FRIEND MILTON SANFORD MAYER

“NARRATIVE HISTORY” AMOUNTS TO FABULATION, THE REAL STUFF BEING MERE CHRONOLOGY

SPEAK TRUTH TO POWER

THE ABOVE, REDONE NOW

ABOUT THIS PAMPHLET

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August 24, Monday, 1908: Milton Sanford Mayer was born in Chicago, a son of Morris Samuel Mayer and Louise Gerson Mayer. He would b e raised as a Reform Jew. He would graduate from Englewood Technical Prep Academy on the South Side of Chicago (this neighborhood would not be “going black” until the ’60s), with a classical education placing an emphasis on Latin and languages. As an adult he would become a Quaker (although not one who would renounce Jewishness).

NOBODY COULD GUESS WHAT WOULD HAPPEN NEXT

1908

Friend Milton Sanford Mayer “Stack of the Artist of

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1925: In Jamaica, the Great Depression, the rise of Rastafarianism, and racial fears increased concern over the use of marijuana. The Panama Canal Zone Report concluded that there was no credible evidence that cannabis was habit forming or that it was having any “appreciably deleterious influence” on American soldiers in the Zone, and recommended that no action be taken. However, urban legends that associated horrible crimes with marijuana and Mexicans were given credence in a Surgeon General’s Report.

The Cuban Communist party was founded by labor organizers Carlos Baliño, student organizer Julio Antonio Mella, and others. (Opiate of the masses, anyone?)

During the era of prohibition, Sanka would be introduced and coffee consumption would reach new highs. By this year, in the United States, a widespread illicit liquor trade had become well established. “Speakeasies” had made their appearance, and consumption had increased particularly among women. A local businessman named Al Capone, none too smart, none too efficient, and not at all charismatic, was able to seize primacy in Chicago’s underworld due to opportunities offered by prohibition of the legal sale of alcoholic beverages.

In the midst of all this, a young graduate of Englewood Technical Prep Academy on the South Side of Chicago, Milton Sanford Mayer, matriculated at the University of Chicago.

1925

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NO-ONE’S LIFE IS EVER NOT DRIVEN PRIMARILY BY HAPPENSTANCE

Friend Milton Sanford Mayer “Stack of the Artist of

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1928: The 1st National Educational Conference of the Chinese Nationalists (Kuomintang) determined that the purpose of Chinese education was to develop character, patriotism, and physical vigor. Under German military influence, they would stress military drill in schools rather than athletic games. To placate parents, the chief secretary of the executive council of the Kuomintang, Dr. Chu Min-yi, would promote t’ai chi ch’uan as a method for maintaining fitness, and go on tour demonstrating his big, flowery movements to military, police, and student groups.

Milton Mayer left the University of Chicago without taking a degree (he would later confess in the Saturday Evening Post that he had been “placed on permanent probation ... for throwing beer bottles out a dormitory window”). A job with Associated Press would last for a year or two, and then he would work for the Chicago Evening Post and the Chicago Evening American — eventually winding up with his own long-running column in The Progressive magazine founded by Robert Marion LaFollette, Sr. in Madison, Wisconsin.

LIFE IS LIVED FORWARD BUT UNDERSTOOD BACKWARD?— NO, THAT’S GIVING TOO MUCH TO THE HISTORIAN’S STORIES.

LIFE ISN’T TO BE UNDERSTOOD EITHER FORWARD OR BACKWARD.

1928

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October 7, Saturday, 1939: Milton Sanford Mayer, in a Saturday Evening Post article “I Think I’ll Sit This One Out,” opinioned that since we refused to face the fundamental problem with which we needed to deal (“the animality in man”), the coming world conflagration was inevitably going to render our human situation worse rather than better.

THE FUTURE IS MOST READILY PREDICTED IN RETROSPECT

1939

WORLD WAR II

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1944: Lyndon LaRouche, Jr. had at first during World War II been a “CO” or Conscientious Objector, but at this point he enlisted. He would serve in US Army medical units in India and Burma.

At a dinner sponsored by the War Resisters League, Milton Sanford Mayer, although a conscientious objector, denied that this amounted to being a “pacifist.” He would promote the need for a moral revolution of anti-materialism in his regular monthly column in the Progressive, a column he would continue for the remainder of his life.

Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s THE STEEP ASCENT.

In the war stories told by Joseph R. McCarthy, he had flown 14 bombing runs over enemy territory. Had that been true, that have been so brave.

THE FUTURE IS MOST READILY PREDICTED IN RETROSPECT

1944

FAKE NEWS

UNAMERICANISM

MCCARTHYISM

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1945: During World War II, it had become the regular custom for American servicemen to wear wedding bands , to remind them of their wives back home waiting for their return.

Milton Sanford Mayer, who had been a World War II conscientious objector, and Bertha Tepper Mayer, got divorced (there were two daughters).

THE FUTURE CAN BE EASILY PREDICTED IN RETROSPECT

1945

WEDDING BANDS

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1947: In the aftermath of World War II, the United States of America enacted a National Security Act that created a Central Intelligence Agency.1

Milton Sanford Mayer remarried, with Jane “Baby” Scully.

1947

1. Four decades into the future, Bill Moyers would be tracing the advent of secretive and often grossly unethical practices back to this National Security Act of 1947, critiquing it as the federal government’s new improved “apparatus of secret power” and as a threat to the US Constitution. Congressman Dick Cheney and former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld would be absconding annually to a remote location to participate in a “most highly classified program” that would entirely supersede the protocol enacted in our Constitution for presidential succession during a national crisis, diminishing the role of the Speaker of the House of Representatives and the federal Congress and developing instead “a secret procedure for putting in place a new ‘President’ and his staff.” Following the September 11, 2001 attacks on New York and Washington DC, Vice President Dick Cheney would routinely be disappearing down a burrow to an “undisclosed location,” and under nominal president George W. Bush, in the name of national security, a shadow government would begin to operate in secrecy out of underground bunkers without any involvement with the legislative and judicial branches of the aboveground apparatus of government.

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1950: During the early years of this decade President Harry S Truman would have the interior of the White House gutted and rebuilt on a skeleton of steel beams on a concrete foundation, making the house safe and ensuring its continued use by American presidents. Thank you, Harry.

The United States of America adopted the Security Act of 1950, which contained an emergency civilian detention plan that was to remain in effect for more than 20 years.2

General Curtis LeMay, commander of the United States Air Force’s nuclear-capable Strategic Air Command, became concerned about base security. “The Russians didn’t threaten us,” said LeMay. “But I was worried about fifth column activity. Sabotage… And the stupidest people we had in the Air Force were put in the Military Police.” To reduce this perceived systemic risk, this American general adopted an agenda of searching out and publicly dismissing bad examples: incompetent provost marshals, unconcerned wing commanders. The general arranged for his security forces to be designated “Air Police” and took steps to treat the key commanders not as unwanted stepchildren but as key members of his hands-on personal security team. To make sure his Air Police understood how very special they were, he provided a distinctive uniform and arranged for professional instruction in aikido, judo, and karate. The general established an Air Police school at Fort Carson, Colorado that would teach his new Air Police how to rise above the level of gate guards and make of themselves a deadly mixture of military police with nuclear weapon security.3

Meanwhile, there were those who were underimpressed by this uncritical pursuit of safety through power. For instance, in this year Milton Mayer, without renouncing his Jewishness, became a member of the Religious Society of Friends.

1950

2. During the early 1980s in Washington DC, US Marine Lieutenant-Colonel Oliver North would help draft secret wartime contingency plans which would provide for “the imposition of martial law, internment camps, and the turning over of government to the president and FEMA,” and more than two decades later, the Sydney Morning Herald would report that the Bush administration might employ these Reagan-era security initiatives, installing “internment camps and martial law in the United States.” Following 9/11, reports of civilian detention camps and plans to “herd people into sports stadiums” would be punctuated by John Dean’s question: “Could terrorism result in a constitutional dictator?” By late 2005, after President Bush would propose a greater role for the military during natural disasters and the imposition of marshal law should there be an avian flu outbreak, former Reagan cabinet member Paul Craig Roberts would assert “The Police State Is Closer Than You Think.”3. During this decade, about twenty Japanese martial art instructors would be touring Air Force bases, and hundreds of US airmen would be taking month-long courses at the Kodokan. His Japanese instructors were among the best available: karate teachers such as Nakayama Masatoshi and Nishiyama Hidetaka; judo teachers such as Daigo Toshiro and Kotani Sumiyuki, and aikido teachers such as Tomiki Kenji. The Air Police were to practice their judo and karate in the gyms that LeMay had ordered built on their bases (following discharge, former Air Police often would continue teaching and practicing judo or karate in their home towns; for instance, Laverne Raab in Omaha and Bill Reuter in Seattle). Karate instructors would no longer emphasize the building up of knuckle calluses but LeMay would seek to make his America become more and more like the pre-WWII Shinto Japan that he had gone to such lengths to defeat.

JUDAISM

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Summer 1954: A Quaker committee involving Stephen G. Cary (clerk), James E. Bristol, Amiya Chandra Chakravarty, A. Burns Chalmers, William Benbow Edgerton, Harrop A. Freeman, Robert Wallace Gilmore, Cecil E. Hinshaw, Milton Sanford Mayer, the Reverend A.J. Muste, Clarence Evan Pickett, Robert Pickus, Norman Jehiel Whitney, and Bayard Rustin,4 was struggling to create a new pamphlet about peace.

They titled their 71-page tract, which would be immensely influential, SPEAK TRUTH TO POWER: A QUAKER SEARCH FOR AN ALTERNATIVE TO VIOLENCE. It would be the 5th in a series that the American Friends Service Committee was publishing on aspects of US foreign policy.

This injunction “Speak truth to power” has since become one on which we Quakers have learned to rely.

This document is powerful because it forcefully engaged the American assumptions underlying the Cold War. Its best known section is probably its final one, “An Affirmation.” Here is the first tantalizing paragraph of that final section:

There is a politics of time, but there is also apolitics of eternity that man would ignore, but cannot.He plays with the politics of time, sees it, manipulatesit, imagines it as of himself alone; but both thepolitics of time and of eternity are of God. Only theeye of faith perceives the relationship, for it aloneglimpses the dimension of eternity. Man sees but dimly,yet enough to know the overarching Power that moves inthe affairs of men. Because we are first men of faith,and only secondarily political analysts, we would speaknow, finally, of the politics of eternity which hasundergirded the whole.

WHAT I’M WRITING IS TRUE BUT NEVER MIND

YOU CAN ALWAYS LIE TO YOURSELF

1954

4. Friend Bayard’s name would not appear because, he agreed, as a homosexual who would eventually be convicted of engaging in illicit sexual activities in Los Angeles in 1953, this might well have compromised the work’s acceptance. According to the recollections of the clerk of the committee, Stephen Cary, however, it had been around Rustin and Pickus that the group had coalesced.

THE QUAKER PEACE TESTIMONY

SPEAK TRUTH TO POWER

THE ABOVE, REDONE NOW

ABOUT THE COLD WAR

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This may be the most powerful statement of pacifism as yet achieved in this country, and it would be well worth your while to give it a read from beginning to end.

When after the publication of this pamphlet the committee would be asked, how they had managed to come up with their neato injunction, “Speak truth to power,” they would respond that they weren’t sure except that it must have been found somewhere in Quaker tradition. The problem then has been, to figure out from whence in the Quaker tradition this injunction had been derived. Over the years since 1954, many yellowing Quaker treatises have been scanned without anyone being able to come up with the expected Quaker precedent. (Someone suggested that, since Friend Milton’s background was Jewish, the source might have been somewhere in his tradition, so Jewish literature also has been scanned — but to no avail.)5

We have noticed a story that when Zilu asked Confucius how to serve a prince, Confucius advised “Tell him the truth, even if it offends him.” So we have posed for ourselves a question, might Mayer have gotten this from Confucius?

We have noticed that in an 1828 essay on the poet Robert Burns placed in the Edinburgh Review by Thomas Carlyle, one of the tropes the poet utilized was “How does the poet speak to men with power, but by being still more a man than they?” So we have posed for ourselves the question, might Mayer have been a fan of Burns, or Carlyle?

Recently this puzzle has, I think, been solved! The phrase this committee had picked up in the summer of 1954 has turned out to have originated as a comment by Mohammed the prophet of Islam — upon whom be peace.

Our key to the puzzle is the surreptitious committee member, Friend Bayard. We just don’t know, at least as yet, exactly how early, or in what manner, he had been able to access this in the Islamic writings, and translate it into a pithy English-language injunction:

5. For background on this, consult H. Larry Ingle’s “‘Speak Truth to Power’: A Thirty Years' Retrospective,” Christian Century, CII (April 27, 1985), 383-385, and his “Milton Mayer: A Quaker Hedgehog,” Quaker Theology, V (Spring-Summer 2003), 67-81 (especially page 75).

CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

“SPEAK TRUTH TO POWER”

“SPEAK TRUTH TO POWER”

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• In the Mishkat collection, BOOK OF RULERSHIP AND JUDGMENT, Chapter 1, Section 2, we learn that a man of Mohammed’s time named Jami’i at-Thirmidhi put it on the record that Mohammed had said (such a record of such a saying is referred to in the Islamic tradition as a hadith), “The most excellent jihad is when one speaks a true word in the presence of a tyrannical ruler.” One of the famous classical commentaries, the RUH AL-BAYAN, also refers to this particular hadith.

• The injunction had been familiar to Friend Bayard before the summer of 1954, when this group was struggling to create this new pamphlet about peace, for, in John D’Emilio’s biography LOST PROPHET: THE LIFE AND TIMES OF BAYARD RUSTIN (NY: Free Press, 2003) there appears on page 48 a letter from Bayard to his Friends monthly meeting in Manhattan, written on August 15, 1942 while this group was considering the possibility that it might begin to provide hospitality and services to American service men in “USO” style:

Since 1942 was years before the use of the injunction in the Quaker pamphlet, clearly, therefore, it would have been Friend Bayard, who already had this injunction “Speak the truth to power,” who would provide it during the summer of 1954 to the primary author, Friend Milton.

This saying of Mohammed, this hadith, “The most excellent jihad is when one speaks a true word in the presence of a tyrannical ruler,” is in the grammatical form that is described as a Declaration. The phrase in the title of the Quaker pamphlet, “Speak truth to power,” is in the grammatical form that is described as an Injunction. So, how does one go about transforming a Declaration into an Injunction?

Let us practice by permuting the Declaration “The best way to put out a house fire is to throw buckets of water on it.” What would be the Injunction that would correspond to this Declaration? We might think of “To put out a house fire, throw buckets of water on it,” but that’s not short and sharp, so we should shorten and sharpen it. Immediately we think of “Fight fire with water.” That does nicely!

That’s enough practice, now for the real thing. Let’s proceed to transform the Prophet of Islam’s Declaration into a pithy English-language Injunction. Mohammed’s declaration had been translated in full as “The most excellent jihad is when one speaks a true word in the presence of a tyrannical ruler.” The injunctive form for that would be “To deal with a tyrannical ruler, say a true word to him or her.” That’s not really catchy, and as we will see below, Friend Bayard slept on it and came up with “speak the truth to power.” To get from Bayard’s “speak the truth to power” to Friend Milton’s “speak truth to power,” all we need to do is drop on the floor an utterly superfluous definite article.

In that letter Friend Bayard had written on August 15, 1942 he had put the phrase within quotation marks, and this of course indicates that he knew very well that the phrase was not original with him. Was there a reason why he might have refrained from providing an attribution? –For sure there was, as he was writing the letter in question to a bunch of Quakers who were mostly in the Christian tradition, who would have been turned off cold had they been informed that “Speak the truth to power” actually derived from the prophet of Islam. I think it is very likely, since when Friend Milton was questioned about “the phrase that he had come up with,” he obfuscated by suggesting that maybe it was to be found somewhere in the Quaker tradition. That, to me,

The primary social function of a religious society is to “speakthe truth to power.” The truth is that war is wrong. It is thenour duty to make war impossible first in us and then in society.To cooperate with the government in building morale seemsinconsistent with all we profess to believe.... The greatestservice that we can render the men in the armed forces is tomaintain our peace testimony.

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indicates precisely one thing: Milton was aware that he really shouldn’t say any more on such a subject. He could no more admit to any other white Friend “I got this from Friend Bayard Rustin,” who wasn’t even being acknowledged as a member of the committee, than Friend Bayard had been able to admit to the Friends in the Christian tradition “I got this from Mohammed, the prophet of Islam.” There were ample reasons why for the benefit of the peace work in a generally Christian and Jewish context, such a provenance needed to be kept in the dark at the back of the closet.

We may note in this context, that during June 2002 there has been quite a tempest in a teapot at Harvard University. Zayed Yasin, a Harvard senior chosen as one of three student orators for that year’s graduation, decided to urge his fellow students to apply the Islamic concept of jihad to their lives. He intended by his oration, which he wanted to entitle “American Jihad,” to redeem this word jihad for American audiences by informing his Harvard community that within Islam there was a use for this term which was both benevolent and righteous. The “greater jihad,” in Islam, is a spiritual struggle within the person, in which the person strives to become the proper and decent sort of person. Only what is known as the “lesser jihad” –the external holy war against unbelievers– might be a proper subject for our disapprobation. Those people who are going around with dynamite strapped to their midsections are truly terrifying — but they should not be allowed to hijack such an important word and make it apply only to their own peculiar form of viciousness. The tempest in the teapot at Harvard commencement was over whether or not this senior would be allowed to deliver his commencement oration, with its provocative title “American Jihad.” (Now of course the matter is done and over with, without any harm, but the incident has reinforced what a sensitive word this word is.)

The “speak truth to power” injunction in the title of this peace pamphlet seems interestingly ambiguous. If one were to approach it from the perspective of might makes right, which of course is the perspective most commonly useful in the real world, the phrase might indicate that when one is confronted by powerful people, one had better tell them the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth without evasion or distortion, because such folks aren’t forced to and aren’t about to put up with evasions and distortions, and most definitely have the ability to punish one upon their displeasure. If one approaches it from the perspective that power creates its own reality, in such manner that the inheritors get to own the official truth, however, the phrase might indicate that when one is confronted by powerful people, one ought to defy their official truth, and accept whatever consequences follow from having spoken disturbing and irritating words which they desire not to be forced to hear. Thus, unfortunately, it is the sort of phrase with which a number of quite different people could agree, and does not in itself perform a critical discriminative function. –But then, one supposes, most language is subject to such limitations. We need, therefore, when we use this injunction, to make certain that our hearers are not misreceiving our communication.

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1955: Stanley M. Vogel’s GERMAN LITERARY INFLUENCES ON THE AMERICAN TRANSCENDENTALISTS (New Haven: Yale UP).

Friend Milton Mayer’s study of some ordinary German lives during the period of the Third Reich, THEY THOUGHT THEY WERE FREE: THE GERMANS, 1933-45 (U of Chicago P).

http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/hfs.cgi/00/1471.ctl

(There’s a short sweet explanation for why this book had been written in English rather than in German.The subtext of the monograph might best be expressed as “Uh, yeah, we postwar Americans — yeah, we’re supposing ourselves to be free.”)

CHANGE IS ETERNITY, STASIS A FIGMENT

1955

WORLD WAR II

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March 2, Wednesday, 1955: The text for the pamphlet “Speak Truth to Power: a Quaker search for an alternative to violence” was submitted to the Executive Board of the American Friends Service Committee and approved for publication. Credit for this would be distributed among Stephen G. Cary (clerk), James E. Bristol, Amiya Chandra Chakravarty, A. Burns Chalmers, William Benbow Edgerton, Harrop A. Freeman, Robert Wallace Gilmore, Cecil E. Hinshaw, Milton Mayer, the Reverend A.J. Muste, Clarence Evan Pickett, Robert Pickus, and Norman Jehiel Whitney.

Queerly, the name of Bayard Rustin would not be mentioned.

THE QUAKER PEACE TESTIMONY

SPEAK TRUTH TO POWER

THE ABOVE, REDONE NOW

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1957: Friend Milton Sanford Mayer’s THE TRADITION OF FREEDOM.

The 22-room New England Friends Home at 230 Main Street in Amesbury, Massachusetts was found no longer to be in compliance with updated state safety standards and notice was given that at the end of the year the facility would need to close down (the basic construction of the building, with long dark stairs, etc., meant that there was no feasible way to meet the new code). At that time, room and board there was $17 per week for elderly Quakers, $3 less expensive than for non-Quakers.

Dr. David Tillerson Smith was awarded the Trudeau Medal for research in tuberculosis by the American Thoracic Society.

Kenneth L. Carroll’s “The Fourth Gospel and the Exclusion of Christians from the Synagogue” (Bulletin of the John Rylands Library 40, pages 19-32).6

Professor Piero Sensi and Dr. Maria Teresa Timbal’s research group at the Lepetit Pharmaceuticals research lab in Milan, Italy discovered, in a soil sample from a pine forest on the French Riviera, a bacterium Amycolatopsis rifamycinica that produced an antibacterial agent that would come to be known as “Rifampicin,” and be a major additive to the “PIERS” cocktail-mix of drugs Pyrazinamide, Isoniazid, Ethambutol, and Streptomycin used to treat tuberculosis.

LIFE IS LIVED FORWARD BUT UNDERSTOOD BACKWARD?— NO, THAT’S GIVING TOO MUCH TO THE HISTORIAN’S STORIES.

LIFE ISN’T TO BE UNDERSTOOD EITHER FORWARD OR BACKWARD.

1957

6. In this year, during a raft trip down the Rio Grande, Ken’s life was saved in Santa Elena Canyon by his adopted brother Lon Slaughter of San Angelo, Texas.

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1958: Friend Floyd Schmoe went to the Middle East to help reopen water wells that had been damaged during the Egyptian/Israeli wars.

Friend Milton Mayer’s THE REVOLUTION IN EDUCATION.

Dr. David Tillerson Smith was awarded the Southern Tuberculosis Conference Medal for distinguished service.

Kenneth L. Carroll’s “Talbot County Quakerism in the Colonial Period” (Maryland Historical Magazine 53, pages 326-370).

1958

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1960: During this decade Friend Milton Mayer would refuse to sign a loyalty oath, and take the Department of State before the Supreme Court for its refusal to grant him a passport (he would win a Supreme Court ruling that the relevant portion of the McCarran Act was unconstitutional, and finally be issued his passport).

Kenneth L. Carroll became a full professor in the Department of Religious Studies at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas. He had risen from instructor in seven years, which is still a record for that institution. A number of honors were bestowed on him during those years, being chosen as “outstanding professor,” “Friendliest Professor,” and “Senior Class Sponsor” a number of times. He was also initiated into Blue Key national leadership honorary society. He had served in various capacities such as freshman advisor, member of the College Planning Board, and faculty advisor to Delta Kappa Epsilon.

During this decade Friend Jeanne Whitaker would help create an American Friends Service Committee office in Providence, Rhode Island.

1960

UNAMERICANISM

RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS

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1964: Friend Floyd Schmoe’s FOR THE LOVE OF SOME ISLANDS, about a summer during which the family explored the natural history of the San Juan Islands, was published in New York by Harper & Row.

Friend Milton Mayer’s collections of essays WHAT CAN A MAN DO?

Kenneth L. Carroll’s “Persecution of Quakers in Early Maryland (1658-1661)” (Quaker History 53, pages 67-80).7

In its temporary building on Alexander Avenue, the Carolina Friends School of the Durham, North Carolina Friends monthly meeting began to offer racially integrated kindergarten classes.

1964

7. Much of Ken’s genealogical materials has been deposited in the Maryland Room at the Talbot County Free Library.

QUAKER HISTORY DOWNLOAD

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1965: At the Anniversary dinner of the War Resisters League the League Peace Award was presented to Friend Bayard Rustin by A.J. Muste. There was a speech by Friend Milton Mayer.

1965

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1967: Sandy Spring Friends House, a retirement community.

Kenneth L. Carroll’s “Thomas Thurston, Renegade Maryland Quaker” (Maryland Historical Magazine 62, pages 170-192). Also, his “Tatian’s Influence on the Developing New Testament” (in STUDIES IN THE HISTORY AND TEXT OF THE NEW TESTAMENT IN HONOR OF KENNETH WILLIS CLARK, edited by Boyd L. Daniels and M. Jack Suggs. Salt Lake City: U of Utah P).

Friend Milton Mayer’s THE MAYER/BOULDING DIALOGUE ON PEACE RESEARCH.

1967

MAYER/BOULDING

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February 11, Saturday, 1967: The Peoples Liberation Army took over effective control of Peking, as well as all civil aviation in China.

The Soviet Union began requiring visas for all Chinese visitors to the country, and China retaliated in kind.

Lukas Foss conducted opera for the first time, in a New York City Opera production of Mozart’s Le nozze di Figaro.

The Orchestral Set no. 2 by Charles Ives was performed for the initial time, in Orchestra Hall, Chicago.

This year was the year of Canada’s centennial celebration. Henri Julien Rechatin proposed to the Niagara Parks Commission that he be permitted to perform a high wire act on a strand less than an inch in diameter above the Whirlpool of the Niagara River gorge (they would refuse).

Abraham Johannes Muste died suddenly in New York City.8

1967

8. His obituary, “The Christer,” would be written by Friend Milton Sanford Mayer.

A.J. MUSTE

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1969: In downtown Boston, a tablet marking the site of our old Quaker meetinghouse (1709-1808) was stolen. There was a march protesting the new Southwest Expressway — “People Before Highways!”

Friend Milton Mayer’s ON LIBERTY: MAN V. THE STATE.

Active in draft counseling during the Vietnam war, the Durham, North Carolina Friends monthly meeting was involved in the establishment of Quaker House in Fayetteville, which would include a military counseling service and an unprogrammed meeting. The 1st resident directors there would be from the Durham group (other families in the meeting would also be serving as resident directors).

In other news relating to this monthly meeting in Durham, a decision was reached at the Carolina Friends School associated with the meeting, that the school had grown to the point at which it needed to hire its initial full-time principal. The school board interviewed one candidate who was a Quaker but had no educational experience, and was not satisfied, and then interviewed another candidate who did have educational experience but was not a Quaker, and was not satisfied, but then someone suggested Harold Jernigan as a candidate, since he not only was a Quaker, but also had educational experience. He was selected and would serve for seven years before moving along to be principal of another Quaker school elsewhere.

During this year and the following one Professor Kenneth L. Carroll would served as the T. Wistar Brown Fellow at Haverford College.

1969

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1972: Friend Milton Mayer’s IF MEN WERE ANGELS.

The Tuskegee Experiment, in which black men had been purposely infected with syphilis without their awareness (and then left untreated so that we could study the long-term results), finally comes to an end. “The United States Government did something that was wrong, deeply, profoundly, morally wrong,” President William Jefferson Clinton would later opinion. “It was an outrage to our commitment to integrity and equality for all our citizens.”

At the Pierrelatte refining facility in France, a discovery was made in uranium ore that had been unearthed at the Oklo River mine of Eastern Gabon, Africa. This ore was found to be depleted in 235Uranium, the fissile isotope we now use in our nuclear weapons. What had been the cause of this anomalous depletion? –Some two billions of years ago, it seems, the natural concentration of radioactive elements in that strata of rocks had caused beneath the surface of the earth a local natural criticality — a self-sustaining fission reaction, a natural nuclear reactor. It had not gone off like an A-bomb (it had not formed itself into a supercritical mass of sufficient size and density, minimal 5% concentration in a minimal mass of some 11 kilograms, to result in a criticality), but –perhaps in combination with surface lightning strikes– the concentration had been sufficient

1972

Recognizably Not An Angel

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to cause unusual local depletion of this isotope in the ore. We’re actually not doing anything in our nuclear power reactors –such as the six that until recently were lined up along the coast at the Fukushima Daiichi electric-power facility in Japan– that the planet hadn’t already done on its lonesome, long before the human species, long before animals, long before land plants, back in the era in which the only life that as yet existed on this planet was in the form of strands of blue-green algae!

A federal safety regulator who was familiar with the design problems of General Electric’s Mark I nuclear reactor containment vessel, with its tacked-on engineering afterthought referred to as “the torus,” urged a ban.However, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission considered that “reversal of this hallowed policy, particularly at this time, could well be the end of nuclear power” (nowadays we’d be tempted to suggest that it was this very failure to reverse our course, as of 1972, that would result in the demise of nuclear power, as of 2011).

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1975: Friend Milton Mayer’s THE NATURE OF THE BEAST.

At the Anniversary dinner of the War Resisters League the League Peace Award was presented to Dave Dellinger.

When the scorecard for the 3rd quarter of the 20th Century came in, it wasn’t pretty:

For sure, if more people had been willing to do their duty, like Friend John R. Kellam for one fine instance, this picture would have been different. However, Friend John is feeling better now about the way he was scorned and condemned during World War II, for refusing to participate in the killing — and here is why:

When our Vietnamese refugee son, Tuoc Q. Phan, became eligibleafter five years to apply for his citizenship, the form he wasfilling in asked if he promised to give military service indefense of America, and at first he was stumped and doubted ifhe could ever become a citizen. He is faithful to his Buddhistupbringing that teaches kindness instead of cruelty to otherpeople, animals, Nature’s Earth, and to avoid doing harmanywhere or to anyone. Also he was instructed in a Catholic highschool to be similarly a peacemaker; and beside all that, helived agreeably with a Quaker pacifist family for a few yearsin our home. An immigration lawyer in Boston told us that thelaw provides for a different oath of citizenship he could takethat would not compromise these principles. So he studied hardand passed his requirements, and was one of 45 people beingnaturalized one morning in the courtroom of District Court JudgeRonald Lagueux in Providence. The judge called 44 names andadministered the usual oath which they swore to. And then the

1975

THE NATURE OF THE BEAST

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judge said there was one more applicant who would take a somewhatdifferent oath as a conscientious objector to all war on accountof religious training and belief. Then the judge said that thisyoung man is “no less welcome” as he becomes a citizen here thanany of the others are!

Suddenly I felt immensely grateful that Judge Lagueux had saidthat, because for about 37 years since Judge Klobe had condemnedmy character for having claimed to be a CO, I had felt quite abit less welcome in the country of my birth. More than he knew,Judge Lagueux validated me as well as the federal law that,before World War II, had legitimized the religious basis for aman’s declining to destroy people and property with weapons ofwarfare. However, reading carefully the text of the revised oathof citizenship as supplied by a friend recently,9 it does notsound like what Judge Lagueux read to our son then beingnaturalized. Its wording obligates a new citizen to acceptwhatever judgment may be reached by a draft board or otherauthority administering a law about military service, howeverthat judgment may violate his dictates of moral conscience orhis religious beliefs. It is a clever wording of the “monkey’spaw” type; that is, it appears to grant the recognition andrespect a person of faith needs, but it does so in a form thatmay be useful when the need arises.

9. “I hereby declare, on oath, that I absolutely and entirely renounce and abjure all allegiance and fidelity to any foreign prince, potentate, state, or sovereignty of whom or which I have heretofore been a subject of citizen; that I will support and defend the Constitution and laws of the United States of America against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I will bear arms on behalf of the United States when required by law; that I will perform noncombatant service in the Armed Forces of the United States when required by the law; that I will perform work of national importance under civilian direction when required by the law; and that I take this obligation freely without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; so help me God. In acknowledgement whereof I have hereunto affixed my signature.”

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April 20, Sunday, 1986: Milton Sanford Mayer died (in Carmel, California where he and Jane “Baby” Scully Mayer had made their home).

1986

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1990: At the Anniversary dinner of the War Resisters League Peace Awards went to Esther Pank and Riley Bostrom.

Posthumously, Friend Milton Sanford Mayer’s BIODEGRADABLE MAN: SELECTED ESSAYS.

Kenneth L. Carroll’s “The Honorable Thomas Taillor: a Tale of Two Wives” (Maryland Historical Magazine 95, pages 379-394).

In the Durham monthly meeting of the Religious Society of Friends:

1990

Clerks of Meeting

1943-1947 Edward K. Kraybill

1947-1948 William Van Hoy, Jr.

1949-1949 John de J. Pemberton, Jr.

1950-1951 Harry R. Stevens

1951-1952 John A. Barlow

1952-1957 Susan Gower Smith

1957-1960 Frances C. Jeffers

1960-1961 Cyrus M. Johnson

1961-1965 Peter H. Klopfer

1965-1967 Rebecca W. Fillmore

1967-1968 David Tillerson Smith

1968-1970 Ernest Albert Hartley

1970-1971 John Hunter

1971-1972 John Gamble

1972-1974 Lyle B. Snider (2 terms)

1974-1975 Helen Gardella

1976-1978 Cheryl F. Junk

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1978-1980 Alice S. Keighton

1980-1982 John B. Hunter

1982-1984 Edward M. Arnett

1984-1986 Calhoun D. Geiger

1986-1988 John P. Stratton

1988-1990 J. Robert Passmore

1990-1992 Karen Cole Stewart

1992-1995 Kathleen Davidson March

1995-1998 Nikki Vangsnes

1998-2000 Co-clerks J. Robert Passmore& Karen Cole Stewart

2000-2002 Amy Brannock

2002-2002 Jamie Hysjulien (Acting)

2002-2005 William Thomas O’Connor

2005-2007 Terry Graedon

2007-2009 Anne Akwari

2009-2012 Joe Graedon

2012-2013 Marguerite Dingman

2013- Co-clerks Cathy Bridge & David Bridge

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1993: Posthumously, Friend Milton Sanford Mayer’s ROBERT MAYNARD HUTCHINS: A MEMOIR.

“MAGISTERIAL HISTORY” IS FANTASIZING: HISTORY IS CHRONOLOGY

COPYRIGHT NOTICE: In addition to the property of others,such as extensive quotations and reproductions ofimages, this “read-only” computer file contains a greatdeal of special work product of Austin Meredith,copyright 2017. Access to these interim materials willeventually be offered for a fee in order to recoup someof the costs of preparation. My hypercontext buttoninvention which, instead of creating a hypertext leapthrough hyperspace —resulting in navigation problems—allows for an utter alteration of the context withinwhich one is experiencing a specific content alreadybeing viewed, is claimed as proprietary to AustinMeredith — and therefore freely available for use byall. Limited permission to copy such files, or anymaterial from such files, must be obtained in advancein writing from the “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo”Project, 833 Berkeley St., Durham NC 27705. Pleasecontact the project at <kouroo@kouroo.info>.

Prepared: April 4, 2017

1993

ROBERT MAYNARD HUTCHINS

“It’s all now you see. Yesterday won’t be over untiltomorrow and tomorrow began ten thousand years ago.”

– Remark by character “Garin Stevens”in William Faulkner’s INTRUDER IN THE DUST

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ARRGH AUTOMATED RESEARCH REPORT

GENERATION HOTLINE

This stuff presumably looks to you as if it were generated by ahuman. Such is not the case. Instead, someone has requested thatwe pull it out of the hat of a pirate who has grown out of theshoulder of our pet parrot “Laura” (as above). What thesechronological lists are: they are research reports compiled byARRGH algorithms out of a database of modules which we term theKouroo Contexture (this is data mining). To respond to such arequest for information we merely push a button.

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Commonly, the first output of the algorithm has obviousdeficiencies and we need to go back into the modules stored inthe contexture and do a minor amount of tweaking, and then weneed to punch that button again and recompile the chronology —but there is nothing here that remotely resembles the ordinary“writerly” process you know and love. As the contents of thisoriginating contexture improve, and as the programming improves,and as funding becomes available (to date no funding whateverhas been needed in the creation of this facility, the entireoperation being run out of pocket change) we expect a diminishedneed to do such tweaking and recompiling, and we fully expectto achieve a simulation of a generous and untiring roboticresearch librarian. Onward and upward in this brave new world.

First come first serve. There is no charge.Place requests with <kouroo@kouroo.info>. Arrgh.