On Treason,
an excerpt from "The Marked Field,"
a work of fiction by Carl L. Biemiller

The Marked Field is a football story with an element of mystery and corruption
that takes place at a college in the US, post WWII, where football and winning is everything.

The title is a link to the novel itself.

This tale was published in the
"Blue Book Magazine For Adventurous Reading"
in October 1949 (v 89 #6)

Carl's biography, which appeared in the magazine,
can be found in the table of links below.

If you have any questions about "this" edition of Blue Book
please drop me a note at: eric@biemiller.com

From Chapter XI, page 122 of the magazine:
Treason does not begin with an overt act against one's country.

Treason is a cumulative affair born of a man's attitude toward himself and his evaluation of his own importance. When that evaluation of a personal belief becomes more important than a comparative evaluation of the well-being of a national society, then treason, with or without a physical or legal transgression, exists.

Yet, in a democratic society there can be no physical punishment for a thought or a belief. In this tenet lay a subtlety which, so far, had prevented democratic countries from dealing sanely with such matters as espionage, loyalties and the so-called preservation of individual liberties.

In this axiom of Americanism lay his personal security, his sense of safety. Yet one could never grow careless. That was punishable by persons who understood the ideals for which they stood and saw nothing beyond reconciliation in the use of blood, brutality and character assassination to support those ideals.
Blue Book Magazine
was a popular serial-format magazine published from about 1910 through 1951 and in its early years was known as Monthly Story.

The magazine was considered a "pulp publication." Pulps, were so called due to the poor quality of paper used. However, these were inexpensive escapes for many readers and many famous authors got their start in pulps.

Blue Book Magazine was most known for running the Tarzan stories by Edgar Rice Burroughs.

 

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