MAN OF THE YEAR: First Among Equals

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Flint's current No. 1 campaign is culture. The city is building housing projects, new churches, school buildings and a huge $5,000,000 civic center. In addition the Flint Junior College is expanding to become the nucleus of the new Flint campus of the University of Michigan, which will open next September. One of its main structures: the Harlow H. Curtice Academic Building. Flint's adult education program has an enrollment of 40,000 people, who study everything from classical languages to the fine art of tying trout flies. The Flint Community Music Association comprises 42 independent groups, including a symphony orchestra, civic opera, and square dances that draw as many as 5,000 people—dancers all.

This Town & Flint. Give or take a few dollars and a few square dancers, Flint could represent—qualitatively—almost any industrial city in the land. It could be Arlington, Texas, which jumped in population from 7,000 to 35,000 in five years, as new plants moved into the area between Dallas and Fort Worth, drawing most of their new employees from agricultural areas. It could be Los Angeles, which added as many factory workers in the past five years (277,400) as in the previous 21. Or even New England, which put its brains to work and found new research and electronics industries after textiles slumped. Or Buffalo. Cleveland or Toledo, little Detroits all, and all building in anticipation of the opening of the Lake Erie portion of the St. Lawrence Seaway in 1959.

How far is Flint from London, Paris, Madrid, Rome, Mexico City and the other cities of the non-Communist world? Not far, in the sense that a prosperous, strong U.S. economic system is clearly the basis for the record-breaking prosperity of the whole free world.

What's Good for Flint. In another sense —the sense of setting an example—Flint is farther away but getting closer. Britain, eying the freely competitive U.S., has this year been hearing its strongest parliamentary attacks on monopolies, and may wind up with the first antimonopoly bill in its history. Last summer, news of the U.A.W.-Ford guaranteed annual wage agreement rocked the national convention of France's 2,000,000-member Confederation Generate du Travail, and seriously weakened Communist control. In today's booming Federal Republic of Germany, an industrialist who has not been to the U.S. to study production methods is not seriously listened to. In Mexico, Sears, Roebuck & Co., G.M. and Ford have raised wages, granted pensions and health plans, and given Mexico's unions new leverage for working on rich local capitalists. In Saudi Arabia the Arabian American Oil Co. has staked hundreds of local bright young men to prosperous careers as importers, contractors, teachers. (Its American methods have also created a feeling of sullen restlessness among other natives who are just discovering what the good life looks like.)

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