And indeed, now, tonight, as evening marks the close of day and skies of blue begin to gray, the “good people” emerge, as though on cue, to protest the executions, attack Uncle Sam and his Legion of Superheroes on the frontiers and harass him within, violate human decency, threaten the Free World with terror and disruption, and strike ruthlessly at the very faith that binds it together. It is no real surprise that in the vanguard of the rebellion are agents of the Phantom disguised as ministers of the Holy Gospel — clemency appeals and rabid protests have been pouring in all week from preachers and theologians in Chicago, Philadelphia, Detroit, California, Latin America, the Vatican, France, and the Evangelical Churches of Italy. Nearly 2300 American “clergymen” sign a last-minute appeal for clemency, demand an audience with the President. There is loose talk about “peace” and “justice” and “mercy.” One would think the Daily Worker had seen the light, so many churchmen appear these days in its pages. “Obvious evidence that the Angels of Darkness are deceiving the very Elect,” FBI undercover agent Herbert Philbrick warns, “is the increasing number of Communist-sponsored petitions going out over the imprimatur of ministers of the Gospel and the outsized number of clergy who are signatories! Never is an Angel of Darkness more secure than when he poses as an Angel of Light!” In Washington, the Rosenberg forces move with a cynical snicker into “Inspiration House” on Kalorama Road. Thousands hold a protest vigil in front of the White House, pretending to “pray” that the Rosenbergs be spared. “I saw those ministers in action,” G-man Phil-brick confides, “ruthless Communist leaders prostituting the Christian ministry to the evil ends of atheism and oppression!”
“The Bible teaches us that we are engaged in a gigantic spiritual warfare,” explains the Reverend Billy Graham, “and when God begins to move in a country, as He is now moving mightily in America, Satan also begins to move!” And not only in America: around the world, demonstrators gather, chant, sing, metamorphose into dangerous mobs, egged on by the inflammatory letters of the Rosenbergs: “We are confident that the people will raise a mighty cry against this new great danger which threatens to engulf millions by dooming two innocent Americans first!” Protests flow in from Mexico, Quebec, Tel Aviv, Copenhagen. Hundreds of mesmerized workers converge on the U.S. Consulates in Milan and Genoa. In Paris, Jean-Paul Sartre calls the Rosenbergs victims of “legal lynchings”: “Whenever innocent people are killed,” he declares, “it is the business of the whole world!”
If you will not hear our voices, hear the voices of the world. Hear the great and the humble: from Einstein, whose name is legend, to the tyros in the laboratories of Manchester; from struggling students at Grenoble to Oxford professors; from the world-famous movie directors of Rome to the bit players of London; from the dock workers at Liege to the cotton spinners of India; from the peasants of Italy to the philosophers of Israel…
Read the tons of petitions, letters, postcards, stacked high in your filing rooms, from the plain and gentle folk of our land. They marched before your door in such numbers as never before, as have their brothers and sisters in London, Paris, Melbourne, Buenos Aires, Ottawa, Rome. They ask you not to orphan our two young boys. They ask brotherhood and peace to spare our lives.
Hear the great and humble for the sake of America.
So cry the Rosenbergs, and in Dublin, two homemade Molotov cocktails crash through the windows of the U.S. Information Agency. British Prime Minister Winston Churchill is set upon by an entire motorcade — they push him to intercede with President Eisenhower, but Winnie does not flag or fail, he braces himself to do his duty: “It is not within my duty or power to intervene.” There are threatened boycotts and work stoppages around the world. Egghead leftists in Europe plan a counter-trial of the people who have judged and sentenced the Rosenbergs. Onstage at the Martin Beck over on Forty-fifth Street, Reverend John Hale in Arthur Miller’s The Crucible is saying: “No man may longer doubt the powers of the dark are gathered in monstrous attack upon this village. There is too much evidence now to deny it!” Nearby, in Times Square, the electric chair lies, uprooted, in the gutter, blocking traffic, while tricked out in nigger colors on the marquee of the Criterion is the strange message, attributed to some frog named Du Bois:
WE ARE THE MURDERERS HURLING MUD!
WE ARE THE WITCHHUNTERS DRINKING BLOOD!
The helmet of night has fallen upon man the word-carrier. It is the Phantom’s hour…!
“I am not much good at saying goodbyes,” Julius Rosenberg writes to his lawyer from his cell in the Death House, “because I believe that good accomplishments live on forever but this I can say — my love of life has never been so strong because I’ve seen how beautiful the future can be. Since I feel that we in some small measure have contributed our share in this direction I think my sons and millions of others will have benefited by it.”
“This front of his makes me nervous as the devil,” the Warden says. “I feel just as if tonight I was going to do something every bit as criminal as he did. I can’t help it. And when I start feeling like that, then I think it’s about time I sent in my resignation.” Why is it that the most obvious things in the world, she wonders, watching the Warden and Chaplain from the wings, seem to elude the understanding of men like these? It’s not that they have failed to learn something, but rather that they have learned too much, have built up ways of looking at the world that block off natural human instincts. It’s as though society through its formal demands were bent, not on ennobling people and leading them toward art and truth, but on demeaning them, reducing them to cardboard role-players like the characters in this play, The Valiant. And the deeper they get into their roles, the less they remember who they were before they took on the parts. But what is the alternative? Going on with life at all means having to adopt one role or another, even if it’s a rebellious one, doesn’t it? She is sixteen years old and she doesn’t think so. She thinks this is the defeatist argument of old people who have failed, people like her own parents, her teachers, those two men out on the stage. It was the argument one of them tried to use on her when he walked her home the other night from the cast party at the Paramount Cafeteria. She said, no, life is more open-ended than that. Then he jammed her up against a wall in a dark doorway, dragged up her skirts, and pushed his knee into her crotch. Some argument. “His whole attitude has been very remarkable,” the Chaplain admits reflectively, winking at her from the stage. “Only a few minutes ago I found myself comparing it with the fortitude that the Christian martyrs carried to their deaths, and yet…” “Has he got any religious streak in him at all?” the Warden asks. “I’m afraid he hasn’t,” the Chaplain sighs. “He listens to me very attentively, but…”
Atheism, as J. Edgar Hoover of the FBI has so often reminded us, is the first step toward Communism, the very “cornerstone of Communist philosophy.” Marx, Engels, Lenin, they all got started that way. A clue leading to the apprehension of the Rosenbergs was their admitted apostasy. Julie had given up the Talmud in favor of Tom Mooney and premature anti-fascism. Ethel, depressed, had gone to a psychiatrist instead of her rabbi. Phonograph records ridiculing the Kol Nidre chant were found in their flat by the FBI. The Phantom, G-man Hoover has warned, is out to “sap religion’s spiritual strength and then destroy it…. Communists have always made it clear that Communism is the mortal enemy of Christianity, Judaism, Mohammedanism, and any other religion that believes in a Supreme Being!”