Public Burning

by Robert Coover

  Is this really the ground the storied ancestors trod? Is this the actual place where Peter Minuit invented the American Way of Life with his twenty-four dollars? Is this hole, now a subway entrance, really the one from which Uncle Sam sprang in all his glory—full-grown, costumed, and goateed—from the belly of Mother Earth? Who knows? It hardly matters. Tradition has hallowed it and investment has certified it. The nation’s dramas are enacted here, its truths tested and broadcast, its elections verified, its material virtues publicized—who has not stood in awe before the famous Wrigley chewing-gum sign, the giant smoke rings and waterfalls, the tipped whiskey bottle that never empties? In Saint Augustine’s words: et inhorresco, et inardesco! It is here where one might have slept with the Yankee Doodle Boy, George M. Cohan, in the Knickerbocker Hotel, got soused on the New Amsterdam Roof with Florenz Ziegfeld, kissed the hand of Sarah Bernhardt, and gone to confession after with Father Duffy, the Fighting Chaplain, at the Holy Cross Church on Forty-second Street—and even today one can still break bread with Milton Berle and Phil Silvers at Lindy’s on Tin Pan Alley, sneak a smoke with Rosalind Russell behind the Winter Garden. This is the site of the world’s largest New Year’s Eve party, where hundreds of thousands gather to watch the ball drop on the Times Tower, exercising its perennial charm against death and entropy. The oracle that “he who circles Times Square will end by falling inside” only inspires greater feelings of awe and desire in the people: “Far from fleeing, we draw nearer…!” The American Showcase, Playland U.S.A., the Electrical Street of Dreams—it was inevitable that Uncle Sam should choose it as the place to burn the atom spies.

  Flags are now unfurled from all the hotels and from atop the Times Tower, and huge blow-ups of Uncle Sam strangling a bear and a dragon are mounted under the starry-digited clocks on the Paramount Building, with General Eisenhower’s immortal D-Day rouser as a caption:

  I CALL UPON ALL WHO LOVE FREEDOM TO STAND WITH US NOW!

  Not only is a terrible dignity thereby attached to this momentous occasion (D-Day having been the nearest thing to the Second Coming mankind will probably know until the real thing comes along), but an overwhelming sense of righteousness and ultimate victory as well—some start calling it E-Day, Electrocution Day, the proper sequel, long-awaited; but others prefer D-Day II: a Day of Death, Drama, and Devotions. Not to mention Decency, human Decency. The little man in the Johnnie Walker whiskey spectacular above the Whelan drugstore is today sporting a red-white-and-blue topper, and the sanitation crew-members wear little badges that read THE LARGE THING TO DO IS THE ONLY THING WE CAN DO. A blue-white-and-orange flag—same as that of the Netherlands in 1626—with the seal of New York City in blue on the white stripe is hung out on the façade of the Times Tower, the five stars above the seal indicating that Mayor Vincent Impellitteri is in the Square or soon will be. Still early, but the Square is filling up. Cafeterias are crowded already, and they’re standing in line under the Eveready sign at Elpine Drinks. Workers, theater people, young execs, guys in sportshirts with cameras around their necks, women in sleeveless blouses with high collars, long pleated skirts. Carpenters and electricians, too, already in some dismay over the seemingly impossible task that confronts them here this morning. Colored boys are sweeping out the theater lobbies, grinning up at the sun, jigging around their brooms like the late departed Bojangles Robinson, winking at all the passing girls. And off to the north, over Central Park, there are already kites in the skies.

  The Police Commissioner, overseeing the Times Square operations alongside the Sanitation Commissioner, is examining the statue of Father Duffy. It has been splashed during the night with a bucket of red paint—now being scraped away by the clean-up crews—but it’s not certain whether this was the Phantom’s doing, or a citizen’s righteous protest against the rising tide of treason among, not only American clerics, but scientists, teachers, and judges as well. To be sure, someone has daubed Omar Bradley’s famous line all over the pavement: WE HAVE GRASPED THE MYSTERY OF THE ATOM AND REJECTED THE SERMON ON THE MOUNT! But on the other hand, right there on Father Duffy’s bronze behind are the words THE ABOLITION OF RELIGION AS THE ILLUSORY HAPPINESS OF THE PEOPLE IS REQUIRED FOR THEIR REAL HAPPINESS, so it’s a moot point.

  “These are the times that try men’s souls, George,” says the Sanitation Commissioner with a sigh.

  “Yes, Andy, an appeal to arms, and to the God of Hosts, is all what is left us.”

  President Eisenhower, of course, has long insisted that “the church, with its testimony of the existence of an Almighty God is the last thing, that it seems to me, would be preaching, teaching, or tolerating Communism,” but even the President is said to be taking a hard second look this morning. For a starter, the Chief has turned over to Edgar Hoover’s G-men the names of 2300 clergymen who signed a “special plea for clemency for the Rosenbergs,” as well as the list of 104 signatories to a follow-up letter, taken to be the hard-core Comsymp preachers. “The Rosenberg campaign,” warns Harold Velde’s Early Warning Sentinels, has “afforded the Communist conspiracy a momentous opportunity to remount a long-planned invasion of the churches of America!” FBI undercover mystery man Herbert Philbrick thinks many of the 2300 are dupes, “unsuspecting victims” sucked in by the wily Angels of Darkness at the center, but turncoat Joe Zack Kornfeder, former bigwig in the American Communist Politburo, disagrees:

  REP. GORDON SCHERER, OHIO: Among those two thousand ministers were, however, some just idealists and pacifists, were there not?

  JOE ZACK KORNFEDER: I do not think so. I think that those two thousand were pretty close to the machine.

  Demonstrators, moving past the White House this morning toward the Supreme Court, are actually carrying blown-up posters of the Son of God Himself, with the text:

  REWARD

  —for information leading to the apprehension of Jesus Christ…

  Wanted—for Sedition, Criminal Anarchy, Vagrancy, and Conspiracy to overthrow the established Government…

  Dresses poorly…has visionary ideas, associates with common working people, the unemployed and bums… Alien—believed to be a Jew… Red Beard, marks on hands and feet, the result of injuries inflicted by an angry mob led by respectable citizens and legal authorities.

  “One of the most sacrilegious propaganda pieces ever used by the Communists!” scream the Early Warning Sentinels, still much agitated by their overnight dreams and eager for some kind of consummating encounter. “The Communists did not need the churches in past years; they had ample other channels of subversion,” G-man Philbrick warns, coughing up a little early-morning phlegm: “They do need the churches now; they will fight savagely for your church!”

  And for anything else they can get: Uncle Sam has been whipping about his vast domains all morning, struggling against crooks, Commies, and crawfishing backsliders. He has just been called to Coney Island to investigate a report of a monster said to be tangled in the roller coaster there, but this turns out to be a metaphorical alarm. Not so phantasmal is the corpse of Steve Franse, former owner of the Howdy Club down in the Village, found brutally beaten, face down, on the rear floor of his automobile just south of Times Square, nor the cynical overnight robbery of the Muscular Dystrophy Association on Broadway: at least nine grand missing, only the Phantom could do such a thing. “Just thinkin’ about it,” quips Uncle Sam, “takes the starch right outa me!” And then a call comes in from further up the street: a thief has just jammed a pistol in the back of a Greystone Hotel secretary and seized a $3600 payroll. Uncle Sam draws himself up, gazing austerely in the direction of this newest outrage, his blue eyes glinting in the morning sunlight, his famous top hat cocked forward on his brow in manly defiance, shoulders squared, lean jaw rippling with suppressed fury, exhibiting all that “rugged strength and radiant beauty” so admired by the great American Prophetess Sarah Hale, ready as ever for his “humble toil and heavenward duty,” but clearly pretty pissed off at the same time. He looks like Grover Cleveland confronting the election return
s of 1888.

  “Do not delay!” the people cry, gathered apprehensively about their Superhero in front of the sacked Muscular Dystrophy offices, “the golden moments fly!”

  Uncle Sam turns and gazes compassionately down upon all these common people whom the Lord and careless fucking have made so many of, and gripping his lapels like Abe Lincoln, declares “Yes, friends, the fack can’t be no longer disgised that a Krysis is onto us. But, hey, politics ain’t beanbag, folks, and repose is not the destiny of man! The ripest peach is often highest on the tree in the boisterous sea of liberty! Yea, the credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose map is marred with sweat and dust and bloody bung-balls, so shoot if you must this old gray head, for the manners of women are the surest criterion by which to fool all of the people some of the time! If destruction is to be our lot in order to insure domestic tranquillity, a new frontier, and a full dinner pail, we must ourselves be its author and finish the work we are in until every drop of blood shall be sunk in this sea of upturned faces!” It seems like no one can hold back from celebrating the Poets and Prophets this morning, least of all the American Superhero, who speaks by custom with the grandeur of a nation of runesmiths, from Davy Crockett to Longfellow, the Carnegies and Cranes to Hank Williams and the Whittier Poets: “The tree in which the sap is stagnant, my friends, is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration, so like that sweaty old nigger piss-fire Ira Aldridge used to say, ‘The bow is bent, the arrow flies, / The winged shaft of fate!’” And off he flashes—WHOOSH!—up Broadway to the north.

  On his way, Uncle Sam stops off in Times Square to inspect the cleanup operations and reconstruction of the Death House set, finds the electricians despondent over the condition of the electric chair, uprooted and half-wrecked, lying in the gutter, draped with the broken Uncle Sam manikin with its Hitler moustache. Workmen are painting over a sign on the south face of the Hotel Claridge that says THE TRADITION OF ALL PAST GENERATIONS WEIGHS LIKE A NIGHTMARE UPON THE BRAIN OF THE LIVING. Uncle Sam strips the manikin of its wig, Uncle Sam suit, and moustache, and what he discovers under all that is not a replica of himself—that stern puritanical visage and lithe powerful frame—but a figure that looks like a cross between Bishop Fulton Sheen, Everett Dirksen, and Our Miss Brooks, and as sexless as Christine Jorgensen. Just a little lump down there, a shiny bulge, like a tumor, and smooth as Ike’s bald pate. Uncle Sam turns it over his knee as though to spank it, but actually to inscribe on it Henry Adams’s dictum: “Modern politics is, at bottom, a struggle not of men but of forces,” and he orders that the manikin, what’s left of it, be hung from the nearest flagpole as a kind of old-time Broadway parable on the nature of reality and illusion.

  More of a problem is what to do about the electric chair: it’s really in bad shape. Wiring all ripped out, legs busted, bolts threaded, leather straps shredded, electrodes swiped. The auxiliary generator has been taken apart and the pieces carried off: nothing left but the concrete base and a protective wire fence. The rheostats and voltmeters are gone, too, and up on the stage, somebody has taken a sledgehammer to the switch panel. Warden Denno, Cecil B. De Mille, Executioner Francel, Electric Charlie Wilson, Rube Goldberg, and others gathered in the Square to put things back together again, are deeply distressed. These electric chairs are relatively rare, no chance to get a new one made this late in the game, and this one seems clearly beyond repair—

  But not so! They watch, astounded, as with one fluid movement, Uncle Sam lifts from the gutter the wrecked chair, light as a matchbox for him, squeezes the splintered wood whole again, and bolts it down on the concrete part of the stage with hammer blows of his powerful fists! Wow! A commanding figure, Uncle Sam; crowds have gathered in the Square to ogle him, root for him, worship him even, discovering in their Superhero all that’s best in themselves. He now studies, tugging thoughtfully on his white goatee, the ripped-out wiring and sabotaged switch, and one is reminded of Tom Jefferson, rugged and tall, poring over his designs for the White House or struggling with his quirky polygraph machine, or perhaps of Handsome Frank Pierce, puzzling over the metaphysical obscurities in the books of his friend Nat Hawthorne. Just as, yesterday, as he fought back against the Phantom’s reckless spree, one saw glimpses of Old Hickory galloping up on Horseshoe Bend, T. R. throwing steers in the Badlands, Abe Lincoln splitting rails, or as now one seems to see George Washington crossing the Delaware or Franklin Roosevelt projecting the Four Freedoms in the simple way in which Uncle Sam instructs the workmen on the repair of the electrical system and sends them off to get the parts they need from Pitt Machine Products Company Incorporated, over by the synagogue on East Houston Street.

  “You mean, we just take the stuff, or…?”

  He hands them the key, looking like Ulysses Grant handing his manuscript over to his publishers. “It’s already took,” he says quietly, his voice firm and gentle as Silent Cal’s. “That business used to belong to Julius Rosenberg.”

  There is this peculiar quality about Uncle Sam: it’s as though his many metamorphoses since his early days as an Inspector of Government Provisions have each left, mysteriously, their mark on him. One discovers Old Tip Harrison’s long nose in the middle of his face, little Jemmy Madison’s scraggly white hair (or is it Old Zack’s or Little Van’s? certainly he’s got Zack Taylor’s craggy cheeks and rough-and-ready ways), Willie (Big Lub) Taft’s gold watchchain, old Jim Monroe’s bony rump still in its—even then—out-of-date pantaloons. Debilities have been shed, donated to museums, or else never assumed (just part of the real-time cover story)—Washington’s rhinoceros teeth and smallpox scars, F.D.R.’s shriveled legs, Cleveland’s vulcanized rubber jaw, Abe’s warts and Jim Polk’s spastic bowels—but virtues and marvels have been laid on, fortified and refortified, many times over: there’s the lean virility of Monroe, Jackson, and “Stud” Tyler, steadily augmented by passage through the likes of Long Abe, Doc Wilson, and Ike; there’s that willful hard-set jaw, shaped by every Incarnation from “54-40 or Fight” Polk to Reverend Garfield, Ugly Honest Grover Cleveland, and the Roosevelt boys, not to mention the strange subtle influences of such as Hamilton and Burr, Clay and Calhoun, Bill Borah, Harry Hopkins, and even Ed Stettinius; there’s the lofty pride of John (His Rotundity) Adams, the shrewdness of the Red Fox of Kinderhook, the Grecian mouth of Millard Fillmore, and a hand calloused by the campaign habits of everyone from Matty Van Buren and Chet Arthur, the Gentleman Boss, to affable Warren Harding, who once shook hands with 6756 people in five hours. When he cocks his head a certain poll-parrot way, he recalls Old Buck Buchanan, who had one nearsighted eye and one farsighted eye—which alone was enough to qualify him as Uncle Sam’s Incarnation. And when, as now, tracing leads, fusing wires, unbending panels, putting this electrical system back together again, he scowls in concentration through a pair of antique wire-rimmed spectacles perched halfway down his Yankee nose, one cannot help but remember Citizen Ben Franklin jotting down his scientifical notes by candlelight after successfully sucking electrical fluid down a kite string. Or the old Rough Rider himself, Teddy Roosevelt, squinting to hide his lame left eye. Abe Lincoln trying to read the program in the weak light of Ford’s Theater: “Other means may succeed,” Uncle Sam says, glancing up at these recognitions, sparks flying between his fingers, “this cannot fail!” Fsst! Sizzle! POP! “As America’s greatest Prophet once said, ‘There is always a best way of doin’ everything…’” The marquee lights dip, there’s a crackling hum on-stage and a faint glow: it is done, the chair is ready! “‘… Even if it be to bile an egg!’”

  Huzzahs from the crowd, beaming smiles from the gathered functionaries, who try to get as close to Uncle Sam as possible. The workmen line up and sing “Hail to the Chief,” then test out the chair by burning six or seven chimpanzees in it. And high over the Square behind Father Duffy, up where the Chevy sign used to be: the headlines from the Newton Kansan of exactly eighty years ago today, June the 19th, 1873:

  LET PATRIOTS EVERYWHERE PRE
PARE TO DO THE CLEAN THING

  BY UNCLE SAM AND HIS BALDHEADED EAGLE!

  9.

  The Vice President’s Beard

  Shaving that morning, I thought: I was born a hundred years too late. If I could let this damn thing grow, I’d look like Ulysses S. Grant. There’d be no more talk about shyster corporation lawyers and used-car salesmen then. I could say what I pleased, glowering over my beard, and everybody would listen. Black and bushy, like Saint Peter or Henry VIII or Whit What’s-his-name. Walt Whitman. My skinned nose and forehead gave me a special ferocity this morning. I growled at myself in the bathroom mirror: G-r-r-row-w-f-f! Beauty and the Beast, that game I used to play with Pat before we were married, my secret self. She thought it was funny, she didn’t understand. Mess up my hair, roll my eyes, shake my jowls, the good old days. I could always get a laugh then. If I’d worked at it, I might have been another Jack Benny.

  I actually started a couple of beards back then, always got embarrassed, shaved them off before anyone started to notice. That drift from the focal center, which was somehow clean-cut and open-eyed—it had to do, I suspected, with the approval of old men. And fear of turning into the grizzly irresponsible red-eyed derelict I looked like after a day or two of stubble. With a beard you were expected to move differently, say different things, become more cynical and detached, I got conscious of my hands, eyebrows, lips. I could let myself look like that bent over law books on a Sunday night, but not in class on Monday morning. Then, before I knew it, I was a prosecuting attorney, had to set a community example, then an OPA civil servant in the war and soon a J.O. in the U.S. Navy, where hairiness was frowned on more even than gonorrhea, unless you wore it on your chest, and I wasn’t even out of the Navy before I was running for Congress. With that, my public face was set. Change it, lose votes, I was no longer a free agent. How a candidate looks is a lot more important than what he says, and the most important thing is to look familiar. Even our rare vacations became public appearances, I put it out of my mind. Except occasionally while shaving in the morning. Maybe someday when I’m President. Like Lincoln. Have some little kid write to me and suggest it. That would solve the television makeup problem, too—I can shave thirty seconds before I go on camera and, unless I put some powder on, still have such an obvious beard that people write me letters about it. The five-o’clock phantom. My enemies will stop at nothing.