The Space Effort

Table of Contents

In Essence

Helping the Aged Peter H. Schuck, in The Public Interest
(Summer 1980), Box 542, Old Chelsea,
New York, N.Y. 10011.
Inspired a decade of civil rights legislation and mindful of the votes of the elderly, Congress hastily passed the Age Discrimination Act (ADA) of 1975. But the act's ambiguities are bound to sow administra- tive confusion and create social conflict, writes Schuck, a Yale Law School professor.
The ADA explicitly bars discrimination against any age group (not just the elderly) in...

Congress. The legislators could have appropriated funds to upgrade inadequate pro- grams for the elderly. Instead, they supported a broadly written law that they knew would redistribute government money covertly and therefore not antagonize other disadvantaged groups.
Herbert Hoover "The 'Great Engineer' as Administrator: Herbert Hoover and Modern Bureauc-
as Promoter racy" Peri E. Arnold, in The Review of Politics (July 1980), Box B, Notre Dame, Ind. 46556.
Most history books describe...

appointing industry representatives to run these divisions. expanding his personal staff, Hoover gained control over the de- partment's previously autonomous agencies.
Finally, Hoover put Commerce in the public spotlight by building a crackerjack public relations staff. He hired professional newsmen and courted the business press with frequent Washington conferences. And he regularly fed scoops to eminent journalists such as William Allen White and Mark Sullivan.
By the time Hoover became President,...

draw- ing up stiffer competency tests for students and teachers, and setting detailed curriculum requirements. Today, a proposed California law would force teachers to spend 200 minutes per week on the arts. Other states are variously mandating stronger programs in alcohol-abuse education, vocational training, and ethnic history.
Atkin argues that added state requirements could narrow the range of serious subjects that local schools can offer. The problem will be exacerbated if public schools-now...

Ste-
ven B. Sample and Eugene P. Trani, in The
Washington Quarterly (Summer 1980),
Foreign Policy Devt. WQ, Transaction Periodicals Con- sortium, P.O. Box 1262, New Brunswick,
N.J. 08903.
The quadrupling of U.S. exports during the 1970s (to $181.6 billion in 1979) and the current dependence of more than 4 million American jobs on foreign trade has given individual states a big stake in foreign affairs. Even lightly populated, once isolationist Nebraska has developed exten- sive foreign economic...

Ste-
ven B. Sample and Eugene P. Trani, in The
Washington Quarterly (Summer 1980),
Foreign Policy Devt. WQ, Transaction Periodicals Con- sortium, P.O. Box 1262, New Brunswick,
N.J. 08903.
The quadrupling of U.S. exports during the 1970s (to $181.6 billion in 1979) and the current dependence of more than 4 million American jobs on foreign trade has given individual states a big stake in foreign affairs. Even lightly populated, once isolationist Nebraska has developed exten- sive foreign economic...

a Demo- cratic Congress unwilling to approve U.S. intervention in Third World conflicts and divided public opinion, neither he nor Presidents Nixon and Ford found ways to parry Moscow's Third World thrusts. They bequeathed to President Carter "a Soviet policy in pieces."
Even before Soviet troops invaded Afghanistan last December, Soviet-Cuban intervention in the Horn of Africa and Vietnam's Soviet- backed occupation of Cambodia had angered Washington. The Soviets complained about U.S....

Lawrence J. Korb, in Society (July-August Joint Chiefs? 1980),BOX A, ~utgers- he State Univer-
sity, New Brunswick, N.J. 08903.
The U.S. military's Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) have greater "potential power" than ever before, writes Korb, a professor of management at the Naval War,College. But, he argues, the JCS faces increasing threats of White House political manipulation.
The five-man JCS was established Congress in 1947 to serve as the top source of military advice to the President,...

William K. Hall, in Harvard in Business Business Review (Sept.-Oct. 1980), Sub-scription Service Dept., P.O. Box 9730, ~reenwich,Conn. 06835.
The U.S. tire industry is losing out to foreign competition, but Goodyear has rolled up respectable annual revenue gains of 10 percent since 1975. Though the American cigarette market has stagnated since 1950, Philip-Morris's 20 percent annual revenue growth since 1975 has eclipsed IBM's nearly 8 percentage points.
These success stories show that the right...

John Sharpless and
of kinism John Rury, in Social Science History (Au-tumn 1980), Sage Publications, Inc., 275 South Beverly Dr., Beverly Hills,Calif. 90212.
In the small, dirty garment lofts, cigar factories, and other sweatshops of early 20th-century America, women frequently worked 12-hour days for as little as 10 cents an hour. But few factory women-most of whom were first- and second-generation European immigrants-were promis-ing candidates for union membership, relate Sharpless and Rury,...

preaching assertiveness. Their meetings resem- bled tea parties and made lower-class women feel out of place.
Eventually, the feminists gave up and turned their attention almost exclusively to suffrage. As historian Alice Kessler-Harris notes, immi- grant women laborers were left "between a trade union movement hostile to women . . . and a women's movement whose participants did not work for wages."
Raising "Gasoline Taxation in Selected OECD
Countries, 1970-79" Alan A. Tait...

Haitung King and Frances B. Locke, in Interna-
in America tional Migration Review (Spring 1980), Center for Migration Studies, 209 Flagg PI., Staten Island, N.Y. 10304.
During America's frontier boom from 1850 to 1880, the sight of pig- tailed Chinese men panning northern California's streams for gold be- came common. Yet, beginning in the 1870s, opportunities for immi- grant Chinese in the New World narrowed, and their descendants are still underrepresented in some white-collar occupations.
During...

1970, the proportion of Chinese working in personal services had plummeted to 7.1 percent (still higher than the 2.3 percent figure for whites). Chinese employed in manufacturing more than doubled, from 7.6 to 17.3 percent. And the proportion of professionals jumped from 2.2 to 21.2 percent, surpassing the figure of 17 percent for working whites. Today, higher percentages of Chinese men hold college degrees than do white or black males.
Chinese are still overrepresented in some fields. In 1970,83...

1978.
From 1972 to 1978, Jews held the most "liberal" views on abortion, Catholics the most "conservative." Whereas 90 percent of Jews consist- ently approved abortion under any circumstances, between 13 and 20 percent of Catholics thought abortion was never justified. Protestant attitudes fell in between. Respondents under 30 years old consistently supported abortion on demand between 1972 and 1978.
College-educated persons held more liberal attitudes than in- dividuals with...

the black estab- lishment (notably the National Urban League). They respond that to- day's black leaders, largely from middle-class backgrounds, have mis- gauged the real needs of the lower-class black majority.

PRESS & TELEVISION
Watching "The Media at Mid-Year: A Bad Year for
McLuhanites" Michael Robinson, in the Primaries Public Opinion (June-~uly 1980), Circula- tion Dept., c/o AEI, 1150 17th St. N.W., Washington, D.C. 20036.
If you relied solely on CBS-TV for news of the 198...

Robinson. Anderson came in third with 28 percent. Carter, however, received 13 more personality knocks than plaudits, and Rea- gan 3 more. Senator Edward M. Kennedy's personality plaudits bal- anced out the gibes, as was the case with GOP contenders John Con- nally, Philip Crane, and Robert Dole, and Democrat Jerry Brown. Re- publican Senator Howard Baker came out slightly behind. Only Ander- son consistently came out ahead.
Robinson speculates that liberal, articulate reporters instinctively warmed...

the story-$6 to $8 per news column in New York, where rates were high- est, $16 for exclusives, and 50 cents an hour when assigned stories fell through. Reporters were rarely reimbursed for their expenses.
Since cost-conscious editors cut stories to the bone, and since column inches meant money, a reporter always handed in reams of copy. Moreover, he quickly learned that "the plain 'fire' is worth a dollar and the 'conflagration' will make him a possible ten," as one editor ob- served...

IODICALS

PRESS& TELEVISION
organizations; 35 percent were opinion columns or editorials. The re- mainder were illustrations and feature pieces. Yet only 6 percent of all stories reviewed the history of affirmative action. A mere 4 percent described the workings and results of special admissions programs. And only 5 percent portrayed the background of plaintiff Allan Bakke. All the papers except the World editorialized strongly against Bakke's position, but news headlines were generally neutral. F...

excluding them from the priest- hood), requiring celibacy of all priests [except for married Anglican clergymen who join the Catholic Church], and his ban on contraception run counter to the contention that each individual is unique, says Cox. And, he adds, the pope seemingly contradicted his own human rights stance refusing to allow dissident Swiss theologian Hans Kung "to select his own counsel and have full access to his dossier" if and when Kung answers the Vatican's summons to defend...

persecution.
A compelling speaker and writer, Herzl electrified the Jewish masses and helped transform Zionism from a longing into a political move- ment. Further, his organizing skills resulted in a parliament, a chief executive, and a state bank, all "in exile." But his post-1898 willingness to consider alternative sites for a Jewish colony (such as Uganda) en- raged "cultural Zionists" who insisted that history made Palestine the only acceptable choice. The dispute split...

preaching that the Church derives its power from the laity. The pontiff stepped in and excommunicated McGlynn in July 1887.
1891, George's reform movement had lost steam, and McGlynn was out of the news. Pope Leo restored McGlynn to the priesthood in 1892 -without consulting Corrigan. Dumfounded, the archbishop at first refused to receive McGlynn back into the diocese but subsequently decided to curry favor with the pope. He became a fervent defender of papal infallibility, then being questioned...

the count- less meteors and meteorites that regularly bombard the earth.
The authors estimate that the meteor was roughly 6.2 miles in diam- eter and created roughly 1,000 times more atmospheric dust than the Indonesian volcano Krakatoa, which spewed about 11 cubic miles of material into the air in 1883. Krakatoa caused brilliant sunsets worldwide for two years; the meteor may have turned day into night for several years.
The fossil record supports theories of a killing global dust cover. Microscopic...

age 23. Though anemia rarely causes death, it cuts the blood's oxygen carrying capacity, increasing the chances of fatality from pneumonia, bronchitis, and heart problems. It also heightens the impact of even moderate blood loss during childbirth, which the au- thors rate as the leading cause of anemia-related death among early medieval women.
Iron intake for men and women increased the 10th century throughout Europe. Development of the three-field crop rotation sys- tem, an advance over the earlier...

shock waves from supernovae, exploded stars that emit vast amounts of energy.
Last year, using telescopes aboard an orbiting satellite, scientists discovered one such field- the largest known object in the galaxy -measuring 1,000 light years across in the constellation Cygnus. This "superbubble," located near the center of the Milky Way (Earth is on the outer edge), and others like it, may be prime engines of star forma- tion, report Cash and Charles, astronomers at the University of...

16 percent the amount of oil burned to make electricity, even as nuclear output fell 8 percent.
The authors contend that nuclear power is also pricing itself out of the energy market. From 1971 to 1978, capital costs per kilowatt rose more than twice as fast for nuclear as for coal plants. Nuclear- generated electricity is already 50 percent more expensive than coal- generated electricity. Managing waste, decommissioning plants, and cleaning up radioactive spills from uranium mining have added...

Boom,theshririldugfamily,the growth of
the SunbehÃ?â??at are likely to affect America's demand for energy

throughtheendofthecentury,reportsReynolds,formersenioreditor
--
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PERIODICALS
RESOURCES & ENVIRONMENT
of American Demographics.
From 1960 to 1970, per capita energy consumption in America jumped 2.9 percent annually. But during the 1970s, total energy de- mand grew only 10 percent-a mere 1 percent per capita annual gain. If this trend continues, th...

the BaBoom, will continue to account for 57 percent of the population.
Moreover, recent changes in conventional family structure will prob- ably boost per capita energy consumption. More working wives create higher household incomes; and in 1975, households with $30,000 to $35,000 incomes spent 52 percent more on energy for heating and transportation than those living on $10,000 to $15,000. The growing ranks of singles tend to inhabit condominiums and apartments-which use 38 percent less energy...

shower- ing the N.R.C. with objections to design details, or to a utility's en-vironmental impact estimates-and then persuading judges that the commission gave them short shrift. Between 1966 and 1970, the typical reactor-construction schedule increased in the United States from just under five years to just over seven years.
contrast, the political parties of France, West Germany, Sweden, and Britain stake out firm positions on atomic issues. Once in power, they claim a popular mandate on nuclear...

1945, 15 tons of guayule rubber could be processed daily. But after the war, breakthroughs in synthetic rubber production ended the need. The plants were burned off to make way for orange groves.
Guayule latex comes from the shrub's branches and roots. The plants contain up to 20 percent rubber. Guayule needs no irrigation or pes- ticides. Unlike hevea, the shrub can be mechanically cultivated and harvested.
The National Science Foundation and the U.S. Agriculture and Commerce Departments have...

a truth-seeking process; and the threat to society posed an official vendetta against an individual. Missing, however, is the gradual acceptance of guilt by Kafka's protagonists.
Kafka both resented and accepted authority. Biographers have traced his "self-corrosive guilt" to a threatening, domineering father. In Beiliss's undeserved plight, Band suggests, Kafka glimpsed a vehicle for expressing his own feelings.
"Andrew Wyeth: Popular Painting and Not Nostalgia Populism" by...

Sheldon Liebman, in Ameri-AS Critic can Literature (May 1980), Duke Univer- sity Press Bldg., East Campus, Duke Uni- versity, Durham, N.C. 27706.
Robert Frost (1874-1963) adamantly refused to publicize his theories about poetry. He nevertheless established himself as a major critic of verse in letters to friends and in interviews, writes Liebman, professor of English at the University of Illinois, Chicago Circle.
Frost believed that the creative process begins with a descent into "chaos."...

Sheldon Liebman, in Ameri-AS Critic can Literature (May 1980), Duke Univer- sity Press Bldg., East Campus, Duke Uni- versity, Durham, N.C. 27706.
Robert Frost (1874-1963) adamantly refused to publicize his theories about poetry. He nevertheless established himself as a major critic of verse in letters to friends and in interviews, writes Liebman, professor of English at the University of Illinois, Chicago Circle.
Frost believed that the creative process begins with a descent into "chaos."...

Stanley Reed, SYY~~'S in Foreign Policy (Summer 1980) P.O. Box
984, Farmingdale, N.Y. 1 1737.
Before Syria's President Hafez al-Assad seized power in November 1970, the nation had suffered through 20 military coups in 24 years. Since then, Syria's once stagnant economy has grown nearly 8 per-cent annually (though per capita national output is only $goo), in a decade of unprecedented political stability. But growing resentment against Assad at home and Syria's failures abroad may doom the re- gime,...

Donald Ro-
World Series den, in American Historical Review (Summer 1980), 400 A St. S.E., Washing- ton. D.C. 20003.
With an intimidating show of force, Commodore Matthew C. Perry opened Japan to trade with the West in 1853. The jolt he dealt to Japanese national pride did not wear off until the 1890s. Helping to ease the loss of face, writes Roden, a Rutgers historian, was Japan's military victory over China (in 1895), the development of a strong Western-style constitutional government, the growth...

the West in 1975 (at an East-West conference in Helsinki). Finland's independence, he reasons, is part of a comfortable status quo. A greater threat to Finland's future are "the bright lights of the open society in the West," notably Sweden, which has drawn 200,000 Finnish emig- rants since 1945.
A Woman's Place "Ideology, ~yth, and Reality: Sex Equal-ity in Israel" Selma Koss Brandow, in
in Israel Sex Roles: A Journal ofResearch (vol. 6,no. 3, 1980), Plenum Publishing Corp.,...

the West in 1975 (at an East-West conference in Helsinki). Finland's independence, he reasons, is part of a comfortable status quo. A greater threat to Finland's future are "the bright lights of the open society in the West," notably Sweden, which has drawn 200,000 Finnish emig- rants since 1945.
A Woman's Place "Ideology, ~yth, and Reality: Sex Equal-ity in Israel" Selma Koss Brandow, in
in Israel Sex Roles: A Journal ofResearch (vol. 6,no. 3, 1980), Plenum Publishing Corp.,...

Ronald Lawson, in Journal of Social His- tory (Summer 1980), ~arnk~ie- ello on
University, Pittsburgh, Pa. 15213.
In 1893, historian Frederick Jackson Turner told Americans to look to the newly closed frontier for the origins of their national character. More recently, many Australian scholars have viewed the rugged "bushworkers" who manned the vast farms and sheep ranches of the arid Outback during the 19th century as the source of their country's own indigenous ethos-egalitarian, collectivist,...

Book Reviews

NIM

by Herbert S. Terrace
Knopf, 1979
303 pp. $15

by R. P. Blackmur
Harcourt, 1980
354 pp. $19.95

by Lynne Sharon Schwartz
Harper, 1980
200 pp. $9.95

by John Fowles and
Frank Horvat
Little, Brown, 1980
unpaged $24.95

by Jeffrey A. Gray
Viking, 1980
153 pp. $12.95

Essays

; histo- rian Walter McDougall looks at developments abroad; NASA historian Alex Roland weighs the practical "payoffs" of space exploration against the disappointments; and historian Bruce Mazlish ponders the disparity between our achievements in space and the tepid public response.

RIDING HIGH

John Noble Wilford
On July 20, 1969, two American astronauts planted human bootprints on the gray regolith of the moon. It was one of the most impressive achievements in the history of Man, an...

On July 20, 1969, two American astronauts planted human bootprints on the gray regolith of the moon. It was one of the most impressive achievements in the history of Man, and it was recognized as such at the time. Yet, almost immediately, Con- gress and the White House took an ax to the budget of the Na- tional Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). There was no public outcry. While NASA, during the 1970s, sponsored a series of unmanned missions to Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Sat...

John Noble Wilford

A thumbnail definition of a great power between the two world wars might have been: "A nation that builds its own air- planes." The updated version would be: "A nation that launches its own spacecraft." While the United States and the Soviet Union are still the Big Two, and remain the only nations capable of orbiting satellites at will, the diffusion of space technology has already begun.
Leaving aside the United States and the Soviet Union, five nations (France, Britain,...

Walter A. McDougall

The dreamers who first launched man into space were not much concerned about what he would do when he got there. When the question was put, many of them simply referred to Columbus's discovery of the New World, as if the analogy were exact and the implications self-evident. Others dusted off the apocryphal story about Ben Franklin at the first balloon flight in Paris in 1783. "But what good is it?," someone asked the American minister. "What good is a newborn baby?," Franklin rep...

Alex Roland

by Bruce Madish
During the late 1950s, man ventured into space; by the late 1960s, he had walked on the moon. A proud Wernher von Braun, NASA's claimant to the mantle of Daedalus, compared the achievement to that moment in evolution "when aquatic life came crawling onto land."
Now we seem to be crawling back. The moon landing, for all the impact it had during that sultry July night in 1969, has scattered into small effects upon us. Our expectations fulfilled, we now seem to have l...

Bruce Mazlish

science fic- tion. Konstantin Tsiolkovsky (1857- 1935), for example, credited Jules Verne with planting the "first seeds" of the idea of interplanetary flight.
During the 1890s, Tsiolkovsky built the first wind tunnel to test aerodynamic designs. 1903 -the year the Wright brothers first flew their plane at Kitty Hawk -Tsiol-kovsky was tackling the theoretical problems of rocket engines (heat transfer, navigation mechanisms, and fuel-supply maintenance). His research feats are described...

:
MANKIND'S BETTER
MOMENTS
In her prize-winning A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous Four- teenth Century (1978), historian Barbara Tuchman focused on a "violent, bewildered, suffering, and disintegrating age." She went on to see a few parallels with our own troubled times. But we should not be blinded by our present predicaments; every age has its ups and downs, as she explains in this essay adapted from the National Endowment for the Humanities' Jefferson Lecture, which she delivered...

Barbara W. Tuchrnan

Gim Nebiolo, Priuh & Verlucca, publishers.
"Everybody reads the works of Mao" is the title of this 1967 poster. Times change. The once ubiquitous portraits of Mao Zedong (Mao Tse-tung) have been removed from most of China's public places -including the Great Hall of the People, or parliament building, in Beijing (Peking).
The Wilson Quarterly/Autumn 1980
lo6
Mao Zedong died in 1976 after leading the Chinese Communists to victory and ruling the People's Republic for 27 years. His...

As every Chinese schoolboy knows, Mao Zedong (Mao Tse- tung) was born into a poor peasant family and grew up amid the hunger and degradation of daily existence in late imperial China. Though he never went to a university, he became head- master of an elementary school in provincial Changsha in 1920, and a major political force in his native Hunan province. From there, he went on to become the supreme ruler of a quarter of mankind for a quarter of a century, an unprecedented feat in human history.
Mao...

Dick Wilson

To assess the Maoist experiment, however, one must look not to official retrospection but to the condition of China's people.

Nicholas Eberstadt

ahaWi.Mmm

REAPPRAISING
THE CULTURALREVOLUTION

by Harry Hayding
The changes in Chinese politics in the four years since the death of Mao Zedong (Mao Tse-tung) have been breathtaking. But none has been more significant than China's repudiation of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, the tumultuous movement that dominated Chinese life for a decade, and that Mao's associates once described as their country's greatest con- tribution to Marxist theory.
The Cultural Revolution, as one Am...

Harry Harding

live in Hong Kong; between 1972 and 1976, Frolic ques- tioned 250 of them. To protect his subjects, Frolic kept their exact identities confidential. Here we present selections from six of his interviews.

The Backdoor
An intellectual from the southeastern coastal city of Fuzhou discusses the paradox ofprivilege in the People's Republic:
Chairman Mao tells us, "To know the taste of a pear, you must eat the pear." He means that you cannot understand life from the outside, by just sitting...

Michael Frolic

nine centuries of "chastened, sober, often grim and drab maturity."
The causes of that languid decline are set forth Mark Elvin, an Ox- ford economic historian, in The Pat- tern of the Chinese Past (Stanford, 1973). Like the United States at the end of the 19th century, China began to "fill up" with people. But rather than look to foreign outlets for its ex- panded economy as the Americans did, the xenophobic Chinese turned inward, reducing their overseas trade and contacts.
Ironically,...

race or family in- come.)
In elementary schools, 40 percent of one-parent children, but only 24 per- cent of two-parent children, were clas- sified as low achievers (having "D" or "F" averages). Only 17 percent of single-parent grade schoolers and 2 1 percent of secondary students earned "A" or "B" averages. But 30 percent of two-parent students in elementary school and 33 percent enrolled in junior high and high school qualified as "high achievers."
One-parent...

.

"I never had but two powerful ambi- having earned his livelihood (as he tions in my life," Samuel Clemens would later recall in Roughing It) as wrote, in the autumn of 1865. "One grocery clerk, blacksmith's appren- was to be a pilot, & the other a tice, drugstore clerk, bookseller's preacher of the gospel. I accom-clerk ("the customers bothered me so plished the one & failed in the other, much I could not read with any com- because I could not supply myself fort," h...

Robert H. Hirst