Milton Mayer

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Milton Sanford Mayer (1908-1986), a journalist, educator, and Quaker, was best known through his long-running column in The Progressive magazine, founded by Robert Marion LaFollette, Sr in Madison, Wisconsin.

Mayer wrote history, perhaps his most influential book being They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45, a study of the lives of a group of ordinary Germans under the Third Reich, first published in 1955 by the University of Chicago Press. At various times he taught at the University of Chicago, the University of Massachusetts, and the University of Louisville, as well as universities abroad. He was also a consultant to the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions.

Something of a radical for his opposition to American participation in World War II, his essays often provoked controversy for their insistence that human beings should assume personal responsibility for the world they were creating.

Mayer first gained wide spread attention in an October 7, 1939, article in the Saturday Evening Post, entitled "I Think I'll Sit This One Out." He detailed that the approaching war would yield more harm than good because it did not deal with what he saw as the fundamental problem, "the animality in man." When he followed this piece up with one two and a half years later in the same journal called "The Case against the Jew," he opened the flood gates; letters flowed in attacking him as an anti-Semite, even though he emphasized his belief that Jews had become so assimiliated that they did not live prophetic lives.

Before a group at a War Resisters League dinner in 1944, he denied being a pacifist, even while admitting that the was a conscientious objector to the present conflict. He opted for a moral revolution, one that was anti-capitalistic because it would be anti-materialist. About this time, he began promoting that moral revolution with his regular monthly column in the Progressive, for which he wrote the rest of his life.

In the mid-1950s, along with Bayard Rustin, he served on the committee that wrote the Quaker pamphlet, Speak Truth to Power (1955), the most influential pacifist pamphlet published in the United States; Mayer is credited with suggesting the title of this seminal work. During the 1960s, he challenged the government's refusal to grant him a passport when he refused to sign the loyalty oath then required by the State Department. Following the Supreme Court's declaration that the relevant portion of the McCarran Act was unconstitutional, Mayer got his passport.

Mayer died in April 1986 in Carmel, California, where he and his second wife made their home.

[edit] References

"Milton Mayer, Quaker Hedgehog, A Review and Profile", by H. Larry Ingle in Quaker Theology Issue #8, Vol. 5, No. 1, Spring-Summer 2003. Available online here.