THE WINNER NAMES THE AGE
Smith, Lillian
The Winner Names The Age by LILLIAN SMITH Each year in June the country is drenched with commencement oratory, much of it pretty vapid and vacuous. But each year there are one or two dazzling...
...We call that century the Age of Reason, of Enlightenment, of the Rights of Man...
...but not necessarily on the right side...
...Democracies—and remember, we are trying to turn the whole world into democracies—cannot have uncontrolled free people around...
...those who believe a clergyman should preach according to his religious conscience should say so...
...But will it...
...They are the ones who fire the teacher who speaks up...
...And I shall not try...
...The easy part: the research, the thesis, the long hours in the library, the field work...
...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...
...A leader cannot be built up unless the people, the best people of a region, build him...
...What percentage...
...Each affects the others...
...Mob number three 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...
...And you will keep on painting it...
...It has often been called "the Age of Anxiety," but it will not, I think, be known in history as that...
...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...
...Enough, also, completely to paralyze public opinion— and sometimes enough even to paralyze the Christian church...
...We do not yet know...
...Now: back to you and me...
...We can still do it...
...But let us tie them a bit more tightly together...
...Such, this year, was Lillian Smith's superb address at the commencement exercises of Atlanta University...
...But we want to know...
...For us it was the best of the year and we are proud to publish it with her permission...
...Without the second, we cannot have the first...
...who fire the young minister who bows to God instead of to White Supremacy...
...For they sing to the civilized mind: the idea that every child has a right to grow...
...Our second ordeal is in everybody's mind: Atomic energy and how to control it...
...This is a new thing: it can be a wonderful thing, 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...
...In their efforts to be moderate or neutral, they either do nothing or something totally irrelevant to the situation...
...Demagogues by the bushel but not one great leader...
...Each holds high potentials for good and evil, for life and death...
...What men some of them are...
...But each year there are one or two dazzling speeches...
...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...
...Not only are many Americans offended but millions of people across the world grow resentful...
...We must go on painting our pictures, yes...
...We let down our leaders by not building them up...
...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...
...Without that protection mob number one would be in jail...
...Malraux was so right when he said, "Always, however brutal an age may actually have been, its style transmits its music only...
...Controls are necessary...
...You may not, perhaps, have heard that book's name: It was called L'Onanisme and was written by a physician named Tissot...
...indeed, they say they obey only the laws they want to...
...But in the back room, somewhere inside you, in a secret corner, you have been painting a picture: a picture you began when you were a child, long before you knew words...
...And yet, actually, the Age of Enlightenment was an age when most Western men could not read or write...
...when men looked on tuberculosis and cancer as punishments from God...
...or you may be slowly finding its form, and even now, it may be taking on a little of the strength and equilibrium of— shall we agree on a Cezanne...
...But controls must be democratic, they must function without taking away the essential civil liberties of all men...
...That is our decision...
...This is the mob on the street, usually dressed in ordinary clothes...
...They can destroy art and music and poetry and books and criticism...
...The only way this public opinion can prevail is for people to stand up and speak out...
...And when you leave the campus, that picture will go with you, along with the facts and the theories, the methods, and all the rest of it you have learned here...
...The first can be described quite simply: It is the new power of world opinion...
...A brief glance at any great age, but let's make it the Eighteenth Century, will remind us how true this is...
...It may be gay and bold and strong in its brushwork, compassionate in its feeling, or it may be as full of terror and angry protest as Picasso's Guernica...
...Suddenly the earth is stripped of its old insulated silence, its slow come-back, and is transformed into a sensitive instrument which responds with electronic speed to whatever is said and done...
...it may be blobs and dots, dribbles and improvisations, with, maybe, the bright colors, the startling accidents of a Pollock...
...Until we do, this new power of world opinion will oscillate between good and evil, life and death...
...They are the men who refuse to sell to those whose opinions they don't like...
...You and I can paint our picture but we cannot name our age...
...For the scientists are the only men on earth who know what they are talking about when they state the facts about radiation and its effect on the human race...
...A lot of us do that, too, you know...
...Both of which—to stay healthy—must be nourished on civilization's great and germinal ideas...
...All three are concerned with new forms of power...
...We are afraid of those stubborn men who continue the testing, in spite of the advice of some of the world's greatest authorities...
...And in a crisis that is a dangerous kind of behavior...
...Let's find the new faith, the new compassion, the new understanding, and yes, the new existential doubt, too, that will send us on and give us the strength and the courage to do what needs to be done...
...they already decide what can be shown on TV and in the movies...
...For otherwise democracy cannot survive, nor, I think, can civilization survive...
...Walls are down...
...the man who scares them, calling fire when there is no fire...
...What we can do is pick the winner...
...Parents were deeply impressed by it and shaped their methods of child guidance on it...
...But they behave differently...
...There are three kinds of mobs, all alike in that they worship an idol, alike in that they have set aside both reason and conscience, alike in that they hold other men's civil rights cheap, alike in that they value security more than survival, alike in that they disregard our laws, alike in that they want to hurt somebody...
...Our problem is the demagogue: the man who deliberately betrays the people...
...clergymen preached on the morality it implied...
...But we must also 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...
...But mob number two is, in my opinion, far more dangerous—because it holds more power and prestige...
...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 and behave like mad men when they want to...
...A Southern Congressman fights the civil rights bill and in doing so makes a remark insulting to the dignity of the human being...
...We are concerned that radioactive fall-out causes an increase in cancer in children...
...You have not named that picture, as yet...
...they can tear up laboratories and libraries...
...Samuel Johnson took part, as you might know he would have, in this controversy— widespread in England...
...doctors based their therapies on it and continued to do so, some of them, until the Twentieth Century...
...A few scientists have spoken clearly...
...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...
...And we do not want the politicians to brush off their words...
...If it wants to, it can measure its strength against the atom, and it can win...
...weigh their dangers in a lump and see what we can make of it...
...when epileptics were hidden away...
...the idea that a man has a right to be different in looks, beliefs, interests, and talents if he does not injure others...
...when the mentally ill were chained and some were whipped to death...
...It may be in pillowcase and sheet...
...others are trustees of school, church, hospital...
...they can even dynamite churches (as we in the South well know...
...Such was Justice Earl Warren's address at the University of Vermont last year...
...This mob is made up of the delinquents and criminals of a community who are too cowardly to do this kind of thing until toe community gives them a green light...
...Or maybe you won't...
...In the South, members of mob number two often belong to the White Citizens Council...
...this easy, cloistered way of life when one makes a friend or two, grows a bit in mind and heart and imagination, and picks up so many useful and useless facts...
...And he has chosen the good way of nonviolence, of intelligence, and compassion, and good will...
...We need leaders, not martyrs...
...For then, they hold even constitutional law cheap...
...This great intellectual era that gave us Rousseau's and Locke's writings, Voltaire's bold, sharp, ironic questions, Thomas Paine's books, and Jefferson's words on liberty and human freedom, gave us also a curious best-seller which swept Europe like wildfire...
...They are, today, a part of the human heritage...
...Dictators keep the people under control by taking away their freedom, by working them hard, starving them half to death, terrorizing them if they protest, and killing them when necessary...
...This is where world opinion can play its first great role in history...
...And it was concerned with the secret sins that children commit...
...Distance has been obliterated...
...But whatever it is, it is your picture of the human experience and you have painted it...
...WELL, it is over now, isn't it...
...Because this is true, I consider the demagogue the greatest enemy a democracy has...
...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...
...We cannot hold, for ourselves, alone, either new things made or new knowledge gained...
...nor have we yet found the new concern and new morality, and new objectivity, to match the new publicity and the new intimacy...
...This mob lives inside men's minds...
...We might call it the mob in the gray flannel suit...
...Shall we...
...Here is the crux of the matter: In a democracy, enlightened, civilized public opinion must prevail...
...some are directors of banks or presidents of insurance companies...
...Just to hear the music of them...
...But we cannot have leaders unless the best people stand by the leaders, unless we give support when support is needed...
...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...
...It is this mob-thinking that condones mob number two's vicious boycott and pressures and leaves its members still thinking of themselves as good men...
...Those who believe violence is wrong must say so...
...May I name a few...
...For the winners would not call it so: and the winners do the naming...
...You may finally say, I cannot bear the truth, even tht small image of it I have made: I'll make it softer, prettier—and less true...
...Each of us must keep on searching for our personal view of this, our only experience of life...
...Miss Smith, the celebrated novelist, last appeared in The Progressive in February 1956 with her "Negroes in Gray Flannel Suits," which stirred worldwide attention and was reprinted or reviewed in more than a score of languages.—The Editors...
...We are faced with three which men have never had to deal with before...
...Our third ordeal is living in a world with two and a half billion free people...
...For the ideas of that century, the symbols that stirred the Western mind so deeply, the daring acts, were the winners who named the baby...
...We know that nuclear power has fabulous possibilities for good...
...You may lay aside one canvas and start another but you'll keep at it, searching for a quality of truth that eludes you...
...When this happens, the free people with their limitless potentials for growth and for good will metamorphose into the mob...
...A few tactless words spoken by an official of one country can upset the government or economy of another...
...Whatever you do to it, that image of your universe, of you and your experience of life, is yours...
...We cannot, as nations, gossip about each other without being heard...
...A young white leader working shoulder to shoulder with Martin Luther King could do much to transform our South...
...You may have painted an abstraction...
...According to this expert those sins caused most of the diseases known to man: from fits to diarrhea, from insanity to blindness, deafness, muteness, cerebral palsy, rheumatism,' anemia, liver upsets, and the like...
...It behaves rather like the mob on the street but you may not hear a sound...
...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...
...they already dictate to the mass magazines...
...Let's commit ourselves, deeply and completely, not to neurotic security but to the survival of man on this earth...
...We want more of them to speak, and in morq detail...
...In a sense, it was so safe and secure, hard but pleasant, this learning process...
...searching for its poetry, its music, and its pain...
...It is this mob-thinking that pushes mob number one out on the streets...
...We are not sure...
...It was a time when educated Europeans were deeply concerned about ghosts...
...the basic idea: that God is the Ultimate Concern beyond all men, that He is the supreme symbol: not the white race, not the communist party, not capitalism, not any authoritarian group...
...Enough to paralyze the police force, the courts, the judges, the juries, and all law-enforcement machinery...
...A GI shoots a trespassing Japanese woman and half the earth shivers...
...who refuse to insure some of those they don't like...
...What happens...
...It will be on somebody's side, yes...
...We cannot trick each other without being found out...
...This kind of thing leaves a man anxious, and -hating, and sometimes wanting to hurt something—he doesn't know what or why...
...Certainly many of its members are chairmen of boards of big business...
...No, it is the democracies that feel this power...
...or it may be non-objective...
...I'll paint life as a paper doll, or a marshmallow...
...It, alone, can compel governments to use nuclear energy in the right way...
...You are as familiar with them as I am...
...The Negro group is searching for and finding its good leaders and is beginning to give these leaders their support...
...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 hysterical world opinion (which it is close to) or than nuclear energy, out of control...
...Those who believe survival is more important than security must say this, too...
...All this you have done in the front rooms of your mind...
...For it is a picture of you...
...perhaps you never will...
...And its members use this strength to hurt those who deviate from their beliefs...
...This mob's strength lies in the fact that it hires people and sells goods...
...the winner will do that...
...the idea that every one in the community has a right to be protected from violence...
...But it is not too late...
...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 Age of Reason was an age when the blind and crippled were persecuted and half starved...
...Mob number two also gives its protection to mob number one...
...Communication lines, economic and political lines are strung everywhere, each crisscrossing the others, with the result that there is no longer a place for secrets...
...What a price we have paid for silencel So many decent, warmhearted, intelligent people are silent today—not only in our South but all over our country, surrendering their opinion because they are torn between the teachings of their childhood and what they, today, know in their minds is right...
...that drives by in a car, fires a shot at someone, and drives on...
...For the mob's power can destroy our freedom as completely as can any Communist dictator...
...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...
...But it comes to a region when an idol is worshipped instead of God— and when men give up civilization's germinal beliefs...
...Or if you dare not look beneath the surface of life, or above it, it is probably as literal as an amateur photograph...
...to turn the mob spirit into the civilized Christian spirit that we should have down here...
...And that is the way we think, today, of those troubled, terrible times...
...Let us look at mob number three: It is difficult to do so because it is invisible...
...Or silent because they are afraid to make the hard and necessary choice...
...Ah, how everyone whispers this to himself, his family, his close friends...
...A powerful control is constitutional law...
...But you have not decided, yet, what to name it...
...we know it can become a great creative force in the future, but what troubles people everywhere is its danger to us right now: 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...
...As the years go by, you may decide its colors are too harsh, its lines too broken, too jagged, and you may do that cruel thing touch it up a little...
...But this power is given it by mob number three...
...Let's get to work and do it...
...What I want us to look at together, now, is a kind of rough, crude blueprint of this age of ours: of the common ordeals—full of danger and opportunities which we, regardless of private views or personal interests, must face together...
...Let's begin with the least dangerous: mob number one...
...Nor will it soon have one...
...This problem of free people and their new and amazing power does not disturb Communist countries— not as long as they have a strong secret police...
...Not the dictator: that is Communism's problem...
...Do these men go out on the street and blow up a church with dynamite...
...Even so, even though the Eighteenth Century was chock-full of hysteria and superstition and irrationality we are right to call it the Age of Enlightenment...
...It is obvious that we have not yet developed an earth-size courtesy and tact...
...others are professional men...
...But the two strongest and best controls come from within a free man's own mind: his conscience and his reason...
...What your style is, I don't know...
...for only by searching for the meaning life has for each one of u« can we, ourselves, become human beings fit for a great age...
...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...
...They have a better way: they destroy the church from, the inside with their cynicism, their hate, their panic, and their pressures...
...This is the number one subversive man in our culture...
...This, all this, came out of the great Age of Reason...
...A democracy can't do without it...
...How many of their children will be defective and malformed...
...That is your secret...
...But it will work only if the people believe in law and respect its processes...
...Witches, too, were still a hot topic...
...And suddenly, everybody everywhere is either glad or sorry...
...Searching for the underside of meaning...
...We are concerned that the fallout has already affected the genes of a percentage of our young people everywhere...
...Although most of us call it names—and I'm sure you, too, in your nasty moods, have plastered it with insults...
...They sneer at the high courts of their government...
...What are the controls that are valid and will work...
...For young Dr...
...Remember we won't do the naming but we will pick the winner...
...And all will shape the earth's future...
...Sometimes we forget this...
...It is an age that has no name...
...And will remain so as long as men live on this earth...
...Even the blunders and crimes of individuals can make foreign offices tremble...
...This is the mob that dynamites a church or a home...
...There is always a dark underside to every age, a festering ill-smelling slum where man's enemies and errors breed...
...This is a totally new thing: this publicity, this tied-togetherness, and this capacity for quick reaction...
...It was translated into English, French, and German and was read by the intelligentsia...
...Not my picture of my experience of life: if you want to see a smidge of that, you can read my books...
...One stupid act, today, can bring on a world crisis, tomorrow...
...We gave that support, every time, to the cheap, foul-mouthed demagogue who appealed not to our reason and conscience but to our anxiety...
...The answer lies first in leadership...
...All I know is, that style is patterned on you: on your unique way of looking at your world...
...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...
...King knows what every leader of stature must learn: that the way is as important as the goal we seek...
...the idea that truth is a search that must never stop, that both reason and imagination are necessary to that search, that the scientific method is neces-sary, too, and cannot be inter-fered with except when human life is jeopardized or profound human values cheapened...
...For the germinal ideas it brought to life, the vision of man's possibilities which is communicated to the future in impassioned words and symbolic acts, will never die...
...and that his laws of love and brotherhood and mercy and compassion must be obeyed...
...No, they destroy his reputation, instead...
...Do they shoot a man down...
...And because we can, I would like for us to take a look at the conditions, the ordeals out of which the winning ideas, the triumphant attitudes and technics will come...
...They cannot have this much power on the loose...
...the idea that the way a thing is done, the means used, are as important as the end sought...
...the idea that all people can speak out and say what they think...
...Let me remind you of a few other things that were happening in this great Age of Reason...
...We can't, here, go into the deep reasons for mob thinking...
...The Oxford University magazines were full of discussions of ghosts...
...this man is the people's real enemy...
...For fifty years, the South has had no great leader from the white race...
...that writes anonymous letters, makes anonymous phone calk, threatens and sometimes kills...
...Those who believe a man has a right to be different must say so...
...We can try but world opinion is powerful and will have its say about it...
...They can, when out of control, do all these terrifying things because freedom gives them strength...
...We forget that always an age is named for its triumphs, always for the big ideas that add stature to the human being...
...We are afraid of politicians and atomic committees who try to keep secret the scientists' warnings...
...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...
...They are not likely to blow up the earth with their power but in their ignorance and inexperience, they may blow up civilization...
...Another GI shoots an alleged peeping-tom in Formosa and a riot takes place in which the American Embassy is left in shambles...
...that burns the cross...
...they can jail scientists and intellectuals and artists...
...For he deliberately breaks down the controls of the church, of conscience, of civilization, of the courts to get the people under his control...
...They put the pressure on...
...What can we do about it...
...of your dreams and feelings, your sudden visions, your awareness, your hopes and despairs, a picture of all that this fabulous human experience has meant to you up to now—or failed to mean...
...we usually don't...
...What I want to show you is something else...
...This, too, is part of the price we have paid for our silence and for our walling ourselves away from the great ideas of our age...
...A free man with the vote, and with wages that give him purchasing power, is armed with some hefty weapons...
...I could not change it if I wanted to...
...It is obvious that mob number two has enormous power...
Vol. 21 • August 1957 • No. 8
