The Winner Names the Age
SMITH, LILLIAN
By Lillian Smith The Winner Names the Age A CHALLENGE TO SOUTHERN DECENCY OURS is an age that has no name. Nor will it soon have one. It has often been called "the Age of Anxiety," but it will...
...There is no longer a place for secrets...
...clergymen preached on the morality it implied...
...when men looked on tuberculosis and cancer as punishments from God...
...It was translated into English, French and German and was read by the intelligentsia...
...Each holds high potentials for good and evil, life and death...
...Mob Number 2 also gives its protection to Mob Number 1. Without that protection, Mob Number 1 would be in jail and would be kept there...
...This, too, is part of the price we have paid for our silence and for walling ourselves away from the great ideas of our age...
...Malraux was right when he said: "Always, however brutal an age may actually have been, its style transmits its music only...
...But it will work only if the people believe in law and respect its processes...
...The two strongest and best controls come from within a free man's own mind: his conscience and his reason...
...It is obvious that we have not yet developed an earth-size courtesy and tact...
...Parents were deeply impressed by it and shaped their methods of child guidance on it...
...Demagogues by the bushel but not one great leader...
...They are the ones who fire the teacher who speaks up, who fire the young minister who bows to God instead of to White Supremacy...
...We can still do it...
...All this came out of the great Age of Reason...
...For fifty years, the South has had no great leader from the white race...
...This great Age of Reason was a time when educated Europeans were deeply concerned about ghosts...
...What can we do about it...
...What percentage...
...Certainly many of its members are chairmen of boards of big business: others are trustees of school, church, hospital: some are directors of banks or presidents of insurance companies: others are professional men...
...Those who believe a man has a right to be different must say so...
...We can paint our picture, but we cannot name our age...
...This mob's strength lies in the fact that it hires people and sells goods...
...The idea that the way a thing is done, the means used, is as important as the end sought...
...And yet, the Age of Enlightenment was an age when most Western men could not read or write...
...They sneer at the high courts of their government...
...The idea that all people can speak out and say what they think...
...A leader cannot be built up unless the people, the best people of a region, build him...
...A stupid act today can bring on a world crisis tomorrow...
...A brief glance at any great age will remind us how true this is...
...The idea that everyone in the community has a right to be protected from violence...
...It burns a cross before a man's conscience, dynamites his reason, threatens his sense of security, sends anonymous phone calls to old memories, old fears that are sleeping in peace...
...whole world into democracies—cannot have uncontrolled free people around...
...Witches, too, were still a hot topic...
...A free man with the vote, and with wages that give him purchasing power, is armed with some hefty weapons...
...This mob-thinking pushes Mob Number 1 out on the streets, and it condones Mob Number 2's vicious boycott and pressures and leaves its members still thinking of themselves as good men...
...We are not sure...
...they can jail scientists and intellectuals and artists...
...We won't do the naming, but we will pick the winner...
...I consider the demagogue the greatest enemy a democracy has...
...But an age is remembered not for its enemies and errors but for those qualities it dramatized which enlarge horizons and give a fine ambience to man himself...
...And he has chosen the good way of non-violence, of intelligence and compassion and good will...
...Shall we commit ourselves, deeply and completely, not to neurotic security but to the survival of man on this earth...
...Each affects the others...
...Democracies—and we are trying to turn the...
...Walls are down...
...Mob Number 2's enormous power is given it by Mob Number 3, and Mob Number 3 is invisible...
...distance has been obliterated...
...For the mob's power can destroy our freedom as completely as can any Communist dictator...
...What we can do is pick the winner...
...A young white leader working shoulder to shoulder with Martin Luther King could do much to transform our South, to turn the mob spirit into the civilized Christian spirit that we should have down here...
...The Negro group is searching far and finding its good leaders and is beginning to give these leaders their support...
...Without the second, we cannot have the first: We need leaders, not martyrs...
...What controls are valid...
...Both of these—to stay healthy—must be nourished on civilization's great and germinal ideas: ? The idea that every child has a right to grow...
...Those who believe survival is more important than security must say this, too...
...We call the 18th century the Age of Reason, of Enlightenment, of the Rights of Man...
...In the South, members of Mob Number 2 often belong to the White Citizens Council...
...It is not too late...
...For the winners would not call it so, and the winners do the naming...
...Sometimes we forget that an age is always named for its triumphs, for the big ideas that add stature to the human being...
...We do not yet know...
...The basic idea: that God is the Ultimate Concern beyond all men, the supreme symbol—not the white race, not the Communist party, not capitalism, not any authoritarian group—and that his laws of love and brotherhood and mercy and compassion must be obeyed...
...they can even dynamite churches...
...they can tear up laboratories and libraries...
...Those who believe that our artists and writers must be left free to create their dreams and ideas into paintings and books must say so...
...Another GI shoots an alleged peeping Tom in Formosa, a riot takes place in which the American Embassy is left a shambles, and, suddenly, everybody everywhere is either glad or sorry...
...Lillian Smith is the author of Strange Fruit, Killers of the Dream and Now Is the Time...
...The first can be described quite simply: It is the new power of world opinion...
...Suddenly the earth is stripped of its old insulated silence, its slow comeback, and is transformed into a sensitive instrument which responds with electronic speed to whatever is said and done: A few tactless words spoken by an official of one country can upset the government or economy of another...
...Those who believe a clergyman should preach according to his religious conscience should say so...
...Yet, though the 18th century was chock-full of hysteria and superstition and irrationality, we are right to call it the Age of Enlightenment...
...For otherwise democracy cannot survive, nor, I think, can civilization survive...
...They can, when out of control, do all these terrifying things because freedom gives them strength...
...We are concerned that radioactive fallout has already affected the genes of a percentage of our young people everywhere...
...doctors based their therapies on it and continued to do so, some of them until the 20th century...
...But controls must be democratic...
...We cannot hold, for ourselves alone, either new things made or new knowledge gained...
...not mob opinion, but the opinion of millions of individuals who have held on to their reason and conscience, and their belief in the free, growing human being...
...The answer lies first in leadership, second in the determined efforts of each individual to take his stand, to speak up and try to create a climate of courage and hope and faith...
...they must function without taking away the essential civil liberties of all men...
...The power of free people has to be controlled, channeled, disciplined by values and knowledge and law—or it can be more dangerous to us than nuclear energy out of control...
...We know that nuclear power has fabulous possibilities for future good, but what troubles people everywhere is its danger to us right now...
...They are the men who refuse to sell to those whose opinions they don't like, who refuse to insure some of those they don't like...
...It was concerned with the secret sins that children commit...
...Mob Number 2 is far more dangerous because it holds more power and prestige...
...The idea that truth is a search that must never stop, that both reason and imagination are necessary to that search, that scientific method is necessary, too, and cannot be interfered with except when human life is jeopardized or profound human values cheapened...
...We gave that support, every time, to the cheap, foul-mouthed demagogue who appealed not to our reason and conscience but to our anxiety...
...who begged us to return with him to the past, a past that never actually existed, instead of going on with the rest of mankind into the future...
...This kind of thing leaves a man anxious and hating, wanting to hurt something—he doesn't know what or why...
...when there is no fire, who tells the people they are free to break the law, free to trample other people's rights, free to slough off their conscience and their reason to behave like madmen when they want to...
...This great intellectual era, which gave us Rousseau's and Locke's writings, Voltaire's bold, sharp, ironic questions, Thomas Paine's books, and Jefferson's word on liberty and human freedom, gave us also a curious bestseller which swept Europe like wildfire...
...We might call it the mob in the gray flannel suit...
...They are not likely to blow up the earth with their power, but in their ignorance and inexperience they may blow up civilization...
...Enough to paralyze the police force, the courts, the judges, the juries, and all law-enforcement machinery...
...We cannot trick each other without being found out...
...This Age of Reason was an age when the blind and crippled were persecuted and half starved...
...They can destroy art and music and poetry and books and criticism...
...Its members use this strength to hurt those who deviate from their beliefs...
...Enough, also, to completely paralyze public opinion—and sometimes enough even to paralyze the Christian church...
...When this happens, the free people, with their limitless potentials for growth and for good, will metamorphose into the mob...
...There is always a dark underside to every age: a festering, ill-smelling slum where man's enemies and errors breed...
...when the mentally ill were chained and some were whipped to death...
...Controls are necessary...
...All three are concerned with new forms of power, and all will shape the earth's future...
...they are the ones who refuse the bank loan to the Negro who works for his civil rights and refuse the loan to the white man who tries to help the Negro secure his civil rights...
...Communication lines are strung everywhere...
...For he deliberately breaks down the controls of the church, of conscience, of civilization, of the courts to get the people under his control...
...But we want to know, and we are afraid of politicians and atomic committees that try to keep secret the scientists' warnings...
...The Oxford University magazines were full of discussions of ghosts, in which Samuel Johnson took part...
...Our third ordeal is living in a world with hundreds of millions of free people...
...A powerful control is constitutional law...
...Fire...
...that is Communism's problem...
...Because we can, I would like to take a look at the conditions, the ordeals out of which the winning ideas, the triumphant attitudes and techniques will come: We are faced with three which men have never had to deal with before...
...We cannot have leaders unless the best people stand by these leaders...
...We let down our leaders by not building them up...
...According ing to this expert, those sins caused most of the diseases known to man, from fits to diarrhoea, from insanity to blindness, deafness, muteness, cerebral palsy, rheumatism, anemia, liver upsets, etc...
...We cannot, as nations, gossip about each other without being heard...
...This is the Number I subversive in our culture...
...What men some of them are...
...Here is the crux of the matter: In a democracy, enlightened, civilized public opinion must prevail...
...they already decide what can be shown on TV and in the movies...
...This is a totally new thing...
...This mob is made up of the delinquents and criminals of a community...
...Because it is happening in our country, especially down here in the deep South where we live, I want to talk about the mob in more detail: There are three kinds of mobs...
...We must, it seems to me, combine our efforts to see to it that the great ideas of our age have a chance to be acted out, to become strong enough to win over the irrational, evil enemies and errors of our age...
...This article has been adapted from her recent address at Atlanta University...
...Those who believe violence is wrong must say so...
...they already dictate to the mass magazines...
...We could have had great leaders: There were men in our South with the intelligence, the integrity, the vision to become great leaders, but we, the people, did not give them our support...
...indeed, they say they obey only the laws they want to...
...The only way this public opinion can prevail is for people to stand up and speak out...
...If the white group could only find a young leader to match the brains and heart, the integrity and vision, the courage, the energy and imagination of young Martin Luther King...
...The idea that a man has a right to be different in looks, beliefs, interests and talents if he does not injure others...
...It has often been called "the Age of Anxiety," but it will not, I think, be known in history as that...
...This is the mob that dynamites a church or a home, burns the cross, writes anonymous letters, makes anonymous phone calls, threatens and sometimes kills...
...Not the dictator...
...For the germinal ideas it brought to life, the vision of man's possibilities which it communicated to the future in impassioned words and symbolic acts, are, today, a part of the human heritage...
...They put the pressure on...
...Those who believe school teachers must not be asked to take a loyalty oath defending segregation or the "Southern way of life" or capitalism or any other form of idolatry must say so...
...World opinion alone can compel governments to use nuclear energy in the right way...
...when epileptics were hidden away...
...We are anxious and concerned not only because the bombs can bring quick and total destruction in war, but because peacetime testing of bombs has already brought unknown damage to the human race...
...It lives inside men's minds...
...We can try, but world opinion is powerful and will have its say about it...
...This problem of free people and their new and amazing power has thus far disturbed Communist countries less than democracies...
...King knows what every leader of stature must learn: that the way is as important as the goal we seek...
...Will it...
...Nor have we yet found the new concern and new morality and new objectivity to match the new publicity and the new intimacy...
...How many of their children will be defective and malformed...
...A fabulous time of greatness can come out of it, but it is also dangerous, because free people have power—more power than a half-dozen H-bombs...
...When men stop believing in these great ideas, when they silence their conscience and trample their reason, when they make their own image their god—or their economic or political beliefs their god—then we are in for trouble...
...This is a new thing...
...For every violent act committed, every threat and effort at boycott and intimidation, every hate word said, there are thousands of minds thinking mob thoughts...
...this man is the people's real enemy...
...The book was called L'Onanisme and was written by a physician named Tissot...
...Our problem is the demagogue, the man who deliberately betrays the people, the man who scares them, calling "Fire...
...A GI shoots a trespassing Japanese woman, and half the earth shivers...
...Mob Number 1 is the mob on the street, usually dressed in ordinary clothes, sometimes in pillowcases and sheets...
...The Age of the Rights of Man was a time when a new slavery was sending deep roots into American soil and a new colonialism was beginning to lay its greedy paws on Asia and Africa...
...Our second ordeal is in everybody's mind: atomic energy and how to control it...
...That is our decision...
...For then they hold even constitutional law cheap...
...the winner will do that...
...For young Dr...
Vol. 40 • August 1957 • No. 34
