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RHETORIC, POLITICS AND SOCIETY

A Gossip Politic
Edited by
Andrea McDonnell
Adam Silver
 Rhetoric, Politics and Society

Series Editors
Alan Finlayson, University of East Anglia, Norfolk, UK
James Martin, Goldsmiths, University of London, London, UK
Kendall R. Phillips, Syracuse University, Syracuse, USA
Rhetoric lies at the intersection of a variety of disciplinary approaches
and methods, drawing upon the study of language, history, culture and
philosophy to understand the persuasive aspects of communication in all
its modes: spoken, written, argued, depicted and performed. This series
presents the best international research in rhetoric that develops and
exemplifies the multifaceted and cross-disciplinary exploration of prac-
tices of persuasion and communication. It seeks to publish texts that
openly explore and expand rhetorical knowledge and enquiry, be it in
the form of historical scholarship, theoretical analysis or contemporary
cultural and political critique. The editors welcome proposals for mono-
graphs that explore contemporary rhetorical forms, rhetorical theories and
thinkers, and rhetorical themes inside and across disciplinary boundaries.
For informal enquiries, questions, as well as submitting proposals, please
contact the editors: Alan Finlayson: a.finlayson@uea.ac.uk James Martin:
j.martin@gold.ac.uk Kendall Phillips: kphillip@syr.edu
Andrea McDonnell · Adam Silver
Editors

A Gossip Politic
Editors
Andrea McDonnell Adam Silver
Communication Political Science and International
Providence College Relations
Providence, RI, USA Emmanuel College
Boston, MA, USA

ISSN 2947-5147 ISSN 2947-5155 (electronic)

Rhetoric, Politics and Society
ISBN 978-3-031-15118-7 ISBN 978-3-031-15119-4 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-15119-4

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer
Nature Switzerland AG 2023
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights
of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on
microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and
retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology
now known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc.
in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such
names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for
general use.
The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and informa-
tion in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither
the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with
respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been
made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps
and institutional affiliations.

Cover credits: CSA Images/Vetta/Getty Images

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature
Switzerland AG
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
 Acknowledgments

We are especially thankful for the efforts of the contributors, whose schol-
arship has brought this topic to life with rigor and spirit, and whose good
humor throughout the editorial process has made work on this project a
pleasure and a privilege.
We are grateful for the support from members of the editorial team
at Palgrave, especially Shreenidhi Natarajan, who helped see the book
through to completion.
We also wish to thank Zachary Lebreiro and Madison Suitor for their
diligence and assistance throughout the research process.
Special thanks to the Ross Priory Broadcast Talk Seminar Group,
whose innovative interdisciplinary spirit has fostered a number of the
projects contained in this volume, and to the Political Science depart-
ments at Providence College and Emmanuel College for their ongoing
support of our scholarly endeavors.

v
 Contents

1 Introduction 1
Andrea McDonnell and Adam Silver

Part I Gossip and the Press

2 The Omigod no! Notes on News Talk 11
Paddy Scannell
3 Talk as News on Television 27
Michael Higgins
4 The Celebrity Interview: Gossip, Empathy and News
in Oprah Winfrey’s CBS Interview with Meghan
Markle 43
Jin Shen and Martin Montgomery

Part II Gossip and the President

5 Hedda Hopper Meets JFK: Hollywood Gossip,
Right-Wing Politics, and the Kennedys 67
Jennifer Frost
6 “Enquiring Minds Want to Know”: President Bill
Clinton and the Blurring of News and Gossip 83
Jennifer Hopper

vii
viii CONTENTS

7 A Trickle-Down Effect of Foreign Policy on Domestic

Narratives: Populism and Trump’s Espousal
of Conspiracy and Gossip to “Make America Great
Again” 99
Prashant Rastogi

Part III Gossip and the Public

8 Media Framing of the Christine Blasey Ford
Testimony: The Influence of Gossip on Sexual
Violence Discourses 117
Madison A. Pollino
9 The Marriages of Celebrity Politicians: A Social
Semiotic Approach to How Commenters Affiliate
Around YouTube Gossip Videos 133
Olivia Inwood and Michele Zappavigna
10 Gossip on the Hill: Bonding, Bitching, and Politicians’
Home Style on Twitter 155
Andrea McDonnell and Adam Silver

Index 177
 Notes on Contributors

Frost Jennifer teaches US history at the University of Auckland, New

Zealand, and is the author of Hedda Hopper’s Hollywood: Celebrity Gossip
and American Conservatism.
Higgins Michael is Senior Lecturer and Programme Leader in Media and
Communication at the University of Strathclyde in Scotland. His research
focuses on the manner in which media and culture influences the polit-
ical realm. Recently, this has concentrated on the rise of aggressiveness
and conflict in media, including his book Belligerent Broadcasting (with
Angela Smith, 2017). Michael’s other books include Media and Their
Publics (2008), The Cambridge Companion to Modern British Culture
(2010) and The Language of Journalism (with Angela Smith, 2nd ed,
2020).
Hopper Jennifer is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Southern
Connecticut State University where she regularly teaches courses in
American Government, the US Presidency, Congress and the Legislative
Process, and Media & Politics. She is the author of Presidential Framing
in the 21st Century News Media: The Politics of the Affordable Care Act
(Routledge, 2017). Her scholarship has also appeared in White House
Studies, Social Science History, and the International Journal of Commu-
nication. Her research interests focus on political communication, the
presidency, and the US news media, particularly as they relate to health
care politics and policy.

ix
x NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Inwood Olivia is a Ph.D. Candidate in the School of the Arts and Media
at the University of New South Wales. Her current research uses methods
in Systemic Functional Linguistics to explore issues of mis/disinformation
and deceptive communication on YouTube. In 2018, she graduated with
First Class Honours in Media, Culture, and Technology, writing her thesis
on blockchain technology start-ups from a social semiotic perspective. She
has research articles written with Associate Professor Michele Zappavigna
recently published in Discourse & Communication and Social Semiotics.
McDonnell Andrea is Associate Professor of Communication and
Director of the Communication Minor at Providence College, USA,
where her research examines the relationship between celebrity culture
and media audiences. She is the author of Reading Celebrity Gossip Maga-
zines (2014), and co-author, with Susan Douglas, of Celebrity: A history
of fame (2019). Her research has appeared in Psychology of Popular Media
Culture and Critical Studies in Media Communication and has been
featured in the New York Times, E! News, NPR, Buzzfeed, and the BBC.
Montgomery Martin is Emeritus Professor of Literary Linguistics at
the University of Macau, China, and Visiting Professor of Media and
Communication at the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, UK. He has
written widely on language and the media—especially on aspects of broad-
cast talk. His latest book is Language, Media, and Culture: The Key
Concepts, published by Routledge.
Pollino Madison A. is a Doctoral Student in Media and Communica-
tion at Bowling Green State University. Her research uses critical, queer,
and feminist frameworks to examine the role of culture in contempo-
rary discourses regarding gendered violence. She is interested in how
hegemonic representations of gender, race, and class influence societal
perceptions of gendered violence as well as one’s decision to disclose
their experiences in interpersonal relationships. She has published work
in Critical Studies in Media Communication, Communication Education,
Feminist Media Studies, and Qualitative Inquiry.
Rastogi Prashant is a Doctoral Candidate at O.P. Jindal Global Univer-
sity, India, and a Geopolitical Risk Analyst for WoRisGo. His research
lies at the intersection of International Relations and Peace and Conflict
Studies with research areas including Conflict Resolution, Populism,
Rebel Communication, Terrorism, Public Diplomacy, and Foreign Policy.
 NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS xi

He also works extensively on Geopolitics, Business Continuity Plans, and

Information Warfare.
Scannell Paddy is Professor Emeritus in the University of Michigan’s
Department of Communication. He is a founding editor of Media,
Culture, and Society and author of numerous books including Media and
Communication, Television and the Meaning of Live, Why do People Sing?,
and Love and Communication.
Shen Jin received her Ph.D. degree in English linguistics in 2018 from
the University of Macau where she worked as a research assistant under
Prof. Martin Montgomery’s supervision. Her doctoral research examines
the use of interactional devices in The Oprah Winfrey Show. Her research
interests focus on discourse interactional sociolinguistics, conversation
analysis, and media discourse.
Silver Adam is Associate Professor of Political Science at Emmanuel
College, USA, where his research focuses on the American Political Party
Development, specifically the relationship between political elites and
the electorate on the crafting of campaign strategy. He is the author
of Partisanship and Polarization: American Party Platforms, 1840–1896
(forthcoming) and co-editor of Agitation with a Smile: Howard Zinn’s
Legacies and the Future of Activism (2014). His research has appeared
in American Nineteenth Century History and Social Science History, and
he has contributed to the Washington Post.
Zappavigna Michele is Associate Professor in the School of Arts and
Media at the University of New South Wales. Her major research interest
is in exploring ambient affiliation in the discourse of social media using
social semiotic, multimodal, and corpus-based methods. She is a co-editor
of the journal Visual Communication. Key books include Searchable Talk:
Hashtags and Social Medi Metadiscourse (2018) and Discourse of Twitter
and Social Media (2012). Recent co-authored books include Researching
the Language of Social Media (2014; 2022) and Modelling Paralanguage
Using Systemic Functional Semiotics (2021).
 List of Figures

Fig. 4.1 Screen grab from the interview 1 50

Fig. 9.1 Dialogic affiliation system (Adapted
from Zappavigna, 2018) 141

Illustration 3.1 Higgins illustration 32

Illustration 3.2 Higgins illustration 32

xiii
 List of Tables

Table 9.1 Nicki Swift video dataset 137

Table 9.2 Sub-systems of attitude 140
Table 9.3 Questions asked in Nicki Swift comment threads 142
Table 10.1 Top 3 most followed democrats and republicans
on Twitter 162
Table 10.2 Tweets by account and member, February 14-March
20, 2022 164

xv
 CHAPTER 1

Introduction

Andrea McDonnell and Adam Silver

The renowned columnist Liz Smith is often quoted as remarking, “Gossip

is just news running ahead of itself in a red satin dress. (Cheng & Barnes,
2017).” If we take a juicy tidbit and peel back the glitzy, the kitchy,
and the bitchy, what remains? In a twenty-first century era of constantly
breaking news, rumors, innuendos, and tweets are significant in their
own right; they both respond to and drive the mainstream news cycle.
From human interest stories to palace intrigue to punditry, political talk
often shares many of the same features of interpersonal gossip: It revels
in speculation, casts a moral judgment, influences opinion, and serves as
a form of entertainment (Jones, 1980). The late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries, thanks in part to the rise of cable news, national

A. McDonnell (B)
Communication, Providence College, Providence, RI, USA
e-mail: Amcdonn3@providence.edu
A. Silver (B)
Political Science and International Relations, Emmanuel College, Boston, MA,
USA
e-mail: silvera@emmanuel.edu

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

Switzerland AG 2023
A. McDonnell and A. Silver (eds.), A Gossip Politic,
Rhetoric, Politics and Society,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-15119-4_1
2 A. MCDONNELL AND A. SILVER

news magazines, and growth of celebrity media, ushered in a period of

increased tabloidization, a shift away from the “objective,” “hard” jour-
nalistic values of post-World War II era and toward a discourse centered
on gossip, infotainment, and human interest (Franklin, 1997). But in
truth, debates about the relationship between news and gossip have
existed for as long as there have been publications to cover either. The
penny papers of the nineteenth century emphasized the lurid and scan-
dalous (MacGill Hughes, 1940, 11; Schudson, 1981); their low cost and
accessible content also allowed them to serve as an entry point into poli-
tics for the previously excluded working class (MacGill Hughes, 1940,
pp. 7).
By the 1930s, gossip columnists like Walter Winchell and Hedda
Hopper were famous and influential journalists who blended news and
entertainment reporting and toed the line between the worlds of high
society, celebrity, and politics. Winchell was known for his dramatic,
signature style of reporting, beginning with a “flash” bit—something
scandalous or crime-driven—and then moving into a blend of gossip
and hard news reporting (Gabler, 1994, pp. 215). This was especially
compelling on radio, where his staccato delivery created an imme-
diate sense of urgency and interest. At the height of his career, fifty
million Americans (out of a total population of seventy-five million)
either listened to Winchell’s weekly radio broadcast or read his daily
column, and he has been credited with transforming journalism into a
form of entertainment (Gabler, 1994). Of course, Winchell later went
on to align himself with Joseph McCarthy and to use his influence in
an effort to undermine his rivals; his political machinations ultimately
soured his career. Similarly, Hedda Hopper rose to prominence with
her column “Hedda Hopper’s Hollywood,” published in the Los Angeles
Times (Frost, 2011). She reported largely on movie stars, but politicians
were not immune to her exposés; in 1939, her reporting on the divorce
of President Roosevelt’s son, Jimmy, made national news (Fine Collins,
1997). Hopper was also a vocal Republican and conservative, speaking
at rallies and conventions, and later running (unsuccessfully) on Repub-
lican ticket for a county political seat (Fine Collins, 1997). She would
later become a prominent force behind the creation of the Hollywood
Blacklist, which accused members of the entertainment industry of being
Communists.
These interconnections between politics and entertainment are long-
standing. But they have become ever more enmeshed in the twenty-first
 1 INTRODUCTION 3

century, as the countless media platforms that have sprung up to host

and disseminate information have become available to users immediately
and at relatively low cost. The Internet has created space for amateur and
citizen journalism, and a platform for anyone to speak their mind and
share information at any time across globally connected networks. This
has made news more accessible than ever, but it has also created a complex
information ecosystem in which reliable reporting exists alongside spec-
ulation, conspiracy theory, and clickbait. In the political realm, sites like
The Drudge Report and Infowars rely on traditional tabloid techniques,
breathlessly reporting on tidbits that may or may not be true while also
fueling political debate and discussion. And gossip sites of the early 2000s,
such as The Dirty, Perez Hilton, and Gawker, foreshadowed the ceaseless
churn of celebrity and pop culture gossip that now runs through sites like
TikTok and Twitter while presenting themselves as news sources. That
the boundary between gossip and political news has become so trans-
parent is a fact reflected in the public’s self-reported lack of confidence in
reliable reporting; only 6 in 10 adults say they have “at least some trust”
in national news organizations and only 27% say the same about news
they read on social media (Pew, 2021).
Not all gossip is celebrity driven, but the powerful and well-known
have long served as recognizable and therefore convenient figures about
whom the public shares a gossip repertoire. When it comes to medi-
ated talk, both news and gossip rely upon a known cast of characters
about whom information sharing can take place. The society pages of
the nineteenth century provided precisely this type of content, reporting
on the social galas and goings on of the rich (stories that were often
written by, about, and read by, women). More recently, the Internet,
paparazzi, tabloid, and social media industry explosion of the early 2000s
has produced an ever-increasing pool of famous figures about whom the
public could learn, speculate, and envy. It has also transformed public
figures from the realm of politics into celebrities in their own rights, as
they regularly appear in magazines, on television, and in venues tradi-
tionally reserved for stars of the entertainment industry (Wheeler, 2013).
Celebrity gossip had long been considered “trash” media—unimportant,
and certainly not newsworthy, except in the softest of news frames. Yet
as celebrities infiltrate facets of the public sphere that have tradition-
ally been considered newsworthy—humanitarian efforts, crime, and even
4 A. MCDONNELL AND A. SILVER

foreign affairs—and as stars of film, television, and music delve into poli-
tics, tabloid gossip has become synonymous with news. The line between
politician and celebrity, news and gossip, has dissolved.

Gossip and Politics

Etymologically, the English word gossip can be traced to the Old English
godsib, which referred to a person, such as a godparent, who was an insider
(but not a relative) within a family group (Tebbutt, 1995). Such a person
would be privy to the personal details of family life, therefore possessing
secret knowledge of personal goings on. Over time, the term evolved
to connote friendship, companionship, and talk—particularly malicious
and scandalous talk—most often engaged by women or feminized actors
(McDonnell, 2014). Gossip is also fundamentally a part of women’s oral
culture. As Deborah Jones writes, it is a mode of connectivity, of bonding
and relationship building, a means of information sharing, and a vehicle
for expressing dissatisfaction and resistance (Jones, 1980).
Women’s interests, and talk about those interests, have historically been
excluded from the public sphere. The term gossip works not only to char-
acterize women’s talk but also to trivialize and dismiss it, to mark it as
personal, emotional, and therefore unimportant. The marginalization of
women’s talk and the relegation of women’s interests to the personal
sphere have been a key point of contention in women’s movements. Jones
writes that gossip can be understood as “women speaking in their roles
as women” and that bitching, which she defines as a form of gossip, is an
important mode of dissent (1980, pp. 194). Feminists of the second wave
fostered solidarity through conversation, including consciousness-raising
groups, contending that “the personal is political.” And more recently,
the #MeToo movement has centered women’s talk as a way of reclaiming
personal narratives and pushing back against the notion that women’s
accounts are merely anecdotal and better kept private. So while it may
be easy to dismiss gossip as trivial or apolitical, to do so is to ignore the
myriad ways in which the feminization of certain kinds of speech and
subject matter has long been used as a tactic meant to suppress those
at the margins. This does not only affect those who identify as women.
Media framing of actors as effeminate can serve to stigmatize, other, and
delegitimize their claims, as was the case for narratives circulating around
gay men during the HIV/AIDS crisis (Lichetenstein, 1996).
 1 INTRODUCTION 5

The way in which women’s talk has been sequestered from “serious
news” can be seen plainly in the mainstream press. The “women’s pages”
and gossip pages have been historically relegated to their own section
of the newspaper, while TV talk shows (aired during daytime hours and
targeted to stay-at-home moms) are considered fluffy and apolitical, even
when they take up issues such as domestic violence, race relations, drug
addiction, and gun control. Yet the celebritization of news media that
began in the 1980s and intensified throughout the early 2000s pushed
mainstream news outlets to cover stories that would have previously
been relegated to the E! network and People magazine. What cable news
station could possibly decline to cover the OJ Simpson trial, or Bill Clin-
ton’s affair with an intern, or the death of stars Michael Jackson, Kobe
Bryant, and Prince without suffering devastating ratings losses? Newspa-
pers—the long-established bastion of reliable reporting—were certainly
not immune, suffering massive circulation declines over the past two
decades despite efforts to keep apace (Pew, 2020). Still, while “hard”
news purveyors increasingly adopted “soft” news stylings and topics,
content traditionally aimed at women—even when it overtly takes up
political topics or breaks critical stories with its reporting—retains its
reputation as trivial and unserious.
No single figure epitomized this dissolution more clearly than Donald
Trump. Throughout his presidency, Trump used multiple platforms,
including cable news, social media (most notably Twitter), and his rela-
tionship with David Pecker, CEO of American Media and publisher
whose holdings have included tabloid titles from the National Enquirer,
to the Sun, to Us Weekly, to craft a representational style as an individual
who was “an outside,” external to the political system in Washington
D.C. After leaving office and having been banned from Twitter, Trump
has continued to cultivate his political celebrity on his own social media
platform, Truth Social.
Tabloid gossip elevated Trump’s public persona as a real estate devel-
oper, fueled his reality television career, and helped launch Trump onto
the political stage. His White House transformed presidential messaging
into a barrage of insinuations, innuendos, and personal affronts. But while
gossip was a defining feature of his presidency, it is not new to politics
nor unique to Trump. A Gossip Politic seeks to make explicit the histor-
ical, technological, and cultural links between American politics, news
media, and gossip as a mode of communication. The analysis yields a
new archetype of the gossip politic in which the lines between politician
6 A. MCDONNELL AND A. SILVER

and celebrity are completely and irrevocably broken. The celebrity politi-
cian advances their own brand without a regard for, or even intention of,
advancing public policies. The only goal is to employ gossip to further
their fame and influence.
While Trump may be the most prominent purveyor of a gossip politic,
members of Congress and news media also embody this approach as they
seek to develop a national brand that extends beyond the geographic
boundaries of their district or occupation. Legislators like Representative
Ocasio-Cortez utilize social media to develop a more intimate connec-
tion with voters by providing personal commentary on happenings in
Washington D.C., policy, and popular culture. At the same time news
pundits, like Tucker Carlson, utilize their station to elevate their status in
the national conversation about future elective office (Smith, 2022). The
advent of this gossip politic archetype raises questions about the nature
of representation and democratic responsiveness.

An Overview
In the collection of essays that follows, an esteemed cohort of inter-
disciplinary scholars from the fields of Political Science, Media Studies,
Linguistics, and Sociology explore the ways gossip has shaped our under-
standing of news, impacted democracy, and contributed to the contempo-
rary partisan political landscape in the United States. The book is divided
into three sections.
The first section, Gossip and the Press, considers the links between
news reporting and gossip, past and present. Paddy Scannell’s opening
chapter explores the relationship between human interest stories, talk
and gender, and the ways in which news makes life “tellable.” Michael
Higgins expands on the topic of mediated talk, tracing the ways in which
talk is performed, and made authoritative, on broadcast news television.
Jin Shen and Martin Montgomery provide an in-depth case study of the
ways talk is “done” on television, through a discourse analysis of Oprah
Winfrey’s 2021 interview with Megan Markle.
Section two, Gossip and the Presidency, examines three historic snap-
shots of the influence of gossip on American Presidents. Jennifer Frost
shows how gossip reporter Hedda Hopper’s ideology shaped her coverage
of the Kennedy administration, and how that reporting impacted the
Kennedy family and the politics of the 1960s. Jennifer Hopper takes up
the entertainment news of the late 1990s in her chapter on Bill Clinton’s
 1 INTRODUCTION 7

affair with Monica Lewinsky, and the ways the media ecosystem both
influenced, and was shaped by, that scandal. Donald Trump’s history as a
creature of the gossip press, and his strategic use of gossip techniques in
service of a populist platform, is the focus of Prashant Rastogi’s chapter
on the recent Presidency.
The final section, Gossip and the Public, explores the function and
effects of a gossip politic in contemporary American culture with an
eye toward the implications for public discourse, civic engagement,
and democratic outcomes. Madison Pollino analyzes media framing of
Christine Blasey Ford’s testimony to show how gossip-style reporting
about sexual assault allegations influenced public sentiment toward then-
Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh. Olivia Inwood and Michael
Zappavigna turn to the comments section of the Nicki Swift YouTube
channel to show how gossip reinforces social bonds while also poten-
tially contributing to the spread of online conspiracy theories. Finally,
the editors close the collection with a chapter that examines politicians’
use of Twitter as a discursive space, and the way in which personal talk
on social media relates to the connection between elected officials and
constituents as the former seeks to develop a representative style that
cultivates a personal brand and a connection with followers.

References
Cheng, C., & Barnes, M. (2017, November 11). Liz Smith, New York’s grand
dame of dish, dies at 94. The Hollywood Reporter.
Fine Collins, A. (1997, April 1). The powerful rivalry of Hedda Hopper and
Louella Parsons. Vanity Fair.
Franklin, B. (1995). Newszak and news media. Arnold.
Frost, J. (2011). Hedda Hopper’s Hollywood: Celebrity gossip and American
conservatism. NYU Press.
Gabler, N. (1994). Winchell: Gossip, power, and the culture of celebrity. Vintage
Books.
Jones, D. (1980). Gossip: Notes on women’s oral culture. Women’s Studies
International Quarterly, 3, 193–198.
Lichetenstein, B. (1996). Creating icons of AIDS: The media and popular
culture. In P. Davis (Ed.), Intimate details and vital statistics: AIDS, sexuality,
and the social order in New Zealand. Auckland University Press. Auckland,
NZ.
MacGill Hughes, H. (1940). News and the human interest story. University of
Chicago Press.
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
The Project Gutenberg eBook of Underground
Movement
This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States
and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no
restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it
under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this
ebook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the
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you are located before using this eBook.

Title: Underground Movement

Author: Allen Kim Lang

Illustrator: Robert Engle

Release date: June 20, 2022 [eBook #68358]

Language: English

Original publication: United States: Royal Publications, Inc, 1956

Credits: Greg Weeks, Mary Meehan and the Online Distributed

Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK

UNDERGROUND MOVEMENT ***
UNDERGROUND MOVEMENT
 By ALLEN K. LANG

Illustrated by ENGLE

A mangled corpse held them captive

in that dark tunnel beneath the Earth's
surface—and taught them a lesson
about what freedom really means!

[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from

Infinity, December 1956.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
The hatch to the front compartment swung open for the first time.
One man came out. He turned at once to make sure that the air-tight
door behind him had locked. Satisfied that it had, he turned again to
look down the cabin at us. His face showed that insolence we'd
learned to know as the uniform of the "Bupo", the State Secret
Police.
The man from Bupo walked down the aisle between the passengers
toward the rear of the car. He swept his eyes right and left like a
suspecting-machine, catching every detail of us on his memory.
People leaned toward the walls as he approached, like children
shrinking back from a big animal, and relaxed as he went by. He was
out of sight in the galley at the rear for a moment, then was back,
carrying a pitcher of water in one hand and the key to the front
compartment in the other.
A battering-ram hammered into my belly. I slammed bent, hitting my
head against the knees of the man sitting across from me. The
capsule shuddered, smearing some obstruction against its outer
wall. There was an instant when I weighed nothing. Then my head
snapped back with hangman's violence as the capsule bounced
forward a few meters. Then we were still. From the shock to the
silence was a matter of ten seconds.
I pulled myself up from the floor. Surprisingly, my skeleton still hinged
at the joints and nowhere else. The Bupo man was flat in the aisle,
bleeding black splotches into the green carpet. He still had hold of a
piece of the water-pitcher's handle. I ignored him, while my brain
began to push out explanations for this impossible accident.
Something had gotten into the Tube, that slick intestine we'd ridden
through under the Andes, below the Matto Grosso, out under the
pampas. Something had got in the way of the hundred hurricanes
that pushed us. The eyes and ears and un-man-like senses I'd
helped build into this five thousand kilometers of metal gut had
stopped the pumps. The vacuum inviting our capsule on had filled
with air, no longer tugging us to the terminal nest by the Atlantic. We
were abandoned, fifteen meters under God-knows-where.
Mrs. Swaime, who knew that I'd helped in the Tube's engineering,
turned to me for explanation. "What happened?" she asked. "What
did we hit?"
The foreigner across the aisle, Mr. Rhinklav'n, smiled, a curious
effect. "A cow on the track, I believe," he said, his voice brassy with
the accent of Mars.
"How did a cow get in here?" Anna demanded. She was the girl
whose girl-ness had snagged the eyes and riled the hormones of
every male in the car.
"The gentleman is joking," I assured Anna. I glanced toward
Surgeon-General Raimazan, the man whose knees had hammered
my forehead. He was clutching his right forearm, his eyes squeezed
shut by pain. "What happened, Doctor?" I demanded, laying my
hand on his shoulder.
"Fractured my arm, my ulna. Get my case under the seat. I want to
look at him." The doctor nodded toward the Bupo man, who was
struggling to sit up. I got out the doctor's bag.
"Morphine?" I asked, finding it.
"Codeine, next tray, will be plenty." I dropped three of the pills into Dr.
Raimazan's left hand. He swallowed them without water. I used my
newspaper for a splint, rolling it tight and bandaging it to the doctor's
forearm. Then I hammocked the arm in a sling made of a triangular
bandage. "OK?" I asked.
"You could make a fortune in orthopedics," Dr. Raimazan said. "Let's
get our friend out of the aisle." I stepped out and pulled the
policeman toward a sitting position. He groaned and opened his
eyes. Though he'd fallen into the fragments of the broken pitcher,
he'd suffered damage only to his dignity and his lower lip. A line of
red dashes below the lip showed where his teeth had bitten through.
He shook his head at our offers of tape and antiseptic and struggled
to his feet. Holding the key to the front compartment before him like
a dagger, he shuffled up there. He unlocked the door. Shouting
something violent, he ducked into the compartment and slammed
the door behind him.

I lent my hands to the Surgeon-General's instructions, patching up

the cuts and sprains the passengers had gotten. In a moment Miss
Barrie, the stewardess, took the bandages out of my hands and
finished the job with fewer knots and less adhesive. The passengers
sat quiet in the dim light of the capsule, as though afraid that panic
might constitute a security-violation. The lovely Anna pouted.
Though she was unhurt herself, her precious radio was shattered. It
lay under her seat, its antenna snapped like a slender idiot's-neck,
its electronic guts spilling from its belly.
"Whatever else happens, we're rid of that puling nuisance," Don
Raffe growled, looking at the ex-radio. His mouth settled into
creases, a satisfied line between parentheses. He picked up his
magazine and leafed through it, to prove himself superior to these
chance joltings-about. The lights maliciously dropped till only the
bulbs at either end of the aisle were glowing. These died till they
were yellow coils, magnifying the dark that fogged us.
In the top tray of my test kit was a flashlight. I broke it out to sweep
the light in a quick survey of the car. Anna's eyes squinted at my
beam, her mouth loose with fear for a moment, like a drawstring bag.
Then she squared off, sat straight, stared defiantly into my light.
Without looking down she snapped her purse open and took a tiny
automatic pistol from it. She laid this on the seat beside her, out of
sight. "I've got a right to defend myself," Anna said, grim as a
suffragette. I laughed out loud at this tableau of maidenhood-at-bay.
She smoothed her hair back with both hands, making a double
cantilever of her arms to lift her breasts, demonstrating the noble
architecture of woman, mocking me. I stopped laughing. I jumped
the beam over her to help Miss Barrie break out the emergency
lights.
Those lamps were lit, and glowed in the cabin with their chilly blue
light. Mrs. Swaime asked of the woman beside her, as though it were
an afterthought, "Why did we stop?"
"I don't know," Mrs. Grimm admitted. I knew her. She was the wife of
the Minister of Agriculture, a man who'd acquired a reputation for
integrity in a government that didn't use the word. "For me the Tube
has always been just a link between home and Albert's office at
Bahia. I didn't think that link could break."
Miss Barrie was knocking at the door up front. It opened a reluctant
inch to show the eye of the Bupo cop. He growled some answer to
the stewardess' question, then slammed and relocked his door. Miss
Barrie hurried back to me. "A man was pulled out of that
compartment," she said. "He unlocked the entry hatch and was
blown out into the Tube by cabin pressure."
"Like a beetle blasted off a bush by a garden hose," Don Raffe
murmured.
"I expect my baggage is strung out from here to Havana," Anna
pouted. "Doesn't the State have regulations to keep prisoners from
killing themselves on public property?"
"Suicide?" Mrs. Swaime asked, soft as a prayer.
"Must have been," Don Raffe snapped. He twisted his magazine into
a club, underlining his words with thumps against his open palm.
"Some weakling not worthy to stand with us in war, he was. A
conscientious objector, probably." Don Raffe said "conscientious
objector" exactly as he'd have said the name of a sexual perversion.
"We're all going to the Capital on the Leader's business. Some of us
have been called to the Leader's actual presence." He glowed pride,
giving his secret away. "There is no place in the Leader's new
society for weaklings. They are better where this one is,
underground, dead."
"Many of us are pained by the thought of war," the Martian said. "Not
in the pain of weakness, but that of pity for men lost in battle who
might have grown strong in peace."
"A peace-monger!" Don Raffe's was the tone of a Puritan finding a
red zuchetto under his pastor's hat. "Surely you don't expect our
Leader to bear forever the insults of the Yellow Confederacy? Of
course," Don Raffe's eyes widened in anticipation of delicious
violence, "you men from Mars are yellow, too." The foreigner, whose
skin was in fact the color of lemon-peel, smiled and made no
comment.
"I wish you men wouldn't talk so much about war," Mrs. Swaime
broke in. "Talking about ugly things just helps them to happen.
Rafiel, my boy, is in the Continental Guard. He says we'll have no
war. He says that the Confederacy is too afraid of our airpower to
risk a war. Rafiel is a flier."
"Of course," Don Raffe smiled, his smile not reaching up to his eyes.
"The Yellow Confederacy is so afraid of our flying defenders that
we're forced to travel like moles, so as not to confuse our own radar
guns. Our skies are closed to us. Everything that flies across two
continents, from Tierra del Fuego to Medicine Hat, is shot from the
air as an enemy. We must take to these caves for a ten-hour trip. Ten
hours for a capsule to be blown from Bogota to the coast, a trip a
rocket could clip off in minutes! That's why our leader will take us to
war, to get back the freedom of our own blue skies." Don Raffe
finished, a little breathless.
"I wonder who the poor man was," Mrs. Swaime said, ignoring him.
Miss Barrie shook her head, wondering the same thing. Without
saying anything, she went back to the galley to call a surface station
on the capsule's radio-telephone. While she was back there, Miss
Barrie took a lamp and peered through the glass window in the rear
hatch. She saw what becomes of a man caught between a pistoning
capsule and its tube. After being sick, she came to tell us that the
surface station had determined that we were just east of the village
of Rabanan. My mental map of the route the Tube followed showed
Rabanan as a dot fifteen kilometers from the nearest exit hatch. Miss
Barrie smiled on courage. "A rescue party will be here before long,"
she assured the others. "Would anyone care for sandwiches or
coffee while we wait?" Her stomach must have cringed at the
thought.
"Tea would be nice," Mr. Rhinklav'n volunteered. Then he realized
his blunder: tea came from Confederacy countries. "I mean coffee, of
course!" he said.
"I'll help you get it ready," Mrs. Grimm said to Miss Barrie.
"Oh, no," the hostess protested, without much conviction in her
voice. Mrs. Grimm smiled and led the way back to the galley. In a
moment she had the water for our coffee steaming on the chemical
burner. The stewardess meanwhile was smearing the current butter-
substitute on slivers of bread and arranging the buttered triangles
into Maltese crosses on our plates. Thus Miss Barrie brought us
tiffin.
The Martian took his coffee black. He sat looking into it as he sipped,
as though apologizing for his alien presence. Mrs. Swaime, more
practiced than the rest of us in this act of informal refection, took a
slice of bread and a cup of sugar-thick coffee and talked. She
steered clear of the grim topics around us, turning her attention
instead to Mr. Rhinklav'n, who sparkled back at her like a grateful
mirror. "Is this your first visit to Earth?" she asked him.
"No, indeed. I spent several years at your excellent University at Sao
Paulo," the yellow man said. "That was some time ago, of course."
He refrained from saying just how long ago. The Martian lifespan
makes humanity's scant three-score and ten look feeble.
The Surgeon-General asked me quietly, "Why, exactly, are we held
here?"
"As long as the body is back there the pumps can't run. Safety
devices prevent the capsule from moving so long as there's a foreign
body in the Tube." I stopped, suddenly aware of my clumsy,
accidental pun.
"All right," Dr. Raimazan said. "We'll have to move the corpse into
the capsule, and take it to Bahia with us."
"It will be the worst sort of job," I said.
"If the repair crew takes more than a day, we're in for trouble
anyway." He was right. This was February, our hottest month. "You
have a strong stomach?" he asked.
"No." I hurried forward to tell Miss Barrie of our decision. She gave
us a lamp and a blanket, and phoned the surface to tell them what
we were doing. The doctor and I locked the air-tight door of the
galley behind us.
At this end of the capsule there was a second air-tight hatch, exactly
like that in front, the one the body had hurtled through. At its middle,
like a glass navel, was a dial showing the pressure outside. It read
975 millibars. I spun the wheel to unlock the door from its frame,
stubbornly resisting the temptation to anticipate through the window,
to see what waited us out there. The hatch swung out.
I turned the lamplight on the walls outside. It was bad. The tube was
bulged at the top a little way back, like a vein about to rupture. Its
surface was smeared with red. It smelled like a place where they
slaughter chickens. The body lay about twenty meters back. I took
the blanket from Dr. Raimazan and walked back along the slippery
shaft, trying to dull my eyes and nose to what I was about to do. The
doctor, one arm trussed to his chest by my crude sling, could lend
me only moral support. I looked down at the corpse. One arm had
been torn off at the shoulder, and was held to the body by the
handcuffs between the wrists. The man had been cut and burned
and broken before he'd thrown himself out of the capsule.
I rolled the thing into the blanket and dragged it behind me to the
capsule. It took ten minutes for me to force it through the hatch.
Inside, we rolled the body under the galley sink, then washed our
shoes and ourselves. We dogged the hatch shut and phoned
topside, telling them to let the winds take hold again.
As we made ready to go back into the cabin, the light of my lamp
glinted off a bit of metal lying on the floor. It had fallen from our
horrible package under the sink. Dr. Raimazan picked it up. He held
it near the lamp, examining it. He was going to say something to me
when the door to the cabin, which we'd unlocked, burst open. "What
in hell's name are you doing?" the Bupo man demanded.
"We've cleared the Tube," I said very softly, shoving before his face
the card that showed with my face and fingerprints that I was a Tube
Engineer. The Surgeon-General stared at the policeman as though
he were something wet and stinking from a swamp.
"Who was the man who jumped from your compartment?" the doctor
asked.
"State business!" the Bupo snapped. "Keep your mouth shut!" Too
late, he recognized the Surgeon-General's uniform, and became
silent.
"Watch your long tongue," Dr. Raimazan growled. "I have an
audience with the Leader: you may find yourself envying the poor
devil under the sink his blanket." The Bupo, wavering between anger
and apology, settled on an attitude of injured dignity. He turned and
stalked down the aisle toward his private cabin up front. I followed
him with my eyes, memorizing him. In case I should ever meet him
again, I wanted to complete wrecking his face where the accident
had left off.
The capsule jumped onto its plunger of wind. Only the brilliance of
the ceiling lights showed that we were again flashing toward the
coast and the Capital. I sat beside the Surgeon-General. "What was
it that you picked up back there?" I asked him. He handed me the
thing. It was a Medal of Honor. Its ribbon was a scrap of silk, and the
medal itself was bent as though it had been clamped in a vise and
hammered. Turning it over, I read the engraved legend through a
smear of blood. "To Doctor Noah Raimazan, for devotion to his
profession, his people, and his Leader." A curt congratulation, I
thought. After a moment I asked, "A brother?"
"My oldest son. He saved hundreds in the ruins of Managua, in the
plague that followed the Revolution there." Dr. Raimazan took the
medal from me and sat rocking back and forth, staring at the laurel-
garnished star in his hand. "Why did they kill him?" he asked.
"It wasn't suicide?"
"It was escape. You saw what they'd done to him, with their little
knives, their pliers and electrodes. Noah was a hero, set by Imperial
order on a pedestal. He looked directly at the Leader, man to man,
his physician. He wasn't as strong as I am, this son of mine. Noah
couldn't watch men killed for their ideas, defending his silence with
the argument that he was a doctor, set somewhere above grubby
politics." Dr. Raimazan's voice was loud enough that anyone in the
car who wished could have heard him.
"Your son died for talking plain," I whispered to the doctor.

We sat in silence. The Capital of the Leader of our hemisphere was

only an hour away. After a moment the Surgeon-General sat straight.
He brushed his uniform with his left hand, and smoothed the sling
under his right arm. Then he crossed the aisle to the seat where
Anna sat. I stared at him. "Do you mind if I sit beside you?" he
smiled down at the girl, as gallant as though they were at a military
ball.
"As you wish, General," Anna answered. She was pleased, I saw,
that a man with such a uniform and such position should notice her.
The doctor talked to Anna the way a pretty girl expects to be talked
to, emphasizing what he was saying by an occasional avuncular pat.
After a while, Anna grew a little bored with a playmate who was older
than her father. As the car began to slow, caught by resistance coils
in the walls of the Tube, I saw the Surgeon-General pat the girl
playfully once more, and pick up something she'd laid beside her in
the darkness. She didn't notice.
We halted on the shores of the Bay of All Saints, Bahia, the Capital.
We saw no more of the Bupo man, since his compartment held the
exit hatch. He was out first, scurrying somewhere with the news of
Noah Raimazan's suicide, news which would either lift him a notch in
his profession or push his head onto the chopping-block. The rest of
us lined up, passed through the front compartment, out onto the
platform. The station sparkled like a diamond tiara, glittering with
slogans and brass and reminders that we'd reached the greatest city
in our half of the world.
A gray sedan stood on the ramp, waiting for those the Leader had
singled out for audience. Its door bore those interlocked commas,
the yin-yang symbol that the Leader had taken from the enemy to
make his cypher. Dr. Raimazan nodded good-bye to me.
Accompanied by Don Raffe, he walked over to the Imperial
limousine. The Surgeon-General replied to the salutes of the
bodyguards with his left hand, turning aside their references to his
injury with a grin. The doors slammed shut, and the sedan roared off,
carrying Don Raffe and Surgeon-General Raimazan to meet the
Leader.
And carrying, under the doctor's sling, the little pistol I'd seen him
steal from Anna.
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