in the way. Also, there was still King George III with whom to reckon. By and large it was a wise founding father who went along with providing the right to bears arms in 1790.

But the right to bear arms in the last part of the 20th century in urban America is a good example of a cultural survival-an atavism, the dead hand of the past imposing itself on contemporary society. It is why every year we kill people by the thousands with guns. People killed annually with guns in a comparable population of 200 million in Europe or in Asia can be counted in the tens, not thousands.

Let me present another reasonably concrete example of cultural lag. As recently as 1960, there were 39 states in this Union in which the urban population constituted a majority of the people. But there was not a single state in the Union in which the urban population controlled the state legislatures. In my judgment, there was never an example of civil disobedience as injurious to the American people as the civil disobedience of the state legislatures which deliberately defied federal and state constitutional mandates on reapportionment. This rural minority so callously ignored urban problems that they forced the urban population to turn to the federal government for the resolution of their problems.

It is rather naive to say that the federal government usurped states' rights. What has happened is that the state legislatures have committed suicide by not joining the 20th century.

The proposed "New Federalism" may well be an important step backwards. If the present Administration follows through on its proposals, it simply will be turning over funds to state governments which for the first 69 years in this century have demonstrated their complete and utter disregard for urban problems. The federal government will be turning funds over to state governments which, by any standards, are more inept, more subject to special interest pressures, more incompetent to do a job and more corrupt than any other branch of government in the United States. The proposed "New Federalism" is one reason the urban crisis will worsen, not diminish, during the years ahead.

Let us consider next some our our sacred tenets-symptoms of our agrarian origin and ideology. The nation and its leaders will probably continue to cling to these outmoded slogans which will continue to prevent this nation from facing up to its problems-shibboleths such as:

That government is best which governs least;

Each man in pursuing his own interest as if guided by an invisible hand will be acting in the interest of the collectivity; Caveat emptor-let the buyer beware;

Taxes are something that government takes away from people and should be kept to a minimum ;

We must adhere to our traditions of rugged individualism and free enterprise-we must not become a welfare state.

Consider the first two of these tenets. They made considerable sense in 1790 when 95 per cent of the American people lived on farms or in small towns. What was there for government to do? And if a man met the economic needs of his family living on a farm he was doing virtually all that was necessary in the interest of the American economy. But to say that government is best which governs least or to repeat Adam Smith's dictum in this last third of the 20th century are good examples of cultural lag. Can you imagine a United States today without a Social Security System, without a Pure Food and Drug Administration, without a Civil Aeronautics Authority, without a Public Health Service, and so on?

Consider next the tenet "caveat emptor"-let the buyer beware. Conservatives are still insisting that this principle should prevail in contemporary American life. What they are saying in effect is that the American housewife is entitled to the right to bear one, two or three thalidomide babies before she discovers that this is an undesirable product and then punishes its producer by refusing to purchase it. Or, it means that the American housewife should learn how to use a slide rule and take it to the supermarket every day so she can discover that the economy-sized package costs more per ounce of product than the small-sized package.

In the light of the nature of goods and services available to the consumer in 1790, this tenet was perhaps not an unreasonable one. But with the complex character of contemporary goods and services, "Let the buyer beware," is another example of cultural lag that is injurious to the consumer. This tenet is a dead shibboleth from the past, consistent with the rugged individualism appropriate

in the frontier American society of 1790, but a social atavism in contemporary life.

Let us consider next the tenet that taxes are something the government takes away and should be kept to a minimum. Are taxes something government takes away from people? To answer this question there is a prior question to consider. The prior and more essential question in this complex world we have created today is, "What are the basic services which government must provide to assure that the United States remains a viable society?". Then the next question should be, "How does the government raise the revenues to provide these services?”. We are proceeding on the tenet that taxes should be kept to a minimum. That is why we are afflicted with such problems as air pollution, water pollution, air and surface traffic congestion, slum housing, poverty and inadequate education, and sadly neglected minorities. Moreover, by reason of the fact that we seem to have concluded that the implementation of the Kerner Commission report is too expensive we are faced with the indefinite duration of the black revolution. The implementation of that report might cost some $32 billion per year. But if we do not expend these monies for adequate education, housing, employment and income flow for American blacks-we may be spending that much for the cost of crime and delinquency; for the cost of rebuilding destroyed cities; for the cost of unemployment and welfare; for the cost of inadequate education. And we would have nothing to show for the expenditure in the next generation. We are spending billions of dollars anyway and recycling the same problems that afflict our contemporary urban areas into the next generation.

It is ironic that now that the Kerner Commission Report is gathering dust the National Commission on Violence has issued its report which calls for essentially the same types of expenditures and is likely to suffer the same fate.

If to maintain low taxes we refuse to enable government to provide the services necessary to continue this nation as a viable society we shall certainly have paid the supreme price for adherence to a dead tenet of the past.

There are many other examples of cultural lag in the United States. It is evident even in our language. By reason of our adherence to such frontier society slogans as "rugged individualism," we regard the term "welfare society" as a pejorative term. But because of the transformation of our society from an agrarian to an urban society we are in fact a welfare society--a partial and, to be sure, inadequate one. It is ironic that President Nixon in outlining his proposal for a revision of the welfare system went to some trouble to insist that his plan would not take the U.S. down the path to a welfare society.

The same addiction to the frontier society's "rugged individualism" and "free enterprise" slogans has made the U.S. the only economically advanced nation in the world to depend on the market for the distribution of medical services. This nation is second to none in the quality of its bio-medical science but is among the more primitive nations in the world in the distribution of medical services.

It may be that we will go down the drain of history still mouthing the shibboleths "rugged individualism," "low taxes," and "free enterprise." This may well happen if we continue to refuse to increase the public sector of the gross national product to provide those services that only the government can provide to assure that the United States remains a viable society.

To resolve the urban crisis we must close the gap between the 20th century technological and demographic world we have created and the 19th and prior century ideologies and institutions we have inherited. The first step in this direction is to recognize the need for a policy to have an urban policy.

A second step is to recognize that in a number of respects the Federal Constitution is outmoded. We in the State of Illinois realize that the state constitution is outmoded and it is now being subjected to revision.

There is major need for an Urban Bill of Rights to supplement the present Bill of Rights drawn in an agrarian setting. The founding fathers did not, nor could they have been expected to, anticipate the population explosion, implosion and displosion and the great technical changes which the United States has experienced since its founding.

What is presented below is a proposed Urban Bill of Rights to be added to the Constitution to pave the way for the closing of the gap between our technological and social worlds:

Every person in the United States is to have the right to:

1. Opportunity, freedom and security to enable him to achieve optimal development;

2. A physical, social and political setting for effective socialization, including formal education, to enable him to acquire the basic skills, the sale

able skills and the civic skills to assume the obligations and responsibilities as well as the rights of citizenship;

3. Opportunity for maximum length of life in good health;

4. An environment controlled in the interest of society, physical and social, free from pollution and adverse population densities and including adequate housing;

5. Opportunity for employment commensurate with his education and skill assuring him an adequate and uninterrupted income flow, preferably for services performed;

6. Knowledge and means of limiting family size in a context consistent with family, community, national and world welfare;

7. Equality and impartiality in the administration of justice in a manner to protect the interests of society even while safeguarding the interests of the person;

8. A system of governance, federal, state and local, consistent with the realities of the metropolitan order and based on democratic principles including representative government and majority rule;

9. Full access to the fruits of economic growth and the benefits of science, technology and the arts;

10. Opportunity to live in a peaceful world in which all conflicts of interest are resolved by adjudicative means, not physical force including conflicts on the international as well as the domestic front. This means among other things the renouncement of war as an instrument of national policy— even at the expense of subordinating national sovereignty to international organizations and forms of government.

Space does not permit a discussion of all the implications of these proposed new urban rights. But it is to be noted that the proposed rights include such fundamental things, necessary in the urban interdependent and highly vulnerable society, as opportunity and security including assured employment and assured income flow. The rights also include access to adequate education, to an unpolluted environment including adequate housing, to opportunity for all for health and longevity, and for equality in the administration of justice. Especially significant is the provision to make the interest of society paramount over those of the individual—a provision that would in effect modify present provisions in the Constitution which place the rights of the person above those of society. The present Constitutional provisions, as interpreted by the U.S. Supreme Court, actually prevent urban areas in the nation from dealing effectively with organized erime with which cities have been afflicted for over half a century. Finally, and perhaps most important, the new bill of rights includes the right to be free from the use of physical force in the resolution of conflicts of interest-on the domestic as well as the international front. This on the domestic front would, among other things, outlaw the use of force in the settlement of labor-management strife— would outlaw both the strike and the lockout and require adjudicative means of settlement. The use of brute force to settle labor-management conflict is another survival from the past which is generally injurious to the entire nation.

Also worthy of special attention is the provision for government based on representative government and majority rule, neither of which the American people have yet achieved. Suppression of the right to vote, gerrymandering and malapportionment have characterized the Congress and the state legislatures. Moreover, the combination of the one party system in the South combined with the seniority rule in the Congress has kept the dead hand of the past on the throttle of national legislative machine. For by this combination the most underdeveloped part of the nation in many dimensions, the South, has had a disproportionate influence on national legislation and has prevented the nation from dealing with many of its 20th century problems.

Finally, to deal with contemporary problems, both the conservative and liberal approaches must be abandoned in favor of a social engineering approach. The conservative turns to the past for an answer to 20th century problems. The liberal too often manifests emotion, zeal and determination to deal with 20th century problems. Both approaches are hopelessly outmoded. What is needed is the social engineering approach-the application of knowledge based on research to the resolution of problems. Social engineering is needed to deal with social problems in the same sense that physical engineering is utilized to solve physical problems and bio-medical engineering (medicine and surgery) to meet bio-medical problems. Our society has come to recognize the role of the physical and biomedical engineer but has yet to recognize and accept the social engineer.

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It is well to remember that it took roughly the century from 1750 to 1850 for the physical sciences to achieve the respectability and acceptance to enable physical engineers to apply physical science knowledge to physical problems. It required approximately the century from 1850 to 1950 for the bio-medical sciences similarly to acquire sufficient respectability and acceptance to enable bio-medical engineers the physician and surgeon-to apply knowledge to the solution of problems of health and life. It may take the century from 1950 to 2050 for the social sciences to gain comparable respectability and acceptance so that the social engineer is permitted to apply knowledge to the solution of social problems.

But it is a moot question as to whether we shall remain a viable society to 2050. It may well be that the chaos with which we are beset will engulf us and drag us down into the drain of history as a nation which achieved the miraculous in technology but could not adapt itself to the new world man created rapidly enough to survive. The United States, as Rome before it, may well collapse and bring down with her most if not all of human society. We have the means to destroy ourselves and perhaps all of mankind; and it is naive to assume that the employment of these means is beyond the realm of possibility.

I close, however, on a positive note. I am convinced that we also have the means to deal with our problems in an effective manner to create a world 20th century in its social, economic and political as well as in its technological aspects. The means to this lies in man's potential for rational behavior-in man's ability through science to acquire knowledge and in his ability through engineering to apply knowledge for the solution of his problems.

[From the New York Times, Dec. 7, 1969]

CITIES LOOK IN VAIN FOR A LIFELINE

The nation's big cities, staggering under a mountainous burden of unmet problems, found themselves increasingly isolated last week in their search for a lifeline of Federal or state financial help. The already bulky shelf of official reports testifying to the gravity of the urban crisis got two impressive additions during the week, but the combination of rampaging inflation and Congressional enthusiasm for tax cuts made it plain that no golden pipeline from Washington would pour money into the metropolitan centers next year.

The Advisory Commission on Intergovernmental Relations, set up by Congress 10 years ago to try to bring some balance into the responsibility, for essential public services, warned that the cities were being pushed into bankruptcy by the failure of Federal and state governments to pick up the full tab for welfare and education or to do anything like enough to modernize urban mass transit.

And the National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence echoed the two-year old warning of the Commission on Civil Disorders that riots and other forms of violent protest would be the price of national failure to insure social justice through peaceful political process. Underlying both reports was one blunt message: The cities are in desperate need of more money-money they cannot get from local tax sources.

That message was underscored by a letter Mayor Lindsay sent Governor Rockefeller estimating that New York City's budget gap for the fiscal year beginning July 1 might reach $1-billion unless it got bundles of cash from Washington and Albany. Even with the desired aid, the city could be merely holding the line on existing services-all made more expensive by higher wages and contract costs and doing little to attack its backlog of accumulated neglect in housing, pollution control and other fields.

But the men to whom such appeals were directed in the White House, Congress and State capitals throughout the country had priority problems of their own that seemed sure to get in the way of any lavish response.

To that limitation was added the special unpopularity the big cities have as political plague spots in the estimation of many in positions of authority.

Thus, a strong bipartisan bloc in the House brushed aside Administration calls for a straight two-year extension of the existing Federal antipoverty program and moved to shift control to the states.

What worried big-city mayors about the attempted coup was that the states would divert much of the poverty money before it ever got to the poor. That worry was heightened by charges, now under investigation by the United States Office of Education, that millions of Federal dollars for school aid simply became a substitute for funds previously spent by the states. A report by a gov

ernmental analyst to the White House Conference on Hunger charged that half the Federal money for school lunches to needy children had been similarly misapplied.

NOT POPULAR

But the cruelest blow of all for the metropolitan mayors last week was the discovery that they were not very popular even in their own house. The mayors of small cities and incorporated suburban communities banded together at the annual conference of the National League of Cities in San Diego to dump the choice of their metropolis-dominated executive committee for future president. The spurned candidate was the most glamorous of all the trumpeters of the urban crisis, John V. Lindsay of New York, fresh from his own electoral triumph here.

He lost in the league balloting to the youthful Republican Mayor of Indianapolis, Richard G. Lugar, as emphatic a supporter of President Nixon's domestic policies as Mr. Lindsay is a critic. What made the upset particularly galling to the Lindsay forces was that Mayor Lugar had defined the central issue in the contest as one of scrapping the gadfly role in favor of a cooperative relationship with the Nixon Administration, the statehouses and all other levels of government. The extent to which the rebuff to Mr. Lindsay was based on anti-New York feeling is likely to reinforce the elements in the Nixon circle endorsing the socalled "Southern strategy"-a strategy that is increasingly being widened to identify all sections outside the Northeast as favoring a more conservative trend in Federal policy. So far as Mayor Lindsay is concerned, no one at City Hall believes he is likely to change his style if for no other reason than the hopelessness of trying to keep New York intact without substantially increased Federal and state aid.

The hobgoblin that refuses to go away is the crushing size of the problems that hang over New York and every other large city. If more testimony is needed on that point, it has been supplied by the President's chief adviser on urban affairs, Daniel P. Moynihan. In an article in The Public Interest, he lists the poverty and social isolation of Negroes and other minorities in core cities as the single most serious urban problem and urges vastly expanded Federal aid to help combat it. In general, he believes that Washington should double the amount of help it gives the states and localities, bringing its contribution to roughly a third of their total revenue. But he hitches that proposal to an important caveat: The policy should be adopted after the end of the Vietnam war.

The gulf between immediate urban needs and the availability of more Federal cash may explain why, when the President met the nation's governors at a White House conference on narcotics last week, he sent them home with gifts of moondust rather than any pledges of large-scale financial assistance.

[From the Saturday Review, Feb. 24, 1968]

THE CRISIS OF THE CITIES: THE BATTLE WE CAN WIN

(By James M. Gavin and Arthur Hadley)

A FORMER ARMY COMMANDER, NOW A PROMINENT MANAGEMENT CONSULTANT, outLINES A BOLD STRATEGY BASED ON INVESTMENT OF VIETNAM WAR FUNDS ON OUR MOST URGENT DOMESTIC NEEDS

Lt. Gen. James M. Gavin, USA (Ret.), former senior U.S. Army planner and stategist and later U.S. Ambassador to France, is chairman of the board and chief executive of Arthur D. Little, Inc., management consultants in Cambridge, Massachusetts. This article is a preview of his book Crisis Now, written in collaboration with Arthur Hadley, to be published by Random House.

Domestically, America has begun a new revolution. I use the word “revolution" precisely and not just as a figure of speech. Unless we realize the size and nature of our problem, any answers we make will be too little and too late-and, indeed, quite irrelevant. Violence will increase, and the overall breakdown of our national life will follow as a scientific certainty.

The environment in which more than 80 per cent of Americans live is the great city complexes sprawled across the nation. We face this environment and attempt to deal with it bewildered, confused, whipsawed by the Scientific Rev