The Devil's Advocate

by Taylor Caldwell

  “Do not believe that this was just a plot in America. It started far back in history, in 1917, with the Bolshevik revolution. Like the black plague of the soul, it seeped into Germany, into Scandinavia, into Britain, into France, into South America and Asia and Africa. It was a nightmare and deathly disease with many names. It was called Fascism and Communism, People’s Democracies and Socialism, the Welfare State and totalitarianism and authoritarianism. In America, is was called Progressive Democracy. But it was the same foul disease that blinded and sickened a whole world, and made the whole world slave. It was the same abominable illness of the spirit, the same madness, that plunged an entire planet into endless wars and degradation and despair. It had for its object the unlimited power of a few men, working together in every nation even while they were ostensibly enemies, and even while their respective nations were engaged in combat against each other.

  “There was no quarrel among these arch-devils of death and ruin; there was only complete understanding. They knew that man cannot be enslaved in a peaceful society, prosperous and full of ambition and hope. So they plotted wars with each other; they taxed the fullness of their nations to finance those wars, and in so doing reduced their nations to poverty and starvation. They blew away the natural resources of the earth, for their wars, which were not against each other, but against their own people. They outlawed God, for a people staunch in their faith will not renounce their liberties and they will not engage in wars. But you, the people of America, were not guiltless of all this.”

  He paused, full of emotion and anger, and his quiet eyes blazed from the screen with mounting passion. He lifted his hand and pointed at the listening millions.

  “We, in America, were not guiltless. For decades, we saw the disease spreading in Europe and Asia, and many of us knew when the infection had reached our own country. But too many of us were greedy; we saw opportunities for individual gain and profit if we supported the emerging tyrants in Washington. Tyrants are so full of pleasant promises; they are so skillful in arraying one section of a people against another, in stimulating false suspicions, false hatreds, false envies, and natural human greed. When we Americans should have stood together, defying with our votes and our voices and our anger each tyrant as he appeared, we turned our innate and instinctive jealousies and dislikes upon our neighbors. We betrayed each other. The disease entered our souls, and we sold our honor for a handful of silver, whether we were workingmen or capitalists, farmers or bankers, bureaucrats or clerks, industrialists or shopkeepers.

  “We could not have so betrayed ourselves and each other up to the year 1914. In the first years of this century Americans were free and prideful and independent. We were an ambitious people, and any social injustices were being slowly but steadily eliminated. We were a kind and generous people, guardful of our liberties. But, after 1917, the black plague spread over Europe, and we were infected long before 1939, when a new and deliberately plotted war broke out. We were infected in the very halls of Congress, in the very inmost chambers of Washington. The disease was already in our flesh, and its foul breath was already in the mouths of our children, and its cries were ringing in every schoolroom, every college, decades before we were plunged into this series of wars which have lasted over twenty years. We were a diseased nation long before we were slaves. We were impotent before we knew we were impotent.”

  An enormous and incredible silence lay over America, as the people listened. John Graham looked at them in that silence, and he felt it. He lifted his hands, and said, with a shaking voice:

  “God has had mercy upon us, though we have committed monstrous sins against each other as well as against the world. God has brought us to this day, though we are not worthy of it. For many years, He has stimulated the hearts and the souls of a few free and just men, who have worked among you, unknown to you. He gave them a lash with which to arouse you. He gave them words to awaken you. He gave them courage to deliver up their lives for you, though you were not worthy of it. You betrayed them to your oppressors and your tyrants, but still they loved you. You called them ‘traitors’ and ‘subversives,’ when they cried out to you that the walls of your nation were tumbling into the seas of tyranny and death. When they warned you on the day religion was turned against religion, and race against race, in America, you laughed at them and denounced them as ‘dividers of the country.’ When they cried to you that States Rights were being abrogated, you shouted ‘Unity!’ at them, and beat them down, and silenced them. When they exposed the causes of wars to you, and the plot against you in those wars, you jeered at them with such epithets as ‘isolationists’ or ‘pacifists.’ While you still had a measure of liberty and could vote vile tyrants and corrupt men out of office, you listened, instead, to the promises of those men, and you voted honorable and decent men out of office.

  “But still, God had mercy on you, and did not abandon you. He gave you the Minute Men of the United States of America. They were your neighbors, and you did not know it. They spoke to you furtively, and you did not know who they were. You lifted yourselves in your chains, and heard the words of life and liberty and saw the glimmer of the sun again. You did not know who called to you in your despair and your agony. And you would not have listened had you not been reduced to hopeless slaves.”

  He paused again, and his eyes kindled on tens of thousands of screens, large and small, and to every man and woman it was as if he spoke to each individually, rousing shame in them, and sorrow, and bitter grief.

  “These heroic men infiltrated every branch of this despotic State, the Armed Forces, the Picked Guards, the industries, the farms, the schools, and what remains of our churches. They used the weapons of the tyrants, which had wounded you almost to death, to save you. They knew that you could not be aroused out of your deathful despair and apathy until driven to your last fortress, the instinct for self-preservation. So, to deliver you, they oppressed you; to bring you liberty, they took away what little liberty remained with you. They carried, to the last mad excess, the directives of your tyrants, and so overcame your tyrants. Under their rods, you revolted. But under their voices and with their guidance, you did not hurl yourselves into anarchy, as Europe and Asia have hurled themselves. You controlled your desire for vengeance, and you waited for deliverance, as a people have never controlled themselves and waited before.”

  Multitudes of eyes looked at other eyes, and millions thought: Were you one of the men who saved us? Was it you? Or you? Or you? And thousands, standing anonymously among their fellows, glanced away serenely and blankly and gave no answer. To the last they would be nameless, and it was of no importance to them.

  John Graham was speaking very gravely and slowly now, and the people brought their attention back to him.

  “I would not have you deceive yourselves. The battle is not entirely won. At least half of the Armed Forces are with us, and a portion of the Picked Guards. But the others will resist you. ‘Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered.’ Your courage and your faith must sustain you for many months. Attempts will be made to delude you, to lead you again into slavery, to confuse and divide you. Your enemies are still alive, and still full of hate for you. They have been momentarily silenced, at your command. They will speak again.

  “We are a free nation, tonight, and in the name of our freedom we cannot silence our enemies. The very opportunity we are giving them will damn them in your own ears. They will betray themselves to you with their own voices. Or, if they choose not to speak in this hour of peril for themselves, they will withdraw to plot against you again. But you are armed. You know who your enemies are.

  “Working together, we can restore this nation, and restore the peace and the liberties of all other nations. A whole world listens to us tonight. With patience and with justice, with mercy and with knowledge, we must work slowly and with enlightenment, for there is so much to be done.

  “Tonight was born a new political party in America—the Constitution party. Tonight there will be iss
ued by me a directive to the commanders of our Armed Forces on all battlefields to call an immediate truce, and to negotiate an armistice. Within a few hours all fighting will stop, and the guns will be silenced, and the war planes will retire. Your sons shall be returned to you as speedily as possible, and there shall be no more war.

  “As of tonight, all work on war orders shall cease. Plans will be made to convert all war plants to the making of civilian goods. All conscripted labor laws are abrogated at once. During the period of reconversion from war to peace your former employers will pay you full wages. When work is resumed, hours of labor shall not exceed forty hours a week, under any circumstances, unless by consent of the employed. All rationing ceases as of midnight. You men and women employed on the farms may remain there, if you desire, at decent wages to be fixed tomorrow, or you may leave. It would be better, however, for all of us, if you continued to work on those farms for the time being, in order that the nation may be fed.

  “All confiscated private property shall be restored to the former owners, and those who confiscated that property, with or without the consent of the State, shall pay back rentals for the periods the property has been at their disposal.

  “All labor camps shall be disbanded tomorrow, the inmates furnished with food and with transportation to their former homes. All children shall be returned to their parents. All political prisoners everywhere shall be freed.

  “Orders are being prepared at this moment to wrest power from the Military and return it to civilian authority. The Military, at midnight, shall be recalled from private homes where they have been quartered, and payments shall be later adjudicated to those who gave the Military involuntary hospitality.

  “As of tonight, the Military has no authority whatsoever, no powers, no directives except as given by me, your Acting President of the United States. Any officer or soldier attempting violence against the people of America shall be judged insubordinate, and shall be punished by death after court-martial. I, the Commander-in-Chief of all the Armed Forces, now call upon all officers and all soldiers and all military men of any designation to retire to their barracks and lay down their arms. I call upon all our ships at sea, in any port, to wait for further orders from me, under pain of death.”

  He looked out from the screen with stern command, and the people smiled at each other with joy and laughed aloud, and embraced each other.

  “We have so much work to do, my dear friends, my dear fellow-countrymen,” he continued. “The ruin of decades cannot be cleared away in a day, a month, a year, or years. It will be a long and slow and sometimes bitter progress, and sometimes disheartening. But, we can do it. We can rebuild our cities and restore our streets and prepare good homes for all of us. This will take much time, and we shall need all the patience and faith we can summon up.

  “Within two months there will be general elections. You will elect a free Congress again. I shall be the Presidential candidate of the Constitution Party. Those who differ with me—and there are free men, too, who might differ—may form their own party.

  “You, the people of the United States of America are in command of your nation. Take that command. Restore your cities and your churches. Speak of God again, freely, and teach your children, and your children’s children, of His mercy. Never let them forget this day of their deliverance, and never let them forget the men who died and worked that they might be free, that peace might live with them again, and the promise of the centuries might be fulfilled in them.

  “Teach your children to be brave. This century of ours has been marked most conspicuously by cowardice of the people everywhere. It was by our cowardice that we were betrayed into the hands of corrupt men who promised to make life ‘safe’ for us and devoid of hazard, and robbed of the adventurousness by which the spirits of men are strengthened. It was by our poltroonery that we lost our liberties. It was by our fears that we almost died. A brave people never become slaves.”

  He lifted his hand in somber warning. “If we, the people of the United States of America, again lose our freedom it will be by our own lack of courage and faith and manhood.

  “Tonight States’ Rights are restored. Guard those Rights as you would guard your lives. They were intended for just that purpose. A centralized government is a centralized evil.

  “On the day when you again allow abominable men to confiscate your freedom, your money, your lives, your private property, your manhood and your sacred honor, in the name of ‘security’ or ‘national emergency,’ you will die, and never again shall you be free. If plotters again destroy your Republic, they will do it by your greedy and ignorant assent, by your disregard of your neighbors’ rights, by your apathy and your stupidity. We were brought to the brink of universal death and darkness because we had become that most contemptible of people—an angerless one. Keep alive and vivid all your righteous anger against traitors, against those who would abrogate your Constitution, against those who would lead you to wars with false slogans and cunning appeals to your patriotism.

  “For, remember, if you die in prison, you will have built that prison. If your sons are again conscripted, you will have penned the writ. If a company of malignant men again assures control of your lives, you will have given them that control. When you hang your enemies you will be hanging yourselves.

  “Always, the peoples are responsible for wicked lawmakers, oppressors, exploiters, criminals in government, tyrants in power, thieves, liars, malefactors and murders in the capitals of the world. You, the man in the street, the man in the factory and in the shop, the man on the farm, the man in the office, you, the man everywhere, are guilty of the creatures whose crimes against you have been so monstruous, and will be again, by your own consent—if you give it.

  “Do not cry to God if you repeat your frightful errors: ‘Deliver us, Lord, from this Evil!’ Pray, rather: ‘Forgive us, Father, for we have sinned.’

  “A wise man distrusts his neighbor. A wiser man distrusts both his neighbor and himself. The wisest man of all distrusts his government. Therefore, be watchful and sleepless; be brave, be strong; be without fear. This is not the end. Villains will try, again and again and again, to enslave you, until the end of time. It is in your hands to defeat them and to destroy them, whenever or however they appear.

  “If you do not, then may God have mercy on your souls!”

  His face slowly faded, but to the last his warning and urgent eyes remained, commanding and exhorting the nation. Even when the Stars and Stripes appeared, swelling into brightness and starry glory, his eyes seemed to pierce through the flag. The majestic chorus of the Star Spangled Banner once more sounded from border to border and rang through every city and struck upon the air with its thunder, setting a nation to weeping for joy. But even as they wept the people vowed to themselves that never again would they be slaves, and never would they permit their children to forget this day.

  At dawn the bells began to ring, everywhere, the jubilant bells of victory, of freedom, set spontaneously into sound and motion by tens of thousands of hands. Durant went out with his friends onto the bright snowy earth to listen to them as they rejoiced from the city and the countryside, and they listened as the brilliant air caught up the clamor and whirled it to the smiling sky and threw it on the winds of the world.

  It was not all to be fully accomplished for three more days, for the privileged groups, recognizing now that they had betrayed themselves into the cause of liberty, gathered together for resistance. Thousands of their confused and stupid slaves joined them, at the command of the fanatics and the zealots and other madmen, who would not be reconciled to the fact that their fellows were free. Military officers banded together and called themselves “loyalists” and herded their troops for revolt. The young soldiers, bewildered and frightened and completely ignorant, obeyed their orders and took up arms against their government.

  Public buildings were burned, populations harassed by guerilla warfare, individuals terrorized, troops fired upon by troops. U
p and down the land raced the opposing armies, engaging in short but bloody fratricidal combats, sometimes in villages or towns or cities, and sometimes in forests or in open fields.

  But the people stood strong and invulnerable, filled with fortitude and faith. They resorted to no violence, themselves. Their very weight overcame the resistance, and at the end the rebels laid down their arms and begged for official clemency. The three days of death and destruction ended, and everywhere the banner of the Republic flew high and unthreatened beneath a free sky.

  They had waited three days in the country house of the Chief Magistrate. On the third day had come his simple coded message: “All is quiet. All is successful. Those Minute Men in the Armed Forces and the Picked Guards may disband at once, and go their ways. The others will be needed for a time to keep order before relinquishing their offices.”

  There was no word of praise from the Chief Magistrate for what had been accomplished by these devoted men, no farewell message. They did not feel the need for these: they had done their duty as Americans. That was sufficient. It was enough for them, that at the end of his message, Arthur Carlson quoted from the Bible: “—I, like my brethren, offer up my life and my body for the laws of our fathers: calling upon God to be speedily merciful to our nation.”

  They had been deeply moved by this. It was not for some hours that they detected that there had been something else expressed in that quotation besides its more obvious meaning. The men in that house looked at each other with frantic grief, assured, now, that Carlson had been speaking of the future also, and himself in particular. All their hopes for his survival were swept away.

  They dared not speak of this to Alice Steffens, but they knew that she had understood. There was a quiet white dignity about her which fended off sympathy and even kindness. She told them that she would join her father, the President of the United States of America, in Washington, and she made her few preparations to leave them. When her hour of departure came, she smiled at them gently, shook hands with them, and then left in silence.