It Can't Happen Here (11 page)

In the greatest of all native American
arts (next to the talkies,
and those Spirituals in which Negroes express their desire to go to
heaven, to St. Louis, or almost any place distant from the romantic
old plantations), namely, in the art of Publicity, Lee Sarason was
in no way inferior even to such acknowledged masters as Edward
Bernays, the late Theodore Roosevelt, Jack Dempsey, and Upton
Sinclair.

Sarason had, as it was scientifically
called, been “building up”
Senator Windrip for seven years before his nomination as President.
Where other Senators were encouraged by their secretaries and wives
(no potential dictator ought ever to have a visible wife, and none
ever has had, except Napoleon) to expand from village back-slapping
to noble, rotund, Ciceronian gestures, Sarason had encouraged
Windrip to keep up in the Great World
all of the clownishness which
(along with considerable legal shrewdness and the endurance to make
ten speeches a day) had endeared him to his simple-hearted
constituents in his native state.

Windrip danced a hornpipe before an alarmed academic audience when
he got his first honorary degree; he kissed Miss Flandreau at the
South Dakota beauty contest; he entertained the Senate, or at least
the
Senate galleries, with detailed accounts of how to catch
catfish—from the bait-digging to the ultimate effects of the jug
of corn whisky; he challenged the venerable Chief Justice of the
Supreme Court to a duel with sling-shots.

Though she was not visible, Windrip did have a wife—Sarason had
none, nor was likely to; and Walt Trowbridge was a widower. Buzz’s
lady stayed back home, raising spinach
and chickens and telling the
neighbors that she expected to go to Washington
next
year, the
while Windrip was informing the press that his “Frau” was so
edifyingly devoted to their two small children and to Bible study
that she simply could not be coaxed to come East.

But when it came to assembling a political machine, Windrip had no
need of counsel from Lee Sarason.

Where Buzz was, there were
the vultures also. His hotel suite, in
the capital city of his home state, in Washington, in New York, or
in Kansas City, was like—well, Frank Sullivan once suggested that
it resembled the office of a tabloid newspaper upon the impossible
occasion of Bishop Cannon’s setting fire to St. Patrick’s
Cathedral, kidnaping the Dionne quintuplets, and eloping with Greta
Garbo in a stolen tank.

In the
“parlor” of any of these suites, Buzz Windrip sat in the
middle of the room, a telephone on the floor beside him, and for
hours he shrieked at the instrument, “Hello—yuh—speaking,” or at
the door, “Come in—come in!” and “Sit down ‘n’ take a load off
your feet!” All day, all night till dawn, he would be bellowing,
“Tell him he can take his bill and go climb a tree,” or “Why
certainly, old man—tickled
to death to support it—utility
corporations cer’nly been getting a raw deal,” and “You tell the
Governor I want Kippy elected sheriff and I want the indictment
against him quashed and I want it damn quick!” Usually, squatted
there cross-legged, he would be wearing a smart belted camel’s-hair
coat with an atrocious checked cap.

In a fury, as he was at least every quarter hour, he would leap up,
peel off the overcoat (showing either a white boiled shirt and
clerical black bow, or a canary-yellow silk shirt with a scarlet
tie), fling it on the floor, and put it on again with slow dignity,
while he bellowed his anger like Jeremiah cursing Jerusalem, or
like a sick cow mourning its kidnaped young.

There came to him stockbrokers, labor leaders, distillers, anti-vivisectionists, vegetarians,
disbarred shyster lawyers,
missionaries to China, lobbyists for oil and electricity, advocates
of war and of war against war. “Gaw! Every guy in the country
with a bad case of the gimmes comes to see me!” he growled to
Sarason. He promised to further their causes, to get an
appointment to West Point for the nephew who had just lost his job
in the creamery. He promised fellow politicians to
support their
bills if they would support his. He gave interviews upon
subsistence farming, backless bathing suits, and the secret
strategy of the Ethiopian army. He grinned and knee-patted and
back-slapped; and few of his visitors, once they had talked with
him, failed to look upon him as their Little Father and to support
him forever… . The few who did fail, most of them newspapermen,
disliked
the smell of him more than before they had met him… .
Even they, by the unusual spiritedness and color of their attacks
upon him, kept his name alive in every column… . By the time he
had been a Senator for one year, his machine was as complete and
smooth-running—and as hidden away from ordinary passengers—as the
engines of a liner.

On the beds in any of his suites there would, at the same time,
repose three top-hats, two clerical hats, a green object with a
feather, a brown derby, a taxi-driver’s cap, and nine ordinary,
Christian brown felts.

Once, within twenty-seven minutes, he talked on the telephone from
Chicago to Palo Alto, Washington, Buenos Aires, Wilmette, and
Oklahoma City. Once, in half a day, he received sixteen calls from
clergymen asking him to condemn the dirty burlesque
show, and seven
from theatrical promoters and real-estate owners asking him to
praise it. He called the clergymen “Doctor” or “Brother” or both;
he called the promoters “Buddy” and “Pal”; he gave equally ringing
promises to both; and for both he loyally did nothing whatever.

Normally, he would not have thought of cultivating foreign
alliances, though he never doubted that some day, as President,
he
would be leader of the world orchestra. Lee Sarason insisted that
Buzz look into a few international fundamentals, such as the
relationship of sterling to the lira, the proper way in which to
address a baronet, the chances of the Archduke Otto, the London
oyster bars and the brothels near the Boulevard de Sebastopol best
to recommend to junketing Representatives.

But the actual cultivation
of foreign diplomats resident in
Washington he left to Sarason, who entertained them on terrapin and
canvasback duck with black-currant jelly, in his apartment that was
considerably more tapestried than Buzz’s own ostentatiously simple
Washington quarters… . However, in Sarason’s place, a room
with a large silk-hung Empire double bed was reserved for Buzz.

It was Sarason who had persuaded Windrip
to let him write
Zero Hour
,
based on Windrip’s own dictated notes, and who had beguiled
millions into reading—and even thousands into buying—that Bible
of Economic Justice; Sarason who had perceived there was now such a
spate of private political weeklies and monthlies that it was a
distinction not to publish one; Sarason who had the inspiration for
Buzz’s emergency radio address at 3 A.M. upon
the occasion of the
Supreme Court’s throttling the N.R.A., in May, 1935… . Though
not many adherents, including Buzz himself, were quite certain as
to whether he was pleased or disappointed; though not many actually
heard the broadcast itself, everyone in the country except sheep-herders and Professor Albert Einstein heard about it and was
impressed.

Yet it was Buzz who all by himself thought
of first offending the
Duke of York by refusing to appear at the Embassy dinner for him in
December, 1935, thus gaining, in all farm kitchens and parsonages
and barrooms, a splendid reputation for Homespun Democracy; and of
later mollifying His Highness by calling on him with a touching
little home bouquet of geraniums (from the hothouse of the Japanese
ambassador), which endeared him, if not
necessarily to Royalty yet
certainly to the D.A.R., the English-Speaking Union, and all
motherly hearts who thought the pudgy little bunch of geraniums too
sweet for anything.

By the newspapermen Buzz was credited with having insisted on the
nomination of Perley Beecroft for vice-president at the Democratic
convention, after Doremus Jessup had frenetically ceased listening.
Beecroft was a Southern
tobacco-planter and storekeeper, an ex-Governor of his state, married to an ex-schoolteacher from Maine
who was sufficiently scented with salt spray and potato blossoms to
win any Yankee. But it was not his geographical superiority which
made Mr. Beecroft the perfect running mate for Buzz Windrip but
that he was malaria-yellowed and laxly mustached, where Buzz’s
horsey face was ruddy and smooth;
while Beecroft’s oratory had a
vacuity, a profundity of slowly enunciated nonsense, which beguiled
such solemn deacons as were irritated by Buzz’s cataract of slang.

Nor could Sarason ever have convinced the wealthy that the more
Buzz denounced them and promised to distribute their millions to
the poor, the more they could trust his “common sense” and finance
his campaign. But with a hint, a
grin, a wink, a handshake, Buzz
could convince them, and their contributions came in by the hundred
thousand, often disguised as assessments on imaginary business
partnerships.

It had been the peculiar genius of Berzelius Windrip not to wait
until he should be nominated for this office or that to begin
shanghaiing his band of buccaneers. He had been coaxing in
supporters ever since the day when,
at the age of four, he had
captivated a neighborhood comrade by giving him an ammonia pistol
which later he thriftily stole back from the comrade’s pocket.
Buzz might not have learned, perhaps could not have learned, much
from sociologists Charles Beard and John Dewey, but they could have
learned a great deal from Buzz.

And it was Buzz’s, not Sarason’s, master stroke that, as warmly as
he advocated
everyone’s getting rich by just voting to be rich, he
denounced all “Fascism” and “Nazi-ism,” so that most of the
Republicans who were afraid of Democratic Fascism, and all the
Democrats who were afraid of Republican Fascism, were ready to vote
for him.

While I hate befogging my pages with scientific technicalities and
even neologies, I feel constrained to say here that the most
elementary perusal of the Economy of Abundance would convince any
intelligent student that the Cassandras who miscall the much-needed
increase in the fluidity of our currential circulation “Inflation,”
erroneously basing their parallel upon the inflationary misfortunes
of certain European nations in the era 1919–1923, fallaciously and
perhaps inexcusably fail to comprehend the different monetary
status in America inherent in our vastly greater reservoir of
Natural Resources.

Zero Hour
, Berzelius Windrip.

Most of the mortgaged farmers.

Most of the white-collar workers who had been unemployed these
three years and four and five.

Most of the people on relief
rolls who wanted more relief.

Most of the suburbanites who could not meet the installment
payments on the electric washing machine.

Such large sections of the American Legion as believed that only
Senator Windrip would secure for them, and perhaps increase, the
bonus.

Such popular Myrtle Boulevard or Elm Avenue preachers as, spurred
by the examples of Bishop Prang and Father Coughlin, believed
they
could get useful publicity out of supporting a slightly queer
program that promised prosperity without anyone’s having to work
for it.

The remnants of the Kuklux Klan, and such leaders of the American
Federation of Labor as felt they had been inadequately courted and
bepromised by the old-line politicians, and the non-unionized
common laborers who felt they had been inadequately courted
by the
same A.F. of L.

Back-street and over-the-garage lawyers who had never yet wangled
governmental jobs.

The Lost Legion of the Anti-Saloon League—since it was known that,
though he drank a lot, Senator Windrip also praised teetotalism a
lot, while his rival, Walt Trowbridge, though he drank but little,
said nothing at all in support of the Messiahs of Prohibition.
These messiahs had not
found professional morality profitable of
late, with the Rockefellers and Wanamakers no longer praying with
them nor paying.

Besides these necessitous petitioners, a goodish number of burghers
who, while they were millionaires, yet maintained that their
prosperity had been sorely checked by the fiendishness of the
bankers in limiting their credit.

These were the supporters who looked to Berzelius
Windrip to play
the divine raven and feed them handsomely when he should become
President, and from such came most of the fervid elocutionists who
campaigned for him through September and October.

Pushing in among this mob of camp followers who identified
political virtue with money for their rent came a flying squad who
suffered not from hunger but from congested idealism: Intellectuals
and
Reformers and even Rugged Individualists, who saw in Windrip,
for all his clownish swindlerism, a free vigor which promised a
rejuvenation of the crippled and senile capitalistic system.

Upton Sinclair wrote about Buzz and spoke for him just as in 1917,
unyielding pacifist though he was, Mr. Sinclair had advocated
America’s whole-hearted prosecution of the Great War, foreseeing
that it would
unquestionably exterminate German militarism and thus
forever end all wars. Most of the Morgan partners, though they may
have shuddered a little at association with Upton Sinclair, saw
that, however much income they themselves might have to sacrifice,
only Windrip could start the Business Recovery; while Bishop
Manning of New York City pointed out that Windrip always spoke
reverently of the church
and its shepherds, whereas Walt Trowbridge
went horseback-riding every Sabbath morning and had never been
known to telegraph any female relative on Mother’s Day.

On the other hand, the Saturday Evening Post enraged the small
shopkeepers by calling Wmdrip a demagogue, and the New York Times,
once Independent Democrat, was anti-Windrip. But most of the
religious periodicals announced that with
a saint like Bishop Prang
for backer, Windrip must have been called of God.