ON THE OTHER HAND
Mayer, Milton
I Used to Be a 'Tribune' Man Myself THE FIRST personal column, properly so-called, that I ever conducted was "The Vertebral Column" in The "E" Weekly, of Engle-wood High School in Chicago. The...
...I signed my "E" Weekly column "Milton S.," my middle name being Sanford...
...One went off as I looked out the window...
...The Devil Is Dead Nearly everybody in America was glad that Stalin was dead.' Oh, how we hated that man...
...Somebody else said, "If there is, we'll put him on a plane for Wisconsin...
...It doesn't do any good to tell nearly everybody that war spreads Communism, and that the last two wars prove it...
...What McCarthy might do is get anti-Catholicism on its feet in this country...
...or to the pronunciation of words like "harass...
...You have got to fight fire with fire, nearly everybody says...
...I clipped this headline, wrote, "He kin, but will he...
...Still...
...above it, sent it in to R.H.L.'s column in the Tribune, and "made the Line...
...The columnist selected them, marked them for bold, light, or italic type, wrote a "last line" for the column, put his initials at the bottom, and there it was...
...Everything is within a stone's throw...
...The groundhog was an annual item...
...I don't know what it it takes, these days, to detonate anything, but who's to keep a man from checking a brown paper parcel in mid-town Manhattan...
...The columnist might write a few little items himself, or stir up competition or controversy among the contributors...
...In those days there was a swindler in Chicago named Koretz...
...maybe it was the circling over the city for three hours the foggy afternoon I got there, trying to land...
...Arendt says, "It belongs to totalitarian thinking to conceive of a final conflict at all...
...The United States government sent an insulting message of condolence, the greatest diplomatic stroke of the new Administration since the new U. S. delegate to the UN refused to shake hands with the Russian delegate...
...Then I heard the noise of cars and trucks...
...I suppose it was the Marinara sauce, though I must say you have got, or at least I have got, to go to New York for really good Marinara...
...I hadn't paid any attention to the air raid shelter signs...
...Quoting Chambers' favorite quotation from Silone, "The final conflict will be between the Communists and the ex-Communists," Dr...
...Everything is so handy...
...New York in Spring, '53 I reached New York the night of March 22 in a state of breaking exhaustion, almost too tired to lift the forkful of spaghetti Marinara that I grabbed on Lexington Axenue before flopping down for the night...
...Of course, that was an airport bus, and the voters in last year's Wisconsin election aren't all riding around in airport buses...
...There were 23 passengers, and no fewer than 20 laughed...
...The Irish The Commonweal, although it subscribes to the Russian-American Treaty which provides that each party prefers to destroy the earth rather than let the other rule it, proves that there is no Catholic conspiracy, and so do Integrity and The Catholic Worker, which are bolder, and therefore less influential, than the Commonweal...
...Maybe it's possible for Germans, Russians, or even (quien sabe...
...I stood at the window in my nightie, listening...
...Then there was— my watch said 3:18 a.m.—an immense explosion...
...Or exercisers, howling vilenesses into the gathering night...
...No fire, police, or ambulance sirens, however, and I remembered having heard that use of sirens in New York was now reserved for air raid warnings...
...He was caught, and his relatives undertook to make good to his victims...
...The Commonweal is a very good journal in any context, and, in the current context, a great one...
...Columns were actually conducted...
...O'Leary's barn, where the Chicago Fire either did or didn't originate...
...It was my first published work, outside The "E" Weekly...
...Its editors fight McCarthyism as Catholics, and, like all other Catholics, they are just as Catholic as the Pope and, on questions outside faith and morals, just as authoritative...
...Somebody else said, "It used to be a fine old name...
...So many people so close together, all of them scrabbling so hard for money or status or whatever, living over-stimulated lives, hurrying to diversions which, if they lived to be a hundred and went out every evening, they would never succeed in exhausting...
...Everything is so handy...
...People sent in jokes, verse, or little essays...
...But American press services estimated 5,000,000 Russians in Moscow walked mourning by his bier...
...Maybe it was the breaking exhaustion...
...A crime was MILTON MAYER has been writing regularjy for The Progressive for twelve years, but this month marks the first serious effort to provide him with the freewheeling status of a columnist...
...Since most people, and nearly all Americans, are neither Communists nor ex-Communsits, the Cham-bers-Budenz Armageddon presents the somewhat less than democratic spectacle of the hundred of millions of stupid sheep caught between the wise bad wolves and the wise good ones...
...You must tell me if I am wrong, but it appears to me that there are three, and only three, alternatives here, and that these three reduce to two: (1) Either these 5,000,000 people (and, presumably, 10, or 50, or 100 million more outside Moscow) are moral imbeciles, who love evil...
...But I wasn't afraid...
...Almost anything bad will spread now, and nearly everybody has accepted the view that you can't stop something bad from spreading except by spreading something else bad...
...The bad to be spread, nearly everybody says, is not so bad as the bad to be kept from spreading...
...I remained quietly where I was and then went back to bed, still listening, still unafraid, and after a while I fell asleep...
...maybe it was the billboards announcing that this or that highway would be closed in case of enemy attack...
...Or a bomb's, now...
...Ted Cook's Cuckoos," in which the columnist was all of the contributors under wild and phony names, was so good that people bought the Hearst papers for it...
...Here was portrayed evil consummate—a creature of human form with no human virtue whatever, a man whose own mother could not have mourned his passing, as, indeed, it was indicated she didn't...
...Skyscraper civilization made it possible for more people to live closer together, moving faster, than ever before...
...Including us...
...The sub-title of "The Vertebral Column" was, "The Backbone of the Paper...
...I hadn't been in New York for a long time, and, as always, I was bewildered by the city...
...In the cases of either (1) or (2), I can see where we would kill them for their own good, as well as for ours...
...Mayer, who lectures widely for the American Friends Service Committee, has written for many American publications, Including Harper's, Life, Fellowship, Negro Digest, The Commonweal, and The Christian Century...
...They say that New York has everything—even privacy...
...It is a community so intensely competitive for all of the goods it has to give, that all pleasantries seem pro forma, all conversations turned on and off and played over and over, all relaxation purposeful, and all silences dull...
...I'm sure that more people plan to spend an evening at home in New York than in all the rest of America together...
...I got up and looked out the open window—my room was on a court—and saw nothing in the sky...
...Nearly everybody replies that you aren't realistic...
...So maybe it wasn't official yet...
...I would still vote McCarthy Least Likely to Succeed...
...Things were different, as I say, or, as the poet says, America was a promises...
...It was as if the whole country had become a race of dirty little boys writing dirty words on fences...
...Arendt says ought to be obvious...
...There was no Jewish conspiracy and no Catholic conspiracy...
...There were fashions which came and went...
...It is a place—/ think—so highly and magnificently organized that, as in all organisms, the central machinery moves the constituent parts around to serve its purposes, not theirs...
...Public officials—so far have we fallen—were glad...
...Now I have finished reading Time's account of Stalin's life and death, under the title, "Killer of the Masses...
...New Yorkers, of course, say that you wouldn't want to visit there, but it's a wonderful place to live...
...The man next to me at the airline terminal, at 42nd and Park, checked a brown paper parcel...
...Somebody said, On the Other Hand By Milton Mayer 23 "There'd better not be...
...The ex-Communists—that is, the professional ex-Communists like Chambers and Budenz, not the innocents who once happened to be Communists and now happen to be something else—are just as crazy about the hatred of Communism as they used to be about Communism...
...Certainly most Germans didn't think they were slaves under Hitler...
...You have got to fight Communism with war, which is not so bad as Communism...
...I supposed, before I went to Germany after the war, that Hitler was a terrible monster (I still suppose so) and that everyone else (above all, the enslaved Germans) would suppose so, too...
...in the Chicago Tribune...
...There were a few lights on in other courts...
...He was also a Christian, which fact, then no less than now, may have hurt him...
...Nowadays there is no being concerned with the Rosenbergs or McCarthy without being concerned with its being terrible for the Jews (or for the Catholics) or the Jews (or the Catholics) being terrible...
...At one state of the career of "The Vertebral Column," there was a "said-the" fashion, which took a long time to burn itself out...
...Example: " 'There's something in that, too,' said the burglar as he put his hand in the cuspidor...
...the deadliness of our crisis is that it isn't...
...It was either a bomb or a refinery, likelier, from the blast, a bomb...
...Including the whole population now...
...Maybe it was because I wasn't listening, but I didn't hear anybody say either that it was terrible for the Jews or that the Jews were terrible...
...as the Russians say) Americans to be slaves without knowing it...
...They are still desperate fanatics—turned inside-out— and their new creed requires the same sacrifice of means to ends that their old one did...
...That suggests a failure of communication, upon which alternative I prefer, if it's all the same with you, to rest...
...a crime—and a lawsuit a lawsuit...
...It must have been the Marinara sauce on the spaghetti...
...2) or they are mental imbeciles, who don't even know they are slaves...
...America was promises, and on a $40 salary my Old Man fed his wife and two children roast beef (once during the week, with lots of cold left over), steak (on Saturday night), and chicken every Sunday...
...In 1928 the greatest statesman of his time was rejected because he was a Catholic...
...The column was called, "A Line o' Type or Two...
...Voices of Europe," a series of recordings he made abroad last year, is currently being broadcast over more than 100 radio stations affiliated with the National Association of Educational Broadcasters...
...I couldn't sleep, and I lay awake in the stillness, meditating (after the manner of dark-hour meditation) the constant, subcutaneous perfidy of human relations...
...The recent Commonweal article on "The Ex-Communists," by Hannah Arendt, goes deeper and straighter to the heart of McCarthyism than anything I have read except John Strachey's articles on "The Absolutists," which made the same point in the Manchester Guardian...
...That's the only example of the "said-the" fashion that I can remember, for Freudian reasons...
...After living in Germany I'm mystified...
...A newspaper headline on this point read: "Koretz Kin Repay $400,000...
...I didn't know what to do...
...The next morning there was nothing in the papers about it and nobody I talked to had heard it...
...Teachers and even preachers were glad he was dead...
...Maybe there are different ideas of slavery...
...The Irish and McCarthy McCarthy won't be President, I Predict...
...And I suppose that a dweller there might find privacy, as the visitor, naturally, doesn't...
...In the case of (3), the implications are a little more complicated...
...The great columnists were F.P.A...
...B.L.T., when he died, was succeeded on the Tribune by Richard Henry Little, R.H.L...
...Bang, and they all move apart, still faster...
...But just let him blow up, and the anti-Catholicism which the intellectual liberals now display in their analysis of him and McCarran will spread...
...In those days things were different...
...The words "controversy" and "controversial" in those days referred to such things as the locations of Mrs...
...Your aim," she says to them, "to make of democracy a 'cause' in the strict ideological sense contradicts the rules and laws by which we live and let live...
...What Dr...
...That won't happen as long as he has masses of Protestants fooled, as the Catholic Hitler had them fooled in Germany, with his anti-Communism...
...In an airport bus in San Francisco a month ago, while we were waiting to take off, the agent stuck his head in the door and asked if there was a passenger named McCarthy...
...in the New York World and B.L.T...
...3) or there is a failure of communication somewhere...
...The Irish and The Jews The swindler Koretz was a Jew, and so, a little later in Chicago, were Loeb and Leopold...
Vol. 17 • May 1953 • No. 5
