Max Lerner

Who was Max Lerner?

Maxwell "Max" Alan Lerner was an American journalist and educator known for his controversial syndicated column.

After immigrating from Russia with his parents in 1907, Lerner earned a B.A. from Yale University in 1923. He studied law there but transferred to Washington University in St. Louis for an M.A. in 1925.

He earned a doctorate from the Brookings Institution in 1927 and began work as an editor:

⁕Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences

⁕The Nation

⁕PM

Lerner's most influential book was "America as a Civilization: Life and Thought in the United States Today". Lerner was a staunch opponent of discrimination against African-Americans, but supported the wartime internment of Japanese Americans and backed an American Civil Liberties Union resolution on the issue to "subordinate civil liberties to wartime considerations and political loyalties." During the 30s, Lerner was a strong advocate of the New Deal.

His column for the New York Post debuted in 1949. It earned him a place on the master list of Nixon political opponents. During most of his career he was considered a liberal. In his later years however, he was seen as something of a conservative, due to expressing support for the Reagan administration.

Famous Quotes:

• We all run on two clocks. One is the outside clock, which ticks away our decades and brings us ceaselessly to the dry season. The other is the inside clock, where you are your own timekeeper and determine your own chronology, your own internal weather and your own rate of living. Sometimes the inner clock runs itself out long before the outer one, and you see a dead man going through the motions of living.
• Having a thirteen-year-old in the family is like having a general-admission ticket to the movies, radio and TV. You get to understand that the glittering new arts of our civilization are directed to the teen-agers, and by their suffrage they stand or fall.
• A President is best judged by the enemies he makes when he has really hit his stride.
• The crime of book purging is that it involves a rejection of the word. For the word is never absolute truth, but only man's frail and human effort to approach the truth. To reject the word is to reject the human search.
• When you choose the lesser of two evils, always remember that it is still an evil.
• We cannot live by power, and a culture that seeks to live by it becomes brutal and sterile. But we can die without it.
• Despite the success cult, men are most deeply moved not by the reaching of the goal but by the grandness of the effort involved in getting there -- or failing to get there.
• Either men will learn to live like brothers, or they will die like beasts.
• The real sadness of fifty is not that you change so much but that you change so little.
• I am neither an optimist nor pessimist, but a possibilist.