It Can't Happen Here (10 page)

“But what does it mean?” marveled Mrs. Jessup, when her husband had
read the platform to her. “It’s so inconsistent. Sounds like a
combination of Norman Thomas and Calvin Coolidge. I don’t seem to
understand it. I wonder if Mr. Windrip understands it himself?”

“Sure. You bet he does. It mustn’t be supposed that because
Windrip gets that intellectual dressmaker Sarason to prettify
his
ideas up for him he doesn’t recognize ‘em and clasp ‘em to his
bosom when they’re dolled up in two-dollar words. I’ll tell you
just what it all means: Articles One and Five mean that if the
financiers and transportation kings and so on don’t come through
heavily with support for Buzz they may be threatened with bigger
income taxes and some control of their businesses. But they are
coming
through, I hear, handsomely—they’re paying for Buzz’s radio
and his parades. Two, that by controlling their unions directly,
Buzz’s gang can kidnap all Labor into slavery. Three backs up the
security for Big Capital and Four brings the preachers into line as
scared and unpaid press-agents for Buzz.

“Six doesn’t mean anything at all—munition firms with vertical
trusts will be able to wangle
one 6 per cent on manufacture, one on
transportation, and one on sales—at least. Seven means we’ll get
ready to follow all the European nations in trying to hog the whole
world. Eight means that by inflation, big industrial companies
will be able to buy their outstanding bonds back at a cent on the
dollar, and Nine that all Jews who don’t cough up plenty of money
for the robber baron will be punished,
even including the Jews who
haven’t much to cough up. Ten, that all well-paying jobs and
businesses held by Negroes will be grabbed by the Poor White Trash
among Buzz’s worshipers—and that instead of being denounced
they’ll be universally praised as patriotic protectors of Racial
Purity. Eleven, that Buzz’ll be able to pass the buck for not
creating any real relief for poverty. Twelve,
that women will
later lose the vote and the right to higher education and be foxed
out of all decent jobs and urged to rear soldiers to be killed in
foreign wars. Thirteen, that anybody who opposes Buzz in any way
at all can be called a Communist and scragged for it. Why, under
this clause, Hoover and Al Smith and Ogden Mills—yes, and you and
me—will all be Communists.

“Fourteen, that Buzz
thinks enough of the support of the veterans’
vote to be willing to pay high for it—in other people’s money.
And Fifteen—well, that’s the one lone clause that really does mean
something; and it means that Windrip and Lee Sarason and Bishop
Prang and I guess maybe this Colonel Dewey Haik and this Dr. Hector
Macgoblin—you know, this doctor that helps write the high-minded
hymns for Buzz—they’ve
realized that this country has gone so
flabby that any gang daring enough and unscrupulous enough, and
smart enough not to
seem
illegal, can grab hold of the entire
government and have all the power and applause and salutes, all the
money and palaces and willin’ women they want.

“They’re only a handful, but just think how small Lenin’s gang was
at first, and Mussolini’s, and Hitler’s, and Kemal
Pasha’s, and
Napoleon’s! You’ll see all the liberal preachers and modernist
educators and discontented newspapermen and farm agitators—maybe
they’ll worry at first, but they’ll get caught up in the web of
propaganda, like we all were in the Great War, and they’ll all be
convinced that, even if our Buzzy maybe
has
got a few faults, he’s
on the side of the plain people, and against all the tight
old
political machines, and they’ll rouse the country for him as the
Great Liberator (and meanwhile Big Business will just wink and sit
tight!) and then, by God, this crook—oh, I don’t know whether he’s
more of a crook or an hysterical religious fanatic—along with
Sarason and Haik and Prang and Macgoblin—these five men will be
able to set up a régime that’ll remind you of Henry Morgan the
pirate
capturing a merchant ship.”

“But will Americans stand for it long?” whimpered Emma. “Oh, no,
not people like us—the descendants of the pioneers!”

“Dunno. I’m going to try help see that they don’t… . Of
course you understand that you and I and Sissy and Fowler and Mary
will probably be shot if I do try to do anything… . Hm! I
sound brave enough now, but probably I’ll be scared to death when
I
hear Buzz’s private troops go marching by!”

“Oh, you will be careful, won’t you?” begged Emma. “Oh. Before I
forget it. How many times must I tell you, Dormouse, not to give
Foolish chicken bones—they’ll stick in his poor throat and choke
him to death. And you just
never
remember to take the keys out of
the car when you put it in the garage at night! I’m perfectly
sure
Shad Ledue or somebody
will steal it one of these nights!”

Father Stephen Perefixe, when he read the Fifteen Points, was
considerably angrier than Doremus.

He snorted, “What? Negroes, Jews, women—they all banned and they
leave us Catholics out, this time? Hitler didn’t neglect us.
He’s
persecuted us. Must be that Charley Coughlin. He’s made us too
respectable!”

Sissy, who was eager to go to a school of architecture
and become a
creator of new styles in houses of glass and steel; Lorinda Pike,
who had plans for a Carlsbad-Vichy-Saratoga in Vermont; Mrs. Candy,
who aspired to a home bakery of her own when she should be too old
for domestic labor—they were all of them angrier than either
Doremus or Father Perefixe.

Sissy sounded not like a flirtatious girl but like a battling woman
as she snarled, “So the
League of Forgotten Men is going to make us
a League of Forgotten Women! Send us back to washing diapers and
leaching out ashes for soap! Let us read Louisa May Alcott and
Barne—except on the Sabbath, of course! Let us sleep in humble
gratitude with men—”

“
Sissy!
” wailed her mother.

“—like Shad Ledue! Well, Dad, you can sit right down and write
Busy Berzelius for me that I’m going to England
on the next boat!”

Mrs. Candy stopped drying the water glasses (with the soft
dishtowels which she scrupulously washed out daily) long enough to
croak, “What nasty men! I do hope they get shot soon,” which for
Mrs. Candy was a startlingly long and humanitarian statement.

“Yes. Nasty enough. But what I’ve got to keep remembering is that
Windrip is only the lightest cork on the whirlpool.
He didn’t plot
all this thing. With all the justified discontent there is against
the smart politicians and the Plush Horses of Plutocracy—oh, if it
hadn’t been one Windrip, it’d been another… . We had it
coming, we Respectables… . But that isn’t going to make us
like it!” thought Doremus.

Those who have never been on the inside in the Councils of State
can never realize that with really high-class Statesmen, their
chief quality is not political canniness, but a big, rich,
overflowing Love for all sorts and conditions of people and for the
whole land. That Love and that Patriotism have been my sole
guiding principles in Politics. My one ambition is to get all
Americans to realize
that they are, and must continue to be, the
greatest Race on the face of this old Earth, and second, to realize
that whatever apparent Differences there may be among us, in
wealth, knowledge, skill, ancestry or strength—though, of course,
all this does not apply to people who are
racially
different from
us—we are all brothers, bound together in the great and wonderful
bond of National Unity, for
which we should all be very glad. And
I think we ought to for this be willing to sacrifice any individual
gains at all.

Zero Hour
, Berzelius Windrip.

Berzelius Windrip, of whom in late summer and early autumn of 1936
there were so many published photographs—showing him popping into
cars and out of aeroplanes, dedicating bridges, eating corn pone
and side-meat with Southerners and clam chowder
and bran with
Northerners, addressing the American Legion, the Liberty League,
the Y.M.H.A., the Young People’s Socialist League, the Elks, the
Bartenders’ and Waiters’ Union, the Anti-Saloon League, the Society
for the Propagation of the Gospel in Afghanistan—showing him
kissing lady centenarians and shaking hands with ladies called
Madame, but never the opposite—showing him in Savile Row riding-clothes
on Long Island and in overalls and a khaki shirt in the
Ozarks—this Buzz Windrip was almost a dwarf, yet with an enormous
head, a bloodhound head, of huge ears, pendulous cheeks, mournful
eyes. He had a luminous, ungrudging smile which (declared the
Washington correspondents) he turned on and off deliberately, like
an electric light, but which could make his ugliness more
attractive than the
simpers of any pretty man.

His hair was so coarse and black and straight, and worn so long in
the back, that it hinted of Indian blood. In the Senate he
preferred clothes that suggested the competent insurance salesman,
but when farmer constituents were in Washington he appeared in an
historic ten-gallon hat with a mussy gray “cutaway” which somehow
you erroneously remembered as a black “Prince
Albert.”

In that costume, he looked like a sawed-off museum model of a
medicine-show “doctor,” and indeed it was rumored that during one
law-school vacation Buzz Windrip had played the banjo and done card
tricks and handed down medicine bottles and managed the shell game
for no less scientific an expedition than Old Dr. Alagash’s
Traveling Laboratory, which specialized in the Choctaw Cancer Cure,
the Chinook Consumption Soother, and the Oriental Remedy for Piles
and Rheumatism Prepared from a World-old Secret Formula by the
Gipsy Princess, Queen Peshawara. The company, ardently assisted by
Buzz, killed off quite a number of persons who, but for their
confidence in Dr. Alagash’s bottles of water, coloring matter,
tobacco juice, and raw corn whisky, might have gone early enough to
doctors.
But since then, Windrip had redeemed himself, no doubt,
by ascending from the vulgar fraud of selling bogus medicine,
standing in front of a megaphone, to the dignity of selling bogus
economics, standing on an indoor platform under mercury-vapor
lights in front of a microphone.

He was in stature but a small man, yet remember that so were
Napoleon, Lord Beaverbrook, Stephen A. Douglas, Frederick
the
Great, and the Dr. Goebbels who is privily known throughout Germany
as “Wotan’s Mickey Mouse.”

Doremus Jessup, so inconspicuous an observer, watching Senator
Windrip from so humble a Boeotia, could not explain his power of
bewitching large audiences. The Senator was vulgar, almost
illiterate, a public liar easily detected, and in his “ideas”
almost idiotic, while his celebrated piety was
that of a traveling
salesman for church furniture, and his yet more celebrated humor
the sly cynicism of a country store.

Certainly there was nothing exhilarating in the actual words of his
speeches, nor anything convincing in his philosophy. His political
platforms were only wings of a windmill. Seven years before his
present credo—derived from Lee Sarason, Hitler, Gottfried Feder,
Rocco,
and probably the revue Of Thee I Sing—little Buzz, back
home, had advocated nothing more revolutionary than better beef
stew in the county poor-farms, and plenty of graft for loyal
machine politicians, with jobs for their brothers-in-law, nephews,
law partners, and creditors.

Doremus had never heard Windrip during one of his orgasms of
oratory, but he had been told by political reporters that
under the
spell you thought Windrip was Plato, but that on the way home you
could not remember anything he had said.

There were two things, they told Doremus, that distinguished this
prairie Demosthenes. He was an actor of genius. There was no more
overwhelming actor on the stage, in the motion pictures, nor even
in the pulpit. He would whirl arms, bang tables, glare from mad
eyes, vomit Biblical
wrath from a gaping mouth; but he would also
coo like a nursing mother, beseech like an aching lover, and in
between tricks would coldly and almost contemptuously jab his
crowds with figures and facts—figures and facts that were
inescapable even when, as often happened, they were entirely
incorrect.

But below this surface stagecraft was his uncommon natural ability
to be authentically excited
by and with his audience, and they by
and with him. He could dramatize his assertion that he was neither
a Nazi nor a Fascist but a Democrat—a homespun Jeffersonian-Lincolnian-Clevelandian-Wilsonian Democrat—and (sans scenery and
costume) make you see him veritably defending the Capitol against
barbarian hordes, the while he innocently presented as his own
warm-hearted Democratic inventions,
every anti-libertarian, anti-Semitic madness of Europe.

Aside from his dramatic glory, Buzz Windrip was a Professional
Common Man.

Oh, he was common enough. He had every prejudice and aspiration of
every American Common Man. He believed in the desirability and
therefore the sanctity of thick buckwheat cakes with adulterated
maple syrup, in rubber trays for the ice cubes in his electric
refrigerator,
in the especial nobility of dogs, all dogs, in the
oracles of S. Parkes Cadman, in being chummy with all waitresses at
all junction lunch rooms, and in Henry Ford (when he became
President, he exulted, maybe he could get Mr. Ford to come to
supper at the White House), and the superiority of anyone who
possessed a million dollars. He regarded spats, walking sticks,
caviar, titles, tea-drinking,
poetry not daily syndicated in
newspapers and all foreigners, possibly excepting the British, as
degenerate.

But he was the Common Man twenty-times-magnified by his oratory, so
that while the other Commoners could understand his every purpose,
which was exactly the same as their own, they saw him towering
among them, and they raised hands to him in worship.