“That,” said Mrs. Berwyn, “will get you some dirty wires from Washington.”
Coley sat down on the edge of his desk and dictated more quietly, sometimes kicking his heels against the bleached mahogany:
“We, the people of the United States of America, have refused for more than a decade to face our real fear. We know our world could end. Every month, every year, several nations are discovering the fabricating instruments which make that ultimate doom more likely. The antagonism between a free way of life and a totalitarian way is absolute. And it appears to be unresolvable owing to the expressed, permanent irreconcilability of Communism.
“What have we done about all this? The answer is shocking. We have failed to meet the challenge. We have shirked the duty of free men. We have evaded every central fact. We have relied on ancient instruments of security without examining the new risks—reinforcing military strength while we left relatively undefended and unarmed the targets of another war: our cities, our homes.
“Many of us, intellectual men, liberals, humanistic in our beliefs, had stood about for upward of a decade muttering, ‘There must be no next war.’ That is childish; it is mad. Wars are generally made by unilateral decision: they are the aggressions of one nation. Not a single man among those who has insisted we get along, henceforward, ‘without war’—since war may spell the earth’s end—has offered a solitary idea or performed a solitary act that has lessened war’s likelihood. How could such people, who call their wishful thoughts ‘ideals,’ be anything but soothsayers? War, if it is to be avoided, must be quenched in the Kremlin and in the broad confines of Russia, taken with its captive states. But these people who say there must be no war are all in Illinois, or Arizona, or New York State—not Russia.
“Others, feeling appalled and thus compelled to do something, however ineffectual, to assuage the pain of their anxieties, have limited their hostility to the here and the now, to the known—and so somewhat evaded, by the delusion, the real, external source of terror. These persons—and they number scores of millions of self-satisfied good Americans—have been content to launch a long and heated crusade against Communism at home, its dupes, its puppets and its sinister agents.
“Conspiracy to destroy this Government by violence is treason. The mere desire to see liberty abolished in order that a compulsive, Communist state may replace it, seems vicious to every person who loves freedom. There is no doubt that domestic Communists are dangerous to liberty. But is it sensible to convert a true dread of the world’s end to a chase of putative traitors and minor spies, giving freedom, the while, no other service and no sacrifice at all? It is not.
“Yet in that one process, multitudes of the people of America and many of their leaders in the Congress have also set aside the concept of freedom itself! They have seized the instruments and ideologies of their foe—with the notion of ‘fighting fire with fire.’ Every private right has been violated, under the Capitol’s dome. The innocent have been condemned without trial. Envy, spite, lies and malicious gossip have been brought to bear on solid citizens, destroying them. So the medieval lust of men cowering before holocaust has been exploited, to make little men look big. We have emulated the tricks of Hitler and Stalin. Today, when some of us pronounce the word ‘un-American,’ what we mean belies the significance of Americanism as every great citizen conceived it from the Founding Fathers until this day. A love of liberty, fair play, justice now is widely held synonymous with ‘un-Americanism!’ Today, a man who defends all we have ever stood for is liable to abuse as a ‘potential traitor.’ All liberty is being turned about: conformity, slavishness, sedulous sycophancy, these are being held true evidences of patriotism. Such traitor-hunting methodology is a sickness of the American mind, a cancer in the frightened soul of a formerly great people. ‘Set a thief to catch a thief,’ says a cynic’s proverb; even the cynic does not admonish, ‘To catch a thief, become one.’
“Even religion, even the holy name of God, is used to restrict the rights of a people dedicated to religious freedom.”
Mrs. Berwyn whistled. “There you go again!”