VOICES FROM THE PAST

Martha Gellhorn 1908 – 1998 (July 11, 2004)

It took nine years, and a great depression, and two wars ending in defeat, and one surrender without war, to break my faith in the benign power of the press. Gradually I came to realize that people will more readily swallow lies than truth, as if the taste of lies was homey, appetizing: a habit.

Unless they are immediate victims, the majority of mankind behaves as if war was an act of God which could not be prevented; or they behave as if war elsewhere was none of their business. It would be a bitter comic joke if we destroy ourselves due to atrophy of the imagination.
- From: The Face of War (1959)

Martha Gellhorn was born in St. Louis in 1908 and left college after her third year to pursue a career in journalism and writing. As an investigator for the Federal Emergency Relief Administration, she reported on the impact of the Depression on the U.S. which caught the attention of First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt. They became life-long friends. She became a war correspondent for Collier's Weekly and covered the Spanish Civil War, the rise of Hitler in Germany and World War II. She landed on the beaches in France on June 7th having traveled over on a hospital ship.

She was with the U.S. troops that liberated Dachau in 1945 and wrote:

I was in Dachau when the German armies surrendered unconditionally to the Allies. We sat in that room, in that accursed cemetery prison, and no one had anything more to say. Still, Dachau seemed to me the most suitable place in Europe to hear the news of victory. For surely this war was made to abolish Dachau, and all the other places like Dachau, and everything that Dachau stood for, and to abolish it for ever.

After WW II she continued covering wars for The Atlantic Monthly. When asked in an interview with ABC News in 1986 what was the worst war she ever covered, she replied:

I hated Vietnam the most, because I felt personally responsible. It was my own country doing this abomination. I am talking about what was done in South Vietnam to the people whom we, supposedly, had come to save. I`m seeing napalmed children in the hospital, seeing old women with a piece of white sulphur burning away inside of them, seeing the destroyed villages, seeing people dropping of hunger and dying in the streets. My complete horror remains with me as a source of grief and anger and shame that surpasses all the others.

Further in The Face of War, a collection of her articles on war, Gellhorn discusses journalism and citizenship:

Serious, careful, honest journalism is essential, not because it is a guiding light but because it is a form of honorable behavior, involving the reporter and the reader.

Citizenship is a tough occupation which obliges the citizen to make his own informed opinion and stand by it.

In 1978 she wrote Travels With Myself and Another about her life with Ernest Hemingway. She died in London in 1998.

Langston Hughes 1902-1967

Langston Hughes was a prolific writer who devoted his life to writing and lecturing. He was awarded an honorary Lit.D. from his alma mater, Lincoln University in Pennsylvania, a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1935 and a Rosenwald Fellowship in 1940. His first published poem "The Negro Speaks of Rivers" was also one of his most famous. His poems, short plays, essays and short stories appeared in the NAACP publication Crisis Magazine and in Opportunity Magazine and other publications. One of his finest essays appeared in The Nation in 1926 entitled "The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain."

Presidential candidate Senator John Kerry has been ending his speeches with the phrase "Let America be America again." It is the title of a 1938 poem by Langston Hughes and Kerry has been invoking its first lines:

Let America be America again
Let it be the dream it used to be.

The complete poem of Let America Be America Again can be found at www.poetryconnection.net/poets/Langston Hughes/2385.

His residence at 20 East 127th Street in Harlem in New York City has been given landmark status by the NYC Preservation Commission. His block of E. 127th Street was renamed "Langston Hughes Place."

Felix Frankfurter

Felix Frankfurter was appointed to the Supreme Court by President Franklin D. Roosevelt. He was born in Vienna, Austria in 1882 and emigrated with his family to the United States twelve years later. A graduate from New York City College and Harvard Law School, Justice Frankfurter took a strong stand on individual civil rights and helped find the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). He brought marked liberal tendencies to the high bench, but was also a firm adherent of judicial restraint. He died in 1965.

"Fragile as reason is and limited as law is as the institutionalised medium of reason, that's all we have between us and the tyranny of mere will and the cruelty of unbridled, undisciplined feelings."

"It was a wise man who said that there is no greater inequality than the equal treatment of unequals."

"The real rulers in Washington are invisible to exercise power from behind the scenes."

"Freedom of the press is not an end in itself but a mean to the end of (achieving) a free society."

Walt Whitman

 

TO YOU

STRANGER, if you passing meet me and desire to speak to me, why
should you not speak to me?
And why should I not speak to you?



TO FOREIGN LANDS

I HEARD that you ask'd for something to prove this puzzle the New World,
And to define America, her athletic Democracy,
Therefore I send you my poems that you behold in them what you wanted.



TO THE STATES

To the States or any one of them, or any city of the States, Resist much, obey little,
Once unquestioning obedience, once fully enslaved,
Once fully enslaved, no nation, state, city of this earth, ever
afterward resumes its liberty.

Rod Serling

 

For those of you not familiar with the "The Twilight Zone", it is an American television series that ran for five seasons from 1959 through 1964. The series was conceived by Rod Serling, who wrote many of the scripts and who was honored with five Emmys for his efforts. The stories were almost always fantastic, but with a strong underlying moral. One of the most well know episodes of the series is known as "The Monsters are Due on Maple Street", about what happens in typical neighborhood during a time of uncertainty. The following analysis of the episode appeared in the Italian e-zine Dada dating from March-April 1996. It may be of relevance today...

"Good and Bad Leaders" (1996)

Milton Mayer

The American journalist Milton Mayer is best known for his groundbreaking work "They Thought They Were Free" (1955), a collection of interviews with normal, everyday people who had succumbed to National Socialism. The lessons he draws are chilling and universal, for all societies. His basic message: resist the beginnings...

www.thirdreich.net/Thought_They_Were_Free.html
Milton Mayer biography at quest.quaker.org

Sanity Check

How did American Presidents and other figures in the public arena used to speak?

www.buzzflash.com/farrell/04/02/far04004.html
"Presidential Material" (satire)


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