South Bend, April 5, 1973
Meeting with Arthur Miller
The real Arthur Miller is certainly different from what one imagines him to be: A tall, gaunt figure without affected manners of the author, homespun, almost simplistic, but of compelling fascination. The world-renowned playwright gave an evening with readings from his works on the Notre Dame campus. He read excerpts from his latest work, The Creation of the World and Other Business, which is scheduled for its world premiere in New York. It is a Creation and the Fall of Man comedy, whereby the Fall is written with an American sense of pragmatism. The whole piece sounds as if Mark Twain had rewritten the “Prologue in Heaven” in Goethe’s Faust. The audience was shaking with laughter, but nonetheless gained new insights into life’s wisdom. In a question and answer session the next day, Miller explained that he is trying in his plays to give meaning to life. Remarkable was also the excerpt from the autobiography Miller is writing at this time. He tells about his origin in the New York ghetto. His father had come as a six year old child alone to America and grew up in the Jewish ghetto of New York. Miller narrates with a certain nostalgia how Harlem, despite its poverty, was worthwhile living in, where Jewish, Black, and Puerto Rican families lived together peacefully side by side and understood each other. Much of Miller’s early life’s experience flowed into his work.
Note
[The autobiography of Arthur Miller mentioned above was published as Timebends: A Life 1987 in New York. According to the autobiography, the Miller family had originally come from the Polish village of Radomizl, which by the end of the 19th century belonged to the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy. The family was deeply rooted in the Jewish faith and felt connected to the Austrian-German culture. In the 1880s Samuel Miller, the grandfather of the author, had emigrated with his family to America. As the money for the ship ticket was lacking, the youngest child was left behind with an uncle. Later, the barely seven year old boy Isidor, the father of the author, was sent alone across the Atlantic to join the family in New York. Arthur Miller was born 1915 in New York. Among his most important works are All my Sons (1947), Death of a Salesman (1949), The Crucible (1953), A View from the Bridge (1955), After the FaIl (1964), and The Creation of the World and Other Business (1972).]
Chicago, April 22, 1973
The View from the John Hancock Center
On a clear day, the Observation Deck on the 94th floor of the still new John Hancock Center, opened in 1969, offers a magnificent panoramic view. To the north you can see along the elegant Lake Shore Drive to Evanston and beyond as far as the adjacent suburbs; to the west you can see as far out as the still open prairie; and to the south one looks with astonishment across the line of high rising new skyscrapers which are being built on North Michigan Avenue and the City Center. From there the eye may rove over Grant Park to the Field Museum of Natural History, the Adler Planetarium, and along the southern shore of Lake Michigan as far down as the industrial conglomerate of South Chicago and Gary in Indiana. Diagonally across from the Hancock Center toward the southwest, there stands the construction of the 110-story high Sears Tower, the highest building in the world that is about to be completed. What one can see here within a 50 mile radius is an encouraging view into the future. Here, the ending 20th century is passing naturally into the 21st. Chicago is a progressive, vibrant city that is continuously renewing itself.
“The largest, the tallest, the fastest in the world”
It is no accident that of all places in Chicago the attributes “the largest, the tallest, the fastest in the world” have become the proud advertisement slogans, which can be seen at every corner of the city. The entrepreneurial spirit is concentrated here to an unusual extent in a number of companies which are indeed the biggest of their kind in the world. Among these are not only the Sears Tower as the highest building in the world and O’Hare as the busiest airport, but also the Merchandise Mart as the largest commercial building, McCormick Palace as the most spacious exhibition hall as well as the Museum of Science and Industry as the largest technological museum in the world. This development had begun with the World’s Fair, the World’s Columbian Exposition in 1893, whereby Chicago caught the attention of the world. Not for nothing did the skyscraper architecture originate here. By its geographical location at the southwest end of the Great Lakes, Chicago developed into the largest railroad hub in the world. The notorious Chicago “stockyards” were the source for the largest meat processing industry. Sears, Roebuck and Co. advanced to the world’s largest mail-order business, while the Board of Trade Building at the end of La Salle Street, the stock exchange of Chicago, became the center for the largest grain market in the world. Chicago is a good example to demonstrate how in America human activities and the potential for development have reached new dimensions. When one arrives in America for the first time, one is often surprised if not intimidated by the super-dimensional. It takes some time to get adjusted to. How did these super-dimensions in America come about? A possible answer could be that the size of the country and the fast industrial development of a continent were a challenge to think big and act in vast dimensions.
South Bend, April 30, 1973
The Scandal: Watergate
When on June 17 last year a group of overzealous Republicans broke into the Democratic Party Headquarters in the Watergate Apartment Complex in Washington, the whole affair looked like a farce or a belated First of April hoax. It was taken as an inroad by a small rightwing clique to which no further significance was attributed for the reelection campaign. Months later, the affair exploded into one of the greatest scandals the White House has ever been involved in. Court proceedings on the Watergate affair now have revealed that the closest inner circle of the President’s staff were accomplices of this political espionage. In their overzealousness for the reelection of Richard Nixon, they did not shrink from criminal activity. And by the cover-up, they got even more entangled in guilt. As President Nixon today declared his point of view on the Watergate affair on national television, one could see that this was the most embarrassing speech he had to deliver before the American public. H.R. Haldeman, the White House Chief of Staff, and his closest associate, John D. Ehrlichman, resigned, while John Dean, the personal adviser of the President, was fired. Attorney General Richard Kleindienst resigned because the investigation of this case concerns personal friends. Whatever may come out of the Watergate affair, it casts a dark shadow upon the Nixon Administration and has shaken confidence in the government. Above all, the affair discredits the White House.