“Oh, when the saints go marchin’ in,
When the saints go marchin’ in,
Oh, I want to be in that number,
When the saints go marchin’in…!”
Naturally, with the entire American constituency out there as an eager audience, each one of these handsome screamers aches for a shot at the microphones as he goes galumphing grandly across the stage, past the electric chair, and down—thunk! splot! — into the elephant patties, but Styles Bridges, the President Pro Tempore and a respecter of hallowed traditions, limits the privilege to a few heroic whoopees from the Majority and Minority Leaders and Whips and a blown kiss and a blessing from the Senate Elders: George, Hayden, Russell, Byrd, and McCarran. Not that this stops the precocious junior Senator from Wisconsin — Joe McCarthy doesn’t give a shit for protocol, but grabs the mike out of Bridges’ hand (some say they saw Bridges hand it to him) and lets rip with a rampagious spate of old-fashioned, breast-beating, salt-boiler drolleries: “No one can push me out of anything!” he cries, and Bridges winks as though to say: You better believe it! “I’m not retiring from the field of exposing left-wingers, New Dealers, radicals and pinkos, egg-sucking phony liberals, Communists and queers! That fight can’t abate on my part or yours until we’ve won the war, or our civilization has died!” Promising the revelation of “a conspiracy of infamy so black that, when it is finally exposed, its principals shall be forever deserving of the maledictions of all honest men,” he announces hundreds of investigations that he plans to launch before the year is out into the State Department with its “prancing mimics of the Moscow party line,” the information- and teacher-exchange programs, East-West trade, the Government Printing Office, the defense industry, the Army Signal Corps (the Rosenberg spy-ring story isn’t over yet! he hints darkly), and even the Army itself: “I am going to kick the brains out of anyone who protects Communists!” The other Senators are made green with envy and flushed with embarrassment at the same time by all this public hyperbole, but the crowds love it, and even Uncle Sam seems reluctant to shut him up. Finally Joe himself remarks on all the time-wasting here tonight and demands that they get on with it: “It’s a dirty, foul, unpleasant, smelly job, but it has to be done! A rough fight is the only fight Communists understand!” He leaps gleefully down into the shit, getting a tremendous ovation — it’s a real pick-up, without him the show had begun to stall.
But time, inexorably, has been ticking away: there’s less than half an hour now to 8:01. The remaining speeches have to be scrapped and, except for the box-seat guests of honor, the rest of the VIPs — including all the senior magistrates, top military brass, forty-eight State Governors, and the official, unofficial, kitchen, golf, poker, and bedroom Cabinets, and all their families and dogs — have to come barreling out on the double, Betty Crocker, reeling off the names, sounding like one of those new slow-speed records on an ordinary turntable. Only Foster Dulles is given a brief moment at the microphone to release a few lugubrious epigrams from the doctrines of Massive Retaliation, Liberation of Captive Peoples, and Faith in Christ Jesus and the Future of Human Freedom, just to remind the citizens what these executions tonight are all about and to give Uncle Sam time to slip off and shazam himself into the President, but the rest go whipping by like tracer bullets. Betty Crocker’s voice now is just a shrieking whir of sound, like an electric beater churning through a fast-thickening pastry dough, as they come streaking out en masse, slipping and sliding, elbowing and punching, thundering right over poor Betty, scrambling frantically for their seats like they’re afraid somebody’s going to take them away from them. Most of them are well winded by the exercise, they’re not used to moving this fast, the judges especially, who are additionally handicapped by their long robes, ripping them on the doorjambs as they shoot out from the wings, tripping and falling over them, having to lift them like skirts to tippytoe at full gallop through the elephant droppings. By the time old Fred Vinson, the Supreme Court Chief Justice, hits the shit, it’s much heated up by the frenetic parade and slick as a greased skillet: woops! down he goes! He picks himself up hastily and—zzzipp! whap! — he’s down again. He proceeds more methodically the next time, placing first one foot under him, then the other, rising slowly…his feet slowly slide apart, he gropes for balance and pulls them together again, they spread fore and aft, he tips, rights himself, he’s running in place, clawing for air, he’s on one foot, the other, neither—SPLAT! His old crony Justice Tom Clark rushes to his aid, only to find himself skidding, slithering, pitching out of control, and landing with a mighty—look out, Fred! — ker-FLAP! on the Chief Justice’s hoary head, just as the old fellow was lifting himself on his hands and knees out of the muck. “That damn fool from Texas,” laughs Harry Truman. With the very honor and dignity of the United States Supreme Court at stake, Justices Robert Jackson and Sherman Minton come bounding to the rescue, as Clark and Vinson, leaning on each other, heads together as though in an embrace, butts out for balance, slowly straighten up — cautiously, hanging on, they turn to look toward their seats and what do they see but Jackson and Minton, faces white with panic and feet back-peddling frantically, bearing down on them—CRASH! they’re all down, wheeling around in the mire like the spinners of children’s board games, piling up in a heap finally under the Death House stage. They glance blearily at each other, count themselves, blanch, and duck — and sure enough, here they come: Stanley Reed and Harold Burton, feet flying, robes fluttering, arms outflung and grabbing at space — WHACK! SPLAT! Ker-SMASH! When the shit clears, the six Justices arc seen, exhausted and blinded by the muck, floundering aimlessly on their hands and knees. Dwight Eisenhower, peeping out from the wings, utters a short cry—“Christ on the mountain! what arc those monkeys doing?”—and disappears again.
Standing there backstage with his wife and sons, waiting for the three ritual knocks that will announce his second (formal) entrance as a special guest of honor, Judge Irving Kaufman has been pondering the rewards of virtue and high office, and the essentially — indeed, necessarily — divine origin of the concept of Law, and it occurs to him now, looking out on this scene and listening to one of the prison doctors beside him practicing his lines for later in the show (“I pronounce this man dead… I pronounce this woman dead… I pronounce…”), that it might behoove him to play a part in this rescue, for even if he failed and joined the rest of them down there in the dreck, it might not be the worst thing that ever happened to him. But just as he steps out, unannounced, onto the stage, he hears somebody, far off in the mob, shout his name. Eh—?! The man comes tearing through the jam-up, past the Rat Pack and pageant figures guarding the perimeter (it’s a piece of the Wild West he breaks through), and right into the VIP section. The man — it’s that damned interloping defense lawyer Dan Marshall from Nashville, up to his tricks again! — charges straight down the aisle and up to the foot of the stage: “A writ of habeas corpus!” he cries. “Hear my plea!”