WE HOLD THESE TRUTHS…'
Meyer, Milton
'We Hold These Truths...' By MILTON MAYER ON July 4, 1776, the Continental Congress of the United States announced that all men are created equal. On April 3, 1944, the Supreme Court of the United...
...They have not been replaced, in spite of "Dr...
...And every Northerner who denounces the Peppers and O'Daniels has got to acknowledge that he made them what they are today...
...It simply stood upon it...
...but, as Arthur Krock said in the New York Times, they had their back to the wall...
...Armies with banners may seize Rumania and the Marshalls from the avowed enemies of democracy, but only the acts of a people at home, through their laws and their government, can make the victory abroad a democratic victory...
...But the 15th Amendment does not argue human equality...
...War Deal" moved into the White House...
...War Deal's" efforts, by Byrnes and Baruch and Clayton and Stettinius...
...On April 3 the Atlantic Charter floated—if only momentarily—to the surface of the Atlantic, and the Four Freedoms—interred by the very men who wrote them—stirred and breathed and called upon the oppressed of all the world to witness the fact that the war for their liberation was not entirely lost...
...If the South is afraid of democracy because its white citizens are bigoted...
...Fascism Staggered In America The anti-democratic statesmen—I beg your pardon, politicians—of the South staggered as their political house shook to its rotten foundations...
...In three years of war it is the first time the American people have been able to say to the people under fascism: Look—we mean what we say...
...not be- cause the Soviet Army entered Rumania four or five thousand miles away from the land of the free, nor yet because the American Army took 10 more atolls in the Marshall Islands, eight or 10 thousand miles away from the home of the brave...
...New Dealers and Old Dealers alike, who went along with preferment, dropped all their differences all at once and came together in a phalanx against democracy...
...New Deal" called in for consultation five to 10 years ago: They are hanging on, appointed for life...
...But they came to life on April 3, and with them the modest hope that men may yet be free...
...Old Dealer Maybank of South Carolina said that his state would "protect our white primaries...
...Fascism staggered in America as fascism will never stagger when the bombs are dropped on Berlin...
...Reed's opinion would be to drop on Berlin, on Bombay...
...I ike the Founding Fathers, the Supreme Court, in deciding that the Democratic Party could not exclude black men from its primaries in Texas, did not argue the point of human equality...
...April 3 was the first democratic victory in a long, long time...
...What a bomb Mr...
...April 3 was a red-letter day {or democracy because eight not-so-very-old men in Washington proclaimed, with the force of the most powerful government on earth behind them, that democracy could not exist if men were deprived of the right to vote because their skin was black...
...if the South is afraid of the majority because its majority is a mob—then the North, which refuses to lift up the South with schools and milk and a hundred TVA's has got to take the whole of the blame...
...The First Real Glimmer We Yankees have our own breeds and brands of fascism, which we might do well to contemplate while we mock the agonies of our fascist brothers in the South, and if the South is keeping the black man under the heel of oppression we Yankees are grinding the heel of oppression into the face of the South...
...War Deal" can not dismiss them...
...He lashed at his colleagues' "intolerance" of precedent and at their assumotion of "a knowledge and wisdom denied to our predecessors...
...On April 3 the democratic dogma, which refuses to argue human equality, came alive again after a series of terrific beatings in Asia, Africa, Italy, France, and (lest we forget) in Texas...
...On April 3, 1944, the Supreme Court of the United States announced that all men included black men...
...Eight not-so-very-old men, appointed for life...
...He dissented because his colleagues overruled his and the Court's opinion in 1935, when the nine old men upheld, with a gesture of helplessness, the fascism in Texas...
...Their decisions have not been any too good since "Dr...
...What a bomb to drop on Texas...
...They are the Court that "Dr...
...And the wall they had their back to was the wall behind the eight not-so-very-old men in Washington...
...Men May Yet Be Free' Poor, fearful man, gazing fondly and regretfully behind him to the good old days when human liberty under the Constitution was held to be the liberty of corporations and not of men...
...Justice Stanley F. Reed said, in his momentous opinion, that the exclusion of black men from democracy in Texas violated the 15th Amendment, which prohibits a state from abridging the right to vote because of race, color, or previous condition of servitude...
...They were appointed for life, and "Dr...
...Justice Roberts' dissent was a piddling monument to the thinking that stands against progress and progressivism...
...still, though it's only a glimmer in the failing fight for human emancipation...
...And upon that wall is written the words Equal Justice under Law...
...Within 24 hours they were bringing their shattered ranks together in a new grand strategy to defeat the advancing banners...
...New Dealer Claude Pepper of Florida said, "The South will allow nothing to impair white supremacy...
...Those were the good old days, when men were unafraid of progress and progressivism, when men were sure of self-evident truths, when they knew what they wanted and what they wanted, for sure, was democracy...
...Democracy Came Alive Again It was a red-letter day for democracy because it did something about democracy...
...Still, though it's only a form and not a substance...
...On April 3 the eight not-so-very-old men rode relentlessly over the prostrate form of a legalistic and logic-chopping status quo represented by the ninth member of the Court...
...Aoril 3, 1944, was a red-letter day for democracy...
...if the South is afraid of equality because its black citizens are illiterate...
...It held this truth to be self-evident...
...it simply asserts it, and, in asserting it, it rests on the dogma of the Declaration, that we hold these truths to be self-evident...
...One of them announced that a state law disfranchising persons whose ancestors came from Africa would stand up in the Court...
...In three years of war it is the first real glimmer, beyond the boloney of the Chur-chills...
...Why is this fond and regretful thinking incapable of looking backward all the way to the preamble of A Declaration of Independence or the 15th Amendment to the Constitution of the United States...
...still, the decision of April S was a form and a glimmer to which all oppressed of the world may rally...
...The Southern politicians frothed at the intrusion of democracy, at its advance across their borders...
Vol. 8 • April 1944 • No. 16
