It Can't Happen Here (29 page)

Again and again, figuring it out on rough sheets of copy paper
(adorned also with concentric circles, squares, whorls, and the
most improbable fish), he estimated that even without selling the
Informer
or his house, as under Corpo espionage he
certainly could
not if he fled to Canada, he could cash in about $20,000. Say
enough to give him an income of a thousand a year—twenty dollars a
week, provided he could smuggle the money out of the country, which
the Corpos were daily making more difficult.

Well, Emma and Sissy and Mary and he
could
live on that, in a four-room cottage, and perhaps Sissy and Mary could find work.

But as for
himself—It was all very well to talk about men like Thomas Mann and Lion
Feuchtwanger and Romain Rolland, who in exile remained writers
whose every word was in demand, about Professors Einstein or
Salvemini, or, under Corpoism, about the recently exiled or self-exiled Americans, Walt Trowbridge, Mike Gold, William Allen White,
John Dos Passos, H. L. Mencken, Rexford Tugwell, Oswald Villard.
Nowhere
in the world, except possibly in Greenland or Germany,
would such stars be unable to find work and soothing respect. But
what was an ordinary newspaper hack, especially if he was over
forty-five, to do in a strange land—and more especially if he had
a wife named Emma (or Carolina or Nancy or Griselda or anything
else) who didn’t at all fancy going and living in a sod hut on
behalf of honesty
and freedom?

So debated Doremus, like some hundreds of thousands of other
craftsmen, teachers, lawyers, what-not, in some dozens of countries
under a dictatorship, who were aware enough to resent the tyranny,
conscientious enough not to take its bribes cynically, yet not so
abnormally courageous as to go willingly to exile or dungeon or
chopping-block—particularly when they “had wives and families
to
support.”

Doremus hinted once to Emil Staubmeyer that Emil was “getting onto
the ropes so well” that he thought of getting out, of quitting
newspaper work for good.

The hitherto friendly Mr. Staubmeyer said sharply, “What’d you do?
Sneak off to Canada and join the propagandists against the Chief?
Nothing doing! You’ll stay right here and help me—help us!” And
that afternoon Commissioner
Shad Ledue shouldered in and grumbled,
“Dr. Staubmeyer tells me you’re doing pretty fairly good work,
Jessup, but I want to warn you to keep it up. Remember that Judge
Swan only let you out on parole … to me! You can do fine if
you just set your mind to it!”

“If you just set your mind to it!” The one time when the
boy Doremus had hated his father had been when he used that
condescending phrase.

He saw that, for all the apparent prosaic calm of day after day on
the paper, he was equally in danger of slipping into acceptance of
his serfdom and of whips and bars if he didn’t slip. And he
continued to be just as sick each time he wrote: “The crowd of
fifty thousand people who greeted President Windrip in the
university stadium at Iowa City was an impressive sign of the
constantly growing
interest of all Americans in political affairs,”
and Staubmeyer changed it to: “The vast and enthusiastic crowd of
seventy thousand loyal admirers who wildly applauded and listened
to the stirring address of the Chief in the handsome university
stadium in beautiful Iowa City, Iowa, is an impressive yet quite
typical sign of the growing devotion of all true Americans to
political study under the
inspiration of the Corpo government.”

Perhaps his worst irritations were that Staubmeyer had pushed a
desk and his sleek, sweaty person into Doremus’s private office,
once sacred to his solitary grouches, and that Doc Itchitt,
hitherto his worshiping disciple, seemed always to be secretly
laughing at him.

Under a tyranny, most friends are a liability. One quarter of them
turn “reasonable”
and become your enemies, one quarter are afraid
to stop and speak and one quarter are killed and you die with them.
But the blessed final quarter keep you alive.

When he was with Lorinda, gone was all the pleasant toying and
sympathetic talk with which they had relieved boredom. She was
fierce now, and vibrant. She drew him close enough to her, but
instantly she would be thinking of him only
as a comrade in plots
to kill off the Corpos. (And it was pretty much a real killing-off
that she meant; there wasn’t left to view any great amount of her
plausible pacifism.)

She was busy with good and perilous works. Partner Nipper had not
been able to keep her in the Tavern kitchen; she had so
systematized the work that she had many days and evenings free, and
she had started a cooking-class
for farm girls and young farm wives
who, caught between the provincial and the industrial generations,
had learned neither good rural cooking with a wood fire, nor yet
how to deal with canned goods and electric grills—and who most
certainly had not learned how to combine so as to compel the tight-fisted little locally owned power-and-light companies to furnish
electricity at tolerable rates.

“Heavensake, keep this quiet, but I’m getting acquainted with these
country gals—getting ready for the day when we begin to organize
against the Corpos. I depend on them, not the well-to-do women
that used to want suffrage but that can’t endure the thought of
revolution,” Lorinda whispered to him. “We’ve got to
do
something.”

“All right, Lorinda B. Anthony,” he sighed.

And Karl Pascal stuck.

At Pollikop’s garage, when he first saw Doremus after the jailing,
he said, “God, I was sorry to hear about their pinching you, Mr.
Jessup! But say, aren’t you ready to join us Communists now?” (He
looked about anxiously as he said it.)

“I thought there weren’t any more Bolos.”

“Oh, we’re supposed to be wiped out. But I guess you’ll notice a
few mysterious strikes starting now and then, even
though there
CAN’T be any more strikes! Why aren’t you joining us? There’s
where you belong, c-comrade!”

“Look here, Karl: you’ve always said the difference between the
Socialists and the Communists was that you believed in complete
ownership of all means of production, not just utilities; and that
you admitted the violent class war and the Socialists didn’t.
That’s poppycock! The real difference
is that you Communists serve
Russia. It’s your Holy Land. Well—Russia has all my prayers,
right after the prayers for my family and for the Chief, but what
I’m interested in civilizing and protecting against its enemies
isn’t Russia but America. Is that so banal to say? Well, it
wouldn’t be banal for a Russian comrade to observe that he was for
Russia! And America needs our propaganda more
every day. Another
thing: I’m a middle-class intellectual. I’d never call myself any
such a damn silly thing, but since you Reds coined it, I’ll have to
accept it. That’s my class, and that’s what I’m interested in.
The proletarians are probably noble fellows, but I certainly do not
think that the interests of the middle-class intellectuals and the
proletarians are the same. They want bread.
We want—well, all
right, say it, we want cake! And when you get a proletarian
ambitious enough to want cake, too—why, in America, he becomes a
middle-class intellectual just as fast as he can—
if
he can!”

“Look here, when you think of 3 per cent of the people owning 90
per cent of the wealth—”

“I don’t think of it! It does
not
follow that because a good many
of the intellectuals belong to
the 97 per cent of the broke—that
plenty of actors and teachers and nurses and musicians don’t get
any better paid than stage hands or electricians, therefore their
interests are the same. It isn’t what you earn but how you spend
it that fixes your class—whether you prefer bigger funeral
services or more books. I’m tired of apologizing for not having a
dirty neck!”

“Honestly, Mr. Jessup, that’s
damn nonsense, and you know it!”

“Is it? Well, it’s my American covered-wagon damn nonsense, and
not the propaganda-aeroplane damn nonsense of Marx and Moscow!”

“Oh, you’ll join us yet.”

“Listen, Comrade Karl, Windrip and Hitler will join Stalin long
before the descendants of Dan’l Webster. You see, we don’t like
murder as a way of argument—that’s what really marks the Liberal!”

About
his
future Father Perefixe was brief: “I’m going back to
Canada where I belong—away to the freedom of the King. Hate to
give up, Doremus, but I’m no Thomas à Becket, but just a plain,
scared, fat little clark!”

The surprise among old acquaintances was Medary Cole, the miller.

A little younger than Francis Tasbrough and R. C. Crowley, less
intensely aristocratic than those noblemen, since only
one
generation separated him from a chin-whiskered Yankee farmer and
not two, as with them, he had been their satellite at the Country
Club and, as to solid virtue, been president of the Rotary Club.
He had always considered Doremus a man who, without such excuse as
being a Jew or a Hunky or poor, was yet flippant about the
sanctities of Main Street and Wall Street. They were neighbors, as
Cole’s
“Cape Cod cottage” was just below Pleasant Hill, but they
had not by habit been droppers-in.

Now, when Cole came bringing David home, or calling for his
daughter Angela, David’s new mate, toward supper time of a chilly
fall evening, he stopped gratefully for a hot rum punch, and asked
Doremus whether he really thought inflation was “such a good
thing.”

He burst out, one evening, “Jessup, there
isn’t another person in
this town I’d dare say this to, not even my wife, but I’m getting
awful sick of having these Minnie Mouses dictate where I have to
buy my gunnysacks and what I can pay my men. I won’t pretend I
ever cared much for labor unions. But in those days, at least the
union members did get some of the swag. Now it goes to support the
M.M.’s. We pay them and pay them big to bully
us. It don’t look
so reasonable as it did in 1936. But, golly, don’t tell anybody I
said that!”

And Cole went off shaking his head, bewildered—he who had
ecstatically voted for Mr. Windrip.

On a day in late October, suddenly striking in every city and
village and back-hill hide-out, the Corpos ended all crime in
America forever, so titanic a feat that it was mentioned in the
London Times.
Seventy thousand selected Minute Men, working in
combination with town and state police officers, all under the
chiefs of the government secret service, arrested every known or
faintly suspected criminal in the country. They were tried under
court-martial procedure; one in ten was shot immediately, four
in ten were given prison sentences, three in ten released as
innocent … and two in ten taken
into the M.M.’s as inspectors.

There were protests that at least six in ten had been innocent, but
this was adequately answered by Windrip’s courageous statement:
“The way to stop crime is to stop it!”

The next day, Medary Cole crowed at Doremus, “Sometimes I’ve felt
like criticizing certain features of Corpo policy, but did you see
what the Chief did to the gangsters and racketeers? Wonderful!
I’ve told you right along what this country’s needed is a firm hand
like Windrip’s. No shilly-shallying about that fellow! He saw
that the way to stop crime was to just go out and stop it!”

Then was revealed the New American Education, which, as Sarason so
justly said, was to be ever so much newer than the New Educations
of Germany, Italy, Poland, or even Turkey.

The authorities abruptly
closed some scores of the smaller, more
independent colleges such as Williams, Bowdoin, Oberlin,
Georgetown, Antioch, Carleton, Lewis Institute, Commonwealth,
Princeton, Swarthmore, Kenyon, all vastly different one from
another but alike in not yet having entirely become machines. Few
of the state universities were closed; they were merely to be
absorbed by central Corpo universities, one in each
of the eight
provinces. But the government began with only two. In the
Metropolitan District, Windrip University took over the Rockefeller
Center and Empire State buildings, with most of Central Park for
playground (excluding the general public from it entirely, for the
rest was an M.M. drill ground). The second was Macgoblin
University, in Chicago and vicinity, using the buildings of Chicago
and Northwestern universities, and Jackson Park. President
Hutchins of Chicago was rather unpleasant about the whole thing and
declined to stay on as an assistant professor, so the authorities
had politely to exile him.

Tattle-mongers suggested that the naming of the Chicago plant after
Macgoblin instead of Sarason suggested a beginning coolness between
Sarason and Windrip, but the two leaders
were able to quash such
canards by appearing together at the great reception given to
Bishop Cannon by the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union and being
photographed shaking hands.

Each of the two pioneer universities started with an enrollment of
fifty thousand, making ridiculous the pre-Corpo schools, none of
which, in 1935, had had more than thirty thousand students. The
enrollment was probably
helped by the fact that anyone could enter
upon presenting a certificate showing that he had completed two
years in a high school or business college, and a recommendation
from a Corpo commissioner.

Dr. Macgoblin pointed out that this founding of entirely new
universities showed the enormous cultural superiority of the Corpo
state to the Nazis, Bolsheviks, and Fascists. Where these amateurs
in re-civilization had merely kicked out all treacherous so-called
“intellectual” teachers who mulishly declined to teach physics,
cookery, and geography according to the principles and facts laid
down by the political bureaus, and the Nazis had merely added the
sound measure of discharging Jews who dared attempt to teach
medicine, the Americans were the first to start new and completely
orthodox
institutions, free from the very first of any taint of
“intellectualism.”