"Malady Battles English School -- Collapse of 100 girls led to a 2-week shutdown" NYT October 31, 1965. Read into the story and we find after several paragraphs of the superficial events, that Princess Margaret visited the town and the school girls were lined up rigidly for 3 hours to greet her; "an unusually warm and humid October day". Then the symptoms -- rapid heart action, rapid and deep sighs, chattering teeth, abdominal discomfort and stiffening of the muscles. For days, groups of children suffered the symptoms in turn. The authorities closed the schools and tested air, paint, food, drains, etc. Finally the obvious diagnosis of collective hysteria. The medical team reporting so gravely might well have advised authorities not to stimulate the conditions predisposing to hysteria by working up the young to the charisma of royalty. Then they wouldn't receive such ugly surprises.
Federal Government contract research in universities expanded from $.415 billion in 1956 to $1.8 billion in 1965, personnel engaged in such research from 30,000 to 77,000. The takeover proceeds apace.
On October 31, the NYT recapitulated a report, headed by Jim Perkins of the New York Committee on Educational Leadership that contains a great many details of the myth of "administrative" "non-political" "technical expert" educational leadership.. integrate --- simplify -- depoliticize --- these are the concepts applied and there is no realization of the problems that come from erasing freedom, diversity, creativity, public involvement and true politics. Blind, ideological technocratic educationalism
"Shoplifters raid Yale's bookstore -- 27 caught in 2 weeks -- Problem called national" goes the Times headline of today. If 27 Yale students steal books and are caught in a 3-week period, twice that many at least are not caught. if this is typical of the nation's best colleges (It is of Princeton, I know) then what is up is obviously not dishonesty, whatever that means. it is part of the general despair and disgust of students all over the land in what they are getting out of college life.
Quite apart from this question I gripe at the offices of admissions, wit their fantastic schemes for admitting the super-class of students who then drop-out, fail-out and steal-out of their silly snobby colleges in large numbers. How costly all this must be and yet they believe they are selecting "scientifically" the Yale type, the Harvard type, the Vassar type, and the Podunk-type.
The political scientists such as Charles Merriam and the educators such as Dewey, both of whom saw the same political processes throughout all groups of society, with power in the family, in the school, in the factory and in the state having the same anatomy and dynamics -- they were part of the American society where a Gompers could seek a union movement that was separate from party politics -- that is "non-political" -- While in Europe, all the associations -- church, labor, family, schools aligned themselves partisanly in the "class struggle" -- i. e. the political struggle and therefore or coincidentally European political and social scientists pursued their narrow definitions of the "political" and when they did not (the geniuses did not) the social structure insisted upon the fiction of politics being of and in the State.
The respectable savants that got rend at the Annual meeting today were at pains to repeat largely what is contained in a couple chapters of my supposedly elementary textbook on political science that I wrote in 1949-50. No one reads, no one listens, all we moved by subterranean in pulses that guide the sciences as they guide the mass mind, the tides, the wishes and acts of fancy-free children. People do not take their commitments seriously.
Some important problems of Political Science
1)Inventions in Representative Government
2)Cracking and restructuring of the primary social units (family, neighborhood, etc.)
3)Role and control of mass communication
4)Social collapse (in 'underdeveloped' countries -- their absurd naive venturing to emulate development; the American cities, rotting away...)
5)The judicial and jurisprudential process (the disasters of judicial logic, the separate nature of authority and truth and the need for a newly defined relation; sanctions what they are and do to people)
6)Total impact studies (e. g., the impact of bureaucracy on a society has to become a fashionable topic.
My birthday -- In Philadelphia at the Academy of P & SS conference on Political Science
I let the word slip and several people become a little more human. I never think of my birthday.
1.All activity is content or subject: all procedures are content and all content can be translated into procedures.
2.Men have motives for being selective about this subject matter.
3.Men of the same general motive can still choose different formulations.
4.These formulations compete on a pragmatic basis. This is the proper role of schools of political science. It is useless to speak of content-less process. If you don't describe the content, attitudes, motives, activity -- you don't describe the process.
People will not act unless triggered by subject-matter category. For example, lawyers will not go into subject except in the legal framework. Political scientists will usually eject themselves from a sex-subject.
Lewis Merriam long ago challenged White's elimination of the what-is-being-administered from the how-to-administer. Both were right; like most scientific controversies, neither thought to define the motive of their formulation.
1965 - this page(I found these in Licodia ca. 1965 as the only remnant of his ever having been there)
Books of my Father's early years:
Before he went to America:"All Aboard for Asia and Africa" (1893)
His early English reading:Frank Merriwell's Athletes
Analytical Speller by Edward Warren (1867)
La Rive et Fleury, Grammaire Française
Wilbur F. Gordy, A History of the U. S.
"Buzzacott's Complete American and Canadian
Sportsman's Encyclopedia of Valuable Instruction
(1906, on Camping)
The four boys are off to school in the dense fog. It has been the warmest New Year in a century. NYC subway and bus drivers are on strike.
The 10 days of holiday have been on the dull side. But who knows what has happened beneath us. Our foundations may have slipped while yawning and bickering. Jill had Carl weigh and measure himself the other day because he slept so long, and he was an inch taller and pounds heavier than a month earlier.
Livio and Dorothy Stecchini dropped in unexpectedly in the afternoon. He gave us his impressions of Italy after being away for a decade. He visited there furiously for two weeks, all in the North, in Lombardy and Venetia. I could not make out whether he spoke more accurately of the people or country than before. Yet I could see that he was more confident of his statements. Travel is vital to knowledge, but most people cannot learn beyond a first impact of the new scene. After that only systematic scientific study or a basic pre-fixed genius or capacity for molding observations to ideas can help one to make true new statements or reinforce old ones.
L. delivered several perceptive anecdotes, and dwelt upon the need of so many Italians to get special treatment -- a man in a sandwich shop asking for more meat, etc. I am always skeptical about "illuminating" incidents. Here, for instance, was the man not extra-hungry, extra-poor, or perhaps [divides] the impression, true or false, that he was getting less than his share? And has one not seen this same incident repeated the length and breadth of America. Nevertheless, I see the point: "A man is nothing lest an exception is declared on his behalf." One might guess that this describes Italians more than British or French or Americans, but one might not say so too. For he is bound to be wrong in a great many cases, no matter whether he applies his words to us or them or another group. Better to rework the statement into more precise form and speculate, or much better, seek new evidence, that indeed there is conventional way of signaling social respect, which is by being given more-than-average deference in one and more of ten thousand ways, that this manner of eliciting respect is present in degree and kind among Italians (North, South, Islanders, young, old, etc.??) to a greater extent than among other national groups or sub-groups, and that larger consequences are entailed, such as a greater consequences are entailed, such as a greater difficulty of tax collections, a weaker sense of equality before the law, and so on. Out of the typical settings must of course be abstracted factors of the type I mentioned above, the absolute incidence of physical need, and the degree of denial of deference or equality of treatment in the sampling of cases.
Principle: the limits of tolerance in a society should equal if not exceed the limits of tolerance in the world as a whole.
January 7, 1966 en route to Princeton from Washington, D. C.
Anachronism of the Legal System
It is questionable finally whether the whole system of law and legal procedures as we know and practice them should be retained. Radical transformation is wanted, something far beyond the competence of courts, lawyers, law schools, and legislators.
I challenge the notion of:
a case: Why should there be a case. Who is anyone to bring a charge against anyone else.
Parties: Who are the Defendants and Plaintiffs in a case, what presumption to think they are involved and not everybody else.
Judge: How is anyone qualified to judge anybody else?
Sanctions: What is to be gained?
Begin again.
Don't make the mistake of thinking that the socialists or communists invented new ideas of law. They put the state right back into the judges robes in the name of the working class.
All that we have learned about behavior, ethics, and systems of control in the last 150 years has not been put into a jurisprudence. We must begin at the bottom again.
January 7-8, 1966 Friday-Saturday
Friday up at 6, out of the house at 7 kissing Jill goodbye just as the boys were stirring. A fast drive in the calm pink dawn to the Trenton station and then to Washington. I phoned the Office of Education upon arrival, to learn of the latest bumbling and delays on my project proposals that had been submitted at their instigation months ago.
The paralysis of this lively and rapidly growing agency is terrible to see. No one will believe it when told. Everyone there is exceedingly busy, forever conferring, phoning, reorganizing, hiring new people, transferring themselves and their belongings, and nothing that will benefit education in America gets done. I am sure that a great many people there are, as individuals, educated and intelligent as well as industrious, but the social forces playing upon the situation of the civil service ruin their capacities.
Instead of frustrating myself by a personal visit to them, I called Kirkpatrick and groused with him for an hour at the APSA offices. Then lunch with Altemus Kilic, Turkish Information Counselor, and meetings at ABI until 6, dinner with Voss and Johnson of AEI, Janda of NU, at Harvey's, followed by cognac and soda with Voss alone at a fairly new French restaurant, then a cab to Eddie's house and an hour of talk with Ed & Ellen before going to bed.
This morning, I awoke after six hours of sleep, read in Eudora Welty's The Ponder Heart, and Genet's plays. Played with the children, talked more, was driven to the Kilic apartment for lunch, where Asuman Kilic welcomed me most warmly, showed me her new paintings and presented me with an exquisite rice and chicken pie. Altemus drove me to the station just in time for the 3 PM Congressional train. I picked up the VW convertible at the lot by the station and by 6:20 I was home. Jill had left dinner for us and gone to NYC, but before we sat down to eat, she had returned. We walked, watched a parody of espionage on television, did a few chores around the house and so to bed to read, on this now very cold and blustery winter night.
When I was settled down to lunch with Altemur Kilic' yesterday, at the Genghis Khan restaurant, he asked me if I noted the changes in him. Actually I had, but not of the kind he had expected me to report. He believed I would see a wrecked man, a beaten down and thinner man. Five years had passed. He had been Minister of Information of the Republic of Turkey and had been arrested with Prime Minister Menderes. For seven months he lived in fear of execution. Then he was tried and acquitted. He should have been, of course, for he was seeking to liberalize the press policies of Menderes. After release, the evil tongues were still active and he was unemployable. He sold his house to pay his bills, finally obtained some small jobs, then was given his present work of information counselor and lives with his wife and daughter in a neat apartment of a great new building in Rockville, Maryland.
Before arrest, he had fallen in love with another woman, and separated from and divorced Asuman. The woman had tended him faithfully during his prison days (I have heard from third parties) but upon release he had taken up with Asuman again, and they remarried.
I found them therefore in statu quo ante, for I had left them packing to return to Turkey in glory one day several years ago, and now they are here, somewhat the worse for wear but happy. Asuman has been painting well through the years. She has lived in Italy and Germany meanwhile and, when her pictures are exhibited, always manages to sell some of them. She is moving from abstractionism into a suggestive abstract impressionism that I like. She is still beautiful and eager.
So I felt that I had to compliment Altemur on his appearance. He looks less fat and avid. His eyes are still a little evasive, but it is more clearly adult suffering rather than childish hostility that lurks in their light blueness. His jaw is harder, his speech more pensive, his judgment better and he has a basic composure he once lacked. "You have improved in appearance," I said, but couldn't say much more. He was surprised and pleased.
We can expand the GNP at an eminently satisfactory rate and end up in 30 years with the standard of living of a caveman.
The GNP = essentially payments regardless of whether what is being paid for in the end.
If what is being paid for is an activity or thing whose justification is a remedy or cost of doing something else, the net "true gain" in standard of life is a difference not the whole, but the GNP calculation does not take account of this fact: it calls everything a gain..
E. g. cost of cleaning polluted water, cost of roads to accommodate people who have fled the cities, cost of noise abatement, cost of obtaining privacy.
The model caveman: What is his GNP: caveman zook need space, Medicare, housing, clothing, light, education, food,
"luxuries."
GNP is an amoral measure that scientoid economists, publicists and politicians use to evade stating their principles of a good society. They accept whatever is as good. This is a grave error.
Indirectly, they are also in error, for apart from whether what is good, there is the question whether accepting the GNP itself creates a new set of moral principles which are evil. That is, the GNP concept is not only amoral, and therefore bad and misleading and useless, it is positively bad because it directs public and personal policies along self-defeating lines .....
U. S. A. GNPQ per cap % of annual change (average) (= GNP a 1948 was 1.8. With 12 years, we get 12 x 1.8 96 x 12 = 12.6% of total (this of course can be obtained directly, better). If it were to continue for a generation of 36 years, we would get 21.6 x 3 = 64.8 and if for 2 generations of 36 years then 129.6. Very roughly, since 1948 + 72 years = 2020, there would be 100% increase in GNP between 1960 and 2020, or between 1948 and 2008, etc. Or 100% : 1.8 = 55 years approximately. Or we are moving on a 50% generational increase. It should be possible to compare a "real" standard of living per capita of 1948 with 1984 by contrast with the GNPQ to see whether the approximately 50% increase is a "true" welfare measure. If we can get a "true" 5% absolute and total increase, we shall, I believe, be doing well. I should not be surprised if a "true" loss of considerable importance is registered.
Cf. with other countries. Perhaps in India the situation is even worse, as the crowds of Calcutta with their pecuniary pittance of pay add to the GNP but once were "better off" in the rural countryside.
Let's go back to reconsider the theory of wealth as weal-th. Here as in most respects the socialists and communists are atavists. They believed in the society they were destroying. They still measure in the oldest material terms. They have not contributed a new economics of well-being.
Perhaps no one dares to use philosophical, classical, ethical theories of weal to set up their measures. If the elite, such measures will discredit them. If the plebs, the measures will dismay them. Existing ideologies will break down. Societies would mill around.
Perhaps there is some "middle" point of development (what a question beggar that term development is) better evolution (also a beggar) perhaps better 'time-passage' 'temporage') when there is a sturdy positive relation between conventional growth measures and well-being. But better yet, shouldn't a new indicator be conceived?
If it were thoroughly subjective (e. g. is subject satisfied with his status and rate of progress?) it could be most conservative but also most radical in its implications. If it were devised by an elitist theorist of the good, it would conflict with the existing GNP concepts to the extent that it partakes of a new ideology. If a measure were based upon a consciousness of the function of such measures and upon even a moderate reshaping of conventional humanitarian visions, it would be immensely superior to the present measures. After all, much of the viciousness of present measures is due to unawareness. if time on way to work, for instance, were deducted as a personal or social cost from GNP, who would complain. If climate were allowed for, who should complain. If self-help and familial non-pecuniary mutual support were calculated, who would object? Insofar as the scales fell from the eyes, no one. But insofar as their position depends upon remaining blind, a great many persons.
Repeatedly I note how competent the social sciences are to get things done when there is agreement as to their desirability. Hence the extreme importance of presenting 1, 2 or X sets of utopias so that the full apparatus of social science can be brought to bear on a set of objectives, either in theory or in practice.
Cast up the major areas of life and set forth the principles of conduct therein in order to achieve a utopia:
1)Child development
2)Family
3)Neighborhood
etc.
X)World order.
There should be recognized a category of extremely confidential business and trust the test of which is: "If a man divulges information or a trust of the Q category to me, I will not violate the trust even if he should become my worst enemy.
Perhaps the USA should choose China, India, and Brazil as "wards". Let other wealthy countries choose different poor lands. Then the US (and the other rich lands) should conclude long-range agreements to support a plan for supplying subsistence levels security. With this kind of arrangement, effort would be focused and the dependent country can make a secure plan instead of moving in half-a-dozen directions at once. E. g. if India would decide to keep people in the villages and build a flourishing rural type of country, it could depend upon reasonable long-range guarantees (50 years?) of the U. S. to provide industrial and technical goods that India would otherwise seek in vain and at the cost of destruction of the rural economy.
Meetings and a banquet of the Center for the International Study of Values of the University of Pennsylvania, Philip and Betty Jacobs hosts. Thirty or so men in attendance, a couple of women, a quarter each from India, Poland, Yugoslavia and America. Out of a vast trove of items, they are trying to assess nine different general value dimensions among the leaders of their countries. A great tour de force but they are all learning something by it.
Sebastian asked me a week ago to attest that Anna Maria had refused to come live with him in America and therefore in effect had deserted him, this being the basis for a divorce suit by agreement of A.-M. and himself. I was not surprised, yet was disappointed for I regard A-M so highly, impossible though she (and Sebastian to some degree) may be. I said that I should have to receive some message from A-M making a similar request of me. I would not be party to their action without her wishing it. So I await some notice from her.
Mr. Frank Keppel -- Another letter never sent. What's the use? Let Frank be happy in his "achievements"
Dear Frank,
I would not wish the history of your administration of the Office of Education to be written without a footnote on my experience with it. The fact that it stands as a perfect failure does not impel me to change the exceedingly high opinion I hold of your abilities, or of the men associated with you in the Office. The great competence of yourself, of Dr. Ianni, Dr. Naisbitt, Dr. Freeman, Miss MacNeill, Dr. Burchmall, and the half-dozen other executives with whom I have had some contact during the past year and more rather serves to highlight the most depressing fact of the age: good men are overmastered by the bad setting of educational bureaucracy in government. They cannot help themselves and they cannot help others. it is worse than that: they consume outside resources in the process of being themselves consumed.
Let the attached letters from --------- on the American Image project be exhibit A. This project brought me into touch with the Office of Education. The words of the letter, I believe, sum up the value of the project as well as lending a valedictum. The hundred or so hours and the few hundreds of dollars on my side (and which I cannot afford) are almost nothing compared to the loss of the idea of the project; I can think of no other activity that would lend more lift and morale to the schools and to the social sciences than this kind of project.
At the time we discussed this project, the Office of Education representatives suggested additional types of research in which they were interested and which they thought my talents and resources were appropriate. I therefore took pains to draw up three new proposals in areas where, it was said, help was urgently needed. Another hundred hours and hundreds of dollars went to these tasks. Several visits to the Washington Office proved tedious and frustrating. These too failed utterly of acceptance: personnel switched, plans changed, and minds changed. Mostly, it appeared, no one knew what the Office wanted except that a vigorous spirit of movement suffused the personnel.
etc.
Finished Genet's The Screens tonight after falling asleep over it on several occasions. If it is a masterpiece, I do not recognize it. I get from it a certain wicked inspiration which, being a prudent man, I need. I admire its major device, the sets of screens that lend great flexibility out of nothing. Its stripping of everything down to its base and baseness, cultivating then that residue of baseness into "flowers of evil" impresses me but then again it does not stifle my yawns. A critic, Walter Kerr, wrote in the newspaper this very morning that the theatre suffers from an audience that is no longer impressed by the most extreme measures (He was speaking of "The Murder of Marat"). The theatre of the absurd has to fail because, like the solipsist who has to argue with someone that nobody but he exists, it pleads that everything is absurd but itself -- an exception unworthy of it.
Today I completed a poem, "Island seen from the Sea", irritably disputed our way of life with Jill, visited with Velikovsky for two hours, tramped the fields and the ice of Lake Carnegie with the dog, read newspapers for an hour, ate and drank fairly heavily, and tired myself from reflections upon my self-dissatisfaction. Just turned 46, I stand still before several paths, feeling strong and able, but with presentiments of doom because I cannot determine in my mind which to take and which to put aside forever. Shall I write this book or that book? Shall I renounce the active life of affairs for the intellectual life? Shall I make more money at the cost of time or shall I demand the radical curtailment of spending? These and other dilemmas confront me. I think that whatever one decides, he can be sure it will be wrong. I suppose that I need some shining sword to appear in the sky, as to the heroes of olden times, with my name emblazoned upon it, pointing towards a distant goal, so that then I would be transported, stop eating or boozing or holding a skirt, struck off those other activities of the pure or the practical -- whatever would not be ordained by the blazing sword -- and get on happily and fiercely with the mission until I tumble into the grave undaunted. But, oh, then what if it were a mirage?
A New College
Size
I.Division of Creativity, Poetry and HypothesisSmall
II.Division of Pure SciencesMedium
III.Division of ApplicationsLarge
Rules.
1.Not over 10% of all income would be spent for anything but teachers' salaries, information retrieval, books, science equipment, and research costs, i. e. 90% for education.
2.Student is admitted by faculty members' licet, graduated by committee of faculty.
3.four-year A & S degree, core curriculum consists of lectures by distinguished outsiders, integrated by instructors of small groups.
4.Students take care of themselves, housing, food, etc. Students are placed in Division III Applications from the beginning. 1 Day on Campus
5.Division III takes in contracts as well as own projects.
Needs:
Grant of $3 million over 6 years. There should be agreement with an existing institution to take over and honor as its own the credits given by the college, should it be decided to discontinue the experiment.
Dinner last night in the hotel rooms of Mrs. Beatty, "The mental wizard", as the Indians call her. Her dusted cheerful Muslim, Jalal, and Romesh Shah were present. She worked marvelously for us with her few utensils. We talked of her father's perpetual calendar, which she trusts me alone to have and which she hopes to publish in America. It is a neat device but I don't believe the Americans are so eternally oriented to want to check 10,000 years of Mondays. (I discovered I was born on Monday. I'm sure my mother would know). We spoke of Mrs. Nehru Gandhi, new premier of India and I expressed my view that it was a triumph of Indian culture to elect a woman to the highest office. I left them too late, out of politeness to pick up the key Sebastian had left for me at the Faculty Club (my own apartment being lent for 4 months while I am to be mostly away to Prof. Kemal Karpat). So I stayed the night with Dante Matelli, Cathy being in Philadelphia.
Returning to the play I wrote eight years ago, "The Politician's Daughter", I think now to make the "gobboons" much more in evidence throughout for their symbolic absurdity. Let the final scene have loud jazz of 8 bars at intervals during which the characters gesticulate unheard. Then when music stop, they are heard as if their conversation had been uninterrupted. In the triumphant exposure scene let del Vecchio climb upon an upturned "gobboon" to direct the action. perhaps the play should be called "the Gobboons". Work in more significant turnout, the squelching of weal issues in favor of the gobboons and the other irrelevancies -- the "affair", personal varieties - (who goes where to meet whom), etc.
January 23, 1966 Sunday 2 PM Princeton
A blizzard has commanded the day. All are subdued and prisoners, of good humor. Carlo played the piano last night until after 12. He was at it again today for 2 hours. He has become an unusually good pianist of 13, and at this rate will become a great one of 20. We are happy with the first big snow of winter. The water levels are far down in the Northeast. Will we have a true climatic change, with different vegetation?
The ponderous Times took up its part of the day. I read it standing, one way to go through it fast. Its writers are spoiled by too much space and take three times as many words as they need to write either news or comment.
A drama critic, Kaufman, asks why the relations between sexes are handled so poorly (read "abnormally") by the playwrights and takes the hypothesis that they cannot write well about marriage because they are homosexuals. Puerile. He recommends that they shy from the subject and be permitted to write homosexually about love of man for man. I am sure that they would do no better, if they are in fact not doing well. "Look at the audience," I say to Jill. "Largely women.. A 'true' man has trouble talking to it. He is 'crude', 'over-forceful', 'Neanderthal'. The women drive the men out of play writing, out of ballet, out of interior design, out of music, opera (though the Italian garrison holds the fort valiantly), and poetry. Shakespearean male audiences and actors felt no fear. Into the hole in maleness carved by the spending and demanding women come the homosexuals. They have much to say, I feel personally, and reproach those like Kaufman who are prissy even in seeing the homosexual problem, about families, women and men. Their style, wit, perceptiveness are mostly to the good. It is not my personal quarrel -- I argue against the way the issue is put by those who take issue) the society creates its favorite authors. The moms, the Aunt Saras, the frill-lovers, the ball-busting Vassarians and Radclifferians -- they are clearing the stage for the snide family-breaking, fierce passionate lover denigrating man-girl writers. So be it. Recognize the causes. Mind the results.
January 27, 1966 Thursday 12 Midnight Washington
The desk clerk at the Mayflower gave me a magnificent suite. Perhaps he thought that this tired old doctor, who had phoned from the Newark Airport, would be in no condition nor would he have time to have a ball. I had intended to spend the night in NYC and then come into Washington in the early morning, but felt that my planless evening might as well be given over to travel. Then I hesitated and was in trepidation as it snowed. I miscalculated train times and finally ended up on a practically empty Eastern airlines flight. Sometimes I am afraid of flying, at other times not at all. Tonight I was. I was glad to see the clear sky after the snow flurries of the ground, and I read most of a book on Lying by a psychiatrist. He reported the whole range of comment on lies but ended up with nothing at all to say except that everybody lies in one way or another and that we shouldn't feel badly about it unless we are malicious.
Trials of an author. The failures are more frequent than the successes, as in every field perhaps. Perry Knowlton, my agent, quoted a reader from Little Brown as saying my novel "was clever, perhaps too clever for its own good." Also it seemed "alternated" ("alienated"?).
I haven't heard from Felix Morrow as to when he will finally get out our book on the Velikovsky Case.
Max Lerner writes of my book on Congress and the Executive Force in his column of the NY Post yesterday, and while praising my intelligence exhibits a regrettable misunderstanding of what I am up to. I am not out to get Johnson. I say so very clearly and sharply that the President can hardly help building up the bureaucracy which then exalts him and represses the country. Lerner takes pains to say that he agrees with that jackass James MacGregor Burns because he is a liberal and wants good Presidents, and to distinguish me as a leading Conservative. In my book I am equally precise in ferreting out the "liberals" as the true Conservatives and I recommended a radical set of reforms. No use.
I managed this past week to pay off a dozen business obligations and to fill out and return six different tax forms including the heavyweights -- the Federal Corporate Income Tax and the Personal Income Tax. We shall exult as the majority grows depressed in early April. How badly we need a calculation of the social costs of the tax system -- the individual income tax work done by 60,000,000 taxpayers must alone cost $5 billions in man-hours. Double that cost for the rest of the army engaged in the process. The withholding system is quite mad, 80 is the series of special taxes to which businessmen are subjected. Like our traffic system, our tax system snarls us up in costs extending beyond the value of the process.
It is eleven days from our time of departure for Europe and the boys are finally showing signs of interest and activity of their own generation. We will be away for two months and drive a great circle around the Mediterranean.
Ezra Pound's Anthology of Poetry (Confucius to Cummings) is by far the best anthology that I know. His genial touch is felt on every page.
Productive Political Scientists of the University of Chicago School (during Merriam's tenure), based on writing and teaching but in no case on teaching alone:
D. White Lewis Dexter
Marshall DimmockGabriel Almond
Avery LeisersonNathan Leites
Kenneth G. ThompsonRenzo Sereno
Walter LanesAl Lepansky
Quincy WrightAl. de Grazia
Sebastian de GraziaAl Somit
V. O. KeyHarold Gosnell
David TrumanH. D. Lasswell
C. E. Merriam, himselfFred Schuman
Alex GeorgeIthiel Pool
Herbert Simon
January 28, 1966En route Princeton by train
Eddie breakfasted with me at my suite in the Mayflower. From 10 to 3:30 I conferred with Baroody, Voss, and Johnson of AEI. We decided on the terms of my work with them over the next year -- $6,000 in fees, $6,000 for expenses. When Jill and I finished our bookkeeping summary for 1965, she could see clearly for the first time what I had been telling her for three years -- we spent twenty-five thousand dollars a year -- whether we earn it or use up capital or capital gains. So we decided that we must have $25,000 for 1966. NYU will not provide, I am fairly certain, over $17,000, though I have just asked them for $23,000. We now have $6,000 more. Jill will work with Ted Gurr on a study of violence in South Africa and earn another $1,200. I expect $1,000 in royalties. That should do it. I am in hopes of earning another $6,000 from a research program that the Rehn Foundation would like me to set up. This would permit, barring accidents, the accumulation of a little capital. We are stripped down to a small equity of $12,000 in our home, otherwise, because of the last eight years of draining of energy and money in the ABS and URS. There remains an equity of perhaps $10,000 in the URS, a promise to pay $5,000 on the ABS two and three years from now, and some unrealized potential in unpublished manuscripts and published books.
I should prefer not to spend so much money in a year. Only 1 out of 25 American families does. But Jill feels dug into Princeton and the house. She hates to budge. With reason. Where does one go from Princeton? Where do the dollars go? $55,500 for food, $4,000 for the house and its upkeep, $2,500 for doctors and dentists, $2,000 for taxes, $800 for my mother, $1,000 for recreation, $800 for car, $1,000 for clothing and laundry, $1,000 for professional expenses, balance furnishings, gifts, misc. ($1,600). There remains the paradox that is difficult to explain to the children. We are well-to-do. Yet we are pressed for money. We cannot cut the spending significantly. Yet we are not materialistic. I am afraid that so long as we manage a household for a family, we shall have to set our caps for that income. When we become alone once more in a few years, should we survive, I shall be able to give no further thought to earning money.
Mostly, we talked at AEI about plans for new studies of Congress. To the computerizing of congressional work, were added the study of a Tribunate for playing the devil's advocate each year for each agency, the study of an preparation of exemplary Legislation, and the study for the Creation of a Sub-Legislative Corps -- all ideas generated in my studies of the last three years. We shall proceed with these and others as far as we can.
Baroody and I talked then alone freely. He dwelt upon the difficulties of collecting research funds under the conservative flag, and asked me how to go about the study of the problems of racial integration. I am not sure how much we may inherently differ in our feelings for racial equality. I am strong, very strong, for equality. We agree that the race question in America is damaging the total social fabric by the thoughtless and hackneyed ways it is argued and solved. I said that we needed a second study of the nature of The American Dilemma of Gunnar Myrdal, so that all factors might be appropriately considered. A full view from every angle is wanted. Both Negroes and Whites must be seen in depth, not in caricature. Baroody went on to speak of the Brookings Institution's success in obtaining $14 million from the Ford Foundation with its pedestrian record. I added that foundations give to safe, reliable, and likable groups -- respectable, in a word. We agreed, I was pleased to note, that one day tax-exempt institutions might lose their special status except for churches and colleges. He said he would like to work through a University. I suggested at first that he should look about for a small college. But then I abruptly questioned why a great University with its dozens of self-serving empires, eternal marginal liquidity, and indifferent boards might not be just as easy a target for anyone with a few hundred thousand dollars of free funds over a five-year period. A few Bolsheviki turned over the whole vast sprawling disconnected Russian Empire. The great American universities are like this. The public universities are, of course, another matter, since they are owned by the government, and appear forever destined to the condition of the Russian Empire.
Shortly before five, I met Carl Stover whose little National Institute for Public Affairs has a tastefully decorated suite at 1000 Connecticut Avenue, and we walked to the Statler-Hilton's Men's Bar for drinks. He is a man of great gifts. I regret he is lending them too long to smallish causes, now the improvement of upper level career servants by educational fellowships and conferences. I told him that he was perfecting an instrument, the executive, just as he described it to me, but the executive had no perfected counterpart. There were others like him -- brilliantly concentrating upon educated managers, but no one to my knowledge was building an equally modern, fully rationalized political process. Representative government cannot exist with only this one well-developed side to it. Who will the bureaucrats deal with? A rotten, incompetent and feeble political system? They will not stomach it. They will support a supreme executive who will master the masses of people. I urged Stover (who is now so successful as to be somewhat immune to conversion) to go over to the other side and develop it. He has a great talent and sympathy going back to his many early years of politicking in California, with the political process.
A Handbook for the Young is needed; Essays on what the family is, what government is, what sports are for, what reading is for. How much fun it would be to write these essays and they would be useful, I know, as a parent of seven. Take just the matter of the family -- all the different types and the many -- 1/4? -- that are interrupted by divorce and separation. Why must the children have the simple-minded Sunday-school ideas of the perfect foursome as their only ingress to this [immense] and critical personal experience.
