It Can't Happen Here (12 page)

Even Europe joined in.

With the most modest friendliness, explaining that they wished not
to intrude on American domestic politics but only to express
personal admiration for that great Western advocate of peace and
prosperity, Berzelius Windrip, there came representatives of
certain foreign powers, lecturing throughout
the land: General
Balbo, so popular here because of his leadership of the flight from
Italy to Chicago in 1933; a scholar who, though he now lived in
Germany and was an inspiration to all patriotic leaders of German
Recovery, yet had graduated from Harvard University and had been
the most popular piano-player in his class—namely, Dr. Ernst
(Putzi) Hanfstängl; and Great Britain’s lion of diplomacy,
the
Gladstone of the 1930’s, the handsome and gracious Lord Lossiemouth
who, as Prime Minister, had been known as the Rt. Hon. Ramsay
MacDonald, P.C.

All three of them were expensively entertained by the wives of
manufacturers, and they persuaded many millionaires who, in the
refinement of wealth, had considered Buzz vulgar, that actually he
was the world’s one hope of efficient international
commerce.

Father Coughlin took one look at all the candidates and indignantly
retired to his cell.

Mrs. Adelaide Tarr Gimmitch, who would surely have written to the
friends she had made at the Rotary Club Dinner in Fort Beulah if
she could only have remembered the name of the town, was a
considerable figure in the campaign. She explained to women voters
how kind it was of Senator Windrip
to let them go on voting, so
far; and she sang “Berzelius Windrip’s gone to Wash.” an average of
eleven times a day.

Buzz himself, Bishop Prang, Senator Porkwood (the fearless Liberal
and friend of labor and the farmers), and Colonel Osceola Luthorne,
the editor, though their prime task was reaching millions by radio,
also, in a forty-day tram trip, traveled over 27,000 miles, through
every state
in the Union, on the scarlet-and-silver, ebony-paneled,
silk-upholstered, streamlined, Diesel-engined, rubber-padded, air-conditioned, aluminum Forgotten Men Special.

It had a private bar that was forgotten by none save the Bishop.

The train fares were the generous gift of the combined railways.

Over six hundred speeches were discharged, ranging from eight-minute hallos
delivered to the crowds
gathered at stations, to
two-hour fulminations in auditoriums and fairgrounds. Buzz was present
at every speech, usually starring, but sometimes so hoarse that he
could only wave his hand and croak, “Howdy, folks!” while he was
spelled by Prang, Porkwood, Colonel Luthorne, or such volunteers
from his regiment of secretaries, doctoral consulting specialists
in history and economics, cooks, bartenders,
and barbers, as could
be lured away from playing craps with the accompanying reporters,
photographers, sound-recorders, and broadcasters. Tieffer of the
United Press has estimated that Buzz thus appeared personally
before more than two million persons.

Meanwhile, almost daily hurtling by aeroplane between Washington
and Buzz’s home, Lee Sarason supervised dozens of telephone girls
and scores
of girl stenographers, who answered thousands of daily
telephone calls and letters and telegrams and cables—and boxes
containing poisoned candy… . Buzz himself had made the rule
that all these girls must be pretty, reasonable, thoroughly
skilled, and related to people with political influence.

For Sarason it must be said that in this bedlam of “public
relations” he never once used
contact
as
a transitive verb.

The Hon. Perley Beecroft, vice-presidential candidate, specialized
on the conventions of fraternal orders, religious denominations,
insurance agents, and traveling men.

Colonel Dewey Haik, who had nominated Buzz at Cleveland, had an
assignment unique in campaigning—one of Sarason’s slickest
inventions. Haik spoke for Windrip not in the most frequented,
most obvious places,
but at places so unusual that his appearance
there made news—and Sarason and Haik saw to it that there were
nimble chroniclers present to get that news. Flying in his own
plane, covering a thousand miles a day, he spoke to nine astonished
miners whom he caught in a copper mine a mile below the surface—while thirty-nine photographers snapped the nine; he spoke from a
motorboat to a stilled fishing
fleet during a fog in Gloucester
harbor; he spoke from the steps of the Sub-Treasury at noon on Wall
Street; he spoke to the aviators and ground crew at Shushan
Airport, New Orleans—and even the flyers were ribald only for the
first five minutes, till he had described Buzz Windrip’s gallant
but ludicrous efforts to learn to fly; he spoke to state policemen,
to stamp-collectors, players of chess
in secret clubs, and
steeplejacks at work; he spoke in breweries, hospitals, magazine
offices, cathedrals, crossroad churches forty-by-thirty, prisons,
lunatic asylums, night clubs—till the art editors began to send
photographers the memo: “For Pete’s sake, no more fotos Kunnel
Haik spieling in sporting houses and hoose-gow.”

Yet went on using the pictures.

For Colonel Dewey Haik was a figure
as sharp-lighted, almost, as
Buzz Windrip himself. Son of a decayed Tennessee family, with one
Confederate general grandfather and one a Dewey of Vermont, he had
picked cotton, become a youthful telegraph operator, worked his way
through the University of Arkansas and the University of Missouri
law school, settled as a lawyer in a Wyoming village and then in
Oregon, and during the war (he was
in 1936 but forty-four years
old) served in France as captain of infantry, with credit.
Returned to America, he had been elected to Congress, and become a
colonel in the militia. He studied military history; he learned to
fly, to box, to fence; he was a ramrod-like figure yet had a fairly
amiable smile; he was liked equally by disciplinary army officers
of high rank, and by such roughnecks as
Mr. Shad Ledue, the Caliban
of Doremus Jessup.

Haik brought to Buzz’s fold the very picaroons who had most
snickered at Bishop Prang’s solemnity.

All this while, Hector Macgoblin, the cultured doctor and burly
boxing fan, co-author with Sarason of the campaign anthem, “Bring
Out the Old-time Musket,” was specializing in the inspiration of
college professors, associations of high-school teachers,
professional baseball teams, training-camps of pugilists, medical
meetings, summer schools in which well-known authors taught the art
of writing to earnest aspirants who could never learn to write,
golf tournaments, and all such cultural congresses.

But the pugilistic Dr. Macgoblin came nearer to danger than any
other campaigner. During a meeting in Alabama, where he had
satisfactorily proved
that no Negro with less than 25 per cent
“white blood” can ever rise to the cultural level of a patent-medicine salesman, the meeting was raided, the costly residence
section of the whites was raided, by a band of colored people
headed by a Negro who had been a corporal on the Western Front in
1918. Macgoblin and the town were saved by the eloquence of a
colored clergyman.

Truly, as Bishop
Prang said, the apostles of Senator Windrip were
now preaching his Message unto all manner of men, even unto the
Heathen.

But what Doremus Jessup said, to Buck Titus and Father Perefixe,
was:

“This is Revolution in terms of Rotary.”

When I was a kid, one time I had an old-maid teacher that used to
tell me, “Buzz, you’re the thickest-headed dunce in school.” But I
noticed that she told me this a whole lot oftener than she used to
tell the other kids how smart they were, and I came to be the most
talked-about scholar in the whole township. The United States
Senate isn’t so different, and I want to thank a lot of stuffed
shirts for their remarks about Yours Truly.

Zero Hour
, Berzelius Windrip.

But there were certain of the Heathen who did not heed those
heralds Prang and Windrip and Haik and Dr. Macgoblin.

Walt Trowbridge conducted his campaign as placidly as though he
were certain to win. He did not spare himself, but he did not moan
over the Forgotten Men (he’d been one himself, as a youngster, and
didn’t
think it was so bad!) nor become hysterical at a private bar
in a scarlet-and-silver special tram. Quietly, steadfastly,
speaking on the radio and in a few great halls, he explained that
he did advocate an enormously improved distribution of wealth, but
that it must be achieved by steady digging and not by dynamite that
would destroy more than it excavated. He wasn’t particularly
thrilling.
Economics rarely are, except when they have been
dramatized by a Bishop, staged and lighted by a Sarason, and
passionately played by a Buzz Windrip with rapier and blue satin
tights.

For the campaign the Communists had brightly brought out their
sacrificial candidates—in fact, all seven of the current Communist
parties had. Since, if they all stuck together, they might entice
900,000 votes,
they had avoided such bourgeois grossness by
enthusiastic schisms, and their creeds now included:
The
Party,
the Majority Party, the Leftist Party, the Trotzky Party, the
Christian Communist Party, the Workers’ Party, and, less baldly
named, something called the American Nationalist Patriotic
Cooperative Fabian Post-Marxian Communist Party—it sounded like
the names of royalty but was otherwise dissimilar.

But these radical excursions were not very significant compared
with the new Jeffersonian Party, suddenly fathered by Franklin D.
Roosevelt.

Forty-eight hours after the nomination of Windrip at Cleveland,
President Roosevelt had issued his defiance.

Senator Windrip, he asserted, had been chosen “not by the brains
and hearts of genuine Democrats but by their temporarily crazed
emotions.” He
would no more support Windrip because he claimed to
be a Democrat than he would support Jimmy Walker.

Yet, he said, he could not vote for the Republican Party, the
“party of intrenched special privilege,” however much, in the past
three years, he had appreciated the loyalty, the honesty, the
intelligence of Senator Walt Trowbridge.

Roosevelt made it clear that his Jeffersonian or True Democratic
faction was not a “third party” in the sense that it was to be
permanent. It was to vanish as soon as honest and coolly thinking
men got control again of the old organization. Buzz Windrip
aroused mirth by dubbing it the “Bull Mouse Party,” but President
Roosevelt was joined by almost all the liberal members of Congress,
Democratic or Republican, who had not followed Walt Trowbridge; by
Norman
Thomas and the Socialists who had not turned Communist; by
Governors Floyd Olson and Olin Johnston; and by Mayor La Guardia.

The conspicuous fault of the Jeffersonian Party, like the personal
fault of Senator Trowbridge, was that it represented integrity and
reason, in a year when the electorate hungered for frisky emotions,
for the peppery sensations associated, usually, not with monetary
systems
and taxation rates but with baptism by immersion in the
creek, young love under the elms, straight whisky, angelic
orchestras heard soaring down from the full moon, fear of death
when an automobile teeters above a canyon, thirst in a desert and
quenching it with spring water—all the primitive sensations which
they thought they found in the screaming of Buzz Windrip.

Far from the hot-lighted
ballrooms where all these crimson-tuniced
bandmasters shrillsquabbled as to which should lead for the moment
the tremendous spiritual jazz, far off in the cool hills a little
man named Doremus Jessup, who wasn’t even a bass drummer but only a
citizen editor, wondered in confusion what he should do to be
saved.

He wanted to follow Roosevelt and the Jeffersonian Party—partly
for admiration of the
man; partly for the pleasure of shocking the
ingrown Republicanism of Vermont. But he could not believe that
the Jeffersonians would have a chance; he did believe that, for all
the mothball odor of many of his associates, Walt Trowbridge was a
valiant and competent man; and night and day Doremus bounced up and
down Beulah Valley campaigning for Trowbridge.

Out of his very confusion there came
into his writing a desperate
sureness which surprised accustomed readers of the
Informer
. For
once he was not amused and tolerant. Though he never said anything
worse of the Jeffersonian Party than that it was ahead of its
times, in both editorials and news stories he went after Buzz
Windrip and his gang with whips, turpentine, and scandal.

In person, he was into and out of shops and houses
all morning
long, arguing with voters, getting miniature interviews.

He had expected that traditionally Republican Vermont would give
him too drearily easy a task in preaching Trowbridge. What he
found was a dismaying preference for the theoretically Democratic
Buzz Windrip. And that preference, Doremus perceived, wasn’t even
a pathetic trust in Windrip’s promises of Utopian bliss for
everyone
in general. It was a trust in increased cash for the
voter himself, and for his family, very much in particular.

Most of them had, among all the factors in the campaign, noticed
only what they regarded as Windrip’s humor, and three planks in his
platform: Five, which promised to increase taxes on the rich;
Ten, which condemned the Negroes—since nothing so elevates a
dispossessed farmer or a
factory worker on relief as to have some
race, any race, on which he can look down; and, especially, Eleven,
which announced, or seemed to announce, that the average toiler
would immediately receive $5000 a year. (And ever-so-many railway-station debaters explained that it would really be $10,000. Why,
they were going to have every cent offered by Dr. Townsend, plus
everything planned by the late
Huey Long, Upton Sinclair, and the
Utopians, all put together!)