Junto Boys

999,999 TOO FEW

It’s been said that liberals love people in groups of no smaller than one million. Individuals they despise. Socialism takes care of both problems by subverting the desires of the individual to the desires of the state. Of course, this isn’t the way they put it. They do what they do out of selflessness. Take Arthur Miller:

In the days after his death, at the age of 89, Arthur Miller was eulogized around the world. Newspaper obituaries and television commentators hailed his work—including those keystones of the American canon Death of a Salesman and The Crucible—and recalled his many moments in the public eye: his marriage to Marilyn Monroe; his courageous refusal, in 1956, to "name names" before the House un-American Activities Committee; his eloquent and active opposition to the Vietnam War; his work, as the international president of pen, on behalf of oppressed writers around the world. The Denver Post called him "the moralist of the past American century," and The New York Times extolled his "fierce belief in man's responsibility to his fellow man—and [in] the self-destruction that followed on his betrayal of that responsibility."

In a moving speech at the Majestic, the playwright Tony Kushner said Miller had possessed the "curse of empathy." Edward Albee said that Miller had held up a mirror and told society, "Here is how you behave."

I hope Not, because. . .

Only a handful of people in the theater knew that Miller had a fourth child. Those who did said nothing, out of respect for his wishes, because, for nearly four decades, Miller had never publicly acknowledged the existence of Daniel.

At his death, the only major American newspaper to mention Daniel in its obituary was the Los Angeles Times, which said, "Miller had another son, Daniel, who was diagnosed with Down syndrome shortly after his birth in 1962.

Miller's friends say they never understood exactly what happened with Daniel, but the few details they heard were disturbing. Miller had not only erased his son from the public record; he had also cut him out of his private life, institutionalizing him at birth, refusing to see him or speak about him, virtually abandoning him.

Daniel Miller, they (disability-rights advocates) say, is a "guy who's made a difference in a lot of lives." They also say he is someone who, considering the challenges of his life, has in his own way achieved as much as his father did. The way Arthur Miller treated him baffles some people and angers others. But the question asked by friends of the father and of the son is the same: How could a man who, in the words of one close friend of Miller's, "had such a great world reputation for morality and pursuing justice do something like this"?

Because Daniel is 999,999 too few.

Arthur and Inge's first child, Rebecca, was born in September 1962, seven months after they were married. From the first, her parents "absolutely doted on her," friends recall. She was, says one, "the precious object. She was stunningly beautiful. Arthur and Inge were not really beautiful people, but they produced this exquisite daughter." Wherever Arthur and Inge went, they took Rebecca—on their trips around the world and to dinner parties. . .

Daniel was born four years later, in a New York City hospital. The Broadway producer Robert Whitehead, who died in 2002, would tell Martin Gottfried that Miller called him on the day of the birth. Miller was "overjoyed," Whitehead said, and confided that he and Inge were planning to name the boy "Eugene"—possibly after Eugene O'Neill, whose play Long Day's Journey into Night, which had won the Pulitzer in 1957, had awed Miller. The next day, however, Miller called Whitehead again and told him the baby "isn't right." The doctors had diagnosed the infant with Down syndrome.

"Arthur was terribly shaken—he used the term 'mongoloid,'" Whitehead recalled. He said, "'I'm going to have to put the baby away.'" A friend of Inge's recalls visiting her at home, in Roxbury, about a week later. "I was sitting at the bottom of the bed, and Inge was propped up, and my memory is that she was holding the baby and she was very, very unhappy," she says. "Inge wanted to keep the baby, but Arthur wasn't going to let her keep him." Inge, this friend recalls, "said that Arthur felt it would be very hard for Rebecca, and for the household," to raise Daniel at home. Another friend remembers that "it was a decision that had Rebecca at the center."

Within days, the child was gone, placed in a home for infants in New York City. When he was about two or three, one friend recalls, Inge tried to bring him home, but Arthur would not have it. Daniel was about four when he was placed at the Southbury Training School. Then one of two Connecticut institutions for the mentally retarded, Southbury was just a 10-minute drive from Roxbury, along shaded country roads. "Inge told me that she went to see him almost every Sunday, and that [Arthur] never wanted to see him," recalls the writer Francine du Plessix Gray. Once he was placed in Southbury, many friends heard nothing more about Daniel. "After a certain period," one friend says, "he was not mentioned at all."

By the early 1970s, however, around the time Arthur Miller put his son there, Southbury was understaffed and overcrowded. It had nearly 2,300 residents, including children, living in rooms with 30 to 40 beds. Many of the children wore diapers, because there weren't enough employees to toilet-train them. During the day, they sat in front of blaring TVs tuned to whatever show the staff wanted to watch. The most disabled children were left lying on mats on the floor, sometimes covered with nothing but a sheet. "In the wards you had people screaming, banging their heads against the wall, and taking their clothes off," says David Shaw, a leading Connecticut disability lawyer. "It was awful."

Toni Richardson, the former Connecticut commissioner for mental retardation, who worked at Southbury during the 1970s, recalls that in those days restraints were still used on children who were considered "rambunctious": the strips of cloth used to tie them to chairs or door handles were called "belly bands"; there was also something that "looked like a straitjacket, except that it was made of cotton."

In September 1995, Daniel and Arthur Miller met for the first time in public, at a conference on false confessions in Hartford, Connecticut. Miller had come to the Aetna conference center to deliver a speech on behalf of Richard Lapointe, a man with a mild intellectual disability who had been convicted, based on a confession that many people believed was coerced, of murdering his wife's grandmother. Daniel was there with a large group from People First. Miller, several participants recall, seemed stunned when Danny ran over and embraced him, but recovered quickly. "He gave Danny a big hug," says one man. "He was very nice." They had their picture taken together, and then Miller left. "Danny was thrilled," Bowen recalls.

Causes not individuals.

The following year, Rebecca Miller married Daniel Day-Lewis, whom she had met on the set of the movie adaptation of The Crucible. Day-Lewis, says Francine du Plessix Gray, "was the most compassionate about Daniel. He always visited him, with Inge and Rebecca." Some say he was "appalled" at Miller's attitude toward his son, and it is possible that Day-Lewis influenced Miller to make his first appearance, sometime in the late 1990s, at one of Daniel's annual "overall plan of service" reviews. The meeting was held in Daniel's apartment and lasted about two hours, Godbout recalls. As Arthur and Inge listened, the social workers who worked with Daniel discussed his progress—his job, his self-advocacy work, his huge network of friends. Miller "was just blown away," Godbout recalls. "He was absolutely amazed at Danny being able to live out on his own. He said it over and over again: 'I would never have dreamed this for my son. If you would have told me when he first started out that he would get to this point, I would never have believed it.' And you could see his sense of pride. Danny was right there, and he was just beaming."

Of course he was surprised. He thought most everyone incapable of taking care of themselves.

Miller never went to another meeting, and he apparently did not visit Daniel again at his apartment. But every now and then a social worker would drive Daniel to New York City to see his parents.

Wow, I'm so proud. Now get me away from him.

Today, Daniel Miller lives with the elderly couple who have long taken care of him, in a sprawling addition to their home that was built especially for him. He continues to receive daily visits from a state social worker, whom he's known for years. Although his father left him enough money to provide for everything he needs, Daniel has kept his job, which he loves and "is very proud of," according to Rebecca, who visits him with her family on holidays and during the summers. "Danny is very much part of our family," she said, and "leads a very active, happy life, surrounded by people who love him."

Some wonder why Arthur Miller, with all his wealth, waited until death to share it with his son. Had he done so sooner, Daniel could have afforded private care and a good education. But those who know Daniel say that this is not how he would feel. "He doesn't have a bitter bone in his body," says Bowen.

So it's okay because Danny is good hearted. I wonder if Danny found it in his heart to forgive Elia Kazan.

The article is quite long and the author keeps going back to her prejudices that Miller is this man of great social conscience. Again and again she tries to find mitigating factors that show Miller to be less than a scoundrel. She, of course, sees his actions as some kind of hypocrisy instead understanding it as perfectly consistent with his overall views of the world.

Socialism isn't a love of mankind, but a disdain for it. It's the idea that people are too foolish to be trusted on their own. A guy capable of institutionalizing his son, not providing for his care, and pretending him into nonexistence could not possibly be possessed with the "curse of empathy" no matter how many fashionable plays he could write.

Miller's villains were probably inspired by the weakness that he saw in himself, only he transferred it to middle America and was lionized for it. The Profiteering father, Joe Keller in ALL MY SONS knowingly sent out defective planes during World War II to make money, therefore capitalism is bad. Willy Loman used his conman personality to sell people things they didn't need therefore capitalism is bad.

Like his characters it seems that Miller's actions repudiate what he stood for too? If you can't trust a real socialist to be selfless, then how can you trust a whole system of them to have your best interests at heart?