It Can't Happen Here (7 page)

“These demands we have made, and how long now, O Lord, how long,
have the politicians and
the smirking representatives of Big
Business pretended to listen, to obey? ‘Yes—yes—my masters of
the League of Forgotten Men—yes, we understand—just give us
time!’

“There is no more time! Their time is over and all their unholy
power!

“The conservative Senators—the United States Chamber of Commerce—the giant bankers—the monarchs of steel and motors and electricity
and coal—the brokers and
the holding-companies—they are all of
them like the Bourbon kings, of whom it was said that ‘they forgot
nothing and they learned nothing.’

“But they died upon the guillotine!

“Perhaps we can be more merciful to our Bourbons. Perhaps—
perharps
—we can save them from the guillotine—the gallows—the
swift firing-squad. Perhaps we shall, in our new régime, under our
new Constitution, with our ‘New
Deal’ that really
will
be a New
Deal and not an arrogant experiment—perhaps we shall merely make
these big bugs of finance and politics sit on hard chairs, in dingy
offices, toiling unending hours with pen and typewriter as so many
white-collar slaves for so many years have toiled for
them
!

“It is, as Senator Berzelius Windrip puts it, ‘the zero hour,’ now,
this second. We have stopped bombarding
the heedless ears of these
false masters. We’re ‘going over the top.’ At last, after months
and months of taking counsel together, the directors of the League
of Forgotten Men, and I myself, announce that in the coming
Democratic national convention we shall, without one smallest
reservation—”

“Listen! Listen! History being made!” Doremus cried at his
heedless family.

“—use the tremendous
strength of the millions of League members to
secure the Democratic presidential nomination for
Senator—Berzelius—Windrip
—which means, flatly, that he will be elected—and that we of the League shall elect him—as President of these
United States!

“His program and that of the League do not in all details agree.
But he has implicitly pledged himself to take our advice, and, at
least until election,
we shall back him, absolutely—with our
money, with our loyalty, with our votes … with our prayers.
And may the Lord guide him and us across the desert of iniquitous
politics and swinishly grasping finance into the golden glory of
the Promised Land! God bless you!”

Mrs. Jessup said cheerily, “Why, Dormouse, that bishop isn’t a
Fascist at all—he’s a regular Red Radical. But does this
announcement
of his mean anything, really?”

Oh, well, Doremus reflected, he had lived with Emma for thirty-four
years, and not oftener than once or twice a year had he wanted to
murder her. Blandly he said, “Why, nothing much except that in a
couple of years now, on the ground of protecting us, the Buzz
Windrip dictatorship will be regimenting everything, from where we
may pray to what detective stories
we may read.”

“Sure he will! Sometimes I’m tempted to turn Communist! Funny—me
with my fat-headed old Hudson-River-Valley Dutch ancestors!”
marveled Julian Falck.

“Fine idea! Out of the frying pan of Windrip and Hitler into the
fire of the New York Daily Worker and Stalin and automatics! And
the Five-Year Plan—I suppose they’d tell me that it’s been decided
by the Commissar that each of
my mares is to bear six colts a year
now!” snorted Buck Titus; while Dr. Fowler Greenhill jeered:

“Aw, shoot, Dad—and you too, Julian, you young paranoiac—you’re
monomaniacs! Dictatorship? Better come into the office and let me
examine your heads! Why, America’s the only free nation on earth.
Besides! Country’s too big for a revolution. No, no! Couldn’t
happen here!”

I’d rather follow a wild-eyed anarchist like Em Goldman, if they’d
bring more johnnycake and beans and spuds into the humble cabin of
the Common Man, than a twenty-four-carat, college-graduate, ex-cabinet-member statesman that was just interested in our turning
out more limousines. Call me a socialist or any blame thing you
want to, as long as you grab hold of the other end of the cross-cut
saw with me and help slash the big logs of Poverty and Intolerance
to pieces.

Zero Hour
, Berzelius Windrip.

His family—at least his wife and the cook, Mrs. Candy, and Sissy
and Mary, Mrs. Fowler Greenhill—believed that Doremus was of
fickle health; that any cold would surely turn into pneumonia; that
he must wear his rubbers, and eat his porridge, and smoke fewer
cigarettes, and never “overdo.”
He raged at them; he knew that
though he did get staggeringly tired after a crisis in the office,
a night’s sleep made him a little dynamo again, and he could “turn
out copy” faster than his spryest young reporter.

He concealed his dissipations from them like any small boy from his
elders; lied unscrupulously about how many cigarettes he smoked;
kept concealed a flask of Bourbon from which he
regularly had one
nip, only one, before he padded to bed; and when he had promised to
go to sleep early, he turned off his light till he was sure that
Emma was slumbering, then turned it on and happily read till two,
curled under the well-loved hand-woven blankets from a loom up on
Mount Terror; his legs twitching like a dreaming setter’s what time
the Chief Inspector of the C.I.D., alone and unarmed,
walked into
the counterfeiters’ hideout. And once a month or so he sneaked
down to the kitchen at three in the morning and made himself coffee
and washed up everything so that Emma and Mrs. Candy would never
know… . He thought they never knew!

These small deceptions gave him the ripest satisfaction in a life
otherwise devoted to public service, to trying to make Shad Ledue
edge-up the flower
beds, to feverishly writing editorials that
would excite 3 per cent of his readers from breakfast time till
noon and by 6 P.M. be eternally forgotten.

Sometimes when Emma came to loaf beside him in bed on a Sunday
morning and put her comfortable arm about his thin shoulder-blades,
she was sick with the realization that he was growing older and
more frail. His shoulders, she thought, were pathetic
as those of
an anemic baby… . That sadness of hers Doremus never guessed.

Even just before the paper went to press, even when Shad Ledue took
off two hours and charged an item of two dollars to have the
lawnmower sharpened, instead of filing it himself, even when Sissy
and her gang played the piano downstairs till two on nights when he
did not want to lie awake, Doremus was never irritable—except,
usually, between arising and the first life-saving cup of coffee.

The wise Emma was happy when he was snappish before breakfast. It
meant that he was energetic and popping with satisfactory ideas.

After Bishop Prang had presented the crown to Senator Windrip, as
the summer hobbled nervously toward the national political
conventions, Emma was disturbed. For Doremus was silent before
breakfast,
and he had rheumy eyes, as though he was worried, as
though he had slept badly. Never was he cranky. She missed
hearing him croaking, “Isn’t that confounded idiot, Mrs. Candy,
ever
going to bring in the coffee? I suppose she’s sitting there
reading her Testament! And will you be so kind as to tell me, my
good woman, why Sissy
never
gets up for breakfast, even after the
rare nights when she
goes to bed at 1 A.M.? And—and will you look
out at that walk! Covered with dead blossoms. That swine Shad
hasn’t swept it for a week. I swear, I
am
going to fire him, and
right away, this morning!”

Emma would have been happy to hear these familiar animal sounds,
and to cluck in answer, “Oh, why, that’s terrible! I’ll go tell
Mrs. Candy to hustle in the coffee right away!”

But he sat unspeaking,
pale, opening his
Daily Informer
as though
he were afraid to see what news had come in since he had left the
office at ten.

When Doremus, back in the 1920’s, had advocated the recognition of
Russia, Fort Beulah had fretted that he was turning out-and-out
Communist.

He, who understood himself abnormally well, knew that far from
being a left-wing radical, he was at most a mild, rather indolent
and somewhat sentimental Liberal, who disliked pomposity, the heavy
humor of public men, and the itch for notoriety which made popular
preachers and eloquent educators and amateur play-producers and
rich lady reformers and rich lady sportswomen and almost every
brand of rich lady come preeningly in to see newspaper editors,
with photographs under their arms, and on their faces the simper of
fake
humility. But for all cruelty and intolerance, and for the
contempt of the fortunate for the unfortunate, he had not mere
dislike but testy hatred.

He had alarmed all his fellow editors in northern New England by
asserting the innocence of Tom Mooney, questioning the guilt of
Sacco and Vanzetti, condemning our intrusion in Haiti and
Nicaragua, advocating an increased income tax, writing, in
the 1932
campaign, a friendly account of the Socialist candidate, Norman
Thomas (and afterwards, to tell the truth, voting for Franklin
Roosevelt), and stirring up a little local and ineffective hell
regarding the serfdom of the Southern sharecroppers and the
California fruit-pickers. He even suggested editorially that when
Russia had her factories and railroads and giant farms really
going—say,
in 1945—she might conceivably be the pleasantest
country in the world for the (mythical!) Average Man. When he
wrote that editorial, after a lunch at which he had been irritated
by the smug croaking of Frank Tasbrough and R. C. Crowley, he
really did get into trouble. He got named Bolshevik, and in two
days his paper lost a hundred and fifty out of its five thousand
circulation.

Yet he was
as little of a Bolshevik as Herbert Hoover.

He was, and he knew it, a small-town bourgeois Intellectual.
Russia forbade everything that made his toil worth enduring:
privacy, the right to think and to criticize as he freakishly
pleased. To have his mind policed by peasants in uniform—rather
than that he would live in an Alaska cabin, with beans and a
hundred books and a new pair of pants every
three years.

Once, on a motor trip with Emma, he stopped in at a summer camp of
Communists. Most of them were City College Jews or neat Bronx
dentists, spectacled, and smooth-shaven except for foppish small
mustaches. They were hot to welcome these New England peasants and
to explain the Marxian gospel (on which, however, they furiously
differed). Over macaroni and cheese in an unpainted dining
shack,
they longed for the black bread of Moscow. Later, Doremus chuckled
to find how much they resembled the Y.M.C.A. campers twenty miles
down the highway—equally Puritanical, hortatory, and futile, and
equally given to silly games with rubber balls.

Once only had he been dangerously active. He had supported the
strike for union recognition against the quarry company of Francis
Tasbrough.
Men whom Doremus had known for years, solid cits like
Superintendent of Schools Emil Staubmeyer, and Charley Betts of the
furniture store, had muttered about “riding him out of town on a
rail.” Tasbrough reviled him—even now, eight years later. After
all this, the strike had been lost, and the strike-leader, an
avowed Communist named Karl Pascal, had gone to prison for
“inciting to violence.”
When Pascal, best of mechanics, came out,
he went to work in a littered little Fort Beulah garage owned by a
friendly, loquacious, belligerent Polish Socialist named John
Pollikop.

All day long Pascal and Pollikop yelpingly raided each other’s
trenches in the battle between Social Democracy and Communism, and
Doremus often dropped in to stir them up. That was hard for
Tasbrough, Staubmeyer,
Banker Crowley, and Lawyer Kitterick to
bear.

If Doremus had not come from three generations of debt-paying
Vermonters, he would by now have been a penniless wandering
printer … and possibly less detached about the Sorrows of the
Dispossessed.

The conservative Emma complained: “How you can tease people this
way, pretending you really
like
greasy mechanics like this Pascal
(and I suspect you
even have a sneaking fondness for Shad Ledue!)
when you could just associate with decent, prosperous people like
Frank—it’s beyond me! What they must
think
of you, sometimes!
They don’t understand that you’re really not a Socialist one bit,
but really a nice, kind-hearted, responsible man. Oh, I ought to
smack you, Dormouse!”

Not that he liked being called “Dormouse.” But then, no one did
so
except Emma and, in rare slips of the tongue, Buck Titus. So it
was endurable.

When I am protestingly dragged from my study and the family
hearthside into the public meetings that I so much detest, I try to
make my speech as simple and direct as those of the Child Jesus
talking to the Doctors in the Temple.

Zero Hour
, Berzelius Windrip.

Thunder in the mountains, clouds marching down the Beulah Valley,
unnatural darkness covering the world like black fog, and lightning
that picked out ugly scarps of the hills as though they were rocks
thrown up in an explosion.

To such fury of the enraged heavens, Doremus awakened on that
morning of late July.

As abruptly as one who, in the death cell, startles out of sleep to
the realization, “Today they’ll hang me!” he sat up, bewildered, as
he reflected that today Senator Berzelius Windrip would probably be
nominated for
President.

The Republican convention was over, with Walt Trowbridge as
presidential candidate. The Democratic convention, meeting in
Cleveland, with a good deal of gin, strawberry soda, and sweat, had
finished the committee reports, the kind words said for the Flag,
the assurances to the ghost of Jefferson that he would be delighted
by what, if Chairman Jim Farley consented, would be done here
this
week. They had come to the nominations—Senator Windrip had been
nominated by Colonel Dewey Haik, Congressman, and power in the
American Legion. Gratifying applause and hasty elimination had
greeted such Favorite Sons of the several states as Al Smith,
Carter Glass, William McAdoo, and Cordell Hull. Now, on the
twelfth ballot, there were four contestants left, and they, in
order of votes,
were Senator Windrip, President Franklin D.
Roosevelt, Senator Robinson of Arkansas, and Secretary of Labor
Frances Perkins.