CHAPTER 9

From the Middle Ground to the Murder of Emmett Till

The year that Rod Serling sold his first television script, 1950, was the same year that a new word entered the American lexicon: McCarthyism. Joe McCarthy, the Republican senator from Wisconsin whose name inspired the term, had been in office for three years by that point but had remained relatively anonymous. In February 1950, however, he gave an infamous speech in Wheeling, West Virginia, during which he claimed to have the names of 57 communists currently working in the State Department. Over time, McCarthy gave conflicting figures—maybe the number was 205, or maybe it was 81. Nonetheless, his allegations ignited intense media coverage and instigated what became known as the Second Red Scare.

While McCarthy’s accusations triggered investigations (inevitably labeled witch hunts) into purported communists working in the US government, the House Committee on Un-American Activities investigated the entertainment industry. Hundreds of people in Hollywood lost their jobs on the basis of supposed ties—tenuous at best, in many cases nonexistent—to communist groups. According to Serling, it was a time “when literally you were damn frightened to put your name on [a script] that said there are certain American flags that in the rain get wet.”¹

Serling was deeply troubled by McCarthy’s tactics and wrote a letter to the editors of the Cincinnati Enquirer to criticize the paper’s defense of McCarthy.² But during his early career, he wrote few dramatic works that McCarthy or his ilk could have deemed subversive. Referring to this period, he said, “I was a strange, haunted, middle-of-the-roader trying to find my way.”³ In a sense, Serling was being typically self-deprecating. Although he, like all artists, went through a developmental period, he always took a middle-of-the-road approach to mixing sociopolitical issues and drama, even after this developmental period was ostensibly over. He approached drama evenhandedly simply because doing so was in his nature. In 1962, Serling said, “It strikes me that we are living in a very polarized society during these times. We are either black or white. We are either patriotic or we are treasonous…. There seems to be no middle ground left for anyone to take a philosophical position. It happens to be the position I’d like to take. I want to stand at a vantage point in which I can look around me, see in both directions, feel flexible enough to take a step left or right on any given issue, in any given controversy.”⁴

While Serling’s personal views would usually lead him to “step left” on the political spectrum, his teleplays, individually and collectively, represent practical examples of the Fairness Doctrine, replete with characters who are given equal time to explicitly and validly present opposing sides of a given issue. In his early scripts, the given issue might not be particularly weighty, but Serling nonetheless presented points of view with which he disagreed.

In Lux Video Theatre’s “You Be the Bad Guy,” Detective Dan Shevlin takes a “liberal” position on the issue of crime and law enforcement and as a result is reprimanded by his hard-nosed lieutenant: “Usually when I get a good cop and promote him to plainclothes I have to sit on him so he doesn’t use his hands on prisoners. You, I get the other extreme. I get a social work routine. ‘Consider their home life, take into account their environment.’” Shevlin takes a fifteen-year-old into custody for shoplifting but ultimately releases him with only a warning because the kid comes from a bad environment and his father is an alcoholic. While this act might seem consistent with Serling’s sympathies, Shevlin’s compassion is not rewarded: the kid takes advantage of this leniency by graduating from shoplifting to murder.

Serling at times used this balanced approach strictly in the service of irony. One of his earliest scripts, “The Air Is Free,” originally written for radio, presents two characters trapped at the bottom of a mine shaft after an explosion. One, Gus Cameron, displays selflessness, worrying about the fate of his fellow miners. The other, Joe Dumbrowski, voices blatant disregard for anyone’s welfare but his own. Serling’s worldview would call for the former to be rewarded and the latter punished. In his drama, however, the selfless Cameron succumbs to weakness, strangles the selfish Dumbrowski, and ends up convicted of murder and facing execution.

In The Twilight Zone’s “The Whole Truth” (1961), a used car salesman comes into possession of an automobile that magically makes its owner incapable of telling a lie. The salesman ultimately breaks this spell by selling the car to someone who needs a lesson in truth-telling: Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev. In The Twilight Zone Companion, Marc Zicree characterizes this resolution as an example of Serling succumbing to “the prejudices of the day.”⁵ Mitigating this interpretation, however, is the fact that there is a scene preceding this resolution in which the used car salesman is approached by an American politician who is just as exaggeratedly dishonest.

“The Rack,” first broadcast on United States Steel Hour on April 12, 1955, is a courtroom drama whose effectiveness depends entirely on presenting equally reasonable positions on an issue: in this case, whether it is ever justifiable to commit what a military court would define as treason. The soldier on trial, Captain Edward Hall Jr., had collaborated with the enemy after being psychologically and physically abused in a North Korean prison camp, and Serling presents his defense with a high degree of sensitivity. Yet in the end, Hall is convicted and faces thirty years to life in prison.

In early 1955, Serling and Reginald Rose met with producer Worthington (Tony) Miner to discuss writing a pilot for The Challenge, a series that would dramatize equally valid sides of sociopolitical issues. Serling and Rose wrote a half-hour pilot script, “The Smallest Revolution,” in which a school bus driver, Bill Whitman, has been asked by his employer to sign an oath pledging that he “is loyal and will be loyal to our government and to our country, and that he is not, nor ever has been, a member of any subversive organization on the Attorney General’s list.”* Whitman hesitates to sign, though he is unsure why, and he is not articulate enough to offer a detailed rationale. When he realizes that his employer’s “request” is actually a requirement and that he will lose his job if he doesn’t comply, his hesitation becomes refusal, and he is indeed fired.

Many of the students are fond of Whitman and protest on his behalf, and a hearing is held to determine whether he should be reinstated. At this hearing, Whitman states his case simply: “If a man walked up to me on the street and asked me to sign a piece of paper saying I wasn’t planning to rob a bank, I’d want to know what right he had to ever figure I’d do such a thing. It would get me mad. Well, this piece of paper got me mad like that. I don’t think anyone has the right to ask me to swear I’m innocent. They’ve gotta prove I’m guilty. That’s what I thought we were supposed to believe in.”

The parents in attendance debate the issue, presenting all sides, some calmly and rationally, some emotionally. The attendees then prepare to vote on whether to recommend that the school board reinstate Whitman. The outcome is then turned over to the audience. “Don’t go,” says the closing announcement. “You, too, have been in this room. You, too, will be counted. The issue is yours to decide. How will you vote? That is the challenge.”

Serling and Rose brainstormed thirty potential episodes for the series, each of which would follow this template, presenting a different issue in relatable, dramatic terms and leaving the unresolved conclusion to the audience. The writers hoped that by presenting both sides of an issue fairly and equally, the series could address political and social issues without making sponsors overly nervous.^† The pilot was financed by the Fund for the Republic, a liberal activist group created in 1952 in response to what organizers viewed as McCarthy’s attack on civil liberties. The Fund’s activities took many forms—awarding grants, performing studies, working in public relations, and producing content for television. The Fund’s television work proceeded from the lofty goal of using the medium to help create an informed American public.

The pilot was produced in April 1955 and starred Jack Warden and was directed by Sidney Lumet. NBC showed interest, but despite this all-star team of creative talents, the pilot failed to attract a sponsor. Miner attributed this failure to sponsors’ trepidation regarding the subject matter, regardless of the actual content: “I suppose you merely mention the subject of loyalty oaths and the lunatic fringe would complain before even seeing the show and finding out we don’t editorialize.”⁶

Before producing the pilot, the Fund for the Republic sent a copy of Serling and Rose’s script to a media buyer, Reggie Schuebel, for consideration. Schuebel, who had no reason to prejudge the show, returned the script to the Fund along with a scathing review: “If I had been given this without the knowledge that it’s a Worthington Miner presentation, written by two well-known and accepted writers, my inclination would have been to toss it in the round brown file.” In addition to relatively mundane criticisms, Schuebel criticized Serling and Rose’s characterizations, which illustrates how any script involving political issues can encounter land mines, regardless of how careful its writers attempt to be. “The very act of slanting the characterizations destroys some of the acceptability of the script,” Schuebel wrote. “For example, the head rabble rouser (the fascist, if you will) is a rather snotty, crotchety little shot [sic]. Just because he is not liberal in his politics is hardly reason to portray him as a minor arch fiend.”⁷

Perhaps the performances in the pilot created subtleties that were not apparent on the printed page. Perhaps the script was edited between the time Schuebel read it and the time it was produced. Whatever the explanation, no character in “The Smallest Revolution” resembles an “arch fiend.” And when one of the liberal characters, an emotional old woman, calls this “head rabble rouser” a “fascist,” another liberal character passionately shouts her down: “Don’t use that word! There’s still room for differences of opinion in this country. Don’t you plaster people with labels. Plaster them with ideas, if you’ve got any.” The pilot episode of The Challenge is a powerful, passionately written piece that plays as timely now as it did in 1955. It has never aired on television.

Even when Serling rebelled against sponsor meddling with a script, his objections most often stemmed not from the interference with his ability to make a statement but rather from the interference with his ability to write honestly about real issues. What he most resented was being prevented from doing his job.

“The Arena,” written for Studio One, is a morality play set in the US Senate in which a freshman senator, James Norton, holds a grudge against the senior senator from his state, Senator Rogers, who was involved in ousting Norton’s father from office. Norton discovers information that is irrelevant to Rogers’s performance as a senator but would be politically devastating. The heart of the story is Norton’s moral dilemma about whether to reveal this information.

Serling never intended to make an explicit political statement with “The Arena.” He never intended to paint a particular political party in a bad light or as a beacon of virtue. If there is a political statement at the heart of “The Arena,” it is the entirely wholesome and simplistic observation that elected officials have a responsibility to put aside personal agendas so that they can do the business of governing. Yet by the time “The Arena” aired on April 9, 1956, sponsors had become so timid, so determined not to offend anyone, that they demanded that all references to existing political parties and current political issues be excised from Serling’s script.

Despite his overall willingness to dramatize opposing points of view, Serling had one issue on which he refused to even entertain the idea that there could be two equally valid opposing perspectives: prejudice. As he famously said in 1967, “I happen to think the singular evil of our time is prejudice. It is from this evil that all other evils grow and multiply.”⁸ More than twenty years earlier, when he applied to Antioch College, Serling wrote, “[I] consider the modern conception of racial groups a harmful creation of unnatural barriers between human beings that need not exist.”⁹ According to Anne Serling, when her father was in college he angrily confronted classmates who patronized establishments that refused to serve African Americans.¹⁰ He spoke out against prejudice fearlessly, consistently, and constantly, but he did not tackle it dramatically on a national level until the horrifying August 28, 1955, murder of fourteen-year-old Emmett Till.^‡

While visiting relatives in Mississippi, Till, who lived in Chicago, allegedly whistled at a white woman working behind the counter in a general store. In response, her husband and his half-brother kidnapped Till, tortured him, shot him in the head, and tossed his body into the Tallahatchie River. When his mutilated body was recovered, his mother insisted on an open-casket funeral because she wanted “the world to see what they did to my baby.” Media outlets published photographs of Till’s body, provoking worldwide outrage.

The two men who killed Till were arrested and tried the following month, and the trial attracted intense media coverage. Reporters from across the country descended on the tiny town in what many of the residents viewed as nothing short of a hostile invasion. Area businesses took up collections to help pay for the two men’s defense, a phenomenon that Serling described as the town declaring, “They’re bastards but they’re our bastards.”¹¹ After a five-day trial, an all-white jury acquitted them after deliberating for sixty-seven minutes. On January 24, 1956, Look Magazine published an interview in which the two men admitted to having murdered Till to make an example of him. They succeeded, though not in the way they had intended. Emmett Till’s murder is now considered the spark that ignited the modern civil rights movement.

It also ignited Rod Serling. Feeling compelled to comment on the atrocity of Till’s death, he produced his most infamous and controversial works, the first of which was titled “Noon on Doomsday.”

UNITED STATES STEEL HOUR

CBS

“Noon on Doomsday”

April 25, 1956, 60 min.

Alternate titles/productions/publications:

1. Teleplay published in Burack, Television Plays

2. Produced on Armchair Theatre (United Kingdom), July 6, 1958

3. Stage play written (several drafts); unproduced

Produced by the Theatre Guild; directed by Daniel Petrie

Cast: Everett Sloane; Jack Warden; Lois Smith; Albert Salmi; Philip Abbott; Frank Overton; Edgar Stehli; Truman Smith; May Lewis

Synopsis:

New England Town, the present time.

A crowd gathers outside a New England courthouse on a sweltering summer day, waiting to hear the verdict in the trial of local boy John Kattell, accused of murdering a “strange old man,” Chinik. Three hours and seventeen minutes after the jury begins deliberating, Kattell bursts out of the courthouse a free man. His neighbors lift him onto their shoulders and parade him around like a conquering hero. A woman grabs a reporter’s microphone and shouts, “That’ll teach those big city buttinskys to stay in their own backyards!” The crowd cheers.

Frank Grinstead watches this display in disbelief. A retired judge, Grinstead knows that a miscarriage of justice has occurred. Making the matter more unsettling is the fact that his son, Rod, served as Kattell’s defense attorney. Grinstead left town thirty years earlier in rebellion against the backward town’s provincialism but has returned to see his son handle this high-profile case. He had hoped that Rod would consider the moral aspects of defending someone so obviously guilty, but as Frank had feared, Rod sees the trial solely as a professional stepping-stone. On the courthouse steps, the judge who presided over the trial offers Grinstead his explanation for the verdict: “This is a little town, Frank. Behind the times, maybe, but full of loyalties. Sometimes perverse and misdirected, but they’re still loyalties. They found this boy innocent because some newspapers in big cities blew a call to arms on a bugle and told us he was guilty.”

At home, Frank confronts his son about his role and receives a similar explanation: “Look, this isn’t just a killer and a victim. It’s more than that. It’s a whole town with a set of attitudes; it’s a little group of people intimidated by outsiders and ordered to condemn someone in their midst! Half the country sits in the bleachers with thumbs down and they don’t remind us what is justice—they dictate it!” To his father’s dismay, Rod goes on to imply that the verdict was justified because Kattell was “a kid liked and known by everybody” while Chinik was “a stranger. A homely old man who couldn’t even speak English.” More than ever, Frank is convinced that the verdict was about “the nature of the victim, not the nature of the crime.”

One of the “outsiders” is Chester Lanier, a reporter from New York. Sitting next to an old man on a bench outside the courthouse, Lanier shares his opinion of the verdict: “That boy was guilty and he’s a menace.” “That may be,” the old man answers, “but he’s our menace. For this town to have found John Kattell guilty would have been like eating their young.”

The following day, the town’s Founder’s Day celebration becomes a celebration of Kattell’s acquittal. The celebration is muted, however, by the arrival of Frank Grinstead, Lanier, and Chinik’s daughter, Felicia. Grinstead lectures the crowd about Kattell’s well-known history as a violent drunk, which was glossed over during the trial. Kattell quickly lives up to this characterization by throwing a beer mug at Grinstead, bloodying his forehead. Lanier then tries to provoke an attack from Kattell, repeatedly insulting him and then handing him a knife and challenging onlookers to “watch what you call self-defense.” Kattell admits that Chinik’s death was not an act of self-defense and claims that the entire town should be viewed as accomplices to his crime: “Anyone would have done it, it just happened to be me!” Finally forced to confront the idea that defending Kattell makes them complicit in his crime, every person at the celebration turns their back on him and leaves.

His case now made, Judge Grinstead approaches Kattell to pronounce his sentence: “From this second on, you live in a desert.” Still searching for an ally, Kattell begins to plead his case to the old man perched on a nearby bench, the same man who had previously embraced Kattell as “our menace.” But even he disowns Kattell. Grinstead’s metaphoric sentence has become reality, and Kattell is left alone, weeping and begging for forgiveness.

Noon on Doomsday is an original work of fiction and has no connection with any people, living or dead, places, or events.

* Signing such oaths was not unusual during the McCarthy era and beyond. As late as December 1968, Serling became embroiled in something of a controversy concerning a requirement that he sign a loyalty oath before speaking at California’s Moorpark College. Serling initially refused to sign the oath, then returned the signed oath but refused to speak as protest for having been asked to sign it, and finally agreed to speak as long as the college did not pay him. He then used his speech to address the controversy. On that occasion and in subsequent comments, he used arguments and explanations that were almost verbatim from those presented in “The Smallest Revolution.” Serling once estimated that Rose wrote 98 percent of the finished script.

† Ten years later, in 1965, Serling became involved in another series proposal with a very similar premise. Spheres of Conflict proposed dramatizing controversial subjects such as abortion and interracial marriage from opposing viewpoints in paired episodes aired in consecutive weeks. Serling wrote two episodes (“Homeland” and “A Walk in the March Rain”), but the series was not produced.

‡ Although Serling tackled a racial theme in “As Yet Untitled,” an early 1952 episode of The Storm, the subject matter meant that no national outlet would consider producing the program, and it aired only in Cincinnati.