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Max Lerner

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Maxwell "Max" Alan Lerner (December 20, 1902 – June 5, 1992) was an American journalist and educator known for his controversial syndicated column.

Civil Liberties in War Times by Max Lerner 1940

Quotes

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  • Years from now, when historians can look back and put our time into perspective, they will say that of its towering figures—more truly great than generals and diplomats, business grants and labor grants, bigger than most of our presidents—was a man called Brandeis.
  • Marilyn Ferguson is the best reporter today on the farther reaches of investigation into the life and human sciences. She represents a new kind of investigative journalist—not a sleuth after the corruptions of a politician but one tracking the spoor of a new research idea in all its windings; following it to its sources and its affinities in allied fields, its conclusions, its implications for the whole spectrum of human thought and consciousness... Nietzsche talked of philosophy as the gay science, the joyful science, and to Marilyn Ferguson the area of knowledge she has staked out for her reporting and synthesizing is a joyful science.
  • I have for some time been impatient with the prevailing sense of pessimism and despair, especially among the intellectual and professional groups of the "New Class." I am not blind to the tragic and absurd, which seem to have been built into our time and perhaps into the human constitution. But I also feel that the sense of hope and possibility is also built in over the millennia of human coping. It is no small part of the new transformative insights that they have released this sense of hope and possibility.
    • Forward to The Aquarian Conspiracy by Marilyn Ferguson (1980)

Public Journal (1945)

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Note: This book is an assembled reprint of newspaper articles written by Lerner between 5 March 1943 and 1 August 1944. Public Journal: Marginal Notes on Wartime America. New York: Viking Press. All quotes are from the April 1945 hardcover publication, 2nd edition printed in October 1945.
  • One final word. I will not say that to pin your soul on your sleeve for brickbats to be hurled at, four times a week, is always a pleasant mode of life. But it is the price you pay for the luxury of roaming over the whole area of human affairs, with the freedom to choose anything- relevant or irrelevant to the great news of the day- as the subject of your discourse. To combine the journal-keeping instinct with the pleasures of the backseat driver- that is the felicity of writing a public journal.
    • "Foreword," p. viii
  • The teen-age years have been at once the despair and fascination of novelists and playwrights. They are the gawkiest years of life, and the most precarious, with stirrings of beauty and desire and adventure, all of them this side of the articulate.
    • "Seventeen," first published 9 April 1943, p. 17
  • I have little patience, on this two hundredth anniversary of Thomas Jefferson's birth, with the mealy mouthings about Jefferson's ideals. The focus of attention should not be on Jefferson but on us, his children. For the first thing that to remember about Jefferson is that he never looked backward, did not want the dead to govern the living from their graves. And the second is that he was a revolutionary, who fought with the weapons of ideas for the high stakes of freedom.
    The recent trend in the Jefferson studies has been to show him as a human being, and it is a good trend. Jefferson was no steel engraving but a flesh-and-blood man, full of contradictions- at once aristocrat and democrat, a gracious plantation owner and a leader of the agrarian masses, an internationalist and an isolationist, a man who loved music and the theater and architecture and books but spent all his life in politics, a thinker who found no idea too vast for him and a practical man who found no ideal too minute.
    • "Jefferson's Children," first published 13 April 1943, p. 110
  • To humanize or glorify a man is one thing; to grasp his place in the history of the human spirit is quite another. Jefferson was part of a bursting world of new ideas. Yet he was dedicated to the commonwealth, with a sense of dedication whcih came partly from the classical authors he read so eagerly and partly from the American soil and the American climate. The ruling group to which he belonged identified itself with the lower classes in a common revolutionary impulse against British tyranny. But Americans were fighting for more than their freedom. They were fighting for a vision of a new world- one in which men, however imperfectly, could shape their own destinies.
    It is that vision that must be our heritage of him. Jefferson's politics and his program have been outdated by the march of the machine and the flight of the plane. But his openness of mind, his revolutionary spirit, his belief in men's potentialities will never be outdated.
    • p. 110-111
  • The tragic thing is that those qualities no longer describe his children. Our ruling economic group no longer lives gracefully nor thinks spaciously. Without having lost its tenacious will to rule, it has lost its sense of moral dedication. We as a people lost our openness to new ideas, our sense of being a new world. We might ask ourselves, as we commemorate Jefferson, what he would think if he knew that his descendants were preparing to be the last bastion of a reactionary European ruling group against the new forces and ideas of European democrats. And what he would think if he knew that out of fear of the Russian revolutionary ideas, we were pushing around the Fighting French, the Free Italians, the Spanish Loyalists, and the others who have fought and died for freedom, and who are the true inheritors of the European Enlightenment of Jefferson's day.
    • p. 111
  • If we care about Jefferson, we would do well to cease our efforts to stifle his spirit as it exists in the world today. Somewhere in the world there is perhaps another Jefferson who is trying to do for our era what Jefferson did for his. It is someone with deep culture, and a belief in reason, a revolutionary spirit, and a passion for freedom. For a moment as I write this it occurs to me that perhaps it is Jawaharlal Nehru. But of course it couldn't be: else he would not have been put in prison by those who are fighting a war of liberation. Perhaps Jefferson is somewhere in Europe, in one of the underground movements, organizing sabotage against the Nazis and preparing a new Declaration of Independence. If he is there, will our soldiers be fighting on his side when they invade Europe, or will the needs of appeasement put him in a concentration camp?
    • p. 111
  • I have been looking through the pictures of the battle of Detroit. They are not pretty, and they are nothing for Americans to be proud of. I don't mean just the blood and the pain that you see on the faces of the men. Nor do I mean just the more than a score dead and the hundreds of wounded in the hospitals. Pain and suffering and the fact of death itself are less important than the cause for which they are endured. But this cause is so meaningless, so deformed. The key to the tragedy of Detroit is the fear and hatred that you can read on the faces of the men and women in the pictures. It is the mask of Caliban enveloping a mob that is wreaking its cruelty on the helpless and the innocent. This hatred- not of the common enemy but of our own American brothers- is a twisted emotion that shows up all the ugliness of the American soul.
    • "The Battle of Detroit," first published 23 June 1943, p. 114-115
  • What dolts we are, to dehumanize ourselves. And in what cause? In Hitler's, as far as immediate consequences go. The men who set these riots off, whether they be Bundists or Ku Klux Klanners, followers of Paul Joseph Goebbels or Gerald L. K. Smith, are doing Hitler's work here. That much is simple. Hitler would be foolish if he did not use this weapon, especially at a time when he is desperate. It is as if he were to send saboteurs among us- only instead of destroying bridges they destroy our sense of decency and instead of disrupting communications they disrupt our living and working together.
    • "The Battle of Detroit," first published 23 June 1943, p. 115
  • It is too easy to find alibis that wash the guilt away from those who took part in the riots, and from the whole American nation. We cry: "Nazi instigators." We cry: "Kluxers." We create something fancy and objective, like "race tensions" and "race prejudice" that we discuss in a detached way. The Kluxers and the Bundists undoubtedly lit the match in every instance. But in every instance our America furnished the flammable material.
    What have we done to ease the daily crucifixion of the Negro in our midst, which leaves in him a smoldering bitterness? What have we done to give him fair employment in our war industries and elsewhere? What have we done to break down Jim Crowism in the armed forces? What have we done, by word and deed, to make him see that he has a share in this war and in the world?
    What have we done, in turn, to cleanse the hatred and ignorance from the whites among us? What have we done to make them see that we are in a war against fascism, and that the essence of Fascism is to treat some men as sub-men because of color and creed? What have we done to teach an understanding of the creative contribution of our minority groups toward the total American culture? What have the Government and business and trade unions done to develop going experiments in which white and black can work and live side by side?
    • "The Battle of Detroit," first published 23 June 1943, p. 115
  • Our spokesmen talk of re-educating Nazi Germany, of liberating Europe. We have some re-educating to do at home. The liberator must liberate himself.
    Look in yoru own hearts, Americans. These men in the Detroit streets- these men splattered with blood, cowering in fear, their faces bashed in, their homes looted and burned, their spirits broken- these men, whatever their color may be, are bone of your bone. These other men and women who have done the destruction, their faces bestial and fury-driven- these are also of your own America.
    American men and women: this is your task. The suffering is yours, and the guilt is yours. You must learn what the facts are, but the facts will not themselves set you free. You must set yourselves free of hate and discrimination, of blindness and inaction. No one can do that for you- not even the federal government. It can help, but you must not lean entirely on that help. The papers say that the Detroit riots have cut down war production. True. But what a curious way of putting it. Negroes are not just machines for turning out planes and ships. Negroes are human beings and Americans. What the riots have cut down is the stature of America.
    • "The Battle of Detroit," first published 23 June 1943, p. 116
  • The root of the racist evil must be found in the soil of American life as a whole. A program of action against the racist evil must be a national program. It must be based on the premise that while it is no doubt that Klansmen and other native fascists are always willing to apply the torch to the race problem, the combustible stuff for the fire is to be found in the way we treat the Negro. And the further premise that this stuff must be cleaned out.
    The paradox of the relation of the whites to the Negro is that they deny him a chance at a job and call him shiftless; they segregate him in the worst slums under conditions that breed criminality, and then call him vicious; they deny him education and then call him ignorant.
    I do not say that no progress has been made, nor that we treat the Negroes in a Nazi way. The Nazis glory in their racist ideas and persecution: we hang our heads in shame at ours. As a nation we have been moving slowly toward a decent treatment of Negroes. Too slowly- that is the point. I know of few Negroes who expect the overnight miracle of complete justice and equality. But I also know of very few who do not want from us a more substantial token than we have given of our intent to apply to them the principles of ethnic democracy.
    • "The Long Road to Racial Justice," first published 25 June 1943, p. 116-117
  • The Negro is becoming an integral part of our economic life. That trend is here to stay. The war has speeded it up, by bringing more Negroes into the war industries. But the war did not invent the trend. Insofar as the racist riots are an unreasoning protest against the newly emerging industrial position of Negroes, they are only an incident in a long historical process. Seen thus, they become as fruitless as the attempts of the Machine Wreckers in the early nineteenths century to hold back the tide of industrialism. But while I am convinced that the process cannot be stopped, much can be done to ease the transition. The going is slow because the obstacles are many.
    • "The Long Road to Racial Justice," first published 25 June 1943, p. 117
  • Pass a new Federal Civil Rights statute, as Carey McWilliams has been urging. I am convinced that the problem of drafting it is not too difficult. Recent Supreme Court decisions also point to its constitutionality. The real problems will be those of enforcement. But, however hard that may be, let us at least put it on the record that as a matter of national policy we outlaw lynching, Jim Crowism, and racial injustice in every form.
    • "The Long Road to Racial Justice," first published 25 June 1943, p. 118
  • Create experimental mixed units of volunteers in the Army and Navy. No one need be forced into them. But there are plenty of Americans, white and black, who would want to give democracy a chance in the armed forces.
    • "The Long Road to Racial Justice," first published 25 June 1943, p. 118-119
  • You will say, this is a long road. Injustice is longer. You will say, this is drastic. Bloodshed and hate are more drastic. You will say, it can't be done. But that is just what the enemies of American life are counting on you to say.
    • "The Long Road to Racial Justice," first published 25 June 1943, p. 119
  • No American has a constitutional duty to like all or any of his fellow-Americans. Although I must add as a footnote that to dislike someone before you know him seems to me stupid.
    • "Speak Out For Freedom," first published 21 October 1943, p. 124
  • That is why we must speak out for freedom, wherever it may be threatened. Violence may be infectious, but freedom and courage are also infectious. The big test of American liberty will come in the let-down after the war. If we do not now learn the habits of speaking out for freedom and fighting for it, we will make poor defenders when we are confronted by the big battalions.
    • "Speak Out For Freedom," first published 21 October 1943, p. 126
  • I will close on a personal matter. Any teacher who lets himself be commanded as to what he will or will not say becomes an intellectual eunuch. I have myself taught at colleges, on and off, for a decade. If at any time a President had told me what to teach, I should have had to resign. Otherwise I could not have looked in a mirror.
    • "Freedom and the Teacher," first published 16 February 1944, p. 142
  • We live at a time when the great enemy of the human spirit is the fascist idea. The first stronghold against that idea should be the school, our first line of defense must be the students, and their commanders should be the teachers. I can understand the danger of brash and unthinking statements on the part of a student, and the teacher has the duty of holding him to a discipline and integrity of thought. But too many teachers blanch when the word fascism is even mentioned, as if the too open discussion of it might offend vested interests in their community. It is one thing to demand integrity of the student. It is quite another to give him the feeling that he is skating on thin ice when he so much as mentions fascism, and that in the face of it he must observe the etiquette and niceties of the diplomatic corps.
    • "An Episode in School," first published 18 October 1944, p. 144
  • Whatever the social roots are from which the fascist poison springs, the moral roots by which it grows and spreads are the weakness and cowardice with which we stand up for the democratic idea. Weapons without ideas are blind. And only courage, whether in the classroom or the home or the church or the factory or the halls of Congress, will give passion and direction to the weapons with which we are freeing the world, and hope to rebuild it.
    • "An Episode in School," first published 18 October 1944, p. 144
  • No one can say that a mounting national income, a shrinking unemployment, and an expanding economy are in themselves adequate to create the good life and the good society for Americans. But it is certain that without them the good life and the good society have no chance. It is certain that a shrinking national income, a mounting unemployment and a contracting economy are the sure road to a fascist society and to man's inhumanity to man.
    • "Epilogue: We Move Toward Tomorrow," p. 406
  • Education has been taken out of the area of private profit and has been recognized as a public responsibility. But the fight still goes on to limit the local school facilities to the local economic level, and to keep the people from underwriting an adequate educational program through federal funds. So far as this means that only some of those who hunger for books and ideas and the chance to work in laboratories will have their hunger sated, it goes against the American grain. For the American tradition is one of the career open to talent, wherever it may be found; and of an elite not frozen by caste or wealth but drawn from the children of the people in an ever renewing circulation of ability in a democracy.
    • "Epilogue: We Move Toward Tomorrow," p. 408
  • The war has shaken up people's lives, given them new exposures, new mobility, new perspectives, access to new experience. It will be difficult to shut tight the vistas that have thus been opened up. We move toward tomorrow with the conviction that all the energy and geniality of our vast continent is best expressed in the quality of the life the ordinary American can live.
    • "Epilogue: We Move Toward Tomorrow," p. 408-409

The Unfinished Country (1959)

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  • A President is best judged by the enemies he makes when he has really hit his stride.
  • The real sadness of fifty is not that you change so much but that you change so little.
  • The crime of book purging is that it involves a rejection of the word... To reject the word is to reject the human search.

Quotes About Max Lerner

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  • To see ourselves as we aren't, but as he would like us to be, read Actions and Passions, by Max Lerner (Simon & Schuster, $3.50). He calls these chapters "Notes on the Multiple Revolution of our Time," which of course they are, since they concern today's upside-down world.
  • Brilliant as he is, Lerner suffers from anguish over the capitalists. He is not pro-Communist... The exigencies of writing each day for a daily might be the cause of his continual harping on the wrongs done minorities, which makes far more noise rather than a sound appeal for their rights. Another safe target are corporations and their selfish attacks on labor unions, and even government regulations against strikes.... His dispatches on the 1948 Philadelphia conventions, both Republican and Democratic, analyze well public sentiment over the two parties and their candidates, even if Lerner guessed wrong about the outcome. His appraisals of the personalities of Wallace, Truman, and others sound solid and reasonable, and much of his thinking on domestic political questions is keen and supportable. All in all, one can disagree with what Lerner writes but still admit that the way he writes is stimulating, pro and con.
  • Max Lerner, an educator, journalist and student of American civilization who was for many years a syndicated columnist for The New York Post, died yesterday... He was 89 ... Mr. Lerner was one of the more conspicuous of the post-World War II nonfiction writers, a humanist whose unabashed liberal conscience led him to the political barricades for more than three decades. Many of his concerns now seem prescient. In 1959, for example, in a speech at Douglass College in New Brunswick, N.J., Mr. Lerner called for the formation of an antiwar elite, making it clear that he was worried about what he saw as growing mediocrity among American students.
  • With all the turmoil of the mid- and late 20th century, Mr. Lerner insisted that he preferred the present "awful but magnificent" era to any other in history. But in a book he wrote in 1957, America as a Civilization: Life and Thought in the United States Today, he talked of his age as a time in which there was a "fear of ideas and the tenacious cult of property." His espousal of ideas regarded as liberal in the 1950's did not sit well with everyone... Between 1932 and 1935, Mr. Lerner served on the faculty of both Sarah Lawrence College and the Wellesley Summer Institute. After a brief stint teaching at Harvard, he edited The Nation magazine for a time and then taught political science at Williams College from 1938 to 1943. Before joining The Post in 1949, he also wrote columns for The New York Star... He continued writing for The Post until two weeks ago.
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