The shorter month has passed. People earn more in February and spend less. Their morale is given a boost just when they need it most, when the winter has dragged on too long.
We have just decided to take some strong step about our domestic finances, sell our big house and buy a smaller, invite Mom and Dad to take an apartment with us, etc. The house and grounds are too much work for Jill and me. The girls are busy at the "higher" pursuits and are not expected to trail a duster around the house. My repair work cannot keep up with the innocent destruction of appliances, tools, lights, windows and shrubs.
On Sunday afternoon, a delegation of the Republican Party of Princeton visited me, three councilmen and two party leaders, both women. They invited me to be their candidate for Mayor of Princeton. Mr. Rose, our house painter, had mentioned something about the matter previously, so I was not taken wholly by surprise. I did ask them why they had settled upon me. They said that I was a professor but not of Princeton; a householder with property in the borough, and had had political experience. I said I was not know; my politicking had all been done elsewhere, while as the incumbent, Raymond Male, was a superior type of hand-shaking going-to-meeting politicians. They said, "no matter", besides you are better known than you think you are, what with your large and ramifying family. I joked then about Vicky and Cathy, both of whom had stood for elections at the High School last month, on opposite parties, Vicky obtaining the highest vote of the losing slate. We parried a few local issues back and forth -- off-street parking, consolidation of the township government with the borough, renewal of dilapidated areas, and so forth. I said I knew nothing of the borough government but handled the questions in a way that apparently pleased them. Why not? I am an old hand at coping with conflict over tricky questions, sensing the turns and twists, the limits of specificity, the fact I don't know and those I do. I said I could probably not run but wondered how much time the mayor's job took to do. They said, far less than Male takes to do it. He procrastinates, hears every last person on every subject, pushes nothing through. I was slightly encouraged by their willingness to let me hold down the time consumed in office and said finally that I was honored by their invitation and, if I could not finally accept it, the reason lay in the press of obligations, both personal and political, that had been assumed elsewhere. I said I would give them my answer in two days. Yesterday I called Jill from NYC. She volunteered to tell them "no" for she had changed from a fair enthusiasm to a grim negativism and I said 'go ahead". The girls opposed my running for office too. They don't like to be put out into the unpredictable winds of public dispute. My major feelings? Too time-consuming on trifling matters; also a definite switch from New York to New Jersey politics, for I should then have to look to NJ for high state office. The federal picture would remain the same. Mainly the lack of large issues and my general reluctance to move out into politics, since I had just resolved to pass the next couple of years on intellectual projects and in some degree of physical freedom.
Sunday night at 1 AM I finished the task of correcting several batches of poetry and preparing them for mailing. I sent the sets of 28 poems called 'Passage of a Year' to Karl Shapiro in Nebraska, the Yale U. Press, the U. of Indiana Press, and the Wesleyan University Press, asking that they be considered for publication.
On Monday I learned that Bill Gore of the U. of Kansas at Lawrence was in NYC and hoped to see me. So after lunch Jessie, excused from school, and I took the train to NYC to see him and attend a cocktail party at the Polish UN embassy in honor of Adam Schaff, freshly arrived with his wife from Poland. I had met Gore, who is from the West, once before in Los Angeles. He proves to be a strong admirer of the American Behav. Scientist, and before our hour together was up, we had concocted several projects. He will send me an article on the concept of decisions for possible publication in the ABS. We will look over an annotated bibliography on public policy that his group[ has prepared with an eye towards a special supplement. We will contact Prof. Roger Barker of the Psych. Dept. of K. U. for an article on his theory of "settings"; Gore says he has observed and made measures of the public interactions of a small Kansas town that take place in setting s such as drugstores, barber shops, etc. Gore is trying something like this in connection with a study of neighborhood renewal in Kansas City. Perhaps then a special issue on the subject of settings, networks, loci of interaction and social transactions. Then Gore asked me to sit in with a group that will be forming to coordinate research on urban redevelopment and I acceded. Finally we discussed the possibility of his coming to NYU in the School of Public Administration and I gave him a few words of advice, such as that it can be an excellent place if one has tenure but miserable without, because of the large supply of local talent always available at very low wages. I also urged him to be sure that he had office-space in advance for himself and any project that he would bring. Because he might have to fight bitterly for it if he arrived without commitment.
All this conversation took place at Archie's bohemian lunchroom at a little round table. Jess and I then headed for the Polish party, pausing on 14th Street to purchase a pair of shoes and stockings more suited to the afternoon in Manhattan than the scuffed and worn moccasins she was wearing. We stopped at the apartment too. She was much pleased with it and helped herself to cookies while I changed my shirt. Then uptown in a cab to 67th St. where to my surprise I found Paul lazarsfeld, gay and tipsy as well as Schaff and Lewandowski, the ambassador. Schaff was to leave town the next day and I invited him and his wife who speaks no English but German to Princeton on their return. He is confident of the success of our plan to set up a center for field studies in Vienna for cooperative research by Eastern and Western European countries, something we had planned and initiated together at the UNESCO general conference in Paris last year in November. Lazarsfeld was happy to hear of it and will work with the project. He is President elect of the Amer. Sociological association. I exclaimed, "You mean you haven't been President of that outfit yet?" and he gave one of his gay, cunning replies. "You know, it takes an immigrant a little longer."
Jess and I ate a hasty dinner at a Chinese restaurant and I placed her aboard the Princeton bus at the Terminal. I shopped at a big store for groceries and returned to 16th Street. Stephanie stopped by after her classes and I fed her a sandwich and coffee. We walked uptown in the novel balmy night to 45th Street where she took a cab home, letting me off on the way to return to 16th St. by subway. I read the morning papers, noting that my two stocks were rising and that there seemed to be the usual plenty of happenings to fill the paper. By definition: before the newspaper there was no news, now there is regularly a nice allotment of news to fill the agreed upon size of the paper.
I raised a row yesterday morning about the jacket to my new book on Welfare. it has several errors and was not approved by Ted or me.
Two contradictory directives in anthropology - sociology - economic development - comparative government:
1. "All mistakes are due to not realizing cultural (social, governmental) relativity"
2. "All people are (can be viewed as, should be studied as) basically alike in behavior and responses."
Conversation yesterday morning with Sig. Mendoza and Anzola from Venezuela at the Carlyle Hotel and then with the latter at lunch at the Henry XIV? (Why can't I remember this large expensive ordinary French restaurant at Rockefeller Center?). It is settled that I go to V. a week from Thursday, with Delos, who is coming from Paris, to stimulate a program of social reform in competition with the communists. I will be back the following week and then wait and see.
Anzola told me of the building of homes for the poor and how unconcerned were the poor with the projects. They live in shacks of board and tin and have a great many children. They work only in dire necessity, or under the whip (the same thing). They do not wish to move into a better life. yet by every visible standard they are among the most miserable people on earth. Now here is a true leisured class. Would Sebastian accept this vast body of the dispossessed and unwashed into his Symposium? Yet he must to be consistent with his theories that leisure is freedom from necessity to labor. For they hardly labor as much as a Roman patrician or Greek philosopher.
"By Peace or By War"
Peacefaring and Warfaring should be viewed as means to the goals of America. Then we can avoid the extreme fluctuations of morale, plans, and program that have beset the history of our world policies. Peace and War in turn are part of a large means, the continuation and development of a world order in which the ideals expressed by our culture and its life may find their way.
By a million accidents and disparate actions we are today supreme. But the massive determinants of world relations, seen in population figures and land areas, are shifting beneath us and make our ascendency the matter of a moment of historical time -- unless we, by reason and plan, seize control of the future.
The single greatest fact of the future is the relations between China and the Soviet Union. It should now be firmly established as the foreign policy of the United States for the next century and forever indeed that there should never prevail a world situation in which these two grand nations are effectively bound together in action, whether by their alliances, or by the dominion of one or the other.
How to Disarm
Total Disarm needed
Complete inspection for nuclear weapons
Rule - 1 per 1000 pop w/ limit of 200,000 under arms
Set up academies to retrain all professional officers and soldiers around the world into a Peace Corps.
Cathy and I passed two days at Palermo last summer and were driven by a friend to a place an hour away to the East, where below on the sparkling blue sea sat a fishing village of the post-medieval type and above a Greek and a Phoenician town, in ruins carved out from the hillside. Few people know of these beautiful spots. I thought of Williamsburg, Virginia, that John D. Rockefeller Jr. had caused to be reconstructed. We, both adults and children, enjoyed our visit there. The mind moves faster and yet more comfortably when surrounded with the images of its subjects. How good it would be to reconstruct and preserve these several forms in their historic molds and together with their beautiful settings, build a reservation of tranquillity, beauty, and contemplation, with bathing, dining and sleeping beneath Mediterranean skies, the auxiliary pleasures of life at their apogee.
We should form a Society for the Proposal of Constructive Solutions as a means of holding back and reducing the flood of violence in fiction on TV, radio, the films, and the comic strips. The number of murders, beatings, and "justified homicides" on TV is appallingly high -- many dozens in a single evening. One result is that the minds of young and old alike are turned to violence as the way out of practically every situation of conflict and dilemma. Apart from the actual change in their attitudes regarding human dignity, including the corruption of some minds and sols ?/ the audience are pointed irresistibly towards the violence as the solution to all problems and away from other more constructive and benign solutions. Undoubtedly the source of this plague of violence lies with the conscious and unconscious perturbation of soul of those who write, photograph, and direct the productions of the mass media. But also the desperate competition in the media is to blame. Why seek to imagine constructive solutions when they are so much more complex than violent ones? Laziness, heavy pressures, lack of imagination, greed, haste -- these are some of the weightiest reasons why the mass media flood the minds of our people with brutality and physical coercion. yet at the same time, in fact, violence plays an ever smaller role in most human relations everywhere, it hangs like a sword of Damocles over our heads in the terrible problem of disarmament, and more than anything else we need to know and practice ingenuity in avoiding and promoting non-violent solutions of conflicts.
The usual difficulties with the term "democracy" in my seminar on comparative government at Rutgers last evening. It is so laden with fog and emotion that you can't lead a discussion through it without marking the path every 60 seconds. All nations and peoples want to cloak themselves in democracy. As a result millions of useless, untrue or imprecise statements are made. No one knows where he is coming from or going. People pursue false ideals, hopeless aims, chimaeras, mirages.
What can be done -- and strangely has not been done -- is to describe a couple, a half-dozen, a dozen model governments -- none (or perhaps yes, why not including) the communists -- that are conceivable and practical -- that will work and work well under the shaping conditions of the world -- so that countries and peoples can aim at something other than the model of the U.S. or British politico-social system. e. g.
something for countries like Pakistan and Turkey
something for the Arab countries
A model for the Caribbean L-A countries
A model for S-A below the equator
A model for SE Asia
A model for sub-Sahara Africa
A model for Central Europe and Israel
A model for the USSR and Eastern Europe
The trial of Eichmann is being held in Israel. He is accursed of superintending the killing of multitudes of Jews during World War II. I do not condone his being kidnaped from Argentina. I feel that, once located, he should have been killed there. Now his trial is being publicized widely. Television cameras will record every detail. Adenauer of Germany is asking the world not to judge Germans by \men such as Eichmann. He is right.
Sixteen years have passed since the dreadful camps were opened by us. Millions of pages of testimony and documentary evidence have been made available. Numerous books have been written. Yet to my knowledge no group, neither those who say all Germans are guilty nor those who say a handful of men committed the crimes nor anyone in the middle, has endeavored to estimate precisely how many Germans took a direct part in the mass executions and how many were in direct support of them. The task is not impossible. Techniques might be devised to record transfers of German personnel from one camp to another; projections of the movements and histories of a known small number of Nazis might be made to the larger number. World opinion, and the pure scholars who try to base political institutions upon a known human nature, both need this statistic. My guess, which is poorly informed, is that about 20,000 Germans participated actively in the genocide program.
March 1961
(Copied from a scrap of paper. June 1961. The trip was a cold rainy one. The boys didn't mind. They were good and their morale was high. After the night settled in gloomy thoughts came to me as they slept. Of years in military campaigns, of goings and comings.)
Camping with my small boys.
Now a score of years later
a full moon shines
on a hut of my boys and memories
of camping here and soldiering then
scamper and rustle like
mice beneath the boards
All the pains of those days
and separation and anxiety
break through the healed skin
of time
A dim candle, a slab of wood,
and a muttering fire.
Stripped to essentials is life --
with nothing to fear -
yet everything awful and helpless
in night and foreign
Many small burdens hurting old scars
Nothing to do but let
them open and bleed for
the young and their troubles lives
to come.
(Spring 1961)
National Referendum (Constitutional Amendment?) on USA position re Communism and directing the US and all State and local governments to exert themselves to all possible resources and means to combat Communism and Socialism at home and abroad.
(Spring 1961)
Suppose we build a universal system on this hypothesis: All man does is an extension of himself. All man's method is the same. All logic is a sub-same, all math must be sub-same. All other tools of research must be sub-same. Ergo, A single system of knowing enquiry logic methodology technique.
I., e. instead of building methodology separate from logic, we should organize logic around means man has of projecting himself onto the world, and then all methodology will be organized as it merges with its related logical principle, Not as something distinct and taught in different courses or not at all.
Imagine logico-methodological extensions of personality, as undimensional factors and then as sets of interacting factors. Then any logical-methodological statement or device will be seen as a synthetic composition whose parts can be disentangled.
(Spring 1961)
A Utopia
First Part
Show people lounging about, enjoying only the fruitful pleasures of life -- the contemplation, the healthful activity, affection -- not the burdens and excessive pains, nor boredom.
Second
Show the physical apparatus of life and society behind all of this happy living. This is the machine society, the scientific society, etc.
Third
Show the logic and philosophy behind the machines. The social science directing it.
Fourth
Show the leadership structures: how goals and wishes are geared to facts through talent and produce fulfillment. Education, communications, elections (flexible choice systems), human relations science, sampling, etc.
(Spring 1961 ?)
Chapter 11, the night is spent without a logic. Is it Thursday or Friday? Neither. Something between. The phone range at 2. When I roused myself and lifted the receiver, the other party hung up. I lay back in bed, puzzled. Only 3 possibilities, I thought. Home, C, or a wrong number. In a few minutes the doorbell rang and it was C. I was still dazed, but she seemed well, so I kissed her long. "Have you been home?" (She had, I know, been to the theater). "Yes" she said. "What are you doing here?" "I went to bed and I thought of you here and me there, and I got up and left." "Did you call me from home" "No. I couldn't". "But what did X say, when you left?" "Nothing" A kiss, on to bed. "I can't stay. Is your phone listed?" "Yes" "Then I must go right now or we must go to a hotel." "Right now? - no" "Yes" "No" "A hotel is so NY. Who is to call?" "X will call". "What did you tell him?" "Nothing. He said where are you going? To your mother's? I said no. To Al? I said no. I just left." I made a wry face. "You have not concealed things as well as you thought ." "That isn't it. The night I called on you and was so furious because you were with R-, when Bill was staying with you. I told him I had been to see you. You shouldn't have." I was a mistake -- I can't stay." I got up. She was baffling. What was she up to. Had she been seized by great yearning? Did her husband offend her? He came home just before her. Perhaps they argued). Was she afraid that I was sleeping with another woman? Was she now remorseful about running out? "Are you still happy you came?" "Yes, I am happy now." "Good,"and I kissed her. "let me do gown with you." I began putting on my clothes. I dressed completely. She took a dollar and change from my desk. "for my cab. I have nothing else." "Take more" "No this is enough". She started down the stairs and was out on the wet street before I caught up with her. "Don't you want to walk to Park Avenue. It's a good night?" "No". "Are you coming tomorrow, I've arranged to stay here until 2?" "No that's why I came tonight because I knew that I wouldn't see you tomorrow." "But we have hours. I arranged specially to stay longer?" :No, it's not enough. I knew it wouldn't be" "We have hours!" "You know if X gets in so late, he won't be leaving until late." Baffling again. No use trying to be logical. A cab pulled up. "Are you happy you came?" "Yes. I really am." I rather believer her. She blew me a kiss as the cab pulled away and I came back in from the mild night. I drew off my clothes and went to bed. It'll be a while before I can sleep. Maybe I should have reproached her for having stayed out with her party so late. No wonder she cannot get up tomorrow! Maybe I should not have let her escape my embrace.
Alfred de Grazia
306 Nassau Street
Princeton. New Jersey
REACHING THE JUNGLE AT RANCHO GRANDE
Moldy green chaos,
glim of hot tired eye
driving a dusty road,
paused now sees
hard sharp vines
stringing straight up
tall trees
like rigging ropes
to the masts
of derelict ships
that let out verdant sails
tattered and yawning
in the gloom
needing to be mended
by nimble-fingered
monkeys unmindful
who stare unseen
from the shrouds
though parrots squawk havoc.
