff, reports that at a meeting between Mr. Johnson and the AFL-CIO Building and ‘Construction Trades Council, the President complained E peace pickets in front of the White House. “It’s diffi- a now getting to the front gate without the dogs bark- ice, ” said the great defender of dissent. In a barely audible iiside he added, “I’m tired of them.” Let the agitators ‘and peaceniks take heed. i- THE NATION / July 17, 1967 Ghost Vote A new way to pervert the democratic process has been devised, or at any rate has just come to public notice. Elegant in its simplicity, it is essentially ballot-box stuff- ing on a grand and public scale, requiring no more than infinite gall on the part of the perpetrator. Students of political science—and political chicanery—have Rep. George P. Miller, a California Democrat, to thank for it. On the floor of the House late in June during a debate on the space agency’s budget, Miller falsified a teller vote in full view of his colleagues and of reporters in the press gallery. Perhaps this has been done many times before; perhaps not. This time, however, someone who saw it reported it in a newspaper the following day. Miller, chairman of the House Space Committee, was defending the NASA budget bill from an amendment which would require the agency to pay some attention to rudimentary safety precautions. The amendment was ‘offered by Rep. Donald Rumsfeld, an Illinois Republican who serves on Miller’s committee. A teller vote was called for. This is an evasive par- liamentary trick used to poll the House without placing individual members on the record; who, after all, wishes to be recorded as voting against safety for the astronauts? Under House rules, Rumsfeld and Miller were ap- pointed tellers. First those in favor trooped up the aisle between the two tellers as Rumsfeld counted and Miller watched (along with other witnesses on the floor and in the gallery). Rumsfeld was seen to count 88 members, and duly reported 88 ayes to the chair. Then came Miller’s turn. A press gallery observer counted 77 members as passing up the aisle, but Miller announced the count as 101. He was not challenged, and this artifice gave him the decision even though he lacked the actual votes. Rumsfeld was asked later if he had noticed the dis- crepancy. “Of course I did,” he replied, “but what should I have done, call him a liar?” The answer is, obviously, yes, but that is not how the game is played in Congress. There has never been a challenge to a teller vote, accord- ing to House Parliamentarian Lewis Deschler. Apparently a “gentlemen’s agreement” operates in such cases, making it difficult for the citizens to be properly represented by their Congressmen. This time, however, honesty won out—the same amendment came up again as part of a package and won handily on a roll-call vote. The Negro and Vietnam Since Martin Luther King’s assumption of leadership in a joint peace-civil rights movement, he has been singled out for a barrage of attacks, some snide, some vicious. The more virulent of these assaults, however, usually con- tain a mitigating clause: namely, that King is not quite as detestable as McKissick and Carmichael and those other fiends who describe Vietnam as a “war of color,” a “race war” and the like. Granting the courage and dedication 37 a ee SE ——————— eee of the leaders of this wing, one may feel that their rhetoric is a net contribution to the cause of those who oppose them. Seldom in history has flamboyant and careless exhortation advanced a good cause. If by a war of race is meant that we are in Vietnam because the Vietnamese (or the Chinese) have a different skin color, the charge falls of its own weight. General Maxwell Taylor is quite plausible when he says that we would fight “the fairest of the fair” if we thought they were “betraying” us by inaugurating a revolution of a type we did not approve. The real question is this: does the American Negro have good reason to feel that he is being victimized in this war? Rep. Augustus Hawkins of Southern California, himself a Negro, has done some research on the subject (Congressional Record—House, April 18, p. 4283). Sum- marized, his findings are: (1) The present draft boards are with few exceptions “small independent kingdoms” heavily weighted in favor of age, white skin and service in past wars. They operate with practically unfettered power and, as others than Mr. Hawkins have observed, with the utmost caprice and non-uniformity. (2) Because of educational discrimination and other disadvantages, only about half of the Negroes in the pre- ferred age group qualify for service, whereas three- quarters of the white youth are acceptable. But in the qualifying groups, only 5 per cent of the Negroes can obtain deferment as college students, whereas 95 per cent of the whites are so deferred. The result is an induc- tion rate for Negroes about twice as high as for eligible whites. Some time back, Mr. Johnson, “surprised” by sugges- tions that color might be a factor in the draft, asked the state governors to give him examples of discrimina- tion. He reported, proudly, that he had received only one such case. But the point, amply documented in the HATFIELD: THE OREGON ENIGMA ROBERT G. SHERRILL Mark O. Hatfield, 45, former Governor of Oregon and since January the junior Senator from that state (Wayne Morse is the senior Senator), has for seven years been regularly mentioned as a possible Vice Presidential candi- date on the Republican ticket. Among national strategists for the GOP he is chiefly valued—like Charles Percy and John Lindsay—as an available balance to a ticket that might be headed by a candidate such as Nixon or Reagan. Nobody, least of all Hatfield, expects the leaders to see him as possessing more ponderous potentialities before 1972, in which year he will still be young enough to sprint to the platform to make his acceptance speech. The Republican National Headquarters likes to describe 38 ~H. Purnell, The Nation, July 3.] They were lining up on j Hawkins report, is that discrimination is so massive, so 1 institutionalized, that individual complaints are really — 1 not relevant: a, Those who prefer white testimony on this point can | , find complete corroboration in The Economist, April 15, — | p. 255. One out of every 11 American men between the | ( ages of 19 and 29 is a Negro, but 2 out of every 11 of 7 the Army’s enlisted men killed in Vietnam up to the end of 1966 were Negroes. The Economist’s U.S. cor- / respondent goes on to point out that despite the discrimi- nation which remains, and the chance of being killed, military service is a refuge for many Negroes—their only escape from city slums or rural sharecropping. It offers three meals a day, clothing, medical care, a little spend- © ing money, and some fringe benefits—particularly the prestige of soldiering. Some whites regard this reconcilia- tion of some Negroes with the military services as progress, but in reality it is the most damning indictment — of all. To compound the irony, Dr. King will find it diffi- — cult to get Negroes to follow the banner he has raised because many are so desperate that they are willing to fight—and to re-enlist—in considerable numbers. Of all — j the careers available to most Negroes, the Army is one Y of the few offering a measure of immediate improvement. Yet, in the long run, McKissick and Carmichael may i 9 prove to be prophets in some peripheral sense. John Lewis } {j of The Washington Post, after interviewing a substantial ‘| 7 number of Negro troops in Vietnam, found that they did i il not feel they were being exploited, but “they did hold } strong views on their rights to equal treatment when they ; ia i ay 5! ft ast ae = . pene —= a t ** ow; =~ 4 i 0 cee ete a be ess i iy i - got back home.” [See “The Negro in Vietnam” by Kari — ready to use violence if necessary. The powers that be had better not toss their hats in the air at the present moderation of the mass of Negroes. “the more activist side” of nonviolence, and some sounded Tp : ] k : ; Hatfield as one of the “fresh new faces,” although there — is really nothing new about him. He has been in politics © —sometimes peering over the edge of national politics— since 1950. He nominated Nixon in 1960; he returned to ‘ the GOP convention four years later to deliver the key~_ note address, which he couched in such reasonable and | i moderate terms that the Goldwater galleries considered i] him an intruder. Over the years, operating out of a state i ie that made no great demands on his talents, Hatfield got J m around the nation enough to cultivate an image which § |p The Saturday Evening Post caught in the title “Oregon’s i ft Golden Boy.” In a party led mostly by men of pewter it | ah was not hard to seem so. Dh Hatfield progressed smoothly upward from the Oregon | | House (four years), into the state Senate (two years), J‘ THE NATION./ July 17, 1967 efly into the secretary of state’s office (two years), then becon ing Governor in 1958 at the age of 36, the youngest Dregonian ever to get there. He served in that office until, without missing a government payday,’ he moved last January into the U.S. Senate, where his national repu- tation to date hangs from two shining hooks: he is the ‘GOP’s most outspoken advocate of a halt to bombing of North Vietnam, of giving the problem to the United Nations, of turning Asia back to the Asians; and he is an eloquent challenger of that “tyranny in our midst” which President Johnson has created by “redefining our Constitution to deny us our liberty.” _ With these stands he has stirred much warmth among Democrats who value sanity over partisanship. Senators Lee Metcalf and Morse are two who have said they would vote Republican in 1968 if Hatfield were the party’s ‘Presidential candidate. This kind of discontent in the other party prompts Hatfield to predict “a greater hope for the GOP next year than in 1964 or 1966, greater also | than in 1960. One of the basic reasons is that in the | history of U.S. political systems, the outs have depended on the weakening of the majority party rather than on the strengthening of the minority party. Of course, you’ve got to do more than wait for their decline. You have to come up with something. To me, it’s an opportunity to espouse alternatives.” } sCiTrhere is not yet anything that could be called a ground | swell in his support, but each day he gets twenty to thirty requests to make speeches, and although his ap- ‘peal seems greatest among university and church organi- zations he has in the last couple of months addressed _ groups as various as a General Electric Co. seminar, the | National Manufacturers Association, the Daughters of the American Colonists, the Young Republican Club of Princeton, the Ripon Society, the National Agriculture “and Marketing Conference, the New York City Young Republicans (to receive their annual War Memorial Award), the University of California student body, the American Society of Newspaper Editors, the Southern Baptist Convention in Miami and the Yale Political Union. The Harvard Young Republicans, who a few days earlier had received Governor Romney very coolly, gave Hat- field a two-minute standing ovation. _ His impact on these groups has no point in common with the craggy cerebralism of Paul Douglas or the Steerage animalism of Lyndon Johnson; he strikes in- stead with the cock-sure decencies of a Calvinistic Re- publican who has never lost an election in a Democratic State. , Hatfield is a trim 6-footer with brown hair, pale green eyes and the kind of scrubbed, perfectly balanced features that recommend him to Oregon women’s groups; ‘A is grooming is fastidious almost to the point of being flashy. Some of his advisers wished he would dress a bit more like one of the boys when he campaigned in the ee mber camps of Oregon, but Hatfield stuck to his dapper athletic. He went out for rugby at Stanford University, but he is better at playing the clarinet. He is a good zardener and an expert canner of pickles. His father was blacksmith and his mother a schoolteacher, and Hat- THE NATION / July 17, 1967 & a green corduroy suit and refused to rough it. He is not. field has not, since leaving home, attained story-book riches; when he left college teaching to enter politics it meant a step up in pay. Still—despite the fact that his career, like his looks, seems to have been programed through some All-Ameri- can IBM machine—there is a primitive excitement about his presence in Washington, as there always is when a talented fellow climbs out of the restricting furrows of state politics and onto the rich alluvial plain of national affairs, there to discover himself and what he can do. Nothing marks his new freedom better than his cam- paign for the Senate. His opponent was Rep. Robert Duncan, a tousled-haired, outgoing Scotsman, a_beer- drinking, snuff-dipping ex-gold-miner and, above every- thing else, a partisan of LBJ’s war in Southeast Asia. Duncan is, in short, just the opposite of Hatfield. In de- feating Duncan, Hatfield freed himself, at least momentar- ily, from most of the parochial criticism that has dragged upon his career for seventeen years—that he is too hand- some, too pious, too slippery on issues, and too. peaceful. Except for the complaints about Hatfield’s philosophi- cal elusiveness—which have some substance, and to which I shall return in a moment—these are plainly the gripes of the outs who cannot think of much to damn a man for except that he is in. The best expression of that group that I have heard was made by a Washington-based Oregonian: “I think he’s basically a fink. But you can't get up on a political stand and say vote against him be- cause he’s a fink. You’ve got to say he’s screwed us here or there—and he hasn't.” Opposition of that sort is worth buying, but Hatfield gets it free—an example of the superb luck that has al- ways followed him. Slander and tough attacks on him have a way of boomeranging in the most spectacular fashion. In 1952 Hatfield, with the help of then Gov. Douglas McKay, was named to the GOP national platform com- mittee instead of Senator Morse. It was partly pique at this rebuff that prompted Morse to switch to the Demo- cratic Party. Free of Morse’s pushy personality, Hatfield was thus nicely positioned to become the outstanding Re- publican in the state. But the victory had a heavy price: a feud with Morse which came to a climax six years later when Hatfield was campaigning for governor. In 1956, Morse had been challenged for re-election by McKay who, as Eisenhower’s Secretary of the Interior, led the giveaway of the Hells Canyon power project. Morse was the leader of the opposition. Ike, hoping to get rid of this irritant, sent McKay home to run against him. Morse slaughtered McKay. Now, in 1958, Morse was restless to complete his revenge for the embarrass- ment of 1952. He would do anything to defeat Hatfield. The contest for governor was tight. The incumbent, Robert D. Holmes, was a popular Democrat who had been elected in 1956 to fill an unexpired term. That same year Hatfield had been elected secretary of state, the only Republican candidate for an Oregon state office to sur- vive a Democratic sweep. Going down to the general election in 1958, it was impossible to tell who was ahead, but many newspaper reporters felt they could detect a water-thin lead for Holmes. Five days before the balloting, Morse decided to play trough. He had two smears to choose between at the bottom of the Democratic grab bag. One was a morals rumor, completely unfounded, similar to the notorious one used ten years earlier to defeat Homer Rainey in his campaign for the governorship of Texas. The other was an old tragedy in Hatfield’s life; eighteen years earlier a child had darted into the path of a car driven by Hatfield, and was killed. A civil suit jury awarded the parents $5,000. Democratic strategists had decided against using either story, but Morse broke their plans, stirred up tales of the car accident, and publicly accused Hatfield of lying to the jury. It was the best thing that could have hap- pened to Hatfield. Former Gov. Charles Sprague, Ore- gon’s Republican elder statesman, had earlier said that his newspaper, The Salem Statesman, would support neither Holmes nor Hatfield. But after Morse’s blunder, Sprague called for Hatfield’s election because of “this foul eleventh-hour attack.” Even the attorneys for the slain child’s parents put in a good word for Hatfield. Thousands of others felt the same. The switchboards at the Portland newspapers were flooded with anti-Morse protests. Leading Democrats tried to repair the damage by dissociating themselves from Morse’s revelation, but there wasn’t time. Although the Democrats had a regis- tration edge of 52,000 voters, Hatfield won by 60,000. (To help grease any possible switch of this kind, Hatfield had left the word “Republican” off his billboards.) Within a year after this painful encounter, the feud was over and Hatfield and Morse moved into a smooth alli- ance, establishing a Washington-Salem axis for squeezing Corps of Engineers and Bureau of Reclamation projects out of the federal government. Their chumminess in eco- nomic matters has now been strengthened by their com- mon opposition to the Vietnamese War. Morse voted for Hatfield last year and he, in turn, is expected to help Morse next year if Morse needs it, which he probably won't. The striking Hatfield luck bobbed to the surface again last year in his race against Duncan. With encour- agement from the Johnson Administration, Duncan flew into the campaign as the most belligerent sort of hawk. When Hatfield brought other issues into the race Duncan tried to block him, saying, “The war is the issue. There are no clear-cut state issues between us.” Sometimes Duncan referred to the race as a “referendum on the war.” En- couraged by his easy primary victory over Howard Mor- gan, a peace candidate backed by Morse, and whipped along by his own rhetoric, Duncan indulged in extrava- gances. The war was merely a choice of fighting on the Mekong Delta or at the mouth of the Columbia River, he said. To hear Duncan talk, the enemy was Communist China, which was about to launch a massive armada of junks against the West Coast of the United States. He suggested with little subtlety that a vote for Hatfield was a vote for Mao. “Hanoi and Peking are watching the elections very closely — particularly the one here in Oregon—to see if the American people will support the [Administration’s] policy of resistance to Communist ag- gression.” Oregonians are a somewhat independent people who 40 enjoy mavericks (witness their tolerance of the senior Senator) and resist being coerced by superpatriotic propa- ganda, but it began to seem that Duncan was moving ahead of Hatfield, despite the fact that Hatfield was far ~ better known in the state and was buoyed up by a much larger campaign budget. Then two key factors turned — in Hatfield’s favor. First, bank interest rates began to © soar, causing a cutback of the nation’s building industry, — followed quickly by a cave-in of the Oregon lumber in- dustry. But Duncan, who by this time was locked in to defending everything that was happening under the John- — son Administration, went about the state claiming that all was well. He succeeded only in irritating everyone. Second, President Johnson announced that he would — hold a conference among friendly Pacific powers in Manila to discuss ways to improve the situation in Viet- nam. Hatfield, a genius at hooking others into an appear- ance of supporting his position, immediately praised ~ Johnson for coming over to his way of seeing negotiation as the way out. The President, not he, had changed, said Hatfield; but he was ready to be big about it and call for the prayers of all Americans so that “he can be the kind of leader we saw in Dwight Eisenhower in 1952.” Then Vice President Humphrey came to Oregon to put in a good word for Duncan, but while there announced: “We are prepared to see the National Liberation Front — represented in peace negotiations.” Hatfield also called this support for his own position; and then on November 4, just before the election, he added UN Ambassador Arthur Goldberg to his stable of “supporters,” giving the impression that Goldberg’s conciliatory remarks in the UN were prompted by Hatfield’s call for peace. By the time Hatfield got through claiming credit and support, he had thoroughly integrated doves and hawks, and had ‘left Duncan seeming to stand alone as a global brawler. — It may not have been exactly an accurate juggling, but it seemed to work. The Oregonian, the state’s largest paper, called Hatfield “the responsible voice of dissent as contrasted to the irresponsible rant and cant of Sen- ator Morse.” (Duncan, who admits today that it was a fatal mistake to limit his campaign to one issue and to seem so closely allied with Johnson, will not make that mistake next year if he runs against Morse.) Although Hatfield was the first Oregon governor of modern times to win re-election, this does not mean his administration (1959-66) was especially sparkling. There was never a hint of scandal, but neither were there many heart-lifting activities. He cannot be blamed for that because Oregon is a difficult state in which to make an outstanding record. The governor has virtually no patronage to use in forcing his program, and there is - little party discipline. The state’s economic structure also inhibits creativity. Half the land is owned by the federal government; the other half is taken up by industries of the soil. The economy and life of Oregon revolve around one crop — lumber — and that tends to give the state's administrators a rather narrow vision. “When the timber industry is prosperous,” Hatfield explains fatalistically, “we are all prosperous, and when the timber industry is in a slump, we are all in a slump.” THE NATION / July 17, 1967 Discontented with these strictures, Hatfield spent much is time trying to recruit hardware industry for the ate. His efforts yielded several electronics plants, and “one notable bust. He leased 100,000 acres to Boeing on “steal” terms and the corporation talked big about build- ing there in a style to rival its mammoth facilities in i Washington, but so far nothing has been done. ® © Hatfield is mainly remembered as governor for two | things. First, he taught the fat cats of Portland that a : politician could get along without much help from them. After their unsuccessful spending spree in 1956 to clect (gj McKay and defeat Morse, the big-money families of | Portland grew stingy. This forced Hatfield, starting in (® 1958. to become the first major Oregon politician with | a really broad-based campaign income. It also gave him J unique independence. The second thing Hatfield is remem- - bered for is a Herbert Hoover-like regard for economy ® (he has had several minor idols in his life, including @ James Farley and Wendell Willkie, but Hoover is his all-time hero). With Hatfield, economy often comes (® heavily veined with moralisms. Poor people should be helped, but they should work for their supper, and to this end his administration hired an ex-Scotland Yard man to ‘See that there were no dead beats on the welfare rolls. ‘Adult males who were judged eligible for welfare were § put to work cleaning up state property. Likewise, sin- ners should not be allowed to repeat their sins, if they are costly. In 1960, Hatfield wrote the chairman of the Oregon Public Welfare Commission that one way to dis- ‘courage abuse of the welfare programs would be to sterilize unwed mothers. ! ! A number of Hatfield’s political shifts seem to be traceable to his deep religiosity. When the state needed more money, he proposed heavy new taxes on igarettes and beer. He was once so hearty a supporter of Gov. Nelson Rockefeller that he was sometimes called “Rockefeller’s agent in the West.” But after Rockefel- Jers divorce, many observers thought they detected in Hatfield a sudden and chilly distaste for his old ally. _ This religious side is welcomed by Oregonians. Where tl ere is an excuse for religion to be added to politics, they are as eager as Southerners to let it in so that they can then squabble over it. In 1960 there was a great deal ot anti-Catholicism in the state, which went for Nixon by 50,000 votes. Some Catholics, without actually blaming Hatfield for Kennedy’s defeat, claim that during the cam- paign Youth for Christ—an organization which Hatfield belonged to and has supported for years—sent out bales of tracts featuring Hatfield and Bible quotes which cre- ated an anti-Kennedy atmosphere. Mrs. Hatfield, daugh- ter of a Yugoslav immigrant, has also offended Catholics. One -Catholic, who participates in Democratic politics in t at state, put it this way: “His wife is an apostate. She Was raised in Madeline parish (Catholic) in Portland. She left the Church to marry Hatfield. Sometimes in their |P litical campaigns she is asked if she isn’t an apostate, } and she says: ‘I never really was a Catholic; I was a } Greek Orthodox.’” He mocked her voice, then added learly to suggest that the change of faith was moti- vated by a desire to gain status as well as a husband: “They were married in Hinson Memorial Baptist Church THE NATION / July 17, 1967 in Portland, a fashionable church in a fashionable area.” Even in this, however, Hatfield has split the op- position. A Portland State University study of voting patterns in Oregon shows that many Catholic areas routinely give their support to him. Among Protestants and nonreligious voters he stirs other emotional opposites. Ever since Sgt. Bill Newell of the Oregon State Police, who then served as Hatfield’s chauffeur, disclosed to the Christian Businessmen’s Association of Portland that occasionally the Governor would have him stop the car so they could get out and join in prayer by the road- side, Hatfield has been subjected to some snickering campaigns. It is certainly true that in his private life Hatfield—who used to smoke a’ pipe constantly but quit, and used to accept social cocktails but now sticks to nonalcoholic punch—has been compulsively religious for about the past seventeen years. His library is heavy with books on theology; he is a regular Bible reader and quick to quote from it, sometimes going so far as to plop into his conversation an identification of which translation he is citing: “The First Letter to the Church at Corinth, fifth chapter and tenth verse (Weymouth translation), shows this very clearly.” Aside from membership in Youth for Christ and Campus Crusade, he has been a lay preacher and a moderator of the First Baptist Church in Salem, has spoken at the Easter sunrise service in the Pasadena Bowl, has addressed the President's prayer breakfast 41 and numerous governors’ prayer breakfasts. Small church colleges (Baptist,. Free Methodist, various types of Presbyterian, Church of God, and Nazarene) have heaped honorary doctorates on him. Many Oregonians admire this, of course, and those who don’t have had a hard time making something out of it, for Hatfield has advocated the separation of church and state with a firmness that would not make Billy James Hargis happy (although in this, as in most things, Hatfield has something for both sides; he thinks the Supreme Court prayer ban wrong). “I have yet discovered nothing in the Scriptures,” he told a church college forum not long ago, “that instructs us to Christianize institutions.” Some of the same people who smile at his insistent piety accuse him of being at the same time hardhearted. As an example they often recall his attitude toward capital punishment. Actually it is not clear just where he does stand on this. To a church college forum in March, 1963, he said that capital punishment is wrong because it is economically unjust—‘the poor die and the rich get off.” But eight months later, speaking to the American Medical Association, he said: “Time after time, people come to my office saying, ‘oh, you should pardon this poor soul,’ or ‘you should commute this poor soul’s sentence. It is really not his fault. It’s society which is to blame.’ These are well-meaning people, who are mistakenly saying they do not believe people should be responsible for their own actions, but that government or society should be, because they are too dependent.” Whether or not it is a political weakness may be debatable, but there are some grounds for saying that Hatfield is philosophically elusive. In his office there is a picture that will soothe the right wingers (an auto- graphed photo of J. Edgar Hoover), but it is hung in a spot to please the left wingers (out of the way, be- hind an inner hallway door). But that’s just nice political balance. By elusive, I mean that in looking back over his record I find that in 1960 he said: “We need to continue civilian supervision of the military to insure that the will of the people is best represented.” By the next Presidential campaign time he was quoted in the Los Angeles Times as complaining: “It’s popular these days to kick the military brass around. But there is a very real danger in the displacement of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and other military experts by the civilian members of the Defense Department and the Kennedy administration.” Then, last year, when ultraconservatives tried to stick a resolution into the Oregon GOP plat- form calling for a transfer of all responsibility for Viet- nam to the military, he opposed the move. In a question-and-answer period with the Executives’ Club of Chicago in April, 1964, Hatfield was asked how, if he were President, he would deal with Castro, and he answered modestly: “Well, the very easy answer for anyone, 3,000 miles away from Washington in a State- house like I am in, to answer that question, would be to say, let’s get tid of Castro. Let’s drive him out of Cuba. But I can’t answer the question that way, be- cause I do not have all the facts. I do not have all the 42 data that the CIA has supposedly presented to the Presi- dent. I don’t have the facts and data as to our military — capacity and: posture at this moment, in terms of mis- siles, and in terms of ground forces, and what have you. So therefore, I do not feel I can answer the ques- tion.” dispense with modesty because he was sharply critica! of the administration for “‘vacillation,” for failure to take all economic sanctions against Castro, and for not en- couraging the spread of governments in exile which q could direct raids against Cuba. Hatfield was uncon- cerned that some of these raids might be launched from ~ US. soil. Hatfield prides himself on his libertarian views, espe- cially in defense of the right to dissent. When Gus Hall went to Oregon to speak to any college groups that ~ would hear him, right wingers tried to pressure Hat- © field into closing the doors of state schools to him. Hatfield refused to be spooked. But he was deeply of- ; fended (“disgraceful”) by the anti-war pickets who turned out to greet Vice President Humphrey. Hatfield is pro- Negro; twice he refused to extradite Negro prisoners to Mississippi, and he consistently and skillfully fought — for expansion of civil rights—most spectacularly at the 1963 Governors’ Conference where, in league with Gov. Nelson Rockefeller, he forced the Democrats to abolish — the resolutions committee, leaving much of its work still pending, rather than face him in a showdown over a © rights resolution. Yet, somewhat like Justice Hugo Black, © Hattield draws back trom the demands that would com- plete the endeavor, feeling that “in our efforts to estab- — lish particularly Negro rights and other minority rights we have moved into an era in which we have become so minority-oriented we’ve forgotten about the majority.” Hatfield has a long and proud record of fighting hate groups. As the keynote speaker at the 1964 GOP Na- — tional Convention, he could not have been more out of tune with the dominant voices when he denounced — “bigots in this nation who spew forth the venom of hate. They must be overcome, and this applies to the Ku Klux Klan, the John Birch Society, the Communist — Party, and the hundreds of others like them.” He got a closetful of mail from the Birchers about that. Hat- |} field was not anti-Goldwater in 1964, but he was clear 4 and open about his fears that if the tough conserva- tives and hate vendors seized control, the party would languish for years. It was not a safe position for an — ambitious young man to take that year, but he took ff it. Then in October, 1965, he did an extraordinary thing. © J Following the lead of Sen. Thruston Morton, who made — a similar attack, Hatticld set out to discredit Group § Research, Inc., of Washington. GRI, in large part sup-— ported by the Democratic National Committee and labor 7 organizations, is not known to the general public but it is recognized by many Washington newsmen and Congress- § men as one of the most effective opponents of right-wing — hate groups. It is a clearinghouse for information about | such groups. Ex-Sen. Maurine Neuberger, for example, waged most of her war against H. L. Hunt and Life Line © with data obtained from GRI. For one who doesn’t like ~ THE NATION / July 17, 1967 4 | By August of that year, however, he had either ob- — tained a pipe line to CIA information or was ready to © x So there are persuasive reasons for thinking it a | Iittle early to paint Senator Hatfield’s political portrait. Y Yet on the most important issue of the moment, Viet- nam, he has not equivocated in the slightest degree. Nor has there been any wavering in his push to establish what “he calls “a world due process,” a global legislative and adjudicative machinery with more authority and more - status than the United Nations, though he does not belittle | that as a beginning. “If I were President, my first move,” | he says, “would be to help reconstruct the United Na- | tions’ police organization. I would try to strengthen the | hand of the Secretary General so that he could dispatch | police forces. Eventually I would seek the admission of | Red China to the United Nations, though it is not realistic | to ask for that until the Vietnam quarrel is settled.” As | for the chances of getting this kind of program past Con- sress, Hatfield is under no illusion that it could be done | peon, “but we must undertake the task at some point. It isn’t an impossibility. There are a number of leaders who ® are willing to consider the idea. Dick Nixon, he sees it; | he may not advocate it, but he comprehends the proposal. | Perhaps only a small fraction of the nation’s leadership | would agree with me on these points right now, but ail | progress starts with a small fraction of the leadership.” | Even in his insistence that the UN be given a greater role in Vietnam he runs into strange opposition. When, at the 1965 Governors’ Conference in Minneapolis, he proposed intervention, the sometimes liberal Washington Post | asked in editorial horror: “How could any serious student ® of world affairs suppose that anything could be accom- | plished at this time by going to the U.N.?” The Post ridiculed Hatfield for expecting a “miracle.” Governors’ conferences are such blotto affairs that Hat- field, simply by speaking his mind, consistently made ) headlines at them. At the Minneapolis conference two years ago he and Governor Romney were the only two | to refuse to vote in favor of a resolution backing the ® escalation of military intervention in Vietnam, but Rom- | ney, after being closeted with Johnson,’ backed away from pis previous opposition. Hatfield stayed firm. At the National Governors’ Conference last year, Hat- field was the only one to vote against giving Johnson carte blanche support in Southeast Asia. “After I took | that position,” Hatfield recalls, “governor after governor came up to me privately and praised me and said they would have liked to vote as I did but felt that thev couldn’t. I would just say ‘oh,’ and stare at them. [ wouldn’t thank them. If you believe something, you should Stand by it. If the heat’s on, it makes loyalty to a position all the more important. “ _ Hatfield’s enemies predicted that as soon as he got to vi pashington he would modify his opposition to the war, s Senator Brooke of Massachusetts has done. Instead, Hatfield has increased his opposition. Howard Morgan, the former Federal Power Commissioner who ran as the Democratic peace candidate in the 1966 primaries, and does not like. Hatfield but dislikes the Vietnamese con- flict more, wrote a letter to a Portland newspaper several THE .NATION / July. 17,. 1967 weeks ago acknowledging that he had been one who thought Hatfield would never persist as a peacenik, but that he now wanted to admit publicly that he had been wrong. Hatfield had hardly hit Washington before he was on national television, urging that the United States gradu- ally withdraw its troops from Vietnam and turn the fight- ing over to Asian troops. Within two months he was also Washington’s major new voice, calling for a completely volunteer “citizens’ army” to replace the draft, not only because “conscription is involuntary servitude,” as he told the American Society of Newspaper Editors, but also be- cause conscription is too expensive, inefficient and unsafe in terms of national security. Last month, when the draft was under debate in the Senate, he fought its status quo extension even more savagely than did the old draft opponents, Ernest Gruen- ing, Stephen Young and Wayne Morse. Among his several darts was an amendment that would have written into law a description of the draft as a “total governmental inva- sion of the liberties of America’s young men.” It lost, of course. It may be that Hatfield’s plasticity on some issues comes from the fact that he is one of those persons who must be personally familiar with the reality on which he bases his conclusions, if he is to hold to them firmly. For instance, Oregon is a well-fed state, roped together at the bottom rung by a fairly decent welfare system. There is little hunger there, and Hatfield apparently thinks the rest of the nation is as fortunate because he can make a speech about feeding the hungry (as he did to the National Can- ners Association in May) without once alluding to the fact that there is hunger in this country. He talked a lot about feeding the world’s hungry. Similarly, Oregon has almost no Negro population, and Hatfield has no knowl- edge of urban ghettos; therefore he quickly loses patience with racial demonstrations. But when it comes to war, it is another matter. He has experienced it, and it left a pacifying mark on him. When he complains that “terroristic or indiscriminate bombing” of Vietnam “must involve deaths of noncombatant men, women and children, and merits the general condemna- tion of humanity, for it cannot be justified as an instru- ment for the fulfillment of U.S. foreign policy,” he is speaking from the memory of a visit to another place. (“I was at Hiroshima shortly after the bombing and it left a deep impression.) When he talks of trying to beat communism in Vietnam by feeding it to death, rather than trying to bomb it out of existence, again he speaks from what he has seen. Hatfield was commander of a wave of the amphibious attack craft at both Iwo Jima and Okinawa. He was pre- paring for the invasion of Japan when the war ended. Then he was ordered to Haiphong, North Vietnam’s best- known harbor, to pick up Chiang Kai-shek’s troops who had come overland to the port, and to convoy them to areas of northern China where they could fight the Com- munist Chinese. He recalls: When we moved into the daylight, the dawn hours, when we were coming into the harbor of Haiphong we could see the reflection of the beautiful polished tile of - 43 it Se ae that very impressive Monte Carlo of Southeast Asia that was on top of a hill overlooking the port. This was the great place for French recreation, of all the Western people’s recreation in the old days of colonialism. And yet around that same hill were the little huts of the people of Vietnam who lived in squalor and poverty. And the contrast of the wealth and the foolish use of that wealth of the Western colonists on top of that hill and the abject poverty of the people living about it was a contrast I shall never forget. ... I remember along the road going into town the bodies, dead bodies alongside the road, not dead because of war or bullets but dead because of starvation. I can’t forget that. And I can’t forget my feeling that food—food— PUERTO RICO Commonwealth, State or Nation? GUY T. NUNN Mr. Nunn is professor of industrial sociology at the Uni- versity of Puerto Rico. San Juan On July 23, Puerto Rican voters will speak on the tight little island’s (population density possibly the world’s highest) most tortured question: status. Record registra- tion for the plebiscite, despite recommended boycott by both the Republican Statehood and Independence Parties, would seem to presage a landslide victory for continua- tion of the present Commonwealth, or Free Associated Statehood status, vigorously supported by the majority Popular Democratic Party, which is still led by its creator, former Governor and currently Senator Luis Munoz Marin. Here as elsewhere, however, political appearances may conceivably deceive. Munoz and the PDP are obviously worried. One index of their concern is their belated at- tempt to make the plebiscite an issue of loyalty, insist- ing that no good PDP member can vote other than for continuation of the Free Associated State. This contra- dicts two decades of PDP assertion, in normal elections, that Puerto Ricans favoring either statehood or inde- pendence could vote PDP without doing violence to their eventual status hopes. All crystal balls are befogged by the fact that the Republican Statehood Party’s convention majority voted months back to boycott the plebiscite, claiming to see in it a “trap” which would destroy the party. This action, ironically, promises to increase, rather than diminish, the pro-statehood vote on July 23. Refusing to accept the majority decision to abstain, Luis A. Ferré, the party’s thrice-beaten candidate for the governorship against Mu- noz (and the island’s richest industrialist), promptly or- ganized a rump group, Statehooders United, and put it on the ballot. Ferré, although almost totally lacking in Mufioz’s popu- lar appeal, is nevertheless an attractive figure. He has energy, intelligence and dedication. He also has money and an enterprising organization of young people which 44 ‘ statehood issue, and scores of thousands of PDP sup- |} would be our weapon, not military might alone. But how we missed it, how we miscalculated, how we became so involved in political power structures and political manipulation between the French and the Vietnamese that today we are reaping that error of not having ad- dressed ourselves to the needs of the people, but rather to support 80 per cent of the French attempt to retake a colony in this century! Hatfield is obviously a man to cause trouble. And the |. more he gets around in the nation and the world, the more he enriches his philosophy from broader personal experi- — ences, the more trouble for this Administration he can |; be expected to cause. 1| “ has saturated the island with statehood propaganda and [iti generated by far the largest and most enthusiastic public "| meetings of the campaign. By breaking away from his own party, he has stumbled into an attractive double-— underdog posture. In the present context, moreover, statehood comes before the voters relatively free of the Republican Statehood Party’s old and (to most Puerto — /hi Ricans) unpalatable association with the mainland GOP. The “ideal” of statehood, Ferré insists, must be kept | alive through participation in the plebiscite, whatever its — outcome. Should this one be lost, other plebiscites will — follow. But this one need not be lost. The PDP’s big © majorities of the past have been largely irrelevant to the porters can finally vote their consciences. There are many signs that Ferré’s intuition is well | grounded. Even the leadership of the PDP is known to- contain a number of statehood advocates (just as it con- tains elements emotionally committed to the opposite pole of independence). Urbanization, which is rapidly liquidat- | ing the jibaro (or rural) class which thrust Munoz into | power originally, is a possibly powerful sociological ally of statehood. So too, presumably, is the extreme youth of the island population. To many new voters, Munoz is — history, the mystique of hispanidad an outmoded con- ception, and Free Associated Statehood intrinsically de-- meaning. This attitude shows itself sharply, and perhaps surprisingly, among servicemen and veterans. Far from_ feeling abused by a “colonial” authority which has conscripted them without representation, Puerto Rican servicemen seem to derive both pride and status from’ their role. Anti-draft demonstrations have, by mainland standards, been infrequent, skimpy and of low voltage— this, perhaps, because they have in the main been spon- sored by independista or nacionalista splinter groups tarred with the presumption of Castro sympathy or sup- port. Young people, in any event, appear measurably readier to accept the implications of outright statehood than their elders, | But a possibly larger “sleeper” factor in the com- | | THE NATION / July 17, 1967 | i | 1 | | ng plebiscite than all of the foregoing is the PDP’s long en in office. Although astonishingly scandal-free, sensitive to emerging social needs, and responsible for an uninterruptedly rising island standard of living, the @overning party shows unmistakable signs of political arteriosclerosis. Munoz, though officially retired from pa arty office, has never, in fact, ceased to govern. He has | been repeatedly called upon to mediate factional crises which the party’s internal machinery has been incapable for resolving without him. | Beneath the dazzling feats of Fomento (Public Works) im giving the island the beginnings of an industrial base, and maintaining a productivity growth well ahead of the a ainland average, lie unreduced social reefs of mon- Strous dimensions: persisting unemployment (officially put lat 14 per cent, but actually closer to 30 per cent if con- | ealed unemployment among housewives and young people out of work and out of school are counted), an a rban slum growth dishearteningly close to the pace of i ehousing, a desperate educational deficit at every level, ‘a collapsing sugar industry, rising delinquency and ad- ‘diction rates, and other problems. The PDP has attacked ‘them, for the most part, with resourcefulness and umane candor, but with grievously limited resources. here is nothing about statehood which in any way promises speedy improvement in these areas, but neither 4s there anything about voters which guarantees that they will give rational expression to discontent. Already nearing 70, Munoz had been called down from his emeritus Olympus to grub through the villages ‘and dusty pueblecitos in search of votes for a “permanent” Free Associated State which he himself, for upward of two i. | if i; 1 d ¢ 8 ' a C ) ‘ r 1h) I | } a i | Walt Dehner: Fortune } THE NATION / July 17, 1967 decades, has pictured as nothing more than a tactical bridge to eventual outright independence. Whether because of age, failing health, or distaste at having to argue (in betrayal of his youth) the inevitability of permanent dependence on the United States—or a combination of all three—the old Mufioz incandescence and almost visceral communion with his audience are gone. He argues well but without color or vigor. Against independence he urges the unthinkability of severing U.S. ties; against statehood, its sheer economic unviability. Statehood is the major “enemy,” and his case against it, while crammed with common-sense economics, is pas- sionless. More, it fails to offer any ultimate reason for statehood’s unacceptability. Puerto Rico, he argues, simply cannot “afford” statehood. The island’s hope of eventual parity with the world’s industrially mature economies (Puerto Rican per capita income lags well behind that of Mississippi, although life expectancy is thought to be a faint fraction higher than that of the United States as a whole) rests upon its continuing ability to offer a tax haven to mainland investors, along with unhindered ac- cess to the U.S. consumer market. Only Commonwealth can preserve the present freedom from U.S. corporation profits taxes. Outright statehood would rob Puerto Rico of a tool crucial to the shaping of its own economic destiny, blighting the golden culmination of Operation Bootstrap. It would mean an automatic and disastrous reduction in island standards of living. Munoz dares his opposition to declare its readiness to pay this price. Theoretically unassailable though his logic is (espe- cially over the short term), it is hardly a clarion call to national pride. Nor does its power seem likely to ignite a pro-Commonwealth vote of a size to sweep the status question permanently off the political agenda, as Munoz and the PDP had obviously anticipated when the decision was made to hold a plebiscite in the more or less im- mediate wake of the Status Commission Report. That report gave equal comfort to the three status alternatives, holding each to be equally “honorable” and workable as eventualities. Commonwealth, or Free As- sociated Statehood, was obliquely favored only to the extent that both statehood and independence were found to be economically sustainable only fifteen or twenty years down the future. Since no one seriously quarrels with that reservation, the plebiscite takes place in a con- text of non-immediacy so far as its practical consequences are concerned. It will be the expression of a sentiment, without fixed or visible consequences. Its only practical effect will be the creation of study commissions to investi- gate the eventual implementation of whatever sentiment is expressed in the plebiscite. This process alone could reasonably consume several years (and probably create the need for further plebiscites on the specific product of such investigation), and the U.S. Congress, torpid of reflex at best, might easily take several years more to accept the result, with its many complications, should either statehood or independence win. All this, of course, is obvious to Puerto Rican voters, and it reduces the plebiscite to an expression of theoreti- cal “druthers,” without the bite of instant necessity for living with the consequences. And it is precisely this 45 “dream” quality which makes predicting the plebiscite outcome so hazardous. Although a vote without clear and predictable conse- quences might logically be thought likely to favor a strong pro-independence expression, few observers are willing to predict an independence vote of more than 2 or 3 per cent. Once a powerful, if subterranean, current even in the PDP leadership, it is now reduced to a handful of small, programless clusters of intellectuals whose leader- ship denounces participation in the plebiscite “fraud,” with occasional vague threats of violence if the “fraud” is consummated. Independence is on the ballot only be- cause of unauthorized self-starter Independistas. The re- cent history of Cuba, the travail of the Dominican Re- public, the depth of American cultural penetration, the benign paternalism of U.S. economic colonialism, the presumably permanent presence on the mainland of nearly a million Puerto Ricans—all these and more may RESPONSIBILITIES OF | . |i. NATIONAL GREATNESS | KENNETH BURKE Critic, teacher and poet, Kenneth Burke is the author, among many books, of A Grammar of Motives, A Rhetoric of Motives (Peter Smith), Book of Moments (Hermes Publica- tions) and Language as Symbolic Action (University of California Press). There is a critical difference between the powerful per- formance of an automobile and the effort of its driver. Runners or cyclists can increase their speed only by a corresponding increase of their exertions; but without any added effort whatever, by merely pressing a slight bit more on the gas pedal, the driver of a car can accel- erate his automotive monster, even to the extent where it can take over, and race or rage beyond his control. This easy opportunity for a vast mechanical transmogrifying of our comparatively feeble physical powers can lure us into drastically irresponsible assertiveness. However, as impressive and extensive and hazardous as the automotive empire is (I take it that one is speaking not metaphorically but literally, when one looks upon the overall resources of travel by car as a kind of empire), it is but an example of man’s relationship to all the great advances in the development of technological power, the tremendous expansion in the powers of physical motion. Everywhere we look, we confront the same fate-ridden disproportion between what I would distinguish as the realms of action and motion. That is: in our nature as persons, we act. Our machines, not being persons, can’t act; they can but move, or be moved. But their sheer motions vastly magnify our powers of action. And by the same token, they impose upon us correspondingly vast new areas of sufferance. In their power is our pride— and, as always, in man’s pride there lurks his greatest 46 - nation of almost terrifyingly vast and expansive political —} be relevant factors; but in any case the fires of national- ism on the island seem to have been banked down to || a flameless smolder. a But Ferré and his United Statehooders remain an im=- —) ponderable and serious threat to Mufnoz’s determination — | to drive the status question permanently underground. If 7) statehood should manage to show significantly more than — the roughly 28 per cent of the vote which the Republican Statehood Party scored in the last election, then the status ~ question must be conceded to be more alive than dead, ~ and the PDP’s insistence on an early plebiscite judged a © strategic blunder. And if the pro-statehood vote should ~ run as high as 40 per cent (as many believe possible), the probability is that the island will be thrown into a continuing status crisis, more insistent, more real, than © the mere nagging backache which the plebiscite was ini- © tially intended to cure. Seeking prematurely to bury a / nuisance, Munoz may have unearthed a monster. danger. If classic tragedy can teach us anything, it should © teach us that. Nor must we be on guard only against those machines which provide motion on command from our physical actions. The dangers of a related yet quite 7} ., different kind of personal aggrandizement beset us, by |} reason of our good fortune as citizens identified with a and economic power. Note my expression, “our good fortune as citizens © identified with” our nation. That term, “identified with,” © brings into focus a more “spiritual” kind of aggrandize- — | ment. This aggrandizement centers in the nature of “iden- © tification,” the kind of corporate identity the individual | citizen possesses by reason of his personal identification with the collective might summed up in our present na- tional greatness. We know of many empires that rose and fell. We know } of none that rose and didn’t fall. Hitler, at the height |},,. of his arrogance, promised his followers, who obeyed © him as automatically as conditioned cattle, that his dis- } mal outfit would last a thousand years. That dream was} soon over. I don’t have the least idea how permanent our | setup is likely to be, though it is a fact known to us all _ that a considerable number of our most characteristic contrivances have to be junked strikingly soon after we _ buy them. q Meanwhile, we may profit by meditating on our per- sonal modes of identification with the great empire of J. which we all are citizens. And regardless of how long — our hegemony may prevail, we can now say for sure that _ the rulers of no other country on earth can come even remotely so near to imposing their will upon all nations J) as can those elected authorities of ours who decide upon § U.S. policies abroad. a| THE NATION / July 17, 1967 The mention of such concepts as “collective might” “hegemony” brings up the possibility of a misunder- iding; my title, “Responsibilities of National Great- | Ness,” may suggest to the reader a likelihood that I intend to deal with the problem of our country’ s foreign policy. i But though I have personal opinions on such matters, I | do not have the equipment to substantiate them as thor- | oughly as an essay on the subject would demand. Rather, my focus upon “identification” is a ferministic matter, about which I am entitled to speak, if not by my com- | petence at least by the great amount of attention and | number of years I have devoted to it. And the kind of | “responsibilities” I shall deal with will concentrate not pon our country’s obligations to other countries but with | a single citizen’s obligations to his country. More narrow- ly still, I shall treat not even of a citizen’s obligations | | in their totality, but only of the need to pause occasionally | and ponder the bepuzzlements of “identification” as they | affect our sense of citizenship. My only claim is that, | ' by peering into this term “identification” somewhat per- | sistently, we find that it reveals notable risks and dangers, |’ “which must be recognized if democracy is to function at | its best. Indeed, what with the heightened responsibilities @ placed upon us by the genius of our technology, I might | also have entitled this paper, “Concepts of Identification Needed To Make Democracy Work.” ia In the religious frame of reference, man acquired | categorical dignity by identification with some transcend- ‘ent principle—as in the Old Testament relationship be- | tween man and God, and the New Testament relation- | ship involving an identification with Christ as intermediary between man and God. With the rise of nationalism, there | gradually arose a more secular kind of categorical dignity, defined by identification with one political power or . ‘another. Machiavelli’s The Prince is a notable book along | the way. For though it reflected the breaking of “univer- | sal” (that is ‘“catholic”) identification into political fac- Se scalismn, its incipiently nationalistic nature was partially concealed by its concern with purely personal rule (a kind of rule that could not become wholly nationalistic until some one feudal ruler had triumphed over many rivals i | and established centralization of authority). At the time | of the Renaissance, Machiavelli was usually thought of ! as a kind of devil. For whereas, according to the universal Hl a Notion of religious motives current at the time, a man’s | private virtues would be the traits of character which, if | cultivated in each individual, would be most beneficial “§) to mankind as a whole, Machiavelli was concerned with | a kind of conspiratorial virtue whereby even the personal vices of a ruler might be of benefit to his empire as a whole. | It wasn’t until Hegel, with his glorification of the | Prussian state, that such factional kind of identification | became wholly sanctioned. Many related developments ; ‘could be considered here. For instance, the concept of | national identity was capable of two quite different uses. Dne might hold to what I would call the “Picture Gallery” theory of culture, whereby each national integer could be appreciated in and for itself, without reference to other ‘such integers. But obviously any such situation set up | the conditions for an invidious emphasis whereby a cul- | 2 he iat e WM THE NATION / July 17, 1967 tural difference could be interpreted rather as a cultural superiority. Ordinarily, such identifications involve simple cases of self-love whereby one admires oneself roundabout by identifying oneself with some group which one praises, whereupon one’s own shares in the assets of the corpora- tion appreciate proportionately. Implied identification can figure as a kind of unavowed statement of policy or at- titude. For instance, to quote from an early review of mine, in The Philosophy of Literary Form (the quota- tion, in which I change one word to avoid too much ex- plaining, will make it clear that the passage, on the sub- ject of identification, was written before the outbreak of World War ID): One could even imagine the emergence of a particular aesthetic school, in which not one single thought or image was “subversive” on its face, yet functioned as a challenge. Nazis in Poland, for instance, wear white sox, harmless enough in themselves, yet significant enough as a challenge to enrage a Polish patriot—and so there may be subtler aspects of a style, functioning like the white sox in Poland, even stylistic ways of wear- ing anti-white sox in Hitler’s Germany. So with “travel literature” like that of Tacitus, who wrote under condi- tions of dictatorship, and attacked the local political situation by an ambiguous device, in presenting an idealization of Germany that implied a criticism of Rome (the point is taken from Jacques Barzun’s inter- esting book on Race Theories, which also notes some irony in the fact that Tacitus, for progressive purposes, here gave the first form to the doctrines of “Nordic” superiority that were subsequently to serve the ends of reactionaries). As to what our sins of identification (if any) may or may not be, we are necessarily uncertain. But at least, looking back upon the group madness that seized a great nation (the nation of Lessing, of Goethe, of Kant, of Schopenhauer, of Heine, of Thomas Mann, of Einstein, of the marvelous musicians, I could go on and on), we can clearly see that such a madness somehow got im- posed upon the citizens of that exceptionally great na- tion, until the citizens, as in the frenzy of a lynch mob, identified themselves with a shrewd madman who had in turn identified himself with them, even to the extent that when contemplating suicide at the thought of his defeat, he was minded to risk taking his whole nation down to defeat with him. And, so crazy are the tricks of identifi- cation, we hear of self-styled “patriots” in Germany to- day, who would live that lie all over again, and only recently have elected candidates to such an end. Since identifications also involve anti-identifications, those neo-Nazis would even blame this political relapse upon us. For it is true that we are pressing West Germany to buy our ammunition. If West Germany does not do So, its citizens can pay less taxes. And if their citizens pay less taxes, they can sell their goods abroad more cheaply. And where would that leave us, as prospective competitors in those same foreign markets, when we are taxing ourselves like fury in the cause of armaments? (Once again, I am not here asking us to consider the rightness or wrongness of such expenditures. I am merely trying to indicate how such processes bear upon the nature of our problem, as citizens who are necessarily, and proper- ly, identified with the policies of our nation.) At the very least, educators might, as I have been do- ing, point out the risks of identification where clearly manifested in errors committed by citizens of countries other than our own. The contemplation of such distresses might have a certain admonitory value. For high among the uses of history is its ability to teach by the patient study of past fumblings, and thereby to help transform the record of mankind’s tragic errors into sources of under- standing, And after all, if you want to learn by the study of mankind’s mistakes, you must concede that you have a marvelously fertile field to work with. What, then, is the range of relevancies that a close look at the term “identification” reveals? The first instance concerns not how we relate ourselves to our society but rather how we employ symbols to relate as- pects of that society to one another. It seems to me ob- vious and inevitable that a highly developed technological economy such as ours must be rationalized by some sort of monetary medium to coordinate the almost infinite details of our country’s production and distribution. How- ever, this very function that finance performs in the allo- cating of our resources can lead to a quite faulty mode of identification. Several years ago, we may recall, a quite destructive 48 hurricane tore its way through New England. And some years before that, there had been the big Market Crash of 1929. Shortly after the hurricane, a writer in the finan- cial columns of a New York newspaper pointed out that, whereas losses in the hurricane were extensive, they were | minor as compared with those suffered in the Market Crash. Note here a failure to distinguish between material destruction and purely symbolic losses. Yet consider how vast the difference was, though both kinds showed on | the books as a radical drop in the “value” of certain people’s holdings. After the hurricane, the countryside was in ruins. To this day, in my area, which was on the outward fringes of the storm, you can still find evidence of that disaster. Yet no matter how deep the plunge of the stock market, the material plant represented by those depreciated shares remained exactly as it had been. Not a single locomotive had been lost, not a single bridge had collapsed, not one tree was down. Materially, there had been no damage at all, except for an occasional speculator who, on seeing | his stocks drop as though they had been bricks thrown ~ out the window, threw himself out after them. Thus, to | identify the Market Crash with the results of the hurri- cane would be like making no distinction between the — actual destruction of a house and the destruction of a document attesting that so-and-so is the owner of that house. How might that particular misuse of monetary f identification serve an admonitory purpose, as regards our current predicaments? Having spent the most urgent years of my life on the study of symbolism, and having — often been accused of wanting to turn the world into — nothing but symbol systems, I would point out, on the con- — ‘trary: My studies in the nature of symbols (or “symbolic — action”) have led me all the more strongly to realize the inexorable difference between the symbolic and nonsym- bolic realms. Hence, I grow particularly disturbed at what | seems to me a new, and much more dangerous, situation involving this same error of identification, this same fail- | ~ ure to distinguish clearly enough between things and sym- — bols. In recent years we have heard much talk about the ~ “gross national product,” which is defined in terms of money. When our sum of economic operations is thus — identified, it looks quite reasonable to conclude: Since — these transactions amount to hundreds of billions of dol- — lars, what’s a mere $10 billion spent for improving the — condition of the poor? Approached thus, in terms of sheerly monetary identification, the solution of the prob- lem seems quite simple, involving little more than a small | tax easily borne. However, if you identify this problem in terms not of _ money but of materials, the conclusions are drastically different. For, as regards sheer materials, a merely sym-_ bolic allocation of $10 billion for such social services in- q volves a corresponding allocation of goods and manpower. i It means, for instance, that the resources employed for construction, medical aid, transportation and the like, in connection with our military activities abroad, simply can-_ not at the same time be employed for improvements at 9 home. When the issue is approached in terms of monetary _ Sl Te ti $0 THE NATION / ‘July 17, 1967 By lem is considered in terms of material resources and hanpower, one realizes that the monetary mode of identi- ation in this case is misleading. _ Perhaps I should pause to make clear that whether you favor putting our treasure over there or keeping it here, ‘within this problem there lurks this tricky shifting of identification. My present thesis is simply that among our _ responsibilities as citizens in a democracy whose economic functions are rationalized in monetary terms, is the obli- gation to admonish ourselves against a “natural” tenden- cy to use monetary or symbolic modes of identification, even in cases where more specifically materialistic terms might be called for. % But whereas an identification problem of that sort | __ involves us primarily in an intellectual confusion, a more | directly emotional kind of responsibility arises from the nature of political representation in a democracy. I re- | fer to the fact that the interests of a nation are not neces- re ; ~ sarily identical with the interests of a party in power. Obviously, any party will use all the rhetorical and ad- - ministrative resources at its command to make such iden- tification seem absolute. This is a natural and wholly un- _ derstandable aim of any political faction, be it in power or out of power. But surely among the major virtues of a democracy | ‘such as ours is the fact that we are not constitutionally | __ required to accept any administrative policy without ques- tion, regardless of the exigencies that may beset us. In- sofar as a policy can be changed by orderly procedures : THE NATION / July 17, 1967 of government, there is nothing treasonous in debating the advisability of changes. There is nothing in the United States Constitution that outlaws the swapping of horses in the middle of a stream. If the citizens want war when an administration wants peace, or if the citizens want peace when an administration wants war, it is their duty to peer beyond the kinds of persuasion and self-persuasion (in brief, the kinds of identification) that make adminis- trative policy and national policy seem identical. However, the problems of identification become more complicated in cases of this sort insofar as a national administration makes alliances with foreign governments or factions, or even is itself responsible for their holding office, as is apparently the case with Premier Ky. For though a decision to withdraw our fighting forces from Vietnam would certainly not involve “letting our boys down,” so far as sparing them the horrors of war is con- cerned, there would be the further problem involved in the fact that we are now identified with Premier Ky and those of his cabinet who have not, yet resigned. This situation is particularly awkward since the faction with which we are there identified is itself hard to identify with democracy. And so, alas! there is a tangle of identi- fications atop identifications atop identifications, some of them clearer than others—but let’s hurry on! All told, as regards such identifications, there would seem to be a complex of this sort: First, there is a supranational kind of identity that comes to a focus in relation to one’s religious or ethical convictions. We might call it in general “the realm of conscience.” Below this comes national identification which, owing to our party system of government, is not directly equatable with any incumbent administration. I had thought of putting vocational affiliations next in line beneath national identification. But unfortunately many of our vocational efforts become identified with the ethics of workmanship, and there are respects in which it would be hard to uphold such a scale, since many aspects of vocation involve matters of conscience. Such thoughts, regrettably, require us to turn aside and introduce a contrary companion term to “identification.” It usually goes by the name of “autonomy.” By “autono- my” in this connection we would mean an exclusive refer- ence to the principles intrinsic to any specialized pursuit. For instance, a man may say: “I am a biologist, a physi- cist, a chemist. I consider it my job to be as competent a biologist, or physicist, or chemist as I can be. This is an autonomous activity, having its own laws and methods. Let me go about my business. And it is not my business to dabble in matters of politics, and the like.” If only the lines really could be drawn there, there'd be no problem. But here enters that damned word “iden- tification” again. And looking at any man’s same autono- mous pursuit as judged in terms of “identification,” we'd be prodded to ask ourselves: “But with what other trans- actions is this autonomous specialist identified, whether he wants to be or not?” Adapting a tender-minded an- cient parable to a present tough-minded purpose, and noting that any specialized or autonomous activity fits into some larger unit of action, we might sum up the re- lationship between autonomy and identification thus: “The shepherd, qua shepherd, acts for the good of the sheep, 49 to protect them from discomfiture and harm. But he may be ‘identified’ with a project that is raising sheep for market.” (I am quoting slavishly from my Rhetoric of Motives.) As regards the “conscientious” kinds of identification, we should further note that they involve family rela- tionships, relations to neighborhood projects, to schools, to lodges, and so on (all variously impinging somewhat upon vocational, factional, national and supranational identifications). There can be happy times when all those kinds of identification are working together, when the party in power is helping our nation do the things we can be most zestfully proud of, and when all other coun- tries throughout the world are joining us and praising us, and when this spirit of good will filters down to our relations with one another, in all our minor identifications. -That’s conceivable, is it not: There is sometimes a temptation among some of us to fecl that a, dominion could be as great as ours only by maximum reliance upon the powers to threaten. Maybe they’re right. If so, may there be a God, and may God have mercy on us all. For if it’s to be by threat, I fear there are much meaner times ahead. Yet everywhere I go in this country, I find, along with the squabbles that we all get into, a constant background of good fellowship. True, there are the mean places. Each day the news assiduously hunts them out, that we newsmongers may variously identify ourselves with some persons in those selected areas of victimage. But there is also the humanity of our people, the fountain of good will that keeps welling up anew. And with this we would be identified, with this we must be identified, for otherwise the supersonic this or that, the moon shots, the great new realms of knowl- edge, the sheer genius of all such accomplishments, the whole thing becomes a damned lie, a crime against the Creator, for so much of it involves the raping and pol- luting of nature, not by deliberate intent but by pragmatic urgencies with which we happen to become identified, as we must, if only to go on living under the conditions which our own contrivances have imposed upon us. One particularly dangerous form of identification is that whereby a man may personally be quite com- pliant, yet feels that his nation should be in every way unbending. Or, while he is himself the soul of unpre- tentiousness, he can think of his nation only in the spirit of the old German challenge, Deutschland iiber alles. And sometimes I wonder whether the largely anarchic relationship that prevails among all nations in the world today is having an influence upon tendencies toward juvenile delinquency, insofar as young people take the norms of national sovereignty as models. with which to identify their personal conduct. One notable device involves identification by antithesis, sometimes with paradoxical results. For instance, our Constitution was framed with feudal monarchy as the enemy. Yet by its very nature it removed this enemy; hence the very government itself took over this antithetic role, and laws formally intended to protect the individual against the Crown came to function as devices for weak- ening the various States’ rights to control excesses of businessmen. Also, identification by antithesis is greatly 30 & responsible for much political oratory. A candidate 7 would have considerable difficulty explaining to the voters exactly how his proposed policies would work. But if he says, “they are against the policies of so-and-so,” that statement somehow makes things seem clear. Doubtless this prime resource of identification by antithesis is also influential in bringing it about that so many citizens vote not for someone but against someone else. There is also what we might call “negative identifica- tion” or “lack of identification.” Its manifestations range from unconcern for the sufferings of experimental ani- mals to unconcern for the sufferings of the enemy in war. It ties in with the ‘‘autonomous” motive, in the sense that a bombardier might cause much havoc, not through any great feeling of aggression on his part but out of sheer obedience, in doing what he’s told to do. and as thorough- ly as he is able. Also, of course, such “lack of identifica- tion” is matched by heightened identification with those on one’s own side, whose safety or rescue may depend upon the skill with which the technically unfeeling opera- tion is carried out. Such “lack of identification” can have regrettable results, but it is wholly devoid of emotional cruelty. How- ever, it can become transformed into morbid gratifica- tion. Thus, I will never forget a story in a German maga- zine I read near the start of the First World War, before the British prohibited the exchange of mail between Ger- many and the United States. It had to do with a part of the front that for some time had been quiet, and the men on both sides of the line had built up undefined rules of distant camaraderie. They did not actually fraternize, but they came to accept it that neither side was aiming to kill men on the other side. The protagonist in the story got to know exactly when a particular enemy soldier would be exposed to gunfire. He bided his time, and one day shot this enemy dead. It was an unforgettable story. For of a sudden this kind of killing took on a quite dif- ferent meaning from the professional killing that would have been in order had the troops been commanded to advance. Here some morbidly different motive had en- tered, a motive not unlike that of the various arbitrary killings we have been reading about recently (for instance, the boy in the tower at the University of Texas, who picked off victims at random). But surely first prize for the vagaries and vaguenesses of identification must go to that tiny first-person plural pronoun, “we.” Until a few years ago, when the Dodgers won a ball game, all Brooklyn proudly proclaimed that “we” had won. Now this purely private company is in Los Angeles, operating on a quite different identification. Or “we” as a nation advance funds to foreign countries from which “we” as private corporations receive this money back in payment for exports. By this ambiguity of identification, as a nation we become “idealists” while. some of our nationals are involved in transactions that are, to say the least, quite realistic. Or whenever “we” fight a war, the range of identifications under the one head extends from men in combat to gamblers in war stocks. Yes, the marvels and mysteries of identification come to an ultimate focus in that scarcely noticeable, workaday pronoun, “we.” THE NATION / July 17, 1967 PR Duh can ae SS eas = SSS Se ee ee ee = oo Se ee ms R FROM LONDON RAYMOND WILLIAMS The continuing crisis within the Catholic Church in Britain has been interesting to many people who, like “myself, are not directly or personally involved. Some part of this interest can be attributed to ordinary curiosity about a row in any public organization, and especially in one that had seemed to the casual observer more or ‘less monolithic. Indeed, some English liberals are still so suspicious of organized religion, and of the Catholic Church in particular, that while enjoying the row they ‘miss its point: any sensible man, they both assume and - conclude, would be bound in the end either to leave the - Church or be kicked out. In this sense, the Catholic crisis is seen as similar to previous crises in the Communist Party: the “good men” eventually get out or are thrown _ out, and return to a point along the English liberal spec- _ trum. I am neither a Christian nor a Communist, but T believe the crises within each kind of organization are _ of general significance: flash points within the long crisis _ of belief in advanced capitalist societies. Two incidents in the Catholic crisis have been widely _ reported. Charles Davis, the leading English Catholic theologian, left the Church. Herbert McCabe was deposed __as editor of the English Dominican magazine New Black- friars. The incidents were related in that the editorial spe- cifically cited against McCabe was a reaction to Davis’ de- _ cision. Taking up a previous argument in New Blackfriars, McCabe admitted that the Church was quite plainly cor- rupt, but went on to argue that one should not therefore leave it; rather stay and work for change. The public argu- ment then became confused, including such incidents as _McCabe’s attending Davis’ wedding, and a still unresolved dispute about the future editorship of the magazine. In this climate, an incident in which a Cambridge chaplain inter- _ rupted an archbishop and stopped the meeting he was ad- _ dressing, attracted wide attention. There was and still is a danger of reducing the whole argument to casual personal rows. I see it differently—mainly because I know, in Cambridge, the young radical Catholics who started the magazine Slant, and especially Terry Eagleton and Adrian Cunningham who wrote the recent Slant manifesto, and who were among the main contributors to the recent New Left May Day Manifesto. I had been having my own argument with some of the Slant contributors; ironically, I had written a somewhat critical review in New Black- _ friars at Herbert McCabe’s invitation. My principal argu- _ ment was that I saw a danger that among radical Catholics _ the New Left position would be reduced to the status of an argument within the Church, when it was really an argument about the whole society and (for Catholics) about the Church’s relation to this. It is still the emphasis _ I would want’to put. Internal rows in the Church, like _ internal rows in the Labour or Communist Parties, are of interest finally for their general confrontation of values, ‘THE NATION / July 17, 1967 THE CATHOLIC CRISIS as part of the social and moral experience of the major crisis now occurring both within capitalist societies and within socialism. This, I believe, is how the young men around Slant also see the situation, though naturally enough, as members of the Church, they follow the in- ternal crisis with special attention. Their view, I think, would be that the Davis and Mc- Cabe incidents dramatized what is only the most obvious tension: between a cautious and conservative Church hier- archy, dragging its feet over implementing recent Vatican Council reforms, and an articulate and progressive section of the laity, concerned with freedom of speech and of conscience, and in general with a kind of modernization. The English bishops lag notably behind other European bishops in this’ kind of progressive thinking. Only two seem really to accept recent council decisions; the rest concentrate on reassuring what they see as a bewildered laity. But the Vatican Council gave the growing English Catholic middle class a new confidence and sense of pur- pose: a newly orthodox, progressive position on liturgical reform, lay participation, a more liberal moral theology, less authoritarianism, and so on. From the Slant point of view, however, this stopped far short of what was neces- sary. To them, the renewal that mattered was the con- nection of Christian action and organization with radical politics. The Church’s primary job, they insisted, was not to reform and adapt itself to a more liberal and permissive climate but to change itself so that it could be the bearer of Christianity’s primary message and mission of social revolution. In the Davis and McCabe incidents, as Slant sees them, this deeper crisis and the more obvious “moder- nizing” tension became confused. Thus Davis’ withdrawal from the Church was ambiva- lent to these young Catholic radicals. It was an effective indictment of the present state of the Church that it lost its best theologian. But they saw the Davis withdrawal as “liberal” rather than “radical”: that is, he was setting up personal values against the Church as an institution, rather than stressing, with the Vatican Council, the neces- sary social structure of Christian belief, through which it could offer effective social and political change. When McCabe referred to the Church as corrupt, it was not primarily because it was an authoritarian and bureau- cratic body, from which a liberal must withdraw in despair; but mainly because it was not effectively a Christian in- stitution and community of a kind to challenge a corrupt society and change it. McCabe has an active concern with practical politics (he too signed the New Left May Day Manifesto) which goes far beyond the demands for liberal internal reforms. It is here that the Catholic crisis engages with a much wider struggle in Britain. There exists among mid- dle-class intellectuals a sort of consensus for change of certain kinds: permissive, liberal, modernizing; an ending of certain outdated habits and attitudes. But in the Church, as in the Labour, Liberal and even Conservative Parties, 31 pivot: os So ere A pa Soe this apparently progressive position coexists with an un- willingness even to discuss more radical questions: Britain’s involvement with a nuclear strategy and with imperialism; persistent social and economic inequalities; the human waste and deprivation of capitalism. Indeed, concern with these basic issues is still referred to as “ideology,” the sort of thing that has to be left behind in much the same way, ironically, as older moral and ethical positions. Such opinion is strong when it comes to an issue like McCabe’s being deprived of his editorship: that is an interference with free speech, and it produced a broad and powerful protest. But what McCabe was saying and meaning went far beyond this. His position, and that of Slant, is under- standable only in the context of the New Left movement as a whole, which is concerned with changing the basic structures of the society and which, at certain crucial points, divides from liberalism in its emphasis on posi- tive beliefs and concern as opposed to permissiveness and laissez faire. To put the matter in this way is of course to sharpen the current conflict. The New Left joins with these lib- erals in opposing interference with free speech and per- sonal moral decisions. It is then easy to see a broad, vague “radical” spectrum, opposing a merely conserva- tive society (or a merely conservative institution like the existing Church). But probably the crucial conflict is within this spectrum. The New Left wants to build these values into socialism, where in the experience of Com- munist societies they have been affronted and denied. At the same time, it insists that to maintain these liberal values while accepting capitalism and its consequences is to reduce human concern to the merest gloss: a per- missiveness for a relatively comfortable minority, in a relatively affluent society, which simply fails to notice the hard determination of the lives of others—the poor and exposed in our own societies, and in Africa, Asia and Latin America. Liberalism is then at best too weak and light a response to our whole contemporary experience; at worst, it becomes a way of avoiding it, by concen- trating on the local problems of an embarrassed minority. That is the crucial intellectual argument now going on in Britain; and the crisis in the Catholic Church is an es- sential part of it. It is complicated, in every sector, and there are constantly shifting alliances. Most of the New Left’s thinking has come directly from the Socialist tra- dition: it is at once a renewal of a creative element in Marxism, and a redefinition of a Socialist humanism which has quite other political sources. The radical Catholic contribution to the New Left has been, nevertheless, important: not only as a joining of Christian concern to this wider renewal; but specifically as a critique of liberalism, at the point where it divides from socialism. This is so difficult and delicate an issue, in the Western political tradition, that it is not surprising that the best work on it has come from Catholic thinkers who in a way, and often to their disadvantage, have been, or have seemed to be, outside that familiar consensus. The point is still sometimes confusing and embarras- sing: it is often very difficult for Socialists to criticize “liberalism,” since certain liberal values have to be ac- tively defended against open reaction and against the er- o2 came, and has kept coming, when socialism had to tran- — scend liberalism, if it was to live and act at full stretch. The present struggles in Britain are best seen in this light. The Labour government is more or less openly abandon- ing socialism of any kind, and yet expecting the support of the Left because the Conservatives are waiting in the background. The New Left, in fighting both the govern- ment and the older order, is trying to alter the lines of the familiar controversy, and to draw new ones. The Catholic crisis is then an essential part of this difficult and continuing campaign. LETTERS (continued from page 34) “There was no limitation of any kind on the right of the UAR to move its troops up to the line at any time,” he added, “and this made the question of the UN force’s withdrawal or continued presence academic.” “I am sure,” he concluded, “that Mr. Eban did not mean what he seemed to imply, that the UNEF was on Egyptian ter- ritory to stay as long as the UN saw fit and to fight against the UAR troops, if necessary, to prevent them from moving up to the line in their own territory.” Edgar P, Young police under oath Jamaica, N.Y. Dear Sirs: About “The Perjury Routine” [The Nation, May 8], Irving Younger asserts two universal propositions as self-evident: “Every lawyer who practices in the criminal courts knows that police perjury is commonplace,” and “policemen are committing perjury at least in some [series of cases], and perhaps in nearly all of them.” William James once said that many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices. In 1965, there were 265,750 police officers in cities and suburban areas of the United States, 27,000 in New York City. What is self-evident is that by no means all or nearly all of these policemen ever testify at all in court, and further that 95 per cent of all serious criminal cases are disposed of by pleas of guilty with no testimony by anyone in court. As to the veracity of police testimony in the remaining 5 per cent of the cases, Mr. Younger’s reputed experience based upon a few years of practice as defense lawyer and as law teacher is flatly contrary to much greater experience of myself and my associates in the same fields. Since none has surveyed the legal profession on this point, how can anyone reliably assert that “every lawyer knows” that something either is or is not “commonplace”? If the asserted propositions are not true, then they con- stitute group libel per se on an occupational basis that is all the more pernicious because it slanders hundreds of thousands. They illustrate the false syllogism or non sequi- tur at the smoldering base of all group prejudice—inferring a general rule from a few observations. . . Thomas J. Mackell, District Attorney, Queens County wrong William Princeton, N. J. Dear Sirs: A friend of mine told me that he didn’t under- stand what I'd said about William Golding [in “The Gentle Desperadoes, The Nation, June 19]. I looked, and neither did I. Because I'd written William Goldman. ... Of course your author is better than my author. But all that glitters is not Golding, and the novelist whom Princeton freshmen tead is now Goldman. Lawrence Lipking THE NATION / July 17, 1967 ui y HAUN 0’CONNELL “Mr. O'Connell teaches English at the Uni- ___It was some months after the funeral, _ during one of those cold, fresh, wet _ springs such as they have in the middle of America, that the letters from the _ prison began to come directly to the house. ~ When she was good she was horrid. Lucy Nelson’s righteous wrath drove her father out of his family into prison, pushed her own mind over the edge of _ sanity and herself into the grave. But _ the slight swell of rhetoric—‘such as - they have in the middle of America”— "in this last paragraph of Philip Roth’s sad, lovely novel tells us what it’s all _ about. The middle of America—that flat, ® fiat land, so fertile for crops, so arid for humans; all those square states. The mid- die of America—where right is might and families pray together to stay to- _ gether. Liberty Center was a town of small white houses shaded by big elms and maples, with a bandstand in the mid- dle of Broadway, its main street. _ The middle of America—middle brow, middle class, middling—where well- meaning people can inflict upon one _ another exotic varieties of pain. These | interstices of American life are not just _ backgrounds against which Roth’s char- - acters strut their stuff. The middle of _ America—a region of mind and heart as well, the vital center—is a fate which _ shapes their ends. Lucy Nelson was a happy child, but _ happiness could not hold roots in the _ played-out soil of her family. She and __ her parents lived in with “Daddy Will” _ and Berta, her grandparents, because | Myra, her mother, was ever her daddy’s little girl; because Duane (“Whitey”), _ her father, was ever trying to turn over a new leaf; because times were tough: _ “Whitey took the Great Depression very _ personally.” Lucy was quick to spy out _ the cynical patronizing beneath grandpa _ Willard’s beneficence and discover the _ willful spinelessness of her parents. So e she tried to free herself from this quiet _ desperation by flinging herself into 4 Catholicism. But that didn’t work; Lucy _ THE NATION / July 17, 1967 could not be born anew so she set out to redeem others. When her father came home drunk one night and mistreated her mother, Lucy called Saint Teresa, but when there was no reply she phoned the Liberty Center Police and had him locked up. The boy that she marries, Roy Bas- sart, had his own ideal vision of Ameri- can life. Back from a two-year army hitch in the Aleutians, Roy—a happy, dangling man—passes months being pampered by his mother and arguing with his father over the course of his future. When he is not busy copying girls’ profiles from match-book covers or eating Hydrox cookies, “one of his oldest passions,” he watches high-school football practice. One day, just as the ball is snapped, Roy sees a faint white moon above the high school and has a moment of ecstatic fulfillment: For the hour of the day, for the time of his life, for this America where it is all peacefully and natural- ly happening, he feels an emotion at once so piercing and so buoyant it can only be described as love. The rest of his life is a falling off from this moment when all seemed possible and all was a beautiful, boyish paradise. He is drawn to hard, resisting Lucy, overcomes her scruples (“Trust me”), but gets her pregnant—he had been too shy to buy prophylactics and “interrup- tion” didn’t work. Roy’s uncle Julian—a World War II hero; a postwar, local laundromat ty- coon; a hard-mouthed child-man—tries his best to talk Roy out of marrying Lucy, but Roy wilts before the force of her righteousness and his own father’s insistence that he do the right thing by her, Each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way, Tolstoy said. The family of Lucy, Roy and young Edward Bas- sart is desperately unhappy but not, per- haps, so special. Theirs seems a common American anguish. They flail at one an- other’s roles: she wants Roy to be a responsible, unadventurous provider; he wants to play his own way at being an adult or he won’t play at all. She pres- sures him—‘When are you going to grow up?”—and he cuts out, home again to the permissive father figure, Julian. Back again, home again, each time de- stroying a bit more. Each, cruelly, pathetically, uses Edward against the other, and the child begins to grow strange, Finally everything lets go in one of the most intense confrontation scenes in literature. Lucy demands her rights; Julian blocks her; Roy is frozen; Ed- ward screams. The events may be writ large but the tensions that cause them are not unknown in other American families. Roth’s characters are not “interes esting” in the usual sense. They do not hang over balconies, drawn by the moon, nor do they write witty letters to the dead. They just try to live in the midst of this country and make a hell and a mess of their lives. They are unredeemed by special distinctions; their “ideas” are an agreed-upon myth of the world; their life patterns are unoriginal. Consequent- ly, Roth does not stunt and strut his rhetoric; his style is suited to this tragedy of the mundane. Roy, for ex- ample, playing with the idea of becom- ing a “professional artist”: He realized it was no easy row to hoe, but maybe the time had come in life for him to tackle something hard instead, of settling for the easiest thing at hand. That sentence doesn’t soar and sing but it does its work; those four or five strung-together clichés do capture the quality of Roy’s mind, boxed in banality. If Roth’s style doesn’t bedazzle, it also doesn’t cry “Author, Author!” His prose is a clear window through which we see how some people lived in this time and this place. The family is both the idea and insti- tution which destroys people’s lives. It is a norm to which everyone pays rhetori- cal obeisance, as does Roy when he will say anything to keep Lucy soothed: After all, the family was the back- bone of society. Take away the fam- ily, and what do you have? People just running around, that’s all. Total anarchy. But the family is not something which very often works. Still, because other alternatives are impoverished, people continue to seek fulfillment in family patterns. Roy is a boy who would be good enough if left alone but he ac- cepts the version of maturity—husband and father—given to him by his own ‘foursquare father. Lucy rebounds from 53 an unhappy family to become a wife and mother out of vengeance. “She would not repeat her mother’s life, nor would her offspring repeat her own.” She doesn’t; her family turns out far worse. One generation is into another’s skin; children recoil and stumble into marriage. Everyone comes from a di- vided house and helps create his own broken home. The family is the destructive element because it violates the integrity of indi- viduality. An incident early in the novel makes this clear. Willard brings his de- mented younger sister, Ginny, away from a “home,” to Liberty Center. For a while this works. Ginny trails hap- pily after young Lucy who “teaches” this simple woman in her 30s. But when Lucy goes off to school Ginny tags after and moans, “Lu-cy, Lu-cy,” all day out- side the window. Finally Willard brings Ginny back to the “home,” because she could not understand the most basic fact of human life, the fact that I am me and you are you. Ginny cannot control herself so she is put away. But her affliction is common to others. Family life provides a con- text in which one can extend himself by controlling others while another can escape the freedom of self by surrender- ing his will. Roy sometimes finds safety in Lucy (“She was so strong, so good”) but she cannot accept him as he is; he must be molded, redeemed. She wants him to be the man her father was not, but not so much a man that he will con- trol her, a delicate balance Roy cannot maintain. He, like her father, refuses the grace that Lucy offers: They simply will not change! All they will do is get worse and worse! Why were they against a mother and a child? Why were they against a beautiful life, and for an ugly one? Why did they fight her and mistreat her and deny her, when all she wanted was what was right! This, then, is more than the story of Lucy Nelson’s self-righteousness; sadly, to be right is the only way she has learned to be at all. Her goodness, no private obsession, is the harvest of our no’ longer virgin soil, in this novel a spiritual dust bowl. It is the result of efforts at personal salvation through family life. This is a novel about a corrupt community, not only a personal aberration. Lucy Nelson lives in the mid- dle of America, in the heart of dark American life; this novel is about the death of that heart. A few years’ago Roth wrote about the fantastic nuttiness of life in this na- tion. “It stupefies, it sickens, it infuri- ates, and finally it is even a kind of embarrassment to one’s own meager 34 imagination.” When She Was Good pre- serves Roth’s sense of outrage over the ugly growths on native grounds, but the novel belies his claim that American writers lack the imagination to match and contain American reality. He has given artistic life to people who are af- flicted by themselves and thus afflict others. Writing this novel must have been | a saddening task—long gone are the fun ~ and games of Goodbye, Columbus—but he did it beautifully. Philip Roth has written a novel which cuts to the heart of a place, a tight, right American girl and, finally, the reader; he has written a great book. The Classroom Struggle | VOICES IN THE CLASSROOM: Pub- lic Schools and Public Attitudes. By Peter Schrag. Beacon Press. 292 pp. Paper $2.25. VILLAGE SCHOOL DOWNTOWN: Politics and Education—A Boston Re- port. By Peter Schrag. Beacon Press. 191 pp. $5.95. RACIAL ISOLATION IN THE PUB- LIC SCHOOLS. Report of the United States Commission on Civil Rights. 2 Vols. U.S. Government Printing Office. Paper $1 each. IVOR KRAFT Mr. Kraft is associate professor of Social Work at Western Reserve University in Cleveland. Formerly, he was child develop- ment specialist with the United States De- partment of Health, Education and Welfare. All discussions of education and inte- gration must begin with the citation of four key facts. Three-fourths of Negro Americans now live in the large urban centers. Of these urbanized Negroes, 80 per cent are compelled to live in ghettos. On every index of educational excellence and pupil achievement the segregated ghetto schools are grossly in- ferior to suburban schools. Finally, evidence shows that the situation is get- ting worse, not better: the ghettoization continues, the achievement gap’ widens. What this means is that we have al- ready taken the first giant steps toward building what will amount to a four-track system of education in American soci- ety. At the top, a small and exclusivistic private system; next, a public-private suburban network; below this, an in- ferior public (and partially parochial) stratum for the white poor, and at the bottom, a custodial public sector for the black ghetto poor. This is not, of course, an accidental stratification of our schools; it is a correct reflection of our class structure. At the top, the elite tuling class; next, the subruling, man- agerial and middle classes; at the bot- tom, the lower and under classes. When the boards and administrators speak of the “neighborhood school,” it is this four-track system that is actually be- ing referred to. A barrier of iron cur- tains is. slowly descending among_ the various child populations now attend- ing these stratified schools, and soon they will be even more rigidly isolated from one another than are the bosses, the secretaries and the charwomen in one of those big-city office buildings. ‘People who have trouble accepting this dire prediction should keep in mind that we have a large private and parochial school sector in this country. Nonpublic school enrollment is over- whelmingly white, and during the last decade it has grown enormously in our largest cities. In Philadelphia, for ex- ample, more than 60 per cent of the white elementary school population at- tends nonpublic schools. All across the country, children of top public school officials routinely attend nonpublic schools, as do about 40 per cent of the children of upper-income Negroes. These facts, so essential to any analysis of the great educational debates of our day, are understood only by the more astute educators and critics. Among them is Peter Schrag, now perhaps the foremost of our newer educational journalists, whose articles in The Nation, Saturday Review and elsewhere are re- quired reading for anyone who wants to know what is going on in the country’s school systems. Schrag’s Voices in the Classroom, which first appeared two years ago, has now been reissued in paperback, and it can be recommended as a good jour- nalistic account of American education in the early 1960s. Some of it is un- derstandably dated; Schrag refers to a $20-billion annual expenditure for edu- cation, but the common figure now cited is closer to $40 billion. Also, Schrag, a reporter who knows how to hit hard and spit venom when the facts warrant, is not immune to the snow job that is typically mounted for transient jour- nalists. He gushes over the schools of Jefferson County, Colo., and he is taken in by more than one useless scheme of compensatory education. But Schrag has something that most ‘THE NATION / July. 17, 1967 sitet. ee ee es “Mee onal journalists do not have: a le, and a scent for the charming dote. One that deserves to be a sic is the slum child’s composition “Kim, the Magic Ballerina,” quoted Voices in the Classroom: The Magic Ballerina danced and anced, and she danced her way to the witch, and she danced into the pot and Was never seen again, and the witch lived happily ever after. _ Pursuing many of the themes men- tioned in his earlier volume, Village School Downtown is a case study in depth of the school system of Boston, a city whose “education faces the rear.” The book is an often mordant exposé of a system dominated by conservative Trish Catholics, numbed by a stifling lower-middle-class mentality, fiercely dedicated to obsolescent practices, and so inbred and hypocritical that it will not even concede that it has a problem of racial isolation and inequality in its midst. Now and again Schrag drops a kind word about some of the teachers. _ The Boston school people, like many educators—especially the big-city super- intendents who dislike and fear the in- fegration issue—are very good at point- ‘ing a sophisticated finger at solutions ‘that must come from bailiwicks other than their own. Moral reform? Certain- ly, and it has to come from our spiritual and cultural leaders; not really a job for teachers. Housing? Of course, and the federal government must build homes to counter real estate discrimination, some- thing that obviously cannot be done by school people. Jobs? Yes, indeed, and this is the responsibility of industrial leaders and government planners who nust guarantee an expanding, dynamic Jabor market; educators cannot do a thing about it. So don’t you see—these educators tell us while solemnly avow- ing their commitment to integrated edu- cation—that there is just nothing we as schoolmen can do to solve the problem? The inner city schools are going to re- “main black, but of course we will do our best to make them good. “Good but black, * “compensatory education”—that is what we must strive for. The educators certainly have a point > in refusing to accept responsibility for the major repair of race relations in American society. No one can quarrel with the jobs-income-housing-politics attack, which does indeed go to the _ Toots of the problem. But that does not get the schoolmen off the hook, and the Report of the United States Commission on Civil Rights (CCR) tells us why. Unlike the typical government docu- r ment on education which is a crashing bore and as often as not out of date by the time it issues from the press, {E NATION / July 17, 1967 MARIANNE MOORE “IT look permanently alarmed, like a frog,” Says Marianne Moore thumbing through photographs; and from a poem, her pet crow Pluto laughs: “This is a goddess detained in river fog.” the two-volume study of the CCR, “Racial Isolation in the Public Schools,” is a forceful, thoroughly documented analysis of the chief educational issue of our day. It deserves to rank with those famous annual reports issued by the state of Massachusetts when Horace Mann was secretary of the Board of Education, more than 100 years ago. Marshaling scores of statistical tables and dozens of national surveys and studies, the CCR report shows how the inner-city school systems perpetuate themselves, how the cycle of inferiority inevitably breeds more inferiority, and how the school boards and admininstra- tors not only fail to put a brake to this process but actually conspire to ac- celerate it. The suburban schools at the same time spend more on education, attract the superior teachers, provide more attractive facilities, and because there is less competition for tax moneys in suburbia, the middle classes who flock to the suburbs can and will con- tinue to improve education within a fiscal structure of lower tax rates. Will the new federal expenditures, at current levels, redress the inequalities? No, says the report, because federal aid accounts for less than 8 per cent of all education expenditures, and at_ this rate it has not and will not bridge the gap between the poor inner cities and the wealthy suburbs. The suburban schools will continue to be superior in all respects: small classes, better teach- ers, more library books, casier access to specialists, better audio-visuai equipment, more modern science labs, and the like. The successes and failures of “compensatory education” in all-black systems have been debated by school- men over the past decade. The CCR reviewed eighty-five major compensatory education programs operative in 1965-66. On the basis of cold statistics (test and achievement scores) the conclusion is that they are almost totally ineffective. One of these was the much ballyhooed Higher Horizons in New York City, at one time purportedly reaching and up- lifting 64,000 slum children. Former Secretary of Health, Education and Wel- fare, Abraham Ribicoff, once visited a Higher Horizons school in Harlem and declared that he had just undergone “the greatest single experience I have RAYMOND ROSELIEP had and the greatest single lesson I have Jearned.” A few years later the entire Higher Horizons venture was quietly scrapped as uneconomical and unsuc- cessful. One way of achieving racial balance in the schools is by busing children from crowded inner-city schools to often underused outlying facilities. A few cities have successful busing projects, but most oppose the idea bitterly. Schrag recounts the story of Boston’s paranoid fear of busing, symbolized by the re- doubtable Louise Day Hicks. The CCR report shows how administrators and . school boards across the nation have de- liberately distorted the busing issue, subtly urging the people to think of it as a violation of their rights. The fact is that in the 1963-64 school year more than one-third of our chil- dren rode buses to get to school, and not for the purpose of integrating the races. Through the years we have wisely moved in the direction of large con- solidated school districts—particularly in rural areas—and thus it is more eco- nomical and educationally sound to re- place small, inferior schools with bet- ter endowed centralized institutions. (In 1965 Kansas had 1,500 school districts; today it has 349.) Some systems have used busing to preserve segregation. In the years be- tween 1955 and 1958, Cincinnati had no trouble with the busing concept. They regularly bused 750 Negro chil- dren who lived in a largely white part of town to a school 54% miles away with a 98 per cent Negro enrollment. The explanation was a bit tortuous, but it all had to do in some unfathomable way with the principle of the neighbor- hood school. The CCR report explains why the neighborhood school has become an out- moded concept. In the old days, when populations were smaller and more dis- persed, it was common for a school to draw its clientele from varied class back- grounds over a large stretch of terri- tory. There was some real mingling of children from professional and laboring classes, from rich homes and poor homes. In this sense a neighborhood had functional and democratic variety, a multi-class character within a largely working-class nation. But today we have 55 ee highly homogenized pupil populations, drawn from quite small and rigidly ap- plied geographical attendance areas. In some of those rabbit warren high-rise housing projects all of the children in a given classroom may actually live in the same block, literally not more than 100 yards from one another. Here we have the so-called “neighborhood school” with a vengeance. In many cities, school attendance zones are carefully gerrymandered to preserve class and race distinctions. A Negro child may walk past a “districted” school attended by a 90 per cent white population in order to get to his 100 per cent Negro school. Site selection and school design are other ways of perpetu- ating racial imbalance. Of 371 new ele- mentary schools opened during the past fifteen years in sixteen American cities, 84 per cent immediately served either a nearly all-Negro or nearly all-white cli- entele. Atlanta, a city which likes to tell the world that it does all in its power to achieve model race relations. de- liberately designs and places its schools so that they will be rigidly segregated by race. There is only one school in Nashville which serves all twelve grades, The Nation SUBSCRIBERS’ BOOK SERVICE Offers the following at a discount: Price OTHE GOODBYE LAND by Jose Yglesias (Pantheon, $4.95) Se rae, cre SH) 0) AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF BERTRAND RUSSELL, 1872-1914 (Little, Brown & AO STD) cinder aloes apes du BOBO GO THE ACCIDENTAL PRESIDENT by Robert G. Sherrill (Grossman, $5.00) $4.00 Strange and Thompson were OO ED HELL’S ANGELS: A Terrible Saga by Hunter (Random House, $4.95). ....... 0 THE FREE WORLD COLOSSUS: A Critique of American Foreign Poliev in the Cold War by David Horowitz OEUTIT ANG: Wane, SBi99)) -ccunwctncnectca-nes $5.55 (0 FRIENDSHIP AND FRATRICIDE: An Analysis of Whittaker Chambers and Alger Hiss by Dr. Meyer A. Z (Viking, $8.95) sod 01 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF POWER by Ronald Sampson (Pantheon, $4.9). ........ $3.95 Remittance accompanying orders should be made payable to THE NATION, 383 6th Ave., N.Y. 10014 (1 Payment enclosed (J Please bill me Readers can avail themselves of our regular offer to send them any book (ex- cept paperbacks), published in the U.S. at the retail price post-free. When order- ing, please give title, author and pub- lisher, if possible. 7-17-67 56 and it was deliberately set up that way to prevent residents of a small Negro neighborhood from sending their chil- dren to nearby white schools. Houston has a carefully planned school-expan- sion program through 1970, guaranteeing that its new building will be racially homogeneous. Some cities have built schools for Negroes no worse than those for whites, but many have not. Milwaukee built forty-four new schools between 1950 hoods where Negro attendance exceeded 50 per cent. How do they get away with it? By a variety of stratagems, such as packing classes (with or without doc- toring statistics for the official record), converting basements and auditoriums to classrooms, double shifts, bringing in “temporary” or portable wooden struc- tures, renting space in church basements or housing projects, or by adding wings to ancient structures. Of all the suggested proposals for desegregating the large urban systems, the commission finds the “educational park” idea the most promising [see “The Educational Park” by John Barden, The Nation, April 20, 1964]. Accord- ing to this scheme, as many as 5,000 to 30,000 students are brought together in one large complex of buildings and services—actually a city of learning. The Syracuse plan provides for closing the present thirty-one elementary schools and reassigning all children to four new educational plazas to be built on the city’s outskirts. There is a plan for East Orange, N. J., where 69 per cent of the students are Negro, which stipulates that all 10,000 children from kindergarten through high school will attend facili- ties clustered on one large site. Al- buquerque, N. M., with 76,000 students, is considering a scheme based on sepa- rate parks for the elementary and secondary grades, each newly con- structed center to serve a maximum of 20,000 children. On the basis of the CCR report, we can say categorically that we do not need more “research” to prove that— no matter what efforts are made in the name of quality—educational segrega- tion by class, caste and color yields not upward mobility but a reinforced im- mobility. All we need to do is look honestly at 100 years of segregated schools and at the record of failure of contemporary efforts at compensation. We do not need a new educational philosophy. John Dewey gave us one with remarkable prescience more than a generation ago. We do not even lack resources—we have them, but they are being poured from the skies over Viet- nam, $30 billion worth a year. As for q the strategies of integration, take your pick: the CCR report- suggests at least six that are bound to work if we want them to. The successful implementation of all these strategies depends absolutely on the two chief recommendations of the CCR. The first is that “Congress should establish a uniform standard providing for the elimination of racial isolation in- the schools,” and the second is that Congress “should provide financial and technical assistance to the states” in car- rying out the needed remedies. What this means in practice is making mas- sive federal funds available to the states, and then allocating them only to schools which are racially balanced, often de- fined as containing a Negro enrollment of between 15 and 50 per cent, but not more. This in turn means forcing the states to redistrict, to mix suburban with inner-city children in common schools. Is this fantastic? Does it imply a revo- lution in the delivery of one of our basic social services, public education? It probably does, but it is not thereby technically or politically unfeasible. It can be done. Schrag (who tends to hedge on the issue of integration versus com- pensation) would probably agree, since similar ideas are hinted at in the con- cluding sections of Véillage School Downtown. Neither Schrag nor the CCR report (which likes the word “substantial”) tells us how much we can expect all of this to cost. My own surmise is that it will require federal expenditures upward of $50 billion a year over the next twenty- five years. This amounts roughly to $1,000 annually for each child in school. If we do it, it will go down in history as the biggest benign bribe ever made by the federal government to the states. Nor is it in the realm of fantasy, when we consider that we are now approach- ing an annual gross national product of $1,000 billion. The great merit of the CCR re- port is that it is based on a strict com- mitment to a democratic public school system for this nation. Most of us were brought up to believe in the public school as the chosen instrument of American democracy. There is room for this belief—if we are thinking of the re- mote past or the future. But with regard to the recent past and the present, the sad fact is that the public schools have been since the turn of the century, and remain to this day, largely a chosen in- strument of big business and corporate liberalism. has never distinguished itself by demand- ing a fair shake for Negroes.) The THE NATION / July 17, 1967 (And American capitalism © gs ey . a a pes otzkig Sih sete ate 2 anise tate Matin te St tat Ri os have never been chiefly con- d with evoking the free and critical ect, sponsoring high culture, pre- rving our democratic ideals, or even achieving “life adjustment” for the young. Their chief mission has been to turn out docile servitors of a business- dominated society. This has meant the three Rs, conformist consumership, loyalty to local interests, and harmless amusements (especially sports). But now there is thunder and light- ning on the horizon. The demand for integration can shatter the mold. A THE LEVITTOWNERS. By Herbert J. Gans. Pantheon Books. 474 pp. $7.95. ELMER BENDINER | Mr, Bendiner, writer and editor, is the _ author of The Bowery Man (Thomas Nel- son). ‘It has been eminently fashionable to to see in them a corruption of man and nature. Now sociologist and city plan- ner, Herbert J. Gans, has written a | voluminous study—The Levittowners— which lambastes such criticism as an aristocratic affectation. Those who would conserve the coun- _tryside against the spread of shopping malls are denounced by Mr. Gans as More interested in trees than in people. Those who bewail the alleged cultural sterility of lower-middle-class suburbia are depicted as intellectual snobs who insist that America be made in their image. In short, he contends that the sniping at Levittown is part of a class war against the lower middle class and all its values. _ Alarmed at the steady drumfire of anti-Levittown criticism, Gans moved into the New Jersey settlement at its inception and stayed there for two years as a “participant-observer” to investigate at first hand the life style of what had become anathema to his fellow intellec- tuals. Working under the sponsorship of the Institute for Urban Studies of the ‘University of Pennsylvania, Gans lived ‘the suburbanite life to the hilt. He culti- _vated his neighbors and conscientiously Michael Goldman, Poetry Edi- tor, will be on leave until Septem- ber 15. During that time no poetry will be considered for publication; we shall welcome submissions again in the early fall. HE NATION / July 17, 1967 scorn the Levittowns of America and> genuine democratic ideal, and a tough one at that; is being thrust forth for implementation, and by surly advocates to boot. Hundreds of American school boards, dominated by conservative pup- pets of the power structure, just cannot cope with this. The solution requires real change, massive new resources and prolonged political strife. The demand for an end to racial and class isolation in the schools is no less than a demand for the rejuvenation of American de- mocracy. It will not be achieved pain- lessly. | Cult of the Majority attended every meeting and Kaf- feeklatsch that would admit him. He supplemented his findings with questionnaires that provided him with hard data and impressive tables. These, however, do not greatly interfere with the book’s readability. Is life dull: in Levittown? Only to “tourists” and “cosmopolitans,’ Gans re- . plies. The inhabitants claim emphatical- ly that it is not and Gans credits their views as most authoritative. Of course it may be said that a man who is pay- ing a good deal of his hard-earned in- come for the first house he can call his own, and who is eager to be on good terms with his neighbors is unlikely to yawn and remark, “How dreadfully dull!” Gans insists, however, that the Levit- town life is precisely what the lower middle class wants and therefore ought to have. “Many working class city dwellers,” he writes, “enjoy street life and urban eating or drinking places; up- per middle class critics like crowds and cosmopolitanism. The lower middle class and the kinds of working class people who come to Levittown had no interest in either. Even previous urbanites had made little if any use of the cultural facilities valued by the cosmopolitan, and had no need of them in the suburb.” As an example of their lack of in- terest in institutions associated with the “vitality of the working class urbanite,” the Levittowners voted to keep their community free of bars. To demonstrate their antipathy to cosmopolitan values they voted against attempts to expand their school’s horizons beyond the severe- ly practical. And they sided overwhelm- ingly with the builder’s efforts to keep the community lily white, yielding only reluctantly after legal action had been taken. ‘ What they want, Gans reports, “is a | kind of interpersonal vitality along with privacy and peace and quiet. Vicarious excitement is something else again. Tele- vision provides programmed and highly predictable excitement but it can get boring. A fire or accident, a fight at a municipal or school board meeting, and marital strife or minor misbehavior among neighbors involve real people and known ones. The excitement they pro- vide is also vicarious but it is not pro- grammed and is therefore more reward- ing.” Add to this tattle-tale gray Peyton Place a large admixture of “the Puritan ethic,” as Gans describes the Levittown atmosphere, and you have as dreary a picture as any drawn by the most cos- mopolitan of critics. Life in Levittown, and probably anywhere else in the nation, becomes a “constant search for compatible people and a rejection of those who are dif- ferent,” Gans says. Although Jews, Catholics, Protestants, | working-class, middle-class and occasionally upper- middle-class people live next door to one another, “propinquity” does not lead to integration. Each seeks his own kind, Gans reports, and sets about the business of excluding others. The “others” in Levittown are most frequently “cosmo- politans,” upper-middle-class Jews or both. (The coupling of Jews and cos- mopolitans is reminiscent and not reas- suring.) Gans has scant sympathy for these FOR WRITERS! 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When he was there they campaigned for causes which he found laudable, but “their dedi- cated activism confounded the decision- makers” who were not accustomed to popular “feed-back” between elections, and “it was easy to think of them as malcontents and agitators.” He credits them with a value as gad- flies but at the same time condemns them because “they could not see that what they considered the public interest was often only an impersonal but never- theless upper-middle class (and therefore self-) interest.” He would have had them distinguish between demands that reflect their own class interests and the lower-middle-class needs of their neighbors. He suggests forlornly that their emphasis on _prin- ciple would have defeated any real coalition, even in areas of prime inter- est to the community as a whole. “The class differences were just too great to be hurdled even for political advantage,” he concludes. The Levittowners is a thorough- going sociological study, but for the lay reader, who is likely to be a hapless “cosmopolitan” critic of Levittown, the book raises a number of disturbing questions. For example, which is the more in- tolerable snob—the one who complains of “rural idiocy” or the one who says that those who live such lives are in fact rural idiots and would be happy in no other condition? In a democracy, Gans argues, the majority in any community ought to dictate the way of life. But is every fight for an expanded school pro- gram, better libraries, greater freedom of thought, or a political house cleaning to be considered an effort to impose values of an alien class because it runs against the grain of the entrenched and tyrannical majority? So rigid a view of class values and so mechanical a definition of democracy, it seems to this reviewer, leads only to a deadly quietism. If Gans were arguing only against the tactics of “cosmopolitan” reformers and radicals, he could, no doubt, make an eloquent analysis. But he goes much further and, despite a grudging admis- sion of the stimulation that comes with any irritant, the implication given the reader is that such people should ac- cept the standards of the community in which they live or go back where they came from. In this tidy view of democracy the rebel gets short shrift. And Gans espouses a cult of the majority that can be as absurd and as deadly as the infamous cult of the individual. 38 Mind-Expanding Verbs A WORLD ELSEWHERE: The Place of Style in American Literature. By Richard Poirier. Oxford University Press. 257 Pp; Sef oe ALAN TRACHTENBERG Mr. Trachtenberg teaches American litera- ture at Pennsylvania State University. In A World Elsewhere, Richard Poirier sets out to rewrite the criticism of major American literature. He argues that our best books are interesting and vital for certain moments contained in specific sentences and paragraphs, rather than for the imitation of reality in entire works. The moments he chooses to cele- brate by a brilliant verbal analysis are when the hero experiences a profound sense of release from confinement and authority. Poirier calls this experience an expansion of self. It is expressed in verbal style, not in dramatic action. Works by Hawthorne, Henry James, Mark Twain and William Faulkner which we usually read as fictional accounts of heroes in fictional versions of the real world, Poirier now would have us read as verbal struggles by both author and hero to escape the historical world al- together, to expand the self infinitely into vacant space. At best the escape can be momentary, and heroes, writers and readers alike must return to a diminished sense of self; out of this conflict comes the unique quality of American romantic literature: “a sustained and acknowledged tension between the writer’s commitment to visionary possibilities and his obliga- tions to certain conventions of expres- sion that tend to frustrate these possi- bilities.” This argument is difficult and elusive, and it may help for the moment to dis- tinguish its leading ideas from its method. Poirier’s method is based on a radical shift in what we consider “real” about literary works. In much recent criticism the work appears as a set of signals which register in the reader’s mind and click off associations—archetypic, mythic, political, literary or generally cultural. Poirier wants us to curb our attention to the signals themselves, the isolated images and symbols, and respond instead to the way they are presented in the text—in particular, to the tone and presence of a speaking voice. What he means by style is the more or less tangible presence generated by grammar and syntax, the ambience of personality which inhabits the language. Let us not extract images and ideas, he argues, but experi- ence them as functions of this verbal entity, style, styles, from inherited verbal patterns, © One of the best and most. useful achievements of the book is the distinc- tion, implied throughout, between meta- — | phor and style, between what a reader recognizes in his mind, what he takes out and paraphrases in his own terms, measures and evaluates, and what he ex- periences, almost kinetically. Poirier reads fiction as a verbal drama rather than as a pattern of translatable mean- — |} ings. Taken as a sheer exercise in read- ~ ing, the book demonstrates a kind of © negative capability, a hushed receptivity — to tonalities and modulations of the — voice in the words. In the practice of his method Poirier gives new and fresh readings to many familiar passages in American books. But | as he moves from method to concep- | tion, the drift of his bias begins to ap- — pear. By reading like detectives looking — for clues, he feels, we have “pacified” the “marvelous and eccentric vitality of — American writing.” True enough. But he continues: “By being historical about | American literature, we have often | missed the history which is particular novels, poems, or essays, the history — lurking in their stylistic and formal char-_ acteristics.” The key expression is “the ~ history which is... .” It becomes clear that Poirier does not want to work out a relationship between style and history _ as we normally understand the term but — to replace history with style, to com- } plete in criticism what he takes to be the most significant drift in the literature it- — self. -_5>[] =P fF ee neg ee eee eet a oii The page-by-page argument is b that the historical nature of American works lies in their stylistic activities, | and not in the reality reflected in ~ the action. If style is a struggle to bring into existence a certain presence, — the struggle in American works is first to detach the reader from traditional — and thus to free him to share the hero’s — expansion of self. The expansion in— writers like Emerson, Thoreau and | Faulkner is so radically new that it re-— quires a dislocation of conventional literary language. This dislocation (and @ Poirier devotes most of his book to analyses of specific passages which exemplify it) serves the writer in his’ relationship both to his reader and his | hero. To communicate his moments of @ transcendent freedom he needs to trans- | port his reader from any conventional — idea of literary reality. Likewise, the | hero requires an unconventional lan- | guage in order to give birth to his un- THE NATION / July 17, 1967 = r ¥ FS a —- g See . : i rf entional visionary consciousness of lom. In Poirier’s version of the re- rary conventions (such matters, in tion, as the need for realistic dialogue) verbal barriers to the expression of freedom, and correspond roughly to ‘social and political conventions. Another way to put this complicated idea is that American’ writers, unable to imagine real alternatives in action to their hero’s (or their own) unhappy rela- tions with society, have invented verbal forms which project momentary illu- ‘sions of freedom. These forms tell the teader that the freedom is momentary and illusive, and thus they protect the free consciousness from the mistake of | our believing it is real and competitive in a scale of values with other moments. _ To be truly free the moment must be unreal. Think of Huck and Jim, naked, on their Taft. We can accept the image only because it is presented as a funda- | mentally impossible idyll. If the writer had presented the moment as something | which could actually happen, he would have to contend with his reader’s normal ‘social judgments about whether it is likely or not. By presenting it as an es- sentially verbal experience, he frees the moment from judgment, transports us _ stylistically, and confirms its temporary ‘Teality by conceding its ultimate un- -Teality. To make style an escape from society, a substitute for history, Poirier ‘Invites his readers at the outset to ac- cept the premise that freedom is the crea- tion of consciousness, not political insti- tutions. His source is Hegel, and his ‘intention is to prove that literature “makes free” through its style, not through figurative versions of a social Teality through which the reader might better understand his own nonliterary Teality. My disagreements with the argu- ‘ment begin at the outset, for as I read Hegel, he hardly meant to detach the mind from history. Freedom for the phi- losopher developed in a process of con- “scious interaction with necessity. To ‘claim that Hegel proposed that freedom consists in the displacement of external I Teality by imagined alternative forms seems a complete misconstruction. Poirier’s stylistic emancipations have lit- tle in common with the Hegel of whom . N. Findlay writes: “True freedom, he -~ more and more to think, can be found only in the laws and usages of some concrete community, in which the individual can ‘find himself.’ ” The utopian, anti-historical imagina- _tion in American literature has been described before, but rarely with such Sweeping assertion of its centrality, its E NATION / July 17, 1967 defiant role in shaping specific literary works. Poirier’s final description of the works he finds most valuable is “ex- travagances of yearning that create the object they yearn for.” In an important sense this description fits all works of literature that have an aesthetic whole- ness: the emotion they create is self- sustaining. But the historical nature of aesthetic experiences cannot be dis- The Gaze Behind ACQUAINTANCES. By Arnold J. Toynbee. Oxford University Press. 312 pp. $7.50. VARIETY OF MEN. By C. P. Snow. Charles Scribner’s Sons. 270 pp. $5.95. CALVIN BEDIENT Mr. Bedient teaches literature at Emory University, Atlanta, Ga. Almost all the subjects of Acquaint- ances are dead, but even if they were still alive, still vulnerable, how easily they could breathe as they took up this new book. For Arnold Toynbee’s heart is a haven. Secrets, vices, open sores are safe with him, and as for malice, or penetration too deep for kindness, or the garlic breath of vulgar intimacy— from these his acquaintances are spared. Above all, they are respected, and this in our day is a mercy. Toynbee’s emo- tion is so generous, his manners are so impeccable, that a portrait from his hands is as good as an absolution. Ever so gently, his mind blesses. Yet which of his many subjects, I wonder, would be fond of his portrait? Itself destined for the attic, it would bring to mind old faded frontispiece photographs, all ghostly blue or humus brown. “Is that my face?” each would ask, looking into Toynbee’s mirror. For none would have thought that his pres- ence was so pale. The human craving to be watched, delighted in, weighed, pre- ferred, would find little to feed on; for Toynbee’s sense of human beings, if mild as moonlight, is also as dim, and here even his closest friends often dis- solve into their careers, or into moments of modern history, or into incidents of Toynbee’s life—into everything that is not quite themselves. Toynbee’s mind is so saturated with “international affairs,” his penchant is so obviously (as he says) for the tree of history instead of the “single leaves,” that, as one reads this book, the title soon begins to provoke one’s sense of irony—it is as if the gal- axies have been mistaken for the lights missed out of hand. All literature, all art, by its nature, creates a “world else- where.” But before this world is called “freedom” or consciousness, its strings of attachment with the other world of power and time need to be more care- fully identified. Keats concluded with a question: “do I wake or sleep?” Poirier concludes with too much certainty that to sleep and dream is to wake. the Lens of a town. How much better even hatred would be than Toynbee’s bland and im- personal underwriting of one’s existence. For, hated, one would at least be there, vivid, felt, individual, and not simply a glimpsed passenger on the great, crowded train of history. Even as a book on Toynbee’s own career, on history, human nature, life in general, Acquaintances draws a blank. It has no sparkle, no poetry, no pro- fundity. It is all a dry rustling of dis- quisition and reminiscence. Though Toynbee’s intellect is prodigious, an ele- phant among minds, it displays the usual defects of massive size: it plods, it comes down ponderously on platitudes. Of Nehru the author writes: “When Fate overthrows, in the end, a man of more than ordinary spiritual stature, Fate is teaching us all a lesson and is calling us all to heel.” Despite the formality of syntax and tone, the interlarded ornate- ness, Toynbee’s work has always been marked by a kind of childlike simplicity, an almost indulgent, cultivated naiveté, a sweetness of reason that is a little self-savoring; and in Acquaintances Toynbee becomes sweeter and plainer than ever. How admirably restrained he is. Yet how innocuous, how determinedly civi- lized, how preciously grateful, generous, forbearing and good willed. Candor, the truth that cuts—these have not tempted him; yet candor has its civilized uses, and Toynbee might have learned from Shaw—whose ethics and meta- physics are so similar—that saintliness and sharpness are not incompatible. What keeps human reality out of Acquaintances is not only Toynbee’s finicky discretion and blindness to presence and preoccupation with the minutiae of history; there is also, at the bottom of this book, insufficient school- ing in the disguises, transmutations, and ambitions of the ego. Intellectually, Toynbee subscribes to original sin; but his eyes tend to exclude the dark. He is, precisely, Victorian in his sentimental 59 suppression of the flagrant, clamoring, animal insistence of the self. Selfless- ness is merely a hiatus in being; Toyn- bee does not recognize its rarity. Of a work by Prof. W. L. Westermann, Toyn- bee says: “He did not live .. . to see it published, but what of that? A scholar writes, not for himself, but for his readers.” Too eager, too consoling, this dismissal of the self echoes through Acquaintances, calling attention to hol- low spaces within it. By contrast, C. P. Snow, in Variety of Men, takes us into the inner corridors of power. A hard presence and beak of a man, rapping out both sympathy and disapproval in the same sharp tones, Snow is equally at his ease with great scientists (Rutherford, G. H. Hardy, Einstein), littérateurs (Robert Frost, H. G. Wells), and politicians (Lloyd George, Winston Churchill, Dag Hammarskjéld and Stalin), all of whom except the last he has personally known. Snow moves among this gathering cool- ly, not as a cat that looks at kings but as a great cat among great cats. The glare of will, independence, genius and confidence that this group sheds is al- most overpowering, but Snow holds up no tinted glass against it. With only mild reservations, he accepts the ego as one accepts a natural force, a geyser or a flood. The book presents personal power as spectacle; it is an aesthetic record of genius and will. The title, Variety of Men, misleads and is a little inflated in that variety has not been sought; it merely comes as it will, and there is not much of it: the great tend to repeat one another, like a spread of stars—all are egos en- deavoring to make themselves equal to the universe. Here the polemicist of The Two Cultures has wisely effaced him- self; the book carries no sermons. On the other hand, Variety of Men lacks vision, it is not all of a piece but only a collection, a photo album of the great; nor does it move beyond personalities to human nature. Not even Snow holds the book together: though he makes judgments, states regrets, praises, is shrewd and analytical, lively and direct, he never quite comes into focus; we look over his shoulder, we listen to his voice. Snow wrote the book, he says, “for fun.” A “set of personal impressions,” it is “modest in intention.” Fair enough; all that was then necessary was that the book should be engrossing. And it is: Variety of Men is a delight to read. Though almost certainly more than an interest in “the variety of human be- ings” lies behind it, though a fascina- tion with greatness and power seems to 60 have fired it, it succeeds simply because it is vivid; it communicates energy; it contains reality. Here is an observer of men. Snow’s eye has a kind of labora- tory clarity, his sense of his subject is concentrated, his ear serves him well. Sitting for Snow, you would feel the heat of the lights, the intent gaze behind the lens. Here, too, is an artist. Without rais- ing his voice—which is tough, straight- forward, vigorous—Snow can draw tears, as in the pieces on Frost and Rutherford. Though he seems rather brittle, his humanity is deep. He is very much his own man, but not cold. In- THEATRE IN EUROPE Ill HAROLD CLURMAN Prague All I knew of this beautiful city as I entered it was that here in 1787, at a theatre still in use, Mozart’s Don Gio- vanni was first performed; that it had been the capital of. an honorable de- mocracy, betrayed at Munich by Cham- berlain and Daladier and taken over by the Communists in 1948. I knew it had given evidence of its resistant spirit during the Nazi occupation and that it contained the oldest remaining Jewish cemetery and synagogue in Europe, part of a ghetto where in the 16th century the legend of the Golem (a giant robot fashioned by the chief rabbi to combat murderous anti-Semites) had originated. I had also seen several interesting Czech films and plays. In short, I knew very little about Prague or its people. It was through its theatre that I came to know more. This statement may be taken as “symbolic.” For I have often Tepeated a _ thesis central to my “ideology”: a theatre may serve as a key to understanding a nation’s char- acter. First a few facts. Prague, with a population of a little more than a mil- lion, has sixteen theatre groups, all of them nationally or locally subsidized and all of them repertory companies. Apart from the opera houses and mu- sical theatres (the National Theatre of- fers drama as well as opera), and aside from “standard” pieces by Shakespeare, Lope de Vega, Schiller, de Musset, Machiavelli, Goldoni, Capek and Lan- ger, one could see last May Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire and The Night of the Iguana, Miller's After the Fall, Ionesco’s The Chairs, Giraudoux’s Mad- woman of Chaillot, Schisgal’s Luy, Ro- telligence, knowledge of the world, sens sory vitality—the book has all these; but ~ perhaps its real brilliance lies in its spirit, its attack. If these “impressions” lack formal beauty and move unpredict- — ably, still they snap and clip along, and © have their impact. One scarcely notices or cares that there are no pockets of — ) silence, that the book lacks serenity and scope. It bears one along on its wave. _ A series of sharp impressions and force- ful judgments, it is percussive. And this is the right spirit in which to record ~ impressions — this swift, free-handed — sketching of lines, unconscious, spon- taneous. Variety of Men is alive. main Rolland’s Game of Love and Death, Diirrenmatt’s latest play, Meteor, Camus’ The Righteous, and a show § dealing with the assassination of John — Kennedy entitled Dallas. | One of the recently formed compa- j nies, calling itself the Gate Theatre, uses — a house seating 400, and operates on a yearly budget of $120,000, supplemented by the government with another $60,000. Its most expensive ticket is $1.10. I paid © $1.50 for an orchestra seat at Lorca’s © The House of Bernarda Alba in a larger i house. The younger companies interested me — the most, though the older ones orb t ably command better actors. I began with a version of Jarry’s King Ubu at the already famous Theatre on the — Balustrade (founded in 1958) in what — appeared to be an obscure square of the ~ “Old City.” The production was a rev-_ elation and typical of present-day Czech | theatre work. 4 The stage, like the auditorium, is tiny: © no larger than those of our most modest — Off-Broadway houses. But the com- pany, under its brilliant director Jan Grossman (who also directed his own © dramatization of Kafka’s The Trial), was able to achieve an astonishing va- riety of movement within the extremely restricted area of the stage space. The set seemed to consist of little more than — a shabby brass bed, which could be taken apart and converted into a series _ of steps, ladders and other contraptions jj ¢ to be used in many different arrange- _ ments, and creating “platforms” on which the actors danced, marched, | leaped- over, under and around in fan-— tastic comedy routines. All this effected, — not only without the slightest awkward: ness but with utter freedom. The actors served as stagehands, the | | THE NATION / July 17, 1967 t 8 and furniture but also carried the ng lady off-stage. Were the actors ned for drama or for the circus! y all seemed to have developed acro- atic skills, an attribute I discovered to be common to the younger companies. One might have supposed that they had all been students of Graham, Robbins * As played here, Ubu is a mockery of ‘Tule by dictatorship, a display of jubi- plant anarchy. Cast in the role of Papa Ubu was an actor who looked like the , young Orson Welles with the avoir- dupois of the present Falstaffian Welles. Despite his obesity, he was as agile as the slimmest of dancers, and much fun- ‘mier than Arbuckle. (In The Trial he plays a minor role which he makes memorable through a series of sadistic sleight of hand tricks with a cigarette butt.) One can never tell at these per- -formances who the leading actors are and who the bit players. Most of them alternate from central roles to subsidi- ary ones. _Improprieties are performed with deft delicacy: a man kisses a girl while but- toning his fly, another asserts his sporti- ness by pulling himself into a towering position by hiking his crotch. Garbage pails become crowns. The satire is de- _fiantly gay; all the wild business of King Ubu is performed with exquisite pre- cision. The audience roars its apprecia- tion and does not leave the theatre till the stage manager decides to turn on ‘the house lights. I dwell on this production because ‘it is characteristic. At another of the new companies, the Dramatic Club, I at- tended a scenic jape taking place, for the most part, at a discotheque. It showed young folk (not hipsters) in jocose rebellion against the working class as conceived before the “thaw” as well as the bureaucracy. The play (of untranslatable title and spare in struc- ture) galloped from one set of mischiev- ous dialogues to another, all of them ‘marked by happy disrespect for authori- ty. (One of the boys yells at a govern- ment employee, “Make up your mind!” to which the exasperated response is, “With us nobody makes up his mind.” Laughter and applause from the audi- ence.) Such pranks and fancy-free im- Provisations are referred to here as _ “happenings.” ; _ The stage at the Dramatic Club is even tinier than the one at the Balu- strade. (I visited backstage where there was hardly enough room for four peo- ple. to stand comfortably. The rather farge company was packed into two or NATION / July 17, 1967 FREE Your Choice of an Outstanding Book BROTHERS UNDER THE SKIN by Carey McWilliams THE FBI NOBODY KNOWS by Fred J. Cook THE FERVENT YEARS by Harold Clurman THE NATION CENTENNIAL ISSUE RUSSIA AT WAR, 1941-1945 by Alexander Werth UNSAFE AT ANY SPEED by Ralph Nader with each new subscription to NATION THE NATION 333 Sixth Avenue New York, N. Y. 10014 Herewith my order and payment for a NEW subscription to The Nation. (1 One Year, $10 CO Two Years, $18 [ 6 Months, $6 (Foreign and Canadian Postage, $1 per year extra) Please check free book desired: O BROTHERS UNDER THE (1) THE FBI NOBODY KNOWS SKIN CO THE NATION 0 THE FERVENT YEARS CENTENNIAL ISSUE O RUSSIA AT WAR Ol UNSAFE AT ANY SPEED THE DISTANCE The field of vision takes my eyes far, far out, a forest of nerves hangs on to them, the tail of a comet , LENNART BRUCE three dressing rooms, gaily perspiring.) But once again the actors, all recently out of a dramatic academy, virtually an obligatory preparation for the profes- sion, are thoroughly schooled, capable of singing, dancing and performing ex- tremely difficult and entertaining turns. (There are scenes in The Trial, on the whole a somber production, in which one wonders if one has not entered a gymnasium where the entire cast—both women and men—carry on like high- wire or trapeze artists preparing for an Olympiad.) At the same Dramatic Club I attend- ed the opening night of Gogol’s Inspec- tor General done with an élan, a fresh- ness of humor, and an extravagance of characterization which were a joy to behold. Again one was amazed that so tiny a platform could contain so much spacious movement: talk about turning on a dime! The false inspector (Chles- takov) was played by the willowy Vladi- mir Pucholt, the scamp in Loves of a Blonde. He looks no more than 22. During the curtain calls (the only things on these occasions which are insuffi- ciently rehearsed) in celebration of the first night a sparse “bouquet” of lilacs was handed him, while the leading lady was regaled with several roses, and a single flower honored the actor who played the Mayor. The cast looked like a collection of thoroughly thrilled col- lege kids. The program of plays at the Gate Theatre is more sober. The designer, Swoboda, one of the most original tal- ents in all Europe, does most of the sets at this establishment as he appears to do throughout the town. The first pro- duction I saw there was a one-act play, Cat on the Rails, by a young Czech dramatist, Josef Topol. The play con- sists for the most part of a long duologue between a truck driver and his girl friend, both nearing 30. The tone of the play is one of lyric pessimism, with flashes of ironic humor. Advertising Rates Classified: 74c a line (6 words) 3 line min. Classified Display: $7.42 per inch (min.) THE NATION, 333 Sixth Ave., N.¥. 10014 242-8400 The two characters, full of animal vitality, are physically passionate. Yet the man, unwilling to settle down and marry, is obsessed by a recurring sense of futility. He is youth without purpose or objective. He appears incapable of progress beyond spasms of desire. He tortures himself and the girl whom he adores, and she does him. They are both locked in a cave of carnal intimacy without issue. Their destiny is mutual self-destruction. The writing is colorful, nervous and charming, romantically glowing and desperate. By itself this might not save the play from becoming static, though its audience is clearly fascinated by its verve and emotional tumult. The acting sustains the evening by being staged in constant motion, the two players using their bodies with the grace of ballet dancers and the vigor of athletes. The direction is choreography. Preceding Cat on the Rails was a pantomime by the Belgian, Michel de Ghelderode, called The Masks of Ostend —miacabre, frenetic and of a flaming hue, in a style reminiscent of James En- sor’s painting. The entire acting corps of the theatre takes part in this phan- tasmagoria, all but the central figure masked, wearing costumes that are pret- tily grotesque. The general import of this piece is the bedevilment of man, his inescapable frustration and defeat. A musical motif which is frantically giddy, harbinger of doom, punctuates the piece like a thread of hell-fire. This theme recurs at intervals in Cat on the Rails and serves as a sort of signature to the evening. Swoboda’s settings for both pantomime and play are contrasts of light and darkness, with electrical ef- fects in an ominous dazzle. In both pieces the surface is sprightly and glam- orous, but one hears a note of warning which indicates that all is not serene in the effervescence of Prague. No such evening is conceivable in the Soviet theatre. I have emphasized the strong accent on physical movement in all these pro- ductions. One wonders if the influence of the once discredited, now “re-estab- lished” Russian director, Meyerhold, who used actors as kinetic instruments, was not at play here. The surmise takes on definition when one sees The Three Sisters at the Gate, where the artistic director, also an actor, is Otomar Krejca. Chekhov’s characters are transfigured into extroverts. Mascha’s infatuation with Vershinin is made entirely overt. He lifts her into his arms and carries her about as if she were a light-of-love. Her displeasure with her husband is un- abashed, He himself is made petty as % ‘well as stupid. The atmosphere of the © Prozoroff home sparkles; the girls are — stylishly dressed. The furniture looks new, expensive and French. The thick light-gray carpet, which is never re- moved even in the outdoor scene, adds to a sense of opulence. Russian visitors disapprove of this interpretation and I must confess to finding myself in the same case. If I were to guess at its intention I should a say the director means to reveal Chek- hoy in a world without shadows, his play a tragicomedy in which the char- acters struggle and suffer despite their apparent well-being and material com- fort. At still another theatre I saw a well- designed production—all gleaming white statuary—of Diirrenmatt’s Romulus the Great, which supposes that the last Roman emperor was devoid of any wish to rule or to preserve his realm. He welcomes the conquering barbarians with undisguised relief. Though neither the play nor the production is especially brillant, the audience responded to it with a peculiar sympathy. The sum of what I experienced at these events, apart from sheer sensory enjoyment in the exuberance of the per- formances, gave me an insight into the Czech state of mind, Though they are said to be more solemn than the blithe, wine-drinking rather than beer-drinking Slovaks (who have their own excellent repertory companies), I discerned in the Czechs a deep and abiding vein of skep- ticism. They are not readily taken in by slogans. Where there is not some sly doubt about what is being imposed on them, there is an actual resistance, at times a kind of smirking sadness. Remember, this is the land of Schweik, the soldier whose vociferous jingoism is a mask covering complete disaffection with the patriotic shibboleths he is for- ever mouthing. Remember, too, that Prague was the birthplace of Kafka, whose bleak world is pierced by shrieks of derisive laughter. “Socialist realism” does not rule the roost in Bohemia. An unequivocally social play like Havel’s The Memorandum is a caricature of officialdom and the gobbledygook of trumped-up efficiency. Present-day cir- cumstances, a prominent Czech artist told me, have made a realist of Kafka. Almost every one of the plays I saw sounded a note of refusal, of hooting escape from an iron hand. The people may be in a bind, but their spirit is animated by something independent and distrustful of overlords. Czechoslovakia has known too many foreign masters ever to put its faith entirely in any ex- ternal force. THE NATION / July 17, 1967 FRANK Ww. LEWIS ACROSS: and 25 down Stroll deliberately? Only when first open. (11, 4) Ran off when about to deride the worn- out condition. (8) What one might be doing with pi, by the sound of it, necessitating a gradu- ate and a ruler, (6) Die in a short time with freedom from pain. (7) Moves hectically through various pro- fessional fields. (7) F. 14 Jerks in British films? (6) _ 15 Space for the rest of the family? (8) | ; 17 But his underlings are only issued steel helmets. (5, 3) 20 The bill for one is rather strange, since it certainly isn’t a blow-out. (6) 1 22 An old picture, but the foil could be aluminum or this. (7) 24 Minus a couple of zeros, it could be- come inauspicious. (7) _ 26 What slide pictures do is self-evident. _ 27 Means for determining how often play- ers get hit? (8) 28 Richard I might be one of two, when 5 down. (5, 6) DOWN: 2 They had some reservations about Idaho and Washington. (3, 6) 3 Listens with difficulty for what the joiner does. (7) ' Tequest to Puzzle Department, The Nation, | THE NATION / July 17, 1967 Crossword Puzzle No. 1209 Is Fundy so exceptionally neat? (4) Where the bulletins are placed for the passengers’ location. (2, 5) What once was well turned may not now make you feel so well, turned. (5) Future writer, otherwise good. (6) Where Belfast is an old compliment for 6. (6) 13 Lesson sounds like a synonym; this sounds like a trap. 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Publication Printers Corp., N.Y.C. 63 TO COMFORT AND TO CHALLENGE To Comfort and to Challenge A Dilemma of the Contemporary Church CHARLES Y. GLOCK, BENJAMIN B, RINGER, and EARL R. BABBIE This national survey of Episcopalians of- fers an analysis of a current dilemma of the church in America. “A most disturb- ing book... the church has two distinct roles . . . to care for the halt, the lame, the blind, the weary and heavy laden (to comfort) and also to make the church meaningful and influential in daily life (to challenge)... . Watch for this book.” —Prof. Edward C. Hobbs, Church Divin- ity School of the Pacific. $5.75 The Community Builders EDWARD EICHLER and MARSHALL KAPLAN This significant study describes in detail the development of new towns in Ameri- ca. Thé authors emphasize California, but include detailed discussion of Reston and Columbia, two new communities near Washington, D.C. 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The many selections —verse, stories, folktales, fables, poems, and excerpts from longer works—are ar- ranged by age group (5 to 15 years) and reading interest. Here is a substantial sampling of what the Soviet child reads today! COMING IN JULY $10.00 The California Oath Controversy DAVID P. GARDNER ‘‘A contribution of the first importance to the educational history of the United States. It is more than that. It is a meticu- lous and impressively objective record of a situation and series of events about which there has been much excited but largely uninformed comment. And even more important, it focuses on the real is- sues in such a way that every intelligent reader is challenged to examine his own position toward them...I thought I knew what was to be known about this contro- versy but Gardner has brought out the key issues in a new and illuminating way.” — Sidney Hook COMING IN JULY $6.50 VERMILION BIRD Modern Brazilian Short Stories Translated by WILLIAM L. GROSSMAN ~ These 17 stories present a wide range of Brazilian themes and styles. Settings vary — from the northeastern ‘backlands to the streets of Rio and Sao Paulo. A striking irony tempers the underlying warmth of — these stories with a certain wryness. The ; pervasive humanity that marks the work of Brazil’s best writers transcends the pro- — vincial; the reader wnderstands the people of these tales. $4.95 The Vermilion Bird T’ang Images of the South EDWARD H. SCHAFER An extraordinary essay on the contribu- tions of the tropics to the knowledge of ~ the medieval Chinese, and the effects of the region upon their senses, sensibilities and imaginations. Written with sensitiv- ity, vividness and humor, the book will — delight students of Chinese history as well as readers with a taste for the exotic. A sequel to The Golden Peaches of Samar- — hand, $11.00 Morley and India, 1906-1910 STANLEY WOLPERT The ‘Morley Era’’ of Indian history was a crucial period of transition. Mr. Wol- pert’s central theme, carried forcefully throughout the entire text, is Morley’s struggle to liberalize the Indian govern- ment against a host of strongly en- trenched conservatives. $6.95 HARVEST OF CHILDREN’S LITERATURE aia ee ea Sth ey te) Sawwon +t ase ne | { anvONIqune —o 1O 6 y , AMY UST- 91718Nd INYONI INE —6bPISSId BEI-12-5— LETTER FROM BERLIN «. ancry ATION JOLY 31571967... -35. cents BURLINGAME AUG 2 1997 a) Engineers of Prophecy Water in a Crystal Ball D. B. LUTEN and GORDON GOULD, Jr. Pacem in Terris II World Web oj Crises ELISABETH MANN BORGESE RC eos The Painters’ Union: V entilatin g th e H a U se of Labor’ surron nau a ESR VIEWS OF OUR WAR General Marshall’s / JOHN N. MORRIS Thich Nhat Hanh’s / JONATHAN MIRSKY 8 Steiner's Elite Conscience / DAVID J. GORDON en: LETTERS the real heroes San Francisco, Calif. Dear Sirs: When in his review of David Gardner's The California Oath Controversy (The Nation, June 19), Prof. George Stewart fails to see the tragedy in the per- sonal lives of the nonsigners, he is obviously referring to the twenty or so esteemed members of the faculty who fought the case legally and won. Some of these had in their pockets offers from at least two centers of higher learning when they made their fight. But... at that time one organization fighting the oath had a list of 1,776 nonsigners, faculty without tenure, teaching assistants, administrative staff, clerical workers and others who had no legal recourse. I know of much tragedy caused by their stand on the oath, mostly the in- ability to get jobs after the episode. These were the unsung heroes of those days. Norman Reider, M.D. therapeutic homicide Beverly Hills, Calif. DEAR Sirs: Phil Kerby’s advocacy (through Dorothy Kenyon) of abortion-at-the-woman’s-will [“Abortion: Laws and Attitudes, The Nation, June 12] is symptomatic of the irreverence for life that we have seen in the American napalming of suspected NLF villages and the Israelis leav- ing the overrun UAR soldiers on the Sinai desert to die of thirst. Therapeutic abortion should be thought of as “justifiable homicide” and entered into with the same grave concern. Sex education and contraception should be widespread and free to all—but not abortion. Richard Thomas Barton, M.D. rewards of anonymity New York City Dear Sirs: Sean Cronin’s “MacDiarmid: Highland Red,” in your issue of June 5, was an engaging and informative piece of journalism. As one who had a minor part in the publication of the first edition of Hugh MacDiarmid’s Collected Poems, 1 can add a footnote to his article... . The project of collecting for the first time the poetic works of Hugh MacDiarmid was suggested to me by M. L. Rosenthal some years ago when I was an employee of The Macmillan Company. Mr. Rosenthal subsequently worked with Mr. MacDiarmid in selecting the poems; mat- ters of organization, and questions of cuts and omissions were necessarily involved because of the voluminous nature of the material. Mr. Rosenthal then prepared the edition for the press, but, as a matter of principle, declined to be identified as the editor of the book. He felt that an edition of a great poet should come before the public neither graced nor encumbered by the name of the lIierary jour- neyman who assembled the collection. .. . The new edition of the Collected Poems, mentioned by Mr. Cronin in his account and described as a “revised edition” prepared by John C. Weston, offers in its intro- duction some disobliging and scarcely merited remarks about Rosenthal’s handiwork. Among these is his in- sinuation that MacDiarmid’s great poem, “The Drunk Man Looks at a Thistle,’ was cut into sections against the author’s will. On the contrary, the author responded very promptly and cordially to Rosenthal’s suggestion that the problems of presenting portions of this major poem might be lessened if the organic parts were further distinguished by appro- priate titles. Indeed, Mr. MacDiarmid cheerfully supplied the titles in question... . Emile Capouya, Executive Editor Funk & Wagnalls 66 ‘of poison from the body politic. And best of all, the 7 | EDITORIALS | F The View from Hanoi Columnist Clayton Fritchey recently paid President | Johnson the great compliment of assuming that the con- | tinuingly sharp escalation of the Vietnamese War is not )|~ a blind, mindless lunging into a void but a real cam-)} paign strategy aimed at 1968. “The strategy,” writes) | jf Fritchey, “is simple: Prosecute the war so aggressively }}j.| that the opposition cannot demand much more without )) j calling for an invasion of North Vietnam or the bombing) jj, of China.” Then Johnson’s own gothic attitude might, ))}, » by comparison, seem almost civilized. Wow If this is Johnson’s scheme, the Republicans so fata | ye have avoided the trap. Romney has reversed himself })j,: again, and now advocates no more escalation. Another )| 4 alternative to the Administration’s pell-mell intensifica- ) |}, tion of the war has come from eight Republican Con- | p gressmen who proposed that bombing in the Hanoi area” q.' be halted for two months. If, during that time, the North 7 |, Vietnamese reduced their own belligerency, then we )|js would move the bombing line one step south, and thus, 7}; i d| q} 1 zone by zone, as each de-escalating quid was balanced || + by a de-escalating quo, the war could be trimmed: down || gp to the negotiating table. | p The proposal is basically faulty, even dangerous, in |p, that success depends on what could be accomplished in® Vind sixty days (and what act of reciprocity would we accept © Mou as an adequate response?). But at least the proposal Vir brought the war into debate in the U.S. House of Repre- | | sentatives for the first time in weeks—a healthy release Wo Republicans treated the public to a discussion of the © : North Vietnamese as a people with a point of view and | di a pride that should be taken into consideration. As_ 4 Rep. Frank J. Horton (R,. N.Y.) put it: “The purpose a of this plan is not to determine who is going to lose, i but to save face so that both sides can de-escalate.” ~ i The restraint of the North Vietnamese was noted by — 4 Rep. Bradford Morse (R., Mass.), who correctly pointed © | out that there is plenty of escalating that the North © F Vietnamese could already have done—more terror — bombings of civilians, more use or their enormous stand- | ™ ing army, etc.—if they were as fanatical as President : Oy pt: Johnson tries to make them out to be. oe Accepting the North Vietnamese as a sensible people} | with an ethics and a pride is the thing most needed by a ie our leaders today. Evidence continues to mount that | pi the North Vietnamese make an undistorted appraisal } tw of the war and that what they say of conditions are at }ki least as trustworthy as the estimates from our own side. [ii To illustrate, compare the statements made in a Hanoi fit radio broadcast on June 2 with information supplied Jw either by the Pentagon, by U.S. officers in Saigon (as | i told to responsible journalists) or developed independently — } & by the journalists themseives: Ope THE NATION / July 31, 1967) WY i c SUMMER SCHEDULE During August, The Nation will appear on alter- | mate weeks: forthcoming issues will be dated _ August 14 and August 28. A ll Hanoi: “The basic U.S. concept of defense is mobile defense, unlike the French colonists. Yet after two years, he U. S. aggressors’ rear bases remain insecure. . . .” | Richard Harwood from Saigon, in The Washington Post, July 11: “This morning at an American military outpost a mere 20 miles south of Saigon [McNamara] was in- Mormed that only four of fifty-six nearby hamlets and only one of twelve nearby villages were under the control of ithe Saigon government.” 4 | Hanoi: “The U.S. strategy of local war of aggression s entered a period of serious stalemate... .” Richard Critchfield from Saigon, Washington Star, July “The McNamara-Westmoreland debate came as many yeteran observers in Vietnam agreed that the recent bat- tles in the central highlands and along the demilitarized M™zone have set U.S. progress back about six months.” | Hanoi: “We have fought 1 million troops of the Ameri- ns and puppets... .” Pentagon and Saigon reports: There are now 466,620 .S. land troops, 36,000 Navy, 53,000 allied (non-Viet), d 724,000 armed Vietnamese under our command, not unting the 35,000 U.S. supporting troops in Thailand, W for a total of 1,314,620. | Hanoi: Claims 2,067 U.S. aircraft shot down over 7 North Vietnam. | | Pentagon and Saigon: It is admitted that more than 2,000 planes have been lost, but U.S. sources divide them differently: 600 shot down over North Vietnam, more }than 1,500 aircraft lost in South Vietnam and elsewhere. _ Hanoi: “The enemy has intensified his attacks on North Vietnam with the aim of preventing it, as the big rear, }from supporting South Vietnam, the big frontline... . But the enemy could not materialize his plan, and he can never do so.” ' David S. Broder, The Washington Post, July 11: “As ‘one White House adviser put it last week, ‘Anybody who ‘thinks that bombing is going to bring North Vietnam to 4 | the peace table is insane. | Since Hanoi’s statements about the position and progress of the war agree broadly with the views of our own “ex- 'petts,” it seems prudent to believe Hanoi’s view of its own strength, stubbornness and purpose. Thus, when | Hanoi radio declares, “We are determined to fight them €éven if they have 2 million troops, even if the fight lasts | for another five, ten, twenty years or longer,” there is No reason to think that this is empty boasting or that | Ho Chi Minh overestimates his capabilities. Some Penta- | gon experts say that Hanoi has half a million men under arms and that there are 2 million more of military age ge 72. | THE NATION / July 31, 1967 our, of IN THIS ISSUE July 31, 1967 EDITORIALS 66 ARTICLES 70 Engineers of Prophecy: Water in a Crystal Ball D. B. Luten and Gordon Gould, Jr. 74 Pacem in Terrs II: World Web of Crises Elisabeth Mann Borgese 80 Letter from Berlin C. Amery 81 The Painters’ Union: Ventilating the House of Labor Burton Hail BOOKS & THE ARTS 85 Soldiering in Innocence John N. Morris 86 Hanoi and the Front Jonathan Mirsky 89 An Elite Conscience David J. Gordon 90 African Bookshelf Gwendolen M. Carter 92 Theatre in Europe IV Harold Clurman 95 Crossword Puzzle Frank W. Lewis Publisher Associate Publisher JAMES J. STORROW JR. GIFFORD PHILLIPS Buitor Associate Editor CAREY MeWILLIAMS Executive Editor ROBERT HATCH Copy Hditor MARION HESS Theatre HAROLD CLURMAN Art MAX KOZLOFF Music BENJAMIN BORETZ Science CARL DREHER Advertising Manager MARY SIMON PHIL KERBY Literary Editor HELEN YGLESIAS Poetry Editor MICHAEL GOLDMAN Washington ROBERT G. SHERRILL Paris ALEXANDER WERTH London RAYMOND WILLIAMS Bonn Cc. AMERY Canberra Cc. P. FITZGERALD The Nation is published weekly (except biweekly in July and August) by the Nation Magazine Company and copyright 1967 in the U.S.A. by the Nation Associates, Inc., 333 Sixth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10014. Tel. CH 2-8400. West Coast office: 1256 Westwood Boulevard, Los Angeles, Calif. 90024. Tel.: GR 4-2533. Second class postage paid at New York, N.Y. and at additional mailing office. Subscription Price: One year, $10; two years, $18. Foreign and Canadian postage: $1 extra per year. Change of Address: It is essential that subscribers ordering a change of address give four weeks’ notice and provide their old as well as their new address. Please give Zip Code numbers for both addresses. Information to Libraries: The Nation is indexed in Readers Guide to Periodical Literature, Book Review Digest, Book Review Index and the Public Affairs Information Service. t NAT IOT Nl Poh aes No. 3 Combined with FRONTIER 67. Bi) Spee ES Hw S arn gr to draw from. Can President Johnson meet that? Does he have any idea what he says when he promises General Westmoreland “all the troops he needs”? Compared to such a wild, open-end position, the simplistic proposal by the eight Republicans seems to embody the wisdom of the ages. What Worries Detroit A new note of urgency has entered the auto negotia- tions in Detroit in the wake of developments in the rail- road and rubber industry labor disputes. Railroad manage- ment’s success in imposing compulsory arbitration has not only irritated the entire labor movement but sent shudders through Detroit, where both labor and manage- ment far prefer free collective bargaining. On the other hand, the 100-day strike in rubber finally saw a break on the management front with General and Goodrich giving new contracts which substantially meet union de- mands, but the cost to profits and the lost wages for workers hardly suggests this example as one for Detroit to follow. The real choice for Walter Reuther and the Big Three auto makers is to make free collective bargaining work reasonably well or face the mess in railroads, where compulsory arbitration now threatens to become the permanent system. The difficulties facing auto negotiators are not the ap- parent ones. Walter Reuther has raised many crucial so- cial issues at the bargaining table. Should blue-collar workers be placed on salary? Should auto workers have a guaranteed monthly income? Should profit-sharing be- come a standard part of wage payment? Should Canadian auto workers, who do exactly the same work as American unionists, be longer denied equal pay? The list is calcu- lated to raise the blood pressure of editorial writers, but such issues are not as knotty as they seem. Profit sharing? In 1955, GM and Ford offered the UAW a stock-sharing plan. The current program of supplemental unemploy- ment benefits added to unemployment insurance is al- ready the basis for a “guaranteed annual income.” And the richest industry in the world can afford a healthy wage package, and doesn’t seriously deny it. Then why are most observers and the bargaining par- ticipants worried about a strike, and the ramifications of a strike? For the same reasons that plague most collective bargaining these days. Given the impact of inflation as the cost of the war in Vietnam expands, general unrest in union ranks is widespread, first among the young workers (and almost 50 per cent of the auto workers have less than five years seniority), and then among the skilled workers. The dilemma is this: If unions and management do agree to give skilled workers extra money, the cost is not prohibitive—but there is every likelihood of a revolt among the unskilled and semi-skilled unionists, In rail- 63 roads and in autos this is a determining factor. However, if the skilled workers don’t get healthy raises, revolt is |j And in autos, the skilled workers | were more or less given veto power over contract settle- viewed as inevitable. ment terms. The painful question now is: How can a reasonable settlement be sold to the ranks in the context of current | } circumstances, since every indication suggests that the first package accepted by union negotiators has little 2 chance of approval by the membership? As of now there — is no answer, and a strike in autos this fall appears certain. In itself, this isn’t as disturbing to the UAW or the auto | industry as would appear. In 1964, when GM was closed — down for six weeks, it still made its highest net profit of all time. What worries Detroit is that Washington may § not understand, and may seek to impose its own view on the auto industry negotiators. The imponderable factor is the course of events in Vietnam. In any contest between guns and real wages, real wages are the sure losers. Nor | would Washington like the appearance of national dis- unity which a large scale shutdown in autos might imply. B. J. WipIck ; | Crime and Insurrection As the battle raged in Newark, New Jersey Gov. Rich- — ard J. Hughes declared at one point that it was “plain and simple crime and not a civil rights protest.” In mo- ments when he was less distracted by the bloodshed and looting, the Governor also spoke of “rebellion” and “‘in- surrection.” In fact, there was both crime and insurrec- ‘tion (some of the crime on the part of the police) in a peculiarly American synthesis. Karl Marx would have disapproved of it as severely as Governor Hughes. He warned the workers against the Lumpenproletariat, which in time of upheaval emerged from its warrens to loot, burn and discredit disciplined revolutionists. But never having heard of Marx, young Negroes conduct their insurrections in their own way, and it is doubtful that the white establishment would be better pleased if they went about the business with more propriety. The Negro who breaks into a liquor store or carries away a television set during a riot may be interested only in his booty, but in most cases his motives are more complex. Among the looters were Negro housewives who took over a supermarket and did their normal shopping without paying for the groceries. “The brother’s got to take everything he gets,” one of them said. “Whitey ain't about to get off of anything unless you make him.” Some Negroes deplored the looting, but most approved. Since Whitey stood for law and order, they were against both. For the most part, Negroes who have the kind of jobs available in their ghettos make common cause with the jobless, and the half-educated go along with the com- pletely uneducated. According to Michael Harrington, the United States THE NATION / July 31, 1967 ta | 1 | i ie Sup wT Say spends a smaller percentage of its wealth on welfare than iny other advanced country. Like Robert Theobald, Harrington favors a guaranteed annual income that would go to the poor as a matter of social justice. The average A merican is not ready for any such dispensation. He does not object to spending 20 or 30 billions a year a squalid war in Vietnam, but he begrudges welfare “spending even on ‘the present scale. His creed is to get all he can for himself, and the idea that a section of the population should be allowed to live without work- ing is repugnant to him. That they may be unable to work, or that there are no jobs for them, makes no dif- ference in this way of thinking. _ And the affluent society rolls on. The revolt of the Negro proletariat is the retribution America has incurred _ for the gross materialism of middle-class prosperity, in which spending has become a religion and selfishness for oneself and the family (“nothing is too good for my kids”) is the lodestar of the new white working class. _ Relieved of poverty (if he ever is), the Negro may do _ ho more with his share of affluence than white America has done, but until he shakes off his role as America’s _ socio-economic underdog he will visit shame and destruc- _ tion on the nation that balks him in periodic outbursts of civil war. Chicken Coop Stupid ideas are supposed to die of exposure, but there _ is a kind whose emotional vigor lends them life beyond their term. An instance is the Civil Defense shelter pro- gram, which no one outside the Defense Department, _ with the exception of Governor Rockefeller of New York, _ has been able to contemplate without embarrassment. It _ is so preposterous in its Gargantuan inadequacy that we thought it had been safely interred, but the Defense _ people have now come out with a brand new pamphlet, “Designing Shelter in New Buildings,” for the guidance _ Of the architectural profession. At first glance it is an impressive, not to say pompous, _ affair, heavy with charts, graphs and technical specifica- _ tions, and prepared under government contract by en- _ gineers at Pennsylvania State University; but when one peers into its assumptions the structure crumbles. The document starts from the suppositions that in the event of a full-scale nuclear attack, 10 per cent of the ‘Nation will be obliterated (that’s 20 million dead) and that 75 per cent of its area will suffer radioactive fallout of varying severity. As a result, says the pamphlet, “most required shelter occupancy periods will be from two days to two weeks in duration. Others will have to remain protected for extended periods of time.” Who says so? The ‘pamphlet ‘says so. What does it mean? Nothing. But that is only a beginning. Comes next the question of an acceptable Protection Factor (PF). Taking the figure of 100 as meaning you would really be safe in "THE NATION / July 31, 1967 your hole (for two days? two weeks? an “extended” period of time?), the handbook arrives at 40 as the figure to be aimed for. “Since, hopefully,” say the authors hopefully, “the need for radiation protection will never arise, many clients feel they cannot afford to incorporate high level shelter which will adversely affect the function or cost of the building.” What this means, if we may translate, is that an air raid shelter that will fail six times out of ten is good enough for the American citizen because (/) it will make him think that nuclear chicken is a game he can afford to play, (2) he probably never will be bombed, and (3) if he is, he won’t be in any condition to protest. Meanwhile, a lot of concrete will be poured and the Russians may be weakened by laughter. It is not entirely surprising that the Defense Depart- ment is still promoting this fraudulent scheme; what is shocking—though regrettably not as shocking as it would have been a few years ago—is to know that a university of some reputation will lend its name to the wicked buffoonery. Choose Your Poll One would like to believe otherwise, but it has been difficult to escape the conclusion that an overriding ma- jority of Americans support the Johnson Administration’s conduct of the Vietnamese War. They do so without en- thusiasm, but Mr. Johnson is able to point to the polls. Not, however, to all the polls. An editorial in the De- cember 19, 1966, Nation called attention to a referendum which got on the ballot in Dearborn, Mich., a city prob- ably as conventional and conformist as any in the country. The question posed to the voters was: “Are you in favor of an immediate cease-fire and withdrawal of American troops from Vietnam, so the Vietnamese people can settle their problems among themselves?” Nearly 80 per cent of those voting answered the question, 14,133 saying “yes” and 20,621 saying “no.” Forty per cent of the voters,. then, were prepared to endorse the extreme posi- tion of unconditional withdrawal. The Cleveland Plain Dealer got an even more astonish- ing result in a straw vote which it conducted on Sunday, May 28, of this year. Three points of view were presented, one by Rep. Mendel Rivers, an avowed hawk, another by Sen. William Fulbright, the third by Dr. Howard Zinn, who needs no introduction to Nation readers. Their essays were titled, respectively, “Escalate and Win,” “De-Esca- late, Talk” and “Withdraw.” A high government official was also asked to present the Johnson Administration’s case, but declined on the ground that he did not wish to enter into public debate. The results of the voting, published on June 4, were: Zinn 5798 Rivers 1716 Fulbright 1648 There may have been a proportionately heavier response 69 Fan plc ge a a ia Z. oe ahd AS DLS PT ae Aaa ae from anti-war readers, but that would hardly account for such a lopsided result. The Plain Dealer has no com- ment, except that their readership certainly represents a cross section of the population and that they have noted a growing concern about the war. The explanation probably is that it is one thing when a pollster appears and poses a question to an unprepared citizen: unless the respon- dent has formed a definite opinion, he is likely to take refuge in a safe and respectable “support our President” or “support our boys” attitude. But when three positions ENGINEERS OF PROPHECY are set forth and he has time to reflect, he is driven to a judicious choice. In most of the media which come to the ordinary citi- zen’s attention, the Zinn viewpoint is represented either as that of beatniks and draft-card burners, or simply ig- nored. If the anti-war policy got equal time and equal space, the results might well be nearer those of the Plain Dealer canvass than those that have been publicized in the past. The lesson is that the anti-war forces must re- double their efforts: the situation is far from hopeless. WATER IN A CRYSTAL BALL D. B. LUTEN and GORDON GOULD, Jr. Mr. Luten, for most of his life a chemist, but now a lec- turer in the Geography Department, University of California, is concerned with the influences of population and conserva- tion pressures in the problems of natural resource manage- ment. Mr. Gould, formerly a student at the University of California, is now with the Peace Corps in Colombia. In a year of drought, flood and great harvest, such as 1965, it was perhaps inevitable that a Senator, in this case Frank Moss of Utah, should ask: “How can a na- tion deal with such paradoxes—with such audacious [our emphasis] whims of nature?” Quite apart from who should be called audacious, as We increase pressure on this part of our environment, so ever more often will the environment step on our toes. During the decades of increasing rainfall, we use more and more water and, lacking policy for retrenchment dur- ing the dry decades, we take it out on some other part of the environment. Hence our exhausted rangelands, our blowing high-plains crop land. Conversely, in the dry decades we move our cities out into the flood plains and, when the pattern changes, fight the mounting waters with ever greater flood-contro! districts. It is not at all Surprising, thus, that alternations of floods and droughts should press more and more closely on each other. Again, since our economy grows as by compound in- terest, exponentially, and our water “use” climbs at a simi- lar but augmented rate, it is unavoidable that plans for the management of water should also grow in scale, cost, magnitude and grandeur. We are devising new notions of financing which enable us not merely to defer the amortization of water development to our grandchildren but also to hand on to them unresolved and ever-increas- ing water deficits. In the Far West, Los Angeles, after exhausting local watersheds, has brought water for urban use, first from Owens Valley, then from the Colorado River, and then from Northern California. In the same period, irrigation water began to be moved southward from the well-watered Sacramento Valley to the drier San Joaquin Valley. In the East, the familiar example is New York reaching out from Manhattan, first up into Westchester County, then 70 across the Hudson into the Catskills and, most recently, over to the Delaware River; meanwhile postponing de- mands on the Hudson itself, because of its poorer quality. Now, as the climax to all these ventures, and with a scope that is characteristic of water development, comes the Continental water plan. The first proposal for this is The North American Water and Power Alliance (NAWAPA). It has been studied in considerable detail by Ralph M. Parsons Co. of Los Angeles, a substantial corporation engaged in large-scale engineering and con- struction ventures. It has also been the subject of a Senate Interior Committee hearing under the prodding of Sena- tor Moss. Although, because of its vastness, it has not yet been worked out in detail, and although informa- tion reaching the public has been limited, especially con- cerning the northeasterly ramifications of the proposals, still quite enough data have been released to permit a general description and to warrant certain reactions. The proposal describes the magnitude and growth rate of the “demand” for water, notes the general deficiency of supplies in the arid Southwest and the increasing “inade- quacy” of even the abundant sources in the humid North- east and the Mississippi Valley. It then turns to the un- occupied Northwest, starting with the upper reaches of the Columbia basin and looking beyond to the headwaters of the Frazer, the Peace, the Liard and the Yukon. Here it sees supplies ample for its objectives. Fortunately, they lie at high altitudes and, in general, NAWAPA proposes to generate the hydropower needed to move water to the objectives, with a great deal left over, to pay in some degree for the undertaking. The facilities proposed do not, perhaps, stagger the imagination, but they do exceed anything of the sort thus far undertaken on this earth. Some half dozen dams, each close to 1,500 feet high, are proposed. (The Empire State Building is 1,472 feet high, including the TV mast.) As for breadth, imagine a dam of that height stretching across Manhattan Island and both the East and Hudson Rivers! These dams are, in large measure, to restrain rivers running seaward in Canada’s Northwest Territory and southeastern Alaska. They would create numerous reservoirs, some of them large. The most spectacular THE NATION / July 31, 1967 x from well up in British Columbia down into Montana almost to Flathead Lake. It would lie just to the west of the main ridge of the Rocky Mountains, filling what _ is known as the Rocky Mountain Trench. Dams across the Columbia, the Kootenay and the Frazer Rivers would _ create this lake. It would serve as reservoir, but also as conduit to move water down into the United States. From this assembly point, water would be moved by two general paths: _ (1) Southward, first to Flathead Lake, then into Clark _ Fork, then under the Bitterroot Mountains into the Idaho _ Wilderness lands. Reservoirs and power plants would as- _ semble water from a number of streams in this neigh- borhood: five forks of the Salmon River, the Clearwater, Lochsa, Selway Rivers and Moose Creek. Some portions of these streams would continue to flow westward, as now, _ into the Snake and Columbia Rivers, primarily to generate _ hydropower for the immense pumping burden in the next southward hurdle. Five rivers, the Bitterroot, the Bighole, the Beaverhead, the Madison and the Yellowstone, lying east of the Continental Divide, would be dammed and in part sent under the Divide to add to this southward flow. All these streams would be assembled in a reservoir on the East Fork of the Salmon River and from its head a tunnel under the Sawtooth Mountains of central Idaho would bring all of the southbound stream into the up- per Snake River valley. Thence it would proceed south- ~ ward roughly along the Nevada-Utah border, splitting into two forks, the westerly one continuing southward to sup- ply water to southern Nevada, California and northwest- ern Mexico, The total supply (see also next paragraph) mentioned for Mexico, 20 million acre-feet, is more than the Colorado River’s present average flow. The eastern fork would tunnel under the Wasatch Mountains into small reservoirs high on the western tributaries of the Colorado, the San Rafael, Fremont and _ Escalante Rivers, then by tunnel completely under Lake Powell* to reach down into central Arizona, but also down into Mexico and then northeastward along the east face of the Rockies as far as Denver. (2) The second path would take water from the Peace River, move it southeasterly into the Athabasca drainage, thence to the Saskatchewan, thence into the Qu’Appelle, with a diversion southward into the Missouri near Wil- liston, N. D., thence into the Assiniboine, with another diversion through the Souris River into the James and southeasterly out of the James across the headwaters of the Red River and into the Mississippi near the Twin Cities. The main stream would go on east into the south end of Lake Winnipeg and thence, via the Winnipeg. Sturgeon and upper Albany Rivers, Lake Nipigon and the Nipigon River into Lake Superior. Associated with this segment are proposals for a host of still ill-defined waterways connecting Lake Huron and James Bay and rador, presumably to provide waterways for moving iron ore. r _ “This supply would be kept separate from the Colorado River, perhaps because the latter comes into a role more of drain. for used water than source for new. THE NATION / July 31, 1967 be a lake 420 miles long extending southeasterly. going on up into Quebec and as far as westernmost Lab- The associated hydropower and pumping structure is, of course, enormous. One of the pumping tasks alone is startling in its magnitude: a stream of 86,000 sec-ft. must be raised 2,400 feet to get it out of the Salmon River country in Idaho. The electrical energy for this lift is a big number: 86,000 x 2 x 365 x 2,400 = 150,672,- 000,000 kwh./yr. To put it into realistic terms, you must know that each American’s share of electricity is 4,009 kwh./yr. (0.5 kw.); so this pumping burden comes to the amount of electricity used today by 40 million of us, or about one-fifth of our total electricity use. Power trans- mission lines may become so prevalent in our wildlands that we shall have more wirescape than landscape. The irrigation water might increase our cropland by 7 per cent and our crop production by 15 per cent. The added volume might be envisioned as flushing out the pollution of Lake Erie but, in fact, would be a minor increment to the existing flow of water through that lake. It might be envisioned also as postponing for hundreds of cities and industries the moments when the truth about pollution by sewage and other wastes must be faced. However, these moments will almost certainly arrive be- fore NAWAPA. Canada would get an immense amount of additional hydropower in its western regions, where it is needed least, and a wonderful system of boreal barge ways, open for at least a few months each year. The proposal would provide benefits for thirty-three states. Practically, this means it would cause sixty-six Senators to think deeply. NAWAPA has been extolled in hundreds of editorials throughout the country, is the sub- ject of a vigorous promotional campaign involving, among other items, the almost daily use of seventeen prints of an attractive color film. It was described as “grand and imaginative” in an editorial in Science two years ago. Nonetheless, to the degree that conservationists have become aware of the proposal, they almost universally oppose it. Why, then, are we out of step? By intruding reservoirs into the heart of the wild- lands of Idaho and, to a lesser extent elsewhere, NAWAPA would ruin a large fraction of the vestiges of such wild- lands in the Western states. Wildlife habitat in all these regions would be modified, almost always adversely. The time is now past when one can argue that reservoirs are an asset to either wildlife or wildlands by saying: “You can’t drown a duck.” Synthetic fisheries could be created, but this is trivial compensation for the losses. High-density, water-oriented mass recreation thrives on reservoirs, but no reservoirs serving such purposes have yet become saturated, and the projected lakes are at the end of the line. When it is asserted that we shall need NAWAPA, the question is raised almost explicitly whether we need wildlife, too. If we decide for NAWAPA, we should say aloud that we can no longer afford wildlands, that, in fact, we are a society of declining living standards. No one, of course, has undertaken to compare our needs for these wildlands a century from now with our needs for NAWAPA’s benefits. In fact, no one is com- petent to do this: we do not know what our population will be, nor how urbanized; we do not know what our 73* Pewee i a a a —- ; ay social traditions will be; we do not know what the rela- tion of man to nature will be; as noted below, we do not know what water demand will be, and we do not know how electrical energy will be valued. Any engineer who is willing to say that the benefits clearly will out- weigh the costs is flouting professional ethics. The anticipated modification of the landscape does not end with the Northwest. The Nipigon River, once the peer of all trout streams, would become a “conduit.” Everywhere, rivers would be regulated; everywhere, the natural processes of the landscape would be modified. All told, flooded land would approximate the area of the state of Maine. No one can say that these modifications would serve the purposes for which they are being. de- signed, but we can say with some confidence that NAWAPA would create more problems than it could solve, for such is the way of resource-management technology. NAWAPA seems not to have questioned the na- ture and magnitude of future, especially far future, “needs” and “demands” for water. Ian Burton and Robert W. Kates, in a review of three books published by Re- Susiina Fres~ SD oe Copper ResK ¢ Taku Frees ~ Liard Res. AS Se ia NAKUNEIET boo ‘Frocky Mountain ' Jrench ! i Lake¢y i Nevada XN + \. Lake Vegas Colorado-="=" sources for the Future (Economic Geography, January, 1964) have hit this nail on the head. They say: “De- mand for [water] .. . is not to be interpreted in conven- tional economic terms. No one knows the . . . amounts of water that are demanded or would be demanded at various prices. Water ‘demand’ for the base year 1960 is really an estimate of the amount of water actually supplied. Similarly, projected ‘demand’ for the year 1980 is really that amount of water expected to be supplied given various assumptions. . . . [The authors] are caught in the prison of their own assumptions . [namely] that things will change, but only in the way and at the speed that they are now changing. . . . The danger which we foresee is that projections may become self-fulfilling prophecies.” NAWAPA’s proponents have seemed happy to. ac- cept estimates of greatly increased needs. Perhaps these serve their purposes, which may well be the continued expansion of civil engineering and the construction in- dustry. Their premises are, then, subjective and _ self- serving. NAWAPA’s proponents have not explored alternate approaches to the problem. The plan has been described 1,000' or over 1,700 1,500 1000 } 706 1,600 1,100 1,200 « Dams 1 Chitina ‘Copper R.) 2 Toku (Taku R) 3 Liarad (Liard R.) 4 Telegraph Creek (L. Stikine R) 5 Skeena (Skeena R) 6 Lillooet Lake (Fraser R) 7 Lillooet (Fraser R) 8 3rd Clearwater (Clearwater R) West end East end ae OKLAHOMA Total Area 45 mm. Acres Irrigated Acreage ° THE NATION / July 31, 1967 ‘ “imaginative,” but imagination has been limited to engineering schemes for moving water. Other matters should also be considered. The first of these is the man- ner of our “use” of water and alternatives to it. How do we “use” water? By and large, we use it to carry _ things. Irrigation water helps plants to carry nutrients from roots to foliage, and upon evaporating from the leaves, to carry heat away, to help cool the foliage. This is a _ “consumptive” use. No water is actually destroyed, but it is vaporized and liquid water is “consumed.” But also, in irrigation, more water must be applied than is evapo- rated in order that some will drain from the fields and carry away the mineral salts of the incoming water and of the weathering soil. Such drain water is “used” but is not consumed. Power plants use water to carry away waste heat. For each pound of coal whose heat of combustion is con- verted to electrical energy, 2 pounds burn to give heat which must be carried away by cooling water. Because the water is only warmed and is not immediately evapo- rated, we tend to call this a nonconsumptive use. But it appears that such water for cooling does evaporate fairly quickly, and so perhaps it is better considered a con- sumptive use. However, if it is evaporated, 1 pound will _ carry away as much heat as 100 pounds of water merely warmed. Should we then think of power plants as ex- travagant users of water in a nonconsumptive fashion, or as fairly parsimonious users of water consumptively? The amounts are | acre-foot of water warmed per year for each American, or 0.01 acre-foot evaporated for each of us. These are interesting numbers in that our con- ‘sumption of potable water (0.1 a-ft./capita/yr.) is their geometric mean. Thus, depending on how we assess the consequences of power plants, either they are a dominant part of our use but nonconsumptive, or a trivial part but consumptive. A complication in assessing and in forecasting water use by power plants is that those which are located on tidewater often do not have to obtain permits for water withdrawal and may thus appear, in the statistics, to use none at all. Be all this as it may, as long as we generate electricity from fossil or nuclear fuels, we shall use cool- ing water, and the amount used will grow at much the same rate as electricity use grows. Finally, the minerals in the water used by power plants will usually return to streams from which the water was withdrawn and will increase its salinity in proportion to evaporation. Cities and industries other than power plants use water to carry away something not wanted. Most of such waste is organic, oxidizable, and perhaps sewage is reasonably typical of it. Where the water resource is ample, we dump used waters into the streams with confidence that natural processes will take care of oxidation and that salinity will be adequately diluted. When pressure on the water resource increases, we have been accustomed to provide partial oxidation in Sewage treatment or industrial waste treatment plants. Beyond this, we are now beginning to think of three ad- ditional possibilities: desalination of sea water, tremen- dous diversion schemes like NAWAPA, and the separa- THE NATION / July 31, 1967 tion of excessively used from unused waters. Already, in southwest Arizona and in Pakistan as well, this third alternative is being undertaken. We can easily think of a fourth and a fifth possibility and, if we do not explore these and unveil numerous others, we should never brag of our “imagination.” The first of these additional alternatives is the com- plete renovation of used water, which means removing saline minerals and complete oxidation of organic ma- terials. While desalination of sea water has a future, it also has some very obvious technical hurdles. The partial desalination of modestly saline waters could escape some of these obstacles and could provide more useful water than desalination. The leading process for doing this is known as “electrodialysis.” If electrodialysis were com- bined with a complete oxidation of used water, we could abandon the entire idea of “waste water.” It is likely that our legislative agencies will, and in the near future, become. so annoyed with the quibbling and pettifogging tactics of water-pollution engineers, regard- ing degrees of tolerance and of alternative ways of getting by. that they will propose that all water be returned to streams in a condition no worse than when it was re- moved. The possibility is mentioned by O. C. Herfindahl and A. V. Kneese in their recent book, The Quality of the Environment, although the authors do not hold it to be economically attractive. How this might be done is a problem for technologists, and it would be presumptuous for anyone not intimately familiar with the field to forecast. But let us be presump- tuous for a moment and note that three years ago G. H. Teletzke suggested in Chemical Engineering Progress (January, 1964) that air alone, under high pressure and at 300°C, will oxidize sewage almost completely in a few minutes. The provision of high-pressure reactors in the volume needed sounds terribly expensive, so let us suggest further that they be provided as caverns at per- haps a mile deep in the ground to make the attainment of adequate pressure easy. A cavern 100 feet across should suffice for a million people. The second additional alternative involves a change in economic viewpoint; it is suggested simply to remind Americans that although daily they hear water spoken of as “our most valuable resource,” still the speaker would usually be hard put to identify any American who pays for water. What we pay for is the management, the entrapment, storage, transport, purification and de- livery of water. Only when a city has paid for water rights previously owned by someone else, as Los Angeles in Owens Valley, can it be said that water itself is bought. A thoroughgoing review and perhaps a revolution in water resources law is in order. If New Yorkers were charged enough for water itself to diminish their use of it, we suspect the income might run the entire city. As an example, too far from home, water users in the Ruhr Valley, Germany, have for years been charged the cost of restoring effluent waters to a tolerable quality. So much for imagination in seeking alternative solu- tions of the problem. And let no one imagine the field is exhausted. In the preceding catalogue of objections, we have 73 ’ di ce see EI oe ies areel Yen oS iS eT aE nae Tiere - ail Teh Es ata beset a aaa 4 “ a zee *.- hel teh challenged NAWAPA’s thoughtless belief that no compe- tition with other resources is involved, have challenged their forecasts of water need, and have challenged their imagination in solving the problems of “use.” Another area of objections is quite different. It deals with the matter of planning, of forecasting, or problem solving. Once upon a time, people who forecast popula- tion changes did so in ivory towers, quite separate from society in the sense that society paid little attention to their projections. Today, though, many elements of the society, in their concern for the future, quite systematical- ly seek out all possible information. As one result, the ideas of forecasters may now influence events. As an example, it is quite clear that the forecasts of continued growth in California, by stimulating investment in public services, in housing, and so on, are themselves in large measure responsible for that growth. The prediction of 40 million people in California by the end of the century, when received with confidence, initiates a program which, it may almost be suspected, requires for its completion the presence in California of 40 million people by the end of the century. So long as projections of resource needs were for limited periods of time, it may have been a reasonable assumption that population growth was foreordained, an independent variable. But as soon as we start talking about 100-year programs, it becomes clear that popula- tion may be dependent on the program. When demogra- phers undertake population projections they always rec- ognize that the essence of the future is that it cannot be perfectly known. But the engineers tend to discard the assumptions, the host of “ifs” in the demographers’ pro- jections, and are far too prone to say, “in 2000, the population will be... .” If we find it necessary to make long-range plans, and probably this is unavoidable, then we are confronted with a new sort of problem—an evaluation of the effect of our plans upon the future for which they are pro- jected. When we speak of short-range plans, they often seem to have a self-fulfilling quality. When we speak of long-range plans they seem, surprisingly, to have a self- PACEM IN TERRIS II defeating quality. Thus, if a hypothetical man of great reputation forecasts that science and technology can solve all the problems of supporting a growing population and that no limits exist to the capacity of the world to sup- port humanity, a forecast which is manifest nonsense, then he may encourage a world in which humanity will eat itself out of house and home, a world quite different from that envisioned. On the other hand, if he foresees dire disaster, he may encourage a course of action of such prudence, providence and conservation as again to avoid the fate foreseen. Both forecasts are self-defeating. Perhaps we shall come closer to fulfilling our long- range purpose if, instead of foreseeing a “solution,” we foresee a shortage and thereby stimulate innovation, per- haps even a termination of population growth! About all that can be said with confidence at this time is that the problems of long-range planning need consideration, a lot of consideration, and by people with far more per- ception than engineers or planners. Quoting from a letter by D. B. Luten to Science: “NAWAPA is a program of bankruptcy. After the water ‘for as long as 100 years’ supplied by this develop- ment has all been ‘used,’ what next? And if we do find a way to wiggle out of the predicament of A.D. 2065, how about that of 2165? No problem of population growth stemming from a static pattern of family size and death rates can be solved either by emigration or by technology. It can only be solved by a changing pattern of family size or of death rates. Science, technology, emigration, can only postpone the issue. If the time gained by post- ponement is not used to find a solution in smaller families, then the problem will only have been enlarged. At to- day’s growth rates, in each 35 years the piper’s bill is doubled. It would seem the part of providence to attack the issue now rather than when time has come to an end. It would seem the part of providence not to lull an audience by telling them they may go their way secure in the knowledge they will be cared for. “If we must build NAWAPA, let us wait until we know our doom is at hand, and when our last realizable am- bition is to amaze future archacologists.” WORLD WEB OF CRISES ELISABETH MANN BORGESE Mrs. Borgese, world known as a critic and writer of fiction, is a member of the staff of the Center for the Study of Demo- cratic Institutions, with particular responsibility for organizing its international studies. She participated actively in the preparations for Pacem in Terris II, The center for the Study of Democratic Institutions held its convocation, Pacem in Terris II, at Geneva from May 28 to May 31. A more difficult moment could hardly have been chosen. Escalation in Vietnam made it impos- sible for the North Vietnamese and the National Libera- 74 tion Front to participate, and their refusal engendered a host of other complications. The South Vietnamese, whose invitation to the assembly had been made contingent on acceptance by North Vietnam and the NLF, had sent none less than their Foreign Minister, Tran Van Do. He was not admitted to participate. The Sovict Union, on the other hand, withdrew its delegation, both in solidarity with the North Vietnamese and because of the exacerbation of East-West relations in the Middle East crisis. The German Democratic Re- public followed suit, but withdrew its withdrawal the fol- lowing day. If one adds to this the departure of the repre- THE NATION / July 31, 1967 aa tn oo ee ee oe ee en) ee eee “message was delivered over Telstar, the absence of Am- bassador Goldberg, the withdrawal of the State Depart- ment which, according to The New York Times, con- sidered the convocation an all-too-open forum for anti- American propaganda—it becomes easy to imagine the _ harassment of the organizers, forced to rearrange programs ‘and speakers’ panels from day to day, and to see to it that even those who were not present physically were properly represented so that there could be a “dialogue.” That this was achieved must be counted as a near miracle. There are differences as well as similarities between Pacem in Terris I, which took place in New York a year and a half ago, and Pacem in Terris II. The differences are both organizational and political. PIT I maintained a clear division between active par- ticipants and audience. The participants were relatively few and came overwhelmingly from the “developed” countries. Ceremonial and formal speeches were sched- uled every day. The audience, comprising some thousands of listeners, remained passive and anonymous. PIT II brought together some 300 people: a rather exceptional group, representing eighty-two nations and including a remarkable number of former or active cabi- net ministers, ambassadors, Members of Parliaments, scientists, dignitaries of various churches, editors of lead- ing newspapers, judges of the International Court. The Nobel Laureates were eight. Among the American par- ticipants were Justice William O. Douglas and Paul Hoff- man, and U.S. Senators Fulbright, Claiborne Pell, Clark and Brooke. This group was not divided between active and passive. Except for a ceremonial opening, there were no formal speeches. Two to three panel discussions convened daily (on coexistence; on the Middle East crisis; on Vietnam and Southeast Asia; on Germany and Europe; on eco- nomic development; on international law; “beyond co- existence”; on interdependence), with four to six partici- pants each, and several hours were reserved each day for brief interventions from the “floor.” Some of these proved outstanding: Pastor Niemoeller’s discussion of the German problem, Martin Luther King (“The U.S.A. is superbly equipped to take the risks of peace”), the Rever- end Castillo on the dangers of the Latin American situa- tion, Bishop Crowther on apartheid, Marya Mannes on the needs and hopes of the younger generation, and a few more. In political terms PIT I had been basically an expres- sion of peaceful coexistence between the United States and Russia. This was so noncontroversial that it was pos- sible for high representatives of the two governments to speak the same language. Vietnam was mentioned once or twice, rather casually; coexistence with China was too remote an issue even to be considered. PIT II had been planned as both an extension and a specification of the problem of coexistence. “The original object of this second convocation was not merely to con- tinue the discussion at the first and to strengthen the ties that were formed there,” President Hutchins said in his opening remarks. “Having established, apparently, that THE NATION /‘July 31, 1967 conversation among men of different faiths and ideologies was possible, the Center planned now to direct attention to what the discussion was to be about, namely, the im- mediate practical steps that must be taken if the world is to hold together and humanity is to survive.’ In fact, however, the basis for discussion had sadly narrowed since PIT I. The consequences were graver for the Americans than for the others; for whereas the Soviet line was forcefully delivered by the Poles, the Chinese found an ardent, eloquent and learned spokes- man in the now Canadian Paul Lin, and the cause of North Vietnam was adequately defended by the repre- sentatives of Cambodia and Indonesia, the State Depart- ment found no advocate for its foreign policy. “There is one point that unites us all,” Kenneth Galbraith noted during one session, “transcending nations, creeds, politics or ideologies, and that is criticism of the American policy in Vietnam.” It should be immediately added that other aspects and phases of American policy—quite particularly the Marshall Plan—were highly praised, both by Ameri- cans, all of whom delivered their criticism of current American policy in a spirit of dignity, loyalty and pa- triotism, and by non-Americans, who never degraded their criticism with cheap anti-Americanism. Thus Senator Clark concluded his brief statement, in which he illustrated the attitude of elected officials in the United States toward international law, with a stirring exhortation. “Gentlemen,” he exclaimed, “do not despair of the United States!” To sum up: While PIT I comprised a dialogue between official U.S. and official USSR, PIT IT represented a world without State Department and without Kremlin. But between PIT I and II there were similarities sufficient to create a continuity and to establish the Pacem in Terris convocations as something sui generis, some- thing that may become a permanent, regular feature of international and intercultural life; similar in a way to the Pugwash conferences of scientists and scholars. One of the characteristic and unique features of the PIT convocations is that they mix authorities of high political standing with private individuals of high intel- lectual standing. This formula has been criticized, especial- ly by Eastern Europeans. It raises problems of protocol, complicates organization, and curbs the freedom of “dialogue.” Certainly it would be easier to restrict par- ticipation to those who bear no political responsibility. But would the deliberations be as significant? Hutchins sug- gested in his opening remarks: “Let us- agree that every~ body is here in as private a capacity as his position per- mits, that the object of this gathering is not to repeat propaganda lines with which we are already too familiar but to understand and to be understood, and to seek courses of action that the frozen official attitudes of governments may have prevented them from noticing.” The PIT admixture of official and unofficial elements is further complicated by another unusual combination: the convocations deal both with general issues, in most theoretical and abstract terms (What is coexistence? Where do we go after coexistence? Where does inter- national law stand today? How must the international machinery be transformed to insure peace and justice?), 78 ee ete and with the most practical, political, even tactical ques- tions, such as whether or not to stop the bombing in Vietnam; how to judge the withdrawal of the UN forces from Egypt; or what to think about the Alleinvertre- tungsprinzip of the German Federal Republic. This formula, too, has been criticized as politically in- effective. Yet to look at the universal in view of the par- ticular, to consider practical problems in the light of general, theoretical and ethical considerations would seem not a bad formula. This is “practical philosophy.” It is, at any rate, the formula of the institution responsible for the PIT convocations: the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions. What is trivial and threadbare does not get far in such a context. This was demonstrated by the discus- sion on Germany—a historic occasion, in any case, since it brought together representatives of both Germanys at an international gathering for the first time in postwar history. Both the Westerners and Easterners delivered their straight party line—the West brandishing freedom, speaking in the name of Germans West and East, and demanding reunification on a prewar basis, and in the frame of an Atlantic (atomically armed) community; the East standing on the here and now, demanding, first of all, recognition of the existing reality, and willing to nego- tiate and go forward from there toward unification within a pacified and de-atomized Europe. If each one succeeded in exposing the flimsiness, self-contradiction and inconsist- ency of the other’s argument, a third German, far above the level of party politics, exposed the flimsiness of the whole argument. In an impassioned address the ven- erable Pastor Niemoeller put the German problem into its place. Time has passed, he pointed out. “The German problem” today is no longer what it used to be. “Fifteen years ago we were forced to trade unity for armaments.” Today the two Germanys are a reality, and if free elec- tions were held in both parts, the situation would not change one iota. Those who think that the younger gen- eration of East Germans wants to return under the capitalistic Western system are subject to a grave illusion. But that, Pastor Niemoeller added, is not really the prob- lem today. The German problem becomes a tiny affair in the wider context of the war now taking shane in Viet- Macpherson; Toronto Star When Politics Are Left To The Generals 76 THE NATION / July 31, 1967 5 i 1 a ee , int he Middle East, in Africa, in Latin America: a of the nonwhite, poor, underdeveloped majority of today’s trouble spots are, in reality, intimately connected, all aspects of the same big struggle. There can be no détente in Europe and, therefore, no solution to the moeller, Jules Moch and others); likewise: peace in the iddle East can only be the fruit of cooperation between the United States and the Soviet Union. Such coopera- tion, on the other hand, can be obtained only through a quid pro quo in Southeast Asia. The East-West conflict furthermore, in its ideological aspect (communism versus capitalism) is obsolete and being overlaid with the North- South conflict, as described by Niemoeller, of which Viet- nam and the Middle East are fleeting episodes but which, in the coming years, is bound to expand in Southeast Asia, to erupt in Aden, in Rhodesia, in South Africa, in Latin America, as well as in the cities of the United States. “There will be a new Vietnam” is becoming a term of common usage. “Vietnam” is being generalized as was, "at its time, “Quisling” or “fifth column.” The traditional " norms of diplomacy, of power politics and war can no longer be applied to this situation. It is a world revolution. Most impressive in this connection were the inter- ventions of the Rev. Gonzalo Castillo-Cardenas of Co- lombia and of Bishop Crowther of the Union of South _ Africa. Father Castillo pointed out that the problems of the _ Latin American countries are far deeper than the oc- _ casional disturbances caused by Castroist subversion; that ' “political, military and psychological conditions exist ' which are leading Latin America toward a painful repe- tition of the Vietnamese experience.” These conditions ' include: The persistence of social and economic structures |} which frustrate the legitimate hope. for liberation of the | great masses of people; the stubborn insistence that the _ only solution to the problems of Latin American economy __ is the free and untrammeled expansion of North American _ private enterprise, when, in reality, such expansion is - equivalent to the legitimization of economic colonialism; |, the permanent and very effective intervention of the | United States, bent on preventing internal social revolu- _ tion, and the political emancipation of the masses. The | forces of this revolution are being suppressed with means quite similar to those used in Vietnam, including napalm _ made in the USS. Kimberley, South Africa, spoke of racism and coexistence. “Racism is war,” he said. “It is war within the soul of the discriminator. It is war within the soul of the victim. It is aggression against the human personality. Wherever racism is found there is war in the spirit. For this to be- come activated in the visible pain and cancer of physical war requires factors of which our human history is all _ too full.” And then he predicted: “The next decade could _ THE NATION / July 31, 1967 Bishop Crowther, just expelled from his diocese of well see in southern Africa the emergence of a situation which could show up Vietnam as a merely localized con- flict. The rejection of apartheid by those who have suf- fered so long could well lock into the world-wide move- ment which rejects racism as the delineation between the haves and have nots.” PIT II brought forth a host of suggestions, pro- posals, resolutions, both short-range and long-range. Nu- merous, and clamorously received were the resolutions, individually or collectively endorsed, calling for cessation of the bombardments of North Vietnam. (These resolu- tions were presented simply as matters of information, since the convocations themselves do not endorse or even consider such motions.) The most significant resolution was one drafted collectively and read into the record by Chester Ronning of Canada, former Ambassador and High Commissioner in India and member of the Vietnam Control Commission, and one signed by all the scientists present at the convocation and presented by Linus Pauling in a stirring address. Suggestions for ending the Viet- namese War, whether Senator Pell’s, those of the scien- tists or others, agreed more or less on the following points: (7) Cessation of the bombings; (2) negotiations for a cease-fire among all parties concerned; (3) phasing out of American troops and phasing in of international troops; (4) free elections in South Vietnam in which the whole population would participate; (5) the right to self-deter- mination for the people of Vietnam and the eventual withdrawal of all foreign troops; (6) amnesty for political opponents or prisoners. and asylum for political refugees. But PIT II had more to offer than such short-range programs, of which there are no lack today. Among the papers prepared in connection with the convocation was a study by Brigadier General Said Uddin Khan of Paki- stan, suggesting—on the basis of a historical, social and economic analysis—the creation of a neutral Southeast Asian Commonwealth, independent of both China and the United States; dependent for its development on a multi- lateral program of aid modeled on the Marshall Plan and channeled through the appropriate organs of the UN. This “Commonwealth” would include Burma, Thailand, Cam-: bodia, Laos, South Vietnam, North Vietnam, Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia and the Philippines. Its organs would have merely advisory powers; their functions would be research and planning. The Commonwealth would be di- vided into two Federations: a Peninsular Federation — (Burma, Thailand, Cambodia, Laos, the two Vietnams) and an Archipelago Federation (Malaysia, Singapore, In- donesia, the Philippines), with which, possibly, a third Federation—Australia and New Zealand—might be as- sociated. Japan could play a constructive role in the eco- nomic development of this new “Commonwealth”—a role that might offer a desirable alternative to the present, American-dominated SEATO course which is up for reconsideration in 1970. The plan is set forth with some detail and divided, for its enactment, into different phases. It was not for- mally discussed by the convocation (nor were any of the other papers prepared in advance and circulated among members or panelists), but the Southeast Asian partici- pants, meeting in a caucus, discussed its main points and 77 en eal art a rae oe F ttt a a A Oe mde: . a R a 1 a a a gee its les ae ; j i Eerste Not Enough? agreed to urge the Center to organize a conference “on neutral ground somewhere in South East Asia to study the proposal now under consideration” which would be “in conformity with the United Nations concept of re- gional cooperation.” “It should be understood that in- vitations to participate on a full and equal basis would be extended to persons from North Vietnam, South Viet- nam and the rest of South East Asia. The objective of this Conference would be to permit the people of South East Asia, without outside interference, to address them- selves to the resolution of their own problems.” If the convocation had yielded only this project, it would have been a respectable result. For the “Common- wealth” formula, with variations and adaptations, may have wider applicability. Let us suppose that curing the Vietnamese malignancy would ease the secondary ills now besetting East-West relations in Europe. Is it absurd to imagine a “Commonwealth” that would plan and co- ordinate, on an advisory basis, the economic, financial, cultural, technical and mutual-security arrangements be- tween the Common Market nations on the one hand and the Warsaw Pact nations on the other; each one of these two groups constituting a “Federation”? It is only in such a context that German reunification could ever take place, or that even the formula for a reunited Berlin, ringed by a UN control zone, ringed further by an expanding de- militarized zone, as suggested by Jules Moch, would be very much worth considering. It is indeed encouraging that on July 14 Willy Brandt proposed just that. “I consider it worth the effort of the 738 A) CNM 7-1 re PLE Behrendt-Algemeen Handelsblad, Amsterdam institutions of the European communities to try to get the Soviet Union and the countries of Eastern Europe to form a committee of cooperation to broaden trade, to promote an increased exchange of technological knowl- edge and thus lead to growing cooperation between East and West. This would not be a stiff. arrangement between the Common Market and Comecon but a meaningful complement to my desire to broaden the system of bi- lateral ties.” Not that the “Commonwealth” formula is a cure-all, or that there exists any formula that could be applied to all trouble spots. But it is no secret that the State Depart- ment is today giving the most careful consideration to the possibility of creating in the Middle East regional organ- isms, analogous to the European “Communities,” to secure peace and stability in that part of the world. The first hint of this came on June 12 from Presidential As- sistant Walt W. Rostow, as reported by The New York Times. “We would hope that out of the frustrations and tragedies of postwar Middle East history we might see emerge a new decision to achieve dignity and stability for all through regional cooperation.” Development is the key to peace in that region, as in all others. Thus the convocation made its own the motto proposed by Pope Paul in Populorum Progressio—that peace must not be based on economic development but that peace is economic development. One whole session —improvised—was dedicated to this problem. While there was much, obviously, to criticize—as is well known, the gap between developed and developing countries is grow- THE NATION / July 31, 1967 ee ee eee a ee e ground for optimism. Real progress has been achieved in a number of countries. Paul Hoffman men- tioned Chile, Irag, the Ivory Coast, Morocco, Thailand, the Philippines and Yugoslavia. “Looking beyond these individual success stories,” he continued, “we can find even more significant reasons for encouragement. One element of tremendous importance is the fact that the poverty of most of the developing countries does not stem from any lack of resources but from their under- utilization.” A careful analysis reveals “that the develop- ing nations are currently using only some 20 per cent of their natural resource potentials, and only some 10 per ‘cent of the potentials latent in their human resources. ‘This means that four-fifths of their natural wealth and -nine-tenths of their human productive power remains as yet untapped.” _ Another encouraging factor, Mr. Hoffman continued, is the change that has taken place in recent years in “what might be called the basic philosophy of development aid.” “There is now a much better understanding that aid should _ be regarded solely as a tool for speeding development and not as an instrumentality of the cold war or as a means _ to achieve a preferential trading position.” In conclusion | Mr. Hoffman pointed to the changing role of economic affairs in the frame of international law and organization: “Economic development is, among much else, an im- portant tool for conducting meaningful dialogue about “peace. ... Thus one of the great strengths of the United Nations as compared with the League of Nations is that the League was an almost completely political body. But in the case of the United Nations, 85 per cent of all those who work for our world organization and the family of related agencies—and 85 per cent of all its revenues are _ devoted to stimulating economic and social progress. This, _ I am convinced, is as it should be.” Mr. Hoffman’s observation leads to the final and _ most comprehensive of the topics considered by the con- vocation: the changing structure of international law. On this topic, too, a panel was improvised, under the chair- _manship of Justice William O. Douglas, and with the _ participation of four judges of the International Court of _ Justice at the Hague (Zafrulla Khan, Pakistan; Philip _ Jessup, U.S.; Manfred Lachs, Poland; and Luis Padilla Nervo, Mexico. Are there many international meetings, one wonders, able to improvise a panel of this sort?). Justice Douglas introduced the topic by pointing out that the International Court speaks for international con- sensus. Its judges come from different Iegal systems, but these systems have “many golden threads in common.” Justice Padilla stressed the need for international legal norms to be adapted to the current conflict “between civilizations, races, economies, ideologies and genera- tions,” and for new forms of international life and inter- National organization to be created “which will set new norms to respond to the needs of new generations.” What was most remarkable, however, and most en- couraging, was the contribution of the Polish member of the panel, Manfred Lachs. It is well known that the concept of international law sustained by the Soviet Union and its allies has, until quite recently, been most p THE NATION / July 31, 1967 conservative. This was evident at PIT I, where Ameri- can and European advocates of an expanding, pro- gressive international law found themselves aligned against an adamant defense of the classical, restrictive concept, based on the inalienable sovereignty of na- tional states, and applied through diplomacy, treaties and sanctions. But at PIT II Justice Lachs emphasized more vigor- ously than anyone else the obsolescence of present international law and urged its “adaptation to the great changes wrought by the scientific and social revolu- tions.” “International law does not address itself to a timeless situation, but to a grim and changing reality.” Rapid change, thus, is the first characteristic of the present situation of international law. The second is its expansion, both vertical, in the sense that it tends to include spheres (economic, social, cultural) which thus far were beyond its scope, and horizontal: covering an ever-growing number of nations and legal systems and customs. The third characteristic, finally, is that international law is no longer necessarily enforced by sanctions but is to a certain extent self-enforcing: that is, as Lachs put it, “people would lose more than they would gain from a violation of international law.” American international lawyers call this “cooperative international law,” whose only, or chief, sanction is ex- clusion from the benefits of participation. This has been a very synoptic view of a discus- sion that rallied some hundreds of the world’s greatest minds, resulted in more than fifty hours of video tape and about twice that much in sound track, which was covered by some 300 journalists and other representa- tives of the mass media. Many details have been omitted, in order to stress the unity of the discussions, the de- scription of which has taken us full circle: Starting with the unitary, economic and racial foundation of the vari- ous apparently disconnected crises facing the world today, we have come around to the need for the develop- ment and expansion of international law and interna- tional organization. How this international law will have to be worked out in practice, how the available inter- national organs and organizations can be made able to administer such a law, are questions that were barely hinted at during this convocation. It is to be hoped that future PIT convocations will carry on where this one left off—if there are future convocations. As Pacem in Terris II came to its close, war broke out in the Middle East. International law was ignored; human rights ceased to exist; truth was blotted out. Ideology yielded to power politics. World order is that much further removed; we are that much closer to Armageddon. \ Then came the emergency session of the UN General Assembly. Many of the delegates called upon to de- liberate there were present and participated in the rea- soned, decent discussions of PIT II. Somewhere in the back of their minds there must be echoes of those discussions. If these could contribute, however slightly, to create that “common language among the delega- tions” that Premier Kosygin augured in his opening address, our efforts would not have been in vain. 79 ite aii lta pay eas a gt pee Ne ae ee ea es “ago Sa es _ LETTER FROM BERLIN Cc. AMERY Mr. Amery is a German novelist and journalist who has done postgraduate work in American universities. He is the author of Capitulation: The Lesson of German Catholicism (Herder and Herder). On June 2. a quiet. conscientious Berlin student by the name of Benno Ohnesorg was watching a rather lively scene in front of the opera house. The Shah of Persia and his wife were visiting in Ger- many; vast police preparations had been made to pro- tect them from the wrath of Persian students in West Germany and Berlin. These preparations had, in turn, stirred the convictions of the German students, and a series of booing, placard-carrying demonstrations ma- terialized wherever the Shah turned up. On the night of June 2, he was attending the opera, and a small police army had been assembled to confront the crowd. Suddenly, while the strains of The Magic Flute filled the opera house, the police charged. They had a plan: they encircled the crowd rather than dispersing it. And then they began beating. Not students only but any spec- tator within reach. The terrified demonstrators and on- lookers tried to break away. Some of them, including Benno Ohnesorg, managed to escape to the right. He was seen fleeing into a service yard down the street. There, pursuing policemen and others waiting surrounded him and a few others. A shot was fired. Ohnesorg, with bruises on his body and part of his skull missing, was brought to a university clinic, where he soon died. The bullet, it was found later, had been fired from behind and at close range. The gunner was a policeman named Kurass, well known as a crack shot on the police range. If the incident was tragic, the immediate official re- action was infuriating. Berlin’s mayor, formerly a Protestant minister and once a special protégé of Willv Brandt, displayed the reflexes of any “good German” by endorsing his police, and denying any undue bru- tality on their part. Police press headquarters issued two totally false versions of the incident (in the first, any shooting was denied; in the second, it was stvled as self-defense) before admitting a possible malfeasance. Kurass, however, is not in custody and has filed suit against some student leaders for defamation. The police Gewerkschaft (trade union) of Berlin has been mutter- ing threats about “ending the soft treatment of public criminals,’ and when public excitement mounted, the usual crooked retreat was made into qualifying state- ments, “impartial” investigations and general obfusca- tion. But the students were awake. Benno Ohnesorg’s funeral did not take place in Berlin but in Hannover, West Germany. The students streamed in and 5,000 of them from all over the republic followed the coffin under black flags. The overwhelming majority of these mourners were neat and well-groomed, further from Maoism or beatnik manners than most other German youth, 80 Up to now, Germany’s students have not been known as a particularly active group..Their complaints have been mild, their patience with overcrowding, bad cafe- teria food, lack of library facilities, astounding. Politi- cal groups had to recruit their few dozens of members from the fringes—either Right or Left. This youth had been spared the convulsions of the Weimar era; it had never seen dead and wounded on the streets. This explains the electrifying effect of Ohnesorg’s death. The first testimonials of students and other young people after the attack at the opera showed deep shock. “These policemen had unbridled faces,” one girl said. (She was beaten over the head several times and kicked when lying on the ground.) These young people had never before seen the face of public violence. And indeed, this physiognomy deserves close atten- tion. Police brutality in handling crowds is not new and not confined to Germany. [See editorial “Was this Violence Necessary?” The Nation, July 17.] But the al- most instinctive efforts to cover up, the refusal of police to face the consequences of their acts, the instantaneous “solidarity” of all higher-ups, the attempt to blame the victims for what had happened—need watching in a country with Germany’s past. Among the higher-ups, the Berlin newspapers were particularly ugly. The city’s press is almost completely dominated by Herr Axel Caesar Springer, the Hamburg tycoon. He controls all but one of the Berlin dailies, the most important of his holdings being Bild Zeitung, a sheet built on headline sensation. At one time, the students of the Free Berlin Uni- versity were the darlings of the Springer press. That was when teams of semi-professional tunnel diggers under- mined the Berlin Wall, when the Frontstadt atmosphere assiduously fostered by the papers nourished a parochial anti-communism. But since then, the climate at the uni- versity has changed: impatient with the intransigence of official East-West policy, eager for new approaches. the students began to favor left-wing causes. At the root of discontent, however, is another and strictly academic issue: the status of the university. itself. The Free University—largely under American spon- sorship—was founded in 1949 with the most liberal constitution of any in Germany. It knew a high degree of student participation in all university affairs, but the old-fashioned majority of the faculty was unable or un- willing to work with such a liberal instrument and in the last two or three years relations between faculty and student body have become increasingly tense. Since then, the Springer press has managed to isolate the students almost completely from the rest of the Berlin population, creating the impression that a bunch of “rowdies,” of beatniks and longhairs—led, of course, by East German provocateurs—was terrorizing the peace- ful citizenry of the Frontstadt. This divisive strategy has worked only too well. After Ohnesorg’s death, stu- dents all over Germany started a unique kind of political action: they went on the streets of Berlin, Bonn and THE NATION / July 31, 1967 ( of open argument. The fact is that a new scapegoat has been gradually emerging. The Jews being unavailable, and indeed showing themselves such good Prussians in their recent Sinai campaign (at least, that was the impression _ THE PAINTERS’ UNION BURTON HALL Mr. Hall has been an attorney for insurgent, rank-and-file groups in several unions, including Painters’ District Council No. 9. a“ 4 In the past few months, the Brotherhood of Painters (AFL-CIO) has been rocked by a series of scandals, and there is a promise of more to come. Increasingly, the action centers around a growing rank-and-file movement, based most strongly in New York City and in San Fran- cisco, which is demanding an end to unrepresentative machines within the union. As_ the rank-and-filers press their fight, they come more and more into con- flict, not only with local leaders but with the top of- ficials of the labor establishment. Everv success thev win points to new explosions ahead. However, the federal court of New York gave a boost last month to the long and, until now, seemingly hopeless struggle of the house painters for honest trade unionism. The impact of its crucial decision may be- fore long be painfully felt by the entrenched bureau- crats of “labor business,” from George Meany and W. Willard Wirtz to the officials of the Brotherhood. Until 1966, two local-area chieftains of the Painters’ - union enjoyed power and prestige that seemed unchal- _ lengeable. In the San Francisco Bay area, Ben Rasnick, chief of Painters’ District Council 16, waging unremit- ting war against rebellious rank-and-filers, could count on the solid support of the Brotherhood’s top officials, and on the refusal of the United States Labor Depart- ment to intervene within his domain. In New York, Martin Rarback, secretary-treasurer of Painters’ District Council No. 9, whose domination of working painters and paper hangers has long been an ugly legend among union people, could similarly depend on the Brother- hood’s top officials, as well as the bureaucracy of the AFL-CIO and the Labor Department, to back him up. Rasnick and Rarback, together with the Rafterys, father and son (the son recently succeeded the father), seemed for years to be the solidest pillars of domination of the union establishment. Then both Rasnick and Rarback were hit by scandal —and more than scandal. Last year, Rasnick was indicted for the murder of two insurgent union leaders, Lloyd Green (financial secretary of the rebellious Painters’ Local 1178 in Hayward, Calif.) and Dow Wilson (re- cording secretary of the huge, rambunctious Painters’ Local 4 in San Francisco). Last spring he was convicted THE NATION / July 31, 1967 given by the Springer press), the new scapegoat is the Ger- man intellectual. More exactly, the German student. Now, however, it is likely that the shot at the Berlin opera will echo for some time to come, and that the Shah, able to crush opposition in his own country, has inadvertently started a freedom movement in the West. Ventilating the House of Labor of the Green murder, sentenced to life imprisonment, and still faces trial on an indictment for the murder of Wilson. In New York, Rarback was indicted for re- ceiving bribes of $840,000 or more to sell out the work- ing conditions of painters in connection with City Hous- ing Authority contracts. Some thirty-two employers and former city officials were implicated in the same case. The bribes to Rarback are alleged to be part of a larger conspiracy to rig bids for CHA contracts. So far, lawyers for Rarback and the employers have managed to stall the trial, which is now expected to take place this summer. But meanwhile, Rarback has been accused, by persons ranging from ordinary union members to the Senate McClellan committee, of a wide pattern of “sweet- heart” dealings with emplovers and labor racketeers. At this point, the outsider may expectto be told that the “honest” and “respected” leaders of our nation have been striving to clean up the mess that has so sud- denly exploded in two cities. But the real situation is just the opposite. George Meany and Secretary of Labor Wirtz have come out. along with the leadership of the Painters’ union, in defense of those regimes, and against the rank-and-file movement. Last October, when Rasnick (unbeknown to him- self) was on the verge of indictment, he asked the Brotherhood to place trusteeships over three of the San Francisco local unions (including Local 1178) that op- posed his rule. No sooner was he indicted than the Brotherhood’s top officials obliged, reckoning, however, without the spirit of the membership. The three locals, along with Local 4, barred the doors to Raftery’s trustees and forced the Brotherhood to sue its locals to enforce the trusteeship. When they did, the federal court in San Francisco took a close look at the situation and ruled the trusteeships invalid, saying that they had not been estab- lished in good faith for any lawful purpose. What makes the case nationally interesting is that the Department of Labor has taken the position—and takes it to this day —that these trusteeships are entirely valid. (As background, it should perhaps be mentioned that Norman Call, the confessed murderer of Dow Wilson, has testified under oath that a man identifying himself as Rasnick told him that the leaders of the International wanted Wilson “eliminated.” Also interesting is the long- standing friendship of Raftery and General Secretary, O. B. Satre with top officials of the Labor Department. Rarback, too, was indicted in October—and his New 81 eee ps a eet 5 st og A a as ra a inn ee Se ee oe 4 2 : York City domain likewise became the stage for one of Raftery’s trusteeships. The day after the indictment, Raftery appointed a “special trustee” for District Coun- cil No. 9, and within twenty-four hours of that appoint- ment, the special frustee reappointed all of Rarback’s assistants and appointees to positions of power in the New York District Council. Still more, a month and a half later, the special trustee reappointed Rarback him- self as “coordinator” of a newly created “Organizing and Educational Department,” from which post he has exercised all his former authority over the Council's affairs and dealt, openly as well as secretly, with employ- ers. The New York trusteeship did, however, make one change of major importance: it canceled the election for Rarback’s former post that had been scheduled for June, 1967, the effect being that Rarback could con- tinue to rule—unofficially but indefinitely. That set off the train of events that led to the court decision. The New York painters asked the Department of Labor to take action under the Landrum-Griffin Act against the phony trusteeship. When the Department refused—in the same pious manner that it has refused to take up any one of the more than two dozen Landrum- Griffin complaints filed by New York painters within the past six years—the New York members, along with representatives from San Francisco area locals, went to George Meany and the AFL-CIO Executive Council with a long train of grievances against their union. To speak with Meany at all, they had to catch him in the corridor at the Executive Council’s meeting, and there won from him nothing more helpful than a short, angry denial that he, Meany, had had anything to do with the affair. And so the New York painters, on their own, went to federal court against the combined power of the Dis- 82 trict Council and the Brotherhood of Painters. The De- partment of Labor soon came into the court battle, rang- ing itself solidly behind the Rarback and Raftery re- gimes and, when it appeared that the members were winning, Meany broke his silence of several months to declare that the Painters’ officialdom was exemplary by his standards. What happened in the court battle, aside from the ardent partisanship of the AFL-CIO and the Labor Department, is best told in the opinion handed down on June 16 by U.S. District Judge Marvin E. Frankel. The plaintiffs, rank-and-file members, moved for a preliminary injunction on what the court called “lengthy a 4 Bi s 3 é 6 ‘ - ’ AT NAS Lie A An A N and detailed affidavits.” Sketching them briefly, the court’s opinion said that the affidavits made, and documented, allegations that there had been long years of corruption in the District Council; a long tenure of tyrannical repression by the Council’s Secretary-Treasurer, Martin Rarback; manage- ment of the Council’s affairs over many years for the personal interests of Rarback and his allies at the ex- pense of the working membership; and a steady pattern of indifference or collusion by the Brotherhood despite numerous appeals by dissident individual members. Citing the reappointment of Rarback and his supporters, as well as the trustee’s failure to investigate charges of corruption, the affidavits alleged (as the court’s opinion put it) “that the trusteeship amounted to a ‘front’ or ‘cover’ for retaining control by the discredited—or at least seriously suspect—Rarback regime.” By contrast, the opposing affidavits of the trustee and of General President Raftery swore to their own good faith but (again quoting the court’s opinion) “left wholly or partly unanswered questions of a serious nature.” THE NATION / July 31, 1967 the alleged problems of corruption? What investigation, _ if any, had he made before reinstating all the members of Rarback’s administration other than Rarback him- self? What had led to the new role of Rarback and how important was that role? How did it happen that after years of inaction, the indictment of Rarback had led to the instantaneous imposition of the trusteeship?” To find answers to these questions, the court ordered a full-scale hearing, at which witnesses could testify as to the real story behind the District Council No. 9 trusteeship. What was revealed casts a bleak light on the nature of the trade union establishment in the 1960s. The plaintiffs testified openly and answered freely on cross-examination. Among them were such militant intra- union rebels as Frank Schonfeld, the Bronx painter who has been leading a struggle against Rarback since 1960; Carl Blum, the woodwork finisher (a craft within the painters’ jurisdiction) who has led, and been blacklisted for, the struggle of his fellow finishers against employer chiseling on wages and hours and against Rarback’s “sweetheart” dealing with employers, and Bill Papson, Frank Loria, David James, Harold Robins, Sam Winn —trank-and-filers who have borne the brunt these many years of Rarback’s domination of his opponents within the union. Their testimony was in marked contrast to the testimony of the special trustee, which Judge Frankel’s Opinion described as part of “a train of evasive, mis- leading, and plainly untrue testimony for defendants.” Except for the special trustee himself, no official of the Brotherhood came forward to testify and be cross- examined, under oath, as to the reasons for the establish- ment of the trusteeship. The evidence at the hearing told, first of all, of the long years through which the officials of the Brother- hood, from General President Raftery (father and son) down to General Representative Harry Altman, had backed the Rarback administration’s betrayals of the union membership, its “faithless representation” of the working house painters. When woodwork finishers (headed by Carl Blum) brought suit in court, accusing Rarback of selling them out to their employers (the federal court in that case upheld their charges, finding “a wealth of facts and acts” indicating sweetheart deal- ing), Rarback pleaded the Fifth Amendment to every question, except as to his name. Since the AFL-CIO Ethi- cal Practices Code forbids a union official to stay in of- fice if he chooses to invoke the Fifth Amendment in regard to union business, the finishers demanded an investigation. Under urging from Meany, so the court’s opinion in the trusteeship case recounts, “General Presi- dent Raftery proceeded to call a meeting—to which was invited none of the 21 plaintiffs who had filed the com- plaint of ‘sweetheart’ dealings, held by this court to state a valid claim —at the end of which he concluded that ‘the complaint involved no charges of misuse of union funds or corruption in any form.’ ” The evidence showed the pattern of Rarback’s hegem- ony—and ofthe consistent backing of Rarback by the Brotherhood’s officials. Moreover, it showed (still quot- ing from the court’s opinion) that, THE NATION / July 31, 1967 while it has dealt harshly with members who were not compliant, the Rarback administration appears to — have been an amiable one for at least many employers who have not been zealous to honor the rights of union members. Contract provisions governing hours, safety and other working conditions have been violated on a wide scale. Inspection and enforcement measures have lain fallow. Members who complained and protested have been “blacklisted” by employers, with no defensive or retaliatory measures being taken by the union. ... Why, then, had the trusteeship been established? The first announcement, made by Raftery in appointing the special trustee, had mentioned “dissension and contro- versy among the membership,” as well as damage to the “image” of the District Council, all due to “widespread publicity” concerning “allegations” of corruption, col- lusive bidding, bribery, etc. But when it came time for Raftery to indicate the reason in his official report to the Labor Department, he left a blank in the box labeled, “To correct corruption or financial malpractice,” and checked, instead, “To assure the performance of collec- tive bargaining agreements or other duties of a bargain- ing representative.” And this became the official re- sponse of the trustee when he was questioned in court. Asked why the trusteeship had been established, he re- plied that it was not established because of dishonesty or wrongdoing but because “turmoil” among the mem-< bers, and a “power struggle” on the part of rank-and- filers seeking to clean up corruption, had caused the Rarback administration to be “lax” in enforcing its col- lective bargaining agreements. It was, said the Labor De- partment, in a brief submitted after the hearing of evi- dence, a perfectly allowable reason for a trusteeship, so what was all the fuss about? The brief went on to argue, ardently, that the officials of the Painters’ union were distinguished leaders and that any worker who challenged them was clearly mis- guided, demented, or maybe un-American. During the hearing, the judge repeatedly pointed out to the union’s attorneys that some testimony from an international official who could say why the trusteeship had been established was necessary to their case. Raftery and Satre were easily available; General Vice President Di Silvestro was in New York City; General Representa- tive Altman, the Brotherhood’s factotum in the New York area, was actually in the courtroom during most of the hearing. But the brass remained mum.. The trustee talked of numerous reforms instituted, he said, by himself. But the evidence showed that he had allowed Rarback to write and edit the new, “impartial” 83 newspaper published under trusteeship auspices (the trustee admitted that Rarback had used District Coun- cil No. 9’s newspaper as his private organ, to vilify his opponents and distort their views, and to trumpet his own virtues). It showed that under the trusteeship Rar- back and Altman had used their prerogatives as officers to hold “special” meetings, at which they traduced their rank-and-file critics and boasted of their own virtues— meanwhile denying to ordinary members the right to answer, or even discuss, their denunciations. It showed that, as the court’s opinion delicately put it, “the prac- tice of electoral frauds has continued into the period of the trusteeship,” and that, in intra-union discipline, “due process has not flourished under the Trustee.” It showed that Rarback continued to exercise consider- able authority over business agents, and that “repre- sentatives of key employers continue to deal with him as the effective negotiator and decider, whether or not his decisions need the formal imprimatur of the Trustee.” It showed, finally, “that plaintiffs are correct in their assertion that Rarback’s continued dominance, and anticipated resumption of the post for which the Trustee has indefinitely postponed an election, must be plain for anyone to see.” Though in an earlier affidavit, the trustee had sworn that charges of corruption were the “main bases” for the trusteeship, he had taken no interest whatever in the charges of corruption in the Rarback regime. He reappointed all of Rarback’s men, He admitted that the bargaining agreement was not being, and had not been, enforced in the area of city-contracted ‘work (the area giving rise to the indictment of Rarback), but he had done nothing whatever to find out who was responsible. As for democracy in the Council, his actions had been entirely on the side of the entrenched officialdom and against the rank-and-file critics. Said Judge Frankel, although his mission purportedly includes the restora- tion of democratic processes in the Council, the trustee has revealed that this objective amounts to “window dressing” to all practical intents and purposes. In these circumstances, the Trustee’s decision—said by him to have been made jointly with Raftery—to allow an elec- tion at the end of this month only for offices other than the Secretary-Treasurer’s is revealed as part of a larger plan to maintain the political status quo in the Council with the least possible disturbance and without genuine reform. The “freeze” the Trustee has ordered, considered in the light of the way he has handled his stewardship, makes his role in effect one of caretaker for the Rar- back forces. The reinstatement of Rarback to a strategic post reenforces this effect. Together with the retention of the whole Rarback apparatus of personnel, it makes probable the return of a Rarback slate to all the places under the one from which Rarback stands suspended. For the membership, long accustomed either to obey or face the retaliatory power of those in charge, will be reluctant to attempt rebellion against a group now at the helm with the apparent strength of the Brotherhood behind them. The unchallenged evidence of continued official in- difference to corruption, of official “neutrality” which aimed at keeping the Rarback regime in power and sup- 84 pressing rank-and-file opposition, of continued sellout or other betrayal of the workers’ rights, left the court with the finding that “The primary reason for establishing the trusteeship was to maintain the status quo in the Council as nearly as possible and thwart the efforts of Rarback’s opponents to achieve power by democratic means.” Accordingly, the trusteeship was invalid under the law, for it “was not established, and has not been maintained, in good faith for a lawful purpose.” The court had no choice’ but to invalidate it and order elec- tions for all District Council offices. But the evidence had shown that the practice (‘‘vividly demonstrated to have continued into the Trustee’s era’) of “stuffing the ballot boxes with fictitious votes” made it highly improbable that under its current officials, the District Council would ever conduct a fair election. So the court ordered that the election for Secretary- Treasurer and business agents—the “entire election process” and not merely the counting of ballots—was to be supervised by the American Arbitration Association. The prospect, therefore, is that the new elections (sched- uled for September 16, 1967) will finally assure rank- and-file house painters of a fair and honest election. The process of upheaval appears to have begun already. On the day the court’s decision was handed down, the insurgent Frank Schonfeld was elected chair- man of Local 1011, one of the larger local unions of the District Council, despite a propaganda barrage captained by the Brotherhood’s general representative, the same Harry Altman, which denounced Schonfeld as “Frank Skunkfeld,” a “Commie,” a “Trotskyite” and a sup- porter of the Arabs against the Jews (Local 1011, a former Yiddish-speaking local, is predominantly Jewish). The movement that has erupted in Local 1011 shows signs of sweeping the entire 10,000-member District Council. Where does that leave the Brotherhood’s top of- ficials? With rebellions on the road to success in San Francisco and New York, and with still nascent rebel- lions in Cleveland, Chicago, Buffalo, Philadelphia and Washington, among other cities, and following upon the heels of the Rasnick and Rarback scandals, their throne —for the first time in well over half a century—is be- ginning to shake. And the top officials of the Depart- ment of Labor (almost to a man, former top officials of the building trades and building service unions), may soon be made to face the embarrassing fact that they have taken no action, all these years, to protect the rights of union members victimized by the Rasnicks, the Rar- backs and their cohorts. Not since the McClellan hear- ings of 1958-59 has Congress investigated internal union dictatorships—and never has it taken a close look at the way in which the Labor Department, a peculiarly wheel- ish-and-dealish patronage body, has carried out the enor- mously important responsibilities which the Landrum- Griffin (or Kennedy-Ervin) Act placed upon it. Perhaps the uprising in the Painters’ union will be seen as the opportunity for such scrutiny. At the least, the painters’ uprising may challenge the conservative regime in the AFL-CIO—and in its bureaucratic core. That in itself could signal the beginning of new vitality for the almost forgotten labor movement. THE NATION / July 31, 1967 _ BATTLES IN THE MONSOON: Cam- - paigning in the Central Highlands, Viet- nam, Summer 1966. By. S. L. A. Marshall. William Morrow and Co. 408 pp. $6.95. _ JOHN N. MORRIS | Mr. Morris is a poet who will be an asso- _ ciate professor of English at Washington University this fall. He is the author of Ver- sions of the Self (Basic Books). I once knew a Marine Corps machine- gun platoon sergeant whose favorite _ author was Jane Austen and who kept works on a shelf above his barracks bed. _ Though not a man of wide culture, he _ had tried other novelists, but always he returned to her. She was more satisfy- ing, he said, because she was more ' realistic. Given the nature and distrac- tions of the art they practice, it is too much to expect of soldiers that many of them should display such sensitivity to the written word. Military men are, of course, great traffickers in the sym- ' bolism of things and gestures, and ' salutes and braid are sometimes capable of subtler meanings than the outsider easily perceives. Their apparent unam- biguousness lulls attention. Thus, when General Westmoreland, concluding his performance before Congress this spring, responded to applause with a salute, his intention was clearly to reassure us, to _ acknowledge as his own the traditional _ American understanding of the army as _a servant of the people, represented by the legislature to which he seemed to defer. His gesture of respect was in- tended to convey that he was not the instrument of the Executive will alone but of the rest of us as well, and that he was content that this should be so. But this particular salute, suggesting as it did that reassurance on this point is something we need, struck me as im- plying with at least equal clarity the precise opposite of its intended meaning. General Westmoreland was, I am _ gure, personally innocent of any sinister intent. But it is in the nature of any war to corrupt communications. Every war, to be sure, has its own language, which those at home can never speak or perfectly understand. But the truth about this one seems particularly diffi- cult to tell—and the difficulty is one which it is particularly important to _ THE NATION / July 31, 1967 R. W. Chapman’s Oxford edition of her © overcome. For there is more to the Vietnamese War than the political and moral issues about which so many of us draw confident conclusions. No doubt these are the major considerations. But for good or ill, combat in Vietnam is already and irrevocably a fact of Ameri- can experience. For the increasing thousands of Americans who have fought there the primary moral dimen- sions of the war are naturally and right- ly very different from those that we at home perceive. Whatever we think of the martial virtues, or whether we think them virtues at all, to soldier is to live the moral life intensely—or so says the Iliad. And, however dimly, it is thus that those who return from this worst war in our history will conceive of their experience. If we are to understand them, the quality of their experience as a felt thing must gain entry to the imagina- tions of even those who most deplore its monstrous occasion. And we must understand. The Viet- namese are the principal victims of this war, but not the only ones. The role of those innocent Americans—I do not speak of the jovial murderers to be found in every army, including the North Vietnamese—who daily risk their lives to no purpose or for an immoral one. is, in a strict sense of the term, tragic. To think of them in such fashion is not to indulge in the pleasures of literary or aesthetic emotion. To accord them the measure of respect they de- serve is to begin to see them as clearly and take them as seriously as for sound political reasons we had better do. For when they come to understand the fu- tility, if perhaps never the immorality, of the projects in which their innocence has been abused, it may well be they, who fought the war, not we who oppose it, who will become the unassimilable, volatile and irresponsible community of, subversion and dissidence. In this effort of understanding we have so far had little assistance. Celebrations of heroism, of course, tell no truth. On the other hand, the sober prose of The New York Times almost never comes close to the actualities that underlie its abstractions. But from Brig. Gen. S. L. A. Marshall, the military his- torian and author of such works as Men | Against Fire, The River and the Gaunt- let and Pork Chop Hill, more was to OOKS & THE ARTS Soldiering in Innocence be expected. The experience of combat is something he clearly understands. “Composing the large battle are any number of small fights, little connected, and sometimes at cross-purposes one with the other,” he reminds us, in passing, in his new book, Battles in the Monsoon, an account of campaigns last summer in the central highlands of Viet- nam. “Each is local and limited in the feelings of the men who engage. Com- pany fights company, platoon goes against platoon. How the regiment or brigade fared as a whole is something that has to be computed jater.” General Marshall’s business, here as in other of his books, is to make sense of this chaos, while providing us with a sense of its reality. In group interviews conducted while memories are fresh, soldiers de- tail to him their recollections of an en- gagement and emend the accounts of one another. In General Marshall’s hands the result is often a narrative— at once abstract and particular—in which both the pattern of the action as it can only in retrospect be understood, and the immediacies of the experience of combat are rendered in a manner- that carries conviction even for someone like myself who has never been to war. In short, General Marshall can tell us what we need to know. But not, by and large, in Battles in the Monsoon. Many of the virtues of his earlier books are indeed present. He makes comprehensible the incredible complexity of individual engagements and the ingenuity, foolishness and courage with which soldiers respond to danger. He clearly describes the new tactics that have evolved in Vietnam. But something is wrong. The difficulty is not merely that his understanding of the Vietcong and the North Vietnamese is, to say the least, a very simple one: they are the enemy. Political feeling is not absent from this book, but it is not directed against soldiers. The men he writes about do not exercise their lethal skills against Communists but against the VC, “Charley,” the NVA—abstrac- tions that have the dangerous habit of materializing, gun in hand. In this re- spect at least, our army remains as un- political as we could wish. The real de- fect of this book lies elsewhere and ex- presses itself in a certain crudity of language—and therefore of feeling—that suggests to me, because it is new in his 85 Se tS ( L 4 prose, that General Marshall’s scarcely acknowledgeable notions about this war are disorderly and troublesome to him. Perhaps I read too much into his phrases, but it seems to me that the tasteless geniality with which he often writes betrays an uncomfortable sense of. the moral vulnerability of our army in this war, a vulnerability which, in his loyalty to the military, he must some- how defy. “As the first light fulled,” Gen- eral Marshall writes, “Puff the Magic Dragon came flying up the valley. This C-47 mounts three 7.62 mm mini-guns, today’s high-polish edition of the old Gatling, each of which can pour out 5400 rounds per minute; it’s a blast.” Marshall is not to be blamed for the grisly whimsy of the name given this machine—inspired, one supposes, by a children’s book—for men have often in- vented friendly names for things not pleasant but necessary to think about. But the prose sets one’s teeth on edge. Note the attempts at modish sprightli- ness—‘“fulled,” “mini-guns,” “high-polish edition”—and that light-hearted phrase, “it’s a blast.” Battles in the Monsoon is spoken of by the blurb writer as “packing even more excitement than Pork Chop Hill,’ and for this concep- tion of battle as a particularly exhilarat- ing spectator sport Marshall’s way with language is largely responsible. When Marshall says that a Lt. Carl V. Hunt, Jr., “gunned this blighter down,” he is resorting, as vainly as a sports writer, to a variation in phrase that is supposed somehow to render the uniqueness of this member in a series of similar ac- tions. “Bright” writing of this sort is not suited to these occasions, for it trivializes them. The language’ of adver- tising is similarly vulgar and cheapen- ing, as when the encouragement of the North Vietnamese to defect is spoken of as persuading them to “come on over to the L&M (Legal & Magnanimous) side.” There is, it seems to me, something a little desperate and certainly disquiet- ing about this insistent geniality—espe- cially since it is new to General Marshall’s prose. For at least in those earlier works of his that I have read, Marshall is a serious and intelligent man. The River and the Gauntlet is not only a first-rate piece of reporting and mili- tary analysis; unrhetorical, intimately engaged with its subject on every level of feeling, it contrives without false sentiment to treat the disasters that over- came the U.S. Eighth Army in Novem- ber of 1950 in tones of such somber irony as to permit us to contemplate that defeat as something very like 86 tragedy. Soldiers and officers seem al- ways to be struggling with ignorant and admirable persistence against circum- stances over which no one has much control and for whose disastrous con- sequences no simple blame can be at- tached. Battle, in these narratives, is im- plicitly conceived of as a paradigm of our more géneral situation. This sort of seriousness Marshall has abandoned in Battles in the Monsoon. The reason, I believe, has to do with the nature of the present war, which presents itself to Marshall as the first in which the energies of our armies have not been continuous with the will of the people—even if that will, as at the time of the Korean War, expressed itself in- distinctly and sporadically. Marshall's stance has always been adversary; he has always been critical of incompetence and cowardice, in soldiers and governments. — (One of his virtues as a military journal- ist has been, and still is, to admit that some soldiers—and now and then he names them—behave badly in combat.) But never before has he felt the army he properly loves to have been betrayed. Such rhetoric as “treason by a rabble” is scarce here, but the emotion that this _ phrase of his expresses, manifesting itself in the new, willed, defiant “tough- ness” of his prose, corrupts too many pages of Marshall’s latest book. When so intelligent and sensitive a soldier as he misunderstands so much, what may we expect of the rest? And when Gen- eral Marshall can find it reasonable to call “some senators” “poltroons,” what (on second thought) may indeed have been General Westmoreland’s thoughts that day in Congress? Hanoi and the Front THE UNITED STATES IN VIET- NAM. By George McT. Kahin and John W. Lewis. The Dial Press. 465 pp. $5.95. Paper $2.95. VIETNAM: LOTUS IN A SEA OF FIRE. By Thich Nhat Hanh. Hill & Wang. 115 pp. $3.50. Paper $1.25. JONATHAN MIRSKY Mr. Mirsky teaches Chinese at Dartmouth College. He is one of the contributors to Peace in Vietnam: A New Approach in Southeast Asia (Hill and Wang). On June 4, John Mecklin, sometime Public Affairs Officer in Saigon, pub- lished a long review article in the Sun- day New York Times book section. In it he lamented that Bernard Fall (whom he otherwise praised) tended “occasion- ally to lean too heavily on debatable ma- terials. For example, he contends that the Vietcong revolt in the late fifties was spontaneous and indeed contrary to the wishes of the Hanoi government.” Mecklin’s survey of books worth reading on the Vietnamese War omits mention of The United States in Viet- nam. Had he read it he would not have so casually rapped Fall’s knuckles, for the origins of the struggle are shown definitely to have been what Mecklin suggests they were not. There are many for whom certain unresolved questions on the war cre- ate a paralysis of will or of decision, Did Hanoi really start the war in the south? Was communism about to en- gulf Indonesia? Was it stopped only be- cause the generals in Jakarta took heart from United States determination in Vietnam? Haven't the Chinese been stirring up trouble for fifteen years in Southeast Asia? Good questions such as these cause men of good will to stand frozen in their tracks muttering despairingly that it’s all too complicated. Help is on the way. George McT. Kahin is professor of government at Cornell and director there of the South- east Asia Program; he is a leading Western scholar on the area. John W. Lewis, associate professor of govern- ment, has written substantially on modern Chinese politics. Between them they have written the most lucid and fully documented study of America’s Vietnamese expedition yet to appear. Their book is broad in scope and absorbing in detail, relying on a great Tange of sources in several languages and offering its documentation discreet- ly, but usefully. After a succinct but comprehensive — historical chapter, The United States in Vietnam covers the period from the French war to Geneva (the treaty it- self is discussed with an admirable clarity which should retire several hardy myths), and then proceeds through the Diem period to the beginning and en- largement of the Americanization of the war. There are two excellent chapters on China’s foreign policy (showing Peking’s striving since Bandung to get on with regimes of any persuasion which avoid entanglements with Wash- ington) and on America’s other South- east Asian involvements. Six maps, four tables, and 50 pages of appendices (in- cluding the Geneva and SEATO treaties, various NLF statements, Hanoi’s Four THE NATION / July 31, 1967 Politics and Revolution THE REVOLUTIONARY PERSONALITY: Lenin, Trotsky, Gandhi E. Victor Wolfenstein Will success spoil the revolutionist? This and other questions are explored in this psycho- political investigation into the fundamental characteristics of three revolutionists: Lenin, Trotsky, and Gandhi. Center of International Studies, Princeton University $7.50 THE SOVIET MILITARY AND THE COMMUNIST PARTY Roman Kolkowicz Focuses on the conflicts and relationships be- tween the two most powerful institutions in the Soviet Union, primarily during the period since Stalin. A RAND Corporation study.. $9.00 THE RUSSIAN ANARCHISTS Paul Avrich The first comprehensive history of Russian anarchism in English. Based largely on ar- chives and documentary collections in Europe and America, it traces the movement from its origins with Bakunin and Kropotkin to the final destinies of the post-Bolshevik emigrces. Studies of the Russian Institute, Columbia University $7.50 Princeton University Press REVOLUTIONARY POLITICS AND THE CUBAN WORKING CLASS Maurice Zeitlin The first book to use the sociological ap- proach of in-depth interviews, conducted in Cuba during the summer of 1962, to discover the workers’ personal responses to the social revolution. August $8.00 .--and a study of today’s peacemakers THE INTERMEDIARIES Third Parties in International Crises Oran R. Young Explores the possibilities for third- party intervention aimed at facili- tating the non-violent termination of international crises. Center of International Studies, Princeton University $10.00 Bese so 2 Points, and the Honolulu declaration) make up the volume. The essentially civil nature of the war, despite frantic obfuscations from two Washington administrations, has been known for several years. Not only have Fall, Devillers, Lacouture and Chatfard ‘shown it to be so but the State Department's own White Paper of 1965 inadvertently proved it as well. The question hitherto not ade- quately treated is the extent of Hanoi’s involvement. It is here that Kahin and Lewis make their most substantial con- tribution; it is the subject which John Mecklin, David Halberstam and other agonized journalists will not face. In sum, the insurrection is Southern rooted; it arose at Southern initiative in response to Southern demands. The Liberation Front gave political -arucu- lation and leadership to the widespread reaction against the harshness and heavy-handedness of Diem’s govern- ment. . . . Contrary to United States policy assumptions, all available evi- dence shows that the revival of the civil war in the South in 1958 was undertaken by Southerners at their own—not Hanoi initiation . . . not as a consequence of any dictate from Hanoi but contrary to Hanoi’s injunc- tions (my italics). The evidence here is striking, con- vincing, and new. In 1956 and 1957, various political groups in South Viet- nam began to gather in the maquis to oppose Diem’s oppression of all those enemies he conveniently labeled Viet- cong. This has been previously well shown by Devillers. Less widely known, however, is that in 1958 there came into being in the south a clandestine radio, calling for resistance to Saigon and using the name National Liberation Front. In 1958 and 1959, the Hanoi Radio regularly attacked these southern broadcasts, first of all as being Ameri- can sponsored! Other charges were that they were sowing dissension among classes, stirring up violence and, worst of all, creating a situation in which a return to Geneva and a political settle- ment from which Hanoi felt sure of emerging victorious would be impos- sible. The crucial evidence for this an- tagonistic North Vietnamese attitude, cited by Kahin and Lewis, is found in Vietnam Presse Bulletin d’Informations Confidentielles, a series of monitorings of Hanoi broadcasts made in Saigon and circulated with circumspection among leading government figures in the Diem regime. Not until September. 1960. did Hanoi give support to the National Liberation Front. Even then, material aid was slow 88 4 in coming. As late as 1963, General Harkins (Westmoreland’s predecessor) was able to state that: “The guerrillas are not being reinforced, or systematical- ly supplied by North Vietnam, China or anywhere else.” (Washington Post, March 6, 1963.) There is much else of interest in this book. In a chapter entitled “The Global Context” Kahin’s long experience with Indonesian affairs enables him to show that the government in Java, with the blood of hundreds of thousands of “Communists” still fresh on its hands, called for American “imperialists” to leave Vietnam. Foreign Minister Malik is unmistakable on this point as are editorials in the army’s newspaper Berita Yudha. The United States in Vietnam should be the “Information, Please!” of the peace movement. It is hard to imagine anyone reading this book and continu- ing to maintain that we should stay in Vietnam. The foundations of such be- lief whether moral or geographical can no longer bear much weight. The problem of shoring up these foundations within Vietnam itself was recognized early by President Eisen- hower. In Mandate for Change he wrote that it “. . . was almost impos- sible to make the average Vietnamese peasant realize that the French, under whose rule his people had lived for some eighty years, were really fighting in the cause of freedom, while the Vietminh, people of their own ethnic origins, were fighting on the side of slavery.” Thich Nhat Hanh, a Vietnamese Buddhist monk and scholar, is a voice from “the inside” insisting on the same fact: The peasants are too frightened to do anything but support the Viet- cong, according to the informants in America. This is simply not true. The fact is that the Front has the sup- port of a considerable number of the peasants because it has been able to persuade them that this is in fact the struggle for national independence. The spirit of patriotism among the peasants is very high. They are not informed about world history or ideo- logical struggles; what they see is a large force of white Westerners do- ing their best to kill their fellow coun- trymen many of whom fought against the French. The peasants do not see the victims of the American military effort as dead Communists, but as dead patriots. Those who met Thich Nhat Hanh in this country last year will not soon for- get his modesty, his intensity or his presence. Since then he has traveled in Europe, had an audience with Pope oe ee Paul, and been warned not to return to — Saigon. What can we learn from Vietnam: Lotus in a Sea of Fire? \t is unique in that it describes in the tones of a Viet- namese an ancient, complex and fasci- nating culture, not mired in the ooze of the dead past and inhabited not by mindless rice eaters who sporadically terrorize their neighbors but by human beings\ who “cannot help being intense- ly patriotic who know very well that no patriotism can be expressed through support of a government that is in fact a puppet, created and main- tained by external power.” These "peasants are “constantly torn between an almost instinctive support of the Front in its battle against ‘imperialism’ and the desire to follow the advice of their religious leaders who warn them against supporting communism in their country.” Thich Nhat Hanh and his supporters in the Buddhist church and laity know very well, however, that: “In the past ten years anti-communism has become Vietnam’s most profitable business.” He is at great pains to separate him- self from such a business and returns repeatedly to Buddhism as an expression of faith, a state of mind, and a potent political force. The first part of his book is, therefore, a meticulous and learned history of Buddhism in Vietnam. He then turns to the impress of foreign occupa- tion and the reaction of devout and patriotic Buddhists who have acted, he insists, in response to the call of the Vietnamese people for succor and lead- ership. He suggests that not until the Vietnamese are free to settle their own affairs can the violence of seventy-five years come to an end. It is to the condi- tion of a people agonizing in decades of such violence that the Buddhist church cries out. In July, 1949, Dean Acheson sent a memorandum to Philip Jessup, re- cently appointed chairman of a com- mittee to examine the situation in Asia since the collapse of Chiang Kai-shek. In it we see the historic interest of this country in Indo-China, an area into which we plainly have not stumbled by mistake: You will please take as your as- sumption that it is a fundamental de- cision of American policy that the United States does not intend to per- mit further extension of Communist domination on the continent of Asia or in the southeast Asia area. What I desire is the examination of the problem on the general assump- tions indicated above in order to make absolutely certain that we are neglect- ing no opportunity that would be with- in our capabilities to achieve the pur- THE NATION / July 31, 1967 _ ose of halting the spread of totali- tarian communism in Asia. ~ How falsely this rings when we listen to Thich Nhat Hanh (now in exile from his own country) reflect on quite an- other interest: The peasants are not concerned about _ ideology: no one can frighten them with stories of the evils of Com- munism. With their property already LANGUAGE AND SILENCE: Essays on Language, Literature, and the In- human. By George Steiner. Atheneum Publishers. 426 pp. $10. | DAVID J. GORDON Mr. Gordon teaches English at Hunter Col- | lege. He is the author of D. H. Lawrence . as a Literary Critic (Yale University Press). _ George Steiner’s vigorous new book de- serves to be vigorously challenged. It _ is written with great moral intensity and rhetorical resourcefulness but with high- handed logic; to adapt a phrase of Henry _James’s, it sets our imagination against _ our judgment. Two large, seductive ideas dominate its pages: (a) A long-standing _ ideal of humane literacy has been shat- tered by our knowledge that Nazi barbarism “sprang from the core of | humanistic civilization,” and by the vul- garization of language in mass-consumer (especially American) democracies: (b) language, now in a state of unprece- dented crisis, is being superseded by mathematics, music and silence, but may yet be saved by something called com- munism (a blend, it seems, of Karl Marx and Marshall McLuhan). It is shocking that. Nazi barbarism sprang from a high civilization. (But _ why “core”? The phrase “Central Euro- pean Humanism” is used throughout in | the curiously private sense of “uniquely objective and cosmopolitan.”) And _ it is shocking to know that a man could read Goethe or Rilke at night, and gas other men in the morning. To Steiner | this knowledge destroys “the hopé grown almost axiomatic from the time of Plato to the time of Matthew Arnold, that culture is a humanizing force, that the energies of spirit are transferable. to those of conduct.” For “if the humani- ties are humane, why did they fail be- fore the night?” Literature may even be directly responsible for inhumanity by deflecting our concern from the real to the imaginary. ~* Steiner would make literature the scapegoat for all human sins. But litera- THE NATION / July 31, 1967 destroyed, they do not fear that the Communists will take their property, and if one speaks to them of free- dom and democracy, they say, “Of what use is freedom and democracy if one is not alive to enjoy them?” So it is clear that the first problem of the Vietnamese peasant is the problem of life itself: how to survive in the midst of all the forces that threaten him; how to cling to life itself. An Elite Conscience ture cannot bear so much or redeem so much. Plato knew that the arts humanize us by exercising our feelings, not by supervising our conduct. The creators of Iago and Raskolnikov knew that intellectual sophistication does not preclude inhuman behavior. (How many Nazis, by the way, were so_sophisti- cated?) Steiner does not take the op- portunity to correct the excessive claims for the humanities made by Arnold— and by Henry Sidgwick and F. R. Leavis, whom he later implicates. One reason, clearly, is that his own bent is strongly Arnoldian. It is he who will not surrender a re- ligious claim for the Word: “Language is both miracle and outrage, sacrament and blasphemy.” Inherently it is neither, and Steiner is led by his absolutism into flagrant overstatements and inconsisten- cies. The only way to read a classic is to be possessed as by an epileptic seizure: he who does not read this way “may technically be able to read print, but is illiterate in the only sense that matters.” He sees the writing of literary criticism as “a defeat ... a bleak coming to terms with the ash and grit of one’s limited talent”; yet “the dominant characteristic of the present literary scene is the ex- cellence of’—among related forms— “the critical essay.” The teaching of literature is demoralized and demoraliz- ing, yet “to guide someone through Lear or the Oresteia is to take into one’s hands the springs of his being.” “Lan- guage itself is a supreme act of com- munity,” but “the living truth is no longer sayable.” Resembling a prophet of the Word, Steiner tends to/announce Di- vine Judgment unless we Repent Now. “Our civilization, by virtue of the in- humanity it has carried out and con- doned, [has perhaps] forfeited its claim . . . to literature’—unless it accepts the “beautiful” temptation of silence. One surmises from all this that the creative use of language is felt by Steiner as a defiant act accompanied by guilt, and that submissive renuncia- tion or exalted identification are strate- gies by which the creative impulse can be liberated from inhibition. At one point he approaches an insight of this kind: “Does the act of speech, which defines man, not also go beyond him in rivalry to God?” But he really seems to mean “God” in a literal, metaphysical sense rather than a metaphorical, psychological sense (disconcerting in a writer who does not commit himself to any theism), and he retreats into ineffability: “It is just because we can go no further, be- cause speech so marvelously fails us, that we experience the certitude of a divine meaning surpassing and enfolding ours.” What I find irritating in much of this is the covert moral snobbery. Steiner seems to ask us to join an “elite of conscience” (a phrase he used re- cently in The New York Review of Books) in order to get a kind of venge- ful pleasure in scorning others: those who don’t suffer enough in remember- ing the Nazis (we must still envy the actual victims: see the essay, “A Kind of Survivor’), those who tolerate the vulgarities of democracy, and those who lack the vision to see that the era of verbal primacy is at an end and that a FOR WRITERS! Enrich your style through Herbert Spencer’s and Edgar Allan Poe's classic principles that have influenced many of the world’s great authors. A help for writers eager to get published. Send $1.00 to PAGEANT PRESS 101 5th Ave. N.Y. 3 Dept. N The Best Way To Get NATION c---------- SS I THE NATION 7-31-67! 333 Sixth Ave., New York 10014 -) One Year, $10 [] Two Years, $18 (0 6 Months, $6 oO Bill Me (] Payment Enclosed (Foreign and Canadian Postage $1 a year extra) ee had rh od ee al ey nis eu Par hic 5 rea es tes INGAAS ESS aeseeecere aateneeve eevee ioremesasrenermeerret see ore CENWTID aD EXE saree rss aneroermeererer gee nee eater OL TDN rst oeeceerejettonast ee tetonceete bere eee ae STRATE crerrsetenierereetirs ES IN Oo sereetreemssnnar ae bil: hy new era of total sensibility is at hand. How does Steiner persuade us that language has degenerated to a point of unprecedented crisis? He trots out the familiar false comparison of past peaks and present averages: “Compare the vi- tality of language implicit in Shakespeare . .. With our present vulgate.” (Why not a comparison of unlettered Anne Hathaway and erudite George Steiner to illustrate the progress of literacy?) He asserts, unreasonably, that buyers of paperbacks do not read them with the same involvement that men used to read books. But Steiner’s chief evidence certain innovative modernists, such as Hermann Broch and Samuel Beckett, raise the question in their art of getting beyond language altogether. Steiner con- sistently confuses the idea of surpassing fiction with the idea of extending it. Fiction that explores its own limits is still fiction; what actually goes beyond language is irrelevant to it. And the re- lation of literary experiment to social health is more complex than he indi- cates. I agree that such experiment, when it is not mere horseplay, reflects an exacerbation of sensibility for which an oppressive society is partly responsible. But it also reflects a salutary ability, partly made possible by a relatively free society, to master disturbing ideas by means of artistic play. Steiner has little sense of language as a mental activity. “Reality now begins outside verbal language. Mathematicians know this.” What can this mean? Mathe- matics is also a language, a symbolic system, a way of talking about what we presume to be the real state of things. Since he externalizes mental life in this way, it is only somewhat surprising that he should unwittingly describe his own qualities in his objections to those he calls Masters: the prophetic stance and under- lying puritanism of F. R. Leavis; the arrogance and snobbery of Claude Lévi- Strauss; the contempt for the irrational of Georg Lukacs; and the apocalyptic bias of Marshall McLuhan. Steiner is at his very best in a hand- ful of more modest pieces buried in the middle of his big book—on Giinter Grass, Arnold Schoenberg, the Bible, Shakespeare, Prosper Mérimée, and Mann’s Felix Krull. Giving his con- science a holiday, he here takes pleasure in, and lets us take pleasure in, his sensitivity to literary texture, his access to wide and relevant allusion, and his ability to phrase truisms attractively and even delicately. - But the heavy hand of high serious- ness tends to stifle such pleasure in the first and last thirds of his book. He hates the “frivolity” of literary studies 20 is that in the West, and admires their “desperate seriousness” in Communist countries: “To shoot a man because one disagrees with his interpretation of Darwin or Hegel is a sinister tribute to the su- premacy of ideas in human affairs—but a tribute nevertheless.” The implication of this statement seems to me inevitable, although Steiner, an avowed anti-Stalin- “ee Be eee vt ee ‘ nine ist, would, I trust, wince at having ft 9 spelled out: killing for an ideal one re- jj gards as high is preferable to what one regards as frivolity; an ideal of humane literacy, carried out absolutistically, has become itself inhuman. Language and Silence left me wonder- ing about the problematic nature of an elite conscience. Ajrican Bookshelf AFRICA: History of a Continent. By Basil Davidson. Photographs by Werner Forman. The Macmillan Co. 320 pp. $25. A HISTORY OF WEST AFRICA TO THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. By Basil Davidson (with F. K. Buah and the advice of ¥. F. Ade Ajayi). Double- day & Co, 342 pp. $1.45 paper. AFRICAN GLORY: The Story of Vanished Negro Civilizations. By J. C, deGraft-Johnson, Walker & Co. 211 pp. $4.95. POLITICAL CHANGE IN A WEST AFRICAN STATE: A _ Study of the Modernization Process in Sierra Leone. By Martin Kilson. Harvard University Press. 301 pp. $6.95. THE TRANSFORMATION OF EAST AFRICA: Studies in Political Anthro- pology. Edited by Stanley Diamond and Fred G. Burke. Basie Books. 623 pp. $16.50. PORTUGAL AND AFRICA, 1815- 1910: A Study in Uneconomic Im- perialism. By R. J. Hammond. Stanford University Press. 384 pp. $8.50. CRISIS IN RHODESIA. By Nathan M. Shamuyarira. Foreword by Sir Hugh Foot. Transatlantic Arts. 240 pp. $7.95. GWENDOLEN M. CARTER Miss Carter is director of the Program of African Studies at Northwestern University. The American interest in Africa is almost a contemporary phenomenon. For all that, or perhaps because of it, the wealth of excellent material being pro- duced by scholars and publicists now bids fair to outstrip that on other de- veloping areas. Those who have been close observers of its spectacular drive to independence during the last decade know the fascination of Africa’s vast variety of peoples and landscape; they know of the complex interaction between its traditonal mores and rapidly spread- ing modernization, of newly discovered historical records and archaeological sites, and of the wealth of music, art and literature which it has long pro- duced. Both they and those who are being introduced more summarily to Africa through the daily headlines will welcome this season’s crop of publica- tions which includes some unusually attractive and perceptive works. A superb combination of readable history and brilliantly chosen illustra- tions has been produced by the inde- fatigable Basil Davidson in Africa: His- tory of a Continent. Unlike so many titles, this one does not claim too much. The artificial division between North Africa and Africa south of the Sahara that so much work has perpetuated has been swept away by the breadth of Davidson’s historical scope and _ the keenness of his perception of relation- ships. Not only does he record the great heritage of Egypt, and the historic trans- Saharan links of mutually advantageous trade and more one-sided political con- quest but for once Ethiopia is given its due share of attention: its unique Christian tradition; its unusual interac- tion of Christians, Moslems and Jews; its little known religious and secular art treasures. Against such a background, and within such a context, the relatively short colonial period falls into a balanced perspective as a great molding factor with both constructive and destructive effects, but only one of the decisive in- fluences by which contemporary inde- pendent Africa has been shaped. Basil Davidson’s A History of West Africa to the Nineteenth Century shares the clarity of phrase, vividness of presentation and _ perspective of his larger book. This more limited and thus more integrated survey tells the storv of West Africa’s economic, social and political growth and ruptures from the full establishment of the Iron Age bv 1000 A.D., through the rise and fall of empires, the dislocations caused by the slave trade, and the organization of new states and lines of trade, to 1800, the eve of the imperialist thrust from Europe. No less significant, be it noted, than the impact of outside pow- ers upon West Africa in this period were THE NATION / July 31, 1967 - (oe a ~~ Be eer oe ee a ee ee oe — eo eee SS ee ee ee ee ee ee ee ee ee et Ee ah counter influences of massive in- voluntary movement of peoples from West Africa to Brazil, the Caribbean and the United States, and of raw ma- terials to stimulate the Industrial Revo- Jution in Europe. 4 Basil Davidson is a British author and journalist, with many books on _ Africa to his credit.. He works closely _ with professional historians like Prof. ’ Roland Oliver, who read the manuscript of Africa: History of a Continent, and Prof. J. F. Ade Ajayi of Ibadan Uni- versity, Nigeria, and F. K. Buah, head- master of a Ghanaian secondary school, whose names are joined with his in ‘writing the History of West Africa. An- other African scholar, Dr. J.C. de- Graft-Johnson of the Department of Economics at the University of Ghana, has also written of pre-colonial Africa in African Glory: The Story of Vanished | Negro Civilizations. First published in 1954, and recently reprinted, African Glory seeks to discover the origin of the _ Negro, as well as to identify those ancient civilizations in which the Negro played _ a significant part. Beginning with Egypt, Carthage, Ro- » man Africa, and the conquest of North _ Africa by the Vandals, Dr. deGraft- _ Johnson pieces together a story of al- _ most constant interaction between peo- _ ples and areas that is relevant to his vasions of which the first, fired with Teligious zeal, won North Africa for | Islam, but the second was _ largely | destructive. Already, however, had come ' the rise of Ghana, founded in the fourth century and at its height fifty years be- _ fore it was conquered by the Almoravids in 1076. Within a decade, the latter had _ extended their rule from Senegal to Spain, and pressed southward the tribes of the Akan group that today inhabit modern Ghana. In the Western Sudan was rising the Mali empire whose most illustrious emperor, Mansa Musa, led a spectacular pilgrimage to Mecca in 1324, and developed the commercial | city of Timbuktu whose university was _ a great Islamic center of culture. Once Dr. deGraft-Johnson begins the | account of the African empires, his his- _ torical reconstruction takes on form, vigor and color. Whether describing the rise and subsequent breakup of the Mali and the Songhai empires, or the Portu- _ guese in Africa, the slave trade or his own Gold Coast (subsequently Ghana), he is pithy and vivid. He ends this new edition with an epilogue geared to 1966 that notes how African leaders, like Nkrumah, by then out of power, had _ denied the freedoms in their own coun- try for which they had originally fought. ‘THE NATION / July 31, 1967. theme. He writes next of the Arab in-: Yet he affirms his faith in the potential stability of his continent if it secures wise and skillful leadership. Another type of historical analysis, one that uses both the approaches and techniques of modern social science, is ably presented by Martin Kilson of Harvard University in Political Change in a West African State: A Study of the Modernization Process in Sierra Leone. American attention has recently been drawn to this small country by the 1967 army coup that followed its general elec- tion and the (momentary) accession to office of a new Prime Minister. For those who are sometimes skeptical of the usefulness for practical politics of academic studies, it is worth noting that Dr. Kilson ends his detailed study with the conclusion that the post-colonial party process “leaves few grounds for optimism,” and that “a movement to- ward full-fledged authoritarian rule in the near future would be no surprise.” Sierra Leone has never wholly bridged the gap between its Creole community in the peninsula area—descendants, like the Americo-Liberians, of freed slaves— and the indigenous Africans in the hinterland. Both, though to varying de- grees, experienced the revolutionary ef- fect of the colonial system in creating social and economic change, and _ ulti- mately political participation. Educa- tional institutions were established rela- tively early for West Africa—Fourah Bay College, now the University of Sierra Leone, dates back to 1827—but Creoles and outsiders long received al- most all the advantage from them. Yet, unlike Liberia, those from the hinter- land became the dominant political in- fluence, and it was they who carried Sierra Leone to independence. The in- teraction of many subtle and significant factors in this complicated equation are skillfully analyzed by Dr. Kilson in what is likely to become a basic study. Moving from West to East Africa, a massive and comprehensive collection of articles entitled The Transformation of East Africa: Studies of Political Anthropology, and edited by Stanley Diamond and Fred G. Burke for the Eastern Africa program of Syracuse University, brings together a wide range of studies of historical, political, eco- nomic and social factors affecting this huge area. Arising out of papers for a faculty-student seminar on Problems of Nation-Building in East Africa, this work is a useful compendium of background material. The last two books to be considered here are very different in their pur- pose and their presentation, but both Winner of the 1967 INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL Cracow, Poland NAPALM IS A BOMB ...IT IS ALSO A FILM A searching portrayal of the anti-NAPALM demonstrations at Redwood City, California. Scenes include views inside the NAPALM plant and bombs in the making; speakers Robert Scheer and Felix Greene; interviews with city officials, business Jeaders and dockworkers. A unique social documentary about a city and a moral dilemma, Available for rental or purchase, King Screen Productions, 320 Aurora Ave. N., Seattle 98109 . bo BW) leit q deal with the area often termed “the white redoubt” because of its refusal to yield to the pressures of African na- tionalism. R. J. Hammond, in his com- petent and illuminating Portugal and Africa, 1815-1910: A Study in Uneco- nomic Imperialism, focuses on Portu- guese policies and attitudes concerning Africa, especially those affected by British policies and attitudes in that period. He contributes materially there- by to an understanding of one of the great paradoxes of colonialism in Africa: why by far the weakest of colonial pow- ers is the only one to continue to domi- nate large areas of that continent, notably Angola and Mozambique, and even to retain its hold on Portuguese Guinea in West Africa. Other studies, already referred to in this review, have pointed out the early outreach of Portugal—so isolated geo- graphically on the European continent —to Africa and beyond. These contacts, its long-standing territorial claims in Africa, and their translation into co- lonial control in the 19th century have been coupled with as yet unshaken Por- tuguese determination to retain what they have acquired. Whatever judgment one may make on the Portuguese brand of colonialism—United Nations censures of its racial policies, in which the United States has joined, and fighting by Afri- can nationalist forces within all Por- tuguese-controlled areas, illustrate how widespread is the opposition—it is im- portant to understand the basis of its strength. Professor Hammond, an econ- omist at the Food Research Institute at Stanford University, has added materi- ally to the all too slight body of infor- mation on the views the Portuguese themselves have held on imperial issues, and provides new insight into the period with which he primarily deals for the contemporary scene. Nathan Shamuyarira’s Crisis in Rhodesia is the most personal, and the most pressing of the books in this re- view. It provides a detailed, highly read- able account both of the inequities in the distribution and use of land, life in the towns, education, and political op- portunities suffered by the majority Africans in Rhodesia (who outnumber the resident and dominant whites by six- teen to one) and of the rise and course of the African nationalist movement. Shamuyarira, editor of The African Daily News from 1956 to 1963, and thereafter a lecturer at the University College in Salisbury, Rhodesia, left his country to study for a Ph.D. at Prince- ton University just six hours before the police arrived at his home with a war- rant for his arrest. The most telling com- 92 mentary on the built-in color discrimi- nation in Rhodesia, with its resultant waste of human resources, is that be- cause he is working for African political rights there is, in his country, no place but jail for a man of Shamuyarira’s in- telligence, experience and integrity. [See “Bleventh Hour in Rhodesia” by N. M. Shamuyarira, The Nation, November 8, 1965.) Africa includes sharp contrasts within |} and between its countries and areas. We | are fortunate that so many serious yet readable studies are being published to enable us to view its vast panorama with more perspective and more bal- ance. This dynamic continent more than repays all efforts to understand the his- tory, the struggles and the aims of its many and varied peoples. THEATRE IN EUROPE IV HAROLD CLURMAN Berlin The theatre in West Berlin is well sup- plied with new and old texts from the drama of all lands. It is thoroughly sound in orthodox techniques, established and rich with honor in the community. But I was more interested in the theatre of East Berlin because of the sharp dif- ference between what one may see there and what one sees in New York, London, Paris and West Berlin itself. I refer to the Komische Oper (“Comic Opera”), to some extent to the Deutches Theater (whose production of the picturesque Soviet allegory The Dragon 1 saw last year) and, of course, to the world-re- nowned Berliner Ensemble. What struck me in the productions of East Berlin, as it had in Prague, was the sheer sense of play: the exhilaration in the variety of physical action, color and movement, by which meaning may be conveyed. When I saw Topol’s Cat on the Rails in Prague, for instance, I seemed to “get” even more of its quality and message without knowledge of the Czech language than I did when I read the script in a good English translation by George Voskovec. In Prague and East Berlin the stage action is speech. Hence my conjecture that the great Russian director, Meyerhold, for a long time taboo in the Soviet Union because of his “formalism,” was probably the in- direct influence on the theatres of Prague and to some degree of East Berlin. Meyerhold said that “Words in the thea- tre are only a design on the canvas of motion.” This was not meant to be taken literally (though it is true that he tam- pered with texts—including those of the “classics”——-a practice held to be hereti- cal). It is obvious that Brecht, the founder and leader of the Berliner Ensemble, couldn’t have minimized the importance of writing in the theatre (he was above all a poet), but the emphasis on the plastics of movement, the almost choreo- graphic treatment of groups and of in- dividual performances, scenic business, tricks and turns are among the most striking features in the theatre of both East Berlin and Prague. This is theatrical theatre, where playing is the play and the text is not altogether the thing. I attended the first night of a new mounting of Verdi’s La Traviata at the Komische Oper. Its director, Walter Felsenstein, a resident of West Berlin, re- hearses his operatic productions for many months. The Komische Oper, like other theatres in East Berlin, is subsidized by the government. Opera under Felsenstein is endowed with an authentic dramatic life. The actors do not deliver their arias from stage center, face front, with an eye on the conductor. They are characters of a drama which is not sliced into set pieces, and they move and act in ac- cordance with dramatic necessity. Every role is individualized. In the gambling and ballroom episodes of La Traviata, for example, there are no “supers”: one can “read” each character among the guests, follow the line of each person’s special behavior and yet discern the pattern of the whole. All this in settings perfect in taste, exquisite in opu- lence (where demanded) and, best of all, expressive of style and content. : During the penultimate moments of the death scene in La Traviata one catches glimpses of the whole course of Violetta’s and Alfred’s history—partic- ularly the former festivities—in brilliant miniature. The juxtaposition of these sparkling fragments of the past and the approach of death adds irony to pathos. To see a Felsenstein production is to suspect that opera might be the greatest of theatrical forms. This surely is “total theatre.” The productions at the Berliner En- semble are no less totally theatrical. Three elements prevail at the Ensemble which we rarely find in Brecht produc- tions elsewhere: elegance, charm and abundantly raffish humor. The actors move in grace and laughter while, at the same time, preserving a certain prole- THE NATION / July 31, 1967 sidering the play’s subject matter, is astonishing. The script was composed by _ Brecht’s “heirs” from scenes only partly _ finished in 1929-30. It is a propaganda play in the playwright’s “epic” style, dealing with the economic hardships of the period. The atmosphere is steeped _ in the dull gray of poverty. Yet there is no heaviness at all in the staging, but _ great charm, while the drabness of the circumstances presented is transformed _ into a spectacle of subtle, visual interest, _ even beauty. In nearly all discussions of _ the Ensemble its purely aesthetic aspect _is overlooked. Externally, the Oriental, _ particularly the Japanese theatre, has served as an inspiration for effects which seem to have been born in Berlin. My intention at the moment is not to _ describe the productions of The Three- _ penny Opera or of Man Is Man, What concerns me now are matters of prin- ciple and instruction which may be extrapolated from the experience of - having seen them. Nowhere in the Western world is such “teamwork” to be seen as at the En- semble. There are several remarkably fine actors in the company (one of them plays the central role in Man Is Man), but the productions are so much of a piece that I very nearly forgot to look at the programs to learn their names. The productions are so wholly integrated that one hardly thinks of individual per- sons or passages. They are “works” in _ which acting, design, direction, seem to have been created by a single artist— _ hot the dramatist, the director, this or that actor but all of them as One. They have created something greater than the sum of its parts. This is the perfection of theatre craft. It is important to remember that these productions (The Bakery, The Three- penny Opera, Man Is Man) postdate Brecht’s death in 1956. They are the work of young directors trained at the Ensemble. It should be remarked that the latest success at the Ensemble is a “production of O’Casey’s Purple Dust. The Ensemble is not a one-dramatist theatre. There is a general significance in these bits of information. For what I persist in calling “true Theatre” is not a display of great personalities, geniuses and stars of whatever sort but a unified effort that represents something more than its component individuals. Of geniuses and personalities we in the United States have our share; they come out seasonally. One way of recognizing a true Theatre —— - THE NATION / July 31, 1967 FREE with each new subscription The FBI Nobody Knows by Fred J. Cook A portion of this important book first appeared in THE NATION (October 18, 1958), as a special feature and attracted nation-wide attention and the highest praise. Now it has been rewritten and en- larged with much new material. “A devastating case against the Federa! Bureau of Investiga- tion and its veteran director, J. Edgar Hoover.” —San Francisco Chronicle “... an effective and powerful document...” —New York Review of Books “J. Edgar Hoover won't like this book . . . well-documented ... likely to cause a furor.” —Publishers’ Weekly “Fred Cook must be credited with a courageous, as well as an illuminating, book. Let those who dispute his charges refute them if they can.” —New York Herald Tribune subscribe to NATION America’s most habit-jorming magazine The NATION 333 Sixth Avenue New York, N.Y. 10014 Herewith my order and payment for a NEW subscription to The Nation. Please send my FREE copy of THE FBI NOBODY KNOWS. [11 Year,$10 [2 Years,$18 [6 Mos., $6 (Foreign and Canadian postage; $1 per year extra) - =a SPs kt eg A noon s+ 2 Se ess i | ne |. is that its value extends beyond the bril- liance of its immediate personnel. The Moscow Art Theatre, for exam- ple, founded in 1898 by Stanislavsky and Nemirovitch-Danchenko, has exercised an enormous influence on the modern Russian theatre (and elsewhere) long after its prestige was established and after its founders’ deaths. This did not come about solely through the eminence of the parent organization (the Moscow Art Theatre is now considered “a museum” by many Russians and others) but through the students of its ideas and practices in many independent and frequently aes- thetically divergent groups. Similarly, the Berliner Ensemble, in- disputably Brecht’s creation, now retains its vitality through the development of principles and procedures bequeathed by him and put to use by people of a later generation for new audiences. A Theatre is not so much the product of a talent as of a concept, a ruling idea. Through its seminal power it survives those who plant it. A true Theatre inspires not only dedication to its idea but generates a common way of work, a fundamental technique, a characteristic style. A Thea- tre is the expression of a culture or at least a powerful current within a com- The Nation SUBSCRIBERS’ BOOK SERVICE Offers the following at a discount: Price (1 THE GOODBYE LAND by Jose Velesias (Pantheon, $4.95) nrcssccscsnssssnsense {) AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF BERTRAND RUSSELL, 1872-1914 ele Brown & GOL ST BS) ccsicesmen swseasomne GOGO 00 THE ACCIDENTAL PRESIDENT by Robert G. Sherrill (Grossman, $5.00) $4.00 (J HELL’S ANGELS: A _ Strange and Terrible Saga by Hunter phompeps (Random House, $4.95) cecum $3.95 (1) THE FREE WORLD COLOSSUS: A Critique of American Foreign Policy in the Cold War by David Horowitz (HAIL and Wang, $6.95) eccsememnenne (9 FRIENDSHIP AND FRATRICIDE: An Analysis of Whittaker Chambers $3.95 $5.55 munity. Indeed, it is not too much to say that a Theatre may contribute to the formation of a culture, a statement supported by many historical precedents. When the Berliner Ensemble moved into the delightful old playhouse where in 1928 The Threepenny Opera was first produced, the following lines (writ- ten by Brecht) were inscribed on a plaque in the lobby as an indication of the En- semble’s spirit: “The Berliner Ensemble is about to give its plays amid ruins. These performances will be staged in this beautiful building not only for pas- time but to have audience and company together establish a harmonious ‘us’: so that this House and much else besides may stand fast.” Attendance at the Ensemble is now greater than when I first visited it in 1956. Every performance I attended was sold out. The audience, it seemed to me, was composed largely of young folk. It is also noteworthy that while the people in the streets of East Berlin are for the most part shabbily attired, they come to the theatre almost formally dressed, as for a festive occasion. Another interesting sidelight: the Alfred of La Traviata at the Komische Oper was an American from Atlanta, Ga. He is not a “defector” but an alien resident of West Berlin, permitted to work with Felsenstein in East Berlin. The day I was informed of this I en- countered Carl Ebert, whom I had first met in Los Angeles where he lives. I asked him what he was doing in Berlin. He told me he was staging Stravinsky’s The Rake’s Progress at the West Berlin Opera House. I inquired whether he was satisfied with his cast. “It’s very good,” he replied, “the three leads are Americans.” Our country, I repeat, suf- fers no lack of talent. THREE POEMS AGAINST VIOLENT DEATH A nail. Twist it and it breaks, Screw it slowly and the juice. rusts it away. But hammer it, and the nail grows, Blackening the earth. It becomes a huge nail, Driven through the leaves, Bigger than whole cities. On a road near Da Nang, twenty young men Scrape their legs and die. They dream of becoming wet flowers That hang in the trees over their heads. They dream of twisting their soft bodies Around a bush, where they could lie for months Turning brown, cracking at the sides, But under the tanned bark would be a stubborn Green thread. But now they scrape at the ground And bite it with their teeth. While, behind The trees the horizon walks up and down On legs of yellow lights, and the planes Know themselves, and are very clean. Set see ee eer, ; be BS OR Cae errant =e America shakes the bombers from her hair. O Pee eee esence ee by There are men in the streets, but who can ao See them? Men in Chicago and in Vietnam. While the President walks in our houses; No one on the street can talk more softly. Stars listen, sharpened and deadly; For the ceremony has awakened inside of bullets. Its corroding cloth has been fitted for trees And flesh; for women whose youth will be scalded Like an egg. In Asia men scrape at the ground/With a fire In their minds and their bodies burning. America shakes the bombers from her hair. No one on the street can talk more softly. 83.05 - Remittance accompanying orders should be made payable to THE x NATION, 333 6th Ave., N.Y. 10014 i 0 Please bill me ARIE (0 Payment enclosed Readers can avail themselves of our ; regular offer to send them any book (ex- cept paperbacks), published in the U.S. at the retail price post-free. When order- ing, please give title, author and pub- lisher, if possible. 7-31-67 ee _ PAUL ZWEIG 94 THE NATION / July 31, 1967. Crossword Puzzle No. 1210 FRANK W. LEWIS Reece | bare LP ees) | ee | te | a ee epi || | | a ete ACROSS: 1 Implying a mixture of pints and pins, just for the fun of it. (4, 3, 8) 9 Gets up and around, no doubt. (7) 10 Is it elementary for the daughter of Tantalus? (7) 11 Follows the captain’s orders to stay put, but doesn’t tell it straight? (4, 2) 12 Wine plant? (8) 14 Is such a fan appropriate when the sun is at its worst? (10) 15 One might hope to do it quietly with gear such as stockings, for example. (4) 17 Sir, out of 9 you could make high points! (4) 19 They might help the library grow. (10) 22 Sate? (8) 23 Is her wit more like those little lies? (6) 25 Is capital required first, usually? (7) 26 Quiet after nine? It’s in the bag, or more probably in the carton. (3-4) 27 Certainly not based on quick figuring, though according to them one pays a premium price! (9, 6) DOWN: 1 Does it show how things burn you up? Just the opposite! (5, 10) 2 Its obvious I would show up in the happening! (7) 3 A container, so arranged as to be pretty ornamental? (8) 4 Does it mark an interruption in the race? (4) 5 Cervantes said great persons are able to do great ones. (10) 6 Like some leather, also came first. (6) 7 Throw out that. clerical character! (7) 8 It does a proper note in time of trouble, but some walk out on them. (8, 7) 13 By the sound of it, what one might do in the flower garden, with the hot sea- son. (10) 16 People have little aspiration to be taken by it (8) 18 The first job of government? (7) 20 What thieves sometimes do first to last might prove a drain. (7) 21 Instead of me being in this country, loudly proclaim another place. (6) 24 One can get to see at a distance, in France’s Pyrenees. (4) SOLUTION TO PUZZLE NO. 1209 ACROSS: .1 and 25 Intentional walk; 9 Frazzled; 10 Baking; 11 Decease; 12 Ca- reers: 14 Flicks; 15 Bedrooms; 17 Brass hat; 20 Puffin; 22 Tintype; 24 Ominous; 26 Devict; 27 Averages; 28 Black Knight. DOWN: 2 Nez Perces; 3 Enlists; 4 Tidy; 5 On board; 6 Ankle; 7 Orwell; 8 Antrim; 13 Abate: 16 Offenbach; 18 Raises; 19 Hepatic; 20 Pompeii; 21 Inure; 23 Twill. Readers are invited to send for a free copy of Mr. Lewis 333 Sixth Avenue, New York, N. Y. Teyuest to Puzzle Department, The Nation, THE NATION / July 31, 1967 » 6 ” Address your 10014. ground rules. S j Composition by R.C.R, Publication Printers Corp., ART ORIGINALS COST LESS THAN REPRODUC- TIONS! Contemporary original signed etch- ings, lithographs, woodcuts, $3.50. Guarantee, Free brochure. GRAPHIC CIRCLE (NA), 68 Fifth Avenue, N.¥.C. 10011, PUBLICATIONS THE IDLER, Lively, offbeat, liberal monthly. $1 brings four different sample back issues, Idler, 413B 6th St., N. E., Washington, D.C, 20002, “SELECTED (Villiers of POEMS” of GEORGE FLYNN London—$2.00) is “the most ex- citing American poetry since Ezra Pound.” —James Turner. Available in U.S, from the author at: 145 West 12 Street, New York City 10011, COSMOPOLITAN CONTACT—polyglot mag- azine for international friendship. % issues $1.00, Postbox 29117, Hollywood, Calif. WHY were Dewey and Stevenson nominated a second time? WHY did Kennedy pick Johnson for Vice President, his bitter an- tagonist in the nomination? WHY do you have only two choises ? Read this revealing inquiry into our electoral structure. THE VOTE AND THE OFFICE $1.25 Postpaid GEORGE MOSES 60 Carroll St., Poughkeepsie, N.Y. 12602 WORLD DEMOCRACY. By Bin Self-Designated Symbolieal World President. Unique. Entraneing. $2. Greenwich Book Publishers, 282 7th Avenue, N.Y.C. Bin Dir Woor says that the world’s greatest need may be 1000 holy mono-maniacs with only one idea, WORLD DEMOCRACY. Dir Woor, AMERICAN HAIKU magazine. Subseription —$3.00 yearly. Box 73, Platteville, Wisconsin 53818, SERVICES MOVING? Professional moving at competitive rates. Anytime, anywhere. Licensed, insured, experienced. THE COVERED WAGON, AL- gonquin 5-1788 (N.Y.C.) APARTMENT NEEDED LADY UNIVE RSIT Y TEACHER (City Col- lege) seeks furnished small apartment, one year September Ist. Marlis Kriiger, 1 Berlina 37, Neue Str. 28, WORKER WANTED EXECUTIVE for Waterbury, Ine., Community Action Agency. ministrative experience. B.A, Degrec preferred. Salary open. Submit appli- eations to: N.O.W,, Ine., 769 North Main Street, Waterbury, Conn, Attention: Miss Christina R. Asklar, Germany. DIRECTOR, New Opportunities Waterbury, Connecticut 4-5 years top Ad- required, Masters Advertising Rates CLASSIFIED 74ce a line (6 words) Three-line minimum CLASSIFIED DISPLAY $7.42 per inch (minimum) The NATION 333 Sixth Ave., New York, N.Y. 10014 CHelsea 2-8400 N.Y.C. 95 Individuals Against the Crime of dll A Declaration To Our Fellow Citizens Of The United States, To whe Peoples Of The World, And To Future Generations: 4 We are appalled and angered by the conduct of our country in ‘a Vietnam. me 2 In the name of liberty, we have unleashed the awesome arsen att the greatest military power in the world upon a small agricultural nation, killing, burnigg and mutilating its people. In the name of peace, we are creating a desert. In the name of security, we are inviting world conflagration. : ly: 3 We, the signers of this declaration, believe this warto be immoral | bh We Believe it to be illegal. We must oppose it. 5 I) ra At Nuremberg, after World War II, we tried, convicted and exe-. cuted men for the crime of OBEYING their government, when that government joe of them crimes against humanity. Millions more, who were not tried, were still guilty of: THE CRIME OF SILENCE. SS Se Se ee erent ee 5 We have a commitment to the laws and principles we carefully \ forged in the AMERICAN CONSTITUTION, at the NUREMBERG TRIALS, and in the UNITED NATIONS CHARTER. And our own deep democratic traditions and our dedica- tion to the ideal of human decency among men demand that we speak out. USE IT— TEAR ON THE DOTTED LINE AND MAIL =< We Therefore wish to declare our names to the office of the Secretary General of the United Nations, both as permanent witness to our opposition to the war in Vietnam and as a demonstration that the conscience of America is not dead. On Septe e é 3 Mer andur { Law was rporated in e Cona sional Record of the 89th Congress of the United States of America, in which eichty leading ‘ tter careful ana { our position actior the Vietnam War, came to the conclusion that we are violating the following accords: The Charte of the United Nat he Geneva A ds of 1954, the Unite Fi T 54, the Ur SS ee b 3 To Protest—To Object—To Dissent has long been an American tradition. The { ee following are a few among the many who have signed this declaration to be on at record, ABE AJAY DR. RALPH R. GREENSON HERBERT D. MAGIDSON ROBERT RYA JAMES BALDW. PROF. ABRAHAM H 4EL SH N Ss ae epplay Ba M ROBERT VAUG HN RICHA RDM. POWE LL DR. MAURICE N. WALSH CARL REINER DR. HARVEY WHEELER JANICE RULE AL. WIRIN, ESQ. \! | wish to sign my name to the above Declaration to the United Nations and want to go on record with this Declaration i of the Individuals Against the Crime of Silence. paar ~ ieee a cs as is Lt re ss et ee Se a a ee penne YOUR SIGNATURE DOES HAVE POWER — IF YOU a : E signatul a ml Ty - addre date Cy ese state zip AY Sign, complete and mail to P.O. Box 69960, Los Angeles, Calif, 90069. The office of the Individuals Against the Crime ° ° of Silence will then forward the information to the United Nations, Should you also wish to support additional publishings and communications, send $1 or more in cash or by check made pay able to Individuals Against the Crime of Silence. This donation entitles you to the lapel emblem and the wallet-sized registration card. Money is needed to speed our progress. The strength of our numbers will requiarly and effectively be made known. Your signature does have power. Pag Tore ce es ee es ee ee ee SACCO-VANZETTI a.pino FELICANI ATION AUGUST 14, 1967 35 cents BURLINGAME AUG 14 1967 finyw ; 3 be BRR UT | THE VIOLENCE 4 NEW YORK / PAUL GoopD : LOS ANGELES / PHIL KERBY } NEWARK / LEWIS M. MOROZE | EAST HARLEM / BENNETT KREMEN ; | DETROIT / B. J. WIDICK | ; ee ee RIOTS: Schools for Revolution? LOUIS Kafer | 2 28 PORNOGRAPHY: School for Crime? [ 2 zo IRVING YOUNGER me ; ae... ) ect Death of Coltrane / A. B. SPELLMAN B pz > ; Oo 2 O£F Frank O'Connor s KEVIN SULLIVAN HARRIET O'CONNOR id @ B2— 5 Tali-Tale Americana ROLFE HUMPHRIES ° = a = = . sae = > LETTERS civil war costs Chicago, Il. Dear Sins: The race riots in more than a dozen cities and the deployment of federal troops in Detroit over the hot weekend document the fact that . . . these riots are civil wars and therefore the complete responsibility of our federal government both as to causes, prevention and rem- edies. The function of the police is local law enforce- ment which is already woefully inadequate in most of our large cities. . . . The national root causes of the alarm- ing increase in almost all forms of crime in the country are clear. They are now a present danger to surrounding “better neighborhoods” if not to a breakdown of “law and order” in larger areas. Let the top businessmen and politicians in our country . .. consider the tens of bil- lions of dollars extracted annually from them for police, welfare, courts, jails and mental institutions—traceable in the main to our substandard population. Galbraith, Myrdal and most economists and sociologists agree that not only would America save the major costs of crime but that the living standards of the lowest brackets will be raised without cost by the mere and sheer acts of manipulating and gearing our fabulous economy for adequate employment at the lowest skill levels, which will in turn produce ade- quate living space, educational and recreational facilities . which in turn will radically reduce the incidence and intensity of crimes. . . . Poor lands and large populations in other nations must perhaps continue to breed despair or revolutions, In America the ratios of population, pro- ductwve areas and natural wealth are still so fabulous that almost all specialists stand perplexed if not horrified by the indifference of the powers in Washington who cannot see the simple and ready solution. Otherwise, as in; Detroit, Washington will be increas- ingly compelled to provide “National Guards” to inform Americans and the world that business prefers to fight a civil war alt home, too. Sidney Blackstone war hearings Washington, D.C. Dear Sirs: I was interested to read the editorial “Advice to Congressmen” in the July 3 issue of The Nation. I thought it would be useful to call to your attention two days of hearings which I held in New York City entitled “Unofficial Congressional Hearings on Vietnam,” on August 12 and 13, 1965S. We were fortunate in gathering a top-flight panel of expert witnesses—both in support of, and critical of, the Administration’s policy—who were able .. . to engage in a dialogue with one another. We included a separate, extra evening hearing on the second day in order to permit local residents to be heard. Interestingly enough, local expression was uniformly critical of the government’s policies in contrast to the balanced presentation during the two all-day sessions. William F. Ryan, Member of Congress, 20th Dist., N.Y. stamp out reviewers New York City Dear Sirs: Readers of The Nation are surely grateful for your choice of so eminent an authority on rural-urban so- ciology as Elmer Bendiner to unmask that blatant piece of propaganda, The Levittowners by Herbert J. Gans [Majority Cult In Levittown,” July 17]... . Bendiner has caught Gans out: The Levittowners, stripped of its pretentions to scholar- ship, is revealed as little more than a clever apologia for (Continued on page 148) 130 x EDITORIALS A Senator Speaks His Mind ) Sen. Thruston Morton, Republican of Kentucky, | could be said to come as close to deserving the title of “Mr. Republican” as anyone since the late Sen. Robert A. Taft, who inspired it. It is not only that he occupies, politically, a position close to the center of the party’s “mainstream” but also that over the years he has served his party skillfully and well. Republicans, from all sec- | tions and of all persuasions, have a high respect for Mr. Morton, and with reason. It is highly significant when a man of the Senator’s stature and influence publicly announces that he has — changed his position on a crucial issue. He did so, not by inches but by a mile—or perhaps the measure should be in light years. It occurred, not in a private interview or at a press conference but on television’s Opinion: Washington (WTTG), and just to show that there could be > no mistake about it, he repeated his statements the next evening to Martin Agronsky on C.B.S. national TV. Senator Morton, who until now has been an outspoken supporter of the bombing of North Vietnam, said that he “thought they’d be brought to the table in a few months if we did that, but I was wrong and I'll admit | ibs * This he followed up by declaring: “T think the | | tools we're working with and the tactics we’re using today _ | are outwer and are not working,” and continued that © we were “painting ourselves into a corner” by following | a policy of escalation. It is a rare and refreshing experience to hear a na- tional political figure stand up and admit that he has | been wrong. It has happened very seldom within our }q experience. The last memorable example was provided |} by President Kennedy, following the Bay of Pigs fiasco |p which he handled with characteristic frankness and }4 aplomb, but under the circumstances he had no choice; fi the facts were there for all to see and to bemoan. Mr. jn Morton had a choice, and with rare courage and honesty | made the right one by obeying his conscience. One might | hope that his example would be followed by those cur-_ rently in power. If they need an excuse for turning away ; from their disastrous course in Vietnam, the forthcoming |} election on September 3, which promises to be a farce, could provide one. But Johnson and Rusk, judged by past} th performances, lack Senator Morton’s integrity. | Ca The Senator eloquently and forcefully espoused an) Ie “honorable disengagement.” We agree with him, and | a would go further and say that immediate disengagement |} of is the only honorable course now left to us. The Senator} is convinced that Vietnam will be “a burning, compelling! issue, the big issue in the 1968 election.” Asked if the: Republican candidate in 1968 should be a peace candi- date, he replied: “Well, to paraphrase ’64, let’s give ai choice, not an echo, and we’ve got a war candidate in)}. the White House today, so I’d say the Republican candi--} date should be a peace candidate... . ” In his view, the:}j, political leader who presents a program of honorable dis- engagement “is going to get elected President of the: U.S.” It would be exciting to see the Senator give it a try. a SS ee nee ee — a eee { 4 I i d p q i tt 1 h qi 4 a THE NATION/August 28, 1967) ti * 4 - Our editorial of July 31 called attention to a poll on Vietnamese policy which the Cleveland Plain Dealer con- » ducted on May 28. Three points of view were present- | ed: one by Rep. Mendel Rivers, a noisy hawk, another by Senator Fulbright, the third by Howard Zinn, a fre- | quent contributor to these pages. Their statements were entitled, respectively, “Escalate and Win,” “De-Escalate” 'and “Withdraw.” The results were: Zinn 5,798, Rivers 1,716, and Fulbright 1,648. On August 6, the always lively and pertinent Sunday ‘Gazette-Mail of Charleston, W. Va., conducted a similar | poll, using the identical statements. The results: Zinn | 888, Fulbright 109, Rivers 97. The poll was publicized | for two days in advance of the deadline; employees of | the paper did not vote; and no evidence of organized | drives by partisan groups could be detected by those ' who conducted the poll and tabulated the results. | The importance of these polls should not be exagger- | ated; in each instance only a small percentage of the F readership participated—slightly more in Cleveland than "in Charleston. On the other hand, the polls cannot be "dismissed as being of no importance. The fact that the | poll material appeared in the “Current Affairs” section of the Gazette-Mail, which it may be assumed is read by 4} a selective portion of the readership less numerous than ‘that devoted to the sports page, may qualify but it does ‘mot impugn the significance of the results. _ The Nation has insisted that general polls on Vietnam "have been somewhat misleading, not because of defects in the sampling or even in the formulation of questions but because the alternative of “withdrawal” has not been treated as a live option. A community poll in which the alternative of withdrawal has never been publicly de- ' bated is not likely to reflect the real sentiments of those | polled. Most of the doves, in and out of Congress, have | stopped short of suggesting withdrawal so it has not figured in the discussion as a real alternative. Individuals may privately agree with a position that has not been publicly debated, but unless the position has been made i) “audible” in the community, it will not show up well in | the polls. _ What sentiment testing in Cleveland and Charleston | demonstrates is that once it has been aired as a real possibility, there is more support for the Zinn position _than is indicated by the polls which President Johnson | carries about with him for personal reassurance and Teady reference. Other papers would be performing a ' genuine public service if they were to follow the lead | of the Plain Dealer and the Sunday Gazette-Mail and (] conduct a similar poll. | The Lindsay Therapy ' Both as mayor of New York and vice chairman of | the Special Commission on Civil Disorders, John V. Lindsay is deeply concerned with the Negro revolt, and is manifesting his concern at no small personal sacrifice. The mayor of the greatest city in the hemisphere has nO sinecure, but in accepting the federal assignment Lindsay, who has never regarded the problems of New HE NATION/August 28, 1967 \ (“RG G6 > IN THIS ISSUE August 28, 1967 EDITORIALS 130 ARTICLES 134 Aunt Effie and the Brass William Foote Whyte 135 Voice of America: Memorandum to John Daly Richard J. Walton 138 Germany and the East: The Outmoded Wall 141 Yankee Station: Inviting Retaliation Thomas W. Pew, Jr. 142 90th Congress: Slapping at Symbols Robert G. Sherrill Carey McWilliams 145 The Yanqui Universities: Ships That Pass in the Night BOOKS & THE ARTS 149 A Labor of Love and Learning Kevin Sullivan 150 Listening to Frank O’Connor Harriet O’Connor 150 Events (poem) Harvey Shapiro 151 Swift Conviviality Vivian Mercier 152 Driving Through Minnesota During the Hanoi Bombings (poem) Robert Bly 153 Tall-Tale Americana Rolfe Humphries 157 Music Benjamin Boretz 157 Those Summer Guests (poem) Jean Garrigue 159 Crossword Puzzle Frank W. Lewis Ronald Hilton Publisher Associate Publisher JAMES J. STORROW JR. GIFFORD PHILLIPS Editor Associate Editor CAREY McWILLIAMS PHIL KERBY Executive Editor Literary Editor ROBERT HATCH HELEN YGLESIAS Copy Editor Poetry Editor MARION HESS MICHAEL GOLDMAN Theatre Washington HAROLD CLURMAN ROBERT G. SHERRILL Art ; Paris MAX KOZLOFF ALEXANDER WERTH Music London BENJAMIN BORETZ RAYMOND WILLIAMS Science Bonn CARL DREHER c. AMERY Advertising Manager Canberra MARY SIMON Cc. P. FITZGERALD The Nation is published weekly (except biweekly in July and August) by the Nation Magazine Company and copyright 1967 in the U.S.A. by the Nation Associates, Inc., 333 Sixth Avenue, New York, N. Y. 10014. Tel.: CH 2-8400. West Coast office: 1256 Westwood Boulevard, Los Angeles, Calit..90024. Tel.: GR 4-2533. Second class postage paid at New York, N. ¥. and at additional mailing -office. Subscription Price: One year, $10; two years, $18. Foreign and Canadiag postage: $1 extra per year, Change of Address: It is essential. that subscribers ordering. a change of address give four weeks’ notice and provide their old as well as their new address. Please give Zip Code numbers for both addresses. Information to Libraries: The Nation is indexed in Readers Guide to Periodical Literature, Book Review Digest, Book Review Index and the Public Affairs Information Service. NATION ee. Combined with FRONTIER 131 eo! ae — York lightly, has taken on a man-killing work load. He attends the Washington meetings but flies back to New York before sundown, just in case Harlem or the south Bronx or Bedford Stuyvesant should burst into flame as Newark, and so many other tinderboxes, did. That New York has escaped so far is largely Lindsay’s doing. What the mayor of New York can do in quieting racial and class tensions is precious little—how little no one knows better than Lindsay. If it devolved on him, he would be spending $10 billion a year clearing New York’s slums, but it is our national shame, rather than merely that of the cities, that sums of that magnitude are appropriated not for domestic welfare but for sense- less carnage abroad. Thus hamstrung, Lindsay has tackled the problem with a therapy of his own applied to the masses of the poor who, elsewhere, are treated as if they weren’t there—until they explode. That crowning injury Lindsay has never inflicted on the almost forgotten men, women and children of the slums. At least he goes among them and tries to give as many as possible a little relief from their drab and bor- ing lives. Things like jazz concerts, open-air movie shows, rides over the metropolitan area in airliners will not cure the evils of the slums but, in a marginal situation, they may afford a breathing space to determine whether the causes of disorder are to be seriously attacked. Or must black people continue to be killed in street fighting and eventually be herded into concentration camps? Even the New York Daily News, which is not noted for indulgence toward do-gooders, has paid tribute to Lindsay’s efforts. Referring to “the Mayor’s cocktail hour,” the News observes that at 6:45 in the evening all good Yale men are supposed to be partaking of the cup that cheers, but one alumnus, class of *44, can be seen pounding the hot pavements, shaking hands, lis- tening to grievances, looking for what is wrong and what he can do to correct it. If New York stays cool, the News suggests, the credit must be given to Mayor Lindsay. Lindsay is equally dedicated in the Washington phase of his work. If President Johnson’s primary purpose was to get the heat off himself, he chose the wrong man when he appointed Lindsay. On July 31, the U.S. Con- ference of Mayors formed an “Urban Coalition,’ with the aim of bringing about “a sense of immediate urgency about the need for positive and progressive action for our cities.” The White House felt that this body would compete with the Presidential commission. Efforts were made to get Mayor Joseph M. Barr of Pittsburgh, the president of the Conference of Mayors, to call off the Urban Coalition, or at least to persuade Lindsay to with- draw from it. The pressure failed to work; Barr and Lindsay refused to change their plans. Lindsay informed Mr. Johnson that he saw no conflict between the two groups: the Presidential commission was looking into un- derlying causes, the mayors’ coalition was trying to avert a recurrence of disorders during the present crisis. If Mr. Johnson still descried a conflict, Lindsay was pre- pared to resign from the commission. This, of course, was the last thing Johnson wanted, so Lindsay and Barr are continuing witth their plan for a thousand-member convocation late in August to seek ‘ta reordering of the 132 nation’s priorities and action by Congress to relieve they}! cities’ plight.” a Thus Lindsay is combining personal suasion in t 2) I New York slums with national action on two fronts: jm in his capacity as vice chairman of the Presidential com= } mt mission and as a leader in the Urban Coalition. What) ie with all these activities, which require not only immense} Wit energy but personal courage, Mr. Lindsay may find him- | pein self rising to the national prominence he deserves. It is)| Pol an axiom in U.S. politics that the mayoralty of even the ps largest city is a dead end. Still, the times are unusual, }\e! and the unusual might happen. ap At The Right To Want a States that have outlawed the union shop are falling) * behind in the economic race. They condemn all theiry} people to lower incomes, not merely those against whom & “right to work” laws are directed. The Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers (OCAW) research department!) finds that nineteen of the twenty “right to work” states)) have personal incomes lower than the national average. The one exception is Nevada, which relies largely on gambling for its income, and since it adopted a “right!) to work” law its average has dropped in relation to the} national average. ; The study finds such states falling further behind year-- ly. OCAW says Indiana has already repealed its “right to work” law as a losing proposition, and thinks others: may follow as the blighting economic effects become bet- ter known. Of the other eighteen states involved, each one has» lost ground; the average annual income for all of them by over $230. In two states this relative decline has ex=) ceeded $500 per year. Wyoming is analyzed by OCAW as a good case study, It adopted a “right to work” law in 1963, when its per i) sonal income was $18 above the national average. By 1965, this had dropped to $188 below. Meanwhile per--) sonal bankruptcies increased 30 per cent, private employ--| ment dropped 2.9 per cent against an increase of 6.7) , per cent nationally, home foreclosures quadrupled to) twice the national rate, new construction dropped 17 pery cent, against a national gain of 8 per cent. The “OCAW also quotes a Phoenix baseball man as: saying that the city may not make the big leagues) because in “right to work” states the public “doesn’ have as much money to spend on entertainment as i states where labor is strong.” Or on anything else? Waves from Cuba Predictably, the first meeting of the Organization fo Latin American Solidarity (OLAS), recently concluded) (i in Havana, was very largely an exercise in anti-U.S.| propaganda. Olas is Spanish for “waves,” and the entire’ community, for the duration of the conference, was) | awash with waves of hatred and promises of violence’) and destruction for the norteamericanos. But amid THE NATION/August 28, 1967 | | Inherent in the relationship between the United States and Latin America is, of course, the envy and resent- | ment of the very poor against the very rich. Nothing is | likely to alter these feelings until the great day comes ‘when the poor are poor no longer. Of course we hate being hated, and ever since Roosevelt’s “Good Neighbor If Policy” have tried energetically to earn, or buy, Latin | understanding and friendship. During World War II, lf) Nelson Rockefeller as Coordinator for Inter-American | Affairs was successful in preventing Latin America from @ siding with the Nazis, principally by virtue of convincing ® them that they would be backing the losing side. Efforts | since the war—the Organization of American States, | the Alliance for Progress—have had little success in woo- ing Latins to our side. _ Perhaps, the Biblical injunction to the contrary, it will @ require more than the “mammon of iniquity” from us to # make friends. Certainly the Cuban message is clear: | there the Alliance and the OAS were both roundly de- nounced as U.S. deceitfulness. Clearly, also, our policy of isolating Cuba, if its intention is or was to topple - idel Castro, is not working either. Castro has over- 4 Whelming popular support, and in addition Cuba, under | his leadership, has made startling economic and social # Progress in spite of our quarantine. And of course the | obsolete Guantanamo naval base is a continuing affront | to Cuban pride. | Cuba is a Communist state, without a doubt. And | in terms of individual liberty, it is considerably more | repressive than any in Eastern Europe. But at heart it y seems more Cubanist than Communist. At the OLAS conference, “Soviet imperialism” received its full share of odium, along with the Yankee variety. And yet a *} further distinction exists in the rapidly growing trade " | with Spain. General Franco could give lessons in anti- / communism to anyone anywhere. But he is still, appar- ‘ | ently, acceptable as a business partner in Fidel’s eyes, of when the chips are down. And surely, if Franco can ‘@ happily inhabit the same world with Castro, the United "} States would be well advised to re-examine the premises 1 of its policy toward Cuba. Cutting off noses to spite faces | is bad for images anywhere. i - | Bigot, Spare That Tree ete a a iq > ip Raleigh Searching anxiously for a new way to express old i} racial attitudes, the school board of Wake County, N.C., “| arly in July raised the specter of fifth and sixth graders } reveling in midnight, interracial orgies in a state park. | Thereby it killed a federally financed summer program for | 500 white and Negro underprivileged children. , Under provisions of the Elementary and Secondary ff Education Act, the federal government offered Wake jj) County, which includes Raleigh, the state capital, $24,000 a to provide four one-week sessions of study and camping 7 for 11 and 12 year olds at beautiful Umstead Park, IF a few miles outside Raleigh. An ESEA director said _ the program was a modest attempt to compensate for “the vacations never known, the trips never taken, the THE NATION/August 28, 1967 nature never seen.” For it, ESEA reserved a spacious area in the park and hired a camp director, ten teachers, ten counselors, a nurse and five cooks. At its first hearing, the ESEA proposal drew opposi- tion only from the chairman of the school board who, avoiding the word “integration,” said he objected to federally sponsored “social reform never intended by our founding fathers.” Perhaps feeling such an appeal too blatant, the other members of the board remained silent until the next meeting, when one of their number, a housewife, provided a more plausible rallying point. She argued that “above the age of 9” boys and girls should not be allowed to stay overnight in the same park, because this was a dangerous “exploratory age.” The combination of unhealthy sexual fascination and idyllic surroundings might prove too much for fifth and sixth graders. “We’re not looking for any trouble,” she said. Following this new tack, the chairman agreed that serious “biological” problems could arise to damage the board’s good reputation. In amazement, one of the ESEA camp coordinators pointed out to the board that the boys and girls would meet only in the dining area. “They both approach the central dining area from different directions and they go in different directions when they return to their own camp sites. There’s a chaperone for every seven people.” The board, which has publicly voiced hostility to North Carolinian Harold Howe and “his” desegregation guide- lines, was unmoved, It voted unanimously to reject the proposal. With new spirit, it then went on to reject also the possibility of day camps at the park. Don’t Sell It; Throw It Away Munich Recent noises from the German grand coalition govern- ment have caused vast echoes inside many an American breast. It looks as if the West Germans, who could never get enough assurances that the United States would stick to its European commitments (I remember Bavaria’s Prime Minister, Herr Goppel, asking this assurance from Sen. Eugene McCarthy in the surprising context of a weekend in the Catholic Academy of Munich), are going to scuttle part of their own defense forces with a light heart. Despite some arithmetic by F. J. Strauss, it looks as if manpower would have to be cut by more than 10 per cent, and that this reduced force will not suffice for existing defense concepts. Quite rightly, the tiny Free Democratic opposition has asked for a parlia- mentary airing of the whole issue and demands the COMING: SPECIAL FEATURE The Nation of September 11 will be devoted to Chris- topher Lasch’s “The Cultural Cold War.” In this re- markable essay, Mr. Lasch examines the sensitive and significant issues raised by disclosures of Central In- telligence Agency subventions to the Congress for Cul- tural Freedom. The editors are confident that this bril- liant piece of social criticism will challenge American intellectuals to a re-examination of the role they have played in the cold war. ; 133 development of a concept adapted to the new situation. Readers of this journal probably remember all the outbreaks of West German ire whenever some such thing as the Rapacki plan was on the agenda. While almost every statesman did consider a thinning out of forces in Central Europe as something which, if not desirable, was at least worth discussion, such plans were being denounced throughout the Adenauer era (and later) as a Communist trap or shortsighted collusion with the enemy. In all such plans, we also remember, mutual thinning out and mutual inspection were envisioned. It would have been tit for tat: any West German soldier demobi- lized under those conditions would have been matched by a GDR, Czech or Polish soldier; any U.S. division with- drawn from the Federal Republic would have been matched by a Russian division withdrawn from Eastern Europe. Nevertheless, the almost unanimous government reaction from Bonn sabotaged all those plans, whether they were named after Rapacki or after Eden. Now they have become unnecessary. America is busy thinning out its divisions in USAREUR, and Bonn starts dismantling also. It is done in the name of Vietnam (as far as the United States is concerned), and in the name of economy (as Bonn sees it). Not a single GDR soldier will lose his job, not a single Russian tank will roll eastward, not a single move at inspection or reci- procity is made: unilateralism, once the dirty word of military policy, has become the panacea of the day. All these events could be registered by friends of peace as a sweet revenge on the old opposition—if they — did not testify to a general trend in German postwar policy. In the past, all possible avenues of~a friendlier ap- | proach to our Eastern problems—the existence of the Ger- man Democratic Republic, the drastic boundary revisions of Poland, the commitments of our Eastern neighbors to support Ulbricht—have been constantly blocked, though such an approach would have visibly improved our po- — litical standing in the world. Implementation of a Ra- packi or Eden plan was by-passed. Negotiations at gov- Vas ernment level in—let us say—1958 or 1960 would have altered the character of the Ulbricht regime substantially; now they will come soon, and will hardly cause a ripple in East Berlin. Legally binding guarantees from Bonn for the Oder-Neisse Line could have strengthened Po- land’s hand in 1956 and given much more elbow room to Gomulka; at present they might prove almost em- barrassing for Warsaw, as they would feed the distrust of Russia’s Western neighbors (particularly the GDR) of a possible West German “divide and rule” scheme. Nevertheless, the issue has to be faced by Bonn, as the issue of negotiations with East Berlin has to be faced, and as the exaggerated West German defense posture — had to be revised. For Bonn has to adapt to the reality, however painfully. For the German nation as a whole, it would have been much better to have done it sooner, but then such action would have violated the basic prin- ciple of our postwar policy: Don’t Sell It; Throw It Away. CARL AMERY AUNT EFFIE AND THE BRASS WILLIAM FOOTE WHYTE Mr. Whyte, author of Street Corner Society (University of Chicago Press), Money and Motivation (Harper & Row) and ‘Men at Work (Richard D. Irwin), is professor of industrial and labor relations and of sociology at Cornell University. The Congressional hearing on the use of air power in the Vietnamese War reminds me of the investigatory method of my late aunt. Whenever Aunt Effie found her- self in a strange town, without culinary information, she would pick a likely looking restaurant, seek out the pro- prietor, and ask him point-blank: “Do you serve good food?” Invariably she found his answer reassuring. Looking back, I can see that this approach had some things to commend it. No waste motion, no delays in decision making. Once in the restaurant and past the proprietor, we sat down and ordered and did not leave until our hunger was sated—or until we had eaten all we could. While I look back upon Aunt Effie’s straightforward approach to life somewhat nostalgically, it had not oc- curred to me that it could be applied to national prob- lems. But that seems to be what is going on in Congress now. The pattern is something like this. The distinguished Air Force general is called before 134 the committee to give his expert judgment. It is not the — first time; some months ago he promised the commit- tee that bombing of North Vietnam would drastically reduce infiltration to the south and shortly bring the North Vietnamese to their knees. Now it has become apparent that the rate of infiltration has increased, and | even the general can detect no weakening in the enemy’s | will or ability to fight. The general now has two options: (1) He can admit that the bombing has not been near- ly as effective as he expected it to be. (2) He can say that the situation would be even worse ~ ' without this much bombing and can still get better with | more extensive bombing. The committee asks him if he would like to have more ; \ targets to bomb. What do we expect the general to say? The outcome of this little drama is so highly predict- | able that we must assume either (a) that the Congress- | /, men are so naive as to expect that they are going to find | out something through this approach, or (b) that the Congressmen are not naive at all but think that the rest | of us are. In the latter case, the purpose is simply to | give a carefully selected expert a sounding board for opinions that the Congressmen want to popularize. Why is this approach bound to produce more propa- ganda than enlightenment? 1 You i tho , qd 4 4 THE NATION/August 28, 1967 | tH } } i ional commitment with expertise. The general may be an sxpert on some aspects of military operations. He ‘is also ia man who has devoted his career to the Air Force. He identifies his success with the success of Air Force mis- sions. He develops organizational loyalties and an or- ganizational point of view. That point of view naturally | tends to exaggerate the importance and effectiveness | of one of the organization’s primary missions (bomb- ing) and to underestimate the limitations and adverse | effects of this activity. _ There is nothing peculiar about this organizational | coloring of human judgment. It is a universal phenome- | non. In industry the production manager who has spent | his career in production naturally sees his company’s problems and their~solutions primarily in production | terms. ‘The sales manager who has had his career in sales _ naturally tends to see the company’s problems and | prospects in terms of selling. r There is a failure to ask the question: what is the _ expert really expert at? An Air Force general can be | expected to have some expertise on problems of Air _ Force administration, on getting planes into the air, and on getting them over the target area. He should be able to tell us how big a bang the bomb will make when it hits. Can he tell us how much physical damage has _ been achieved in a given bombing mission? While the ' record shows a tendency to exaggerate on this point, at least the general can speak from such concrete evi- p dence as air reconnaissance photographs. Can he tell us what the enemy will be willing and able to do to re- - pair the damage or otherwise compensate for its effects? - On this question, his training and experience have given = no expertise at all. Can he tell us what the effects will be upon the morale of the North Vietnamese and B their leaders? Not only does he have no expertise for ' this question but the record shows that he is far more likely to be wrong than right. | There is also the failure to learn from past experience | —even from a well-documented past experience, For _ example, the strategic bombing survey of Germany after ie q 4 VOICE OF AMERICA MEMORANDUM TO | RICHARD J. WALTON \ _ Mr. Walton, a former newspaper man, worked for VOA for ® eight years, the last five as principal correspondent at the Yo United Nations. He resigned in May and now is working B on a book on Adlai Stevenson at the UN, to be published next year by Coward-McCann. _ In your early days on the job as director of the Voice of America you'll be getting plenty of briefings but perhaps you won’t hear some of the things I am about to say, al- ‘though you will certainly learn them sooner or later. No te (a i lin a ir a | THE NATION/August 28, 1967 World War II clearly showed that the advocates of bomb- ing had been completely unrealistic in expectations and promises. Great physical damage was done, but until very near the end of the war the Germans were able to maintain and even increase their war production. Ef- fects on morale? The Germans were depressed, all right, at losing their homes and relatives, but this did not affect their determination to fight on. It is one of the curiosi- ties of that war that so many British experts expected bombing to break the German will to resist, whereas the heavy bombing of Britain had had no such effects on the British. There is also a failure to evaluate the past perform- ance of experts. If following the advice of a broker leads us to lose a lot of money, the chances are we will look for another broker. When the Edsel did not sell, the Ford Motor Company did not continue to build the car. Somehow military and diplomatic advisers seem to en- joy immunity against the test of experience. In those fields, nothing succeeds like failure. Each new failure seems to provide arguments for a more massive applica- tion of the policy that failed. Critics of our Vietnamese policy are often asked to offer something constructive. Let me seek to comply by offering suggestions for the streamlining of future Con- gressional hearings on military and diplomatic policies. We know enough about the types of expert testimony that emerge in such meetings to be able to simplify great- ly the hearing process. Much time of all concerned could be saved if the committee did not physically meet, but just issued press releases on what would have been said if the committee had met. Standard stories could go out regularly, with appropriate headlines like “Air Force General Supports Bombing.” Furthermore, the same story could be used again and again for years, simply with minor changes in detail, for the record indicates that the advocates of air power have been making the same argument for twenty-five years, no matter what the sit- uation. If my advice were followed, at least we could intro- duce some modern refinements into the simple, primitive approach of Aunt Effie. JOHN DALY matter how much authority President Johnson or USIA Director Leonard Marks said you will have, you will find it is precious little. In the first place, VOA is not nearly so self-contained as it seems. Dozens of your subordinates are in frequent touch with their counterparts in the parent USIA, and many important decisions will be made with- out your even knowing there was a decision to make. This is particularly true in the most important area of all. As you know, USIA has an apparatus to insure that the agency’s work conforms to national policy. This, on the face of it, seems unexceptionable, but you will soon 135 find out that the policy officers are the nay-sayers. They are the ones who will do all they can to obstruct what you said on your appointment VOA should do: “fully and fairly” report American and international dissent to the Administration’s policy in Vietnam. For they know the periodic statements that the Voice of America broad- casts the truth are empty but expected rituals. Cer- tainly VOA broadcasts the truth, but it is Madison Ave- nue’s selective truth, not “the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.” The USIA policy office has a branch within VOA and whenever a VOA program person has a policy question— and with Vietnam and the racial disturbances you can be sure there will be plenty—he goes to the policy office which nominally is under you. Or the policy office—which routinely gets copies of all newscasts and commentaries before they go on the air—can take the initiative to kill or modify something they think would be too embarrassing to the Administration—say, a commentary that frankly discusses the depth and significance of the anti- Vietnamese dissent within the intellectual community. However, if the program officer persists—and only a few, the best, are likely to—the VOA policy office can take the matter to the USIA policy office. But if USIA policy turns down the item, and such is the usual course, an unusually persistent program man can go to your assistant director for pro- grams. He may counsel that the fight be dropped or, if he | is exceptionally bold, he might tell the program man to jf‘ go ahead despite policy’s recommendation, but this is a | rare and perilous course. All this—and important questions are often involved— | takes place without your knowledge. Only if the program man insists or succeeds in enlisting your assistant’s sup- port will the issue come to your desk. Then you must de- cide whether to take up the fight with the knowledge that the agency’s assistant director for policy is your equal in | rank, is acting with the full support if not at the insistence of the State Department, and is in frequent touch with Director Marks whom you see only when you go cross- town from the VOA office to USIA headquarters up the street from the White House. You would also realize that you would be asking Mr. Marks, a personal friend of the President, to approve for broadcast something embarrass- ing to the Johnson Administration. Mr. Johnson does not encourage his subordinates to embarrass him. The practice has been, even for courageous VOA offi- cers, to drop the fight after it has gone up a couple of levels. This is not timidity but the practical realization that if they fight every issue to the top, their appeal to higher authority will soon lose its effectiveness. So only the very big ones are fought to the top; many lesser, but still important, issues go by default. Of course, 136 THE NATION/August 28, 1967 » pate no st policy decisions—even obviously bad ones— > not appealed at all, oe most ee at VOA, »# ~©influences many more programs than ever come before it ' for review. Many program officers rather than get in- volved with policy simply leave out things they know should be in, particularly on so touchy an issue as Viet- _ nam. Ironically, this can mean the omission of something that policy would have passed. But it is human for people to avoid getting involved, and since policy’s policy is clearly “don’t” rather than “do,” that is the tone you will find dominant at VOA, challenged only by the best. All during this appeal process—and the in-fight- ing can get very bitter when your best program men see the guts ripped out of their stuff by overcautious policy _officers—the term “credibility” is invoked. Many pro- } gram people are of the conviction that only the truth "} ©6should be the criterion for VOA broadcasts. But they _ know that such an argument would get short shrift from -USIA, the Administration and Congress, all of whom believe that VOA’s job is solely to make America look | good. So they have fallen back on “credibility,” which _ means that if you don’t tell the truth or at least a good ‘part of it, nobody will listen to or believe VOA. Since _ this argument is irrefutable it has served to keep the hour- ly news bulletins largely, but not entirely, free of propa- ganda. But credibility is essentially a negative argument and has much less influence on programs, other than q newscasts, that constitute the bulk of VOA’s air time and | are designed to show the U.S. in a favorable light. “Look,” ha policy officer might say, “we’ve got to put this anti- ' Vietnam march in the news because everyone else - is _ carrying it, but let’s give it the minimum coverage con- sistent with credibility. Then let’s do a news analysis to put it in perspective.” Putting things in perspective, as you will learn, Mr. Daly, means justifying or explaining away something unfavorable to the Administration. You no doubt admire the skilled ingenuity of language and _ logic needed to explain, say, how the South Vietnam- ese are helped by moving them en masse out of entire districts and resettling them in squalid refugee camps. Intimately related to this is the question of foreign _ service officers. You will have discovered by now that many of the top jobs at VOA are held not by career VOA men who are professional broadcasters but by foreign | service officers who are serving only temporarily at the “Voice.” Not only are they usually without substan- tial experience in broadcasting but their friends and their futures are with the foreign service of USIA _and the State Department. They are, in a sense, a sort of fifth column to keep VOA in line, for USIA and State | have a wholly exaggerated view of the career VOA peo- ple as “tigers” who don’t give a damn about policy. These foreign service officers weaken the esprit de corps of VOA in several ways. They work for VOA, yet their attitudes are the public relations attitudes of USIA; VOA, although a propaganda arm of the government, is (- also a huge news broadcasting organization with the | more objective standards implicit therein, Why should HE NATION/August 28, 1967 foreign service officers appeal policy decisions with which they generally agree? This policy-foreign service attitude, Mr. Daly, might be defined like this: Never re- port anything unfavorable unless there is absolutely no choice. If such a report cannot be avoided, make it as short and as inconspicuous as possible and couch it in the best possible terms. Further, these foreign service officers are professional bureaucrats, and bureaucrats seldom leap gleefully into battle with higher authority, particularly when that au- thority will determine whether the officer gets promoted and whether he and his family go to Rome next year or to Ougadougou. Thus, Mr. Daly, you cannot expect these foreign service officers—although there are notable and splendid exceptions—to share your dedication to full and fair coverage of the troubled American scene. Not only are they public relations men, not newsmen, but such dedication would mean almost constant controversy and, if there is anything the bureaucrat has learned, it is that controversy and advancement seldom go hand in hand. Further, however much they think of you per- sonally, the foreign service officers, both within USIA proper and VOA, almost certainly regard you as an out- sider who will be gone in a year or two. They naturally assume that an outsider, however intelligent, doesn’t really get the picture. They will not fight. you; they will just pleasantly, smilingly, affably hem you in and among themselves, the club members, make many of the de- cisions that should be yours. So the organization you nominally head often will have, in ways that will seem mysterious to you, a momentum almost totally unre- sponsive to your direction. One final word about these foreign service officers. The career VOA people see them come and go, filling the high posts to which they aspire. It’s bad enough for them to see their legitimate ambitions blocked by birds of passage, but much worse for morale when they know that these temporary occupants are not only less well qualified than they but put other interests first. Thus, when a foreign service officer makes a particularly timid decision about something controversial in the news, it is considered sufficient explanation simply that he is a for- eign service officer. “He’s foreign service. What did you expect. ; There is no need to say too much about Congress, Mr. Daly. You have already begun to learn about that. No sooner did you advocate full and fair coverage of the Vietnamese situation at home and abroad than you were landed on with both feet by Congressman John J. Rooney, the budget-cutting terror of successive adminis- trations. The Brooklyn Democrat promptly defined your job perhaps a bit differently than you envisioned it: “His job is purely administrative. It has to do with contracts and the purchase of equipment. And where he does get into programing he should realize his job is to promote our way of thinking.” Mr. Rooney is not entirely wrong. You will find so much of your time taken up with ad- ministration and budget preparation (particularly how to outmaneuver that same Mr. Rooney) that you will have little left for programing. But you will find plenty 137 SP Rig eee or Sarees pears! — ¥ fone eaten! pear of people willing to take most of that work off your hands. Nor is Mr. Rooney alone in his concept of your role in programing. Congress has always been generous with VOA—to the envy of your colleagues in the rest of USIA—because it can “penetrate the iron and bamboo curtains” and thus clobber the Commies. No doubt Rep. Charles S. Joelson (D., N.J.) was speaking for many, probably most, of his colleagues when he told the House that you had a mistaken idea of your new job if you thought it was to broadcast all points of view to the world. And in every administration, the White House, the State Department and USIA have shared this view that VOA is a salesman demonstrating the ideal, not the real, America. The above would be sufficient to frustrate your fine goal of objective news coverage, for even in quiet times you would have found that you had taken on a job with _GERMANY AND THE EAST THE OUTMODED WALL CAREY McWILLIAMS Most of the East European intellectuals with whom I spoke on a recent visit to Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Rumania were impatient for change. The prevailing mood was not one of dissatisfaction but rather an eagerness for liberalization and reform along lines that seemed to have been already indicated. The easing of controls that came after 1956 and again in 1962 aroused intense hopes, not merely that there would be further relaxation but that freer discussion would encourage rapid economic improvement. But the wider scope for comment, which is real enough, has thus far failed to produce the miracles that were at first anticipated and, to a degree, the earlier optimism has begun to wane. Sensing this change of mood, the regime in Czecho- slovakia has attempted to tighten controls but, from what I could learn, without much success. At the writers congress in Prague, June 27-29, sterile pronouncements by party spokesmen evoked few cheers; in fact the re- joinders were sharp and uninhibited. The party leader- ship, which seems to be somewhat out of touch, has been disturbed by the “way out” character of recent Czech movies. Quite recently, official spokesmen deplored two favorable film reviews that had appeared in Liter- arni Noviny, but the editors replied that films would not be reviewed at all if the magazine could not feel free to distribute praise as it saw fit. That dispute is perhaps not yet settled, but it was my impression that East European intellectuals are capable of defending their interests; they certainly do not hesi- tate to say what they think about a wide range of issues. While they are impatient and critical, most of them feel that the new economic measures which go into effect next year will bring about significant improvement, Mar- ket forces are to be allowed freer play in an effort to un- Mas S incompatible goals. As I learned well, no one can be at one and the same time newsman and propagandist. But — in these far from quiet times, if there is one thing cer- tain about the Johnson Administration it is that it does | not welcome criticism and dissent. One can be regret- | fully sure that no matter how deep your conviction—and | I do not for a moment question it—you, like your prede- cessors, will find it impossible to give full and fair coverage to the troubled American scene. You will find that you — must do things LBJ’s way or not at all. Sadly, you may | discover that you were hired not for your considerable pro- | fessional skills but to help brighten the image of the — Johnson Administration. And you will be expected in — your broadcasts to brighten that image abroad just as your famous presence has brightened it at home. For you direct not the Voice of America but the Voice of Lyndon Baines Johnson. Good luck. fetter the economy from centralization and red tape; the goal is a kind of “market socialism,” notably in the area of consumer goods. | | could sympathize with the mood of impatience but | I] also felt some sympathy for the planners and bureau- — crats. The weight of history, custom and tradition in | these countries is enormous. Incongruous elements from — the past persist alongside contemporary socialism. In — Czechoslovakia I was told repeatedly that the educational _ system has adapted very slowly to new goals and pur- : poses. There is surely nothing “reactionary” or “regres- _ sive” about ballroom dancing per se, but it is at least _ surprising that under socialism as under capitalism, many _ Czech parents feel that instruction in this social grace | is essential to the education of their young. Similarly, the sight of a bride and groom, in full wedding regalia (old style), riding through the crowded, narrow streets — of Prague in an open horse-drawn carriage, with a large | wedding party following in automobiles in low gear, is charming and reassuring but not in the accepted So-— cialist style. By Czech standards, enormous sums are being spent on renovating—principally cleaning the fa- cades—of Prague’s handsome buildings; scaffolding hangs | |) in almost every street. The force of custom—the pride in history—give a distinctly “national” cast to the socialism of these coun- } tries. Traditional intellectual and cultural ties with West- ern Europe have not been broken. Nevertheless, old — habit can create problems for planners. Highly advanta-_ geous trade agreements which could nowadays be made | with such cold-sea countries as Norway, Iceland and — the Soviet Union would enable the Czechs to enjoy — excellent sea food at very cheap prices. But the tyranny | of the dumpling is a force to be reckoned with in Czechoslovakia, and it will take time, and much persua- | sion, to win a place for cod and haddock on the tables — ff THE NATION/ August 28, 1967 _ a Prague. The relatively low consumption of milk, the st that vegetables and fruits are regarded as seasonal Tuxuries, and that more venison is consumed than mut- | ton—these and many similar aspects of the Czech diet illustrate the drag of custom. All the same, there is good reason to believe that the East Europeans’ desire for livelier economic activity will be gratified. The proposed reforms should help, but _ it may be more important that the current “minislump” in West Germany—the first in the postwar period—has ' resulted in a significant shift of policy. The Kiesinger- _ Brandt regime has made sharp cutbacks in military ex- ‘penditures (much to the annoyance of Washington), and | is pushing an “opening to the East” policy with great vigor. Even now the German “presence” is palpable in the three countries I visited. German tourists, from the @ West and from the East, are everywhere. They have founa that an easy way to circumvent the Berlin Wall and the division of the German nation is to rendezvous _ with friends and relatives in one or another of the East _ European countries. Roads are good, travel is cheap, restrictions are minimal, and prices are relatively low. _ Germans who want to indulge, as many of them do, in _ black-market currency operations, find a vacation in | Prague very inexpensive indeed. But tourism is merely one phase of the growing Ger- ' man “presence.” West Germany is the leading trade partner with all the East European countries. The Soviet bloc nations have doubled their trade with the West since 1958, raising it to well above the $6 billion mark and, _ as Gilbert Burck observes in the July issue of Fortune, _ “they appear ready to do almost anything short of break- ing off relations with the Soviet Union itself to increase Qs wg 080 oS £ B00 ———s a _ THE NATION/August 28, 1967 ‘y | “It Says To Set Up A Market” | : trade with the West even more steeply.” To date the bulk of this trade has gone to West Germany. The American share is not much larger than Sweden’s—about $285 million in 1966 and even less than it was in 1938. The economic reforms that will go into effect next year in Hungary and Czechoslovakia should make it easier for them to trade outside the Communist bloc. The Soviet economic model, which was rigidly adhered to at the outset, was never well adapted to conditions in these countries. The Soviet Union is largely self-sufficient in raw materials, but planning based on self-sufficient eco- nomic development was unrealistic for the East Euro- pean nations. Hungary exports almost 40 per cent of what it produces, whereas in the Soviet Union the figure is a mere 2 per cent. Like all small countries, Czechoslo- vakia, Hungary and Rumania need trade, and the more they industrialize, the greater becomes their need. Today about two-thirds of their export business is with other Socialist states, between 30 and 40 per cent being with the Soviet Union itself. Increased trade with the West should permit the East European countries to bargain more effectively with the Soviets. It is a question of emphasis and not, of course, an either/or proposition. For example, Rumania’s trade with the West has in- creased since 1964, and its trade with the Soviet Union has declined in the same period, but Rumania is not about to move out of the Soviet orbit, now or in the fu- ture. For trade with the West to be profitable, however, the East European countries must know what their real costs are and must be able to relate their prices to those on the world market. The new economic reforms should be helpful on this score. As for the more immediate political and economfe stimulation of the new West German policy, the first Szpilki, Warsaw _ 439 wif oe tangible success came last January when the agile Ru- manians decided to recognize the Bonn regime regardless of what East Germany, Poland or the Soviet Union might think about it. True, the West Germans issued an accompanying statement which, in effect, stated that recognition implied no change in the Federal Republic’s position on certain long-standing issues, but recognition is recognition, with or without face-saving statements. Rumania’s qualified “independence” within the Soviet bloc made it the logical member to scout the territory. But on August 3, Czechoslovakia and West Germany signed a treaty for the exchange of trade missions with limited consular functions. The missions will have diplo- matic status. The agreement will regulate trade and pay- ments and, with the help of a 1966 West German regu- lation enlarging the list of goods for trade with Commu- nist countries, should make it easier for the Czechs to overcome a $2.5-million deficit in the annual $200-mil- lion exchange with West Germany. The kind of trade- mission agreement just concluded is a form of de facto recognition, and in fact only a few outstanding issues prevent formal diplomatic recognition. Hungary, Yugo- slavia and Bulgaria will probably conclude similar agree- ments soon and one may assume that formal recognition will eventually follow. Rumania probably stands to gain less from expanded trade with West Germany than does Hungary or Czech- oslovakia. With Rumania, a compelling motive for the agreement with Bonn was to buttress its “independent” position. The speech of Nicolas Ceausescu, general sec- retary of the Rumanian Communist Party, at the recent National Assembly session (July 24), was in essence -a tactful declaration of qualified independence within the bloc. International disputes, he said, can no longer be settled by the big powers alone; the cooperation of all states is required. “By acting with vigor and militancy in defense of their legitimate interests and rights, the middle-sized and small countries can play an outstanding part in international life, can considerably influence the course of events, contributing toward the safeguarding of world peace and security.” Rumania did not attend the seven-nation conference in Budapest on the Middle East, and what Ceausescu said in his speech about the Middle East was not far removed from the Israeli position. The Rumanians have been careful not to cross the Soviets on any issue that might invite a crackdown, but they know—indeed they have been the first to discover— that as long as the East European countries stay within certain clearly indicated limitations, Moscow can do little to prevent them from pursuing a discreet “inde- pendent” line. To date, the Russians have said nothing about the Bonn-Bucharest agreement, but the fact that on July 20 Ceausescu announced a shake-up of the Ru- mianian security forces and denounced as “impermissible interference” any meddling in Rumania’s internal affairs suggests that some interference may have been at- tempted. Following up on the January agreement, West German Foreign Minister Willy Brandt has recently vis- ited Bucharest—the first such official visit by a West Ger- man of his position to an East European capital other -140 iy { ay | | than Moscow since the war. Apparently the visit went | i well: Rumania will support: West Germany’s entry into | i the seven-nation Danube Commission as a full member §" and Brandt announced that West Germany would liber- }* alize its trade policies on Rumanian imports. It is intriguing to speculate as to what will happen — to the structure of “the German problem” if this new “opening to the East” is pursued. The East Germans cannot prevent the other East European countries from — trading with, and even recognizing, the Federal Repub- || q lic. As West German trade with the East European | countries expands—and as East Germany’s trade with | these same countries also grows—what will be the mean- _ ing of a continued division of Germany? Won’t the East European countries become increasingly aware of a gen- — eral German “presence,” made evident by a steadily | rising stream of German tourists, officials and salesmen from the East and from the West, as well as by steadily — expanding trade with both Germanys? And if this trend ] should persist, why, in the fairly near future, should not — West and East Germany achieve, first, some practical — working agreements on a variety of issues (on August 7 } it was announced that East Germany had placed orders for $25 million worth of rolling stock and electric equip- | ment in West Germany) and, eventually, some form of mutual recognition? If all East Europe recognizes both Germanys, why should one Germany not recognize the other? Most of the East Europeans, including officials, with whom I spoke about these matters took essentially that position. At the same time, I sensed sharply that the East Europeans have by no means made their peace with the Germans. Everywhere I heard versions—a dozen or more—of the same joke. What is the difference, the joke goes, between West Germans and East Germans? And the answer: “We have to smile at the East Ger- mans.” The Czechs note—and stress—that the Federal Republic always has a representative present at meetings of the various patriotic groups that seek a return of the “lost provinces.” And every now and then a German will show up in the Sudetenland to warn the occupants f of the farm he once owned that he intends to regain possession one of these days and is holding them respon- sible for its good care. On the other hand, the Czechs and the Hungarians 1y,. are convinced that West Germany is a good trading } r partner. And as long as this trade is properly balanced, it } can be a factor not merely in improving the standard of living in the East European countries but in promoting a new stability and security in Middle Europe. It should pe be noted, however, that birth rates are quite low in Hun- } gary and Czechoslovakia and that the preponderance of German power is already very great. In productive power, } either Germany alone would be a match for these coun- | | tries. But the Soviet Union, of course, provides a strong hy, counterweight. ; Men An American visitor to Eastern Europe today } i); must see the extreme short-sightedness of our policy. We Jn, have a remarkable opportunity there, if only we were | prepared to take advantage of it. To be sure, the war in e THE NATION/ August 28, 1967 i YI intries I visited. Those with whom I discussed Vietnam Xp pressed their views frankly but there was no rancor in yhat they said. In fact I encountered nothing that could 9e fairly characterized as “anti-American” in any sense. _ The East Europeans are eager to trade with the West and i in particular with the United States. But they cannot W) trade with us, Vietnam or no Vietnam, as long as our i rade policies discriminate against them to the extent that i) they now do. Yet the possibilities of trade are excellent. [t is ironic that the old Yankee trading spirit should be most visibly exemplified in Rumania today by Pepsi-Cola, which is rapidly becoming the nation’s most popular soft irink. If Pepsi-Cola can tap this market, why can’t it be tapped by a long list of American products? There is a unger in the East European countries for consumer foods, and it should be possible to devise means whereby they could acquire the dollars they would need if they were to become significant buyers of our products. An xpanded American tourist influx would be one source; Yugoslavia garnered $18 million from American tourism ast year. But there are other means. The Yugoslavs have found markets in this country for a wide range of #@ products, from slivovitz to aluminum and copper bars. . And last year Yugoslavia bought $173 million worth of U.S. goods—nearly as much as the other East European countries combined, Granted that Yugoslavia is, for the moment, a special case, still the Czechs estimate that if they were accorded most-favored-nation treatment their Sales to the United States would soon exceed $100 mil- lion a year. There would surely be a market in this coun- try for Bohemian glassware and other fine Czech prod- ucts. And why not extend long-term credits? Some West ‘European and Japanese exporters now give these coun- tries up to ten years to pay. No East European govern- ) YANKEE STATION THOMAS W. PEW, JR. } Mr. Pew is editor and associate publisher of the Troy Daily News, Troy, Ohio. | Yankee Station is a spot in the Gulf of Tonkin where a) three or four United States aircraft carriers steam in a Md} perpetual circle launching and recovering their planes. | During the first week of August its complement included (} the carriers Oriskany, the Constellation and the Intrepid. 4) The Forrestal, normally one of this number, was missing. Thus far in the war the giant floating air bases have been safely out of range of enemy attack, although they are far from safe duty posts for American sailors and air- men. (The flight-deck fire aboard the 75,900-ton Forres- ay), tal that wiped out twenty-six planes, killed some 129 crew- men, and left several “dining-room-size” holes in its deck was the third aboard an aircraft carrier off North Vietnam earlier fires raked the Oriskany and the Franklin D. rire NATION/August 28, 1967 ment has ever defaulted on a trade obligation to the West, although they did, of course, repudiate the debts of their pre-revolutionary regimes. To the extent that East European countries can in- crease trade with the West, their domestic reforms will have a better chance to succeed. To the extent that they can trade outside the Communist bloc, their dependence on the Soviet Union will be reduced. If we fail to seize the developing opportunity, others will take it. In any case, the “opening to the East” which the West Germans are now exploiting promises to make a shambles of the Dulles policy of freezing East-West relations in Middle Europe. As Uwe Kitzinger pointed out in a recent talk on the B.B.C.: “During the cold-war days of the Dulles- Eisenhower era West Germany in effect had no options . for the East had nothing to give on terms that the West Germans could accept. Bonn was a vital and some would say influential ally with a special relationship to Washington. . . . But today the Americans are preoccu- pied in Asia and wanting support from Europe rather than giving it... and options appear to be opening up through direct German deals with Eastern Europe. .. .” Today the East European countries, as Rumanian diplo- macy has demonstrated, do not need to be pawns or satellites of the big powers; within limitations they can pursue independent trade policies and they should be en- couraged to do so. Rumania’s Premier, lon Gheorghe Maurer, said recently that Europe would be a safe place “if NATO and the Warsaw Pact were both scrapped.” Each country, he added, would then be master in its own house. NATO is in fact weakening and that implies a weakening of the Warsaw Pact; it may soon be possible to work out new security arrangements in Middle Europe. In this changing pattern of relationships there are “open- ings” for both the East and the West, the United States included. JINVITING RETALIATION Roosevelt.) But even the devastating Forrestal disaster would be mild compared with a surprise missile or artil- lery attack from the coast of North Vietnam. Arching high or streaking low along the water, guided missiles and ar- tillery shells could be ripping holes at the water lines and blasting the decks of the carriers before the vessels would be aware that they were under attack. Such an attack on the carriers—which have no significant anti-aircraft armament other than their own interceptors—could con- ceivably cost the United States thousands of men; and, if skillfully executed by the North Vietnamese, nearly $1 billion in ships and aircraft. Worse than this, such an at- tack could catapult the U.S. into a large act of escalation and Yankee Station into the role of World War III’s Pearl Harbor. That North Vietnam is working on a few complex weapon emplacements along the coast has been quietly revealed. A special report to The New York Times by 141 SSS : a Oo <= —— ——— William Beecher noted that “aerial reconnaissance has de- tected a handful of elaborate new concrete weapons in- stallations along the North Vietnamese coast between Thanh-hoa and Donghoi.” At almost the same time it was announced that U.S. naval activity off the coast was going to increase with the addition of the reactivated battleship New Jersey whose nine 16-inch guns are capable of lob- bing 1,900-pound shells over ranges exceeding 20 miles. Exhibiting typical Pentagon confidence one officer said: “We can’t be sure the Soviets won’t provide surface- to-surface missiles to North Vietnam, but we don’t think they’re eager to do so. They realize that, beyond attack- ing the launching sites, we might feel compelled to escalate the war still further. And we don’t think the Russians want that.” But, he conceded, the Times reports that “if Hanoi were able to sink a destroyer, cruiser or aircraft carrier with a missile it would gain a major propaganda coup.” The New Jersey, a nostalgic symbol of American mili- tary might, would also make an excellent target. Since the United States has failed miserably in protect- ing its major ground air bases in South Vietnam from short-range mortars and rockets, by what presumption do naval and Pentagon officials feel they can stop or even predict an attack from sophisticated coastal emplace- ments? Are we to circle and wait at Yankee Station as we sat and waited at Pearl Harbor? Or is there possibly some scheme to use a few lost American ships and a few thousand lost American men to fan the home front into supporting a drastic attack on North Vietnam? As for a choice of missiles that would do the job on the U.S. sit- ting. ducks, the Russians have a generous arsenal to offer the North Vietnamese. Beecher lists the following: @ Kennel-8, a short-range anti-shipping missile de- signed initially for launching from a bomber. The 28-foot- long turbojet missile has a 16-foot wingspread and resem- bles a small jet fighter. @ Shaddock, a 40-foot missile with a range estimated at over 200 miles. It has been paraded through Moscow, and 90th Congress: Slapping at Symbols | ROBERT G. SHERRILL Washington The militant Negroes will be in for just one more disap- pointment if they take too seriously their own talk of a “rebellion.” They can destroy property with matches, but they can’t destroy the power structure that way. The un- romantic truth is that when the smoke has all blown away they still will have to build their future on the whims of Congress. The Congress that will sit through 1968 lacks the will power, the leadership and the inclination to carry out anything in the way of a major reform. The only cheer- ful footnote is that this Congress also hasn’t enough energy to be effectively vengeful. The House of Representatives is in especially bad shape. 142 4 the Soviet press describes it as a coastal-defense missile. — @ Styx, a 20-foot missile resembling the Kennel-8. One }} version has a 15-mile range and another is believed some- what longer ranged. The Styx is the standard armament on | small Soviet missile boats. @ Scud, a land-based 35-foot guided missile. One ver= } sion is estimated to have a range of 90 miles, and a longer- § range version has been developed. That the North Vietnamese have already given consid- erable thought to coastal defense has been proved in sev- eral artillery hits they have scored against American ships that have operated too close to the coast from the “17th Parallel north to Thanh-hoa.” In this area there are about } ten destroyers and one cruiser. Defense Department offi- | cials have admitted that they “are worried about the damage that might be done if larger, longer-range weap- | ons are installed,” the Times reports, and notes that: “The principal Russian coastal artillery gun is a 130-mm weap- on that fires a 70-pound projectile 17 miles or more. It is_ | reputed to have considerable armor-piercing power.” The installation of this artillery piece or any of the missiles described above would considerably hamper U.S. style on — the water, if not blast our ships out of the water forth- with. As one planner told the Times: “We can’t expect to place warships off the coast of North Vietnam and bom- — bard it for a year or more and not expect weapons to be — brought in that can do us some damage in return. While | we certainly pray we don’t lose any ships, we can’t count _ on it indefinitely.” . Meanwhile, Yankee Station continues to steam in a cir- _ cle—a bull’s-eye for destruction. It is not only the North | Vietnamese we have to worry about, though they are | going to build those missile and artillery bases on the coast and try to blow us out of the sea; it is the vacillating Pen- _ tagonites and the pride-blind naval officers who are the real danger. And there may be one higher up who is even |} more dangerous as he weighs the political advantages in } (0 an election year of having a consensus on the war. | Members openly talk about Speaker McCormack’s senil- ity. Majority Leader Carl Albert is physically ill and ex- hausted; he has been unable to exert the slightest discipline this session. Minority Leader Gerald Ford apparently thinks he is still playing football at the University of Michi- | gan because in response to any problem he babbles along at the level of socko (!) and pow (!). Ever since the Dixie- [| crats and conservative Republicans learned that they were | « powerful enough to block due process for Adam Clayton | |) Powell, a mob spirit has prevailed. First the Powell kan- } Kj garoo court, then the anti-flag-burning bill, and now the | \y anti-riot bill. bth The Senate is also a terminal case, but quieter. Whatever } Jj virility might have been mustered was dissipated by Demo- tio cratic Whip Russell Long, first in his tedious filibuster to 1 109 —— nd a” eel THE NATION/August 28, 1967 pt | f tic defense of Thomas Dodd, the censured Senator. te the Dodd fiasco, Sen. Thruston B. Morton of Ken- _tucky appraised the situation accurately but incompletely: “I don’t think there has been a time in my memory when | Congress has been at such a low ebb in the judgment of the American people.” He could have said low ebb of any kind. i Among unhappy progressives wandering the halls of mm the Capitol, the most optimistic prediction comes from | Rep. Henry Reuss: “I think it would be fatuous to say | | a ‘ia { | | i Ce \ Ben Roth Agency Congress will do something this session when our record so far is so poor. But some of the Administration’s pro- grams are so unrelated to anything that’s going on, who can say a frontal assault with some new program wouldn’t have results?” Others would be more likely to agree with | Rep. Henry Gonzalez: | This Congress is dead. It has been from the beginning. | It is a mad, confused Congress that wastes its time slashing at symbols. It’s the same kind of Congress I ran | into in 1963, when I came to Washington. Nothing was being done then that related to the problems out in the | country. A little energy would be worked up by Wednes- | day, and this would carry over to Thursday, maybe, but then all life would go out of it again. Came the assassina- wh tion and Congress swung into action. Now we've got an- , other Wednesday-and-Thursday Congress, doing nothing. Does it take assassinations to get action? »| Even the few efforts made in this Congress to correct the causes of violent feelings are being undercut by President Johnson. Once again—as was tragically true of his Civil Rights Act—the President is indicating that he does not want a gutsy program; he merely wants a few bill titles ' that he can wave in the next campaign. The New York 4| Times recently editorialized that “the Johnson Administra- _ tion is determined to fight poverty, urban decay and other root causes of civic unrest with all the slogans in its ar- THE NATION/August 28, 1967 senal—provided it doesn’t have to back them up with money.” Half the arsenal is made up of empty slogans, the other half is empty bills. For instance: Potentially, the most useful bill working its way through Congress now is the House version of the proposed Consumer Credit Pro- tection Act, better known as the truth in lending bill. As it stands now, the main provisions of the bill would re- quire (/) that the lender or seller clearly state the annual finance charge; (2) that no interest higher than 18 per cent can be charged; and (3) that garnishment of wages will be outlawed. It is no secret that a great many middle and low-income people are made miserable by gouging creditors. Senate hearings revealed ghetto Negroes and whites paying 290 per cent interest on auto purchases, and up to 285 per cent interest on TV sets. When the ignorant man borrows money, the interest rate is often 300 per cent or higher; if he can’t pay, the creditor garnishees his wages. This angers the boss, who fires the worker. This angers the worker, who figures it is just another sign of the Estab- lishment’s meanness. And he’s ready to use a brick. Some of the smashing and looting of shops was undoubt- edly done by happy debtors “getting back their own.” The House Banking Committee staff estimates that $1.5 billion in debt were wiped out by personal bankruptcy ac- tions last year, and that 80 per cent of the people who went into bankruptcy admitted doing so as the only way to escape garnishment of wages, followed by the loss of their job. The National Industrial Conference Board in 1965 found that 13 per cent of all employers will fire any worker subject to garnishment, and that 43 per cent of the companies that hire more than 5,000 employees will fire a worker for that reason. In some areas, garnishment is an industrial way of life. The Chicago plant of Inland Steel is supervising the garnishment of wages for 2,000 of its 22,000 employees. This is the situation that the truth in lending bill is supposed to correct. Now comes the betrayal: More than a year ago national headquarters of the AFL-CIO began urging certain Congressmen to write a tough consumer credit bill. More than half the signers of the House bill put their names on it at the request of AFL-CIO lobby- ists. A few weeks ago, for instance, Rep. Jonathan Bing- ham was asked by two labor lobbyists to put his name on the bill and give it his full support; he was assured by the lobbyists that if labor had anything against the bill, “it was too soft.” Yet on the third day of the hearings in the House Banking Committee, Andrew J. Biemiller, director of leg- islative affairs for the AFL-CIO, stated, straight-faced, that “no formal or specific national policy has been de~ veloped by the national AFL-CIO” on the problem of maximum interest rates, or garnishment or creditor-debtor contracts. He said he considered these premature elements in the bill, and he urged that Congress hold off any action until a full study was made, as suggested by President Johnson. The President had put the pressure on labor to help gut the bill of its most controversial sections, just as he had sent his consumer “expert,” Betty Furness, to make the 143 Sa - eS same appeal to the committee the day before. Johnson isn’t interested in the bill’s program; he is interested only in its title. Precisely the same philosophy brought about the death of the celebrated rat-control bill. If President Johnson really cared about killing rats, he could have quietly channeled millions of dollars through extermination pro- grams already existing in the Department of Health, Edu- cation and Welfare. That department should supervise the program, anyway. The emphasis on rat extermination should be to improve human health—not real estate. The Department of Housing and Urban Affairs is not the proper administrator of the program, just as the Depart- ment of Agriculture is not the proper administrator of the food-stamp program, which also should be given to HEW on the same grounds: food distribution programs are to improve human health, not farm incomes. But Johnson was set on getting a bill with that titlk— Rat Control Bill—into Congress, even if it meant risking the program. So he sent it to the floor, although his House advisers warned him that the head count was incomplete and, such as it was, indicated a most precarious position for the legislation. With his interests now solely centered on next year’s campaign (labor officials who experienced an hour and a half of monologue in the White House recently came away reporting that the President sounds truly panicky about 1968), no response to the slum problem, except perhaps another call to prayers, can be expected from the White House. Just to make sure his cronies in Congress under- stood his mood, Johnson had Treasury Secretary Henry Fowler announce that none of the money raised by the proposed 10 per cent income tax surcharge would go to anti-poverty; all would go to Vietnam. When Johnson named Gov. Otto Kerner of Illinois— protege of Chicago’s Mayor Richard Daley—to chair the eleven-man Special Advisory Commission on Civil Disor- ders, nobody needed a guide book to understand the purely political nature of the investigation that would re- sult. Skepticism immediately became epidemic. “The chief purpose of the commission, one suspects,” wrote Charles Bartlett, “is to buy the time necessary to give the White House a clearer view of the nation’s reaction to the ghetto uprisings.” Not to be outstudied by the Executive branch, the House voted $25 million for “planning and research” into the cause and control of riots, and in the Senate, John McClellan of Arkansas tooled up his subcommittee for an investigation of the riots that promises to be about as objective as McClellan’s personal attitude. When a Newark policeman appeared before the Senate Judiciary Commit- tee, McClellan began shouting at him: “What are you afraid of? .. . Are you timid? Have the police been cowed? Why are they afraid to do their jobs?” The riots have been useful in at least one respect. They have made Washington admit what should have been obvious long ago—the Vietnamese War is a domestic issue. The Johnson Administration used the “guns-and- butter” argument with surprising success until this summer, but that’s done with now. Last year it would have been 144 thought an impossible achievement, but the riots have | actually destroyed the old cliche. What guns and what } butter? The guns in Newark and the butter on Premier | Ky’s table? The terms have become meaningless; every- | thing is too mixed up. Saigon (possibly because the local military operates with equal fairness in both places) seems as close as Plainfield, N. J., and Vice President Hum- phrey talks about a “Marshall Plan” for Detroit. At least Martin Luther King is vindicated here in the | capital. In the spring, the Congressional Record was } spotted with denunciations of King for trying to merge the } peace movement with the Negro freedom movement. | Looking back on it now, that hardly seems like a radical _ position, but even old allies like the NAACP and the Urban League said he was out of line. On April 10, the NAACP passed a resolution reading: “Civil rights —_ will have to be fought or won on their own merits, irrespec- tive of the state of war or peace in the world.” The Wash-— ington Post, always happy to serve as a sheath for Presi-— dent Johnson’s daggers, reported on April 16: ona tration officials privately suggest that Dr. King leaped head- long into peace campaigns partly in search of money and headlines. .. .” Four months later, the riots made the lumping of race | and war problems a commonplace, even among such cau- tious moderates as Sen. Robert Kennedy. On. the televi- | sion program, Meet the Press, recently Douglas Kiker _ asked him: “Which will be the larger issue [in 1968]_ Vietnam or big city riots?” Kennedy answered: “I think — they are going to be very closely related. . . .” In April, | Dr. King was scolded for confusing issues when he said | that giving top priority to military spending pointed to | the nation’s “approaching spiritual death.” In August, Sen. William Fulbright calls the Great Society a “sick society” for the same reasons, and nobody gives it a cond | thought; after all, at least one-third of Congress, that least sensitive of bodies, is saying the same thing, publicly i or privately. But this Congress is saying many things, in all direc- | tions: some of “them make headlines, although they re- flect no substantive impulses. This Congress is without trends—it is stuck. Once in a while some member will | stray into a compassionate insight. (Sen. Philip Hart: “The _ rioters belong to no world but their own. It is a world | where the, police can arrive in five minutes but it may take months to get the building code inspector in.”) But the effect on the 90th Congress is, practically speaking, no better or worse than the numskulleries of Congiesemaisl John Rarick (“Senator Bilbo, Senator McCarthy, and an army of others foresaw and forewarned our people of the — | black- “power movement controlled by the Communist Party | years ago”); or the overwrought alarms of a normally bal- anced Senator such as Eugene McCarthy (“the statements of Stokely Carmichael in Cuba .. . run far beyond the reasonable limits of freedom of speech”). Vice President Humphrey blames Congress for the riots, | and Sen. Joseph Clark says Congress shouldn’t be blamed. | The unretiring J. Edgar Hoover is showing new sources of | usefulness, supplying quotes to both sides: some Congress- men have him saying that the slum disturbances are the work of conspiring Communists; others that there is no | THE NATION/August 28, 1967) | | i i i) i, } 1 cor nspiracy. House Concurrent Resolution No. 450 is one of several efforts to make the Justice Department prose- ; ae Stokely Carmichael for sedition. But on the other hand, ten members of the House signed a statement urging U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam (just as Carmichael is doing) so that the money can be spent for domestic reforms. If all this adds up to anything, it is a significant zero. When King David was “old and covered with years,” THE YANQUI UNIVERSITIES SHIPS THAT PASS RONALD HILTON Mr. Hilton is executive director of The California Institute of International Studies at Stanford. He returned last spring from a year in Latin America. Where are American universities headed? They are being Latin Americanized. Where are Latin American univer- sities headed? They are being Americanized. After graduating from Oxford University, I undertook as a modern version of the Grand Tour a methodical plan of graduate study in each of the major countries of the Western world, spending in the course of this pro- gram two years (1934-36) in Madrid and two years (1937-39) at Berkeley as a Commonwealth Fund Fel- low. In recent years I have visited practically every uni- versity in Latin America several times; their traditional structure has been modified by the influence of France, Germany and now the United States, but it is still essen- tially Spanish. Quite unlike that of Spain and Spanish America, the U.S. university system took on its peculiar form because unconsciously, or sometimes consciously, it imitated the structure of our business corporations. I re- ceived, therefore, a sharp impression of the dissimilarity between Spanish and U.S. universities. One of my first experiences at the University of Madrid was the crisis (this was at the beginning of the Civil War) between the university and the government when students used the Faculty of Medicine to shoot it out with the police. A Civil Guard was killed (usually the students were the victims of these affrays), and the monarchist paper A.B.C. put the tear-jerking caption “Civil Guards also have mothers!” under photographs of the dead mem- ber of the elite police. Life at the university college known as the Residencia de Estudiantes was frustrating. The stu- dents at one faculty or another would declare a strike. We would learn of it when we went down to breakfast, and the students would stay home all day, playing tennis, talking politics, occasionally doing a little work. They knew Spanish politics inside out, and I learned then that books, journals and newspapers are inadequate for the study of politics in Spanish-speaking countries. Only long hours of conversation open the gate to this fascinating Helds's,.. A graduate student in law, a Communist who lived THE NATION/August 28, 1967 the Bible says, the wise men of his tribe tried to restore his circulation by putting a young virgin in bed with him, “but he got no heat.” The men who run Congress, especially the leadership of the House of Representatives, are like David—old in their bones, cold in spirit, and unable to respond normally to passionate situations. Not even the most riotous summer in the nation’s his- tory can arouse this Congress to more than a quiver of cliches and angry groans of impotence. IN THE NIGHT across from me in the Residencia, was killed in one of the battles fought in the university city. My best friend was a conservative who took refuge in the Uruguayan Em- bassy. When Franco entered Madrid in 1939, this man was released after three years of confinement, drafted into the Blue Legion to fight on Hitler’s Eastern front, and died in the snows of Russia. American universities provided a quite different kind of surprise. No American professor or student in the late 1930s would declare himself to be an “intellectual,” a word common on the Madrid academic scene. Professors were described as “employees of the university”; I hum- bly find this normal now after thirty years, but then it seemed an outrageous affront to the “intellectuals.” On the day I arrived in New York, a professor jumped from a skyscraper window, following a disagreement with his university administration. I can understand that too now, but at the time I wondered how universities could possi- bly have administrations so powerful as to drive the faculty to suicide. In fact, the expression, “university administration,” meant little to me; in Europe no sich thing really existed. An American businessman whom I met had been a university dean; when I asked why he had left academic life, he answered that he couldn’t stand the competition. The universities I visited were efficiently run. The administration ran the corporation; the faculty was busy with research which would bring prestige, promotion and salary increases; the students had a good time and © | studied enough to acquire the diploma that would bring them, if not prestige, at least a job. Long, fascinating conversations about politics would have interfered with the tedious job of equipping oneself for the struggle for existence in a competitive society. Since World War II a curious mutual shift has been taking place. Dissatisfied with the inhumanity of WH the American academic structure, the liberals among the faculty and students have pointed to certain distasteful features of our university system and, in trying to remedy | them, have been pushing our universities toward pre- cisely the same solution which the Spanish-American vy universities found under the impact of the liberalizing movement. Meanwhile, upset by the inefficiency of the | liberal university system, the conservatives, the military, | a — i te St. ee Oa = eee ie ae the Roman Catholic Church and North American business interests have been urging or even forcing Latin Ameri- can universities to adopt the traditional structure of U.S. universities. To speed the process, they have established new universities which, for want of a better term, we shall call the “Americanized” universities. Latin Amer- ican intellectuals are viscerally opposed to the American- ization of their universities, but the money and power behind this movement are hard to resist. Moreover, Latin Americans desperately want their countries to be successful, and since a successful country has as an in- tegral part a successful university system, they are willing to try U.S. academic methods. Few Latin Americans, even those who dislike Americanization, stop to analyze the implications of the U.S. system of higher education. Conversely, very few Americans realize that their uni- versities are being Latin Americanized. The two systems are, therefore, like ships passing in the night. Perhaps a little ship-to-ship conversation would be a good thing, since the seas are uncharted. What are the issues in- volved? Faculty and students in the United States are no longer willing to be controlled, through the boards of trustees, by the power elite. They want a say in the conduct of the university’s affairs on the highest level. Most Latin American universities have achieved this, usually with a tripartite governing body drawn from the faculty, the alumni and the students. This system is blamed, rather, unfairly, for the inefficiency of Latin American university administration. The Americanized universities employ U.S.-style boards of trustees on which the faculty and students have little, if any, representation. Usually a sop is offered in the form of a committee made up of admin- istration, faculty and students, which airs its views but has no real power. It is doubtful that this device will much longer appease the demands of the faculty and students, who want to have their hands on the legal con- trols of the university. There have not yet been demands for the tripartite system used in Latin America, but they may come later. In Latin America the Cordoba university reforms of 1917 brought back the medieval democratic system by which university authorities, especially the rector (i.e., president) and the deans are elected by the faculty and students. Faculty members present themselves as candi- dates, make speeches expounding their programs, and the victorious candidate takes office for a stipulated term. Sometimes the elections are as colorful as a U.S. political _ convention. By contrast, our university presidents have traditionally been appointed for an unlimited term by the boards of trustees, which can dismiss them at will. There are now demands that the faculty be guaranteed at least some say in the selection of a president. More- over, academic elections in the United States have been pretty much a formality. They are elections for com- mittees, not for executive posts; candidates do not pre- sent themselves, and those elected do not have to state their program. It is now proposed that the elections ac~ quire some reality, that there be effective candidates, and that they be required to state their platforms. Meanwhile, the Americanized universities in Latin America are mov- 146 a ing toward the traditional U.S. system; the trustees appo the rector, who in turn appoints the deans. The circus of elections is abolished. American university campuses have had no special legal status. In Spanish-speaking countries, university buildings have for centuries been as sacrosanct as the churches, where anyone fleeing from the law could seek asylum. In front of some old Spanish university buildings are stone pillars connected by a chain, beyond which the police could not pass. The tradition of barring police from a university has allowed students in Latin America to barricade themselves inside university buildings and allegedly to convert them into revolutionary barracks. The Americanization of Latin American universities has been accompanied by a flouting of this tradition. When Venezuelan President Leoni recently sent troops into the Central University of Caracas, it did not occur to him that he was acting like the military governments of Argen- tina and Brazil, which democratic Venezuela has formally denounced. In the United States the reverse trend is perceptible. The presence of the state police on the Berke- ley campus has become a major issue, and in a TV in- terview on February 5 former President Clark Kerr of the University of California said that the assignment of outside police to various campuses had aggravated student unrest. There are demands that university police take care of campus problems, the feeling being that once the campuses are under the thumb of the regular police, aca- demic freedom will vanish. It was precisely this fear that made Latin American universities challenge the right of the government police to enter university buildings. In the past, most of our great universities were supported by tuition. Since World War II there have been, even in New England and in New York State, moves to provide free higher education on a scale hitherto unknown in the world. Generous California is now wondering how it can afford to maintain its costly state university and college systems, but Governor Reagan’s proposal to in- troduce tuition is generally regarded as a step backward. In Latin America, free university education has been the rule, but in fact the governments have usually been un- able or unwilling to pay for a modern university system. Salaries have been low, and funds for libraries and equip- ment insufficient. The Americanized universities charge tuition and in many cases, as at the Universidad de los Andes in Bogota, offer fair salaries and provide relative- ly good facilities. The move to introduce tuition would undoubtedly spread were university authorities not afraid of rioting students who will seize and burn buses if fares are raised a cent. Caught in a financial vise, public Latin American universities stress “autonomy,” i.e., the state should provide the funds but otherwise not intervene in the affairs of the universities. This cherished autonomy, now being eroded in Latin America, is essentially what the Berkeley liberals demand. Until now, few Latin American professors have been engaged full time..Most were active in public affairs or supplemented their incomes with outside jobs. Such com- binations of activities have been unusual in the United States, but are so no longer. In Latin America faculty absenteeism and lack of concentration on academic duties THE NATION/ August 28, 1967 a gtzeNbeliges . See airs Set TESS have been sharply criticized, and U.S. foundations are unwilling to support institutions which do not have a solid core of full-time teachers. Many Latin American administrators claim that their aim is to have a com- pletely full-time faculty. The goal is remote, but it is the direction in which Latin American universities are mov- ing. “The American universities traditionally had church - affiliations. However, over the past half century univer- sities associated with Protestant churches have been secularized, and just in the last year there has been a surprising movement to secularize Roman Catholic uni- versities. The reason stated is that higher education is incompatible with Church control; it is also probably feared that control of higher education may embarrass the Church, as for example in the case of the faculty strike at St. John’s University. Latin America in modern times has feared such control and has kept higher educa~ tion separate from the Church. The liberal university movement in Spain got its start in the 19th century from the refusal of a group of professors to swear to support Catholic doctrine—a religious version of the loyalty oath. Now the Latin American power elite and U.S. business interests support Americanized universities controlled by the Roman Catholic Church, which is looked upon as a bulwark against communism. The Creole Foundation, belonging to a subsidiary of the Standard Oil Company, tefuses to support the Central University in Caracas but is giving massive aid to the Catholic University. In March, 1967, Episcopal Bishop James A. Pike charged in Play- boy magazine that the Jesuits had heavy investments in Creole Petroleum. The Jesuits have traditionally been regarded as the allies, and indeed the agents, of con- servative ruling groups. Hence they are constitutionally banned from Mexico, but nevertheless operate the Uni- versidad Iberoamericana with the support of commercial companies. In Guadalajara the business community, sup- ported by the U.S. State Department and U.S. founda- tions, has been promoting the Catholic university to offset the state university, looked upon as “Socialist.” In brief, while in the United States there has been a THE NATION/August 28, 1967 broad move toward the secularization of higher educa- tion, in Latin America the trend has been toward cleri- calization. While in the United States a liberal Supreme Court has been pushing the separation of church and state in education, the thrust of U.S. influence in Latin America has been to strengthen the hand of the Roman Catholic Church in university affairs, The fact that Cath- olic universities employ some Protestants and Jews should not mislead us as to the focus of power. It must be said that some Catholic universities do an excellent job and that they are usually willing to cooperate with secular, Protestant and Jewish organizations in a way that would have been inconceivable two decades ago. Unfortunately, the death of Pope John XXIII has brought a slight set- back in this cordiality. Thus, American universities are moving toward the position formerly held by Latin American univer- sities, while these are being pushed into “Americaniza- tion.” This march and countermarch reflect cultural changes. Previously, American faculty and students stuck to their academic business; they did not demon- strate or strike for political reasons. Now alienation from the power elite has produced every form of social pro- test on our campuses except armed rebellion. In a con- scienceless social structure, our academicians have come to regard themselves as the conscience of the nation. That has traditionally been the stance of Latin Ameri- man. intellectuals, but in the Americanized universities of Latin America faculty and students are being told, quite forcefully, that they must concentrate on being good professionals and forget the illusion that they are the conscience of society. The difference is that between the conservative and progressive viewpoints. The mana- gerial class wants universities to turn out competent technicians with a veneer of culture, not independent citizens who will seriously question the origin of power and wealth. In our universities the progressives have be~- come more aggressive; in Latin America they are being weakened or entirely ousted, with the active collusion of U.S. agencies. The Americans who are taking part 147 | ‘ hy in what might be called “Operation Latin American Uni- versity” justify their actions by saying that the liberals who held power in the universities were hostile to the United States and to U.S. business, and had allowed the universities to become chaotic and ineffective. What Latin America needs, the Americans argue, is not campus politicians but qualified engineers and business admin- istrators. The issue thus enters the domain of foreign policy. What might fairly be called the Reagan viewpoint dom- inates U.S. influence and aid programs in Latin Amer- ican education. It is evident in such things as the crea- tion of American-style schools of business, which will turn out U.S.-style business executives. Evident in this emphasis is a curious double standard. We are trying to build academic bridges with the USSR, and govern- ment agencies have been inviting a stream of Russian specialists to our campuses. But when a Latin American university enters into relations with the USSR, it is likely to be blacklisted by the United States. When one Latin American university invited some Russian tists to come as visiting professors, tension between the — American Embassy and the university became intolerable, and the rector resigned to lead a leftist political party. We may be playing with fire. By supporting Roman Catholic universities, we may be unwittingly fanning anti-clericalism, and our university policy generally may become as popular as Governor Reagan’s in Cal- ifornia. We should study the virulent anti-Americanism of Fidel Castro’s Foreign Minister Raul Roa, an acade- mician who had even been the beneficiary of U.S. largess. The University of Havana was a focal point of the hos- tility to the academic Americanization described in this article. Without skill and luck our generosity may, as the Spanish say, be contraproducente—which seems to be the origin of our neologism “counterproductive.” As our two academic ships pass in the night, they could ask each other, “Is this trip worth while?” The trouble is that neither the captains nor the crews seem to know where they are going. LETTERS (Continued from page 130) the cult of the majority, for the values of the lower middle class, for segregation, and against rum, Judaism and cosmo- politanism. Gans’s worst offense, of course, is his nasty habit of presenting unpalatable facts about democracy. And he has the gall to write about them as if they were true. We share Bendiner’s outrage and trust that in future reviews he will carry forward the campaign to stamp out such evils as information, mental health, fluoridation and the loss of vital body fluids. Martha AH, Gillmor Daniel S. Gillmor New York City DEAR Sirs: It is hard for me to see how the Gillmors can imagine that Mr. Gans’s work was “stripped of its preten- sions to scholarship” by a review that refers to it as “a thoroughgoing sociological study.” . . . I think it important, however, to rescue Mr. Gans from his admirers. . . . Gans himself nowhere offers his conclusions as gospel. I am certain that he does not consider it blasphemy to question those conclusions and that, if he were to answer his gentle critics, he would find a better medium than acid. Elmer Bendiner expensive platitudes San Francisco, Calif. Dear Sirs: It is understandable that Elisabeth Mann Bor- gese, a staff member of the Center for the Study of Dem- ocratic Institutions which sponsored Pacem in Terris II, would want to put the best possible light on what tran- spired at that Geneva meeting (The Nation, July 31). Having sat through its boring sessions, I think the European press reaction to PIT was more accurate. The Journal de Généve headlined its coverage: “Does one have the right to be banal?” and Le Monde said that the conference “uncorked only a series of pious wishes.” One of the few challenging talks of the meeting was by Prof. Paul Lin of McGill University, who argued per- suasively that the nuclear nonproliferation treaty negotia- tions led by the U.S. and the USSR are in reality noth- 148 f 9 ¢ ing more than an effort by the big two to preserve their monopoly of power. Mrs. Borgese unfairly dismisses him in her article as a Chinese “spokesman.” Lin is a Cana- dian and a professor of history. He spoke as a_ scholar, although perhaps somewhat out of harmony with those who, like Mrs. Borgese, thought that “coexistence with China was too remote an issue even to be considered.” Referring to some of the “outstanding” talks, Mrs. Borgese cites Marya Mannes, but doesn’t report that her talk contained virtually the only criticism of the confer- ence to be uttered. Politely, Miss Mannes said: “We have ' suffered deprivations at this meeting. Oh no, not physical. In fact the luxury of our surroundings is perhaps in un- happy contrast to the poverty of our powers. We have been deprived not only of our adversaries but of our greatest allies—the young . . . they know more what is going on than we do here—and the absence of their voices is a tragic omission.” The platitudes uttered were worth neither the near $1 million they cost nor the 5 pages of space they got in The Nation. Marshall Windmiller yellow peril Willoughby, O. Dear Sirs: I register my strong disagreement with the editorial “The Negro and Vietnam” [The Nation, July 17] in which you belittle those who interpret the Vietnamese War as a race war. Consider the following: (1) The French referred to the Vietnamese as “les jaunes,’ the Americans refer to them as “the little yellow bastards” or “gooks.” (2) The American scale of values—for the destruction of one rub- ber tree the plantation owner receives $85 compensation, for destruction of one child in an accidentally bombed friendly village the bereft parents receive $34. (3) LBJ’s statement— without our military power we would be “at the mercy of every yellow dwarf with a jack knife.” It is difficult to separate colonialism and racism, but just as the Negroes constitute an internal colony here in the U.S., sc in Asia Washington’s colonial adventure is also a racist war. Alan Rhodes THE NATION/ August 28, 1967 _A SHORT HISTORY OF IRISH LIT- ERATURE: A _ Backward Look. By Frank O’Connor. G. P. Putnam’s Sons. 264 pp. $5.95. KEVIN SULLIVAN Mr. Sullivan is associate dean of the Grad- uate Faculties at Columbia University and the author of Joyce Among the Jesuits (Co- lumbia University Press). In Ireland Frank O’Connor’s last book has been published under the title The Backward Look and carries as an unob- trusive subtitle, “A Survey of Irish Lit- erature.” The same book now appears in America as A Short History of Irish Literature to which is tacked on—gra- tuitously, it seems, but perhaps guiltily— the subtitle, “A Backward Look.” I men- tion this not to raise a quibble against the commercial wisdom of O’Connor’s American publishers but because the in- terchange of titles can affect the expec- tation of readers and the response of reviewers on either side of the Atlantic. Clearly a book calling itself a history, however short, on a subject as various, complicated and obscure as Irish liter- ature often is, cannot be read or judged in quite the same way as a book of gen- ial obiter dicta by a distinguished and charming Irish writer taking a last look backward. There seems nothing to do in such a case but to write two reviews—which is what I propose to do—one of the book in its academic title and gown, the other of the same book as relaxed and learned retrospection. , The book’s academic origins are in a series of lectures delivered by the author at Trinity College, Dublin, a year or so before his death on March 10, 1965. The unifying thread of those lectures was a question O’Connor had put to himself: “Is there such a thing as an Irish literature, or is it merely two unrelated subjects linked by a geograph- ical accident?” His answer, ultimately, is affirmative: “If it is not a real sub- ject, then all the subjects of our criti- cism are likewise dreams.” But this is hardly a resounding affirmation. O’Con- nor, honestly confessing himself “con- fused by its vagaries as well as by my own lack of academic scholarship,” knows that to prove his claim he must establish a continuity—whatever its na- ture—between literature written in Irish and literature, an Irish literature, writ- _ THE NATION/August 28, 1967 _ A Labor of Love and Learning ten in English. No one, so far as I know, has yet succeeded in this difficult and perhaps impossible task. The best attempt so far made, and that on a lim- ited scale, is Vivian Mercier’s The Irish Comic Tradition. Ironically, O’Connor, while full of admiration for Mercier’s scholarship, at one time dismissed his thesis as unproved and unprovable. That irony comes home to roost when O’Connor sets himself the task of sur- veying the whole of Irish literature from its earliest beginnings down to the rambunctious entertainments of Bren- dan Behan and the girlish lubricities of Edna O’Brien. And so he can write: Sometimes one gets the impression that all the vital political issues of the time [the 19th century] were unimpor- tant compared with the task of bringing the name of Cu Chulainn into English literature. This was finally achieved by a combination of great Celtic scholars and the literary genius of Yeats and his circle, and by the year 1910 it could be said that Irish literature again existed in something like the way in which it had existed about the year 800. This brief passage illustrates the kind of thing that faults the book as literary history: personal impression, vague spec- ulation, overextended comparison, and the blurring of distinction that allows “English literature” in the first sentence to reappear by magical sleight-of-word as “Irish literature” in the second. (We are not, of course, expected to take ser- iously the claims of Cu Chulainn, either as myth or history, over those of Daniel O’Connell or Charles Parnell.) What is lacking here and generally throughout the book is method, some critical consis- tency that will not be seduced from the task at hand, the history of a rich lit- erature—ancient and new—by the blan- dishments of personal preference or in- dulgent supposition. O’Connor’s dislike of Joyce, for example, is too well known for his devaluation of Ulysses or Fin- negans Wake to come now as much of a surprise. But his dismissal of Maria Edgeworth’s Castle Rackrent as “utterly didactic and censorious” is both arbitrary and unfair, though it may be no more, as I suspect, than a gentle dig at his friend Thomas Flanagan for the latter’s high but just appraisal of that novel as “an almost perfect work of fiction.” He seems no less casual, but much more kind, in his appraisal of men like Synge, O’Casey or Colum. At times O’Connor is even more arbi- trary in his praise than in his censure. Lady Gregory’s plays have, it is true, been unjustly neglected in recent years, but I doubt that her reputation will be greatly advanced by the extravagant claim that parts of Dervorgilla are ‘as noble as anything in Irish literature,” or that the climax of The Gaol Gate “is as great as anything in classical tragedy.” This is neither criticism nor history; it is affection and loyalty, a debt lovingly paid to the memory of a redoubtable lady who helped young Michael O’Don- ovan find his way in the world of liter- ature which he was to grace for more than forty years as Frank O’Connor. If the book is not fully satisfactory as literary history, the failure can be traced to its original conception as a series of lectures. It was not thought out from the beginning as a “history.” If he had lived, O'Connor would almost certainly have recast it in different form. The appendix to the present book is an example of the way in which he had already rethought his approach to and interpretation of early Irish saga, es- pecially the Tain Bo Cudilnge which had always a powerful fascination for him. He might also have imposed stricter limitations on himself and his material and not have attempted so much in so little. Even so, it is the book of a learned man and a man who loves his subject however troubled at times the marriage may seem between love and learning. “The Irish,’ O’Connor writes, “had the choice between imagination and intel- lect, and they chose imagination.” Just so O’Connor: the play of his imagina- tion through Irish literary history con- stantly diverts him, however engagingly, from the scholarly labors proposed but only imperfectly executed by a fine and voracious intellect. To turn now from the book as literary history and to consider it as literary retrospection—to read it, that is, under its Irish rather than its Amer- ican title—is to reduce much of what has been said here to pedantic cavil, as ungrateful as it is inaccurate. Inaccu- rate because under this other mode O’Connor was not writing a treatise but telling a story; ungrateful because this is a love story, the story of O’Connor’s lifelong affair with language—whatever language his country spoke or wrote at whatever time in its long and troubled i | 149 ! ; \ A if f history. That the story should often be unhappy—what love story is not finally? —and angry and anguished and impa- tient, is perhaps inevitable. But it has also its moments of glad grace, and it is honestly and lovingly told as such a story should be. O'Connor had always insisted that the short story, his own special métier, should retain the sound of the story- teller’s voice, and in his own practice he adhered faithfully to that principle. Much of the charm of the present book comes from the sound of O’Connor’s voice, the sly or humorous or affec- tionate tone of it when he is talking about Yeats and Lady Gregory, Ste- phens and Synge and Joyce and other of his near contemporaries, but hardly less so when he evokes for us the re- mote past of early Irish lyric and saga and those nameless men who copied down or transcribed the stories that had been preserved from still earlier times by the human voice alone. So great is O’Connor’s sympathy with the oral tradition that these voices as he distinguishes among them—as, for example, in the Tain—take on many of the characteristics of living men, shroud- ed in mist still and only half emerged into light, but distinct now one from the other, each itself and no other. There is a sense in which O’Connor himself is part of this oral tradition, and as a, storyteller his insight into the problems and purposes, the partial successes and failures, of these ancient practitioners of the craft surpass anything that might be expected from scholarship alone. As for method, the scholar’s stand- ard may be critical consistency, but the storyteller’s touchstone is always “rele- vance.” In talking about a subject that extends from the fifth century A.D. to the present, O’Connor must in the in- terest of economy hazard certain gen- eralizations and conjectures without which the symmetry of the story would be spoiled. But his view of the subject remains whole, however much the liter- ature, or literatures, may have been divided and fragmented. He sees, for example, that the Irish success in confining and finally absorb- ing the Norman invasion was in the end a self-defeating, even a tragic enter- prise, for it precluded the political inte- gration of Ireland into the feudal civ- ilization of Europe and left the country exposed to a more alien and ruthless settlement from England in the cen- turies that followed. And yet the shock of the Normans was enough to start Trish literature on a long and slow de- cline, its aristocratic traditions gradually degenerating into a folk literature of hillside, bog and cabin, until by the end of the 18th century it had virtually 150 { / ceased to exist. After Cromwell and the rise of an Anglo-Irish ascendancy, all hope for that literature rapidly dis- appeared. For the Cromwellian subjuga- tion of Ireland succeeded where the Normans and others had failed because, O’Connor points out, there was never a chance that the remnants of Gaeldom, Catholic and clustered about an en- feebled and futile nobility, could any longer exert that fatal Irish capacity for absorption against the anti-Catholic, anti-Royalist and middle-class force ma- jeure of the new entrepreneurs. The rest of the story, as O’Connor sees it, is the tragedy of Anglo-Ireland. ~ - But that, fortunately, is not the end of | it. The storyteller himself had a part in the last chapter, and now a new chap- ter is in the making. A younger genera- tion of writers has grown up in an Ire- land different from that of O’Connor or of those before him—the ascendancy is gone, independence is matter-of-fact —and they are free of that compulsion to be ever looking backward. But when- ever they may do so, Frank O’Connor will be part of what they see; and they will know in the work he has left be- hind what they have gained, and in the memory of the man himself what they have lost. Listening to Frank O’Connor HARRIET O’CONNOR Mrs. O’Connor is the widow of the late Frank O’Connor. She prepared the following memoir especially for The Nation, It was in a classroom that I first saw Frank O’Connor. A casual, part-time student, I'd decided to take his course at Harvard because of a story of his which treated with humor and urbanity problems I had never realized could be taken that way—not the best of aca- demic .reasons. It was summer and he wore a rumpled seersucker suit (which I later discovered he thought a variety of American tweed), a thick, fuzzy, blue and orange tweed tie, and a look both frightened and delighted—as though he didn’t quite know what “a simple Irish- man” (as he often called himself) was doing at Harvard. With one pair of horn-rimmed glasses in his hand and another pushed up on his forehead he was describing people called “P Celts” who seemed to be importantly different from other people called “C Celts.” I wondered briefly what this could have to do with the course I’d enrolled in for Anglo-Irish literature and which sort of a Celt Joyce would turn out to be—but EVENTS 1. Nothing was known of those events, The unconscious appearances Of the self. Like tracking History on the sea’s surface. 2. Facing the dark, Fortified by bourbon, The dreams already In my head. 3.The paranoia That makes him move. HARVEY SHAPIRO Frank O’Connor’s voice was so com- pelling and the picture he drew of pre- Christian Ireland so fascinating I soon really began to listen. I went on listening—with delight and increasing amazement for the next fif- teen years. I listened as he talked Irish to a gardener outside Lamont, as he praised the German philologists who'd rescued early Irish sagas from oblivion, as he half-chanted, half-declaimed. his translation of “The Lament For Art O’Leary, whose epitaph—“generous, handsome, brave’—delighted him by its aptness and its Irishness). I heard him describe books—often long out of print—by authors whose names were completely new to me—Father Peter O’Leary, Gerald O’Donovan, Asaneth Nicholson, Daniel Corkery. I began to learn that Irish literature is unbe- lievably old, fragmented and, in part, still untranslated. It was only after we were matried that I discovered how much it meant to him, and how hard he worked to gain the knowledge he had. There was, for example, his struggle to translate the Old Irish poem “The Nun of Beare.” The verbal forms in this poem are exceedingly difficult, and scholars have frequently disagreed about the meaning of various words and phrases. One line—translated by a _ scholar as “happily the tide returns to its fat” particularly annoyed him. “ ‘Happily the tide returns to its fat’—that’s not - poetry—it doesn’t even make sense.” He submitted his most ingenious solu- tions for final judgment to Dan Binchy, probably the greatest living expert on Old Irish Law and an authority on ob- scure grammatical forms. Together they'd pore over the text—often Dan would sigh, smile and say: “An abso- lutely brilliant guess—but I’m afraid it THE NATION/August 28, 1967 ) 3 op of P ten 4 + the ' 4 pm 1) VE oy hi yy och ae wih te ee undred years after this poem was itten.” But occasionally, with the ue scholar’s caution, he’d say: “You now, that might be right, and if it is ” and that would lead to more days of work on some other obscure line. ' _ But this fascination with the sources of the literature he was a part of ex- tended in every direction. I remember _ the hours we spent driving up un- _ marked, muddy boreens or tramping across soggy, furze-covered fields searching for a bit of an eighth-century high cross, or the remains of a carved _ chancel arch—locking for the concrete, artistic expressions of the ideas and beliefs of those early Celtic people. I remember too a night at the YMHA in New York, when by cutting the cho- _ ruses and choosing four plays that were televant, he gave us a reading of Yeats’s plays which was also the story of Yeats’s life. That night he pointed toward the importance of the past for Irishmen when he said: “William But- ler Yeats saw himself as a man who perhaps never lived, an ancient Irish hero called Cu Chulainn. There was an- ' other man in the same town at the | same time who also saw himself as Cu ' Chulainn, a man named Pearse, and | _ his dream ended one spring morning before an English firing squad. Both men knew one another, each knew the other thought that he was Cu Chulainn. i The one founded a literature, the other Lg a state.” ia But what, in all of this, of Frank O’Connor the short-story writer? In a way he was the man we Americans are | —s most_-concerned about. How often we (friends, wife, editors—particularly edi- tors) said: “Wouldn’t you forget the | =~ ~poem, or that lecture, or the transla- tion of the sage and write us a story?” He smiled, and went on with what he was doing, because he knew, as I had | _— to learn, that stories did not come from SS the same perseverance that knowledge | ! came from. He said of the stories he wrote: “One writes in a sort of dream, and | can only hope that when I wake, I shall be satisfied with what I have dreamt.” When he was writing a story nothing else in the world mattered. He simply wasnt there. And it was always the (9 same when he’d finished. There they ‘a would be—the Irish characters in an Trish locale, working out their Irish 7 problems—and this despite the fact that fh. many of them were written while we ia were living in Brooklyn Heights and about people we knew in America. He explained it once: “I think of charac- ters in termS of the way they talk . . My memory is always empty of physical details—the color of someone's - THE NATION/ August 28, 1967 eyes and hair, or the sort of clothes they wore—but it is always full of voices. . . . The voices tell me how the characters think—if I tried to write as Americans talk I'd not only get the ca- dences wrong—lI’d get the characters wrong as well.” Thus my cousin’s wife, who told him the story of “The Man of the World” becomes, in that story, a little boy from the lanes of Cork. And in the story which he wrote to tease me —"Expectation of Life’—I become “Sheila Hennessey, the daughter of a small builder in Cork.” Because Frank O’Connor was so pas- sionately interested in people (“In this world,” he told me, “people are all that matters”) his characters could be, and often are, you or me. But he be- lieved that “people” have ultimately to be “somebody in particular” and that the best way to be somebody in partic- ular is to know who you are and all you can about the tradition that has shaped you. I think spent so much time looking backward. He wanted to find the pattern—to un- derstand as well as he could the past which produced him and the people he knew, loved and wrote about. I believe the search enriched every word he ever wrote. Swift Conviviality VIVIAN MERCIER Mr. Mercier is a member of the English Department at the University of Colorado. He is the author of The Irish Comic Tra- dition (Oxford). Long before Ireland began to realize that tourism was potentially one of its greatest industries, Irish hospitality had become proverbial throughout the Eng- lish-speaking world. The nearly eighty delegates to the Swift Tercentenary Sym- ° posium who converged on Dublin last spring must have carried home with them as a dominant impression the ex- traordinarily lavish and~imaginative hos- pitality provided for them by the Irish Government, Dublin’s two great univer- sities, and most of the leading cultural institutions of the capital of the Irish Republic. Even nature was in a_ hospitable mood: incredibly, not a drop of rain fell in Dublin during the festivities of April 25-29. The many trees along the streets were already in full leaf and loud with the song of blackbirds at dawn for the benefit of light sleepers or late roisterers. Tulips of all colors blazed against the emerald of the lawns in Trinity College and St. Stephen’s Green, while the main sfreets and O'Connell Bridge were vivid with wall- flowers and tulips, placed there in urns by courtesy of the city government. The bulk of the delegates, naturally, came from American and British uni- versities, but there were sizable contin- gents from France and Canada, a fine showing from Belgium, ones and twos from New Zealand, West Germany, Austria, Sweden, Switzerland, Finland, and delegates from Budapest and Lenin- grad. In many ways the symposium could be viewed as an ecumenical occasion. Conspicuous at most of the ceremonies were the Very Rev. J. W. Armstrong, Swift's current successor as dean of St. Patrick’s Cathedral (Church of Ire- land, ie., Anglican), and a brown-hab- ited Capuchin, Rev. T. M. Crowley, rep- resenting the Catholic University of Louvain. The two universities in Dublin, Trinity College (as the one-college Uni- versity of Dublin is familiarly known) and University College (part of the National University of Ireland)—the former traditionally Protestant and the White people: It’s our revolution too! Read the F.E.A.S.1.B.L.E, master-plan: A Serious Call to an American (R)Evolution by N. Emorey With appendix abstract of Yale University Symposium on “The Shape of the Future” “Certain to be one of the talked-about books of the 68 campaign. Professor- of-humanities N. Emorey has here contributed to humanity!”—Jerome Ellison Paper $1.95 ($2 postpaid) Cloth $2.95 ($3 postpaid) AC a ORS Te nat ORDER FORM ("~ >” > 7 aaa ' ' Bulldog Books, Box 1078, ‘ New Haven, Conn. 06504 ' Check enclosed for.. ..... copies of Emorey’s Serious Call ' ' ' sd ec a ale plod Sen aD li lk all lal, a this is why he- latter traditionally Catholic—had coop- erated in sponsoring the symposium. _ Almost certainly because of this, Don- agh O'Malley, the dynamic Irish Min- ister for Education, chose the week be- fore the symposium to announce his plans for amalgamating the two institu- tions into a greater University of Dub- lin, no part of which could be subject to the ban of the Catholic Archbishop of Dublin. The conversation at the American Embassy cocktail party, which unofficially launched the celebrations, dwelt obsessively on the so-called “‘shot- gun wedding” of the two institutions. The official celebrations began in the Public Theatre of Trinity Col- lege, under a lofty ceiling enlivened by some of the magnificent plaster bas- reliefs for which 18th-century Dublin architecture is renowned. The walls are lined by larger-than-life oil paintings of alumni, including Swift. The President of Ireland, Eamon de Valera, now in his 85th year and almost blind, but still an erect, imposing fig- ure, made a brief speech that was not entirely ecumenical in spirit. Having mentioned his first acquaintance with the name of Swift in County Limerick folk tales about the dean and his ser- vant Roger, the President went on to de- scribe Swift as a religious bigot, but applauded his Irish patriotism. The pro- vost of Trinity, Dr. A. J. McConnell, and the president of University College, Dublin, Dr. Jeremiah J. Hogan, formerly professor of English at U.C.D., followed with brief speeches. Then the retiring professor of English at University Col- lege, London, James Sutherland, de- livered a paper planned but left incom- plete by his late friend Prof. Herbert Davis, former president of Smith Col- lege and editor of The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, who had died some four weeks earlier. The same evening Trinity entertained the delegates, President de Valera, Prime Minister Jack Lynch, and other digni- taries at a banquet in the dining hall. This excellent meal was accompanied by some of the fine wines (notably the claret, Ch. Léoville-Barton, 1953) that have made the college cellars justly fa- mous—and doubtless envied by U.C.D. Toasts were drunk to “the President of Ireland” and “the guests,” and a tele- gram from Russia, praising Swift’s cham- pionship of the common people of Ire- land, was read, but speeches were omit- ted in favor of conversation, which reached a high pitch of liveliness after the cognac and port had circulated. The traditional sonorous Latin graces, re- cited by members of the Trinity classics department, opened and closed the pro- ceedings. Next day, the scholarly papers began in earnest. Prof. Irvin Ehrenpreis of the University of Virginia was prevented DRIVING THROUGH MINNESOTA DURING THE HANOI BOMBINGS We drive between lakes just turning green; Late June. The white turkeys have been moved To new grass. How long the seconds are in great pain! Terror just before death, Shoulders torn, shot From helicopters, the boy Tortured with the telephone generator, “T felt sorry for him, And blew his head off with a shotgun.” These instants become crystals, Particles The grass cannot dissolve. Our own gaiety Will end up In Asia, and in your cup you will look down And see Black Starfighters. We were the ones we intended to bomb! Therefore we will have To go far away To atone For the sufferings of the stringy-chested And the small rice-fed ones, quivering In the helicopter like wild animals, Shot in the chest, taken back to be questioned. ROBERT BLY s as from reading his paper on Swift’s poli- fii tics by a family misfortune as tragic as the untimely death of Professor Davis, but it was ably read for him by Prof. Oliver Ferguson of Duke University. This, like the other papers on the first two mornings, was given in the room of the Trinity Graduates’ Memorial Building used by the College Historical Society (founded by Edmund Burke) for its debates. My own paper, “Swift's Humour,” followed that of Professor Ehrenpreis. At 5 P.M. the same day, the Minister for Finance opened “Swift and His Age: A Tercentenary Exhibition” at the Na- tional Gallery of Ireland. Thanks to the generous terms of Bernard Shaw’s will, the gallery is being doubled in size. That night the unwearied dele- gates were entertained at a reception giv- en by Frank Aiken, Minister for Exter- nal Affairs, in the State Apartments of Dublin Castle, once the Kremlin of British rule in Ireland, whose walls are still lined with the portraits of British generals and administrators. Beneath them paraded some of modern Ireland’s most celebrated faces, including the ac- tors Micheal MacLiammoir (The Im- portance of Being Oscar) and Hilton Edwards, who recently directed Phila- delphia, Here I Come on Broadway. A concert of the music of Swift’s Dublin, destined for Irish television, followed the reception, but I evaded it on the ground that Swift hated music. On Thursday morning Prof. Louis Landa of Princeton and Prof. Ricardo Quintana of Wisconsin, the dean of Swift studies in the United States, read their papers dealing with Swift’s church- manship and the satiric intent and exe- cution of Gulliver's Travels, respectively. The afternoon was filled by a visit to the home of Vanessa (Esther Van Homrigh) at Celbridge, outside Dublin, where the delegates viewed an exhibit and heard a lecture by the Hon. Des- mond Guinness. In the evening we attended a new play at the rebuilt Abbey Theatre, Dearly Beloved Roger by John O’Don- ovan, author also of Shaw and the Char- latan Genius. This was a highly pro- fessional production, brilliantly directed by Edward Golden, who plays Martin Cunningham in the film of Ulysses. Joe Lynch, the versatile actor who plays Blazes Boylan in Ulysses, not only gave an insight into the complexity of Swift but managed to resemble closely the Bindon portraits of the dean. O*’Dono- van’s play was a pageant of Swift’s life, interspersed with dramatic readings of much of his verse and some of his prose. The delegates on the whole seemed rather hostile to its adoption of dubious theories about Swift’s rela- tionships (in every sense of the word) THE NATION/August 28, 1967 , alit if inge me het 4 | pl a oF hi DF iti 4 , i _ i C oy iti Wi | su | ti | 4 “i th é WV ay +} ? ha br Stella and Vanessa. In the theatre a little lecture in the form of an apology. If his theories required an apology, his ‘ingenious, rather Brechtian entertainment did not. On the last morning we all con- gregated in St. Patrick’s Cathedral to I hear two papers delivered from the pul- | pit. The first, “The Age of Swift in _ Ireland,” was read by J. G. Simms, historian brother of the Anglican Arch- bishop of Dublin. After a coffee break in Swift's deanery, we returned to the _ Cathedral for Bach and Handel selec- tions by the boy choristers. +» Then came what was for me the most _ surreal moment of a surreal week: Aus- tin Clarke, Ireland’s greatest living poet, a Catholic by birth and upbringing though strongly anti-clerical, and a worthy successor of Swift in his topical satiric verse, mounted to this Protestant pulpit to deliver a paper on “Swift as a Poet” that pulled few punches about the harshness or obscenity of much of the dean’s verse. We adjourned next to St. Patrick’s Hospital, the first mental hospital in Ireland (founded by Swift's legacy) for sherry and a banquet lunch. Austin Clarke recently published his greatest long poem, “Mnemosyne Lay in Dust.” which by coincidence deals with the year he spent in St. Patrick’s as a pa- tient at the end of World War I. Over a glass of sherry he freely discussed his experiences there. This extraordinary day reached its cli- max in the afternoon with an address by Dr. Norman Moore, for twenty years the enlightened master of the hospital, who has fallen completely under the spell of Swift. He gave us a brief his- tory of St. Patrick’s and went on to deny that Swift was ever mad, except in the sense that his brain was severely damaged by a stroke at the age of 75. Swift may have had a lifelong fear of insanity, said Dr. Moore, but, if so, he put it to good use by the terms of his will, thus exemplifying the aim of modern psychiatry, “the transmutation of a destructive force into a creative act.” Next came cocktails and champagne at the French Embassy. Oblivious of any need for dinner, many of us went straight from the Embassy to the fare- well reception given by U.C.D. in New House, 86 St. Stephen’s Green, for- merly the residence of that 18th-century Dublin rake “Buck” Whaley. The mar- velous rococo plaster reliefs in the re- ception rooms, along the staircase and over the ceilings provided a gracefully classic contrast to the business suits of the men and the “mod” styles of the younger women. Chief Justice Carroll O’Daly, the tireless chairman of the THE NATION/August 28, 1967 Symposium Committee, rendered thanks to all his aides, and especially to the unflappable secretary, Dr. Maurice Harmon of U.C.D., and to Miss Mat- thews of Trinity. He gave special thanks also to Prof. Philip Edward of the Uni- versity of Essex (formerly of Trinity) and Prof. Roger McHugh of U.C.D., as well as to Mrs. Sybil Le Brocquy, a Dublin hostess and amateur Swift scholar who had first conceived the celebration. Prof. James Sutherland added his thanks on behalf of the delegates. Next day the delegates piled into buses and were driven along the coast south of Dublin, past Joyce’s Martello tower and via the Vico Road to Loughlins- town House, one of the homes of the Irish-Australian millionaire, William Galvin. The printed menu for our al- fresco lunch under the trees there ran to 8 pages of 18th-century prose and verse, including the verse recipe for one of the dishes, “Mr. Gay’s Knuckle,” addressed by the poet John Gay to. Swift: it proved to be a sort of veal goulash. Most of the guests preferred venison, lamb, rabbit, lobster or salm- on, washed down by white or red Burgundy and, as the menu spelled it, “champaign.” The well-designed menu bore the imprint of the Dolmen Press, headed by Liam Miller, Dublin’s most enterprising printer and publisher. Dol- men, in association with the Oxford Uni- versity Press and Dufour Editions, will issue the symposium papers and other Swift studies in the fall under the title Jonathan Swift: A Dublin Tercentenary Tribute. As I left the Irish International Air- lines plane at Chicago and said goodby to Ireland, I echoed fervently the famil- iar Gaelic lines translated by Frank O’Connor: The sudent’s life is pleasant, And pleasant is his labour... Tall-Tale Americana ROLFE HUMPHRIES The Collected Poems of Rolfe Humphries was published in 1965 by Indiana Univer- sity Press. Mr. Humphries is retired from the faculty of Amherst College and now lives in California. Alfred Henry Lewis (1859-1914) wrote approximately twenty books, sometimes as many as three appearing in a sin- gle year. His production was mainly fiction, and the fiction mainly short sto- ries. The Wolfville chronicles were his best-known works, though, sadly, they are almost unknown to the present gen- eration of readers. He wrote at least one novel, The President (1904): he also wrote biographies. He seems to have been drawn to reprobates, or at least to characters whose probity was unconventional; we find him dealing with Andy Jackson, Aaron Burr, the Tammany boss Richard Croker. He was interested enough to supply an in- troduction to John Doyle Lee’s account of the confessions of his days as the (allegedly) official assassin of the Mor- mon Church under Brigham Young. Other titles include Confessions of a Detective, The Apaches of New York, Nation-famous New York Murders. But his reputation in his day was based most solidly on the Wolfville yarns, and it is on these that his fame must rest. There might, however, be time and space for a quick glance at some of the biographical writing. Lewis’ first volume was Richard Croker (Life Pub- lishing Co., 1901). This was his third book, following Wolfville, and Sand- burrs, which appeared, respectively, in 1897 and 1900. As biography, this is a BASIC QUESTIONS AND BASIC ANSWERS oO ETHICS IN THE SOVIET UNION TODAY, by Prof. H. L. Parsons $1 (paper) oO HUMANISTIC PHILOSOPHY IN YUGOSLAVIA & POLAND, by Prof. H. L. Parsons $1 (paper) [] MARXISM & MODERN LITERATURE, by Prof. G. C. LeRoy $1 (paper) El CONCERNING THE CERTAINTY OF KNOWLEDGE, by Prof A. Kolman $1 (paper) LL] MARXISM & DEMOCRACY: A SYMPOSIUM, edited by H. Aptheker $3.50 (cloth) [] MARXISM & ALIENATION: A SYMPOSIUM, edited by H. Aptheker $4 (cloth) American Institute For Marxist Studies 20 EAST 30TH STREET New York City 10016 (Checks may be made payable to AIMS) 153 curious performance indeed; of its 372 pages, not over a third say anything whatever about Croker; Lewis digress- es all over the place, with general opinions on politics, his philosophies (often enough conflicting) of _ life, sketches of Aaron Burr, later the sub- ject of another volume, Grover Cleve- land, William McKinley, Arthur Pue Gorman, David B. Hill. He warns us in his first chapter that he will be- have in this way, and his final sen- tence proclaims no regret: “I have had, on subjects, various and several, the unpent pleasure of saying what I thought and why | thought it.” What he thought is not entirely consistent: he professed admiration for Burr as against Hamilton, for Democrats as against Republicans, for Tammany Hall as against goo-goos, for democracy as against plutocracy, for the Old South * YOU SHOULD KNOW CANADA BETTER! Read CANADIAN DIMENSION Editor: C. W. Gonick Leading forum of Canadian opinion. Independent and lively. Send $4.00 for a trial year’s subscription—8 Big Issues Write: CANADIAN DIMENSION P.O. 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Sherrill (Grossman, $5.00). $4.00 oO HELL’S ANGELS: A Strange and Terrible Saga by Hunter Thompson fieandom House, $4.95)... oe ec wcns $3.95 Oo THE FREE WORLD COLOSSUS: A Critique of American Foreign Policy in the Cold War by David Horowitz (Hill and Wang, $6.95).......... . $5.55 oO THE PSYCHOLOGY OF POWER By Ronald Sampson (Pantheon, $4.95) ... $3.95 Remittance accompanying orders should be made payable to THE NATION, 333 6th Ave., N.Y: 10014 Payment enclosed Please bill me O O Readers can avail themselves of our regular offer to send them any book (ex- cept paperbacks), published in the U.S. at the retail price post-free. When order- ing, please give title, author and publisher. 8-28-67 EPI ADELE LETS CIEL SE EE TEED 154 as against New York, and for the Far West as against the effete East. In general, his political ideas are a curi- ous anticipation of the kind of stuff Shaw wrote many years later, in the text and preface of Geneva. The style is highly idiosyncratic; one of his fav- orite words, apparently, was the prepo- sition of, which he employs as a syn- onym, almost, of fo, for, by, with, and there is an elaborate florid quality to much that he puts down. Yet he can be devastatingly direct and forthright: Jones of Nevada once told that of all whom he had met in high places Cleveland was mentally the most abun- dantly dark. When he came to be President, he had not read the Con- stitution of the country. Again, on Cleveland: He had no mental finenesses; no taste for art nor music. He knew no pleasant difference between a Murillo and a three-sheet poster. He would have had no preference for one of Schubert’s ser- enades over The Arkansaw Traveler. He would rather talk than read, eat than talk, fish than eat, drink than fish. Or on McKinley: McKinley is the middle size of man. He is passive: he is acted upon and does not act. He is prudent of himself; nor Over-sensitive. He strikes poses and becomes a picture. He shrinks from the new. He sees nothing that has not been seen, hears nothing that has not been heard, finds nothing that has not been found, says nothing that has not been said, thinks nothing that has not been thought, knows nothing that has not been known, does nothing that has not been done, and would neither eat nor breathe were there not precedent for each. He is a peg of a President on which Money hangs its hat as it_ sits down to the conduct of government—a snub- bing post to which all craft, pirate and merchantman, tie up alike. Is he honest? —yes. The last of the biographies written by Lewis, An American Patrician, the Story of Aaron Burr, appeared in 1908. The style is florid indeed, with a great deal of imagined dialogue, few dates, almost no documentation, though some of the letters are no doubt authentic; I am not historian enough to know. I do not think any man could truthfully call this work judiciously objective; there is little doubt that the sympathies of the author lie with Burr, not only as against Hamilton but also against Washington; no question whatever but that Burr is the hero, though patrician seems strange terminology to apply to the son of a preacher, to the eventual first leader of Tammany Hall. For all its extravagance, the text, especially the dialogue, does have a sense of character, of dramatic tension; wonders whether Lewis himself might not have had the stage in mind in some scenes, for example, of verbal fencing between Burr, Washington, Is- rael Putnam. To sum up: for the re- searcher in American Studies, the po- litical writing of Lewis would afford, I surmise, a wealth of material, raw ore, a crude but fascinating combina- tion of post-Populist, Bullmoose-pro- gressive, and proto-Fascist elements. His first book, Wolfville, was pub- lished by Stokes in 1897 and went into at least fourteen printings. The author presents the doings of this Arizona polis as they are recalled and recount- ed by the Old Cattleman, septuagénari- an, bachelor, now retired, living com- fortably, with some personal attendants, we are not told exactly where in the East or South, some place like Sara- toga or White Sulphur Springs, com- fortable, not too fashionably gaudy, with wide verandas and spacious pri- vate cottages. We very soon come to know Wolfville’s leading citizens, Sam Enright, alcalde; Jack Moore, kettle tender to the Stranglers; Doc Peets, the most educated sharp in Arizona; Cherokee Hall, who presides over the games of chance; Texas Thompson, whose wife sold up his cattle at public vendue for her alimony; Dan Boggs; Dave Tutt; Col. William Greene Ster- ret, editor and publisher of the Wolf- ville Daily Coyote, is introduced in a later volume. High in the councils also are a few estimable females; Faro Nell, who serves as lookout for Chero- kee Hall; Tucson Jennie, spouse of Dave Tutt; Mrs. Rucker, who operates the O. K. Restaurant, henpecking her spouse, that most surly Boniface, into taking refuge among the Indians. There are also lesser characters in perma- nent residence (if any residence, where there is so much gunplay, can be called permanent)—Old Monte, who drives the stage; Huggins, his closest rival as a drunkard: Black Jack, who tends bar in the Red Light Saloon; Hamilton, who runs the Dance Hall. There are many transients, the Sting- ing Lizard, Jaybird Bob, Pinon Bill, Crawfish Jim, The Man from Red Dog, The Man from Yellowhouse, as_ well as miners, cowboys, et al., so listed on the playbill of the Broad Street The- atre production written by Clyde Fitch and Willis Steele and presented in Oc- tober of 1905. In Sandburrs, published in 1900 by Stokes, with George Luks as one of the illustrators, Lewis has broadened his field to include the New York under- world; some of the stories are told straight, some, the more preposterous, are ascribed to the Office Boy; some, THE NATION/August 28, 1967 files one © Tas 2 ERO AS RE ARE TR a Ra kee wih cB its Dare eats pc Rl ae CE ES. Destin ih 2 inet those from the Annals of the ud, are recounted by one Chucky in _ dreadful dese-and-dose patois. The | Old Cattleman has the floor on other | occasions in this volume, as the Wolf- | ville stories continue; these are far and away the best narratives, though Lewis tried once more, in the Black Lion Inn Stories (published by Russell in 1903), to provide his best narrator with some competition from fellow guests at that snow-bound «hostel, The Jolly Doctor, | the Red-Nosed Gentleman, The Sour | _ Gentleman and Sioux Sam; again The | Old Cattleman wins hands down. Some | of the tales in this collection may have |) been leftovers from Wolfville Days and | Wolfville Nights, published, by both | Stokes and Grosset and Dunlap, in the | same year, 1902. L These stories assay a _ high per- _ centage of violence; some of the humor | depends on crude, if not cruel, practi- _ cal joking; killing by gunfire, and | _ lynching by the rope, are common- places of existence, or the termination | thereof. Yet, so the Old Cattleman in- | sists, Wolfville, compared with an | astern metropolis, is a model of ser- iF ene and lawful composure, and for this point of view there is something to be said. | The Frontier is not exactly the gen- _ tlest of places. Wolfville is xenophobe, i but whether the phrase fear of the | ~—«ostranger is to be construed as contain- I. ing an objective or a subjective geni- tive depends a good deal on who is the xenos, the white man, or the Mex- ; ican or the Indian. Which is the racial | -minority? Here the Negro, except the | Buffalo soldier who may have deserted ' from the U.S. Cavalry, is virtually un- f known: the Chinese is regarded with | both affection and disdain as a worthy I but inconsequential menial; the Indian | and the Mexican are low-down, danger- ' ous, untrustworthy varmints, whose speedy extermination is looked upon as fi more than a desideratum. Yet there is a good deal of ambivalence in the Old | ~~ Cattleman’s attitude here, for in almost every story in which Indian or Mexi- can figures as the principal actor, he is presented as a personage of dignity, begets a digression into the difference between pride and arrogance, or an at- tempt to define what is meant by con- ceit.) And—? (Silence.) Thrift? A de- sire for security? Altruism? (Embar- rassed dead end.) I give up, and tell them the answers, though my state- ments still take the form of questions, now rhetorical—what about courtesy? generosity? hospitality? absolute invi- olability of an honor code? humor? (Sir, is humor heroic?), magnanimity (as distinguished from Forgive your enemies, Or Turn the other cheek), zest, gusto, delight in living? That blessed infant, Enright Peets Tutt, at the age of 8, would have less trouble with such queries; Enright would know. He’d know better. “To judge a poem or piece of prose,” wrote Robert Frost in the days of his gathering power and confidence, “you go the same way to work—apply the one test—greatest test. You listen for the sentence sounds. If you find some of those not bookish, caught fresh from the mouths of people, some of them striking, all of them definite and recognizable, so recognizable that with a little trouble you can place them and even name them, you know you have found a writer.” Exactly. Or, as al- most any Wolfville citizen would put it, “That's whatever!” But this does not mean that the sentence has to be sub-Wordsworthian in tone, or in some of Frost’s own muted and suggestive cadences. No; there is a place also for the gorgeous, the hyperbolic, the rhet- oric of “Look, the morn in russet man- tle clad,” of “the multitudinous seas incarnadine,” where true to life does not mean stenographic accuracy of transcript, but where faith is kept with life in the sense of liveliness, élan, panache, vigor, gusto, zest, vitality. It is by this above all that you know you have found a writer when you have found Lewis. Take, for example, some lines from the story about “The Dis- missal of Silver Phil,” in Wolfville Nights. This felon, by some extraordi- nary perversion of Arizona justice, has actually been tried by a jury. Dooms slow an’ shiftless as they shore be, at the wind-up Silver Phil’s found guilty, an’ is put in nom’nation by the presidin’ alcalde to be hanged; the time bein’ set in a crazy-hoss fashion for a month away. As Silver Phil— which he’s that bad an’ hard he comes mighty clost to bein’ game—is leavin’ the co’t-room with the marshal who’s ridin’ herd on him, he says: “T ain’t payin’ much attention at the time,’—Silver Phil’s talkin’ to that marshal gent,—‘bein’ I’m thinkin’ of something else, but do I onderstand that old grey sport on the bench to say you-all is to hang me next month?” “That’s whatever!” assents this mar- shal gent, ‘an’ you can gamble a bloo stack that hangin’ you is a bet we ain’t none likely to overlook. Which we're out to put our whole grateful souls into the dooty.” “Now I thinks of it,” observes Silver Phil, “I’m some averse to bein’ hanged, I reckons, speakin’ free an’ free as be- tween fellow sports, that in order for that execootion to be a bDlindin’ success Ill have to be thar personal?” “It’s one of the mighty few o’ca- sions,” responds the marshal, “when THIRD ANNUAL SOCIALIST SCHOLARS CONFERENCE September 9th and 10th The New York Hilton POVERTY AND CLASS CONSCIOUSNESS: Michael Harrington, Stanley Aronowitz, Hyman Lumer, Russ Nixon ANTHROPOLOGICAL STUDIES OF PEASANTS: Richard Frucht, Eric Wolf, Stanley Diamond, Sydney Mintz SHAKESPEARE TODAY: Michael Folsom, Paul Siegel, John illo, Herbert Weisinger CLASS, PARTY AND REVOLUTION: John Cammett, Robert Wolfe, Bruce Brown, Manuela Dobos Schleicher THE WELFARE STATE: Irving Howe, Ronald Aronson, Stanley Plastrik, Robert Paul Wolff THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF BLACK POWER: Ray Franklin, James Boggs, Harold Cruse, Ivanhoe Donaldson, Gilbert Osofsky RADICALS, LIBERALS AND THE ORIGINS OF THE COLD WAR: Lloyd Gardner, Bart Bernstein, Michael Wreszin RADICAL INTELLECTUALS IN THE 1930’s: James Gilbert, George Novack, Christopher Lasch, Warren Susman MASS MEDIA AND RADICAL SOCIAL CRITICS: Peter Clecak, Chris Koch, Emile Capouya OTHER PANELS: : Catholicism and Socialism; Marxism and Sociology; Methods, Model Building and Social Science; Policy Planners for the Ruling Class; Marxism and International Eco- nomic Relations; Marx and the Industrial Proletariat. Two papers will be delivered by Soviet social scientists on: Contemporary Soviet Society and International Working Class Movements. The dinner speaker will be OWEN LATTIMORE Please register promptly by mail: Registration fee: $5.00; Dinner $12.50. Mail checks to: Socialist Scholars Conference—Box 462—Brooklyn, New York 11201 bravery, high honor according to his code (which differs, to be sure, from the white man’s) of gentleness, wisdom, humor. An occasional coward crops up, but Wolfville is not a locale where the cult of the anti-hero is rife. The virtues are those of the epic; first and foremost, physical courage. And what else? Teaching the Iliad to college freshmen taking required humanities courses, I have found them pathetically at a loss when I ask this question. “Pride?,” some bolder spirit will suggest, with interrogative diffidence. (This usually THE NATION/August 28, 1967 155 your absence would surely dash an’ damp the general joy. As you says, you'll have to be thar a heap personal when said hangin’ occurs.” “T’m mighty sorry,” says Silver Phil, “that you-all lays out your game in a fashion that so much depends on me. The more so, since the longer I con- siders this racket, the less likely it is Pll be thar. It’s almost a cinch, with the plans I has, that I’ll shore be some-ers else.” Or hear the Old Cattleman talking about Huggins, who fomented the great Wolfville strike of the printers against Col. William Greene Sterret’s Daily Coyote (Wolfville Days)— But speakin’ of this Huggins party, I never likes him, Aside from his bein’ mostly drunk, which, no matter what some may say or think, I holds im- pairs a gent’s valyoo as a social factor, Huggins is avaricious an’ dotes on money to the p’int of bein’ sordid. He’d gloat over a dollar like it was a char- lotte roose, Huggins would. So, as I says, I ain’t fond of Huggins, an’ takes no more pleasure of his company than if he’s a wet dog. Still, thar’s sech a thing as dooty; so when Huggins comes wanderin’ wild-eyed into the Red Light about first drink time one evenin’, an confides to me in a whisper that thar’s a jack rabbit outside which has sworn to take his life, an’ is right then bushwhackin’ about the door waitin’ to execoote the threat, I calls Doc Peets, an’ aids in tyin’ Huggins down so that his visions can be met an’ coped with medical. The Best Way To Get NATION SSSSSETESESERSETEEEEREESETETSRECR SERRE EE THE NATION 8-28-67 333 Sixth Ave., New York 10014 {_] One Year, $10 [_] Two Years, $18 (_] 6 Months, $6 [_] Bil! Me {_] Payment Enclosed (Foreign and Canadian Postage $1 a year extra) BML ere erent iat sr iyuseren os sseite BEE ete ter reat eg) VC dete : OOS ROS Sa a ee : Be ii lniens Zip 'No,.....: : 156 Or Sam Enright rebuking Boggs for his impulsive qualities: “Dan,” says Enright, “when I re- flects on the hole we drug you out of, an’ the way you-all gets in, you reminds me of that Thomas Benton dog I owns when I’m a yoothful child on the Cumberland. Which Thomas Benton that a-away is a mighty industrious dog and would turn over a quarter- section of land any afternoon diggin’ out a ground-hawg. But thar’s this drawback to Thomas Benton which im- pairs his market valyoo. Some folks used to regyard it as a foible; but it’s worse, it’s a deefect. As I remarks, this Thomas Benton dog would throw his whole soul into the work, an’ dig for a ground-hawg like he ain’t got another dollar. But thar’s this pecooliarity: After that Thomas Benton dog has done dug out the ground-hawg for a couple of hours, you all is forced to get a spade an’ dig out that Thomas Benton dog. He’s dead now these yere forty years, but if he’s livin’ I'd shore change his name an’ rebrand him ‘Dan’l Boggs.’ ” The same method can be used more aphoristically; Col. William Greene Sterret remarks of his brother Jeff: “Jeff's reedic’lous fond of fishin’; which he’d sooner fish than read Paradise Lost.” And of his grandfather, who liked his liquor more than somewhat: “I can remember how on them im- pressif occasions, I would stand an’ look at him. I’d think to myse’f—I was mebby eight at the time—‘He’s on- doubted the greatest man. on earth, but my! how blurred he is!’” Dan Boggs has comment, along somewhat similar lines, of his father’s demeanor in the War between the States: My old pap is a colonel with Gen’ral Price, an’ on this evenin’ is engaged in leadin’ one of the most intrepid re- treats of the war. As he’s prancin’ along at the head of his men where a great — commander belongs, he’s shore scan- dalized by hearin’ his r’ar gyard firin’ on the Yanks, So he rides back, my old pap does, an’ he says: “Yere, you- all eediots! Whatever do you mean by shootin’ at them Yankees? Don’t you know it only makes ’em madder?” How good is the Lewis ear? This is hard to say; the foregoing should certainly have established something about his imaginative use of rhetoric, and it is possible that a trained phone- tician could form deductions as to the accuracy of the dialect. I note a ten- dency for some consonants to be dropped, for some vowels to be length- ened, but this may be simply a con- cession to the convention of the time, when a phonetic spelling, and a solecis- tic grammar, were regyarded as mighty yoomerous; Mark Twain, times; Mr. say nothing of a host of lesser men— illustrate the point. This does bother the reader somewhat, so that he de- lays over words rather than goes along with the flow, the run, of the sen- tences; it is easy to miss the splen- dors of the epithet if you have to say a word out loud to yourself before you can sense what it means. I might point out that the vocabulary has tremendous range, somewhat at the risk of inconsistency; for Dan Boggs, who can neither read nor write, makes use of the same vocabulary, grammar, sentence structure, as does Doc Peets, the most eddicated sharp in Arizona. Natural enough, I suppose, since all the narration comes to us through the Old Cattleman, sometimes at third, or even fourth, remove; quotes within quotes within quotes are not at all un- common. It makes us listen for the sentence sounds, not isolated, but in the narrative context, with the yarn spinners digressing, as yarn spinners do, and telling stories within stories within stories. The same _ treatment, without the phonetic aspects, exists in the Metamorphoses of Ovid and, for that matter, the /liad of Homer. Also, probably, if the whole truth were known, in literature as much prior to Homer as Homer is to us. In Wolfville Folks, which appeared with the imprint of D. Appleton & Co., in 1908, Lewis varies his method slight- ly; chapter and yarn no longer corre- spond exactly, but one tale will run through two or three chapters, the cul- minating incident, usually, to illustrate some prior discussion or philosophical argument among the leading citizens. Some of the stories are retold from earlier versions, and improved; on the other hand, there begins to be a con- siderable amount of self-repetition, the bold similies become clichés, the blind dog gropes too often in the meat shop, the pan of milk comes fluttering too many times from the top shelf, Texas Thompson insists too many times on the injustices perpetrated by that di- vorced helpmeet of his in Laredo, Boggs overasserts the sagacity of Doc Peets. Lewis’ great achievement—in my own opinion, a much more substantial con- tribution than that of Bret Harte—is that he has created, with no tremen- dous strain on our willing suspension of disbelief, a town, its people, their language, larger than life, to be sure, but hardy, vigorous and delightful. Po- etic, also, if one accepts the definition of poetry as being memorable speech; these cadences lend themselves very readily to ear and voice. Which my THE NATION/August 28, 1967 Dooley; Bre’r Remus—to | and I to this day converse in olfvillese on mighty slight provoca- tion, and have done so, off and on, for _ lose to five decades. Let me suggest, by way of close, that some publisher might do very much worse than reis- sue at least some of the Wolfville yarns, a selection as viable as any- thing we have in the area of tall-tale Americana; and that, likewise, such es- tablishments as care for the spoken word, perpetuate, on disk or tape, be- fore it is too late, the voice of the Old Cattleman. MUSIC Benjamin Boretz The lessons to be learned from the ‘Hamburg State Opera’s performances at the Metropolitan Opera House during the Lincoln Center Festival ’67 are those ‘of repertory and discipline rather than of conception or execution. For the repertorial choices were obvious under the circumstances: three core classics of the 20th-century literature (Berg’s Lulu, | _- Hindemith’s Mathis der Maler, Stravin- a sky’s The Rake’s Progress), two works ' of particular relevance to a German company (Janacek’s Jenufa, a classic in German-speaking countries, and Jaco- ie _bovsky and the Colonel, a recent work “by the young German composer Gisel- , her Klebe) and an American opera P originally commissioned and performed ia by the company (Gunther Schuller’s The Visitation). The point is that such pro- |} + graming need never in itself be ‘imagi- native”; all that is required is a minimal | awareness of the appropriate literature (and the awareness of Rolf Liebermann, a sophisticated composer who is the director of the company, is considerably beyond such trivial boundaries). It is certain that no major opera company in the world would have missed the extra- ordinary opportunity to give first New York performances of Lulu and Mathis, to one-up the Metropolitan’s notorious single production of The Rake, or—per- haps the greatest gamesmanship of all— to give the local (and American) pre- miére of a work by one of our own most prestigious advanced composers. All this could have been noted imme- diately upon the announcement of the repertory. But the real irony of the affair was that in every production I attended (all but Jenufa and Jacobovsky), it was obvious that the Metropolitan’s own com- pany could have presented considerably superior performances of these very works, that, in fact, the ability of the Hamburg company to perform them had nothing to do with any notable artistic capacity but merely demonstrated that a reasonably professional company, of even such minimal resources by comparison with those of the Metropoli- tan megalith, could do so simply by an act of decision and discipline. In particular, neither the little theatre- pit orchestra imported with the company, nor its conductor, Leopold Ludwig, was more adequate to the demands of the scores than any other routine German opera-house ensemble; which is to say, quite inadequate to reproduce more than a skeletal semblance even of the surface involved, with no hint of the sonic depths of any of the nuances, and with an amount of sloppy playing (more in attack, rhythm and tone quality than in actual “pitch”) that would not be toler- ated by most professional American orchestras. The comparisons that one was constantly impelled to make with the extraordinary performance last sea- son by the Metropolitan’s own orches- tra, under Karl Bohm, of a work of THOSE SUMMER GUESTS Those summer guests that sat in chairs Upon the lawn have left. That hump of land across the lake— } It’s here but not much else. fh The picnic tables, mossy stools Where girls arrayed in white Flattered away an evening of the moon— The stranded and phlegmatic rock— My comic opera’s done And I myself am one who sits In a boat choked red with leaves. An oarlock’s gone. I can’t row out To drown my amour propre In the full muster of the year’s big rout. ‘My joys were false and my chagrins the truth.’ THE NATION/August 28, 1967 JEAN GARRIGUE comparable difficulty, Strauss’s Die Frau . ohne Schatten, were truly disheartening. Even in the musically best of the Ham- burg performances, The Rake, there was a notable raggedness of ensemble, dead- ness of sonority and—perhaps revealing as sources of the foregoing—an incompe- tence of solo playing that seemed partic- ularly forlorn under the officially con- spicuous circumstances and in the gran- diose surroundings. Paradoxically, another effect of the Hamburg performances was to vin- dicate, in some respects, the Metropoli- tan’s own attitude toward the perform- ance of such literature. For both the economics and the environmental char- acter of the new house—like those of -the old—are inescapably bound to maxi- mally lavish productions of maximally popular works. The costs of producing any opera in the house on an appropriate scale are such that every performance must be a sellout, and the capacity of the new premises makes this requirement virtually one of mass-media appeal. The fact that even the first performances of even the certified masterpieces in the Hamburg series drew no more than a 61 per cent paid attendance (according to a normally reliable source) is a power- ful counter-argument to those who would recast the Metropolitan into a respon- sible cultural institution. Whether or not it is a major socio- cultural pity that such a house was built with public funds in the first place—and the domination of large-scale American operatic performance by a company with the Metropolitan’s attitudes thereby assured—this is nonetheless the actual situation; and no virtuous intentions will make it any the less incongruous to sub- ject delicate and intricate works to an arena whose dedication to cultural Popu- lism is depressingly evident in every physical detail. I, for one, will no longer feel compelled to demand reform from the Metropolitan. Other aspects of the Hamburg per- formances were interesting in these mul- tiple respects as well. Thus, the small scale of both the sights and sounds of all the productions (reflecting not only limitations of performances but also the size of the house for which they were designed) was devastating visually but surprisingly less so vocally, even though some of ithe voices were of almost sub- operatic proportions. This may be partly due to the undeniably superior (though highly variable) acoustics of the hall; but it also indicates that judicious vocal-in- strumental balance and, especially, accu- rate pitch production is more important for generating audibility and intelligibil- ity than the usual reliance on vocal volume and mannerism. And in general, it was quite true that the singing of the 157 Hamburg company was far more dis- ciplined and at least literally accurate than is usually the case in local operatic performances; moreover, this discipline extended to some of the operatic acting, normally a rather marginal activity. As a result, a quite few distinguished reali- zations of individual roles emerged in several of the operas. And, significantly, some of these were by young American singers “expatriated” to European com- panies by the Metropolitan’s cannibalistic “star” system. But again, even though the stage dis- cipline tended to be high, its execution was often rather routine, and overall it gave signs of no remarkable directorial concepts. The Schuller Visitation suffered most cruelly from Gunther Rennert’s unimaginative eclecticism, borrowing clichés from old American-scene movies of the thirties and from routine melo- dramatic theatre just where originality of conception, projection and—especial- ly—timing were most crucially needed. The production of Lulu, marred by the far more fundamental disabilities noted below, was also so perfunctory in its casual one-set amalgam of circus-ring and bourgeois apartment, and its unkeyed direction of movement, that it succeeded in projecting the Berg-Wedekind high Expressionistic verbal, dramatic and PERSONALS SAN FRANCISCO BAY AREA If you believe orthodox religion and clericalism are no longer tenable in this scientific age write to: Secularists Suite 130, World Trade Center San Francisco, Calif. 94111 For information, literature, forum to share your ideas. COMMUNITY ACTION, LATIN AMERICA: Need: —Experienced field workers for urban slum socio-economic development through self-help. ~— Developer for slum micro-industries. —Manager for technical training centers. Two year contracts. Box 603, c/o The Nation PROTESTANT VISIONS OF THE VIRGIN MARY. I am writing a book on this subject. Stories needed. Greatly appreciated. Bennett Wm. Palmer, 15 $. Second St., Haines City, Fla. HOFFA FOR PRESIDENT: Impeach Johnson; circulars, stickers, bumper strips, rulers, dial- ers, safety matches, etc. $1 to $5 assortments. Plentyism, Box 115-W Edison, Miami 33151. apenas tee ga ee Se a DOVES OF PEACE, beautiful life-size, hand painted ceramic Doves from Mexico. All orig- inal designs. $2.00 postpaid. Gift and lamp catalogue available—25c. Angel Shop, 1517 30th St., San Diego 92102. DO EMPLOYERS READ GALBRAITH? B.S. in physics did, wants to work three ten hour days per week. Full value for 34 salary. 4316 Clearbrook, Kensington, Md. 20795. ESKIMO POWER! Reusable paper protest but- tons .. . 12 different, 50c. William A. Pelz, 6870 W. 177th St., Tinley Park, Ill. 60477. ee 15? musical continuity into a soap-operatic nonchalance. Even The Rake’s Progress, the most relevant and integral production (directed by Gian-Carlo Menotti), suf- fered from incessant “business” hostile to the self-contained efficiency of the textual-musical conjunction, and adding the distraction of a broad visual gag just in time to obscure a musical-verbal one of much more elevated wit, or frantic side-show activity just when con-_ centration on words and music was most appropriate. As far as the individual produc- tions are concerned, space precludes more than an encapsulated summary of some notable features. Mathis der Maler: Although perhaps it is ultimately a victim of Hindemith’s characteristic substitution of musica] and dramatic earnestness and external “sig- nificance” for genuine music-dramatic ideas, with its consequent “talky” neu- trality and static solemnity, Mathis never- theless has an impressive total integrity and seriousness that could scarcely sur- vive the irresponsible elision, in the present production, of a major portion of the work, colorless orchestral sonority, and the generally undistinguished vocal- ism and direction. The Rake’s Progress: This was the most distinguished of the Hamburg per- formances. In particular, Loren Dris- coll was as musically and dramatically accomplished a Tom as he appeared to be on the recent Columbia record- ing, Tatiana Troyanos was a remark- able Baba, and Arlene Saunders was an accurate and delicate Ann, though her inflective range was rather small. The principal vocal difficulty was Tom Krause’s Shadow, whose pitch uncer- tainty and verbal obscurity were in con- trast even to the peripheral roles. Lulu: The serious misrepresentation of this work in its first New York per- formance was an act of regrettable irre- sponsibility on the part of the Hamburg company. For now that the existence of a virtually complete and easily realiz- able third act for Lulu (left unfinished by Berg) has been made public by George Perle and others, it was astonish- ing to find the Hamburg Opera still offering the absurd “expedient” of an orchestral movement interspersed with vocal fragments (an absurdity heightened by slides with verbal legends summarizing the plot). Even more inexplicable was the absence of any indication in the pro- gram or on stage that this was anything but a complete performance, or even that the work was not intended by Berg for performance precisely in this way— which could only indicate to an un- informed audience that Berg’s superb dramatic capacities, evident every- where in the first two acts, had suddenly disappeared for the conclusion. Almost — as irresponsible was the substitution of a series of silly (and devastatingly conti- nuity-breaking) slides and titles in the second act for the film explicitly re- ‘quired and described in minuscule detail in the score. In other respects, the per- ‘formance suffered more than others from the general orchestral and conductorial ‘shortcomings, but the vocal perform- ances, including those of the most minor ‘roles, were surprisingly adequate even where Bérg’s procedure of “simultaneous characterization” of a multiplicity of parts presented the most formidable problems. The intense, wholly physical imagery of the opera required more maturity and subtlety than Anneliese Rothenberg’s excessively kittenish Lulu conveyed, but her representation of the vocal line was otherwise quite compe- tent. The Visitation: A new work of major proportions and implications, The Visit- ation will require far more than this manifestly tentative first production to be adequately perceived. At first en- counter, it appears to be an extraordinary attempt at a synthesis of several of the significant 20th-century confluences of music and theatre—of the American “operatic” social verismo of works like the Weill-Rice Street Scene, and the popular-music into serious-theatre man- ner of the earlier Brecht-Weill works and Porgy and Bess, with the syntax and surface of works like Berg’s Wozzeck. This intention is signaled by the libretto, a realization of Kafka’s The Trial in terms of American Negro repression; and the Wozzeck parallel is evident both in the “character-and-situation sketch” aspect of the. scenes of the first act, and in specific details of musical gesture from the figurational level to the dark- ened-stage orchestral interlude just be- fore the banal music-accompanied final scene (a children’s song in Wozzeck, a New Orleans street funeral dirge in The Visitation). Indeed, this latter con- junction seems almost an explicit allu- sion, as well as an ingenious climactic clue to the “hidden” signification of the drama. The principal apparent obstacles in the work itself to the realization of this extraordinary idea were some verbal in- felicities in the text, as well as the frag- mentary character of some of the dra- matic and musical developments. But this impression was particularly difficult to confirm in the present pro- duction, whose timing, both of action and scene change (seriously flawed by the mechanical failure of the Metropoli- tan’s turntable) was obviously erratic, and whose performances (especially by McHenry Boatwright in the principal role of Carver Jones) seemed insecurely sung and acted as caricature. THE NATION/August 28, 1967 | Crossword Puzzle No. 1212 FRANK W. LEWIS ae ACROSS: 1 A bad coil with a car might imply heat. (7) 5 Bear back when little goes with a motor- Jess 1 across—the country type. (7) 9 Part of the plane is able to return with her, as the French see it. (7) 10 Travel first-class with a certain amount of physical difficulty, and only medium results. (7) 11 Forest that I sing about, where some of your loads might be dropped. (7,8) 12 How to answer questions concerning things that take to the water. (7) 13 it’s always before sun-up, reputedly. (7) 14 Not so much in place of repose as the alternative to getting damned. (7) 17 Does what a harbinger might do. (7) 20 How can one act so? Comprehend? (15) 21 Those who don’t walk around a group such as Mosby’s? (7) 22 A race when one of the old pipe-players is quiet around it? (7) 23 Treats wound with what may now be purchased in paper. (7) 24 Those who make 23 might follow one. (7) DOWN: 1 Once taken away from it, you still could have an example, of a sort. (7) 2 Keys for storage places? (7) 3 Such as “Thou shalt not steal’? People therein should follow such _ precepts. (9.6) 4 Reached a high level in describing some birds. (7) 5 Does it show what I did when tired or sick? (Mind it’s closed in such a condi- tion!) (7) 6 Does it bother one who tells an oppo- site effect with it? (7,8) 7 Don’t come in first to take part in it! It might suggest milk and sugar. (7) 8 An early light fixture? 14 The vision of January Ist might be for some. (7) 15 One who seriously starts out to learn might, taking the long view! (7) 16 Has a use for something? Quite the con- trary. (7) 17 Describing high noon o’ the clock in a criminal order. (5,2) 18 A number light on it, but it might go up in smoke. (7) 19 Give one a date, perhaps, suggesting a stopping point. (3,4) SOLUTION TO PUZZLE NO. 1211 ACROSS: 1 Pea Jacket; 9 Plowman; 11 and 13 Rat trap; 12 Dolmen; 15 Redolent; 16 Recede; 18 Common; 20 Reporter; 23, 24 and 6 across Long Island Sound; 25 Rut; 28 Earshot; 29 Ironing; 30 Tiled; 31 Reg- istrar. DOWN: 1 and 10 Paper weights; 2 Adopted; 3 Armadillos; 4 Kindling; 5 Towhee; 6 and 27 Slipshod; 7 Unhorse; 8 Disappear; 14 Lemon drops; 15 Recollect; 17 Berating; !9 Mineral; 21 Terrier; 22 Ish- tar; 26 Tiger. ee or er renee THE NATION/August 28, 1967 <= 14 Printed by Milford Publishers, Inc., SAVE YOUR COPIES OF The NATION * Each file holds a full year’s copies. 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Why not join this group of alert and forewarned citizens? subseribe to NATION The paperback edition of THE NEW STUDENT LEFT, an anthology edited by Mitchell Cohen and Dennis Hale with a foreword by Carey McWilliams, has much new material by Carl Oglesby, Paul Booth and others. “This is a very worthwhile book ... a primary source, a document in the history of a political movement, at once tough and naive, whose impact continues to be felt.” FREE with each NEW subscription The NATION 333 Sixth Avenue New York, N.Y. 10014 NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW Herewith my order and payment for a NEW subscription to The Nation. Please send my FREE copy of THE NEW STUDENT LEFT. 1 1 Year, $10 [ 2 Years, $18 ([ 6 Mos.. $6 (Foreign and Canadian Postage: $1 per year extra) Fill out the subscription coupon at left, and start receiving The Nation, this country’s oldest weekly journal of opinion. THE FACES OF F IDELISMO uinpa EDER ATION SEPTEMBER 4, 1967 35 cents KENTUCKY’S COAL BEDS OF SEDITION rau: coon TV Editorials: Brave @ Free? VICTOR H. BERNSTEIN RA ae Upheaval in a Chinese Village cC. P. FITZGERALD 2 210 Third-Party Expectations CYNTHIA L. ADCOCK =z zo & = > San Francisco Guerrilla Troupe ROBERT F. SAYRE mimo —? ® Pact ews of JOHN BERGER, PAUL BOWLES, UWE JOHNSON uUrrh o the equivalent of the weather. It is time “For God's sake, don’t teach them anything they can use, which can promise “the peace of God” The warden said, and which can lash and destroy with “And no female assistants.” Deadpanned, they slump in their seats, “unimaginable” fury. Again, I am bei | bee : Eereeriaial uke ket imayobe facture Not being fooled, not being taken in. The doctor cuts a rope, metaphor in the attempt to define a hidden, subjective experience—the gen- Knots it, restores it, and bumbles offstage, dropping his scissors. eralized impact on a doctor’s imagina- The architect conjures doves from a warming pan, tion of the suffering which he meets almost daily and which cannot be re y : settled by writing prescriptions. Goes skittering around the windowless room, flies back To become a squab which he gnaws for an exit. And then ’'m on With only a deck of cards, watching my hands grow thick Through waterfall and accordion shuffles, fans, Sloppy arm-turnovers, ; And color changes I learned when I was too young and too lucky To get arrested except on. Hallowe'en. And one flaps up, é Not merely the analogue of Sassall to Conrad heroes but the stuff of which we ourselves, every day, doctor or patient, search for and seek—the roots of life and its meanings: It is impossible to say now whether i this period of crisis was induced by his decision to examine within himself the I remember friends basis of what up to now he had pro- Who taught me to steal books, then how to write them. jected outwards as “the unimaginable, What kind of sleight of hand will work tomorrow? or whether he entered a period of What kind ] TAN crisis and therefore decided to look ar bum} example A more closely at himself. Either way it Were we supposed to be? The white, Indian, and Negro Nn bears some resemblance to the period of Faces are watching to see what we can do, i isolation and crisis which precedes in Gn Siberian and African medicine the pro- ‘ fessional emergence of the shaman or If anything— Production, destruction, restoration, illusion, manipulation, the inyanga. The Zulus have a name for With no intermission, with nothing usable ~ this process. The inyanga, they say, suf- In a house of correction, fers because the spirits will give him And I finish by throwing cards with a flick of the wrist, skimming no peace and he becomes “a house of , ; Boescis? One after the other over their heads And into the dark At the back of the room where they smack into the wall, then drop To the floor like sparrows conking themselves on glass. The random applause Says nothing to anyone. The lights go on. One Indian Is trying to throw a card with a flick of the wrist. A beautiful book. Sociologists have said all this about doctors and the doctor- patient relationship and the divergence of expectation of the two. But there is a world of difference between Berger’s creative presentation and a sociological document: the difference between Oscar It sticks in his fingers. Lewis and Zola, for example, on the And we, the nervous Society of American Magicians, culture of poverty. Cluster to talk about ourselves. The guards i 182 THE NATION/September 4, 1967 H ' q ¥ 7 d f Pa Se , r Lube nll ¥ wi ; * 2 e ‘ ; Bon eet a a m a the audience Which opens as if by magic. 2 THE TIME OF FRIENDSHIP. By 'Paul Bowles. Holt, Rinehart & Winston. 5 pp. $4.95. SHARLES T. SAMUELS 'Mr. Samuels, who teaches at Williams Col- | lege, is at work ona critical study of Henry | James. q Mod A | Paul Bowles’s previous collection of short fiction, published seventeen years ago, was dedicated to “my mother, who first | read me the stories of Poe,” but Bowles improved on his master. With muted prose, he refined Poe’s menacing but frequently hysterical atmosphere, while his tropical and African settings pro- vided a more plausible backdrop for ferror than Poe could dream up in his New York Grub Street. More important, Bowles writes out of an ironist’s vision ‘of human bestiality, whereas Poe writes mostly for emotional effect. Neverthe- | less, master and pupil share defects of clarity and variety which are as evident | in Bowles’s new stories as in The Deli- ate Prey. 4 “Donia Faustina” begins its black course in a way Poe might have envied (“No one could understand why Dona Faustina had bought the inn.”), and its puzzles create progressive anxiety. What ripples the water from the bottom of Dofia Faustina’s tank? Why does she | allow a mestizo interloper to rape her, and what did she feed him before the act? _ Bowles’s answers are appropriately awful. The lady bought the inn for the purpose of hiding kidnaped babies, the tank contained crocodiles to which she fed their corpses, and her banquet damour was a baby’s heart. The heart Should have conferred “the power of thirty-seven” (presumably babies) on the offspring of her violation, but the sig- nificance of so bizarre an act is still in doubt by the end of the tale. Dona Faustina’s son does become so strong and cunning that he is made a police colonel, but when he captures thirty- NATION/September 4, 1967 And file it loud and long through a corridor, to vanish. Under the floodlit night, we stroll to the gate DAVID WAGONER What’s That in the Tank? seven bandits in a stunning coup, he lets them go. Did Bowles intend a joke about the unexpected effect of witch- craft (including a parody of the Resur- rection: the boy’s name is Jesus Maria) or a warning against exotic diets? The ending encourages facetiousness, but the rest of the tale is too sinister to be taken for comedy. More characteristic but equally puz- zling is “Tapiama,” about an American photographer in the tropics who lets himself be taken to an island cantina, where he gets drunk and encounters some ominous denizens. As events be- come more phantasmagoric, the hero’s desire to attain freedom through self- abandonment seems to fail him. Chal- lenged to remain, he loses heart: but when he tries to row himself back to his hotel he gets lost, only to be picked up by five men who refuse him return. Instead they insist that he repeat the sound of a talking bird that caws “Idigaraga” at them from a nearby tree. His experience is a nightmare “whose painful logic he followed with the entire fiber of his being, without however, once being given a clear vision of what agoniz- ing destinies were at stake.” After creat- ing the experience with great power and vividness, Bowles leaves the reader just as perplexed. The five men tell the photographer that the bird is one which invades others’ nests and bemoans its unpopularity when expelled, but any parallel that might be drawn to the hero is confounded by his unbirdlike passivity and indifference. A third evocative tale is more deft in characterization and complex in struc- ture. “The Hours After Noon” concerns a pension proprietor described, in the first section, as a woman whose dissatis- faction with her present makes her hate the romantic past which throws it into low relief. The story’s epigraph (from Baudelaire), a pattern of statements and verbal echoes, bits of action and décor— even the heroine’s name (Mrs. Cal- lender )—all point to a serious considera~ tion of time and memory; but the plot scarcely articulates the theme. Mrs. Cal- lender nearly causes an affair between her daughter and a roué guest by warn- ing the girl against a surrender which would, in effect, repeat her own past. However, the affair doesn’t come off, while the girl becomes involved but quickly uninvolved with another man. Nevertheless, the story concludes with the roué’s murder, though Bowles makes it difficult to know who killed him and why. Seldom does one encounter stories so carefully composed, with atmosphere so commanding, prose so fluent, and purpose so little ascertainable. One walks through a dream where everything is simultaneously vivid and muffled. There are exceptions, like “The Wind at Beni Midar,” a gruesome anecdote about superstition, and “The Hyena” and “The Garden,” parables whose ironic dispatch provides especially sharp versions of Bowles’s belief that evil is unconquer- able. Other tales like “The Successor” and “A Friend of the World” are clearly conceived, but they are too slight to re- lieve the book’s mood of indefinite malaise. The title story, about a Swiss school- teacher wintering in Algeria, who be- friends a street urchin, is the volume’s one substantial success. Making the boy her factotum, the schoolteacher inspires “an attitude of respect bordering on adoration [which] never altered unless she inadvertently tangled with the subject of Islam. .” Beneath her friendship and charity, unacknowledged but determinant, is a sense that the boy is culturally inferior, as well as poor. Trying to train him in the civilized re- ligion of the Nazarenes, the school- teacher fails, but she thinks she has at- tained a truer understanding of Slimane, the street urchin. Throughout their friendship, she knew that the worsening Algerian War would soon make her vacations impossible. What she did not know was that Slimane longed to reach a city where he could take part in it. When she is finally ex- pelled by the French, the tearful boy in- sists on accompanying her to her place of departure. By allowing him to bid his friend goodby however, she has unwit- tingly provided him with the chance to be killed by the very civilized people 183 she had wanted him to emulate. As her train pulls out, she wryly thinks: “If only death were absolutely certain in war- time. . . . the waiting would not be so painful.” “The Time of Friendship” is the best story Bowles has published, but it is so absolutely atypical, both in its realistic cultural implications and in its tender- ness, that it prevents us from making any generalizations about his art. When I reviewed Bowles’s most recent novel in 1966, I recommended that we recon- sider this once celebrated writer who ’ had grown into a neglected middle age. Up Above the World was also neglected, and I now think | know why. Save for the title story, the new collection reveals neither development nor deepening. Bowles’s style is still masterly in its main- tenance of tension. His vision is still acerbic and his inventions exotic. But his significance still shimmers fitfully; and when we reach the bottom, it seems either shallow or stagnant. There may be a crocodile down there, but if his teeth haven't gone bad they still chew the same stuff. Upheaval in a Chinese Village FANSHEN: A Documentary of Revolu- tion in a Chinese Village. By William Hinton. Monthly Review Press. 637 pp. $12.50. Cc. P. FITZGERALD Mr. FitzGerald teaches Far Eastern history at Australian National University. He is the author of Birth of Communist China and, most recently, Concise History of East Asia (both Frederick A. Praeger). Fanshen is an extraordinary book: it was beyond expectation that twenty-one years after the end of the Second World War there could still appear a work by a first-hand observer of the early phase of the Chinese Communist Revolution, the land distribution which followed the surrender of the Japanese armies in China and was concurrent with the civil war which ended the Nationalist rule. The book covers these years, late 1945, 1946 and 1947, down to the end of 1948, when the final triumph of the Communist People’s Liberation Army was a foregone conclusion. The scene is the village which Mr. Hinton translates as “Long Bow Vil- lage” (a slightly pedantic rendering, as if we were to call a Fletcher Street, Arrow Maker’s Street). This village is examined in great detail, the lives of its inhabitants are related from the years before the war, through the Japanese oc- cupation, and then through the momen- tous happenings of the early revolution- ary phase. Hinton knew these people, interviewed them and recorded their stories, judged their. characters. The book is a true documentary based on very copious notes, which after many years of legal obstruction at last be- came available to the author and per- mitted him to produce this invaluable report. It will, one may hope, 184 dispose of many myths, both those of the Left and of the Right. Peasants undergoing rev- olutionary changes, and their local lead- ership, appear neither as pure heroes of the people, nor yet as devils of de- struction and subversion but as human beings still inspired with hopes, still divided by jealousies, greed and fear, still apt to take advantage of their néw authority, and yet struggling out of their ignorance and limited lives to create something new and fundamentally different from the age-old pattern of rural existence in China. All this, as observed in Long Bow, went on in the province of Shansi, which before the war was always called the “model province,” because it had no civil wars and kept out of those of other provinces; it had much less banditry, and had made some develop- ment of communications and some indus- trial progress. Hinton does not refer to these facts, which put the story he tells in- to an even sharper light. For in the “mod- el province,” it is now all too clear, the ancient oppression of the poor by the rich, the subjection of the peasantry to the rural landlords was as cruel and as prevalent as anywhere else. Even so, as he notes, Long Bow had an unusually mixed population; there were many families who had come to this mountain village from the plains of Hopei—where the armies counter- marched year by year, and even from Shantung. These people were in fact refugees from the even greater evils of life in their native districts. Instead of huge bandit armies and the scarcely better forces sent out to fight them, they found in Shansi and in Long Bow settled landlords, still ruling the village, and in the ancient manner. There might as well have been no republican revolu- tion in 1911. In Long Bow life was un- changed since time immemorial. The Japanese invasion, whi C¢ the people into collaborators and _ re: sistance, was the first shock; the sur- ah render of Japan and the coming of the jr Communist forces, the incorporation of li the village into the Liberated Area of a the Shansi-Hopei-Honan-Shantung Bor. 1 der Region, one of the largest areas | which by the end of the war had be-— come a Communist Liberated region, |! was the second and decisive transfor- mation. Land reform began at once; the }! landlords, not very numerous, but own- |! ing more than half the lands in the | village, were dispossessed, in some cases }! slain, and in almost all cases sae away with nothing but their clothes. }! The close connection between collab- }! orators and landlords helped to give a) touch of extra ferocity to this phase. i The movement was still in thes hands of the peasants, mostly poor peas-— ants. The local Communist Party had |} not yet been formed, the district party } machine was not yet in control of the» rural villages. As Hinton truly says this phase could have turned out as no} b more than a “jacquerie,” an ill-organ-- ized, spontaneous uprising of the most » i oppressed, and would infallibly have } been destroyed through its own Jack of | cohesion and program for the future »} had not the Communist Party come on--§ to the scene and, over three years, } gradually instilled discipline, order and|§ a step-by-step program for rational land! 1 division and economic progress. One all- - | important fact emerges with perfect) clarity; the Chinese agrarian Tevolutiogyyy was spontaneous: the consolidation of 9 f that movement into a social and politicallt t revolution was the work of the Commu--j| nist Party, and without that organiza-— t tion it would never have succeeded. This :@, is a fact which should be pondered ini) other countries in Asia. | The Chinese Communist leaders: were from the first aware of the diffi- 9 culties and obstacles that must be over- 9 come. It is perhaps ironic today to read !j the following quotation from Liui§ Shao-ch’i, the much abused “top party |) person.” In his book, How To Be aig Good Communist, Liu writes: . even if the opposition and rebuff of the great majority of people force him (the Communist) into temporary isolation—glorious isolation—and even if on this account he may be endang- ered he will still be able t stem the tide and uphold truth and will never resign himself to drifting with the tide. So far as he himself is concerned he has nothing to fear . . . for the sake of certain important aims of the Party and of the Revolution he is required to endure insults, shoulder heavy bur- dens, and to do work which he is re- luctant to do... THE NATION/September 4, 196. ’ | on shows that whatever may now of the man who wrote those Ap words, this was the standard f ‘conduct which dedicated members of the party tried to apply and often ucceeded in attaining. sf An interesting aspect of the life xf Long Bow, which as the author says vi somewhat dim the existing image | of the old Chinese family, is the evi- mm dence he provides not only for vice | and licentious conduct by the landlord families but also for loose morals among the peasantry. It is perhaps possible that the mixed population of Long Bow, with many residents who were not natives of the village or had parents ho had migrated there, made this feature of life more prominent than it may have been in villages where the gg clan structure was less impaired and | more stable. The influence of this fac- jm tor on the struggles for land reform mf and revolutionary reconstruction was Often significant. It is a point which if helps to explain, what every visitor to ©ommunist China observes, the obsessive | puritanism of the present society. 4] THE THIRD BOOK ABOUT ACHIM. ! By Uwe Johnson. Harcourt, Brace & orld. 246 pp. $5.75. BRIDGES AND BARS. By Rolf Schnei- der. The Viking Press. 189 pp. $4.95. POSTWAR GERMAN THEATRE. Edi- fed and translated by Michael Benedikt and George E. Wellwarth. E. P. Dutton & Co. 348 pp. $7.50. - R. von FREIBURG Von Freiburg is a pseudonym for a bilingual East-West writer team of two who have ived in both Germanys for many years. For Uwe Johnson, who left East Ger- Many in 1959, yet could never complete- ly lose it nor find himself in West Germany, his homeland is not merely divided but kaleidoscopically splintered. Tn novel after novel, with endless pains, he sweeps the glittering shards of his National identity together and tries to make them function, if not as what they ‘were, then at least as what they are or might be, knowing from the start that even this melancholy compromise must fail. In his third novel, which could as aptly be titled “The Third Book about Uwe,” he is once again pursuing the _will-o’-the-wisp of Germany’s _ truth, which always beckons from that side of Tm NATION/September 4, 1967 oT ¥ ~ Much must have happened in Long Bow in the past seventeen years. The meticulous sharing out of the land will have been superseded by the Co-opera- tive Farm and then by the Commune. It would be fascinating to know, from a village so closely observed in the early stage, how these later develop- ments were received in a community which Hinton has rendered so live and vivid to the reader that each individual and family becomes a familiar char- acter. Finally there is the question: What does the Cultural Revolution mean to such people, who have undergone a still more significant cultural revolu- tion already—that which transformed them from degraded illiterates into men and women who can now read and write. If these questions cannot be an- swered by the exact and objective ob- servation of a Western scholar, all who study modern China must be grateful for what they have received, a defini- tive report on what really went on when the Communist Revolution came to China. he Fragmented Approach the frontier where he is not, and lures him “home from home.” Truth? Well, “the things you'd call the truth, since that’s how it looks to you,” as Karsch says. Karsch is Uwe Johnson’s alter ego, an invented West German writer who has agreed tb write Achim’s biography. A sort of Holy Ghost, he exists solely in his function, which is to mediate between Johnson and his subject. The subject—insofar as one can determine it, piecemeal as it is presented—is an East German bicycle champion, former Hitler youth, and later, thanks to having been star athlete and pin-up boy of the German Demo- cratic Republic, a deputy to the People’s Chamber. We get op art views of the champion and his associates, which tease the eye with bars and dots of negative description. Here we see, in not seeing, Achim’s girl friend Karin: . . for some time now he began sens- ing her presence again before he ac- tually saw her, as though she filled an open, only temporarily covered spot in his attention with the long-expected reality of footsteps and echo and long- limbed motion; I mean: he’d recognize her from the way eyes followed her, like a furrow, as she walked from the door to the counter. The author’s preoccupation with manipulating light—literally, light—also comes through in such straightforward passages as, “The light from the small table lamps, the wind-ridden light from the street lamps and the gray radiance of night merged across his notebooks.” But the expected is what Johnson never gives you. He slips you “if I see what you mean” when you were just anti- cipating “if you see what I mean.” He cancels life in the living and admits it to objects: “In the middle of the blue crowd empty streetcars stood waiting, nonplused and_ yellow.” Nothing is whole, all is eye-dazzling juxtaposition of fragmented approaches. The very paragraphs may suddenly be left dan- gling, without a period, the thought it- self abandoned. The new paragraph may start unindented, in the middle of an unheralded remark from elsewhere. The extraordinary presentation ap- pears to be the result not of any strain- ing for originality but of the real ob- structions set up by our warring world and the objective impossibility of “get- ting the facts” in their entirety from either side, East or West, as long as the state of war persists. The purpose of the now-you-see-it-now-you-don’t tech- nique is presumably to eliminate the clichés — that brightness—that is, light which by re- vealing too much actually reveals noth- ing. Unfortunately, not much is revealed this way either. When Johnson shows us his hero in the flashes of a broken mirror (with so many details missing between the pieces) and tells us in effect, “We can never really find the truth about the two Germanys or anything else,” we may agree if we have stuck with him to ~ the end, but many readers will lose patience long before that; for as Johnson WRITERS N. Y. publisher wants books on all subjects, fiction, nonfiction. No fee for profession opinion. 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Thus Karsch tries to describe Achim’s first visit to West Berlin where he felt like a foreigner: Nothing invited him .. . he was as _ distant from them [the West Berliners] as the impression of Sunday morning from working days; there was move- ment all around him that left him standing still, the way Sunday stops and leaves one standing alone and helpless in lonely rooms. In this clean remote- ness in this neat foreign country, Sun- daylike alone and insecure. —Something like that perhaps? asked Karsch. —Might be: said Achim. — Perhaps: he said. In a way... Possibly for related reasons, Rolf Schneider does not emerge in Bridges and Bars as a whole or convincing per- sonality. One of East Germany’s more gifted and versatile younger writers, best known for his competent radio plays, Schneider seems to be trying to prove in this collection of short stories that he can also juggle the unfamiliar and do literary saltos, and as a circus per- former imitating the West and the past he really does succeed admirably, he amuses and diverts, although with a singularly waxen humor. One wonders: Is this his way of coping with the heart- aches of being a German—by evading, rehashing, play-acting? Some of the stories so blatantly resemble famous models, from Kafka to Grass, that one is bound to assume Schneider did them as a playful exercise; one is tempted to write “very good” at the top and hand his paper back to him. Indeed, the writing is most accomplished. It is syn- thetic, that is all. Two of the ten playwrights in Postwar German Theatre are Swiss, one is a Hungarian living in Switzerland, and one was a prewar dramatist. Eight of the eleven plays are one-acters, none is by an East German; and of West Germany’s important writers for the stage, Rolf Hochhuth, Martin Walser and Christian Geissler are left out. The translations are excellent, but the leit- motiv of this disappointingly biased selection is the entrapped and self-pitying intellectual in the modern world, which does not give a fair picture of the Ger- man drama today. A notable treasure in the volume (apart from the three full- length classics by Kaiser, Borchert and Sylvanus) is Tankred Dorst’s witty “Freedom for Clemens,” about a man who prefers yearning for freedom to actually choosing it when it is offered. Third-Party Expectations GIDEON’S ARMY. By Curtis D. Mac- Dougall. Introduction by H. H. Wilson. Marzani & Munsell. 3 Vols. 884 pp., $19.50. CYNTHIA L. ADCOCK Mrs. Adcock’s studies in history and jour- nalism have centered on American radical- ism and the Progressive Party. The notion that the Presidential elec- tion of 1968 is likely to be a repeat of 1948 appears often in the American press today. James Reston, Tom Wicker, The New Republic’s T.R.B., and other columnists anticipate four candidates: a Democrat (Johnson); a Republican; a States’-Righter (George Wallace of Alabama replacing the 1948 contender Strom Thurmond), and .a_peace-civil rights candidate in place of Henry Wal- lace, Progressive Party candidate in 1948. Indeed, many basic elements of the political situations then and now are similar. A legendary, liberal President (Roosevelt, Kennedy) died in office, and was replaced by a relatively con- servative Vice President (Truman, John- 186 son); corn-ball humor replaced sophis- tication in the White House. Henry Wal- lace and the most prominent of Roose- velt’s liberal advisers were sent into exile by Truman; Robert Kennedy and many New _ Frontiersmen have left Johnson’s Administration. In 1948, we had escalation of the cold war to be followed by the Korean War; today we have the war in Vietnam. These similarities make it timely to reread the story of the Progressive Party of 1948. Gideon’s Army, by Cur- tis MacDougall, narrates the growth of the Progressive movement from Henry Wallace’s defeat for the 1944 Vice Presidential nomination to his defeat as Progressive Presidential candidate. Vol- ume I carried the story up to Wallace’s announcement that he would run for President. Only the most _ interested reader will fight his way through the turgid repetitive prose, the succession of headline clichés in place of analysis, and the errors in punctuation that veil the author’s meaning. Inexpert writing notwithstanding, MacDougall is profes- sor of journalism at Northwestern, and ‘looms , ' ¥ oe Van was for many years ‘a practicing jours | nalist. He ran for the Senate from Illi- | nois on the Progressive ticket, and has | an insider’s knowledge of the move- |p) ment. When he narrates the Progres- |W sive campaign itself, in Volumes II and }1 III, his writing improves markedly; we }# are caught up in the drama, and find | to that he, too, seeks to analyze the ex- |) perience. J | For MacDougall, “the story of the | Progressive party of 1948 is one of an /fi unsuccessful attempt to impress the elec- | i torate with the prime importance of | 10 foreign affairs as they related to world) p peace.” The basic technique of the cam- i th paign was that of mass appeal by the jt national leaders, Wallace and Vice Pres- } a idential candidate Sen. Glen Taylor. The } party’s greatest weakness was the fail- | ure to build local organizations. ig Although Communists and extreme ji left wingers were very active in the party, MacDougall sees their influence as generally “conservative.” They re- strained Wallace’s tendency to rant about | “Wall Street imperialism,” and urged | him to emphasize bread-and-butter is- |j sues rather than foreign policy. In an }§ extensive discussion of Progressive plat- | form writing, MacDougall shows that } no clear-cut Left-Right schism existed, }; and his hundreds of interviews with party workers since 1950 lend weight to these conclusions. In the story of the Progressive } Party, it is the overwhelming predom- } inance of Henry Agard Wallace which largest. Liberals and radicals § alike made a cult of this corn-fed, apolitical, idealistic product of Amer- ica’s heartland, who used the rhetoric of Eastern urban radicals and the Pop-— ular Front. He gave to radicals the hope. that all of America could be converted. In a chilling intimate portrait, however, MacDougall shows us Henry Wallace as cold, stingy and smug, the kind of man who could say: “I always made it clear whenever extremists were in conversa- tion with me that I believe in God.” The naive trust with which he was received by party workers no longer exists—it cannot be granted to Robert Kennedy or any other major politician today. Nor are today’s politicians likely to duplicate the innocent enthusiasm with which Wallace left his party to lead a personal crusade (he did not even put up a battle for the Democratic Presidential nomination). Wallace was willing to leave his party because he confidently expected a large vote of approval from the American people rather than the overwhelming de- feat he suffered. The expectation was for 5 million votes; 1 million were ac- tually received. (The party won no elec- — toral votes and only 2.38 per cent of | the popular vote.) | THE NATION/September 4, 1967 a2 | te that “the United States is not d the bipartisan reactionary war licy which is dividing the world into © armed camps.” And though opposi- ‘tion to Truman’s foreign policy was | quite as widespread as is present opposi- | tion to the war in Vietnam, 1948 (and /1966 as well) demonstrate how poorly “peace candidates may run. The Progressives of 1948 believed | firmly in the promise of the New Deal, ‘and aimed at restoring a valid tradition ‘to its rightful place. To do so a third party seemed a natural response if the i] two major parties were abandoning the ij) tradition. Today the Left is bewildered %§ and divided in its explanations for what | ‘soured the tradition. How did the en- I thusiasm of the New Deal welfare pro- @ grams produce for millions the despon- | dency of life on the dole? Or the war ' machine, built to defend us against Hit- i! ler, sow the seeds for Vietnam and for future Vietnams, with helicopters in i] Thailand and napalm in Peru? A third ij party seems self-defeating and prema- , ture to much of the Left today. From lj} SDS to SNCC to older radicals, the MF Left is dissatisfied with protest tech- “niques; it wants to concentrate on build- ing: a political movement with a com- mitment that will last beyond any single issue like Vietnam. _ MacDougall’s book makes obvious another significant difference between 1948 and our own times. In 1948 the Left was an exiled “rump” of a major party, coalesced about a single national ‘leader-in-exile. It thus resembled the other Progressive parties of our century _—Theodore Roosevelt’s Bull Moosers of 1912 and the La Follette movement in 1924. Today the Left more closely ‘Tesembles the early stages of the two “most successful third parties in our his- tory, the Republicans in the 1850s, and the Populists of the 1890s. Both were strongest on the local level, based on well-established protest movements led _by a variety of regional organizers and bitterly alienated from the national leadership of major parties. In 1948 American radicalism was or- ) ganized about the Democratic Party. The major groups in the Progressive | Party were those who had formed in | 1944 to support Roosevelt’s re-election. Indeed, many radicals had enjoyed Es- tablishment status under Roosevelt. To- day the civil rights and peace move- ‘Ments are outside the Establishment. _ They contend equally with Democratic -and Republican foot dragging. When they turn to electoral politics, activists from both movements build their own organizations and select their own can- didates, even if these run in the Demo- _€fatic primary. The “CIPA” movement (Committees for Independent Political THE NATION/September 4, 1967 100 Years of Fighting Stampedes* TEE has managed to survive, the Decatur N AT IO IN (Illinois) Herald observed on the occasion of our centennial, “by fight- ing stampedes for over 100 years.” Heading off stampedes is peculiarly American; the country has the energy and space to set hoofs really thundering. We call to mind only a few of the most irrational flights: the jingoism that plunged us into wars with Mexico and Spain, the hypocritical hysteria of Prohibition, the “uproar” of McCarthyism, “Let’s Get Hoffa!,” “Send in the Marines!” (to Haiti, Nicaragua, the Dominican Republic, Cuba, etc.), “We must beat the Russians to. the moon,” the anti-missile missile, the SST. The list is long. Some of the stampedes of the last 102 years ran over us roughshod, some we slowed a bit, some we helped to stop. But there are few we failed to challenge. If you think Bonanza is where the action is, come out on the range with The Nation. *(“Stampede, any headlong flight of a large group; from the Mex.- Sp. estampida or ‘uproar.’ ”) FREE with each NEW subscription AMERICA’S VIETNAM POLICY: THE STRATEGY OF DECEPTION This book, which is now available in a paperback edition, is an authori- by Edward S. Herman tative study of the most baffling as- . pects of U. S. policy regarding our in- anes Richard B. Du Boff volvement in Southeast Asia. The NATION Herewith my order and payment for a NEW 333 Sixth Avenue subscription to The Nation. Please send my f AMERICA’S VIETNAM POLICY. New York, N.Y.10014 Jf ©? [7] 1 Year, $10 [-] 2 Years, $18 [7] 6 Mos., $6 (Foreign and Canadian postage: $1 per year extra) 187 Action) proliferates, but still only in local politics. In the absence of a national leader- in-exile, and with radicals very skepti- cal of a national third party, it seems unlikely that a major independent challenge to President Johnson will de- velop in 1968. Liberals, dissatisfied with the war in Vietnam, are more like- ly to defect to the Republican Party, as the ADA recently warned the Presi- dent. The very complexity of our po- litical society militates against new parties. No single group is strong enough to change the structure. Change must come through coalition and com- promise, usually through the vehicles of the major parties. The primary elec- tion makes intra-party accommodation even more likely. The electoral-vote sys- tem, where the winner takes all of a state’s votes, makes a minor party al- most’ a hopeless cause. Since 1948, new nominating petition and vote-winning re- quirements for getting on the ballot have multiplied the difficulties as well. Minor parties of course agitated for many reforms later adopted by the major parties—the convention system of nominations, woman and Negro suf- frage, direct election of Senators, the SS 63 Ee a Ee The Nation SUBSCRIBERS’ BOOK SERVICE \ Offers the following at a discount: Oo THE NEW RADICALISM by Christopher Lasch (Knopf, $6.95). $5.55 fal THE GOODBYE LAND by Jose Yglesias (Pantheon, $4.95)............ $3.95 oO AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF BERTRAND RUSSELL, 1872-1914 (Little, Brown & GO IOD).-ectichs oe tdleis ee ROC ee Rew $6.35 oO THE ACCIDENTAL PRESIDENT by Robert G. 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But nonparty pressure groups engaged in similar agitation, And third parties have even more often served as burial grounds for reforms, such as the single tax, free coinage of silver, fiat money and government ownership of railroads and telegraph lines. In short, the third party is not a proven vehicle for advancing change, especially of foreign policy. Perhaps they are more often a safety valve for frustrated reformers and radicals. In a society as bureaucratic as ours, such emo- tional release is valuable, and Progres- sive Party workers remember their crusade with intense nostalgia. MacDougall credits the Progressive Party with causing an immediate shift to the left by the Democratic Party. Today, bogged down in Vietnam, our cities filled with racial unrest, and the war on poverty ground to a halt, the change seems neither significant nor Heroes of a Bad Time CHILDREN OF CRISIS: A Study of Courage and Fear. By Robert Coles, M.D. Little, Brown & Co. 401 pp. $8.50. ROBERT BELENKY Mr. Belenky is associate professor, Grad- uate School of Arts and Sciences at Boston College. Children of Crisis is an important social document about the personal correlates of political change in the American South. Robert Coles, a child psychia- trist, spent several years in the South, first as an Air Force doctor and then as a participant observer in the civil rights struggles of the early 1960s. He became particularly concerned with the effects of these struggles on those who fought: the children, their parents and teachers, the civil rights activists and the racists. Coles lived among the pro- tagonists, became a trusted and helpful friend to many and listened patiently to all. What I am trying to do [Coles ex- plains] is describe certain lives; specifi- cally, describe the way those lives have come to terms with the political and social changes that have taken place in a particular region of this country. .. . I have tried... to... locate my body and mind where certain citizens are up against difficult times, so that their lives, like those of the sick, may have something to teach the rest of us. A most unusual mental health prac- titioner, Dr. Coles has produced a labor lasting. The threat of a Democratic } schism did cause Truman to veto the | ' Taft-Hartley bill, but he made no e I fort to prevent Congress from voting to override. Truman evinced no feeling | ' of obligation to the Left after he was | ! re-elected. i? A successful party, minor or major, } ! requires an organized power base, and | | this the Progressives lacked. Does such I an independent base for a new third \ party exist today? Economic conditions, | | too, are a paramount factor in the suc- | ! cess of third parties. When a major | price drop is combined with a severe | : or prolonged drop in business activity, | | protest voting reaches new heights. | ‘ When the war in Vietnam is over, will | ‘ a recession follow? It is such factors, | | rather than any foreign policy issue, | that augur the fate of a future third } party. At any rate, these seem to be the | lessons of 1948 for the politicians of 1968, q| is of love—no, a love song—to his “pa- | tients” (clinical terms don’t really ap- ply—we should call them friends, I suppose). Through them _ psychiatrist | Coles has “gained insights” about being in touch with life and the world. He in turn has attempted to pass the message on. But communication is not always free of clutter. Coles’s perspective is some-— times uncertain. Torn between a totally involved, advocacy-of-change position and an objective, remote and scientif- ically correct stance, he sometimes sounds as if he is at a clinical staffing 9 or a professorial colloquium. Most of | i the time, however, he resolves the con- flict by saying simply what he thinks. © Coles himself manages to emerge at least as clearly as do the people he - describes. He is an interesting man, — ambling, comfortable, loquacious. Al- 9 though he writes about revolution with jf considerable sympathy, there is a notable 9 absence of strident, jarring sound. He writes as if smoking a pipe. His manner is gentle, humane, almost aesthetic. One @ can readily understand why people, busy 9 in the midst of shattering crises, would it choose to spend so much of their time in conversation with this man. 4 } Coles provides us with rare op- | portunities to know a diverse selection @ of people living in the eye of the storm: 9} Ruby, a 6-year-old Negro girl who had to brave angry mobs each day in order © to attend a nearly empty classroom; a cultured white schoolteacher who al- | THE NATION/September 4, 1967 oe d when she saw a Negro an in the shower but who came atually to request an integrated class- Toom (not really a non sequitur); a pu- ritanical, self-denying Negro teacher who does not want integration—“we’re so ‘anxious to ‘integrate’ that some of us are willing to lose ourselves; to disap- pear”; Larry, the white liberal in con- | flict who came to be useful, respected, appreciated—despite himself . . . and then there were shopkeepers, professors, | a grand Southern lady and others. -_ He discovers that little of what he ) sees can be understood in terms of psychopathology, either of the individual or of groups. Neither the little school children, nor the civil rights demonstra- - tors, mor even the lynchers and burners are by and large mentally ill or in any i real sense beyond the fringes of worka- _ day encounters. And Coles concludes that | participation in struggle, even when it _ becomes most frightening and discour- aging, may have a salutary effect on the | human psyche. Ruby said: “So I told | Granny that as bad as they make it _ for us, the stronger Ill get.” But the actors are never larger than _. life; they are neither heroes nor villains of the monumental sort. The message that continually comes through is that, despite our expectations, people involved on all sides were perfectly ordinary— just like the rest of us. Most seemed _ simply to have been thrust by accident into the mainstream of history and there they managed to swim only be- cause they weren't prepared to sink. Although most modern psychiatrists leave little to chance, Dr. Coles seems to be saying that people often happen to get caught in a tidal movement of social forces and just simply do what they have to. On the other hand, Coles precisely _ discards historical determinism. People are most assuredly not passively buf- feted about by circumstances but in fact create circumstances—sometimes _ with considerable fervor. As with every- ir ‘thing else there seems to be a middle _ ground, a dialectic, and more fascinating _ even than the philosophy are the explor- _ ations of the people, those, for example, _ who buck the current: the determined Southern white liberals, sometimes se- _cretly heroic, often by necessity openly so; or those who swim with the ebbing _ ante-bellum tide and must spend enor- mous psychic energy to maintain the conditions of a fantasy—that complex of myth and feelings known as Ameri- _ can racism. Then there are those who _ change. George, although presumably Still a segregationist, first torments Lois, then considers her “our nigger” and » finally asks to sign her yearbook out of _ respect, sympathy and admiration—as well as guilt. HE NATION/September 4, 1967 Coles is at his best when he describes and records. He is a fine social docu- menter—a journalist in the best sense— and his book is a rich provision of sensitively excavated material of the recent struggles in the South. THEATRE ROBERT F. SAYRE Mr. Sayre is a member of the English De- partment and Center for Modern Letters at the University of Iowa, and the author of The Examined Self: Benjamin Franklin, Henry Adams, Henry James (Princeton). San Francisco This summer’s productions of the San Francisco Mime Troupe have been Commedia dell’ Arte versions of Carlo Goldoni’s L’Amant Militaire (translated by Betty Schwimmer, adapted by Joan Holden), and Lope de Rueda’s Olive Pits (adapted by Peter Berg and Peter Cohon). The “theatres,” as has been the case for the last six years, are pub- lic parks in San Francisco and the Bay Area, where Olive Pits is done Wednes- days-Fridays and L’Amant weekends. On the surface, this combination must seem like an awful anomaly, another San Francisco weirdy to go with jazz- poetry and cable cars. In New York, after all, “authentic” revivals of com- media are for college drama societies, the park is for Shakespeare (if possi- ble), and Goldoni and Lope, de Rueda are for Off-Broadway. Yet in San Francisco it all works. L’Amant is an hour and three-quarters of grotesque anti-military satire, in which the analogy of the Spanish im- perial army in Italy and the United States in Vietnam is quite intended and deftly elaborated. The Pantalone is a grabby collaborator who is_ interested in marrying his ravishing daughter to the Spanish “Generale.” The Harlequin is a sweet little guy who gets tricked into enlisting and then, when he tries to get out by dressing as a woman, gets arrested as a “pervert, fairy, draft dodger’! At other moments comic Span- ish soldiers strut like automated Gls and go through rifle drill with crutches. Between scenes a gravel-voiced puppet roars out anti-war ballads and leads the audience in chanting “Hell No; We Won't Go.” Olive Pits satirizes commercial agri- ethia \ culture, really an equally sensitive sub- ject in this rich state. In it the Pantalone is a poor farmer who thinks he can beat the system by investing and be- coming an olive grower. He turns his daughter’s dowry over to a Scaramouche who steals it, cheats the daughter, and leaves him in debt at something like 75 per cent interest. Thus, what unites the various ele- ments of these two plays is their po- litical purpose. Both are illustrations of the principle that any nimble, serious theatre today almost must be political. Ronnie Davis, who directs the Troupe, refers to it as “guerrilla theatre.” He started it in 1959 as a sort of cell group within the San Francisco Actors Work- shop, but two years later broke loose to try to play in public parks. The motto became “Commitment and Fresh Air,” even though the park department did its best to stop performances and thus limit the latter. The legend is that it supports itself strictly on what its actors beg, wandering-player-like, from the audience at the end of each show; and of outdoor shows the legend is apparently true. But whatever the truth, the commitment endures and deepens. One basic reason is that any actor who will work under Mime Troupe condi- tions—dressing in privies or behind a truck, speaking over the noise of dogs, playgrounds and police sirens—has to The Best Way To Get | NATI ON | THE NATION 9-4-67 333 Sixth Ave., New York 10014 [_] One Year, $10 [_] Two Years, $18 [_] 6 Months, $6 (] Bilt Me (Foreign and Canadian Postage $l a year extra) (_] Payment Enclosed PCCP REPT RRR RRC SREP PROPER EOC OPE REPKE RE REECE OER ROR Ree eee NAICS. tarda Cairo lectus apaanee nena ‘ BGOLESS sat ais paccontdae ceatene meee p CIy aoe Rane ie Meis te nolo Hee ee Site resececdoah cee. Zip No 189 be committed. (And in such places: as Denver, Colo., and Calgary, Alberta, as well as the city of St. Francis, the police have committed them.) But the Troupe is also an illus- tration of what may be a more important principle—that contemporary political theatre must be nonrealistic. As Viet Rock and America Hurrah are recent forms of surrealism, the Mime Troupe’s commedias are a reawakening of pre- realism. The conditions of outdoor play- ing almost demand commedia—loud voices, typed characters, exaggerated gestures and easily followed plots (even if ornately complicated). But the reason these old commedia methods work so well is that their dramatic grossness corresponds remarkably to the actual grossness of Vietnam America: its fat malproportioned wealth, its hypocrisy and cant, its mummified code of values. But the beautiful thing about the Mime Troupe, unlike more ephemeral kinds of nonrealistic satire, is that these classical gestures and situations are not only so peculiarly representational but also so earthy, powerful and clear. Com- pared to the recent spate of satirical re- views, which are sometimes described as modernized commedia or “our form of it,” the Mime Troupe plays are fresher and bolder. The smartly dressed Teview audiences want wisecracks which will hold their attention only while the lights are out and they sip a $1.50 Scotch. To the park audiences—parents and kids and the dropouts and rejects who have always been the inhabitants of city parks. in America—Pantalone, Scaramouche and the lovely busty maidens mean a great deal more than the new night-club wit. A sophisticated theatregoer will see these stereotypes as remote and historical, while a park-goer simply recognizes the types—the cheat- ing businessman, the loan shark, and wronged and angry girls. And the basis of such a recognition is the growing knowledge—of enormous political po- tential—that we are, and are surrounded by, types, of which the commedia ones are a good, popularly usable index. Com- media can thus flow into our public consciousness as an improved way of seeing. In the future, however, Mime Troupe commedias might have to. discard certain other residual traces of foreign times and places. My criticism of these 190 OCTOBER: DEAD STEER “Bloated” the herdsman ascertains, and phones the man who'll buy and render what. he can. Toward the beast stiff as a wineskin, tank-shaped, over chewed-down grass the herd drifts in a cloud. At last, five daylight hours since day lit— the first among them reaches their fellow, smells him or nudges. Two others follow. Then a dozen. They have nothing to say. Behind them a gleaner chews the pale cornfield— hurried back and forth, its diesel roar heard never by Sidney Spenser Lodge Jonson Milton in their Arcadies. The crowd takes turns noiselessly to look, real curiosity, detached and brief. When he brings a wagonload of feed they shake their grass-stained knees and raise one voice following the herdsman where he drives, their brother left in the empty place. Back and forth the yellow reaper runs spitting out waste, more and more field left bare. Fed, they go on making the same bad paths, same vast immodesties, sexual blunders, doomed tries and battles: none enthusiastic. Lick each other and, with cow hearts, keep close. The man with the truck comes and takés away the solitude that moaned, then chilly lay like bare field, where the reaper finishing— swollen with the corn—turns off its sound, two productions—at least at the shows I saw—is that there are still minor dif- ficulties in following plots and in know- ing, at some moments, when and to what degree some actors are in char- acter and when not. With another kind of theatre such troubles could be fatal. They aren't here because the Mime Troupe uses so many forms of hilarity and because the troubles are a conse- quence of riches, not deficiencies. The Troupe also demands its freedom to ex- periment, to keep trying new improvisa- tions for each new audience. What might be done, for example, with the great gap between American hippy life and all the ancient fusses about dowries and inviting suitors to dinner? There is surely a lot of comedy to be made from such disjunctions, though requir- ing considerable economy to succeed without sacrificing other things. Com- media could be stronger if it were selec- tively further domesticated, as the Troupe did earlier with its Modern Minstrel Show: Civil Rights in a Cracker BINK NOLL Barrel. characters and plots which would be © more easily followed? One of the Troupe’s former members, Luis Valdez, has found some by starting a grape pickers’ theatre in Delano, El Teatro Campesino, which uses stock characters like the broker, the boss, the striker and the scab. Let there be.no doubt, though, that the Mime Troupe is on its way—and also on its way east this October for another tour of college and university theatres and shows at places on the underground circuit like the Firehouse Theater in Minneapolis. Above-ground San Francisco now distrusts this guerrilla troupe to the extent that neither of the two remaining daily papers has reviewed this summer’s plays. I suspect there are a lot of people among the city’s Dot- tores, Capitanos and Scaramouches who will be very glad to have it leave town for a while—which, of course, is the Old West’s kind of low-down, dirty honor. THE NATION/September 4, 1967 Aren’t there other formulaic FRANK W. LEWIS rossword Puzzle No. 1213 ror ACROSS: 1 The source is found in Lincoln’s early folk. (10) 6 and | down Honest and fair on the adjacent face of the cube, as more pros- perous times were termed. (4,6,3,6) 10 Sandy might describe his head according to folk-lore. (7) 11 Paid informer with a way of divvying things up. (3,4) 12 Star some distance above Richmond? (4) 13 and 18 down Evidently the martyr liked everything hot and spicy. (1,3,3,3,7) 1S Trained to make up at least part of the down payment. (5-2) 16 The sign of the orient in back of the oriental? (7) 17 Linen suit expected to bring out the following expression? (2,5) 20 Where the occupants may be scaled ac- cording to their environment. (7) 22 Nothing has a faint trace like stone. (10) 23 The part of the check that makes the trip possible. (4) 25 Born high-class, but once changed for a time. (7) 26 Blemish, and where the spot is marked it’s possibly made red. (7) 27 Daring outbreak? (4) 28 Someone said they don’t make prisons for such as Jackson! (5,5) inside gets DOWN: | See 6 across 2 What comes toward the end of the year shortly has a way of making the girl. The auctioneer might hope to hear the same thing. (4) 4 One can’t say “it’s al 5 Not necessarily 10d to the British, de- spite the sound. (7) ; 7 The adjective doesn’t apply to knowing 8 9 4 ue just like a man!” (7) people. (7) Made up like an Austrian girl, but really pretty American. (8,7) Obviously big circus, but no big-top. (9) Used to rate the good-natured spirits going around. (9) 18 See 13 across 19 The case is confused terminology. (7) 20 Proving there’s a little spirit in an attributive type of name. (7) 21 It sometimes happens when the panel is hung. (7) 24 Depicted a well-known stage family. (4) SOLUTION TO PUZZLE NO. 1212 ACROSS: 1 by rather legal Caloric; 5 Bucolic; 9 Nacelle: 10 Gouache; 11 Freight stations; 12 Re- spond; 13 Darkest; 14 Blessed; 17 Heralds; 20 Understandingly; 21 Raiders: 22 Spanish; 23 Dresses; 24 Pattern. DOWN: 1 Conifer; 2 Lockers; 3 Religious orders; 4 Crested; 5 Bigoted; 6 Counter-irritant; 7 Lactose: 8 Cresset; 14 Blurred; 15 Endwise; 16 De- tests; 17 Hands up; 18 Ignite; 19 Say when PUBLICATIONS THE IDLER. Lively, offbeat, liberal monthly. $i brings four different sample back issues. Sane. 413B 6th St., N.E., Washington, D.C, 20002 “SELECTED POEMS” of GEORGE FLYNN (Villiers of London—$2.00) is “the most ex- citing American poetry since Ezra Pound.” —James Turner. Available in U.S. from the ama! at: 145 West 12 Street, New York City 1001 WORLD DEMOCRACY: By Bin Dir Woor, Self. Designated Symbolical President. Unique. En- trancing. $2. Greenwich Book Publishers, 282 7th Avenue, N.Y.C. Bin Dir Woor denies that he is at present a candidate for the presidency of the United States, but he asks thousands to run for public offices, not to win, but to pray for the sick and the dying, and to bless CHILDREN in the name of a just and humane WORLD DEMOCRACY. ART. WOULD YOU BELIEVE? 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Anytime, anywhere. Licensed, insured, experienced. THE COVERED WAGON, ALgon- quin 5-1788 (N.Y.C.) $2.95 each SAVE YOUR COPIES OF The NATION * Each file holds a full year’s copies. Attractive and practical for your home or office 3 for $8.25 ORDER NOW — send check or money order. MAGAZINE FILE CO. 520 FIFTH AVENUE NEW YORK 36,N. Y. * Jesse Jones Vol- ume Files for every publication. * Covered in durable leather like Kivar, title embossed in 16 Kt gold. Satisfaction guaranteed FREE DESCRIPTIVE FOLDER UPON REQUEST Advertising Rates Classified: 74c a line (6 aia 3 line min. Classified Display: $7.42 per inch (min.) THE NATION, 333 Sixth Ave., N.Y. 10014 242.8400 _ THE NATION/September 4, 1967 Printed by Milford Publishers, Inc., Milford, Conn. 191 ia” Saree. a nation-wide call to women Challenge the Draft Calls say. No More Men for Vietnam More and more young Americans are saying ‘No’ to the draft and ‘’No” to the Vietnam war. Thousands face jail, court martial or exile ~because they refuse to participate in an immoral, illegal and unjust war which proceeds without the clear consent of the American people. These courageous young men are acting for all Americans who oppose the war, but who fee! power- less to stop it. For, when a government acts without consent and all petitions to reverse its action fail, then refusal to carry out unauthorized governmental orders is the fundamental obligation of citizens in a democracy. : Come to Selective Service Headquarters Wednesday, September 20th, Wash., D.C. Join us— cam sasaki teae tn Show that American women want their sons to build, not bomb. Show that American women support the brave boys who say “No”. it On September 20th we women will pledge: \ to assist those young men whose conscience has led them to resist the draft. a to encourage all American women to join us in a massive movement which will force our government i 4 i . . . . Ry, to reverse its unauthorized policies. ne \ to unseat those men in office who deny the needs of black and white citizens for a decent, demo- cratic and peaceful America. { Launch a Women’s Resistance Movement PEC PCRS CARER TORE KUT C RECT RE REST TE STR T ETERS TEV E STC R TREKS CECT RSET SSE HTT GES H ESTEE ERE Ke ee eee Eee Women Strike for Peace 799 Broadway New York, N.Y. 10003 Board the Women Strike for ap? Bi Peace Bus Caravan. Bring your lunch. Buses will make I want to support the boys who resist the draft........ Send more information. dinner stop.... Seabee enclosed to help your peace work. Or cee > Sete enclosed for...... bus tickets. ($8 round trip from all points in the N.Y. Come on your own, or fill a car, plane or bus from your own community. Placards will be provided. Assemble at White House gate at 12:30 PM. Later to rally across the street and then a few blocks to Selective Service Head- ‘quarters. Metropolitan area. Schedules and departure points will be enclosed with your tickets. Call your local office of Women Strike for Peace for travel information in other areas.) Name (print) Address ce ccc eg MN City State Zip wn ER a ee ee ee NATION SEPTEMBER 11, 1967 35 cents af ct a ANE at woul Ae Bi of] (Q8 SPECIAL FEATURE ‘THE CULTURAL COLD WAR Christopher Lasch ESS eee THE ANTI-COMMUNIST EMPIRE Responsible Critics: Draper and Steel TOM J. FARER "| < et Indonesia: The Guru and the Coup RD - = ALEX JOSEY oes Vietnam Guide: An Annotated List ig mimso oo he Pec i | wre wv at &D=—pA ih o Encounter addressed themselves with zeal to its destruc- tion. The new magazine lost no time in establishing its point of view and its characteristic tone of ultra-sophistication. The very first issue contained a spirited polemic on the Rosenberg case by Leslie Fiedler, whose uncanny instinct for cultural fashions, combined with a gift for racy lan- guage (“Come Back to the Raft Ag’in, Huck Honey”), made him a suitable spokesman for cultural freedom in the fifties. Fiedler had already, in “Hiss, Chambers, and the Age of Innocence,” exhorted intellectuals to accept their common guilt in the crimes of Alger Hiss. With an equal disregard for the disputed facts of the case, he now went on to berate sentimentalists who still believed the Rosenbergs to be innocent. “As far as I am concerned, the legal guilt of the Rosenbergs was clearly established at their trial.” From the fact of their guilt, Fiedler spun an intricate web of theory intended to show, once again, what a pervasive and deplorable influence Stalinism had exercised, for twenty years, over the life of the mind in America. Years later it turned out that the central document which had been used to convict the Rosenbergs was a crude forgery. Even while proclaiming the “end of innocence,” Fiedler was performing feats of gullibility that. rivaled and even ex- celled the ones he attacked. Again and again, the profes- sional cold warriors were taken in by just such “evidence” as that which convicted the Rosenbergs—evidence brought forward to prove a Communist conspiracy in the United States and a Communist conspiracy to take over the world; or on the other hand, to prove that, whereas So- viet intellectuals lived under bureaucratic control, Amer- ican intellectuals arrived at their judgments quite inde- pendently of official interference. In the latter context, “in- nocence,” the end of which Fiedler somewhat premature- ly celebrated, could hardly go further than that of certain editors of Encounter, in the matter of the magazine’s financing. For a group of intellectuals who prided themselves on their realism, skepticism and detachment (qualities they regularly displayed in cogent analyses of the deplorable state of affairs in Russia), the editors of Encounter and their contributors showed a surprisingly unshakable faith in the good intentions of the American Government. It was inconceivable to them that American officials were not somehow immune to the temptations of great power. The defense of “cultural freedom” was wholly entwined, in their minds, with the defense of the “free world” against communism. Criticism of the men who presided over the free world—even mild criticism—tended automatically to exclude itself from their minds as a subject for serious dis- cussion. These men might make occasional mistakes; but there could be no question of their devotion to freedom. “Encounter,” wrote Denis Brogan (a frequent contribu- tor) in 1963, “has been the organ of protest against the trahison des clercs.’ Julian Benda’s point, in the book from which Brogan took this phrase, was that intellectuals should serve truth, not power. Encounter’s claim to be the detender of intellectual values in a world dominated by ideology rested, therefore, on its vigorous criticism of all influences tending to undermine critical thought, whether they emanated from the Soviet Union or from the United THE NATION/ September 11, 1967 0. . ‘5 FF ie Gy # ay 4 ia oH 4 ‘! E | A a — ee a — od ee ag A ee OS oy eee a Se WD i he 2 aE, of Encounter have made. As we shall see, the cold-war liberals have not hesitated to criticize American popular ' culture or popular politics, but the question is whether they have criticized the American Government or any _ other aspect of the officially sanctioned order. And the fact is that Encounter, like other journals sponsored by _ the Congress for Cultural Freedom (except perhaps for Censorship, which recently expired), consistently ap- _ proved the broad lines and even the details of American policy, until the war in Vietnam shattered the cold-war coalition and introduced a new phase of American poli- tics. Writers in Encounter denounced the Soviet intervention in Hungary without drawing the same conclusions about ’ the Bay of Pigs. The magazine published Theodore Dra- per’s diatribes against Castro, which laid a theoretical ba- sis for American intervention by depicting Castro as a Soviet puppet and a menace to the Western Hemisphere. Writers in Encounter had little if anything to say about the American coup in Guatemala, the CIA’s intervention in Iran, its role in the creation of Diem, or the American support of Trujillo; but these same writers regarded Com- munist “colonialism” with horror. The plight of the Com- munist satellites wrung their hearts; that of South Korea and South Vietnam left them unmoved. They denounced racism in the Soviet Union while ignoring it in South Af- rica and the United States until it was no longer possible to ignore it, at which time (1963) Encounter published FRONTS [—etacon runo 16 C) i PRICE FUND \\) /\_- aeons foo] iA —| WILLIFORD - TELFORD FUND So MIUCHIGAN FUND | | DAMES CARLISLE TRUST _ THE NATION/September 11, 1967 CONDUITS AMERICAN COUNCIL FOR See Crone stete [or ie MR COMMISSION OF FURISTS HOGLITZELLE FOUNDATION T.M.KAPLAN Af FUND.INC, RABB(SIONEY AND ESTHER) CHARITABLE FOUNDATION an issue un the “Negro Crisis,” the general tone of which was quite consistent with the optimism then being pur- veyed by the Kennedy administration. In 1958, Dwight Macdonald submitted an article to Encounter—*America! America!”—in which he won- dered whether the intellectuals’ rush to rediscover their native land (one of the obsessive concerns of the fifties, at almost every level of cultural life) had not_produced a somewhat uncritical acquiesence in the American imperi- um. A magazine devoted to the defense of intellectual freedom might have welcomed a piece of criticism on so timely a subject, all the more timely inasmuch as some of the more prominent of the rediscoverers of America (Les- lie Fiedler, for example) had also written for Encounter. Instead, the editors asked Macdonald to publish his article elsewhere. In the correspondence that followed, according to Macdonald, “the note sounded more than once... [was] that publication of my article might embarrass the Congress in its relations with the American foundations which support it.” When the incident became public, Nicholas Nabokov, secretary general of the Congress, pointed in triumph to the fact that Macdonald’s article had eventually appeared in Tempo Presente, an Italian peri- odical sponsored by the Congress. That proved, he said, that the Paris headquarters of the Congress did not dictate editorial policy to the magazines it supported. But the question was not whether the Paris office dictated to the editors; the question was whether the editors took it upon themselves to avoid displeasing the sponsors, whoever they RECIPIENTS CONGRESS FOR Agneb sr CULTURAL FREEDOM INSTITUTE OF INTERNA — TIONAL LABOR RESEARCH INC SYNOD OF BISHOPS OF THE RUSSIAN CHURCH OUTSIDE. OF RUSSIA AFRICAN -AMERICAN INSTITUTE AMERICAN FRIENDS OF THE MIDOLE EAST ; AMERICAN SocIETy oF AFRICAN CULTURE INSTITUTE OF INTERNA- TIONAL ERPUCATION INSTITUTE OF PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION ATWATER RESEARCH PARO- GRAM IN NoRTH AFRICA NATIONAL STUDENT ASSCCIATION OPERATIONS 8 POLICY RESEARCHING, Harry Moss (based on a chart in Newsweek) 201 = a5 te Wit, od rs, hme were, standing behind the Congress for Cultural Freedom. The reference to “American foundations,” in their corre- spondence with Macdonald, seemed to suggest that the editors exercised a degree of self-censorship, partly con- scious and partly unconscious, that made any other form of censorship unnecessary. It was possible that they had so completely assimilated the official point of view that they were no longer aware of the way in which their writ- ings had come to serve as rationalizations of American world power. Mission to India The Congress for Cultural Freedom, growing directly out of the postwar power struggle in Europe, centered most of its attention on Europe, as did American foreign policy in the fifties, but it did not neglect the rest of the world. In 1951 it sponsored a large conference in India, attended by such luminaries as Denis de Rougemont, W. H. Auden, Stephen Spender, Ignazio Silone, Louis Fischer, Norman Thomas and, of course, James Burnham, without whom, in those early days, no gathering of the Congress was complete. The Times correspondent understated the case when he wrote that “many of the delegates are said to be former Communists, who have become critics.” He noted further: “The meeting has been described as an answer to the ‘World Peace Conference’ supported by the Soviet Union.” (The Berlin conference of the year be- fore, it will be recalled, was also conceived as a response to Soviet “peace propaganda.” Its immediate stimulus was a series of peace congresses in East Germany.) The delegates meeting in India hoped to bring home to the nonaligned nations the immorality of neutralism. Transferred to a non-Western setting, however, the reiter- ation of this theme, which had gone down so well with the Berliners, led to an “unexpected undertone of dissatis- faction,” according to the Times. When Denis de Rouge- mont “compared the present Indian neutrality with that of the lamb that is neutral between the wolf and the shep- herd,” one of the Indian delegates drew from the fable a moral quite different from the one intended. He pointed out that the shepherd, having saved the lamb from the wolf, “shears the lamb and possibly eats it.” Many Indians boycotted the Congress because it had been “branded widely as a U.S. propaganda device.” The Indian Govern- ment took pains to withhold official sanction from the meeting, and insisted that it be held, not as intended in the capital, New Delhi, but in Bombay. It seemed at times that the Indians did not want to be free. Robert Trumbull, a correspondent of the Times, tried to reassure his readers about their “peculiar” point of view. The Indian speakers weren’t really neutralists, they were only “manifesting the common Indian oratorial tendency to stray from the real point of the issue in hand.” A dispassionate observer might have concluded that they understood the point all too well. The Congress, having in any case suffered a rebuff, made no more direct attacks on neutralism in the Third World. In 1958 it held a conference on the problems of developing nations, but the tone of this meeting differed noticeably from the one in Bombay. (It was on the sec- ond of these occasions, incidentally, that Richard Rovere 202 a rn My. i as Wet es ty ay th rea y ) ht wrote the memorable description of the Congress for Cul- tural Freedom as “fa worthy organization, anti-Communist © and generally libertarian in outlook and associated with |) no government.”) The conference, meeting on the isle of Rhodes, produced no notable results. Probably it was not expected to have any. Already the global struggle for cultural freedom seemed to have entered a new phase, in which the crudely propagandist flavor of the Berlin and Bombay meetings had given way to a new worldliness, a new “sophistication”’—about neutralism, for example— that heralded the coming of the New Frontier. A new official style was emerging, faithfully reflected in the Congress for Cultural Freedom—urbane, cool and bureau- cratic. The old slogans had become passe (even as the old policies continued). The union of intellect and power deceptively presented itself as an apparent liberalization of official attitudes, an apparent relaxation of American anti-communism. McCarthyism was dead and civilized conversation in great demand. The Congress for Cul- tural Freedom no longer proselytized; to everyone’s de- light, it sponsored conversation—bounded, of course, by the limits of rational discourse, the agreed-upon end of ideology, but with no other visible strings attached. The Congress flew people to Rhodes (a pleasant place to find oneself in the middle of an American winter) and en- couraged them to participate in a highly civilized, non- ideological discussion of economic development—a grat- ifying experience for everybody concerned, all the more so since it made so few demands on the participants. Ex~- pansive and tolerant, the Congress asked only that intel- lectuals avail themselves of the increasing opportunities for travel and enlightenment that the defense of freedom made possible. Home Front Rancors Shortly after the founding of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, its more active members set up subsidiaries in various countries. The American Committee for Cultural Freedom was founded in 1951 by Burnham, Farrell, Schlesinger, Hook and others, to hold annual forums on such topics as “The Ex-Communist: His Role in a Democ- racy” or “Anti-Americanism in Europe”; to “counteract the influence of mendacious Communist propaganda” (for instance, “the Communist assertion that the Rosenbergs were victimized innocents”); to defend academic free- dom; and in general “to resist the lengthening shadow of thought-control.” The Committee had a limited though illustrious membership, never exceeding 600, and it sub- sisted on grants from the Congress and on public contri- butions. It repeatedly made public appeals for money, even announcing, in 1957, that it was going out of busi- ness for lack of funds. It survived; but ever since that time it has been semi-moribund, for reasons that will become clearer in a moment. Sidney Hook was the first chairman of the ACCF. He was succeeded in 1952 by George S. Counts of Teachers College, Columbia, who was followed in 1954 by Robert Gorham Davis of Smith. James T. Farrell, who took Davis’ place in the same year, resigned.in 1956 after a quarrel with other members of the Committee. Traveling THE NATION/September 11, 1967 { ! q | | m | ". i] 7 | | | aS ; ‘ { " the Third World, he had come to the conclusion that eign aid was a waste of money and that the Indians, | for instance, believed that their best policy was “to flirt ' with Communists, insult us and perhaps get more money | out of us.” In a letter written from Turkey and published in the Chicago Tribune, Farrell insisted that American _ aid should be given only on condition that the recipients _ join the United States in “a truly honest partnership in ' freedom”; otherwise Americans “should retire to our own | shores” and “go it alone.” Diana Trilling, chairman of the administrative commit- tee of the American Committee for Cultural Freedom, attacked Farrell’s letter on the ground that it “sullied his long record as a champion of understanding among the _ free peoples of the world.” Anyone expressing such opinions, she said, was “not suited” for the chairmanship _ of the ACCF. Farrell, in resigning, said that “his travels | had convinced him that he and other members had been ‘wrong’ in earlier struggles against Paris office policies.” His statement, incidentally, suggests that the Paris office sometimes tried to enforce its own views on subsidiary organizations, in spite of its disclaimers. It also shows— what should already be apparent—that the Congress in its early period took a very hard line on neutralism. Farrell’s resignation, along with other events, signaled _ the breakdown of the coalition on which the American ' Committee was based, a coalition of moderate liberals and reactionaries (both groups including a large number of ex-Communists) held together by their mutual obses- sion with the Communist conspiracy. James Burnham had already resigned in 1954. Earlier Burnham had re- signed as a member of the advisory board of Partisan Review (which since 1959 has been sponsored by the Committee) in a dispute with the editors over McCar- thyism. Burnham approved of McCarthy’s actions and held that the attack upon him was a “diversionary” issue created by Communists. William Phillips and Philip Rahy, adapting a favorite slogan of the cold war to their -own purposes, announced that there was no room on Partisan Review for “neutralism” about McCarthy. Originally, the ACCF took quite literally the assertion, advanced by Koestler and others at Berlin, that the Com- munist issue overrode conventional distinctions between Left and Right. Right wingers like Burnham, Farrell, Ralph de Toledano, John Chamberlain, John Dos Passos, and even Whittaker Chambers consorted with Schlesinger, Hook, Irving Kristol, Daniel Beil and other liberals. In the early fifties, this uneasy alliance worked because the liberals generally took positions that conceded a good deal of ground to the Right, if they were not indistin- guishable from those of the Right. But the end of the Korean War and the censure of McCarthy in 1954 created a slightly less oppressive air in which the right-wing rhet- oric of the early fifties seemed increasingly inappropriate to political realities. Now that McCarthy was dead as a political force, the liberals courageously attacked him, thereby driving the Right out of the Committee for Cul- tural Freedom. The ACCF and its parent, the Congress for Cultural Freedom, had-taken shape in a period of the cold war when official anti-communism had not clearly distin- guished itself, rhetorically, from the anti-communism of _ THE NATION/ September 11, 1967 the Right. In a later period official liberalism, having taken over essential features of the rightist world view, belatedly : dissociated itself from the cruder and blatantly reactionary type of anti-communism, and now pursued the same anti- ie Communist policies in the name of anti-imperialism and ti progressive’ change. Once again, the Kennedy administra- ip tion contributed decisively to the change of style, placing ; more emphasis on “counterinsurgency” than on military alliances, advocating an “Alliance for Progress,” de-em- phasizing military aid in favor of “development,” refrain- i ing from attacks on neutralism, and presenting itself as the champion of democratic revolution in the undeveloped world. The practical result of the change was a partial detente, with communism in Europe and a decidedly more aggres- sive policy in the rest of the world (made possible by that detente), of which the most notable products were the Bay of Pigs, the Dominican intervention and the war in Vietnam. The particular brand of anti-communism that flourished in the fifties grew out of the postwar power struggles in Europe and out of traumas of 20th- century history—fascism, Stalinism, the crisis of liberal democracy—all of which had concerned Europe, not Asia. The anti-communism of the sixties focused on the Third World and demanded another kind of rhetoric. Heresy or Conspiracy During its active years, however, the ACCF represent- ed a coalition of liberals and reactionaries who shared a conspiratorial view of communism and who agreed, moreover, that the Communist conspiracy had spread through practically every level of American society. (It is the adherence of liberals to these dogmas that shows how much they had conceded to the right-wing view of his- tory.) Sidney Hook’s “Heresy, Yes—Conspiracy, No!,” published in The New York Times Magazine in 1950-51 and distributed as a pamphlet by the ACCF, set forth the orthodox position and tried to distinguish it (not very successfully) from that of the Right, as well as from “rit- ualistic liberalism.”” Heresy—the open expression of dis- senting opinions—had to be distinguished, according to Hook, from secret movements seeking to attain their ends “not by normal political or educational processes but by playing outside the rules of the game.” This dis- tinction did not lead Hook to conclude that communism, insofar as it was a heresy as opposed to a conspiracy, was entitled to constitutional protection. On the contrary, he argued that communism was a conspiracy by its very na- ture—a point he sought to establish by quotations from Lenin and Stalin which purportedly revealed a grand de- sign for world conquest. Since they were members of an international conspiracy—servants of a foreign power— Communists could not expect to enjoy the same liberties enjoyed by other Americans. The American Committee’s official position on academ- ic freedom started from the same premise. “A member of the Communist Party has transgressed the canons of aca- demic responsibility, has engaged his intellect to servility, and is therefore professionally disqualified from perform- ing his functions as scholar and teacher.” The committee on academic freedom (Counts, Hook, Arthur O. Lovejoy 203 { t 2 ree 5 and Paul R. Hays) characteristically went on to argue that the matter of Communists should be left “in the hands of the colleges, and their faculties.” “There is no justifica- tion for a Congressional committee to concern itself with the question.” Academic freedom meant self-determination for the academic community. The full implications of this position will be explored in due time. “Ritualistic liberals,” according to Hook, not only failed to distinguish between heresy and conspiracy, they helped to “weaken the moral case of Western democracy against Communist totalitarianism” by deploring witch hunts. Hook, like many liberals in the ACCF, essentially en- dorsed James Burnham’s contention that this issue was a Communist diversion, conjured up to divide the forces of anti-communism. Talk of witch hunts, he argued, gave the unfortunate impression that America was “on the verge of fascism.” He conceded that some demagogues—he tactfully re- frained from naming them—sought to discredit unpopular reforms by unfairly labeling them Communist. But the important point was that these activities were not the offi- cial policy of “our government,” they were the actions of “cultural vigilantes.” Ignorant people saw progressive education, for example, or the federal withholding tax, as evidence of Communist subversion—an absurdity which suggested to Hook, not the inherent absurdity of the anti-Communist ideology but the absurdity of untutored individuals concerning themselves with mat- ters best left to experts. “A community has a right to de- cide whether it wishes to support a medical system or a school system. But it would be absurd to try to settle, by the pressures of the market place, what medical theories should guide medical practice or what educational theories should guide educational practice.” Likewise it was ab- surd to argue that a withholding tax on wages was “a sign of a police state.” “There may be relevant arguments against any general or specific form of tax withholding, but they are of a technical economic nature and have ab- solutely nothing to do with a police state.” Once again, the student of these events is struck by the way in which ex-Communists seem always to have retained the worst of Marx and Lenin and to have discarded the 204 ” cuwnenié best. The elitism which once glorified intellectuals as a rev- olutionary avant-garde now glorifies them as experts and social technicians. On the other hand, Marx’s insistence that political issues be seen in their social context—his in- sistence, for example, that questions of taxation are not “technical” questions but political questions the solutions to which reflect the type of social organization in which they arise—this social determinism, which makes Marx’s ideas potentially so useful as a method of social analysis, has been sloughed off by Hook without a qualm. These reflections lead one to the conclusion, once more, that in- tellectuals were more attracted to Marxism in the first place as an elitist and anti-democratic ideology than as a means of analysis which provided not answers but the beginnings of a critical theory of society. Hook’s whole line of argument, with its glorification of experts and its attack on amateurs, reflected one of the dominant values of the modern intellectual—his acute sense of himself as a professional with a vested interest in technical solutions to political problems. Leave education to the educators and taxation to the tax lawyers. Hook’s attack on “cultural vigilantism” paralleled the academic interpretation of McCarthyism as a form of Populism and a form of anti-intellectualism, except that it did not even go so far as to condemn McCarthyism itself; instead, it fo- cused attention on peripheral issues like progressive edu- cation and the withholding tax. Some liberals, in fact, specifically defended McCarthy. Irving Kristol, in his notorious article in the March, 1952 issue of Commentary, admitted that McCarthy was a “vulgar demagogue,” but added: “There is one thing that the American people know about Senator McCarthy; he, like them, is unequivocally anti-Communist. About the spokesmen for American liberalism, they feel they know no such thing.” This article has been cited many times to show how scandalously the anti-Communist Left allied itself with the Right. Kristol’s article was a scandal, but it was no more a scandal than the apparently more moderate position which condemned unauthorized anti- communism while endorsing the official variety. By de- fining the issue as “cultural vigilantism,” the anti-Com- munist intellectuals lent themselves to the dominant drive THE NATION/September 11, 1967 am | aI a ) _oe Wadeds nates ae .oen oa te RE Shai ap ale Lee ee ets ees of violence (vigilantism) but to discredit all crit- which does not come from officially recognized experts (‘cultural vigilantism”). The attack on vigilant- “isn played directly into the state’s hands. The govern- ment had a positive interest in suppressing McCarthy, ‘not because of any solicitude for civil liberties but be- ause McCarthy’s unauthorized anti-communism com- peted with and disrupted official anti-Communist activ- “ities like the Voice of America. This point was made again and again during the Army-McCarthy hearings. ‘(Indeed the fact that it was the Army that emerged as McCarthy’s most powerful antagonist is itself Suggestive.) The same point dominated the propaganda t of the ACCF: unofficial anti-communism actually weak- ened the nation in its struggle with communism. “Govern- ® ment agencies,” said Hook, “find their work hampered by the private fevers of cultural vigilantism which have arisen like a rash from the anti-Communist mood.” “Constant vigilance,” he added, “does not require private citizens to usurp the functions of agencies entrusted with the task of _ detection and exposure.’ In effect—though they would have denied it—the in- | tellectuals of the ACCF defined cultural freedom as what- | ever best served the interests of the United States Govern- | ment. Vigilantism was bad because it competed with the experts; also because it blackened the image of the | United States abroad. When James Wechsler was dropped | from a television program, The New Leader (a magazine which consistently took the same positions as the ACCF) f | | | ij ' wrote: “This lends substance to the Communist charge _ that America is hysteria-ridden.” After McCarthy’s at- tack on the Voice of America, even Sidney Hook criti- | cized McCarthy because of “the incalculable harm he is | doing to the reputation of the United States abroad.” The | ACCF officially condemned McCarthy’s investigation of | the Voice of America. “The net effect, at this crucial mo- | _ ment, has been to frustrate the very possibility of the Unit- } ed States embarking on a program of psychological war- | fare against world communism.” A few months later, the ACCF announced the appointment of Sol Stein as its ex- | ecutive director. Stein had been a writer and political af- | fairs analyst for the Voice of America. He was succeeded in 1956 by Norman Jacobs, chief political commentator of q the Voice of America and head of its Central Radio ia Features Branch from 1948 to 1955. | The ‘Sincerity’ Test ls While avoiding a principled attack on McCarthyism, | the ACCF kept up a running fire on “anti-anti-commu- | nism.” (It was characteristic of the period that issues so | _ often presented themselves in this sterile form and that positions were formulated not with regard to the sub- | stance of a question but with regard to an attitude or _ “posture” which it was deemed desirable to hold.) In _ January, 1953, the ACCF handed down a directive setting _ out the grounds on which it was permissible to involve oneself in the Rosenberg case. “[The] pre-eminent fact of _ the Rosenbergs” guilt must be openly acknowledged be- _ fore any appeal for clemency can be regarded as having _ been made in good faith. Those who allow the Commu- THE NATION/September 11, 1967 nists to make use of their names in such a way as to permit any doubt to arise about the Rosenbergs’ guilt are doing a grave disservice to the cause of justice—and of mercy, too.” % In 1954, the Emergency Civil Liberties Committee sponsored a conference at Princeton, at which Albert Einstein, along with Corliss Lamont, I. F. Stone, Dirk Struik, and others, urged intellectuals not to cooperate with “witch-hunting” Congressional committees. Sol Stein immediately announced that the ACCF op- posed any “exploitation” of academic freedom and civil liberties “by persons who are at this late date still sympa- thetic to the cause of the Soviet Union.” Following its usual practice, the ACCF proceeded to lay down a stand- ard to which any “sincere” criticism of American life, even of McCarthyism, had to conform. “The test of any group’s sincerity is whether it is opposed to threats of freedom anywhere in the world and whether it is con- cerned about the gross suppression of civil liberties and academic freedom behind the Iron Curtain. The Emer- gency Civil Liberties Committee has not met that test.” The validity of criticism, in other words, depended not so much on its substance as on its adherence to a prescribed ritual of dissent—a ritual, one can see, which had a spe- cial significance for ex-Communists because it required the critic first of all to purge himself by denouncing the crimes of Stalinism, but which invariably served to blunt criticism of the United States. On another occasion, the ACCF tried to plant with the New York World-Telegram and Sun a story, already cir- culated by The New Leader, that a certain liberal journal- ist was a “Soviet espionage agent.” Sol Stein called the city desk with what he described as a “Junior Alger Hiss” story. The reporter who took the call asked whether the proper place to determine the truth of these charges was not a court of law. Stein replied, in this reporter’s words, that “libel suits were a Communist trick to destroy oppo- sition by forcing it to bear the expense of trial.” The reporter then asked whether the ACCF was “upholding — the right of people to call anyone a Communist without being subject to libel suits.” Stein said: “You misunder- stand the context of the times. Many reckless charges are being made today. But when the charges are documented, the Committee believes you have the right to say someone is following the Communist line without being brought into court.” The reporter asked if Stein had any proof that the journalist in question was a Soviet spy. Stein said no, “but we have mountains of material that show he consistently follows the Soviet line.” When they took positions of which the ACCF disap- proved the “ritualistic liberals’ were Communist tools. When they took positions critical of the Soviet Union, the ACCF denied their right to take them. Arthur Miller in 1956 wrote a statement condemning political interference with art in the Soviet Union. The ACCF did not con- gratulate him; it asked why he had not taken the same position in 1949. The Committee also noted that Miller, in any case, had made an unforgivable mistake: he had criti- cized political interference with art not only in the Soviet Union but in the United States, thereby implying that the two situations were comparable. American incidents, the Committee declared, were “episodic violations of the 205 tradition of political and cultural freedom in the United States,” whereas “the official government policy” of the USSR was to “impose a ‘party line’ in all fields of art, culture and science, and enforcing such a line with sanc- tions ranging from imprisonment to exile to loss of job.” Having dutifully rapped Miller’s knuckles, the ACCF then went on to make use of his statement by challenging the Soviet Government to circulate it in Russia. Where the Chips Fell In 1955 a New York Times editorial praised the ACCF for playing a vital role in “the struggle for the loyalty of the world’s intellectuals”—in itself a curious way of describing the defense of cultural freedom. The Times went on to make the same claim that was so frequently made by the Committee itself: “The group’s authority to speak for freedom against Communist slavery has been enhanced by its courageous fight against those threatening our own civil liberties from the Right.” We have already noted that the Committee’s quarrel with the Right, even though it finally led to the departure of the right-wing members of the Committee, was far from “courageous.” Even when it found itself confronted with cultural vigilantism in its most obvious forms, the Committee stopped short of an unambiguous defense of intellectual freedom. In 1955, for instance, Muhlenberg College canceled a Charlie Chaplin film festival under pressure from a local post of the Ameri- can Legion. The ACCF protested that “while it is perfect- ly clear that Chaplin tends to be pro-Soviet and anti-Amer- ican in his political attitudes, there is no reason why we should not enjoy his excellent movies, which have nothing to do with Communist totalitarianism.” This statement left the disturbing implication that if Chaplin’s films could be regarded as political, the ban would have been justified. The assertion that art had nothing to do with politics was the poorest possible ground on which to defend cultural freedom. But whatever the nature of the ACCF’s critique of vigi- Jantism, a better test of its “authority to speak for free- dom” would have been its willingness to criticize official activities in the United States—the real parallel to Soviet repression. (In the Soviet Union, attacks on vigilantism are doubtless not only not proscribed but encouraged. It is attacks on Soviet officials that are not permitted.) It is worth examining, therefore, the few occasions on which the ACCF expressed even the slightest disapproval of American policy. In March, 1955, the Committee criticized a post office ban on Pravda and Izvestia as “unreasonable and inef- fective in dealing with the Communist conspiracy.” A year Jater the Committee deplored the Treasury Department’s raid on the office of The Daily Worker. “However much we abominate The Daily Worker . . . we must protest even this much interference with the democratic right to pub- lish freely.” The ACCF criticized the Agriculture Depart- ments dismissal of Wolf Ladejinsky and the Atomic Energy Commission’s persecution of Oppenheimer, in both cases arguing that the victims had established them- selves in recent years as impeccably anti-Communist. On one occasion the ACCF attacked the U.S. Information Agency because it had canceled an art show in response 206 to charges that four of the artists represented were sub yer- sive. Diana Trilling insisted that “actions of this kind hold us up to derision abroad.” She went on to question the ‘| judgment of government officials “who mix politics and | art to the detriment of both.” On the other hand, when 360 citizens petitioned the | Supreme Court to repeal the 1950 Internal Security Act (which created the Subversive Activities Control Board), — James T. Farrell issued a statement for the ACCF calling the petitions “naive,” accusing them of a “whitewash” of |) » the Communist Party, and declaring that if freedom were left in their hands “it would have no future.” The infrequency of complaints against American offi- cials, together with the triviality of the issues that called | them forth—as contrasted with the issues against which ~ | others protested out of their “naivete’—show that the anti-Communist liberals cannot claim to have defended cultural freedom in the United States with the same con- ‘| . sistency and vigor with which they defended it in Russia. In the first place, they concerned themselves with the actions of vigilantes at a time when the gravest threat to freedom came from the state. In the second place, even the attack on vigilantism was halfhearted; it was only | when McCarthyism moved against the Voice of America that the ACCF criticized him at all, and most of the criticism came after McCarthy had already been cen- sured by the Senate. Claiming to be the vanguard of the struggle for cultural freedom, the anti-Communist intel- lectuals in realitygbrought up the rear. Finally, they based their positions (such positions as they took) on grounds that had nothing to do with cul- tural freedom. They condemned vigilantism on_ the grounds that it embarrassed the United States abroad and interfered with the government’s efforts to root out the Communist conspiracy at home. They criticized inter- ference with art not because they thought that the best art inevitably subverts conventions (including political ones) and is valuable for that very reason but because they believed, on the contrary, that art and politics should be “divorced.”* They defended academic freedom for non-Communists only, and even for non-Communists they defended it on the ground that educators, as experts in a complicated technique, ought to be left alone to man- age their own affairs. In all of this, the cold-war intellectuals revealed them- selves as the servants of bureaucratic power; and it was not altogether surprising, years later, to find that the relation of intellectuals to power was even closer than it had seemed at the time. The Professional and the State As a group, intellectuals had achieved a semi-official status which assigned them professional responsibility for the machinery of education and for cultural affairs in general. Within this sphere—within the schools, the uni- versities, the theatre, the concert hall and the politico- literary magazines—they had achieved both autonomy and *The popularity of the “new criticism,” with its insistence that a work of art can be understood without any reference to the author’s life, was symptomatic of the cultural climate of the fifties. THE NATION/ September 11, 1967 a rent to the government, to corporations and to the oundations. _ Professional intellectuals had become indispensable to society and to the state (in ways which neither the intel- lectuals nor even the state always perceived), partly be- cause of the increasing importance of education—especial- ly the need for trained experts—and partly because the cold war seemed to demand that the United States com- _ pete with communism in the cultural sphere as well as # in every other. The modern state, among other things, ‘is an engine of propaganda, alternately manufacturing | crises and claiming to be the only instrument which can ® effectively deal with them. This propaganda, in order Die be successful, demands the cooperation of writers, teachers and artists not as paid propagandists or state- censored time servers but as “free” intellectuals capable of policing their own jurisdictions and of enforcing ac- ceptable standards of responsibility within the various intellectual professions. A system like this presupposes two things: a high _ degree of professional consciousness among intellectuals, _ and general economic affluence which frees the patrons ' of intellectual life from the need to account for the money they spend on culture. Once these conditions _ exist, as they have existed in the United States for some | time, intellectuals can be trusted to censor themselves, | and crude “political” influence over intellectual life | comes to seem passe. In the Soviet Union, on the other rr hand, intellectuals are insufficiently professionalized to be | able effectively to resist political control. As one would | _ expect in a developing society, a strong commitment to | applied knowledge mitigates against the development of | _ “pure” standards which is one of the chief prerequisites | of professionalization. It can be demonstrated that in the 19th century United States professionalization of intellectual activities went hand in hand with the acceptance of pure research as a legitimate enterprise, first among intellectuals themselves and then among their patrons. Only When they win acceptance for pure research do intellectuals establish themselves as masters in their ; ; own house, free from the nagging public scrutiny that | naively expects to see the value of intellectual activity _ measured in immediate practical applications. This battle | having been won, the achievement of ‘“‘academic free- { 5 | dom” is comparatively easy, since academic freedom _ presents itself (as we have seen) not as a defense of | the necessarily subversive character of good intellectual _ work but as a prerequisite for pure research. Moreover, _ the more intellectual purity identifies itself with “value- _ free” investigations, the more it empties itself of political - content and the easier it is for public officials to tolerate _ it. The “scientific” spirit, spreading from the natural - sciences to social studies, tends to drain the latter of _ their critical potential while at the same time making _ them ideal instruments of bureaucratic control. The high status enjoyed by American intellectuals ‘ Becpends on their having convinced their backers in _ government and. industry that “basic research” produces _ better results in the long run than mindless empiricism. But in order for intellectuals to win this battle it was ‘THE NATION/September 11, 1967 » necessary not only to convince themselves of these things but to overcome the narrowly utilitarian approach to knowledge that usually prevails among the patrons of learning. The advancement of pure learning on a large scale demands that the sponsors of learning be willing to spend large sums of money without hope of immediate return. In advanced capitalism, this require- ment happily coincides with the capitalists’ need to en- gage in conspicuous expenditure; hence the dominant role played by “captains of industry” in the profession- alization of higher education (with the results described by Veblen in The Higher Learning in America). At a still later stage of development, the same role is played by the foundations and directly by government, both of which need to engage in a form of expenditure (not necessarily conspicuous in all its details) that shares with the conspicuous expenditure of the capitalist a marked indifference to results. Modern bureaucracies are money-spending agencies. The more money a bu- reaucracy can spend, the larger the budget it can claim. Since the bureaucracy is. more interested in its own aggrandizement than in doing a job, the bureaucrat is restrained in his expenditure only by the need to account to some superior and ultimately, perhaps, to the public; but in complicated bureaucracies it is hard for anyone to account for the money, particularly since a state of continual emergency can be invoked to justify secrecy in all the important operations of government. This state of perfect nonaccountability, which is the goal toward which bureaucracies ceaselessly strive, works to the indirect advantage of pure research and of the profes- sionalized intellectuals. In Soviet Russia, a comparatively undeveloped econ- emy cannot sustain thé luxury of unaccounted expendi- 207 ~ yy seh ae ah, a ’ te@ em ture, and the bureaucracy is still infected, therefore, by a penny-pinching mentality that begrudges expenditures unless they can be justified in utilitarian terms. This attitude, together with the lack of professional conscious- ness among intellectuals themselves (many of whom share the belief that knowledge is valuable not for itself but for the social and political uses to which it can be put), is the source of the political interference with knowledge that is so widely deplored in the West. It is obvious that the critical spirit cannot thrive under these conditions. Even art is judged in narrowly utilitarian terms and subjected to autocratic regulation by ignorant bureaucrats. What needs to be emphasized, however, is that the triumph of academic freedom in the United States, under the special conditions which have brought it about, does not necessarily lead to intellectual independence and critical thinking. It is a serious mistake to confuse academic freedom with cultural freedom. American in- tellectuals are not subject to political control, but the very conditions which have brought about this result have undermined their capacity for independent thought. The American press is free, but it censors itself. The university is free, but it has purged itself of ideas. The literary intellectuals are free, but they use their freedom to propagandize for the state. The freedom of American intellectuals as a profes- sional class blinds them to their un-freedom. It leads them to confuse the political interests of intellectuals as an official minority with the progress of intellect. Their freedom from overt political control (particularly from “vigilantes”) blinds them to the way in which the “knowledge industry” has been incorporated into the state and the military-industrial complex. Since the state exerts so little censorship over the cultural enterprises it subsidizes—since on the contrary it supports basic research, congresses for cultural freedom, and various liberal organizations—intellectuals do not see that these activities serve the interests of the state, not the interests of intellect. All they can see is the absence of exter- nal censorship; that and that alone proves to their satis- faction that Soviet intellectuals are slaves and American intellectuals free men. Meanwhile, their own self-censor- ship makes them eligible for the official recognition and support that sustain the illusion that the American Government, unlike the Soviet Government, greatly values the life of the mind. The circle of illusion is thus com- plete; and even the revelation that the campaign for “cultural freedom” was itself the creation and tool of the state has not yet torn away the veil. The Intellectual Front That there is no necessary contradiction between the iaterests of organized intellectuals and the interests of American world power, that the intellectual community can be trusted to police itself and should be left free from annoying pressures from outside, that dissenting opinion within the framework of agreement on cold-war fundamentals not only should be tolerated but can be turned to effective propaganda use abroad—all these things were apparent, in the early fifties, to the more 208 enlightened members of the governmental bureaucracy; but they were far from being universally acknowledged even in the bureaucracy, much less in Congress or in the country as a whole. “Back in the early 1950s,” says Thomas W. Braden, the man who supervised the cul- tural activities of the CIA, “ ... the idea that Congress would have approved many of our projects was about as likely as the John Birch Society’s approving Medi- care.” There was resistance to these projects in the CIA > itself. To a man of Braden’s background and _ inclina- tions, the idea of supporting liberal and Socialist “fronts” grew naturally out of the logic of the cold war. During the Second World War, Braden served with the OSS— next to the Communist movement itself, the most fruit- ful source, it would appear, of postwar anti-communism (the same people often having served in both). After joining the CIA in 1950, Braden served as a member of the California State Board of Education. He was a new type of bureaucrat, equally at home in govern- ment and in academic circles; but when in 1950 he proposed that “the CIA ought to take on the Russians by penetrating a battery of international fronts,” his more conventional colleagues made the quaint objection that “this is just another one of those goddamned pro- posals for getting into everybody’s hair.” Allan Dulles intervened to save the project after it had been voted down by the division chiefs. “Thus began the first centralized effort to combat Communist fronts.” Before they had finished, the directors of the CIA had infiltrated the National Student Association, the Institute of International Labor Research, the American Newspaper Guild, the American Friends of the Middle East, the National Council of Churches and many other worthy organizations. “We . . . placed one agent in a Europe-based organization of intellectuals called the Congress for Cultural Freedom,” Braden notes. This “agent” was Michael Josselson, who was born in Russia in 1908, educated in Germany, represented American department stores in Paris in the mid-thirties, came to the United States just before the war, and was naturalized in 1941. During the war Josselson, like Braden, served in the OSS. Afterwards he was sent to Berlin as an officer for cultural affairs in Patton’s army. There he met Melvin J. Lasky.. In 1947 he and Lasky led a walkout of anti-Communists from a cultural meeting in the Russian sector of Berlin. When they organized the Congress for Cultural Freedom in 1950, Josselson became its executive director—a position he still holds, in spite of the exposure of his connection with the CIA. “Another agent became an editor of Encounter.” The usefulness of these agents, Braden comments, was that they “could not only propose anti-Communist programs to the official leaders of the organizations but they could also suggest ways and means to solve the inevitable budgetary problems. Why not see if the needed money could be obtained from ‘American foundations’ ”? Note that he does not describe the role of the CIA as having been restricted to financing these fronts; its agents were also to, promote “anti-Communist pro- grams.” When it became public that the Congress for Cultural Freedom had been financed for sixteen years by the CIA, the editors of Encounter made a great point THE NATION/ September 11, 1967 to ‘the magazine; but the whole question takes on a dif- ferent color in light of Braden’s disclosure that one of — to Lasky or Kristol—had worked for the CIA. Under _ these circumstances, it was unnecessary for the Congress to dictate policy to Encounter; nor would the other editors, _ ignorant of these connections, have been aware of any direct intervention by the CIA. On April 27, 1966, The New York Times, in a long article on the CIA, reported that the CIA had supported the Congress for Cultural Freedom and other ‘organizations through a system of dummy foundations, and that “Encounter magazine . . . was for a long time—though it is not now—one of the indirect bene- ficiaries of CIA funds.” (Rumors to this effect had circulated for years.) The editors of Encounter—Stephen Spender, Lasky and Irving Kristol—wrote an extremely a VA - TO ZELLE (> oseit S QUNDATION | 4 \ disingenuous letter to the Times in which they tried to refute the assertion without denying it outright. They asserted—what was a half-truth at best—that the Con- gress’ funds “were derived from various recognized foundations—all of them (from such institutions as the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations to the smaller ones) publicly listed in the official directories.” What was not publicly listed was the fact that some of these “smaller ones” received money from the CIA for the express purpose of supporting the Congress for Cultural Free- dom. Thus between 1961 and 1966, the CIA through some of its phony foundations (in this case the Tower Fund, the Borden Trust, the Beacon Fund, the Price Fund, the Heights Fund and the Monroe Fund) gave $430,700 to the Hoblitzelle Foundation, a philanthropical enterprise established by the Dallas millionaire Karl Hoblitzelle, and the Hoblitzelle Foundation obligingly | passed along these funds to the Congress for Cultural Freedom. Needless to say, no hint of these transactions was in the Lasky-Spender-Kristol letter to the Times. Privately, Lasky went much further and declared _ Categorically that Encounter had never received funds _ from the CIA. (Later he admitted that he had been “insufficiently frank” with his colleagues and friends.) _ THE NATION/September 11, 1967 7 / In public, however, the magazine’s defense was con- ducted in language of deliberate ambiguity. Another letter to the Times, signed by John K. Galbraith, George Kennan, Robert Oppenheimer and Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., completely avoided the question of Encounter’s financing and argued merely that the magazine’s edi- torial independence proved that it had never been “used” by the CIA. One must ask why these men felt it neces- sary to make such a guarded statement; and why, since they had to state their position so cautiously, they felt it necessary to make any statement at all. The matter is even more puzzling in view of Galbraith’s statement in the New York World Journal Tribune (March 13, 1967) that “some years ago,” while attending a meeting of the Congress in Berlin (he probably refers to a confer- ence held there in 1960), he had been told by a “knowl- edgeable friend” that the Congress for Cultural Freedom might be receiving support from the CIA. Galbraith says — that he “subjected its treasurer to interrogation and found that the poor fellow had been trained in ambiguity but not dissemblance.” “I was disturbed,” he says, “and I don’t think I would have attended any more meetings” if his entrance into government service had not ended his participation. In an interview with Ivan Yates of the London Observer (May 14, 1967), Galbraith says that he “made a mental note to attend no more meetings of the Congress.” Yates asked “how in that case he could possibly have signed the letter to The New York Times.” He replied that at the time, he had ‘very strong suspicions’ that the CIA had been financing the Con- gress. ‘I was writing really with reference to Encounter, but you could easily persuade me that the letter was much too fulsome.’ ” Whereas Lasky believes that he was “insufficiently frank,” Galbraith allows that he may have been “too fulsome.” His urbanity is imperturbable. The letter was “fulsome” indeed. Moreover, it specifi- cally dealt with the Congress for Cultural Freedom, not with Encounter, which it does not even mention by name. The letter states that “examination of the record of the congress, its magazines and its other activities — will, we believe, convince the most skeptical that the 209 | t } congress has had no loyalty except an unswerving com- mitment to cultural freedom. . .. ” Yet one of the signers of this statement was sufficiently skeptical to have “made a mental note” not to attend any more meetings of the Congress! And he was assuring the still unsuspecting public of the Congress’ unimpeachable independence long after he had privately reached the conclusion that it was probably being supported by the CIA. _ We have heard a great deal about the “credibility gap” that is supposed to have been created by the Johnson Administration; but what about the credibility of our most eminent intellectuals? As a further indication of the values that prevail among them, when the Encounter affair finally became public, Galbraith’s principal concern was that a valuable public enterprise was in danger of being discredited. The whole wretched business seemed inescapably to point to the conclusion that cultural free- dom had been consistently confused with American propaganda, and that “cultural freedom,” as defined by its leading defenders, was—to put it bluntly—a hoax. Yet at precisely the moment when the dimensions of the hoax were fully revealed, Galbraith joined the Con- gress’ board of directors; and “I intend,” he says, “to put some extra effort into its activities. I think this is the right course and I would urge similar effort on behalf of other afflicted but reformed organizations.” What should a “free thinker” do, asks the Sunday Times of London, “when he finds out that his free thought has been subsidized by a ruthlessly aggressive intelli- gence agency as part of the international cold war?” According to the curious values that prevail in American society, he should make a redoubled effort to salvage the reputation of organizations that have been compro- niised, it would seem, beyond redemption. Far from “reforming” themselves—even assuming that this was possible—Encounter and the Congress for Cultural Free- dom have vindicated the very men who led them into disaster. At their mecting in Paris last May, officials of the Congress voted to keep Josselson in his post. Lasky’s resignation was likewise rejected by the man- agement of Encounter. Ever since The New York Times asserted that En- counter had been subsidized by the CIA, the Congress and its defenders have tried to brazen out the crisis by intimidating their critics—the same tactics that worked so well in the days of the cold war. Arthur Schlesinger leaped into the breach by attacking one of Encounter’s principal critics, Conor Cruise O’Brien. Fol- lowing the Times’s initial disclosures, O’Brien delivered a lecture at New York University, subsequently pub- lished in Book Week, in which he referred to the Times story and went on to observe that “the beauty of the [CIA-Encounter] operation . . . was that writers of the first rank, who had no interest at all in serving the power structure, were induced to do so unwittingly,” while “the writing specifically required by the power structure” could be done by writers of lesser ability, men skilled in public relations and “who were, as the Belgians used to say about Moise Tshombe, comprehen- sifs, that is, they could take a hint.” In reply, Schles- inger at first dodged the question of Encounter’s rela- 210 Ss aa LC SCI ea are WA tions with the CIA by attacking O’Brien’s “apparent | inability to conceive any reason for opposition to com- || munism except bribery by the CIA.” When pressed, he said that “so long as I have been a member of the Encounter Trust, Encounter has not been the beneficiary, direct or indirect, of CIA funds.” (The subsidies to Encounter, it is now known, ran from 1953 to 1964, although the Congress’ connection with the CIA, accord- ing to Galbraith, continued until 1966.) Moreover, Schlesinger said, Spender, Lasky and Kristol had re- vealed “the past sources of Encounter’s support” and documented “its editorial and political independence.” They had, of course, done nothing of the kind. The magazine’s editorial independence was not to be taken on the editors’ word, and the question of its financing was an issue they had studiously avoided. Why did Schlesinger go out of his way to endorse their evasions? Presumably he knew as much about Encounter’s rela- tions with the CIA as Galbraith—probably a good deal more. How was cultural freedom served by lending one- self to a deliberate deception? In its issue of August, 1966, Encounter published a scurrilous attack on O’Brien by “R” (Goronwy Rees). Karl Miller of the New Statesman offered O’Brien space to reply, but when Frank Kermode of Encounter (who has since resigned as editor, saying that he knew nothing of the CIA connection) learned of this, he called Miller and threatened to sue the New Statesman for libel if O’Brien’s piece contained any reference to Encounter’s relations with the CIA. O’Brien then sued Encounter for libel and won a judgment in Ireland. At this point, Ramparts broke the story of the CIA’s infiltration of NSA, bringing a whole series of other disclosures in its wake, including the CIA’s connection with the Congress for Cultural Freedom. The editors of Encounter, unable to deny those relations any longer, and threatened with heavy damages, apologized to O’Brien, retracted its as- persions on his integrity (which it now admitted were “without justification”), and agreed to pay his legal ex- penses. Instruments of Policy Throughout this controversy, the editors of Encounter have repeatedly pointed to their editorial independence, first in order to deny (by implication) any connection with the CIA, and then when it was impossible any longer to deny that, in order to prove that the CIA, although supporting the magazine, had not tried to dic- tate its editorial policy—or in Josselson’s words, that the money had “never, never” been used “for propaganda and intelligence purposes.” Spender, Kristol and Lasky, in their letter to the Times, claimed that “we are our own masters and are part of nobody’s propaganda.” The letter signed by Galbraith and Schlesinger declared that Encounter maintained “no loyalty except an un- swerving commitment to cultural freedom” and that it had “freely criticized actions and policies of all nations, including the United States.” These statements, however, need to be set against Thomas Braden’s account of the rules that guided the International Organization of the CIA: “Use legitimate, existing organizations; disguise THE NATION/ September 11, 1967 ex ent ‘et ehca interest; protect the integrity of organization by not requiring it to support every 4 aspect of official American policy.” | -—S«*‘ These rules do more than shed light on the nature | and extent of Encounter’s editorial freedom. By pub- lishing them at a time when they must surely embarrass the writers concerned, Braden reveals the extent of his con- _ tempt for the CIA’s kept intellectuals. Whatever the intel- _ lectuals may have thought of the relation, the CIA regarded them exactly as the Communist Party regarded its fronts in the thirties and forties—as instruments of its own purpose. Most of the beneficiaries of the CIA have been understandably slow to see this point; it is hard to admit that one has been used and that one’s sense of freedom and power is an illusion. Norman Thomas, for instance, admits that he should have known where the money for his Institute of International Labor Relations was coming from, but (like Galbraith, like Thomas Braden himself) what he chiefly regrets is that a worth-while work has had to come prematurely to an end. The Kaplan Fund, Thomas insists, “never inter- fered in any way’—which merely means that he was never aware of its interference. He does not see that he was being used, as Stephen Spender puts it in his own case, “for quite different purposes” than the ones he thought he was advancing. He thought he was working for democratic reform in Latin America, whereas the CIA valued him as a showpiece, an anti-Communist who happened to be a Socialist. Spender has had the wit to recognize the situation (retrospectively) for what it was. “In reality,” he writes, the intellectuals employed by the CIA without their knowledge were “being used for concealed government propaganda.” Spender admits that this arrangement made a “mockery” of intellectual .freedom. Michael Wood, formerly of the National Students Association, has writ- ten even more poignantly of his relations with the world of power. “Those of us who worked for NSA during 1965-66, experienced an unusual sense of personal liber- ation. While actively involved in many of the insurgent campus and political movements of the day, we were also able to move freely through the highest echelons of established power.” These experiences, Wood says, “gave us a heady feeling and a sense of power beyond our years.” But “to learn that it had been bought with so terrible a compromise made me realize how impotent we really were.” Sham Pluralism What conclusions can be drawn from the history of the cultural cold war? Some of them should be obvious. Thanks to the revelations of the CIA’s secret subsidies, it is no longer very novel or startling to say that Amer- ican officials have committed themselves to fighting fire with fire, and that this strategy is self-defeating because the means corrupt the end. “In our attempts to fight unscrupulous opponents,” asks Arthur J. Moore in Chris- tianity and Crisis, “have we ended up debauching our- selves?” The history of the cold war makes it clear that the question can only be answered with an emphatic affirmative. _ THE NATION/September 11, 1967 These events, if people consider them seriously and try to confront their implications without flinching, will lead many Americans to question (perhaps for the first time) the cant about American “pluralism,” the “open society,” etc. Andrew Kopkind puts it very well: “The illusion of dissent was maintained: the CIA supported Socialist cold warriors, Fascist cold warriors, black and white cold warriors... . But it was a sham pluralism, and it was utterly corrupting.” A society which tolerates an illusory dissent is in much greater danger, in some respects, than a society in which uniformity is ruthlessly imposed. For twenty years Americans have been told that their country is an open society and that Communist peoples live in slavery. Now it appears that the very men who were most active in spreading this gospel were them=- selves the servants (“witty in some cases, unsuspect- ing in others) of the secret police. The whole show—the youth congresses, the cultural congresses, the trips abroad, the great glamorous display of American freedom and American civilization and the American standard of living—was all arranged behind the scenes by men who believed, with Thomas Braden, that “the cold war was and is a war, fought with ideas instead of bombs.” Men who have never been able to conceive of ideas as anything but instruments of national power were the sponsors of “cultural freedom.” The revelations about the intellectuals and the CIA should also make it easier to understand a point about the relation of intellectuals to power that has been widely misunderstood. In associating themselves with the war- making and propaganda machinery of the state in the hope of influencing it, intellectuals deprive them- selves of the real influence they could have as men who refuse to judge the validity of ideas by the requirements of national power or any other entrenched interest. Time after time in this century it has been shown that the dream of influencing the war machine is a delusion. In- stead the war machine corrupts the intellectuals. The war machine cannot be influenced by the advice of well- meaning intellectuals in the inner councils of govern- ment; it can only be resisted. The way to resist it is simply to refuse to put oneself at its service. That does not mean playing at revolution; it does not mean putting on blackface and adopting the speech of the ghetto; it does not mean turning on, tuning in and dropping out; it does not even mean engaging in desperate acts of con- science which show one’s willingness to take risks and to undergo physical danger. Masked as a higher selflessness, these acts become self-serving, having as their object not truth or even social change but the promotion of the indi- vidual’s self-esteem. Moreover they betray, at a deeper level, the same loss of faith which drives others into the service of the men in power—a haunting suspicion that history belongs to men of action and that men of ideas are powerless in a world that has no use for philosophy. It is precisely this belief that has enabled the same men in one lifetime to serve both the Communist Party and the CIA in the delusion that they were helping to make history—only to find, in both cases, that all they had made was a lie. But these defeats—the revelation that the man of action, revolutionist or bureaucrat, scorns 211 k Se i art pean et the philosopher whom he is able to use—have not led the philosopher to conclude that he should not allow himself to be used; they merely reinforce his self-contempt and make him the ready victim of a new political cause. The despair of intellect is closely related to the despair of democracy. In our time intellectuals are fascinated by conspiracy and intrigue, even as they celebrate the “free market place of ideas” (itself an expression that already betrays a tendency to regard ideas as commodities). They long to be on the inside of things; they want to share the secrets ordinary people are not permitted to hear. The attractions of power and the satisfactions of inside-dopesterism are stronger, in our society, than the pull of any particular position. In the last twenty years, the elitism of intellectuals has expressed itself as a celebration of American life, and this fact makes it hard to see the continuity between the thirties and forties, on the one hand, and the fifties and sixties on the other. The hyper-Americanism of the latter period seems to be a reaction against the anti- Americanism of the depression years. Both of these phenomena, however, spring from the same source, the intellectuals’ disenchantment with democracy and their alienation from intellect itself. Intellectuals associate themselves with the American war machine not so much because it represents America as because it represents action, power and conspiracy; and the identification is even easier because the war machine is itself ‘‘alienated” from the people it claims to defend. The defense intel- lectuals, “cool” and “arrogant,” pursue their obscure cal- culations in a little world bounded by the walls of the Pentagon, sealed off from the reality outside which does not always respond to their formulas and which there- fore has to be ignored in arriving at correct solutions to the “problems” of government. At Langley, Va., the CIA turns its back on America and busies itself with its empire abroad; but this empire, which the CIA tries to police, has no relation to the real lives of the people of the world—it is a fantasy of the CIA, in which con- Spiracy and counter-conspiracy, freedom and Communist slavery, the forces of light and the forces of darkness, are locked in timeless combat. The concrete embodi- ments of these abstractions have long since ceased to matter. The processes of government have been intellec- tualized. Albert D. Biderman, the prophet of “social accounting,” speaks for the dominant ethos: “With the growth of the complexity of society, immediate exper- ience with its events plays an increasingly smaller role as a source of information and basis of judgment in contrast to symbolically mediated information about these events. . . . Numerical indexes of phenomena are peculiarly fitted to these needs.”* Washington belongs to the “future-planners,” men who believe that “social accounting” will solve social “prob- lems.” Government is a “think tank,” an ivory tower, a community of scholars. A member of the RAND Corporation speaks of its “academic freedom” which “allows you to think about what you want to.” A civil servant praises the democratic tolerance, the respect for *See Sol Stern, “The Defense Intellectuals,” Ramparts, February, 1967; Andrew Kopkind, “The Future Planners,” The New Re- public, February 25, 1967. 212 hy Kahn, jolly and avuncular, encourages “intellectual di- versity”; on his staff at Hudson Institute, a center of learning largely devoted to the science of systematic de- struction, he retains a dedicated pacifist who doubtless thinks that he is slowly converting the Hudson Institute to universal brotherhood. Never before have the ruling classes been so solicitous of cultural freedom; but since this freedom no longer has anything to do with “immediate experience and its events,” it exists in a decontaminated, valueless void. HUAC Under Siege (Continued from page 197) that committees cannot conduct investigations unless they have a valid legislative purpose, HUAC has been desper- ately trying to find one. In the last Congress, it reported out three bills, none of which was adopted. Now HUAC is making another try it hopes will be aided by the political fallout from the McHugh-SACB explosion. On May 25, the committee’s chairman intro- duced H. R. 10390 which would restore the McCarran Act to life by providing that the Attorney General, not SACB, should register those persons found, by SACB, to belong to one or another of the various “Communist” groups. During the hearings (August 15-18), spokesmen for the committee frankly conceded that the purpose of the amendment was “to get around the Supreme Court rulings.” The Senate Internal Security Subcommittee has reported to the full Judiciary Committee a similar bill (S. 2171) which has now been reported out to the Sen- ale. What are the chances of one of these bills passing? The silence from the Justice Department has been deafening. It is worth noting that the Judiciary Committee did not ask the Justice Department for its opinion. The HUAC measure received favorable testimony from a former FBI assistant director (but not from the FBI itself), a former president of the American Bar Association (but not from the ABA itself), and from Judge Michael Musmanno of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, among others, in a transparent effort to create the impression that bar, bench and bureau were behind it. The HUAC measure contains a provision (not found in the Senate bill) ) which would forbid the courts from interfering by injunction, declaratory judgment or otherwise while proceedings were pending before SACB. At the present time, SACB cannot proceed with the only case now pending before it—involving the W. E. B. DuBois Clubs—until a three- judge court has disposed of a constitutional challenge to the proceedings. If H.R. 10390 fails, what other mischief can HUAC engage in by way of justifying the $350,000 appropria- tion it received for 1967? It has promised public hearings on the recent ghetto riots. But in which of the riot-torn cities could HUAC hold hearings that would not be a provocation to further rioting? What Congress should do, of course, is to enact Senator Proxmire’s bill (S. 2146) which would abolish SACB, and then it should abolish HUAC, THE NATION/ September 11, 1967 — ABUSE OF POWER. By Theodore Dra- | per. The Viking Press. 244 pp. $4.95. | Paper $1.25. PAX AMERICANA. By Ronald Steel. The Viking Press. 371 pp. $6.95. TOM J. FARER Mr. Farer is an assistant professor of law at Columbia University and was formerly Special assistant ‘to the general counsel, United States Department of Defense. / | For the past several years, Theodore | Draper and Ronald Steel have been two of the most trenchant critics of Ameri- can foreign policy. Now each _ has “stitched together his shorter pieces and placed them, with some elaboration, be- tween hard covers. For regular read- ers of liberal periodicals there is, then, | nothing very new here except the pack- age. That package, however, will ap- | parently succeed in carrying the “mes- Sage” beyond the cloistered confines of Greenwich Village and Central Park West to the solid burghers of Green- ’ wich. (Pax Americana has already re- ' ceived a favorable reference in the edi- ' torial columns of The Wall Street Jour- | nal.) But the most interesting feature _ of these two books is the actual differ- fence in their messages, a difference | which, I fear, will be overlooked in the drum roll of acclaim that any reason- ably thoughtful attack on American _ policy currently evokes. _ Draper and Steel do agree that Viet- fam is a part of the pattern of Ameri- _¢an policy. To Draper it is one of in- | creasing reliance on economic and es- _ pecially military, as opposed to politi- cal, “methods of persuasion.” This pattern of American policy has come about as a result of one political failure and frustration after another. A weaker power might have suffered them in silence or in angry self-recrimination. But the United States is too rich and powerful to take a political setback without seeking some other way to im- pose its will. _ At best, Draper’s diagnosis constitutes _a highly restricted, purely tactical in- _dictment of American foreign policy and contrasts sharply with Mr. Steel | whose thesis is that the United States _has become an imperialistic power, that ‘we have—in President de Gaulle’s _ words—“yielded « . . to that taste for intervention in which the instinct for domination (cloaks) itself.” THE NATION/September 11, 1967 The Anti-Communist Empire The difference can be stated more precisely. Draper is an obsessive anti- Communist. Like many of his genera- tion’s emotional refugees, he still seems a little shellshocked from the fratricid- al struggle with that segment of the Left which three decades ago served as a deluded fifth column for Russian power. For him labels are still mean- ingful, I suppose, and the label “Com- munist” apparently makes him twitch with hostility. Since the proclaimed ob- jective of the United States is to suppress the Communists in every cor- ner of the globe except Europe, Drap- er is hardly the man to challenge the relevance of that overriding objective to our real national interests. He does not appear to pass the first test: he does not flatly oppose the objective. While meticulously avoiding any gen- eral statement of American national in- terest, Draper drops some suggestive hints. For instance, he asserts that the partition of Vietnam under the Geneva Agreements was an “undeniable reverse to the Western powers.” As a practical matter, this assumes that the interests of the West would have been better served if France or some other West- ern state had continued to exercise hegemony over Indo-China. But why? In order to have a base on the Chinese borders? Or because we are in some mystical sense diminished by the fact that the rulers of a scrap of land label themselves Communists? Or for some more esoteric reason known only to Draper? (It must be fairly esoteric, since Draper ridicules every one of the myriad reasons cited at one time or another by successive administrations.) If, as many believe, China is the real problem in Asia, a fair case can surely be made for the proposition that a strong buffer against Chinese expansion in Southeast Asia would be a unified, independent Vietnam, and even that gentleman-troglodyte who managed Far Eastern policy for President Eisenhow- er, Walter Robertson, was prepared to concede that Ho Chi Minh and his as- sociates were the only people capable of carving such a state out of the rot- ting hulk of the French empire. Apparently, this pragmatic ap- proach to national interest doesn’t whol- ly appeal to Draper. “I, for one,” he says, “would far prefer to see an Asian democratic reformer or even an honest civilian, rather than the most ‘inde- pendent’ Communist, in power in South and North Vietnam.” His use of the conjunctive is significant, since all of us would prefer to see “democratic” - reformers not merely in Vietnam but everywhere else in the world, just as we would prefer to witness universal peace, affluence and respect for moth- erhood. But just what type of fellow is this “honest” civilian character who is not a democratic reformer? Is he dem- ocratic but not a reformer? If so, he is unlikely to institute those reforms which Draper believes have always been prerequisite to “victory” in South Vietnam. Or is he a reformer who is not a democrat and doesn’t steal? If so, he sounds like Ho without the Com- munist label. Since Draper puts a few nails of his own into the coffin of the monolithic-Red-threat theory, why then should he care whether the authoritari- an reformer calls himself a Commu- nist? A skunk by any other name should still stink. It is difficult not to feel compassion for Draper. As an American, his con- science is in shreds over what we are doing to the people and the country of Vietnam. As a man with intellectual integrity, he is revolted by the mock- ing duplicity of our government. Spurred by these emotions he has writ- ten a devastating brief on American policy in Vietnam. The tortuous thread of official explanation is diligently pur- sued from mouth to mouth, from year to year. Each knot of inconsistency is carefully unraveled before our eyes. A man from another planet reading the painstakingly assembled evidence might conceivably conclude from this book that the managers of American foreign policy were either cretins or liars. But after all this preliminary effort, what has been accomplished other than autotherapy? I assume that the au- thor’s interest was not to contribute a formula for extrication, since none is offered, though there are mini-hints that we should arrange the formation of a neutralist, civilian government prepared to negotiate peace with the NLF. The real intent of Abuse of Power is to treat Vietnam as a case study, a politi- cal parable, that will serve to inform future policy. “Whatever one may think about getting out,” Draper writes, “there is still the larger and deeper crisis of how we got into it and how 213 we got into the Cuban and Dominican military interventions” (to which he ad- verts in his opening chapter). Well, then, how did we? It is a little strange that this mas- ter’s eloquent prose should turn sud- denly turbid when applied to the criti- cal question. Yet there is no denying the frustrating opacity of Draper’s an- swer. It is either uselessly abstract— reliance on military power — or dis- concertingly superficial: the consistent i error *® political ineptitude manifested Ny by our identification with men who lack popular support (Batista in Cuba, Ca- bral in the Dominican Republic and Diem in Vietnam). Instead, one is com- pelled to deduce, we should have Ae backed “democratic reformers.” Who and where were they? We are never SPRING 1967 told. As a historian who claims to be concerned with the underlying causes of traumatic events Draper displays a strongly limited curiosity. He never asks why we end up bound to men of the Batista ilk. For an answer to that more pro- found question, we must turn to Steel who states almost bluntly that America has become an anti-revolutionary power supporting the status quo everywhere because of an “obsessive fear of Com- munism.” At least that is what he says half of the time. Draper’s description of Dean Rusk—consistency is not his hobgoblin—might, perhaps a little un- charitably, also be applied to Steel, since in one breath he claims that “what American postwar intervention The agitations of April in the sky call down to you, while earth quivers underfoot as if the Eighth Avenue express burrowed all the way to Vermont; and the rain soaking the fish-scale snow, the bloom of emerging beer cans down the road lead you toward and into spring, another spring. You can think of nothing Ney | that is not rotten, nor see anything not hideous, as the sprung wicker chair 4 m4 L scarred with ice and lichen wrenches its way You laugh, in hysterical inaction across the yard. calculating the nostalgia he v4 of people fifty years from now. Your mind Aye wrenches across the world, in the slush and mud of your gross citizenship, tearing the dirty shimmer of blossom from every bough in your shame for fake. Leaking shreds of protoplasm, fi down on one leg, you strain in the mire of blood, Alte the hysteria of inaction, you drag yourself like a tugged water-weed,-slimy and cold... Everything you make is taken from you, f . ad! is repainted and displayed in the national exposition, i every word is stripped from you in the national tirade, ce every gesture is absorbed in the national arm, iq i whatever you are disposed to think is already explained a in the national advertisement, and your being, e if you let yourself be, wi: is rung up, ping-ping, on the national cash register. | Your innocence is like cold spit in your mouth, y eject it or swallow it—you cannot " use it. The water Hit which you have not polluted squeals k in your belly. Your insane feet are marching, wee numbers crawl on your skin like lice. Everywhere ‘ ian the spring lies darkening, a choked baby a whose besotted mother will stuff it wailing into the hole an of your own despair. April, May—you vomit, and your green sex shrivels like a napalm scab. HAYDEN CARRUTH VN As Ny Pals | wor ay . t eae : aoe rc << f <7 boils down to in practice is not inter- vention against injustice or poverty for a its own sake, but intervention against Commuhism,” while in the next he claims that our real problem is not morbid fear but excessive idealism: — “(The) desire to translate American ideals into a universal political system — lies at the core of the current crisis in American diplomacy.” One suspects that whereas Draper’s obsession is communism, Steel’s is cred- | ibility. He wants to be loved in Darien, | and he is an alert enough fellow to know that the ordained cachet of “re-— sponsible criticism” of noble motives to American policy. At least this is a not implausible ex- plantation for Steel’s sporadic, plaintive the following is not uncharacteristic: If America, like Metternich’s Austro- Hungarian empire, has become an anti- revolutionary power, it is not from a desire to enforce her will upon other nations, but from an obsessive fear of Communism, a fear which induces the belief that all revolutions are Commu- nist-inspired and directed against the United States, I doubt that any nation has ever sought — to impose its will for no reason at all. — Is fear of other states a morally su- |} perior motive to greed or prestige? } The answer, I suppose, is that while the moral significance of fear may be debatable, its practical significance is © evident: if the neurotic aspects of that Aq motive are undraped, America, to para- | phrase Foggy Bottom’s favorite rhetori- | cian, may stop doing what its leaders know it is doing. ' The principal source of America’s counterrevolutionary reflex is five dec- | ades of alarm over the Communist menace. Men of many political per- suasions have rung the tocsin, not least } among them a body of now slightly aging figures long identified with liber- al causes. With a variety of motives, — one supposes, these men have engaged — in Philippics against communism—not — merely Russian or Chinese tyranny— — which have rivaled the effusions of the late Senator from Wisconsin. Through } their identification with American lib- — eralism they have lent an aura of human- © ity and intellectual respectability to ideo- logical passions which have a more nat- ural base in the barbarous Right. By seeming to believe that commun- } ism defines a single, definite and ‘uni- a 3 versally evil program for the conduct } of human affairs, Draper reveals some emotional link with (in Jason Epstein’s slashing phrase) that superration on the | Right of New York’s intellectual com- | munity which today provides the most _ sophisticated rationalizations for HES NATION/ September J2-c1G67m is the attribution — slightly remonstratives among which }j| the | 5 re , Ei nite “There is no doubt odore Draper stands a moral ear away from men like Irving ol, and his massively documented unciations of the ineffable hypocrisy ich has characterized our govern- nt’s defense of American _ inter- ition are hardly calculated to gener- te an invitation to tea at the White louse. Nevertheless, one fears the pres- ce of the debilitating reflex, a Pav- vian fleck of foam on the lips when someone dances by wrapped in a vast, shapeless blanket embroidered with the yord “Communist.” Those who may )think this characterization unfair ) should take another look at the last | paragraph of Draper’s acclaimed es- say in Commentary on the Dominican _ invasion: A great deal would be gained if the problem were attacked in different terms. Conservatives and liberals might | well ponder the words of Professor Russell Kirk in a letter to Robert _ Welch the founder and master of the John Birch Society: “Cry wolf often enough and every- one takes you for an imbecile or a knave, when after all there are wolves in this world.” Did he mean anything other than the ‘proposition that the American invasion ' was unjustified for the sole reason that the Dominican Communists did not dom- inate the insurgents? I admire Theo- dore Draper not only because he has ‘such a passionate regard for the truth | but also because his sense of humanity, | as well as proportion, overwhelms _ his | ideological repugnance. But that rooted | hostility toward an abstraction (which has flesh enough, I am sure, in his } own mind) weakens his attack and ‘strengthens the defenses of the apos- | tles of empire. The road to the Viet- ‘Mamese abattoir is paved by decisions ‘which were largely the product of the society's reflexive antagonism to the | incubus of communism. “We cannot,” Draper writes “contin- | ue to live wholly in the moment, hold- ‘ing onto every status quo, however rot- ten and unstable, to maintain the line | against Communism at whatever cost.” ) Then what should we do? Find our- | selves a democratic reformer? The | trouble is that they seem to be rather Tare birds or, at least in many coun- tries, keep themselves extraordinarily well hidden. Furthermore, what is to be done while we are trying to find them? Draper obviously believes that the Communist alternative must be ac- | cepted. at least when the cost both to us and the people we are saving is as great as it is now in Vietnam. Unfor- tunately, questions of prestige may have become unanswerable by the time Our viceroys discover either that there NATION/ September 1], 1967 4 ii ae rege - By Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. Houghton Mifflin. 126 pp. $3.95. A member of the Kennedy “govern- ment in exile,” this prize-winning his- torian enters a mild dissent from the Johnson Administration’s policy. THE POLITICS OF ESCALATION IN VIETNAM, By Franz Schurman and others. Beacon Press. 160 pp. $3.95. Incisive analysis of ten episodes in U.S. policy toward Victnam. Presented as a “citizen’s white paper” to LBJ. VIETNAM: THE LOGIC OF WITH- DRAWAL. By Howard Zinn. Beacon Press. 131 pp. $4.95. Brief, educated, angry analysis of such questions as the “Munich analogy,” rev- olution and counterrevolutionary vio- lence, and the possibility and desirabil- ity of U.S. witnadrawal. | The Guru and the Coup no. “The PKI will suffer all insults. They can spit in our faces. We shall not retaliate. We will keep close to Su- karno. He is our best friend.” As for Subandrio, Aidit told me in 1964, “he thinks he is using us whereas we are using him. We will wait for the elec- tions and win a third of the seats and, in a NASAKOM government, we will be the most powerful influence.” Aidit’s belief, upon which the PKI’s policy was based, was that the PKI would eventually assume power, peace- fully, by supporting Sukarno’; concept of a “truly representative government.” The two dominant forces in Indonesia were the army (the second largest mil- itary establishment in Asia), and the Communist Party (also the second larg- est in Asia). Sukarno thought that he could contain the Communists and con- trol the generals. Aidit also thought he could manipulate the political situation. He had nothing but contempt for the other politicians, and in a partnership with them after the promised elections, with a third of the ministers members of the PKI, Aidit was sure that Indo- nesia would soon find that it was head- ing for a Communist regime. (For this line of thought the PKI leadership un- der Aidit was severely criticized by the new Central Committee, meeting in secret in Central Java on August 17, 1966. In a Politburo statement, “Les- sons of Indonesian Events,” the PKI said in effect that an armed struggle for power was, and still is, unavoida- ble.) Most of the non-Communist generals realized what game Aidit was playing, but the army leadership lacked solidar- ity, and some Dutch writers still insist that it is highly probable that the coup was in fact an internal army affair, a conflict in which the Air Force sided with the Central Java officers and the PKI leadership took an opportunistic role. What is certain is that the PKI had decided to put their money on peaceful penetration of state power under the protection /of Sukarno, rather than scheme to seize power through force. The PKI never possessed a large sup- ply of weapons. Aidit knew that the army leadership, disunited though it might have been, in the main opposed him, and although he tried to subvert the army, he admitted to me on one occasion that much less than one-third of the soldiers and junior officers were in any way friendly to the PKI. How then can Vittachi say that Aidit was planning to make a bid for power in 1965? Without comment the author quotes from the 50-page confession which Aidit is supposed to have made to the army before he was shot, and which Asahi Evening News secured from the army as a world scoop. In this document Aidit admits he was the one with the e ort d rep tion irsthan on Mao highest responsibility for the coup. “Had it succeeded,” he said, “my poli- ‘cy was to establish closer economic re- lations with Communist China.” He said that the coup failed because it was pre- mature, and also because some of the pared to believe that Aidit still lives. Tarzie Vittachi deals with the events which led up to the September 30 af- fair, then goes on to discuss the mas- sacre of half a million Indonesians which followed, and seeks an explana- of one of Indonesia’s own pi working entirely on-his own. ... . Sud. denly his voice faltered. He stopped and left the rostrum, seeming to limp. His aides were heard calling, apparent- — ly for the attendant doctors. Dr. Wu, top PKI leaders opposed it. Another tion for this astonishing blood bath. chief of the medical team from Peking reason was the lack of support of Some Indonesians might have believed hurried to his side. Apparently in a | “Communist China and international they were helping to wipe out an anti- state of collapse, Sukarno was taken to} communism on which we had placed Sukarno PKI, but another contributing a small room. Within minutes the ru-_ | hopes.” factor, a most important one, was that mor swept the city that Sukarno wa fen bat is the army had always supported the dead. According to Vittachi, Aidit was }(!) vial eae I have read the confession. It does richer peasants against the PKI’s “sev- on the platform. He did not go back~™ } ii F" not read like the Aidit I knew. This en devils of the rural areas” cam- stage to see what was happening. He™ } i may be because of faulty translation: I don’t suppose he wrote the original in paign, and the PKI’s efforts to enforce land reform. A lot of poor peasants English. But this document makes him died and a great deal of land was say things I do not believe he could handed back after the abortive coup. say, except perhaps at the point of a It was President Sukarno’s sudden gun. The photographs which illustrated _ jllness during the evening of September neh | this article in the Japanese newspaper, 30 that triggered the whole affair. For Said to have been taken shortly before an hour Sukarno spoke to a large audi- Aidit was shot, confirmed my feelings ence in the Jakarta Stadium. Making of suspicion. What is also significant is full use of his celebrated powers of that the army has never put out a imagination, Sukarno told them that In- statement about Aidit’s death, although donesia was now able to produce its I could find no one in Jakarta pre- own atomic bomb through the efforts made for the exit and was never seen” | in public again. al Lieutenant Colonel Untung, comman- | der of Sukarno’s bodyguard, Vittachi says, was not on the platform when | Sukarno collapsed, but when news ¢ reached him that the President was | either dead or dying, “he pressed the button,” and the September 30 affair got under way. Eight generals were to be kidnapped: six were murdered, two} ( escaped: General Nasution and Gener- | * al Suharto. Vittachi, tells in full the | Di story of General Suharto’s escape. He | Mo was not home when the assassins called, Like most Indonesians, General Suhar- IN to, now the Acting President of Indo- | jy nesia, believes that his dukun, or guru, iF a , TH | Hol 4 f BLUES TO BE SUNG IN A DARK VOICE T's time to shine the bottom of my shoes. ian angels. On the day of September 25, Suharto’s © dukun told General Suharto he should | not return to his home before 2 in the _ morning of October |. This, as it turned” out, was the time the plotters planned to murder Suharto. Suharto’s dukun ad-_ vised him to spend the night hours wor- shipping God at a place where the sea and the river waters meet. It was long } after 2 A.M. when Suharto returned — home. He saw jeeps and lorries outside } his home and a great deal of unusual activity. So he turned his car around | and went to army headquarters. Su-— harto was, as he said later, very calm, | knowing that his spiritual guardians } who had saved him from capture and } possible murder would send him guid- ance. He soon made contact with Gen- eral Nasution, and counteraction against the coup d’état was swiftly tak- en. The radio station was captured, and the news came through that Presi- dent Sukarno was at Halim Air Base. . What was he doing there? Vittachi spent nearly a year examin- ing reports and rumors but his book adds: little to what has _ already appeared in print about Sukarno’s in- volvement, or indeed about anything else connected with the plot. We shall probably never know the truth, for it | could lie buried beneath contradictions — nes Wet. ta Move over, cousin. Here comes my bad news. ae proph om a ee Suharto ae } We Va Goodbye, good hoy. Hello, hello, blues. tachi.’ Sutlario's ain eal this oui A iW i (spoken) Milkman won't milk me, tailor won't suit me now. ance < given to him by Suharto’s guard- | ™ Hy : So goodbye, good boy. >} ing : 4 Florist won't let me smell his kind of bunch. Grocer won't deliver me, that’s a cinch. Banker won't check me out to drink some lunch. (spoken) Jeweler just watches, he don’t ring me up. So goodbye, good boy, Dealer won't cut me in on his old game. Sheriff don’t teach me how to spell my name. Driver won't bus me, I'll get there just the same. (spoken) Garbageman don’t give me no pick-me-ups. So goodbye, good boy. Shoe-man won't put bottoms on my tops. Druggist drug me down to see the cops. Plumber won't bail me out, I'm here for keeps. (spoken) Railroads won't forgive my trespasses. So goodbye, good boy, Baker ain’t going to roll me any more. Barber ain't going to clip me like before. Mama can’t get my knees down on the floor. (spoken) Doctor won’t take my pulse ’cause he can’t keep it. So goodbye, good boy. Loan-man likes that X on the dotted line. Preacher, he keeps crossing me all the time: Someone sets fire to it, it burns just fine. (spoken) Landlord ain’t going to land on me again, Lord. So goodbye, good boy. DAVID WAGONER 218 THE NATION/ September 11, 1967 ' Thy md intrigues. Vittachi comes to the conclusion that there were probably | | A | | | | the PKI to make a take-over bid with af | ferred to as the Council of Generals. iS) (2) Colonel Untung’s preparations M™) against a possible Army plan to bring i) THE GODMOTHER. By Janice Elliott. | Holt, Rinehart & Winston. 223 pp. | $4.95. i DIGGING OUT. By Anne Richardson. McGraw Hill Book Co. 181 pp. $4.50. |) NORA SAYRE _ Miss Sayre is the New York correspondent | for the New Statesman. _A Boston atheist of 87 recently re- _marked with some amusement that dy- ing resembles molting—that she feels @ like a snake that wants to shed its skin. Having always believed that “God ' is only the word after gocart in the dic- ' tionary,” she’s startled to find that the self is so eager to be rid of the body, “to be divorced from the organs,” and _ that she does experience a tugging in- dependence of the soul. (She adds: “If someone doesn’t believe that the soul f and body are connected, just let him be constipated for a day or two.”) At y any rate, she stresses that approach- _ ing death is a fascinating process. And why should it not be, if there is ade- quate health and an exuberant mind? However, as the anthropologist Geof- | frey Gorer has explained, most mod- ern Anglo-Saxons treat death with the prudery which the Victorians reserved for sex—an embarrassing and disgust- _ ing phenomenon that few want to ac- knowledge. But Janice Elliott’s The Godmother is a magnificent acknowl- edgment: here, an old woman’s grad- ual dying appears almost as an achieve- ment. True, her eccentric detachment _ from the present vexes her relatives and friends; with alternating admira- _ tion and resentment, they recall all of the roles which ‘she has played: god- mother, aunt, sister, daughter, “virgin _ spinster,” never (but nearly) a wife or _ mother. THE NATION/ September 11, 1967 President died, with military assistance from the Air Force, and to establish a government probably with Dr. Su- bandrio as the nominal civilian head. Whatever action, or combination of actions, brought about the fall of Su- karno and the eclipse of the PKI, Su- karno must still be considered a poten- tial political factor, and the PKI a ser- ious threat. And, as Vittachi reminds us, “in fifteen years time someone will have to reckon with the possibly un- avoidable desire for revenge among the two million children” orphaned by the murders which followed the Septem- ber 30 affair. } Certain Aspects of Death As the emotional scenery shifts, she appears as a comforter, a destroyer, a “love goddess,” an invalid, a clair- voyant, a potential murderee, a benign magician, a malignant witch, and final- ly—in senility—as a child to be pro- tected. Miss Elliott’s characters are muted, respectable people who long for violence. They want to shout at and strike one another; for them, the old woman is “an island on whose shores they might be wrecked or saved.” Ig- noring their furious expectations that she will “bring out the best or the worst” in them, endanger or enlighten them, she relives a visit to Delphi, where the oracle’s cave returned only her own voice. Once dead, others re- alize that she “delivered no message; question the oracle and the dry stone gives back not an explanation but an echo. In the distortion lies the illusion of prophecy.” In short, her service was to reveal people to themselves—and often, the acquaintance was repellent. Miss Elliott’s primary concern is the passive and almost arbitrary interac- tion of people who are far from fond of one another. They’re seduced by the belief that others are responsible for their horrors or delights, or that “things just happen,” or even that an absent-minded old woman can predes- tine and guide their experiences. None of them wants to be an engine of con- trol; hence their irritable insistence on making “the godmother” a mythic fig- ure from whom miracles are expected. Thus, she lives and dies personifying other characters’ imaginations—as, in- deed, some solitaries do. Since she once seemed “immemorial,” she is not for- given for being mortal. There are several plots sufficient for separate novels here: a drifter murders one old woman because another took too long to die; a chill but resilient di- vorcée experiments with nonlove; a wo- man, crimped with jealousy of her sis- ter’s lover, tells his wife that she’s a cuckold—the wife promptly kills her- self, and the complacent informer in- herits the suicide’s husband and child. But none of these quietly savage themes is really developed. Miss Elliott concentrates on reverberations rather than events, self-deceptions instead of confrontations. All of her characters wear the stripe of madness: the kinds of psychosis that need not prevent pro- saic functioning, or even an orderly life. (For these, violence is tempting because it suggests the virtue of self- assertion, of which they’re usually in- capable.) The novel gives meticulous testimony that almost everyone feels— or is—insane at certain moments. The book’s only flaw is an overdependence on E.M. Forster’s Marabar caves: al- though the spelling has been altered from “boum” to “Boom,” those infini- ty-echoes really do belong to him, and are disturbing in a novel that’s other- wise unique. Washed throughout by re- curring undersea imagery, Miss Elli- ott’s prose also distills a series of frighteningly lucid observations: “there was something almost mad about their VIETNAM: Crisis of Conscience by Robert McAfee BROWN Michael NOVAK Abraham HESCHEL tells WHY we must... "© Stop bombing—unconditionally © Negotiate NOW for a peace without victory ® Accept the Vietcong at the negotiation table Prepare for the rebuilding of war-torn. Vietnam These distinguished leaders from Ameri- ca’s three major faiths call upon Protes- -tants, Catholics and Jews to discuss and act together NOW to stop the war in Vietnam. A guidebook for study and ac- tion. Explains tersely how we got involved and the’ price we're paying in men, money, and morality. Asserts that the war in Vietnam is immoral, and that our reli- gious commitment demands united inter- faith action. “A significant and compelling call for moral and religious judgment on politi- cal action.” Sen. EUGENE J. MCCARTHY “NIETNAM: Crisis of Conscience will, ! hope, stir the conscience of both Chris- tians and Jews and. cause them to look beyond the purely political and military implications of this conflict.” Sen. MARK O. HATFIELD. $3.50; paper, 95¢ At your bookstore or direct ASSOCIATION PRESS 291 Broadway, New York, N.Y. 10007 219 / po iB Mh ip "% dedicated sanity as if balance taken too far breeds its own imbalance.” As a study in delusions, The Godmother makes the word “sensitive” a compli- ment—which it hasn’t been for decades. Perhaps the inhibitions about death and the denial of grief analyzed by Mr. Gorer will be flushed by the newest novelists. In Digging Out, Anne Richardson’s admirable first novel, the anguish of the living is detailed, as it wasn’t in The Godmother. There is also the honest repulsion instilled by a body jammed with tubes and wires and needles, injected or emptied of liquids, dominated by tainted tissues, retchings and slime. (The decomposition is em- phasized by recalling all of the mas- sages, hair treatments, and manicures that failed to embellish the same flesh.) At Christmas, a girl attends her mother’s tardy death; the daughter’s identification with her mother is so acute that cancer seems contagious. At moments, she seems to be dying along with the thumb-sucking, drooling inva- lid, who has been reduced to babbling remarks such as “The grocery-store has a new hat, a new hat!” Here are all of the aspects of death that most families hate to recognize: the irration- al guilt that is inevitable when a blood Telation dies, the invalid’s struggle to live while others hope that she will not, the calm, brisk brutality of doctors (“there will be some vomiting from the gas, and a temporary blindness”), and the fact that all of the dying person’s lifelong fears are finally justified—that it’s reasonable to be terrified of suffer- ing. There is also the lavish relief when the death is completed. In this novel, none of these feelings is pum- meled into the shape of secrecy—as most relatives, hospitals and funeral di- rectors encourage them to be. The physical agonies of death are magnified because they unfold in an Opulent apartment, in a family sus- tained by a world of doormen, Chinese lacquer and gold leaf, Venetian marble floors, infinite pastries, clocks that play Brahms and heated pools. But this wealth is no more romantic than the chocolate crumbs which one character leaves on the fur rug in her Rolls- Royce. Mrs. Richardson is _ especially skilled at depicting the paralysis of lux- ury. The older people fear that some- one will snatch their money away, while the younger ones torpidly take plenitude for granted. While it is usual- ly impossible to repine over the prob- lems of the rich, this particular joy- lessness is devastating: possession rath- er than pleasure, habit instead of stim- ulus. Mrs. Richardson is also dexterous at flashbacks: earlier family deaths 220 lurk behind the narrative. But none of the dead relatives were invalids; ill- ness is shown to be far worse than sudden death—as it undoubtedly is. One wishes that Mrs. Richardson had included more of the past of the dy- ing woman—readers are further com- mitted when they encounter the dawn- ing life of a character whom they al- ready know will die. But the devouring Jewish family is so robustly drawn that it is comprehensible that the girl should resolve—at the graveside—to be free of her “tribe.” “The tribe does not take kindly to defection, but now that my mother was going into the ground I could leave them chanting in the tem- ple. . . . I-would become the first American in my family. To be an American one must have no root, no family, perhaps a few hastily covered graves along the freeway.’ Here, per- haps, is a clue to the national dislike of acknowledging death: the remains are hastily—if lushly—buried, so that the living can keep traveling, pretend- ing that nothing ugly has occurred. (Mr. Gorer has observed that the drive against smoking—that is, against death THEATRE/ Julius Novick Stratford, Ont. I have been saying for several years, in this journal and elsewhere, that the Shakespearean Festival at Stratford has higher standards than any other thea- tre on this continent; its current sea- son does not tempt me to change my opinion. Since 1963, when I began coming to Stratford, the festival has had only one notable deficiency: among great num- bers of fine, exciting actors, it has lacked a magnetic star performer for the heroic parts. The ensemble has been superb, but certain plays are built to have one or two actors transcend the ensemble, and this has not been happening at Stratford. This season, for the first time in several years, the fes- tival has imported a couple of big-name actors: Alan Bates to play Richard III, and Christopher Plummer (a Canadian, and a member of the company for five seasons between 1956 and 1962) to play Antony. But the transcendence still did not take place; the current season is remarkable more for the amazing con- sistency of its quality than for any in- dividual outbreaks of brilliance. Of course, the standard at Stratford is so high that what would be acclaimed as brilliance elsewhere tends to be accept- ed as a matter of course. This year the festival offers four vo" a) from cancer—almost suggests that death is an immoral act, a_ personal disgrace. ) Both these fine novels are valid re- minders of how many different kinds © of death there are, and that certain deaths are far more bearable than oth-— ers. After all, response to death is tinged with knowing that the dead per- son did—or didn’t—wring what he want- — | ed from life. Also, since our society | is a soup of so many religions’ rem- | nants, it’s sometimes hard to admit | that “good” or “bad” deaths are often | determined by the body. The bowels can clock the spirit, as any small child 9} ; knows. However, neither of these nov- | els is depressing, and both have extra- ordinary privacy. Public or dramatic ) death—from the assassination to num- | , erous cut-and-splash films—is so near- |. ly conventional that numbness lapses into the desire for caricature or exoti- ca. Today, the topic is most fashiona- ble if it is marinated in fantasy or sadism. But natural death now seems | a more intimate—and daring—subject | for fiction than any number of sexual © cook-outs or assumptions. . plays on the famous thrust stage of the — Festival Theatre, and two operas and a © play on the proscenium stage of the Avon Theatre, in addition to two con-— cert series and miscellaneous exhibi-— tions, workshops and seminars. And this | year, as always, my visit to Stratford has helped me to maintain my fre- quently shaken faith in the possibility that our theatre may still be reinvigor- ated by its resident professional com- panies. The festival’s opera company lacks | any major-league talents; it concen- trates on well-staged and thoroughly re- — hearsed ensemble productions. This sys- tem works well for Mozart’s Cosi Fan Tutte, and even better for Benjamin | Britten’s Albert Herring, a charming comic opera about a mother-ridden lad in an English village who finally breaks out and discovers the world of the senses. Albert Herring is a gentle fer- tility rite, a celebration of spring and sex and youth. David William’s stag- ing makes it a genuine theatrical ex- perience, sweet-natured and cozy but seldom overcute, and Gregory Demp- sey is a stalwart Albert. The play at the Avon is Colours in the Dark by James Reaney, the third original work to be presented at the festival in the fifteen years of its his- tory. Neither of the first two presenta- - eS Semmes Fane ee — —— os a Sa na =o oa ee SS ee si a eee eae ee THE NATION/ September 11, 1967 ) ever been produced anywhere if the same fate befalls Colours in the Dark, it will be not so much a _ matter of the play’s merits or lack of ‘them as of its peculiar suitability to Stratford. Mr. Reaney was born and ‘Taised on a farm 3 miles from Strat- ford, and his play is a sort of collage of memories, anecdotes and poems, | based on the author’s own life journey, and extending out toward the universe. _ It includes a fight between hardwood | and softwood trees, played by children, and an old woman who is hanging out, on a kid’s jump rope, all the clothes, she says, that she has ever worn. Chil- dren shout anti-Catholic and anti-Prot- estant jingles, a girl tap dances in a | superbly horrible pink dress, a man _fecites an “Ode on the Mammoth _ Cheese.” One section is a “Fantasia _ on the Street Names of Winnipeg,” an- | other is a “Dance of Death in London, _ Ontario.” _ The play, if that’s what it is, recalls _ Our Town in its small-town content and _ affectionate attitude, but is far more discontinuous and explicitly metaphori- cal, in the modern manner. (I wished for a stronger, clearer through-line.) _ Reaney’s writing is sometimes preten- tious (“I curse the discovery of fire! I curse Prometheus!”), and sometimes sentimental, but on the whole Colours _ in the Dark is not just a promising work _ but a pleasure right now. John Hirsch’s lively, sure-handed _ Staging features extensive use of pro- | jections as background. The acting is | simple, grave and good. There are no Toles in the customary sense; the per- former with the most to do is Douglas | Rain, a stubby, curly-haired fellow who has appeared at the festival every sea- | son since it was founded. Few actors | are so quietly, so unassumingly watch- | able as Mr. Rain. Even when, as often } in this work, he appears to be doing nothing in particular, he somehow catches and holds the attention. a P Three of the plays at the Festi- | val Theatre are by Shakespeare; the | _— fourth is a brilliant revival of The Gov- | ernment Inspector. Since it concerns civic | corruption and social pretension, there | is no question as to the contemporary i | relevance of Gogol’s 1835 satiric farce. | Peter Raby, the festival’s ‘‘drama- turge,” has adapted it into speakable _ and witty English. Michael Langham, the festival’s artistic director, has Staged it boldly and broadly as a wild, harsh fantasia of greed, chicanery, hy- pocrisy, cruelty, vanity, self-delusion and other human failings. William Hutt (another veteran of the festival’s first season) is ineffably fun- _ ny as Khlestakov, the insignificant _ young clerk who fetches up, dead broke, g THE NATION/ September 11, 1967 in a miserable provincial town, and is mistaken by the town’s corrupt offi- cials for a government inspector trav- eling incognito. Hutt’s performance is the apotheosis of swish and, under the circumstances, why not? Swish, after all, is an overelaborate assumption of elegance and refinement, and _ thus seems quite appropriate for a foolish young provincial who has gone to the big city and would love to be consid- ered a man of fashion. Gogol’s play shows a fake butterfly alighting on a dunghill, and Mr. Lang- ham has surrounded his hero with a depthlessly sordid environment, popu- lated by seedy grotesques. In a mor- dantly funny, wordless scene, Khlesta- kov is triumphantly led through town, while a red carpet is spread in front of him and quickly rolled up behind so it can be spread in front again, and bed- ridden patients are slung ruthlessly out of the way so as not to interfere with the great man’s inspection of the hospi- tal. Langham’s staging is full of ingenui- ty, and all the actors play right up to the hilt. Yet the director and the ac- tors never seem to be making the play funny; they seem rather to be bringing out, in masterful fashion, the comedy that was in it all the time. The Government Inspector was originally staged for a transcontinental tour of Canada last winter, as part of the Centennial celebrations. This sum- mer’s first production was Richard III, directed by John Hirsch: an entertain- ing show that goes with a swing. Alan Bates’s movie-star charm is used, not to whitewash Richard but to make his success more plausible; here, for a change, is a Richard from whom some- body might conceivably buy a used car. Yet this Richard III is not what it once might have been; it commemo- rates an occasion when the festival’s audience failed it. The production was originally planned as the climax of a four-year enterprise: a mounting of Shakespeare’s great double tetralogy of history plays, which begins with the downfall of Richard II, and continues, through the carousings and conquests of Henry V and the civil anarchy of the Wars of the Roses, to the restoring of order with the death of Richard III. The three parts of Henry VI, which are among Shakespeare’s earliest works, were to be presented in the adaptation John Barton made for the Royal Shake- speare Theatre, which resolves the three plays into two, entitled Henry VI and Edward IV. Henry VI, as produced at the festival last year under John Hirsch’s direc- tion, was a brilliant, luridly powerful evocation of chaos; but the Toronto critics condemned it, and it was sparse- ly attended. As Jean Gascon, the festi- val’s incoming artistic head, observes (in discussing the difficulty of selling The Government Inspector), “The peo- ple... are hoping to see the pageant- ry—the trumpets and the banners and the whole bit. It’s very hard to break that pattern, but it must be done.” But M. Gascon also points out: “If you have one play here that doesn’t’ work in a season, it means the whole financial situation is in danger.” This year the intention had been to conclude the series with Edward IV and Rich- ard III. The two plays have a very close continuity: some half dozen char- acters survive from one into the other, including Richard; many events in the later play have roots in the earlier. But in response to what was interpret- ed as widespread lack of demand, Ed- ward IV was dropped (when, now, will anybody on this continent dare to pro- duce it?), and Richard III was left to stand by itself. This it is well able to do, of course; but we have been de-. nied a rare chance to see it in context. Perhaps as a result of all this, Mr. Hirsch’s thoroughly competent staging seems for most of the evening to. have no particular concept behind it. And then in the last act, he goes off in a frenzy of half-cocked innova- The Nation SUBSCRIBERS’ BOOK SERVICE Offers the following at a discount: 0 PRISON NOTES by Barbara Deming (Grossman, $4.95)... ...cccdmc00... see THE NEW RADICALISM by Christopher Lasch (Knopf, $6.95). $5.55 THE GOODBYE LAND by Jose Yglesias (Pantheon, $4.95)............ AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF BERTRAND RUSSELL, 1872-1914 (Little, Brown & Co., $7.95) THE ACCIDENTAL PRESIDENT by Robert G. Sherrill (Grossman, $5.00). $4.00 THE FREE WORLD COLOSSUS: A Critique of American Foreign Policy in the Cold War by David Horowitz (Hail and) Wane.'$6:95) . ..u.....'...4ee sone THE PSYCHOLOGY OF POWER by Ronald Sampson (Pantheon, $4.95).... $3.95 $3.95 Era A 2 O Remittance accompanying orders should be made payable to THE NATION, 333 6th Ave., N.Y: 10014 q Payment enclosed oO Please bill me Readers can avail themselves of our regular offer to send them any book (ex- cept paperbacks), published in the U.S. at the retail price post-free. When order- ing, please give title, author and publisher. 9-11-67 221 _— SS 2"; ent ————— ee ee tion. Richard for some reason permits Richmond to kill him. A suicidal Crook- back? Why? Richmond, moreover, is in this production not a radiant symbol of justice and order but, in direct con- tradiction to the text, a snarling tough. After three hours during which there is no indication that Hirsch has any strong feelings about the play one way or an- other, it suddenly seems as if he has been reading Jan Kott when he should have been reading Richard III. Edward IV was replaced in the sched- ule by The Merry Wives of Windsor, Shakespeare’s most commercial script —written, presumably, to make a quick buck out of the continued popularity of Sir John Falstaff. Shakespeare wrote several plays that were worse in vari- ous ways, but none (except for The Comedy of Errors) more mechanical and less resonant. Merry Wives is not even a particularly good commercial piece; there are jokes in it that would embarrass the author of The Wayward Stork. David William, the director, de- fends the play sturdily in a program note, but his production proves only that in the proper hands it can be hi- larious. (Not that ’'m out to knock hi- larity.) Tony van Bridge makes a ma- jestic, grandiloquent Falstaff; Zoe Cald- well as Mistress Page is a bouncing bourgeoise with a high opinion of her own dignity; Jean Gascon is the ex- plosive Frenchman (“By gar!”), Dr. Caius; theirs are probably the funniest of many funny performances. Alan Bates as Ford plays this not very showy supporting role with self-denying The Best Way To Get NATION THE NATION 9-11-67 333 Sixth Ave., New York 10014 [_] One Year, $10 {_] Two Years, $18 [_] 6 Months, $6 {_] Bilt Me [_] Payment Enclosed (Foreign and Canadian Postage 1 a year extra) BRECK KRERET HEHE PROPOR RARER ERE RRR RRR ee BNAINIE Yess -c:212)s10 afai state Suctaia bicte ede alord ois PPIIEGES 3, 5.a.0 oavisekiysalnisint ve se asnestalg : WOU es We nsosaiacisktes rtietetetee enn aLke BEALE AY, « alelsje sient oo eee ZipiNOs..-n.-- : Dense cenacscccsccascececeuccusscssccnsssat 222 HELLO THERE! (for Robert Bly) The poets of the midwest Are in their towns, Looking out across wheat, corn, Great acres of silos. Neruda waves to them From the other side of the field. They are all so happy, They make images. HARVEY SHAPIRO conscientiousness: he could not have played it better had he been a total unknown. Merry Wives, as might be expect- ed, is doing very well at the box office, but the big popular hit of the festival is the season’s final production, Antony and Cleopatra. This production was the focus of tremendous expectations. It was the only one of Shakespeare’s ma- jor plays that had never been done at Stratford; it is the last production to be directed by Michael Langham be- fore he retires as the festival’s artistic director. (He is headed for La Jolla, Calif., to start a new theatre.) And its leading roles are being played by Chris- topher Plummer and Zoe Caldwell. In the event, the production proved somewhat disappointing, for all its mer- its. Langham’s staging cuts and dis- solves from scene to scene with cine- matic speed, using cinematic tech- niques. Costumes and props are aus- tere, no mobs of extras are in evi- dence, yet the atmosphere of a luxuri- ous, decadent court is created. The sup- porting cast is excellent, with William Hutt as a disgruntled Enobarbus and Kenneth Welsh as a chilly Caesar dis- tinguishing themselves particularly. Christopher Plummer is an expansive magnanimous, virile Antony; it is easy to understand the loyalty with which his men serve him. But though he plays his scenes of suffering competently, some final dimension, some audacity, some kind of profoundest cutting loose is missing; this Antony is shaken, but not to his innermost depths. Miss Caldwell’s Cleopatra is a little, bouncy red-headed woman—no compe- tition for Elizabeth Taylor, but the con- verse is also true. Miss Caldwell has her own, kinetic attractions, and her Cleopatra has plenty of exquisite arts with which to hold Antony. She begins as a delightful, dangerous tiger-kitten, throwing all her energies tempestuous- ly into every passing impulse: this is a Cleopatra who both could and would “hop forty paces through the public street.” Yet her intelligence shines through her self-indulgence in the form of irony, with which her words quiver he and gleam. ‘The way:she.asks, on hear-— ing of the death of Antony’s wife, “Can — Fulvia die?’ is indescribable. ei But Shakespeare’s prescription de- i mands “infinite variety,” and this Miss Caldwell cannot supply. She does not grow into the splendor of the final scenes. Insinuation becomes her better than grandiloquence. She continues, moreover, to move as if she were about to climb a tree or beat the boys at softball. This is properly one of Cleo- patra’s modes, not her only one. - And so it seemed to me that this much heralded production runs down- hill after an excellent beginning. But perhaps all I am saying is that the play demands great acting, which is not forthcoming on this occasion. And have we ever a right to expect great acting? At any rate, this Antony and Cleopatra is an achievement of which no theatre would need to be ashamed. I had a talk with Jean Gascon, who takes over at the end of this sea- son as “executive artistic director” (John Hirsch will be “artistic direc- tor’), and found him keenly aware of the dangers inherent in the festival’s tremendous success. “There is a dan- ger here of stagnation,” he says. “It’s probably the most important and or- ganized company on the North Ameri- can continent. But the danger of it is that it could become an institution. Peo- ple get self-satisfied. . . .” In future seasons he plans to decrease the em- phasis on Shakespeare and to widen the repertory. Already he has invited a number of dramatists, both Canadian and foreign, to Stratford, with the hope that they will be tempted to write for the festival. He plans to have the com- pany make films and recordings, “and all sorts of things.” One central aim, which Gascon ex- pects to accomplish within two years, is to make the festival a year-round oper- ation. This will be done by scheduling annual winter seasons in Montreal and in another Canadian city to be an- nounced, and by touring inside and out- side Canada. Year-round employment will make it easier to attract and hold actors and staff; year-round operation will provide more time and scope for experiment. Gascon is full of praise for what has been done at Stratford since its found- ing, but “if I were told tomorrow that I had to follow that line and stay there, I would just go away. I have to feel that there’s development .. . and that will keep me alive as an artist—and the same for everybody here.” As Can- ada’s (and North America’s) leading theatre comes, for the first time, under Canadian leadership, this kind of think- ing is a good augury for the future. THE NATION/ September 11, 1967 ACROSS: 1, 10, 9 and 22 down Obviously better, better than most of us! (3,3,3,5,3,4,2,5,5) 11 Dined? It’s about time, though the gas may be charged when one does. (6) 12 Direction the mountain is hardest us? (8) ’ 14 Excessive length. (7) 15 Excessive depth. (5) 17 Chided with having a fixed charge? (5) 19 Found it went first around a tailored coat? (7) 21 Saws around the pole, and bends the nails over. (8) 23 Did he keep us in suspense by moving | around a lot? (6) 25 Asked for a meal to be arranged. (7) 26 Compassionate, in a paltry way. (7) 27 Not necessarily a party supporter, since one would hardly expect to take dicta- tion so. (14) on DOWN: 1 British battle square? (9) 2 The bole of “Home Thoughts from Abroad.” (3-4) 3 With the record made Variations”?. (9) 4 An implied word of response when the desired level is reached. (4) to “Andante THE NATION/September 11, 1967 PP Crossword Puzzle No. 1214 FRANK W. LEWIS _anannm 5 “Sand Pebbles” on location, or just anoth- er movie. (2,3,5) 6 Concerning the first woman magistrate? 7 Does Jack sometimes live in it? (7) 8 In which the stage directions might be “Take it off!” (4) 13 A real hot spot to have a drinking spree on! (One can probably expect to crawl home!) (10) 15 The response might be, if one is shoved in the back. (9) 16 A girl always found inside, or how a few are found at the same time. (9) 18 Two-fiddle composition, not of something to suggest the twist! (7) 20 Descriptive of the train found in “Pa- tience.” (7) 21 Cut short the harvest? (4) 24 See a place available? (4) SOLUTION TO PUZZLE NO. 1213 ACROSS: 1 Aborigines; 6 and 1 down Just around the corner; 10 Ostrich; 11 Pro rata; 12 Nova; 13 and 18 down A Man For All Seasons; 15 Trade-in; 16 Eastern; 17 En suite; 20 Aquaria; 22 Opalescent; 23 Stub; 25 Neocene; 26 Marxist; 27 Rash: 28 Stone walls. DOWN: 2 Octavia; 3 Ibid: 4 Inhuman; 5 Expense; 7 Unaware; 8 Trail- ing arbutus; 9 Colosseum; 14 Perimeter; 19 Escheat; 20 Agnomen; 21 Retrial; 24 Drew. ccm 14 ART WOULD YOU BELIEVE? EXCITING ORIG- INAL woodcuts, etchings, lithos, $4.50 each. Subscription information: Graphic Circle, (N), 68 Fifth Avenue, New York City 10011 PUBLICATIONS THE IDLER. Lively, offbeat, liberal monthly. $1 brings four different sample back issues. OE 413B 6th St., N.E., Washington, D.C. 20002. “SELECTED POEMS” of GEORGE FLYNN (Villiers of London—$2.00) is “the most ex- citing American poetry since Ezra Pound.” —James Turner. Available in U.S. from the Aas at: 145 West 12 Street, New York City is 300 WAYS TO MAKE MONEY WHILE LIVING in THE COUNTRY — $1.00. Larson’s Books— , 410 E. Minn., Cannon Falls, Minn. 55009. TENNESSEE POETRY JOURNAL. Triquarterly. Now considering new verse. Box 196, Martin, Tenn. 38237. EDUCATIONAL THE AMERICAN COLLEGE SELECTOR recom- mends best choices from 1,000 accredited col- leges and universities based on computer analysis of high school student and colleges. Free 16 page questionnaire. ACS, Dept. 32D, 3757 Wilshire Boulevard, Los Angeles, Cali- fornia 90005. Pepe SON A LS HOFFA FOR PRESIDENT: Impeach Johnson; circulars, stickers, bumper strips, rulers, dial- ers, safety matches, etc. $1 to $5 assortments, Plentyism, Box 115-W Edison, Miami 33151. LEGALIZE ABORTION and every other vic. limless activity. LEGALIZE LIBERTY, POB 24282, Los Angeles, California 90024 CAMBRIDGE proftessor’s widow, active at 93, seeks live-in companion. Two maids employed.- Only greater Boston residents need apply. Box 604, c/o The Nation. THE FUTURIST, published bimonthly World Future Society, reports. scientists’ forecasts for coming decades. Subscription: $5 yearly. Box 19285-N, Twentieth Street Station, Washington, D.C. 20036. SERVICES MOVING? 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Cook THE FERVENT YEARS by Harold Clurman THE NATION CENTENNIAL ISSUE RUSSIA AT WAR, 1941-1945 by Alexander Werth UNSAFE AT ANY SPEED by Ralph Nader subscribe to NATION | America’s most habit-forming magazine Herewith my order and payment for a NEW subscription to The Nation. [] 1 Year, $10 [_] 2 Years, $18 [-] 6 Months, $6 (Foreign and Canadian Postage: $1 per year extra) THE NATION 233 Sixth Avenue Please check free book desirec New York, N.Y. 10014 [] BROTHERS UNDER THE [] THE FBI NOBODY KNOWS SKIN [_] THE NATION [.] THE FERVENT YEARS CENTENNIAL ISSUE [] RUSSIA AT WAR [] UNSAFE AT ANY SPEED address ARTAUDIAN ORESTEIA sutius Novick ATION SEPTEMBER 18, 1967 35 cents \S> C - awn - Ww - \Y Vietnam ‘The Generals Sing an Old Song PHILIPPE DEVILLERS cE oo eaR Meat Inspection: The New J net NICK KOTZ ‘ee aa oS ea The Dollar Invades Europe JOSEPH D. PHILLIPS le ea HARRY MAGDOFF on Kenneth Galbraith = 7 ERIC HOBSBAWM on Antonio Gramsci ° Oc DANIEL STERN on Julio Cortazar eS eae er 2: | te D-—- A Oo<~onw lo . LETTERS Abril protests Sao Paulo, Brazil Dear Sirs: With reference to Ernest Blum’s “Brazil’s Yankee Network,” published in your May 29 issue, we would like to call your attention to the following: (1) Victor Civita was not—as Mr. Blum reports—born in Italy; (2) Victor Civita was never a “Time-Life em- ployee”; (3) Victor Civita did not emigrate to Brazil in 1951, nor did his brother Cesar emigrate to Argentina in that year. As a matter of fact, Cesar Civita has been in publishing in Buenos Aires for over twenty-five years; (4) in Argentina, Panorama is published by Panorama S.A., a joint Editora Abril S.A.I.C.1.F.Y.A.-Time, Inc. venture, and not—as Mr. Blum confidently suggests—by Editora Abril S.A.1.C.1.F.Y.A. It is true that our company has been “accused of links with Time-Life.” And, in every case, the “evidence” has been of the same sort uncovered by Mr. Blum: fabricated, imagined, inaccurate, malicious, speculative . . . and com- pletely untrue. As responsible Brazilian publishers, with no connection whatsoever with Time-Life or any other foreign enterprise, we deplore the irresponsible, offensive and libelous state- ments in Mr. Blum’s article, and request that the record be set straight immediately. _ Gordiano O. Rossi, Director Editora Abril more pornography New Orleans, La. Dear Sirs: Irving Younger [“Pornography and Violence,” The Nation, Aug. 14] writes: “None would object to cur- tailing the freedom of the pornographer whose sole motive iseprofit. .. 3.” Mr. Younger is wrong, / object! I agree with Paul Krass- ner when he wrote, “I think people have the right to have their prurient interest aroused. I also think that a book or whatever should not necessarily have to have what the Court called ‘socially redeeming qualities’ in order to be given the protection of the First Amendment. In fact, the ability to arouse prurient interest may very well be a ‘so- cially redeeming quality.” So far as I know, a cause-and-effect relationship has not been established between pornography and sex crime. So why not pecuniary pornography? If Mr. Younger has any scientific proof that pornography for pornography’s sake is harmful, let him trot it out so that we may examine it. If not, it seems to me that he speaks from the sound base of contemporary community prejudice, at least in his state- ment that “. . . punishment should be the lot of the pecu- niary pornographer.” Keith A. McKinley Bothell, Wash. Dear Sirs: Irving Younger’s excellent analysis, as ruthlessly parsimonious as it is, goes too far. He wants pornography “forbidden” when given or sold to persons under 18 not the children of the giver or seller, and also forbidden to be sold or given to anyone unwilling to buy or receive. Mr. Younger must know that forbidding means passing laws and that means giving power to police. Unfortunately, this does not mean the gentle application of reason but the use of force, with stupidity, brutality and often violence. I want the police entirely out of my chld-raising respon- sibilities; and the privacy of the individual is more greatly threatened when police force is requested than when we take our chances. Bernard Poll good question Lawrence, Kan. Dear Sirs: “If [ shudder to drown a kitten, how can I bomb thousands of children?” Let’s ask this question each day as we read about Vietnam. Melvin Landsberg 226 EDITORIALS The Experts Like the Three Wise Men who came from the East to bring word to Herod of a Great Happening, Three Elec- tion Experts, flanked by the American Ambassador, held their press conference in Saigon and pronounced the Vietnamese elections “reasonably efficient, reasonably free and reasonably honest”—quite on a par with elec- tions in the United States. The press subjected the Three to some sharp questioning, inquiring how, after only four days in a strange land and visits to only a handful of polling places, they had been able to reach this firm conclusion. The spokesman’s reply, “you can, I think, de- velop a certain appreciation of competence,” referred, ap- parently, to the mechanics of the balloting; he disavowed “political philosophical” judgments. The press did not inquire how the Three had been chosen, or anointed. It is far from The Nation’s intention to cast the slightest doubt on the competence and bona fides of these gentlemen but, after all, a man’s back- ground does play some part in his thinking and the con- clusions he may reach in sizing up a complex situation. The President seems to have added Election Experts as an afterthought; they were not members of the twenty- two man Presidential observer team, some of whom did not shy away from “political philosophical” judgments. The spokesman of the Three was Prof. Richard M. Scam- mon of the Government Affairs Institute in Washington; his colleagues were Prof. Donald Herzberg, Director of the Eagleton Institute of Politics at Rutgers University, and Prof. Howard Penniman of Georgetown University. By what process of divination did the President select the Big Three from the 16,000 members of the Ameri- can Political Science Association, which is fairly bursting with experts, including several hundred, one may assume, who are authorities on elections, foreign and domestic? If the President had assistance, as is usual in such mat- ters, who recommended the Three, and what investigation was made of their institutional connections? If, as there is reason to believe, their associations included agencies which were beneficiaries of State Department, Depart- ment of Defense or other governmental grants or con- tracts, might it not have been better public relations to have given this information to the press? Such informa- tion could hardly be regarded as irrelevant, since, how- ever investigators circumscribe their investigations, phil- osophical and political factors do have a way of getting into the picture. Mr. Scammon’s Government Affairs Institute, for ex- ample, is said to have received sizable grants from the Departments of State and Defense—something around $286,000. Mr. Penniman was on the staff of the CIA (1948-49), then served as Deputy Chief of the External Research Staff, State Department, when Dr. Evron M. ’ Kirkpatrick was Chief, and succeeded the latter as Chief (1953-55). Dr. Kirkpatrick is an Executive Director of the American Political Science Association, of which Max M. Kampelman is Treasurer and Géneral Counsel. Dr. Kirkpatrick doubles as Executive Director of Opera- THE NATION/ September 18,1967 fout in The Nation (February 27, “The Professors and | the CIA”) received grants in 1963, 1964 and 1965 from | the CIA, via various “conduit” foundations. The Nation is advised that Government Affairs In- _Stitute owns the real estate in which the American Po- “litical Science Association has its headquarters. We are | further advised that Scammon, Penniman and Herzberg ® have all done work for Operations and Policy Research. Sherrill pointed out that Kirkpatrick is a close friend of Vice President Humphrey; Kampelman is another good friend of the Vice President. Of course Mr. Humphrey _has many friends, including the editor of The Nation, and he knows many experts in many fields, but was it good | politics to send on a mission where at least the appear- _ance of objectivity is important men with these con- nections? | Yet when one considers the situation in broad per- spective, isn’t it all of a piece? The elections in South _ Vietnam were originally conceived as a public relations _ gimmick to counteract the Buddhist demonstrations which at their peak, threatened to topple the government. _ The scheme was to impart an appearance of legitimacy to _the South Vietnamese government, and to convince | doubtful Americans that we were -indeed defending a freedom-loving people against Communist aggression. The _ VIP mission, with its add-on of Election Experts, was a _ part of this massive public relations effort. In Vietnam, at least, no one was fooled. The Wall Street Journal: _ (September 6) interviewed a senior Vietnamese general _ who called the dispatch of observers “ridiculous.” The ' general noted that the observers never got far from their _ Vietnamese government guides. “If the election were not fair,” the general asked, “how would they find out?” Scammon, Penniman and Herzberg can put their heads _ together on that one. What Next? Unfortunately for Mr. Johnson—unfortunately also | for the people of the United States and the people of _ both Vietnams—public relations stunts do not solve the problems of peace and war. With the echoes of this particular Washington cum Madison Avenue operation dying away, what is Mr. Johnson’s next move? For move _he must: the 1968 U.S. election campaign is less than a year away. _ The election in Vietnam could afford Mr. Johnson | temporary shelter, as he views this black squall rapidly | approaching. Having won the Vietnamese election, he could without loss of face order a halt in the bombing of _ North Vietnam. Not just a pause with a time limit, for that would be an ultimatum and the North Vietnamese _ have already shown how they deal with such stop-and- _ go maneuvers. If the North Vietnamese did not respond to a halt without conditions, Mr. Johnson’s second option | would be to take the case to the United Nations. It is in fact already there and requires no new initia- tive. The Nation pointed this out editorially (“Call It | THE NATION/ September 18, 1967 IN THIS ISSUE EDITORIALS 226 ARTICLES September 18, 1967 230 Meat Inspection:. The New Jungle 233 Vietnam: Nick Kotz The Generals Sing an Old Song 238 It’s Getting Noisier . Philippe Devillers Carl Dreher 242 The Dollar Invades Europe Joseph D. Phillips BOOKS & THE ARTS 246 Rationalizing the. Irrational 248 Straight and Nouveau 249 Introduction to Gramsci 251 A Signal Danger 251 Foreign Policy (poem) 252 Theatre 255 Crossword Puzzle Publisher JAMES J. STORROW JR. Editor CAREY McWILLIAMS Executive Editor ROBERT HATCH Copy Editor MARION HESS Theatre HAROLD CLURMAN Art MAX KOZLOFF Music BENJAMIN BORETZ Science CARL DREHER Advertising Manager MARY SIMON Harry Magdoff Daniel Stern Eric Hobsbawm David Cort Robert Bly Julius Novick Frank W. Lewis Associate Publisher GIFFORD PHILLIPS Associate Editor PHIL KERBY Literary Editor HELEN ea Poetry Editor MIC CHAEL GOLDMAN Washington ROBERT G. SHERRILL Paris ALEXANDER WERTH London RAYMOND WILLIAMS. Bonn Cc. AMERY Canberra c. P. FITZGERALD The Nation is published weekly (except biweekly in July and August) by the Nation Magazine Company and copyright 1967 in the U.S.A. by the Nation Associates, Inc., 333 Sixth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10014. Tel.: CH 2-8400. West Coast office: 1256 Westwood Boulevard, Los Angeles, Calif. 90024. Tel.: GR 4-2533. Second class postage paid at New .York, N. ¥. and at additional mailing office. Subscription Price: One year, $10; two years, $18. Foreign and Canadiam postage: $1 extra per year, Change of Address: It is essential-that ‘subscribers ordering.a change of address give four: weeks’ notice and provide their old as well ss thelr new address. Please give Zip Code numbers for both addresses. Information to Libraries: The Natlom is indexed in Readers Guide to Periodical Literature, Book Review Digest, Book Review Index and the Public Affairs Information Service, = Volume 205 No. & Combined with FRONTIER 227 f % Ste ee Up!” July 3) and sentiment is now building up in the Senate for reviving the dormant 1966 U.S. resolution in the Security Council, calling for a conference to draw upon the Geneva Accords of 1954 and 1962 for estab- lishing peace in Southeast Asia. If the appeal is renewed, France or the Soviet Union may exercise the veto, but what of it? The issue will then go to the General As- sembly, where there would be an opportunity for diplo- matic give and take. It is hard to see how matters could be any worse than they are now. Senator Morse is probably right when he suggests that bilateral negotiations can lead to a truce but not to a settlement. For a settlement, a larger frame is needed. Dumping issues on the UN is standard operating pro- cedure which has worked on occasion in the past. It could work in this case, at least to the extent of getting the situation off dead center. Such a maneuver holds out some promise at this junc- ture because all parties are in trouble. Hanoi is hurting, as the Pentagon gleefully points out, and if it decides to wait out the ’68 election it is assuming some real risks. On the American, or Johnsonian, side, the margins of escalation are getting very thin. The Stennis Committee hearings are only one of a group of storm warnings. The disintegration of Mr. Johnson’s so-called consensus is another, and the further it disintegrates the more press- ing the need for action on his part. If he waits too long, he will lose what initiative he has left. The hawks are not waiting; he will be in their claws completely if he takes another escalatory step—or if he does nothing. The Military Voice It is now perfectly clear that a serious schism exists in the ranks of the Johnson Administration between the Joint Chiefs and the military generally on one side, and the other war-makers—the “crisis managers” as John McDermott calls them—on the other. This is not a clean- cut military versus civilian issue. Some of the generals, in this hassle, are young, strong-minded civilians in the Department of Defense; it is a truism that one can be a militarist without wearing a uniform. The importance of the issue is rather that the military voice, whatever its source, is becoming more strident, and Mr. Johnson’s internal troubles are increasing proportionately. These conflicts rage behind closed doors and the public —the segment that is interested—hears only muffled echoes of what is going on. What does emerge is con- fusing, precisely because there is no sharp conflict of principle as there was, for instance, in the early days of the cold war between Henry Wallace and James F. Byrnes. Now all alike are trying to win a war that, on any grounds of political decency and American moral leadership, should never have been started. They dis- agree only on the means of perpetrating international crime with maximum effectiveness. Nevertheless, degrees of temerity in such a situation have some barometric significance: the tougher the talk from people in high places, the more menacing the fu- ture appears. Another important phase is that the coali- tion between the Administration hawks (including those 228 in uniform) and the Congressional hawks becomes tighter and therefore more threatening. The generals do not be- come as emphatic and venturesome before a Congres- sional committee unless they feel the tide is running their way. Their usual stance is one of caution, but no one was cautious before the Stennis Committee. The phrase- ology was different, but the conclusions were the same as those of an apoplectic militarist like Mendel Rivers— — and more effective because of the appearance of sober restraint. a Where does this leave Secretary McNamara? The President’s attempt to paper over the differences between the Joint Chiefs and McNamara on the effectiveness of bombing North Vietnam was a palpable failure. It left the impression that the differences are more deep-seated, and that what is left of the consensus cannot be kept in- tact very much longer. By next spring, if not before, McNamara’s authority may be so impaired that he can no longer exercise his office with an acceptable degree of effectiveness. In the press conference at which Presi- dent Johnson announced his latest capitulation to the generals, the most significant remark—and one which has gone largely unnoticed by the daily press—virtually sidetracked McNamara. The Joint Chiefs, said Johnson, “are available to come to the President any time they choose without coming through the Secretary of Defense. They have been requested to do that any time they want to.” If McNamara really believes that bombing the North has little value in curbing Hanoi’s help to the Viet- cong, how can he justify the cost in pilots and aircraft? On the ground that having started, it is hard to stop? Or that it is important to keep an appearance of unity before the public and the services, so that morale will not sag? As a man of principle (he still has a tenuous claim on that status) McNamara should force a bombing pause of indefinite duration on the Administration or, if that is beyond his power, he should resign and speak his mind freely. The chances are that he will not do anything so drastic. And therein lies the national weakness beneath the over- whelming military strength. If a McNamara-cannot hew to the line in a matter of such importance, what can be expected of the ordinary, half-informed, powerless citi- zen? And if nothing is to be expected of the sovereign people but a supine submission to whatever atrocity is next on the list, how long can the country remain a democracy in fact as well as in name? An Entertainment Culture San Francisco Yes, California has done it again! Shirley Temple is going to run for Congress, and there is very little chance that she won’t win. California has given the political world something new—the politician as entertainer—and it must keep up the good work. George Murphy danced, as all Senators should, and Ronald Reagan sold soap and saved chimps, as all Governors should. And now Shirley Temple Black, America’s sweetheart (of a few decades ago) will be a Congresswoman. Can you imagine THE NATION/September 18, 1967 “over 40 not voting for her? It would be indecent, 1 Ps even un-American. _ She is another citizen-politician who has “got the call’ to serve her fellow man. Enough of this housewifery _ business for Mrs. Black; her children are old enough to . fend for themselves now. Her job is to go to Washington, _ D.C., and save the country she once charmed. . There are a number of significant aspects to her can- _ didacy and the success of her two predecessors, Murphy and Reagan. The rise of television has made charisma very important. If you are photogenic, project sincerity, and can remember what your public relations people tell _ you, you too can be a politician. And the less experience you have, the better, since politics is seen here as “dirty.” Reagan campaigned as an amateur and an innocent, and with a bit of backlash won by a million votes. Now Shirley Temple will no doubt make true the Bibli- cal injunction “. . . a little child shall lead them.” When _ people vote for her it will be on the basis of their memory of her in the films, when she was a cute kid; she’s not _ much to look at now. The last point, which explains this business of movie stars going into politics, is that Ameri- cans seem to insist, now, that their political leaders be entertaining. It’s more than a television image and charis- ma—you have to be able to amuse somehow, either by singing or dancing or fighting Indians or making records. We seem to be moving in the direction of being an entertainment culture: lawyers entertain (and become heroes of television programs), professors entertain, doc- tors entertain; everybody has to be capable of entertain- ing, somehow. Those who insist upon total entertainment can move to Disneyland, of course. But the state seems to be moving in that direction itself, so if one is patient he will find Disneyland coming to him. What is going on in California is very amusing—but it isn’t very funny. ARTHUR BERGER _ Is Bormann in Argentina? For fourteen months Argentina has been without her National Congress, and all political parties have been banned. The mustached President Juan Carlos Ongania, who closed the satirical magazine Tia Vincenta a year ago for running a cover cartoon depicting him as a walrus, has just signed into law a long-delayed “anti-Communist” measure which defines a Communist as “one who carries out activities that are proved to be undoubtedly motivated by Communist ideology.” The law puts a branch of the intelligence service in charge of deciding who should be charged with being a Communist and provides that “activi- ties prior to the present law must be taken into account.” All Argentines must now carry a paassport or cedula _ which has to be presented in purchasing a railroad ticket _ Or in registering at a hotel. A few months back, another law was enacted which provides that youngsters of both sexes on reaching age 14 may be conscripted, if the nation- al interest requires, and put to work in any part of the country for a period of one to three years—a brilliant solution of the vexing problem of student power. Recently a scheduled production of Harold Pinter’s The Homecoming was banned, on the recommendation of the Honorary Commission for the Moral Classification THE NATION/September 18, 1967 of Theater Spectacles—the third major work to be banned in Buenos Aires in the last three weeks. Among films banned recently is Loves of a Blonde, the prize-winning Czech film. Concern has been expressed in Buenos Aires, reports Barnard L. Collier in a dispatch to The New York Times, that the recent legislation will be used to “intimidate or destroy those that the Argentine regime considers a threat to its power.” Martin Bormann, the missing Nazi, may not be hiding in Argentina, but there his spirit marches on. The Chicago Jewish Forum Chicago Little magazines come and go so rapidly and generally have so little substance that neither their arrival nor de- parture merit public attention. But now and then a maga- zine of small circulation establishes a lasting place for itself by reason of its quality or longevity or through fill- ing a definite need. The Chicago Jewish Forum is such a magazine. It has now completed twenty-five years of continuous publication under the aegis of one man, Ben- jamin Weintroub, who has been its editor, publisher, and man of all tasks. We hope that it will enjoy many more years of useful existence under Mr. Weintroub’s devoted direction. Sonic Boom Tests With the Concord scheduled for its initial test flight not many months hence, the British Government has be- latedly taken some official cognizance of an annoying yet inevitable fact: The British-French supersonic plane will create a sonic boom whenever it flies at or above the speed of sound. Since there are people in the world who do not like to be subjected to shock waves, thunderous noises, or other painful assaults upon the senses, someone in the government decided that it might be prudent to determine the British tolerance for annoyances of this sort. Ar- rangements were made for the RAF to create some sonic booms in the vicinity of London. The British public was not told when to expect a boom on every occasion. The results, predictably, were inconclusive. They simply indi- cated that many people did not like the booms. The fact of the matter is that the tests—like those conducted in the United States—were unscientific in the extreme. They did not take into account the fact that the sound and shock of the sonic boom varies with at- mospheric conditions in a manner not fully understood. Nor could they purport to simulate the boom that will be created by the Concord, since the tests were made with much smaller planes. The intensity of the boom increases with the size of the plane. But the most glaring omission in all the sonic boom tests is that they do not take into account the real effects of the sonic boom on people. The first major U.S. tests, conducted in Oklahoma City, produced data concerning the number of windows broken, the amount of plaster shattered, and the number of claims filed for property damage. The most recent U.S. tests, in the Mojave Desert, tabulated certain property damage statistics plus 229 the stated opinions of the local residents—most of whom . are dependent upon the Air Force Base for a living. But none of the tests has as yet measured any of the important effects upon people. We do not know how much time will be required to return to sleep after having been rudely awakened by a sonic boom. We know vir- tually nothing about their effects on the nervous systems of normal people—much less people suffering from hyper- tension. Not even the most rudimentary physiological tests have been made to determine the effects on heart beat, perspiration, adrenalin flow, or ability to concen- trate. We do not even know what effect the boom mey have on laboratory animals. But what we do know about the boom is dicen There is sufficient cause for alarm that some truly an n tific sonic boom tests should be undertaken—this time by — biochemists, physicians and other scientifically trained ~ people who are competent to judge the effect on human beings. Although the FAA has spent thousands of dollars on boom tests designed to show how much property damage the boom may cause, those tests provide small clue con- cerning the human damage that may ensue. To date our government has not even undertaken simple physiologi- cal tests that could provide important data—tests similar to those presently required before any company can mar- ket a lipstick, an insecticide, or a household paint. KarL M. RUPPENTHAL Meat Inspection: The New Jungle NICK KOTZ Mr. Kotz is a Washington correspondent for the Des Moines Register and the Minneapolis Tribune. He has been credited by Sen. Walter Mondale with first having called attention to the inadequacies of existing meat inspection legislation. Washington Does the American citizen have an inherent right to safe, government-inspected meat, even when traveling through a state that does not provide meat inspection? Aled P. Davies, genial and skilled chief lobbyist for the American Meat Institute, nonchalantly denies it. When Rep. Thomas Foley (D., Wash.) peppered him in mid-July with questions about how the traveler can be assured the hamburger he buys is made of safe, fed- erally inspected meat, Davies replied casually that he might variously demand federally inspected meat, ask to see the meat package, determine the meat’s condition by smelling it, or—if he is really nervous—carry his own meat with him. _ Lounging easily in the witness chair before a House Agriculture Livestock Subcommittee, which usually fol- lows the advice of his industry, Davies said he was not nervous. He expressed complete confidence in the whole- ‘someness of American meat, whether federally inspected, state inspected, or not inspected at all. The hearing was called to consider legislation to mod- ernize a 1906 federal meat inspection law which has not been significantly changed since Upton Sinclair provoked it with The Jungle, which deals inadequately with condi- tions in a fast-changing meat industry and which leaves 15 per cent of American meat slaughtering and 25 per cent of meat processing exempt from federal inspection. But since the sessions were sparsely attended and largely ignored by the press, the vast majority of Americans were not privy to Davies’ view that visitors to a state are no more entitled to special meat protection than to special hunting laws. State laws differ on many issues, he said. Meat produced for interstate commerce must be fed- erally inspected, but 8.7 billion pounds (enough to feed 30 million people) are sold annually intrastate without 230 federal inspection. It is doubtful that many consumers know that only twenty-five states require inspection of both slaughtering and processing and that even these, states usually have insufficient trained personnel to en- force their laws. Congressman Foley, a subcommittee member, is aware of these facts and their unappetizing significance. The 38-year-old sophomore Representative perked up when Davies said of state inspection systems: “We believe that generally speaking they have provided the kind of consumer protection that the people living in those states have thought necessary and have been willing to pay for.” Foley, who is urging that federal inspection be ex- tended to cover virtually all meat sold in the United States, does not for a minute share Davies’ confidence in the public satisfaction. He believes that most house- wives feel secure at the market only because they falsely assume that all meat has undergone rigid federal inspec- tion, Davies is vice president of the American Meat Institute, which represents the largest meat packers. The hostility he expressed toward the need for any new leg- islation was echoed by representatives of the Independent Meat Packers Association, Western Meat Packers Asso- ciation, the National Renderers Association, and the Na- tional Association of State Departments of Agriculture (NASDA). One week later, however, most of the major trade associations and NASDA had altered drastically their position and switched their lobbying tactics. Suddenly, mosi of the meat lobbyists openly or privately began to back a Johnson Administration bill that would strength- en federal enforcement and would provide up to 50 per cent of federal funds to states willing to approximate fed- eral inspection standards. The bill, however, would not expand federal inspection to any more plants. The meat industry and NASDA now want the bill approved quickly and quietly, their new objective being to head off tougher legislation proposed by Foley and Rep. Neal Smith (D., Ia.). Foley and Smith propose not THE NATION/September 18, 1967 close loopholes in the present law but to bring intrastate packers under federal inspection, so that / per cent of the nation’s meat supply would be feder- | ally inspected. et The two Congressmen can see no legal logic to limit- | ing federal meat inspection by a 1906 interpretation which restricts the term “interstate commerce” to actual sales | across state lines, since most federal laws regulating in- | dustry have long assumed jurisdiction over firms having sufficient volume of business “to affect interstate com- _ merce.” The federal minimum wage law applies to busi- nesses grossing $250,000 or more a year, and that is the figure the sponsors of the new bill adopt. The worst fears of NASDA and the meat industry in the last five years have suddenly become a reality. A few _ newspapers and consumer critic Ralph Nader have begun to reveal the stomach-turning details of a Department of Agriculture investigation showing conditions in non- federally inspected plants throughout the country. The survey, made in 1962, revealed unbelievably foul sani- tary conditions, the use of diseased animals, adulteration of meat products, and labeling practices which mislead consumers as to the contents of luncheon meats, wieners and sausage. It also showed most state and local in- spection systems to be completely inadequate, either be- cause of limited laws, insufficient appropriations, un- | . skilled inspectors or lax enforcement. The report was never released or legislation pushed because the department was transfixed in a Hamlet-like conflict between its responsibility to consumers and its responsibility to promote meat sales. But now the un- savory details are getting about, and the meat industry and cooperative Congressmen want the Administration bill adopted quickly before public alarm and disgust pro- vide pressure for the Smith-Foley bill. Following a cozy private conference between the in- dustry and leaders of the Agriculture committee, the sub- committee and full committee have quickly approved the Administration bill. The Smith-Foley substitute plan was defeated by overwhelming votes in both the subcommit- tee and full committee. The committee does not plan to print the report of the 1962 USDA investigation or of a new survey made in July of this year, a survey that confirms the 1962 findings of filth, adulteration, decep- tive labeling and farcical state inspection. Most committee members agreed that the USDA studies should be with- held in order to protect the legitimate industry. But Smith and Foley, joined by a small but growing band of new supporters, are now armed with the reports and are unafraid to use them as they carry their fight to the House floor. Furthermore, Sen. Walter Mondale (D., Minn.), shocked by news accounts of abuses, is now pushing an even stronger bill in the Senate. Adopting concepts from the Administration’s earlier 1965 bill, Mondale would make all meat subject to federal in- spection but would permit states to inspect intrastate meat when the Secretary of Agriculture finds that they have established adequate systems to guarantee federal stand- ards. The Administration backed away from the 1965 bill only because NASDA and the meat industry had success- fully blocked the legislation from even receiving a hear- _ THE NATION/September 18, 1967 ing in the 89th Congress. Now Smith has asked Presi- dent Johnson to reassert the Administration’s support for stronger legislation. The most recent USDA survey is not pleasant reading, but it makes vivid the conditions which the proposed leg- isiation is designed to correct. Least surprising were re- ports from the eight states (Alabama, Alaska, Colorado, Delaware, Maryland, Minnesota, New Hampshire and South Dakota) which provide no state inspection. Among the conditions reported by experienced USDA meat in-- spectors: @ At a New Hampshire plant: “All rooms were dirty, caked with blood, grease and filth. Men with dirty clothing were boning dirty meat on dirty tables.” @ Ata Colorado plant: “The band saw had not been cleaned for several days and the bone dust in the bottom of the saw was filled with maggots. I noticed rat drop- pings and tracks on boxes and wrapping paper in saw- dust on the floor.” @ At an Alabama plant: “The cooler contained a dressed hog with a sore on the side which had not been trimmed and several hogs with excess hair.” The federal inspectors found similar conditions at plants in many of the thirteen states which provide vol- untary meat inspection; that is, meat packers may have state inspection if they request it. These states are Ari- zona, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Mon- tana, Nebraska, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, Penn- sy!vania, Rhode Island and Texas. @ At a Pennsylvania plant: “Ninety per cent of beef quarters showed evidence of bruises, sores, etc. General sanitation of the entire establishment was very poor.” @ Ata Texas plant: “Meat drums were very dirty, contaminated with rust and the insides showed a very poor job of washing.” @ At an Oklahoma plant: “This company slaughters and processes a full line of sausage and smoked meat products in a building which isn’t fit to be a dog food plant. Sewage water was backing up in one room. A dead mouse was lying in the corner of one cooler.” @ At a Nebraska plant that advertises “sausage products with that old-world taste,” the inspector noted a curing vat “in which corrosion was from one-fourth to one-half inch thick.” Most disturbing, perhaps, were field notes from the 231 twenty-five states which theoretically require inspection. Although industry officials testified that California has the best state meat inspection system, the USDA inves- tigator noted that “canned meat product is produced without any semblance of inspection on the part of Cali- fornia state meat inspection.” Of one canning plant in the Los Angeles area, the inspector said: “The operation is located in a building that is falling apart. It is infested with flies, cockroaches and rodents. The whole place smells bad. There is no semblance of sanitation.” @® Of general practices in many Wisconsin process- ing plants: “Ham loaf rarely includes ham; pork trim- mings and veal with appropriate amounts of cereal would be more likely.” @ At a Florida plant: “In viewing the trimmings being dumped into the chopper chute, we noted a little trash, such as paper drinking cups, in the raw product.” @ At the largest non-federally inspected plant in Indiana: “The equipment was contaminated and rusty. Rack trucks used in the transportation of meat were covered with fat and heavily contaminated grease.” The 1967 report does little to support the NASDA and meat industry argument that states are rapidly im- proving their inspecting systems. Neither does a reading of U.S. Public Health Service statistics which show 20,040 reported cases of salmonellaosis, an intestinal disease which can be transmitted by meat products, in 1966. Pub- lic Health Service officials say that probably only 1 per cent of instances of this disease are actually reported. Meat industry spokesmen also contend that the imspection problem is gradually taking care of itself as an increasing number of plants come under federal in- $pection. The American Meat Institute stressed that the number of federally inspected plants has doubled since 1950 and that meat under federal inspection has risen by 5 per cent. But the institute did not point out that total meat production has increased by 50 per cent during this period, and that the actual amount of non-federally inspected slaughter has actually risen from 4.2 billion pounds in 1950 to 4.9 billion in 1966. Various opponents of expanded federal inspection have their own particular reasons for disliking it. The state agriculture department officials do not want the federal government to take over part of their domain, particularly with the clear implication that they are not doing their job. Many independent meat packers know that they would be unable to meet rigid federal require- ments, especially those for plant construction. Some conservative Congressmen, state officials and meat firm executives simply are opposed in principle to any expan- sion of federal government into state activities. One would suppose, however, that the giant firms would favor complete federal inspection, since more than 90 per cent of their production is already federally in- spected. Yet interviews with officials of the eight largest meat packing firms reveal that only one—Oscar Mayer and Co.—favors expanded federal inspection. It is per- haps not coincidence that Mayer is one of the very few national firms which does all of its slaughtering and proc- essing under federal inspection. Publicly, officials of the largest firms say only that 232 reo’ they fear Congress will not appropriate adequate funds to maintain an expanded federal system. They also ex- press fear that dual federal standards will develop, less rigid standards being applied to smaller companies. USDA officials estimate it would cost $30 million annually to provide expanded inspection as proposed by Foley and Smith. Smith points out that the expense amounts to less than one-tenth of a cent per pound of meat and would be a small price to pay for the safety inherent in rigid fed- eral meat inspection. In these inspection procedures, federal inspectors scrutinize meat continuously in the production process, beginning with inspection before slaughter, followed by examination of organs of the slaughtered animal, and continuing through whatever processing may be involved. Last year, federal inspectors examined more than 25 bil- lion pounds of meat and condemned 250 million pounds because of disease, spoilation or adulteration. Several witnesses before the livestock subcommittee have suggested that a more vital concern for some of the largest firms is to avoid federal inspection of their relatively few branch processing plants which sell entirely within a state. Arnold Mayer, legislative representative’ for the Amalgamated Meat Cutters and Butcher Work- men of North America (AFL-CIO), testified: “Live cattle which obviously cannot pass inspection is sent to uninspected plants. This is done not only by the small number of get-rich-quick operators but also by some highly respectable firms. The very competitive sit- uation in the industry currently leaves them no alterna- tive. Their competition does it. They must do it.” An official of one of the largest firms admitted pri- vately that his company could not compete effectively in sales of luncheon meats in several important markets it the company’s branch plants had to meet federal re- quirements for sausage and wiener ingredients. The Agriculture Department has deleted the names of plants inspected in its new investigation, but the 1962 survey reported improper conditions in a number of non- federally inspected branch plants operated by several large national firms. Swift & Co., the nation’s largest packing firm, was criticized for conditions in several of its branch plants. A spokesman for Swift said that 97 per cent of the firm’s slaughtering and 90 per cent of its processing is carried out under federal inspection. The company re- portedly sells about 4 billion pounds of meat annually. Oi the eight national firms interviewed, only Swift de- clined to reveal how many plants it operates without fed- eral inspection. Rodney Leonard, Deputy Assistant Secretary of Agriculture, told the subcommittee that modern technol- ogy—in addition to providing a wide variety of better and handier meat products—has made it easier for unscrupulous operators to mask the true condition of meat. He referred to the use of high-speed equipment, the prevalence of frozen meat (which must be defrosted for effective inspection), fast curing processes, artificial smoking, coloring agents, “and other additives which are potentially deceptive and dangerous to one’s health when their use is not regulated.” THE NATION/ September 18,1967 tem ‘is Sriccling to keep up with such technological in- novations, and believed that few, if any, state inspection systems have sufficient competent personnel to inspect complicated, modern processing plants. Most supporters of expanded federal inspection readily | admit that even the present Administration bill would be a step in the right direction. Most important, it would give _ the Agriculture Department authority to keep so-called | inedible meat out of human food supplies. At present, USDA has virtually no power to check on the activities _ of renderers, dog and cat food manufacturers, and other handlers of inedible meat that sometimes gets slipped illegally into products which are intended for human consuniption. Labor union official Mayer and other supporters of expanded federal inspection doubt, however, that state meat inspection will be greatly improved by the offer of VIETNAM The Generals Sing PHILIPPE DEVILLERS Mr. Devillers, director of Southeast Asia Studies at the Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques in Paris, is the author of Histoire du Vietnam de 1940 a 1952 and other works. Paris On January 28, North Vietnam’s Foreign Minister Nguy- en Duy Trinh (long known as a pro-Chinese hard-liner) declared in an interview that if the U.S. really wanted _ talks, it must unconditionally end its bombing of the DRY and “other warlike acts against it.” This was the first time that North Vietnam had offered access to talks with no mention of “points” or “principles.” Ha- noi, also Moscow, gave unusual prominence to this in- terview and there was no doubt in Europe that it was a signal as important as Ho Chi Minh’s November, 1953, interview with the Swedish daily Expressen, which start- ed the process that culminated eight months later in the Geneva Agreements. Washington heard the signal, but did not respond. As William Bundy, one of the architects of U.S. policy in Vietnam, put it a few weeks later, the Administration did not believe the signal was serious because it was public. (This reasoning, incidentally, would seem to cast a dubious light on the so widely publicized U.S. peace offensives.) In actual fact, the signal was hotly discussed by the American strategists. In February, Hanoi was informed through neutral channels that an “intense strug- gle” was going on within the White House between those who wished to reply and those who said that the inter- view proved Hanoi was losing the war, and that “by _ August” the American position in Vietnam would be im- _ proved to the point where Hanoi would be forced to ac- cept American conditions. On hearing this, a North Vict- _ THE NATION/September 18, 1967 federal funds and technical assistance. Referring to this provision in the Administration bill, Mayer said: “It would leave the situation almost the way it is now. It is an effort to buy the states into enacting meat inspection laws. But there is no requirement for the states to do so. Nor are there any real sanctions to assure that the legis- lation and its enforcement is effective.” The proposal of legislation has at least led to some changes in the meat buying habits of a number of secre- taries on Capitol Hill. Girls in the offices of Congressmen dealing with the legislation confess they are for the first time examining processed meat packages to make sure that they contain the federal stamp of approval. It is denoted by a circle with the wording “U.S. inspected and passed by the Department of Agriculture.” Federally ap- proved raw meat bears the purple stamp, “USDA inspect- ed.” If consumers generally would insist on the federal stamp, they might get the legislation they deserve. an Old Song namese representative said: “Once again the Americans are mistaken and badly informed. By August the situa- tion will be worse for them.” It was clear at the time he spoke that Hanoi had received from its allies (and especially from the Russians) pledges of modern weapons and other new equipment, and that a good part of it was already in Vietnam. August is just over, and everyone can decide for him- self who was right and who was wrong. The White House in February spurned what was probably the best chance it ever had to get negotiation promptly started. It waved aside the Kosygin-Wilson plan, resumed the bombing after the Tet truce, and once more escalated the war. The least that can be said is that the results have not measured up to expectations. Though a series of “major victories” and local successes have been an- nounced, the fact is that the war has assumed a new aspect which seems to have taken some experts by sur- prise. The U.S. Air Force can still strike heavy blows on the communications system of North Vietnam (bridges, roads, railways tracks and yards), on the power plants, oil parks, hospitals, schools (called barracks) and air- fields; but it meets increasing resistance from enemy flak, and—more important—has been unable to prevent the forces of both the DRV and the NLF from lifting the intensity of the ground struggle to new heights. Since April, the fighting has concentrated more and more heavily in the area close to the 17th Parallel, the Demilitarized Zone and the area of the South Viet- namese First Army Corps. There, in a very difficult country of jungle-covered hills and ridges, something like positional warfare has developed, and the Marines have had to face an enemy extremely skilled in jungle war- fare and now provided with new Russian guns, rockets 233 and missiles. Isolated posts, hill bunkers, have been re- peatedly assaulted and are held only at heavy cost, air support being difficult. General Westmoreland has been forced to move into this area units that were already engaged in the South. The outcome of these hard battles has led Hanoi to believe that the NLF is now trained and equipped to wage the people’s war in the South without reliance upon the North’s manpower. It should be added that north of Danang the NLF has the advantage of support from the population of central Vietnam which, as a result of General Ky’s cruel repression of the Buddhists last year, how actively or secretly supports the Front. Hatred of the Marines has reached new levels in this region. In the north, as well as in the center and south, North Vietnamese and the NLF are fighting harder than ever, and American casualties are running at the highest rates of the war. Despite optimistic reports, “pacifica- tion’ is a failure and is likely to remain so. At the time of Secretary McNamara’s trip, it was suggested that South Vietnamese combat teams be attached as auxiliaries or hostages to the American units, to help in the “pacification.” This was what the French did in the 1890s and more recently, from 1949 to 1952 when, faced with the reluctance of Paris to send reinforce- ments, the High Command in Indo-China decided to “jaunier’ (make yellow) its units. “Pacification,” writes The New York Times on May 17, “requires saturation of the area with well-trained allied troops” and among army officers “there is virtual unanimity that despite the aid of about 55,000 South Korean, Australian and New Zealand troops, and more than 700,000 South Vietnamese military and paramilitary forces, there are not enough men to go around.” The U.S. military insists that the troops it is getting cannot produce “the results the President wants” and that at the present rate of Northern infiltration and American “progress” on the battlefield, the war could go on for years. Probably Au Truong Thanh (who endeavored to run as a peace candidate in the recent elections) was right when he told American correspondents on July 4 that there could be no military victory over the Com- munists in Vietnam “unless you are prepared to com- pletely destroy the country. And because of the inter- national situation you cannot do that. 53 However, military victory is what the generals want. And because, despite the huge machine set in motion for that purpose, victory is still not in sight, they are becoming exasperated. Continuously, repeatedly, they urge the President to escalate—to send more troops, to sup- press criticism. Five divisions (about 150,000 men with the supporting units), are thought necessary. General Westmoreland has Ict it be known that he needs these troops to retain the initiative in South Vietnam. Head- quarters in Saigon has stressed the continuous infiltra- tion and build-up of the enemy (and Joseph Alsop cites among Northern divisions recently infiltrated, the 325th which he identified in August, 1965, as already fighting in central Vietnam!). Stalemate is denied. The enemy is said to be hurting badly, the war is being slowly but steadily won, the United States must just keep the pres- sure on, or still better step it up. The war is “a con- 234 test of wills,” it becomes increasingly a “war of attri- tion,’ and the Americans must show the “Commies” that they cannot hope to see the day when the United States gives up. It is an old song, only too well known on this side of the Atlantic. It was heard from Ger- man generals in Russia; it was heard later in Indo- China and in Algeria. Reacting to increased criticism of the air attack on North Vietnam, military advisers have told the White | House that should it choose to decrease the bombing, — the army “will require still more soldiers in the South | to handle the concomitant increase in enemy combat | capability” resulting from stepped-up infiltration. q Washington still shows some reluctance to give in to the generals. In July, Mr. McNamara was “doubtful — ot U.S. intelligence reports of North Vietnam troop build- ups in the South” over the last three months. It seems — thus that the Administration is onto some of the tricks used in the “decision-making” process. (In 1950, Mac- | Arthur’s Tokyo headquarters described an “enormous” invasion of Chinese volunteers into Korea, hoping thus to persuade President Truman of the necessity to drop A-bombs on Manchuria or China. ) Nevertheless, General Westmoreland got 45,000 men — and President Johnson decided to escalate the air war, and probably the ground war too. He has thus chosen to 4 vield again to the temptation of a military victory, bring- ing upon Vietnam still more bombs, napalm, defoliants and other chemical poisons, forced removals of villagers, destructions of “structures,” etc.—all in the hope that some day Hanoi will “come to the conference table.” The tragedy is that, by taking this path, the Ad- ministration is moving toward an ever-increasing Ameri- canization of the war, and therefore probably toward rising casualties. The capacity of the supporters of the war to delude themselves on this point seems unlimited. They still talk of letting “the South Vietnamese fight for themselves,” and comment on “the progress of the South Vietnamese army.” Reliable reports from both Viet- namese and neutral sources indicate, however, that if a year ago there still was a chance to rebuild the army, the chance has now gone forever. As an “aggressive force,” the South Vietnamese army is virtually nonex- istent. Outraged by the way the Americans treat them and speak of them, revolted by orders to destroy villages — | of their own people on behalf of dubious leaders, an- gered——or tempted—by corruption that spreads on every level, soldiers and N.C.O.s now just try to get by. Even so, many die in defensive or even “offensive” opera- tions. Figures (from The New York Times) are instruc- tive: In 1964, there were 73,319 desertions from an army of 434,006; in 1965, 113,462 desertions from 531,086; in 1966, 116,406 from 597,977. New measures have been taken this year and spokesmen say there will be no more than 60,000 deserters. They forgot to add that the game has changed. Soldiers now desert within the army, shifting from one battalion to another, and collecting an enlist- ment premium with each switch. Not infrequently, officers will report 600 or 700 men on the roll, whereas they may have only 400 or 450. They pocket the extra pay and sell the extra equipment THE NATION/ September 18,1967 — Ri sorrictimes to “traders” acting on behalf of NLF. On an increasing scale, persons widely be- “Tieved to be on the “government” side (and being paid _ by that side) are in fact working for the Front, are keep- ‘ing it informed of everything the Amerigans say and plan. General Ky’s police does its best to ferret out | these agents. The feared chief of police, Gen. Nguyen _ Ngoc Loan, has gone so far as to work again with _ Le Kim Tuyen, former chief of the secret police under Diem, who kept excellent files. But terror and fear of assassination work against such efforts. And as the non- Communists and Buddhists in Saigon say: “If the South Vietnamese army cannot win on the battlefield, it is because they do not defend anything worth defending.” The. Asian allies are wavering. The Thais and the | South Koreans have recently become more aware of _ the dangers of the game. Guerrilla activity in Thailand has risen to the level that South Vietnam was experi- encing in 1960-61, just before the United States began its major commitment, and Bangkok now seems unwill- ing to participate in a war so widely condemned, to risk a worsening of its relations with so many govern- ments. The Philippines, facing a resurgent Huk activi- ty, has also grown cautious. Korea too faces internal difficulties, and sees no clear interest in an armed in- tervention into Vietnamese affairs. Thus, from now on, the Americans must wage the Vietnamese War in great- er and greater isolation. And, as the Stockholm confer- ence on Vietnam showed this summer, the war is in- creasingly seen by African, Latin American and Asian countries as a colonial war of unprecedented scale. This point of view has far-reaching consequences. First, it focuses upon the United States (and upon the United States almost exclusively, since any other belligerents are now identified with the American interest), the in- grained emotions common to former colonies, protecto- rates or dependencies of European powers. It should be pointed out, however—as Walt W. Rostow patiently ex- plained to me in May, 1965—that the attitudes of the mew governments have not much changed and Washing- ton, therefore, sees no need to worry about the opinions of their peoples. Second, the growing isolation forces farsighted govern- ments of older nations to adjust their policies. They may not want to criticize Washington, but realistically they must remain in sympathy with the new generations of Africa, Asia and Latin America. If only to prevent Peking or Havana from exploiting the opportunities, they must dissociate themselves from President Johnson’s policies. Tt is now a commonplace that the war in Vietnam par- | alyzes the development of peaceful coexistence between _ Washington and Moscow. Pressure for “counter-escala- tion” is therefore increasing in various parts of the world, and as anger deepens, a trend toward advocat- ing force gains momentum. Has World War III, then, already begun? The ex- plosive colonial character of the war in Vietnam is gen- erating new assessments and decisions. By March of 1966, General- de Gaulle, because he had learned the lesson of 1949-54 and did not want the Fifth Republic to be associated with U.S. colonial policies (as the Unit- E NATION/ September 18, 1967 ‘Franklin, Toronto Star ed States had previously been associated with the French Fourth Republic in Indo-China), moved France out of NATO and adopted a policy of active neutrality in the conflict developing between the Anglo-Americans and the Third World. Now, in the) last twelve months, interna- tional conferences and gatherings have linked the Viet- namese War with the Latin American revolutionary move- ment and the struggle for black power within the United States. From all information available here, it is difficult not to conclude that the tensions created by the war in Vietnam have begun to boomerang in hitherto rela- tively stable regions of the globe. Secretary General U Thant, on May 11, expressed his fear that these tensions were leading into a new World War; but some groups in Europe go so far as to accept the idea that World War LI started in February, 1965, when the United States attacked North Vietnam. Since then, according to this view, the war has been slowly but steadily moving forward—‘“a protracted war,” some Chinese papers have called it, “of twenty, thirty or even fifty years” waged, mostly, by harassment and guerril- las, by all the colored peoples against the Anglo-Ameri- cans. Psychological mobilization is going on and there can be no doubt that in this context, the recent Middle East war has created in the Arab world emotions which echo those of the Vietnamese War. One can thus understand why on July 10, in Stockholm, Gunnar Myrdal stressed the “increasing world-wide po- litical and moral isolation of America,” and regretted that it “is not realized by the broad strata of the Amer- ican people . . . . What they do not learn from their newspapers or anybody else is the solid opposition to the American war policy in Vietnam among the peoples on all continents. I consider this a serious fault of the American press and other news media which otherwise are free. To them demonstrations and flag burnings are news, but apparently not the much more important 235 trends of public opinion abroad. . The result 1s that the Americans are left unaware of their increasing moral and political isolation.” It does seem, however, that an appreciable section of American public opinion now finds the time ripe for a reassessment of the Vietnamese question. Whatever the rights or wrongs of the past, the present task is to define America’s long-term interest, to decide how well it is served by waging the war in Vietnam to the finish, and to assess the desirability of alternative policies. That alternatives exist The New York Times showed admirably on May 24: “The alternatives of the Vietnam war have become as clear as they ever have been: either a military victory or negotiation. Sinée January, the one and only possible route towards negotiations has been a cessation of the bombing of North Vietnam. The attempt might fail, but could anyone claim that present policies are succeeding. . . ? The American policy of fighting a ‘limited war’ means simply prolonging the agonies of wounds, deaths and destructions. When the relatively small risks of an unconditional pause in the bombing of North Vietnam are weighed against the enor- mous risks of a much greater and wider war, the choice 3 Seems easy. . . . As early as February, Kosygin endorsed Nguyen Duy Trinh’s proposal, and interpreted it as meaning that should the United States unconditionally stop the bombing of North Vietnam, it would be possible to ex- plore avenues toward a political solution of the Viet- namese problem. In February, also, after the resumption of bombing, Nhan Dan, official Hanoi daily, interpreted the Trinh interview as a clear offer to negotiate. In an interview with Jeune Afrique (April 16), Prime Min- ister Pham Van Dong said that if the. Americans were wise enough to understand that the first step is up to them, the Vietnamese would show that they knew how to be generous. On May 8, in Stockholm, Col. Ha Van Lau said that his government continued sympathetic to- ward finding a settlement of the war, but that it could never negotiate until the United States ended its bomb- ing of North Vietnam. At the end of May, Pham Van Dong, in an interview with a pro-Chinese Australian Com- munist paper, said the offer to discuss a settlement if the United States permanently and unconditionally stopped bombing his country “still had full value,’ and at the same time, Foreign Minister Nguyen Duy Trinh reiterat- ed in an interview with the Japanese Kyodo agency Hanoi’s “expressed willingness to work out a political solution, including negotiations,” adding, however, that “the United States should indicate its good faith with actions.” In July, during the World Conference on Viet- nam, delegates from the DRV again repeated that if the bombardments were to cease for good, there could be talks. In June, Eastern European sources had hinted strongly that if the Americans would stop the bombing, negotiations could start immediately and Mr. Kosygin is said to have confirmed this to President Johnson at Glassboro. But the President again tragically missed his opportunity. He is said to have been persuaded by his advisers that the United States was strong enough to humiliate Moscow in the face of the Third World, a folly that merely reinforces the propaganda coming out of — Peking, Havana and Paris. ’ As matters now stand, the Administration still prefers to wait for the enemy to surrender. In-his July 19 speech, Secretary Rusk once again ruled out any cessa- tion of the bombing of North Vietnam until Hanoi gave some indication of what it could do to scale down its “half of the war.” “If Hanoi is prepared to abandon its effort to seize South Vietnam by force, there can be peace within hours, but so long as they attempt to seize South Vietnam by force, the struggle will continue, and there will be some tough days ahead.” Except for those naive enough to believe still in the Administration’s candid desire for peace, no one can be in doubt as to what that means. The facts have been put clearly by a former Presidential assistant, Richard N. Goodwin, who on May 6 in San Francisco accused the government of wanting complete military victory rather than a negotiated settlement. “We have not made up our mind to accept a negotiated settlement at all. We want a victory.” In May, A. Hetherington, reporting for the Manchester Guardian, asked the military in Wash- ington whether they would accept another pause in the bombing to see whether negotiations could be started. The answer he got was, “No, the restocking of ammuni- tion in the South during the Tet truce in February was too great. .’ The new escalation of bombing is further evidence that, as in Imperial Germany, the gen- eral staff (supported by industrial magnates) has the de- cisive word in councils of the Chief Executive. The minds of the President’s most influential advisers are now apparently set beyond hope of change. Sen. George D. Aiken expressed that view when he admitted last May his conviction “that the present Administra- tion cannot achieve an honorable peace in Vietnam.” Gunnar Myrdal said in his closing address to the Stock- holm World Conference: “The small group of people around President Johnson who are running this unde- clared, large-scale and cruel war on the Asian continent are poisoned by their own rhetoric and their own propa- ganda, and by their need to defend all the mistakes they have already committed and are committing in an escalating measure .. . . Some time ago I gave up hope of bringing to reason the group in Washington that is now the motor of the war in Vietnam... .” _ What it comes to, then, is that the citizens of the United States must now decide. Is this war, waged for six years, 8,000 miles away in a small and innocuous country of Asia, the vital issue of the decade for the United States? Is it so important that it must be carried to completion, though that may mean the sacrifice of peace within the United States and even of world peace itself? The Administration has used many arguments to justi- fy its course, and one after another the arguments have been attacked, often successfully. However, some are still in use, and those are worth discussing. Is it really a “limited” war, as Washington says, to make it more palatable and to allay fears of world con- flict? Spending at the direct rate of $28 billion, and probably at $50 billion if all indirect expenses are in- THE NATION/September 18,1967 -a death rate of 10,000 a year; wholesale de- struction of Vietnam’s cities and villages with the (tem- | porary) exception of Hanoi and Haiphong; the seeds of | hatred spreading through the continents of Asia, Africa, | Latin America—all this scarcely fits the compass of a limited affair. In the glossary of “limited wars,” the words “attrition,” “obliteration,” “removals,” “refu- gees,” have probably also a “limited” meaning. _ Are America’s vital interests really involved? To con- tain China? China once again suffers civil war and Viet- | nam for ten centuries has kept independent of China | without the slightest help from a foreign power. In any case, as Secretary of State John Foster Dulles said on May 11, 1954, Southeast Asia can be defended without Indo-China. With the Seventh Fleet in the China Sea, | with bases in Okinawa, Taiwan, the Philippines and Thai- | Jand, the United States has all the air and sea power necessary to dissuade Peking from any dangerous initia- tive. Fighting a war in the jungles of Vietnam has noth- | ing to do with China’s containment. | What exactly is the nature of the “sacred commit- | ments’? In November, 1954, wishing to maintain their _ consulates in Hanoi, the Department of State and the British Foreign Office asserted that Vietnam, according _ to the Geneva Agreements, was one country and that _ they had thus the right to maintain consulates in the | North since they had recognized the Saigon government. _ Reference to the 17th Parallel as a “line” is to be found only in the military agreement signed between _ the French and Vietminh commands, which has never | been countersigned by any foreign power. It thus cannot _ be a national border. However, Secretary Rusk af- | firmed on July 6 in Chicago that America would stay in Vietnam “until the right of South Vietnamese people to work out their own future under a government of | their own free choice has been secured.” But in truth a people can hardly afford to be “pro- tected” in the way that the United States has protected South Vietnam since 1960. Writing to the Herald Tribune (June 20), W. J. Sulzman, of the North American Col- lege, Vatican City, remarked: “The term ‘war of attri- tion’ can be more accurately used to describe what the people of South Vietnam, Vietcong and otherwise, have had to endure in the name of defending their freedom, than it can be to describe the overall strategy for vic- tory of the United States and its allies. It can hardly be said that the people of Vietnam have ever enjoyed ' freedom since the beginning of this horrendous struggle | thirty years ago. But now, the situation has worsened ' to such a degree that ‘war of annihilation’ would scem to better describe it.” With frustration and exasperation comes rising in- _ tolerance. Those who oppose the war are accused of “doing what the hawks in Hanoi most desire”: “making - our will look weak and strengthening the enemy’s _ proportionately”; “giving aid and comfort to the enemy”; | “betraying the boys dying for freedom in Vietnam.” Let- | ters to the papers insist that “the best way to break | the enemy’s will is to convince him that we are certain | to fight as long as necessary to insure our goals,” and _ the Detroit Free Press proclaims that “Ho should realize THE NATION/ September 18, 1967 that the U.S. will never fail to support its war in the field as did the French Government in the early 50s.” Protestors and demonstrators are described as Red pawns, and the FBI is urged to investigate. Gen. Maxwell Taylor warns against losing the war in Washington while it is being steadily won on the battlefield, and former Presi- dent Eisenhower scorns the behavior of politicians faced with a war. But slandering the dissenters is not proving to be a very effective device; it merely calls attention to a split in national opinion that is remarkable in a country at war. In his admirable speech at the University of Con- necticut last year, Senator Fulbright drew the line between “the two Americas.” The first America still keeps the spirit of freedom and would use power in its service. The second America, essentially money-minded, relies heavily on financial and physical power (military and nonmilitary) to secure new “positions of strength”— and new markets. In its view, Vietnam is a key position in the New “Far West” (as described in Look, May 30), to be held at any cost. Some intuition into the forces at work within formerly colonized peoples is enjoyed today by a consid- erable group of American citizens. Better than their chauvinistic counterparts, they understand modern na- tionalism (even when, by historical circumstances, it is permeated with Marxism), as well as the meaning that Asian and Afgican peoples (not their Westernized oli- garchies) attach to the word “freedom.” It is by such insights that the real nature of the Vietnamese War is to be grasped. For more than forty years, the Vietnamese people have been actively struggling to achieve genuine independence, national unity, the eradication of feudal privileges, of corruption, of poverty. This struggle threat- ens nobody except some small but powerful cliques, and the foreign interests that protect them. Helping the Viet- namese to achieve their national aims is only continuing in the path set by the American and French Revolu- tions. Helping the cliques is following the example of indirect colonial rule, as practiced by Great Britain and other imperialist states in past centuries. Who today will believe that the cliques can prevail over the awak- ened peoples? Senator Aiken is right: “The President predicates peace on the capitulation of the enemy, and that solution seems far in the distance.” No solution is in sight, and no vital U.S. interests are involved. Only the amour-propre of a few generals and politicians is at stake, and for this the cost is high. Washington can still change its course. “Every mili- tary strategy must be subject to constant review and re- appraisal,” wrote the Washington Star on May 24. “It is necessary to watch for the moment where a change of strategy may produce a greater gain at a decreased risk. That moment has arrived. We should say nothing, explain nothing, set no conditions or limitations on our switch of strategy. We should simply stop bombing and see what the enemy does. We will always have the right and the capacity to respond appropriately, no matter what he does, .. .” The opportunity offered by the North Vietnamese over- 237 “ture of January 28 is stilt there. The United States can seize it immediately. It has only to dare. After the cessation of bombing, discussions with Hanoi would prob- ably soon begin. To be fruitful, their emphasis should be more on the political than on the military aspects of the problem. And once seated around the conference ta- ble, American and North Vietnamese delegates will have to face a problem whose solution is not really theirs to decide (they can only help): how can a genuine de- mocracy and a genuine independence be restored to the area now designated as South Vietnam? This will nec- essarily require political negotiation with the NLF, which leads the Southern armed insurrection. It is obviously not easy for the United States to enter into direct talks with the NLF, but Washington this year even missed the opportunity to assist in an honorable Start toward peace in the South. Only a free election could provide a popular government capable of dealing effectively with the NLF, Hanoi and the United States. Instead, the military regime in Saigon has been allowed to organize a mockery of Presidential elections, from which such candidates as Duong Van Minh (a liberal IT’S GETTING NOISIER... CARL DREHER When President Johnson proclaims that overloading with noise “is without precedent and poses a serious threat to the health and welfare of mankind,” we know in our ears and nerves he is right. When Rep. Theodore R. Kupferman says that noise detracts from the quality of our lives as does a filthy street or a polluted stream and that we have no right to call ourselves civilized unless we do something about it, few will disagree (but fewer still will easily surrender their own right to make noise for profit or pleasure). All abuse of the environ- ment is like that. Not that noise is entirely a modern affliction—Don Quixote’s frightful adventure with the fulling hammers shows it isn’t—but in our time it has grown to monstrous proportions. While the noise level has been rising steadily, counter factors, such as distance and physical barriers, have been weakening. And instead of striving to narrow the gap between information on noise control and its application, we have allowed it to widen. Public resent- ment will eventually reverse this trend, but in the mean- time it is each for himself and the devil deafen the hindmost. A little acquaintance with the physics of sound is necessary both for acoustic self-defense and effective social action against noise. Sound, whether objectionable or otherwise, varies in power over an enormous range. Standing near the tail of a jet airliner with all four engines roaring, a person has his eardrums assaulted with a pres- sure a thousand trillion (1,000,000,000,000,000) times greater than the minimum sound he can distinguish against a silent background (an approach to which is to 238 general), Au Truong Thanh (a peace candidate,) not t speak of every friend of Nguyen Huu Tho (the NLF leader) or of Thich Tri Quang (the Buddhist nationalist | leader) have been barred. It is as though an American’ | Presidential election were to offer Generals Walker and | LeMay, running against Governors Wallace and Maddox, | with regular Republican and Democratic candidates banned by the John Birch Society and the Ku Klux Klan. That is what President Johnson, in his press conference | of August 18 called “decisive progress towards a repre- — sentative government.” @| “We cannot but continue to fight until we shall have’ | factual evidence that a peaceful mind at last prevails 2 in the counsels of the White House.” That was said by — a spokesman for Hanoi in March, 1966. It is now Sep- | tember, 1967, and there is still no indication that the ~ Johnson Administration is prepared to put an end to a its intervention in Vietnamese domestic affairs, to aban- | don its efforts to impose its protectorate upon the South — Vietnamese people, to drop its plans to set up, with a — handful of local warlords, an American Manchukuo on | the shores of the South China Sea. a be found only in the laboratory). Since acousticians, and | engineers dealing with electronic reproduction of sound, — have better things to do than write zeroes, they borrowed | from the Bell Telephone Laboratories the decibel (db), — a unit so useful that it is now coming into vernacular use. | It is a tenth of a bel, named, with the final 1 dropped, | after Alexander Graham Bell. An appropriate memorial: — before he invented the telephone, Bell was a teacher of © the deaf. j 4 Decibels are used in calculations of power, of pressure — (the response of the ear is proportional to pressure) and — for many other technical purposes but, however applied, | a decibel is just a logarithmic ratio. Logarithms afford | a rapid means of multiplication by addition and division © by subtraction (a slide rule does it mechanically) by means of which the cumbersome number cited above © can be written as 10 to the fifteenth power (10%) or, © still more conveniently, 150 db. The whole vast range | of sound volume is thus compressed into an easily man- | ageable compass. a1 The accompanying graph shows the db range, from minimal perception of sound by young, normally sensitive ears, which is taken as zero, to the output of a siren | that is rumored to be the latest exotic weapon for use | in Vietnam. It has been compiled from a number of © sources which do not agree precisely and is intended only © to give a general idea of the magnitudes involved. | Besides their use in arranging sounds in ascending or- § der of physical strength, decibel ratings help us to assess | the subjective magnitude of changes, up or down. While _ there are important complicating factors, such as pitch, j) lowering the level of a sound by 2 db will be just about | noticeable, a drop of 10 db will be significant, while a © | THE NATION/ September 18,1967 was previously disturbing. The. reason is again loga- tit mic—a 30 db reduction corresponds to a pressure reduction on the ear of 10° (1,000) which is obviously | considerable. Conversely, a rise of 10 db may change } an unobtrusive noise into an annoying one. In another application, building structures, such as walls and floors, may be rated in db for their ability to cut down noise. Noise can damage hearing in a number of ways. Blast trauma that ruptures the eardrum or disrupts the chain of small bones that transmit sound within the ear is exceptional, but occupational deafness is common and _ lias assumed great importance in the field of industrial | hygiene. It was well established in the 19th century that blacksmiths, boiler makers and other workers in noisy | surroundings tended to become hard of hearing earlier | in life than other people. With increase in industrial | noise and recognition of the principle that employees are entitled to compensation for injury incurred in the course _ of work, this type of disability has increasingly concerned Management and labor. What with the differences of individual tolerance and the difficulties in measuring complex types of noise, quantitative standards are not easy to set up, but the need is as obvious as for speed limits on highways. Leo L. Beranek, a leading acoustical engineer, observes that men of 30 who have been exposed to a work en- vironment with an average noise level of 90 db for periods as short as ten years, may have hearing as impaired as men in their 60s and 70s who have worked in a quiet environment. The danger limit for most individuals is somewhere between 80 and 85 db. The U.S. Air Force, the largest single employer with an inescapably noisy _ environment for much of the personnel, has settled on | 85 db, in the frequency range important for speech in- telligibility, as the level where ear protection is man- datory. Investigation has shown, however, that some degree of hearing loss may occur at levels around 80 db, which is well below many of the levels commonly _ encountered under all sorts of contemporary conditions. The existence of these community noise levels means that few people, especially in cities, can escape harmful exposure, and since more and more of us live in cities, or in suburbs which often are just as noisy, the incidence of noise-caused deafness is pretty sure to increase. For the past thirty years the noise level has been increasing at the rate of 1 db a year. In general, noise varies with the power of the source, and some of the increase is at- _ tributable to a horsepower race which, unfortunately for our hearing, is not confined to automobile designers (who, unlike some other machine designers, at least make some efforts to reduce noise). The typical self-propelled power mower of fifteen years ago was driven by a 1-horsepower _ gasoline engine. Now, even “economy” and push models are equipped with 3 or 34% H.P. engines, and some householders with a total lot area of 1 acre acquire pres- tige among the neighbors—and help to deafen them— with riding mowers or tractors that may develop as much as 12 H.P. Indoors, where sound is reinforced by ‘rever- ‘beration, vacuum cleaners boast of electric motors rated at more than 2 H.P.; less than | H.P. is exceptional. In ‘THE NATION/September 18, 1967 the kitchen, with an exhaust fan, dishwasher and garbage grinder going simultaneously, it is said that the noise level may reach 100 db. High fidelity music reproduction affords another ex- ample. A stereo amplifier for home use will commonly be advertised as producing 120 watts, or 60 watts of audio power per channel. The advantage is supposed to be that momentary peaks will be accommodated without distortion, but since the acoustic output of a 100-man symphony orchestra seldom rises above 10 watts, and modern loud-speakers are quite efficient, it is hard to see what anyone can legitimately do with such power in a living room. Surface traffic is a major noise producer not only in the cities, where it is taken for granted, but within a band hundreds of yards wide along every express high- way. Since intercity expressways extend for hundreds and thousands of miles, acoustically they bring the city to the country on a formidable scale. Every time an interstate highway is extended, we witness not only the destruction of houses in its path but the engulfment by noise of a far greater number of residences whose occupants had pre- viously enjoyed a measure of quiet. There is compensa- tion for property that is condemned for a road, but none tor the loss of a peaceful environment. City subways and rail lines are another source of high- level noise. The San Francisco Bay Area Rapid Transit District, the Montreal subway and a few other urban- suburban railroads have taken pains to reduce noise, but most of the major systems, like that of New York City, seem to be operated on the basis that noise is unimpor- 239 , i t } oe, i oi it 3 i] 1 ] tant. Well-known, perfectly feasible engineering measures to abate noise are regarded as a refinement to which the users of public transportation are not entitled. Fortunately the exposure of the individual is intermit- tent, and people vary in susceptibility. This is true also of those exposed to occupational noise: some come through with unimpaired hearing, while others suffer rapid de- terioration and should be taken out of this kind of en- vironment before irreversible damage is done. However, there is now convincing evidence that millions of Ameri- cans sustain ear damage, usually without knowing it, from a high general noise level. Dr. Samuel Rosen and others have made audiometry measurements on Mabaan tribes- men, who live in an exceptionally quiet desert region in the southeast Sudan. The majority of Americans (men somewhat more than women) suffer severe hearing loss at the higher frequencies in old age, while the Mabaans show the same acuity of hearing at age 75 as the average American at age 25. The elderly American hears speech, but guesses at the meaning. He misses the low-energy fricatives (f, th, ch, etc.) and consonants that are es- sential for intelligibility. These researches cast doubt on — the concept of “normal” loss of hearing, and indicate that those who already have some hearing loss should expose themselves as little as possible to loud noise. Noise is also charged with causing emotional and physical illness. Dr. Rosen has probed a possible correla- tion between noise and coronary heart disease, which is as rare among the Mabaans as deafness, but their lives are so different in all respects from those of Westerners that the evidence is only suggestive. Constant interference with sleep is certainly harmful but, again, individual sus- ceptibility varies. The same is true of reaction to low- level noise. Dr. Beranek points out that while some people are able to live happily next to elevated railroads, truck- ing routes, airplane flight paths and other racket-making sources, at the other extreme there is a group that seem to be disturbed by any noise, however faint, that is not of their own making. Interviews elicited the fact that these people were dissatisfied with other features of their surroundings as well. Boosting the ambient acoustic field by increases in household motor size, high-speed roads, faster aircraft, etc., is one way in which a mere nuisance may be con- verted into a menace. Yet noise is by no means the most intractable type of pollution. One saving feature is its local character. Even thunder, an extremely loud noise at close range, dies away at a distance of 12 miles at most. Like other forms of radiation, sound in the open’ is subject to the inverse square law: double the distance, and the intensity drops to a fourth. The waves also bounce back from barriers and are attenuated as they pass through. But as air and surface vehicles multiply in numbers, speed and power, distance becomes less of a protection; at the same time modern building con- struction tends to transmit noise, whether from the out- side or from room to room, to a greater extent than pre- World War II construction. There is no question that modern building practices incorporate many improvements, but protection against noise is rarely one of them, despite the fact that from an 240 center, a teen room, a pre-schooler room, a party room, a engineering standpoint it is more readily available than ever before. Efforts have been made to cut down on noise, especially in one- and two-family housing, but the 7 | results have been poor. The situation is summed up in ~ a survey in House and Home (December, 1966): “What ~ ever became of the big noise about the Quiet Home?” ~ The story begins: “Few merchandising ideas ever looked more promising than did the Quiet Home in 1963.” The second paragraph ends: “What happened? Is the Quiet” tiome dead and buried?” The post-mortem that follows is thorough, and gives some promise of limited success ~ in the future. It points up an important fact: much of | our affliction with noise is due, in more senses than one, to people. | A typical experience is that of a leading Southwest building firm, Fox & Jacobs of Dallas, which centered ~ a major promotion around anti-noise construction. Spend- ing considerable money on research and development | aimed at applying existing acoustic knowledge to medium- priced houses, they evolved a sound-conditioning package —_ | costing roughly $500 for houses in the $13,000 to ~ $35,000 range. They sold just four Quiet Homes. Other builders had the same experience. N. P. Dodge of ~ Omaha summed it up in 1966: “We were very disap- — pointed with the public’s reaction. This thing has no ~ sex appeal whatsoever. People are interested in price; the average buyer—of homes, say, in the $30,000 range —has only a nominal interest in quality.” The National Association of Homebuilders, in co- ~ operation with manufacturers of acoustic materials, has — switched the promotion from “Quiet Home” to “Quiet — Living” or, more specifically, “Quiet Room,” which costs — | about $200, or somewhat more for zonal quieting. They are also resorting to an indirect or “piggyback” sales ap- | peal involving rooms for specialized functions—a study — } home gym, an arts-and-crafts room, in the hope that these | gags “will be distinctive enough emblems of newness — and status to entice prospects.”” When a prospect shows — | interest, the salesman points out the indispensability of — | sound-conditioning if the study center and the home | gym, for example, are to coexist. a If, to the average home buyer, noise control is a | luxury subordinate to bathroom lighting fixtures in gold — finish or a double oven in the kitchen, noise in the apart- ment house may turn out to be a.menace to both tenant | and landlord—although usually neither realizes it until too late. It is a fact that the cold-water flats of the 19th — | century were built better, acoustically, than many of the — luxury apartments going up today. It was not that the | landlords and builders were solicitous for the tenants, but the builders were limited both in their knowledge | and their choice of materials. They knew only one way — to construct a partition: full-size two-by-four~studs to which was nailed wooden lath, and over that an inch | or so of plaster. The result was a heavy structure which © blocked sound pretty well: unless the neighbor was beat- — ing his wife, the chances were the slum tenant would not be too much disturbed. As for luxury apartments of the twenties, acousti- | cally, and in some other ways, they are today real treas- THE NATION/September 18, 1967 4 . ty cal apartment house of this class were to be dupli- cated today, the tenants would have to pay rents of about _ but it gives some idea of the deterioration in building standards. The same expert points out that European - noise-control standards are higher than ours. As far as is known, nowhere in the United States does a local code _ (there are 6,000 of them) specify any degree of noise control. It is a matter left entirely to the builder and he, along with the banker who provides the mortgage loan, is concerned primarily with keeping down already in- flated costs. New York City is at present considering a code which would stipulate 45 db reduction from one | room to the next, and between floors. This is the standard | now required by the Federal Housing Administration in homes for which it provides a mortgage guarantee. It | is inferior, however, to the 56 db prescribed for Grade I structures in Britain, and even to their 51 db for less expensive Grade II housing. The Netherlands, Sweden, Germany and the USSR likewise have up-to-date acoustic | codes. When the plasterers in New York City urge in subway advertising, “Keep New York plastered!” and inveigh against wallboard, they have a good case as far as it goes. Light sheet material on aligned studs will produce a partition that lets through TV sound and even normal conversation. Plaster is heavier and stiffer and blocks sound better. However, a serviceable partition can be built with wallboard if the studs are offset, so that-there is never a direct path from one side to the other, and 200 NOISE WEAPON C7?) 150 }-—— AIRLINE JET, CLOSE RANGE AIR-RAID SIREN,NEARBY —TJET AIRPORT PASSENGER RAMP MOTORCYCLE AIRLINER CABIN SUBWAY PLATFORM SHOUTED CONVERSATION 100 DANGER EVEL —— HEAVY CITY SURFACE TRAFFIC ——_NORMAL CONVERSATION —— AVERAGE URBAN INTERIOR HEARING THRESHOLD ° ‘THE NATION/September 18, 1967 the interstud space is filled with soft insulating material. In general, sound insulation is the same as thermal in- sulation; there is no particular mystery to the art of keep- ing sound in its place of origin. Some anti-noise measures, such as floating floors and hanging ceilings, do entail extra expense; others do not, or at least very little. For instance, weather stripping on inside doors (sound passes through cracks) is not a costly item, nor does the builder save significantly when he allows the electrical contractor to install outlets back to back, providing an acoustic path from room to room. If the rooms are in adjacent apartments, so much the worse. Bathroom medicine chests back to back are like- wise indefensible. Overall, good acoustic design need not raise the cost more than 5 per cent. As renters grow more critical, new construction will be forced to meet higher acoustic standards, and rents in buildings of poor construction will decline—but hun- dreds of thousands will still be forced to. put up with annoyance which could have been easily avoided in the first place. As yet, few prospective tenants take the obvious precaution, in a new house which is still largely vacant, of playing a transistor radio at high volume in the adjacent apartment (but the squeaky sound tells nothing about transmission of low tones) and walking on the floor above, while someone checks on the sound getting through. In an occupied house, a visit in the evening will often reveal reasons for not renting that were not apparent during the day. Of course, for anyone buying a cooperative apartment investigations of this kind are even more advisable. More publicity has been given to airplane noise than to any other kind, but relief is a long way off. Despite countermeasures, the prospect is for further de- terioration in most areas. Jets. produce a higher pitched, hence more disturbing noise than propeller-driven air- craft, and there are going to be more and mote jets. The Federal Aviation Agency predicts a doubling of pas- senger volume in the next five years, and a ninefold in- crease in small jets, which, in proportion to power, are the noisiest of all. The seriousness of the situation is appreciated in high quarters and some extremely competent people are work- ing on it, particularly in the Office of Science and Technology, which advises the President, and in com- mittees reporting to it. But, as Nicholas E. Golovin, a member of the OST staff, points out in a paper on “Alle- viation of Aircraft Noise” (January, 1967, Astronautics and Aeronautics) it is extremely difficult to compromise among the conflicting interests of airplane manufacturers, airline and airport operators, pilots and communities— which themselves often contain warring factions and are by no means united behind the homeowners directly under the flight paths. Some of the latter had no choice, but some have them- selves to blame, as well as the tract developers who got them into this bedlam. Anyone who contemplates buying near an airport should make it his business to sit in the living room during the 5 to 7 P.M. rush hour, when the air and the runways are filled with aircraft landing and taking off, and on the terrace almost any time, He will “241 ones ae then have some idea of what he is letting himself in for. One story that can lead only to melancholy reflections concerns a housing development close to the John F. Kennedy airport, New York’s largest. When the home- owners organized to combat the noise, the FAA noise abatement officer asked if they had not been aware of the problem when they bought. The indignant owners explained that the sales agency had told them that the airport would close down the disturbing runway as soon as the area was developed. It never occurred to them that, since Kennedy is ringed with developments, on this basis the airport would soon be out of business, nor did they think of checking with FAA before signing the contract. To end on a note of relative cheer: the chances are that the supersonic transport will not make the situation worse in the vicinity of airports. Whether the SST is a good thing is a moot question, but the economic stakes are so large that the heat is on the design engineers on no account to increase take-off and landing noise. These THE DOLLAR INVADES EUROPE JOSEPH D. PHILLIPS Mr. Phillips, research professor in the Bureau of Economic and Business Research, University of Illinois, is the author of Little Business in the American Economy and The Self- Employed in the United States (both University of Illinois publications). In January, British Prime Minister Harold Wilson, while stressing his government’s loyalty to the Atlantic Charter, stated in Rome that “we don’t believe that anything in it requires us to accept the domination of European in- dustrial and economic life by American industrial inter- ests.” London newspapers published his remarks side by side with an announcement that Chrysler had obtained voting control of Rootes Motors, Britain’s fourth largest automobile manufacturer. Two days later Sir Paul Cham- bers, chairman of Imperial Chemical Industries, Britain’s largest industrial corporation, said in a Paris speech that U.S. economic expansion is a menace to the whole econ- omy of Western, Europe, and Wilson, expanding on his Rome remarks in the House of Commons, stated that “loyal membership of NATO does not mean, for our part, that we thought it right that vital sectors, particu- larly in the technological industries of Europe, should be overrun and dominated by American firms.” These reports illustrate, on the one hand, a widespread European attitude in both government and business cit- cles and, on the other, the inexorable expansive pressure of the U.S. economic invasion which mocks this attitude. The British Labour Party objected bitterly when Chrysler purchased 45 per cent of Rootes stock in 1964. Chrysler agreed then to accept only three of twelve seats on Rootes’s board and to make no effort to control Rootes, but to work as a partner in building the company. How- _€ver, the sagging British auto market of 1965 and 1966, 242 efforts will probably be successful. They had better be. The sonic boom is another, quite separate question but here again a note of optimism is justified. Unre- strained, the SST could change noise from a local phe- nomenon to one of nation-wide proportions, as the air- craft streaked from coast to coast, laying down sonic- | boom “carpets” 50 miles wide across the country. [See the recent three-part series by Karl M. Ruppenthal, The Nation.] But this will not happen. If the boom turns out — to be seriously disturbing, by the time the prototype is built public resentment will collide head-on with the proj- | ect. Some experts believe that by modifying the shape | of the aircraft to reduce drag and hence the force of | the boom, it can be kept within tolerable limits. If they | prove wrong, there is little doubt that the SST will be ~ barred from overland use. The economic consequences would be serious, but the public relations problem would a | be even worse. Either the technical problem will be — solved, or the SST will be the first major casualty of the — anti-noise movement. = a ee ee CL tm = pinched by the austerity program adopted by the Labour government to meet Britain’s balance of payments crisis, — brought growing losses to Rootes. The government asked Britain’s automobile manufacturers to suggest any pos- — sible way of keeping Rootes as a British-controlled com- pany, only to report to Commons that “no such scheme proved practicable.” Chrysler could say that it stepped in only when it was asked and when it became evident Rootes could not make it on its own. After this switch — cf control, three of Britain’s top four auto companies were under control of U.S. car manufacturers. This contrast between resistance by European govern- ments and some private groups to domination of their cconomies by U.S. corporate enterprise and the actual course of events appears again and again. The proposed purchase in May, 1966, of a majority interest in Deutsches Erdol A.G., the largest West German-based oil company, by Texaco, Inc., was first reported to have been abandoned because of opposition from the West German Government. Deutsches Erdol had about 5,000 service stations, produced about 35 million barrels of petroleum products annually in its refineries and about 10 million barrels a year of crude oil in West Germany, and had interests in the crude production of Libya and other foreign areas. Rumors of the take-over had raised the price of DEA stock almost 50 per cent in the weeks immediately before negotiations were broken off. DEA objected to the government attitude on the ground that it restricted the free choice of DEA stockholders in mak- ing decisions about their financial welfare “without want- ing to assume responsibility for the preservation” of their assets. Subsequently, the West German Government with- drew its opposition to the take-over by Texaco because it could not come up with an alternative to keep DEA going in the face of its unprofitable coal operations and — eon ee 3 ome oes lelC SCO ts BD THE .NATION/ September 18,1967 att hasty its lack of an adequate independent source of crude oil. - In 1964, President de Gaulle, the most prominent op- ponent of the U.S. economic invasion of Europe, first +vetoed the proposed purchase by General Electric of a | major interest in Machines Bull, the French computer manufacturer in which the French Government held a _ he was persuaded that the French company could not } survive without G.E.’s technological know-how in the | computer field. These retreats and the many penetrations where | no attempt at a defense has been made reflect in the main _the advantage of American firms in size and financial resources. Chrysler could easily dip into its assets for the | $48 million—half for additional stock and half for a | loan—required by the Rootes deal. Texaco could not | only spare the cash for the take-over of Deutsches Erdol - but also draw upon its international sources of crude petroleum to supply the DEA refineries. However, the Machines Bull case illustrates still an- other advantage of the giant American firm over its European rival, the “technology gap.” Enormous gov- _ ernmental expenditures on research and development _ for the space and military programs have given American _ corporations, which are the principal beneficiaries of | these programs, such a lead in new technology that Eu- _ Tope runs the risk, as French science minister Alain Pey- refitte has pointed out, of “falling as far behind the U.S. _ as the underdeveloped nations are behind Europe.” In _ 1966, the United States spent almost $30 billion on R&D, _ compared with about $8 billion in all of Western Europe; _ well over a million people were employed in these activi- ties in the U.S., compared with some half million in | Western Europe. Computers, those handmaidens of | science, technology and massive corporate and govern- ment bureaucracy, are far more widely used in the U.S. _ than in Western Europe, about 55,000 of them being in | Operation or on order in the U.S., compared with less , Michael Heath, New Society | THE NATION/September 18, 1967 than one-fourth that number in Europe. These and other facilities, plus higher salaries, attract young European scientists and engineers to the U.S., a “brain drain” that further contributes to the “technology gap.” One result is a large net outflow from Europe to the United States of payments for rights to use American patents; it amounts to some $500 million annually. But the advantage the gap gives to the multi-national Ameri- can firm over its European rivals is what worries Euro- peans. They see this as a growing threat to their sover- eignty. It accounts for Prime Minister Wilson’s particular objection to domination of the technological industries of Europe by American firms. The extent of the economic invasion of Europe is suggested by the growth of American direct invest- ments there. These amounted to only $1.7 billion in 1950, when they accounted for 15 per cent of all U.S. direct investments abroad. The Marshall Plan set the stage for expansion; by 1957, the total in Europe had risen to $4.2 billion. The creation of the Common Market and the European Free Trade Association and the emer- gence of boom conditions in Europe stimulated the move- ment of U.S. firms into these areas; the high profits of the long business upswing of the sixties in the United States fed by growing military and space expenditures, provided the capital; the vast expansion of research and development, largely financed by the government, gave American companies the competitive advantage. By the end of 1965, U.S. direct investments in Europe had grown to $13.9 billion, 28 per cent of all direct invest- ments by U.S. firms in foreign countries. It has been esti- mated that the total in Europe now amounts to almost $20 billion. Most of these direct investments were in foreign cor- porations that are subsidiaries of American firms. In 1957, the most recent year for which such detailed in- formation is available, less than 5 per cent were in branches of American corporations. In that year the per- centage of U.S. ownership of the subsidiaries was 95 per cent or more in about three-quarters of them by value and almost as many by number. In most of the re- mainder, U.S. ownership was at least 50 per cent. The growth in the share of U.S. private business in- vestments going to Europe reflects the fact that U.S. firms have preferred to concentrate their direct invest- ments in the most advanced industrial countries rather than in the underdeveloped areas of the world. This tendency becomes more evident when Canada, a country whose per capita income puts it well outside of the un- derdeveloped class, is added to Europe; these two areas together accounted for nearly 60 per cent of all US. direct investments at the end of 1965. Furthermore, the largest amounts of U.S. direct invest- ments in Europe are in the most industrialized countries. The United Kingdom, with $5.1 billion at the end of 1965, had more than one-third of the total. Direct invest- ments of U.S. firms in West Germany amounted to $2.4 billion, or about one-sixth of the European total. France ranked next with $1.6 billion, and Switzerland followed with $1.1 billion. More than half of all U.S. direct investments in Europe 243 at the end of 1965 were in manufacturing, whereas in the rest of the world less than one-third were in this sector. If U.S. direct investments in Canada, Australia, Japan and European South Africa are also excluded, less than one-fifth of the foreign equities of U.S. firms are in manufacturing. The difference in this respect between Europe and the rest of the world is growing; 70 per cent of the capital expenditures by foreign affiliates of U.S. firms in Europe during 1965 were in manufacturing com- pared with 50 per cent in Canada, 41 per cent in Latin America, and 33 per cent in the rest of the world. Clearly United States manufacturing investment abroad tends to concentrate in the economically most advanced areas. How profitable are these U.S. investments in Europe? The rate of return in 1965 on their book value at the beginning of the year was only 9.6 per cent, where- as the figure for the world total was 12.2 per cent. How- ever, the world figure was pulled up by such juicy returns as the 62 per cent earned by U.S. direct investments in the Middle East, the 58 per cent in Libya, the 21 per cent in Peru, and the 18 per cent in Venezuela. These were principally the result of petroleum and mining windfalls, for which not many companies can hope. U.S. companies with direct investments in European manufacturing did better than average in 1965, earning a return of 13 per cent. This was not as high as in the lush years of the fifties when returns on U.S. direct in- vestments in manufacturing there ran above 18 per cent in some years, while the average rate of return on U.S. domestic manufacturing capital was 3 to 5 percentage points lower, But the rise in the average U.S. domestic manufacturing rate of return to about 15 per cent in 1965, while that of U.S. direct manufacturing investments in Europe fell to 13 per cent, has not yet reduced the en- thusiasm of U.S. firms for expansion in this sector of the European economy. Expenditures for new manufacturing plant and equipment in Europe by U.S. affiliates were 244 projected in June, 1966, at $2.4 billion for 1966 and $2.5 billion for 1967, compared with actual expenditures — of $1.9 billion in 1965. The heavy concentration of U.S. direct investments in European manufacturing was generally welcomed there in the period of postwar reconstruction when capital was very scarce and there was great need for American tech- nology. As European expansion got under way, U.S. firms rushed to take advantage of the growing market opportunities provided. The Treaty of Rome, providing for free movement of capital not only among the member countries of the Common Market but also across the boundaries of the market as a whole, served as an addi- tional stimulus to investment by U.S. firms, since there was no assurance that the tariff barriers confronting ex- porters outside the Common Market would be reduced significantly, as were those between the member coun- tries. The way to beat the game was to get inside. The organization of the European Free Trade Association had much the same effect. Affiliates of U.S. firms proved particularly adept at taking advantage of the enlarged market areas created by these two organizations. Coming in with experience in operating throughout a large con- tinental market, they were better prepared to set up a European network than were the French, German or other national companies. Today, many European business and_ political leaders feel that expansion of U.S. firms there has gone far enough, perhaps too far. There are various reasons for this attitude. One is widespread fear that U.S. invest- ments threaten the economic and political independence of the countries in which they occur. It is evident that President de Gaulle holds this view. The policy of his administration to convert short-term dollar assets into gold, which reduces the U.S. hoard of that fetish, has been interpreted as an effort to restrict American foreign investment by intensifying the U.S. balance of payments problem. Chairman Hermann J. Abs of the Deutsche Bank, West Germany’s most influential private banker, has suggested than Bonn might be well advised to follow a similar policy. The increasing resort by European countries to na- tional and regional planning, even if only of the “indica- tive” type, intensifies the need to be able to influence the actions of key enterprises. Foreign-controlled enterprises are more likely to resist the “moral suasion” of govern- ment agencies than are those owned by nationals. Fur- thermore, when U.S. firms buy out domestic enterprises (a process which accounted for about one-fifth of the in- crease in U.S. manufacturing investments in Europe dur- ing 1965), they provide the previous owners with liquid assets that may present them with new problems of di- rection or control from the standpoint of the planning agency. The position of U.S. firms in Europe also gives Wash- ington an instrument with which to affect the trade activ- ities of European countries. Restriction or outright pro- hibitions on exports to Communist countries may limit the expansionary trade policies of Western countries in which U.S. affiliates operate. In the Netherlands, U.S. enibassy officials were reported to have told U.S. sub- THE NATION/ September 18,1967 ries not to make certain shipments to East European C ntr es. _ Another concern of some Europeans, although it is not often mentioned in reports, is the threat to the future alance of payments of their countries contained in the present inflow of American capital. As of now, the drain Lo earnings to the United States is exceeded by the net ifiow of capital from the United States for direct invest- ; ment in Europe. In the years 1950-65, $5.5 billion were ‘returned to the United States out of direct investment | earnings in Europe, whereas net capital inflows for direct | investment in Europe amounted to $8.1 billion. | However, Europe is not assured that it will continue to enjoy this surplus of receipts indefinitely. Currently, | the U.S. Government, as a measure to improve its bal- | ance of payments, is trying to persuade American firms | to hold back on foreign investments that require capital Outfiow. Furthermore, the flow of capital is dependent ‘upon a variety of other factors in both the United States -and Europe. Earnings on U.S. direct investments in Europe are more stable, but every increase in the amount invested tends to increase the amount of earnings. Not all earnings on direct investments are returned to the | parent company; about one-third of the $1.2 billion | earned in Europe in 1965 was retained as undistributed i. ‘subsidiary earnings, and presumably reinvested. But more p could be repatriated, and the U.S. Government has urged | American firms to do just that as a means of relieving | the balance of payments pressure. Europe could find itself paying out more in profits on U.S. direct invest- | ments than it receives in capital for direct investment. | That is what happened on a world scale in the period | 1950-65; U.S. parent firms took back in earnings about | $13 billion more than flowed out from their treasuries | as capital for direct investment abroad. (Despite this, ‘the value of their investments abroad rose from $11.8 | billion to $49.2 billion.) More important, perhaps, is the adverse reaction of - foreign business interests which feel that the expansion of US. affiliates may in some cases threaten their very existence. The automobile industry is an example. Some “observers believe that it is already overbuilt in Europe. In the summer of 1964, when Fiat in Italy and Renault in France were making overtures to the German auto- mobile industry for some sort of joint approach to the problem of excess capacity, General Motors announced plans for a $100-million plant in Brussels. The much greater resources of the U.S. auto firms permit them to ; compete most effectively and, where no restraints are im- | posed, to squeeze the domestic European firms. General | Motors’ Opel and Ford’s Taunus have already reduced _the share of Volkswagen in the European market. Similar | developments are evident in other industries. | One consequence of the invasion by U.S. business that causes concern in some European circles has been the step-up of the merger movement. Cartels and com- bines have long been a prominent feature of European | economies, but many of these were devices to restrict competition among enterprises that continued to function a8 separate companies while dividing up the market. After World War II, the occupying powers broke up many of these cartels in Germany, but soon there was strong | iP ; ; | } THE NATION/ September 18, 1967 pressure to re-establish them. Now the sheer size of the American corporations operating in Europe, such as General Motors, Ford, IBM and the international oil companies, has forced European companies to form a single giant enterprise out of several smaller ones in order to compete. There is a strong feeling in business circles and in the Common Market organization that this move- ment must be carried much further. However, many European companies are at a disadvantage: the Common Market authorities have not reached agreement on a Siatute permitting Europe-wide corporations, whereas many American corporations have established headquar- ters in Europe to coordinate their operations throughout the Continent. Although a Common Market Commission inquiry, made at the request of the French, reported no cases where U.S. affiliates were abusing “dominant posi- tions” in contravention of the anti-cartel provisions of the Rome Treaty, there have been many complaints in Europe about the advantage these enterprises enjoy by virtue of their size. The fact that much of the concern over U.S. corporate expansion in Europe reflects fear of lower profits on the part of a relatively small segment of the European population does not alter its significance as a portent of changes in legislation that may restrict the American affiliates. The worry over profits is reinforced among a larger public by feelings of national pride. In addition, it is sometimes feared that the American-owned plant might suddenly curtail its operations, leaving local employees without jobs. By no means are all European attitudes toward Amer- ican investment antagonistic. The Europeans are am- bivalent. Many of them obtain top managerial positions with U.S. affiliates and become ardent supporters of their employers. Local governments and industrial develop- ment bodies, eager to increase employment opportunities and purchasing power, offer a variety of inducements to encourage U.S. firms to locate plants in their regions. Op- position to the domination of Europe’s technological in- dustries by U.S. firms is countered by statements to the efiect that American direct investments should be en- couraged only in those industries where they will serve to introduce new technological developments. Concern about the effect on Europe’s anti-inflation efforts of an influx of U.S. capital is matched by fear that U.S. attempts to curb the outflow of capital will intensify the credit squeeze in Europe and slow the rate of business expansion. Whatever the fears and hopes, Europe faces a con- tinuation of the U.S. investment invasion. It could avoid it only by departing from the capitalist road. European firms are too dependent upon international markets, above all the United States, to become the advocates of general restriction. They hanker after the multi-national character on which many of the larger U.S. firms now pride themselves. Powered by enormous cash flows and backed by the re- sults of research programs financed in large part by the government, increasing numbers of American firms have found in foreign investment the answer to the require- mént: “Expand or die.” European firms will be hard pressed to match them, 245 Sa BOOKS & THE ARTS Rationalizing the Irrational THE NEW INDUSTRIAL STATE. By Kenneth Galbraith. Houghton Mifflin Co. 427 pp. 36.95. HARRY MAGDOFF Mr. Magdoff was formerly special assistant to the Secretary of Commerce. He is lec- turer in economics at the New School for Social Research. All the refreshing and rewarding ele- ments of Professor Galbraith’s former writing on economic affairs are present here and in good measure: the broad perspective, the bold confrontation of doctrine with reality, and the urgent concern with social reform. This book, though, takes us further; its purpose is a new synthesis, based on the propo- sition that today’s society is drastically different from that of the past. Economists, he charges, are trapped by assumptions and _ preconceptions which belong to an economic order that has passed into history. They tend to be less concerned with current social problems than with such matters and assumptions as can comfortably be han- dled by the scientific tools of the trade. Above all, “economics as it is conven- tionally taught, is in part a system of belief designed less to reveal truth than to reassure its communicants about es- tablished social arrangements.” To find out what makes today’s econ- omy tick, Galbraith urges, we must first remove our blinders and recog- nize that the old gods of the market place are in fact dead. However, in the process of dethronement, he leads us to new gods to worship or fear: the gods of the corporate state. He puts it bluntly: It is part of the vanity of modern man that he can decide the character of the economic system. His area of de- cision is, in fact, exceedingly small. He could, conceivably, decide whether or not he wishes to have a high level of industrialization.. . . Given the de- cision to have modern industry, much of what happens is inevitable and the same. The inevitable is an economy dom- inated by an alliance of government and huge corporations, in which plan- ning and control of markets are key fea- tures. While many parts of the economy still operate according to the old rules of the game, the dynamic and determi- nate core of the modern economy is to be found in a few hundred highly organ- ized corporations. The prime mover of 246 this inevitable result is modern technol- ogy. The latter involves greater special- ization, more trained manpower and larger amounts of capital than in the past. More time is now needed to work up and bring a project into full opera- tion. It is more difficult to shift from one project to another. Decision making, therefore, becomes more complex and more risky. The only way to cope with such risk and complexity is to plan. Planning, however, has its own inherent logic. To plan effectively, the corporation must be independent and be able to control its own destiny, without reliance on out- side financial institutions; a steady and sure flow of profits must therefore be available to finance research, develop- ment and expansion. Such a profit goal is attainable only if the corporation can (a) control markets and manipulate customers so that enough goods are sold at the right price; and (b) control the provision of supplies at consistent prices. The upshot of this sequence is the giant corporation, one that is large and powerful enough to exercise the controls for the planning compelled by modern technology. Despite such pow- er, the giant corporations would still be vulnerable without an adequate and non- fluctuating flow of total consumer in- come and, consequently, consumer de- mand. This is where the government steps in with its large spending pro- gram centered on military supplies. As Galbraith sees it: If a large public sector of the econo- my, supported by personal and corpo- rate income taxation, is the fulcrum for the regulation of demand, plainly mil- itary expenditures are the pivot on which the fulcrum rests. Additionally, they provide underwriting for advanced technology and, therewith, security for the planning of the industrial system in areas that would otherwise be excluded by cost and risk. The inflationary pressures associated with this activity create the need for government influence on wage and price increases; this too makes planning more viable. The logical necessity of these ar- rangements leads to a harmonious blending of the goals of business, labor and government. The center of power in the giant corporation is not top man- agement but what Galbraith terms the . of individualism. Since emancipation via — “technostructure”: the whole gamut of executives, sub-executives, technicians — | and other specialized talent who partici- | pate in group decision making. The in- | terest of this technostructure is the suc- cess of the corporation. This means that © the aim is no longer maximum profits” but security and growth. Enough profits — have to be garnered to pay dividends and © to create an independent fund for re-— search and investment, but the | emphasis is to get the greatest possible — growth in sales. Under the impetus of growth and planning, a more benevolent — attitude to trade unions is not only possi- ; ble, it is in fact desirable. The unions, © due to their own weaknesses and needs, are also increasingly conciliatory. Above all, industry becomes an extension of the arm of government bureaucracy. The harmony of interest, spurred by } the imperatives of technology, helps to _ impose on all society the goals of the industrial system. Successful as this — system is in producing an ever-expand- ) ing bounty, it also involves great harm } to society, as for example: a cold-war | and arms competition that can lead to total destruction, subordination of social © goals (health, welfare and the good life), }.) corruption of education and weakening © Ste eres Fae Me eee el acd ates the elimination of the industrial system is not possible (remember its inevita; bility), what is needed is emancipation — from the goals—and ideas—of this sys- |. tem. Fortunately, Galbraith believes, the potential emancipators are at hand in the growing legion of scientists and edu- | cators, who might through political and } group action bring about a more desira- }° ble balance between social goals and the industrial system. My summary does little justice to — Galbraith’s stimulating and _ intriguing presentation of his argument. One of the © most ‘appealing features is the unity and consistency of the economic theory sup- plied—the end result, it seems, of Gal- braith’s ‘long search for what is rational in an irrational society. But what emerges is as much a rationalization as a rationale of the business system. This may be due to the method of analysis itself, in the way the rational is separated from the irrational. The structure and operation of the modern economy is seen to be © objectively determined; hence it is logi- _ cal and inevitable. The irrational fea- tures arise from the goals of the indus- trial system, which are subtly interwoven § with the goals of society as a whole. And § THE NATION/September 18, 1967 | f se pon are in the realm of ey are amenable to change and Galbraith’s selection of technology }as the key to a rational explanation of gantism and planning may strike a ) re esponsive chord in the reader living in the atomic, electronic and space age. But does it fit the facts? Was it tech- ology that dictated the origin of the andard Oil Company? Is it the com- plexity of manufacture that induces oli- gopoly in the cigarette, soap, detergent and chewing gum industries, in each of which four companies control from 70 per cent to 90 per cent of the market? ie Or perhaps it is the mystery of technique that requires the extent of market con- ; rs ol that exists in meat, ice cream and § flour mill operations. where cight leading #@ companies control 40 per cent to 50 per ' | cent of each market? While the procedure of isolating speci- | fic causes is used for. the sake of dealing it may often result in a , ‘graceful side-stepping of the n.ore vital “aspects of reality. Take, for example, the appearance of hardheaded realism in the statements: “The industrial system as not become identified with weapons competition by preference or because it is inherently bloody. Rather, this has been the area where the largest amount of moncy to support planning was avail- able with the fewest questions asked.” _ The reader is thus directed to the signi- ficance of military orders as the source of corporate identification with foreign ae But by the same token, the ex- ‘amination of any other interest of the industrial system (Galbraith’s term for _ the dominant giant corporations) in U.S. pacification and control of foreign lands | is eliminated. The avoidance of such an issue seems quite strange in a book de- voted to proving the vital need of the giant corporations to control their sources of raw materials and to achieve persistent growth of sales. One would imagine that if control over sources of supply is an _ imperative for the corporation, then the - Jatter might have more than a vague Be utiosity about the stability and security of their foreign properties from which ie civing raw materials come: iron ore, meannite, copper, lead, zinc, manganese, tantalum and columbium (for jet en- -gines and gas turbines), and lest we | forget, oil. me In addition, the imperative to grow and _ control markets has been pushing the Jarger business organizations beyond the _ domestic borders. Thus, of the 500 lar- _ gest corporations, 386 had notable for- I eign operations. A score or two of the large companies have a third or more of their total assets abroad; some eighty _ of these firms derived 25 per cent or _ more of their sales and earnings from overseas. Sales of foreign-based U.S. 1967 tL | | i! | % Eo | ‘THE NATION/September 18, | ; manufacturing firms have increased more than five times since 1950. In 1965, it has been conservatively estimated, earn- ings on foreign investments amounted to more than 20 per cent of after-tax profits of domestic non-financial corpo- rations. Perhaps, then, there is more than a mild interest by the corporate organiza- tions in U.S. foreign policy anc its mili- tary complement as a convenience in sus- taining a comfortable business environ- ment. In Galbraith’s analysis, though, the irrationality of the cold war and militar- ism is an unfortunate accompaniment to the rational need of industry for govern- ment support of domestic markets; as such, it is unrelated to the persistent needs for business expansion and control. Even more striking is the separa- tion of the situation of the Negro and of poverty from the framework of analysis. It is hardly the case that Galbraith is indifferent to the social evils of our time; he could properly insist that the main purpose of his tract is to contribute to the removal of the evils. The issue is the diagnosis. Implicit in his diagnosis is the assumption that such evils are things apart from, and surely not a product of, the industrial system. For ex- ample, “ ... the poor, by any applicable tests. are outside the industrial system. They are those who have not been drawn into its service or cannot qualify”; the unemployed are “those who are currently unemployable by the industrial system.” Hence, the solution. to poverty is to be found largely in better education and “better cultural accommodation to the industrial system.” This sort of thinking reflects the com- mon observation that there are job op- portunities for certain skills, especially during the overheated period of the econ- omy. But it does not square with the historical tendency of the industrial sys- tem to require less labor relative to the labor force: a decline in the demand for labor unrelated to the availability or lack of availability of computer pro- gramers or metallurgists. In 1929, man- ufacturing, transportation and public utilities supplied 46 per cent of all wage and salary jobs: in 1966, these industries, with all the help of govern- ment contracts, employed only 36 per cent of the total wage and salary earn- ers. During the 1950s the entire private sector (small as well as big business) provided only one out of every six new jobs; the other five jobs arose from government purchases, govern- ment employment or nonprofit institu- tions. It is hardly reasonable to assume that the industrial system would have supplied a significantly greater number of jobs if there were more technically educated and “culturally accommodated” persons available. By separating out social evils as things apart from the industrial system, Galbraith avoids confronting the issue of whether the industrial system oper- ates in such a way as to create “cultur- ally unaccommodated” pockets. Thus, he notes the pattern that Negroes are the last to be hired and the first to be fired. But he does not in the least recognize that this very industrial practice, where- by the Negro serves as a cushion of re- serve labor, is an essential ingredient in a long and entrenched process in which lack of “cultural accommodation” evolves. Nor, by the same token does Gal- braith take into account any interde- pendence between the success of the in- dustrial system and poverty. He affirms the role that profits play in securing corporate power, but ignores the influ- ence of profits as a contributor to pov- erty and a barrier to the elimination of poverty. Profits are needed for research to create artificial obsolescence; they are needed to finance mergers for bet- ter market control. Naturally, prices and costs must be consistent with these and other profit imperatives. In turn, such necessary costs and prices become the measuring devices—the standards— to determine what is economically feas- ible and efficient. This much will un- doubtedly be granted by our author. But he does not concern himself with the consequences that these are the very standards by which the corpora- tion decides to invest abroad and also decides not to invest in the economic development of underdeveloped city and farm areas of the United States. Sim- ilarly, there is no consideration of the conflict between the cost-price-profit ar- rangements of existing institutions and, on the other hand, changes in the struc- ture of industry to produce goods which meet social needs and, say, a program of industrialization and land reform to revitalize the urban ghetto and the rural South. The absence of an appreciation of the influence of profit making on poverty may be a_ by-product of the author’s concentration on his theory of , corporate motivation. According to this theory, the modern corporation is more interested in rapid growth of sales than in the growth of profits. Unexplored in the book is the question whether one is feasible without the other or whether there is any conflict between these aims during a long cyclical upswing. Gal- braith traces the substitution of sales for profit growth in part to the self-interest of the technostructure—its need to grow and to have a more secure base. In this respect, a new study from the National Bureau of Economic Research is par- ticularly noteworthy. A study of com- 247 ‘ pensation plans for top executives of fifty leading corporations shows that nearly half of the income of these ex- ecutives is tied to the price of the stocks of their corporation, whether through stock options or deferred compensation plans. The New York gambling casino may after all be of some use to such executives, as it is to the stockholders. And one thing the stock market adores is a rapidly rising volume of earnings, especially when it is associated with a rising rate of profit. In his reform program to replace the cold war, Galbraith does introduce a note of realism that will seem strange to the Keynesian community. The more orthodox Keynesians, especially the right wing, maintain that the economy could adjust quite readily to disarmament with simple fiscal adjustments; in particular, with a sufficient tax reduction. Pro- gressive Keynesians, on the other hand, claim that tax-rate changes will not be effective regulators in the absence of very large public expenditures. Hence, the way to handle the impact of disarm- ament is to counterbalance with large public works — housing, hospitals, schools. Galbraith, though, goes much further than even these left wingers. j He is all for social-welfare spending and believes it should be carried on for its own sake. But it won’t do the trick because it won’t feed the giant corpo- rations with the right kind of stimulants. To keep business solvent and sustain the economy without cold war, he pro- poses government sponsorship of substi- tutes that are roughly equivalent in scale and technical complexity to mili- tary items; for example, high-speed land and air communications, ocean-floor ex- plorations and climate alteration. Val- uable as these suggestions may be, we should recognize that they too may not be adequate. It will probably take too much time for the research and devel- opment before production can begin; more than that, they may not even then result in sufficiently large scale repeti- tive operations to keep the wheels of the industrial system turning. What is really needed is an ingenious scheme which could continuously depreciate our stock of bombs, missiles, airplanes, tanks and navy ships and, at the same time, stimulate the need for periodic replen- ishment of these stocks with new models —all this without anyone getting killed. Did someone propose a declaration of war against Mars? Straight and Nouveau END OF THE GAME and Other Stor- ies. By Julio Cortazar. Translated from the Spanish by Paul Blackburn. Pan- theon Books. 277 pp. $5.95. DANIEL STERN Mr. Stern is a novelist and critic. His most recent book is After the War (Putnam). There is, currently, a secret confrater- nity. I am a member. We are the ser- ious teaders who admit to finding only sections of The Tin Drum actually en- grossing; who applaud and desire ex- periment, yet find that after page 60 Mi- chel Butor is boring; that even before page 60 the novelty and attractiveness of Robbe-Grillet has died an early death. But because we are essentially the people Nathalie Sarraute speaks of in her excellent essay, “The Age of Suspicion,” we are also the ones who no longer believe the gray, endless sea of prose that claims to report our ex- perience in the manner and language of earlier, more naive times. If one reads “straight books” with suspicion, and is still unconvinced by the self-in- dulgent extravagances of many of the “advanced” writers, where, then, does one stand? Or, more important, where does one turn? One turns, it seems, to Argentinian- 248 born Julio Cortazar. When Cortazar’s most successful novel, Hopscotch, was published here last year, I read it with great pleasure and boredom. . . and irritation! Here was a man whose writing flashed with wit, superb imagery and who obviously was possessed of— and by—a fantastic imagination. But what of the endless self-indulgences? The tricks and games played not with or for—but on the reader. In this new book, a culling of stories from three previously untranslated col- lections, the shorter form allows no time for the merely tricky. Yet what magnificent tricks Cortazar does play. A woman dreams about a beggar wom- an on a bridge in Budapest (a city for- eign to her). Then she arrives in Buda- pest and finds the beggar woman on the same bridge. They embrace—and in horror the woman stands rooted while watching herself leave. This playing with time (the two women, it is suggested, may be the same person at different times) is characteristic. But it is only one of Cortazar’s techniques for break- ing down reality, mixing it with various illusions, and scrambling them to make a brand new reality—or is it a brand new illusion? In “Axolotl,”’ a man who is insistently drawn to a certain fish in the aquarium keeps returning to ob- serve and to imagine what it must t | : like to be that fish. The power of the imagination is attested to by the fact that an exchange is forced. The man finds himself looking out at the world from within the watery cage. Still a bright texture of reality runs through these stories. It is as if Cortazar is showing us first that it is essential for us to reimagine the reality in which we live and which we can no longer take for granted; and second, he shows us how to do this by the use of infinite variety and possibilities. (This variety, these possibilities, of course, all carry with them the threat of danger—people are always going out too far in the ex- ercise of the imagination.) In “The Pursuer,” the only un- successful story in this volume, a musi- cian who is obviously Charley Parker, “reaches” in the most banal Man-With- the-Golden-Horn sense, for the truth- © ful music he knows he can blow—and in so doing disorders his senses and his imagination until he destroys himself. Pace Rimbaud and Yardbird. In “Blow-Up,” the story on which An- tonioni loosely based his film, an ama- teur photographer (we are all dabblers in perceiving reality, Cortazar implies) takes unsolicited, candid photographs of a woman in the throes of an embrace. Only here she is with a boy, not an older man. In a nearby car an older man sits, waiting. The woman remonstrates with the narrator about taking the photo- graph. The boy runs away under cover of the ensuing argument between the woman (who is joined by the man in the car) and the recording angel who is telling the story. When he develops the photographs later, it seems to him that perhaps the woman had a more sinister purpose in mind, possibly to seduce the boy for the man who waited in the car. If this was so then the in- tervention of the photographer actually influenced the course of events and freed the youngster. Cortazar has a mar- velous way of implying much with little. The possibilities of the moral effects of art as action were totally obliterated in Antonioni’s film; but this implication is what makes the work a gem among con- temporary stories. As the novel, Hopscotch, did not “work,” these stories “work.” Their ef- fects come off, both as technical feats and as reverberating emotions and ideas. Actually, Cortazar is involved with ideas only in the sense that the best science fiction or fantasy is. A man becomes a fish; two human beings change identi- ties and existences. In the story, “The Night Face Up,” a man on a motorcy- cle being chased to his eventual death in a hospital bed is contrasted (and sym- bolically joined) with a man in some prehistoric cave culture. At first one is THE NATION/September 18, 1967 inced that the primitive is a meta- for the more advanced situation. reversal at the end is breath-taking. ; In reading such _ experimental work there is the temptation to overdo he concentration on influences. In the i case of Cortdzar it is interesting and i valid to consider them. While a number of European influences are clearly in- ‘dicated, it is two compatriot authors ‘who strike this reader as most important to Cortazar’s growth: the classic Ma- chado de Assis and, most significantly, the great modernist Jorge Luis Borges. Cortazar has lived and worked in Paris since 1951. He writes with all the so- phistication of an expatriate. And, like Borges. he often combines elements of the essay with the fictional elements of his stories. Here is the author comment- j) ing on the reaction of a character to ' the unaccustomed availability of lux- _uries: (For the files: note, following Ortega, the contact between the common man and technology. Exactly where one would imagine a cultural shock, there is, On the contrary, a violent assimilation and enjoyment of the progress. Mauro talks about refrigeration units . . . with ' the self-sufficiency of the Buenos Aires inhabitant who firmly believes he has everything coming to him.) He shares with Borges, also, a _per- vading sense of the mysteriousness of natural objects and banal daily life. Cor- tazar writes with all the ambiguity, irony ANTONIO GRAMSCI AND THE ORI- GINS OF ITALIAN COMMUNISM. By John M. Cammett. Stanford Univer- sity Press. 306 pp. $8.50. ERIC HOBSBAWM Mr. Hobshawm is the author of The Age of Revolution, 1789-1848 (World), Primitive Rebels (Praeger) and Labouring Men (Basic Books). Antonio Gramsci’s reputation outside Italy is now quite considerable. It has increased sharply over the past ten years, but most of it still rests on hear- say. Until recently, practically all that was available in English was an inade- quate volume of selections of Gramsci’s work, four or five articles of uneven quality, and a few observations by the livelier historians of ideas such as Licht- heim and Stuart Hughes. This even though Gramsci -was one of the most original Marxist thinkers of this cen- tury, the inspirer and leader of the Italian Communist Party, and a man THE NATION/September 18, 1967 and attention to objects, common to Ginter Grass, Butor, Robbe-Grillet: the most nouveau of the nouveau. The dif- ference is that Cortazar, in these stories, knows precisely when to stop. Brevity, in the land of advanced writing attains to a kind of morality. Not that serious work must necessarily be short; but it must have those virtues common to briefer works: careful selection of de- tail, the rightness of the particular form, and the compelling sense that what has been left out is playing an important part in the final work of art. These factors are, to some extent, ab- sent in Hopscotch. Deliberately, judging from some remarks the author made in a recent interview. “The novel,” he States, “is like a chain of mountains. It can go on and on.” But the concept of the novel as a great catchall, from which the reader takes what he wishes, is old-fashioned and no longer perti- nent. The use of indeterminacy and shuffling of sequence (as in Hopscotch) is simply the catchall notion dressed up in fancy clothes. In any case the present volume con- tains enough rewards for the most dif- ficult and suspicious of readers in search of demanding pleasures and dark de- lights. The translation, by Paul Black- burn, is properly colloquial, elegant and eloquent, and is flavored with just enough touches of Spanish and French phrases to spice the narrative. At this point in the development of a freer form for prose writing, Cortazar is indispensable. | Introduction to Gramsci who is accepted in his own country as a major figure in Italian culture, apart from politics. John Cammett’s book is the first full-scale treatment of him published in our language. It is a fairly short work—the text amounts to barely more than 220 pages—and the author does not claim that it exhausts the sub- ject. Still, it provides us with an ex- cellent introduction to the man and his achievement, and this is more than any other work in English has so far done. In spite of Gramsci’s importance in the politics of his country, his chief Significance is as a theorist and teacher. This is not to make a sharp distinction between theory and practice. Gramsci’s thought was almost as completely dom- inated by the practical tasks of trans- forming society as Lenin’s, and the re- markable successes of the Italian Com- munist Party have been largely due to his ideas. But he had neither the temperament nor some of the gifts of © the political operator, which his fellow MARTOV A Political Biography ofa Russian Social Democrat ISRAEL GETZLER Julius Martov (lulii Osipovich Tseder- baum) was of the generation of the Russian alienated intelligentsia which grew up in the reaction and gloom of the 1880s, turned Marxist in the early 1890s, and supplied the leadership of Russian social democracy in the 1900s. This is the first full study of Martov, the founder and leader of Menshey- ism, and of his ideas and activities in the Russian revolutionary movement and in international socialism. Dr Getzler traces Martov's career from his apprenticeship in Vilno and St Petersburg through his friendship and partnership with Lenin, the break- up of that association and the party split between Bolsheviks and Men- sheviks in 1903, his role in the 1905 revolution and his later socialist activ- ities ending with the Mensheviks in exile and his death. Photographs and drawings $12.50 =] CAMBRIDGE 7] UNIVERSITY PRESS 32 East 57 Street New York, N.Y. 10022 250 FREE with each new subscription The FBI Nobody Knows by Fred J. Cook A portion of this important book first appeared in THE NATION (October 18, 1958), as a special feature and attracted nation-wide attention and the highest praise. Now it has been rewritten and en- larged with much new material. “A devastating case against the Federal Bureau of Investiga- tion and its veteran director, J. Edgar Hoover.” —San Francisco Chronicle “... an effective and powerful document . . .” —New York Review of Books “J. Edgar Hoover won't like this book . . . well-documented ... likely to cause a furor.” —Publisher’s Weekly “Fred Cook must be credited with a courageous, as well as an illuminating, book. Let those who dispute his charges refute them if they can.” —WNew York Herald Tribune subscribe to NATION America’s most habit-forming magazine 333 Sixth Avenue The NATION New York, N.Y. 10014 Herewith my order and payment for a NEW subscription to The Nation. Please send my FREE copy of THE FBI Nospopy KNows. [-] 1 Year, $10 []2 Years, $18 [7] 6 Mos., $6 (Foreign and Canadian postage: $1 per year extra) student and successor Palmiro Togli so obviously possessed; and even if his” career as a politician had not ended in 1926 (he died shortly after his release from jail eleven years later) he would — probably not be remembered as an out- standing practical strategist and tactician. — Thus, he lives mainly through his writ- | ings, in the Ordine Nuovo of Turin | (which he edited), in the “Lyons theses” — which laid the foundations for subse- quent Communist policy in Italy and, above all, in the almost 3,000 pages of the Prison Notebooks which he wrote, under fascism and the multiple handi- caps of permanent illness, prison bru- | tality and chicanery, restricted reading _ and censorship, in the last ten years of his life. Cammett is undoubtedly right in thinking that these “may eventually be recognized as one of the master- pieces of twentieth-century political | thought.” ; Gramsci’s writings are extremely Italian, and to the extent that most of us are unfamiliar with his intellectual context—for instance with the role played during his lifetime by the philos- opher Croce—they are not easily ac- cessible to foreigners, though for the same reason they make an immediate and vivid appeal to Italian intellectuals of all political persuasions. Gramsci belonged to that inter- national generation of revolutionaries who rebelled against the passive oppor- tunism of the pre-1914 social-democratic movements, and the extreme determin- ist and evolutionist version of Marxism with which writers like Kautsky dis- guised this passivity. At the same time —and perhaps because they recognized the absorption of these elements in Kautskyism—he belonged to those who rejected the positivist commonplaces of late 19th-century thought. Politically, Gramsci belongs with Lenin (whose views he, almost alone in Italv, devel- oped in 1917); with Luxemburg and what Lichtheim has called the ‘“‘cen- tral-European left”; and insofar as they also rejected social-democracy, with the syndicalist rebels, though he rejected anarchism and “spontaneity.” (He was, however, notably kinder to Sorel than most Marxists.) Ideologically he was, at any rate initially, very much more critical of the public corpus of Marx’s writings than, say, the Russian Left. He shared with many of the contemporary anti- social-democratic Left a dislike of deter- minism and a taste for Hegel, but it may be argued—it has lately been so argued by Althusser and others—that his historicism, voluntarism and _philo- sophical idealism went beyond what most Marxists would find acceptable; or at least that he never entirely reconciled this original bias with the mature reflec- tions of the Prison Notebooks. THE NATION/September 18, 1967 glancing up, occasicnally, to look at the light. throwing up dirt steadily, almost down to the grave. -Gramsci’s thought undoubtedly be- ame Marxist, but his relative independ- ence from the received text of Marx and Engels allowed him to explore freely several aspects not normally dealt with at length in the Marxist writings of his time, notably in the field of cul- ture and political theory. His case is particularly relevant to those who think of the historic development of Marxism as essentially the elaboration or extrapo- lation of classical texts, for it demon- strates that this is not in fact the way | the major Marxist thinkers operated. Even those who find this immensely original thinker most congenial, should ‘be prepared to exercise their critical faculty on him. It is one of the merits of the Italian Communist Party that it has never resisted such critical analysis of its leading theorist. _ Gramsci also belonged to a country _ which was both industrialized and back- ward, economically independent and co- lonial. He himself was a Sardinian— and there are few more impoverished and backward areas in Europe—but his experience in Turin, the Italian Detroit, also gave him an insight into the prob- lems of a fully industrialized society. Gramsci’s background allowed, and in- deed obliged, him to see revolution not simply in terms of the proletariat, but of working-class predominance within a much wider movement, in fact one of national liberation and rebirth. Piero Gobetti, the brilliant boy who inspired so much of Italian liberal anti-fascism, saw the Ordine Nuovo (with which he cooperated) as a movement capable of Tegenerating Italian life through the agency of the working class; and this is very much what the Communist-cen- tered resistance movement actually was to achieve after 1943. Such an insistence on the broad charac- ter of working-class leadership or “he- gemony,” to use the term central to his analysis, meant more than the mere assertion of the primary importance of the peasantry and the role of intel- lectuals as a _ special social group, though Gramsci analyzed both with re- markable acuteness. Unlike most other Marxists, Gramsci’s political theory con- sistently operates not only in terms of the “state” but of “civil society,” that is, the sum total of nongovernment- THE NATION/September 18, 1967 1. I see a stomach without eyes, scmetbing that travels along the ground eeting, 2. It is a shovel without a handle, the blade returning, doing well now, ROBERT BLY al institutional and private manifesta- tions of society, of its culture and moral climate. A socio-economic system was not merely an economic base maintained by the superstructure of the ruling-class government and coercion but also im- plied the “hegemonic” predominance of one social group operating through “civil society,” or the element of consent that other classes gave to it. The task of the labor movement, especially in Western countries, was to make the proletariat a “hegemonic” class even before it seized power; and indeed in such countries its victory was improbable unless it estab- lished such hegemony, and won accept- ance as a potential dominant class. Politically, the most interesting aspect of this analysis is that it pro- vides an answer to the prize question of all revolutionary movements, namely what to do when a seizure of power is not in prospect (or after it has suc- ceeded or failed). At such times, Gram- A Signal Danger STORY OF AN ACCUSATION. By Terence Reese. Simon & Schuster. 246 pp. $5.95. Paper $1.95. DAVID CORT Mr. Cort’s most recent book is The Glossy Rats (Grosset & Dunlap). Bridge is a game of signals, legally lim- ited to signals that can be understood by all the players. Tournament bridge is also a deadly competition for fame and riches, especially for American players. Thus an invisible, tabooed mag- netic pull might be assumed, to invent additional secret signals, and break the game wide open. One elbow on the ta- ble might signal two good suits of the same color; the other elbow something else; a throat-clearing something else; all timed during the bidding. The check on this is that the play exposes all the cards in due course. When the same kind of hand is twice accompanied by ‘the same secret signal, the fun is over. And so two British champions, Ter- sci argued, a “war of position” must necessarily succeed a “war of maneu- ver,” that is, the struggle for hegemony must supplement or replace the struggle for power. (Incidentally, the Gramscian analysis also appears to offer the pros- pect of a nontotalitarian communism, without retreating into the dream world of anarcho-syndicalism or utopia.) Theoretically, his analysis led him in- to a variety of remarkable insights into the way in which political societies op- erate, the function of culture and in- tellectuals within them, and the develop- ment of his own nation. In both theory and practice it provided the Italian Com- munist Party with an unusually flexible approach to its political tasks: it is, after all, the party which succeeded both in organizing the most successful parti- san war in Western Europe and in func- tioning most effectively under condi- tions of capitalist prosperity. Not the least surprising thing about it is that it maintained its “Gramscianism” intact through the most monolithic and sec- tarian periods of Stalinism. However, this is probably due less to Gramsci himself than to the exceptional political gifts of his friend Togliatti. Cammett’s book will surely attract many radicals in the United States and Britain to this impressive and stimu- lating thinker. At present they will still have to learn Italian to read most of » his work. Fortunately a larger selection of it is being translated now. It is to be hoped that it will soon be available. ence Reese and Boris Schapiro, were accused by their American opponents, B. J. Becker and Dorothy Hayden, of holding their cards in such a manner that the number of fingers outside cor- tesponded to the number of cards in the heart suit—a crude, unimaginative, limited and detectable stratagem for two such highly ingenious gentlemen. Two British officials, Swimer and But- ler, hastily accepted the slander. In case your newspaper did not recognize the sinister international potentials of this event, it took place at the inter- national matches in Buenos Aires in 1965 among Italy (the habitual cham- pions), Britain, the U.S. and Argentina. Now Terence Reese tells if all, com- plete with bridge hands, bidding, suspi- cions and rebuttals. What is chiefly revealed by the epi- sode and by this book is the rankling cattiness that suffuses championship bridge. To an indifferent outsider the Americans look especially smug, silly and small time, possibly because they 251 have the most money at stake. As makers of the American image abroad, Becker and Hayden are to be deplored. The others in this world sound like non-Us trying to be U, but the Americans don’t even have the pride to try. Tournament bridge must inculcate qualities of envy, malice, self-righteousness and overween- ing conceit. In simple discretion, a player would only cheat with one partner, and he would be more effective with that part- ner than with anyone else. But in this tournament Reese didn’t want to pair with Schapiro; they were worse than usual, and worse than with other part- ners. Since the average number of any suit in a hand is between three and four, and holding the cards with three or four fingers outside is quite normal, a large number of correlations would be inevitable. It took the genius of the Americans to settle on the heart suit. Thus we get the authentic scent of pure evil as in the play, The Children’s Hour. But absurd accusations are even harder to refute than serious ones. One cannot laugh forever. At least one example of the accu- sation in detail must be given. Here, with the involved bidding and thinking of these people, is Britain-Italy 18: East dealer North-South vulnerable NORTH @ Q10 ¥K107 9874 &KI74 WEST EAST @365 @A9872 ¥ 65 992 @J32 @KQ105 109865 &A3 SOUTH K43 YAQI843 @A6 &Q2 SOUTH WEST NORTH EAST Garozzo Reese Forquet ae ig 1 dble No 2& 29 No 26 No No 2NT all pass @ 5 led. Made three, 150 to Italy, Criticism: That East bid two hearts because he knew his partner held only two hearts and so would not give an inconvenient raise. Answer: The Italians were playing (Herbert) responses to take-out doubles, so that North’s two clubs (as attested by his subsequent inactivity) showed fair values. Thus East knew his partner must be very weak. It was likely that the vul- nerable opponents had the values for game and also likely, on the surface, that their best suit would be hearts. So East may well try to keep them out of a heart contract. As to the alleged risk, if I, as West, had held a singleton spade and four or five hearts, I would cer- tainly have been alive to the possibility 252 that partner’s heart bid might not be genuine. The hand actually contains a negative point for the defense. If the illicit knowledge is presumed, then Wesr has a very obvious two hearts available on the way round. It is a set-up situation for a psychic of that type. Underlying the episode was the chal- lenge to the honor and self-respect of Englishmen. The British proceedings were rigorous, without trace of white- wash, and the vindication was well- earned. Furthermore, the British refused better together than with other part- ners, by a sort of psychic ESP which may be parsed with intuitive legal § cheating. They were unique among tour- nament players in accusations of cheat- ing. This ended when at a San Fran- cisco tournament, while the British trial was going on, somebody else accused them of cheating. At this rate, tournament bridge may soon be destroyed, and all these people will have to go back to work. THEATRE/ Julius Novick Minneapolis American productions of Greek tragedy are a problem for the critic: the plays come highly recommended, but the ex- perience of watching them is usually very pallid. How is one to reconcile these two intractable constants? One of my customary solutions is to remark (cogently, I think) that American di- rectors and actors do not deal with Greek tragedy often enough to learn how to handle it, and that anyhow the translation lacks the grandeur which those who know Greek customarily at- tribute to the original. But my favorite recourse has been to hide behind W. H. Auden’s opinion that the Greek classics in English have more historical and anthropological than aesthetic in- terest. Tyrone Guthrie’s production of The House of Atreus at the Guthrie Theatre in Minneapolis makes such shifts and dodges unnecessary. It is the only re- vival of a Greek tragedy that I have ever seen; all the other attempts were mere exhumations, The Oresteia, Aeschylus’ trilogy of Agamemnon, Cly- temnestra, Orestes, and the great chain of familial murder that they forged, has been freely adapted for the occasion by John Lewin, but the result is still Greek tragedy, Aeschylus’ drama and not Mr. Lewin’s. Dr. Guthrie has succeeded— uniquely, I think, among modern di- rectors—in conjuring up a considerable vestige of those dark tremendous forces that the Athenians encountered in the Theatre of Dionysius. And, in so doing, he has given us probably the nearest thing to a Theatre of Cruelty spectacle, as Antonin Artaud imagined it, that we have ever had in this country. Artaud was a French actor, director, poet, playwright, critic and theoretician who died at Ivry, near Paris, in 1948, two years after his release from the in- sane asylum at Rodez. His influence is based on a book called The Theatre and Its Double, first published in 1938, in which he argued that the “decadent” modern theatre must be swept away and replaced by “a theatre which events do not exceed, whose resonance is deep within us, dominating the instability of the times.” Peter Brook’s production of Marat/Sade used techniques developed in a “Theatre of Cruelty” workshop that Mr. Brook headed for the Royal Shake- speare Theatre in London. But just what did Artaud have in mind when he talked of a “Theatre of Cruelty’? Not what might be super- ficially expected. He wrote: With this mania we all have for de- preciating everything, as soon as [ have said “cruelty,” everybody will at once take it to mean “blood.” But... it is not the cruelty we can exercise upon each other by hacking at each other’s bodies, carving up our personal anato- mies, or, like Assyrian emperors, send- ing parcels of human ears, noses, or neatly detached nostrils through the mail, but the much more terrible and necessary cruelty which things can exer- cise against us. We are not free. And the sky can still fall on our heads. And the theatre has been created to teach us that first of all. And that, first of all, is what Greek tragedy teaches us. Artaud sought to bring back to the stage at least “a little breath of that great metaphysical fear which is at the root of all ancient theatre”: The theatre must make itself the equal of life, not an individual life, that indi- vidual aspect of life in which charac- ters triumph, but the sort of liberated , life which sweeps away human individ- uality and in which man is only a re- flection. The true purpose of the theatre is to create Myths, to express life in its immense, universal aspect. . This sounds as if Artaud were calling almost explicity for a revival of Greek tragedy which, more than any other kind of Western theatre, deals with “life THE NATION/September 18, 1967 een . ss ts immense, universal aspect.” But was not: We shall try to concentrate, around _ famous personages, atrocious crimes, su- perhuman devotions, a drama which, without resorting to the defunct images of the old Myths, shows that it can ex- tract the forces which struggle within them. (My italics.) _ The key assumption here is that the “images of the old Myths” are “defunct,” and anyone who has seen English-lan- guage productions of Greek tragedy would be likely to agree. In our time and country, only Dr. Guthrie has been able to disprove this assumption with tegard to Greek tragedy. Artaud himself was entirely unable to see that Greek tragedy might be the foundation for the kind of theatre he sought to build, because he was in vio- lent revolt against the French theatri- cal tradition of reverence for the classics, which was—often still is—expressed through static stagings in which the actors declaimed the sacred text. “A theatre which subordinates the mise en scéne and production, i.e., everything in itself that is specifically theatrical, to the text,’ was, according to Artaud, “a theatre of idiots, madmen, inverts, grammarians, grocers, antipoets and positivists. . . .” Throwing out the baby with the bath water, he raised his fa- mous cry, “No more masterpieces!” Masterpieces of the past are good for the past: they are not good for us... . If the public does not frequent our literary masterpieces, it is because those masterpieces are literary, that is to say fixed; and fixed in forms that no longer respond to the needs of the time. Artaud demanded “a theatre which eliminates the author in favor of what we would call, in our Occidental theatrical jargon, the director; but a director who has become a kind of manager of magic, a master of sacred ceremonies.” But what if the director could function in this manner without eliminating the author? That is exactly what. Dr. Guthrie has done with The House of Atreus. The significance and power of his production come from his success in evoking “a little breath of that great metaphysical fear,” “life in its immense, universal aspect,” “gods fee teroes,. .. monsters. ; . natural and cosmic forces’—just those central elements of Greek tragedy that are ab- sent from most productions. The import of The House of Atreus—an import felt in the first place by some more primal, basic faculty than the reasoning mind —is that tremendous powers are loose in the world, compared to which an ordinary mortal is a puny creature in- deed. In other words—Artaud’s words— THE NATION/September 18, 1967 “We are not free. And the sky can still fall on our heads.” Dr. Guthrie’s means, as well as his ends, are on the whole quite Artaudian. He does not, of course, fill the entire prescription. I did not notice, for in- stance, a “physical rhythm of move- ments whose crescendo and decrescendo will accord exactly with the pulsation of movements familiar to everyone,” or “the physical action of light which arouses sensations of heat and cold,” or “absolutely new sounds, qualities which present-day musical instruments do not possess.” A rather more significant dic- tum is also unfulfilled: We abolish the stage and the audito- rium and replace them by a single site, without partition and barrier of any kind, which will become the theatre of the action. A direct communication will be re-established between the actor and the spectator, from the fact that the spectator, placed in the middle of the action, is engulfed and physically af- fected by it. But though stage and auditorium remain separate areas at the Guthrie Theatre, they are at least in the same room, and not separated by the wall-with-a-hole-in- it that we call the proscenium; and though the spectator is not in the middle of the action, the Guthrie’s asymmetric thrust stage brings the action into the midst of the spectators. In other respects, The House of Atreus comes far closer to what Artaud wanted. The prophet called for a thea- tre that “turns words into incantations.” He demanded cries, groans, apparitions, surprises, theatricalities of all kinds, magic beauty of costumes taken from certain ritual models; resplendent lighting, incantation- al beauty of voices, the charms of har- mony, rare notes of music . . . concrete appearances of new and surprising ob- jects, masks, effigies yards high, sudden changes of light.... All these Dr. Guthrie supplies, and few of them fail in their effect. Human individuality is not, as Artaud demanded, entirely swept away. Mr. Lewin’s adaptation elaborates on Aeschylus’ occasional hints for intimate details: the grim reminiscences of a soldier back from Troy, the feeble wail- ing of Orestes’ old nurse. Dr. Guthrie deftly brings out the individuality of certain major characters: Agamemnon’s slightly cheap arrogance, Clytemnestra’s bitchiness, the forlornness of Cassandra. Yet these towering figures are not di- minished thereby; the production is Ar- taudian in spirit because of the success- ful boldness with which Dr. Guthrie uses anti-realistic, hieratic, bizarre de- vices to place it on a superhuman plane. The actors are not dressed in the white crypto-mini-skirts and dainty draperies that traditionally serve for Greek tragedies; designer Tanya Moisei- witsch has swathed them in costumes of coarse, earth-colored fabrics, and cov- ered their faces with masks. The chorus- es seem human, more or less, but the major characters are larger than life size; with their rigid, stately gestures, they look like huge, awe-inspiring dolls. Yet even they are dwarfed by the tawny gates that dominate the set, and by the tremendous figures of the gods, who are out of human scale altogether. At Argos, Orestes is a heroic figure, and grim enough when he kills Clytemnestra; but at Delphi, in the shadow of great golden Apollo, he looks like a small boy clinging to his father for support. All the actors, except some in the chorus, are men, which places the action Why does a poetry press publish prose? The answer is Erich Kahler. The Rallying Idea by Erich Kahler me $ UNICORN PRESS Your Studio 126, El Paseo Bookseller Santa Barbara, California YOU SHOULD KNOW CANADA BETTER! Read CANADIAN DIMENSION Editor: C. W. Gonick Leading forum of Canadian opinion. Independent and lively. Send $4.00 for a trial year’s subscription—8 Big Issues Write: CANADIAN DIMENSION P.O. 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Among the men who play men, the most notable are Lee Richardson as Agamemnon and Apollo, and Len Cariou—one of the finest young classical actors now work- ing in the U.S.—as a powerful Orestes. The actors who make up the choruses are notable because they are not riff- raff whose only virtue is that they come FOR RENT HAVE LARGE .FURNISHED APARTMENT, share or sublet. Short distance City College, Columbia, Yeshiva. LO 8-0659 after 8:00 P.M. SITUATION WANTED ADMINISTRATIVE ASSISTANT, organiza- tional experience, writing ability. Conscien- tious, mature, responsible. Purposeful work major requirement. Box 605, c/o The Nation. PERSONALS YOUNG MAN seeks full-time work with peace, civil rights or humanitarian organization. Wishes to “cop out” of industrial advertising. Experienced in copywriting, editing, direct mail, publicity. Organizational and promotional experience with local liberal concerns. Alan Swenson, 11 Park Place, Bloomfield, N.J. 07003. THE FUTURIST, published bimonthly by World Future Society, reports _ scientists’ forecasts for coming decades. Subscription: $5 yearly. Box 19285-N, Twentieth Street Station, Washington, D.C. 20036. VIETNAM FOR VIETNAMESE Bumper strips, 25c, 12 different $2; Also, HOFFA FOR PRESI- DENT; IMPEACH JOHNSON; circulars, stick- ExS, etc. Plentyism, Box 115-W, Edison, Miami 3151 LEGALIZE ABORTION and every other vic. timless activity. LEGALIZE LIBERTY, POB 24282, Los Angeles, California 90024 The Best Way To Get NATION SRSSCSRTCRRSTCEREST ERCP SRRSRTESESSSSESEP. THE NATION 333 Sixth Ave., New York 10014 x 9-18-67 [_] One Year, $10 {_] Two Years, $18 {_] 6 Months, $6 [_] Bilk Me (Foreign and Canadian Postage $1 a year extra) {[] Payment Enclosed INGING Shojo ficcistsms mee eee ten aetos s AC reSS i231 5.1: tenons ew hae) ° at oy) A i YT Reagan is making a pass at middle roaders to broaden his Presidential appeal, while taking his conservative — friends for granted. The Orange County Senator, who - won't be taken for granted, is among the small, but perhaps growing, number of true believers disillusioned by Reagan. Moderate Republican politicians, who ad- wire Earl Warren and like Pat Brown, are not too un- happy with Reagan. One, a state Senator, said: “Rea- gan appeases the Right with rhetoric, while moving toward the Center of politics.” Another, a state As- semblyman, thinks the big budget and the big taxes would have been about the same if Brown had been re- elected. But a Sacramento reporter who covers the cap- ital has a different view: “Reagan was elected to stop California, to put on the brakes, and that is just what he is doing.” Governor Brown shares the pessimism of the true believers, for different: reasons. Brown: “Lack of interest in social justice is Reagan’s greatest fault.” Assemblyman Charles Warren of Los Angeles, a rather unpartisan state Democratic chairman, believes Reagan may turn out to be a “passably good caretaker gover- nor, but lacks the imagination of a real leader.” Except for a few light jabs, Democratic politicians, who have as much respect as anyone else for a man who can win by a million votes, have not been able to lay a glove on Reagan. His most consistent and most effective critic, oddly enough, turned out to be the Los Angeles Times, whose editorial management, infiltrated by intellectuals, is running a low-grade fever over the Governor. Calling the latest legislative session “‘disap- pointing,” the Times said: “The Administration won out on the largest tax increase in California’s history to sup- port the largest spending program in history, but there was no commensurate tax reform and no meaningful property tax relief.” The attitude of the Times, formerly a house organ for business, is not typical of the free-wheeling business and industrial entrepreneurs of the state, the comparatively new rich, who have made their money in postwar fed- erally subsidized California, whose population, now near- ly 20 million, has nearly tripled in the past quarter cen- tury. They lavishly financed Reagan’s campaign, they reciprocate his boyish admiration for them, and they are the single biggest influence in his administration. Reagan has weighted his administration with men whose Views are antithetical to their official functions. His real estate Commissioner is past president of the California Real Estate Association and a leader in the fight against the state’s open-housing law; the agricultural commis- sioner is a rancher and a member of the anti-labor Right To Work Committee; a former consultant to savings and loan associations is the savings and loan commissioner; the industrial relations commissioner is a former corpo- ration executive; and other appointments reflect a sim- ilarly negative outlook. The head of the Department of General Services is a retired right-wing army general; the Governor’s clemency aide is a former assistant dis- trict attorney who believes in capital punishment. Rea- gen reached into the ranks of Berkeley professors, of all places, for an appointment to the State Utilities Com- THE NATION/Sepltember 25, 1 967 -—=—= SS Se mt mission, but the professor is a long-time advocate of pare pti . ° eyeye 3 more lenient regulation of utilities. Exceptions to the mediocre quality of such appointments are excellent se- _ lections in conservation and resource development, agen- ee cies vital to a state being ploughed under and paved over by rapacious exploiters. Flushed with a million-vote victory, surrounded _ by men who were as conservative, or more so than he was, Governor Reagan launched a no-compromise ad- ministration. Such ideological purity, never known under Pat Brown, became the spirit of Sacramento under Ron- ald Reagan—but not for long. The Governor of California—“where the action is’— is a figure of national political importance. The spectacu- lar election of Ronald Reagan, a liberal turned right- wing movie actor, made him something of far greater significance in our publicity-conscious culture: a na- tional celebrity. He attracts relays of journalists to Sacra- mento. They usually depart bemused. Governor Reagan was not the Ronald Reagan of the evangelical speeches against the income tax as a “Communist plot.” He is not the Reagan who trembled in fear the Communists might take over the country no later than 1970. In short, Reagan, as one put it elegantly, is not a “nut.” What had happened to “Ronnie Baby”? He had been reading the public opinion polls, and the polls told him that his fellow countrymen considered him a “Presi- dential possibility.” Governor Reagan, who will go to the Republican convention as a favorite son, wants a firmly united party behind him. One of the prices of unity—support- VIETNAM ELECTIONS KARL H. PURNELL Mr. Purnell is starting this month as the Vietnam correspon- dent for the Public Broadcast Laboratory, the new TV net- work directed by Fred Friendly. Saigon The big surprise in Vietnam’s recent elections was the excellent showing of an unknown peace candidate, Troung Dinh Dzu. By far the harshest critic of the pres- ent military junta, Dzu placed second in the race. His campaign symbol of a white dove of peace and his con- tinued jabs at the ruling generals apparently aroused hope among some Vietnamese who saw in him a prom- ise for change. At a large political rally in Nha Trang, a coastal city ap- proximately 350 miles north of Saigon, the short, heavy- set Dzu told a cheering crowd that it was time to throw out the rascals in Saigon. “What is democracy in Vietnam? It is anything which is against the present government,” he shouted to an ap- preciative audience. Even Dzu’s campaign oratory was not enough to stop | THE NATION/September 25, 1967 ing the moderate Senator Kuchel—is a moderate one. There is the more difficult problem of Richard M. Nixon. In stage whispers that can be heard in the upper balcony, Reagan’s staff refers to him sadly as “the all-time cham- pion loser.’ Rumors floating around say Nixon has hinted he might enter the California primary if Reagan stacks the state’s national convention delegation too heavily against him. That is unlikely, unless California Republicans, in the midst of success, revert to the strate- gy of 1958 when the magic coalition of Nixon, Knight and Knowland schemed the party into disaster. On the biggest issue in Presidential politics, Reagan’s view is characteristically clean-cut and straightforward: “We ought to go into Vietnam and make it one big park- ing lot and paint a stripe down the middle.” Despite this quality of simplicity and candor, and other advan- tages, Reagan, coining one of his nimble phrases—‘I have a four-year contract with the people of California” —keeps saying he is not a candidate. His staff assistants, brisk, young confident types, keep leading him up the mountain and showing him those polls. The latest, a year and five months before the Presidential election, reports that the strongest Republican ticket would be Rockefeller for President and Reagan for Vice Presi- dent. Reagan’s aides can put together any number of combinations, and they always end up with Reagan for President. Meanwhile, a lovely little cloud, no bigger than a dainty woman’s white glove, has arisen on the California horizon, an omen of yet another political miracle fash- ioned in the Hollywood dream factory. Shirley Temple is running for Congress. MARCHING OUT THE HORSES the government landslide. Generals Nguyen Van Thieu and Nguyen Cao Ky received twice as many votes as Dzu. This kind of sweep might be considered a strong man- date to rule in a Western democracy where a majority can express its will at the polls. In Vietnam, however, it appears that the generals may have gone too far in masterminding an election which may well have sown the seeds for yet another revolution. Before the campaign for a new President, Vice Presi- dent and Senate started, the generals had planned their victory. Essentially, these preparations consisted of three parts: selection of candidates, official pressure on the peasants and a large military vote. Having accounted for each of these ingredients by Election Day, there was little need for the generals to manipulate the ballot box. It was simply a matter of marching out the horses on September 3 and pretending to the world that a demo- cratic election was being held. The selection of candidates was held in such a way that the most popular political figure in Vietnam, Gen- 267 eral Duong Van Minh, was eliminated from the race. “Big” Minh, in exile since last year, was the one person who could rally heavy Buddhist support and also cut into the large military vote. As such, he was a dangerous rival to Thieu and Ky. Consequently, the Armed Forces Coun- cil ruled, on grounds of “security,” that he could not enter the country to campaign. When questioned about this, General Ky exploded in anger. “Minh better keep his mouth shut or we'll exile him forever,” he said. Short- ly afterward a docile Credentials Committee of the Con- stituent Assembly found a technical flaw in Minh’s ap- plication and the one man who could have given the gen- erals a real race was eliminated. Another prominent candidate was eliminated because his platform did not conform sufficiently to present gov- ernment policy concerning the war. Au Troung Thanh, a Minister of Economics under the Ky government until he resigned in protest last year, also wished to be a candidate for President. Thanh had prom- ised that if elected, he would seek an immediate cease- fire. Furthermore, he favored halting the bombing of North Vietnam in order to get negotiations started. This policy, Thanh said, reflected the true aspirations of the Vietnamese people. It did not, however, reflect those of Ky and Thieu. Thanh’s candidacy was thrown out on the grounds that he was a leftist and a Communist. When Premier Ky was asked why he had allowed Thanh in his cabinet as Minister of Economics if the man was a Communist, the General replied that he wanted to “keep an eye on him.” There were several other candidates eliminated from the race who protested in downtown Saigon. How- ever, their appeals were in vain and the list was nar- rowed to ten civilians and the generals. The ten civilians were mostly middle-class, French- educated politicians who posed little threat to the gener- als’ candidacy. Only Dzu had much life, but he was prac- tically unknown in Vietnam and had only a token ‘or- ganization. Tran Van Huong, a former Prime Minister until he was overthrown, was thought to be the leading civilian candidate. However, his duil speeches and quiet manner failed to inspire much reaction despite the fact that he was relatively well known. Possessed of a dedicated band of young followers, Huong simply could not pull the kind of vote needed to overcome the bloc votes of the gen- erals. The third-place civilian, Phan Khac Suu, 62, is an old hand at Vietnamese politics. He had spent several years in both Diem’s and Japanese prisons for his opposition to existing governments. As a candidate, he had the same trouble as the others developing a dynamic image among those who were not acquainted with him. Most of the candidates possessed dedicated followings; however, none had the kind of organization required to beat the com- bined power of the generals. If the civilians had made the one sacrifice needed to defeat the Thieu-Ky ticket, the election would have been a different matter. There were rumors during the cam- paign that several of the front runners would drop out in favor of one candidate. Negotiations to this effect 268 = ie were held at several points during the monthlon paign, but they could not agree on who should drop out. * | Consequently, the civilian candidates split the anti-gov- ernment vote ten ways, allowing the Thieu-Ky ticket smooth sailing on Election Day. With the opposition weakened and divided, the generals’ second strategy was to rely on the influence of province, district and hamlet officials to deliver a fair share of the peasant vote. The kind of pressure which a local official can exert upon the Vietnamese peasant cannot be underestimated. The recent history of rural Vietnam has taught the peas- ant farmer that respect and obedience to the local author- itv can spell the difference between life and death. Since the province, district and most hamlet chiefs have been appointed by the Saigon government, it takes little imag- ination to determine which ticket these officials were sup- porting. Most peasants, who neither knew the candidates nor had any conception of what the election was about, were easily susceptible to the subtle suggestions of their superiors. This willingness to comply with government. wishes was dramatically illustrated by the 83 per cent voter turn- out in Vietnam. Americans who are accustomed to a 55 to 60 per cent turnout are usually surprised to find that so many people vote in Vietnam. The answer is simply that local officials make it known that they want the people at the polls on Election Day. Each voter’s card is stamped after he votes. Many Vietnamese are con- vinced that if their cards are not stamped, they will be arrested. Consequently, they make a point of getting to the polls and, in many cases, of voting for the candidate suggested by the authorities. The third element of the Thieu-Ky victory was reli- ance on a well-disciplined military vote. There are 5,953,- 251 registered voters in Vietnam. Of these, approximate- ly 1 million are considered part of the military, accord- ing to figures released by the political section of the Uni- ted States mission in Saigon. Even assuming that Thieu and Ky did not get all the military votes (American officials conceded 70 per cent to them), they still had the election well under control before the voting started. Their nearest rival, Dzu, polled only 817,120 votes, which was just over the number of military ballots upon which the generals could rely. This military vote, plus those picked up by province officials, was augmented by several deals made with groups inter- ested in the status quo. The Chinese in Cholon, many of whom are making fortunes because of the war, business- imen who cater to the Americans, and those who profit trom widespread corruption, all threw their support to the generals. With this kind of backing it is surprising that the victors polled only 1,649,561 votes. In fact, the final tally indicates that the mass of Viet- namese people do not approve of their new President and Vice President. Generals Thieu and Ky received only 34 per cent of the total vote, the rest being split among the remaining ten candidates. Had this anti-gov- ernment vote not been divided, or if a run-off election were held, it is almost certain that a civilian President, and Vice President would be elected. THE NATION/September 25, 1967 | ea | ee eee ermore, there are more than 3 million potential South Vietnam who live in Vietcong-controlled areas and are presumably sympathetic to the National Ve Liberation Front. If this were added to the anti-govern- _ ment vote, it becomes clear that the 1.5 million votes or _ so won by the generals represents a small portion of the _ Vietnamese people. Many of the defeated candidates feel that they have _ been cheated of a hard-earned victory through the power _ politics employed by the generals. Several, including Dzu, held a press conference four days after the election to protest the election results. These candidates have had years of experience in politics. Their followers, some of whom were members of the constituent assembly, are well acquainted with the mechanics of an underground movement. One candidate, Ha Thuc Ky, spent several years in solitary confinement during the Diem regime. _ Tough, astute and experienced, several of these candi- _ dates and their followers claim they are now faced with the choice of joining the National Liberation Front, which they despise, or starting an underground opposi- tion movement aimed at toppling the gencrals. THE CHASTENING CARL DREHER On October 4 the space age will be ten years old. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration, estab- lished about a year after Sputnik I by the Space Act of 1958, grew rapidly into a great federal empire, with 42,000 employees of its own and more than 400,000 people across the country working on the moon program alone. Only the Central Intelligence Agency surpassed it in status and immunities. NASA’s notices in the printed and electronic press were almost uniformly laudatory. In the halls of Congress its request was law. If it did not get the money right away, it threw a tantrum and Congress came across. | In its Mercury and Gemini flights, NASA and its con- ) ‘tractors must be credited with some solid engineering | and managerial achievements—and debited with errors } which for a time were screened from public view. Then came the tragedy of January 27, 1967. Where previously NASA could do no wrong, after Grissom, White and f Chaffee lay dead in their burned-out spacecraft, NASA and its prime Apollo contractor, North American Avia- tion, incurred the opprobrium reserved for fallen idols in the American success saga. They did indeed have much to answer for. Despite all their simulators and computers | and “sophisticated” technology, they had designed Apollo | with a pre-launch atmosphere of 16 pounds per square | inch of pure oxygen and a hatch-opening time of not less than ninety seconds—a foreseeably lethal combination in the event of ignition of the abundance of flammable ma- | terials in the cabin. There could be arguments pro and | con on many points, but what could not be disputed was \ B-. THE NATION/ September 25, 1967 \ i The frustration of the defeated candidates, plus the bitterness of those Vietnamese who feel the elections were not meaningful, is precisely the kind of spark which is needed in order to kindle a new revolt in Viet- nam. Their despair is what the militant Buddhists have needed to rekindle the Struggle Movement so ruthlessly suppressed by the government last year. Thich Tri Quang, the shrewd monk who led several previous revolts, has been biding his time for just this opportunity. Already, rumors have started of a coalition between the Bud- dhists of the An Quang Pagoda in Saigon and the bitter civilian candidates. Although the immediate results of the September 3 elections may have pleased those who favor a continu- ation of the war in Vietnam, it may well be that the generals have overplayed their hand in their sweep at the polls. By arranging so ingeniously for their continu- ation in power at the expense of the Vietnamese people, the new President and Vice President may have won a Pyrrhic victory which both they and their supporters may soon regret. OF NASA that the Apollo in which the fire occurred was so full of defects that it should never have been tested with men inside. The basic mistake, however, was the cold-war race for the moon which, despite pleas and warnings from disinterested observers, NASA had pressed from the outset and even teday has not repudiated. President Kennedy’s 1961 setting of a target date for the landing on the moon, “before the decade is out,” was necessarily a political decision, both on his part and that of the Congress which authorized it and appropriated the initial funds. Kennedy inherited the problem of a bad international image of U.S. scientific capability which the Soviet accomplish- ment in space had created. If he continued the program at the leisurely pace of the Eisenhower administration (Clarence B. Randall, President Eisenhower’s economic adviser, had referred to Sputnik as “that basketball in the sky”), the U.S. was certain to face a whole series of future Soviet firsts. Kennedy concluded that it would be self-defeating to continue a space effort that gave no promise of better returns than in the past. His choice was essentially either to pull out, hoping to find some other, socially more useful way of demonstrating U.S. technological prowess, or to accelerate the program to the point where our achievements would reflect our true capabilities vis-a-vis the Soviet Union. Jerome B. Wiesner, President Kennedy’s science ad- viser, weighed some very large development projects at home and overseas as alternatives to an accelerated space effort, but he and the President were unable to convince themselves that there was a really satisfactory substitute from the point of view of offsetting the damage done to 269 the international reputation of U.S. science and technol- ogy. The President understood that the program could not be justified primarily on the basis of its scientific ob- jectives and he never presented it in that light. The other problems he was facing at the time, including the after- math of the Bay of Pigs, exacerbated the political prob- lem and may very well have had some influence on the decision. Once the die was cast, the 1970 goal was an ef- fective political and morale-stimulating way of presenting the moon project to the country. But it was never con- templated that this objective, projected far ahead in time, under unforeseeable technical conditions, would determine future decisions affecting space missions and the lives of the astronauts delegated to carry them out. Yet NASA, no doubt guided subsequently by the wishes of the John- son Administration, continued to adhere to the deadline laid down in 1961 and, in fact, pushed it forward: ac- cording to the industry press, in mid-January, 1967, they were shooting for August, 1968. After the fire, NASA officials kept reassuring Congres- sional investigators and newsmen that the 1970 goal was still attainable. They have never stopped. James A. Webb, the head of the agency, set the pattern in April and has been dutifully echoed by his subordinates. As late as August 18, at a conference on bioastronautics at the Vir- ginia Polytechnic Institute, a NASA official emphatically reaffirmed the December 31, 1969, deadline. It seems almost incredible that after the loss of a year as a result of redesign necessitated by the fire, the fact that neither the Saturn V booster nor the revamped Apollo has flown, and current reports of defective workmanship in wiring passing through pyrotechnic areas of the 017 Apollo 270 scheduled for an early (unmanned) launching, NA still clings to the deadline which, perhaps more than a other factor, got it into trouble. There is reason to believe that behind the scenes the deadline is no longer taken literally and that NASA will not launch upcoming flights until hazards have been re- duced as far as possible. Yet even the pretense that the race must continue, after the loss of three of our space fliers and at least one of the Russians’, calls into ques- tion NASA’s good faith and independence of political dic- tation. It also has practical consequences, such as making more difficult U.S.-Soviet cooperation in efforts to rescue astronauts stranded in earth orbit. The future course of Apollo will furnish further evidence of the extent to which NASA chastened is NASA improved; this should have a bearing on the proportion of the country’s resources to be applied to post-Apollo activity, including the Apollo Applications Program (AAP). The money to be spent, and the probable loss of life even if future flights are conducted with all possible prudence, must be weighed against the benefits to be ex- pected. One certain return is public entertainment. Iron- ically, the sacrifice of the three fliers will greatly enhance the pulling power of the next manned flight for TV kicks and the interspersed advertising. The public knew that space flight was dangerous; how dangerous has now been demonstrated. The public does not wish to see astronauts killed any more than they wish to see auto-racing drivers killed, but without death lurking at the turns they would not go to the races. Thus Navy Capt. Walter Schirra and his crew will play to the biggest audience yet and their mission, now scheduled for mid-1968, will be the most suspenseful up to that time. In fact, even the forthcoming unmanned Apollo flights will whet the public appetite and get more attention than unmanned flights normally do. AAP and manned planetary missions are in a different case. The principal entertainment feature will be a pos- sible manned mission to Mars. The formidable difficul- ties of this project will be discussed later; in the pres- ent connection the point is that simulated and un- manned flights, with their low show-business potential, will extend over a period of perhaps ten years. If men do finally take off for Mars, the journey will be of such duration that the high spots—launch, rendezvous and coupling, and ascent; circumnavigation of the planet or the maneuvers of landing and departure; and the last stages of return to earth—will be separated by mnths, if not years, of uneventful and boring flight. From an entertainment standpoint, the project lacks an essential element—sustained pace. However, titillating the public is only one feature of space flight. Intellectual values are also involved. Many intelligent people tend to disparage the technological ex- pressions of intellect, but this aversion must be regarded as a selective form of anti-intellectualism. The diverse kinds of thought and invention necessary for space travel, the interdisciplinary links that must be forged before hard- ware can be manufactured and operational techniques de- veloped, are as formidable as anything to be found in other forms of cultural achievement. Space travel pro- THE NATION/September 25, 1967 A financed “scientific investigation” to the extent of $560 million in fiscal 1967. Even if a considerable part of this is not basic science, NASA is sponsoring a major intellectual effort, though one particularly vulnerable from _a budgetary standpoint. In a struggle for funds between science and non-science, it needs no gift of divination to predict the outcome. _ Except for those who take the position that we do not need further technological progress, the promoters of _ AAP can make out a strong case for future space inven- tions useful on earth. The amazingly rapid achievement of communications via satellite certainly supports opti- _ mism in this area. Orbiting telescopes, earth-resource sat- _ ellites for agricultural surveys and the like, satellites for _ weather forecasting, mapping, navigation, etc., are con- fidently to be expected. Until men had gone into space _ No one ever got a good look at the earth from a distance. _ In another phase, medical knowledge will almost certainly be derived from experience with subjects in closed eco- logical systems radically different from those of sub- 4} merged nuclear submarines, while psychological data may ) _ be obtained from the behavior of men in “micro-society.” | It should be noted that most of this space research and _ development involves flight in low earth orbit, where the basic vehicular problems have been solved and the pe- riod of useful returns is at hand. There is, of course, the other side of the coin. Both | _ the U.S. Air Force and the Russians have been using sur- | __veillance satellites for some years. “Inspection” of intelli- i: _ gence-gathering spacecraft will surely follow, and _ this could lead to disabling action against spacecraft, manned and unmanned, engaged in activities virtuous in ourselves | __ but nefarious in others. The Air Force’s Manned Orbiting Laboratory (MOL) is nothing but a preparatory model of a combat-type spacecraft. Combat in space, which is to be distinguished from bombs in orbit, is not the worst innovation that can be imagined. From any rational viewpoint, space, the remoter the better, is surely the preferred place for military ac- tivity. Unfortunately, for the present at least, combat in space is almost certain to be in addition to, rather than a substitute for, combat on earth. However, none of this is an argument against NASA. It is not what it pretends to be—a wholly civilian agency—but it does promote some useful civilian activities and should be encouraged to enlarge this phase of its operations. As it is, the Air Force gives signs of pushing NASA for space funds at the $5 billion annual level by the mid- or early 1970s. ‘a The most immediately salable effect of space enterprise | is that it provides employment for large numbers of work- f | f | | / ened ers, ranging from scientist-engineers down to the tech- nicians who replenish the Coke machines. Here we must distinguish between what should be and what is and, bar- ring revolutionary change, will continue to be. As Ameri- | can society is constituted, no end of things that should be done are not done, or are done badly, while some activi- | ties, such as sending a deputation to Mars, receive a | higher priority than they deserve by humanistic stand- ie | ards. Nevertheless trivial, senseless or even harmful ac- oe THE NATION/September 25, 1967 tivities enable employment to keep up more or less with disemployment, one of the perennial hazards of our kind of technological culture. Space is doing its part in keep- ing the economy from sliding back into the 1930s; there- fore space is good—and isn’t it better, actually, than many occupations that we tolerate? . The following are more or less educated guesses on future space development. First, men will almost cer- tainly land on the moon and return to earth, though the odds against completing the round trip will be against the early arrivals. Eventually, small colonies of astrono- mers and other specialists may serve limited tours of duty. From such societies we might get new knowledge and insights. This assumes that if combat occurs in Cis- lunar space it will not spread to the moon, or that there will be intervals of peaceful or even cooperative explora- tion. Large-scale colonization of the moon is not taken seri- ously even by space enthusiasts. Any place lacking an oxygen-bearing atmosphere is dubious on that ground alone for long-term residence. The antarctic regions, which do have oxygen and where thermal conditions are less severe (except for wind) than on the moon, and which are easily reached by aircraft, are still practically unin- habited. I am far from certain that men will reach Mars and Venus, but the chances are fifty-fifty, or better, if we are willing to pay the price—about $100 billion for Mars alone. | have a more decided opinion about the outer plan-. ets. It is conceivable that men will not desire to go beyond the terrestrial planets even if development of nuclear pro- pulsion should make such journeys feasible. The orbit of Jupiter, the nearest of the outer planets, is at a mean distance of about five astronomical units, i.e., about five times as far from the sun as the earth, or about 480 mil- lion miles as compared with 93 million. Because of its enormous mass (for a planet, but still less than a thou- sandth of the mass of the sun) and the resulting gravi- tational characteristics, a landing on Jupiter’s surface (as- suming that it has a solid surface) would be suicidal, aside from the time required to get there. Its satellites would seem more feasible for landing purposes, but it is hard to see why exploration should not be carried out by un- manned probes. One thing is certain: it would be cheaper, though by no means inexpensive. The cost of an un- manned probe to Mars, even, is at least $2.3 billion. If I could return to earth in 2067 for a review of these prognostications, I would no doubt be amazed by many technological marvels unconceived by the most farsighted engineers of today. If I were told that men had not been able to reach the moon I would be astonished—and mor- tified. But if I learned that Mars had been reached, but that it had proved impractical or not worth while to go farther, I would not be much surprised. Although Mars (hence also Venus) may be feasible objectives, this by no means is to say that the jump beyond the moon is a natural progression. One of the impres- sions that came out of the bioastronautics conference (the sixth of a valuable NASA-Virginia Polytechnic Institute series on various aspects of space flight) is that our prepa- ae et Seas ae ee ee, Sg eee 2 ie eS ee i & Ma oh ration for the Mars mission is in a very early and primi- tive stage, and the difficulties that can be perceived, not to speak of the unexpected, make those of Apollo seem slight by comparison. One set of difficulties centers about man himself; hence the pertinence of bioastronautics to missions of Mars mag- nitude. Such projects are known as 1,000-day missions. By some configurations it can be done in half that time, but the propulsive energy requirements are more within reason with the longer duration, and the re-entry speed less appalling. All these long-duration missions, however, present problems that will take a while to solve, if indeed they prove to be soluble. By way of example, toxicologists are not sanguine about man’s ability to withstand the build-up of initially minute quantities of contaminants in the spacecraft atmosphere. These microbiological poisons are virtually undetectable, but cumulatively they may have deleterious effects. The only way of finding out is ground-based simulation for periods as long as the actual mission. And unlike a long- duration earth-orbiting flight, which can be terminated if an astronaut is taken sick, serious illness on a 1,000- day mission would as likely as not be fatal to the astro- naut involved and perhaps to his companions. Dr. A. A. Thomas, director of the toxic hazards divi- sion of the biomedical laboratory at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, reported that ninety-seven trace contaminants were identified in the course of a_ twenty-seven-day manned experiment in a space cabin simulator. Twenty- one of these were attributed to the crew, the rest came from the materials in the cabin. Carbon monoxide in- creased from | milligram to as much as 25 milligrams per cubic meter, and this was with everything working normally. Carbon monoxide production in even a small fire, or contaminants released in large volume from some otherwise minor malfunctioning of equipment, could be lethal. Sickness which has only nuisance significance on earth could be extremely dangerous in space: for instance, vomiting, with release of particulate matter, or diarrhea, could produce emergency conditions. Nor, just because men are known to thrive in an atmosphere of pure oxy- gen and under weightless conditions for periods of a week or two, is it safe to assume that there would be no harmful effects over periods of months or years. Equally unknown is the effect of long confinement in a closed environment on the body’s immunological system. Merely to touch on another problem: the daily intake requirement per astronaut is estimated at 15 pounds a day for food, oxygen and water. This amounts to 2.7 tons annually per man. Techniques for regeneration of water and oxygen are well advanced, but the food problem for missions of long duration is not a slight one. Closed-cycle food systems, such as obtaining proteins from bacteria acting on body wastes, or cultivation of algae, have many unresolved questions. NASA’s problems are technical and budgetary. Although ruthless cuts in the 1968 budget are unlikely, the debate in Congress had ominous overtones. One member of the Senate space committee was quoted as saying: “We didn’t want to put NASA out of business, 272 even more.” The “cannibals” wanted an across-the-board — cut of $1 billion, and next time around they may get it. — Aside from Apollo, which is sure of respectful treat- ment, military and earth-oriented applications will be in earth orbit and these are most likely to emerge at the head of the breadline. Most members of Congress have little use for projects that do not promise immediate pork-barrel benefits, or that cannot be connected with wars in progress or in prospect, or that will not show the United States to advantage, militarily or technologi- cally, vis-a-vis a rival. Another difficulty is that while a number of Congressmen have developed considerable expertise On space programs, most members have little idea of what it is all about, especially in relation to sci- entific aspects. Consequently, even assuming the best of intentions, NASA’s most valuable contributions are most likely to be manhandled—unless the scientific community can convince-the Congress of the folly of such an order of priority. Space has another technological-political aspect that has had little attention but which may play a major role in the future. Our current social pathology is that of a country which is dissipating its resources of materials, machinery and skilled manpower in a war the end of which is not in sight, and in preparation for bigger wars to come, specifically the one against Red China. No na- tion has ever had the capability to deploy military man- power on anything approaching the present American scale; with supreme irony, that power, which might have a stabilizing influence, is being used in precisely the way the founding fathers repudiated—America going abroad in search of monsters to destroy. Simultaneously, America is going out into space, and while this venture has its military aspect, it is a continuation of man’s exploration of the universe and carries with it neither the moral nor the military peril of our invasion of Southeast Asia, which even many “hawks” now feel was ill advised at its in- ception. Both that war and the journey into space impair our ability to find solutions for the deterioration of Ameri- can cities, and specifically for the problem of Negro dis- affection, but in very different degree. The space agency’s current budget is at most one-sixth of the billions being squandered annually in Vietnam, and only about one- fifteenth of the total $70 billion defense budget—less when the final returns on Vietnam are in and $70 billion mounts to $75 billion or $80 billion — assuming the Chinese stay out. Moreover, if NASA were severely cut there is little prospect that its loss would be a gain for the slums. It. is much more likely that the Air Force would pick up the pieces. On this and the grounds pre- viously cited, it seems that cuts in NASA’s funding should be opposed, even by those who otherwise would not re- gard a slowing down of space activity as a national calam- ity. Suppose, however, that the war were to end. Then, and only then, could national attention, national under- standing and national will be focused on the most press- ing internal problems. In the meantime NASA and its THE NATION/September 25, 1967 i - he Gah ‘ any yhere, everywhere, except for the war raging in South- » east Asia. , These budgetary slashes, moderate at present but dras- tic in prospect, bring into the realm of practical politics the question The Nation raised editorially (“Vietnam vs. Space,” May 23, 1966) namely, whether the long- and medium-term interests of space administrators and work- ers are not opposed to the interests of those employed in materiel manufacture (munitions, military aircraft, tanks, artillery, etc.). The potential conflict is obscured by the fact that in aerospace, particularly, these essentially dis- parate activities are carried on by divisions of the same corporations. But, once space begins to suffer from Viet- nam, or from some future extension of this type of war- fare, the conflict which exists but is not yet articulated may come to expression. _ The Nation editorial emphasized that such a clash would involve far more than favored places at the public trough: “aside from jobs, careers and incomes, the space people have created a vast complex of new technologies to which they are passionately devoted . . . [they] foresee a great future for themselves and their children—pro- vided their claim on a cut of the national resources is recognized and the holocaust that would end it all can be avoided. The Vietnamese War forecloses that claim, invites the holocaust, and is a disgrace to a nation with the professed ideals of the U.S... .” What is this—wishful thinking, or prophecy? It could be the former now and the latter later, since it applies not only to Vietnam and the 1968 budget; besides, in the meantime, civil disorder has become a potent factor and is taking on an ever more menacing character. The policy of revolutionary violence of the black power move- ment, however self-defeating it may be for the moment, NEW POLITICS AT RICHARD BLUMENTHAL Mr. Blumenthal has been editorial chairman of The Harvard Crimson and a reporter for The Washington Post. Chicago “Pinch me, Ernest,” said the white-haired little lady from Wisconsin Citizens for Peace, as she stared about her in bewilderment. “I can’t believe its all real.” Hanging above her from the gilded balconies of the Palmer House Grand Ballroom, the banners of the New Politics Convention proclaimed “A NEW POLITICS IN 1968 AND BEYOND’ — “PULL LIBERATION OF THE BLACKS” — “DON’T MOURN, OKGANIZE.” Under the twinkling chandeliers, speakers marched across the richly carpeted floor to denounce the materialistic corruption of liberalism and demand a radi- cal, revolutionary, irreversible change in the decision- making process of society. Television lights cut through the heavy haze that filled the high-ceilinged room, forcing the radicals to squint or wear sun glasses as they railed THE NATION/September 25, 1967 is not to be dismissed from a long-term international perspective. These revolutionists base their plans on the undeniable fact that most of the world’s population is desperately poor, as is the American Negro “under class.” Both groups are teased and tormented by their exposure through the news media to American middle-class afflu- ence. The result may be a succession of Vietnams, par- alleled by Negro guerrilla warfare and terrorism in the United States. These not implausible upheavals may fall short of nuclear war and genocide, but they could bring in their train concentration camps and copious bloodshed, with an explosive generation of war psychoses in the United States, which so far has been in the fortunate position of fighting its modern wars on foreign soil. In such ex- tremity the armed services will get everything they want if, indeed, they do not take over the direction of the government under the assumed conditions. But what will space get—nonmilitary space or anything else that is halfway humane, useful, civilized? To sum up NASA’s prospects beyond the moon land- ing: the technical problems for manned deep space flight are formidable, the solutions will be expensive, the im- mediate returns are becoming less attractive in Congres- sional eyes. An ominous domestic and foreign situation for which no solution is in sight is developing and, by every indication, will be reflected in pressure on NASA’s budgets and the business fortunes of space contractors. The handwriting is on the wall. But—as yet—there is nothing fated or irreversible about the prospect. And the space people are in a favorable position in one im- portant respect—in a relative sense, what is good for them is good for the country too, and in serving their own in- terests they can be helping to control the malign forces that threaten us all. CHICAGO against the establishment press. It was so bizarre—so much a melange of McLuhanesque gimmicks, visual shocks and identity crises —- that one hard-nosed newspaper man summed it up as a “pop convention.” As if to pinch himself, Simon Casady, co-chairman of the National Conference of New Politics, told reporters: “The atmos- phere has got a touch of absurdity about it, I admit, but the politics is real politics.” Whether new politics or real politics, the affair was a great deal more significant than a mere happening. [See editorial, “No Hope?” p. 261.] This band of disparate liberals, peaceniks, radical community organizers, mili- tant and moderate blacks, had come to Chicago to agree on a strategy—perhaps even a set of candidates—to de- feat President Johnson and end the war in Vietnam. They soon became preoccupied with the psychological mechan- ics of keeping one another in one room and one move- ment. Their announced goal was to redistribute power in society, but they spoke almost entirely about the dis- 273 ie ’ eli maT wt SRS A bet PIP RP Se — Sine Al teat aes ete oe fetes es oe Se Lt psc pe Saad Sagat EE ee $-. 1 aT ena a AO i 5 Ae PEL RO 7 = re mgt tribution of power within their own organization. And in the process of testing themselves—building what they eventually called ‘an alliance” between whites and blacks —they transformed their convention into a kind of 20th- century morality play on race relations. It was a play that did not challenge so much as it caricatured the one they attributed to the establishment. The moving force in the drama was the black caucus —meeting continuously in secrecy, with shaven-headed bodyguards posted at the doors, shifting from one build- ing and one room to another, staring fiercely at whites as they walked past them in the hallways, and taunting them as they solicited contributions for “our black broth- ers in the jails.” Leaders of the convention knew only vaguely how many there were (estimates ranged from 200 to 600, though reporters never counted more than 180 entering a meeting room); the whites dealt with Carlos Russell, chosen by the blacks as leader through “African consensus” (none of the Negroes could remem- ber ever having voted), a tall, articulate former anti-pov- erty worker from Brooklyn, whose charismatic speeches were flavored with the accent of his West Indian birth- place. Russell’s band included African nationalists attired in African shirts and faletas; Northern ghetto militants wearing blue jeans and rimless tinted glasses, represent- atives from Rev. Martin Luther King’s Southern Chris- tian Leadership Conference in high-priced suits and ties, women from the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party in simple cotton dresses and young men from the Stu- dent Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in “black- power” T-shirts. This caucus, playing on a cauldron of guilt, suppressed self-contempt, hatred and physical fear, brought the con- vention to its knees with two tests of sincerity—called “tests of the social barometer.” In the first, presented during the opening plenary session, they demanded that the whites endorse—without amendment—thirteen prin- ciples in a black power resolution, including a condemna- tion of the “imperialist Zionist war” in the Middle East and all the statements of the Newark Black Power Con- ference. Then, after a taunting kick at participatory de- mocracy by one of their leaders, James Forman of SNCC, they persuaded the convention to give them 50 per cent of the vote, a controlling share. Rarely did the blacks themselves speak for these demands; they preferred to leave the argument to white radicals and wait in the wings with their silent threat to withdraw. Not until the final session, in fact, did they all take their seats, then filing into the ballroom silently and glowering en masse. Though often bitterly divided among themselves, they re- fused to discuss or even reveal their differences to the rest of the convention. Under pressure from the caucus, the 2,100 dele- gates debated the thirteen-principle black power reso- lution without once discussing the merits of the Newark pronouncements—few even knew what they were—or of the Isracli-Arab issue. They concentrated instead on their own responsibility for centuries of oppression, the failure of civil rights legislation, the hypocrisy of their fa- thers, brothers, etc. The ultimatum-threat would measure 274 their personal commitment: “it is only fair of them, said Mike Eisenscher of the Milwaukee organizing com- mittee, “to ask of us that we put up or shut up.” “I don’t agree with any of it,’ said a Maryland woman who asked not to be identified, “I just think we have to make some gesture.” “I don’t think what it says is im- portant,” said Donna Allen of the Washington Mobili- zation to End the War in Vietnam, as she raised her delegate card in favor of the principles. “If we accept them, we’ve got to accept this.” Eric Mann, a Newark community organizer who has spent several years work- ing in the ghetto, warned that they were “browbeating” themselves into a “patronizing, condescending and ma- nipulating view of blacks.” But the delegates voted by a 3 to 1 margin to approve the principles and give the blacks “sole power” to amend them. If this was in fact a black power resolution, only blacks should have the right to say what would be in it. The dominating argument for the second test was less the guilt of the whites than their simple weakness and incompetence. The case for the SO per cent demand was couched in terms of “an equal voice” for the Negro mi- nority—an example for the rest of the world to follow. But the proposal would plainly give the blacks much more than an equal voice, since they would be voting as a bloc against the splintered whites. Such control was right, one speaker after another argued, because the white radicals had no power base or constituency outside the conven- tion, whereas the blacks could summon up their 17 mil- lion “brothers” in the ghettos (counting out 3 million as Negroes, or Toms’). The blacks were the movement. “We are just a little tail,” said Bertram Garskoff of the Ann Arbor Citizens for Peace, “on the end of a very powerful black panther. And I want to be on that tail— if they'll let me.” Once they surrendered power, Garskoff said, the whites must “trust the blacks the way you trust children. . . . Now I don’t mean to say it like that be- cause these are very sophisticated people and they’ve taught the whites in here a hell of a lot.” This challenge to power and manhood produced fright- ened yelps from many of the New Politics leaders. “One thousand liberals are trying to become good radicals and they think they can do it by castrating themselves,” charged Arthur. Waskow, a member of the steering com- mittee. “The black caucus came in and gave us a set of demands which they intended to act as a social barome- ter of where the whites stand,” said Peter Weiss, a mem- ber of the executive board. “And we answered: ‘We haven’t got the imagination to figure it out—we stand wherever you say.’ That is not a relationship out of which anything healthy can come.” When the whites passed this final test—voting again 3 to | to give the blacks control—the blacks rewarded them with ostentatious kindness. The sound and fury of their accusations and demands gave way to the hushed voice of young Russell, speaking with his black brothers behind him in a press conference: “This is the first time in my life that blacks have worked with whites on an equal basis.” The resonant bongo drums and black power chants and phonograph recordings of civil rights demon- strations—which had echoed through the convention hall THE NATION/September 25, 1967 ar \ ~ for four days—were suddenly silenced. The blacks seemed to remove their fearsome bearded masks of hatred—smil- _ ing down on the whites, and not just through them. “We are for togetherness,” said Russell. Nevertheless, this business of “building trust,” as it was called, left the white delegates curiously drained and dispirited—with little time or energy for the subject origi- nally closest to most of their hearts: formulating a stra- tegy for 1968 and “beyond.” After a comparatively short debate, and several backstage compromises, the delegates approved a strategy resolution that ruled out a nation-wide Presidential peace ticket or party but encouraged groups in individual states to mount their own candidates and campaigns if they could muster sufficient financial and popular support. The strategy provided for a nominating convention to coordinate campaigns in different states, but it clearly emphasized sustained local organizing, aimed at a local redistribution of power, and convention lead- ers expected peace’ tickets in only about six or seven states. In effect, the strategy focused on the “beyond,” rather than on 1968. It was thus a clear victory for the white community organizers who feared that a national campaign would detract from their efforts to build a revo- lutionary movement at the grass-roots level, “from the bottom up.” It bitterly disappointed many of the dele- gates from moderate peace groups,. who believed that with black support a nation-wide peace ticket might hold a sort of balance between the major parties in a 1968. The blacks, moreover, for all their talk of alliance, refused to drop their anti-Israel principle from the black power resolution. This measure, many of the peace dele- gates felt, would be fatal to any candidate associated with the New Politics group. Rev. Martin Luther King him- self sent a secret last-minute appeal through his aide, Jose Williams. Dr. Benjamin Spock, prominently men- tioned as a King running mate, also expressed hope that the blacks might decide to significantly modify the state- ment. But the black caucus recommended only that the principle be changed to condemn the Israeli Government, instead of “imperialist Zionist war.” Some of the New Politics organization’s largest contributors, including Mar- tin Peretz and his wife, indicated that they were through with the group. Many of the blacks were equally uneasy—even un- happy—in the coalition produced by these tumultu- ous doings. They were not only contemptuous of the whites for the ease with which they capitulated but offended by what they regarded as a more subtle and pernicious form of paternalism. “I don’t think they un- derstood these demands at all,” said Roy Ennis, leader of the Harlem Congress of Racial Equality. “This patroniz- ing thing is just a new trick of keeping the natives happy. I think they feel, many of them, that they can co-opt or capture us—it’s the same old desire of whites to use blacks.” “Its just self-flagellation,” remarked a national leader privately. Many wondered why they had chosen to ally with a white group that lacked both financial power and popular following. “I don’t make alliances with someone weaker,” said Ennis, “they would have to use our power base.” THE NATION/September 25, 1967 The black leaders had insisted, after all, that Negroes would no longer ally with whites out of love or brother- hood — only out of self-interest, and only when they were ready. “No one who has not suffered as we have,” James Forman had told them, “has the right to dictate the forms of our struggle.” “I don’t believe black people are in a position to coalesce with anybody at this time and age,” Floyd McKissick, national CORE leader, had said. “We have to build our own position.” And Mc- Kissick had insisted: “No longer can black people be a plank in somebody else’s platform.” If the blacks com- manded the crucial sources of power in the ghetto— through electoral politics, as well as uprisings — why should they tie the white radicals around their necks? Lost somewhere in the flush of victory were self-interest and self-determination. And who were these radicals they had gained as allies? Were they strong, self-confident determined work~ ers? No, admitted Paul Booth, an executive board mem- ber and long-time community organizer. “Most of them are just liberals trying to show they’re different from their parents, or the people back home.” Some in the group, like Booth, Todd Gitlin, Mike James, John Maher, Mann and others, were dedicated radicals, who have worked in the ghetto, organizing the poor to gain power against the establishment. But the vast majority were more like Peggy Brennan, a 42-year-old Nassau County mother of three, who got involved in politics seven years ago and is now running for county clerk on the United for Peace ticket. Her revolutionary program, she says, has no name: “When I married my husband seventeen years ago, I didn’t have to give it a name or describe it. He knew my needs and I knew his—call it life.” Or Robert Kealy, of Oconomowoc, Wis., who retired as a government attorney two years ago at the age of 49 to begin studying for a degree in comparative literature at the University of Wisconsin. “I always thought of myself as a liberal’ says Kealy, a small, balding man. “I voted for the [black power] resolution because the blacks had a right to formulate their own position and not have it 275 om se “it hy WI formulated by someone else.” Or Frank Parker, a 26- year-old government attorney who graduated from Ober- lin, Oxford University and Harvard Law School and who works part time for Concerned Citizens for Peace in Wash- ington, D.C. “Don’t get hung up on this word radical,” he says, “it’s what you do that counts.” Few of the committed community organizers had a developed or concrete program to offer the blacks. “Com- munity organizing has become as American as cherry pie,” Todd Gitlin told a Vietnam Summer caucus, “it’s only a method; we need to give it some political con- tent.” The radical ideology, Booth admitted, was at best one of “bits and pieces.” For all the heated and tedious discussions within the radical caucus, they were no more sure of that political content at the end than when they arrived. The attempt to wring an alliance out of tests of sin- cerity and faith, divorced from tangible issues or inter- ests, thus only increased distrust and doubt. By forcing the whites to take this kind of personal, soul-searching test, the conference in effect compelled them to gloss over important differences if not to falsify their real feel- ings on some of the issues. What the whites offered the blacks was contempt for the white middle class—spring- ing from self-contempt—that affirmed something about the power of being black. But that self-contempt, as Rob- ert Scheer, managing editor of Ramparts warned, would cut the whites off from their potential constituency—‘our own parents, sisters, the kids on the block, the guys who hold down normal jobs.” Until the radicals could “reach normal America,” he said, “we're not going to develop a base and we're going to be useless.” The whole affair might be dismissed as a work of the theatre of the absurd—if it did not bear so striking a resemblance to what delegates to the National Student Association’s Congress did only a few weeks before. This group of nice middle-class white liberals (they had no aversion to being placed-in that category), acceded to demands from their own black caucus that they endorse a black power resolution without amendment. The reso- lution called for liberation of the blacks “by any means necessary ’—a phrase which opponents argued would con- done violence and which supporters preferred to leave ambiguous. But the issue for the blacks was not so much the content of the resolution as it was the test of faith. The whites first turned down the phrase, but reversed themselves after the blacks threatened to walk out. In both instances, the blacks argued that whites should not be allowed to amend the resolutions because they would be altering a document written by blacks to “de- fine themselves.” “This is a statement of black power,” argued Fred Patten, a student at California State College in Los Angeles attending the NSA congress. “They have been defining us for 300 years. If we allow them to change this, we allow them to define us again—just the way they will call us Negro instead of black.” Neither whites nor blacks at these conventions realized that if these resolutions were in fact self-definitions, it would be meaningless, even dishonest, for whites to try to approve them and take them as their own. Whites, in effect, would 276 l y tions to express themselves, they would at best be patt ting the blacks on the head for a job well done, or co-opting them—both of which run directly counter to the spirit of the resolution. The delegates at the New Politics convention thus — adopted one of the aspects of the old politics to which they objected most strongly: the tendency of politicians to substitute vague statements of solidarity and love for coalitions for action based on real interests. In the old politics, at least, the statements were accepted as mean- ingless, but the honesty of the New Politics requires that they be taken literally. The New Politics delegates tried to bring more human warmth into political contention— “Make love more possible,” as Carl Oglesby of Students for a Democratic Society would say—and at the same time make politics more real. But they shifted the focus of their strategy for a short-term immediate issue on which they were all united (ending the war in Vietnam) to a longer-range tactic on which their real interests dif- fered very sharply (local organizing). This tactic was only a method of politicking—bereft of goals, program or interests that would give it political meaning. To paper over their differences and furnish some basis for unity, the convention Jeaders then had to turn to tests that were almost entirely emotional—centered on “the spirit of resolution,” as Garskoff put it, rather than “the princi- _ple”’—-and equally unrelated to anybody’s real interests. They appealed to “‘personal commitment,” “true feeling” and “sincerity.” Through their New Politics they attempted to apply on a mass level relationships of love and trust which they knew deep down could only be meaningful on an individual level. ‘The New Politics radicals feared being taken on their own terms—real interests—because they recognized very early what Roy Ennis later pointed out: “Why should I negotiate with the whites here? They’ve got nothing to deliver. I'd rather bargain with the power structure.” Their convention demonstrated that a New Politics based on abstract tests of inner motive may be even more corrupt- ing than the old politics—and ludicrous without power. x LETTERS (Continued from page 258) view, from the middle of the heap, was different from Mr. Chancellor's from the top, but since most of the policy disputes never reach the director’s desk, his view from the top was not necessarily better than mine... . VOA was, in many ways, a good place to work, one of the reasons being the courtesy and consideration of Mr. Chancellor and his colleagues at all levels. But there comes a time when some decide, for whatever reason, that it is time to leave. Some, like Mr. Chancellor, make that deci- sion within a couple of years: others of us, often to our regret, take longer. But since Mr. Chancellor and I, from our different viewpoints of status and philosophy, both have the best interests of VOA in mind, perhaps this airing of our differences is useful. Finally, | prefer the second of the two definitions my dictionary gives me for “fie”: humorous pretence of being shocked. Richard J. Walton THE NATION/September 25, 1967 ~ ROBERT SKLAR _ Mr. Sklar is the author of F. Scott Fitz- gerald: The Last Laocoon (Oxford). He teaches at the University of Michigan. _ We speak of writers as emerging, as if _ in our mind’s eye the literary world were a stage and apprentice writers _ waited in the wings, or a sea where writers surface like submarines, or a ' world into which they are born from | the womb of the muse. The stage, the surface sea, the world, belong to criti- cism and literary history; the wings, the depths, and the womb to sociology and the history of taste. Writers, in a dif- ferent metaphor, make up an iceberg, with only a thin sharp edge showing in the open air, visible to the critics and the public unwilling to dive. But at the present moment no metaphor seems quite appropriate for the generation of American writers under 30. From this generation so far only one fiction writ- er, Thomas Pynchon, has emerged above the surface: and few could guess how vast or sturdy the iceberg is beneath him. This fact clashes so strongly both with historical precedent and with the contemporary experience of other art forms that it cannot help but illuminate the status and prospects of American fiction today. From. the 1890s on, every young American generation—until the present one—found its voice and _ proclaimed its special vision through the art of fic- tion. Of breakthroughs and new starts the sixties have seen many—but they have come from writers already past the age of 30, like Joseph Heller, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., and John Barth. The children of the Great Depression have produced, astonishingly, almost no visi- ble literature, nor have their younger brothers and sisters born during the Second World War. Graduate fellow- ships may have stolen the energies of young writers, the hippie ethic may have immobilized them, or activism pulled them out into a different world. Perhaps they may come back from these diver- sions, like Conrads from the sea, to write mature and worldly novels. The fact remains that young people read fiction but, on the whole, they do not write it. They do write poetry. They write songs and sing them. They paint, they sculpt, they play instruments, make films, dance, design happenings. Young people have made a considerable con- tribution, here and there a major contri- ‘THE NATION/Septeniber 25, 1967 bution, to all the arts except the art of fiction. If fiction has not completely lost its relevance as an art form to creative young people, then it languishes in a period of biding time; since fiction is tied more closely to events and ideas than other arts, perhaps it stands in a fallow period, assimilating new config- urations, as happened in the mid-19th century after Darwin and the early 20th after Freud. In this perspective, Thomas Pynchon is far more than, dutifully rec- ognized, the only known and therefore leading writer of the wunder-30s; for more than any other contemporary American novelist he has succeeded, in two interesting, intelligent and serious novels,’ in absorbing and transforming new scientific and philosophical perspec- tives within his art. Pynchon was born in 1937 and at- tended Cornell University, where as an undergraduate he published his first story, ‘Mortality and Mercy in Vienna,” in Epoch. Soon after leaving Cornell he published three short stories—‘Under the Rose,” in Noble Savage #3; “En- tropy,” in The Kenyon Review, and “Low-lands” in New World Writing #16 —which earned him an immediate rep- utation among the narrow but intense circle of short-story readers. His novel V. won the Faulkner prize as the best first novel of its year, 1963. His second novel, The Crying of Lot 49, published last year and received with far less warmth from reviewers and readers of fiction, won as compensation an award given annually to a meritorious novel that criticism and commerce have unjustly slighted. Besides the novels he has published in the past five years only one story, “The In this and subsequent issues, a group of mainly younger critics will attempt to define and evaluate the form and direction being taken by contemporary American fiction. Our critics will include Charles Thomas Samuels discussing Nor- man Mailer; Stephen Koch on Susan Sontag; Shaun O’Connell on the fictional side of William Styron’s new novel (based on the life of Nat Turner), and Herbert Aptheker on the historical side; and Leonard Kriegel on the effec- tiveness of current Vietnam war novels, among others. Mr. Sklar’s essay on Thomas Pynchon is the first in the series. A Secret Integration,” in The Saturday Evening Post, and a magazine essay on Los Angeles in The New York Times Magazine. The critical point in Pyn- chon’s career so far lies in the radical shift in literary focus he undertook to make from V. to The Crying of Lot 49. To say that the second novel is a better and more important novel than the first is not simply a way of scoring an easy victory over dull reviewers or doggedly insisting on a principle of growth. To grasp the nature of Pynchon’s shift, for its artistic and intellectual value, and as a liberating gesture in its own right, is to take the measure of his wider sig- nificance for. contemporary American fiction. As a liberating gesture, Pynchon’s shift from V. to The Crying of Lot 49 broke him free from the constricting limitations of belonging to a “school” and writing in a genre. One reason the second novel proved disappointing to some admirers of the first, in fact, was its failure to fulfill the stereotyped ex- pectations they had held for him. Yet even if V. wears a “black-humor” label, and stands as one of the most intricate and elaborate novels in that genre, it accomplishes a good deal more than that. One who rereads V. in the light of The Crying of Lot 49 may come to feel that V. is itself a liberating gesture, a gesture of liberation from nearly all the styles and forms of fiction that have preceded it. As Catch-22 may be the first Ameri- can novel truly to have attained a Cubist form in its treatment of space and time, so V. may be the first American novel of collage, an abstract composition put together with parodies of spy novels, political novels, adventure novels, deca~ dent novels, romances, utopias and what- ever other category the ingenious mind can find. V. may be doomed to the fate that befell Finnegans Wake, as Edmund Wilson described it, to go directly from the pen of the author into the hands of the schoolmasters. This is not the place to begin the task of critical dissection to which V. is foreordained; but when that job is done the attentive explicator will find that one of the principal subjects of parody in V. is the “black-humor” style itself. Read in the light of The Crying of Lot 49, then, V. does not appear as a launching platform for a style or a sub- ject but rather as an isolated object or as an ending. That novel published in 277 1963 seems in 1967 not so much a con- temporary work as a historical work, a novel that reflects the moods of the late fifties in America and the style of the early sixties. Part of this feeling, if it is an accurate one, may be attributed to a stylistic trait of the novel common to many works in the “black-humor” genre, a style deliberately constructed to put a distance between the reader and the work, as if the novel were a game drawing on the reader’s mental faculties but deliberately excluding his emotions. The natural reaction to this sort of reading experience is to feel admiration for the author, for his ingenuity or his imagination or his nihilism or his guts, and feel almost nothing for the novel itself. In contrast the reader, for exam- ple, of The Sound and the Fury invests his primary feelings into the matter of the work itself, and responds to the skill of the author only secondarily, as a de- liberated afterthought. V. is like a rid- dle that once correctly answered never taxes the mind again; The Crying of Lot 49 is founded in an emotion of mystery, an emotion which remains, inviolate and mysterious, even when the outward mys- tery is solved. V. is a complex novel that gets simpler with each rereading, The Crying of Lot 49 a simple novel that reread grows more complex. V. is chiefly memorable for what its earlier admirers called its vast ware- houses of information, its immense knowledgeability, its. prodigies of re- search. If one function of the novel, as Mary McCarthy once suggested, has been to provide facts, to let the reader know how to catch a whale or cut a field of hay, Pynchon’s V. may rank as one of the most encyclopedic founts of facts in the history of the novel. In V. the reader may find out how to perform a nose operation; how the Germans wiped out the native population of South West Africa before the First World War: how British espionage agents operated in the Middle East since the time of Kitchener; a good part of the history of Malta in this century, and much more. How much one may care to rely on Pynchon’s facts is another matter; this reader, at least, has not yet taken the trouble to verify Pynchon’s account of Wilhelmian Germany’s African poli- cies or of Maltese political life; and given Pynchon’s propensity to parody the fictional styles which have conveyed this sort of subject in the past, it might be wise not to make any bets on the basis of what one reads in V. In any case the truth of Pynchon’s details, or even their significance, is not a matter that deeply engages the reader’s concern. Form and style in The Crying of Lot 49 combine to give a far greater reso- nance to facts, but a much more striking comparison can be made between Pynchon’s very good short story, “Under 278 { the Rose,” and the chapter of V. into which that story later was transformed. “Under the Rose” is a poignant story of a few days in the life of a British spy in the Middle East, ending with his death. The story is far from simple, but it is tightly controlled, and the effect is tragicomic, an exceptionally fine fusion of emotional depth and historical breadth; more than anything else Pyn- chon has written, “Under the Rose” justifies the claims of some critics who link him to the tradition of Nathanael West. In the novel the focus is frag- mented among eight different narrative voices, and the culmination of the action is deliberately shrouded in mystery. Pynchon obviously was reshaping the material to fit the larger thematic pur- poses of the novel, but undeniably the narrative form diffuses the reader’s atten- tion and ultimately his concern for the characters and their fate. Nevertheless, Pynchon has cre- ated in V. an aura of formidable intel- lectual competence, and nowhere more significantly than in his mastery of scien- tific and technical subjects, particularly physics and electronic technology. It may be that no American novelist be- fore Pynchon—science-fiction writers not excepted—has brought so thorough and so prepared a scientific intelligence to bear on modern life, and this capacity to include in the novel the pervasive scientific and technological aspects of our day-to-day lives rather than to neglect them through ignorance, may make V. a landmark of the novel’in yet another sense. It is true, though, that Pynchon dis- sipates this competence by expending it on a theme beloved of science-fiction writers and their cousins among black humorists, the battle between men and machines, between the power of anima- tion and the power of the inanimate. Per- haps the struggle of humans against the inanimate which pervades V. is one more aspect of Pynchon’s satire, almost a self-parody of a black-humor thematic stock in trade. On a different level it is an aspect of Pynchon’s even more per- vasive concern with dualisms, with worlds and anti-worlds and worlds with- in worlds. At the heart of Pynchon’s imagination lies not science and tech- nology, nor the parody and wild humor which are so much a part of his style but a sense of mystery, a vision of fan- tasy, that expresses itself in dualisms, in images of surface and depth, of mir- rors, of secret societies and hidden worlds. The prime mystery of V., of course, is the mystery of V. herself, as a woman in many guises—Victoria Wren, Hedwig Vogelsang, Veronica Manganese, a mys- terious woman in Paris, the Bad Priest (i Sh ane + he 5 % eo ‘9G killed in Malta—as a bald cipher that is charged with greater resonance with every repetition, until the eye responds to every capital letter V as if it were inked in red: Veronica the rat, Vheissu the fantasy land beyond the deserts and the mountains, Venezuela, the V-Note jazz club, Valletta, the capital of Malta, and the Vatican, Voce del Popolo, Birth of Venus, Ponte Vecchio, Via Cavour, Queen Victoria. Who is V.? The British espionage agent, Sidney Stencil, one of her lovers, in 1899 had written in his journal: “There is more behind and in- side V. than any of us had suspected. Not who, but what: what is she? God grant that I may never be called upon to write the answer, either here or in any official report.” Pynchon, however, does feel called upon to write the answer, and he raises few mysteries in V. for which he does not quite openly and obviously provide the solution. But to answer who she is in her many masks is not to answer Sid- ney Stencil’s question, what she is, and that question Pynchon leaves to his exegetes. It is true that a Freudian or a Jungian explication would serve the book quite comfortably, though Pynchon has dropped his broadest hints in the service of a historico-philosophical in- terpretation. One of the principal changes Pynchon made in revising “Under the Rose” for the novel, curiously, was rig- orously to eliminate the word “apoca- lypse” each of the many times it appear- ed in the short story. Yet he still tosses “apocalypse” around so much in V. that its face is rubbed smooth, and one can barely make out its features. The reverberations of that word, how- ever, lead the attentive reader inexor- ably toward a historical interpretation for the novel, an interpretation that may encompass a meaning for 20th-century history — history since that portentous day in “Under the Rose” when Kitche- ner and Marchand collided at Fashoda— and one that must come to terms with the revolutionary stances which Pyn- chon so noticeably adopts. All the an- swers to the puzzles of V., and all the possible interpretations of its meaning and significance will one day be given to us in the scholarly studies for which V. seems almost to have been made; one leaves them here in a half-completed form because their true completion may be found, not in an explication of V. but in Pynchon’s second novel, The Crying of Lot 49. Pynchon’s radical shift in literary focus from V. to The Crying of Lot 49 took the shape not of new themes and images but rather changes in form and tone that significantly altered the value of old themes and images. His verbal playfulness, puns and jokes are reduced in quantity rather than intensity, and THE NATION/ September 25, 1967 _ the “historical facts” _ Lot 49 for the purpose of the novel and ie serve the movement of the actual materials remain as im- lant to the second novel as to the rst, but whtic in V. the facts seemed to have been real but not necessarily true, Pynchon quite obviously invented in The Crying of | thereby made them more plausible, ar- __ planations.. the form of the novel stinately _ sense of mystery remained in V. was _ tistically more true. The form of V., _ moreover, exaggerated the sense of mys- _ tery and the aura of an exotic unknown, _ though Pynchon too often broke in and disengaged the mystery by providing ex- In The Crying of Lot 49, centers on the normal and the everyday: strange events are explained earnestly and_ straight- forwardly, yet the aura of mystery ob- grows. And finally, whatever focused and contained by the past, where a in The Crying of Lot 49 the feeling of mystery that will not down comes in- exorably to rest in the present and the future. The Crying of Lot 49 is the story of how Mrs. Oedipa Maas discovers a world within her world, an anti-world, an adversary world—or invents one in her imagination. She has been named co-executor for the estate of a Califor- nia financier named Pierce Inverarity, with whom, before her marriage, she had had a brief affair. In Mexico City with Pierce she had seen a_ painting that had made her cry: a painting of frail girls held prisoner in a circular tower, that made her recognize that she too was imprisoned in a tower, “that what really keeps her where she is is magic, anonymous and malignant, visited on her from outside and for no reason at = all.” When the novel opens Oedipa is already primed to find a new magic to deliver her from the malignant magic that has her in its spell. Driving into _ the Southern California suburb where Pierce had lived, she looks down on the neat pattern of uniform houses and thinks of a time when she looked at a printed circuit inside a transistor radio —*‘there were to both outward patterns a hieroglyphic sense of concealed mean- ing. of an intent to communicate. There’d seemed no limit to what the printed circuit could have told her (if she had tried to find out); so in her first minute of San Narcisco, a revela- tion also trembled just past the thresh- old of her understanding. Smog hung all round the horizon, the sun on the bright beige countryside was painful; she and the Chevy seemed parked at the center of an odd religious instant.” S/all I project a .werld? Ocdipa writes later in her notebook. Oecdipa comes upon her new magic—to adopt language which _ Pynchon’s reference to religion validates ¥ “THE NATION/ September 25, 1967 —in an immanent world which grad- ually becomes more and more imminent. The adversary world reveals itself to Oedipa through the symbol of a muted post horn and also by signs bearing the initials WASTE or w.a.s.t.e. These signs and symbols represent an under- ground postal system which operates par- allel to or in direct subversion (through forged stamps and cancellations) of the U.S. Post Office. Oedipa pursues the long history of this secret system through’ in- vestigations into the arcane byways of bibliography—a good part of the novel centers on the performance of a mock Jacobean revenge play, The Courier’s Tragedy, and. the tracing of its various texts and editions—and philately, giving Pynchon an opportunity to display his intellectual ingenuity in two fields he neglected to cover in V.. But the backbone of Pynchon’s intel- Jectual structure in The Crying of Lot 49 as in V. is science, and in the second novel he develops a scientific metaphor far more rich and more original than the animate-inanimate dichotomy he borrowed or parodied in V. As with V., Pynchon set down the new theme even more precisely in a preliminary short story, “Entropy,” of which, however, only the theme carried over to the novel. -In physics the term entropy applies to the second law of thermodynamics. It describes loss of energy, or the amount of energy unavailable for use in a ther- modynamic system. Henry Adams bor- rowed this idea for his essay, “The Rule of Phase Applied to History,” in which he calculated the running down of in- tellectual energy on earth — Thought would reach the limits of its possibilities, he postulated, in the year 1921. Henry Adams’ concept of entropy lies at the core of Pynchon’s story of that title, but the concept of entropy most important for The Crying of Lot 49 derives from communications and information theory, particularly as that term was discussed by the mathemati- — cian Norbert Wiener. In The Human Use of Human Beings and in Cybernet- ics, Wiener argued against the pessi- mism which the second law of thermo- dynamics had engendered in Henry Ad- ams and others. He agreed that the uni- verse’s energy would surely run down some day, but at a given moment in a given part of the system there were forces powerful enough to decrease en- tropy, to increase the amount of avail- able energy in that part. “We may well _ regard living organisms,” Wiener wrote, “such as Man himself, in this light.” In The Crying of Lot 49 Pynchon takes up not only the scientific significance of Wiener’s viewpoint but its obvious social and political significance as well. The w.a.s.t.e. system puts to use moral and human energies that the surface THE NEW HUNGARIAN QUARTERLY No. 27 AUTUMN 1967 Editor: Ivan Boldizsar Neighbours In The Danube Valley: An Active Policy of International Relations Dr. Josef Klaus Modern Forms of Cooperation Tibor Petho Hundred Years of Ausgleich Peter Hanak .... Two Secret Reports from the Hungarian Archives /LONDON, 1939 and 1941/ Eva Haraszti Critical Judgement in a Changing Climate John Willett Which Humanism? Maurice Lambilliotte School for Genius — The Bosendorfer — Afternoon Tea One-act plays by: Miklos Hubay—Ferenc Karinthy—Gabor Gorgey Utopia or Dystopia Dennis Gabor SURVEYS @ BOOKS AND AUTHORS ° ARTS e ECONOMIC LIFE THE NEW HUNGARIAN QUARTERLY 17 Rakoczi ut, Budapest VIII, Hungary Please send me a free sample copy: NAME ADDRESS system—the United States Government and the dominant American mode of life, as Pynchon makes explicit—lets go to waste. The Crying of Lot 49 is a radical po- litical novel. Where in V. and in “Under the Rose” Pynchon tossed out an idea of political apocalypse with bravado and as if to scare the liberals, in The Crying of Lot 49 he never uses the word “apoc- alypse” but rather builds a concept and a structure of revolution right into the form of the novel. Unexpectedly Oedipa runs across a Mexican anarchist she and Pierce had once argued with in Mexico. The anarchist says to her: You know what a miracle is. Not what Bakunin said. But another world’s intrusion into this one. Most of the time we coexist peacefully, but when we do touch there’s cataclysm. Like the church we hate, anarchists also believe in another world. Where revolutions break out spontaneous and _ leaderless, and the soul’s talent for consensus al- lows the masses to work together without effort, automatic as the body itself. And yet, sena, if any of it should ever really happen that perfectly, I would also have to cry miracle. An anarchist miracle. The Crying of Lot 49, too, in this sense, is an anarchist miracle, a novel which not only postulates another world but creates with the truth of art another world’s intrusion into this one. It is perhaps idle to talk of an Amer- Fe a ee Rie ae < ted . ican tradition in the novel, but one of the unmistakable virtues of The Crying of Lot 49 is its success in making new and contemporary a traditional concern of the great American novelists—the creation, through the style and form of their fiction, of a social system more true to their national ideals than the existing political and social system. The Crying of Lot 49 ends with Oedipa Maas awaiting the auctioning of the lot of postage stamps which will prove wheth- er the muted post horn symbol and the w.a.s.t.e. signs form only a web to snare her paranoia or, in truth, the communi- cation network of another world. For all his philosophical and _ scien- tific competence, for all his revolutionary political inclinations, Pynchon is above all an artist; and the ending of The Crying of Lot 49 makes clear what the Argentine Jorge Luis Borges meant when he wrote in an essay, “that imminence of a revelation that is not yet produced is, perhaps, the aesthetic reality.” One would like to say of The Crying of Lot 49 what T. S. Eliot said of The Great Gatsby, that it represents the first step forward for American fiction in some time: for if the road ahead for fiction lies in the direction Borges in his stories has pointed, toward greater philosophical and metaphysical sophistication, Pynchon surely ranks as the most intelligent, most audacious and most accomplished Amer- ican novelist writing today. Dorothy Richardson in Limbo PILGRIMAGE. By Dorothy M. Rich- ardson. Alfred A. Knopf. 2,110 pp. $30. DOROTHY RICHARDSON: An Ad- venture in Self-Discovery. By Horace Gregory. Holt, Rinehart & Winston. 114 pp. $4.95. RICHARD FREEDMAN Mr. Freedman teaches at Simmons College and the Harvard Extension. He has written for The Kenyon Review, Book Week and Saturday Review. A decade after her death, the reputation of Dorothy Richardson remains an equiv- ocal one. Frequently cited in textbooks on the novel as one of the originators and finest practitioners of the stream-of- consciousness method, Dorothy Richard- son has been bracketed with such 20th- century giants as Proust, Joyce and Vir- ginia Woolf. What she has lacked has been readers. Pilgrimage was originally published in twelve installments beginning in 1915 and reaching semi-completion in the omi- nous year 1938, when few readers had 280 { the equanimity to plow through its more than 2,000 pages. The new edition ap- pends a previously unpublished final sec- tion, “March Moonlight,” found among the author’s papers at her death. To her first readers Dorothy Richard- son must have seemed willfully eccentric and avant-garde, especially in her avoid- ance of “plot.” A half-century later she appears .doomed to occupy the limbo of the Historically Important. Today her long work reads like a hyper-inflated Edwardian Bildungsroman, the kind of novel that painfully details each faltering step in its hero’s intellectual, emotional and spiritual development. It is no ac- cident that in her Foreword, Dorothy Richardson pays tribute to Goethe’s Wil- helm Meister, the first real Bildungsro- man, and to Arnold Bennett, whose Clay- hanger is the best example of the genre in her own period. Still another Ed- wardian, H. G. Wells, encouraged her to write, had a brief affair with her, and appears as a major character, Hypo Wil- son, in the novel. Profoundly influenced, too, by Charlotte Bronté’s Villette, Doro- thy Richardson turned her eyes at least ' Where Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus has a whe NIGHTS Now the room is silent. The venom must have Spilled to the next room, HARVEY SHAPIRO ah | as much to the literary past as to the | future. | The major pleasure Pilgrimage af- |) fords now is as a period piece, both in d lon its subject matter and its technique. The |} # years 1890-1915 are richly evoked in| all the material detail for which Virginia } ma Woolf took the Edwardian novelists to me task in “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown.” — } ti As a chronicler of those years, always } ki through the myopic but piercing eyes of |} \, her heroine, Miriam Henderson, Doro- | the thy Richardson is unsurpassed. The emo- |} wy: tions of a well-brought-up girl on smok- — } ji ing her first cigarette, the suffragette | movement, radical talk in Soho cafés, English schoolgirls in Germany, all satu- | rate the novel in the flavor of the time. Hig But the great novelists with whom | Pi Dorothy Richardson is so often com- | ; pared have more going for them than this. Where Pilgrimage fails in compari- son to Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist, Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past or Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse is in the inadequacy of Miriam Henderson as the focal figure for such an inordi- nate weight of analysis of emotion. 1 i i i } in | nes I cia ide ine i wh > int is ; aut | | | | mn ; 1 no ‘“dewy wet soul,” Miriam’s is merely | mh | damp. “He If one is going to write a work about hi oneself as long as Pilgrimage, it helps to have the verbal wizardry and the sense of humor of a Joyce or a Proust. Doro- thy Richardson’s language is pedestrian, and she is totally humorless in her dogged pursuit of the “important ideas” of her time. This is a severe limitation because the ideas she considered so im- portant are now vieux jeu indeed, while, paradoxically, Proust’s dilettante dab- bling with the petite madeleine will res- onate forever. Dorothy Richardson herself mentions Proust in her Foreword as someone who, like her, was “producing an unprece- dentedly profound and opulent recon- struction of experience focused from within the mind of a single individual.” But she is chary of the term “stream of consciousness,” which was first applied to her work by a fellow novelist, May Sinclair. More accurately, Pilgrimage is an omniscient narrative with a rigorously | restricted point of view, in the manner of James, but lacking his high intelli- gence and moral sensitivity. Pilgrimage differs, too, from such stream-of-consciousness novels as Vir- ginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse in the way in which it renders material detail. We see the Lon- don of Mrs. Dalloway exclusively as it THE NATION/ September 25, 1967 — Se Di, on the consciousness of Clarissa er major figures in the book. The ‘jal settings of Pilgrimage remain independent of Miriam’s perception of them. They are externalized in a con- ventionally Edwardian way, and occupy at least as much space in the novel as ‘Miriam’s mind does. : | . Horace Gregory’s essay, beefed up to book length by the inclusion of tong, not very relevant quotations and | even less relevant digressions on Byron, | Shelley and Violet Hunt, is hardly the / magic “key to the author and achieve- | ment of Pilgrimage” that its jacket pro- | claims it to be. Having read Dorothy | Richardson’s letters (as extensive, he tells | us, as her novel!), Gregory has come to the conclusion that Pilgrimage “is closer to the art of autobiography than to fic- | tion,” and is, in fact, “an extended _ memoir.” ; Mr. Gregory then glibly refers through- | out his book to “Dorothy-Miriam” or to “Hypo-Wells.” Wells himself called f Pilgrimage “a very curious experiment ” | | | im autobiography.” Part of its curious- 4 ness must be a fictional element suffi- ciently strong to preclude so easy an | identification between author and _ hero- ine; and surely Walter Allen is correct when he says. in his brief but sensible _ introduction to the novel, that ‘there | is still a world of difference between autobiography and an autobiographical novel, and we have no more right to see Dorothy Richardson and Miriam Henderson as interchangeable and sy- | monymous than we have Joyce and Ste- _ phen Dedalus or Lawrence and Paul | Morel.” | ! i , | \ | | | f | By making precisely such an un- sophisticated—and undocumented—iden- tification his shaky major premise, Greg- ory is able to construct a narrative which takes us through the novel, keying ma- jor episodes to Dorothy Richardson’s | life. | Dorothy Richardson seems to have | been goaded into writing in the first _ place by a childhood which was quiet _ on the surface, but which seethed, in | a characteristically Victorian way, with | the usual sexual turmoil exacerbated by | a stygian, pre-Freudian ignorance. Her mother stabbed herself to death with | a kitchen knife when Dorothy was 22, | an event which filled the author with | personal guilt only partly expunged in | the last section of her novel. | Her father’s betrayal of her was even | more grotesque. A grocer by birth, a / gentleman by volition, and a failure | at both, Charles Richardson determined _ that he wanted a son after having been presented with two daughters. Undis- _mayed by reality, he “dealt with his disappointment by making her a favorite daughter and calling her ‘my Be ' | son throughout his life. Small wonder that | THE NATION/September 25, 1967 * ra et - f oJ 3 “fe e Pilgrimage teems with Lesbian episodes, and that in it, the wrongs perpetrated by men on women loom disproportion- ately large. Charles Richardson’s follies were fi- nancial as well, necessitating Doro- thy’s getting a job as quasi-governess in a German school (the material for “Pointed Roofs,” the first section of the novel), and later, as secretary to a Lon- don dentist. Gregory’s account, thin as it is, of her struggles to keep financially afloat without compromising her art, is harrowing. Encumbered with a chroni- i } cally ill and unsuccessful artist, Alan Odle, whom she married in 1917, she found herself translating mediocre French and German books, and even writing for The Dental Record. Such heroism demands our respect. One only wishes that the novel it pro- duced were as triumphant a vindication of the sacrifices endured while writing it as, in all fairness, it should have been. But Pilgrimage remains a curious mon- strosity, an eccentric offshoot in the his- tory of fiction, rather than a legitimate masterpiece. The Mind oj the Exile FERDYDURKE. By Witold Gombro- wicz. Translated by Eric Mosbacher. 272 pp. $5. PORNOGRAFIA. By Witold Gombro- wicz. Translated by Alastair Hamilton. 191 pp. $5. (Both Grove Press.) PAUL ZWEIG Mr. Zweig is a poet who teaches at Columbia University. Witold Gombrowicz is an exile. He is a man who has been left out, and who has left himself out. For almost thirty years, the circumstances of war and poli- tics have kept him from his native Po- land. And yet there is a more permanent exile embedded in his character: a root- lessness and brittle resonance marking the sensibility and style of his novels. Gombrowicz’s first novel, Ferdydurke, was published in Poland before the war, and was very well received. Soon after, however, he left Europe, fleeing not only the war which already threatened but also, it would seem, the burden of his own recognition. He settled in Argen- tina where he lived, entirely unknown, for more than twenty years. Ferdydurke, however, continued to lead an underground existence in Poland. Although it was never republished, cop- ies of the book circulated among Polish intellectuals after the war. Expressions from its rich bestiary of human behavior became part of the language. When the events of 1956 brought about a brief cultural thaw, it is not surprising that one of the first acts of the new intelli- gentsia was to re-issue Ferdydurke. Again it was a great success. Too great. For the government, soon after, withdrew the book from circulation. Its humor was too well suited to the rebellious mood of the Polish intellectuals. This time, however, the novel was no- ticed abroad, particularly in France, where Ferdydurke and a new novel, Por- nografia, were quickly translated. Gom- browicz’s popularity in France was, and remains, enormous. His play, The Mar- riage, was produced several years ago, and is still talked about. His Journal, short stories (Bakakai), new novel (Cos- mos) and other writings, have all been translated into French. The two novels issued last spring by Grove Press mark the first step in the announced publica- tion of Gombrowicz’s complete works in English. Although Ferdydurke and Pornografia BASIC QUESTIONS BASIC ANSWERS fe ETHICS IN THE SOVIET UNION TODAY, by Prof. H. L. Parsons $1 (paper) oO HUMANISTIC PHILOSOPHY IN YUGOSLAVIA & POLAND, by Prof. H. L. Parsons [] MARXISM & MODERN LITERATURE, by Prof. G. C. LeRoy $1 (paper) $1 (paper) oO CONCERNING THE CERTAINTY OF KNOWLEDGE, by Prof A. Kolman $1 (paper) [] MARXISM & DEMOCRACY: A SYMPOSIUM, edited by H. Aptheker $3.50 (cloth) oO MARXISM & ALIENATION: A SYMPOSIUM, edited by H. Aptheker $4 (cloth) American Institute For Marxist Studies 20 EAST 30TH STREET New York City 10016 (Checks may be made payable to AIMS) 281 Saba | I a gf eee Fe é 5 SITS No Nm a Ur. FALL SEMESTER In the Classroom For the convenience of teachers, who want to use THE NATION in the classroom, we offer a special classroom rate. 65c per month per student in bundle orders of ten or more deliv- ered to the same address. Desk copy is sup- plied free to the teacher. Simply fill out the coupon for immediate service. “I have come to appreciate a new dimension of the value of The Nation since 1 began to teach graduate students of communications. I find often now articles that inform me and that I wish to bring to the students’ attention be- cause of their relevance to our interests and concerns in esthetic criticism, creative writing, and in the examination of communications institutions in their political, social, cultural and economic contexts.” Prof. Robert Lewis Shayon University of Pennsylvania subscribe to NATION THE NATION, Education Department 333 Sixth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10014 Please. sendme.4). 249%)\.0. >. sar. copies per month LOL Te AN TR Le hes eran pa a TGs a months. (Minimum order ten copies per month. ) |_| Check enclosed [-] Bill me AME cenit a asete eet dunc, << ath Ce he ee bo ee ADDRESS (0) u4)e i sno hgh. Ge a, ..... Rae aaimees TUN eon ches Geet ness STATE. See ZIPNo: eee 9-25-67 iy cA . K AP Be 4 1 vr ah si ‘wa are separated by more than twe years, they form together a propriate entry into the world of Gor . browicz’s imagination. Both explore the | precarious tyranny of the “adult”: the tyranny of “man” over “boy,” of style and form over the “green” shapeless- ness, the beauty and “inferiority” of youth. This is the theme to which Gombro- wicz returns again and again, as if he needed to resolve its fascination anew each time he wrote. Man is in love with his own “inferiority.” He distrusts what he has become: a face, a moral whole, and loves only what he despises: his youth, the corrosive “unseriousness” of “the boy,” “the girl.” In the preface to Pornografia, Gombrowicz quotes a passage from his Journal: “Youth seemed to me the highest value of life .. . but this ‘value’ has a peculiarity undoubtedly invented by the devil himself: being youth it is below the level of all values.” < 2 iecanc I EEE A IE ES a IE TI 5 This is the moral dilemma upon which both novels turn. It is appropri- ate to have abstracted the “idea” from its dramatic context in the novels, for Gombrowicz, at his most intense, at his most grotesque, remains a man of ideas. The novels are immersed in a thickness of reflection, a peculiar electricity which is, at times, more convincing than the characters themselves. Neither Ferdydurke or Pornografia are wholly successful’ as novels. Gom- browicz’s gift for characterization flows out of the terrible urgency of his “idea.” As a result, there is often a curious rigidity, a lack of dramatic wholeness, especially in the first half of Pornografia. Events are grossly manipulated, their “meaning” overpow- ers them. Yet Gombrowicz’s very per- sistence becomes fascinating. The reader finds it hard to resist his perverse con- cern with youth, and its terrible “un- seriousness.” Of the two novels, Ferdydurke is un- doubtedly the more successful. Because it is frankly satirical, Gombrowicz is. freed from the need to embrace his characters too closely. The novel gen- erates a mood of grotesque humor in which the characters move flatly, almost jerkily, like surrealist marionettes. The narrator of the story is a young man in his early 30s who suddenly finds that he has been made captive of his own “immaturity.” An inspector of schools, by the name of Pimko, the essence of fat, ridiculous adulthood, has taken him in hand. He is abducted by the hypnotic Pimko, who leads him to the local high school, and inscribes him in the proper class as a boy of 17. The school is a vast model of “maturity,” a hierarchy of forms, styles, orthodoxies, which is wildly ridiculous and yet inescapable. It becomes a grotesque symbol of all con- THE NATION/September 25, 1967 purpose is to manufacture “imma- turity,” inferiority. The dead forms of _ Patriotism, the “Ideal,” Fatherhood, . P Motherhood, are wielded by worm-eaten professors, so as to fabricate childish- ness, irresponsibility, and therefore, para- doxically, the corruption of the forms themselves. There is a grotesque episode in which two schoolboys, Mientus and Siphon, agree to the most terrible battle of all: a duel of grimaces. In order to defeat the tyranny of face, they will take their faces in their hands, and hurl them at each other. “Some of us trembled at the throught of Mientus bringing out into broad daylight the dreadful weapon which no one had yet dared to use, except after taking precautions to en- sure solitude and secrecy. Mientus was proposing to do in public what we had never dared to do, except alone in front of a mirror when nobody could see.” Idiosyncracy, in all its. seething naked- ness, tears holes in the fabric of names and attitudes. The face is destroyed by its opposite, the face. It is this energy which is at play throughout Ferdydurke: the adult “lies” of form and style are endlessly worried by youth, by what is inferior, below all values, and yet, ul- timately, fascinating. Twenty years later, in Porno- grafia, Gombrowicz returns to these ideas, this time in the style of a Polish “provincial novel”: an old-fashioned ve- hicle for the same half erotic, half philo- sophical obsession. The novel tells of two men who visit a friend in the Polish countryside, during the German occupa- tion. In this stifled atmosphere of war and ennui, the men become fascinated at first, and then obsessed, by a couple of adolescents. The boy and girl have al- ways known each other in their child- ish way. But now it becomes the secret “pornography” of the adults, to bring them together erotically. The adults, drawn to the “mere” beauty of the boy and the girl, despise them for their youth. Yet they become wholly engrossed in a scheme of manipulations which are meant to bring the children together, “in” and “for” the adults. Here again, in this work, Gombro- wicz’s sheer persistence, his ability to create a mood of cold, desperate obses- sion, finally overcomes the improbabil- ity of the story. The world of Witold and Frederick, the two men, is formed and noble, disengaged from the “‘green- ness” of youth. And yet there is no pas- sion it can generate for itself. It is im- potent and deathlike, if it cannot reach out “obscenely,” for the despised gift of the young. It cannot live, it can only manipulate. Although the novel gathers strength as it goes on, it fails seriously in one THE NATION/September 25, 1967 respect. The reader feels too easily that Gombrowicz is working out a kind of intellectual jigsaw puzzle. His distrust of the adult prevents him from creat- ing adult characters. It boils over into an absurd sense of physical repulsion. “There were five of them—men—in the house. Hippolytus, Siemian, Albert, Frederick and I. Ugh . . . Nothing in the animal world attains such deform- ity—What dog, what horse can compete with this incontinence, with this cyni- cism of form? Alas, after the age of 30, men lapse into monstrosity.” The exile of Witold Gombrowicz is irreparable, Like Gulliver, he cannot bear the presence of man (or woman), and Pornografia suffers from this inner constraint, this inability to approach the other without disgust or, if the other is “young,” without a curious ecstacy mingled with condescension. Machismo DOWN THESE MEAN STREETS. By Piri Thomas. Alfred A. Knopf. 333 pp. $6.95. ELMER BENDINER Mr. Bendiner, writer and editor, is the author of The Bowery Man (Thomas Nelson). In any society the transformation of boy into man is a painful ordeal of al- ternating proof and doubt, but in the comfortable classes a soothing murmur assures the fledgling that when he shaves the stubble on his chin he will in fact be a man. In the ghettos the world damns the boy to nothingness and dares him to be a man. There is no slow maturing, no time for experiment and question. There is only a desperate hunger for the state of grace called machismo. Piri Thomas in his autobiography, Down These Mean Streets, describes the passionate, painful search to validate his manhood for which, with dead-pan cool, he had to fight, steal, submit to buggery, open his veins to any drug, take any dare, any risk. He has done it all in Harlem’s mean streets and gone on from machismo to manhood, acquiring dur- ing the journey an understanding of man. This is not a confirmation ritual im- posed by what the sociologists call the “barrio subculture.” This is a trial by ordeal that American society devises when it challenges a boy to feel like a man while he’s up to his neck in the muck that is thrown at him. Piri Thomas emerged from his ordeal like a phoenix out of the fire. He sur- vived the anguish of addiction and cold- turkey withdrawal, street combat and the degradation of prison. He came out to engage in what is called social re- habilitation of his countrymen in Harlem and in Puerto Rico. More important, per- fhaps, he has given us this document of how a boy grows up in hell. His account is all the more effective because he has not written of his child- hood as hell untempered by love. He writes fondly—almost sentimentally—of the barrio and its people as if there were no villains, Negro or white, but only victims. He has compassion even for cops. When he is not talking about the fight for manhood he is developing the second theme.of man’s development, what Whit- man called, “the dear love of comrades.” Comradeship to a boy does not depend on a cause or a banner. It is blind to human faults and deaf to reason. One of the most telling crises Thomas describes occurs in prison when the cons ate about to riot over food. Their com- plaint seems unfounded to Piri Thomas; there is no prospect of winning, there is only a humiliating defeat, reprisals, injury and perhaps death to be expected. And still he feels the overwhelming need to stand shoulder to shoulder with men Christmas brochure An illustrated, 40-page brochure an- nouncing all new Christmas cards and constructions, books, reproduc- tions, and a wide selection of distinc- tive gifts from The Museum of Modern Art is now available. Cards and constructions reproduce favorite works by artists in the Museum Col- lection including Picasso, Villon, and Georgia O’Keeffe. Others have been specially commissioned from con- temporary artists. They range from a poster design by Ryuichi Yamashiro (10 cents) to Mon Levinson’s silk- screen Plexiglas construction (limited edition at $1.95). Highlights are the specially designed Chess Set, 1968 Appointment Calendar, new posters, recent publications, and the Trova Kaleidoscope—an unusual version of a classic Christmas toy. The Museum of Modern Art 67—13 5300 Lenox Hill Station New York, New York 10021 | enclose 25¢ for the 1967 Christmas brochure (deductible from orders over $5.00) o 3 ® g The Museum of Modern Art < a @ 7. who have nothing in common with him except a common cendition. He wavers until it is too late to leap to their side and then he curses himself for having failed to join still another lost cause that would have won nothing and cost him his parole. The soldier-hero knows that comradeship is more precious than victory and that reason is only a distraction. But manhood and comrade- ship are the only possible achievements in the ghetto. Piri Thomas had a special prob- lem to compound the general terror and confusion. He was the only dark-skinned member of a Puerto Rican family. His brothers and sister could pass for Spanish whites and so escape the skin stigma. For a while he carried his Spanish accent like a badge and explained to all who would listen that he was not Negro but Puerto Rican. It impressed only one white American, a Southern whore who thought she was accommodating a swarthy grandee until he shattered her complacency by shouting that she had » OE, te We fad just been had by an American Negro. Piri Thomas flirted with militant Mohammedanism in prison but on his re- turn to Harlem relapsed into respectable Christianity and earnest social work. This may seem to some to be a happy ending; it may disappoint others. In any case it would be best to await fur- ther word from Mr. Thomas. He may tell us whether he can find new answers in the old formulas or whether Malcolm X did not wind up a similar odyssey in a more promising port. There is one danger in Piri Thomas’ book though not primarily of his making. Middle-class Americans may smile con- tentedly when they finish its horrors and say: “You see, I knew it could be done. There is some good in them after all, and if they only try like Piri Thomas, they can all make it.” To guard against that crushing smug- ness it would have been good if Piri had a bit more anger and a bit less of the Puerto Rican’s Christ-like tolerance that bids them murmur sympathetically at the hostile world—“Ay Bendito.” I Quit! From Solo to Chorus THE NEW LEGIONS. By Donald Duncan. Random House. 274 pp. $5.95. ALAN SAMUELS Mr, Samuels is a writer, presently in the armed forces, The jacket of Donald Duncan’s book is approximately the Ramparts cover for February, 1966, on which a grim, highly decorated master sergeant announced he had just quit the Army. This bad omen notwithstanding, The New Legions is not one of those articles stretched into books only to exploit the initial publicity. Dun- Can is an astute man with a lot more to say. Actually he seems to have had two books in mind: an autobiography and a sociological study of Army influence in America. The New Legions contains snatches of each. The personal parts de- scribe induction, jump school, Special Forces training and some daring infil- tration missions in Vietnam. Most of these episodes are written in Male-Ad- venture style—a parody of Robin Moore’s fake toughness. An unfortunate result is that we get little sense of the internal dialogue Duncan must have conducted before he quit, and only a slight under- standing of why, if his background and ambitions were so typical, he took such an exceptional step in the end. The essays are better, particularly those on the depersonalization of the Army experience and the way in which universal military training has led to the 284 subservience of civilian America. One of the strongest discussions—because the personal half takes on the weight of parable—deals with the Special Forces, advance party in our Vietnamese adven- ture. Duncan, who was attached to Spe- cial Forces as an instructor, recruiter and team leader, concludes that its true specialty has always been fighting pub- licity campaigns. He describes the ex- tremely funny turning-point victory which came when President Kennedy was dazzled by a hoked-up display of proficiency on a visit to Fort Bragg. Kennedy immediately upgraded the role of Special Forces, and authorized its members to wear the coveted green beret. As often happens, though, the per- petrators of the sales pitch fell for it themselves. The greenie beanies—though their reading of Mao, Tito and Che should have taught them better—came to believe that good training in language and first aid, demolition and intelligence- gathering, would enable them to counter an army of farmers fighting for their land. Vietnam was the first test of their peculiar theory that a shark can be trained to move among the people like a fish in water. Duncan tellingly describes his arrival there, a Candide in tropical worsteds, wholly dedicated to winning the hearts and minds of the people. Within hours a bar girl gave him his “first Vietnamese evaluation of the Special Forces . . ‘Ohhh!’ she squealed, smiling approval. 4 Le eae 1 ae, yi ta: hie re af? ha ERY TB Py: rf A Nig ahaa aS JH ae 7 a Fi BW a ced ‘You Special Forces . . . Special Force: number one. They eat pussy.” ace There were other disillusionments, , of course: a recruiting officer sayi ng, “Don’t send me any niggers”; Americans lighting cigarettes while their Vietnamese eH ' counterparts tortured and murdered pris- oners; the blatant venality of Saigon’s rulers. But Duncan kept his observations _ to himself. (Only recently he has learned that a man he worked with intimately — in Vietnam was also against the war at — that time, and has now quit in disgust.) He played it so straight that when he © finally did resign he was the most dec- — orated enlisted man in Vietnam, and | up for a Silver Star. \ Duncan’s decision was all the more remarkable because the voices for — peace had never reached him. He had to work out all the arguments against soldiering on his own. It’s true that the peace movement lionized him afterward, but it never reached out to him during his struggle. Even today the movement does little to encourage future Duncans. Implicit in the cry of Hell No at the induction centers is the idea that the aim- less draftee who stumbles nervously past the picket line has already reached a moral par with the Marine who burns huts by zippo lighter. Despite the signs that say Bring Our Boys Home, the Women Strike for Peace rhetoric about Their Sons, and the occa- sional agitator who enlists, there is very little contact between Movement people and army people. Many of those who carry signs calling the Gls brothers seem in fact to be rooting for their death— that is, they gloat at news of Vietcong victories. (The National Guardian runs what can be read as a triumphant box score of American casualties.) As for the would-be organizers who enter the service, they often underestimate the psychological and practical difficulties of propagandizing in basic training— when your constituency is literally run- ning from dawn till dusk. The hard fact is that the Movement barely understands the workings of the war machine. I have heard men who know the history of Southeast Asia cold, who could cite every argument against a counter-deterrent nuclear strategy, use the words “pla- toon,” “battalion” and “brigade”. as synonyms. One way the Movement might learn more about the Gls it must influence, if it means business, would be to operate out of the bar-whorehouse-pawnshop towns near the big training bases, the parasite towns where soldiers drink and dependents live. There are services to be performed out of store fronts in Lees- ville, La., and Manhattan, Kan. The children of personnel stationed at, say, Fort Polk, must attend’ rural Louisiana schools. A pre-school or upgraded teach- THE NATION/ September 25, 1967 c Maid be welcomed by wives nilitary men alike. Perhaps an ibudsman’s ear could be tilted toward ‘the post to pick up such scandals as the ‘ome that broke this summer at Fort Leonard Wood, where the commanding general had been pressuring men to plead guilty in court-martial cases. (This story _ floated in rumor form for months; by | breaking it, a Movement journal like Viet Report would have earned the good will of some 35,000 soldiers.) But Vier _ Report isn’t interested in the day-to-day _ problems of American soldiers. Another Movement job might be to help doctors and enlisted men organize, at those posts where spinal meningitis is endemic, a fight for a guaranteed eight hours sleep. But why should the induction centers _ be the scene of the Movement’s final | appeal to GIs? The day you report, Duncan reminds us, you are frightened and bewildered, hardly in condition to ingest a pamphlet on high politics. And Teporting for induction, though trau- matic, need not represent a philosophical watershed. Boys of 19 or 20 have not thought it all through and arrived at a firm, homicidal resolve. They are as old as college boys, and just as subject to wavering. Many accept induction even though they disapprove of the war. Some are educated; some have been ex- posed to the hip scene; some are black men who admire Muhammad Ali but, unlike him, need the honorable dis- charge in order to make a living. They are not all conformists, certainly not all Stratford, Conn. ‘Some years ago I wrote that the Ameri- can Shakespeare Festival Theatre and Academy at Stratford, Conn., was ‘“‘con- scientiously devoted to bad work.” This is no longer true; today the festival is not conscientiously devoted to anything in particular at all. This season its four productions have been staged by four different directors, none of them permanently employed at Stratford: two solid old-timers of various vintages (John Houseman and Jerome Kilty), a notori- ous chichi merchant (Cyril Ritchard), and this year’s hot young director (Michael Kahn). But one advantage of this absolute eclecticism, this commit- ment to nothing except Shakespeare’s name, is that some fine work now and then manages to get done. Every year the festival mounts one non-Shakespearean production: this year it is Anouilh’s* Antigone, a grave, in- telligent, and yet impassioned meditation on the eternal struggle between freedom and order. The best single piece of acting ; THE NATION/September 25, 1967 killers, but they are not up to the enormous sacrifice the Movement now demands of them. Only a handful of men have the re- sources, moral or financial, to say Hell No. There are many more who are whispering Well Maybe. They don’t want jail, exile or ostracism, and they hear the Movement’s strident message as: Risk Your Neck. The army seems un- changeable to them, since they have never seen anyone change it. They sense that the Movement is preoccupied with Vietnam and oblivious to their other dif- ficulties. And so they rightfully wonder, if a Romney came in tomorrow ‘and ended the war, would there still be a Movement to honor the men languishing in stockades and penitentiaries? It is only after soldiers see that it is possible, on some level, to change their situation that they might think of press- ing demands which now seem outlandish and suicidal—such as the right to de- cline assignment to.a given duty station. To expect mass refusals to fight in Viet- nam is like thinking American workers could have forced through the Wagner Act in 1870. The Movement has not taken the elementary step, Step A of any serious organizing process: convincing people that problems they perceive as individual and unsolvable are in fact widespread and—by common action— solvable. Only when that job is done will Duncans appear in legion. Then and only then will there really be a chance of stopping the war in Bolivia. THEATRE/ Julius Novick at Stratford this year is Maria Tucci’s performance as Antigone. Delicate yet strong, Miss Tucci’s Antigone has depths of sensibility apparent behind the Botti- cellian beauty of her face. She is clearly marked out for tragedy from the mo- ment she appears, and yet she is never pretentious or monotonous. Otherwise, this Antigone is not a distinguished pro- duction. Morris Carnovsky has produced a strong but ponderous Creon; constantly addressing Antigone as though she were a public meeting, he crushes much of the irony, delicacy and compassion out of his part. Jerome Kilty, the director, has decked the play in modern trappings— rock'n'roll, mini-skirts, pantsuits, a hand mike for Anouilh’s one-man Chorus— but they never seem like anything but trappings. The all-round best production this season is a vigorous Macbeth, imagi- natively staged by John Houseman in a cold, threatening, aluminum environ- ment designed by Rouben Ter-Arutunian The Nation SUBSCRIBERS’ BOOK SERVICE Offers the following at a discount: oO PRISON NOTES by Barbara Pee (Grossman, $4.95)... - $3.95 THE NEW RADICALISM by Christopher Lasch (Knopf, pans $5.55 THE GOODBYE LAND by Jose Yglesias (Pantheon, $4.95)............ $3.95 AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF BERTRAND RUSSELL, 1872-1914 (Little, Brown & COs, | Sisoabeauuty alent kaha dal eee $6.35 THE ACCIDENTAL PRESIDENT by Robert G. Sherrill (Grossman, $5.00). $4.00 THE FREE WORLD COLOSSUS: A Critique of American Foreign Policy in the Cold War by David Horowitz (Gillvand Wane, i$6;95))......5/00.%osive> als $5.55 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF POWER by Ronald Sampson (Pantheon, $4.95).... $3.95 ie tte] lee tel QO Remittance accompanying orders should be made payable to THE NATION, 333 6th Ave., N.Y- 10014 q Payment enclosed oO Please bill me Readers can avail themselves of our regular offer to send them any book (ex- cept paperbacks), published in the U.S. at the retail price post-free. When order- ing, please give title, author and pe U.S.S.R. 50th ANNIVERSARY CELEBRATION TOUR November 1-22, 1967 $895 complete Section #1 completely sold out A second section now open Sponsored by NATIONAL COUNCIL AMERICAN-SOVIET FRIENDSHIP See Moscow’s November 7 Celebration Historic Leningrad-Kiev Also 4 exciting Central Asian Cities Sponsorship makes possible visits to in- teresting places not open to ordinary tours and opportunities to meet Soviet people. Experienced, friendly conductor. For information write or call: Suite 304, 156 5th Ave., New York 10010 Phone: 212 YU 9-6677 a (scenery) and Jennifer Tipton (lighting). When King Duncan says, ‘‘This castle hath a pleasant seat,” he is obviously quoting Shakespeare instead of looking around him; otherwise the problems of staging Macbeth are ingeniously and conscientiously solved:. Even the witches are less of a nuisance than usual. John Colicos’ is a satisfactory Macbeth, and Carrie Nye is a young, blond, sinuous, bitchy Lady. (For a change, when Lady Macbeth cries to the evil spirits, “Unsex me here,” there is something to unsex.) Mr. Houseman, his designers, and his 285 actors have provided a cogent and skill- ful traversal of the play. Only later, read- ing Herbert Blau, did I come upon words for what the production seemed to me to lack: “ ... the subterranean life of the plays (a Macbeth, for instance, clawing bloodily at “the insane root”), and instead of fidelity or capricious up- dating, an immediacy of conception, by which I know that that world on the stage is unavoidably mine.” But this (like most things that Mr. Blau wants) is hard to find. The festival’s Merchant of Ven- ice is remarkable in one respect. Michael Kahn, who directed, has borrowed Ty- rone Guthrie’s idea that Antonio, the Merchant himself, the man who risks losing the famous pound of flesh, is deeply in love with his friend Bassanio, in whose behalf he takes the risk. This may sound like mere wise-guy psychol- ogizing, but in practice it makes excellent sense. It turns Antonio, who in most productions is just a faceless necessity of the plot, into a genuine and highly in- teresting character. It explains his mys- terious sadness, his sense of himself as “a tainted wether of the flock.” It lends poignancy to his willingness, at whatever risk to himself, to lend Bassanio money, though Bassanio has made it quite clear that he wants the money to go court a wife. Wisely, Mr. Kahn does not take things too far; the subsidiary Venetians discuss the matter in tones that drip with unmistakable innuendo, but there is nO pawing and no camping. The cour- age and magnanimity with which Antonio The Best Way To Get NATION SRE SECC ERR ESSERE ESRREEE EEE SBE SEE, THE NATION 9-25-67 333 Sixth Ave., New York 10014 s [_] One Year, $10 {| Two Years, $18 {j 6 Months, $6 {_] Bilk Me (Foreign and Canadian Postage 1 a year extra) [_] Payment Enclosed Civics wae = MGERSCOCASR SORTS RSESE SESH RREE seh e sees 286 TONIGHT Looking up while scratching my kneecap, I saw you, young star. What luck? fi am so partial to whatever glows as a lighthouse or as myself who am a fire fed by Claire Dom June Dorothy Michael Kathy Rici Whitney Gunther— what timbers! I add more lovers and friends. I burn more fiercely tonight. Look, Listen, good luck to you out in the heart of the universe, burning. I must confess my burning fiercely in this land of ideals and slaughter is impossible. My friendship for you is a sudden storm where there arises a vision of the young meteorites about you being everywhere snuffed out in the frigid darkness. Good lord, are we cousins? I must go, although I remember now Walt Whitman’s embracing of the universe and you tightly, with my neck strained upward. How nice if I remained and my mind then unlocked a thousand doors to you, but my new girl friend is wringing her hands waiting. Smack in my opened hand, hers will be, to the “screw you” of living, wild star, the opposite phenomenon... . endures and abets what amounts to Bas- sanio’s rejection of him give him con- siderable stature; as finely played by John Devlin, he rivals Shylock in gravity and dignity. In other respects, however, this Mer- chant is not up to much. Morris Carnoy- sky’s Shylock is sustained by the actor’s tremendous inborn dignity and strength, but it is a disappointment all the same. The ferocious irony in the part goes for nothing; perhapc Mr. Carnovsky simply has no gift for irony. But one gift he does have is the power to thunder like Jove, and this he does not use. In the climactic scene after his daughter leaves him, he does not rage; he weeps, damps down the scene with self-pity, and thus discourages us from pitying him. Acting teachers tell you not to give rein to your sobs and tears, that it is much more effective to fight against them and barely manage to hold them in; they would seem to have a point. Barbara Baxley makes a pretty, blond Portia, with an attractive shyness and a nice dry wit, but her thin, nasal voice sets strict limits to what she can do with her part. Still another of the production’s liabilities is that Mr. Kahn, desiring to show us that the Venetians were a giddy and superficial bunch, has encouraged or at least permitted several of them to giggle and chuckle and frivol and revel with annoying insistence and lack of conviction. Notwithstanding all this, however, I enjoyed the trial scene enormously; I had not seen it for a ALLAN KAPLAN time and had forgotten what a brilliant piece of dramatic craftsmanship it is. Even more so than the trial scene from Merchant, “The most lamentable comedy, and most cruel death of Pyra- mus and Thisbe” from A Midsummer Night's Dream is an almost irresistibly brilliant piece of writing for the stage, and in Cyril Ritchard’s staging it is very funny. But on the whole this production of Midsummer is characterized by a disagreeably spurious chic. The court of Theseus is dressed in a sort of musical- comedy Empire style; the fairies prance about in chiffon; the forest, hung with coldly glittering strips of plastic, looks like Tiffany’s window. Mr. Ritchard turns the play into a star vehicle by doubling as Bottom and Oberon. His Bottom is comic enough, and his Oberon is not without dignity, but Mr. Ritchard has abused his considerable talents for so long that he is now the prisoner of his own persona, and can do only superficial variations on his familiar, annoyingly swish routine. His production and both his performances have an air of campy meretriciousness about them. Four plays then, four directors, four directions. This is a better season than many have been at Stratford, but once again there is a sense of aimlessness and discontinuity. Nothing, artistically speak- ing, leads to anything else; nothing is being built. And meanwhile the plays themselves are not being grappled with on any very profound level. THE NATION/ September 25, 1967 ‘rossword Puzzle No. 1216 FRANK W. LEWIS re sammma ACROSS: 1 Use the pony with discretion — it sounds as though it’s bound to be alongside. (10) 6 Isaac’s son in Blake’s “Autobiography.” (4) 10 Such material obviously wouldn't be found on top. (7) 11 Animal found more colorful about the East. (3, 4) 12 The character of Philadelphia good will. 13 Responsible for a peculiar glint, after ca- joling. (10) 15 Ways traditionally explored by promisers? (7) 16 European flower, shown by the disc held therein. (7) 17 Make like a bear. (7) 20 The retort isn’t right, in addition. (7) 22 One’s impact might be shattering! (10) 23 What poker players go for, and check back. (4) 25 This is an old retort! (7) 26 The air is bad in this cave structure, and it’s probably in bad odor. (7) 27 Ruined city of ancient Elam, (March might be suggested by the sound.) (4) 28 Broken sets can and do portray our an- cestors. (10) com- DOWN: 1 Instruments found in the most recent state? (8, 7) Se faz i ae ta . Jase a i & F ae h i ee ee ao ooo | i ee 2 Native craft taken out of the trunk? (7) 3 It may take several layers of tarlatan to make one. (4) 4 Little knots. (7) 5 Spring rites without the traditional circle of fairies. (7) 7 A splice arranged in a particular way. (7) 8 Not just quality! (15) 9 Unemployed executive? The force is transferred by one. (4, 5) 14 They gave warning of impending destruc- tion. (4, 5) 18 Press material might explain what they are supposed to do. (7) 19 Ties, or else can get untangled. (7) 20 Implying one went with a will? (7) 21 Your feelings, and mine too, perhaps. (7) 24 Research and Development for the rich- est gold fields in the world? (4) SOLUTION TO PUZZLE NO. 1215 ACROSS: | Infanticide; 9; 23 and 20 across A Bicycle Built for Two; 10 Prints; 11 Bet- ters; 12 Staying; 14 Stands; 15 Celibacy; 17 Stick-pin; 22 Club car; 24 Antioch; 26 Med- ian; 27 Restated; 28 Storekeeper. DOWN: 2 Nicotinic; 3 Accords; 4 Tees; 5 Capital; 6 Daisy; 7 Object; 8 Ethnic; 13 Scant; 16 Bar- ricade; 18 Teller; 19 Plainer; 20 Finesse; 21 Wicked; 25 Trek. Readers are invited to send for a free copy of Mr. Lewis’ request to Puzzle Department, The Nation, THE NATION/September 25, 1967 Address your 10014 “ground rules.” 333 Sixth Avenue, New York, N. Y. Printed by Miltord Publishing Ince., PUBLICATIONS THE IDLER. Lively, offbeat, liberal monthly. $1 brings tour different sample back issues. pan 413B 6th St., N.E., Washington, D.C. “SELECTED POEMS” of GEORGE FLYNN (Villiers of London—$2.00) is “the most ex- citing American poetry since Ezra Pound.” —James Turner. Available in U.S. from the moe at: 145 West 12 Street, New York City MONTHLY NEWSLETTER for a Guaranteed Income. Subscription: individual, $3.00; organ- izational, $6.00. Twenty page bibliography available, $2.00. Write: Ad Hoc Committee for a Guaranteed Income, 969 E. 60th Street, Chicago, Illinois 60637. THE EMPLOYMENT MYTH ... SHATTERED? New economic philosophy sets functions of taxation to maximize technological abundance and personal freedom. Pioneer Book, $2.00, Publication M-10, Idein House, P.O. Box 81, St. ella Pennsylvania 19087, EDUCATIONAL 1.8. 210 New York City Are you a: Supervisor-Principal Teacher Consultant Educational Specialist Artist, creator, sculptor, dancer? We are operating and designing an inno- vative community-controlled school in the ghetto. If you are interested in a new, challenging concept in education, send a resume of your experience and training to: David Spencer, Executive Secretary; 1.8. 201 Planning Board; P.O. Box 768, Manhattanville Station, 10027 ART WOULD YOU BELIEVE? EXCITING ORIG- INAL woodcuts, etchings, lithos, $4.50 each. Subscription information: Graphic Circle, (N), 68 Fifth Avenue, New York City 10011 SERVICES MOVING? Professional moving at competitive rates. Anytime, anywhere. Licensed, insured, experienced, THE COVERED WAGON, ALgon- quin 5-1788 (N.Y.C.) SITUATION WANTED ADMINISTRATIVE ASSISTANT, organiza- tional experience, writing ability. Conscien- tious, mature, responsible. Purposeful work major requirement. Box 605, c/o The Nation. PERSONALS NO MORE WOODEN NICKELS HOFFA FOR PRESIDENT on 114” wood discs, also WASH OUT WASHINGTON. Impeach Johnson, recall war supporters; also on 6” wood rulers. 12/$1.—100/$5 (circulars, balloons, bum- per strips, safety matches). Plentyism, Box 115, Edison, Miami 33151 LEGALIZE ABORTION and every other vic- timless activity. LEGALIZE LIBERTY, POB 24282, Los Angeles, California 90024 SUPPORT FOR REFORM CANDIDATE FOR BOSTON CITY COUNCIL — volunteers or con- tributors are requested to communicate with John L. Saltonstall, Jr.. 46 Bromfield Street, Boston, Mass. HA 6-0620. THE FUTURIST, World Future published bimonthly by Society, reports scientists” forecasts for coming decades. Subscription: $5 yearly. Box 19285-N, Twentieth Street Station, Washington, D.C. 20036. NOTICE TO SUBSCRIBERS! ALL change of address notices, orders for subscriptions and other correspondence, should be sent to: THE NATION, 333 Sixth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10014 Milford, Conn. IST ee ee Ae ee ee enna MB a ~t eee \ : ad if ASS zy oe F S 22a) ‘ ( y : i 5 } ( 2 TT Naa 1 Z sAY Fe ply eean nnn ‘ fj 2 ti vBe ey eA AAT Ti ey / Woon ig Sea yey d + oom { wo \ a | 4 \ Thine * I ‘ ay 3 = an a 4, ) .. to == "3 on: \ yey > a“ rf ay oer eiee sh > yy, 1 pL» Ko PIE ae x / SG Ds eh Ni vy ; foe * L ate, a x a” = we TOE US § fae - s et SEE sy ‘J | SS -~ Neos eM TE F lehe f . ~~, ene) i ‘ UN Np’ Tie Pe aerated SR ee \ t “a, t ie. s Le S Nie meal . \ ae ae + ‘ + | 5 oy 2 ot ‘Ri st é bak ‘ Nae ise’ ‘een aN: Sees VM c 6 Lz \ panes 2 CA PLE ofuimbia Rivey a 12 cater nis Monee IN * } d 4 A me t - ~ k ’ >. is_k. ies Mayet Ver » 41/6. om ein SAA M4 Pe . ; \ oA" \ 7 mm Vas Pe A : Zale a , UPR Me ros sy Sai ON ‘ ] ol a» t ‘ A Ribs ae Di Pee . < ’ mS. is i oz2r “i a fy R Vis (. ‘ by / 8) fae i pe N / . Nk oe e St eae l te ue :f oa77,/* | ae : c “¥ ~ Pi i £ ie J Sao ee i seaae ' “ “3 " x 4 3 : / Le 2. Z ee i el ee Bases rte aa x : , yh SAM peas Ay A iy Seen Tose! ue es eee 5 Need BR nee ’ -~ 5 f Ree ors" 4 c . ‘ ‘ Ail ar ig Th ae 6 NS a oe | set I \ 2 4 ye nee NN i ROUTES OF MIGRATORY FISH--~ rs ‘ Be eecettnie Seo > | se ine: J\ b/ Dee Ag ? oe il yagi COLUMBIA RIVER SYSTEM Ase. Rif Pie) Ete a en ab } ' F -¢< a x Poa f if 7 x Jytat LEGEND ba ee : ! | ' foweemm = MIGRATORY ROUTES AND PRESENT AVAILABLE SPAWNING AREAS. Aes Saad | AREAS NEVER AVAILABLE OR NEVER SUITABLE. AREAS NOT AVAILABLE OR NOT SUITABLE, DUE TO MAN-MADE CONDITIONS, pooh-poohs the argument that we must go stowiy in build | ing such plants because the effects on the environment — and especially on the valuable fishery are not yet fully — known. ; Yet the reasons for caution are evident. A report by the ~ Bureau of Commercial Fisheries of the U.S. Fish and — Wildlife Service issued last summer asserts that the nu- — clear stations planned for the Willamette River, a major tributary of the Columbia, will heat the water by Sep- tember, when many of the adult fish migrate upstream, to levels that would be “devastating.” On the Columbia, in late summer and early fall, discharges from the plants, “while not so destructive, would still place an additional heat load on the salmonids that are presently living in an environment that is far from optimum.” A fishery biologist of the Federal Water Pollution Con- trol Administration says: “We are taking a tremendous chance by building nuclear power plants on salmon rivers. Upstream migrants might not be able to endure such heat as they will encounter. The tiny downstream migrants ... would be in the greatest danger because they usually swim near the surface.” Yet biologists for the power company assure the public that all will be well. There are surely obvious alternatives to the cluttering of majestic rivers with atomic plants. I have visited every country in Europe where salmon is or was an important resource, and in none except France (which has frittered ear stations on salmon rivers. The very idea is so fool- ish, a British power official remarked to me, that it is un- _ thinkable. _ The British claim that more nuclear power is now generated in their country than in all the rest of the world together. Every station is located close to the sea, not only far from population centers but where no valuable marine life is found. Generation and distribution systems are government- owned, and in contrast to the heedlessness in the United States, consideration is given to all the “amenities” and resources affected by the construction of power plants. Sir Roger Makins, chairman of the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority, has said: Before a nuclear establishment can be built or ex- panded, the consent of the appropriate local planning -~ authority is required. In selecting and developing nuclear sites, close consultation has, therefore, been essential with the local planning authorities and this has, wherever pos- sible, been extended to other interested parties. At Win- frith, for example, discussions covered not only the disposition and design of reactors and buildings but also such aspects as landscaping, the protection of archae- ological sites and the identification of areas of special interest to botanists, plant ecologists and entomologists. There were also extensive discussions with local fisher- men about the expected effect of the effluent to be dis- charged into the sea. In the United States, I cannot discover that either the Portland General Electric Company, or the Atomic Energy Commission, discussed the Columbia River project with local planning authorities, or with Oregon or Washington fishery agencies, or with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Serv- ice, or with any local planning officials—certainly it never crossed their minds to consult fishermen, or plant ecologists or entomologists. There is, in fact, a serious gap in our legislation. Under the Federal Water Power Act, no utility can obtain a license to build a power dam on an interstate river unless it provides facilities to safeguard the fish that are resi- dent in, or migrate past the reservoir and plant. But the act was written in 1920 and has never been amended to encompass the nuclear age. The Federal Power Com- mission does not license nuclear establishments (in any case, it is a wishy-washy agency, inclined to knuckle under to a utility industry) nor does Oregon require a license for the construction of nuclear establishments. “As matters stand,” said the Portland Oregonian in an editorial, “the utilities are making the decisions. The people of Oregon would be unwise to disregard the ap- proaching problems of thermal pollution and to depend upon the future decisions of the utilities themselves to act when conditions become acute. New sources of pollution should be prevented, not allowed to grow to the acute stage. (The Columbia and Willamette Rivers are already heavily polluted by pulp mills and raw sewage.) The problem may not be severe with one nuclear plant. But there will be dozens before the next century dawns.” The electric power industry is already unpopular in parts of the United States because of its enormous con- tributions to air and water pollution. Charles F. Luce, THE NATION/ October 9, 1967 former Under Secretary of the Interior, warned the indus- try last February that it “must adopt new standards, per- form in new ways, show new concern for the quality of the environment, and be an even better citizen in the com- munities it serves.” Soon after making his speech Mr. Luce became chairman of the board and executive officer of Consolidated Edison, allegedly at $150,000 a year on a ten-year contract, with munificent retirement benefits. The PGE project on the Columbia will not start for a year or more. Its adversaries are now gathering their strength. Much hope lies in the Federal Water Pollution Control Administration, now part of the Department of the Interior. R.F. Poston, Pacific Northwest administra- tor, told the power planners of the region last March that the federal government, under the President’s Executive Order 11,288 issued in 1966, intends to control the dis- charge of effluents, whether from nuclear reactors, pulp mills or other sources, into interstate or coastal waters. “Potential developers of thermal power,” he said, “would be well advised to recognize that their plans must include control of their heat problem on their own premises, or be prepared to prove beyond doubt that by advantageous site selection or other means their plant effluent, plus the collective effect of other present and potential heat pro- ducers, will not interfere with established water uses.” Poston is endeavoring to persuade the Atomic Energy Commission to bring its contract with Portland General Electric Company under water-purity standards estab- lished by Oregon and Washington and approved by the Federal Water Pollution Control Administration. Aroused by the casual attitude of both the AEC and the Portland General Electric Company—particularly the util- ity’s refusal to consider the use of cooling towers, a tech- nique which the company says it cannot afford because it would add about 5 per cent to the cost of the power— many people are wondering why the federal government, which has spent billions of the taxpayers’ dollars to de- velop nuclear generation, is turning this knowledge over to private industry for quick, easy profit. By licensing private utilities to build nuclear plants on the Columbia, the federal government seems to be abdi- cating its responsibility for the safety and welfare of the environment and the fishery resources. This may turn out to be another of the numerous mistakes that have wrecked so large a part of our natural heritage: freeways running riot through spectacular scenery, rivers polluted with the muck of industry and municipal sewage, mountains stripped to their bowels for the coal, iron or copper that lies below the surface. One has only to glance at the mel- ancholy pictures in the last yearbook of the Department of the Interior, “The Third Wave,” to see how much of America the Beautiful has been converted into Ugly Ex- pendable America. The ideal location for nuclear generation is, as the Bri- tish aver, on the seacoast. For Oregon that would entail somewhat longer transmission lines and would add per- haps one-tenth of a cent per kilowatt to the cost of elec- tricity. The consensus in the Pacific Northwest is that this is a bargain price to pay for safeguarding the natural en- vironment and above all, for saving the precious salmon. 339 hs mt Pe Pa A fi F RW git PONE DOE AR ie | tye vet ath PA Wy Meer q i — SSS eee The Cultural Cold War: Below is a representative sample of the comment which we have received in response to Christopher Lasch’s “The Cultural Cold War’ (The Nation, September 11), —Editors Florence, Italy I read Christopher Lasch’s CCF-CIA analysis with growing fascination and growing sadness. The facts themselves are no longer news, but the article manages to put them into an impeccably clear perspective. In this perspective it is not so much the CIA that is distress- ing—there have been CIAs, in one form or another, in many eras in many countries—it is the depressing performance of the “intellectuals’—of ourselves—that gives pause. This general crisis of the intelligentsia, of which the shriek- ing sophisms of Borkenau and Co. are merely superficial symptoms, includes—I need not spell it out here, a crisis of values, of styles, of ideals, of truth. It includes the in- tellectuals’ relations with science, technology, bureaucracy, power and money. “Self-censorship,” conditioned by intan- gible pressures, is far more pernicious than any official government censorship. For “self-censorship” engenders far less energy of reaction and organized resistance. Mr. Lasch goes to the very heart of the whole problem when he says “the despair of intellect is closely related to the despair of democracy.” The crisis of the intellectuals is the crisis of democracy. So let’s keep working on both, without losing time. It certainly would be useful if The Nation fol- lowed up with other articles on the crisis of the intellectuals in Europe, East and West, and in the developing countries. In the meantime, let me congratulate you for this courageous beginning. Elisabeth Mann Borgese Sussex, England I welcome the article with delight and envy. Had I known as much as Lasch knows, I would have loved to write it my- self. In my last book, The Perils of Democracy, 1 tried to argue that “security” is but a short word for “insecurity.” Mr. Lasch makes my point, finally. As a footnote to the article, may I praise the common sense of the British? My London club subscribes to Encounter (and one of its ex-editors is a member). Everyone knew—because of its gentle treatment of American misdemeanors—that fi- mance came from the United States. Only the most cynical suggested the ClA—before the revelation. When John Masefield died, a London cartoonist pictured a CIA meeting, the chairman saying: “Well now, who’s our candidate for Poet Laureate?” Herbert Agar Trappist, Ky. As I live a somewhat secluded and contemplative life, I am by no means a reader either of The Wall Street Journal or of The Nation. But I have friends who, from time to time, like to make my blood run cold. Hence it chanced that I re- ceived at the same time, Christopher Lasch’s Nation article and a clipping from The Wall Street Journal. The comparison is quite suggestive. The clipping from The Wall Street Journal was a complacently approving review of a new book about The Corporation and the Arts. Far from being un- American, the arts, we are told, are good business. Hence the “donative powers” which the corporation “holds in trust for the entire community” should now be lavished upon the arts, in tax-exempt largess. The artist should be taken under the wing of business. What for? Not merely to feed the bas- tard but because something can be got out of him. ‘The artist 340 A a tata en crarorenmaann Comments and the businessman can be unassailable collaborating in the name of freedom against all suppressive tactics. .. .” It is the old story. Of course the basic assumption is that the artist will accept the businessman’s concept of freedom, which equals free enterprise or the freedom to make money. Will the symbiosis of art and business survive the cruel articulation of the artist’s idea of freedom? That question will be answer- ed not by debate but by winning over. the artist to sincere faith in the primacy of money. In brief, Big Money has more than one way of buying off the intellectual. In this the pluralist society is far more versa- tile than the totalitarian (as the reviewed book apparently makes clear). Now Christopher Lasch begins his article with a reproof of nonliberals and a complaint that there has not been enough serious political criticism. The tendency has been either to conform or drop out. To succumb to the blandish- ments of the CIA or to rebel and cry in one’s beer. He calls for that lucid, liberal criticism, that enlightened reason which, since the 18th century and indeed long before, has been in- voked as the sure and accessible instrument for solving all problems. Which in theory it is. A few names come up in the Lasch article, singled out for praise: sharp and lucid minds, But there are other names, names of rather less distin- guished intelligences: everyday liberal squares. Those of us who are radicals, pessimists, tend to balance these two kinds of intelligences as we see them in the liberal camp, and we find the sharp ones very much outnumbered. The political world of our time is not becoming more reasonable and more enlightened from day to day. There seems to be a Gresham’s Law at work and the bad currency appears to be winning. Even then, I agree, an appeal to reason makes more sense than tears of desperation. I certainly hope that Mr. Lasch is right in his basic assumptions. My own doubt is this: inso- far as the liberal (as distinct from the radical) retains his identification with what seems to be an established disorder, to what extent can he guarantee that lucid reason will pre- vail over the versatile blandishments of the money which is the prime mover of that disorder? Thomas Merton Dublin, Ireland Mr. Lasch refers to the judgment which I won in Ireland against Encounter. It might be worth noting that the original defense adumbrated by Encounter was that I had given cur- rency to the “false assertion” made about them in The New York Times, viz. that they had been in receipt of indirect benefactions from the CIA. Before the case came for judg- ment in Dublin, revelations in the United States made by Ramparts magazine had made this defense untenable. At this stage, Encounter apologized to me in court through their counsel, published their apology in their June issue, paid all costs and expenses and made a contribution to a charity named by me. This particular story is told more fully in the current issue of the New Left Review and in the Spring issue of Rights. Conor Cruise O’Brien Cuernavaca, Mexico Although no one ever accused me of being either a liberal or an intellectual, may I congratulate you and Mr. Lasch, with less than 5 per cent of reservations, for his essay on liberal intellectuals and the cold war? I hope I won’t sound pompous in saying that he and recent New York Review contributors have made a noble breakthrough from the starry- eyed, pontifical liberalism of pre-Vietnam vintage. THE NATION/ October 9, 1967 y he i u a itical-economic-cultural ghetto created for my kind by the ers of the cold war, and finally received the Order of the McCarthyan Boot. I presume that when Mr. Lasch writes about “desperate acts of conscience” which, “masked as a higher selflessness . . . become self-serving, having as their object not truth or even social change but the promotion of the individual’s self-esteem,” he is talking about people like me. Yet he is almost as shy as the other liberal reappraisers about the existence of us heretics throughout the period of his second thoughts, obstinately insisting (wherever we could) that the crusade against communism was a hoax, the Rosen- berg case a hoax, the “liberation” of Iran and Guatemala a hoax; and that an inquisition, which the honest citizen must defy, had been installed to browbeat everyone into accepting them. Our heresy consisted in saying so at the time. We were not oracles, and figured many things wrong, but we used what common sense the gods gave us. Nor were many of us people of distinguished attainments; but if these are necessary for mention in a liberal remastication of the hash of the past, overlooking of such heretics as Shapley and Einstein is odd. Mr. Lasch is evidently still not ready to reappraise his pre- Vietnam view (The New Radicalism in America) that radi- cals of our type do little good and are defeated by their own personalities and the immutable tragedy of life. I suggest that their efforts and sacrifices (perhaps “inconveniences” is more accurate for most United States inquisition victims, though some were executed or driven to suicide) are more responsible than he knows for the fact that he is now in circulation to denounce lickspittle liberals. Was Einstein acting “desperately,” not for truth or social change but for his own self-esteem, when he counseled total resistance to the inquisition up to willingness to go to jail? Is there presently something wrong with self-esteem, and is not action for truth and social change the best way to preserve it? Cedric Belfrage New York City I read with deep interest the piece by Christopher Lasch on the overall intellectual atmosphere of the late 1940s and 50s, the role of the CIA, etc. It goes more deeply into the phi- losophy and social implications of this period than anything which I have read in recent times. Harrison E. Salisbury Assistant Managing Editor The New York Times Portland, Ore. The length of an article is one measure of its importance in editorial eyes, and, in the case of “The Cultural Cold War” I tend to agree with the estimate. Phrases that really turned me on were: “. . . contempt for . . . kept intellectuals,” and “the man of action .. . scorns the philosopher whom he is able to use... . .” Hasn’t Eric Hoffer also had harsh words for intellectuals and their (our) power games? An unmentioned reason why our present national policy of blind anti-communism is so absurd is that it blinds us to a danger which will ultimately be much more important than communism: the nonwhite world is beginning the logarithmic growth phase which the “white” world began 500 years ago. The struggle cannot be prevented. Our.choice is whether to lead the world revolution (racial not Communist) as peace- fully as possible or to make the fight to hold onto the status quo. If intellectuals are to be induced to gather round the au- THE NATION/ October 9, 1967 ical tainted with eresy, I settled down inthe’ po- thor’s flag, we shall have to give more attention to positive alternatives to the existing situation. To simply advise with- drawal until the rules are altered to our satisfaction is a childish proposal. We need a positive doctrine and missionary methods to attract enough intellectuals and “men of action” to give us a reasonable chance at success in the coming struggle. ¢ William E. Morton, Associate Professor University of Oregon Medical School Mexico City Mr. Lasch’s article is an admirable piece of sleuthing, worthy of the CIA itself. I hope that it will provoke many people into asking whether politics have anything to do with ethics or morality; whether any nation wants anything other than power and perhaps prosperity; and whether when it pretends otherwise, it is not likely to be exposed. As the Germans say, “against stupidity the gods themselves are powerless,” and Mr. Lasch raises the question whether dopers and doped, in the Congress for Cul- tural Freedom or on the masthead of Encounter, are not both suffering from “invincible ignorance.” Do individuals or nations really change? Is not an ex-Communist, after all, but a turncoat (same coat, same skin)? Is not the United States the same country Thoreau castigated for its behavior to (and in) Mexico in the last century, behaving in the same way in another country and context today? Anne Fremantle Sherman, Conn. Christopher Lasch’s article draws a pretty grim picture, but doesn’t overdraw it; in fact there are other aspects of the part played by intellectuals in the cold war that are even more disturbing. Not to mention the part played by the government, with its black lists, gray lists and secret subsidies, in all, quite a fertile field for historical research. I hope there is more of it. Malcolm Cowley Eugene, Ore. Christopher Lasch draws a conclusion which won’t satisfac- torily improve the relationship of intellectuals to power. To end the corruption of intellecuals by ending all their participation in the councils of government evades the prob- lem of bringing power to bear on the war machine. Rational arguments from outside are too easily dismissed by those in power, and it is naive to believe that disassociation will de- prive the government of the brain power it needs. There will always be those who can serve any master and rationalize — their actions. It is better that there should be some intellec- tual prostitution with a possibility of influencing the war machine, rather than intellectual purity for all and a govern- ment which would “judge the validity of ideas by the re- quirements of national power or any other entrenched inter- est.” But would an intellectuals’ boycott of the war machine really produce the intellectual purity Mr. Lasch wants, or would it be an abdication of responsibility and an invitation to Machiavellianism in an era which can’t afford that kind of international politics? The answer isn’t to remove the intellectuals from the cen- ters of power but to have intellectuals assume the integrity they somehow lost on the road to Washington. As Vietnam and this summer’s reaction to the racial uprisings have shown, criticism from outside has little or no effect upon decision making in Washington. With more courage and integrity on the part of those intellectuals in Washington there might have been more meaningful dialogue, but with Mr. Lasch’s boy- cott there could be no chance of dialogue at all. Donald E. Drake, II 341 BOOKS & THE ARTS James Purdy and the Works EUSTACE CHISHOLM AND THE WORKS. By James Purdy. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. 241 pp. $5.95. RCBERT K. MORRIS Mr. Morris is assistant professor of English at the City College of the City University of New York. His critical study of Anthony Powell will be published by the University of Pittsburgh Press. Mr. Morris’ essay is the third in a series on contemporary American novelists. Jen years ago James Purdy was, in the words of the composite kudo, a “young, bold, individual, arresting and irritating talent.” Today, four novels and three volumes of short stories later, he is con- sidered part of the older new-guard in American fiction—a “voice,” but one that has lately been greeted by diminished bravos, at times catcalls. The critical hatchet job by Stanley Edgar Hyman (memorable, but somewhat in excess of even a purist’s obligation to the public) was a reaction partly prompted by Dame Edith Sitwell’s pronouncement that Purdy is “one of the greatest living writers in our language.” More to the point, Mr. Hyman, in all but calling Purdy one of the worst writers in the language, was not substituting one fiat for another. He was articulately, if mercilessly, challeng- ing the “voice” to inorease its range and dynamics, chasten its coloring, stop play- ing the echoes. To try, in other words, for more substance and less texture. However Purdy’s original brilliance may actually have dimmed of late, how- ever his inventiveness may have flagged, the feeling that he has said all he has to say in a handful of stories and his first novel (Malcolm) is not universally shared among critics. Like all writers obsessed by certain themes Purdy does repeat him- self. Yet I suspect both the obsession and repetition are lodged in the impossi- bility of solving the problems he has set for himself through any single artistic coup. All his fiction is at bottom a vari- ation on the quest for the last vestiges of humanity in an America whose ideal has not only been shattered (Fitzgerald, Wolfe, West) but debased, corrupted and befouled by such assorted things as: noise, confusion, pumped-up virility and pornography .. . salesmen, imbeciles, retired faggots, strip-tease-sluts . . dirt, hollowness, race transvestism .. . the movie theatre... TV... carbon monoxide . . . the belief in everything and everybody ... the hatred of being 342 alone in silence for more than 20 sec- onds ... the assurance that immortality was Americans eating all-cow franks ... while talking to a crowd of fifteen tril- lion same-bodies, etc. What a Purdy character quests after in this wasteland is knowledge of himself. But there is an eloquence in Purdy that is not often found in other “quest novels” of the period: the very funny neoclassi- cal satires of Barth and the equally funny parodic ones of Pynchon. Purdy, de- spite his rich vein of macabre wit, neither satirizes nor spoofs but spins out pointed fables of modern sickness and despair. This fabulist quality is predicated on two things: the kinds of characters he writes about, and the way in which he writes about them. His world, at its most bizarre reaches, is peopled by the gro- tesque and abnormal, and when closest to reality, by the ordinary run-of-the- mill misfit who cannot connect either emotionally or physically. Young men, rootless and fatherless, middle-aged men, impotent in sex and their professions, middle-aged women, dowdy, fat, frus- trated socially and biologically, outweigh the dwarves, cripples and homosexuals. Yet every character lives the myth of the isolated self, a stranger to himself and to others, locked in his own private hell that seals off the world outside. IT count Purdy a fabulist, too, for the simple reason that the end toward which he writes is a moral one. It is often reached via a logic that is not of the day-to-day variety, a logic that in fact is bound by no rules, but a logic best suited to the dim realities of the dream world and to the nature of the quest that begins at the very moment a character is plunged into the “sudden en- gulfing emptiness” of his life. As might be expected the moral changes from novel to novel. The important thing, however, is to recognize that Purdy’s fables have morals, not always an easy task in the face of a multiplicity of themes and the sensational clutter of ab- normal vehicles that carry them. Malcolm (1959) grandly suffers from such excess. It packed in everything that was original and best in Purdy: a gallery of wild, comic, frightening characters; surrealistic juggling of time and space; absurd scenes, and the darkest humor. The picaresque adventures of the young innocent, Malcolm, and his quest for any sort of stable value showed pretty thor- oughly how we in America were com- mitted to lack of values. Purdy slaugh- tered a herd of sacred cows— the family, love, religion, urban existence, sex,—but let it go at that. The moral is plain, but Malcolm is a negative book. The Nephew (1960) is Purdy’s first sustained attempt to kindle the fire from almost dead ashes. It is also his most straightforward book and perhaps his best one, since he subjects a single theme to multiple views rather than vice versa. Alma Mason’s attempt to reconstruct the past of her nephew killed in the Korean War and to write his “memorial” pivots on a pointed irony. As the facts of Cliff's life grew more illusive and con- tradictory, her own hollow existence comes into sharper focus. The novel seems to have a built-in moral, mouthed by Alma’s brother—“We’re all pretty much strangers to one another’—but I consider this a dilute obiter dictum and old hat to boot. Life is certainly com- plex, but this is hardly sufficient reason not to raise (or write) memorials to the dead. The novel’s force is really in the implicit suggestion that those who try to live in the dimness of the past must ex- perience the emptiness of the present and, more terrible still, the despair of the future. The Nephew pays lip service at least to the idea that life must be lived, wheth- er the loss of certain values makes the liying of it worth while or not. In one way—unfortunately not stylistically— Cabot Wright Begins (1964) goes be- yond The Nephew, exchanging the bo- vine fears of rural America for the can- nibalistic terrors of its cities, and jetti- soning irony for a fiercer paradox. The upper-class WASP, Cabot Wright, shar- pened at Yale and honed in Wall Street and suburbia, who becomes a master rapist and something of a national hero, begins as a spokesman for Purdy’s ni- hilism and ends as a glib auto-therapist. He learns to laugh at the human predica- ment, not with the laughter of a mad- man but with that of someone who has learned to “tick”— who has found him- self—and equated life with the symbol “HA.” Moral: if life is a cosmic joke it must be countered by cosmic laughter. Purdy’s choice of subject for his most recent novel, Eustace Chisholm and the Works, published last May, might easily seem at first blush even less distinguished than the stuff he injected into Cabot Wright Begins. Following in the wake of a flotilla of recent homo- THE NATION/ October 9, 1967 se iction it may neither shock nor surprise. No one is likely to find it his _ best book to date, and for obvious rea- _ sons. The quest motif is not only fa- tigued but it is blatant; and, to pile irri- tation on disappointment, the quest turns out to be for love. Nevertheless, its sig- nificance in the Purdy canon must ulti- mately (if somewhat grudgingly) be con- ceded. To mention that the novel is about homosexuality will prompt one to lump it with the work of Genet, Chester, Rechy, Burroughs and Selby: a dis- service all around since Purdy nowhere pretends to thoroughness in plumbing the homosexual psyche and is hard-core only about the writer’s craft. His fine chiseled prose, his spare, naked imagery, his precise characterization, his ear for dialogue and his sense of scene make One aware that he is writing a novel and not a tract. Categories are all-encompassing and therefore limiting. Homosexuals com- prise most of the characters in Eustace Chisholm and the Works, but homosex- uality is not really the subject. While Purdy’s queens are a seamy, randy lot, their fixation—or so they try to persuade us—is upon something higher than the baggage below the navel. The world of the pervert (which had been incidental to Malcolm and Cabot Wright Begins) has been blown up to accommodate the larger themes of alienation, isolation and lovelessness. Aware that he has written about these before, Purdy is at times overrelentless in structurally forcing the impact. Consequently, what begins as _ the whimpering and whining of unrequited lovers moves toward a crescendo of suf- fering, and what starts as a vague, troubled dream becomes an excursion in nightmare. At the dead center of the novel (set mostly in Chicago during the depression) is the fatal and unnat- ural (an epithet now tried and true) passion of Amos Ratcliffe, a fragile, beautiful and intellectual youth for Dan- iel Haws, the “common, phony tough” all-American hetero, more latent than Amos is overt; and at the peripheries are scenes of incest, abortion, suicide and murder. Purdy’s nightmare is not “air-condi- tioned”; it chokes and suffocates, though like all nightmares it keeps a purchase somewhere on reality. The passage de- scribing Maureen O'Dell’s abortion, for example, while accountably more gro- tesque for having the abortionist a dap- per Negro fairy, is strangely clinical, and creates an impact equal to anything out of more (so-called) “naturalistic” works. And the disembowelment of Haws by the coolly insane proto-Fascist, Captain Stadger, wielding an “iron instrument of unbelievable medieval shape and THE NATION/October 9, 1967 monstrous design,” is a travesty of the De tials ae.” See doe id See Se eat A GEANG Ci RU Ra ie Cae AAA e enue Spe finest aberrations of Sade and Masoch | only up until Haws’s final, shattering scream. The best writing, however, is not always the most intense, and the best effects are not necessarily contigu- ous with the novel’s neo-Gothic geogra- phy, nor dependent upon its hagridden sleepwalkers. Purdy eludes inversion and monotony by timely and imaginative shifts in technique—moving from quiet irony (“You're too full of love for your own good”) to gallows humor (Amos and Reuben’s love-making before the coffin housing Reuben’s mother), and from free-wheeling satire (the female Christian Scientist who starts as a “coi- tal repeater” and matures into a “‘serious fucker”) to epigrammatic truths (“Just to be alive means inconveniencing every- one around”). Throughout, Purdy alternately tickles, prods, bludgeons and lacerates us with all these verbal weapons into an accept- ance of something so naive as to be impossibly complex: love, pure and sim- ple, as the panacea for our Angst. But love—to paraphrase Wilde—is never quite so pure and rarely simple; at times it becomes not only perverted but down- right bizarre and destructive. This, per- haps, is what Eustace Chisholm has been saying all along: Love unnaturally and perish. The best sort of “message” Purdy can work out is through para- dox, forcing us to recognize love not by what it is but by what it shouldn’t be. Purdy’s anatomy of love has always been a distorted one. He has shown how it devours, tortures, castrates; he has found it crude, repulsive, destruc- tive. His vision is vaguely nihilistic and at its darkest apocalyptic; but now and again the vision lightens. Purdy is basic- ally too good a writer to blunder un- compromisingly toward apocalypse. Nightmare is backed by reality, satire is supported by truth, black humor is substantiated by clear wit and, above all else, by logic which, in Eustace Chis- holm and the Works, is pretty plain. The quest for love is hard, frustrating, debilitating, often nigh hopeless, but always worth it; for love is the only sub- stantial timber to shore against our ruin. Here, as in his earlier novels, Purdy is extending a life line to those who believe he is saying something and care, or to those who may not believe him but care nevertheless. When at the very end Eus- tace, who has given up both poetry and homosexuality, “slowly, like all sleep- walkers in the world,” takes his wife to bed and warms her “with a kind of ravening love,” are we to imagine this is a positive conclusion? There is love, but there is sleepwalking, too. Perhaps we should abide such ambiguities until someone comes along and spells out In paperback from Cambridge International Relations: A General Theory J. W. BURTON Jr Readings in the Applied Economics of Africa E. H. WHETHAM & J. I. CURRIE, eds Vol. 1: Micro-Economics Vol. 2: Macro-Economics Africa since 1800 ROLAND OLIVER & ANTHONY ATMORE Studies in Words, 2nd edition C. S. LEWIS George Crabbe: Tales (1812) and Other Selected Poems HOWARD MILLS, editor Chaucer’s World: A Pictorial Companion MAURICE HUSSEY English Verse: Voice and Movement from Wyatt to Yeats T. R. BARNES Shakespeare’s Stagecraft J..L. STYAN Racine, or The Triumph of Relevance ODETTE DE MOURGUES Goethe: A Critical Introduction RONALD GRAY The Philosophical Works of Descartes E. S. HALDANE & G. R. T. ROSS, eds Two volumes, each $1.95 $1.95 each $2.25 $1.95 $2.75 $2.75 $2.75 $2.25 $2.45 $2.25 $2.75 Reason and Morals JOHN WILSON The Italian Renaissance in its Historical Background DENYS HAY The Humanity and Divinity of Christ JOHN KNOX $1.45 $1.95 $1.45 At your bookstore For list of Cambridge paperbacks write to Miss Alice Prior Cambridge University Press 32 East 57th Street New York, N.Y. 10022 343 eee” | \ what love is and how we are to find it. Anyway, I get the feeling that Purdy the artist comes closest to one of his own heroes; the pained, wild pariah of “Daddy Wolf,” composed of just enough love for human beings to despise him, living in monolithic isolation and mak- ing “emergency phone calls” to parties he doesn’t know. Every Purdy novel is just such an emergency phone call, and the author doesn’t give a damn how many message units he wastes. Punishing THE FLAGELLANTS. By Carlene Hat- cher Polite. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. 214 pp. $4.95, NORA SAYRE Miss Sayre is the New York correspondent for the New Statesman. Referred to a point beloved by segrega- tionists — that there has been no colored Mozart or Negro Shakespeare, Dr. Ken- neth B. Clark said a few years ago that the American white has “ta tendency to invest himself with a virtue and a talent which he personally doesn’t have. Why allude to geniuses from other countries and other centuries? Michelangelo does not belong to American whites. All I want is the ordinary freedom that any- one else has. What the hell has this got to do with Beethoven or Tolstoy?” It’s notable that this argument is usually wielded by poorly educated people for whom the classics are probably threat- ening. Yet, in an equivalent absurdity, our most educated society is quite foolishly eager to mismarry culture and sociology —to link names and erect road signs. There’s a deluded zeal—among whites— to classify writers within “traditions” (just as our university courses in native lit- erature stress that each writer is “pe- culiarly American”: a perversity which dissolves when poured over Poe or Washingion Irving). Category hounds will be betrayed by Carlene Hatcher Polite, a new Ns=ro novelist. Her frus- trating yet absorbing novel can’t be colored — or discolored — into racial tradition. “I hate a coward, a weak thing — especially a black one.” The Flagellants is brutally critical of Negroes, lashing at those who do or don’t advance, the educated or the ignorant, the “freedom now! boys” as well as the nonviolent. Yet, in this small document of love gone wrong, the young black couple alternates between agonies that are uniquely Negro, and torments which can afflict lovers of any color: sexual jealousy, polygamous 344 mstincts and the dread of marriage, “mis- taking kindness and sensuality for pas- sion,” working at deadening jobs while love is ravaged by lack of cash, and rep- etition: “You sicken me, using love- making as an opiate. Our problems are still here when we wake up.” Thus, the novel’s abrasive strength springs from the rotation of white and Negro problems, embodied in a pair who hurl their historical past at each other: “cocksmanship,” the steam-rolling Negro matriarchy, the castrated man who lets his woman support him, the woman who demands that her husband or lover be “a superman” in order to atone for gen- erations of trodden Negro men. The Faulknerian Negro who “endures” has become a fellow punisher: “You use your color as a crutch.” Here, flagella- tion represents two themes. First, the sensation of being Negro means feeling beaten. Second, these lovers try to numb their racial pains by lacerating each other. At moments, they seem to seek mutual destruction in order to be re- born — in what form? Naturally, no alternatives are offered. Psychologists, including Dr. Clark, have suggested that Negro riots are akin to suicide — an attempt to destroy what’s intolerable. In certain passages, Miss Polite’s lovers seem inflamed with the temptation of a suicide pact. Much of their masochism leaps from the feeling that Negroes are truly inferior: “We really believe that white is right.” Self- despising, contemptuous because “Our lack of knowledge . . . keeps us always a light-year behind,” taught early to feel guilty at any self-assertion, they have come to measure love by punishment be- cause their parents chastised them for the confidence or independence which would vex whites. Hence, as adults, “We .. . seek cruelty, arguments, pain- ful conflicts, denials as expressions of love and power.” It all has a hideous ; > Y ns : logic, as the furious lovers fail to fort each other, and finally writhe apart. Anger at whites ripples through the novel, but it’s a murmuring stream com- pared to the cascades of accusations against Negroes. Ironically, the sentient pair are worse off in New York than they would have been in “hometown,” where civil rights movements might have chan- nelled their outrage and their energies, and hard work would have been praised. (This point is made with a grim exuber- ance.) In Manhattan, trying to be artists and private persons, they are simply the second-rung citizens whom_ benevolent liberals cannot quite tell apart—includ- ing two Negro men who “resemble each other about as much as an anteater and a glowworm.” All this white heat is stoked into an essay, not a novel. Miss Polite is careless of characterization — perhaps because she intended to evoke universal emotions rather than those of individuals. There is a fine prologue, which describes the girl’s childhood in the South where dreams, devils, spells and hoaxes bind Negroes to the implication that God fa- vors whites: “It was not right to feel alive, warm, or free.” Here, the language is telegraphic yet sensual, succinct in its imagery. But there’s an abrupt stylistic change in Chapter 1, clearly of the au- thor’s choosing. Much of the succeeding novel plunges into preciosity: “Night was a dream world with heretic writh- ing with the giddyup of acetylene spurs.” Convictions and passions are filtered through forced images that weaken and disperse them. Miss Polite’s gifted intel- ligence may have been overdosed with the pumped-up prose of some writer like Anais Nin: a brand of symbol clashing that’s irrelevant to the substantial themes of The Flagellants. Yet her work is so painfully urgent that it’s worth digesting her overseasoned language: the ingredi- ents are too strong to be negated. Do Svidanyia, Ilya ALEXANDER WERTH Was Ilya Ehrenburg my friend? It is difficult to say. He was moody and un- predictable and, as with others who knew him, our friendship had its ups and downs. We first met very casually in Paris, around 1930. He was then one of the great “Montparnasseans,” a friend of the late Modigliani, a friend of Léger and Picasso. With me, he was haughty and standoffish. I got on better with him in Madrid, when we had drinks in the shell-battered Hotel Florida with Ernest Hemingway. He was the war correspond- ent of /zvestia, I the correspondent of the Manchester Guardian, and we stood, as it were, on the same side of the barri- cade. But the great Stalin “purges” were then at their height, and Ehrenburg’s friend, the famous Pravda correspondent in Spain, Mikhail Koltsov, was soon to be recalled to Moscow and shot. Ehren- burg, though passionately devoted to the Spanish Republican cause, was, clearly, uneasy about what was going on in Rus- sia at the time, and was cagéy and un- communicative. I did not become great friends with him until the war years in Russia. Those were perhaps the greatest years in Ehrenburg’s life. In a frenzy of work, THE NATION/ October 9, 1967 oso aoe fS ee a? ee oe —for Pravda, for the Red Army yaper, The Red Star, for newspapers in _ England, the United States, Sweden and other countries. His pungent anti-Nazi | and, in effect, anti-German propaganda _ was brilliant, with nothing to equal it _ except for some pieces by Sholokhov or | Alexei Tolstoy; but these were occa- _ sional, while Ehrenburg turned out his pages and pages of brilliant invective and ridicule day after day—right up to April, 1945 when, with the Russian armies al- ready deep inside Germany, Stalin sud- denly put a stop to them. There were good reasons for this: it was no good saying any more that a/l Germans were evil, and that even German democrats, if Socialists and Communists were noth- | ing but Nazis in disguise. Russian troops _ in Germany were running wild, the time Was approaching when the Russian oc- _ cupation authorities would have to find some “good” Germans with whom to run the country. The sudden disavowal of Ehrenburg was done in the usual nasty and malicious “Stalinist” way, and Ehren- burg felt deeply hurt. After all, had not Stalin himself said that Ehrenburg’s _. propaganda had been worth as much as twenty or thirty divisions of fighting men? But Stalin, for all his inhumanity, nev- er quite forgot the immense service Ehrenburg had rendered the country throughout the war years, and particu- larly in the grim years of 1941 and 1942. Ehrenburg was immensely popular in the country, and especially in the army; Russian guerrilla fighters were known to swap a Tommy gun for a bunch of Ehrenburg clippings. He had greatly contributed to Russian wartime folklore—with his image of the “Winter Fritz,” wrapped in feather boas and oth- er women’s garments stolen from the Russian people at the time of the Battle of Moscow, and with an icicle hanging from his red nose. Some Russian soldiers resented the contempt and ridicule with which Ehrenburg treated a deadly pow- erful and efficient enemy but, on bal- ance, his ultra-patriotic pieces proved highly salutary. — ; = = re I saw a great deal of Ehrenburg during the war, often at his home with his charming wife, Lyuba, an excellent painter who must have been a very beau- tiful young woman, and his adored Scotch terrier, Boozoo. (I even figure together with Boozoo in one passage of his Memoirs.) After the war, my rela- tions with Ehrenburg deteriorated. I saw little of him during my last two years in Moscow, 1947 and 1948, and when I met him again at the “Partisans of Peace” Congress in Paris in 1949, he scarcely said hello to me. A few years ago, I reminded him of that unpleasant episode. “Yes, 1 re- THE NATION/October 9, 1967 ‘toi cen, ' ‘a > * ah fie ; Nod Wea member,” he said, “but those were dif- ficult, very difficult times.” They were indeed. I had just published a book de- nouncing Zhdanov’s victimization of writers, artists and composers, while Ehrenburg was still part of the Soviet Establishment. I knew he wholly agreed with what I had said of Zhdanov but that he had to keep quiet. He spoke bril- liantly and passionately at the “Partisans of Peace” meetings at the height of the cold war. And that is about all he did during those years. However, an “obit- uary” in an English paper after Ehren- burg’s death is grossly unfair: He prospered while the best of his colleagues were being killed, crushed, or rodv-ed to silence. A Jew, he not only stood by while Stalin conducted his post- war campaign against Soviet Jewry, but actively joined in the witch hunt. A cos- mopolitan, he assisted in Zhdanov’s hounding of “rootless cosmopolitans.” In reality he did not join in any witch hunt; nor did he “assist” Zhdanov in any way. The same writer states: “Only the Recording Angel knows all the facts of Ehrenburg’s career”; but the title of the article, “Ehrenburg, the Unhappy Villain,” clearly insinuates that Ehren- burg was guilty of unspeakable crimes. Since the Recording Angel did not re- veal his secrets to the author of the ar- ticle, the insinuations are all the more gratuitous. What, indeed, was Ehren- burg’s crime? Clearly, that he “survived.” whereas many other Jewish writers did not. Most of the Jewish writers who per- ished in Stalin’s anti-Semitic drive around 1950 were specifically Yiddish, and not simply Jewish writers. Others of Jewish nationality or origin, but writing in Rus- sian, survived, just as Ehrenburg did— Ley Kassil, Victor Shklovsky, Pavel Antokolsky, to mention only the best known. I knew Ehrenburg for years; and I never found anything sinister or evil about him; on the contrary, he was a man of great goodness. He was im- mensely helpful to young writers of tal- ent he discovered, such as the soldier-poet Simeon Gudzenko, and many others. After Stalin’s death (until then he had little choice but to keep silent, except at the international Peace Meetings) he became the greatest and most effective liberal influence throughout Russia. In 1954, he wrote his novel, The Thaw, the very title of which marked a whole epoch in Russian literature. It was a fierce indictment of Zhdanovism, even at a time when nobody else dared speak up against either Zhdanov or Stalin. His six volumes of Memoirs, to which he devoted the last years of his life, are a continuous plea for better and freer art and literature, for a “broader outlook,” for greater tolerance and understanding toward the great modern art of the West. In Russia, he popularized some of his old friends: Matisse, Léger, Modigliani, Picasso; and spoke scathingly of Alex- ander Gerasimov, Stalin’s “painter lau- reate” and the other academic hacks of official “Soviet art.” He did his utmost to “rehabilitate” writers who had com- mitted suicide or had died in the purges —Isaac Babel, Marina Cvetaeva, Osip Mandelstam, Andrei Belyi and many others. He had the courage to speak up for Pasternak and to protest vio- lently against the Siniaysky-Daniel trial. He was deeply loathed and savagely at- tacked by Ilyichey, head of the propa- ganda department of the Central Com- mittee, by Khrushchev himself in 1963 and (more recently, by that self-appoint- The University of Iowa Second Biennial Conference for Modern Letters “THE NEW GROTESQUE, or, Is There a Post Realistic Fiction?” (Sponsored by the University of lowa English Department and Center for Modern Letters) Speakers Warner Berthoff, “The Novel in a Time of Troubles” Susan Sontag, “The New Fiction” Robert Creeley, “Writing Writing” Ronnie Davis, “The San Francisco Mime Troupe and SatEvePost Realism” Richard Poirier, “The Literature of Self Parody” Carl Oglesby, “Literature and Violence” Robert Scholes, “Making Sense of It AIL” Plus San Francisco Mime Troupe in “L’Amant Militaire’ and “Olive Pits” University of Iowa Theater in Samuel Beckett's “Come and Go” Additional Participants . Jakov Lind, Joseph Heller, J. G. M. Le Clézio, Paul Krassner, Iris Murdoch, and others. Thursday-Saturday, October 19-21, 1967 Fee $5.00, Students $3.00 William D. Coder, Director of Conferences, ‘University of Iowa, lowa City, 52240 For reservations, write: ed Grand Inquisitor of Russian litera- ture, Mikhail Sholokhov. | had my last meeting with Ehren- burg two months before he died. I had Junch—French wine, French cigarettes and all—at his Gorki Street apartment— almost a small museum of Chagalls, Matisses, Picassos and Légers, all given to him by the painters themselves. He was physically in poor shape, but men- tally as witty and alert as ever. He was certain that the “liberals” were slowly but surely winning in Russian literature, and thought there would again be a great Russian literature—in twenty years’ time. When I asked him what he thought of the vicious attack made on him by Sholokhov at the Writers’ Con- gress shortly before, he remarked: “Well, you see, in our country we have only one party, so everybody gets into it, even Fascists like Sholokhov!” New Light on Jesus THE LIFE OF JESUS. By Marcello Craveri. Translated from the Italian by Charles Lam Markmann. Grove Press. 520 pp. $7.95. HUGH J. SCHONFIELD Mr. Schonfield is the author of books on the Bible, the Dead Sea scrolls and Judaism. His most recent book is The Passover Plot (Bernard Geis Associates). Books on the life of Jesus had their hey- day in the 19th century when the devel- Opment of rationalist thinking allowed the subject to be treated with much greater freedom than previously. Writers of various persuasions, some scholarly and some highly imaginative, made their contribution toward the interpretation of the enigma of the central figure of the Christian faith. But the number of such treatments has tended to decline in the 20th century, especially in the | past twenty-five years, now that it has been clearly established that genuine bio- graphical infermation is quite insufficient for a life of Jesus. Attention has therefore been concentrated on seeking to clarify aspects of his personality and activities. The principal sources of information, the four Gospels, are recognized today as reflections of Christian thinking from fifty to seventy-five years after the time of Jesus, when Christianity was operating chiefly in a pagan environment and had been severed substantially from its orig- inal Jewish milieu, and when ideas about Jesus’ nature and mission had greatly changed. What remained of the Jesus of history was confined to certain salient events in his brief career and some con- fused recollections of sayings and in- cidents handed down by tradition. Enough has fortunately survived to enable us to be confident that the man Jesus, a Galilean Jew, really did exist and was crucified at Jerusalem by the Romans as pretender to the Jewish throne during the governorship of Pon- tius Pilate. Beyond this, something of his character and intentions could be ascer- oes by a careful comparison of the traditions about him, with the religious, 346 social, economic and politigal conditions in Palestine at the time. Here a most valuable addition to knowledge has re- cently been furnished by the discovery of the Dead Sea scrolls. The best service which the general writer still can perform is to convey the fruits of the specialized studies of scholars in a readable manner to a pub- lic which is avid for new light on the figure of Jesus, all the more because so much that was formerly taught and believed about him has proved to be mythical. But this is not exactly what Dr. Cra- veri has attempted. He has a certain familiarity with recent discoveries and opinions based on a considerable reading of authorities; yet in writing what he calls RIGOLETTO I thought you were crazy (My own father) But I listened too, As the ancient record squeaked out Caro Nome. “She was very funny-looking, You said (with a look that told That I was beautiful), “But her voice made up for everything.” I squealed along, imitating the notes In a feverish falsetto. (Gilda—Galli-Curci lived Somewhere in New York, But she couldn't hear us.) Though only a second soprano, 1 am still your first daughter, Dragging around \a maledizione. At the top of my voice ! hear you singing, Incredulous that you are not yet dead. Two years, That I sing our duet, Silly or not. FLORENCE VICTOR the 19th century than to the * mid-208 This perhaps was inevitable in writing for "4 Italians with a Roman Catholic back- ground, to whom much that has been familiar to others is still extremely novel and perturbing. The author has indeed been quite courageous in boldly stating many things about Jesus which would shock convinced Catholics and even a good many Protestants. Craveri’s book is well written, extreme- ly readable, and follows an orderly plan; but curiously it blends a progressive narration of the story of Jesus, and an exposition of his teaching founded upon the Gospels, with the frequent denial that their information is dependable. This in- ‘vests the portrayal of Jesus with an at- mosphere of complete unreality which Dr. Craveri seeks to overcome by dis- quisitions, not always correct, on certain ideas and attitudes of the period, and by a parade of Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek terms, with explanations which suggest insights unfortunately not borne out by many of the author’s statements. Dr. Craveri has endeavored to assimi- late a great deal of information obtained from a host of scholarly works without discriminating in his employment of them. His sources represent a very mixed bag of good and bad authorities. The re- sult is that his book contains a number of errors of fact and ludicrous blunders, which could not have been perpetrated by anyone not forced to depend on what he could glean from the writings of others. This is particularly so when he deals with Jewish matters of paramount ‘importance in writing about Jesus and his background. Dr. Craveri is much better with his Latin, his classics and his church fathers, and the merits of his book lie in his comments on how the image of Jesus was changed by the development of the — Christian faith. He makes it very clear that the theological Christ as God in- carnate is totally unhistorical. The Life of Jesus would have gained by dealing solely with the transforma- tion of Christianity. As it is, the author has provided a book of inordinate length in which his attacks on the follies of Roman Catholicism are so intermingled with his account of Jesus that his purpose is diffused. The book is not made more up to date by dragging in the recovered Gospel of Thomas, as if this Gnostic: or quasi- Gnostic work were a relevant source of . information. Much in modern scholarship that would be more relevant has escaped the author’s notice, or perhaps was not available to him in Italy. We must treat the book, therefore, not as the production of a New Testament scholar—the author is a teacher of Italian and Latin literature —but as the thinking on paper of a man independently eager to discover for him- self the Jesus behind the myths and mar- THE NATION/ October 9, 1967 "an adoring Church. His findings ‘si Id at least help to clear away some ‘the cobwebs which still cling to the minds of traditionalists, and if he suc- ceeds at all in this, the years he has de- voted to his task will not have been spent in vain. The translator could not be expected to rectify Dr. Craveri’s ignorance of things Jewish, but he deserves high com- mendation for what must have been a most strenuous undertaking, accomplish- ed with great literary competence. Book Marks SARA BLACKBURN Mrs. Blackburn, a former. book editor for a New York publishing house, is now a free- ‘ance writer. $250,000. By Edward M. Cohen. G. P. Putnam’s Sons. 252 pp. $4.95, Mr. Cohen’s publisher notes that his novel “makes A Mother’s Kisses look like Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm.” He might have described it more tellingly as the Oliver Twist of New York Jewish novels, except that Mr. Cohen has creat- ed a series of characters so grotesque —and so repulsive—that he has allowed them to almost literally nag his novel to death by the end of its second chapter. By then, most readers will be unable to muster interest in whether Blossom (“Her breasts fell almost to her navel and her hips hung from her waist like heavy bags of flour’) will share the _ $250,000 which she has systematically embezzled from her employer over a thirty-year period with her sadistic roommate/mother (“ . .. I tried to get rid of you in the bathtub, but even be- fore you were born you were strong as an ox”) or her bookie brother, Itchy (“Bloated bags of skin ballooned under his eyes and heavy jowls dragged on his mouth.”). $250,000 is too exaggeratedly grotesque to be shocking, and too full of a kind of anger which Mr. Cohen isn't in charge of to be funny. This is too bad, because the author can write, and it is not wholly to his discredit to say that his characters have gotten out of his control, taken on a hideous life of their own, and spoiled his book, THE MIMIC MEN. By V. S. Naipaul. The Macmillan Company. 301 pp. $4.95. The Mimic Men is for readers of “fine fiction” as opposed to good novels. It is a serious, urbane and beautifully writ- ten book, but its concerns, despite the fact that it is engaged in exploring the tragic conflicts of Modern Man and his _ THE NATION/October 9, 1967 FREE with each new subscription The Text of the Controversial Republican White Paper THE WAR IN VIETNAM Prepared by the Staff of the Senate Republican Policy Committee | Although disowned by some Republicans and criticized by some Democrats, this document has been highly praised by Senators as varied in their views as Senators Dirksen, Aiken and Fulbright. subscribe to | NATION America’s most habit-forming magazine The NATION 333 Sixth Avenue New York, N.Y. 10014 subscription to The Nation. Please send my FREE copy of THE WAR IN VIETNAM. [] 1 Year, $10 []2 Years, $18 [7] 6 Mos., $6 (Foreign and Canadian postage: $1 per year extra) Herewith my order and payment for a NEW we eee era so eras eee er seroseseeenessoveseeo0eR22904F2892FR92004F 44980 eet e so see eee ere eee er esasesesecosseeseessseeeesrsessesecesrs ee eeeeese 347 Place in a Changing Society, are 60 curiously out of touch with any tangible kind of reality that it is. an academic novel, to be assigned in contemporary literature courses as an example of the modern novel of ideas. Its setting alter- nates between London and a Trinidad- like colonial island; its protagonist, Ralph Singh, is an extension of V. S. Naipaul’s own Indian/Trinidadian back- ground, and Mr. Naipaul draws him through his various roles as student, lover, husband, man of the world, poli- tician, exile and recluse with skill, wit and a fine sense of timing. But this is a novel that has little to do with life and a great deal to do with people who spend a lot of time thinking about it. There is finally an overeducated prissiness to The Mimic Men that comes of an aver- sion to the kind of passion and engage- ment which Mr. Naipaul and his Singh know is out there somewhere. And al- though it may be- argued that this is exactly the tragedy which Mr. Naipaul is using Singh to explore, the very passiv- ity of Singh’s position as withdrawn and jaded observer makes him a rather exas- perating character. RAPPAPORT. By Morris Lurie. William Morrow & Co. 223 pp. $4.95. It’s a pleasure to recommend, of all things, this New York Jewish novel set The Nation BOOK SERVICE Offers the following at a discount: FAMINE 1975! America’s Who will Survive? by Decision: William and Paul Paddock (Little, Brown, $6.50) .. $5.20 PRISON NOTES by Barbara Deming LGrOssep rn SB4i95) i. woke tae ite pate ets $3.95 D THE NEW RADICALISM by Christopher Lasch (Knopf, $6.95) .. $5.55 THE GOODBYE LAND by Jose Yglesias (Pantheon, $4.95) ............. [J AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF BERTRAND RUSSELL, 1872-1914 (Little, Brown & “ES ara Re DL ERD (J THE FREE WORLD COLOSSUS: A Critique of American Foreign Policy in the Cold War by David Horowitz (HiT and) Wang, /$6;95))o oc end ieee 5.55 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF POWER by $3.95 Ronald Sampson (Pantheon, $4.95) .... Remittance accompanying orders should be made payable to THE NATION, 333 6th Ave., N.Y- 10014 0 Payment enclosed oO Please bill me Readers can avail themselves of our regular offer to send them any book (ex- cept paperbacks), published in the U.S. at the retail price post-free. When order- ing, please give title, author and publisher. 10-9-67 ‘ bien fie nares rma Sn Be aS Ea CRE LI TE uk mabe ae 348 in Australi elec is a day in the lives of Joseph Rappaport and his friend Michael Friedlander, both in their 20s, high school graduates engaged respective- ly in the antique and advertising busi- nesses, and striving mightily to be hip- sters—not hippies—in Melbourne. If Mr. Naipaul tells us eloquently about aliena- tion, Morris Lurie, with none of his ad- mirable intellectual trappings, what it’s like. Rappaport and Fried- lander devour American magazines, talk incessantly about Bogey and the Marx Brothers, listen avidly to Sonny Rollins, but are both more or less in the full-time business of looking for a formal entrance into life without being shy, as they are, about closeness, friendship, sex, and the possibilities of love. With all of its witty bravado—and Rappaport is a very funny book—Mr. Lurie’s novel has an unfright- ened sweetness, a warmth and directness that have been missing in its hipster- oriented American counterparts for a shows us - Jong time, The book sa bit middle, and has suffered somewhat | what seems to be a two-year gap b tween its writing and publication in this — country, but Mr. Lurie is a very good ~ novelist, and the best measure of my admiration for Rappaport is to say that I would buy his next book the day it appeared. NOBODY LOVES A DRUNKEN IN- DIAN. By Clair Huffaker. David McKay Co. 278 pp. $4.95, One mark of a poor reviewer is vitriol without information. I risk it here to note that the publication of Mr. Huf- faker’s slick, awkward and unfunny “comic” novel about life today on a West- ern Indian reservation is an ironical re- minder that William Eastlake’s ‘classic novels on the subject, Go In Beauty and The Bronc People, continue to remain out of print. FILMS/ Harold Clurman Innocent that I am, I enjoyed every one of the seven features I saw during the first week of the Fifth New York Film Festival at Lincoln Center. When I say that, I am not necessarily recom- mending them as good pictures. Some of them have glaring flaws: in some cases, a strained archness or an allusive- ness bordering on the unintelligible. Nor am I particularly interested in technical devices (“pure cinematics”) which pre- occupy the true movie buff. What I appreciated most of all was the relevance of virtually all the ex- hibits to the worlds which produced them. They are much more expressions of our day than most of the plays we see in the theatre. We expected the festival to begin with “experiment”; it began with ex- cellence. The Battle of Algiers is a first- rate picture. From the specialist’s point of view this film—the work of a 35- year-old Italian director Gillo Ponte- corvo—is remarkable for being an en- tirely convincing “documentary” of which not one foot is composed of stock shots or newsreel material. Yet one finds that one is there in the midst of the moment. A sense of the actual is never compromised by the taint of con- trivance for effect. An expert may also admire the organizational capacity the picture demonstrates. In appearance and movement, the crowd scenes convey reality more strikingly than do the tech- niques of cinéma vérité, The Battle of Algiers creates the im- pression of total objectivity. Folks with a particular political bias will contradict this. (A Parisian journalist told me that the picture was under official ban in France and that the Algerians had con- tributed not only their land but funds to the film’s making.) The film may be “read” in various ways according to one’s sentiments and convictions without our being oppressed by a feeling that a prejudiced view is being foisted upon us. Yet a specific emotion is communi- cated: the film is saying something. It embodies an idea without engaging in argument or special pleading. The picture mirrors events in the Algerian uprising against French domi- nance of their country. At first we wit- ness incidents in the terrorist campaign initiated by members of one cell of the National Liberation Front (the FLN). We are shown parts of the French counter-terror — bombings, etc. The Algerians kill a number of the French- European policemen; the French re- taliate with even greater ferocity. The Algerians then blow up several cafés and an air terminal largely frequented by the Europeans. The French army formally intervenes through a paratroop division headed by a Colonel Mathieu. With quiet and deadly efficiency he rounds up the leaders of one of the most active of the terrorist units. Though the army code does not contain the word, torture is re- sorted to. When the last of the terrorists is trapped (along with his aides) the group is liquidated: the FLN rebellion is quelled. All this happens in 1954. THE NATION/ October 9, 1967 q i ~~ =a ee No matter who is being de- _ stroyed, we shudder at the terror of the events. We take little satisfaction at the “triumph” of one side or the other in the mutual slaughter. (We even pity the poor cops.) In one of the cafés we see a crowd of Europeans (French) at their drinks and a baby licking an ice cream cone. When the place is blown up we remember that child. We are outraged at the wantonness of this “senseless murder.” 2 We of course are equally infuriated by _ the French when we witness the terrible pain inflicted on the Algerian prisoners from whom their captors are determined to elicit information. The variety and ‘ingenuity of the means employed add to the horror of the procedures. We ad- mire the cool austerity, the intelligence and soldierly self-discipline of the French colonel but we realize that he is a killer. (He points out that he was a member of the underground against the Nazis and is thus no Fascist.) We re- spect the terrorist leaders for their de- termination, courage and steely prag- matism but they are as ruthless as the French. Even in its most violent scenes the film indulges in neither sentimen- tality nor delight in cruelty. It contains none of the sadism common to so many pictures presented as entertainment. The objectivity of The Battle of Algiers is not indifference. We might conclude that the picture’s final state- ment is pacifist. But I doubt that that ds its intention. Pacifism is an untenable position unless one is willing to die rather than to resist evil through fight- ing. Only the saintly are capable of such a course, and very few of us are that. In the context of the picture alone I found myself partisan of neither side. Some in the audience equated the struggle in Algiers with the war in Viet- nam. Others thought of the more violent aspects of the civil rights move- ment: Watts, Detroit, Newark, and so on. Such analogies are misleading or false. The French had much more justi- fication for the repression of the Algerian revolt than we have in inter- vening in Southeast Asia: they had been in Algeria for 130 years, had developed the country and given full rights of citizenship to the Algerians. Is the picture “revolutionary” then, as we understood the term in_ the thirties? Not precisely. Still what it com- _municates is not nebulous or indeter- minate in its implications. What we may gather from it politically is that ulti- | | THE NATION/October 9, 1967 oe tee mately no people will allow itself to be ruled by alien force. In many respects the Algerians profited from the French presence in their country and were treated better than we have treated the black man in ours. They still wanted to be free of any governing class not of their stock, language, tradition or religion. Even this, however, is not the picture’s true import. Its content has classic and tragic dimensions beyond politics. Wars are as unreasonable as they are terrible. For it may be argued that they rarely achieve the benefits that both sides sincerely claim they are bat- tling to bring about. (Are not many now shocked at Algeria’s position in the Mideast situation?) It has been man- kind’s destiny to engage in internecine conflict when in one manner or another it suffers oppression. No matter how futile the effort may prove in view of the later consequences, the world bursts into flames of anger and homicide when men can no longer bear what they con- sider to be unspeakable injustice. This is tragic because the actual process and conduct of these conflagrations are always and everywhere “inhumanly” infernal. If this is not so then all history is a meaningless shambles. How many of us truly believe this? War and revolutions may not be in- evitable. We pray and plan to avoid them but from time immemorial they have not been avoided. In that sense they are all too human. Understanding and wisdom are impossible without an initial recognition of this tragic fact. We can accept it without condemning our- selves to hopelessness, to an impotent fatalism or to a hawkish militarism. Much of this may be strongly con- tested. On another occasion I might contest it myself! That I should be im- pelled to say this now is simply evidence of the picture’s sober eloquence, its modest power. Its acting, as well as its other elements, is in the vein of a simple and direct expressiveness. Particularly striking in this regard are Jean Martin as the French colonel: dignified, hard, tempered, keen, and the two men of unalterable commitment and resolution who play the FLN leaders. (Are they professional actors?) The brave 10-year old Algerian boy who is part of the rebel equipe is also perfectly cast and directed. All in all then The Battle of Algiers is a film of which it may be said without absurdity that it is a masterpiece of epic realism. My only demur relates to the musical score about which Pontecorvo was especially concerned and on which he is said to have collaborated. The music is not “bad’”—it will not interfere with anyone’s appreciation of the picture— but in respect to the rest it is rather conventional and not stylistically con- sonant with the whole. I was able to see six other of the festival’s first week’s offerings: the Yugoslav An Affair of the Heart, Le Départ, directed in French by a Pole in Belgium, Funnyman, an American film by John Korty, the West German Yesterday’s Girl and Young Toerless, and finally the Swedish Hugs and Kisses. Though none of them are with- out blemish they all, I repeat, have the merit of dealing with a relevant reality, things which in one way or another touch us. I hope to discuss them in a forthcoming issue. But this much may be immediately said: comedy or drama, they all register testimony of a sad world of confusion, wasted energy, in- creasing spiritual isolation, and of a freeze of emotional sensibility. The con- solation—no matter how dismal the re- port—is that they are being made. HELEN YGLESIAS Like A Beautiful Child is a beautiful little film which you are unlikely to get a chance to view unless you are a member of Local 1199 of the Drug and Hospital Employees, who produced this twenty-six-minute documentary as an aid in union organization. It is a most effective one. What is more sur- prising is that it turned out to be an artistic and social venture full of other lessons it surely never intended to teach —not the least of which is that it is WRITERS Y. publisher wants books on all subjects, fletion’ nonfiction, No fee for professional opinion. FREE: Brochures that show how your book can be published, publicized, sold; cone tracts, Write Dept. 147. EXPOSITION PRESS INC. 386 Park Ave, So., New York, N. Y. 10016 YOU SHOULD KNOW CANADA BETTER! Read CANADIAN DIMENSION Editor: C. W. Gonick Leading forum of Canadian opinion. Independent and lively. Send $4.00 for a trial year’s subscription—8 Big Issues Write: CANADIAN DIMENSION P.O. Box 1413 Winnipeg 1, Manitoba, Canada NOTICE TO SUBSCRIBERS! ALL change of address notices, orders for subscriptions and other correspondence, should be sent to: THE NATION, 333 Sixth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10014 » 349, possible to make so good a film on a $5,000 budget. Moe Foner, the union’s executive secretary, conceived and plotted the project with the help of John Schultz, a TV professional. Schultz directed; Don Hunstein, a still photographer, worked the camera; and the narration, written by Foner, is persuasively understated by actor-John Randolph. The rest of the film belongs to the hospital workers. Schultz has taken his camera into the Harlem apartment of Ida Mae Cameron, following her out into the streets where she is “carrying her son to school” and then into the bowels of Mt. Sinai Hospital where she and her fellow workers do the jobs so un- thinkably menial that indeed we, above, manage to hardly ever think them. Once having seen the workers in the film, however, I don’t think it possible to ever enter a hospital again without a strong consciousness of the mainly black and Puerto Rican workers who cook, clean, mop, empty the bedpans and iron the uniforms. It is not the prevalent consciousness by which we delight to scare ourselves with the threat of the oppressed mass beast in our midst, its heart set on murder. What comes out of black Harlem and the barrio is supposed to be terrifying; but it seems that what comes out of those slums, when there are jobs for them to come out to, is the working class, which provided here with an ideology of militant brotherhood, is depicted as The Best Way To Get NATION THE NATION 333 Sixth Ave., New York 10014 10-9-67 {| One Year, $10 [_] Two Years, $18 [_] 6 Months, $6 L) Bill Me {_] Payment Enclosed (Foreign and Canadian Postage la year extra) SSSCSHOSCAHAHSEERHRSETTHETEEEKEOKHE RHR EEBERR EER’ UE RE hr Reddit tam OH. | : Ram erm tA Melis | ; REMIT SS eveiiede ts «vant Zip No.....\..... : SS eVREMSSNESASGun) ener innisasiKensacmnnnad 350 about ° ¥ va | made up of individual men and women of startling dignity and beauty. Like A Beautiful Child celebrates this old-fashioned working-class concept — and a number of others, equally un- fashionable. A film about an act of organization, it is itself well organized. Extolling the dignity of labor, it works its effects with admirably honest skill. A full close-up of a beautiful black girl serving a patient is matched by her own words and voice; in that authentic Harlem syntax and accent which only a genius might duplicate, she describes the raison d’ étre of her work, the grati- fication in helping others who are ill— “which everybody sometimes has to get sick.” A Puerto Rican mops the corridor floor and explains with characteristic sweetness why the work does not now demean him. A cook (light Negro or Puerto Rican) with the bearing of a U.N. dignitary cracks open eggs with consummate efficiency and tells of the power of the union to restore his man- hood: the supervisors may no longer call him “boy.” Since it is a film for a union audience it does the practical things it should do, telling of the benefits and hiring, the classes and techniques of organization. This is very well done and always in specifically human _ terms. When Ida Mae Cameron exults in the substantial pay increases won, “yes, a little more in the pay check there,” her voice is rich with satisfaction. The camera can also be mobile in making a surface comment, as in its skimming treatment of Lindsay and Robert Kennedy, the politicians “who come to us now.” It moves with the face of the black young man trying to outrun the brutally punishing encirclement of cops and high-pressure water hoses directed against a picket line, and bumps along with a neatly dressed black demon- strator (jacket, tie, hat) who goes limp and is dragged to the wagon. In fact, without making any fuss about it the film is also a celebration of successful black and white coalition— even of blacks and white Jews—for it faithfully records the Jewish accent of the union official who announces the big strike virtually won. Finally, it cele- brates victory, so difficult to believe in, given our modern propensity to find virtue in defeat and the stuff of art only in those adventures where the move- ment fails. Like A Beautiful Child is perfectly convincing in conveying the joy of victorious mass action; it makes us believe in it. The New York Times carried a story about the surprising impact of this film on its own union audiences a few weeks ago. The story created outside interest and the modest venture has moved ft aed eT ‘hpi etoes 7 ’ beyond the closed audience for it was intended: Moe Foner reports since the Times story he has hundreds of requests for the film. James Wechsler also wrote a column in the New York Post. After praising it and the incorruptibility of Local 1199, he used the film as a stick with which to beat the New Left and the New Politics Convention, exhorting them to learn the lesson of black and white coalition. In addition, the National Review started its predictable yapping about John Randolph’s political past. These are in- teresting signs of the film’s power to send forth ripples from its unassuming center. * For me the ripples extended back into the thirties and early forties when unions—“good” unions like 1199— were not such rare birds. The National Review reaction reminded me that though nobody could care less about such nonsense now, there was a time in the late forties and fifties when it would have béen enough to have the film banned and the union attacked. In a way, the National Review comment shows up the disingenuousness of Wechsler’s reaction. For surely he remembers, as I do, the systematic de- struction, by way of Taft-Hartley, McCarthyism and the anti-Communist liberals, of just the kind of coalition he calls for in his column. If the new radicals—black and white—literally do not know which way to turn in order to make their fragments coalesce into united action, it is not they who should be scolded. Their ugly problems, which lead to ugly solutions, are partly caused by the failure of any other movement to fill the vacuum left by the coalition which was destroyed and which de- stroyed itself. Though Local 1199’s film doesn’t get into any of this, it does have Malcolm X at a union rally and keeps his words on the sound track as un- compromising as they came straight from his mouth. I don’t know what other union would do that. Its a measure of the film’s concept of “brotherhood,” and of what constitutes the whole of a worker’s life. Not only union scale—there’s plenty of that around—but the higher working-class awareness of solidarity, which in a few deft and poignant strokes Like A Beauti- ful Child does so much to revive. One more ripple: what are all those underground film makers with the hand- held cameras doing, when there are stories like this to be told? Robert Hatch has been on leave of absence. His regular film column will resume this month. THE NATION/ October 9, 1967 es sy, oe SC ACROSS: 1 Stores might be for those with toy pistols; winter sports activities might go on under them. (8,4) 9 The sort of desk confused with what might be commonly jeft without hesita- tion. (10) 10 See 5 down 11 Elicit as a shaker for salt? (8) 12 A joker, perhaps, around an absurd yarn. (6) 13 Start with crushed stone! (5) 15 Change is left up to the malignant. (8) 16 Has quite a compulsive force at intro- ducing religious articles. (8) 19 Observes how to prepare 13? (5) 21 Hamlet’s man was noble in it. (6) 22 Concerning what most women want to keep as something to do when things don’t add up. (8) 24 Just mediocre entertainment. (4) 25 Looks over the washing equipment? They might provide a sense of balance. (5,5) 26 Re legal minds of this sort, one is likely to go to pieces when thrown into the conflict. (5,7) DOWN: 2 Sounds like what some do with mint sauce, as they run away. (4,2,2,3,3) EEE & ie) Pe | if a ee | el ist | i i i ey ee oe) | | ES i i | Aa oe | a ee anti | ee eee Re | ab No gentleman passes the best clubs rec- ommended by them. (7) tw 4 Leaves from here in 3 down, perhaps. (5) 5 and 10 across where some cook and wash up? One might have been in the row, but hardly from choice. (6,5) Publicity speech is a matter of habit. (9) This is still broken by a word. (7) The drive might be what the magazine salesman hopes to make us. (14) 14 Catch-line of the professional? (9) 17 The stand some take in debate. (7) conn 18 The ways of the city-dweller. (7) 20 Not quite eight in ten might draw close. (7) 23 May not sound like a real member of the religious order! (5) SOLUTION TO PUZZLE NO. 1217 ACROSS: 1 Infringe; 5 Upshot; 10 Wrest; 12 Nominee; 13 Natural; 14 Ushers; 15 Session; 18 Paneled; 21 Thrust; 24 Infidel: 26 Genesee; 27 Germinate; 28 Weeps; 29 Rather; 30 Isolated. DOWN: 1 and 11 It won't be long now; 2 Freemason; 3 Intense; 4 Gibbets; 6 Penates; 7 Honor; 8 Toweling; 9 and 21 down Blind Staggers; 16 Insistent; 17 Springer; 19 Luddite; 20 Dollar; 22 Re- newal; 23 Messed; 25 First. Readers are invited to send for a free copy of Mr. Lewis’ The Nation, your request to Puzzle Department, N. Y. 10014. THE NATION/ October 9, 1967 <_> “ground rules.” Address 333 Sixth Avenue, New York, PUBLICATIONS “SELECTED POEMS” of GEORGE FLYNN (Villiers of London—$2.00) is “the most ex- citing American poetry since Ezra Pound.” —James Turner, Available in U.S. from the aoe at: 145 West 12 Street, New York City 10011. MONTHLY NEWSLETTER for a Guaranteed Income. Subscription: individual, $3.00; organ- izational. $6.00. Twenty page bibliography available, $2.00. Write: Ad Hoc Committee for a Guaranteed Income, 969 E. 60th Street, Chicago, Illinois 60637. RADICAL AMERICA, SDS journal of American Radical History. Sept.-Oct. issue just out. Liberalism, 1946-49; exchange on “History from the Bottom Up,” and 2 articles on suppression of Wobblies. 50¢ or $3/year (6 issues? to: P. Buhle, 1237a Spaight, Madison, Wis. 53703 BOOKPLATES FREE CATALOG—beautiful designs for every age and taste. Special designing too. Address: BOOKPLATES, Yellow Springs 2, Ohio. ART WOULD YOU BELIEVE? EXCITING ORIG- INAL woodcuts, etchings, lithos, $4.50 each. Subscription information: Graphic Circle, (N), 68 Fifth Avenue, New York City 10011 SERVICES MOVING? Professional moving at competitive rates. Anytime, anywhere. Licensed, insured, experienced. THE COVERED WAGON, ALgon- quin oF 1788 (N.Y.C.) PERSONALS. NO MORE WOODEN NICKELS HOFFA FOR PRESIDENT on 114” wood discs, also WASH OUT WASHINGTON. 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As ambassadors and secret agents, pirates and gov- ernment officials, army officers, debt- ors, and world travelers, the Sher- leys were legends in their own time. With wit and urbanity D. W. Davies traces their extravagant ad- ventures. 6 illustrations. 368 pages. $7.50 The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture By Davm Brion Davis. Winner, Pulitzer Prize in General Nonfiction, 1967. “A large, immensely learned, readable, exciting, disturbing... volume, one of the most important to have been published on the sub- ject of slavery in modern times. » «+ The book is brilliant.” M. I. Fintey, N. Y. Review of Books. 520 pages. $10.00 Henry James A Reader's Guide By S. Gortry Purr. “A provoca- tive stimulant for the Jamesian scholar, as Mr. Putt . . . knows the world of James, his critics, and his numerous detractors, and is able to balance these elements percep- tively.”—Virginia Quarterly Review. 432 pages. $6.95 ($2.95 in paperback) The Failures of Criticism Emended edition of “Writers and Their Critics” By Henri Peyre. With new ex- amples Professor Peyre has revised and expanded his lively evaluation of critical writing. “His scholarship is rich, vital, and extensive; his thought, brilliant.”—from a review of Writers and Their Critics in South Atlantic Quarterly. $8.75 384 pages. ($2.95 in paperback) Willa Cather and Her Critics Edited by James Scuroeter. “A generous collection of critical es- says on Cather selected with the intent of showing the changing crit- ical appraisal of her work from the 1920’s to 1965. The writers include H. L. Mencken, Carl Van Doren, Edmund Wilson, Sinclair Lewis, Joseph Wood Krutch, Rebecca West, David Daiches, Louise Bogan, Alfred Kazin, Henry Steele Commager, Howard Mumford Jones, and the editor.’”—American- Library Association Booklist. 408 pages. $10.00 The Morality of Scholarship Essays by NortHrop Frye, STUART Hampsuire. and Conor CRvuIsE O’Brien. Edited and with a Fore- word by Max Brack. The authors probe the complex questions of scholarly commitments and their re- lationship to the scholar’s social re- sponsibilities. This is the inaugural volume of Cornell’s new Studies in the Humanities series. 108 pages. $4.50 At your bookstore or from Cornell University Press -ITHACA, NEW YORK 14850 c _ ‘THE WORLD 1S THE PROBLEM HARVEY WHEELER ATION OCTOBER 16, 1967 35 cents The Spirit of Fascism _ Hooked on Law Enforcement EDGAR Z. FRIEDENBERG Data Banks The Punchcard Snoopers PHIL HIRSCH Ghetto Redevelopment Corporate Imperialism for the Poor RICHARD A. CLOWARD & FRANCES FOX PIVEN Cr. Styron’s Nat Turner er The Story SHAUN 0’CONNELL me A Note on the History HERBERT APTHEKER ore & Da o=“Oo o weve i ee ye es ~ Pa a SS LETTERS the Lynd case Dear Sirs: On Sept. 17, the Board of Governors of State Colleges and Universities of Illinois will very likely recon- sider the case of Staughton Lynd—a case, we believe, that raises issues of national importance. In July, the board re- jected the appointment of Lynd as associate professor of history by Chicago State College, even though the appoint- ment was unanimously recommended by the department of history and the president of the college. The board . . . did “not question Dr. Lynd’s ability as a scholar and as a teacher of history.” Instead it held that his “public activities’—his advocacy of “nonviolent civil diso- bedience” and his trip to Hanoi in 1965-66—“go beyond mere dissent.” So far this case has attracted very little attention outside Illinois, but we are confident that many readers will agree with us that the board’s action represents a particularly flagrant invasion of academic freedom. As such, it con- cerns everyone who values the right of dissent. We hope that readers of this letter, singly or in groups, will com- municate with the board at Springfield, Ill., urging upon them the principle that a man’s political views cannot be permitted to override the professional judgment of his PEELS Hn. Us Professors at a dozen private and public universities have formed a Committee for Academic Freedom in Illinois, which is attempting to publicize the case and to support Professor Lynd’s lawsuit against the board. Individuals who would like to sign the committee’s statement of principles and contribute to a fund for legal defense are urged to communicate with one of the co-chairmen of the committee who have signed this letter. Christopher Lasch, Northwestern University Evanston, Ill. Alfred F. Young, Northern Illinois University DeKalb, Til. restoring the consensus Durham, Conn. Dear Sirs: I disagree with the assessment of many editors and writers that President Johnson is caught in a difficult dilemma, the conflict between a continuing gradual escala- tion in Vietnam or genuine efforts at negotiating a peace, each alternative guaranteeing further displeasure from large segments of the "68 electorate. Not a statesman, Johnson is very definitely a politician, too clever to commit political suicide. He will run in ’68 and he will win. His victory will be assured by the deliberate involvement of this coun- try in a war with China. In the summer of 68 we will be “provoked” into a defensive assault upon China. If that happens, and if history is any teacher, the people will not turn the incumbent President out in the heat of so perilous a venture. That is the morality I see in this President and this Administration, and that is the future I see for this country unless by some miracle the Congress (or someone, or something) turns Johnson’s head in the next fourteen months. Robert F. Crosson, Ph.D. one threat is enough Lake Worth,, Fla. Dear Sirs: If our “over-kill” in thermonuclear weapons re- strains the second largest possessor of such destructive forces, why the necessity to traverse the globe with our military forces? It would be sufficient if the President di- rected our UN Ambassador to notify world delegates that in the event any country practiced aggression against us, we would treat their people to the devastation we have re- served for Soviet Russia. . . . George M. Fox 354 EDITORIALS Morton the Realist Sen. Thruston Morton’s switch from the pro-war to the anti-war side may well prove to be the key event in the 1968 election. A former GOP national chairman, Morton is respected by politicians of both parties for ex- pertise and integrity. He added to his authority by the manner in which he changed his position. He simply said, | “IT was mistaken.” This is the most effective way of avoid- ing fruitless discussion and the need for apologetics de- signed to prove that one can be right on both sides of a controversy. It also attracts attention by reason of its novelty. Other Senators could well make use of it. In an interview with John H. Averill of the Los Angeles Times, Mr. Morton discussed the public reaction to his switch. He mentioned the overriding reason for making it, which is that he felt it to be in the national interest to end the Vietnamese War as soon as possible and there- fore, as a matter of conscience, he could not continue to support the President. At the same time, he felt that he was voicing a view that a great body of citizens was be- ginning to adopt in their individual thinking. One reason for this swing in public sentiment is the duration of the war and the lack of any prospect of ending it by military means. At the same time President Johnson’s mistakes, and his efforts to cover up, are becoming more evident every day. It has become imperative for responsible poli- ticians of both parties to part company with him. Mr. Morton’s timing was good. His speech of September 27 did not come out of the blue. In our issue of August 29 we noted editorially that he had changed his mind and had said so in an interview that was little noted at the time. The underlying politics of the Presidential succession in 1968 furnishes ample reason for Morton’s determi- nation to drive the Republican Party toward a peace plat- form. The GOP is today a third party, as George Gallup pointed out in summarizing his latest poll. Out of every 100 adults, 42 describe themselves as Democrats, 31 as Independents and 27 as Republicans, If the Democrats cannot win as Democrats, much less can the Republicans win as Republicans. Experienced men like Morton, Cooper and Case see this clearly—and they know what is going on in the minds of that 31 per cent in the middle. Every day they are getting more sick of the war. Another phase of the GOP campaign tends in the same direction. Nixon is pursuing Goldwater’s 1964 tactic and his own tactic of 1960 in trying to corral dele- gates, a technique at which he has no equal. But this may not work in 1968 because of the large number of fav- orite-son delegations which did not exist in 1964, and— a point of cardinal importance—because the polls are superseding the primaries. Their temper is that a mod- erate Republican who is a critic of Johnson’s war policy has an excellent chance of the nomination—and of being elected. Whether the dump-Johnson movement will succeed is doubtful, but it does not have to succeed—Johnson THE NATION/ October 16, 1967 be got rid of without it. To be sure, the voters would e a wider choice if an end-the-war candidate were lable on the Democratic side, but in that case the pressure to line up the Republican Party against the war would be reduced. As for the chances of a Republican | hawk, at this juncture Morton does not rate them high. “Reagan doesn’t know what goes on beyond the contin- ental shelf,” he says. He is more afraid of Johnson’s ) Switching to an end-the-war position. Johnson, Morton ¢)), Says, is the canniest politician alive, and once he becomes ) convinced that an overwhelming majority of the voters want out of Vietnam he may act. But he cannot do it as Morton did—with a candid avowal of error. _ To rehabilitate the Republican Party requires a dump movement too, the dumpee being Senator Dirksen. What sensible, civilized men like Case, Morton and Cooper think of the old Illinois vaudevillian is better not quoted, | but it can be imagined. As long as Dirksen speaks for | the party, their work is not done. But what Morton has done makes a start. There is fea limited but effective logic in the two-party system. 1) Morton wants to give the voters a chance to exploit this d | logic: and in this he demonstrates his politcal realism. _ Electronic data processing (see “The Punchcard _ Snoopers” by Phil Hirsch, p. 369) is one of the most in- _ toxicating techniques of our age, and there is scarcely a major activity in the country, government or private, com- _ mercial or social, that is not busy applying the ubiquitous } punchcard to its problems and functions. _ With a data bank, every citizen’s medical record could | be available almost instantly to any hospital in the coun- _ try; with a data bank, a fire department could know with- _in minutes how many people lived in a blazing building. The historian Richard Hofstadter foresees that, with a _ data bank, the public could be polled any day, and if ‘y Decessary every day, on matters of sovereign concern: the franchise might again be as responsive to the public } weal as it was among the Athenians‘ in the brief glory of | their city-state. Governor Winthrop Rockefeller even dis- covered that, with a data bank, an instant Republican ' Party could be created in the one-party state of Arkansas. Yet Mr. Hirsch contemplates this electronic marvel _ with acute uneasiness and Edgar Friedenberg (“Hooked on Law Enforcement,” p. 360) suggests why. Technical innovations do not develop in a vacuum, or even according | to their own nature. They are shaped by the social and | political environment that spawns them. And, as Mr. ; Friedenberg describes in detail, this American decade is _ scarcely an ideal time in which to store away for instant _ availability the salient facts about every human being in | the country. Such a compendium of almost godlike knowledge implies an almost godlike forbearance, but | ours is an age when sanctions upon the individual, and | techniques for applying them, grow ever more pressing. As Mr. Hirsch shows, the facts about you that are so- licited ostensibly for one purpose are readily and indis- | criminately passed along for quite other purposes. Even | when your vital statistics are not keyed to your name, THR NATION/Orctoher 16. 1967 IN THIS ISSUE EDITORIALS 354 ARTICLES October 16, 1967 358 The World Is the Problem 360 The Spirit of Fascism: Harvey Wheeler Hooked on Law Enforcement 365 Ghetto Redevelopment: Edgar Z. Friedenberg Corporate Imperialism for the Poor 368 Letter from Munich 369 Data Banks: The Punchcard Snoopers Richard A. Cloward and Frances Fox Piven C. Amery Phil Hirsch BOOKS & THE ARTS 373 Styron’s Nat Turner. . 374 Historical Days (poem) 375 ...A Note on the History 376 Earnest Revolutionary 377 The American Unconscious Shaun O’Conneil Jay Wright Herbert Aptheker Peter Berek John Bright 378 Down and Out in Havana Richard J. Walton 380 Theatre 381 Films 383 Crossword Puzzle Publisher JAMES J. STORROW JR. Editor CAREY McWILLIAMS Executive Editor ROBERT HATCH Copy Editor MARION HESS Theatre HAROLD CLURMAN Art MAX KOZLOFF Music BENJAMIN BORETZ Science CARL DREHER Advertisiog Manager MARY SIMON Harold Clurman - Harold Clurman Frank W. Lewis Associate Publisher GIFFORD PHILLIPS Associate Editor PHIL KERBY Literary Editor HELEN YGLESIAS Poetry Editor MICHAEL GOLDMAN Wasnington ROBERT G. SHERRILL Paris ALEXANDER WERTH London RAYMOND WILLIAMS Bonn Cc. AMERY Canberra Cc. P. FITZGERALD The Nation is published weekly (except biweekly in July and August) by the Nation Magazine Company and copyright 1967 in the U.S.A. by the Nation Associates, Inc., 333 Sixth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10014, Tel.; CH 2-8400. West Coast office: '1256 Westwood Boulevard, Los Angeles, Calif..90024. Tel.: GR 4-2533. Second class postage paid at New -York, N. ¥. and at additional mailing office. Subscription Price: One year, $10; two years, $18. Foreign and Canadian postage: $1 extra per year, Change of Address: It js essential. that subscribers ordering.a change of address give four weeks’ notice and provide ‘their old as well as their new address. Please give Zip Code numbers for both addresses. Information to Libraries: The Nation is indexed in Readers Guide to Periodical Literature, Book Review Digest, Book Review Index and the Public Affairs Information Service. NATION "2" | Combined with FRONTIER 6 St re a they go into a pool to create a “norm” to which you and a thousand others must conform in getting a loan, insur- ance, or a job. It is not who you are that counts, it is how you fit. Behind this lies something that Mr. Friedenberg calls the spirit of fascism. He is not evoking concentration camps by that phrase but rather the disposition to treat people as cogs in a consensus. It is the peculiar faculty of the computer that it can reduce the most diverse and idiosyncratic data to cogs. There is no doubt that it can thus produce knowledge that was hitherto beyond our grasp. Nor is there doubt that much of this knowledge could prove valuable to a society whose complexity grows at a bewildering speed. But there is nevertheless every reason to doubt that we are prudent to feed these ma- chines with information about ourselves for the use of institutions whose motives we do not know and have no reason to trust. The computer revolution is at least as radical as was the industrial revolution, and is capable of as much distortion of human lives. CDC Convention Long Beach, Calif. The California Democratic Council’s special conven- tion here September 30 was not so spectacular as the conference on New Politics a month earlier in Chicago. However, Long Beach may prove to be more significant than Chicago. For the first time since our military ad- venture began in Vietnam, a group of Democrats is chal- lenging President Johnson and his war policy within the electoral machinery of the party. The CDC, which repre- sents 33,000 members and is the largest volunteer Dem- ocratic organization in the country, will send an anti- war slate of delegates to the 1968 National Convention. It was all accomplished under Robert’s Rules of Order and rather quietly, too. The decision to enter a peace slate was never in doubt. Twenty-one CDC directors who disapproved of the move had resigned and did not attempt to block the convention action. Those who spoke against the slate did so obviously for the record. While they spoke (“President Johnson is more interested in peace than anyone here,” and “let’s not split the party”), the delegates listened passively, occasionally booed or wan- dered out of the arena. When it was all over, what the convention had done with comparatively little fuss was to give 5 million California Democrats an opportunity next June to conduct a referendum on the war. Among the dele- gates supporting CDC’s position was Edmund G. Brown, Jr., son of former Gov. Edmund G. Brown of California, who is among those in opposition. The political conse- quences may be serious for the West Coast Democrats. Charles Warren, state Democratic chairman, said the de- cision of the CDC “may well divide the efforts of those who share its goals.” A member of Warren’s law office sought and accepted a place on the steering committee. When the peace slate was proposed at the last regular CDC convention in March, even its supporters had little hope of success. It was more a moral gesture than a prac- tical political move. But the September 30 convention takes on real significance in the light of a recent profes- 356 dent of CDC, and other CDC leaders are now me their slate will win if policy on Vietnam is unchanged, Chicago was a shake of a fist at white America by a collection of Left radicals thoroughly alienated from the country’s political institutions. Long Beach was a sharp | dissent from the war, but also an expression of confidence that reform within the democratic process can bring the blacks and the poor into the American mainstream. On Vietnam, the peace slate is pledged to support a | party platform and candidate committed (1) to an im-- mediate halt in the bombing of North Vietnam, (2) to negotiation—“including all participants’—and (3) to international guarantees for nonintervention in Vietnam. } The convention’s keynote speaker, Dr. John Kenneth Galbraith, national chairman of Americans for Demo- cratic Action and former Ambassador to India, favored a step-by-step de-escalation. “There is logic,” he said, “on the side of those who say we should simply withdraw... ._ But I have also been conscious . . . of the need to per- suade others. And it is more in the mood of the Ameri- can people to take things by steps.” Liberals and radicals, Galbraith said, are persuaded we must get out of Viet- nam. Their task is to persuade public opinion. “Let us keep a clear distinction between political persuasion and political catharsis.” Power and Responsibility | \" Three recent events—Carl B. Stokes’s victory in the } Democratic primary for the office of mayor of Cleveland, the National Conference of Negro Elected Officials in Chicago, the naming of five Negroes to the new nine- | ° member District of Columbia City Council, and of Walter _ E. Washington as the city’s new Commissioner (in effect its mayor)—raise issues of major importance. Perhaps now the voices of elected and appointed Negro officials, who have the responsibility that goes with power, will be heard above the noise and clamor of the black na- | tionalists. The election of Mr. Stokes, and of Richard Hatcher in Gary, Ind., should they be successful, would © represent the transfer in these cities of a significant share of responsibility to the Negro communities, where it belongs. Cleveland, torn with racial unrest, managed to escape major violence this last summer largely because Negro voters did not want to injure Mr. Stokes’s chances | (he received 95 per cent of the Negro vote in the primary). But today Negro elected officials are placed in an ex- |}, tremely difficult position. For the most part, they are — middle-class Negroes. In some respects they too have been out of touch with sentiment in the “crisis ghettos.” The _ Conference of Elected Negro Officials grew out of the | realization, on the part of certain Negro officials in Cali- : fornia, that they were not as fully aware of conditions in Watts as they had imagined themselves to be. Today | the Negro official must keep in close and continuous | communication with the residents of the “crisis ghettos” — and must be able to articulate their demands. If he cannot maintain their allegiance and support, he is in serious seat noon Bei —- “= |) od‘ a|} 66 ewe) ae | =aeee ‘ee THE NATION/ October 16, 1967 — 7 ectively with the white community, for if he can- eet—and fairly promptly—some of the more urgent | needs of the Negro community his tenure in office yall be | brief and inglorious. A great deal is riding, therefore, on the quality of the mp elected Negro leadership (some 500 Negroes are in office now and after November there will be more). But even “More depends on the response of the white community. Locally and nationally, it must respond quickly, intelli- _ gently and sensitively to the needs of the Negro com- __ munity as voiced by its elected officials. And since, as the experience in Cleveland, Gary and Memphis indicates, _ Negro candidates cannot rely on strong party support, _ they must have nonpartisan backing to win and, once elected, to accomplish what needs to be done. Any attempt u__by the white community to “use” elected Negro officials E as lightning rods, as by electing them without giving them | the support they need once in office, will backfire in the Negro officials must not be “used”; they must be supported on their merits as candidates and on their per- _ formance as office holders. The emergence of a respon- . Siecticularly in the large cities, is essential to any solution - of the present racial situation. But in the end the entire i 5 community will get the kind of Negro leadership it de- : : serves—tresponsible if the whites act responsibly, irres- ponsible if they do not. ; ‘The Damned Fool’ It takes a lot of courage for a young man to go to Viet- ‘} nam with an infantry battalion and maybe return with his | leg shot off, or in a flag-draped coffin. It takes even more _ courage to refuse to go. The latter course also calls for a certain amount of enlightenment. It is easier for a draftee to submit to being sent overseas if he doesn’t know— perhaps would rather not know—what the war is about. \ The ratio of the few who have that special kind of } courage, in contrast to the many who do what they are if told, can be estimated by the experience of 23-year-old army private, Ronald Lockman, described in the San Francisco Chronicle as a “nice-looking, soft-spoken Negro from North Philadelphia.” He was drafted five months ago and, although he was a member of the W. E. B. DuBois Club, went through his training un- eventfully—as “a good soldier,” he says. He is not a pacifist; he would have fought in World War II had he been of military age. But when his unit was to be shipped to Vietnam, he held a press conference in San Francisco with his lawyer, Terrence Hallinan, to explain why he wasn’t going. Then he reported for duty at the Oakland Army base and stood with ninety-nine fellow infantrymen, rifle at his side. The ninety-nine boarded buses for Travis Air Force Base; Lockman stood his ground. Now he awaits trial on charges of disobeying the lawful order of a commissioned officer and missing a scheduled transfer, offenses which carry a possible eleven-year term at hard labor and dishonorable discharge. f The ratio of 99 to 1 is not Lockman’s fault. He did _ some canvassing among the members of his company and __ THE NATION/ October 16, 1967 he believes that most of the men, white and black alike, supported his stand but feared being called unpatriotic and un-American—not to speak of eleven years in jail. Lockman explains his own readiness to defy the Army by saying that his fight was back home in the Philadelphia ghettos where he was born and raised. “I will not go 10,000 miles away to be a tool of the oppressors of the Vietnamese people,” he says. “I feel it is about time to follow my own mind and do what I know is right.” The press and TV crew were not allowed past the gate at the Oakland base. Seeing the cluster of people, a- woman driver stopped her car and asked, “What’s going on?” A reporter told her. “Oh, is that all?” the woman said. “The damned fool!” Blind conformity is built into the social system, but history often reveals the Lockman type of “damned fool” in another light. Many years after the Mexican War a lieutenant in that war, later a general officer, wrote: “I do not think there was ever a more wicked war than that waged by the United States on Mexico. I thought so at ~ the time, when I was a youngster, only I had not moral courage enough to resign.” His name was Ulysses S. Grant. i Beer in the Gallery Ever since the cold war got into full career, connois- seurs have noted that the satirist’s occupation was gone, at least in the realm of politics. The method of satire is to exaggerate, but when the events themselves are mani- festly absurd or vicious, what is left for travesty? The satirist becomes merely a reporter. A current instance is that of the observers who were dispatched as an inspired Presidential gimmick to attest to the validity of the Vietnamese election. Admitting that they had no means of detecting fraud, they nevertheless obliged the President by marveling at the emergence of democracy in South Vietnam. Three of the observers were political scientists whose background was noted in a Nation editorial, ““The Experts” (September 18). With reservations that could easily be overlooked, they certi- fied the elections as being on the up-and-up, or at least no more tainted than our own. But what happened then? Troublemakers in the South Vietnam National Assembly, not satisfied with the Ameri- can verdict, persisted in investigating anew. A special elections subcommittee recommended by a vote of 16 to 2 that the elections be invalidated on grounds of irregu- larities. The Assembly had to accept or reject the report of the committee. If they accepted it, political chaos would ensue. The members had another reason for rejecting the report and confirming the victors, Lieut. Gen. Nguyen Van Thieu and Air Vice Marshal Nguyen Cao Ky, in the offices of President and Vice President, respectively. In the gallery, drinking beer, sat Brig. Gen. Nguyen Ngoc Loan, the South Vietnamese Beria, who can jail anybody in the country and who had already jailed peace candi- date Truong Dinh Dzu, who scored the highest vote among the civilian candidates. The Assembly prudently voted 58-43 to confirm the “victorious” slate. The rejoicing of the American Em- (Continued on page 372) 357 mete i i THE WORLD IS THE PROBLEM _ HARVEY WHEELER Mr. Wheeler is a staff member of the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions, and the author of its publications, The Rise and Fall of Liberal Democracy and The Restoration of Politics. The problems dividing the world are often stated in terms of ideological differences between the liberal and the collectivist democracies. This leads quickly to disputes involving the conflicts between individual liber- ties and economic justice, and to charges and counter- charges employing epithets such as capitalist imperial- ism and Communist expansionism. An inspection of these conflicts reveals that they all share one thing in common: they are international rather than mondial. That is, they are stated in terms of the components mak- ing up the world rather than in terms of the problems of the world as a community. The distinction is like that made by economists when they contrast the micro- economic problems of the individual unit with the macro- economic problems of the economy as a whole. It will be objected immediately that macro-economics does not exist on the level of the world as a whole. There is no world community. It would seem to follow that the only way one can state the economic problems of the world is in the terms through which they present them- selves to us. Therefore, the only realistic way of stating world economic problems is in terms of the separate communities that actually exist, namely, the nation- states. To repeat, actual economic problems are inter- national, not mondial. This is indisputably true. However, it is just as true that if one persists in stating economic problems in terms oi the presently existing components of the world, it will be almost impossible—if not certainly impossible—ever to see the world economy as a whole. And if we cannot even conceive of world economic problems in terms of the world as one community (a community, admittedly, that has yet to be formally ratified), it will be very dif- ficult, if not impossible, ever to see how the various in- ternational components that now exist will have to com- port themselves in order to become the macro-economic community of the world. So, let us inspect the above issues with the world as a single community in mind, and see where they lead us. If one looks at the world economic community from the standpoint of its poor nations, all rich nations look surprisingly alike. This is not to deny that the rich nations differ among themselves in many details. Their negotiations are conducted under different auspices. Gen- eral Motors and AMTORG show but few resemblances to each other. Yet both are from capital-rich nations. Their internal differences are swallowed up by their ex- ternal similarities. Both, when they approach the poor nations, represent the interests of the rich. The overall economic situation is one in which those who are rich in Capital tend to act in much the same way regardless of 358 the highly publicized ideological differences that are said to distinguish them. ; Capital is color blind. It carries with it very nearly the same imperatives whether it is all red, or red, white and blue. Any nation that is in a position to invest capi- tal in other nations wishes to maximize the return on its investment. And while the specific kinds of returns de- sired by the various capital suppliers may differ greatly, these differences tend to disappear when seen through the eyes of the poor. The point is simple: advanced in- dustrial nations, of whatever ideological hue, occupy similar economic positions in the world and have similar economic interests to protect. These similarities are most apparent to the poor, for the poor also have special in- terests which they hold in common. The result of this situation is that the more vigorously the capital-rich nations pursue their own economic in- terests throughout the world, the more grievous becomes the situation of the poor. It is hard to see how matters could be expected to turn out otherwise. And the fact is that in recent years the capital-rich nations have in- deed been getting richer. On the other hand, the poor nations have stagnated or fallen behind. That is, the rate of economic development among the poor either barely keeps up with their rising needs or, in some cases, has even begun to fall, relative to needs. More of this later. This state of affairs. recalls to mind the description Marx gave to the worsening condition of the. 19th-cen- tury working classes. If one regards the world as a single political community, the poor nations within that com- munity can be viewed as the world counterparts of the working classes within the nations of the 19th century. And the capital-rich nations confront the poor in the stance of ruling classes. There is nothing new in this proposition. Long. ago, Arnold Toynbee referred to the world’s poor nations as the “external proletariat” of the advanced industrial nations. Before that, Socialists had made a similar point in claiming that the capitalist na- tions had “exported” their unemployment problem through imperialist exploitation of the world’s colonial areas. It must only be re-emphasized that the important part of the simile between nations and classes concerns not only the poor but also the rich. For all capital-rich na- tions treat the poor in pretty much the same way regard- less of whether they are liberal or collectivist. In short, Russia, Japan, the United States, Germany and England approach Nigeria, Cambodia and Uruguay, etc., in much the same way that 19th-century capitalists approached ~ the working classes. But what is the reaction of the poor? Here again a rough parallel can be drawn. The poor do not respond collectively. Instead, they respond as individuals. Each seeks his own individual betterment. The immediate reaction of each is to try to bargain separately against the rich as well as possible. It is necessary to use raw materials, market concessions, diplomatic pressures and long-term contracts in order to entice economic benefits from the capital-rich countries. That is, each poor nation, THE NATION/October 16, 1967 yas a Beavereign® independent state, seeks to acquire lore capital goods of its own and more subsistence gods for itself alone. ; In order to do this effectively it obviously becomes -} Necessary first to qualify as a sovereign nation-state. y r The poor struggle—perhaps prematurely in some cases— for national independence in order to proceed more ex- ry) peditiously in the business of development and moderni- ation. They must have their “union card” of national | sovereignty in order to enter the international capital ‘market effectively. They must enroll as nations at the United Nations. They must jealously protect their sover- | eign integrity. They must become adamant defenders of a ‘the principle of sovereignty in defiance of movements | toward world order that appear to threaten its infringe- t | ment. For they believe that without their sovereignty ie they would lose their ability to negotiate freely.. They | believe that any infringement of their sovereignty would | cause them to fall even further behind in their struggle for . | development. . It is obvious that this way of thinking corresponds ‘to what Marx called “trade union consciousness,” when | yh e reflected on the immediate reactions of the 19th- | ! “y , | Ly] -} century working classes to their depressed conditions. And the same criticisms Marx made of trade union con- | I “sciousness now apply to the “‘state sovereignty conscious- ness” that exists among today’s poor nations. It leads only to ad hoc, reformist and gradualist improvements. | But the situation of the poor is so grievous, and is worsening at so rapid a rate, that much more profound ] Measures are required. For the cause of their difficul- r ties traces to the overall system of relationships in | which they and the rich find themselves. Nothing less | than a change in the overall system in which they are encompassed will improve the condition of the poor. The logic of all this would appear to indicate that so fi | long as the poor insist on jealously maintaining their | own sovereign independence they will condemn them- @ selves to continue suffering the depressed status they } now experience. In this special context the sovereignty q principle means economic nationalism. But as we have | seen, economic nationalism is the game of the rich. It | h is a game poor nations can never win. i Now we are brought back to the question with | which we started. For the one thing that the rich are \ _ agreed upon, regardless of their other differences, is the } Paramount need to protect economic nationalism. In- | deed, in the collectivist democracies economic affairs are | nationalized by actual law. They are even more ada- | mant defenders of economic nationalism than are the ; liberal democracies. Moreover, it appears that the col- _ lectivist democracies may one day become the leading | “capitalists’—that is, the most formidable capital-rich | actors—in the world theatre. For no matter how big \ _ General Motors and A.T.&T. become, they are not likely to rival the economic power of the USSR or that of the centrally coordinated economies such as Japan. The other side is that no matter how much capital development Ghana, for example, acquires, it can never hope to bar- _ gain equitably against either General Motors or the USSR. | 9 P| : | Moreover, bad as is the situation of the poor today, THE NATION/ October 16, 1967 / I ! | everything indicates that it will deteriorate at an ever- increasing rate during the next few years. Gunnar Myr- dal has given us indisputable empirical evidence of this fact, should we be tempted to avert our eyes or trust blindly in some providential improvement: (1) Capital inflow to the poor is declining and it is changing into types less and less suited to their real, long- term needs. (2) The population explosion is just getting — way. (3) Agricultural productivity is not increasing in pro- portion to needs. In short, the poor nations figure to get even poorer while the rich will become even richer. Our above simile comparing the working classes of the 19th century with the poor nations of the 20th century now becomes quite disturbing. For the condition of the world today appears to conform to the classical descrip- tion of a revolutionary situation. What is the solution? The only hope appears to lie in the renunciation of the world counterpart of the private property principle; the renunciation, that is, of the principle of economic nationalism. Let us give the name economic mondialism to the alternative. Eco- nomic mondialism is the world counterpart of national collectivism, That is, it implies the world counterpart of a Socialist revolution. ‘This seems to be what is re- quired before the poor nations can truly improve their lot. Nationalization must give way to mondialization. World ownership of certain of the most fundamental forms of capital must be the solution of the future. What would economic mondialization mean? For one thing, it would mean vesting ownership of certain types of capital in a world authority. This would entail the creation of a more effective world order. In the be- ginning, however, quite rudimentary institutions would suffice. For example, with only a few administrative changes the World Bank could qualify as an example of mondial ownership. Similar authorities could be insti- tuted for the control and exploitation of the riches of the seas. The world’s atmosphere and control over its use must soon be vested in a world authority. It is not reasonable to allow private firms or even individual na- tions to possess space satellites as private property. Reg- ulation and control of world communications and the use of world airways is needed already. The approach- ing capacity to influence and control weather will require a world authority. The development and use of atomic energy can be made just, equitable and free of danger only through a world authority. The world’s major ca- nals must shortly come under the control of a world au- thority. But beyond this, world redistributions of agricultural surpluses and allocation of certain basic commodities, such as steel, will be required to alleviate the plight of the poor nations. But in all these cases, the important thing is to make sure that these new world authorities are independent of domination by the major capital-rich nations. Something comparable to the national princi- ple of the independence of the judiciary is required: a world economic counterpart of the principle of the rule of law. For the so-called “welfare state” approach will 359 not suffice. The welfare approach depends upon the en- lightened humanitarianism of the capital-rich nations, aid there is no reason to expect that it will work any better on the world level than it does on the national. In the long run every nation of the world, rich and poor, will benefit from such maneuvers. But in the rela- tively short run the rich may feel that their present rate of growth will be adversely affected. One cannot, there- fore, expect capital-rich nations to introduce such meas- ures of their own free will. The rich will never curb their immediate impulses unless they receive sufficiently force- ful pressures from outside. But how can this happen un- less the poor perceive their interests collectively? This would require the poor to abandon their present state of sovereignty-consciousness in favor of a new world- consciousness. For reason would indicate that the poor should be the ones to demand the institution of the prin- ciple of world ownership of the chief means of produc- tion. Only then would the rich accede. Only then would a just solution to the world’s economic problems become possible. At this point, however, it must be admitted that the THE SPIRIT OF FASCISM 5% history of reform movements gives little ground for hope that matters will turn out exactly this way. Really effec- 9 tive reforms and revolutions appear to initiate from cer- tain displaced middle-class intellectuals, rather than from the poor on their own initiative. But here again, today’s world seems to have learned its prehistory well. Todav’s world happens to contain a series of just such potential leaders. England, France and Scandinavia, among others, are the world’s displaced middle-class intellectuals. They might possibly furnish the leadership and the spark of world consciousness that the poor require to inaugurate the revolution of world ownership. World peace through world ownership is the theme of this essay. But not only world peace, world order as well. For the history of man’s effort to forge true polliti- cal unions appears to indicate that the creation of a com- munity follows the possession of common property. This is shown, among other instances, by the early history of the Christian churches. There must be common goods, owned in common, before there can be a common good. Because the most elementary problem of the common good is what to do about what is held in common. \ HOOKED ON LAW ENFORCEMENT EDGAR Z. FRIEDENBERG Mr. Friedenberg is a professor of education and sectology at the State University of New York at Buffalo. His latest book is The Dignity of Youth and Other Atavisms (Beacon Press). “In our times, from the highest class of society down to the lowest, everyone lives as under the eye of a hostile and dreaded censorship,” John Stuart Mill observed in his essay On Liberty. It is hard to imagine what he would have said about life in 1967, in the days of the transistorized martini olive or—as in the action of the Buffalo police against my colleague Leslie Fiedler—the transistorized teeny-bopper. His statement is now truer than he could ever have imagined. There have been few times and places in history in which people have not lived as under the eye of a hostile and dreaded censor- ship. But not everyone. What was modern about Mill’s experience of social constraint was that it affected the highest as strongly as the lowest; in some cases, more strongly. Traditionally, one assumes otherwise; the aris- tocracy is supposed to be licentious with impunity. Cen- sorship and other forms of oppression are ordinarily directed by the legally constituted authorities against those who challenge them; and the authorities represent their most powerful social groups and assert the legitimacy, of their demands on their subordinates. When this becomes no longer true, it is questionable that there really is any longer an upper class; for status has not much mean- ing in the absence of power. This decline of the upper 360 class, and along with it the decline of personal liberty, was the novel aspect of the phenomenon Mill witnessed, its central element of social change. The censorship of which he complained, though ubiquitous, was largely unofficial and informal; it was not imposed from above. The hostile and dreaded censor was everywhere, was one’s neighbor, was oneself. But he was real enough, and his actions were as binding as those of any inquisitor. It is this sense of being under the eye of a hostile and dreaded censorship that I have called the spirit of fascism. In my judgment it has gotten steadily stronger since the beginning of the 19th century, though in some respects also less crude. Nothing as strident and uncivil as Hitler is likely to erupt again in the form he made familiar. Brown shirts, to paraphrase the singing group called the Mothers of Invention, don’t make it. But the basic trend continues. There is little that is oppressive in our life in this country today that Tocqueville, writing twenty years be- fore Mill (who draws heavily on his work), did not anticipate. But clarity may be improved by focusing on a specific, contemporary form the spirit of fascism is taking. I could most easily have used the public school system and its practices as my source of examples; but so much of my writing has been devoted to this increas- ingly dismal topic that I prefer, on this occasion, to look elsewhere. An equally informative, and depressing, pecu- liarity of modern life in America is the sacredness of the police as a social institution, especially among the less sophisticated lower-middle class—the people with THE NATION/ October 16, 1967 our local police” bumper stickers who en- their lives by reading about child molesters in the nday supplements. _ This does not, of course, imply that such people never find fault with their police. Indeed, police spokesmen are probably justified in their frequent complaint that they face increasing distrust and disrespect in attempting to discharge their duties. But what is criticized is usually some specific police action. There is no complaint about 3 the ideology police power expresses; in the mass media F and among “straight” people, at least, each successive incident of police brutality or violation of civil liberty is i B reparded as an exceptional case—a malfunction, to be ; condoned, dismissed, or in rare cases investigated, in | Order to determine what went wrong. This is rather the attitude Shakespeare takes toward royalty in his plays; in them there are kings who do a bad job, and even bad Mines but never a critical examination of the institution | of royalty itself. _ This suggests that there was something in the Eliza- Y bethan social climate that was inimical to any notion that he monarchy itself. or any assumption underlying it, might be a source of social problems. There is, I believe, a closely corresponding mechanism that operates in our ‘society to limit criticism of police constraint. | In any case, no American speaking in any official _ Capacity today dares to say, “No, it is not always better | for the law to be enforced!” or “So far as we can judge by the evidence to date, race riots in American cities | are usually precipitated by police action, and in the | absence of zealous law enforcement they would probably T not occur.” No more would he declare that “pot-busts, | not marijuana, are what is demoralizing the students in _my school, and until there is some positive evidence that the stuff is at least as harmful as alcohol we are not ' going to cooperate with any more of them.” All of these are reasonable assertions with a stronger empirical basis | than the policies now in effect have to rest on, but they 7 are never publicly made. Instead, the defenders of liberty | accept the assumption that law enforcement is good in 4 itself and argue only about whether a particular law | should be repealed or whether due process has been | violated. Even when it has, enforcement is still regarded | as the greater good. Governor Hughes of New Jersey | \ praised the action of the police and National Guard in | [ the Newark riots, in which they committed most of the | violence that occurred, while promising that individual 4 abuses of police power would be investigated. Earlier, 4 California State Assembly Speaker Jesse Unruh had been equally laudatory about the action of the Los Angeles } police in suppressing with great brutality the demonstr a- ‘| tion against President Johnson’s appearance at the Cen- ‘| tury Plaza Hotel. Yet simply on the basis of past observa- tion of the Newark and Los Angeles social scenes, and of the role the police had come to play in them, any rational observer could have predicted the course that police intervention would follow. To say that unfortunate - abuses occurred and look for their cause in particular idiosyncracies is like explaining away the relationship ? seeewveen smoking and lung cancer in terms of individual = NATION/ October 16, 1967 Rid mite “wa susceptibility—which does, indeed, affect who the victims will be—instead of admitting that your local police may be dangerous to your health. Our reverence for law enforcement is not an expression of respect for law itself. We are a lawless and unruly people, as peoples go. Notoriously, the same Congressmen who trumpet their indignation as they propose increasing- ly harsh legislation against rioters or draft-card burners turn out to be the ones who are implicated in dubious transactions. This is not hypocrisy; wheeling and deal- in are attempts to evade the law, not to defy it. The Congressman, once caught, is usually as tearful and repentant as a spanked child may be; if, like Mr. Powell, he isn’t, he does become an object of intense hostility. What Americans demand of themselves and one an- other is not respect for the law, or respect for authority —a tradition of griping and derision toward authority is our standard way of concealing from ourselves that, in fact, we submit to it instead of saying, quietly and solemnly like Bartleby, “I prefer not to.” We demand, rather, submission to popular sovereignty. The policeman represents more than the law, and something different from the law; policemen, in fact, find themselves some- what at a disadvantage in open court where the defendant and the witnesses enjoy formal protection. He represents the values and social attitudes of the common man, the anxieties and resentments of what, in some respects, is the most deprived level of society. Young men who choose to become law-enforcement officers are, after all, choosing a comparatively low-paying and dangerous job whose chief appeal must come from its bureaucratized security and the opportunities it provides for controlling the lives of others. This control may be benevolently exercised; in many cities the police informally and with little extrinsic reward in fact perform the services that preserve poor and desperate people from disaster— stopping husbands from beating up wives, getting sick people to the hospital, cooling down scenes of violence— and which are supposed to require the skills of profession- al social workers. But the processes of self-selection that determine who will devote their lives to law-enforcement insure that the police officer will, on balance, be hostile to liberty and to any form of uncontrolled spontaneous behavior, though stereotyped forms of disorderly conduct may be tolerated with good humor. Police have a built-in bias against youth, hippies and other undersocialized persons, and sometimes add insult to the injury they have done them by winking at gross disorder if it is a kind that seems conventional. Last spring, for example, the same police who had been making life miserable for the more turned-on students at the Davis campus of the University of Cali- fornia (by their obsessive preoccupation with marijuana) quite willingly stopped traffic on a major street adjacent to the campus for an hour or so to permit students in two fraternities to pelt one another with garbage and rotten fruit in a battle that had become traditional. While this undermined whatever confidence the hippy students may have had in the integrity of the police, the incident is un- derstandable—indeed, revealing—as an example of the 361 ty eee cisee we capacity of the police to distinguish forms of disorder which indicate genuine rejection of social norms from forms which don’t. There is nothing peculiarly American about this; people do not become law-enforcement officers anywhere in order to serve as guardians of liberty. What does seem more intense here is a panic determination to praise the kind of order the police enforce and limit any challenge to questions of procedure and technique. We are hooked on law enforcement. There is no other country in which the secret police, however powerful, have enjoyed the degree of social endorsement and approval accorded the FBI. It takes courage in this country even to demand due process. But this, important as it is, does not get to the heart of the matter. Returning, for example, to the Fiedler case, even if the police had used unquestionably ethical methods of gathering evidence, is it desirable that they, even with a valid warrant, burst into the house and ar- fest its residents, subjecting them in the process to the consequent indignities that have since been fully re- ported elsewhere? The action is wholly destructive; noth- ing is gained to compensate for the waste and suffering that are caused by compelling people to exhaust their emotional and intellectual resources in struggling just to preserve themselves, under conditions of shock and anxiety, instead of continuing to use their energy to illu- minate our lives, 362 ee “l All societies sacrifice some measure of individual — creativity to the maintenance of order, but societies differ in their conception of order and of its source; and some have been governed, at least for a time, by a nobler con- ception of order than that which can be imposed by a “hostile and dreaded censorship.” Why, then, do we continue to respond to such clichés as “Nobody gets special treatment around here, no matter what they do or how smart they are,” or, “As long as it’s on the books, the law must be enforced,” or ‘“There aren’t any privileged sanctuaries for lawbreakers in our com- munity,” as if the only thing wrong with them was that they were corny, naive or hypocritical. While nobody believes such statements (though children in school are forced to accept them) and while no society—no military platoon, even, in which they were in fact true could function—we still agree that they represent an ideal. Why? In part because one of our basic cultural beliefs associates law with order; though, as Paul Goodman has so often stated, the law does at least as much to promote disorder as to preserve order, since it continu- ally interferes with the processes of civic and political homeostasis and accommodation, creating problems where none would otherwise exist and impeding efforts to solve those that do. There are cities in America which remain bearable and viable, or barely viable, simply because their governments are corrupt; being corrupt they can get a little something done, instead of being absolutely impotent. But a more basic reason, surely, is that the law-enforce- ment process is thought of as democratic, as more demo- cratic than the law itself, since the courts are dominated by smooth-tongued lawyers, while the police represent and, indeed, act out—the anxieties and sentiments of the populace as well as, and often rather than, the commands of the law. Where the two are in conflict, the police remind individuals that they have overstepped the social norms. The victims may win on appeal, but it takes a decade and costs a fortune. Police action, rather than conviction in court, is the real sanction. To criticize law enforcement as a social function, rather than to direct one’s complaints to specific abuses, is therefore to challenge the democratic process itself. The socially acceptable response, instead, is to say that the law should be changed, but the police must be obeyed till it is. In practice, even this is more than an angry and hostile community will often tolerate. It was precisely Professor Fiedler’s sponsorship of an organization which advocated legalizing marijuana that drew the wrath of local authorities on him. But legal forms of advocacy and protest may also, in practice, be not only futile but humiliating, as the advocate comes to perceive that his adversaries are counting on his willingness to abide by the rules to insure that he makes no progress in the contest, that the futility of his protest has been pro- gramed into the system so that his adherence to legiti- macy makes him a fall guy. This is what is happening with pot and also what has happened to both the civil rights and Vietnamese War protest movements, and accounts for much of the bitterness which makes Rap Brown seem much more relevant today than Dr. King. THE NATION/ October 16, 1967 Y Pinder the working rules of American democracy. It seems reasonably clear that here and now the American people are not turned against the war by depictions of ts brutalities or by the memorable contradictions in the | statements of public leaders, though they do dislike pay- _ ing for it and having it dislocate their personal plans. Nor | were they appalled when Andrew Jackson—the leader and custodian of the American democracy Tocqueville observed—defied a Supreme Court decision and destroyed the settled and literate Cherokee Indians—whose willing- fess to adopt ways that had recently become American made them a peculiar threat to their white rivals—by _ forcing them from their North Carolina homes on a death march to Oklahoma that seems, in its conception and its } execution, to have been a century ahead of its time. It seems intolerably doctrinaire, in the face of such ' €vents occurring repeatedly since the republic was | founded, to persist in assuming that American democ- racy, for some reason, would provide an optimum climate for the growth of freedom and dignity if it were only A working right; and that the abuses are accidents rather ‘a than expressions of its spirit. Our efforts to reconcile | Vietnam and racial bigotry with the stated values of our [| social system have surpassed the desperation with which )| the Ptolemaic astronomers sought to prevent the observa- tions of Copernicus and Kepler from revealing that what actually happens in the solar system just wasn’t like their model. The American social system has many remarkable _ features: its material standard of living; its power to undertake by persuading us that we were involved in its "| formulation; and, above all its remarkable genius for ij exploiting individual ambition to achieve antagonistic ' cooperation rather than overt conflict among people of very different backgrounds. But it is not a society in which individuals are treated with respect, and never | was. If its founders had conceived that it might be, they | the Constitution which seeks specifically to safeguard _ Ctucial areas of personal liberty with the flat prohibition, “Congress shall make no law .. .” No document, how- } political action, to be legitimate, must continually be | ratified by people who despise and fear it. _ Historically, our political tradition holds that the im- ‘} pulse toward freedom and dignity comes from the hearts of the people, whom our institutions are designed to pro- tect from the constraints and domination of privilege. It is an old and powerful tradition, strong enough to have led the aristocratic Stendhal to perceive Napoleon as a | liberator. Many of those who favored democracy, on }} balance, as the most promising of possible social systems, | remained cautious, however, particularly if they had the responsibility for actually advancing democratic social in- | Stitutions. Tocqueville—himself an aristocrat who never lost either his principles or his poise, though his father _ was put to death in the French Revolution—held that so- | ‘THE NATION/ October 16, 1967 ciety would inevitably become more egalitarian and that democratic social institutions provided the best hope of keeping it decent and orderly, though at great cost in freedom, diversity and human fidelity. The founding fathers not only chose to construct a system of checks and balances biased in favor of settled men of property; they were deliberately disingenuous in writing the Declaration of Independence. Carl Becker, in his classic work, recounts, with illustrations from suc- cessive drafts of the Declaration, their rather comical dif- ficulties in ascribing to harmless, nutty old George III the oppressive acts which they knew quite well to be Acts of Parliament, but which had to be interpreted as mo- narchical abuses in order to justify secession. Plenty of social critics—and these not inimical to liberty and human dignity—have argued that the source of the hostile and dreaded censorship was the growing — power of the mass itself in political democracies that were functioning very much as might be expected from their design and structure. Besides Tocqueville and Mill there have been Henry Adams, T. S. Eliot and Ortega, to name the most consistent and obvious. The thought of all these men is familiar, but it cuts across our ideological grain. We continue,’ then, to connect democracy and liberty in such a manner as to assume that advances in the scope of popular’ control should enhance the quality of freedom, though there seems more reason to expect the — contrary. At this point in our civic life, invasion of privacy is at least as pressing a social problem as broadening the base of political decisions. This is not to deny the urgency of our need to make civic processes responsive to those who must now live— as the urban poor, for example, do—at the mercy of decisions they are powerless to influence, for every individual has a right to participate in the social processes that bear on his life and dispose of his person and _ his resources. But if the exercise of that right is not to strengthen even further the operation of the hostile and dreaded censorship, it is imperative that the American people be enjoined from intruding on other persons’ lives, whether those others be their fellow citizens or unfranchised long-haired youths and nomads or Viet- namese peasants. We have no such reticence today. Empirically, even liberals operate as if they knew that it was usually unwise to turn to the instruments of popular sovereignty: as allies in the defense of personal freedom. Surely, no university president has ever rebuffed a critic who objected to the presence of controversial speaker or student organization on campus by saying: “If I interfered with my students’ freedom to hear whom they choose and support such causes as seem just to them, the legislature would launch an investigation!” Still, the idea that personal freedom is lodged in popular sovereignty retains its strength, and re- mains, indeed, the basis for legitimation of democratic government. It is this assumption that consensus holds the key to moral as well as legal authority that makes it difficult for a liberal to scrutinize critically the specific values actually - involved in rigorous enforcement of marijuana laws or compulsory school attendance or the Selective Service Act. Yet underlying our deference to the institutions of popular sovereignty is not only the democratic tradition but realistic fear as well—fear of the ressentiment of a vast majority of individuals who have been lured by the promises of a seductive economic system into meaning- less sacrifices of personal fulfillment for the sake of fit- ting in to a society that has no use for them as people and cannot even allow them the leisure or the privacy in which to reflect on what their lives have become. If the headsman and the memory of Thomas Cromwell were fearsome enough to discourage the Elizabethans from too fundamental an examination of monarchy, so is the unyieldmg sullenness of a Congress which hates the poor too much to provide decent housing; and the suspicion and misery in the eyes of motel owners, TV announcers, smiling stewardesses and senior citizens in leisure towns are enough to terrify most men of good will who might be interested in a closer scrutiny of the meaning of Ameri- can democracy. Is it possible to conceive of an American society organized so as to be less destructive in its psychological impact on those who must live in it, one that would sub- ject us less to the hostile and dreaded censorship? No doubt it is, but societies have not much free choice. They are not constructed; they evolve, and even the forms their revolutions take are molded by their peculiar heritage, of which their members are at once victims and bene- ficiaries. The peculiar demands and opportunities offered by our economic system have surely played a funda- mental role in making us what we are, but whether at 364 this point we would become very different under ther system, or could devise and execute the change, is an-— other question. We might. It does seem clear, as Jules Henry has argued in The Nation {“Capital’s Last Frontier,’ April 25, 1966]), that the most oppressive features of our foreign policy stem from our colonialism, particularly our need to expand capital investment in Asia rather than merely seek new markets there. Much of our national economy, particu- larly in California, is dependent not only on the war but on winning enough of a victory in it to permit us to re- establish and surpass the economic interests in Asia of which communism threatens to deprive us. Such factors as this have often led, as they have led us, to aggressive expansion and war. But much of the horror of what we are doing in Viet- nam and elsewhere stems from the fact that we depend on capital investment not only for affluence but for self- esteem, and this seems a peculiar feature of the Ameri- can corporate economy. Tocqueville specifically noted this, too: the unusual dependency of a democratic middle class on a high standard of living in order to think well of itself. Today, the mass media exploit this connection so thoroughly that it is impossible for the poor to retain any self-respect unless they become alienated from the society and reject its reward-system; and this would not be true, or as true, in a Socialist country. But this, as Franklin Roosevelt—no mean defender of the free-enterprise system himself, it now appears—used to say, is an iffy question. What is perfectly clear is that under our system the social fabric has been stretched so tight by the frustrations involved in seeking self-esteem under the eye of the hostile and dreaded censorship that _it is ripping. Both the hippy movement and the summer riots have served notice that there are limits to the degree of control that can be derived from vigilant assertion of legitimate authority. The authority may be formally un- impeachable and may be used as a basis for jailing and sometimes killing the protestors and rioters, but it is then thoroughly apparent that repression has solved noth- ing and the invocation of legal norms has shamed no one and occasioned no repentance. I do not mean to suggest that hippies and slum HOLES I : are natural allies. I wish they could be; but I fear that, | except in very special circumstances, they are more likely to be adversaries. Youth protest in America, as Goodman has stated in his Playboy article and elsewhere, is middle class in origin and aristocratic in attitude. Hippies, who have mostly emerged from the middle-class bag they felt was suffocating them, put the social system down and treat the rewards poor urban looters demand with a destructive irony that must be insulting to people who have never enjoyed them. Student activists, who are not exactly hippies but who usually have more in common with them than with the urban poor, report that their major difficulty in cenineinell| draft resistance in the slums is that for many poor Negro youths the army, even Vietnam, seems an opportunity— | and is one. Basically, the rioters want what the society values and are looting in protest against being deprived of it; they are so much less alienated than hippies that THE NATION/ October 16, 1967 i le motives of the two groups are in fundamental conflict. Less abstractly, it seems very likely that as urban groes gain more opportunity they will join the ranks he hippy haters. These are primarily persons who | have recently become respectable—like many policemen, | school officials and municipal bureaucrats—and fear that | iny sudden movement may dislodge their new status. Such people hate both hippies and unruly Negroes, which provides, for the moment, a common cause. But the latter may also be anxious, upward mobile Negroes, or Toms. Aspiring Negro teachers often treat lower-class Negro ‘children more severely than they do white, or than white teachers do. Former school Superintendent Willis in Chi- cago relied for years on an elderly and formidable Negro | matron on his board as his staunch ally in defending the 1) Chicago school system against the demands of uppity ‘civil rights militants. Hippy youth, angry and exhausted by continual harassment, sometimes say of themselves: “We're the new niggers!” But a large, and increasing, | | | “GHETTO REDEVELOPMENT tha ; | RICHARD A. CLOWARD _|and FRANCES FOX PIVEN '| Mr. Cloward and Mrs. Piven are members of the faculty of | the Columbia University School of Social Work. Lg i | The “urban crisis” has clearly become a full-blown | political crisis. Just as clearly, national elites are re- | sponding by fashioning the outlines of a plan to forestall "| further violence. The plan features public subsidies to \ | induce private enterprise to redevelop the ghetto—at both | high profit and low risk. | Political leaders are stumbling over one another in : | their haste to promote corporate intervention in the “} ghetto. Senator Kennedy has proposed tax advantages | for large-scale investors who can be persuaded to build | low-rental housing, at profits of between 12 and 19 per "cent. Another Kennedy bill would extend similar tax 1 benefits to big employers who agree to locate in ghettos }and hire local residents. Senator Javits, focusing on * | somewhat smaller entrepreneurs (tax advantages work : | best for big investors), is calling for a “domestic devel- t [opment bank,” funded by public and private capital, y | from which redevelopers could borrow at low cost. ‘| Governors and Presidential aspirants are also busy. , | Romney toured seventeen urban slums across the nation {(in nineteen days), and Rockefeller has proposed a - | quasi-public “New York State Urban Redevelopment | Corporation” (to be launched with $50 million of public | funds) which would work with local, state and federal i] agencies to promote private investments in ghetto housing i a industry. Recently, the President announced that "\the nation’s major life insurance companies were pre- “pared to invest $1 billion in redevelopment—thus initiat- jing a “creative private-government partnership,” accord- bh F |THE NATION/ October 16, 1967 i ! ee: ae > j number of Negroes today are, in this sense, the new Irish or the new Italians—the black caucus seems re- luctant to be the new Jews—and are likely to be as up- tight and hostile to flower children as any ethnic group that is having troubles with marginality. Nevertheless, both hippies and rioters have succeeded this year in challenging the hegemony of the uptight way of life, and the adequacy of the legal norms from‘ which it derives its right to use force and violence. That their direct and sometimes unlawful social action is alarming to the general public is undeniable; that it may occasion more repressive legislation, and elicit more severe violence from the authorities is probable, and tragic. But there seems no less costly way of raising fundamental questions about American polity and its legal and moral bases, among a people who see no incongruity in judging their country’s foreign policy by the degree of endorsement it receives on public opinion polls. That’s the way we check ourselves; we think we’re voting on someone else! Corporate Imperialism for the Poor ing to The New York Times. What makes this partner- ship attractive to insurance companies is the promise of federal rent supplements to guarantee a return from low- income tenants, and changes in FHA policies to insure private investments in “high risk” areas—i.e., ghettos. The new urban program is being pressed by an alliance of political and corporate leaders, with representatives of labor and traditional civil rights organizations bringing up the rear. In New York City, Mayor Lindsay actively cultivates business leaders through his Economic Devel- opment Council, and is now joined on walking tours in Harlem and Bedford-Stuyvesant by such notables as Gerald L. Phillippe, chairman of the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, and Christian A. Herter, Jr., vice president of the Mobil Oil Corporation. A comparable council in Detroit, formed after the riot, is headed by Joseph L. Hudson, Jr., president of one of the largest department stores in the country, and includes the top officials of General Motors, Chrysler and Ford. Cleveland businessmen have created a revolving fund to provide “seed money” and to guarantee loans for ghetto rehabili- tation. In Pittsburgh, the Allegheny Housing Corporation draws on funds from PPG Industries, U. S. Steel, Rock- well Manufacturing, Westinghouse Electric and Alcoa, among others. The Urban Coalition which met recently in Washington brought together 800 national political leaders, mayors, officials from labor and civil rights and such stalwarts of corporate enterprise as Andrew Heiskell, chairman of Time Incorporated; Henry Ford II, chair- man of the Ford Motor Company; David Rockefeller, president of the Chase Manhattan Bank, and Irwin Miller, chairman of Cummins Engine Company. The urban alliance could have substantial economic impact. Public subsidies for the ghetto are now pitifully 365 small. By using public funds to guarantee profit, however, huge private investments can be turned toward the ghetto. The $1 billion promised by the insurance companies is undoubtedly only a beginning, and at that it is three times the amount allocated for public housing in this fiscal year. These benevolent proposals are much at odds with the mood of the electorate. Most Americans, the pollsters say, believe blacks are not badly off, and regard riots as simply a breakdown in law and order, spurred perhaps by “outside agitators.” The popular view is re- flected in Congressional carryings-on, especially in the House, where measures for riot control and punitive wel- fare amendments are passed eagerly, while even innocuous proposals for rat control are resisted. How do we account for the “statesmanlike” responses of elites at a time when the wider public seems goaded to new expressions of rac- ism? The answer is not difficult to find. First, corporate enterprise no longer has major stakes in domestic racism. Historically, racism helped to perpetuate a caste system that produced a surplus of cheap black labor. That sur- plus was used against white workers, chiefly to under- mine wage levels; more directly, blacks were hired as scabs and goons to impede efforts by whites to unionize. The resulting antagonism between blacks and whites was one aspect of a history of pervasive conflict among ethnic groups in America, leading them to turn upon one an- other rather than against oppressive classes, thus accoun- ting in good measure for the absence of a cohesive work- ing class. However, antagonism has been most acute be- tween poor blacks and whites. Nor has that conflict sub- sided: it now extends beyond the labor market, erupting in bitter struggles to control neighborhoods, schools and city government. With automation and the corporate management of markets, low-skilled and low-paid labor has become a relatively unimportant factor in the profits of much large- scale urban enterprise. Consequently, racism is no longer needed to depress wages and inhibit unionization. The racist attitudes of the working and lower-middle classes persist, but these attitudes, and the ghettos they help to produce have become anomalies—vestiges of an earlier era of industrial organization. Indeed, racism is beginning to exact some costs from corporate enterprise. Violence in the cities disrupts the civic stability on which huge, bureaucratized enterprises depend. Note, for example, that department store owners are prominent in the spate of local committees and com- missions formed in the wake of the riots. Nor is it any accident that insurance companies, faced with huge losses in property damage, are at the forefront in proffering in- vestment funds for redevelopment of charred ghettos. Now, too, there is the promise of profit to be made in removing poverty. Redevelopment promises to be a huge business, running into billions of dollars—provided that public funds and public powers are employed to eliminate risk and guarantee profit. Far-seeing corporations like Litton Industries and U. S. Gypsum have been alert to these possibilities for some time, undertaking research and demonstration projects (often put forward as “civic” activ- 366 ities) to explore cost-saving materials and new build ng techniques so as to create a product within reach of the ghetto market. Industry’s technical explorations have not | accomplished much to reduce costs, but that doesn’t mat- ter: public subsidies will bridge the gap. For their part, politicians are in trouble, and the alliance is a way out. Urban disorder has made them vul- nerable; they must act to end it or face defeat at the polls. However, they are not free to indulge the outraged senti- ments of their working- and middle-class constituents, for repression would alienate blacks all the more and might lead to worse violence. Blacks are also becoming a major electoral force in the cities, a fact which cannot be ignored much longer. Nevertheless, white racism pre- vents political leaders from securing legislative approval for programs to pacify the ghetto. The corporate alliance solves this dilemma: relatively small amounts of public money can be used to stimulate relatively large private investments. Furthermore, programs carried out under corporate auspices will neutralize a great deal of opposi- tion: this is, after all, “the American way of doing things.” The President, it should be noted, has the most to gain, for he is in the deepest trouble. With rapidly escalating costs in the Vietnamese War already creating presssure for an unpopular tax rise, he risks political disaster by calling for even higher taxes in order to placate rioters. Opening the ghetto for private investment permits him to avoid the antagonism of the electorate toward both blacks and taxes, while continuing to pay for the war primarily from current revenues. The new program, in brief, is impelled by the threat of disruption and the promise of profit. It will work to curb violence, and to secure gains for political and cor- porate leaders alike. The ghetto is also likely to be some- what better off economically for being absorbed into corporate spheres. Who, then, can reasonably object? Well, clearly peace groups should. If the President succeeds in avoiding sub- stantial tax increases, the task of shoring up weakening electoral support for the war will be considerably eased. Grass-roots black activists also have much to fear, for these developments portend a vast extension of corporate power in the ghetto. The economy of the ghetto is now run by relatively small entrepreneurs who are somewhat vulnerable to local pressure, such as consumer boycotts _ and rent strikes. The new managers of the ghetto will be huge quasi-public development corporations (like the New York Port Authority) insulated from effective political control and endowed with powers to issue bonds, condemn property, and form webs of relations with private invest- ment companies, large-scale contractors and management companies. Industrial firms will spin off new subsidiaries to exploit opportunities for subsidized profit in employing ghetto people. And predominantly white unions will ab- sorb these workers, thus neutralizing whatever potential that separate Negro unions might have had as an instru- ment of ghetto power. The ghetto has nothing much to offer which corporate enterprise needs—skilled labor, en- trepeneurial skills or raw materials. It is even too poor on its own to attract corporate products on any large THE NATION/October 16, 1967 ( ove ments will thus convert the ghetto to a subsi- dized market, and life conditions will be improved, but no Negro-controlled economic institutions are likely to emerge, nor will the ghetto have the resources to in- fluence the operations of outside corporate enterprise. ; The greatest danger to blacks is that the new corporate role will help to erode the power of municipal government, and this at a time when the black is about to obtain control of the city. Lyle M. Spencer, president of Science Research Associates (a subsidiary of IBM), glowingly comments on the new corporate alliance: the “military-industrial complex,” he observes, is about to be superseded by a “social-industrial complex.” Consider- He i =| l eh HY aM | a Se on Ss awe Ye.sTe: ing the influence the former exerts in national life and foreign affairs, who can doubt that the latter will possess comparable influence over city government and the ghetto? Impending changes in the relations of federal and local government will mesh well with corporate intervention, further weakening the traditiorfal powers of city govern- ment. The federal government is beginning to use the vast resources of its grants-in-aid programs to create metropolitan-wide administrative agencies to cope with pollution, blight and other urban problems. As agents of federal power, the metro bureaucracies will supersede local government as channels for federal money. Since these new administrative complexes will be largely removed from popular control, the blacks of the ghettos—even as they reach electoral majorities in the cities—cannot hope to influence them greatly. But the metro bureauc- racies—manned by an emerging class of planners and technicians—will find congenial counterparts in the corpo- rate world. In other words, just as black majorities come to power in the city, much of that power will be usurped by an alliance of national corporations and_ political leaders, as well as by federal-metropolitan bureaucracies. There is not likely to be much opposition to these de- velopments, however. Churchmen and union leaders have already given their blessing. Traditional civil rights leaders have special reason to be pleased, for their symbolic hegemony over the ghetto has been undermined, on the one side by the failure of the Johnson Administration to keep concessions flowing, and on the other by the grow- ing challenge of spokesmen for black nationalism. It was not without reason that traditional civil rights leaders joined with the President and leaders of the insurance business to announce the billion-dollar pledge of corporate funds to the ghetto. It is possible to imagine that militant leaders in the ghetto will resist the intrusion of corporate giants, but it is much easier to see how their resistance will be over- come. The new corporate imperialism will be mediated through a host of intervening subsidiaries and manage- ment structures, many located in the ghetto itself. Advo- cates of “participatory democracy,” “decentralization” and “black control of black affairs” will find these themes turned against them as they are invited to endorse and participate in the new corporate subsidiaries. Even now business leaders in some cities are cultivating black activ- ists, often over the protestations of local politicians be- fuddled by the curious twist in alignments. If grants-in-aid were to be funneled through city govern- ments, as in the past, and not through quasi-public and private corporate structures, black municipal leaders could convert these funds into the jobs, services and facilities required not only to improve economic conditions but to consolidate a black electorate as well. Under such cir- cumstances, local government would serve blacks as it has served other groups by providing a base for power in state and national affairs. Once absorbed in local cor- porate subsidaries, however, blacks will become instru- ments of national corporate power. Their economic lot will be improved somewhat, to be sure, but their long- term economic prospects depend on their potential politi- cal power, and that will be diminished. 367 TT LETTER FROM MUNICH Cc. AMERY Mr. Amery is a German novelist and journalist who has done postgraduate work in American universities. He is the author of Capitulation: The Lesson of German Catholicism (Herder and Herder). “What goal remains for the German Left?” That was the topic of a meeting sponsored by an intellectual group within the German Social Democrats—one of the many small groups worried by the soporific effect of the Great Coalition on German domestic politics. The gathering took place in a genteel setting, the Munich Kiinstlerhaus of fin de siécle fame; the room was painted as a garden pavilion in mock Italian—with clusters of shaded little wall lamps, thickets of fruit and fluttering birds of game on the ceiling. The moderate Left, i.e., the Social Demo- crats, have become respectable, as the clink of champagne and gin-and-tonic glasses in the background attested. Outside, beyond the tall French windows, it was a hot, splendid summer night, and an endless stream of Mer- cedes and Volkswagens, Peugeots and BMWs slid by. But all participants of the meeting were worried people —the discussion proved it. Two short talks were sched- uled (as usual on the Left, they turned out longer than expected), and sociologists, journalists, students of his- tory, smart middle-aged and chic young women were present—plus some full-time politicians of the SPD, in- cluding one fast-rising member of the Bundestag. The first speaker had done his homework. He talked about the philosophical basis of a possible future Left: about traditional values revisited, about ethics and an- thropology. His approach was precise, somewhat donnish, with strong reminders of Thomism (he is one of the still rare breed of young party workers for the SPD reared in a Catholic conviction), and a little bit boring. The jigsaw pieces of his composite vision clicked into place a little too smoothly: a vision of a future democracy sans reproach, where the mad beast in man would finally lie down with the lamb, where the ugly old egoisms wouid yield to solidarity. He referred to practical political issues often enough—there is no Social Democrat in Germany today, young or old, who doesn't. But the whole thing was too rational, too straightly derived from principle, to sound exciting. The old party no longer has the power to make the trumpet ring. The second speaker was very different. He was the head of the Munich group of SDS: the Socialist Students’ Association which makes headlines in nonconformism. Sons of “good” families mostly, these students are exas- perated by the sleepiness of political and social life, plagued by the alienations of heart and mind, and tuned to a high pitch of messianism by recent events: the chain of demonstrations and police actions following the route of the Persian Shah, and the growing discontent of the thinking Left with the practices of government. The prophet of this group is Herbert Marcuse, the Ger- man emigrant professor living in California, who preaches a fine contempt for the gods of profits and turnover, de- 368 viates from Marx in abandoning the leading role of the | working class, and visualizes a future without work, dedi- | cated to the unfolding of Self. The first and most captivating thing about the speaker — was his obvious amateur standing. He was shy, he spoke — without a manuscript, he tended to repeat his idea, but — he managed to transmit to the audience his burning concern for Germany’s future. He and his friends fear the coming of rule by manipulation; a form of mild but very effective repression, a plot of the two big parties forming the government (and confronted by a tiny and insecure opposition) to perpetuate the present machinery of power. The Bundestag, in their eyes, has abdicated its traditional role, and evidence of this self-imposed defeat | is the plan to form, in times of emergency, an inner com- mittee, a “rump parliament” of thirty-three, to carry on the necessary business of rubber-stamping. Definition of such an emergency. according to the planned laws, would remain mostly in the hands of the executive; even a mild recession looming around the corner could be styled | as such. The underlying malaise of this sort of relation- ship is immobility—immobility as the only real course of “action” for the powers that be. Immobility, in the eyes of these angry young people, is also the direct con- sequence of moral guilt, as shown in the government’s acquiescence in the scandal of Vietnam and in the recently emerged authoritarian regimes in Europe. Par- liamentary democracy has ceased to be a premise accepted without questioning. What should replace it? This transcends the polit- ical horizons even of the revolutionary-minded. Some- where, the “sovyets” are invoked as a solution—pre- Bolshevik Soviets, of course, subject to constant control by the masses. It was easy for the party workers present to show the weaknesses in this kind of thinking and | hoping; to show, for instance, that an increase in rest- lessness, a growing distrust of parliamentary democracy would result only in the upsurge of Fascist resentment. This is something which academic revolutionaries gener- ally overlook: popular uprisings against an establishment — are usually diverted against scapegoats (Christians, Jews, | sectarians), are usually blinded by short-term resent- _ ment, and very rare are the moments (November, 19174] for instance), when the trained mind and the perceptive — will are able to muster the support of mass despair. This _ fact is invisible to idealistic young students; they insist, with touching stubbornness, that the worker could be — educated, that he could be brought to the realization that his servitude is only smoother, materially brighter than it used to be, that the patterns of power and domin- | ion are old, but not venerable. Therefore, the case of the — SPD parliamentarians against the New Left is legitimate. Once the old distrust of the “system” dimly remembered from Weimar days begins to blossom again, the national choice of an alternative will not be Marxist. The case against the New Left may be legitimate— but the spirit of the defense was not. The most sadden- THE NATION/October 16, 1967 | pression of this spirit was the behavior of the fast- rising MP, who matched the assertiveness, the aggressive and tricky argumentation, the complete lack of insight __ and self-criticism of his worst CSU colleagues. It was easy, for him, to maneuver the students into a tight corner; but he chose to do it with such massive ill grace that his early and demonstrative leaving was greeted by all with relief. It makes one wince to see such types arguing for parliamentarism—a parliamentarism which provides such dubious methods of selection. While the political arguments of the New Left, of the wild students, are doubtful, it is hard to imagine that their misgivings can be assuaged by the living example of slick operators elbowing their way up into the establishment. The ensuing discussion did not do much to recon- _cile the viewpoints present. This, also, is usual. It left this observer with a mingled feeling of hope and appre- hension. Hope can be founded on the evidence that even the backwaters of West German provincialism have not suffocated the spirit of wild and free speculation; appre- hension from the fact that the utopias of old are as DATA BANKS THE PUNCHCARD PHIL HIRSCH Mr. Hirsch is Washington correspondent for Datamation Magazine, a leading computer industry trade publication. He has written extensively about the social and technical aspects of automation. Washington “The information that you are required to furnish is held confidential by law. Your census report cannot be used for purposes of taxation, investigation, or regulation.” So stated the director of the Census Bureau on the front page of every 1960 census form. Below his signature, the message was repeated in slightly different language. Yet, since 1960, the Bureau has distributed detailed statistics, summarized from individual census questionnaires, to hundreds of companies, trade associ- ations and government agencies, without determining what those statistics would be used for. In 1963, the American Medical Association sent the Bureau a list of 900 physicians living in Chicago and the rest of Illinois. Census pulled the returns of 188 doctors, then summarized their incomes. The report sent to AMA was classified into more than two dozen income cate- gories. The number of doctors within each group was further subclassified by type of medical specialty (gen- eral practitioner, internist, surgeon), as well as by area of residence (inside and outside Metropolitan Chicago). Census officials insist that selling this information to AMA didn’t violate anyone’s privacy. They maintain that there is no way of telling, from the statistics, which THE NATION/ October 16, 1967 far removed from us as ever. There was little or nothing in the view of the New Left which has not been said better and more brilliantly—by Trotsky, by’ Marxist thinkers of the European belt west of Russia, by the incorruptible theoreticians of the Yugoslav periodical Praxis, and others. It shows the effectiveness of our German isolation that we are condemned to rethink the often-thought, proclaim anew the utopias of the 1930s, relive the nagging doubts of a society potentially weak and powerless in the face of neurotic malice. The participants in this Munich meeting all had good faces; faces one could trust. (An exception has been mentioned.) It is hard, among such faces, to keep alive the fact that such groups are islands; islands floating in a sea of apolitical and anti-political muck. And it is important to realize that the monsters threatening us are not oxygen breathers; that they can subsist, indefinitely almost, under fathoms of dark mire. Only the feeblest attempts have been made to dredge this sea. Neither the humanist and selfless party workers of the SPD nor their antagonists of the New Left are strong enough, \ individually, to tackle this job. SNOOPERS ot the 900 individuals in the original list were included in the sample. But the message on the front cover of the 1960 census questionnaire says nothing about summariz- | ing and selling the information inside. It clearly implies the opposite. Actually, the Bureau can’t really know if the AMA tabulation violated anyone’s privacy because it simply | accepted the association’s statement that the data was 4 needed for a study of physicians’ incomes. Other orders for census statistics are also filled without being investi- | gated. Instead of investigating. warnings are issued—possibly | in the hope that they will make the investigations un- necessary. The annual catalogues issued by the Census Bureau tell prospective purchasers of special tabulations that “the purposes for which such tabulations are ob-— | tained must not be contrary to the public interest, nor i must they be used to give unfair commercial or other | advantage to any person or group.” 7 Among the Bureau’s customers during the past few | years was an advertising agency that wanted to know | which areas of the country contained a high percentage of | teen-agers; the agency was promoting “Do-It,” described | as “a teenage dance fad item.” An insurance conn. seeking prospects for its personal accident policy in New | Mexico, asked for data on Indians and persons with | . Spanish surnames. Another ad agency sought help in locating families with specified incomes, who would makell good credit-card customers for stores and oil companies. A Boy Scout group wanted to improve its fund-raising activities, while an electrical products firm asked ‘oll 36 \ secant ene Bor < Saree | | | 370 family income data that could be used to “evaluate” its pay structure. “... 1 am sure that the Census (Bureau) can get from our members, in some cases, information which they probably wouldn't give to the (American Textile Manu- facturers) Institute,’ said R. B. Brandis, an ATMI executive, when he appeared before a House subcom- mittee in 1964. This is one of the few times the propriety of the Bureau’s special tabulations has been referred to in public. What Brandis said raises a rather chilling prospect. For if the Bureau is distributing information to third parties which they couldn’t legitimately get on their own, it is a stool pigeon, not a statistical service agency. The fees charged for these tabulations cover “the total incremental cost . . . of extracting the data from the files and preparing the tabulations,’ Census Director Ross Eckler told the subcommittee last year. He neglected to add that the preceding steps—collecting data from each household and processing it into extractable form—are far more expensive and are subsidized by the taxpayer. Just the first job, data collection, represented more than two-thirds of the cost of the 1960 decennial census. Special tabulations are by-products of the data that produces published census reports, explains a Bureau official; he argues that if there were no tabulations, the same information would still have to be gathered in the field by census enumerators. Hence, the Bureau doesn’t feel right charging users of special tabulations for work, But the business firms and trade associations that purchase special tabulations have originated many of the census questions added in recent years, so this program must have increased the complexity and expense of census collection and data processing. Several other federal agencies—notably the In- ternal Revenue Service, Federal Housing Administration, Small Business Administration and Department of Agri- culture—sell aggregate statistical summaries to public and private organizations. The individuals who supply this information, like those who fill out census questionnaires, are always assured that what they tell the government will be kept strictly confidential. In November, 1964, IRS tabulated the adjusted gross incomes of 5,000 subscribers to the New Jersey Blue Shield Plan. Separate income figures were presented for family and single person subscribers, for those enrolled under group contracts, and for those paying premiums directly. From this analysis, New Jersey Blue Shield developed a proposal in 1965 to increase rates for middle-income subscribers. It was never adopted, but only because the plan’s trustees, a majority of whom are doctors, found a better alternative: in October, 1965, they authorized a 6 per cent increase in the fees paid to participating physicians, causing a run on the plan’s financial reserves during 1966 which forced the state to grant Blue Shield an overall 12 per cent increase early this year. IRS and the other agencies do a relatively small amount of statistical tabulating for outsiders. But at the Census ‘Bureau, this is a big business. As Robert Voight, a special assistant in the Bureau’s office of research and development boasted last March, in a speech to the American Bankers Association: “In financial terms, the THE NATION/October 16, 1967 =— = for the current Bureau program for several years, and this year will exceed that figure by a substantial margin.” (The Bureau’s fiscal 1967 appropriation totaled approxi- mately $25 million.) This business should grow considerably because the Bureau is busily refining its statistics and procedures to improve its service. Here is Voight telling the ABA about the major changes planned for their benefit in the 1970 census: We expect to provide much greater geographic flexibility. We will identify data down to the individual side of a city block so that it can be grouped into any geographic configuration you call for. Also, we expect to indentify these block sides by coordinates of latitude and longitude. This will open up a whole new area of potential value to marketers. For example, you could ask us to give the characteristics of the population and housing in one mile circles from your bank location or from a prospective bank location. We will be in a position to map cities for you in square mile grids or other configurations on the computer, to geographically display the characteristics of such areas, to provide a land and housing value chart, commuting patterns, new housing, old housing, deteriorated housing, et cetera. Some of the future possibilities are quite exciting. . . . To exploit this new capability, all the customer will have to do is give the Bureau a list containing the names - and addresses of the individuals he wants to know about; a computer will then retrieve the corresponding records and summarize their contents automatically. These “matching studies” could be made previously, but they had to be done manually, were restricted to a few large cities, and usually failed to match a substantial number of names on the customer’s list. Computerization, together with the widespread use of mailed census - questionnaires in 1970, is expected to reduce these short- comings and increase the commercial appeal of matching studies substantially. If the “data bank” proposed by the Bureau of the Budget materializes, matching studies will become even more useful. The Budget Bureau wants to set up a computerized storehouse encompassing the statistics col- lected by twenty federal agencies, including Census. The information would be converted into a standard format, permitting figures collected by different agencies to be related, and enabling users—government officials, scholars and businessmen—to combine the information in new ways. This can’t be done now because the data collections of most agencies overlap and the boundaries are murky. (See “National Data Center: The Computer vs. the Bill of Rights’ by Anthony Prisendorf, The Nation, October 31, 1966.) Several other data banks are already in operation, or planned. According to EDP Weekly, an electronics in- dustry trade publication, a nation-wide computerized network designed to help keep undesirable drivers off the highway is being developed within the Department of Transportation. Each state will feed in the records of individual drivers whose licenses have been revoked; all states then will be able to check their driver license appli- THE NATION/October 16, 1967 _ particular areas, whose purchasing and payment habits cations against this file, routinely and instantly. The basic idea is to prevent a driver who loses his license in one state from getting relicensed in another. Who will have access to this information has not been disclosed. New Haven, Conn., is developing an IBM system which, according to U.S. News & World Report, “will produce facts and figures about anyone” living in the city. Credit bureaus across the country are merging their records at a frenetic rate. Some region-wide data banks are in operation, and by 1972 the Associated Credit Bureaus of America plan to have a nation-wide network. A few legislators—notably Rep. Cornelius Gallagher of New Jersey, Rep. William Green, Jr., of Pennsyl- | vania, and Missouri’s Sen. Edward Long—have wondered | out loud whether galloping computerization is hurrying ~ the nation toward an Orwellian society. Gallagher has — suggested that the Budget Bureau’s proposed data bank — could collect individual dossiers and make their contents accessible to anyone with enough political clout. He has | succeeded in getting the whole idea shelved, at least tem- ~ porarily. Meanwhile, the Census Bureau has been per- © suaded not to ask each person for his religion and social | security number in 1970. | Very little has been said, though, about another aspect of the privacy problem which could be just as | much of a threat to the individual as a computerized | dossier. The nature of this threat is suggested by a com- |) puterized system developed recently at MIT to evaluate |) consumer loan applications. It is based on “population | subsets”—discrete groups of borrowers, residing within | are measured statistically, then cross-classified by income level, family size and various other characteristics. The } resulting statistical profiles provide yardsticks for evalu- | ating the people who apply for loans. Matching each | applicant with “his” population subset allegedly will in- |} dicate whether he’s a good or a bad credit risk. { This idea has great appeal for “credit grantors,” as) they are called in financial circles. Their primary goal} is to maximize profit at minimum risk, which means | locating a large number of “responsible” borrowers as i efficiently as possible. If a computer is able to reduce the | costs of existing evaluation procedures (and there is little | doubt it can), that is sufficient justification for com~] puterization. Presumably, the new system should also | have a better batting average than the old one. But the} definition of a “responsible” borrower is flexible, so this| judgment depends largely on the judge. 1 As credit bureaus merge their records into regional | and national data banks, systems like the one developed | at MIT could encompass more and more credit grantors]| and more and more borrowers. The physical relationship) would change also. Now, when an individual applies for: a loan or a charge account, he often has a chance to persuade the credit manager to overlook a doubtful] record. In a few years, the borrower’s fate is likely to be! decided in micro-seconds by an electronic oracle installed on a remote Olympus. 1 Some credit managers probably will continue to rel mainly on their judgment. But many won't. For denying | 37]f ot 3 | i h is a big responsibility. Many applicants who don’t conform to the life pattern programed into the credit bureau computer complex will undoubtedly alter their habits. The others simply will be denied credit, on the basis of guilt by association, because they belong to a wrong population subset. In the automobile insurance industry, guilt by associ- ation already has been honed into a valuable marketing tool. The House Judiciary Committee recently began in- quiring into the widespread practice of canceling policies “without sufficient justification, and often on the basis of whimsy or flimsy excuse.” The inquiry was announced July 10. In the next ten days, the committee received more than 120 complaints from individuals who claimed they had been denied coverage, or had been forced to pay excessive premiums because of age, sex, color, economic background or place of residence. Not all businessmen have the resources of the in- surance companies, or the same power to extract personal information from their customers. The Census Bureau is amply endowed with both, however, and is more than willing to put them at the service of business. The 1970 census will, among its other questions, ask for detailed figures on individual income—farm and non- Beer in the Gallery (Continued from page 357) bassy was dampened slightly by an outburst on the part af Phan Khac Suu, the chairman. “I resign as chairman,” Phan Khac Suu announced. “I will not accept the re- sponsibility of announcing this before history.” The three American experts should now take the floor and enlighten their fellow countrymen. What would have happened if the Honorable Ngoc Loan had not been re- laxing in the gallery? The Doctor Shortage An article by Elton Rayack, “AMA: The Restrictive Power,” in the May 3, 1965 Nation, began with the thesis that regardless of all other factors the availability of doctors limits the amount and quality of medical serv- ices that can be provided. The splendid series of articles by Richard Lyons, which began with “Doctor Shortage _ Nearing a Crisis” in the September 28 New York Times, reaffirms Rayack’s charges and brings into the open what the public has already learned by individual experience— that the wealthiest country in the world is faced with a shortage of physicians estimated at 50,000 for the entire country and leaving many areas without a single doctor within reasonable distance. Furthermore, in their efforts _ to avert a complete breakdown, many U:S. hospitals are recruiting foreign doctors who are either unqualified—so that the patients receive substandard medical care—or, when they are adequately skilled, should be serving the _ people in their own countries. In sum, the restrictive poli- cies of the American Medical Association have simulta- neously injured a large section of the American public a man credit in a society where credit is indispensable farm earnings, interest and dividend income, welfa ments, Women will be asked how many babies they ever had. Those individuals born after April, 1953, will report whether they worked at any time in the week preceding the census, and if so, how many hours; where the em- ployment was located; how the individual traveled there; whether he was absent at any time during the week because of illness, vacation or other reason; whether he was looking for work, was unemployed or laid off; the name of his employer; his occupation, duties and job title. There will be equally detailed questions on marital status and living accommodations. Those who rent homes or apartments, for example, will have to tell how much they pay the landlord, what they spend on utilities, and what appliances they own. Most of these questions will be asked to only a sample of the population. But this shouldn’t stop the Census Bureau’s computers from massaging the data into match- ing studies tailored to the individual needs of its custom- ers. While names will be kept confidential, the rest of the information on each census questionnaire will be an open book. Pitchmen of all types and moral complexions will be led straight to their marks, and the marks will pay most of the bill. and the people of other countries. This malfeasance has been on such a scale, and so prolonged, that even the Association is now alarmed and is casting about for ways of mitigating the —- for which it has largely been responsible. Siphoning off doctors from countries which need their services, and where they could practice most efficiently, is the most execrable form of brain drain. It would be de- plorable enough if it involved one poor country robbing another, but it is an international scandal when the United States robs countries like Turkey, Greece, India or the Philippines. That this sort of thing goes on elsewhere in the world is no excuse for America, which engages in the traffic on a larger scale and with the least excuse. Lyons quotes a Pennsylvania medical educator: “This country is simply stealing talent and stealing it from countries that can least afford it.” The drain has become so acute in India that physicians there are no longer al- lowed to take the examination which would qualify them for practice in the United States. As an outstanding example of manpower resources un- tapped in the United States, Negroes constitute only 3 per cent of doctors in this country. Medical training is ex- pensive—about $4,000 a year—and few Negroes apply. Few poor white boys apply for the same reason. Money is sometimes available for bright students, including Negroes, but no organized effort is made to acquaint them with the opportunities and the need. The medical profession must exert itself to reach the young in the same way that the aerospace industries do, and to con- vince those whose values are not already hopelessly warped that it is more important to heal the sick than to send a few picked specimens to the moon. THE NATION/ October 16, 1967 unemployment and other insurance benefi a Site Meccan ee ee ees a moti aaa be _ THE CONFESSIONS OF NAT TURN- ER. By William Styron. Random House. _ 429 pp. $6.95. SHAUN O’CONNELL Mr. O'Connell teaches English at the Uni- versity of Massachusetts. Styron has run some risks with this novel. This is true despite its striking, contemporary relevance. Nat would have understood Stokely Carmichael’s threat _ and gone him one better. When a honkie hits you, you indeed kill him, but first you organize, then you plan to kill them all. Still, this book is likely to raise some Tesentment. For Styron has presumed to know a Negro. A white ex-Southerner of the middle 20th century insists he knows enough to assume the guise of an early 19th-century black slave. Not only that but Styron admits—in an important essay, “This Quiet Dust” (Harper’s, April, 1965) which explains his personal obsession with Nat—that “most Southern white people cannot know or touch black people,” that the contemporary Negro “may feel that it is too late to be known, and that the desire to know him reeks of Outrageous condescension.” Yet, Styron insists on telling Nat’s story in first-per- son narrative. In a serious way he seems not to care what LeRoi Jones, say, might think of his presumption. This is something he had to do. In the desperately understated cliché, he is paying his dues, just as did Faulkner in /ntruder in the Dust and Warren in Who Speaks For the Negro?. For, Styron says, “to come to know the Negro has become the moral imperative of every white Southerner.” To argue that this is arrogant and futile is to re- sign oneself to fragmentation, alienation, violence. Styron chances a daring, imag- inative leap into a tormented black psyche to better understand himself and his country. He has taken to heart Bald- win’s wisdom—hatred destroys the hater; the American white man must “find a way of living with the Negro in order to be able to live with himself.” For Styron this personal, social prob- lem “resolved itself into an artistic one.” How could he best understand, embody, become Nat? He could be circled from the outside with historical documents, the actual Confessions and the only book on the subject, The Southampton Insurrec- tion (1900)- by W.S. Drewry. These scant notes could be amplified by close readings in the history of slavery. Though THE NATION/ October 16, 1967 these works provide Styron with a frame- work of the actual, reference points which had to be touched, and an abun- dance of specifics from which to draw, he had, finally, to confront Nat’s single, isolated self. Who was he? Why did only he, in the long history of American slavery, lead an uprising? Why, when about sixty whites were slaughtered, did he personally only kill one? She was 18, her name was Margaret Whitehead, a belle, and, as Nat actually confessed, “after repeated blows with a sword, I killed her by a blow on the head with a fence rail.” Why did the thrust of Nat’s rebellion flinch after this murder? Styron asks, “Did he discover his humanity here or did he lose it?” History can help but, finally, Styron had to depend upon his novelist’s first-rate sense of self to create situation and character which would convince us that these questions can be answered. Nat’s humanity is both Styron’s and, as he sees it, Nat’s problem. He was “favored” as perhaps no Virginia slave had been before. Son of the cook, he ate well. A cute pickaninny, he was pam- pered by whites. Further, he had the “luck” to be owned by a man of unu- sually enlightened convictions, Samuel Turner—‘Turner” is, of course, his name, not truly Nat’s—who felt “that the more religiously and intellectually enlightened a Negro is made, the better for himself, As part of the discussion of the novel in the United States, two views of William Styron’s treat- ment of Nat Turner’s slave re- bellion are presented here. Mr. O’Connell addresses himself to the fictional aspects of the novel. But because Mr. Styron’s book is a dramatization of a real event in the history of the American Negro, it seemed of interest to present a historical view as well. The rebellion is documented in history by “The Confessions of Nat Turner as fully and volun- tarily told to Thomas R. Gray,” published in Baltimore in 1831 and reprinted as an appendix to Herbert Aptheker’s Nat Turner’s Slave Rebellion. In the essay which follows, Mr. Aptheker concerns himself with questions of histor- ical accuracy and interpretation. KS & THE ARTS his master, and the commonwealth.” At first Nat responds gratefully to this be- nevolent despotism. He develops a sense of his own significance that a field hand could never know. He feels the joy of becoming; “I shiver in the glory of self.” Spurred by his heightened sensitivity to the promises of life he mimes the whites, their talk, their style, studies his Bible, learns his carpentry and, he says, be- comes “a pet, the darling, the little black jewel of Turner’s Mill.’ He pushes so successfully against the barrier of his “niggerness” that Turner promises eman- cipation. But Turner is weak, caught in a depression caused by the exhaustion of tobacco lands, and goes back on his word. When Nat is sold, when it is clear that he will never be free, that he can never more become in that way, he experienced a kind of disbelief which verged close upon madness, then a sense of betrayal, then fury such as I had never known before, then finally, to my dismay, hatred so bitter that I grew dizzy and thought I might get sick on the floor. Having been promised more—through ‘the white man’s “wanton and arrogant kindness’”—and seeing that promise de- nied, Nat had to kill. The need to slaugh- ter those who are most compassionate is, Nat says, “the central madness of nig- ‘ger existence.” Their philanthropy, how- ever patronizing, creates a sense of self in Nat, but their refusal to accept that self as fully human creates in him the capacity to deny their human reality, to make their blood flow “in a foaming sacrament.” He will grow, if not one way, then another. If he cannot become white then he will be black with an unimagined power of blackness: I knew that ... the whole world of white flesh would someday founder and split apart upon my’ retribution, would perish by my design and at my hands. Given the alternative by two-faced whites of being Sambo or Black Daemon he chooses the latter so that he can forever wipe out the sight of those white faces. But it is Nat’s curse and his nobility that he cannot wholly do to the white man what they have done to him. Even though he is betrayed by one master, whipped by another, even when he sees his mother raped by an Irish overseer, his best friend sold down the river, Nat cannot fully reduce the white man to a caricature, the Oppressor, whose lack of human characteristics justifies any 0 | ee a ee retributive horror. Nor, despite the upris- ing, can he successfully suppress his own humanity. Nat’s burden of intelligence creates in him an ambivalence. He can hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time—hatred and understanding— and not quite go mad. Understanding is not forgiveness—he has sixty killed. But ‘it diminishes his ferociousness—he might have killed 600. He is almost successful in stifling his apprehension of the human- ness in his enemy but, with Margaret Whitehead, comes to a kind of love which, though it does not save her, keeps him from more murder and insures his own defeat and death. Styron’s Margaret is the Southern belle seen with compassion and under- standing. She is a charming thing, full of little lyric bursts of froth, sentimental about the darkies’ lot and squashed tur- tles, but a first-rate sensibility, trapped in taffeta, who can only talk to Nat— this odd, brilliant slave—whom she per- forms for, respects, patronizes, flirts with, she hardly knows what. For she is as blocked and profoundly isolated as he. Nat can articulate his isolation: I thirsted to plunge myself into the earth, into a tree, a deer, a bear, a bird, a boy, a stump, a stone, to shoot milky Warm spurts of myself into the cold and lonely blue heart of the sky. He reaches for shimmering visions of God and bloody revenge. But Margaret HISTORICAL DAYS I go out on these days, down to the foot of the bridge, with the gasps of water hoses echoing in my ears, down past the steel bars cracking up into the fat brown fences like darts into cork boards, and boogaloo on old cars. I turn down streets picked clean as kosher hens, watching locks indecently dangling from shuttle thin houses. Summer. And yet old, brandy-eyed and flat men huddle in plucked overcoats. f think they must remember the negligent wind that their silent, twisted mouths accuse me of. The seasons, in this circle, are so unchanging. When I’m alone at night, sleep is a dirty rug, and I sit up, a jaded historian, and announce, It was a day like any other, as they say. JAY WRIGHT is as lonely and knows it less. She is disgusted by her brother—a smug preacher who likes to hunt runaway slaves—distressed by the nonsense she hears about Negro inferiority at her girls’ seminary, yet caught in the only world she knows. She and Nat cannot come together in life, in love, so they seek each other in death, in murder: Then when I raised the rail above her head she gazed at me, as if past the imponderable vista of her anguish, with a grave and drowsy tenderness such as I had never known, spoke some words too soft to hear and, saying no more, closed her eyes upon all madness, illu- sion, dream and strife. So I brought the timber down and she was swiftly gone, and I hurled the hateful, shattered club far up into the weeds. “Such as I had never known.” Can there be a greater isolation? Never until then had either seen his own humanity reflected in another's eyes. For this the houses of their bodies are on fire; for this lack they lie down in darkness. In this novel, as well as intensi- fying his complex, compelling vision, Styron extends his craft, modulates his style. The soaring, personal rhetoric of his other books is here held back to bet- ter delineate a range of characters. T. R. Gray, who set down the original Con- fessions, speaks in legalistic, Latinate rhetoric which luxuriates in revealing, polysyllabic distinctions, as when he de- fines Nat as “an-i-mate chattel.” Hark, Nat’s right-hand man, has an earthy, sharp rhetoric—‘Nigger life ain’t worth pig shit!’ Jeremiah Cobb, who passes death sentence on Nat, speaks in a style which is at once boozy, grand, self-pity- ing and perceptive—“God, God, my poor Virginia, blighted domain.’ Nat is up tight, masked, cool, so his rhetoric is controlled, fluctuating between “nigger gabble,” when that will serve his ends, and formal, perfect English. Thus Sty- ron’s flexible style helps him portray a variety of characters, a range of experi- ences—a dramatized paradigm of “the peculiar institution” in its several as- pects—and amplify the thin original Confessions into a full, plausible state- ment of a man’s groping understanding of the significance in his own life. Nat is believable, the gap between color and times can be bridged, because he is first and last a man, not a Negro slave. That is, as an imaginative, sen- sitive man concerned with ways to live a meaningful life, Nat is not so far apart from Styron as at first it seems. Styron has been able to detect and describe the man beneath the murderer. We accept the man and are thus implicated in his deeds. For example: Nat sits alone in his cell, in a “web of chains,” watching flies buzz “in haphazard elastic loopings” through huge motes of dust. He 1 X if the motes hinder the flies’ flight, but — then decides that they can be no more obstruction than the “harmless, dazzling, pelting flurry” of October leaves to a man. He fancies an envy for the flies’ brainless state, “unacquainted with misery or grief.” But then he turns this idea around to see the flies as “God’s su- preme outcasts, buzzing eternally between heaven and oblivion in a pure agony of mindless twitching.” He thinks, then, of the infrequency of suicide’ among slaves, how he had mistakenly interpre- ted this as evidence of their Christian forbearance, but now, sitting in chains, musing upon a fly: It seemed rather that my black shit- eating people were surely like flies, God’s mindless outcasts, lacking even that will to destroy by their own hand their unending anguish. .. Here Styron dramatizes Nat’s marvelous associations in terms which any man, any time, could understand. Who has not mulled the significance of flies? Then he dramatizes an extraordinary sensibility, one able to yoke seeming dissimilarities in a striking synthesis. Which of us has construed the mote/leaf, fly/man connec- tion? Thus we are swayed into provi- sional acceptance of the fly-slave analogy because we have already agreed with the logic of his previous metaphors. So it goes throughout the novel. Nat im- pinges. His humanness cannot be denied. Comfort, however, should not be taken from Nat’s humanity. Styron’s novel should be as disturbing to white liberals as to black militants. For, given charac- ter and conditions, Nat had to do what he did. Seeing it all from his point of view forces us into the paradoxical situ- ation of urging his revenge even though we know it will also mean general hor- ror and his own destruction. We flinch from the horror—women scalped, a baby smashed against a wall—but Nat, despite Margaret, does not. I would have done it all again. I would have destroyed them all. Yet { would have spared one. I would have spared her that showed me Him whose presence I had not fathomed or maybe never even known. God is love and love is Margaret and, as she cites from John, “he that dwelleth in love dwelleth in God, and God is him. . . .” But love does not conquer justified hatred, nor should it. God is also righteous wrath and, Styron demon- strates, Nat is in every way sympathetic and right when he leads in vengeance “a majestic black army of the Lord.” Styron has written an apologia for no political position, but a stunningly beau- tiful embodiment of a noble man, in a rotten time and place, who tried his best to save himself and transform his world. THE NATION/ October 16, 1967 | HERBERT APTHEKER Mr. Aptheker is the director of the American Institute for Marxist Studies and a member of the National Committee of the U. S. Communist Party. He is the author of American Negro Slave Revolts (J/nterna- tional), A Documentary History of the Ne- gro People (Citadel) and Nat Turner’s Slave Rebellion (Humanities Press). I have been asked to comment upon William Styron’s new novel from the viewpoint of a historian and to do so within very brief limits. The assumption behind this request is, I take it, that a historical novel should bear some resem- -blance to reality and that, indeed, through the creative act it may perhaps deepen the grasp of that reality; assumed, also, is the idea that each gen- \ eration’s historical novels tell at least as much about that generation as about the past they depict. At any rate, these are assumptions that I do hold. The discrepancies between the real- ities of the Turner rebellion and Mr. Styron’s rendition thereof are numerous, often quite serious, and form, I believe, a pattern amounting to consequential distortion—a distortion widespread in the United States at the present time. The discrepancies stem both from omission and from either false or quite dubious affirmations. One of the very well-established facts concerning the slave, Nat Turner, is that he fled from his owner in the mid-1820s, stayed away about one month and then, moved by re- ligious qualms, returned to the service of his earthly master. We know, too, that upon his return he was berated for this act by many of his fellow slaves— they “murmured against me,” as he said. No hint of this is in the novel and this part of the actual Confessions is omit- ted from the fairly extensive quotations used within the book. Especially impor- tant here—and elsewhere in the Con- fessions, but not in the novel—is the evidence of the impact upon Turner of the anti-slavery feelings present among his peers. » Perhaps the most dramatic moment in the actual Confessions comes when Turner's court-appointed interrogator demands to know from him whether or not he sees now—in jail and in chains —that he was mistaken in what he had undertaken, especially since he is soon to be executed. The interrogator him- self reports Turner’s reply: “Was not Christ crucified?” This direct, simple and great flash is not in the novel. Where Styron does quote from the Confessions, he is mainly accurate; where he is not, his omissions are in- THE NATION/ October 16, 1967 structive. He has Turner saying that “my mother strengthened me” in a belief in his special capacities; the actual Con- fessions has Turner saying “my father and mother”; the italicized words are omitted. A little further along, Styron quotes Turner as saying that “my mother” and others offered the opinion that with his marked “sense” he would develop into a _ difficult slave; but actually in the Confessions at this point, Turner said “my grandmother.” At still another point, Styron has Turner say, “T never laid eyes on my grandmother”; Turner, however, not only “laid eyes” on her but remembered her rather well and specifically says that he “was much attached” to her. In fact, while American slavery cer- tainly dealt awful blows to the family structure of the slaves, it never fully destroyed it—in large part because of the women’s ingenuity and _ resistance; and a rather unusual feature of Turner’s life—well documented—is that he re- membered both his father and_ his mother and a grandmother, too. The father—also a slave—fled and made good his escape (this fact is in the novel), but he did not do so before having left a clear mark on the memory 2 hen Newark blew up, Tom Hayden was there. He is white, but having lived and worked in the ghetto for more than two years, he was able to move freely throughout the city during the riots. This book tells what he saw and heard, and what he learned i from other eyewitnesses. = And it vividly shows—with many specific incidents— EEE Shi What really ~ Adppened in Newark? and the consciousness of his son. All this may be in conflict with the so- called Moynihan thesis, but that is the fault of the thesis—not of Nat Turner! Indeed Turner tells us that his parents taught him how to read—though he adds that he has no memory of just how early this occurred. This may be con- trasted with Styron’s long and repeated references to the “experimental” beney- olence of a master who undertook Turner’s education. There is repeated reference in the novel to the Great Dismal Swamp, lying in the southern part of Southamp- ton County—locale of the revolt—and extending into North Carolina. Styron has Turner reject this as a_ possible refuge for the discontented slaves, in- sisting that to reach it and to survive therein was not possible. The historical fact is that the Swamp was the refuge, for generations, of fugitive slaves, many of whom not only made it but survived in it, carved out a community life, re- sisted capture, and used it as a base from which to launch punitive expedi- tions against plantations. Indeed, many contemporaries thought—when the Turner uprising became known—that it was in fact another such assault, The Turner rebellion cannot be understood unless it is seen as the cul- minating blow of a particular period of how the police and National Guard not only failed to cool the violence, but actually in- tensified and prolonged it. REBELLION IN NEWARK Official Violence and Ghetto Response By TOM HAYDEN Published with The New York Review of Books. Cloth $3.95; Vintage Book paperback $1.65. Now at your bookstore RANDOM HOUSE rising slave unrest. This was never absent in the South for long; it appeared and reappeared in waves and the Turner cataclysm was the highlight of one such wave which commenced about 1827 and played itself out in 1832. In the Con- fessions indeed, the interrogator specifi- cally asked Turner about this and whether his outbreak was part of other such efforts just past and perhaps im- pending. Turner said no to this but added in a perfectly straightforward way that since he had been moved to rebel, others similarly situated might also similarly be moved. An important feature of this marked unrest just before the Turner outbreak was that it resulted in the reinforce- ment of the already massive machinery of control—a machinery never mention- ed in the novel but fundamental to an understanding of slave militancy and protest. Not only were new repressive laws passed—just before the outbreak— but additional police measures were taken at the specific requests of Southern state governors, including the Governor of Virginia. Furthermore, this reached the highest levels of govern- ment, so that at the orders of the Secretary of War, federal forts were re- inforced in the spring of 1831 both in Louisiana and in Virginia—and Turner and his men rose up in August. None of this fits a pattern which weaves through the novel—and has been stated by its author elsewhere quite explicitly—that the system of slavery had ‘“‘dehumanized the slave and divested him of honor, moral respon- sibility and manhood,” and that “the character (not characterization) of ‘Sambo’ . . . did in fact exist.”* Cer- tainly in the novel the bulk of the slaves are made into “Sambos” and I am afraid this is characterization; that it is not character is demonstrated by the actual record of the Negro people in the United States both during and after slavery. Space permits only three more specific comments. The character of Will who plays so vital a part in this _ novel has no resemblance to anything history shows of the Will who partici- pated in the Turner uprising. While Styron makes him a mad _ monster finally engaging in a power play with Turner, in the Confessions one meets Will through Turner’s mouth only when —just before the launching of the attack—he found Will as a newcomer among the conspirators. Turner says only that he greeted Will and then asked him how he came to be there, *These are Styron’s words in his review of my American Negro Slave Revolts, in the New York Review of Books, September 26, 1963. 376 wri, and that Will replied that freedom was as valuable to him as to any man and that he meant to try for his; this, says Turner, was enough to put him in my confidence and Will joins the fray and loses his life. Ali this is to be contrasted with the lustful, sadistic, crazy figment that appears and reappears with filth in his mouth and blood on his hands through page after page of the book. The novel emphasizes in many ways that Turner was able to recruit only about seventy or seventy-five men, while the county held over 7,000 slaves of whom many hundreds might physically have been expected to join. But the records of history—unlike the novel— do not show efforts at recruitment other than the original handful of six. It is these six who commence the uprising, in one parish of the county: and in a day and a half of desperate struggle actually are joined by perhaps seventy more. All things considered—including the system of control, the stakes in- volved, the apparent lack of prior preparation—this argues for discontent so deep that scores would actually risk their lives in order to express it. The repeated references in the novel to masters arming loyal black slaves to resist the rebels are made up out of whole cloth; there is no evidence of this whatsoever and to believe it or offer it shows an utter misapprehension of the nature of American slavery. Finally, one of the themes of the course, each event is unique, b idea here repeatedly offered is that the Turner uprising was “the only one sustained, effective revolt” in the history of United States slavery. This is not true. The actual fruition in uprising, in armed attack, occurred frequently in the United States on the part of slaves, from 169! in Virginia to 1864 in Mississippi; this apart from uprisings in coffles and aboard domestic slave- trading vessels; the massive participation of runaway slaves in the Seminole Wars; and the persistent phenomenon of maroons everywhere in the slave region. This novel reflects the author’s belief that the views of slavery in the United States associated with the names of Frank Tannenbaum and Stanley Elkins —which, in substance, are those of U.B. Phillips, the classical apologist for plantation slavery—are valid. The data do not support such views, however; and whether ‘“‘Sambo” is seen as the cre- ation of racism or the creation of a latter-day socio-psychological environ- mentalism, the fact is that “Sambo” is a caricature and not a reality. Nat Turner, however, was real; per- haps a novelist will yet come along to do justice to him, as, about thirty years ago, Arna Bontemps did justice to another great slave rebel, Gabriel, slave of Prosser, also of Virginia, in his book Black Thunder. Earnest Revolutionary THE REVOLUTIONARY. By Hans Koningsberger. Farrar, Straus and Gir- oux. 212 pp. $4.95. PETER BEREK Mr. Berek teaches English at Williams College. Why does the intelligent, educated, attractive son of well-to-do parents de- cide to throw a bomb at a judge who convicts some striking workers? By what progression of events and emotions does a youth who had every possibility and every reason for accepting his society willfully isolate himself from it and even risk his life to change it? Hans Konings- berger’s The Revolutionary scarcely at- tends to the obvious conflicts of men and ideas that one thinks of as radical poli- tics, and instead tries to tell us what it feels like to be such a revolutionary. And to be such a revolutionary, it ap- pears, is to be perpetually uncertain and self-questioning; to live in an alternation of hope and despair, idealism and cyni- cism. His hero is willing to deny him- self to achieve freedom for a whole so- ciety, but his great achievement is to attain freedom for himself. He dwells among men who debate doctrines and he tries to work amid a framework of politics, but his true geal is nondoc- trinal and nonpolitical: a visionary idea of human happiness. Koningsberger tries to keep our at- tention on the responses of the single individual by giving his novel the form of a parable. He makes no clear identi- fication of the time and place of his action (although it is apparently central European and early 20th century). The hero, called only “A.,” a young univer- sity student who has joined the Radical Party, becomes annoyed with its lack of action, allies himself with the “others” (the “International” — presumably the Communists), and then, still impatient, moves on to the Anarchists.-He is dis- owned by his family, beaten, arrested, expelled from the university, drafted: he deserts the army and becomes a fugitive from the police. He has an unloving af- fair with a Radical comrade; leaving her THE NATION/ October 16, 1967 individual and society, impelled by love, _ ean be fully human and fully free; trying to live up to this vision, he is forced to realize the impossibility of convincing even allies and friends that it is meaning- _ ful. He devotes his life to politics while he realizes how inadequate politics is to _ what really matters. One has to admire Koningsberger for making the structure of his novel so true to the hesitant and self-conscious character of his hero. Nothing is in The Revolutionary merely to be agreeable or entertaining. But in his praiseworthy de- sire to keep our attention focused on the notion of a revolutionary temperament or set of mind, rather than on the de- tails of any particular time and place, Koningsberger has given up most of the resources of the conventional realistic novel. He makes little attempt to give a full account of the horrors of the world against which A. is rebelling. Most of the people A. meets are counters rather _ than characters; they have names and social roles—the Radical Professor, the Horrified Father, the Officious Organ- izer — but no interest as individuals. Finally, the lack of detail in The Revo- lutionary makes it hard for us to under- stand the character of the hero. Good novels have been written which do not attend to background, char- acterization, motivation and suspense, but such a novel must sustain a stylistic intensity that is either beyond Konings- _berger’s grasp or denied him by the pat- tern of narration he has chosen. The Revolutionary develops like a movie, by cutting from one short scene to another. The total effect of these short chapters (there are seventy-three of them in a 200-page novel), presumably intended to create or suggest a mood, becomes rep- etitious or simply not very interesting. Potentially comic scenes, such as a “day of the poor’ when Anarchists, claiming to be officials celebrating the President’s birthday, take over a municipal pawn- shop and return articles without pay- ment, end before they are well begun. Because we see the action of the book from A.’s point of view, Koningsberger sometimes has trouble making clear which of the hero’s thoughts we are to take straight and which ironically. A novel striving for a continual double- ness of vision—and The Revolutionary certainly is that—needs a precise nar- rative control. But the style of The Rev- olutionary is not equal to the author’s subtle conception of the nature of the revolutionary temperament and _ the ironic intentions of his narrative scheme. A. thinks: “I want to find myself a THE NATION/ October 16, 1967 gypsy to fall in love with, a dark dark girl, born from the earth and music. Abundant, not virginal.” If this is lyri- cism, it is not lyrical enough; if adoles- cent extravagance, not silly enough. When A. sees his mother despite his father’s ban on such meetings, “he felt a wave of tenderness toward her go through him. ‘I do love you, you know,’ he said to her. She smiled at him.” This is the flattest kind of Novelistic Narration; it suggests no human relationship at all. In a poem by Brecht that Konings- berger uses as an epigraph to The Rey- olutionary, the poet says: “There was little 1 could do. Yet our rulers/Would have been happier without me, I hoped.” This wry understatement of the goals of the revolutionary catches the essence of the achievement of the hero of the novel: to be revolutionary is almost fruitless, yet essential. In his honesty about this un- spectacular vision, Koningsberger has re- fused to provide us with any of the ob- vious entertainments his subject might suggest. Perhaps this honesty of imagina- tion is more important than some partial failures of craft. . The American Unconscious THE AMERICANIZATION OF THE UNCONSCIOUS. By John Seeley. Inter- national Science Press. 456 pp. $8.95. JOHN BRIGHT Mr. Bright is a novelist and screen writer. There are many bigotries besides the fa- miliar noxious ones fortified by illiter- acy and bile. In the lofty worlds of scholarship there are bigotries fortified by learning and arrogance. They are not as nakedly damaging as those on the sewer level, but they are hurtful never- theless because they sabotage the basic purpose of knowledge itself, which in- cludes the deepening of human under- standing and the extension of control through the process. Mencken put it bluntly when he spoke of “learned donkeys.” Ellul explains the breed in terms of the necessities imposed by technology, an overlord of man’s cre- ation, fragmenting comprehension and dimming humanism. : So there are “separate” sciences, like separate skills, and they pursue their discrete ways in airy disregard—as if they were different sects of monks trudg- ing toward Heaven by diverse paths. The Americanization of the Uncon- scious is a brilliant and persuasive argu- ment against this overconfident “boxing off’ of disciplines because their ap- proaches seem to dictate mutual exclu- sion. Seeley’s address here is to sociology (his own specialty) and psychoanalysis, two bodies of thinking with an apparent polarity in the explanation of man’s be- havior. The title of the book has nothing to do with infiltration of our psyche from the Right, but is concerned, not fear- somely with revolution; in fact, a pair of them—the sociologist revolution and one inspired by ‘‘the psychiatrist as reluctant revolutionary.” Between them they have effected, often unintentionally, radical and pervasive changes in man’s group and individual behayior (and misbehavior), his institutions, values and norms. “We are in the process of. producing, if we have not already produced, a distinctly American Unconscious.” A “distinctly American Unconscious” is scarcely an idea to intrigue a Freudian of the classical mold, but I suspect it — would have charmed Freud himself. What Seeley seems to be saying, accommodat- ing to the psychological vocabulary, is that the cultural convolutions and the psychological impacts have resulted in a The Nation BOOK SERVICE Offers the following at a discount: FAMINE 1975! 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When order- ing, please give title, author and publisher. 10-16-67 Ri RRR GET REE TE BETS 377 45 x Zu Ae Bal re er meme > new and quite indigenous pattern of re- Sponses to internal and external stimuli. (it is fascinating to speculate upon the application of the thesis to other cul- tures: Soviet, Nigerian, Bahamian, Portu- guese and Vietnamese.) - Unlike his orthodox colleagues, Seeley is not above value judgments. He believes this newly developed American Uncon- scious can move toward « “manipulative society” (as indicated by Vance Pack- ard) or a “therapeutic community.” The former can lead to Orwellian disaster; the latter can eventuate in “a humanity more human than any we have ever known. .... Only if we can bring out of the consulting room into the society ... the intelligent affection that contains and domesticates the otherwise threaten- ing possibilities of insight, only if we can institutionalize these in public life, can we hope that we have called out the forces of life rather than tapped on the door of .death’s angel.” What Dr. Seeley asks for, to help bring about the humanistic alternative, is a “beneficial encounter” between sociolo- gists and psychologists to enrich and ful- fill the relationship of man-in-society and society-in-man. What is called for is not synthesis, nor incorporation, for a merger of the two disciplines would cause each to “lose all distinction of iden- tity, or, unduly bristling, [to] refuse con- jugation for fear of engulfment.” Just as a successful marriage is no threat to sexual distinctiveness (on the contrary) so can the “encounter,” the dialogue and complementarity of the behavioral sci- ences bear fine fruit. As marriage broker, Seeley brings to his task, besides wit and imagination, a logic that is Aristotelian because of in- sistence upon definition. No wedding, to say nothing of enduring wedlock, is pos- sible without recognition of terms, meth- odology, boundaries and ground rules— including the cancellation of the game because of rain. _ It might reasonably be asked: why is such a conjugation necessary? Why can- not sociology and psychology pursue their separate usefulnesses to man without be- ing in tandem, or at least close associa- tion? Seeley replies that the tandem is implicit in a joint etiology—a common preoccupation with human behavior. “If we say, for instance, that alteration in family behavior affects the behavior of members of the family we are talking sheer animism; altered family behavior is altered family member behavior.” (Ita- ics his.) Seeley recognizes that many at- tempts have been made in both disci- plines to break through a rigid dichotomy. “The psycheanalysts come to terms with what David Reisman has called the ‘dirty secrets’ of sociology: social class, eth- nicity, and the like; the sociologists come to terms with the corresponding dirty 378 secrets of the analysts: sex and aggres- sion.” So we have, in one area, the “in- terpersonal relations” of Harry Stack Sullivan, Erik Erikson’s ceaseless dialec- tic, and the socially based explorations of Fromm, Horney and Kardiner. And they have their opposite numbers in sociology, such as Reisman, Packard and, of course, Dr. Seeley himself. Such minds, however, are tributaries. The main streams of both islands are confined by orthodoxy and dense with obscurantism. Sometimes the opaque- ness is deliberate, to conceal thin or ob- vious ideas, as with Talcott Parsons. (That the Harvard guru is capable of clear vigorous writing when he is grap- pling with a big idea is demonstrated in his exciting synthesis of the inter- nalization theories of Freud and Durk- heim.) Sometimes it is a mask to con- ceal accommodation to the status quo, as with Seymour Lipset and other acade- micians of comfortable tenure. (The clearest piece of prose given out by Lip- set was his denunciation of the student rebellion at Berkeley.) Then there is the retreat into trivia, the insignificant or, at best, the less sig- nificant. Seeley observes that “we flee, I believe, in motive as well as in effect, from the larger questions, just as we di- vert resources, and, worse, attention from these much more far-reaching matters. American sociology and psychology go that way, I believe, not on the mere ground of scientific safety or ease of management of the problem but from covert alliances with the going order, in its major aspects, already, in the heart of the scientist.” A comparison of the official house organs of the two professions reveals a common turgidity, dreary when not downright unintelligible. Yet, happily, there are Young Turks in both camps. Sociology on Trial (which contains an excellent piece by Seeley) indicates the counter-force to the Brah- — mins, as does Trans-action; ably edited by Alvin Gouldner. Psychoanalysis likewise has its dissidents, a movement which would be led by Freud himself if he were alive to roar at the conformity he never practiced. Dr. Seeley writes with such illu- mination on so many subjects—mental health, education, the family, social path- ology, to name but a few—that it is al- most cavalier to demand other dimen- sions in his thinking. It is usually re- garded as unfair, a critic’s dirty trick, to complain what a book is not. But See- ley’s omissions and underemphases re- late sharply to his focus on the “distinc- tive American Unconscious,’ and_ his most legitimate proposal for cross-fer- tilization of sociology as well as psychol- ogy “in the context of committed ac- tion.” Are there not other forces—outside and beyond the purviews of sociology and psychology—that contribute very im- portantly to man’s inner and societal life? Galbraith, in The New Industrial State, thinks so; and C. Wright Mills, more pejoratively, thought so too. It is not a narrow determinism, nor animism, to insist that man-made structures, after leaving the assembly line, develop a spe- cial dynamics of their 6wn. The techno- logical superstructure analyzed by Ellul is one example. War is another, more hid- eous, illustration. Dr. Seeley’s refusal to invite two more> guests to his “think-in’—economics and political science—makes the party more cheerful, but their dour presence would be a guarantee against euphoria. Down and Out in Havana INCONSOLABLE MEMORIES. — By Edmundo Desnoes. Translated by the author. The New American Library. 155 pp. $4.50. RICHARD J. WALTON Mr. Walton, a former correspondent at the United Nations, is at work on a book about Adlai Stevenson at the UN, to be pub- lished next year by Coward-McCann. He visited Cuba before the Castro regime came 10 power. It is probably unfair to the author but almost inevitably Inconsolable Memories must be treated more as a political-cul- tural event than as a novel. As the first post-revolution novel by a Cuban resi- dent to be published in the United even specifically about States, it is an event, particularly since so many North Americans are hungry for information about Cuba and look for that peculiar truth often found more in fiction than in journalism. For those who believe that a novel should be as- © sessed as a novel, and not as anything else, it may be some consolation that the author, a Cuban book editor who lived and worked in the United States for ten years, must have expected just such treatment. This honest book does tell a lot about Castro’s Cuba although not in terms of housing schemes, literacy programs, in- dustrial development, sugar harvests, or the degree of individual freedom in Cuba. But it does tell, in diary form, what life there is like for a middle-class Cuban. THE NATION/October 16, 1967 eg we asa ne oe ene fet ase ie th AS yho makes little attempt to mself, or at least part of him- nonhero, records him as suf- _ fering from the most painful kind of love- hate relationship with Cuba, past and esent. I can’t think of the Cuban bour- geoisie without foaming at the mouth. I hate them with tenderness. Feel sorry for them: for what they could have been and what they wasted out of plain stupidity. For a time I tried to convince them to go into politics, throw out all those professional politicos and tin soldiers, find out what was happen- __ ing in the rest of the world. I insisted that they had to modernize the country: put an end to all those thatched huts and all that Cuban rhythm and primi- tive gaiety and force everybody to study _ Mathematics, Nothing. All wasted. And I've gone down with them. Alone here now. And later he writes of a middle-class friend that “He thinks the government is going to fall because they no longer import cars with long tail fins.” _ ingway’s house, in which he mocks both _. its glorification as a museum and the faithful retainer who shows _ visitors around, Desnoes’ nonhero feels “love and hate toward Hemingway; I admire him and at the same time he humiliates me. The same as my people, it’s the same feel- ing I have when [ think of Fidel, of the revolution. Permanently split; I can’t even agree with a part of myself.” Yet while he rails against the bour- geoisie, he doesn’t shrink from saying: . . . now there is only flat socialist equality for all. There’s no future for me; the future is worked out by the State. The future of a bourgeois... has been reduced to zero. The only refuge left to me is the mind, and the revolution has even broken into this hideout like a bull in a china shop. They've eliminated bourgeois freedom in order to plan the workers’ future. There’s even a weird morbid pleasure in knowing that people like me are slowly becoming extinct. This helps to explain the constant Stream of middle-class refugees from Cuba. There is still an economic place for them there but no psychological place unless they change, and like most of us, they can’t. But Desnoes, who was working in New York as an editor of Vision, a Spanish-language Latin-Amer- ican news magazine, swam against the stream. A cosmopolite more at home in New York, he returned to Havana in 1960 even though, as he has his diarist write: “Tt no longer looks like the Paris of the Caribbean, as tourists and whores used to call it. Now it looks more like THE NATION/October 16, 1967 ‘the capital of a banana republic in Central America, one of those dead, underdeveloped cities. . . .” Alienated from Cuban middle-class society and unable to adjust to the drab, controlled society that replaced it, Des- noes presumably returned and _ stayed because he thought his place was there. A brave act this, but the author doesn’t think so. Of Desnoes’ earlier novel, the diarist says: “He must be fishing for official approval. The artist, the true artist (you know that, Eddy) will always be an enemy of the state.” And Desnoes the author says of Desnoes the char- acter: “He even wrote an article against that New York news magazine for Spics, Visién, where he’d worked for over four years. If it was such a reactionary mag- azine, he shouldn’t have stayed there in the first place, He resigned when the magazine started its attacks against the revolution. That’s what he said, What a farce! He came back because he was a nobody in New York: to show off in underdevelopment.” After describing Eddy sitting on a lecture platform looking like a judge and smoking in lordly fashion a cigar pulled from the inside pocket of his blue Prince of Wales suit, Desnoes has his nameless diarist write: “Once you were young and pure, Eddy, and look at yourself now, Edmundo Desnoes.” Although he, himself, and Cuba (pre- and post-revolutionary) are the chief targets for his pitiless criticism, Des- noes has a bit left over for the Russians (and Americans): “Always the same. Emissaries of the great world power down Visiting their colonies. Humbler men than most Americans, true, and without any holdings in Cuba—but deep down their attitude is very much alike. Be- In a splendid long scene at Hem- eS ee STATEMENT OF OWNERSHIP, MANAGEMENT AND CIRCULATION (Act of October 23, 1962; Section 4369, Title 39, United States Code). 1. Date of filing: October 1, 1967. 2. Title of publication: THE NATION. 3. Frequency of issue: weekly, except July and August when bi-weekly. _ 4. Location of known office of publication (Street, city, county, state, zip code): Sixth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10014. 5. Location of the headquarters or general business offices of the publishers (Not printers)3 333 Sixth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10014. : 6. Names and addresses of publisher, editor, and managing editor: Publisher (Name and address): James J. Storrow Jr. 333 sixth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10014. Editor (Name and address): Carey McWilliams 333 Sixth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10014. Managing Editor (Name and address): Robert L. Hatch, Jr. 333 Sixth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10014. ___ 4 Owner (If owned by a corporation, its name and address must be stated and also immediately thereunder the names and addresses of stockholders owning or holding 1 Percent or more of total amount of stock. If not owned by a corporation, the names and addresses of the individual owners must be given. If owned by a partnership or other unincorporated firm, its name and address, as well as that of each individual must be given). Name: The Nation Associates, Inc., (no stockholders), 333 Sixth Ave. N. Y., N. Y. 10014; Carey McWilliams, Pres. and Treas., 333 Sixth Ave., N. Y¥., N. Y¥. 10014; James J. Storrow Jr., Vice-Pres. and Sec., 333 Sixth Ave., N. Y., N. Y. 10014. 8. Known bondholders, mortgagees, and other security holders owning or holding 1 percent or more of total amount of bonds, mortgages or other securities (If there are none, so state): None. 9. Paragraphs 7 and 8 include, in cases where the stockholder or security holder ap- Pears upon the books of the company as trustee or in any other fiduciary relation, the name of the person or corporation for whom such trustee is acting, also the statements in the two paragraphs show the affiant’s full Knowledge and belief as to the circumstances and conditions under which stockholders and security holders who do not appear upon the books of the company as trustees, hold stock and securities in a capacity other than that of a bona fide owner. Names and addresses of individuals who are stockholders of @ corporation which itself is a stockholder or holder of bonds, mortgages or other securities of the publishing corporation have been included in paragraphs 7 and 8 when the interests of such individuals are equivalent to 1 percent or more of the total amount of the stock or securities of the publishing corporation. 10. Extent and nature of circulation. Average no. copies each issue during preceding 12 months; single issue nearest to filing date. A. Total no. copies printed (net press run): Average no. copies each issue during preced- ing 12 months, 42,140; single issue nearest to filing date, 40,800. B. Paid Circulation: 1. Sales through dealers and carriers, street vendors and counter sales: Average no. copies each issue during preceding 12 months, 3,681; single issue nearest to filing date, 3,900. 2. Mail subscriptions: Average no. copies each issue during preceding 12 months, 27,817; single issue nearest to filing date, 27,370. C. Total Paid Circulation: Average no. copies each issue during preceding 12 months, 31,498; single issue nearest to filing date, 31,270. D. Free Distribution (including samples) by mail, carrier or other means: Average no. copies each issue during preceding 12 months, 160; single issue nearest to filing date, 160. i E. Total Distribution (Sum of C and D): Average no. copies each issue during preceding 12 months, 31,658; single issue nearest to filing date, 31,430. ‘ F. Office use, left-over, unaccounted, spoiled after printing: Average no. copies each issue during preceding 12 months, 10,482; single issue nearest to filing date, 9,370. G. Total (Sum of E & F—should equal net press run shown in A): Average no. copies €ach issue during preceding 12 months, 42,140; single issue nearest to filing date, 40,800. I certify that the statements made by me above are correct and complete. JAMES J. STORROW JR., Publisher 379 333 sides, what they can’t take away in dol- lars they get out of us in propaganda.” Even in Cuba, Russians and Americans have come to resemble each other. Viewed strictly as a novel, In- consolable Memories is a deliberate monotone of existential despair relieved only (or perhaps accentuated) by fre- quent flashes of sardonic humor and perceptive observations. There is vir- tually no plot or dialogue, just a series of “inconsolable memories,” including several unhappy affairs, reeling out of the mind of a man deep in depression. Too much self-centered despair for some readers, no doubt, although oth- ers, like this reader, will find themselves pulled along by the clean, colloquial language (Desnoes did his own transla- tion) and by sympathy for this nonhero, for it is not only in Cuba that men find themselves out of step with their society. A glance at any newspaper is cause for depression. Indeed, if postwar literature is any criterion, perhaps despair is the normal state of the mid-20th-century man. But, for the time being at least, the book’s great value is in what it tells us about Cuba, implicitly as well as ex- plicitly. There is no way of knowing here how many—if any—books have been suppressed by the guardians of Cuban thought, but this one was pub- lished in Cuba and the United States. And even though the book is unsparing- ly critical of Cuba after the revolution, Desnoes kept his job at the Cuban na- tional book publishing company. In most post-revolutionary situations the fact that the book was based on the assumption (in this case more often implied than stated) that the revolution was just and mecessary would not have saved the author from the wrath of the zealots. If other Cuban artists have this free- dom—and there is evidence that at least some do—it is a good and significant sign among the bewildering profusion of signs, good and bad, that makes Castro’s revolution so difficult to assess. Further, Inconsolable Memories would be even more important if it has begun to open a permanent breach in the cultural bar- riers between two nations only 90 miles apart. If these barriers are to be re- moved, as eventually they must, the first steps necessarily must be taken by the one country so infinitely stronger than the other. In the meantime, Jnconsolable Memories is an honest look at Cuba, well worth reading in its own right. NOTICE TO SUBSCRIBERS! ALL change of address notices, orders for subscriptions and other correspondence, should be sent to: THE NATION, 333 Sixth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10014 Neale bathe THE I had seen Stephen D., Hugh Leonard’s adaptation of Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Stephen Hero, four years ago in London and had been only mildly impressed by it. When I heard that it was to be produced here, I doubted that it could interest an audience not already familiar with the books of which it is a sort of staged reading. And for those who had read them, I thought, any adaptation must prove inadequate and disappointing. Cer- tainly it is not a conventional play, but my companion of the evening, who had never read a line of Joyce, was moved by it. And by present standards, any per- formance by actors on the stage which shapes to a meaning and stirs us is a play. I could not imagine myself caring for Stephen D. in New York because the actors would not bring to it the authen- ticity of the London production, which was composed of the largely Irish Gate Theatre company of Dublin. But, oddly enough, though the local troupe lacks certain Joycean qualities I found the production at the East 74th Street Theatre more touching, closer to me. For all the song in his writing, there is an astringency in Joyce, a toughness, even a cold nastiness which one may find repellent. But Joyce is all the greater for conveying the unpleasantness in the environment and the people which his work sets before us. This is his realism. The clammy wetness, the dis- comfort, the crabbiness, the obscenity, the stale intimacy of the little Dublin world are all present without mitigation in Joyce’s writing. Some of these elements endured in Joyce’s very being. He who had lived most of his life in Europe carried the dirt of the Dublin streets on the soles of his shoes wherever he went, just as he never completely got over the effects of his early religious training though he abjured and loathed it. It is this perhaps that gives his work a special sort of universality; that he was able to cherish what he cursed, that he faced and accepted what to begin with had offend- ed and wounded him. There is in Joyce an all-embracing yea along with the mockery and blasphemy of his nay. The New York production is softer than the one I saw in London. The actors bring an unconscious lyricism to the material without stagy eloquence. They are perhaps less “professional” than the London company, but a certain naiveté in them endows the play with a tenderness which it very much needs and is, in fact, of its essence. What finally is the import of Stephen D. as we now receive it? It is the poem of a resolute conscience emerging from the soil of a young man’s painfully re- pressive, ungracious background. The quarrels about Parnell in the parental home are very funny to us, but they must have lacerated Stephen. The sermon on hell may make us laugh (especially as it it cut by more than half in the adaptation), but it could have been no less than terrifying to the boy. The wish to believe, the imperative to deny, the offense against his mother’s suscepti- bilities, the need to atone and the power- ful urge to “sin,” the struggle against religious bigotry and cultural narrow- ness—all these must have put an un- speakable burden on the boy that was and the man to be. When in the youth there grows the determination, “I will not serve that in which I no longer believe, whether it call itself my home, my fatherland or my church: and I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can... using for my defense the only arms I allow myself to use—silence, exile and cunning,” and later when he says, “I do not fear to be alone. . . or to leave whatever I have to leave. And I am not afraid to make a mistake, even a great mistake, a lifelong mistake...” we are inspired as by the birth of a brave soul. Though it is clear that he is a fright- ful egotist, such a man in our day and age of laxity, compromise and moral in- difference attains a heroic stature. His credo, pushing its way through doubt, disarray and error, moves us intimately. When, after all his negations, we hear him cry out, “O Ireland, my first and only love,” we find ourselves on the verge of tears. The play then becomes not simply about the writer Joyce but a play for all those for whom the epithet “idealist” need not have a hollow ring. Is it necessary to add that the writing of Stephen D., being entirely culled from the original sources, is music to the ear and a spur to the mind? Some fine prose passages do not “cross” in the theatre because they are not impelled by a specific dramatic intention, but for the most part the play works as comedy and drama with sure and often profound effect. The production and acting under James Waring’s direction is not always of one piece and at moments clumsy, but the very lack of a self-confident rhetoric in the company proves more telling than a studied aplomb. Stephen Joyce’s reading of Stephen D. is clear, unembellished, intelligent and_ sincere. William Prince is excellent as Father Arnall who delivers the vile sermon on THE NATION/ October 16, 1967 ¥ : i a on: something like benevolence. mot McNamara brings a comic or to the role of Davin, one of sphen’s classmates. The truest acting ¥; in the sense of characterization) is that of Roy Scheider as Stephen’s chum _ Cranly. His portrayal combines goodness _ of heart with an asperity more feigned _» than real. It is unlikely that there will be many more rewarding evenings in our theatre _ this season. _ FILMS HAROLD CLURMAN T said last week that most of the exhibits I saw at the New York Film Festival at Lincoln Center (thirteen in all) struck me as “sad.” The modern posture, how- ever, is to treat everything, no matter how dreadful, as a joke. The more face- tious pictures were ironical, the more painful detached and cold. An exception may be found in the Soviet film Sons and Mothers. It is about Lenin’s mother and devotional in spirit. Its most touching aspect was the purity of Elena Fadeyeva’s countenance in the central role. The film is admirably photo- graphed. The Hungarian entry Father (Grand Prize at the Moscow Festival)’ has an honestly humane air not without humor. The picture suggests that the confronta- tion with the humble facts of life is the base for health, while “fantasy” no matter how innocent spells confusion. Father is free of distortion by ideology or by - formalist pretension. The West German contributions were of diverse cinematic quality but were in one way related in significance. Yester- day’s Girl, somewhat discontinuous and elliptical in narrative technique, reveals heartlessness, a heavy-handed bureau- cratic attitude, a pedantry in the new Germany similar to what prevailed in the old. Very little of this film is sentimental; its best sequences are bluffly comic. The more straightforward of the two pictures, Young Toerless, based on a novel by the Austrian Robert Musil, is every way more thoroughly realized. Still, it is not without its own ambiguity. It tells the story of the cruel hazing of a weak-willed student at a German sec- ondary school for well-born youths be- fore the First World War. Toerless, played by an actor with handsomely re- gal features, observes the hazing, which includes homosexual assault, with a mix- ture of distaste and dispassion. The pre- text for the cruelty is that the victim has stolen some money from a fellow student. Toerless and another classmate THE NATION/ October 16, 1967 ar red ~ are told about the theft by the boy from whom the money was taken. All three agree that the culprit must be punished. The immediately injured party is a bully, the second boy is a conscious amoralist. Though of finer fiber, Toerless never in- terferes with the sadistic practices of the other two beyond making tentative ges- tures of protest. He leaves the school premises in order to think over what he must do. When interrogated as to the reason for his absence without permission, Toer- less explains that the sight of the violence inflicted on the hapless student — in which by the way the whole class finally joins—fascinated him objectively. Every- one involved, he reasons, is a normal youth; yet all lent themselves to what amounted to torture of their unfortunate classmate. Toerless himself participated in the ugly event through his passivity. The parallel with the German people under Hitler and the defense of some of the worst criminals at the postwar trials is unmistakable. Beyond that, a point which might be described as “ex- istentialist” is made—a point which may be functionally useful but which I sus- pect of being dangerous. If we are all capable of deliberate, senseless yet some- how rationalized savagery (after all what the boys do may be interpreted as the “correction” of a thief), in the name of what are we to forbear? What reason, apart from social expediency, have we for checking the brutal aggressiveness which, it is argued, is “normal” to us? No answer is immanent in the picture. That is what makes it somewhat ambig- uous. But its detail is exact and presented with restrained force. The final touch is ironically telling: all the boys are per- mitted to remain in school except Toer- less who is dismissed because of his “ex- citable” nature which he had betrayed by having taken overnight leave without permission. The Yugoslav film, An Affair of the Heart, contains a sly comment which in view of the politics of its particular origin should be noticed. On the surface the picture is a commonplace story about an affair between two rather unin- teresting people: the girl a_ telephone operator at the central exchange, the man a state-employed exterminator of rats. The affair begins with casual banality, mounts to a domestic (though not mari- tal) felicity, and because of a momentary lapse of fidelity on the girl’s part (which causes pregnancy) ends with her acci- dental death by drowning due to the man’s attempt at suicide in a moment of drunken despair. There are points to be noted in passing. The first is that the girl’s breach of faith is explained by the fact that, being Hun- garian, she finds it extremely difficult to be without a man for two months. (Pre- sumably nothing like this would have happened if she were pure Yugoslav.) And then too, as in most pictures nowa- days, there are shots of what by this time may be called the obligatory nude. In An Affair of the Heart the nudity is rather refreshingly matter of fact. If I pause to remark on this here it is be- cause of the contrast with the Soviet code which makes such exposure unthinkable. Even more pertinent to the picture’s significance than its canny touches of ribaldry (I refer to the illustrated sex lecture which opens the picture and an- other on the instruments and detection of crime) are the scenes in which the lovers in their preliminary and more in- timate embraces watch television. What they see at first is the destruction of re- ligious symbols and places of worship during the early days of the Bolshevik victory and later a view of workers marching to the tune of stirring songs SOVIET EDUCATION : Achievements and Goals by ELIZABETH MOOS ; The extent and quality of m mass education devel- oped since 1917 in the USSR as reported by a qualified authority on the subject. Paperbound 128 pp. 15 illus. $1.25 From your Bookdealer, or NATIONAL COUNCIL of AMERICAN-SOVIET FRIENDSHIP 156 5th Ave., N. Y. 10010 The Best Way To Get NATION BERR R RRR RETR RETR RETR ERE E ERA THE NATION 10-16-67 333 Sixth Ave., New York 10014 [_] One Year, $10 [_] Two Years, $18 [_] & Months, $6 [_] Bilt Me (Foreign and Canadian Postage $1 a year extra) {_] Payment Enclosed SRR REPKE RRR RRR ERR REPRE PRP eee eee SRR RRR RRC R RRR RRR 381 celebrating the new and glorious times to come when the revolution will have re- made mankind and all would be new and different. What the picture says is that the “new day” is not yet here and that most of the ordinary citizenry is pretty much as it always has been. Some may say, ‘So much the better,” others, “Too bad,” still others, ‘History is slow.” That the so-called Communist coun- tries west of the Soviet Union are more gamy and certainly far less “orthodox” in their films than their big brother is evidenced by the two Polish entries to the festival, both directed by Skolimowski. One of them, Le Départ, was shot in Belgium and spoken in French. It was very well liked by the majority of the festival’s audience. It is the fanciful tale of a young hairdresser who is wild about motoring and the excitetment of driving at perilous speed. The picture is lighthearted and occa- sionally witty. The synopsis furnished to the press tells us that in the end the young man “opts for sex over racing cars,” but the cinematic metaphors em- ployed in the final sequence left me with exactly the opposite impression: the ma- chine supersedes the girl. The boy is im- potent. The implication appeared to tickle most of the spectators. I found Skolimowski’s Warsaw film Barrier an “experimental” cheat. It pur- ports to mirror the havoc of misunder- standing between the new and old gen- erations in Poland—on the whole as a reproof of the new—in surrealist imagery. YOU SHOULD KNOW CANADA BETTER! Read CANADIAN DIMENSION Editor: C. W. Gonick Leading forum of Canadian opinion. Independent and lively. Send $4.00 for a trial year’s subscription—8 Big Issues Write: CANADIAN DIMENSION __,_ P.O. Box 1413 Winnipeg 1, Manitoba, Canada Grin at Franco now our beloved ally; ete. etc. Not soft-pedaled for schools or happy gamblers? Pages taken in at a glance. ALL ABOUT IT. WAR-MAP OF THE COLD WAR goofs of the Far Right fringe. Sample spots on map: Bohemia seacoast as beachhead against Czech commies. Ireland takes any side where England isn’t. Aramco’s fabulous meloncuts not for drafted guards of world’s hugest oil-game. Axis butcher Map alone postpd. $1. Free with following book: HISTORY WIDE OPEN: Afield and Revealed C or D.A.R. Its raw facts: as Founding Fathers: lofty sages blers in worthless “continentals”, in latter a vast followed Constitution getting off thus on wrong foot. Episodes adorned with their scenic background in marked panoramas. A real book innovation. Graphic, concise 200 pp. cloth, inc. Cold-War map, all postpd. $4.50 B. F. Johnson, Post-box 1137, Ensenada Baja, Calif. 5 Once again the manner is flippant and comically extravagant but the effect here is not only opaque but dull. The director seems unsure of himself, as if fearing some political reprisal. In any case, the result is a symptom of immaturity and of a certain vulgarity. To stand at the crossroads of moral or political decision is no sin, but to conceal this by super- cilious nonchalance or arty cleverness may very well be. For a Jong time the Russians were held to be “enigmatic”; I find the Swedes strange. Their greatest writer Strindberg was long regarded as an individual case, but the agony in his work and its occa- sional release in a mysticism which veers between hysterical religiosity and spiri- tual exaltation seems to recur in lesser forms in virtually all the Swedish art with which I am familiar. Swedish films offer particularly striking examples. In the comedy Hugs and Kisses, the unfeeling playfulness of a middle-class husband who invites an impecunious school chum, now an unsuccessful writer, to be his house guest leads to odd com- plications. When the slightly eccentric guest gets to be boisterously overfamiliar his host, to be rid of the intruder, resorts to all sorts of hoaxes involving sex. But the tables are turned and the husband loses his wife to the guest. The husband becomes a household fixture, reduced to standing by as a sort of puzzled ac- complice to his wife’s infidelity. This is told tongue in cheek. We are shown the vigorous contact of bodies, but no joy. Sex is central but not essential. Feeling and sentiment hover over and around the couples as a kind of unholy ghost, disturbing without being serious. Sensuality produces pain through its failure to provide comfort or grace. This I say is eminently Swedish. Many of us elsewhere understand it and may ac- knowledge its reality. When translated into film some are amused but a great number are put off. On the other hand, sex on the level of ecstatic love becomes poetry in a beautifully made picture (in gratifying color and sensitive composition) called “killing” quickly Mr. Clurman covered the Ni York Film Festival in the absence of Robert Hatch from the city. Mr. Hatch will resume his regular col- umn in an early issue. Elvira Madigan. Based on an actual event evidently well known in Sweden, it is about a young lieutenant who abandons his wife and two children and deserts the army for a famous circus dancer. Both, in short, renounce everything to consum- mate their love in idyllic hiding in Den- mark, Pure as their love may be—and it is superbly conveyed—they are doomed. Both die in a suicide pact. Boundless love is destined to destruction—a wildly romantic notion which exerts a certain appeal everywhere. But it strikes me in this instance as the opposite pole to the particularly Swedish cold and frivolous obsession with sex. The picture gains immeasurably in conviction not only by the delicacy of Bo Widerberg’s direction but by the ex- cellence of the cast, especially Thommy Berggren as the lieutenant and the en- chanting 17-year-old Pia Degermark. With John Korty’s Funnyman we are home. It was the festival audience’s favorite picture. It is about the “redemp- tion” of a comic from a San Francisco night club through the solace of sane love. He has a series of silly affairs till he meets a sensible girl, a model in the nude for a Japanese artist and baby sitter in the artist’s home. The picture pleases with affable sat- ire on the imbecilities of the television business: agencies, advertising executives, programs. A certain offhand, loose- jointed, relaxed good nature is the pic- ture’s chief asset. Indeed it constitutes its meaning. The comic, fed up with what he feels are his inconsequential chores as a per- former, is brought by his new-found girl friend to the realization that the night- club and television efforts he scorns are more valid self-expressions than his at- tempt to become deeply significant. It is the picture’s gentle sagacity that one must do what one can to speak honestly in one’s own voice, no matter how small the sound. No point is insisted upon, but the tone is one of smiling reconciliation with the crazy brouhaha of our civilization. Amid the disarray and disaffection, this is what so many nowadays wish to hear: that we must live and speak companion- ably. It absolves us from seeking salvation in ideologies. This is an amiably Ameri- can and as it were Pacific (or San Fran- cisco?) way out of our dilemma. Peter Bonerz as the funnyman embodies the \ attitude very pleasantly. The picture is amateur in the friendly sense of the word. THE NATION/Octoher 16. 1967 led FRANK W. LEWIS ACROSS: 1 Might be 13, or 17, or 19, as the first illustration. (5,7) 10 Goes out of business, about it. (5,2) 11 Hit everything — and nothing — in port. (7) 12 A number talk like mad with desire. (5) 13 Prometheus was by the vulture daily, and finally by Hercules. (9) 14 Were people forgotten in such dungeons? (10) 16 Looking back on the star, she seems to be five years old. (4) 18 It’s nothing to see the created by the poet. (4) 20 Does the prosecutor appear to be in favor of the motorcycle gang, or are we merely being brainwashed by it? (10) 23 Be Prepared? Not if it’s this. (9) 25 Hispaniola, in part. (5) 26 Realite, in place of the artist? (7) 27 Attic dwellers might supply themselves with this and others like it. (7) 28 It’s a big waste! (6,6) and doesn’t talk text, in short, DOWN: 2 Plant the seeds of heated discussion in it. (7) your request to Puzzle Department, N. Y. 10014. THE NATION/ October 16, 1967 Readers are invited to send for a free copy of Mr. Lewis’ The Nation, Crossword Puzzle No. 1219 — a, Ree aa oe Ww Hypnotic. (8) One might expect him to be speeding. (9) March past when this appears. (5) Russian cubist who sounds somewhat like a muffin. (6) Make bigger, in general. (7) 8 Hog calls I copy, but not regular war- fare type. (13) 9 One helped in a way, while others made their crossing. (4,9) 15 Set forth. (9) 17 They’re supposed to know a lot of break- fast food tycoons. (8) 19 Stamp of influence? (7) 21 Isn’t this or that controlled by the rein? (7) 22 Elegance of tongue? (6) 24 One of cheese is rather cheap. (5) nn ~ SOLUTION TO PUZZLE NO. 1218 ACROSS: 1 Stocking caps; 9 Skedaddled; 11 Silicate; 12 Canard; 13 Onset; 15 Spiteful; 16 Attracts; 19 Notes; 21 Reason; 22 Refigure; 24 Fair; 25 Check stubs; 26 Mills grenade. DOWN: 2 Take it on the lam; 3 Caddies; 4 India; 5 and 10 Galley slave; 6 Addiction; 7 Silence; 8 Oversubscribed; 14 Technical: 17 Rostrum; 18 Streets; 20 Tighten; 23 Fakir, “oround rules.” Address 333 Sixth Avenue, New York, | $2.95 each SAVE YOUR COPIES OF The NATION * Each file holds a Attractive and full year’s copies. practical for your home or office 3 for $8.25 ORDER NOW — send check or money order. MAGAZINE FILE CO. 520 FIFTH AVENUE NEW YORK 36,N. Y. * Jesse Jones Vol- ume Files for every publication, ¢ Covered in durable leather like Kivar, title embossed in 16 Kt gold. Satisfaction guaranteed SE REE DESCRIPTIVE FOLDER UPON RE . UsE Sig ~“BOOKPL ATES | FREE CATALOG—beautiful designs for every age and taste. Special designing too. Address: BOOKPLATES, Yellow Springs 2, Ohio. SERVICES MOVING? Professional moving at competitive rates. Anytime, anywhere. Licensed, insured, experienced, THE COVERED WAGON, ALgon- sai 5- re (N.Y.C.) ART WOULD YOU BELIEVE? INAL woodcuts, etchings, lithos, $4.50 each. Subscription information: Graphic Circle, (N), 68 Fifth Avenue, New York City 10011 PUBLICATIONS “SELECTED POEMS” of GEORGE FLYNN (Villiers of London—$2.00) is “the most ex- citing American poetry since Ezra Pound.” —James Turner. Available in U.S. from the mueher at: 145 West 12 Street, New York City 10011. MONTHLY NEWSLETTER for a Guaranteed Income. Subscription: individual, $3.00; organ- izational. $6.00. Twenty page bibliography available, $2.00. Write: Ad Hoc Committee for a Guaranteed Income, 969 E. 60th Street, Chicago, Illinois 60637. LEGALIZE ABORTION and every other vic- timless activity. LEGALIZE LIBERTY, POB 24282, Los Angeles, California 90024 EXCITING ORIG- TOPICAL Humor Service and Forty speaker’s jokebooks. Catalog free. Samples $5.00. Orben Publications, Dept. 110, Bas: N.Y. 11510. PRINTING | HALLELUJAH PRESS—Offset prune plate- making. Specialize in POETRY MAGAZINES. Low rates. Immediate service. Call 982-9515. PERSONALS WE HAVE BEEN BETRAYED—Our ’64 vote was for Peace—Impeach Johnson, recall war sup- porters; also HOFFA FOR PRESIDENT and WASH OUT WASHINGTON on 6” ruler and 1-1/4” wood discs. 12/$1, 100/$5 (circulars, bal- loons, bumper strips, telephone dialers, ete.). Plentyism, Box 115, Edison, Miami 33151 TEACHER, WRITER, RESEARCHER, will help prepare theses, papers, speeches, articles. Buaken, Apt. J, 1026 W. 14th Street, Casper, Wyoming. Advertising Rates Classified: 74c a line (6 words) 3 line min, Ciassified Display: $7.42 per inch (min.) THE NATION, 333 Sixth Ave., N.Y. 10014 242.8400 Printed by Milford Publishing Inc., Milford, Conn. 383 ae Tee yas bil e roe viet OF) eae ¥ 8; ‘/ ‘ Be ae Fateh ae Mo) Sy he oe ane f _ | CONFRONT THE WARMAKERS IN WASHINGTON, D.C. OCT. 21! | SATURDAY, OCT. 21 ASSEMBLE: 10 AM (two locations) Lincoln Memorial * Washington Monument. MARCH: Begins 11 AM to field near Pentagon | RALLY: 2:30 PM at field near Pentagon DIRECT ACTION: 4 PM. Those who wish to participate will leave the rally for a peaceful sit-in to block the halls and entrances of the Pentagon. Others will either remain at the rally or, if they wish, can go to their buses. SUNDAY, OCT. 22 DIRECT ACTION continues at Pentagon with supporting picket line for all those at able to stay over. | Rally Co-chairmen: JULIAN BOND DAVE DELLINGER | SUPPORT OUR MEN IN VIETNAM! BRING THEM HOME NOW — ALIVE! = SELF-DETERMINATION FOR VIETNAM AND BLACK AMERICA F FROM DISSENT TO RESISTANCE National Mobilization Committee to End the Clip ies a i SS SSS ear aes ee ee a War in Vietnam Ip and mail to: 857 Broadway, New York, N.Y. 10003 National Mobilization Committee to End the . Telephone: (212) 675-4605 War in Vietnam (organizers of the massive April 15 protests) 857 Broadway, Third Floor, New York, N.Y. 10003 | 2 : Telephone: (212) 675-4605 | Founding Chairman: A. J. Muste (1885-1967) C Enclosed "7 = $ contributine da teets | | Chai “oie i kus ange Bras SPM er eee the National Mobilization Committee to End 4g Co-chairmen the War in Vietnam. Rev. Ralph Abernathy Lincoln Lynch LJI want to participate in the October 21 anti- ¥e Prof. Robert Greenblatt Prof. Sidney Peck | war demonstration in Washington, D.C, Please | B i Al Evanoff Rt Rev. Charles OU Bice send me information on transportation and as- | api Prof. Donald Kalish Cleveland Robinson sembling of contingents. Sidney Lens Mrs. Dagmar Wilson | | 4 . ; h Toh Wilson TATTLE... << cvsscammeunshesatenQeneme enteceeraanee PHONG ...cccserseescesiess 4 a National Director: Rev. James Bevel Address: .27.:Rihidupipis ve ves antl ee taeeons ene envns ateeeee | fe National Coordinator: Prof. Robert Greenblatt i Cit S Zz I fi Project Co-directors: Jerry Rubin, John Wilson LUY We.2s0. suds cobesvastansercenpnty UALS aadsesnesessnsn ip : tf tay, THE TOMBS OF BEN SUC JoNnaATHAN MIRSKY ATION OCTOBER 23,1967 35 cents a eo ee AT&T—PAaRT ONE Who Will Bell The Colossus? NORMAN L. PARKS THIN ICE IN THE DESERT Egypt: Bruises and Suspicions VERN L. BULLOUGH Arab Cojjee Break ' MARTHA GELLHORN > Win Cc ci 2 BN PRR OE ee ok ee eer ae eg z= 20 és wi ¢ °¢ Mailer’s American Males / CHARLES T. SAMUELS = =

>2 GABE PRESSMAN , mina es ot, peo Seen | es | : = 2-5 SPOKESMEN FOR THE BLACKS a JUNE MEYER é@ @& aN wavanay The Man Who Created ‘Simple’ KENETH KINNAMON =a ps The McLuhanatic Fringe NEIL COMPTON LETTERS left out Syracuse, N.Y. DEAR Sirs: To supplement what was not reported in the Establishment press about the Oct. 21st Washington demonstration, one should take note of the following: (1) Several of the young troops tried to defect to peace. (2) The Pentagoners quickly released a news bulletin at a press conference to the effect that the peace demonstrators used tear gas on the militia! (3) Scores of young people made it their thing to clean up the debris both at the Lincoln Memorial and at the Pentagon. (4) Photographers com- pletely ignored me, with my graying hair, Brooks Brothers suit and Burberry coat. Robert Seidenberg, M.D. a pat for Percy Wilmette, JIl. Dear Sirs: Your editorial “Profiles in Opportunism” in the Oct. 23rd issue was too harsh on Senator Percy. I agree with the point that Percy should follow through on his proposed resolution concerning Vietnam, . . . And there is no doubt that the Senator’s activity that produced your wrath represents a regression on his part. But I am satis- fied, as of now, that our new Illinois Senator .. . repre- sents the best, that the Republican Party has to offer with respect to any decent alternative to the Johnson Adminis- tration in foreign policy. He may even be a more intelligent alternative on the Johnson domestic program, assuming there is one any more... . I speak from personal knowledge, as well as on the basis of the public record... . . Give him a paternal spanking when he deserves it, but do not turn his picture to the wall. Percy may ,be our one real hope for a return of America to sanity. Harry Barnard source of quote Regina, Canada Dear Sirs: Alexander Werth, in his review, “The Middle East Ulcer” (The Nation, Oct. 2)... alleges that the “head of the Palestinian Arabs”—there actually is no such person and that is one of the problems—wants to “exterminate in Israel every man, woman and child the way Hitler did.” A similar quotation was circulated in Great Britain in the early summer. A challenge published in a leading Brit- ish newspaper as to its authenticity has gone unanswered. No one knows who made such a statement, when he made it, Or who heard it originally. I very strongly suspect that... it was manufactured in Israel in late May and presented to news correspondents who have long depended On very partisan sources for translations of what is said in Arabic broadcasts. Ray L. Cleveland, Associate Professor of History University of Saskatchewan Paris Dear Sirs: I was myself skeptical about the “kill every man, woman and child in Israel” statement, even when it appeared in the highly reliable Paris Monde; but what con- vinced me that it must be true is that the Russians (Zhukov, top commentator on international affairs in Pravda and Mr. Gromyko’s right-hand man at the Soviet foreign ministry), who are pro-Arab and anti-Israel, deplored the fact that Shukairy did “play into the hand of the Israeli hawks” with a statement of this kind. Alexander Werth ols EDITORIALS The Maid Servant , Until World War I, the British aristocracy had no #f servant problem. Loyal, efficient, well-mannered butlers, — cooks, housekeepers, et al., were always available. We — know how lamentably this situation has changed for the — British gentleman, but in politics it has not changed at all. The Labour Party, however defiant it may sound, can be relied upon to clean up whatever mess the Tories may choose to make, and to do this time after time. Harold Wilson has just done it with the devaluation of the pound, and the American press—which hates the very name of labor, whether spelled with a u or not—is even more jubilant than the Tories. The sequence is almost ritualistic. The Tories open — the vents, the economy booms a bit. The voters are — happy; many still have a filial feeling toward the Estab- § lishment—good old Winston, etc. But shortly things get out of hand; given Britain’s depleted place in the — world and its overcommitments it could hardly be other- wise. The voters bare their teeth and call on Labour. A ~ government is accordingly formed and sets to work in the Augean stables. But there is no magical remedy— ~ no river that Hercules can divert. To save the pound, sacrifices must be made. The voters are even more dis- satisfied than they were with the Tories, and the Tories _ come back. Another cycle has been started and will follow its predestined course. The irony in the present episode is that Harold Wilson — is a far better economist than are most politicians. The question arises: why didn’t he devalue shortly after 4; taking office and blame the necessity, fairly enough, on his predecessor? The answer probably is that he could not. Labour had a very small margin in the House and — to govern at all probably had to make commitments which tied Mr. Wilson’s hands. As always, the® temptation to maintain the special relationship with the United States proved irresistible. For reasons that must be deeply — embedded in the British psyche, the Tories always seem to handle Washington better than Labour can. And Washington prefers its opposite numbers to be Conserva- tive—which is one reason the latter can do a better job. Then, also, every government makes mistakes, and La- bour is no exception. Wilson fuzzed up the Common Market possibilities, such as they were. He held on too long to Britain’s top-heavy military commitments. He set aside a popularly elected government in British Gui- ana, messed up Rhodesia, and is pulling out of Aden too late and without proper advance planning. Labour’s misfortunes are partly Labour’s fault—but only partly. Devaluation is not a solution, only a palliative. It does afford a respite: it will help bring domestic consumption down and increase the opportunities for export. But it is no substitute for the kind of radical political surgery that Britain requires, and has required throughout the post- — war period. This is not to imply manning the barricades, | but it does call for a tough reconstruction of the economy, a realistic policy toward the United States (which is no ~ special friend of Britain when the hands-across-the-sea 2S Sat at I a A I TE, EE THE NATION/December 4, 1967. 4 Ficuiality i is discarded), a further cutback in military ing, an effort to develop trade with the Socialist untries, and other difficult operations. Can a parlia- lentary democracy impose such harsh discipline on itself? Democracy is on trial everywhere, but in Britain its filemma is most crucial, and the Tory-Labour cycle, with abour always on the dirty end, can be repeated once foo often. Given a crisis in which that technique brings “no results, the voters might be stampeded into measures more perilous. Ee ianissimo Persuasion All modern wars have their public relations aspect— the soldiers, and the folks back home, need to have their ‘morale jazzed up at frequent intervals in order that they “may sacrifice their lives and comfort more or less willingly. the case of Vietnam, there has been very little rificing except by the troops; nevertheless it is probably fhe most unpopular war in which the United States has ever engaged. Heroic public relations efforts have been applied, but the harder the PR boys have tried to sell the "war, the more resistant has the public become. The s ccession of generals and ambassadors is now mostly orgotten—who remembers General Harkins (1963: the war will be won “within a year”) or Ambassador Nolting P Cikewise 1963: “South Vietnam is on its way to victory “Over the Communist guerrillas.” )? ' The cheery statements of Gen. Maxwell Taylor—and Secretary McNamara—are of more recent memory; per- “haps on that account current pep talk is pitched in a lower Key. The President chats with General Westmoreland (“Westy”), who exudes quiet optimism. It is so quiet, indeed, that it can hardly be called optimism: all he Says is that within two years “we might phase down the level of our commitment.” On the other hand, it might be ‘only a token. When you come down to it, Westy hasn’t “said anything at all, but has done manful duty in the soft ‘salesmanship the Administration has decided to impose ‘on the people. In the meantime, he wants more troops— | and of course warns against a bombing pause. _ Ambassador Bunker also contributes his moiety of encouragement: “We are making steady, not spectacular, progress.” Such assurances probably produce a mild lift in the mood of the man in the street. Things can’t be altogether bad when such big shots fly such long distances ‘to bring him tidings of victory, albeit in the indefinite future. The Republicans listen and say nothing. They are “pretty sure that the war will still be raging up to and ‘beyond Election Day, and that Mr. Johnson’s conduct ' of it will be the overriding issue of the campaign. In the meantime, let him and his emissaries talk: no one can say that the Republican Party wasn’t bipartisan—at least until votes were at stake. There is a big difference, it should be noted, between public relations and press relations. When addressing the press, the persuaders deal with people who know some- thing of what is going on. Some of the press people are _ very skeptical. In the New York Post, for instance, Clayton | Fritchey juxtaposes a list of statements by government spokesmen with news items that are flatly contradictory, THE NATION/December 4, 1967 — FEB10 IN THIS ISSUE December at 1967 EDITORIALS 578 ARTICLES $82 Anatomy of a Hangup: Last Word on the Hippies Hans Toch Jockeying at the Post 589 The Faith of Eugene McCarthy Robert G. Sherrill 591 The Rockefeller-Lindsay Feud Gabe Pressman 593 Lost in Vietnam William Eastlake 594 Neo-Colonialism: Ignoring the Storm Warnings Geoffrey Bing BOOKS & THE ARTS 597 Spokesmen for the Blacks 598 The Visit (poem) 599 The Man Who Created. ‘Simple’ 601 Spun on a Thread 602 The McLuhanatic Fringe 603 Records 605 Theatre 607 Crossword Puzzle June Meyer Karen Swenson Keneth Kinnamon John Logan Neil Compton Benjamin Boretz Harold Clurman Frank W. Lewis Publisher Associate Publisher JAMES J. STORROW JR. GIFFORD PHILLIPS — Editor Associate Editor CAREY McWILLIAMS PHIL KERBY Executive Editor ROBERT HATCH Literary Editor HELEN YGLESIAS Copy Editor, MARION HESS; Poetry Editor, MICHAEL GOLD- MAN; Theatre, HAROLD CLURMAN; Art, MAX KOZLOFF; Music, BENJAMIN BORETZ; Science, CARL DREHER; Ad- vertising Manager, MARY SIMON. Washington, ROBERT G. SHERRILL; Paris, ALEXANDER WERTH; London, RAYMOND WILLIAMS; Bonn, C. AMERY; Canberra, C. P, FITZGERALD; United Nations, ANNE- TUCKERMAN. fhe Nation is published weekly (except biweekly in July and August) oy jhe Nation Magazine Company and copyright 1967 in the U.S.A. by the Nation Associates, Inc., 333 Sixth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10014. Tel.: CH 2-8400. West Coast office: 1256 "Westwood Boulevard, Los Angeles, Calit..90024. Tel.: GR 4-2533. Second class postage paid at New York, N. ¥. and at additional mailing office. Subscription Price: One year, $10; two years, $18. Foreign and Canadias postage: $1 extra per year, Change of Address: It is essential. that subscribers ordering.a change of address give four: weeks’ notice and provide their old as well as their new address. Please give Zip Code numbers: for both addresses. Information to Libraries: The Nation is indexed in Readers Guide ta Periodical Literature, Book Review Digest, Book Review Index and Public Affairs Information Service, NATION "n> Combined with FRONTIER 379 a “=e Ere et it Richard Dudman, writing from Washington in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, starts off his November 12 report with: “Serious doubts have arisen over the accuracy and significance of the facts and figures that lie behind current rosy official estimates of how the Vietnam war is going.” He points out that North Vietnam has committed only a small part of its army, conceded to be the best in South- east Asia. In the South, the population is growing at the rate of 500,000 a year, and with at least a third of the country under Vietcong control, the guerrillas will not be running out of manpower next month, or next year either. To those who are hungry for good news, the pro- nouncements of Westmoreland and Bunker may offer sur- face reassurance. But anyone who looks hard at their state- ments, and at earlier ones—anyone who scans the evidence to the contrary—will be more inclined to agree with the opinion of Senate Majority Leader Mike Mans- field, supposedly an Administration supporter: “We should not delude ourselves by such phrases as a ‘phase- down’. .. . Rather, we should face up to the very strong possibility that the war ... may well take years and require, as it has heretofore required, additional inputs of American forces... .” To the same effect, Sen. George D. Aiken protests against optimistic forecasts and says that in the Senate cloakrooms rumors of a further sub- stantial build-up are heard—and possibly even wage, price and materials controls. In short, the credibility is not improved by the PR sell, hard or soft. The gap still widens. ‘Scavengers of the Press’ The Johnson Administration is trying to cheer up the public; does it perhaps need some cheering up itself? At his last press conference the President adopted a new swinging style calculated to persuade the most skeptical. Hanging a microphone around his neck, he trotted about the stage, waved his arms, and tried to convince by sheer activity if not by content. But will this simulation of a medicine show allay the spreading doubts at GHQ? “Capital Malaise” is the title of a November 8 story in The Wall Street Journal, under the by-line of Henry Gemmill. As everyone in the news industry knows, the Journal has the resources and the will to do a reporting job second to none. In this case it sent twenty reporters of the paper’s Washington bureau around the cocktail circuit and elsewhere to assess the private mood of the Administration, which could conceivably turn out to be quite different from what officials say it is when a news- man asks them to talk for publication. Some officials were still smiling, and Gemmill cautions that Americans need not fear that their government is teetering on the brink of nervous breakdown; nevertheless he senses neu- rosis in the findings. Frustration and depression are always present to some degree in a bureaucracy. But in the last couple of years, Gemmill writes, feelings of inadequacy “have spread by imperceptible degrees until now they suddenly seem dominant. In their darker depths, distortions of mood are producing some odd behavior.” One official has such a fear that other officials may 580 that a contradiction of aims? Everybody would be proud Paver Ae trick him into a position where the Johnson’ ing will strike him down that he insists on witnesses to tele- phone conversations and an electronic warning system to steer him away from dangerous topics. Some bureaucrats _ work too hard; others have given up working at all, | Among the super-workers is a top civilian assistant to _ Secretary McNamara, At 8 A.M. he is at his desk, and) } not until 7 P.M. does he prepare to leave, no doubt with — a bulging briefcase. But his heart isn’t in it. He is con-— | vinced his boss “has violated his own logic and for mere} political reasons has gone along with the President both }: on continued bombing of North Vietnam and on con- } structing an anti-missile system. He contends the Secretary _ should have resigned rather than swallow these ‘insincere’ policies.” This fellow must have been reading The Nation, | which kept repeating this advice to McNamara until the | editors themselves became tired of it. Gemmill goes on in this vein; it is painful reading. No-— body likes the President, except, of course, Lady Bird ~ and the girls. The quit-rate would be very high, but people don’t like to desert a sinking ship. About one thing _ there can be no doubt: the malaise can be traced back predominantly to the war. In this sense, LBJ is being — punished for his violation of campaign pledges. If he had | eased off on the war instead of escalating it, he would be} subjected only to the normal wear and tear of his office. That The Wall Street Journal hit an exposed nerve is” obvious from the counterattack of Labor Secretary Willard © Wirtz, normally a cool man. He referred to the Journal's” highly professional observers as “scavengers of the press.” He declared that the Administration’s big happy family was proud “to work for America—under the leadership of Lyndon Johnson and Hubert Humphrey.” But isn’t: to work for America, but how can you do that and also” work for a President who has hornswoggled the country into an unconscionable war? LBJ is reputed to be a great political maestro, and in one sense he is. He knows party politics, Texas style, and functioned brilliantly as majority leader of the Senate. 7 But as Walter Lippmann has pointed out, this is a 4} Presidential country, and the fact is that as a national leader Mr. Johnson is a washout. That is one reason why the Journal survey stands up, the war being the other. More exactly, the two reasons are one. And the cure is as obvious as the disease. The Miscasting of Shirley California voters show an unusual weakness for enter- / tainment figures, having recently elected two actors, George Murphy and Ronald Reagan, to high office. Therefore, the question that everyone asked when Shirley Temple Black entered the special run-off election in San Mateo County this fall was whether some pattern was taking shape whereby movie stars could grab whatever political plums caught their attention. Mrs. Black’s resounding de- feat at the hands of Pete McCloskey, a 39-year-old law-— yer who is a lieutenant colonel in the Marine Reserves” and a dove on Vietnam, seems to have answered that ques- tion for the time being. Now there will be a run-off be- THE NATION/December 4, 1967 McCloskey and a Democrat, Roy Archibald, for ' House seat. McCloskey is almost sure to win. ‘Several explanations can be offered for the repudiation f Shirley Temple. An entertainment candidacy seems fore successful in state-wide elections, where candidates ean be marketed more effectively. In smaller races a nu mber of local issues must be confronted, the voters have | more information and can’t be as easily hypnotized. Also, unlike the Reagan and Murphy elections, there was an acceptable alternative to the voters within the GOP. There may also have been some anti-movie-star backlash. In addition, Mrs. Black’s campaign was remarkable for | her contemptuous attitudes toward political debate and | contact with the voters. She really didn’t campaign. She | entered the race late and “presented herself” to selected ' admirevs in carfully staged situations. She took this easy road, probably, because she assumed that she didn’t have ‘to bother —that her name would be enough. | . Then, her positions turned out to be much more un- popular than she expected. She guessed wrong on Vietnam } 4 ‘(she was a fierce hawk, dropping remarks to the effect that the bombs hadn’t even started falling) and she over- ‘estimated the power of backlash. She was much more ‘subtle than Mrs. Hicks of Boston but people knew where she stood, and a large number of them didn’t like it. It “was possible to cross party barriers in this election and ‘many Democrats voted for McCloskey to block Shirley | Temple. There are 117,000 Democrats and 97,000 Re- | publicians in San Mateo County, but 114,000 Republican votes were cast. _ The San Mateo election has disproportionate signifi- ' cance as far as policy on Vietnam is concerned. Between | the large vote for Proposition “P” in San Francisco (urg- ) ing that we get out of Vietnam immediately) and the | : McCloskey victory in San Mateo County, there’s plenty for President Johnson to think about. | Funny Money | _ The Nation has information that the Brown Founda- | tion, Inc., of Houston, Tex., set up by the late Herman _ Brown and his brother George R. Brown and others, has been channeling big money into at least one Central _ Intelligence Agency ‘conduit foundation and into at least one organization partly supported by the CIA. If it was not inevitable, at any rate it is not surprising, to discover _ that the founders of Brown & Root—the giant construc- tion- firm that for years has been the closest financial ) ally of Lyndon Johnson—is a patron of the CIA spies. _ In fiscal 1963 the Brown Foundation gave $50,000 | and in fiscal 1964 it gave $150,000 to the American | Friends of the Middle East, a pro-Arab and anti-Zionist organization whose CIA ties were first disclosed in The Nation (“The Beneficent CIA” by Robert G. Sherrill, _ May 9, 1966). In fiscal 1963 the Brown Foundation also gave $150,- | 000 to the Vernon Fund. The Brown Foundation’s re- | turns, as filed with the Internal Revenue Service, show a gift of $100,000 in 1964 to the “Verda Fund,” but the _IRS’s Cumulative List does not record any such organi- zation, and “Verda” is virtually certain to have been a 4 HE NATION/December 4, 1967 ae Ay tae % bad ge aa eA ty ing t My, y ti ee stenographer’s blunder in writing Vernon. (No accounting later than 1964 has been made public by the Brown Foundation.) The Brown Foundation thus becomes by far the largest contributor to the Vernon Fund, which during the ClIA-foundation exposures earlier this year was shown to be in the CIA money pipe line. This brings to at least seven the number of CIA-con- duit foundations known to be operating now or in the recent past out of Texas, the others being the San Jacinto Foundation, the Marshall Foundation, the Ander- son Foundation, the Hoblitzelle Foundation, the Jones- O'Donnell Foundation and the Hobby Foundation, op- erated by Oveta Culp Hobby, former Secretary of HEW under Eisenhower, and her son William Hobby, Jr., execu- tive editor of the Houston Post. Both are personal and political friends of the President; Hobby has said he was “proud to serve the CIA and would do it again.” From the few facts known to the public there is no indication that Texas-based foundations are any more susceptible to romancing by the CIA than are those based in other areas. But inasmuch as Congressman Wright Patman, the U.S. House of Representatives’ most aggressive foundations critic, is from Texas, and inas- much as the Hobbys and the Browns and some of the other rich foundation founders in that state are personal friends of his, he might find it easy as well as illuminating to turn his questions upon them. In the eight months that have elapsed since the CIA was discovered to have polluted the world of the founda- tions, neither the IRS nor Patman has shown any interest in discovering just how deeply the spies have penetrated the supposedly charitable organizations. Patman’s investi- gations into charity, like charity itself, should begin at home. He might even tell us what good works have been supported lately by the Lyndon Johnson Foundation, established a few years ago by the President. ‘Soap Opera,’ Denver Style “Soap opera,” sponsored by a university and financed by the Department of Health, Education and Welfare, is something new. The University of Denver has such a project going in cooperation with KRMA-TYV, the area’s noncommercial station. The purpose is to show the poor how to achieve a better life, and the unspoken assump- tion is that their households will have TV, whether there is food in the house or not. Fight weekly programs are being written and produced by university graduate students in cooperation with TV personnel. Most of the actors are from minority groups; the stories are drawn from real life, particularly those about public housing projects. The “commercials” explain how to get a job; how to improve health, how to spend money wisely, etc. Welfare workers tell their clients of the programs, dis- tribute notices and pay some recipients to watch the programs and tell others of them. A survey will be con- ducted later to find out how effective the programs were and which approaches were best. The format has been tried in Latin America, but this seems its first use in the United States. 534s ie — eine Sallie SET LRN eee SS BE AP OO ARTERIES eee : peer SRS BET! a aa nt EPS Fat SETS oe ees ESS ANATOMY OF A HANGUP LAST WORD ON THE HIPPIES HANS TOCH Mr. Toch, professor of psychology at Michigan State Univer- sity, is at present visiting professor: of criminal justice at State University of New York, Albany. He is the author of Social Psychology of Social Movements (Bobbs-Merrill) and the editor of Legal and Criminal Psychology (Holt, Rinehart & Winston). We view the American press in 1967, the year of its. Discovery of the Hippie. The scene is San Francisco. A young assistant editor of Look magazine, with newly grown matted hair, sparse light beard, eye patch, neck- lace, lapel buttons, ornamental hat and old clothes, is being interviewed by a lady reporter, who—surprisingly enough—has mistaken him for just another news item. The pretend-hippie listens to her “sexual and bizarre” questions. He is sufficiently offended to permit himself to be interviewed, and to concoct a scintillating confession. He recalls fondly that the lady “left, satisfied and smacking her lips.” Meanwhile, somewhere in the Vicinity, another lady, representing The Saturday Evening Post, takes up temporary residence and makes “a few friends.” These provide her with an inside view so ex- clusive as to make her skeptical of colleagues (including reporters from Look) whom she observes “largely inter- viewing one another.” The lady tells us that Time’s cover story on hippies rests on serious misinterpretations, stemming from an inability to bridge the generation gap. That is sad, for Time had tried hard. To secure its story, it sent one reporter into battle “wearing, in various com- binations, faded old Nebraska levis, a red mini-dress and an unwashed London Fog raincoat”; another appeared with her arms “ornamented hippie style with Day Glo paints,” and a third, male, was generously overhung with seed beads. To insure authenticity, Time’s story was ultimately put together by a writer who “had tried the beatnik thing himself,” when young. The hippie revolt, one sees, has been met more than halfway by the press, and the press has been responding— as it usually does—to a public mandate. Extraordinary reporting efforts have been fed by (and have fed into) a wave of public concern, of worry, of debate, of itchy curiosity, that has reached the proportions of a collective obsession. In the glare of this interest, the object of in- quiry has been distorted and become hopelessly misunder- stood. He has come to serve as a symbol of other people’s concerns, has been made into a rarified, idealized com- posite—a myth. This myth now substitutes for data in discussions of the hippie as a problem, and is reflected in the hippie’s view of himself. It has created, in hippie language, a “hangup”—a delusion that inhibits accurate perception and prevents appropriate responses. Probably the majority of educated Americans have in some degree become victims of the hippie hangup. The condition governs their dealings with hippies, and induces the hippies to play roles they see as prescribed for them. 582. One of the components of the hangup is the willingness to convert neutral attributes to virtues. Much has been made of the fact that hippies are gentle, harmless and non- violent. Their avoidance of entirely hypothetical dangers, such as wholesale freak-outs, epidemics and crimes, has been invoked as impressive. Abstention from alcohol is accepted as an index of purity. This orientation allows the hippie to express hostility in circuitous ways. He knows that if he “plays it cool” he can play it with impunity, and he masters the art of operating on the safe side of anti-social limits. Worse, he becomes adept at exploiting outsiders while repudiating and victimizing them, The despised tourist is trained to pay with an indulgent smile for libels directed at him; police officers can be harassed while being forced to act the part of persecutor. Several incidents come to mind. One of them occurred at a press conference following the opening of a hippie ‘art exhibit in a fashionable San Francisco gallery (a thumping commercial success). Columnist Merla Zeller- bach transcribed in the San Francisco Chronicle an excerpt from this session with the hippie exhibitors: Q. Do you feel that by having this show you might be selling out? Laughter. Q. Is there any danger of your being ostracized by your community? Laughter. Q. Is the motivation strictly money or are you serious about this? Laughter. Her report continues: Finally, one of the artists gave an answer—an “answer” more contrived, more unoriginal, more pat than any of the questions. “We're not talking the same. There’s a gap between s? us. : Another artist spoke: “Is it really that hard to under- stand art works?” And another: “Are your ties uncomfortable?” This type of interaction, in which the feeding hand is bitten while the feeder remains helpless, becomes possible because hippies are exempted from social amenities, and because their expression of hostility is sanctioned in its customary guise of eccentricity. More ambiguous is the hippie gambit of expressing contempt with displays of helpfulness, and even solicitous affection. It is, of course, difficult to prove that any given instance of suspected irony is not in fact an act of saint- liness or a singular propensity for turning the other cheek, However, we have some supporting information from the hippies themselves, who tend to be voluble in expressing contempt for the people whom they smother with love. They also make no secret of their attempts at forceful conversion, justified, presumably, on the ground that the merits of hippie life are self-evident. The technique of offensive solicitude encouraged by the hippie hangup is illustrated by the retaliation against THE NATION/ December 4, 1967 — Paces Pi: shebelne «9g PR eg a = ——s a ebb Punch: Ben Roth “I’m Filled With Love for the Whole World! Except, Of Course, for my Own Lousy. Parents” differentiation is the amount of time invested in being a hippie. “Weekend” or “summer” hippies are universally excluded from the “real” hippie category; older hippies or very young hippies are sometimes deprived of legitimacy; completely unemployed or conspicuously “straight” hippies are also disenfranchised, as are hippies who are excessively organized or unduly alienated, Hung- up observers habitually view their own hippie inform- ants as models of orthodoxy. Henry Brandon, writing in the Saturday Review, tells us that the true hippies—and I consider my favorite hippy a true one—who were in revolt against the greed of a materialistic society, who resent the abuses of affluence, are suddenly disenchanted by the failure of their own hippy society, which more and more are joining—“just for kicks.” The advantage of distinguishing between “real” and “pseudo” hippies is that it provides an observer un- limited opportunity for projecting into hippies almost any attribute he considers desirable. If the object is to depict hippies as a contributing community, the kibbutz may be defined as the prototype of hippiedom (Time thus points out that “the new-found trip of work and responsibility reflected in the Morning Star experiment is perhaps the most hopeful development in the hippie philosophy to date’’); if the object is to emphasize aliena- tion, the same manifestation of “work and responsibility” can be explained away as un-hippie. (“The hippies are 384 becoming more and more organized,” Martin Arnold states in The New York Times, “. . . if this trend con- tinues, the hippies won’t be hippies anymore, hippie ad- | mirers feel.” ) The same discrimination can be applied to political sophistication, artistic productivity, spirituality, spontaneity, etc., according to whatever functions the stereotype of the hippie is required to serve. Sometimes hangup victims define hippies away altogether, by proclaiming that a hippie apprenticeship is a salutary but passing phase in the evolution of a contemporary youth. A final attribute of the hangup victim is a propensity to caricature opposition to hippiedom, with the implica- tion that admiration is to be equated with sophistication. The opposition may be saddled with a membership of narrow-minded politicians, arch-conservatives, old-line police officers and senile octogenarians; a favorable attitude, conversely, may be deemed to imply open- mindedness, love of freedom and a tolerance of devia- tion, particularly in the young. In fact, the unambiguously anti-hippie faction has been very much in the minority. It seems to take two distinct forms. One is the visceral reaction, such as that of the police officer who confessed to The New York Times that “The hippies have the men more aggravated than anything else. You feel like vomiting.” Lesser degrees of physical aversion are typified by an article in U.S. News & World Report: “The hippie is easy to spot. In most cases, he needs a shave, a haircut and a bath. He makes every effort to look bizarre.” To prove such assumptions, some reporters develop considerable skill at diagnosing unwashed feet and unlaundered clothes; their interviews are designed to match, and tend to elicit anti-parental diatribes and accounts of drug peddling. The other, intellectual, end of the anti-hippie spectrum quarrels with interpretations of hippie philosophy. One ingenious position, for instance, is that of the orthodox theologian Will Herberg who, writing in the National Review, reveals that the hippies are a revival of the Adamites, a nudist branch of the early Christian church. Herberg is especially offended by the hippie assumption that man is inherently innocent, a premise that denies original sin. Also theologically offensive is hippie advocacy of Love, which “for them is an orgiastic feeling in which they wallow in self-indulgence,” as opposed to the “concern and commitment” which con- servative theology would prefer to find. at the core of positive affect. This position is especially interesting because probably the most wholehearted endorsement of hippiedom is to be found in the religious press. Christian Century, for in- stance, has published several articles, all either apologetic or eulogistic. In its August 16 issue, historian James Hitchcock informs us that the hippies “preach the ancient message of Christian asceticism.” Hitchcock presents the hippie as a compound of monk, mystic and saint, and credits him with an assortment of other-worldly, meaningful concerns. The point about hippies, he writes, is that they “have directly and seriously injected metaphysical questions into our culture.” Several pages later, in the same issue, Norman Gottwald THE NATION/ December 4, 1967 | i is ce ar a NE hc MOT Te me Dn i. =a} ire * ' } +e f7 4 Pus ‘ ‘ A ‘+ ica & Be victs hippies as “a bold question mark ed over the sharp collision between the practiced the professed values of American life.” The church | is expected to respond to the challenge: “Now that the witness of truth arises from hippies and political radicals,” writes Gottwald, “we have a new opportunity to embody the gospel’s true humanism by taking part in their struggle ' to be the vanguard of a reconstituted American society.” | One of the most revealing statements embodying the ' premises of the hippie hangup is a book-length sermon entitled /t’s Happening (with the misleading subtitle, “A Portrait of the Youth Scene Today’). The authors of this volume, J. L. Simmons and Barry Winograd, are con- nected with the University of California, Santa Barbara, ‘and this academic affiliation, particularly since one author is a professional sociologist, implies that the subject will be treated objectively. This proves not to be ‘Teally the case. Under the guise of describing hippie ideology, the ’ book relays the myth of the Hippie Revolt against Soul Enslavement. The conflict is presented as a morality " play, starring Heroic Hippies, whose “pervasive human- ism” accentuates “the value of human beings and | human life” (p. 13), who “reject the categorizing and | generalizing which is so rampant in our educational system” (p. 15), who rebel against “limitation on directions people can travel and grow” (p. 16), who are “unhappy with compromising Establishment liberals” (p. 18), and who in many cases “are probably stumbling | toward what will prove to be more realistic and effective _ roles which may better fit the upcoming times” (p. 29). _ As one might expect, the book devotes considerable discussion to drug use. “Tripping’—we are told—is an _ ineffable experience (a standard hippie evasion whenever _ the subject is broached). But the elusive nature of the | experience does not curb the eloquent portrayal of its benefit. A trip, we are told, “frees the nervous system,” permitting it to operate “in less prefixed fashion.” As a result, |) The drug user becomes able to “see things in their | intricate complexity”; if he looks at his own life he will ‘see it in a differént, broader, less defensive and hide- | bound way. . And if he looks around at his society, | he may see through things and games and cozy deals and arbitrary conventions that he was previously taking for _ granted as valid and natural.” In addition to perpetuating the myth that hallucina- _ tions have didactic value and that drug-induced jumbles ' can somehow sort the real from the apparent, victims of | the hippie hangup do not neglect more direct hedonistic | tewards. The “psychedelic experience,” we are told, “is ! a time when the senses come alive’—and we are furnished enticing detail. __ What seems most interesting about this type of treat- Ment is not its partiality but the seeming ease with which efforts to be fair merge into surrender to an idealized | characterization. Clues to more realistic assessment of _hippie ideology come to be ignored; when they are | spotted, their significance is underestimated. ' Why, for instance, is it that hippies “see most every estriction that modern man has devised as a limitation iE NATION/ December 4, 1967 “one’s sensations are most intense and direct.” on directions people can travel and grow”? Why is it that for the hippie “‘ ‘should’ isn’t good enough unless coupled with ‘want to’”? Whence the compulsion to “turn the world on” or “to force your enemies to become your friends”? These questions are never posed, although to those not subject to the hippie hangup there is nothing self-explanatory about the abrogation of conscience, the rejection of social responsibility, the premise that life is pleasure, and the cavalier rejection of alternative value systems. There are several groups which, each for its own reasons, have problems with the hippies. One of these is the political activists, who take umbrage at what looks like a hippie indictment of their premises. The activist listens to the hippie denounce the gamut of contemporary evils, with emphasis on the war in Vietnam. He expects such complaints to be followed by action, and the hippie fails to oblige. More than this, the hippie condemns political action; he expounds the powerlessness of the individual in the System, and proclaims the futility of involvement in organizations that always betray their objectives. This attack hits a nerve because few political efforts are unambiguously successful, and because most result in little tangible gain. There is always the temptation to characterize the opposition as invulnerable, and to adjudge the obstacles as insurmountable; there is always the prospect of temporary retirement, pending a more favorable turn of events. What is not obvious is that this frame of reference results from psychological limitations rather than from political experience. Senior citizens among hippies often have a history of participation in the New Left, which terminated with the 1966 elections. The political activity ended, not because the “Establishment was unwilling to listen” but because there was no reason why it should have. The lesson of the defeat could have been a realization that too much had been expected at the wrong time, and that aims had been pursued in incorrect fashion. However, the assimilation of this kind of lesson pre- supposes intellectual flexibility and the willingness to work at remedies. As Jack Newfield has pointed out [The Nation, June 26], the political deactivation of hippies is a function of their hedonism and personal im- potence. To the extent to which political activists are susceptible to the hippie’s appeal, they are insufficiently aware of this fact; and to this extent, they are victims of the hangup. Another group for whom hippies pose a problem is the underprivileged segment of society, and in particular the Negro. Although one of the key clauses in the hippie’s indictment of the “Establishment” is the alleged “betrayal” of the Negro revolt, no love is lost between Negroes and their self-appointed hippie champions. For one thing, it irritates underprivileged people that pampered hippies have the audacity to proclaim themselves the most persecuted minority in America, and that they appear to have support for this claim. (For instance, the ACLU’s Washington affiliate certifies hippies as “presently the No. | harassed group in the state.”) Thousands of persons who daily experience persecution and indignities find 585 + a tat se SARS gee ee ¥ SPO a it ee bitter irony in the momumental debates and apologies following battles between park commissioners and practitioners of “acid rock,” or in the front-page headlines publicizing occasional raids (usually forced by complaints) against hippies who boast of violating the law (and who usually regale the arresting officers with lectures about the irrationality of the legal system). The hippie’s status as a privileged, rather than a victimized, member of society is clear to the real victims. Persons exposed to interrogation by cruising officers, or who are frequently ordered off public streets, cannot but see the selectivity of federal suits instituted (and won) on behalf of loudly complaining hippies who have been evicted from a city park in an isolated incident. They must wonder about editorials such as the following from The New York Times (June 1): The nonconforming—and irritating—youths known s “hippies” were in the wrong, They were sitting on the grass where their permit for a meeting gave them no right to be. They were disturbing many residents of the neighborhood with their bongo drums and Buddhist love chants. They were jeering and insulting to the first policemen who told them to move on. ' Annoying as these actions were, however, they hardly called for the heavy concentration of policemen that suddenly moved in, or for the free wielding of night- sticks that ensued. These manifestations of over- enthusiasm on the part of the police were totally out. of proportion to the trivial nature of the offense... . The hippie’s call for services frequently conflicts with the legitimate demands of groups who require these same services to survive. Mark Harris, discussing the Haight- Ashbury community in the Atlantic Monthly, notes that “Negro tenants desired the attention of the health de- partment, desired the attention of agencies whom hippies monopolized with appeals for food and housing for the ‘summer of love.’ The needs of the Negroes, especially for jobs, appeared to Negroes a great deal more urgent than the needs of white middle-class hippies who had dropped out of affluence to play games of poverty in San Francisco. ‘Things should be given away free, said a Negro man in a public debate, ‘to people that really need them.’ ” The hippie’s temporary self-exile into the gutter can be an unconvincing performance to a ghetto audience. “The hippies really bug us,” one young Negro explained to a reporter, “because we know they can come down _here and play their games for a while and escape.” “After the hippies go back to their middle-class homes,” declared another Negro observer, “we'll still be here.” The hippie, like his cousin the New Left, has a pen- chant for assuming that he is spiritually related to people who view him as a freak. At a recent neighborhood “happening,” a hippie was assaulted when he shouldered up to a Negro teen-ager and declared his affinity for “soul music.” Other well-meaning hippies recently appeared in a Negro housing development in Newark to stage a “be-in,’ at which they distributed leaflets, flowers and groceries. Their reception was far from enthusiastic. One Negro woman commented to a hippie, “I don’t know if it’s going to do us any good to have people like you on our side.” In fact, the hippie is not really on the Negro’s side. 586 | materialistic and hopelessly middle-class. oY al is a game for squares,” one hippie informed Newfield: aa “why should I demonstrate to get the spades all the © } things I am rejecting?” Hippies have a romantic attach- "} ment to the Negro as an Outsider, but they view him as_ | part of the hated Establishment as soon as he becomes © | an accepted member of the social order. What, then, is the positive message of the hippie, ; 1 stripped of connotations assigned to it by the hangup? — It seems that two themes which run through the hippies’ world view principally govern their conduct. Both themes . | permeate almost every aspect of hippie life; but neither is — seriously taken into account by victims of the hippie hang- up. The first can be described as chronic passivity in || relation to the stream of life. Part of what is involved © here is a stance of dependence, a willingness to let chance or the conduct of others determine one’s fate, a blind — confidence that some provision will be made for one’s | survival and welfare. Descriptions of life in hippie com- — | munes, such as a recent article in The New York Times, ~ stress that the members never worry about rent money or ~ food; “somehow” these commodities are expected to | materialize. Look’s William Hedgepeth mentions a pair |} of hippies who “had less than a dollar between them and — were going to be evicted from their pad the next day, i) along with about 30 others”; the point being that “it © didn’t seem to bother them.” Another of Hedgepeth’s hippies had a revealing routine: he would go out and © earn money, give it away, and then “come home and ~ mope hungrily until someone gave him some food.” || Hedgepeth once asked a hippie what time it was and ~ was told, “we never know.” Other observers have en- || countered hippies who are completely disoriented, both — in time and space. The second recurrent theme in the hippie world view q\ ‘ is that of irresponsibility, of freedom from obligations, — “The general motto in all things,” writes Hedgepeth, ‘Don’t do it if it doesn’t groove ya.” The assumption that — one’s pleasure is the sole guide to acceptable conduct is © elaborately rationalized in ways that appeal to the hippie hangup. One version is that pleasure must have spiritual, |) transcendental or revolutionary implications. In the words of one female hippie, “Whatever turns me on is a © sacrament.” Guru Leary has stated the case with more | | circumlocutions, but the principle is the same. q Another rationalization, more powerful because it 7} appeals to guilt and frustration, and because it builds on © the noncontroversial premise that conventions are time — bound, equates the social contract with puritanism, re- § sponsibility with enslavement, obligations with self- 7) obliteration. The argument maintains that self-indulgence 7) ; is a principled revolt against conventions designed to- destroy the individual who submits to them. One aspect of this outlook is the hedonistic ethic, Joan Didion, in her Post article, relates a conversation with a hippie who expressed extreme pride in his freedom } from the customary social amenities: I’ve had this old lady for a couple of months now, maybe she makes something special for my dinner, and I come in three days late and tell her I’ve been THE NATION/ December 4, 1967 Punch: Ben Roth “I've Got a Son in There Somewhere” with some other chick, well, maybe she shouts a little but then I say, “That’s me, baby,” and she laughs and says, “That’s you, Max.” Max says it works both ways. “T mean, if she comes in and tells me she wants to have Don, maybe, I say, ‘OK, baby, it’s your trip.’ ” This orientation makes relationships self-centered, but does not completely rule out altruistic conduct. Hippies make a point, for instance, of sharing means of sub- sistence (including drugs) with others. It is no coinci- dence, however, that the beneficiaries of this altruism are fellow hippies, who can be expected to reciprocate when today’s philanthropist becomes tomorrow’s mendi- cant. Altruism thus becomes a kind of insurance. This type of exchange arrangement is described by Erich Fromm as the Ethic of the Marketplace; it is character- istic, according to Fromm, of early stages of social (and individual) development. The second aspect of irresponsibility removes legitimacy from rules governing individual conduct. Galahad, a New | York hippie, states this principle as “God is the only one | who makes rules that you can’t break.” The premise that circumscription is an intolerable imposition—with the evanescent exception of regulations governing man in his natural state—is a personal stratagem, not the philosoph- ical ideal discussed by victims of the hangup. Hippies as individuals reject limitations on their pursuit of pleasure, | and eventually learn to defend this action by invoking libertarian and anti-tyrannical slogans. This sequence becomes obvious when hippies discuss their motivations | for “dropping out,” as in the following interview by Miss | Didion: “My parents said I had to go to church,” Debbie - says. “And they wouldn’t let me dress the way I wanted. In the seventh grade my skirts were longer "IHE NATION/ December 4, 1967 than anybody’s—it got better in eighth grade, but still.” “Your mother was kind of a bummer,” Jeff says to her. “They didn’t like Jeff. They didn’t like my girlfriends. I had a C average and my father told me I couldn’t date _ until I raised it, and that bugged me a lot too.” “My mother was just a genuine all-American bitch,” Jeff says. “She was really troublesome about hair. Also, she didn’t like boots. It was really weird.” “Tell about the chores,” Debbie says. “For example, I had chores. If I didn’t finish ironing my shirts for the week, I couldn’t go out for the week- end. It was weird. Wow.” The average non-adolescent wonders how whims in- volving seemingly petty activities can turn into matters of such momentous principle. Surely, no one leaves home over issues such as the length of skirts or the hair- cuts of their friends? But they do. And on reflection, it is obvious that they must. For it is a fact that what to us are caprices, to the adolescent are the testing grounds of his identity. And what to us are minor interferences, to the adolescent are the symbols of a forced return to childhood. And para- doxically, the problem is especially acute for the per- missively brought up, middle-class youngster—a category from which most hippies derive. Spoiling instills expectations of unfettered freedom and unconditional reward. It insures that the world view from the crib will last undisturbed through sobering ex- periences that usually overlay infancy with the veneers of civilization. It results in physically mature biological products without the psychological disposition to match— adults who expect to be cared for, who see no occasion to expend effort, who cannot compromise their own de- sires, who are unable. to join in cooperative efforts. This orientation creates intense problems at adoles- 587 wa ‘I! i % cence, the age at which the satellite role of the child must be transmuted into the independent self of the adult, which can be sure of its own existence, which can belong without merging, which can assert without monopolizing, which can give and take without bargaining. The spoiled child feels this need most acutely, because it has learned to regard itself as supremely important. And whereas the spoiled child continues to operate on the assumption that the universe exists to provide him with pleasure, he now also feels that he should be permitted to call the shots. In other words, the spoiled child’s self-perceived status of super-adulthood occasions a strident demand for power and freedom. As the spoiled child sees it, adolescence must bring autonomy without delay or compromise, But at the same time, the spoiled child cannot give up (as it implicitly must) its advantage as a perennial dependent, an object, a passive consumer of the efforts of others, a bloated protoplasm perched in wait for the charitable breast. The diagnosis of hippiedom as a perpetuation of in- fancy would come as no surprise to the hippies them- selves. Hippies constantly refer to themselves—both literally and metaphorically—as young. The very term “flower children” carries this connotation. So do such hippie slogans as “The psychedelic baby eats the cyber- netic monster,” and hippie references to productivity (“creation is play”) and to the benefits of the drug experience (“You die and you are reborn as a child. We're all really like children”; “It’s like seeing the world again through a child’s eyes,” etc.). What hippies do not make explicit, and may not understand, is that a per- petuated childhood has psychological attributes other than openness and innocence—and that these may negate the claim to adult identity. For the main fact of hippie life is that the prescription is not feasible. No matter what shape it takes, the com- bination of super-adult expectations and infantile striv- ings cannot be satisfied and, possibly as a result, becomes insatiable. Hence, the displays of ostentatious dress com- bined with the proclaimed desire for anonymity; the obsession with control and power combined with passivity in relation to means of subsistence; the rejection of reality and the claim to perceptiveness; the rejection of ethics and the vaunted honesty; the insistence on “doing one’s thing” and the intolerance of other people’s values; the assertion of selflessness in connection with blatantly self-indulgent conduct. These paradoxes expose the futility of the spoiled adolescent’s effort to play at being mature. Their sum—the world of the hippie—is a dis- torted nursery, with defiant and militant overtones. Analysis of the hippie syndrome not only suggests that it is a psychological monstrosity but also that it is diffi- cult to accommodate as a social phenomenon. The hippies, after all, accept—even demand—social services, while rejecting the desirability of making a contribution to the economy. Their cry for services presumes that society contains individuals and agencies (medical clinics, the ACLU, the custodians of public parks) that are necessary for survival or that deserve to be patronized. On the other hand, the aspect of society that calls for 5388 productivity is characterized as the “Establis Er and comprises brutal police, compromising liberals, draft boards, men in flannel suits, hucksters, hypocrites, multiversities, the military-industrial complex and other — assorted evils. membership—consuming but noncontributing. Real © “dropping out” would abrogate the social contract (the ~ arrangement by which, in the words of Rousseau, “each — citizen necessarily submits to the conditions which he — imposes on his neighbor,” and vice versa). A complete — escape from the “soul-destroying Establishment” would — entail breaking from the participating privileges and life- — facilitating commodities that are contractually available | through membership; it would require the renunciation © of sustenance, protection, legal recourse and a voice inj the public forum. By refusing to “drop out” of the succor- © ing community, the hippies are requesting a marriage of || convenience to a community in which they insist they do 4 not belong—an ad hoc alliance that has a parasitic and | one-way character. Why is this pattern not understood—is in fact, ob- ~ fuscated—by victims of the hippie hangup? One reason, certainly, is that many people find they can project into | the idealized hippie their dissatisfactions with their own lives and with our imperfect social structure. By taking | the hippie’s slogans seriously, by systematizing his in- — articulate rationalizations, by toning down his totalism, — we arrive at statements of our own discontents, and can point to the hippie as a living barometer of our concerns. ~ | The hippie also provides a subculture in which we can — -selectively satisfy our own infantile impulses with a | pretense of respectability. We can become tourists in a | community of self-indulgence, shoppers in a cafeteria of © irresponsibility. The hippie makes it possible for the ~ middle-class drug experimenter to define himself as a 7 reality-seeker or an amateur anthropologist; it redefines — promiscuity as an ethical revolution; it widens the defini-— tion of creativity and spontaneity to include doodling, and converts sordidly self-demeaning lapses into romantic © adventures of the spirit. } Finally, the hippie hangup redirects attention from in- dividual and social problems whose solution is difficult, ~ | to pseudo-problems that require no consuming commit- 7} ment. Inequities in society can be abandoned to the myth — of individual impotence; shelved, pending spiritual conversions; personal isolation — becomes a metaphysical fact, and interpersonal deficien- 7 | cies are elevated to a natural condition. Self-centered-— ness, insensitivity, nonparticipation, fatalism, . justfied, if one accepts the hippie diagnosis that we have reached a cul-de-sac in social evolution. And one can |) then go blindly about the business of increasing freedom where it is already abused, while ignoring it where none © is available; disguise concrete needs, and one can pretend that the © hippie hangup provides society with a license to concern | itself with its navel while ignoring the fact that the body politic is rotting away. THE NATION/ December 4, 1967 This artificial split (which ignores the — | functional link between, say, the ACLU and “com- } promising liberalism”) is designed to justify “dropping | out.” What it supports, however, is a new type of social — institutional deficits can be |} are all@) one can evolve sterile abstractions that — | ROBERT G. SHERRILL |. Washington | A little more than a year ago one of the Senate’s dissenters told The Nation that Eugene McCarthy had remarked to "a small group of his colleagues, “We must do something to stop this madman” (referring, of course, to President Johnson). If Senator McCarthy did in fact make such a remark privately, he took pains to cover his feelings from the public. Even in off-the-record conferences with news- men at that time, he sounded discouraged to the point of | inaction. He told a reporter for The Nation in the spring ‘of 1966: “The commitment [in Vietnam] is now so | extensive, not even the mildest dissent is to the point.” | In the same interview he said that he did not really look | upon the Senate dissenters’ advocacy of the Kennan- Gavin enclave theory as a true alternative to the Presi- } dent’s course of action, but merely as a way of saying | “we would support him in a modification” of his war | program. Pessimism, hesitancy, cynicism, some constitutional | conservatism and a lot of lone-wolfism have heretofore | muted Senator McCarthy’s part in the Congressional | dissent. He took not the slightest interest, for example, ‘in the move to nullify the Tonkin Gulf resolution, He said that it had given the President no powers he did not ) have before, so why withdraw an empty gesture? He signed letters to the President urging de-escalation, but would not join with Senators Morse and Gruening in | voting against the Pentagon appropriation bill nor would ) he line up with Morse and Nelson against the Vietnam supplemental appropriation. Similarly, he refused to join the larger group of dissenters who supported Senator ! McGovern’s amendment last year—a retribution amend- “Ment—to cut the military aid bill by the same amount | the Senate had cut the Development Loan Fund. Parting ! from men like Church, Clark, Gruening, the Kennedys, ! McGovern, Morse and Nelson, McCarthy voted with the | majority and for the Administration. | ~—s In such matters, McCarthy is faithful to a philosophy, | which is that the Senate should adopt a policy positively | rather than cut appropriations in a negative attempt to | force policy upon the government. And because of that | position McCarthy was, at least until recently, rated by ‘the Administration among the “responsible dissenters.” ! Up to last February he was still being invited to formal ) dinners at the White House. | ~=—s The fact that he has now climbed over the trenches to “challenge Johnson much more personally and dramatically | than any other member of Congress not only has thrown | the White House into a dither but, oddly enough, has | knocked some of the press rather cockeyed—though none | quite so cockeyed as William S. White, President John- | gon’s intimate friend and favorite leaker, who became JHE NATION/ December 4, 1967 e Faith of Eugene McCarthy hysterical to the point of mixing metaphors about McCarthy’s proposed candidacy: “What meat, then, is feeding this improbable Caesar, Eugene McCarthy? Sincere belief, no doubt, but beyond that a fierce fire of ambition fanned by the hot, fanatic thirst that now grips the throats of the American peacenik movement.” Gould Lincoln, writing in the Washington Star, likened McCarthy’s efforts to those of Wallace as a “spoiler” of LBJ’s chances (although by now everybody who knows anything about Wallace’s venture realizes he will under- cut the Republicans, not the Democrats). And David Broder, of The Washington Post, denounced McCarthy as a turncoat on the ground that he had supported John- son in 1964. But in fact there is nothing surprising about McCarthy’s leap. With the approach of a Presidential race, he—like Stassen—is always socked by a special load of adrenalin. It shows up in numerous ways, including his propensity to write books. Thus we were given Frontiers in American Democracy in 1960 and A Liberal Answer to a Con- servative Challenge in 1964; this time he jumped the gun with The Limits of Power, published in October. Every four years, McCarthy becomes hyperactive, either as a front man for another candidate or running for himself. Except in 1952, when he was too busy at home exterminating a Republican opponent who was trying to smear him as “soft on communism,” McCarthy has been in the thick of every national election since he was elec- ted to Congress in 1948. In 1956 he handled Hubert Humphrey’s campaign for the Vice Presidential nomina-_ tion; in 1960 he stumped first for Humphrey as the Presidential candidate; then, when Hubert faltered, switched to Lyndon Johnson, and finally, in a burst of supreme drama, gave the only strong appeal at the con- vention for the consideration of Adlai Stevenson (“do not reject this man... do not, I say, leave this prophet without honor in his own party”). It was never clear whether his plea that the delegates withhold final decision past the first balloting was meant to help the candidacy of Stevenson or Johnson, but in any event he was un- successful in getting the convention to listen to him—as he had been unsuccessful in each of his previous forays into national politics, and was again to be unsuccessful in 1964 when he sought to become Johnson’s Vice Presidential running mate. Total failure, in fact, has attended McCarthy’s efforts to place himself or a friend on the Democratic national ticket. But, unlike Stassen, McCarthy has never seemed to be much handicapped by his reverses. If he has fallen short of the nation’s approval, he has also escaped its pity, and thus his present candidacy comes with a fresh- ness despite the experiences of 1956, 1960 and 1964. His candidacy is also fresh because this time he is not 589 ern SSS motivated by personal ambition. He knows he cannot, by working through a scattering of primaries, unhorse John- son at the national convention and get the nomination himself. But by inviting participatory criticism of the President in a few primaries, he can increase the momen- tum that could unseat Johnson in the general election, unless Johnson squashes the Pentagon and obtains peace. “The McCarthy candidacy is likely to fade sadly if the outlook in Vietnam visibly improves greatly,” Joseph Alsop observes in one of his oddest quibbles. “That is the real weakness in the Senator’s program.” It is a weak- ness which McCarthy prizes. McCarthy doesn’t want in, not now. He just wants an unrepentant Johnson out. He doesn’t like what the man stands for. And the best way to tick off his LBJ dislikes, in scale of importance, is to recall why McCarthy once called Adlai Stevenson “the purest politician of our times.” He still feels that way about Stevenson because his career, by McCarthy’s reckoning, embodied these three principles: “First, a decent respect for the opinions of mankind in world affairs.” (It is not necessary to remind anyone of LBJ’s total disregard for the world’s opinion of his activities in Vietnam. ) “Second, a willingness to accept the judgment of the majority and popular will in domestic politics, as manifest in party conventions or in general elections.” (The will of the majority in 1964, disregarded by LBJ, was clearly not to escalate the war in Vietnam.) “And third, by unselfish surrender of his own personal reputation and image for the good of the common effort if, in his judgment, that surrender would advance the cause of justice and order and civility.” This third principle is what will bring McCarthy, if anything does, into the Presidential campaign. It is a principle (not unlike a willingness to be martyred) that would concern a moralist more than a politician, and McCarthy is indeed a moralist, as he has sometimes shown when debating issues. Always the Senate’s foremost crusader for improving the working conditions of migrant laborers, and for pro- hibiting the importation of Mexican braceros, McCarthy once told the Senate: “The moral problem should be of more concern than the problem of whether we are to have cheap tomatoes or pickles.” One of McCarthy’s often repeated wisecracks was his suggestion that he deserved the nomination in 1960 because “I’m more liberal than Hubert and more Catholic than Kennedy.” He is right on both scores. After a year as a novice in a Benedictine monastery, McCarthy gave up the idea of entering the priesthood but did not cut himself away from religion. When the Supreme Court handed down its school prayer decision in 1962, McCarthy worried about it as being another sign “that ours could be not only a secularized government but a secularized society.” He once said, “In practice, church and state can never be completely separated.” He likes to quote G. K. Chesterton to the effect that the Declaration of Independence is a “creed set forth with dogmatic and even theological lucidity.” National interest, he says, “cannot in every case override considerations of right or wrong.” Having braided morality and politics so tightly, he goes on to say that the one thing 590 hampering the effectiveness of most Chri stians is they give advice and point the direction “without the support of example.” It may seem a bit unusual, but McCarthy’ s candidacy cannot be put in proper perspective without considering Ih it as a gesture of faith; he has privately preached the i, | necessity of stopping the children of darkness in the }, White House, and now he will publicly give the co ; ship. This is not to say that McCarthy is heavy-handedly | pious (at least, predominantly Lutheran Minnesota | doesn’t seem to think so). Indeed, his alliances among) ,. Catholics would probably be strongest with the un- _ regimented Populists; even with back-to-the-soil anarch- f ists such as Dorothy Day and the staff of The Catholic Worker. When much of the Catholic world, lay and cleric. | (as well as much of the Protestant), was carried away b | ‘ the anti-communism of the early 1950s, McCarthy was} not. In 1952, a vintage year of hysteria when LBJ’s pal, - Congressman Homer Thornberry (since appointed to i! the federal bench), was pushing a bill to permit Washing- ton officials to fire “security risks without having to go to” the Civil Service Commission and go through a lot of red tape on appeals,” McCarthy, then in the House, tried to” amend the bill in such a way that security risks couldil stay in nonsensitive government jobs. In those days that | y was a dangerous position. 1, ei 4 s that | It’s true, McCarthy has said that Johnson has used — ' the Supreme Court as a public relations purification in medium for the Kennedy assassination investigation, and _ has turned the Democratic National Committee ito a q a boot-polishing machine, and the Senate into a rubber i" stamp for foreign policy faits accomplis. But much more important than these particular dislikes is his fear that | the power balance within government is being destroyed. McCarthy has always been a close student of power } relationships. Although he was something of a big shot) in the House, having put together “McCarthy Marauders” (more formally known as the Democratic Study Group), McCarthy chose to risk his ten-year-old seat to challenge Republican Edward Thye. He was prepared to gamble for a seat in the upper chamber, he explained at the } time, because of “the changing relationship of power | between the House and the Senate. While upper or second) legislative bodies in other democratic countries have declined in power in the course of the last century, some) | disappearing entirely and others remaining as little more) than symbols, the Senate of the United States has grown in power and authority.” Since reaching the Senate in 1958, he has been among g those most jealous of the Senate’s powers, and both John} Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson have offended him by” denigrating the Senate’s role, especially in foreign affairs. In 1961 he said, only half jocularly, “We used to be asked to approve a thing before it was done. Now we’re asked?) after it’s done. It’s the New Frontier.” McCarthy has been one of the real fighters (futilely) to give the Senate more — supervision of the CIA, because he looks upon this) agency as one of the Executive’s most insidious routes) for by-passing Senate supervision of foreign policies. The fact that a few Senators (such as Richard Russell) have access to some of the CIA’s secrets does not appease” THE NATION/ December 4, 1967 thy. * ‘If we were to permit the Executive branch to hich members of Congress to confide in, the 2x step,” he said, “would be to ask, why not let the Sec cretary of State name the members of the Committee n Foreign Relations, or the Secretary of Defense the n eibers of the Armed Services Committee?” shaken by the Kennedy-CIA trickery at the Bay of ' Pigs and by Johnson’s bungling of the Dominican Repub- lic crisis, McCarthy saw our Latin American policy as _ hanging solely by Executive whim, and harangued his colleagues: “Our function in the Senate is not merely to | find out what the Administration policy is and then to , 8 y yes or no to it—oftentimes too late. We have a " definite responsibility to develop policy ourselves.” | He said that in 1965. He has been saying it ever since. So have other Senators, and most of the headlines have ‘gone to them, especially to Senator Fulbright, but “McCarthy is used to being overlooked. When Robert ‘Kennedy proposed letting the Vietcong have a “share and tesponsibility” in the South Vietnamese government, the | Administration denounced the Kennedy proposal and the | fuss stayed in the headlines for several days. In the midst @ of this, McCarthy noted, somewhat plaintively, that he | ik had made a similar suggestion two weeks earlier and no- | body had paid any attention. =“ Fulbright’s conflicts with the generals have also received | much more public attention than have McCarthy’s, al- though the latter has been much more open in his distrust _ of the military mind. # Aside from the ideological reasons pushing McCarthy into this campaign, there are the lower impulses, such _ as revenge. Not only will McCarthy be bearding Johnson, he will also be challenging Robert Kennedy who thinks he B has a franchise on the role of official dissenter. _ McCarthy has been sorely embarrassed by both camps. 7 GABE PRESSMAN | Mr. Pressman is an N.B.C. news reporter who has covered New York politics for TV and the press for the last eighteen years. New York City - November 16, 1967, was a red letter day in New York | politics. It was the day when Gov. Nelson Rockefeller _ got so angry at Mayor John Lindsay that he committed a rare breach of political etiquette: he spoke his real _ feelings in public. _ For newsmen it was a fascinating spectacle. Rarely are ‘our politicians completely truthful on television or in print. It is only when they get “sore,” as Rockefeller @ described his feelings about Lindsay, that the public gets | a glimpse of what is really going on. __ What.made the Governor so angry? The immediate | cause was Lindsay’s comment on national television No- | | vember 12: “Mr. Rockefeller has been a distinguished Governor. . . . He continues to declare that he’s not a THE NATION/ December 4, 1967 Most infamous, of course, was the use Johnson made of him in 1964 to inject a little drama into what was other- wise obviously going to be a dull, cut-and-dried conven- tion. Johnson teased McCarthy into pushing himself for the Vice President’s spot. Whether or not his action can be traced to this ambition, McCarthy early in 1964 voted to protect the oil depletion allowance which on three earlier occasions during his Senate career he had voted to cut. The “competition” between McCarthy and Humphrey reached its low point on a Meet the Press television show just before the convention opened; the two Minnesota friends tried to outdo each other in promoting the John- sonian way of life, and Johnson phoned both men to say he had enjoyed their toadying. “We got a passing grade,” Humphrey giggled. Maybe that was the last straw, or maybe McCarthy finally realized he was being toyed with; anyway, a few hours after the show he wired the White House that he was pulling out of the contest. As it turned out, McCarthy is glad he didn’t get the job. He believes a Vice President should “stay healthy and quiet,” and doubts that working for LBJ would have permitted him to stay either. As for the Kennedy brand of politics, McCarthy has not forgotten the way big brother Jack treated him in 1961. McCarthy thought for sure he had the strength to pass legislation for suspending the bracero farm labor program that year. But on the afternoon before it was to be brought up on the floor he got a call from President Kennedy saying, sorry, but he was withdrawing his support. “That’s going to be em- barrassing,’ McCarthy replied. “Yes, I know,” said Kennedy, “so I suggest you get out of town.” That's Establishment politics. McCarthy never has learned how to play it very well. Which is one reason why so many non-Establishment voters across the country welcome his proposed candidacy. i The Rockefeller-Lindsay Feud candidate [for President] . . . but should he change his mind I think it would be a good thing for my party and my country.” On the surface, it seemed an innocent com- pliment. But, to Rockefeller and his staff, it looked like a Machiavellian design to kill the Governor with kindness. In recent days, Rockefeller knew, a “Draft Rockefeller” movement had been pushed in New York City’s Young Republican Club by a key Lindsay aide, Sid Davidoff. A 27-year-old ex-college wrestler, Davidoff is also the dispenser of low-level patronage and an advance man for the Mayor. In the 1965 campaign he organized “Davidoff’s Raiders,” the group that talked up Candidate Lindsay’s appearances in each section of the city and turned out the crowds. The Governor saw Davidoff’s un- solicited actions on his behalf as an effort to put him on the spot, to force him into the primaries to be slaughtered in a free-for-all, as in 1964. Lindsay’s television remarks were made on Sundayl November 12. On Tuesday, he and the Governor met face to face at a meeting called to announce a new ao WIS See eS Sn ee aaaeugereaes council promoting labor-management peace in New York, As they posed smiling for photographers, one reporter overheard a not so pacific conversation: ROCKEFELLER: Heard you've been talking about me. Linpsay: Oh, that was just a throwaway. ROCKEFELLER: I was just a throwaway three years ago. And then, reportedly, Rockefeller walked grimly away. A close associate of Lindsay has a different version of this conversation, which goes like this: Linpsay: I’m going to California. Do you have any throwaways you want me to drop? ROCKEFELLER: They tried to throw me away three years ago out there. Wednesday night, Lindsay flew to Los Angeles, ostensibly to introduce the New York City Opera Com- pany. Actually, his major activities during three days were private meetings with Western Republican leaders including Governor Reagan and Lt. Gov. Robert Finch, and public appearances before groups of students, busi- nessmen, lawyers and civic leaders. All week Mr. Rockefeller had been fuming and on Thursday his resentment overflowed. At the close of a press conference announcing a new state park, the Governor received a question about the draft-Rockefeller movement promoted by close associates of Lindsay. He replied: “I have spoken to him very frankly about it and asked him—and asked the people—to please desist, that it was very embarrassing to me.” “You asked him to call off his Davidoffs?” “Yes, I so asked him.” “What did he say?” “Well, he said he had no control over them.” “.. . And if this does continue, is there anything else you can do to convince him?” “Sure,” the Governor said, and his jaw tightened. Later, Rockefeller reportedly told friends that Lindsay was out to kill him off as a possible candidate, that Lindsay wanted the nomination himself. Apprised of this as he flew back from Los Angeles, Lindsay responded: “No truth to it whatsoever.” He was “mystified” by the controversy and would meet soon with the Governor “and talk about many things—all of them private.” The Mayor said he wasn’t running for anything and, “as far as ’'m concerned, there is no misunderstanding between the Governor and me.” Thus, tempers are heated as two of the most prominent non-candidates engage in public controversy over what each professes not to want. The feud that is in the air follows logically from the history of strained relations between these two liberal Republicans, so close ideologically and so far apart by temperament. In 1963, in Manhattan, Governor Rockefeller backed his cousin, Richard S. Aldrich, for the Republican Councilman at Large nomination. Of Aldrich the Governor said: “He is my cousin and I think very highly of him.” Lindsay, then a Congressman, threw his support to Richard Lewisohn, a Republican district leader. Under pressure, Lindsay’s man finally withdrew. But the incident certainly hurt Lindsay with the Republican organization and with the Governor. In the winter of 1965, the Governor tried to persuade oz t ia * F Lindsay to run for Mayor. At the closed-door meetin 2, | P the Congressman turned it down, abruptly and curtly. The leaders present were shocked at what they regarded 1 as Lindsay’s tough attitude. i Later, Lindsay changed his mind and decided to run. | He stayed clear of Rockefeller, who was still nursing 1964 i political wounds, and waged his own campaign. 7 In his first months as Mayor, Lindsay tangled with § (i the Governor in Albany. The Mayor submitted a city tax J \ program, but the legislative leaders would not accept it. ‘|| Rockefeller, claiming to play the role of “honest broker,” | offered a compromise plan, which he charged Lindsay’s _ | people “torpedoed.” He accused the Mayor of reneging on a deal and, by implication, of being “misinformed and totally irresponsible.” Asked if he still regarded the — Governor as an honest broker, Lindsay snorted. Ulti- — mately, Rockefeller called Lindsay and the legislative leaders together and hammered out an agreement. Relations between Rockefeller and Lindsay were better | in the 1967 legislative session. Perhaps the tone was set © by Lindsay’s “Dear Santa Claus” letter of December, 1966, when the Mayor laid out the city’s needs in a most’ } conciliatory message to the Governor that praised Rocke- feller for his concern for the city. i But, when Lindsay went to Washington early in’ | October, the Rockefeller-Lindsay feud erupted again. — For months Rockefeller had been urging Republican — moderates to unite behind George Romney as their can- didate for the Presidential nomination. Lindsay held a private briefing for Washington reporters in which he said — that Charles Percy of Illinois would be the strongest | nominee. Sen. Jacob Javits (R., N.Y.) deplored Lindsay’s — remarks: “It’s completely wrong to attack Romney. This is precisely what destroyed the moderate cause in 1964, | when the moderates were unable to unite behind a single — candidate.” As for Rockefeller, holding his feelings in 7 check publicly, he said: “If John has something to tell ~ me, I’m sure he’ll tell me himself.” One politician who knows them both intimately sees it all as a clash of personalities. He puts it this way: Lindsay feels he should be treated as an equal. Rocke- feller feels Lindsay goes back on his word. Neither trusts the other. They operate differently. Rockefeller tends to be more patient. He seldom loses his temper. He’s a _ better negotiator. If he can’t get his own way, he compromises. Lindsay is impatient. His attitude is: “There’s a lot wrong. Let’s do something about it now. Let’s get it done.” Rockefeller says: “Let’s get part of it done.” Rockefeller knows you win some and you lose some. Lindsay wants to win them all. i As for the recent imbroglio over drafting Rockefeller, ~ a close friend of Lindsay asked: “Why the hell is Rocke- feller so rattled if he’s not a candidate? Why would he be |} blowing his stack over something like this? Analyze it. 7} In 1960, Rockefeller single-handedly forced a revision |} of the Republican platform at his meeting with Nixon in New York. In 1964, Rockefeller courageously stood in the Cow Palace in San Francisco and faced the right |} wingers, finishing his speech despite their boos and heck- © | ling. And now, in 1967, Rockefeller takes on Sid Davidoff, ~ a handyman and coat holder for the Mayor! How }} paranoid can he get?” THE NATION/ December 4, 1967 | D sply, one of Rockefeller’s close associates said: I don’t know why Lindsay is doing this. He’s been gant and independent, and he’s ungrateful. Rocke- er helped raise money for his campaign. He made eches for him. When Rockefeller ran for re-election, indsay didn’t do a thing for him. The Governor has | been good to him, and he just continually needles the Il Governor.” Then this Rockefeller partisan noted solemn- | y: “But I think the Governor made a mistake bringing _ this into the open. This kid’s not in his league.” _ Those who know Rockefeller well do not doubt that M§ he still harbors Presidential ambitions. But his strategy i now is passive. He told a friend recently: “I’m nearly 60 I® years old. I have a wonderful wife and two young boys. ® I am content. I am not going to kill myself for this.” ® ©Rockefeller is a fatalist. He knows he can’t go after the | nomination this time—it must seek him. Ironically, Rockefeller has accused Lindsay of doing ' the very thing the Lindsay people think Rockefeller is ' doing himself. They believe that he has been pushing Romney in the hope that the Michigan Governor will fall i ie ) WILLIAM EASTLAKE 1 Mr. Eastlake, author among other books of The Bronce People _ (Harcourt, Brace) and Castle Keep (Simon & Schuster), has _ recently returned from his second trip to Southeast Asia. ® The American army cargo plane was punctured with bullet holes that had been patched, but they did not get , all of them so we could not maintain cabin pressure. The | port engine was in trouble. The landing gear was not | working properly. She was overloaded and they could | mot secure the ammo. It was the prelude to a normal | trip to Danang. The plane would not take off for other reasons that were kept secret from us. The secret was never revealed to anyone. It was the best-kept secret of the war. The inside of the ship looked like a very large Chinese laun- dry, steam hissing out in all directions from the air-condi- | tioning ducts that did not work. The lady Vietnamese | camp followers were looking as though they might be | there to massage the hundred American, Australian, Korean, Filipino and Vietnamese soldiers jumbled into the plane. Even though the Chinese laundry or massage parlor plane that was to take us to Danang had been ab- } solutely full for two hours it did not take off. We would ! stay on the Tan Son Nhut airstrip until the war ended. | Now the plane’s captain was talking on the intercom. | This was the only gadget that worked. He was telling the passengers what to do if the plane crashed on take-off, and he was telling us what to do if we took ground fire and he told us what to do if he ditched it. Then he took this back and said he would not ditch the plane. This was most reassuring and a perfect boost to the inhabitants | of the Chinese laundry. Now the intercom went dead. _ That would not work either. | THE NATION/ December 4, 1967 ‘LOST IN VIETNAM on his face and that the moderates ultimately will turn to Rockefeller. It would appear that only a political miracle could win Rockefeller the nomination, and Lindsay’s chances are infinitely less than that. Rockefeller’s people believe Lindsay would like nothing better than the Vice Presi- dential nomination, but the 46-year-old Mayor has told intimates he definitely would not accept. In assessing the chances of either man, an image comes to mind: that angry scene in San Francisco three years ago. Rockefeller stood on the platform, bravely reading his speech even as jeering conservative delegates tried to drown him out. And one remembers Lindsay, his face red with fury at the Goldwaterites, so upset he refused to talk to New York reporters as he left the floor of the Cow Palace. If substantially the same kind of delegates take control in Miami next year, it is difficult to imagine that either - Rockefeller or Lindsay could be acceptable to them. Un- less the primaries turn the situation upside down, the Rockefeller-Lindsay feud will have been futile indeed. An Australian passenger said they’d best get the chaps out of the plane before they all died. “Why do you say that?” A Nigerian near him asked. “By the by, the Australian Vietnam commitment is minige mal considering all.” Then the Nigerian picked on the Zambesi. “I suppose the Zambesi effort is less.” Sess, “What do you mean, considering all,” the Australian lieutenant said. “There’s me,” the Zambesi said. “Is Zambesi a country? the Nigerian asked. “How many more of you are there?” “What do you mean, considering all?” the Australian said. “Considering that Australia is threatened by the Red Horde,” the Nigerian said. “We are only threatened by this aeroplane.” “J don’t like you,” the Zambesi said to the Nigerian. “What a pity,” the Nigerian said. “What a way to die among all this acrimony.” “IT spoke to you before we got on this plane because you were black and now you abuse me because I am: black.” “My dear fellow, soon we may all be dead. Let us not leave this precious, precious earth in disputations.” “I don’t think this plane’s ever going to get off this earth,” the Australian said. “I fahnd the Australian accent grating,” the Nigerian said to me. “Shali I kill. him?” the Australian asked me. . “Soon we will all be dead,” the Nigerian said. Then the Nigerian said to the Zambesi: “When this plane tries to take off the Vietcong will kill you for sure.” When the Chinese laundry finally took off it made 593 it, even with the near starboard engine dragging its ass and spitting yellow flames, causing us to veer too close to the mine field at the end of the runway that a wounded B-52, back from bombing the farmers, had slithered into that morning. Whoom Whoom Whoom. “After every mission we come back here and blow our- -selves up,” the Australian said. “Whose side are you on?” the Nigerian wanted to know. “Gott is mitt uns,” the Australian said. “If He wasn’t -with us how could this massage parlor fly?” The hundred troopers were all dripping a hundred gal- lons of water. The Vietnamese women were doing better, staring around at the round-eyed white troopers in quiet, slant-eyed Oriental amaze. At Bien Hoa, when the land- ing gear fouled, the white round-eyes were all dead asleep but the Asian women watched, alert, while the white crew beat the shit out of the hydraulics with a crow bar. At Phan Rang we were asked to overfly because of a fire fight near the landing zone, and at Cam Ranh Bay the control requested us to proceed to Nha Trang with- out any bullshit, but Nha Trang was closed in or in the hands of VC. Anyway, by this time we were lost in the monsoon and the pilot decided to find Qui Nhon or bust. “IT admire that chap’s desperation,” the Australian said. “We don’t seen to be popular in Vietnam, even at our own airfields,’ the Nigerian said. “Here we are being bandied about from pillar to post like a pest house. The British would never put up with this. The British would not put up with this for one moment,” the Nigerian ac- cused the Australian. The Zambesi allowed that if the pilot did not find Qui Nhon in the monsoon he would commit suicide rather than be taken alive. “And be eaten by the savages. You talk such rot. Such bloody rot,” the Nigerian said. “I’m ashamed that we both - come from the same continent.” “You talk like a Vietcong.” NEO- NEO-COLONIALISM IGNORING THE STORM WARNINGS GEOFFREY BING Mr. Bing, Queen's Counsel and former Labor Member of Parliament, was from 1957 to 1961 attorney general of Ghana, and thereafter served as a senior official on the staff of the President until the coup d'état of February, 1966. His book on Ghana, Reap the Whirlwind, is scheduled for publication in England early next year. London The elder of the chien who, for forty years, played the piano downstairs in a brothel without ever learning what was taking place upstairs is, in a way, symbolic of our age. His argument that he never permitted any impro- priety in the many and varied tunes he found himself called upon to play during his long carecr, is after all 594 “Thank you,” the Nigerian said and then th went to sleep. - The plane crash-landed at Pleiku. When we walked" 7 away from it I asked the Australian what in God’s name — the Nigerian and the Zambesi were doing in Vietnam. ~ “I haven’t the foggiest,” the Australian said. “Not the | foggiest. But then I’ve never been able to figure out what you American chaps are doing here either, Can you help — me?” a defense we all make of our own political actions, Our | behavior, like that of the elder, is within its ambit irre- proachable. It is merely that we, as he, have not suffi- ciently explored the environment within which our talents are employed. So it is with neo-colonialism. For this in Britain there is an excuse. The British Par- liamentary system has been remodeled in our century in a way which makes it difficult for the man in the street or his Parliamentary representative to discover what is going on upstairs. Indeed, it is impressed upon Members, the press: and other inquirers, as no doubt it was upon the elder, that any inspection of what takes place elsewhere is not only a breach of security but might bring ruin upon the whole enterprise. Neo-colonialism, which is at the root of much counter- THE NATION/ December 4, 1967 at all. Indeed Sir Alec Douglas Home in 1964 told the | Parliament of Nigeria that the word did not exist in | our vocabulary. It seems to be tacitly assumed that the “undoubted and statistically advertised fact that three- i? "quarters of the world each year gets relatively poorer | is due to the incompetence and perversity of the vast | majority of mankind, and is in no way to be associated ' with the parallel fact that at the same time the wealthy | quarter of the world is each year getting wealthier. Neo-colonialism differs from old-fashioned co- ‘lonialism in that it treats the less developed world as _ an estate to be exploited by the entire industrialized world and not, as previously, as separate rival colonies, | or their equivalent of client states, under the exclusive | influence of this or that great power. Today, in the main, _ the industrialized nations dispute about their appropriate | share in the total gains and not about the territorial | limits of any particular territory, a matter which with the _ old colonialism provoked continued world crises of the _ Fashoda and Agadir types. - In essence, neo-colonialism is a system by which the less developed world is paid proportionally less and less _ for its exports, and charged proportionally more and more for its imports with every year that passes; so far as Britain is concerned, it is of prime importance in keeping the country solvent. According to the calculations of the Financial Times, from 1964 to 1967 Britain’s annual gain in terms of trade against the less developed world amounted in foreign exchange to an additional £300 million per year—that is to say three times as much as has been gained through the often discussed and much heralded cuts in overseas military and civil ex- penditure, and twice as much as has been achieved by the controversial policy of deflation. These lesser contributions to the balance of payments problem have been argued about ad nauseam, but the social, political and international implications of the prin- cipal method by which our external balances are main- tained is passed over in silence. The symptoms of neo- colonialism—wars, counterrevolutions and international tensions—are not hidden; it is only the disease for which the British Parliament attempts no diagnosis. Thus it is that behind our backs a world revolutionary situation is being generated. The exploited three-quar- ters of mankind lack any uniform ideology, and up till now, their reaction to pressure often has been national- ist rather than Socialist. For this reason such clouds as there are in the skies of the less developed world, as sur- veyed from Britain, can be dismissed as no bigger than a man’s hand. In reality, it is the unnatural calm which is the true warning of the hurricane. In countries where the pressure was greatest, as, for example, Indonesia, the calm which has brought cooperation with the developed world has been achieved only after considerable blood- shed, but, generally speaking, the “‘bloodless” coup d’état has been the method used to destroy governments in the undeveloped world which have attempted to organize against neo-colonialism. At home we have been led to believe in consequence that the disease spread by the THE NATION/ December 4, 1967 imbalance of wealth has been cured. On the contrary, this world illness is entering its most dangerous state. The international political temperature today is sup- posed to be gauged by the relative chill of the cold war. It is presumed that when the world history of our own time comes to be written, the activities of other countries will appear merely as a footnote to the struggle for power between the United States and the Soviet Union. The acceptance of this interpretation leads on to the further assumption that any event in the world must be dealt with in terms of the balance of power between Russia and America and that, in regard to any war or revolution anywhere, attitudes must be determined by its likely effect on that relationship. The fact that these conflicts might be the result of tensions produced within the less developed world by factors which have nothing to do with the cold war is entirely ignored. The truth is that irrespective of whether or not it is, as alleged in the West, the policy today of the Soviet Union or of China to force more or less Communist regimes on unwilling developing states, they lack the material means to do so. Indeed, they can assist even pre-established revolutionary regimes only exceptionally, as, for example, in the case of Cuba. China or the Soviet Union may pro- vide arms and ammunition, as a gift or on long-term credit terms, but only in the most unusual circumstances, as with Korea, have they provided troops. There has been no other Chinese or Soviet inter- vention in any internal struggle in any less developed country on the scale of the prewar German and Italian intervention in the Spanish Civil War. In Vietnam it is Vietnamese and not Chinese or Russian soldiers whom the American army is fighting. The Soviet Union could still, no doubt, interfere effec- tively in the internal affairs of Eastern Europe but, even if its government desired to do so, it cannot today intervene decisively, either economically or militarily, in Asia or Africa or on the Latin American continent. In ten years’ time, perhaps, the growing strength of the Soviet Union might make this possible. But in the meantime what are mistaken for Russian- or Chinese-inspired regimes are governments which have been forced into revolutionary attitudes. by their own internal conditions. Counterrevolution in the less developed world is of three main types. First, no government based on the pre- supposition that Western methods of rule are of them- selves able to provide the education, the social services and the wage structure which, it is illogically presumed, accompany an acceptance of the outward trappings of the Western way of life, is likely ultimately to survive. | In many newly independent countries colonial trained elites occupy positions of power in the civil service and in the armed forces and are capable of staging a counter- revolution on their own. It is only necessary, such counterrevolutionaries believe, to copy every policy and every attitude of mind of the former colonial power to reproduce in their own country the social advantages enjoyed at home by their erstwhile imperial rulers. But such coups, hailed as victories for the West, in fact mee prepare the ground for a genuine revolution. The second type of coup is one inspired, directed and ) Sas te Ree = ~ iy | FREEDOM, ET Ke G2 cm <_ a ~——— LAE LZZZ™ 3 ZZ covertly assisted from without to reinforce neo-colonial control by the former imperial power, or to eliminate the excessive influence of some other Western state which has taken advantage of the former colony’s new, if nominal, independence to establish itself in the neo-colonial pre- serves of the former ruling state, The third type of coup is, in contrast, a concerted Western effort aimed at destroying a regime imagined to be under Russian or Chinese domination. Often these two types of coup follow each other. The West combined to remove Patrice Lumumba in the Congo, but subse- quently disputed about his successor. The Belgians con- sidered they were entitled to have Tshombe in power, while America believed he was not sufficiently aware of their interests and supported Mobutu in his two coups d état against President Kasavubu in 1960 and 1965. Theoretically, these two latter types of coup, since they can depend on practical economic assistance and, in some cases, actually on foreign troops, should be less vulnerable to a new counterrevolution than the first type. In practice, as the internal history of South Vietnam has demonstrated, the contrary is the case and a massive Western presence provokes, rather than prevents, counter coups d'état. This is due to the operation of a kind of Gresham’s law of counterrevolution. Once the process has started, the more reactionary and corrupt regime always drives out the less reactionary and less corrupt. Counterrevolution in the underdeveloped world is based on the assumption that economic and social ills can be cured by establishing or strengthening the neo- colonialist relationship. The counterrevolutionaries may, in the first place, be honest and well-meaning individuals determined to suppress corruption and raise the standards of living, but the harsh realities of the system which they support frustrate their good intentions. Their West- 596 eee OO IN EXCHANGE PoR-: oll § | Ihusiner Beeteres net RSSLEN® BU P MIUTARY BASES, POLITICAL & ECONOMIC. : = CiuetTe-.. LA E = ; c A Z tz 4 Zz 3 it ~ S SS A] RSS S SONY ANS ee N ped SS 6 poor?) This is the season when Houghton Mifflin released (white) Jonathan Kozol’s Death at an Early Age: The Destruction of the Hearts and Minds of Negro Children in the Boston Public Schools. In an interview, Kozol ob- served: There’s nothing in my book that Negroes couldn’t tell you themselves, Exactly. As regards ghetto public “edu- cation,” there’s nothing in his book that Negroes have not been ¢rying to tell. That’s what the busing was all about: SRF ak Oe pr Nn Co ee a \ { yt } 598 ’ % oe from CAMBRIDGE Socialism, Capitalism and Economic Growth: Essays Presented to - MAURICE DOBB Edited by C. H. FEINSTEIN The main theme of this book, economic growth and planning, has been central to the major part of Maurice Dobb’s work. The essays, by economists from all over the world, are written to mark his retirement as Reader in Economics at Cam- bridge in 1967. Among the contributors are Leif Johansen, Michal Kalecki, Paul M. Sweezy and E. H. Carr. $8.50 ‘The German Revolution of 1918 A. J. RYDER This study of German socialism in war and revolt is a story of conflict with far-reaching im- plications. Dr Ryder evaluates the half- completed revolution of 1918 in relation to the German past (Bismarck) and future (the breakdown of Weimar democ- racy), to the Marxist socialism which supplied the ideology of the revolutionary leaders, and to Bolshevik Russia. Illustrated. $11.50 Cambridge University Press 82 Hast 57th Street New York, N.Y. 10022 an attempt, by black parents, to dilute the consistency of an “education” serv- ing to lower IQ scores and reading levels of black children. And that’s what community school boards are now about: in lieu of the bus, and in view of the manifest impossibility of “integra- tion.” (The bitter history of Harlem’s Intermediate School 201 is a case in point.) But the spirit and the pace of Kozol’s testimony is, altogether, that .of a white man, a free man, a stranger to destruc- tive, Overpowering circumstance: the ghetto. His testimony, for these reasons, is new, and may succeed where an ex- . pressed weariness of suffering has failed. Malcolm X spent a determining part of his life in that same Roxbury section of Boston where Jonathan Kozol, in the words of one reviewer, underwent a “radicalization”’—as a fourth-grade teacher, for eight months. In a com- pletely other sense, and by his own account, Malcolm X also underwent a “radicalization” in Roxbury. And after- ward, Malcolm X repeatedly condemned the systematic “destruction of the hearts and minds of Negro children” in the public schools of Boston, Milwaukee, Chicago, Charleston, Los Angeles, Houston, New York, etc, etc. (Was anybody, anybody white, really listening to him?) Jonathan Kozol is not Malcolm X. But Kozol is honest: “Radical” or not, he is rare. To judge by contemporary vogue, he could as easily have written, and published, a sensational book en- titled: “Last Year At Gibson: I Was A Fourth-Grade Negro Student.” But Death at an Early Age documents the THE VISIT The wild animal fear is upon him. Still young enough to smell death and the cripple he does not want to come in here where she lies in her crib. But he does guarded by the lives of grandmother and mother, t eyes strafing the room for comfort. The tendon raw hands reach through the bars. Time is a membrane between their touch. she says, “My baby, my boy,” pulling him into her parenthesis of steel. “You must not call him a baby,” His voice is torn linen, “She can call me anything.” Could he be the face? She laughs at us and kisses his hair through the cage. ian enlightened, white minority—very very slowly—realize something hideously wrong. Put differently: the virulent, demonstrated racism of the}; white majority can-— itself as real persons | any kind. This is as much the director’s fault as” the actors’. It may escape our critics | but the audience, whether it knows it | or not, is thus deprived of contact with a basic dimension of the play’s dramatic effectiveness. A production which might — live on its own level as a “story of true love” and bracing idealism—many a poorer play has done so—leaves the audience dubious if not entirely in- different. The acting in Wole Soyinka’s — two African plays at the Greenwich } Mews Theatre, 141 West 13 Street, is uneven and crude, but by virtue of its — energy and relative authenticity works and makes at least the first of the two plays a salty frolic of abundant humor. It is called The Trials of Brother Jero, and deals with a man whom the author identifies as a “Beach Divine,” in other words, a religious fraud whose Christian — evangelism is agglutinated with primi- tive superstition for purposes by no means sacred. i It is a shrewd folk tale in which — enormous gusto is put into service of } somehting more than a piquant exoti- } cism. It reveals an ancient and still un- self-conscious tribalism as it begins to | pick up, without assimilating, the out- | ward forms of a religiosity outworn in } the civilization of its origin and alien } to both worlds. The combination and } contrast of both elements (European } and African) are rendered both pictur- | esque and funny, but one detects in Soyinka’s treatment that he could easily | transfigure the image that his play offers us into a much more troubled and disturbing picture. Here the colors are brightly laughable and the actors | display them with gorgeous good humor | and abandon. With the exception of Harold Scott, who is a cultivated performer, the acting is professional only here and there, but it seems to gain something in this instance from its very lack of “polish.” The whole is refreshingly likable. The second and more ambitious play, | The Strong Breed, is a tale of sin, suffer- | ing and expiation in peculiarly African } terms. In this case the lack of adequate | means in stage equipment, direction and unity of acting style muddies the im- pression of the play—mvystic in essence },, —so that one cannot arrive at any con- | fident appraisal. All one is sure of is that Wole Soyinka (now a political prisoner in Nigeria) is a writer endowed with a gift of speech that is both literary _ and true to the vein of the people he depicts. Soyinka’s dialogue is not simply | racy but has about it, without the slightest trace of affectation, a moun- tain-air cleanness and elevation. THE NATION/ December 4, 1967 _ FRANK W. LEWIS Al ACROSS: iM 1 The craft of 12 could have an alarming tr conclusion, but it’s barely noticeable. “a (11) 1 9 One who delivered more acid, possibly? e (8) off 10 Trouble inside, but | ‘the units! (6) th | 11 Pushing back the dirt’s always showing || “such a superior position! (7) IS} 12 Not a regular team to become less ac- | tive. (7) 1S. 14 He taught Elizabeth a few things! (6) | 15 What might be paid back in the revolu- tionary “land of cotton”? One might be fs obsessed with it. (4,4) | 17 What Sidney Carton did, not better, but Ir} off relatively little worth. (8) in} 20, 13 and 7 down Half of the team in- f@} capable of remolding character? (3,3,5,6) id | 22 and 16 down. This might make a mes- 1 senger speak loudly and bitterly of dan- gerous material to drop. (7,9) | 24 A husband might be, seeing bills for ey that new coat! (7) is ms One sees this sort of work about 4, the city. (6) | 27 Reputedly indulged in the sincerest form of flattery. (8) VI) 28 Be like a Cincinnati player around the YG E National, perhaps—completely surround- vt ed. (11) e || it’s little credit to as = DOWN: 2 Didn’t quite hit the target, f waterwheel for example? (9) } such as a | _— 7 HE NATION/December 4, 1967 | Crossword Puzzle No. 1226 3 A relatively smooth form of the rocky road? (7) 4 Comparatively right wet and drippy! (4) 5 If they do this to you, you might not complain about being taken in. (7) 6 Does it involve a pile-up if you do as the priest might have said? (5) 7 See 20 across 8 A number around hippy headquarters show the flower, in part. (6) 13 See 20 across 16 See 22 across 18 Producing something to put on the salad —in just one shake! (6) 19 Wheat, for example, that is found around Arthur's mother. (7) 20 Using harsh words. (7) 21 See 23 down 23 and 21 The contents of long-distance vans isn’t trimmed as flat as possible. (5-6) 25 Cal! up for the opera series? (4) SOLUTION TO PUZZLE NO. 1225 ACROSS: 1 Medication; 6 Isn’t; 10 Nomi- nee; 11 Plenary; 12 Conjunctivitis; 14 Re- serves; 15 Escape; 18 Windrows; 22 and 16 On the spur of the moment; 24 Set free; 25 Imagoes: 26 Ears; 27 Interested. DOWN: 1 Monochrome: 2 Demands; 3 Conquering hero; 4 Treacle; 5 Orphic; 7 Stamina; 8 Toys; 9 Devil’s advocate; 13 Reassessed; 17 Monitor; 19 Inutile; 20 Outpost; 21 Astern; 23 Ashe. <> Printed by Milford Publishing Inc., PUBLICATIONS AMERICAN REFORM: THE AMBIGUOUS LEG- ACY. Provocative essays by Warren Susman, Marvin Gettleman, Frank Warren, David Her reshoff, Heyward Ehrlich, Jack Salzman, Fred Greenbaum, and Daniel Walden, editor. $1.45. et Nab aay 4 PRESS, Yellow Springs, Ohio “SELECTED POEMS” of GEORGE FLYNN (Villiers of London—$2.00) is “the most ex- citing American poetry since Ezra Pound.” —James Turner. Available in U.S. from the at Der at: 145 West 12 Street, New York City SUPERB LITERARY MAGAZINE. Belitt, Mert- on, Neruda; Graphics, Plays; $5. a year. Voy- ages, Box 4862, Washington, D.C. 20008 Read THE NATIONAL CALL—for Responsible and Educated Citizenship. A psychological and Philosophical approach. Send $1.00 for a 6- months trial. Box 381, Marietta, Ohio 45750 HOT WAR-MAP OF COLD WAR. Grin at Far Right excesses! Bohemia seacoast as beach- head against Czech commies. Axis butcher Franco now our beloved ally etc., etc. Map, postpaid $1. Free with the following book: HISTORY WIDE OPEN: Afield, Revealed Raw facts. Officials scandals. 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Pape, 150 Broadway, Room 915, New York City 10038 MEET YOUR IDEAL MATE (Computerized Matching—All Ages) “Let TEAM make you a team.” Write: TEAM Project 245 East 30th Street New York, N.Y. 10016, Phone 889-6020 Milford, Conn. 607 , iN Celi ; ue +) tt + Dy °f an.) Se ee eee a Pee eA Above is the verbatim testimonial of a to dig their own incredibility gap. Below typically confused subscriber who ean’t tell are the highlights of our five most our journalism from our satire; as a mat- “Aarrrggh!”’ issues; they cost $1 or they're ter of principle there are never any labels free with a subscription. in The Realist because we prefer readers oer *““The Parts That Were Left Out of the Kennedy Book”’ —the feature that caused the largest number of sub- scription cancellations in 9 years; plus “Case History of the Manchester Caper’’—a follow-up on the back- ground and repercussions of that feature. *“Cartoons—the offensive ones by pros like Ed Fisher that get rejected by commercial periodicals; and spreads created specifically for The Realist—the Dis- neyland Memorial Orgy, the Junkie Battalion, Ed Sorel’s I’ve Got Rhythm movie poster. **“The Cynic Route from Crazy SANE to Loving Haight’’—all about cheerleaders at a peace rally; the LSD game; behind the scenes with the Diggers, the Joe Pyne show and the League for Sexual Freedom. **Celebrity Mucking—‘“‘An Impolite Interview with Woody Allen’; Steve Allen describes a bizarre dinner with William F. Buckley; ‘Dick Gregory and His Mississippi Airlift’; Norman Mailer’s speech at Berke- ley. **“Tegal and Actual Concentration Camps in America’”’ —a legacy of the McCarran Act, still ready and wait- ing—revisited by Charles R, Allen, the man who first broke the story in 1952. **“Blow-Up, Psychedelic Sexualis and The War Game” —three contemporary films and how they relate to Great Moments in Violence, from Tompkins Sq. Park to LBJ’s $1000-a-plate bash; latterday hedonism, from hippyland to the Renaissance Pleasure Faire; and in- famous personalities, from Mort Sahl to Herman Kahn. — **Soft-Core Pornography—the obscene telephone calling service; the homosexual editor of a girlie magazine; in defense. of those little comic books that men like. **Qld Fashioned Exposes—The President’s ranch hold- ings; Hell’s Angels as patriots; secret budget for CIA expenditures; Marvin Kitman’s advice to the veteran- lorn; the sex life of J. Edgar Hoover; the future of flag-burning; Who Killed Adlai Stevenson? **Sacrilegious Dept.—The Americanization of Zen; The Devil’s Visit to New York; Little Orphan Annie’s cam- paign against Mental Health. *“Inside Reports—from Hanoi, the Dominican Republic and the final Bratwurst Festival in Sheboygan, Wiscon- sia, The Realist, Dept. N 595 Broadway New York, N.Y. 10012 Enclosed please find: as described 5 issues free 5 issues free IGS! the 5 6 elSiny ce. sv veo Sle eee Address: <.2h ahttn a it are Citterio StGte "Sie ket Bi PN ata 6% O $1 for the five most ‘’Aarrrggh!” issues O $3 for a 10-issue subscription plus those O $5 for a 20-issue subscription plus those 3Iwvwve7anN Ve Na :- => A Re er Pere Gree ON pe neem NIGHT ON IRON MOUNTAIN avin cort ATION DECEMBER 11, 1967 35 cents : ‘I Am Tired :. oF Your Gimmicks’ ee e A Congressman i Speaks to LBJ on Vietnam and the Cold War i 4 REP. GEORGE E. BROWN, Jr. i | After the Mobilization THE GO ALS OF DISSENT i E LAWRENCE GRAUMAN, Jr. Hi ; f Free Press | i ¢ =i &@ Fancy Packages... te mesia i 2 =o earn Who Butters Their Bread A. Q. MOWBRAY Hl ees The Case of the Private ‘I’ FRANK J. DONNER o=x~OoQOw © Cennan Memoirs ROBERT G. HAZO LETTERS at the border Washington, D.C. Dear Sirs: Your editorial “Isolation Without Splendor” [Nov. 13] misquotes me. Many Canadians, but few im- migration officers, regard 1-A draft status as evidence of a prospective Canadian immigrant’s desirability. Border of- ficials at some points are so Americanized that they mis- takenly think they have an obligation to American law. I strongly recommend that draft evaders not make a point of their draft status at the Canadian border. The rest of your statement is accurate: war resisters are generally well received in Canada. David Lloyd-Jones selling the census Washington, D.C. Dear Sirs: “The Punchcard Snoopers” by Phil Hirsch [The Nation, Oct. 16], contains such serious misinterpreta- tions of Census Bureau practice that I feel the record should be corrected. ... The Bureau will not release individual records nor tabula- tions from which an individual could be identified. The fact that the Bureau has distributed detailed statistics sum- marized from individual census questionnaires to hundreds of users without determining what the statistics would be used for is in no way in violation of law or practice. .. . . To imply that the Bureau is lax in not knowing how thousands of persons will use these statistics is counter to the principle that statistical information should be widely distributed. ... The statement that “while names will be kept confidential, the rest of the information on each census questionnaire will be an open book” simply is not true. The tabulations that will be prepared will not reveal individual information. They will, however, serve to pinpoint areas where specified population groups are to be found. .. . This statistical service, however, does not serve to identify any person who is in need of a particular service or who might be con- sidered a prospect for any particular type of business activity. A. Ross Eckler, Director Bureau of the Census Bethesda, Md. Dear Sirs: If, as Dr. Eckler admits in his letter, “the Bureau has distributed detailed statistics summarized from individual census questionnaires without determining what the statistics would be used for,” I’m unable to understand how he can insist that this practice “is in no way in violation of law or practice.” Wouldn’t he have to know the uses before reaching that conclusion? The subsequent defense that “statistical information should be widely distributed” is a pretty weak reed to lean on. If “wide distribution” is the major criterion, then why not sell the individual returns as well as the summaries; that would really attract an audience. Dr. Eckler believes my article misinterprets Census Bureau practices. | suggest that he ask a cross section of Americans who filled out forms in 1960 how they inter- preted the statement on the front of the form. .. . If any significant number of respondents inferred from the wording that Census could sell summary data about them to business firms, I'll apologize personally. Dr. Eckler’s statement that the Bureau’s distribution of (Continued on page 628) 610 EDITORIALS —s_—> Exit McNamara fice For all practical purposes, the tenure of Robert § McNamara is over. Ironically, in the face of an event so important, one does not know whether to be glad of sad. It could have been otherwise. Had the Secretary | 0 Defense departed betimes, with an avowal, direct or im plicit, of his differences with the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Johnson Administration, he could have performed F a great service for his country. As it is, he can scarcely) be said to be trailing clouds of glory. The whole affa rc}, is ambiguous, and the war situation more ominous thar ever. The Secretary’s departure is political—amid all th explanations and conjectures, that is the one fact nm open to doubt. He is no more needed at the World Banki},; than any of the directors, whose names are quite unknown De to the general public. The presidency of the Bank sounds a more important job than it is; very little real power: iy is attached to it. When you have been in charge of thes}. biggest market in the world, spending the greater part of! ® the whole U.S. budget annually, any other position would |} be a comedown, but heading up the World Bank is a ludicrous anticlimax. “Tei Equally ludicrous is the “official” version of McNa=. ie mara’s move—that he and the President are deeply at i ) h wl ¥ Q a } a). Tato y { tached each .to the other, bound by mutual loyalty a is beyond measure. Lyndon Baines Johnson is more aware: of the implications of McNamara’s resignation, just at thig time, than any man living. Either the Secretary of De- fense wanted out and used the World Bank offer as a : discreet substitute for a formal resignation, or the?) President wanted to be rid of him, possibly to avoid? ‘ some kind of ultimatum from the Joint Chiefs which} could be deeply embarrassing in an election year, and} simply used the Bank offer as a convenient subterfuge. (Incidentally, did Mr. George Woods just happen to) think of McNamara as his successor, or did someone>}: prompt him to make the offer?] The Alphonse-Gaston act, . staged so belatedly, underscores the phoniness of the »} “official” explanation. Even at face value, the statements || : of the President and Mr. McNamara make no sense. There » was no urgency about the Bank job and even if Mr. | McNamara honestly felt that a “fresh” person might be» needed at the Pentagon, he was, so he says, quite willing : nm to stay on. Both men know vividly how difficult it will be *}}, to initiate a new person into the responsibilities which |}, attach to the largest managerial operation in the world. - ti A shift of this kind is not made in an election year with- -} a out a reason more persuasive than mutual affection. 5 hy The political departure is the climax of political dif-- R ferences; that also all the world can see. The President! §; was acting as the balance wheel between the Secretary | hy of Defense and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, but in recent fj months—perhaps for as long as the past year—he has | ceased to balance. McNamara lost one battle after another: over the bombing targets in the North, over the “thin” - ABM defense system, over the number of troops to be: committed, and probably over further escalations still hi Wt THE NATION/ December 11, 1 967 lanning stage. In several recent instances it was ar that the decisions he publicly defended had been ached by processes contrary to his own reasoning. In ; ort, he had ceased to function as Secretary of Defense; nly the title was still his. He must have been aggrieved the President’s bland statement that the Joint Chiefs puld always come to him directly without going through Secretary, ‘but it was a statement of the way things had come to be. |) McNamara was treated shabbily by Johnson, who all cut anyone’s throat when it suits his purpose, but it ‘hard to stir up sympathy for McNamara on that account. = should have resigned and stated his reasons. That this § almost unthinkable is a commentary on the state of merican politics. If McNamara could not override the OO against resignation on grounds of principle, who an? Such resignations are vital from the standpoint of 2 informed, functioning democracy. Charles Frankel lad just stepped down from his position in the State Jepartment when the McNamara storm broke. He also efrained from stating his reasons, although it was widely reported that he did not approve of Vietnamese war jolicy. All this respect for teamwork is very convenient W fora headstrong President, but it bodes ill for the country. 'To speak of “civilian control” of the military in the Pcontext of what the Pentagon has become in the last even years is quite misleading; most of the “civilians” lare more military than the men in uniform. Under Mc- Namara, the Department of Defense has become the top )Management agency for American industry. It is a much more efficient, powerful and dangerous agency than it was before Mr. McNamara brought order and system into it iby the application of modern management methods. }Against this background, the fact that he was a restrain- jing influence on the Joint Chiefs seems irrelevant; he has bturned over to them—and to his successor, and to the | President—a more terrifying mechanism than the one he jinherited. The military sit firmly in the seats of power. }McNamara’s successor, even if he should be inclined to | try to lessen their importance, will remember McNamara’s ifate. He will be an adviser within the department rather | than its boss. ; It is possible that McNamara decided to leave because | yet another defeat for his policy of moderate aggression— bhalfway between doves and hawks—was in prospect. ee of the Eisenhower-Bradley call for a tentative invasion of North Vietnam may be accidental, but it is ely a harbinger of further escalation. Not much is left to the hawks but chastising the Cambodians and con- Erronting the North Vietnamese army on its own soil. A -scale invasion is likely to follow the “end-run” advo- cated by Eisenhower and Bradley. It suits both the Re- Publican and Johnsonian purposes. If it succeeds, the R me Publican hawks can claim the move as their own, since ) it was advocated by the head of the party and seconded by his chief lieutenant in World War II. For his part, i the President is probably in a mood to resort to desperate /measures. When he plunged into a full-scale Asian war, | violating his 1964 campaign promises, he was taking a | gamble, In the wake of the first gamble he was forced into | ie ) others. Now, with 1968 upon him and McNamara out, the vay is open for the biggest gamble of all. THE NATION/December 11, 1967 | IN THIS ISSUE December 11, 1967 EDITORIALS 610 ARTICLES 614 A Congessman Speaks to the President: “T Am Tired of Your Gimmicks” Rep. George E. Brown, Jr. 617 After the Mobilization: The Goals of Dissent Lawrence Grauman, Jr. 621 Free Press & Fancy Packages A. QO. Mowbray The Minority on the Border 624 Cabinet Meeting in El Paso Philip Darraugh Ortego 627 Cesar Chavez’s Biggest Battle Doug Adair BOOKS & THE ARTS 629 The Case of the Private “I” Frank J. Donner 633 The Ultimate Joke David Cort 634 Between Effort and Effect Robert G. Hazo 634 A Sound from the Earth (poem) William Stafford 636 Theatre Harold Clurman 637 San Francisco Mime Robert Hatch 638 Television John Horn 639 Crossword Puzzle Publisher JAMES J. STORROW JR. Editor CAREY McWILLIAMS Frank W. Lewis Associate Publisher GIFFORD PHILLIPS Associate Editor PHIL KERBY Executive Editor Literary Editor ROBERT HATCH HELEN YGLESIAS Copy Editor, MARION HESS; Poetry Editor, MICHAEL GOLD- MAN; Theatre, HAROLD CLURMAN; Art, MAX KOZLOFF; Music, BENJAMIN BORETZ; Science, CARL DREHER; Ad- vertising Manager, MARY SIMON. Washington, ROBERT G. SHERRILL; Paris, ALEXANDER WERTH; London, RAYMOND WILLIAMS; Bonn, C.. AMERY; Canberra, C. P. FITZGERALD; United Nations, ANNE TUCKERMAN. The Nation is published weekly (except biweekly in July and August) by the Nation Magazine Company and copyright 1967 in the U.S.A. by the Nation Associates, Inc., 383 Sixth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10014, Tel.: CH 2-8400. West Coast office: 1256 Westwood Boulevard, Los ’ Angeles, Calif. 90024. Tel: GR 4-2588. Second class postage paid at New York, N. Y. and at additional mailing office. Subscription Price: One year, $10; two years, $18. Foreign and Canadian postage: $1 extra per year. Change of Address: It is essential that subseribers ordering a change of address give four weeks’ notice and. provide their old as well as their new address. Please give Zip Code numbers for both addresses. Information to Libraries: The Nation is indexed in Readers Guide to Periodical Literature, Book Review Digest, Book Review Index and the Public Affairs Information Service, NATION *" Combined with FRONTIER The Senator’s Dilemma Sen, Robert Kennedy has lately been trying—not too eagerly—to come to grips with the issues raised by the Vietnamese trauma. With Sen. Eugene McCarthy con- - fronting the President, Mr. Kennedy could hardly do otherwise. In his latest presentation—on Face the Nation—the Senator’s tactics and his interpretation of recent history were faulty. As to the latter, Mr. Kennedy makes much of the argument that the President, in his San Antonio speech, eroded our “moral position” on the war, and departed from the principles defined by President Ken- nedy. The theory is that up to that time our position had been predicated on our helping the South Vietnamese defend themselves against aggression from the North. This won’t wash, for several reasons. On more than one occasion, while he was President, General Eisenhower made it perfectly clear that we were in Vietnam from considerations of national interest—not merely to contain China but to maintain access to the markets and raw materials of Southeast Asia, for Japan as well as for ourselves. We wanted this because we were bent on keep- ing Japan in our camp and out of China's. This pro- duces the odd spectacle of Japan’s securing, with our connivance and under our protection, the very advantage it fought for unsuccessfully in World War II. Johnson let the cat only half out of the bag at San Antonio; he placed the stress on “national security” and said almost nothing about national “‘interests” in a broader sense. If what the Senator means is that John- son decided to be a bit franker, that is one thing, but he did not change the basis of the American position, with which Senator Kennedy is thoroughly familiar. We know on General Gavin’s authority that China has al- ways been the key factor, at least from 1954 on. Presi- dent Johnson is responsible for the military escalation, but he did not set the policy; he has merely continued the Truman-Eisenhower-Kennedy policy. As to the Senator’s tactics, they are invalidated by the awkward fact that Sen. Eugene McCarthy has taken up the open opposition to Johnson which should properly devolve on Kennedy himself. Kennedy excuses himself on the ground that he would be accused of carrying on a Kennedy-Johnson vendetta, and of seeking the Presi- dency, if he were to offer a direct challenge to Johnson. He is pained by the thought that the public will not con- sider his criticism of Vietnamese policy on its merits. But the evasion is transparent. The whole country knows he wants to be President, nor is there anything wrong with that ambition. His real reason for not challenging the President directly, and for remaining his nominal supporter, is that he probably feels the Republicans will win in 68. Therefore, if he were to get into the fight now, he could be accused later of splitting the Demo- cratic Party and contributing to the defeat. Again his reasoning is faulty. The Democratic Party could hardly be split more sharply that it is at the moment. Look at the Senate; look at the state organizations. Not only is the party split but most Democrats have no desire to run in harness with Johnson. If he is nominated, he may drag down some who might otherwise succeed, 612 upon to come up with a realli” alterantiee policys | only the Democrats can or might. But if this is t and if the Senator feels that he is not the best candidat to challenge Johnson, then, but his own logic, he shoul L i actively support Senator McCarthy. After all, the GOP}) will be of little avail for another year, during whick time crucial decisions may be made by the harried John son, spurred on by a military that is now more than ever, in a position to exert a decisive influence on policy. strong counterpressure from within the Democratic Party itself would reduce the imminent danger of recklessness. Kennedy encourages McCarthy—he likes the idea of)) a meaningful dialogue on the war within the Democrati¢} Party—but he supports Johnson and Humphrey. Ye my he claims to be taking a moral position. Important as t war is, even more is at stake. If Kennedy is distressed that young people are losing confidence in politics and)} a taking to the streets to protest, why does he not do what) he can to restore their confidence by taking an unequivo=)}, cal stand himself? He would be clearly the strongest: contender. However, if he does not want that role for} himself then his active support would greatly improve.) Senator McCarthy’s chances. Or does he wish us to sus=} pect that he will stay in a neutral corner until McCarthy) scores significant victories in the primaries and disables) the Johnson machine, whereupon Kennedy will move in with his own machine and fight for the nomination?) in Senator Kennedy may not like it, but events have put him on the spot. If he does not wish to discredit himself, he must suit the action to the word, and that soon. q The Lion Is Not Dead credit registered a marked increase the last few weeksi at the United Nations, where British diplomacy has madé&} an impressive comeback. ] It was the British representative, Lord Caradon, who} after months of wrangling submitted the resolution on thes) Middle East which was adopted unanimously by the | Security Council. The resolution finally led to the appoint- 1 ment of a UN special representative for the Middle East, |) which opens a new, if difficult, phase in the search fol i stability in the area. While Lord Caradon’s initiative did} not bring forward really new ideas—formulas and] counter-formulas on “principles” to achieve a just peace} had been exchanged ad nauseam—he found just the right} relationship between duties and obligations of the parties.) Above all, he observed the essential rule for any success- ful diplomatic deal: proper timing. In a larger sense, the British proposal reflected the renewal of ties between! Cairo and London, ably negotiated by Sir Harold Beeley, | and a modest but not insignificant resumption of British) influence in the Middle East, where United States support for Israel has resulted in a temporary American lockout. } The timing also coincided with Russia’s apparent disen- chantment with the unrealistic claims of the Arab cause. Renewed respect for Britain showed itself when the} UN intervened in another storm center—Cyprus. While} suggestions were made for the departure of swollen Greek \ dl THE NATION/ December 11, 1967) n i -_ a | ms | anes a ' rkish contingents from the island, no word was d (even from the Soviet Union) against the British ase in Cyprus. The United Nations peace force in Syprus, of which British troops form the largest contin- gent, was commended as the best instrument for the yreservation of order. _ Another annual General Assembly attack on Britain Over the question of Aden faded away as London realisti- cally advanced the date of independence for the South Arabian Federation, and British negotiators worked against the clock to hammer out an agreement between tival Arab factions in the territory, in order to transfer power to them on November 30. _ These developments have undoubtedly regained some | prestige for Britain in the international community on the East River and offset the systematic battering it has en- “dured for years because of its colonial policies in Africa and Asia. ANNE TUCKERMAN ‘How To Prepare For College’ To General Westmoreland, the busiest press agent the ‘U.S. Army has ever produced, the battles at Dakto } marked “the beginning of a great defeat for the enemy.” For many of the young men of the Second Battalion of 'the 173rd Airborne, it meant only nights of terror and _ agony, brought to an end by death. “Everybody was try- _ing to get underground,” a survivor related. “Every time _ you tried to dig, you put your shovel in somebody. The | dead guys were everywhere.” And amid the litter of the _ battlefield, someone found a tattered paperback copy of | How To Prepare for College. | Now, less than a week after Hill 875 was taken, doubts are emerging and questions are being asked. Hedrick Smith reports from Washington in the November 29 _ New York Times that American officials acknowledge } that North Vietnam, as well as the “allied forces,” i achieved important gains in the Dakto fighting. As usual, with the aid of air power—lacking which American. forces i could literally be driven out of Vietnam—North Vietnam- ese and Vietcong casualties were several times those of i@ the American and such South Vietnamese forces as took -part in the fighting. In return, American troops had to be diverted from the pacification program in central Viet- nam, where for the time being the enemy has the in- _ itiative. The cost on the “allied” side is some 300 Ameri- | cans killed and 1,000 wounded, plus about 200 South | Vietnamese casualties. “Last spring,” one Washington official is quoted as Saying, “we were freewheeling. We were deciding where and when to fight, we were taking the initiative with oper- Next Week MILITARISM, MILITANCY And The STUDENTS A special issue devoted to the clash between au- thority and conscience now inflaming the nation’s campuses, and to an evaluation of the ideology and Strategy of the insurgent students. Books & The Arts will be devoted to customary year-end roundups. ations like Cedar Falls and Junction City. Now, we are reacting to their initiative and they are forcing us to shift our forces around.” But we have Hill 875, and the Ameri- can boy who wanted to go to college is probably among our 300 dead. The pessimism in Washington, below the level of the bestarred and ambassadorial press agents, is an echo of the feeling in the combat areas. Peter R. Kann, the 1 Street Journal’s man at Dakto, quotes a weary U.S. fantry officer standing on the 875 summit: “If this were conventional warfare,” the officer said, “this hill would have strategic value. It commands that valley. . . . [But] it isn’t conventional warfare. So that valley doesn’t have any strategic value. Neither does the hill.” At the Marne and at Verdun, in World War I, Ger- mans and Frenchmen engaged in mutual slaughter on equal terms, air power not having reached the stage where it could be used for ground support. The carnage was appalling and some French infantry units mutinied. The two sides squandered their lives for la patrie and das Vaterland, with a show, at least, of plausibility, since the two countries were contiguous, In the Vietnamese War Americans are dying far from home, with the Pa- cific Ocean and the U.S. Navy between home and battle- ground, At Dakto they fought valiantly and all honor is due to both the living and the dead, but it is hard to think of a war in which lives have been sacrificed more need- lessly. For the soldiers one can feel only compassion; the guilt of those who send them on their futile missions stains our history. Alas, Poor Nixon Citizens who have feared that their electoral duties might be perplexed in 1968 by the appearance of a “new Nixon” in the sweepstakes may be at least partly re- assured. Judging from his one-hour trial run on N.E.T. on the evening of November 27, the model has been somewhat improved as to body styling but the basic chassis remains the same. The passing years have incised lines of maturity into Mr. Nixon’s face, giving the TV engineers planes and shadows of statesmanship to illuminate. His performance is also much smoother, with enough reserve power so that he does not strain on the tough questions. The suggestion that politics is the art of back scratching does not cause him to shift into the role of outraged choir boy; rather he elevates the practice to an ethical principle (idealism, Mr. Nixon notes, is an aberration of youth, causing it to leap into the maelstrom of principle instead of seeking the pools of consensus). He has learned to laugh with frank teeth, and without seeming to discover himself the victim of a practical joke. But the defect that has plagued Mr. Nixon in all his frustrated races to glory has not been corrected: he still cannot look you in the eye without giving the impression that he is about to produce a bottle of headache tablets in his right hand. Ask him about Vietnam, and a tape recorder immediately seems to take over from the man on camera. The fault merely is not in the simplistic rationalizations of the views, but that the views have so ~ obviously been memorized and practiced before a mirror. 613 Mr. Nixon has always seen public service as a form of salesmanship; he is hardly alone in this, but it is his mis- fortune that he is a poor salesman. He inevitably, and fatally, betrays the fact that he is speaking not from conviction but from the pages of a promotion kit. Alas, poor Nixon—he must use television, and television will destroy him. John Wayne’s Green Beret Thus far, Hollywood producers have made no pictures about the war in Vietnam because they feel that the unpopular war is box-office poison. Not so John Wayne; the old cowboy star is now filming The Green Berets, Robin Moore’s nonfiction novel about the “Special Forces.” Judging from a well-documented story in a recent issue of Variety, Moore’s “hard-headed ex- pose of Special Forces’ unorthodox and often ‘unprinci- pled’ methods . . . has become a big action outdoor ad- venture picture, as producer Mike Wayne puts it”’—and blatant hawk propaganda for the Vietnamese War. In transforming the novel into a screenplay, the two Waynes have made a number of interesting changes. For example, according to Variety, “the Berets are no longer seen violating international agreements; condoning tor- ture; employing bandits, delinquents, opium smugglers or prostitutes. None of them now demonstrates a cynical unconcern for the lives of his allies, nor do they view the Vietnamese strike forces as ‘lousy little dirty bugouts,’ just as likely as not to be members of the Viet Cong.” “In the book .. . a Special Forces camp. . . is com- manded by a Finnish-born former member of the Nazi army who has surrounded himself with an ‘all-Anglo Saxon’ team. In the film, it is Captain Kirby (John Wayne) in command, and his associates are a varied lot, with such names as Muldoon, Kowalski and Doc (a Negro).” “While Viet Cong brutality is played up, none of the book’s many descriptions of South Vietnamese brutality A CONGRESSMAN SPEAKS TO THE PRESIDENT ‘I AM TIRED OF YOUR GIMMICKS’ Rep. GEORGE E. BROWN, Jr. Congressman Brown, Democrat from Los Angeles County, has been at various times a graduate fellow of the Fund for Adult Education, and vice president of the Monarch Savings and Loan Association. He is a member of the AFL-CIO International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers and of the Wider Quaker Fellowship. Today we witness the continued escalation of the mili- tary action in Asia—matched of course by the other side. Similarly we see an escalation of debate about the war here in the United States, with more and more indi- cation that some efforts are being made to use this period as one of constructive dialogue on the fundamental structure of American foreign policy, There is even 614 over-night.’ ” hy The film is made with the cooperation of the Depart- §) ment of Defense, which supplies the war equipment used. by the actors, and in turn “has been working with the 4 producers on script revisions for close to a year”’—al- ff, though John Wayne’s long proclivity for right-wing causes J would make it seem doubtful that Defense had‘ to ask | for much rewriting. What is most appalling is Mike Wayne’s claim that “we're not making a political picture; we’re making a } picture about a bunch of right guys. . . . It’s cowboys and J .. In a motion picture you cannot confuse the audience. The Americans are the good guys and the Viet § . . Maybe we shouldn’t have > destroyed all those Indians, but when you’re making a § Indians . . Cong are the bad guys. . picture, the Indians are the bad guys.” Variety asked Wayne “what he would have done if | he’d been making a picture about the Indians at the time they were being killed. Wouldn’t he have worried about | the effect on his audience, who’d have ended up thinking | of them as ‘bad guys’ and might have gone out and shot | some more of them? What was his view on the propriety jf of making a big ‘entertainment’ about a war in which many men on both sides were still dying? His answer was: ‘I can’t help wars. I’m not making this picture for any political reason or anything. ’m making a motion picture that will make money’.” Since the Waynes declare themselves to be motivated only by nonpolitical greed, it would be futile to denounce their Minute Man perversion of the facts. If the public will stay away from their glorification of this most odious op- eration of a wholly odious war, the Waynes will suffer in their pocketbooks—the only place where they can be | really hurt. Meanwhile, congratulations to Variety for breaking the story. some faint sign that the American two-party system may rise to the challenge and present to the electorate a reasoned choice of policies in next year’s election, | rather than an elaborate but meaningless discourse of platitudes. What follows here is my contribution to the debate and dialogue on the present situation. Rumors are now current that the President, having treated the hawks to a period of escalation which enlarged target lists in North Vietnam and increased troop levels in South Vietnam, may be about to treat the doves to a period of intensified diplomatic activity coupled with a bombing pause, thus maintaining his posture as a moderate pursuing the course of consensus. As one dove in good standing, I wish to say to the | _ THE NATION/ December 11, 1967 i” (ae ah 7) agi < : Mr. President, spare yourself the trouble. Do t do it. You have treated the citizens of this country id of the world at large to this type of activity before. will no longer have on them the effect you desire; it ty have the reverse effect, decreasing at even faster ice your credibility and popular standing in the polls— ticularly if it is followed by renewed escalation, as is been the case previously. The North Vietnamese and the National Liberation ‘ont have made clear that they will not respond to a Tribune, London B Rep. George E. Brown, Jr. > (a be A bombing pause. They would prefer that we continue the bombing. It is hurting us more than it is them. - I would like to say to you, Mr, President—and to your colleague, Secretary Rusk—gentlemen, I am tired of your gimmicks. Until you are ready to face reality and take the steps which you know and I know are Necessary to get a political settlement in Vietnam, spare Me pious incantations about “unconditional negotiations” and “self-determination” for Vietnam. | You know and I know that your course today is | aimed at perpetuating the present government in Saigon, with no concessions to the National Liberation Front in ) terms of free participation in the process of government. | You know that this amounts to calling for unconditional | surrender, since participation in the government is what | the .NLF is fighting for. Therefore, you are doomed to | continue this war until you achieve “unconditional sur- | render,” or are yourself defeated. I believe that this | f i country would be better served if you would explain frankly that this is your goal, and why. THE NATION/December 11, 1967 ; > f al Few people in this country today believe that anything we could do in an Asian peasant country of 15 million is worth a down payment approaching $100 billion (1 do not speak now of the cost in lives on both sides), . with a long-term contract that may cost several times that. For that amount of money we could help India, which represents 90 per cent of the people living under. a democratic system on the Asian mainland (and nearly half of those living under democratic systems in the entire world), make itself into a model for Asian democ- racy. That would change the course of history. We get nothing for our investment in South Vietnam except an indefinite future of trouble. In terms of serving the future of democratic governments in Asia, no worse misapplica- tion of resources could be imagined. So what are your reasons, Mr. President, for seeking “unconditional surrender” in South Vietnam? Let the Congress and the American people know, so that we may debate and decide them on their merit, rather than engage in a futile and frustrating exercise over ambiguous or meaningless phrases. Much of the reason for your insistence on “victory” and “unconditional surrender” must come from a feeling that Vietnam is part of the “cold war” against communism, a war this country has been waging without halt since 1945. This fixation on the “cold war” led us to install Syngman Rhee as the head of an unpopular Korean Government, and refuse participation in that government to any “left-wing” forces. This decision, made in 1946, precipitated the Korean War in 1950, has left a divided Korea as a chronic and dangerous sore on the Asian mainland, and has cost us well over $100 billion and several hundred thousand casualties. Nearly eighteen years later we are still paying exorbitant amounts of our taxpayers’ dollars each year and keeping 50,000 USS. troops in Korea to prove that we won something. The tragic aspect of all this is that in Korea we were reacting to Russian communism, spending our resources. without heed to prevent the Kremlin from having a major influence on a united country, and today we are eagerly seeking ways to extend the hand of friendship to Russia. And Russia is finding that its own excessively zealous efforts to maintain by military force Communist govern- ments on its own borders was perhaps a fruitless expendi- — ture of resources, as more and more of these governments seek to go their own nationalist ways. We continued the cold war by deciding to support Chiang Kai-shek on Formosa, after first deciding not to intervene in an obviously hopeless Chinese situation, To- day a new generation of Americans has almost forgotten that Formosa is a part of China, and many even feel that we are defending another gallant free nation there. instead of interfering, as is the case, in an unfinished civil war. The basic policy and decisions we are defending today in South Vietnam are the policy and decisions made in 1954 by Dulles to sabotage the Geneva Agreements and to create another point of confrontation with revolution- ary communism on the Asian mainland. The basic question, Mr. President, is not South Viet- nam but the policy underlying South Vietnam. Are we 615 today going to maintain the course of the cold war, per- «-- compounding it. What will prevent revolatoigny violer 1 haps attempting to shift its focus from Russia to China, or are we going to seek a more promising road to peace and a modicum of freedom in the world? Is there a more promising road? A person who urges that we face honestly the facts of the cold war, and weigh and examine its value in achieving peace, economic progress and political freedom, always faces the danger that he will be accused of favoring communism. I am convinced that our almost blind and automatic dedica- tion to the cold war and its continued military, diplomatic and other confrontations, not only with communism but with all types of revolutionary movement around the world, is furthering communism. It is also driving us inexorably toward another world war—this time with China—and is depriving two-thirds of the human race of any real chance to solve the economic problems that confront them. This is tragedy on a scale hitherto un- known to mankind. It is tragedy which can be averted, but only if we act now. There will be no next generation to correct our failures. The cold war is at its center an ideological _ Struggle. On our side we see it as a confrontation between our system of political and economic freedom and the Communist system of political and economic tyranny. The Communist side, using a different set of glasses, sees the goal of political and economic power for the masses through the overthrow of a system dominated by an all-powerful capitalist class. The views of neither side can survive close scrutiny by objective observers, yet the struggle has developed into one having many aspects of a holy war, using all the symbols which generate emotional commitment without rational analysis. Why is the cold war not inhibiting communism? Com- munism is the response of a desperate people to intoler- able economic, social and political conditions. It promises the destruction of the rich and the rapid progress of the poor. In a world that is predominantly poor and making little progress, its promises are seductive. The cold war consumes per year resources worth $200 billion. By rough calculation, the total income of the poorest two-thirds of mankind is also $200 billion per year. The money spent on the cold war prevents any solution to their problems. The present rate of economic development of the poor countries would, under the most optimistic conditions, double their per capita incomes every thirty years or so, or about every two generations in these countries where life is short. In five generations, they might aspire to per capita incomes of $200 or $300 per year instead of their present $50 or $100 per year. The prospect is so hopeless that any call for revolutionary violence is met with enthusiasm by the masses. I believe that most Americans would react with the same revolu- tionary violence if confronted by the same problems. The violence in the ghettos is to some degree so motivated. Under these circumstances, any victories we win in the poor countries of the world are meaningless. For a fleeting moment and at untold cost we hold back the flood, but the pressure will continue to increase until it is over- whelming. We are not responding to the problem; we are 616 \ One thing only. Hope based on progress. The poor countries of the world require, for a hope sufficient to inspire them, a rate of economic de-~ ' velopment that shows meaningful progress in each gen- eration. Probably this means a rate of increase in GNP per capita of 8 to 10 per cent per year instead of 2 to 3 per cent. If this were translated into money, it would — mean probably an infusion, in total, of an additional $10 billion per year into their economic life, or 5 per cent of what the cold war costs the people of the world. Of course, more than money is required. The other — things include an end to wars and the threat of war, and dedication by the poor nations themselves to solving — their own long-standing social and political problems. The There are events in history for which acquiescence is complicity. Vietnam is such an event. Many in America are beginning to realize that. Many are beginning to see that the time for quiet counsel has given way to a new demand: the demand for open opposition and forthright dissent... . Vietnam is our nightmare. And it is not just an Amer- ican problem. It is the great problem of the West. . So I have come tonight not so much as an American Congressman, but rather as a member of the Parlia- ment of the West. Those of us in America who seek to end this war are beginning to feel signs of hope in public opinion if not public policy. We are building a momentum which, if sustained, can ultimately achieve its goals. But that momentum must be replenished a ves with energy by events in America, in Vietnam, in the ‘of United Nations, in the Vatican and the other great Tne churches of the world, in the Communist nations, and 1a in all the great democracies whose commitment to peace and skill in democracy are beyond dispute. And oh it is in this spirit that I have come to address you. kn George E. Brown, Jr., speaking to the annual Tribune be rally at the British Labour Party Conference ; 5 greatest problem, that of population control, must be~ solved by their own efforts. Only then can they begin to solve the next most important problem of an adequate 4 food supply. bi Although the amount of money required to provide ET ! in hope of progress to the poor nations is ridiculously _ i small when measured against the demands of the cold © bi war, the pressures for even more cold-war expenditures | by the rich nations, fueled by the emotional fervor of ] fi ideological commitment, and backed by fantastically pow- ba erful industrial-military institutions, is immeasurably — i, greater than the pressures seeking a solution to the real he problems of humanity. Yet the pressures of revolutionary — Th communism cannot otherwise be met. | : This condition must be changed. It can be changed | i only if the dialogue of Vietnam can be translated into § the dialogue of human progress. So I say to you, Mr. President, and to Secretary Rusk, \ let us be done with trivialities and subterfuges. Let us — make it clear that what is at stake is an effort to stem a | Sar de i} Ton pe al? SE vast revolutionary tide rising in the poor nations of the — earth. Let us debate whether that tide can be stemmed THE NATION/December 11, 1967 ; $100 billion in Korea, $100 billion in South Vietnam, # further hundreds of billions to protect other dic- t tatorships in “free” countries around the world. Or would )it be cheaper in human iife and dollars to spend $5 | billion or $10 billion per year in a real effort to achieve some economic progress? Instead of a CIA that haunts the undergrounds of the paird World, perhaps a similar number of dedicated scholars, teachers and technicians honestly seeking to AFTER THE MOBILIZATION | | LAWRENCE GRAUMAN, Jr. im) Mr. Grauman, who teaches literature at Vassar College, is | completing a book on American writers and political in- _ vestigation. ie if the most recent Washington anti-war demonstration can ! be said to have demonstrated anything, it was that the peace movement has very little clearer idea of its purposes and possibilities than the Administration has of its foreign | policy. The nation, Sen. Albert Gore said recently, “should be willing to accept less than what is and has been our real objective in Southeast Asia in return for a cessation of the conflict.” Partisans of the Vietnam protest move- | ment know very well that neither Mr. Gore nor anyone else in Washington has said much about what that “real objective” is or ought to be. What they do not seem to _ know very well are their own real objectives, up to or beyond the obvious imperative of ending the war. Now that the veterans of the October Mobilization are settling into nostalgic recollection of their finest hours ‘at the Pentagon, now that the Administration has counter- attacked with new bombing in North Vietnam and the same Hubert Humphrey everywhere, and now that Presi- dent Johnson has shrugged off the “restraining” counsel of Secretary McNamara, those of us who intend to con- tinue to oppose American foreign policy had better begin | to ask ourselves: what are we trying to achieve, through ) what means and with what allies? | If the recent Mobilization is to be instructive, a few distinctions must be stressed. Press coverage was not ‘only as irresponsible as most demonstrators expected it # would be but has assumed greater strategic significance |, than its effects on past protests would have suggested. This factor includes the self-fulfilling effect of the mass ‘Media upon the demonstrators themselves, as well as a consequent severe overreaction by much of the liberal | and radical press. Second, while only a few thousand | young zealots engaged in acts of violent provocation— | these out of a total of more than 70,000 protesters who | gathered peacefully at the Lincoln Memorial—they have | had an increasingly disproportionate influence on the | 1 | / | | | | | anti-war movement, in terms both of how it is viewed by the general public and how it is beginning to view its THE ‘NATION/December 11, 1967 help those people would accomplish our goals better—in- - cluding our goal of getting honest information about the conditions of that world. Only if we meet this problem squarely can the United States play a significant role in the world today. Only by facing and resolving it can we cure our schizophrenia of national purpose. The de- bate on Vietnam can help to achieve this, but only if you, Mr. President, will take the lead by being honest with the American people as to why we are in Vietnam. HE GOALS OF DISSENT own role in the conduct of democratic politics. More- over, the older leadership of organized anti-war protest (it is becoming difficult to call it a “peace movement”) must be seen as ambiguous and at present inadequate to the complexities of political change. Finally, the October Mobilization should be analyzed with regard to the dif- ferent forms of opposition manifested during the week- end, at least one stratagem—that of “conscientious resist- ance”—affording an instructive contrast to the uncivil disobedience of the Pentagon siege. Dr. Benjamin Spock, that most unpolitical of activists, indicated what the strategic value of the Washington Mobilization might have been when he said at the Lin- coln Memorial: “We, the protesters, are the ones who may help to save our country if we can persuade enough of our fellow citizens to think and vote as we do.” (We can be forgiven for wincing when he said, the following day on a C.B:S. interview, that the violence of the Penta- gon demonstration hadn’t damaged the cause of the anti- war movement: “I didn’t find it distasteful myself; and I would imagine that the majority of American people would not find it distasteful.”)) But by the time Dr. Spock had spoken to the assembled thousands, the responses of the country at large and of much of his immediate audience had been determined by a pervasive anticipa- tion of disorder perniciously conveyed in the pre-march coverage of The Washington Post, the Evening Star, the wire services, the national television networks and most local radio stations. Of course, it would be naive to think that press cover- age of protest demonstrations would be sympathetic, or even responsible, if only excessive behavior were some- how suppressed. (After the April Mobilization in New York, Time dismissed it as a rabble of hippies and dupes; after the Washington march, Time characterized the April event as a model of responsible dissent. You can’t please Time—or The New York Times, for that matter.) And organizers of protest demonstrations certainly can- not afford to consider the approval of the press as a primary determinant of their commitments. But why must so many radicals treat this as an either/or situation? The fact remains that the greater part of the anti-war move- ment still believes in democratic politics—specifically, 617 i) qi young seem to them in many ways preferable to those of a sober, decent, worthy man like, for example, Mike Mans- field—who has betrayed his doubts about the war but voted consistently for every military appropriation. One can un- derstand and appreciate the style of the young when it emanates from a deeply rooted reaction to that kind of conventionality in places of authority; one can respect the | courage of young men who are willing to go to jail rather | than serve in Vietnam; but one need not conclude, there- , fore, that the style of the young—even the serious young —is any more likely to provide an effective political re- | sponse to the horrors of American foreign policy than is | the compromised “leadership” of Mike Mansfield. | Part of this trouble with style—and while we can talk confidently of only a few thousand young radicals, it should be recognized that they are generally, in matters of public | protest, the style-setters—is that militant youth now finds | itself trapped in a symbiotic relationship with the very | middle class it rejects. Dependent upon the middle-brow | press for their self-definition, student activists have too | often had to adopt a rigid anti-style with which to con- | front a “reactionary Establishment.” Consider, for ex- | ample, the curious spectacle in Washington: leaders of the ' Mobilization spent hours in earnest consultation with gov- : ernment officials in order to establish the boundaries they - could later violate, and to set up first-aid tents and “arrest | booths” at the Pentagon. (The arrest booths, which never L | L “THE NATION/December I1, 1967 ReaD TRE OS cs yi M Ay: : Vo £7 os AG exeetivek ea Cas bl 4 FEN \\y appeared, were to have served as central sources of advice to the demonstrators about the nature of the march permit and the legal consequences of violation. Lawyers pre- sumably would have been in attendance to facilitate effi- cient displays of noncooperation.) This symbiotic relation- ship expresses itself in other, more ominous ways. Writing of the Washington Mobilization, the editors of The New Republic observed that “it wasn’t as dignified or as spruce a demonstration as the one two years ago, when 35,000 people who gathered at the Washington Monu- ment had been carefully prepurged by SANE of all elements who might fail to counsel strict non-violence or ee CA ae Abu, Tribune (London): Ben Roth “Of Course We All Want Peace—And We're Ready To Fight For It” who might not look quite respectable. But it’s a very different, much bigger and more savage war, that’s now being more bitterly protested.” This kind of rationaliza- tion reveals the most dangerous effect of political sym- biosis: that since there are only two perspectives from which to view the conduct of American foreign policy (just as there are only two perspectives from which to view “the struggle for world domination”), and since these two perspectives are determined and altered in response to each other, then an escalation of savagery will inevitably elicit an increasing measure of counter- savagery. Given the present crisis in American politics, one cannot afford to disparage the strategy (or the absence of it) of the Vietnam protest movement without pro- posing what the military planners call “viable alter- natives.” At least one alternative has been suggested by the formation of a group called the Conscientious Resist- ance; how viable it is remains to be seen, though it has already afforded an instructive contrast to the mindless aggressions of the Pentagon siege. The Conscientious Re- sistance was recently organized by a number of writers and academic people—including William Sloan Coffin, Noam Chomsky and Dwight Macdonald—who intend to support the refusal of young men to serve in Vietnam by organizing the “conscientious core of America’s middle- class professional community” to expose itself to the 619 eH: ia legal consequences of aiding, abetting and counseling these men against conscription. By the Friday afternoon preceding the Mobilization, the conscientious core had grown to include Robert Lowell, Norman Mailer, Ashley Montagu, Seymour Melman, Marcus Raskin and more than 300 writers, students, clergymen and professors from most of the major colleges and universities in the East. Organizers of the Resistance had brought to Washington representatives of twenty-four local and regional groups around the country, and each of these young men had brought with him the draft cards that had been collected in his locality. Prior to marching to the Justice Depart- ment, the over-30 contingent of professional people all signed statements that committed them to a specific, public affirmation of support for draft resisters, and con- ceivably opened the way to their prosecution under Section 12 of the Selective Service Act. A simple and at times eloquent ceremony was held in front of the Justice De- partment, during which 1,000 draft cards were collected. Then a delegation composed of several students and several prominent professional men went inside to con- front one of Ramsey Clark’s assistant attorneys general. As expected, the federal attorneys refused to accept the draft cards; they also declined to press charges against the writers and scholars who had tried to engage them in a legal confrontation. The Resistance strategy has thus yielded several temporary conditions favorable to public dissent: It will be difficult for the Justice Department to pick off individual resisters in selective prosecutions without also taking to trial Professors Chomsky, Melman, Montagu and the rest of the conscientious core; it will be difficult for the Justice Department to prosecute several hundred of the most prominent writers and teachers in the country without arousing the latent resentment of colleagues, deans, students, publishers and much of the as yet unheard from middle-class community; and it will be difficult for the Justice Department to explain why it is not fulfilling its constitutional obligation to proceed against lawbreakers. (For the moment the Administration is claiming that these provisions of the Selective Service Act are under review in the federal courts.) In this way many militant young students joined with older people of various political persuasions in a carefully calculated expression of total noncooperation with the American war in Vietnam, a form of civil disobedience that is both morally relevant to tactical considerations and likely to be politically persuasive. Now that McNamara’s departure increases the possibil- ity of further escalation—including the immediate prospect of such horrors as the mining of Haiphong harbor—it appears that many more people will be considering civil disobedience than have ever considered it before; and so it becomes even more important that civil dis- obedience be considered clearly and in the terms whereby it might be justified. If large numbers of Americans are going to choose this mode of protest, they must justify their choice in moral and political, as well as emotional, terms—assessing its consequences for others (and for the 620 ap en! ; oat eG anti-war movement as a whole), as well as for selves. Since the obligation to act in accordance with law in- creases in direct proportion to the progress of democracy, » Americans must recognize the special character of civil” disobedience in this quasi-democratic society. (The United States is not a non-democratic country, no matter how monstrous our government may seem to us now; nor is itd a truly democratic country, as long as such gross im-— equalities of power exist among various cultural and — economic groups, and as long as there is no effective | popular participation in decisions made on foreign policy.) }/ In a democratic or even quasi-democratic society the con-— em= fyi fined character of civil disobedience is most appropriate i to its social environment. It requires that disobedience, } when it is finally determined upon, be of a calculated and limited character, that it be directed toward specific changes in social structure, public policy or law—though } these changes may be substantial ones—but not toward the total transformation of state or society. This commitment to self-restraint has been manifested in a number of ways, most notably in nonviolent be- | havior during the course of disobedient action, and in ff nonresistance to officers who enforce the law. There should be as close a connection as possible between the disobedient action and the object of protest. Tradition- | ally, limits have also been self-imposed by the deliber- ately public character of the action and by the public explanations offered in its defense—gestures which can cut two ways in a society where the press is available to diverse persuasions. [See “Law, Speech and Disobedience” by Carl Cohen, The Nation, March 28, 1966.] Although civil disobedience has been advocated and | justified by many different people in a number of social and historical situations—e.g., Thoreau, William Morris, | Kropotkin, the violators of the Fugitive Slave Law, Gandhi, civil rights workers—the only justification for it as a stratagem of the Vietnam protest movement would | be in terms of a democratic political campaign, as an expression of collective determination to persuade the citizenry of the rightness or wrongness of a particular | policy or law. Since democratic politics doesn’t operate by majority rule alone, since it is also responsive to the relative strengths of conviction, intensity, endurance and organization, a minority that is deeply committed to a particular interest frequently prevails—and frequently should—over an apathetic majority. When civil dis- obedience is a mode of expressing moral conviction or exceptional concern, it says, in effect: “You, the majority (or the constituted authority), you can have your way, but you had better consider carefully how badly you want it, because you are going to have to put me in jail to get it. . . .” Thus, for civil disobedience to be effective it must have an unambiguous political objective and must be limited by collective decisions as to how that objective may be best achieved. The essential question now confronting the confronters of war makers is whether or not they are prepared to set limits on the decisions and actions of their leaders and supporters. In terms of civil disobedience, however, this question subsumes a number of others: Are certain THE NATION/ December 11, 1967 | A i s ancieanindi i Sid B . ! n of an unjust and immoral war? Are they persuasive stics? Are they likely to legitimate lesser forms of DF position and so enhance the anti-war movement as a hole, or will they turn people from the movement’ and ; ereby contribute to the prosecution of the war? Assum- ig that one could determine the relations between dis- yedient citizens and all those others who oppose the ar Jess strenuously or more circumspectly, it might elop that the two groups could not coexist within a n le unified movement (not that they necessarily must), nc that the commitments of the smaller group would phave to be relinquished to the interests of building the a pest possible movement against the war. Although it is A. O. MOWBRAY Mr. Mowbray is the author of The Thumb on the Scale br The Supermarket Shell Game (J. B. Lippincott). Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one.—A. J. Liebling Although much lip service is paid in this country to the principle of an informed electorate, it seems clear that to unhealthy degree the electorate depends for its informa- (p tion upon those who have a vested interest in influencing | their judgments. _ Any proposed legislation that promises to benefit the consumer by limiting the freedom of action of a powerful segment of industry “is doomed unless it can attract wide- spread public support, but the process of developing this ‘support is often long and tedious. Typically, a rising tide of complaints culminates in Congressional hearings to air the abuses. Exposure of the problem in the hearings / serves the dual purpose of clarifying the need for legisla- I tion and broadcasting the issue to the people, through {| press reports and accompanying editorial comment. This g}) dialogue among the people, the press and the Congress creates the substance of public awareness upon which demand for legislation must rest. . The success of this democratic procedure is assured ny if the channels of communication are open. During | the recent five-year struggle to enact a truth in packaging law, the channels of communication were blocked, the consumer did not know what was happening, and the bill finally emerged as the Fair Packaging and Labeling A kct of 1966, a highly ineffective piece of legislation that promises little in the way of reform. The opening round of packaging hearings, in 1961, jade lively copy. Newspapers reported that Senate wit- ig had called the consumer a “sucker”; columnists lambasted the food manufacturers. Television screens owed Sen. Philip A. Hart (D., Mich.), sponsor of the packaging bill, holding up deceptive packages for all the HE NATION/ December 11, 1967 = bb ad J FREE PRESS & FANCY PACKAGES unlikely that such a determination could be made with — any precision, the immediate implications for the van- guard of guerrillas who led the charge at the Pentagon and in the streets of Oakland are fairly clear: if they wish to do more than create a tiny group of the heroic, the tested and the martyred, their style of work will not suffice, As Irving Howe has put it: If one wants to build a movement in which not everyone need give “the whole of their lives” [read “do their own thing’), then the suspicion and_ hostility such an outlook is bound to engender toward the some- what less active and somewhat less committed can only be damaging. For in effect, if not in intent, it is a Strategy of exclusion, leaving no place for anyone but the vanguard of the scarred. nation to see. But before the mass-circulation magazines could comment, the food manufacturers collected their wits and retaliated. Paul S. Willis, then president of Grocery Manufacturers of America, the trade association for the $80-billion-per-year food industry, summoned the publishers of sixteen national magazines to “discuss with them the facts of life covering advertising-media relationships.” As Mr. Willis later told it, “We suggested to the publishers that the day was here when their editorial department and business department might better understand their interdependency relationships as they affect the operating results of their company; and as their operations may affect the advertiser—their bread and butter.” Now, a persistent and dearly cherished tenet of the mass-circulation publications is that editorial policy is independent of advertising pressure. Here was a naked test of whether that separation was truth or myth. Mr. Willis “invited” the publishers “to consider publishing some favorable articles about the food industry instead of only singling out isolated cases of criticism.” He pointed out that “as the readers turn the pages and come across an interesting article, they will react more favorably to the advertisement and be more inclined to purchase the product.” Some months later, Mr. Willis seemed pleased with the results of his persuasion. “We can point with pride,” he said, “to some of the things which have happened since our visit.” He then enumerated recent articles in eight magazines that were favorable to the food industry. “The articles,” he pointed out, “will surely help to create a better understanding of the industry and a favorable public attitude toward -it.” Two of the magazines whose publishers had met with Willis had earlier commissioned writers to prepare articles on the Hart bill, Possibly as a result of the Willis interview, these articles were never printed. While gather- ing material for my book on truth in packaging and the fate of the Hart bill, I wrote to nine of the leading mass- 621. circulation magazines, asking them what they had pub- lished on the bill or on the problems that it dealt with. The replies indicated that, during the five years that the Hart bill languished in Congress, these magazines had told their readers nothing about this legislation that could have major implications for the prices paid in the super- market. A search of Readers’ Guide to Periodical Litera- ture bore this out. The January 26, 1965, issue of Look magazine con- tained an article titled “Let’s Keep Politics Out of the Pantry,” by Charles G. Mortimer, chairman of General Foods Corporation and one of the most implacable foes of truth in packaging. After charging that some vote- conscious politicians, through “headline-making innu- endoes” and “emotion-charged appeals,” were endanger- ing the “machinery of free competition” by an intrusion where government did not belong, Mr. Mortimer got down to cases: “By making all packages ‘look-alikes’ on the shelf,’ he wrote, “restrictive legislation would stifle innovation and put a halter on an indispensable form of competition: the freedom to bring out packages which are easy to open, easy to close, easy to handle, easy to store.” Mr. Mortimer warned his readers that “we are faced with the grim prospect of having Government officials tell the consumer what product she can buy and what kind of package she can buy it in.” This flagrant misrepresentation of his bill angered Senator Hart, who asked publisher Gardner Cowles for the opportunity to present his side of the case in the pages of Look. The publisher replied: “I will be inter- ested to see how much attention the general public pays to the subject in the next several months’—the implica- tion being that any decision to publish the Senator’s rebuttal must be founded on the sound editorial basis of high reader interest. Mr. Cowles’s estimate of reader interest was revealed by the fact that Look bought full- page advertisements in other magazines, including trade journals in the food industry, to trumpet its publication ae i CS LAW p aN oo We a Macpherson, Toronto Star of “this compelling article.” Senator Hart was never given the opportunity he requested. Esther Peterson, then special assistant to President’) Johnson for consumer affairs, also wrote to Look as a\}\ result of the Mortimer article, offering to prepare ai}, rebuttal. Robert Meskill, assistant managing editor, } replied: “We do not plan to hold a ‘debate’ on this» subject, but we appreciate your offering to engage ini} one.” | At about the time of Willis’ plain talk to the publishers, © Senator Hart had sent background material on his bill to} twenty-one magazines, hoping to stimulate articles or some editorial comment. These included twelve magazines in} the grocery field and nine general circulation magazines. }j No articles resulted. One editor replied, “I think the bill: is certainly needed but I doubt whether we can mention | it editorially.” Thus did the magazine publishers and editors knuckle fi under to the pressure from their advertisers. With the publishers brought to heel, Willis turned | his attention to the television industry, the occasion being }) a speech he delivered at the eighth annual meeting of the Television Bureau of Advertising, in the Starlight Roof ni of the Waldorf-Astoria, on November 16, 1962, less; than four months before the 1963 hearings on the Jy packaging bill were to open. z| In proud and loving detail, Willis told the television — men the story of his success with the magazine men, — continuing with: I wish I could say similar nice things about the relationship of our advertisers with television. Even though the networks receive about 65 per cent cf their — advertising revenue from GMA members, there is lots to be desired as it applies to our relationship with their — top management. We are not aware of any great amount of cooperation which television has extended to us in passing along interesting, favorable information to the public, information such as appeared in the magazine articles. The newspapers throughout the United States publish a great deal of information relating to food prices, food supplies, nutrition, and so on. In contrast with these favorable items, we have seen some television newscasts where they seemingly took great delight in bellowing out stories that were critical of this industry. Why should this be necessary, Willis asked, wheni# there were so many nice things that television could sa | about the food industry, its greatest source of advertising |} revenue? “There is plenty of interesting material available |} about this industry for radio/TV use, and broadcasting ;# such information should create a better public attitude, the advertising would be more effective, and the advertiser | would get more for his advertising dollar. It is something,” ’ he concluded, with all the subtlety of a pointed shotgun, _ “to think over.” | Apparently, the television men thought it over. During: } the hearings held the following year, the first hearings on)! the bill itself, truth in packaging was mentioned on only J": two television shows. Further, Senator Hart’s scheduled! appearances on several programs were canceled. “I was}. told the advertisers had objected,” the Senator explained. In short, during the five-year struggle to pass aiff THE NATION/ December J1, 19677 Pe”, » <7. =. . fo el x ASE ; ” ‘ , | the issues in the mass media of communication. Thus was probably true, as some opponents of the bill ed, that the clamor of the general public for passage e bill was notable by its absence. The voice of the d industry was strong and unequivocal; the voice of the -onsumer was weak and confused. The weakness and on usion stemmed from a lack of hard information on whi h to base a judgment. The people had not been told. et The people had not been told, for example, about packaging to price,” economically the most harmful of deceptive practices that infest the shelves of the rmarket. Packaging to price is the technique whereby food manfacturer, faced with rising costs, elects to rease the contents of his packages rather than to increase the price. This practice works to the housewife’s lisadvantage in two ways: _ First, because the decrease in contents is often accom- panied by a package redesign, the housewife is often unaware that any reduction in contents has occurred, and he price is increased without her knowledge. For ii@ example, a l-pound (16-ounce) box of breakfast cereal ) might be redesigned so that the box becomes higher, wider, and thinner, and contains only 14% ounces at the game price. In this way, the manufacturer manipulates a 10 per cent price rise that is undetected by all but the most wary shopper. Second, the net contents of packages are reduced to quantities that no longer have any rational relationship to our system of measurement. The simple pound and quart disappear from the shelves, to be replaced by packages containing such irrational quantities as 72 ounces, 2 pounds 5 ounces, | pint 14 ounces, and so on. The great advantage of this non-system, from the standpoint of the food manufacturer, is that the shopper finds it very difficult to compare the price per ounce, ) per pound, or per pint of different brands or, indeed, of ® different sizes of the same brand. ) In the bill that Senator Hart introduced in 1961, the Food and Drug Administration and the Federal Trade Commission would have been given the authority to W) issue regulations to standardize the net contents of those ) packages in which the packaging-to-price disease had ) resulted in chaos. As the law finally emerged from Congress five years later, the food industry is given the Opportunity to clean its own house on a voluntary basis, under the aegis of the Department of Commerce. Anyone reading the thousands of pages of testimony offered by Tepresentatives of the food industry and noting their unanimous, uncompromising, unremitting hostility to any packaging legislation would entertain small hope for the Success of the voluntary approach. _ The Fair Packaging and Labeling Act, totally rewritten to satisfy the objections of the powerful lobbyists for the food industry, was finally signed by President Johnson in November, 1966. In view of the poor performance of the press and the broadcasting industry during its pro- tracted passage through Congress, it may be of some interest to note the reception accorded my book on the bill, which was published the following October. I spent the last two wecks in October on a publicity THE NATION/December 11, 1967 om ie tour of Pittsburgh, Washington, New York, Philadelphia, Boston and Chicago. During those visits only two news- papers expressed any desire to talk with me about the book, and one of them canceled our appointment on the day of the interview. The other interview did take place, with the food editor for a big-city daily, who said, half jokingly, that her copy was not subject to anyone’s review, and therefore it was sure to make the first edition, but she could give no guarantee about subsequent editions. Of the six cities visited, reviews have appeared in newspapers in Boston, Washington and Philadelphia Jee (where I live). Newsday published a chapter of the book in its October 21 issue. Perhaps this limited notice in the press is all one could ask for a first book by an unknown author, even — though the message in the book impinges directly on the purse of every food shopper in the nation. This — reticence on the part of the press, however, was in sharp contrast to the uninhibited enthusiasm of radio and tele- vision producers. Much to my surprise, the producers of interview and “talk” shows, which seem to be proliferating in the broad- casting industry, unhesitatingly welcomed me at every stop on the tour. During the two weeks, I was invited to appear on twenty-two shows in the six cities. Time after time, in the lobbies of the broadcasting studios, I saw proud displays in glass-enclosed cases of the products of the sponsors, many of them food packages of the very kind I was condemning in my book. How, I asked the on producers, could they get away with it? The answer was always the same. “We couldn’t care less about that,” they said. “We thrive on controversy. That’s what makes our show a success.” ; As I walked into one studio, a frantic bit of last- minute scrambling was under way to rearrange some of — the segments that were to make up the half-hour program. I was told by the producer that someone had just noticed that there had been a commercial for a packaged food product just two minutes away from my slot in the pro- gram. Some readjustment had been ordered to insert a litle more time between our conflicting messages. “Theoretically, we’re completely independent of this kind of thing,” the producer said, “but in practice we must be a little careful.” I was totally disinclined to criticize his caution: it appeared to me commendable that I was there at all. As.more and more newspapers give up the ghost, and the power of the press becomes concentrated in fewer and fewer hands, it is heartening to find an increasing number of television and radio shows such as Contact in Boston, Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, the 7Zom Duggan Show and Kup’s Show in Chicago, Capital Tie Line and Panorama in Washington, Night Talk and the Murray Burnett Show in Philadelphia, and others. The producers of many of these shows are exhibiting a degree of imagination and courage that the newspapers might well emulate, to their increased good health. It appears that islands of civilization may be forming in the vast waste- land, and that the much maligned broadcasters may be our best hope for real communication in the future. 623 ay ore THE MINORITY ON THE BORDER > Cabinet Meeting in El Paso PHILIP DARRAUGH ORTEGO Mr. Ortego, who teaches English at New Mexico * State University, is completing a historical novel of the Mexican revolution. El Paso, Tex. To get to Juarez, Mexico, you must pass over the littered, tenement streets of El Paso. For most “Anglos” it is a transit zone through which they hurry in their cars, but for the Mexican-American who lives there, it is home; and for the immigrant or itinerant Mexican who crosses the border legally or illegally, it is a place of refuge in the flight to opportunity. There is a certain security about south E] Paso: the people there are all alike and all speak the same language. It produces a way of life; days give way to years, and aspirations are transferred to children. Hundreds of such areas exist along the 1,500-mile Mexican-American border from the Pacific Ocean to the Gulf of Mexico. Many Mexican-Americans argue that the whole southwestern United States was a region of Hispanic influence long before the Anglo set foot on Plymouth Rock, but historical circumstance relegated the Mexicans who came with the conquered and bartered land to a subservient position not quite analagous to that of the Negro in the South after the Civil War. As the Anglos settled and populated the Southwest, the com- munities divided themselves into American and Mexican zones. The light-skinned Spaniard moved freely in the Anglo community, where the brown-skinned Mexican had difficulties and the dark-skinned “Indio” could not enter at all. But through the years the Mexican zones have grown larger and larger, threatening the stability of the Anglo half of the communities. In Crystal City, Tex., for example, the Mexican-Americans actually gained control of the city government for a time, though not without a struggle, and not without a bitter aftermath. Today, the social consciousness of the Mexican-American is growing in large measure from the example set up by the Negro revolution. Emboldened, Mexican-American leaders have been pressing the President with demands for the social and economic improvement of the Mexican-American. The children of the zones are now men, pushing at the boundaries, threatening to break through. To meet the “threat,” President Johnson created the Inter-Agency Committee on Mexican American Affairs, and appointed Vincente T. Ximenes, a New Mexican with an impressive public record, as its commissioner. At the same time, he created a Cabinet Committee on Mexican Americans, composed of Secretary Wirtz (Labor), Sec- retary Gardner (Education), Secretary Freeman (Agri- culture), Secretary Weaver (Housing and Urban Develop- ment) and Director Shriver of the Office of Economic Opportunity. Ximenes was appointed chairman of this 624 committee. At the installation of Ximenes as commissioner of the Inter-Agency Committee on Mexican American” Affairs, the President also announced his appointment to” the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. That was in June. ‘ | On October 26-28, the Cabinet committee hearings on Mexican-American Affairs were held in El Paso, Tex., | amid much fanfare that derived from the highly pub-— | licized meeting between President Johnson and soe Diaz Ordaz of Mexico on Saturday, October 28, as the concluding act in the Chamizal land transfer. Mr. Ximenes_ arrived in El Paso on Wednesday and was greeted by State Rep. Raul Muniz. The next day, the commissioner released the following statement to the press: ; President Johnson has sent us here to listen to the voice of the Mexican American . . . and to report back to him specific recommendations to improve the quality of, life for the five million Spanish surnamed Americans in the United States. The President has recognized the urgency of this mission by naming four members of his Cabinet and the Director of the Office of Economic Opportunity to the Inter-Agency Committee on Mexican American Affairs. Vice President Humphrey is also honoring us with his presence. We are presented with a glowing opportunity at the highest level to act now on the problems besetting the Mexican American community. At the hearings we will be conducting. we will be looking for solid workable solutions to those problems—not pat recipes to be filed away and forgotten. Speaking for my distinguished colleagues on the Committee, I am confident that we will find the solu- tions, and that the full resources of the Johnson Ad- ministration will be available to translate them into action. But dissident voices were already mumbling that the whole “schmeer” was a political concoction to win over — the second largest minority group in the United States for the Democrats in 1968. Francisca Flores in her Carta | Editorial (October 24), published in Los Angeles, de-_ nounced the fifty invited speakers at the hearings as “professionals and/or bureaucrats, whose positions on | the issues they are to speak on are already well known to | everyone and especially available to the administration | agencies if they would only bother to ask for it.” This | was the general feeling of the “uninvited delegates” from | California, representing MAPA, the Mexican-American } Political Association led by Rodolfo (“Corky”) Gonzales, | whose board of directors voted 58 to 5 to boycott the |) hearings. The Californians had allies in the followers of Reies Lopez Tijerina, the firebrand leader of the Alianza} de Pueblos Libres of northern New Mexico, and in the» followers of Cesar Chavez, leader of the National Farm)} Workers. The only “substantial” group in El Paso itself to’ boycott the hearings was the South El Paso Federation) of Spanish Speaking People. Most of the grumbling hadi} THE NATION/December 11, 1967 '} e's he! 7 to do less with the selection of the speakers than with the E act that Gonzales, Chavez and Tijerina had not been in- _ day, most of the “delegates” were agreeing with Francisca Vited to speak—it was thought because they represented the most militant Mexican groups in the five southwestern states of California, Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico and Texas. At the reception held the evening of registration Flores that the fifty speakers and 1,000 invited participants were perhaps “a captive audience, invited to listen but not to speak.” Quite the opposite of Commissioner Ximenes’ public statement. Many Mexican-American leaders had hoped for a White House conference on Mexican-American problems, similar to the White House conference on Negro problems. When the President announced, instead, that a Cabinet committee would hold hearings on Mexican-American affairs in El Paso, some of these Mexican-American leaders accused the Administration of bad faith. And when the list of speakers and participants was made public, the protests became cries of anger and resentment. It was sprinkled generously with such names as Governor Reagan; Gunther R. Lessing, president of Disney Founda- tion; Charles Bannan, president of Western Gear Corpora- tion; Lee S. Bickmore, president of National Biscuit Com- pany; Henry Ford I, chairman of the board of the Ford Motor Company, et al. The absence of Chavez and Tijerina was held equivalent to considering the Negro problem without consulting Martin Luther King, Jr., or Roy Wilkins. Commissioner Ximenes is an ample and affable man with a quick and ready smile; the uninitiated Anglo might Say there is the charm of the Latin about him. With him in the reception line of the opening formalities were Dr. Mike Hernandez of Austin, Tex., field representative for the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, and other lesser dignitaries. Out in the street in front of the Plaza Hotel various Mexican-American groups were al- ready picketing. The day before, Mike Hernandez, who works like a diplomat but looks more like a football play- er, had met with some of the leaders of the dissident groups who were still clamoring for representation at the hearings. A spokesman for one of the dissenting groups commented: “If we will not be allowed to speak we will hold our own conference with true Mexican-American representation,” threatening to convene a rump meeting in San Jacinto Plaza, if necessary. The most vocal of the excluded groups, MAYA, the Mexican-American Youth Association, raised the possibility of drastic action if their views were not heard at the hearings. However, most of the delegates to the hearings dis- missed the possibility of violence. They reasoned that while the hearings might be political in intent, and whereas the participants may have been largely hand picked, the occasion itself was nevertheless serving to focus on the Mexican-American problem. And in this context, they argued, Tijerina’s presence in El Paso was an asset rather than a liability. The fact of the matter is that while there are those who view Tijerina as another Stokely Car- _- michael or Rap Brown, many of the delegates were in sympathy with his cause. _ THE NATION/December 11, 1967 in Dr. Clark S$. Knowlton, head of the Sociology Depart- ment at the University of Texas, El Paso, points out, however, that the Tijerina-Carmichael parallel may grow if the Anglos don’t take steps to settle the land claims in northern New Mexico. Professor Knowlton points out that failure of the Anglos to settle the land grant claims could very well be the rallying crisis about which the Mexican-Americans would unite. At the moment, the weakness of the Mexican-Americans is that they are splintered into groups and factions pulling against one an- other. Attempts to form a functional political coalition have fizzled for the same reasons that most coalitions fizzle. New Mexico groups resented that El Paso was picked as the site of the hearings, and the California groups and San Antonio groups felt similarly slighted. Each local- ity believes that its area is the focus of the problem. To most Anglos, Tijerina’s struggle may seem remote from the current problems of the Mexican-Americans, but Knowlton explains that “the cause of poverty in northern New Mexico is the land loss of the Spanish-Americans,” who have become culturally isolated as a consequence. And this land loss, Knowlton continues, is “how they measure Anglo-American civilization.” Certainly, the his- tory of the American acquisition of this part of the United States is telling evidence about the nature of the south- western social structure. Knowlton contends that there is a “tortilla curtain” between the Anglo-American and the Mexican-American that prevents fruitful inter-ethnic progress. The “tortilla curtain,” like the “iron curtain,” can breed only inter-ethnic conflict and hostility. There was an unmistakable political tremor at the re- ception. While Gonzales, Chavez and Tijerina were all be- ing extolled—more in Spanish than in English— the name of “Sal” Ramirez seemed to come up most often in con- versations seeking to name the “real leader” of the Mexi- can-Americans at the hearings. Salvador Ramirez is the executive director of the El Paso Boys’ Club. He’s a short, stocky man of 34 who pulled himself up out of the south El Paso streets, served a hitch in the Marines, got a B.A. from the University of Texas at El Paso, and was named Outstanding Young Man of 1967 in El Paso. Some Anglos contend that Ramirez seems to be the best bet for a Mext- can-American leader. He is liked by both sides, but this can be a liability, for some of the more militant Mexican- Americans interpret this popularity as a sign of accommo- dation with the Anglo community. Appropriately, the theme of the Cabinet-level hear- ings was “A New Focus on Opportunity.” At the plenary meeting, held in Magoffin Auditorium at the University of Texas at El Paso, Vice President Humphrey zeroed in on the theme with such skill as to suggest that perhaps some Mexican-American had written the speech for him. The Vice President reinforced the slogans in pamphlets that had been issued to the participants of the hearings. The pamphlets stressed that the Mexican-American “was an American long before this land became the United States,” and Humphrey admitted that they had been here long before the Humphreys had ever thought of emigrating from Norway. More Mexican-Americans have more medals than any other group, Humphrey told them. Of ‘ a a ww tes Ng oes See Sa ® {) i} ny i j ¥ t Py ¥ course, that is what the 1,000-odd delegates wanted to hear. And in a rhetoric that has become the hallmark of the Johnson Administration the Vice President poured out aphorism after aphorism about democracy and oppor- tunity, commiserating effectively with la raza. He told them there was no Russian word for “opportunity,” and didn’t fail to mention Lincoln, a key word in the rhetoric of poverty and opportunity. The applause was thunderous as the delegates smiled at one another, comforted by the words. Vice President Humphrey concluded with the hope that “today’s problems evolve into tomorrow’s oppor- tunity.” But “opportunity” is a word in a language with which many Mexican-Americans are still struggling. Most Anglos are quick to point to this linguistic disadvantage as the root of the socio-economic problem of the Mexican- American. In fact, the general feeling among most south- western Anglos is that the Mexican-American is not very much interested in improving his lot—else he would try to learn English. Smugly, they point to the excellent prog- ress made by some Mexican-Americans who leave learned the English language, and who have become Anglo in all but name. But these Anglo-Mexican-Americans now protest that their Hispanic surnames keep them from the final stage of full participation in national affairs. ' While the Vice President was addressing the delegates inside Magoffin Auditorium, pickets from various organi- zations circled in front of the building, advertising their complaints. Students who had been dismissed from classes for the arrival of the Vice President stood about, crowding: the picketers, heckling and jeering them. Only the few inside the auditorium heard the Vice President’s words about “bringing the government to the people, instead of bringing the people to the government.” The hearings were spread all over town: Labor and HUD at the Plaza Hotel, HEW and Agriculture at the Paso del Norte Hotel, Economic and Social Development at the Cortez Hotel, and War on Poverty at the El Paso National Bank Building. The program listed the hearings from 1 to 6 P.M., but most of them started late and the speakers used more than their allotted times, so that the session ran into the evening. Each section was monitored by a Mexican-American leader; the plan was to have a speaker deliver his paper, then be questioned by the chairman and/or the monitor, followed by questions from the floor to be answered by the chairman, the monitor, or the speaker. Unfortunately, the Hispanic penchant for Oratory overpowered the plan. Thousands of copies of the “papers” had been printed, and more than one delegate wondered about the necessity of having the authors read them aloud, since so many of the speakers spoke slowly and pompously. Most of the papers dealt with the immediate problems of the Mexican-Americans. Many were superficial in perspective and conclusions, and some were irrational, muddled and illogical, revealing the ignorance and prejudices of the author. Nevertheless, they made their point. The criticism of Anglo society was honest, and the recommendations for improving the status of Mexican- Americans were sincere. But there was also a strong and alien note in the papers that insisted on elevating and maintaining the Hispanic culture on a par with the Anglo- 626 5 American culture, and on the need for bilingual educa- tion. Both are objectionable to the American pattern of — cultural fusion. Some sociologists wonder if such schemes — would not, in fact, strengthen the very disadvantages the — Mexican-Americans are now fighting to eradicate. That afternoon the dissident groups did hold a rump — meeting in south El Paso’s Sacred Heart Church; Tijerina ¥ was the featured speaker. In Spanish, he denounced the — hearings and pressed for more militant action. As a result, — several representatives of local dissident groups were in- — vited to air their complaints at the hearings the next day. But not Tijerina. Commissioner Ximenes had washed his ~ hands of Tijerina on the day before the hearings began when he testily cut short a press interview, saying that Tijerina was not his affair, in response to the first and only question. The hearings on the following morning were cut short by the arrival of Presidents Johnson and Ordaz. Assem- bling hastily at the Hilton Inn, near the International air- port, the delegates were treated to a few minutes of Mr. Johnson’s charm, The President introduced United States Sen. Ralph Yarborough who, because of a mix-up, was still back on one of the buses. But when the President introduced Texas Gov. John Connally, the delegation hissed and booed, remembering Connally’s attitude toward the Texas migrant farm workers who have been seeking his help from alleged police brutality in south Texas and for his avoidance of a minimum wage law. The rest of the day, El Paso and Juarez celebrated the memorable occasion marking the end of the dispute over the Chami- zal land. But the real problem is not over, and one wonders if the hearings themselves really caught up with it. The socio-economic plight of Mexican-Americans is made even more glaring by the strident progress of Negro Americans. But the same solution cannot be proposed for the two sets of problems. Negroes don’t come into this country as the Mexicans do. There is no Negro language to penalize the Negro. There is no Negro country contiguous to the United States across whose border the Negro may travel at will. The daily intercourse across the border is like an umbilicus that keeps the fetus dependent upon the mother. La patria, the homeland, is just across the border for the more recently arrived. As one generation moves out of the zone another moves in to take its place. This then is the real problem of the Mexican-American situation in the United States. For if the Americanization of immigrant groups from overseas countries takes, let us say, one or two generations, the Americanization of Mexican immigrants, if it occurs at all, takes three, four or five generations. And because of the Mexican immigra- tion into high-density Mexican-American zones, there is always a surplus of cheap labor. The newly arrived will work for peanuts, because whatever they earn looks like a “fortune” by comparison to what they were earning back home. And where labor is so abundant wages are correspondingly low. Therefore, competition for whatever work is available is extremely keen and makes any kind of unionizing very difficult. In El Paso alone, hundreds of women daily cross from Juarez, Mexico, to work in El Paso stores, shops, factories and in homes as maids. THE NATION/December 11, 1967 Me ‘ican men cross to work as laborers in construction gangs, gardeners, waiters and busboys. This contributes to the stereotype Anglos have of Mexicans and Mexican- Americans and reinforces the discrimination barriers _ against hiring Mexican-Americans in other occupations. __ Many Mexican-American leaders hope for little from the Cabinet hearings since they feel that the real problem _ was overlooked. They are eagerly awaiting the projected _ Senate Labor Committee hearings on the effects of cheap | Mexican labor on the American labor market along the = DOUG ADAIR Mr. Adair is editor of the Texas edition of El Malcriado: The Voice of the Farm Worker. He was working in the fields near Delano, Calif., when he was enlisted into Hector Chavez's union movement and moved to Texas. The United Farm Workers Organizing Committee, led by _ Cesar Chavez, is fighting for its life this winter, despite the tremendous progress it has made in the last six months. For the first time in history, farm workers won contracts in 1967 without having to go on strike. Almaden Vine- yards, Gallo Vineyards and Christian Brothers Vineyards i all signed contracts after elections that indicated an over- ' whelming majority of the workers wanted union represen- @ tation. The jurisdictional dispute with the Teamsters ® union has been settled. And the Farm Workers hiring | hall dispatched workers this season to harvest more than ! 10,000 acres of grapes owned by Schenley Industries, | Di Giorgio Fruit Company, Goldberg & Company Packers and Perelli-Minetti Vineyards—all companies forced to sign contracts after bitter strikes. _ The lowest wage included in the contracts is $1.65 an | hour, plus 15c for every box picked (an average worker would thus clear at least $2.10 an hour), and the base pay at most of the contract ranches is $1.80 plus the “incentive” or piece rate. This is a rise from a $1 to $1.20 wage range in the 1965 season, before the strike. The con- 7 tracts include an additional 5c or 10c an hour contribu- | | J tion by the employer for health insurance, a life insurance program, unemployment insurance, a very strong griev- ance procedure clause, seniority rights, drinking water and toilets in the fields, rest periods, and a host of other details common to other industries. These are the first contracts farm workers have ever worked under in the | continental United States, except for a few short-lived : agreements in the 1930s. With such examples to show the other workers, one might think that organizing would be greatly facilitated. And workers do now realize the benefits of the union. Where they are allowed to vote, they show themselves overwhelmingly pro-union—of the 126 workers at Al- maden Vineyards, 119 voted for the union; and 405 Wisconsin cucumber pickers voted si to only eight no votes in an election won at Libby’s by Obreros Unidos, THE NATION/December 11, 1967 border. These are projected for some time in January. Again, El Paso will be the host city. The President of the United States has come and gone. And for one brief moment the south El Paso streets shone in the sun. But now they are littered and rubbled once more, and the Mexican-Americans are waiting, as they have been waiting, to see what will be. What could happen is what Commissioner Ximenes told the Sociology — Club at the University of Texas at El Paso: there could be violence in the streets. Cesar Chavez's Biggest Battle an independent but allied wing of the union. But growers are exempted from the National Labor Relations Act, and they are not required to allow their workers to vote on the question of union representation. They are free to fire workers for union activities, to black-list union members, and use any unfair labor practice that they wish, Thus the union is usually forced to employ both strike — and boycott, to invest its meager resources and the jobs and lives of its members in a bitter struggle for recogni- tion. Strikes have dominated the life of the union. The Delano grape strike, which began against thirty-three Delano-area grape growers, continues against thirty of | those growers, with only a few (though admittedly among the largest) under contract. And the melon strike in Texas has won only one minor contract, and no contract against any of the five major growers in Starr County on whom the union is concentrating. One such struggle is with the grower, Joseph Guimarra, who refused to allow elections when approached by the union and by Governor Reagan’s conservative State Con- ciliation Service. When more than 800 Guimarra workers signed union cards in July, and voted to strike unless management allowed elections or discussed a contract with the workers, Guimarra refused all demands. The “Patron” then began a campaign of harassment and intimidation (and even raised wages) in an effort to break the union. The members went on strike on August 3, and between 600 and 800 workers, predominantly Mexican-American, as are most members of the union, walked out of the fields. Guimarra had eighty workers at the end of the first week in August, out of a normal work force of more than 800. Two hundred strikers per picket line sealed off his fields. But by the second week in August, it became apparent that Guimarra would go far to break the strike. After union pressure, the U.S. Department of Immigration made _ | a halfhearted investigation and rounded up some 500 “wetbacks” (illegal aliens) in the Kern County vineyards in less than a week. Guimarra claimed that he had not known he was employing wetbacks illegally. Meanwhile, the federal government showed its traditional cooperation with the growers by allowing Guimarra to employ hun- dreds of “legal” foreign workers. Though Secretary of 627 é Labor Wirtz claims that he is opposed to allowing these Mexican “green card” workers to break strikes, the border was wide open for Guimarra. Some estimated that more than half of Guimarra’s work force, after the ex- pulsion of the “wetbacks,” was made up of “green card workers.” (A “green card” is supposedly a permit for permanent immigration to the United States, but Wirtz has allowed the cards to be used as a loophole to re-establish the out- lawed bracero program. He approved 8,100 of the new- style braceros to harvest the California tomato crop this year, as well as unlimited strikebreakers for the grapes in California and the melons in Texas. “Green carders” often “immigrate” for a ten-hour strike-breaking visit across the Texas border, return home at night, and immigrate again the next day. The union favors liberal immigration laws, but is absolutely opposed to this perver- sion of the law.) Guimarra has also recruited heavily in Texas, where farm workers still average under $1 an hour. Guimarra’s wages (averaging more than $1.50 an hour) seemed good and the financial pull was stronger on the desperately poor than loyalty to /a raza (the Spanish term for Mexican-Americans) or the increasing realization of the benefits gained from the union. Guimarra, who is worth an estimated $25 million and who owns oil wells, a winery, and cotton crops worth $247,000 a year in direct government cash subsidies, averages a $12 million a year crop in fresh table grapes. _ To beat the boycott which the union has launched against him, he has packed his grapes under more than fifty different labels owned by other growers from the area (any box of table grapes from Delano, Bakersfield, Arvin or Lamont, Calif., is scab unless it has the UFWOC label on it). Such cooperation among the growers was not nearly so close in previous strikes and boycotts. Guimarra has also gotten his neighboring growers to recruit workers and put them to work in Guimarra fields without telling them of the strike. And Guimarra has gotten friendly judges to restrict picketing to one picket every SO feet. Strikers were not allowed to visit scabs in their homes, hand out leaflets, or even (for a time) use megaphones to speak to scabs deep in the fields. A local judge in Texas recently outlawed all picketing in the melon strike. None of the 100-odd arrests of strikers made by the Texas Rangers and Starr County cops has yet been brought to trial in Texas, and that ties up in bonds huge amounts of badly needed money (bail in Texas is often $500 cash). These factors, coupled with the devastation of hurricane Beulah, which destroyed 70 per cent of the winter harvests in south Texas, have crippled the union’s activity there. In Texas it is now a holding operation, working on community organizing, voter registration and the Guimarra boycott, and giving its members whatever services and help it can afford, Arrests have not been so heavy in California as in Texas, due to the nonviolent aspect of the strike and the dis- missal of almost all of the cases so far brought to trial here. But the legal restrictions on the strike have been severe. Finally, just as the union came to grips with the com- bined effort of Guimarra and the other growers and their 628 allies in the county courts and in the federal gover P contributions to the union were drastically cut. The United — Auto Workers, a heavy contributor to the farm workers’ - struggle, began cutting back in anticipation of its own strike. The loss of this assistance, and of support from the Industrial Union Department of the AFL-CIO (an organizing agency run by Walter Reuther and funded in — large part through the UAW) have left the union in almost disastrous financial shape. Even after the Ford strike is settled, the UAW will be pinching pennies for a long time to come, to pay off the huge expenses of their own strike. The Organizing Department of the AFL-CIO under William Kircher (Meany’s counterpart to the IUD) has offered steady help. But as the union’s drive expands on so many fronts, new sources of income are desperately needed. The result of this financial crisis has been a partial cut- back in organizing in other parts of California, Arizona and Texas, and a reduction of the service activities of the union. The Co-Op gas station and. Auto Parts Store _ were delayed, but are at last completed. The Farm Worker Clinic and Pharmacy, offering medicine and health care at free or minimum cost, may have to remain housed in two old house trailers. There are still no foundations # the clinic, which should have been completed this all. This loss of momentum by the union, at the very time When it should be expanding, will encourage more vigorous resistance by the growers, and will encourage those already under contract to defy the union when the contracts expire. The farm workers, who have been. building one of the most militant and democratic unions in the nation, are thus faced this winter with one of the most serious crises in their short history. LETTERS (Continued from page 610) Statistical information . . . “does not serve to identify any person who is in need of a particular service or who might be considered a prospect for any particular type of business activity” is even harder to swallow than his other assertions. Why does he think those businessmen lay out hard cash for census statistics? Phil Hirsch The Nation in Uganda Far Rockaway, N.Y. Dear Sirs: For many years, I have been sending my copies of The Nation to the St. Mary’s College in Uganda, East Africa. Because of this, I have been corresponding with the assistant headmaster of the school. He has been sending me some very interesting and informative letters. He has now been transferred to a new school. I should like to send my copies to the new school but I do not want to abandon St. Mary’s College. Do you know of anyone who would be willing to send their copies to the college? It costs only about a dollar a year for postage. The address is: St. Mary’s College, Kisubi, Uganda, East Africa. Please be kind enough to let me know if you find some- one who will do this as, otherwise, I shall continue to send my copies there. Mrs. Sidney Stenzler THE NATION/ December 11, 1967 ai: | The Case of the | FRANK J. DONNER Mr. Donner is a New York attorney who “specializes in constitutional law and civil R liberties cases. He is the author of The Un- | Americans (Ballantine). Six Congressional investigations since 1960 have made us familiar with elec- _ tronic eavesdropping, mail covers, com- _ puterized dossiers, long-range photog- ' raphy, psychological tests and other in- ' strumentalities of intrusion. Before the _ current crop of books (many of them | heavily dependent upon the testimony in the Congressional hearings) we had | offerings on the same subject from Vance ) Packard (The Naked Society), Myron @ Brenton (The Privacy Invaders), Martin t Gross (The Brain Watchers), Morris L. i) Ernst (Privacy: The Right To Be Let @ Alone) and Samuel Dash (The Eaves- ' droppers). The returns are all in. What ) was formerly a matter of suspicion, po- ' lemics or partisan advocacy is now ob- _ jectively established: our privacy is being invaded both by public and private agencies on a vast and unprecedented scale. The technological revolution has brought frightening dimensions to elec- tronic eavesdropping practices; the physi- cal barriers and distances, which once shielded the privacy of conversation, have _ been overcome by new, sophisticated _ gadgetry. And the quality of the in- trusions has changed: the old-style wire tap selectively monitored only a single channel of communication, but a properly placed micro-miniaturized bug and micro- phone can transmit to a snooper all of the communications in a room within its range. Moreover, the traditional as- sumptions about the conditions which shelter from disclosure other areas of conduct have been shattered almost overnight by miniaturized closed-circuit TV cameras (which with the aid of “optical pipes,” can be used to spy from afar on unsuspecting subjects) and by long-range and infrared photography, laser beams and optical scanners which can read mail. Brown’s handbook, a sort of Kama- Sutra of electronic intrusion, describes in detail the technical characteristics and relative merits of various kinds of eiec- tronic devices. He also assesses the de- buggers and speech scramblers that are employed (sometimes by the same tech- nicians who installed the bugs in the first place) to foil the eavesdroppers. For government agencies and corpo- “THE NATION/December 11, 1967 Private ‘I’ THE ELECTRONIC INVASION. By Robert M. Brown. John F. Rider Publisher. 184 pp. $3.95 paper. PRIVACY AND FREEDOM. By Alan F. Westin. Atheneum Pub- | lishers. 487 pp. $10. THE INTRUDERS. By Senator Edward V. Long. Frederick A. Praeger. 230 pp. $5.95. SPY GOVERNMENT. By Omar V. Garrison. Lyle Stuart. 277 pp. $5.95. PRIVACY AND BEHAVIORAL RESEARCH. U.S. Government Printing Office. 30 pp. 15c paper. THE LABOR SPY RACKET. By Leo Huberman. Monthly Review Press. 209 pp. $5. THE SPY IN THE CORPORATE STRUCTURE AND THE RIGHT TO PRIVACY. By Edward Eng- berg. The World Publishing Co. 247 pp. $5.95. ESPIONAGE AND SUBVER- SION IN AN _ INDUSTRIAL SOCIETY. By Peter Hamilton. Hutchinson (London). 230 pp. $6. rations that seek to insure the privacy of their conferences, there are floating rooms, plastic tents and lead walls. Americans have long been conditioned to the marvels of electronics as a means of eavesdropping: by the comics, James Bondery, TV spy serials and space ex- ploration, A mass market is developing both for eavesdropping devices and for de-bugging and scrambling equipment, and Americans are flocking to the supply houses in growing numbers to see (and buy) these new fruits of the good life: transmitters and microphones which are concealable in picture frames, moldings, coat buttons, martini olives and false teeth and (less melodramatically) the telephone, camouflaged voice actuated tape recorders, automatic telephone monitors, directional and spike mikes and audio-stethoscopes. The present concern for privacy does not, for the most part, seek to outlaw all the devices or the practices which threaten privacy. But even a minimal therapy in the three privacy-invading areas (physical, psychological and data surveillance) would require new legis- lation, administrative regulation, stricter “4 7 4x . ‘ a. go ony eam pele. . professional ethics, and a greater sensi- _ tivity to privacy by the information gatherers and guardians. — The scope of the problem and © proposals for dealing with it are brilliantly % explored in Westin’s Privacy and Free- — dom. A spacious ocean liner of a book which almost submerges the smaller craft — on the same course, it is sponsored by a — Special Committee of the New York i City Bar Association, and was supported — by a Carnegie grant. Meticulously docu- et mented and thoroughly researched (there _ are over 1,100 footnotes and 55 pages — of bibliography), this study by a Colum- a bia professor whose disciplines include ~ Baal na law and political science, is bound oe serve as an important tool in the almost inevitable legislative and judicial strug- gles to curb threats to privacy in the { + i next decade. oe i Its most original and illuminating sec- hi tions comprise five “case studies”: the continuing controversy between law-en- | forcement agencies and civil libertarians _ over bugging and wire tapping (the - author points out that the claim that Da electronic surveillance is indispensable ay to crime detection has never been per- it, suasively documented); police and per- sonnel polygraphing—widely attacked as — u 4 unscientific and banned in a number of ie states; the debate over psychological test- oat ing in which academics, traditionally on ih the libertarian side of privacy issues, t find themselves on the defensive; the con- troversy which flared in the late fifties — over subliminal advertising (Westin sees a its rejection as a triumph of “civic con- san tainment,” but it can also be argued that this spookish phenomenon died be- __ cause of its ineffectiveness as an adver- ay tising medium) and, lastly, the ongoing arguments over proposals for a com- puterized national data bank. [See “The Punchcard Snoopers” by Phil Hirsch, — ont The Nation, October 16.] poe Re Such a center would provide govern- ment and private elites with access to the computerized life histories of all © Ht —— ‘ Me Americans: employment, medical history, school record, grades, credit, military — service, income tax, psychiatric treat- 2 1 ment, organizational affiliation—the cate- i i gories are endless. The jeopardy in which this electronic monster could place the aie individual is emphasized by the fact that the mere existence of this processing capability would whet the appetite for 5 4 the collection of even more data. i Government administrators and many social scientists who are moving toward a new information theory to solve prob- lems of service, prediction and control, which a mass society presents, make a strong case for such a center, wooing the doubters with promised curbs on data input and access. But the old Quis custodiet problem persists; the stakes are too high to gamble on the good faith of our governors. Imperiled human values tip the beam. In an already highly anomic and depersonal- ized society, who can chart the social and psychic damage inflicted by a fear that the press of a button can reveal to a stranger that one is an _ afrrestee, divorcé, remarried, childless, a dropout, a health, security, credit or driving risk, emotionally disturbed, a heavy drinker, a non-churchgoer or foreign born? Who can vouch for the selfhood of Com- puterized Man? Senator Long’s book is a first-rate survey of the testimony adduced before his subcommittee on invasions of privacy. The book and the hearings remind us that Congressional investigating com- mittees, with devoted leadership and an informed staff, can powerfully contribute to the national enlightenment. The hear- ings of the House subcommittee of the Committee on Government Operations under the chairmanship of Rep. Cor- nelius E. Gallagher have been equally fruitful—particularly in the fields of com- puter privacy and the use of polygraphy. Senator Long’s recommendations are forthright and courageous, including a ban on all private wire tapping and bug- ging, and the confinement of law-en- forcement eavesdropping on a state and federal level to situations where one of the participants gives consent. In so-called “national security” cases “involving a clear danger” the President would have the authority to order tapping. But in- formation so obtained would not be ad- missible in court. These views closely parallel the President’s proposal on eaves- dropping now awaiting hearing before Senator Long’s committee. Omar V. Garrison’s Spy Govern- ment is an account of government sur- veillance based largely on the disclosures of Congressional committees and earlier books on the subject. A chapter (‘‘Pro- gramming Our Youth For Bondage’), deploys in a convincing way the emerging evidence that our youth have been made targets of surveillance by a variety of federal agencies from the Food and Drug Administration to the CIA. While much of this material has also appeared in other media, it is useful to have it assembled in one place. Too much of Garrison’s presentation consists of a stringing together of “items” (“A major record company is exploiting the grow- ing interest in privacy invasion among 630 € a the young people. It has put on sale a fifty-minute recording that eavesdrops on parties at which teenagers went on LSD ‘trips’ ”), divorced from a context nec- essary to give them meaning. And his chapter on government, “Publicity as Punishment,” makes no reference at all to the publicity exposure system of the Congressional anti-subversive commit- tees. It is perhaps even more curious that there is no discussion of the FBI’s political informers in a book on spy government. The conflicts between privacy and behavioral research are sensitively ex- plored by a panel of ten distinguished citizens (many of them officers of col- leges and universities) in a report for the Office of Science and Technology. The panel addresses itself to the intrusive character of many “personality inven- tory” and related psychological tests em- ployed both in school and for personnel screening. The offensive quality of many of these inquiries became a target of the ultra-Right in the late fifties. Today the problem has° been more widely recog- nized. Senator Ervin’s bill outlawing pri- vacy-invading tests in the federal estab- lishment has overwhelmingly passed the Senate. The panel deals more generally with all forms of intrusions by behavioral scientists; there are over 35,000 of them now; 2,100 new Ph.D.s are turned out each year and some 40,000 are now en- rolled in studies for advanced degrees. They, together with practitioners in other branches of social science, are steadily A civil society is not a society of complete mutual transparency or visibility. Everyone needs to be allowed to live somewhat in the shade—both rulers and ruled—in order to “keep” what “belongs” to them. Intrusions on privacy are bane- ful because they interfere with an individual in his control of what belongs to him. The “social space” around an individual, the recollec- tion of his past, his conversation, his body and its image, all belong to him. He does not acquire them and is entitled to possess them by virtue of the charisma which is inherent in his existence as an in- dividual should—as we say nowa- days, in his ‘individuality—and which is inherent in his membership in the civil community and his membership in his own society. A society which claims to be both humane and civil is committed to their respect .... From “Privacy and Power’ by Edward Shils ] Oi ee a ee eee aan escalating the “information explosion.” They are voracious producers and con- sumers of data and have made the 7) fi American society the most surveyed, in- || "a terviewed, tested, questionnaired and © sh pulse-taken on the face of the earth. } i The panel’s report recognizes that pri- | bcs vacy is an elusive value which cannot |) ys be captured in a formula, analyzed with >| nt legal precision, or defined in terms of © | Le specific kinds of human activity: AD si i} es The usual examples of privacy are Hy the too gross to convey fully its nuances tria and strength. One thinks of the right sun to turn away the interviewer at the vat door, to throw away the mailed mf questionnaire, or to exclude outsiders | ind from a meeting. One thinks of privacy to make love, to reflect in financial success, to express pride in professional achievements, and so on. There are more subtle and personal forms, how- ever. Actually what is private varies for each person and varies from day to day and setting to setting. In- deed the very core of the concept is the right of each individual to deter- mine for himself in each particular setting or compartment of his life how much of his many-faceted beliefs, attitudes, and behavior he chooses to disclose. The panel acknowledges that tension has developed between privacy and em- pirical social science research and urges consent as.a curb on abuse. But there are admittedly situations in which con- sent is not feasible, either because the inquiry may involve complex variables which a layman may not understand, or. because the validity of the experiment depends on keeping the subject in the dark. Where informed consent is. not possible, then the confidentiality of the research records must be preserved and the identity of the subject shielded. ‘The panel points out that there may be con- flicts where some degree of privacy in- vasion is inevitable. How are such con- flicts to be resolved? By some process of balancing yet to be worked out. But, the panel insists, even a valid claim to privacy should not prevent socially sig- nificant research. “A wise and discrim- inating society has found, and will con- tinue to find, that many invasions of privacy are tolerable and necessary for the health of the community.” In the end one is left with the uneasy feeling that the gaps between the cog- nitive passions of the social scientists and the claims of privacy will not be easy to bridge. More than this, there is a serious danger that the community will come to react with resentment and hostility even to valid social science re- search because so much of it is silly, prying and aimless. (“Just for that you all get off,’ Jimmy Durante snorted as one too many flies landed on his nose.) THE NATION/December 11, 1967 Ms) A classic work on labor espionage | is Leo Huberman’s Labor Spy Racket. Originally published in 1937 to publicize testimony before the LaFollette Civil Liberties Committee by employers and labor spy agencies, it is now re-issued by the Monthly Review Press with a _ postscript on the undercover activities of “labor relations consultants,” laid bare in the 1958 McClellan Committee hear- ings. As Huberman points out, labor espionage has by no means come out of the cold; its new quarry is the indus- trial “security risk.” This justification for surveillance has made the industrial pri- vate eye and the corporation “security officer” a permanent fixture in American industrial life. Mr. Engberg’s sparkling book is concerned with industrial espionage and the methods (bugs, broads, booze, bribes) used by corporations to acquire infor- mation from competitors that threaten them economically. Engberg is_particu- larly effective in dissecting the forms of intellectual property, from research re- sults and formulas to market surveys, which are the targets of surveillance and theft. Corporations are not only deeply involved in surveillance and espionage games against competitors but have long depended on these practices both to pro- tect their own property and to check on production. Undercover techniques were classically developed by American cor- porate enterprise as a response to the challenge of unionism and labor unrest. Labor espionage and infiltration were justified as a check on revolutionary vio- lence against the state. When these prac- tices were discredited, the corporations continued their reliance on surveillance to “audit” employees suspected of theft (the rhetoric of surveillance is loaded with euphemisms of this kind; my own favorite is “cooperate with the FBI” to describe what a political informer does), and they resorted to polygraphy for the same purpose. The huge corporate in- vestment in research, and the ease with which the fruits of research can be de- livered to a competitor simply by the resignation of a key technician or scien- tist, have created a corporate “loyalty crisis” which has led to reliance on pri- vacy-invading techniques (mainly poly- graphy and personality testing) to screen employees and job applicants. Another surveillance device in increasing use by corporations is closed-circuit TV, both open and concealed, to supplement su- pervision in checking on work pace and to substitute for line foremen displaced by automation. In contrast to the European police system under which investigation, in- quisition and law enforcement were con- solidated into a centralized national in- stitution closely linked to the exercise of “THE NATION/December 11, 1967 Ge Tal gre Tar s “ ,.. lyric, skillful, delicate, probing...” Publishers’ Weekly The Collected Poems of Dilys Laing With an Introduction by M. L. Rosenthal “This is a body of fine work, to cherish... Dilys Laing... had a sureness with words, and a quick imagination. Her poems are lyric, skillful, delicate, prob- ing.”—Publishers Weekly. “The publication of The Collected Poems of Dilys Laing is a literary event, Those of us who have for years cared about her work will rejoice: those who have not yet read her poems will make a discovery. One need not be a poet to discern her craft, to tremble at the acuity of her insights; and to recognize that these are the poems of one who dared the risk of being true woman and true poet.” — Isabella Gardner. “A strong mind and a feminine heart were joined in Dilys Laing to produce a poetry of modern sensitivity, clear but warm, precise but imaginative,” — Richard Eberhart. “Reading through this volume of some four hundred poems...1 am struck by the underlying unity of the book as a whole... [it] is all authentic Dilys, and since Dilys was all woman, the entire book is utterly female... it is especially the personal touch and voice of Dilys herself that accounts for the book’s unity 464 pages, $8.50 and evenness. ’—Ramon Guthrie. The Press of Gase Western Reserve University 2029 Adelbert Road, Cleveland, Ohio 44106 631 power. American police arrangements have been characteristically local and more responsive to democratic controls. The transplanting to the United States of revolutionary ideologies, and the need to contain the growing labor force, pre- sented problems for American business which were beyond the scope and _juris- diction of the local police. This vacuum was filled by independent, privately or- ganized bodies of investigators who bor- rowed from their official European counterparts techniques of surveillance, impersonation, deception, infiltration, in- forming and dossier keeping. “Pinkertonism” enjoyed a semi-official status because of the power.of its clients, 4 its reliance’ on police departments for new cadres, and its availability to per- form on behalf of the police services which are forbidden by law in return for immunity from prosecution. The assump- tions as well as the techniques of Pinker- tonism shaped the functioning of the nativist anti-radical societies which flour- ished between the wars, and have left a deposit of influence on the contem- porary ultra-Right as well as the Con- gressional anti-subversive committees. Today this private security industry enjoys revenues in excess of $5 billion annually, is strongly dominated by ex- FBI agents, a haven for former Tele- phone Company employees and, in the IBERATION and the AMERICAN RESISTANCE Since its inception in 1965, LIBERATION has played an active and creative role in the growth of the new radicalism. From civil rights to black liberation, from ‘‘ban the bomb” to the movement to end the war in Vietnam, LIBERATION’s radical critique of the existing social structure and its emphasis on democratic and direct action has been vital. As the Movement enters a new phase—the American Resistance —LIBERATION continues its catalytic role. Editorial Board: Dave Dellinger, Editor; Deming, Paul Goodman, Sidney Lens, Staughton Lynd. Associate Editors: Kay Boyle, Tom Hayden, Nat Hentoff, Mulford Sibley. SPECIAL INTRODUCTORY OFFER! ® Begin your subscription with the special November Pentagon issue, in- cluding analyses of the October Re- sistance and Mobilization actions by George Dennison, Dave Dellinger, Bar- bara Deming, Paul Goodman, Mar- tin Jezer, Keith Lampe, Sidney Lens, Staughton Lynd, Arthur Waskow, David Zimmerman of The Resistance, an interview with John Wilson of SNCC, and more, including a report on talks with 4 American deserters by Ernest Young. ® With a NEW subscription get FREE the 80-page A. J. Muste memorial issue, with articles by Noam Chomsky, Dellinger, Deming, Goodman, Nat Hen- toff, Hans Koningsberger; Lens and many others! Lamar Hoover, Managing Editor; Barbara MERE PERE ERE EERE EERE EERE EERE ERE LIBERATION 5 BEEKMAN STREET NEW YORK, N. Y. 10038 [] Enclosed is $5 for a one-year sub- scription plus the A. J. Muste memo- rial issue. C) Enclosed is $9 for a 2-year sub- scription. C1 Enclosed is $13 for a 3-year sub- scription. C] Please bill me and send the A. J. Muste issue on receipt of my payment. language of Edward Shils, constitutes a “large body of enterprising specialists eagerly offering their services in the in- fringement of all sorts of privacy for every purpose.” And its files are nothing © to be sneezed at: the Wackenhut Cor- poration—the smallest of the “big four” private security agencies—boasts 3 mil- — lion individual dossiers, and they are in- creasing at the rate of 10,000 a week. Of the books under review only Hamilton’s is written from the “law and order” position. Hamilton, a former British security officer and once an in- telligence aide to General Wedemeyer, is now a “security theoretician” and a consultant to British industry. His book is an exposition of the principles of Pin- kertonism adapted to British conditions. — The tenets of Hamilton’s “security culture” are Strangelovish indeed. Since large-scale crime weakens the state, crime must be regarded as a form of ~ subversion; ditto for strikes: every major strike is a form of “negative sabotage.” Subversion and propaganda are the char- acteristic weapons of the Russians, but “the West except the CIA seems to pre- fer economics and public relations.” To foil the subversion which takes the form of blunt wage demands and similar out- rages, the employer must stimulate humor in the work force (“Humour is highly antipathetic to all forms of subversion, including communism”), encourage and develop artistic gifts among the workers, “and care about his employees in much the same way as did the good squire and his wife for their tenants and workers.” The author projects a Chestertonian restoration of English village and com- munity life to provide “the cohesion lack- ing in today’s society.” Here the unifying force consists of security committees which would collect information and insure the availability of “alternative labor” in the event of a strike. Although Hamilton’s entire “security culture” is riddled with privacy-invading measures, he assures us that he cherishes privacy, and offers as example of this evil, gate crashing by unwanted guests at private parties. (An American is tempted to murmur in response: “I never knew this death hath undone so many.”) Hamilton’s book is a potent reminder of the extent to which privacy is a hostage to security mongering. For a quarter of a century hot and cold wars have cumula- tively deepened anxieties of Americans about the “national security.” While the recession of McCarthyism has diminished our overt obsession with this theme, the justification of national security or of an inquiry into “loyalty” has inflicted enor- mous wounds on privacy, not only in the investigation of public and private iob applicants but in the use of federal power to investigate dissenters as an end in THE NATION/December I1, 1967 fell 1 intel H jc ait who! js radi h Lon} {ices gress iH tice my ever ) mak p secu my fine than It ay the may) cage ey) for. peat forn Ou dres Con shou this a particularly offensive 7 sel com clea the that Hy vac’ 4 i mar ' judi cme In the claimed pursuit of “political igence” or “counter-intelligence,” a iisdiction assumed by Mr. Hoover wholly without authorization, the FBI is noW invading the privacy of campus | radicals on a wholesale scale. Senator Long’s book hints that these illegal prac- ices have remained immune from Con- gressional scrutiny because they are po- | litically sensitive. But since virtually every proposal for curbing eavesdropping ' makes an exception of the “national | security,” some policy-making body other | than J. Edgar Hoover’s will have to de- fine it. ) It surely cannot rationally embrace | the photographing of a University of Chi- cago demonstration against class ranking | for draft purposes, eavesdropping on a | peace meeting at Oberlin, sending in- _ formers into a Portland college campus ' group or stealing correspondence ad- _ dressed to the organizer of the National | Conference for a New Politics. Nor should a probe of privacy invasion in this area exclude the nongovernmental security narks, 40 per cent of whose in- ) come is Said to be derived from “loyalty ' clearance” work. These books tell us how “they” — _ the propitiating name for the Eumenides that pursue us—are robbing us of pri- vacy. The favorite model is Orwellian, a manipulative Big Brother. The answers to Big Brotherism are legislative and judicial curbs. Both of these may well emerge within the next few years. The REPORT FROM IRON MOUNTAIN | ON THE POSSIBILITY AND DESIR- | ABILITY OF PEACE. With introduc- } tory material by Leonard C. Lewin. The Dial Press. 109 pp. $5. DAVID CORT Mr. Cort’s most recent book is The Glossy Rats (Grosset & Dunlap). Tron Mountain is an actual, visible, tangible hollow mountain near Hudson, N.Y.. filled with vaults, board rooms and living facilities reserved for very high corporate personnel, in the event of atomic holocaust. It is the quintessence of insurance or paranoia. Here, we are told, a top-level study group examined for several years the Big Question: is | eternal peace possible and/or desirable? True, diligent inquiry at Iron Mountain finds no record of any such meetings, and the most reliable spies in the White House have uncovered not the faintest spoor of any such report, ostensibly pre- _ pared for the most exalted eyes but oer: THE NATION/December 11, 1967 presently proposed legislation may suc- .. cumb to a skillfully exploited crime-in- the-streets backlash or a “national-secur- ity” blitz (now also being prepared in the House for Senator Ervin’s bill); but there are good prospects that the Supreme Court will*find an overarching right of privacy in the provisions of the First Amendment (free speech and the right to silence), the Fourth Amendment’s ban against unreasonable search and seizure, and ‘the due process and protection against self-incrimination provisions of the Fifth Amendment. But suppose that government snoopers (Big Brother) are effectively curbed. Is that the end of the matter? The Orwel- lian explanation for what has been done to us cannot account for what we have done to ourselves. There remains another more tormenting model—that of Kafka or Pinter. Our society is rife with voyeur- ism and. with privacy invasion as an end in itself. “They” may be taking privacy from us but we are also giving it away. And even resistance rarely prevails over profit drives. As in other areas, the key question here is whether the society is so hooked on technology, so eager to permit process to be pushed to the limits of its logic, that it is incapable of making a stand for the human needs of its members. How much longer can we afford the old easy optimism, bred by an overfertile technol- ogy, that there is no injury that we can do to ourselves that is beyond repair by more technology? The Ultimate Joke suppressed for others. Here it is all revealed. And yet, if we ask, is this shocking document real, the answer must be yes. The footnotes, with bibliography, sufficiently establish that it is in the real world; it is rooted in familiar reality. This is not a private joke of Leonard Lewin’s or of the Monocle crowd; it is more probably the joke on all mankind, the intolerable rack for the sense of humor, the ultimate unforgivable joke, God’s laugh. Lewin is not Voltaire or Swift, but he may have found a more terrible joke: war is indispensable to a successful civilized society. He, or the study group, started out with such hardhearted assumptions as that medical advances create more problems than they solve, some poverty may be desirable, armies are social welfare institutions, a sort of slavery may be necessary, and that by “peace” is meant total and general and eternal disarmament. This is, of course, “big thinking” and obiectionable to humanists, but if we 4 TECHNICOLOR® PANAVISION® FROM WARNER BROS.-SEVEN ARTS WORLD PREMIERE NOW : WARNER THEATRE Bway & 47th St, CO 5-5711 WRITERS | N. Y. publisher wants books on all subjects, ‘ fiction, nonfiction. No fee for professional Opinion. FREE; Brochures that show how your hook can be published, publicized, sold; cone tracts. Write Dept. 147L EXPOSITION PRESS INC. 366 Park Ave. So., New York, N. ¥. 10016 must estimate amounts of air pollution, clean water requirements, future duck populations, LSD mutations, or just take a census, what is so wrong about dis- cussing the whole society in the same objective terms? First, it was discovered that “world war industry” represents a tenth of the world economy: and that war is not merely an instrument of a national society but the essence of the nation, to which all other institutions must be subordinate. “The capacity of a nation to make war expresses the greatest social power it can exercise.” Most major technological advances have. been intro- duced by war. Civilian standards . of living rose during World War II in the United States. With the elimination of war, the nation-state will wither away. All this has a good content of acceptable truth. Now the study group looks for a suitable substitute for war. This must impose a credible threat to life. It must be wasteful, to the extent of 10 per cent of the economy. (When this rule has been violated, the economy has repeat- edly collapsed.) War on poverty is no substitute because it would not cost enough. Without war, art forms would lose their sense of conflict and enter an art- Jess, value-free aesthetic, now prefigured in the current “art without content.” The implication is that without conflict, there are no values, no beauty, no art. The seriousness of this study is specially revealed in the footnotes, such as “Values were assigned to the known and unknown in each parameter, tested against data from earlier chronologies, and modified heuristically until predict- able correlations reached a useful level of accuracy.” Ultimately the study concludes that 633 “the price of peace is too high,” But our government must prepare for the possibility of peace “because it may be thrust on us in some form whether we are ready for it or not.” In case of war, we must “adjust the planning of casualty rates” in accord with population pressures. Except for such few indiscretions as the two preceding sentences, Report from Iron Mountain is obviously not satire. It is a modest understatement of the more unappealing facts of life. Its gentle overtures invite a little further development, after we have all agreed that we must try to outlaw atomic war; obviously there’s nothing we can do to stop ordinary war, which can begin to- night on any street corner. An extension of the study group’s conclusion might begin: One of the facts of life, from the moment of birth, is death, nor is this fact noticeably em- barrassed by the horror of the good- hearted. People say (insincerely) that they know they must die; but institu- tions never intend to die. Without death, we would have today the Macedonian, Roman, Carolingian, Holy Roman, Austro-Hungarian, and British Empires piled on top of one another in inoperable bedlam. No corporation would ever go bankrupt. No fashion would become obsolete. Nobody would have to change his mind. All the bad artists would spring to life again, and the great ones would fade into the crowd. If we could guarantee eternal peace, that is, eternal life, to the existing 3 billion people now alive, we would The Best Way To Get NATION THE NATION 12-11-67 333 Sixth Ave., New York 10014 [| One Year, $10 {| Two Years, $18 [| 6 Months, $6 [] Bill Me [_] Payment Enclosed (Foreign and Canadian Postage $1 a year extra) « SSSR ERE REE SY 634 < RUS R RRSP R OTERO RTE E ETRE HOPE HECHT OPER Somewhere, 1 think in Dakota, they found the leg bones—just the big leg bones—of several hundred buffalo, in a gravel pit. Near there, a hole in a cliff has been hollowed so that the prevailing wind of autumn thrums a note so low and persistent that bowls of water placed in that cave will tremble to foam. The grandfather of Crazy Horse lived there, they say, at the last, and his voice like the thrum of the hills made winter come as he sang, “Boy, where was your buffalo medicine? T say you were not brave enough, Boy. I say Crazy Horse was too cautious.” A SOUND FROM THE EARTH Then the sound he cried out for his grandson made that thin Agency soup that they put before him tremble. The whole earthen bowl churned into foam. also have to impose total death on all new life. With the end of both death and birth, all life would inexorably grind to a halt. Any such prospect is a chimera, for the unarguable reason that this universe was not created by a commission of kindly liberals. The actual, certifiable creation is at constant war with man: cold, rain, snow, lightning, heat, insects, bacteria, hurricane, flood, earthquake, starvation, drought, plague, etc. Com- petition, sometimes implemented in war, is simply part of mankind’s fairly des- perate war to survive in difficult en- vironments, often aggravated by the neighbors who are also trying to survive. When winter comes, government by fools must die. The next Ice Age, which is inevitable, will end a lot of nonsense, WILLIAM STAFFORD at least in the present temperate zone, Certainly the glorification of death is despicable. No respectable philosopher has attempted it, though several have been misread as doing so. On the other hand, nearly all philosophers have asked mankind to include death in the defini- tion of life. Open publication of Iron Mountain’s sort of big-picture thinking is generally taboo because of a theory that the mob (the subject of the discussion) can’t stand hearing about it. But the mob is usually very interested in these extrap- olations of its future. It would really like to know how it is going to make out, or at least how somebody figures it is going to make out. For the mob has its own ideas on how it intends to make out. I know: I’m a member of it. Between Ejjort and Effect MEMOIRS, 1925-1950. By George F. Kennan, Atlantic-Little, Brown. 583 pp. $10. ROBERT G. HAZO Mr. Hazo is senior editor of Encyclopaedia Britannica. He is the author of The Idea of Love (Praeger). No man made a greater effort than George F. Kennan to formulate, influ- ence and understand United States for- eign policy in the second quarter of the 20th century. His Memoirs are a de- tailed record of that attempt. Judging from them no one officially involved ex- perienced more frustration, nor had a rec- ord of a greater gap between effort and effect. With a few well-publicized excep- tions (which the author hints might have come about without his advocacy), this is a catalogue of ignored recommen- dations, abandoned initiatives, and contin- ual failures with which the recent history of American diplomacy is so amply lit- tered. Except for Kennan’s self-portrait THE NATION/December 11, 1967 r if HF : f i i } a am me i} Was ach ] fill wit bee call } tual Digg tha ligh the, Son 4 | tell Pe In | lack con sho, wth 4 Ken Tk ms of dignified, intelligent and imaginative | F sistence in the face of massive inertia, | this book is, in no sense, an edifying document. It should, however, not only be read but carefully studied by anyone who still believes that a comprehending, sophisticated and flexible foreign policy | can emerge through the existing institu- | tions of the United States Government. ‘ This observation is not based on any _ overall agreement with the substance of Kennan’s advocacies; it is fully justified “solely on the presumably accurate ac- _ count of the manner in which his recom- “Mendations were received and considered. | For most of what he wrote—even in the ) high phase of his influence under Mar- | shall and Acheson—was not read by any- | One of consequence. Even he emphasizes _ that the success of his long communica- @ tion from Moscow, which decisively al- | tered his career and catapulted him into the stratosphere of the State Department, ' was largely a matter of accidental timing and bureaucratic happenstance. One anticipates that distillations from experiences such as this, however melan- choly the recollections, will be rare _ treasures. Accordingly, I received this | book with great expectations. I have been a Kennan fan for a long time and learned much from his earlier works. @ This one looked like the grand summa- ' tion. After all, Kennan is an extraor- _ dinary and extraordinarily able man, one Wy of the rare figures who survived the _ Tapid transition from the old to the new | diplomacy, who is an authentic gen- | eralist and intellectual engagé, whose ® broad sensitivities continually inform his | persistent, gnarled intelligence, whose allegiance is to realistic principles rather than flamboyant causes and who, al- most alone in our diplomatic establish- ' ment, held that a breach of proprieties | was as consequential as a failure to achieve an objective. The great expectations were not ful- filied. This book suffers by comparison _with the earlier, shorter treatises largely because of a lack of identity. Kennan calls it an “intellectual biography.” Ac- ' tually it is a mixture of intimate remi- ‘miscences and high diplomatic history that seldom happily mesh; the political light is frequently even dissipated by _ the, at best, tangentially relevant per- sonal foliage. (In an attempt to impose a unity that just isn’t there, Kennan tells us, for example, that an awkward ‘experience with a drunken Congressman in the Kremlin confirmed him in his lack of enthusiasm for people-to-people contacts in international relations.) It should also be noted that, though the style is invariably felicitous, the whole is simply overwritten. Worst of all, perhaps, is that Kennan has fallen prey to the bugaboo “THE NATION/December 11, 1967 Re of: self-justification. The best case in point is the association of his name with the policy of containment following World War II. Only his bitterness about the American occupation policy and be- havior in Germany is matched by his rancor because of the positions attributed to him as a result of the famous X ar- ticle. Little in his whole tour of duty caused him more anguish. He does con- cede that some of the misunderstanding arose from confusions (he intended a localized and temporary containment), ambiguities (the containment was to be political, not military) and egregious omissions which he calls mysterious or inexplicable. As the article is not re- printed in the appendices, I dug it up in a library and reread it carefully. Leaving aside the postwar mood (which certainly made for misunder- standing), I must say that the thrust and language is such that the popular reaction to what was written—whatever may have been intended—is not inac- curate. It is true that Kennan advocated a tactic not a doctrine. But it is also true that it is inexcusable for a highly articulate diplomat, writing on a very sensitive subject for a major political organ, not to make himself abundantly clear. If Kennan was misinterpreted it was mainly because he allowed himself to be uncharacteristically fuzzy. In this work Kennan is not at all un- clear about two of his old and favorite themes. One is his implacable opposition to the blight of legalism in American diplomacy and the universalist tone it lends to policy statements. The “love for pretentious generality’ which Ken- nan takes to be an integral part of the legal mind is considered by him to have created as much mischief as any other factor in foreign affairs. He scores again and again what he calls “the congenital American aversion to regional approaches and the yearning for universal ones” and the reluctance to take “specific decisions on. specific problems” instead of going off on theoretical binges. Though he favored our aid to Greece under the Truman Doctrine, the language of the statement infuriated him. Instead of say- ing that we were coming to the aid of Greece under certain conditions, Truman proclaimed a universal obligation to re- sist Communist encroachment every- where that, if taken as binding, could draw us into situations that were not “in our interests or within our means.” In Kennan’s view this sweeping tend- ency leads to measureless dangers. As a man who is sensitive to style he also deplores it because it debases public utterances and produces the “arid legal- ism and semantic pretentiousness that so often passes . . . for statesmanship.” The hostility to this approach should not be interpreted as a disdain for political theory; few men love it more than Kennan. It is a singular opposition to the use of fatuous slogans and formulas to cover the complex and. changing realities with which diplomats must deal. Kennan is, after all, a practical man and is saying only that the sophisti- cation of approach in international re- lations must match the character of the reality. Above all he insists that inter- national life is something organic, not mechanical, and that the diplomat is an artist, not a legal technician. Accordingly he has little enthusiasm for the United Nations, the legal basis of which, he claims, tends to favor, those who benefit from the status quo and dis- advantage those who want change. Since law is too rigid to accommodate organic change, the diplomat should not be en- cumbered by many rules and precedents but allowed a generous amount of dis- cretion. One should recall, however, that this is a long-standing theme in Ken- nan’s work, and be humbled that a powerful mind has been obliged to argue so long a time for the self- evident. Kennan’s second hobbyhorse is his near worship for the professional and his disdain for the amateur. The mark of the amateur is a fatal and unforgiv- THE CENTENNIAL REVIEW voL. XI, No. 4 FALL 1967 LADISLAS SEGY Geometric Art and Aspects of Reality: A Phenomenological Approach F. 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BSECERRTRR EERE RRERECC EER ER EERSTE eee Cutty Wren Records 108 Grand Street White Plains, N.Y. 10601 Please send albums of NO MORE WAR. I enclose check for $ Name PREITES Stars. 40 U0) yaaa Cag Rea ci) FARA tate 636 Ve F ‘ * ‘ : : % ; ’ \ able tendency to play to the gallery in- stead of coming to grips with a situation directly and dispassionately. The former results only in cheap verbal victories or “histrionic futility.” The “striking of atti- tudes before the mirror of domestic pub- lic opinion” is deplored as a sign of the self-consciousness and introversion that frequently have plagued American di- plomacy. As Kennan argues elsewhere, the only remedy for ineffectual posing is a more extensive use of the principle of professionalism in foreign affairs. Pre- sumably this would ameliorate some of the effects of the “vast, turgid, self- centered and highly emotional process of decision making” in Washington. Kennan is undoubtedly correct about the unfortunate results of the diplomat’s taking on the role of an actor. But there is something ingenuous about his criti- cism. American foreign policy is set, after all, by national administrations that must seek and retain the approval of the people. The State Department is un- avoidably influenced by and, sooner or later, subject to this check. If the effects of the cruder forms of public opinion or sentiment are pernicious in delicate international dealings (and with the re- minder of Tocqueville’s claim that the people rule in America as God does in the universe), one is forced to ask what Kennan expected. At one of the few points where he does not skirt the margins of the genuinely controversial, Kennan raises and gives his answer to the fundamental question behind most of his specific indictments. He asks “wheth- er a government so constituted should deceive itself into believing that it is capable of conducting a mature, con- sistent and discriminating foreign policy. Increasingly, with the years, my answer would tend to be in the negative.” Ob- viously, there was a time when Kennan expected much more. THEATRE HAROLD CLURMAN I regret not having seen Tyrone Guthrie’s staging of The House of Atreus because from all reports it was a meaningful as well as an exciting experience. I say this because I have yet to see the production of a Greek tragedy in English which was not a little absurd. On two occasions—one of them at Epidaurus—I benefited by the pathos of distance: ignorance of the language in which the plays were spoken and the distance caused by the great space separating me from the stage. Despite the disparateness of the various translations, IT am nearl vs moved by reading the Greeks in English, but | am rarely convinced on seeing one of their plays that I am witnessing anything better than a more or less estimable exercise. Iphigenia in Aulis, directed by Michael Cacoyannis in an English version by Minos Volanakis (Circle in the Square) — and unanimously praised, seems to me no exception. j Though Volanakis’ translation posses- ses a straightforward dignity, I could ~ understand no more than half of the — lines assigned to the chorus. It struck | me, moreover, as a company of high | school girls weaving about in what are — | presumably pretty patterns of no clear © meaning and, for the most part, totally without dramatic impact. We all know or, more correctly, we have all read, © that the chorus of Greek tragedy moved — | in dancelike description, but such move- ments must have had some relevance to the play’s basic argument or signifi- cance; if not they, must have been as 7) as what we now emptily ornamental behold. The actors in the Cacoyannis pro-— duction twist, turn and twirl because, | the theatre being in the round (oblong, to be more exact), everyone in the audience must be given a chance to see — their faces as often as their backs. But | their gyrations struck me as senseless} | ih Square: why should it be so for Greek | in every other respect. This is not inevitable on a circular or square stage surrounded on three sides by spectators. I was not aware of such distractions in other productions at the Circle in the drama? Individually, the cast of the new — Iphigenia is very well chosen. The men | (Mitchell Ryan as Agamemnon, Alan — Mixon as Menelaus, Christopher Walken as Achilles) are all handsome, virile- — looking actors, with fine bodies and — powerful voices. One hears everything they say distinctly, though I must add that while their resonance is gratifying their vocal register is limited. They speak on a reduced scale of notes, and being young they might all do further work to remedy this defect. Jenny Leigh is an appealing actress of promise and Irene Pappas, who plays Clytemnestra, besides being a woman of splendid physique, impressive force and a strikingly beautiful “mask,”’ makes good sense of her lines. But speaking of masks, one en- counters a problem. Greek drama, I am inclined to think, requires the use of masks not because the great size of the amphitheatres in which the plays were first performed aided visibility but because there is something superhuman, - beyond the common phenomena of earthly life, in the very conception and writing of these plays. (In terms of JHE NATION/ December 11, 1967 4 ” Euripides’ — : ait i tt anc AD des re Nec bin mundane reality most of the Greek tragedies are ridiculous.) For con- “temporary purposes masks are perhaps “Rot mandatory but a masklike feeling || OF appearance, something to raise the actor above workaday realism, is _ essential. The three men in the Cacoyannis “production vociferate a great deal, which helps to give their figures a certain much | needed largeness of dimension, but |) Irene Pappas who acts more “humanly” I) by that very circumstance seems to |) diminish her role and the play’s legend- ary scope. She is too much a “real” ) Mother and can’t be that to a truly | effective or touching degree because the ) play’s style and form defeat the > “natural.” |) This despite the fact that Euripides | is the most modern of Greek drama- “tists, the one whose “realism” and intro- duction of what we today call psychol- ogy in the theatre made him an object / of mockery to certain Greeks of his |, time and the béte noire of Nietzsche @ in his masterful though perhaps ‘“mis- @ taken” account of The Birth of Tragedy. | For all his “intimacy,” in comparison _ with his dramatic forebears, Euripides is still thoroughly Greek, a classic in _ distress and very nearly in breakdown into latter-day protest and pathos. | | : | , The “psychology” in Iphigenia in i I I Aulis is especially perceptible in the person of Agamemnon. He is accused of being hungry for power—as he very well may be—and he is caught in the 1. toils of fate, which in this case means sm that he must yield to the pressure of his | army which insists that he sacrifice his daughter, Iphigenia, so that it may "i advance in battle on Troy; he suffers a | father’s sorrow because of what he feels | | compelled to do, and is justified by 4 Iphigenia herself, who sees in her father’s action and her own death by | his hand a triumph of a supreme value: | the triumph of Greece. Thus we have | elements of social motivation (and | critical indignation), personal pain and ; patriotic fervor, commingled and very lf nearly at war with one another. This | ; | ete cert ie disturbed synthesis was precisely the innovation in Euripides, regarded as a decline by many of his contemporaries, as well as by certain living scholars and aesthetes, but a mixture which brings him closer to most of us. Stull, I repeat, for all his inner struggle with the religion of his state, Euripides remains Greek to the core. What exactly do I mean by this; what ‘trait ties him to his tradition? In Greek ‘tragedy everything is paid for. All action is honorable and, in one way or another, doomed. The most terrible destiny is necessary and by that very necessity redeemed. Beethoven asked ' himself, “Must it be so?” and answered, “Yes, it must be so.” So it was for the r te i a i. t a he [ ie “THE NATION/December 11, 1967 ii ae 1% Greeks, and for all his urge to deny it, Euripides in Iphigenia in Aulis accepts tragic destiny and pronounces it glorious. San Francisco Mime Robert Hatch The San Francisco Mime Troupe opened a three-week New York stand on Thanksgiving Day, playing in the new loft home of the Film-makers Cinematheque on Wooster Street. The piece they chose from their repertory to show on the lower East Side was Goldoni’s L’Amant Militaire, a com- media dell’arte chestnut that, set in Italy during a time of Spanish “pacifica- tion,” lends itself well to the troupe’s satiric improvisations. This handsome, impertinent young company has drilled and polished itself with a diligence it would never have endured from its elders (one gathers trom the context that the mimers see 50 as that incredibly remote age when body and mind crumble into senility). They sing, dance, strut, rant and defy the crummy gods with a disciplined ex- uberance that sweeps an audience into their power. Their costumes (the men in half-masks) are flamboyant, the backdrops to the platform on which they gambol are stylized to a witty, pretty simplicity, the production is flung on stage with the chaotic efficiency of a good tumbling act. You feel convinced that the mountebanks have come to the fair, which is the idea. Only the diction needs grooming—it is no good being outrageous in a variety of ludicrous accents if what you say is half lost in the hubbub. It is also a question just how out- rageous the Mime Troupe’s contempo- rary interpolations now sound. The times, I felt, have been sneaking up on them. The political dialogue of the general community has itself turned rancid and, at least within the audience the San Francisco players can hope to attract, the nation’s leaders are seldom mentioned without the ritual applica- tion of abusive adjectives. The Mime Troupe has a reputation for running afoul of the legionnaires and the watch and warders wherever it plays, but it sounded to me more naughty than wicked. Perhaps what the company needs is a script writer old enough to fight dirty. These young men and women are no doubt intent on raising hell, but they get so quickly caught up in celebrating the joy of life that their bite has no poison. 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TN1I | | I | I | | Name | | | | | | l L TELEVISION/John Horn Surveys of Americans as consumers are almost as plentiful as advertisers in our consumption-based economy, but sur- veys cataloguing benefits the public has derived from the “greatest and freest press in the world” and “man’s greatest medium of communications,” to quote the familiar self-praise of American newspaper publishers and network presidents, are few and far between. One such was conducted last Jan- uary by Opinion Research Corporation of Princeton, N.J., for C.B.S. News. It was based on the network’s “National Current Events Test,’ and produced results that were shocking when placed alongside other survey findings that most Americans today use television as their primary source of news. Some of the results: 73 per cent of those questioned failed the current-events test; 54 per cent were wrong on ques- tions about United States involvement ART WOULD YOU BELIEVE? 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When order- ing, please give title, author and publisher. 12-11-67 | EBT BeBe BEE BEART Ae ERED AS RS EE TBE EAT 638 in Vietnam; 61 per cent guessed wrong about Laos’s neutrality; 64 per cent thought captured U.S. fliers had been tried by Hanoi as war criminals; 69 per cent believed that Premier Ky of South Vietnam first assumed office by election; 53 per cent thought the Red Guards were demonstrating to overthrow Mao Tse-tung. “The survey,” C.B.S. stated, “indicated that the general public, age 18 and older, has a low understanding and knowledge of current events.” Now another valuation that has come to light suggests that the mass media, and particularly television, fail at their supposed function of informing. It is a recent thesis by Thomas H. Allen, a West Virginia University graduate student who last June interviewed per- sons representing 100 households in what he described as the worst sections of the Pittsburgh Negro ghetto. The median education was 8.2 years, aver- age income $2,800 and male unemploy- ment 19 per cent. If the sample seems small, it is nevertheless formidable by A. C. Niel- sen standards: 100 Negroes are per- haps two dozen fewer than those rep- resenting all Negroes in the entire United States in the Nielsen national television sample of 1,200 homes. Every household in the Allen survey had at least one television and one ra- dio set. Only 14 per cent subscribed to a daily newspaper, 60 per cent to a Sunday paper and 13 per cent to a Negro weekly. They read only a small part of the papers: “styles” and “sales” were what they read most. Forty-two per cent received at least. one maga- zine. Ebony was the most popular; oth- ers mentioned were True Detective, True Story, Secret and Modern Ro- mance. There were two subscribers to Look, one to Reader’s Digest, none to Life, Time or Newsweek. Eighty-six per cent watched the television news some time between 5 and 7 P.M. every night. Evidence was clear, Allen said, that the Pittsburgh ghetto resident depended almost entirely on the TV _ evening newscast for national or international news. Yet interviews displayed wide- spread ignorance about such contem- porary commonplaces as the location of Vietnam and the Suez Canal (the Arab-Israeli war had broken out just before the survey), and the identity of such news makers as Charles Per- cy and Ronald Reagan. Allen concluded that the mass media do little to stabilize ghetto society. Through emphasis on advertising and intensification of unattainable desires for material goods, they may even u * serve as an. indirect cause of social d content and violence. He noted that Sukarno praised some Hollywood exec- utives in 1956 for stimulating postwar revolutions in Asia _ by Asians—via films showing fine clothes, automobiles and refrigerators—that they had been deprived of their birthright. This unsettling effect on the ghetto may have gathered violent momentum when the Negro rioter saw himself in the headlines or TV newscasts, the dis- order being fed by the journalistic tra- ’ | dition that gives special attention to violence or the threat of it. The Allen thesis was brought to my attention by William B. Monroe, N.B.C. News director in Washington, who re- ferred to it recently race and news media, scoring several self-critical points himself. “News media people,” Monroe said, “need to educate themselves more deep- ly about the Negro revolution, the white resistance and the possibilities of ‘ communication between the races. Sec- ond, we need more reporting, and dif- ferent reporting, about Negroes... . We have plenty of reporting about Ne- groes as Negroes, in other words, as members of a race. We need more re- porting about them as people. ... “We need more reporting, and dif- ferent reporting, about whites. Whites get their news from white-controlled media. These media have usually dealt with Negroes as Negroes, as members of a race. But they have seldom dealt with whites as whites, as members of a race. To a decent white editor, who doesn’t regard himself as prejudiced, it comes natural to look on Negroes as Negroes and to regard white people as people. It’s a case of the blind leading the blind. [An editor] two years ago said he believed in depth reporting based on the assumption that white people were not so much prejudiced as they were- unaware of the Negro, his life and problems, But I have the im- pression that somebody is _ prejudiced, and I don’t think it’s only the cop on the beat. We need more reporting about prejudice. We need the help of psychia- trists, psychologists and social scientists to get at it. We need to talk about things we don’t like to talk about, things we hate to talk about, things we angrily deny exist. “I have wondered sometimes why this whole racial business is discussed in this country with such unrelieved grimness, with such pessimism, hope- lessness, with such foreboding. I sus- pect it’s because we all dimly under- stand that we’ve been piddling around with superficial treatment to relieve our symptoms, but we have not yet really begun the operation to cut out the can- cer.” convincing — in a talk on — | | THE NATION/December 11, 1967 © a FRANK W. LEWIS ro eee pagans ACROSS: 1 Taken off the job, runs to make pre- cautionary interruptions of one class or another. (4,6) 6 Propaganda is extremely useful if you get in deep around Malaya. (4) 10 When people are by 1 across, they’re really not frightened—only alerted to possible danger. (7) 11 and 14 down Putting things that beat to- gether in conversation? (5-2-5,4) 12 They’ re sometimes hard to catch in a downpour. (4) 13 Certainly not disagreeable to purpose, that is, to point inside the religious com- munity. (10) 15 Feeling of this was one of the things not _akin. to Longfellow’s pain. (7) 16 Short for this type of facsimile. (7) 17 Reacted differently and offered a certain “amount of amusement. (7) 20 Gets up a diffierent alternative to cus- toms. (7) 22 They evidence artistic handling of mat- ter sent with some difficulty. (10) 23 Press material for old-fashioned 25? (4) 25 Stop back for the equivalent. (7) | 26 and 3 down Is the point so made, made y the hard way? (The-end of the run is sudden if you do.) (4,2,1,4) 27 An American pull-back? (4) 28 Great savings institutions imply a lot -of net results here. (5,5) DOWN: 1 One is supposedly taught to stand up for THE NATION/December 11, 1967 | Crossword Puzzle No. 1227 Meer re ee oo a ae saan bal eee | tet iti e Ela ld i PA eet Poo his work. (7,5,3) Ties directly on this, perhaps, but there’s time to get dressed around it. (7) See 26 across, You’re probably well covered here, and soon rid of it, (7) The harbor, in its own manner of speaking. (2,5) 7 Make an application again to retire? (7) 8 It implies just one day of rest after an- other—somewhat like several weeks’ vacation. (1,5,2,7) 9 The most important part of the joint of Frangoise d’Aubigné? (9) 14 See 11 across. 18 Is what some people pay for lodgings not brought up around the state capital? (7) 19 The pen name of Sir Reed? (7) 20 A worker might find being one a strain. (7) 21 A noble cut indeed, though the sound of the title is really meant to be just above. (7) 24 No parting without it, or at least parting is difficult. (4) SOLUTION. TO PUZZLE NO. 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Soe, Rae See eee Pap $2 ee Mae os Fo . Sign Gift Card from .............= Name Ss PUMA CSS ooo ae Sacco noel eee et olan n sence nncens van hk Ree Dee pepe ae tee noc ee Somes ke Se — City OE a wcaco tar A 7p Ee MN Fh a a Sign Gift Card from ............. sessengeeesscesecenensee Your Own Name ......... slot —_ Se ee ae Address ms se sie bi ceed RN So A epee ee State a Se 2 AWD BBD HDD MDP DMD DH DDB De Bebe sD WW II BPD DIBBA D BD HWW BD WH Ws i PUD Di Bi De IA IA De me GAN oO WOO ' NOTES ON RODIN JOHN BERGER ATION DECEMBER 18, 1967 35 cents THE WAR ON CAMPUS Untangling the Alliances GABRIEL KOLKO Preparation for Dow Day H JOHN L. SHOVER Scholars @ Soldiers: A Crisis \ of Values MARSHALL WINDMILLER Mr. Leavitt Comes to Harvard i GEORGE ROSS { National Rally : 2 2 for Student Power JAMES BRANN J 7 THE END OF THE YEAR coor Editor’s Non-Definitive Booklist | AO— i ba % Books by NATION Contributors i LETTERS the power of facts New York City Dear Sirs: Among other things, Oliver Lee’s article, “The Myth of Chinese Aggression” [The Nation, Nov. 6] reveals the internal, civil character of the original Korean con- flict and underscores the possibility that Syngman Rhee’s regime, with the connivance of Dulles, initiated the war by a provocative attack on the North. It may be useful to add that a study sponsored by the U.S. Air Force and the RAND Corporation (China Crosses the Yalu, by Allen S. Whiting) demonstrates that virtually all the evidence, in- cluding the contemporaneous demobilization of the Chinese army and the confusion of the Chinese press after the story broke, shows that the Chinese did not anticipate the war. The strategically defensive and conservative nature of their involvement is luminously clear. What is also becoming clear, thanks in part to such arti- cles as Walter LaFeber’s “America’s Long Dream in Asia” [The Nation, Nov. 6] is the long-term, unlimited expansion- ism of the United States... . The best short exposition of the economic origins of “our” foreign policy is Harry Mag- doff’s Monthly Review pamphlet, “Economic Aspects of U.S. Imperialism.” The renewal of interest in imperialism, and the economic aspects thereof, among serious American students is a tribute to the power of facts to prevail against fashion, even well-subsidized fashion. . . .Lynda.N. Shaffer East Asian Institute, Columbia University soldier's view Miami, Fla. : Dear Stirs: Vice President Humphrey has said that the critics of the war in Vietnam are pessimists. I agree. Any- One who isn’t pessimistic has got to be insane. For us to win this war upon the Vietnamese people would be a tragedy, and to lose it would be unfortunate. The only way one could possibly be optimistic about it would be to expect that we will abandon our efforts there and withdraw. I can see nothing to indicate such a change in policy. Reynolds Moody, Lt. Col. USMC (Ret.) Morton the switch Santa Barbara, Calif. Dear Sirs: Your enchantment with Sen. Thruston Morton is curious indeed [Morton The Realist,” Oct. 16]. “Morton is respected by politicians of both parties for expertise and integrity.” . Obviously you share this esti- mate. Yet you admit that Morton is concerned that John- son may switch too and snatch the election victory from the jaws of defeat. Vietnam? Peace? Morality? Humanity? To win the election is the name of the game... . Your homage to “a limited but effective logic in the two-party system and political realism” is unworthy of The Nation and distressing to this reader. Theodore Schoenman generous readers Roxbury, Mass. Dear Sirs: Thank you very much for publishing our appeal to aid the starving Negroes in Mississippi [letter, Nov. 13]. Contributions from your readers have added considerably to our fund, and will enable us to provide food stamps for needy Negro families in Mississippi. On behalf of these families and Boston CORE, I extend my thanks to The Nation and its readers. John Young, Chairman, Boston CORE 642 EDITORIALS Many Thanks, General Gen. Lewis B. Hershey, becoming uneasy about re i sistance to the draft on college campuses, went to the Ihe White House and obtained consent for the drafting of) }0} a letter to Selective Service boards around the countr p jot advising the swift induction of student protesters wha {te interfere with the operation of the Selective Service ma= j whe chinery by sitting-in at draft boards or induction centers, app or by willfully getting in the way of Army recruiters. ju Although the letter did not mention students, it was jl clearly directed at them, since there is at present no {dis other more or less homogeneous body of activist pro-) testers. There was only one reference to demonstrations; {Rep clearly, Hershey, did not wish to outlaw anti-war demon-)| bi strations as such—or did not have the temerity to try it. 7 |W The dimensions of the anti-Hershey reaction are im | Lou pressive. The American Civil Liberties Union challenged) the him with three actions at law. Both Students for a Demo- iil cratic Society and the National Student Association)) ! brought suit. Student newspapers were in full cry; pro= +] pe fessors wired individual protests. Recruiting facilities )| No were denied at Columbia University, and at Stanford) } toh Pres. Wallace Sterling announced that “so long as the | he Hershey directive remains in effect” recruiting would ) my be banned on that campus. The normally moderate. } shi president of Yale, Kingman Brewster, Jr., who had re- | buked the university chaplain for his activities against the > draft, termed Hershey’s position an “absolutely outrageous | iV usurpation of power.” The academic dander was up. | Among politicians, reaction was equally forcible, with | ) only an occasional voice, like that of the national com- jh mander of the American Legion, raised in Hershey’s de- ie fense. Senator Javits denounced the move as “absolutely |“ wrong.” Rep. John Moss, one of the few Congressme || who work insistently for freedom of information in the |™ government, demanded Hershey’s resignation. In a shrewd move calculated to bring maximum embarrassment on | the Administration, Sen. Philip Hart, a Democrat, called | for “prompt” opinion from the Attorney General as to |. the legality of the Hershey proposal. |, In view of the lawsuits directed against Hershey, Su- |) preme Court Justice Abe Fortas’ comment at Colgate University was perhaps ill advised, but it left no doubt |! as to where the Justice stood. He was quoted as saying |) that Hershey was “a law unto himself” and one who i “responds only to his own conversation.” | Hershey’s proposal would have drawn protests under /|| any circumstances, but the heat of the reaction can be | accounted for, in part, by a widespread uneasiness about } interference with civil liberties arising from the most | frustrating war ever undertaken by the United States. There is a feeling, also, that anything an official in Her- } shey’s position says in condemnation of draft protesters” is bound to have a multiplier effect on local draft boards. Many are itching to crack down on demon-_ strators, legal or illegal. To the same effect, there has. been considerable harassment of students by the FBI. El Gaucho, the student newspaper of the University o THE NATION/ December 18, 1967 ia at Santa Barbara, reported in its November 120 issue that at least eight local students, six of them from }UCSB, had been questioned by FBI agents concerning (their non-possession of draft cards. The story mentioned jscattered reports of arrests in other parts of the country. h ij The most significant part of the furor, however, and ‘the one in which General Hershey has undercut his own porganization, is the damage done to the basic concept bf conscription. It has few remaining friends except in )the veterans’ organizations. Businessmen are handicapped when they wish to hire draft vulnerable applicants. The | applicants are at even greater disadvantage. College and i UNiversity administrators are annoyed. Middle-class families, including those who support the war in Vietnam, i dislike having their own sons drafted. ig) GOP politicians sense a popular issue. A group of @ Republican Congressmen has written a book on How To nd the Draft that makes excellent sense. Future wars are likely to be of the guerrilla type, which can be fought more effectively by professional soldiers, or so the argument runs. As for a nuclear exchange, soldiers will have little to do except die with the civilians. _ A striking harbinger of the demise of the draft, | probably at the hands of the Congress to be elected next i November, is Nixon’s endorsement of the concept of a ij volunteer professional army. In his usual slippery way, i he would postpone any change until after the Viet- |mamese War, but when Nixon prepares to abandon a 7. ship it must truly be sinking. a | i ‘what's Your Plan?’ | | a [ _ The Johnson Administration has played a dishonest ® but effective game with those of its Vietnam critics whom # it has deigned to notice. When asked. what it purposes to | do about ending the war, it retreats into the never-never 4) world of its eagerness to negotiate, or implies that con- # tacts with North Vietnam and even the National Libera- @ tion Front are being sought, or shuts off inquiry with # the assertion that “it would be inadvisable to say more jj at this time.” Or it asks, with wide-eyed innocence: ! “What would you have us do? What is your plan?” This § smug tiposte comes from an Administration that has a | thousand cable and radio circuits at its finger tips, that | has countless representatives abroad, that is saturated | with information—and secure in the means of withholding | it. But, as with all games, there is a counter-strategy. # Sen. Eugene McCarthy has come up with one rebuttal '—he wants the Johnson Administration to reveal its plan, if it has one. In fact the Johnson cabal does have "a plan—only it is not for ending the war but for con- # tinuing it. Dean Acheson, a top Johnson adviser, made | this perfectly clear in a TV discussion with some college students on December 3: “When the Communists feel that this effort [in Vietnam] has not succeeded, they will stop the effort. But if they get to talking with us, then we # get on this eternal flypaper, in which half the United | States will be negotiating for them.” There are other reasons why the United States is not Jikely to go to that negotiating table which it pictures as its goal. Dean Rusk is a persuasive advocate—if one THE NATION/ December 18, 1967 IN THIS ISSUE December 18, 1967 EDITORIALS 642 ARTICLES The War on Campus: 645 Untangling the Alliances Gabriel Kolko 648 Preparation for Dow Day John L. Shover 651 Scholars and Soldiers... A Crisis of Values Marshall Windmiller 654 Mr. Leavitt Comes to Harvard George Ross 658 National Rally for Student Power James Brann BOOKS & THE ARTS 661 Notes for an Essay on Rodin John Berger 663 The 1967 Non-Definitive List Helen Yglesias 665 Books by Nation Contributors 667 Art Max Kozloff 669 Theatre 671 Crossword Puzzle Harold Clurman Frank W. Lewis Publisher Associate Publisher JAMES J. STORROW JR. GIFFORD PHILLIPS Editor Associate Editor CAREY McWILLIAMS PHIL KERBY Executive Editor ROBERT HATCH Literary Editor HELEN YGLESIAS Copy Editor, MARION HESS; Poetry Editor, MICHAEL GOLD- MAN; Theatre, HAROLD CLURMAN; Art, MAX KOZLOFF; Music, BENJAMIN BORETZ; Science, CARL DREHER; Ad- vertising Manager, MARY SIMON. Washington, ROBERT G. SHERRILL; Paris, ALEXANDER WERTH; London, RAYMOND WILLIAMS; Bonn, C. AMERY; Canberra, C. P. FITZGERALD; United Nations, ANNE TUCKERMAN. The Nation is published weekly (except biweekly in July and August) by the Nation Magazine Company and copyright 1967 in the U.S.A. by the Nation Associates, Inc., 388 Sixth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10014, Tel.: CH 2-8400. West Coast office: 1256 Westwood Boulevard, Los Angeles, Calif. 90024. Tel.: GR 4-2583. Second class postage paid at New York, N. Y. and at additional mailing office. Subscription Price: One year, $10; two years, $18. Foreign and Canadian postage: $1 extra per year. Change of Address: It is essential that subscribers ordering a change of address give four weeks’ notice and. provide their old as well as their new address. Please give Zip Code numbers for both addresses. Information te Libraries: The Nation is indexed in Readers Guide to Periodical Literature, Book Review Digest, Book Review Index and the Public Affairs Information Service. NATION '"” Combined with FRONTIER 643 knows little of the actualities—for the publicized Ameri- can position. He has learned by rote certain phrases which have the ring of authenticity but are completely lacking in substance. He would collapse if, by some miscarriage, he actually found himself at the bargaining table. There he would have to think, and thinking is what he has not done for years. But if the Johnson Administration has no plan for peace, such plans do exist. One has been written for Le Monde (and reprinted by Atlas) by Philippe Devillers, an old Indo-China hand. He points out that the National Liberation Front program published during the September elections opens the way to peace—if peace is wanted. Reunification, the program states, is to be carried out “gradually by peaceful means, by negotiations between the two zones.” It promises to respect private property, along with private initiative and political, economic and religious freedom. The problem is not to create a Socialist state in the South but to assure independence, reconstruction and prosperity. It proposes to form “a democratic government of national union bringing together . . . all the forces that have contributed to national liberation.” (There, of course, is the rub. This provision would bar the quislings and rogues who constitute the government of South Viet- nam that is supported by the United States.) Devillers says that this Front program “offers the greatest oppor- tunity for an honorable peace since the beginning of American intervention.” Another peace plan is that of Paul Martin, Canada’s Secretary of State for External Affairs, which has been endorsed by Sevellon Brown, editor-publisher of the Providence Journal and by a group of Brown University professors. Martin proposes a number of steps, the first being some degree of physical disengagement, as for instance by re-establishing the demilitarized zone. Then military activity on both sides would be “frozen” at its present level—a more difficult determination, it would seem, than the third step, which involves cessation of all military activity, in accordance with the cease-fire pro- visions of the Geneva settlement, repatriation of prisoners, withdrawal of outside forces, etc. There are other plans—Galbraith’s and Gavin’s, for instance. The point is not that any of the plans is with- out weaknesses, If a plan did approach perfection, it would still not work without the will on both sides to seek peace. All the evidence tends to the conclusion that peace is not the objective of the Johnson Administration, except under conditions that would be totally unaccept- Attention! CAMPUS AND STUDENT ORGANIZATIONS Copies of this special issue can be obtained at the following bulk-order rates: 100 copies, $25; 200 copies, $40; S500 copies, $75—plus shipping charges. Checks or money orders must accompany orders; shipping charges will be billed separately. Write or wire: Paul Russell, The Nation, 333 Sixth Ave., New York, N.Y. 10014. ; , . ‘; zi _ an unsinkable aircraft carrier, accounting for some 80 | able to both the NLF end Feces The primary ss: is for the U.S. peace forces to spike these pretensions, 2 to force open discussion of the plans that do exist. Inconvenient Truth Under date of December 3, the Associated Press re~ {i ports from Bangkok that the Thai Government is ag-) jj, grieved at “certain sections” of the American press, The) jp, Washington Post, the Washington Star, The New York een Times and The Nation in particular. These publications },,, have written what the Thai Government alleges to be” Ih “malicious and scandalous” articles, thereby dragging }p,; poor little Thailand into “the dirt of American politics.” | }p, Newspapers and magazines are not the only targets of | Thai officialdom; the foreign minister, Thanat Khoman, |, frequently lashes out at “misguided” American liberals and opponents of the Johnson Administration’s policy in) | Southeast Asia, his special target being Senator Fulbright.” |; The uneasiness of the Thai military dictatorship which is what it is, with a civilian and monarchic” facade—is likely to get worse. The interest of the Ameri- |, can press arises not from the beauty of Thai temples or }); Thai women but from the massive American military presence in the country. When the reporters look into } that, they necessarily inquire also into the whys and }, wherefores of Thai politics. Neither The Nation nor any of the other publications | the Thai Government resents is anti-Thai. What possible | ground could there be for such an attitude? The Nation | in particular is concerned that the Thai oligarchy, without } the knowledge of the Thai people, is selling their birth- | right to the American Government as at present con- | stituted. In effect, as Robert Buckhout pointed out in | the October 2 issue of The Nation, Thailand has become } per cent of the missions flown by USAF bombers against | targets in North Vietnam and Laos, and for B-52 mis- | sions to South Vietnam. More than $1 billion has been |) spent on the Sattahip-Utapao B-52 complex alone. The | Mr country is saturated with American military advisers, ex- | FBI men, CIA personnel, Green Berets, U.S. Informa- | tion Service propagandists and other auxiliaries of the } 40,000-man U.S. troop force. All these operators trumpet the virtues of the Thai Government which let them in | and which, if it ever decides to get rid of them, will find | y, that this sort of occupation moves on a one-way street. a The excuse for much of this activity is the guerrilla | ¢. movement in the seven northeast Thai provinces, which | have been under martial law for several years. As could |}, have been predicted, the American occupation has ex- |», acerbated and spread this uprising, which heretofore was } 1), feeble enough. The Thai Government has just imposed no martial law on five southern and central provinces, in- cluding one close to Bangkok. 1 | So the Thais are uncomfortable, and with good reason. } yj Traditionally they have preserved their independence by avoiding foreign entanglements. Now their government [,, has tied them to the American war juggernaut, which f,,, is hated by the intelligent and informed minority in the United States. Unless the Johnson Administration can fy be unseated and replaced by one committed to a more } THE NATION/ December 18, 1967 ged reign policy, Thai involvement will worsen. In os Angeles Times (the Thai bureaucrats should add ae Times to the list of U.S. publications they regard as Os stile), Jack Foisie points out that there are “substan- I” indications that at least the Sattahip-Utapao complex all remain in American hands indefinitely, probably nder some SEATO cover arrangement. Mr. Foisie, an yecasional Nation contributor, is neither pro- nor anti- rl ai; he is just a good reporter. If the Thai Government lwere less greedy for U.S. largess in the present, and had Nn acute sense of what the future holds, it would be grate- to the American publications that send reporters of Foisie’s type to Thailand, or that print stories like the one Robert Buckhout contributed to The Nation. || ty , ee ecember 2, 1967 _A day of famous deaths, an anniversary, and a begin- ling. A cold day, windy, full of high autumnal colors. In New York, the Church’s most bellicose priest died, and, jours later, the last trip of what was America’s most rompt and luxurious traveler, the Twentieth Century Limited, left Grand Central. In Chicago,’ Sen. Eugene I McCarthy gave his first campaign speech, a sporadically | eloquent, oddly fatigued invocation of noble losers, Steven- ® son, Hannibal and Captain Dreyfus. Several hours earlier, #6 miles south of the Loop, on the site of the Squash ‘GABRIEL KOLKO | Mr. Kolko is an associate professor of history at the Univer- ) sity of Pennsylvania. He is the author of The Triumph of | Conservatism (Free Press) among other books, and the forth- ‘coming The Politics of War (Random House). | Philadelphia The university has become the main arena for an anti- 'War movement that is now passing from dissent to re- sistance. The anger of frustration, the inchoate thrashing about for means to make profound opposition effective, | has in two brief months created dozens of Berkeleys -and Penns. The Defense Department, largely indifferent | toward the ritual gestures that characterized the peace | movement until now, has taken important measures to I Save its rapidly eroding connection to the American uni- 'Versity system, a relationship that took two decades and | billions of dollars to solidify. That it can save the asso- | ciation is now very much in doubt, especially if the ! anti-war movement intensifies its efforts and adjusts its | tactics to attain maximum impact. [See “Uneasy Alli- |, ance: Universities and the Pentagon” by Gabriel Kolko, The Nation, October 9.]| } | Massive faculty and student effort over the past two THE NATION/ December 18, 1967 Rackets Room under what had been the west stands of Stagg Field, the president of the University of Chicago, the widow of Enrico Fermi and the sculptor Henry Moore yanked at the tarpaulin draping the massive coppery bronze which was unveiled to mark the twenty-fifth anni- versary of Fermi’s baptismal announcement of the atomic age: “The reaction is self-sustaining. The curve is ex- ponential.” The commemorative scene might have been staged by Fellini. The guests sat under a peppermint awning, the wind threatened the ropes and flags, the Farragut High School Band squirted out Sousa marches. A little way off, cranes and earth movers stopped trenching the old foot- ball field for the piers of the new university library. SDS picketers festooned the ugly rectangles of the Fermi Institute and the crenellated concrete of the Quadrangles with injunctions to Get Out of IDA (the Institute of Defense Analysis). They'd been cheated of their proper target: LBJ, with the necessitous wisdom which keeps most heads of state off their own streets, had delivered his commemorative remarks by closed-circuit television. His huge face, oddly chiseled by the ferocious strains of baffled purpose, seemed an excessively newsy interruption of what was a day for memory, for humorous self- gratulation and a certain historic awe. The survivors of the nuclear navigator’s band were (Continued on page 660) THE WAR ON CAMPUS ntangling the Alliances years at the University of Pennsylvania resulted in the termination of the university’s chemical warfare research geared to Vietnam and by September had caused Penn to abandon every form of classified military research. At Cornell, implicated in the Penn affair through its Aero Lab (CAL), faculty opposition rose steeply when it was revealed that CAL had contracted for a counterin- surgency project in Thailand, to cost $1.5 million and scheduled to last up to five years. Cornell President James Perkins resigned from the CAL executive board, 645 and when the faculty senate, at the beginning of October, voted overwhelmingly to sever CAL from the university it assumed that the trustees would soon endorse the uni- versity’s wishes. Minnesota’s new president, Malcolm C. Moos, announced last September that he would call for an end to secret research, in part because military rules denied him knowledge of a classified campus project on the use of drugs for the interrogation of prisoners be- cause he lacked a security clearance. The project was canceled. Last spring, New York University moved to tighten restrictions on the acceptance of secret research, and failed to renew a chemical warfare study that might have run into student-faculty opposition. Stanford’s Committee on Research Policy urged at the beginning of October that the university ban all con- tracts whose identity or sponsorship could not be re- vealed, as well as social and behavioral science studies in foreign countries that required security clearances. The chairman acknowledged that his committee was out to eliminate all CIA and intelligence research, though in fact the new ruling will have little effect on the science departments. A national survey taken by The Wall Street Journal at the end of October concluded that a number of key schools were scaling down or abandoning secret research to prevent a repetition of the Penn and Cornell crises. But some were not to make the shift in time to avoid trouble. Columbia quietly transferred contracts in its Electron- ics Research Lab to a new organization with which it claims to have no affiliation, but on October 16, the local SDS revealed that an unclassified project in the In- stitute on East Central Europe was ClA-sponsored, a charge that the university immediately admitted. At Pittsburgh, the faculty had been considering a new policy when members revealed that various sections of the university were engaged in projects as diverse as ord- nance systems and chemical warfare against Vietnamese tunnels. Accordingly, a special faculty senate was con- voked at the beginning of December. Princeton, which technically refuses to permit classified research on cam- pus, was embarrassed on October 23, when thirty-one students blocked the entrance to the Institute for De- fense Analysis’ communications research building on prop- erty rented from Princeton. The dramatic confrontation, which led to the arrest of the students and unusual na- tional publicity, gave direction and content to the resist- ance theme of the Washington Mobilization of the prior weekend, but also opened the question of the IDA’s re- lation to the twelve universities, including Princeton, that own it. The Princeton facility, which has been publicly identified as working on code making and breaking for the National Security Agency, employs faculty members, as do IDA projects elsewhere dealing with the applica- tion of chemical warfare in Vietnam, strategic nuclear warfare and the like. Challenges to university participation in the IDA, most of whose $15 million budget comes from the Pentagon, have been initiated among students and faculty of other member institutions. But up to now the most important instance of oppo- sition to military research has arisen at the University of Michigan, whose $21.6 million in Pentagon contracts 640 Sener _$10 million for classified rosedpolee taritent it t thied nationally in 1966. On October 17 the Michigan Dail one of the best student papers in the nation, began four-part series documenting Michigan’s long-term Thai: land counterinsurgency contracts, missile research, and development of electronic warfare and infrared systems \h geared to the Vietnamese War. When the paper began detailing faculty exploitation of university-developed tech-) nology and facilities to create private companies worth millions of dollars, it became clear that key Michigan” administrators were eager to avoid public embarrassment’ |), and possible scandal. The Dean of Engineering now jj readily advocates that the Willow Run Lab, where most/ |p of the controversial work is done, be dissociated from the’ 1 university. On November 1, more than 300 students and}; faculty sat in at the administrative building and were politely addressed by leading university officials. There was no show of police force, and therefore no violence, |; and in the past weeks Michigan officials have been re- sponsively exploring ways to heed the demands of the : university community. It seems most likely that Be gan will follow the lead of Penn and Cornell. While the power and will to sever the military’s con- }jy tractual ties with the universities has been growing, a) q bloodier and more complex ‘issue—the appearance of re- },j cruiting agents from Dow Chemical, the CIA and the al various service branches on campus—has been torment- |. ing academic life. Scarcely an important university ~—_ i escaped some manifestation. Tal At Wisconsin, on October 18, police brutality avainal i 0 hundreds of students among some 3,000 demonstrators} resulted in seventy student injuries, paralyzed the life }fic of the school for days and led President Fred Harrington | jn to threaten that “the university has been firm, is firm, es and will be firm.” Harvard contented itself with placing }} m eighty-one undergraduates on probation and ‘ ‘admonish- } t ing” many more, but at Indiana the police arrested | n) thirty-seven students, i th dl The Dow-CIA issue is one of principle and tactics, , but also of justifiable passion and outrage that the Viet- |} namese War evokes among more and more young people J; whose values and very lives are threatened, if not this) year then next, by the defoliation chemicals, napalm and! terror which the Dow and military recruiters symbolize. , It would have been dismal had the sensibilities of stu--} dents been so dulled that they ignored the offensiveness: and challenge of the recruiters’ presence. This said, the Dow confrontations revealed as never’ before the intellectual and moral superficiality of all too)! many college administrators, and the tactical ineptitude fi of the student anti-war movement. The stands taken by’ administration spokesmen betrayed how few of them un-. Jj derstood the nature of the academy as something other’ than a service station for corporate and government( interests. “Civilized procedures” had been abandoned, Di Harvard’s Nathan Pusey commented in his predictably bland style, “to restrain the freedom of expression or’ movement of others.” “In the interest of free speech) and against unlawful assembly, I'm prepared to use: force,’ Harrington told the Wisconsin state Senate. THE NATION/ December 18, 1967’ hought control,” echoed Stanford’s provost, Richard > Lyman. Students and faculty should have been quipped to reply immediately to such civil libertarian leas on behalf of makers of flaming death or espionage, and it is unfortunate testimony to the paucity of thought Nat accompanies the flood of anti-war passion that the tudents did not meet the argument head on. Freedom in a university is the freedom of public ex- osition and dialogue, for anyone—anarchists or liqui- lationists of the innocent alike—and the anti-war move- ment must recognize that it will become the major vic- jtim should administrators permit exceptions to that rule. gut the freedom of the CIA or Dow in a university con- ists Only in its right to justify its function and advocate ts values in open forum, with words; it does not extend to the use of university facilities as the instrument for ad- vancing its objectives. It is this critical distinction that students and faculty should have immediately clarified. When Dow is invited to speak publicly it usually efuses, for Dow makes Saran Wrap, napalm and profit, ind ideas for their own sake are foreign to it. ® if the tension between the abstract principles of the Mj university and the actual deeds of the social order that Support it leads to drastic administrative compromises, administrators cannot complain when students and fac- up ulty reaffirm the humanist obligations and neutrality of Mi the university at embarrassing moments. The fault lies ! | with the administrators who ask Rusk and McNamara to _ honorary degrees, for these honorific gestures are Not in recognition of scholarly or humane qualities but ather acknowledge the control of authority which con- flicts with intellectual sensibilities—an intrusion of power | into the true freedom, and immediate material power- l f | essness, of ideas. What the protesters advocate is no /more than true academic freedom and disinterestedness rough total functional neutrality toward the foreign | policy of the existing federal government, an end to two | decades of compromise with the Defense Department. | Once a university administration permits Dow or, 4) much more important, the Pentagon to exploit it for non- } academic purposes, it can expect the response of its §} Critical constituencies to be non-academic, since they | have no formal, binding procedure for registering their wishes, and will not passively consent to polite impotence ) unless everyone is subject to the same restrictions. In the last analysis, the university community consists ex- | clusively of the scholars and the seekers after truth and | Knowledge who have certain rights and obligations only | in regard to one another. Academic freedom exists solely in this context, and so-called “freedoms” to hire on ‘campus or other service activities are tolerable only in- sofar as they do not distract from the larger essential ) functions. As long as students have the civil right to protest peacefully, as was recently reaffirmed by Federal District Court Judge James Doyle in connection with Visconsin students, disciplinary rules will not solve the } administrators’ problems. It is not for the students to be silent or obedient, but for the administrators to con- front their relationship to the military services in such ‘a manner as will permit the autonomy of the university THE NATION/ December 18, 1967 ot i > 2 to survive and the dialogue within the academy to con- tinue on the basis of ideas, not on the power of tear gas and the ability of military agencies to violate the ground Tules for true freedom and discourse. The price of such renovation is disengagement, but that goal is not apt to be obtained until those who oppose Dow and the military ethics which Dow symbolizes attach priorities to their objections. Dow, the CIA and the Pentagon seek to get their work done, and they can re- cruit quite as easily in hotels as on campus (the CIA has already chosen to make the shift where necessary). Dow and the military contractors have more candidates than ever before because draft exemptions go with their jobs, and this supply of graduates of inconsistent con- science—who favor direct violence for others but not for themselves—cannot be cut off. To the extent that anti-recruitment activities distract from the more per- manent and attainable goal of stopping military research on campus, students and faculty should minimize them. Here the clarity of anti-war student-faculty leadership, in recognizing what is both attainable and critical, can make the difference. At Michigan the Dow-type protests were secondary, but at Wisconsin, with its $1.4 million Army Mathematics Center and $1 million in Defense contracts, the activists skirted the truly vital issues. To the Defense Department the resistance to its contracts on campus poses a Vital threat to its “basic” research structure. “We can work around it but we certainly hope it’s not carried too far,” one Pentagon spokesman confessed several months ago. “It would be adverse to the national interest,” stated another. At the beginning of November the Pentagon’s head of research, John §S. Foster, told some university administrators that he would attempt to retain as much as possible of the Pentagon’s university-based research, On November 2, Foster issued the scarcely noticed statement that he was “taking steps to assure that in the future all basic research supported by the Depart- ment of Defense at universities will be unclassified.” Anti-military research critics have not hitherto ex- ploited this distinction between “basic” and “applied” research, with about $140 million going to the former. Even though Foster refused to reveal the dollar distri- bution of classified and unclassified “basic” research, he in effect made it possible for critics to claim that no classified research is “basic.” Since many universities justified acceptance of classified contracts only on the ground that the research was alleged to be fundamental, the Pentagon inadvertently undercut a major rationale for taking their money. Applied research, whether or not it is classified, is inherently non-academic and can be performed anywhere. Faculty opponents are likely to ask that the Pentagon identify all contracts as “basic” or “applied,” thus broadening their argument for rejecting Pentagon work altogether. Foster’s November statement also conceded that the Pentagon’s definition of “basic research” was “new knowledge . . . relevant to security’—a novel qualifica- tion since basic academic research has traditionally been considered pure scholarship, not necessarily relevant to 447 poe ae | \ | M 7 | anything. Foster’s interpretation, which one might have predicted from earlier frank Pentagon admissions that there was nothing disinterested in anything it paid for, now confronts the university still more implacably with the incongruity of its ideals and practices. Those hereto- fore untroubled by the controversy must now define a policy toward the Pentagon’s detailed statement. In fact, seeking to save existing Pentagon-university links, Fos- ter committed tactical errors of the first order. Since at least a large portion of Pentagon dollar allocations go to classified work—at Michigan it is nearly one-half—the issue will arise as to why _ universities should retain already existing contracts in classified form, especially in “basic” research, Anticipating the challenge, Foster backed away from his promise of imminent reform by adding that the new changes “are more administrative streamlining than anything else,” leaving himself open to charges of having made false claims of reform. If only to add to the ineptness of his statement, Foster hinted at an expansion of “right to review” clauses, which make contracts subject to future classification restrictions at the Pentagon’s discretion, a procedure like that followed in all government-sponsored foreign areas studies, where “results of research in the behavorial and social sciences related to foreign policy must be reviewed prior to publication.” This clumsy Preparation for Dow Day JOHN L. SHOVER Mr. Shover, professor of history at San Francisco State College, is the author of Cornbelt Rebellion: The Farmers’ Holiday Association (University of Illinois Press). San Francisco Unwilling simply to await the strife that has developed on other campuses, San Francisco State College acted before the Marine recruiters and Dow Chemical arrived by convening what was called a War Crisis Convocation, a week of debates and discussion, followed by a campus- wide vote. It was an attempt to build a genuine sense of community, and it met with considerable success. When President John Summerskill and the academic senate agreed to endorse the convocation, they realized that it would have to deal with more than simple proce- dural and administrative questions. At stake were the very values and goals of the university. The students, faculty, administration and staff would have to examine funda- mental values, if their discussions in the convocation were to have lasting purpose. The problems confronting San Francisco State are identical with those that challenge almost every American university. Campus demonstrations and clashes with re- cruiters are tangible evidence of the deep sense of moral outrage and indignation felt by a sizable number of the most sensitive and able members of this student gener- ation. Judgments on the propriety of recruiters on cam- pus, or whether military training is appropriate for an 648 SES STS ie - ars oN ea ' analogy is likely to open the larger question of evel \, form of government-sponsored foreign area research, andj the ambiguous role of the Foreign Area Research Coors Amt dination Group in directing much university contract re 1 search. This little known committee, which includes the i CIA and Pentagon, as well as more benign Executi Seton agencies, in 1966 allocated more than $36 million pri 40s marily to academics for projects in which the CIA ang He Pentagon had an active role in sponsorship, research) mn formulation, or contract allocation—as well as approval | ” of publication. Even to refer to the FAR group, much)» less to its functions, was a tactless if honest exposure of iif the Pentagon’s intentions. Viki The Pentagon’s active search for justification of itsy){oi continued relationship to the American university sys=)pie tem is evidence that the university has now become the} major arena for opposing the war in Vietnam. If that resistance is limited to only a single large institutional} sector of American life, it is nevertheless a vital oné to the ongoing functions of the cold war. What will besfiii an expensive and time-consuming set of difficulties for the Pentagon will also be a profound reformation of the} American university’s social and historical role. One»}i can measure the speed of that transformation over thes) past months, and that it will continue to gather mo- mentum is now undeniable. : AV ] academic curriculum, are not made in a vacuum and can=+} not be separated from a deeper context. Should the col- lege merely reflect and transmit the values of the society, } or should it question these values, challenge them, and} provide new moral leadership? Whom should the uni versity serve? Should it provide intellectual leadership)} beyond the campus boundaries, and if so, how does itt} do this amid the pressures generated by the society? Iss the university a distinctive kind of social institution, |) j dedicated to the pursuit of truth, or is it, like a busi-} ness corporation or government bureau, an adjunct of whatever “establishment” dominates the society? The idea of a convocation began to take shape in mid--| October. Student activists, embittered by the brutal clashes: with police at the Oakland Army Induction Center, were: calling attention to what they alleged was the complicity/} of their own college with the war in Vietnam. Demon--} strations were threatened against recruiters for the CIA,, Dow Chemical and the Marines, all scheduled to appear’ upon the campus within weeks. Perplexed as to how the:} college should respond, President Summerskill and thes academic senate found that no clear guides or policies) existed. Marshall Windmiller of the Department of In--} ternational Relations argued persuasively in the senate’) that the matters of real concern were substantive, not'} procedural. These involved the goals, aspirations and the: future of all those associated with the university, not | just faculty and administrators. All who were involved'} should be party to any decisions that were to be made. > THE NATION/ December 18, 1967 fy y Micctured “committee ‘of student and faculty vol- ateers headed by Windmiller set to work on the planning. The convocation was a storm center of controversy om the moment it was proposed. The student Left was ispicious. The convocation, it charged, was a not too abtle ploy by a liberal faculty and administration to co- pt the militant student anti-war movement by channel- g it away from threatening, grass-roots organizing and jon into placid, faculty-dominated discussion. Even Sesintions were passed, it was asked, how would they le implemented? Nevertheless, Students for a Democratic ciety chose to participate, making clear, however, its atention to relent not one bit in direct- action protests igainst campus complicity. “We favor discussing issues,” me SDS flier declared, “on which students can ultimately fake decisions and on which students can act.” | From another position, skeptical faculty members threw ifierent kinds of blocks in the way of the convocation. O's running this campus, the students or the faculty?” lsome asked. Cautious members of the academic senate insisted that action taken upon the resolutions be in no way binding, morally or legally, Others feared the haste pwith which the planning was done and urged a delay of @ several months to permit adequate planning and reflec- ption. One department censured the senate for having Bice ed the convocation without first polling the entire Piaculty. John Bunzel, chairman of the Department of : ‘ Political Science, expressed the concerns of many faculty P members. Such questions as the definition of academic |freedom and whether the university shall take a stand on “PB political questions, he argued, strike at the very core of “ar constitutional St pEOns upon which a university in a 0] THE NATION/ December 18, 1967. free society operates. As such, they are not proper sub- jects for majoritarian decision making. — Clashing views about the decision-making process cre- ated one of the most difficult problems the planning com- mittee dealt with. While many of the faculty argued that no vote at all should be taken, the leaders of the student Left demanded just as vehemently a “one man, one vote” rule, and insisted that the results of the voting should become college policy without further procedures. The committee and the academic senate hammered out a com- promise that was criticized by both sides. The vote on the resolutions was to be considered an “opinion poll,” but the faculty, the legal governing body of the institution, was to meet two weeks after the convocation to consider questions of college policy suggested by the results. There was no commitment that any action by the faculty or administration would ensue. The four~plenary sessions of the convocation, de- spite fears of faculty skeptics that anarchy was about to descend upon the campus, proceeded in orderly fashion. Whether to dismiss classes was left to the individual dis- cretion of each professor and many, although not a ma- jority, responded. The students were less diffident than their teachers. Participants jammed the main auditorium and overflowed into nearby rooms where many watched the proceedings on closed-circuit television. Discussion from the floor was passionate, but all speakers, including the commanding officer of the ROTC unit, received cour- teous attention. On the opening Monday, two faculty members and stu- dents debated before an audience of 3,000 the question: “Should the college take and implement a stand on the war in Vietnam?” On Tuesday, panels discussed ROTC, military and industrial recruiting, and the relevance of academic freedom. Discussion was carried on Wednesday in a series of twenty-five (out of eighty-eight) depart- ment meetings, many involving more than 100 students and faculty. Meanwhile, in accord with a procedure de- veloped by the planning committee, advocates of a variety of positions were gathering’a minimum of fifty signatures on resolutions that, once the inevitable overlapping was eliminated, would be voted upon by the whole campus community. By the Wednesday deadline, more than fifty- five had been submitted. On Thursday and Friday the plenary sessions debated these resolutions, which the resolutions committee had narrowed to a still formidable twenty-seven. They varied from one that would deny to no organization or individual the right to interview on the campus to another that would bar from recruiting at the college the CIA, the military services and all businesses manufacturing destructive weapons. Nearly 5,000 of State’s 15,000 students and faculty, the largest number ever to participate in a campus election, cast ballots on the twenty-seven resolutions during the three-day voting period, November 20-22. The significance of the convocation, however, was not in its procedures, the resolutions or the voting. The floor discussions and, still more, the arguments carried on in classrooms, offices and the commons, clarified issues and delineated positions. Perhaps most important, the con- vocation revealed the ideological gulf that separates the 649 7 aD ie Uh { } i REA = aes fe rere st university from the principal concerns and interests of its most socially conscious students. The issue of recruitment brought ideological differences into clearest focus. Prof. Robert Berdahl, a political sci- entist, warned against drawing boundaries that would admit some recruiters and bar others because they were morally repugnant to the sentiments of the majority. To do so,.he maintained, would be a coercive act that would vitiate the position of the university as the one in- stitution in society which is an open forum where all ideas, the pure as well as the outrageous, may clash. Prof. Eric Solomon of the English Department rejoined that education itself is an act of selection; to fail to make choices was to fail to sustain the moral imagination worthy of a community of scholars. Recruiting, he contended, was not correctly a “free speech” issue since representatives of war-related industries and the military did not visit the campus to engage in open discussion. The student activists who were the most numerous and vigorous participants in the convocation debates were impatient with such distinctions, particularly those that attempted to set the university apart from the rest of society. Many concurred with Marshall Windmiller’s care- ful position [see page 651] that would avoid the problem of distinctions by permitting all industrial recruiting at the university and specifically ban only CIA and the military services. Open Process, the college’s underground publication, sharply criticized Windmiller, asking why it Was necessary to invoke so much reason, logic and history to arrive at so modest a conclusion. The polarity that separated the academic liberals from the new student Left was made perfectly evident in an SDS flier which declared: Implicit in the convocation’s format is the kind of free speech argument that we have learned is largely irrelevant to the issues. This argument depends on the civil libertarian notion that a kind of “absolute” free speech is possible in a society that introduces a bias into every aspect and on every level of American life, even into the lives of individuals who pride themselves on their “open minds,” without recognizing that an “open mind” is itself a doctrinaire position. Our experi- ence has shown that the doctrine of “open-mindedness” typically lends itself to empty-headedness, inaction, ivory-tower intellectualism, moral cowardice and an ideological position that ultimately constitutes no threat to the establishment. Eventually there is a point at which the only legitimate question is not “how open are our minds?” but rather “shall we act now?” If we all had “open minds,” AFROTC would remain on campus, and CIA would continue recruiting here. Such declarations are most agonizing of all to-the liberal intellectuals, many of whom have fought the free-speech battle since the McCarthy era. The sharply contrasting frame of reference of radical students renders difficult the most basic kind of discourse. At the root of the posi- tion of the new student Left is a sense of angry moral indignation: the only real question is one of making moral choices. A society that condones the use of napalm and drops bombs on leper hospitals is outrageous. And ac- cording to these students, a college, like San Francisco State, which allows war recruitment to continue and 659 maintains an ROTC program, assists the war in Vi and is in complicity with immorality. ; From the discussions on the floor of the rea ry fom sessions, an observer might easily have concluded i radical students dominate San Francisco State. The Stus) | li dents for a Democratic Society, allied with the Progres= i sive Labor Party and the Young Socialists’ Alliance, were ays the most organized group. Their members spoke mos iy frequently and their hard work and initiative set the tone)| sil of the convocation and determined the issues that re= ceived most attention. Whether by design or not, the of-)} fensive of the student Left brought into action a seg ment of the campus that has been oblivious to four years. of political activity and educational experimentation. Stu= | dents and faculty in the business division, the quiet core»} of the silent Center, attempted to counter SDS by organ=)} izing “Students To Keep the Campus Open.” “Pleasé») protect my right of freedom of choice on this campus,”) |) read the petition they addressed to President Summer=)} skill. “I request that the San Francisco State College} administration protect the rights of individual students)) to participate in on-campus functions without the physical interference of students or non-students. I respect the» right of dissent on the campus, but regard force and violent methods to be incompatible with the freedom of!} the college and the rights of the students.” By the end of the convocation, they claimed that 3,251 students and HY faculty had signed. “Most of the people discussing free» speech,” quipped one faculty member, “are those who il) don’t want free speech to take place.” oH The process by which the resolutions were voted upon was the subject of many complaints. Because there were important shadings of meanings in different resolutions, , and because they feared confidence in the convocation’s procedures might be damaged if too many were rappee the resolutions committee chose to present many thatt} significantly overlapped. A voter who cast his ballot forr} banning ROTC, for example, had to decide, then, if he» Mt would also vote “yes” on a resolution that merely modified: kg the program, even if in so doing his vote would indicate?) tt greater support for the moderate position than it deserved. , The votes that resulted from such decisions present?) problems of interpretation, Nevertheless, some clear pat--} Pt terns emerge. By large majorities, the voters indicated) pa that they wanted all industries and the military services;} to continue recruiting on the campus. By a smaller margin, , a majority also favored continuance of ROTC. Sentiment( ° at San Francisco State, then, seems to run strongly sym--} of pathetic to an “open campus,” the strong anti-war stand} Pf and apocalyptic concerns of the militant Left not enjoy--} ¥ ing majority support. Apparently the student Left still hass} & an important educational job to do in its own backyard; \} perhaps it needs to re-evaluate its tactics. : Pr 4 What did the war-crisis convocation achieve? San)} Francisco State today represents a college administrator’ worst nightmare. The campus is acutely politicized, and } students and faculty alike are grouping around mutually exclusive positions. Given the political climate of Cali- jj t0 fornia, the college is vulnerable to a whole range of ex- pol ternal repressive actions. 5 Yet there were important accomplishments. San Fran- pi THE NATION/ December 18, 1967 ae 20 State’s problems did not arise from the convocation. ather it exposed emotions and cleavages that now con- font or soon will confront every large American uni- ersity. San Francisco State is in a better position for Having attempted, even in an awkward way, to look seri- Susly at its values and goals. For the first time in its his- ory, a sense of community may be emerging in the sprawling, impersonal institution. People separated by vide disagreements are nevertheless united by having com- mon concerns and sharing a sense of urgency and crisis. ‘Faculty members who have grumbled at or ignored the pactivities of students, academic departments where the | university has been conceived as a service station, indi- Viduals whose perception of the social crisis was con- )fined to newspaper headlines have found themselves in | volved, often painfully, in difficult personal decisions. In places untouched before, a dialogue has commenced. } Among the most important episodes of the convocation MARSHALL WINDMILLER t. Windmiller is an associate professor of international re- : | lations at San Francisco State College and director of its ® International Relations Center. He is co-author of Com- "| munism in India (University of California Press) and a con- ‘tributor to the forthcoming The Dissenting Academy. San Francisco wa While the problems deriving from the impact on col- | leges and universities of the war in Vietnam have pro- | duced intense emotions and a certain polarization of opinion, they have not, in my opinion, produced an amount of scholarly study commensurate with their com- ‘plexity and their seriousness. We speak of crisis and | militancy with so little restraint as to deprive these words of much of their force. Crisis is not new to the aca- demic community, and neither is student militancy. At Harvard, forty-three of the seventy members of the class of 1823 were expelled just before commencement for participating in a student rebellion. Student militancy was a worry even to Thomas Jefferson. Indeed, that | farsighted gentleman foresaw many of the problems we | have today when he wrote the regulations for the Uni- versity of Virginia in 1824. “No student,” said Jefferson, “shall, within the precincts of the University, introduce, ‘keep or use any spiritous or vinous liquors, keep or use ‘weapons or arms of any kind, or gunpowder, keep a ervant, horse or dog, appear in school with a stick, Or any weapon . . . without permission of the professor, Nor use tobacco by smoking or chewing, on pain of any of the minor punishments. .. .” While the list of things which are forbidden by cam- pus authorities has changed over the years, the issues THE NATION/ December 18, 1967 week was the visit of several of the most dedicated anti- war students to a student-faculty meeting in the business division. Not many opinions were changed in two hours of angry discussion, but at the end a few heads on both sides were nodding in agreement and the challengers were given an ovation for their courage in making an appearance. The Drama Department, usually politically aloof, is discussing plans to write and perform plays dealing with the war; they have asked the faculty and staff in the Department of International Relations to brief them on the background and alternatives in Vietnam. No one ever hoped that the convocation would elim- inate crisis. Internally and externally, severe pressures will be bearing down upon San Francisco State in the ' months ahead. But perhaps by a frank confrontation of issues these pressures are being shared through the com- munity. A qualitatively better environment has been created for dealing with perplexing questions. : s cholars and Soldiers... 7 A Crisis of Values that are raised by the existence of such lists have been fairly constant. What are the rules and laws by which the academic community is to be governed; what is their relationship to the rules and laws of the society as a whole; who is to enforce them, and by what means? It is interesting that Jefferson also had a clear- cut statement on these questions. “Fighting with weap- ons which may inflict death,’ he wrote, “or a chal- lenge to such a fight, given or accepted, shall be pun- ished by instant expulsion from the University, not re- missible by the faculty; and it shall be the duty of the proctor to give information thereof to the civil magis- trate that the parties may be dealt with according to law. Offenses cognisable by the laws of the land shall be left to the cognisance of the civil magistrate, if claimed by him, or otherwise to the judgment of the faculty.” In quoting Jefferson’s views I am not suggesting that Q ; ~ 651 jae aS ss they are necessarily appropriate to the present day. I draw attention to them only as a reminder that many of the problems we have are old, and that something worth while may be learned from a study of the past. I wish to state an assumption which lies at the foundation of the argument I am about to develop. It : is that the enterprise of higher education today is in a : state of crisis that is both unique and of severity greater ; 4 than any that has been encountered before. This crisis is sometimes thought to have been caused by the war in ; Vietnam, but the war has only made acute a process ‘ which has been going on for some time. The process is . ; the militarization of American society. The acute stage ; began around 1960, when military procurement became the prime determinant of the economy and the basis of a whole new socio-economic power center. As it progressed, military considerations came to dominate our foreign policy. The present stage is one of readjustment of the American value system to accord with the dictates of military necessity. We are already well into this period t and the real nature of the crisis we face is the necessity to decide whether the academy shall resist this development, by or become one of its instruments. f To analyze the problem properly, we should examine | fundamental values. We must find out whether we can agree on what is really important and what is merely or} peripheral to our interests as students and teachers. We Aten cannot do so without asking who we are, and what our . role in society is and should be. And we cannot do that without looking at our past, for we cannot know who we are without knowing what we have been. SF The pressure of our present situation has prompted if me to do some reading in the history of the academy x in America. It has not been exhaustive, and I make no pretense to expert knowledge. But this reading has led me to conclude that certain values have been cen- tral to American academic life. Some of them are very old, and go back at least as far as Socrates. Others seem to be peculiar to the American experience. The first of these values is truth, and the compul- sion to search for it wherever it may be and no matter how profoundly the effort may upset dogma and popular opinion. Related to this is the right and the duty to disseminate knowledge as widely as possible for the good and welfare of all. The second value is skepticism. The academy is al- ways skeptical, always challenging old assumptions, al- ways replacing what seemed to be true yesterday with new truths that are discovered today. The third value is tolerance—the willingness to coexist with ideas and practitioners who are thought to be in error because of the possibility, often demonstrated in history, that the majority is mistaken and the minority right. Out of this tolerance comes a remarkable diver- sity of ideas which enriches the intellectual life of the academy and makes it a stimulating place. The fourth value is mental discipline. The academy is engaged in training young people to discipline their minds, to learn to conquer boredom and tedium, not flee from it, to learn the value of caution in expressing 652. ‘chess the truths that one ‘beliover one has diectved ie | wri ing a sonnet, learning a foreign language, composing fugue, solving an equation, learning, karate, analyzin an international crisis—in all of these endeavors the ke; to achievement is discipline. The fifth value of the academy, and this is peculiarly) an American value, is the idea of service. In the Eng- lish universities the central theme is the enrichment a culture. In the German universities the motif is scholar: ship—the careful and detailed development of esoteri knowledge. We have these themes too, but we have alsoy), an idea of service that is especially American. It is) what has gotten us into the trouble we are in today, for we have not been clear about whom we are serving We have served the farmers by setting up agricultura extension services in our great universities. We have served labor with institutes of industrial relations. We have served business with business schools, and the pro- fessions with professional schools. These schools have not only trained personnel to take up positions in these vocations but have also provided research and exper advice to the industries and professions on a continuin basis. But the most important entity to which the academ has rendered service, particularly since World War II, has been the government. As the government has be=) come increasingly influenced by the military and its satellite industries, the effect on the academy has been profound. Even the academy’s traditional role of servic to the business community has become in great measure service to the military, because it is for the military that a large segment of industry, particularly highly); technical industry like electronics, is working. This process can be seen in its most advanced form at the University of California in Berkeley. The unive sity operates for the Atomic Energy Commission two gi=)j, gantic nuclear bomb factories, one at Livermore, Calif...) the other at Los Alamos, N.M. A great deal of university’s program in the sciences is dependent upor contracts from the government which have military pu poses. But the process is much more extensive than that. I has to do with the social sciences as well, where large? numbers of scholars accept consultantships with th military services or with militarized industries, or BP es leave to work for the RAND Corporation or the dozens Fi of similar organizations. It has to do with the exten ttl, to which the. academy readily took up the study off con counterinsurgency in order to give the army a weapor Vy : with which to pursue a counterrevolutionary foreign pol- H icy in Southeast Asia, Africa and Latin America. It ha l do to do with psychologists who undertake research to fa 4 lke cilitate the interrogation of prisoners. In short, the acad- i: emy has become deeply involved with the military-indus- | trial complex, and this involvement has greatly affected!f, its values. | ly I am not a pacifist and I believe that until there isi, : some sort of world government, the United States must}, * have armed forces. I do not want what I am about to say to be interpreted as a blanket condemnation of the entire military enterprise, or of the many men of! | her THE NATION/ December 18, 1967 A itary services. I do wish to point out, however, that the - military has its own set of values, that those values © propagated by the growth of the military-industrial Briblex, and that some of them are antithetic to the values of the academy. , What are these values that threaten the academy? The first is power. The military must have the power ‘to destroy the enemies and the potential enemies of the nation. Traditionally, that has meant having the weapons necessary to kill soldiers and destroy the enemy’s war- making capability. Today, because of the highly political mature of strategic deterrence and counterinsurgency war- fare, because of the importance of psychological war- fare techniques, power means much more than weapons. | It means also the political power to eliminate restraints on the most effective use of weaponry. That is why the Air Force, for example, has helped to establish the Air | Force Association, a powerful lobbying and pressure | group with a nation-wide membership made up of Air Force personnel and war industry employees and mana- gers. It is one of the best financed and most effective lobbies in Washington. _ The political power of the Air Force also reaches di- | rectly into the academy. One example is the Himalayan Mi Studies Project at the University of California in Berke- | ley. Why should a social science study of the strategic ! Himalayan states north of India be funded with a $285,000 ‘grant from the Air Force? In such a project, to what | extent does the academy seek truth for purposes defined ll) by the values of the academy, and to what extent does | it serve the military for purposes defined by them? The value placed on power by any military establish- 4 ment is not evidence of character defects or evil qualities | among military men. It derives simply from the nature | of the enterprise. As long as the military mission is to | destroy an enemy, soldiers must place a high value on p ower. | A second value of the military is obedience—obedi- | ence to authority and to doctrine. The military man is trained to execute his orders without question. This value o derives from the nature of the military enterprise. An army cannot function effectively by democratic pro- cess, and considerations of morale do not permit free inquiry by the soldiers into the merits of a particular campaign or war. For these reasons, the military must | control the information flow to its constituent elements, : } must manage and censor the news, and must frequently | tell lies. These procedures tend to produce rigid ortho- doxies and conforming individuals. There are exceptions, | like Gen. Billy Mitchell, but he was court-martialed for Bi nonconformity. The third value of the military is the centralization | of power and authority. There can be only one strategy )for an army if it is to fight successfully. All forces MH must work together, and this requires a highly cen- ) tralized system. There may be diversity of weapons, but there can be no diversity of plans or goals. _ There are, of course, other military values—bravery, patriotism, dedication to duty, chivalry (though I fear THE NATION/ December 18, 1967 aon ar to 7 F that chivalry is a casualty of the Vietnamese War), but the main values are those I have cited, and they are hostile to the values of the academy. They pro- duce a rigid orthodoxy and conformity which stifles di- versity, is intolerant of dissent, and gravely endangers the pursuit and dissemination of truth. Therefore, the penetration of the power of the military into the acad- emy can only be regarded as a threat which those who cherish the traditional academic values must resist. Unfortunately, reaching this conclusion does not solve a problem that is complicated and studded with dilemmas. The problem of on-campus recruitment by — the war industries provides one example. Some view this as a free-speech issue. I would agree that it is if the recruiters came on campus to speak in the audi- — torium or in a classroom. But they don’t, and by denying them office space in which to hire employees we would not deny them the right to make speeches or engage in dialogue elsewhere on the campus. For these reasons, I do not think that free speech is really the issue here. However, I do think that there are better grounds for arguing that it would be unwise to ban these re- cruiters. To ban war industries, it is necessary to define what a war industry is, and this is difficult. Many of the industrial employers who recruit on our campuses have war contracts. Some have a large amount of mili- tary business; others have less. By what formula shall we permit some to recruit, while others are banned? I do not think that a satisfactory formula can be de- vised, and therefore we must ban or permit all industrial recruitment. I favor the latter course because it pro- vides a service which some students find valuable. Moreover, the weakening of the military-industrial complex which would result from banning Dow Chemical and similar firms from campus would not, I think, be significant. It is far better to use the occasion of their visit to educate the campus and the public about na- palm and the war; a greater victory is won if students can be persuaded not to be interviewed. The military services and the CIA present a more clear-cut case. While the mere presence of recruiters from time to time does not really endanger the values of the academy, I believe that there is some important symbolic value to be derived from refusing to cooperate with them. If these were normal times, and our govern- ment were not dominated by the military-industrial com- plex, I would make a different judgment. But my studies lead me to conclude that the military exerts a dangerous power over our government today, and any form of re- sistance to this power, even symbolic resistance, is therefore important. This applies even more forcefully to the CIA, a para-military organization which is more dangerous because it is unprincipled, secret, insidious and not subject to adequate legislative control. | would ban all military service recruiters from the campus. As for ROTC, persuasive arguments are offered for having these programs on campus. The main one is that they provide an opportunity to instill in the minds of some future military officers a respect for the values of the academy. There would also be some educational gain if the ROTC were willing to discuss the problems of war and peace publicly with other disciplines on the campus that are concerned with these questions. They are, however, reluctant to do this. Again, if these were ordinary times, I should welcome the opportunity to educate future officers of the military services, even though I believe that to them the values of the academy would always be secondary to those of their chosen profession. The military-industrial complex in my judgment is a menace, not only to the academy but to our democratic form of government. ROTC is one of its tentacles. Therefore, I believe we should cease all cooperation with it. There are other problems to be faced. None of the al- ternatives open to us is without a price tag; any de- cision will cost us something. There was a time when universities could be sanctuaries, shielded from the pres- sures of politics and functioning outside the political arena. Many times I have wished that we could again be protected from mass hysteria, from irresponsible and anti-intellectual politicians, and left in peace to handle our four-letter words, our protesters, our journalistic ex- cesses and our nude-ins in our own way. But to be tolerated as a sanctuary while we are fi- nanced by public moneys, we should have to be rather quiet, and we simply are not capable of that. This is especially true when there is massive social injustice in the land, and a monstrous war in Vietnam. Whether we like it or not, for good or for evil, we are highly political institutions in a political environment, and there- fore on some issues we must take a political position. The war in Vietnam is a clear and present danger to the values of the academy. It is a danger not only because it may tear us apart with controversy too laden with emotion but also because it is an affront to the truth. The press refers to the credibility gap; the reality is that it is a war based on lies. The President says that we are fighting to implement the Geneva Accords, Mr. Leavitt Comes GEORGE ROSS Mr. Ross is a teaching fellow in government and social studies at Harvard University, and a candidate for a Ph.D. degree. Cambridge Institutions exist in, not outside, society, and universities are no exception. In recent weeks a whole series of campuses have been the objects of student protest, not only against the war but to expose what the protesters see aS university complicity with the war, through the grant of university facilities for war research, or for job recruitment by industries with military contracts. Thus when Mr. Leavitt, the Dow Chemical recruiter, came to Harvard, Harvard was brought face to face with its posi- tion in the real world. In the process, its status as a liberal university was challenged. 654 _ the truth is regarded as a hostile stranger. Unless we to Harvard ,*. of om “it So pee et cn? 8S Ue Sean ; eta when in fact we are fighting to prevent them from bein implemented. He says we are fighting to defend free dom, when in fact we are fighting to protect a tyranni- cal government in South Vietnam. He says we are fight-} ing to prevent Chinese hegemony in Southeast Asia,” |! when in fact we are fighting to establish American hege~ mony. He says we are fighting to stop aggression, when in fact we are committing aggression. There is not space to document these assertions here, but they can be documented. q How can we seek and teach the truth about Vietnam without becoming opponents of the government? In pres- ent circumstances, either the scholar becomes a resister simply by being a scholar, or he gives up his love of the truth. The academy takes and implements a position — | 0 on the war whenever its members study and disseminate ~ 1 : the truth. a If what I say is correct, then we are given a clue |! as to how we should respond to the war in Vietnam. |! In my opinion, the academy opposes the war best when” } it does what it is best equipped to do, namely works |: to discover and disseminate the truth. The universities — | pol should adopt as an urgent priority the task of educating — their own members to the truth about American policy ji: in Vietnam and the dangerous growth of the military. industrial complex. They should then develop new and — unique methods to reach out into the community to edu- — cate public opinion. I am not talking about a modest speakers’ bureau or a symposium or two. The serious- ness of the crisis requires bold and radical proposals” for new instruments of communication and new tech- |} niques for putting pressure on those who control the ex- isting media. We shall develop specific proposals when” more of us begin to think seriously about them. 4 The academy cannot survive in an environment where |} accept greater responsibility for the environment, we shall not be able to protect the values of the academy. | At Harvard, as across the nation, a strong current of | militant “Resistance” to the war was beginning to flow. Peaceful protest had gotten nowhere; the war was bigger and more vicious than ever; more drastic action was called for. Demonstrations which deliberately confronted authori’ ties, which broke laws and transgressed limits, were one } alternative for the frustrated anti-war militant. Major physical confrontations with the police had occurred all | over the country in the early autumn, and many advocated - such “Resistance” tactics at Harvard. “Putting one’s body on the line” was an individualistic kind of protest. One did it in the hope that others, perceiving the depth of the protester’s opposition to the war, might be brought them- selves to question the nature of the war. | The tactic of “putting one’s body on the line,” while . it appeared to be gaining nationally, did not control the field at Cambridge. Harvard-Radcliffe Students for a THE NATION/ December 18, 1967 re. nocratic Society is a large, influential group on campus. morphous, as are all SDS groups, but nonetheless ssed of a high level of political sophistication. HR- DS is also highly self-critical, and the new school year whad brought it to an intensive examination of its goals and nethods. ~ Many local activists felt that their work in the past had been that of an in-group, with the result that the Harvard fadical community, although sizable and growing, was jomewhat isolated from the majority of students. When an action was taken, for example last year’s confrontation with Secretary McNamara, it was not prepared for with therefore not fully understood by the rest of the student body and often led to the further isolation of SDS. Yet most students were upset by the war. Sectarianism thus represented a political blunder, a failure to build and broaden an anti-war movement when such building and Broadening were objectively possible. _ The remedy was theoretically simple: SDS, by serious | and intelligent organizational work, had to present itself | politically as an organization dedicated to the interest of all students. It had to make itself credible to the majority yf students, upset by the war but as yet unprepared to Make the connections which would lead to committed ! radicalism. In short, SDS had to “build a base.” In this Wm Mew perspective, the time might come for “putting one’s | body on the line,” but only when and if most students | understood politically why it was necessary. Two approaches to anti-war action—base building | and personal resistance—were thus being put forth at Harvard when the likelihood of the Dow recruiter’s | visit became known. On the day before Mr. Leavitt ived, the SDS Executive Committee met to consider | what should be done, and the “base builders” won over ) the “resisters.” No one, it was felt, had made the effort | necessary to convince the student body that recruitment | by a firm engaged in war production was not an exercise FHE NATION/ December 18, 1967 serious political work on campus. Such actions were - ee aie Lad eae : es a 4 of free speech (a serious problem, considering the depth of civil libertarianism at Harvard), let alone to persuade people that Dow recruiting involved university complicity in the war. It was decided to picket Mr. Leavitt, but sitting-in was rejected. However, one of SDS’s virtues—and problems—is its lack of discipline. A loose group with members at various — stages of political development, it is not a party and its deliberations, while informative, are not necessarily binding. Those who wanted to “put their bodies on the line” were not deterred by SDS’s decision. The evening before Mr. Leavitt's appearance, a small group decided to promote a_ sit-in. When the recruiter set up shop in the morning, the peaceful demon- stration prescribed by SDS began, but talk among the pickets turned to more drastic action. Soon a majority of those present (then relatively few) was won over, and the group decided to make it physically impossible for Mr. Leavitt to conduct his interviews. The action was seen both as a broad anti-war protest and as a protest against Harvard’s complicity with the war effort through lending campus facilities to Dow. The demonstrators were “con- tributing to the forcible obstruction of an individual,” to be sure, but for the greater good of ending the forcible destruction of the Vietnamese people, and of ending one aspect of the university’s guilty association with that evil. Once the decision to sit-in had been taken, a new situation exisicd. Putting one’s body on the line is an irrevocable act, and the demonstration gained strength as people of various views acknowledged this fact. Com- mitted activists had little choice—supporting a sit-in already in progress was different from advising against a proposed sit-in on grounds of political strategy. Though apprehensive about the effect of the demonstration on the attempt to build a broader anti-war movement on campus, those who originally opposed the sit-in felt they had to support the demonstrators. But activists were not the only group to join the demonstrators, nor the biggest. As news of the demon- stration spread, large numbers of students joined from a desire to protest the war in general. Strong in their re- vulsion against the killing in Vietnam, many of these people felt much less sure about the issue of university com- plicity. They were prepared to justify their action in terms that transcended the university. That they might be justified politically in breaking the university's laws on the level of the university itself, that there might be strong arguments against allowing Dow to recruit at Harvard, were possibilities which many of them had not considered. As the sit-in progressed, the contradictions within the demonstrating group became more and more apparent. Despite speakers from the Left who constantly raised the critical political points, the group as a whole could not agree on why exactly it was that Mr. Leavitt was being confined to his room. General protest against the war, the need to “resist” whenever a good occasion to convey an anti-war message to the public presented itself, the wickedness of Dow Chemical and the allegation of uni- versity complicity were all advanced. The group then voted that the focus of the demonstration be Dow and the war, and set as a condition for Mr, Leavitt’s release 655 ate SE Se = wes —— Si igs ah nel Bea malo ges ster se f= oS ws - $ t | t _ that he agree never again to come hunting for colleagues at Harvard. The weakness of this was that although it pushed aside the university’s position in the affair, the demonstration was obviously directed against the univer- sity. The protest soon attracted an array of deans, masters and other university officials, all seeking ways to spring Mr. Leavitt without provoking an ugly scene. In the end, the demonstrators themselves were largely responsible for his release. From talks with him it became apparent that he would not return unless invited back by the university, and that he saw his presence at Harvard not as his respon- sibility but as that of the university for offering him the use of its facilities. At length, the demonstrators themselves realized that holding Mr. Leavitt made much less sense than confronting the university. While students had no power to prevent Dow from producing napalm, they might have the power to prevent Harvard from offering Dow its hospitality. Thus Mr. Leavitt was finally let out. The sit-in group, 400 strong, then went into a two-hour discussion of the demonstration, voting to demand of the university that Dow, the CIA and the military not be allowed to recruit and that no one be punished for participating in the demonstration. The key figures in shaping the university’s response to the demonstration were the deans. Harvard deans, both by role and ethos, tend to be profoundly conservative. Their role is to protect the integrity of Harvard as an institution, to see that rules are not broken, limits not transgressed. Their ethos is that of the institution: Harvard liberalism. Moreover, given Harvard’s national image and prominence, they must deal with situations such as the Dow demonstration in a manner to minimize scandal and conflict. Strong faculty demands for severity must be balanced against the feelings of faculty doves, and the results of such calculations must be balanced off against the likely response of the student body to any action proposed, In the Dow situation, would a measure of re- pression calm students and deter similar action in the future, or would it elicit student counteraction? (The word “Berkeley” was on almost every tongue.) In certain respects the deans’ response could be pre- dicted. They believe that the liberal university is perhaps the best of man-made institutions. It follows from this that ungentlemanly conflict within the confines of such an institution not only ought not to happen but cannot be understood when it does happen. Their reaction to the demonstrators was that, even given the possibility of uni- versity complicity with the war, regular procedures should have been followed to deal with the situation. As good liberals, the deans thought “Dissent” through proper channels a fine thing; indeed that was their own strategy for ending the war. But actions outside these channels threatened the existing order itself, with which deans and liberals are really quite happy. The deans’ response would focus, then, on the issue of rule breaking, reducing the controversy from that of a wicked war and the university’s role in it to the transgression of regulations. The core issues of the demonstration would be totally obscured. The Harvard faculty was in a different position. While in many ways the deans were mediators, peacemakers, 656, faculty is the liberal university, by Se eas When’ th institution is threatened, in real terms it is the facult that is threatened. To them the liberal university is island in a corrupt society, a neutral oasis where a de tached search for truth can be carried on. The obstructio of Mr. Leavitt was thus seen as a direct challenge t tc Harvard’s liberalism. The faculty was not monolithic in this view. A minorill (probably small) was prepared to defend the demor strators. Some, caught up in the anti-war movement. argued that civil disobedience was justifiable for such < serious issue. Others defended the demonstrators in terms of the ideology of university liberalism itself. Job recruit ment, they said, is no part of the university’s role. Not was the issue one of free exchange of ideas, since Mr. Leavitt had not come to exchange views with anyone, certainly not to exchange views about Dow and the war.” However, a majority of the faculty shared the deans’ interpretation of the episode as rule breaking. What this would mean objectively was obvious: punishment for rule breaking would at the same time be a frontal attack” on the Harvard anti-war movement. Moreover, justifica- tion of such punishment in terms of the ideology of the university put many on the faculty in the position of attacking the anti-war movement on campus, while main= taining their own opposition to the war. Perhaps the best deterrent to strong punishment for the Dow demonstrators would have been the prospect of a unified and militant student action if such punishmen were decreed. But the demonstration group was itself internally divided and its relations with the broader student body were uncertain at best. The sitters-in had been unified in the face of Mr. Leavitt by a broad feeling of anti-war revulsion. But after Mr. Leavitt left, and when it became apparent that the university would treat the demonstration as a breach of its rules, the group began to break up into a majority whose primary object had been to protest the war, and a large minority of New Leftists} who had been determined, in different ways, to protest not only the war but the university’s involvement with it. - The majority of moderate anti-war protesters felt that disregard of university rules was justified for such a noble cause, but they had not tackled the issue of university complicity prior to the demonstration. After the demo stration, confronted with arguments about free speech) and the sanctity of the liberal university, and feeling just}) plain scared by the possible consequences of their action,)) the moderates pulled back to safer ground. While the sit in was justified by the enormity of the war, a rule had been broken and the demonstrators were morally bound to face the consequences. This concession was crucial,) for it meant that unity against punishment would bd { difficult to achieve. Even among the most political of campus activists lines of division were readily apparent. “Student syndi calism,” one school of politics in SDS, stresses student power tactics to revolutionize the university; it is part of a broader strategy for revolutionizing all institutions with: in which radicals find themselves. The rhetoric of “student syndicalism” was used by only a very few activists during a - - ee. — = TST eR ge ee ee Fe ee SL = a ee = = SS 5 THE NATION/ December 18, 1967 ‘ emonstration, but received an undue amount of pul licity. Other radicals saw “student power” for its own sake as of secondary importance. For them, the primary _ goal was to expose the university as functional to a bad Society via the issue of war complicity, and thus to build a political base for change. Both groups, orthodox radicals and student syndicalists, agreed that no punishment for the demonstrators was jus- tifiable. However, a third segment of the New Left, the Resistance, had yet another way of viewing the situation. _ To the resister, putting one’s body on the line was the ‘way to build an anti-war movement, but one corollary _ of this was demanding punishment. The tactic of breaking laws and rules was designed to force authorities to punish the idealistic transgressors, and thereby to “desanctify” the position of the law enforcers. Presumably this “de- _ Sanctification,” plus the resister’s emphatic public stand, would lead others to change their minds about the war. Conditions were hardly propitious for a struggle against the university's forthcoming punishment. The base builders were being proven correct, the demonstration had | been premature, without enough prior political work. This | was shown by the fragmentation of the protesters after the demonstration. It was even more clear from the reaction | of the average Harvard student who saw the protest, as _ did the faculty, in terms of wronged liberalism. For the deans, the task of determining the exact weight / of punishment—enough to satisfy the faculty discipli- | Marians, not so much as would offend faculty moderates ' or provoke a violent student response—was far from ‘simple. That no one be punished was impossible; that all 500 people who had turned in their student cards in support of the demonstration be punished was equally in- conceivable. Punishment would have to be selective. In- _ itially, then, three types of letters were sent out to pro- testers, according to their alleged roles in the demonstra- tion. The strongest letter was sent to undergraduates _who supposedly had been identified actually infringing | Mr. Leavitt's “right of egress.” The second letter was sent | to undergraduates who had been identified in the build- | ing where the demonstration occurred. The third went | _ to students who had simply turned in their cards. Well- | founded rumor had it that the thirty or so people who had received strong letters were up for expulsion. Selective punishment based on identification solved the | deans’ problem of how to meet student demands for collective responsibility. It also purported to isolate | those most responsible for the sit-in from those who went | along “without quite understanding what they were do- | ing.” As an added benefit, although perhaps not so phrased, those who received strong letters would most likely be New Left activists, whose projected departure from the campus was sure to make things calmer. The main difficulty was that it proved extremely awkward to relate selective punishment to any rational standard of '. justice. First, direct obstructers of Mr. Leavitt were not necessarily the leaders of the demonstration, and often owed their conspicuous positions to the chance moment of arrival. Then, why were those who found themselves | physically in the corridor more guilty than the many others who were not there because they were off enlist- | | | “THE NATION/ December 18, 1967 A +h met ing more students to participate? Approximately 100 graduate students turned in their cards, and at least thirty were present at the demonstration. Yet the gradu- ate school deans, who were present, “could not identify” any graduate students at the demonstration. 4] The vagaries of the identification process itself were many and obvious. Tutors from the Harvard houses were called in to pick out people they knew (a process hardly designed to improve tutor/student relationships). Some tutors refused to spy for the administration; others did so in a halfhearted, absent-minded way. Some stu- dents who had taken leading parts in the demonstration. were thus not identified at all, while others who had done little were named. The Harvard Crimson had an exten- sive photographic record of the demonstration, from which positive identifications could have been made, but f the file was not used. ae. It began to look as though the issue of arbitrary pum- ishment might reunite the demonstrators as a group and i give them greater support from other students. However, i Sr eS es selective punishment cum severance was still hypothetical. Whatever the deans finally proposed had to be discussed and ratified by administrative boards and a full faculty meeting. In the five-day interim much occurred. On the __ student side petitions for leniency and in protest against F the proposed selective punishment received thousands of signatures. The threatened students insisted on collective — responsibility and sought legal protection. At the same time, pressure was exerted from the faculty side. A Har- vard Crimson advertisement supporting the demonstrators was signed by a number of Harvard faculty, plus many — more Boston-area professors. A group of Law School professors was said to have sent the deans a letter pro- testing the proposed plan of punishment. Several ad hoe leniency caucuses sprang up in the faculty and among teaching fellows, groups which systematically approached deans, members of the administrative boards and key faculty members. The deans were deluged with letters and callers. And this pressure began to have effect. Im- portant persons changed their minds and the deans moved away from the idea of dismissals. Se gate TET Seep I SP 2 peg In this atmosphere of de-escalation, the admini- stration’s final answer to the demonstration was, as Dean Glimp told the faculty meeting, a “measured response.” No one was to be expelled; eighty-one were to be placed on probation, while 171 others were to be “admonished.” The administration’s recommendation was adopted over- whelmingly, while an amendment for equal punishment was rejected. The administration’s retreat from possi- ble expulsions caught the main pro-demonstrator faculty caucus by surprise. When defining the conditions of an adequate settlement, this group had decided that no severance was its central criterion. When it developed that there was to be no severance, but large numbers of students were to be placed on probation, the caucus was unprepared to press the deans on the selective punish- ment question itself. Thus the issue of how the eighty-one were chosen went largely unquestioned by the faculty. One proposal of a constructive nature was advanced: that a faculty/student committee be set up to discuss recruit- 657 \ > protest on campus. The real grievances behind the demon- stration had not been totally forgotten. The punishments finally handed down evoked no sig- nificant protest, even when, a few days later, it was dis- _ covered that some students had been “identified” on the basis of self-incrimination, while others who had at- tempted to incriminate themselves in order to share col- lective responsibility had not been allowed to do so. Fac- ulty and student movements toward moderation comple- mented each other, and the general response was relief that the affair was at last being concluded. Harvard survived Mr. Leavitt’s visit remarkably well. One reason for this was that the student anti-war movement was not coherent enough to wage a sustained struggle against the university. Indeed, the experience proved one thing: that many students and faculty did share a conception of the liberal university. On the side of the administration and faculty this shared system of values played an important role in moderating the situation, al- lowing men otherwise in profound disagreement to talk to one another and, more important, allowing moderates to talk the stern disciplinarians down. In the hectic period of discussion prior to the settlement, informal channels of communication involving people who had at least one set of principles in common were much more important than formal bodies. Thus a real purge of the student Left, which some desired and which was very close at several points, did not occur. The Harvard anti-war movement had prevented Mr. Leavitt from recruiting; and the CIA, scheduled to arrive the following week, decided to stay away. But the real Mr. Brann is a reporter on The Chronicle of Higher Educa- tion, a national newspaper for college administrators and faculty. The lesson is clear—you cannot keep any group in subservience in a society which purports to be free with- out that group applying the standards and hopes of democracy to its own condition. The labor movement said that in the 30s; the Black people have said it in the 60s; the students will say it in the late 60s and beyond. Remarks of Edward Schwartz, president of the National Student Association, to the national conference on student power. We have no leaders; we are all leaders. Reply of the University of Minnesota’s radical 17th of November Movement to President Malcolm Moos’s invitation to send their leader to meet with him. Minneapolis The American college student’s reluctance to play In- dian to someone else’s chief may eventually prove as annoying to leaders of the student power movement as it 653 t MY, faye Cae by igiae pat Wi. test of the Dow demonstration for the - student Left yet to come. The issue of university complicity with he war has been raised and it is now up to the Left to carry the issue, with convincing arguments and evidence, to the broader student body. Whether the movement will use — the proposed student/faculty committee to further its — cause (and this will involve doing some very serious — homework on the relationship between the university and the war) is as yet unclear. If it does not do so, the com- — mittee will turn into what many on the faculty hope it — will be, a device to divert and, if possible, to discredit the — student Left. . . But there is a conclusion to the story of the demonstra- — tion still broader than that. Militant anti-war actions, with- — out serious prior political work among the as yet un- mobilized majority, run the risk of isolating, not building, the anti-war movement. In the Harvard situation, the consequences of such risky actions can be overcome after the fact by hard efforts to reach the uncommitted. On a national scale, acts of militant individual moral protest against the war, largely committed by middle-class stu- dent types, may play directly into the hands of those making the war. If the government can count on being © able to identify the anti-war movement with specific social groups (or rather can capitalize on the self-isolation of anti-war protesters), it will be able to carry on its horri- ble war. Let the anti-war movement build real contacts with other groups in society by hard organizational work, Jet it “build a base,” and the war will be brought to an end, whatever the present government desires. The price which we shall all pay if that lesson is not learned, or is learned too late, may be greater than any of us yet imagine. National Rally for Student Power JAMES BRANN is today to college administrators and faculty. From a distance, the campus architects of student power ap- pear to have no problem except success. Scores of major colleges and universities have been torn this fall by dem- onstrations that often ended in bloody confrontations with police or National Guardsmen. In addition to wide- spread protests against recruiters for Dow Chemical and the armed services, students have been effectively mo- bilized to combat their administrations on such diverse issues as the construction of new buildings (City College of New York), overemphasis on athletics (Grambling College, La.), or the proposed sale of a campus (Long Island University ). The intensity of campus combat in recent weeks, with the attendant expulsions and arrests, makes the 1964 disturbances at Berkeley, which began this era of stu- dent power, appear mild. Today’s student realizes that he has power and is learning how to wield it; his leaders, meanwhile, are bothered by the question of what to do with it. Some 350 of them gathered in late November to discuss goals and tactics at a national,student power con- ference at the University of Minnesota. It was sponsored THE NATION/ December 18, 1967 the National Student Association, a twenty-year-old nal organization of student leaders. | _ Delegates to the NSA meeting were more moderate _ than groups like the Students for a Democratic Society (though some NSA people are also SDS members) or Minnesota’s 17th of November Movement. However, pte NSA demands are tough enough to rattle admini- | Strators and faculty at most campuses. They want control _ of nonacademic regulations and a basic restructuring of America’s colleges and universities. Mosi of all, the serious delegates and their national E leadership want reform of the academic process. And | they are prepared to use techniques developed in civil | tights activities and in harassing campus recruiters to / accomplish their goals. : “The best kids I know in America are dropping out | of college or staying in and gritting their teeth because | of their parents or because of their own self-doubts,” Michael Vozick, an NSA staffer from Washington, told | the delegates. Vozick was one of the founders of San Francisco State College’s Experimental College; at 30, he | advises students who want to set up their own free uni- versity experiments. “No one, or few people, are de- __ fending the present system because it is good. “Educational reform is the hottest thing in higher edu- cation today,” he continued. “The one thing holding it back is that the faculties and administration people fear kids would use it as an excuse to goof off. If we can ) just prove that won’t happen, we’ll have it made.” Vozick said his experience convinces him that students | work harder when grades are eliminated and they are given responsibility to help plan courses. NSA President Schwartz broke into a discussion of the faults of the lecture system and student complaints | about the lack of relevance of their education: | “The desire for student power springs from the needs | f you have that aren’t being met by the system as it exists. It’s clear you’re not getting the things you really want fs THE NATION/ December 18, 1967 ee 4 a " because the things the faculty has on its mind are not what’s on your mind.” He insisted that certain powerful private concerns should somehow be woven into the educational program. As examples, he cited: “There’s not a guy at this con- ference who isn’t worried about the draft, or a girl who isn’t worried about who she’s going to marry or whether she will sleep with him first. There’s not a person who isn’t worried about his relationship to his family, and there is that quiet worry about your mother and father’s relationship and the relationship you will have as husband and wife.” Like most delegates, the NSA president was short on © specifics as to how he wanted his goals made real. Asked another delegate: “How do we make colleges and universities more humane places in which to spend four years? Nobody knows how. How do we make a national organization of students? We haven’t done it.” The delegates were divided on whether to form an alliance with the faculty. Vozick and Schwartz insisted it was the only viable course. Others felt that students have long been betrayed by professors and cannot afford to trust them. This faction pointed out that faculty sen- ates have the power to institute innovation and reform, yet have resisted student (and administration) efforts to produce change in the classroom. “Why aren’t faculty members working for change?” a student from the University of Illinois shouted to Robert Van Waes, associate secretary of the American Asso- ciation of University Professors. “Why do we have to have a student power conference? You already have the - power.” Several students demanded to know why the AAUP does not educate its members to threaten to strike or re- — sign when student rights are trampled. “There’s absolutely no way to keep a faculty member from acting like a faculty member,” said Michael Ross- man, 27, a founder of Berkeley's Free Speech Move- ment in 1964. He urged delegates to adopt the course © of Black Power advocates and “get together in a group and cut yourself off from the faculty.” “It’s the only way,” he said. “You’ve got to stomp on the faculty member. Maybe someday we can all get together, black and white, students. and faculty—but it won’t work now.” Schwartz and the AAUP’s Van Waes urged delegates to bring pressure on their deans to vote in favor of the joint statement on student rights drafted this year by representatives of five major organizations, including the NSA and the AAUP. The statement, which covers a wide range of student rights and responsibilities on and off the campus, will be considered for endorsement at spring meetings of the National Association of Student Personnel Adminstrators and the National Association of Women Deans and Counselors. The rights document does not mention stu- dent power and was described by Schwartz as “a list of minimal demands.” However, it would insure freedom from censorship of student newspapers, permit students to bring any speaker on campus, and would democra~ tize disciplinary hearings. Also, the statement provides: 659 i { The student body should have clearly defined means to rticipate in the formulation and application of insti- utional policy affecting academic and student affairs.” It leaves the details to be worked out on each campus. For a number of the delegates, the crusade for stu- dent power centered almost solely on the question of unlocking women’s dormitories. When chided by their more serious colleagues, these students insisted that girls’ hours was the one issue that could attract widespread support on their campuses. The activity thus aroused could later be channeled into other causes. “IT don’t agree with that,” said Mary Quinn, a student at Mount Mercy College, Pittsburgh. “If you start that way, you keep playing their mediocre little game forever.” Miss Quinn was worried by the emphasis some of the delegates placed on tactics. She drew loud applause at the closing session when she announced, “I’m scared. Too many people here want to talk about tactics without knowing where they’re going.” President Schwartz also tried repeatedly to keep the conversation directed toward goals. “If a debate on tactics becomes the central ideological debate, then any chance of viewing the problems of achieving student power in a hardheaded manner will be lost.” Schwartz warned against those who “would wish the movement to become merely a test of tactics for their own sake.” Early in the con- ference he took a stand against harassing campaign re- cruiters. Students have fought too long for free speech on campus, he said, to want to bar it now to some groups. The three-day conference failed to live up to its advance billing—probably too ambitious—as a “place to plan concerted, nationally coordinated action.” However, it did send delegates back to their home campuses better able to articulate demands. Some solid planning was accomplished for an alliance between Illinois colleges and universities. This group will provide financial support—bail and legal-aid funds— for students in conflict with authorities. The students hope to organize sympathy strikes on their campuses to aid confrontations in another part of the state. They plan to transport busloads of students to campuses when a battle occurs. Students from the New York City area discussed Strategies for future action similar to the support from other city campuses that went this fall to striking students at Brooklyn College and to protestors at Long Island University. Schwartz urged the delegates to carry their battles with administrators into the courts. The NSA has compiled a list of recent precedent cases in which courts have rein- Stated students expelled from public universities, and have ruled against college authorities on other issues. He promised that NSA will soon publish a list of student rights—such as freedom of expression and freedom from double punishment by civil and university authorities— that can be readily defended in today’s courts. Schwartz said the NSA is planning a nation-wide legal- aid network to supply attorneys and advice to students who battle with college administrators, “Test your rights in the courts; the climate is recep- tive,” he told his fellow activists. 660 f { nM : Ne Net ey hy) SNE Deceinber 2 (Continued from page 645) mostly old and famous. Scientific administrators, corpora tion presidents (Greenwalt of Du Pont); Nobel Prize winners Libby, Segre, Wigner and Seaborg. The last, tall, dark, as infolded as a de Mille Inquisitor, called Fermi’s work “the greatest scientific achievement of the century,” and pleasure in this assessment, perhaps, enabled the men to bury old hatchets with such as General Groves, who ~ sat with them, elegant, jowly and gray. All appeared appreciative that not a building or endowment but a single work of art commemorated the famous deed. The small, gray-haired sculptor sat with Mrs. Fermi in front. His sculpture, “Nuclear Energy,” was a huge, — eyeless form—head, vegetable or nuclear cloud—whose — interior force had ruptured its center into strong, intricate — cavities. The massive coppery cranium shone in the odd, windy light of late afternoon, hulked over the crowd, the — tennis courts, the ripped earth and the striped tent. On an early sketch, Moore wrote, “the great problem [for me] is to combine sculptured form with — human energy.” The Italian Henry might have con- curred. One thought of many parallels between them. Both worked with the stuff of earth, both worked against — its recalcitrance, both worked with assistants but largely — on their own. The scientists kept coming back to the simplicity and efficiency of Fermi’s work. Walter Zinn said that the Chicago project “was finished with unprece- dented speed though it lacked the computers, elaborate — organization and scientific managerial techniques now — considered indispensable for such undertakings. . . . Enrico Fermi overbalanced all of these.” Herbert An- derson recalled that in July, 1939, the nuclear scientists — needed $6,000 worth of graphite. No university physics — department could consider so enormous a request. Szilard, — just come from England, had the notion of getting it from the U.S. Treasury. Unheard of, but thanks to Ein-— stein’s famous alert to FDR, it was done. Such recollections were bucolic, the artful inventors — speaking directly to authority in what Senator McCarthy that night called (in another connection) “the language of promise and of hope.” Since then, almost everything had changed. Chicago Pile-One had led not only to mass murder but contributed to the new breed of policy makers, the urbane theoreticians who like General Pruhl in Tolstoi, “so love their theory that they lose sight of the object of the theory . . . immutably conceited men, ready to face martyrdom for their own ideas.” At the Conrad Hilton that night, the handsome, hesi- tant Senator from Minnesota quoted Péguy and Toynbee:” “A single legal crime, a single dishonorable act will bring about the loss of one’s honor, the dishonor of a whole people,” this from the Catholic poet: “The nemesis of war is intrinsic. It did not need the invention of the atomic weapon to make this apparent,” from the historian, Reading words of such purity, a spectator of the nuclear commemoration wondered why the pursuit of power sounded so much further removed from ordinary human standards than the simpler pursuits of artists and scientists whose work, durable, usable, beautiful and memorable, came shining, as it were, right out of im- purity and recalcitrance. RICHARD STERN ——_> &> —=—-" ao wi ef oa Re ee ee ee THE NATION/ December 18, 1967, _ JOHN BERGER _ Mr. Berger writes regularly on art for New | Society (London). His most recent pub- _ lished work is A Fortunate Man (Holt, Rine- hart and Winston). “People say I think too much about _ women,” said Rodin to William Rothen- _ stein. Pause. “Yet after all, what is there "more important to think about?” The fiftieth anniversary of his death. Tens of thousands of plates of Rodin . sculptures have been specially printed this year for anniversary books and Magazine features. The anniversary cult is a means of painlessly and superfi- cially informing a “cultural elite” which for consumer-market reasons needs to be constantly enlarged. It is a way of consuming—as distinct from understand- i” _ ing—history. Of the artists of the second half of _the 19th century who are today treated as masters, Rodin is the only one who was internationally honored and officially considered illustrious during his working life. He was a traditionalist. “The idea of progress,” he said, “is society’s worst form of cant.” From a modest petit bourgeois Parisian family, he became a - master artist. At the height of his career he employed ten other sculptors to carve the marbles for which he was famous. From 1900 onward his declared annual income was in the region of 200,000 francs: in reality it was probably con- siderably higher.. A visit to the Hotel de Biron, the Rodin Museum in Paris, where versions of most of his works are to be seen, is a strange experience. The house is peopled by hundreds of figures: it is like a Home or a Workhouse of statues. If you ap- proach a figure and, as it were, question it with your eyes, you may discover much of incidental interest (the detail of a hand, a mouth, the idea implied by the title, etc.). But, with the exception of the studies for the Balzac monument and of the “Walking Man” which was a kind of prophetic study for the Bal- zac made twenty years earlier, there is not a single figure which stands out and claims its own, according to the first principle of free-standing sculpture: that THE NATION/ December 18, 1967 is to say not a single figure which dom- inates the space around it. All are prisoners within their con- tours. The effect is cumulative. You be- come aware of the terrible compression under which these figures exist. An in- visible pressure inhibits and reduces every possible thrust outward into some small surface event for the fingertips. “Sculpture,” Rodin claimed, “is quite simply the art of depression and pro- tuberance. There is no getting away from that.” Certainly there is no getting away from it in the Hétel de Biron. It is as though the figures were being forced back into their material: if the same pressure were further increased the three- dimensional sculptures would become bas-reliefs: if increased yet further the bas-reliefs would become imprints on a wall. The “Gates of Hell” are a vast and enormously complex demonstration and expression of this pressure. “Hell” is the force which presses these figures back into the door. “The Thinker,” who overlooks the scene, is clenched against all outgoing contact: he shrinks from the very air that touches him. During his lifetime Rodin was at- tacked by Philistine critics for “mutilat- ing” his figures—hacking off arms, de- capitating torsos, etc. The attacks were stupid and misdirected, but they were not entirely without foundation. Most of Rodin’s figures have been reduced to less than they should be as inde- pendent sculptures: they have suffered oppression. It is the same in his famous nude drawings in which he drew the woman’s or dancer’s outline without taking his eyes off the model, and afterward filled it in with a water-color wash. These drawings, though often striking, are like nothing so much as pressed leaves or flowers. This failure of his figures (always with the exception of the “Balzac”) to create any spatial tension with their surroundings passed unnoticed by his contemporaries because they were pre- occupied with their literary interpreta- tions, which were sharpened by the ob- vious sexual significance of many of the sculptures. Later it was ignored because the reviva! of interest in Rodin (which began about fifteen to twenty years ago) concentrated upon the mas- tery of “his touch” upon the sculptural surface. He was categorized as a sculp- tural “Impressionist.” Nevertheless, it is this failure, the existence of this ter- rible pressure upon Rodin’s figures, which supplies the clue to their real (if negative) content. The figure of the emaciated old woman, “She Who Was Once the Hel- met-Maker’s Beautiful Wife,” with her flattened breasts and her skin pressed against the bone, represents a paradig- matic choice of subject. Perhaps Rodin was dimly aware of his predisposition. Often the action of a group or a figure is overtly concerned with some force of compression. Couples clasp each — other (vide “The Kiss” where every- thing is limp except his hand and her arm both pulling inward). Other cou- ples fall on each other. Figures embrace the earth, swoon to the ground. A fallen caryatid still bears the stone that weighs her down. Women crouch as though pressed, hiding, into a corner. In many of the marble carvings fig- ures and heads are meant to look as if they have only half emerged from the uncut block of stone: but in fact they look as though they are being com- pressed into and are merging with the block. If the implied process were to continue, they would not emerge inde- pendent and liberated: they would dis- appear. Even when the action of the figure apparently belies the pressure being ex- erted upon it—as with certain of the smaller bronzes of dancers—one feels that the figure is still the malleable crea- ture, unemancipated, of the sculptor’s molding hand. This hand fascinated Rodin. He depicted it holding an in- complete figure and a piece of earth and called it “The Hand of God.” Rodin explains himself: “No good sculptor can model a human figure with- out dwelling on the mystery of life: this individual and that in fleeting vari- ations only reminds him of the immanent type; he is led perpetually from the creature to the creator. . . . That is why many of my figures have a hand, a foot, still imprisoned in the marble block; life is everywhere, but rarely in- deed does it come to complete expres- 661 \ i i i tf ¥ 4 ih m or the individual to perfect free- dom.” Yet if the compression which his fig- es. suffer is to be explained as the ex- pression of some kind of pantheistic fusion with nature, why is its effect so disastrous in sculptural terms? Rodin was extraordinarily gifted and skilled as a sculptor. Given that his work exhibits a consistent and fundamental weakness, we must examine the struc- ture of his personality rather than that of his opinions. e e e Rodin’s insatiable sexual appetite was well known during his lifetime, although since his death certain aspects of his life and work (including many hun- dreds of drawings) have been kept se- cret. All writers on Rodin’s sculpture have noticed its sensuous [sic} or sexual character: but many of them treat this sexuality only as an ingredient. It seems . to me that it was the prime motivation of his art—and not merely in the Freud- ian sense of a sublimation. Isadora Duncan in her autobiography describes how Rodin tried to seduce her. Finally—and to her later regret— she resisted. “Rodin was short, square, powerful, with close-cropped head and plentiful beard. . Sometimes he murmured the names of his statues, but one felt that names meant little to him. He tan his hands over them and caressed them. I remember thinking that be- neath his hands the marble seemed to flow like molten lead. Finally he took a small quantity of clay and pressed it between his palms. He breathed hard as he did so....Ina few moments he had formed a wom- an’s breast. . . . Then I stopped to ex- plain to him my theories for a new dance, but soon I realised that he was not listening. He gazed at me with lowered lids, his eyes blazing, and then, with the same expression that he had before his works, he came towards me. He ran his hands over my neck, breast, stroked my arms and ran his hands over my hips, my bare legs and feet. He began to knead my whole body as if it were clay, while from him emanated heat that scorched and melted me. My whole desire was to yield to him my entire being... .” Rodin’s success with women appears to have begun when he first began to become successful as a sculptor (age about 40). It was then that his whole bearing —- and his fame—offered a promise that Isadora Duncan describes so well because she describes it obliquely. His promise to women is that he will mold them: they will become clay in his hands: their relation to him will 662 (, become symbolically comparable to that of his sculptures. “When Pygmalion returned home” (Ovid, Metamorphoses, Book X), “he made straight for the statue of the girl he loved, leaned over the couch, and kissed her. She seemed warm: he laid his lips on hers again, and touched her breast with his hands—at his touch the ivory lost its hardness, and grew soft: his fingers made an imprint on the yield- ing surface, just as wax of Hymettus melts in the sun and, worked by men’s fingers, is fashioned into many different shapes, and made fit for use by being used.” What we may term the Pygmalion promise is perhaps a general element in male attraction for many women. When a specific and actual reference to a sculptor and his clay is at hand,\ its effect simply becomes more intense because it is more consciously recog- nizable. What is remarkable in Rodin’s case is that he himself appears to have found the Pygmalion promise attrac- tive. I doubt whether his playing with the clay in front of Isadora Duncan was simply a ploy for her seduction: the ambivalence between clay and flesh also appealed to him. This is how he described the Venus de’ Medici: “Is it not marvellous? Confess that you did not expect to discover so much de- tail. Just look at mnumberless undu- lations of the hollow which unites the body and the thigh. . . . Notice all the voluptuous curvings of the hip. ... And now, here, the adorable dimples along the loins. . .. It is truly flesh. - - - You would think it moulded by caresses! You almost expect, when you touch this body, to find it warm.” If I am right, this amounts to a kind of inversion of the original myth and. of the sexual archetype suggested by it. The original Pygmalion creates a statue with whom he falls in love. He prays that she may become alive so that she may be released from the ivory in which he has carved her, so that she may become independent, so that he can meet her as an equal rather than as her creator. Rodin, on the contrary, wants to perpetuate an ambivalence be- tween the living and the created. What he is to women, he feels he must be to his sculptures. What he is to his sculp- tures, he wants to be to women. Judith Cladel, his devoted biographer, describes Rodin working and making notes from the model. “He leaned closer to the recumbent figure, and fearing lest the sound of his voice might disturb its loveliness, he whispered: ‘Hold your mouth a you were playing the flute. Again!” “Then he wrote: ‘The mouth, the luxurious protruding lips sensuously elo- quent. . . . Here the perfumed breath comes and goes like bees darting in and out of the hive... .’ “How happy he was during these hours of deep serenity, when he could enjoy the untroubled play of his fac- ulties! A supreme ecstasy, for it had no end: ; ““What a joy is my ceaseless study of the human flower!’ “ “How fortunate that in my profession I am able to love and also to speak of my- love!’ ” We can now begin to understand why his figures are unable to claim or dominate the space around them. They are physically compressed, imprisoned, forced back by the force of Rodin as dominator. Objectively speaking, these works are expressions of his own free- dom and imagination. But because clay and flesh are so ambivalently and fatally related in his mind, he is forced to treat them as though they were a chal- lenge to his own authority and potency. This is why he never worked in marble but only in clay and left it to his employees to carve in the more in- tractable medium. This is the only apt interpretation of his remark: “The first thing God thought of when he created the world was modelling.” This is the most logical explanation of why he found it necessary to keep in his studio at Meudon a kind of mortuary store of modeled hands, legs, feet, heads, arms, which he liked to play with by seeing whether he could add them to newly created bodies. Why is the “Balzac” an exception? Our previous reasoning already suggests the answer. This is a sculpture of a man of enormous power striding across the world. Rodin considered it his mas- terpiece. All writers on Rodin are agreed that he also identified himself with Balzac. In one of the nude studies for it the sexual meaning is quite ex- plicit: the right hand grips the erect penis. This is a monument to male potency. Frank Harris wrote of a later clothed version and what he says might apply to the finished one: “Under ‘ the old monastic robe with its empty sleeves, the man holds himself erect, the hands firmly grasping his virility and the head thrown back.” This work was such a direct confirmation of Rodin’s own sexual power that for once he was able to let it dominate him. Or, to put it another way, when he was working on the “Balzac,” the clay—probably THE NATION/ December 18, 1967 lin ti teat is alas a ae Ae lh the only time in his life—seemed him to be masculine. : The contradiction which flaws so much f Rodin’s art and which becomes, as it were, its most profound and yet nega- tive content, must have been in many ways a personal one. But it was also typical of a historical situation. Nothing reveals more vividly than Rodin’s sculp- tures, if analyzed in sufficient depth, the nature of bourgeois sexual morality in ee ae ‘This year, when holidaying and _ gift- giving seems almost an immoral act (Dick Gregory’s plea to put Christmas out of business while the war continues, is impossible to ignore), books may offer an honorable way out. If the given book is one which aims to move men’s bn minds to areas where the vision is more clear and where the action is more just, so much the better. One of the redeeming aspects of a hysterically expanding book - production is that in a system where any- thing can get published, even excellent _ works get hauled along in the general _ crowd. There’s junk enough around, of _ course. But junk has not been prevalent in. these pages where the aim (and the need, given our limited space) has been to choose the books and the reviewers whose concerns are meaningful for Nation readers. For that reason, we feel that what has been discussed in the book pages all year is a most valuable guide to book buying, along with the Nation - contributors’ booklist which appears elsewhere in this issue. There are also books which would be _ good to get and to give that we have ot yet reviewed. Among these are a ood sampling of the many books pub- ished in connection with the anniversary of the Russian Revolution, to be covered our issues of January | and 8. Of these, Tsaac Deutscher’s The Unfinished Revo- ution (published by Oxford University Press) should be noted and either the Grove Press or Harper & Row editions = of Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and _ Margarita. Régis Debray’s Revolution in the Revolution? will also be discussed by ~Egbal Ahmad, William Appleman _ Williams and Geoffrey Bing in an early ‘ pes issue. All this is in the way of making the ‘unsettling comment that the booklists actered here are not definitive. Their aim ; be to steer a preferential path through the indiscriminate, bountiful confusion of F he bookshops. - (Books on our con- ributors’ list are not repeated.) In the field of the novel, our reviewers E NATION/ December 18, 1967 the second half of the 19th century. On the one hand the hypocrisy, the guilt, which tends to make strong sexual desire—even if it can be nominally satis- fied—febrile and phantasmagoric; on the other hand the fear of women escaping (as property) and the constant need to control them. On the one hand Rodin who thinks that women are the most important thing in the world to think about; on the other hand the same man who curtly says: “In love all that counts is the act.” The 1967 Non-Definitive List thought very well of the following (in the case of Styron’s book there was also some strong dissent) : Edmundo Desnoes: /nconsolable Memo- ries Jean Genet: Miracle of the Rose Herbert Gold: Fathers Isaac Bashevis Singer: The Manor Philip Roth: When She Was Good Susan Sontag: Death Kit Gertrude Stein: The Making of Ameri- cans William Styron: The Confessions of Nat Turner In a not yet published review, Christina Stead’s current book of novellas, The Puzzleheaded Girl, will receive the same high praise as have earlier Stead books in these pages. Though they are not newly released works. the Tolkien books, the works of Hermann Hesse, and the novels of Thom- as Pyncheon were most persuasively pre- sented by Robert Sklar as especially attractive to students. They are all avail- able in the bookshops. Among the newer novelists, Nation reviewers were most impressed with: Chester Aaron: About Us Donald Barthelme: Snow White Stanley Elkin: A Bad Man Janice Elliott: The Godmother Morris Lurie: Rappaport Carlene Hatcher Polite: The Flagellants Anne Richardson: Digging Out Following are a few books for children, up to all ages, with considerable special appeal. The first two titles are stories about Negro children, and the biography of Higginson is an account of the aboli- tionist colonel of the first all-Negro regi- ment recruited by federal forces. The last item, The Road Goes Ever On, is a natural for Tolkien fans. ZEELY. By Virginia Hamilton. Illus- trated by Symeon Shimin. The Mac- millan Co. 122 pp. $3.95. SAM. By Ann Herbert Scott. With draw- NEW DIRECTIONS BOOKS EZRA POUND 2. a. Pound/Joyce: Letters & Essays. $10.00 ve DYLAN THOMAS The Notebooks. $8.50 DELMORE SCHWARTZ Selected Poems. NDP 241, $1.75 TENNESSEE WILLIAMS One Arm, Stories. NDP 237, $1.85 LAWRENCE FERLINGHETTI Starting From San Francisco. Poetry, — NDP 220, $1.00 as WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS In The Money. Novel $4.95; NDP 240, _ $2.75 Pictures From Brueghel. Poetry. $5.00 1 A a } GARCIA LORCA Five Plays. NDP 232, $1.75 ‘ vt NICANOR PARRA Paes | Poems And Antipoems. $5.50; NDP 242, Pye $1.95. i : ™ JULES SUPERVIELLE ee te | | i Selected Writings. $6.75; NDP 209, $2755, t qY , CARL RAKOSI Amulet. Poems. $4.50; NDP 234, $1. 0 RAJA RAO Kanthapura. Novel. NDP 224, $1.95 JEAN COCTEAU The Infernal Machine. $2.75 Plays. NDP 2 5 JOHN HAWKES ¥ The Beetle Leg. Novel. $4.50. NDP 239, $1.50 The Innocent Party. $2.95 Plays. NDP 238, % yee THOMAS MERTON Selected Poems. NDP 85, $1.65 TA NEW DIRECTIONS | if 333 Sixth Ave., New York 10014 a Sg ne Say om = UNFINISHED BUSINESS JAMES N. ROSENBERG PAPERS A distinguished coflection of public and private papers from the long, rich and rewarding life of a well- known lawyer, painter and public figure. Illustrated. $10. VINCENT MARASIA PRESS. Mamaroneck, New York In the Winter Issue from Latin America ™ Marxism-Leninism vs. Castroism from the USSR Underground Bolshevik Call from Indonesia Communist Party Self-Criticism from Vietnam U.S. Defeat Inevitable Se ees ee ere eee WORLD REVOLUTION Dept. NYR P.O. Box 208, Church Street Station New York, N.Y. 10008 Please enter. ..subscription(s) for 1 year to World Revolution at $2.00 each. PROGRESSIVE a6 LABOR People’s War is Inevitable MuchoDebris from Regis Debray Analysis of Key U.S. Strikes Notes from the Detroit Rebellion PL, national organ of the Progressive Labor Party, offers Marxist-Leninist an- alysis from the factories, campuses, from rebelling ghettos and the impov~’ erished farms. Future issues include: NYC Welfare—the Caseworkers' Re- port, Appalachia from the Inside, Wil- liam Styron vs. Nat Turner and more. eee PROGRESSIVE LABOR Dept.NYR G.P.O. Box 808, Brooklyn N.Y. 11201 1 am interested in receiving...copies of PL at 50¢; ....Sub(s) to PL at $2.50 yearly ...PLP Eastnewspaper Challenge at $2 yrly ..-PLP West newspaper Spark at $2 yearly WONDERS, ings by Symeon Shimin. Mc-Graw Hill Book Co, 30 pp. $3.95. COLONEL OF THE BLACK REGI- MENT: The Life of Thomas Went- worth Higginson. By Howard N. Meyer. W. W. Norton & Co. 346 pp. $5.50, HIGGLETY, PIGGLETY POP! or THERE MUST BE MORE TO LIFE. Story and pictures by Maurice Sendak. "Harper & Row. 69 pp. $4.95. THE KITCHEN MADONNA. By Rumer Godden. The Viking Press. 89 pp. $3.75. WARRIORS, AND BEASTS ABOUNDING: How. the Artist Sees His World. By Beryl Barr. Foreword by Thomas P. F. Hoving. 117 illustrations; 31 in color. Double- day & Co. 128 pp. $6.95. An original and tasteful concept of presenting art for young people through the artists’ view of animals, heroes, the sun, stars, fire and night, with examples from world art through the centuries. The text discusses technique and style, and draws upon fables, legends, poetry and mythology. THE ROAD GOES EVER ON: A Song Cycle. Music by Donald Swann. Poems by J.R.R. Tolkien. Houghton Mifflin Co. 67 pp. $3.95. Books not reviewed but excellent* for gifts: CASTRO’S CUBA, CUBA’S FIDEL. Text and photographs by Lee Lock- wood. The Macmillan Co. 288 pp. $9.95. An American photo-journalist’s report on his visit to Cuba in 1966. Lock- wood’s questioning but warm approach to the people of Cuba and its leader results in some surprisingly intimate photographs and in an extraordinarily candid and long interview with Fidel, which forms the major part of the book. PORTAL TO AMERICA: The Lower East Side 1870-1925. Edited by Allen Schoener. Holt, Rinehart & Winston. 256 pp. More than 150 illustrations. $12.95. A picture of the life of immigrant Jews in New York’s ghetto. It includes vivid journalistic accounts of the period, and the final section, “Bintel Brief” letters to the editor of the Jewish Daily For- ward, is particularly charming. OTHELLO: The National Theatre Pro- duction. Edited by Kenneth Tynan. Rica He aye te + PICASSO: ; OS Srne Photographs by Lord Snowden, Angus McBean, Roddy McDowell and Chris” Arthus. Texts by Kenneth Tynan, Alan Seymour, F. R. Leavis, W. H. Auden, and excerpts from nine theatre critics’ reviews of Olivier in Othello. Stein and Day. 110 pp. $6.95. GALLOWS SONG. By Christian Mor- genstern. Translated by W. D. Snod- grass and Lore Segal. Illustrations by Paul Klee. University of Michigan Press. 124 pp. $7.95. ART TREASURES OF RUSSIA. Text by M. W. Alpatov of the Academy of Fine Arts of the USSR. Translated by Norbert Guterman. 104 hand- tipped color-plate illustrations. Harry N. Abrams. 178 pp. $25. THE AGE OF THE RENAISSANCE, Edited and with an introduction by Denys Hay. Texts by Nicolai Rubin- stein, Cecil Grayson, Peter Murray, Roberto Weiss, Delio Cantimori, I. D. McFarlane, G. R. Potter, A. A. Parker, Joel Hurstfield, L. D. Ett- linger, John Hale. 600 illustrations, 180 in color. 420 photographs, wood- cuts, drawings and maps. McGraw- Hill Book Company. 359 pp. $24.95 until May 31, 1968; $30 thereafter. 20,000 YEARS OF WORLD PAINT- ING: A COMPREHENSIVE HIS- TORICAL SURVEY FROM CAVE PAINTING TO MODERN ART. Edited and with an introduction by Hans “L. C. Jatie.> lexts by sR Kahane, P. Francastel, G. C. Argan, Michael Levey, Hans L. C. Jaffé, H. Hetl-Kunze. Translated from the French, German and Italian by Robert Erich Wolf. Over 1,000 reproductions in full color. Harry N. Abrams. 418 pp. $25. DRAWINGS BY DEGAS. Essay and Catalogue by Jean Sutherland Boggs. 156 illustrations. Includes a_ selected reading list and chronology of the life of Edgar Degas. Harry N. Abrams. 237 pp. $12.50. AUGUSTE RODIN. Text by Jean- Frangois Chabrun. Illustrations pre- pared by Robert Descharnes. The Viking Press. 277 pp. $30 until De- cember 30; $35 thereafter. SIXTY YEARS 408 GRAPHIC WORKS. _ Introductory text by Bernhard Geiser and Daniel- Henry Kahnweiler. An __ illustrated catalogue of the Los Angeles. County Museum of Art exhibition of aquatints, dry points, engravings, THE NATION/ December 18, 1967 f i a » stchings, linoleum cuts, lithographs ' and woodcuts by the master. New York Graphic Society. $12.50. _ PICASSO DRAWINGS. Text by Jean Leymarie. Translated by Stuart Gil- bert. 51 drawings in color and mono- chrome. Skira. Distributed by The World Publishing Company. 107 pp. $7.50. _ IDEALISM AND NATURALISM IN GOTHIC ART. By Max Dv6orak. Translated by Randolph J. Klawiter. Preface by Karl Maria Swoboda. 9 | color illustrations, 15 in. black and white. University of Notre Dame Press. 252 pp. $22.50. ™ THE MEDIAEVAL ARTIST : AT WORK. By Virginia Wylie Egbert. a $3 black and white _ illustrations. Princeton University Press. 94 pp. BS sa87.50. THE LIVING THEATRE OF MEDI- : EVAL ART. By Henry Kraus. Fore- i word by Harry Bober. 135 black and white illustrations. Indiana University Press. 248 pp. $15. OXFORD. By Felix Markham. Intro- duction by C. M. Bowra. 16 color illustrations, 80 in black and white. f + ‘-‘ William Morrow and Co. 192 pp. | S15. THE DANCE THROUGH THE AGES. By Walter Sorell. 250 illustrations, 18 in color. Grosset & Dunlap. 304 pp. , $14.95. fh CITIES OF DESTINY: AN ILLUS- | TRATED HISTORY OF CITIES. ) Edited and with a preface by Arnold | Toynbee. Texts by 20 contributors, E- including Maurice Bowra, J. R. Hale, Harold Acton, Steven Runciman, Alan i Pryce-Jones, C. A. Doxiadis, Arnold } Toynbee. 542 illustrations, 157 in fi color. 385 photographs, drawings, | __ maps, plans and diagrams. McGraw- Hill Book Co. 376 pp. $24.95 until May 31, 1968; $30 thereafter. JOSE LUIS SERT: ARCHITECTURE, CITY PLANNING, URBAN DE- SIGN. Edited by Knud Bastiund. Introduction by S. Giedion. Illustrated. Frederick A. Praeger. 244 pp. $20. THE LAROUSSE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF ANIMAL LIFE. Foreword by ° i Robert Cushman Murphy. Based _ partly on the work of Léon Bertin. Texts prepared by Maurice Burton, J. A. L. Cooke, R. G. Davies, Ben- jamin Dawes, J. W. Jones and C. M. ) THE NATION/ December 18, 1967 Yonge. 100 photographs in color, 900 ~. Ramsey. Illustrated with more than in black and white. McGraw-Hill 500 monochrome plates. Includes a Book Co. 640 pp. $22.50. full glossary of terms accompanying each section. Hawthorn Books. 1472 THE COMPLETE ENCYCLOPEDIA pp. $14.95 until Christmas; $17.50 OF ANTIQUES. Compiled by The thereafter. Connoisseur and edited by L. G. G. HELEN YGLESIAS Books by Nation Contributors We list below books published in 1967 The Life of the Drama (reprint). by writers who contributed to The Atheneum. $2.95 paper. Nation during the past year. This com- pilation—a regular year-end feature— JoHN BERGER. A Fortunate Man. Holt, includes books published in England, Rinehart & Winston. $5.95. showing equivalent prices in dollars, available on special order from most HarotD J. BERMAN (with Peter B. booksellers. Maggs). Disarmament Inspection under Soviet Law. Oceana. $7.50. CaRL AMERY. Capitulation. Herder & chal Herder. $5.50. WENDELL BERRY. A Place on Earth, H Eric BENTLEY. The Theatre of Commit- ATCONEIS BiaSe Se Warr Dr: oe Sou i , GEOFFREY BING. Reap the Whirlwind. The Brecht-Eisler Song Book (editor MacGibbon & Kee (London). $7. with Earl Robinson). Oak. $10. The Playwright as Thinker (reprint). PAUL BLACKBURN. The Cities. Grove. Harvest. $2.45 paper. $2.95; Did the U.S. Government help kill freedom in Greece? — The American State Department and the CIA played a crucial part in crushing democracy in Greece, says the author of this startling behind-the-scenes report. It ‘ells, for the first time, the complete story of the coup and reveals the U.S. role as silent partner of the ruling junta. ‘A wealth of exciting material...an important book!’’—Kirkus’ Service The Death of a Democracy GREECE AND THE AMERICAN CONSCIENCE by STEPHEN ROUSSEAS $6.50, now at your bookstore, or direct from publisher. (Please enclose payment.) GROVE PRESS, 315 Hudson St., New York 10013 665 weciwacks seein a Setemast ad translator. Pantheon. $5.95. Poem of the Cid, translator. American R.D.M. Corp. $1.95. ~Ropert Bry. The Light Around the Body. Harper & Row. $3.95. Forty Poems of J. R. Jimenez, trans- _ lator. Sixties Press. $2. Twenty Poems of Pablo (translator with James Sixties Press. $2. Hunger (by Knut Hamsun), translator. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $4.95. Neruda Wright). Kay Boy Le, editor. The Autobiography of Emanuel Carnevali. Horizon. $5.95. LENNART BRUCE. Making the Rounds. Kayak Press. $1.50. VERN L. BULLoUGH. The Development of Medicine as a Profession. Hafner. ‘$6. KENNETH BurKE. Language as Symbolic Action: Essays on Life, Literature, and Method. University of California Press. $10. Collected Poems: 1915-1967. Univer- sity of California Press. $6.50. The Philosophy of Literary Form (second edition). Louisiana State University Press. $7.95. HAYDEN CARRUTH. Contra Mortem. Crow’s Mark Press. $2.50 paper. RICHARD CARTER. The Doctor Business (reprint). Pocket Books. 75c paper. Breakthrough: The Saga of Jonas Salk (reprint). Pocket Books. 95c paper. Frep J. Coox. The Plot Against the Patient. Prentice-Hall. $5.95. Daviv Cort. The Glossy Rats. Grosset & Dunlap. $5. RicHarp Haver Costa. H. G. Wells. Twayne. $3.95. RICHARD EBERHART. Thirty One Sonnets. Eakins Press. $4.95. (Signed, num- bered, boxed edition $15.) FREDERIC EWEN. Bertolt Brecht: his life, his art and his times. Citadel. $10. C. P. FitzGeratp. The Chinese View of Their Place in the World (reprint). Oxford (England). $1 paper. MICHAEL BREWSTER FOLSOM (with Mary Elting). The Mysterious Grain: Science In Search of the Origin of Corn. M. Evans. $4.50. WALLACE FOWLIE. Climate of Violence: The French Literary Tradition from Baudelaire to the Present. Macmillan. $6.95. Wy 666 Morton H. Friep. The Evolution of Political Society: An Essay in Political Anthropology. Random. $7.95. Paper $2.95. Readings in Anthropology (Vol. I, second edition). Crowell. $4.95 paper. JEAN GARRIGUE. New and_ Selected Poems. Macmillan. $5.95. MARTHA GELLHORN. The Lowest Trees Have Tops. Michael Joseph (England). $6.25. The Face of War. Sphere (England). 70c paper. EUGENE D. GENovESE. The Political Economy of Slavery (reprint). Vintage. $1.95 paper. MARVIN E. GETTLEMAN (editor with David Mermelstein). The Great Society Reader: The Failure of American Liberalism. Random. $7.95. Paper $1.95. RicHARD GoTT (with Martin Gilbert). The Appeasers (reprint). Weidenfeld & Nicolson (England). $2.65 paper. Movements. ARTHUR GREGOR. Basic Gyre Press. $2.75. ALLEN GUTTMANN, The Conservative Tradition in America. Oxford Univer- sity Press. $6. ‘ Korea & the Theory of Limited War, editor. D. C. Heath. $1.50 paper. JoHN Hatcu. A History of Post-War Africa (reprint). Methuen (England). $2.50 paper. Rosert G. Hazo. The Idea of Love. Praeger. $7.95. RoBERT HERSHON. Swans Loving Bears Burning the Melting Deer. New Books. $1.25 paper. HERBERT HILL (editor with Arthur M. Ross). Employment, Race and Poverty. Harcourt, Brace & World. $6.95. Eric HopsspawM. Laboring Men. Double- day Anchor. $1.75 paper. Louis Kampr. On Modernism: The Prospects for Literature and Freedom. M.I.T. Press. $10. Henry S. KArieEL. The Decline of Amer- ican Pluralism (reprint). Stanford University Press. $2.95 paper. RoBpertT E. KEETON (with Jeffrey O’Connell). After Cars Crash: The Need for Legal and Insurance Reform. Dow Jones-Irwin. $4.95. GABRIEL KoLko. The Triumph of Con- servatism: A Reinterpretation of Amer- rev ee ay ican History, $2.65 paper. WALTER LAFEBER. America, Russia, and the Cold War. Wiley. $6.50. Paper $2.95; a DENISE LEvERTOYV. The Sorrow Dance. New Directions. $1.60 paper. With Eyes at the Back of Our Heads’ (reprint). New Directions. $1.45— paper. aa In Praise of Krishna (translator with Edward C. Dimock). Doubleday Anchor. 9Sc paper. Dan Levin. Stormy Petrel: The Life & Work of Maxim Gorky. Frederick Muller (London). $3.60. Joe. LieBeER. How The Fishes Live, McKay. $6.50. RICHARD G. LILLARD (with Otis Ww. Coan). America in Fiction. Pacific Books, $5.50. A. WALTON Litz. Jane Austen. Oxford University Press. $1.50 paper. JOHN LoGAN. Ghosts of the Heart. Uni- versity of Chicago Press. $1.50 paper. Gary MacEoin (as told to). All of Which I Saw, Part of Which I Was: An Autobiography of George Hunton. Doubleday. $4.95. Bi l What Happened at Rome? (reprint). Doubleday Echo. 85c paper. CarEY McWILLIAMs. III Fares the Land: Migrants and Migratory Labor in the — United States (reprint). Barnes & Noble. $8.50. j : Ambrose Bierce (reprint). Archon =.) Books. $12. Jay MarRTIN. Harvests of Change: Amer=- — ican Literature 1865-1914. Prentice- Hall. $7.50. The Waste Land: A_ Collection of a Critical Essays, editor. Prentice-Hall. $3.25. Paper $1.25. 4 JONATHAN MIRSKY (with others). Peace . in Vietnam (new enlarged edition). Hill & Wang. $1.25 paper. E. J. MisHAN. The Costs of Economic” ‘ Growth. Praeger. $6.50. ALG: Mowsray, The Thumb on the — Scale or The Supermarket Shell Game. | \p J.B. Lippincott. $4.95. | JOHN FREDERICK Nims, Of Flesh and Bone. Rutgers University Press. $3.75. — The Poems of St. John of the Cross (revised and _ retranslated). Grove. © $1.95 paper. x THE NATION/ December 18, 1967 4 tf Not. The Feast. Harcourt, Brace orld. $4.50. FFREY O'CONNELL (with Robert E. _ Keeton). After Cars Crash: The Need for Legal and Insurance Reform. Dow - Jones-Irwin. $4.95. fi “Cart OGLEsBy (with Richard Shaull). Containment and Change. Macmillan. $5.95. Paper $1.45. " ¥ SHERMAN Pau. Edmund Wilson: A | Study of Literary Vocation in Our ' Time. University of Illinois Press. _ $2.45 paper. a. | ADRIENNE RICH. Snapshots of a Daugh- _ter-In-Law: Poems, 1954-1962 (re- " print). W. W. Norton. $4.50. Paper Bo1.95. | M. L. RosentuaL. The New Poets: | American and British Poetry Since World War II. Oxford University Press. $6.50. Paper $1.95. The New Modern Poetry: British and American Poetry Since World War Il (anthology). Macmillan. $7.95. Z | STEPHEN W. RousseEas. The Death of a | Democracy: Greece and the American , ~ Conscience. Grove. $6.50. _ Lioyp I. RupotPH & SUSANNE HoEBER Rupotpyw. The Modernity of Tradi- | _—‘tion: Political Development in India. | ‘University of Chicago Press. $6.95. | | Kart M. RuprenTHAL. Business Logis- , tics in American Industry. Stanford University Press. $6.95. b Hue J. ScHonrievp. The Passover Plot | _— (reprint). Bantam. 95c paper. | The A-Z Bible Companion. New American Library. 95c paper. & Cuartes [. ScuorTiaNnp. The Social Security Program in the United States. Appleton-Century-Crofts. $5.95, The Welfare State. Harper & Row. $1.95 paper. : J. P. Scorr. Early Experience. Wads- _ worth. $1.95 paper. | Rosert G. SHERRILL. The Accidental 7 President. Grossman. $5, | NATHAN SILVER. New York. Lost | Houghton Mifflin. $12.50 to Dec. 31; $15 after. | Louis Simpson. Selected Poems (reprint). ) _ Harcourt, Brace & World. $1.45 paper. An Introduction to Poetry. St Martin’s Press. $3.95 paper. | SMITH SimPSON. Anatomy of the State | . Department. Houghton Mifflin. $5.95. _ Rosert Skxar. F. Scott Fitzgerald: The | THE NATION/ December 18, 1967 i, Uy Last Laocoén. Oxford University Press. $8.50. DANIEL STERN. After the War. Putnam’s. $5.95, Who Shall Live, Who Shall Die. Avon. 75c paper. GEORGE R. STEWART. Good Lives. Houghton Mifflin. $5.95, Names on the Land (reprint). Hough- ton Mifflin. $6. JAMES TATE. The Lost Pilot. Yale Uni- versity Press. $3.75. Paper $1.45. The Notes of Woe. Stone Wall Press. $4. JAMES R. TOWNSEND. Political Participa- tion in Communist China. University of California Press. $5.50. The Revolution of Chinese Youth: A Study of Chung-Kuo Ch’ing-Nien. University of California Center for Chinese Studies. $2. MARTIN TUCKER. Africa in Modern Literature. Frederick Ungar. $7.50. GABRIEL VAHANIAN. No Other God. Braziller. $4. Paper $1.50. The Death of God (reprint). Braziller. $1.95 paper. Mark VAN Doren. 100 Poems. Hill & Wang. $3.50. Paper $1.50. ALEXANDER WERTH. De Gaulle: A Political Biography. Simon & Schuster. $7.50. Penguin. $1.45 paper. Prelude to Downfall by Saul Fried- lander (translator with Aline B. Werth). Knopf. $6.95. JoHN R. WILLINGHAM. Literary Re- flections. McGraw-Hill. $4. Handbook of Critical Approaches to Literature (reprint). Harper & Row. $2.95 paper. STANLEY WOLPERT. Morley and India, 1906-1910. University of California Press. $6.95. The Expedition. Cassell $7.50. (England). Jose Youesias. The Goodbye Land. Pantheon. $4.95. The Party’s Over by Juan Goytisolo, translator. Grove. $3.95. Howarp ZINN. Vietnam: The Logic of Withdrawal. S25; Beacon. $4.95. Paper Additional art books and record roundups will appear in next week’s issue. / ART MAX KOZLOFF The current paintings of Frank Stella and Kenneth Noland, more prolix than one would have expected from such “re- ductive” artists, smack of the mathe- matical, although whether their process is multiplication or (sub)division is hard to say. Not scale, already fixed at huge dimensions, but the widely differ- entiated, almost innumerable layering of bands, curving or horizontal, now horn- swoggles the eye. Only with difficulty can one sustain an idea of the original mod- ules of this work, because its color codes become so wide-ranging and non- . repeating that the whole effect is irk- somely analytic. The gray-threaded chan- nels of unprimed canvas between the sharp, tape-marked contours of the units —it is erroneous to call them areas or — shapes—do not isolate their optical vi- th) eS A Ls ¢ S TECHNICOLOR® PANAVISION® & FROM WARNER BROS.-SEVEN ARTS = WORLD PREMIERE NOW WARNER THEATRE Bway & 47th St. COS-5711 The Best Way: To Get NATION) THE NATION 12-18-67 333 Sixth Ave., New York 10014 [_] One Year, $10 [_] Two Years, $18 [_] § Months, $6 [_] Bill Me [_] Payment Enclosed (Foreign and Canadian Postage $1 a year extra) % 667 a a Bre ar ee = mae stapee a “frustrated” dynamics, ations. Nor does the discrete concen- ism or parallelism of the pictorial order estrain sudden imbalances of “weight,” Dr integrate gaps in the spectrum. Parts, im more ways than one, dominate the conception of the whole, and it is just this domination that leads us to consider these two abstractionists, still intensely competing with each other, as having arrived at a mannerist phase of their art. This commences in Stella with his elaboration of one motif, circularity, to pre-empt composition, and to enact, lit- erally, the role of format. His earlier maneuverings of giant, shaped canvases, rectangular ‘torsos’ pronged with Trimmed triangular or polygonal “append- ages,” have given way to immense, diz- zyingly reiterated circles, utterly frozen in their fluidity, quartered or bisected, flanked, reversed or intersected, and ar- ranged tangentially in strange diptychs or triptychs. Just to describe them is to become verbally muscle-bound. Imagine someone drawing a circle with a 10-foot diameter, then switching the compass point 5 feet off to the side, or perhaps to the bottom, or diametrically between these positions, inscribing the corres- ponding arcs, cutting them off with straight edges at mid-career, and binding that area of their confluence into a “pic- ture” projecting the regularized echoes of these actions in radiating colors. That is what Stella has done, with the addi- tion of many quite arbitrary stoppages or overlaps of the circle paths, so that an illusionist potential is bewilderingly in- jected into otherwise surface-affirming patterns. The exhibition itself (Castelli Gallery), though composed. of so many is only a tiny sampling from a vast pictorial program upon which the artist is engaged: each title, “Abra,” “Sabra,” “Sinjerli,” etc., has a grouping of three differently con- figurated versions: interlace, rainbow and fan. (The names are of ancient Indian cities with circular plans.) It seems to me that at this moment Stella, with his new blend of curvilinear density and orchestrated pastelish day- glo color, has abruptly leaped from an indifference to the problem of style to an endorsement of stylizztion. Notwithstand- ing his consistency in planning his geo- metrical schemes, this planning has now inadvertently shifted meaning to a level of self-consciousness whereby the ele- ments in the painting are perceived as ornamentation. (Something very similar happens to certain details in Wright’s “fu- turistic’”’ Guggenheim Museum.) Further, this relates to the arbitrariness of their effect. It could almost be said of his earlier parallel strip paintings, because they struck an incisive, inevitable balance between function and stereotype, that they were classical in spirit. His previous exhibition revealed asymmetries which wedged this balance open, yet depended 668 upon it to yield extraordinary tension. Currently, tension is dissolved into an idea of tension; there is no foreordained necessity for the double functioning of his materials which now looks so inter- mittent and playful. Moreover, these paintings “feel” aligned, through their Over-many points of excitation, with the super-enhanced, mercilessly pretty palette of the psychedelic pop scene. Stella’s pre- cedents in the history of modern art— Delaunay’s “simultaneous discs,” Johns’s targets and device circles, and Noland’s concentric circles of 1961—-serve only to highlight the decorativeness that he has transferred to a theme which once had a luminous drama, an intransigent spare- ness, Or an ironic reflex of motion. Nor do the religious connotations suggested by the polyptych shapes, or certain stained-glass effects in the “fans,” unin- tended, I think, yet curiously contrived, integrate his precision of making with the precision of thought that once distin- guished his work. Noland’s paintings (Emmerich Gallery) seem, at first sight, to have done for lateral design what Stella has effected in the area of the rotary. That is, his canvases purvey a_ horizontal streamlined striping, radical not only in the way it takes over whole walls but by its alternation of thick bands with clusters of thin ones, giving the whole an aura of pinpointed velocities. (Some- how, lines less than an inch in width seem to “go” faster than their broader colleagues.) In terms of Noland’s de- velopment, this is a new motif, for al- — though he had already introduced frieze- like compositions of extremely dimin- ished height, as compared to a width which the eye simply could not accom- modate in one glance, they were parti- tioned in equal channels of only a few fairly modulated colors. To be brought up to date on his activities is to see a much more heterogeneous idiom: one in which he defies a holistic reading of the fa- cade by dropping out expected color transitions, or by throwing value con- trasts to the upper or lower margin, or finally, by raising the verticality of the format without taking advantage of the gained space to move attention upward as well as sideways. One almost aberrational result is the curious com- pression of the gallery walls promoted by these tactics. The room seems much more a hall than it had ever given evi- dence of being, with perimeters that run into one another and collide at break- neck speed. Moreover, it becomes im- possible for the spectator to take a proper sighting of the art, for any off- center position gives him an anamor- phically distorted view, while the shal- lowness of the gallery prevents anyone centrally placed, and necessarily close up, from comprehending edges which are, for all seat purposes, ri way off to the side and even then’ tendable without optical inconsistency. The sense of space generated is almost as Mannerist as the “infinities” of the e Uffizi corridor, % Remnants of Noland’s “mainstream” color—primaries and relatively heavily saturated variations thereof—still abound. — They are responsible for that acrylic brilliance, rigorously crafted, which has — always elicited the epithet “handsome” in discussion of his work. But granting — the general persuasiveness of this style, — 4 it is relevant to ask how convincing and memorable are the individual creations” within it. Aside from the intimations o landscape in Noland’s multiple horizons, he has also not been able to avoid effects. 4 similar to prism refractions, so that even : he puts blue below and red on top, as n “Graded Exposure,” there are illus- © Deng aspects to the present works. — These would not be disturbing if it could. i be demonstrated that they were inten- — tional. Rather, I think of them as merely — unfortunate by-products of Noland’s new — way of arranging things. A more serious objection resides in the linear functioning ~ of the narrow stripes in what is essen- — tially a chromatic context. Their imme-_ diate surrounds, unprimed channels of canvas, isolate their quotients of dark-— ness, so that they are drawn out of any — decisive interchange with hue. One under- — stands that Noland is deliberately flirting with intervals, but those here are too de- tachable from one another to be alto- gether coherent. It may have been in recognition of this that he repeats the | same band of unpronounced gray-blue twelve times in “Lyre” to arrive at a greater closeness of value, but the res are still disruptive. But,. following this lead, two canvases © in the show unfurl themselves as success-— ful solutions; indeed, as masterpieces of their kind. One, “Dateline,” is a large picture consisting of broad pinkish white | bands separated by raw canvas channels — in turn irrigated by off-center yellow pin stripes, the whole punctuated by olive — and black bars at the bottom. Because ~ the warm white, though predominant, is actually a species of negation, from a chromatic point of view, the cooler un- — painted areas are proportionately more 1 activated, and the experience becomes a ~ very subtle, high-keyed adventure in over- — tones, almost musical in the way it makes — you aware of the “pitch” of color (with — the bold addition of the full notes be-— neath). In the 19-foot “Coarse Shadow” — (anything but befitting its name), this procedure has gone so far as to shrink double pencil stripes of color (pink and — blue, yellow and olive, etc.), again — within the bare canvas runnels, between — huge polar white bands, with such con-_ trol that one forgets that edges seem to have invaded the center, and that such THE NATION/ December 18, 1967 es erage at ’ “ ra ing ements of color, when every image has been bleached from the Onment, should have such pervasive uence over noncolor. I would not care to draw conclusions from Noland’s success in turning his normal approach inside out. But if it testifies to the pre- iriousness which grips an _ abstract msibility in the throes of mannerism, I Palso symptomizes its vitality. “THEATRE HAROLD CLURMAN ‘Recalling the three plays I saw during the past week I am tempted to say that ) 1 passed from the ridiculous to the sub- , ime. On reflection, however, I have ' become unsure as to which is which. The | plays were Something Different by Carl | Reiner (Cort), Edward Albee’s Every- | thing in the Garden (Plymouth) and ‘Michel de Ghelderode’s Pantagleize, an APA production at the Lyceum. , _ Everything in the Garden is important cause it is the best of Albee’s adapta- tions and because he is a man of distinct talent. The play is in large degree the work of a now deceased English writer, Giles Cooper, whose play of the same title I saw in London five years ago. | ‘Praise or blame must be shared by both. The voice is Jacob’s voice, but the hands are the hands of Esau.” | The play is about a lower-middle-class | ‘suburban family, English with Cooper, | American with Albee. Such a family is ‘usually “comfortable” but perennially haunted by indigence. A foreign lady (possibly Hungarian in the original, English in the adaptation) arrives on the ) scene and insinuates to the wife that she ' can earn sizable sums by satisfying the | sexual needs of proper gentlemen while | her husband is at work. At first outraged by the proposal, the housewife finally ‘succumbs. Money begins to pour in; the | husband discovers its source, and is | ready to kill his spouse. Then he, she , and we discover that all the neighbors and friends—husbands and wives—have | improved their finances by the same : Means, accommodating themselves to the situation with satisfaction. When a play- | fully good-natured, wealthy bachelor becomes aware of what is going on, it becomes entirely possible (because he is a cynical drunk) that he will blab. The husbands strangle the playboy and bury | him in the garden. | _ This is not as farfetched as it sounds: | “a newspaper item some years ago ex- _ posed a parallel instance in the borough of Queens. Cooper told his bitter anecdote in dulcet tones, with a trace of a smile, and one could take it with as much gravity or levity as one desired. ; ! | i | i | | | i) | o _ THE NATION/ December 18, 1967 The play’s fault was that it was virtually over by, the middle of the second act. Cooper concluded with a Pirandello-like discourse (out of context) which was as useless and unseemly as a sixth finger. Albee’s treatment is much more virulent. He makes the play a parable of the prostitution of our civilization. He begins quite skillfully. His dialogue is excellent: there are some keen strokes of observation. But as the play proceeds he gets angrier and angrier: the joke has become a scream; we are repelled. This revulsion, combined with a refusal to believe, is not due to the violence of the play’s premise or to its import, which are now clichés. But the dramatic presentation of this message— even in a sardonic comedy—should not be as pat and absolute as Albee has made it. The simplicity of Everything in the Garden is adolescent, and when you add grimness of manner to it it becomes false, if not offensively ludricrous. There would be no problem in life if everything were all bad: the difficulty arises from the fact that the beautiful- and the damned coexist within each _ other. Realization of this is what makes both sharp comedy and strong drama. It also makes life interesting. To clarify my _ slight preachment, Virginia Woolf is engrossing despite its venom because its people are not one- tone types, any more than are the characters in Bessie Smith or Delicate Balance. In Garden there are only stereotypes. These may still serve sound purposes if arresting notes are struck through genuine wit, eloquence or special insights. But such qualities are lack- -ing in Albee’s adaptation after the first third of the play. For a bit of construc- tive criticism, Albee would have done well to drop the murder, which makes the play too neat a syllogism. The man who knows the community secret would then become a mocking threat in a quizzically light-handed vein. As for the production, its leading actors Barry Nelson and Barbara Bel Geddes are good. It is true that Miss Bel Geddes has too gentle and warm a nature to engage in the business she is called upon to perform, but she always acts with such complete faith in her roles that one is obliged to yield to. her spirit. With an actress of such innate enchantment it is perhaps ungracious to suggest she watch her weight. The others give competent if routine performances, and Peter Glenville has directed according to the dramatist’s specifications. Michel de Ghelderode—even when exasperating—is one of the most original playwrights of our time; Panta- gleize, written in 1929, may well be his masterpiece. One of Ghelderode’s plays is named ae wonderful “A terrific, record.” unusual, Mrs. Cyrus Eaton NO MORE WAR a long-playing album of twelve brilliant songs composed and sung by JACQUELINE SHARPE and arranged by Walter Raim “Jacqueline Sharpe has a haunting voice which, together with the chal- lenge of her lyrics, sent shivers down my spine.” Rabbi Maurice N. Eisendrath . Pres., Union of American Hebrew Con- — gregations* “I found the songs most meaningful and pertinent to these troubled times . . . As a performer myself I would be interested in carrying their message to my audiences.” Mrs. Martin Luther King, Jr. “What impressed me are the vari- . ety of musical styles which Mrs. Sharpe uses easily and, above all, the degree to which she has suc- ceeded in expressing the horror and indignation she and I both feel about this war. The record brings home to the conscience the human facts of Vietnam.” Staughton Lynd “An excellent record . . . editori- — ally and musically a fine expression of the best kind of citizenship.” David Schoenbrun “A powerful outing.” Record World *title for identification only If you want to say “Peace on Earth” with your gift, then give NO MORE WAR. Prices: Single albums, $5.00 each. 3 or more albums $4.25 each. Phone orders accepted. Call collect 914-RO 1-8700. Cutty Wren Records 108 Grand Street White Plains, N.Y. 10601 Please send albums of NO MORE WAR. I enclose check for $ Address .. State SSSR CTEEEE TSE RERRETH RHETT HEB eee 669 BOCCSRKH ERR EERE Ree eee eee eee . PERSONALS LAWYERS WANTED Challenging opportunities immediately available with an outstanding Legal Services Program on the Navajo Reser vation, for capable attorneys who are interested in meaningful public service responsibility and broad legal experi- ence. 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Position at Central Office, Window Rock, Arizona. Salary $12,000 per annum plus fringe benefits and housing allot- ment. Send resume to: Theodore R. Mitchell, Director DINEBEIINA NAHIILNA BE AGADITAHE, INC. P.O. Box 415, Window Rock, Arizona 986515 Telephone: 602/871-4151 NO MORE WOODEN NICKELS HOFFA FOR PRESIDENT also Impeach John- son on 1%” discs & 6” rulers, 12/$1—100/$5; circulars 50/$1; stickers, balloons 3c; Key cy Plentyism, Box 115 Edison, Miami ADVERTISE YOUR NEEDS IN THE NATION 670 Chronicles of Hell, and that might be the title for the entire body of his work. He calls Pantagleize “a farce to make you sad.” The hell of Pantagleize is an abor- tive revolution against capitalism and imperial power. It is a mad venture touched off unwittingly by a puny and sweet nonentity (or “imbecile’”) named Pantagleize. This wisp of a man is whirled along to his destruction by the absurd tides of a movement of which he is wholly unaware and to which he is entirely indifferent. Pantagleize is a funny play but as grotesque in its comedy as Ghelderode’s other plays are tragic and savage. If Genet had written it he would have called Pantagleize a “clown play.” All the characters are creatures of a macabre fantasy, but their content is meaningful. They are a disaffected avant-garde poet, a wildly naive African house servant full of race hate and credulity, a nihilistic gangster who naturally joins in any destructive activity, a proud, beautiful and militant Jewess with hopes for the redemption of her martyred people. All these, along with the ministers of state, the bankers, the police, the military, are presented like figures in a frieze of gargoyles. They are typical of Ghelderode’s saturnine humor. It is “medieval” and very Flemish. Think of the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch in the 15th century and James Ensor in ours: they are insanely imaginative, distorted, frequently obscene, flushed with hectic color. Ghelderode is profoundly Catholic, with a faith that verges on heresy. It sees little more in the world than a butcher shop, smelling of decay. The world is an inferno which only faith in God and the Christian injunction to love may redeem. On a first reading of Pantagleize the black man and the Jewess may strike one as indications of anti-Negro and anti-Semitic sentiments. (This impression is reduced in the drastically cut APA text.) It would seem that only such inferior people (not ex- cluding the idiotic poet) are both the fomentors and victims of revolution. But the people they blow up are no better. All of us therefore are the broilers and the broiled of hell: that is man’s fate in our sinful world. Ghelderode stands outside politics. Revolutions miss the point. They can be true only if they effect a change of heart: faith in God who is that absolute love to which man can merely aspire and which he can achieve in no more than an extremely modest degree. Thus the most conscious and articulate among the rebels of the play, an educated man who has become a waiter, speaks of his “com- rades—whom I despise a little. while still loving them a lot.” He accepts execution because, “Filled with hatred, I am unworthy to work for the ideal revolution.” But none of us may ver be absolved, for “The triumph of noble minds will never come.” Beatitude is conceivable only in the beyond. Yet Ghelderode is fiercely attached to this world in all its foulness, torment and lurid discord. He “loves it a lot.” That explains the kind of playwright he is. And that too is why he has written this epic farce of Pantagleize. The name is as odd in French, the original language of the play, as it is in English. It is my fancy that it is made up of two French words: pantin which means puppet, and glaise which is potter’s clay. This name itself is a clue to the play’s style. It was an act of courage, not to say foolhardiness, for the APA to undertake this fascinating and difficult work. They j| are not up to it. They provide a few visually exciting moments (a May Day parade just before a riot), and there is intelligence in the overall conception. But the acting is generally at a univer- sity-theatre level. Ellis Rabb, who plays the title role and who with John Houseman staged Pantagleize, has been at times an effec- tive character actor, as in Moliére’s Scapin. He is disastrously miscast in the present part. At best he resembles a director demonstrating how the part should be played. He looks and sounds like a sensitive college instructor, not the tiny kinetic clown whose range must be that of a Charlie Chaplin. Rabb hasn’t the ebullient imagination, the Puckish freedom and the physical versatility the part demands. And as he fails, so do the others who to a greater or lesser degree remain unfunny and unstirring. Only a supreme actor, a splendidly flexible com- pany and a great director could realize the magically horrendous and Rabelaisian theatricality of this play. As a serious man I should have nothing good to say about Carl Reiner’s Something Different, but it made me laugh. For this play about a man who can’t write a play by a man lamentably | determined to write one on that subject reflects a recognizable segment of our urban society. sa It is a mixture of the fun and games of a Jewish delicatessen restaurant, old- burlesque high jinks and a vulgar street gang, all of whose members have seen “plays of the absurd” in the wackiest of Greenwich Village cafés. The cast includes Bob Dishy, who was very funny as the German scientist in Ustinov’s The Unknown Soldier and His Wife; Gabriel Dell, a broadly gifted actor who has not yet come into his own; Linda Lavin, excellent in the opening performances of the Mad Show; the’ ever expert and commanding Claudia McNeil, all of whom throw themselves pell-mell into the not so kosher stew of Something Different. THE NATION/ December 18, 1967 ACROSS: 1 Spoonerism for less titled woman of fortune expected to come out of the office. (4,4) 5 Stephen was, but not in the way the jargon of some groups dictates. (6) Gives a broad smilé in support, obvi- ously. (5) 11 See 2 down. 12 Information (3-4) Leave, perhaps. (7) A boring drink, to say the least. (6) Tyranny at last becomes one, according to Dostoyevsky. (7) “Made to cause a sour description? (7) Not the main office of water requested in some drinks. (6) One of the armed forces responsible for the “Spell of the Yukon”? (7) Nothing leaves the fuel for part of the fuel system. (3,4) Bane of all genius, virtue, truth, according to Shelley. (9) ‘Would you’ find hers O.K., ritually permitted? (6) Occupied the chair. (8) DOWN: Ringing the changes on a bell’s likely to identify things. (6) Sed. 2, 11 and 28 across Originally indicating a change of film locale, and not neces- sarily descriptive of presidential mood at specific times. (9,4,2,3,5) not for the higher-ups? 24 Day freedom, 29 30 or just _— [ _ THE NATION/ December 18, 1967 3 Pillage. (7) 4 Not exactly a taxi I catch, one advises. 6 Successful communications set up when they’re good to medium? (7) 7 Uncanny, or just out? (3,2) 8 Channels occasionally have to be, but it’s One point in which some people go off. (8) 9 Climbed like a fish! (6) 16 There might be a lot sold this way. (9) 17 There might be some interest displayed in the account carried within its pages. (4,4) d 19 Source of oil is about in the mineral. (7) 20 Ernest, the author, sounds uncompromis- ing. (6) 7 21 An insect on a much larger animal could be a needless threat. (7) Takes in things with the eyes of a sea- faring man? (7) Associated with Stanislavsky, actors do them badly. (6) Winds and rocks? (5) SOLUTION TO PUZZLE NO. 1227 ACROSS: 1 Fire drills; 6 Proa; 10 Alarmed; 1! and 14 Heart-to-heart talk; 12 Cabs; 13 Convenient; 15 Sadness; 16 Electro; 17 Catered: 20 Arouses; 22 Treatments; 23 Iron; 25 Kettles; 26 and 3 Stop on a dime; 27 Yank: 28 Grand Banks. DOWN: 1 Francis Scott Key; 2 Roadbed; 4 Indoors; 5 Le Havre: 7 Retreat; 8 A month of Sundays; 9 Maintenon; 18 Trenton; 19 Dreiser; 20 Artisan; 21 Sirloin; 24 Comb. SS Printed by Milford Publishing Inc., Milford, Conn. ART WOULD YOU BELIEVE? EXCITING OR INAL woodcuts, etchings, lithos, $4.50 each, Subscription information: Graphic Circle, (N), 68 Fifth Avenue, New York City 10011 BOOKPLATES FREE CATALOG—beautiful designs for every age and taste. Special designing too. 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Also send a FREE copy of the book I have listed. ee CIEE bene vee ree ete ie bee ene nee rere reer ~ an INANE 0. ccisscesnsavcvieseceancesssstacnivns Jad buvus dececcbusustecesebes SpMeMBen cod sabesMewens otscu aulos lveeule CORD ADRERATO VEE: CTR TRIE Seen conn one ne ae Address -— Deamon posisoshaalscesccteccesesoesesnsdvec sce eune tbe cjalctet tie MUABUBR Rts Beeee sf fateh ca 0s Pasa t= Oe a cc “ee Address SHV ON ITUNES _ iwleigietetzieiguerete PLIABLE TRH DDD eH BASH Be Besse eB ee eee! The Wars of Private Hochhuth c. AMERY NATION. DECEMBER 25, 1967 35 cents The Feast at the Pentagon SANFORD WATZMAN ‘Cease-Fire First’ Cc onvers ati on With a Monk JONATHAN MIRSKY (ae A asp ; From RAND to Berkeley | | California Draws a Blank ua praper D’ARCY McNICKLE STEPHEN ZOLL Vanished West and Vanishing East Art and Record Roundups JOHN PERREAULT BENJAMIN BORETZ 1<$14 “9Ge1e—¢ 9118Nd 3NYONITHNG 60P ¥ . Other reviewers... . to bury the red herring East Lansing, Mich. Dear Sirs: For many of us, an encouraging aspect of the National Labor Leadership Assembly for Peace [“Labor Meets for Peace” by B. J. Widick, The Nation, Nov. 27] was that it seemed a long step toward ending two decades of redbaiting in the labor movement. Sitting side by side with men and women from AFL-CIO unions in the dis- cussions, indeed even appearing as panelists, were men from unions that have been in Coventry for eighteen years —since 1949, when the CIO expelled them on charges of “following th Communist Party line”: the U.E., the West Coast longshoremen, even the old United Public Workers, which sent a delegate from their 7,000-member local in Hawaii. In the hour-long debate on the policy statement, one speaker who was generously applauded when he was recognized by the chair and even more so when he con- cluded, was Harry Bridges, president of the West Coast longshoremen, and the only international union president at the meeting... . One is tempted to hope, with you, that it may be possible to build a strong minority opposition to the war in the ranks of labor, even, one day, to see the electrical workers, the longshoremen and, the others once again participating fully in the councils of the labor movement. Charles P. Larrowe, Professor of Economics Michigan State University without abuse Amherst, Mass. Dear Sirs: Although a letter is not liable to communicate to someone not reached by a book, I should like briefly to comment on Louis Kampf’s review of my book, The Con- servative Tradition in America [The Nation, Nov. 20]. I don’t complain that Kampf disagrees with me about the contemporary political situation, but I do ‘object to his suggestion that I see the United States as near to utopia. What I indicate in my book is that we are, as a society, relatively better off politically, economically and even moral- ly than at earlier times in our history. I say this because of the misery and injustice of the past and not because of any “perfection” of the present. The war in Vietnam is a tragedy; Negroes have suffered and still suffer from cruel injustice. These judgments are in the book but they are decidedly not the center of my concerns, Kampf rightly identifies my views as social democratic, but he abhors these views so much that he cannot allow me to discuss political ideas rather than politics. I analyze the political ideas of the military and he complains that I do not discuss the political influence of the military. I am aware the military establishment exercises immense in- fluence. Who isn’t aware of this? But I meant to point to certain truths not nearly as obvious, namely, that the military are not a separate caste with separate and “militaristic” ideas. From Kampf’s concentration on the present, the reader of the review must assume I dismiss the idea of conserva- tism from the South simply because Southern literature wasn’t conservative, but most of the section on the South is concerned with the family, with political theory and with economics. Similarly, Kampf never acknowledges that most of the book is about the Loyalists of the Revolution- ary period, about the Federalists, the Catholic Church, Adams and Santayana, the Humanists and the Agrarians, the Neo-Conservatives. and others who may not interest him but who are, nonetheless, of some interest to me and to (Continued on page 702) E74 a 3 a iy eh a EDITORIALS» The Nervous Cheerleader Mary McGrory, Washington columnist, remarks that je a Hubert Humphrey has been a cheerful cheerleader for these war. This may be an apt characterization of his pastijattl role, but things are going to get tougher. The Vice Presi- } fil’ dent has now been given the assignment of neutralizing)) pt Sen. Eugene McCarthy in his contest with the President. lyn and he is beginning to show signs of uneasiness. Not that iii the choice is a bad one from LBJ’s point of view. Both: men are from Minnesota, both are “liberals,” both are:} articulate—Hubert the more so; he is perhaps the world’s t most articulate man. So if McCarthy is to be put down ini} good time, Hubert is the man to make the attempt. } But what a wretched assignment for any politician— | even one of Hubert’s gifts. If he makes one misstep \}} Lyndon will be on his back. And Hubert is apt to step wrong in his new assignment, precisely because a residue #"™ of liberalism remains in his bosom, It got him into trouble ff at the time of the riots last summer, when he began sounding off about a Marshall Plan for the United States. Lyndon didn’t like anything that far out; if he sponsored jf it, he would be open to the charge of rewarding the J. rioters. He spoke to Hubert. Recently the Vice President made some ad lib radio comments about bringing non-Communist elements of the NLF into a Saigon government, and the scramble that ensued to correct this wide-eyed blunder extended from the State Department to the office of Dr. Frank Stanton, | president of C.B.S. Then there is the question of a strategy to handle- McCarthy. Hubert must sedulously peddle his master’s line: Lyndon as The Man of. Peace and Ho Chi Minh — as The Man Who Won’t Come to, the Table. Both epithets ji so lack novelty that the TV audience yawns whenever h. a & either is sounded—even those who believe. But Hubert has problems other than being boring about a war in which | every lie has been told countless times. He must defend the duly elected government of South Vietnam and keep — pretending that it is, on balance, a government of the — people, by the people, and for the people—propositions — controverted daily by a large section of the people them- selves. What prevails in Vietnam is a puppet government, a client government, led by former collaborators with the French. But the pretense that these are good men and © true must be kept up and, in the process, these grafters | and mercenaries are given truly enviable leverage for |] blackmail. If, before the campaign gets under way, | Lyndon decides he had better negotiate on equal terms, how will he get the consent of the South Vietnamese generals? And how will Hubert, in his capacity of mouth- ~ piece and explainer, deal with that situation? . McCarthy, no slouch in such matters, is likely to bear ~ down on the proposition that the National Liberation ~ Front and the North Vietnamese are perfectly willing to ~ negotiate, given assurances that a permanently divided Vietnam and a continued American presence are not the x Bn THE NATION/ December 25, 1967 7. non of the American position. Casting about for er, Hubert might retort that the government of nam will not negotiate with the “enemies of freedom.” the NLF and Hanoi need do, in that case, is argue it the enemies of both peace and freedom are in Saigon j express themselves as willing to negotiate with the l power—the United States—provided that it is not mt on staying in Vietnam for the rest of the century. en these premises, Hubert has dutifully accepted a at will become impossible. It is even conceivable that on will survive McCarthy’s onslaught but that may not. Is the Elephant Wising Up? The two-party system does have a limited logic—when permitted to work in accordance with its theory, ch is that when one party makes a gross mistake the her will offer an alternative. The voters must be given choice, otherwise what is the use of elections? On this emise, a GOP victory in 1968 might be a good thing the country. It remains to be seen whether the GOP avail itself of the opportunity, both for itself and for electorate. ) At this juncture one can only speculate on whether the felephant is invincibly stupid or is beginning to show mmerings of sense. No more than that is required: the emocrats are obviously in a bad way, and no one knows better than the Democrats themselves. Sen. Joseph ings, a Democrat, recently confirmed the findings of The Wall Street Journal on which we commented Scavengers of the Press,” December 4)—fatigue, jalaise, the premonition of defeat; above all, recognition tt the party merits a rebuke for the debasement of ical ethic into which Lyndon B. Johnson’s uncon- cionable war has led it. side from poetic justice, the practical consideration is a Republican administration has a better chance of tiating a way out of Vietnam than have the Demo- trats, who got us into it on the present scale. Having osen to escalate, having sent some 15,000 Americans ‘useless deaths and incurred almost unanimous inter- tional obloquy, Mr. Johnson is scarcely in a position “say: “J made a mistake; excuse it, please.” And if he otiates, with the Republicans still supporting his ier conduct of the war, he will leave himself open to charge by fire-eaters in both parties that, after such du cost, he still failed to achieve victory. sf Enough straws are blowing in the wind to give some pe that the Republicans may actually give the voters a reak. ‘ | Straw No. 1: Richard M. Nixon, his nostrils aquiver, Pput-civil rights ahead of Vietnam in his speech at the tional Association of Manufacturers dinner, and in the mer councils of the party he is trying to placate oppo- nents of the war. This gentleman knows where the votes are; his worst enemies cannot deny that. (2) Nelson Rockefeller, by far the strongest GOP /mominee—if he can disengage himself from his prior upp ort of the President on Vietnam—has set up a com- eae 1 rH [E NATION/ December 25, 1967 ‘“) IN THIS ISSUE December 25, 1967 EDITORIALS 674 ARTICLES 678 “Cease-Fire First”: Conversation with a Monk Jonathan Mirsky 682 From RAND to Berkeley: California Draws a Blank - Hal Draper 686 The Feast at the Pentagon Sanford Watzman 689 Congo: The Mercenaries Change Sides Stanley Meisler BOOKS & THE ARTS 692 A Record of the Vanished West D’Arcy McNickle 694 ... And the Vanishing East Stephen Zoll — 694 Animula (poem) W. S. Merwin 696 More Big 1967 Books John Perreault 697 Sonnet XXIX Pablo Neruda Translation Ben Belitt 698 Records 1967 Benjamin Boretz 700 The Wars of Private Hochhuth C. Amery 701 Films Robert Hatch 702 Television John Horn 703 Crossword Puzzle Frank W. Lewis Publisher Associate Publisher JAMES J. STORROW JR. GIFFORD PHILLIPS Editor Associate Editor CAREY McWILLIAMS PHIL KERBY Literary Editor HELEN YGLESIAS Executive Editor ROBERT HATCH Copy Editor, MARION HESS; Poetry Editor, MICHAEL GOLD- MAN; Theatre, HAROLD CLURMAN; Art, MAX KOZLOFF; Music, BENJAMIN BORETZ; Science, CARL DREHER; Ad- vertising Manager, MARY SIMON. Washington, ROBERT G. SHERRILL; Paris,s ALEXANDER WERTH; London, RAYMOND WILLIAMS; Bonn, C. AMERY; Canberra, C. P,. FITZGERALD; United Nations, ANNE TUCKERMAN. The Nation is published weekly (except biweekly in July and August) by the Nation zine Company and copyright 1967 in the U.S.A. by the Nation As 2s, Inc., 333 Sixth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10014, Tel.: CH 00. West Coast office: 1256 Westwood Boulevard, Los Angeles, Calif. 90024. Tel.: GR 4-2533. Second class postage paid at New York, N. Y. and at additional mailing office. ara Subscription Price: One year, $10; two years, $18. Foreign and Canadian postage: $1 extra per year. Change of Address: It is essential that subscribers ordering a change of address give four weeks’ notice and. provide their old as well as their new address. Please give Zip Code numbers for both addresses. Information to Libraries: The Nation is indexed in Readers Guide to Periodical Literature, Book Review Digest, Book Review Index and the Public Affairs Information Service. NATION “7 Combined with FRONTIER 675 eee mission to study what to do about the economy after the war ends. This is oblique enough, but the association in the voter’s mind must be that if the Governor is thinking about postwar problems, he must also be putting his first-rate mind to work on how to bring the war to an end. At the Governors’ Conference, also, Mr. Rockefeller, while not opening the door on his availability as a Presi- dential candidate, did rattle the knob a bit. (3) The GOP governors are pushing for some larger measure of influence at the 68 convention. They are not pushing hard enough but that may come. (4) The Ripon Society, a small, university-based group | of Republican liberals, expressed concern on December 11 that the Johnson Administration might be planning to invade North Vietnam. They offered little more evidence than the stories that have appeared in the papers and the fact that invasion will be a next-to-the-last resort, but they are not putting their trust in the prudence of the Great Escalator. (5) Republican members of the subcommittee headed by Rep. John E. Moss have given the Democrats just one more week to make public a report critical of land- reform efforts in South Vietnam, The report has been kept under wraps for two months, and there have been rumors that the White House would like to see it toned down. (6) Finally, there is the strange case of Senator Dirksen, often referred to as LBJ’s favorite ‘‘Democrat” in Illinois, after giving loyal service in the same capacity to President Kennedy. The liberal-moderates in the GOP do not like the idea of Senator Dirksen serving as chairman of the platform committee at the ’68 convention, and they have begun to make him the target of oblique attacks. He has backed down on school busing and recently joined with Rep. Gerald Ford in saying that “the Congress and the people have seen all too little evidence of genuine effort to explore and exploit the diplomatic opportunities avail- able to us”—to settle the war. Although he is sure of re- nomination next year, his prestige as a Republican leader in Illinois is waning and he now finds himself in the posi- tion of trying to convince Republicans that he is not a Johnson coadjutor. None of the foregoing is at all conclusive, but it shows that there are some politicians in the Republican ranks who would like to get into power after these lean years. Strategically they are in a good position. They can watch Eugene McCarthy make his attack on LBJ over Vietnam and see what works and what doesn’t work. And the- voters can watch both McCarthy and his potential bene- ficiaries. Politicians who cannot take advantage of such openings certainly will not excite the admiration of voters with even average savvy. The Tailored Press Again the credibility gap. Ronald Reagan, who holds sway in California, has created a considerable one over the allegation that two members of his staff were dis- missed when it was discovered that they were homo- sexuals. It appears that when the Governor calls someone 676 a liar (in this case Drew Pearson, who had b story) he means only that the man has made a stat that might dim the Reagan political star. But politicians like Ronald Reagan come and go, do actors like Ronald Reagan. An issue more serious than the Governor’s ability to tell the truth under pressure the apparent willingness of certain segments of the press} snd to edit the news for his convenience. With minor excepay) (oes tions, the California papers did not carry the Dre ffi Pearson column, and again with minor exceptions they)) ani did not unfold the story as Mr. Reagan’s attempt to dit + cleat credit Mr. Pearson boomeranged. At one point, when hey} jn was being closely questioned, the Governor said of he cud San Francisco Chronicle’s careful allusions to the Pearson) jy) column, “Someone violated what I’ve been told the was were going to do.” a What they (i.e., the press) were going to do, it seems) was keep their traps shut. This state of affairs has s alarmed Sen. Wayne Morse that he took the time of hi colleagues to protest it at length and with his customar vehemence. Senator Morse is a Democrat, and wh particularly exercises him is that the press of the country which is predominately Republican, applies a politica double standard to scandal in public office. He cited th Jenkins case and the matter of gifts to make his point. | But Senator Morse is also a man concerned for th moral health of the country. He referred to the drift ¢ journalism toward monopoly as a particular reason why the citizen should be alarmed by the suggestion that hi news is being tailored. One doubts that Mr. Morse, man of long political memory, sees in Governor Reagal more than a passing threat to the national welfare. Bu Reaganized news worries him, as it does us. And thougl he does not say so, we trust that he is also alarmed by Johnsonized news. ie | But > thin ves we sion con {rod | the ) 15 | $3¢ wit Wh Footnote to History Many observers with experience in power politics have doubted from the first the official story of the attack or U.S. destroyers in the Gulf of Tonkin. We know now tha’ President Johnson had already determined to expand the war in Vietnam, and that on the basis of the alleged EEE attack he was able to extract a blank check from Congress} 5 —a check which many Congressmen have since regrettedy in signing. The whole sequence was exceedingly pat. Now a9) participant in ne action writes in the New Haven Register (December 6): . I maintain that President Johnson Secretary McNamara and the Joint Chiefs of Staff gave false information to Congress in their report about U.S destroyers being attacked in the Gulf of Tonkin,” and tells in detail what actually occurred. In August, 1964, John White, now of Cheshire, Conn., was serving as a commissioned naval officer aboard U.S.S. Pine Island (AV-12), the first American warship to entet the combat zone in response to the alleged attack on the destroyers Maddox and Turner Joy. There were North) Vietnamese torpedo boats in the area and they used§ harassing maneuvers. That is not the issue—they had a least as much right to be there as the American vessels The crucial question is: did they, as charged, actually fire THE NATION/ December 25, 1962 | $ or torpedoes at U.S. warships? White says flatly ey did not. e overheard the radio messages from the destroyers posedly under fire and later spoke with the chief an of the Maddox, who was in the sonar room ng the “attack.” This technician’s evaluation of the harscope picture was negative, meaning that no torpe- Ss were fired, at the ship or otherwise. The commanding ficer was so informed. “My naval experience as an mtisubmarine warfare officer,” White writes, “makes it clear that a chief sonarman’s judgment in such a situation is more reliable than that of anyone else on the ship, in- cluding the commanding officer. No one is in a better posi- tion to know than the chief, and in this case-his judgment was that there was no attack.” | White does not discuss the possibility that the North | Vietnamese boats fired something other than torpedoes. | But even if they did, no hits were scored, nor could any- | thing but torpedoes pose any real threat to the American | vessels. Yet the Pentagon reported to the President that | we had been attacked, and the President used the occa- | sion to panic Congress into giving him carte blanche to | conduct the war in any way he pleased. He now has more | troops in Southeast Asia than Truman had in Korea, and the Seventh Fleet is operating off the coast; more than 5,000 American lives have been lost, the war is costing $30 billion a year, Vietnam is being devastated, and war | with China is an ever-present possibility. “Let’s hope,” | White concludes, “our warships aren't attacked by Chinese sampans next.” Ff | New Voices from the Convent s A dispute that would have been unthinkable in the Catholic Church prior to Pope John XXIII and Vatican | TI is taking place in Los Angeles. Sisters of the Immacu- ‘Yate Heart of Mary, a teaching order, are defying the wishes of James Francis Cardinal McIntyre, the ultra- " conservative 81-year-old archbishop. At immediate issue "are these principal points: freedom of habit or dress for | sisters, annual parochial school contracts for the nuns ™ and permission for sixty to seventy sisters to leave the schools next year to complete their education for teach- | ing credentials. Cardinal McIntyre opposes the first two | requests and wants the order to cut in half the number ' of nuns planning to finish their academic training. The order has rejected the cardinal’s views, and unless a | compromise is reached, 200 sisters will withdraw next _ year from Los Angeles Catholic schools, already short of teachers. } -—«- The educational reform measures are only a part, and | the least important aspect, of the controversy. Central ‘to the disagreement is the increasing pressure by the re- | ligious, and the laity, for democratic reforms in the structure of the Church. Sister Anita Caspary, mother "general of Immaculate Heart, said pointedly: “For the first time our rules have been changed from within and not imposed from without.” Later she added: “The key issue is our initiation of experimentation with a new ‘mode of religious life, as authorized by the directives of THE NATION/ December 25, 1967 . Pope Paul VI after Vatican II. .. . Provided our life is rooted in the Gospel, ought not sisters, like other women in today’s world, be permitted to devise a way of life which fosters diversity instead of uniformity, in- itiative instead of acquiescence, shared responsibility instead of unquestioning compliance?” It is a question admirably suited to the issue, and while Cardinal McIntyre exemplifies the adamant old order, new voices for change are raised in the hierarchy itself. Bishop Charles A. Buswell of Pueblo, Colo., praising the reforms of the Immaculate Heart sisterhood, commented recently: “Where there is no tension there is no life, where there is no life there is death, and where there is death, people get buried.” The Dead Horse Walks Again There should be a proverb which reads: Before kicking a dead horse make sure it will not get up and walk away. Paternalism in the administration of Indian affairs has been such a dead horse for longer than anyone can remember. Everybody takes a kick at the carcass— editorial writers, members of Congress, even Interior Secretaries and Indian Commissioners—and the carcass regularly rises up and astounds the epitaph writers, No one will say a kind word for paternalism (every man’s hand is against it) and yet every new administration in Washington feels compelled to make a solemn declara- tion that paternalis:. in dealing with the Indian people is ended forever. Which leads one to wonder how many times a horse can come to its mortal end. Perhaps it is a matter of semantics: the humanism practiced in one administration is regarded as soft-headed coddling by its successor. But on reflection it seems to be more com- plicated than that. The events relating to the introduction and promotion of certain legislation now pending in Congress provide some clues for those who would explore the subject. The Indian Resources Development Act of 1967 was intro- duced on May 18 by Senator Jackson, of Washington, at the request of Secretary of the Interior Stewart L. Udall. This bill, S. 1816, is beyond doubt the most important single piece of Indian legislation to come before Congress in more than thirty years. In bulk alone it is formidable, consisting of four titles, fifty-some sections and numerous subsections. One is bound to ask how it reflects Indian purpose, and in what way it breaks with paternalistic practices in dealing with the Indian people. The present Commissioner of Indian Affairs, Robert L. Bennett, himself of Indian descent, began his adminis- tration by conducting some nine regional meetings through the fall and early winter of 1966, at which he conferred with a total of 153 tribes and intertribal groups, represent- ing both urban and reservation Indians. That the Indians were not reluctant to express their views in these meetings is indicated by the 1,950 separate recommendations offered, many of them understandably duplications. The results were analyzed by anthropologists Deward E. Walker, Jr., of the University of Idaho, and Bruce J. Rigsby, of the University of New Mexico, and published 677 Far by Washington State University (Northwest Anthropolog- ical Research Notes, Vol. 1, No. 1, 1967). The analysis is especially instructive with respect to questions touching on Indian decision making and the familiar father-knows- best approach which everybody, including the present Administration, condemns. The pending legislation seeks to enable Indians “to participate more fully in American social, economic, edu- cational, and political life; and to permit them to exercise greater initiative and self-determination.” These aims will be achieved, Secretary Udall declared in his transmittal letter to Congress, by enabling Indians “to enter the money markets of the Nation to secure the capital so essential to individual and community development.” The main features of the legislation include (1) an authorization of $500 million which, when actually appropriated by Congress, could be used either to guarantee commercial loans, or for direct government loans when private credit is not available; (2) permission for Indian tribes or corporations to finance certain types of public improvement through the issuance of tax exempt bonds, as is done by state and local governments, and (3) increased tribal control over trust-protected resources, including the authority to mortgage and sell tribal land or other assets. _ The proposals, in themselves, are unimpeachable. They reflect the kind of program planning one would expect of men trained and experienced in business management and public finance. Unfortunately, they reflect neither the experiences of Indians nor the views and recommendations which were offered at the Commissioner’s regional meet- ings. The legislation would enlarge the opportunity for Indians to enter the market place, but the Indians ob- viously are looking elsewhere. We quote what seems to us to be the significant findings in the Walker-Rigsby report: Clearly, there is widespread opposition to termination of reservations and a strong desire that treaty rights and Indian land be preserved in their entirety. There is a wide- spread wish to participate more fully in formulation of policies affecting Indian people. . . . In the opinion of most of those making recommendations, many Bureau of Indian Affairs services need expansion. . . . Industri- “CEASE-FIRE FIRST’ \ * ™ 0 os f A alization of reservations and maximal developme: recreational potentials also were widespread recom- | mendations. Requests for improved water and road — systems were numerous, as were recommendations for increased appropriations, services, facilities, and oppor- tunities in health, education, employment, and housing. Increased development of Indian resources was a com- mon request closely related to the equally common re- — quest for thorough human resources surveys under government auspices. . . . Finally, virtually universal requests . .. were for expansion of the Bureau of Indian Affairs revolving loan fund and for provision of loan facilities to enable tribes to buy up their heirship land interests for consolidation into tribal holdings. Nowhere in this listing of priorities can one find a nod ‘| or a thumb jerk in the direction of private money lenders ~ , 7 < or the bond market. The Indians want financing, but they — ]| want to do business with the only banker they have ever jf known, Uncle Sam. And they expect him to operate — through their own elected officials and tribal corporations. Maybe this is wrong. Maybe the time has come for the Indian people to learn about Wall Street and the local © Building and Loan Association. The men who drafted S. — 1816 obviously had that in mind. They know what is good for the Indian people. Like it or not, that is what — the tribesmen are likely to get, if they get anything. 3| It is a pity though, considering the effort the new Com- — missioner exerted in obtaining Indian opinion, possibly giving the people to believe that their wishes would prevail—a pity that his legislative experts chose to be guided by their special wisdom and to let Indian experi- ence continue to lie fallow. That has always been the essence of paternalism: the substitution of expert thinking — for folk thinking; authority for mutual agreement. The handouts, the free services—which are what the adminis- trators have in mind when they talk of paternalism— are not what render a people dependent on government. — It is rather the constant chopping down of the seedlings of community decision. And so, it would seem, we must wait until another administration comes along and ~ promises an end to paternalism. } Heigh-ho! The dead horse walks again. D’Arcy MCNICKLE CONVERSATION WITH A MONK JONATHAN MIRSKY Mr. Mirsky, who teaches Chinese at Dartmouth College, is co-author of Peace in Vietnam (Hill & Wang). Mr. Mirsky was here briefly after his last visit to Vietnam, and then left again for the East, this time to visit Cambodia and Nepal. He has been refused a visa by South Vietnam. “You must alarm the people of America. Tell them the United States is fighting not only Communists but Viet- namese nationalists of all religions, beliefs and classes. _ All of us are in this fight.” 678 Such is the state of mind of Thich Tri Quang, a leading figure in the Vietnamese Unified Buddhist Church. Ameri- cans first read of him during the chaotic period before Diem’s fall, when the Saigon government began cracking down on the Buddhists who shocked the world by burn- ing themselves to death. In Hue, then (as now) the center of disaffection, Thich Tri Quang appeared in the van- guard of Buddhist resistance. Americans remember him, — too, for leading the abortive 1966 Buddhist demonstra- tions in Hue against the Ky regime, after which he went on a marathon hunger strike while under house arrest. THE NATION/ December 25, 1967 — . i , tly he could again be seen in press photographs, resident Thieu’s office, sitting day after day in rain, protesting the July 18 Buddhist Charter, gave official sanction to only five of the eleven ie r uring his activities of last year (the uprisings were y put down in Hue by troops sent north in American ) Thich Tri Quang acquired a reputation for eness and duplicity which culminated in a cele- ated Time cover story that thoroughly blackened his acter. Since then, not surprisingly, he has given no ferviews for publication, confining his conversations ith foreigners to old acquaintances and a few peace- iented visitors to South Vietnam. Since Americans the importance of public figures by how often their Si appear in the press, his “influence” is said to have Bad.” In the week before the Vietnamese election an elderly igon lawyer took me to see Thich Tri Quang. The da lies near a crowded thoroughfare and is still being . It is invariably crowded with throngs of the faithful ho participate in a relaxed way in whatever religious : ity is in progress while watching the construction and ne monks at devotions, Bi Saigon is a suspicious place. Americans in civilian lothes are assumed to be working for the CIA. The first e I, a foreigner, appeared i in the pagoda, several monks cked my path, inquiring with forced smiles whom I vished to see. My companion left me with them and dis- ippeared toward the rear. The monks continued to stand n front of me, politely pointing out interesting aspects yf the architecture. When I returned the next day, I en- intered quite different smiles, and found my way unob- ucted into the inner recesses of the pagoda. There I vas ushered into a small, unpretentious, cement-floored room containing a desk, typewriter, telephone, bed and a w low stools. In this room the Venerable Thich Tri | Juang lives and works. He swept into the room and st a double armful of long-stemmed roses into my ds. _ Thich Tri Quang is about 40, with a shaved head, large eyes and a wide mouth which produces frequent capti- , va ating smiles of great warmth and good humor. If the word “charming” had not been devalued, it would apply very well to him. Relaxed and supple of gesture and ett at moments when his discourse might throw his listener into profound gloom and even guilt, he sud- Ei rily shoots forth a look of dazzling friendliness, indicat- ‘that you in no way merit disapproval. Interpretation under such circumstances is critical and s handled in this instance by Thich Tri Hai, a young a educated in America (when she was still a secular rson), who is one of the Venerable’s constant attend- at least when he is sought out by Americans. (At this $ point it should be made clear, for the last time, that ich does not mean “venerable”; it is the Vietnamese form Sakya, the Lord Buddha’s name, and is adopted by members of the Buddhist clergy. The term “Vener- e” refers only to appropriately senior figures. ) F NATION/ December 25, 1967 Insofar as I won Thich Tri Quang’s confidence, it is” because my introduction to him came from Vietnamese whom he knows beyond peradventure have no dealings with the American Establishment. Introductions are vital . in Asia, but particularly in Vietnam where an indis- cretion can result in the death or imprisonment of the subject of your “story.” Also, the Venerable had read Peace in Vietnam, a book prepared for the American Friends Service Committee, of which I am a co-author. Therefore, when I asked Thich Tri Quang if I could take notes during our conversation, he assented at once, and when our conversations (which ranged over two days) finished he asked me to transmit his feeling to as many Americans as possible. For forty-five minutes Thich Tri Quang interviewed me. He wished to know the influence of the peace move- ment in America. Were the numbers increasing? Were there many conscientious objectors? (He had asked me very quickly about my own feelings on the draft.) Did our government intend to end the war after the election or enlarge it? How did I feel peace could be achieved and, in particular, how could a cease-fire come about? When my answers were given, he paused and then said: “It seems to me that this war is a personal matter for President Johnson.” The importance of s‘opping the war remained upper- most in all his s..e en.s, even when he ‘discussed the American proics. ..2 has met over the years. “In the past I have recei.ed nui. cers of peace groups. I remember one in particular. lt was made up of representatives from women’s associations, Protestant, Catholic and other religious groups, and professors. I asked them if they were against the war because of compassion, a dislike of Americans dying, or because it is purposeless. They . had no clear answer, and I guessed they would not re- — main firmly opposed to the war. I have heard that when they returned to America many of them gave up and that only those with a strong religious conviction con- tinued actively to speak against the war.” Many Americans are puzzled by the activity of the Buddhists and some are troubled by their ‘“worldliness.” This fails to fit into our conception of the reclusive monk, withdrawn from mundane matters and devoted only to the spiritual. Leaving aside the occasional hyper- activity of Buddhist monks in other countries and ages (Japan in the 8th century, for instance, was the scene of violent struggles between various sects), it should be re- membered that Buddhists in Vietnam have a long history of opposing foreign occupation. From 1885 to 1898, the clergy were in the forefront of the Royalist Resistance Movement against the French; indeed, the uprising of 1898 is referred to as “The Monks’ War.” In succeeding decades numerous anti-French secret societies—the most famous being the Cao Dai and Hoa Hao—were linked by power- ful Buddhist sentiments. In 1963, as is well known, it was the activity of the Buddhist clergy that brought about the collapse of the Diem regime. While it is true that the outward manifestations of Buddhist organization were smashed by Ky’s soldiers in the summer of 1966, it would be a serious error to conclude that the strength 679 of the Buddhists, which is based finally on a faith shared by millions of Vietnamese, has been dissipated. His con- fidence in the endurance of this faith explains Thich Tri Quang’s answer to my question about why the NLF and the Americans both disapprove of the Buddhist Church. “The main reason that the NLF opposes us is because of our broad following in the countryside; the NLF dis- Accurso Thich Tri Quang likes any other group with strong support from the popu- lation; they know that many peasants follow the Buddhist leaders. This is not the same as the American opposi- tion, which stems from an awareness that the Buddhists Tepresent extreme Vietnamese nationalism and anti-for- eignism.” On the subject of negotations and cease-fire, Thich Tri Quang expressed himself clearly and practically: To speak of peace.means to speak of a cease-fire. Others advocate full-scale negotiations first. Obviously, such negotiations would be held between Washington and Hanoi. The NLF would not be an important participant; in such matters it would be essentially de- pendent on North Vietnam. I cannot agree with a course of action whereby negotiations must precede a mutual cease-fire; the atmosphere at the moment pre- cludes broad negotiations. Everyone is too nervous. If, however, there should be a cease-fire first, these 680 save face. Neither will have to admit any kind of mili- tary defeat. Next, although Hanoi might later send troops into the South, Americans and Vietnamese would no longer be killed. Third, and most important, is that — with a cease-fire there would occur for the first time in © many years a chance for public participation in gov- ernment. It is very, very important that the people take part in the political struggle. If negotiations come first, ~ only Washington and Hanoi will take part and the voice ~ of the Vietnamese people will not be heard. 4 Vietnamese remember what Kennedy said: “The Vietnamese fought the Communists because they wanted freedom. But under Diem they had no freedom, so why should they fight?” Now the Vietnamese are fight- ing to live! But life is impossible. There must be a cease-fire so the people can feel safe, can live, and can struggle for their freedom. It seemed natural to inquire whether or not the NLF* would take over the country at once if the Americans §} >, stopped fighting. Thich Tri Quang’s answer to this ques: tion showed his awareness of the present stage of the war. Many patriotic, non-Communist Vietnamese are now either in the Front or are considering joining; especially 4 among quite ordinary people, the Communists are seen § primarily as resistance leaders, as was the case in Europe )} during World War II. a Buddhist students, who by upbringing, faith and edu: cation are nonviolent, told me in August that they were wrestling with this problem. Two different young men told me with deep anguish that they could now imagine | themselves tossing a hand grenade into an American | billet. Another leading Buddhist monk, when asked by me what he would say to a youth thinking of joining the NLF, replied: “There are many patriots in the NLF; it is’ essentially a nationalist organization with Communis ‘leadership. I would say to such a young man that there hi are many ways for a Vietnamese to do his duty; he should §) | oppose the United States, and if he chooses violence this 9) a is very sad, but it may be necessary under the circum- 9) ,, stances. Buddhists are Vietnamese; the people and the Church are one. We have responsibilities involving the 9) fate of our country.” Thus, in discussing the possibility of an NLF take-over after a cease-fire, Thich Tri Quang said: If people go into the Front, it is because they want to retaliate against the Americans. We Vietnamese laugh when you say you are here to protect us against the Chinese. This may be an American reason, but how can we take it seriously? Our own xenophobia is sufficient to deal with our enemies. The more anti-U.S. many Viet- namese feel, the more they go into the Front. But if the people in the countryside were not fright- ened by the war they would not cooperate with the NLF. If the NLF could totally persuade them it would have happened twenty years ago! The Saigon govern- ment has had no influence in most of the country for that length of time—and yet the people do not go to the NLF, in many instances, because they want to keep their religion. Let me say this: The influence of a cease-fire is great. Look at the cease-fires in the past during Christmas and Buddha’s birthday. American soldiers, Vietnamese, and all the world were glad. Everyone, including the Pope, ~ was horrified when the killing began again. If there THE NATION/ December 25, 1967 nother three-day pause, I believe the war would resume. People would be horrified. Just prior to their Presidential election, my Viet- nese friends were in a state of considerable depres- , feeling that the last chance for a civilian government h popular support was about to disappear. They nted to a number of factors: General Duong Van , 4 past premier of considerable popular following o had been removed from office on charges of attempt- y to negotiate with the NLF, was not being allowed |} return from his Bangkok exile to run for office; Au Tr ong Thanh, Marshall Ky’s ex-finance minister, an Oficial highly regarded by both Vietnamese and Ameri- sans, was declared ineligible to run because his cease- | fire/negotiate platform was ‘“Communist-inspired.” Shortly after the election, General Loan of the Security ‘olice came personally to Thanh’s office and took him to Police Headquarters in handcuffs. After an international outcry he was released. (Dzu, the surprising runner-up in I the election, did not announce the details of his peace platform until after his approval as a candidate; he, too, has been put under house arrest by the Security Police.) ' Another factor in favor of a government victory was the refusal of Generals Thieu and Ky to resign their ‘ofsices—as the law demanded—in order to campaign. | They could, therefore, employ the unparalleled facilities | of the central government to call on the district and pro- | Vincial officials to get out the vote. Finally, the other | candidates were limited to five-minute personal appear- ances in a minority of the forty-three provinces, thus in- ring their continued anonymity with the bulk of the | peasants. A simple plurality, all that was required, would ‘suffice to return the incumbent military government. (As ) it turned out, the government was returned by less than 20 per cent of the potential adult voters of South Vietnam. ) | ‘It was against such a background that Thich Tri Quang | gave me the following analysis of the political situation, The U.S. Government is turning a blind eye to the eases of fraud and dishonesty which are taking place _ during the preparations for the coming elections in f _ South Vietnam. Fraud and dishonesty are manifested by the following facts: A free election requires freedom in running for elections. But now there is no such freedom for the ‘candidates. Many Senate candidate lists which appear opposed to the existing government have been canceled. There is no freedom for electioneering. Many prov- inces have no election posters. The candidate lists which appear to be popular have been torn down. Many country areas are not under government con- | trol. For these areas, false lists of voters have been f= s drawn up to enable substitute voting to take place. In | this way they can claim greater control over rural areas than in fact they possess, and can increase the number of voting cards. _ The government is well aware that during election- eering and especially after the elections, there will be a strong opposition from the people. Therefore, many forms of terrorizing and sabotage against the opposition have been applied, so that the latter will have no more energy or courage to struggle. oy _ For example: two motorcycles have been distributed te each village so that secret police can go from family re. ro “THB NATION/ December 25, 1967 ies A : to family, giving orders that they must vote for Thieu and Ky if they wish to be safe. According to Venerable Thich Tri Quang, the U.S. Government is more afraid of the mass opposition which will take place after the elections than is the Thieu-Ky faction in itself, for the following reasons: ® The Johnson government will not then be able to claim that the elections have brought about political sta- bility in South Vietnam, ®@ The opposition of the Vietnamese people after the elections will bear badly upon the coming Presidential elections in the United States. ; @ The U.S. President and government are deceiving the American people by distorting the truth about the elections in South Vietnam. The Buddhist clergy is now facing a grim dilemma; it knows that many Vietnamese are torn between their anti-foreignism—which impels them into the National Liberation Front—and the teaching of their monks, which is based on deep religious devotion. The monks are striv- ing not to seem overly anti-Communist, for fear of being mistaken for allies of the Americans. Since many peasants now turn toward the NLF out of desperation as a means of resisting the Americans, Buddhists, too, must search for ways to appear both patriotic and peaceful. This is perhaps becoming easier for them as the American Em- bassy radiates increasing hostility toward any group that opposes the war. Accordingly, on this subject Thich Tri Quang spoke with the greatest passion, taking my right hand in both of his and looking me dead in the eye when he insisted: “You must alarm the people of America. Tell them the United States is fighting not. only Communists but Vietnamese nationalists of all religions, beliefs and classes. All of us are in this fight. Your government is deceiving the people about the nature of the war. Besides vour NLF enemy, there is a national front composed of Buddhists, Catholics and many groups, acting together.” I asked him if this struggle was already taking a vio- lent turn. “Not yet, but violence is very probable. There is now a strong anti-American spirit in all elements of our so- ciety.” Rather timidly, since one hesitates even to seem to offer advice under these circumstances, I asked him why, since so many Vietnamese worked for the Americans, they did not employ classic methods of noncooperation. “This is a special aspect of Asian psychology—one can work for the Americans and at the same time work against them. Even the most humble Vietnamese know why they work for the Americans; you have taken away their food.” He rose, gathering his white robe about him. “In the name of the Vietnamese people, victims of suppression and dishonesty, I humbly thank you.” Giving me a final flashing smile, he pressed his hands together, and left the room. The following day I heard one of the Americans in charge of pacification say: “If I put Vietnam first, I'd go down to the Embassy and picket for peace. That’s what this place needs.” 681 SP ee nee QR one : FROM RAND TO BERKELEY CALIFORNIA DRAWS A BLANK HAL DRAPER Mr. Draper is the author of Berkeley: The New Student Revolt (Grove Press). He is an editor of New Politics and the Independent Socialist. New UC PresipeENT—A ‘MysTERY MAN’ was. the headline in the San Francisco Chronicle when Charles Johnston Hitch was named president-elect of the Uni- versity of California. It was an ingenious try, but there is little mystery about Hitch, about his selection, or even about why the “mystery man” appellation was thought up. For eight months a Board of Regents subcommittee had searched in vain for a new president to replace Clark Kerr, not a single figure with national standing being willing to _ accept the post after the way Kerr was fired. On Tuesday, September 19, meeting at UCLA, the Regents committee decided to give up the hunt and settle for the university’s Vice President for Administration, who had come to University Hall in September, 1965, as Vice President for Business and Finance. The next day (to follow the account given by the Los Angeles Times’s well-informed education editor, William Trombley) Hitch was notified, and immediately went to Sacramento for a private talk with Governor Reagan before deciding to accept. Also on Wednesday, Acting President Wellman told a meeting of the nine UC chancellors that Hitch was the man. By Thursday the report was spreading through UCLA’s halls, and that evening it appeared in the press. But on Friday, when the Board of Regents met formally, some regents had not yet been informed of Hitch’s selection and were “pretty peeved about being left out of the whole thing.” What with the news also of the secret Reagan-Hitch meeting, a couple of angry regents threatened to vote “no” in protest; but after some palaver they caved in, as usual, and the decision was unanimous. There probably isn’t much mystery even about Hitch’s powwow with Reagan. The new president’s early test in office will come when the university requests $308 mil- lion for 1968-69; and Hitch—especially since budgets are his forte—may have wanted to make sure his throat would not be cut before he got well started. Officially, everyone hailed Hitch’s appointment, even the Faculty Advisory Committee on the presidential se- lection. There is no record that the faculty’s advice was asked; but the chances are that few members remember the bravura moment when they made the demand to have a say in the matter. In fact, the faculty committee’s statement even declared its satisfaction that “he meets in all respects the standards set forth in the criteria that underlay the Presidential search.” If they are that satisfied, they are in a minority, since one of the points made about Hitch is that so little is known about him-in areas rele- vant to his fitness for the presidency of a great university. “Mystery man,” after all? Not exactly. The man simply has no recorded views on the issues. Whether it is stu- 682 Guindon dent rights, or the “multiversity,’ or tuition fees, of faculty-administration relations, or pretty much any issue whatsoever about universities or education, Hitch’s views are a blank, not only to the public, the students and the} academic world but evidently also to the Board of Regents ‘f that: chose him. And perhaps to Hitch himself. Trombley “Perhaps the most important question about ‘He’s informed and reported: Hitch was asked by one regent: efficient, but what does he believe?’ ” qj His acceptance speech made the usual obeisance to) }) 9 academic freedom: “Scholars and students must have) } }j . full freedom of inquiry.” And: “If you find a uni-)) 4 versity that is not striking some sparks, you can assume) | 9 that it is dead.” He may even mean it; that will be seen | ) if and when the sparks start flying. V As the Chronicle article put it: “Nobody really knows { about Hitch because he has been under cover as fi an expert, a specialist, and not a leader.” Under cover? )) , Before surfacing at UC, he was a very public Assistant 7 Secretary of Defense for four years, as McNamara’s financial right-hand man, with a booming reputation in y circles that followed what he was doing. That Hitch is “not a leader” is evident enough from the record. His forte has been staff work; more bluntly, he is a natural-born Number Two man. Even before as- suming the presidency, he had already impressed ob- servers with his capacity for nonleadership. In a press” conference, Hitch made clear that he had asked the regents for no commitments. “I count on the regents to defend | and protect the university’s autonomy.” THE NATION/ December 25, 1967” ; everyone knows that his predecessor was axed the regents in order to appease Reagan, and specif- ly by the very clique on the board that chose Hitch, ount on the same regents to preserve the autonomy of the university is something like relying on Lyndon Johnson to keep politics out of the White House. The optimists say that Hitch was merely being conventionally hypocritical, but he probably must be taken at his word when he says he asked the regents for no commitments. . is well known that this is precisely what was not done by various prestigious candidates for the job. While the new “captain of the bureaucracy” (Kerr’s term) is still something of a blur in the public conscious- mess, let us see what is known about him. ia a. Hitch was born and raised in Boonville, Mo., where his father was head of the Kemper Military Academy. The son graduated from the academy in 1929 in his 19th year. (He is still a director of the school to- iy —his only experience as an educator outside of his teaching. ) The University of Arizona accorded him a E -A. in 1931. A top student, Hitch spent a postgraduate year at Harvard and won a Rhodes scholarship to Oxford. There Queen’s College gave him its B.A. in 1934, a fellowship the following year, and an M.A. in 1938. He became general editor of the Oxford Economic Papers in 1941. His war apprenticeship started in the same year, First he joined Averill Harriman’s lend-lease mission 1 London as staff economist. In 1942-43 he served c the planning commission of the War Production Board. Then in 1943 he was inducted into the army, assigned to the Office of Strategic Services (wartime an- cestor of the CIA) as a first lieutenant, based in Britain to analyze the economic effects of Allied air raids. By ‘the end of the war (according to a 1965 article in Sci- ence) he was working on the selection of targets in Japan. (This raises the interesting question of whether he was _ involved in picking Hiroshima and Nagasaki. ) During all this time he was still formally associated ‘with Oxford. (His Who’s Who entry of “1935-48” for ‘Oxford has led various appointment hailers to refer to his “thirteen years” of academic work there.) Even after _ the war he did not immediately return to teaching at - Oxford, but became chief of the Stabilization Controls Division of the Office of War Mobilization and Recon- version. In 1946 he returned to Britain but decided not _ to stay at Oxford and went to Sao Paulo as visiting pro- fessor. He quit Oxford formally in 1948, when he dis- ‘covered the RAND Corporation and vice versa. RAND was a natural connection for Hitch. This is a good point at which to list his published works. He has _ written three books, all concerned in one way or another with the economics of war planning, a subject that seems _ to have captured him early. In the case of his first, Ameri- ¢a’s Economic Strength (1941), the topic is not obvious _ from the title, but this booklet was a popular presenta- - tion for a British audience of America’s war-making po- tential. His later books—The Economics of Defense in 1 he Nuclear Age (1960) and Decision-Making for Defense (1966)—were respectively the direct products of his work first at RAND and then at the Pentagon. THE NATION/ December 25, 1967 The same theme runs through almost all his articles. (I have traced fifteen; no bibliography is available from the university.) In 1939 Hitch was joint author of an article on price theory which was not war-oriented. But thereafter, with one clear exception to be discussed in another context, it can be said that all his published arti- cles were on war planning or were war-connected or, in a couple of cases, were theoretical offshoots of his cen- tral concentration on war planning. The two articles he published during the forties were on reconversion from the war economy. The articles of the fifties were based on his RAND work and deal with military operations research (also called systems analysis in its higher-level reaches, or cost-effectiveness studies in its lower). As he wrote in one of these articles: “My own operations-research experience is pretty much re- stricted to military problems. .. .” There is no question but that the bulk of Hitch’s ca- reer has been wrapped up in war planning, at which he is indubitably a very competent technician. The issue it raises is not whether his specialty makes him a saint or a monster but simply whether it is a desirable back- ground for the president of the largest university complex in the United States. That is also the issue to keep in mind in connection with Hitch’s RAND period. He came into the corpora- tion when it was newly organized in 1948. Two years before, Project RAND had been created by the Air Force as an adjunct of Douglas Aircraft. It has been described as an “unprecedented marriage of the indus- trial and the academic,” but it was more a ménage a trois of the industrial, academic and military. The direct tie- up with industry did not work: therefore the RAND Corporation was created in 1948 to divorce Project , RAND from Douglas. The corporation became an in- dependent think-tank (the first of a breed), operating Project RAND under contract to the Air Force as its main job, but free to take on work for the AEC or other government agencies. As the London Times Literary Supplement said of the institution when it reviewed Hitch’s RAND book: From this and other seminaries there issues a stream of distinguished consultants—Kahn, Wohlstetter, Brodie, Hitch, Kissinger, Bowie, Schelling—who move freely through the corridors of the Pentagon and the State Department, rather as the Jesuits through the courts of Madrid and Vienna, three centuries ago. In 1948 Hitch organized the economics division of RAND and became its first head. Later he also became > chairman of the RAND planning and research council, responsible for planning and directing the research of | the whole organization. As his own province he chose the cost-effectiveness/ operations research/systems analysis sector of war plan- ning—more simply defined as the economics of “a big- ger bang for a buck.” In 1960, Herman Kahn published On Thermonuclear War, which created a sensation, and Hitch published The Economics of Defense in the Nu- clear Age, which created no sensation. Hitch was the book’s senior author, signing jointly with R. N. McKean, also a RANDster; various chapters were written by other colleagues from the seminary. Hitch’s preface explains 683 that most of the book was written as part of the Air Force’s Project RAND. “The book is virtually a collec- tive product of the RAND Corporation,” Hitch told Business Week. Theodore White listed it in Life as one of the corporation’s major contributions. It won the 1961 award of the Armed Forces Management Association; and when Hitch went to the Defense Department that year, it became known as the “Bible of the Pentagon.” The Russians translated it for their own use. Herman Kahn became for a time a public monster, symbol of cold-blooded planning for a nuclear holocaust, and inventor of the “Doomsday machine.” And such is the power of symbols, if Kahn were appointed president of the University of California, there would probably be something of a scandal. But as a plain matter of fact, Hitch’s book was, and was intended to be, the economic supplement to Kahn’s notorious study. The two books were reviewed together more than once. The New States- man bracketed them as dealing “respectively with the strategy and economics of nuclear policy.” (In a burst of revulsion, the reviewer cried that “books like these should be treated as pornography, within the meaning of the act.”) A good deal of one chapter in Hitch (Chapter 17) is explicitly based on Kahn. To get the Kahn flavor, one need only turn to the very end of Hitch’s section on “Re- cuperation Possibilities” after nuclear war: When allowances are made for defective and inac- curate missiles, it is clear that to demolish 80 per cent of United States capital would require a large attack. It goes without saying that this level of destruction would be catastrophic. And yet, if the initial period of disorganization and hysteria could be bridged, the sur- vivors could probably get an economy going again. That’s all; upbeat. end of discussion—with the characteristic The complete content of Hitch’s thinking on war policy, in this book, as in his articles, is Massive Deter- rence by the Balance of Terror (his terms)—that is, H- bomb pointed against H-bomb as the foundation of peace. Disarmament he treats in several places as vir- tually meaningless. He assumes, with Kahnian aplomb, that the United States must make certain of “our ability, under all foreseeable conditions, to destroy the attacker as a viable society.” He writes matter of factly that “It should always be our policy to spend whatever is nec- essary for defense.” His summary of the future is: “per- petual partial mobilization.” It can at least be said of Hitch’s views in this field that they are all of a piece. Just as Kahn can be a broad-minded liberaloid, even as he “thinks the unthinkable,” so Hitch is no devilish warmonger. His mind-set goes with the job. He has merely made it his life task to figure how many bombs are needed to kill how many cities; how many dollars pay for enough missiles to destroy a society; what is the cost-effectiveness of incinerating a population here or erasing an industrial region there. Put it this way: as long as capital punishment is maintained, there has to be an executioner; but would you want your daughter to marry one? In this case, should a university marry one? 684 Hitch wrote down a very realistic view of ‘ie role o people like himself: aaa Economists now serve handmaiden roles in most op- erations research organizations. . Paradoxically this role for the economist is more important in military and other governmental areas than in industrial operations research, Ng This handmaiden image is evidence of the man’s mod- — esty, but it is hardly calculated to dispel fears that Hitch is better trained by his experience to become a servant — of the regents than a leader of the university. 5 Impressed by his RAND work and RAND book, McNamara in 1961 brought Hitch into the Defense De- — partment, as assistant secretary with the title of comp- troller. There, by all accounts, he did an outstanding — job of reorganizing the budgeting and financial planning systems of ‘the department for greater efficiency. McNa-— mara gave him full support against the hard-nosed Pen- tagon types who referred to him as “that bookkeeper and ~ his whiz kids.” Business Week listed him among the — main “Planners of the Pentagon.” Installed in offices on the executive ring of the Pen-— tagon, just down the hall from McNamara, Hitch defined his job: “My problem, as I see it,” The New York Times — quoted him in 1962, “is to get the most of what we ~ spend. How much we spend is Mr. Kennedy’s responsi- — bility, not mine.” Just a technician: he thinks as a hand- maiden, But it must not be supposed that his Pentagon work was limited to juggling dollars in a narrow sense. Indeed, the Hitch “revolution” in Defense Department procedures was precisely in terms of integrating strategic ; and budgetary planning. There were reports that Mc- — Namara had so much confidence in him as a war planner — that he gave him assignments outside the budgeting - chores, including one of heading a task force on strategic — warfare. Hitch’s position was so solid that Pentagon old-— timers who resisted his changes were cashiered. Or so Hitch told a Newsweek interviewer: jerking a thumb — toward the window, he explained: “Some of those who objected or resisted got rotated out.” ; During all these years, in the Defense Department as at RAND, Hitch’s written and public utterances reflected — unquestioning agreement with the standard mentality of the Pentagon. As he wrote in his 1966 book: There is no question but that the systems analysis groups working within the defense establishment tend to take on the philosophical coloration of their spon- soring organizations, if for no other reason than that — they are exposed to the same environment and same influences. The observation could be autobiographical. All his ieee lished references to Southeast Asia are simplisteaa hawkish, though not extremist. In 1963, when a research — group headed by Seymour Melman published a report on ~ the tremendous percentage of “overkill” built into U.S. war planning, it was Hitch who was assigned to answer ; Melman, in a defense of the Pentagon’s overkill capacity. On leaving the Pentagon for Berkeley, Hitch was — signed to a consulting agreement by the Defense Depart- — THE NATION/ December 25, 1967 — ainly to keep my security clearance alive.” for what? Though the Berkeley faculty recently against the university’s accepting any more classi- search, Hitch will likely be the “cleanest” univer- president since Eisenhower presided over Columbia. What are Hitch’s views on social questions other an how to get the biggest bang for a buck? It is charac- istic of his books and articles that little of this comes ough, except as already mentioned. [here is one outstanding exception. In 1957 the out- ng president of the Operations Research Society of rica, Prof. Russell Ackoff, made a retiring presiden- ddress enthusiastically advocating that operations- ch experts should devote their talents to something than military planning—namely, to national plan- particularly in underdeveloped countries. Ackoff elf had just spent a few months doing that in India. uld seem a natural proposal for the field. Yet right at that meeting, and following up with an article in the society’s journal, Hitch made a sweeping at- k on the whole idea of applying operations research ational planning. More than that, he assailed the very a of national planning itself (for India, for example), iterposing reliance on price-regulated market mecha- The “philosophical coloration” is evident: the discipline could be used for war and it could be d for industry, but it must not be used for planning ation’s peace and prosperity. ditch had not always been of this mind. I have not entioned his very first publication, in 1938: not his 1 work but an “American edition,’ which he edited, troduction to Economic Analysis and Policy, by the inent British economist James E. Meade. The title, ich sounds like another economics textbook, is decep- “Meade’s book is a strong programmatic plea for alism, including socialization of monopolistic indus- s, the banks and other sectors of the economy. In ct, the program advocated is far more radical than the sent position of the Labour Party. Nor was Hitch’s ntribution narrowly editorial: besides ““Americanizing” terminology (including changing the term “sociali- on” to “public ownership”), Hitch also did some sing of the text in collaboration with Meade—thus king on responsibility for the contents. It can scarcely be doubted that he agreed with it at the time. | Does Hitch’s appointment to the presidency of the | University of California illustrate a trend? A theory, ! which I would not dare put forward myself, was pre- ed in Theodore White’s Life series of last June on e Action Intellectuals.” White offers a long cele- ion of the intellectuals who have become government n trusters: “the new priesthood,” “the most .. . pelling influence in all American government and tics,’ “the drive-wheels of the Great Society,” “the elite of American scholars.” “From White House to hall, scholars stalk the corridors of American er,” burbles White. (What gives it away is that word it is the thirteenth bong of the clock.) A gallery exalted intellectuals is presented, with full-color portraits; Hitch is fifth. y ho are they? First there is half the Cabinet: Rusk, . oe | NATION/ December 25, 1967 McNamara, Katzenbach, et al. Then come the academics proper: Jerome Wiesner, Hans Mark (of Berkeley’s Law- rence Rad Lab, who complains that his work in making nuclear bombs more efficient “wins no applause from out colleagues,” but who stoically “endures the obloquy”), McGeorge Bundy, James Tobin. Hitch is next, followed by many others, including Walt Rostow. Here is the point that emerges from the rhapsody: according to White, this phalanx of court intellectuals is moving out into the country. RAND’s graduates “have -left to spread their way of thinking at Harvard, M.L.T., Chicago—even to France.” Those who see a brain cartel inexorably taking over the nation’s thinking can trace . . . neat and precise interlockings and directorates. McGeorge Bundy’s trajectory is traced from Harvard to the White House to the Ford Foundation. Carl Kaysen’s, from Harvard to RAND, to the White House, to Prince- ton’s Institute for Advanced Study. Dean Rusk’s from Mills College, to government bureaus, to the Rocke- feller Foundation, to the State Department. (It gets to sound like The Red Network.) And, not least: Charles Hitch goes from Oxford to RAND to Yale and to RAND again . . . [to] the Defense Department at the Pentagon, then emerges at Berkeley as a vice president of the University of California. White’s style may be overrich, but about this vision of a “brain cartel inexorably taking over the nation’s thinking’—is there a tendency for the intellectual hand- maidens of the Establishment to act as a loosely inter- related fraternity, moving into the power slots connecting the governmental and :vi'i'ary bureaucracies with the universities, foundaticns end think tanks? It is interest- ing that the thesis, though couched in’ more journalistic terms, is closely related to Clark Kerr’s analysis, in The Uses of the University, of the stratification of the univer- sity-multiversity. If the image is modified from White’s almost conspiratorial vision of a take-over to that of a social trend—fusion of state and academia—the hypothe- sis becomes less sensational but not less disturbing. Certainly, the Hitch appointment symbolizes the fact _ that a great university’s president, in the opinion of its governing powers, does not have to have any substan- tial background as an educator. Trombley reported: Hitch agrees with a chancellor who said, “You don’t understand this job until you understand this is no longer a university in the classical sense but a system of higher education with coordinated, independent parts.” If it is not a university (“in the classical sense”), then clearly you don’t need a university president at all (“in the classical sense”). If it’s a system, you get yourself a systems analyst instead. You get a very efficient operations engineer, to oil the coordinated, independent parts. From the other (Stanford) side of the bay, the Palo Alto Times opined that Hitch’s “appointed role seems to be to make UC run with a high-powered, quict purr.” But is that what the University of California com- munity wants? It is true nobody asked them; but if the “classical” university is not entirely dead, there may yet be some sparks amid the quiet purr. Then we may see what Mr. Hitch is about. 685 SANFORD WATZMAN Mr. Watzman is a reporter in the Washington bureau of the Cleveland Plain Dealer. Washington, D.C. Behind Defense Secretary McNamara’s official boasts as to “cost effectiveness” and “buying only what we need” and “buying at the lowest sound price,” is the reality of war profiteering on a scale so vast that the private tax- payer can scarcely ‘grasp the figures. The recent disclos- ures of Rep. Otis G. Pike (D., N.Y.) dealt with nuts and bolts—mere pickings from the great table. The incomparably greater feast in large defense con- tracts is well documented, nor is it challenged (or for that matter reported or even acknowledged) by the press officers around McNamara. They have evidently been ordered not to publicize the Pentagon’s responses to charges that began to gain limited circulation last April, before Pike uncovered his smaller scandals. McNamara has fought a battle of news releases with Pike, who suc- ceeded in getting the attention of the national media, but the Secretary chose not to advertise reforms he has been promising on the other front because to do so would reveal to more people that a second and more substantial front does exist. The Secretary of Defense i is the world’s biggest spender. He is shelling out more than $46 billion a year (or $125 million a day) on military purchases—a figure which makes defense procurement the largest single item in the federal budget (25 per cent of it, at least). A little- known, highly technical fair-pricing law is supposed to protect the public against being overcharged for this war materiel. It is the Truth in Negotiating Act of 1962 (Public Law 87-653) which, were it adequately enforced, would buttress the famous McNamara slogan: “Buying at the lowest sound price.” But the law has not been adequately enforced. Rather, spread across public records is evidence of derelictions so broad in scope as to appear incredible. Not only has the Pentagon allowed itself to be fleeced on individual multimillion-dollar contracts but it has also been guilty of unbusinesslike practices that in many cases seem to make overpricing inevitable. The Truth in Negotiating Act does not cover the innu- merable but relatively trivial routine transactions cited by Pike—purchases of small gadgets, gears, clamps and knobs for thousands or hundreds of dollars. The law, aiming much higher, applies only to purchases starting at $100,000. Its principal targets are the huge weapons systems: ships, missiles, bombers, bombs, detection and communications networks. For years, the General Accounting Office (GAO), an investigative arm of Congress, has been criticizing the Pentagon in barely readable reports, weighted with the jargon of auditors, for not implementing the “Truth” Act. [See “The Putsch Against McNamara” by H. L. Nieburg, The Nation, December 26, 1966.] Although many of the reports were made public, they received scant attention 686 pillio more Nas ¢ down ) Th ol f0 bility a un pare from Washington newspaper men who, by and large, seem to prefer the McNamara handouts. The tastes of the pre: corps are perhaps accounted for by the fact that the Per tagon is crawling with press agents, while GAO had ne even one on its payroll until the first was hired e this year. But when the Cleveland Pneumatic Tool Co. wa accused by GAO of overcharging the Army about 10 pe cent on three contracts totaling nearly $2 million (unde circumstances bespeaking negligence by Army procure ment officers), the Cleveland Plain Dealer took notice Its Washington bureau examined a number of other GAG} reports, and in April the paper published a series ofm|' articles, with follow-ups during the rest of the year—a of them ignored by the news establishment of the Easter; seaboard. Sen. Stephen M. Young (D., O.), a Clevelander and | member of the Armed Services Committee, was shocke by what he read. He ordered the articles reprinted 2 the Congressional Record and demanded an investiga=y! “ tion. Rep. William E. Minshall (R., O.), questioned Pentas)| ' gon witnesses about the stories at a closed-door hears} ing of the Defense Appropriations subcommittee, anc in May, Sen. William Proxmire (D., Wis.), chairmai of the Joint Economic Committee and of its Economy it Government subcommittee, added the Truth in Negotiat ing Act to an agenda of public hearings that had bee! called to check on Secretary McNamara’s housekeeping With only one Senator, Stuart Symington (D., Mo.), ¢ former Air Force Secretary, not concurring, the biparti san panel issued a report in July censuring the Defens Department for “a disturbing record of loose managt ment” and a “lackadaisical” attitude toward the Act. h Pentagon was accused of “a serious and comprehensive lack of compliance” with it. In September, additiona hearings were held by the Special Investigations sub committee of the House Armed Services Committee, which had drafted the law. The Joint Economic Committee resumed hearings in November. No one knows how much money has been thrown away on fatty contracts, and GAO will not even hazarc a guess. The agency will say only that, over a ten-year period, it detected a total of $130 million in overcharges. and recovered $72 million for the government. Burg ; projection is possible from these figures because they a based on haphazard spot checking. GAO has acted only on complaints or tips, ignoring all but a few of the 30,000 procurement transactions consummated each day. Another weak clue was afforded in GAO testimony given last) July to a subcommittee headed by Rep. Chet Holifield] (D., Calif.). It stated that a survey of 101 contracts se- lected at random during a ten-week period in 1965 turned up thirty-three cases of overpricing—with an average of $100,000 and a total of $3.2 million. The contracts in- volved purchases adding up to $446 million. Again, a GAO official cautioned against generalizing on the basis off THE NATION/ December 25, 1967 the number of contracts or the amount of dollars, . both projections could be misleading. Two years the former Army Audit Agency guessed that $1 on in pricing proposals could be “questioned.” A re recent Pentagon estimate is $1.8 billion. But GAO S come up with no evidence to sustain, bolster or knock wn these figures. The fact is that GAO, part of the legislative branch ‘government, has neither the resources nor the responsi- ity to enforce the law. It is the Defense Department, unit of the Executive branch, that has the constitutional igation to make certain that the law is obeyed. Com- red wih GAO, the Pentagon has a vastly superior i of auditors. GAO has repeatedly urged that these | auditors be unleashed, but until pressures built up just recently McNamara kept delaying his decision to order a comprehensive contract audit program. (One wonders how much income tax would be collected if the Internal Revenue Service refused to audit returns, or if it were own to ignore whole classes of returns.) The “Truth” Act is necessary because competitive bid- 1g is not feasible for major military purchases. Modern aponry is so intricate that usually only one plant, or best a few, can produce what’s needed by a given te. The Joint Economic Committee reported that in fiscal years 1948 through 1966, 86.2 per cent of military buying was based on negotiated contracts. “During this period,” the report said, “the 100 largest companies | and their subsidiaries annually have received from 63 to arg 74.2 per cent of the part awarded to business firms. The ‘ten largest concerns and their subsidiaries annually have received from 26.6 to 38 per cent of the business. Fifty per cent of the volume in each year has been awarded to minimum of eighteen firms and a maximum of thirty- 99 _ The Pentagon keeps a different set of statistics. Mc- ‘Namara pictures a steady increase in the number of competitive contract awards, reaching a high of 44.4 per cent in fiscal 1966, but GAO officials point out that all rchases of $2,500 and less “are reported as competitive en though many are not.” In fact, a GAO survey es- blished that two out of every three procurements of is type had been falsely labeled competitive. The Pen- gon’s rebuttal, in testimony given the Joint Economic mmittee, was that the automatic classification simpli- fied its bookkeeping. Whatever the true figure may be, the ‘Defense Department acknowledges that it does a large amount of buying from corporations that hold effective _ Monopolies or oligopolies on certain items. So when bar- ‘gaining with these companies under the Truth in Negoti- ating Act, the Pentagon supposedly obtains assurances— in fact, a certificate—that material and labor costs, cited by the companies in support of their prices, are based on “accurate, complete and current” data. The “Truth” Act has had an interesting history at is perhaps best understood in the context of Presi- nt Eisenhower’s warning about the “military-industrial ‘ complex.” Throughout the postwar period, GAO checked ‘defense contracts at random, repeatedly finding cases of ‘inflated cost estimates. By 1959 the Pentagon was per- mre , THE NATION/ December 25, 1967 suaded to promulgate a regulation requiring a “truth” certificate. But GAO kept nosing about, and discovered that the Pentagon was not enforcing its own regulation. In file after file, GAO found no certificate. In 1960 the Truth in Negotiating Act was introduced by Rep. Carl Vinson, then chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, in an attempt to add force to the regulation by ensconcing it in statute. When the Penta- gon objected (on the ground that the bill would hamper negotiating flexibility), the legislation died. Two years Robert S. McNamara later it was introduced again, and this time passed: 362 to 0 in the House and on a voice vote in the Senate. Then the law was promptly forgotten by everyone except GAO. oe The Congressional watchdogs were not satisfied, Though the law was already on the books, they kept turning up new cases of profiteering, and firing off re- ports which in many instances named the offending cor- poration and detailed the Pentagon’s derelictions. Then came a strange interlude. The corporations com- plained, charging that GAO was damaging their reputa- tions before the charges against them could be adjudicated by the Armed Forces Board of Contract Appeals. Through their lobbyists, they were able to set up an extraordinary series of public hearings in 1965 at which GAO itself— rather than its findings—came under investigation. Rep- resentative Holifield presided, as chairman of the House Military Operations subcommittee. The hearings re- ceived almost no notice in the press. GAO officials found themselves in a delicate position. As agents of Congress, they had been free to criticize the Pentagon, but at this confrontation with their bosses, many of whom were obviously sympathetic to the con- 687 tractors, tact was required. The hearings concluded with GAO assurances to Holifield that it no longer would issue Truth in Negotiating reports on individual com- panies except in unusual cases. Instead, GAO would concentrate on examining groups of contracts to measure compliance with the Act, and these summary-type re- ports would name no names. Actually, GAO officials were not unhappy about this new reporting strategy. Their attitude was that recent reports in the old style had been largely ineffective, and they reasoned that a new approach might pack more punch. As it turned out, they were right. Although GAO stuffed the hearing record with ex- amples of overpricing, Holifield and his colleagues were not greatly impressed. They made no real attempt to de- termine how the eighteen-month-old law was working, or whether it needed strengthening. Defense Depart- ment witnesses also had very little to say on this point. (Early this year, Pentagon officials complained to The Plain Dealer that the law was “imprecise,” but they con- ceded they had never asked Congress for clarifying amendments.) The Holifield group held no further hear- ings on the subject until it suddenly called one last July, evidently to vindicate its own vigilance and to pillory the Plain Dealer. Meanwhile, GAO made sensational disclosures in the new summary-type reports issued in 1966 and 1967— except that they were bound to be over the head of any- one not familiar with the subject. One report told of a check of 242 contracts, worth a total of $600 million. The “Truth” certificates were in the files where required, but there were no supporting documents to indicate what the certificates were based on, and GAO objected that the certificates should not be accepted on faith. In other cases, where evidently no certificate was needed because of certain exemptions in the law, there was nothing in the file to explain and justify the dispensation. Only twenty of the 242 files were complete. Also noted was the absence of the Defense Department’s Form 633—a questionnaire which, if properly filled out, would have supplied much of the information needed. A GAO in- quiry established that the Form 633s were gathering dust in a warehouse. They had not been distributed to Pentagon contracting officers across the nation. (This at a time when the Department was spending $125 million a day!) Another summary report revealed that McNamara’s staff was accepting contractors’ cost estimates without. requiring them to establish formal cost estimating sys- tems. For ten years the Pentagon’s own auditors had been emphasizing the necessity of curbing such guesswork. Some of the auditors’ reports were choked by red tape. Others were ignored or receded from view. Still-others were fated to become a basis for more studies and more reports. But none was adopted until GAO blew the whistle early this year. Still another summary report disclosed an examination of 237 construction contracts involving a total of $128 million. Rather than making a careful analysis of the con- tractors’ proposals, GAO said, the Pentagon merely 688 earlier) whether to post-audit a category of contracts Pie eee : 1 en compared them with the government’s cost esti “We noted, however, that when the proposal was greatery)) pli! than the government estimate, the government estimat io Ci was often raised—on the basis of information obtained) iin during negotiations—to equal or exceed the price nego=) tiated.” GAO found in other cases that the governmen estimate was not a good standard for comparison becausi it was not organized in the same way as the contractor's proposal. Another finding was that the Department ac=¥)) hud cepted contractors’ estimates without requiring them to) submit verifying data. 4 These summary reports raised eyebrows (and hackles) at the Joint Economic Committee hearings in May Senator Proxmire and his colleagues were incredulous They asked Comptroller General Elmer B. Staats, head of GAO, about the need for formal cost estimating sys- tems. “This goes to the heart of negotiations,” he replied. “Unless the government has some basis for estimating what the costs are going to be, the negotiations are going to be one-sided.” ; “Do you mean to say,” Proxmire demanded, referring to another GAO report, “that the Pentagon had no sys ( tem for checking back on contracts—to determine whether Me it had been cheated—until you prodded them into adopt- a ing such a program?” “That’s right, sir,” Staats replied.) mn William A. Newman, an aide of Staats, interposed: “Itsqgi| *" just impossible for us [at GAO] to audit all these con-%) : tracts ourselves. We’re pecking at it as best we can. Buty) P they have 3,600 auditors over there at the Defense De- partment.” Further testimony revealed that the incipient audit program contained a large loophole. The Pentagon still had not decided (it was chewing on this issue when c it appeared before the Holifield subcommittee two years that covers most major procurements and is known as the Firm Fixed Price (FFP) contracts. “In the time it is taking the Pentagon to ponder this problem,” Proxmire asked, “how much money has been lost to the taxpayers?” “There’s no way of knowing,” said Staats. Shortly after the Proxmire hearings, the Defense Department announced new regulations requiring care- ful documentation of “Truth” certificates. In another development, Representative Minshall on June 6, intro- h duced legislation to close the FFP loophole. Minshall’s b bill (H.R. 10573) is in the form of an amendment to A the Truth in Negotiating Act. Proxmire dropped an ! identical bill (S. 1913) into the Senate hopper. A third reaction was an order to organize “seminars” on the law at procurement offices around the country. Five years after the law was passed, a concerted attempt was to be made to explain it to Defense Department personnel. But then the summer lull set in. Minshall’s bill was referred to the House Armed Services Committee, where it languished while the Pentagon delayed taking a stand. But Senator Young and Rep. Charles W. Whalen, Jr., a freshman Republican from Dayton, O., stepped in to keep © the controversy alive. Young made a speech in the Senate — entitled “ ‘Private Letters’ on War Profiteering.” He said: “T have continued to look into this problem and have had a great deal of research and investigation made. I am THE NATION/ December 25, 1967 ry to report I have found many additional cases of pr fiteering—cases uncovered by GAO but not reported | to Congress and the public, as most are. Frankly, the Re dimensions of this problem are even greater than I first | supposed.” Young had obtained from GAO data on individual corporations—that is, reports of the kind that _Were routinely made public prior to the Holifield hearings. Although he did not name the corporations, since they _ had not been given an opportunity to reply formally to GAO, Young revealed that one Ohio company had racked _ up a 42 per cent profit on one contract by padding the | price $143,681. Among other overcharges cited by Young “was one of $1.6 million and another of $1.5 million. Many of these corporations won contracts even though GAO had accused them of overpricing in earlier cases. In the House, Representative Whalen made a similar speech, citing additional examples of swollen contract ‘prices. Whalen, a member of the Armed Services Com- mittee, also announced that he was joining Minshall as a sponsor of H.R. 10573 and would try to recruit addi- ' tional sponsors on the committee. On September 18, Minshall turned his anger on | McNamara. “He has been stalling more than three “months,” the Congressman charged in a statement. “I | introduced my legislation June 6, and there has not been ' a word frorn him since. What’s he afraid of? That action under my bill would turn up more cases of multimillion- dollar overcharges—chiseling that could have been pre- | STANLEY MEISLER _ Mr. Meisler, Africa correspondent of the Los Angeles Times, .. Nairobi, Kenya The white mercenaries of the Congo, now in rebellion, _ have humiliated black men everywhere in Africa, and by doing so shattered some of the self-confidence that _ Africans need to run their affairs well. Moreover, some _ Africans have struck out at whites to assuage this hu- | miliation, and the beatings and killings have torn re- | lations between white men and black men over the con- __ tinent. _ These are terrible consequences. Yet it is pointless bellion of the mercenaries was the legacy of an attempt - by the United States Government to stage-manage the unmanageable Congo. Using them worked for a while; then they flew out of hand. Why blame them? The present group of rebellious mercenaries first came ‘to the Congo in 1964 with the support of the United States Government, then as now the most powerful and ; ‘significant outside influence on the Congo. It was pre- ‘ ‘THE NATION/ December 25, 1967 vented had McNamara strictly enforced the Truth in Negotiating Act?” One week later, hearings were opened by the House Armed Services Special Investigations sub- committee, headed by Rep. Porter Hardy (D., Va.), with Representative Pike as its ranking Democratic member. The panel made it plain to Defense Department witnesses, who arrived with nothing new to report, that it agreed with Minshall. McNamara finally got the message. On October 2, Assistant Defense Secretary Thomas D. Morris delivered personally to the offices of Minshall and Proxmire a copy of a new Pentagon order commanding audits of Firm Fixed Price contracts. Now, Morris suggested, the Min- shall and Proxmire bills were no longer needed. But the two lawmakers have not agreed to a cease-fire. They have said that they will continue to push for pas- sage of their bill They know, from a study of GAO reports, that the Pentagon does not have a distinguished record of carrying out its own regulations. Representative Pike brought out one reason why the Pentagon will have difficulty convincing the Congress- men of its good intentions. At his subcommittee hearing, he asked Charles M. Bailey, deputy director of GAO’s defense division, whether he knew of even one case where a Defense Department official had been fired, demoted or otherwise disciplined in an overpricing case. Bailey’s answer was “no.” The controversy will no doubt continue for some time ‘to come. pared to do whatever it could, even to the point of sup- porting mercenaries, to help Moise Tshombe, the new Prime Minister, put down a leftist rebellion in the eastern Congo. Officially, the State Department said it could not con- done Tshombe’s use of mercenaries, but there are reliable reports that the United States took part in the original planning. And whether or not it was in at the start, the United States openly maintained the mercenaries, flying food, equipment and ammunition to them in four U.S. C-130 transport planes and three H-34 helicopters. Washington also gave the Congolese Air Force five B-26 bombers, flown by CIA-hired Cuban refugee pilots and serviced by ClA-hired ground crews, to support merce- nary attacks upon the rebels. When the mercenaries took over Stanleyville, after the American-Belgian parachute drop in November, 1964, Maj. Michael Hoare, the mercenary leader, decided to live in the abandoned American consulate there. Without the mercenaries, the Congolese army would probably have failed to put down the rebellion, and the Congo would have splintered. In a sense, their use was not unusual. Many African armies employ white officers, mostly on loan from European countries. Nevertheless, the presence of mercenaries in the Congo incensed — 689 — twine > » _ African nationalists, their anger stemming in part from sympathy for the rebels but mostly from disgust at the way many mercenaries vaunted their white supremacy. Several made no bones about the pleasure of killing + ey ae) Pah a from the Katanga mines, a mutiny by mercena east, an attack by new mercenaries elsewhere, proc lamation of a Congo Free State, and the return of | Kinshasa. ATLANTICSS “OCEAN Sevoeevee, CLK AAA AEA VEweeorrcvr ; Yi AKA CALAN nee ak hm Kaffirs for a buck. It humiliated Africans to feel that ‘stability in the Congo depended on racists. By 1967, the mercenaries had become more an embarrassment than an asset. Save for a few bands here and there, the rebels were defeated. In addition, President Joseph D. Mobutu, branded as an American stooge and an accessory to the murder of Patrice Lumumba, wanted .to repair his image among African nationalists. He started it to disband the mercenary units, to get them out of the Congo before September, when the Organization of _African Unity was to hold its summit conference in k Foreseeing the end of their adventure, the mercenaries decided to switch sides, and agreed to take part in a plot to overthrow Mobutu. According to sketchy evidence, the organizers of the plot were associates of Moise Tshombe, then living in exile in Madrid. The plot was mad. It en- comipassed the sabotage of the railway carrying copper @kinshasa Tshombe. But in the massive, undisciplined, impossible Congo, it might have worked. By the end of June, the railway had been struck bs four explosions, one crumbling a bridge east of Mutshat-- sha. Several new mercenaries, recruited by agents of the plotters in Rhodesia, had flown into Kindu. This was- groundwork for a coup still some months away. Then Tshombe was kidnaped. At gun point, Francis Bodenan, a French croupier turned Congo agent, forced the pilots of - Tshombe’s plane to land in Algiers. The embarrassed 3 Algerians imprisoned him. The abduction caught the white mercenaries in the Congo with no patrons for their wild plan. Led by a ~ Frenchman, Col. Bob Denard, and a Belgian, Maj. Jean ¥ Schramme, they decided to plunge into action much sooner than planned. At dawn on July 5, six days after the kid- naping, the mercenaries rebelled in Kisangani (the former Stanleyville), Bukavu and Kindu in the eastern Congo. The mutiny began with carnage, the mercenaries spraying two camps of the Congolese army with submachine gun I | « IN Kisangani : 9 STanlerville) Com Goo f Bukavue awash \ «4 Gc = Kindy e —_—-" Si - ie ee ee, Se ae ¥Ho-2 | WILL INDEEEE ET THE NATION/ December 25, 1967 i. fire, killing scores of soldiers and their wives and children. _ The Congolese Government panicked at the uprising. Mobutu declared a state of emergency and restricted the | movement of whites. The Congolese radio broadcast anti- _ white diatribes around the clock, entreating the Congo- _ lese to kill their foreign enemies. All this unleashed the be anger and bitterness toward whites that had long been _ building up in the Congolese. In Lubumbashi (the former Elizabethville), Congolese _ soldiers found whites on the street between 6 and 7 P.M. _ on July 6, the first night of the curfew on whites. The __ whites were confused because some announcements had _ Said that curfew would begin at 6, while others gave the deadline as 7. The soldiers took nine whites into the woods at the edge of town and executed them, with their bayonets. 4 At first, the mercenaries fared badly. The small unit at _ Kindu failed to take the town. Mercenaries captured r _ Bukavu but abandoned it and headed north, having mis- | understood an order from their leaders in Kisangani. __ Though Kisangani was taken easily, the mercenaries met _ Congolese soldiers fired mortars. Denard was wounded _ in the head and evacuated to Rhodesia. Schramme then became colonel and commander of the Mercenaries and changed the character of the rebellion. _ As a British mercenary put it later, “The trouble with _ Schramme is that he’s an idealist, and there’s no room for an idealist in a mercenary army.” Unlike most of the hired | white soldiers, Schramme has roots in the Congo. He | went there in 1944 as a boy of 14. At independence, he _ owned a plantation of coffee, rubber and palm oil in the | eastern Congo. With Schramme at their head, the Mercenaries were led by a confused visionary who talked in vague, diffident tones about remaking the Congo and , replacing Mobutu with a stable, representative govern- | © ment that included Tshombe. He did not see himself as | __the hired hand of plotters but as a prophet cleansing the Congo through turmoil. . Schramme withdrew from Kisangani, regrouped with _ the mercenaries who had mistakenly left Bukavu, and _ trekked through the eastern Congo picking up whites who _ were threatened by the hysterical soldiers of the Congo- | lese army. During these weeks, the Congolese radio | boasted that its soldiers had trapped Schramme, his 160 | .-—*Swhite mercenaries and their allies, 1,000 African soldiers who had been gendarmes in Tshombe’s secessionist | _ Katanga province. But, on August 9, with the Congolese soldiers scampering away from the onrushing mercenary force, Schramme shocked the Congo by seizing Bukavu, an old colonial resort town in the hills alongside Lake Kivu. The mercenaries led more than 100 white refugees across the bridge that leads from Bukavu to the little country of Rwanda. Then they returned to celebrate their romantic triumph with caviar and champagne stolen from the stocks of the town. In the flush of victory, Schramme _ decided to keep Bukavu and wait for a revolution. He evidently expected it to break out in either of two ways: _ The chaos caused by his march—whites fleeing, mines > shutting, crops rotting—might ignite the hostility toward Mobutu. Or, if that proved not enough, more chaos could "THE NATION/ December 25, 1967 be provoked by an invasion of Katanga by Denard and other mercenaries assembling in Angola. But Schramme and his men waited in vain for three months; the revolution never came. The mercenaries grew tired and testy with one another and with Schramme. Their bickering arose from the pointlessness of their life and the uncertainty of their future. Even mercenaries want to know occasionally where they are going and why. Moreover, they received very little pay while awaiting Schramme’s revolution. Many wanted out. By October, the Congolese army, with the help of American transport planes, had put at least 5,000 men in the hills commanding Bukavu. They bombarded the mercenaries and Katangese with mortars. The mercenaries, while troubled by these continual attacks, were still con- temptuous of the Congolese soldiers. Schramme toyed and hesitated, negotiating with Red Cross officials who were trying to arrange an evacuation at the request of the Organization of African Unity. In early November, the mortar attacks intensified, and the Congolese soldiers rushed at Bukavu. Schramme radioed to Angola. Denard and a group of mercenaries" invaded Katanga in what looked like the long-awaited thrust designed to ignite the revolution. But it was evidently only a diversionary tactic. While the Congolese Government shouted about the trouble in Katanga, Schramme and his men withdrew from Bukavu into Rwanda. According to diplomatic reports, Denard and his men then slipped back into Angola. With this chapter of the mercenary adventure over, an outsider can try to draw a few conclusions. The first of these is that administering the massive Congo is a hope- less task. The lumbering, luxuriant Congo is too big, too cruel, too unnerved to be managed by an incompetent and emotional government in Kinshasa. The mercenaries have shown that any small group of armed adventurers can snap the Congo into chaos almost at will. In view of this, something must be wrong with an American policy that always shores up the central government of the Congo, however inefficient, childish or __ hysterical it may be. But it is not easy to prove it wrong, for on the surface the policy seems successful. By sending the mercenaries in 1964, the United States helped to end a savage rebellion, whose bloodthirsty leaders were unfit — to rule. By opposing the mercenaries in 1967, the United States calmed the Congo somewhat and convinced the rest of Africa that Americans are heroic anti-imperialists. Yet _ these recent successes seem hollow when it is realized that the troubles they mitigated were caused by the earlier success. The Congo is a quagmire for the United — States; every step sinks it deeper. Every American move to pull the Congo out of turmoil seems only to prepare the ground for a new round of turmoil. Finally, the reaction of the Congolese to the rebellion revealed for a moment the bitter sense of inferiority and resentment of Africans toward whites in Africa. Of course, the Congo differs from the rest of Africa; in some ways, in fact, it is a parody of the continent. Yet the terrifying attacks on whites there may be a foretaste of more intense terror to come. The mercenary rebellion was ugly; the consequences may some day be uglier. 691 | ‘ a , } ‘ 4! A Record of the Vanished West WILDERNESS KINGDOM: Indian Life in the Rocky Mountains, 1840- 1847. The Journals and Paintings of Nicholas Point, S.J. Translated and intro- duced by Joseph P. Donnelly, S.J. With an appreciation by John C. Ewers. Illus- trated with 280 maps, drawings and paintings, 230 in color. Holt, Rinehart & Winston. 274 pp. $17.95. D’ARCY McNICKLE Mr. McNickle is a member of the Confed- erated Salish and Kootenai tribes of Mon- tana. He is a professor of anthropology at the Universiy of Saskatchewan, Regina Cam- pus, Canada, and the author of The Indian Tribes of the United States: Ethnic and Cultural Survival (Oxford University Press). [See editorial page 677.] The journals and paintings of Father Nicholas Point present a rare conjunc- tion of the primitive. The author-artist, an unschooled peasant-priest, recorded in childlike color and form the lives of preliterate hunting tribesmen of the American Northwest during the past century. The product, in text and sketch, suggests that the parties, Euro- pean and Indian, were about evenly matched. Neither had a superior under- standing of the other, and it is to be wondered what either learned from the other. Wilderness Kingdom is in any event an extraordinary, original docu- ment, rescued after 100 years of oblivion in “a large dusty box” in the archives * of a Montreal Jesuit school. The task of translating the handwritten French text and of obtaining acceptable color prints, which the editor Father Don- nelly describes for us, was arduous and often discouraging. The result is a sumptuous product of the printer’s art. The color rendering is especially re- markable for bringing out detail which otherwise would be Jost in murky over- layers of pigment. The penciled sketch- es, being less cluttered than the essays in color, are often more revealing as documentary records of the vanished West. Occasionally Father Point encour- aged the always curious Indians to try their hand with brush and paper, and as a result we have a number of Indi- an-eye views of what the white man looked like. These colored drawings are among the most charming in the entire collection. The circumstance which called Fath- 692 4 A Painting by Father Point of a Brave in Ceremonial Dress from Wilderness Kingdom er Nicholas Point to the Northwest as a member of the Jesuit mission or- ganized by the renowned Father Pierre Jean De Smet was born of illusion and miscalculation, and in the sequel the Jesuits and the Indians were in a sense both victimized by their own enthusi- asms. It is a matter of record that Indians from the Northwest traveled to St. Lou- is on several occasions during the years 1830 and 1840. Who these Indians were and what the purpose of their journeys, have been matters in dispute ever since. The editor's introduction does not reduce the confusion’ but only perpetuates some questionable assump- tions. In the earliest references to these In- dians they were described as members of the Flathead tribe, a branch of Sal- ish-speaking Indians inhabiting what is — now western Montana. News stories of the period played up the astonishing — tribesmen journeyed © report that these to St. Louis seeking teachers who would THE NATION/ December 25, 1967 instr sloies i nd | yonar" Rec on the Anse | 1 ave who Bitter i unt | party frend if gon, UErst “SECS: { ‘man salva led “Mou oifer ed darki tdito King i} ( ‘the ao Ne | | man Ness, hem in the Christian faith. The s Spread all the way to New Eng- and stirred up a wave of mis- y activity. ecent historical studies cast doubt the identity of the tribe from which pilgrims traveled. The party may e€ consisted of Nez Percé Indians, ho inhabit an area just across the itterroot Mountains from the Flathead country—or it may have been a mixed y from both tribes. They were mdly neighbors who went on hunt- ing and war parties together and inter- larriages were frequent. It is perhaps ificant that when Presbyterians t to the Northwest in 1836, five vears before De Smet’s party left St. Louis, they established a mission in the . Percé country. s to the motives which inspired the jans to seek the white man’s reli- on, that too was a source of misun- rstanding. Three different Christian is—Methodist, Presbyterian, and Ro- Catholic—reacted to the report of ation-seeking Indians who had trav- ed on foot all the way from the Rocky lOuntains. Various explanations were fered to account for this unprecedent- journey by savages living in “moral irkness.” The version followed by the tor in the Introduction to Wilderness gdom is the one commonly recited Catholic writers. Other sects modify details to account for their particu- involvement. All are written from same viewpoint—that of the white an responding to a cry from the wilder- The episode has been studied by sveral ethnologists who were interest- in discovering in what ways contact th white men, direct or indirect, af- ted Indian life. What emerges from ese studies is at least as interesting the version offered in Wilderness dom, and it tells us a good deal bout the Indians of the Northwest who erwise, in Father Point’s journal, are nm as rather incredible forest crea- tures. Long before the Nez Percé-Flathead journey to St. Louis, the tribesmen of interior plateau country had heard umors of a new age to come, of new beings. Perhaps these were echoes from ny miles away and many years back n time, of contact between Indian and hite far to the east and to the north. ording to what was told by Indian naries, life would be different. The ‘orld would be made easy. Sometimes . word was to the effect that the sid would be destroyed, then re- wed. The dead would return and ev- hing would be in abundance. The ple must prepare themselves by per- ning certain dances and behaving in ain ways. An explorer on the Colum- Seimion/December 25, 1967 bia River in 1811 found an Indian going through the motions of blessing his peo- ple by sprinkling water over their heads —a priestly act which gave rise to the place name Priest’s Rapids on the riv- er. ; The Indians who went to St. Louis in 1830 and thereafter were in a changing world. The Blackfeet to the north of the Flathead and Nez Percé peo- ple were closer to established trade routes and therefore obtained guns first. They made life miserable for their gun- less neighbors. The Sioux and Crow pushing up into the Northwestern plains disputed the buffalo grounds with the mountain tribes. If these latter were to survive they had to find new magic, new power: the iron pots, the steel axes, the thunder sticks which mad the white man so all-powerful. 4 They brought the priests to their country in high hopes—what Father Point interpreted as “mutual and pro- found joy.” The disiJlusionment came for the Flatheads a few years later when they discovered that they were expected to abandon the very patterns of life which they were trying to buttress. They were to dig and plant the soil and become white men! ; The mission which had been estab- lished with such enthusiasm in 1841 was abandoned in 1850. The priests had dis- covered by then that the Indians, like other men, rarely make on the first try. An Indian Letter Sent to Father Point. An Illustration from Wilderness Kingdom, a Journal of a Missionary’s Travels in the Northwest Territory 125 Years Ago. it to heaven — ' ) \ Ate > coe And the Vanishing East LOST NEW YORK. By Nathan Silver. Houghton Mifflin Co. 242 pp. $12.50 until December 31; $15 thereafter. STEPHEN ZOLL Mr. Zoll’s articles have appeared in Dissent, The Village Voice and The Nation. You can predict far more accurately the moment when a building will be torn down for economic reasons than you can forecast with any certainty the frequency of seismic destruction. Earth- quakes throughout the world are re- corded at the rate of 60,000 tremors a year, involving 14,000 fatalities. This ob- viously outdoes any puny efforts of man-made clearance. Nevertheless, you have to give the unbuilding of the Met- ropolitan Opera high marks for thor- oughness. It is difficult to say whether the recurrence of economic or seismic forces are more natural; both are hard on those who appreciate stability. Lost New York is a heartbreaking list of casualties in the battle between the economic flux-mongers and the cul- tural order-doctrinaires. One side has all the titles and deeds; the other side has sustained all the losses. Generally speaking, a building in Manhattan can be demolished and the site re-used on a cycle of about every twenty years. Not every building—not the ramshackle affairs such as old-law tenements, 43,- 000 of which, built before 1901, no one knows how to get rid of today short of earthquake. But the structures built with care, excellence of design and ma- terials, and a style that speaks of a pride in status are, unfortunately, the most vulnerable to replacement. Nathan Silver has illustrated over 200 of these casualties in Lost New York, which also supplies an example of every kind of building of any distinc- tion that had been demolished so that the land on which it stood might be used for a newer, bigger, better, more urgent or more profitable replacement. The Met was eighty-four years old, the Vanderbilt mansion forty-seven, the Sen- ator Clark House twenty-three. The twenty-year replacement cycle is a prin- ciple, not an accurate measure. Here are some of the reinforcing rhythms of the twenty-year cycle: a building’s 5 per cent annual depreciation for tax deduction is 100 per cent used up in twenty years; construction is usually financed by a twenty-year loan, and when the loan is paid up, the land may well be more valu- able as equity in a new venture than is the building as security on a refinanced loan; prestigious addresses for status buildings, if chosen wisely, would ap- preciate quickly because of the subse- 694 quent attraction of prestigious neigh- bors, but the pioneer building may end up underscale and outshone in twenty years’ time. The twenty years is only a possible interval of flux, and given the dead loss of such specifically used and short-lived status symbols as both sets of World’s Fair buildings, the aver- age may be brought down below that. The first Plaza Hotel made way for the second at age sixteen. These are some of the non-architec- tural forces involved in unbuilding that have caused Lost New York to become a rich, full compendium and Mr. Silver to become a recording angel. It is im- possible not to be on his side and to deplore waste and the impermanence of excellence. Unbuilding a great city quickly becomes a matter of morality and the recording angel cannot help but also become a guardian angel: but a sword of flame, to mix a metaphor, can become a double-edged hot potato. When a good building survives beyond a twenty-year maturity despite its self-imposed vulnerability, the cri- teria of its survival are more stringent than for less specifically designed and auspiciously located buildings. But Sil- ver, interested in imposing order, and attempting to maintain the premise that excellence should be immutable, considers the morality of change rath- er harder than he does the criteria for survival in a free market. He sets up too neat an opposition between the bad guys of flux and the good guys of sta- bility. Stability, by this token, means cultural stability: buildings as history and the citizen allowed to locate him- self within his citizenship and his city by the record of the past surrounding him. It can be said that stability ex- ANIMULA Look soul soul barefoot presence through whom blood falls as through a water clock and tears rise before they wake I will take you at last to where the wind stops by the river we know by that same water and the nights are not separate remember W. S. MERWIN ists in the city’s eae ins hie ‘soutt Bronx, Harlem and central Brook where mile after mile of deca buildings, nated by their dwellers, ar nevertheless still worth more than the? land they are built upon, and therefore cannot be replaced—not even, appar- ently, with federal subsidization. De- pressing as these unchanging slums are now, the buildings were far from im- pressive even when new. Prestigious buildings are meant to impress; that is one of their uses. The Singer Sewing Machine Company, now the diversified Singer Company, Inc., occupied a_ delicate building with wrought-iron decoration similar to the scroll work on period sewing machines. It still stands, 12 stories high, at 561 Broadway. Outgrowing it in 1908, the company built the then tallest building in the world at 149 Broadway. The loca- tion faded as a prestigious address un- 9) ie til the renaissance of lower Manhattan with the building of the Chase Man hattan Plaza, by which time the com- pany was at Rockefeller Center. U.S. Steel is now tearing down the 47-story Singer Tower to replace it with a mon- ument of their own. The Singer Com- pany’s removal from two excellent buildings, which Silver places in a pro- phetic section called “Landmarks in Danger,” illustrates the decision to de- molish inherent in the relative value of land and buildings. The first Singer Building survives, even after it lost power to impress, because its site cupied an economic backwater and did not appreciate out of proportion to a second use (commercial subdivision) that was found for it. The second Sing- er Building is being demolished be- cause, no longer useful as a monument to Singer, the value of its land soared and demanded prompt re-use. Y Similar to a geologic fault, there is an economic fault: the rift between land and property. An earthquake caused by the violent movement of the ground on one. side of the fault rela- tive to the other. Demolition is caused by the movement of land appreciation relative to the building’s value. The more specific the use for which a bu ing is designed, the more violently will the building’s value fluctuate. When the lines on the graph pass each other as steep and speedy verticals, the conser- vation editorials in the newspapers be~ gin. ke Lost New York is a collection of ghosts. The author’s accomplishment is to make a record of the vanished past, commend it for its style, lament its passing, and see if it is possible to get a little scare value out of the historical shades. However, this is a historicisi with traps. Silver quotes Le Corbusier in order to argue with his dictum that THE NATION/ December 25, 196; * iv” ‘the permanent condition of New York ‘is change; this is an argument one “cannot win. Even to save somebody » else’s monument rather than to replace - it, a second use would have to be found more valuable than the first to offset ) land appreciation. If such re-uses of - buildings could always be found or in- vented (against the logic of history) ) this change, too, would bear out Le > Corbusier’s vision of New York. E In his introduction, Silver outlines a program to stop demolition by legisla- tion. Laws would include landmarks preservation of buildings as_ historical Objects even if there were no immedi- ate re-use; zoning permissiveness to Jegalize area-wide, revivifying potential " re-uses; and tax favoritism within a zoning area so that buildings could be » Operated on a more comfortable mar- gin. The purpose is to conserve land use to improve individual building val- ues. But building replacement is a re- sult of appreciation — not depreciation. It would be just as useful to legislate against earthquakes. When change does occur, Silver wants iM it to overtake only the weakest ele- i) ments of the city, the undistinguished mm) 6S parts that no one could miss. Just try a | to get a mortgage there; banks are | not pioneers; they stick with the win- mers of whatever twenty-year cycle is “i ~SCcurrent. Imagine a map of New York 6S with the number of times each site has M)6)—SOobeen built on coded to a color: dull WM 6=oblacks and grays for low numbers and iy D . bright primary colors for the more rap- @))6~—SCiid and repeated building successions. lm) = There will be an overwhelming corre- i) = spondence of the brightest colors to the im «© tallest, best-designed and _ specifically dl } used buildings, tenants with the best Wim) SC Credit ratings, available. financing and ! rapid land appreciation. of There are, of course, acts of great MSs criminal substitution. Built for World's I~) Fair crowds, the Summit Hotel and motley West Side motels survived the “@) ~=6=s diminished demand fer hotel rooms, but om the Astor succumbed; and the new M6) Madison Square Garden (prominent a “among whose builders was the brother Ii = of_~the then City Planning Commission- Mm er) was encouraged to replace Penn- | _ sylyania Station. If legislation can serve _ an improving function it would have to te | | take a larger view than the way each ) building looks. To insure that rebuilding is never a downgrading of urban func- ! © tion and to avoid entrusting aesthetic judgment to the law, the concept: that every separate plot of land is sover- eign needs to be subjugated. A start "was made in taxing the Seagram Build- | ing’s plaza for the prestige value ac- | cruing from that non-income-producing fuse of the city’s land. A greater prece- » dent could have been set at the inter- -—r Bees aS J/™ THE NATION/ December 25, 1967 ot section of 52nd Street and Sixth Ave- nue. Those new buildings on each cor- ner do not work together or enliven the city as do the walks, shopping mall and skating rink interconnecting the towers of Rockefeller Center. No attempt was made to integrate the massive, practically simultaneous re- building by dealing imaginatively with the roadways that split what might have been a unified plot. The impermanency of should have as a corollary that the land temporarily built upon is only loaned, whoever holds the title, and only on certain conditions. Perhaps a formula could be worked out measur- ing the respect shown for the city by the plans of a building seeking Build- ing Department approval. This would take into account the likely number of jobs created for the building’s tenants, the number of square feet of residen- tial space demolished that might ¢ave housed those workers, a coefficient of gain figured out over the previous use of the land, which color of the land re-use map was being exploited, and so forth. Concessions could be granted al- lowing valuable variances from zoning restrictions. The danger of Lost New York is that its logic arrives at the accusation real estate that the city wantonly destroys itself, even though one must admit that the economic engine of change has steadily created more jobs, a larger tax base, and greater services to its citizens. For instance, in the twelve years between Mayor Wagner’s first budget and May- or Lindsay’s, municipal expenditures rose from just under $1 billion to just over $4.5 billion. Such sums can be a red flag inspiring the co-accusation against urban change that New York is nothing but a monument to money. In the making of money, it is acknowl- edged, human values tend to be forgot- ten; but it may be too easily acknowl- edged. A good deal of the sentiment against change and the death of any single building is a reaction to the pre- sumed motives of the monger behind its execution. In comparison with Sil- ver’s cultural testament (“the basic things in the city, the truthful things measured by human experience, though not necessarily those most clear and well-ordered and visual”), the builder’s motives are selfish and inadequate. Some vanished buildings are, by any consideration, Jamented beyond their value in order to pass judgment upon the profiteers of their doom. But New York is a monument to money. Passengers on the Circle Line CDtInmG Tia EL. Ba Yak Alt 2OO1 ban sayin $5.95 At your bookstore, or Photo: KATHINKA FOX BASIC BOOKS, INC., 404 Park Avenue South, N.Y. 10016 695 curity, boat trip around Manhattan are treat- ed by the barker to superlatives of size. weight, number of windows, height and cost. It Manhattan skyline and not think of wealth. Even Henry Adams wrote with passion about the financial aspects of three centuries of cathedral building. Real estate and corporate profiteers do stalk the streets thinking only of ag- grandizing present opportunities and not of how to conserve past glories. Are they more nakedly greedy than such sympathetic city stereotypes as the Eu- ropean immigrant, or the Broadway stage aspirant, or the dreamers clerk- ing in a bank here rather than for low- er wages in Binghamton or San Juan? The city’s power of attraction is pre- cisely the action of the economic en- gine and that one can aspire and work for status, space, a private fortress or a public image. Silver has used an abstraction to con- nect the building-by-building inventory of what has been lost to the relation- ship between the citizen- and his city. He states that the city is a record of culture and the citizen locates himself within it as he is able to see it spread out, the oldest buildings and the new- est, before him. But to speak of the city in terms of such assigned abstrac- tions is sentimental. Mumford’s “in the city time becomes visible,” is grandilo- quently romantic about only secondary effects and characteristics. There is a greater discontinuity in American cities than is represented by the lamentable loss of even a cou- ple of hundred good buildings. This dis- continuity is unmentionable. For a poli- tician to truthfully describe the city’s problems today with both accuracy and a practical plan for solution would be willful suicide. Imagine applying Emma Lazarus’ poem on the Statue of Liberty to an analogous monument at the bus terminal. Northern cities have absorbed 5.6 million of rural Southern blacks and Puerto Ricans. If today’s immi- grants were welcomed with the pa- tronizing allusion to “wretched refuse,” there would be pickets around City Hall in less time than it takes to misspell a signboard. The glory of New York was that it was the place where the opportunities were good, the competi- tion tough, the prizes great: where competition achieved status, money, se- housing, and assurance that children would get more than their par- ents had. A good deal of this assur- ance, housing and security is now at- tempted by the swollen municipal budg- et. In the past, immigrants from Ohio and the Ukraine became the middle class because their labor was needed; it was modestly or inadequately com- pensated, and it served, in many cases, as an investment to finance the city’s 696 oo is impossible to look at the _ SO Ag eet) Nae Me eas growth. Today’s immigrants are finding a different city. The technology of the industries represented by the prestige buildings is beyond primitive skills. Such labor is not needed, and the city’s growth is being called on to finance the assimilation of a disadvantaged class. Lost New York is a marvelous museum of a book. As a museum, its text constitutes probably the most in- telligent set of display cards ever writ- ten. Silver has researched diligently, selected carefully, and presented it all artistically. This was old. This was good. This was unique. But as a book, it has not accepted the condition for all museums: this is past. It no longer may be possible to com- plain about the destruction of distinc- tive real estate in the face of other urban problems. First, it may be ir- relevant, in the instance of the Brokaw Mansions, whether we have the present vulgar building on the site which is deemed profitable, or the old vulgar ones, deemed historical. And second, clearance or wholesale flux may be the only solution to the greatest problem: keeping the city viable. Urban Renew- al by Title I clearance was noisily de- clared to have failed in 1961: and the concept of rehabilitation aided by the same federal millions of dollars in More Big 1967 Books JOHN PERREAULT Mr. Perreault, who is a poet and the regular art critic for The Village Voice, has pre- pared this additional listing of books for gifts [see The Nation, December 18}. ARTIST'S PROOF: The Annual of Con- temporary Prints, Vol. VII. Edited by Fritz Eichenberg. 96 black-and-white illustrations. Pratt Center for Contem- porary Printmaking in cooperation with Barre Publishers. 128 pp. $12.50. The print in all its old forms and in many new forms (three-dimensional, plastic, silk-screen paintings and vac- uum molds) is, since Pop, ubiquitous. This lively annual of contemporary prints is most informative about the revolutionary rebirth of an art form particularly suited to a mass society. Art critic Michael Benedikt’s lead essay, “The Contemporary Print: From Feedback to Forecast,” clarifies this new phenomenon, pointing out the immense but so far undeclared in- fluence of Pop artist Andy Warhol. Prof. Fritz Eichenberg writes on “Lissitsky and the Russian Avant- as write-downs and ianateaae ‘Gere ost, 1 per cent loans, rental. supplements and experimental grants, must be consid ered, so far, also to have failed. The pendulum is probably about to swing back. & Some day soon, the nation will in- evitably free itself to turn to the reno: vation of the cities. Up to $25 billion “ annually might be reappropriated for Be this work. Then perhaps the mold of R the old city might be broken; perhaps not only buildings will go but the grid itself can be opened up, loosened, made to generate greater land values, and create enriched human values. There is hi more than enough national wealth to add to the concept of clearance the justice of compensation. In fact, ade- quate compensation, even lucrative compensation, is the principle behind the replacement of one prestige build- ing with another, bigger one. Compare this with the principle behind clear- ance under Title I eminent domain: the sacrifice of the supposed few for the never materializing many. Without repeating the litany of the present urban ills that start with polhu- tion, paralysis and the burden of riders and subclauses on the Social Contra ot that is the lease governing occupancy of this city, it seems as though the earthquake is upon us. And that isn’t altogether a bad thing. | ess Cor cer 18 Garde.” ‘There are also informative essays on Mexican print making, past and present, and six selections con- cerning new print-making techniques Included is a Leonard Baskin wood engraving printed from the original wood block on Japanese paper. . THE COMPLETE EEAVES VG $0) GRASS. By Walt Whitman. With . Prose Essences by William L. Moore. Preface by Gay Wilson Allen. 85 re- productions of Japanese calligraphy Taibundo (Japan). 1096 pp. $33.50. : Mr. Moore’s “prose essences” may be of help to Japanese readers of Whit- man for whom this huge book ‘is apparently intended, or at least that is what is suggested by Gay Wilson Allen in his short preface. Printed on oppos- ing pages to the text of Whitman’s poetry, the “essences” are not sum: maries, explanations or commentaries. Supposedly to clarify the “drift” of the text and to aid in retaining what Mr. Moore reads as Whitman’s “Theme of Man,” he interprets “I celebrate my- self, and sing myself,/ And what - “de | My THE NATION/ December 25, 196; , you shall assume,/For every n belonging to me as good belongs y you” as: “The miracle of my Self —my soul the soujourner, my body the house—I celebrate. Of the Creator ‘of Space and of Earth and of my orbit connecting me with both, I sing.” This highly unnecessary labor for American readers results in an odd though handsome volume with special ‘interest for collectors of editions of Leaves of Grass. fHE AGE OF THE GRAND TOUR. Historical introduction by Anthony Burgess. 236 monochrome reproduc- _ tions. 4 full-page reproductions of steel engravings. 16 full-page color _ mental journey through the Continent - considered obligatory for the would- ‘ be English gentleman of the 18th century. There is also an essay on _ 18th-century art by Francis Haskell. i Sonnet by Pablo Neruda. Aires, amor. The English SONETO XXIX Vienes de la pobreza de las casas del Sur, de las regiones duras con frio y ierremoto no s dieron la leccién de la vida en la greda. ba’ Se Eres un euballito de greda negra, un beso e barro oscuro, amor, amapola de greda, Dine del creptisculo que vol6é en los caminos, BY ; M uchacha, has conservado tu corazon de pobre, tus pies de pobre acostumbrados a las piedras, tu boca que no siempre tuvo pan o delicia. at es del pobre Sur, de donde viene mi alma: en su cielo tu madre sigue lavando ropa con mi madre. Por eso te escogi, comparera. NATION/ December 25, 1967 que cuando hasta sus dioses rodaron a la muerte Bleancia con ldgrimas de nuestra pobre infancia. More involving, however, are the docu- ments and pictures gathered in a volume which is designed rather aptly for leisurely nonsequential reading and browsing. Short passages from diaries, letters and travel books pro- vide the excuse for the sumptuous illustrations, steel engravings and color plates. Those quoted include Madame de Staél, Boswell and Shelley and the only American in the book, James Fenimore Cooper. It is an extrava- gant book, totally unnecessary; but it will impress and delight both the ex- tremely literate and the quasi-literate, the seasoned Continental gadabout, as well as the armchair traveler. sates. Crown Publishers. 136 pp. $30. AUBREY BEARDSLEY. By Brian Reade. 502 black-and-white illustra- ee The Age of the Grand Tour is a tions. The Viking Press. 372 pp. coffee-table book, measuring 19 by $16.95, 13% inches. Its theme is set in an essay by Anthony Burgess that re- Brian Reade, who selected the taste- _ creates without sentiment the senti- making Beardsley show at The Victoria and Albert Museum (later seen in New York at the Gallery of Modern Art), writes a turgid but help- ful summary of Beardsley’s life and art, pointing out that this now very Neruda “Soneto XXIX” is one of a hundred love poems written to his wife, Matilde, by the celebrated Chilean poet, Pablo This collection has been published in Spanish by Editorial Losado, under the title Cien sonetos de translation below will appear in Later Poems of Pablo Neruda, translated by Ben Belitt, to be published by Grove Press in 1968. Buenos SONNET XXIX * fashionable enfant terrible of the Yellow Book era, who died at the age of 25, was more than a decadent illustrator of symbolist literature. He was also an innovator in graphics and ‘an influence upon such artists as Picasso, Kandinsky and Paul Klee. The major portion of this heavyweight book is, as it should be, taken up with Beardsley’s work itself — whiplash frontispieces, decorations and illustra- tions ranging from Tristan through Wilde’s Salome to the polymorphous perversity of his notorious illustrations for Lysistrata. Lovers of line and plastic inventiveness will delight in this book, but it is not for puritans or their brothers, the prurient. FROM PEDDLERS TO MERCHANT PRINCES. By Penrose Scull with Prescott €. Fuller. [lustrated with 258 photos, etchings and documents. Follett Publishing Co. 274 pp. $10. Where camp is still fashionable, this should be the high camp book of the ; year. The text is written in the un- equivocal and sometimes unintention- ally humorous style usually reserved Translation by Ben Belitt You come from the destitute South, from the house of privation, regions made hard with the earthquake and cold that gave us hard lessons in living in the chalk and the clay while the gods whom they worshipped were spinning away to their death, You are a little mare carved in black clay, a kiss dusky with pitch, beloved, a clay poppy, a pigeon of twilight that fluttered its way on the roads and followed us into a childhood of want, with its tears. You who always preserved your heart's poverty, girl with the feet of the needy, accustomed to stones, whose mouth was not always acquainted with sweetmeat and bread: You come from the destitute South that once nurtured my soul; in her heaven, your mother goes on with her washing, washing clothes with my mother. Therefore I have singled you out to be my companion. 697 for sixth-grade American history text- books. The photos, old ads and steel engravings are delightful. The book is a good choice as a gift for a merchant uncle who takes himself seriously enough to take the book seriously or a copywriter cousin who will get the point. A caption reading “Post’s adver- tising copy of 1907 reflected his forthright convictions, combining com- mercialism with a health crusade,” identifies a Postum ad that begins: “Do you wake up in the night with a feeling of suffocation and dread?” AMERICAN DAGUERREIAN ART. By Floyd and Marion Rinhart. 78 black-and-white illustrations; 12 in color. Clarkson N. Potter. 135 pp. $10. With few but occasionally notable exceptions (“Man in a Straw Hat,” “Virginia Gentleman,” “Two Bakers’ ) ei UE the daguerreotypes reproduced in this eh informative book are not art but Lili! merely documents of a__ historical ti period and of the birth pangs of i photography. This rather specialized book traces and illustrates the short ' but fascinating history of the daguerre- 4 otype in America. Of particular in- terest are the color daguerreotypes of Levi Hill. Along with numerous Ca portrait photographs there are land- in scapes and a sampling of decorative if daguerreotype cases. | i Mi) "PHE IMPERIAL COLLECTION OF BUMS AUDUBON ANIMALS. By John | Hh James Audubon and the Rev. John Xi Bachman. 150 color prints. Hammond. al 307 pp. $19.95 first printing: $25 Diet thereafter. pe This handsome collector's item with bhi ath an illustrated text by Audubon and aaa the Reverend Bachman, has an up- mae dating by editor Victor H. Cahlane. iy hue tHe SHOREBIRDS OF ‘NORTH iy AMERICA. Edited by Gardner D. zi Stout. Text by Peter Matthiessen. Paintings by Robert Verity Clem. 32 color plates. The Viking Press. 270 pp: $22.50. } | Although the color plates are attrac- | tive to all, this is a book for the iI specialist, the naturalist, and only the i) advanced bird watcher. Amateur, arm- ti Ne chair naturalists may get lost, for it Se treats the habits and characteristics of shorebirds (not gulls, terns, geese or ducks but sandpipers, plovers and the like) with great scientific detail. JACKSON POLLOCK. By Francis V. O’Connor. 110 illustrations. 1 color gatefold. Museum of Modern Art. 698 Distributed by Doubleday & Co. 148 pp. $6.95. Paper $3.95. Published in connection with the Pollock retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art last year, this fascina- ting book documents chronologically bits and pieces of biographical data, interviews, letters, statements, gallery shows and reviews from Pollock’s Records 1967 /Benjamin Boretz In this annual listing, the first category, “Records of the Year,” is a compilation of performances and works of major musi- cal interest. “Literature of Special Inter- est” lists a number of other recordings released during 1967 that make worth- while, if somewhat more limited, con- tributions to the recorded literature. “Performances of Special Interest’ and “Significant Reissues’ list responsible performances of frequently performed literature and reissues of historical per- formances or of more recent recordings lately out of print. I. RECORDS OF THE YEAR BACH, C.P.E.: Four Orchestral Sym- phonies. The Little Orchestra of Lon- don: Leslie Jones, cond. Nonesuch H- 71180. BERG: Wozzeck. Walter Berry, Isabel Strauss, Fritz Uhl, Carl Doench, vocal soloists; Chorus and Orchestra of the Paris National Opera: Pierre Boulez, cond. C.B.S. 32 21 0002. BYRD: Mass in Three Parts. Mass in Four Parts. Choir of King’s College Chapel, Cambridge; David Willcocks, “cond. Argo ZRG 5362. Mass for Five Voices. Magnificat and Nunc Dimittis from The Great Servy- ice. King’s College Chapel, Cam- bridge; David Willcocks, cond. Argo ZRG 5226. CHOPIN: Mazurkas, Rubinstein, piano. 6177. complete. Artur RCA Victor LSC COPLAND: Quartet for piano and strings (1950). Sextet (1933). Vitebsk. Juilliard String Quartet; Aaron Cop- land, piano. Columbia ML 6454 MS LOS: MAHLER: Das Lied von der Erde. James King, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, soloists; Vienna Philharmonic Orches- tra; Leonard Bernstein, cond. London OS 26005. at Cody, Wyo. 1956 in East Hampton. This book of hard facts and documents affords a glimpse of the man behind the paintings in a way that no biog- raphy or criticism could ever do. It should interest anyone either fascina- ted with or bewildered by Pollock's great paintings. MONTEVERDI: Vespers of 1610. Gregg Smith Singers; Texas Boys’ Choir; Columbia Baroque Ensemble; Robert Craft, cond. Columbia M2 363/M2S 763. 1 MOZART: Don Giovanni. Nicolai Ghiaurov, Claire Watson, Nicolai Gedda, Christa Ludwig, Walter Berry, Mirella Freni, vocal soloists; New Philharmonia Orchestra and Chorus; Otto Klemperer, cond. Angel ein 3700. NEW MUSIC FOR PIANO: Works by Dahl, Berger, Kennan, Adler, Overton, Babbitt, Gideon, Berkowitz, Weber, Kraft, Pisk, Powell, Gould, V. Fine, Hovhaness, Perle, Cazden, Prostakof: Glanville-Hicks, Bacon, Helps, Bruns- wick, Kim, Alexander; Robert Helps, piane. RCA Victor LM/LSC 7042, — i PUCCINI: Turandot. Nilsson, Corelli, Scotto, vocal soloists; Rome Opera Chorus and Orchestra; er Molinari-Pradelli, cond. Angel (S)CL_ 3671. t RACHMANINOFF: Piano. Constance Philips PHC 2-006. 24 Preludes for Keene, piano. SCHUETZ: Kleine Geistliche Konzerte, Book I. Soloists, Instrumentalists, Westphalian Choral Ensemble; Wil-— helm Ehmann, director. Nonesuch ii HB-73012. i SCHOENBERG: The Works of Arnold” Schoenberg, Vol. 5. i Wind Quintet, Op. 26. Danzi Qnintet! . Philips PHC 9068. eee STRAVINSKY: Marta (1922). Le Noces (1912-23). Soloists and ensem: bles conducted by Robert Craft. Columbia ML 6391/MS 6991. Movements. Epitaphium. Double | Canon Septet. The Owl and the Pussy Cat. Fanfare. A Sermon, a Narrative | and a Prayer. Igor Stravinsky, cond. — Columbia ML 6454/MS 7054. ha THE NATION/ December 25, 1967 a fs me ” . SKY: Symphonies Nos. hilharmonia Orchestra: Otto aperer, cond. Angel(S)CB 3711. Falstaff. Dietrich Fischer- eskau, Ilva Ligabue, Regina Resnik, iella Sciutti, Juan Oncina, lando Panerai, and other vocalists; Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra; Leon- Bernstein, cond. Columbia M3L 350/ M3S 750. |. LITERATURE OF SPECIAL INTEREST ABBITT: Ensembles for Synthesizer, with Cafe: Variations II and Pousseur: Trois visages de Liége. Columbia MS 7051. BACH: Art of Fugue. Chamber Orches- tra of the Sarre; Karl Ristenpart, cond. “Nonesuch HB-73013. Cantata No. 201, “Der Streit Zwischen “Phoebus und Pan.” Edith Mathis, Ingeborg Russ, Wilfrid Jochims, Peter Schreier, Erich Wenk, Jakob ‘Ss tampfli, soloists; Chorus of the Gedachtniskirche and Bach-Collegium, Ss tuttgart; Helmuth Rilling, cond. A Nonesuch H-7166. . TOK: Sonata for piano. (with: 3 Studies, Out of Doors, and Suite). Noél Lee, piano. Nonesuch H-71175. RGER: Chamber Music for 13 Players (1956). Three Pieces for two ‘pianos (1961). Columbia Chamber “Ensemble; Gunther Schuller, cond. Paul Jacobs, Gilbert Kalish, pianos. Columbia ML 6359/MS 6959. BOULEZ: Le Marteau sans maitre. | Jeanne Deroubaix, alto; Severino Gazzeloni, alto flute; Georges van Gucht, xylorimba; Claude Ricou, | vibraphone; Jean Batigne, percussion; Anton Stingl, guitar; Serge Collot, viola; Pierre Boulez, cond. Turnabout TV 4081/TV 340818. JCKNER: Symphony No. 5 in B flat. Jew Philharmonia; Ctto Klemperer, cond. Angel S-3209. Symphony No. 6 in A. Bavarian Radio Orchestra; Eugen Jochum, cond. DGG SLPM 139 136. | DVORAK: Symphonies 1,2,3,4,5,6. Lon- Pi don Symphony Orchestra; Istvan Kertesz, cond. London CS 6523, CS ae CS 6525, CS 6526, CS 6511, { ES 6495. | EL ECTRONIC MUSIC FROM THE UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS. Briin: F ‘utility for speaker and tape. Gaburo: Lemon Drops; .For Harry. Hamm: Canto for soprano, speaker, and en- ‘semble. Hiller: Machine Music for piano, percussion and tape. Martirano: THE NATION/ December 25, 1 967 Underworld. Ensemble from the Uni- versity of Illinois; Jack McKenzie and mee Gilbert, conds. Heliodor HS2 47. ELGAR: Cello Concerto. Jacqueline du Pré, cello; London Symphony Orches- tra; Sir John Barbirolli, cond. Angel (S) 36338. HANDEL: Organ Concertos, complete. Edward Miiller, organ. Chola Cantor- um Basiliensis; August Wenzinger, cond. Archive SKL 917/21. ISAAC: Missa Carminum. JOSQUIN: Ave, Christe Immolate. LASSUS: Choral works. Niedersachsigher Sing- Kreis; Willi Trader, cond. Kaufbeurer Martinsfinken; Ludwig Hahn, cond. Nonesuch H-71084. LUTOSLAWSKI: Concerto for Orches- tra. Funeral Music. (with: Venetian Games). Warsaw National Philhar- monic Orchestra; Witold Rowicki, cond. Philips PHS 900-159. MILHAUD: La Création du monde. (with: Le Boeuf sur le toit.) Orches- tre du Théatre des Champs-Elysées; Darius Milhaud, cond. Nonesuch H- 71122. NEW MUSIC FROM BRITAIN. Davies: Leopardi Fragments. Goehr: Two Choruses. Bennett: Calendar. Williamson: Symphony for Voices. Melos Ensemble; John Carewe, cond. Angel (S) 36387. ROSSINI: Semiramide. Joan Sutherland, Marilyn Horne, and other soloists; London Symphony Orchestra; Richard Bonynge, cond. London OSA 1382. SCHUETZ: Deutsches Magnificat. Saul, Saul, was verfolgst du mich? Psalm 2 (with Monteverdi: Magnificat). Kan- torei Barmen-Gemarke; Helmut Kahl- hofer, cond. Nonesuch H-71134. Symphoniae Sacrae (9 Concertos from Book I). Soloists and Instrumentalists; Helmut Rilling, cond. Nonesuch H- 71160. SCHULLER: Triplum (1967). New York Philharmonic; Leonard Bern- stein, cond. Columbia ML 6452/MS 7052. STOCKHAUSEN: Complete — Piano Music. Aloys Kontarsky, piano. CBS 32 21 0008. STRAVINSKY: Les Noces. Pribouatki. Berceuses du chat. Four Russian Songs. Four Russian Peasant Songs. Chorus and Soloists of the Orchestre du Théatre National de l’Opéra, Paris; Pierre Boulez, cond. Nonesuch H- TASS; Orpheus. Symphony in Three Move- ments. London Symphony Orchestra; Colin Davis, cond. Philips PHS 900- 153. Symphony in E flat. Columbia Sym- phony; Igor Stravinsky, cond. Colum- bia ML 6389/MS 6989. TCHAIKOWSKY: Queen of Spades. Valentina Levko, Tamara Milashkina, Irina Arkhipova, Zurab Anzhaparidzye, Mikhail Kiselev, Yuri Mazurok, solo- ists; Chorus and Orchestra of the Bolshoi Theater; Boris Khaikin, cond. Melodiya/ Angel (S)RD 4104. Suites for Orchestra. London Sym- : TICKETS g Vy 3g a 4 \ : NOW AT BOX OFFICE OR ELELLETILILLLLLT LTDA LLTPLVLILL A = TECHNICOLOR® PANAVISION® FROM WARNER BROS.-SEVEN ARTS. WORLD PREMIERE NOW : WARNER THEATRE Bway & 47th St. CO 557114 The Nation BOOK SERVICE Offers the following at a discount: (] ANATOMY OF THE STATE DEPARTMENT by Smith Simpson (Houghton Mifflin, $5.95) OJ FAMINE 1975! America’s Decision: Who Will Survive? by William and Paul Pace (Little, Brown, & Co., $6.50) (0 THE FREE WORLD COLOSSUS: A critique of American Foreign Policy in the Cold War by David Horowitz (Hill & Wang, $6.95) (0 FRIENDSHIP AND FRATRICIDE by Meyer A. Zeligs (Viking, $8.95) (1D THE GOODBYE LAND by Jose Yglesias (Pantheon, $4.95) (10 PRISON NOTES by Barbara Deming (Grossman, $4.95) (0 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF POWER by Ronald Sampson (Pantheon, $4.95) .. (OU THE NEW RADICALISM by Christopher Lasch (Knopf, $6.95) .... AAS $7.16 eee ew eesee penne ene wm eer een oee Remittance accompanying orders should be made payable to THE NATION, 333 6th Ave., N.Y. 10014 Readers can avail themselves of our regular offer to send them any book (ex- cept paperbacks), published in the U.S. at the retail price post-free. When order- ing, please give title, author and publisher. 12-25-67 Cad tee EE TS LES ECE EG RE 699 _ phony Orchestra; Antal Dorati, cond. Mercury SR3-9018. TELEMANN: St. Matthew Passion. Theo Altmeyer, Horst Giinter, Sena Jurinac, Franz Crass, soloists; Lucerne Festival Choir, Swiss Festival Orches- tra; Kurt Redel, cond. Philips PHS 2-994. WAGNER: Tristan und Isolde. Birgit Nilsson, Wolfgang Windgassen, Chris- ta Ludwig, Martti Talvela, Eberhard Waechter, soloists; Bayreuth Festival Orchestra; Karl Bohm, cond. DGG 139) 221/25. Die Walkiire. Birgit Nilsson, Regina Crespin, Christa Ludwig, James King, Gottlob Frick, soloists; Vienna Phil- harmonic Orchestra; Georg Solti, cond. London OSA 1509. WUORINEN: Piano Variations. Mar- tirano: Cocktail Music. Burge: Eclipse II; David Burge, piano. Advance FGR III. PERFORMANCES OF SPECIAL INTEREST BARTOK: Piano Concertos Nos. 1 and 3. Peter Serkin, piano. Chicago Sym- phony Orchestra; Seiji Ozawa, cond. RCA Victor LM/LSC 2929. BEETHOVEN: Violin Concerto. Yehudi Menuhin, violin. The New Philhar- monia Orchestra; Otto Klemperer, cond. Angel (S) 36369. ‘DEBUSSY: Piano Music. Charles Rosen, piano. Epic LC 3945/BC 1345. DVORAK: Symphonies Nos. 7,8.9. The Cleveland Orchestra; George Szell, cond. Epic SC 6055/BSC 155. FRANCK: Symphony in D minor. New Philharmonia Orchestra; Otto Klemp- erer, cond. Angel (S) 36416. SCHUMANN: Symphony No. 1. Man- fred Overture. New Philharmonia Orchestra; Otto Klemperer, cond. Angel (S) 36353. VERDI: Un Ballo in Maschera. Leon- tyne Price, Carlo Bergonzi, Shirley Verrett, Reri Grist, Robert Merrill, Ezio Flagello, soloists; RCA Italiana Opera Orchestra and Chorus; Erich Leinsdorf, cond. RCA Victor LM/ LSC 6179. TV. SIGNIFICANT REISSUES BEETHOVEN: Fidelio. Soloists, Vienna State Opera Chorus; Vienna Philhar- monia; Wilhelm Firtwangler, cond. Seraphim 6022. Symphonies 3, 5, 7. Vienna Philhar- 700 monia; Wilhelm Fiirtwangler, cena Seraphim 6018. LISZT: Faust Symphony. Orpheus. Royal Philharmonic Orchestra; Thomas Beecham, cond. Seraphim IB-6017. STRAUSS: Alpine Symphony. Bavarian State Orchestra; Richard Strauss, cond. Seraphim 60006. VERDI: Aida. Maria Caniglia, Beniam- ino Gigli, Ebe Stignani, Gino Bechi, soloists; Rome Opera Chorus and Orchestra; Tullio Serafin, cond. Sera- phim IC 6016. The Wars oj Private Hochhuth Cc. AMERY Hans Hochhuth’s The Soldiers was banned in England; it will be presented in Toronto on February 28 by the non- profit and partly government-sponsored Theater Toronto; a second production is scheduled to open at the Mark Taper Forum, Los Angeles, on March 15. Berlin Compared to The Deputy, Hochhuth’s latest venture into the ethics of World War II, The Soldiers. has caused only tiny ripples in Germany. And I doubt that this is simply a-.matter of artistic decline. Hochhuth’s old-fashioned ap- proach to the theatre is similar in both plays; both are more impressive when read, and in both the author’s historical footnotes, liberally sprinkled through the italics of stage directions (directions which can never be translated into “busi- ness”), convey the real Hochhuth style. One reason for the awful Berlin flop of The Soldiers could be that it did not have the benefit of a director as power- ful and sovereign as the late Erwin Pis- cator, who virtually “made” The Deputy on the stage. Another reason could be that Hochhuth’s first play, attacking Pope Pius XII, carried with it the ad- vantage of surprise, which could not be generated a second time. I believe, however, that the real reason for Hochhuth’s inability to rouse the German public again goes deeper; and that it is a strictly political reason. Funda- mentally, even the rabid German Nazi was never anti-Churchill. Despite his savage determination, his cruel jests about the Hun, his relentless method of run- ning the war, Churchill had a curiously positive image in Germany. Hitler must have felt that; his maniacal concentra- tion on Churchill, his rantings against the “whisky drinker” and “madman,” Car Nicolai, Nficio Flippesthi; I Boris Christoff, soloists; Rome Ope Chorus and Orchestra; Gabri ri¢l Santini, cond. Seraphim IC 6004. © WAGNER: Parsifal. 1951 Bayreuth Production; Hans Knappertsbusch, cond, Richmond RS 65001. Die Walkiire. Martha Médl, Ludwig Suthaus, Leonie Rysanek, Ferdinand Frantz, Gottlob Frick, Margarete Klose, soloists; Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra; Wilhelm Furtwangler, cond Seraphim IE-6012. 4 show a definite fear—the fear of a type of Fuehrer superior to the German brand. It is well known that Hitler and the Nazis revered the British Empire— as they saw it, and as it never was: the | result of a vast master plan to dominate the world, executed by a race of super. men holding morality in utter disregard. They were never able even to guess at the post-Christian substance behind the fagade of the empire. Churchill was, to them, the embodiment of the British conqueror spirit and their rage at him was largely caused by his curious failure (as they saw it) to pursue England’s true interest. i Hochhuth’s debunking attempt oa therefore bound to fall flat. What, after all, did he try to prove? That Chure: was Machiavellian, the designer of the air war against Germany’s cities, and the plotter of Sikorski’s death? That is not news; not even emotional news The Deputy managed to shock and sur- prise because it forced a new historical view on the public; The Soldiers does not. It is significant that even the ex- F treme Right—always eager to run up di the accounts of Hamburg and Dresden against those of Auschwitz and Bergen- Belsen—made no real attempt to oes the issue. For Hochhuth, this was probably not unfortunate. He is anything but a N and nothing was and is further from bit mind than to provide alibis for our past. His two crusades were both born of deeply moralistic attitude; an attitu touching in its fundamental simplicity For him, it is obvious, Men Make His- tory. A witty German critic remarked 7 that The Deputy could have been writ-— ten only by a Protestant: no Catholic would think of piling so much moral credit, so much free responsibility, upon | a Pope of the Church. The remark can be applied as well to Hochhuth’s net THE NATION/ December 25, 19 y extracurricular state- e “Hochhuth has bent backward to dake clear his view that Churchill’s was truly tragic dilemma; that he could not escape the consequence of the war, of power constellation linking the West d Soviet Russia, of the necessity to eeeport the Russian land war before an invasion from the West But the play fails to bring out that di- lemma. This, it seems, is the fault of his old-fashioned dramatic means. He does not even attempt to get away from a ‘drama of “protagonists”; and it can be ‘said that Shakespeare’s Richard I] shows more affinity to modern politics than does either of Hochhuth’s plays. He is, im a way, a typical “little German”; fas- inated by the People Up There, blaming the blood baths on their moral shortcom- ings, and unable or unwilling to analyze a ah ‘If I were a functionary of Mr. Johnson’s war, the thing about Felix Greene’s “Inside North Vietnam that would frighten me is its evidence that the people are merry. The defense, no doubt, would be to cry falsification, cit- ing the facts that Greene is avowedly hostile to the American intervention, that he enjoyed the cooperation of the authorities in Hanoi, that he reports having shot ten hours of film for a pic- ture that runs eighty-five minutes. Thus there was plenty of scope for selection, and a cold warrior could try to evade the movie by saying that it was made ‘fo prove a point. Well, no doubt it was, and no doubt Steene chose those passages that made Hthe point most effectively. But unless you are prepared to believe that the North Vietnamese are a nation of pol- ished actors, unless you can imagine that, in a period when they are strug- gling to keep their land functioning un- der the rain of American death, large companies of them took out time to re- hearse for Greene’s camera, it is hard to. argue away the effect they make. ‘Because that effect lies not in anything . particular that they do but in their car- lage and oresence. They are quick, ‘resourceful, ironic, full of laughter, drawn together in a brotherhood of per- rai Anyone who lived with the British during World War II will be convinced by the spirit of Greene’s documenta- tion, because he will have experienced ‘before the euphoria that uplifts a reso- lute people when they are harassed from the sky. _ The most surprising quality of the North Vietnamese is their coolness. On- ‘ly one man in the footage Greene ks HE NATION/ December 25, 1967 i was possible. — the social structures that force even the protagonists of history into their molds. This is regrettable, because it betrays a state of moral affairs in literature which becomes dangerous to our future. ‘With “Christian” literature nonexistent, and Marxist literature becoming more and more cynical under the guise of hilarity, the earnest and undivided moral purpose in literary endeavor is left to the cranks, to the second-raters and to individual crusaders. While the whole literary Left upholds the traditions of Zola, it is silently agreed that his direct approach to issues of the day is obsolete. More than ever, we need a Friedrich von Schiller in German literary life, a man who believes in the theatre as a “moral institution.” It is too bad that his emu- lator today does not share his keen and differentiated historical insight. FILMS / Robert Hatch shows gives evidence of anger, and he is a farmer in a small thatched vil- lage, whose wife and son had been killed in a raid the night before. Other- wise, these people fight the war clini- cally, as though a disease were ravag- ing their country. The plague, as they know, can devastate a whole populace, but one does not for that reason curse the rats. Speed, discipline, selflessness are demanded of a people under siege; rage is irrelevant. No one whom Greene interviews, from high officials to fac- tory girls and workers in the rice fields, spoke as harshly of Americans as John- son and Rusk have spoken of their do- mestic critics. They all seemed entire- ly content to let the events speak for themselves. Greene talked with an Air Force ma- jor who had been shot down ten days earlier, suffering a broken arm and leg. He received first aid in the field (the claim is not made, but I suspect that the North Vietnamese public has the best training in practical medicine to be found anywhere today), and was moved quickly to a hospital where his fractures were expertly tended. In the film, he seems bewildered by this hu- mane treatment, a state of mind that may have influenced his answers to Greene’s questions. What he said though, sounded more like common sense than contrition: the war is bad for everyone concerned and should be terminated at the first possible mo- ment; but it can be ended only by the American people themselves, who must go to the polls and vote their determina- tion. I was struck by the fact that when Greene asked Pham Van Dong wheth- er his country would accept volunteers (presumably from China or Russia), — the Prime Minister seemed not very much interested in the question. Yes, he said, such assistance would certain- ly be welcome if the day ever came when it was needed, but clearly that need was too remote to engage his present attention. Greene reports that except for Hanoi and Haiphong, urban life has ceased in North Vietnam. But despite the bomb- ing that daily wipes out villages and kills villagers in this predominately ru- ral country, North Vietnam does not look badly hurt. Again, Greene could have edited to minimize the devastation (what he shows is bad enough), but I really do not see how he could have simulated the health and vigor that spring from every scene and provide the beauty of his film. It is as certain as prediction can ever be that the North Vietnamese will not be defeated or driv- en to negotiate. But they are dying, and it is at least possible that if we raise the bombing level sufficiently high, and continue it sufficiently long, we can kill them all. The alternative to exterminat- ing this peculiarly attractive people is — to make peace. Greene’s message iS that it is we who must make that peace, that it is not in the character of the Vietnamese to cry mercy of their tormentors (after all, they have resisted the Chinese for centuries). Mr. Johnson would no doubt call that prop- aganda; I call it the nature of man, The Best Way To Get NATION] SSSCHESSSRESESSRESESRSSESSCSRSESRRRREEE EES THE NATION 12-25-67 333 Sixth Ave., New York 10014 [_] One Year, $10 [_] Two Years, $18 {_] 6 Months, $6 (| Bill Me —‘[_] Payment Enclosed (Foreign and Canadian Postage $l a year extra) . 2 . € 701 TELEVISION/John Horn President Johnson set up a task force last August to review past activities in the entire field of communications, from television to satellites—both domestic (potential) and international (actual) — and to formulate (finally) a national communications policy. Eugene V. Ros- tow, Under Secretary of State for Pub- lic Affairs, is chairman of the committee, which is made up from a cross section of Administration executives. Better late than never seems to be the United States policy in television, as in other matters. Slowly we are coming around to reluctant acceptance of plan- ning (the American genius is improvi- sation) and of the philosophy that the public, in all its diversity and individu- ality, must be served by the air waves it Owns in more qualitative ways than that determined by body count. These considerations, yet to be acknowledged in the United States, in the founding of England’s TV back in 1936. Our communications gap is as scandalous as our credibility gap. One of the weaknesses of Public Broadcasting, as recently enacted by Congress, derives from a lack of over- view of television. Public Broadcasting, apart from instructional television which, it seems, everyone wants and no one wants to pay for, apparently is intended to fill an informational-cultural need. This was assumed without a review of commercial television, which attracts 98 per cent of the audience, and has failed. to live up to its public responsibility in the private use of the public air waves. For their part, commercial-tele- vision operators claim either that the LETTERS (Continued from page 674) I don’t claim credit for the observation that James in- were keystones. need does not exist or that it is not their function to meet it. The public is expected to buy a pig in a poke to nourish their informational-cultural appetites. Wishing the task force well, one wishes also that it were ready, willing and able to assume the long view. A good way for it to prepare for Ats work would be to take—and pass—the thirty- program course on “Communications and Education” that Charles A. Siep- mann, professor emeritus of the New York University School of Education, is currently conducting for the New York State Education Department. Pro- duced by the School Television Service of WNDT/Channel 13, New York, the series is seen Tuesday and Thursday evenings on Channel 13 and is available to other stations, including WETA-TV, Washington, D.C., where it is most needed. Members of Congress as well as the task force are urged to acquaint themselves, through Professor Siep- mann’s course, with practices and pos- sibilities of the great medium they have allowed to become simultaneously the broadcaster’s gold mine and the public’s social-cultural pocket of poverty. Siepmann, who taught at New York University for more than twenty years and is special television consultant to the Ford Foundation and author of many books on communications, dis- tills in his current postgraduate course the facts and findings of his life work, which began with the B.B.C- in his native England. From a thirty-year retrospect of broadcasting, Siepmann ranges far, wide and deep. He is wry: “Everyone, particularly But the gist of Guttmann’s book is that conservative ideas are an irrelevance since things are getting better and more _ programing. That Siepmann has been a a the ignorant Laytet knows | wrong with education and how to right. 2 He- as ebiunt? , is a system of broadcasting adminll conceived to make of this a great instru: ment of cultural advancement, but a system that has failed.” He is as di- dactically amusing as Bernard Shaw, whom he quoted in a warning ignored two decades ago by the U.S. broad- — casting audience: “Get what you like © or you will be forced to like what you~ Bers Siepmann’s farsightedness should — impress any task force now belatedly ad- | dressing itself to a national communica- — tions policy. Nineteen years ago, in — The Radio Listener’s Bill of Rights, he — wrote: Since the major appetite of listen- ers is for entertainment, stations find that they can put on entertainment programs during all the evening hours and muster consistently large audi- ences. This is very nice—and it is also very profitable. The temptation, therefore, is to pocket the handsome profits and — claim that radio is giving the public what it wants. What radio overlooks is that, by catering primarily to the major appetites of the majority, the majority’s minor appetites and a great Many minorities’ major appetites (for good music, for good discussion and fine drama, etc.) are seriously under- fed. The result is a surfeit of entertain- ment and a shortage of other kinds of programs. His radio analysis was a forecast of | television. The affluence of TV stations is matched by the wholesale pap of TV prophet without honor is his adopted country’s shame. enlightened all the time (“relatively better” in his letter: the qualifier is not in evidence in his book). Thus the slaughter in Vietnam has to be looked at as a blunder, a tragic accident. These matters are not peripheral to Guttmann’s book; indeed, they are its very reason for being. I “cannot allow” Guttmann “to discuss political ideas rather than politics,’ because The Conservative Tradition in America’s primary concern is, in fact, the relation of ideology to political reality. My complaint is that Gutt- mann’s picture of political reality is an academic fantasy. Could Guttmann look once more at my remarks on the military? They appear not to have registered. As: for my failure to “acknowledge” the dozens of topics discussed in his book, I hereby acknowledge them. But I will not ac- knowledge that I misrepresented the book. Nor will I acknowledge that German and Italian fascism, for example, were opposed to bureaucracy, to organized industrial soci- — ety and to modernization. Whose histories has he been reading? I suggest to Guttmann that Fascist cant is not equivalent to social fact. The same holds true for the cant of American social democrats. Louis Kampf fluenced Eliot, but I hope I provided some evidence of speci- fic ways in which the influence was manifested. Any re- viewer can summarize any book in a way that makes it seem idiotic. Responsible reviewers try not to do this. Finally, I objected to the implication that my views are akin to those of the Nazis. I see planning as one element in social democracy and Kampf points out that planning was a part of fascism and of the concentration camps... . As a matter of simple historical fact, fascism was an anti- modern rebellion against bureaucratically organized in- H dustrial society, against modernization, against rationalism , f itself. Fascism affirmed the glories of the irrational and the Spontaneous rather than the planned. I don’t mean that | Kampf is thereby a Fascist. I do wish we might communi- cate without flurries of abuse. Allen Guttman i] Cambridge, Mass. Dear Sirs: Allen Guttmann thinks the war in Vietnam a “tragedy.” I do not. Unless deliberate murder engendered by an imperialist foreign policy is to be considered tragic. 702 THE NATION/ December 25, 1967 Crossword Puzzle No. 1229 FRANK W. LEWIS mee tt Poa TT el || ete ||| ee | | ACROSS: 1 End up with clean sheets, based on some- one else’s work! (10) 6 The opening side sounds spread. (4) 10 Unable te, even in an old-fashioned way, get a drink from one? (7) 11 See 1 down. 12 Ascertains the size of bills in bars. (8) 13 Set at bedtime, perhaps, it’s a fright. (5) 15 Follow the sun explosion in the orient, or at least signs of it. (5) 17 The scatterings of the tribe stem from it, and causes some animosity. (9) 19 Well-dressed, perhaps, but happened to be evicted. (6,3) ; 21 The answer suggests the sound of him in the morning. (5) 23 Prepare a dynamic still prepare! (5) 24 Gets ripe for distinction? (8) 27 Draw with force?(7) 28 Ruth less likely to be found with such types. (7) 29 See 4 down: 30 Stand-out examples of dress, (10) presentation, but old-fashioned DOWN: 1 and 11 across. Spinal anaesthetics are probably out-of-date! (4,7) 2 and 25 down. Speculates on vegetables raised for market, and is mightily sur- prised! (6-6) 3 Edsel’s city. (5S) THE NATION/ December 25, 1967 oe | | er 4 and 29 across. Your selection in the third might, if behaving predictably. (3,4,2,4) 5 Turns commercial, perhaps. (5) 7 Welcome anger? That’s mean! (7) 8 A shrub stem that might prove to be poisonous. (10) 9 Told the speaker is divided, evidently. (8) LANs iy ae ee io than none, when it comes to a loaf made by your wife, perhaps! (6,4) 16 Each person should be associated with morality. (8) 18 The flower of operatic stagecraft? (9) 20 Genuine high point reached by the broker? (7) 22 Recurring at fixed times in the army, perhaps. (7) 24 Stroke ten in court. (5) 25 See 2 down. 26 They might be held at the 23. (4) SOLUTION TO PUZZLE NO. 1228 ACROSS: 1 Lame duck; 5 Stoned; 10 Beams; 12 Low-down; 13. License; 14 Gimlet; 15 Disease; 18 Acetous; 21 Branch; 24 Service; 26 Gas line; 27 Obedience; 29 Kosher; 30 Presided. DOWN: 1 Labels; 2, 11 and 28 Meanwhile back at the ranch; 3 Despoil; 4 Cabinet; 6 Trances; 7 Not in; 8 Deepened; 9 Scaled; 16 Auctioned; 17 Pass book; 19 Olivine; 20 Sterne; 21 Bugbear; 22 Absorbs; 23 Method; 25 Reels. Printed by Milford Publishing Inc., Milford, Conn. PUBLICATIONS “THE PRESS AND THE BAY OF PIGS’ A detailed study by Victor Bernstein and Jesse Gordon The role played by The Nation in breaking the Bay of Pigs story to the American public, reprinted from the Fall issue of Columbia University Forum. 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