END OF THE LINE
Mayer, Milton
Of Men and of Angels End of the Line By MILTON MAYER THE hydrogen bomb is nothing but the last in a long line of gadgets. Whether or not to make it or throw it is no more a moral problem than...
...It is not unthinkable that Henry Wallace, the great plougher-under, will come up with something like self-sinking battleships, cracked airplane propellers, mousetraps that open instead of close, and poisoned bread marked, "Poison...
...We won't stop...
...I am not sure about Truman, Johnson, Acheson, and the newspapers, but I am pretty sure about the physicists, about a lot of them, anyway...
...Human history is just full of weapons that were made and never used, just full...
...use—the last best hope of earth-has spectacular possibilities...
...The physicists and the Army are our janizaries...
...Why, Russian roulette, of course...
...they've been at it longer...
...The solution to the paradox, or schizophrenia, is that we had a suicide compulsion...
...Defense Secretary Johnson, a smaller Truman, says, "We will lick hell out of them...
...The idea is to wave it around without letting go of it...
...the butterfly's wing, for instance...
...They have had their bellies full...
...The problem is the suicide compulsion, just as it was in Eden...
...Everything after that was a problem of technique...
...When Bormann and Rosenberg and Himmler pressed the Fuehrer with increasing insistence to seize the churches, Goebbels stopped them by saying, "The people are not yet prepared for it...
...We wring our hands, already dyed with the blood of all the innocents, and say, "Indeed we haven't...
...Human life, which requires choice, choice, choice, was too much for us...
...They do not know where to turn or how to begin to extricate themselves from their suicide compulsion, which is only a reflection of ours...
...Suddenly they were gods, movers and shakers who put Ford, Carnegie, and Rockefeller in the shadow...
...the choice was whether or not to make the trench mortar...
...Up course the physicists were making |f for the Army, and under order <j| the Army, and they would have been shot by the Army if they hadn't de* livered it...
...We are weaker still after suppressing still more of them still more ruthlessly...
...to live, it was within our power, except for the suicide compulsion, to give the Russians what they wanted when what they wanted was still land, bread, and peace...
...The physicists assure us that the new gadget, which they are hurrying to prepare, will destroy Los Angeles when it goes off in New York...
...II The purpose of Truman's announcement was not to scare the Russians, since, as every fairly mature infant knows, it will only scare the Russians into being worse...
...They should have got off before they made the atomic bomb...
...I don't know why it can't be done...
...But getting off means getting hurt...
...They have lost their faith in freedom because we have lost ours...
...The factories...
...You're asking me what form...
...Who wants to get shot...
...Human life, which requires choice, was too much for us...
...McMahon asks for 50 billion dollars—why not 50 trillion or 50 cents?—to buy peace, he is voicing the hallucination of all of us...
...If they were strong and free, they would help themselves, but they aren't...
...We, the people, the self-governing, sovereign people are the bums and the boobs...
...The preachers preach, the poets praise, the professors pipe, and there is a great weeping and gnashing of teeth...
...His articles appear in Harper's, Life, Negro Digest, and other magazines...
...We believed the serpent—just imagine Harry Truman as a full-grown serpent!—because we wanted to be as gods...
...All these characters, interesting though they may be psychologically, are pipsqueaks, and it is all of humanity that is squeaking the pips...
...The Russians are, as we all know, Oriental in outlook, if not positively Jewish, Negro, or Catholic...
...The way to make free men is to be free men, and this is the end of the line...
...We can be free men or, if need be, free cinders...
...But none of them will get off...
...They need our help...
...We don't want to get shot, we don't want to get fired, we don't want to get jailed...
...The hysteria was already well under way, with Truman's request, which will be granted, of 71% of the new budget for guns and 29% for butter...
...Our heart has failed us, and the bigger the muscles the worse the strain on the heart...
...unless they, too, were produced for prevention of use—would hum ever faster because the shortage would never be relieved no matter how fast they hummed, and nobody could do anything to anybody...
...Now they are moven and shaken themselves, condemned to be the helpless middlemen of doom...
...They have drunk enough blood...
...Truman doesn't like war...
...Now they will ride on to the end of the line and go up in smoke with the wild elephant...
...Production for the prevention of...
...A lot of the butter, such as general expenses of the Government, goes for guns, in addition...
...III We can not expect Truman, Johnson, Acheson, and the physicists to take heart for us...
...The flintlock...
...None of them will choose...
...Death, which comes without choice, is easy...
...And so they were astounded, when the Army, the minute they received it in working order, exploded it...
...The bump at the bottom—loss of job and reputation—looks a lot harder to a physicist, whose career has up to now been characterized by bumplessness, than it does to a peanut vendor or a poet...
...They want to get off before the end of the line...
...They were a dime a dozen...
...The choice is not whether or not to make the hydrogen bomb...
...It is we, the people, who have created the specialized task forces of physics and soldiery out of our own number...
...We were told that death was the wages of wanting to be as gods...
...Nobody can avoid being hit by the bomb, but anybody can avoid what is worse, namely, hitting somebody else with it...
...the choice was whether or not to make the machine gun...
...When the New York Times and the Christian—Christian, mind you —Science Monitor shake their heads sadly and say, "It's terrible, it's awful, it's bestial, and it's fatal, but we have to do it," they are voicing the sin of all of us, and not committing it on their own...
...Hysteria, not hydrogen, is the indispensable ingredient of the great explosion...
...Morris Fishbein and the American Medical Association in the December and January issues of Harper's has provoked nation-al comment...
...And when J. Edgar Hoover sends his little boys in blue serge around to keep us from working and hollering, we can still decline to blow up the old one ourselves...
...Now they want to be as gods, just as we do, and we shall all be penalized together...
...The spear, the sword, the rock...
...Whether or not to make it or throw it is no more a moral problem than whether or not to make or throw the first rock was...
...Now we are going to get our suicide...
...These squeaking pips are all in the position of the farmer Carl Sandburg tells about, who said, "I don't want what belongs to anybody else...
...So much for us...
...Pasha...
...We have taken the easy way...
...He may have something there...
...They were, in terms of the world's ideals of money, fame, and power, something less than men...
...For five dollars...
...Not they...
...What form...
...The choice was not whether or not to make the blockbuster...
...The physicists are the only hope we have...
...If we can't do anything else, we can pose as products of the ideal of production for the prevention of use, and refuse to be used...
...The Russians will make more bombs than we make and make them faster than we make them and drop them sooner than we drop them, because the Russians are more suicidal than we are...
...I mean us...
...The only thing Truman has to fear is fearlessness itself...
...We are now at the end of the line...
...And so, at the end of the line, we come full circle from the ideal of production for use to the ideal of production for the prevention of use...
...Contains Just What You Want...
...Mayer's analysis of Dr...
...One of them, a foreigner who has not yet been arrested, is terrify-ly human and full of Schlamperei, or kittenishness...
...The newspapers all say we have no choice...
...The way to get off is to get off, and not to get under his belly or ask for a transfer...
...easier still, before they made the tomahawk...
...Their faith will revive when ours does, and not the other way around...
...But the historical interest of the physicists—if there is any history to be interested—arises from a line in the petition of the twelve who plan to deliver the bomb to Harry Truman marked, "Do Not Open...
...And when I say "we," I do not mean the Germans or the Russians, any more than I mean Truman, Johnson, Acheson, the physicists, the New York Times, or the Christian—Christian, mind you—Science Monitor...
...We are still hanging on at the end of the line...
...Nobody in his right mind likes war...
...We do not fight Communism by arresting Communists and people who were once seen sitting next to a Communist in a subway train...
...It is a long time since Randolph Bourne said, "He who mounts the wild elephant goes where the wild elephant goes...
...We blew the Japanese off the face of the earth because they were tyrants who would not get out of China, and now the Communists have China and we have installed a tyranny in Japan...
...The decision to make and throw the first rock, taken by Cain and affirmed by the generations of men, was the fatal one...
...Goebbels, the cunningest man of our time, knew all about these matters...
...They will do what the Germans did under Hitler, what the Russians do under Stalin...
...When we take heart and return to our faith that here and everywhere we can build democracy by being democratic, we will live...
...Our heart has failed us...
...I just want what jines mine...
...Do I hear a second from the floor...
...The physicists and the Army are the front line bums and boobs, and we, who sit tight in the papier-mache cellar, put them there...
...We must take heart for ourselves and, in doing so, hearten them...
...And so do the Russians...
...At the end of the line the problem is the same as it was at the beginning...
...The people whose dying wish is that Truman, Johnson, Acheson, and the physicists will be cooked slowly, and from the inside out, are, at the end of the line, still kidding themselves...
...If we have no heart, we perish...
...Now we are wounded and weak, weak unto death...
...But we can still be free, and no pip-squeak government, neither Truman's nor Stalin's, can stop us...
...We, then, each one of us and, if necessary, each one of us alone, have got to get off the wild elephant...
...We were weaker after we got through using the machine gun than we were before...
...The choice was not whether or not to make the machine gun...
...When the twelve little physicists petition the President and hurry to add, "There is no one here who will not obey the President's directive," they are voicing the surrender of all of us to tyranny...
...The physicists could deliver a bomb that wouldn't go off...
...America is beaten, beaten not by the physicists or the Army, or by the Trumans or the Stalins or the Hitlers, but by the bums and boobs who comprise its population, by the people who want to be citizens without wanting to take the responsibility of citizenship...
...the choice was whether or not to make the blockbuster...
...It is too late for the wild elephant riders to get off...
...If we had wanted MILTON MAYER, special representative of the Great Books Foundation and visiting lecturer at Cleveland College, is also a lecturer for the American Friends Service Committee, the Fellowship of Reconciliation, and the Jewish Peace Foundation...
...O'MoIotov might say, "And feat form should the negotiations take...
...Not we...
...We are weaker still after using the atom bomb...
...Only the physicists are of historical, as well as psychological, interest...
...I propose to preserve this line for posterity, as long as posterity lasts, and do so here and now...
...Don't we all...
...Even in Eden, we would not choose...
...They wore their overcoats backward, forgot their umbrellas, put equations on the blackboard while their students threw spitballs at them, and desiccated in public...
...I've been offered five dollars to turn him in, but what do they think I am—an informer...
...The choice was not whether or not to make the atom bomb...
...When Sen...
...All of them and all of us will do everything but one thing...
...Truman represents America more faithfully than any man since Coo-lidge...
...The automatic rifle...
...They are the weakest of all of us because they are carrying the heaviest load...
...The only purpose of Truman's announcement was to scare us into greater hysteria, under the influence of which we will abandon such sentiments as we have against suicide...
...We can still build the new world as long as they let us work and holler...
...Of course, if they got caught they'd get shot...
...We were weaker when we got through suppressing human rights, after the first war, than we were before...
...The elephant is going too fast...
...the choice was whether or not to make the atom bomb...
...The physicists, like all academics, were ignored for a thousand years...
...It will cost only 100 or 200 million—dirt cheap, compared with the two billion spent on the original gadget—to produce something that nobody wants for the purpose of keeping anybody from getting it...
...The only trouble with the ogMM two-billion-dollar gadget is th8^| got out of the hands of the physic^ and into the hands of the Army...
...I can think of worse things, but they can't...
...America has been beaten, not by a Truman who says, just as if he were a great big grown-up Hitler, "The decision is mine," but by its people's willingness to have him make it...
...We just want to die...
...When the hysteria reaches the exploding point, the jining will be a cinch...
...We want to die...
...We grow weaker and weaker...
...The ultimatum would appeal to the Oriental in them...
...The spokesman of the twelve who petitioned Truman the other day said, "Of course we cannot afford not to have the hydrogen bomb...
...The hand grenade...
...They will feel simply terrible about doing what they have to do, and do it...
...It's nothing but the exploding cigar trick in reverse...
...We knew that the Lord wasn't kidding, but we believed the serpent anyway...
...America has been beaten by its infidelity to its own faith...
...Stalinstein might say to O'Molotov, "Look, Rastus, these Americans are our kind of people all Let's negotiate with them...
...There can be only one justification for our development of the hydrogen bomb," said the twelve little men in their little petition, "and that is to prevent its use...
...There is only one thing left to do," says this kittenish foreigner, "and that is to make a pile of hydrogen bombs as fast as we can and deliver an ultimatum to the Russians that if they attack us, we will blow ourselves up...
Vol. 14 • March 1950 • No. 3
