“It gets something off my chest, doesn’t it?”: Keeping Norman Corwin’s “Appointment” (1941) Because Liberty Won’t Keep in the Heat of Hatred

Speaking out against fascism—publicly and nationally, via the airwaves—used to be regarded in the United States of America as a moral imperative, or at least, in the terms of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), as an act “in the public interest.”

These days, in the era of MAGA on steroids—and, to be clear, the first “A” in the acronym can be readily substituted to designate any number of imperiled democracies—fascism is no longer the anathema to democratic rule that it used to be understood as constituting.  

This is mainly because democracy itself—as a construct, an ideal and a reality—has become anathema to the members of a growing movement that is celebratory of autocracy and that, perversely and perfidiously, argues anti-fascism to be a threat to autocracy as a preferred system of streamlined government in which checks and balances are discarded and in which oppositional forces and alternative voices are denounced as deleterious and traitorous.

I had been meaning to write about the weaponization of the FCC in the wake of the cancellation and temporary or partial silencing of late night talk shows critical of the Trump administration; but for some reason, and via a route too tedious to trace, I happened, quite fortuitously, as it turns out, on a script for a radio play by poet-journalist Norman Corwin, the unofficial “poet laureate” of US radio during the early to mid-1940s.

I have already devoted a dozen or so posts to Corwin and his work, including plays as diverse as “A Man with a Platform,” “My Client Curley,” and “Seems Radio Is Here to Stay.”   

To this day, one of the most rewarding acknowledgments of my scholarly pursuits, such as they are, remains receiving word from Corwin expressive of his approval of my academic writings on him.

Although I have discussed many of Corwin’s writings for radio in Immaterial Culture, I had somehow failed to show up for his “Appointment”—a play first produced on 1 June 1941 as part of the cycle Twenty-six by Corwin.

Among the distinctions of that particular production is that Corwin, after auditioning several other actors, cast himself in the leading role as Vincent, a prisoner—political, I assume—who composes an impassioned poem he calls a “psalm of sourish milk and galling honey,” a “hateful hymn” that, his incarceration notwithstanding, he launches “[a]gainst the tyrants and the traitors” of his day.

Reading the evolving poem to his embittered self, Vincent confirms its urgency even in the face of his removal from anyone of consequence who might hear, read and heed his words

… stamped and sealed: hot wax / Can hate. /Oh, we who love and love / Print clearly on the label: Blood. / Pure hate, Grade X and certified/ Seasons will keep, and Liberty will not.

Not altogether alone, Vincent does have an audience of one, an audience as captive as he.  Peter, his cell mate, mocks Vincent’s impulse of resorting to “hate,” a word that Vincent, mocking Peter in turn for his attempt to solve a crossword puzzle, defines as a “four-letter word meaning one day we’ll get even.  One day we shall keep appointment with some swine.”

That the “swine” of the times is never identified by name was due to network radio’s compliance with the US policy of neutrality prior to the attack on Pearl Harbor, which “Appointment” precedes by six months.  Corwin had wanted the villain of the piece—the source of Vincent’s vitriol—to be the Führer rather than the fictional commandant that takes his place; but, as Corwin states in the notes that accompany the published script, naming Hitler as the enemy “was more than [US] radio could take at the moment.”

As it turns out, “Appointment” is a more impactful parable as a result of not naming names.  The omission of a concrete reference to a particular despot not only makes it more applicable to the ominous developments of the present day—in which the media and free speech are coming under attack from the right, and in which hate speech is argued to be a right of the right only—but also underscores the message of the play, which argues against individualized attacks and for concerted efforts to preserve the freedoms under attack.

Hatred, as an impulse and a weapon, were prominent on US radio during the war on democracy that the US entered only belatedly.  One example of anti-fascist hate speech equal in grotesque violence to the late nineteenth-century caricatures of James Gillray in response to the Reign of Terror is Edna St Vincent Millay’s “The Murder of Lidice.”

First broadcast over NBC affiliated stations on 19 October 1942, thus four months after the Nazi’s retaliatory raid on the Czech village of Lidice, Millay’s dramatized verse narrative, a Grand Guignol for radio, was, as I put it in Immaterial Culture, commended

as an example of how radio—in contrast to a slowly responding legitimate theater that was still “labor[ing] under an adverse critical attitude […] prone to decry ‘journalism’ in drama”—successfully “picked up an item out of the current war and made it at once into effective art.”

Millay was approached by the Writers’ War Board (WWB), which, founded weeks after the attack on Pearl Harbor, became a recruitment center for anti-fascist poets, novelists, and playwrights.  While operating independently from the government, the WWB received government funding by the Roosevelt administration and worked largely at the request of government agencies like the Office of War Information (OWI).

Headed by the mystery writer Rex Stout, the WWB was, organized to serve the objective of influencing public opinion; it could do so far more directly than the OWI itself, which was restricted in its distribution of propagandistic material within the US.

“We shall hate, or we shall fail,” Stout declared in the plain speech with which he, as host of Our Secret Weapon (1942-43). meant to counter “sanctimonious double talk”:

Fight your enemies, shoot them, starve them, kill them, destroy their cities, bomb their factories and gardens—but love them! That may make sense to the Tuesday Evening Culture Club but not to me.

as an example of how radio—in contrast to a slowly responding legitimate theater that was still “labor[ing] under an adverse critical attitude […] prone to decry ‘journalism’ in drama”—successfully “picked up an item out of the current war and made it at once into effective art.”

Is the enemy a single person? Is it a people subsumed under the name associated with its leadership? Is personification useful in the squashing of a movement that threatens the very notion of personhood, of identity and the constitutional right to think differently?

Corwin’s “Appointment” reflects on the compulsion to fixate on a single manifestation of evil, the removal of which, at the appointed time—by vote or by violence—would presumably fix whatever is seen to be ailing a nation or the world at large: Be shot of Hitler—or a dictator by any other name—and you solve the problem of dictatorship.  To disabuse the public—or its presumed majority of persuadable and educatable individuals—of that notion was Corwin’s main objective when writing “Appointment.”

Sure, hate speech, in the words of Peter, Vincent’s cell mate, can be an “uplift for the sagging soul,” a “Vitamin V for Vengeance.”  Can it effect change, though, or is it a publicized version of the private hells we delight in creating for the folks we loathe?  

According to Corwin, the play’s intended message was that, even though “[n]o man in the history of the world has had more people wish him dead than Adolf Hitler” and the “wishful thinking of millions has been concentrated on the violent death of this fantastic little pervert,” the “frequent expression of fond dreams of assassination by otherwise mild and benign folk” was not going to counter the nightmare scenario that gave rise to those “fond dreams.”

As Corwin saw it and sought to make his listeners see, “individual terrorism avails nothing.”  Rather, it is

only by plan and calculated action that men can hope to be free.  Deliverers don’t pop up all of a sudden.  It takes more than a Hitler to make a Hitler—it takes Thyssens and Baldwins and Chamberlains and Daladiers.  Likewise it needs more than a leader to make men free.  It needs the men themselves.

Men, women and transgender activists.  The attacks on constitutional freedoms once taken for granted are not only real—they may be devastatingly permanent, resulting in an ultimate voicelessness.

“In fifteen minutes,” as Vincent is told by Mark, a supporter of his cause. after a prison break succeeding the killing of Peter at the extended hands of the Commandant, the Commandant “will be succeeded by some stooge just as bad or worse.  You’re hitting at a hydra head.  Two rats grow in the place of every lizard.”

These days, rats multiply by the minute.  “Appointment,” in which Corwin imagined himself as a split personality of a journalist and a poet in search of answers, strikes me as a remarkably apposite plea for action that, regardless of a left-leaning writer’s inclination to attack the right, is—or should be—a matter not of “right” or “left,” or of right or wrong, but of political discourse, a concourse of sorts and thoughts that is rapidly disintegrating, disappearing—or, rather, made to disappear—in the current climate of neo-fascism fueled as much by hate speech as it is by disinformation.

“It gets something off my chest, doesn’t it?” Vincent defends his “hateful hymn.” As Corwin reminds us, it just is not enough to get something “off [your] chest” by ranting, in verse or in prose, privately or publicly, and on whatever platform you manage to allocate for yourself. What is needed is a return to meaningful discourse to effect change … while, for now, change by democratic means is still possible.