Madison's Music by Burt Neuborne

© 2015 by Burt Neuborne
    All rights reserved.
    No part of this book may be reproduced, in any form, without written permission from the publisher.
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    â€œThe House Was Quiet and the World Was Calm” from The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens by Wallace Stevens, copyright © 1954 by Wallace Stevens and copyright renewed 1982 by Holly Stevens. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Random House LLC. All rights reserved.
    Published in the United States by The New Press, New York, 2015
    Distributed by Perseus Distribution
    LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
    Neuborne, Burt, 1941– author.
    Madison’s music : on reading the First Amendment / Burt Neuborne.
    pages      cm
    Includes bibliographical references and index.
    ISBN 978-1-62097-053-9 (e-book)
    1.    United States. Constitution. 1st Amendment.      2.    Civil rights—United States—History.      3.    Constitutional history—United States.      I.    Title.
    KF45581st .N48      2015
342.7308'5—dc23
2014026735
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    Composition by dix!
    This book was set in Electra
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Odysseus the Tailor
    Odysseus the Tailor’s real name was Sam. A gentle, unassuming man who stood all of five five, my father was one of a dozen U.S. Navy frogmen dropped into the English Channel several hours before the Normandy invasion in 1944, with instructions to attach explosives to a wall of underwater steel spikes designed to tear the bottoms out of Allied landing craft. Once the explosives were in place, Pop and his buddies swam to the beach and crouched in the surf until the invasion boats neared the French coast. Then they blew a hole in the steel wall, opening a bloody path to the liberation of Europe. After D-Day, Pop was assigned to “Patton’s Navy,” a small combat unit supporting amphibious crossings of French rivers during the Third Army’s push toward Paris. From our kitchen in the Greenpoint section of Brooklyn, my mother and I anxiously plotted Odysseus’s progress across Europe. My job was to keep Pop up-to-date on his beloved New York Giants. Each letter from me contained baseball box scores laboriously clipped from the Brooklyn Eagle . Pop’s heavily censored replies promised a glorious future when we would see a baseball game together at the Polo Grounds.
    When Odysseus the Tailor finally came home in the summer of 1946, I oiled my baseball glove and waited for the great day. July passed into August—but no baseball. Pop reopened his tailor shop, and we sat comfortably in the warm sunlight while silver needles danced in his thimbled fingers—but no baseball. School began after Labor Day—but no baseball. Finally, in mid-September, I broke down at dinner. “What have I done,” I wailed, “that we can’t go to a Giants game.” My father, who had forgotten his wartime promise, was stricken. He hugged me. “I love you, Butchie,” he whispered. “But we can’t go to a Giants game yet. . . . They still