by Howard Fast
“Since all this trouble started.”
“Trouble? We haven’t so much trouble.”
“You’re nicer,” she said sadly. She was growing up, he realized. They were all growing up. He decided that he would walk over and see Joel Seever, who lived only a few blocks away. There was time enough to go there and be back for dinner.
“Where are you off to?” Myra asked, as he was putting on his coat.
“Over to talk to Joel Seever.”
“You know, it’s snowing.”
“The first snow of the year,” he thought, as he went outside. Myra had said it was snowing, but she was saying, why walk over there and hurt yourself more? Joel Seever is the same as the others.
He turned up the collar of his coat as he came outside. It was just fading twilight, and the snow was in soft, big flakes, one of those early snows that are not lasting, a presage of winter. Silas had always loved best of the whole year those days that are not of any season, but between seasons, days when something is dying and something else is being made, days when the currents of life seem to run fast and full and rich. It helped his spirits. “Why not Joel Seever?” he asked himself, recalling that Seever had signed the peace petition. He felt that if there was a break, an opening somewhere, even in terms of a handful of people, others would follow. Logic and reason were not inconsiderable forces, and one would think that to those who lived by logic and reason, they would be irresistible.
With his thoughts thus occupied, he had walked the few blocks between his house and Seever’s, and he felt the persuasion of his own inner arguments as he knocked on the door. Ruth Seever opened it. They had never been too close, but their acquaintance was an old one; Ruth could hardly be rude, but when you know that a person is uncertain of his welcome, you go out of your way to compensate for that. A little surprised, she said, “Why, hello, Silas. I suppose you’re looking for Joel.” She did not go out of her way to compensate for his uncertainty, but led him inside, and he stood in the hallway in his coat, hurt by the small stab of rejection, and standing there, looked at the house newly, wondering for the first time why houses of Clemington were so much the same, the same inside and outside, the furniture the same, the sounds the same, with nothing specific to say, this is the home of Joel Seever, who is a man and an individual in his own right.
He blamed his own bitterness, and when Seever appeared, tall, white-haired, with his ruddy, good-looking face as striking as always, Silas tried to be at ease and casual. Seever’s greeting was warm enough. There was a time when Silas would not have measured the warmth or coolness of a greeting, nor would he have been concerned. Now a greeting was a barometer of many things and a summation of history as well.
“Why don’t we find a quiet corner and talk,” Seever suggested. Silas hoped he was not taking Seever away from important things that he had planned, and Seever said no, he just happened to have an hour with nothing planned at all. Anyway, he was glad to see Silas, he said, and asked whether it had been rough.
“I suppose so,” Silas agreed. “You make adjustments, however, and that seems to me to hold a certain danger. It’s so easy to adjust. When we were in Washington at the hearing, we adjusted to the notion that we would be suspended. When the suspension came through for each of us a few days after we returned, we had already adjusted, and therefore we hardly made a fight of it. We’re beginning to understand the process now. If anyone had told me a month ago that today I’d be without a job, dishonorably suspended for subversive activities, with a whole life to remake—why I would have said he was insane.”
“And rightly so,” Seever nodded. “But isn’t there a good chance of being reinstated, Silas? I mean, you will go before the faculty board of review?”
“Which now consists of Cabot, Lundfest and Pepham. That isn’t it. Suppose there were three average deans on the board—what chance would we have even then?”
“Yet they can’t prove you’re a communist.”
“Precisely. And I wasn’t suspended for being a red—none of us was. The language of the suspension order decries our unwillingness to cooperate—behavior unbecoming a teacher. It’s like quicksilver. You can’t take hold of it, you can’t grasp it. That’s the whole devilish quality of it, Joel—it runs through your fingers and it’s caustic. It eats away a little at a time. Not the way they did it in Germany. There it was crude, blatant, with shouting and strutting and posturing and all sorts of nonsense about blood and race and leader. They made professors ride on carts of dung and led them through the streets with ropes around their necks and signs hanging from their shoulders. It shocked the world. Everyone said, ‘What beasts they are! What cruel, inhuman beasts!’ Here they do it differently—no ropes, no carts of dung, no indignity except the single indignity of taking away from a man his livelihood, his career and his hope. And all for his own good. If you’ll only cooperate, and be a good American—like Bob Allen—then all is forgiven. You can live with us, if only you’ll take steps to make it impossible for you to live with yourself. Everything nicely done with due process—as befitting a democracy. But the end result is the same. Joel, do you realize that over five hundred teachers have been driven out of the school system in just this fashion? I didn’t know—and I wouldn’t have believed. It had to happen to me first.”
“When you put it that way, it does seem rather frightful,” Seever admitted.
“How else can I put it, Joel?”
“The point is, what can we do about it? When you come right down to it, Silas, there’s precious little we can do.”
“I can’t accept that. I’ve been discussing it with Brady and Federman, and they feel there is something we can do.”
“We’re all going to pay a price for that damned peace petition of Brady’s. Of all the childish, foolish—”
“Joel,” Silas said patiently, “I don’t want to get into that argument. It wasn’t Brady’s petition, but I won’t even argue it. The point is that we’re in a situation, and we must do something about it. And we think we can. You have to ask why they limited this thing to seven faculty members. They could just as well have made it ten or twenty or thirty—but they left it at seven. Why? Well, the answer is fairly obvious. Seven can be handled; seven is not too few—and also not too many. Twenty would be a major incident, and thirty out of one university might be too much to handle. On the other hand, fifty or a hundred might blow the whole thing up in their faces. Well, we know there are at least a hundred members of this faculty who are decent people—people of conscience, people who feel and understand what is happening. We want to bring these people together, and then perhaps add to their number, so that never again will a handful of faculty members be isolated the way we were isolated—”
“How many of this hundred have agreed?” Seever asked directly.
“Well—I don’t know how much luck Brady and the others have had—”
“But you’ve had none.”
“So far,” Silas admitted.
“What do you want me to do, Silas? I’d like to be a hero. Everyone would, but you get over that when you get over childhood. I’ve got kids. I’ve got a wife. I’ve got a home that takes one hundred and twenty a month in carrying charges, even if we don’t eat. I’m putting it on its most practical basis—”
“How practical is it, Joel? Or for how long? Cabot has the names of every person who signed the atom bomb petition. How long? Is it better for every honest man in the university to be picked off one by one—in silence?”
“I can’t accept that.”
“Neither could I,” Silas said bitterly. “After all, my name is Silas Timberman. I’m not a Jew and I’m not a Negro. I’m a white Protestant American. Not even a subscriber to The Nation.”
“But you will admit that you put your foot in it. I’m not saying that I don’t sympathize with you, Silas. I might question the wisdom of your actions. When I read your testimony, I felt that you were perhaps unnecessarily aggressive. We’re dealing with a very basic thing. Su
rely, you cannot question the right of a congressional committee to gather facts?”
“As an inquisition?”
“That’s a word, Silas. We are slaves of semantics these days. Gestapo, inquisition, star-chamber, witch-hunt—a whole semantic mythology.”
“It’s not very mythological when you sit in the middle of it.”
“I suppose not. But everything is not plain and simple, no matter how plain and simple you try to make it, Silas. It was not only the atom bomb petition, but the attitude you took on civil defense. Then all this rumpus with Lundfest. He was put in an utterly impossible position.”
“Are you defending him?” Silas asked quietly.
“For God’s sake, Silas—don’t have a chip on your shoulder. I’m not defending him at all; I’m simply remarking on the difficulty of his position, and you can hardly deny that. Also, there’s Bob Allen’s testimony. I didn’t want to bring it up—but you force me into a position where I have to.”
“Bob Allen’s testimony?”
“It’s there, Silas. It exists.”
“Do you believe it?” Silas asked, dumbfounded.
“I don’t know whether I believe it. It’s less important whether I believe it than whether others who don’t know you as well as I do believe it.”
“And you think I’m a communist? After all the years we’ve been associated, you think I’m a communist?”
“Look, Silas, I don’t know. When you come down to it, I don’t know whether anyone’s a communist, or whether the genus exists. I’ve often thought that Ike Amsterdam and Alec Brady were communists—perhaps Leon Federman, too, but I don’t know. I’m not a judge in this kind of thing. The point is, Bob Allen does seem to know. Say what you will about him—the man’s behaved like a cad, and no one admires an informer—he does seem to know whereof he talks. People are going to believe him. My wife’s younger brother is in Korea. Of course, she feels something about that—”
“Give it up,” Silas thought. “It’s over and done. He is where he is, and he’s unshakable. The winds of fear are blowing all over him. Give it up. You degrade yourself in arguing this.”
But he couldn’t give it up, and he had to argue it, and he had to be gentle and understanding and not lose his temper. He himself was already categorized; he had burns, and they would never heal. He had to remember the way he had been only a little while ago. He had to say to Seever.
“But Joel, leaving all judgments of character out of it, I think we could agree about what’s happening at Clemington. This used to be the most liberal university in the midwest. Not five or ten years ago, but only yesterday. There isn’t a school of journalism that didn’t look upon Fulcrum with envy, as the epitome of a free and independent press. The very thought that there were truths one was forbidden to speak at Clemington would have been unthinkable, and it would have been equally unthinkable that a faculty member here could lose his job for doing what his conscience dictated. I don’t say that everything was perfect. There were petty things, contests of personal ambition, petty greeds and jealousies, injustices—but that was to be expected in a place as big as this. But the overall picture was one of freedom to think, to talk, to inquire. And what is it now? There’s a black pall of fear over this campus so thick you could cut it with a knife. I telephone people—and I hear the fear in their voices, and people have told me that they believe their wires are tapped. Of course, it’s nonsense—but what a feeling to have at Clemington! I’m told that there hasn’t been a mention of Mark Twain in the English Department in five weeks. Brady has a course on the French Revolution; they’ve suspended him and eliminated the course. We had the only course in the country on the American Indian, which based itself on the findings of Lewis H. Morgan; they’ve canceled the course because Engels used the work of Morgan in his Origin of the Family. There’s been an investigation of the entire Department of Home Economics, based on those ridiculous charges of sex instruction calculated to destroy the American family—because Edna Crawford was dragged down to Washington with us—”
“I know, Silas,” Seever said, nodding to show that he expressed no disagreement with the facts. “When you put it all together that way, it sounds as alarming as hell. But isn’t it a little unfair to pile it up in that fashion. It’s not the end of the world, Silas, not even the end of Clemington. The only thing to do with a situation like this is to wait it out. Such things blow over. In 1919, they expelled four socialist professors from the university. Well, they were reinstated when the hysteria blew over.”
“This isn’t 1919,” Silas said hopelessly.
“Of course not, Silas. Still, I don’t see any solution in hysteria.”
“That’s just it. I want to fight hysteria and stop it. That’s why I want you to come into this with us.”
“I couldn’t, Silas: I just don’t think it’s advisable. I think you’ve been carried away by the pressure of Brady and Amsterdam.…”
* * *
It is the essence of human life, and perhaps of all life, that it should create for itself conditions of normalcy wherein to function. It rejects the unusual, the impossible, the incredible—or else it rationalizes them until they too become the normal and matter-of-fact. There have been countless cases of people who lived on in houses even though they knew that the walls would crumble momentarily, the ceilings fall, the floors collapse, and there have been cases of farmers who went on plowing mine fields even though they knew the dangers. People have lived with bombs and battle, with disease and flood, so it is not too strange that the seven faculty members who appeared before the senate committee were able to return to Clemington and slip back into an altered normalcy.
They had begun to adjust to what happened before it happened, and therefore when it happened, it did not seem too strange or surprising. Each was formally suspended; each faced the end of a career; each faced the problem of life and family and survival. And each participated in the feeling that his fate transcended himself.
Each was also spared the knowledge that he was not forgotten, for in America the distance between Washington, D.C. and a place like Clemington can often be unimaginably great.
If Silas knew that something more would happen, he also could not be certain that anything more would happen; and there was a certain amount of relief in thinking that nothing more was planned. He lived with the future in the only way an ordinarily normal person can live with it, by not turning to crystal balls to interpret it; and naturally there was a good deal that he did not know.
He did not know that in a large and orderly building in Washington, a file contained a folder marked, Timberman, Silas, and that this folder not only grew in content, but elicited a surprising amount of interest. He would have been amazed to know how many people were sent out to what curious corners of the country to make inquiries concerning one, Timberman, Silas, and he would, perhaps, have been somewhat amused by the reports turned in and duly added to the folder’s contents. He had been aptly conditioned to a number of things, but not yet wholly conditioned to a multiplication of nonsense. He would also have been interested, disturbed, and not a little bewildered to discover how many people of importance thumbed through the folder and how often and in what manner it was discussed.
Yet in this attention paid to him, he was neither singular nor unusual. There was an amazing number of such folders in the same orderly building during that early winter of 1950, and while most were left undisturbed, many were discussed.
It was a time for such things. There had never been such a time before in all the life of the nation, in all the being and struggles and hopes and dreams of the nation. In this nation, there had never been a time before when people were afraid, and now they were becoming afraid. There had never been a time before when their fears and prejudices had been fed so steadily, like an insatiable furnace endlessly and tirelessly stoked, but now their fears and prejudices were so fed. There had never been a time before when so little information was given to them, but now fear began to se
ep in everywhere, and editors and newspaper men and commentators were not immune, and though no one knew exactly what to print and speak of, almost everyone in such a position began to understand what one did not print or speak of.
It was a time when the nation discovered certain things about itself, when evil crawled like vermin from beneath long-lying stones, when liars became heroes and informers were ennobled. Pimp had been a word for the bawdy houses, tout for the race tracks and the betting joints, but now the pimp and the tout became king and archduke of a new order.…
* * *
Ed Lundfest had never been an impulsive man, and as he drove along now, he rehearsed what would be the probable pattern of his errand. He was not unaware that he made an excellent impression upon most people, but he also knew that this was a part of intending and striving to make such an impression. He felt that people casual about human relations, moved through life casually, and he had no desire for the Reverend Elbert Masterson to have that impression of him. As with so many others, he sensed the increasing motion and tempo of events at Clemington, and because he was in a fortunate position with the top level of school administration, he knew that these events were not entirely haphazard. While he could not perhaps have spelled out in all detail the far-reaching and complex political goals that the Clemington incident aimed at, he was aware of many of them and he was also aware of his own place in them. More importantly, he understood the pattern. He was less interested in whether Anthony C. Cabot would be a candidate for the presidency or the vice-presidency of the United States, or the governorship of the state, than he was in the more personal question of who would succeed Dr. Cabot as president of Clemington. There were many bridges to be built, but first his own; since those latter were bridges no one else would be constructing; and it was in this latter capacity that he went to see Reverend Masterson.
In all, Clemington boasted churches of eleven Protestant denominations, as well as one large Roman Catholic church, sometimes called a cathedral, but hardly that. Since there were only seven Jewish families in the town, no synagogue had ever been built, and while the Protestant churches were numerous, both the buildings and the congregations were rather small. Reverend Masterson was the Methodist pastor in Clemington, and his tiny, ivy-covered church, rectory attached, could have been scaled about in the center of the eleven. The Methodist community was small, no more than a hundred and twenty families, and socially heterogeneous. You could not say of it, as you might have of the Episcopalians and Presbyterians, that it included the wealth of the town, nor, as was the case with the Baptists in Clemington, that its congregation consisted mostly of people who worked with their hands. It had an inherent stability that such congregations as the Seventh Day Adventists and the Jehovah’s Witnesses lacked, and its social pattern was both similar to yet subtly different from the Unitarians and the Congregationalists. Perhaps Lundfest had taken some of these factors into consideration, or perhaps he only felt that of all the clergymen in Clemington, Reverend Masterson commanded the most respect and was best equipped to deal with problems which would inevitably have an influence beyond Clemington.
