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The Sound of Cicadas. In one of the most moral gestures in the annals of humankind, the U.S. had sent its sons to die in Korea without hope of conquest or dream of reward. But the war hung fire, neither won nor lost, and the aggressor remained unrepentant, ready to strike again. For the U.S., public morality abroad seemed to be easier than at home. It had been a summer of suspicion and scandal. The charges of Wisconsin's Senator Joe McCarthy shrilled as insistently as the cicadas in summer's dog days, stirring distrust and fear. Both national chairmen of the nation's major parties stood accused of dipping political fingers into the RFC's bottomless jampot. In the last decade, the U.S. could boast of an enormous stride forward toward racial tolerance and understanding. Yet in Illinois last week, a grand jury of citizens exculpated the men who led the ugly Cicero race riots, indicted instead a man who pleaded for justice.
The wholesome thump of foot on pigskin and the blare of 25,000 brass bands sounded over the land. Yet in the autumn of 1951, even the appetite for football was soured by the breath of scandal. More serious was the fact that investigations of organized crime growing out of the Kefauver hearings were getting nowhere. In New York a swarthy little gambler called Harry Gross insolently defied the law to do its worst, and the district attorney could only weep in helpless anger.
Over the nation's largest city, a cloud of smog lay heavy last week, stinging eyes and hospitalizing 25 workers in nearby Elizabeth, N.J. Retired Rear Admiral William S. Maxwell, the deputy smoke commissioner whose mistake was to crack down too hard on smoke violators while his boss was away, bitterly told an audience: "I know I am going to be fired." In the uneasy air of 1951's autumn, a sense of wrong stained the air like smog.