WE HAVE GOT TO START FROM HERE
Mayer, Milton
We Have Got To Start From Here By MILTON MAYER IT SEEMS—why does it always seem in these true stories?—that a Southern town decided to spend $85,000 on the improvement of its school. When it came...
...like Wilson's war to save the world for democracy, their certain collapse will disillusion our friends, gladden our enemies, and precipitate, here at home, another orgy of "realism" like the '20's...
...But we will have to raise the standard of living in America if we are going to reduce it to the point where no man is rich...
...Verily, we have what it takes, we white folks...
...Sentiment in America is moving to the right, and moving fast...
...It is huddling us still closer together, still further widening all the gaps that have appeared since Jefferson's time...
...And the war, which has given all of us work at killing, at teaching to kill, and at making the means of killing, is costing us a great deal of the insufficient bread we produced before the war began...
...Those rights are sacred, and liberty, without them for a model, would have long since had the axe laid to it in every land...
...But there are other rights, which even Jefferson overlooked...
...The reason is that Jefferson, though the most worldly man of his time except Franklin, was a provincial...
...Gentlemen," he said, "do you mean to tell me that it is going to take all of that $85,000 to fix up the white school so the white children can get a decent education...
...I am in favor of reducing our standard of living, in doing so, to the point where no man in America is rich...
...And under all these conditions, more common today than they were in Jefferson's time, the gulf between white and black, Jew and Gentile, worker and owner, worker and jobless, country and town, has widened...
...I do not know if Mr...
...The New Dealers know that the New Deal is dead, and not one of them bothers to deny it...
...We are all in the desert together in this less than best of all possible worlds...
...We may disown the sordid doctrine that charity begins at home...
...Roosevelt betrayed the country...
...At any rate, it was the few...
...If, in a word, we mean what we say, why the devil don't we do something about it now and here...
...They are worse than nonesense...
...The principal of the Negro school was so informed...
...He assumed it would be ever thus, and the Bill of Rights made no provision for the maintenance of life itself...
...Fascism is a perversion of the perfectly sound doctrine that good government, even in a democracy, requires leadership...
...But it did not give us economic freedom...
...If their call was ignored, they would have at least demonstrated that they really meant freedom from fear and want and freedom of worship and speech...
...And besides all this, two marvelous moats to insulate us in our garden from the timeless horrors of Asia and Europe...
...And today the last best hope of earth looks more like the fearful slum of Europe than it did in Jefferson's time, with people huddled in heaps, not just in the towns but even in tar-paper shacks in the country...
...True, that document was not the work of the Founding Fathers, who overlooked it, but of Thomas Jefferson, who, observing the pigs and paretics that tyrannized Europe, instructed Jimmy Madison to get those rights into the Constitution—or else...
...Roosevelt is Churchill's enthusiastic office boy...
...You would think that he would at least erect a memorial, across from the Roosevelt Library in Hyde Park, to the NYA, the CCC, the PWA, the Anti-Trust Division, and the Wagner Act...
...He and the country have together betrayed themselves...
...If all men are brothers, then, surely, all men within reach of each other are brothers...
...He was provincial not in space, but in time...
...When it came to allocating the money, it seemed that the school for white children needed a new roof, a new toilet, a new gymnasium, and, to make a long story short, the white school's needs toted up to exactly $85,000...
...If, in order to move forward in the sand at all, we have got to get people off other people's backs, we will have to start with the people who are ready to hand...
...Let us, here in America, think of ourselves as the white men of the world, bent on assisting our less fortunate brethren on their long hard trek through the baking desert to the land of milk, honey, and lavender plumbing equipment...
...The trek across the desert is hard and slow...
...Roosevelt has abandoned his liberal leadership at a time when the community needs it most...
...Roosevelt, who howled for bank reform when the whole country was howling for bank reform, is busy "winning the war" while the country slips back to the glories of normalcy—back and maybe beyond...
...And if the answer to my rhetorical question is, "No," then how, by the beard of the prophet, can any American suppose that we are going to be better prepared than we were before the war to sow the Four Freedoms broadcast like manna to the billion-and-a-half who hunger in the desert that is Europe and Asia...
...The New Dealers know, too, that there never was and never will be any Churchill New Deal and that Mr...
...The American poor, in Jefferson's time, were the louts and the sluggards...
...I am against the doctrine of America first...
...The instrument that gave us political freedom was just about perfect...
...Roosevelt can arrest that sentiment, born as it is of war and the opiate of war prosperity...
...And of what utter sense are the visions of Henry Wallace, and the pretended visions of Churchill and Roosevelt, if we cannot deliver on our promises...
...but we must admit that life does...
...We have a Bill of Rights the likes of which the world has never seen...
...Yes, the committee was sorry to say, it was...
...Some of us are riding on the backs of others, including not only the Nazis, but the British in India, and the 200 American corporations whose 1943 profits—after taxes—are going to be twice as high as in 1939...
...Moses did not promise the Promised Land a week from Thursday, but when the children of Israel lagged behind and longed for the chains of Egypt again, he led them on...
...They could call out for the reforms here and the reforms now that would make America a working model for democracy, an inspiration to bloodied mankind, and a philanthropist with something to give to the starving post-war world...
...War breeds reaction—which is why some of us defeatists, appeasers, and disruptionists were opposed to war—and Mr...
...We will have to figure out how to employ men and feed them so that they will have something extra to give...
...One was the right of black men to be created free and equal, and we have made some progress in repairing Jefferson's oversight...
...And the land, and the treasures beneath the land, and even the fish in the sea, began to fall into the hands of the few...
...And so we flourished...
...Why, for instance, all this elegant chatter about the Four Freedoms and not a word from the White House about the naked fascism in India—the India where thousands are starving to death...
...He and his friends who are now waving the Atlantic Charter in the faces of their critics could at least try to revive the New Deal...
...Nor has Mr...
...I see no reason why, because you and I had the luck to be born in the sunniest of climes, we are entitled to anything extra...
...And besides the land, great treasures beneath it...
...The New Deal, that thing of liberal shreds and patches, is a dead duck...
...Let's say "the enterprising few" or "the lucky few...
...Then take it, gentlemen, take it, 'cause if there's anything we Negroes need in this town, it's educated white men...
...Again and again, in citing the blessings of America, he pointed out that every man could have land to work, and, if he chose the life of the town, the demand for craftsmen was insatiable...
...Still, thanks to God, and His 100 per cent Americanism, we found, among our uncounted blessings, land enough, and good enough, for many of us...
...Does any American in his right mind, or anywhere near it, suppose that this country is going to be better off, rather than worse, when the war is over...
...If we are going to give the world the Four Freedoms, why do we first reach them out to the Hottentot, stretching our hands above the heads of the suffering brethren down the block and across the tracks...
...How else will we convince the saddled peoples far away that we mean what we say?' How much of a dent would Moses have made had he promised the Law to the people across the Jordan instead of bringing its blessings to his own in the wilderness...
...I am in favor of sharing our rich store with the hungry of the world...
...And then we invented machines, and we mechanized men to run them...
...Is it, do you suppose, because Mr...
...But he could at least try to arrest it and, if he failed, go down trying...
...Roosevelt is so preoccupied with what the Nazis are doing to their victims that he does not know what the British are doing to theirs...
...Roosevelt, with both ears and his nose to the ground, is moving with it...
...We who were enterprising, or lucky, can fly from New York to California over night, but the Arizona Oakie can not get to California in a lifetime...
...The wretched of the world found a banner to rally to in our Bill of Rights, but they found no recipe for sustaining the life on which liberty first of all depends...
...The other was the right to live at all...
...Is it because it is cheaper to talk about it then and there...
...Roosevelt, outdoorsman though he is, does not seem to have even enough interest in it to have it mounted...
Vol. 7 • November 1943 • No. 44
