It Can't Happen Here (31 page)

December tenth was the birthday of Berzelius Windrip, though in his
earlier days as a politician, before he fruitfully realized that
lies sometimes get printed and unjustly remembered against you, he
had been wont to tell the world that his birthday was on December
twenty-fifth, like one whom he admitted to be an even greater
leader, and to shout, with real tears in his eyes, that his
complete
name was Berzelius Noel Weinacht Windrip.

His birthday in 1937 he commemorated by the historical “Order of
Regulation,” which stated that though the Corporate government had
proved both its stability and its good-will, there were still
certain stupid or vicious “elements” who, in their foul envy of
Corpo success, wanted to destroy everything that was good. The
kind-hearted government was fed-up,
and the country was informed
that, from this day on, any person who by word or act sought to
harm or discredit the State, would be executed or interned.
Inasmuch as the prisons were already too full, both for these
slanderous criminals and for the persons whom the kind-hearted
State had to guard by “protective arrest,” there were immediately
to be opened, all over the country, concentration camps.

Doremus guessed that the reason for the concentration camps was not
only the provision of extra room for victims but, even more, the
provision of places where the livelier young M.M.’s could amuse
themselves without interference from old-time professional
policemen and prison-keepers, most of whom regarded their charges
not as enemies, to be tortured, but just as cattle, to be kept
safely.

On
the eleventh, a concentration camp was enthusiastically opened,
with band music, paper flowers, and speeches by District
Commissioner Reek and Shad Ledue, at Trianon, nine miles north of
Fort Beulah, in what had been a modern experimental school for
girls. (The girls and their teachers, no sound material for
Corpoism anyway, were simply sent about their business.)

And on that day and every day
afterward, Doremus got from
journalist friends all over the country secret news of Corpo
terrorism and of the first bloody rebellions against the Corpos.

In Arkansas, a group of ninety-six former sharecroppers, who had
always bellyached about their misfortunes yet seemed not a bit
happier in well-run, hygienic labor camps with free weekly band
concerts, attacked the superintendent’s office at
one camp and
killed the superintendent and five assistants. They were rounded
up by an M.M. regiment from Little Rock, stood up in a winter-ragged cornfield, told to run, and shot in the back with machine
guns as they comically staggered away.

In San Francisco, dock-workers tried to start an absolutely illegal
strike, and their leaders, known to be Communists, were so
treasonable in their speeches
against the government that an M.M.
commander had three of them tied up to a bale of rattan, which was
soaked with oil and set afire. The Commander gave warning to all
such malcontents by shooting off the criminals’ fingers and ears
while they were burning, and so skilled a marksman was he, so much
credit to the efficient M.M. training, that he did not kill one
single man while thus trimming
them up. He afterward went in
search of Tom Mooney (released by the Supreme Court of the United
States, early in 1936), but that notorious anti-Corpo agitator had
had the fear of God put into him properly, and had escaped on a
schooner for Tahiti.

In Pawtucket, a man who ought to have been free from the rotten
seditious notions of such so-called labor-leaders, in fact a man
who was a fashionable
dentist and director in a bank, absurdly
resented the attentions which half-a-dozen uniformed M.M.’s—they
were all on leave, and merely full of youthful spirits, anyway—bestowed upon his wife at a café and, in the confusion, shot and
killed three of them. Ordinarily, since it was none of the
public’s business anyway, the M.M.’s did not give out details of
their disciplining of rebels, but in
this case, where the fool of a
dentist had shown himself to be a homicidal maniac, the local M.M.
commander permitted the papers to print the fact that the dentist
had been given sixty-nine lashes with a flexible steel rod, then,
when he came to, left to think over his murderous idiocy in a cell
in which there was two feet of water in the bottom—but, rather
ironically, none to drink. Unfortunately,
the fellow died before
having the opportunity to seek religious consolation.

In Scranton, the Catholic pastor of a working-class church was
kidnaped and beaten.

In central Kansas, a man named George W. Smith pointlessly gathered
a couple of hundred farmers armed with shotguns and sporting rifles
and an absurdly few automatic-pistols, and led them in burning an
M.M. barracks. M.M. tanks were
called out, and the hick would-be
rebels were not, this time, used as warnings, but were overcome
with mustard gas, then disposed of with hand grenades, which was an
altogether intelligent move, since there was nothing of the
scoundrels left for sentimental relatives to bury and make
propaganda over.

But in New York City the case was the opposite—instead of being
thus surprised, the M.M.’s rounded
up all suspected Communists in
the former boroughs of Manhattan and the Bronx, and all persons who
were reported to have been seen consorting with such Communists,
and interned the lot of them in the nineteen concentration camps on
Long Island… . Most of them wailed that they were not
Communists at all.

For the first time in America, except during the Civil War and the
World War, people were
afraid to say whatever came to their
tongues. On the streets, on trains, at theaters, men looked about
to see who might be listening before they dared so much as say
there was a drought in the West, for someone might suppose they
were blaming the drought on the Chief! They were particularly
skittish about waiters, who were supposed to listen from the ambush
which every waiter carries about with
him anyway, and to report to
the M.M.’s. People who could not resist talking politics spoke of
Windrip as “Colonel Robinson” or “Dr. Brown” and of Sarason as
“Judge Jones” or “my cousin Kaspar,” and you would hear gossips
hissing “Shhh!” at the seemingly innocent statement, “My cousin
doesn’t seem to be as keen on playing bridge with the Doctor as he
used to—I’ll bet sometime they’ll quit playing.”

Every moment everyone felt fear, nameless and omnipresent. They
were as jumpy as men in a plague district. Any sudden sound, any
unexplained footstep, any unfamiliar script on an envelope, made
them startle; and for months they never felt secure enough to let
themselves go, in complete sleep. And with the coming of fear went
out their pride.

Daily—common now as weather reports—were the rumors
of people who
had suddenly been carried off “under protective arrest,” and daily
more of them were celebrities. At first the M.M.’s had, outside of
the one stroke against Congress, dared to arrest only the unknown
and defenseless. Now, incredulously—for these leaders had seemed
invulnerable, above the ordinary law—you heard of judges, army
officers, ex-state governors, bankers who had not played
in with
the Corpos, Jewish lawyers who had been ambassadors, being carted
off to the common stink and mud of the cells.

To the journalist Doremus and his family it was not least
interesting that among these imprisoned celebrities were so many
journalists: Raymond Moley, Frank Simonds, Frank Kent, Heywood
Broun, Mark Sullivan, Earl Browder, Franklin P. Adams, George
Seldes, Frazier Hunt, Garet
Garrett, Granville Hicks, Edwin James,
Robert Morss Lovett—men who differed grotesquely except in their
common dislike of being little disciples of Sarason and Macgoblin.

Few writers for Hearst were arrested, however.

The plague came nearer to Doremus when unrenowned editors in Lowell
and Providence and Albany, who had done nothing more than fail to
be enthusiastic about the Corpos, were taken
away for “questioning,”
and not released for weeks—months.

It came much nearer at the time of the book-burning.

All over the country, books that might threaten the Pax Romana of
the Corporate State were gleefully being burned by the more
scholarly Minute Men. This form of safeguarding the State—so
modern that it had scarce been known prior to A.D. 1300—was
instituted by Secretary of Culture
Macgoblin, but in each province
the crusaders were allowed to have the fun of picking out their own
paper-and-ink traitors. In the Northeastern Province, Judge
Effingham Swan and Dr. Owen J. Peaseley were appointed censors by
Commissioner Dewey Haik, and their index was lyrically praised all
through the country.

For Swan saw that it was not such obvious anarchists and soreheads
as Darrow, Steffens,
Norman Thomas, who were the real danger; like
rattlesnakes, their noisiness betrayed their venom. The real
enemies were men whose sanctification by death had appallingly
permitted them to sneak even into respectable school libraries—men
so perverse that they had been traitors to the Corpo State years
and years before there had been any Corpo State; and Swan (with
Peaseley chirping agreement)
barred from all sale or possession the
books of Thoreau, Emerson, Whittier, Whitman, Mark Twain, Howells,
and The New Freedom, by Woodrow Wilson, for though in later life
Wilson became a sound manipulative politician, he had earlier been
troubled with itching ideals.

It goes without saying that Swan denounced all such atheistic
foreigners, dead or alive, as Wells, Marx, Shaw, the Mann brothers,
Tolstoy, and P. G. Wodehouse with his unscrupulous propaganda
against the aristocratic tradition. (Who could tell? Perhaps,
some day, in a corporate empire, he might be Sir Effingham Swan,
Bart.)

And in one item Swan showed blinding genius—he had the foresight
to see the peril of that cynical volume, The Collected Sayings of
Will Rogers.

Of the book-burnings in Syracuse and Schenectady and
Hartford,
Doremus had heard, but they seemed improbable as ghost stories.

The Jessup family were at dinner, just after seven, when on the
porch they heard the tramping they had half expected, altogether
dreaded. Mrs. Candy—even the icicle, Mrs. Candy, held her breast
in agitation before she stalked out to open the door. Even David
sat at table, spoon suspended in air.

Shad’s voice, “In the
name of the Chief!” Harsh feet in the hall,
and Shad waddling into the dining room, cap on, hand on pistol, but
grinning, and with leering geniality bawling, “H’ are yuh, folks!
Search for bad books. Orders of the District Commissioner. Come
on, Jessup!” He looked at the fireplace to which he had once
brought so many armfuls of wood, and snickered.

“If you’ll just sit down in the other room—”

“I will like hell ‘just sit down in the other room’! We’re burning
the books tonight! Snap to it, Jessup!” Shad looked at the
exasperated Emma; he looked at Sissy; he winked with heavy
deliberation and chuckled, “H’ are you, Mis’ Jessup. Hello, Sis.
How’s the kid?”

But at Mary Greenhill he did not look, nor she at him.

In the hall, Doremus found Shad’s entourage, four sheepish M.M.’s
and
a more sheepish Emil Staubmeyer, who whimpered, “Just orders—you know—just orders.”

Doremus safely said nothing; led them up to his study.

Now a week before he had removed every publication that any sane
Corpo could consider radical: his Das Kapital and Veblen and all
the Russian novels and even Sumner’s Folkways and Freud’s
Civilization and Its Discontents; Thoreau and the other hoary
scoundrels
banned by Swan; old files of the Nation and New Republic
and such copies as he had been able to get of Walt Trowbridge’s
Lance for Democracy; had removed them and hidden them inside an old
horsehair sofa in the upper hall.

“I told you there was nothing,” said Staubmeyer, after the search.
“Let’s go.”

Said Shad, “Huh! I know this house, Ensign. I used to work here—had the privilege of putting
up those storm windows you can see
there, and of getting bawled out right here in this room. You
won’t remember those times, Doc—when I used to mow your lawn, too,
and you used to be so snotty!” Staubmeyer blushed. “You bet. I
know my way around, and there’s a lot of fool books downstairs in
the sittin’ room.”

Indeed in that apartment variously called the drawing room, the
living room, the
sittin’ room, the Parlor and once, even, by a
spinster who thought editors were romantic, the studio, there were
two or three hundred volumes, mostly in “standard sets.” Shad
glumly stared at them, the while he rubbed the faded Brussels
carpet with his spurs. He was worried. He
had
to find something
seditious!

He pointed at Doremus’s dearest treasure, the thirty-four-volume
extra-illustrated
edition of Dickens which had been his father’s,
and his father’s only insane extravagance. Shad demanded of
Staubmeyer, “That guy Dickens—didn’t he do a lot of complaining
about conditions—about schools and the police and everything?”

Staubmeyer protested, “Yes, but Shad—but, Captain Ledue, that was
a hundred years ago—”

“Makes no difference. Dead skunk stinks worse ‘n a live one.”

Doremus
cried, “Yes, but not for a hundred years! Besides—”

The M.M.’s, obeying Shad’s gesture, were already yanking the
volumes of Dickens from the shelves, dropping them on the floor,
covers cracking. Doremus seized an M.M.’s arm; from the door Sissy
shrieked. Shad lumbered up to him, enormous red fist at Doremus’s
nose, growling, “Want to get the daylights beaten out of you
now … instead of later?”

Doremus and Sissy, side by side on a couch, watched the books
thrown in a heap. He grasped her hand, muttering to her, “Hush—hush!” Oh, Sissy was a pretty girl, and young, but a pretty girl
schoolteacher had been attacked, her clothes stripped off, and been
left in the snow just south of town, two nights ago.