It Can't Happen Here (37 page)

Once it was Mr. Dimick of Albany again; once, another insurance
agent—who guffawed at
the accidental luck of insuring Shad Ledue’s
new Lincoln; once it was an Armenian peddling rugs; once, Mr.
Samson of Burlington, looking for pine-slashing for paper pulp; but
whoever it was, Doremus heard from the New Underground every week.
He was busy as he had never been in newspaper days, and happy as on
youth’s adventure in Boston.

Humming and most cheerful, he ran the small press, with
the hearty
bump-bump-bump of the foot treadle, admiring his own skill as he
fed in the sheets. Lorinda learned from Dan Wilgus to set type,
with more fervor than accuracy about ei and ie. Emma and Sissy and
Mary folded news sheets and sewed up pamphlets by hand, all of them
working in the high old brick-walled basement that smelled of
sawdust and lime and decaying apples.

Aside from pamphlets
by Spartan, and by Anthony B. Susan—who was
Lorinda, except on Fridays—their chief illicit publication was
Vermont Vigilance, a four-page weekly which usually had only two
pages and, such was Doremus’s unfettered liveliness, came out about
three times a week. It was filled with reports smuggled to them
from other N.U. cells, and with reprints from Walt Trowbridge’s
Lance for Democracy and from
Canadian, British, Swedish, and French
papers, whose correspondents in America got out, by long-distance
telephone, news which Secretary of Education Macgoblin, head of the
government press department, spent a good part of his time denying.
An English correspondent sent news of the murder of the president
of the University of Southern Illinois, a man of seventy-two who
was shot in the back “while
trying to escape,” out of the country
by long-distance telephone to Mexico City, from which the story was
relayed to London.

Doremus discovered that neither he nor any other small citizen had
been hearing one hundredth of what was going on in America.
Windrip & Co. had, like Hitler and Mussolini, discovered that a
modern state can, by the triple process of controlling every item
in the press,
breaking up at the start any association which might
become dangerous, and keeping all the machine guns, artillery,
armored automobiles, and aeroplanes in the hands of the government,
dominate the complex contemporary population better than had ever
been done in medieval days, when rebellious peasantry were armed
only with pitchforks and good-will, but the State was not armed
much better.

Dreadful,
incredible information came in to Doremus, until he saw
that his own life, and Sissy’s and Lorinda’s and Buck’s, were
unimportant accidents.

In North Dakota, two would-be leaders of the farmers were made to
run in front of an M.M. automobile, through February drifts, till
they dropped breathless, were beaten with a tire pump till they
staggered on, fell again, then were shot in the head, their
blood
smearing the prairie snow.

President Windrip, who was apparently becoming considerably more
jumpy than in his old, brazen days, saw two of his personal
bodyguard snickering together in the anteroom of his office and,
shrieking, snatching an automatic pistol from his desk, started
shooting at them. He was a bad marksman. The suspects had to be
finished off by the pistols of their fellow
guards.

A crowd of young men, not wearing any sort of uniforms, tore the
clothes from a nun on the station plaza in Kansas City and chased
her, smacking her with bare hands. The police stopped them after a
while. There were no arrests.

In Utah a non-Mormon County Commissioner staked out a Mormon elder
on a bare rock where, since the altitude was high, the elder at
once shivered and felt the
glare rather bothersome to his eyes—since the Commissioner had thoughtfully cut off his eyelids first.
The government press releases made much of the fact that the
torturer was rebuked by the District Commissioner and removed from
his post. It did not mention that he was reappointed in a county
in Florida.

The heads of the reorganized Steel Cartel, a good many of whom had
been officers of steel
companies in the days before Windrip,
entertained Secretary of Education Macgoblin and Secretary of War
Luthorne with an aquatic festival in Pittsburgh. The dining room
of a large hotel was turned into a tank of rose-scented water, and
the celebrants floated in a gilded Roman barge. The waitresses
were naked girls, who amusingly swam to the barge holding up trays
and, more often, wine buckets.

Secretary of State Lee Sarason was arrested in the basement of a
handsome boys’ club in Washington on unspecified charges by a
policeman who apologized as soon as he recognized Sarason, and
released him, and who that night was shot in his bed by a
mysterious burglar.

Albert Einstein, who had been exiled from Germany for his guilty
devotion to mathematics, world peace, and the violin, was now
exiled from America for the same crimes.

Mrs. Leonard Nimmet, wife of a Congregational pastor in Lincoln,
Nebraska, whose husband had been sent to concentration camp for a
pacifist sermon, was shot through the door and killed when she
refused to open to an M.M. raiding section looking for seditious
literature.

In Rhode Island, the door of a small orthodox synagogue in a
basement was locked from
the outside after thin glass containers of
carbon monoxide had been thrown in. The windows had been nailed
shut, and anyway, the nineteen men in the congregation did not
smell the gas until too late. They were all found slumped to the
floor, beards sticking up. They were all over sixty.

Tom Krell—but his was a really nasty case, because he was actually
caught with a copy of Lance for Democracy
and credentials proving
that he was a New Underground messenger—strange thing, too,
because everybody had respected him as a good, decent, unimaginative
baggageman at a village railroad depot in New Hampshire—was dropped
down a well with five feet of water in it, a smooth-sided cement
well, and just left there.

Ex-Supreme Court Justice Hoblin of Montana was yanked out of bed
late at night and
examined for sixty hours straight on a charge
that he was in correspondence with Trowbridge. It was said that
the chief examiner was a man whom, years before, Judge Hoblin had
sentenced for robbery with assault.

In one day Doremus received reports that four several literary or
dramatic societies—Finnish, Chinese, Iowan, and one belonging to a
mixed group of miners on the Mesaba Range, Minnesota—had
been
broken up, their officers beaten, their clubrooms smashed up, and
their old pianos wrecked, on the charge that they possessed illegal
arms, which, in each case, the members declared to be antiquated
pistols used in theatricals. And in that week three people were
arrested—in Alabama, Oklahoma, and New Jersey—for the possession
of the following subversive books: The Murder of Roger Ackroyd,
by
Agatha Christie (and fair enough too, because the sister-in-law of
a county commissioner in Oklahoma was named Ackroyd); Waiting for
Lefty, by Clifford Odets; and February Hill, by Victoria Lincoln.

“But plenty things like this happened before Buzz Windrip ever came
in, Doremus,” insisted John Pollikop. (Never till they had met in
the delightfully illegal basement had he called Doremus anything
save “Mr. Jessup.”) “You never thought about them, because they
was just routine news, to stick in your paper. Things like the
sharecroppers and the Scottsboro boys and the plots of the
California wholesalers against the agricultural union and
dictatorship in Cuba and the way phony deputies in Kentucky shot
striking miners. And believe me, Doremus, the same reactionary
crowd that put over those
crimes are just the big boys that are
chummy with Windrip. And what scares me is that if Walt Trowbridge
ever does raise a kinda uprising and kick Buzz out, the same
vultures will get awful patriotic and democratic and parliamentarian
along with Walt, and sit in on the spoils just the same.”

“So Karl Pascal did convert you to Communism before he got sent to
Trianon,” jeered Doremus.

John Pollikop
jumped four straight feet up in the air, or so it
looked, and came down screaming, “Communism! Never get ‘em to
make a United Front! W’y, that fellow Pascal—he was just a
propagandist, and I tell you—I tell you—”

Doremus’s hardest job was the translation of items from the press
in Germany, which was most favorable to the Corpos. Sweating, even
in the March coolness in Buck’s high basement,
Doremus leaned over
a kitchen table, ruffling through a German-English lexicon,
grunting, tapping his teeth with a pencil, scratching the top of
his head, looking like a schoolboy with a little false gray beard,
and wailing to Lorinda, “Now how in the heck would you translate
‘Er erhält noch immer eine zweideutige Stellung den Juden
gegenüber’?” She answered, “Why, darling, the only German I
know
is the phrase that Buck taught me for ‘God bless you’—’Verfluchter
Schweinehund.’”

He translated word for word, from the Völkischer Beobachter, and
later turned into comprehensible English, this gratifying tribute
to his Chief and Inspirer:

America has a brilliant beginning begun. No one congratulates
President Windrip with greater sincerity than we Germans. The
tendency points as goal
to the founding of a Folkish state.
Unfortunately is the President not yet prepared with the liberal
tradition to break. He holds still ever a two-meaning attitude the
Jews visavis. We can but presume that logically this attitude
change must as the movement forced is the complete consequences of
its philosophy to draw. Ahasaver the Wandering Jew will always the
enemy of a free self-conscious
people be, and America will also
learn that one even so much with Jewry compromise can as with the
Bubonic plague.

From the New Masses, still published surreptitiously by the
Communists, at the risk of their lives, Doremus got many items
about miners and factory workers who were near starvation and who
were imprisoned if they so much as criticized a straw boss… .
But most of the New Masses,
with a pious smugness unshaken by
anything that had happened since 1935, was given over to the latest
news about Marx, and to vilifying all agents of the New
Underground, including those who had been clubbed and jailed and
killed, as “reactionary stool pigeons for Fascism,” and it was all
nicely decorated with a Gropper cartoon showing Walt Trowbridge, in
M.M. uniform, kissing the foot of Windrip.

The news bulletins came to Doremus in a dozen insane ways—carried
by messengers on the thinnest of flimsy tissue paper; mailed to
Mrs. Henry Veeder and to Daniel Babcock between the pages of
catalogues, by an N.O. operative who was a clerk in the mail-order
house of Middlebury & Roe; shipped in cartons of toothpaste and
cigarettes to Earl Tyson’s drugstore—one clerk there was an N.U.
agent; dropped
near Buck’s mansion by a tough-looking and therefore
innocent-looking driver of an interstate furniture-moving truck.
Come by so precariously, the news had none of the obviousness of
his days in the office when, in one batch of A.P. flimsies, were
tidings of so many millions dead of starvation in China, so many
statesmen assassinated in central Europe, so many new churches
built by kind-hearted
Mr. Andrew Mellon, that it was all routine.
Now, he was like an eighteenth-century missionary in northern
Canada, waiting for the news that would take all spring to travel
from Bristol and down Hudson Bay, wondering every instant whether
France had declared war, whether Her Majesty had safely given
birth.

Doremus realized that he was hearing, all at once, of the battle of
Waterloo, the Diaspora,
the invention of the telegraph, the
discovery of bacilli, and the Crusades, and if it took him ten days
to get the news, it would take historians ten decades to appraise
it. Would they not envy him, and consider that he had lived in the
very crisis of history? Or would they just smile at the flag-waving children of the 1930’s playing at being national heroes?
For he believed that these historians
would be neither Communists
nor Fascists nor bellicose American or English Nationalists but
just the sort of smiling Liberals that the warring fanatics of
today most cursed as weak waverers.

In all this secret tumult Doremus’s most arduous task was to avoid
suspicions that might land him in concentration camp, and to give
appearance of being just the harmless old loafer he veritably had
been,
three weeks ago. Befogged with sleep because he had worked
all night at headquarters, he yawned all afternoon in the lobby of
the Hotel Wessex and discussed fishing—the picture of a man too
discouraged to be a menace.

He dropped now and then, on evenings when there was nothing to do
at Buck’s and he could loaf in his study at home and shamefully let
himself be quiet and civilized, into renewed
longing for the Ivory
Tower. Often, not because it was a great poem but because it was
the first that, when he had been a boy, had definitely startled him
by evoking beauty, he reread Tennyson’s “Arabian Nights”:

A realm of pleasance, many a mound

And many a shadow-chequered lawn

Full of the city’s stilly sound,

And deep myrrh-thickets blowing round

And stately cedar, tamarisks,

Thick
rosaries of scented thorn,

Tall orient shrubs, and obelisks

Graven with emblems of the time,

In honor of the golden prime

Of good Haroun Alraschid.

Awhile then he could wander with Romeo and Jurgen, with Ivanhoe and
Lord Peter Wimsey; the Piazza San Marco he saw, and immemorial
towers of Bagdad that never were; with Don John of Austria he was
going forth to war, and he took the golden
road to Samarcand
without a visa.