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Margaret Mead and Government by Wilton S. Dillon (Smithsonian Institution) (c) AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST Did Aristotle foreshadow Margaret Mead? In examining Mead's experience with statecraft and governance as public citizen, teacher, and anthropologist, the Aristotelean model provides a metaphorical point of departure. She enjoyed the jokes about her oracular qualities when she once spoke at Delphi but might have regarded as outrageous any hypothesis that she provided some continuity between 20th-century American thought and classical Greece. The Greek philosopher, educator; and scientist (384-322 B.C.) was much concerned with ethics and politics, which require knowledge enabling humans to act properly and live happily (Edel 1968). He believed that the most striking aspect of nature was change; his philosophy of nature included psychology and biology. Mead, too, was much preoccupied by the mind-body (Byers 1979) relationship and made her forays into public affairs with a keen awareness that human behavior must be understood in the context of the size of our brain and the intricacy of our nervous system. Her interest in change and ethical choice are well known (Bower and De Gasparis 1978; Mead 1961, 1969). Aristotle's writings included exoteric (popular) works aimed at a general audience outside Plato's academy, as well as technical treatises (esoteric) for students inside the Lyceum. While not easily forgiven by some of her fellow anthropologists for her powers of communication (Murphy 1978), Mead saw a symbiosis between her never-ending fieldwork and her sharing imperfect knowledge with all who might benefit. (As a Fogarty Fellow at the National Institutes of Health, in 1973, she brought 1930s field notes of Mundugumor households to make correlations between kinship and population, poring over material in the early mornings before whisking off to testify before congressional committees, to confer with the Council on Environmental Quality, and to find resources for the National Anthropological Film Center of the Smithsonian Institution.) The American Philosophical Society elected her to membership in April 1977, not long after she was finally admitted to the fold of the National Academy of Sciences. However, as a native Philadelphian with ancestral roots deep in Ohio when it was the Western Reserve, Mead came naturally to an embrace of standards of the academy as manifest in the "classical" period of this republic. Her childhood in Philadelphia exposed her to such inspirational aims as those that Benjamin Franklin gave to the nation's oldest learned society, which he founded "for Promoting Useful Knowledge." The current fragmentation of the roles of scholars and activists had not yet occurred in the Philadelphia of 1743. Early members of the American Philosophical Society were bearers of the 18th-century approach to knowledge, especially the kinds now called scientific and technological: canal building, astronomy, and getting oil out of sunflower seeds. The society also combined theory and practice, so Franz Boas and Edward Sapir's interest in American Indian [page 320] linguistics and Mead's work on childhood socialization are among its library's documentation. Mead was a master at combining the exoteric and the esoteric. Aristotle's method of inquiry focused on human rationality and yet stressed the continuity of humans and nature rather than a basic cleavage. He integrated the ethical and social, as contrasted with the dominant modern proposals of a value-free social science and an autonomous ethics. In working on a foundation for morals, politics, and social theory, he extrapolated from the older city-state, the polis, the organized small-city community. Mead's own analytical modes and personal style of leadership as a citizen were influenced by models of leadership from traditions far removed from ancient Greece or prerevolutionary Philadelphia-the Village of Peri in New Guinea, which she and Reo Fortune first visited in 1928. John Kilipak, known to readers of Coming of Age in New Guinea and New Lives for Old, brought together those two worlds in September 1979 when he opened an exhibition of photographs at the University of Pennsylvania Museum showing Mead at various stages of fieldwork in Peri, from periods between 1928 and 1977. In one 1928 photograph, he appeared as a I4-year-old hunter from "the Stone Age," and in real life today demonstrated what a space-age leader from a South Pacific polis can do outside of government structures to apply civic energy to making something happen; in this instance, the organization of the Margaret Mead Community Center in Peri Village, opened on January 1, 1980. Each taught the other a great deal about citizen's rights and responsibilities, the latter including techniques of reconciling divergent viewpoints to reach goals beneficial to the community at large. (Incidentally, Michael Maloney reports in personal conversation that, during his own recent fieldwork in Papua New Guinea, Manus islanders living now in Port Moresby attribute their own success in politics and higher learning to the influence of Mead upon their parents. The same citizens disagree with some of Mead's interpretations of contrasts between coastal and inland Manus people as found in her published writings, but they remain respectful of her contribution to making them modern men and women.) Kilipak and Mead's friendship and collaboration reflect the genuine reciprocity in a fieldwork situation (see Wax 1952) in which the observer and the observed traded ideas about leading and following. [1] Kilipak knew, moreover, that Mead was fascinated as an anthropologist in studying leadership in her own society and had paid years of attention, say, to the United Auto Workers (UAW) as a source of American leaders on national and international issues. Whether leaders come out of small villages or towns or solidarities such as a trade union, Mead was engaged incessantly in extrapolations from small organized communities to the world as polis. Her shifts from micro- to macroanalysis were essential tools in her teaching Americans how to understand themselves in light of human experience in other cultures. THE CASE OF THE CARTERS President and Mrs. Jimmy Carter can attest to Mead's taking seriously her duties as citizen. She acted upon Aristotle's notion that "appetites" are plastic. raw material for virtue or vice and that humans are capable of exercising collective judgment on the effects of policies and the adequacy of rulers. Normally approaching presidents of the United States through their wives, Mead caught the interest of both Carters when, at her 75th birthday, celebrated in 1976 with a ball and a symposium in Tarrytown, New York, Mead prepared a set of prescriptions on how best to start the new administration. Thirty or so houseguests of her host, Robert Schwartz, surveyed a number of issues ranging from plutonium to child care and unemployment. Recommendations reflected views of a whole spectrum of ages and professions, the younger generation being represented by correspondents from Children's [page 321] Express. She offered counsel on avoiding priorities in a linear fashion, admonishing the new farmer-engineer-president to remember that a systems approach was in order, that problems are interdependent. The nonpartisan group offered to try to liberate the president-elect from the unrealistic and dangerous expectations of great accomplishment during "the first 100 days," a legacy of the Franklin D. Roosevelt era. Given the inherited budget limitations from the Ford administration, and therefore lacking the flexibility to take initiatives, the new president, argued Mead, ought to make the best of a difficult situation by relying on symbolic forms of communication before being able to deal with "substance." She told him this by telephone. She also urged him to remain as accessible as possible, suggesting the development of town-hall type encounters with the citizenry. Mead was aware that others were providing similar counsel; she wished to reinforce what had already occurred to the new occupant of the White House as part of an effort to restore credibility to government in the wake of cynicism growing out of Vietnam and Watergate. Having lived in Georgia during a semester at Emory University, Mead had a firsthand sense of the regional culture that molded the president-elect and knew from other Georgians that Carter combined "born-again" humility with a robust self-confidence. Furthermore, believing strongly that presidents should serve all the people, not just those who cast favorable votes, Mead wanted to influence the citizenry to appeal to his "raw material for virtue" and help him through his handicap in conventional politics: his aversion to asking for help, thus incurring obligations. Carter wanted to be free of obligations and indebtedness, to act as a free agent, ignoring Mauss's observation that everything is stuff to be given away and repaid (Mauls 1954). Mead knew that holding public office is essentially an exchange relationship and that leadership consists of asking citizens to contribute their gifts to the public good (Dillon 1972). She wanted to set a good example for him and other citizens, giving the elected leader the benefit of citizens' counsel and expecting responses appropriate to an experiment in self-government. One intended gift to the new president was to steer the public away from the crippling expectation that he would commit miracles in the first 100 days. Another aim was to try to prevent the new administration from trying to do everything at once and, being unable to take the time to consult interested parties, thus run the risk of building up resistance to needed changes in mood and policy. Mead broke her own precedent in actually endorsing Carter as a presidential candidate during the campaign. Just before the election, she spoke in several Pennsylvania communities, including Kutztown, bringing up the presidential campaign as an illustration of social change. Mindful of history, she was impressed by the prospects of a Deep South candidate's becoming the president of all the people, particularly a candidate whom she knew to be devoted to civil rights. She was not disturbed, but rather attracted, by the candidate's varieties of religious experience. An Episcopalian, Mead had no fear of a Southern Baptist "theocracy," despite the Church of Nashville's record of intervening to influence public policy, not dissimilar from positions taken by the Church of Rome. (An exception lay in the politics of prohibition, reflecting the traditional Baptist aversion to beverage alcohol.) Mead's experience in Georgia and other parts of the South had convinced her, moreover, that some of the virtues of small-town civility and caring, associated with a strong system of kith and kin, deserved to be carried to the rest of the republic by an exemplary First Family. At the Democratic Party Nominating Convention on July 13, 1976, at Madison Square Garden, Mead had sat in the balcony watching the rituals of American politics as an observer and partisan participant. The bicentennial year coincided with her own 75th birthday; she enjoyed enormously the advantages that such an age bestowed on her in memories of earlier presidents. At the time of her birth, Theodore Roosevelt had just [page 322] become chief executive, following McKinley's assassination. Earlier historical periods for Mead functioned as different cultures for comparative purposes. Between the Carter election and the inauguration, Mead worked out close communications with Barbara Blum and Stuart Eizenstat and their Transition Group Task Forces, careful not to impose on their busy schedules. They agreed on kinds of matters that could be left to their respective secretaries, who could then pass on messages without playing games of protocol as to who was the most important. Two themes of her concern for the new president were how to overcome his predictable sense of isolation in the imperial trappings of the office and how to reduce the national (particularly East Coast) prejudice against Southerners. On specific issues, she made no sex differentiation in matters she addressed to both the Carters, believing in the value of their husband-wife teamwork and assuming that the president would be as interested, say, inhis wife's mental-health projects as she would be interested in nuclear proliferation, arms control, or the Iranian revolution. Yet, it was to the president she addressed a particularly strongly worded telegram, in 1978, urging him not to veto the Child Nutrition Act because he had threatened to keep down budgets. Dictated to her assistant, Rosalind Lippel, from her hospital bed on November 1, Mead dispatched this message, labeled "personal and urgent":
He replied with a letter on November 8, 1978, delivered to her hospital bed: "Thank you for sharing your thoughts on the Child Nutrition Act of 1978. It was good to hear from you. Sincerely, Jimmy." The act was made law (Public Law 95627) with a presidential signature two days later, although Carter admonished the next Congress to hold down spending on supplemental feeding. Mead followed such Washington developments from the room in which she died on November 15, 1978. Earlier Mead communications with the Carter White House centered on foreign affairs and the president's difficulty in presenting his domestic and foreign initiatives as part of one central purpose. On August 15, 1977, she typed this letter from New York: Dear Jimmy,
Writing on a similar theme of the politics of cultural pluralism, Mead again wrote the president on October 17, 1977: Dear Jimmy:
Mead's office in New York received no response to the letter on partitions, but to the letter on Taiwan, a reply came from Hodding Carter III at the Department of State. He thanked her and quoted the president's support of the Shanghai Communique, leaving it up to the Chinese and the Taiwanese to find a peaceful settlement themselves. He quoted Secretary Vance, who said that progress toward those objectives "may not be easily or immediately evident, but this Administration is committed to the process," and asked Mead to keep writing her views on foreign relations. On December 16, 1977, Mead wrote three similar letters to President Carter, Dr. Peter G. Bourne, and Margaret (Midge) Constanza. Only to Carter did she draw diagrams to reflect her points. To "Dear Jimmy," Mead got straight to the point in her opening sentence:
Diagram A shows Carter as ego sending out torpedolike symbols, three going up, three going down, with a caption: "Each initiative partly destroyed by necessary compromise." Diagram B resembles a wheel with President Carter at the hub. Nine spokes go out from the center. Some are identified by such issues as "Energy," "Anti-Proliferation," "Social Security," "Panama Treaty," and "Human Rights." Some are empty. The caption, in Mead's handwriting: "President Carter's purpose clear and glowing compromises on the periphery of a total plan on which all the presidential initiatives are related." Her phrase, "working with you and for you," was unique to her letters to Carter, designed by her to suit his temperament. This letter prompted a response the next week with the president's signature: "Thank you for sharing your observations about problem-solving with me. I am grateful for your friendship and support." He wrote in his own handwriting at the bottom on the page: "Your diagrams are great! You are very wise. J." The variation on that advice to Carter was found in her note to Dr. Bourne, then special assistant to the president, a psychiatrist with whom Mead had enjoyed conversations about her teaching at the departments of psychiatry in Topeka and Cincinnati. She wrote Bourne:
To Constanza, she wrote:
Mead met Mrs. Carter face-to-face for the first time June 14, 1977, backstage of the Eisenhower Theater at the Kennedy Center, where they were gathering for the opening ceremony of "Kin and Communities," a Smithsonian symposium chaired by Mead. Mrs. Carter and Mead knew each other from correspondence and TV, but these indirect encounters had not prepared Mead for discovering that: "Rosalynn enters a room just as I remember Eleanor Roosevelt; Eleanor would already be in the room before one noticed her coming in." This was a considerable compliment, for Mead had greatly admired Mrs. Roosevelt and her unassuming qualities. Mead and Mrs. Carter met again not long afterward at the White House when Mead and Rhoda Metraux interviewed her for Redbook (Carter and Mead 1978). Mrs. Carter made several telephone calls to Mead in the New York hospital. The president later tried to telephone but could not get through because the phone was not plugged in. Mead eventually left word at the White House, thanking him and suggesting that the president should consider his call as having been made, that Camp David negotiations should command his full attention. On December 7, 1978, Rosalynn Carter sat in the front pew of the National Cathedral to pay the respects of the Carter family and the nation at a memorial service in honor of Mead. She sat alongside Mead's niece, Lucy Steig Franceschini, who represented the Mead family. On January 20, 1979, President Carter, represented by Ambassador Andrew Young, presented the Medal of Freedom posthumously to Mead in a ceremony at the American Museum of Natural History. The medal was received by Mary Catherine Bateson, daughter of Gregory Bateson and Mead. Bateson and the ambassador met two days later. Following a pattern of counseling public figures already well established by her mother, she criticized American policy in Iran and discussed the Iranian revolution in light of her observations of the religious revival of Islam and Iranian national character (M. C. Bateson 1979). In analyzing Mead's various communications with the White House, students of her practice of self-government will notice that, while she did not write Aristotelean syllogisms, she respected busy leaders by keeping her messages crisp and brief. She reserved anecdotes, "small talk," and benign gossip for personal meetings with friends, and even then only after working through an agenda of purposeful things to do. MEAD AND ELLIOT RICHARDSON Though much involved with the Carter administration, as indicated, Mead was devoted to the two-party system and spent some energy trying to figure ways to save it. In early 1974, James Reston of the New York Times had been editorializing on the problem, prompting me to report to him on January 27 that he might wish to interview Margaret Mead. I mentioned a conversation she had had in my house in the previous month with Dr. William D. Davidson, president of the Institute for Psychiatry and Foreign Affairs. Davidson, who had traveled with Eugene McCarthy during his campaign, shared Mead's interests in the kinds of personalities attracted to presidential politics and the kinds that appeal to different constituencies, e.g., Agnew. Their conversation ended at 3:00 A.M. with a consensus that the two-party system could best be saved by inventing some political [page 325] mechanism that would guarantee the citizenry that candidates would have matching talents and comparable backgrounds. Such would not reduce diversity as a principle of an e pluribus unum republic; rather, it would guarantee an emphasis on "issues rather than personality." For example, if Elliot Richardson should become a candidate, who would be a "Richardson-type" on the side of the Democrats? Reston, apparently surfeited with tips, ignored my suggestion. In 1974, Mead wanted me to try out a hypothetical Richardson candidacy on my mountain kinfolk in Tennessee, to whose village of Palmyra I was heading on a familyhistory inquiry into my ancestral roots. Just as Mead had once dispatched me with some questions to ask French families in fieldwork there (Dillon 1968), she wanted me to get some Southern mountain reactions to Richardson as a potential Republican candidate, mainly from the point of view of his Boston Brahmin personality and body language, and less from the perspective of actual issues. When I found that Franklin D. Roosevelt and Richardson were not too easily distinguishable as Easterners, allowing for Roosevelt's greater charisma, I reported back to Mead that Richardson would appeal to Tennessee hill people. I interviewed less on personality grounds than on the fact that he represented the Republican Party, with which they identified positively because their ancestors had not been slave owners during the Civil War period. They felt that Mr. Nixon was a usurper, bringing on strong, centralized government, while Richardson would be truer to Republican principles of decentralization. Mead took careful note of these family anecdotes and continued to make sure she caught Richardson on any TV talk shows or press conferences, a habit that persisted after the November 1974 "Saturday Night Massacre." He embodied many of her own values about public service. I think she hoped that the right combinations of timing, party support, and political alchemy with voters might fall into place and that Richardson might become a presidential candidate. I eventually arranged for Mead to meet Richardson when he was a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, working on a book about federalism, and she was a Fogarty Fellow in Washington. Their busy travel schedules frequently delayed their first meeting; when they did talk, Mead pressed him to answer her question, "Do you really want to be President? If so, act like it." [2] I have no record of his response, but Mead told me that Richardson, like any public figure, must learn how to send out subliminal messages that register with voters' feelings, which are often tied up with ballot behavior more than is "rationality." She often advised other elected officials to look into the TV camera with the red light, rather than into the eyes of their interviewers, so that they could make eye contact with their unseen audiences. Richardson gladly accepted an invitation to address the Anthropological Society of Washington in its 1973-74 series on "Anthropology and Society" (Maday 1975). He was introduced by Lawrence Angell, Smithsonian anthropologist, whose wife is a cousin of Richardson. Margaret Mead and Philleo Nash served as commentators to his essay "Anthropology and Education," which reflected his awareness of The Wagon and the Star, a 1967 book on community initiative by Mead and Muriel Brown. He also referred to Conrad Arensberg's 1955 essay "American Communities," in American Anthropologist. So Mead's interest in types of political personalities extended also to having public dialogs with those same personalities about questions of public policy, which would be joined with research done by students of human communities and behavior. When Richardson became U.S. ambassador to the Court of St. James, he departed with my advice to read her book And Keep Your Powder Dry and Geoffrey Gorer's Exploring English Character as guides to improving Anglo-American communications (Mead 1975; Gorer 1955). And later, Mead, long identified with policies affecting both space and ocean exploration, rejoiced over Richardson's assignment as ambassador to The Law [page 326] of the Sea Conference. She knew that one does not have to be president to work for the public good. MEAD AND THE FEDERAL BUREAUCRACY Dealing with the White House incumbents and their staffs and party apparatus is less complex than divining lines of communication and leverage points within the federal bureaucracy. Mead knew this well from her first major encounter with the Washington scene, at the start of World War II. She was a special instance in a larger case of intellectuals working along Constitution and Independence avenues, as described in "The Role of the Intellectual in a Bureaucracy" (Merton 1949). Mead's own account of that period is found in greater detail in The Uses of Anthropology (Mead 1979a). Mead's pattern of approaching the federal bureaucracy, formed during her service as executive secretary of the Committee on Food Habits of the National Research Council, took the form of entering the system at a variety of points. She chose to work not from a fixed position inside the government but from a vantage point at the edge, which gave her freedom and mobility to communicate with people at many levels. She respected the reality of the need for orderly channels, "chains of command," and "lines of authority." In addition, believing that government was too important to be left to the bureaucrats alone, she helped move messages and paper, through personal interventions and intermediaries. She approached government bodies rather like a physician checking up on a patient's nervous system, testing reflexes and probing sluggishness. Hers was an oldfashioned family-doctor approach: a lot of listening and never too busy to make house calls. One such call Mead made in 1976 at the office of President Ford's Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare, F. David Mathews, a young historian on leave from the presidency of the University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa. William Sturtevant accompanied her as an officer of the AAA and as chauffeur (Sturtevant 1976), leaving behind, in the best of ethnographic description, an account of what he observed: Meeting arranged at the last minute by AAA Executive office because of (a) sudden announcement on 12 April of cessation of National Institutes of Mental Health predoctoral training fellowships; (b) presence of Mead in Washington to speak to Anthropological Society of Washington evening of April 15. Clear that it was only possible to do this because of Mead's fame and Mathews' desire to meet her. Sturtevant's account reveals that the secretary, two minutes early, plunged into discussion of a book Mead had endorsed (unspecified) and then told her of his interest in Lester Ward, Charles H. Cooley, and William Graham Sumner, surprised that Mead knew of Cooley, and commenting that these personal readings were topically relevant to HEW. Getting then to the point of the visit, Mathews said to Mead, "But that isn't why you're here. Tell me the reason." She immediately responded that it was because the NIMH predoctoral program had been canceled, the record shows. "Mathews to MacKenzie (assistant to Mathews): 'Have we done that?' " Mead then presented the importance of predoctoral research-fieldwork-to anthropologists and the need for contrastive experience as a kind of "residency" to prepare anthropologists for work on national problems. Mathews and his staff promised that the matter would be reexamined, and Mead, thus reassured, suggested that anthropologists are needed in HEW affairs-on panels, in administrative, and research positions. Mathews tried out on her such problems as health-delivery care, how to develop medical paraprofessionals, how to deal with the entrenched interests of the American Medical Association, and problems of government intervention in the family. [page 327] He spoke of the unintended weakening of family structure by massive bureaucratic programs intended to help. He mentioned desegregation in the case of Louisville. Mead agreed that anthropology is relevant, and she came up with more examples, such as mass inoculation programs and the problems of Vietnamese-refugee settlement. Sturtevant noted that "No one present ever said or implied that he thought anthropologists only study Indians or Papuans." Escorting the visitors from his office, Mathews asked Mead if she would be so kind as to give him a minute to meet his wife, who was "right next door and wouldn't forgive him for not introducing her." Mead found Mrs. Mathews, their three children, and Mathews's parents, and began shaking hands all around and remarking about "three-generation families." Mead later told Sturtevant that meeting the family was worth 150% of the conversation and that she would get someone to work up for Mathews a bibliography on Lester Ward, etc., and salt this with references and maybe copies of modern work, especially by anthropologists, to complement Mathews's strong interests in late 19th century U.S. social history. She later sent some of her own books to one of the Mathews' daughters interested in studying anthropology. Though such documentation is missing on countless other Mead encounters with the federal establishment, her personal notebooks and records of schedules and appointments over the decades since the early 1940s will doubtless reveal similar examples of efforts to bring the human sciences to bear on government. The war years brought her into closer contact with the Office of War Information and the Department of Agriculture, and Mead's counsel was later either sought or volunteered in many settings. She was fascinated by government as social organization and as opportunity for social invention-new structures to match new consciousness of problems to be solved, such as housing and urban development, NASA for the space age, and the Environmental Protection Agency. (Among her friends in the bureaucracy was an Air Force intelligence officer with whom she had many conversations on unidentified flying objects, pointing out that earth people had launched objects that could be plainly identified and that other creatures in space might have the same capacity.) MEAD AND THE U.S. CONGRESS Perhaps no citizen in modern times has testified on so many different topics before more different congressional committees as Mead. Her testimony extends from plutonium and breeder reactors to statements about Samoans and American Indians, to the use of the behavioral sciences in foreign policy, and to the care and nurturing of children before Senator Mondale's subcommittee on children and youth. When not making direct testimony, she helped legislation along through such interventions as her telegram to President Carter on the Child Nutrition Act. (Her testimony before Mondale's subcommittee helped launch the growing practice of "family impact" evaluations of any policy bearing on parent-child and other family relationships; the effort is institutionalized now through the privately financed Family Impact Seminar of George Washington University, organized by A. Sidney Johnson III, former assistant to Mondale.) In Blackberry Winter (Mead 1972), referring to her college days at Barnard, Mead wrote:
Yet, in dealing with politicians, many of them lawyers trained in the adversary system [page 328] that she eschewed, she professed a great admiration for those who had chosen the profession of politics. When friends and admirers urged her to stand for public office and help put women in high places, as well as to close the generation gap, she would often reply that the politicians had chosen their métier, she had chosen hers. In her long efforts to influence public policy, Mead made a distinction between influence and manipulation. One should not use either a person's strength or weakness against him, she wrote in her autobiography. "The only course that is ethically justified is an appeal to strength-not to throw one's opponent by means of his own strength but on the grounds that reliance on strength will work for the good" (1975). She approached members of Congress with such a principle in mind. This generated trust and mutual respect across party lines. Mead brought with her testimony a detailed knowledge of legislative process and the politician's sense of the art of the possible. Legislators, caught between their own realities of needing to run constantly for reelection and counting by fiscal years, enjoyed her time perspective, which gave significance to the bills on which they were working. She spoke before politicians without the patronizing manner characteristic of some academics. (Also respected by legislators was Barbara Ward [Lady Jackson], with whom Mead had shared numerous platforms.) "Civilized societies have never before been asked to make proper provision for such a large proportion of elderly people," Mead told the House Select Committee on Aging in prepared testimony September 8, 1977. She said:
Mead's advice was focused on age stereotyping and the media. In such testimony, she drew upon her long interest in the design of new towns, stimulated by her friendship with Dinos Doxiodis and Lord Llewelyn Davies, both architects and town planners; her specific attention to the Reston (Virginia) and Columbia (Maryland) new town experiments (she wrote an introduction to Carlos Campbell's New Towns: Another Way to Live [1976]); her professional friendship with Dr. Robert Butler, director of the National Institute on Aging; and, above all, her fieldwork in simpler societies where birth and death were witnessed by kith and kin of different generations living close together. Similar echoes are to be found in Mead statements before the U.S. Habitat Conference in Vancouver. American suburbia was treated by Mead as an abomination rivaled only perhaps by the invention of the junior high school as an enemy of overlapping generations. A further sampling of her Washington schedule in 1974-77 shows Mead: speaking for 20 minutes before the House Science Committee and answering questions on the role of science and basic research in solving national problems for the rest of the century; testifying before the Senate Labor and Public Welfare Committee's hearings on renewal of support for the National Science Foundation; making 10 minutes of argument before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on advantages and disadvantages to the U.S. of participation in the United Nations; speaking before the Congressional Clearinghouse for the Future on the effects of legislation on family structures; speaking before both House and Senate committees concerned with establishment of the National Anthropological Film Center at the Smithsonian; and testifying before a Senate subcommittee on science and technology on the implications of recombinant DNA. When not appearing in hearing or committee chambers, Mead would telegraph her views from her apartment, 211 Central Park West, when solicited, as in the case of Olin Teague inviting her views on fast-breeder-reactor technology to see whether they had [page 329] changed since earlier merits and demerits had been described in a letter. Mead replied: "Still strongly oppose any continuation of breeders on moral, physical, and economic ground. Wish to emphasize that U.S. will only have credibility in stopping the proliferation of the plutonium economy in the rest of the world if our breeder program is completely halted. Margaret Mead, June 13, 1977." Not all such testimony explicitly called upon anthropology as popularly understood even by anthropologists who can also be literalists. Mead's testimony was sought in her capacity as the president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (Dillon 1974) on a number of issues prompting debate on policies affecting both science and technology. She was sought also as a sage, a wise person capable of seeing the relationships between seemingly disparate events and phenomena, past and future. But when it came to promoting, clarifying, and defending the science of humankind, Mead took full advantage of her knowledge that she personified anthropology to government and to the public at large and therefore had a special obligation and responsibility to act and speak for her profession. She did so, eloquently, before the House of Representatives Subcommittee on Interior and Related Agencies, on April 19, 1977, calling for public support of a national film center to prepare researchable records of vanishing ways of life: During thousands of years of independent cultural evolution in the different comers of our earth, many remarkable and informative natural experiments have come into being. But now, for the first time in all human history, these diverse and independent expressions of basic human potential are coming to an end. Modernization is quickly extending into the last remote corners of the world ... a new epoch ... in which cultural convergence is erasing or disorganizing the wide range of human variation which has evolved ... Film records are of scientific and humanistic importance ... To whatever degree we allow such data to vanish, we diminish our ability to understand our own species. She called for working out cooperative projects with Third World citizens with inside knowledge of their own language and culture, and called for participation by all with talent to make visual inquiry into these "crucial reserves." (The center was established at the Smithsonian, where it has encountered an uneasy relationship with museum anthropology because of its multicultural and multidisciplinary approach and because of its quest for sufficient autonomy to control its own budget.) Mead had been under no illusion that launching such an invention would be simple; she stated in 1978, for the Film Center's advisory council, her view: "The entire issue of where [the center] fits into the scholarly spectrum is an intriguing one ... the kind of question which often comes up when a new kind of academic enterprise comes into being. The Center is one of these new directions in scholarship and therefore requires nurturing." MEAD AND THE BOWHEAD WHALE While much concerned with creating film records of vanishing styles of life and the uniqueness of each cultural experiment, Mead remained preoccupied with change as inevitable and related to the rights of humans to choose and become aware of the consequences and implications of their choices. "Today . . . there are the sentimentalists who would like to put fences around the remaining groups of primitive peoples and treat them like wild creatures in a game preserve," she wrote in Blackberry Winter (Mead 1972). "And increasingly, there are those who are attempting to turn primitive peoples living on the edge of modern civilization into tourist attractions-as if they were exotic animals set out for public view in a zoo." From that perspective, Mead intervened in a number of [page 330] instances to avoid simplistic approaches to policies or practices that might threaten tradition. Before breakfast on a Sunday morning in 1977, I received a telephone call from Mead in New York, she having read in the New York Times an article about the Eskimo use of explosives in bowhead whaling in Alaska. "On a weekend, where can I find Patsy Mink?" Mead asked me. The former member of Congress from Hawaii was then assistant secretary of state responsible for the Bureau of Oceans and International, Environmental, and Scientific Affairs and concerned with representing the U.S. vis-a-vis the International Whaling Commission. After some detective work, I traced Mink to a number where Mead might reach her that evening. Mink recalls that Mead was concerned that Secretary Vance might object to the International Whaling Commission's restrictions upon Eskimos' whale quota in the name of "protecting their culture." The secretary eventually followed Mead's and others' counsel on supporting the decision of the commission for a zero quota, although the quota system is constantly subject to compromise. Mead did not regard herself as a specialist on Eskimos or the Arctic. However, she wanted government officials not to think that anthropologists automatically aligned themselves with protection of all cultural traits, especially those that might endanger a species. Her espousal of environmental causes brought her into questions of how to protect the fragile food chain in this biosphere, how to keep an eye on the balance between the whole and the parts, and the ethics of how humans compete with other species for scarce natural resources. On the intricate bowhead issue, Mead apparently had been influenced by "pro-whale" environmentalists she had met in Vancouver at the U.N. Habitat conference, and had not consulted her friend, Philleo Nash, former commissioner of Indian affairs, who had a long record of active support of rights of subsistence hunters deprived of food by animal protection laws. In a recent Smithsonian lecture, John Bockstoce, of the New Bedford Whaling Museum, put the issue in context by identifying the bowhead as the Arctic's largest, least known, and most endangered animal. Nearly exterminated by commercial whaling fleets in the 19th century, the Bering Strait bowhead whales have been protected now for nearly 50 years from all but aboriginal subsistence hunting, yet the possibility of extinction remains a threat. The increasing Eskimo harvest has raised heated controversy over the survival of the whale, bringing conservationists concerned about dwindling wildlife resources into conflict with native groups who argue for continuing the traditional hunt as a central part of their culture and a necessity to their survival. As a result, two vastly different cultures are brought into conflict, with no simple resolution in sight (Bockstoce 1977a,b). Given the complexity of the issue, Patsy Mink was happy that Margaret Mead believed in self-government enough to intervene. Mead, while a respecter of cultural tradition, had seemed to side with the whale, or to question whether the hunters wanted them for food or to buy snowmobiles. Mink favored the Eskimo side. A three-way approach to the U.S. position was manifest in a Rashomon-type situation involving divergent recommendations from the Bureau of Indian Affairs, the Department of Commerce, and the Department of State. Far from being settled, a "middle position" now allows Eskimos to catch up to 18 whales, making use of whaling bombs in their capture. Chief Justice Burger has refused to step into a fray that Margaret Mead did not shy from (Mason 1977). In the same year, Mead encountered other issues involving the Department of the Interior and the Department of justice, testifying on Samoan culture and the right of American Samoans to preserve their own customs and traditions, in a case (Jake King v. Cecil Andrus) evoking philosophical questions similar to those surrounding Eskimo whaling but lacking the explosiveness of harpoons. [page 331] MEAD'S KULA RING Though some of Mead's friends and cohorts did not know of the existence of the others, the recent vogue of network analysis in anthropology might be applied usefully to understand Mead's pattern of approaching her duties as citizen-scholar, by identifying key access persons to various types of agencies and institutions. Whether the U.N., the White House, the Congress, the federal bureaucracy, the mass media, or the myriad of voluntary associations that function as governance, Mead depended on a network of friends and acquaintances for intelligence about what was going on. She then called upon the same persons to pass on her suggestions or questions when she felt it was best to have an intermediary rather than act directly. (Mead was much impressed by the importance of go-betweens in American culture despite the prevailing self-image of American forthrightness that Americans are said to maintain. She felt that anyone looking for a job should never ask for it directly but should be nominated by a third party.) An incomplete and random list of persons (some now also deceased) engaged in Mead's personal kula ring over the past two decades would include the following, identified with broad areas of interest, many of them overlapping: United Nations and the affairs of nongovertment organizations working with the U.N. and on world food and population problems: Philander Claxton, René Dubos, Buckminster Fuller, James Grant, Glen and Mildred Robbins Leet, Priscilla Reining, Helen Reurs, Harold Schneider, Michael Shower, David L. Sills, Irene Tinker, Barbara Ward; Questions of leadership on civil rights influencing institutions concentrating on education of Black Americans: James Baldwin, Austin Ford, Jerome Holland, Coretta Scott King, Alonzo Moron, Frederick Douglass Patterson; Corporations and labor unions: Andrew and Sally Brown, Eliot D. Chapple, Jack Conway, Richard Eells, Frank Tannenbaum; Foreign affairs, particularly East-West relationships: Geoffrey Gorer, Clyde Kluckhohn, Philip Mosely; Media: Charlotte Curtis, Stephen Rosenfeld, Barbara Walters; Alternative life-styles: John and Nancy Todd Community studies and civic action: Muriel Brown, Solon T. Kimball, Marion Pearsall; Women's movement: Percy Langstaff, Madeline Rosten Lee; Architecture and town planning: Carlos Campbell, Dinos Doxiodis, Lord Llewelyn-Davies; Science and public policy, including environmental issues and science and technology in developing countries: Harrison Brown, William Carey, David Challinor, Barry Commoner, John McConnel, Alan McGowan, Russell Peterson, Gerard Piel, Roger Revelle, Glen Seaborg; Japanese affairs: John W. Bennett, Mie Caudill, Wilton S. Dillon, Daniel Métraux, Herbert Passin, David L. Sills; Irish affairs: Lu Verne Conway; [page 332] Nutrition, ranging from basic research to action on improving protein supply: Porter Briggs, Flemmie Kittrell, Jean Mayer, Walter Modell; American Indian affairs: Ruth Bunzel, Vine Deloria, Jr., Philleo Nash, Samuel Stanley, William Sturtevant; Papua New Guinea affairs and the Pacific Basin: Lady Cleland, Harold J. Coolidge, Theodore Schwartz; World mental health: Thomas Lambo, Alexander Leighton, Jack Rees, Kenneth Soddy, Mottram and Elizabeth Torre; Ecclesiastical affairs, including the World Council of Churches: Anthony Bloom, Theodore Hesburgh, J. Brooke Mosely, Francis B. Sayre, Jr., Cynthia Wedel; European affairs: Clemens Heller, Alfred and Rhoda Metraux; American philanthropy: McGeorge Bundy, Vernon A. Eagle, Sr., Adele Morrison, Lita Osmundsen, Philip Sapir, Richard Sheldon, Warren Weaver, Sr., Donald Young. Such a list is only illustrative, mentioning only persons I remember her approaching in my years of association. Missing are people from earlier decades, including World War II, when Mead, Arthur Upham Pope, Derwood (Ted) Lockard, Gregory Bateson, and Eliot Chapple, acting as the Committee on National Morale, approached Henry Wallace, Harold Ickes, and John Knox of the Roosevelt administration on matters of war mobilization (Bateson and Mead 1941; Bateson 1942). Of such a list, the pivotal persons with whom she consulted on ideas, strategies, and theories of all sorts included Gregory Bateson, Geoffrey Gorer, Rhoda Metraux, and Philleo Nash. In a paper prepared for the 50th anniversary of Mead's fieldwork in Samoa, I referred to Mead as a multinational enterprise, transcending national boundaries by acting on a series of world stages, between and inside societies. She kept her home base in the U. S., as do conglomerates such as ITT or Unilever, but with dramatic contrasts in scale and purpose. If others use the Mead model to make things happen, they might create a horizontal or circumferential chain of responsible initiating persons at different hierarchical levels in major or minor institutions -a modern version of the kula ring, in which everybody is a donor and recipient, the roles being alternated by the situation (Fox 1980). The trade-offs may be in information, a book title, writing a preface or a book review, serving as an intercessor when a good person is changing jobs and needs a new one, putting together an invitation list of influentials who ought to know each other . . . like a 20th-century Thomas Jefferson writing letters of introduction or sharing intelligence about the workings of institutions, government agencies, and international bodies . . . without disturbing loyalties or allegiances but passing on one's judgment about whether the time was ripe for action on a given project that would benefit larger numbers of persons. Participants in Mead's kula ring were voluntary, far from an elitist network, but nevertheless an organic structure that she shaped, always recruiting idiosyncratic talent and nurturing that talent by tossing out opportunities for growing and problem solving on an ever-widening stage (Dillon 1976). MEAD AND THE FOURTH ESTATE Print media and, later, electronic media were essential in Mead's roles as teacherscholar-citizen. When not participating as an insider-outsider in formal structures of [page 333] government, Mead seemed quite aware of Thomas Babington Macaulay's observation that reporters in the gallery become a fourth estate of the realm. The reporters knew her well as a source of commentary on almost all topics related to human beings. Helen Thomas, of United Press International, introduced her at the National Press Club in 1974 and summed up Mead's appeal to journalists-her sharp imagery, which could convey meaning about modern life-styles-images such as "instant hot water" and "five children in a station wagon" to portray suburbia of the 1950s. Her prophetic time perspective also made news: "We may have 25 years left to . . . ." Yet, Mead knew a lot about the other side of printing and publishing, editing school papers, and preparing book manuscripts and magazine articles (Mead 1979b). At Barnard, she helped edit theJournal of the American Statistical Association. Such technical knowledge of the trade helped put her at ease with journalists and editors; she herself was disciplined at beating her own and others' deadlines. She respected journalism as a profession in the manner that she respected politicians, whose techniques of getting elected and staying in office became part of her knowledge of social process. Mead knew about the limitations on the power of the press and the power of government and still managed to bring these estates together in brief moments of interplay. Letters to editors by Mead would often receive prominent display on editorial pages, timed to be read by the policy establishment, either to urge a specific action or to provide an understanding which would influence action. Her letters were models of what Ambassador Andrew Young had in mind in 1978 in urging members of the International Association of Political Psychology to share what they know with the public about nonrational aspects of human behavior, by writing essays for op-ed pages. For example, Mead, five months before her death, wrote to the editor of the New York Times:
Like Walter Lippman (1947), Mead knew that the press is no substitute for institutions, that it should not be burdened with accomplishing whatever representative government, industrial organization, and diplomacy have failed to accomplish. Creating a mystical force called public opinion to take up slack is unrealistic, Mead would agree. However, Mead strongly believed that the press has the power to trigger pathological behavior and that responsible public officials, editors, and journalists ought not to be accused of censorship if they agree to withhold news that might incite violence. At about the same time that Mead wrote to the Times concerning the Soviet dissident trials, she was writing (July 7, 1978) urgent messages to the mayor of New York about street crime in the wake of the Central Park attacks on joggers: "The temperatures are above normal, people are extraordinarily jittery, and urgent action is needed." She had spoken by phone to Mayor Edward Koch and followed up with a memo and letter in which she stated her view that the local police may be helpless, that rescuers of victims get killed, and that the mayor might benefit by rumors that nonlocal police or servicemen, FBI, state troopers, or national guards might be brought in to cover housetops and byways. Her memo stated:
Mayor Koch, in declining the suggestion, told Mead, on July 11, 1978, that it would be extremely difficult for him, as a public officer, to call on the organs of communication to restrain themselves in their reporting of crime news. . . . "However, you, as a prominent New Yorker and a world-renowned scholar, are under no such constraint. You can speak directly to the media, and I am sure you would be seriously listened to." Future users of the Mead archives will discover that Mead did not let the matter end there, but continued to write and telephone the mayor, as she had done earlier with Jimmy Walker, Fiorello LaGuardia, Robert Wagner, and John Lindsay. Not all of Mead's contributions to print were aimed at people who could influence government in national or foreign affairs. The summer 1979 issue of The Hazen Road Dispatch, journal of the Greensboro (Vermont) Historical Society, included an editorial from Mead challenging the historically minded citizens to decide on the long-term future of the community in which she visited with the Metraux family in summers. Ever interested in small communities, Mead campaigned for crafts projects, a farmers' market in the summer, finding a new use for a vacant filling station prettied up for the bicentennial and then abandoned, and organizing forums to study future sources of energy for Greensboro. Like Aristotle, Mead wanted people to act properly and live happily. Like Plato, she wanted mayors of a megalopolis like New York and aldermen of a New England town to be philosopher-kings. She hoped that the fourth estate would share in that esoteric and exoteric task of governance. Her duty as a citizen was to serve as a pilot to both realms. EVOLUTION OF MEAD'S STYLE OF LEADERSHIP Mead's eminence on the world stage as a proponent of common humanity alongside her cherishing of diversity was thoroughly compatible with her often-stated observation that caring for the world depends on caring about oneself and one's kith and kin. This outlook undergirded many of her acts as a citizen: "Our own identities depend upon where we place ourselves in time and space and how we perceive ourselves with respect to the known and unknown, the familiar and strange," Mead wrote in World Enough (Mead and Heyman 1975). Quite familiar to Mead, as an old American, were her roots in Winchester, Adams County, Ohio, founded by two of her great-great-grandfathers. Mead's paternal grandfather was a school superintendent "who was such a vigorous innovator that exhausted school boards used to request him to leave after a one-year term-with the highest credentials-to undertake the reform of some other school" (Mead 1972:46). The transmitter of such memories was Mead's highly influential paternal grandmother, who lived in the Mead households during her childhood around Philadelphia. While much is recorded of Mead's pioneering mother, from her professor father Mead learned early about university politics and financing and the "strategems and ruses adopted by ambitious men," prompting her father to stress loyalty and trust to make organizations work. His view of government was that the best government is the least government, though he came to respect such new developments as social security and public ownership. Mead eventually evoked a much larger expectation of government responsibility, as [page 335] witnessed in her quoting President Johnson's "Great Society" inaugural address in the epilogue to And Keep Your Powder Dry (1975). From her fieldwork and secondary sources, Mead also developed views and attitudes about government and the civic action required to make them work, the variations on a theme of governance that included the nonhierarchical Arapesh, the bravery and eloquence demanded of Iroquois leaders, or the centralized priestly hierarchies of the Bachiga of Ruanda (Mead, ed. 1961). In the 1930s, Mead's mentor and friend Ruth Benedict often chafed at the amount of energy their professor, Franz Boas, devoted to "good works," lamenting the time lost to research and writing. But, as the Nazi crisis deepened in Europe and World War II approached, she who had so vigorously rejected good works was, in the end, drawn in (Mead 1974). Benedict drew Mead into active participation in government affairs-with a bang. Recommended by Benedict, Mead was attending her first meeting in Washington with the incipient Committee for the Study of Food Habits at the National Research Council (Mead 1964) when she heard the news of Pearl Harbor. Anticipating the ultimate defeat of the Japanese, Mead talked with Benedict and Gorer about retention of the Japanese emperor system as essential to positive transformation of Japanese society. [3] World War II became the model for Mead's newly released energies to apply to the war effort what she considered incomplete knowledge from the human sciences. There was no pacifism in Mead's approach to fighting the scourges of Fascism and Nazism in World War II. The first edition of And Keep Your Powder Dry was written with that in mind. The war period became a later standard for Mead's appeals to government and to voters to find peacetime goals that would demand sacrifices of a whole people, when the rich and poor, clever and stupid, fortunate and unfortunate, are temporarily joined together in work for a cause that is meaningful to all. War is learned behavior and can be unlearned, she often stressed, admitting that war can also "bring out some virtue." The atomic bomb and, later, the Apollo flight influenced everything else Mead wrote and acted upon. She fumed often, however, at her countrymen's amnesia about earlier initiatives and experience that should have been remembered. In the postwar period, the development of applied uses of nuclear energy, alterations in the political and economic structure of the world, the growth of U.N. specialized agencies, and innovations in computers and automation in the 1950s prompted many, she lamented, to ignore the work done in the 1940s. From the baseline of watching the federal bureaucracy and the presidency both grow during 1941-45, as a participant-observer in Washington, Mead never held bigness as a virtue; on the contrary, she practiced "small is beautiful" and a personal asceticism and austerity in approaching big problems. The process by which a young woman, with travel money from her professor father, could set sail from Morningside Heights to Samoa with her notebooks and camera and, nearly 55 years later, without a big bureaucracy or wealth behind her, command the attention of bishops, revolutionaries, bankers, legislators, monarchs, housewives, husbands and children, and the deaf and the blind, to name a few constituencies, is worthy of study by all interested in leadership and how knowledge is brought to bear on human choices. What is the interplay of individual initiative, intelligence, moral purpose, timing, energy, and an admixture of modem transport and the media with which a leader can move about the earth and communicate views on the foresight and cooperation required for the survival of our biosphere? Aristotle set the stage. Mead came along centuries later to provide a concrete case. Her unsettling example can be summed up by what she told a television audience when she chided powerful people who, as though they are a disenfranchised minority, say, "We're [page 336] just part of the process," and then pass the buck to others. She urged listeners to think about the future by arranging to have access to children "even if you have to borrow one." Then she looked straight into the red eye of the turned-on TV camera and reminded all viewers that "the buck starts here," that is, with oneself (see also Shower 1978; Houston 1977; Rubin 1979; Dillon 1978). Biblical experience as well as Greek democracy provided models for Mead's notions of responsibility, citizenship, leadership, and initiative. Mead was delighted by, and often quoted, Rudyard Kipling's poem "The Sons of Martha," Martha having become a metaphor for working anthropologists-of both sexes-who do more than contemplate their disciplines. Martha, the sister of Lazarus and Mary, as recorded in Luke 10 and John 11, appears as a character devout in Jewish tradition, "cumbered with much serving," and "careful and troubled about many things." She behaved like the elder sister, the head and manager of the household. Kipling picked up the metaphor and inspired Eliot Chapple to editorialize, in Human Organization, that anthropology needs more "Sons of Martha" (Chapple 1955), as reflected in these excerpts from Kipling's 1907 work, The Years Between:
NOTES Acknowledgments. Some of this material was presented in Boston at the February 20, 1976, program of the American Association for the Advancement of Science organized as a tribute to Margaret Mead on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of her first fieldwork in Samoa. My paper, entitled "Shaping Structures for World Citizenship," was, along with other papers, heard by Dr. Mead. "I was not looking forward to this long day," Mead commented afterward, "but in the end I found I was not bored for a minute." I thank Dr. Mary Catherine Bateson for permission to quote from unpublished correspondence that is part of the Mead estate. [page 337] I am grateful also to Rosalind Lippel, Nona Porter, and Amy Bard, of Mead's staff, who helped me locate documents, and I offer a special vote of thanks to Barbara Sperling for her unique memory and assistance. No aid is comparable to that provided by Mead herself in serving as an informant in continuous shared fieldwork on interactions between anthropologists and various social structures called "government." [1] Objectivity in any analysis could be found best in taking into account the life history of the observer and recognizing that selective perception is inevitable, a natural condition that places a premium on the precision and quality of documentation and field methods left behind. Mead bared her life and values; she made her unique selections but left ethnographic records so complete that generations of later students of her material will have a chance to make their own selections and analyses. Thus, Mead was free of conflict between her roles as fastidious field-worker and as improver of the self-knowledge of her countrymen by sharing anthropology with governments and various publics. Moreover, her entry into anthropology took place before the discipline became colored by the ideology of a value-free social science. Closely linked with medicine, particularly pediatrics and psychiatry, she thought of medicine as a healing art. That might also have been part of her view of anthropology, with its earlier dependence on history and literature as records of human emotions and social structures. A synthesis of these insights could improve the human condition. (See Ruth Benedict's "Anthropology and the Humanities," in Mead's Ruth Benedict 1974.) A complete bibliography on Mead has been published by Joan Gordan (1976). [2] Mead would be fascinated by the 1979 pundits' analyses of public personalities vying for the Republican nomination. For example, Joseph Kraft, commenting on Senator Howard Baker of Tennessee, wondered about the intensity of his appetite for the presidency, whether he could develop the obsessive appetite that has been "a critical element in the rise of all those who clawed their way to the job through the primaries." (See Kraft, "Too Casual a Candidate?" Washington Post, Nov. 1, 1979, p. A19.) [3] A whole separate study could be done to document the contributions of World War II anthropologists to the ultimate decision to keep the Japanese emperor on his throne. Robert Sherrod, the author, now preparing a biography on aspects of the MacArthur Allied occupation, points a number of arrows toward Ambassador Joseph Grew as the man who prevented the punitive treatment demanded by the Soviet Union, Australia, and some other allies. As undersecretary of state, Grew and his staff, including Eugene Doorman and Joseph Ballantine, formulated a policy of indirect rule. Grew, citing the example of a queen bee, told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee: "Take her away, and you destroy the whole swarm under her rule . . . Remove the emperor and the United States will have to nurse forever a crumbling society of seventy million people." (Quoted in The Pacific Rivals by the staff of the Asahi Shimbun, Weatherhill/Asahi, New York and Tokyo, 1972.) John K. Emmerson's The Japanese Thread (Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1978) reveals his support of the Grew-Doorman thesis that the emperor should be retained. Benedict's The Chrysanthemum and the Sword (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1946), eventually gave an anthropological rationale for the decision. Mead frequently referred to Gorer and Benedict's "culture at a distance" insight as important for policy on Japan, and Chie Nakane, the Japanese anthropologist, agreed that keeping the emperor was important for social equilibrium. Grew, writing to his daughter the month after Hiroshima was bombed, said his conscience was clear in having persuaded the administration to keep the emperor "as the only man who could stop the war and avoid the needless loss of thousands of our soldiers if we had had to invade Japan itself." (Unpublished letter in Grew Papers, Houghton Library, Harvard, dated September 2, 1945.) I do not know whether any anthropologists ever talked with Grew.
REFERENCES CITED Bateson, Gregory. 1942. Morale and National Character. In Civilian Morale. Goodwin Watson, ed. pp. 71-91. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. [page 338] Bateson, Gregory, and Margaret Mead. 1941. Principles of Morale Building. Journal of Educational Sociology 15 (4): 206-220. Bateson, Mary Catherine. 1979. 'This Figure of Tinsel': A Study of Themes of Hypocrisy and Pessimism in Iranian Culture. Daedalus 108 (3):125-134. Bockstoce, John. 1977a. An Issue of Survival: Bowhead vs. Tradition. Audubon 79 (5):142-145. __________. 1977b. Eskimo Whaling in Alaska. Alaska Magazine 43 (9):4-6. Bower, Robert T., and Priscilla De Gasparis __________. 1978. Ethics in Social Research: Protecting the Interests of Human Subjects. New York: Praeger. Byers, Paul. 1979. Margaret Mead: A Remembrance. Kinesis 1(3):3. Carter, Rosalynn, and Margaret Mead. 1977. A Redbook Conversation. Redbook 149 (6):123, 204, 206, 208, 210. Chapple, Eliot D. 1955. Wanted: 'Sons of Martha.' Human Organization 14 (4):1-2. Dillon, Wilton S. 1968. Gifts and Nations. The Hague: Mouton. __________. 1972. Anthropological Perspectives on Violence. In Perspectives on Violence. Gene Usdin, ed. pp. 69-107. New York: Brenner/Mazel. __________. 1974. Margaret Mead: President Elect, 1974. Science 184 (4135):490-493. __________. 1976. Shaping Structures for World Citizenship. Unpublished paper prepared for 50th anniversary of Mead's fieldwork in Samoa symposium sponsored by the American Association for the Advancement of Science. __________. 1978. Margaret Mead, 1901-1978. Grants Magazine 1 (4):290-293. Edel, Abraham. 1968. Aristotle. In The International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences. Vol. 1. David L. Sills, ed. New York: Crowell Collier Macmillan. Fox, Renee. 1980. Margaret Mead. In The International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences. Vol. 18. David L. Sills, ed. pp. 513-528. New York: Free Press. Gordan, Joan, ed. 1976. Margaret Mead: The Complete Bibliography 1925-1975. The Hague: Mouton. Gorer, Geoffrey. 1955. Exploring English Character. New York: Criterion Books. Houston, Jean. 1977. The Mind of Margaret Mead: How She Democratizes Greatness. Quest July/August: 22, 24-26, 28, 76. Lippmann, Walter. 1947. Public Opinion. New York: Macmillan. Maday, Bela C., ed. 1975. Anthropology and Society. Washington: Anthropological Society of Washington. Mason, Milo. 1977. Bowhead Whale Controversy; Background and Aftermath of Adams vs. C. Vance. Harvard Environmental Law Review, Vol. II: 363-388. Mauss, Marcel. 1954. The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies. Ian Cunnison, trans. New York: Free Press of Glencoe. Mead, Margaret. 1961 The Human Study of Human Beings. Science 133:163-165. __________. 1964. Food Habits Research: Problems of the 1960's. Washington, D.C.: National Academy of Sciences-National Research Council. Publication 1225. __________. 1969. Research with Human Beings: A Model Derived from Anthropological Field Practice. Daedelus 98:361-386. __________. 1972. Blackberry Winter. New York: William Morrow and Co. [page 339] __________. 1974. Ruth Benedict. New York: Columbia University Press. __________. 1975. And Keep Your Powder Dry: A New Expanded Edition of a Classic Work on the American Character. New York: William Morrow and Co. __________. 1978. Soviet Dissident Trials: They are Theatricals. New York Times, 20 July, editorial page. __________. 1979a. Anthropological Contributions to National Policies During and Immediately After World War II. In The Uses of Anthropology. Walter Goldschmidt, ed. pp. 145-158. Washington: American Anthropological Association. __________. 1979b. Margaret Mead: Some Personal Views. Rhoda Metraux, ed. New York: Walker. Mead, Margaret, ed. 1961. Cooperation and Competition Among Primitive Peoples. Boston: Beacon Press. (1st ed. 1937). Mead, Margaret, and Ken Heyman. 1975. World Enough: Rethinking the Future. Boston: Little, Brown and Company. Merton, Robert K. 1949. Role of the Intellectual in Public Bureaucracy. In Social Theory and Social Structure. pp. 161-178. New York: The Free Press of Glencoe. Murphy, Cullen. 1978. In Darkest Academia. Harper's Magazine 257 (1541):24-28. Rubin, Vera. 1979 Margaret Mead: An Appreciation. Human Organization 38 (2):193-196. Shower, Michael. 1978 Margaret Mead: Non-Token Woman. New Directions Citizen Force 2 (4):1. Sturtevant, William C. 1976. April 16, 1976, Meeting of Margaret Mead with HEW Secretary F. David Mathews in his office at HEW, 11:45-12:30 P.M. Unpublished memorandum in files of American Anthropological Association, DOC No. 76-67. Wax, Rosalie. 1952. Reciprocity as a Field Technique. Human Organization 11(3):34-37.
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