It Can't Happen Here (14 page)

Through the welter, before Doremus’s eyes, jabbed a flying wedge of
Minute Men, led by what he was later to recognize as a cornet of
M.M.’s. They were not on duty, and they were not belligerent; they
were cheering, and singing “Berzelius Windrip went to Wash.,”
reminding Doremus of a slightly drunken knot of students from an
inferior college after a football victory. He was to remember them
so afterward, months afterward, when the enemies of the M.M.’s all
through the country derisively called them “Mickey Mouses” and
“Minnies.”

An old man, shabbily neat, stood blocking them and yelled,
“To hell
with Buzz! Three cheers for F.D.R.!”

The M.M.’s burst into hoodlum wrath. The cornet in command, a
bruiser uglier even than Shad Ledue, hit the old man on the jaw,
and he sloped down, sickeningly. Then, from nowhere, facing the
cornet, there was a chief petty officer of the navy, big, smiling,
reckless. The C.P.O. bellowed, in a voice tuned to hurricanes,
“Swell bunch o’ tin soldiers!
Nine o’ yuh to one grandpappy! Just
about even—”

The cornet socked him; he laid out the cornet with one foul to the
belly; instantly the other eight M.M.’s were on the C.P.O., like
sparrows after a hawk, and he crashed, his face, suddenly veal-white, laced with rivulets of blood. The eight kicked him in the
head with their thick marching-shoes. They were still kicking him
when Doremus wriggled
away, very sick, altogether helpless.

He had not turned away quickly enough to avoid seeing an M.M.
trooper, girlish-faced, crimson-lipped, fawn-eyed, throw himself on
the fallen cornet and, whimpering, stroke that roustabout’s roast-beef cheeks with shy gardenia-petal fingers.

There were many arguments, a few private fist fights, and one more
battle, before Doremus reached the auditorium.

A block from it some thirty M.M.’s, headed by a battalion-leader—something between a captain and a major—started raiding a street
meeting of Communists. A Jewish girl in khaki, her bare head
soaked with rain, was beseeching from the elevation of a
wheelbarrow, “Fellow travelers! Don’t just chew the rag and
‘sympathize’! Join us! Now! It’s life and death!” Twenty feet
from the Communists, a
middle-aged man who looked like a social
worker was explaining the Jeffersonian Party, recalling the record
of President Roosevelt, and reviling the Communists next door as
word-drunk un-American cranks. Half his audience were people who
might be competent voters; half of them—like half of any group on
this evening of tragic fiesta—were cigarette-sniping boys in hand-me-downs.

The thirty M.M.’s
cheerfully smashed into the Communists. The
battalion leader reached up, slapped the girl speaker, dragged her
down from the wheelbarrow. His followers casually waded in with
fists and blackjacks. Doremus, more nauseated, feeling more
helpless than ever, heard the smack of a blackjack on the temple of
a scrawny Jewish intellectual.

Amazingly, then, the voice of the rival Jeffersonian leader
spiraled up into a scream: “Come on,
you
! Going to let those
hellhounds attack our Communist friends—friends
now
, by God!”
With which the mild bookworm leaped into the air, came down
squarely upon a fat Mickey Mouse, capsized him, seized his
blackjack, took time to kick another M.M.’s shins before arising
from the wreck, sprang up, and waded into the raiders as, Doremus
guessed, he would have
waded into a table of statistics on the
proportion of butter fat in loose milk in 97.7 per cent of shops on
Avenue B.

Till then, only half-a-dozen Communist Party members had been
facing the M.M.’s, their backs to a garage wall. Fifty of their
own, fifty Jeffersonians besides, now joined them, and with bricks
and umbrellas and deadly volumes of sociology they drove off the
enraged M.M.’s—partisans
of Bela Kun side by side with the
partisans of Professor John Dewey—until a riot squad of policemen
battered their way in to protect the M.M.’s by arresting the girl
Communist speaker and the Jeffersonian.

Doremus had often “headed up” sports stories about “Madison Square
Garden Prize Fights,” but he did know that the place had nothing to
do with Madison Square, from which it was a day’s journey
by bus,
that it was decidedly not a garden, that the fighters there did not
fight for “prizes” but for fixed partnership shares in the
business, and that a good many of them did not fight at all.

The mammoth building, as in exhaustion Doremus crawled up to it,
was entirely ringed with M.M.’s, elbow to elbow, all carrying heavy
canes, and at every entrance, along every aisle, the M.M.’s were
rigidly
in line, with their officers galloping about, whispering
orders, and bearing uneasy rumors like scared calves in a dipping-pen.

These past weeks hungry miners, dispossessed farmers, Carolina mill
hands had greeted Senator Windrip with a flutter of worn hands
beneath gasoline torches. Now he was to face, not the unemployed,
for they could not afford fifty-cent tickets, but the small, scared
side-street
traders of New York, who considered themselves
altogether superior to clodhoppers and mine-creepers, yet were as
desperate as they. The swelling mass that Doremus saw, proud in
seats or standing chin-to-nape in the aisles, in a reek of dampened
clothes, was not romantic; they were people concerned with the
tailor’s goose, the tray of potato salad, the card of hooks-and-eyes, the leech-like mortgage
on the owner-driven taxi, with, at
home, the baby’s diapers, the dull safety-razor blade, the awful
rise in the cost of rump steak and kosher chicken. And a few, and
very proud, civil-service clerks and letter carriers and
superintendents of small apartment houses, curiously fashionable in
seventeen-dollar ready-made suits and feebly stitched foulard ties,
who boasted, “I don’t know why all these
bums go on relief. I may
not be such a wiz, but let me tell you, even since 1929, I’ve never
made less than
two thousand dollars a year
!”

Manhattan peasants. Kind people, industrious people, generous to
their aged, eager to find any desperate cure for the sickness of
worry over losing the job.

Most facile material for any rabble-rouser.

The historic rally opened with extreme dullness. A
regimental band
played the Tales from Hoffman barcarole with no apparent
significance and not much more liveliness. The Reverend Dr.
Hendrik Van Lollop of St. Apologue’s Lutheran Church offered
prayer, but one felt that probably it had not been accepted.
Senator Porkwood provided a dissertation on Senator Windrip which
was composed in equal parts of apostolic adoration of Buzz and of
the uh-uh-uh’s
with which Hon. Porkwood always interspersed his
words.

And Windrip wasn’t yet even in sight.

Colonel Dewey Haik, nominator of Buzz at the Cleveland convention,
was considerably better. He told three jokes, and an anecdote
about a faithful carrier pigeon in the Great War which had seemed
to understand, really better than many of the human soldiers, just
why it was that the Americans were over
there fighting for France
against Germany. The connection of this ornithological hero with
the virtues of Senator Windrip did not seem evident, but, after
having sat under Senator Porkwood, the audience enjoyed the note of
military gallantry.

Doremus felt that Colonel Haik was not merely rambling but pounding
on toward something definite. His voice became more insistent. He
began to talk about
Windrip: “my friend—the one man who dares
beard the monetary lion—the man who in his great and simple heart
cherishes the woe of every common man as once did the brooding
tenderness of Abraham Lincoln.” Then, wildly waving toward a side
entrance, he shrieked, “And here he comes! My friends—Buzz
Windrip!”

The band hammered out “The Campbells Are Coming.” A squadron of
Minute Men, smart as Horse
Guards, carrying long lances with
starred pennants, clicked into the gigantic bowl of the auditorium,
and after them, shabby in an old blue-serge suit, nervously
twisting a sweat-stained slouch hat, stooped and tired, limped
Berzelius Windrip. The audience leaped up, thrusting one another
aside to have a look at the deliverer, cheering like artillery at
dawn.

Windrip started prosaically enough.
You felt rather sorry for him,
so awkwardly did he lumber up the steps to the platform, across to
the center of the stage. He stopped; stared owlishly. Then he
quacked monotonously:

“The first time I ever came to New York I was a greenhorn—no,
don’t laugh, mebbe I still am! But I had already been elected a
United States Senator, and back home, the way they’d serenaded me,
I thought I was
some punkins. I thought my name was just about as
familiar to everybody as Al Capone’s or Camel Cigarettes or
Castoria—Babies Cry For It. But I come to New York on my way to
Washington, and say, I sat in my hotel lobby here for three days,
and the only fellow ever spoke to me was the hotel detective! And
when he did come up and address me, I was tickled to death—I
thought he was going to tell
me the whole burg was pleased by my
condescending to visit ‘em. But all he wanted to know was, was I a
guest of the hotel and did I have any right to be holding down a
lobby chair permanently that way! And tonight, friends, I’m pretty
near as scared of Old Gotham as I was then!”

The laughter, the hand-clapping, were fair enough, but the proud
electors were disappointed by his drawl, his weary
humility.

Doremus quivered hopefully, “Maybe he isn’t going to get elected!”

Windrip outlined his too-familiar platform—Doremus was interested
only in observing that Windrip misquoted his own figures regarding
the limitation of fortunes, in Point Five.

He slid into a rhapsody of general ideas—a mishmash of polite
regards to Justice, Freedom, Equality, Order, Prosperity,
Patriotism, and any
number of other noble but slippery abstractions.

Doremus thought he was being bored, until he discovered that, at
some moment which he had not noticed, he had become absorbed and
excited.

Something in the intensity with which Windrip looked at his
audience, looked at all of them, his glance slowly taking them in
from the highest-perched seat to the nearest, convinced them that
he was talking
to each individual, directly and solely; that he
wanted to take each of them into his heart; that he was telling
them the truths, the imperious and dangerous facts, that had been
hidden from them.

“They say I want money—power! Say, I’ve turned down offers from
law firms right here in New York of three times the money I’ll get
as President! And power—why, the President is the servant of
every
citizen in the country, and not just of the considerate
folks, but also of every crank that comes pestering him by telegram
and phone and letter. And yet, it’s true, it’s absolutely true I
do want power, great, big, imperial power—but not for myself—no—for
you
!—the power of your permission to smash the Jew financiers
who’ve enslaved you, who’re working you to death to pay the
interest on their
bonds; the grasping bankers—and not all of ‘em
Jews by a darn sight!—the crooked labor-leaders just as much as
the crooked bosses, and, most of all, the sneaking spies of Moscow
that want you to lick the boots of their self-appointed tyrants
that rule not by love and loyalty, like I want to, but by the
horrible power of the whip, the dark cell, the automatic pistol!”

He pictured, then, a Paradise
of democracy in which, with the old
political machines destroyed, every humblest worker would be king
and ruler, dominating representatives elected from among his own
kind of people, and these representatives not growing indifferent,
as hitherto they had done, once they were far off in Washington,
but kept alert to the public interest by the supervision of a
strengthened Executive.

It sounded
almost reasonable, for a while.

The supreme actor, Buzz Windrip, was passionate yet never
grotesquely wild. He did not gesture too extravagantly; only, like
Gene Debs of old, he reached out a bony forefinger which seemed to
jab into each of them and hook out each heart. It was his mad
eyes, big staring tragic eyes, that startled them, and his voice,
now thundering, now humbly pleading, that
soothed them.

He was so obviously an honest and merciful leader; a man of sorrows
and acquaint with woe.

Doremus marveled, “I’ll be hanged! Why, he’s a darn good sort when
you come to meet him! And warm-hearted. He makes me feel as if
I’d been having a good evening with Buck and Steve Perefixe. What
if Buzz is right? What if—in spite of all the demagogic pap that,
I suppose, he has got
to feed out to the boobs—he’s right in
claiming that it’s only he, and not Trowbridge or Roosevelt, that
can break the hold of the absentee owners? And these Minute Men,
his followers—oh, they were pretty nasty, what I saw out on the
street, but still, most of ‘em are mighty nice, clean-cut young
fellows. Seeing Buzz and then listening to what he actually says
does kind of surprise you—kind
of make you think!”

But what Mr. Windrip actually
had
said, Doremus could not remember
an hour later, when he had come out of the trance.

He was so convinced then that Windrip would win that, on Tuesday
evening, he did not remain at the
Informer
office until the returns
were all in. But if he did not stay for the evidences of the
election, they came to him.

Past his house, after midnight,
through muddy snow tramped a
triumphant and reasonably drunken parade, carrying torches and
bellowing to the air of “Yankee Doodle” new words revealed just
that week by Mrs. Adelaide Tarr Gimmitch:

“The snakes disloyal to our Buzz

We’re riding on a rail,

They’ll wish to God they never was,

When we get them in jail!

Chorus:

“Buzz and buzz and keep it up

To victory he’s floated.

You were a most ungrateful pup,

Unless for Buzz you voted.

“Every M.M. gets a whip

To use upon some traitor,

And every Antibuzz we skip

Today, we’ll tend to later.”