THE NATION: Stain In the Air

THE NATION Stain in the AirAutumn came to the U.S. last week with a souse of wet snow on Denver, a spatter of cold rain on South Dakota’s Black Hills, a chill wind in Chicago that moved on to New York. Autumn found the nation prosperous as never before, its people uneasy as seldom before.

It was a time of transition and suspension. Along New England’s shores, the squeak of a fisherman’s oars against thole pins sounded lonely and clear in the fog of early morning, lately shrill with the cries of the vacationist and his young. The town greens had subsided into their dreaming quiet and the beaches were left to the surfcasters. Vermont’s fields were gilded with goldenrod, shadowed with purple asters, and the swamp maples glowed red.

Sweet Gum & Burnt Cork. On the Pacific Coast, nights had turned cold, and beachcombers gathered salt-crusted chunks of driftwood to add color to the flames of the winter’s fireplaces. The salmon fisherman clumped along river banks for the fall run, and hunters, oiling their deer rifles, anxiously eyed the .forest fires that crackled in the summer-dry mountains. To the south, Los Angeles sweltered in 92° heat and awaited its first sight of a World Series by television.

In Texas river bottoms the sweet gum trees were tinged with yellow. At night, deer jumped the wire fences to nibble at the heavy-headed sorghum. The rivers ran low and clear, and yellow cats, black bass, carp and perch sailed lazily in their depths, too fat to bother with baited hooks. In northern Michigan, the bow & arrow boys, 18,000 strong, patiently honed their two-and three-bladed arrows, tentatively twanged their 5O-lb. bows, got out their brown-and-green camouflage suits, the grease paint and burnt cork for blacking their faces while stalking the wary deer.

Under the clean autumn sunlight, the land burgeoned with plenty. The second largest corn crop in history drowsed on the fields of Iowa, Illinois and Indiana. Other crops were short of alltime records, but bountiful beyond the dreams of the farmers of other lands.

Small Decisions & Deep Breaths. For the city dweller, the fall was a time of fresh resolution. Vacation was over, the children were launched on a new term, the work year stretched ahead. Men took deep breaths and set their jaws; women made their small decisions on the family budget. The decisions were easier this year. During the year, U.S. families had nearly doubled their savings, and the price climb was expected to slow down. Early mornings and even Sundays were loud with the sound of carpenters’ hammers as builders rushed new apartments to completion in the good weather. Personal income was the highest ever, unemployment at a postwar ebb. Nevertheless, at Chicago’s Harbor Light on Skid Row, the Salvation Army began passing out overcoats, and drunks were jackrolled in the gutters for their clothes. The first leaves fell from the poplars and scuttered across the sidewalks. In the suburbs, there was the smell of burning leaves.

Yet, admiring his handsome land in the fall of 1951, the U.S. citizen was aware that a sense of something wrong nagged at his consciousness, a sense of evil unpunished and perhaps unpunishable.

The Sound of Cicadas. In one of the most moral gestures in the annals of humankind, the U.S. had sent its sons to die in Korea without hope of conquest or dream of reward. But the war hung fire, neither won nor lost, and the aggressor remained unrepentant, ready to strike again. For the U.S., public morality abroad seemed to be easier than at home. It had been a summer of suspicion and scandal. The charges of Wisconsin’s Senator Joe McCarthy shrilled as insistently as the cicadas in summer’s dog days, stirring distrust and fear. Both national chairmen of the nation’s major parties stood accused of dipping political fingers into the RFC’s bottomless jampot. In the last decade, the U.S. could boast of an enormous stride forward toward racial tolerance and understanding. Yet in Illinois last week, a grand jury of citizens exculpated the men who led the ugly Cicero race riots, indicted instead a man who pleaded for justice.

The wholesome thump of foot on pigskin and the blare of 25,000 brass bands sounded over the land. Yet in the autumn of 1951, even the appetite for football was soured by the breath of scandal. More serious was the fact that investigations of organized crime growing out of the Kefauver hearings were getting nowhere. In New York a swarthy little gambler called Harry Gross insolently defied the law to do its worst, and the district attorney could only weep in helpless anger.

Over the nation’s largest city, a cloud of smog lay heavy last week, stinging eyes and hospitalizing 25 workers in nearby Elizabeth, N.J. Retired Rear Admiral William S. Maxwell, the deputy smoke commissioner whose mistake was to crack down too hard on smoke violators while his boss was away, bitterly told an audience: “I know I am going to be fired.” In the uneasy air of 1951’s autumn, a sense of wrong stained the air like smog.