The latest “review” of Tell It Slant comes from Olympia, Washington Friends Meeting:

24-08-08 Library Committee — Ramona Hinkle shared a book report:
Tell It Slant – Chuck Fager, A Prophetic Life of Adventure & Writing on Religion, War and Justice, Love and Laughter by Emma Lapsansky-Werner and Chuck

I considered reviewing this book with some trepidation. It is fat, 569 pages. Could I read and review it in time for the September newsletter deadline? Well, no problem. I read it in one week and enjoyed it immensely – even the bibliography at the end with a running commentary by Chuck!

Chuck was trying to make a living as a freelance journalist with mixed success. Reading about his journey, I recalled my own passage through those years with many a laugh along the way.

(Chuck is in his eighties now.) What Chuck was most interested in writing about was what was going on with his fellow Quakers… So I learned some of what Quakers had been up to during those years.

Thanks to the recommendation by Gabi, the library committee purchased this book for us. Enjoy!

In an earlier excerpt from Tell It Slant, (“… A Whippersnapper and His Elders …” ), I described some of the “seasoned Friends” who helped me in beginning to grapple with becoming a Quaker. For space reasons, others were left out, and this weekend brought another, very important one, back to mind: Milton Mayer.

August 24^th would have been Mayer’s 116^th birthday. Here, adapting material from both the biography (Tell It Slant), and a religious memoir, Meetings, is more about Mayer, his immediate impact on me, and a tribute to his work and witness among Friends.

Norman Whitney (1891-1967) had been a leading academic left wing Quaker of his generation in the U. S. On an early spring morning in 1966, Whitney gathered with a class of students at the very new and experimental Friends World College, the campus of which took up several long-empty houses on a decommissioned air base next to a trotting horse race track on Long Island, New York. With him was a visitor who was to conduct our morning “class.”

Whitney  was spending a term at Friends World College, where I was doing alternative service as a junior “faculty member” (more like a  camp counselor). I think his title was “Quaker in Residence.”

He talked the part, saying “thee” and “thou” to us, and offering the occasional vocal prayer in our silent meetings.

Norman Whitney (1891-1967) had been a leading academic left wing Quaker of his generation in the U. S. He looked the part of an eccentric professor: dressed like a time-traveling Victorian, he wore pince nez glasses, the only living person I ever met who did so. In cold weather, he added a billowing cloak rather than a coat. To me he looked quaint, old, irrelevant; O foolish youth.

Yet if we had been interested, he had a long track record of 1930 and 1940s antiwar activism: after becoming a Friend as a young adult, he co-founded the Syracuse Meeting in upstate New York. In 1936 with other activist Friends he organized the Syracuse Peace Council, a body that still exists in 2024. He had also been an important figure in the American Friends Service Committee, directing its national peace program for several years after retiring from teaching.

Then in his twilight (he died in 1967), Whitney did not regale us about these adventures. I think he knew we wouldn’t have listened; and perhaps he understood his generation of Quaker peace workers was about to be pushed roughly aside by the tumults of the Vietnam War, and the brash impatience of a rising generation, namely mine.

Nevertheless, Norman Whitney made one very important contribution to us that day, and particularly to me, with both immediate impact and lasting value: he had brought us Milton Mayer.

Mayer (1908 – 1986) was a thinker, a classicist, and above all, a writer. By 1940, a series of essays in popular magazines brought him to the brink of literary celebrity. But then his stubbornly antiwar views, and left wing sympathies veered increasingly out of sync with reigning public opinion, as the U. S. joined World War Two, and then followed it with an anti-Russian Cold War and McCarthyite witch hunts.

Mayer’s writing was soon relegated to the pages of smaller-circulation journals outside the lucrative mainstream. In Who’s Who, he answered the question of religion with: “Jewish; member, Religious Society of Friends.”

Of course, I had never heard of him  when Norman Whitney sat down in what passed for our fledgling library and introduced him to our ragtag bohemian group. sitting in a circle, many on the floor. I don’t recall the announced topic. Mayer had written and spoken much about war and peace, with particular attention to the threats posed by new American wars, hot and cold, to what freedoms and democracy our society was struggling to maintain.

On that day, the U. S. Government was rapidly escalating a major war in Vietnam, which indeed posed mortal threats both to the health of the republic, and to the lives of tens of thousands of American troops, and millions of unknown innocent people far away.

Maybe that was the announced topic. But it didn’t work out that way.

After silence and a brief introduction, Whitney turned to him and said, “Milton, why don’t thee tell us what is on thy heart, and on thy mind.”

Mayer looked us over. Unusually for our setting, he was in a suit: gray, with a starched white shirt and bow tie. I now think he was headed somewhere else, perhaps to a meeting at a foundation or to speak to some well-heeled metropolitan liberals.

But he was in no hurry. After surveying us from under his dark brows, his expression grew somber and he said, “Well, Norman, as I sit here with all of you, I find that what is on my heart is different from what is on my mind.”

He rubbed his chin. “So I believe I’m going to tell you what is on my heart.”

After another moment, he began:

“As you are now,” he declared, “so I once was. As I am now, so you will be. You will be tempted to smile when I tell you that I am middle-aged and corrupt.”

There was a scattering of snickers.

“You should resist the temptation,” he continued. “Twenty-five years from now you will be ineluctably middle-aged and, unless you hear and heed what I say today, just as ineluctably corrupt.”

Was it the quality of his voice? Or maybe that he was not speaking about the abounding evils outside our walls, but with a calm melancholy about his own? Whichever, he had my attention.

“You will not believe me, and you should not,” he said, “because what I say at my age should be unbelievable at yours. But you should hear me out,  because I know more than you do in one respect: you know only what it is to be young, while I know what it is to be both young and old.

In any case, I will not lie to you in order to make you feel good. You will be old much longer than you are young, and I would rather that you believed me the longer time than the shorter.”

It would be incorrect to say his words transfixed me, unless the image evoked was that of the moth fixed and struggling hopelessly on the point of the collector’s pin. His voice was relentless:

“A cynic once said that he would not give a hang for a man who wasn’t a socialist before he was twenty or who was one after that. I do not know if socialism is a good ideal, but I know that it is an ideal and I know that the cynic was confident that you would lose your ideals. You may even have trifled, in your springtime, with such radical aberrations as pacifism. But you will soon stop trifling; and when, at thirty, you have already begun to molder, your friends will tell you that you have mellowed.”

I should have felt defensive. The others in the room were mostly twenty or younger. At twenty-three, I was officially their elder. Moreover, I was well into two years of full-time status as a pacifist. There was even an official U. S. Government documentation, like the circular blue “Grade A” inspection stamps they used to ink on large cuts of meat, certifying that I was no mere trifler at it. No moldering on me.

But Mayer cut through all that, like a ship breaking ice. He was speaking a truth I had not known I knew, but recognized as he spoke it. Although it was a feeling more than a thought, I saw that turning thirty had long seemed somehow impossible. Before then — before December 1972 arrived, if it ever did for me — the world would go up in the smoke of nuclear war; or I would die in the (nonviolent) revolution; or its victory would abolish aging; (or, as came to pass for not a few, I could take refuge in a state of arrested development).

For me the echoes of a slogan made famous in the Berkeley Free Speech Movement barely two years ago still loudly reverberated: “Don’t trust anyone over thirty.”

And here, right before our eyes, was an acknowledged resident of that alien land, a conservatively-dressed, soft-spoken double agent, who had somehow managed to slip past the border guards just long enough to look us in the face and confirm that Berkeley motto.

To me he was terrifying, and convicting.

And he was not done.

“At twenty I was what you are; I had had all the middle-class care that a middle-class society and a middle-class home could provide. My parents wanted me to have what they took to be advantages, and I had them. But my advantages were of no use to me at all when life came down on me, as it will upon you, like a ton of bricks.

“I had studied morality, just as you have, but it was the easy morality designed to sustain my character in an easy world. I would not steal another man’s watch unless my children were starving, and my children would never be starving. Nor will yours if, with what your parents call your advantages, you do as you are told and get to the top. The reason your children will not be starving is that you will have been corrupted. Your corruption will save you from having to decide whether to steal another man’s watch.”

Behind him were shelves of donated books that few of us had yet opened. Around him, were the students listening, fidgeting, doodling in notebooks? I don’t know: I couldn’t look away.

“My education prepared me to say no to my enemies,” Mayer said. “It did not prepare me to say no to my friends, still less to myself, to my own limitless need for a little more status, a little more security, and a little more of the immediate pleasure that status and security provide. Corruption is accompanied by immediate pleasure. When you feel good, you are probably, if not necessarily, doing bad. But happiness is activity in accordance with virtue, and the practice of virtue is painful.”

Mayer paused and stroked his chin again. His tone was still calm, but the message was relentless.

“I tell you that you are in mortal jeopardy today, and anyone who tells you differently is selling you to the Devil. . . . You may delude yourselves, as I did, by setting about to change the world. But for all that you do or do not do, you will leave the world, as I do, no better than you found it and yourselves considerably worse.

“For the world will change you faster, more easily, and more durably than you will change it. If you undertake only to keep the world from changing you — not to lick ‘em but to avoid j’ining ‘em — you will have your hands full.

“What you need is what the psalmist knew he needed — a heart, not a head, of wisdom. What you need is what Bismarck said was the only thing the Germans needed — civilian courage.

“I do not know where you will get it. If I did, I would get it myself. You were divinely endowed to know right and to do right, and you have before you, in the tradition of your country and of human history, the vision to help you if you will turn to it. But no one will compel you to turn to it, and no one can.

“If Socrates did not know where virtue to do right came from — and he didn’t — neither do I. He pursued it earlier and harder than anyone else and concluded that it was the gift of God.

Mayer gave us a weary smile. “In despair of your parents and your society, of your teachers and your studies, of your neighbors and your friends, and above all of your fallen nature and the Old Adam in you, I bespeak for you the gift of God.”

He settled back into our customary closing silence. The rest of us also did, rather more restlessly.

How do I remember all these passages, when so much else about that time and its circumstances has faded?

I confess: I cheated.

Not long afterward, browsing through the library’s neglected shelves, I came across a book there, What Can A Man Do? which was a collection of Mayer’s articles and speeches. And in it was a piece called “Commencement Address,” in which Mayer imagines himself speaking to the graduating class of his old high school.

That morning, he had merely tweaked and recycled it for us. I smiled at this, but it did not diminish its impact.

I wonder what the others thought of Mayer and his sermon; but never mind. For me it was pivotal.

It took me awhile to notice that Mayer had given us a sermon, of a classically simple sort, reducible to not much more than Luke 13:3: “Except Ye repent, ye shall all perish!” Like the best preachers, he put the message in a way that his hearers, or this one at least, could receive it.

And his modesty, even agnosticism about where and how we could seize the chance to escape this fate, only made it more effective. It echoed another well-known verse with which I’m sure he was familiar, but I did not know at the time. It’s the query that haunted the beleaguered protagonist of the Book of Job: “But where is wisdom (and virtue) to be found?” (28:12)

The force of the query was reinforced by a second book of his that I found near the first. This one, They Thought They Were Free, was published in the mid-1950s. It is Mayer’s magnum opus, still in print at this writing, more than seventy years later.

The book is about how ordinary Germans were quietly, even stealthily swept up into the epochal evil of Nazism. Mayer spent a year at a university in a small German town in 1951, and got to know a number of people who had accepted the Hitler regime and then survived the war it produced. From them he pieced together the story.

In the telling, these men (women’s voices were not yet part of such conversations) become real, human, and familiar to American readers, their plight and corruption becoming not only plausible, but unnervingly so.

As one of them put it, in shame, “What happened was the gradual habituation of the people, little by little, to be governed by surprise, to receiving decisions deliberated in secret; to believe that the situation was so complicated that the government had to act on information which the people could not understand, or so dangerous that, even if people could understand it, it could not be released because of national security. . . .

“To live in the process is absolutely not to notice it–please try to believe me–unless one has a much greater degree of political awareness, acuity, than most of us ever had occasion to develop. Each step was so small, so inconsequential, so well explained or, on occasion, ‘regretted’ . . . .

“Believe me this is true. Each act, each occasion is worse than the last, but only a little worse. You wait for the next and the next. You wait for one shocking occasion, thinking that others, when such a shock comes, will join you in resisting somehow. . ..

“Suddenly it all comes down, all at once. You see what you are, what you have done, or, more accurately, what you haven’t done (for that was all that was required of most of us: that we did nothing). . . . You remember everything now, and your heart breaks. Too late. You are compromised beyond repair.” (Mayer P. 166-171)

They Thought They Were Free, is very well-written; the pages turn. But its cumulative effect was terrifying, because I recognized so much of it as being, not only a horrible piece of history but basically a template for many current events much closer to home.

That was in 1966. I read it again, after September 11, 2001; the second time it was even more familiar, even more terrifying. I have not been able to read it a third time yet.

The impact was deepened by the discovery, a year later, of a brief column by Mayer in The Progressive Magazine, called “Quaker Seed.” In it, he recalled how his key German source for the book, who was close-mouthed for most of Mayer’s time there, finally opened up after he learned that Mayer was a Quaker, and could explain the origin of a small bag of seed that was delivered to the man’s family when he was a boy, after the end of World War One:

“We had nothing to make a crop with,” he told Mayer. “And then each farmer got a bag of seed, including my father. The Buergermeister said it was ‘Quaker seed’—that was all he knew about it. Nobody ever knew what ‘Quaker seed’ meant. But it saved us.”

Mayer: “So I told him what Quaker seed was, taken to the starving ‘enemy’ by the American Friends Service Committee. I told him I was connected with the AFSC.

He sat still and stared at me, and stared and stared . . . . After a long time he said, “Professor, could you and I have a long talk?” I said I thought it could be arranged.”

Then, “he broke down and told me everything, including some things I did not want to print then and that don’t need to be printed now. I had cracked the hard nut with a bag of Quaker seed.”

Between the delivery and the long talk and Mayer’s column had passed fifty years. “Fifty years,” Mayer mused. “Good years for the devil, with plenty of hands to sow his seed. Good years for the Lord’s work, too, with plenty of it available for the few (but slowly increasing) hands looking for that kind of work.”

I only saw and spoke to Mayer one other time, a few years later when he was teaching at the University of Massachusetts. Then he retired to southern California, where he died of cancer in 1986. But his 1966 “sermon” and the calm but penetrating spiritual challenge behind it, and especially the insights in They Thought They Were Free, have stayed with me, and kept working on me, as the example and words of an ideal Quaker elder ought.

There is more about Mayer online, including an excellent profile by Quaker historian Larry Ingle, here. And Pendle Hill published in 1967 a witty, thought-provoking and profound dialogue/debate Mayer had with the distinguished Quaker economist and system thinker Kenneth Boulding, as their Pamphlet # 153.

More excerpts  from Tell It Slant are online at:

> Excerpt #1: A Quaker’s Life in Our “Interesting,” Tumultuous Times:
> Excerpt #2: “Fighting for A Future”:

Excerpt #3: A Whippersnapper & His Elders:
>Excerpt #4: “Tell It Slant”: Author Emma Lapsansky-Werner Speaks

> Excerpt #5: San Francisco & “Going Naked for a Sign “ — or at least a job

> Excerpt #6 Going Postal on EEO & Vietnam at USPS