It Can't Happen Here (21 page)

The new “Northeastern Province” included all of New York State
north of a line through Ossining, and all of New England except a
strip of Connecticut shore as far east as New Haven. This was,
Doremus admitted, a natural and homogeneous
division, and even more
natural seemed the urban and industrial “Metropolitan Province,”
which included Greater New York, Westchester County up to Ossining,
Long Island, the strip of Connecticut dependent on New York City,
New Jersey, northern Delaware, and Pennsylvania as far as Reading
and Scranton.

Each province was divided into numbered districts, each district
into lettered counties, each
county into townships and cities, and
only in these last did the old names, with their traditional
appeal, remain to endanger President Windrip by memories of
honorable local history. And it was gossiped that, next, the
government would change even the town names—that they were already
thinking fondly of calling New York “Berzelian” and San Francisco
“San Sarason.” Probably that gossip was false.

The Northeastern Province’s six districts were: 1, Upper New York
State west of and including Syracuse; 2, New York east of it; 3,
Vermont and New Hampshire; 4, Maine; 5, Massachusetts; 6, Rhode
Island and the unraped portion of Connecticut.

District 3, Doremus Jessup’s district, was divided into the four
“counties” of southern and northern Vermont, and southern and
northern New Hampshire, with
Hanover for capital—the District
Commissioner merely chased the Dartmouth students out and took over
the college buildings for his offices, to the considerable approval
of Amherst, Williams, and Yale.

So Doremus was living, now, in Northeastern Province, District 3,
County B, township of Beulah, and over him for his admiration and
rejoicing were a provincial commissioner, a district commissioner,
a county commissioner, an assistant county commissioner in charge
of Beulah Township, and all their appertaining M.M. guards and
emergency military judges.

Citizens who had lived in any one state for more than ten years
seemed to resent more hotly the loss of that state’s identity than
they did the castration of the Congress and Supreme Court of the
United States—indeed, they resented it almost
as much as the fact
that, while late January, February, and most of March went by, they
still were not receiving their governmental gifts of $5000 (or
perhaps it would beautifully be $10,000) apiece; had indeed
received nothing more than cheery bulletins from Washington to the
effect that the “Capital Levy Board,” or C.L.B. was holding
sessions.

Virginians whose grandfathers had fought beside
Lee shouted that
they’d be damned if they’d give up the hallowed state name and form
just one arbitrary section of an administrative unit containing
eleven Southern states; San Franciscans who had considered Los
Angelinos even worse than denizens of Miami now wailed with agony
when California was sundered and the northern portion lumped in
with Oregon, Nevada, and others as the “Mountain and Pacific
Province,” while southern California was, without her permission,
assigned to the Southwestern Province, along with Arizona, New
Mexico, Texas, Oklahoma, and Hawaii. As some hint of Buzz
Windrip’s vision for the future, it was interesting to read that
this Southwestern Province was also to be permitted to claim “all
portions of Mexico which the United States may from time to time
find it necessary
to take over, as a protection against the
notorious treachery of Mexico and the Jewish plots there hatched.”

“Lee Sarason is even more generous than Hitler and Alfred Rosenberg
in protecting the future of other countries,” sighed Doremus.

As Provincial Commissioner of the Northeastern Province, comprising
Upper New York State and New England, was appointed Colonel Dewey
Haik, that soldier-lawyer-politician-av
iator who was the chilliest-blooded and most arrogant of all the satellites of Windrip yet had
so captivated miners and fishermen during the campaign. He was a
strong-flying eagle who liked his meat bloody. As District
Commissioner of District 3—Vermont and New Hampshire—appeared, to
Doremus’s mingled derision and fury, none other than John Sullivan
Reek, that stuffiest of stuffed-shirts, that
most gaseous gas bag,
that most amenable machine politician of Northern New England; a
Republican ex-governor who had, in the alembic of Windrip’s
patriotism, rosily turned Leaguer.

No one had ever troubled to be obsequious to the Hon. J. S. Reek,
even when he had been Governor. The weediest back-country
Representative had called him “Johnny,” in the gubernatorial
mansion (twelve rooms and a
leaky roof); and the youngest reporter
had bawled, “Well, what bull you handing out today, Ex?”

It was this Commissioner Reek who summoned all the editors in his
district to meet him at his new viceregal lodge in Dartmouth
Library and receive the precious privileged information as to how
much President Windrip and his subordinate commissioners admired
the gentlemen of the press.

Before he left
for the press conference in Hanover, Doremus
received from Sissy a “poem”—at least she called it that—which
Buck Titus, Lorinda Pike, Julian Falck, and she had painfully
composed, late at night, in Buck’s fortified manor house:

Be meek with Reek,

Go fake with Haik.

One rhymes with sneak,

And t’ other with snake.

Haik, with his beak,

Is on the make,

But Sullivan Reek—

Oh God!

“Well,
anyway, Windrip’s put everybody to work. And he’s driven
all these unsightly billboards off the highways—much better for
the tourist trade,” said all the old editors, even those who
wondered if the President wasn’t perhaps the least bit arbitrary.

As he drove to Hanover, Doremus saw hundreds of huge billboards by
the road. But they bore only Windrip propaganda and underneath,
“with the compliments
of a loyal firm” and—very large—”Montgomery
Cigarettes” or “Jonquil Foot Soap.” On the short walk from a
parking-space to the former Dartmouth campus, three several men
muttered to him, “Give us a nickel for cuppa coffee, Boss—a
Minnie Mouse has got my job and the Mouses won’t take me—they say
I’m too old.” But that may have been propaganda from Moscow.

On the long porch of the Hanover Inn,
officers of the Minute Men
were reclining in deck chairs, their spurred boots (in all the M.M.
organization there was no cavalry) up on the railing.

Doremus passed a science building in front of which was a pile of
broken laboratory glassware, and in one stripped laboratory he
could see a small squad of M.M.’s drilling.

District Commissioner John Sullivan Reek affectionately received
the editors
in a classroom… . Old men, used to being revered
as prophets, sitting anxiously in trifling chairs, facing a fat man
in the uniform of an M.M. commander, who smoked an unmilitary cigar
as his pulpy hand waved greeting.

Reek took not more than an hour to relate what would have taken the
most intelligent man five or six hours—that is, five minutes of
speech and the rest of the five hours to recover
from the nausea
caused by having to utter such shameless rot… . President
Windrip, Secretary of State Sarason, Provincial Commissioner Haik,
and himself, John Sullivan Reek, they were all being misrepresented
by the Republicans, the Jeffersonians, the Communists, England, the
Nazis, and probably the jute and herring industries; and what the
government wanted was for any reporter to call on any
member of
this Administration, and especially on Commissioner Reek, at any
time—except perhaps between 3 and 7 A.M.—and “get the real low-down.”

Excellency Reek announced, then: “And now, gentlemen, I am giving
myself the privilege of introducing you to all four of the County
Commissioners, who were just chosen yesterday. Probably each of
you will know personally the commissioner from your
own county, but
I want you to intimately and cooperatively know all four, because,
whomever they may be, they join with me in my unquenchable
admiration of the press.”

The four County Commissioners, as one by one they shambled into the
room and were introduced, seemed to Doremus an oddish lot: A moth-eaten lawyer known more for his quotations from Shakespeare and
Robert W. Service than for his
shrewdness before a jury. He was
luminously bald except for a prickle of faded rusty hair, but you
felt that, if he had his rights, he would have the floating locks
of a tragedian of 1890.

A battling clergyman famed for raiding roadhouses.

A rather shy workman, an authentic proletarian, who seemed
surprised to find himself there. (He was replaced, a month later,
by a popular osteopath with
an interest in politics and
vegetarianism.)

The fourth dignitary to come in and affectionately bow to the
editors, a bulky man, formidable-looking in his uniform as a
battalion leader of Minute Men, introduced as the Commissioner for
northern Vermont, Doremus Jessup’s county, was Mr. Oscar Ledue,
formerly known as “Shad.”

Mr. Reek called him “Captain” Ledue. Doremus remembered that
Shad’s
only military service, prior to Windrip’s election, had been
as an A.E.F. private who had never got beyond a training-camp in
America and whose fiercest experience in battle had been licking a
corporal when in liquor.

“Mr. Jessup,” bubbled the Hon. Mr. Reek, “I imagine you must have
met Captain Ledue—comes from your charming city.”

“Uh-uh-ur,” said Doremus.

“Sure,” said Captain Ledue. “I’ve
met old Jessup, all right, all
right! He don’t know what it’s all about. He don’t know the first
thing about the economics of our social Revolution. He’s a Cho-vinis. But he isn’t such a bad old coot, and I’ll let him ride as
long as he behaves himself!”

“Splendid!” said the Hon. Mr. Reek.

Like beefsteak and potatoes stick to your ribs even if you’re
working your head off, so the words of the Good Book stick by you
in perplexity and tribulation. If I ever held a high position over
my people, I hope that my ministers would be quoting, from II
Kings, 18; 31 & 32: “Come out to me, and then eat ye every man of
his own vine, and every one of his fig tree, and drink ye every one
the waters of his cistern, until I come and take you away to a land
of corn and wine, a land of bread and vineyards, a land of olive
oil and honey, that ye may live and not die.”

Zero Hour
, Berzelius Windrip.

Despite the claims of Montpelier, the former capital of Vermont,
and of Burlington, largest town in the state, Captain Shad Ledue
fixed on Fort Beulah as executive center of County B,
which was
made out of nine former counties of northern Vermont. Doremus
never decided whether this was, as Lorinda Pike asserted, because
Shad was in partnership with Banker R. C. Crowley in the profits
derived from the purchase of quite useless old dwellings as part of
his headquarters, or for the even sounder purpose of showing
himself off, in battalion leader’s uniform with the letters “C.C.”
beneath the five-pointed star on his collar, to the pals with whom
he had once played pool and drunk applejack, and to the “snobs”
whose lawns he once had mowed.

Besides the condemned dwellings, Shad took over all of the former
Scotland County courthouse and established his private office in
the judge’s chambers, merely chucking out the law books and
replacing them with piles of magazines devoted
to the movies and
the detection of crime, hanging up portraits of Windrip, Sarason,
Haik, and Reek, installing two deep chairs upholstered in poison-green plush (ordered from the store of the loyal Charley Betts but,
to Betts’s fury, charged to the government, to be paid for if and
when) and doubling the number of judicial cuspidors.

In the top center drawer of his desk Shad kept a photograph
from a
nudist camp, a flask of Benedictine, a .44 revolver, and a dog
whip.

County commissioners were allowed from one to a dozen assistant
commissioners, depending on the population. Doremus Jessup was
alarmed when he discovered that Shad had had the shrewdness to
choose as assistants men of some education and pretense to manners,
with “Professor” Emil Staubmeyer as Assistant County Commissioner
in charge of the Township of Beulah, which included the villages of
Fort Beulah, West and North Beulah, Beulah Center, Trianon, Hosea,
and Keezmet.

As Shad had, without benefit of bayonets, become a captain, so Mr.
Staubmeyer (author of Hitler and Other Poems of Passion—unpublished) automatically became a doctor.

Perhaps, thought Doremus, he would understand Windrip & Co. better
through seeing
them faintly reflected in Shad and Staubmeyer than
he would have in the confusing glare of Washington; and understand
thus that a Buzz Windrip—a Bismarck—a Cæsar—a Pericles was like
all the rest of itching, indigesting, aspiring humanity except that
each of these heroes had a higher degree of ambition and more
willingness to kill.

By June, the enrollment of the Minute Men had increased to 562,000,
and the force was now able to accept as new members only such
trusty patriots and pugilists as it preferred. The War Department
was frankly allowing them not just “expense money” but payment
ranging from ten dollars a week for “inspectors” with a few hours
of weekly duty in drilling, to $9700 a year for “brigadiers” on
full time, and $16,000 for the High Marshal, Lee Sarason …
fortunately without
interfering with the salaries from his other
onerous duties.

The M.M. ranks were: inspector, more or less corresponding to
private; squad leader, or corporal; cornet, or sergeant; ensign, or
lieutenant; battalion leader, a combination of captain, major, and
lieutenant colonel; commander, or colonel; brigadier, or general;
high marshal, or commanding general. Cynics suggested that these
honorable
titles derived more from the Salvation Army than the
fighting forces, but be that cheap sneer justified or no, the fact
remains that an M.M. helot had ever so much more pride in being
called an “inspector,” an awing designation in all police circles,
than in being a “private.”