It Can't Happen Here (4 page)

She was a loyal woman,
Emma Jessup, warmly generous, a cordon bleu
at making lemon-meringue pie, a parochial Tory, an orthodox
Episcopalian, and completely innocent of any humor. Doremus was
perpetually tickled by her kind solemnity, and it was to be chalked
down to him as a singular act of grace that he refrained from
pretending that he had become a working Communist and was thinking
of leaving for Moscow immediately.

Doremus looked depressed, looked old, when he lifted himself, as
from an invalid’s chair, out of the Chrysler, in his hideous garage
of cement and galvanized iron. (But it was a proud two-car garage;
besides the four-year-old Chrysler, they had a new Ford convertible
coupe, which Doremus hoped to drive some day when Sissy wasn’t
using it.)

He cursed competently as, on the cement walk from the
garage to the
kitchen, he barked his shins on the lawn-mower, left there by his
hired man, one Oscar Ledue, known always as “Shad,” a large and
red-faced, a sulky and surly Irish-Canuck peasant. Shad always did
things like leaving lawnmowers about to snap at the shins of decent
people. He was entirely incompetent and vicious. He never edged-up the flower beds, he kept his stinking old cap on
his head when
he brought in logs for the fireplace, he did not scythe the
dandelions in the meadow till they had gone to seed, he delighted
in failing to tell cook that the peas were now ripe, and he was
given to shooting cats, stray dogs, chipmunks, and honey-voiced
blackbirds. At least twice a day, Doremus resolved to fire him,
but—Perhaps he was telling himself the truth when he insisted that
it was amusing to try to civilize this prize bull.

Doremus trotted into the kitchen, decided that he did not want
some cold chicken and a glass of milk from the ice-box, nor even a
wedge of the celebrated cocoanut layer cake made by their cook-general, Mrs. Candy, and mounted to his “study,” on the third, the
attic floor.

His house was an ample, white, clapboarded structure of the vintage
of
1880, a square bulk with a mansard roof and, in front, a long
porch with insignificant square white pillars. Doremus declared
that the house was ugly, “but ugly in a nice way.”

His study, up there, was his one perfect refuge from annoyances and
bustle. It was the only room in the house that Mrs. Candy (quiet,
grimly competent, thoroughly literate, once a Vermont country
schoolteacher) was never
allowed to clean. It was an endearing
mess of novels, copies of the Congressional Record, of the New
Yorker, Time, Nation, New Republic, New Masses, and Speculum
(cloistral organ of the Medieval Society), treatises on taxation
and monetary systems, road maps, volumes on exploration in
Abyssinia and the Antarctic, chewed stubs of pencils, a shaky
portable typewriter, fishing tackle, rumpled carbon
paper, two
comfortable old leather chairs, a Windsor chair at his desk, the
complete works of Thomas Jefferson, his chief hero, a microscope
and a collection of Vermont butterflies, Indian arrowheads,
exiguous volumes of Vermont village poetry printed in local
newspaper offices, the Bible, the Koran, the Book of Mormon,
Science and Health, Selections from the Mahabharata, the poetry of
Sandburg,
Frost, Masters, Jeffers, Ogden Nash, Edgar Guest, Omar
Khayyam, and Milton, a shotgun and a .22 repeating rifle, an Isaiah
College banner, faded, the complete Oxford Dictionary, five
fountain pens of which two would work, a vase from Crete dating
from 327 B.C.—very ugly—the World Almanac for year before last,
with the cover suggesting that it had been chewed by a dog, odd
pairs of horn-rimmed
spectacles and of rimless eyeglasses, none of
which now suited his eyes, a fine, reputedly Tudor oak cabinet from
Devonshire, portraits of Ethan Allen and Thaddeus Stevens, rubber
wading-boots, senile red morocco slippers, a poster issued by the
Vermont Mercury at Woodstock, on September 2, 1840, announcing a
glorious Whig victory, twenty-four boxes of safety matches one
by one stolen from the kitchen,
assorted yellow scratch pads,
seven books on Russia and Bolshevism—extraordinarily pro or
extraordinarily con—a signed photograph of Theodore Roosevelt, six
cigarette cartons, all half empty (according to the tradition of
journalistic eccentrics, Doremus should have smoked a Good Old
Pipe, but he detested the slimy ooze of nicotine-soaked spittle), a
rag carpet on the floor, a withered sprig of
holly with a silver
Christmas ribbon, a case of seven unused genuine Sheffield razors,
dictionaries in French, German, Italian and Spanish—the first of
which languages he really could read—a canary in a Bavarian gilded
wicker cage, a worn linen-bound copy of Old Hearthside Songs for
Home and Picnic whose selections he was wont to croon, holding the
book on his knee, and an old cast-iron Franklin
stove. Everything,
indeed, that was proper for a hermit and improper for impious
domestic hands.

Before switching on the light he squinted through a dormer window
at the bulk of mountains cutting the welter of stars. In the
center were the last lights of Fort Beulah, far below, and on the
left, unseen, the soft meadows, the old farmhouses, the great dairy
barns of the Ethan Mowing. It was
a kind country, cool and clear
as a shaft of light and, he meditated, he loved it more every quiet
year of his freedom from city towers and city clamor.

One of the few times when Mrs. Candy, their housekeeper, was
permitted to enter his hermit’s cell was to leave there, on the
long table, his mail. He picked it up and started to read briskly,
standing by the table. (Time to go to bed! Too
much chatter and
bellyaching, this evening! Good Lord! Past midnight!) He sighed
then, and sat in his Windsor chair, leaning his elbows on the table
and studiously reading the first letter over again.

It was from Victor Loveland, one of the younger, more
international-minded teachers in Doremus’s old school, Isaiah
College.

Dear Dr. Jessup:

(“Hm. ‘Dr. Jessup.’ Not me, m’ lad. The only
honorary degree
I’ll ever get’ll be Master in Veterinary Surgery or Laureate in
Embalming.”)

A very dangerous situation has arisen here at Isaiah and those of
us who are trying to advocate something like integrity and
modernity are seriously worried—not, probably, that we need to be
long, as we shall probably all get fired. Where two years ago most
of our students just laughed at any idea of
military drilling, they
have gone warlike in a big way, with undergrads drilling with
rifles, machine guns, and cute little blueprints of tanks and
planes all over the place. Two of them, voluntarily, are going
down to Rutland every week to take training in flying, avowedly to
get ready for wartime aviation. When I cautiously ask them what
the dickens war they are preparing for they just scratch
and
indicate they don’t care much, so long as they can get a chance to
show what virile proud gents they are.

Well, we’ve got used to that. But just this afternoon—the
newspapers haven’t got this yet—the Board of Trustees, including
Mr. Francis Tasbrough and our president, Dr. Owen Peaseley, met and
voted a resolution that—now listen to this, will you, Dr. Jessup—”Any member of the faculty or
student body of Isaiah who shall in
any way, publicly or privately, in print, writing, or by the spoken
word, adversely criticize military training at or by Isaiah
College, or in any other institution of learning in the United
States, or by the state militias, federal forces, or other
officially recognized military organizations in this country, shall
be liable to immediate dismissal from this college,
and any student
who shall, with full and proper proof, bring to the attention of
the President or any Trustee of the college such malign criticism
by any person whatever connected in any way with the institution
shall receive extra credits in his course in military training,
such credits to apply to the number of credits necessary for
graduation.”

What can we do with such fast exploding Fascism?

Victor Loveland.

And Loveland, teacher of Greek, Latin, and Sanskrit (two lone
students) had never till now meddled in any politics of more recent
date than A.D. 180.

“So Frank was there at Trustees’ meeting, and didn’t dare tell me,”
Doremus sighed. “Encouraging them to become spies. Gestapo. Oh,
my dear Frank, this a serious time! You, my good bonehead, for
once you said it! President
Owen J. Peaseley, the bagged-faced,
pious, racketeering, damned hedge-schoolmaster! But what can I do?
Oh—write another editorial viewing-with-alarm, I suppose!”

He plumped into a deep chair and sat fidgeting, like a bright-eyed,
apprehensive little bird.

On the door was a tearing sound, imperious, demanding.

He opened to admit Foolish, the family dog. Foolish was a reliable
combination of
English setter, Airedale, cocker spaniel, wistful
doe, and rearing hyena. He gave one abrupt snort of welcome and
nuzzled his brown satin head against Doremus’s knee. His bark
awakened the canary, under the absurd old blue sweater that covered
its cage, and it automatically caroled that it was noon, summer
noon, among the pear trees in the green Harz hills, none of which
was true. But the bird’s
trilling, the dependable presence of
Foolish, comforted Doremus, made military drill and belching
politicians seem unimportant, and in security he dropped asleep in
the worn brown leather chair.

All this June week, Doremus was waiting for 2 P.M. on Saturday, the
divinely appointed hour of the weekly prophetic broadcast by Bishop
Paul Peter Prang.

Now, six weeks before the 1936 national conventions, it was
probable that neither Franklin Roosevelt, Herbert Hoover, Senator
Vandenberg, Ogden Mills, General Hugh Johnson, Colonel Frank Knox,
nor Senator Borah would be nominated for President
by either party,
and that the Republican standard-bearer—meaning the one man who
never has to lug a large, bothersome, and somewhat ridiculous
standard—would be that loyal yet strangely honest old-line
Senator, Walt Trowbridge, a man with a touch of Lincoln in him,
dashes of Will Rogers and George W. Norris, a suspected trace of
Jim Farley, but all the rest plain, bulky, placidly defiant Walt
Trowbridge.

Few men doubted that the Democratic candidate would be that sky-rocket, Senator Berzelius Windrip—that is to say, Windrip as the
mask and bellowing voice, with his satanic secretary, Lee Sarason,
as the brain behind.

Senator Windrip’s father was a small-town Western druggist, equally
ambitious and unsuccessful, and had named him Berzelius after the
Swedish chemist. Usually he was
known as “Buzz.” He had worked
his way through a Southern Baptist college, of approximately the
same academic standing as a Jersey City business college, and
through a Chicago law school, and settled down to practice in his
native state and to enliven local politics. He was a tireless
traveler, a boisterous and humorous speaker, an inspired guesser at
what political doctrines the people would
like, a warm handshaker,
and willing to lend money. He drank Coca-Cola with the Methodists,
beer with the Lutherans, California white wine with the Jewish
village merchants—and, when they were safe from observation,
white-mule corn whisky with all of them.

Within twenty years he was as absolute a ruler of his state as ever
a sultan was of Turkey.

He was never governor; he had shrewdly seen
that his reputation for
research among planters-punch recipes, varieties of poker, and the
psychology of girl stenographers might cause his defeat by the
church people, so he had contented himself with coaxing to the
gubernatorial shearing a trained baa-lamb of a country schoolmaster
whom he had gayly led on a wide blue ribbon. The state was certain
that he had “given it a good administration,” and
they knew that it
was Buzz Windrip who was responsible, not the Governor.

Windrip caused the building of impressive highroads and of
consolidated country schools; he made the state buy tractors and
combines and lend them to the farmers at cost. He was certain that
some day America would have vast business dealings with the
Russians and, though he detested all Slavs, he made the State
University
put in the first course in the Russian language that had
been known in all that part of the West. His most original
invention was quadrupling the state militia and rewarding the best
soldiers in it with training in agriculture, aviation, and radio
and automobile engineering.

The militiamen considered him their general and their god, and when
the state attorney general announced that he was going
to have
Windrip indicted for having grafted $200,000 of tax money, the
militia rose to Buzz Windrip’s orders as though they were his
private army and, occupying the legislative chambers and all the
state offices, and covering the streets leading to the Capitol with
machine guns, they herded Buzz’s enemies out of town.

He took the United States Senatorship as though it were his
manorial right,
and for six years, his only rival as the most
bouncing and feverish man in the Senate had been the late Huey Long
of Louisiana.

He preached the comforting gospel of so redistributing wealth that
every person in the country would have several thousand dollars a
year (monthly Buzz changed his prediction as to how many thousand),
while all the rich men were nevertheless to be allowed enough to
get
along, on a maximum of $500,000 a year. So everybody was happy
in the prospect of Windrip’s becoming president.

The Reverend Dr. Egerton Schlemil, dean of St. Agnes Cathedral, San
Antonio, Texas, stated (once in a sermon, once in the slightly
variant mimeographed press handout on the sermon, and seven times
in interviews) that Buzz’s coming into power would be “like the
Heaven-blest fall of
revivifying rain upon a parched and thirsty
land.” Dr. Schlemil did not say anything about what happened when
the blest rain came and kept falling steadily for four years.