It Can't Happen Here (24 page)

Through the Chester-Arthur, red-brick prissiness of President
Street, Doremus saw marching a surprisingly well-drilled company of
young men in the uniforms of Civil War cavalrymen, and just as they
were opposite the
Informer
office, the town band rollicked into
“Marching through Georgia.”
The young men smiled, they stepped
more quickly, and held up their banner with the steering wheel and
M.M. upon it.

When he was ten, Doremus had seen in this self-same street a
Memorial Day parade of the G.A.R. The veterans were an average of
under fifty then, and some of them only thirty-five; they had swung
ahead lightly and gayly—and to the tune of “Marching through
Georgia.” So now in
1937 he was looking down again on the veterans
of Gettysburg and Missionary Ridge. Oh—he could see them all—Uncle Tom Veeder, who had made him the willow whistles; old Mr.
Crowley with his cornflower eyes; Jack Greenhill who played
leapfrog with the kids and who was to die in Ethan Creek—They
found him with thick hair dripping. Doremus thrilled to the M.M.
flags, the music, the valiant young men,
even while he hated all
they marched for, and hated the Shad Ledue whom he incredulously
recognized in the brawny horseman at the head of the procession.

He understood now why the young men marched to war. But “Oh yeh—you
think
so!” he could hear Shad sneering through the music.

The unwieldy humor characteristic of American politicians persisted
even through the eruption. Doremus read about
and sardonically
“played up” in the
Informer
a minstrel show given at the National
Convention of Boosters’ Clubs at Atlantic City, late in August. As
end-men and interlocutor appeared no less distinguished persons
than Secretary of the Treasury Webster R. Skittle, Secretary of War
Luthorne, and Secretary of Education and Public Relations, Dr.
Macgoblin. It was good, old-time Elks Club humor,
uncorroded by
any of the notions of dignity and of international obligations
which, despite his great services, that queer stick Lee Sarason was
suspected of trying to introduce. Why (marveled the Boosters) the
Big Boys were so democratic that they even kidded themselves and
the Corpos, that’s how unassuming they were!

“Who was this lady I seen you going down the street with?” demanded
the plump
Mr. Secretary Skittle (disguised as a colored wench in
polka-dotted cotton) of Mr. Secretary Luthorne (in black-face and
large red gloves).

“That wasn’t no lady, that was Walt Trowbridge’s paper.”

“Ah don’t think Ah cognosticates youse, Mist’ Bones.”

“Why—you know—‘A Nance for Plutocracy.’”

Clean fun, not too confusingly subtle, drawing the people (several
millions listened on the radio to
the Boosters’ Club show) closer
to their great-hearted masters.

But the high point of the show was Dr. Macgoblin’s daring to tease
his own faction by singing:

Buzz and booze and biz, what fun!

This job gets drearier and drearier,

When I get out of Washington,

I’m going to Siberia!

It seemed to Doremus that he was hearing a great deal about the
Secretary of Education. Then, in late
September, he heard
something not quite pleasant about Dr. Macgoblin. The story, as he
got it, ran thus:

Hector Macgoblin, that great surgeon-boxer-poet-sailor, had always
contrived to have plenty of enemies, but after the beginning of his
investigation of schools, to purge them of any teachers he did not
happen to like, he made so unusually many that he was accompanied
by bodyguards. At this
time in September, he was in New York,
finding quantities of “subversive elements” in Columbia University—against the protests of President Nicholas Murray Butler, who
insisted that he had already cleaned out all willful and dangerous
thinkers, especially the pacifists in the medical school—and
Macgoblin’s bodyguards were two former instructors in philosophy
who in their respective universities
had been admired even by their
deans for everything except the fact that they would get drunk and
quarrelsome. One of them, in that state, always took off one shoe
and hit people over the head with the heel, if they argued in
defense of Jung.

With these two in uniforms as M.M. battalion leaders—his own was
that of a brigadier—after a day usefully spent in kicking out of
Columbia all teachers
who had voted for Trowbridge, Dr. Macgoblin
started off with his brace of bodyguards to try out a wager that he
could take a drink at every bar on Fifty-second Street and still
not pass out.

He had done well when, at ten-thirty, being then affectionate and
philanthropic, he decided that it would be a splendid idea to
telephone his revered former teacher in Leland Stanford, the
biologist Dr. Willy
Schmidt, once of Vienna, now in Rockefeller
Institute. Macgoblin was indignant when someone at Dr. Schmidt’s
apartment informed him that the doctor was out. Furiously: “Out?
Out? What d’you mean he’s out? Old goat like that got no right to
be out! At midnight! Where is he? This is the Police Department
speaking! Where is he?”

Dr. Schmidt was spending the evening with that gentle scholar,
Rabbi Dr. Vincent de Verez.

Macgoblin and his learned gorillas went to call on De Verez. On
the way nothing of note happened except that when Macgoblin
discussed the fare with the taxi-driver, he felt impelled to knock
him out. The three, and they were in the happiest, most boyish of
spirits, burst joyfully into Dr. de Verez’s primeval house in the
Sixties. The entrance hall was shabby enough,
with a humble show
of the good rabbi’s umbrellas and storm rubbers, and had the
invaders seen the bedrooms they would have found them Trappist
cells. But the long living room, front- and back-parlor thrown
together, was half museum, half lounge. Just because he himself
liked such things and resented a stranger’s possessing them,
Macgoblin looked sniffily at a Beluchi prayer rug, a Jacobean court
cupboard, a small case of incunabula and of Arabic manuscripts in
silver upon scarlet parchment.

“Swell joint! Hello, Doc! How’s the Dutchman? How’s the antibody
research going? These are Doc Nemo and Doc, uh, Doc Whoozis, the
famous glue lifters. Great frenzh mine. Introduce us to your Jew
friend.”

Now it is more than possible that Rabbi de Verez had never heard of
Secretary of Education
Macgoblin.

The houseman who had let in the intruders and who nervously hovered
at the living-room door—he is the sole authority for most of the
story—said that Macgoblin staggered, slid on a rug, almost fell,
then giggled foolishly as he sat down, waving his plug-ugly friends
to chairs and demanding, “Hey, Rabbi, how about some whisky? Lil
Scotch and soda. I know you Geonim never lap up anything
but snow-cooled nectar handed out by a maiden with a dulcimer, singing of
Mount Abora, or maybe just a little shot of Christian children’s
sacrificial blood—ha, ha, just a joke, Rabbi; I know these
‘Protocols of the Elders of Zion’ are all the bunk, but awful handy
in propaganda, just the same and—But I mean, for plain Goyim like
us, a little real hootch!
Hear me?
”

Dr. Schmidt started to protest.
The Rabbi, who had been carding
his white beard, silenced him and, with a wave of his fragile old
hand, signaled the waiting houseman, who reluctantly brought in
whisky and siphons.

The three coordinators of culture almost filled their glasses
before they poured in the soda.

“Look here, De Verez, why don’t you kikes take a tumble to
yourselves and get out, beat it, exeunt bearing corpses, and
start
a real Zion, say in South America?”

The Rabbi looked bewildered at the attack. Dr. Schmidt snorted,
“Dr. Macgoblin—once a promising pupil of mine—is Secretary of
Education and a lot of t’ings—I don’t know vot!—at Washington.
Corpo!”

“Oh!” The Rabbi sighed. “I have heard of that cult, but my people
have learned to ignore persecution. We have been so impudent as to
adopt the tactics
of your Early Christian Martyrs! Even if we were
invited to your Corporate feast—which, I understand, we most
warmly are not!—I am afraid we should not be able to attend. You
see, we believe in only one Dictator, God, and I am afraid we
cannot see Mr. Windrip as a rival to Jehovah!”

“Aah, that’s all baloney!” murmured one of the learned gunmen, and
Macgoblin shouted, “Oh, can the two-dollar
words! There’s just one
thing where we agree with the dirty, Kike-loving Communists—that’s
in chucking the whole bunch of divinities, Jehovah and all the rest
of ‘em, that’ve been on relief so long!”

The Rabbi was unable even to answer, but little Dr. Schmidt (he had
a doughnut mustache, a beer belly, and black button boots with
soles half-an-inch thick) said, “Macgoblin, I suppose I may talk
frank wit’ an old student, there not being any reporters or
loutspeakers arount. Do you know why you are drinking like a pig?
Because you are ashamt! Ashamt that you, once a promising
researcher, should have solt out to freebooters with brains like
decayed liver and—”

“That’ll do from you, Prof!”

“Say, we oughtta tie those seditious sons of hounds up and beat the
daylight out of ‘em!” whimpered
one of the watchdogs.

Macgoblin shrieked, “You highbrows—you stinking intellectuals!
You, you Kike, with your lush-luzurious library, while Common
People been starving—would be now if the Chief hadn’t saved ‘em!
Your c’lection books—stolen from the pennies of your poor, dumb,
foot-kissing congregation of pushcart peddlers!”

The Rabbi sat bespelled, fingering his beard, but Dr. Schmidt
leaped
up, crying, “You three scoundrels were not invited here!
You pushed your way in! Get out! Go! Get out!”

One of the accompanying dogs demanded of Macgoblin, “Going to stand
for these two Yiddles insulting us—insulting the whole by God
Corpo state and the M.M. uniform? Kill ‘em!”

Now, to his already abundant priming, Macgoblin had added two huge
whiskies since he had come. He yanked out his
automatic pistol,
fired twice. Dr. Schmidt toppled. Rabbi De Verez slid down in his
chair, his temple throbbing out blood. The houseman trembled at
the door, and one of the guards shot at him, then chased him down
the street, firing, and whooping with the humor of the joke. This
learned guard was killed instantly, at a street crossing, by a
traffic policeman.

Macgoblin and the other guard
were arrested and brought before the
Commissioner of the Metropolitan District, the great Corpo viceroy,
whose power was that of three or four state governors put together.

Dr. de Verez, though he was not yet dead, was too sunken to
testify. But the Commissioner thought that in a case so closely
touching the federal government, it would not be seemly to postpone
the trial.

Against the terrified
evidence of the Rabbi’s Russian-Polish
houseman were the earnest (and by now sober) accounts of the
federal Secretary of Education, and of his surviving aide, formerly
Assistant Professor of Philosophy in Pelouse University. It was
proven that not only De Verez but also Dr. Schmidt was a Jew—which, incidentally, he 100 per cent was not. It was almost proven
that this sinister pair had been coaxing
innocent Corpos into De
Verez’s house and performing upon them what a scared little Jewish
stool pigeon called “ritual murders.” Macgoblin and friend were
acquitted on grounds of self-defense and handsomely complimented by
the Commissioner—and later in telegrams from President Windrip and
Secretary of State Sarason—for having defended the Commonwealth
against human vampires and one of the most
horrifying plots known
in history.

The policeman who had shot the other guard wasn’t, so scrupulous
was Corpo justice, heavily punished—merely sent out to a dreary
beat in the Bronx. So everybody was happy.

But Doremus Jessup, on receiving a letter from a New York reporter
who had talked privately with the surviving guard, was not so
happy. He was not in a very gracious temper, anyway. County
Commissioner Shad Ledue, on grounds of humanitarianism, had made
him discharge his delivery boys and employ M.M.’s to distribute (or
cheerfully chuck into the river) the
Informer
.

“Last straw—plenty last,” he raged.

He had read about Rabbi de Verez and seen pictures of him. He had
once heard Dr. Willy Schmidt speak, when the State Medical
Association had met at Fort Beulah, and afterward had
sat near him
at dinner. If they were murderous Jews, then he was a murderous
Jew too, he swore, and it was time to do something for His Own
People.

That evening—it was late in September, 1937—he did not go home to
dinner at all but, with a paper container of coffee and a slab of
pie untouched before him, he stooped at his desk in the
Informer
office, writing an editorial which, when he had finished
it, he
marked: “Must. 12-pt bold face—box top front p.”

The beginning of the editorial, to appear the following morning
was:

Believing that the inefficiency and crimes of the Corpo
administration were due to the difficulties attending a new form of
government, we have waited patiently for their end. We apologize
to our readers for that patience.

It is easy to see now, in the revolting crime
of a drunken cabinet
member against two innocent and valuable old men like Dr. Schmidt
and the Rev. Dr. de Verez, that we may expect nothing but murderous
extirpation of all honest opponents of the tyranny of Windrip and
his Corpo gang.

Not that all of them are as vicious as Macgoblin. Some are merely
incompetent—like our friends Ledue, Reek, and Haik. But their
ludicrous incapability permits
the homicidal cruelty of their
chieftains to go on without check.

Buzzard Windrip, the “Chief,” and his pirate gang—