The Grand Inquisitor's Manual (43 page)

Other victims did not succeed in cheating the public executioner, and they were put to death by hanging on Gallows Hills, a spectacle designed to warn any other witches who had gone undetected against the consequences of trafficking with the Devil. The girls who had accused them in the first place were brought along to taunt the “firebrands of hell” one last time. When the cart carrying the condemned prisoners to one such hanging was momentarily stuck on the steep road, the girls shrilled that they could see the spectral figure of the Devil at work yet again. But the Devil was powerless to prevent the hangings, the last auto-da-fé to be conducted on American soil.
¹⁰

Soon after the hangings, some of the Puritan witch-hunters found themselves afflicted yet again. What tormented them now, however, was a troubled conscience rather than an invisible agent of the Devil. Another 150 victims of the witch panic, some as young as eight years old, were still awaiting trial on accusations that were based on nothing more than slander, gossip, and the rantings of frightened and vengeful children. Now, at last, a few sensible voices could be heard over the clamor of the accusers: “It is better that ten suspected witches should escape than one innocent person should be condemned,” observed the renowned Puritan preacher Increase Mather (1639–1723), neatly reversing the bloodthirsty declaration of the Abbot of Cîteaux during the Albigensian Crusade (“Kill them all; God will know his own”).
¹¹

A new rule was now applied by which “spectral evidence” was excluded and the confessions previously extracted from various terrified defendants were put aside. Suddenly, the cases against the accused witches “melted like moonshine at daybreak,” as Marion L. Starkey writes in
The Devil in Massachusetts.
A general pardon was issued, and the remaining defendants were released, two of them carrying babies who had been born while they were behind bars. Even Tituba was delivered from jail, although she was promptly sold into slavery to a new master to raise money for the prison fees that every defendant was obliged to pay before being discharged. One of the pardoned women who was unable to scrape up the money died in prison, a debtor rather than a convicted witch.
¹²

As the years passed, some efforts at reparation were undertaken. Five years after the hangings, a day of fasting was declared in Massachusetts as a gesture of regret and repentance. On that occasion, Samuel Sewall, one of the nine judges of the Court of Oyer and Terminer who had sent the accused men and women to the gallows, offered an apology for “bring[ing] upon ourselves the guilt of innocent blood.” Ann Putnam, one of the adolescent accusers, waited until 1706 to acknowledge that the “spectral evidence” she had given “was a great delusion of Satan” and to “earnestly beg forgiveness of all those whom I have given just cause of sorrow and offence.” In 1711, the sum of 598 pounds and 12 shillings was appropriated by the state of Massachusetts for distribution to the surviving victims and their descendants. The following year, in a final and purely symbolic act of contrition, the excommunication of Giles Cory was formally revoked by the First Church of Salem.
¹³

If the Salem witch trials of 1692 can be compared to the Inquisition, they amount only to an inquisition in miniature. The whole ordeal lasted fifteen months, only fourteen women and six men were put to death, and—even counting the men, women, and children who were imprisoned rather than executed—the total number of victims was equal to a single day’s work by the friar-inquisitors at an auto-da-fé during the Spanish Inquisition. None of the grand inquisitors was ever moved to the act of moral justice that Judge Sewall performed when he stood up in church and apologized for the spilling of “innocent blood.”

But the points of similarity should not be overlooked. Like the Inquisition, the Salem witch trials were set in motion by whispered rumors and fabricated evidence; they were fueled by confessions extracted under the threat of torture and execution; their victims were demonized, quite literally, as agents of Satan; and the whole enterprise was carried out not by a lynch mob but by constables, magistrates, jailors, and executioners on the public payroll, all of whom acted in the name of the state as the ultimate guardian of law and order. Indeed, the most alarming fact about what happened in Salem in 1692 is the sure conviction of the civil authorities that extraordinary means were justified because of the dire threat posed to the sleepy village of Salem—“the Rendezvous of Devils,” as one panic-stricken preacher put it, “where they Muster their infernal sources.”
¹⁴

The Inquisition, as we have seen, was brought into existence on the same dire assumptions and for the same weighty purpose—it was “an organ of repression,” according to Giorgio de Santillana, “conceived for situations of emergency.” What constitutes an emergency, however, is always in the eye of the beholder. For Pope Innocent III, it was the pale and emaciated Cathar
perfectus;
for Torquemada, it was the bishop whose great-grandfather may or may not have been Jewish; for Cardinal Bellarmine, the Hammer of Heretics, it was a scientist who insisted that the earth revolved around the sun. For the town fathers of Salem Village, the emergency took the carnal form of any man, woman, or child whom Ann Putnam and her hysterical girlfriends might denounce as a witch.
¹⁵

More recently, of course, America has confronted other emergencies, some of them quite real and others that exist, as the witches of Salem existed, only in our imaginations. And here we confront the deadly and inevitable peril of the inquisitorial impulse: sometimes we do not know the difference between an authentic threat and an imaginary one until it is too late.

America was at war with a flesh-and-blood enemy in 1942 when Franklin Delano Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066, a presidential decree that empowered military commanders to arrest, imprison, and confiscate the property of every man, woman, and child of Japanese ancestry along the Pacific seaboard from Washington to California. As early as 1939, the FBI had begun preparing a list of “enemy aliens,” and the first arrests were made on the same day that Pearl Harbor was attacked by the Japanese armed forces. Even infants with “one drop of Japanese blood” were to be sent to the internment camps: “A Jap’s a Jap,” declared the general who directed the operation. No hearings were held to determine whether, in fact, the victims of Executive Order 9066 actually posed a threat to national security, although the Supreme Court ruled in 1944 that the internment was justified by “pressing public necessity.” Not a single Japanese-American was arrested for an act of sabotage or espionage, however, and the 120,000 internees were wholly innocent of wrongdoing.
¹⁶

Imperial Japan’s military threat against America was real, of course, but the fear of Japanese-Americans turned out to be wholly imaginary. Precisely the same phenomenon was still at work in America only a few years later when Senator Joseph R. McCarthy (1908–1957) and the congressmen who served on the House Un-American Activities Committee (better known as HUAC) undertook a crusade to defend the country against what they claimed was a vast conspiracy to establish “Communist totalitarian dictatorship throughout the world” through “treachery, deceit, infiltration” as well as “espionage, terrorism and any other means deemed necessary,” according to the Internal Security Act of 1950.
¹⁷

By 1950, China was ruled by a Communist regime, the United States was at war against North Korea, the Soviet Union had acquired nuclear weapons with the assistance of a few spies in the Manhattan Project, and the threat of Communism was plausible enough to plant a terrifying idea in the collective imagination of American government, media, and business—“the fear of a Red tank on Pennsylvania Avenue,” as Lillian Hellman put it. But the red-baiting politicians and propagandists of the McCarthy era were not only afraid of Soviet aggression. Like the inquisitors of medieval Europe and the witch-hunters of colonial Salem, they sought to portray Communists and their fellow travelers in America as invisible and inhuman, “almost a separate species of mankind,” or, even worse, something both pestilential and apocalyptic, “the germ of death for our society,” a “political cancer” that had infected “every phase of American life.”
¹⁸

So a new model of the machinery of persecution was tinkered together and kicked into operation in America. No one was tortured or burned alive by HUAC and its senatorial counterpart, of course, but some of the old inquisitorial tools were unpacked and put to use. Testimony was taken in secret from anonymous informants, known euphemistically as “friendly witnesses,” as the congressional tribunals ranged across America, and then used in public hearings that functioned as the latter-day American equivalent of the auto-da-fé, some of them televised. Abject confessions were much sought after: “I want to humbly apologize for the grave error which I have committed,” pleaded writer Nicholas Bela, sounding like one of the defendants in the Moscow show trials, “and beg of you to forgive me.” Potential targets were hounded tirelessly by congressional investigators and federal law enforcement officers—like the FBI agent who showed up at Charlie Chaplin’s front door, a stenographer at his side, ready to interrogate the famous man on his own doorstep.
¹⁹

Above all, the men and women who were called to testify by HUAC and other congressional committees were judged not by their willingness to confess their own membership in the Communist party, past or present, but by their readiness to denounce their fellow members. Indeed, a Communist who had recanted and abjured his or her party membership was also obliged to identify those who had merely attended a party gathering or made a contribution to a so-called Communist-front organization, the modern version of the medieval crime of fautorship. Precisely like the tribunals of the Inquisition, HUAC subscribed to the principle that the failure of a witness to betray friends, relations, and co-workers rendered the witness’s own confession defective and unacceptable. To make matters worse, if a witness under subpoena was willing to answer some but not all questions—to confess his or her own political sins but not the sins of others—the witness forfeited the legal protection of the Fifth Amendment, and so the refusal to name names was treated as a crime in itself.

“The ultimate test of the credibility of a witness,” declared Congressman Donald L. Jackson, a member of HUAC, “is the extent to which he is willing to cooperate with the Committee in giving full details as to not only the place of activities, but also the names of those who participated with him in the Communist Party.”
²⁰

The result of the Communist witch-hunt was not only an “orgy of informing, “as journalist Victor Navasky puts it, but “a Cecil B. DeMille–sized one.” Indeed, HUAC was especially successful when its attention turned to the entertainment industry. Actor Sterling Hayden gave up the name of a former lover to the tribunal. A screenwriter named Martin Berkeley (
My Friend Flicka
) may have set a record when he offered a total of 161 names. Director Elia Kazan paid for an advertisement in the
New York Times
to explain his reasons for naming names and to encourage others to follow his example. Among the “unfriendly” witnesses who refused to name names was playwright Lillian Hellman, who declared that betraying others to save herself would be “inhuman and indecent and dishonorable” and famously told the committee that she “cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit this year’s fashions.” Hellman summed up the moral climate of the whole sordid era in the title of her memoir:
Scoundrel Time.
²¹

Like the victims of the historical Inquisition and its other modern equivalents, the men and women who were targeted during the McCarthy era were not guilty of any wrongful acts; rather, they were accused only of thought-crimes. McCarthy and his fellow witch-hunters, like the grand inquisitors of the Middle Ages, defined a circle of approved beliefs and associations and condemned anyone who, by their lights, had crossed the line into heresy. “It was not enough to be American in citizenship or residence—one must be American in one’s thoughts. And lack of right thinking could make an American citizen un-American,” explains Garry Wills. “These latter can be harassed, spied on, forced to register, deprived of government jobs, and other kinds of work.”
²²

The American red-baiters, like every other inquisitor, were quick to appeal to every ugly prejudice in order to turn public opinion against their victims. Ten of the first nineteen witnesses called by HUAC in its investigation of Hollywood were Jewish, and a stench of anti-Semitism hung over the proceedings. When a planeload of celebrities flew to Washington to show their support for the Hollywood witnesses, for example, Congressman John Rankin rose on the floor of the House of Representatives to reveal their given names, precisely the same ploy being used at that very moment by
Pravda
when it printed the Jewish-sounding names of the victims of Stalinist purges. Danny Kaye’s real name was David Daniel Kaminsky, the congressman announced, and Melvyn Douglas was actually Melvyn Hesselberg. “There are others too numerous to mention,” ranted Rankin. “They are attacking the committee for doing its duty to protect this country, and save the American people from the horrible fate the Communists have meted out to the unfortunate Christian people of Europe.”
²³

Some victims of the Communist witch craze ended up behind bars; the so-called Hollywood Ten, for example, were writers and directors (including Dalton Trumbo and Ring Lardner Jr.) who were cited for contempt of Congress and sent to prison after they appeared before HUAC but refused to answer questions about their political beliefs. Victims who readily confessed their own membership in the Communist party or “Communist-front” organizations were punished when they refused to incriminate others; novelist Dashiell Hammett, for example, spent six months in a cell because he refused to divulge the names of contributors to a defense fund for victims of McCarthyism.