It Can't Happen Here (22 page)

Since all members of the National Guard were not only allowed but
encouraged to become members of the Minute Men also,
since all
veterans of the Great War were given special privileges, and since
“Colonel” Osceola Luthorne, the Secretary of War, was generous
about lending regular army officers to Secretary of State Sarason
for use as drill masters in the M.M.’s, there was a surprising
proportion of trained men for so newly born an army.

Lee Sarason had proven to President Windrip by statistics from the
Great
War that college education, and even the study of the horrors
of other conflicts, did not weaken the masculinity of the students,
but actually made them more patriotic, flag-waving, and skillful in
the direction of slaughter than the average youth, and nearly every
college in the country was to have, this coming autumn, its own
battalion of M.M.’s, with drill counting as credit toward
graduation.
The collegians were to be schooled as officers.
Another splendid source of M.M. officers were the gymnasiums and
the classes in Business Administration of the Y.M.C.A.

Most of the rank and file, however, were young farmers delighted by
the chance to go to town and to drive automobiles as fast as they
wanted to; young factory employees who preferred uniforms and the
authority to kick elderly
citizens above overalls and stooping over
machines; and rather a large number of former criminals, ex-bootleggers, ex-burglars, ex-labor racketeers, who, for their skill
with guns and leather life-preservers, and for their assurances
that the majesty of the Five-Pointed Star had completely reformed
them, were forgiven their earlier blunders in ethics and were
warmly accepted in the M.M. Storm Troops.

It was said that one of the least of these erring children was the
first patriot to name President Windrip “the Chief,” meaning
Führer, or Imperial Wizard of the K.K.K., or Il Duce, or Imperial
Potentate of the Mystic Shrine, or Commodore, or University Coach,
or anything else supremely noble and good-hearted. So, on the
glorious anniversary of July 4, 1937, more than five hundred
thousand young
uniformed vigilantes, scattered in towns from Guam
to Bar Harbor, from Point Barrow to Key West, stood at parade rest
and sang, like the choiring seraphim:

“Buzz and buzz and hail the Chief,

And his five-pointed sta-ar,

The U.S. ne’er can come to grief

With us prepared for wa-ar.”

Certain critical spirits felt that this version of the chorus of
“Buzz and Buzz,” now the official
M.M. anthem, showed, in a certain
roughness, the lack of Adelaide Tarr Gimmitch’s fastidious hand.
But nothing could be done about it. She was said to be in China,
organizing chain letters. And even while that uneasiness was over
the M.M., upon the very next day came the blow.

Someone on High Marshal Sarason’s staff noticed that the U.S.S.R.’s
emblem was not a six-pointed star, but a five-pointed
one, even
like America’s, so that we were not insulting the Soviets at all.

Consternation was universal. From Sarason’s office came sulphurous
rebuke to the unknown idiot who had first made the mistake
(generally he was believed to be Lee Sarason) and the command that
a new emblem be suggested by every member of the M.M. Day and night
for three days, M.M. barracks were hectic with telegrams,
telephone
calls, letters, placards, and thousands of young men sat with
pencils and rulers earnestly drawing tens of thousands of
substitutes for the five-pointed star: circles in triangles,
triangles in circles, pentagons, hexagons, alphas and omegas,
eagles, aeroplanes, arrows, bombs bursting in air, bombs bursting
in bushes, billy-goats, rhinoceri, and the Yosemite Valley. It was
circulated that
a young ensign on High Marshal Sarason’s staff had,
in agony over the error, committed suicide. Everybody thought that
this hara-kiri was a fine idea and showed sensibility on the part
of the better M.M.’s; and they went on thinking so even after it
proved that the Ensign had merely got drunk at the Buzz Backgammon
Club and talked about suicide.

In the end, despite his uncounted competitors,
it was the great
mystic, Lee Sarason himself, who found the perfect new emblem—a
ship’s steering wheel.

It symbolized, he pointed out, not only the Ship of State but also
the wheels of American industry, the wheels and the steering wheel
of motorcars, the wheel diagram which Father Coughlin had suggested
two years before as symbolizing the program of the National Union
for Social Justice, and,
particularly, the wheel emblem of the
Rotary Club.

Sarason’s proclamation also pointed out that it would not be too
far-fetched to declare that, with a little drafting treatment, the
arms of the Swastika could be seen as unquestionably related to the
circle, and how about the K.K.K. of the Kuklux Klan? Three K’s
made a triangle, didn’t they? and everybody knew that a triangle
was related to
a circle.

So it was that in September, at the demonstrations on Loyalty Day
(which replaced Labor Day), the same wide-flung seraphim sang:

“Buzz and buzz and hail the Chief,

And th’ mystic steering whee-el,

The U.S. ne’er can come to grief

While we defend its we-al.”

In mid-August, President Windrip announced that, since all its aims
were being accomplished, the League of Forgotten
Men (founded by
one Rev. Mr. Prang, who was mentioned in the proclamation only as a
person in past history) was now terminated. So were all the older
parties, Democratic, Republican, Farmer-Labor, or what not. There
was to be only one: The American Corporate State and Patriotic
Party—no! added the President, with something of his former good-humor: “there are two parties, the Corporate and
those who don’t
belong to any party at all, and so, to use a common phrase, are
just out of luck!”

The idea of the Corporate or Corporative State, Secretary Sarason
had more or less taken from Italy. All occupations were divided
into six classes: agriculture, industry, commerce, transportation
and communication, banking and insurance and investment, and a
grab-bag class including the arts, sciences,
and teaching. The
American Federation of Labor, the Railway Brotherhoods, and all
other labor organizations, along with the Federal Department of
Labor, were supplanted by local Syndicates composed of individual
workers, above which were Provincial Confederations, all under
governmental guidance. Parallel to them in each occupation were
Syndicates and Confederations of employers. Finally, the
six
Confederations of workers and the six Confederations of employers
were combined in six joint federal Corporations, which elected the
twenty-four members of the National Council of Corporations, which
initiated or supervised all legislation relating to labor or
business.

There was a permanent chairman of this National Council, with a
deciding vote and the power of regulating all debate as
he saw fit,
but he was not elected—he was appointed by the President; and the
first to hold the office (without interfering with his other
duties) was Secretary of State Lee Sarason. Just to safeguard the
liberties of Labor, this chairman had the right to dismiss any
unreasonable member of the National Council.

All strikes and lockouts were forbidden under federal penalties, so
that workmen
listened to reasonable government representatives and
not to unscrupulous agitators.

Windrip’s partisans called themselves the Corporatists, or,
familiarly, the “Corpos,” which nickname was generally used.

By ill-natured people the Corpos were called “the Corpses.” But
they were not at all corpse-like. That description would more
correctly, and increasingly, have applied to their enemies.

Though the Corpos continued to promise a gift of at least $5000 to
every family, “as soon as funding of the required bond issue shall
be completed,” the actual management of the poor, particularly of
the more surly and dissatisfied poor, was undertaken by the Minute
Men.

It could now be published to the world, and decidedly it was
published, that unemployment had, under the benign reign of
President
Berzelius Windrip, almost disappeared. Almost all
workless men were assembled in enormous labor camps, under M.M.
officers. Their wives and children accompanied them and took care
of the cooking, cleaning, and repair of clothes. The men did not
merely work on state projects; they were also hired out at the
reasonable rate of one dollar a day to private employers. Of
course, so selfish is human
nature even in Utopia, this did cause
most employers to discharge the men to whom they had been paying
more than a dollar a day, but that took care of itself, because
these overpaid malcontents in their turn were forced into the labor
camps.

Out of their dollar a day, the workers in the camps had to pay from
seventy to ninety cents a day for board and lodging.

There was a certain discontentment
among people who had once owned
motorcars and bathrooms and eaten meat twice daily, at having to
walk ten or twenty miles a day, bathe once a week, along with fifty
others, in a long trough, get meat only twice a week—when they got
it—and sleep in bunks, a hundred in a room. Yet there was less
rebellion than a mere rationalist like Walt Trowbridge, Windrip’s
ludicrously defeated rival, would
have expected, for every evening
the loudspeaker brought to the workers the precious voices of
Windrip and Sarason, Vice-President Beecroft, Secretary of War
Luthorne, Secretary of Education and Propaganda Macgoblin, General
Coon, or some other genius, and these Olympians, talking to the
dirtiest and tiredest mudsills as warm friend to friend, told them
that they were the honored foundation stones
of a New Civilization,
the advance guards of the conquest of the whole world.

They took it, too, like Napoleon’s soldiers. And they had the Jews
and the Negroes to look down on, more and more. The M.M.’s saw to
that. Every man is a king so long as he has someone to look down
on.

Each week the government said less about the findings of the board
of inquiry which was to decide how the $5000
per person could be
wangled. It became easier to answer malcontents with a cuff from a
Minute Man than by repetitious statements from Washington.

But most of the planks in Windrip’s platform really were carried
out—according to a sane interpretation of them. For example,
inflation.

In America of this period, inflation did not even compare with the
German inflation of the 1920’s, but it was
sufficient. The wage in
the labor camps had to be raised from a dollar a day to three, with
which the workers were receiving an equivalent of sixty cents a day
in 1914 values. Everybody delightfully profited, except the very
poor, the common workmen, the skilled workmen, the small business
men, the professional men, and old couples living on annuities or
their savings—these last did really suffer
a little, as their
incomes were cut in three. The workers, with apparently tripled
wages, saw the cost of everything in the shops much more than
triple.

Agriculture, which was most of all to have profited from inflation,
on the theory that the mercurial crop-prices would rise faster than
anything else, actually suffered the most of all, because, after a
first flurry of foreign buying, importers
of American products
found it impossible to deal in so skittish a market, and American
food exports—such of them as were left—ceased completely.

It was Big Business, that ancient dragon which Bishop Prang and
Senator Windrip had gone forth to slay, that had the interesting
time.

With the value of the dollar changing daily, the elaborate systems
of cost-marking and credit of Big Business were
so confused that
presidents and sales-managers sat in their offices after midnight,
with wet towels. But they got some comfort, because with the
depreciated dollar they were able to recall all bonded indebtedness
and, paying it off at the old face values, get rid of it at thirty
cents on the hundred. With this, and the currency so wavering that
employees did not know just what they ought to
get in wages, and
labor unions eliminated, the larger industrialists came through the
inflation with perhaps double the wealth, in real values, that they
had had in 1936.

And two other planks in Windrip’s encyclical vigorously respected
were those eliminating the Negroes and patronizing the Jews.

The former race took it the less agreeably. There were horrible
instances in which whole Southern
counties with a majority of Negro
population were overrun by the blacks and all property seized.
True, their leaders alleged that this followed massacres of Negroes
by Minute Men. But as Dr. Macgoblin, Secretary of Culture, so well
said, this whole subject was unpleasant and therefore not helpful
to discuss.

All over the country, the true spirit of Windrip’s Plank Nine,
regarding the Jews, was
faithfully carried out. It was understood
that the Jews were no longer to be barred from fashionable hotels,
as in the hideous earlier day of race prejudice, but merely to be
charged double rates. It was understood that Jews were never to be
discouraged from trading but were merely to pay higher graft to
commissioners and inspectors and to accept without debate all
regulations, wage rates, and
price lists decided upon by the
stainless Anglo-Saxons of the various merchants’ associations. And
that all Jews of all conditions were frequently to sound their
ecstasy in having found in America a sanctuary, after their
deplorable experiences among the prejudices of Europe.

In Fort Beulah, Louis Rotenstern, since he had always been the
first to stand up for the older official national anthems,
“The
Star-Spangled Banner” or “Dixie,” and now for “Buzz and Buzz,”
since he had of old been considered almost an authentic friend by
Francis Tasbrough and R. C. Crowley, and since he had often good-naturedly pressed the unrecognized Shad Ledue’s Sunday pants
without charge, was permitted to retain his tailor shop, though it
was understood that he was to charge members of the M.M. prices
that
were only nominal, or quarter nominal.