It Can't Happen Here (15 page)

“Antibuzz,” a word credited to Mrs. Gimmitch but more probably
invented by Dr. Hector Macgoblin, was to be extensively used by
lady patriots as a term expressing such vicious disloyalty to the
State as might call for
the firing squad. Yet, like Mrs.
Gimmitch’s splendid synthesis “Unkies,” for soldiers of the A.E.F.,
it never really caught on.

Among the winter-coated paraders Doremus and Sissy thought they
could make out Shad Ledue, Aras Dilley, that philoprogenitive
squatter from Mount Terror, Charley Betts, the furniture dealer,
and Tony Mogliani, the fruit-seller, most ardent expounder of
Italian Fascism
in central Vermont.

And, though he could not be sure of it in the dimness behind the
torches, Doremus rather thought that the lone large motorcar
following the procession was that of his neighbor, Francis
Tasbrough.

Next morning, at the
Informer
office, Doremus did not learn of so
very much damage wrought by the triumphant Nordics—they had merely
upset a couple of privies, torn down and burned
the tailor-shop
sign of Louis Rotenstern, and somewhat badly beaten Clifford
Little, the jeweler, a slight, curly-headed young man whom Shad
Ledue despised because he organized theatricals and played the
organ in Mr. Falck’s church.

That night Doremus found, on his front porch, a notice in red chalk
upon butcher’s paper:

You will get yrs Dorey sweethart unles you get rite down on yr
belly and
crawl in front of the MM and the League and the Chief and
I

A friend

It was the first time that Doremus had heard of “the Chief,” a
sound American variant of “the Leader” or “the Head of the
Government,” as a popular title for Mr. Windrip. It was soon to be
made official.

Doremus burned the red warning without telling his family. But he
often woke to remember it, not very laughingly.

And when I get ready to retire I’m going to build me an up-to-date
bungalow in some lovely resort, not in Como or any other of the
proverbial Grecian isles you may be sure, but in somewheres like
Florida, California, Santa Fe, & etc., and devote myself just to
reading the classics, like Longfellow, James Whitcomb Riley, Lord
Macaulay, Henry Van Dyke, Elbert Hubbard, Plato, Hiawatha, & etc.
Some of my friends laugh at me for it, but I have always cultivated
a taste for the finest in literature. I got it from my Mother as I
did everything that some people have been so good as to admire in
me.

Zero Hour
, Berzelius Windrip.

Certain though Doremus had been of Windrip’s election, the event
was like the long-dreaded passing of a friend.

“All right. Hell with this country, if it’s
like that. All these
years I’ve worked—and I never did want to be on all these
committees and boards and charity drives!—and don’t
they
look
silly now! What I always wanted to do was to sneak off to an ivory
tower—or anyway, celluloid, imitation ivory—and read everything
I’ve been too busy to read.”

Thus Doremus, in late November.

And he did actually attempt it, and for a few days reveled
in it,
avoiding everyone save his family and Lorinda, Buck Titus, and
Father Perefixe. Mostly, though, he found that he did not relish
the “classics” he had so far missed, but those familiar to his
youth: Ivanhoe, Huckleberry Finn, Midsummer Night’s Dream, The
Tempest, L’Allegro, The Way of All Flesh (not quite so youthful,
there), Moby Dick, The Earthly Paradise, St. Agnes’ Eve, The Idylls
of the
King, most of Swinburne, Pride and Prejudice, Religio
Medici, Vanity Fair.

Probably he was not so very different from President-Elect Windrip
in his rather uncritical reverence toward any book he had heard of
before he was thirty… . No American whose fathers have lived
in the country for over two generations is so utterly different
from any other American.

In one thing, Doremus’s literary escapism
failed him thoroughly.
He tried to relearn Latin, but he could not now, uncajoled by a
master, believe that “Mensa, mensae, mensae, mensam, mensa”—all
that idiotic A table, of a table, to a table, toward a table, at in
by or on a table—could bear him again as once it had to the honey-sweet tranquillity of Vergil and the Sabine Farm.

Then he saw that in everything his quest failed him.

The reading
was good enough, toothsome, satisfying, except that he
felt guilty at having sneaked away to an Ivory Tower at all. Too
many years he had made a habit of social duty. He wanted to be
“in” things, and he was daily more irritable as Windrip began, even
before his inauguration, to dictate to the country.

Buzz’s party, with the desertions to the Jeffersonians, had less
than a majority in Congress.
“Inside dope” came to Doremus from
Washington that Windrip was trying to buy, to flatter, to blackmail
opposing Congressmen. A President-Elect has unhallowed power, if
he so wishes, and Windrip—no doubt with promises of abnormal
favors in the way of patronage—won over a few. Five Jeffersonian
Congressmen had their elections challenged. One sensationally
disappeared, and smoking after his galloping
heels there was a
devilish fume of embezzlements. And with each such triumph of
Windrip, all the well-meaning, cloistered Doremuses of the country
were the more anxious.

All through the “Depression,” ever since 1929, Doremus had felt the
insecurity, the confusion, the sense of futility in trying to do
anything more permanent than shaving or eating breakfast, that was
general to the country.
He could no longer plan, for himself or
for his dependants, as the citizens of this once unsettled country
had planned since 1620.

Why, their whole lives had been predicated on the privilege of
planning. Depressions had been only cyclic storms, certain to end
in sunshine; Capitalism and parliamentary government were eternal,
and eternally being improved by the honest votes of Good Citizens.

Doremus’s grandfather, Calvin, Civil War veteran and ill-paid,
illiberal Congregational minister, had yet planned, “My son, Loren,
shall have a theological education, and I think we shall be able to
build a fine new house in fifteen or twenty years.” That had given
him a reason for working, and a goal.

His father, Loren, had vowed, “Even if I have to economize on books
a little, and perhaps give
up this extravagance of eating meat four
times a week—very bad for the digestion, anyway—my son, Doremus,
shall have a college education, and when, as he desires, he becomes
a publicist, I think perhaps I shall be able to help him for a year
or two. And then I hope—oh, in a mere five or six years more—to
buy that complete Dickens with all the illustrations—oh, an
extravagance, but a thing to
leave to my grandchildren to treasure
forever!”

But Doremus Jessup could not plan, “I’ll have Sissy go to Smith
before she studies architecture,” or “If Julian Falck and Sissy get
married and stick here in the Fort, I’ll give ‘em the southwest lot
and some day, maybe fifteen years from now, the whole place will be
filled with nice kids again!” No. Fifteen years from now, he
sighed, Sissy might
be hustling hash for the sort of workers who
called the waiter’s art “hustling hash”; and Julian might be in a
concentration camp—Fascist
or
Communist!

The Horatio Alger tradition, from rags to Rockefellers, was clean
gone out of the America it had dominated.

It seemed faintly silly to hope, to try to prophesy, to give up
sleep on a good mattress for toil on a typewriter, and as for
saving money—idiotic!

And for a newspaper editor—for one who must know, at least as well
as the Encyclopædia, everything about local and foreign history,
geography, economics, politics, literature, and methods of playing
football—it was maddening that it seemed impossible now to know
anything surely.

“He don’t know what it’s all about” had in a year or two changed
from a colloquial sneer to a sound general statement
regarding
almost any economist. Once, modestly enough, Doremus had assumed
that he had a decent knowledge of finance, taxation, the gold
standard, agricultural exports, and he had smilingly pontificated
everywhere that Liberal Capitalism would pastorally lead into State
Socialism, with governmental ownership of mines and railroads and
water-power so settling all inequalities of income that every
lion
of a structural steel worker would be willing to lie down with any
lamb of a contractor, and all the jails and tuberculosis sanatoria
would be clean empty.

Now he knew that he knew nothing fundamental and, like a lone monk
stricken with a conviction of sin, he mourned, “If I only knew
more! … Yes, and if I could only remember statistics!”

The coming and the going of the N.R.A., the F.E.R.A.,
the P.W.A.,
and all the rest, had convinced Doremus that there were four sets
of people who did not clearly understand anything whatever about
how the government must be conducted: all the authorities in
Washington; all of the citizenry who talked or wrote profusely
about politics; the bewildered untouchables who said nothing; and
Doremus Jessup.

“But,” said he, “now, after Buzz’s inauguration,
everything is
going to be completely simple and comprehensible again—the country
is going to be run as his private domain!”

Julian Falck, now sophomore in Amherst, had come home for Christmas
vacation, and he dropped in at the
Informer
office to beg from
Doremus a ride home before dinner.

He called Doremus “sir” and did not seem to think he was a comic
fossil. Doremus liked it.

On the way
they stopped for gasoline at the garage of John
Pollikop, the seething Social Democrat, and were waited upon by
Karl Pascal—sometime donkey-engine-man at Tasbrough’s quarry,
sometime strike leader, sometime political prisoner in the county
jail on a thin charge of inciting to riot, and ever since then, a
model of Communistic piety.

Pascal was a thin man, but sinewy; his gaunt and humorous face
of a
good mechanic was so grease-darkened that the skin above and below
his eyes seemed white as a fish-belly, and, in turn, that pallid
rim made his eyes, alert dark gipsy eyes, seem the larger… . A
panther chained to a coal cart.

“Well, what you going to do after this election?” said Doremus.
“Oh! That’s a fool question! I guess none of us chronic kickers
want to say much about what we plan
to do after January, when Buzz
gets his hands on us. Lie low, eh?”

“I’m going to lie the lowest lie that I ever did. You bet! But
maybe there’ll be a few Communist cells around here now, when
Fascism begins to get into people’s hair. Never did have much
success with my propaganda before, but now, you watch!” exulted
Pascal.

“You don’t seem so depressed by the election,” marveled Doremus,
while Julian offered, “No—you seem quite cheerful about it!”

“Depressed? Why good Lord, Mr. Jessup, I thought you knew your
revolutionary tactics better than that, way you supported us in the
quarry strike—even if you
are
the perfect type of small capitalist
bourgeois! Depressed? Why, can’t you see, if the Communists had
paid for it they couldn’t have had anything more elegant for our
purposes
than the election of a pro-plutocrat, itching militarist
dictator like Buzz Windrip! Look! He’ll get everybody plenty
dissatisfied. But they can’t do anything, barehanded against the
armed troops. Then he’ll whoop it up for a war, and so millions of
people will have arms and food rations in their hands—all ready
for the revolution! Hurray for Buzz and John Prang the Baptist!”

“Karl, it’s
funny about you. I honestly believe you believe in
Communism!” marveled young Julian. “Don’t you?”

“Why don’t you go and ask your friend Father Perefixe if he
believes in the Virgin?”

“But you seem to like America, and you don’t seem so fanatical,
Karl. I remember when I was a kid of about ten and you—I suppose
you were about twenty-five or -six then—you used to slide with us
and whoop like
hell, and you made me a ski-stick.”

“Sure I like America. Came here when I was two years old—I was
born in Germany—my folks weren’t Heinies, though—my dad was
French and my mother a Hunkie from Serbia. (Guess that makes me a
hundred per cent American, all right!) I think we’ve got the Old
Country beat, lots of ways. Why, say, Julian, over there I’d have
to call you ‘Mein Herr’ or ‘Your Excellency,’
or some fool thing,
and you’d call me, ‘I say-uh, Pascal!’ and Mr. Jessup here, my
Lord, he’d be ‘Commendatore’ or ‘Herr Doktor’! No, I like it here.
There’s symptoms of possible future democracy. But—but—what
burns me up—it isn’t that old soap-boxer’s chestnut about how one
tenth of 1 per cent of the population at the top have an aggregate
income equal to 42 per cent at the bottom. Figures
like that are
too astronomical. Don’t mean a thing in the world to a fellow with
his eyes—and nose—down in a transmission box—fellow that doesn’t
see the stars except after 9 P.M. on odd Wednesdays. But what
burns me up is the fact that even before this Depression, in what
you folks called prosperous times, 7 per cent of all the families
in the country earned $500 a year or less—remember, those
weren’t
the unemployed, on relief; those were the guys that had the honor
of still doing honest labor.

“Five hundred dollars a year is ten dollars a week—and that means
one dirty little room for a family of four people! It means $5.00
a week for all their food—eighteen cents per day per person for
food!—and even the lousiest prisons allow more than that. And the
magnificent remainder of $2.50
a week, that means nine cents per
day per person for clothes, insurance, carfares, doctors’ bills,
dentists’ bills, and for God’s sake, amusements—amusements!—and
all the rest of the nine cents a day they can fritter away on their
Fords and autogiros and, when they feel fagged, skipping across the
pond on the Normandie! Seven per cent of all the fortunate
American families where the old man
has
got a job!”