YEAR IN REVIEW 1998: JACKIE ROBINSON

Jackie Robinson: A 50th Anniversary Remembrance Nearly 54,000 people--among them U.S. Pres. Bill Clinton--jammed New York City's Shea Stadium on April 15, 1997. Although the Los Angeles Dodgers and New York Mets baseball teams played that evening, the impressive turnout had more to do with a ball game played exactly 50 years earlier at Ebbets Field in nearby Brooklyn. That game marked the debut of a rookie named Jack Roosevelt Robinson, an African-American whose presence in the Dodgers lineup marked the first time in the 20th century that a member of his race had played in a major league ball game. The Shea Stadium crowd gathered to honour the memory of the man who had withstood taunts, death threats, and other forms of abuse from players and fans alike as he broke baseball's colour barrier and helped to spark the civil rights movement. "If Jackie Robinson were here today," Clinton told the crowd during a 15-minute ceremony, "he would say we have done a lot of good in the last 50 years, but we could do a lot better." Major league baseball spent the summer commemorating Robinson's achievement. The theme was "breaking barriers," and Robinson's impact on the sport and race relations in the U.S. was celebrated. The integration of baseball had opened the athletic arena to minorities, and eventually Hispanics and Asians followed Robinson's lead. By 1959, every major league baseball team had at least one African-American on its roster; some 17% of baseball's players were black, and blacks had also been accepted in professional football and basketball. By 1997, 80% of the players in the National Basketball Association were black, as were 67% of the players in the National Football League (NFL). In baseball, however, that number had dropped to 15% by 1997. Curiously, the Dodgers opened the season with the same number of African-Americans on their roster as they had had in 1947: one. Hispanics, however, accounted for 20% of major league players. As Clinton suggested in his address, minorities were now welcome on the playing fields, but stereotypes and other barriers lingered. Leadership positions both on the field (catcher in baseball and quarterback in football) and off were rarely filled by blacks. Not until 1975--three years after Robinson's death--did a major league baseball team hire an African-American to be a field manager, and in 1997 only four teams had black managers. In the NFL only four blacks had ever served as head coaches, and, although 11 of the 30 head-coaching positions changed hands during the 1996 season, none went to blacks. No major sports franchise in the U.S. had ever had an African-American as a majority owner. As Robinson's Hall of Fame career and his place in history were recognized in big league ballparks throughout the season, a baseball team known as the Colorado Silver Bullets--the only all-women's professional team in the country--spent the summer barnstorming from town to town to play exhibition games, just as teams of blacks and players from the Negro Leagues had done during the first half of the century. The Silver Bullets served as a reminder of the fact that until at least one more barrier was broken, a full one-half of the population remained effectively banned from playing major league baseball. ANTHONY G. CRAINE Labour-Management Relations For the industrialized countries, economic growth in 1997 was generally good. Unemployment was a different story. Though low in the United States, fairly low in the United Kingdom, and low, as usual, in Austria, Japan, Luxembourg, and Switzerland, it averaged more than 10% in the European Union (EU) as a whole. The continuing differences in unemployment and job creation between the U.S. and most continental European countries revived the argument about labour-market flexibility. It was argued that the flexibility of the U.S. labour market favoured efficiency and low unemployment, whereas the more highly regulated practices common in much of Western Europe had led to high labour costs and unemployment. Others maintained that not only did a high degree of regulation afford a level of worker protection that was appropriate in an advanced industrial society but also that there was no strong evidence that it resulted in unemployment or was detrimental to competitiveness. Labour's Return to Power On May 1, 1997, the voters of the U.K. dispatched the Conservative Party into opposition after 18 years in power and replaced it with the Labour Party and a new prime minister, Tony Blair. (See BIOGRAPHIES.) The election set a number of records: It gave Labour more seats (418) and a bigger majority (179) than the party had ever achieved before. The number of women elected to the House of Commons, 120, easily beat the previous record of 60. The Conservatives suffered their lowest share of the popular vote (30.7%) since 1832 and won their fewest number of seats (165) since 1906. For the first time ever, the Conservatives emerged from the election with no MPs from Scotland or Wales. Seven outgoing Cabinet ministers were defeated in their own local constituencies--the largest number at any election in the 20th century. The Liberal Democrats won more seats (46) than at any election since 1929. Conservative Prime Minister John Major's outgoing government had never recovered completely from "Black Wednesday"--Sept. 16, 1992--the day the U.K. was forced to leave the European exchange-rate mechanism and devalue the pound. During the next two years, a series of tax increases were implemented in order to restore equilibrium to the U.K.'s public finances. Labour, meanwhile, had made itself more appealing to the electorate, choosing the charismatic Blair as leader in July 1994 and ridding itself of its traditional commitment to state socialism in April 1995. The party rebranded itself as New Labour in an effort to show voters that it had changed. In particular it promised not to increase the standard (23%) or higher (40%) rates of income tax. During the six-week election campaign, two other factors harmed the Conservatives: they remained divided over Britain's relations with the rest of the European Union (EU), and they failed to rid themselves of their reputation for individual malpractice, or "sleaze." The former trade and industry minister, Neil Hamilton, refused to stand down as Tory candidate for the normally strongly Conservative constituency of Tatton in the north of England despite having been accused of taking bribes from Egyptian-born businessman Mohammed Al Fayed. (See BIOGRAPHIES). By contract, Labour and the Liberal Democrats withdrew their candidates in favour of an independent candidate, Martin Bell, a well-known former war correspondent for BBC television. This widely publicized local contest embarrassed the Conservatives nationally and culminated in a clear victory for Bell, who became the first independent MP since 1950. The election saw the intervention of a new party, the Referendum Party, founded by the financier Sir James Goldsmith (see OBITUARIES) to campaign for a referendum on Britain's relationship to the EU. He spent 20 million--as much as Labour or the Conservatives--on a campaign to support candidates in 547 of the U.K.'s 659 constituencies, but his party won only 2.6% of the vote, and none of its candidates was elected. PETER KELLNER Law The tendency, increasingly visible in previous years, for international law to change from a set of rules governing relations between sovereign nations (and relevant only to those nations) into a framework for joint action on matters that directly affect individual citizens became even more pronounced in 1997. This was reflected in two aspects of the conduct of nations. The first of these was their increasing recourse to international legislation (treaties and multilateral conventions) in order to develop their own laws in collaboration with other nations, and the second was the increasing subordination of national action to international adjudication that was being undertaken by the growing number of international courts and tribunals. LIBRARIES Around the globe, libraries captured headlines in 1997 as they were struck by wars or natural disasters and became the subjects of political disputes. Flooding in Europe during the summer took a heavy toll on some 100 libraries in Poland, where institutions in 23 of the country's 49 administrative districts reported significant damage to collections, buildings, and equipment. At the Academy of Medicine in Wroclaw, some 40% of the library's 300,000 volumes were damaged. Although some 20,000 volumes were destroyed at the University of Wroclaw, the efforts of volunteers saved one of the most outstanding collections of old prints and manuscripts in Europe. Conflict in Albania resulted in destruction or damage to libraries in Tiran, where an agricultural library was looted and burned; Sarand, where the Italian Library was destroyed; and Vlor, where a public library was heavily damaged. In July police in Purna, India, opened fire on demonstrators who were attempting to burn a college library. The incident was precipitated by the desecration of a statue representing a leader of a lower social caste. Librarians from the United States continued their efforts to rebuild the collection of the war-ravaged National and University Library of Bosnia and Herzegovina. When libraries made news without mention of destruction or physical violence, censorship was often the issue. Election victories in France by the extreme-right-wing National Front in the cities of Orange, Marignane, Toulon, and Vitrolles resulted both in materials' being removed from library shelves by city officials and in firings and wholesale resignations of librarians who opposed the actions. The library in Orange faced imminent shutdown. French leaders, including Pres. Jacques Chirac and Prime Minister Lionel Jospin (see BIOGRAPHIES), condemned the National Front, and the French legislature considered issuing a "library bill of rights," but many observers believed that the situation would worsen before it improved. In response to a suit filed by the American Library Association and other groups, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the Communications Decency Act, which sought to ban the on-line transmission of "indecent" material. Meanwhile, public libraries across the U.S. faced pressure from politicians and citizens groups to install filtering software to prevent children and other patrons from accessing sexually explicit materials on the Internet. The provocative design and the staggering cost (some $1.5 billion) of the National Library of France, a part of which opened in December 1996, also caused controversy in France. Wooden shutters were added to the building's four L-shaped glass towers after librarians and scholars warned of the damage that sunlight would inflict on the books. The appearance of the shutters and the building's location in a remote area in Paris drew bitter criticism. Other national libraries made more upbeat news. Die Deutsche Bibliotek, a new German national library in Frankfurt, was dedicated in early May. The contemporary building housed some 15 million volumes. The Frankfurt library had an annex in Berlin, where the music collection resided, and another in Leipzig, which duplicated the Frankfurt collection in addition to boasting a few specialized collections of its own. In Nicaragua the Banco Central de Nicaragua had served as a national library since 1964. After the building was destroyed in the devastating earthquake of 1972, however, the library was housed in "temporary" quarters. With a new bank building nearing completion, the library would soon return to a permanent home. In Egypt the government agreed to underwrite the budget of the Library of Alexandria, currently under construction near the site of the original edifice, built around 300 BC. The long-standing process leading to the opening of the new British Library at St. Pancras, London, continued. Some departments were opened, while other collections were still in the process of being moved. On May 1 the U.S. Library of Congress reopened its 1897 Thomas Jefferson Building following a 12-year-long, $102 million restoration and modernization. In what was hailed as the greatest gift to American libraries since Andrew Carnegie financed the construction of 1,600 libraries at the turn of the 20th century, Microsoft Corp. chairman Bill Gates and his wife, Melinda French Gates, announced in June that they would bestow $200 million to establish the nonprofit Gates Library Foundation to bring computers into public libraries in low-income communities throughout the U.S. and Canada. Microsoft would also match their cash contribution with $200 million in training and software. The Federal Communications Commission voted in May to provide discounted telecommunications services to U.S. libraries and schools, a measure that would lower the cost of hooking up to the Internet computer network by up to 90%. The plan would limit the amount of discounts to $2,250,000,000 annually, beginning in 1998, and the revenue would be raised by billing homes and businesses with more than one phone line a higher federal monthly charge. In South Africa two racially separated professional associations of librarians formally united, while in Copenhagen 2,976 librarians from 141 countries attended (August 31 to September 5) the 63rd Council and General Conference of the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions. Grant support enabled about 140 librarians from less-developed countries to attend that conference. The New York Public Library launched a drive in September to raise $500 million to take the institution into the 21st century. The campaign was reportedly the largest fund-raising effort ever undertaken by an American cultural institution. GORDON FLAGG; THOMAS GAUGHAN This article updates library. Literature In 1997 the world of publishing was as fickle as ever. The sudden death of Diana, princess of Wales (see OBITUARIES), occasioned an outpouring of books that were devoured by the public, even as critics decried the impulse behind them. Although major publishing houses owned by multinational corporations continued their hegemony, an increasing number of highly regarded small presses came to represent a kind of literary samizdat. The virtual bookstore became a reality so overwhelming that many physical bookstores began to feel the effects. In the United States in particular, the best-seller lists were unexpected homes to a good number of dense and imposing literary titles by writers such as Thomas Pynchon (Mason & Dixon) and Don DeLillo (Underworld), and the winners of major literary fiction prizes (the National Book Award for Fiction in the U.S. and the Booker Prize in Great Britain) were big commercial successes in advance of the awarding of the prizes themselves, which disputed the initial common wisdom that the memoir was supplanting the novel as the literary form du jour. Both prizes, however, were increasingly vexed; the shortlists ignored any number of important titles in both the U.S. and the U.K., and both were won by first-time novelists, which caused many in publishing to shake their heads in disbelief and dismay. Throughout the world the approaching millennium sent writers fleeing to the past for subject matter. In the U.S. major novels explored the 18th century, the Civil War, the Cold War, and the 1960s. In Britain Jim Crace's Quarantine took place in 1st-century Judea, and France's Prix Goncourt was won by La Bataille, an account of an 1809 Napoleonic battle told from the combatants' point of view. Germany's cult hit Starfish Rules was set in the U.S. during the 1930s, and a major Danish novel explored the religious and political struggles of 14th-century Denmark. Throughout Latin America fiction meditated on recent historical outrages. The persecution of writers by the state continued in many parts of the world, notably in the Middle East and Africa. The International Parliament of Writers, headed by Nobel Prize winner Wole Soyinka of Nigeria, mailed out an appeal for funds, citing censorship, harassment, imprisonment, and even murder in places like Algeria, Iran, China, Nigeria, and Uzbekistan. Highly regarded new English translations of Horace's Odes and Ovid's Metamorphoses appeared. The 75th anniversary of James Joyce's Ulysses was marked by the publication in the U.K. of a "reader's edition," which most critics regarded as a travesty. Other highlights of the year included the sudden high visibility of expatriate Indian writers, as well as new works by such internationally known authors as Haruki Murakami, Philip Roth, Peter Handke, Peter Carey, Robert Stone, Cynthia Ozick, John Updike, Saul Bellow, Norman Mailer, Colleen McCullough, Beryl Bainbridge, Peter Findley, Ben Okri, J.M. Coetzee, Athol Fugard, Hlne Cixous, Aharon Appelfeld, Joyce Carol Oates, Mario Vargas Llosa, A.B. Yehoshua, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Kurt Vonnegut, Mario Benedetti, and Lyudmila Petrushevskaya.STEVEN BAUER