Another Christmas, Another Carol, and the Soviet Communist Conspiracy
While this is not the best of all possible worlds, its potential remains quite intact. And I think this potential stems from … the business of talking out, of dissenting, of arguing and rebutting…. Therein lies the hope: communication. That’s the highway between men’s minds—that guarantee as long as men talk they will not fight. And as long as they do not fight, they survive. So, I will leave you with this thought: don’t stop talking. And don’t stop thinking. And don’t, for God’s sake, stop arguing. No people, no race, no country and no civilization ever died from too much talk, too much divided opinion, too many variances of view.
—ROD SERLING, 1966
“A remarkable television venture has become embroiled in a heated controversy.”1 If a news item began this way between 1955 and 1975, there was a good chance it involved Rod Serling. In this case, it was, and it did.
It was, in fact, one of the most unusual endeavors in television history, and for a time it was one of the lost mysteries of the Serling catalog. “Carol for Another Christmas” aired on ABC on December 28, 1964, but was not seen again until Turner Classic Movies dusted off a copy for broadcast nearly fifty years later, when the New York Times called it “probably the darkest, most unusual version” of Charles Dickens’s classic story.2
The controversy, however, had nothing to do with its darkness or unusualness. The program was the first of a series produced by the Telsun Foundation, a nonprofit organization that had been established with a four-million-dollar grant from the Xerox Corporation specifically to promote the work of the United Nations. Telsun’s involvement provoked the ire of the John Birch Society, a right-wing political organization that vehemently opposed the United Nations and its goals. Declared the Birch Society’s public information director, “We hate to see a corporation of this country promote the U.N. when we know that it is an instrument of the Soviet Communist conspiracy.”3 The Birch Society frequently organized letter-writing campaigns in response to activities that it deemed procommunist, and it urged supporters to send Xerox “a flood of 50,000 to 100,000 letters of protest.” Xerox received approximately 29,500 such letters, but this outcry did not affect the company’s involvement with the series.4
“Carol for Another Christmas” was produced and directed by five-time Oscar winner Joseph L. Mankiewicz and starred Sterling Hayden, Peter Sellers, Eva Marie Saint, and Ben Gazzara, all of whom agreed to work for the union minimum, as did Serling. Thanks to the grant from Xerox, the program was broadcast commercial-free. “It’s rare in TV that legitimate challenges are thrown to you, and rarer still that we have a chance to do something worthwhile,” Serling said. “This is precisely that opportunity for me.”5 For Serling, the show also offered an opportunity to make a blatant political statement that even a fantasy setting would not obfuscate.
Serling’s adaptation of Dickens’s story is a stark reminder that Serling’s promotion of individual rights, reverence for individual dignity, and his faith in individual morality must not be mistaken for selfishness or egotism or egoism or confused with Ayn Rand’s definition of individualism, which promotes the individual’s happiness as the only moral imperative and argues that altruism is immoral. Indeed, less than two years after “Carol for Another Christmas” aired, Serling invoked Dickens’s story to make this point in a letter to the Los Angeles Times. Responding to a column in which Max Rafferty, California superintendent of public education, argued that no individual should bear responsibility for problems beyond his or her personal sphere of influence, Serling wrote,
Might I suggest to this illustrious educator that he pick up a story by one Charles Dickens (and if his eyesight is as confined as his humanity he had best get someone to read it to him) and take note of what the ghost of Jacob Marley said to Ebenezer Scrooge in “A Christmas Carol.” “Mankind,” cries the Ghost, “was my business. The common welfare was my business; charity, mercy, forbearance, and benevolence, were, all, my business.”6
This passage may be said to be at the heart of Scrooge’s transformation, and it is clearly the heart of Serling’s adaptation.
In Serling’s version, Ebenezer Scrooge is renamed Daniel Grudge, a wealthy former military man who has bitterly mourned his son, Marley, who was killed in action on Christmas Eve during World War II. Grudge’s bitterness has turned him into a strict isolationist, and the show opens with Grudge receiving a visit from his nephew, Fred, a college professor who begins a debate on personal and national involvement in world affairs. Grudge stubbornly rebukes Fred, professing a philosophy of “every man on his own side of the fence” on a global scale.
As in Dickens’s original, Grudge is soon visited by three ghosts. The first, the Ghost of Christmas Past, appears as a World War I soldier. He takes Grudge to the fog-shrouded deck of a troop transport ship covered from edge to edge with coffins containing dead soldiers from every country, sharing the ultimate equality of death. This vessel is part of a hundred-ship convoy that carries the dead from every war since the beginning of time. “I’m all of ’em,” the ghost says. “I’m the one who rallied around the flag. Any flag. All flags. I’m the dead—all the dead.” The ship ultimately transports Grudge to the horror of postnuclear Hiroshima, where he is forced to remember that he had once confronted the gruesome victims of the bomb and that he had once regretted the taking of innocent lives. The ghost does not intend to simply provoke feelings of guilt, however; he seeks to force Grudge to consider how much more destructive warfare has become in a relatively short period and how much more imperative it has thus become to find an alternative to war.
Grudge next encounters the Ghost of Christmas Present, who sits at a banquet table behind a glass wall, gorging himself while multitudes of starving people watch from just outside. He asks Grudge to consider the philosophy of uninvolvement in the face of this suffering. “How do you devise this exact science whereby you disinvolve yourself from all the anguish that isn’t in your direct line of vision? You are involved as of the date of your birth. You are all mankind because you are a part of mankind.” Serling similarly invoked John Donne’s “No Man Is an Island” in several other scripts as well as in lectures and speeches. In a commencement address at Ithaca College on May 13, 1972, he said,
The greatest thing you take away with you off this campus … is that moment of thoughtful reflection that has to do with the person next door or down the street or across the tracks, or on the other side of the earth. Every man’s death does diminish us. And it follows that every man’s poverty, every man’s indignity, every man’s frustration and hopelessness—they are a part of mankind.7
Like the Ghost of Christmas Past, the Ghost of Christmas Present does not solely intend to instill in Grudge feelings of regret or to place blame. Instead, the ghost uses the graphic sight of starving people to respond to some of the fears raised by groups such as the Birch Society: “If you shared a loaf of bread with them, how would you be relinquishing your freedom? If you joined other nations to administer vaccinations to their children, how would you have desecrated your flag? If you had offered them solace and hope and comfort, how would you have made yourself susceptible to tyranny?”
This snippet of dialogue is sufficient evidence that Serling’s adaptation frequently lapses into preaching and sounds like propaganda, which it largely was. The third segment of “Carol for Another Christmas,” however, redeems Serling’s script. In this sequence, Serling, in the best Twilight Zone fashion, creates a surrealistic nightmare to suggest the ultimate real-world price for following Grudge’s brand of isolationism.
The Ghost of Christmas Future transports Grudge to a postnuclear wasteland. Survivors who appear as if they have just crawled from beneath rubble have gathered inside the wreckage of a town hall. “Before we reached a time when talk became superfluous,” the town hall had been a place “where people could talk things over.” The United Nations had once been a place like this, the ghost says – a global town meeting hall. But then the talking stopped, transformed into “screams of anger, suspicion, and prejudice. No discussion—no place for it.”
Into this scene enters the Imperial Me. Preceded by a marching band and carried on a litter by men wearing shirts emblazoned with the word ME, he is greeted by the gathered crowd with hysterical screams normally reserved for rock stars. Climbing to a podium high above, he addresses them as leader of the “non-government of the Me people.” He preaches xenophobia, warning his followers to beware of “them from down yonder and cross river” who want to corrupt the Me people with the “insidious doctrine of involvement.”
“The world of the Ultimate Me is finally within our grasp,” he says. This coming utopia will be a time when “‘We’ will be stamped out and become ‘I’ forever!”
Grudge’s butler, Charles, is among the crowd, but he alone does not buy the gospel. He steps forward and speaks his conscience, trying to convince those in the audience of the need for cooperation and compromise, to get them to accept that an unwillingness to talk has brought this holocaust upon them. At first he is merely laughed at. Then he is charged with “subversion of the Individual Me” and the mob batters him under the approving eyes of the Imperial Me. He ultimately emerges from the crowd, dazed and bloodied, and climbs a teetering tower of wreckage, looking for escape. When he reaches the top, the mob chants, “Jump, jump, jump.” He pleads for those in the crowd to listen to reason, but the chanting continues. A child wearing a dusty cowboy hat and a holster around his waist opens a box that reads “Just Like Daddy’s!” Inside is a gun. As his mother watches, the boy takes out the gun and casually fires it at Charles, who topples to the ground, dead. He was the last of his kind. With his fall, all sanity, all conscience, has left Earth.
With this inconvenience out of the way, the Imperial Me returns to his sermon. “Now, we must dispose of those people from down yonder and cross river who want to come in here and talk,” he says. “And then we kill each other. Until there is one individual Me. The civilization of I.” Grudge asks a familiar question: “Ghost, is this the world as it must be or as it might be?” He gets no answer. But he has seen enough.
Daniel Grudge wakes on the floor of his study, unclear about how he got there. Fred returns, and the two of them conclude their debate from the previous day. Grudge’s transformation is a simple, sober change of opinion: The United Nations may not be the best answer to the world’s problems or the final answer, but so far, it is the only answer. “It seems the conclusion is inevitable—there must be involvement. We’ve run out of the luxury of alternatives. We either greet the morning … or accept the night.”
Daniel Grudge does not run through the streets handing out money and wishing strangers a merry Christmas—he simply enters his kitchen and announces that today, for a change, he’ll have his morning coffee in there with his (African American) servants.
Six months before “Carol for Another Christmas” appeared, Serling wrote to executive producer Edgar Rosenberg and director Joseph Mankiewicz, “For one of the few times in my career, I find myself incapable of making judgement on what I’ve done. I think it’s right. I think it’s poignant. I think it makes its point. But really, I’m not sure at all. This, gentlemen, is the seventh draft, which should attest to my dedication, even if the finished product says nothing for my talent.”8
Critics roundly panned the show, with many (correctly) labeling it propaganda. “Practically each and every line of dialogue [Serling] wrote sounded like a slogan, more at home in a pamphlet than in the mouths of actors on a stage,” Barbara Delatiner wrote in Newsday. Nonetheless, when a story includes three characters who exist specifically to deliver a message to another character—to teach that character a lesson—criticism of the show as didactic or even preachy seems misplaced. Further, while Serling’s overall message is delivered via sledgehammer, the story’s explicit support of the United Nations itself is understated. The organization is never presented as the world’s savior, and Daniel Grudge does not end up bowing down as a convert to the church of the United Nations. Grudge’s revelation, if it can be called such a thing, is only the acceptance that involvement in world affairs is good, isolationism is bad, and if an international entity can facilitate diplomatic solutions to disputes that would otherwise end in violence, this is a noble goal. Serling’s support for the mission of the United Nations was primarily based on the simple premise, voiced by the Ghost of Christmas Past: “When we stop talking, we start swinging. Then we bleed. Then we got problems. Like winding up dead.”