The Munificent King

Once again the streets of Teheran rang with angry shouts. Two thousand workers invaded the university campus to battle students. In the teeming bazaar, steel-helmeted police beat back religious leaders who were attempting a three-day strike. All the excitement was over the social reforms of Iran's 43-year-old king of kings, Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlevi. After years of hesitation, the Shah at last was tearing the land from Iran's feudal village owners and religious leaders, distributing it to the peasants, and forcing factory owners to give workers a 20% share of their profits.

The Moslem mullahs (priests), whose shrine lands were up for leasing to Iran's landless farmers, did not like the idea at all. Students protested the Shah's dissolution of the Majlis (parliament) a year and a half ago after the legislators rigged elections, then crippled the royal land reform bill with 93 amendments. Since then, ruling by decree, the Shah has distributed 2,000,000 acres of private land (with compensation to owners) to some 50,000 peasant families in 3,500 villages.

It was some record for a monarch who once seemed ineffectual and powerless to stave off the growing discontent of Iran's poor masses. A decade before, few would have imagined that workers and farmers would be crying his slogans, waving his banners. But there they were on the eve of the big referendum called to give the nation's yes or no to his sweeping plans for aid to needy rural and city Iranians. Women, who got the vote for the first time in Iran's history, gathered at polling places to shout, "Long live Mohammed Reza Shah for granting us freedom." The nation's poor were equally enthusiastic, flocked to cast their ballots in unprecedented numbers. The Shah expected a landslide victory, and sure enough, early returns backed his referendum by the lopsided margin of 1,000 to one. The popular enthusiasm was doubtless aided by the Shah's announcement on the eve of elections that he was giving up the last of his own royal land, 3,500,000 acres on the Caspian's Caviar Coast.

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