Only Seventy-five
Mayer, Milton
Only Seventy-five Still time enough to change the world BY MILTON MAYER Seventy-five years ago, a nickel Hershey bar cost a nickel; a gentleman removed his hat when a lady entered the elevator;...
...No," said Lola, "it's no good talking to friends, and anyway you're not sick enough to talk to Harry...
...But not all of us...
...Today they're pretty bad, on the whole...
...You're just an ordinary neurotic...
...And so they did...
...It goes on coming out of its monthly corner swinging...
...I want you," said Lola, "to talk to a psychotherapist...
...The Progressive deserves better of its...
...But it was a world- America's was—of promises...
...He thought that what I needed to do was take it a little easy...
...The dream of progress ended with the Gatling gun, which fired ten bullets a second, a machine for mowing men...
...The best of life for The Progressive, when things were looking up instead of down, is gone bye-bye—life without Reagan, life without fear, life with a nickel Hershey...
...We feel, not progressively but regressively, that we are becoming strangers to one another...
...Fighting Bob and Fighting Morris deserved better of their time...
...Mel A neurotic?' "You," said Lola...
...Anybody who gets dejected because he discovers all of a sudden that he's seventyfive is an ordinary, commonplace, run-ofthe- mill neurotic...
...Since Verdun it's been war, war, war, with the America that was promises turned into the world's greatest alltime war-maker...
...There is fear, great fear, abroad in the one-time feckless land, fear and mistrust and wantonness and decadence...
...still less, since she is my doctor, am I a stranger to her...
...and Ma said to Art the grocer, "Throw in a few soupgreens, Art...
...Except for war...
...So I talked to a psychotherapist about talking to him and discovered that that would run into money—which dejected me further...
...Things aren't that feckless and frolicsome any more...
...Beautiful Lola Steinbaum is no stranger to me...
...You don't see The Progressive taking it a little easy at seventy-five...
...It hasn't a prayer against the big battalions...
...The world has been changing these last years, these last decades...
...It is a deadly earnest voice, carrying the fight to the farthest places—you don't see it taking it "a little easy...
...Make no mistake here: It was a crummy world when Fighting Bob and Fighting Morris came strutting on to the scene seventy- five years ago...
...The Great War gave way to a greater, and the greater opened the way to the annihilation of the race...
...The Progressive reads me a stern lesson at seventy-five, on its birthday and mine...
...It is too bad that the American promise produces, in the end, a moral midget to lead it whooping and hollering down the primrose path to the ultimate instant of perdition...
...A little easy" were his words...
...The good uphill fight all the way...
...The Progressive in a time of terrible diminution is not dejected...
...The universal hope is that things won't get worse any faster than they are getting worse now...
...The Progressive calls for help, and strong-hearted men and women, some of them in the ardor of youth, some of them seventy-five, respond, and the fight of Fighting Bob and Fighting Morris goes doggedly forward...
...Publications like The Progressive were popping up all over, blowing the whistle on the malefactors of great wealth and the perpetrators of all manner of wickedness...
...Seventy- five feckless, frolicsome years ago...
...It calls its readers and its writers forth to battle to change the world against the most hopeless odds imaginable...
...From 1914 to 1918 man exerted his every effort to prove that he wasn't corrigible after all...
...Seventyfive years ago, when the world was young, Fighting Bob LaFollette established The Progressive and Fighting Morris Mayer established The Progressive's Milton Mayer...
...The best of life went bye-bye when the New Deal gave way to the War Deal and the New Dealers forgot that while there are worse things than war, war is the cause of all of them...
...Nuts...
...And things got better for a while—the terrible injustices of a raw society progressively alleviated by the efforts of the progressives and the Progressives, and at last a kind of shreds-and-patches safety net came into being in the 1930s...
...But it has not been changing in the direction The Progressive calls it to...
...Fighting Bob and Fighting Morris were wide-eyed optimists, Middle Western prairie types, who knew that things would get better and better faster and faster, who knew (you heard me) that their children would be better off than they were, who knew (that's right) that whatever they meant by "better," and they may have meant different things, things would be better in that most feckless and frolicsome of new lands, America...
...is not necessary to hope in order to undertake, nor to succeed in order to persevere...
...You hear it calling to its votaries to be of good heart and remember that it is only seventy-five...
...I suppose," I said, "I could talk to my friend Harry the shrink...
...At the time of The Progressive's hydrogen bomb expose a few years ago, when the Government threatened to put the magazine out of business, somebody at a small gathering said that the Government might succeed in doing just that, and Erwin Knoll, the editor of The Progressive, said that it wasn't the business of The Progressive to stay in business—it was the business of The Progressive to change the world...
...The faint-hearted fall away...
...Its motto might well be that of Charles the Bold (or was it William the Silent...
...Only Seventy-five Still time enough to change the world BY MILTON MAYER Seventy-five years ago, a nickel Hershey bar cost a nickel...
...Milton Mayer has been The Progressive's Roving Editor for more than half of its and his seventy-five years...
...You see The Progressive come out of its corner each month fighting the good fight at seventyfive...
...And then things took a sharp, good-time-Charley turn for the worse...
...There was a Progressive Dream, and a Socialist Dream, and an Anarchist Dream of a better world, and the founding fathers of The Progressive and me knew—I said knew—that they would leave the world a better place than they found it...
Vol. 48 • July 1984 • No. 7
