The World Is My Home: A Memoir

by James A. Michener

  But Ludenberg was most impressive when he talked about the regeneration of Germany, its escape from the indignities of the Versailles Peace Treaty of 1919: ‘Those wrongs will be corrected. Boundaries will be readjusted. Apologies will be demanded and received.’ He may have spelled out precisely what he and Hitler meant by those phrases, but if so, I forget what he proposed; I do, however, know that he was serious.

  He was extremely outspoken about the political changes that would have to take place in Germany: ‘All vestiges of Versailles will be wiped clean. The German people are not disposed to take the outward forms of democracy seriously. We’re not like the United States or Great Britain, a mix of many different peoples, some of them degenerate. We’re one people, Nordic, strong, intellectually at the top of the heap, great philosophers, musicians, artists. We deserve our own kind of government and we’ll get it.’

  ‘What kind will it be?’ I asked.

  ‘Strong central leadership. Society properly disciplined rather than messing all over the place. And I think’—he paused—‘probably restricting the right to vote, if we have voting, to proper Germans only.’ Quickly he added: ‘Of course, others will be free to live among us, and they’ll be fully protected, but only on our terms.’

  Never in our conversations did Herr Ludenberg mention the word ‘Nazi’ nor did he ever make any reference to the swastika. He did mention war as an agency of national policy but he foresaw none of Herr Hitler’s triumphs as being attained through the use of arms. His whole message was that Hitler’s ends would be achieved because they were inevitable; they represented the irresistible force of history, and persons of good sense, such as myself and my British friends, would see the propriety of allowing Germany to reassert her historical rights, and once that was done, the world could move forward in justice and harmony. In all the time I knew him, Ludenberg never rattled the sword, never issued threats.

  When I recalled the disgust my other German friends in the Austrian mountains had vehemently expressed against Jews, I was surprised that Ludenberg had never once mentioned the problem, and I began to think that maybe this anti-Semitism was an aberration limited to Germany’s upper classes. But when I asked him one day: ‘How do your Jews fit into your new pattern?’ his face darkened, as if he were displeased that I had broached this unpleasant topic, and he started once or twice to give an explanation but reconsidered. In the end he drew back, studied me to see whether I could be trusted and apparently decided not. ‘They may have to be disciplined,’ he said.

  Now came one of the dangerous turning points in my life. I had formed the habit of crossing the English Channel on those remarkable ferries that plied regularly to ports like Calais, Dunkirk, Ostend, Antwerp and Amsterdam, and this gave me an opportunity not only to visit the famed art galleries in the big cities but also to meet young people who liked the same mode of travel and whose interest in the contemporary world was at least as deep as mine. In this way, and because I was consciously casting about for new acquaintances who could teach me something, I fell in with a group of Belgian students at one of the art galleries who were on their way to a big student gathering in Brussels, a short train ride to the south.

  When we reached that city we were met by two young women with arm bands and were led to a large, bare meeting hall at a school of some kind, and there unwittingly I received my introduction to Europe’s vibrant university Communist movement. I was surrounded by students from a dozen different nations, Spain, Italy and Greece north to Sweden, Norway and Denmark, with everything in between on both east and west. I was the only American and I was there by chance. They were Communists and they were serious about it.

  Then followed two or three days of the most intense intellectual gymnastics, with older speakers from various countries explaining the relative conditions of their movement and the likelihood of their party’s attaining power in the near future. Speakers from Russia, addressing all of us as if we were committed to the revolution, gave general encouragement insisting that time was on our side. Enthusiastic orators from Spain claimed that they might be able to take power at any moment, but those from Italy warned that whereas their long-term chances looked good, Mussolini was too powerful at the moment to be toppled easily. Speakers from Great Britain were not optimistic.

  At this powerful Communist gathering I was in exactly the position I had been in when I was traveling with a fascist rail pass to the political exhibitions in the Italian cities, or when I was mountain climbing in the lower Alps with my National Socialist friends or holding long discussions with Herr Ludenberg, the philosophical supporter of Adolf Hitler: I was striving to understand the world; I wanted to know what Communism offered its young people to make it so alluring, and in those days in Brussels I found out.

  But in the discussion groups, in which I took as active a part as my limited command of languages permitted, I discovered something significant. When the European delegates spoke of the downtrodden poor or the bitter hardships endured by the underprivileged, they were talking in bookish generalities lacking any foundation in personal experience, and I quickly learned that I knew far more about the real poverty of the world than any of the other participants. In America I had witnessed the worst of small-town economic deprivation, the worst of homelessness as men drifted across the nation without jobs or hope, and all the other dislocations in society for which Communism was supposed to be the only solution. In short, without being aware of the fact, I knew far more about social disparities than they did.

  I did not feel confident in the midst of so many to argue that in the United States, at least, there were ways other than Communism of dealing with disaffections caused by dire poverty, but the more I heard of the analyses of European conditions and prospects, the more convinced I became that in America the solution did not lie in Communism.

  The three days I spent in that powerful assembly in Brussels were three of the most rewarding I would spend anywhere. The session was in effect an intense seminar that filled in the gaps in my college curriculum, where Karl Marx was never mentioned and not one professor seemed to realize that an eruption of the most titanic kind was about to engulf Central Europe. I would have remained a lesser man had I not gone to Brussels.

  In 1932 a British merchant ship took me to the east coast of Spain, and I traveled up to the remote mountain town of Teruel, which was to become the center of bitter fighting in the civil war. There and in Valencia I saw clearly that Spain’s fragile democracy was in peril from both the right and the left, with the resolution capable of going either way. In Teruel I met men who were determined to see that the antidemocratic forces did not prevail, and when I asked if they thought they could hold off the military if it decided to take arms against the republic, they said: ‘All Europe will jump to our defense. They will not allow our country to be stolen from us.’ It was clear that when they referred to ‘all Europe,’ they meant ‘all left-wing and Communist sympathizers,’ for to save their newly won freedoms they would accept help from any source.

  Such was my political education in Europe: I saw dreadful poverty and unemployment in Great Britain; triumphant fascism in Italy; nascent Nazism in Germany; Communism gaining ground in Europe; and the prologue to civil war in Spain. These were the great challenges of my age and I had been close to the heart of each.

  The darkest day of my life came years later on a snowy street corner in Washington, D.C., when the infamous McCarthy era was at its height.

  A former teacher friend of mine, Bill Vitarelli, had contemplated studying for the priesthood but had become instead an expert in wood-working, ceramics and puppet making. Since I had once spent a summer touring the eastern United States as a professional puppeteer of moderate skill, I fell in with Vitarelli and together we put together a puppet show that played the big department stores. He was unbelievably skilled with his hands, excited about the possibility of teaching young people, and interested in almost everything. He was an easy man to like, a difficult man to protect from
his enthusiasms. And he had been, among other things, the man who got me started in 1953 on professional fortune-telling. I realized what a free spirit he was and that he might find himself in trouble in a straitlaced environment.

  Bill was in trouble, but that was not news, for he was always in trouble of some kind. This time it was serious, so serious indeed that his entire career and even his livelihood were in jeopardy. I had helped him get a government job teaching school in Guam and Palau in my old South Pacific arena, and he was doing a spectacularly good job when news came from Washington that an unnamed accuser had formally charged him with being a Communist. He was brought back to Washington to stand before one of those infamous in-house investigative tribunals whose three members would determine the relevance of the indictment. If the three men, who were not lawyers, decided from the evidence they had that he had lied about not being a Communist his teaching career would be destroyed.

  As in all such cases, Vitarelli was kept in ignorance of the specific charge against him. He was not allowed to know who had lodged it, what its gravamen was, what part of his varied career it pertained to, or what infamous thing he was supposed to have done. All he was permitted to know was that someone among our two hundred million citizens had told someone else: ‘Bill Vitarelli is a Communist,’ and faced with that meager, shadowy charge he was required to prove that he was not a Communist.

  In such a desperate situation it was crucial for Bill to enlist in his defense the most reliable character witnesses he could, and after consultation with a magnificent old Quaker lawyer it was decided that I should go first to defend his character as solidly and unqualifiedly as possible.

  Of course I was obligated to do so, but now excruciating anxiety gripped me: if I went before the committee and swore that I had never myself been involved in Communist activities, and if the people who were determined to hound Vitarelli out of public life took the trouble to look into my background in Europe, they could easily find out that I had twice intimately associated with German Nazis and, what was infinitely worse, I had also attended that big Communist meeting in Brussels and allowed my name to get on a roster somewhere (because for some time thereafter I received through the mail in Scotland materials from the Communist party in Scotland, where, during the depression, underground cells flourished).

  For some weeks I had agonized over this and now on this bleak wintry day on a street corner in the shadow of a gray government building Bill Vitarelli, on the verge of having his life destroyed, was pleading with me to promise to be his first character witness. I could not confide my own vulnerability, nor could I give any other reasonable excuse for not stepping forward, so I hedged, and as I did so, looking like a vacillating coward, he suddenly screamed: ‘My God, Jim! This is my life. What can I do to persuade you?’ His cry was so anguished that with no further thought as to my own safety, I said: ‘I’ll be there.’

  The three men of the investigative committee, ordinary government employees from the same department as the accused—I believe it was Interior, since Guam and the Palau Islands came under that jurisdiction, but I could be wrong—sat behind a long desk on a dais in a large drab room. There were tipstaves and court reporters taking down every word I said, and the atmosphere was solemn.

  When the meeting began, the chairman asked who the first witness was, and Vitarelli’s gray-haired lawyer indicated that I would take the stand. The chairman asked me who my employers were, and I was able to say truthfully that I had last worked for the Reader’s Digest, The Saturday Evening Post and the New York Herald Tribune, three of the most conservative publications in America. Here I was, far more suspect than Vitarelli because of my behavior in Europe, testifying in his behalf as a solid American patriot solely because of my association with agencies having impeccable credentials.

  I was on the stand, I believe, for most of that first day. My defense of Bill proved so strong, covered so many different areas of his life and was so unwavering that the tribunal felt that it had to rebut some of my remarks. As they proceeded to do so I noticed for the first time in such hearings—I would participate in several other cases—that a moment would come when these three ordinary men would begin to see themselves as latter-day Solons and would imitate the mannerisms of the wise judges they had seen in their favorite movie. All of the judicial proceedings were a farce, of course: Bill had been indicted, so he must be guilty.

  The mundane interrupted the high drama when during a recess we all went to the men’s room and each of the judges asked me for my autograph, saying how much he had liked some of my work. I thought I was justified in concluding that I had saved the day for Vit. When my testimony resumed I stuck to my guns, assuring the investigators that Vitarelli could never have been a Communist for the good reason that he was such a lone wolf he had refused to join anything. But even as I was fervently defending him, I had the sickening thought: My God! I have no idea what I’m supposed to be defending him against.

  My fears were realized: when the verdict was handed down some days later, Vitarelli was found to have been a Communist and was therefore fired forever from government service and left without a penny, but with a wife and five children to support.

  Sometime later I met one of the officers of the trial and he astonished me by revealing that it was my testimony that had condemned Vit. I was so visibly staggered that the man said: ‘Yes, more than three times the judges led you by easy steps to the point where, if you had been telling the whole truth, you would have explained what happened in the Georgia case. But you always shied away, so it was clear to all of us that you were either hiding something or lying.’

  ‘Georgia case? I never heard the name Georgia mentioned till this minute. Not by anybody. What in hell was the Georgia case?’

  ‘We couldn’t tell you because then you’d know the nature of the evidence against him. It was your shifty silence that did him in.’

  I was so enraged by this terrible miscarriage of justice, and so was the old Quaker lawyer and some of Vit’s other friends, that we mounted a campaign that took this world’s worst example of injustice all the way to the Supreme Court. In the meantime, in order to keep Vit and his family alive, I put him on my personal payroll. A titanic struggle began between a group of ordinary citizens and the full majesty of the government as represented by the awesome power of Senator McCarthy, but slowly, thanks to the devotion and brilliance of other defenders of a free society, the justices of the Supreme Court began to look at this miserable affair, and the Vitarelli case became the first victim of these infamous tribunals to have its judgment overturned.

  Vit’s name was cleared. His back pay was restored. He was able to return to the job he loved, teaching the natives on Palau, and an ugly footnote to American history in the 1950s was rectified to the extent that such hurtful damage can ever be mended.

  In that dark period of national hysteria I was proud to testify in behalf of many friends accused of being disloyal to their country, and in the process it occurred to me that the type of life I had led had brought me into contact with an unusual number of men and women who were exploring the frontiers of knowledge. When I defended one of my former professors at Harvard I thought how revolting it was that although I was not qualified to substitute for him in the classroom, I had been put in the position of verifying his patriotism. I also defended a college classmate whose rather popular name was confused with another. And I defended a newspaperman who had written an article that someone had deemed criminally irreverent.

  A young man in New York who at one time had badgered me for months to join him in the Communist party found himself in serious trouble and asked me to swear that he had never even considered Communism, but this I would not do. When he whined: ‘Why not? I thought you were my friend?’ I reminded him: ‘You hammered me pretty hard, but you didn’t even believe in it yourself,’ and I would have nothing more to do with him.

  Those were bad times, some of the most shameful we’ve gone through in my lifetime. As I
paraded myself as witness beyond reproach because of my affiliation with those three stalwart pillars of conservatism, the Digest, Post and Tribune, I often reflected on what might have happened to me had I spent those two years not in Europe but in New York and Chicago and especially Hollywood, where I would have been susceptible to pressures from older men whom I respected to involve myself in certain meetings or protests. For doing infinitely far less than I did in Europe, I would have been blacklisted and perhaps even sent to jail, for the anger I showed in the Vitarelli case could easily have been directed against the House Un-American Activities Committee and I could have been charged with contempt.

  Years later I finally solved the mystery about ‘the Georgia case’ that I had presumably handled so poorly that my friend Bill Vitarelli was found guilty of being a Communist. It seems there was a middle-aged woman teacher, who read subversion in every editorial and saw flame-throwing violence in every black face, who had attended a teachers’ conference in Atlanta, where she heard a visiting professor from New York, name of Vitarelli, utter an appalling statement that others testified he had said: ‘Sooner or later circumstances will force you to surrender your bourgeois attitudes,’ and as soon as she heard that fatal word bourgeois she knew she was in the presence of a Communist. So she entered an official complaint against Vitarelli even though she did not know him and had never spoken to him. Hers was the only complaint ever lodged against Bill, but it nearly succeeded in ruining his life.