Silas Timberman

by Howard Fast

  “I spoke to Silas about it,” Amsterdam said.

  “God, war and politics are three things I consult with no one on,” Edna Crawford snapped. “I also resent the implication, Mr. MacAllister.”

  “Sorry. I’ve got to blunder ahead.”

  “Not seven, six,” said Lawrence Kaplin, rather sadly. “I suppose we’ll be dealing with ideas, convictions and that sort of thing, Mr. MacAllister, and it’s rather complex and one person has more courage or conviction than the next. Silas asked me what I intended to do, and I told him I would enlist in Cabot’s program, whatever that meant. I told him I was afraid and felt that for me to defy Cabot and Lundfest at this point would be tantamount to handing in my resignation. Silas held that there was no foundation for my fears—but I am afraid he was wrong. In any case, I went along with the civilian defense thing, just the declaration of willingness on my part, because there’s been no more to it than that, as if it was only meant to be declared and promptly forgotten.”

  “Perhaps it was, Professor Kaplin.”

  “God damn them, why don’t they look at him?” Silas thought. “Can’t they understand how he would feel, or how I feel?” But Edna Crawford was looking at him and so was Alec Brady, and Federman’s fierce eyes were curiously veiled and somber. MacAllister was watching all of them, his pudgy face quizzical and thoughtful, and his friend, the trade union organizer, was observing the lot of them with complete concentration and fascination.

  “May I ask,” said MacAllister, “why this extraordinary attitude about so nominal a thing as a civilian defense program that has no other reason for its existence than a day of headlines and the record of Mr. Cabot?”

  “I don’t consider it extraordinary at all,” answered Edna Crawford. “Really, I’m a little disappointed, Mr. MacAllister.”

  “You see, MacAllister,” Spencer said, “there are personal factors involved, but we here at Clemington made our own small contribution to the Manhattan Project, and some of us have kept awake about it, and a few of us here are physicists—well—”

  “Perhaps we both gain from this association, MacAllister,” said Amsterdam. “Don’t sell teachers short, because they’ve already taken a beating, and hot too badly. It’s true that we live a soft life, an easy life compared to some, but we walk in a strange world that despises learning and logic and all the powers of the mind. Maybe we talk too much to each other, but at least a few of us don’t enjoy playing with garbage, and that’s more than can be said for most professions.”

  “God save me, I wasn’t attacking teachers!”

  “Yet amused by an act of faith. Add to your dossier that we all signed the atom bomb petition, and call it self-interest. Is there any place for us in the world the gentlemen in Washington are making?”

  “I don’t know,” MacAllister said thoughtfully.

  * * *

  Another hour passed, and still there were whole fields of simple agreement and action that they had barely touched upon; and Silas realized how delicate and how complicated was the coordinated working of seven people even upon one matter such as this. At the same time, he had learned more about the other six during this one evening than he had in all the years he had known them; and he kept repeating to himself, “What an extraordinary lot they are.” Then, of course, it occurred to him that any seven people placed in a similar situation would also be extraordinary—as perhaps all people were. Sitting there, listening for the most part, saying very little, he tried to comprehend the nature of the situation they were in. Do what they might, the history of such things indicated that their time at the university was over, and in that sense, each and every one of them had already gone through his or her professional death. Pieces of paper had been handed out, and the work of seven lives had gone down the drain. First, he tried to compute it objectively and philosophically, speculating upon how the history of America would be just a little different because no more students would encounter the rapier-like wit of Federman, the calm wisdom of Edna Crawford, the caustic experience of Ike Amsterdam, the gentle reflection of Lawrence Kaplin, the masterly social recollection of Alec Brady, the mind of Hartman Spencer who had probed so long and deeply into the meaning and substance of matter—and himself—what of himself? Where from here, and what? He had made some contribution, at least, poring through the writing of the past for a line of logic, a witness to reason—and the time of reason was dying, dying, and night time was coming down all over the land; and he was very tired and would go back to bed and Myra and hold her close to him—

  “Silas!”

  He had been listening, not sleeping. MacAllister had just acknowledged that while he was not dealing with poverty-stricken people, he did recognize that they were reasonably poor. He would go with them if they wanted him, and the fee would be fifty dollars each and expenses.

  “It should be more,” Silas said.

  “We won’t quarrel about that. The main thing is to understand procedure,” MacAllister said. “We are going to be asked questions, and for the most part Brannigan will do the questioning, and he’s very clever at it. He will have some information at his disposal, what the Justice Department chooses to supply him with, what Cabot or any number of others here at Clemington may supply—bits of material, odds and ends, gossip, rag-tag and bobtail—oh, you’d be surprised with what he may turn up, and he knows how to use it, and we must know how to meet it. We go into an arena—the circus—the games of our time, television, radio, all of it. Brannigan will want to turn up something sensational, something to give him headlines all over the country, a Moscow spy plot, a cabal to destroy education and poison the minds of the youth, a foreign agent or two, a subversive cancer on the body of this fair and free land—”

  “And with their lives and careers already down the drain, they listen undisturbed to this fantastic program,” Silas thought.

  “Really, Mr. MacAllister,” Edna Crawford said.

  “No, no, I don’t exaggerate. Now where is the trick, the trap, the pitfall in this question of congressional investigation? Your average, decent American citizen says, ‘Congress must have the power to investigate. How can they write legislation unless they do?’ Beyond dispute. But Brannigan is not interested in legislation—he is interested in Brannigan, and that comes to headlines and turning up spies and communists. Now let us agree that there are communists in this room. How many there are or who they are does not concern me, and I want to state emphatically that nothing I intend to propose would be one whit different if each of you took an oath on the Bible that you’ve never belonged to anything. And the same goes for Brannigan. Do you follow me?”

  “I’m afraid you’ve lost me somewhere,” Spencer said. “Do you mean that Brannigan doesn’t give two damns whether or not we’re communists?”

  “More or less. You see, a congressional committee is not a court. They have no powers of judgment or imprisonment—and in turn, we have no powers of defense or cross-examination. Yet a congressional committee has a power to persecute and destroy, if used cleverly and ruthlessly. The law says that a witness must answer all relevant questions—a very broad frame. Failure to do so constitutes contempt of Congress, punishable by a thousand dollar fine, a year in prison, or both—and Brannigan has interpreted relevancy to cover everything from soup to nuts.”

  “But why shouldn’t we answer any question he chooses to ask?” Kaplin demanded. “We have nothing to hide.”

  “I’m sure we have nothing to hide. But let’s see what happens, Professor Kaplin. Question number one—is X a member of the Communist Party? X isn’t, and he states this forthrightly and indignantly. Whereupon, Y takes the witness stand and swears that he attended party meetings with X.”

  “Who is Y?” Federman asked.

  “I have no idea, but it’s a matter of experience that where X is present, Y is also present.”

  “But I’m not a member of the Communist Party,” said Kaplin.

  “Prove it.”

  “Why should I have to?�
�

  “Because Y can prove you are.”

  Edna Crawford said, “Still, he has answered the question, and he’s not guilty of contempt of Congress.”

  “Granted. On the other hand, according to Y’s testimony, X has just committed perjury—he has lied under oath. The penalty for perjury runs up to five years imprisonment for each count. If Y contradicts X five times, it will subsequently lie within the power of a judge to sentence X to twenty-five years imprisonment.”

  “But that’s monstrous. I’m not as innocent as some, Mr. MacAllister, but I still cannot believe that such a thing could happen in the United States of America.”

  “It has happened. There are a dozen men today who have been convicted of perjury in political cases, framed on the testimony of stool pigeons, most of them sentenced to at least five years in jail. You know of these cases.”

  “To know it is one thing,” observed Federman. “To be it is something else entirely.”

  “Still,” said Silas, “you’re predicating this whole thesis on the presence of an informer who will commit perjury himself.”

  “As all informers do,” MacAllister agreed. “From the time of Judas, informer and liar have been synonymous, but you are not the only one who realizes this. The informer knows it and his employer knows it—and it just so happens that his employer is the government, and the government will not charge its own stool pigeons with perjury. If they did so, they would be quite insane, wouldn’t they, for you don’t pay an informer wages to perjure himself and then put him in prison for perjury. No, my friends, in cases like this, the charge of perjury is reserved for honest men—”

  “I want to go along with you, Mr. MacAllister,” Silas interrupted. “I’m not entirely naive, and I’ve had an intensive education in petty infamy over this past month, but I cannot accept the proposition that our entire governmental machinery is corrupt from top to bottom.”

  “Maybe not the machinery, Professor Timberman, but a lot of the men who run it are corrupt as hell! I talk from experience. I had ten years of the political sewer! I know! I’m not trying to impress you. The events of the next few days will impress you sufficiently. I’m not a very successful lawyer at this moment, Professor Timberman. My shoes are old and un-shined, and my trousers are uncreased because the God-damned material won’t hold a crease any longer. But I happen to be a damn good lawyer, and the only lawyer in Indianapolis who will talk to you right at this moment. The time is late, and none of us has any choice in the matter. I’m trying to prepare the lot of you, so that you won’t go into that senate hearing chamber like lambs to slaughter. That’s all I’m trying to do!”

  “And I’m trying to retain my sanity,” Silas thought, saying nothing, but looking at the fat little man with suppressed anger and bruised feelings. Who the devil was he to build up a nightmare like this? Well enough for Federman and Brady and Amsterdam; this was water they swam in, and they liked the temperature—but if a man couldn’t cling to some shreds of reality and sense, he might as well go into the next room and blow his brains out.

  “But you see,” Spencer was saying, “all this talk of paid informers is highly speculative. I can’t accept the fact—even the supposition that we have that sort of thing at Clemington. We are very ordinary members of a very ordinary college faculty. We have perhaps used our consciences a little dangerously, but that’s all. There’s no plot, no organization, not even, I’m sorry to say, any attempt to organize the teachers here into a union.”

  “Then why the subpoenas, God damn it?”

  “We don’t know,” said Amsterdam dryly. “Why don’t we stop all this holier than thou line and let Mr. MacAllister get on. Otherwise, we’ll be here all night.”

  “That, at least, makes sense,” said Edna Crawford.

  “A little sense,” MacAllister smiled. “Here am I getting angry and you getting angry and the hour is late, and I am a sour man from the cold night who comes calling doom. No welcome. Ah, forgive me, my friends. I will go back to my little law practice—and where will you go, I wonder?” He had another whisky that Edna Crawford poured him, and Brady said.

  “You’ve dealt with X and Y, MacAllister. How about Z, who really is a communist?”

  The others looked at Brady now, one by one, but he sat as he had all evening, relaxed and loose in the rocking chair, puffing slowly on his pipe, and regarding MacAllister with a mixture of affection and curiosity—causing Silas to wonder that he had known him so little; and Silas was envious of a man who could take it this way, easily and unperturbed. As with others in the room, he was wondering now whether Brady really was a communist, and how it felt, and how did it make Brady different from the rest of them? Or were others different too, and what about Federman, he wondered? What about Amsterdam? Where was the difference that he could put his finger on? And why could he not place Spencer in one group or the other? Was it a question of indecision, certainty, lack of certainty, fear, doubt, hesitancy? Could it be true, as they said, that there was a dedicated, fanatical group of highly-disciplined subversive men, part of a vast cabal to destroy America and hand over the ruins to the men in the Kremlin?

  “Thank God,” he said to himself, “that I retain a little of a sense of humor, even at two in the morning.” Lawrence Kaplin glanced at him and wondered why he was smiling, and Silas realized that even Kaplin understood this thing better than he did. Confusion, ignorance, fear, half-truths and fantastic distortions—this was his stock of political knowledge, and he was professor of American Literature; and how was it with others, so many others who lacked even his minimum willingness to probe, to find out, to risk the truth?

  “Let us consider Z,” nodded MacAllister. “Z is a communist, and so he says. Proud of it, we may say. Are you a communist, Z? I am. And do you meet with other communists, Z? I do. Please name them, Z. So, you see, the road of Z is also a short road. Be an informer or go to jail for a year—and yet this isn’t as hopeless as it seems. We have a few weapons. To begin with, I’ll be sitting beside each of you when you’re answering questions. You can ask me anything you’re in doubt of. We have certain Constitutional hopes—not bulwarks, but hopes, and it’s better to have some hope than none at all. I feel that questions like these should not be answered, not only because they are traps and intended as traps, but because they violate certain rights guaranteed to us by the Constitution. Therefore, I would implement my refusal to answer by citing the First Amendment, namely, that Congress should make no law abridging the freedom of speech or of the press. I would also refer to the Fourteenth Amendment, Section One, which holds that no state shall deprive any person of life, liberty or property without due process of law—both of these will bear refreshing tomorrow, and I think you should be thoroughly familiar with the use and history of both these amendments.

  “At the same time, there seems to be some really valid hope in the use of the Fifth Amendment—which holds that no person should be compelled to bear witness against himself.”

  “Couldn’t that be taken as an admission of guilt?” Federman asked.

  “They will take what they please as an admission of guilt. However, the Fifth Amendment was written into the Constitution as protection for the innocent, not the guilty, a guarantee against torture and intimidation. Wouldn’t you agree with me, Alec?”

  Brady nodded. “There’s quite a history, and it’s too late to go into it, but the thing arose out of the struggles of the Protestant dissenters in England against the High Church—the Star Chamber hearings, the confession by force and threat, subsequently used as witness against the confessor—in other words, forced witness against oneself. It’s been brought up in a number of cases recently, hasn’t it?”

  “In at least four cases recently, the witness invoked this privilege against self-incrimination, and there seems to be a good chance that it will hold in the Supreme Court. This becomes even more important when we reflect on the fact that more than a dozen writers and teachers are serving prison sentences at this moment—b
ecause they depended only on the First Amendment. It doesn’t hold. But since the conviction of the national leaders of the Communist Party in New York, the court seems disposed to regard any question relating to communism or any activities that might be so construed as coming within the framework of privilege against self-incrimination. To you, it may mean the difference between prison and freedom, but it’s not an easy thing to use. It means an understanding of this privilege—and a good deal of alertness.”

  “It seems to me,” Silas said slowly, “that it also means an admission of guilt.”

  “I tried to answer that, Silas,” Brady said.

  “I know—but history is one thing and the world we live in is another. This will be construed as a trick, a maneuver, an evasion of whatever accusations are brought against us.”

  “But no accusations have been brought against us, Silas,” Amsterdam argued. “For God’s sake, man, look at the world you live in! We haven’t been indicted, arrested, accused of anything—we are being brought in as performers for a circus!”

  “In which I will not perform.”

  “Then what—go to jail?”

  “If I have to.”

  “And what about Myra, the kids? What about your career, your life?”

  A cold, cold chill of fear flowed over Silas; it ran down his spine and into his belly; it spread across his mind, and his thoughts moved slowly, sluggishly.

  “I don’t know,” he said.

  Brady said, “I can understand Silas’ position—only too well. I don’t know whether it’s right or wrong. It’s not my position, but that doesn’t mean my position is right or that MacAllister’s position is right. We’ve been trying to jam a new world, a new fear, a whole new set of values and defenses into a few hours. It can’t be done. I mean no criticism of you, Mac,” he told the lawyer. “There’s still tomorrow and Tuesday, if we go in by plane. It’s too late tonight to make any more out of this. We’re too tired. The truth of it is that we’re shocked. The shock has to wear off a little—”