
Charlton Heston: “I Didn’t Know The Difference”
I have always considered myself a very lucky man on many counts, but most particularly because I was inoculated early in life against a dread disease—bigotry. The treatment was drastic—complete quarantine. But it certainly took. I was raised in a part of Northeast Michigan more heavily settled with trees than people. I must be one of the few members of my generation who went to a one-room school, and, during most of the time I went there, the one room contained eleven pupils and eight primary grades. In view of the fact that two of the eleven were cousins of mine, it’s not surprising that the racial and religious make-up of the school was as uniform as it was. To me, men came in only one pattern—white Protestant. Not church-going Protestant, either. We had no church in St. Helen then.
It may be hard to believe that a boy could grow into adolescence in the Twentieth Century so ignorant of one of the great evils of the modern world, but that is exactly what happened to me. I can claim no particular credit for the sunny tolerance with which I viewed the world around me then. I had few playmates, knew few people, indeed, outside the family. The few boys I did know seemed very much like me. I spent most of my time roaming the woods alone, which may have had something to do with my innocence in these matters. Nature doesn’t discriminate.

When we moved to a large city, where there were other faces, and other faiths, too, the vaccination had apparently taken. There must have been many examples of prejudice around me, but the group and race labels that prompted them were never very clear to me. Back home a man was a farmer, a sawmill hand, a tourist guide or a trapper and a Protestant, of course. Here, the choice of jobs was greater and so was the choice of religions. But a man was still whatever kind of man he was on his own account, as far as I was concerned, and it never occurred to me to take into account where he worshiped or how or even whether!
Most people, of course, arrive at this point of view as soon as they are old enough to start thinking for themselves; I have always been grateful that I never had to go through the painful period of reexamining and discording old and shallow thinking first. Again, I can claim no credit for this happy fact, it’s just that I never met a man I didn’t like until I was old enough to have a better reason for disliking him than the church he went to, or didn’t go to.
All this has not been something I’ve thought much about, up until now. ’m not much on introspection, as a rule; but it’s been ringing some bells for me, lately since I’ve been working on the role of Moses in Mr. DeMille’s production of The Ten Commandments.
I’m a long way from any position of authority on Moses. The nine months I spent preparing before we went to Egypt to begin shooting last October and the experience of building the part since have taught me more than anything some sense of the infinity of this man. The only position from which I can speak with any voice at all is that of a man who has stood on Sinai, and who has worked for a year and a half on the character of the man Moses whose life was described by Winston Churchill as, “. . . . the most decisive leap forward, ever discernible in the human story.”
Moses is proving a great experience for me, personally as well as professionally. It would be trite, and a little oversimplified besides, to say that the role was an inspiration for me; but you cannot spend a year and a half digging into a personality as vital as Moses, spend ten and twelve hours a working day trying to be that man, and still be the same when you’ve finished it. When we shot the sequences of Moses’ exile in the terrifying Wilderness of Sin, a desert sojourn he seems to have shared with the prophets of almost every major religion, Christ, Mohammed, Buddha, I remembered my own early solitudes, and tried to relate them to what I was trying to experience, as Moses. My presumption is obvious, of course. My own wanderings had only served to preserve my innocence; Moses had come from his exile inspired with a philosophic concept whose impact on the world has never stopped echoing that Law can be more than the casual will of the government; that it can be an immutable code for men to live by, regardless of their beliefs or strengths. The same law, for all men.
I think this is the true strength of Moses’ place in the life of Man, the loudest voice with which he speaks across three millenia. To Jews he is the Deliverer, to Christians he is the Lawgiver and to Moslems he is the First True Believer, but to all these faiths, and to men of no faith at all, he brought the Law by which men still try to live. You could go to church or synagogue or mosque, or be out of reach of any church, as I was as a child, and find this the same in every place.
To me there is a wonderful aptness in this: that Moses, whose message cuts so heedlessly across all the intricate barriers and lines of demarcation man has so painfully set up to keep him from his fellows, should also be claimed by all men for their own. He is all men, of course, grown a little taller.
As I said, ’m a lucky man, many times over. For Michigan, and Moses, and a little boy my wife bore me, this last Lincoln’s Birthday. I’ve got a piece of those woods to take him to, pretty soon, too. Although he can’t grow up there, our country’s grown up, too, I think. We aren’t so worried, even in the cities, about how a man spells his name, or what he calls his God. My son can live in the city, I think, without contracting that virus I spoke of. Oh, he’ll come home some day and tell me about that awful kid in the next block, and how he hates him. But it’ll be because the awful kid tore the tail off his Davy Crockett cap, not because the awful kid wears a St. Christopher. And when he goes back to take after the awful kid, the things he yells will be something like what I heard a little boy yelling after another outside just now, “Go fall in the garbage, you Maneaters I Have Known! A Bendix would eat you!” instead of the things little boys used to yell. I think this will be fine.
THE END
—BY CHARLTON HESTON
It is a quote. MODERN SCREEN MAGAZINE SEPTEMBER 1955