u/Crazy-Old-Stories

[This was the basis of the 1989 novel The Girl Next Door by Jack Ketchum and the 2007 film An American Crime starring Elliot Page and Catherine Keener.]

Trials: Addenda to De Sade

TIME

May 5, 1966

Seated on folding chairs in a packed Indianapolis courtroom last week was the largest array of defendants to stand trial for a single murder in Indiana his tory. It was also one of the most bizarre: a wispy-haired 90-lb. woman, three of her children and two teen-age neighbor boys. As outlined by police, their story seemed almost unbelievably ugly.

It started last July, when 16-year-old Sylvia Marie Likens was left with her sister, Jenny, 15, in the care of Mrs.

Gertrude Baniszewski, 31, a divorced mother of six. Mrs. Baniszewski had offered to board the Likens girls, whom her children had met at a neighbor’s house, for $20 a week while their par ents traveled the Midwest fair circuit.

A pretty lass who liked the Beatles and roller skating, Sylvia was nicknamed Cookie and described by a girl friend as “a sweet nut.” With her few possessions — her most treasured was a jewelry box in which she kept two favorite pins —Sylvia moved into Mrs. B.’s rundown house in an Indianapolis blue-collar neighborhood.

Slaps & Punches. For two months, things went pleasantly enough. Then one day Paula Baniszewski, now 11, hit Sylvia on the jaw so hard that Paula broke her wrist. Paula’s mother took to slapping Sylvia for ever more frequent, if imagined, offenses. She did not complain to her parents when they made a visit in early October. After that, her tormentors became increasingly sadistic. John Baniszewski Jr., now 13, and two neighbor boys, diabetic Richard Dean (“Ricky”) Hobbs and Coy Hubbard, both 15, joined the laceration game. Sylvia was burned with matches and cigarettes, whipped with a heavy leather belt, hit on the head with a paddle and broom. A 14-year-old girl who visited the house recalled: “It was ‘Sylvia, do this’ and ‘Sylvia, do that’ all the time, and when she didn’t do it, they would beat her.”

Forbidden to eat at one point, she was seen consuming scraps from a garbage can. Oct. 6 was her last day at school. Concerned by Sylvia’s absence from church, the pastor dropped in to inquire about her, was told by the woman that the girl was being kept home because she stole things. At the time, Sylvia was tied to an upstairs bed, forbidden water or the use of the bathroom.

By now, torturing Sylvia had become a neighborhood sport, with at least four other youngsters taking part. Even Shirley Baniszewski, 10, and Sister Marie, 11, joined in. So did Stephanie, 15, whom Sylvia had accused of being a prostitute. In fact, John Jr. told police, at one time or another everyone in the family except Mrs. B.’s 18-month-old baby had burned Sylvia with cigarettes. Polio-crippled Jenny Likens was occasionally forced on pain of beating to join the assault on her sister.

Brands & Salt. Around mid-October, after Sylvia had wet her bed, Mrs. B. ordered her to sleep thereafter in the basement on a pile of filthy rags, along with the family’s two dogs. Later, according to Hobbs, Mrs. B. told Sylvia, “Now I’m going to brand you.” A three-inch sewing needle was heated with matches and, Hobbs said, “Gertie started putting words on her, but she got sick and told me to finish it.” Etched in two tiers of inch-high block letters across Sylvia’s lower abdomen, the words said: “I’m a prostitute and proud of it.” Two days later, Hobbs added, he used the hooked end of a 2-ft.-long anchor bolt that had been heated with burning newspapers to brand the numeral 3 on Sylvia’s chest.

About 2:30 the next morning, Sylvia, by then in what officials described as a state of “profound apathy,” made what was apparently her only effort to get help. Using a coal shovel, she scraped on the basement floor for almost two hours. A woman next door was awakened and on the verge of calling police when the scraping stopped. That afternoon, as Sylvia lay moaning and mumbling incoherently on her pile of rags, Mrs. Baniszewski, Ricky, John B. Jr. and Paula sprinkled a box of soap powder on her, then added hot water. Afterward, John Jr. sprayed her with cold water from a garden hose.

“Only Pretending.” Carried upstairs to a bedroom, the girl was given a lukewarm bath, dressed in a pair of white Capri pants, and placed on a mattress on the floor. Mrs. Baniszewski struck Sylvia on each side of the head with a book and told her to get up, that she was only pretending to be sick. Mercifully, Sylvia died.

Called by her keeper, police found Sylvia’s body with arms crossed over her breast. Even to hardened cops, the sight was stomach wrenching. Virtually no part of the girl’s corpse was unmarked. Her fingernails had been broken upward; there were massive bruises on her temples; much of the skin on her face, chest, arms and legs had peeled from scalding water. Her lower lip had been bitten in two, presumably during her agony. The immediate cause of death was a blow on the skull. In all, Sylvia’s body bore an estimated 150 burns, cuts, bruises and other lesions. Said one veteran of more than 35 years on the force: “In all my years of experience, this is the most sadistic act I ever came across.”

In December, a grand jury indicted Gertrude Baniszewski, Paula, Stephanie and John Jr., along with Hubbard and Hobbs, on charges of first-degree murder. (Under Indiana law, minors face the same maximum penalty for murder as adults: the electric chair.) As the trial got under way last week before a jury of eight men and four women, Mrs. Baniszewski, John Jr. and Hubbard pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity; Paula, Stephanie and Ricky pleaded simply not guilty. Upstairs in an anteroom sat Sylvia’s parents, still not comprehending how and why it had happened. Sitting sunken-cheeked in court, her blue-veined legs crossed and swinging silver-stitched black slippers, Mrs. Baniszewski also looked puzzled by the whole affair. Shortly after her arrest, she had confided to police: “Sylvia wanted something in life. But I couldn’t figure out what it was.”

INVESTIGATIONS: Nobody Asked: Is It Moral?

TIME

May 9, 1976

It did not matter that much of the information had already been released —or leaked—to the public. The effect was still overwhelming: a stunning, dismaying indictment of U.S. intelligence agencies and six Presidents, from Franklin Roosevelt to Richard Nixon, for having blithely violated democratic ideals and individual rights while gathering information at home or conducting clandestine operations abroad.

The two-volume, 815-page report released last week by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence was 15 months in the making. It documents as never before how the White House and the baronies of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Central Intelligence Agency took the law into their own hands in the cause of preserving liberty. To cure the sweeping excesses, the eleven-member Church committee—so named for its chairman, Idaho Democrat Frank Church—proposed some sweeping reforms, 183 in all. Yet many of the key reforms may well be gutted or killed by the full Senate.

Scarcely anyone who was involved in the operations—bugging phones, breaking into houses, slipping LSD to unsuspecting bar patrons, planning assassination attempts, undermining governments—seems to have wondered whether he was doing anything wrong. The values of the men who operated in the shadowy underground world were summed up by William C. Sullivan, for ten years the head of the FBI’s domestic intelligence division: “Never once did I hear anybody, including myself, raise the question: ‘Is this course of action … lawful, is it legal, is it ethical or moral?’ We never gave any thought to this line of reasoning, because we were just naturally pragmatic.”

Foremost among the pragmatists were the six Presidents, Democrats and Republicans alike. Before World War II, F.D.R. authorized wiretaps of suspected “subversives” without ever defining just what a subversive was. He also asked the FBI to file the names of Americans who criticized his national defense policies and supported those of Colonel Charles Lindbergh, who was then preaching isolationism. With similar Executive arrogance and in the same tradition, the Nixon Administration was installing illegal wiretaps and using the Internal Revenue Service to hound its domestic “enemies” 35 years later.

There was guilt aplenty to go round.

As U.S. Attorney General, Robert F. Kennedy gathered information on the “sugar lobby” by tapping ten telephone lines of one law firm, plus the phones of two lobbyists, three Executive Branch officials, a congressional staffer and North Carolina’s Congressman Harold D. Cooley, then chairman of the House Agriculture Committee. A squad of FBI men used informants, undercover agents and bugging to let Lyndon Johnson know what was happening behind the scenes at the 1964 Democratic convention in Atlantic City.

“Black Bag.” Trying to sniff out subversion, the FBI, the CIA, the Army and the National Security Agency violated Americans’ rights over the years by opening some 380,000 first-class letters, staging hundreds of “black bag” break-ins, securing copies of millions of private cables and tapping an unknown number of telephones.

With a paranoid compulsion, the agencies developed lists of troublesome or potentially troublesome Americans. These included members of organizations on the right (the John Birch Society, Ku Klux Klan) as well as the left (the Socialist Workers Party, Students for a Democratic Society). The FBI kept handy a list of people—26,000 strong at one point—who were to be detained during a national emergency (including Novelist Norman Mailer). The Army accumulated the names of 100,000 people who were involved, even tangentially, in political protest activities (including Illinois Senator Adlai Stevenson III, who made the list for merely attending a peaceful political rally watched by the service’s agents). The CIA surpassed everyone, maintaining a catchall index of 1.5 million names taken from the 250,000 letters opened and photographed by the agency. Noted the Senate report: “Too many people have been spied upon by too many Government agencies, and too much information has been collected.”

Looking for leads, the organizations would infiltrate almost anything. The

FBI dutifully investigated women’s liberation groups and decided to keep up the surveillance, even though they appeared to be concerned just with freeing “women from the humdrum existence of being only a wife and mother.” In 1941, the FBI began an intensive probe of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, after 15 black mess stewards in the Navy protested against racial discrimination. For 25 years, the bureau hunted for signs of Communist influence in the N.A.A.C.P., although a report in the first year of the investigation said the organization had a “strong tendency” to “steer clear of Communist activities.” There were more chilling examples of excesses by the FBI. Operation COINTELPRO (counterintelligence program), which sought to disrupt dissident groups, tried to get members of the Black Panthers and a black activist group based in California, US, Inc., to kill one another. The cold-eyed crusade against Martin Luther King Jr.—”the most dangerous and effective Negro leader in the country”—included not only the familiar taping of his bedroom activities but also plans to harass his widow after his assassination.

In the past year and a half, the U.S. intelligence community has taken a number of steps to correct its faults. The CIA has severely limited its activities at home. U.S. Attorney General Edward Levi has laid down some strict ground rules for the FBI. Even so, the Senate committee was unappeased. It recommended 96 steps to make sure that the domestic intelligence apparatus would concern itself only with the legitimate goals of catching spies and stopping crime, including acts of terrorism.

The committee urged the passage of laws limiting intelligence probes to terrorist action and hostile foreign espionage when there was a clear-cut and immediate danger, and the threat is certainly there. Of the 1,079 Soviet officials assigned to the U.S. in 1975, more than 60% were intelligence agents according to the FBI.

Own Airlines. The committee recommended that wiretapping, bugging and break-ins occur only after proper court orders. Within the U.S., the CIA would be permitted to act only to protect its own employees or infiltrate a domestic group to establish “cover” for a foreign intelligence mission.

In describing U.S. operations overseas, the committee noted that the CIA was so autonomous that it ran its own airlines and set up its own businesses to act as covers for agents and even created its own insurance companies, whose total assets amount to more than $30 million. More disturbing to the committee was the fact that the CIA put academics, newsmen and missionaries on its payroll and propagandized not only foreigners but Americans. CIA types wrote books backing up U.S. policy that were made available in the U.S.—sometimes after they had been favorably reviewed by other CIA types.

The report itself was evidence of the agency’s continuing clout. At the urgent request of CIA officials, some 200 pages of material on secret overseas operations were deleted from the final version, and many portions of the surviving text were heavily censored. These changes may have been justified, but the CIA even tried to delete transcripts of hearings that had already been publicly telecast. At this, however, the Senators plucked up their courage and drew the line.

The committee did get across its main point: from 1961 to 1975, the CIA conducted some 900 major covert operations overseas. Many of these not only were of questionable value but occurred without proper supervision by the White House or oversight by Congress.

For a while, the committee gave serious consideration to proposing a total ban on all covert activities, reasoning that they were simply incompatible with the tenets of a democratic society. But the final report concluded that the U.S. should be able to mount undercover operations to counter grave threats to the nation. Last February, President Gerald Ford announced new Executive guidelines to control the CIA’S covert activities, but the committee remained unsatisfied, insisting that the restrictions be made even tougher and written into law.

To establish clear-cut responsibilities and lines of authority for foreign and domestic intelligence operations, the committee recommended the formation of a special watchdog committee in the Senate (leaving it up to the House to enter into a joint committee later on, if it wishes). Under the reorganization recommended by the Senators, the new committee would be able to pass on the foreign intelligence budget (which is now considered so vital a secret that the figure—estimated at about $10 billion —was eliminated from the report at the request of the CIA). What is more, the President would be compelled by law to inform the committee before any significant undercover operation was undertaken—thereby giving the members a chance to object to, although not veto the enterprise. Political assassinations would be forbidden by statute, as they now are by Ford’s decree. In addition, the committee would ban by law any attempt to subvert a democratic government—a step that Ford says he favors.

There are already strong indications that the Senate is not prepared to approve the radical new reforms or even the creation of a new oversight committee. G.O.P. Senators John Tower and Barry Goldwater refused to sign the report, arguing that its strict recommendations would make it impossible for the CIA to operate effectively. The proposed change, said Tower, vice chairman of the committee, “could endanger American security.”

Heated Issue. Under the present law, six committees on the Hill (three in the Senate and three in the House) are charged with overseeing intelligence operations. Their oversight has been infrequent and ineffectual. Yet their chairmen are reluctant to share any power. In addition, Church and his allies face another problem as they try to push through their proposals: growing apathy. Because the whole process has taken so long, and so much has been written and said, controlling the CIA is no longer a heated political issue. The substantial reforms initiated by Ford, the CIA and the Department of Justice have also eased the pressure.

There is, finally, a real fear among some Senators that a committee so powerful and fully informed could do profound damage if it sprang any leaks. Last week the Senate Rules Committee voted 5 to 4 against proposals by the Church committee to set up a new watchdog unit to keep an eye on the intelligence agencies. But the fight is not over yet. This month Church plans to carry the struggle to the floor of the Senate, where he feels the younger liberals in both parties may help him carry the day. The “crucial” element of reform, says Church, is a committee that can pass on the CIA’s budget and learn about its planned covert activities in advance. Adds Minnesota’s Walter Mondale, chairman of the subcommittee on domestic operations: “In the past, Congress has been able to excuse its lack of vigilance on the grounds that it didn’t know [what was happening]. Now it does. And if we know it and don’t do anything about it, then we’re really saying, ‘O.K., let ‘er rip.’ “

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Notes: Frank Church, chairman of the committee, was running for president int the Dem primary at the time (but this issue of TIME had a cover story on Carter and admittted he was almost guaranteed to win by that point).

We now know that in 1973, CIA Director Richard Helms ordered the destruction of all MKUltra files to hide the evidence from the Church Committee. It wasn't until a Freedom of Information Act request in 1977 that 20,000 surviving documents were found, revealing that the CIA had been running over 150 sub-projects involving electroshock, hypnosis, and "psychic driving" (looping recorded messages to brainwash subjects).

The reason the CIA founded their own private insurance companies to cover their secret assets was because no public insurance company would touch "ghost" planes and "non-existent" employees.

A REAL-LIFE GHOST STORY

Little Morganton, N.C. (population: 15,000) is probably best known as the home of Watergate hero Sam Ervin. But just two blocks past Ervin's home on Lenoir Street lives another Morganton celebrity, Mrs. Joann Denton—a middle-aged, miniskirted former go-go dancer and Sunday-school teacher who works at a center for retarded children, but is best known as the town witch.

For most of the five years Mrs. Denton has lived in Morganton, her mystical dabblings were considered a colorful eccentricity—her house with its skulls and her automobile (a Gremlin) both bear the name "Gray Shadows"—and at times were a positive asset. The money she collected from children who stopped to visit on Halloween, for example, was turned over to the local rescue unit. But this week, Mrs. Denton was scheduled to go on trial under a little-used 1952 "witchcraft" law following the death of another Morganton woman—on precisely the day that had been predicted at one of Mrs. Denton's séances.

The dead woman, Mrs. Dorothy Ramsey, 38, had never actually heard her own demise predicted; family sources said she was told of it by her estranged husband, Fred Warren Ramsey, 42, who lives in an apartment house owned by Mrs. Denton. Ramsey and Mrs. Denton had become somewhat chummy, townspeople recalled, he helping her to spruce up vacant apartments and lay carpeting. Ramsey also became involved in some of her séances—including two on March 17 and 20 at which he said he hoped to make contact with his wife's dead son-in-law. It was at these sessions, participants said, after the usual table-tilting and ghostly knocking, that Dorothy Ramsey's destiny was suddenly brought up. "I see death... look above my shoulder and see who it is," ordered Mrs. Denton. Ramsey described a woman with black hair, then wept: "It's Dot. It's Dot."

That vision and others apparently led Ramsey to tell his wife she would die on April 10, most probably in an auto accident. The news was clearly disturbing to Mrs. Ramsey, who had a history of nervous breakdowns and had received shock treatments, according to her daughter Kathy. On the morning of April 10, Mrs. Ramsey refused to leave her house; "she seemed nervous," said Kathy, "like she was scared to get in her car." She died that night, with empty bottles of tranquilizers strewn in her apartment. An autopsy showed a high level of drugs and alcohol in her bloodstream, and her death was listed as suicide.

Next day, Mrs. Denton sent a pink carnation to the funeral parlor to be pinned to the dead woman's lapel—"just like it was some kind of hex," according to daughter Kathy, who quickly sought police action against the spiritualist whose visions had proven so prophetic. A detective remembered the old witchcraft law (originally passed to prevent fortune-telling by roving gypsy bands) and a warrant was issued. Some of the dead woman's relatives also hinted that her estranged husband had recently taken out an insurance policy on her, but that turned out to be simply an accident policy on himself—with no payoff as a result of the suicide.

Mrs. Denton was apparently untroubled by the possible sentence facing her (a maximum fine of $500 and six months in jail). "With the powers of my mind, I could [practice black magic] if I wanted to, but I'm no devil witch sticking pins in people," she declared, sitting amid the Lord's Prayer samplers that fill her home. "I'm a very religious person."

—DAVID M. ALPERN with JOSEPH B. CUMMING JR.

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Notes: She was charged under a North Carolina law prohibiting the practices of fortune telling, clairvoyance and phrenology (i.e. feeling the bump's on someone's skull). This law has since been repealed.

She appeared in court April 27, 1976 and the charges against her were dropped.

She ran for mayor of Morganton in the 1981 election.

She sued the town of Morganton for her removal from the 1993 Morganton Downtown Halloween Parade.

TIME magazine Apr. 29, 1996

Techwatch:

SWEET SMELL OF…SILICON?

Convinced that smelling is believing, Arizona-based Ferris Productions Inc. last week unveiled the Experience System, a virtual-reality game station with an olfactory add-on.

A mere $12,000 buys the system: a heat-sensitive chair that contours to the body and simulates zero gravity; a million-pixel, head-mounted display that feeds the eyes, headphones that fill the ears, and a quarter-inch hose that fits under the nose.

Our test-sniff report: though it is relaxing to smell “brine” while virtual scuba diving, the cybertrees in the “forest” begin to hint of Pine-Sol after a few minutes, and a flight though the “atmosphere” leaves a trace of burning tires.

The company promises more smells over the next year. Not on the list, however, are sex-attracting pheromones. Although Ferris co-founder Scott Jochim has had plenty of requests, he worries that each whiff could be “addictive.” Sure, but so is the smell of money.

GHOST IN THE MACHINE

New-media enthusiasts bedeviled by vaporware–products hyped before they exist–should thrill to the rare appearance of its opposite. Call it ghostware: technology that is alive and well today with no one (or almost no one) sensing its presence.

One example of ghostware haunts America’s 3.1 million alphanumeric pagers (a.k.a. alphas), those sleek ’90s icons that deliver, along with the usual phone numbers, written messages such as “Running late” or “Where’s my heroin?” Almost all today’s alphas, unbeknown to their owners, can also receive E-mail. That means Mom can beckon you home by sending a message over CompuServe or your husband can slip an electronic grocery list across the Internet and onto your hip. (If you have a pager, one phone call to your service provider should be enough to turn on the mail.)

The next step is interactivity. Wireless Access, a Silicon Valley start-up, has invented an innovative product called SkyWriter that includes an onscreen keyboard and a thumb-guided cursor for pecking out and transmitting messages. It works: five minutes after a Time reporter first picked one up, he managed to create and send E-mail–while navigating rush-hour traffic. How good is the technology? Three weeks ago, Microsoft shelled out an estimated $25 million to increase its small stake in Skytel, a pager company that will sell the SkyWriter this fall. Bill Gates, it seems, believes in ghosts.

CYBERIAN LANDSCAPES

For this summer’s crop of well-intentioned but clueless souls endeavoring to turn their drab backyards into earthly Edens, the 3D Landscape CD-ROM could be as valuable as seeds or hoes. With this instructional software from Books That Work, budding green thumbs can design their own realistic gardens on an easy-to-use computer grid, dragging and dropping into place any of 800 plants and flowers. Advanced features let users take a 3-D tour of their creations or watch the virtual gardens blossom and fade as the seasons pass. One tip: Don’t add water. (Books That Work, 1-800-242-4546, $59.95)

INTEL OUTSIDE

Even though microchip giant Intel has been living in a world of sunny profits and growth, industry watchers are impressed to see that CEO Andy Grove has been quietly preparing a rainy-day strategy. Aided by some of his top engineers, Grove has invested more than $200 million in glitzy applications like virtual reality and on-screen PC televisions. The reason: these programs make extreme demands on the average computer, prompting feature-hungry users to upgrade to new, extra-fast microprocessors–something Intel happens to make millions of each year. For techies who have gone Pentium, Grove’s bounty should prove a boon: today’s PCs will surely justify the upgrade with Intel-funded gaming and communications programs. A look at three of the best:

INTERCAST: Intel engineers have figured out a way to use the vertical blanking interval–the portion of the TV signal normally reserved for closed captions–to send Net data alongside broadcast video. The result is a scrappy but functional version of interactive TV that lets users browse the Web while watching miniature televisions on their specially equipped PCs. Among the first possible providers: nbc News, which could beam out Web pages with its nightly broadcast. While Tom Brokaw talked about Bosnia, viewers could click their way through a Balkans map or send E-mail to the U.N.

RSX: Intel is another company working to make virtual reality less virtual and more real. Their target: your ears. The RSX system brings nearly CD-quality 3-D sound to Web-based VR. With two stereo speakers, the program can simulate Doppler effects, explosions and even the sound of a circling helicopter that fades from left speaker to right and back again.

PROSHARE: Next week Intel will unveil the newest version of this year-old video-conferencing program. The system, which requires ISDN wiring and (surprise) a Pentium chip, lets scattered users collaborate in a shared online “office.”

–By Daniel Eisenberg, Marty Katz, Michael Krantz and Noah Robischon

By Mary McCarthy

Feb. 9, 1986.

THE HANDMAID'S TALE By Margaret Atwood. 311 pp. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company. $16.95.

SURELY the essential element of a cautionary tale is recognition. Surprised recognition, even, enough to administer a shock. We are warned, by seeing our present selves in a distorting mirror, of what we may be turning into if current trends are allowed to continue. That was the effect of ''Nineteen Eighty-Four,'' with its scary dating, not 40 years ahead, maybe also of ''Brave New World'' and, to some extent, of ''A Clockwork Orange.''

It is an effect, for me, almost strikingly missing from Margaret Atwood's very readable book ''The Handmaid's Tale,'' offered by the publisher as a ''forecast'' of what we may have in store for us in the quite near future. A standoff will have been achieved vis-a-vis the Russians, and our own country will be ruled by right-wingers and religious fundamentalists, with males restored to the traditional role of warriors and us females to our ''place'' - which, however, will have undergone subdivision into separate sectors, of wives, breeders, servants and so forth, each clothed in the appropriate uniform. A fresh postfeminist approach to future shock, you might say. Yet the book just does not tell me what there is in our present mores that I ought to watch out for unless I want the United States of America to become a slave state something like the Republic of Gilead whose outlines are here sketched out.

Another reader, less peculiar than myself, might confess to a touch of apathy regarding credit cards (instruments of social control), but I have always been firmly against them and will go to almost any length to avoid using one. Yet I can admit to a general failure to extrapolate sufficiently from the 1986 scene. Still, even when I try, in the light of these palely lurid pages, to take the Moral Majority seriously, no shiver of recognition ensues. I just can't see the intolerance of the far right, presently directed not only at abortion clinics and homosexuals but also at high school libraries and small-town schoolteachers, as leading to a super-biblical puritanism by which procreation will be insisted on and reading of any kind banned. Nor, on the other hand, do I fear our ''excesses'' of tolerance as pointing in the same direction. Liberality toward pornography in the courts, the media, on the newstands may make an anxious parent feel disgusted with liberalism, but can it really move a nation to install a theocracy strictly based on the Book of Genesis? Where are the signs of it? A backlash is only a backlash, that is, a reaction. Fear of a backlash, in politics, ought not to deter anybody from adhering to principle; that would be only another form of cowardice.

The same for ''excessive'' feminism, which here seems to bear some responsibility for Gilead, to be one of its causes. The kind of doctrinaire feminism likely to produce a backlash is exemplified in the narrator's absurd mother, whom we first hear of at a book-burning in the old, pre-Gilead time - the ''right'' kind of book-burning, naturally, merely a pyre of pornographic magazines: ''Mother,'' thinks the narrator in what has become the present, ''You wanted a women's culture. Well, now there is one.'' The wrong kind, of course.

The new world of ''The Handmaid's Tale'' is a woman's world, even though governed, seemingly, and policed by men. Its ethos is entirely domestic, its female population is divided into classes based on household functions, each class clad in a separate color that instantly identifies the wearer - dull green for the Marthas (houseworkers); blue for the Wives; red, blue and green stripes for the Econowives (working class); red for the Handmaids (whose function is to bear children to the head of the household, like Bilhah, Rachel's handmaid in Genesis, but who also, in their long red gowns and white wimple-like headgear, have something of the aura of a temple harlot); brown for the Aunts (a thought-control force, part-governess, part-reform-school matron). The head of the household - whose first name the handmaid takes, adding the word ''of'' to show possession -''Offred,'' ''Ofwarren'' - is known as the Commander. It is his duty to inseminate his assigned partner, who lies on the spread thighs of his wife. THE Commanders, presumably, are the high bureaucracy of the regime, yet they are oddly powerless in the household, having no part in the administration of discipline and ceremonially subject to their aging wives. We are not told how and in what sense they govern. The oversight perhaps accounts for the thin credibility of the parable. That they lack freedom, are locked into their own rigid system, is only to be expected. It is no surprise that our narrator's commander, Fred, like a typical bourgeois husband of former times, does a bit of cheating, getting Offred to play Scrabble with him secretly at night (where books are forbidden, word games become wicked), look at his hoard of old fashion magazines (forbidden), kiss him, even go dressed in glitter and feathers to an underground bunny-type nightclub staffed by fallen women, mostly lesbian. Nor is it a surprise that his wife catches him/ them. Plusca change, plus c'est la meme chose. But that cannot be the motto for a cautionary tale, whose job is to warn of change.

Infertility is the big problem of the new world and the reason for many of its institutions. A dramatically lowered birth rate, which brought on the fall of the old order, had a plurality of causes, we are told. ''The air got too full, once, of chemicals, rays, radiation, the water swarmed with toxic molecules.'' During an earthquake, atomic power plants exploded (''nobody's fault''). A mutant strain of syphilis appeared, and of course AIDS. Then there were women who refused to breed, as an antinuclear protest, and had their tubes tied up. Anyway, infertility, despite the radical measures of the new regime, has not yet been overcome. Not only are there barren women (mostly shipped to the colonies) but a worrying sterility in men, especially among the powerful who ought to be reproducing themselves. The amusing suggestion is made, late in the book at a symposium (June 25, 2195) of Gileadean historical studies, that sterility among the Commanders may have been the result of an earlier gene-splicing experiment with mumps that produced a virus intended for insertion into the supply of caviar used by top officials in Moscow.

''The Handmaid's Tale'' contains several such touches of deft sardonic humor - for example, the television news program showing clouds of smoke over what was formerly the city of Detroit: we hear the anchorman explain that resettlement of the children of Ham in National Homeland One (the wilds of North Dakota) is continuing on schedule - 3,000 have arrived that week. And yet what is lacking, I think - what constitutes a fundamental disappointment after a promising start - is the destructive force of satire. ''Nineteen Eighty-Four'' had it, ''A Clockwork Orange'' had it, even ''Brave New World'' had it, though Huxley was rather short on savagery. If ''The Handmaid's Tale'' doesn't scare one, doesn't wake one up, it must be because it has no satiric bite.

The author has carefully drawn her projections from current trends. As she has said elsewhere, there is nothing here that has not been anticipated in the United States of America that we already know. Perhaps that is the trouble: the projections are too neatly penciled in. The details, including a Wall (as in Berlin, but also, as in the Middle Ages, a place where executed malefactors are displayed), all raise their hands announcing themselves present. At the same time, the Republic of Gilead itself, whatever in it that is not a projection, is insufficiently imagined. The Aunts are a good invention, though I cannot picture them as belonging to any future; unlike Big Brother, they are more part of the past - our schoolteachers.

But the most conspicuous lack, in comparison with the classics of the fearsome-future genre, is the inability to imagine a language to match the changed face of common life. No newspeak. And nothing like the linguistic tour de force of ''A Clockwork Orange'' - the brutal melting-down of current English and Slavic words that in itself tells the story of the dread new breed. The writing of ''The Handmaid's Tale'' is undistinguished in a double sense, ordinary if not glaringly so, but also indistinguishable from what one supposes would be Margaret Atwood's normal way of expressing herself in the circumstances. This is a serious defect, unpardonable maybe for the genre: a future that has no language invented for it lacks a personality. That must be why, collectively, it is powerless to scare. ONE could argue that the very tameness of the narrator-heroine's style is intended as characterization. It is true that a leading trait of Offred (we are never told her own, real name in so many words, but my textual detective work says it is June) has always been an unwillingness to stick her neck out, and perhaps we are meant to conclude that such unwillingness, multiplied, may be fatal to a free society. After the takeover, she tells us, there were some protests and demonstrations. ''I didn't go on any of the marches. Luke [ her husband ] said it would be futile, and I had to think about them, my family, him and her [ their little girl ] .'' Famous last words. But, though this may characterize an attitude - fairly widespread - it does not constitute a particular kind of speech. And there are many poetical passages, for example (chosen at random): ''All things white and circular. I wait for the day to unroll, for the earth to turn, according to the round face of the implacable clock.'' Which is surely oldspeak, wouldn't you say?

Characterization in general is weak in ''The Handmaid's Tale,'' which maybe makes it a poet's novel. I cannot tell Luke, the husband, from Nick, the chauffeur-lover who may be an Eye (government spy) and/ or belong to the ''Mayday'' underground. Nor is the Commander strongly drawn. Again, the Aunts are best. How sad for postfeminists that one does not feel for Offred-June half as much as one did for Winston Smith, no hero either but at any rate imaginable. It seems harsh to say again of a poet's novel - so hard to put down, in part so striking - that it lacks imagination, but that, I fear, is the problem.

The Lady Was Not for Hanging

The dedication of ''The Handmaid's Tale'' -''For Mary Webster and Perry Miller'' - holds clues to the novel's roots in our Puritan past. ''Mary Webster was an ancestor of mine who was hanged for a witch in Connecticut,'' Margaret Atwood explained. ''But she didn't die. They hadn't invented the drop yet'' - the part of the platform that falls away - ''so they hanged her but she lived.'' The author's studies in early American history under the Harvard scholar Perry Miller also informs her theme of religious intolerance. ''You often hear in North America, 'It can't happen here,' but it happened quite early on. The Puritans banished people who didn't agree with them, so we would be rather smug to assume that the seeds are not there. That's why I set the book in Cambridge,'' said the Canadian author, who lives in Toronto and has traveled widely in the United States. Like many of her fictional women (she has written poems, essays and novels, notably the feminist classic ''Surfacing''), she is wryly unpolemical. ''Feminist activity is not causal, it's symptomatic,'' she said of the book's antiwoman society. ''Any power structure will co-opt the views of its opponents, to sugarcoat the pill. The regime gives women some things the women's movement says they want -control over birth, no pornography - but there's a price. If you were going to put in a repressive regime, how would you do it?'' Despite the novel's projections from current events, Margaret Atwood resists calling her book a warning. ''I do not have a political agenda of that kind. The book won't tell you who to vote for,'' she said. But she advises, ''Anyone who wants power will try to manipulate you by appealing to your desires and fears, and sometimes your best instincts. Women have to be a little cautious about that kind of appeal to them. What are we being asked to give up?'' - Caryn James

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Mary McCarthy, whose latest book is ''Occasional Prose,'' will assume the new Stevenson Chair of Literature at Bard College beginning this fall.

Youth: Teen-Age Marriage

TIME APRIL 29, 1966

You got that feel, learning good, You’re ready now, girl, You’re ready now.

Or so lots of the teen-age hippies swinging to Franky Valley’s rock-‘n’-roll hit think. Last week a group of psychologists and educators gathered at the San Francisco Medical Center to discuss how teen-age marriages fare. The background statistics were chilling in themselves: 40% of today’s brides are between the ages of 15 and 18; within five years, half of teen-age marriages end in divorce.

Why do teen-agers get married? And what goes wrong? Pennsylvania State University Professor Carlfred Broderick sees it beginning when they decide to go steady (more than half do), terms this “the beginning of the end.” Says Broderick: “It takes little or no effort to get more and more involved; before they know it, they are slipping and sliding into marriage.” For boys, sex is the driving force (at least 35% of teenage brides are pregnant when they marry); the stronger the moral code, the more likely that the teen-ager will marry early.

For girls, as important as sex is the desire to “love.” But an early expectation of romance can soon be replaced by harsh reality. Disillusion is especially rapid when the husband has to curtail his education or children arrive too early.

The teen-age marrieds present on the panel tended to agree that escape into early marriage is risky at best. One part-time secretary who was born illegitimate herself confessed she had yearned for security. A pretty cocktail waitress who was wed at 17 said, “I was marrying to get out of home.” Bitterest of all was a girl who married at 17, is now in the process of getting divorced. “My parents trusted me too much,” she said. “In a way, it’s too bad giving kids too much time for things they’re not ready for.” For her, the future is bleak. Said she: “I have a little boy of two and a little boy of four, and they’re too much for me. I’m not grown up yet.”

What would the teen-age marrieds advise their own children to do? Said a 19-year-old motorcycle enthusiast who had to sidetrack a law career and go to work in a cement plant when he found his wife-to-be was pregnant: “I don’t think it’s a good idea for young people to get married; there are too many things to do then. But it’s so hard for a teen-ager to say, This is my judgment,’ when in your own experience you don’t know what you’ve done until it was done.”

TIME, May 3, 1976

The High Cost of Learning

Terrel H. Bell, 54, had a problem familiar to many Americans: even with a handsome salary ($37,800), he was not going to be able to put all his children through college. Bell’s eldest son will enter the University of Utah in September (room, board and tuition: $2,700); two other sons will soon follow.

With that in mind, Bell candidly wrote his boss, Health, Education and Welfare Secretary David Matthews, that even with just one son in college, there was “no way I can support him from my present position.” And so Terrel Bell submitted his resignation, effective Aug. 1, as U.S. Commissioner of Education.

He will become Utah’s commissioner of higher education and head of its board of regents—at a salary of $48,600.

An F in History

At Public School 161 in Manhattan, three-fourths of the students are Hispanic. So the community school board decided to rechristen the school, which bore the name of Fiorello H. LaGuardia. As a three-term mayor, the “Little Flower” championed city dwellers of every race and creed. But no matter; he was Italian, not Hispanic. The board thereupon chose the name of Pedro Albizu Campos, who before his death in 1965 proved his “unselfish devotion,” in the board’s words, “to the cause of liberation of Puerto Rico from the yoke of American colonialism.”

As it happens, only about 4% of Puerto Rico’s voters in the 1972 elections seemed to want liberation.

As it also happens, Albizu had waged a lifelong terrorist campaign. He instigated the 1950 assassination attempt against Harry Truman and in 1954, after four of his followers sprayed gunfire around the House of Representatives, wounding five Congressmen, hailed the triggermen for “sublime heroism.”

Some New Yorkers protested. The only Puerto Rican in the House of Representatives, Bronx Congressman Herman Badillo, suggested that the board could “find more impressive people than Mr. Albizu, who supported violence and overthrow of governments.” Asked LaGuardia’s widow, Marie: “Can they do that?” At week’s end the board was standing by its eccentric decision.

Power Switch Hitters

Weighing the case of a Justice Department worker who had been fired for spurning the sexual advances of her boss, U.S. District Court Judge Charles R. Richey last week tried to apply some firm rules of law to such indelicate situations. He came close to succeeding, then fell on his face. From his Washington courtroom, Richey decreed that under Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, employees discharged for not submitting to amorous advances may bring sexual-discrimination charges against the following bosses: 1) males who try to seduce female subordinates, 2) females who make advances toward male underlings and 3) homosexuals who have eyes for employees of the same gender.

Unaccountably, Richey then left a loophole big enough to destroy all the above rules. He decided that bisexual bosses are free to impose themselves on whomever they like—presumably on the ground that they would not discriminate against workers of either sex.