The Grand Inquisitor’s Manual

by Jonathan Kirsch

  Along with the common law and certain notions of civil liberty, all of these uglier traditions were carried to the New World in the baggage of the Pilgrim Fathers. Indeed, the Puritans were true believers and theocrats who sought religious liberty for themselves but refused to grant the same liberty to anyone else. One of the dirty little secrets of American history is the fact that the Quakers were ruthlessly persecuted in the Massachusetts Bay Colony in the seventeenth century. Quaker men and women were flogged for their defiance of Puritan law—like the Cathars, they refused to recognize clerical authority and declined to take oaths on religious principle—and they were ultimately ordered to leave the colony on pain of death. A few of the Quakers who defied the order of expulsion were tried and hanged by the civil courts of Massachusetts as thought-criminals in a brave new world.

  It was the first American inquisition, but not the last.

  “Who torments you?” is the simple question that set off a witch panic in Salem Village in the winter of 1692, the single most notorious example of how the machinery of persecution can be made to operate at any place and time, even here in America.

  A clutch of bored teenage girls in the settlement of Salem began to spend their idle hours in the company of a household slave named Tituba, who amused them with some of the “tricks and spells” she recalled from her childhood in Barbados. Back home in their own strict households, the girls began to act out in strange and unsettling ways, barking like dogs and braying like donkeys, screaming and stamping their feet to drown out the words of the family at prayer. Surely these outbreaks of adolescent hysteria were evidence of nothing more than a guilty conscience; after all, if Quakerism was a capital crime in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, the consequences of dabbling in black magic must have shaken the hearts of the Puritan girls who played in Tituba’s kitchen.4

  “Who torments you?” asked the credulous ministers and magistrates who assembled in Salem to investigate the curious phenomenon. Surely, they thought, the grotesque behavior was best explained as demon possession at the behest of a cult of Devil worshippers, and they wanted the girls to name names. At first, the girls were silent, but when their interrogators began to suggest a few likely culprits—including not only Tituba, an obvious suspect, but also various other citizens of Salem, all eccentric or unpopular—they saw a way to spare themselves by blaming others. They readily affirmed that Tituba was one of their tormentors, and they went on to denounce the wife of a common laborer who was thought to be “shrewish, idle, and above all slovenly,” and then a widow who was suspected of taking her handyman as a lover before marrying him. The list of accused witches and wizards grew ever longer, ranging from a five-year-old girl to an eighty-year-old man.5

  “They should be at the whipping post,” said a skeptical farmer named John Procter about the chorus of accusers. “If they are let alone we should all be devils and witches.”6

  Procter’s anxiety, as it turned out, was well founded. After the first few accused witches were formally put on trial in civil court on charges of sorcery, both Procter and his wife were denounced by the girls, who claimed that the diabolical couple was invisibly afflicting them even as they sat in the courtroom. “Why he can pinch as well as she!” one of the girls cried out. Such was the quality of “spectral evidence”—more accurately described by author Marion L. Starkey as “the crazed fantasies of wenches in their teens”—on which the judges were content to find the Procters and other defendants guilty of the crime of sorcery. A few of the accused witches managed to escape the gibbet by offering their own abject confessions, and when prompted by the prosecutors, the confessors were pressed to denounce yet others, the same chain of betrayal that had so often operated the gears of the inquisitorial apparatus in other times and places.7

  “There are wheels within wheels in this village,” one of the characters in Arthur Miller’s The Crucible is made to say, “and fires within fires.”8

  As with the Inquisition, not even spouses were safe from each other during the Salem witch trials. A woman named Martha Cory fell under suspicion when she reacted to the first news of the adolescent coven in Tituba’s kitchen by laughing out loud. Her eighty-year-old husband, Giles, was called as a witness at her trial, where he allowed that he found it hard to pray when she was around—an ambiguous remark, as was all his testimony, but damning words in the judges’ ears. Later, Giles himself was accused of witchcraft, and—perhaps because he had been so easily manipulated into betraying his wife—he fell silent in the face of the magistrates. So Giles was subjected to the traditional English torture of peine forte et dure in an effort to extract a plea from the stubborn old man; by refusing to answer as stones were piled on his chest, he effectively prevented the court from exercising its jurisdiction over him. According to tradition, if not the historical record, Giles Cory uttered only two words as he was crushed to death: “More weight.”9

  Other victims did not succeed in cheating the public executioner, and they were put to death by hanging on Gallows Hills, a spectacle designed to warn any other witches who had gone undetected against the consequences of trafficking with the Devil. The girls who had accused them in the first place were brought along to taunt the “firebrands of hell” one last time. When the cart carrying the condemned prisoners to one such hanging was momentarily stuck on the steep road, the girls shrilled that they could see the spectral figure of the Devil at work yet again. But the Devil was powerless to prevent the hangings, the last auto-da-fé to be conducted on American soil.10

  Soon after the hangings, some of the Puritan witch-hunters found themselves afflicted yet again. What tormented them now, however, was a troubled conscience rather than an invisible agent of the Devil. Another 150 victims of the witch panic, some as young as eight years old, were still awaiting trial on accusations that were based on nothing more than slander, gossip, and the rantings of frightened and vengeful children. Now, at last, a few sensible voices could be heard over the clamor of the accusers: “It is better that ten suspected witches should escape than one innocent person should be condemned,” observed the renowned Puritan preacher Increase Mather (1639–1723), neatly reversing the bloodthirsty declaration of the Abbot of Cîteaux during the Albigensian Crusade (“Kill them all; God will know his own”).11

  A new rule was now applied by which “spectral evidence” was excluded and the confessions previously extracted from various terrified defendants were put aside. Suddenly, the cases against the accused witches “melted like moonshine at daybreak,” as Marion L. Starkey writes in The Devil in Massachusetts. A general pardon was issued, and the remaining defendants were released, two of them carrying babies who had been born while they were behind bars. Even Tituba was delivered from jail, although she was promptly sold into slavery to a new master to raise money for the prison fees that every defendant was obliged to pay before being discharged. One of the pardoned women who was unable to scrape up the money died in prison, a debtor rather than a convicted witch.12

  As the years passed, some efforts at reparation were undertaken. Five years after the hangings, a day of fasting was declared in Massachusetts as a gesture of regret and repentance. On that occasion, Samuel Sewall, one of the nine judges of the Court of Oyer and Terminer who had sent the accused men and women to the gallows, offered an apology for “bring[ing] upon ourselves the guilt of innocent blood.” Ann Putnam, one of the adolescent accusers, waited until 1706 to acknowledge that the “spectral evidence” she had given “was a great delusion of Satan” and to “earnestly beg forgiveness of all those whom I have given just cause of sorrow and offence.” In 1711, the sum of 598 pounds and 12 shillings was appropriated by the state of Massachusetts for distribution to the surviving victims and their descendants. The following year, in a final and purely symbolic act of contrition, the excommunication of Giles Cory was formally revoked by the First Church of Salem.13

  If the Salem witch trials of 1692 can be compared to the Inquisition, they amount only to an inquisition in miniat
ure. The whole ordeal lasted fifteen months, only fourteen women and six men were put to death, and—even counting the men, women, and children who were imprisoned rather than executed—the total number of victims was equal to a single day’s work by the friar-inquisitors at an auto-da-fé during the Spanish Inquisition. None of the grand inquisitors was ever moved to the act of moral justice that Judge Sewall performed when he stood up in church and apologized for the spilling of “innocent blood.”

  But the points of similarity should not be overlooked. Like the Inquisition, the Salem witch trials were set in motion by whispered rumors and fabricated evidence; they were fueled by confessions extracted under the threat of torture and execution; their victims were demonized, quite literally, as agents of Satan; and the whole enterprise was carried out not by a lynch mob but by constables, magistrates, jailors, and executioners on the public payroll, all of whom acted in the name of the state as the ultimate guardian of law and order. Indeed, the most alarming fact about what happened in Salem in 1692 is the sure conviction of the civil authorities that extraordinary means were justified because of the dire threat posed to the sleepy village of Salem—“the Rendezvous of Devils,” as one panic-stricken preacher put it, “where they Muster their infernal sources.”14

  The Inquisition, as we have seen, was brought into existence on the same dire assumptions and for the same weighty purpose—it was “an organ of repression,” according to Giorgio de Santillana, “conceived for situations of emergency.” What constitutes an emergency, however, is always in the eye of the beholder. For Pope Innocent III, it was the pale and emaciated Cathar perfectus; for Torquemada, it was the bishop whose great-grandfather may or may not have been Jewish; for Cardinal Bellarmine, the Hammer of Heretics, it was a scientist who insisted that the earth revolved around the sun. For the town fathers of Salem Village, the emergency took the carnal form of any man, woman, or child whom Ann Putnam and her hysterical girlfriends might denounce as a witch.15

  More recently, of course, America has confronted other emergencies, some of them quite real and others that exist, as the witches of Salem existed, only in our imaginations. And here we confront the deadly and inevitable peril of the inquisitorial impulse: sometimes we do not know the difference between an authentic threat and an imaginary one until it is too late.

  America was at war with a flesh-and-blood enemy in 1942 when Franklin Delano Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066, a presidential decree that empowered military commanders to arrest, imprison, and confiscate the property of every man, woman, and child of Japanese ancestry along the Pacific seaboard from Washington to California. As early as 1939, the FBI had begun preparing a list of “enemy aliens,” and the first arrests were made on the same day that Pearl Harbor was attacked by the Japanese armed forces. Even infants with “one drop of Japanese blood” were to be sent to the internment camps: “A Jap’s a Jap,” declared the general who directed the operation. No hearings were held to determine whether, in fact, the victims of Executive Order 9066 actually posed a threat to national security, although the Supreme Court ruled in 1944 that the internment was justified by “pressing public necessity.” Not a single Japanese-American was arrested for an act of sabotage or espionage, however, and the 120,000 internees were wholly innocent of wrongdoing.16

  Imperial Japan’s military threat against America was real, of course, but the fear of Japanese-Americans turned out to be wholly imaginary. Precisely the same phenomenon was still at work in America only a few years later when Senator Joseph R. McCarthy (1908–1957) and the congressmen who served on the House Un-American Activities Committee (better known as HUAC) undertook a crusade to defend the country against what they claimed was a vast conspiracy to establish “Communist totalitarian dictatorship throughout the world” through “treachery, deceit, infiltration” as well as “espionage, terrorism and any other means deemed necessary,” according to the Internal Security Act of 1950.17

  By 1950, China was ruled by a Communist regime, the United States was at war against North Korea, the Soviet Union had acquired nuclear weapons with the assistance of a few spies in the Manhattan Project, and the threat of Communism was plausible enough to plant a terrifying idea in the collective imagination of American government, media, and business—“the fear of a Red tank on Pennsylvania Avenue,” as Lillian Hellman put it. But the red-baiting politicians and propagandists of the McCarthy era were not only afraid of Soviet aggression. Like the inquisitors of medieval Europe and the witch-hunters of colonial Salem, they sought to portray Communists and their fellow travelers in America as invisible and inhuman, “almost a separate species of mankind,” or, even worse, something both pestilential and apocalyptic, “the germ of death for our society,” a “political cancer” that had infected “every phase of American life.”18

  So a new model of the machinery of persecution was tinkered together and kicked into operation in America. No one was tortured or burned alive by HUAC and its senatorial counterpart, of course, but some of the old inquisitorial tools were unpacked and put to use. Testimony was taken in secret from anonymous informants, known euphemistically as “friendly witnesses,” as the congressional tribunals ranged across America, and then used in public hearings that functioned as the latter-day American equivalent of the auto-da-fé, some of them televised. Abject confessions were much sought after: “I want to humbly apologize for the grave error which I have committed,” pleaded writer Nicholas Bela, sounding like one of the defendants in the Moscow show trials, “and beg of you to forgive me.” Potential targets were hounded tirelessly by congressional investigators and federal law enforcement officers—like the FBI agent who showed up at Charlie Chaplin’s front door, a stenographer at his side, ready to interrogate the famous man on his own doorstep.19

  Above all, the men and women who were called to testify by HUAC and other congressional committees were judged not by their willingness to confess their own membership in the Communist party, past or present, but by their readiness to denounce their fellow members. Indeed, a Communist who had recanted and abjured his or her party membership was also obliged to identify those who had merely attended a party gathering or made a contribution to a so-called Communist-front organization, the modern version of the medieval crime of fautorship. Precisely like the tribunals of the Inquisition, HUAC subscribed to the principle that the failure of a witness to betray friends, relations, and co-workers rendered the witness’s own confession defective and unacceptable. To make matters worse, if a witness under subpoena was willing to answer some but not all questions—to confess his or her own political sins but not the sins of others—the witness forfeited the legal protection of the Fifth Amendment, and so the refusal to name names was treated as a crime in itself.

  “The ultimate test of the credibility of a witness,” declared Congressman Donald L. Jackson, a member of HUAC, “is the extent to which he is willing to cooperate with the Committee in giving full details as to not only the place of activities, but also the names of those who participated with him in the Communist Party.”20

  The result of the Communist witch-hunt was not only an “orgy of informing, “as journalist Victor Navasky puts it, but “a Cecil B. DeMille–sized one.” Indeed, HUAC was especially successful when its attention turned to the entertainment industry. Actor Sterling Hayden gave up the name of a former lover to the tribunal. A screenwriter named Martin Berkeley (My Friend Flicka) may have set a record when he offered a total of 161 names. Director Elia Kazan paid for an advertisement in the New York Times to explain his reasons for naming names and to encourage others to follow his example. Among the “unfriendly” witnesses who refused to name names was playwright Lillian Hellman, who declared that betraying others to save herself would be “inhuman and indecent and dishonorable” and famously told the committee that she “cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit this year’s fashions.” Hellman summed up the moral climate of the whole sordid era in the title of her memoir: Scoundrel Time.21

&nb
sp; Like the victims of the historical Inquisition and its other modern equivalents, the men and women who were targeted during the McCarthy era were not guilty of any wrongful acts; rather, they were accused only of thought-crimes. McCarthy and his fellow witch-hunters, like the grand inquisitors of the Middle Ages, defined a circle of approved beliefs and associations and condemned anyone who, by their lights, had crossed the line into heresy. “It was not enough to be American in citizenship or residence—one must be American in one’s thoughts. And lack of right thinking could make an American citizen un-American,” explains Garry Wills. “These latter can be harassed, spied on, forced to register, deprived of government jobs, and other kinds of work.”22

  The American red-baiters, like every other inquisitor, were quick to appeal to every ugly prejudice in order to turn public opinion against their victims. Ten of the first nineteen witnesses called by HUAC in its investigation of Hollywood were Jewish, and a stench of anti-Semitism hung over the proceedings. When a planeload of celebrities flew to Washington to show their support for the Hollywood witnesses, for example, Congressman John Rankin rose on the floor of the House of Representatives to reveal their given names, precisely the same ploy being used at that very moment by Pravda when it printed the Jewish-sounding names of the victims of Stalinist purges. Danny Kaye’s real name was David Daniel Kaminsky, the congressman announced, and Melvyn Douglas was actually Melvyn Hesselberg. “There are others too numerous to mention,” ranted Rankin. “They are attacking the committee for doing its duty to protect this country, and save the American people from the horrible fate the Communists have meted out to the unfortunate Christian people of Europe.”23