Tomorrow! Page 13

  “Even religion, even the holy name of God, is used to restrict the rights of a people dedicated to religious freedom.”

  Mrs. Berwyn whistled. “There you go again!”

  His answering grin was bleak. “Then grab your hat, Bea. Because I’m telling the truth, for once.” He went on:

  “A few years ago a new President of these United States made several loosely considered assertions about God and America. Americanism, he indicated, is founded in a belief in God; atheism, he suggested, is synonymous with the alien doctrines of the Soviet. This was an exultant discovery—for churchgoers, however evil their private conduct, narrow their views, or sleazy their religious tenets. For now, all atheists, agnostics and all the religiously unconforming could be looked upon by millions with suspicion, as Communists, or near to Communism. Special Faith was made to seem an American imperative—and Freedom died a new death.

  “The attitude was a desecration of the principle upon which our nation is founded: religious freedom, tolerance, deliverance from persecution on any, and every, philosophical ground. For if we are a free people, we are not bound to conform to anybody’s belief, but only to let others believe and practice as they will, so long as they do not interfere with the general rights. It matters nothing what Presidents say; they come and go. We cannot, in simple fact, conform religiously. Any overt effort to do so would split and wreck this nation without recourse to arms and bombs. It is liberty that permits us to exist and grow strong, not conformity to one God, one cult, or any other beliefs save a belief in the freedom of the conscience of every citizen.

  Religious freedom means we are responsible as a people to freedom itself, not to any God.

  Responsibility even to God—if it were mandatory in this land, as so many have begun to imagine—would merely raise the question: Whose God? .

  “It is a terrible question to ask in such an hour, a question more destructive and divisive among free men than enemy assault. For we Americans have come our long way in harmony simply because it is ‘un-American’ to insist on belief in aught but liberty. If we do, then shall it be more or less ‘American’ to believe in the Presbyterian Trinity? Or is the Baptist Faith correct and does every individual have to decide for himself about God, acknowledging only certain holy names in baptism. What of the Jews? Is their Jehovah the suitable God of Americans and their Law proper for all? And the Catholics! Is every American obliged to venerate the Virgin in order to show, as all Catholics believe, a true reverence? Suppose a Hindu becomes a citizen here? Are his many ‘gods’ also to be our God? Is Vishnu? And what of a Confucianist who truly believes ‘God’ to be good manners and perfect ethics? Then, let us ask, do Christian Scientists believe in God at all? According to millions of Protestants and others, they are rank heretics, the deluded followers of a woman from Boston. What of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Unitarians?

  “You can see here why we cannot accept the President’s implications that Americanism connotes belief in God: Americans have too many diverse ideas concerning God to attempt conformity. And besides, they have, or once had, freedom in the matter.

  “This last leads to a greater irony. For those Americans who are of most value in this terrible age—the men of science, the technicians, the sociologists and psychologists—the only persons who offer America any practical hope of deliverance from present panic—do not, by and large, believe in God at all, according to the conventional descriptions of organized Faiths. These men and women are in one sense opposed to ‘faith.’ They have accepted, in their heads and hearts, a search for truth and an inquiry into reality, in place of all creedal statement. Yet they are no less honest, honorable, pure and true than other men. On the contrary, because their minds are not suborned by the intellectual despotism of this outworn creed or yonder debunked dogma, they are, as a group, more honest, more honorable, more truthful and more reliable than the conventionally religious. They are the people who have made most of humanity’s advances; the rest are followers, often reluctant, sometimes sadistic and destructive.

  “If, by pretending ‘Americanism’ is synonymous with religious faith, we alarm these people in our midst—the discoverers, pioneers, leaders of thought, inventors, scientists, educators—then we shall truly have beheaded the nation in the name of Godliness. It is one more symptom of our hidden panic.

  “There are many others besides. If the McCarthys should remove from U.S.A. every single Communist and Communist suspect, the present danger to us all—so clear, so terrible —

  would not be measurably alleviated.” Coley cleared his throat. “Underline the last phrase twice, Bea.” He continued, “America would be Communist-free, spy-free, to be sure. But half a billion people elsewhere in the world, Communists all or slaves of Communists, would still be undeterred and laboring day and night to destroy liberty on earth and the United States in particular. We would have killed a few gnats and let fatal hemorrhage run unchecked. That is the measure of the cosmic unimportance of the Senator from our sister state. And that is the measure of the foolishness of those who hold the credulous notion that the McCarthys are accomplishing work of primary importance in the matter of our imminent doom.”

  “I never thought of it quite that way.” Mrs. Berwyn stretched, sank long fingers in her rust-red hair and yawned.

  “That’s what I’m getting at. The people in River City, the folks in Green Prairie, don’t think of it that way either. But that’s the way it is. It’s like anti-Semitism. You wipe out the Jews, and what have you got? The same old problems, sins, poverties, wars, troubles and evils as always. Plus a guilt-ridden population, a bunch of executioners who have learned to fear each other. You wipe out every Commie in U.S.A., and what would you have? Russia to deal with, unchanged. And a bunch of Americans who had violated their own trustworthiness and so become scared of one another, for dam’ good cause!—without solving their problem at all!”

  Mrs. Berwyn demurred. “Still, I hate to think of any Commies sneaking around in Government, in the Pentagon, anywhere. . . .”

  “Me, too. Catching them, though, isn’t an amateur sport. It’s a hard job for the FBI and the intelligence and counter-intelligence people.” He whipped out a pocket handkerchief and wiped his damp face. “Do you realize how nutty we’ve become? Getting professors to sign oaths? Making a lot out of whether or not people refuse to admit party membership? Your real, dangerous, hard-core Commie will sign any oath. He’ll swear to any lie. He belongs to a church.

  He maybe even works as an investigator for a Senate committee. His Communism is hidden under careful coats· of everything that looks ‘American’ to the most brassy patriot, the biggest oaf. These Senators have ‘exposed’ a number of Commies—sure. How many dangerous ones have they unearthed? Put it the other way. Why don’t they turn up some people who were unsuspected even of liberalism? Get my point? Let a Senator and his posse of meddlers expose one three-star general in the pay of the Kremlin, or a bishop or a nun—and I’ll have some respect for this empty game of sifting miscellaneous fools, skeptics and dissenters through a mesh. of senatorial bigotry, prejudice, empty-headedness and personal ambition. Show the people the enemies of freedom and you are really a great man, I say. Play on their fears, feed them straw men and whipping boys, and Huey Long’s your name!” Coley shrugged.

  “Is that all,” she asked.

  “All?” He stared uncomprehendingly. “No. Not quite all.” He walked across the room and gazed over the moon-ghosted cities as he talked on:

  “Some of us, nowadays, take refuge in such medieval and panicky hiding places as these, undoing our own liberty in false hope of saving our skins. Some are sillier still. They look to people, imaginary people not unlike God, to come from ‘outer space’ and save them. They see Flying Saucers on every breeze and in every night sky and console themselves with the idea that beings ‘higher’ than themselves will soon come and save mankind from man and his bombs.

  This is escapism, too, fantasy, exactly such superstitious stuff a
s was the foundation for many medieval tenets.

  “Others take their qualms back to the churches—the churches they abandoned years back for golf on Sunday, bridge, pleasure riding, and TV. There are millions. They are praying for peace, now, and protection against holocaust. Such prayer, uttered ardently by billions to every major deity man’s been able to invent, has never yet been answered! The wars have gone on.

  Those historic devotees who exhausted themselves, their time and energy in such incantations were merely easier prey for foes they would not prepare for. This indeed may be the American fate-the price of doing away with intellectual freedom and putting a compulsion on belief. Yet, in all the other provinces of peril, we stay sane.”

  His eyes focused on the far phosphors of the night. “On our prairies,” he dictated,

  “farmers, fearing the onslaught of the wind, dig cyclone cellars. They rod their barns and ground their aerials, lest the lightning strike. If the autumn is dry, their ploughs make circuits around their homes and livestock pens so prairie fire cannot consume what they hold dear.” He looked far away, to his right. “Downstream on the Green Prairie River, and below on the Missouri, men have erected great dams, constructed lakes, set up levees, against Hood. In our cities, lest fire break out, we maintain engines and men to save us from burning. And against all crimes, police patrol our streets, in cars these days, vigilant with every electronic device. We have appraised many dangers and prepared against them in these and a hundred other fashions. What of the peril of world’s end?

  “Today in Washington, men who do not, who cannot, understand what it is they are talking about argue interminably concerning how doomsday may be resisted or put off. Since, in their technical ignorance, they cannot appraise recent perils, their thoughts concerning the perils to come are useless. We maintain a navy—against what may never move by sea. We levy vast armies and hold them the final arbiter of every battle even though, just the other year, an empire called Japan fell to us with never a foot soldier on its main islands. We believe our airplanes can deliver stroke for stroke, and better, but we will not count the effect of strokes upon ourselves.

  We admit our radar screen is leaky. We have dreamed up—and left largely on drawing boards—

  such weapons as might adequately defend a sky-beleaguered metropolis. In sum, we face the rage of radioactivity, the blast of neutrons, the killing solar fires, with peashooters and squirt guns.

  “Indeed, if the findings of our local schoolmarms are accepted, we soon may taboo even the mention of such dangers. It upsets the pupils, they say; Rorschach Tests reveal this remarkable perturbation. All hell may be winging toward us in the sky but, in the name of American education, let us not permit it to ruffle a single second-grader!”

  Mrs. Berwyn snorted.

  His answering grin was bleak. “It’s the truth! Minerva just sent us some bloody pedagogical bulletin full of ‘data’ about ‘anxiety-curve-rise’ with every set of atom tests in Nevada. Minerva feels, and she’s backed up by nervous parents and whole school boards, that the radio, TV and press should, perhaps, stop publishing any reference whatever to mass-destruction weapons, atomic-energy tests, or anything connected with the subject.”

  “The ostrich principle?”

  “Yeah. That got us, unready, into two big wars lately and several small ones.”

  “Anything else?” she asked. “Just a paragraph or two.” His desk chair received him, squeaked a little as he tipped it back, boosted his feet onto his blotter and spoke:

  “America had—and missed—its only golden chance. If, in 1945, or 1946, or even 1947, the American people had seen the clear meaning of liberty, there would have been no war and there would be no danger now. The proposition is exquisitely simple. Our nation is founded on the theory that the majority of the people, if informed, will make appropriate decisions. That, in turn, implies—it necessitates—the one freedom that underlies all others: freedom to know, intellectual liberty, the open access of all men to all truth. That—that alone—is the cornerstone of liberty and democracy. When the Soviets showed the first signs of enclosing, in Soviet secrecy, mere scientific principles like those of the bomb, we Americans could and should have seen that Russian secrecy would instantly compel American secrecy. We should have seen that an America thus suddenly made secret, in the realm of science where knowledge had thitherto been open, would no longer be free, and its democratic people could no longer be informed.

  Hence Russia’s Iron Curtain would have been seen as what it was and is and always will be: a posture of intolerable aggression against American freedom.

  “If that had been seen at the time, the Iron Curtain could have been dissolved by a mere ultimatum: America then was the earth’s most powerful nation, Russia was devastated. But we were powerful only in arms and trusted them. We were feeble-minded in ideals and ideology: our vision of freedom was myopic. We, too, clamped down on abstract knowledge a new, un-American curtain called ‘security,’ and every kind of freedom commenced inevitably to dwindle in a geometric progression. That was our chance. Our peril today, our ever-growing and ever-more-horrible peril in the visible future, is the cost of saying we were free and acting otherwise.

  We flubbed the greatest chance for liberty in human history and hardly even noted our blunder, our betrayal.

  “Ten years have gone by. We could, at vast expense, have decentralized our cities. We didn’t. We could, at lesser expense, have ringed our continent with adequate warning devices and learned to empty our cities in a few hours. We didn’t. The cost, still, was too great; the dislocation of human beings, the drills and inconveniences, beyond our bearing. We had cause, in a struggle to regain landsliding liberties, we have always had the cause, to challenge Soviet power earlier, in the name of liberty, brotherhood, justice, human integrity and decency. All we did was to make a few peripheral challenges, as in Korea. We didn’t face the issue when the Kremlin’s bombs were scarce and weak. We are not even good opportunists.

  “Now, the sands of a decade and more have run out. We cannot challenge without venturing the world’s end. Quite possibly our death notice is written, a few months or years farther along on the track of this wretched planet. Then, perhaps, our flight from freedom will get the globe rent into hot flinders, atomized gas. But the only question before you, citizens of Green Prairie, of River City, of the wide prairie region, of this momentarily fair nation and the lovely world, is this, apparently:

  “What new idiocy can you dream up, with your coffee, your porridge, your first cigarette, to keep yourself awhile longer from facing these truths?”

  Coley fell silent. He wiped his brow again.

  “What do we do with it?” Mrs. Berwyn asked, a little stunned by the blunt finale.

  “Eh?” He was paying no attention.

  “I said, what shall I do? Tear it up? Do you want it transscribed? Is it for the archives, so you can whip it out someday in case it’s justified?”

  He was looking at her, then, perplexedly. “I said. It’s tomorrow’s editorial.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “Why?”

  She glanced apprehensively at her wrist watch and back at the smallish man in the chair.

  “It would fill the whole page. There’s hardly time to set it up, anyhow, to make the home-delivery edition. Bulldog’s almost out. . . .”

  “Shoot it right to composing,” he said, yawning.

  She stood up and came to the side of his desk. “You quitting the Transcript, Coley, after you spent your life to build it?”

  “Maybe.”

  “What do you mean— maybe? This thing rubs salt in every sore in town! It kicks every private idol to smithereens!”

  “Yeah. And may wake up a sleepwalking nation.”

  “It violates what people believe. Even some of what I believe.”

  “Does it?”

  “I think it does,” she answered, suddenly doubtful. She was close to unprecedented tears.

  “You ca
n’t do it, Coley. You can’t kick apart the town you love!”

  “I’m trying to keep it from being kicked apart!”

  “Do me a favor. Do us all a favor. Do the Transcript a favor. Wait till tomorrow. Let everybody mull it over—”

  “Remember, Bea, back in nineteen forty-three. When I went abroad?”

  “What’s that got to do—”

  “To England,” he said, musingly. “The whole Middle West refused to believe in the blitz.