BOTH YOUR HOUSES
Mayer, Milton
Both Your Houses By MILTON MAYER I DON'T know why, exactly, but I would rather be Alger Hiss than Whittaker Chambers. I would rather be Harry Bridges than Louis Budenz. I would rather be Owen...
...Communism is a rotten, red-handed institution out of which no good has ever come or ever will...
...If my refusal to run with the hounds makes me a Communist, close your doors and pull your blinds when you see me coming...
...We are not...
...I have been called worse names by better people than you...
...What are we doing— keeping our noses clean, or our skirts...
...In Christ's name, Federal Councillors, let's be something...
...Last time out, I was a Nazi because I did not want my country to destroy its democracy fighting Hitler, and neither did the Nazis...
...They are potentially human, both of these Joes...
...Christ was too busy to spend His time being effective and influential...
...And what happened to the pacifist "effectiveness" and "influence...
...Every time a pacifist tells Americans to disarm these days, a ComMILTON MAYER, a regular contributor to The Progressive, lectures through' out the country for the American Friends Service Committee, the Fellowship of Reconciliation, the Jewish Peace Foundation, and the Great Books Foundation, His articles have appeared in Common- weal, Harper's, Fellowship, Negro Digest, Life, The Reader's Digest, The Nation, and The Saturday Evening Post, munist cheers...
...First we avoid the Communists, or anyone who is called a Communist or convicted (justly or unjustly) of being one...
...Some of my pacifist friends show disconcerting signs of succumbing to the anti-Communist terror on which, historically, anti-Communist totalitarianism rides in...
...What are we afraid of...
...The Soviet Union is an implacable tyranny and a perversion of Communism, which is itself a perversion of human nature and of human society...
...America is in no greater danger from the Communists than it is from Chambers, Budenz, McCarthy, and Bentley, and it is in mortal danger from both...
...He can vote against bad motions, refuse to sign bad resolutions, and fight against bad ideas...
...The Federal Council has just endorsed an American Legion proposal to establish a "clearing house for information" on subversive individuals and organizations...
...He was too busy to spend His time protecting His integrity...
...Let's go it alone, like Christians, like Americans, like democrats, like men, and carry the fight to both of them...
...I am going to heaven, with an awful lot of God's help, and nothing can stop me but my own corruption, and nobody can corrupt me but myself...
...Our jobs...
...In the end we are one with Peter, who, when Christ was had up for sedition, said, "I know him not...
...Sure...
...What really bothers some of my pacifist friends—and some of my liberal friends who find themselves fighting racism and child labor in company with the Communists—is the terror of being caught in the company of the Communists...
...I know where I'm going, no matter who's going with me...
...If we steer clear of them, they will assuredly carry the day...
...We think we have got to stay on the right side of the American temper, even if the American temper is rabid...
...Come on, my fellow-Americans, let's hang on to our souls and win the world...
...The pacifists are in favor of American disarmament, too...
...Then we find we have to avoid the Socialists, who, we are already told, are as bad as the Communists...
...Often in battle there can be no doubt that if a man will throw away his arms, and fall on his knees before his pursuers, he may escape death...
...The Federal Council is blackmailed, or moved, by its own necessity (as it defines necessity) to prove that it is safe and sound, which it will fail to do, and, be is said, by its pious hope that it can moderate the lynching bee, which it will also fail to do...
...If we have the truth, let's carry it to the Communists, and if we can't reach them abroad, let's reach them at home...
...The easiest and the noblest way is not to be disabling others, but to be improving yourselves...
...The Federal Council of Churches has been blackmailed, as Christ was not, into joining the anti-Communist lynching bee...
...We have to keep clear of them or lose our integrity...
...Do you want to avoid being called a Communist...
...Half the world is Communist...
...Christ's work, which was, I should suppose, as important as ours, took him among the lepers and the infidels, and among the harlots and the publicans...
...and my accusers are keen and quick, and the faster runner, who is unrighteousness, has overtaken them...
...Between them, they have you coming and going, as long as you are fatheaded enough to come or go either way...
...What are we afraid of...
...Integrity...
...II A case in point was the Mid-Century Peace Conference in Chicago a few weeks ago...
...Half the world is Communist...
...that is not a way of escape which is either possible or honorable...
...You can't tell me anything about Communism...
...We have let the Stalins and the McCarthys, between them, maneuver our country into a position where a man is guilty until he is proved innocent—and he can pot, be proved innocent if he maintains, on any other day than the Fourth of July, that all men are created equal...
...and in other dangers, there are other ways of escaping death, if a man is willing to say and do anything...
...What happened...
...As I recall, he did not...
...I guess I had my belly full of the Red Menace, which always was a fraud, still is, and always will be...
...Half the world is Communist...
...It has let itself be polarized...
...The people who are hunting down Communists in America are not, in my opnion, trying to save America...
...He was turning the world upside down: He had work to do...
...We have let the Communists and the McCarthys, between them, run us to cover...
...We have to keep clear of them or lose our influence...
...Joe Stalin and Joe McCarthy are allies...
...I don't, as I say, know why, exactly...
...If my refusal to howl with the pack makes me a traitor, call me Benedict Arnold...
...Well, sir, the press described the affair as a pacifist conference and indicated that the pacifists were no different from the Communists on the subject of Mother Russia...
...I do not have time to spend my life ducking, dodging, alibiing, apologizing, and asking my fellowmen for a loyalty oath before I shake hands with them...
...Neither will anti-Communist totalitarianism, so I don't like that kind, either...
...And what will your country be like when you have saved it with them...
...Our appearances...
...The Communists are in favor of American disarmament...
...Why, all the better...
...What are we doing—saving democracy or trying to get into the country club...
...What if McCarthy sees us carrying it to them...
...What are the pacifists afraid of...
...If American disarmament is right, it is right no matter who is for or against it...
...Once a man has been called a Communist, he is through...
...for that runs faster than death...
...But what's a little embarrassment in a world like this...
...Then we find, regretfully, that we have to avoid our friends who have been caught (guiltily or innocently, it doesn't matter) in the net...
...They have us on the ropes, begging McCarthy for mercy...
...IV The way—and the only way—to stop error is with truth...
...We seem to be worried unduly, and, in any case, ineffectively, about keeping our skirts clean...
...But let's carry it effectively...
...We want to stop Communism...
...I have been thrown out of better saloons than yours...
...The pacifist is in favor of Russian disarmament, too, of course, but by that time the Communists are cheering him so loudly that nobody hears him say it...
...But we have got to be where we can fight them, and that is where they are, in their meetings and their conferences and their conventions, in their committes and their homes and their hearts...
...He needs it exactly as badly as they do...
...Decent men have got to be for decent things, no matter what indecent men do...
...In our desperate effort to avoid being lynched, we find, regretfully, that we have to be lynchers ourselves, denouncing and informing as frantically as any Budenz...
...The worst that can happen to a good man in bad company is that he may seem bad to fools...
...If any nation could be saved by hunting down Communists, Nicholas II would have saved Russia...
...Communist totalitarianism won't let me do any of those things, so I don't like Communist totalitarianism...
...Then you have got to join the Communist Party, which no liberty-loving American would touch with a pitchfork...
...And now I depart hence condemned by you to suffer the penalty of death—they too go their ways condemned by the truth to suffer the penalty of villainy and wrong...
...Let's fight them both...
...What in the world can happen to a good man at a bad conference...
...Is there any evidence that this crew has ever been devoted to democracy...
...So the pacifists, instead of going and fighting on the floor and trying to convert the Communists and, if necessary, walking out a la Vishin-sky, scurried for their holes...
...Are we to oppose what is right because the Communists, who are for it for the wrong reasons, are for it...
...I do not want to live in terror, any more than I want to live as a terrorist...
...The McCarthys and the Stalins both know this...
...We have to keep clear of the Communists or lose our effectiveness...
...We don't dare move, or talk, or enter a meeting where, according to what somebody told somebody else on reliable authority, the Communists are...
...If we try to stop it by tyrannizing ourselves, the whole world will be Communists, because tyranny, whether it is called Fascism or Communism or Americanism, is the condition of Communism...
...Communism is the consequence of proletarianism, or prop-ertyiessness...
...The other half of the things the Communists are for, any decent man has got to be against...
...The Communists took over and drew up a lot of resolutions condemning America and failing to mention the role of the People's Paradise in the current disorder...
...we would not have been the first such...
...Between the upper and the nether stones of anti-Communism and Communism, the rights of man are grinding to dust...
...We think that we will, if we are tarred by the McCarthys, lose the influence we haven't got...
...No more than there is that the Communists have ever been, and the Communists have never been at all...
...I've heard about the Communist kind, but the kind I've seen close up is the anti-Communist kind...
...And what does it matter which one of them carries it, as long as both of them, in their present state of mind, will destroy the rights of man...
...Then you have got to join the Ail-American Conference against Communism, which no liberty-loving American would touch with a fork...
...Let's forget all about being called something...
...The way to stop intellectual and moral error— the two kinds of error in Communism—is with intellectual and moral truth...
...Worm of the dust that I am, I take as my mentor in these matters a man who had more than all these at stake, and who faced the McCarthys of his day, after they had convicted him of being a Communist, and said: "I would rather die having spoken in my manner, than speak in your manner and live...
...Our effectiveness...
...Exoneration of any man charged is impossible...
...So much for Communism and the Communists...
...For neither in war nor yet at law ought I or any man to use every way of escaping death...
...At the moment the hunters are a shade more un-American than the hunted...
...Can anything happen that can make him or his cause less good...
...We want to stop Communism...
...it is sunk...
...Then the Negroes and the Jews...
...They mean a state in which every tenth man is a Chambers, a Budenz, a Mathews, a Gitlow, a Bentley, a state where no man dares speak his mind to any other, where the mutual faith, the mutual hope, and the mutual love that alone make democracy possible are as dead as the Christian religion will be...
...And I will remain, all unruffled, at your service, providing you do not require my assistance in converting my own, my native land, into a limepit like Russia...
...Boloney...
...At its head are the Hearsts, and the exploiters of the veterans, and the Kluxers, and the Gerald L. K. Smiths...
...The pacifists all signed up, and then the word went around—doubtless true—that the Communists were muscling in...
...If we Americans were on the verge of gaining the whole world and losing our own souls, our behavior would be understandable...
...Do you know what the words "police state" mean...
...What we have got to do, if our work is important, is stay on the right side of right, with or without an audience or in spite of an audience...
...The back of my hand to the eith-er-or Inquisition...
...The difficulty, my friends, is not to avoid death, but to avoid unrighteousness...
...But we are on the verge of losing our souls and the whole world both...
...I am old and move slowly, and the slower runner has overtaken me...
...We think we have got to do whatever it takes to "hold our audience" which we haven't got...
...Boy, oh, boy, a new Red Network—and in Lizzie Dilling's original "clearing house," that is, blacklist, the names of the leaders of the Federal Council led all the rest...
...I am going to spend my life talking to anyone who will listen to me, going to any doggone meeting I want to go to, joining any doggone committee I want to join, attending any doggone conference I feel like attending, and casting my sacred, secret ballot any doggone way I please...
...The last Man Who had important work to do had an audience of twelve, and in the end one of them betrayed Him and another ran out on Him...
...We want to stop Communism...
...If you think that by killing men you can prevent some one from censuring your evil lives, you are mistaken...
...our work is to humanize them...
...These Chamberses, Budenzes, Mathewses, Gitlows, Bentleys—you can have them and save your country with them, if you can...
...III I put it to you, my friends: The great Anti-Communist crusade in this country, and in every country, is, as it always has been, a crusade against democracy in the name of anti-Communism...
...The Communists are laughing their heads off at us...
...Are we going to walk into the squeeze play between the antidemocratic Communists and the anti-democratic anti-Communists...
...If we try to stop it by war, the whole world will be Communist, whoever wins...
...Is it our integrity we are trying to preserve, or our appearances...
...But I never was a Nazi or a Communist, and I'll never be either, and nobody will ever make of me what I'm not...
...Our "integrity...
...And I would rather, far, be stranded on a desert island with Judy Cop-Ion than with Elizabeth Bentley...
...I have got to try to stop them both, beginning with the one that menaces democracy right here and right now...
...The McCarthys who crucified Him had Him dead to right on guilt by association, and He never said a mumbling word...
...War is the quickest way ever discovered to make people propertyless in wholesale lots...
...Are we going to fall for the polarization come-on...
...If we try to stop it by lynching Communists, the whole worid will be Communist...
...That suits the Communists right down to the ground...
...Neither one of them knows what Americanism is...
...I would rather be Owen Lattimore than Joseph McCarthy...
...This time out, I'm a Communist because I do not want my country to destroy its democracy fighting Stalin, and neither do the Communists...
...A pox on the polarizers...
...Thus the pacifists are embarrassed...
...Are we Americans yokels...
...If we yield to the terror and the anti-democratic Communists don't get us, the anti-democratic anti-Communists must...
...The Council itself is called "Communistic" by the American Council of Churches, a small pawn of the anti-Communist cabal, and by John T. Flynn, the same great brain who has discovered that Norman, and not J. Parnell, Thomas is the enemy of the American Republic...
...I have had my fill of the Red Menace...
...Do you want to avoid being called a fascist...
...Half of all the things the Communists say they are for, any decent man has got to be for...
...They have so succeeded in focusing all our attention and energies on steering clear of them that we have no attention or energy for anything else...
...Look at the melancholy situation of the Federal Council of Churches in Christ in America...
...he will have us into his parlor, and we'll carry it to him, too...
...But I will not engage in the national pastime of lynching Communists, probable Communists, and possible Communists...
...This business of saving appearances is pernicious business...
...What are we doing—turning the world upside down or competing for the Young Man of the Year Award from the Junior Chamber of Commerce...
...Our deadly error—we few pacifists and liberals and radicals who are left—is in thinking we are influential...
...Do you suppose they mean a state with policemen in uniform...
Vol. 14 • July 1950 • No. 7
