I Married a Communist by Philip Roth Page B

to a close—the mere citing, on the radio, of American cities and states ("through the nippy night air of New Hampshire," "from Egypt to the Oklahoma prairie town," "And the reasons for mourning in Denmark are the same as they are in Ohio") had every ounce of the intended apotheosizing effect.
So they've given up.
They're finally done in, and the rat is dead in an alley back of the Wilhelmstrasse.
Take a bow, G.I.,
Take a bow, little guy.
The superman of tomorrow lies at the feet of you common men of this afternoon.
    This was the panegyric with which the play opened. (On the radio there'd been an unflinching voice not unlike Iron Rinn's assertively identifying our hero for the praise due him. It was the determined, compassionately gruff, slightly hectoring halftime voice of the high school coach—the coach who also teaches English—the voice of the common man's collective conscience.) And this was Corwin's coda, a prayer whose grounding in the present made it seem to me—already an affirmed atheist—wholly secular and unchurchy while at the same time mightier and more daring than any prayer I had ever heard recited in school at the beginning of the day or had read, translated in the prayer book at the synagogue, when I was alongside my father at High Holiday services.
Lord God of trajectory and blast...
    Lord God of fresh bread and tranquil mornings...
    Lord God of the topcoat and the living wage...
    Measure out new liberties...
    Post proofs that brotherhood...
    Sit at the treaty table and convoy the hopes of little peoples through expected straits...
    Tens of millions of American families had sat beside their radios and, complex as this stuff was compared to what they were used to hearing, listened to what had aroused in me, and, I innocently assumed, in them, a stream of transforming, self-abandoning emotion such as I, for one, had never before experienced as a consequence of anything coming out of a radio. The power of that broadcast! There, amazingly, was
soul
coming out of a radio. The Spirit of the Common Man had inspired an immense mélange of populist adoration, an effusion of words bubbling straight up from the American heart into the American mouth, an hour-long homage to the paradoxical superiority of what Corwin insisted on identifying as absolutely ordinary American mankind: "far-flung ordinary men, unspectacular but free."
    Corwin modernized Tom Paine for me by democratizing the risk, making it a question not of one just wild man but a collective of all the little just men pulling together. Worthiness and the people were one.
Greatness
and the people were one. A thrilling idea. And how Corwin labored to force it, at least imaginatively, to come true.
    ***
    After the war, for the first time, Ira consciously entered the class struggle. He'd been up to his neck in it his entire life, he told me, without any idea what was going on. Out in Chicago, he worked for forty-five dollars a week in a record factory that the United Electrical Workers had organized under a contract so solid they even had union hiring. O'Day meanwhile returned to his job on a rigging gang at Inland Steel in Indiana Harbor. Time and again O'Day dreamed about quitting and, at night in their room, would pour his frustration out to Ira. "If I could have full time for six months and no handcuffs, the party could really be built here in the harbor. There's plenty of good people, but what's needed is a guy who can spend
all
his time at organizing. I ain't that good at organizing, that is true. You have to be something of a hand holder with timid Bolsheviks, and I lean more to bopping their heads. And what's the difference anyway? The party here is too broke to support a full-timer. Every dime that can be scraped up is going for defense of our leadership, and for the press, and a dozen other things that won't wait. I was broke after my last check, but I got by on jawbone for a while. But taxes, the damn car, one thing and another