Robert Coover - Public Burning

And while Uncle Sam, using his corncob pipe as a baton, conducts the band in playing “When the Saints Go Marchin’ In,” out they come, not marching, but jogging on like tensed-up ballplayers, everybody who’s anybody in the above-board American Power Structure, each one introduced by Betty in her somewhat tremulous old-lady voice (though if anything, it must be said she’s getting younger every day) and welcomed with a rousing “He’s our man!” cheer led by the Indiana University cheerleaders. The first few to lope out pull up momentarily before that unfortunate mound of elephant dung, but since there’s no way around it and no way back, they flash their vote-getting smiles, square their shoulders, and slog on through, and once a path is laid there are no further hesitations. There’s an old panhandler out there, stuffed into a thick wool overcoat like an antique shopwindow dummy from the Great Depression and seemingly rooted to the spot, who’s something of an obstacle, too, but the VIP’s jogging by merely assume he’s some kind of turnstile (couldn’t be real, after all, not in prosperous postwar America) and stuff quarters in as they pass.

The VIP area has been divided into three sections, one each for the three branches of government who together have made these executions possible, with pride of place tonight given to the judiciary, the legislative branch seated to their left and the executive to their right. A special section of box seats, decorated with flags and bunting and exhibits from the trial, has been set aside just in front of the stage for those directly associated with the Rosenberg case: the FBI director and agents who broke the case, the Judge, jury, prosecution team and witnesses, the Attorney General, and a ringside front-and-center seat for President Eisenhower, who’s never been one to settle for a side-aisle pew. The back rows of the three sections are reserved for state and local officials from around the country — legislators, judges, administrators, mayors, National Guard officers, tax collectors, Lieutenant-Governors, sheriffs, and the like — and these are the first to come out, followed by all the auxiliary personnel who serve the three federal branches, all the agencies, bureaus, departments, commissions, institutes, foundations, boards, councils, societies, administrations, appeal and claims courts, funds, organizations, banks, services, systems, committees, national centers, offices, and authorities, and all their staff, counsel, secretaries, chiefs, directors, clerks, treasurers, personnel officers, confidential assistants, managers, commissioners, auditors, recorders, consultants, editors, superintendents, chairmen, military aides, receptionists, curators, and parliamentarians. Next come all the key personnel from the major executive departments attached to Cabinet officers, the federal district judges and senior circuit judges in the appeals courts, and all 435 members of the U.S. House of Representatives. It’s a colorful lot, and even plain-spoken self-possessed Betty Crocker gets a certain itchy pleasure out of calling out their names: Laurie Battle! Porque Patten! Zeke Gathings! Rubie Scudder! Jimmy Utt! J. Edgar Chenoweth! Prince H. Preston, Jr.! Gracie Pfost! Hamer Budge! Runt Bishop! Shepard Crumpacker! Errett P. Scrivner! Hale Boggs! Tip O’Neill! Richard B. Wigglesworth! Thaddeus M. Machrowicz! Kit Clardy! Elford A. Cederberg! Dewey Short! Morgan M. Moulder! Norris Cotton! T. Millet Hand! Jack Dempsey! Stuyvesant Wainwright! Franklin D. Roosevelt, Jr.! Jake Javits! Usher Burdick! James G. Polk! Page Belcher! Sam Coon! Homer D. Angelí! Wally Mumma! L. Mendel Rivers and Gerry Ford! Percy Priest! Olin E. Teague! Homer Thorn-berry! Winston Prouty! Thor C. Tollefson! Harley Staggers! Melvin Laird! Clem Zablocki!

“Gubser! Gubser! he’s our man!

If he can’t do it, Hillings can!

Hillings! Hillings! he’s our man!

If he can’t do it, Yorty can!

Yorty! Yorty…”

“Whoopee-ti-yi-yo!” laughs Uncle Sam, herding them in, “the whole dingbusted United States guvvamint is corraled in here tonight, I see, everybody from the guinea pigs at Disease Control to the coffee steward at the Pentagon! It’s a real smorgasbord! Here muster, not the forces of party, but the forces of humanity, and a appetizin’ lot they are, too!” Then he suddenly starts and glances up at the sky, lost beyond the bright lights and hovering smog of Times Square. “God damn that tarnacious Phantom if he lets one fly tonight!” he mutters, and a collective gasp shakes the Square. Could it happen? “What am I sayin’? Anything he can do I can do better! I yam strong as the breezes w’ich blows down big treeses, so c’mon, get on with it, punkin, dish ’em up! In skatin’ over thin ice our safety is in our speed!”

Nobody knows better than Betty Crocker the importance of proper timing in laying a good table, so she rushes on, bringing out the ninety-six Senators now and all their spouses and children: Lister Hill and John Sparkman of Alabama, Carl Hayden and Barry Goldwater of Arizona, John McClellan and J. William Fulbright of Arkansas, William Knowland and Thomas Kuchel of California, Edwin Johnson and Eugene Millikin of Colorado, Prescott Bush and William Purtell of Connecticut, John J. Williams and J. Allen Frear of Delaware, Spessard Holland and George Smathers of Florida, Walter George and Richard B. Russell of Georgia, Henry Dworshak and Herman Welker of Idaho, Paul Douglas and Everett McKinley Dirksen of Illinois, Homer Capehart and William Jenner of Indiana, Bourke Hickenlooper and Guy Gillette of Iowa, Andrew Schoeppel and Frank Carlson of Kansas, Earle Clements and John Sherman Cooper of Kentucky, Allen Ellender and Russell B. Long of Louisiana, Margaret Chase Smith and Frederick Payne of Maine, John Butler and J. Glenn Beall of Maryland, Leverett Saltonstall and John F. Kennedy of Massachusetts, Homer Ferguson and Charles Potter of Michigan, Edward J. Thye and Hubert H. Humphrey of Minnesota, James Eastland and John Stennis of Mississippi, Thomas Hennings and Stuart Symington of Missouri, James Murray and Mike Mansfield of Montana, Hugh Butler and Dwight Griswold of Nebraska, Pat McCarran and George Malone of Nevada, Styles Bridges and Charles Tobey of New Hampshire, H. Alexander Smith and Robert Hendrickson of New Jersey, Dennis Chavez and Clinton Anderson of New Mexico, Irving Ives and Herbert Lehman of New York, Clyde Hoey and Willis Smith of North Carolina, William Langer and Milton Young of North Dakota, Robert Taft and John Bricker of Ohio, Robert Kerr and Mike Monroney of Oklahoma, Guy Cordon and Wayne Morse of Oregon, Edward Martin and James Duff of Pennsylvania, Theodore Francis Green and John Pastore of Rhode Island, Burnet Maybank and Olin Johnston of South Carolina, Karl Mundt and Francis Case of South Dakota, Estes Kefauver and Albert Gore of Tennessee, Lyndon B. Johnson and Price Daniel of Texas, Arthur Watkins and Wallace Bennett of Utah, George Aiken and Ralph Flanders of Vermont, Harry Byrd and Willis Robertson of Virginia, Warren Magnuson and Henry (Scoop) Jackson of Washington, Harley Kilgore and Matthew Neely of West Virginia, Alexander Wiley and Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin, and Lester Hunt and Frank Barrett of Wyoming.

“Oh, when the saints go marchin’ in,

When the saints go marchin’ in,

Oh, I want to be in that number,

When the saints go marchin’in…!”

Naturally, with the entire American constituency out there as an eager audience, each one of these handsome screamers aches for a shot at the microphones as he goes galumphing grandly across the stage, past the electric chair, and down— thunk! splot! — into the elephant patties, but Styles Bridges, the President Pro Tempore and a respecter of hallowed traditions, limits the privilege to a few heroic whoopees from the Majority and Minority Leaders and Whips and a blown kiss and a blessing from the Senate Elders: George, Hayden, Russell, Byrd, and McCarran. Not that this stops the precocious junior Senator from Wisconsin — Joe McCarthy doesn’t give a shit for protocol, but grabs the mike out of Bridges’ hand (some say they saw Bridges hand it to him) and lets rip with a rampagious spate of old-fashioned, breast-beating, salt-boiler drolleries: “No one can push me out of anything!” he cries, and Bridges winks as though to say: You better believe it! “I’m not retiring from the field of exposing left-wingers, New Dealers, radicals and pinkos, egg-sucking phony liberals, Communists and queers! That fight can’t abate on my part or yours until we’ve won the war, or our civilization has died!” Promising the revelation of “a conspiracy of infamy so black that, when it is finally exposed, its principals shall be forever deserving of the maledictions of all honest men,” he announces hundreds of investigations that he plans to launch before the year is out into the State Department with its “prancing mimics of the Moscow party line,” the information- and teacher-exchange programs, East-West trade, the Government Printing Office, the defense industry, the Army Signal Corps (the Rosenberg spy-ring story isn’t over yet! he hints darkly), and even the Army itself: “I am going to kick the brains out of anyone who protects Communists!” The other Senators are made green with envy and flushed with embarrassment at the same time by all this public hyperbole, but the crowds love it, and even Uncle Sam seems reluctant to shut him up. Finally Joe himself remarks on all the time-wasting here tonight and demands that they get on with it: “It’s a dirty, foul, unpleasant, smelly job, but it has to be done! A rough fight is the only fight Communists understand!” He leaps gleefully down into the shit, getting a tremendous ovation — it’s a real pick-up, without him the show had begun to stall.