E. Doctorow: The Book of Daniel

“Those are the children!” he heard Ascher cry out. “But those are the children!” He ran into Susan before he saw her — clutching his hat with both hands, with no more room around her than her body made, her arms jammed against her chest. He put his arm around her shoulder and tried to regain his sense of direction. The heat was unbearable. He looked up, saw the sky, saw the roofline of buildings to his left. He decided if they were to cut through to his right they would reach the sidewalk and could follow the curb back toward the beginnings of the crowd. He knew how to get home.

“I don’t like this,” Susan said. “I can’t move!”

“Here they are!” A man standing next to him peered down. “I’ve got them.”

And then Ascher was there and they were being pulled forward once more. “These are the children,” Ascher kept saying. “Let us through, please. I’ve got the children.” Eventually this was understood by people in the crowd. “He’s got the children!” they called to each other. Daniel could see a banner stretched on poles across the top of the platform ahead. FREE THEM! Someone lifted him up and he found himself being passed over the heads of the people, propelled sinuously like something on the top of the sea. He was terrified. He heard Susan’s voice behind him. “Let me down!” she was saying. “Help! Danny!”

And finally it was the amplified voice that was booming out over Broadway: “Here are the children!” And a great roaring filled his ears as he and Susan were raised, tottering, onto the platform. He was dizzy. He grabbed Susan’s hand. Flushed and breathless, dizzied by the motion of heads and the thousands of voices in motion like the roar of the sea, they stared out at the crowd, a vast hideous being of millions of eyes that seemed to undulate in the canyon of the street, splashing life and sound and outrage in great waves up on the platform. Islanded, he felt the wind in his eyes. He felt for a moment that he and Susan had been betrayed and that the great mass would flood over them and carry them away. But the roar, though directed at them, was not meant for them; it was meant for others who dwelt in a realm so mysteriously symbolic that it defied his understanding. At the foot of the platform, at his feet, Ascher’s face stared up from the street, triumphant, beatific. He was shouting something but Daniel couldn’t hear. The man who had been speaking put one arm around his shoulder and one arm around Susan’s, gently, but with unmistakable authority, arranging himself between them. Still they held hands. And the roaring of the crowd had become a chant, a great choir echoing against the buildings until it was continuous: Free them, free them, free them! And he and Susan were transfixed by the placards, the oversized pictures of their mother and father everywhere above the crowd, going up and down in rhythm as the crowd roared Free them, free them, free them.

Oh, baby, you know it now. We done played enough games for you, ain’t we. You a smart lil fucker. You know where it’s at now, don’ you big daddy. You got the picture. This the story of a fucking, right? You pullin’ out yo lit-er-ary map, mutha? You know where we goin’, right muthafuck?

AN INTERESTING PHENOMENON

Many historians have noted an interesting phenomenon in American life in the years immediately after a war. In the councils of government fierce partisanship replaces the necessary political coalitions of wartime. In the greater arena of social relations — business, labor, the community — violence rises, fear and recrimination dominate public discussion, passion prevails over reason. Many historians have noted this phenomenon. It is attributed to the continuance beyond the end of the war of the war hysteria. Unfortunately, the necessary emotional fever for fighting a war cannot be turned off like a water faucet. Enemies must continue to be found. The mind and heart cannot be demobilized as quickly as the platoon. On the contrary, like a fiery furnace at white heat, it takes a considerable time to cool.

Take World War I. Immediately after this war, President Wilson’s ideal of international community ran afoul of fierce Republican partisanship under the leadership of Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, a man who had his eye on the Presidential elections of 1920. Congress’ failure to ratify Wilson’s dream of a League of Nations was regrettable, to say the least, in view of the unfortunate events in Europe that were to follow. Wilson himself can be said to be a victim of this partisanship, suffering a cleaving stroke down the left side of his face and body. This is a phenomenon noted by many historians.

On the labor front in 1919 there was an unprecedented number of strikes involving many millions of workers. One of the larger strikes was mounted by the A.F. of L. against the United States Steel Corporation. At that time workers in the steel industry put in an average sixty-eight-hour week for bare subsistence wages. The strike spread to other plants, resulting in considerable violence — the death of eighteen striking workers, the calling out of troops to disperse picket lines, and so forth. By branding the strikers Bolsheviks and thereby separating them from their public support, the Corporation broke the strike. In Boston, the Police Department went on strike and Governor Calvin Coolidge replaced them. In Seattle there was a general strike which precipitated a nationwide “red scare.” This was the first red scare. Sixteen bombs were found in the New York Post Office just before May Day. The bombs were addressed to men prominent in American life, including John D. Rockefeller and Attorney General Mitchell Palmer. It is not clear today who was responsible for those bombs — Red terrorists, Black anarchists, or their enemies — but the effect was the same. Other bombs popped off all spring, damaging property, killing and maiming innocent people, and the nation responded with an alarm against Reds. It was feared that as in Russia, they were about to take over the country and shove large cocks into everyone’s mother. Strike that. The Press exacerbated public feeling. May Day parades in the big cities were attacked by policemen, and soldiers and sailors. The American Legion, just founded, raided I.W.W. headquarters in the State of Washington. Laws against seditious speech were passed in State Legislatures across the country and thousands of people were jailed, including a Socialist Congressman from Milwaukee who was sentenced to twenty years in prison. To say nothing of the Espionage and Sedition Acts of 1917 which took care of thousands more. To say nothing of Eugene V. Debs. On the evening of January 2, 1920, Attorney General Palmer, who had his eye on the White House, organized a Federal raid on Communist Party offices throughout the nation. With his right-hand assistant, J. Edgar Hoover, at his right hand, Palmer effected the arrest of over six thousand people, some Communist aliens, some just aliens, some just Communists, and some neither Communists nor aliens but persons visiting those who had been arrested. Property was confiscated, people chained together, handcuffed, and paraded through the streets (in Boston), or kept in corridors of Federal buildings for eight days without food or proper sanitation (in Detroit). Many historians have noted this phenomenon. The raids made an undoubted contribution to the wave of vigilantism which broke over the country. The Ku Klux Klan blossomed throughout the South and West. There were night ridings, floggings, public hangings, and burnings. Over seventy Negroes were lynched in 1919, not a few of them war veterans. There were speeches against “foreign ideologies” and much talk about “100 percent Americanism.” The teaching of evolution in the schools of Tennessee was outlawed. Elsewhere textbooks were repudiated that were not sufficiently patriotic. New immigration laws made racial distinctions and set stringent quotas. Jews were charged with international conspiracy and Catholics with trying to bring the Pope to America. The country would soon go dry, thus creating large-scale, organized crime in the U.S. The White Sox threw the Series to the Cincinnati Reds. And the stage was set for the trial of two Italian-born anarchists, N. Sacco and B. Vanzetti for the alleged murder of a paymaster in South Braintree, Mass. The story of this trial is well known and often noted by historians and need not be recounted here. To say nothing of World War II—