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Telephone callers from Western Europe, Latin America, Africa and Australia have importuned Governor Brown to spare Chessman's life. Brown has received save-Chessman pleas from Belgium's Queen Mother and from the Social Democratic members of Italy's Chamber of Deputies. Secretary of State Christian Herter told his press conference last week that the Chessman case had stirred up "quite a surprising amount of interest" in South America. In Brazil, circulators of a save-Chessman petition claim more than 2,500,000 signatures. In The Netherlands, record dealers are profiting from brisk demand for a new platter, in Dutch, called The Death Song of Chessman. The London News Chronicle recently editorialized that "the great American nation is humiliated because of the agony of Chessman," and the London Daily Herald added that the day Chessman is executed "will be a day when it will be rather unpleasant to be an American." Buenos Aires' Critica called the Chessman case "the most terrible case that has faced the world in recent history."
Symbolic Cause. A score of condemned men besides Caryl Chessman await execution on San Quentin's Death Row, and another 140 or so in other Death Rows in the U.S. alone. But none of the others stir international telephone calls, hunger strikes, petitions and jukebox recordings. Why Chessman?
Essentially, the world has singled out Caryl Chessman from the faceless men on the world's Death Rows because Chessman wrote his way out of obscurity. Most of the men sentenced to death for criminal offenses in the Western world are inarticulate and without the influence that Caryl Chessman's talents as writer and self-taught advocate have brought to his cause. They tend to be, said Governor Brown in his message asking the legislature to abolish capital punishment, "the weak, the poor, the ignorant." But Chessman wrote a bestselling book, Cell 2455 Death Row.* Published in 1954, it has sold 500,000 copies in the U.S. alone, been translated into more than a dozen foreign languages. Cell 2455 Death Row is an erratic and pretentious book, but in the minds of its readers in the U.S. and abroad, it made Caryl Chessman a vividly living personality.