Public Burning (18 page)
Read the tons of petitions, letters, postcards, stacked high in your filing rooms, from the plain and gentle folk of our land. They marched before your door in such numbers as never before, as have their brothers and sisters in London, Paris, Melbourne, Buenos Aires, Ottawa, Rome. They ask you not to orphan our two young boys. They ask brotherhood and peace to spare our lives.
Hear the great and humble for the sake of America.
So cry the Rosenbergs, and in Dublin, two homemade Molotov cocktails crash through the windows of the U.S. Information Agency. British Prime Minister Winston Churchill is set upon by an entire motorcadeâthey push him to intercede with President Eisenhower, but Winnie does not flag or fail, he braces himself to do his duty: “It is not within my duty or power to intervene.” There are threatened boycotts and work stoppages around the world. Egghead leftists in Europe plan a counter-trial of the people who have judged and sentenced the Rosenbergs. Onstage at the Martin Beck over on Forty-fifth Street, Reverend John Hale in Arthur Miller's
The Crucible
is saying: “No man may longer doubt the powers of the dark are gathered in monstrous attack upon this village. There is too much evidence now to deny it!” Nearby, in Times Square, the electric chair lies, uprooted, in the gutter, blocking traffic, while tricked out in nigger colors on the marquee of the Criterion is the strange message, attributed to some frog named Du Bois:
WE ARE THE MURDERERS HURLING MUD!
WE ARE THE WITCHHUNTERS DRINKING BLOOD!
The helmet of night has fallen upon man the word-carrier.
It is the Phantom's hourâ¦!
“I am not much good at saying goodbyes,” Julius Rosenberg writes to his lawyer from his cell in the Death House, “because I believe that good accomplishments live on forever but this I can sayâmy love of life has never been so strong because I've seen how beautiful the future can be. Since I feel that we in some small measure have contributed our share in this direction I think my sons and millions of others will have benefited by it.”
“This front of his makes me nervous as the devil,” the Warden says. “I feel just as if tonight I was going to do something every bit as criminal as he did. I can't help it. And when I start feeling like that, then I think it's about time I sent in my resignation.” Why is it that the most obvious things in the world, she wonders, watching the Warden and Chaplain from the wings, seem to elude the understanding of men like these? It's not that they have failed to learn something, but rather that they have learned too much, have built up ways of looking at the world that block off natural human instincts. It's as though society through its formal demands were bent, not on ennobling people and leading them toward art and truth, but on demeaning them, reducing them to cardboard role-players like the characters in this play,
The Valiant
. And the deeper they get into their roles, the less they remember who they were before they took on the parts. But what is the alternative? Going on with life at all means having to adopt one role or another, even if it's a rebellious one, doesn't it? She is sixteen years old and she doesn't think so. She thinks this is the defeatist argument of old people who have failed, people like her own parents, her teachers, those two men out on the stage. It was the argument one of them tried to use on her when he walked her home the other night from the cast party at the Paramount Cafeteria. She said, no, life is more open-ended than that. Then he jammed her up against a wall in a dark doorway, dragged up her skirts, and pushed his knee into her crotch. Some argument. “His whole attitude has been very remarkable,” the Chaplain admits reflectively, winking at her from the stage. “Only a few minutes ago I found myself comparing it with the fortitude that the Christian martyrs carried to their deaths, and yet⦔ “Has he got any religious streak in him at all?” the Warden asks. “I'm afraid he hasn't,” the Chaplain sighs. “He listens to me very attentively, but⦔
Atheism, as J. Edgar Hoover of the FBI has so often reminded us, is the first step toward Communism, the very “cornerstone of Communist philosophy.” Marx, Engels, Lenin, they all got started that way. A clue leading to the apprehension of the Rosenbergs was their admitted apostasy. Julie had given up the Talmud in favor of Tom Mooney and premature anti-fascism. Ethel, depressed, had gone to a psychiatrist instead of her rabbi. Phonograph records ridiculing the Kol Nidre chant were found in their flat by the FBI. The Phantom, G-man Hoover has warned, is out to “sap religion's spiritual strength and then destroy itâ¦. Communists have always made it clear that Communism is the mortal enemy of Christianity, Judaism, Mohammedanism, and any other religion that believes in a Supreme Being!”
Julius and Ethel Rosenberg have written hundreds of pages to each other and the world, and there's not a word in them about a Supreme Being. They never mention the afterlife, angels, or the Holy Trinity. Peace, bread, and roses, that's all they talk about: their materialist dream. Even Justice Douglas in his eccentric recreancy admits that “we are a religious people whose institutions presuppose a Supreme Being,” and if pressed, he might even be able to tell you His name. It's true, of course, Patriot John Adams, in one of his spasms of quirkiness, did pretend that no “persons employed in the formation of the American government had interviews with the gods, or were in any degree under the inspiration of Heaven,” but the Prophets have since corrected himâthe Lord Himself has declared right out in the
Doctrines and Covenants
of the native-American Latter-Day Saints:
I
established the Constitution of this land, by the hands of wise men whom I raised up onto this very purpose!
Nothing could be clearer than that. When Tom Jefferson swore “eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man,” he swore it “upon the altar of God,” that Heavenly Engineer who set the world going, fathered Jesus Christ, and fired the shot heard round the world, and Long Tom himself once asked in a theocratical fit: “Can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are the gift of God? that they are not to be violated but with His wrath?” This afflated reflection has stirred the hearts and minds of American Super-heroes from General George Washington right down to the current Incarnation, who is much given to visions of God working His wondrous will through the invention of America. His Quaker Vice President, lay evangelist and cleanser of the temple, has often echoed him, and more: “Our beliefs must be combined with a crusading zeal to
change the world!”
LET THE CHURCH SPEAK UP FOR CAPITALISM!
For there is, as the Christian missionary John Foster Dulles, former Chairman of the Commission on a Just and Durable Peace of the Federal Council of Churches (now U.S. Secretary of State), has said, “no way to solve the great perplexing international problems except by bringing to bear upon them
the force of Christianity!”
But is there time? A young girl appears. She is fresh and wholesome, and rather pretty, but her manner betrays, as the authors say, a certain spiritual aloofness from the ultramodern world which separates her from the metropolitan class. She is dressed simply and wears a blue tailored suit with deep white cuffs and a starched white sailor-collar, and a small blue hat over her fluffy hair. Her costume hints at the taste and repression of an old-fashioned home, the sort of home perhaps which would have taken to heart Mr. Edgar Hoover's firm advice:
Since Communists are anti-God, encourage your child to be active in the churchâ¦. Whether you know it or not, your child is a target. His mind is the fertile plot in which the Communist hopes to implant his Red virus and to secure a deadly culture which will spread to others. When enough are infected the Red Pied Piper hopes to call the tune. He lives for the day when he can draw constantly increasing numbers of American youngsters away from their families and the sound traditions and principles which have guided this Nation thus far along its course and enroll them in the service of the Red masters!
J. Edgar Hoover's advice is to use faith, history, hickory, and old-fashioned prayer on these susceptible young. The girl onstage, however, would seem to need none of them. Incorruptible purity is her essence. She is neither timid nor aggressive; she is self-unconscious, an open-faced contrast to the more devious Warden and Chaplain. Her expression is essentially serious due to the present mission; ordinarily she takes an active joy in the mere pleasure of existence, according to the script. She has just heard the Warden say, with regard to the doomed prisoner: “I don't want any such yelling and screeching tonight as we had over that Greek!” Now, seeing her, he half rises from his chair, much affected by her youth and innocence, and with grave deference offers her a chair. The audience's laughter at the image of the screeching Greek subsides. The young girl regards the Warden trustfully, being a good actress. He says he understands she wishes to see the prisoner. “Yes, sir. I
hope
I'm notâ¦too late⦔
But maybe so. Terrorists creep out of their jungle hiding places and lay waste villages in Indonesia, Malaya, French Indochina. A full company sweeps down on U.N. positions north of the Hwachon Reservoir in Korea and a U.N. effort to retake Christmas Hill is repulsed by the Phantom's hyped-up forces. Two hundred Indian fishermen are reported missing forty miles off Madras in the Bay of Bengal. Officers sift through the ashes of the fire in Whittier, Alaska, named after the Quaker Poet who once prophesied that “evil breaks the strongest gyves,/ and jins like him have charméd lives!” They agree that the important U.S. military port is now totally inoperative. Damages are estimated at $20,000,000. John Greenleaf Whittier also gave his name to the home town of the young Vice President, and some wonder if the Phantom had really been aiming at him but missed? HUAC, clutching their dossiers and taking for the Congressional bomb shelters, issue a warning that roaming the nation's streets unchecked, intent upon committing all manner of sin and transgression against the American government, are 469 heretical organizations, not least of which are all the Rosenberg clemency committees to whom are rallying thousands of people, all displaying “a shocking readiness to join hands with treason!” Hardly have names been named when new demonstrations crop up in London, Chicago, Jakarta, Japan. In Times Square, the stage, unchaired, is dark, torn Jell-0 packages flutter through the streets in a cold breeze, and suspicious-looking characters lurk in the doorways. “This is a sharp time, now, a precise time,” Deputy Governor Danforth is saying onstage at the Martin Beck, “we live no longer in the dusky afternoon when evil mixed itself with good and befuddled the world. Now, by God's grace, the shining sun is up, and them that fear not light will surely praise it!” Yes, but the sun is not up. The sun is down.
And as the fatal midnight hour, when all evil things have power, closes down on them, the children of Uncle Sam, slipping uneasily into their beds, are beset with nightmare visions of Soviet tanks in Berlin, dead brothers lying scattered across the cold wastes of Korea, spreading pornography and creeping socialism, Phantomized black and yellow people rising up in Africa and Asia in numbers not even Lothrop Stoddard could have foreseen, and the Rosenbergs, grown monstrous, octopuslike as Irving Saypol depicted them, breaking out of their cells, smashing down the walls of Sing Sing with their tentacles, and descending upon the city like the Beast from 20,000 Fathoms. They knock over buildings, crush automobiles under their bodies, swallow policemen whole, get tangled up in a Coney Island roller coaster. Bullets do not stop them. They are joined by Walter Ulbricht the Coffinmaker, wading ashore with his firing squads; the Necrophile John Reginald Halliday Christie, his huge organ bloody and gangrenous; a big black white-eyed giant with
SUPER MAU MAU
emblazoned on his savage breast; thousands upon thousands of groaning victims, blinded, their flesh eaten away, from Hiroshima and Nagasaki; and Chairman Mao, swirled about by fumes from the dens of vice, like a bloated gold-toothed Fu Manchu. The Rosenbergs pulverize synagogues and cathedrals in their monstrous tentacles. Super Mau Mau smashes the windows of supermarkets and department stores, letting the dark out. With a lash of his tail, Chairman Mao reduces Wall Street to rubble. Christie grabs little girls out of Sunday schools and beauty parlors, smearing whole handfuls of them against his calloused peter and laughing maniacally. As the Red Pied Piper tootles, Nero, Pontius Pilate, Genghis Khan, and juiced-up Red Indians from
Ambush at Tomahawk Gap
smash their way out of movie palaces, crying:
“The weapons with which the bourgeoisie felled feudalism to the ground are now turned against the bourgeoisie itself!”
The people scrunch down in their sheets, shivering in spite of the warm June weather, chilled by the Phantom's echoing laughter, dismayed by the prospect of a never-ending night. How did this happen? Where did all the good times go? Whatever happened to the rendezvous with destiny?
But then they hear, distantly, the cheering thump of Nelson Eddy singing “Stout-Hearted Men,” and over that, through the deep darkness, comes the voice of Uncle Sam, firm, resonant, unwavering: “0 suffering, sad humanity! O ye afflicted ones, who lie steeped to the lips in misery,
illegitimi non carborundum
, as Vinegar Joe useter say: Don't let the bastards grind ya down! I know the gloomy night before us lies like a black arse in a coal-hole, but jumpin' jig-a-jig! we ain't weak if we make a proper use of those means which the God a Nature has placed in our pockets! So punch, brothers, punch with care! Punch in the presence of the passenjare, so when Jesus comes to claim us all and says it is enough, the diamints will be shinin' but no longer in the buff!”