It Can't Happen Here (8 page)

Great and dramatic shenanigans had happened, and Doremus Jessup’s
imagination had seen them all clearly as they were reported by the
hysterical radio and by bulletins from the A.P. that fell redhot
and smoking upon his desk at the
Informer
office.

In honor of Senator Robinson,
the University of Arkansas brass band
marched in behind a leader riding in an old horse-drawn buggy
which was plastered with great placards proclaiming “Save the
Constitution” and “Robinson for Sanity.” The name of Miss Perkins
had been cheered for two hours, while the delegates marched with
their state banners, and President Roosevelt’s name had been
cheered for three—cheered affectionately
and quite homicidally,
since every delegate knew that Mr. Roosevelt and Miss Perkins were
far too lacking in circus tinsel and general clownishness to
succeed at this critical hour of the nation’s hysteria, when the
electorate wanted a ringmaster-revolutionist like Senator Windrip.

Windrip’s own demonstration, scientifically worked up beforehand by
his secretary-press-agent-private-philosopher,
Lee Sarason, yielded
nothing to others’. For Sarason had read his Chesterton well
enough to know that there is only one thing bigger than a very big
thing, and that is a thing so very small that it can be seen and
understood.

When Colonel Dewey Haik put Buzz’s name in nomination, the Colonel
wound up by shouting, “One thing more! Listen! It is the special
request of Senator Windrip that you
do
not
waste the time of this
history-making assembly by any cheering of his name—any cheering
whatever. We of the League of Forgotten Men (yes—and Women!)
don’t want empty acclaim, but a solemn consideration of the
desperate and immediate needs of 60 per cent of the population of
the United States. No cheers—but may Providence guide us in the
most solemn thinking we have ever done!”

As he
finished, down the center aisle came a private procession.
But this was no parade of thousands. There were only thirty-one
persons in it, and the only banners were three flags and two large
placards.

Leading it, in old blue uniforms, were two G.A.R. veterans, and
between, arm-in-arm with them, a Confederate in gray. They were
such very little old men, all over ninety, leaning one on another
and glancing timidly about in the hope that no one would laugh at
them.

The Confederate carried a Virginia regimental banner, torn as by
shrapnel; and one of the Union veterans lifted high a slashed flag
of the First Minnesota.

The dutiful applause which the convention had given to the
demonstrations of other candidates had been but rain-patter
compared with the tempest which greeted the three
shaky, shuffling
old men. On the platform the band played, inaudibly, “Dixie,” then
“When Johnny Comes Marching Home Again,” and, standing on his
chair midway of the auditorium, as a plain member of his state
delegation, Buzz Windrip bowed—bowed—bowed and tried to smile,
while tears started from his eyes and he sobbed helplessly, and the
audience began to sob with him.

Following the old men
were twelve Legionnaires, wounded in 1918—stumbling on wooden legs, dragging themselves between crutches; one
in a wheel chair, yet so young-looking and gay; and one with a
black mask before what should have been a face. Of these, one
carried an enormous flag, and another a placard demanding: “Our
Starving Families Must Have the Bonus—We Want Only Justice—We
Want Buzz for President.”

And leading
them, not wounded, but upright and strong and resolute,
was Major General Hermann Meinecke, United States Army. Not in all
the memory of the older reporters had a soldier on active service
ever appeared as a public political agitator. The press whispered
one to another, “That general’ll get canned, unless Buzz is
elected—then he’d probably be made Duke of Hoboken.”

Following the soldiers were
ten men and women, their toes through
their shoes, and wearing rags that were the more pitiful because
they had been washed and rewashed till they had lost all color.
With them tottered four pallid children, their teeth rotted out,
between them just managing to hold up a placard declaring, “We Are
on Relief. We Want to Become Human Beings Again. We Want Buzz!”

Twenty feet behind came one lone
tall man. The delegates had been
craning around to see what would follow the relief victims. When
they did see, they rose, they bellowed, they clapped. For the lone
man—Few of the crowd had seen him in the flesh; all of them had
seen him a hundred times in press pictures, photographed among
litters of books in his study—photographed in conference with
President Roosevelt and Secretary Ickes—photographed
shaking hands
with Senator Windrip—photographed before a microphone, his
shrieking mouth a dark open trap and his lean right arm thrown up
in hysterical emphasis; all of them had heard his voice on the
radio till they knew it as they knew the voices of their own
brothers; all of them recognized, coming through the wide main
entrance, at the end of the Windrip parade, the apostle of the
Forgotten
Men, Bishop Paul Peter Prang.

Then the convention cheered Buzz Windrip for four unbroken hours.

In the detailed descriptions of the convention which the news
bureaus sent following the feverish first bulletins, one energetic
Birmingham reporter pretty well proved that the Southern battle
flag carried by the Confederate veteran had been lent by the museum
in Richmond and the Northern flag by
a distinguished meat-packer of
Chicago who was the grandson of a Civil War general.

Lee Sarason never told anyone save Buzz Windrip that both flags had
been manufactured on Hester Street, New York, in 1929, for the
patriotic drama, Morgan’s Riding, and that both came from a
theatrical warehouse.

Before the cheering, as the Windrip parade neared the platform,
they were greeted by Mrs. Adelaide
Tarr Gimmitch, the celebrated
author, lecturer, and composer, who—suddenly conjured onto the
platform as if whisked out of the air—sang to the tune of “Yankee
Doodle” words which she herself had written:

Berzelius Windrip went to Wash.,

A riding on a hobby—

To throw Big Business out, by Gosh,

And be the People’s Lobby!

Chorus:

Buzz and buzz and keep it up,

Our cares and needs he’s
toting,

You are a most ungrateful pup,

Unless for Buzz you’re voting!

The League of the Forgotten Men

Don’t like to be forgotten,

They went to Washington and then

They sang, “There’s something rotten!”

That joyous battle song was sung on the radio by nineteen different
prima donnas before midnight, by some sixteen million less vocal
Americans within forty-eight hours, and by at
least ninety million
friends and scoffers in the struggle that was to come. All through
the campaign, Buzz Windrip was able to get lots of jolly humor out
of puns on going to Wash., and to wash. Walt Trowbridge, he
jeered, wasn’t going to either of them!

Yet Lee Sarason knew that in addition to this comic masterpiece,
the cause of Windrip required an anthem more elevated in thought
and spirit,
befitting the seriousness of crusading Americans.

Long after the convention’s cheering for Windrip had ended and the
delegates were again at their proper business of saving the nation
and cutting one another’s throats, Sarason had Mrs. Gimmitch sing a
more inspirational hymn, with words by Sarason himself, in
collaboration with a quite remarkable surgeon, one Dr. Hector
Macgoblin.

This Dr. Macgoblin,
soon to become a national monument, was as
accomplished in syndicated medical journalism, in the reviewing of
books about education and psychoanalysis, in preparing glosses upon
the philosophies of Hegel, Professor Guenther, Houston Stewart
Chamberlain, and Lothrop Stoddard, in the rendition of Mozart on
the violin, in semi-professional boxing, and in the composition of
epic poetry, as he was
in the practice of medicine.

Dr. Macgoblin! What a man!

The Sarason-Macgoblin ode, entitled “Bring Out the Old-time
Musket,” became to Buzz Windrip’s band of liberators what
“Giovanezza” was to the Italians, “The Horst Wessel Song” to the
Nazis, “The International” to all Marxians. Along with the
convention, the radio millions heard Mrs. Adelaide Tarr Gimmitch’s
contralto, rich as peat, chanting:

BRING OUT THE OLD-TIME MUSKET

Dear Lord, we have sinned, we have slumbered,

And our flag lies stained in the dust,

And the souls of the Past are calling, calling,

“Arise from your sloth—you must!”

Lead us, O soul of Lincoln,

Inspire us, spirit of Lee,

To rule all the world for righteousness,

To fight for the right,

To awe with our might,

As we did in ‘sixty-three.

Chorus

See, youth with desire hot glowing,

See, maiden, with fearless eye,

Leading our ranks

Thunder the tanks,

Aeroplanes cloud the sky.

Bring out the old-time musket,

Rouse up the old-time fire!

See, all the world is crumbling,

Dreadful and dark and dire.

America! Rise and conquer

The world to our heart’s desire!

“Great showmanship. P. T. Barnum or Flo Ziegfeld never put
on a
better,” mused Doremus, as he studied the A.P. flimsies, as he
listened to the radio he had had temporarily installed in his
office. And, much later: “When Buzz gets in, he won’t be having
any parade of wounded soldiers. That’ll be bad Fascist psychology.
All those poor devils he’ll hide away in institutions, and just
bring out the lively young human slaughter cattle in uniforms.
Hm.”

The thunderstorm, which had mercifully lulled, burst again in
wrathful menace.

All afternoon the convention balloted, over and over, with no
change in the order of votes for the presidential candidate.
Toward six, Miss Perkins’s manager threw her votes to Roosevelt,
who gained then on Senator Windrip. They seemed to have settled
down to an all-night struggle, and at ten in the evening Doremus
wearily left the office. He did not, tonight, want the sympathetic
and extremely feminized atmosphere of his home, and he dropped in
at the rectory of his friend Father Perefixe. There he found a
satisfyingly unfeminized, untalcumized group. The Reverend Mr.
Falck was there. Swart, sturdy young Perefixe and silvery old
Falck often worked together, were fond of each other, and agreed
upon the
advantages of clerical celibacy and almost every other
doctrine except the supremacy of the Bishop of Rome. With them
were Buck Titus, Louis Rotenstern, Dr. Fowler Greenhill, and Banker
Crowley, a financier who liked to cultivate an appearance of free
intellectual discussion, though only after the hours devoted to
refusing credit to desperate farmers and storekeepers.

And not to be forgotten
was Foolish the dog, who that thunderous
morning had suspected his master’s worry, followed him to the
office, and all day long had growled at Haik and Sarason and Mrs.
Gimmitch on the radio and showed an earnest conviction that he
ought to chew up all flimsies reporting the convention.

Better than his own glacial white-paneled drawing room with its
portraits of dead Vermont worthies, Doremus
liked Father Perefixe’s
little study, and its combination of churchliness, of freedom from
Commerce (at least ordinary Commerce), as displayed in a crucifix
and a plaster statuette of the Virgin and a shrieking red-and-green
Italian picture of the Pope, with practical affairs, as shown in
the oak roll-top desk and steel filing-cabinet and well-worn
portable typewriter. It was a pious hermit’s
cave with the
advantages of leather chairs and excellent rye highballs.

The night passed as the eight of them (for Foolish too had his
tipple of milk) all sipped and listened; the night passed as the
convention balloted, furiously, unavailingly … that congress
six hundred miles away, six hundred miles of befogged night, yet
with every speech, every derisive yelp, coming into the priest’s
cabinet
in the same second in which they were heard in the hall at
Cleveland.

Father Perefixe’s housekeeper (who was sixty-five years old to his
thirty-nine, to the disappointment of all the scandal-loving local
Protestants) came in with scrambled eggs, cold beer.

“When my dear wife was still among us, she used to send me to bed
at midnight,” sighed Dr. Falck.

“My wife does now!” said Doremus.

“So
does mine—and her a New York girl!” said Louis Rotenstern.

“Father Steve, here, and I are the only guys with a sensible way of
living,” crowed Buck Titus. “Celibates. We can go to bed with our
pants on, or not go to bed at all,” and Father Perefixe murmured,
“But it’s curious, Buck, what people find to boast of—you that
you’re free of God’s tyranny and also that you can go to bed in
your pants—Mr.
Falck and Dr. Greenhill and I that God is so
lenient with us that some nights He lets us off from sick-calls and
we can go to bed with ‘em off! And Louis because—Listen! Listen!
Sounds like business!”

Colonel Dewey Haik, Buzz’s proposer, was announcing that Senator
Windrip felt it would be only modest of him to go to his hotel now,
but he had left a letter which he, Haik, would read. And he
did
read it, inexorably.

Windrip stated that, just in case anyone did not completely
understand his platform, he wanted to make it all ringingly clear.

Summarized, the letter explained that he was all against the banks
but all for the bankers—except the Jewish bankers, who were to be
driven out of finance entirely; that he had thoroughly tested (but
unspecified) plans to make all wages very
high and the prices of
everything produced by these same highly paid workers very low;
that he was 100 per cent for Labor, but 100 per cent against all
strikes; and that he was in favor of the United States so arming
itself, so preparing to produce its own coffee, sugar, perfumes,
tweeds, and nickel instead of importing them, that it could defy
the World … and maybe, if that World was so impertinent
as to
defy America in turn, Buzz hinted, he might have to take it over
and run it properly.