Peace, love, creativity: Hope of mankind; Pursuit of happiness, part one

From the Great Hall of the Cooper Union in New York City. National Educational radio presents the Cooper Union forum series on peace love and creativity the hope of mankind. These programs were recorded by station WNYC. Here now is the chairman of the Cooper Union forum Dr. Johnson he Fairchild. Good evening ladies and gentlemen this is your chairman speaking to you from the great hall of the gathering. Creativity and Christmas Christmas. We're talking about the pursuit of which. The last of the pursuit of happiness of individuals and our speaker is the picture

commissioner of New York City Department of Parks. That is almost enough to say about anybody but anybody who knows anything about our park situation in New York City realizes that one it's terribly important and to what a controversial position. And in my humble opinion and that's my personal opinion. The parks have taken a new life in very recent times and great strides are being made that is forward strides are being made in the parks in New York City. You know I just mentioned that. August Heckscher was probably director of the Twentieth Century Fund. He was a New Yorker. His background has to do with the St. Paul School.

You know Harvard. He was honorary degree is from a large number of schools which I'm not going to mention because there are too many. He has been a member of the department of government to Yale University and editor of a newspaper in New York. Chief editorial writer of The New York Herald Tribune he's been trying to stress teaching services for the United States. President Kennedy the late named him to serve as the president's first special consultant on the arts. He has a large number of other things birds Lincolns and all kinds of things very fine books and so forth. I am having one in my hand the public happiness. Very interesting and

very nice volume among others he's written very delighted that this very outgoing and very fine commissioner parts of August Heckscher could be here this evening at the Cooper Union to tack on the pursuit of happiness. Mr. Fairchild ladies and gentlemen. Let me say that I appreciate your coming out on this inclement evening. I look forward to the opportunity of speaking for a while and then particularly I look forward to the question which I trust you will ask me afterwards about the park about the city and of course in your own way about the pursuit of happiness the pursuit of happiness. That is the topic upon which I have been asked to speak this evening. I will talk as you may well imagine about the pursuit of happiness

as it exists and as it is carried on in cities in the great city of the modern world. It would be perhaps more in the spirit of Christmas it would be a good deal easier to talk about the pursuit of happiness in a simple life from which so many folk have it so many of our old stories so many of our early affections are drawn. When man talked about happiness in the old times when Jefferson used the immortal phrase created it for the first time the pursuit of happiness. He of course was thinking of a simple country of farming folk. Jefferson was suspicious of the great cities. He disliked the idea of people coming off the farm for any reason at all. When the people are crowded upon one another in cities as in your happy fed and then they will grow corrupt as in Europe. And

he felt that we were building here and on this new continent a land different from the old world where men and women and simplicity and Grace could find their happiness in the midst of simple joys and simple duties. Also. Where the happiness of those early days rise perhaps easy to achieve. Leisure was defined by the task that man had to do in the absence from those tasks of the day and the evening. The season of planting in the season of harvesting and the cry of winter that came afterwards. Happiness was keyed to the turning year to the changing seasons. But how different it is today. We may think that we still live in a rural country. In fact long after the city had begun to dominate the American scene we kept this myth this pleasant myth

that we were still a rich folk pursuing simple pleasures. We found them most of us that we had come from and that we are passing through the city as well as transit and a way perhaps of making our living and that someday will one day or rather we would go back to the Somme and in the midst of a lot of course we let our cities grow up too often in our greatness and in neglect. In the however much we may have tried to preserve the myth of simple pleasures and of passion happiness we had to wake up finally and to recognize that we are after all a city folk that we are if we are going to find happiness or to find it in the great city it doesn't anywhere else. We may dream of escaping. We may dream of a treat. The playwright and the artist may think of going back to nature but in fact it is

in the midst of a city that the creative impulse is born and it is here as I say that modern men and women find them out and for them of happiness. It didn't always so easy to find happiness in this new context from nature living a life largely by the variations of season just ignorant of the varied tempo and the varied tasks which the changing year round SABERA to end time is spent. So I have affectionately rupturing and come and go. We speak rather of killing time in the midst of the rush of the great city. Domestic life the family life around which so much happiness was centered in the family ceremonies that year by year the traditions preserved from childhood on forgotten in the modern

city as the family early breaks out as its members move out into different theaters different parts of the country. Children often promise to be strangers to their parents. The influence of religion around which so much of the early a concept of happiness of blessedness was built that influence also was weakened. It seems as if religion has been most at home in. In the country life where men and women are found kinship with the soil and with nature where there seemed to have been manifestations of the Deity in a landscape and in all the natural events that passed around them how different it is in the city how much how much more difficult it is to believe in the almighty being one around Ron. One sees the confusion the busyness and sometimes

the ill humor around his fellow human beings. And yet as I say we're not going to find happiness anywhere except here except here in the city. I am myself I just a Fairchild said. I sit a man and bread. I was born here in New York. I have carried out most of my work. I suppose that I won't stray very far for very long before I end my career. I have of course made my own attempt to escape it or like the generality of Americans I have thought that perhaps happiness could be found in the small town right after the when I left New York and I went out to edit a newspaper in a small city in a city of some fifty five thousand population in upstate New York where I had the good fortune to be the editor of a most charming evening paper a liberal

enlightened a well written that probably is published in this state or indeed in this country at least it seemed to me so during those two years in that small town which I look back on as the happiest of my life. I had a fight. I thought that I was really going to be a phenomena. I thought that I had found that in this these acres along a Roscoe lake the key and the secret to true happiness. But sometimes I was somehow I was back to the city and as I say I am now resigned as I suppose most everyone else. Is he in a survey after all we do and the excitement we find the multiplicity of human contact kinds of people doing all sorts of things to satisfy every human that we may have. Here we find the raw option of choice which to life

provide. Men change their careers they change their neighborhoods without ever feeling that they're being untrue to them fair hours or inconsistent in their career. Men and women about the highest manifestations of the intellectual spiritual be artistic life and find it in the rich abundance where it satisfies the human spirit. So part of modern happiness but happiness of modern men and women I found happen to live on a street on the east side here in New York and ninety Fourth Street and I think of being a kind of neighborhood that has many of the qualities of the virtues of a small town in a run down here and lay in the direction of the river. One gets to know runs neighbors I remember the night that I came home having first been appointed by mail and they do this job as commissioner of parks and finding my front door decorated

with a Law Commission and signed the neighbors. In the spring the children gather the tree used blossom wine as a feeling as I say that one can combine here in the city. The best of the joys of the great metropolis and some of the more simple places that I have been describing as part of country life. The one thing that has happened it seems to me is we have changed our concept of happiness from the happiness of the countryside to the happiness of the great city. It has been quite the same way about the pursuit of happiness. We don't use the phrase that Jefferson used when we think of our own work and our own life here in the city. We have to a considerable extent from an emphasis upon the individual and the private sphere to something that might be called the provision of happiness. We have kind of a feeling that the community the city the state the federal

government that have a positive responsibility in making it possible for men and women to find satisfaction and content. One may pursue happiness or run marathons but if the environment is NOT agree the air is polluted if traffic is impossible. If a Streets a day then you can pursue happiness all you want and somehow it will scape you there is a responsibility that rests upon as a citizen rests upon the officials of city government and of levels of government. There is a responsibility to make provision. For the happiness of the citizens to see that it is possible for them to express themselves and for them to fulfill their their life. But the patch I mention that I had written some books and one of which indeed he had in his hand is the public happiness it is it is a book written upon the theme that the political body

does have a responsibility today for creating the environment for setting the scene for something and shaping the circumstances which allow men and women to be happy. I read a bad book. It was an abstract and I wrote a philosophical sort of a book. And it never occurred to me that one day not so far off I would be last February or March by New York's Mayor John Lindsay to see whether I could put some of his ideas to the test. My job is in the field of recreation of power. Of Cultural Affairs. I seem to be mixed up in areas of civic and political life where the body politic is trying to provide something more than the manifest it is something many conveniences which make it possible for us to get about the town or to

breathe or want to or to have a comparative amount of quiet. It would have been unthinkable perhaps a few decades ago to think that government had this further responsibility of dealing with and not merely with economic facts and conditions that it was dealing with cultural affairs with recreation and that it spread apart not just as places not just as pieces of real estate but in areas in which the spirit of the people manifested itself as a precious pieces of Greenland. Having something to do with the human spirit and the quality of life itself. When President Kennedy fest asked me to come to Washington some years ago and we talked about the role of government in the arts. I remember a thing government will have a fairly. In these matters of value in these cultural and recreational things

government will always play a small role. Human happiness is concerned it will I remember the word that he used. He said it will have a marginal place in dealing with these things. I think that President Kennedy was right and I agreed with him as I had the privilege of working with him shaping Sam of the legislation the National Arts Foundation and other things which the cultural life of the country. It is a small part a marginal part but it is absolutely crucial. And that's to say that I feel a responsibility for values beyond convenience and necessity that the government will not answer to the needs of the people and that will not be the next creation which the great cities are meant to be and have have it in their destiny to become. Let me sum up briefly at the various ways in which the city Daz today through this new administration of Mayor

Lindsey's which I had the various ways in which the state has tried to say the happiness of man. Let me talk first a little bit about the park. There's Green Bay that I have called it in the midst of the great city of stone and steel. As I've said I'm not as bad pieces of real estate. They have the best of a very alive contradiction of people who want to be doing different things expressing themselves in different ways so I'm at a set somewhere out of summat to play bongo drums I was meant to play chess or checkers and so on I think I have a condition even though medication may create problems for the park commission that these paths of reflection and the temp of the city. If the today are empty if people are afraid to go in them if they are neglected and

rundown I am afraid sometimes they are run down and I hope ultimately they will be there. Then I say beware. But as many of us today which is sad. And Samurai Abby the flame of discontent perhaps of Ryad will best out family Sal and that the community itself. But if the park is alive then at least there is hope. I remember when the mayor had gone on a summer trip to another city in connection with his rare as vice chairman of the president's committee on civil disorder. He came back and he said what was frightening in their city rivals that he ran through the paths on the streets there and it seemed really as if the city was dead he said he went into Iraq we may have lots of troubles but at least you can say that the place is dead but the place is down. Set apart the reflection of the life of the community. Go through the

park and you can take the temperature of a city life itself. The. Link with nature in it from which nature is rapidly disappearing or being pushed back from the areas in which men live. I don't read it would be possible to live a good life. Without the experiences and the refreshments which Nature brings. It might be possible. I myself would hate to see that experiment tried. I would hate to see a generation that had found happiness. Apart from this connection with the natural organic to which man is inseparable and inevitably linked and the vital contact. Sometimes it may be something as well as a tree in the street. We keep the trees in the street and we

plant them and we try to prune them. Sometimes it may be a neighborhood sometimes it may be one of the great parks would still live in the midst of the city of New York. POLLACK for example the Highbridge park to think of in Manhattan of course and Central Park in prospect both these beautiful romantically landscapes areas designed by alms to jest about the same time that this great building was built. Men and women can be green and changing unexpectedly right in the center of the great state of the sea that surrounds New York. The sea which expects a match that is elemental to man by the elevated highways we have constructed by the rock. But I write me my writing to be reclaimed by the city. They first gave them to the city and we may be saved by our contact with the

sea. There's a wonderful passage that you may remember and maybe Dick describes how in that time it was about 1840 I think. Man on a Sunday afternoon could be a day he said going out of the. On the streets and the edges of the sea and there they stood he said crowding closer and closer because it was important for them to see which man can never master and which was that which kinds of supply him and provide him with so much in the right way a recreation and of enjoyment. I remember events as these people are looking for. Their time of life. While I don't err on the real time the ungraspable phantom of life. But I'd like to think that as we restore through Rob and I mean that through Marina's through restaurants on the sea restoring his

contact with the better in the rivers and the oceans with which New York is so greatly blessed that men and women will find something that is enjoyable and important to them. But of course individual and humanize the city I think would be if it weren't for the switch breaking into the grid which can identify the different neighborhoods that compound was the home. People have no difficulty in describing read a living or for that matter are they live because they live beside Washington Square Prospect Park Club Flags park on Staten Island that has given a focus to them. Just to get an architecture if you will to the city itself. Are there ways the way this great building

is a matter of salad and the salad to the buildings in the city and if you will. You can look at a city in terms of the great buildings which cluster within it where you can change your perspective. As you look at they say that they squares on a checkerboard instead of seeing red on black you see black on red you look at a city with a different perspective and you don't see just the structure you see. Open spaces between the structures the parks and the streets in the square which as I say individualized the city save it from becoming one grey homogenous mass. And then there's another crime scene which the parks provide a run which we have had I think developed into an expansive and vibrant runway during these past two years. The parks provide a setting for the great celebrations of urban life in the small

town of which I spoke earlier in the countryside. There are always places where men had to listen to speeches too. Then celebrations on the Fourth of July the hottest democracy. I remember that date when I had gone out to a young friend of mine who was starting out on his political career running in the primaries for the state senate and he told me he was going to make is that his speech in the little town I remember its name. And that disappears at the appointed time and I couldn't find any writing as I thought they would be everybody it was the noon hour and people with a lot of rocking and a definite I ran across the square. I couldn't see very much of a town. To be perfectly truthful about I stopped at a station and I said is it this way. Mr. Metcalf Mr. Metcalf later did win the primary and had a distinguished career in the New York State Senate. It is this

way Mr. Metcalf is going to make a speech and I like the reply. He said Mr. Metcalf and I didn't even try to make any speech but if he was going to make a speech it's going to be here because. That's at the center of the town and the square of the city. But it was there that the great events of the common life occurred the opening of a political campaign perhaps a funeral or perhaps a wedding ceremony. They arrive at our place.