Carl%20Sagan%20-%20The%20Demon%20Haunted%20World

THE DEMON-HAUNTED WORLD
atmosphere in which no man feels safe against the public airing of
unfounded rumors, gossip and vilification'. He called HCUA's
activities 'the most un-American thing we have to contend with
today. It is the climate of a totalitarian country.'*
The playwright Arthur Miller wrote The Crucible, about the
Salem Witch Trials, in this period. When the drama opened in
Europe, Miller was denied a passport by the State Department on
the grounds that it was not in the best interests of the United
States for him to travel abroad. On opening night in Brussels the
play was greeted with tumultuous applause, whereupon the US
Ambassador stood up and took a bow. Brought before HCUA,
Miller was chastised for the suggestion that Congressional investigations
might have something in common with witch trials; he
replied, 'The comparison is inevitable, sir.' Thomas was shortly
afterwards thrown in jail for fraud.
One summer in graduate school I was a student of Condon's. I
remember vividly his account of being brought up before some
loyalty review board:
'Dr Condon, it says here that you have been at the forefront of a
revolutionary movement in physics called' - and here the inquisitor
read the words slowly and carefully - 'quantum mechanics. It strikes
this hearing that if you could be at the forefront of one revolutionary
movement. . . you could be at the forefront of another.'
Condon, quick on his feet, replied that the accusation was
untrue. He was not a revolutionary in physics. He raised his right
hand: 'I believe in Archimedes' Principle, formulated in the third
century BC. I believe in Kepler's laws of planetary motion,
discovered in the seventeenth century. I believe in Newton's
laws . . .' And on he went, invoking the illustrious names of
Bernoulli, Fourier, Ampere, Boltzmann and Maxwell. This physicist's
catechism did not gain him much. The tribunal did not
* But Truman's responsibility for the witch-hunt atmosphere of the late 1940s
and early 1950s is considerable. His 1947 Executive Order 9835 authorized
inquiries into the opinions and associates of all federal employees, without the
right to confront the accuser or even, in most cases, to know what the
accusation was. Those found wanting were fired. His Attorney General, Tom
Clark, established a list of 'subversive' organizations so wide that at one time it
included Consumer's Union.
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