More and more, Coley Borden had taken to standing by the window, especially at night, or on dark afternoons, when the big buildings were lighted. Sometimes when he looked for a long while, he’d sit on the sill—twenty-seven stories above the street, above the people-ants, the car-beetles—watching the last thunderstorm of summer, for instance. When his secretary came into his office, to announce a visitor or to bring copy for the Transcript, he’d be there, while black clouds tumbled behind the silhouette of the two cities, while the dull light Battened them so they resembled cardboard cutouts of skyscrapers, and until shafts of storm-stabbing sun restored dimension to the soaring cityscape.
He’d be sitting there, or standing, when fog rolled in or when the wind picked up dry earth from between the myriad acre-miles of corn stubble and plunged the cities into the darkness of a duster.
He’d watch rain there.
Sometimes the men at the city desk would say, “Coley’s getting a bit odd.” Then, thinking how his family had perished one by one in ways which, to the lucky, are merely statistical, they’d add a kindly, “No wonder.”
Mrs. Berwyn, his secretary, would always say, “You’re crazy—not the boss. He’s just taken to doing his thinking looking out the window. Maybe some of you dumb journalists would improve your work by staring at something more than city-room walls.”
Coley was, one night, looking at the moon and its effect upon the spires and minarets of his homeland. A powdery light sifted over the region and picked out not just the loftiest buildings but lesser structures, objects that did not usually draw his daytime attention. Thus the tarred roof of the block-square produce market stood revealed across River Avenue. Out toward Rocky Glen, near the Country Club, he could see the glister of a greenhouse and guessed it was the Thomas Nursery. Slossen’s Run, a muddy tributary of the river, indistinguishable by day from a dusty road, now glinted to the west wherever the buildings left a space for it to show-a proper water course by night, however much the day defiled it. He saw, too, the distant spires of River City’s Roman Catholic Cathedral newly finished, up on the corner of Market and, appropriately, St. Paul.
He was thinking that there had been a time in America, not long before even by the brief calendar of human lives, when church spires had been the loftiest landmarks. Now, the steeples of commerce towered above, dwarfing and belittling man’s homage to God. It was not, Coley reflected, an accidental phenomenon. When men turned from inner values to those outside, to “getting and spending,” their tabernacles dwindled while trade places grew majestic.
He heard his door open and sighed, looking away from the moon-lacquered panorama.
“Mr. Conner’s here to see you,” his secretary said. “And it’s almost ten o’clock.”
“Conner?”
“Henry Conner.”
Borden smiled. “Oh. Hank. Tell him to come right in.”
“You haven’t had supper yet, Mr. Borden. Would you like…?”
“Later. Later.” He snapped on lights and sat down at his desk.
Coley Borden could tell, nine times out of ten, about how a man felt, just from a glance.
Seven times out of ten, with the same quick look he could guess what a man was thinking. With women, he wasn’t so sure. In the case of Hank Conner, Coley knew even without the seeing what his thoughts would be. He was astonished, however, when Hank came in. Hank was “dragging his shoulders.” His hair wasn’t iron-gray, any more; it was just plain gray, curly still, but he was getting bald. His homely, solid face was still good-humored, but in a patient way, not with his old exuberance. He looked like a man who would have a quiet chuckle ready for an ironic joke, not like a man who would yell louder than a Sioux and do a war dance in a bowling alley after six strikes in a row.
“Hello, Hank.”
And there was also a new, unwelcome diffidence about Henry Conner. He sat down uncomfortably in the walnut-armed, leather-upholstered chair beside the desk. “Good evening, Coley.” He didn’t add, “You old type-chewer,” or anything.
“Like a cigar?”
Hank’s head shook. “Brought my pipe. Mind?”
“This place has been perfumed by some of the vilest furnaces in the Middle West. Fire it up!” Hank did. “Came to talk about Civil Defense, Coley.”
“I know.”
“Kind of hate to. Always liked the Transcript. Respected it.” His big mouth spread with something like his old-time smile and when he rubbed his cheek, Coley could hear the bristles that had grown since morning. “You know, first time my name was in the paper, or my picture, it was the Transcript. High school graduation.”
Coley said, “Sure.”
“Tried to get you at your home. Mrs. Slant said you were still down here. So I hopped in the car.”
Coley didn’t say anything. Hank’s diffidence was real; so was the determination underneath. The best thing was to let Hank go about it in his own way. The editor felt sad. His instincts—and every syllable of his logic—were on the other man’s side.
“Of course,” Hank went on, after a sip of smoke, “I know Minerva Sloan was responsible for your policy change.”
“Yeah.”
“But it’s doing us bad harm. Real bad.” Hank mused a while, got up and lumbered across the room to the big map on the west wall. It was a street map of the two cities, their suburbs and the surrounding villages; there was a duplicate at CD headquarters. Hank used his pipestem for a pointer. “My district, Coley, is here—from West Broad on the north to Windmere Parkway. And from Bigelow to Chase Drive. Takes in a lot of territory—about four square miles, give you a few acres.” He smiled again. “It isn’t so full of folks as you’d think, on account of Crystal Lake and Hobart Park—about eleven thousand people is all. A little over three thousand homes and buildings. Stores in three small shopping centers. Libraries and schools and churches and hospitals and so on. You know it, about as well as I do.”
“Sure, Hank.”
“Out of my area, we had darn near a thousand volunteers, all told.” His eyes, clear and blue like Nora’s eyes, sparkled a little. “Three quarters of ’em roughly were just plain people, working people, running from masons and carpenters and delicatessen owners to the middle category, folks like us Conners. I wouldn’t say more than a quarter—if that, quite—came from the big places around Crystal Lake or up in the chichi district toward Cold Spring. Just a cross section of ordinary city people, you might say. And I’m tolerably sure that out of the thousand not every man-jack—or woman-jill—would show up set and ready, if my outfit ever got asked to do what it’s here for.
“The point is, Coley, these people are the backbone of not just Green Prairie or the Sister Cities, or a couple of states, but the whole doggoned country. Les Brown may just be a handyman. But if you were cast on a desert island for a few years, you’d be smart to take Les—for company and comforts. Alton Bowers may own ten acres of lawn and landscaped gardens and a big mansion, and he may own a pile of grain elevators, but he’s as close to Christian as Baptists ever get!” Hank, a Presbyterian, let the joke linger for a moment. Then the brightness left his eyes, he came back and sat down. “Called a meeting of the whole gang at the South High yesterday, Coley.” Hank looked at his pipe. “Forty-three people showed up.”
“Good Lord!”
Henry sighed. “We usually turned out around five, six hundred.”
“What do you want me to do, Henry?”
The bulky man stirred in his chair, frowned, rubbed his thorny cheek and said, “Talk, first of all. Get out from behind Minerva Sloan’s skirts and talk!” He reached around his neck and wrestled, one-handedly, with his vertebrae, disarranging his neat blue suit. “I’ve always had a good deal of respect for you. You’ve been right about things in this man’s town—sometimes when I was wrong. You’ve got a good mind, Coley. You’ve read a lot of history. You know a lot about this science stuff. Your paper’s been wide awake. Now, all of a sudden, because we jam up traffic—and it’s not the first time we’ve done it but maybe the tenth—you change tack on us.”
Coley Borden’s face wrinkled with intensity, glowed with a burning expression, like helpless sympathy. It was a brownish face, as if perennially suntanned; and the eyes were too big for it. Time, not very much time at that, for Borden was contemporary with Henry Conner, had bent and gnarled the editor. “I can imagine how you feel, Henry.”
“The point is—why I came here, is—what do you really think? I’ve talked to lots of people, last few weeks. People in CD and even people from River City who think the whole show is some kind of boondoggle. Those folks haven’t even got enough organization on paper. I talked to Reverend Bayson, he’s a fire fighter in my outfit. I talked to a couple of professors. I kept asking, ‘Should we go on? Is it worth it? Are we doing anything valuable? Or are we what they call us—a bunch of Boy Scouts’? I decided to put you on my list of people to talk to.”
“Thinking of quitting, yourself?”
Henry Conner looked squarely at the editor. “That’s it.” He recrossed his legs as if his body dissatisfied him. “Not right off. I don’t mind looking ridiculous to other people, so long as I don’t feel that way myself. Well. What about it?”
“If I were you,” Coley said, “I wouldn’t quit if hell itself froze over.”
Henry stared for a moment. “Be damned,” he breathed. “Why?”
“Because men like you, Hank, are the only life insurance left to the people of U.S.A. The other policies have all run out. First, Soviet friendship; then, our lead on the bombs; next, our superiority and our H-bomb. All gone.”
“They’re talking peace, hard. They made those deals and kept their word, so far.” It was almost a question.
“How many times have they jockeyed our politicians into a peace mood? Fifty? Then snatched something. It’s got so the people of the United States are scared to say or do anything that sounds hostile, even disagree, for fear they’ll spoil some new ‘chance’ at ‘world peace.’
Makes a man sick! Can you imagine, twenty years ago, Senators pussyfooting around, trying to stop free men from freely saying what they think for fear Russia would be ‘antagonized’ or made ‘suspicious’? I say—the more suspicious they are the better, and the more antagonized the better.”
“Then why print in the Transcript that Civil Defense preparations in America discourage honest peace desires in the Kremlin?”
“Minerva Sloan.”
“Who does she think she is,” Hank asked enragedly, “Mrs. God?”
“You’ve hit it. Yes. Mrs. God.”
“If I could only be sure,” Hank murmured. He got up, went to the window, saw the moonlight and murmured, “Pretty view.”
“I like it,” the editor said and switched out the fluorescent lamps in the office. That allowed Henry Conner to absorb, as his eyes grew accustomed to the soft silver outdoors, the same panorama that so frequently held Coley fixed at his window.
“Be a shame,” Henry said at last, in a quiet tone, “to wreck it.”
“Lot of lives. Lot of work.”
“You think they’ll ever try?”
“That,” Coley answered, coming around his desk in the dark and standing beside Hank, “is not the question. The question is, Could they if they tried. And the answer is, They could. So long as that’s the answer, Hank, we need you where you are.”
“That’s your opinion?” Henry stared. “It’s darn beautiful out there.”
“Darned congested, too, Hank. And darned inflammable, if you want to think of that.”
The square, firm head of the chief accountant of a chain of hardware stores, the head of a father of a family, a husband, a citizen and a good neighbor was fixed for a while so its eyes could drink in the view; then a hand scratched its grizzled hair. “I know. I know all that stuff. I know it so well it sounds sometimes like jibberish. As if the meaning had gone out. Blast, heat, radiation, fire storm—all that. Nuts.”
“Nuts is the perfect word. Insane. Completely mad.”
“You mean people?”
“I mean people.”
Henry hardly knew how to say all that was on his mind. His deep respect for Coley Borden made him prefer to appear the easy-going, almost “folksy” kind of individual for whom he was generally taken. Lacking much formal education, he hesitated even to display the insights he had gained through reading and observation. Finally he put a question. “Know much about psychology, Coley?”
“Read a lot of books. Seems the psychologists don’t know too much themselves! Keep arguing…”
Henry nodded, smiled a little. “Sure. You read much about the unconscious mind?
Subconscious? Whatever they call it?”
“Some, Henry. Why?”
“You believe in it?”
The editor laughed. “Have to. Can’t explain a single thing otherwise. Take you and Alton Bowers. You agree on every solitary fact taught in school. Comes to religion—you’re a Presbyterian, Alt’s a Baptist. Why? Something unconscious, something not faced fair and square by you both, right there.”
“Never thought of it that way,” Henry admitted. “I was only thinking about Civil Defense. Atom bombs. I get a lot of what the Government calls ‘Material.’ Even psychology stuff. It’s all about how people will act. It’s all based on studies of how they did act in other disasters. But if people have unconscious minds, how in Sam Hill can any psychologist figure what they’d do, facing utterly new terrors?”
“Some psychologists know a lot about how even the unconscious mind works—and why.”
“Not the ones the Government hires! All their birds are mighty chirky about the American people. Think they’d do fine if it rained brimstone. I’m not so sure. I’m far from sure!
I suspect the worst thing you can do, sometimes, is to keep patting people’s backs. Keep promising them they’re okay because they’ll do okay in a crisis. Makes ’em that much more liable to skittishness, to loss of confidence, if the crisis rolls around and they find they’re not doing letter perfect.”
Coley nodded. “I’ll buy that. It’s like the armed forces. Always calculating what’s going to happen on the basis of what happened before. Trying to convince themselves, even now, that an atom bomb is just another explosion—when it’s that, times a million, plus an infinite number of side effects, and not counting the human factor. The factor you call ‘unconscious’-and rightly.” The editor nodded. “They ought to look back over the military panics that have followed novel weapons. Next, they ought to reckon on how much less a civilian is set for uproar than troops. People go nuts, easy.”
“And then,” Henry went on slowly, “what about the people that are nuts? Seems to me I’ve read someplace that about a third of all the folks think they’re sick are merely upset in their heads. That’s a powerful lot of people, to begin with. Then, a tenth of us are more or less cracked. Neurotic, alcoholic, dope-takers, emotionally unstable, psycopaths, all that sort. Plus the fact that half the folks in hospital beds this very day are out-and-out nuts!”
“What’s your procedure with them?”
Henry shook his head. “What can it be? They’re uneducatable. Can’t teach ’em to behave properly in normal situations. How’n hell you teach ’em to face atom bombing? A tenth of the whole population is worse than a dead loss. It’s a dangerous handicap, come real trouble.”
The editor smiled. “ Only a tenth, Henry? More likely a third of the people are neurotic.
Already over-anxious, fearful, insecure. What about the have-not people? People with hate in their hearts? People who never were free, who never had an even and equal chance? What would they do, if things blew sky-high? Stand firm and co-operate? Like hell!”
“I know,” Henry murmured.
“And the merely poor people! With a feeling they’ve heen gypped. And look! Five per cent of the total population of River City and Green Prairie, like the people in every city, are folks with criminal records. Not just unpredictable. You can predict that—sure—a few will become noble in a disaster. lust as sure, you know the most of ’em will keep on being criminal and take advantage of every chance. Loot, for instance. Kill, if they’re that type. Rape, if they’re in that sex-offense category. Everything! What’s procedure there?”
“Green Prairie has a lot of volunteer auxiliary police and the cops train ’em. River City?
You tell me how they’d handle things. They’ve got nothing.”
“What’s Federal policy?” Coley persisted. “After all, the Government must realize that somewhere between a quarter and a half of your big-city people aren’t what could be called at all emotionally stable. They’re pushovers for panic and naturals for improper reaction.”
“No policy,” the other replied. “Except force. Police effort. How can there be?”
“And psychological contagion?”
“Meaning what?”
“If the nuts, the near-nuts, the neurotic, the criminal, the have-not people and the repressed minorities go haywire—why, how many of the rest will catch it? What’s more catching than panic?”
“You got me,” Henry said. He sighed and stood. “All I believe is, the more people face what might happen, ahead of time, without being deluded about how ‘firm’ they are, the fewer’ll go wild.” He glanced around the office as if it symbolized something he cherished and had reluctantly hurt. ‘‘I’m sorry to come up here with all this on my mind, Coley….”
“I know.”
“Guess you do. Well…!”
They shook hands warmly.
When the lights had been turned on, when Henry Conner had gone, saying it was past his bedtime, chuckling, walking out with square shoulders, Coley Borden sat a while and then buzzed for Mrs. Berwyn. She came in—red hair piled high, greenish eyes mapped out as usual with mascara, all her brains and kindness and unanchored tenderness concealed in the outlandish aspect of her homely face and big body. (After Nan died, he thought, I should have married Beatrice; she’d be terrific—you’d only have to have it dark.)
“Get your book, Bea,” he said over his shoulder. He was standing again, looking along shelves for a volume which, presently, he took down. When he turned, she was sitting; she had brought her pencils and stenographic notebook with the first buzz.
“How old are you, Bea?” he asked, opening the book and looking from page to page. “You never asked me that.” Her voice was clear and rather high.
“Asking now.”
“Fifty-three.”
“I’ll be damned!”
“Why? Didn’t a woman ever tell you her right age before?”
He gazed at her and his lips twitched. “Sure. Once. I thought it was going to land me in prison, too. She was seventeen.”
“Your dissolute ways!” the green eyes flickered.
“I was kind of surprised,” he said quietly, “because you’re a year older than me. That’s all.”
“Oh.” She looked at the Door. “From you, that’s a compliment.”
“Right. We’re going to do some work. An editorial.”
“For morning? The page is in.”
“Yeah. If it comes out right, it’ll be for morning. I’m kind of rusty, Bea. But I’ll take a crack at it and maybe I’ll run it. Ready?”
She nodded.
He began to walk in front of his desk and to dictate:
“Ten years ago and more, this nation hurled upon its Jap foe a new weapon, a weapon cunningly contrived from the secrets of the sun. Since that day the world has lived in terror.
“Every year, every month, every hour, terror has grown. It is terror compounded of every fear. Fear of War. Fear of Defeat. Fear of Slavery. These fears are great, but they are common to humanity. Man in his sorrow has sustained them hitherto. But there are other fears in the composition of man’s present terror. These are fears that his cities may be reduced to rubble, his civilization destroyed, humanity itself wiped out; in sum, fear that man’s world will end. And this last fear has been augmented through the long, hideous years by hints from the laboratories that, indeed, the death of life is possible—and even the incineration of the planet may soon be achievable, by scientific design or by careless accident.
“Fears of mortal aggression and human crimes are tolerable, however dreadsome. But men have never borne with sanity a fear that their world will end. To all who accept as likely that special idea, reason becomes inaccessible; their minds collapse; madness invades their sensibilities. What they then do no longer bears reasonably upon their peril, however apt they deem their crazed courses. They are then puppets of their terror. And it is as such puppets that we Americans have acted for ten years, and more.”
Coley paused. Bea looked up and nodded appreciatively at his rhetoric. But when he did not immediately continue, she said, “I think, if you asked the first hundred people on the street if they were terrified, they’d laugh.”
“That’s a fact,” he answered. “Good suggestion.” He went on:
“Man has always reacted with universal panic to notions of the world’s end. Time and again in the Dark Ages, some planetary conjunction, the appearance of a comet, or an eclipse led to general convulsion. Business stopped. Mobs Bed the cities. Cathedrals were thronged.
Hideous sacrifices, repulsive persecutions, stake burnings and massacres were hysterically performed in efforts to stay the catastrophe. Futile efforts. Yet, whenever the people were thus frightened, they turned to violence, sadism and every evil folly. Time and again, multitudes on hilltops, awaiting to ascend to heaven, trampled each other to death while sparring for the best position from which to be sucked up by a demented Jehovah.
“The end of the Dark Ages did not alter this sinister trait. Through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries our American hills have seen the scramble of the doomed as they awaited Judgment. At the beginning of this very century, the country was stricken by awe when it learned Earth would pass through the tail of Halley’s Comet. By that day, to be sure, science had so prospered in a climate of liberty that many millions stood steadfast in the presence of the celestial visitation. These restrained the rest. Blood did not flow on the altars of our churches; infants were not dashed against cathedral walls in atonement for presumed guilt; mobs of True Believers did not loot their own institutions and rape their own relatives in a last ecstasy of zealous horror. But today it is not the priest, not the self-appointed prophet with his crackpot interpretation of Daniel or the Book of Revelation, who says, ‘The earth may end.’ It is that very group of reasonable, orderly, unhysterical men upon whom society has learned, a little, to lean for comfort and truth: the scientists themselves!”
Mrs. Berwyn interrupted. “Two hundred thousand church-going subscribers of the Transcript are going to view that dimly.”
“True, isn’t it?”
She reflected, tapping her lush lips with a pencil. “Yes. I suppose it’s all perfectly true. But….”
A muscle tensed visibly in his jaw. He paced away from her, swung around, came jauntily back:
“The more civilized a man may be, or a woman, or child, the less readily he, or she, or the child will admit panic. That is what ‘civilized’ means: understanding, self-control, knowledge, discipline, individual responsibility. What happens, then, if a civilized society finds itself confronted with a reasonable fear, yet one of such a magnitude and nature that it cannot be tolerated by the combined efforts of reason and the common will? Such luckless multitudes, faced with that dilemma, will have but one solution. Feeling a gigantic fear they cannot (or they will not) face, they must pretend they have no fear. They must say aloud repeatedly, There is no reason to be afraid.’ They must ridicule those who show fear’s symptoms. Especially, they must pit themselves, for the sake of a protective illusion, against all persons who endeavor to take the measure of the common dread and respond sensibly to its scope. To act otherwise would be to admit the inadmissible, the fact of their repressed panic.
“Thus a condition is set up in which a vast majority of the citizens, unable to acknowledge with their minds the dread that eats at their blind hearts, loses all contact with reality. The sensible steps are not taken. The useful slogans are outlawed. The proper attitudes are deemed improper. Appropriate responses to the universal peril dwindle, diminish and at last disappear.
“All the while, the primordial alarms are kept kindled in the darkness of self-shuttered souls. Within them, in mortal quaking, march the impulses that set Inquisitions going, threw over liberty, brought down truth screaming, and assembled men repeatedly for bloody rites. Men’s ‘leaders,’ most of them, take up the suicidal expressions of the mob. For leadership, alas, is of two sorts: one, that courageous chieftainship which administers according to high principle, whatever the mob’s view at the moment; the other, specious and chimerical, a ‘leadership’ which merely rides upon the wave of mob emotion, capitalizing it for private aggrandizement, and no more truly leads than a man ‘leads’ the sea as it dashes him toward death on a rock. Such leaders—Hitler is an example—are in the end engulfed by that which sustained them. The other sort, true leaders—Lincoln was one—conduct the people by truth and reason through their panic to security, oftentimes against its stream.
“There are no Lincolns among us today.”
“That,” said Mrs. Berwyn, “will get you some dirty wires from Washington.”
Coley sat down on the edge of his desk and dictated more quietly, sometimes kicking his heels against the bleached mahogany:
“We, the people of the United States of America, have refused for more than a decade to face our real fear. We know our world could end. Every month, every year, several nations are discovering the fabricating instruments which make that ultimate doom more likely. The antagonism between a free way of life and a totalitarian way is absolute. And it appears to be unresolvable owing to the expressed, permanent irreconcilability of Communism.
“What have we done about all this? The answer is shocking. We have failed to meet the challenge. We have shirked the duty of free men. We have evaded every central fact. We have relied on ancient instruments of security without examining the new risks—reinforcing military strength while we left relatively undefended and unarmed the targets of another war: our cities, our homes.
“Many of us, intellectual men, liberals, humanistic in our beliefs, had stood about for upward of a decade muttering, ‘There must be no next war.’ That is childish; it is mad. Wars are generally made by unilateral decision: they are the aggressions of one nation. Not a single man among those who has insisted we get along, henceforward, ‘without war’—since war may spell the earth’s end—has offered a solitary idea or performed a solitary act that has lessened war’s likelihood. How could such people, who call their wishful thoughts ‘ideals,’ be anything but soothsayers? War, if it is to be avoided, must be quenched in the Kremlin and in the broad confines of Russia, taken with its captive states. But these people who say there must be no war are all in Illinois, or Arizona, or New York State—not Russia.
“Others, feeling appalled and thus compelled to do something, however ineffectual, to assuage the pain of their anxieties, have limited their hostility to the here and the now, to the known—and so somewhat evaded, by the delusion, the real, external source of terror. These persons—and they number scores of millions of self-satisfied good Americans—have been content to launch a long and heated crusade against Communism at home, its dupes, its puppets and its sinister agents.
“Conspiracy to destroy this Government by violence is treason. The mere desire to see liberty abolished in order that a compulsive, Communist state may replace it, seems vicious to every person who loves freedom. There is no doubt that domestic Communists are dangerous to liberty. But is it sensible to convert a true dread of the world’s end to a chase of putative traitors and minor spies, giving freedom, the while, no other service and no sacrifice at all? It is not.
“Yet in that one process, multitudes of the people of America and many of their leaders in the Congress have also set aside the concept of freedom itself! They have seized the instruments and ideologies of their foe—with the notion of ‘fighting fire with fire.’ Every private right has been violated, under the Capitol’s dome. The innocent have been condemned without trial. Envy, spite, lies and malicious gossip have been brought to bear on solid citizens, destroying them. So the medieval lust of men cowering before holocaust has been exploited, to make little men look big. We have emulated the tricks of Hitler and Stalin. Today, when some of us pronounce the word ‘un-American,’ what we mean belies the significance of Americanism as every great citizen conceived it from the Founding Fathers until this day. A love of liberty, fair play, justice now is widely held synonymous with ‘un-Americanism!’ Today, a man who defends all we have ever stood for is liable to abuse as a ‘potential traitor.’ All liberty is being turned about: conformity, slavishness, sedulous sycophancy, these are being held true evidences of patriotism. Such traitor-hunting methodology is a sickness of the American mind, a cancer in the frightened soul of a formerly great people. ‘Set a thief to catch a thief,’ says a cynic’s proverb; even the cynic does not admonish, ‘To catch a thief, become one.’
“Even religion, even the holy name of God, is used to restrict the rights of a people dedicated to religious freedom.”
Mrs. Berwyn whistled. “There you go again!”
His answering grin was bleak. “Then grab your hat, Bea. Because I’m telling the truth, for once.” He went on:
“A few years ago a new President of these United States made several loosely considered assertions about God and America. Americanism, he indicated, is founded in a belief in God; atheism, he suggested, is synonymous with the alien doctrines of the Soviet. This was an exultant discovery—for churchgoers, however evil their private conduct, narrow their views, or sleazy their religious tenets. For now, all atheists, agnostics and all the religiously unconforming could be looked upon by millions with suspicion, as Communists, or near to Communism. Special Faith was made to seem an American imperative—and Freedom died a new death.
“The attitude was a desecration of the principle upon which our nation is founded: religious freedom, tolerance, deliverance from persecution on any, and every, philosophical ground. For if we are a free people, we are not bound to conform to anybody’s belief, but only to let others believe and practice as they will, so long as they do not interfere with the general rights. It matters nothing what Presidents say; they come and go. We cannot, in simple fact, conform religiously. Any overt effort to do so would split and wreck this nation without recourse to arms and bombs. It is liberty that permits us to exist and grow strong, not conformity to one God, one cult, or any other beliefs save a belief in the freedom of the conscience of every citizen.
Religious freedom means we are responsible as a people to freedom itself, not to any God.
Responsibility even to God—if it were mandatory in this land, as so many have begun to imagine—would merely raise the question: Whose God? .
“It is a terrible question to ask in such an hour, a question more destructive and divisive among free men than enemy assault. For we Americans have come our long way in harmony simply because it is ‘un-American’ to insist on belief in aught but liberty. If we do, then shall it be more or less ‘American’ to believe in the Presbyterian Trinity? Or is the Baptist Faith correct and does every individual have to decide for himself about God, acknowledging only certain holy names in baptism. What of the Jews? Is their Jehovah the suitable God of Americans and their Law proper for all? And the Catholics! Is every American obliged to venerate the Virgin in order to show, as all Catholics believe, a true reverence? Suppose a Hindu becomes a citizen here? Are his many ‘gods’ also to be our God? Is Vishnu? And what of a Confucianist who truly believes ‘God’ to be good manners and perfect ethics? Then, let us ask, do Christian Scientists believe in God at all? According to millions of Protestants and others, they are rank heretics, the deluded followers of a woman from Boston. What of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Unitarians?
“You can see here why we cannot accept the President’s implications that Americanism connotes belief in God: Americans have too many diverse ideas concerning God to attempt conformity. And besides, they have, or once had, freedom in the matter.
“This last leads to a greater irony. For those Americans who are of most value in this terrible age—the men of science, the technicians, the sociologists and psychologists—the only persons who offer America any practical hope of deliverance from present panic—do not, by and large, believe in God at all, according to the conventional descriptions of organized Faiths. These men and women are in one sense opposed to ‘faith.’ They have accepted, in their heads and hearts, a search for truth and an inquiry into reality, in place of all creedal statement. Yet they are no less honest, honorable, pure and true than other men. On the contrary, because their minds are not suborned by the intellectual despotism of this outworn creed or yonder debunked dogma, they are, as a group, more honest, more honorable, more truthful and more reliable than the conventionally religious. They are the people who have made most of humanity’s advances; the rest are followers, often reluctant, sometimes sadistic and destructive.
“If, by pretending ‘Americanism’ is synonymous with religious faith, we alarm these people in our midst—the discoverers, pioneers, leaders of thought, inventors, scientists, educators—then we shall truly have beheaded the nation in the name of Godliness. It is one more symptom of our hidden panic.
“There are many others besides. If the McCarthys should remove from U.S.A. every single Communist and Communist suspect, the present danger to us all—so clear, so terrible —would not be measurably alleviated.” Coley cleared his throat. “Underline the last phrase twice, Bea.” He continued, “America would be Communist-free, spy-free, to be sure. But half a billion people elsewhere in the world, Communists all or slaves of Communists, would still be undeterred and laboring day and night to destroy liberty on earth and the United States in particular. We would have killed a few gnats and let fatal hemorrhage run unchecked. That is the measure of the cosmic unimportance of the Senator from our sister state. And that is the measure of the foolishness of those who hold the credulous notion that the McCarthys are accomplishing work of primary importance in the matter of our imminent doom.”
“I never thought of it quite that way.” Mrs. Berwyn stretched, sank long fingers in her rust-red hair and yawned.
“That’s what I’m getting at. The people in River City, the folks in Green Prairie, don’t think of it that way either. But that’s the way it is. It’s like anti-Semitism. You wipe out the Jews, and what have you got? The same old problems, sins, poverties, wars, troubles and evils as always. Plus a guilt-ridden population, a bunch of executioners who have learned to fear each other. You wipe out every Commie in U.S.A., and what would you have? Russia to deal with, unchanged. And a bunch of Americans who had violated their own trustworthiness and so become scared of one another, for dam’ good cause!—without solving their problem at all!”
Mrs. Berwyn demurred. “Still, I hate to think of any Commies sneaking around in Government, in the Pentagon, anywhere….”
“Me, too. Catching them, though, isn’t an amateur sport. It’s a hard job for the FBI and the intelligence and counter-intelligence people.” He whipped out a pocket handkerchief and wiped his damp face. “Do you realize how nutty we’ve become? Getting professors to sign oaths? Making a lot out of whether or not people refuse to admit party membership? Your real, dangerous, hard-core Commie will sign any oath. He’ll swear to any lie. He belongs to a church.
He maybe even works as an investigator for a Senate committee. His Communism is hidden under careful coats· of everything that looks ‘American’ to the most brassy patriot, the biggest oaf. These Senators have ‘exposed’ a number of Commies—sure. How many dangerous ones have they unearthed? Put it the other way. Why don’t they turn up some people who were unsuspected even of liberalism? Get my point? Let a Senator and his posse of meddlers expose one three-star general in the pay of the Kremlin, or a bishop or a nun—and I’ll have some respect for this empty game of sifting miscellaneous fools, skeptics and dissenters through a mesh. of senatorial bigotry, prejudice, empty-headedness and personal ambition. Show the people the enemies of freedom and you are really a great man, I say. Play on their fears, feed them straw men and whipping boys, and Huey Long’s your name!” Coley shrugged.
“Is that all,” she asked.
“All?” He stared uncomprehendingly. “No. Not quite all.” He walked across the room and gazed over the moon-ghosted cities as he talked on:
“Some of us, nowadays, take refuge in such medieval and panicky hiding places as these, undoing our own liberty in false hope of saving our skins. Some are sillier still. They look to people, imaginary people not unlike God, to come from ‘outer space’ and save them. They see Flying Saucers on every breeze and in every night sky and console themselves with the idea that beings ‘higher’ than themselves will soon come and save mankind from man and his bombs.
This is escapism, too, fantasy, exactly such superstitious stuff as was the foundation for many medieval tenets.
“Others take their qualms back to the churches—the churches they abandoned years back for golf on Sunday, bridge, pleasure riding, and TV. There are millions. They are praying for peace, now, and protection against holocaust. Such prayer, uttered ardently by billions to every major deity man’s been able to invent, has never yet been answered! The wars have gone on.
Those historic devotees who exhausted themselves, their time and energy in such incantations were merely easier prey for foes they would not prepare for. This indeed may be the American fate-the price of doing away with intellectual freedom and putting a compulsion on belief. Yet, in all the other provinces of peril, we stay sane.”
His eyes focused on the far phosphors of the night. “On our prairies,” he dictated, “farmers, fearing the onslaught of the wind, dig cyclone cellars. They rod their barns and ground their aerials, lest the lightning strike. If the autumn is dry, their ploughs make circuits around their homes and livestock pens so prairie fire cannot consume what they hold dear.” He looked far away, to his right. “Downstream on the Green Prairie River, and below on the Missouri, men have erected great dams, constructed lakes, set up levees, against Hood. In our cities, lest fire break out, we maintain engines and men to save us from burning. And against all crimes, police patrol our streets, in cars these days, vigilant with every electronic device. We have appraised many dangers and prepared against them in these and a hundred other fashions. What of the peril of world’s end?
“Today in Washington, men who do not, who cannot, understand what it is they are talking about argue interminably concerning how doomsday may be resisted or put off. Since, in their technical ignorance, they cannot appraise recent perils, their thoughts concerning the perils to come are useless. We maintain a navy—against what may never move by sea. We levy vast armies and hold them the final arbiter of every battle even though, just the other year, an empire called Japan fell to us with never a foot soldier on its main islands. We believe our airplanes can deliver stroke for stroke, and better, but we will not count the effect of strokes upon ourselves.
We admit our radar screen is leaky. We have dreamed up—and left largely on drawing boards—such weapons as might adequately defend a sky-beleaguered metropolis. In sum, we face the rage of radioactivity, the blast of neutrons, the killing solar fires, with peashooters and squirt guns.
“Indeed, if the findings of our local schoolmarms are accepted, we soon may taboo even the mention of such dangers. It upsets the pupils, they say; Rorschach Tests reveal this remarkable perturbation. All hell may be winging toward us in the sky but, in the name of American education, let us not permit it to ruffle a single second-grader!”
Mrs. Berwyn snorted.
His answering grin was bleak. “It’s the truth! Minerva just sent us some bloody pedagogical bulletin full of ‘data’ about ‘anxiety-curve-rise’ with every set of atom tests in Nevada. Minerva feels, and she’s backed up by nervous parents and whole school boards, that the radio, TV and press should, perhaps, stop publishing any reference whatever to mass-destruction weapons, atomic-energy tests, or anything connected with the subject.”
“The ostrich principle?”
“Yeah. That got us, unready, into two big wars lately and several small ones.”
“Anything else?” she asked. “Just a paragraph or two.” His desk chair received him, squeaked a little as he tipped it back, boosted his feet onto his blotter and spoke:
“America had—and missed—its only golden chance. If, in 1945, or 1946, or even 1947, the American people had seen the clear meaning of liberty, there would have been no war and there would be no danger now. The proposition is exquisitely simple. Our nation is founded on the theory that the majority of the people, if informed, will make appropriate decisions. That, in turn, implies—it necessitates—the one freedom that underlies all others: freedom to know, intellectual liberty, the open access of all men to all truth. That—that alone —is the cornerstone of liberty and democracy. When the Soviets showed the first signs of enclosing, in Soviet secrecy, mere scientific principles like those of the bomb, we Americans could and should have seen that Russian secrecy would instantly compel American secrecy. We should have seen that an America thus suddenly made secret, in the realm of science where knowledge had thitherto been open, would no longer be free, and its democratic people could no longer be informed.
Hence Russia’s Iron Curtain would have been seen as what it was and is and always will be: a posture of intolerable aggression against American freedom.
“If that had been seen at the time, the Iron Curtain could have been dissolved by a mere ultimatum: America then was the earth’s most powerful nation, Russia was devastated. But we were powerful only in arms and trusted them. We were feeble-minded in ideals and ideology: our vision of freedom was myopic. We, too, clamped down on abstract knowledge a new, un-American curtain called ‘security,’ and every kind of freedom commenced inevitably to dwindle in a geometric progression. That was our chance. Our peril today, our ever-growing and ever-more-horrible peril in the visible future, is the cost of saying we were free and acting otherwise.
We flubbed the greatest chance for liberty in human history and hardly even noted our blunder, our betrayal.
“Ten years have gone by. We could, at vast expense, have decentralized our cities. We didn’t. We could, at lesser expense, have ringed our continent with adequate warning devices and learned to empty our cities in a few hours. We didn’t. The cost, still, was too great; the dislocation of human beings, the drills and inconveniences, beyond our bearing. We had cause, in a struggle to regain landsliding liberties, we have always had the cause, to challenge Soviet power earlier, in the name of liberty, brotherhood, justice, human integrity and decency. All we did was to make a few peripheral challenges, as in Korea. We didn’t face the issue when the Kremlin’s bombs were scarce and weak. We are not even good opportunists.
“Now, the sands of a decade and more have run out. We cannot challenge without venturing the world’s end. Quite possibly our death notice is written, a few months or years farther along on the track of this wretched planet. Then, perhaps, our flight from freedom will get the globe rent into hot flinders, atomized gas. But the only question before you, citizens of Green Prairie, of River City, of the wide prairie region, of this momentarily fair nation and the lovely world, is this, apparently:
“What new idiocy can you dream up, with your coffee, your porridge, your first cigarette, to keep yourself awhile longer from facing these truths?”
Coley fell silent. He wiped his brow again.
“What do we do with it?” Mrs. Berwyn asked, a little stunned by the blunt finale.
“Eh?” He was paying no attention.
“I said, what shall I do? Tear it up? Do you want it transscribed? Is it for the archives, so you can whip it out someday in case it’s justified?”
He was looking at her, then, perplexedly. “I said. It’s tomorrow’s editorial.”
“You’re kidding.”
“Why?”
She glanced apprehensively at her wrist watch and back at the smallish man in the chair.
“It would fill the whole page. There’s hardly time to set it up, anyhow, to make the home-delivery edition. Bulldog’s almost out….”
“Shoot it right to composing,” he said, yawning.
She stood up and came to the side of his desk. “You quitting the Transcript, Coley, after you spent your life to build it?”
“Maybe.”
“What do you mean— maybe? This thing rubs salt in every sore in town! It kicks every private idol to smithereens!”
“Yeah. And may wake up a sleepwalking nation.”
“It violates what people believe. Even some of what I believe.”
“Does it?”
“I think it does,” she answered, suddenly doubtful. She was close to unprecedented tears.
“You can’t do it, Coley. You can’t kick apart the town you love!”
“I’m trying to keep it from being kicked apart!”
“Do me a favor. Do us all a favor. Do the Transcript a favor. Wait till tomorrow. Let everybody mull it over—”
“Remember, Bea, back in nineteen forty-three. When I went abroad?”
“What’s that got to do—”
“To England,” he said, musingly. “The whole Middle West refused to believe in the blitz.
The folks were deluded then, the same way. They wouldn’t face the fury of Hitler’s Luft waffe—
and they wouldn’t admit the British had the guts to take such a beating. I went over, just so they could read the stories of a typical Middle Western editor—written from London, while the fire bombs fell and the ack-ack drummed. Remember?”
“Sure,” she said. “My husband was alive—then.” He ignored that human dating of the occasion. “I went because, by God, I’m an editor. Because I knew what the papers reported was the truth. Because I thought an editor, an American editor, was obligated to help the American people face facts. I still think so!”
“Even, Coley, if it means you commit newspaper suicide?”
He rocked forward in his chair and began, delicately, to straighten and align the objects which comprised his desk set: clock, calendar, pens, pencils, inkstand, paper cutter, memo pad, the engraved paperweight given him by the YMCA Newsboys Club.
He said, “Sure. Even if it marches me off the stage.”
“You think it’s right?”
“I think anything else is wrong. Dead wrong. And almost everybody is wrong. I was on the edge of that conclusion a long while back. Weeks. I reached it when good old Hank Conner came in tonight. Besides”—he turned and smiled at the big woman—“who knows? Minerva Sloan has brains. Lots of brains. The arguments in that editorial make plain common sense. She won’t listen to them; she won’t read them in the places where they’re appearing. In her own paper, though, she’ll have to read them!”
“You think you can change the mind of Minerva?”
“Stranger things have been accomplished.”
“I better get to my typewriter.”
He watched her go—the magnificence of her hair—the absurdity of her make-up—the splendor of her bosom and hips—the fantastic smallness of her high-heeled shoes. His blood stirred and he half rose.
“Old ass,” he said of himself, aloud.
Just before daybreak, remembering he’d had no dinner, he went down to Court Avenue and Fenwick and had pumpkin pie and coffee at the Baltimore Lunch. Some raggedy women, charwomen from the tall buildings, were sliding trays along the vast cafeteria’s silver rails. A man—perhaps a once-respectable man—a bum now. One of his own reporters. A young girl in a yellow evening dress, a too-young girl, for the hour, with a disheveled college boy, slightly drunk. The white-dressed people behind the glass counters and steam tables looked sleepy.
He went back up in the lonely elevator and watched dawn invest the cities.
Life returned to the great building, where it had not quite perished in the long night. The presses, underground, shook it a little. Doors slammed. Elevators hummed at intervals. It didn’t sleep, quite. And as the light increased, the tower became a tympanum that vibrated in tempo with the increasing traffic down below.
When the sun cut deep into the man-made canyons, throwing aside the rectilinear shadows of the buildings, shining on windshields, bus tops, palisades of glass windows, he knew Minerva would be awake. She would be ringing for her maid. Getting coffee and a folded copy of the morning paper which she owned. Making phone calls to executives who would try, by alert rejoinders, to pretend they, also, greeted every daybreak with all snoring put aside, eyes open and a message to Garcia avidity for the new day’s commands. Coley knew.
His phone rang. “Lo?”
“This is Minerva Sloan.”
“’Morning, Minerva. How—”
“You’re fired, Coley.”
He put on his hat and coat when he went out that time.