Robert Coover - Public Burning

It has been a dramatic move. It’s obvious that Uncle Sam and his government in Washington are determined, their Fourteenth Wedding Anniversary Celebration having been taken away from them, to exterminate Ethel and Julius Rosenberg now as quickly as possible. And not just out of spite: the anxious haste with which Uncle Sam has summoned the Elders back to National Headquarters suggests he might be fighting for his very life. There’s the mounting world pressure of course, the military buildup on both sides, the threat of all-out nuclear exchange, but it’s more than that — it’s almost as though there is something critical about the electrocutions themselves, something down deep inside, a form, it’s as though events have gone too far, as though there’s an inner momentum now that can no longer be tampered with, the nation is too deeply committed to this ceremony, barriers have already come down, the ghosts have been sprung and there’s a terror loose in the world, an excitement: if the spies don’t die and die now, something awful might happen, the world’s course might get bent — Look! Out in the world, the frontiers are crumbling — but as the people draw back toward the center to restore their strength, they find an appalling void right where the axis of the earth ought to be, a big black hole inviting them to fall in and be lost forever! There are actually a few who hold that the executions may not have been Uncle Sam’s idea in the first place, but rather a devious and calculated maneuver by the Phantom, either to distract Uncle Sam from actions on the frontiers, or maybe…maybe to get everybody down to Times Square and then let them have it! Is this what is driving Uncle Sam? Is this why Herbert Brownell has acted so swiftly and with such transparent alarm? No wonder the Courthouse is packed!

Of course, some people scoff at this. They pretend not to see the black hole and they don’t respond to the apocalyptic funk. What kind of a rube do these neo-latitudinarians take Sam Slick for? they ask. They even conjecture that the American Superhero may have coaxed Justice Douglas into this brief delay just to heighten the drama and draw a bigger crowd. After all, is Uncle Sam the maker and shaper of world history, or isn’t he? Just as he might have engineered the border troubles, goaded the Phantom into exposing himself around the world, provoked the strikes and boycotts, and altered a few marquees and billboards himself just to ignite the occasion with a few titillating “Fee-Fie-Fo-Fums.” Some skeptics are dubious about all these anniversary patterns in the first place, and others argue that Uncle Sam simply needed this delay to finish getting the stage built. Or to negotiate an end to that “iron curtain” around the Statue of Liberty. Or to extract confessions from the Rosenbergs by making them live their last hours over and over again.

In any case it’s certainly true, no matter whether Uncle Sam and/or the Phantom wanted it this way or not, the Rosenbergs suddenly have a terrific rating — overnight they’ve shot past every show in the country, and up in the city their executions are already being acclaimed as the biggest thing to hit Broadway since the invention of the electrical spectacular. To be sure, there’s not much competition this time of year, it’s the off-season for theater and rerun time on TV, but short of a Bowl Game or a return from the other world by Harry Houdini (and where would he appear? the old Hippodrome is gone…), it is difficult to imagine any act outdrawing the Rosenbergs. And it’s not simply because they’re to die, people die every day — look at poor unlamented and uncelebrated Willi Goettling who got executed over in East Berlin: he played to a few pigs and an empty field — no, it’s the way they’ve been linked, like all top box-office draws since the days of the Roman Circus, to archetypes. Irving Saypol and Judge Kaufman have helped them in this. So have Uncle Sam, Congress, the press, the FBI. They have worked hard at it themselves, though they have not achieved exactly the image they sought. And they have become — no less than Valentino and Garbo, Caruso and Bernhardt, the Barrymores and the Bumsteads, Rin Tin Tin and Trigger — true Stars, their performances forever engraved upon the American imagination, their fame assured for generations to come. Sooner will the nation forget Walter Pidgeon and Greer Garson than Julius and Ethel Rosenberg.

Waiting for the Court to arrive, the crowds on the Mall exchange rumors, take snapshots of each other with Baby Brownies, buy pop and ice cream from passing vendors, sun themselves on the grass, listen to the newscasters on their portable radios. The Justice Department is said to be working on back-up moves just in case things go wrong this morning, but there seem to be few doubts which way the Court will vote. Less certain is the outcome, also due today, in another trial out in Hawaii: that of the six longshoremen — the so-called “Aloha Shirt Set”—accused of Communism. The trial has already lasted seven and a half months, during which time eighty-three witnesses have unloaded more than three and a half million words of testimony, and now the jury — all American nationals, but of mixed Chinese, Japanese, Hawaiian, and Caucasian descent, a real goddamn zoo in the minds of most statesiders — has been locked up for over a hundred hours trying to reach a verdict. They’re nervous about it, because they’re aware that Hawaii’s prospective membership in the Union may well rest on the results.

This seems to be the morning’s pattern: there are no clear victories. Five thousand Red demonstrators attack a pro-Mossadegh rally in Teheran, but are repulsed — though Mossadegh himself, like Rhee, is a pain in Uncle Sam’s fundament. In Quezon City, a security guard and a leader of a Huk rebel outfit trying to sabotage Manila’s water supply are shot dead before any damage is done (that’s good), but in Indochina, the French Army’s biggest fuel dump is ablaze and still erupting after a daring night raid by Vietminh commandos (that’s bad). The four-man Vietminh suicide team has run through a wall of French machine-gun fire to hurl firebombs on the steel storage tanks in Haiphong, the tanks exploding just like in all the movies, big orange balls of roiling fire billowing up into the skies, thousands of gallons of burning oil spilling out onto the highway — hundreds of French troops and volunteers are needed just to contain it. Authorities report that “…at least one of the raiders was hit.” Probably.

In Malaya, Sir Gerald Templer orders house-to-house searches and confiscation of all rice in excess of a week’s portion, to keep the villagers from feeding the terrorists (“This is not a punishment! It will enable you to tell the terrorists truthfully that you cannot spare rice for them!”), and progress is reported in the sticky Burma-China talks in Thailand, but while the Legion of Superheroes are fighting it out amongst themselves over what to do with Royal Dutch Shell’s rich oil holdings in Sumatra, guerrilla bands sweep down from Galdengoen Mountain hideouts south of Jakarta and murder sixty villagers. As Uncle Sam has often said, muttering through a rubbery jaw, his thumb hooked under a sheriff’s badge: “It is a condition what confronts us — not a theory!”

WORLD NEWS PUTS DAMPERS ON STOCKS, The New York Times has revealed this morning. The instability of the world is frightening people. So are the Soviet “peace offensive” and the threat of a Korean truce. Volume on the Exchange dwindled to a nine-month low yesterday, and is off to an even slower start this morning. The value of such A-bomb stocks as Du Pont is sinking. General Motors, American Telephone, U.S. Steel, General Electric: all down. There’s a rash of strikes, new taxes, and rising prices, including hikes in the cost of crude oil, steel, cigarettes, and linoleum. Store sales are down and the profit ratio is at a nineteen-year low. There is frank talk of a coming recession. The American Management Association, ingathering at the Statler, is told that “American industry should prepare now to weather a business recession in order to ward off government intervention, should one occur.” Companies are warned to get rid of undesirable personnel now: “Don’t discover them when you are trying to cut expenses in a depression!”