Milton Mayer (1908–1986)

Milton Mayer was born in Chicago, Illinois, to a Jewish American family, the son of Morris Samuel and Louise Gerson Mayer. He graduated from Englewood High School, where he received a classical education with an emphasis on Latin and languages. He attended the University of Chicago in 1925–1928, but but did not earn a degree. He became a reporter for the Associated Press, the Chicago Evening Post, and the Chicago American. He wrote a monthly column in the Progressive magazine for more than 40 years. During his stint at the Post, he married his first wife Bertha Tepper, with whom he had two daughters. In 1945, they divorced, and two years later, he remarried to Jane Scully, who had two sons from a previous marriage.

Mayer is probably best remembered for his influential book They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45, first published in 1955. It was a study of the lives of a group of 10 ordinary Germans from the town of Marburg under the Third Reich, based on extensive interviews Mayer did with them, and his research. Other books included What Can a Man Do? (1964) and The Revolution in Education (1944, with co-author Mortimer Adler). He also taught at the University of Chicago, the University of Massachusetts, and the University of Louisville, as well as universities abroad. In the mid-1950s, along with Bayard Rustin, he served on the committee that wrote the Quaker pamphlet, Speak Truth to Power (1955); Mayer is credited with suggesting the title of this seminal work. During the 1960s, he challenged the State Department's refusal to grant him a passport after he would not sign the loyalty oath then required. Following the Supreme Court's 1964 decision in Aptheker v. Secretary of State that the relevant portion of the McCarran Act was unconstitutional, he got his passport.