It Can't Happen Here (23 page)

But one Harry Kindermann, a Jew who had profiteered enough as agent
for maple-sugar and dairy machinery so that in 1936 he had been
paying the last installment on his new bungalow and on his Buick,
had always been what Shad Ledue called “a fresh Kike.” He had
laughed at the flag, the Church, and even Rotary. Now he found the
manufacturers canceling his
agencies, without explanation.

By the middle of 1937 he was selling frankfurters by the road, and
his wife, who had been so proud of the piano and the old American
pine cupboard in their bungalow, was dead, from pneumonia caught in
the one-room tar-paper shack into which they had moved.

At the time of Windrip’s election, there had been more than 80,000
relief administrators employed by the
federal and local governments
in America. With the labor camps absorbing most people on relief,
this army of social workers, both amateurs and long-trained
professional uplifters, was stranded.

The Minute Men controlling the labor camps were generous:
they offered the charitarians the same dollar a day that the
proletarians received, with special low rates for board and
lodging. But the cleverer
social workers received a much better
offer: to help list every family and every unmarried person in the
country, with his or her finances, professional ability, military
training and, most important and most tactfully to be ascertained,
his or her secret opinion of the M.M.’s and of the Corpos in
general.

A good many of the social workers indignantly said that this was
asking them to be spies,
stool pigeons for the American Oh Gay Pay
Oo. These were, on various unimportant charges, sent to jail or,
later, to concentration camps—which were also jails, but the
private jails of the M.M.’s, unshackled by any old-fashioned,
nonsensical prison regulations.

In the confusion of the summer and early autumn of 1937, local M.M.
officers had a splendid time making their own laws, and such
congenital
traitors and bellyachers as Jewish doctors, Jewish
musicians, Negro journalists, socialistic college professors, young
men who preferred reading or chemical research to manly service
with the M.M.’s, women who complained when their men had been taken
away by the M.M.’s and had disappeared, were increasingly beaten in
the streets, or arrested on charges that would not have been very
familiar to
pre-Corpo jurists.

And, increasingly, the bourgeois counter revolutionists began to
escape to Canada; just as once, by the “underground railroad” the
Negro slaves had escaped into that free Northern air.

In Canada, as well as in Mexico, Bermuda, Jamaica, Cuba, and
Europe, these lying Red propagandists began to publish the vilest
little magazines, accusing the Corpos of murderous terrorism—allegations
that a band of six M.M.’s had beaten an aged rabbi and
robbed him; that the editor of a small labor paper in Paterson had
been tied to his printing press and left there while the M.M.’s
burned the plant; that the pretty daughter of an ex-Farmer-Labor
politician in Iowa had been raped by giggling young men in masks.

To end this cowardly flight of the lying counter revolutionists
(many of whom,
once accepted as reputable preachers and lawyers and
doctors and writers and ex-congressmen and ex-army officers, were
able to give a wickedly false impression of Corpoism and the M.M.’s
to the world outside America) the government quadrupled the guards
who were halting suspects at every harbor and at even the minutest
trails crossing the border; and in one quick raid, it poured M.M.
storm troopers
into all airports, private or public, and all
aeroplane factories, and thus, they hoped, closed the air lanes to
skulking traitors.

As one of the most poisonous counter revolutionists in the country,
Ex-Senator Walt Trowbridge, Windrip’s rival in the election of
1936, was watched night and day by a rotation of twelve M.M.
guards. But there seemed to be small danger that this opponent,
who,
after all, was a crank but not an intransigent maniac, would
make himself ridiculous by fighting against the great Power which
(per Bishop Prang) Heaven had been pleased to send for the healing
of distressed America.

Trowbridge remained prosaically on a ranch he owned in South
Dakota, and the government agent commanding the M.M.’s (a skilled
man, trained in breaking strikes) reported that on
his tapped
telephone wire and in his steamed-open letters, Trowbridge
communicated nothing more seditious than reports on growing
alfalfa. He had with him no one but ranch hands and, in the house,
an innocent aged couple.

Washington hoped that Trowbridge was beginning to see the light.
Maybe they would make him Ambassador to Britain, vice Sinclair.

On the Fourth of July, when the M.M’s gave
their glorious but
unfortunate tribute to the Chief and the Five-pointed Star,
Trowbridge gratified his cow-punchers by holding an unusually
pyrotechnic celebration. All evening skyrockets flared up, and
round the home pasture glowed pots of Roman fire. Far from cold-shouldering the M.M. guards, Trowbridge warmly invited them to help
set off rockets and join the gang in beer and sausages. The
lonely
soldier boys off there on the prairie—they were so happy shooting
rockets!

An aeroplane with a Canadian license, a large plane, flying without
lights, sped toward the rocket-lighted area and, with engine shut
off, so that the guards could not tell whether it had flown on,
circled the pasture outlined by the Roman fire and swiftly landed.

The guards had felt sleepy after the last bottle
of beer. Three of
them were napping on the short, rough grass.

They were rather disconcertingly surrounded by men in masking
flying-helmets, men carrying automatic pistols, who handcuffed the
guards that were still awake, picked up the others, and stored all
twelve of them in the barred baggage compartment of the plane.

The raiders’ leader, a military-looking man, said to Walt
Trowbridge, “Ready,
sir?”

“Yep. Just take those four boxes, will you, please, Colonel?”

The boxes contained photostats of letters and documents.

Unregally clad in overalls and a huge straw hat, Senator Trowbridge
entered the pilots’ compartment. High and swift and alone, the
plane flew toward the premature Northern Lights.

Next morning, still in overalls, Trowbridge breakfasted at the Fort
Garry Hotel with
the Mayor of Winnipeg.

A fortnight later, in Toronto, he began the republication of his
weekly, A Lance for Democracy, and on the cover of the first number
were reproductions of four letters indicating that before he became
President, Berzelius Windrip had profited through personal gifts
from financiers to an amount of over $1,000,000. To Doremus
Jessup, to some thousands of Doremus Jessups,
were smuggled copies
of the Lance, though possession of it was punishable (perhaps not
legally, but certainly effectively) by death.

But it was not till the winter, so carefully did his secret agents
have to work in America, that Trowbridge had in full operation the
organization called by its operatives the “New Underground,” the
“N.U.,” which aided thousands of counter revolutionists to escape
into Canada.

In the little towns, ah, there is the abiding peace that I love,
and that can never be disturbed by even the noisiest Smart Alecks
from these haughty megalopolises like Washington, New York, & etc.

Zero Hour
, Berzelius Windrip.

Doremus’s policy of “wait and see,” like most Fabian policies, had
grown shaky. It seemed particularly shaky in June, 1937, when he
drove to North Beulah for the
fortieth graduation anniversary of
his class in Isaiah College.

As the custom was, the returned alumni wore comic costumes. His
class had sailor suits, but they walked about, bald-headed and
lugubrious, in these well-meant garments of joy, and there was a
look of instability even in the eyes of the three members who were
ardent Corpos (being local Corpo commissioners).

After the first hour
Doremus saw little of his classmates. He had
looked up his familiar correspondent, Victor Loveland, teacher in
the classical department who, a year ago, had informed him of
President Owen J. Peaseley’s ban on criticism of military training.

At its best, Loveland’s jerry-built imitation of an Anne Hathaway
cottage had been no palace—Isaiah assistant professors did not
customarily rent palaces.
Now, with the pretentiously smart living
room heaped with burlap-covered chairs and rolled rugs and boxes of
books, it looked like a junkshop. Amid the wreckage sat Loveland,
his wife, his three children, and one Dr. Arnold King, experimenter
in chemistry.

“What’s all this?” said Doremus.

“I’ve been fired. As too ‘radical,’” growled Loveland.

“Yes! And his most vicious attack has been on
Glicknow’s treatment
of the use of the aorist in Hesiod!” wailed his wife.

“Well, I deserve it—for not having been vicious about anything
since A.D. 300! Only thing I’m ashamed of is that they’re not
firing me for having taught my students that the Corpos have taken
most of their ideas from Tiberius, or maybe for having decently
tried to assassinate District Commissioner Reek!” said Loveland.

“Where you going?” inquired Doremus.

“That’s just it! We don’t know! Oh, first to my dad’s house—which is a six-room packing-box in Burlington—Dad’s got diabetes.
But teaching—President Peaseley kept putting off signing my new
contract and just informed me ten days ago that I’m through—much
too late to get a job for next year. Myself, I don’t care a damn!
Really I don’t! I’m glad to have
been made to admit that as a
college prof I haven’t been, as I so liked to convince myself, any
Erasmus Junior, inspiring noble young souls to dream of chaste
classic beauty—save the mark!—but just a plain hired man, another
counter-jumper in the Marked-down Classics Goods Department, with
students for bored customers, and as subject to being hired and
fired as any janitor. Do you remember that in
Imperial Rome, the
teachers, even the tutors of the nobility, were slaves—allowed a
lot of leeway, I suppose, in their theories about the anthropology
of Crete, but just as likely to be strangled as the other slaves!
I’m not kicking—”

Dr. King, the chemist, interrupted with a whoop: “Sure you’re
kicking! Why the hell not? With three kids? Why
not
kick! Now
me, I’m lucky! I’m half Jew—one
of these sneaking, cunning Jews
that Buzz Windrip and his boyfriend Hitler tell you about; so
cunning I suspected what was going on months ago and so—I’ve also
just been fired, Mr. Jessup—I arranged for a job with the
Universal Electric Corporation… . They don’t mind Jews there,
as long as they sing at their work and find boondoggles worth a
million a year to the company—at thirty-five hundred
a year
salary! A fond farewell to all my grubby studes! Though—” and
Doremus thought he was, at heart, sadder than Loveland—”I do kind
of hate to give up my research. Oh, hell with ‘em!”

The version of Owen J. Peaseley, M.A. (Oberlin), LL.D. (Conn.
State), president of Isaiah College, was quite different.

“Why no, Mr. Jessup! We believe absolutely in freedom of speech
and thought, here
at old Isaiah. The fact is that we are letting
Loveland go only because the Classics Department is overstaffed—so
little demand for Greek and Sanskrit and so on, you know, with all
this modern interest in quantitative bio-physics and aeroplane-repairing and so on. But as to Dr. King—um—I’m afraid we did a
little feel that he was riding for a fall, boasting about being a
Jew and all, you know, and—But
can’t we talk of pleasanter
subjects? You have probably learned that Secretary of Culture
Macgoblin has now completed his plan for the appointment of a
director of education in each province and district?—and that
Professor Almeric Trout of Aumbry University is slated for Director
in our Northeastern Province? Well, I have something very
gratifying to add. Dr. Trout—and what a profound
scholar, what an
eloquent orator he is!—did you know that in Teutonic ‘Almeric’
means ‘noble prince’?—and he’s been so kind as to designate me as
Director of Education for the Vermont-New Hampshire District!
Isn’t that thrilling! I wanted you to be one of the first to hear
it, Mr. Jessup, because of course one of the chief jobs of the
Director will be to work with and through the newspaper editors
in
the great task of spreading correct Corporate ideals and combating
false theories—yes, oh yes.”

It seemed as though a large number of people were zealous to work
with and through the editors these days, thought Doremus.

He noticed that President Peaseley resembled a dummy made of faded
gray flannel of a quality intended for petticoats in an orphan
asylum.

The Minute Men’s organization was
less favored in the staid
villages than in the industrial centers, but all through the summer
it was known that a company of M.M.’s had been formed in Fort
Beulah and were drilling in the Armory under National Guard
officers and County Commissioner Ledue, who was seen sitting up
nights in his luxurious new room in Mrs. Ingot’s boarding-house,
reading a manual of arms. But Doremus declined to go
look at them,
and when his rustic but ambitious reporter, “Doc” (otherwise Otis)
Itchitt, came in throbbing about the M.M.’s and wanted to run an
illustrated account in the Saturday
Informer
, Doremus sniffed.

It was not till their first public parade, in August, that Doremus
saw them, and not gladly.

The whole countryside had turned out; he could hear them laughing
and shuffling beneath his
office window; but he stubbornly stuck to
editing an article on fertilizers for cherry orchards. (And he
loved parades, childishly!) Not even the sound of a band pounding
out “Boola, Boola” drew him to the window. Then he was plucked up
by Dan Wilgus, the veteran job compositor and head of the
Informer
chapel, a man tall as a house and possessed of such a sweeping
black mustache as had not otherwise
been seen since the passing of
the old-time bartender. “You got to take a look, Boss; great
show!” implored Dan.