Public Burning (3 page)

Not even the innermost precincts of the Phantomized world have been immune. In the Soviet Union Josef Stalin's heart “has stopped beating,” and his presumptive heirs—Beria, Molotov, Malenkov, and Khrushchev—are said to be at each other's throats. As though in sympathy, Czech Puppet Klement Gottwald has “died of a cold,” and strikes and riots have crippled the country. And now, overnight, with the Rosenberg executions just a day away, the big breakthrough comes: the East Germans, who until now have been fleeing Westward at the rate of nearly fifty thousand a month, suddenly stop, as though on cue, turn back, and confront their masters…

“The Rebellion in the Rain”: no wonder T
IME'S
been inspired! This uprising in Berlin, which soon spreads to Magdeburg, Jena, Chemnitz, Rathenow, Leipzig, Halle—in Brandenburg, workers maul the Red D.A. to death on top of a police car and rip the ear off a “people's judge,” while Czechs are pissing in Pilsen on portraits of dead Puppet Gottwald—is Uncle Sam's crowning touch to over two years of stagecraft, prayer, and arm-to-arm Injun rassling with the Phantom's ubiquitous agents.

But it has not always been easy, not even for America's mighty Superhero. The tag end of the 1940s, which began so well, has seen the Red Tide swallow up half of Europe, sweep through Cathay and threaten all of South Asia, batter at the shores of Africa, Byzantium, and Latin America.

How did it happen?

The score in the middle of the decade is 1,625,000,000 people for Uncle Sam, only 180,000,000 for the Phantom, and most of them in declining health, thanks to Overlord, German tanks, and the A-bomb. What's more, no sooner has Uncle Sam, virtually single-handed, won the war and saved humanity but what he's out inventing the United Nations, unleashing television, laying a dose of freedom and morality on the Hottentots, funding the World Bank, and humbly taking over the world for its own good—he's had to use up one of his best Incarnations of all time to do it, but it's worth it. With the bodies of the Nazi hoodlums still dangling warm on their ropes, Ely Culbertson the Bridge Wizard can announce to the world: “God and the politicians willing, the United States can declare peace on the world and win it!” That's mainly because the U.S. is holding trumps, of course—and keeping them. As Harry Truman, Uncle Sam's unusual new disguise, puts it: “The atomic bomb is too dangerous to be let loose in a lawless world. That is why Great Britain, Canada, and the United States, who have the secret of its production, do not intend to reveal that secret until means have been found to control the bomb.” It seems like the Golden Age—like Mother Luce's dream of “The American Century” come true!

And yet, suddenly, by the end of the decade, the Phantom has a score of 800,000,000 to Uncle Sam's 540,000,000 and the rest—about 600,000,000 so-called neutrals—are adrift. What went wrong? Who's responsible? People wonder if this is what the astronomers are talking about when they speak of the “red shift”: God drifting away and losing touch. The Phantom's dark gospel has spread throughout the world, he has acquired dozens of new disguises and devices, Uncle Sam's most private councils have been infiltrated. Not that the American Superchief and his Sons of Light have been idle—the Truman Doctrine has wrested Greece and Turkey from the Phantom's grasp, the Marshall Plan has saved Christianity in Europe, West Germany and South Korea have been improvised, staffed, and armed, the Strategic Air Command has been revved up with atomic weapons and NATO created, and Point Four is spreading the American Dream upon the Yahoos like manna—but you can't argue with the scoreline. “In 1944,” as Congressman Richard Nixon of California sums it up, “the odds were nine to one in our favor. Today…the odds are five to three against us!” And worse to come: in a few short weeks, before the 1949 World Series has even begun, Mao Tse-tung chases Chiang Kai-shek's bony behind off to Formosa and the Reds take over all of China, America is hit by its first postwar recession, the U.S. Secretary of Defense commits suicide, and on top of it all, Russia explodes her first atomic bomb!

The news rocks the nation.
“Treason!”
cries the press. Others agree. “If the President says the American people are entitled to know all the facts,” declares Congressman Nixon, “I feel the American people are also entitled to know the facts about the espionage ring which was responsible for turning over information on the atom bomb to agents of the Russian government!”
Espionage ring?!
Here Uncle Sam's been seeding the rubes gathering outside his tent all these years with whole pressruns of fresh greenbacks, and now that his wares are out on the table and it's time for the payoff, not only have they pocketed the bait and wandered off, making ungrateful ridicule the while of his “Yankee notions,” but some bastard's even picked his pockets while he was watching them go!
“Sweet Betsey from Pike, 1 been hit by a pooper!”
cries Uncle Sam as the Russian bomb mushrooms into the ether.
“Thar she blows, goddamn it, our just and lasting peace with honor in our time, shot to shit, it's most enough to make a deacon swear! Ed-GAR!”

Deep in the inner sanctum of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, high up on the fifth floor, J. Edgar Hoover, the world's most famous policeman, lost for a moment in reverie and congratulatory telegrams (he is this year celebrating his Silver Anniversary as America's Top Cop, his career being contemporaneous with that of Mickey Mouse), jumps clean out of his chair. What? What! He stumbles about confusedly, scattering dossiers, old $2 betting stubs, and comic books depicting his own life saga every which way. Holy Moley! This is terrible! His heart is palpitating, his florid face is splotchy, his trigger finger has gone cold and limp as a wet noodle. It's times like these when John Edgar Hoover of the FBI wishes his mother were still alive. Of course it's a spy ring, has to be, it always is. I
mean
, there's only one secret, isn't there? We had it, now they've got it, it's that simple. He's been warning them this would happen since 1937. The enemy within. Now, just look! Jumping Jehoshaphat! And if they could penetrate Los Alamos, they could penetrate Congress or the White House, or even—he pushes the thought out of his mind and, glancing edgily over his shoulder, scrambles frantically for the intercom buttons. Goodness! he's all thumbs! This is worse than the day he tried to put the cuffs on Old Creepy Karpis! He whacks the intercom with his thick fists and cries: “The secret of the atom bomb has been stolen! Mobilize every resource! Find the thieves!” He cries:

Up on Capitol Hill, Early Warning Sentinels Mundt, Bridges, Nixon, and Hickenlooper take up the chorus: “To-my-rang-tang-a-whaddle-linky-dey!” It mushrooms into a countrywide singalong, orchestrated by the national press. G-men, whistling along softly, scurry through the FBI building and out secret exits, buttoning up their trench coats…

FBI double agent Herbert Philbrick breaks his cover, and eleven top U.S. Communists are nailed as fanatical schismatics. Spying charges and naughty rumors are slapped on Judy Coplon from Justice and a Russian plant in the U.N. Wartime New Dealers are implicated, and the shadow of suspicion falls heavily on apostate Henry Wallace—once but a heartbeat away from the Incarnation—plus the million people who voted for him in 1948. And, thanks to the untiring vigilance of Congressman Nixon—who has already helped to sanitize Hollywood and the labor unions, and co-sponsored a tough-fisted Communist registration bill, which even Harry Truman has to admit is the equal of the Alien and Sedition Act of John Adams's heyday—the slippery Alger Hiss is run to ground at last…

“The only sensible and courageous way to deal with Communists in our midst,” declares Hearst columnist Westbrook Pegler, “is to make membership in Communist organizations or covert subsidies a capital offense and shoot or otherwise put to death all persons convicted of such!” Congressman Harold Velde, an ex-FBI agent elected to the House on the slogan
GET THE REDS OUT OF WASHINGTON AND WASHINGTON OUT OF THE RED
, has a celebrated vision of Russian espionage agents running amok all over the country, and his Pennsylvania colleague Bob Rich, speaking in tongues, lets fly the suspicion that Secretary of State Dean Acheson
might
be working for Stalin himself! “The great lesson which should be learned from the Alger Hiss case,” Dick Nixon warns, “is that we are not just dealing with espionage agents who get thirty pieces of silver to obtain the blueprint of a new weapon…but this is a far more sinister type of activity, because it permits the enemy to guide and shape our policy!” To that, Mr. Republican himself, Senator Bob Taft, says: “Hey! to-my-whang-fol-doodle-daddy-
dey
, Dick!” And in Wheeling, West Virginia, Senator Joe McCarthy, the Fighting Marine, waves a piece of paper—“I have here in my hand a list…!”—and launches an Era…

“A list,” says he, “of two hundred and five…card-carrying Communists in the State Department!” He says: “Commiecrats! Prisoners of a bureaucratic Communistic Frankenstein! Parlor pinks and parlor punks! Prancing mimics of the Moscow party line in the
State
Department!” Oh yes! “Egg-sucking phony liberals,” says he, whose “pitiful squealing…would hold sacrosanct those Communists and queers” who had sold China into “atheistic slavery!” He says: “A conspiracy so immense and an infamy so black as to dwarf any previous such venture in the history of man!” He says:

“I thank God,” cries the Reverend Billy Graham, “for men who in the face of public denouncement and ridicule go loyally on in their work of exposing the pinks, the lavenders, and the reds who have sought refuge beneath the wings of the American eagle, and from that vantage point try in every subtle, undercover way to bring comfort, aid and help to the greatest enemy we have ever known, Communism!” And then, while Bible-belters, ex-FBI agents, Catholic hardliners and anti-Zionists, ladies' clubs, Hearst newsmen, the legendary China Lobby, patriotic queer-bashers, and most of the Republican and Democratic parties surge around Joe to get a piece of History, the besieged President, egged on by Bernard Baruch, Edward Teller, Columbia University's Dwight Eisenhower, and an uptight Dean Acheson, overrules the Atomic Energy Commission and sets in motion a new crash program:
TRUMAN ORDERS HELL BOMB BUILT!
“I wasn't going to be one of your arm-rolling cheek-kissing mollycoddles!” says Harry. Du Pont gets the H-bomb contract, cash on the line. But already it may be too late…

Up on the fifth floor of the FBI buildings, surrounded by souvenirs from his epic past and autographed photos from the radio stars of “The FBI in Peace and War,” Crimebuster J. Edgar Hoover, hand-in-hand with his bachelor friend Clyde Toison, oversees the spy-ring hunt. “Clyde,” he says, feeling a bit giddy, unable to suppress a soft little giggle, “this is the Crime of the Century!” “You said it, Eddie,” says Clyde. The entire FBI is mobilized for the hunt. They are digging into records at Los Alamos, poring through AEC personnel files, badgering a few old suspects, interviewing hundreds of people. Others, disguised as tourists, slip catlike through the ghettos of the nation's cities, in deep where the unassimilated live, speaking alien tongues, eating weird shit, their seed still frothy with unhomogenized Old World discontents; 90 percent of all Commies in this country, as every G-man knows, are foreign-born or were dropped by foreign-born parents. But chasing them down is like falling down a well: there are nearly forty million of these yahooskis in the U.S., plus all their goddamn kids—over three hundred thousand Russians in New York City alone—it's an impossible job. Knock knock! Who's dere? Police! Police who? Uh, police tuh meet yuh, lady. Thistle be quick. Chester routine inquiry. Hassan a body here seen a spy ring? We all aspiring, mister, it's a Mary kin way! Clem the ladder of success, you know? Gopher broke. Hokay? Well, yeah, but… C'mon, Thomas money, copper, and Eisenhower late as it is! Yes'm, Czar Rhee tuh bother yuh. Dewey have your pardon? Sure, son, Hiss all right, to err is Truman. Better luck on the—knock knock!—Nixon…