In our quest of understanding,
we beseech God’s guidance.
We have begun in our grasp
of that basis of understanding,
which is that all free government is firmly founded
in a deeply felt religious faith;
if we understand, then we won’t have Communism.
That, it seems to me,
is the prayer that all of us have today:
that we shall remain free, never to be proven guilty
of the one capital offense against freedom,
a lack of staunch faith.
That is the way I see it.
My friends, thank you for being with us. Good night.
God bless you.
PART TWO: FRIDAY MORNING
8.
What a Glorious Morning for America!
reads the sign being erected on the Roof of the Astor Hotel overlooking Times Square. The sun is rising, sending its prophylactic shafts deep into the city canyons, dispersing not only the Phantom and all his legions, but all thought of them as well. Although the Supreme Court will not reconvene for hours, there is already, with the first hazy glimmer of sunlight, a new certainty in the air, a confidence, bookies refuse to take more bets, the electrocutions seem a sure thing, preparations resume. Traffic is once more blocked off, carpenters and electricians busy themselves about the sabotaged stage, the Phantom’s filthy litter is swept away by Sanitation Department crews. There is a resurgence of pride, even the taxi drivers leave off their complaints as traffic snarls around the edges. The temperature is already in the seventies and rising, the humidity is falling, it’s going to be a beautiful day. It feels good to wake up, get out on the streets.
Except for the Sanitation crews maybe—the Phantom has laid a formidable task on them this morning. The stage is wrecked, the props lie smashed and strewn for blocks around, wires have been ripped out and knotted, the bunting hangs in shreds, and the litter of pornography and propaganda is worse than a midwinter snowfall. Sanitation is no small task in New York City any day of the year: there are about 6000 miles of streets to clean, flush, and service, with more than 24,000 tons of refuse to collect and dispose of every single day, over 12,000,000 pigeon bowel movements to cope with, 5000 tons of daily dogshit, so the cleanup crews are hardly fans of the leafletting and wreckage-strewing Phantom. Given the arduous mission, they are joined in Times Square this morning by volunteer teams from the Fire Department and the New York City Transit Authority, as well as a good many of the city’s 19,000 cops and most of its 200,000 pigeons.
The area’s capacity to absorb these multitudes is but one of its many and renowned magical properties. It is actually home for over 50,000 people, and thousands more of transients from all classes sleep here—now stirring, scratching, yawning, blinking out on all this bright activity, watching tow trucks haul away parked cars, overalled workers sweep up the gutter flyers and scrape the clemency snipes off the NO PARKING signs and hooded traffic lights, scrub the graffiti off the tall chalk-white statues on the Bond clothing store. Some 357,750 commuters begin to pour into the center, soon to be followed by tens of thousands of shoppers, sharks, and eager sightseers.
Including the previous Incarnation and his First Lady: Harry and Bess Truman, now what the press calls just another couple of ordinary American tourists, have arisen before dawn this morning back home in Independence, Missouri, birthplace of the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints and likely site of the New Jerusalem, and have set out in a brand-new automobile to come to the big city to see the show and visit their daughter Margaret. Just what Harry thinks about these ceremonies he hasn’t said, but it was his own Attorney General who pushed for them in the first place, and when Harry had his own chance to act on a clemency appeal from the Rosenbergs last January, he simply passed it on, without comment, to his successor, granting amnesty and full pardon instead to his old crony J. Parnell Thomas, the HUAC Early Warning Sentinel who’d been jailed for taking salary kickbacks from his office staff. Some say he passed the buck on the Rosenberg appeal just to complicate the new President’s life. Others that it was an act of modesty and generosity, typical of Harry Truman: let the new man have the headlines. Many, though, believe he’d simply lost touch with Uncle Sam by then and didn’t want to take any chances.
As for the new man this morning, he’s wandering around the White House in his pajamas in a playful mood, practicing his oral clumsiness and startling his staff with bounding Eisenhoppers—those little plastic grasshoppers with springy metal legs and rubber suction cups on the bellies, given to him by his old friend Louis Marx the Toymaker, not to be confused with his Martian theorist. Reporters christened them “Eisenhoppers” at Christmastime and they’ve since sold like hotcakes. There is much curiosity, even among insiders, as to how and when Uncle Sam chooses his disguises. The National Poet Laureate has called Dwight David Eisenhower “The Man of Destiny,” and certainly there have been few Incarnations less obvious (as Harry himself has said: “Why, this fellow, this fellow don’t know any more about politics than a pig knows about Sunday!”) and yet more inevitable than this grinning aw-shucks farmboy from the wrong side of the tracks who clowned his way through West Point and the Mexican border troubles, only to find himself suddenly the Supreme Commander, Allied Expeditionary Forces, and, without firing a shot, the Number One Hero of World War II. And yet, it must be admitted, all American Superchiefs are “men of destiny.” So few men actually seek the office, it should be easy to get if they want it, yet there seems to be no evident connection between their own eagerness to surrender to the hypostasis and the actual takeover—indeed, it’s often just when they’re giving up and looking the other way that suddenly and improbably the famous plug hat falls down around their ears. How does this happen? Why them? Does Uncle Sam groom his Incarnations from birth, for example, or does he play it more impulsively, adjusting to the surprises that come along? Does he field a range of options for himself and drift speculatively among them, or are these apparent alternatives merely illustrations of discarded possibilities? And what about the reserves: do the same rules apply to the Vice President, or is this a kind of wild card that Uncle Sam allows the world to play just to liven things up every twenty years or so? Finally, when a candidate does arise (or is conceived), does the actual Incarnation hit him like a ton of bricks, a sudden brutal invasion of the Presence, or has it been growing in him all along? Does the voter, entering the polling booth, exercise his own free will, or is he too the captive of some larger force—and if the latter, is that power exercised upon him directly by Uncle Sam, or more subtly through some sort of force field that even the American Superhero cannot entirely control? Are political parties, in short, living organisms, abstractions, solvents, catalysts, viable alternatives, or merely the visible form of Paradox in the world?
Well, only Uncle Sam knows why this or that receptacle is chosen to receive the Host, but one thing is clear: Uncle Sam moved toward Dwight Eisenhower with more conviction and gusto than toward any other Incarnation since the Father of the Country himself. The new President was packaged and sold by BBD&O as “Strictly a No-Deal Man Clean as a Hound’s Tooth Who Will Go to Korea Restore Faith in God and Country and Carry On a Crusade to Clean Up Creeping Socialism Five-Percenters the Mess in Washington Crooks Cronies Mink Coats Deep Freezers and Rising Inflation,” but the true source of his power was summed up more simply in the big badge Uncle Sam wore last fall on his blue lapel: I LIKE IKE. Uncle Sam seemed to want Eisenhower like a child wants happiness. Perhaps it was because he was nostalgic for the old days, the time of his childhood when life was simple and causes were clear, the days of the Minutemen and Bunker Hill, of cracker barrels and hayrides and old-time religion. A “crusade” Eisenhower called his political campaign, and he told stories about his old Uncle Abraham Lincoln Eisenhower galloping his goofy gospel wagon through prairie villages, shouting “This way to heaven!”, and he told about selling hot tamales three for a n
ickel and riding a raft in a flood with his brother Ed while singing “Marching Through Georgia,” learning to fire old muzzle-loading guns with powder and shot, about seeing a real cowboy shootout on Texas Street in Abilene. He conjured up the crackle of a campfire, the taste of country fried chicken and thick potato salad at church picnics and the thump and clank of a game of horseshoes, lamented the passing of the old country store, and recalled the time during the Spanish-American War when the whole town ran out in the streets on hearing the rumor: “There’s a Spanish airship over Abilene!”—it turned out to be a box kite advertising a sale of straw hats. Straw hats! Box kites! Airships! Wow, it felt so good to think about these things again! The early 1950s has been a time of great national prosperity but also a time of great national malaise: things seem to have gone sour somehow. Uncle Sam is running half the world and scaring the pants off the rest, but it’s not as easy or as much fun as people had thought it would be. So maybe Uncle Sam just wanted to get inside all those old memories again, experience for himself once more the dusty heat of a lazy summer day on the prairie, the excitement of hearing the C. W. Parker Circus parade coming down Main Street, the romance of a young happy-go-lucky officer in a Mexican border town on a Saturday night, even the old-fashioned sting of a hickory stick on his fanny. It may be so.
“Behind the dingy walls inside cramped rooms,” his Man of Destiny is declaiming now, “and airless, ah, there are thousands of homes let me say in which parental love and care burn as brightly as, as intensely…” He spies his wife’s personal secretary, presses an Eisenhopper down on her desk, pokes his finger in his ear as though absently cleaning it. “As in the homes of, uh, Abilene…” She pretends to be startled when it pops up and Eisenhower roars with delight. Mamie, staggering half-blind out of her bedroom, fumbling with trembling hands for a wake-up fag, asks him what the hell’s so funny this morning, what’s got into him? He grins, that effortless affable grin that has brought him to these premises (what’s got into him? well, for one thing, he woke up a short while ago with the handsomest hard-on in a dog’s age, dreaming of his old Irish WAC girlfriend, they were both stark naked, running around in France somewhere in the middle of the war, he wasn’t even sure which side of the lines they were on or who was winning or losing, but they were balling the jack something fantastic, out in the open fields, in tents and bivouacs, village streets, in the mud of the trenches, and the only thing spoiling the fun at all was a weird little runny-nose private—he looked foreign or Jewish or something—who kept wandering by looking miserable and threatening to tattle on them…but somehow even this was exciting in its way), and says: “Hey, listen, Mamie, what do you think of this: Hemmed in by masonry and, uh, by masonry walls confined to thin streets, boys, let me assure you, in New York even as in Kansas they have found ways to enjoy themselves without hurt to property or to their elders, the farm boy and the tenement boy are one, ahem, at heart. That’s what I’m trying to get at.” He smiles. His wife stares at him for a moment through squinting eyes. Then she grunts, shrugs, and shuffles back into her bedroom. “I should say, or remind you,” he calls after her, “that does not mean that we can forget about the unforgenate, uh, FORTCH-inut circumstances growing up—which many young per—people grow up in trusting that good will! Ah, will flower out of evil! At least that is my opinion!” He has meanwhile pressed down another Eisenhopper, having glimpsed his own secretary coming in the door behind him: the hopper leaps with a loud BO-I-I-ING!, the secretary squeals, Ike’s laughter booms.
The President’s assistant, Sherman (The Abominable No-Man) Adams, is in the Oval Office laying out the President’s agenda for the day, which includes a Cabinet meeting, a therapy session with the stricken Bob Taft, and a possible address to the nation after the Supreme Court meets at noon. Adams, hearing all the shrieking and laughter and seeing the President promenading out on Harry’s Balcony in his pee jays, wonders if, by coincidence, Eisenhower woke up this morning in the same state of oddly disturbing excitement that he’d experienced himself. It’s impossible, of course, for Sherm Adams to know, but were a poll to be taken, he would discover that not only he and the President, but also most of Congress, the Supreme Court, lesser courts and commissions, the Fourth Estate, Cecil B. De Mille and Cardinal Spellman, the Holy Six, the Vice President sacked out on his living-room couch, and the entire Cabinet—even old Ezra Taft Benson of the Council of Twelve Apostles—have all awakened this morning from the foment of strange gamy dreams with prodigious erections and enflamed crevices. Some, like Irving Saypol, have wisecracked about it. Others, like Foster Dulles, have felt furtive and guilty. It has made Joe McCarthy boisterously reckless, Felix Frankfurter confused, the Boy Judge grumpy, Emily Post gay. Edgar Hoover has taken a cold bath. But none, curiously enough, has used his or her aroused sexuality on a mate, it’s as though, somehow, that’s not what it was all about, and all are left in a state of suspended agitation, feeling itchy and faintly irreverent, giddy and bemused yet unsatisfied, somehow detached and isolated, but gregarious at the same time, and with an unwonted appetite for risk and profligacy. Which makes them nervous. Hoo-eee! have to take it easy today or things could go haywire. Few, however, can put their finger on what it is that’s disquieting them. One who has no such difficulty is the Sing Sing Executioner Joseph Francel. Brushing his teeth in his bathroom in Cairo, New York, Joe winces at himself in the mirror (his is frankly hurting him) and says: “Hmf. (Spit.) Better get down to Times Square this morning.”
Times Square, the Crossroads of the World: it is said that half the people on Forty-second and Broadway at any given moment are from out of town—and the other half are Armenians. Shabby by day, luminescent by night, it is the most paradoxical place in all America, and thus the holiest. Historians have written that everything that happens in the Western World originates in Times Square and—to judge by the souvenir shops, auction galleries, gutter debris, and panhandlers—dies here as well. The Heart and Cock of the Country, it is called. Sin City U.S.A. The Entertainment Capital of America. The United States is the first electric nation of the world, and this is its luminous navel. The Diamond Stickpin in New York’s Shirtfront. The Brightest Ten Blocks in the World. Here pilgrims come to kiss the holy stones, the despised second sons of the world to seek their fortunes, mystics to walk the Great White Way.
There is an ancient tradition for this. Nomadic tribes crisscrossed the island for centuries, and transience is the profoundest element in the American Spirit. Broadway itself, as legend has it, is an old Indian trail—certainly this would explain its erratic polestar course down through the island. It’s said the last to use it were the Mana-hatta tribe, who departed by it after nicking gullible old Peter Minuit, first of the tourist yokels, for twenty-four dollars. Many Italians have come here, more than there are Italians in Italy, but the first was a navigator named Verrazano, who claimed the island for the French. Next came an Englishman named Henry Hudson on behalf of the Dutch, who named it Niew Nederland and commenced to settle it. The English wrested it from the Dutch in the name of the Duke of York, then lost it to their rebellious colonials a century later (even then, the inhabitants of Medcef Eden’s meadows, eventually to become Times Square, stayed out of it, played both sides, and raked what profit off the Revolution they could). By the time it had become the Capital of the United States of America and seen in its streets the Incarnation of General George Washington as Superchief I, there were more than thirty thousand people, heterochthonous the lot of them, passing through the borough’s precincts, and half that many again in nearby Breuckelen, Bronck’s Land, Queens, and Staaten Eylandt.
Now, a little over a century and a half later, there are seven and a half million people living in 116 villages around Times Square, these in turn surrounded by another 574 suburban communities of millions more, and half of them are foreign-born or one or more of their parents were. The huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse, getting processed for destiny now in Uncle Sam’s melting pot. Lithua
nians, Thais, Persians, Jamaicans: this is the place of their initiation into Americanism, the Great White Way. The heaviest migrations come west from Italy and Russia, but there are thousands upon thousands of Germans and Czechs, too, and Irish, Austrians, Hungarians, English, and Welsh. And it is these, the tired, poor, and tempest-tost, more American, as they say, than the Americans, who each year play host to the summer inswarm of country boobs, come east to Mecca like flies drawn to a pig’s ass.
From planes, cars, trains, ships, and buses, they debouch upon the city in a breathless rush and scatter, squealing in awe and umbrage, clicking cameras, streaming through the narrow streets in their patterned sport-shirts and J. C. Penney dresses like blind and anxious ants, hot on the trail of the unknown. There are bright clusters of them at Rockefeller Plaza, Greenwich Village, Fifth Avenue, crawling all over each other, going where the others go, seeing what the others see. The Battery. The United Nations. The Waldorf-Astoria. Scurrying about, chasing temptations, ogling heights, asking directions, bumping into each other, dropping parcels, taking bus tours, panicking at intersections, getting lost. Some find themselves on the subway while looking for the men’s room. Some try to leap off the Empire State Building or photograph the burlesque shows, others get off at the wrong stop on the Third Avenue El and miss everything. They consume staggering quantities of egg rolls, shish kebab, knishes, French doughnuts, Hungarian goulash, oyster stew, and pizza pie, lick millions of postage stamps, trample hotel carpets to shreds, and wrinkle, stain, and burn holes in enough sheets to tent the nation. They get aroused by streetwalkers, maligned by cab-drivers, lectured in Union Square, sunburned at Coney Island, and raped in Central Park.
But wherever they go, sooner or later they will come to Times Square. Today, of course, this is required of them, even the locals will be here tonight, but even without the public electrocutions, they would gather here. Partly because of the sex: this is the home of the G-string, the cut-rate hustler, the dirty book and naughty record, the bedroom comedy and cheap condom, and the American tourist is well-known—and far beyond his own shores—as the horniest creature this side of the Bronx Zoo. Whatever he needs, he can find here, from an orchestra view of famous movie stars onstage in their skivvies to a quick blow job in a subway John, but this is not in the main why he is drawn here. For if sex is dirty, it is also, at its dirtiest, cleansing; if it defiles, it also sanctifies: the principal reason for the traffic into Times Square—this place of feasts, spectacle, and magic—is that it is the ritual center of the Western World.
Public Burning Page 21
