It Can't Happen Here (19 page)

On Wednesday, January 6, 1937, just a fortnight before his
inauguration, President-Elect Windrip announced his appointments of
cabinet members and of diplomats.

Secretary of State: his former secretary and press-agent, Lee
Sarason, who also took the position of High Marshal, or Commander-in-Chief, of the Minute Men, which organization was to be
established permanently,
as an innocent marching club.

Secretary of the Treasury: one Webster R. Skittle, president of the
prosperous Fur & Hide National Bank of St. Louis—Mr. Skittle had
once been indicted on a charge of defrauding the government on his
income tax, but he had been acquitted, more or less, and during the
campaign, he was said to have taken a convincing way of showing his
faith in Buzz Windrip as the
Savior of the Forgotten Men.

Secretary of War: Colonel Osceola Luthorne, formerly editor of the
Topeka (Kans.) Argus, and the Fancy Goods and Novelties Gazette;
more recently high in real estate. His title came from his
position on the honorary staff of the Governor of Tennessee. He
had long been a friend and fellow campaigner of Windrip.

It was a universal regret that Bishop Paul Peter Prang
should have
refused the appointment as Secretary of War, with a letter in which
he called Windrip “My dear Friend and Collaborator” and asserted
that he had actually meant it when he had said he desired no
office. Later, it was a similar regret when Father Coughlin
refused the Ambassadorship to Mexico, with no letter at all but
only a telegram cryptically stating, “Just six months too late.”

A new cabinet position, that of Secretary of Education and Public
Relations, was created. Not for months would Congress investigate
the legality of such a creation, but meantime the new post was
brilliantly held by Hector Macgoblin, M.D., Ph.D., Hon. Litt.D.

Senator Porkwood graced the position of Attorney General, and all
the other offices were acceptably filled by men who, though they
had roundly
supported Windrip’s almost socialistic projects for the
distribution of excessive fortunes, were yet known to be thoroughly
sensible men, and no fanatics.

It was said, though Doremus Jessup could never prove it, that
Windrip learned from Lee Sarason the Spanish custom of getting
rid of embarrassing friends and enemies by appointing them to
posts abroad, preferably quite far abroad. Anyway, as
Ambassador
to Brazil, Windrip appointed Herbert Hoover, who not very
enthusiastically accepted; as Ambassador to Germany, Senator Borah;
as Governor of the Philippines, Senator Robert La Follette, who
refused; and as Ambassadors to the Court of St. James’s, France,
and Russia, none other than Upton Sinclair, Milo Reno, and Senator
Bilbo of Mississippi.

These three had a fine time. Mr. Sinclair
pleased the British by
taking so friendly an interest in their politics that he openly
campaigned for the Independent Labor Party and issued a lively
brochure called “I, Upton Sinclair, Prove That Prime-Minister
Walter Elliot, Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden, and First Lord of
the Admiralty Nancy Astor Are All Liars and Have Refused to Accept
My Freely Offered Advice.” Mr. Sinclair also aroused
considerable
interest in British domestic circles by advocating an act of
Parliament forbidding the wearing of evening clothes and all
hunting of foxes except with shotguns; and on the occasion of his
official reception at Buckingham Palace, he warmly invited King
George and Queen Mary to come and live in California.

Mr. Milo Reno, insurance salesman and former president of the
National Farm
Holiday Association, whom all the French royalists
compared to his great predecessor, Benjamin Franklin, for
forthrightness, became the greatest social favorite in the
international circles of Paris, the Basses-Pyrénées, and the
Riviera, and was once photographed playing tennis at Antibes with
the Duc de Tropez, Lord Rothermere, and Dr. Rudolph Hess.

Senator Bilbo had, possibly, the best time
of all.

Stalin asked his advice, as based on his ripe experience in the
Gleichshaltung of Mississippi, about the cultural organization of
the somewhat backward natives of Tadjikistan, and so valuable did
it prove that Excellency Bilbo was invited to review the Moscow
military celebration, the following November seventh, in the
same stand with the very highest class of representatives of
the classless
state. It was a triumph for His Excellency.
Generalissimo Voroshilov fainted after 200,000 Soviet troops, 7000
tanks, and 9000 aeroplanes had passed by; Stalin had to be carried
home after reviewing 317,000; but Ambassador Bilbo was there in the
stand when the very last of the 626,000 soldiers had gone by, all
of them saluting him under the quite erroneous impression that he
was the Chinese Ambassador;
and he was still tirelessly returning
their salutes, fourteen to the minute, and softly singing with them
the “International.”

He was less of a hit later, however, when to the unsmiling Anglo-American Association of Exiles to Soviet Russia from Imperialism,
he sang to the tune of the “International” what he regarded as
amusing private words of his own:

“Arise, ye prisoners of starvation,

From Russia make your getaway.

They all are rich in Bilbo’s nation.

God bless the U. S. A.!”

Mrs. Adelaide Tarr Gimmitch, after her spirited campaign for Mr.
Windrip, was publicly angry that she was offered no position higher
than a post in the customs office in Nome, Alaska, though this was
offered to her very urgently indeed. She had demanded that there
be created, especially for
her, the cabinet position of
Secretaryess of Domestic Science, Child Welfare, and Anti-Vice.
She threatened to turn Jeffersonian, Republican, or Communistic,
but in April she was heard of in Hollywood, writing the scenario
for a giant picture to be called, They Did It in Greece.

As an insult and boy-from-home joke, the President-Elect appointed
Franklin D. Roosevelt minister to Liberia. Mr.
Roosevelt’s
opponents laughed very much, and opposition newspapers did cartoons
of him sitting unhappily in a grass hut with a sign on which
“N.R.A.” had been crossed out and “U.S.A.” substituted. But Mr.
Roosevelt declined with so amiable a smile that the joke seemed
rather to have slipped.

The followers of President Windrip trumpeted that it was
significant that he should be the first president
inaugurated not
on March fourth, but on January twentieth, according to the
provision of the new Twentieth Amendment to the Constitution. It
was a sign straight from Heaven (though, actually, Heaven had not
been the author of the amendment, but Senator George W. Norris of
Nebraska), and proved that Windrip was starting a new paradise on
earth.

The inauguration was turbulent. President Roosevelt
declined to be
present—he politely suggested that he was about half ill unto
death, but that same noon he was seen in a New York shop, buying
books on gardening and looking abnormally cheerful.

More than a thousand reporters, photographers, and radio men
covered the inauguration. Twenty-seven constituents of Senator
Porkwood, of all sexes, had to sleep on the floor of the Senator’s
office, and
a hall-bedroom in the suburb of Bladensburg rented for
thirty dollars for two nights. The presidents of Brazil, the
Argentine, and Chile flew to the inauguration in a Pan-American
aeroplane, and Japan sent seven hundred students on a special train
from Seattle.

A motor company in Detroit had presented to Windrip a limousine
with armor plate, bulletproof glass, a hidden nickel-steel safe for
papers, a concealed private bar, and upholstery made from the
Troissant tapestries of 1670. But Buzz chose to drive from his
home to the Capitol in his old Hupmobile sedan, and his driver was
a youngster from his home town whose notion of a uniform for state
occasions was a blue-serge suit, red tie, and derby hat. Windrip
himself did wear a topper, but he saw to it that Lee Sarason saw to
it
that the one hundred and thirty million plain citizens learned,
by radio, even while the inaugural parade was going on, that he had
borrowed the topper for this one sole occasion from a New York
Republican Representative who had ancestors.

But following Windrip was an un-Jacksonian escort of soldiers: the
American Legion and, immensely grander than the others, the Minute
Men, wearing trench helmets
of polished silver and led by Colonel
Dewey Haik in scarlet tunic and yellow riding-breeches and helmet
with golden plumes.

Solemnly, for once looking a little awed, a little like a small-town boy on Broadway, Windrip took the oath, administered by the
Chief Justice (who disliked him very much indeed) and, edging even
closer to the microphone, squawked, “My fellow citizens, as the
President of
the United States of America, I want to inform you
that the
real
New Deal has started right this minute, and we’re all
going to enjoy the manifold liberties to which our history entitles
us—and have a whale of a good time doing it! I thank you!”

That was his first act as President. His second was to take up
residence in the White House, where he sat down in the East Room in
his stocking feet
and shouted at Lee Sarason, “This is what I’ve
been planning to do now for six years! I bet this is what Lincoln
used to do! Now let ‘em assassinate me!”

His third, in his role as Commander-in-Chief of the Army, was to
order that the Minute Men be recognized as an unpaid but official
auxiliary of the Regular Army, subject only to their own officers,
to Buzz, and to High Marshal Sarason; and
that rifles, bayonets,
automatic pistols, and machine guns be instantly issued to them by
government arsenals. That was at 4 P.M. Since 3 P.M., all over
the country, bands of M.M.’s had been sitting gloating over pistols
and guns, twitching with desire to seize them.

Fourth coup was a special message, next morning, to Congress (in
session since January fourth, the third having been a Sunday),
demanding the instant passage of a bill embodying Point Fifteen of
his election platform—that he should have complete control of
legislation and execution, and the Supreme Court be rendered
incapable of blocking anything that it might amuse him to do.

By Joint Resolution, with less than half an hour of debate, both
houses of Congress rejected that demand before 3 P.M., on January
twenty-first.
Before six, the President had proclaimed that a
state of martial law existed during the “present crisis,” and more
than a hundred Congressmen had been arrested by Minute Men, on
direct orders from the President. The Congressmen who were
hotheaded enough to resist were cynically charged with “inciting to
riot”; they who went quietly were not charged at all. It was
blandly explained to the agitated
press by Lee Sarason that these
latter quiet lads had been so threatened by “irresponsible and
seditious elements” that they were merely being safeguarded.
Sarason did not use the phrase “protective arrest,” which might
have suggested things.

To the veteran reporters it was strange to see the titular
Secretary of State, theoretically a person of such dignity and
consequence that he could deal
with the representatives of foreign
powers, acting as press-agent and yes-man for even the President.

There were riots, instantly, all over Washington, all over America.

The recalcitrant Congressmen had been penned in the District Jail.
Toward it, in the winter evening, marched a mob that was noisily
mutinous toward the Windrip for whom so many of them had voted.
Among the mob buzzed hundreds
of Negroes, armed with knives and old
pistols, for one of the kidnaped Congressmen was a Negro from
Georgia, the first colored Georgian to hold high office since
carpetbagger days.

Surrounding the jail, behind machine guns, the rebels found a few
Regulars, many police, and a horde of Minute Men, but at these last
they jeered, calling them “Minnie Mouses” and “tin soldiers” and
“mama’s boys.”
The M.M.’s looked nervously at their officers and
at the Regulars who were making so professional a pretense of not
being scared. The mob heaved bottles and dead fish. Half-a-dozen
policemen with guns and night sticks, trying to push back the van
of the mob, were buried under a human surf and came up grotesquely
battered and ununiformed—those who ever did come up again. There
were two shots;
and one Minute Man slumped to the jail steps,
another stood ludicrously holding a wrist that spurted blood.

The Minute Men—why, they said to themselves, they’d never meant to
be soldiers anyway—just wanted to have some fun marching! They
began to sneak into the edges of the mob, hiding their uniform
caps. That instant, from a powerful loudspeaker in a lower window
of the jail brayed the voice
of President Berzelius Windrip:

“I am addressing my own boys, the Minute Men, everywhere in
America! To you and you only I look for help to make America a
proud, rich land again. You have been scorned. They thought you
were the ‘lower classes.’ They wouldn’t give you jobs. They told
you to sneak off like bums and get relief. They ordered you into
lousy C.C.C. camps. They said you were
no good, because you were
poor.
I
tell you that you are, ever since yesterday noon, the
highest lords of the land—the aristocracy—the makers of the new
America of freedom and justice. Boys! I need you! Help me—help
me to help you! Stand fast! Anybody tries to block you—give the
swine the point of your bayonet!”

A machine-gunner M.M., who had listened reverently, let loose. The
mob began
to drop, and into the backs of the wounded as they went
staggering away the M.M. infantry, running, poked their bayonets.
Such a juicy squash it made, and the fugitives looked so amazed, so
funny, as they tumbled in grotesque heaps!