It Can't Happen Here (13 page)

So beatifically did hundreds of old people in Beulah Valley believe
this that they smilingly trotted into Raymond Pridewell’s hardware
store, to order new kitchen stoves and aluminum sauce pans and
complete bathroom furnishings, to be paid for on the day after
inauguration. Mr. Pridewell, a cobwebbed old Henry Cabot Lodge
Republican,
lost half his trade by chasing out these happy heirs to
fabulous estates, but they went on dreaming, and Doremus, nagging
at them, discovered that mere figures are defenseless against a
dream … even a dream of new Plymouths and unlimited cans of
sausages and motion-picture cameras and the prospect of never
having to arise till 7:30 A.M.

Thus answered Alfred Tizra, “Snake” Tizra, friend to Doremus’s
handyman, Shad Ledue. Snake was a steel-tough truck-driver and
taxi-owner who had served sentences for assault and for
transporting bootleg liquor. He had once made a living catching
rattlesnakes and copperheads in southern New England. Under
President Windrip, Snake jeeringly assured Doremus, he would have
enough money to start a chain of roadhouses in all the dry
communities in Vermont.

Ed Howland, one of the lesser Fort Beulah grocers, and Charley
Betts, furniture and undertaking, while they were dead against
anyone getting groceries, furniture, or even undertaking on Windrip
credit, were all for the population’s having credit on other wares.

Aras Dilley, a squatter dairy farmer living with a toothless wife
and seven slattern children in a tilted and unscrubbed cabin way up
on Mount Terror, snarled at Doremus—who had often taken food
baskets and boxes of shotgun shells and masses of cigarettes to
Aras—”Well, want to tell you, when Mr. Windrip gets in, we farmers
are going to fix our own prices on our crops, and not you smart
city fellows!”

Doremus could not blame him. While Buck Titus, at fifty, looked
thirty-odd, Aras, at thirty-four, looked fifty.

Lorinda Pike’s
singularly unpleasant partner in the Beulah Valley
Tavern, one Mr. Nipper, whom she hoped soon to lose, combined
boasting how rich he was with gloating how much more he was going
to get under Windrip. “Professor” Staubmeyer quoted nice things
Windrip had said about higher pay for teachers. Louis Rotenstern,
to prove that his heart, at least, was not Jewish, became more
lyric than any of them.
And even Frank Tasbrough of the quarries,
Medary Cole of the grist mill and real-estate holdings, R. C.
Crowley of the bank, who presumably were not tickled by projects of
higher income taxes, smiled pussy-cattishly and hinted that Windrip
was a “lot sounder fellow” than people knew.

But no one in Fort Beulah was a more active crusader for Buzz
Windrip than Shad Ledue.

Doremus had known that
Shad possessed talent for argument and for
display; that he had once persuaded old Mr. Pridewell to trust him
for a .22 rifle, value twenty-three dollars; that, removed from the
sphere of coal bins and grass-stained overalls, he had once sung
“Rollicky Bill the Sailor” at a smoker of the Ancient and
Independent Order of Rams; and that he had enough memory to be able
to quote, as his own profound
opinions, the editorials in the
Hearst newspapers. Yet even knowing all this equipment for a
political career, an equipment not much short of Buzz Windrip’s,
Doremus was surprised to find Shad soap-boxing for Windrip among
the quarry-workers, then actually as chairman of a rally in
Oddfellows’ Hall. Shad spoke little, but with brutal taunting of
the believers in Trowbridge and Roosevelt.

At
meetings where he did not speak, Shad was an incomparable
bouncer, and in that valued capacity he was summoned to Windrip
rallies as far away as Burlington. It was he who, in a militia
uniform, handsomely riding a large white plow-horse, led the final
Windrip parade in Rutland … and substantial men of affairs,
even dry-goods jobbers, fondly called him “Shad.”

Doremus was amazed, felt a little
apologetic over his failure to
have appreciated this new-found paragon, as he sat in American
Legion Hall and heard Shad bellowing: “I don’t pretend to be
anything but a plain working-stiff, but there’s forty million
workers like me, and we know that Senator Windrip is the first
statesman in years that thinks of what guys like us need before he
thinks one doggone thing about politics. Come on,
you bozos! The
swell folks tell you to not be selfish! Walt Trowbridge tells you
to not be selfish! Well,
be
selfish, and vote for the one man
that’s willing to
give
you something—give
you
something!—and not
just grab off every cent and every hour of work that he can get!”

Doremus groaned inwardly, “Oh, my Shad! And you’re doing most of
this on my time!”

Sissy Jessup sat on the running
board of her coupe (hers by
squatter’s right), with Julian Falck, up from Amherst for the week-end, and Malcolm Tasbrough wedged in on either side of her.

“Oh nuts, let’s quit talking politics. Windrip’s going to be
elected, so why waste time yodeling when we could drive down to the
river and have a swim,” complained Malcolm.

“He’s not going to win without our putting up a tough scrap against
him. I’m going to talk to the high-school alumni this evening—about how they got to tell their parents to vote for either
Trowbridge or Roosevelt,” snapped Julian Falck.

“Haa, haa, haa! And of course the parents will be tickled to death
to do whatever you tell ‘em, Yulian! You college men certainly are
the goods! Besides—Want to be serious about this fool business?”
Malcolm had the insolent
self-assurance of beef, slick black hair,
and a large car of his own; he was the perfect leader of Black
Shirts, and he looked contemptuously on Julian who, though a year
older, was pale and thinnish. “Matter of fact, it’ll be a good
thing to have Buzz. He’ll put a damn quick stop to all this
radicalism—all this free speech and libel of our most fundamental
institutions—”

“Boston American;
last Tuesday; page eight,” murmured Sissy.

“—and no wonder you’re scared of him, Yulian! He sure will drag
some of your favorite Amherst anarchist profs off to the hoosegow,
and maybe you too, Comrade!”

The two young men looked at each other with slow fury. Sissy
quieted them by raging, “Freavensake! Will you two heels quit
scrapping? … Oh, my dears, this beastly election! Beastly!
Seems
as if it’s breaking up every town, every home… . My poor
Dad! Doremus is just about all in!”

I shall not be content till this country can produce every single
thing we need, even coffee, cocoa, and rubber, and so keep all our
dollars at home. If we can do this and at the same time work up
tourist traffic so that foreigners will come from every part of the
world to see such remarkable wonders as the Grand Canyon, Glacier
and Yellowstone etc. parks, the fine hotels of Chicago, & etc.,
thus leaving their money here, we shall have such a balance of
trade as will go far to carry out my often-criticized yet
completely sound idea of from $3000 to $5000 per year for every
single family—that is, I mean every real American family. Such an
aspiring Vision is what we want, and not all this nonsense of
wasting our time at Geneva and talky-talk at Lugano, wherever that
is.

Zero Hour
, Berzelius Windrip.

Election day would fall on Tuesday, November third, and on Sunday
evening of the first, Senator Windrip played the finale of his
campaign at a mass meeting in Madison Square Garden, in New York.
The Garden would hold, with seats and standing room, about 19,000,
and a week before the meeting every ticket had been sold—at from
fifty cents to five dollars, and then by speculators
resold and
resold, at from one dollar to twenty.

Doremus had been able to get one single ticket from an acquaintance
on one of the Hearst dailies—which, alone among the New York
papers, were supporting Windrip—and on the afternoon of November
first he traveled the three hundred miles to New York for his first
visit in three years.

It had been cold in Vermont, with early snow, but the white drifts
lay to the earth so quietly, in unstained air, that the world
seemed a silver-painted carnival, left to silence. Even on a
moonless night, a pale radiance came from the snow, from the earth
itself, and the stars were drops of quicksilver.

But, following the redcap carrying his shabby Gladstone bag,
Doremus came out of the Grand Central, at six o’clock, into a gray
trickle of cold dishwater from
heaven’s kitchen sink. The renowned
towers which he expected to see on Forty-second Street were dead in
their mummy cloths of ragged fog. And as to the mob that, with
cruel disinterest, galloped past him, a new and heedless smear of
faces every second, the man from Fort Beulah could think only that
New York must be holding its county fair in this clammy drizzle, or
else that there was a big
fire somewhere.

He had sensibly planned to save money by using the subway—the
substantial village burgher is so poor in the city of the
Babylonian gardens!—and he even remembered that there were still
to be found in Manhattan five-cent trolley cars, in which a rustic
might divert himself by looking at sailors and poets and shawled
women from the steppes of Kazakstan. To the redcap he had piped
with what he conceived to be traveled urbanity, “Guess ‘ll take a
trolley—jus’ few blocks.” But deafened and dizzied and elbow-jabbed by the crowd, soaked and depressed, he took refuge in a
taxi, then wished he hadn’t, as he saw the slippery rubber-colored
pavement, and as his taxi got wedged among other cars stinking of
carbon-monoxide and frenziedly tooting for release from the jam—a
huddle
of robot sheep bleating their terror with mechanical lungs
of a hundred horsepower.

He painfully hesitated before going out again from his small hotel
in the West Forties, and when he did, when he muddily crept among
the shrill shopgirls, the weary chorus girls, the hard cigar-clamping gamblers, and the pretty young men on Broadway, he felt
himself, with the rubbers and umbrella which Emma had
forced upon
him, a very Caspar Milquetoast.

He most noticed a number of stray imitation soldiers, without side-arms or rifles, but in a uniform like that of an American
cavalryman in 1870: slant-topped blue forage caps, dark blue
tunics, light blue trousers, with yellow stripes at the seam,
tucked into leggings of black rubberoid for what appeared to be the
privates, and boots of sleek black
leather for officers. Each of
them had on the right side of his collar the letters “M.M.” and on
the left, a five-pointed star. There were so many of them; they
swaggered so brazenly, shouldering civilians out of the way; and
upon insignificances like Doremus they looked with frigid
insolence.

He suddenly understood.

These young condottieri were the “Minute Men”: the private troops
of Berzelius
Windrip, about which Doremus had been publishing
uneasy news reports. He was thrilled and a little dismayed to see
them now—the printed words made brutal flesh.

Three weeks ago Windrip had announced that Colonel Dewey Haik had
founded, just for the campaign, a nationwide league of Windrip
marching-clubs, to be called the Minute Men. It was probable that
they had been in formation for months,
since already they had three
or four hundred thousand members. Doremus was afraid the M.M.’s
might become a permanent organization, more menacing than the
Kuklux Klan.

Their uniform suggested the pioneer America of Cold Harbor and of
the Indian fighters under Miles and Custer. Their emblem, their
swastika (here Doremus saw the cunning and mysticism of Lee
Sarason), was a five-pointed star,
because the star on the American
flag was five-pointed, whereas the stars of both the Soviet banner
and the Jews—the seal of Solomon—were six-pointed.

The fact that the Soviet star, actually, was also five-pointed, no
one noticed, during these excited days of regeneration. Anyway, it
was a nice idea to have this star simultaneously challenge the Jews
and the Bolsheviks—the M.M.’s had good intentions,
even if their
symbolism did slip a little.

Yet the craftiest thing about the M.M.’s was that they wore no
colored shirts, but only plain white when on parade, and light
khaki when on outpost duty, so that Buzz Windrip could thunder, and
frequently, “Black shirts? Brown shirts? Red shirts? Yes, and
maybe cow-brindle shirts! All these degenerate European uniforms
of tyranny! No sir! The Minute
Men are not Fascist or Communist
or anything at all but plain Democratic—the knight-champions of
the rights of the Forgotten Men—the shock troops of Freedom!”

Doremus dined on Chinese food, his invariable self-indulgence when
he was in a large city without Emma, who stated that chow mein was
nothing but fried excelsior with flour-paste gravy. He forgot the
leering M.M. troopers a little; he
was happy in glancing at the
gilded wood-carvings, at the octagonal lanterns painted with doll-like Chinese peasants crossing arched bridges, at a quartette of
guests, two male and two female, who looked like Public Enemies and
who all through dinner quarreled with restrained viciousness.

When he headed toward Madison Square Garden and the culminating
Windrip rally, he was plunged into a maelstrom.
A whole nation
seemed querulously to be headed the same way. He could not get a
taxicab, and walking through the dreary storm some fourteen blocks
to Madison Square Garden he was aware of the murderous temper of
the crowd.

Eighth Avenue, lined with cheapjack shops, was packed with drab,
discouraged people who yet, tonight, were tipsy with the hashish of
hope. They filled the sidewalks, nearly
filled the pavement, while
irritable motors squeezed tediously through them, and angry
policemen were pushed and whirled about and, if they tried to be
haughty, got jeered at by lively shopgirls.