Chapter XI

A CITIZEN OF THE WORLD

“Idealists are all crackpots until they become heroes or saints.”

—Caresse

As Caresse reached another turning point in her life, she was still her father’s daughter, and William Jacob was a man who “dreamed of, believed in, and planned for a better world for rich and poor alike.” The cause she was seeking turned up on her doorstep in January 1948. “A young lawyer, Rufus King, and his wife Janice came to my editorial office in Washington, bringing a beautiful idea with them in manuscript,” she wrote. “They appealed to me as an independent publisher to print their work. Other publishers had turned it down as, at best, ‘ahead of its time,’ or at worst, ‘crackpot.’ These young people aimed to do something towards making this earth of ours a better habitat.”

We have just survived a cycle of three decades that carried us from total war to total war. This time, the cycle may be shorter; and this time it promises a holocaust. . . . We are young, with good years ahead of us in this life. . . . We believe that our lives could scarcely mean more to us than yours to you. . . .

This document of some hundred pages—The Manifesto for Individual Secession into a World Community—was couched in legal terms, but the thrust was obvious: A small number of national leaders had unleashed a weapon of total destruction. Only by pledging allegiance to a higher, international authority could mankind avoid the total disaster of a third World War.

“That night, in reading over their conception of World Citizenship, I realized that I had in my hands the cornerstone of a new World Order,” Caresse noted. “Their greatest appeal was to my heart and conscience. I knew it [The Manifesto] would have no immediate political or financial success. The best I could promise was to get it into print in Paris in the spring, and to distribute review copies.”

She began by placing announcements in Washington newspapers inviting anyone interested in world citizenship to gather at the new editorial office at 2008 Que Street. Some 50 people came, a cross-section: “the religious man, the artist, the soldier, the diplomat, the housewife, the businessman, the student.” The movement failed to gain momentum until April, when Caresse flew to Europe with Rufus King, taking the Manifesto in his briefcase. At their first stop, Hyde Park Corner in London, the tall, lanky young American impressed passers-by with his well-expressed ideas. In Paris, Roger Lescaret’s press put the Manifesto into production, with the publication date May 15, 1948.

Also in May, the Black Sun Press produced the first World Passport:

This passport has little meaning in itself. You will note that you have made no pledge or promise. You are simply identified as one who “will endeavor to recognize” his responsibilities as a member of the single, total World Community. . . . The number on your passport is the number of human beings who have accepted this trust already. Their numbers grow. We welcome you and honor the step you have taken.

A young American in Paris, Garry Davis, was the first to act upon the idea of individual secession. A slight man with sandy hair and a self-effacing smile, Davis was deeply moved by his experiences as a bomber pilot in World War II. “No one really understood except those of us who had been out there with them and heard them laugh the night before it happened, heard them jeer obscenities . . . and then seen them die the next morning.” The son of Meyer Davis, a popular society orchestra leader, Garry planned to make a career as an actor before the War. When he returned, he was not the same carefree young man who left for flight training. After he read the Manifesto, “The only thing that was clear in my mind was that I, Garry Davis, was in some way responsible for the march of nations toward World War III.”

In a dramatic gesture, Davis walked into the Passport Division of the U.S. Embassy in Paris and renounced his American citizenship. To prove his point, he camped on the steps of the Trocadero, at that time the meeting place of the United Nations, designated an international territory. In a filibuster lasting for several days, Davis lectured the passers-by about U.S. history and the Founding Fathers—Madison, Monroe, Jefferson—self-declared “Americans” who relinquished citizenship in their native states to declare allegiance to a higher authority. Citizens of contemporary nation-states—particularly the Big Four—should renounce their own national interests on behalf of world government, according to Davis. (Lescaret, hero of the French Resistance, infiltrated the crowds to take meals to Garry.) The crowds thinned out as soon as the novelty wore off, but one young American stayed on.

“Are you Garry Davis? I’m Rufus King from Washington.”

“I’ve heard about you, Rufus. Good to know you.”

“I thought you could use some professional advice. Say, I’d like to help you to put this thing over . . . We could draw up a world Constitution, a Bill of Rights, a Pledge of Allegiance, etc., for world citizens.”

Despite Rufus’s offer of legal aid, Davis was a young man without a country, subject to extradition by the French. Caresse knew the day would come when gendarmes would move in to arrest him, and she did what she could to prevent such injustice. Reporting back to Olson in Washington, she wrote:

I am now official printer to the Citizens of the World! Youth movements, World crusaders, etc., etc., flock around my door. I am printing leaflets for “followers of Garry Davis”—it’s growing—60 countries heard from. Youth is against the Atlantic Pact—or any military pact; they’re scared, they want to rise up soon and assert their rights to live in peace. You’d better come help us—or prepare to help me have a big rally in Washington in September!

The international press at the time discredited and caricatured Davis and the World Citizens movement. As publisher of its “Bible,” the Manifesto, Caresse Crosby was tarred with the same brush.

The Sunday News in Washington noted on June 27:

World Citizen No. 3! Mrs. Caresse Crosby has a world citizenship movement of her own, in which she follows Mr. and Mrs. Rufus King on an informal citizenship roll. . . . Puzzled State Department officials have no answer. Millions outside want “in,” desiring the most useful citizenship in the world, and others clamor to renounce the privilege.

Several periodicals returned the published Manifesto to Caresse without reviewing it. A few enlightened individuals—such as Norman Cousins, editor of The Saturday Review and leader of the United World Federalists—praised the World Citizens movement as an idea whose time had come.

A major breakthrough occurred when Robert Sarrazac, leading French intellectual, risked his reputation by recruiting a distinguished group to meet at the Cité Club, a Conseil de Solidarité, with André Breton, the poet, and Albert Camus, the novelist, among them. With such substantial backing, the world press began to swing in Davis’s favor. The New Yorker acknowledged: “Mr. Davis, whether he acted wisely or foolishly, is in step with the universe. The rest of us march to a broken drum.” Life noted that Davis had aroused a deep longing for peace. An editorial in Harper’s magazine stated that “Six months ago, young Davis was a pathetic and somewhat absurd figure, staging a one-man sit-down strike on the doorstep of the U.N. Assembly. Now . . . he is supported by a group of intellectuals which astonishingly includes Albert Einstein, the novelist Richard Wright, and a number of French literary figures such as Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre, and André Gide.”

In the busy summer of 1949, Davis took the Manifesto to the first World Citizens’ rally in Belgium, and Caresse printed an agenda for the Peoples’ World Convention to be distributed by the British Parliamentary Committee for World Government. She was also invited to become sub-editor of Across Frontiers, a world newspaper edited by Jerry Kraus in London. Never one to play second fiddle, she decided to form her own organization.

A new idea began to take shape, of finding a home for World Citizens in an international territory. Pietro Lazzari, the Italian artist whose works Caresse had shown at the Crosby Gallery, thought of the town where his mother was born in Rieti province. “You must go there and see the ruined castle at Roccasinibalda,” Pietro suggested. “It’s just the place to start your ‘one world’ idea. Artists would love to live in that place.”

The next summer, Caresse took a lease from the Vatican with the option to buy, a million lire as down payment. “My idea was to provide an atmosphere where the poet and the philosopher, the artist, can really create ideas that will lead the world to peace and sanity. It’s a very big idea, but this is a very big place to start . . . In this ancient fortress, with a new idea, with ideas for a world where artists are important, I can carry on my own activities and help others . . . There’s a sense of beauty, of eternity . . .”

Once settled in, she determined to declare her own small fiefdom a Città del Mondo. She invited the women of the village to come up to the castle to sign the petition. At that time, there were three women for every man, so many men had lost their lives during World War II.

Their hostess offered vino and an attentive, sympathetic hearing of their problems. Before the signoras left, they voted to be recognized as citizens of the first World City. They marched back down the cobblestoned path to convince their men and the Mayor of the Commune that their town should be declared an international territory. Caresse wrote to a colleague in Washington:

During the past two months I have been living here in an ancient castle . . . in a pitifully poor, but humanly beautiful community (500 souls) in the foothills of the Abruzzi . . . This mondialization has drawn a great deal of public and journalistic attention to Roccasinibalda. But while its women have taken a courageous step forward in time, their present surroundings remain pitifully inadequate. They look to me and to America as their saviours.

To another Washington correspondent, Caresse urged help for “these men and women . . . I have visited the rubbled homes of the poorest citizens and know that with a small contribution of materials and of willing minds and hands we could mend and restore . . .”

We will need an engineer for advice, an architect for plans, some handy-men and white-washers for manual work . . . the use of a buzz-saw for cutting planks, the use of a cement mixer, a sewing machine, and one or two young women to sew curtains, etc.

At the end of another busy summer, the Vatican refused to grant Caresse the option to buy the Castello. Her dream of establishing a World Citizen center at Roccasinibalda would be postponed for another ten years.