It Can't Happen Here (16 page)

Julian was silent; then whispered, “You know—fellow gets
discussing economics in college—theoretically sympathetic—but to
see your own kids living on eighteen cents a day for grub—I guess
that would make a man pretty extremist!”

Doremus fretted, “But what percentage of forced labor in your
Russian lumber camps and Siberian prison mines are getting more
than that?”

“Haaa! That’s
all baloney! That’s the old standard come-back at
every Communist—just like once, twenty years ago, the muttonheads
used to think they’d crushed any Socialist when they snickered ‘If
all the money was divided up, inside five years the hustlers would
have all of it again.’ Prob’ly there’s some standard coup de grace
like that in Russia, to crush anybody that defends America.
Besides!” Karl Pascal
glowed with nationalistic fervor. “We
Americans aren’t like those dumb Russki peasants! We’ll do a whole
lot better when
we
get Communism!”

And on that, his employer, the expansive John Pollikop, a woolly
Scotch terrier of a man, returned to the garage. John was an
excellent friend of Doremus; had, indeed, been his bootlegger all
through Prohibition, personally running in his whisky from Canada.
He had been known, even in that singularly scrupulous profession,
as one of its most trustworthy practitioners. Now he flowered into
mid-European dialectics:

“Evenin’, Mist’ Jessup, evenin’, Julian! Karl fill up y’ tank for
you? You want t’ watch that guy—he’s likely to hold out a gallon
on you. He’s one of these crazy dogs of Communists—they all
believe in Violence instead of Evolution and
Legality. Them—why
say, if they hadn’t been so crooked, if they’d joined me and Norman
Thomas and the other
intelligent
Socialists in a United Front with
Roosevelt and the Jeffersonians, why say, we’d of licked the pants
off Buzzard Windrip! Windrip and his plans!”

(“Buzzard” Windrip. That was good, Doremus reflected. He’d be
able to use it in the
Informer
!)

Pascal protested, “Not that Buzzard’s
personal plans and ambitions
have got much to do with it. Altogether too easy to explain
everything just blaming it on Windrip. Why don’t you
read
your
Marx, John, instead of always gassing about him? Why, Windrip’s
just something nasty that’s been vomited up. Plenty others still
left fermenting in the stomach—quack economists with every sort of
economic ptomain! No, Buzz isn’t important—it’s
the sickness that
made us throw him up that we’ve got to attend to—the sickness of
more than 30 per cent permanently unemployed, and growing larger.
Got to cure it!”

“Can you crazy Tovarishes cure it?” snapped Pollikop, and, “Do you
think Communism will cure it?” skeptically wondered Doremus, and,
more politely, “Do you really think Karl Marx had the dope?”
worried Julian, all three at once.

“You bet your life we can!” said Pascal vaingloriously.

As Doremus, driving away, looked back at them, Pascal and Pollikop
were removing a flat tire together and quarreling bitterly, quite
happily.

Doremus’s attic study had been to him a refuge from the tender
solicitudes of Emma and Mrs. Candy and his daughters, and all the
impulsive hand-shaking strangers who wanted the local editor to
start
off their campaigns for the sale of life insurance or gas-saving carburetors, for the Salvation Army or the Red Cross or the
Orphans’ Home or the Anti-cancer Crusade, or the assorted magazines
which would enable to go through college young men who at all cost
should be kept out of college.

It was a refuge now from the considerably less tender solicitudes
of supporters of the President-Elect.
On the pretense of work,
Doremus took to sneaking up there in mid-evening; and he sat not in
an easy chair but stiffly, at his desk, making crosses and five-pointed stars and six-pointed stars and fancy delete signs on
sheets of yellow copy paper, while he sorely meditated.

Thus, this evening, after the demands of Karl Pascal and John
Pollikop:

“‘The Revolt against Civilization!’

“But there’s
the worst trouble of this whole cursed business of
analysis. When I get to defending Democracy against Communism and
Fascism and what-not, I sound just like the Lothrop Stoddards—why,
I sound almost like a Hearst editorial on how some college has got
to kick out a Dangerous Red instructor in order to preserve our
Democracy for the ideals of Jefferson and Washington! Yet somehow,
singing the
same words, I have a notion my tune is entirely
different from Hearst’s. I
don’t
think we’ve done very well with
all the plowland and forest and minerals and husky human stock
we’ve had. What makes me sick about Hearst and the D.A.R. is that
if
they
are against Communism, I have to be for it, and I don’t
want to be!

“Wastage of resources, so they’re about gone—that’s been the
American share
in the revolt against Civilization.

“We
can
go back to the Dark Ages! The crust of learning and good
manners and tolerance is so thin! It would just take a few
thousand big shells and gas bombs to wipe out all the eager young
men, and all the libraries and historical archives and patent
offices, all the laboratories and art galleries, all the castles
and Periclean temples and Gothic cathedrals,
all the cooperative
stores and motor factories—every storehouse of learning.
No inherent reason why Sissy’s grandchildren—if anybody’s
grandchildren will survive at all—shouldn’t be living in caves and
heaving rocks at catamounts.

“And what’s the solution of preventing this debacle? Plenty of
‘em! The Communists have a patent Solution they know will work.
So have the Fascists, and the rigid
American Constitutionalists—who
call
themselves advocates of Democracy, without any notion what
the word ought to mean; and the Monarchists—who are certain that
if we could just resurrect the Kaiser and the Czar and King
Alfonso, everybody would be loyal and happy again, and the banks
would simply force credit on small businessmen at 2 per cent. And
all the preachers—they tell you that they alone
have the inspired
Solution.

“Well, gentlemen, I have listened to all your Solutions, and I now
inform you that I, and I alone, except perhaps for Walt Trowbridge
and the ghost of Pareto, have the perfect, the inevitable, the only
Solution, and that is: There is no Solution! There will never be
a state of society anything like perfect!

“There never will be a time when there won’t be a large
proportion
of people who feel poor no matter how much they have, and envy
their neighbors who know how to wear cheap clothes showily, and
envy neighbors who can dance or make love or digest better.”

Doremus suspected that, with the most scientific state, it would be
impossible for iron deposits always to find themselves at exactly
the rate decided upon two years before by the National Technocratic
Minerals Commission, no matter how elevated and fraternal and
Utopian the principles of the commissioners.

His Solution, Doremus pointed out, was the only one that did not
flee before the thought that a thousand years from now human beings
would probably continue to die of cancer and earthquake and such
clownish mishaps as slipping in bathtubs. It presumed that mankind
would continue to be burdened
with eyes that grow weak, feet that
grow tired, noses that itch, intestines vulnerable to bacilli, and
generative organs that are nervous until the age of virtue and
senility. It seemed to him unidealistically probable, for all the
“contemporary furniture” of the 1930’s, that most people would
continue, at least for a few hundred years, to sit in chairs, eat
from dishes upon tables, read books—no
matter how many cunning
phonographic substitutes might be invented, wear shoes or sandals,
sleep in beds, write with some sort of pens, and in general spend
twenty or twenty-two hours a day much as they had spent them in
1930, in 1630. He suspected that tornadoes, floods, droughts,
lightning, and mosquitoes would remain, along with the homicidal
tendency known in the best of citizens when their
sweethearts go
dancing off with other men.

And, most fatally and abysmally, his Solution guessed that men of
superior cunning, of slyer foxiness, whether they might be called
Comrades, Brethren, Commissars, Kings, Patriots, Little Brothers of
the Poor, or any other rosy name, would continue to have more
influence than slower-witted men, however worthy.

All the warring Solutions—except his,
Doremus chuckled—were
ferociously propagated by the Fanatics, the “Nuts.”

He recalled an article in which Neil Carothers asserted that the
“rabble-rousers” of America in the mid-‘thirties had a long and
dishonorable ancestry of prophets who had felt called upon to stir
up the masses to save the world, and save it in the prophets’ own
way, and do it right now, and most violently: Peter the Hermit,
the
ragged, mad, and stinking monk who, to rescue the (unidentified)
tomb of the Savior from undefined “outrages by the pagans,” led out
on the Crusades some hundreds of thousands of European peasants, to
die on the way of starvation, after burning, raping, and murdering
fellow peasants in foreign villages all along the road.

There was John Ball who “in 1381 was a share-the-wealth advocate;
he
preached equality of wealth, the abolition of class distinctions,
and what would now be called communism,” and whose follower, Wat
Tyler, looted London, with the final gratifying result that
afterward Labor was by the frightened government more oppressed than
ever. And nearly three hundred years later, Cromwell’s methods of
expounding the sweet winsomeness of Purity and Liberty were
shooting,
slashing, clubbing, starving, and burning people, and
after him the workers paid for the spree of bloody righteousness
with blood.

Brooding about it, fishing in the muddy slew of recollection which
most Americans have in place of a clear pool of history, Doremus
was able to add other names of well-meaning rabble-rousers:

Murat and Danton and Robespierre, who helped shift the control of
France
from the moldy aristocrats to the stuffy, centime-pinching
shopkeepers. Lenin and Trotzky who gave to the illiterate Russian
peasants the privileges of punching a time clock and of being as
learned, gay, and dignified as the factory hands in Detroit; and
Lenin’s man, Borodin, who extended this boon to China. And that
William Randolph Hearst who in 1898 was the Lenin of Cuba and
switched the mastery
of the golden isle from the cruel Spaniards to
the peaceful, unarmed, brotherly-loving Cuban politicians of today.

The American Moses, Dowie, and his theocracy at Zion City,
Illinois, where the only results of the direct leadership of God—as directed and encouraged by Mr. Dowie and by his even more
spirited successor, Mr. Voliva—were that the holy denizens were
deprived of oysters and cigarettes
and cursing, and died without
the aid of doctors instead of with it, and that the stretch of road
through Zion City incessantly caused the breakage of springs on the
cars of citizens from Evanston, Wilmette, and Winnetka, which may
or not have been a desirable Good Deed.

Cecil Rhodes, his vision of making South Africa a British paradise,
and the actuality of making it a graveyard for British
soldiers.

All the Utopias—Brook Farm, Robert Owen’s sanctuary of chatter,
Upton Sinclair’s Helicon Hall—and their regulation end in scandal,
feuds, poverty, griminess, disillusion.

All the leaders of Prohibition, so certain that their cause was
world-regenerating that for it they were willing to shoot down
violators.

It seemed to Doremus that the only rabble-rouser to build
permanently had
been Brigham Young, with his bearded Mormon
captains, who not only turned the Utah desert into an Eden but made
it pay and kept it up.

Pondered Doremus: Blessed be they who are not Patriots and
Idealists, and who do not feel they must dash right in and Do
Something About It, something so immediately important that all
doubters must be liquidated—tortured—slaughtered! Good old
murder, that since
the slaying of Abel by Cain has always been the
new device by which all oligarchies and dictators have, for all
future ages to come, removed opposition!

In this acid mood Doremus doubted the efficacy of all revolutions;
dared even a little to doubt our two American revolutions—against
England in 1776, and the Civil War.

For a New England editor to contemplate even the smallest criticism
of
these wars was what it would have been for a Southern Baptist
fundamentalist preacher to question Immortality, the Inspiration of
the Bible, and the ethical value of shouting Hallelujah. Yet had
it, Doremus queried nervously, been necessary to have four years of
inconceivably murderous Civil War, followed by twenty years of
commercial oppression of the South, in order to preserve the Union,
free
the slaves, and establish the equality of Industry with
Agriculture? Had it been just to the Negroes themselves to
throw them so suddenly, with so little preparation, into full
citizenship, that the Southern states, in what they considered
self-defense, disqualified them at the polls and lynched them and
lashed them? Could they not, as Lincoln at first desired and
planned, have been freed without
the vote, then gradually and
competently educated, under federal guardianship, so that by 1890
they might, without too much enmity, have been able to enter fully
into all the activities of the land?

A generation and a half (Doremus meditated) of the sturdiest and
most gallant killed or crippled in the Civil War or, perhaps worst
of all, becoming garrulous professional heroes and satellites of
the politicians who in return for their solid vote made all lazy
jobs safe for the G.A.R. The most valorous, it was they who
suffered the most, for while the John D. Rockefellers, the J. P.
Morgans, the Vanderbilts, Astors, Goulds, and all their nimble
financial comrades of the South, did not enlist, but stayed in the
warm, dry counting-house, drawing the fortune of the country into
their webs,
it was Jeb Stuart, Stonewall Jackson, Nathaniel Lyon,
Pat Cleburne, and the knightly James B. McPherson who were
killed … and with them Abraham Lincoln.