The news all looks the same now. The National Educators Association routs communism at its national convention in Boston. “The Communist is not suitable as a teacher.” Nor as butcher, baker, candlestick maker, beggar man, or thief, as far as that goes. The Negro singer Paul Robeson they have taken to calling the Black Stalin.
Has the world stopped on its axis? It doesn’t seem to be so, as the wheels of Mexico creak forward on their slow revolution. Europe raises herself from the ash and holds out a hand to her poor and damaged. But if Truman calls for any change, education improvements, or Social Security, a chorus shouts him down: welfare state, collectivism, conspiracy. What an extraordinary state of things, we are the finished product. A rock thrown in the canyon rolls neither uphill or down, it’s frozen in place.
August 5
Nationalist China falls to Mao’s armies. Or fell already. Acheson disclosed the collapse. The chorus is now at full howl, Truman presides over the Party of Treason, he and his Democrat cronies have thrown China into the mouth of the Communist dogs, didn’t everyone say he should send more gunpowder to help Chiang Kai-shek? I just hope we won’t be sorry about this, and now we are, now you pay.
September 23
Russia has the bomb. Every evening radio program was stopped for this: the crooners in front of microphones quietly folded their sheet music, the wise guys laughing it up at Duffy’s Tavern set their steins slowly on the counter, their jaws dropped, they gaped. The fine fabric of our nation, ripped open to reveal a naked vulnerability. An atomic explosion has occurred in the USSR. Truman said the thing in as few words as possible. Two nations now have the bomb.
A man is shot dead this morning in Oteen. A panic on this land, the crowds toting pitchforks. Someone gave the Russians that bomb, they didn’t make it on their own, they don’t have the brains the drive the science, it had to be Alger Hiss but it could have been any of them, Paul Robeson, Harrison Shepherd, they all stick together it’s what they do.
It feels out of the question to go outdoors, to walk about in the open. With anger running this high, it finds targets. The man in Oteen was killed by someone living right on the same street, a warehouse security guard. At the end of a brooding night shift, instead of going home he walked through an unlatched screen door, screaming, “Dirty Russians!” and shot a neighbor in his undershirt. The wife and children watching.
They are Slavs, judging from the name, probably emigrated to escape Stalin. The gunman knew of the family through his son. The children go to school together.
The terrible concert in Peekskill, that was Robeson. Workingman’s songs and Negro spirituals and concertgoers beaten bloody afterward. Just one road leading out of the place—how trapped those families must have felt, with throngs of armed police and citizens waiting at the roadsides to hurl rocks at their buses. Hands pressed flat against the windows, automobiles overturned, families dragged out and beaten, no matter their color. It’s here in Life Magazine, photo and caption: “In scheduling the concert the party-liners had hoped for just such a chance to become propaganda martyrs, so there was a tendency to conclude that ‘they asked for it.’ The Communists got more help from the hoodlums who stoned the buses than they did from their own fellow travelers.”
It’s the same as the Mexican press after we were attacked at Lev’s. We asked for those blazing guns and fire bombs and screaming panic and Seva shot, Trotsky organized it all himself. We are doing this to ourselves.
The Evening Post, October 6, 1949
“Books for Thought,” by Sam Hall Mitchell
An End Foretold
Harrison W. Shepherd is that twentieth-century phenomenon—the international Communist. He has vehemently shunned publicity, but thanks to a persistent campaign of public exposure his ties with Mexican Communists have lately come to light. His life has been obscure but hardly small, as thousands of Americans were drawn into his message, particularly the young and impressionable as his writings pressed their way even into children’s schoolrooms.
Now his latest arrives as the most insidious of the lot. The Unforetold is the story of an ancient empire crumbling through its final days, while those in power remain insensible to their nation’s impending collapse. This book takes a dismal view of humanity indeed, leaving no room for wise leadership or energetic patriotism. We should expect nothing else from Harrison Shepherd, who was quoted two years ago in the New York Weekly Review (March ’47) as follows: “Our leader is an empty sack. You could just as well knock him over, put a head with horns on a stick, and follow that. Most of us never choose to believe in the nation, we just come up short on better ideas.”
Earlier this year Shepherd was dismissed from a government position for Communist activity. The public cannot now be blamed for wishing to second the motion with a single mind, dismissing the rogue scribe from our libraries, bookstores and homes.
Mrs. Brown is on a war path. “Mr. Shepherd, it’s a character in your book that said that. Would they hang Charles Dickens for a thief because he made up the old fellow Fagin that told boys to go pick pockets?” Given the current climate, I told her, Charles Dickens is wise to be dead already. Which did not please her.
Intestinal fortitude, Mrs. Brown has got. Marching in here to work despite Mrs. Bittle’s ban, the concern no longer being polio but other contaminations. Mrs. Brown says if the lady evicts her, she will go live with a niece. One of Parthenia’s daughters “up and married a towner” and they get on well, the niece and aunt. The couple’s house is small as a pin, but she could sleep on a chaise, care for the baby, and try to be a help.
We waited for the telephone to ring off its handle. Other newspapers are sure to pick this up, as it’s too thrilling to keep under a hat. She stood near the telephone, arms crossed, ready to knock me cold if I tried to overrule her. “You can go on about your business now and leave me be, Mr. Shepherd, any man who calls here to confirm that quote will have me to talk to, and he shall hear what’s what.”
I agreed, we seem to have no choice this time. We can set the record straight: these are words spoken by a character in a novel, Poatlicue by name, disgruntled with a deranged Aztec king.
We looked it up, to verify the passage. It’s from Pilgrims of Chapultepec, we both recognized that—a scene about midway through, the fourth forced exodus, the two boys talking while they skin out the deer. Sure enough, he’s got it word for word, this Sam Hall Mitchell, but why that line, attributed to an interview? Mrs. Brown looked through the files and found he did take it from the Review, as he says, a piece about the book that quoted that excerpt. She had several copies in the files, and I may have sent one to Frida—we’d liked this reviewer. He was thoughtful on many subjects, including Soviet containment, a new doctrine at that time. Poor man, they’ll now be after him too. The last line he’d quoted from my book, Mr. Mitchell has dropped in his exposé, for better or for worse. Wherein Poatlicue says, “It’s probably a law: the public imagination may not exceed the size of the leaders’ ballocks.”